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0:48
This is Undaunted Life a Man's Podcast.
0:51
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:53
Let's get into it.
0:54
All right guys, today we've got a very special guest on the podcast.
0:56
His name is Andrew Clavin.
0:58
He is an international best-selling fiction and nonfiction author.
1:01
The two-time Edgar Award winner, that's an award that's given out by the mystery writers
1:04
of America.
1:05
And he's also the host of the Andrew Clavin show on The Daily Wire.
1:08
So this is a very, very interesting guy and we got into a lot of this in the show, but
1:12
he grew up as a secular Jew in New York City, a very intellectual environment, all these
1:16
types of things.
1:17
But then he became a Christian at the age of 49.
1:19
Okay.
1:20
So he talks about that a lot in his memoir, which we talked about in the show, but we're
1:23
here to talk about a lot of his new book, right?
1:26
And his new book is called The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest
1:31
Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
1:35
And so I remember when this was pitched to me, I was super excited to talk to Andrew
1:38
Clavin just because of a lot of his conservative commentary.
1:40
But I was like, okay, a book about Jesus and the gospels and English poets and like I just
1:46
didn't really get it until I read the book.
1:48
And then he kind of weaved all those things together to really give you a sense of like,
1:51
okay, if you're having issues figuring out some things in the gospels and it's maybe
1:56
because you're not reading them in the right way or maybe you can inform some of the things
2:00
that you're reading and with some other things that you do understand, which will help you
2:03
understand the truth that's being told there and the beauty that's being bestowed.
2:07
But guys, we talk about, you know, why he got into writing, we talk about his memoir
2:11
and how he converted to being a Christian from being a secular Jew.
2:14
We talk about this book, but then we get into a lot of topics about the daily wire, how
2:18
he got started with daily wiring, he kind of gave us a behind the scenes look of how
2:21
the daily wire even got started and how he kind of, you know, rode the wave with those
2:24
guys and is still riding the wave.
2:26
We talk about conservatism in general.
2:28
We talk about transgenderism and how that's really one of the most corrosive thing that's
2:31
happening in our modern society.
2:33
But then at the very end, I thought our interview was over, but he said something about manhood
2:37
and I asked him if I could ask him one more question and I did and I was so glad that
2:40
we got to talk about what we got to talk about masculinity and manhood towards the end
2:44
of the very, very last question of the show.
2:46
So guys, you're going to want to make sure you stick around for that, but I'm not going
2:48
to keep him from you any longer.
2:49
So without further ado, let's get into it.
2:52
Andrew Clavin, welcome to a Daunted Life of Man's podcast.
2:54
Thanks.
2:55
It's good to be here.
2:56
It is wonderful to meet you because I just got to say I've had a lot of prolific writers
3:00
on this show and you may be the most prolific.
3:02
I swear to goodness, like I can write, but I just hate it.
3:05
You apparently love it.
3:06
You have an incredibly prolific career.
3:08
So I was just a general wave introduction for you to anyone in my audience who maybe doesn't
3:12
know who you are.
3:13
You've written dozens of books.
3:14
You've written screenplays, you've really made a business of being a very prolific writer
3:18
and you're one of the most known people and kind of the crime and suspense drama genre.
3:23
So if you would just as a generic place to start, what made you decide that you wanted
3:27
to become a writer and how did you kind of get into that genre?
3:31
I wanted to be a writer almost as long as I can remember ever since I stopped going to
3:35
be like a cowboy and an astronaut, basically this was the way I communicated with the world.
3:41
It was the way I saw the world of books that I read.
3:44
When I was growing up, I didn't have a lot of metal role models that really appealed
3:49
to me.
3:50
I found them in tough guy novels.
3:51
I found them in Ernest Hemi Ray novels and Raymond Chandler and Joshua Hammett and I
3:56
can remember to this day a line that Raymond Chandler, the great mystery writer wrote a
4:01
character named Philip Marlowe, he was describing his character and he said down, this is where
4:06
we get the phrase mean streets.
4:08
He said down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
4:13
tarnished nor afraid.
4:15
And I remember thinking that's the guy I want to be.
4:18
And so it was really important to me and I guess it just became important to me to then
4:21
pass that on and tell stories, the kinds of stories that I loved reading.
4:25
Absolutely.
4:26
And we'll get into some of that.
4:27
We're going to be focusing mainly today on your nonfiction writing.
4:30
But right from the beginning here, I'm going to try to make things as awkward as possible.
4:33
I'm going to make you pick your favorite kid.
4:36
Okay.
4:37
And a lot of books, I think I counted like 37 38.
4:40
There's probably more I missed, right?
4:42
If you, if you went toes up today and that was it for Andrew Clavin and you could only
4:47
leave one book that you've ever written for humanity.
4:51
I'm making you do it.
4:52
You got one book to represent you and to represent your work, what you feel the best about.
4:58
Who's your favorite kid?
4:59
What are you leaving us?
5:00
Well, it was true.
5:01
They are like your kids.
5:02
So you don't really have a favorite.
5:03
But the one I would obviously leave is my memoir, The Great Good Thing because it tells
5:06
the story of my life and it sort of tells who I am in the most direct way.
5:10
Absolutely.
5:11
Well, I'll just go ahead and say that is the perfect segue because I made it so.
5:14
So we're going to segue right into the great good thing.
5:16
So that is your memoir that you wrote back in 2016, The Great Good Thing, a secular Jew
5:21
comes to faith in Christ.
5:22
So just from there, I think people can kind of get the general ideas to kind of what you're
5:25
writing about in there.
5:27
But the thing that I'm interested in for you is obviously we talked about your prolific
5:30
career.
5:31
This was your first foray that at least that I know of into the world of nonfiction, right?
5:36
You had mainly stayed in the fiction world.
5:37
So just kind of take me through what that was like after having such a long and successful
5:41
year in the fiction realm.
5:42
Yeah.
5:43
It was the first time it's a long form nonfiction.
5:44
I had written articles and things like that.
5:46
But it was really difficult.
5:48
Now I've written the second nonfiction book and the thing that I find hardest of all is
5:52
editing out things like when I finished The Great Good Thing.
5:58
I handed it to my wife who's always been my first and best editor.
6:01
And she said to me half of this is the best book you've ever written.
6:06
So I gave her a pen and I said show me which half and she did.
6:10
And I literally cut out half the book, which is no pleasant thing to do after you've worked
6:14
and worked at it.
6:15
But I couldn't find a way to just stop downloading.
6:17
I had so many things to think about, so many thoughts I wanted to communicate and you're
6:21
not communicating them in like you are in fiction and gestures and pieces of action.
6:26
You're communicating them directly.
6:28
So you just want to get everything in there.
6:30
And I had really, really helped to cut it all out.
6:33
And yet when I wrote the new book, The Truth in Beauty, I did the same thing again.
6:37
And when I handed this one to my wife, she literally, I actually put this in the book,
6:41
she literally said to me, this is so hard to understand that I literally started to be
6:46
afraid you had gone insane.
6:48
And I said to her, I said to her, I was really calm about it because I knew it was a terrific
6:53
book.
6:54
I'm really happy with this book.
6:55
I said to her, no, it's a great book.
6:56
I just have to cut out all the bad parts.
6:58
And I proceeded to do the same thing again, I must have cut out a third of the book to
7:02
get to what was there already, which was like, is kind of like carving a statue and
7:06
seeing the figure in the stone.
7:08
It was already there and it came out very clearly.
7:10
But I just seemed to have a problem with nonfiction that I have to put it all down and
7:13
then cut it all out.
7:14
Right.
7:15
And I mean, we're going to get more into the stuff you do with the Daily Wire later.
7:18
But I'm wondering if for you, because it's this way for me, I'm wondering if it's the
7:20
same for you.
7:21
That's why I like the podcast format because I can just put five or six bullet points on
7:26
my notepad and then just flow for 30 or 45 minutes.
7:29
So for you as a writer, is it cathartic for you to kind of be able to flow a little bit
7:35
with your show and just kind of see where it takes you and just kind of leave the fat
7:37
on the bone, if you will?
7:38
Yeah, it is cathartic, but I still love the fact that I can, when I bring out a book,
7:43
I have gone over it a hundred times.
7:45
I know it's what I want to say.
7:47
And there's so many times when you go on a podcast and you go home and you think like
7:50
that wasn't exactly it, you know, and if somebody, and people get so angry at you, you know,
7:55
especially in the political realm, when they attack you, you know, you know, you can apologize
7:59
because that's all that my friends on the left are trying to do is get me to put some
8:03
blood in the water.
8:04
I'm not going to do it.
8:05
But sometimes to yourself, you're thinking, ah, you know, I didn't quite say what I wanted
8:09
to say.
8:10
At least when I'm writing, I know I can take full responsibility for it.
8:13
Yeah, I'm my worst critic.
8:14
When I listen to myself back, not only do I feel like I sound stupid, I'm like, oh,
8:17
my gosh, that's totally not the word you meant to say, did you go to school?
8:21
Can you even read?
8:22
I completely understand, but again, in the great good thing, it's a story of you going
8:27
from not just being a Jew to a Christian.
8:29
You were an agnostic intellectual Jewish person, and then you became a Christian and you did
8:33
all this at the age of 49, this wasn't like a high school, you know, church camp experience.
8:38
Like you had lived a really good and intellectual life up to that point, but in the book, you
8:43
actually describe several experiences in your life where looking back, you now recognize
8:48
those things as God essentially calling you to himself, like trying to communicate to
8:53
you.
8:54
And it was like really core tenants of Christianity.
8:55
And guys, in order to get, you know, the full story, you're going to have to go buy the
8:58
book.
8:59
Don't worry.
9:00
It will be in the show notes, but there was one story in particular, I guess maybe you
9:03
can give us an insight into some of those experiences, but specifically, one of those
9:07
experiences was kind of this mystical experience that you had with your wife, Ellen, when she
9:11
was giving birth to your daughter.
9:12
So I think that might be a good and very poetic way to kind of encapsulate some of the core
9:16
parts of that book.
9:17
Yeah.
9:18
One of the things about writing this book is when it was over, and I read it, I could
9:21
see God standing next to me.
9:23
I guess he Jesus Christ standing next to me through so many of the even most difficult
9:28
parts of my life.
9:29
It was so obvious.
9:30
I mean, he had left so many signs, almost, it was like that old Jim Carrey movie where
9:34
he says, "Show me a sign," and there are all these signs all over and he doesn't see
9:38
them.
9:39
It was exactly like that.
9:40
And one of the biggest experiences I was an agnostic, I was really a practicing atheist.
9:45
I mean, I really just didn't believe, as you say, I was living an intellectual life.
9:49
I was living in places like New York and L.A. and London.
9:52
I didn't associate with people who were believers.
9:55
The very word Jesus always felt like somebody had dropped a bug down my back.
9:59
I just thought, "Oh, just leave me alone with that."
10:01
But when my wife went into labor and she went into a long 13-hour labor without any drugs,
10:07
my wife was going to the sergeant rock of labor.
10:09
She just actually went through it, it was this long, long experience.
10:12
Then my daughter was born, when I saw her come out, I experienced this incredible sense
10:18
of love.
10:19
And I actually had, it's the only truly, truly mystical experience I've ever had in my life.
10:24
I actually felt myself, this love washed through me like a tide and washed myself out of my
10:29
body into my wife and into this child and then start to move out into what I could see
10:35
now was infinite love.
10:38
I could see, in front of me, I could actually see it, was infinite love that I was washing
10:41
the way into.
10:43
And in terror, basically, in an act of just fear, I pulled myself back in, always wondered
10:49
what would have happened if I just let go, would I have died, would I have disappeared,
10:53
what would have happened.
10:54
But after that moment, it was very, very difficult for me to convince myself that there was nothing
10:59
beyond.
11:00
I had actually seen it, I had actually seen it.
11:04
And I'm not a person who hallucinates, I'm not a crazy man, I'm not even someone who
11:08
was very upset with the anatomical reality that you face when you're watching somebody
11:16
give birth.
11:17
It didn't really bother me at all.
11:18
So I was not in any kind of dissociative state.
11:20
It was just the experience of love beyond anything I had felt before.
11:25
And it made me realize, I've had this incredibly fortunate marriage and it made me realize
11:30
that this love you feel is actually part of something bigger than yourself.
11:33
Well, and it's very hard to explain, and I was just talking with somebody who's very
11:37
calvinescent in their ideas of things and how they were trying to square what a lot
11:40
of Muslims are going through, because like one of the fastest growing places for the
11:44
church and for Christianity is in Iran, where you can't just have a church on the street
11:48
corner like I can't hear in Oklahoma, right?
11:50
And so when you have Jesus appearing in Muslims' dreams and communicating to them in their
11:55
dreams, you can't put that in a Bunsen burner and heat it up.
11:59
Like you can't measure that using science or psychology or something like that.
12:03
But it means something.
12:04
It means that there is a substance that's kind of outside of the matter of the world.
12:08
And so guys, the great good thing, you have to go and pick that up because we're leaving
12:10
it very, very short shrift because we got to get to the new book, which is what I want
12:14
to spend most of our time talking about today.
12:16
So thank you very much for sending this my way, but it's called the truth and beauty,
12:19
how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding
12:25
of the words of Jesus.
12:26
So I just got to tell you right from the beginning, Andrew.
12:28
When I read the title, I was like, I already don't get it.
12:30
I'm like, what is this going to do for me like I suck at poetry.
12:35
When I read poetry, I could be in a calculus class and feel smarter than whenever I'm sitting
12:40
trying to read and understand poetry.
12:42
But anyway, even though you feel like you're talking to a Neanderthal now, I always like
12:46
giving the author the breadth, I guess, in the space to describe the book in their own
12:51
words.
12:52
So give us the basic Spark notes version of what the truth and beauty is about.
12:56
Okay.
12:57
First of all, one of the things that's actually not about is poetry.
12:58
I wanted to write it through a book for people who never read poetry because it's about the
13:03
lives of these guys and how they develop their thought and their vision and what they put
13:07
into their poetry and their lives are hilarious and tragic and very deep experiences.
13:12
They had some of the best stories in all of literature.
13:15
I mean, the thing is that the time that they were living in was a time so much like this
13:19
one that is almost uncanny.
13:23
Things were falling apart.
13:25
Religion was falling apart.
13:26
This was exploding and people were losing their faith.
13:29
People were losing their sense of moral reality.
13:32
They were beginning to develop this relative sense that, oh, what one person says is moral.
13:37
Somebody else says is immoral.
13:38
They were beginning to question gender roles, not just marriage, but actually who should
13:42
be doing what and why can't everybody just sleep with everybody else and why should women
13:47
sleep with fewer people than men.
13:49
And there was this fight going on and this will sound familiar between radical and conservative
13:53
politics because there had been this French Revolution which everybody thought all the
13:59
thinkers thought was going to change the world and bring paradise and it failed.
14:05
And only a few of these thinkers were brave enough to say that it had failed.
14:09
Wordsworth, one of the great poets of the time, looked at this and he was a radical.
14:13
He went to France.
14:14
He was participating in parts of the revolution in a small way and he said, you know, this
14:18
went, this has gone wrong.
14:20
There's terror.
14:21
They're killing people.
14:22
They started a world war and he changed and he was canceled.
14:25
I mean, people just started writing poems about what a terrible person he was and what
14:29
an awful thing he had done.
14:31
So these poets were faced with a task that I believe were faced with today which was building
14:35
everything back for a new age.
14:37
How are you going to do it?
14:39
Now that you know that science is science, then the world doesn't work quite the way
14:43
that people thought it did.
14:44
How are you going to have faith?
14:45
How are you going to build back?
14:46
How are you going to experience the inner world, your inner world and know that it is
14:52
part of reality.
14:53
So in other words, what they started to think was that we are acting in collaboration with
14:59
God or inner reality is a collaboration with God.
15:02
When you go back to the Gospels, and this is why I started writing about this, when you
15:05
go back with the Gospels, you suddenly realize, that is exactly what Jesus is telling you.
15:10
He is saying you have got to be a branch on the vine, you are not going to produce fruit
15:15
unless you're a branch on the vine.
15:17
So today when somebody says, "Oh, I have the body of a man, but I'm a woman."
15:22
And people say, "Well, he is really a woman."
15:25
You say, "No."
15:26
You may have feelings, but you are not collaborating with reality.
15:30
You are not collaborating with creation.
15:32
It is just a beautiful story because these poets really didn't mean to do it.
15:37
They weren't necessarily believers, some of them, but they just stumbled their way back
15:42
to Gospel wisdom, and I found that by looking at what they said and looking at what they
15:47
wrote, I knew Jesus better.
15:50
I got closer to him coming in through the back door almost.
15:53
I just got closer to him in a way I never had.
15:56
Yeah, you came in through the back door kind of like they did into their own faith.
15:59
And I think about it when sociology, I saw a headline a few weeks ago where it was like,
16:03
people that don't live together before they get married actually have a lower divorce rate.
16:08
Shocking, it's almost as if there's a model for this that works better and all those types
16:12
of things.
16:13
And I do want to reiterate something that you said there.
16:15
Obviously, this is not a poetry book.
16:16
It's a book about poets and there's poetry throughout.
16:18
So guys, if you're scared of poetry like I am, don't be too scared.
16:21
It's very accessible.
16:22
But there was a very early point in the book that was very interesting to me.
16:26
So you're sitting down with your son Spencer and you're having whiskey, which by the way,
16:29
what were you drinking?
16:30
Do you remember?
16:31
Yeah, McCallen, 12.
16:32
It's all I drink.
16:33
I had some of that like three days ago.
16:35
We're going to be best friends.
16:36
You're sitting there having a great single malts and McCallen, 12 year old with the blue
16:40
box and the gold label.
16:41
Everything's good to go.
16:42
You're having a good time, but you're talking to your son Spencer about how you don't quite
16:46
understand the sermon on the mount.
16:48
And it's just like it was bothering you, right?
16:50
And your son said this to you.
16:52
He said, maybe the problem is that you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying
16:56
to get to know a man.
16:58
And in your head, this was your response to yourself.
17:00
I recognize this on the instant as the single smartest thing anyone had ever said to me.
17:05
And that, you know, through the mouths of babes, even though he was an adult at that point,
17:09
or seemingly adult, but at that point, you decide that you're going to stir to read the
17:13
gospels and to do it in Greek to try to get to know Jesus, not philosophy, not a certain
17:18
theology or something like that.
17:20
So just take us through that process because there's not a whole lot of people that, you
17:23
know, they would lead them to that type of an action, you know?
17:25
Yeah.
17:26
Well, like I said, you know, when I when I was talking to him, I was kind of experiencing
17:29
the fact and telling him about the fact that a lot of things that we quote that Jesus said,
17:34
we just quote them because we're so used to hearing them, and we kind of quote them as
17:37
if they were, you know, with this kind of serious piety, and you start to think about
17:40
them and think, well, wait a minute, really, you know, love my enemy?
17:43
I don't even like my enemy.
17:44
Do I ask?
17:45
Do I want to love me?
17:46
Do I want to turn the other cheek?
17:47
Or do I want to knock a guy?
17:48
You know, I said to my son, you know, if somebody attacked you or your mother, I'd kill
17:52
him, you know, and then I'd bring him back to life and kill him again, you know, just
17:55
with the body, you know, so we're talking about turning the other cheek.
17:58
What are you talking about?
17:59
And when he said this to me, you've got to get to know him as a person instantly.
18:02
I thought, yeah, because when you really know a person, like maybe you know your siblings
18:06
or maybe you know your dad or something like that, it's not like you think like, oh, dad
18:10
has a certain philosophy.
18:12
What you think is if dad were here, he would say this, you sort of can see through his
18:16
eyes a little bit.
18:17
And I realized that that was what I was trying to do.
18:20
So my process was I did teach myself Greek, although badly, I mean, I did it as, you know,
18:24
I could read about five sentences a day and translate them.
18:27
And I read the book without any theology.
18:30
So I read the Gospels, the four Gospels without thinking about what Paul said, without thinking
18:35
about what the Catholic said, without thinking about what the Protestant said, nothing.
18:38
Just him, you know, just Jesus.
18:40
And I tried to approach it like I was reading a novel, like you might get to know a character
18:44
in a novel, or you're reading a memoir and you might get to know him or a biography, you
18:49
know, you're reading about General Grant and you think, oh, now I see who General Grant
18:53
was.
18:54
I just tried to read it like that.
18:55
And as I was reading it, that's when all these lines from this poetry started to come
18:58
back to me.
18:59
You know, I get it.
19:00
I see what he sees a little bit.
19:02
I start to see a little bit of what he sees because it was the same thing these poets
19:05
saw, namely that you are in a world where you are collaborating with the spirit and a lot
19:11
of the Christianes, as they sometimes call it, you get deaf to it after a while, you hear
19:16
it so much, you don't experience it anymore.
19:19
And so that was my process.
19:20
I mean, some guy, one guy that I sent to you when you have a book, he sent it out, hoping
19:23
people will put an endorsement on the back.
19:26
One Catholic I sent it to told me that I was a heritage.
19:30
He wouldn't give me a blurb.
19:33
And I said, you know, it's really not theology.
19:36
You can still have your theology.
19:37
This was just my experience of reading the book in this specific way.
19:41
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20:08
Well, Andrew, it was an encouragement to me because I remember I had the same feeling
20:12
reading your book as I did when I read "Beautiful Outlaw" by John Eldridge back in the day.
20:16
He was the writer of "A Wild at Heart."
20:18
I remember.
20:19
He was talking about the personality of Jesus.
20:21
And when you read through the gospel's deadpan, it's just like, "Oh, this is a serious guy
20:25
being serious all the time."
20:26
But it's like, "No, he probably was cracking jokes and he was probably way more aggressive
20:30
than you gave him credit for."
20:31
And so the next time I go read the gospels, I kind of skim.
20:35
You know what I mean?
20:36
Because it's like, "I've heard this before.
20:37
I know what he's about to say.
20:38
I know what happens.
20:39
I know the ending of the story."
20:40
And so you're losing some of that juice that you can squeeze out of the story.
20:44
So I definitely appreciated that.
20:45
And I guess the other thing I really appreciated about the book, Andrew, is that a major theme
20:49
was truth and not just truth, it was capital T truth.
20:52
So you elucidate that by referring to Pontius Pilate, asking Jesus what is truth and the
20:58
opening line of the play Hamlet, Shakespearean play where the lead character says who's there.
21:03
And so there's one quote and I want to get you to give me a little bit more on this from
21:06
the book.
21:07
It's the meaning of Jesus' life is the meaning of everything.
21:10
His truth is truth.
21:12
His right is right.
21:13
His beauty is beauty.
21:14
These are human ideas.
21:16
Truth, right, beauty.
21:17
These are ways we humans experience the indescribable logos.
21:21
But how do we know our truth, truth is our truth.
21:24
Our right is right.
21:25
Our beauty is beautiful.
21:27
We know by knowing Jesus.
21:29
Now breaking news to you, Andrew Clavin, I've heard that truth is bigoted, right?
21:34
That there's no such thing as capital T truth, there's only your truth and my truth and collective
21:39
truth and justice.
21:40
And you know, that's what I've heard.
21:42
But here you are saying that truth can be summed up in the life of Middle Eastern Jew.
21:47
Not me.
21:48
Yeah.
21:49
Well, that's right.
21:50
I mean, this is part of the idea that your inner truth is either sovereign, you can turn
21:54
yourself into another sex instantaneously, or it's meaningless.
21:59
You may think what you're doing is right.
22:01
You may think it's right to be free, but other people think it's right to hold slaves.
22:05
And so they're just, they have their system and you have yours.
22:08
So we have lost touch with this fact that when John Keats, one of these great poets, wrote
22:13
the line, "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty."
22:16
That's all you know on earth and all you need to know.
22:18
He wasn't saying everything you find pretty is pretty.
22:20
He wasn't saying, "Oh, you like pink flowers and I like yellow flowers."
22:23
He was saying that your body, your entirety, your mind, your reason, your heart, your flesh,
22:29
everything about you is a God-made machine for seeing the truth of life.
22:35
But you can go astray, right?
22:37
And you know, it's a funny thing because you know you can get things wrong.
22:41
You know you can see a dragon and there's no dragon there.
22:43
You know, you've fallen in love, but you weren't in love.
22:45
It was just an infatuation.
22:47
You know, you might have thought something was right and later on you find it's wrong.
22:50
If you can get things wrong, you can get them right.
22:52
So how are you going to test that experience?
22:55
And one of it is, one way is through this experience of intense rightness that you feel.
23:01
But also you need a guide and a model.
23:03
And the smartest of all these poets, and maybe one of the smartest men who ever lived, was
23:07
Samuel Colrich.
23:08
He wrote the run of the ancient Mariner where we get phrases like water, water everywhere
23:13
and not a drop to drink, and a sadder, but a wiser man.
23:16
He's the guy who made up all those lines.
23:17
He was the most brilliant man alive in his time.
23:20
He knew virtually everything.
23:22
Of all of them, he was the one guy who from the very start through to the end was a believer.
23:27
He was the one guy and he inspired each person he talked to change dramatically.
23:32
And it was kind of funny because Colrich was a drug addict.
23:36
He was a broken man in so many ways, but he was just a genius.
23:40
And one of the things he said was Jesus, he called it the sensorium, and word I'd never
23:46
heard before, but it means the model of how we experience things, the model of how the
23:51
world should come to us.
23:53
And listen, the proof is of the puddings in the eating.
23:56
If you in fact start to understand what Jesus says and start to live accordingly, your life
24:01
becomes more joyful.
24:03
And this is an experience that most believers who are honest believers have.
24:06
Your life becomes, and when I say joyful, I don't mean happy, I don't mean you're walking
24:10
around with a yellow smiley face.
24:11
I mean, you are just involved with life in a much deeper, much more live way.
24:16
It's what the poets called gusto.
24:17
They call it gusto.
24:18
You live with gusto.
24:20
And I think that that's the proof of it.
24:22
I don't think that any thing else, there is no other religion that basically takes the
24:29
creation and us and puts them together into one person.
24:34
The Jews, God love them.
24:35
They sort of see Moses talking to the burning bush.
24:38
The Muslims have a God who is absolutely above even reason.
24:41
He doesn't even have to respond to reason.
24:43
We have a God we're in touch with.
24:45
And so Jesus is the representation of the complete communication of God and us.
24:51
Remember, somewhere in the Bible, it says, no one has ever seen God.
24:55
God, the Father is beyond our comprehension.
24:58
We cannot put that in our mind.
25:00
We can only put into our mind God as human beings experience him.
25:04
That's what Jesus is.
25:05
I think the big thing you brought up there, Andrew, is testing.
25:08
However, people bring their worldviews to the fore.
25:10
It's like, okay, where can we test this?
25:12
Where can we ground this?
25:13
And I love that expression, intense rightness.
25:15
I swear to God, I'm surrounded by intense rightness from people that keep saying dumb
25:19
things.
25:20
But I do want to get into a quote here.
25:21
This is my absolute favorite quote from the entire book.
25:24
So I want to get a little bit more on it.
25:25
So here it is.
25:26
As radicals today, condemned Thomas Jefferson for holding slaves without realizing they
25:30
learned their hatred of slavery at Jefferson's knee.
25:33
So the French slaughtered priests in the love of liberty, the church had instilled in them,
25:38
aged by painful age.
25:39
The radical always thinks his pristine morality is what another of Burke's opponents, Thomas
25:44
Payne, called common sense.
25:46
But that isn't right.
25:47
Morality is fashioned in the forge of centuries.
25:50
It's a thing of iron that will melt away in too much heat.
25:54
Aside from the fact that I could put all of my brain fibers together and try to write a
25:58
paragraph so beautiful and I wouldn't be able to do it.
26:00
I kind of hate you for that point.
26:03
What a point that you made there.
26:05
Because again, we think we're the first people to come up with these ideas and I'm using
26:09
that term we, you know, colloquially or collectively.
26:12
That's what we think, right?
26:14
But here we are.
26:15
We're judging these great men of the past or these great ages of the past by our modern
26:20
sense of virtue and morality.
26:23
And that's one thing that I think that's interesting for someone that's read as much
26:25
as you have.
26:27
You recognize just like it's old hat that this isn't new.
26:31
None of this is new.
26:32
You talked about earlier in this show.
26:33
So give me a little bit more behind that because I thought that was, that was a major
26:36
center point hinge point for me for your entire book.
26:38
Well, you know, they used to call the West Christendom because everybody was a Christian
26:43
and you could tell you were in Christendom because if you weren't a Christian, they tended
26:46
to kill you.
26:47
You know, it was not, it was not like they were gentle, meek and mild.
26:51
This was the religion of this time, but what they didn't realize was the religion was shaping
26:55
them, even as they thought they were living it out.
26:58
You know, Jesus talks about this.
27:00
He says, they say, well, can we get divorced?
27:02
And Jesus says, you know, Moses gave you laws to let you get divorced because your hearts
27:07
were hard, but you really shouldn't get divorced because what God has put together, no man
27:11
tears us under.
27:13
I compare Jesus to a nuclear blast in a book.
27:17
He destroys everything that was there before and at first there's all these miracles and
27:22
everything is, you know, all these kind of weird stuff is going on and then mutations
27:26
start to happen.
27:27
People start to respect freedom.
27:29
People start to say, well, kings don't have entire power.
27:32
No one had ever said that before.
27:33
People start to say, well, you may be women or people too.
27:36
Maybe women have rights, maybe men have rights, maybe people have equal rights.
27:41
All of these things are a result of this explosion of understanding that came with Jesus.
27:47
We think we just, they just dropped on us like the gentle rain from heaven.
27:50
And no, you know, these are things that are over slow periods of time.
27:54
You know, it's interesting during some of the war on terror.
27:59
People would say, well, what the Muslims need is they need a reformation.
28:02
And I would think, you know, the reformation was one of the most bloody times in human
28:05
history.
28:06
And what happened was after one of the worst wars Europe had ever experienced, the 30 year
28:10
war, people started to say, you know, this doesn't look good for Christians to be killing
28:14
each other with this kind of cruelty.
28:17
In other words, they were comparing their actions to a standard.
28:21
That standard is not the human standard.
28:23
That standard is not a standard that existed in Rome.
28:25
It didn't exist in Greece.
28:26
It only existed where there were Christians.
28:29
And so that reaction, you know, people will say, well, Christians were violent.
28:32
Yes, they were.
28:33
And then they started to say, how does that violence, you know, comport with this philosophy
28:38
of the God I know and love?
28:40
That's how you change over time.
28:42
And the fact is we live in time, you know, we live in time.
28:44
We are not, you know, hopefully people are going to be better than us a hundred years
28:48
from now or not.
28:50
But ultimately, the things we believe shape us over time.
28:54
And so these guys who, you know, Edwin Burke was the guy who said this in this time in
28:58
the romantic era, he basically said, if you give up your traditions, you're giving up
29:02
the wisdom of the ages, you're giving up the wisdom of the dead, there's going to be
29:06
change.
29:07
Things are going to be changed.
29:08
But if you change in keeping with your traditions, if you keep down the road you're traveling
29:13
on, you will get to the place you're supposed to get to.
29:16
And that I think is built into the gospels as well.
29:19
When I think we have this horrible, modern habit of straw manning everything and steel
29:23
manning nothing.
29:24
And so it's very easy to look at the actions of Christians that are acting outside of the
29:29
dictates of the gospel or any type of a biblical ethic and being like, you see those Christians
29:33
over there?
29:34
It's like, no, no, no.
29:35
In that moment, they're not acting like a Christian.
29:36
Like people wasn't Hitler, Christians like, you know, me read a book, like, come on, be
29:41
more Andrew Clavin, would you?
29:43
But the thing about it is I absolutely really, really enjoyed this book.
29:46
The truth in the beauty guys, you got to go pick up a copy.
29:48
It's going to be in our show notes.
29:49
I love books that are short, but dense.
29:51
It's like a Ben Shapiro book, which is our segue into talking about the daily wire because
29:56
you've obviously been a part of the daily wire for several years now.
29:58
I'm sure all your woke liberal friends really love that about you that you're part of the
30:02
daily wire.
30:03
But I guess just from the beginning, how did you even get hooked up with those guys over
30:07
there?
30:08
Because you didn't really need the daily wire.
30:09
You were successful, you know, writer, you could have done your own thing.
30:12
So how did you guys get connected?
30:13
Yeah.
30:14
Well, I started doing satires, video satires for a friend of mine when he started a place
30:18
called PJTV.
30:20
And he showed me the videos that he were doing, very serious conservative videos.
30:25
And I said, you know, I'd like to do one of those, but do it like Monty Python.
30:29
I want my videos to just be hilarious.
30:30
And he said, okay.
30:31
And he let me do it.
30:32
And they were very popular.
30:33
And it became sort of a second career.
30:35
So Ben and Jeremy came to me, Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring runs the daily wire.
30:41
They came to me and they said, would you do some videos for a project?
30:44
We're starting.
30:45
And they started a project that we did that was not the daily wire.
30:49
And it did very well.
30:50
And then we all got fired.
30:51
The guys who were giving us the money just said, we don't want to do this anymore.
30:54
And they fired us.
30:55
And Jeremy said to me, I'm going to go get some more money.
30:58
And I'm going to build this thing myself the way I want to build it.
31:01
And so I said, sure, you know, I'm here.
31:02
You know what to find me.
31:03
And you're writing, you know, just give me a call.
31:05
And he did it.
31:06
It took him about six months and he came back with a parcel of money.
31:09
And it was me and Ben and Jeremy sitting in Jeremy's pool house, the changing house by
31:15
his pool in LA.
31:17
And we had a little card table with a microphone on it and a camera.
31:20
And Ben would do like a 20 minute podcast and I would do a 15 minute podcast.
31:25
And the entire thing about it was that was going to be different than other conservative
31:30
venues is it was going to be actually capitalist.
31:33
Right.
31:34
Leftist socialists are graded capitalism.
31:36
They make movies.
31:37
They make us pay us for their propaganda.
31:39
You know, it's amazing.
31:40
But we are always being funded by some billionaire who has a, you know, a point of view when
31:46
we have to follow that point of view.
31:47
And we said, no, we're going to get sponsors and we're going to make this make money.
31:51
Well, Ben became so successful so quickly that we all kind of wrote his coattails and
31:55
the thing just exploded.
31:57
So I literally went from being in this pool house talking to 15 people on a microphone
32:03
on a card table to being in this elaborate television studio that looked as good as any
32:08
of the television studios I've been in in my life talking to a great many more people
32:12
than that.
32:13
And so it was just, it was a really, a real experience.
32:16
I mean, it was a really different experience than anything I'd ever had still is.
32:19
And I enjoyed every minute of it.
32:21
The guys are great.
32:23
We would just argue and yell at each other and, you know, bring our ideas together.
32:28
Ben and I got into a couple of arguments.
32:30
So, you know, I love the guy.
32:31
We got in a couple of arguments so loud that the women would actually call us up.
32:35
You'd go home.
32:36
They say, are you all right?
32:37
I go, yeah, why?
32:38
You know, this is Ben and I talked to each other, you know, it's nothing.
32:42
But it really was just a wonderful formation experience and it's been great ever since.
32:47
Well, I kind of want to talk about how you all get along because we have Andrew Clavin,
32:52
Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles.
32:56
One thing that you all have in common is y'all are really, you have really small personalities
33:00
and you don't have big opinions.
33:05
But funny is like, obviously I'm being sarcastic.
33:07
You guys have big personalities, big opinions, you know, big platforms, all the things.
33:11
How do you all get along?
33:12
Because we get to see the, you know, the daily wire backstage and a lot of guys that listen
33:15
to the show have daily wire subscriptions and all that.
33:18
And it seems like y'all are having fun sparring with each other politely.
33:23
But I just assume, you know, you get into those knockdown drag outs.
33:26
So how do y'all, how do y'all coalesce all that together?
33:29
Because even just you being, you know, an outspoken advocate of Christianity now, even
33:33
though you were a secular Jew, how does that jive with Ben Shapiro being, you know, a very
33:37
religious Jew, you know, take me through all that.
33:39
Yeah, it's been, I mean, mostly it's having a sense of humor.
33:42
I mean, for me, sitting around with a bunch of guys that I disagree with in the small ways,
33:49
but agree with in big ways.
33:50
I mean, we're all conservative.
33:51
We all believe in freedom.
33:52
We all believe in God.
33:54
We all believe that, you know, God has a moral plan and a moral structure of the world to
33:58
sit around with a bunch of guys like that and drink scotch and smoke cigars and yell at
34:03
each other is one of my favorite things in life.
34:05
I mean, it's like, you know, it's like, I will wake up, I will show up for that every single
34:08
day.
34:09
And so it's been utterly great, I mean, I cannot think of a single time we had a genuine argument.
34:15
We've had many, many big arguments, but never an argument that had any kind of viciousness
34:19
to it, where we're personal, where I hate you or anything.
34:23
I don't think it's happened one time.
34:26
What we have had is just differences of opinions and the faith that in arguing about them, we
34:32
would get a hearing, you know, it's like we got other guy would hear what I was having
34:36
to say, and would tell me honestly what he thought.
34:38
And again, to me, I'll show up for that every single day.
34:42
It's one of my favorite things in life.
34:44
Still, you know, we kind of live, we've now kind of moved to different cities, but whenever
34:48
we're in the same city, I love it when we get together and have cigars and just scream
34:51
and yell at each other.
34:52
It's a beautiful thing.
34:53
And it helps you.
34:54
It helps you find out where you're wrong, which is great, you know, the reason why you're
34:58
comfortable sparring is because you have some humility, but you also have some things that
35:03
you feel very strongly about that are grounded in something real.
35:07
You don't have your feet planted firmly in midair.
35:08
I know I'm stealing that quote from somebody, but the thing that I think I like the most
35:12
about the daily wire, because I was a, you know, absorber of content of y'all's for years
35:17
and then became a member and all that, it's because as a company, seemingly you all don't
35:21
just sit around and lament the culture wars.
35:24
You fight them, right?
35:25
And you don't just fight them by being defensive.
35:27
You fight them by going on the offensive.
35:28
So you have a publishing wing now, you know, there's a lot's been made about the movie
35:32
company, just in the last couple of weeks, Jeremy's razors, right?
35:35
You got a razor company because, because Harry's went full [inaudible] on you and like, I like
35:39
that y'all are pushing back because conservatives have always been the people that we're going
35:43
to be polite and quiet and sit back until they absolutely had to lash out.
35:47
And the problem was, is in a lot of the culture wars, the war was over.
35:51
The conservatives wake up and they're like, wait a minute, I never even put on my armor
35:55
and my sword.
35:56
And it's like, yeah, the war has passed you by.
35:57
And you decided that no hills were worth dying on.
36:00
So talk me through that because that's a bold move, Cotton, to have the daily wire really
36:04
pushing back in the culture wars, isn't it?
36:06
This is the most gratifying thing about the experience to me because the way I became
36:09
a conservative, I was a liberal, I was a liberal Jewish, you know, coastal guy.
36:14
And I moved to England because I got sick and tired of political correctness and I spent
36:17
most of the 90s in London with my family.
36:20
And I didn't really know that my mind was changing.
36:22
I was just away from American politics, so I wasn't experiencing it.
36:26
I came back and shortly after I came back, 9/11 happened and I'm sitting and watching
36:30
television and David Letterman, the comedian, the late night, he was at the time, the late
36:34
night comedian, he came on and he said, I have to ask, I think out loud for a minute
36:39
and ask myself, why do they hate us?
36:41
And I thought, who cares, they're essentially Nazis, they're supposed to hate us.
36:48
You know, if we're not hated by guys who think like the Islamists think, we're doing
36:53
something wrong, you know, and this was the first time I started to say something terrible
36:58
happened to the culture while I was gone.
37:00
Well, the difference was being gone, I saw the results, you know, when something happened
37:04
slowly, you don't always see it.
37:06
And I started to realize that the people I agreed with now are all on the right, including
37:10
Rush Limbaugh.
37:11
Like I was in England and I heard about this terrible guy Rush Limbaugh, I turned him on
37:14
and I thought, hey, I'd like him, yeah, so I realized my mind had changed.
37:19
And I started going to, this is now 20 years ago and more, I started going to conservative
37:25
meetings and saying, you know, you guys have let the culture slip, you guys have lost,
37:30
we lost our country at the movies, you know, we lost it in publishing, we lost it in music.
37:35
And they would look at me, so help me, they would look at me like, you're cute, but I
37:39
don't know what you're talking about now, it's kind of cool that you work in Hollywood,
37:43
but I have no idea.
37:44
You know, that's kind of nice.
37:45
You know, the guy's going to talk about, you know, capitalism and the things we really
37:50
care about.
37:51
It's taken 20 years, but now people have started to get it.
37:55
They've started to get the fact that you cannot be hammered ceaselessly with propaganda and
37:59
not have a change, the nature of this country.
38:03
What's happened when you hear people talking about, I mean, I brought this up a couple
38:07
of times only because it drives me nuts, but when you hear people saying that men can
38:11
become women and then should be allowed to compete in women's sports, when you hear
38:15
people complaining, teachers complaining that they're not allowed to talk to kindergartners
38:20
about their homosexual sex life, you go like, okay, something has happened because in the
38:26
old days, you'd have been hanged for that, you know, and like, that's, you know, going
38:30
near, and when you say, you can't do that to my child, they say, well, the FBI's going
38:34
to investigate you as a terrorist, you know, you know, something really bad has happened
38:38
to the culture and we need to take it back and the only way to take it back is to build
38:42
a culture of your own.
38:44
I worked in Hollywood for years.
38:45
You are not going in and convincing those people to change their minds.
38:48
That is not happening.
38:49
That is not a happening thing at no point are they going to go like, yeah, you know, Donald
38:53
Trump really had it right, you know, that's, that is not a thing that's going to happen.
38:56
You have to build your own things.
38:58
And that means that the billionaires, the right wing billionaires who give their money
39:04
to oil development and to banking and all that have got to start thinking about giving
39:08
some of that money to movie studios and to publishing houses and to means and to schools,
39:14
means of communication because you've got to shape people to understand freedom.
39:19
You know, we were talking before about the influence over time of ideas.
39:23
Well, if you're just hearing these crazy ideas for the last, you know, what is it 60, 75
39:29
years, that shapes this country and it has shaped this country until we've gone a little
39:33
insane and we need to start shaking it back.
39:36
You know, notice the words culture war, they only come up in the media when we fight back,
39:41
you know, if they go in and try to tell, tell, tell, if they go in and a teacher tries to
39:45
tell your son that he's really a little girl, right, and we say, stop that.
39:49
They say, oh, you're fighting the culture war or no, you know, we're fighting back in
39:52
the culture war.
39:53
This is a defensive, this is a regard action in which we hope to take back the territory
39:57
of freedom and, and sanity and morality, you know, and so that's what got me into this
40:03
in the first place.
40:04
And the fact that now the daily wire is making movies and we're just getting started publishing
40:08
books, it's just a, it's, it makes my heart sing.
40:12
It really does.
40:13
I mean, it's something I have worked on my whole life, the culture being in the culture,
40:18
telling stories that matter, telling stories that are true and stories that are not false,
40:22
which I think is really important.
40:24
And to have it be happening at this level is just enormously gratifying to me.
40:28
I can't tell you.
40:29
It's just a beautiful thing to see.
40:31
It sounds like it and it seems like you're in the right spot.
40:34
And the thing is, is here at Undaunted Life, our mission is equipping men to push back
40:37
darkness.
40:38
And what it used to be was equipping people, not for us, but in general, it seemed like
40:42
culture was like equipping men to recognize darkness, but then it was like, you recognize
40:46
it.
40:47
Now what do you do?
40:48
And so it's like, now it seems like there's more people that are moving in the direction
40:51
of like, no, we're going to actively push back against these things.
40:54
That's why someone like Ron DeSantis, he seems to just keep winning.
40:57
You know, when he signs that, that bill into law, he's like, go ahead.
41:01
I'm in a, he doesn't say this, but he's in a win-win situation right now.
41:04
If you sue him, he's on the side that's defending parents.
41:06
And if you don't sue him, he gets to protect kids.
41:09
And so it's like, go ahead.
41:11
I throw your, your, your biggest flaming arrows at me right now.
41:14
I don't care.
41:15
That's why I like what he's doing so much.
41:16
But even to maybe pull out even a little bit further, just, let's talk about conservatism
41:21
in general in the United States, maybe a little bit philosophical.
41:24
But I know you'll, you'll appreciate that.
41:26
What do you feel like the current state of conservatism is right now in America?
41:30
Because for me as a conservative, I'm a little concerned about 2024 because I'm concerned
41:34
about Trump hopping back into the race.
41:37
He lost a race before January 6th and regardless of what you think of January 6th, he is forever
41:41
stained with that now.
41:43
And so it's like the only thing that could galvanize Democrats and leftists right now
41:47
is orange man, orange man bad.
41:49
And so it's like, and he's not really a diet in the wool conservative.
41:52
He just kind of does conservative things.
41:54
So there's a lot to be concerned about that is outside of my control.
41:57
But what do you think the current state of conservatism is overall in the United States?
42:00
Well, I think that conservatism took a wrong turn.
42:03
It was really during the Reagan era, though it wasn't Reagan's fault.
42:06
When it started to empty itself of moral values and say that it was really about business,
42:11
it was really about capitalism was the important thing.
42:14
You want to make a lot of money.
42:15
The pursuit of happiness didn't mean the pursuit of spiritual happiness was what it's supposed
42:19
to mean, the pursuit of virtue, which is what makes you happy.
42:22
It's being virtuous that makes you happy.
42:24
It was about you could build a business, we want it to be free.
42:28
We started talking about free speech as if it were an unlimited idea.
42:33
Of course, there's always some speech that is children shouldn't be looking at pornography.
42:38
Frankly, no one should really be looking at pornography.
42:40
There are plenty of things that you can censor.
42:43
And so we kind of gutted conservatism of its moral meaning, except when we attacked people
42:49
for their sex lives.
42:50
And my feeling is I don't care what your sex life is, I work in the arts my whole life.
42:57
Half the people I know have I'm sure are doing incredibly kooky things behind closed doors.
43:02
Maybe they shouldn't do that.
43:04
Maybe that's going to get them in trouble with God, but it's not going to get them in trouble
43:07
with me.
43:08
I'm here to just do my work and be the friends of people I'm friends with.
43:12
But once you come out of your room, once you come out and say this is a good thing, or
43:17
you come out and say this should be celebrated, or you come out and say this should be, if
43:22
you don't celebrate this, you should be knocked off Twitter and knocked off Facebook, then
43:26
I have a problem.
43:27
Then you are in the public square and I have a right to fight back and to talk back.
43:31
And so when one of the problems I think we have with conservatism, I say this to people
43:36
all the time.
43:37
The funny thing about Donald Trump was he had a very, very good presidency, but he wasn't
43:41
a very good man.
43:43
And I think you have to keep both those things in mind.
43:45
It lost because people disliked him and people disliked him for some fair reasons, which
43:49
is that he treated people disrespectfully.
43:51
He treated people who deserve respect without respect.
43:55
And I think that that's the thing that Ron DeSantis has.
43:57
He stands up for what he believes.
43:59
He's immovable.
44:00
He knows where he's going, but he doesn't talk to people like they're dirt, and he's a
44:08
statesman.
44:09
You know, part of being a politician is being a politician.
44:12
That's when people would say Trump, well, he's not a politician, you think, well, yeah,
44:15
but that's your skill set from being a politician.
44:19
It's like saying, I like Clavin's books because he's not a writer.
44:22
No, that is my skill set.
44:25
So I think that you're absolutely right.
44:27
I think Trump was a necessary figure.
44:29
I think he changed the game for the better.
44:32
I think he did a wonderful thing.
44:33
And I think if he could do it, if he hadn't in him to do it, he should say, Ron DeSantis,
44:38
the guy to carry on my legacy.
44:40
And I think it would really be a helpful thing for him to do.
44:43
Everybody I know who knows him says he's not going to do that.
44:45
He's going to run.
44:46
But there's still a lot of time between now and that election.
44:48
Right.
44:49
And the thing is, if he decides not to run, I don't see him endorsing Ron DeSantis.
44:53
I see him endorsing his son or his daughter.
44:56
And then now, MAGA has a different thing to focus on and right, and conservatives don't
45:00
really have Republicans in general, don't really have the ability to filter off or splinter
45:06
off votes, right?
45:07
Because that's what happened a little bit to Hillary Clinton in 2016 because Bernie Sanders
45:10
voters said, I screw you guys, you screwed us, I'm going to stay home and then ended up
45:13
not being so great for him.
45:15
But you know, last question of the day, because I know we're running out of time and there's
45:17
a lot of other stuff that we can talk about.
45:19
But there were some things in your new book that kind of hinted at this and you said some
45:23
things earlier in this conversation that made me think about it as well.
45:26
But another big subject that we're dealing with right now as conservatives or just as
45:29
people in general is a transgenderism issue and how it's manifesting, especially in the
45:34
lives of children.
45:35
And I heard a report, it may have even been on the daily wire, the morning wire where
45:38
there are teachers in certain districts in the country that are hearing students in the
45:41
hallways saying, Hey, have you chosen yet?
45:45
And what they're what they're referring to is, have you chosen your gender yet?
45:47
Like we're figuring out, you know, what game we're going to play at recess.
45:51
So I feel like that is one of the things, and I've made this comment before, and people
45:54
think I'm crazy.
45:56
Trange gingerism is the last thing is the last thing that's kind of sort of outside the
46:00
Overton window, before we get to pedophilia being this normal thing, absolutely, just talk
46:04
about because if if you're seven years old and you can pick your gender, why can't you
46:07
pick your sexual partner?
46:08
But I don't want to take any of your steam.
46:10
Talk to me a little bit more about that subject and how it's so potentially corrosive for
46:13
us.
46:14
Well, this is, I said on my show, I think it was last Friday, I said that this is the
46:19
mask of tolerance over the face of evil, because I think most of us believe and live
46:23
and let live.
46:24
It's a very American thing.
46:25
You just don't care what other people are doing in their personal lives.
46:28
You're not here to judge other people.
46:31
That's not my thing.
46:32
I'm not here to tell them what to do if they don't ask me.
46:35
If they ask me, I will tell them.
46:37
Once you come out into the public square, once you start talking to children about these
46:41
things, you are actually committing an act.
46:43
An act can be responded to, right?
46:46
So a person who tells a child that he is not the gender that he is, is committing an act
46:51
of evil.
46:52
There's nothing unclear about that.
46:54
There's nothing cloudy about that.
46:56
He's bringing confusion to somebody as that person is trying to establish himself in the
47:01
world.
47:02
It is natural, normal, right, healthy, and moral for people to form families based on
47:11
a man and a woman and to want their children to do the same.
47:15
That is basically the whole business of physical life is to continue the race through relationships
47:22
that give that child the best chance to thrive, which is having a mother and a father, and
47:27
wanting that child to then go on and become a mother or a father.
47:30
To say to somebody, to have a child who comes to you at some point and says, "I can't do
47:37
that.
47:38
Maybe my sexuality is different."
47:39
Well, I hope you would treat that child with kindness and love, whatever that means
47:42
to you.
47:43
However, to go to a child and say, "Oh, no, you don't want to do that.
47:46
I'm not your parent, but I'm going to tell you," is already an act of pedophilia.
47:50
It's already an act of child abuse.
47:52
It is disgustingly evil, and you're absolutely right that the fact that they have talked
47:58
their way this far into darkness is simply a function of the fact that we didn't stop
48:04
them.
48:05
We didn't know how to fight back.
48:06
This is why I get very frustrated with conservatives who don't want to talk about values.
48:12
You don't have to talk about going to church.
48:14
You don't have to talk about any of that, although actually, I'm in favor of that.
48:18
I believe that we lost the fight when they took God out of school.
48:21
I think that that was when we lost the fight.
48:23
We should have fought back against that right there.
48:26
This is like they're using our tolerance, which is leaving people alone to live their
48:31
lives, to mask evil, which is them inserting themselves into the lives of vulnerable people
48:37
with a foul and slivery-inducing ideology.
48:42
If you lose control of yourself, if you lose control of your sexuality and your lusts and
48:47
your desires, if you lose control of your identity and you can no longer tell that your
48:52
body is something given to you by God, which comes along with responsibilities as well
48:56
as privileges.
48:57
If you lose that, you are no longer fit to be free, and that is what they want.
49:03
That is always, always their main idea.
49:06
They want to get rid of reason because it keeps you free.
49:08
They want to get rid of families because families teach you to be free.
49:11
They want to get rid of sexual restraint because sexual restraint helps keep you free.
49:15
All of these things are about getting rid of freedom, and the reason they want to get
49:19
rid of freedom is because they think they're smarter than we are and can run everything
49:22
much better than we can.
49:24
I just think that you have to understand that sexuality is something that makes everybody
49:28
very upset.
49:29
It's a very emotional topic, but the real topic is freedom.
49:32
The real topic is liberty, and that is what they're after.
49:35
Everything they do.
49:36
It's funny.
49:37
They don't care that what they say doesn't make sense.
49:39
They say women and men are exactly the same, but a man can become a woman.
49:44
You say, "Well, if they're exactly the same, how would you even know if you become a woman?"
49:47
It doesn't make any sense at all.
49:49
They don't care because reason is the enemy, because reason keeps you free.
49:53
All of this stuff is about power, and just the same as climate change is about power.
49:59
Every emergency, every time they say it's a crisis, it's a catastrophe, it's an emergency.
50:02
It's all about give me more power.
50:05
This is truly bad, and the only hopeful thing I can say about it is parents are striking
50:10
back, simple reason is striking back.
50:14
The moral heart of humankind is not going to buy into this.
50:18
Now the fight's begun.
50:19
Now the fight is on.
50:20
Up until this point, I always felt like I was a voice in the wilderness saying, "You've
50:24
got to stop this stuff," but now I don't feel like that at all.
50:28
I feel like everybody gets it.
50:31
It's time.
50:32
Andrew, to the conservatives that don't want to talk about values, you say you would just
50:35
ask them, "If we give rid of conservative values, what are we conserving?"
50:39
Exactly.
50:40
Like tax policy, like capitalism, like there are things out there that are a little bit
50:44
more important than those two things that are also important.
50:47
But Andrew, we could go a million different places with this, but we are out of time.
50:50
I know you got more of these to do to try and push the book, but that's all for me.
50:53
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
50:55
No, I really appreciate talking to you in that last thing you said that it takes courage.
50:59
It takes manhood is really the word we're all looking for.
51:03
We can't do without it.
51:04
It is the first virtue because without it, there are no other virtues, and we can't keep
51:08
silent.
51:09
We can't just let it go by.
51:10
We have to do it.
51:11
Andrew, could I petition you to ask you one more question?
51:15
I wanted to ask you about that, but I want to be cognizant of your time.
51:18
Tell the person that just got bumped that I'm so sorry and they can fight me for it if
51:21
they want to.
51:22
Manhood is what we talk about here all the time because we are focused.
51:25
We're a men's ministry.
51:26
We're focused on men.
51:27
This audience is overwhelmingly men.
51:30
There is obviously a tremendous attack on masculinity, masculinity in and of itself is
51:34
considered to be toxic, whatever that means.
51:36
And yet, Will Smith can go up and quote unquote defend his wife that he's cuckolding and watching
51:42
her get banged by other men, but he goes up and smacks Chris Rock for saying an incredibly
51:46
PG joke.
51:47
And all of a sudden that's like, yeah, that's defending your woman's honor.
51:50
It's like, wait a minute, that sounds like toxic masculinity to me if I use your definition,
51:55
but masculinity is obviously under attack.
51:58
And I think that's because people that fight on the other side of real morality and real
52:02
virtue, they know that if the men are strong, the men will fight back.
52:06
But if the men are milk toast, and if the men are weak, and if they're men without chess,
52:09
as CS Lewis would talk about, and if they're men without any of that fire in the middle,
52:13
they can just keep pushing because you're not going to push back and they know that.
52:16
Am I off my rocker?
52:17
No, you're absolutely right.
52:18
I mean, you know, the thing is, I know all kinds of men who are manly.
52:21
Some of them are little dweeds, little nerds who work at computer, some of them are soldiers
52:25
and, you know, Navy seals who can kill you with a look.
52:29
All kinds of different men.
52:30
The one thing they all share, the two things they all share are courage and integrity.
52:35
Money means that you are who you say you are, you will do what you say you do, and you will
52:39
not back down when you know you're right.
52:41
That is what integrity is.
52:42
Courage is having the courage to actually put that into action, to set, to speak when
52:47
you have something to say, to not drop your voice, to not whisper, to not stand back.
52:51
I know, like I said, I know plenty of people, some of those guys could pick up a pool table
52:55
and throw it through a window.
52:56
Some of them can hardly get out of bed in the morning, but they have that courage and integrity
52:59
and you know they're men.
53:01
You know, this is something, and whenever you say this stuff, they say, "Well, women can
53:04
do this too."
53:05
No.
53:06
No.
53:07
This is a thing that men do, is they stand where they stand and you can't push them off
53:12
that dime.
53:13
And like I said, you can look like anything, you can be built like anything, you can do
53:16
anything for a living.
53:18
But if you are willing to be who you say you are, which first of all makes you consider
53:22
who you are, it makes you think about who you are, it makes you make sure that your morality
53:26
makes sense.
53:27
And you know, the one thing I said here, the same as the thing I said here, that's what
53:31
integrity is.
53:32
Everything is fitting together and then have the courage to show that integrity to the
53:35
world.
53:36
I mean, I think that really is, you know, what, you know, it really is what all of this is
53:41
about.
53:42
You know, they always talk about gentle Jesus, meek and mild.
53:44
I always say, "Show me one phrase in the gospel where Jesus says anything, even remotely
53:48
nice."
53:49
You know, the greatest empire on earth came and said, "We're going to kill you if you
53:54
don't back down."
53:55
And he just stood there and he brought that empire down around his ears simply, simply
54:00
by standing there, you know, that that is what men do.
54:04
And I think that this idea that we have to be belligerent, this idea that we have to,
54:08
you know, beat people up when we disagree, all of that, all of that is nonsense.
54:12
You simply have to be who you say you are, do what you're going to, what you say you'll
54:17
do and have the courage to show that to the world.
54:19
Hey, you know what?
54:20
I think we may have come up with the "Daily Wires Next" podcast, the "Toxic Masculinity"
54:24
podcast with Andrew and Kyle, so I think we'll pitch it to Jeremy and see if we can use some
54:30
of that razor money to buy some more microphones.
54:32
But hey, I really appreciate all the latitude you've given us for this conversation.
54:37
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Andrew Clavin.
54:39
Thank you for coming on "On Daunted Life" and "Man's Podcast."
54:41
Great talking to you.
54:42
Thanks a lot.
54:43
There you go, guys.
54:44
I hope you enjoyed my interview with Andrew Clavin.
54:45
I know I did, but before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
54:49
"Add Undaunted Life," our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that
54:52
for just spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
54:55
So here are the links I've got for you today.
54:56
The first is a link to the book that we talked about in the show, "The Truth and Beauty, How
55:00
the Lives and Works of the England's Greatest Poets," point the way to a deeper understanding
55:04
of the words of Jesus.
55:05
We also have a link here to his memoir, "The Great Good Thing," a secular Jew comes to faith
55:09
in Christ.
55:10
And then if you want any other information about Andrew, it's going to be on his website,
55:13
so we've got that link for you as well.
55:14
All right, guys.
55:15
Thanks so much for listening to the show.
55:16
We do appreciate it wherever you're listening to this.
55:18
Please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive five-star review.
55:21
If you want to come speak on your podcast or live at your event, just shoot me an email
55:24
to info@undontadotlife, that's i-n-f-o @undontadotlife, follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook
55:30
and check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content
55:33
like this coming your way.
55:34
Just go to www.undontadotlife, and we also want to thank the band August Burns Red for
55:39
allowing us to use their music for our content.
55:41
The music on this podcast is our song, "Cutting the Ties," which is off their 10th anniversary
55:45
re-recording of their album, "Leveler."
55:47
The links are in the description.
55:49
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
55:51
Remember, keep pushing back darkness.
55:54
Keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
55:58
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
56:24
[music]