WM: [laughs]
CW: And that’s part of the appeal—hearing people who come from the perspective of being world-class fuckups and then being able to become successful off of that. But it engenders a kind of anger…
WM: I mean, there are no greater believers in American meritocracy than liberals, because they’ve been the primary beneficiaries of a meritocratic system. And our success would seem to turn on its head all of the, uh, traditional vectors of how one becomes successful.
CW: But just to finish that—from the very early days of the show, part of the appeal was hearing three fuckups scream into the void about how fucked up and stupid their life was. And then that’s the audience that then comes to that, is people who are like, “Yeah, I’m also a fuckup, in the same way that these guys are.” You’re relatable to a certain type of person, a certain demographic.
I absolutely understand the people who were like, “Fuck Chapo, I don’t care what three white dudes have to say at this moment”—but at the same time, I’ve always imagined that the show was diverting at least a few white dudes toward progressive thought who might otherwise not have seen a place for themselves in those movements.
MC: And the white dudes—I’m not crying for them, they’re the ones who more than any other group of people who’ve gotten us to this position. So it absolutely makes sense. If politics are not to have a material base that points to capitalism as the cause of problems, it has to have a demographic scapegoat one way or another. But it means that, culturally, you have people becoming adults and doing media consumption and encountering a culture where they’re proscribed ahead of time. And that limits what their options are. I do think that, in general, I’d say that Chapo probably prevented, I’d say, three mass shootings.
I like that you thought about the number before you said it.
MC: I didn’t, really. But it’s more than one.
CW: I will say that the best compliment and one of the most frequent ones that we get when we do live shows is people coming up and saying “I appreciate you guys for making me not feel alone and insane.”
MC: Because when you feel insane and alone, what do you do? You start pricing bump stocks.
Matt and Chris, what can you tell me about Hell on Earth, your new podcast about the Thirty Years War?
MC: This was actually Chris’s idea. We’d done Hell of Presidents, this podcast about the Presidents…
CW: That came from us being on tour late at night, having a beer in the hotel room. I could just name any US president and Matt could do 20 minutes off the top of his head. So that was my original idea for Hell of Presidents— I would, no prep, come in and be like, “George Washington”…
MC: [free-associating] Fake teeth-havin’ bitch!
CW: …but then it developed into something more.
MC: And I loved it. Like, one of the things I want to do to make up for that lack of a political valence to the show is find some other artistic element to bring to it. I want to do more rigorous historical stuff. And Chris suggested the Thirty Years War.
Alex Pappademas
Source link
