Wynton Marsalis: How Jazz Explains Democracy

So why am I telling you this? I've been thinking about that a lot over the last several months as we've been living through these unprecedented times. We've all been forced to improvise. But if we can do it in harmony with one another, we have the chance to reimagine what our entire society looks like and how it operates, and come out on the other side of this as

a more inclusive, kinder, equitable, and successful nation. If there's no better art form to explain these times in jazz, then I'm very lucky to have with me today one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, my longtime friend went to Marsalis. Wenten is arguably the greatest trumpeter alive. He's won nine Grammys. He's the only artist ever to win Grammys in the same year for both jazz and

classical records, and he did it twice. In his early twenties, he became the first jazz musician to receive the Fuel of Surprise from Music. He's received both the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal, and performed for Hillary and Me at the White House that one of our national Millennium events with Marion McPartland. The main guest was President Buckliffe Hovel of the Czech Republic. He led perhaps the only peaceful revolution in the world, powered by jazz.

They met in the Jazz Clubs. It's co founder of Jazz at the Lincoln Center. Wentn't has helped to grow the global jazz community through performance, advocacy, and education. He's a passionate champion of equality and social justice, constantly using his gifts to celebrate our common humanity and to show us what we can do if we work together. That's true more than anything else, and two of his most recent works, The Democracy Suite and The ever Funky Lowdown.

I've been Blessed to know went in for more than twenty five years now, and I've had a lot of chances to listen to and to learn from him. I come away from every performance or conversation knowing I have learned from listening, and knowing now I have a deeper appreciation for jazz, for America, for the human experience, and for Winting Marsalis. I very I had to talk to him now went and welcome. Yes, sir, it's a great pleasure, on of course, to sit out and talk with you,

as it always is. So thank you for that that very flowery introduction and all those all those kind acones. Thank you. I remember once I was talking to you on the phone and I asked you how much of your great gift was God given and how much it was his work. And I told you a story about how I decided not to become a musician when I was sixteen. I looked in the mirror and I said, I'm happier playing my saxophone than anything I've ever done. But no matter how hard I work, I'll never be

as good as Cold Frank. And uh, you said something to me about Cold frand I'll never forget. You said, yeah, that's true, but he said, don't underestimate hard work. And you sent me a tape of Coltrane playing at age seventeen. You remember that, Remember that he said he's flapped half the time. And I listened to you and I realized that was true, and how much better he got the longer he lived. And then I realized that at seventeen and flat, he was better than I ever thought about.

I love that you re ready's today tap of him in the navy, that's right. But he I think he gave my seventeen or nineteen. Yeah, well, you know, we like to We like the joke. But I always love the fact that you you played, and you brought that consciousness to people, you know, And I think that that's one thing that's been truly been lost and our political discourse, looking at all the debates, everything that's going on, and

you take the pick the years you want. Did the power of our arts and the American arts to heal us, to bring us together? The virtuosity of the artists, the kind of hipness and the soulfulness of a Coltrane. None of us are gonna play like Train. I mean, you know, Train was was what Train was. But the fact that we know John Coltrane, and we know what I Love

Supreme is, and we know what jazz is. It was always kind of a binding thing, like, yes, Coltrane had prodigious talent, but he didn't he wasn't like Charlie Parker, and he felt like he had no talent. And yes, Coltrane worked this behind off and he became much much better as the years past. Those two things are always true about him. And it was also true as it doesn't mean you will practice and be as great as him in terms of whatever you're aspiring to. But in

jazz you can achieve the sound of your person. Nothing keeps you from achieving that. It's just depends on what your definition of virtuosity is. And I know the things you learned just from being a jazz musician, once you were able to apply them to all the other things that you knew, that just made you so much stronger in dealing with other people. Because jazz is a very

empathetic music. We've often talked about her. Jazz is more than just America's original unique art form, but really it's the music of democracy at its best, and as you've said, part of america mythology At what point in your career did you think about the connection of jazz to democracy and what prompted you to do it. I think early on, because I grew up with a jazz musician and always hearing my father and the other musicians talk about America,

and also my my father's viewpoint. He was always in the barbershop arguing against points of view that we all had in the seventies. That was the Black Power time and the kind of first time black people had a voice, and the younger people we had our afros and our our platform shoes and all the things that we had, and we were all talking in the same way that we had been talked to. And my father was always

so so even minded. At that time, of course it was an embarrassment to me, but he was always speaking for against racism, against retaliation against people, always at a very deep spiritual connection to the human condition as a whole. He always was talking about larger thoughts and that was not what we were thinking about. So I always connected jazz to a democracy through him and other jazz musicians.

What do you make of this last selection? Is that an affirmation of our common humanity or a reaffirmation of our deep divisions. You know, I think that is both it ties into what we were talking about with jazz because it just so so happens at the fact that we have the type of diversity we have in our democracy, uh is making it hard to undermine the will of the voter, and we have that with in jazz bands, with an individual who is improvising, with the collective of

the group playing a written part or improvising. A lot of the stuff we do is by choice. The rhythm section is considered to be the back line and the horns are called the front line, but the rhythm section defines the music. So we have horn players versus a rhythm section versus us as a group, and we find

that dynamic playing out. That's interesting that the states are now, regardless of party, upon you to be loyal to government, regardless of party, and that has a lot in common with jazz because a single solos can stand up and play thirty minutes a solo themselves, and the band has to has to police what's going on, it has to choose. Hey, it's it's six of us up here. You can't play a thirty minute solo if you're a drummer. You're okay, you have the loudest instrument, but no one can hear

anything but drums, so we see. I don't know, I'm giving you kind of long, long answer. But this election and all of this is so so so full of implication because, as you know, a democracy is not a given in the world, no, and they're very hard to preserve.

Ours has been around a long time, and people take a lot of things for granted once it's been around a long time, and so everybody levels around the edges to take advantage of getting what they want until pretty seting the foundations are weak, and I think that's what's happening to us, but this could be strengthening. One of the things I liked about ever funking lowdown is that you basically talk about how this divisiveness its us in them world is kind of like a drug. You you

get addicted to it. You've got to be against something in somebody, and reconciliation takes is harder work. I remember I spent three billion dollars of the American people's tax money to sequence the human genome, and the most important thing we learned from a political and social point of view is that we're all nine and nine and a half per cents the same, but we spend nine and nine and a half a percent of our time focusing

on the half of percent. Now, to turn everything into a zero sum game is a bad way to run a railroad or a country. And I see you trying to be a force for reconciliation, and I think that live in a time where, in different ways, almost all of us are being programmed right for division right. And you know, when you look at the religious traditions, if we look into Junior Christian traditional, what the devil does,

the devil symbolically simplifies. So for those who may not believe in in that religion or have a different belief system, it's a simplification to take all nuances out and give you a non choice choice, and then the ever funky lowdown. That's what Mr Game does. He points out that there are others. Then he tells you what's wrong with them. I think I heard that they've been committing the various climes and they don't believe in God. Then he says

you have to beat them. We must strike first to prevent what they may be trying to do to us, and to save them, and the ever funky lowdown is when you've beaten them. He says, losers want to be winners. He speaks in the terms of losers and winners. And then what the losers have to do is they have to accommodate the winner's vision of them. Let me take you back to the school yard. Most kids just give in and follow the bully, but a few back away,

threatening some type of retaliation. Whether subservient or resistant, each will adjust their philosophy to accommodate defeat. That's the illusion of choice, the old binary hustle. Let's see versus who too, God fearing versus heathens, Democrats versus Republicans. Yes, there are two sides to every coin, but it's still the same coin.

Losers have two choices. Entertain us by playing out our vision of them as meek, emasculated justice or excite us playing out our vision of them as dangerous, captured savages. It's much more provocative when you when you begin to attack people or attack something. But still, if you take the most brilliant of all of us, we still don't know anything in relation to what there is to be known, because we can't rise above whatever our press active may

happen to be. The problem of human living requires more than the vision of a single person, whoever that person is. We say in our trumpets section, it's four of us and one of our trumpet players we were going to play a party was written for me, but he would have been much better playing it. His name is Marcus print Up. So when I said, I think Printaple played this part much better, we all knew he would. So the catch of the band all started laughing, Oh, give

it to print You're scared to play your part. You're scared to play the part. And Printer said, well, it's four of us back here, and we all have different things we do, but if you put the four of us together, we make one hell of a trumpet player.

So it's like to conceive of the talent that we have in the world or in the United States of America, that we only have a vision of how to keep other people down or beat up on people who don't have agency, and people with the most agency in the society spent a lot of that time figuring out how

to how to work on a sophisticated kleptocracy. And that's on both sides of the coin instead of figuring out how a free to potential in all the power we have and bringing us together and using our intellectual firepower, spiritual firepower, and the best of our tradition. Because the best of our tradition is us coming together. We should never forget even something that's divisive as race relations. And you know, I'm a Southerner. I grew up with great

uh prejudice and ignorance and in segregation. I don't play around with it. I never joke or act like it wasn't for real. It's for real, and it was for real. But when I look through my own history, can I honestly say I didn't have white Americas that said, well, I'm with you in this struggle. And I think that our mythology hurts us as a nation because whenever there's something negative, it's picked upon and it's spread and the legacy of success that we've had has to be used

to combat all of the many failures we've had. Harmony, that's right, harmony. My little brother asked me what is the opposite of disharmony, and I said, unison. Wow, So we started to laugh. We started to laugh about it because because because dis harmony and chaos. When you talk about dis harmony and chaos, uh, the you you would think that the opposite of it is harmony, But actually the opposite of it is unison because everybody playing the same thing. That's also what you do not want. You

don't want everybody having the same opinion. You want to be forced to harmonize with people, to make choices to go in and out in harmony is one of the greatest arts of music. I wanted, asked Lenda Bernstein about harmony. I'd read his his class on harmony of the Young People's Council. He said, Man, that's the most difficult thing to to describe, he said, because harmony is like a conversation in which a person is the center of the conversation in one moment and their point of view is

absolutely of no interest. They have to become active as listeners, he said. So in harmony progression, you know, at one point a note C may be the root of the card and the most important thing, he said, But the very next second that may be a flat thirteen of some upper extension of the of the harmony. And then on the next it may be a note that does not even sound. So it's it's an art that it's vertical. It lays out in blocks, and it's horizon, it lays

out in time. So I think, Uh, yeah, what you're saying about harmony, it's it's a very complex thing to teach and to understand more with my guests went to Marsalis after this. Let me ask you about another recent fist you did, the Democracy Suite. Uh, what did you want the message to be? And if jazz loving policeman in New York hered it, how would you like him

to feel? Um, I would like him to feel that he's a part of a great ongoing process that needs his industry and his energy to take us to a higher and better place that he may want to go in. One of my best friends in the world was a Chicago City policeman in what Chicago. I was the best man in his wedding, Officer Tony Parker, and Uh, we were good friends. We are good friends and will will be good friends for life. And we've argued the kind of police abuse and arguing and all the stuff that

goes on. And I think that it's it's important for us to understand that corruption exists everywhere in the system, and and for us to not give people who are not corrupt put them in a place where they have to co sign corruption, but also to not act like we don't know that there is corruption. So I think in the Democracy Suite, I deal with all things that

we all have dealt with in this time. Spotlight on one of the movements in the Democracy Suite that dance we do that you know we love to do, and that's about all the different protests around the world where people found a solidarity with with Brianna Taylor, George Floyd. They found that because the people everyone in the world can can identify with not having agency and not having power and being abused by an individual or group that

does have power. So I tried to not simplify by things into black white issues or right wrong issues, but I try to try to bring nuances in that way to to the dance we do. Even in the course of protests and people hitting tambourines, playing grooves, singing, infect your songs, and it does not make the song less serious or less for real and keeping their slogans black lives matter. It's not less real than we shall overcome. The one kind of somber movement. It's not even somber.

It's called Deeper than dreams, and it's about all of us who lost loved ones during this period that you didn't get a chance to say goodbye to your loved one. That transcends all politics and all other things. So I tell my friends sometimes they say, man, I h you know I can't sleep at night. I said, well, that's the old folks coming to you. They're coming to you because they y'all have to heal in a space that's deeper than dreams. Uh. You lost your dad earlier this

year to COVID. Uh. We had a good, long life and left a remarkable legacy, and you and his other sons. From the first time I ever heard about you, listen

to your brother Branford player. I've always been fascinated by your family story and the role your father played, and the letter you wrote in tribute to him was one of the most moving things I think I ever read, and all the more powerful for saying that your hurt was no more valid or stronger than that of so many others who lost people, which I think your dad also said, not long for it. So tell us about him and what impact he had on your growing up and on your life and what impact is loss has

had on what you do now? Well, you know, for I appreciate you your comments on him. I mean, he was my man, you know, went from the time I was born as like I hung with him and it was not glamorous like he was just he was a guy. My father was not a a physical guy, heroic wanting to whatever strike want to strike people or be uh. He was very philosophical person who who when he was growing up. He told me he had gotten bullied by

people because that wasn't his personality. And I learned more about what it meant to be a human being just watching him. He talked to everybody the same. If he had the chance to meet you, he would be honest. He would be just as respectful as he would with a homeless person in the street. He would talk to homeless cats and come back, man, this cat had an interesting story. You see. He used to be an architect. He could go into the whole thing that he had

talked about. And I saw my father playing empty clubs for for the seventeen years I lived with him. I saw him be in situations that would humiliate any person. Each handled it all with racy sophistication. He studied, he practiced, he taught. He was a person of the community. He played for no people. He played just as hard to an empty room as he would play for people. I always tell the one story, I never really liked jazz

growing up. I was just always I like to be in clubs and here older people down on their luck. Here the stuff they talked about, all the kind of nasty talking things that went on. So I always loved being in an environment. And I was fortunate to be in the environment because I was with him. I knew how to be quiet, how to just be in my space. But I loved that. I did not like the music

that much. When I started to get into the music, I was eleven or going into being twelve, and he played in the club called Lewin Charlie's, and it was late at night. He closed the club up. There was nobody in this club but one man who was drunk. And I went to my father and I said, man, let's go. You know, it's two o'clock, it's only me and you. Let's let's look this guy here. He was drunk, and we looked out into the club. Empty club nobody

in it. My father playing at piano. My father looks at me and he he says, Man, this gig against at two thirty and to thirty. Man, let's get this guy out of here and close up. Charlie is the old club on it. Charlie is gone. Let's let's go home. We had a thirty minute drive home. My daddy told me, man, sit your ass down and listen to some music for a change. So it actually was. It was actually funny

because it's only meet him. So I actually sat down and for all the years of being in the club, then I guess since I was two years old, I've been in clubs, it's the first time I really just really listened to him playing. Now. Of course, I grew up here in practice, so his song was a part of my life. I looked around that club and I thought, what makes a person do what this man is doing? Playing for no people it two in the morning, and uh, you know that that shaped my life, like just the

integrity he showed. And he played a pile of piano in that thirty minutes. And then I said to myself, I wonder if I could learn how to play like him, because I mainly teased him at because he was such a serious man. I was always joking with him, even the last conversation I had with him before he before he went in the hospital and then he died a few days after that. I was teasing and messing with him and always kind of joking, joking with him that

I could play better than him piano. I played my piano and play some ones, you know, start playing some courts like him. This just favorite chord. He would play this big six nine chord. So you always played and you go. He always played those kind of little phrases. I would start playing him and said, man, you better look out. I'm coming for you. So yeah, I remember, I remember that night. And there's so many other things. My daddy was so fair with people, and he had

such integrity about things. You couldn't buy him out. He didn't remember. When I made a little money. I was twenty one twenty two. I said, man, let me get your house. He said, man, you you felipe. I don't need you to get me a house. I'm comfortable in my own house. So he he was just philosophically. If you were if you acted small, or you did something that was small. He would call you on it. He hated for you to call people them. He said, who

is they? Man? Who is they? That's why I wrote a movement and the ever fun get Down called they because he tell me who they are? Do you know them? What's their name? And so many other things I could tell you. I mean, I just he was. He was such a he was such a big person. I remember once. I'm gonna just tell you this one last story to just about who he was. When I first came to New York, I started to get a lot of publicity, and I talked a lot. So the older musicians really

didn't like me. And I was always talking about the integrity and music and all these things that were far beyond what my playing earned me the write to talk about. From a philosophical standpoint, what I was saying was not inaccurate, but I shouldn't have been saying it, you know. And I went back to New Orleans to play a gig, and my father always let me see there with him, and then this gig he did, he didn't call me

up on the band stand. So the whole time I was standing the man I was I was getting, I said, he just like these other musicians in New York. Then finally, on the last tune, he brought me up on the band stand. I was dealing with all kind of emotion and angry at him that he was mad because I had become successful and uh so I played and as we were walking off the band stand, thinking all the stuff I was thinking, my father put his arm around me and he said, man, I'm sorry about my rhythm section.

I really didn't want to call you up at all. So I started laughing. I told him, but I said, man, I was thinking so many small thoughts. And he just looked at me and shook his head. He said, boy, this cat so you know he was Yeah, he was. He was. He was a good person. I mean he had a good heart and a good, good feeling to him. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Bill Clinton. I

hope you're enjoying. Why am I telling you this? After leaving the White House, I wanted to keep working on issues I cared about where I believed I could still make a difference and help a lot of people. I started the Clinton Foundation on the belief that everyone deserves the chance to succeed, Everyone has a responsibility to act

and we all do better when we work together. In the twenty years since the Foundation first opened its doors in Harlem, we've brought people together across traditional divides to address some of the most complex and pressing challenges of

our time. From our earliest efforts to expand access to life saving HIV AIDS medications from millions of people around the globe and promote healthy eating and physical activity in American schools, to our programs helping Puerto Rico and our Caribbean neighbors are built from natural disasters and prepare for the intensifying impacts of climate change, to distributing resources for parents and caregivers to promote early learning in school readiness,

and providing meals and essential items for vulnerable populations in and around Little Rock. The Clinton Foundation is still putting people first and creating a culture of possibility. We couldn't do any of it without your support. I hope you'll take a moment to share your thoughts and ideas with us and learn more about our work by visiting www dot Clinton Foundation dot org. Slash podcast. Thank you. You know. One of the things that I always liked you did

was your interests in autism. Hillary was on the Autism Caucus in the Senate. And I remember when she ran for president in two thousand and eight. We do these front porch rallies, you know, when there'll be people there. Maybe there's fifty people and maybe there's three hundred. I would always mention autism and how she was the first person ever to have a position on autism. And I promise you there was not one single solitary event I ever did, not one where someone didn't mention to me

after when I was shaking hands. You know, my sister has it, might have a child with it. Here's my spectrum is very broad. Here's my fifteen year old who's got autism and he's running for class president. I mean, I think that it's kind of like this coronavirus, you know it, when that virus goes chasing you, your Republican or Democratic credentials don't keep it out. And that's the way autism. And when you know, because you've got in your family, you've got to be pretty flexible and how

you deal with it. I think I think we we so much of a human condition unifies us, you know, childbirth, adolescence, death, loss, all these things we all are experience them. Any health crisis you have, everybody is having it. If you have it, you have art conditioned. A lot of people have art conditions, mental conditions. People have it. And uh, I learned so much from having a brother that was severely artistic growing up, just to see kind of the impact on the family

and not knowing what then. We didn't know what it was even to describe somebody in my neighborhood what autism was. They thought we were saying artistic. They say, man, that's great. You know what, what what is this? What does he? Is he a paint or whatever? You know, artism? What is that? So I think, yeah, and I also agree with you. The coronavirus can be a great rally and crying.

I think the last movement of the democracy Suite. I wrote a piece called That's when all We'll see And what it's about is that you see in our country after nine eleven, the things people did to come together after the the Katrina. I thought that was a fantastic national story. Yes, there's a lot of government in the aptitude.

There was a lot of things to complain about. Corruption, stealing always goes on, But when you look at what the citizens of the United States of America did for citizens of New Orleans all up and down this country. It's an unbelievable national success story, but it remains in natural memory is something that left a bad taste. You know.

Of course the city made decisions it made. It were not intelligent decisions, but the feeling of the people that came out in that time being a New Orleanans going around asking people for help for New Orleans. There was an unbelievable outpouring of love and of citizenship and of help that was very tangible to hundreds of thousands of people.

And that's when all wins will see says, we have so many points of connection, and we continue to override those instances to find a way to hate each other and to continue the legacy of hatred and to allow leaders to drag us down that road. And not just leaders,

political leaders. Anyone who is willing to exploit a populace for some type of gain and agency is a master's in a slave narrative, and that masters slave mythology that only a handful of people can have agency and the rest of y'all, y'all better work for us and just be exploited. When an actuality. Everything great in the world is showing us that we live in an unbelievable ball of creativity, that we can create more and more and more increase as we free more and more and more

creative people. And the arts is the best place to begin to adjust your understanding of a common humanity. And we as Americans, for some reason, have never been able to find or locate the arts in a in a position on our national radar, not even an unimportant position, lit a long the position of prominence it needs to occupy for us to do what we need to do

to get the nourishment that it most clearly provides. Let me ask you before we finish, because a lot of people will be listening to this who maybe never been to New Orleans, and it's one of my favorite places on earth. And I was honored to work for years on in the afrimath of Katrainer to try to help the whole Golf Coast, but especially the Crescent City to recover.

If you were talking to total stranger who had never been out of Alaska about what you got out of being born in and growing up and around there and then that culture, what would you say to them? Um, I would say a sing song way of approaching bad things did happen? And a full culture because it's there's a lot of soul for people in Alaska to now. I've been I played there, I played up in old

old Alaska. But we have a full culture. We have our own art, we have our own music, we have our own architecture, we have our own stories, we have our own and the sing song like so, if you're not against a sing a sing song, skip a dance a way to approach the tragedies of life when you when you you understand how much, what what type of armor and shield that is. I remember you and I talked. You were president then, and you told me, I don't

know if you can remember this. You said, Man, I just came back from from New Orleans and Bourbon Street Man, that was some of the worst music I ever heard in my life. What can we do to get people back to playing New Orleans music. I told my daddy that he loved that. He says he knows what's happening. Yeah, I was upset because there was nobody playing. There was nobody, you know, you had to except for presidenttion Hall. There

was nothing going on. It was no New Orleans music. Yeah, I saw you once on television and you didn't have a horn in your hand. You were given a college lecture about music, and I was I was doing something else. I just sort of saw it as I was passing by a TV and I sat down and listened to the whole thing, and I thought, it's relatively rare for a person to be gifted at anything, be a great golfer, be a great track star, be a great anything, who

is also a profoundly great teacher of it. And the thing that is to me has been greatest about jazz at the Lincoln Center over all these years, and all those young people you've brought in there, all of them, you've taught, many of them had the pleasure to hear play from time to time. Where'd you get that? And how can we value that more? Well? I appreciate your olver assessment of my abilities, so thank you. But it's

all my daddy stuff, you know. I mean, I just he was a great teacher, and I just was always around him, seeing him in the way he would teach. And then also as experience for me, I've been teaching since I did my first class in East St. Louis when I was eighteen for high school students, I was on the road plan with our Blakey And I think just having that good example of my father and the many great teachers I've had and work with Jazlyne Consenter.

We have education Department and twelve education programs and we get great students and they also teach, so you know, I just think that, uh, it's just there are there are many fantastic teachers across the United States and the world, and they do their work every day with with Noah Hoopla and just to be in that lineage and in that line and to have respect and to have a

veneration for information and for education and for knowledge. A democracy has to have that, because as as we lose our relationship with the process of learning things, we're gonna be more and more susceptible to the cheapest forms of populism. As we are in music. If you look at the American Music Awater, Yeah, you have to laugh at some of this stuff. Man, So much of it is trash. But that's where we are, and for us to reform it, we've got to start with a baseline of education and

in a belief in in knowing. And I think, uh, I come from the Blues tradition, and in that tradition we but we always believe we're believers, and and and I always want people to know that your belief is an action. With trump at playing, always teach when you take a breath, everything that's in that breath is what's gonna come out of your sound. Doesn't cost you anything to take a breath. When you take that breath, fill that breath with the most meaningful things that you want

to play, and then it will come out. And a thought is an action. So I want us to deal with I thought. I I believe in you, I believe in this process. I believe in people. I believe that we can get from point A to point to point see and that we will not descend into chaos and killing each other because we it would have been easy for us to do that before now, and we have not done it. So I don't need the evidence to

believe in that. I am going to be the evidence of it, and that we were all doing all we can to make the life that we live better. Maybe it begins a boy takeing using people to take a deep breath, A deep breath, full of something meaningful. You know when I was when I was a boy, I was closed and I was in the school band. I used to go to this clinic and we had a high school band director in Arkansas who played first trumpet

and John Phillips Susan's last band. I love that and it was a knight of Arkansas, like just having to be here. And he said, if you can learn when to breathe and how to control your breath, you will control your mind, you will control your heart, you will build a life. And he would start these teaching things about taking this trumpet and flaying what seemed forever. He could hold his breath twice as long as any of us and maintain the clarity and purity of the note.

And I think that that's the legacy that you have given the many of us. We listen to you. We'd love to hear you play, we'd love to hear your talk. But you touch our hearts and our minds and give us a chance to learn in harmony and creativity. Thank you, Thank you so much. Mr President has been honest speaking with you. Let me just close this one thing out. We're talking now, and you're giving us knowledge about something that's spiritualist breath from an everyday teacher, and that's what

where the belief in the hope comes from. And you've been the President of the United States of America, and that consciousness is in you, and that's how that's how close we are in the world. So thank you for allowing me to join you always with the deepest love and respect. Thank you, You wouldn't bless you. And thanks. Yes, sir, why am I telling you? This is a production of our Heart Radio, the Clinton Foundation and at Will Media.

Our executive producers are Craig Manascian and Will Malnady. Our production team includes Mitch Bluestein, Jamison cat Sufis, Tom Galton, Sarah Harrow Woods, and Jake Young, with production support from Tyler Scott and I'll Tavia Young. Original music by What White. Special thanks to John Sichs, Tina Finois, John Davidson on Hell Arena, Corey Gantley, Oscar Flores, Kevin Thurm, and all

our dedicated staff and partners at the Clinton Foundation. If you have an idea of suggestion for the show, we'd love to hear from you, so please visit Clinton Foundation dot org Slash Podcast to share your thoughts with us. If you like the show, tell someone else about it. You can subscribe to who Am I Telling You This on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. By listening to this podcast, you're helping support the work of the Clinton Foundation, so thank you.