The Michael Knowles Show - November 30, 2025


＂You're WRONG Knowles!＂ After That, The Dark ｜ Andrew Klavan

Topics
Kickoff credit builder
Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Guests
Andrew Klavan
Mentioned
Drew Mozart Bing Crosby Shakespeare Yeats Alfred Lord Tennyson Cormac McCarthy Louis Armstrong Charles Murray Jonathan Haidt Andrew Kolvet Henry James James Bond Tolstoy Dickens Macbeth Hitler Jacob Nasty
Michael Knowles Reads His Reddit Hater Threads Ep. 1865 - Why Do We Keep Importing Migrants To Murder Us？

Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

192.88

Word count

3,572

Sentence count

323

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On today's show, Andrew Klavan joins me to talk about his new book, "Crossing the Bar," and why he thinks the Bible is the most important book of all time. He also talks about why he doesn't read fiction.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:01:34.840 Here, on this very show, is Mr. Andrew Klavan.
00:01:49.520 Drew, good to see you.
00:01:50.980 Hey, what's the matter with my voice?
00:01:52.600 I don't know what you're talking about.
00:01:53.800 I've never heard that.
00:01:55.180 I thought, of all the things to criticize about you.
00:01:58.600 I'm sitting here listening, you're talking Latin, you've got like plane song going.
00:02:02.080 This is like being in The Omen, you know?
00:02:05.040 This show.
00:02:05.780 It's a chanting.
00:02:07.420 Drew, for the four people who watch it, they are getting an experience like none other.
00:02:15.300 You know, it's a little niche.
00:02:16.580 It's a little esoteric.
00:02:18.920 I called the FBI, by the way.
00:02:21.860 The Latin mass was taking place.
00:02:24.660 My show at this point, it's like the Ku Klux Klan, you know?
00:02:28.100 It's just all FBI agents and like bubba.
00:02:30.920 So that is the audience of my show.
00:02:33.320 And they don't.
00:02:33.920 So someone pointed out the other day, I said, whenever it was, like two months ago, I said,
00:02:39.720 I'll get Drew on to talk about his new book.
00:02:42.440 And my team, what do they go out?
00:02:45.220 I don't know what they do.
00:02:45.960 They smoke cigarettes behind the building.
00:02:47.820 They go play pickleball.
00:02:48.960 They go, Jacob goes and buys nice leather jackets.
00:02:51.180 They said to me, they say, Drew's really angry because you haven't had him on to talk about
00:02:57.380 his book.
00:02:58.120 And I said, well, then he should be angry with you because I've told you multiple times to
00:03:02.960 get Drew on to talk about his book.
00:03:04.340 This book at this point, I think, came out in like 2018.
00:03:06.840 I don't know.
00:03:07.060 It's been like so long since it came out.
00:03:09.100 The book is after that, The Dark, which, by the way, refers to one of the poems like
00:03:15.340 nearest to my heart.
00:03:16.900 Alfred Lord Tennyson's Crossing the Bar.
00:03:19.280 Yes.
00:03:19.820 Yes.
00:03:20.120 It's a poem he wrote.
00:03:21.360 It came to him in a moment, he said.
00:03:24.060 And after he wrote it, he ended all of his books with it because it was about dying.
00:03:29.240 It was about sailing off into eternity.
00:03:32.620 Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me.
00:03:35.920 And may there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to see.
00:03:38.980 I think I forget the rest of it.
00:03:40.580 That's very good.
00:03:41.660 That's it.
00:03:42.180 And after that, The Dark.
00:03:43.480 And that's where it comes from.
00:03:44.960 Then he quotes it in the book.
00:03:47.320 Why?
00:03:48.240 You know I'm a Philistine.
00:03:49.440 You know I certainly have.
00:03:51.020 I haven't read enough.
00:03:52.160 Yours are like the only novels I read.
00:03:54.500 I know.
00:03:54.920 You've read two works of fiction, the Divine Comedy and me.
00:04:00.180 And you quote them incessantly.
00:04:03.000 I don't understand why you don't read so much more.
00:04:04.960 Then you'd have so much more to quote.
00:04:06.300 Your soul would be bigger.
00:04:07.820 This is the thing that really drives me crazy.
00:04:10.480 Conservatives are all, they talk spiritually.
00:04:12.740 You know, they're always talking about the spirit.
00:04:14.280 They talk about God.
00:04:15.160 We're not afraid to talk about God.
00:04:16.640 We're not afraid to.
00:04:17.240 And then art comes.
00:04:18.360 It's like, why should I read fiction?
00:04:20.000 I was a fiction.
00:04:21.020 I thought it didn't really happen.
00:04:22.580 It's like it's to enlarge your imagination so that you perceive the world in a bigger way.
00:04:27.840 And that is actually.
00:04:28.760 And by the way, there's basically nobody.
00:04:31.340 There's no good conservative writer left.
00:04:33.560 But now that Cormac McCarthy is dead.
00:04:35.360 It was me and him.
00:04:37.600 It's just me.
00:04:38.700 So, I mean, if you're not reading me, you are literally not supporting conservatives in the arms.
00:04:43.780 Yes.
00:04:44.300 You know, I realize this.
00:04:46.740 Occasionally, I am forced to read fiction.
00:04:48.980 And when I say fiction, I mean like Tolstoy.
00:04:51.540 You know, I mean works that I should have read 15 years ago.
00:04:54.040 And I have to do it for my book club show or whatever.
00:04:56.780 And then every time, well, unless I read a bad book.
00:04:59.160 But like whenever I read good books, by the time I get to the end of it, I say, wow.
00:05:02.740 Wow, I feel refreshed.
00:05:04.840 I feel like I've just seen something.
00:05:07.620 I've lived something.
00:05:08.960 My soul feels bigger.
00:05:10.680 Wow.
00:05:12.120 I'm viewing the world in a new and interesting way.
00:05:15.760 And then I say, well, I'm never doing that again.
00:05:18.120 Now, what do I need to do that for?
00:05:20.760 It's like Charles Murray discovered God.
00:05:24.640 And I said, do you pray?
00:05:25.580 And he said, no, I tried it once and it worked.
00:05:27.220 So I never did it again.
00:05:30.280 That's you in fiction.
00:05:31.240 But no, I really do think that this is a serious thing that I think as you ingest more art,
00:05:39.040 you start to walk around the world and say, oh, I recognize this situation.
00:05:42.480 Just like if you live as many hundreds of years as I have lived, you've seen things before
00:05:46.860 and you see them again and you kind of know how they're going to go.
00:05:48.920 But that happens with art, too, because you think, oh, yeah, Shakespeare said this.
00:05:52.860 Or, you know, I read this in a book and you can see what's going to happen.
00:05:56.240 It's the reason that I am continually right.
00:05:58.320 Like when we have those friendly fire shows, we're all talking and you guys are saying,
00:06:02.000 well, I read the polls and this is going to happen.
00:06:03.960 And I'll sit there and go, no, that's not what's going to happen.
00:06:06.000 It's going to be this.
00:06:06.800 It's because I read the arts.
00:06:09.120 It's because I read fiction.
00:06:09.940 I do wonder how much the, I don't want to be too harsh here, but the conservative Philistinism is, you know,
00:06:18.100 affects our, especially our more contemporary politics.
00:06:21.740 Because I think, even though I, you know, I'm mostly a Philistine,
00:06:26.220 I have read a decent amount of, I don't know, poetry or something.
00:06:29.980 I've been dragged into reading some of the great books.
00:06:33.340 And, and it, it does, gives you a bit of a lighter step.
00:06:37.480 So much so that people will call you gay.
00:06:39.400 They'll say like, you're, you know, come on, quit. 0.95
00:06:41.720 What are you reading poetry for you, fanook?
00:06:43.580 You know, come on, we got to get, we got to start reading, you know, like Hitler or something.
00:06:47.460 What do you, and it used to be, it was a manly thing to do to read the arts because you were sophisticated.
00:06:52.980 You know, you knew that a guy like James Bond read, read all the great British novels, you know,
00:06:58.120 that say he wouldn't be that way if he hadn't.
00:07:00.400 It is enculturating, if that's a word, that it may, it gives you culture.
00:07:05.320 And I think, you know, I really do think this because it's been frustrating in some ways.
00:07:09.420 I feel like, I feel like, like 20 years ago, I started fighting this fight to take the culture 0.98
00:07:16.420 and all the means of communications away from the left because they had this stranglehold on it
00:07:22.040 and they were killing our country by basically producing this toxic atmosphere.
00:07:26.960 You were talking about Jonathan Haidt, you know, this is like, this is the toxic atmosphere that
00:07:30.460 he lives in that he, you know, he can't see through.
00:07:32.740 I interviewed him about his, his atheism and like, he seriously can't get past it and see
00:07:39.060 the truth because of the atmosphere that he lives in.
00:07:41.580 And, and we've won so much of this fight, you know, we have defeated their news media.
00:07:47.080 Their news media is now almost virtually irrelevant.
00:07:49.580 They're just this kind of font. 0.70
00:07:51.280 They just kind of stink up the place with their lies, but we still have not come back
00:07:56.380 and, and taken the arts away. 0.83
00:07:58.340 And like, Hollywood is dead.
00:07:59.920 Hollywood is, when I say it's dead, it's like lying on its back with its feet.
00:08:04.000 It's what the cops call tits up, you know, it's like it's just dead.
00:08:08.220 And we're not doing anything, you know.
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00:09:47.580 What do you make of, because there is in the tradier world, you know, which is kind of
00:09:52.040 on the upswing. The traditionalists, people go on a high liturgy churches and stuff. That's on the
00:09:56.700 upswing. I'm definitely part of it. There is a longing for high art, high culture, even if most
00:10:05.920 of them never go to the opera or ballet or something, but there's still a longing for it,
00:10:10.560 a gesture toward it. But what you're talking about is novels and Hollywood. What should we be aiming at?
00:10:18.140 You know, is there, because I would love, I was in Hungary for CPAC Hungary and one of the
00:10:25.200 organizers comes up to me and goes, Michael, you look kind of cultured. Do you like the opera?
00:10:28.920 And I said, I actually do like opera, but I haven't been in ages. I said, okay, well,
00:10:32.260 here's some opera tickets. And I go, and it was really terrific, actually, all things considered.
00:10:37.760 And I thought it was almost entirely empty. And the people who were there were dressed in t-shirts.
00:10:42.340 Like there was no sense that this is a real to-do and we should dress in a respectful way for
00:10:47.940 this, you know, and we should fill up that. It's amazing. Beautiful opera house. Should we be
00:10:52.720 aiming at the high arts or the low arts, or am I even misthinking, misconsidering this?
00:10:57.580 You're kind of misthinking. I'll tell you what, I was at the opera Sunday. I saw The Marriage of
00:11:03.580 Figaro at the Kennedy Center. It was wonderful, wonderful cast, wonderful production, and packed.
00:11:08.020 It was just packed. Although, I mean, I was the youngest person there, so that might
00:11:11.580 tell you something about the audience.
00:11:13.760 Mozart was there. Mozart was in the audience.
00:11:16.960 And look, it is very, very hard to match the European arts and culture at their highest.
00:11:24.820 There was something about that culture that produced the greatest art that humankind has
00:11:29.760 ever produced. And that is intimidating for Americans and has been ever since America began.
00:11:35.000 But there was something really different about the European arts is that Europe was a number of
00:11:39.660 small countries. So each, what we would call a state was a country, and each one could address
00:11:45.860 the entire country in a single work of art. So Dickens could write Britain. You could write the
00:11:51.240 entire country of Britain. We can't do that in America, too many of us, too big and too individualistic.
00:11:56.440 And that's why Americans have found their expression almost always their greatest expression in genre,
00:12:03.540 in musical comedy, in detective stories, in westerns, in science fiction. We're really good
00:12:09.900 at those. I mean, you look at somebody like Conan the Barbarian. He's tossed aside as junk. No,
00:12:16.440 these are some of the greatest adventure novels ever written. And they say something about American
00:12:20.760 life without, of course, ever talking about American life. I work mostly in the crime genre,
00:12:25.580 sometimes in fantasy and horror. You and I did another Kingdom trilogy together, which is still
00:12:30.360 selling quite well, by the way. I just got some royalties for that. It's doing very nicely.
00:12:34.320 When do I get my royalties? Hold on.
00:12:36.140 Yeah, you get Zittenbupkus. I'll send you a bagel. I don't know, maybe. 1.00
00:12:39.900 I could use it in naturalizing.
00:12:41.120 In the shape of how much money you get this.
00:12:45.960 But somehow, somehow the American dream is expressed in dreamlike stories that are genre stories. And that's
00:12:53.440 a really interesting fact and really different. But we shouldn't be cowed by the high culture
00:12:59.960 of Europe, though we should ingest it so we can put the stuff that's in there into our works.
00:13:05.940 But it's just different. I mean, a movie like Casablanca, The Godfather, these are works of art. There's no
00:13:11.000 question about it. And the fact that they're not, you know, Macbeth, they don't have the language that
00:13:15.660 Shakespeare had is not to be, doesn't mean that we should turn up our noses at them. I think it really
00:13:20.900 is important. You know, one of the true crisis resolutions in my life, I was just writing about it
00:13:28.020 for somebody else. And so I'm on top of my mind, is I knew that I had, let's just say,
00:13:34.460 a sophisticated vision of what the world is. It was a complex, sophisticated vision. But I knew my
00:13:40.280 skill was writing fast-moving, you know, crime stories. That was really the talent I'd been given,
00:13:46.060 right? And I thought, how do I do that? How do I put those things together? And I read a great
00:13:52.000 Victorian thriller called The Woman in White. And I was lying in bed reading this and I sat up in bed and I
00:13:56.800 thought, that's how you do it. And then the trick became taking a slow-moving Victorian novel and
00:14:03.240 turning it into a fast-moving American novel, which has been sort of the work of my life.
00:14:07.180 If you read After That the Dark, you will see the results of that. And I'm not, I am selling the
00:14:12.260 book. I hope everybody goes out and buys the book. But this is, when I finished that, I thought, yeah,
00:14:17.240 that's what I'm trying to do. Because it is full of complexity. It is full of a vision of the world.
00:14:23.880 But it is done as a fast-moving American thriller, because that's America. America is not a slow-moving,
00:14:30.600 ruminating culture where we sit around and worry which fork goes on. You know, Henry James, who was
00:14:35.760 an American writer and became a British writer, talked about where the fork was. And if you didn't
00:14:39.900 know where the fork was, then that told you something about character. It doesn't tell you
00:14:43.380 anything about an American. An American is a very different kind of character who I think is
00:14:48.680 expressed in musicals, Westerns, detective stories, and science fiction, and fantasy. That's how we
00:14:54.720 talk to each other. And I think it's right and proper that we do. We shouldn't look down on it.
00:14:58.740 Right. I've never considered that, that in America, you can't have this totalizing vision
00:15:04.880 in a totalizing work of art. Because we're just, it's a weird country that was founded by like
00:15:09.620 pilgrims, religious separatist zealots, and kind of miscreants, and moneymakers. And then we got a bunch
00:15:17.780 of slaves, and then a ton of immigrants. Right? You know, it's like pretty hard.
00:15:24.320 And yeah, and you get these wonderful moments when like, you know,
00:15:27.880 Bing Crosby listens to Louis Armstrong and thinks, I want a little of that black stuff in my life. And 1.00
00:15:33.340 you know, Bing Crosby is singing songs written by Jews. And it's like, yeah, it's different than 0.92
00:15:38.480 Mozart, you know, because Mozart is embodying an entire culture. But it is a work of genius. It's a
00:15:45.040 work of genius. Right. When you hear the American songbook written by all these Jews for blacks, 1.00
00:15:51.540 for whites, and you know, and Irish guys singing, you know, all this stuff, you're hearing something
00:15:55.340 new and beautiful and unique. And I think we should be proud of it and understand it as an expression
00:16:02.180 of ourselves, this incredible, wild country. It's nothing like it. I mean, maybe Rome a little bit
00:16:08.600 at its peak, but nothing like this. No, that was the comparison I was thinking. And in terms of
00:16:13.420 genre, you know, for gigantic globe-encompassing decadent empires, I was thinking of the poetry of
00:16:20.420 Catullus, much of which is just pornography. And, you know, I guess that's a prolific genre in a
00:16:27.240 decadent global empire as well. But better to focus more on like the crime stories and the musicals and
00:16:33.160 the... No, I mean, you know, Yeats made fun of the critics of his day, the poet, the Irish poet Yeats
00:16:40.000 made fun of the critics of his day because they were stuffy. He called them bald heads, you know,
00:16:44.820 old bald heads. And the last line of that poem is, what would they say if their Catullus came their
00:16:50.580 way? In other words, the art in its time was filthy and it was fun and it was big and dirty. And now the
00:16:56.420 critics are going, oh, Catullus. And so I really do think the critics get in our way.
00:17:03.160 They get between us and the things we love. One of the reasons I talk about video games is
00:17:07.840 because I think they are a stunning visual art form at their best. Obviously, 90% of them are
00:17:15.560 crap. But every now and again, you do something and you think, wow, that's beautiful. And I'm being 1.00
00:17:19.520 sucked into it by gameplay, which has never happened before. And these are just new things. And I think,
00:17:25.220 you know, yeah, art is a two-way street. So if you're sitting in your mother's basement smoking
00:17:29.200 dope and playing video games, you are not participating in art. But I've played video
00:17:33.620 games that have stuck with me and have changed the way I see things and have enhanced the way I see
00:17:37.600 things. So I just don't think snobbery is what works. I think recognizing quality both in European
00:17:46.620 style art and in American art is what brings it to life. And I think that's why conservatives get lost.
00:17:52.060 You know, they will go to the opera. They will watch a guy's eyes plucked out in King Lear.
00:17:56.300 But then when they see it in Game of Thrones, they think, ooh, you know, it's violent.
00:18:00.140 Naughty. Nasty. Yeah. Drew, you might have convinced me to stop being such a Philistine 1.00
00:18:05.820 and to go read After That, The Dark, a book that is out right now. Everyone needs to go get it.
00:18:12.040 I believe I'm seeing you in about three seconds to go do Friendly Fire. Is that right?
00:18:17.040 I'll be there.
00:18:17.880 See you then. One, two.
00:18:18.680 We're both wearing these incredible sweaters.
00:18:20.940 I know. This is, we got to get you. Is that a nice Michael Knowles sweater? If not,
00:18:25.440 we have to get you one. You can all go get yours at dailyware.com slash shop.
00:18:28.920 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.