All that authenticity starts to get on my nerves after a week, but for
a period of time he's great. Ask not what your country can do for
you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Garbahaw, tear
down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I am Rob Long in New
York. I'm joined today by Peter Robinson and Palo Alto. James Lilas is
off this week, and our guest today Andrew Clayton. Drew Clayven will be
joining us in a minute. Let's get this podcast started. Once you get
here, I'll know the uh workers on the key bridge and then stop the
holy take thirteen, this beast, the whole bridge just found out. Start
started. Whoever everybody, the whole bridge just collapsed. Well this question is
directed. That's correct. Give you no hot traffic stop. I can't get
to the other side whether the bridge is down. Welcome to the Rickchet Podcast.
This is number six hundred and eighty five. We have missed spent our
lives. We're gonna do a thousand of these, aren't we before? Oh
yes we will. I don't know. I am Rob Long, a co
founder of Ricochet and joined me as always as my co founder, Peter Robinson
and Palo Alto. Peter, how are you? I'm well, Rob,
all the better for hearing your cheerful voice. Cheerful. Oh okay, I
got to amend that it's a mondy. I know, I know if if,
if the news is the missiles will strike in twelve minutes, I'm going
to give you a call. I have never heard you sound less than cheerful,
even when you're saying things. Yeah, I'll take out to bad people
too, I'll say. And we are usually joined by James Lilas James lys
Nott Availble. Today he is off doing something very interesting, I'm sure,
and he will be back next week. And uh this today we have a
guest, Andrew Claven. Drew claved to us, who's an old friend of
mine, a friend of ours, and he's gonna join us a little bit.
But before we get to Drew, can we just say we should say
something about the death yesterday at eighty two years old of Joe Lieberman. Joe
Lieberman was a cenator from Connecticut and a former vice presidential candidate. He was
eighty two years old. And I cannot think of another Democrat or am I
being unkind who represented the kind of Joe Lieberman ish. He was the Lasian,
the last kind of moderate dem would be considered a kind of a liberal
republican modern Democrat, new Deal, almost Harry Truman Democrat. He believed in
a big government and a very healthy welfare state to help the less well off.
Our critique of that is now well our. The conservative critique of that
is of course very well known at this stage, that you build a big
welfare state and actually hurts those. Nevertheless, those are his intentions, and
what sets him apart is that he from today's Democrats is that Joe Lieberman was
unwoke. He wanted strong national defenses. He wished that wherever the United States,
for it, faced adversaries in the world, that the United States would
prevail and the adversaries would lose. And he was pro Israel and also a
personally religious man, an observant Jew who refused to work on the Sabbath,
refused to attend Senate sessions, which are sometimes called over the weekend, and
simply said, I have my religion that comes first. So he would and
I didn't, I say the last time I saw him, as though I
saw him every Weekend. I saw him half a dozen times in my life.
But he came to the National Review. Oh gosh, Rob, what
would it have been? It was ages ago now, but something like the
sixtieth anniversary dinner of National Review. Yeah, that's right, the kitos forever
ago. Joe Lieberman was not a conservative. He would never have voted the
way National Review wanted him to vote. But he was making a point,
and that point was we listen to each other. So he was an admirable
man, an altogether admirable man with whom I would have disagreed and he would
have sat there and listened to the disagreement. Yeah, he would have contended
with you in in a way that was he was. He was a friend
I think to debate. He was a friend to civility. But that didn't
mean he was an milk toast. And uh, last time I saw him,
this is a long time ago, was at the commentary magazine Roast,
and they was to jumping ours this thing. It's really kind of a brilliant
money making scheme where you you find somebody famous, you roast. It's like
a regular Comedy Central rose to the old D Martin Roast and then people pay
a lot of money for tables to sit there and watch this this famous,
well known person get roasted, and it's often uh soft, you know.
There's some people come in and there was like, you know that is that
is the the equivalent of a when you're being interviewed for a job and somebody
says, what are your what are your biggest weaknesses? And you say,
oh, I just I care too much. You know, a lot of
it is like that bad stuff, but some of it is great and has
teeth and it's hilarious. And the best one I saw was Megan McCain,
John McCain's daughter, Megan mcain right, Megan yes, Yes, and John
McCain and and Jolie were very very close friends, very very good friends,
and so she knew him for Uncle Joe, she knewhim forever, hers,
her whole life. And she gave the most vicious, hilarious roast. And
he was kind of doing that thing. The last time I was supposed to
be laughed that hard was Reagan at this second inaugural, the TV special banquet,
and Don Rickles is just going after him, remember, and you just
would cut up to Reagan and Nancy and Reagan was like eyes were like crying.
He was crying, laughing so hard. And then of course Nancy was
not laughing at all. She was not enjoying it. But he was live
very hard. And she had this great joke. She said, the great
thing Joe Liban was he always put his country above his party. Always we
just never knew what party it was. We always knew what country it was.
Israel killed uh, and he was he was. I mean, he
seemed like the he seemed like a real gentleman. And it's a you know,
tempting to say things like, well, that's that no more of those
guys around, but I suspect that there are probably some people who are there
have to be okay. And meanwhile, events in York Town of Baltimore,
Baltimore, so that's a I guess it's uh, I forget it's a Singapore
prater, Sringapore Singapore flagship. I think ship the Dolly. The Dolly hit
the bridge supports of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and took it down. I
mean, first of all, it's kind of amazing because you see these things
floating and you think, you just forget, that's an enormous amount of mass
traveling at a speed, and it discusses in the water doesn't mean it's not
going to knock something down. And you just forget how big these things are.
These things are enormous, these container ships. And then the one thing
that struck me over and over again was that there's just an instant need for
people who don't know anything about it on social media to uh describe their specific
experts. Yeah, iowahawk, David berg I think's burg Bergie Burge said that
he said a propos nothing today. I thought I would just kick off this
new Twitter trend by mentioning three things I don't know anything about. One,
you know, Finnish epic poetry. Two intricacies of South Asian cuisine. Three
container shipping. Who's next? But the only thing I know about container ships
that I know a bunch, But I mean that is relative relevant here is
that if it was dirty fuel, which some people think it was, that
fuel had to probably came from the Baltimore Harbor, right the bunker in the
harbor? Or is that the newest thinking? That basically the power went off,
the boatstalled, and that it that it's important people remember that the person
guiding the these container ships in and out of the harbor of every harbor around
the world. It's a pilot, a local it is always a local pilot.
It is never the master of the ship. And this has been true
for I mean maybe a century. This has been true for a long long
time. And then the other thing that's about it is how amazing it is
that they get these pilots on the ship. Depending on how fancy the the
the harbor is. On the way in, they sometimes send out a tug
right or a speedboat with a pilot on it. They also in big sports
like Shanghai and I think I think sometimes Long Beach, which is I think
the biggest part in the world, second bigestport in world, they chopper the
guy in that I just kind of dangles down and just jumps on on the
deck. Yeah. Really, it's a pretty amazing thing. And then I
saw it. I saw it a bunch of times. And then the master
who's in charge of this giant thing, stands back and the pilot just takes
over. So that was what was happening there. And then the second thing,
the most interesting thing for me, because as you know, I'm kind
of junkie about this stuff, is the economic ripple effects huge one ship,
one bridge, one bridge, and just the fact that I think we tend
to think of ourselves as like, well, it's all about software, it's
all about these sort of bits going through the pipes. And the twentieth century
we think was brought to us by computers, and I just don't think that's
true. I think the modern world's brought to us by container shipping. It
is the most remarkable thing I think the past one hundred years. Maybe AI
will exceed it at some point, but right now it's still container shipping.
And started because a guy who ran a trucking company in the southeastern part of
United States, I think is his name is mac McLaren was upset that his
trucks would go to the Savannah or the Wilmington or any of these ports,
and it take them three days to unload a truck and load it on the
boat, or to load the truck back up with stuff from the boat.
Remember there's a cargo nets of cargo nets, a giant net. Yes,
yes, yes, yes, And he thought it's got to be an easier
way. Why don't we just take the back of the truck off the truck
and put it in the boat, and then why don't we make it the
size of the thing that goes on rolling stock for trains. Why don't we
make it all the same thing? And it seems so obvious now, so
obvious, But the time and the point you make at how recent this development
is in historical terms. You and I know gym Mattis. Jim Mattis is
former Secretary Defense, former four star in the Marine Corps, a colleague of
mine at the Hoover Institution. When Jim Mattis was if I recall this correctly,
sixteen or seventeen years old, he somehow became interested in Eric Hoffer.
Do you remember that name. I know, the name Eric Hoffer was the
kind of the common man's philosopher. Eric Coffer was a working man in San
Francisco, and his job was something that no longer exists and these days even
sounds quaint. He was a Steve Adore. Steve Adore. And if you
look at the movie again, it's not that long ago. This was a
post war movie. It's a great movie. There's a good argument that was
Marlon Brando's best performance on the Waterfront. All of those men were Steve Adores.
They handled. These were human beings who carried objects onto ships locally into
those cargo nets exactly. I'm the reason I'm mentioning Jim Mattis is that Jim
Mattis is not an ancient person. He's retired, but he's not some sort
of century old relic. And Jim hitchhiked from his home in Oregon down to
San Francisco, no appointment, no nothing, showed up on the docks in
San Francisco and started asking guys around for Eric Hoffer. And it took about
twenty minutes before the Oh, Eric's right out there, and he saw Eric
Coffer sitting on a pier eating a sandwich. It was his lunch break.
And Eric Coffer had big arms and big hands because he was a workingman.
His classic book is the true believer. In any event, I'm just trying
to point this out that this was all recent. It is within living memory
that global trade became possible on something like the scale we have today because of
the innovation of cargo shipping. Here's what you tell me, what you say,
I'm kind of struck. The very first impulse, at least as reflected
on Twitter, was somebody must have been drunk. They were doing drugs.
The pilot didn't know what he was doing. The captain must have been something.
Actually, as far as I can tell, the human beings behaved promptly
and quickly. As soon as the engine failed, there was an emergency message
to the poort authority. It took them something like thirty seconds to block traffic
on both ends of that bridge. So I believe the men who whom we
now presumed dead were maintenance workers of some kind. Can you imagine what would
have happened. I mean, we know what it's like to drive down the
I ninety five corridor. So this is one of those instances where it does
seem to have been mechanical failure. The human beings performed as they should have.
Remarkable, as far as I can tell, Am I mistaken? No?
I think you're absolutely right. I think that actually happens up and down
the chain of container shipping. In general. It's the most important thing in
the world, and everybody's a professional and they kind of know that it's the
most important thing in the world, so they're kind of professional and they're professional
in the when you come steaming into Shanghai or Tianshan, which is the Hong
Kong or Bossan, South Korea, as I've done, or Long Beach or
Seattle or Oakland. They kind of like they they considering how much gets passed
by, passed along the shipping lanes, and that everything we look at,
even it's, you know, insanely trivial, is often delivered to us by
a container. It kind of works. I mean, I actually feel like
that happens more often than not. That the normal people doing important jobs.
You think to yourself, why aren't they in charge? Because the people in
charge tend to be horrible. Although I suspect that I expect that they think
I do. By the way, another famous stevid or Is was a Senator
Patrick Moyne. He was a steved or worked on the docks and said he
just you could just up in the hell's kitchen, I guess in the Irish
part of the old Irish part of town in New York. You could just
walk a few blocks to the Hudson River docks. Yes, and he could
to show up and they would just give you a job. But it took
a long time. And so the other story here for if you're a free
market conservative is that unions fought I mean, I completely understandably fought container shipping
tooth and nail because they knew that once should make it easier. You don't
need stevedores. And so now guys they sit on top of cranes and they
move these giant I mean, now it's an amazing ballet. I sat on
the top deck of the of the Hand in Miami, in the Bussan Port,
and I sat on a folding chair on the deck, smoking a cigar
and watching just under, just above me, hundreds of containers being removed from
the ship, rearranged and put back and reloaded onto the ship. It by
five guys and five cranes, and it was like a crazy ballet. Rob.
I want you to know. I want you to know that everybody who
knows you expect that when there is hard physical labor to be done, so
you're sitting at a lawn chair smoking a cigar. That is so true.
Speaking of true, we have one of the great writers, great writer and
also great novels. So I'm separating these two things. Great political, great
popular crime and mystery novels. Andrew Claven, our friend Drew, but also
a thoughtful, smart and delightfully humorous and fun political and cultural commentator. He's
the host of The Andrew Claven Show. He's been I think that's a daily
wire, has been social daily wire for bazillion years. I'm trying to be
nice to him, so because I could. I'm going to stop the minute
he gets here and just say, you gotta if you if you're looking for
a great read, cup, but a bunch of great true crime, Empire
of Lies, the House of Love, the House of Love and Death,
along with his memoir The Great Good Thing and the Truth and Beauty. Uh
he is. Ah. He is a truly truly renaissance writer and a wonderful
guy and a great friend of course that you and I can't stand the son
of them. Yeah, you guys told you. And uh, and so
he's here, and so we're gonna gon attempt to be nice and respectful.
Drew Happy Mandy Thursday. Do you celebrate that? I don't know. I
do a weird sect you're in that we know we stuck? Is he really
though? I don't know. No, I'm an actual Christian. That's so
you do the whole God thing, you guys. Yeah, yeah, we
were past that, the Pascapelian faith. I understand. Yeah, I was
there. Okay, so look, let's just I don't want to talk about
this, right, but let's just do it so we can do it.
You're associated with Daily Wire. You've been there for a long time, uh,
Benjapiro, Jermy Boring, good friends of ours, good friends of Ricochet.
You had a you had a I don't know, a contributor to somebody.
I don't I can't quite understand the structure that Candace owens. In my
opinion, this happened too late. But okay, you got rid of her,
and then all hell broke loose because you said something because she some You're
gonna have to sorry, you just have to. You've got to back it
up and explain Candace and what she did and why she Just give us a
paragraph you got from Okay, and let me let me just say, first
of all, I've been with the Daily Wire. At the beginning. It
was me and Jeremy and Ben. That's how it started. You know,
you know, given the cast of characters, it is just astonishing that that
thing has succeeded. That we're not all on the street or in jail.
I know, it's amazing. I don't know what I don't know what went
wrong. We were trying our best, but you know Candace. I spotted
Candas instantaneously when she was on YouTube back in the day and she had a
small following and she was kind of doing a Blexit thing, you know,
black should get out of the Democrat Party. And I thought that I have
an eye for broad sort of a decade ago. Yeah, yeah, okay,
yeah, And I have an eye for you know, broadcast down because
I grew up my father was a big radio guy, and I've always been
able to spot it from a mile away. That's why I never talked to
you guys. And I saw her, I invited her on my show.
She walked out. I literally walked down the hall to Jeremy's offices before he
had the Throne room, you know with the guys with the spears and everything.
I walked out to Jeremy's office and I said, if you want to
hire a woman, I just met her. She's fantastic. He wouldn't do
it, you know, it wasn't time, and so he when he finally
went back to her, she had become this massive, massive success and cost
him a bundle. And I laughed at him. I've never seen a broadcaster
quite that talented or as charismatic and some of the stuff. And I don't
want to make this about her because I wish her well and I always got
a lot with her. I didn't know her very well. I'd see her
in hair and makeup and stuff, and I, you know, we'd say
hello, and we were always very friendly, always had some you know,
funny chats, never had a problem, and I now today wish her well.
However, the integrity of what the Daily Wire is saying really matters to
me. And we have lots of different different opinions. We have people,
you know, like Michael Knowles and should obviously be in prison, and then
we have Ben Shapiro who's fantastic, and you know, it's like really really
a wide spectrum of people. And she would say things like about, I
don't know, you know, nine to eleven's kind of hinting that there was
nine to eleven was an inside job, or the moon landing was a fake
and all this stuff. And you know, to me whatever, you know
that her audience loved it. She's a talented person. Everybody chooses how they
use their own talent. Then it started to get I thought a little dark
you know. I mean, she started to say things about the Jews,
and she kept coming back to the Jews. And you know, there was
a time when Kanye said I'm going to go Defcon three or whatever you said
on Jews, and she backed him up. And now she was her friend,
and I thought, all right, she's showing some loyalty in all this.
But then it got to be some stuff that you know, she got
an argument with Ben Shapiro and online and she said he was all about the
money. He can't serve God and money. And then she used this phrase
Christ is King, which has become and I believe that, I believe that
Christ is King, but it's also become a catch phrase of guys like Nick
Fuentes who are open Jew haters and basically feel this is white man's country.
Flentes has said, this is a white man's country and the Jews are an
alien race here, the hat us and all this stuff, and so that
phrase, you know, and I'm getting this stuff from good people Christians saying
how could Christ the King possibly be? You know, an even phrase?
And you know, Jesus said, you may call me lord lord, but
if you don't, you know, you don't serve my father in heaven,
then I don't care whether you folk, Floyd, I won't know you.
And so any phrase, of course can be used in a wicked way,
and anybody hail victory, Hail victory sick kile right, exactly exactly. So
it became uncomfortable for certainly for me, because I want to defend people and
I'm never going to attack my colleagues, and I never attacked her. And
finally they parted ways on the basis of the fact that this was hurting the
brand. I think, you know, I was getting to the point and
Jeremy talked to everybody and told him why he was doing it, and I
said on the air that I was proud of him. I thought he had
you know, obviously, these are very complicated things, their contracts and all
kinds of laws that you have to fulfill. But I thought he did the
right thing, and I thought he restored the integrity of what the Daily Wire
stands for, because it's not a question of free speech. She's absolutely free
to go and say whatever she wants, but the Daily Wire stands for something
and that's not it. Just like if as I made the comparison on the
air where I said, if I suddenly thought, hey, abortion's great,
you know, I would have to leave, you know, or keep my
mouth shut. I couldn't go in there because we don't believe that. We
think it's a bad thing, you know. So Drew, may I quote
someone who is a friend of all three of us, the late Christopher Hitchins.
Here's the quotation. Anti Semitism. So seldom a good sign. That's
great, it was the best. I repeatedly called it the devil's flagpole.
It's like it knows no side, it knows no team, it knows no
party. Wherever it shows up, you know that you're dealing with. So
could I just ask you're you're I just do not. I live on the
edge of the Stanford campus and I work in the middle of it Stanford.
These kids are brilliant, and some of by the way, I will stipulate
that it is a small proportion of the kids. It's very it's but it's
loud, and it's visible, and it is anti Semitic, and so I
do not understand I of my generation. I can tell you two stories.
My mother's one of my mother's best friends brought her mother, who was an
old lady to our house when I was a little kid, and my mother
said, come over here, I want you to meet her. And I
met her, and then my mother said, take a look at this.
And the old lady showed me numbers on her arm, and my mother said,
I'll explain this later, but I want you to see it. So
that was the kind of thing that was the sort of mindset in the in
gentile middle class America when I was growing up. There was something horrible that
had happened singular in all of human history. And if we understood one thing,
we understood that doesn't happen again, and somehow it's gone. I don't.
I just really it takes. Maybe I'm a fool, maybe I'm naive,
but I'm shocked. What do you make of it? Well, in
some of my earliest writing, I think in my first novel, when I
was like in my twenties, I called our general holiday Jews because this shock
of evil, this thing that brought down as far as i'm destroyed Europe.
These wars were the end of the great European culture. Had caused enough shame
in people of goodwill that they started to restrain themselves. You know, they
started to say, well, maybe the anti sentimentism thing isn't as much fun
as we thought it was going to be. And I always knew it would
pass. And the reason I truly believe this, the reason I believe it
is pass is because through Jesus Christ, the central ethos of the Jews has
spread through all Christendom, right, I mean, what do they believe to
be good to the poor? To you know, act humbly and act justly
and walk humbly with your God and love mercy. Those are things. You
know. Jesus didn't just make that stuff up. He wrote it, and
they passed on to the Jews, and then he inherited it from the Jews
in physical forms, and so as that's I think a lot of times the
people who hate the Jews hate that about themselves. You look at Wagner trying
to establish, you know, a German pagan mythology, trying to go back
before and I think that that's why it keeps coming up, because it keeps
making us take stock of the rights of women, the rights of the poor,
the rights of the humbles, the weakest among us. And who needs
that, you know? I mean, it gets in the way of all
the fun victory and punching people out and conquering places. And I think that
that just spreads spread, and it's not a coincidence that Europe destroyed itself in
this absolute the explosion of jew hatred. I mean, I think that that
was the end of their civilization and at the end of what was then called
Christendom because of that reaction to it. And I do not think, you
know, even the idea that the Jews kill Christ, which I still hear
people of goodwill using the Jews represent everybody in the New Testament, you know,
and we sing that him, you know, I I it was who
denied the eye crucify that we sing that to him. That's right, that
is that is what that means. And even that I think is rejecting the
entire gift that we were given through Christ in the name of the Jews.
So they put it on the Jew so nobody has to say, oh,
I don't like Jesus. But really that's I think that's the Jews they're attacking.
You know. It reminds me, reminds me of a wonderful story about
John Wayne. On his deathbed, one of his Jewish friends dropped in and
was teasing him and said, well, we all know you don't like Jews,
because Wayne didn't care, and they got his friends that I know you
don't like Jews, and Wayne said, the only Jew I don't want to
meet is the one up there. I think. I think that that's who
they're really rejecting, and that's why it will never go away until it all
goes Overay, you know, that's kind of had. I do agree with
you, especially today's Mandy Thursday, Tomorrow is good Friday. So that we
hear the story again. And the more you hear the story, we're times
you get the story, the more different parts you play in it, I
think in your head, Like for me, you know, the I did
once one year on Palm Sunday. We read it and sort of do we
did the passion of the church I go to, and so we read it
out loud and so people read the parts. And the part I really wanted
was Pilot because it's the best part, you know, it's the best part
of it. And I got Pilot, And so for a long time I've
just thought of, you know, well, that's what I'm that's what I
would be, That's who I would be. I'd be the guy just trying
to figure out a way out of this problem who doesn't really care. But
it's hard not to get chills down your spine when you realize Palm Sunday,
the cloaks on the path and the palms and the we're hey, welcome,
welcome, welcome, and then a few days later crucifying the same people,
And it's hard not to think that's us, right, that's everybody. It's
everybody, religious, religious people, the political people, the people people,
it's everybody, you know, and it's everybody. And there's one or two
guys, I mean, even Peter his like do your stuff? Yeah,
yeah, they flay, they're gone, they're's just history. I was in
Jerusalem last year. You go to this this beautiful church, uh uh,
the commemorate it built on the spot where Saint Peter denied Christ three times.
Be kind of weird, if you know, if you somehow Peter comes back
and he says, you know, I did a lot of other stuff.
This is the one like I did some stuff that church right here, like
my worst moment. But in a way that's kind of you know, that's
sort of the story of our faith. Okay, But so before we get
to faith, because I know I want to talk about you know, it's
Holy Week. Do you guys celebrate Holy Week? I don't know what you're
weird doing. No, I'm in I am an Anglican Catholic. I've never
sled. My theology is actually Catholic. But I'm not beholden to the Vatican.
So oh, there you go, okay, and into behead my wife,
which is all. And I'm sure if you are married to you wouldn't
want you to church. Will say, uh uh, just to go back
to Polish for a minute. Do you think it's the larger I mean the
is the is what happened Daily Wire, the Cannas, Daily War. Think
is that a fractal of the conservative movement? A little bit like there are
now there are? Do we need? I mean William F. Buckley famously
you know, I don't know, the word purage is not correct, but
he identified and refocused the conservative movement in the fifties and sixties away from kind
of you know, John Bercheriy stuff and towards you know, free market,
uh freedom, national security, yeah, anti socialism essentially. Do we need
to do we need to do that? I think we're going to have to
deal with a segment of conservatism. It's kind of the Patrick Denin crowd who
feels that this liberal business, liberal in the good sense of the word,
has been a failure. And right now I totally understand that. It's good
Friday. It's this is the moment when everything looks bleakest. And it does
look bleak to me. I mean it's we have lost our way. We're
you know, boarding like nine hundred and sixty thousand babies a year. The
Democrat Party is giving a standing ovation to abortion. The State of the Union,
where you know, I laugh because it's corruption makes me laugh, but
like that's a you know, that's a bad sign for America. And when
you talk about you know, we're butchering children in the name of the name
of changing their sex, which is impossible. And we remember John Adams saying
this is a constitution for moral and religious people, and I think, like,
oh, you know, that's that's not a good thing. And so
I understand why a lot of these young kids, and it's especially Generation Z,
because twenty twenty came along. They looked out their windows, they saw
people looting stores and burning buildings, and they turned on the TV, and
people were saying, well, it's mostly peace, it's mostly these are mostly
peaceful. And they were told that they had to stay in their homes and
let their grandmother die alone. But it was okay to go to a riot
because you know, and I've talked to them. I've talked to these twenty
four to twenty five year old kids. That's their political moment in the same
way for me, like maybe the assassination of Kennedy or you know, the
Nixon was my political moment. That is their political moment. And so they
think these people hate me. These these people don't like me. They don't
like the constitution parenthesis add to that to put in another dimension on exactly the
same point that you're making. I'm conscious of it because I work at a
university. The kids are smarter. The kids now know and we all knew
very quickly that people in their twenties and younger were at essentially zero risk of
COVID, right, and all these universities charged the families full tuition and shut
down. And these kids know they were being lied to worse than that,
they were being robbed. Their parents were being robbed. That's right, all
right, No, none of those people has been punished. None of them
has left lost their reputation, one of them has lost their office. Nothing.
So none of them has so much as apologized as apologize exactly. So
this is this is the moment that they're in and there's thinking, you know,
maybe what we need They call it red Caesar. We need a red
Caesar to come and take over this republic business and re establish this sort of
chain of command from God to the king to the people, and that'll that's
going to bring it back. And they've forgotten the concerns of the founders,
which is that you give people power they think, you know, and you
have to divide the power and set it off against each other. They've forgotten
that they're not They're not. I'm making them a little simplistic. They actually
do have a sort of politics. It's a little more complicated than that.
They want to sort of country, this run like a corporation. But they
want to get rid of this liberalism stuff and this republic stuff. And I
understand that, but that's it's a despair as a self fulfilling prophecy. And
I think if we decide that it's over, it'll be over where I think
there's a fight to be had, and I think it's a fight, you
know, worth worth having. We may lose, that's the way fights are,
right, There's no guarantee that we can get back to our our constitutional
rights. But I think it's still worth having that fight. And yeah,
I I buy that, right. But I also I mean, I'm I
believe despair is a sin. I don't despair. Good Friday. Still we
still know what happens at the end. I mean, last night was the
celebration of Tenebray. I don't know, you're a weird cult, but we
do tennibray in mine, uh, which is kind of line of ray.
Yeah, it's right, that's right, capsule version of the Holy Week call
kind of a in wine. It's super dark at the end, but it's
kind of light at the end because one candles still live. All the great
movements were maybe not great, but like big movements in American history, you
know that only have been a few, right, Abolition, temperance, civil
rights. The's all been essentially religious movements. They started in church. They
started as religious movements, and they were not political movements until much later,
to some success. If you're trying to ban alcohol in this country, which
they did always surprises me, and to some moderate lack of success, depending
on how inevitable you think the Civil War was. But they started from the
idea of persuasion. You go from town to town, you stand on the
back of a pickup truck or a back of something, and you talk to
people and you persuade them. My problem with the contemporary conservative movement that you're
describing is that it seems to be seems to think that we live in some
kind of parliamentary system where all you need to do is win by one vote
and you get everything you want, and it's, I mean nice. You
can fantasize about it, cast about it all you want, but that is
not the system we have. And it seems to me that the one smart
thing, not one, but many smart things, among the many smart things
the left has done and done relentlessly since the sixties is never stopped talking and
persuading to the American people. And it's only recently that it's gotten mean and
vicious, and you know it's it's it's kind of revealing its clause. But
mostly the country has moved left relentless, slower or faster, depending on who
the president was what the cultural tides were. Why can't we do that?
Yeah? Why is it always rage and anger? And I mean the buzz
is divisive and still it's divisive, but I mean the division is a very
bad way to convince people. The best example of this is abortion, which
is now more popular than it was when they overturned Roe v. Wade because
these guys are like, you know, you these poor politicians have no guts,
they have no spine, and the people want them to get out and
say we must ban abortion. Well, you know, Abraham Lincoln said,
public sentiment. You know, you cannot do anything until you have public sentiments.
So convincing people comes before passing laws. And I think that we don't
do it. We want everything on Everything on the right is a crisis.
Everything has to be dealt with right away. We cannot possibly wait. The
left has this spidery patient where they just wait and wait and wait and just
push it. And remember Barack Obama saying, oh, you know, marriage
is between a man and a woman. He didn't believe that he was flying.
You know. Then the minute he wins in the Supreme Court, he
lights up the White House with with rainbow lights to tell fifty percent of the
country screw you. This isn't your house, it's my house. That's and
so you know, he played his he played the long game, and we
never do that. And it is profitable for people who go on the air,
who just talk, to play into that anger and to play into that
urgency's profitable. Yes, it gets the numbers. Yes, yes, that's
what I mean. I've noticed sometimes when I'm talking to conservative donors or conservative
you know, supporters, you'll mention some projects this or that and the other,
and they'll say, hey, that sounds great, you know, be
great. If you get like back in the day when he was on Fox,
Tucker, Well, Tucker, do you think Tucker would cover this?
Or Laura? I'm always like, that's who cares people watching Tucker and Laura
already agree, yeah, that's not who we're going after. And if you
ask, you know, like what, I still find it amazing people say
that, well, you look how popular some of those shows are. You're
telling me the country is not conservative, But well, the country's got three
hundred ffty million people in it, and a whole bunch of them vote now,
and you got to win by more than one vote. If you want
to do anything. I mean, you don't have to win by more than
one vote to actually take office. You could do that, but you're not
going to be able to do nothing. Yeah, there's also this illusion that's
you know, I've been getting attacked on social media. Kansas came after me
and all our followers, and they're calling me names and all this stuff.
They keep saying things like he's over, he's done, And I think,
like, you don't understand, you're not in the real world. This little
place, seven of you talking to each other, and it sounds like a
movement, but it's not, you know, And it's it's that that illusion
is magnified by a press that falls into it. But look at look at
what they do. I to apologize you. I was doing the tweeted.
I know that I do that every week. Yeah, and I appreciate the
postcards as well. I think that's old fashion. But the effect, yeah,
like, I know you, I know you're o G. But but
I mean I think that this is you know, when you look at the
at the left right now, they are afraid. I mean, when you
see the NBC has to fire this rhino, it's kind of mild mannered you
know, d N for former are Republican Party chairman chairwoman. They got a
fire while having Jen Pasaki on their team. You know, that's like,
we can't possibly have a Republican The biggest example is Elon Musk. I mean,
Elon Musk is everybody's hero. He's got an electric car, he's going
to solve the climate crisis, is going to go to Mars. Then he
buys Twitter and lets people like me talk and stop standing. You know,
I gain fifty thousand followers, like in a day after Elon Musk took over,
maybe two days, you know, and suddenly he's being investigated by every
agency in the government. You know, he's there. The attempts to silence
us are insane. And instead of understanding, oh wait, we're actually kind
of on the cusp of winning, which I think is what's happening. Let's
let's play our cards right, Let's do the right thing. Let's convince people,
let us, you know, show people good. We constantly blow it.
There's so much anger. You know. One of the things I sincerely
believe is I sincerely believe we're at the end of something, namely me and
my generation. We've come to the end this, and two things have failed.
One this failed is the Great Society. The Great Society has been an
utter, complete, total failure. It has been bad for black people,
it's been bad for the country, it's been bad for the Constitution. It's
just a complete, utter failure. So now what you have. And they
kept it in line by calling people racist when they opposed it. So now
what you have is they're the racist. They're saying, oh, we'll hire
you because you're black. You know you want to be a surgeon. You
don't know anything about medicine. That's okay, you're black. Well, you
know you can do surgery, you can fly a plane. We don't care
because they're trying to prop up this dead thing. The other thing that has
failed is kind of anti Roosevelt conservatisms, the idea that we're somehow going to
completely be the first, you know, democratic nation on earth to get rid
of our welfare state instead of reforming it and cutting it back. And so
you have Donald Trump, who sounds makes all the noises of a conservative but
isn't conservative at all. He is, I mean, Ben Shapiro keeps saying
he's the most moderate candidate running, which is absolutely true. He's got a
little left the center. He's just you know, but he's got all the
gestures. So it's this empty suit and they love it. I mean,
look what the way they follow him, you know. And I'm not a
hater of Trump. I don't like hate the guy. I thought he did
a pretty good job for three years actually, but I do find him kind
of awful in a lot of ways, and he's a bore and all this
stuff. But they just love him because he sounds, he's got that,
he's talking, he speaks their their anger. I sympathize with their anger.
I know why they're angry. They've been insulted for fifty sixty years. But
still those two things have failed. And it really is time for the right
to start thinking what do we want? What do we want? All this
time we've been talking about freedom. Every possible right wing thing is the liberty
this, and the liberty that, and the egle that and the all American
this is liberty, liberty, American eagle and all those things. And now
they're saying, and we want a king, So I know, excuse me
for a little bit, just for years, right, yeah, clean,
two weeks to stop the right. That's basically what it is exactly. Okay,
So you believe that it's good Friday culturally, politically, and that Easter
Easter Sunday's coming. Yeah. Is that fair? Yes, not just politically
and culturally. I believe it. That's the truth. I believe that.
I believe that this amazing thing happened and it has changed everything. Yeah,
and the evidence is on my side. It's true. A good friend of
mine who converted from he was sort of very secular jew and he converted to
Catholicism and I asked him, I said, why on earth did you do
that? And he looked at me and he said, well, I think
it might be true. For one thing. I think it's really kind of
answer. I don't know. I think it might be true. So I
would not I would not have converted if I didn't think that. I truly
would not have. You know. I mean, obviously these late the layers
of meaning all pan out, so you can get you know, it's okay
for a while to go into one layer of meaning that's beyond the facts and
is just explaining other things to you. But ultimately, if it didn't happen,
as Paul says, if it didn't happen, then we're fools to believe
it. But but it kind of clearly, did you know. I mean,
it's kind of I keep saying. Somebody somebody said, why do you
believe this? And I said, well, there's more evidence than for the
assassination of Julius Caesar. I mean, the evidence for you know, it's
not like they made it up. Yes, exactly, And and I think
that it really is interesting the war that I know this sounds like Fox News,
but it's just true that Jesus ed, don't worry. You do not
sound like news anymore. You used to just relax on that one somebody on
the wars from Damascus and fell off. No, I mean the edited Jesus
out of everything. You know, there's a the book Reviews that I read
a biography of Dostoevsky, and it's like when Dusty, if he's talked of
Christ, he was really talking to the Russian people. I don't think so.
I think that's what I've read all his books. You know, that's
what he was talking about. And they and you know, if you watch
like the Johnny Cash biography, there's seven seconds where he goes into a church.
That was the meaning of Cash's life, the last third of his life,
you know, that was and they do it in every film except the
Christian films, which are you know, kind of dopey because everything is happy
and great, which is another thing that the Bible doesn't teach us at all.
But the people the power that this has, that the people who want
power have to silence it is evidence in its favor, you know. And
and it really is remarkable. And I think that people in America have been
spoiled. You know, you have to go back and remember, like,
yeah, the first people who believed in this were like used as human torches
through to lions. Yeah, and like you know, so we get thrown
off of Twitter, you know, or something like that, and it's like,
oh my god, there's a war on Christianity. Like it's going to
get a lot worse. You know. That is that is one of the
weird experience of reading the Book of Acts or anything like that. I say
that sat yeah whatever, I have that say you like google it? Oh
plade, Yeah good, that sounds that sounds un And I understand what they
all later. They all want to go to the desert just to get away
from these people. Uh so you converted. I just I just want to
follow. So you convert, you went all the way to Anglicanism, why
not just keep going? I mean, I know I'm want to speak to
Peter here. You just one more step. I'm just still waiting. Who
moved? Like people who moved, you know, they would go, they'd
move from the East coast or Chicago, l A. And they would stop
and like, but you could see why there was something like them bees right
there? Keep going, just keep what you walk on it right, it's
been almost exactly twenty years was baptized, almost exactly twenty years ago. You
were married, you you got married before your conversion. Oh, I've been
married for fifty years. I mean, so what effect. I've only met
your wife twice, I think, and she's a lovely person. NIC's like
the nice well she would have to be right, she's the nicest person on
earth. Yeah, Christian rob is handling the interrogation here, But at some
point I'd like to know the effect on your wife or what she made of
all this. That is a major change to announce in the family. You
know, three weeks after I was baptized, she turned to me and she
said, you know, you've changed completely and I who had You know,
you don't you know, you don't notice one. It's you, you know,
like, I said, what do you mean? She said? She
said, it's like you're serene. You're like a totally different person. She
said it to me again about three months ago, because it is true.
I've gone through, and you know, you get it gets deeper and deep.
You know this great C. S. Lewis line where you invite the
guy in to do some carpentry and he tears down the house and builds it
back up again, and you know, it has been That has been my
experience. The most exciting part of it is the it's an infinite distance.
You're constantly moving towards the center, toward the light, which is just a
joy. You know, like I should be I'm one hundred and twenty two
years old. I should be, you know, kind of solidifying your affairs.
But instead, you know, you keep moving towards this light and it's
very beautiful. And yeah, I'm like nothing like what I was twenty years
ago. And I don't think it's age. I think it's God and it's
an a It's been an amazing experience and h and just a it's just a
joy, which is kind of like this week. Every now and again,
I had a great week and a lot of wonderful things were happening, you
know, just professionally and personally and all this stuff. And then every now
and again I go on X and they're just be like I hete Drew.
Yeah, my goodness. Yeah, like the mom is not far from your
door. So I did this. I do a little commentary issue in the
public radio in LA called Martini Shot. Now I do it. Oh,
Michael, Yes, you opened with the story about a certain unnamed friend who
I believe was me and your life. Yeah, you were the unnamed friend.
I just I did one recently. I told a story but a friend
of mine had an MBA and he said, but it doesn't you know,
you show himus spreadsheet. He just know, he says. My NBA did
not take. But I talked about a little bit about the scariest word in
Hollywood, which was I think last week before, which is Jesus. It's
just a scary word. And I don't think it's necessarily because people are anti.
Really, I don't really think they have a belief that structure that keeps
them from making money like that they the guy's doing the Chosen or the Sound
of Freedom or the one of them movie mal Cabrini. I don't think that's
what it is. I just think it's there, like this is this is
dangerous. We don't think about it. Everybody's so touchy kind I just avoid
it. Could I trot out of theory for you, two old friends of
mine that has just been it's half formed. I haven't and I haven't said
it out loud to any So this is the first time. But since nobody
listens to this podcast anyway, it's just the three of us. It's like
a safe space exactly. It's a very safe space. Okay. So it
begins with a story years ago when Milton Friedman died. Bill mcgern got in
touch and said his friend Jimmy Lai was coming from Hong Kong to San Francisco
to pay his respects to Rose Friedman. He'll be in San you meet him,
all right, So I, Jimmy Lai and I sat down for breakfast.
Jimmy Lai, who is now in prison, we sat down. We
had a three hour breakfast. It was one of those breakfasts that ended at
lunchtime and he. I was full of questions about China, and this one
I remember in particular. The fallen Gong was in the news followon Gong,
a kind of crazy small sect, and I said, why do the Chinese
authorities care about the falloon Gong? It's best I can tell. It's it's
tiny and it's great. And Jimmy Lai explained, oh no, no,
here, this is what you need to understand. Maoze Doun eliminated Confucianism,
and then Deng Xiaoping eliminated Maoism, and now you have a country of over
one billion people who believe in nothing but material gain, and they know that's
not all there is. Any system of belief could take off in China,
and that's why they're even worried about the fell and Gong. All right,
I now have come to the conclusion. It's not a conclusion, it's tentative.
It may be crazy, and the two of you may say so that
something like that is true in this country. When I first came to the
Hoover Institution, Milton Friedman was still very much with us, and oddly enough,
his office was just down the hall from Lin I stopped. We chatted
from time to time, and he explained to me that he went into economics
because he grew up during the Great Depression, and the overwhelming question of the
day was how do we organize our society to meet our material needs? People
needed jobs and they couldn't find them. There were people who had trouble feeding
their family. Of course, he decided the answer was free markets. But
that was the question of the time when we were kids and in college.
I remember long bull sessions in the dorm. The Cold War actually did matter
to us, Vietnam, Matt. So how do we establish peace? How
do we win in this death grip struggle with communism? Kids today have grown
up in a period of immense prosperity. That's not their question, and a
period of relative peace, that's not their question. Their question is what does
it all mean? And the left understands that, I think instinct. That's
why Jesus is so scary. I because totally agree with this. I totally
agree. Is that right? Yes, the left totally gets it. That's
they speak morally. They address issues from a moral standpoint. We have had
this stupid thing about you know. They transformed Reaganism into pure capitalism, you
know, and neighbor, and it was never that. And and capitalism prostitution
is capitalism selling fentanyls. Capitalism obviously, it rests on top of a set
of values. And people are terribly lost. We have this. I wrote
about this. I have a sub stack with my son Spencer called The New
Jerusalem where we discussed faith. That's all we talk about. He's actually one
of the best exegutes I know, he's a brilliant guy. And I was
saying, you know, there's this I can't even remember the word for it.
It's this wonderful word that I just discovered called ultra crepidarianism, which is
people, which is people who think that because they're an expert in one thing,
they're an expert in another. And we have these years now of scientists
saying, well, there is no God, any think like, what do
you know about you know, Hey, you're an astrophysicist. I respect that,
but you don't know anything about this. You know, and you read
them, you read if you sit and read Richard Dawkins, a guy actually
like in respect us in terms of what he's trying to do with science,
you didn't know anything about theology, doesn't he doesn't know what he's talking about,
you know. And and Stephen Pinker is another one. Stephen Pinker has
this long thing in one of his dope His books are ridiculous, but he
has where he talks about the ghost in the machine. There's no ghost in
the machine. I thought nobody's believed. That's sin State cart like, that's
right, that's right, And they didn't believe it before tanke Art, you
know. And so you know that we've had this long idea that the cool
kids, the smart kids don't believe, and throughout history the opposite has been
the case, the dopes didn't believe. And I believe that remains true today.
And I've been saying for a long time, probably a decade. I've
been saying that there is going to be a rebirth, and it's going to
come from the top, because what we need are some of the people who
look around at the at their intellectual accomplishments and say, you know what,
none of this holds up if we don't start with faith. You know,
I remember reading this has to come from the top, Yes, the intellectual
top let us definitely. Yeah, no, I mean, but but you
know, I think that's really true. We used to have this thing called
the Great Conversation, which was the you know, Aristotle talking to Plato,
talking to Shakespeare talking to aquinas you know, like across time and people.
And I remember reading a book by a guy from Yale whose name escapes me,
but he said, you know, this isn't essentially a secular enterprise,
because once you have a religion, then a conversation stops. And I thought,
that's the very that would be Yale. It sounds and recently, and
I have to track this down. I believe he actually recanted and said,
no, that's not right, because I thought, like, what, you
know, you make your mind up when you see that the earth is not
flat, then you can't believe the earth is plat anymore. But there's still
millions of things to discover, and many of the great questions remain open.
And you know, one of the things that is that I find very distressing
about the Christian community, or at least a segment of it, is it's
certainties about certain things. You know, the Bible is words words when you
read them, or reading is an interpretive action. There are things to discuss,
things to have arguments about. I believe that God has fractured the Church
to make us understand that a lot of these things that seem in conflict will
actually ultimately come together and be united. And yet I have these people.
I mean, when I was talking about this situation as Daily Wire last week,
I was talking about my belief that I'm going to talk about again tomorrow
on my show that we don't know really who God is going to welcome into
the kingdom. And sometimes the people that he welcomes into the kingdom. In
the Bible things he says are people who didn't know that they were serving it.
You know. He says, you fed, you fed me, and
you gave me drink, and they say, huh, we didn't We didn't
know we were doing that, you know. And and and always by the
way, yes, yes, And all week long there's been this fury.
No, you must say christis king, you must say Jesus Lord. And
he says, in the Bible, many who call me lord lord are not
going to be And also he also says, you don't have to make a
big deal about it. Yeah, yeah, that that too, you know.
And you know, he said the one that always gets me is he
says, Samaritans, you worship what you do not know and then people say,
what should we be, Like, We'll be like the Samaritan because it's
the funny stuff in there. Yeah, there's some funny stuff in there,
right, and this only the two of you, only the two of you.
Come on, there's something comic material here. There's some great material in
there, some great bial got a crack up. He's like, well,
there's that great moment where U when he when he cures blind man spitting and
mud and he gets in trouble like the you know, the local you know,
bureaucratic rabbit says, how dare you cure somebody's blindness on the Sabbath?
That was his right, Like you think you're gonna cure blindness? Yeah,
I don't know. We could break we can bend the rule today. But
it's just this is pretty funny stuf. Right, Even Palm Sunday's got this
great moment. It's incredible scene. Right, He's coming in and on a
donkey and people are putting other cloaks in their palm fronds, and we celebrate
it, you know, two thousand plus years later incredible and marches into the
city and they takes a look around the temple and says, well, it's
getting late and they go home. They leave. You can't read that and
not do what Wait a minute, Like that was a major drum roll,
because yeah, they're still here, Okay, let's go home late. I
think because the hour was late. I think like, like, what took
us a little longer to get here? It's pretty funny. Hey, So
I so, I uh, I want to a book to somebody who said,
like, well, you know, here's why I believe that this is
true because a lot of it doesn't make any sense, and if we were
making it up, we would totally agree to stand off the edges, right,
I mean a story, you make up a story, it's like it's
got to be integrated. So the second thing i'd ask you, Drew,
because I know we're both you know, writers in the in the entertainment business.
When you're not writing ex. Podcast, Yeah, when you're not writing
explicitly about face, how is it? How does it fit? M hm?
You know when I when I realized that I had become a Christian,
which was an absolute shock to me. It was actually like a sort of
a bolt, you know, one of my great fears. Took me five
months to admit that it was true. I mean, I knew it because
it came into my head like bang, and then I thought, you know,
I must have misheard. I must Yeah. So one of my greatest
fears was that I was going to become one of these circular yellow smile smiley
faces like some of these Christians that I know who, and instead of writing
about hookers and gangsters, which is my milieu, you know, instead of
writing about tough guys mystery stories, I was going to end up writing about
like a little girl who lost her bunny. But Jesus brought it back again
and everything's great, you know. And one of the things that is really
interesting is that, in a lot of ways, as I've grown more joyful
within and I that's not happy, it's just vital and daffing gusto and all
that stuff. As I've grown more joyful within, my perspective has grown darker.
I now see, you know what they meant when they were talking about
the fall of man. You know, I look around and I think,
oh, yeah, you know, like you're talking about being shocked by the
anti Semitism now. And then you know, I just wrote this little piece
about gone with the Wind for our sub stack, and I said, you
know, it really is awful. The way they depict the slaves is happy
and well treated, and you know, the Leslie Howard one says, oh,
we treated them great, you know. But but even with that awfulness,
it gives you the feeling of what it was like to lose your civilization.
Because it's awful that we're killing a million babies a year. But we
don't sit around and think, oh, yeah, take our civilization. If
they took it away, we miss it. We miss America. There's many
beautiful things about it. And so suddenly the evil that we all do and
that we all live with, and that we're all kind of shrug off in
some ways even though it bothers us. Somehow, I have found that it
rises up and you sort of see the sulfur of smoke coming out. But
at the same time, you know that everything is somehow all right. You
know, it's you feel yourself moving into Flannery O'Connor territory. You know,
I understand why you say that. I find that I find that my view
of the in some way you're more straightforward, I think, is that right?
Yeah? Yeah, I mean, and she's dealing with a different Milia
I'm kind of dealing with this. I love this kind of stories I write,
and I'm writing now this series, which I've never done before, never
happened before, because I never found a character that I wanted to continue for
more than a couple of books. And I'm writing this series about a guy
and he's not a believer, and he's walking through the world slowly realizing that
everything he does believe in is dust. That nothing, Matt you know,
that that he thought mattered matters. And that's kind of the way that is
working. But the one thing that it did is it freed me from this
constant circular question of how can you know anything? Because ultimately they're things that
you actually know. You know. There was a moment when I wrote the
novel you mentioned the novel True Crime. There's a moment I think it's on
the front first page where he says, you know, the Chinese philosopher says,
how do you know? He's talking about guy in death Row, and
he says, the Chinese philosopher says, how do you know your or whether
you're a man dreaming you're a butterfly, or you're a butterfly dreaming you're a
man, and the narrator says, he you know, you know, yeah,
you actually now and that ended postmodernism for me. That that moment is
the moment when postmodernism died for me, you know. And I think that
that has just made me. If I may say so, I think my
work has gone. I am, like I said, I'm one hundred.
I think I'm one hundred and fifty seven. I may understand it before between
the best work of my life. There's no question in my mind that I'm
writing the best stuff of my life. I just finished a new nonfiction book,
the first draft, last twenty five pages of that. I just thought,
you know what, you might want to just shovel off right now.
I'm not sure you know you're going to top that, you know it.
It has really deepened my perspective, darkened it to some degree, but also
infused it with joy. It's an amazing experience. That's you know, I
recommend it to anybody, you know, I think like, if only for
the rewards, you know, the rewards are amazing. You do have to
get played. But that's as I've made not so much anymore. Yeah,
that's right for now. Yeah, this week, Hey Drew, Happy Eastern
Happy Easter to you guys. It's really great to see you. It's too
it's too long. You know, I don't live far away from you,
Rob, you know where do you live now? I live in right across
from DC and right across the river from DC. Why why did you say
that? Because my work is in Nashville. My grandchildren are in New York.
Okay, yeah, yeah, stop there, grandchildren. I get I
don't have grandchildren yet, but they may come, and I sort of I
sort of understand that. One. Yes, grandchildren in the Sistine Chapel are
the only two things I've ever found are as good as people say. They
are as much fun. And it's crowded, that is noisy, right,
not the grandchildren. Thank you, right, Happy Easter, See sooner,
hope. It's great to see it. Thanks a lot of guys, Thank
you. Take care. I think I am. I I think I've known
him. I mean maybe twenty years, maybe twenty years. You've known him.
You've known him then since before he became a Christian. When you knew
him, it was show business. That was the Yeah, he was a
scream. Was also before he was it before he was conservative, and before
you were before you were out of the closet as a conservative. No,
no, you were. You've been ready for Nashville for years. Written by
Delia Owens, A Girl on the Trade by which was hold on for some
reason, my alexis going off. Alexa stopped talking. I don't know why
she she kicked it because it was listing books by Drew Alex, you say,
Andrew Craven. Oh that's right. Wow, that's crazy. Okay,
that's funny. Yeah, they definitely stopped talking. I want to sell more
of his books. Yeah. No, I think I met him, and
I think I knew his work, and I think I met him, and
then I saw him at a Friends of ABE meeting, which we used to
have a big giant meetings or gatherings in southern California and Hollywood right for you
know, the center right really and at that point was the center right and
there he was. I was like, wait a minute, Andrew, Andrew
Claven's here, said yeah, like, what are you doing here? You're
in big trouble but wonderful right, wonderful, wonderful writer, and we're thrilled
to have him, and we're glad he's here. That's sort of remind me
I saw excuse me, but go ahead. C. S. Lewis wrote
someplace that the beginning of every friendship is always the same, and it always
arises from two words, you too. That's kind of true. That's kind
of true. And since that, of course, every time we get together,
it's so we usually insult each other and then disagree on certain things and
then you know, have a couple of drinks and it's fine. So you
have big Easter plans, Peter, Actually we have very small Easter plans.
We've been through holidays, a very eventful, tumultuous holidays with all the kids
coming home, and our oldest got engaged three weeks ago and and everybody is
gone and we will be on our own for Easter. So we do now
have big plans. We have quite small plans. Big holiday we'll enjoy.
We'll go to a restaurant and have a nice meal after Mass, and that
will be our Easter. What about you, that's a pretty good Easter.
Well, I'm gonna have some people in I think probably, oh really make
up a big paschal lamb and uh, you just got back from so I'm
gonna do, you know, be a big It'll be moye a Moroccan lamb,
but we'll have be have you know, Middle Eastern Maghrebian flavors to it.
I always like to do that. I was like to I'd like to
remind people and on Easter that it's not about ham, it's about lamb.
Nicely yes, yes, nicely done. Uh And I guess next week we're
going to be joined again. And I hope James comes back. I'm sure
he's going to come back, but I'm but we're doing a day early,
so we had a hard time scheduling, but he missed a good one before
we go. I should tell you this podcast was brought to you by the
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once again, ricochet dot com that's the place to be for conversation and friendship
and deep conversations like the one we just had, and super light ones like
the ones we have. Also here on the Ricksday Podcast, I'm Peter.
See you next week. Next week, Happy Easter, everybody, Cappy Easter.
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