Ep. 382: "The Year with the Asterisks"
Hello there, Merlin Mann.
The OG.
Hey, there he is, Mr. Guy.
B-M-O-C.
There he is.
Yep.
Big man on COVID.
That's stupid.
That's pretty bad.
Yeah.
How are you doing?
Oh, well.
You doing some homeschooling?
Yeah, I'm getting – I have a situation where the teacher of the class is providing bad, garbled, disorganized material and seems to be of the –
impression that times are tough all over and that seems to be an emerging theme in responses to everything times are tough on her too and so anyway here's some stuff that she just you know pulled down
And through and throwing at us with no sort of context or explanatory supporting documentation, just like, you know, like, like you print out a piece of paper and it says, like, we're working on the states.
It's like, oh, OK, what does that mean?
What are we?
We're working on the states.
What does that mean?
What am I?
You know, what she's saying basically is educate your children.
And so – but because there is this pretend packet, I'm forced to sit down with it and try and interpret it rather than just say, well, I guess this week we're learning about the states, sweetie.
I'm forced to go through this garbled piece of – this sort of pile of words and sort out exactly what they're – and it ends up being more –
than if they said, we're not pretending to be part of this anymore, and we're just going to, you know, like, good luck, God bless.
I feel like this is a problem I've had to differing extents at different times with different assignments, but I hear you on how much that is amplified right now.
I think we've had this conversation probably a hundred times.
I know I've talked to Syracuse about it, but it used to just drive me nuts when there would be quote-unquote homework.
And for the longest time, the homework was usually like a worksheet.
And I don't want to be unkind because I know these are folks who are very, very busy.
They've got a lot to do, but...
It was often the worst combination of just a rehash of what they did at school that day, but combined with this content, like you say, context-free, you know, what is this in service of thing—
Um, and sometimes it really just felt to me like something they got off the internet and printed out or just the worksheet we always do because homework is a thing that we do.
And I think that word context is so important.
We're like, not just for the kid, but for you, you know, when you say the States, well, I mean, I don't know.
See, I don't want to bag on these folks, but I mean, why, why couldn't you just say we're working on state capitals right now?
Are we talking about federalism?
Are we talking about states' rights?
Are we talking about the war against the states?
Electoral college?
There's a lot of things with states, and maybe I'm overthinking this, but I always feel like in business and project management, I learned that it's so critical to open with what we're trying to accomplish.
It sounds ridiculously obvious to everybody.
Well, of course you would start, but you don't do that.
You might be so deep for the person who's like running the project or, you know, it's your idea.
You might be so deep in the project that you it's difficult for you to stop and explain it to somebody in pigs and bunnies.
And I think that happens with schoolwork, too.
And when that happens, it's frustrating.
It's frustrating that you're willing to do what you need to do right now.
But it really does just sometimes feel like busy work.
Well, I would be gratified if they would just send us some busy work.
Because a lot of what's happening right now between my kid and me is somewhat performative.
She doesn't want to be in school.
anymore this year.
Like it's a, it, it, it feels somewhat like a farce to her.
It's all wrapping in no presence.
It's all wrapping in no presence.
My friend, some of my friend Tony said in college that I think about all the time, all wrapping no presence where it's like, yeah, I get it.
I get it.
But like she, this, my, my, my kid just got her quote unquote final grades today.
And I understand this.
I want to brag for a second.
She had straight A's.
or fours, as they say.
But guess what?
They all got changed to P. They all got changed to P. Which is fine.
Like, who cares?
Except that it would have been nice for her to come out of this first year of middle school with the grades that she earned.
And I hate to sound like Ayn Rand or something, but there are... And that's maybe one of the most trivial examples you can think of.
There are so many things the kids are not going to get, but we continue the theater of school in order to feel like we're helping.
Yeah, they, at the school...
feel like they can't give her straight A's because of special circumstances.
Which I have to say, I understand.
I do understand that the school structure that is now missing is going to hit a lot of kids hard.
And it's not fair to hold them to that same standard if their mom's a nurse.
But as you're saying, from the kid's perspective, they didn't do anything wrong.
And suddenly all their straight A's just got evaporated.
I mean, this is always the problem when you have a straight A
student because it's a different problem than if you have a student that is not getting straight A's, right?
The student that was struggling also got a pass.
And so they're feeling like, oh, well, good.
Yeah.
I mean, I understand and appreciate it on a social level, but on a strictly family level, I just like, I would like her to get a ribbon.
You know what I mean?
And from, from, from my standpoint, what I want to do is between my daughter and me,
maintain a fiction that we both know is a fiction that every day we're going to do school.
Now, it's not going to be what we when when coronavirus started and we sat down every morning and said, we're going to work for three hours straight on schoolwork.
Then we're going to take a lunch break and then we're going to work for three more hours.
Like that went away a long time ago.
Yeah.
And then it was, okay, we're going to work an hour in the morning and an hour at night and we're going to do some kind of outdoor project.
Yeah, go ride bikes.
And then – but now she looks – I put this packet down in front of her and it's like we're working on the states.
And she looks at me and she's like, what?
Yeah.
And I'm like, what I want from the teacher, what I want is something perfunctory that is in the shape of a packet where we put it down in front of the child and say, complete this.
And she and I can work on the states.
If the school wants to send me a private message and say, teach your daughter the 50 states and capitals, it's like, okay, fine.
We can work on that.
That is actionable.
That's actionable.
But what we need with her is something intelligible from the school that looks like – because it's no longer even about learning.
It's no longer even about what's in the packet.
Right.
What it's about is this agreement that my daughter and I have that she's still in school, that school matters, that the things that are coming from the school are official.
And so it's not negotiable that we're not going to argue about it.
We're going to just do the schoolwork and then we can talk about it.
Then we can elaborate on it.
Then we can work from this.
But if what the school sends is like, here's a pile of marbles, invent an education.
It's an Apollo 13 type situation.
You dump out the box and you go, we're doing states and duct tape.
Come on, people.
You got to get that filter on there.
What?
But she sees right through it, right?
I'm nine.
She looks at me and she's like, no one's in charge here.
And I'm like...
Right.
But that's not how, you know, like I have to go downstairs now and talk to Merlin and your mama is talking about web security to somebody on a Zoom call who is in Australopithecus.
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That's an expensive call.
It is a very expensive call.
I need you to also be at work and not just sitting and playing Barbies or out running around in the street.
And that needing you to be at work is absolutely 100% like a shared fantasy.
But the school is not playing along.
And what the school is giving me is a packet that if I were to use it as educational materials, it would require that I sit with her and educate her for five hours today.
Yeah.
I mean, it's almost like you didn't get Postmates.
You got Blue Apron.
But worse, it's more like, well, go make a farm and you're like, well, I just want dinner.
I really, I don't, I don't want a recipe.
I want to eat.
Well, what I got was blue apron without a recipe.
Yeah.
Right.
Or, or, or they, they sent me the recipe in an envelope and it was like, start chopping the green onions.
You're like green onions.
Was I supposed to have green onions?
Yeah.
What's like a sandwich?
A sponge and some dice.
Anyway, it's a small issue, but we're now moving into phase two of coronavirus, as you know.
The bumps are there now.
You really feel the bumps.
Phase two where nobody was prepared for this.
And the fact that the suggestion is out there that like, oh, well, maybe we're returning to normal.
has put everybody in a posture of like, do I have to stop trying now or do I have to start trying again or do I have to?
And it's a hundred times worse.
Which difficult situation do you want me to be moving into?
The difficult situation of moving back to the normal we never had or the difficult situation of this getting 10 times more or worse as our expectations are all over the map and the information is really lacking?
It's the all over the map information lacking that is
Like, if the word coming down from on high was, in order for this to work, is this thing on?
In order for this to work, we're going to have to stay quarantined as hard as we've been all the way, like, super quarantined until August 1st.
Then I think everybody would just act accordingly, and it would be extremely hard, but...
But you turn on the news, and it's like, oh, geez, people are just out at the beach now, and other people are maintaining a strict quarantine.
Some people are having picnics.
There was a hilarious video this guy posted of all this, oh, yeah, things are really hard right now, and I'm quarantined.
And then I went out and had some drinks in quarantine, and it's like, oh, this is so hard right now.
But continuing to basically do whatever he would normally do in calling it quarantine.
Oh, I see.
Now we went to the movies in quarantine.
In quarantine, yeah.
Because they're wearing a mask or they're not even wearing a mask?
Well, there's a thing.
I won't look for this right now, but Philip Bump from The Washington Post is a writer that I like a lot.
He posted something the other day that is just such an elephant in the room right now that...
It's like pressing a bruise.
I have to keep rereading this one article in order to not feel insane.
And in summary, what he says is COVID is in the White House now.
There are at least two people who are staffers that have COVID.
Everybody knows this, I guess.
But what he said was, and Fauci is or isn't in quarantine, and Pence is or isn't in quarantine, et cetera, et cetera.
But basically, he said the one place in the world...
where they have the resources and control to keep this thing out.
Really, the single place where they have the best information and all of the resources, and they couldn't do it at the White House.
But you want people to go to Chick-fil-A?
You think it's safe?
The numbers are still going up every day?
Do you take my meaning, though?
That's the one place.
God, just let it begin with you.
How about you not fuck this up before you have everybody going out there and going to Walmart?
It's like...
mental like but like so many things in the world right now for us for me to stay so when my mom comes over she has a mask on she sits in a chair in the backyard and we sit in chairs with our masks on 20 feet from her yeah and we have a social afternoon where we don't actually see each other's faces and then she goes home and we
We started doing that just because even, even, you know, my mom, super introvert.
And I mean, basically my mom and I would be fine.
It's my sister, my daughter, they're like, I'm going crazy.
So, so we started, you know, we started doing this.
Well, now we're sitting in the backyard with masks on 20 feet from each other.
And we're looking over the fence at people that are having a picnic.
And we start to feel like even though we know we're doing the right thing, we start to feel like dummies.
Like what?
Yeah, you're one of those simps.
Yeah.
What are we doing?
We look like fucking idiots here, even knowing that we're not.
And that is and on top of that, like my mom and I are people that are not at all really worried about looking like idiots to normals.
Yeah.
Right.
We're not like peer pressure.
You're not here to impress the snorks.
And yet we're sitting there like, I don't want to be wearing this mask.
You don't want to be wearing this mask.
Like, give me any opportunity to not be wearing it.
And yet the risk to you today, mom, 85-year-old mom, is probably greater than it was.
two months ago.
Yeah.
Well, remember, remember we did that thing for a while where we're like, Hey, listen, you know, there's a thing that what month time is meaningless, but there's that thing not, you know, when this first started really kicking off and people were taking it seriously, including allegedly the white house that we did this thing where we said, Oh, you know, okay.
Some, some people have this, they may be asymptomatic.
Taking a temperature and a test is not enough.
This is not a test that you pass once and you're good for life.
Like you could get it,
It could be negative for 50 days and then positive the next day.
But the thing was, correct me if I'm wrong, but the thinking was, if you're around somebody who definitely had corona, you need to go self-quarantine for two weeks.
to be safe.
And if you're around somebody that might've had it, like you still need to go isolate for a while.
It just seems like we're not even pretending that we're doing that anymore.
The white, how is that?
How is it that I'm sorry to be fixated.
How is it that everybody in the white house doesn't have this fucking thing?
I have no idea how so few people have it given how careless they have been with their behavior.
This is what's insane about it.
Our insanity making is if this was incredibly virulent, virulent, virulent,
And everybody that got in contact with somebody got the disease and died.
That would be one thing.
If this was like a bad cold, you know, or that just killed old people or something, but it doesn't – because it just bounces around, it doesn't – like you want all the people that violated quarantine and stood outside of a Chick-fil-A cocking their shotguns and talking about their hairstyles –
I need a haircut, Mr. Trump, sir.
You want them all to get sick.
You know what?
I don't want anybody to die.
I don't really want anybody to get sick, but I need somebody to be a teachable moment.
Well, that's what I mean.
I don't want them to get sick.
What I want is for them to get sick in order to demonstrate that.
that that's not what we're going to do but if they all get out there and they're hugging each other and wrapping themselves in the american flag and shooting their guns in the air and then they go back to work and they don't get sick it just makes the quarantine look dumb and then you and then you you flip over to another page and it's like well you know 15 000 more people got it this week and it's like but none of the ones with the none of the ones at the chick-fil-a
Well, who knows?
Maybe it's mostly it's mostly actually just Mexican people working at a food processing plant.
It's like, well, that's what?
No, that's not that's not the like, why is the virus?
also recapitulating the problems of the United States.
Oh, God, you're so right.
You're so right.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like somebody said on political Twitter somewhere today was saying, like, you know, listen, understand that when these ding-a-lings say it's time to get back to work, what they really mean is it's time for the low-wage workers who constitute my business, comprise my business, it's time for them to go back to work.
That's what they mean.
And I guess what I'm amazed by is that a virus in particular, you want it to be the great leveler, right?
This is the type of thing that class can't protect you from.
This is the type of thing.
It's in the White House, right?
This is the type of thing that is a great universalizer.
And yet somehow this virus is like a – is striking –
you know, more profoundly
across class and race lines in a way that that you you want to grab the virus by the shirt and go what like why didn't you kill boris johnson like if you had done that virus just the one thing boris johnson was so arrogant about this virus and then he got it and he got sick and he went to a hospital and you just he and his wife name or girlfriend named their new kid after the nurses that saved him
Oh, isn't that sweet?
But the virus had a chance to scare the living shit out of everybody in the world.
The Prime Minister of the UK died after two weeks before having been like, we need herd immunity or whatever.
And yet he pulls through, right?
And so it's like, why?
I didn't want Boris Johnson to die.
I think he's hilarious.
But
What a great opportunity from a PR standpoint if this virus is really serious about getting famous.
And this virus just – It doesn't have muscle.
It's like that guy at South by Southwest that one time that said, listen, if you want to make it in the music business, you have a choice.
Do you go to your grandmother's funeral or do you finish out the tour?
And where I'm standing from, you finish out the tour.
And Josh Rosenfeld, the question came to him down the panel.
And Josh said, at Barsouk Records, we would like you to be able to attend your grandmother's funeral.
Put that on a mug.
Oh, wow.
Good line.
After the panel was over, Josh was just mobbed by people trying to get him.
This is 2001 or whatever.
2000 josh just bobbed and you could just see on josh's face you know he's like he knew he was the hero he knew he he knew when he was born that he was meant to be a hero and this was this was the moment that like the gods had finally lifted him up this is his like um coronation
Now, fast forward 20 years later.
So apart from the just unkindness of hoping someone you don't like gets ill, which I think is, from a political standpoint, kind of understandable right now.
This is the week where I say all the obvious things.
There's two things wrong with that.
That common like, oh, I hope Stephen Miller gets it.
Well, OK, two problems.
First of all, that person will probably give it to other people.
Whether that's the lady working at the Chick-fil-A or the person that parks your car, because this does not discriminate in that way, a douchebag could easily give it to many, many non-douchebags.
And that's not sustainable.
Let's not wish ill on people if they can make other people sick.
The other one, just from a political standpoint, everything will always be someone else's fault.
Everything will... I mean, in this... Especially in this economy, this administration, no matter what... So if the... God forbid, the president gets sick with this, right?
That is going to be the fault of the fake news media that would not get out the message that he was trying to get out, right?
It's just... There is no up is down, left is right, dogs and cats living together.
You know what I mean?
So, like, you're going to get people sick, and then...
it's always going to be somebody's fault.
Maybe it's the Jews.
I don't know, but it's going to be somebody else's fault.
What is someone else's fault?
We know where it came from.
That's right.
We know.
Oh, we know.
I can't say right now.
No, I don't, I am.
I am still fine.
Right.
And my, I'm, I'm fine in this.
If we don't break quarantine, you know, talking to the music industry folks, um,
They long ago, weeks ago, said there is no music industry.
And talking about live music, concert industry.
Right, right.
Which, correct me if I'm wrong, is the way, the primary way necessarily that a lot of bands make their money now.
They're not selling records so much that the touring is the potential salvation.
But leaving bands aside.
Mm-hmm.
The network, the American, well, and global sort of constellation.
What it would be the concert industrial complex.
Exactly.
So, for instance, in your own town, the wonderful venues of the Great American Music Hall.
and the Fillmore and bottom of the hill.
Slims is closed now.
Slims is totally done.
Boss Gags is out.
No more Slims.
Slims.
You've got the Independent.
A lot of venues in San Francisco are legendary, world-class music venues, and they employ hundreds of people, and what they represent is the San Francisco tip of
of a global network of booking agents, managers, tour, you know, tour managers, sound people, bartenders, you know, into the, into the tens and hundreds of thousands of people, security, tick a ticket master, all this stuff, you know, and within their culture, there's no,
Um, like they have, uh, have all met in their, their secret, um, like gold plated bathrooms and they've said, our business is over.
No one is going to come.
No one is going to go to a concert.
Probably not until 2022.
Yep.
And so what, what's next for us, right?
They're not, they aren't,
Sitting around saying like maybe in August will open because the because the funny thing is that when they run their numbers Somebody somebody sent me a somebody from this business sent me a link to one promoter who had had this thing where They it was a big theater, you know, like the let's say the Fillmore.
Yeah
And they had set up on their seating plot, they'd set up chairs every six feet.
And they had...
So the Fillmore capacity.
It's not like you would pass by anybody to get to your seat.
No, no, no.
You would float in like Baron Harkonnen.
Or go to the bar or the bathroom.
Exactly.
Oh, you get to the trough.
Six feet at the trough, please.
But so here was the Fillmore Auditorium.
Capacity 60.
And the tickets were $300 or something.
And they're trying to think of a way like, well, so do you think that – do you think that the Decembrists or Grimes or whatever, do you think that somebody would tour –
under these conditions, like the band shows up, there's 60 people sitting in polling chairs, six feet from one another that all paid $300 to be here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, this is, this is such, I think about this constantly every time.
So we took a, it was mother's day yesterday and, um, I just wanted to like take a, pick a walk, uh, socially distance walk.
And so we did that, uh, basically just, you know, walk from our place, um, you know, down toward the beach and, you know, I've got a socially distanced coffee in quarantine and,
I said to her, of course, I'm taking note of all the places that are open and not open.
We haven't done a lot of that.
We've been in the house.
I was just flooded with all of these thoughts.
I said to her, I know this sounds dumb, but I can't believe how much stuff is closed, but I also kind of can't believe how much stuff is open for a variety of reasons.
And I mean, of course, now I'm also thinking about this referendum that got passed in, I want to say March, whenever the primary was in California.
There's a referendum, which is, you know, when, as you know, when the snorks come up with an idea and everybody votes on it.
And that was like, boo, there's not enough occupancy in San Francisco retail.
So from now on, if you have a spot that's been open for X months, we're going to start, I guess, technically taxing you a certain amount each month for your empty storefront.
And I'm like, wow, I wonder what's going to happen with that law.
But what I kind of finally landed on was just like, I don't understand how you open your place for such small capacity.
You can't.
Well, yeah, exactly.
And then today, this one was a real head-scratcher for me on Morning Edition or one of the local stations.
They said that there's a school that will be open, or a school system, I guess, that I believe they said will be opening one day a week.
And I was like, that seems like the worst of all worlds.
Because you're not opening it up, really.
I mean, there's some infrastructure stuff.
Like, you know, there are schools that have become the place where you can come pick up food and stuff like that.
But, you know, do you follow what I'm saying?
You think about what it would take.
It's the same kind of reason that you and I, you know, somebody said, hey, come to my fan thing or come to my...
meetup or whatever, it's in Saskatchewan and there's no money.
And you're like, that's a lot of cost for me to do something where I'm not going to make money.
I would lose money on that.
So I can't do that.
In this case, think about what's involved in getting that school up.
and running for one day.
Well, let's say it's for seven days a week.
Maybe let's do this.
Let's play some catch up, get ahead a little bit.
We're going to open for seven days a week.
Kids got to go to school seven days a week.
So what do you do?
You open the school.
You got to bring everybody back in.
How much cleaning will you have to do to make that place safe?
And then on top of it all, you're basically throwing your kids in a fucking Petri dish for six hours of education.
And it's like, I mean, I know these are smart people.
They're smarter than me and they have their reasons.
But like, that's the thing with whether it's restaurants or, you know, pretty much any kind of thing that's considered essential.
I don't know how they're doing it.
I think it's a it's a thing that we've talked about you and I already a couple of episodes, which is that there's a colossal failure of imagination.
And we're right at the crux of like imagination failure.
Like two months ago, a month ago, we were in a state where everything was unprecedented.
And so we had yet to evolve a, as John Siracusa would say, we've yet to evolve a new way of thinking.
And no one's prepared to really slam the casket lid down on a lot of things that are going to die.
And so this is an exciting time.
It's all a world of potential.
And now because of the mealy mouthed and, you know, sort of weaselly way that this first stage has been handled, what we've got is a lot of people who are trying to justify their existence or trying to imagine the future in terms of the past, who are just trying to get stuff out.
in motion again and the only thing they have they don't have the imagination to model something new all they have is like like like giving your daughter those those pass grades it's like that's just people who only had three options uh uh you know succeed fail or other yeah pass fail or incomplete yeah and they just they just picked the one that would get them in the least trouble
And they didn't have the imagination to say that – to understand that every kid, what they needed most right now was something supportive.
It doesn't matter.
When they apply to college, every college in the country is going to recognize that in 2020 –
Whatever your grades were that year, kind of don't matter.
We're looking and we know this is the year with the asterisks.
That was the asterisk.
So everybody knows it.
So whatever your school district is, what they could do is send a letter home with a big certificate in it that says, amazing, you were amazing this year.
Isn't it amazing that we're all still here?
Or whatever.
Today, after I get off this call, Marilyn, I am going to...
A Zoom meeting that on my schedule, on my calendar, it is a five-hour Zoom meeting.
Five hours.
Five hours on Zoom.
Okay.
Because earlier this year, you know, the – we're talking about January, maybe December –
I was asked to be on a panel for a foundation that gives artist grants.
Oh, cool.
And it's a prestigious panel because within Alaska culture, like this group, the Rasmussen Foundation, is the premier arts foundation group.
It was started by the descendants of Elmer Rasmussen, the man that started the National Bank of Alaska.
And when he died, all of his billions of dollars, he decided he was going to give back to the people of Alaska.
And I grew up with this family, right?
This is one of those... Elmer Rasmussen was the generation that was there right before my Uncle Jack got there.
So Uncle Jack, who arrived in Alaska in 1951, like Elmer was already...
Had already scraped together the the simoleons to start a little bank.
But like, you know, this was when Anchorage was town population 10,000 or something.
Anyway, Elmer Rasmussen and the Rasmussen family, like his granddaughter, Natasha Rasmussen, married Kurt Hansmeier, who lived at the end of my street.
You know, it's small town stuff.
But now the Rasmussen Foundation is this foundation that's endowed with an incredible amount of money, and they are giving it away.
And so the Rasmussen Foundation reached out to me and said, will you be on a panel that's going to – we're going to look at hundreds of applications for artist grants, and you and your fellow panelists are going to help us choose –
And it's not a small grant and it's not, there's not a small number of them or some of them are small.
Some of them are big, but you know, we're giving out dozens of them.
And they're like, we know this is a lot of work.
You know, you're going to have to review submissions of hundreds of artists, but we're going to fly you to Anchorage.
We're going to put you up at the captain cook hotel for a week.
You're going to sit together in a conference room with these other artists, you know, mature artists.
And you're going to,
talk about all this stuff and work through all this, all these, um, performances.
And I was like, that does sound like a lot of work, but it's a real honor to be asked.
Um, and it's, and it's a little bit of like the state of Alaska holds me in such high regard as like a, like an, like an Alaskan.
That's an honor.
It really was.
And when I said it, when I said to my uncle Jack, like, yeah, I'm coming up this year.
Um, the Rasmussen foundation has asked me to,
to do this you know the whole thing was worth it just to see my uncle go what
the rasmussen foundation i was like yeah it's like the first time you appear one time i was on nbc nightly news and my my brother-in-law was like whoa it's like whoa you're on the brian williams show yeah exactly like like you you exist but you know like you're official he couldn't believe it he thought it was like so amazing and and um
And I was, you know, I was so proud.
And then this all happened, right?
And they wrote and said, well, you know, the thing is these artists still need these grants.
And I was like, right.
And they said, and we can't, you're not going to fly to Anchorage and spend a week in a hotel.
I was like, right.
So they said, so what you're going to do is you're going to sit on multiple five hour long zoom calls.
Oh no.
And review the way that I make you watch a YouTube video with me.
You're going to do that with bands for five hours, several times.
Yes.
And review all these people that are like – because some of them are like, hi, I'm an established artist and I am trying to make –
i would like to take this grant in order to bring zydeco music to the native villages of alaska and you're like huh interesting proposal and then there's a guy that's like i'm kind of a rich kid i went to middlebury and what i'd you know what i'd like to do is go play oboe under the sea and it's like okay i'm not sure how that helps and then there's the then there are like dozens of people that are like
I've got a band and we don't make any money.
We appreciate your support.
We'd like to make a record.
And we feel like if you gave us money, that it would help us make a record.
Quick question.
How vetted are they at this stage?
Are you just going to look at everything people send in or has somebody pre-sorted these into like, here's our 25?
They have pre-sorted them in, I think, pretty extensively because I think they get thousands of applications.
Oh, God.
And so what they've done is narrow it down to like the top hundred, which includes a lot of people that are
Like, I write songs and I've got a band.
And then you listen to it and you're like, yeah, you do.
You write songs and you've got a band.
But what you need to do is spend some more time in your band.
You know, like if you're serious about it.
You need to go back to that shed by the Richard Hugo house for a while.
And there's a lot of...
In music, they're not wrong when they say all our band needs is to have a little bit of money that would enable us to buy a practice space or to get a computer that's good and that will help us make our music.
They're not wrong that that will maybe help them make their music.
What they're wrong is to think that
that that matters.
Yeah.
Right.
Like the, there is a survival of the fittest problem in all of the arts.
And sometimes the people that survive are not the best.
They're the ones that, um, had resources going in or were the most tenacious or whatever.
But I think I told you the story, uh, at the 25th anniversary of sub pop Nabeel Ayers and I,
Co DJed a sub pop Sub pop night at Linda's tavern, which was like the Linda's was co-owned by Bruce Pav and it was like, you know cool kid bar and Nabeel brought all his records and Ben London brought his records all the people like brought all their vinyl from 1989 and Nabeel and I did a whole night's worth of grunge DJ brunch vinyl
And every record we pulled out
of these crates we would you know we'd hold it up to each other we'd be like oh my god remember that band oh this is gonna blow their minds it's so great okay you know we're you know we've got some song is playing and we're about to cue up this tune and we're just like tittering with how it's how it's just gonna destroy the room that we're like throwing down this steel pool this is me dropping the needle on zumpano yeah here we go dude you're gonna love zumpano this is so good
And then we would drop the thing, and it would be, you know, it's like, and it would suck.
And we'd be like, fuck, okay, all right.
Oh, dude, dude, dude, remember fucking Kappa?
Kappa was real.
Remember L. Steiner?
Like, this is going to be incredible.
Like, throw it on.
And all night long, we were playing records by what we thought were these legendary bands from the time.
And the good music was by Soundgarden and Mudhoney and Nirvana.
And you realize like, oh, there was an aperture and only a few bands got through, but those were the ones that were good.
And for the most part, like the argument in the music business that like, ah, it's full of rich kids or it's rigged.
It's always...
On one side of that aperture, bands are convinced that it's rigged.
It's who you know.
It's all this stuff.
But when you really listen to 100 artists who are all looking for a grant, you realize it's kind of not rigged.
It kind of is if you're good, you stand out.
And if you're good, people want to pick you.
And if you're, if you show promise, which a lot of these bands do, you know, a lot of their music is like, Oh, right.
That's, I get what you're going for.
However,
you haven't figured it out.
You haven't figured out how to, how to land your chorus.
You haven't figured out how to do your thing.
Yeah.
It's like, you've probably never seen the shark tank, but people come in and they pitch an idea for a product.
And clearly there is some, some vetting here and they bring in ones that are obviously really good.
And ones that are obviously really terrible.
And that's part of the fun is like any of these reality shows, you get to laugh at the snorks and their, Oh, their dreams.
Um, and I,
there but what you're describing here though is that sometimes on that show they have to say to people look you know you're obviously just here for some free advertising like there's all these classic like these things never get funded and one of those is like as steve jobs said like this is a feature not a product or this is a product not a company like you don't really have a business that needs my investment there's nothing i would benefit from giving you and a lot of times they're like this is a really good idea but you have
this debt or this is a really good idea, but you're just not ready.
But, but, but, but, but.
And I think that's true for a lot of bands is that that process, and I realize there are things where obviously people have huge advantages over other people, but like that road hardened, like playing every night kind of thing, like makes you a different kind of band.
You know, it's really different from your aspirations are important, but your track record is critical.
Yeah.
And the thing that takes a songwriter and makes them good is, I think in a lot of cases it was for me, writing a bunch of songs that are almost good and finding that you got a reaction from people that was appropriate.
Like you played them some almost good songs and they were like, hmm.
And then you go back and do it again.
and try something else.
And when you've written some almost good songs, the way you think about it is, hey, these songs are almost good.
Like if I just had... You just need a bridge loan to get me over the finish line.
Yeah, if I just didn't have to work, I'd be able to write good songs all the time.
And it's like, nope, you have not yet demonstrated that you can write a single good song.
So anybody who's in a position to say like, okay, why don't we give you a year off so you can write songs?
They're never going to do it.
It's like going to the Ministry of Silly Walks with a walk that isn't that silly.
So anyway, what had happened was...
Now I am having agreed to do this.
I can't say, look, there's no...
there's no amount of money or respect or love for the state of Alaska in the world that would have made me agree to a thing where I had to sit on five-hour Zoom calls multiple days in a row listening to people's demos.
Like, if you had come to me with that in January and said, the king of Alaska has decided to hand you his scepter, all you have to do is spend...
five days on Zoom calls with people you don't know listening to people's demos, I would have said, thank you, but no.
That's not what you signed up for.
I'm altering the deal.
Pray I do not alter it further.
Now I can't back out, right?
I mean, these people are counting on me.
Yeah, right, right.
And so I'm in a situation where there is no...
And I'm not saying that there's a failure of imagination on the part of the Rasmussen Foundation.
They're just doing what they can do, right?
They're just trying to fulfill their promise.
But if next year there's a coronavirus, they hopefully won't do it this way, right?
This is an ad hoc, like, throw it together kind of solution.
Yeah.
But so many things, like the concert industry, right now those people are trying to think of a new reality.
And it isn't going to be people in folding chairs paying $300 to sit six feet apart.
It's going to be something else.
And we're seeing... And offering complimentary chicken fingers is not paradigmatically different enough to accommodate this new world.
Right.
And you see, in the hip-hop world, they just went right over to Instagram and were like, hey, we're doing a live concert.
And everybody went, great.
Well, this is what we're doing now.
We're watching concerts on... And they are different enough and they're unique enough that they're worth it.
Ben Gibbard's been doing a show every week from his little home studio...
Since week two of the quarantine.
Right.
And he's just like, I'm doing this now.
This is what I do.
So people are being inventive.
But we're.
I'm feeling like a tremendous pressure in the world to do exactly what we predicted several weeks ago, which is.
Return to the thing.
Return to the things that weren't working.
Like, let's hurry up and get back to the things that weren't working before we really realize how badly, how stupid our world was.
Yeah, I mean, this is like that classic example of me with the VW, where, like, as long as we're changing the gaskets on the engine, we might as well do everything else that would benefit from having torn the engine out.
And, like, right now the engine is out.
And this is a really good time to get the scissor jacks and work on all the other things that could be better right now.
And what is that?
It's a dramatic... I mean, you know, unfortunately... Unfortunately, this hasn't panned out to be as big of a disaster as it could have been so far.
And so it does look like a panic for nothing.
It does look like a...
It does look like liberal hyperventilation or whatever it is that it's being cast.
Yeah.
And it's really undermining the – it's hard to say that I wish this earthquake was stronger.
Mm-hmm.
Because it's not quite strong enough to justify anything other than a weekend at Bernie's.
I totally agree with you.
And that's, I mean, so many thoughts swimming through my head.
One is that in the end, I think the epidemiologists and public health people will get a ton of blame for the thousands that died and very little credit for the millions that didn't.
Like they say, if I'm doing my job, you'll never notice me.
If you notice me doing my job, it's probably too late.
Bad stuff is already happening.
And then on top of that, it's like, yeah, exactly.
It's like, well, there's this lust to act like this is behind us mostly at this point.
And I think there are a handful of people driving that narrative and many, many people who really like the people driving that narrative and are happy that that's the narrative that
You know, it's also the problem with accelerationism in general.
Is it like people really like good people are going to get harmed really badly with accelerationism?
And that's, I don't know, that's a real old man thing to say.
It's not very cool.
But when you say like, oh yeah, hook it to my veins.
I love to see this.
And you're like, oh man, there's a lot of nice people that are going to get really harmed if that earthquake gets worse.
Yeah.
And I think it's, I think it's revealing that,
It's revealing something about... There are a lot of people that aren't worried about people getting harmed.
And I think a lot of people, and maybe across both sides of the aisle, who hope the other side gets harmed.
And this isn't really...
because the virus isn't breaking the way it was predicted to, it's like, because the earthquake wasn't strong enough, it feels like that this has become the...
It's not even that.
I was going to say that this culture war that feels like it's burbling beneath the surface, that this –
This hasn't even been enough of a crisis that it has precipitated that culture war particularly.
It's precipitated it in that the same fucking Clive and Bundy's are stomping around.
It's accelerated the kind of cultural stuff that already existed, but it hasn't.
uh, provoked the kind of, I don't want to say revolution, but provoke the kind of response that would, that would, um, unquestionably prove that a lot of people want something different.
But, but I, you know, that I,
I don't even think it's accelerated it.
I just feel like... The guys with the guns at Subway?
I mean, maybe that's just because they're getting photographed doing that.
But there were already guys with the guns at Subway that were protesting Black Lives Matter protests.
They were already doing that.
Think about those ding-a-lings at the University of Virginia that marched with their polo shirts and their tiki torches.
That was a bigger...
march than any of these like reopen coronavirus marches i guess not i guess those i've seen those pictures the way they report on this is a little unfair because they really give not only do they give these ding-a-lings too much attention but they often do shoot it in a way that makes it look you look at you look at a tight shot versus like a drone shot and it's hilarious yeah yeah no it basically yeah it looks it looks like a thumbhead picnic
Yeah, we're being forced to reopen by a handful of thousands of people.
Like every state, 500 people are sort of banging trash can lids.
Yeah.
whatever, millions of people are like, huh, well, I guess it's like half the people want to reopen and half of them don't.
In summary, America is a land of contrast.
It's the Westboro Baptist Church problem, right?
Like, oh, well, I guess there's a whole huge group of people in the country that believe that God...
uh, uh, is killing soldiers because of gay marriage.
And it's like, no, there's 40 people.
There are people who believe that God hates fags.
And then there are people who don't think that.
So basically both sides, both sides.
I mean, they, they, they do, uh, they're making a point.
I'm extremely anxious and not anxious about anything that's going to affect me.
Right.
Like I'm not worried that, uh,
Um, I'm the, like the meat shortage that's coming because all of the meat processing plants are shut down.
That meat shortage isn't even going to affect me, right?
There's never going to be a hamburger shortage in Seattle because all of our hamburger is locally sourced, hand raised, grass fed, um,
where on the package it says, this cow's name was Mary.
Everyone in my steer has a master's degree.
But I'm anxious about how broken we were and how this is not going – there's no version of where we are right now.
And I never say this on the show, and I hate to –
ever introduce it we've already talked about coronavirus more on this program than on all of our subsequent ones but it's because our president is so bad he's really dumb it really is he's so bad it's rough it's unbelievable it's unbelievable it's always been unbelievable i just don't i just haven't spent any time saying so because everybody knows it but
No, it's not very cool to continue to notice that.
But, yeah, I feel the same way.
I'm very anxious, too.
I'm really of many minds about many things.
But, I mean, there's...
And amidst these challenging times, I do feel like there is often a benefit to something like Occam's Razor, which is trying to understand, like they say, when you hear hoofbeats, assume horses, not zebras.
Do they say that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think I learned that from House.
I like it.
It's never lupus.
But there are simple explanations for everything.
One simple explanation is that there's so many levels of easily understanding Trump.
And you don't even have to be unkind about it, because everybody's had an uncle or a friend of the family that's like that guy.
But he's like all of those guys.
That's the problem.
He's not just racist, and he's not just not very bright.
And he's not just incurious about the stuff that would enable him to do a D-plus job
Um, he's, he's all of those things, which is really a pretty bad combination in a leader right now, a leader who not only doesn't want to lead, but well, let's go through some of the obvious things.
He likes things that benefit him.
You know, we keep learning time after time, Jared Kushner doing these deals that like are meant to look like they're helping, you know, the country, but it's really just like the first card he pulled out of his Rolodex that he owes that person a favor, I'm guessing, or there's a little bit, there's a nickel, a grift that he would get out of it.
I don't want to
But let's go back first principles, Clarice.
Somebody said this on Twitter today.
Like, if you don't understand why somebody did or didn't do something, the easiest conceivable explanation that it's either they did it because they wanted to do it and they didn't do it because they didn't want to do it.
There's so many things where you just, I'm like that.
Why did I do what I do?
Why did I not do that?
Why am I not a potted fern?
I don't know.
I mean, I do what I like and I don't do what I don't like.
And everybody is like that.
But then on top of that, you've got the chuds that just love to see this owning the libs, trigger those libs kind of things.
And it's like, it's a death cult.
To me, stuff like the NRA, stuff like the White House right now, it's a death cult.
And they are the ultimate accelerationists.
They can't wait to always do the most chaotic thing.
They're very jokerified.
They always want to do the most chaotic thing that's going to muddy the waters the most.
And I don't think there's a plan.
I just think that's how they like to operate.
And it's not a great time for that.
No, there's never been a plan.
And it's astonishing how much the plan always was.
Well, the plan of the whole world throughout history has been nobody's really got a plan.
They're just doing what they want and not doing what they don't want.
And, you know, and that produced over time systems, systems that were entrenched.
Systems that were, well, what we think of as a class system or we think of as the caste system or we think of as an industrial system or a series of – or the capitalist system.
All of those systems were just the result of people making sort of –
decisions based on what they wanted to do and what they didn't want to do and when they saw somebody across the across the stream that was doing the same thing they were like hey let's you know let's sync up on this it seems like uh seems like when we try to harvest our food in the winter and plant it in the uh late summer that that's not working out so why don't we do it the other way and see if that you know like just basic stuff like um and a lot of it in the last
50 years, a lot of those systems we challenged.
We wanted to dismantle because we looked at them and said, there are things intrinsically unfair about this.
There are things that are unjust.
And we've dismantled a lot of them.
And I think the premise in dismantling them was that there was an underlying truth, an underlying justice that
that was waiting for us, if we could just take away the artificial injustice that had been imposed, if we could just dismantle the unfair systems, what we would find underneath was something good or that we could build something fair.
And what was in the way was
Not the fact that we were not a very good band.
What was in the way was a conspiracy to keep our band down.
Oh, a conspiracy and a system.
A system's what gets you.
A system.
A system.
Oh, the system.
And so we've dismantled the system in a lot of ways, at least in our minds, right?
We haven't dismantled the system as far as the actual system that's operating still.
But in our minds, we've envisioned, in a lot of ways, like science fiction—
We've envisioned a world that is post-capitalist or post-patriarchal or post-racist or post-whatever.
We've Star Trek-ified in our imaginations reality so that we can confidently tilt against the windmills of all these bad systems.
But what we're discovering is that there is no good, pure thing beneath them.
You dismantle them, and what ends up happening is it's just all against all again.
Not on shin bones.
Yeah.
If you take away the premise that the president of the United States is not a grifter, you find that, well, we never wrote down anywhere that the president of the United States didn't.
get to be a drifter if you wanted to or grifter yeah yeah and so a little loophole we should have closed probably so what we did was we took away the you know we we tried to dismantle um what we thought of as an oppressive system and what we got was a autocrat right like what's waiting beneath is not better it's worse
And you can't go into these things with an idea that we're just dismantling the bad.
You have to go into it with a fully fledged vision of something better where you already have all the laws written and all the benefits.
And so much of what we do now is all rapper, no present.
It's like we're just going to – don't worry about what the laws are that are going to enable us to have a free and just society.
We'll deal with that later.
What we're going to do, first of all, is – Before we have this fantastic health care that apparently will exist at some point, we need to get rid of Obamacare because that's bad.
And what we replace it with, don't worry.
It's going to be really good.
Don't worry about that.
Don't worry about that.
Wave hand.
Wave hand.
We'll talk about it soon in a very short period of time.
What we need to do is get rid of those insiders, those Washington insiders, or replace them with some businessmen or outsiders.
Somebody like Jared Kushner, who's not an insider, somebody who's really earned their position.
Get those insiders out and get those outsiders in.
And of course, the outsiders are going to be great at it because they're not insiders.
Oh, they love going to work.
Oh, you got to get.
And the problem is that whole like get the insiders out and the outsiders in that is that that mentality goes across the spectrum.
Right.
That's what everybody runs on.
Everybody's going to run on that.
It's time for a fresh start for a fresh start.
Yeah.
And it's like every time what we're doing is we're getting rid of the people that knew where what how things worked and we're replacing them with people that don't know how things work.
And then we're going to wait.
We're going to watch for four years.
They'll pick it up.
Yeah, we're going to watch them try and figure out how things work, and right about the time that they figure it out, we're going to get rid of them and replace them with people that don't know how things work.
And, you know, and the alternative, right, is like, well, you've got a class of people that just run things, and we don't want that.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's like, remember in Taxi Driver, Palantine, we are the people.
And now we're the government, too.
So here we are, right?
We do not...
I think about this all the times in terms of the critiques I used to make about drone warfare that would attract the attention of Lieutenant Colonel Matt Martin, who would send us bitchy emails that ended up taking me to Africa.
Long story.
You know, the idea that we now have this technology –
And we hadn't really thought about it.
We hadn't really thought about the ethics of it until it was already here.
And so we're just going to keep doing what the technology allows us to do.
And y'all worry about the ethics.
But the problem is it's too late to worry about the ethics because we're already doing it.
We're going to do it.
So possession is nine tenths of the law.
So anyway, thanks.
And so much of what's happened in the last 20 years.
Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Exactly, right?
There's a little box in this house right now, sitting in this room, and if I say the word computer, what is the land war in Africa?
The computer's going to say.
Mm-hmm.
It just listed a bunch of actors.
It said Charlize Theron and a bunch of other people.
She's very gifted.
So there's a thing in the corner that's listening to me, and I don't want it there.
I didn't agree to it.
But it's there because somebody in this house wants to be able to say, computer, play Old Town Road.
Set a 10-minute pasta timer.
Is he getting his horse?
Here we go.
I think so.
Computer, turn it up!
Can you hear it?
A little bit, yeah.
Old Town Road is playing now.
Somebody wants that.
Yes.
And so there's a little box in the corner that's listening to me talk all the time.
Computer, stop.
Please go, computer, stop.
I don't want it to stop.
I don't want to get sued.
No sue.
Oh, wait.
Maybe we qualify as a remix, and therefore we'll go straight to number one.
Yeah, I'm wrapping up.
Had you thought of that.
Computer, stop.
So, yeah, here we are.
You know, here we are.
Yeah.
And what I've realized in the last three months is what I want to do every day is ride my bike and work in the garden and make a little dinner and continue to do my podcasts and
And time, as you say, the flat circle-ness of time has never been clearer.
I don't have any ambition anymore.
I don't want to go anywhere.
I don't want anything different to happen.
You know, time, I could just get old this way.
I've stopped caring for my beard.
It's like I look like Michael Chabon.
And I'm not worried about it.
You know, like...
I don't want to – I have – there is no try.
There's only do.
And so I have a lot of time to sit and think about what we could –
And maybe I need to start a blog.
Oh, that's such a good idea.
You should start a blog.
Maybe I should start writing this stuff down on Medium.
I've been noticing a lot of people are reading a lot of people's Medium posts.
There's a lot of thought leadership going on with Medium.
And that's the thing, like thought leadership.
I started to watch a TED Talk the other day, and I got like 30 seconds into it, and
And, like, rage quit.
I was like, there's a reason I don't watch TED Talks.
Some of them are very good.
I don't know.
I like the one with the pickpocket guy.
His is great.
Does he pick people's pockets?
Oh, my God.
Apollo.
Not Apollo Creed.
Apollo Robbins.
He's this really good pickpocket.
And his TED Talk is great.
Temple Grandin.
Very good.
There's some good ones out there.
I keep thinking of this.
So Michael Lewis is the guy who did, for our listeners, is the guy who did, I think he did Moneyball.
He's done lots of things.
Let me see if I can get the actual information here.
Yeah, so he did Moneyball.
Oh, he did The Big Short.
I think he did.
Yeah, he did Money, Paul.
He's the director or the writer?
No, sorry.
He's a writer.
When you say he did.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
He's an author.
And so I think his latest book that I'm aware of is The Fifth Risk, which is very interesting and harrowing.
And it's about the current administration and about doing a very deep dive on these three agencies that are just critical, that people don't think that much about, energy, agriculture, and commerce.
Oh, yes.
Oh, I love this book already.
Yeah.
He's such a good writer.
I'm thinking of that because it's pretty scary to read because it's basically about exactly what you're describing.
So anyway, recommending The Fifth Risk.
Also recommending his podcast, which is called what?
I think it's called Something About the Rules.
His podcast, which I've listened to all of, is called...
The rules, isn't that a dating thing?
Against the rules.
Against the rules.
And it's fascinating.
So let me read what the Internet Science page says.
Lewis's podcast, Against the Rules, first aired April 2, 2019.
First season comprised seven episodes, each taking on a different aspect of society, addressing the concept of fairness, quote, in realms ranging from art authentication to consumer finance, unquote.
And it's very, very, very good.
And the first episode, I think sort of the...
I don't know.
I don't recall.
I haven't listened to it in a while.
But I feel like the initiating idea was like, what happened to referees in American life?
The people who know, cite and enforce the rules.
And so a lot of what he ends up talking about is some twist on what it means when you either don't respect referees anymore, or in some cases, you just don't have referees anymore.
Yeah.
And it's obviously, it's germane, it's what the podcast is about, but it goes straight to what you're saying here.
I'm calling it accelerationism, but just this idea that we've got to wipe out all of these systems that are so crooked because they don't benefit us.
And of course, there's just this whole double standard of all the things that I do are good necessarily, and all the things that they do are bad necessarily, and I'm going to systematically either install my own referees or get rid of the referees that I don't like.
Now, sit down with a paper and pencil and make a list of all the referees who have gone away in the last three plus years.
It's pretty astonishing when you look at it from that angle where you're saying, well, this corrupt agency has caused problems for me in the past.
Or maybe they haven't.
Maybe they're not complimentary enough or whatever it is.
But you just go in and they're just picking out one at a time, just firing all the refs because they think the rules don't apply.
And they don't like the very unfair system of how it's applied to them.
And the danger, of course, or the thought danger, is when you go far enough back upstream to a place where there are referees that are, like, not universally accepted, but generally accepted.
Yeah.
In order to get that far back up the stream, you're walking back into – you're walking back across –
Across lines of injustice, right?
Because at a point at which you have referees that are generally accepted, there are going to be people disincluded, right?
There are going to be referees.
At the level that it's generally accepted, there are going to be people that are disenfranchised.
Well, referee lives matter.
LAUGHTER
Keep going.
And that is the thing that at least in our contemporary world, we find the most intolerable.
And so but the problem is once you know what?
This is the thing that we that we didn't expect in 1990 when we started to say like that the referees were part of.
systemic, class-based, patriarchal world.
And it was us.
It was the left.
It was the universities that said, we no longer accept your biased referees.
What we didn't anticipate was that
what was good for the goose was good for the gander and that all the people in front of Chick-fil-A that are carrying rocket launchers also then could say, well, we don't accept your referees.
Right.
And that was something we didn't, we, we just didn't,
Think about, as we said, we're going to untangle ourselves from your from your your biased and.
Do you include in that things like challenging the idea of the Western literature canon?
Well, that was where it started, right?
But I mean – and the initial – and the thing is the initial premise of all this stuff is good.
It's good.
It's virtuous, right?
To say like they're – Pointing out that – so like you take the phrase Russian judge.
The Russian judge is a meaningful analogy for a reason.
And it is true.
You can just see it that –
So the Russian judges, Soviet or Soviet, I guess, judges in the past at the Olympics do tend to grade pretty harshly on the Western teams and especially the United States.
So it's understandable to say, well, we've got to get the Russian judge out of there because, you know, they're corrupt.
But it goes, it all goes so much further than that.
Well, what if you just say, well, there's no judging anymore.
Now I just decide who wins.
Oh, by the way, gold medal to my son-in-law, Jerry Kushner.
Right, and then you guys get to have your own gold medal, and then everybody gets their own gold medal.
Nobody's going to interfere with your business.
But how you put that genie back in the bottle is that you don't.
And so generally in history, what ends up happening is someone comes in at a certain point, because you can't have a thousand different referees or none.
You can't have...
You can't have competing systems of law, right?
You can't have – there's not going to be conservative – I mean right now we have conservative judges and liberal judges, but they're working within a system.
They don't get to write their own U.S.
code.
Right.
But as soon as – and we're close to saying on both sides.
And again, both sides.
On both sides.
So important.
You could find someone on either side of the aisle that said the entire system is corrupt and I can't get a fair trial within it and we need a new system of law.
And as soon as that happens –
And as soon as enough people, as soon as the news media reports it and enough of us are like, well, I guess there are some people that believe there should be a whole new system of system of courts.
You know, I guess there should.
The problem is the police are unfair.
So we're going to need a whole new system of police.
What the inevitable thing that happens is that someone comes in eventually as a complete autocrat and just imposes their fucking law on on an anarchy scramble.
And then you get – I'm just talking from a historical standpoint alone.
Then you get a thing where what you wanted to do was introduce more justice into the world.
What you did was introduce chaos.
And what ends up happening is there's less justice in the world.
Well, you end up doing the writing for the other team.
So basically, people on mostly our side of the aisle started referring to something called fake news.
And fake news is what our side of the aisle called all this bots.
I think people way overamplify the importance of bots, but whatever.
Every liberal thinks a bot is whoever disagrees with them.
But that's a bat.
I don't care about these bats and turtles.
And so, but no, but like truly, then I don't think fake news was a fixture of the left for more than, I'm going to say two months, might've been six months, but I'm going to say two months before the president started saying it.
And then all those other people started saying it.
And then fake news, even now he uses it as an adjective or he uses it as like this twisted adjective turned into a noun where he says like, oh, you're CNN, you're fake news.
Fake news, I think he's using it as an adjective there.
So when anybody I respect uses that phrase, and I'm guilty as anybody of saying failing New York Times or whatever, but I'm just doing, I'm carrying the water for that ding-a-ling.
You know what I mean?
And when we, you know, we have to be careful because anything we, everything you make can be weaponized by somebody who wants the weapon more.
I do believe there are things that are real.
Oh, bless your heart.
I know.
I know.
It hurts so bad.
I'm listening.
I believe.
I believe in America.
Suspended the sentence.
Suspended the sentence.