Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Mister garbageaw tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lylyx. At today we talked to novelist, social commentator, artist guy thinker Andrew Clayman about his new book A Woman Underground. So let's have yourselves a podcast.
And just the other day, speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating isle 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. Only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and fifteen. I'm James Lylyx in Minneapolis, which is expecting snow that I'm not ready for it, but bringing a sunny care charmed to the rest of the podcast is Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward, who maybe, for all we know, in Iceland or Madagascar or where do you happen to be Today's.
I'm back home in California, where we are expecting our first reign 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 ol when 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 time.
I'm going. I'll tell you what.
I'm going around the neighborhood as a 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 where this night looks 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 it. 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 battle of ground state after another. It looks to me 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 shineance, 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 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 option 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 seventy two 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, Well, I've always had a theory that the camp pain it's having the most fun is usually the winning campaign. That goes back to Reagan in nineteen eighty. You remember Reagan used to get on his campaign plane, he'd changed into a pair of sweatpants, and then as the plane was taking off, he would roll an orange down the aisle. This became kind of a you know, fun thing for the press, Corn in the back and
all the rest of that. And and the campaign where you're hearing rumors of backbiting and and you know, a turmoil and trouble. That's always the losing campaign. That was Bush in ninety two, for example. And you hear that from the Harris campaign. Now, so look, I think Trump's gonna win. I think it's possible he wins comfortably. And here's there are 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 under rating Trump's strength. Even if the error on Trump's strength is half what it was 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 polsters.
Saying, boy, we're working really hard.
To correct our under our undersampling 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 posters are experimenting and trying to figure out ways to make up with their defects instead of 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 to pull 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 fifty 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 maximum votes? Well, labor union members 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 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 kamalo 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 more 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 it'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 eroteed substantially.
That's the only way Trump would get so.
In other words, instead of instead of Harris winning New York by twenty three points as Biden did four years ago, she only wins it by ten. And that kind of erosion democratic support would be an interesting thing. If you have fluke like that, that happens, and of course watch everybody switch sides and suddenly Democrats will love the electoral college, which will.
Be and he is he is piling up. It's a ridiculous term, but they seem to be using it. He's piling up excess are unnecessary votes. He's up by ten in Florida, up by seven in Texas, up by nine 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, wouldn't 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 everything that's true, true, everything is coming up Mitt at the end. And I just remember how surprised we were on election nine. 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 into four quadrants, and then the birds flew through the upper right hand quadrant, which I believe foretels
well for Trump. Now the garbage comment was interesting because it goes back to I mean, never mind what wood Biden said. What I find fascinating about it is the 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 you know, 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 when we can discuss that, putting them in the same category as the La Times in 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 news paper 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. Is 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 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, is 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 abjective 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 in the Washington Post and exist in an ideological bubble, and there are no venn diagrams bursting their way into 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 christfallen 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 nineteen eighty 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 twenty sixteen, 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 forty five 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 Claven's son what Spencer Claven and others. Right, you're right, and they're saying and they're peddling misinformation and YouTube needs
to censor them. So you know, 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 in 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 comember 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 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.
Just well, okay, well minute, our guest. Our guest happens to know a thing or two about journalism. Let's bring him in and we'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 Claven back to the podcast after an awful long time, of course, host to the Andrew Claven Show, which you could find I don't know, We'll I have a link to it somewhere here on Ricochet. Andrew, welcome back, Good to talk to you.
Hey, James, good to see it.
Author of A Woman Underground, which is the next book briefly A Prices. 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 it's I think it's really one of the best books in the series. I'm really happy with it.
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 sud My wife was like, eh, you know, it's like she wouldn't go.
For it, Okay, So I just wanted to get that one out of the way.
James back to you.
Sorry, I'll be tell you.
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 mails 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 off 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 social proselytizing, which is turning off 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 read the 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 leftward. What do you think about the entire medium of gaming and 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 I feel they kind of crested in the nineties because the innovation was so exciting, just so exciting to watch Pong turn into these incredibly elaborate games. Now they're 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 cannot 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. It's closer to real life than anything that 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 the really shapely girls women go around fighting people, and thirteen year old boys get to play bounce them around. I remember the first time that what
with the tomb raider. What's her name again, I've forgot Laura Croft, Laura Croft. I remember the first time they made it so that her breast bounced when she jumped up and down. I saw for about twenty minutes just making her jump up and down. And that was my life for a while. And I think that can be very useful. But yeah, you know, listen, I'm for all
the arts. I love every new thing. I think every 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 doing podcasts when podcasts came along. And I think all these things our venues of culture,
and culture is a beautiful thing. And I think it's culture is a way we encapsulate the society and play it back to itself so we can see it more objectively.
I do one more thing on that. It's a great way of putting it. There was a game called BioShock, Yes, which was which was all about, in the end, the intellectual limitations and perils of an iron Rand philosophy, which people loved. Yeah, give it to Ion. The next game to that was all about the perils and the horrors of collectivism. The third one was about the perils sort 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 it's it's it's absolutely fascinating and my father, 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 give that to you for free.
I give that to you inspired. Yeah, so listen.
So the current book is a Woman Underground. It's book four in the Camera and Winter series. I confess because you write so fast that the only one of the four I have read is the first book book never 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 their thought provoking, but their entertainments correct.
This is the whole thing for me, is you know 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, you know, really deep and interesting while not slowing it down.
That's okay.
So I want to I want to name the books where 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 books series that had four books in it, But this is the first time I've ever thought committed myself to something longer. It began during the COVID lockdowns. My old friend Otto Pensler, who is the greatest mystery editor of
his generation. Without 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 that the fact was I had had this Christmas mystery in my head for thirty years and I just couldn't solve it. I couldn't figure out how to get from what I knew was the ending, 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's kind of inspired me, and I took a couple of days during COVID, took these long walks, and I cracked the story. And so I 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 afterwords. I think, difference whether Superman fights a dragon or Frodo does it, it makes 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 the two thousands, and that all of those stories were about anties and I had been written writing anti hero novels up till then. But then 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 straight 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 ten books, because I think it's going to take ten to fifteen 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 will 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. You're so productive. But Drew just the 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 pop up at a conference without hearing that you just spoken
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 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 actually turn everything off while I'm writing, and most of the time by the time i'm finished writing because 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. I work a hard day. But Steve, you're the you are the Steve Hayward who writes the ghost stories.
Right, Well, that's all my critics say.
I suppose, right, Although I'm glad to hear about your writing habits, and 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 a lot of trouble with this question set up. But you know, there's a saying popular with you know, my political philosopher pals and 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 what I mean.
You know, the line is.
That we live in a guyanocracy now, right, and this is what's going to get me in trouble. But I want, 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.
You know, 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.
You know, Spencer, your son is all over this.
And you know, I'm watching these male subcultures that are resisting this and so what they're into, weightlifting, they're in 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, 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 young males from you know, when I was a young male, which is around the time of the Boer War.
I don't know, well, how 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 gonna 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 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 that nobody was paying attention to television news anymore.
And when you see the name is Andrew Clavin, everyone this is not the voice of Peter Robinson or Steve Hayward or James Lyax continue continued, ladies.
But but it's that right, It's simply 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 say is this is right wing and I 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 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.
What's up. Yeah, thinking man's ign rant, thinking man's sign rent 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 that really science is pointing us back to God. And I think that once men return to the church and a lot of this nonsense that's going on in the churches where they're basically just adopting, you know, 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 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 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 adaptation from uh what Apple, I forget Amazon, right, and it's Missus proto fighting the Dragon, right.
And I mean, you know.
The criticism from the left of the Lord of the Rings 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 gonna wake up and say, you know, it's going to be popular. I've actually got 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 right, but that's where
the money is going to be made. And ultimately, isn't money going to force the entertainment industry to turn this around? Well?
Yeah, I mean I think that one of the things, you know, I was I was at a dinner once with the 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 he's holding court. How surprised.
He got to me, and his question was, what do you know that nobody else knows? And think, so, what I know that nobody else knows is they don't care about the money. And this is true in Hollywood. And people in Hollywood do not care about them 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, and it's like we want to convince that 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.
And I actually have some respect from Mark, 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 him 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 technolog g this three D technology which is going to let us live in stories and play stories like we're on the Holid deck 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 nineties retread when I think that new stuff,
you know, 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, you know, if I were starting out now, what I would be doing is doing three dimensional stuff, and I
would be if somebody asked me to do it. I do it anyway, And I just think that 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 muskme long, nobody does anything about it. I think we should be inventing that stuff.
Three D immersive meta style virtual reality is interesting, but it seems to me like it's the cold fusion of entertainment. It's always 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 it early on when meta Facebook came up with their ghastly system, the metaverse, which which instantaneously, 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 are still something that seems to me fundamentally isolating about sitting somewhere with this alien face hugger 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 gets 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 over through ever since me too, ever since twenty twenty, 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 Jimbros start to appreciate sculpture and the Paris Opera House and the rest of it, and do the whole return thing where the you 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 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 Borjes where it's a review of a new version of Donkey Hodie. And the thing is that 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, you know, my conservative worldview is not big enough to create, and so I'm going to open it up a little bit and then 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, I think that it's going to be great. And I'm not
predicting that things are going to be great. I'm think predicting that things are going to change, and that we have a new day coming, that our generation is passing away as even even we must. And I think, you know, a new new forms are going to take place, and I think it's I'm hopeful about it. I'm not at all despairing about it.
Well, and let the records just show that Andrew Clavin has endorsed romanticism, which you have can be manifested in novels like The Sorrows of Young Verter, which resulted in an epidemic of teen suicides throughout Germany. So that's another one for you. You mentioned you mentioned don Quixote.
It would be good to do another version of that today with with with Mill Gibson in a mad Max car tilting at the windmills, these dark satanic things that spin in the countryside, that that I would absolutely love to see.
I just want I just want to point out that dark satanic mills is William Blake, one of the great.
Romance poets and did these feet and Ancient Times, which actually was covered by Emerson Lake and Palmer of all phones. Yeah, and I is you really don't expect Blake and Uh 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 the 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 ten foot poll.
Thanks Peter.
Right, So Donald Trump's report, Donald Trump, the book again? The book Again is a Woman Underground, book number four in the Cameron Winter 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 era. 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 he's something like eight percent up with men and Kamala's nine percent up with women. And so, yes, there is something to that, and he has played run a very bro campaign. But there's there's something else about Donald Trump. I mean, I sensed 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 other all of his flaws aside. I think he believes that the best thing he can do is fixed 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 sixty 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 Steve,
on you Drew, but also on Stephen James. And this is just in my head, so here it comes out loud for the first time, and it may be wildly wrong, but it seems to me that up until two months ago, maybe even six weeks ago, you could characterize Donald Trump as this atavistic figure from the nineteen fifties that if he closed his eyes, what he really wanted was a Queen's that where it was safe to play stickball in 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 a zempic and this is not right. Yeah, 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 nineteen fifties, is not that at all anymore.
There is an openness to the future. There is a seriousness about social problem 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 true?
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, I agree, there's time 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 One, and I went to a party with the heads of Europe after World War One, 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, you know, because he's a guy who sees a problem and he fix it. He's not done. He's just moved on to the next thing. And you're absolutely right about that rocket capture the Peter
it was. 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 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, the jump back in.
You know, it seems to me that what ought to terrify these lablishment the established institutions that have failed that you mentioned, Andrew is.
Someone it must do.
And he took over Twitter, what he fired seventy five percent of the staff and found out to 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.
We don't want and.
Then rfk Ju and your 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 with Kennedy's virtue is.
Going to be he's going to come in in the CDC and all the other hell 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 you're going to really have to, you know, be sterurner than that.
Right.
And so just the disruption of this, I mean, when you tell the American people, because 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 twenty twenty five. They kept saying he's going to cut fifty percent of the bureaucracy, and I thought, oh, you know, that's wrong about seventy five percent. 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 just the other day I interviewed the doctor Martin McCarry 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 lined 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 this 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're 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 made
for sales, Drew. Can we discuss a kickback over I'm easy.
To bruy, right, So to your point about RFK saying some things, but you wish the source is 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. 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.
This moment, All right, everybody, A woman on the ground. Is the book? Buy it in eye by it, 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 in a terrogate 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 Claven. Thank you for joining us in the podcast today, My friend beat to see you guys.
Bye bye, take care of Drew.
So before we go, is there anything you guys? Here's what we should do. Actually, we 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 to make you sound an incredibly prescient because yeah, I told.
You guys, I knew she would win. That's a that's a stand by for me.
Can I remember that old movie Clue where they had like four different endings in the movie, and 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 Rogan, 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. Four years of the some people just may 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 they 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 a lot of people are voting for him because they know that he will not do these other things correct. And when it comes to an inflation and immigration, the two big eyes 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 kind of 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, even 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 loss. Am I wrong there? Well?
I signed up this way, James. Look, there's downsides to eat a candidate winning. Doubts about Trump are well known. But I think it's 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 ever bit as much as it did after their losses in the nineteen eighties that brought them Bill Clinton in a moved to the center, really save them from almost oblivion. And if that, oh,
good times for Conservatives. If Harris wins, I mean, will be miserable and shold a lot of terrible stuff, But we.
Will be on the offensive 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 vacuus person.
Midterms. Midterms would be lit as the kids.
True, that's right. And look Trump.
A Trump victory will ratify, especially I think his inspired choice of JD Vance as that I think it turns out in retrospect that will ratify a change in the character of demo of the Republican Party that I think will mean a good times ahead for the long term.
Agreed, Well, we we will meet next week. Wow, think of that next week, next week, It'll all it'll it'll be done, It'll be settled. Who am I kidding? Probably dragon for another two or three months. As Arizona says, well, we can't, we can't. We can't count we can't count them. I mean, for Heaven's sake. So where was that Argentina
had an election and they knew the results? By oh, we used to have we used to And I to go back to what Steven 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 caught in fugue playing throughout the whole building. You could feel the base 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 a you know, 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 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 this little cheap little thing that they had 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 sho go to ricochet dot 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 dot com. Peter, it's been a pleasure, Steven, it's been a pleasure as well. The book Andrew Claven a Woman Underground. Yeaht 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 for point Oh next week, guys, oh next week Ricochet.
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