The Karol Markowicz Show: Navigating Hollywood as a Conservative Christian with Andrew Klavan

There was a Puse study from January. I refer to this study a lot, just because it really blew my mind that found parents would prefer by a lot that their children prioritize financial independence and a good career over family and children. Eighty eight percent of parents said it was extremely or very important for their children to be financially independent when they reached adulthood. I mean sure, like

who doesn't think that that's definitely a worthy goal. And eighty eight percent also said the same of their children having a job they enjoy. Okay, you know, I want my kids to be financially independent. I want them to have a job they enjoy. I'm with you. But then only twenty one percent of parents said it was extremely or very important for their child to get married, and just twenty percent felt that strongly about their kids reproducing.

So I mean, just the idea that such a greater number cared about their child's job versus having grandchildren is astonishing. I mean, to me, that's civilization ending, and beyond that, it's just bad advice for life. Like, if you're concerned about your child making a good living them, getting married goes a long way towards that, and living a stable life in general goes a long way towards making more money. I got into this a few episodes ago with Brad Wilcox.

But married people or simply richer I don't just mean earning more money. They also save more money, which is a really surprising stat since you know, married people often have to take care of these really expensive little people that live with them. They still end up saving more money than single people. Putting money or career first doesn't work. You can't have it all in that way. You can have it most of it if you're in a stable relationship.

I mean, married people also pool their resources. You want your kid to be financially secure, move marriage to the top of his or her to do list. A study I looked at found that twenty nine percent of single adults consider themselves financially secure, whereas about half of married couples say the same. I mean, that's a jump, you know, but forget about the financial part of it. That's the other thing I think like getting too wrapped up, and

I tend to do it myself. I tend to look at these studies and say, like, it's so much better for you financially to get married. But that's you know, not romantic and all of that. So it's important to look at marriage as being important for a lot of reasons. We hear a lot about people dying lonely deaths, deaths of despair, and yet we're giving our kids this terrible advice to pursue money over relationships, only to what have them die alone at sixty? Who wants that life for

their children. What's worse is parents are specifically not passing on their own values to their kids. It's baffling. A pupil from a few months ago found that only about a third of parents consider it important to pass their religious values onto their children. Like, are you serious with this?

Someone sent me A study just came out on Friday. Actually, Communio, a national nonprofit organization, conducted a nationwide survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees, and they did it during worship in one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic con ggregations. They found that only twenty two percent of church goers consider themselves lonely, while that number is about fifty percent in the general population. I mean, religion matters, the religious services.

Attending religious services. We know that this leads to, you know, a sense of community that you just simply don't have if you don't go. And you know, honestly, I I'm sort of mixed on where our family is for religious services. We don't really go to anything regularly, and I, you know, I feel like for my own kids, I have to make that change. I'm trying. I've been trying, but I get that it's important even if we don't do it. You know, I feel like I understand that we need

to be motivating towards that. None of this is a coincidence. Religion is good, marriage is good, community is good. These are things that we know. So how did we get to this stage where we're giving our kids such awful

life advice saying that those things don't really matter. I really think that what happened is parents try to be cool or try to be a friend to their kid, and what ends up happening is if anything goes attitude like, oh you don't need to get married, Oh you don't need to go to religious services, you could do whatever you want, everything's fine. They don't want to be like that uncool generation who raised them. They want to be understanding and let their kids be free to make their choices.

I mean, sure, kids will make their own choices no matter what you say to them, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't lay down the markers in your own home. This is what we believe, This is what we want for you. This is what a successful life looks like. You win nothing by pretending all choices are just as good as all the other choices. Tell your kids the truth and then let them go forge their own path.

Coming up next and interview with Andrew Claven. Join us after the break and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. Our guest today is Andrew Claven. Andrew is host of The Andrew Claven Show an author of the new novel The House of Love and Death. Thank you so much for coming on, Andrew, it's.

a sort of better person. He's taken a job as a poetry professor in a Midwestern school, but he has this what he calls a strange habit of mind where every time he sees certain crimes that just don't make sense to him, he's obsessively has to go out and see if he can figure out what it is that doesn't make sense about them. So he's a guy who's kind of been an anti hero is trying to overcome that becomes something better in the world, and the world

is falling apart around him. He's living in modern America, so the world is falling apart around him, And it's basically exploring the idea of how can you be a good Man in a bad Time.

they would never black Chust. It's all about the money. And I kept saying, ah, you know, I don't know. But he was never quite convinced. But he never got anywhere with it. Eventually they'll be banned into movies, but not for a while. Maybe I have to disappear before that happened.

of the most important parts that conservatives don't understand. It's not enough to make movies because you can make movies off a credit card. Now they're absolutely beautiful looking. You need distribution entities, and you need review entities. You need to give awards to artists. I mean, artists live for love,

you know. And Yeah, when you want to know why actors don't care whether their movies make money, it's because they get awards, they get prestige, they get girls, they get all the things that they went into acting for, right, and so they and the money will come. But we don't have any of those things. So when I bring out a novel, for instance, this I used to get before I became outspoken. I used to become get hundreds of venues giving me absolutely great reviews. Now I'm lucky

if I get any kind of major review attention. And still I've managed to put books on the bestseller list, which is amazing because because we're developing our own media, but it's still very difficult, and we just haven't committed to the culture the way we should not yet, but we're starting. It's starting.

hanging fruit, it's fruit lying on the ground. They don't make you know, A long time ago I made a video called the One State Solution about how the entire middle he should be given to the Jews. And when I came up with the idea, I thought, that's such an obvious joke. Someone must have made it. No, No, they don't make any of those jokes, And so the field is open. We could devour them if people would just start spending the money and the attention to do it.

Things that are coming out that are going to be the great new art form are things like the oculus that the meta stuff where you have three dimensional art going on, is going to be. You know, YouTube and videos are a form of art that we've actually done very well. In those small satirical videos. We're a lot funnier than they are where you know, we're a lot we're saying it's easier to be funny because we tell

the truth. So there's all kinds of ways for ordinary creative people to make their mark, but you have to do it, and you have to give up on the big career in Hollywood. This was a benefit that I had. I got blacklisted in Hollywood. I always say I didn't care couldn't care less. It was painful, but I never lost any sleep over it because I just thought, no, I'm going to make things any way I can. If I have to just go to people's houses and scratch

it on their door, I'll do that. And it's been great. It's worked out. You know, I'm good at what I do. I've worked very hard to become good at what I do, and so when people pick it up. I'm not a conservative making art. I'm an artist who's a conservative. That's that's what we're looking for.

up and think about what you're doing. So these new books, the Camera and Winter books are really, I feel like, really rich with kind of the tradition that I've been working in all this time. And it's a very moving experience to kind of look at everything you've done and try to bring it all together.

both so such different people with such different outlooks. But not only are they loving toward one another, but they actually have each one of them this voice that I think is right rather remarkable. I've read Faith's new book and it's charming and witty and just another kind of thing you know, that I would do or Spencer would do, and I think it's it's a wonderful thing to see.

And again, because no one else is doing what we do, the field is kind of open, and it's it's kind of nice to be able to offer things to people who aren't getting entertained because they're always being attacked.

so wonderful. I love them and we're close, and it's it's a beautiful thing. I do the work that I set out to do, and I do it at as high a level as I could have ever expected of myself, and sometimes higher. So yeah, you know, let's put it this way. I have no complaints. I guess the reason I hesitate to give you a yes or no answer because there's always something ahead of you. There really something

more you want to achieve. And that's a beautiful thing too, because I wouldn't want to just kind of dust off my hands and say, well that's that's it. Until the boss calls time, you know. So so yeah, you know, I feel it's just been an amazing life. And again, I'm not sure some I keep expecting someone to knock on the door and say, sorry, you got the wrong life, But yeah, I have no complaints.

in the podcast. You know, I never expected to be doing anything like this. I never expected to be in public, certainly never expected to be in front of cameras, and it took me a while to sort of warm up and let go and open myself to what I was doing. At first, I felt very withdrawn and a little bit performative in the since I'm not really a performer. It took a while for me to kind of overcome that. But I'm really happy to hear that. I mean, it is.

I do give it everything I've got every week. And one of the reasons it was I was doing it four days a week and I said to Jeremy Barne, who runs the Daily Wire, I said, you know, I just can't get it at the quality I want it, so I want to I asked if I could cut it back. And it's been great. I mean, that has been great. I feel it is up the quality, and I'm thrilled to hear that.

of that stuff has come true. And so the question, now, you know, it's funny, but even people I know who have no faith, who have no religion, are talking to me now in religious terms. They're talking about demonic times. They're talking about the end of days and all those things. And so, either you know, we're going to look up in the cloud and God is going to be coming down with charriots and angels and all that stuff, or it's time to make a turn. We're going through something

that I've never seen before. I've been I'm now one hundred and seventy two years old, and I've never seen I've never seen a pause in the culture like this. Our movie stink, our books aren't that good, our music is terrible. Everything has stopped. Even the New York Times. I have to say that one of their critics wrote

a long piece about this, why has this happened? And of course everything after that was incorrect, but he was at least asking the question that means that something new is coming, and hopefully it's something new that remains human and humane and starts to I moved back toward the light of spiritual faith, because we're not just meat puppets filled with chemistry sets. We're actually are something far more than that. And I understand that we had to explore

this thought. Some thoughts are inevitably will be explored. But it was wrong. There was thought was wrong, and the thought that created modernism and postmodernism and all the things that came afterwards was an incorrect thought. And now that we've hit the bottom, I'm very hopeful that we will turn around. I did, I mean my life. I was baptized at the age of forty nine. I mean my life has been a long journey in that regard. And I only came to faith because it made sense when

nothing else did. And it not only made sense in itself, it made sense of everything else. And so I cannot help but believe and have faith in the idea that people ultimately turn to what makes sense away from what is destroying them and dragging them down. So many, especially young people, I talk to them all the time. They're so unhappy and it's like, you know, it's eventually you start to think, well, maybe I don't have to be this way, Maybe this is not what life is supposed to be.

that's not what we are. The obvious truth is that the chemicals in our bodies, or our bodies or physical machines are reflecting something that's happening that you know, just like a word reflects a meaning, our bodies reflect a self. And I think that's where we're going to have to come back to. And yes, of course it's solvable because the funny thing, the weirdest thing about life, and the most hopeful thing about life, is you only have to turn the ship around. It's like the minute you turn

in another direction. This is in the New Testament. There's a story of the prodigal son who goes off and wastes everything. He has everything, and he comes back and the minute he comes over the hill, thinking I'll beg my father to take me back, And the minute he comes over the hill, his father runs to greet him. And that is something I've seen before. To give an example, the seventies were very much like this time, not quite

as bad. There were things that were better about them, but the economy was bad, the culture was bad, and all that had to happen was Ronald Reagan had to just say we're going to go in a different direction, and within a year everything was better. Rudy Giuliani took over a city that was just as bad as San Francisco is today and somehow worse, and all he need to do is turn the culture well. The New York Times called them names and a racism every day, but

the whole city turned around almost instantaneously. It was really a beautiful thing, and that's true of individual lives too. You only have to turn around and you know your father comes running to meet you. And so I'm really always optimistic, even though I do know that everything that's mortal dies and everything built by mortal fans collapses. I don't think we're there yet. I don't think this is that time yet, and so I'm hopeful it can turn around and quicker than we think.

talked about it to be. So that's a journey. It's pretty exciting and I would like to write about that too.

media and called names. If you point to you know, things that are wrong in the culture, that maybe it would be better if more black people got married before they have family, Suddenly you're a racist for saying the one thing that a friend would actually say to a friend, which is the truth that they need to hear. And it also means, and this is the hardest part, It means accepting the shame for your own behavior and for your own thoughts and for the ways in which you

fail yourself and fail. This is the one thing that's true of every single person. Every single person knows he is not who he's supposed to be, every single one of us. And the way that you turn that around, and the way that you turn that around is you start to tell yourself the truth about yourself. And it costs you shame. And it's something that people, if I had to find you know, people say, ohtho, everybody's motivated by sax. Everybody's motivated by money and all these things.

If I had to pick one thing, I would say, everybody's motivated for by the need to feel virtuous. And once you accept the fact that you're not virtuous, that you are a coward, that you are corrupt, that you would sheet if you were given the moment, the darkness to do it. And once you accept that about yourself, suddenly you see it's like a road, a magic road appears in front of you where you don't have to be that way anymore. And so that's the one thing

I would tell people. Make the effort to tell yourself the truth, make the effort to speak the truth, pay the price, and keep going because you will get to a better place than you are right now. There's just no question about it.