The Ricochet Podcast - About the Lamb, Not the Ham

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Andrew Klavan returns to the Ricochet Podcast for a special Good Friday/Easter episode! He, Rob and Peter cover everything from antisemitism—the devil's flagpole, as Drew calls it—and what it really means to believe that Christ is King; on to poetics, popular fiction, political persuasiveness and the right's shortcomings as conveyors of truth. Plus, Peter and Rob give a tribute to the last centrist Democrat Joe Lieberman; and consider the power of container ships, both as objects and as economic game changers, after one knocked out a bridge in Rob's city of origin.- Audio this week: Emergency Dispatch recording in Baltimore Harbor

All that authenticity starts to get on my nerves after a while. Me too. But for a period of time, he's great. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I am Rob Long in New York.

I am joined today by Peter Robinson of Palo Alto. James Lyle is off this week. and our guest today, Andrew Klaben. Andrew Klaben will be joining us in a minute. Let's get this podcast started. Once you get here, I'll go grab the workers on the key bridge and then stop the outer loop. Take 13 dispatch. The whole bridge just fell down. Start, start, whoever, everybody, the whole bridge just collapsed. 10-4 dispatch is correct. That's correct. Give me no more traffic, we're stopping.

I can't get to the other side, sir, the bridge is down. Welcome to the Ricochet Podcast, this is number 685. We have misspent our lives. We're going to do a thousand of these, aren't we? Oh, yes, we will. I don't know. I am Rob Long, co-founder of Ricochet, and joining me as always is my co-founder, Peter Robinson in Palo Alto. Peter, how are you?

I'm well, Rob. All the better for hearing your cheerful voice. Cheerful? Oh, okay. I'm going to amend that. It's Maundy Thursday. all the better for hearing your cheerful voice. Cheerful? Oh, okay. I'm going to amend that. It's Maundy Thursday. No, I know if the news is the missiles will strike in 12 minutes,

I'm going to give you a call. I have never heard you sound less than cheerful, even when you're saying the most doleful things. Yeah. I'll take out the bad people, too, I'll say. And we are usually joined by James Lilacs. James Lilacs is not available today. He is off doing something very interesting, I'm sure, and he will be back next week. And today, we have a guest, Andrew Klavan, Drew Klavan to us. He's an old friend of mine, an old friend of ours, and he's going to join us a little bit but before we get to drew um can we just we should say something about the uh death yesterday at 82 years old of joe lieberman joe lieberman was a senator from um

connecticut and a former vice presidential candidate he was 82 years old and i'm i cannot think of another democrat or am i being um unkind who represented the kind of Joe Lieberman-ish position. He was the last. The last kind of moderate Dem would be considered a kind of a liberal Republican, moderate Democrat. New Deal, almost Harry Truman Democrat. He believed in a big government and a very healthy welfare state to help the less well-off. Our critique of that is now well-our. The conservative critique of that is, of course, very well-known at this stage,

that you build a big welfare state and actually hurts those. Nevertheless, those were his intentions. And what sets him apart is that he, from today's Democrats, is that Joe Lieberman was un-woke. He wanted strong national defenses. He wished that wherever the United States faced adversaries in the world, that the United States would prevail and the adversaries would lose. And he was pro-Israel and also a personally religious man, an observant Jew who refused to work on the Sabbath, refused to attend Senate sessions which are sometimes called over the weekend, and simply said, I have my religion, that comes first. So, he was, and I didn't, I say

the last time I saw him as though I saw him every weekend. I saw him half a dozen times in my life. But he came to the National Review, oh gosh, Rob, what would it have been? It was ages ago now, but something like the 60th anniversary dinner of National Review. Yeah, that's right. God, it was forever ago. Joe Lieberman was not a conservative. He would never have voted the way National Review wanted him to vote, but he was making a point. And that point was we listen to each other. So he was an admirable man, an altogether admirable man with whom i would

have disagreed and he would have sat there and listened to the disagreement yeah he would have contended with you in a way that was he was um um he was a friend i think to debate he was a friend to civility um but that didn't mean he was milquetoast and i the last time i saw him this is a long time ago was at the commentary magazine roast and uh they was to jump door says this thing's really kind of a brilliant money-making scheme where you uh you you find somebody famous you roast just like a regular comedy central roast the old d martin roast and then people pay a lot of money for tables to sit there and uh watch this this famous well-known person get roasted and um it's often uh soft you know there's some people come in and they're just like uh you know that is that this is the uh the equivalent of when you're being

interviewed for a job and somebody says what are your what are your biggest weaknesses and you say oh it's not i care too much you know so a lot of it is like that bad stuff right but some of it is great and has teeth and is hilarious and um the the best one i i saw was megan mccain john mccain's daughter she's megan mccain right megan yes yes um and john mccain and uh um and joe leeman were very very close friends very very good friends and so she knew him for, she called him Uncle Joe. She knew him forever. It was her whole life. And she gave the most vicious, hilarious roast.

And he was kind of doing that thing. The last time I saw somebody laugh that hard was Reagan at the second inaugural TV special banquet and Don Rickles was just going after him. I remember that. They would cut up to Reagan and Nancy and Reagan was like, eyes were like crying.

He was crying, laughing so hard. And then, of course, Nancy was not laughing at all. No, yes. She was not enjoying it. But he was laughing very hard and she had this great joke. She said, the great thing about Joe Lieberman was he always put his country above his party. Always.

We just never knew what party it was. We always knew what country it was. Israel. Killed. And he was, I mean, he seemed like a real gentleman. And it's tempting to say things like, well, that's that. No more of those guys around.

But I suspect that there are probably some people who are... There have to be. Okay. And meanwhile... Vents in your town of Baltimore. Baltimore. So, I guess it's... I forget.

It's a Singapore freighter? Singapore flagship, I think. Flagship, but the Dali hit the bridge supports of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and took it down. I mean, first of all, it's kind of amazing because you see these things floating and you think, you just forget that's an enormous amount of mass traveling at a speed. And just because it's in the water doesn't mean it's not going to knock something down. And you just forget how big these things are. These things are enormous, these container ships. And then the one thing that struck me over and over again was that there's just an instant need for people who don't know anything about it on social media to describe their their specific to become maritime experts yeah um um

uh iowa hawk david bird i think it's burge burgy burge um said that he said apropos of nothing today i thought i would just kick off this new twitter trend by mentioning three things i don't know anything about one you know finnish epic poetry two um intricacies of south asian cuisine three container shipping who's next but uh what the only thing i know about container ships uh that i know a bunch but i mean that is relative relevant here is that if it was dirty fuel which some people think it was that fuel fuel probably came from the Baltimore Harbor, right? The bunker in the harbor. Oh, is that the newest thinking?

That that was what caused the power to cut off? Basically, the power went off. The boat stalled. And it's important for people to remember that the person guiding these container ships in and out of the harbor, of every harbor around the world, is's a pilot a local pilot it is always a local pilot it is never the master of the ship and this has been true for i mean maybe a century this has been true for a long long time and then the other thing about it is how amazing it is they get these pilots on the ship depending on how fancy the the um uh the harbor is on the way in they sometimes send out a tug right or a speedboat with a pilot on it they also in in big sports like shanghai and i

think um i think sometimes long beach which is the i think the biggest sport in the world second biggest sport in the world they chopper the guy in the guy just kind of dangles down and just jumps on the on the deck yeah really? It's a pretty amazing thing. And then I saw it. I saw it a bunch of times. And then the master, who's in charge of this giant thing, stands back. And the pilot just takes over. So that was what was happening there. And then the second thing, the most interesting thing for me, because, as you know, I'm'm kind of junkie about this stuff is the economic ripple effects

huge one ship one bridge one bridge and um and just the fact i think we we tend to think of ourselves as like well we're it's all about software it's all about these sort of bits bits going through the you know pipes um and the 20, we think, was brought to us by computers. I just don't think that's true. I think the modern world's brought to us by container shipping. It is the most remarkable thing, I think, in the past hundred years.

Maybe AI will exceed it at some point. But right now, it's still container shipping. And it started because a guy who ran a trucking company in the southeastern part of the United States, I think his name was Mac McLaren, started because a guy who ran a trucking company in the southeastern part of the united states i think his name was mac mclaren was upset that his trucks would go to the savannah or the wilmington or any of these ports and it'd take him three days to unload a truck and load it on the boat

or to load the truck back up with stuff from the boat remember there's a cargo nets of cargo net it's a giant net yes yes yes yes he thought, this guy needs your way. Why don't we just take the back of the truck off the truck and put it in the boat? And then why don't we make it the size of the thing that goes on rolling stock for trains? Why don't we make it all the same thing? And it seems so obvious now. So obvious. But at the time. And the point you make at how recent this development is in historical terms,

you and I know Jim Mattis. Jim Mattis is a former Secretary of Defense, former four-star in the Marine Corps, a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution. When Jim Mattis was, if I recall this correctly, 16 or 17 years old, he somehow became interested in Eric Hoffer. Do you remember that name? I know the name. Who was that? Eric Hoffer was the kind of the common man's philosopher. Eric Hoffer was a working man in San Francisco and his job was something that no longer exists and these days even sounds quaint. He was a stevedore. Steve Adure. And if you look at the movie, again, it's not that long ago. This was a post-war movie. It's a great movie. There's a good argument that

it was Marlon Brando's best performance on the waterfront. All of those men were stevedores. They handled...these were human beings who carried objects onto ships, loaded them into those cargo nets. Exactly. The reason I'm mentioning Jim Mattis is that Jim Mattis is not an ancient person. He's retired, but he's not some sort of century-old relic. And Jim hitchhiked from his home in Oregon down to San Francisco, no appointment, no nothing, showed up on the docks in San Francisco and started asking guys around for Eric Hoffer. And it took about 20 minutes before the, oh, Eric's right out there. And he saw Eric Hoffer sitting on a pier eating a sandwich. It was his lunch break.

And Eric Hoffer had big arms and big hands because he was a working man. His classic book is The True Believer. In any event, I'm just trying to point this out that this was all recent. It is within living memory that global trade became possible on something like the scale we have today because of the innovation of cargo shipping. Here's what, you tell me what you, I'm kind of struck, the very first impulse, at least as reflected on Twitter, was somebody must have been drunk, they were doing drugs, the pilot didn't know what he was doing, the captain must have been something. No, no.

Actually, as far as I can tell, the human beings behaved promptly and quickly. Yeah. As soon as the engine failed, there was an emergency message to the port authority. It took them something like 30 seconds to block traffic on both ends of that bridge. So, I believe the men whom we now presume dead were maintenance workers of some kind. Can you imagine what would have happened? I mean, we know what it's like to drive down the I-95 corridor. So, this is one of those instances where it does seem to

have been mechanical failure. The human beings performed as they should have, remarkably, as far as I can tell. Am I mistaken? No, I think you're absolutely right. I think that actually happens up and down the chain of container shipping in general. It's the most important thing in the world, and everybody's a professional, they kind of know um that it's the most important thing in the world so they're kind of professional and they're professional um in the uh when you come steaming into shanghai or tian shan which is the hong kong or busan south korea as i've done or long beach or seattle or oakland they kind of like they they considering how much gets passed by passed along the shipping lanes and that everything we look at even it's you know

insanely trivial is uh often uh delivered to us by a container um it kind of works i mean i actually feel like that happens more often than not that like the normal people doing important jobs you think to yourself why aren't they in charge? Because the people in charge tend to be horrible. Although I suspect that they do. By the way, another famous stevedore was Senator Patrick Moynihan. He was a stevedore. Pat Moynihan worked on the docks.

Pat Moynihan said you could just, growing up in Hell's Kitchen, I guess, in the old Irish part of town in New York, you could just walk a few blocks to the Hudson River. To get to the docks, yes. And you could just show up, and they would just give you a job. But it took a long time. And so the other story here, if you're a free market conservative, is that unions fought, I mean, completely understandably, fought container shipping tooth and nail. Sure.

Because they knew that once you make it easier, you don't need stevedores. And so now guys, um, you know, they sit on top of cranes and, um, they move these giant, I mean, now it's an amazing ballet. I sat on the top deck of the, of a, of the hand gin Miami in the Busan port. And I sat on a folding chair on the deck, smoking a cigar, and watching just above me hundreds of containers being removed from the ship, rearranged, and put back and reloaded onto the ship by five guys and five cranes. And it was like crazy ballet. Rob, I want you to know,

I want you to know that everybody who knows you expects that when there is hard physical labor to be done, you're sitting on a lawn chair smoking a cigar. That is so true. Speaking of true, we have one of the great writers, great writer and also great novelist so i'm separating those two things great political uh great uh popular crime and uh mystery novels

andrew clavin our friend drew uh but also a thoughtful smart and um delightfully humorous and fun um political and cultural commentator he's the host of the Andrew Klavan Show. He's been, I think that's Daily Wire, he's been special with Daily Wire for a zillion years. I'm trying to be nice to him because I'm going to stop the minute he gets here and just say, you got to, if you're looking for a great read,

a bunch of great reads, True Crime, Empire of Lies, The House of Love, The House of Love and Death, along with his memoir, The Great thing and the truth and beauty uh he is a uh he is a a truly truly uh renaissance writer and a wonderful guy and a great friend with the result of course that you and i can't stand the son of a yeah you guys told you um and uh and so he's here, and so I'm going to attempt to be nice and respectful. Drew, happy Maundy Thursday. Do you celebrate that?

I don't know what kind of weird sect you're in. No, we sacrifice a baby. He's an Episcopalian, Rob. That's the weird sect. Is he really, though? I don't know. No, no, I'm an actual Christian. Oh, wow.

Oh, so you do the whole God thing, you guys. Yeah, I know. know yeah we were past that i understand yeah i was there okay so look let's just i don't want to talk about this right but let's just do it so we can do it um you're associated with daily wire you've been there for a long time um uh ben shapiro jeremy boring good friends of ours good friends of ricochet you had a you had a i don't know contributor somebody i don't i can't quite understand the structure that candace owens um in my opinion um this happened too late but okay you got rid of her and then all hell broke loose because you said something because she

so you're gonna have to sorry... You're going to have to... Sorry, you just have to. You've got to back it up and explain Candace and what she did and why she... You just give us a paragraph. You've got a little more explanation, I think. Let me just say, first of all, I've been with The Daily Wire at the beginning. It was me and Jeremy and Ben. That's how it started.

You know, given the cast of characters, it is just astonishing that that thing has succeeded. That we're not all in the street or in jail. I know it's amazing. I don't know what I don't know what went wrong. We were trying our best. But, you know, Candace, I spotted Candace instantaneously when she was on YouTube back in the day. And she had a small following and she was kind of doing a B day. And she had a small following and she was kind of doing a Blexit thing. You know, blacks should get out of the Democrat party. And I thought that is, I have an eye for broadcast.

And this is sort of a decade ago-ish? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. And I have an eye for, you know, broadcast talent because I grew up, my father was a big radio guy and I've always been able to spot it from a mile away. That's why I never talked to you guys. And I saw her, I invited her

on my show. She walked out. I literally walked down the hall to Jeremy's office. This was before he had the throne room, you know, with the guys with the spears and everything. I walked down to Jeremy's office and I said, if you want to hire a woman, I just met her. She's fantastic. He wouldn't do it. You know, it wasn't time and so he when he finally went back to her she had become this massive massive success and cost him a bundle and i laughed at him i've never seen a broadcaster quite that talented uh or as charismatic and some of this stuff and i don't want to make this about her because i wish her well and i always got along with her i'd say you know i didn't know her very well i'd see her in hair and makeup and stuff. And I, you know, we'd say hello. And we were always very friendly. Always had some, you know, funny chats,

never had a problem. And I now today wish her well. However, the integrity of what the Daily Wire is saying really matters to me. And we have lots of different opinions. We have people, you know, like Michael Knowles, who should obviously be in prison. And then we have Ben Shapiro, who's fantastic. And, you know, it's like really, really a wide spectrum of people. And she would say things like about, I don't know, you know, 9-11, kind of hinting that 9-11 was an inside job or the moon landing was a fake and all this stuff. And, you know, to me, whatever, you know, that her audience loved it. She's a talented person. Everybody chooses how they use their own talent. Then it started to get, I thought, a little dark. I mean, she started to say things about the Jews and she kept coming back to the Jews. And there was a time when Kanye said, I'm going to go DEFCON 3 or whatever he said on Jews. And she backed him up. And now he was her friend. And I thought, all right, she's showing some loyalty and all this. But then it got to be some stuff that, you know, she got in an argument with Ben Shapiro

and online. And she said he was all about the money. He can't serve God and money. And then she used this phrase, Christ is king, which has become, and I believe that. I believe that Christ is king. But it's also become a catchphrase of guys like Nick Fuentes, who are open Jew haters and basically feel this is a white man's country. Fuentes has said, this is a white man's country, and the Jews are an alien race here, they hate us

and all this stuff. And so, that phrase, you know, and I'm getting this stuff from good people, Christians saying, how could Christ the King possibly be, you know, an evil phrase? And, you know, Jesus said, you may call me Lord, Lord, but if you don't, you know, you don't serve my Father in heaven, then I don't care whether you're the Lord, I won't know you. And so, any phrase, of course, can be used in a wicked way, and anybody can do it. Darrell Bock Hail victory, hail victory, sig heil.

Richard Averbeck Right, exactly, exactly. So it became uncomfortable for, certainly for me, because I want to defend people and I'm never going to attack my colleagues and I never attacked her. And finally, they parted ways on the basis of the fact that this was hurting the brand, I think, you know, I was getting to the point. And Jeremy talked to everybody and told them why he was doing it. And I said on the air that I was proud of him. I thought he had, you know, obviously, these are very complicated things, there are contracts and all kinds of laws that you have to fulfill. But I thought he did the right thing. And I thought he restored the integrity of what The Daily Wire stands for, because it's not a question of free speech. She's absolutely free to go and say whatever she wants, but the Daily Wire stands for something and that's not it. Just like if one, as I made the comparison on the air where I said if I suddenly thought, hey, abortion's great, you know, I would have to

leave, you know, or keep my mouth shut. I couldn't go in there because we don't believe that. We think it's a bad thing, you know? So, Drew, may I quote someone who was a friend of all three of us, the late Christopher Hitchens? Yes. Here's the quotation. Antisemitism, so seldom a good sign. I have repeatedly called it the devil's flagpole. It's like it knows no side, it knows no team, it knows no party. Wherever it shows up, you know that you're dealing with... So, could I just ask your... I just do not... I live on the edge of the Stanford campus and I

work in the middle of it. Stanford! These kids are brilliant! And some of, by the way, I will stipulate that it is a small proportion of the kids. It's very, but it's loud and it's visible and it is anti-Semitic. And so, I do not understand. I, of my generation, I can tell you two stories. One of my mother's best friends brought her mother, who was an old lady, to our house when I was a little kid, and my mother said, come over here, I want you to meet her. And I met her, and then my mother said, take a look at this. And the old lady showed me numbers on her arm. And my mother said, I'll explain this later, but I want you to see it. So that was the kind of thing, that was the sort of mindset in Gentile, middle-class America when I was growing up.

There was something horrible that had happened, singular in all of human history, and if we understood one thing, we understood that doesn't happen again. And somehow it's gone. I don't, I just, really, it takes, maybe I'm a fool, maybe I'm naive, but I'm shocked. What do you make of it? Well, in some of my earliest writing, I think in my first novel when I was like in my 20s, I called our generation holiday Jews because this shock of evil, this thing that brought down, as far as I'm concerned, destroyed Europe, these wars were the end of the great European culture, had

caused enough shame in people of goodwill that they started to restrain themselves. You know, they started to say, well, maybe this anti-Semitism thing isn't as much fun as we thought it was going to be. And I always knew it would pass. And the reason I truly believe this, the reason I believe it passes is because through Jesus Christ, the central ethos of the Jews has spread through all Christendom, right? I mean, what do they believe? To be good to the poor, to act humbly and act justly and walk humbly with your God and love mercy.

Those are things, you know, Jesus didn't just make that stuff up. He wrote it, and he passed it on to the Jews, and then he inherited it from the Jews in physical form. And so, as that spread, I think a lot of times the people who hate the Jews hate that about themselves. You look at Wagner trying to establish, you know, a German pagan mythology. Trying to go back before Christian civilization. And I think that that's why it keeps coming up, because it keeps making us take stock of the rights of women, the rights of the poor, the rights of the humbles, the weakest among us. And who needs that? You know, it gets in the way of all the fun, victory, and punching people out and conquering places.

And I think that that just spread and spread. And it's not a coincidence that Europe destroyed itself in this absolute explosion of Jew hatred. I mean, I think that that was the end of their civilization and the end of what was then called Christendom because of that reaction to it. And I do not think, you know, even the idea that the Jews kill Christ, which I still hear people of goodwill using, the Jews represent everybody in the New Testament. And we sing that hymn, you know, I it was who denied thee, I crucified thee, we sing that hymn. That's right. That is what that means. And even that, I think, is rejecting the entire gift that we were given through Christ in the name of the Jews. So, they put it on the Jews so nobody has to say, oh, I don't like Jesus. But really, I think that's the truth they're

attacking. You know, it reminds me of a wonderful story about John Wayne on his deathbed. One of his Jewish friends dropped in and was teasing him and said, well, we all know you don't like Jews because Wayne didn't care. And his friend said, I know you don't like Jews. And Wayne said, the only Jew I don't want to meet is the one up there. I think that that's who they're really rejecting. And that's why it'll never go away until it all goes away you know that's kind of i i do agree with you especially um today's monday thursday tomorrow's good friday so this we hear the story again and the more you hear the

story more times you hear the story the more different parts you play in it, I think, in your head. Like, for me, you know, I did once one year on Palm Sunday, we read it and sort of do the Passion of the Church I go to. And so we read it out loud and so people read the parts and the part I really wanted was pilot. It's the best part, you know,

it's the best part. And I got pilot. And so for a long time, I've just thought to myself, you know, that's what I would be. That's who I would be. I'd be the guy just trying to figure out a way out of this problem who doesn't really care. But it's hard not to get chills down your spine when you realize Palm Sunday, the cloaks on the path,

and the palms, and the, hey, welcome, welcome, welcome. And then a few days later, crucify him. The same people. And it's hard not to think that's us right that's everybody it's it's everybody it's the religious people the political people the people people the crowd it's everybody you know and it's everybody and there's one or two guys i mean even peter is like feet do your stuff they're the worst yeah yeah they flee they're gone they're just history. When I was in Jerusalem last year,

you go to this beautiful church that's commemorated. It built on the spot where St. Peter denied Christ three times. It would be kind of weird if somehow Peter comes back, and he says, you know, I did a lot of other stuff. This is the one. Like, I did some stuff. Did you build This is the one. Like, I did some stuff. Did you build a church right here? Like, my worst moment?

But in a way, that's kind of, you know, that's sort of the story of our faith. Okay, so before we get to faith, because I know I want to talk about, you know, it's Holy Week. Do you guys celebrate Holy Week? I don't know what your weird denomination is. Yeah, I am an Anglican Catholic. I insult everybody. My theology is actually Catholic, but I'm not beholden to the vatican so oh there you go okay and i get to behead my wife which is awesome and i'm sure if you are married to you would want you to

um uh just go back to politics for a minute um do you think it's a larger i mean the the is what happens daily wire the candace daily i think is that a fractal of the conservative movement a little bit like there are now there are we do we need i mean william f buckley famously you know i don't know the word purge is not correct but he identified and refocused the conservative movement in the 50s and 60s away from kind of, you know, John Bircher-y stuff and towards, you know, free market, freedom, national security, anti-socialism, essentially we do we need to do that

i i think we're going to have to deal with a segment of conservatism it's kind of the patrick denine crowd who feels that this liberal business liberal in the good sense of the word has been a failure and right now i totally understand that it's good friday it's this this is the moment when everything looks bleakest and it does look bleak to me i mean it's we we have lost our way we're you know aborting like 960 000 uh babies a year uh the democrat party is giving a standing ovation to abortion in the State of the Union, where, you know, I laugh because it's corruption makes me laugh. But like, that's a, you know, that's a bad sign for America. And when you talk about, you know, we're butchering children in the name

of changing their sex, which is impossible. And we remember John Adams saying this is a constitution for moral and religious people. And I think like, oh, you know, that's that's not a good thing. And so I understand why a lot of these young kids and it's especially Generation Z, because 2020 came along. They looked out their windows. They saw people looting stores and burning buildings. And they turned on the TV and people say, well, it's mostly peaceful. It's mostly these are mostly peaceful. And and they were told that they had to stay in their homes and let their grandmother die alone. But it was okay to go to a riot because, you know, and I've talked to them. I've talked to these 24, 25 year old kids. That's their political moment. In the same way for me, like maybe the assassination of Kennedy or, you know, the Nixon was my political moment. That is their political moment. And so they think these people hate me. These people don't like me. They don't like the Constitution.

Drew, may I add, parenthesis, add to that, to put another dimension on exactly the same point that you're making. I'm conscious of it because I work at a university. The kids are smarter, the kids now know, and we all knew very quickly, that people in their 20s and younger were at essentially zero risk of COVID. And all these universities charged the families full tuition and shut down. And these kids know they were being lied to. Worse than that, they were being robbed. Their parents were being robbed. That's right. All right. None of those people has been punished.

None of them has lost their reputation. None of them has lost their office. Nothing. None of them has so much as apologized. Has apologized. Exactly. So this is the moment that they're in and they're thinking, you know, maybe what we need, they call it the Red Caesar.

We need a Red Caesar to come and take over this Republic business and reestablish the sort of chain of command from God to the King, to the people. And that'll, that's going to bring it back. And they've forgotten the concerns of the founders, which is that when you give people power, they, they stink, you know, and you have to divide the power and set it off against each other. They've forgotten that. They're not.

I'm making them a little simplistic. They actually do have a sort of politics. It's a little more complicated than that. They want a sort of country that's run like a corporation, but they want to get rid of this liberalism stuff and this republic stuff. And I understand that. But that's it's a despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think if we decide that it's over, it'll be over. Where I think there's a fight to be had.

And I think it's a fight worth having. We may lose. That's the way fights are, right? There's no guarantee that we can get back to our constitutional rights. But I think it's still worth having that fight and so yeah i i buy that right but i also i mean i'm i believe despair is a sin i don't despair good friday still we still know what happens at the end last night was the uh the celebration of tenebrae i don't know you're a weird cult with you tenebrae we do tenebrae in line uh which is kind of like

yeah it's right a little capsule version of the holy week i'll kind of all in one it's super dark 10 of Ray and mine. He does 9 of Ray. 8 or 9 of Ray. A little capsule version of the Holy Week all in one and it's super dark at the end. But it's kind of light at the end because one candle's still lit. All the great movements, or maybe not great, but big movements in American history. There have only been a few, right?

Abolition. Temperance. Civil rights. there have only been a few, right? Abolition. Temperance. Civil rights. These have all been essentially religious movements. They started in church. They started as religious movements. And they were not political movements until much later. To some success, if you're trying to ban alcohol in this country, which they did.

Oh, it surprises me, and to some moderate lack of success, depending on how inevitable you think the Civil War was. But they started from the idea of persuasion. You go from town to town, you stand on the back of a pickup truck or back of something and you talk to people and you persuade them my problem with the contemporary conservative movement that you're describing is that it seems to be seems to think that we live in some kind of parliamentary system where all you need to do is win by one vote and you get everything you want and it's i mean nice you can fantasize about it and wish cast about it all you want but that is not the system we have yeah and it seems to me that the one smart thing not one but many smart thing among the many smart things the left has done and done

relentlessly since the 60s is never stop talking and persuading to the american people and it's only recently that it's gotten um mean and vicious and you know it's it's kind of revealing its claws but mostly the country has moved left relent slower or faster depending on who the president was what the cultural tides were um why can't we do that yeah why why why is it always rage and anger and um i mean the buzzword people are divisive it's always divisive but i mean division is a very bad way yeah to convince people the best example of this is abortion which is now more popular than it was when they overturned roe v wade because these guys are like you know you

these poor politicians have no guts they have no spine And the people want them to get out and say, we must ban abortion. Well, you know, Abraham Lincoln said public sentiment, you know, you cannot do anything until you have public sentiment. So convincing people comes before passing laws. And I think that we don't do it. We want everything on the right is a crisis. Everything has to be dealt with right away. We cannot possibly wait.

The left has this spidery patient where they just wait and wait and wait and just push it. And you remember Barack Obama saying, oh, you know, marriage is between a man and a woman. He didn't believe that. He was lying. You know, then the minute he wins in the Supreme Court, he lights up the white house with a rank with rainbow lights to tell 50 of the country screw you this isn't your house it's my house that's and so you know he he played his he played the long game and we don't we never do that and it is profitable for people who go on the air who just talk to play into that anger and to play into that urgency it's profitable yes it gets the numbers yes i mean i've noticed sometimes when i'm talking

to conservative donors or conservative you know supporters you'll mention some projects this or that the other and they'll say hey that sounds great um you know it would be great if we could get like back in the day when he was on fox t Tucker. Do you think Tucker would cover this or Laura? I'm always like, who cares? People watching Tucker and Laura already agree. That's not who we're going after. And if you ask, I still find it amazing. People say, well, you look how popular some of those shows are.

You're telling me the country's not conservative? Well, the country's got 350 million people in it. And a whole bunch of them vote now and um you gotta win by more than one vote if you want to do anything i mean you don't have to win by more than one vote to actually take office you could do that but you're not going to be able to do nothing yeah well there's also this illusion that so you know i've been getting attacked on social media uh kansas came after me and all her followers and they're calling me names and all this stuff. They keep saying things like, he's over, he's done. And I think, like, you don't understand. You're not in the real world.

You're in this little place. There's like seven of you talking to each other and it sounds like a movement, but it's not, you know. And it's that illusion is magnified by a press that falls into it. But look at what they do. I have to apologize to you. I was the one that tweeted this. I know that was you. I figured that.

I do that every week. Damn Klavan. He's over. And I appreciate the postcards as well. I think that's old-fashioned but effective. Yeah, I know you're OG. But I mean, i think that this is you know when you look at the at the left right now they are afraid i mean when you see the

nbc has to fire this rhino woman it's got a mild-mannered you know uh dn's former our uh republican party chairman chairwoman they got a fire while having Jen Psaki on their team. You know, that's like we can't possibly have a Republican. The biggest example is Elon Musk. I mean, Elon Musk is everybody's hero. He's got an electric car. He's going to solve the climate crisis, going to go to Mars. Then he buys Twitter and lets people like me talk and stops standing.

I gained 50,000 followers like in a day after Elon Musk took over maybe two days. Suddenly, he's being investigated by every agency in the government. The attempts to silence us are insane. Instead of understanding, oh, wait, we're actually kind of on the cusp of winning, which I think is what's happening. Let's play our cards right. Let's do the right thing. Let's convince people. Let us show people a good...

We constantly blow it. There's so much anger. You know, one of the things I sincerely believe is I sincerely believe we're at the end of something, namely me and my generation. We've come to the end. And two things have failed. One of the things that's failed is the Great Society.

The Great Society has been an utter, complete, total failure. It has been bad for black people. It's been bad for the country. It's been bad for the Constitution. It's just a complete, utter failure. So now what you have and they kept it in line by calling people racist when they opposed it. So now what you have is they're the racist. They're saying, oh, we'll hire you because you're black. You know, you want to be a surgeon. You don't know anything about medicine. That's OK. You're black. Well, you know, you can do surgery. You can fly a plane. We don't care. Because they're trying to prop up this dead thing. on earth to get rid of our welfare state instead of reforming it and cutting it back. And so you have Donald Trump, who sounds, makes all the noises of a conservative, but isn't conservative at all. I mean, Ben Shapiro keeps saying he's the most moderate

candidate running, which is absolutely true. He's kind of a little left to center. But he's got all the gestures. So it's this empty suit. And they love it. I mean, look the way they follow him. You know, and I'm not a hater of Trump. I don't like hate the guy. I thought he did a pretty good job for three years, actually. But I do find him kind of awful in a lot of ways. And he's a bore and all this stuff, but they just love him because he sounds,

he's got that, he's talking, he speaks their anger. I sympathize with their anger. I know why they're angry. They've been insulted for 50, 60 years. But still, those two things have failed. And it really is time for the right to start thinking, what do we want? What do we want? All this time we've been talking about freedom.

Every possible right-wing thing is the liberty this and the liberty that and the eagle that and the all-American this and the liberty liberty american eagle and you know all those things and now they're saying and we want a king right right so i mean you know excuse me just for a little bit just for a year right yeah he'll clean it's all gonna be two weeks to stop the spread that's basically what it is exactly okay so you believe no that it's good friday culturally politically and that easter's easter sunday's coming yeah is that fair yes it is not just politically and culturally i believe it as the truth i think i believe that i believe that this amazing thing happened and it has changed everything. And the evidence is on my side. It is true.

I had a good friend of mine who converted from, he was sort of very secular Jew and he converted to Catholicism. And I asked him, I said, why on earth did you do that? And he looked at me and he said, said well i think it might be true for one thing i think it's really kind of the answer i don't know i think it might be true so like i would not i would not have converted if i didn't think that i truly would not have you know i mean obviously these late the layers of meaning all pan out so So you can get, you know, it's okay for a while to go into one layer of meaning that's beyond the facts and is just explaining other things to you. But ultimately, if it didn't happen, as Paul says, if it didn't happen, then we're fools to believe it.

But it kind of clearly did, you know. I mean, it's kind of, I keep saying, somebody said, why do you believe this? And I said, well, there's more evidence than for the assassination of julius caesar i mean the evidence for you know it's not like they made it up trojan war yeah yeah exactly and and i think that um it really is interesting the war that i know this sounds like fox news but it's just true that don't worry you do not sound like fox news anymore i should say you used to just relax on that one somebody got somebody was on the on the horse from damascus and fell off yes no i mean they edit jesus out of everything uh you know there's a um

the book reviews that i read a biography of Dostoevsky. And it's like when Dostoevsky talks of Christ, he was really talking to the Russian people. I don't think so. No. I don't think that's what he meant. I've read all those books, you know. I don't think that's what he was talking about. And, you know, if you watch like the Johnny Cash biography, the seven seconds where he goes into a church, that was the meaning of Cash's life, the last third of his life, you know, that

was, and they do it in every film except the Christian films, which are, you know, kind of dopey because everything is happy and great, which is another thing that the Bible doesn't teach us at all. But the people, the power that this has, that the people who want power have to silence it is evidence in its favor you know and um and it really is remarkable and i think that people in america have been spoiled you know you have to go back and remember like yeah the first people who believed in this were like used as human torches thrown to lions and like you know so we get thrown off of twitter you know or something like that and it's like oh my god there's a war on christianity like it's going to get a lot worse that is uh that is one of the the weird experience of reading the book of acts or anything like that

like oh let's say yeah whatever have that say you like google it oh flayed that sounds unpleasant i understand what they all later they all want to go to the desert just get away from these people um uh so you converted just i i just want to follow so you converted you went all the way to anglicanism why not just keep going i mean i don't know peter here you just did one more step i'm just sitting here waiting we're waiting people who move to la you know they would go they'd move from the east coast or chicago to la and they would stop and like but you could see why there was an ocean there like the beach is right there keep going just keep what you walk on it

right it's it's been almost exactly 20 years i was baptized almost exactly 20 years ago wait you were married you you got married before your conversion. Oh, I've been married for 50 years, I mean. So what effect, I've only met your wife twice, I think, and she's a lovely person. A nicest person, literally. I know, she's like the nicest, well, she would have to be, right? We know she's the nicest person on earth. She's the most Christian person on earth. Rob is handling the interrogation here, but at some point I'd like to know the effect on your wife or what she made of all this.

That is a major change to announce in the family. You know, three weeks after I was baptized, she turned to me and she said, you know, you've changed completely. And I, who had, you know, you know how you don't notice when it's you, you know, like, I said, what do you mean? She said, she said, it's like you're serene, you're like a totally different person. She said it to me again about three months ago because it is true i've gone through and you know you get it gets deeper and deeper you know it's great c.s lewis line where you invite the guy in to do some carpentry and he tears down the house and builds it back up again and you know it has been that has been my experience the most exciting part of it is

the since it's an infinite distance you're constantly moving toward the center toward the light which is just a joy. You know, like I should be. I'm 122 years old. I should be, you know, kind of solidifying. You should be wrapping up your affairs. Let's be honest. But instead, you know, you keep moving toward this light and it's very beautiful.

And yeah, I'm like nothing like what I was 20 years ago. And I don't think it's age. I think it's God. And it's been an amazing experience. And it's just a joy, which is kind of like this week, every now and again, I had a great week. And a lot of wonderful things were happening, you know, just professionally and personally and all this stuff. And then every now and again, I'd go on X and they'd just be like, oh, yeah, you do. You're like, oh, my goodness.

Good. Yeah. The mob is not far from your door. So I did this. I do a little commentary. I used to do it in the public radio in LA called Martini Shot. Now I do it for something called The Anchor.

Yes, you opened with a story about a certain unnamed friend who I believe was me in your last story. Yeah, you were the unnamed friend. I did one recently. I told a story about a friend of mine who had an MBAba and he said but it doesn't you know you show him a spreadsheet he just no he says my mba did not take um but i talked about a little bit about um the scariest word in hollywood which was i think last week before which is jesus yeah yeah

it's just a scary word and i don't think it's necessarily because people, um, are anti. I don't really think they have a belief that structure that keeps them from making money. Like they, they, the guys doing the chosen or,

uh, the sound of freedom or, or the wonderful movie. Um, now Cabrini, I don't think that's what it is. I just think it's there. Like,

this is, this is dangerous. We don't think that's what it is. I just think it's there, like, this is dangerous, we don't think about it. Everybody's so touchy. Why not just avoid it? Could I trot out a theory for you two old friends of mine that has just been, it's half-formed, and I haven't said it out loud to any friends, so this is the first time. But since nobody listens to this podcast anyway, it's just the three of us. It's like a safe space. Exactly. It's a very safe space. Okay. So, it begins with a story. Years ago, when Milton Friedman died, Bill McGurn got in touch and said his friend Jimmy Lai was coming

from Hong Kong to San Francisco to pay his respects to Rose Friedman. He'll be in San, you meet him. All right. So, Jimmy Lai and I sat down for breakfast. Jimmy Lai, who is now in prison. We sat down, we had a three-hour breakfast. It was one of those breakfasts that ended at lunchtime. And he, I was full of questions about China. And this one I remember in particular, the Falun Gong was in the news. Falun Gong, a kind of crazy small sect. And I said, why do the Chinese authorities care understand. Mao Zedong eliminated Confucianism, and then Deng Xiaoping eliminated Maoism. And now you have a country of over one billion people who believe in nothing but material gain, and they know that's not all there is. Any system of belief could take off in China. And that's why they're even worried about the Falun Gong. All right. I now have come to the conclusion. It's not a conclusion. It's tentative. It may be crazy and the two of you may say so. That something like that is true

in this country. When I first came to the Hoover Institution, Milton Friedman was still very much with us and oddly enough his office was just down the hall from mine. I stopped, we chatted from time to time. And he explained to me that he went into economics because he grew up during the Great Depression. And the overwhelming question of the day was how do we organize our society to meet our material needs? People needed jobs and they couldn't find them. There were people who had trouble feeding their family. Of course, he decided the answer was free markets, but that was the question of the time.

When we were kids and in college, I remember long bull sessions in the dorm. The Cold War actually did matter to us. Vietnam, so how do we establish peace? How do we win in this death grip struggle with communism? Kids today have grown up in a period of immense prosperity. That's not their question. And a period of relative peace. That's not their question. Their question is, what does it all mean? And the left understands that. I think, instinctively, that's why Jesus is so scary.

I totally agree with this. I totally agree with this. totally agree is that right yes the left totally gets it that's they speak morally they address issues from a moral standpoint we have had this stupid thing about you know they transformed reaganism into pure capitalism and you know and it was never that and and capitalism, prostitution is capitalism. Selling fentanyl is capitalism. Obviously, it rests on top of a set of values, and people are terribly lost. We have this, I wrote about this, I have a substack with my son, Spencer, called The New Jerusalem, where we discuss faith. That's all we talk about. He's actually one of the best exegetes I know.

He's a brilliant guy. And I was saying, you know, there's this – I can't even remember the word for it. It's this wonderful word that I just discovered called ultracrepidarianism, which is people who think that because they're an expert in one thing, they're an expert in another. And we have these years now of scientists saying, well, there is no God. You think like, well, what do you know about, you know, hey, you're an astrophysicist, I respect that, but you don't know anything about this, you know. And you read them, you read, if you sit and read Richard Dawkins, a guy I actually like and respect in terms of what he's trying to do with science,

he doesn't know anything about theology, he doesn't know what he's talking about, you know? And Steven Pinker is another one. Steven Pinker has this long thing in one of his dopey – his books are ridiculous, but he has this one book where he talks about the ghost in the machine. There's no ghost in the machine. I thought nobody's believed that since Descartes. Like, that's – and they didn't believe it before Descartes. And so, you know, we've had this long idea that the cool kids, the smart kids

don't believe. And throughout history, the opposite has been the case. The dopes didn't believe. And I believe that remains true today. And I've been saying for a long time, probably a decade, I've been saying that there's going to be a rebirth, and it's going to come from the top, because what we need are some of the people who look around at their intellectual accomplishments and say, you know what, none of this holds up if we don't start with faith. You know, I remember reading…

Darrell Bock This has to come from the top? Richard Averbeck Yes, the intellectual top. That lets us out. That lets us out. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, no, I mean, but, you know, I think that's really true. We used to have this thing called The Great Conversation, which was, you know, Aristotle talking to Plato, talking to Shakespeare, talking to Aquinas, you know, like across time. And I remember reading a book by a guy from Yale whose name escapes me but he said you know this is essentially a secular enterprise because once you have a religion then

the conversation stops and i thought that's idiotic yeah that's the very word the very word that would be yale of course yeah it sounds like and recently and i i have to track this down i believe he actually recanted and said, no, that's not right. Because I thought, like, you know, you make your mind up when you see that the earth is not flat, then you can't believe the earth is flat anymore. But there's still millions of things to discover, and many of the great questions remain open. Right, right. One of the things that I find very distressing about the Christian community, or at least a segment of it, is its certainties about certain things. The Bible is words. Words, when you read them, are readings and interpretive action.

There are things to discuss, things to have arguments about. I believe that God has fractured the church to make us understand that a lot of these things that seem in conflict will actually ultimately come together and be united. And yet, I have these people, I mean, when I was talking about this situation at Daily Wire last week, I was talking about my belief, which I'm going to talk about again tomorrow on my show, that we don't know really who God is going to welcome into the kingdom. And sometimes the people that he welcomes into the kingdom in the Bible, the things he says, are people who didn't know that they were serving him. You know, he says, you fed me and you gave me drink.

And they say, huh? We didn't know we were doing that, you know. It's true in the Hebrew Bible as well, by the way. Yes, yes. And all week long, there's been this fury, no, you must say Christ is King, you must say Jesus is Lord. And he says in the Bible, many who call me Lord, Lord, are not going to be in the kingdom of heaven. And also, he also says, you don't have to make a big deal about it. Yeah, yeah, that too, that too.

And, you know, he said—the one that always gets me is he says to Samaritans, you worship what you do not know. And then people say, well, what should we be like? We'll be like the Samaritan. There's some funny stuff in there. Yeah, there's some funny stuff in there, right? And this apps. Only the two of you, only the two of you. Oh, come on.

There's some really funny stuff. There's some rich comic material here. There's some great material in there. Some great material. No, that's a crack up, easily. Well, there's that great moment where when he cures blind men, spit and mud, and he gets in trouble, like the local bureaucratic rabbi says, how dare you cure somebody's blindness on the Sabbath? That was his...

Like, you think you're gonna cure blindness yeah i don't know we can we can break we can bend the rule today but it's just it's pretty funny stuff right even palm sunday's got this great moment incredible scene right he's coming in and on a donkey and people are putting out their cloaks and their palm fronds and we celebrate it you know two thousand plus years later incredible he marches into the city and he takes a look around the temple and says well it's getting late and they go home they leave you can't read that and not think what wait a minute like that was a major drum roll yeah i think still here okay let's go home it's getting late i think because the hour

is was late i think like what took us a little longer to get here it's pretty funny uh hey so i so i uh i i once wrote a book to somebody who said like well you know here's why i believe that this is true because um a lot of it doesn't make any sense and if we were making it up we we would totally agree. Totally agree. Sand off the edges, right? I mean, a story, you make up a story, it's like it's got to be integrated. Totally agree. So the second thing I'd ask you, Drew, because I know we're both writers in the entertainment business. When you're not writing explicitly about faith.

You used to be before this podcast. Yeah, before this. When you're not writing explicitly about faith how is it how does it fit you know when i when i realized that i had become a christian which was an absolute shock to me it was actually like a sort of a bolt you know um one of my greatest fears took me five months to admit that it was true i mean i knew it because it came into my head like bang and then i thought you know i must have misheard. I must have misheard. Let's sleep on that one.

Yeah, let's sleep on it. So, one of my greatest fears was that I was going to become one of these circular yellow smiley faces like some of these Christians that I know who, and instead of writing about hookers and gangsters, which is my milieu, you know, instead of writing about tough guy mystery stories, I was going to end up writing about like a little girl who lost her bunny, but Jesus brought her back again, and everything's great, you know. And one of the things that is really interesting is that in a lot of ways, as I've grown more joyful within, and that's not happy, that's just vital and having gusto and all that stuff, as I've grown more joyful within, my perspective has grown darker. I now see, you know, what they meant when they were talking about the fall of man. You know, I look around and I think, oh,

yeah, you know, like you're talking about being shocked by the anti-Semitism. Now and then, you know, I just wrote this little piece about Gone with the Wind for our sub stack. And I said, you know, it really is awful the way they depict the slaves as happy and well babies a year, but we don't sit around and think, oh yeah, take our civilization. If they took it away, we'd miss it. We'd miss America. There's many beautiful things about it. And so suddenly, the evil that we all do and that we all live with and that we're all kind of shrug off in some ways, even though it bothers us, somehow I have found that it rises up and you sort of see the sulfurous smoke coming out. But at the same time, you know that everything is somehow all right. Do you feel yourself moving into Flannery O'Connor territory?

You know, I understand why you say that. I find that my view of the world is… She's Rococo in some way. You're more straightforward, I think. Isn't that right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and she's dealing with a different milieu. I'm kind of dealing with this.

I love the kind of stories I write. I'm writing now this series, which I've never done before, never happened before, because I never found a character that I wanted to continue for more than a couple of books. And I'm writing this series about a guy, and he's not a believer, and he's walking through the world slowly realizing that everything he does believe in is dust, that nothing, you know, that he thought mattered matters. And that's kind of the way that is working. But the one thing that it did is it freed me from this constant circular question of how can you know anything? Because ultimately, there are things that you actually know, you know?

There was a moment when I wrote the novel, you mentioned the novel True Crime. There's a moment, I think it's on the front first page, where he says, you know, the Chinese philosopher says, how do you, he's talking about a guy in death row. And he says, the Chinese philosopher says, how do you know whether you're a man dreaming you're a butterfly or you're a butterfly dreaming you're a man and the narrator says yeah you know you know you know you actually that's how and that ended post-modernism for me that that moment is the moment when post-modernism died for me you know and and i think that that has just made me if i may say so i think my work has got i'm i am like

i said i'm a hundred I think I'm 157, I may have underestimated before. I'm doing the best work of my life. There's no question in my mind that I'm writing the best stuff of my life. I just finished a new nonfiction book, the first draft, last 25 pages of that, I just thought, you know what, you might want to just shovel off right now because I'm not sure you're going to top that. You know, it has really deepened my perspective, darkened it to some degree, but also infused it with joy. It's an amazing experience. I recommend it to anybody. You know, I think if only for the rewards, you know, the rewards are amazing. You do have to get flayed, but that's aside from that. Not so much anymore. Yeah, that's right. For now.

Yeah, this week. Hey, Drew, happy Easter. Happy Easter to you guys. It's really great to see you. It's too long. You know, I don't live far away from you, Rob. Where do you live now, Drew? I live right across from D.C.

I'm right across the river from D.C. Why? Why did you get that? Because my work is in Nashville. My grandchildren are in New York. Okay, grandchildren because my work is in nashville my grandchildren are in new york okay my son is in that yeah yeah stop there grandchildren i get i don't have grandchildren yet but the day may come and i sort of i sort of understand that one yes grandchildren in the sistine chapel are the only two things i've ever found that are as good as people say they are. As much fun. Wow. And it's crowded.

And it's noisy, right? Not the grandchildren. That's exactly right. Happy Easter, Drew. See you soon, I hope. It's great to see you. Thanks a lot, guys. Take care. Take care. I think I've known him I mean,

maybe 20 years? Maybe 20 years. You've known him, I mean, maybe 20 years? Maybe 20 years. You've known him then since before he became a Christian. When you knew him, it was show business. That was the look, correct? Yeah, he's a screenwriter. It was also before he was conservative and before you were out of the closet as a conservative. No, no, you've been writing for National Review for years.

It was written by Delia Owens. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. Oh, hold on. For some reason, my Alexa's going off. Alexa, stop talking. I don't know why she's kicked on. I don't know what she's doing. It was listing books by Drew.

Alexa heard you say Andrew Klavan. Oh, that's right. Wow, that's crazy. Okay. That's funny. Yeah, then definitely stop talking. I want to sell more of his books. Yeah, no, I think I met him, and I think I knew his work,

and I think I met him, and then I saw him at a Friends of Abe meeting, which we used to have this big, this giant meetings or gatherings in Southern California and Hollywood for the center-right, really. At that point, it was the center-right.

And there he was i was like wait a minute you're andrew andrew claven's here he said yeah like what are you doing here you're in big trouble um but wonderful right wonderful wonderful writer and um we're we're thrilled to have him and we're glad he's here um it sort of reminds me i saw excuse me but yeah go ahead c.s lewis wrote someplace that the beginning of every friendship is always the same and it always arises from two words you too that's kind of true that's kind of true uh and since then of course every time we get together it's we usually insult each other and then disagree on certain things and then you know have a couple drinks and it's fine um so uh you have big easter plans peter actually we have very

small easter plans we've been through holidays uh eventful tumultuous holidays with all the kids coming home and uh our oldest got engaged three weeks ago and um and everybody is gone and we will be on our own for easter so we do not have big plans we have quite small plans big holiday we'll enjoy we'll go to a restaurant and have a nice meal after mass and that will be our easter what about you that's a pretty good easter well i'm gonna have some people in i think probably oh really make up a big pascal lamb lamb and maybe we'll fly to New York. So I'm going to do, you know, it'll be a big it'll be a Moroccan lamb, but it'll have

you know, Middle Eastern Maghrebian flavors to it. I always like to do that. I always like to remind people on Easter that it's not about ham, it's about lamb. Nicely, yes. Yes, nicely done. And I guess next week we're going to be joined again and i hope

james comes back i'm sure he's going to come back but i'm but we're doing a day early so we had a hard time scheduling but uh he missed a good one before we go i should tell you this podcast was brought to you by the ricochet audio network so you could support them and us by signing up at ricochet.com please do and be and we'd love to have you join as a member. If you could take a minute and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, I know everybody asks you to do that, but the truth is it really does move us up in the algorithm and allows new listeners to discover us,

and that helps keep this show going. And once again, Ricochet.com, that's the place to be for conversation and friendship and deep conversations like the one we just had and super light ones like the ones we have also here on the podcast. I'm Peter. See you next week. Next week.

Happy Easter, everybody. Happy Easter. Ricochet. Join the conversation.