Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
23 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“The slide, in my view — that’s what attracted me to the trombone, the fact that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or valves, and that’s what makes it distinct.”
02 / belief
“My advice would be, do not talk about politics on the first date. In fact, I would say don’t raise it at all.”
03 / commitment
“I’ll probably write another book, and I will continue to play music, perhaps take up a new instrument, and continue optimizing for happiness.”
04 / belief
“I think one thing that makes him popular is the very fact that he was squarely within the tradition and school, being a disciple of Lil Wayne — the school that said the worst possible things, the most dismissive, misogynist possible things.”
05 / belief
“I think the truth is, when I was a full-time musician, gigging trombone every night, I had an itch to scratch that was not getting scratched.”
06 / belief
“I think that is one of the biggest things stopping many black people, and people of color in general, from agreeing with me publicly, is not that they disagree with me privately, it’s that they don’t want to tolerate those same feelings of discomfort from the white conservatives who will agree with them.”
07 / belief
“I do think, in the same way that some people have probably given me some false praise for being young or that’s added to their opinion of me, I think the fact that he’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and a former basketball player who happens to have this other skill might lead people to rate his output in that other domain somewhat more highly.”
08 / belief
“I would say that there’s a lot of black jazz musicians that fall into that category, quiet as it’s kept.”
09 / evaluation
“I would basically explain it by saying the idea of color blindness, by which I mean trying to treat people without regard to race and having color-blind, race-neutral public policy: that’s become a dirty word and a dirty concept, in particular on the Left, in the past couple decades — really in the past decade. This book is an attempt to rescue color blindness from the jaws of disdain and argue that it is the best overall philosophy by which to view the idea of race.”
10 / belief
“What it did do, I think, is that growing up so deeply in the jazz world — which is very diverse, multiracial, multinational — advertised the possibility of true deep interracial friendship and interracial working with people of different cultures and not seeing anything weird about that, towards a common goal and towards a common passion.”
11 / uncertainty
“Most unusual successful work habit. I don’t know if I have any unusual successful work habits.”
12 / belief
“I’ve gotten a little bit better at that and become a more balanced person, but I would say working for long stretches of time with no break at all — as opposed to what might be more common advice, which is every hour take a 20-minute break.”
13 / belief
“To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.”
14 / evaluation
“I remember rejecting that in a very knee-jerk way because it is so easily used as a way of shutting down a person like myself, and I knew from introspection that my own views were not coming from a love of whiteness or white supremacy or something.”
15 / evaluation
“I can’t really speak to, that much, Billy Joel being great outside of the few hits, but “Piano Man,” I think, is a correctly rated song.”
16 / evaluation
“Because if you grow up in a scenario, especially if you grow up with two happy, loving parents, as I did, who are clearly of different races and different cultures and so forth — my mother grew up speaking Spanish, and my dad was as American as you could get — it becomes difficult to believe that there are deep dividing lines between groups of people, because your immediate context says otherwise.”
17 / commitment
“However, I think there should be a strong firewall between saying all of those things and saying the state ought to treat my group special because of this, that, or another reason.”
18 / preference
“I think that’s a good thing, because to get too into the world I’m in with politics and debate and so forth can be taxing and toxic without balance.”
19 / evaluation
“For example, his early movie Memento I think over-indexes on the fun of the playing with time without enough real raw human emotion, and I think Interstellar strikes the perfect balance.”
20 / evaluation
“Johnson did it — it’s a catch-22 because the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful bebop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory musician, which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians.”
21 / recommendation
“I think you should start with Mingus Ah Um because it’s the album that would most broadly appeal to someone who didn’t know any Mingus.”
22 / evaluation
“I would argue that, for instance, in my view, attitudes towards racism have changed pretty dramatically in the past 50 years — in the past 100, certainly.”
23 / preference
“Mingus’s music is my favorite of all of those because it sounds like Duke Ellington if Duke Ellington had an acid trip and composed things that were broadly in his idiom, but just everything was changed a bit.”