The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 133 ｜ THIS Is Where Cancel Culture Comes From ｜ Andrew Klavan

00:00:00.000 Today's guest I am thrilled to have on. He is human, he's conservative, and he's who I want to be when I grow up.

00:00:13.780 He is brilliant. He is a commentator, a novelist in multiple genres, best-selling author, screenwriter, radio playwright, and the winner of the Edgar Award.

00:00:26.460 I don't know who Edgar is, but I bet it's better than Oscar.

00:00:30.000 Whoever he was. He's so good that he made a career in Hollywood as a conservative, and they started getting dicey.

00:00:38.760 His True Crime book was turned into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

00:00:44.180 Other films based on his book have featured an impressive array of actors and directors.

00:00:48.980 His most recent project is The Covenant, an upcoming multi-season TV series that shows us the stories of the Old Testament without the Hollywood influence.

00:00:59.560 His latest book, The Truth and Beauty, is a look into how poetry can inform our relationship with God.

00:01:09.340 Poetry. I mean, we're down to this.

00:01:11.940 That's what I thought before I spoke to one of my heroes, Andrew Klavan.

00:01:21.560 Abortion is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and the world.

00:01:26.880 Since Roe v. Wade, 63 million babies have been killed just here in the U.S.

00:01:35.500 Nearly one in four pregnancies don't choose life.

00:01:39.240 In the midst of all of this, we have to do something about it.

00:01:42.660 What are we going to do?

00:01:43.260 Well, we found the Ministry of Preborn, and Blaze Media has partnered to help them rescue babies from abortion in 2022.

00:01:51.600 Preborn is the direct competition to Planned Parenthood and the largest provider of free ultrasounds in the U.S.

00:01:58.160 And by letting women see their baby on an ultrasound and hear the heartbeat, they're 80% more likely to choose life for their baby.

00:02:06.660 That's a remarkable thing.

00:02:10.160 Preborn has a passion to save unborn babies from abortion and see women come to Christ.

00:02:15.680 And over the past 15 years, preborn centers have counseled over 340,000 women that were considering abortion.

00:02:24.040 More than 169,000 babies have been saved.

00:02:28.100 Holy cow.

00:02:29.840 What did you do with your day, dear?

00:02:32.520 I was in a meeting.

00:02:34.460 That's a remarkable thing.

00:02:36.660 Here's the thing.

00:02:38.140 You are the answer.

00:02:39.400 You are the hero of every preborn baby in this nation and the ambassador for eternal life for every mom, dad, and family that walks in to every preborn partner clinic.

00:02:50.200 You can help rescue babies.

00:02:52.780 Donate pound 250.

00:02:55.980 Say the keyword baby.

00:02:58.100 Just hit pound 250, keyword baby, or you can go to preborn.com slash Glenn.

00:03:06.660 Hello, my friend.

00:03:18.620 How are you?

00:03:19.060 Good to see you.

00:03:19.800 Good to see you.

00:03:20.960 It's been a long time since we've actually sat in the same room.

00:03:23.540 I think I saw you in Los Angeles last time.

00:03:25.560 That's a long time ago.

00:03:26.640 Yeah.

00:03:26.860 It's now years.

00:03:27.760 I don't know how many people I have told when people say, tell me interesting people you've met or, you know, who's really stuck out.

00:03:37.640 And I say, always Andrew Clavin is not only intimidating because he's so smart, but he is also one of the most honest and genuine people I know.

00:03:51.120 Oh, that's very kind of you.

00:03:52.220 Coming from you, that's a great compliment.

00:03:55.400 Well, thank you for that.

00:03:56.680 I was, I'll never forget when we first sat down, we actually were at a friend's house.

00:04:04.520 Yeah.

00:04:04.680 We were having dinner and you came up to me sheepishly.

00:04:08.080 Do you remember?

00:04:08.740 Yes, I do.

00:04:09.440 I do.

00:04:09.920 Will you tell the story?

00:04:10.640 Well, this was something that ate at me for, it must have been over a year.

00:04:14.560 When I started doing my podcast for the Daily Wire, I was completely inexperienced and I was making jokes, my usual kind of, you know, funny stuff.

00:04:25.040 And I made a couple of jokes about you.

00:04:26.720 They were jokes that I have made to your face.

00:04:28.740 They're jokes that I've made on the blaze.

00:04:30.180 When you started the blaze, you hired me to do satirical things.

00:04:32.680 I used to do these jokes about how crazy you are.

00:04:34.820 And I would say, I would say to your staff, is Glenn going to mind my calling him crazy?

00:04:38.340 No, he knows he's crazy.

00:04:39.460 You know what I'm saying?

00:04:40.640 So, I did it.

00:04:43.860 I urge people to make fun of me.

00:04:46.340 You do.

00:04:47.040 You've always been.

00:04:47.940 Yeah.

00:04:48.760 So, I did it on the air, but you weren't there to laugh.

00:04:53.920 So, afterwards, I thought, you know, that really sounded like I was dissing a guy that I, and I, you know, I'm not flattering you.

00:05:01.740 You know, I think you're one of the greatest broadcasters of the age, you know.

00:05:05.100 And I thought, you know, because it caught up with me.

00:05:07.920 It took about a month.

00:05:09.100 And then I started to think, you know, I hated that.

00:05:12.000 And then I was going to write to you.

00:05:13.980 And I thought, no, you know, that was a bad thing to do.

00:05:16.820 You did it in public.

00:05:17.500 You got to walk up to a face-to-face.

00:05:18.980 So, a year later, easy.

00:05:22.200 And you came up to me.

00:05:23.980 I had no idea about it.

00:05:26.580 I just remember thinking.

00:05:27.580 Just on my mind.

00:05:28.560 Yeah.

00:05:28.840 I remember thinking, relax.

00:05:30.160 You wouldn't believe what's been said about me.

00:05:32.780 Whatever you thought.

00:05:33.720 But I like you.

00:05:34.480 I will tell you that not a lot of people have that kind of integrity.

00:05:42.060 Oh, well, it really does.

00:05:44.120 You know, I want to be.

00:05:45.880 The thing is, my life has all been words.

00:05:47.720 It's writing words.

00:05:48.600 Now it's talking words.

00:05:49.940 If the words coming out of my mouth are not saying what I mean them to say or they're not true, that's what keeps me up at night.

00:05:56.060 That is the thing that really makes me think I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

00:06:01.340 That is, words have real power.

00:06:05.780 Real power.

00:06:06.580 Yes.

00:06:06.820 And they are.

00:06:09.280 I won't speak for women, but for a man, his word, if his word isn't good, what is he, you know?

00:06:15.660 Somebody asked me just the other day, what's the thing that has been said about you?

00:06:21.980 Does any of it bother you?

00:06:23.380 And if so, what is the worst thing?

00:06:26.620 And I said, when people question, he's got a, he doesn't believe that.

00:06:37.740 He's got an ulterior motive, whatever, because I've worked so hard to keep my word.

00:06:44.220 Right?

00:06:44.480 Yes.

00:06:44.660 And that's the first thing your opponents always say.

00:06:47.640 Always say.

00:06:47.920 You're doing it for the money.

00:06:48.700 You're doing it for this.

00:06:49.460 You're doing it.

00:06:49.740 Yeah.

00:06:49.840 And when you really, when you really try to be careful with your words.

00:06:55.760 When you really have true intent of trying to do good, it's crushing because it's the only thing that you really own.

00:07:07.060 Your words are the only thing that you really own.

00:07:10.020 Yes.

00:07:10.400 And, and, you know, I mean, I'm sure this is true of you.

00:07:12.740 I've lost a lot of money by my words.

00:07:14.980 I've lost jobs and I've been blacklisted and all these, these things.

00:07:18.180 And so you're, it's kind of nuts when somebody disagrees with you.

00:07:22.000 Just say you disagree.

00:07:23.160 This is why.

00:07:23.840 Instead of, you know, oh, you're just doing this because, you know, Ben Shapiro told you to or whatever it is they say, because it is offensive.

00:07:31.460 I mean, at this point, I figure my reputation walks in front of me.

00:07:34.300 Like anybody who knows me knows that it ain't so.

00:07:36.620 Yeah.

00:07:36.820 Including, including Ben, because I drive him crazy.

00:07:40.720 That is an amazing think tank you guys have there.

00:07:43.920 It's amazing.

00:07:44.580 It really is.

00:07:45.380 And we started in a place that looked like this, you know, we started in Jeremy Boring's pool house.

00:07:52.140 Me and Ben just doing podcasts on a car table.

00:07:55.520 I remember.

00:07:55.880 Yeah.

00:07:56.280 I remember.

00:07:56.600 And it, it, it took five, six years and it was huge.

00:08:00.300 There was a moment where we were going to, we were going to merge together.

00:08:03.100 That's right.

00:08:03.480 That's right.

00:08:03.900 But then you, you scuttled that and went to the blaze.

00:08:06.680 I don't think that's, that's not my recollection, but I will tell you that it is.

00:08:12.660 I was so disappointed in one thing.

00:08:16.040 I love the fact that you all get together and you all just talk about things.

00:08:23.840 Oh, that's great.

00:08:24.380 That was, you know, that's the one thing because, you know, everybody's, a lot of the people work out of Dallas.

00:08:31.100 Some of them, Crowder works, you know, 45 minutes away, you know, Mark is up in Virginia.

00:08:39.020 And so we don't have that chance to sit around and just be a brain trust.

00:08:44.740 And that is, that's great.

00:08:47.280 It was an amazing experience, especially as it was coming up because we're all kind of packed together in a little space.

00:08:53.720 And then Trump came along and there was so much to talk about, so much to figure out.

00:08:56.880 Nobody had ever seen anything like him before.

00:08:58.820 We were yelling at each other, screaming at each other, but it was all very friendly.

00:09:01.660 And it was all, it helps you think, you know, it's, I mean, part of thinking is talking, you know, is conversation, which is one of the problems in our country right now is nobody talks to us.

00:09:10.480 Right. And if, if you can't talk, if you can't question, what are we really, you know, you can't, you cannot move without questioning.

00:09:18.680 The one thing that I want to, that I think makes you different is that you are a God guy.

00:09:29.880 You're a deep philosophical guy.

00:09:32.420 You've written, you've written, I've got to get to this book, but you've written The Truth in Beauty.

00:09:38.680 And, you know, usually, usually when I'm reading my books on, you know, the romantic poets, which I never do.

00:09:49.040 But you say that through poetry, you can come closer to God and the scriptures.

00:10:00.380 Oh, no question about it.

00:10:01.480 These poets specifically, these are the romantic poets for a brief period on the little island of England.

00:10:07.500 Six of the greatest poets who ever lived, Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron, were all living at the same moment, all writing in the same moment.

00:10:15.340 And they were writing in a moment, which was incredibly like this one.

00:10:20.320 We had, they had the French Revolution, but we had the 60s where everything changed and we thought it was going to be paradise.

00:10:27.160 It all collapsed. It all became a terror.

00:10:29.560 It became, for us, it became the Cold War.

00:10:31.180 For them, it became the Napoleonic War.

00:10:32.860 And it was all surrounding this issue of faith, the fact that faith had gone out of the world.

00:10:38.360 And these poets were basically trying to say, if the age of reason has led to a reign of terror, what did we do wrong?

00:10:49.300 You know, Wordsworth was a big supporter of the revolution.

00:10:51.580 And then it just became a bloodletting.

00:10:53.080 And he said, what did we do wrong?

00:10:54.240 And they started to deal with the fact that God had gone out of the world.

00:10:58.720 They didn't always know.

00:10:59.660 Coleridge, who was the brightest of them, always knew.

00:11:02.520 And so when I went back, I became a Christian, as you know, late in life.

00:11:05.400 I was almost 50.

00:11:07.140 And when that happens and you're not a cradle Christian, you look at some of this stuff in the gospel, you think, like, I don't know what this guy is talking about.

00:11:13.800 You know, he says, turn the other cheek.

00:11:15.800 Should I?

00:11:16.460 I mean, if like somebody slugs me, am I really going to turn the other cheek or am I going to deck him?

00:11:21.640 You know, I mean, you start to think, well, what is he talking about?

00:11:25.240 And so I thought, I'm going to go find it, see if I can find out.

00:11:27.940 I'm going to put everything out of my mind, just read Jesus as Jesus.

00:11:31.080 No Paul, no theology, nothing.

00:11:33.480 I taught myself Greek badly and I started reading it in the Greek.

00:11:37.740 You're very, you're very Jefferson.

00:11:40.080 I'm very dogged.

00:11:42.300 I'm dogged.

00:11:42.900 Yeah.

00:11:43.720 I taught myself Greek.

00:11:45.480 Well, I taught myself pig Latin.

00:11:48.320 So.

00:11:51.240 But I started reading this and I thought, this is all the stuff that's in the romantics.

00:11:56.340 The stuff that Jesus is saying is the stuff that's in these great poems.

00:12:00.440 Jesus was actually telling us something.

00:12:02.100 He was actually teaching us a way to look at the world that would do what he said.

00:12:07.240 He said, well, the joy that's in me, he said, will be in you.

00:12:10.620 And that's been my experience of Christianity.

00:12:12.260 It has made me a much more joyful, much more serene person.

00:12:15.840 Me too.

00:12:16.140 Yeah.

00:12:16.560 I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's like magic.

00:12:18.400 It's kind of strange.

00:12:19.640 It's, you know, Jordan Peterson.

00:12:20.960 He talks about the, you know, the importance of salvation and forgiveness.

00:12:26.620 You, there's nothing that replaces that.

00:12:29.700 No.

00:12:30.020 I mean, it is, you know, I believe, and I know what redemption has done to my life.

00:12:38.360 I mean, it's changed me fundamentally.

00:12:43.620 But, you know, people will be atheists and they'll say, you know what?

00:12:46.920 I know it's worked for me.

00:12:49.140 And even if it's a giant con and I believe it, and therefore I'm a better human being,

00:12:56.260 I'm great with that.

00:12:57.660 You know, if I wake up and it's just dirt around me, I'm like, ah, crap.

00:13:01.520 You know what I mean?

00:13:02.480 But it's fundamentally changed me.

00:13:07.160 It changes, and it changes you every time.

00:13:09.680 This is one of the issues that I was dealing with.

00:13:11.480 Every time I understand it a little better, my life gets more joyful.

00:13:16.200 Yeah.

00:13:16.380 You know, and when I say joyful, I don't mean happy.

00:13:18.140 I don't mean walking around with a big smile on my face.

00:13:19.680 What I mean is alive, vital, you know, that like even, even when things are sad, you're

00:13:25.100 thinking this life, you know, I'm here in life and I'm living life at this very, you

00:13:30.400 know, intense, aware level.

00:13:32.260 And that's, that's what you ask for.

00:13:34.120 Have you always been a God guy?

00:13:36.180 No, no.

00:13:37.100 Oh, no.

00:13:37.520 I was, you know, I was what I call a secular Jew.

00:13:39.840 I was a Jew, but I didn't believe in Judaism.

00:13:41.960 I was raised with it, but my parents didn't really believe in it.

00:13:44.880 So I thought it was just hypocrisy.

00:13:47.200 I've told you, I think the story before when I was bar mitzvahed, I got all these gifts,

00:13:51.380 thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and stuff like this.

00:13:54.100 And one day I just took it and I threw it away because I didn't, I was lying.

00:13:58.840 I was, I didn't believe in it.

00:14:00.300 And after that, I just thought I'm done.

00:14:01.900 You know, I was a sophisticated, modern coastal guy.

00:14:05.900 And this is not when people talk to me.

00:14:07.380 Yeah, I went to Berkeley.

00:14:08.280 Yep.

00:14:08.520 And, and I was an artist and I was working in Hollywood.

00:14:11.220 I was working in publishing.

00:14:12.200 You know, there was nobody around, but first going through my own, you know, craziness,

00:14:21.140 the own, my own trauma of childhood and youth.

00:14:23.980 And I really had a breakdown in my twenties.

00:14:26.800 I genuinely went, genuinely, genuinely went nuts.

00:14:29.540 I mean, in my twenties and through a great psychiatrist who just recently died.

00:14:35.220 He was the only mentor I ever had.

00:14:37.340 He cured me.

00:14:38.620 He, I'm like the guy who was cured by a psychiatrist.

00:14:41.000 I'm like the only guy.

00:14:41.800 Wow.

00:14:41.980 You're the guy.

00:14:42.840 And it was only when I started to become happy that I started to think, well, now if I follow

00:14:51.520 this thought that is leading me to God, it won't be a crutch.

00:14:55.040 When I was miserable, I would think, well, I'm not going to just grab onto God as a crutch

00:14:59.680 because then it's not real.

00:15:01.540 But once I started to think I'm, you know, I'm happy, then logic led me to God.

00:15:06.620 Like you cannot, the one question that no one has ever been able to ask me is why should

00:15:12.080 you care what's right and wrong if you don't believe in God?

00:15:16.080 Why shouldn't you just get what you want or pretend you care and then get what you want?

00:15:21.660 And that's what the Marquis de Sade said, the only honest atheist writer I ever read.

00:15:25.340 He said, you know, there is no God.

00:15:27.180 I'm going to rape people and kill them because I find that really fun.

00:15:30.740 And, uh, and I thought like, yeah, that, that makes sense, but it's also hell, you know,

00:15:36.180 it's, yeah, it would, um, I mean,

00:15:38.880 doing things out of the flow of God or universe or whatever, it's very enslaving, but it's very

00:15:51.300 attractive because do whatever you want, especially in the moment.

00:15:54.620 Yeah.

00:15:55.000 Yeah.

00:15:55.200 And I would absolutely, if, I mean, there's no governor on you except yourself.

00:16:00.600 Right.

00:16:02.180 You know, but then you have this problem.

00:16:04.460 If, if it's different to, to be kind to a child than it is to set a vagrant on fire.

00:16:12.540 If those two things are different somehow, then there's a level of meaning like above nature,

00:16:19.700 right?

00:16:19.940 Because there's nothing to say that's different.

00:16:22.620 I mean, there's gotta be someplace where, where it's different, where it's good and bad,

00:16:27.580 because, you know, there's no, there's no logic that leads you to that necessarily.

00:16:32.040 There's certainly no evolutionary idea that leads you to anything except self, um, you

00:16:38.180 know, self aggrandizement, self profit.

00:16:40.580 They say, oh, well, there's game theory and you're figuring this stuff out, but who cares?

00:16:44.320 You know, I mean, if you turn your back and I can get away with it, why should I care?

00:16:48.560 It's the stuff you do alone and the stuff you think about alone.

00:16:51.340 I mean, oh yeah, you know, that's the stuff I found that when you have found happiness,

00:17:00.320 you can turn the radio off in your car, do it all the time.

00:17:05.020 Yeah.

00:17:05.300 Because you, you're not wrestling with the things that are happening inside your head

00:17:11.220 because it's the things that you think about.

00:17:14.300 Yeah.

00:17:14.780 You know what I mean?

00:17:15.800 That just keep playing these tapes over and over and over again.

00:17:18.980 That is, you know, that is a great, it's a great metaphor because I, I'm one of the

00:17:23.460 few people, you know, who doesn't play the radio in the car.

00:17:26.000 I love to be in the car and think and all this stuff, but you're right.

00:17:29.500 There's so many people with the headsets plugged in and the phones in front of them.

00:17:33.020 And I, yeah, of course, of course you do that.

00:17:34.580 Of course you have to do it.

00:17:35.780 And, and the thing is, we all know this in our hearts.

00:17:39.140 We all know that there's something we're missing and it's not going to church and

00:17:44.040 shouting Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

00:17:45.400 It's not necessarily, you know, uh, going to a soup line.

00:17:49.580 It's some intense connection with life with a life that's in me is also out there somehow,

00:17:57.220 you know, that exchange between the spiritual world, this level of meaning and me.

00:18:02.960 And I think that that's what so many of us are missing.

00:18:06.120 And a great philosopher, uh, your, your writer was showing me Rene Girard, who's a wonderful

00:18:11.540 philosopher.

00:18:12.180 And he said, once you get rid of that connection, then you've got two things.

00:18:15.140 You've only got what you've got inside you.

00:18:17.140 So if you say I'm your, if I say I'm suddenly turned into a woman, then I'm suddenly a woman.

00:18:21.720 And then you've got this confusing world outside that has to be explained by experts.

00:18:25.120 So I, I'm a woman, but I can't leave my house until Anthony Fauci tells me to, you know?

00:18:29.260 And so, but if you have a connection, this connection, suddenly you think like, no, no, wait a minute.

00:18:33.420 I've got this.

00:18:34.260 I understand this.

00:18:35.060 You know, I'm going to need help.

00:18:36.000 I'm going to need information, but I can live in this world because it's part, I'm part of

00:18:40.260 it.

00:18:40.620 I'm part of this world.

00:18:41.700 It's, um, have you ever lived on a farm?

00:18:44.440 No.

00:18:45.640 It's fascinating.

00:18:46.480 Yeah.

00:18:46.780 Uh, I, uh, I had a, I have a ranch and when my kids were really small, you know, we had

00:18:54.600 sheep, we had, we had goats, we had cattle and chicken and everything else.

00:18:58.200 And all of a sudden, everything made sense.

00:19:04.860 You know what I mean?

00:19:05.700 Yeah.

00:19:05.860 Yeah.

00:19:06.000 Yeah.

00:19:06.240 And the scriptures started to make sense.

00:19:08.920 We, we literally went for the one lost sheep one time and we were so concerned about it

00:19:16.520 and you know, the flock is fine, but that one lost that, that was all our concern that

00:19:22.400 night and it's, you don't have to explain.

00:19:26.700 I saw a line on 1881 or 1883.

00:19:30.040 Have you been watching that show?

00:19:30.980 No.

00:19:31.400 Oh, this is the prequel to, uh, you would love it.

00:19:34.560 It's poetic.

00:19:35.780 Yeah.

00:19:35.980 It's great.

00:19:36.680 Beautiful.

00:19:37.180 I do want to watch it.

00:19:37.860 Beautifully written.

00:19:38.540 Yeah.

00:19:38.940 Um, but, uh, uh, at one point, one of the girls says to their mom, what do I do with a

00:19:48.580 boy?

00:19:49.540 And she said, honey, you've seen the animals you've been on a farm long enough to know

00:19:54.340 you'll figure it out.

00:19:56.600 And it's, it's amazing how much of life is just explained just by watching nature.

00:20:03.080 Uh-huh.

00:20:03.620 Yeah.

00:20:03.800 No.

00:20:04.180 Yeah.

00:20:04.340 Well, that's, that's right.

00:20:05.220 And also, and now we're urban people.

00:20:09.220 So many of us are urban people and we have all these machines.

00:20:12.020 It's so easy to get detached.

00:20:13.740 Like it's so easy not to know how detached you are, not just from nature, but just from

00:20:18.480 the present moment.

00:20:19.600 I didn't even, when I lived in New York, I hadn't seen the moon and I didn't even realize

00:20:25.480 that bothered me too.

00:20:26.800 Right?

00:20:27.360 Yes.

00:20:27.860 Yeah.

00:20:28.180 You don't see the moon and it, at least for me, I didn't recognize that until I left and

00:20:34.760 I went out to the ranch and the stars and the moon.

00:20:38.580 And I realized I'm so caught up in man's world.

00:20:43.320 Yeah.

00:20:43.840 I hadn't, you do, you sit around a fire, you do the same, no matter where you are, no

00:20:48.660 matter what language you speak, you sit around the fire and eventually somebody says, you

00:20:54.280 know, man, we are small.

00:20:56.520 You know what I mean?

00:20:57.420 And if you don't have that experience by living in a city where all you could see, everything

00:21:04.460 you see pretty much is what man made, even Central Park man made that.

00:21:09.220 Right.

00:21:09.640 You know, you, you completely lose perspective and we have, and you lose your sense of the

00:21:14.900 moon always bothered me specifically because you lose your sense of time.

00:21:18.280 The only way we experience time in the cities that you get older, you start to feel creaks

00:21:22.280 and pain and all this, but, but there's this great wheel turning around constantly, everything

00:21:28.160 in relationship with everything else.

00:21:29.700 And just sitting for a moment, as you say, and saying, Oh, Oh, I get it.

00:21:33.880 That's what I'm this little tiny, you know, it really does remind, you know, it's, it's

00:21:40.440 so much, it's about values, the way you, uh, the moment that you're in, like, am I going

00:21:46.300 to be kind to this person?

00:21:47.500 Am I going to show my love to this, to my wife?

00:21:49.740 Am I going to do the right thing in this moment?

00:21:52.140 And it's so much easier when you're into the flow of the world.

00:21:56.620 You know, I mean, it's, it's not, it's not mystical.

00:21:58.660 It's not like a new age, airy fairy craziness.

00:22:01.780 It's simple.

00:22:02.580 It's actual, just living.

00:22:03.860 It is actually just living.

00:22:05.560 And I think that, um, you know, it, it pains me to see what churches and church life have

00:22:11.980 become.

00:22:12.600 Uh, it pains me to see that religion has become so much of a, uh, a side in a battle.

00:22:18.040 You know, I'm, I'm on the Christian side and, you know, you're, you're one of those

00:22:22.000 lefty, you know, and, and no, I actually do believe that you can sit next to someone that

00:22:26.380 with whom you disagree.

00:22:28.080 I have good, I have good friends that are atheists.

00:22:30.220 Yeah.

00:22:30.560 Yeah.

00:22:30.820 I don't mind them.

00:22:31.740 They don't mind me.

00:22:32.960 That's right.

00:22:33.640 But I mean, I think we have great discussions.

00:22:36.520 You have great conversations.

00:22:37.880 I know.

00:22:38.220 And that is, well, the other thing, the thing I love about Christianity is that people who actually

00:22:42.560 think about it, no matter where they are on an IQ level, they have something interesting

00:22:48.580 to offer.

00:22:49.480 Yeah.

00:22:49.700 And that's, that's really interesting.

00:22:51.060 And that just shows how true it is because when you're talking about the truth, you're

00:22:54.360 interesting, whether you're, you know, a professor or a street sweeper, you're going to be an

00:22:59.080 interesting guy for telling the truth.

00:23:00.280 If the last two years have taught us anything, it's that you have to take control of your

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00:24:44.520 So I've watched a couple of movies recently.

00:24:48.400 I don't remember what they were, but they've quoted Yates and Shelley.

00:24:52.860 Yeah.

00:24:52.920 And I did this with the, I think it was the Bronte sisters too.

00:24:58.680 I read, was Wuthering Heights was Bronte.

00:25:01.700 And I remember reading Bronte's Wuthering Heights and I, and I closed the book and I went,

00:25:07.620 wow, there is something to these classics.

00:25:12.560 And every time I hear these guys, I think I should read them because every time I hear a quote,

00:25:18.800 it's like just so great, convince me I should read this.

00:25:24.720 You should read this?

00:25:25.860 Yes.

00:25:26.120 Oh yeah.

00:25:26.580 You should definitely read this because when you start to think about the stuff Jesus said,

00:25:31.080 it's confusing.

00:25:32.360 You know, Peter walks on water and he starts to fall because he gets afraid.

00:25:36.160 And Jesus says, oh, ye of little faith.

00:25:38.020 And I always thought, really?

00:25:39.320 Because I have a lot of faith and I can't walk in water at all.

00:25:43.460 I've never taken it.

00:25:44.340 So what is he talking about?

00:25:45.540 Why does he say that?

00:25:46.460 You know, why does he say stuff like, like love your enemy?

00:25:49.420 Like really?

00:25:50.560 I mean, cause we all, we all feel that stuff is good.

00:25:53.000 You know, it's, it's kind of, and until you take it all away, until you take all the holiness

00:25:59.300 and the piety and the theology and the church life, until you take all that away and just

00:26:03.760 sit with this man.

00:26:04.600 You know, the reason I started writing this book is I said to my son, who's this brilliant

00:26:07.440 guy, Oxford scholar, you know, I said to him, I don't understand the sermon on the

00:26:12.040 mountain and I feel that it makes sense, but I just can't turn the lens and bring it into

00:26:16.840 focus.

00:26:17.420 And he said, that's because you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying

00:26:21.360 to get to know a man.

00:26:23.320 And when I went back to the, and it's hard to get to know Jesus, right?

00:26:26.100 Cause he's Jesus.

00:26:26.920 You're sort of, dude, you know, but, but when I went back to these poets, I thought like,

00:26:32.040 oh, they're inventing Jesus.

00:26:33.860 They're reinventing him.

00:26:34.940 Cause he's gone out of the world.

00:26:36.120 He's gone out of their life.

00:26:37.540 And, and so they're, they have to reinvent him from scratch.

00:26:41.520 Coleridge knew they were doing it, but the rest of them were doing it almost by accident,

00:26:44.560 just by talent and insight.

00:26:46.400 And so it just brings that back.

00:26:48.660 It brings you back into the things you've always known, the things you've always read.

00:26:51.980 And suddenly they have meaning.

00:26:53.500 Suddenly you understand why he said that to Peter.

00:26:55.580 You understand.

00:26:55.900 Give me some examples out of this.

00:26:57.620 Show me.

00:26:58.760 All right.

00:26:59.260 Well, there, there's a wonderful, wonderful poem, William Wordsworth.

00:27:04.740 You're one of these people that have, you know, the poems by heart.

00:27:07.600 I don't, I wish I could memorize poems better, but William Wordsworth and Coleridge had this

00:27:12.600 year of, of talking together.

00:27:14.460 They had both become distraught at the fact that this revolution in France, which was

00:27:18.980 supposed to change, turn the world into paradise.

00:27:20.740 It was like Woodstock.

00:27:21.740 It was supposed to be, everything was going to be great.

00:27:23.740 Instead, it became a world war.

00:27:25.180 It became the terror and became a world war.

00:27:26.600 And then two depressed geniuses out in the country, in the hill country.

00:27:30.580 And one day Coleridge walks over to see Wordsworth and they begin a year long collaboration,

00:27:35.340 which produces a book of poetry called lyrical ballads, which changes English literature forever.

00:27:41.180 And one of these poems, the last poem in it is a poem by Wordsworth standing out by the

00:27:47.700 ruins of this abbey.

00:27:48.640 And it's very profound that he's standing by the ruins of the abbey because that's what's

00:27:52.360 happened.

00:27:52.680 Religion has gone out of the world.

00:27:55.360 And he thinks back on his past and he says, you know, as a child, I was connected to nature.

00:28:02.880 I was, you know, nature.

00:28:04.020 He says, heaven lies about us in our infancy.

00:28:07.400 Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

00:28:08.880 So he was like, there was something natural about being a child.

00:28:12.220 But as he grew older, he lost that.

00:28:14.420 He lost it.

00:28:15.080 And he starts to think about why and where it goes.

00:28:18.780 And he talks about life as this kind of arc.

00:28:20.880 And he says, he says, we don't come from nothing.

00:28:24.960 We come trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home.

00:28:29.820 You think like, and then you think about Jesus saying, in order to get into the kingdom of

00:28:34.640 heaven, you have to become a child again.

00:28:36.220 You have to become like a child.

00:28:37.280 And you realize that when we think back on our lives, we sometimes idealize our youth,

00:28:44.640 even if it was, but the true childhood lies ahead of us, not behind us.

00:28:50.020 You have to start to acquire, you know, that's why there's a sword when they throw Adam and

00:28:53.800 Eve out of Eden.

00:28:54.640 There's a sword whirling around to keep them out.

00:28:57.140 The heaven paradise lies ahead of you, not behind you.

00:29:00.020 You have to acquire the wisdom to become simple again.

00:29:03.780 You can't, you can't acquire ignorance.

00:29:06.080 You can't acquire stupidity.

00:29:07.500 You're not going to become a babbling child again.

00:29:09.980 You're going to move forward until you get so deeply immersed in God that you become

00:29:14.980 like a child again because everything disappears.

00:29:18.420 You know, there's a wonderful meme called the, what is it called?

00:29:22.160 The bell curve meme.

00:29:23.700 I don't know if you've ever seen it.

00:29:24.860 On one side are just a small number of really, real idiots who see the world in a simple way.

00:29:31.740 At the top are the majority of people who really see the complexity of life.

00:29:36.320 And on the far side is the Jedi, you know, the wise man who sees it just like the idiots.

00:29:41.420 And that's suddenly you realize, oh, that's what Jesus is talking about.

00:29:45.260 That's why he wants you to, he says, he says, I want you to love your enemy.

00:29:48.740 Not to make the, Jesus never says you're going to make the world a better place.

00:29:52.840 Never ever does he say you will make the world a better place.

00:29:55.340 He says the world is going to suck.

00:29:57.320 I mean, that is basically what he tells you.

00:29:59.160 But he says, love your enemy because then you will see what God sees because God makes

00:30:04.720 the rain and the sun fall on the good and bad alike.

00:30:07.500 And you'll be seen through God eyes.

00:30:09.380 You'll be seen.

00:30:10.280 That's very different than love your enemy or you're going to hell or love your enemy

00:30:14.220 and you'll be a good person.

00:30:15.820 Or what the church has fallen for is love your enemy and then you'll make the world a better

00:30:19.400 place.

00:30:20.520 That's an actual mental shift.

00:30:22.600 It's a way of seeing the world through God's eyes, what they call the Jesus mind.

00:30:28.520 And these poets had to make that stuff up.

00:30:32.460 So they're saying it and we are in this world, a godless world now too.

00:30:36.800 So we have to kind of reinvent it too.

00:30:38.740 For our world, we have to reinvent it in language that we understand.

00:30:41.500 We have to reinvent it in ways that we understand.

00:30:44.420 And then it all starts to make perfect sense.

00:30:47.600 So these poems, the poems are beautiful.

00:30:49.860 I mean, I know poetry can be hard for people.

00:30:52.300 And that's one of the reasons I try to explain it a little bit and sort of talk about it in simple

00:30:56.340 terms, but the poems are so beautiful.

00:30:58.780 And when you stop and think about, I think if you read this and then go back and read

00:31:02.900 the poems, you'll say, oh, I see.

00:31:04.880 You know, when Keats looks at a Grecian urn and he says, beauty is truth and truth, beauty,

00:31:10.980 that is all you know in life and all you need to know.

00:31:14.280 You know, when you first hear that, you think like, yeah, I don't understand that.

00:31:17.240 I don't get that.

00:31:17.820 But once you start to think it through and once you understand the beauty he's talking

00:31:21.840 about is not prettiness.

00:31:23.560 It's not your taste and my taste.

00:31:25.100 It's some essential connection between the facts of life and the spiritual underpinning

00:31:29.740 of life and a collaboration between the imagination of man and the things that we see.

00:31:36.340 Once you realize that that's the beauty he's talking about, you think, oh, beauty is truth.

00:31:40.320 And it's and it becomes much more important.

00:31:43.260 I have to say there are things now that I don't I used to look at everything, horror

00:31:48.520 movies, you know, dirty movies, whatever.

00:31:51.480 You know, I just look at anything because I wanted I wanted it all.

00:31:53.720 I wanted it all.

00:31:54.940 But now every now and again, I'll think, you know, I don't need that in my head anymore.

00:31:58.040 I know it's there.

00:31:58.860 I know there's the ugliness in the world, but I'm not going to sit and look at some guys.

00:32:03.540 I mean, I'll look at Macbeth.

00:32:05.240 I'll look at evil that is full of wisdom and life.

00:32:08.900 But I'm not just going to watch some disgusting gore fest, you know, that doesn't mean anything

00:32:14.140 because beauty is truth and and things that, you know, that's what you're always looking

00:32:19.100 for when you make those connections.

00:32:20.400 And these poets make these connections at moments.

00:32:23.240 If they make these connections in moments where they give it to you so that you hit a line.

00:32:28.980 After, you know, a verse and suddenly you go like, wow, I get that.

00:32:33.560 I feel it.

00:32:34.180 And the reason I dealt with poetry instead of philosophers, because a lot of the philosophers

00:32:38.200 at this time were thinking about the same stuff.

00:32:40.400 It's not a philosophical question.

00:32:41.920 It's a poetic question.

00:32:43.180 It's an experience that you have.

00:32:45.220 But you can't you can only communicate it through art.

00:32:48.400 You can't communicate it by saying by the kinds of things I'm saying now.

00:32:52.860 I can't put that experience in your head.

00:32:56.140 But you've experienced that.

00:32:57.620 You've seen a movie or read a book and even or a poem.

00:33:00.740 And suddenly you go like, oh, you know, everything kind of makes more sense than it did.

00:33:06.860 I want that in my life as much as possible.

00:33:09.560 I want it in my life every other second if I can.

00:33:12.780 You know, I want to be in that mindset when I'm talking to you, which I kind of feel I am in this moment.

00:33:18.980 It's like, you know, but I want it all the time.

00:33:21.720 I want it walking down the street.

00:33:22.900 I want to drive and I want it, you know, in the gym.

00:33:25.820 All of it, because this is this is this life that you Keats, one of the great poets that I talk about here.

00:33:32.480 He called life the veil of soul making.

00:33:35.040 It is the place where you are created as a soul in life.

00:33:38.580 And this is a guy who lived to be about 25, died horribly in obscurity, failed at everything he ever tried and wrote some of the greatest poetry literally since Shakespeare.

00:33:47.900 I mean, there was Shakespeare.

00:33:48.700 There was Keats.

00:33:49.600 And in between there were guys who were not as good as they were.

00:33:53.300 And he wasn't recognized in his time.

00:33:55.820 Not really.

00:33:56.700 Some some of his friends knew some of the people who knew him knew, but his reviews were constantly bad.

00:34:01.940 Why?

00:34:03.960 He was he was not an upper class guy.

00:34:08.860 Politics was just like it is now.

00:34:10.660 Wordsworth became a conservative and was canceled.

00:34:13.100 I mean, he was I mean, you talk about cancel culture.

00:34:15.120 They were some of their great poems written about what a horrible person Wordsworth is because he became a conservative after the revolution.

00:34:21.840 And though Keats was not really a political person at all, some of his friends were radicals.

00:34:28.200 And so the conservative press came after him and he was just ripped to pieces.

00:34:32.520 Some of the worst reviews you will ever read.

00:34:34.740 And the last book he wrote before he died, he actually said he had trained to be a surgeon, an apothecary.

00:34:42.080 And he actually said, if this book doesn't make it, I'm just going to have to go back to apothecary school.

00:34:47.700 It is one of the greatest works of literature that any human being has ever produced.

00:34:52.600 And he died not knowing.

00:34:55.580 I mean, and it wasn't like it came out and everybody said, this is great.

00:34:58.380 It was like when he died, people start to say, I think we missed I think we missed something here.

00:35:02.840 And it was only over time that his reputation grew.

00:35:05.580 It's it. I mean, these are the stories I try to tell in the book because I didn't want it to just be me talking about poetry.

00:35:10.220 I try to tell the stories of these guys lives in their important moments.

00:35:13.880 Great stories.

00:35:14.800 I mean, the story of how Frankenstein, how Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, one of the great stories of all time.

00:35:19.640 So tell that story, because I have a I have a theory on Frankenstein that I wanted to ask you because I thought you would know.

00:35:27.260 And it ties into to what's happening today, which is your theory in this book.

00:35:31.600 Yes, we're very similar.

00:35:32.700 So tell me about Frankenstein.

00:35:33.740 Well, my theory about Frankenstein, as Mary Shelley said, and many people have said that it's about a man who tries to be God by making a human being.

00:35:41.720 But that's not really true, because people make human beings all the time.

00:35:45.740 They use the materials they have and they make human beings.

00:35:47.840 But what Frankenstein, what Victor Frankenstein makes is he makes somebody without a woman.

00:35:52.620 And Mary Shelley was this lovely, young, very feminine girl who grew up with a feminist mother, one of the first feminists, Mary Wollstonecraft, and a father who was a deep, real radical.

00:36:08.560 They all hated marriage.

00:36:10.120 They believed in free love.

00:36:11.740 She ran off with the poet, Percy Shelley, who believed in free love.

00:36:15.380 And basically, she watched as free love destroyed every woman that she had ever met.

00:36:20.720 You know, I mean, Shelley left his wife.

00:36:22.180 His wife drowned herself with a child.

00:36:24.480 You know, it's just like free love turned out to be a nightmare.

00:36:27.500 You know, they thought everybody was going to be free.

00:36:29.300 And one night she and Shelley and Byron are in Italy because they've they've been basically thrown out of England and they're all getting together.

00:36:38.440 And it's a summer, a really stormy summer.

00:36:41.460 And there are lightning storms and they're getting together in these in Byron's mansion, which is still there.

00:36:47.220 The castle, the mansion, Diodati, still out there.

00:36:51.600 And they would get together and they would just talk philosophy.

00:36:54.680 And Mary Shelley said, I never said anything because I was just a girl.

00:36:57.660 And there were these two brilliant, two of the great, brilliant men of the age.

00:37:01.860 And they're talking about bringing people back to life with electricity.

00:37:04.580 And they're talking about the meaning of life.

00:37:06.020 They're talking all about all this stuff.

00:37:07.220 And Mary Shelley was just sitting there.

00:37:08.500 And one day, Byron, they're all reading to each other from a book of ghost stories.

00:37:14.560 And Byron says, you know what?

00:37:15.940 We're all going to write a ghost story.

00:37:17.840 Every one of us is going to write a ghost story.

00:37:19.580 And they all start off writing ghost stories.

00:37:21.180 And Mary can't think of one.

00:37:22.740 And she was a story.

00:37:23.440 She liked telling stories.

00:37:24.260 She liked writing and she preferred it to she liked her daydreams.

00:37:28.500 And she can't think of one.

00:37:30.640 And they all gave up.

00:37:33.560 All of them, you know, Shelley didn't finish his.

00:37:36.220 Byron didn't finish his.

00:37:37.400 They all started and didn't finish.

00:37:38.320 And she was just embarrassed because she couldn't think of one.

00:37:40.540 And then one day, she's lying half asleep.

00:37:43.220 And she has this vision of a man basically in a laboratory doing something.

00:37:47.840 And she writes Frankenstein.

00:37:49.480 And what Frankenstein is about is about getting rid of women.

00:37:53.300 It's about science's attempt to get rid of the female body, basically.

00:37:57.980 And I show you how in the book.

00:38:00.700 It's what she's talking about.

00:38:01.920 And if you think about science fiction ever since, if you think about all the dystopian books like Brave New World,

00:38:08.180 and Fahrenheit 451, and what's the one that the kids like, The Giver, which is a young adult.

00:38:13.840 The one thing they all have to deal with is what do we do with the female body?

00:38:18.300 Because it keeps creating people.

00:38:20.700 And then it also creates women who want to take care of those people and who don't really care as much about being in business.

00:38:28.580 Who may not care as much about politics.

00:38:31.140 But they really care about creating these souls, you know, not just bodies because mothers create souls as well.

00:38:38.640 And if you think about science fiction, this was the invention of science fiction.

00:38:41.800 Mary Shelley, she was, I think, 19 when she wrote it.

00:38:45.620 She invented science fiction.

00:38:47.000 This is the invention of science fiction and science fiction horror.

00:38:50.260 And if you think about it, like a lot of science fiction is about women's bodies.

00:38:54.040 If you think about Carrie having her period and you think about the exorcist as a little girl basically coming into womanhood,

00:39:00.480 the matrix, the matrix is a word that comes from womb, basically.

00:39:05.160 And it's by these two transgender guys who create a world in which, you know, the world doesn't exist at all.

00:39:11.560 It's just that there is no creativity.

00:39:12.940 There's just people's minds.

00:39:14.440 Women's bodies are, you know, even God, when he wanted to become a person, chose a mother.

00:39:21.040 You know, he's God.

00:39:22.560 He could have just said, you know, I'm just going to appear.

00:39:24.500 But he didn't.

00:39:25.220 He chose a mother first.

00:39:27.000 Mothers are at the center of human life.

00:39:28.980 And the feminism that has convinced women that they are just mothers, that they are just homemakers and need to really get out in business.

00:39:37.440 The feminism that says to businesses, you have to take care of women by giving them daycare instead of saying by giving, paying their husbands enough so that they can actually do the work that they were given to do is, I think, has made women miserable.

00:39:50.820 I mean, when I, before COVID, when I was speaking a lot in colleges, I would get up and I would say, young women look miserable to me.

00:39:58.900 If I'm wrong, after I'm finished talking, get up.

00:40:02.620 Never happened.

00:40:03.460 Not once.

00:40:04.060 Not once that a young woman get up and say, no, no, we're really thrilled with the way women's lives are going.

00:40:08.920 So this moment, this moment when Byron says, let's all write a ghost story, and none of them does except for Mary Shelley, is transformative because it introduces one of the real philosophical problems of a godless world.

00:40:23.140 First, what do we do about the creative force of a woman's body, which is not just the giving birth, it's also nurturing a child.

00:40:32.660 I talk about this because Wordsworth writes a whole poem about the interchange between a mother and a child that she's nursing and how it gives them life.

00:40:39.700 And this turns out scientifically to be correct.

00:40:42.020 I mean, it turns out that this interchange, this thing that happens between mothers and babies creates individuals.

00:40:47.240 What do we do about that?

00:40:48.560 And why do we live in a society that not only doesn't honor it, but tells us that men can do it too, and that, yes, if I suddenly decide I want to be a woman, I'm a woman.

00:40:57.680 And if I want to, you know, be in women's sports and defeat every woman around me because I'm actually not a woman, I'm a man, that's all fine.

00:41:04.880 When did we lose this sense that we were made in God's image male and female, and this female part is half of the enterprise and its core to the enterprise?

00:41:15.340 We have lost the respect, the awe that people felt about that when they were worshiping the Virgin Mary.

00:41:22.220 So, but did we feel that way?

00:41:24.580 Because, you know, women were property.

00:41:27.640 You know, these two men are talking and I'm not going to say anything because, you know what I mean?

00:41:31.880 I'm just a woman.

00:41:33.260 You know, it's an interesting thing.

00:41:34.820 When you go back into the literature, it is always true that people who are stronger hurt weaker people, right?

00:41:41.220 Because we're sinful and broken.

00:41:43.260 Women have something men want, which is their bodies.

00:41:45.780 And so there's just, it's just a recipe for abuse and cruelty and an abuse of law.

00:41:51.140 But when you go back and read the literature in the West, women are treated a lot differently than you think.

00:41:57.600 They're spoken about and thought about a lot differently than you think.

00:42:00.920 If you look at the Bible, the first time they talk about the Ten Commandments, the last commandment is thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife or his house or his mule or anything that belongs to him.

00:42:14.380 But the second time, hundreds of years later, when they write the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy, they say thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife and thou shalt not cover his house and his mule.

00:42:24.240 Women are not looked at as property.

00:42:26.560 There was this slow, slow advance.

00:42:28.360 It took a long time because it's just too tempting to treat them as property, treat women as property.

00:42:33.980 But there was this slow advance, really, from the very beginnings of Western civilization until now of women becoming people.

00:42:41.420 And the era that I'm writing about, the Romantic era, this was when people started to say, well, you know, maybe women should be allowed to vote.

00:42:48.200 Maybe women should have equal rights.

00:42:49.680 Maybe this is when they started to think about that for reasons that I explain in the book, which are not actually just philosophical reasons.

00:42:56.780 They're actually practical reasons.

00:42:58.880 But that has been happening in Western civilization from the beginning.

00:43:02.680 It just takes slow centuries to figure out.

00:43:05.020 So I've got two questions, and I'm going to write the second one down.

00:43:08.740 But I want to go back to Frankenstein.

00:43:10.600 And I don't even know why I'm doing this because you have nailed it.

00:43:15.140 And now mine seems really stupid.

00:43:16.800 But in reading Frankenstein, because I read it, I don't know, last year or something with my son as he was studying it in school.

00:43:24.640 And I said, we read it together.

00:43:26.560 I've read it before.

00:43:27.460 It's just fantastic.

00:43:28.260 It's a great book.

00:43:29.060 Fantastic book.

00:43:31.920 But what I was struck with, because I love futurists.

00:43:37.080 Yeah.

00:43:37.400 And right now we're debating, you know, life.

00:43:43.140 What is life?

00:43:44.960 You know, Ray Kurzweil said, by 2030, you'll be able to download you into a computer.

00:43:50.880 And I've said to him, that's not me, Ray.

00:43:54.080 That's not me.

00:43:56.140 But they believe that.

00:43:57.900 Yeah.

00:43:58.080 And it's, you know, so I'm, I'm thinking about those things and what's coming in AI and ASI.

00:44:06.160 And then I'm reading Frankenstein.

00:44:11.320 And I thought, we're living in very much the same age.

00:44:16.480 You know, God is on the ropes.

00:44:20.720 All of these things are happening.

00:44:22.660 Society is changing.

00:44:24.640 The Industrial Revolution, everything is changing.

00:44:28.560 And science is coming to the forefront where they say, look, if we hit electricity, the frog's legs move.

00:44:36.520 And the frog's dead.

00:44:39.460 And I thought, they really think they can bring people back to life at this point.

00:44:44.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:45.680 It's the same thing that we have going on right now.

00:44:50.380 So isn't this, isn't the tale of Frankenstein, everything we're dealing with right now?

00:44:56.940 It's everything.

00:44:57.740 She was, I mean, I really believe, T.S. Eliot said that a great poet in writing himself writes the world.

00:45:04.240 And I think when you write the world, you also write the future.

00:45:06.760 And I think Mary Shelley was like a prophet.

00:45:09.120 I think a lot of great writers are like prophets.

00:45:11.180 And, yeah, she saw exactly, I don't think she, through her intellect, she envisioned where everything was going.

00:45:18.280 Well, she saw man.

00:45:21.200 And man just repeats himself over and over and over again.

00:45:24.820 And the thing is, the threat that we're facing from, you know, obviously science is a great, glorious gift.

00:45:30.140 I mean, if it had only kept children from dying, it would be a great, glorious gift.

00:45:33.640 It's the science I'm worried about.

00:45:35.820 It doesn't matter what bother me when people say follow science, which means experimentation and getting things wrong and correcting things.

00:45:41.420 When they say follow the science, I think I'm in The Wizard of Oz.

00:45:44.120 Because there is no the science.

00:45:46.680 The science is an idol.

00:45:48.120 And the idol is that there is something, that there is a way to solve the problems of humanity without eliminating humanity itself.

00:45:57.920 And that's a real problem.

00:45:59.940 That's what I think Mary Shelley saw, that if you can get rid of women, I mean, women are the obstacle because they are this consequence for our sexual urges.

00:46:11.420 They create consequences for that.

00:46:13.300 They create new life, which is just this out-of-control thing, you know.

00:46:18.020 They are needed to create souls when we want everybody to be working on the machine.

00:46:23.620 We want everybody to be part of this, you know, machine economy.

00:46:26.840 And, you know, you should be consuming things, you know.

00:46:28.720 You should be buying stuff, you know.

00:46:31.900 The question is, how are we going to go forward and remain human beings?

00:46:36.480 The question is not, how are we going to solve the problems of humanity?

00:46:39.080 It's how are we going to go forward as human beings?

00:46:42.080 And there are a lot of people now saying, no, we shouldn't do that.

00:46:44.340 I mean, this guy Huvel Harari wrote a book called Homo Deus, you know.

00:46:48.100 Terrifying.

00:46:48.660 Yeah, it's terrifying.

00:46:49.480 Terrifying.

00:46:49.980 It doesn't matter what you think.

00:46:51.140 And, you know, Christians believe, they don't believe there's one end of the world.

00:46:57.080 They believe there's two end of the world.

00:46:58.420 There's one for the saved.

00:47:00.360 There's one for the salvation impaired, right?

00:47:02.600 You know, and I think that world, that mechanical world in which we become like unto gods, but we lose our humanity, is the world that you and I are trying to avoid.

00:47:14.760 You know, when I talk about all the books and movies that grow out of Frankenstein, one of them I talk about is The Terminator.

00:47:20.920 And The Terminator is about a world where the machines rule, but a hero is born.

00:47:26.560 So what do they do?

00:47:27.440 They go back to kill his mother.

00:47:29.260 They go back to, they send somebody back to kill his mother.

00:47:31.280 They don't kill him.

00:47:32.180 They go back to kill his mother.

00:47:33.320 And who is his mother?

00:47:34.280 And that first Terminator, the genius of that first movie is she's just a girl.

00:47:38.260 She's just a girl.

00:47:39.100 She's not a muscle person.

00:47:40.200 She's not a hero.

00:47:40.980 She's nothing.

00:47:41.600 She's just a girl, wants to get her hair done, wants to have dates, wants to go out and party.

00:47:44.720 It is her girlness that they want to kill.

00:47:48.800 And I think that when we look at this, we have to start to say, well, wait a minute.

00:47:53.480 If now we understand that the stone that was thrown away, women, maybe one of the cornerstones of the temple, maybe we should start to think about how we treat the human body and how we solve the problems of birth and how we solve the problems of sex and sexuality.

00:48:09.740 Those are things that maybe Christians should be thinking about without saying, you know, you're a gay, so I don't like you or all the kind of nonsense that it all boils down to when you're not really thinking it through.

00:48:24.000 And and so, yeah, I agree with you.

00:48:26.120 I think that we are headed for a machine like world, but not all of us.

00:48:31.100 Some of us are going to opt out.

00:48:32.440 And I think that that is where the wisdom lies.

00:48:34.480 And so I asked Ray Kurzweil, because he was he was talking about, you know, chips and implants and upgrades, you know, basically what Stephen Hawking said would be the end of the homo sapien.

00:48:47.640 Right.

00:48:47.860 Twenty fifty.

00:48:49.300 And, you know, now you have Elon Musk with his Neuralink.

00:48:53.780 And I asked Ray.

00:48:57.080 What happens to those people who don't want an upgrade?

00:49:01.260 And he looked at me so puzzled.

00:49:03.140 They don't think things.

00:49:04.480 And he looked at me and he said, why wouldn't somebody want that?

00:49:09.340 And I said, I don't know.

00:49:10.780 They like the way they are.

00:49:12.540 They're happy.

00:49:14.100 They they they want to search for things on their own.

00:49:19.060 And he said, well, no, everybody will get an upgrade.

00:49:23.780 And I said, again, what happens to those who don't want one?

00:49:29.260 And he said, well, I can't imagine anyone that would want to deny this to their kids and everything else.

00:49:37.080 But they would have to live.

00:49:38.760 They'd have to be separate from society.

00:49:40.800 That's brave new world.

00:49:41.900 Right.

00:49:42.220 Yeah.

00:49:42.500 He said, because you won't be able to understand what we're saying because we'll have all this knowledge running through our heads.

00:49:49.460 You won't be able to understand you will be a detriment to all of society.

00:49:55.480 I think, you know, I think that there is something to that.

00:49:58.960 And I think, you know, when I'm when I say that you have to go forward to go back, that in order to get back to your childhood, you have to move ahead.

00:50:06.700 This isn't true of just individuals, true of the human race as well.

00:50:10.380 We're not going to get rid of science.

00:50:12.020 We're not going to say, oh, yeah, let the kids die.

00:50:14.300 And, you know, we don't need.

00:50:15.820 No, of course, we want to.

00:50:17.080 We just want to guide it in a human fashion.

00:50:19.680 That is not that.

00:50:21.360 That is why I talk about the last part of this book.

00:50:24.300 Only only part of the book is about the romantics.

00:50:26.700 The last part is about Jesus and it's about let's re-understand.

00:50:30.180 It's not changing anything he said and it's not naturalizing what he said.

00:50:33.260 He's the son of God.

00:50:34.080 He is exactly what he said he was, you know, but it's just kind of trying to understand what he says.

00:50:39.540 And I say that we can only create a machine universe, but he actually has a science that is very humanizing.

00:50:46.680 And I think there is a version.

00:50:48.180 There may even be a version of upgrades that is more humanizing, that gives us more wisdom, that gives us more humanity.

00:50:53.420 But the thing is, that's not going to be its first manifestation.

00:50:57.900 Its first manifestation is going to be like what we have now.

00:51:00.120 These phones, look, I love the fact that I can get any piece of literature in the world on this thing in my pocket.

00:51:06.240 That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

00:51:08.100 I don't so much love the fact that he keeps saying, you know, like, look at this.

00:51:11.040 This will make you angry.

00:51:11.820 Look at this.

00:51:12.240 This will, you want to buy this.

00:51:13.820 That's the part I don't like.

00:51:14.960 So, you know, the idea that you can choose between those things.

00:51:18.500 They always want to tell you that you take one thing, you get the other.

00:51:20.880 But I don't think that's true.

00:51:21.880 I think that there is a version of the future that is a human version.

00:51:26.380 And I think some of us are going to opt for that.

00:51:27.880 And we may be truly, truly hunted for it.

00:51:30.880 I mean, we're being hunted now.

00:51:32.220 Yeah.

00:51:32.440 I think that's without a doubt.

00:51:34.760 Without a doubt.

00:51:35.540 Yeah.

00:51:36.180 You, you know, does this pattern that we're in right now, you, in your book, you talk about how the French Revolution.

00:51:49.460 Yeah.

00:51:49.640 But then you look at 1930s and you look at now and it's all driving towards the same thing.

00:51:58.600 Yeah.

00:51:58.760 And there is no human element to it because each time they're looking at the collective, not the individual.

00:52:09.540 Yeah.

00:52:09.740 And God, you know, the, the Tower of Babel story, Nebuchadnezzar says, let us build bricks.

00:52:19.900 Okay.

00:52:20.780 Well, God makes stones.

00:52:22.700 He makes all of us different.

00:52:24.560 Yeah.

00:52:25.120 He's saying, let's, let's make everybody the same.

00:52:28.120 Yeah.

00:52:28.300 And, uh, and then we can do anything.

00:52:32.540 We can build a tower to the sky.

00:52:34.360 Right.

00:52:35.360 Um, that, that's not, that's man.

00:52:39.100 That's right.

00:52:39.820 Man.

00:52:40.200 Yes.

00:52:40.380 God says the individual man in these darker periods.

00:52:45.220 Why?

00:52:46.700 Why?

00:52:47.400 Well, you know, one of the, one of the best lines I ever read about world, you know, I, I was fascinated by world war one.

00:52:53.780 I know you are too.

00:52:54.560 And you read book after book and at the end of reading 20, 25 books, you think like, how did it begin again?

00:53:00.200 Like, why did they just wipe you off off the face of the earth?

00:53:03.760 And, and Peggy Noonan wrote a column about it once where she asked somebody that question.

00:53:08.580 He said, there's just something wrong with people.

00:53:10.580 And she said, that's the best definition of the original sin I've ever heard.

00:53:13.440 You know, and it is, there's something wrong with us.

00:53:15.460 There's something, we are not what we're supposed to be.

00:53:18.780 Uh, you know, which is why the world is so tragic and hilarious at the same time.

00:53:22.960 We're kind of like a, a guy in a tuxedo who falls in a puddle.

00:53:25.960 You know, it's kind of funny, you know?

00:53:27.340 Uh, and, and so you say, you say the same things happen again and again.

00:53:35.080 That's an effect of trauma.

00:53:36.480 And I think maybe the fall of man was a trauma.

00:53:40.620 I, you know, everybody has trauma in their lives and you find yourself repeating traumatic patterns and mental health is when you can break those patterns and start to do new things and start to see new things.

00:53:51.620 But you're still going to have a personality.

00:53:53.340 You're still going to do certain things.

00:53:54.480 You know, you're not about to be, you know, you're not about to become a ballet dancer.

00:53:57.200 I'm not about to become a baseball player.

00:53:58.580 You know, we are, we are what we are.

00:54:00.420 And so you repeat those patterns, but you repeat them in a way that grows and becomes more human.

00:54:05.460 I do some of the same thing.

00:54:06.380 I'm still writing novels.

00:54:07.460 I'm still writing, you know, a writer and still have my personality, but I become, I think, more human.

00:54:14.020 And so these patterns are going to repeat.

00:54:16.420 But the one thing we can be sure of is that people who go down the wrong road are going to see bliss in front of them, but they're going to find misery.

00:54:25.220 And when that misery becomes too intense, things break.

00:54:28.380 And it's whether, you know, you're at the pinnacle of human culture in 1914 and you think like, let's go defend Belgium and wipe everybody, kill everybody.

00:54:39.660 Or whether it's like some horrible war or whether it's a religious revival and it happens peacefully.

00:54:47.540 People come back from the brink, not everybody, but some people come back from the brink.

00:54:52.480 And that's a, that's part of the human pattern too.

00:54:54.920 There is something in us that remembers.

00:54:56.540 There's something in us that remembers who we're supposed to be.

00:54:59.380 And when you are the guy in the room who remembers and people start beating you up and picking on you or shouting, crucify him or get off Twitter or whatever it is they want to do.

00:55:12.780 You're just going to have to have courage.

00:55:14.260 There's nothing else for it.

00:55:15.580 There's nothing else for it, but to say, you know, I'm not going to budge.

00:55:19.140 I'm going, I'm going down this road.

00:55:21.300 And, you know, I do believe, I think you believe that God walks with you, you know, and that it, it, it, it, it, it eases the loneliness and the pain and the persecution, but, but it doesn't take away the tragedy of life.

00:55:32.740 Life is very tragic.

00:55:34.020 And that's why I think we have the, we cling to the resurrection and the promise that there is some, some version of life that maybe is, is different.

00:55:41.740 It makes the walk with him makes it worthwhile.

00:55:48.340 I remember, cause I have a really, I have a, I have a different relationship with the Lord.

00:55:55.000 He tells me stuff and I'm always like, Oh, not that.

00:55:58.520 No, that's how I know it's from God.

00:56:02.560 It's never something I want.

00:56:04.840 It's always something that was like, Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

00:56:08.860 Yeah.

00:56:09.340 I'm not that guy.

00:56:10.660 Okay.

00:56:11.220 No.

00:56:11.640 Um, and, uh, and I remember at one point, um, I said, and I meant it, no, I'm not doing, no, I am not doing that.

00:56:29.740 And I remember in my prayer hearing very kind, very kind, very gentle.

00:56:35.100 Well, it's okay.

00:56:37.360 I'll find someone else.

00:56:39.500 And in that moment, I realized I won't be who he wants me to be.

00:56:48.960 And, and I don't want to be left behind.

00:56:51.760 I don't want to be left behind.

00:56:52.820 Not that I would go to hell or anything else, but I don't, I want to be with him.

00:56:57.700 Um, and it's, I don't think people who, who haven't had a religious experience or a spiritual experience, I don't think they get that.

00:57:07.300 But all of us, you know, this is a wonderful thing about that words with poem.

00:57:10.240 I was talking about that.

00:57:10.940 Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

00:57:12.500 I don't think there's a person on earth who does not know that there is a person he was made to be that he isn't.

00:57:20.200 You know, I think every single person knows that, that he, there's a person he was made to be.

00:57:24.920 I disagree.

00:57:25.440 As a, as a recovering alcoholic, one of the biggest problems was of really doing the soul searching.

00:57:33.420 I mean, when you are out, I had to take everything I thought I knew and take it out and examine it and then look at it and then atone for it and whatever else, whatever was in there.

00:57:46.680 And then pick them up back on the table and put that one back in.

00:57:50.920 Cause I understand it now, pick this one and put it in.

00:57:53.860 But if they conflict, I got to take them both out because something's not right.

00:57:58.260 Okay.

00:57:58.880 Yeah.

00:57:59.740 And I remember before I started that, I thought there's nothing inside of me.

00:58:05.440 I am, I'm just my collection of experiences and, you know, the bad kind of makes me who I am.

00:58:17.840 You know what I mean?

00:58:18.740 And I'm not sure there's something in there.

00:58:21.080 And I, I think that's unfortunately common.

00:58:26.800 You're afraid to look in because it's hard to change.

00:58:31.120 Oh, I don't deny that.

00:58:32.900 Yeah.

00:58:32.980 And it's, you're afraid too, that maybe this is as good as it gets.

00:58:37.380 I completely agree with that description.

00:58:39.560 One of the things that I know so many artists who are afraid to get help for their problems because they're afraid their talent will go away.

00:58:45.860 And, you know, of course, it all gets better.

00:58:47.580 Yeah.

00:58:47.740 It all gets better.

00:58:48.480 But, but I still, I still believe that in inside everybody, if you interrogated them, you had to know that that alcoholic Glenn was not the Glenn.

00:59:00.420 Yeah.

00:59:01.100 I mean, I knew that that was not the right path.

00:59:04.760 Right.

00:59:05.060 For me.

00:59:05.480 Yeah.

00:59:05.700 I mean, cause that, when I look back, like I was miserable in my youth and for a long time I had that idea, oh, well, I'm an intellectual, so I, I should be, you know, it's hip to be miserable when you're young and intellectual, right?

00:59:17.380 But I knew, I knew you were not supposed to be like this.

00:59:21.120 This is not the way you're supposed to be.

00:59:22.840 We're not supposed to be miserable.

00:59:23.860 And there, and there, and I knew there was a me that had been made that I didn't have, you know, and that's still true, but at least I feel now I'm walking in that direction all the time.

00:59:34.700 You know, which is just a joyful experience in and of itself.

00:59:37.740 And it's weird that, like Viktor Frankl, it's very strange that even, as he said, sitting on the cart with a stack of dead bodies, a dead body, and I take an old sandwich from my pocket and I'm eating it, and I can just disappear.

00:59:56.680 I'm not, I become numb until I realize nothing can destroy my happiness except for me.

01:00:05.700 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:06.320 You know, when you're singing in the prison and they're torturing you, that's, that's a, that's a good place to be.

01:00:12.320 That, I mean, that, I love that book.

01:00:13.980 And I, there's that, the ill, sick woman who looks out at the beautiful branch.

01:00:20.080 That's the level of life I'm talking about.

01:00:21.860 Yeah, that, that would be fantastic.

01:00:23.220 I know.

01:00:23.940 And I think, I think.

01:00:24.760 Because that shows you're not supposed to be miserable.

01:00:27.140 That's right.

01:00:27.480 Things can be the worst.

01:00:31.060 But.

01:00:31.540 Yeah.

01:00:32.200 You, you, that's a choice of yours.

01:00:35.040 But, and you know, I always compare it to a movie.

01:00:37.780 You're watching a movie or whatever, you know, Downton Abbey or whatever, and somebody dies.

01:00:41.940 And you're sitting there and you're weeping and you're weeping and you're weeping.

01:00:44.720 Then you turn off the TV and you say, that was great.

01:00:46.740 I love that.

01:00:47.960 You know, life has that element to it.

01:00:50.000 That like, you know, it's, it's incredibly painful.

01:00:53.140 Some of life is just incredibly.

01:00:55.140 That's some of the most beautiful stuff.

01:00:56.640 But it's, but it's beautiful.

01:00:58.280 Nobody wants to suffer, but everybody knows that suffering does something, you know, grand.

01:01:03.320 Yeah, I know.

01:01:03.900 And it's like, it's a, it's a strange system, but it is the system.

01:01:07.300 And, and living at that level, every day you're even trying to do it.

01:01:11.960 You're having a better day, you know.

01:01:14.940 So where are we?

01:01:16.720 What, what's coming?

01:01:18.080 Yeah.

01:01:18.420 What do you, I mean, this cancel culture is getting scary.

01:01:23.520 It's scary.

01:01:24.160 I mean, one of the, one of the reasons I always make jokes about you, because sometimes I feel like you and I are like mirror images.

01:01:30.120 Like I always think like, you always think like I can connect these dots to a disaster.

01:01:34.600 And I always think, yeah, but you know.

01:01:36.560 I can connect with us.

01:01:37.900 Yeah.

01:01:38.340 You know, it's really weird.

01:01:39.840 Smiling and frowning face of theater, you know.

01:01:41.720 What's really weird is I always say, I'm a guy you do not want to be on the Titanic with until we hit the iceberg.

01:01:50.120 That's right.

01:01:50.420 Because I'm telling you, there's not enough lifeboats if we hit something.

01:01:53.780 You know, I'm the guy going, it could work out.

01:01:55.100 Yeah.

01:01:55.980 But as soon as we hit that ice, I'm good.

01:01:58.560 I'm like, we're going to make it.

01:01:59.680 Get in the lifeboat.

01:02:00.440 Let's go.

01:02:01.020 I always say the pessimists are always right eventually, you know.

01:02:03.720 Yeah.

01:02:04.280 Yeah.

01:02:04.860 Yeah.

01:02:05.040 But, you know, you'll kill me for saying that, but I actually believe that the good guys are on the offensive now.

01:02:12.980 I mean.

01:02:13.620 Oh, yeah.

01:02:14.200 Yeah.

01:02:14.520 I mean, and this is a wonderful thing.

01:02:16.700 And it's like, you know, it made me, I was watching, I guess we're all watching Joe Rogan take it.

01:02:21.660 He's the latest guy on the chopping block.

01:02:23.720 And it pained me to watch him try to apologize for some of the things he had said, not because I understood where he was coming from.

01:02:32.280 He used the racial slur and he thought that was not.

01:02:35.580 But we know that they don't care.

01:02:37.300 They don't care.

01:02:38.280 You know, they say black lives matter.

01:02:39.620 And then they pull funding for the police and thousands of black lives.

01:02:42.460 And by the way, I just want to say, I don't believe there is such a thing as a black life.

01:02:46.380 I mean, there's life.

01:02:48.360 There's life.

01:02:48.960 Yeah.

01:02:49.300 And, and, you know, it pains me to see him apologize.

01:02:52.800 But it also showed me that he actually has a conscience.

01:02:55.800 Yeah.

01:02:56.080 It's the people who are attacking him.

01:02:57.260 So I thought the same thing.

01:02:59.060 I'm watching him and I was like, he's sincere.

01:03:01.660 Right.

01:03:02.000 He is sincere.

01:03:03.260 But they don't care.

01:03:04.120 Yeah.

01:03:04.320 They don't care.

01:03:05.000 Yeah.

01:03:05.540 And the debate is, should you apologize or not?

01:03:09.640 And I feel pretty alone on this, that he was, he, it's one thing to have an epiphany.

01:03:19.080 And that's what he had.

01:03:20.240 Right.

01:03:20.500 You know, gosh, I'm, I'm watching this and this is making me uncomfortable.

01:03:24.380 I, that I haven't done that a long time, but this was really bad.

01:03:28.660 And I don't, I'm not that guy.

01:03:30.480 Right.

01:03:30.740 Okay.

01:03:30.940 That's an epiphany.

01:03:32.560 The apology.

01:03:34.000 Don't ever apologize to people who don't listen to you.

01:03:37.520 I agree with you.

01:03:38.080 Don't, don't, you don't apologize to people who were never offended.

01:03:42.080 They weren't offended.

01:03:43.400 Yep.

01:03:43.680 The people who put that tape together.

01:03:45.080 I can tell you, they put that tape together with glee, with glee.

01:03:49.400 Right.

01:03:50.040 Morality depends on context.

01:03:51.620 You know, the thing is you cannot, you cannot do the right thing at the wrong time.

01:03:55.940 You have to do the right thing at the right time.

01:03:57.180 And to apologize to people who really don't care and are just trying to advance, cancel

01:04:01.800 culture is wrong.

01:04:03.560 I mean, what you really should say.

01:04:04.820 How would Christ have handled that?

01:04:06.700 I mean, he wouldn't have been using the N word.

01:04:08.560 So, well, we, we, we kind of know because they canceled them.

01:04:12.060 You know, I mean, like we know that he just, you know, they said, are you saying these things?

01:04:16.480 And he said, that's what, you know, you said it.

01:04:18.020 And, and he just stood there.

01:04:19.700 And, and the thing is, if you're not afraid that, I mean, that is the lesson of Christ.

01:04:24.900 Don't be afraid.

01:04:25.640 It's like, if you're not afraid, they really have no power over you.

01:04:29.380 You have to have some trust that it's going to be all right, that you're going to make

01:04:32.560 it through.

01:04:33.280 But, you know, I, I got, I got kicked out of Hollywood.

01:04:36.680 My, my, my leftist agent keeps telling me, no, no, no, that's not what he took this book.

01:04:42.440 Liar.

01:04:42.740 He read this book.

01:04:43.780 He loved this book.

01:04:45.300 This book?

01:04:45.980 Yeah.

01:04:46.280 This is my, my Hollywood agent.

01:04:47.440 I just have, may I just read this?

01:04:49.340 Okay.

01:04:49.500 This is when Christmas comes.

01:04:50.880 Yeah.

01:04:51.360 And I just have to read the inscription that you wrote to me because I wrote the Christmas

01:04:56.280 sweater a long time ago.

01:04:57.380 You wrote to Glenn, sweaters in nice are nice and all, but the true meaning of Christmas

01:05:03.360 is murder.

01:05:06.680 I did think of you because you wrote that wonderful book, you know, and I thought, yeah,

01:05:10.940 but now you don't have the real killing in your life.

01:05:15.740 That's hysterical.

01:05:16.880 But my, my agent loves this book and he sent it out to everywhere and he called me up and

01:05:21.120 he said, I can't understand it.

01:05:22.160 I haven't got even a nibble.

01:05:23.500 And I said, well, you know, I think I'm persona non grata.

01:05:26.980 Yeah.

01:05:27.200 I'm all, I'm absolutely sure.

01:05:28.680 No, no, no, it's not that.

01:05:30.320 He said, they mentioned it, but it's not that, you know, but the thing is, you can't be

01:05:35.940 afraid of that.

01:05:36.700 I mean, it really, I mean, is that really what it is that you're not going to be in

01:05:40.260 Hollywood that, you know, you're not going to get to write some, you know, some movie.

01:05:44.480 That's not what my life is about.

01:05:46.100 My life is what we started talking about.

01:05:47.920 My life is trying to tell the truth beautifully.

01:05:49.820 That is what, you know, that is what I'm, I've tried to do.

01:05:52.340 That's what I think it was given to me to try to do.

01:05:54.680 Boy, what a beautiful mantra to have.

01:05:58.700 That's the meaning of your life is to tell the truth beautifully.

01:06:01.740 No Hollywood producer can stop me from doing that.

01:06:03.760 And so they don't have, they can't take anything from me.

01:06:06.860 You know, I mean, like, you know, I, I had to sell my house after that happened.

01:06:10.480 My, my income went from here to here in a very short period of time.

01:06:14.080 I never even, I mean, I, I, I, I thought about it.

01:06:18.060 Obviously I had to take care of myself, but I didn't like sit and go like, oh, boo hoo.

01:06:21.460 I lost my Hollywood career.

01:06:23.580 I thought, no, I'm, I'm saying what I have to say.

01:06:25.580 I'm, I'm doing the right thing.

01:06:26.900 I know I'm doing the right thing.

01:06:28.340 And if I have to live a little bit, you know, differently, differently, I can do that.

01:06:33.080 You know, if, if that's what you're worried about, that's why Jesus says you can't serve

01:06:36.680 God and money.

01:06:37.600 It's not because money is icky.

01:06:38.980 It's because, you know, if you put money first, you're going to make the wrong decisions.

01:06:42.500 And the thing is, Glenn, I know a lot of Hollywood writers who went the other way, a lot of them.

01:06:48.000 And they are, there's something about them that had, I know the price they paid is bigger

01:06:54.860 than the price I paid.

01:06:55.880 I know it is.

01:06:56.840 I can tell by the look in their eyes.

01:06:58.580 I can tell by the way they talk about themselves.

01:07:00.380 I can tell by the way they think about life.

01:07:02.840 You know, you just have to, if you're not afraid of these guys, they really don't have

01:07:07.480 as much power over you as, as you think.

01:07:10.440 And I think that that's what bothers you about a Joe Rogan apologizing.

01:07:13.580 You wonder, like, you know, I hope he's being sincere, but you also wonder, is he thinking,

01:07:18.220 well, you know, I'm making a lot of money here.

01:07:19.600 And if I lose Spotify, you know, um, I'm not accusing him of anything.

01:07:23.080 I don't know what's hard at all, but I'm just saying, I watched it and he may be thinking

01:07:27.220 some of that, that may play a role, but he seemed, you know, people misjudge people all

01:07:34.540 the time.

01:07:35.320 If Donald Trump runs again, why would people say he's running?

01:07:39.960 Yeah.

01:07:40.160 Because he's an egomaniac, he can't leave it alone.

01:07:43.660 I sat with him over dinner a couple of months ago and, uh, he said, this is such a mess.

01:07:52.840 He said, this is such a mess.

01:07:54.560 He said, and I fixed it.

01:07:56.540 I had it fixed.

01:07:57.760 We were on the right track.

01:07:59.620 And he said, uh, and then he just sat there for a while and I'm just eating my food.

01:08:05.140 And he says, uh, I look at all the people, so what I went through was hell, but I look

01:08:14.320 at all the people who weren't president, but stood up for me when they were just raked

01:08:23.300 over the coals.

01:08:24.920 He said, I promised them I would fix it.

01:08:29.240 And now it's broken.

01:08:31.940 I think of them.

01:08:33.700 They were loyal to me.

01:08:35.460 You know how much he appreciates loyalty.

01:08:36.860 Yeah, he does appreciate loyalty.

01:08:37.440 He's like, they were loyal to me.

01:08:39.700 Yeah.

01:08:39.880 How can I not be loyal back to them?

01:08:43.220 You know, it's a really interesting thing because I, you know, I voted for Trump twice

01:08:46.980 and I, I thought I was just the other day thinking about what an incredibly successful

01:08:51.820 presidency he had until, until COVID hit.

01:08:54.520 But I had real problems with his comportment, with his treatment of people.

01:08:58.760 And, and I thought, well, why does it take a guy like that to do the right thing?

01:09:04.380 You know, I mean, like he's not, he's not the greatest genius who ever lived.

01:09:07.600 If he governed that well, it must be easier than others make it look.

01:09:10.200 Yes, yes.

01:09:11.820 I mean.

01:09:12.820 I think it's just don't listen to the experts.

01:09:14.900 It's don't listen to the experts.

01:09:16.300 It's don't listen to the elite.

01:09:17.540 And it's also withstand, he had that lizard skin that helped him withstand cancel culture.

01:09:25.060 Amazing.

01:09:25.200 And this is the thing, you know, people say, well, there's cancel culture on the right

01:09:28.180 and there's cancel culture on the left.

01:09:29.140 No, there's not.

01:09:30.060 Cancel culture is an outgrowth of the leftist strategy of silencing the opposition by calling

01:09:35.740 them hateful.

01:09:36.440 That's all it is.

01:09:37.120 That is what, that is the definition of cancel culture.

01:09:39.700 It's Saul Alinsky.

01:09:40.580 And it is the definition.

01:09:41.680 And I hate it when people say, well, right wingers, you know, fire people for saying things.

01:09:45.840 And yeah, there's always going to be that.

01:09:48.160 If you worked for me and you said something horrific and hateful, I might well fire you

01:09:52.640 for saying something horrific and hateful.

01:09:54.420 But they have transformed all disagreement into hatefulness.

01:09:57.040 And all the words they use, racist, white supremacist, phobic, this, phobic, that, all of them, they

01:10:02.820 just mean shut up.

01:10:04.180 You know, just shut up and sit down.

01:10:05.560 You know, and like, I think that, I think that that's where cancel culture comes from.

01:10:10.080 So it's like, you can distinguish between a guy who's done something genuinely horrible,

01:10:16.160 like every single person at CNN.

01:10:19.140 Is that crazy?

01:10:20.960 It's nuts.

01:10:21.540 It's crazy.

01:10:22.380 It's like I worked there.

01:10:23.960 I wasn't having an affair with anybody.

01:10:26.460 What happened?

01:10:27.840 Am I that ugly?

01:10:28.960 Really?

01:10:29.620 You missed the vote.

01:10:30.780 I know.

01:10:31.940 I could have walked out with, what did Cuomo walk out with $20 million?

01:10:35.860 I just needed some information about the boss.

01:10:39.620 Gosh, it's crazy.

01:10:41.140 Yeah.

01:10:41.340 But I mean, you know, it's, you know, they have made it so that it takes a guy like Trump

01:10:47.880 just to get something done.

01:10:50.300 I mean, when you think of the effort that was put into destroying him, I mean, it was a huge

01:10:55.140 effort.

01:10:55.920 It was a, we know now it was a global effort.

01:10:59.920 Yeah.

01:11:00.420 I mean, there were, you know, they came out and they even said it, you know, as a business,

01:11:05.760 we came out and we pooled our resources together.

01:11:08.880 You did what?

01:11:09.720 Yeah.

01:11:10.300 You did what?

01:11:11.780 And they're not ashamed of it.

01:11:13.180 No.

01:11:13.480 And they knocked them.

01:11:14.140 They knocked the president of the United States off social media, which in my view ought

01:11:18.740 to be illegal.

01:11:19.380 I mean, they shouldn't.

01:11:20.040 Oh, yeah.

01:11:20.360 You know, they, they silenced information about Hunter Biden.

01:11:24.380 They lied about his Russian connections.

01:11:26.040 They did all this stuff.

01:11:26.840 And like, and again, he made it, he often made it hard to defend him by the way he behaved.

01:11:32.620 But when you look at, you know, I can just list the stuff he did, the economy that lifted

01:11:36.960 all boats, getting rid of ISIS.

01:11:38.680 People forget about that.

01:11:39.580 That ISIS caliphate was the size of Ohio.

01:11:41.920 And he got rid of it, turning our attention to China, which nobody else was doing.

01:11:45.740 The Middle East peace talks, which he actually came up with a solution.

01:11:49.860 You know, I'm like, he might be the Antichrist, not for any of the other reasons, but I don't

01:11:54.940 think this was supposed to happen.

01:11:57.000 And it was all by just saying, let's not do it.

01:11:59.380 Yeah.

01:11:59.800 Let's not do what the State Department says to do.

01:12:02.140 And, you know, I've met a lot of guys from the State Department.

01:12:04.860 They are the smartest, stupidest people I have ever met there.

01:12:07.900 Every one of them, they're smart.

01:12:08.900 They're well-read.

01:12:09.660 They're, they're nice.

01:12:10.640 I like them, you know, but they say things, the words that come out of your mouth and you

01:12:14.040 think like, no, that's not crazy.

01:12:18.480 It's like the guy, the guy at the end of the bar with his loud mouth has more sense

01:12:23.000 in his head.

01:12:23.940 We know because he was president and he actually did a job.

01:12:26.360 And I think that was his secret was, he's got an incredible gut on him.

01:12:32.100 You know, don't you think?

01:12:33.400 Yeah.

01:12:33.580 He says he's got the like, no, we're going this way.

01:12:36.960 Yep.

01:12:37.000 Yep.

01:12:37.300 And stuff that even I thought, yeah, that's crazy.

01:12:41.180 It works out.

01:12:42.500 Yeah.

01:12:42.620 I don't know how, but he's got a great gut on him.

01:12:45.180 Um, and he shockingly listens to all sides.

01:12:52.040 Yeah.

01:12:52.500 That is interesting.

01:12:53.560 You didn't know that I've heard that.

01:12:55.360 And I've heard that he reads a lot, which I, I don't know about that.

01:12:57.940 I mean, maybe I don't have any information that he doesn't, but I know he listens.

01:13:02.760 I mean, he will, he talked to me about his China policy for like 25 minutes.

01:13:08.760 And then he had the boss to say, which I said, this is why I like you.

01:13:14.980 We disagree on trade barriers.

01:13:17.620 And I said, look, China is a different thing.

01:13:19.880 I agree with that, but trade barriers.

01:13:22.340 And I made a case against trade barriers and he made his case for, and I came back and then

01:13:28.380 he came back and then I came back.

01:13:30.140 And he was like, you know what, Glenn, I just got to tell you the truth.

01:13:33.860 I love trade barriers.

01:13:35.260 I'm going to do them.

01:13:36.980 I was like, thank you.

01:13:39.300 You know, no, he didn't come my way at all.

01:13:42.080 Yeah.

01:13:42.460 You know?

01:13:42.980 Yeah.

01:13:43.780 But he listens to everybody.

01:13:45.920 I have to say my feeling, my political instinct, and it could be wrong because I didn't see him

01:13:51.060 coming at all, is that he should anoint somebody else to run for president.

01:13:57.000 I don't know if he's got the, you know, ego to do that.

01:14:00.740 He was the man of the moment.

01:14:02.160 He broke the China shop.

01:14:04.320 He was the bull in the China shop and he broke the China.

01:14:07.320 Any Republican who does not realize that they have to take a lesson from him is done, is

01:14:12.560 finished.

01:14:12.880 You know, the guys who, you know, try to appease the left, they're finished.

01:14:18.940 Glenn Youngkin, a great example in Virginia, he caught on.

01:14:23.040 He started to stand up to the teachers, to the school boards and all this stuff.

01:14:28.000 He's a moderate guy.

01:14:29.960 He's, you know, what does Jim Acosta call them?

01:14:32.200 Stalin or something.

01:14:33.380 He's like a moderate Republican.

01:14:35.140 But he understands that part of this fight is a cultural fight.

01:14:39.060 And that was Trump's great genius that, you know, it's not, it's partly, it's about taxes

01:14:44.600 and regulations and strong defense.

01:14:46.760 All those things matter.

01:14:47.880 But it also matters that you stop telling people that their country stinks, that their

01:14:52.420 God stinks, that they're racist, that they're sexist, that their natural opinions stink,

01:14:56.560 that their, that their natural, their marriage doesn't matter, that women don't need a man,

01:15:00.440 you know, all the stuff that they said, you've got to stop.

01:15:03.380 You are ruining the world.

01:15:05.000 You are actually ruining the world by doing that.

01:15:07.060 And Trump is the only one who actually said, you know what?

01:15:10.900 Like, no, I'm going to embrace the flag.

01:15:12.920 I'm going to talk about God.

01:15:13.900 I'm going to say abortion.

01:15:14.660 Like, you know, wait, I know.

01:15:17.240 Did anybody stand up at the March for Life before he did that any president ever did?

01:15:21.060 I mean, you know, and crazy, right?

01:15:23.960 I mean, he did stuff that I was like, ah, he's just, he's saying that he's not going

01:15:27.220 to actually do that.

01:15:28.180 There's no way he's going to do that.

01:15:29.400 And then he did it.

01:15:30.120 And you're like, I know what happened.

01:15:32.320 And any Republican who did not hear that call on some of them, you can see they didn't

01:15:35.920 hear it.

01:15:36.420 And it's just not in their nature.

01:15:37.920 They just haven't got that thing.

01:15:39.960 But I think DeSantis has got it.

01:15:41.880 I think he does.

01:15:42.960 And I, you know, but I think Trump is getting up there.

01:15:45.920 I'm tired of being governed by 80 year old men.

01:15:48.660 You know, I think it's time, it's time to let a new generation come in.

01:15:51.660 If I were Trump, I think what I would do is, you know what?

01:15:54.600 This is my guy, DeSantis.

01:15:55.820 He's going to go forward and, and then have that kind of influence on the White House that

01:16:01.900 you have behind the throne.

01:16:03.060 I think he did the thing that he was sent to do, but I could be wrong.

01:16:06.540 Yeah, I know.

01:16:07.940 I've stopped, you know, 2016, I was against him.

01:16:12.600 I was wrong.

01:16:14.120 2020, I thought he was going to win.

01:16:15.820 I was wrong.

01:16:17.380 And I was wrong.

01:16:20.240 And God was right both times.

01:16:22.600 You know what I mean?

01:16:24.200 That happened.

01:16:25.180 And I'm like, there's no way.

01:16:26.720 There's no way.

01:16:27.520 I was wrong on that.

01:16:29.160 Joe Biden being elected is turning out exactly the way I thought it would.

01:16:34.100 But I didn't see that.

01:16:38.120 That was a trigger.

01:16:39.960 It was kind of like they were hiding and everybody's like, yeah, I know they're not telling the truth,

01:16:45.640 but, you know, it's going to be fine, you know.

01:16:48.720 And now we're seeing it.

01:16:50.300 And people who are not don't agree with me are like, OK, all right.

01:16:55.180 Whoa.

01:16:55.800 Yep.

01:16:56.280 This is way out of lying.

01:16:58.420 You know, it's really interesting.

01:17:00.280 I was in New York just before Christmas and I was going to parties, a lot of which got canceled

01:17:04.480 because Omicron was on the rise and I was, you know, rolling.

01:17:07.480 But a lot of, you know, some of these parties, literary parties have a lot of leftists in them.

01:17:11.540 And for the last during the Trump years, I would go to these parties and people would shun me.

01:17:15.880 I mean, they would kind of not want to be seen with me.

01:17:18.360 All of a sudden, they were coming up to me and said, you know, I'm starting to sound a little bit like you, you know.

01:17:23.000 And I think like, you know, the thing is leftism offers virtue and virtue because we don't have it.

01:17:29.500 We want it, you know, because we know we're sinful.

01:17:31.560 We know we're broken.

01:17:32.480 And somebody says, we're going to make everything equal.

01:17:34.440 Everything's going to be nice.

01:17:35.300 Everything's going to be fair.

01:17:36.280 We think like, oh, I want to be that way.

01:17:38.160 It just doesn't work.

01:17:39.120 You know, it doesn't work.

01:17:40.100 So they get elected because they offer virtue.

01:17:42.420 The right doesn't get elected, even though everything they do actually works because they don't talk morally.

01:17:46.980 And that's the funny thing about Trump.

01:17:49.220 People talk about his immoral life, but he spoke in moral terms.

01:17:52.980 Make America Great Again.

01:17:54.080 MAGA was a moral movement, you know, and that's and that's why they hated him so much, because he was black and white.

01:18:02.080 There's a right and wrong.

01:18:02.960 There's a right and wrong.

01:18:03.660 And like, I think that I think he has.

01:18:06.580 I think my my idea, Glenn, is that we're at the end of something and at the end of something, there's going to be chaos.

01:18:12.440 We're at the end of the post-war era, basically.

01:18:15.100 We're at the end of the post-Cold War era.

01:18:16.860 But I think we're even at the end of the post-war.

01:18:19.320 A lot of the.

01:18:20.100 Yeah.

01:18:20.580 I think a lot of the people.

01:18:24.180 Who Trump drove crazy, you know, those commentators who were important and now we're just kind of off in the wilderness, babbling about who knows what.

01:18:31.420 You know, I think they couldn't accept that it's time for a new thing.

01:18:35.340 And Trump, like you said, in his gut, he understood that.

01:18:38.540 Yeah, I think I think you're right.

01:18:40.280 I, you know, I said in 2016, we're at the end of the progressive era.

01:18:44.180 What started 100 years ago.

01:18:47.240 Now comes the choice and the transition.

01:18:50.720 You know what I mean?

01:18:51.620 We're either going to go where they wanted us to go or we're going to push back.

01:18:55.760 But I hate to use this word, but a reset is coming.

01:18:58.980 I agree.

01:18:59.760 Hopefully it's back to factory settings.

01:19:03.220 It is always good to see you.

01:19:04.840 It's great to see you.

01:19:05.520 I didn't even use a single question I had for you.

01:19:08.720 I want you to come back because I want to talk to you about your dad.

01:19:13.060 Oh, sure.

01:19:13.800 Yeah.

01:19:14.000 You know, your dad's a legend.

01:19:15.720 Yeah.

01:19:16.180 One of the great.

01:19:17.000 That's how that's how I recognize broadcasting talent.

01:19:19.280 I can see.

01:19:19.780 I have to say I have a knack.

01:19:21.360 You know, I see people come along and I know exactly who's going to make it in the broadcasting world.

01:19:25.500 He was he was a great broadcaster.

01:19:27.080 Yeah.

01:19:27.660 All right.

01:19:28.240 Come back.

01:19:28.920 Thank you.

01:19:29.200 Always.

01:19:29.820 God bless.

01:19:35.760 Just a reminder.

01:19:37.380 I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:19:42.980 I'll see you next time.

01:19:50.520 I'll see you next time.

01:19:55.360 Bye.

01:19:59.340 Bye.

01:20:07.840 Bye.

01:20:08.440 Bye.

The Glenn Beck Program - February 12, 2022

Ep 133 ｜ THIS Is Where Cancel Culture Comes From ｜ Andrew Klavan ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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