Phil Lesh: Hollywood, for instance, people were all pretty crazy cause there were some security people who were getting pretty violent, and so we went out and did our thing—everybody was pretty high in Hollywood, they just sort of relaxed, they just got into the zone, in the space of long slow changes which, if you're pretty high and feeling like killing, it might just change your thinking.
Kwame Anthony Appiah: And I found that very bracing and exciting. It may be valid, but it's unsound because the premise isn't true.
Lesh: Which might give you an idea of how heavy it was for me.
Appiah: Now, why am I saying all of this?
Lesh: That’s just a personal opinion.
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Appiah: But sometimes people misunderstand you in ways that you could have entirely predicted if you thought about it more.
Lesh: That's what I was really after and it just hasn't happened. This is my theory, anyway.
Appiah: And you'll get better at writing too.
Lesh: I think that it's one of the greatest tools for learning about yourself.
Appiah: Oh, all the time.
•••
Lesh: In the United States we've got a million of them and they're just so jive.
Appiah: There's also a whole country, a repertory of cultural tools trying very hard to make our lives worse, and we have to combat those.
Lesh: Besides, nobody ever asks me anything interesting.
Appiah: I can contribute, but my book is not going to break the back of the thing.
Lesh: Unless you've got a specific kind of harmonic change that's happening like where you can play the fifth of the chord which becomes the root of another chord, being the same note.