good morning john in 1969 neil diamond
dropped what would become an american
classic his hit sweet kerala 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
and for some mysterious and complicated
reason it has become an american
tradition to at that point of the song
and then after this line
[Music]
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 editions
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-ba's 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 bapas 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 percent of the time the other 25 of
the time someone would do it now
occasionally this was an honest mistake
someone had been buying their whole life
it was hard to not bop up ah they
accidentally bopped out or just
which was adorable like those in those
cases we tried again and if it worked it
worked but in some cases somebody was
like
and then we tried again and they did it
again in that case you just stopped
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
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 every one of those
rooms had functionally the same
experience they did not walk away with
their brains thinking the same thing
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 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 the comments john i'll see you
soon
so good