Did it cause some introspection in terms of your own education?

Well, no one who ever paid me a check for anything has ever asked me once if I went to school. But — I’m not a brain surgeon. To be a filmmaker you don’t have to go to school. At the time, film schools would not have let me make Pink Flamingos, but they would today. So I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t go to school. I’m just saying, for me, if you really are obsessed and you know what you want to do, you do not have to go to school. You go to school to figure out what you want to do, don’t you?

And this whole thing with trigger warnings is hilarious to me, because I thought that is why you went to school — to have your values challenged.

But you also make the case that the outsider is in fact the new insider…

Yeah! Wouldn’t you say that both Trump and Obama consider themselves outsiders? The “insider”—that’s the dirty word. So for me, I like being an insider now, because it means you snuck in somehow and you have power (which for me is just bizarre) and then you can use it to screw up things in a good creative way. If you’re an outsider, you never get to decide policy, you never get to change anything.

In the 60s — we lost. The revolution didn’t happen. We won a lot of things, but in the long run, it didn’t happen, which I always found kind of humorous in a way, because I never believed it was gonna happen, but I liked the anarchy that was surrounding the possibility of it.

John Waters’s new album—Make Trouble—includes a full recorded studio version of his RISD speech, as well as small vignettes of him reflecting on his education. (Third Man Records)

So how did your commencement speech not only turn into an album, but an album on Jack White’s record label?

Ian Brennan, who is my promoter and the booker for all of my Christmas shows and other places (like he got me into Coachella and Bonnaroo), he knows that world and has himself won a Grammy for world music. (I got a Grammy nomination in the spoken word category for Role Models, which was shocking to me. But I got beat by Joan Rivers, who was my friend. But death was a good career move that year. And….she would not mind me saying that.) So Ian hooked it up.

And I had met Jack before and knew him a little. He had come to me another time and was trying to get me to work with the Insane Clown Posse, which I wanted to do! But the song just wasn’t right at the time. I thought that was a good combination to do it with the most hated and despised rap group. I wanted to re-do “Freaknik” and have us come out together. But that never happened. So who knows? You never know what can happen in the future.

So in terms of your album and the topic of education, I was actually thinking of something I heard Jack White say in a documentary, where he talks about the importance of “the struggle” as an essential part of the creative process, and I’m wondering if you think that’s true or is it more of just a romantic notion?

I think that everybody struggles in the beginning. I don’t understand when kids come to me and ask “How can I get a movie made?” If you have to ask, you never will. You have to think, I’m gonna get a movie made and you can not fear rejection or being turned down. Because, you’ll be turned down a lot, but it’s like hitchhiking — you just need one person to stop. If every car stopped there would be a traffic jam and you’d never get there. So to me, it’s just a lot about thinking, I’m gonna do this. And you can’t fake that really.

Being that I’m here in Silicon Valley, I have to ask about the section of your commencement speech where you tell students to, “Use tech for transgression.” And then you encourage students to make you nervous. So I’m wondering what makes you nervous these days?

I sort of always wished that Silk Road had a hustler line. They never did, you could sort of buy everything else, but you couldn’t shoot your load on Silk Road. So, I’d never go on the Dark Web because I always figured they’d bust me or something, but I do kind of find hackers interesting: if you’re up in your bedroom shutting down a branch of the government. [They are] the new juvenile delinquents. But they should do more interesting things, like find out Trump’s porn downloads.

But I think it’s great, all these kids who just sit in Starbucks around Silicon Valley and think up something and then they sell it for a billion dollars. I think that’s wonderful, even when it hasn’t happened yet, with no ads or anything. I’m for that, it’s like me pitching a movie and they give me the money (which I’m always shocked, when I go in and pitch an idea and they give me six figures). It’s the same thing, we’re both kinda scamming, but if the idea works, it’s pretty exciting. A pitch is a kind of standup act.