Good morning, John.

In 1969, Neil Diamond dropped what would become an American classic, his hit "Sweet Caroline." And the only reason that is important to this video is because after he sings the name of the song, "sweet Caroline," these horns come in. [audio clip]. And for some mysterious and complicated reason, it has become an American tradition to at that point in the song, go, "Ba ba ba." And then after this line [audio clip], you go, "So good! So good! So good!" If you are in America and you hear this song in public and there are a lot of people around, it is extremely unlikely that you will not hear these improvised additions. 

Why am I talking about this? Well, John, back in 2017, when you and I went on tour, we hatched an extraordinarily precarious plan based on this phenomenon. I would play, on my guitar, "Sweet Caroline" and then we would instruct the audience to during the part where you would normally do the "ba ba bas," to remain perfectly silent.  

This is a treacherous thing. This is like riding your mountain bike on the side of a cliff. Because you have just given everyone in the theater the power to make this not happen, and everyone has to agree -everyone- that it should happen. And because we are raised in this society and we expect the "ba ba bas" in that moment, the absence is a presence. It's like a kind of silence that is louder than any other kind of silence I have ever experienced.

Which is why, when it worked, it was really wonderful. And it did work, about 75% of the time. The other 25% of the time someone would do it. Now occasionally this was an honest mistake. Someone had been "ba ba ba-ing" their whole life, it was hard to not "ba ba ba," they accidentally "ba ba ba-ed" or just "ba-ed," which was adorable. Like in those cases we tried again and if it worked, it worked. But in some cases, somebody was like "ba ba ba," and then we tried again and they did it again, and in that case you just stop doing it. 

And the first time that happened, John, I remember us having a conversation backstage, like "maybe we shouldn't do that bit anymore." Because when it didn't work, it felt pretty bad.

We decided to keep doing it in part because it felt so good when it worked, but also because I think of how instructive it is when it doesn't work, because there's a bunch of lessons you can take from this. The first and easiest lesson to take is that "look, we're humans, and if you give everyone the power to ruin something, someone will." And that's kind of a bummer. But ultimately, it's true, you can't get around it.

But here's another lesson that it took me a long time of thinking about this to get to. In the situations where there were 500 people in the room who didn't go "ba ba ba," the people in the room had a dramatically different experience than the people in the rooms where 499 people didn't go "ba ba ba." Just totally different sets of learnings from those two experiences. The people who only had it one or the other way, which is everybody except for me and John, just had such different moments. 

But in both of those situations, mathematically, the experiences were basically identical. Either 500 people not making any noise, or 499 people not making any noise- that's the same, right? But it is interpreted entirely differently.

Regardless of the fact that, like, mathematically everyone in those rooms had functionally the same experience, they did not walk away with their brains thinking the same things. It's just impossible to feel like 500 people stayed silent, when only 499 did. But that's not evidence that 499 people didn't do something together- they did. It's evidence that my brain can't interpret reality correctly.

But I don't think [audio clip begins in background and continues until end of video] those two lessons are the only ones you can take from this, so I'd be curious to hear other people's takes as well in comments. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

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