The Ricochet Podcast - Higher Ground with Andrew Klavan

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

It's the last episode before the election, and given the anxiousness surrounding this cycle, we've recruited Andrew Klavan to bring his good cheer, wit and wisdom to put us at ease. We get his take on the race and field a few predictions, along with his perspective on America's cultural whirlwind—everything from the suffusion of the arts and tech to modern manhood and the search for enduring truth. (Plus, you'll want to pick up the latest copy of his just-published novel, A Woman Under Ground.Peter, Steve and James also make what they can of the latest moves in the polls, and tack on a couple predictions of their own. - Sound clip from today's open: Joe Biden's comments on garbage.

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 with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to novelist, social commentator, artist, guy, thinker, Andrew Klavan about his new book, A Woman Underground. So let's have ourselves a podcast. And just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Well, let me tell you something.

I don't know the Puerto Rican that I know, or Puerto Rico where I'm in my home state of Delaware. They're good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is their supporters. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast number 715. I'm James Lileks in Minneapolis, which is expecting snow, and I'm not ready for it. But bringing a sunny California charm to the rest of the podcast is Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward, who may be, for all we know, in Iceland or Madagascar or where do you happen to be today? I'm back home in California where we are expecting our first rain of the season sometime in the next week.

Well, it is Halloween and we won't talk about that because by the time people get to this, that'll be gone. I'm not looking forward to it, frankly. Two hours of door billing and dog barking and having to say cute costume. Oh, and what are you? Iron Man? Of course. But the other thing that will be pertinent by the time this comes out is the election. So, Peter, Stephen, it's coming down to it. Predictions. More talk. I'm going, I'll tell you what, I'm going around the neighborhood as the garbage man.

Right. It was a brilliant bit of theater, too. I mean, when he's standing up there and saying, you know, they told me to wear this and I'd look thin. That's all it took. I mean, it's funny. He's having fun, of course. That man has his faults, but he is not Hitler, for goodness sake. So I'll trot out my little bit of thinking, and then I submit it to the adjustment by the two of you. Polls, it seems to me, you can never really trust the magnitudes, but you can trust the direction. And in the last couple of weeks, they've all moved in trump's direction by how much in one battleground state after another it looks to me with to be within the margin of error

it looks to be to be remaining within the margin of turnout operations i'm not an expert on this by any means but i've heard over and over again from people who are are experts that the democrats turnout operation is just better more seasoned more highly organized better funded than the republican turnout operation and also if the margins are as tight as they seem to be it may well remain within the margin of shenanigans particularly in philadelphia and milwaukee So do I care to make a prediction? I do not. It feels, but of course it would feel this way to me because I have a certain hopes I incline in this election. It feels to me as though the man having fun is Donald Trump. It feels to

me as though the candidate behaving as though it sees options opening out in front of it in these last few days is the campaign of Donald Trump. He's added a stop in New Mexico, which nobody thought was in play until about 72 hours ago, and he seems to have added a stop in Virginia. Now, whether that's really in play or just close enough to enable him to mess with people's minds, I don't know. But the movement, the fun, and the daring moves all seem to be taking place on his side. Steve? James?

Yeah, well, I've always had the theory that the campaign that's having the most fun is usually the winning campaign. That goes back to Reagan in 1980. You remember Reagan? Reagan used to get on his campaign plane he'd change into a pair of sweatpants and then as the plane was taking off he would roll an orange down the aisle mrs reagan orange was this is reagan i don't know yes yes this became kind of a you know fun thing for the the press corps in the back and all the rest of that. And the campaign where you're hearing rumors of backbiting and turmoil and trouble, that's always the losing campaign. That was Bush in 92, for example. And you hear that from the Harris campaign now. So look, I think Trump's going to

win. I think it's possible he wins comfortably. And here's the two problems, though, at least two problems, leaving aside the cheating problem. One is that my hunch is that the polls are going to be maybe not as wrong as they were the last two cycles around, but still underrating Trump's strength. Even if the error on Trump's strength is half what it was in the last elections, that still means he wins by a point and a half in the national vote and in the swing states. What makes me, what's odd about this, since I do follow polling way more than any sensible human should, is all the pollsters say, boy, we're working really hard to correct our under sampling and our underestimation of Trump in the past, and yet all the major polls are converging around the same point. I would expect more variance in all the leading polls if the pollsters are experimenting and trying to figure out ways to make up for their defects.

Instead, they're clustering together. And I think that's no one wants to break from the pack, except I will mention, Peter, I know you were traveling. You may have missed this. CNN had a poll out midweek that had very good news for Kamala Harris. It's a real outlier. After, by the way, the last CNN poll that I remember was good news for Trump. So that's a weird one. And we'll just have to pay attention to that. But the other problem is, you know, early voting started slowly and then has gone

gangbusters the last two, three weeks. I think maybe it's now up to like 50 million votes. One of the things I wish we knew is how many of those people had second thoughts after they cast an early vote. So here you have all this business with garbage people and Puerto Rico and all this crazy stuff at the end. And, you know, one of the arguments against early voting, aside from potential fraud and so forth, is that you don't have the late-breaking information. We're not all expressing, I'm an old believer in the view that Election Day should be a collective expression at a single point in time of almost the entire electorate. And we don't have that now. We have Election Month, and I think that's a real civic problem.

So it's going to be interesting if we ever find out the extent to which the early vote, which has favored Republicans more this year than in the past, differs substantially from the election day in-person vote. One final point about turnout. So here's the thing to think about, Peter, and I've got to think Democrats are paranoid right now. Their turnout operation has always been great, but who have they targeted for maximal votes? Well, labor union members, minorities, groups where Trump is picking off large numbers of people. So if I'm a democratic operative right now i'm terribly worried that my turnout operation is going to turn out the margin of victory for trump and wouldn't that be fun oh that would be so i guess if i see what you think of this if we did a kind of probability dispersion i'd say three chances in five that Trump loses the popular vote but wins in the

Electoral College. One chance in five that Kamala ekes out a narrow victory, but also about one chance in five that Trump wins the popular vote and the Electoral College, and that this whole thing breaks in his way, in his direction over the next few days, and that he wins by three or four points, and it's just a solid, unambiguous victory. And that, honestly, of course, is what I'm hoping for, because the backbiting, the agony, the lawsuits, the incriminations that we now know can go on for months when we get a mixed result. Anyway, it just seems to me, four out of five, in my little

personal probability dispersion, four out of five chances Trump wins in one way or another, and about one in five that he wins pretty, let's put it this way, unambiguously, decisively. Does that sound right to you guys? Yeah, I think that's right. The remote possibility that Trump wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college, and you can game out the states to get that outcome. But what it will mean that no one has recognized is that in a lot of blue states, Democratic support has eroded substantially. That's the only way Trump would get. So, in other words, instead of Harris winning New York by 23 points,

as Biden did four years ago, she only wins it by 10. And that kind of erosion in Democratic support would be an interesting thing, if you have a fluke like that that happens. And, of course, watch everybody switch sides, and suddenly Democrats will love the Electoral College, which will be funny. He is piling up, it's a ridiculous term, but they seem to be using it, he's piling up excess or unnecessary votes. He's up by 10 in Florida, up by 7 in Texas, up by 9 in Ohio. Those are

millions more votes, so to speak, than he needs. So who knows? I don't know what late information could come to somebody who'd already cast their vote. Like the garbage thing, for example. I mean, would it be any news to somebody to believe that the other side of the party believes that people who hold a particular set of ideas are garbage? They just haven't said it before, but they certainly implied it. You're right about the feeling, Peter, but the last time I had a feeling like this was Mitt Romney. Everything's coming up. Yes, that's true. That is true. Everything is coming up Mitt at the end, and I just remember how surprised we were on election night.

I don't really follow the polls very much. I've been doing things Roman style. I got up today. I got out my auspice rod. I divided the sky into four quadrants. And then the birds flew through the upper right-hand quadrant, which I believe foretells well for Trump. Now, the garbage comment was interesting because it goes back to, I mean, never mind what Biden said. What I find fascinating about it is the desire to wish out of the ether an apostrophe that has been pursued by many people in the media. He didn't say garbage supporters. He's garbage supporter apostrophe S. And people have gone over this like the audio

Zapruder tape, trying to find the gap into which they can insert that little kernel of an apostrophe. When you see everybody in the usual suspects doing this, it reminds you of what the Washington Post is going through. The Washington Post declined to endorse anybody, and the reasons for that can vary, and we can discuss that. Putting them in the same declined to endorse anybody, and the reasons for that can vary, and we can discuss that, putting them in the same category as the LA Times and the USA Today and the newspaper for which I work, by the way. And this has resulted apparently in a quarter million canceled subscriptions, because apparently people believe it is the duty and purpose of a newspaper to be forthright in who they stand for as a matter of the entire paper's reputation.

That's the thing that's interesting to me, is these people are not just saying, well, it's the editorial board. Everybody knows that that's separate intellectually and technically and all the rest from the rest of the paper. But no, they seem to be giving the game away as saying our paper as a whole must stand on the side of right or we're going to resign. Well, take an extra week off, you know, with medical pay. And Bezos has said to the people, look, you got to start hiring conservatives. And he's not saying this, as I understand, as saying the editorial board has to hire these people. What he is saying, and I think correctly, is that the general population of the paper has to become

more ideological diverse. Now, I don't know how you do that when you're hiring people. Sometimes you can do a wink and a nod. Where do you come from? What school did you go to? Stuff like that, or just read their social media and the rest of it. And I don't know how you can say that we're going to have these people and then not expect them to uphold objective standards. But he is correct. When you have a monoculture in a newsroom, you just simply, you don't have anybody to say, but that's not what the other side thinks. That's not what the other side is concerned about. You have people who listen to National Public Radio and read the New York Times and the Washington Post and exist in an ideological bubble, and there are no Venn

diagrams bursting their way in to say, actually, there is another take on this. So they're always surprised, for example, when Trump wins. I mean, when Trump won last time, I had people coming up to me in the office because they knew that I was on the right side of things. And they were genuinely, genuinely crestfallen that they couldn't see it coming. And the paper made a concerted effort to get out there and talk to people that they'd sort of cast to the wilderness of the political and cultural world. You know, I still have in my file somewhere the Washington Post editorial right after the 1980 election with Reagan's first landslide. And it said, gosh, there must have been something going on out there in the country that we just did not perceive.

Flash forward to 2016, the Post ran almost the identical editorial. It was hilarious. Talk about learning nothing on the intervening time. Look, I think a couple things quickly. One is there's a quote going around from New York Magazine attributed to a senior media executive, they don't name the person, saying it's pretty clear that if half the country thinks Trump's qualified to be president, they're not reading the media, the mainstream media anymore. It's like newsflash to the news business. The other one is, what is Joe Rogan's interview with Trump is now up to something like 45 million views. And by coincidence, the New York Times comes out with a story today that they've been investigating for a few weeks saying YouTube is empowering all

these YouTubers like Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan's son, Spencer Klavan and others, right? You're right. And they're saying they're peddling misinformation and YouTube needs to censor them. So what you're watching is the paranoia and panic of the failing media. I mean, Trump was way ahead of the curve on this, obviously. He's absolutely right to call it fake news and the failing media. And so here's a real crisis. And to me, the big question is, and I'll end here, is Bezos about to become the next Elon Musk? Remember, Musk was an Obama-supporting, mostly liberal, and who knew he was going to go all the way over to where he has landed now? And Bezos, maybe he's going to follow the same trajectory i think the first sign

uh you mentioned james who they would hire i'd say the post hire byron york as one of your principal political reporters from the washington examiner that would be a sign that they're going to change i just well okay well wait a minute our guest our guest happens to know a thing or two about journalism let's let's bring him in and and'll ask him about, oh, a few things like what he's been working on lately, but possibly also immediate current events of these next few days. Why not? That's a great way of segueing into Andrew Klavan. Back to the podcast after an awful long time, of course, host of The Andrew Klavan Show, which you can find, oh gosh, I don't know, we'll have a link to it somewhere here on Ricochet. Andrew, welcome back. Good to talk to

you. Hey, James. Good to see you. Author of A Woman Underground, which is the next book. Briefly, A. Precious, what's it about? It's the fourth book in the Cameron Winter series. It's kind of the crucial crisis book where he has to go back into his past and find out what he's all about. So I think it's really one of the best books in the series. I'm really happy with it hey drew could i just before we continue about your book and your brilliant thoughts and so forth it's come to this we end up booking you because spencer was

unavailable i know i know that's everyone does that explain that explain what that feels like, Dad. Well, you know, it's a terrible thing as you come to the end of, I think, a fairly successful career. To see your brilliant son begin a successful career of his own. It's a bitter, bitter blow. And I'm not sure I'll ever get over it. Don't you wish you'd smothered him in the crib? You know, I suggested it. My wife was like, eh. She wouldn't go for it.

Okay. I just wanted to get that one out of the way. James, back to you. Sorry. I'll behave. I'm going to say something here that I write books myself too. We love the word. We love the story, the plot and the things and the depth that we can get to it. But if we wanted to reach modern males today, the modern males where I was being told are in crisis and they are from just about any metric that you look at. Why would we write a novel when we could write a game? I've been reading an awful lot on Twitter because I follow some people who are insiders and outsiders of the gaming industry, and the way that it's been hijacked by people who are determined to inject into every single possible game they touch a social proselytizing,

which is turning on vast swaths of the audience, which just basically want to play Call of Duty and not be lectured about pronouns and the rest of it. But it is a ripe medium that the right has yet to really sort of get their hands around. Should we? Is it simply too simplistic to deal with the issues that we think should be discussed? Would an attempt to sort of make it more right-friendly just result in games that are as dead as the ones that try to go leftwards? What do you think about the entire medium of gaming and how we can use it to shape the culture we want.

Well, I'm one of the rare conservative commentators who love games. I've been playing them since Pong. I continue to play them, although I feel that they kind of crested in the 90s because the innovation was so exciting. It was just so exciting to watch Pong turn into these incredibly elaborate games. Now they've kind of plateaued. But you're absolutely right. They've been invaded by the woke. And what I like about that is that means there are many games that I can play with pleasure, but there are now also many games that I can not play with pleasure.

I can actually sit and not play the latest game that I know is going to lecture me about pronouns. And people ask me all the time if I think that games are an art, and I think that there are games that have, in fact, been artistic. The problem is, just like any art, just like the novel, movies, whatever, they're not an art if you don't treat them like an art. If you sit there for four hours staring at this thing

in a darkened room and never do anything with your life, that's not using games as an art. But still, I think there's a lot of good stuff that can be done. And the good thing about being a conservative is you don't have to lecture people. You just have to give them the experience that's closer to real life than anything the left can produce. So, I mean, you know, you mentioned Call of Duty, just fighting the bad guys can be a conservative experience. I would like to see fewer action women. I think I now no longer will watch a movie

in which a woman beats up a man because I just think it's inherently dishonest and not only dishonest on the surface, but dishonest down to the ground. And so I think I'd like to see a lot less of that. But really in games, what's happening is these really shapely girls, women go around fighting people

and 13-year year old boys get to play that bounce them around I remember the first time that what would the Tomb Raider what's her name again I forgot Laura Croft Laura Croft I remember the first time they made it so that her breasts bounced when she jumped up and down and I saw for about 20 minutes just making her jump up and down and that was that was my life for a while and i think that could be very useful but yeah you know listen i i'm for all the arts i i love every new thing i think every uh i've kind of my life has been a little bit like the like alfred hitchcock system where he would

denigrate everything new and then use it and that's what i've tried to do i've written a movie that was released on an ipad i've started podcasts when podcasts came along, and I think all these things are venues of culture, and culture is a beautiful thing, and I think culture is a way we encapsulate the society and play it back to itself so we can see it more objectively.

One more thing on that. It's a great way of putting it. There was a game called Bioshock, which was all about, in the end, the intellectual limitations and perils of an Ayn Rand philosophy, which people loved. Yeah, give it to Ayn. The next game to that was all about the perils and the horrors of collectivism. The third one was about the perils of national Christian exceptionalism, which didn't lecture you about it, but just laid out a very interesting world. And these are ways in which you can tell these tales. But sometimes I have to think,

I have been playing recently a game called, sorry, it's true, gas station simulator, which is the most conservative thing I've ever done in my life, because you have to balance books, you have to order petrochemicals and all the rest of it. And it's absolutely fascinating. And my father father a gas station owner would be very pleased there i've said it peter you were going to say uh drew book five in the cameron winters series to be released next spring the bouncing breasts you know i i i give that to you for free i give that to you thanks i'm inspired yeah so listen so the current book is a woman underground it's book four in the cameron winter series i confess because you write so fast

that the only one of the four i have read is the first book book number one when christmas comes absolutely marvelous gobbled it down in a weekend which i think is you'd be happy to hear that that's what you have in mind these are to be be, they're thought-provoking, but they're entertainments. Correct? This is the whole thing for me. I started out, that's what I've started out trying to do, is take this form that I love and that I happen to have a gift for and try to make it really deep and interesting while not slowing it down.

That's the game. Okay, so I want to name the books. We're selling today A Woman Underground. That's book four. When Christmas Comes is book one. A Strange Habit of Mind is book two. And then The House of Love and Death is book three. Have I got that?

Yep. Okay. What made you suppose that you could sustain the sheer inventiveness over a series? I had just questions about how you do this. How did you come up with Cameron Winter? Is that where you started first? Do you have in your desk drawer six more plots? Is this to be a dozen?

How do the creative juices, it's so mysterious and yet at the same time it can't be entirely mysterious because this is a business that you're in. You've got to keep readers satisfied. You've got to hit some kind of rhythm. How do you do it? Where do you start? Well, you know, this is the only time I've ever written a series. I've written trilogies, and I wrote one book series that had four books in it. But this is the first time I've ever committed myself to something longer. It began during the COVID lockdowns. My old friend Otto Penzler, who is the greatest

mystery editor of his generation, there's nobody second, really. He's just the best. And he called me up and asked me if I would write a Christmas mystery. And the fact was, I had had this Christmas mystery in my head for 30 years, and I just couldn't solve it. I couldn't figure out how to get from what I knew was the beginning to what I knew was the ending. just couldn't solve it. I couldn't figure out how to get from what I knew was the beginning to what I knew was the ending. I couldn't figure out the middle. But when he said that, it kind of inspired me, and I took a couple of days during COVID,

took these long walks, and I cracked the story. And so with every story, to me, the idea is, who is the person or people you're going to put in the story to make it as rich as it can possibly be? Because there's a big difference. So you start with character? I start with character and plot together. Like in other words, it's a big difference whether Superman fights a dragon or Frodo does it.

It's a totally different story. And so I fashioned Cameron Winter to be in this story that I finally solved. And the minute I did, I realized that I felt I had tapped into a cultural vein, which was this, that I saw a big transition coming in American culture. I thought the last rise of good American fiction was the television revolution in I saw them on TV and I realized they were going to be there, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and The Shield and Deadwood and all these stories that were bad guys, but kind of good. And I realized that the reason they were doing that is that they had outlawed manhood so that the only manhood could be among outlaws. And I thought, okay, we've played that strain out because you could see it dying. You could just see television eat it up and spit it out. I thought, I'm going to take a guy who has been a bad guy and see if I can turn him into a good guy over time.

And so I took this kind of broken man, this guy had come out of government work doing some very bloody stuff, came back to a country that was not the country that he had left to fight for, and realized that he had no place to be, that he was a killer without a cause, as it were. And he had to now find a way to express himself that transformed him. And so this is a guy who's been searching for himself, searching for what he can become. And it's been amazing. I knew the minute I did that, I thought,

this is going to take at least 10 books, because I think it's going to take 10 to 15 years as this country moves through the transition we're going through. And I think I can kind of record that in a fictional way that'll give it more depth. I didn't say, and here are the stories I will tell. I simply understood that everything had to be based on his character. Like, in other words, he could never, you know, he's not going to go into musical comedy. He's got a certain series of traits like every one of us, and those traits and those instincts and that nature is going to guide him in where he goes. And that really brings this,

you know, originally the story brought the character into being, but now the character brings the stories into being. So you're talking to three people who do a fair amount of writing, not as much. Well, no, no, James writes one. Excuse me. I don't do as much writing as the rest of you. Therefore, of course, I hate you i hate you you're so productive but drew just a kind of nuts and bolts question of the kind that i find actually does fascinate people when do you do it you're on the air all the time you travel constantly i can't i can't pop up at a conference without hearing that you just spoke and left and now i have to beat your example do you get up at five in the morning and put in three hours before breakfast or how does it, how do you work this into your life? Basically, I don't sleep

very much and I do wake up at five in the morning and I do get to work very quickly. And you know, most of the time the phone doesn't start ringing until I'm, I actually turn everything off while I'm writing. And most of the time, by the time I'm finished writing, cause I'm actually a slow writer, but if you write for three and four hours every day, you will produce a book eventually. And so, you know, so I do that. And then the phone doesn't really start ringing until after I'm done. And I try not to schedule things for my writing time. And yeah, I work hard.

I work a hard day. But Steve, you are the Steve Hayward who writes the ghost stories, right? No, well, that's what my critics say, I suppose. Well, I'm glad to hear about your writing habits, Andrew. I'm always asking those things, and I'm glad to hear you say you're a slow writer, because that's what I think I am, too. I have to labor things for a long time, and Peter won't believe me. But look, so I'm going to get in a lot of trouble with this question set up. But, you know, there's a saying popular with my political philosopher pals,

that sometimes the surface of things is the heart of things. And so when I saw the title, A Woman Underground, my first thought was, find me a woman underground anywhere. They're everywhere. I mean, you know, the line is that we live in a gynocracy now, right? And this is what's going to get me in trouble. But I want to turn it around, which is, we've already talked about it, but I want to draw you out further.

Well, here's one piece of data for you. College enrollment is dropping. That's probably a happy thing overall. But the demographic that is dropping fast in higher education is young males, especially young white males. Very disaffected. Spencer, your son is all over this. And I'm watching these male subcultures that are resisting this. And so what?

They're into weightlifting. They're into the Roman Empire. A lot of them are reading the classics in a very serious way. But also Nietzsche, which of course is problematic. I mean, I understand why, but it's a very dissident culture, which has shocked me, right? I mean, this is a very different sort of conservative or rebellious young males from, you know, when I was a young male, which is around the time of the Boer War. I don't know. How are you sizing this up? What worries you?

What gives you hope? I'll end my question there. Well, I'm an anti-feminist, so I'm going to say, if you think you're going to be shocking, you're really not. You're going to have to catch up with me. I think the future is always male.

I think whatever men are doing is the future. And that means if they're failing, the country will fail with them. The society will fail with them. But the thing is, when women take over, this is almost an iron rule. When women take over a business, it's because the business is finished. And that's not because it's because the business has become irrelevant. That's not because women are bad at it. It's because men have already moved on to the

next thing. So as women became directors, the movies were over. As women became anchor women, nobody was paying attention to television news anymore. The name is Andrew Klavan, everyone. This is not the voice of Peter Robinson or Steve Hayward or James Lylex. Continue, continue. Ladies and gentlemen, Andrew Klavan. Who lives that? It's simply true.

Women create life and men create culture, and that's the way it goes. And so I think what you're seeing, when you say men are being part of a subculture, it's not really a subculture, except in the New York Times, to be fit, which is one of the things that's happening. I love the fact that the New York Times says, this is right wing, and I go, good, so we'll be able to beat you guys up which is exactly what you need and that's one thing it's not a subculture to read the classics reading the classics is the right thing to do Nietzsche I think is uh an interesting guy but we're gonna have to deal with him because Nietzsche followed the logic of God being dead and he did it just like the Marquis de Sade he did it honestly and that gave

him a lot of power what's that yeah yeah thinking man's Ayn The Thinking Man's Ayn Rand. The Thinking Man's Ayn Rand, exactly. And I think one of the things that I hope we'll start to see, and you speak of Spencer, he's got a new book about this, is that really science is pointing us back to God. And I think that once men

return to the church, a lot of this nonsense that's going on in the churches where they're basically just adopting left-wing talking points as religion is going to go away. I think that that is a feminization of the church. That's a representation of churches that have been taken over by women internally. And so they basically just go with what is, you know, what's happening in the culture because women are,

I think, susceptible to cultural persuasion. Let's stick with that theme and then switch to pop entertainment. You said something a few minutes ago that grabbed me. You said it makes a difference whether Superman is fighting the dragon or Frodo is fighting the dragon. Well, now, of course, we see all these new Tolkien adaptations from Apple, I forget, Amazon, right? And it's Mrs. Frodo fighting the dragon, right? And I mean, you know, the criticism from the left

of the Lord of the Rings was it's too male and too masculine, right? And so lo and behold, we have these utterly unwatchable adaptations now that are meant to appeal to women. And I mean, when are the studios going to wake up and say, you know, it's going to be popular? I've actually had a couple of young screenwriters say,

you know, we're really looking forward to getting back to the good old days. We can have women in short skirts and... But that's where the money is going to be made. And ultimately, isn't money going to force the entertainment industry to turn us around? Well, yeah. I mean, I think that one of the things, you know, I was at a dinner once with Ted Cruz, and, you know, he's a very, very bright guy.

And he was kind of holding court and asking everybody a question. He got to me and his question... Ted holding court, how surprising. He got to me and his question was, what do you know that nobody else knows? And I said, what I know that nobody else knows is they don't care about the money. And this is true in Hollywood. People in Hollywood do not care about the money. They care about the love.

They care about the awards, the prestige, the women. And they get all those things by being left wing and by showing their woke credentials. And those things die. And they die in the box office. And they don't care. They keep making them even though they die in the box office. Ultimately, you beat them by competing with them. You cannot beat them by trying to convince them. This is the thing that drives me crazy about the right. It's like we want to convince the right is much more less interested in whether I say something shocking like I just did than being approved of by Bill Maher. Like I could care less. I actually have some respect for Maher, but I could care less what he thinks of me and what he thinks of the culture because I know he's kind of a lost soul. So, you know, I think that we have to

compete with them by making things that are innovative, that are exciting, and that includes taking up new technologies before the left dominates them. Right now, I mean, you were talking about games, James, but I think way beyond games is this new meta technology, this 3D technology, which is going to let us live in stories and play stories like we're on the holodeck on that science fiction show. I think that this is really exciting stuff. And it bothers me that everything that comes out from the right looks to me like a kind of 90s retread when I think that new stuff should be coming down the pike. You know, you mentioned novels. I love the novel. I understand that it's an old

form, but I think that there are certain forms that are eternal because they're just so intimate. One of them is theater. Theater is always dying, but it's always alive. Novels are always dying, but they're always alive, and so I write what I love. But still, I think if I were starting out now, what I would be doing is

doing three-dimensional stuff. If somebody asked me to do it, I'd do it anyway. And I just think these are the things that should be leading us. And it drives me nuts when we complain about the fact that all the social media sites are left-wing. But until Elon Musk comes along, nobody does anything about it. I think we should be inventing that stuff. 3D immersive meta style virtual reality is interesting but it seems to me like it's the cold fusion of entertainment

it's always this it's always just one step away from really being the big thing i've been watching vr come down the pike for an awful long time i had an experience that early on when meta facebook came up with their ghastly system, the Metaverse, which was a nightmarish world of sliding around a disembodied torso in these jaggy brooms with people babbling about it. It was the worst. I said, all right, let's just wait for Apple to do it. And Apple has done it, and Apple's going to come out with something cheaper. But yet, but yet, but yet, there is still something that seems to me fundamentally isolating about sitting somewhere with this alien facehugger on your face, engaged in an alternate reality,

engaged in a feely, engaged in another world, while the rest of life goes about you in what we used to call meat space. So I get it. I get the attraction. I'm a little hesitant about it. But maybe let's say that's in our future. You said earlier that we're going through a cultural shift, going through a cultural shakeout, and that eventually we're going to end up at a different place at the end of it. And I assume

that you think it's going to be a better place because these masculine virtues about which you speak will eventually have no choice but to assert themselves. When you said that Hollywood doesn't care about whether or not they make money because they want to signal their virtues, that's true. But as Margaret Thatcher said about socialism, eventually you run out of other people's money to fund the next version of acolyte. And I think what we're seeing now is this huge python pig that's been working its way ever through, ever since Me Too, ever since 2020, that at the end of it will have produced no art, will have produced no profit, will have produced nothing but all of these inert pieces of cultural embellishment that have done nothing but deface the things to which they were attached. So that's one thing I think they're

going to realize that they have to shift. The second thing is, and this is the part that I want your wisdom on, when I see on Twitter red-pilled gym bros start to appreciate sculpture and the Paris Opera House and the rest of it and do the whole return thing where the U is a Roman V and the rest of it, that's all great. Going back to cultural traditions, to the heritage of Western society is great. And the more people understand that, the better. But the more I follow these accounts and the more I get them, the more they also shade into a very unfortunate sort of white supremacy, not supremacy, but isolationism. After a lot of these, I start to get stuff from the algorithm saying, well, you know, Rhodesia was actually a pretty good idea.

And then the next thing, and you get more of that and you can see how people get stuck into these little communities that do not connect them to a greater pluralistic society like we have, but funnel them into just another poisonous form of identitarianism. How do we get a soft landing out of all this? Well, you know, how is going to be an individual thing, because what we need is artists to do the right thing. Going back, see, going back can result in exactly what you're saying. It can result in this kind of yearning for the worst of the past, thinking that what really made Europe great was the color of people's skin, which is nonsense, both when it comes from the left and from the right. But also going back, you get the

Renaissance. You get people doing things that they think were done before, but they're actually reinventing. You get Shakespeare writing Roman plays that turn into an entirely new art form. There's a wonderful short story by Borges where it's a review of a new version of Don Quixote. And the thing is, the new version is exactly the same as the old version, but because it's being written today, it has an entirely different meaning. And so I think that there are openings for art, but you have to have people who, you know, art is not always leftist, but it's always liberal.

It is always open to the varieties of human beings, open to change, open to cultural criticism. It's one of the reasons that conservatives back off from it instead of saying, oh, maybe, you know, my conservative worldview is not big enough to create. And so I'm going to open it up a little bit and get a little bit looser. You know, we basically say, oh, that's bad. It has a naked woman in it or that's bad. It has a gay person or whatever we wind up saying. And so, of course, you're right. This is a danger, James.

It always it always is. I mean, you know, they blame romanticism for fascism. But romanticism is one of the great movements in the arts, and it's one of the most intelligent movements in the arts, and one of the most important movements in the arts. And so I think if we can refine, retake that up, and do it in a fresh way, I think that it's going to be great. And I'm not predicting that things are going to be great, I'm predicting that things are going to change, and that we have a new day coming that our generation is passing away as as even even we must and i think uh you know a new new forms are going to take place and i think it's i'm hopeful about

it i'm not i'm not at all despairing about it let it let the record just show that andrew clavin has endorsed romanticism which of course can be manifested in novels like the sorrows of young werther which resulted in an epidemic of teen suicides throughout Germany. So that's another one for you. You mentioned Don Quixote. You mentioned Don Quixote. It would be good to do another version of that today with Mel Gibson in a Mad Max car tilting at the windmills,

these dark, satanic things that spin in the countryside. That I would absolutely love to see. I just want to point out that Dark Satanic Mills is William Blake, one of the great romantic poets. And did these feet in ancient times. Which actually was covered by Emerson Lake and Palmer, of all things.

Oh yeah. You really don't expect Blake and British music to be twinned thus. But then again, as Stephen will tell you, as us progressive fans know, it was perhaps the last gasp of musical ability and style and intelligence and sophistication in Western popular music. There, I'm shutting up. Peter.

Drew, I have a couple of questions about politics, and I would like viewers to understand that I have backed well away from my computer because I don't want to touch you with a 10-foot pole. Thanks, Peter. I think I can count on your support. Donald Trump, the book again, the book again is A Woman Underground, book number four in the Cameron Winters series. Donald Trump, I just checked this, in Real Clear Politics, they have him up another tenth of a point in the Cameron Winters series. Donald Trump, I just checked this, in Real Clear Politics, they have him up another tenth of a point in the national average. So now he's leading in the

national vote by half a percentage point, still within the margin of error, but he ticks up and up and up. Is it because whatever else he is, he's a guy? Well, I mean, there is a huge divide, right? But I mean, he's something like 8% up with men and Kamala is 9% up with women. And so, yes, there is something to that. And he has played, run a very bro campaign. But there's something else about Donald Trump. I mean, I sense that he was months ago that he was on the rise and that he was going to possibly complete what is now one of the most amazing comebacks in political history. You know, Trump, people who hate Trump can't see what he is,

I think, and maybe people who love Trump also can't see what he is. But I think that one of the things he is, is first of all, a highly intelligent man who adapts to situations and changes because he believes in common sense fixing of things. All of his flaws aside, I think he believes that the best thing he can do is fix stuff to make it run better. And in doing that, Trump has become a real symbol of American spirit in ways that I would not have expected when he first came on the political scene. His courage under fire, which is remarkable and inspiring. His absolute refusal to knuckle under to the woke mind viruses, Elon Musk calls it. His absolute refusal to change because he's being attacked constantly.

And in fact, he kind of welcomes the attacks. All of these things represent a spirit of America that has been beaten down for 60 years. And I think when I look at him, what I see is the future, oddly enough. Maybe not in his policies, but in what he represents, because I think people are just not going to be held down any longer. Let me try a thought on you guys and on you, Drew, but also on Steve and James. And this is just in my head, so here itavistic figure from the 1950s, that if he closed his eyes, what he really wanted was a Queens where it was safe to play stickball on the streets again, and a Detroit that was turning out Cadillacs with big fins and a lot

of chrome on the grill. He wanted to take us back. Up until some weeks ago, Elon Musk is now part of the Trump campaign. And in my opinion, the most important political event of the last month and a half was the capture of that booster rocket as it returned to Earth. And so, Elon Musk, Bobby Kennedy. Now, Bobby Kennedy says things, many things that are crazy, but you know about two-thirds of what he says is really serious and thoughtful. And at some level, nobody talks about this except Bobby Kennedy, but at some level, we all know that half the country is on Adderall and the other half is on Ozempic,

and this is not right. And Bobby Kennedy at his best, and his best is pretty impressive, I think, sounds almost like Daniel Patrick Moynihan. We have social problems, and we're a great nation. We should address them. And so within this Trump, this Trump take us back to the 1950s is not that at all anymore. There is an openness to the future. There is a seriousness about social problems that just sort of takes my breath away. Now, calm me down. But that's a little bit in the direction of what you were saying a moment ago, isn't it, Drew? Yes. And I think one of the things that the American ruling class has not quite digested yet, is how entirely and catastrophically they failed during COVID. You know, there's a line in Winston Churchill's memoir of his young life where he says,

I went to a party with the heads of Europe before World War I, and I went to a party with the heads of Europe after World War I, and all of the people in those parties were different because they had failed. That was the last time we had that kind of catastrophic failure of leadership, and those people were cleaned out. No one has been fired over COVID. No one has lost his reputation over COVID. Nobody has been held to account for the lies that were told by the highest people in the country and the most powerful people in the country during COVID, but the people keep the score. And so ultimately, these guys are done. And the thing about Donald Trump is because he's a fixer,

because he's a guy who sees a problem and he fixes it, he's not done. He's just moved on to the next thing. And you're absolutely right about that rocket capture, Peter. It was exactly the sort of thing that Trump looks at and thinks like, ooh, you know, that's cool. And there's apps. And while the left is literally sitting around going, how can we investigate that?

Elon Musk to get him to stop allowing conservatives to speak on X. You know, Donald Trump is going, ooh, I like that. That's the future. This is the difference between the left, which is dead, and the right, which is in transition. And I think that, you know, you're just right about this. The failure of our elite class is entire and the consequences have been nil, but they will come. They've got to. Well, you know, to jump back in, you know, it seems to me that what ought to terrify the establishment, the established institutions that have failed, that you mentioned, Andrew, is so what did Musk do when he took over Twitter? What, he fired 75 percent of the staff and found

out they work just as well without them? I mean, I'd like to see it replicated with just about every government agency. Fire half the staff, wouldn't matter which half, it would get better, which maybe we don't want. And then RFK Jr., yeah, I completely agree with Peter that he says crazy stuff. But right now, public regard for institutions is so low that, first of all, neither one of them, if they're actually in official positions, Musk and Kennedy, will be swallowed by the bureaucracy the way so many appointees are in both parties, but especially Republican administrations. And what Kennedy's virtue is going to be, he's going to come in and the CDC and all the other health people are going to tell him this and that and he's just going to look at him say i don't believe you anymore and and you're going to really have to you know it'd be sterner than that right and so just the disruption of this i mean when you tell the american people guys these are crazy people who are going to disrupt our institutions i think at least half the country smiles when they hear that and it's long overdue that was one of the funny things about that project 2025 they kept saying he's going to cut 50 of the bureaucracy and i thought oh you

know that that's wrong it should be about 75 yeah but you know my problem with rfk is that like buried you know just because somebody tells a lie that doesn't mean the opposite is the truth and i just the other day i interviewed the dr marty McCary, who said many of the same had spotted many of the same problems that RFK spots. But he's a much more responsible, balanced, measured person who sort of talks about the various ways in which these things can be addressed. And I would like to see more people like him come forward and say, yes, they are lying. But that doesn't mean the opposite is true. Yes, they may have lied about the efficacy of the vaccine, but that doesn't mean the vaccine is worthless or going to kill you. You know, I mean, I think that everything is more shaded than RFK

admits, and he worries me in that regard. Before James takes us out, I want to read the books again. Number one, When Christmas Comes. Number two, A Strange Habit of Mind. Number three is The House of Love and Death. And number four is A Woman Underground. They are the Cameron Winter series. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy all four for Christmas, stick them in different stockings, and then these are fun books. These are books that you can read in a couple of days,

and the family will pass them around. You've made four sales, Drew. Can we discuss a kickback? Over to James. I'm easy to buy. a couple of days and the family will pass them around you've made four sales drew that's all can we discuss a kickback over to over to james i'm easy to run yeah right so so to your point about rfk saying some things but you wish the source was greater i have my problems with psychiatry but i don't necessarily want to go to the l ron hubbard people to get my talking points about it yeah we'll leave you we'll go out with this. Prediction. Next week, the election. What do you think is going to happen?

Well, my feeling is that Trump is going to win, and he's not just going to win the electoral college, he's going to win the popular vote, but it is just a feeling, and so it's not a prediction, it is just the way I'm, it's what I feel in the culture right at this moment. Alright, everybody. A Woman Underground

is the book. Buy it in iPad. Buy it in Kindle. Buy it in paper form. And we assume that the fifth book in the series, of which there are to be, what, ten, will be set in a VR world in which one can move about and interrogate characters and form your own adventure and the rest of it.

If there's anybody we trust to do something interesting, fascinating, fun to read in that medium, as in all others, it's Andrew Klavan. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today, my friend. Great to see you guys. Bye-bye. Take care, Drew. So before we go, is there anything you guys—here's what we should do, actually.

We've got about four or five minutes here. Each of you should make a prediction about the election, one for Trump and then one for Harris, and then we'll edit it later, depending on what actually happens, to make you sound incredibly prescient, because, yeah. I told you guys, I knew she would win. That's a stand-by for B. Do you remember that old movie, Clue,

where they had like four different endings to the movie, and you just pick one of the reds, like, okay, like that, right? Right. Well, if Harris It's like, okay, like that, right? Right. Well, if Harris wins, if nothing else, we're going to see an absolute boom in comedy. I mean, I don't know if they're going to do what they're doing with Rogan and just keep her away from people who would interrogate her in detail,

but the malapropisms, the word salads, the nonsensical orations, for years some people just made despair and say, I can't take it. But you have to admit, it's not going to be lacking for entertainment. Same with Trump, of course, although people are worried that there will be chaos because nobody knows what's going to happen. Nobody knows who's going to join the administration or whether or not it's going to be like it was before. People just, as I said and Peter agreed with a while ago, it's not so much that people think that Trump is going to do all of these things. It's that a lot of people are voting for him because they know that he will not do these other things. And when it comes to inflation and immigration, the two big I's, there we may see some action. A, one, if he does actually get Musk to come on

and get out his shears and say, oh, two trillion, I can do that. That would be interesting to see. And the shrieks and the howls and the bloodletting and the rest of it, that's a national experiment I think we need to have when it comes to cutting that. And immigration, we're always seeing people talk about how it's going to be absolutely impossible to expel people who are here illegally, even the criminals. if we don't get to the point where the vans are going around and shoving people in them, I think something that says that you cannot make yourself a sanctuary city that turns rapists loose instead of telling ICE where they are, I think that era would come to an end by popular demand, if not lost. Am I wrong there? Well, I size it up this way, James.

Look, there's downsides to either candidate winning. The doubts about Trump are well known. But I think it's the what's worse, the Democratic Party, if Harris wins. It's the worst thing that could happen to them. The party needs to clean house every bit as much as it did after their losses in the 1980s that brought them Bill Clinton and a move to the center that really saved them from almost oblivion. And if that if oh, good times for conservatives if harris wins i mean we'll be miserable and she'll do a lot of terrible stuff but we will be on the offensive

but if we keep the senate if we keep the senate and china doesn't move on taiwan we can almost live with the leader of the democratic party being this utterly incoherent vacuous person midterm midterms would be lit as the kids. That's right. And look, a Trump victory will ratify, especially I think his inspired choice of J.D. Vance as I think it turns out in retrospect, that will ratify a change in the

character of the Republican Party that I think will mean good times ahead for the long term. Agreed. Well, we will meet next week. Wow. Think of that. Next week, it'll be done. It'll be settled.

Who am I kidding? This election will probably drag on for another two or three months, as Arizona says. Well, we can't count them. I mean, for heaven's sakes. It was that Argentina had an election, and they knew the results. To go back to what Stephen said at the beginning,

I remember the first time that I voted in a presidential election, it was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I went to a church and there was an organist practicing for Sunday. So you had this, you had to cotton fugue playing throughout the whole building. You could feel the bass notes in you and you walked into this little booth and you pulled the curtain behind you. You made your mechanical selections and then you picked up this great lever, a great lever, like you were throwing the switch on an electric chair or a train or something. And you pulled it and you could almost sense the votes just clattering off through these mystical relays to the place where they'd be tabulated. And it was great. It felt great.

It felt much better than walking up with a little big pen and making an oval mark in this little cheap little thing that they have that feels like a porta potty for hobbits. I enjoyed it then, and I really liked when we knew by the end of the day, I think we can do it again, and I don't really see a compelling argument why we can't. But next week, we'll find out. In the meantime, everybody should go to Ricochet.com. Sign up if you haven't.

The member feed is where you want to be, and it's where on election night, of course, we will have many, many conversations that it'll tell you it's the place you're looking for. Facebook? No. Twitter? No. You want community? You go to Ricochet.com. Peter, it's been a pleasure. Stephen, it's been a pleasure as well. The book, Andrew Klavan, A Woman Underground, you ought to buy it because he's one of us. And I have nothing more to say except thanks. And we'll see you at the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, guys. Oh, next week.

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