Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister garbageaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward.
I'm James Lylyx. At today we talked to novelist, social commentator,
artist guy thinker Andrew Clayman about his new book A
Woman Underground. So let's have yourselves a podcast.
Speaker 2: And just the other day, speaker at his rally called
Puerto Rico a floating isle of garbage. Well, let me
tell you something. I don't know the Puerto rican that
I know, or Puerto Rico where I'm in my home
state of Delaware. They're good, decent, honorable people. Only garbage
I see floating out there is his supporters.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and fifteen.
I'm James Lylyx in Minneapolis, which is expecting snow that
I'm not ready for it, but bringing a sunny care
charmed to the rest of the podcast is Peter Robinson
and Stephen Hayward, who maybe, for all we know, in
Iceland or Madagascar or where do you happen to be Today's.
Speaker 1: I'm back home in California, where we are expecting our
first reign of the season sometime in the next week.
Speaker 3: Well, it is Halloween, and we won't talk about that
because by the time people get to this, that'll be gone.
I'm not looking forward to it, frankly, two hours of
door billing and dog barking and having to say cute
costume ol when what are you iron man? Of course.
But the other thing that will be pertinent by the
time this comes out is the election. So Peter Stephen,
it's coming down to it. Predictions more time.
Speaker 4: I'm going. I'll tell you what.
Speaker 5: I'm going around the neighborhood as a garbage man. Right.
Speaker 3: It was a brilliant bit of theater too. I mean
when he's standing up there and saying, you know, they
told me to where this night looks thin, that's all
it took. I mean, it's funny, he's having fun. Of course,
that man.
Speaker 5: Has his faults, but he is not Hitler for goodness sake.
So I'll trot it. I'll trot out my little bit
of thinking, and then I submit it to the adjustment
by the two of you.
Speaker 3: Polls.
Speaker 5: It seems to me you can never really trust the magnitudes,
but you can trust the direction. And in the last
couple of weeks they've all moved in Trump's direction by
how much in one battle of ground state after another.
It looks to me to be within the margin of error.
It looks to be to be remaining within the margin
of turnout operations. I'm not an expert on this by
any means, but I've heard over and over again from
people who are are experts that the Democrats turnout operation
is just better, more seasoned, more highly organized, better funded
than the Republican turnout operation. And also, if the margins
are as tight as they seem to be, it may
well remain within the margin of shineance, particularly in Philadelphia
and Milwaukee. So do I care to make a prediction?
I do not, it feels but of course it would
feel this way to me because I have certain hopes
I incline in this election. It feels to me as
though the man having fun is Donald Trump. It feels
to me as though the candidate behaving as though it
sees option options opening out in front of it. In
these last few days is the campaign of Donald Trump.
He's added a stop in New Mexico, which nobody thought
was in play until about seventy two hours ago, and
he seems to have added a stop in Virginia. Now,
whether that's really in play or just close enough to
enable him to mess with people's minds, I don't know.
But the movement, the fun, and the daring moves all
seem to be taking place on his side.
Speaker 1: Steve James, Well, I've always had a theory that the
camp pain it's having the most fun is usually the
winning campaign. That goes back to Reagan in nineteen eighty.
You remember Reagan used to get on his campaign plane,
he'd changed into a pair of sweatpants, and then as
the plane was taking off, he would roll an orange
down the aisle. This became kind of a you know,
fun thing for the press, Corn in the back and
all the rest of that. And and the campaign where
you're hearing rumors of backbiting and and you know, a
turmoil and trouble. That's always the losing campaign. That was
Bush in ninety two, for example. And you hear that
from the Harris campaign. Now, so look, I think Trump's
gonna win. I think it's possible he wins comfortably. And
here's there are two problems though, at least two problems,
leaving aside the cheating problem. One is that my hunch
is that the polls are going to be maybe not
as wrong as they were the last two cycles around,
but still under rating Trump's strength. Even if the error
on Trump's strength is half what it was last elections,
that still means he wins by a point and a
half in the national vote and in the swing states.
What makes me what's odd about this, since I do
follow polling way more than any sensible human should, is
all the polsters.
Speaker 4: Saying, boy, we're working really hard.
Speaker 1: To correct our under our undersampling and our underestimation of
Trump in the past, and yet all the major polls
are converging around the same point. I would expect more
variance in all the leading polls if the posters are
experimenting and trying to figure out ways to make up
with their defects instead of clustering together. And I think
that's no one wants to break from the pack, except
I will mention Peter, I know you were traveling. You
may have missed this. CNN had to pull out midweek
that had very good news for Kamala Harris. It's a
real outlier after By the way, the last CNN poll
that I remember was good news for Trump. So that's
a weird one, and we'll just have to pay attention
to that. But the other problem is, you know, early
voting started slowly and then has gone gangbusters the last
two three weeks. I think maybe it's now up to
like fifty million votes. One of the things I wish
we knew is how many of those people had second
thoughts after they cast an early vote. So here you
have all this business with garbage people and Puerto Rico
and all this crazy stuff at the end. And you know,
one of the arguments against early voting, aside from potential
fraud and so forth, is that you don't have the
late breaking information we're not all expressing. I'm an old
believer in the view that election day should be a
collective expression at a single point in time of almost
the entire electorate, and we don't have that now we
have election month, and I think that's a real civic problem.
So it's going to be interesting if we ever find
out the extent to which the early vote, which has
favored Republicans more this year than in the past, differs
substantially from the election day in person vote. One final
point about turnout. So here's the thing to think about, Peter,
And I've got to think Democrats are paranoid right now.
Their turnout operation has always been great. But who have
they targeted for maximum votes? Well, labor union members groups
where Trump is picking off large numbers of people. So
if I'm a Democratic operative right now, I'm terribly worried
that my turnout operation is going to turn out the
margin of victory for Trump.
Speaker 4: And wouldn't that be fun?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 5: That would be So I guess I see what you
think of this. If we did a kind of probability dispersion,
I'd say three chances in five that Trump loses the
popular vote but wins in the electoral college, one chance
in five that kamalo ekes out a narrow victory, but
also about one chance in five that Trump wins the
popular vote and the electoral college, and that this whole
thing breaks in his way in his direction over the
next few days, and that he wins by three or
four points and it's just a solid, unambiguous victory. And that, honestly,
of course, is what I'm hoping for, because the backbiting,
the agony the lawsuits, the incriminations that we now know
can go on for more months when we get a
mixed result. Anyway, it just seems to me, four out
of five in my little personal probability dispersion, four out
of five chances Trump wins in one way or another,
and about one in five that he wins pretty let's
put it this way, unambiguously decisively. Does that sound right
to you, guys?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's right.
Speaker 1: The remote possibility that Trump wins the popular vote but
loses the electoral college, and you can game out the
states to get that outcome. But what it will mean
that no one has recognized is that in a lot
of blue states, democratic support has eroteed substantially.
Speaker 4: That's the only way Trump would get so.
Speaker 1: In other words, instead of instead of Harris winning New
York by twenty three points as Biden did four years ago,
she only wins it by ten. And that kind of
erosion democratic support would be an interesting thing. If you
have fluke like that, that happens, and of course watch
everybody switch sides and suddenly Democrats will love the electoral college,
which will.
Speaker 5: Be and he is he is piling up. It's a
ridiculous term, but they seem to be using it. He's
piling up excess are unnecessary votes. He's up by ten
in Florida, up by seven in Texas, up by nine
in Ohio. Those are millions more votes, so to speak,
than he needs. So who knows.
Speaker 3: I don't know what late information could come to somebody
who'd already cast their vote, Like the garbage thing, for example.
I mean, wouldn't be any news to somebody to believe
that the other side of the party believes that people
who hold a particular set of ideas are garbage. They
just haven't said it before, but they certainly implied it.
You're right about the feeling, Peter. But the last time
I had a feeling like this was Mitt Romney. Everything
everything that's true, true, everything is coming up Mitt at
the end. And I just remember how surprised we were
on election nine. I don't really follow the polls very much.
I've been doing things Roman style. I got up today,
I got out my auspice Rod. I divided the sky
into four into four quadrants, and then the birds flew
through the upper right hand quadrant, which I believe foretels
well for Trump. Now the garbage comment was interesting because
it goes back to I mean, never mind what wood
Biden said. What I find fascinating about it is the
is the desire to wish out of the ether an
apostrophe that has been pursued by many people in the media.
He didn't say garbage supporters, he's garbage supporter apostrophe s
and people have gone over this, like the audio Zapruder tape,
trying to find the gap into which they can insert
that little kernel of an apostrophe. When you see everybody
in the you know, the usual suspects doing this, it
reminds you of what the Washington Post is going through.
The Washington Post declined to endorse anybody, and the reasons
for that can vary when we can discuss that, putting
them in the same category as the La Times in
the USA today and the newspaper for which I work,
by the way, and this has resulted apparently in a
quarter million canceled subscriptions, because apparently people believe it is
the duty and purpose of a news paper to be
forthright in who they stand for as a matter of
the entire paper's reputation. That's the thing that's interesting to
me is these people are not just saying, well, it's
the editorial board. Everybody knows that that's separate intellectually and
technically and all the rest from the rest of the paper.
But no, they seem to be giving the game away.
Is saying, our paper as a whole must stand on
the side of right or we're going to resign. Well,
take an extra week off, you know with medical medical pay.
And Bezos has said to the people, look, you got
to start hiring conservatives. And he's not saying this, as
I understand, is saying the editorial board has to hire
these people. What he is saying, and I think correctly,
is that the general population of the paper has to
become more ideological diverse. Now, I don't know how you
do that when you're hiring people. Sometimes you can do
a wink and a nod. Where do you come from,
what school did you go to? Stuff like that, or
just read their social media and the rest of it.
And I don't know how you can say that we're
going to have these people and then not expect them
to uphold abjective standards. But he is correct. When you
have a monoculture in a newsroom, you just simply you
don't have anybody to say. But that's not what the
other side thinks. That's not what the other side is
concerned about. You have people who listen to National Public
Radio and read the New York Times in the Washington
Post and exist in an ideological bubble, and there are
no venn diagrams bursting their way into say, actually, there
is another take on this. So they're always surprised, for example,
when Trump wins. I mean, when Trump won last time,
I had people coming up to me in the office
because they knew that I was on the right side
of things, and they were genuinely, genuinely christfallen that they
couldn't see it coming. And the paper made a concerted
effort to get out there and talk to people that
they'd sort of cast to the wilderness of the political
and cultural world.
Speaker 1: You know, I still have in my file somewhere the
Washington Post editorial right after the nineteen eighty election with
Reagan's first landslide, and it said, gosh, there must have
been something going on out there in the country that
we just did not perceive. Flash forward to twenty sixteen,
the Post ran almost the identical editorial. It was hilarious
talk about learning nothing on the intervening time. Look, I
think a couple things quickly. One is, there's a quote
going around from New York Magazine attributed to a senior
media executive. They don't name the person, saying it's pretty
clear that if half the country thinks Trump's qualified to
be president, they're not reading the media, the mainstream media anymore.
It's like newsflash to the news business. The other one is,
what is Joe Rogan's interview with Trump is now up
to something like forty five million views, and by coincidence,
the New York Times comes out with a story today
that they've been investigating for a few weeks saying YouTube
is empowering all these YouTubers like Ben Shapiro and Andrew
Claven's son what Spencer Claven and others. Right, you're right,
and they're saying and they're peddling misinformation and YouTube needs
to censor them. So you know, what you're watching is
the paranoia and panic of the failing media. I mean,
Trump was way ahead of the curve on this. Obviously,
He's absolutely right to call it fake news in the
failing media. And so here's a real crisis and to me,
the big question is, and I'll end here, is Bezos
about to become the next Elon Musk comember Musk was
an Obama supporting mostly liberal and who knew he was
going to go all the way over to where he
has landed now? And Bezos maybe he's going to follow
the same trajectory. I think the first sign you mentioned, James,
who they would hire, I'd say the post hire Byron
york As, one of your principal political reporters from the
Washington Examiner. That would be a sign that they're going
to change.
Speaker 5: Just well, okay, well minute, our guest. Our guest happens
to know a thing or two about journalism. Let's bring
him in and we'll ask him about oh a few
things like what he's been working on lately, but possibly
also immediate current events of these next few days.
Speaker 3: Why not. That's a great way of segueing into Andrew
Claven back to the podcast after an awful long time,
of course, host to the Andrew Claven Show, which you
could find I don't know, We'll I have a link
to it somewhere here on Ricochet. Andrew, welcome back, Good
to talk to you.
Speaker 6: Hey, James, good to see it.
Speaker 3: Author of A Woman Underground, which is the next book
briefly A Prices. What's it about?
Speaker 6: It's the fourth book in the Cameron Winter series. It's
kind of the crucial crisis book where he has to
go back into his past and find out what he's
all about. So it's I think it's really one of
the best books in the series. I'm really happy with it.
Speaker 5: Drew, could I just before we continue about your book
and your brilliant thoughts and so forth. It's come to this.
We end up booking you because Spencer was unavailable.
Speaker 6: I know, I know that's.
Speaker 4: Everyone does that.
Speaker 5: Explain that? Explain what that feels like.
Speaker 6: Dad, Well, you know, it's a terrible thing as you
come to the end of I think a fairly successful career,
to see your brilliant son begin a successful career of
his own. It's a bitter, bitter blow and I'm not
sure I'll ever get over it.
Speaker 5: Don't you wish you'd smothered him in the crib?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 6: I sud My wife was like, eh, you know, it's
like she wouldn't go.
Speaker 5: For it, Okay, So I just wanted to get that
one out of the way.
Speaker 4: James back to you.
Speaker 5: Sorry, I'll be tell you.
Speaker 3: I'm going to say something here that I write books
myself too. We love the word, We love the story,
the plot and the things and the depth that we
can get to it. But if we wanted to reach
modern males today, the modern mails where I was being
told are in crisis, and they are from just about
any metric that you look at. Why would we write
a novel when we could write a game. I've been
reading an off I've been reading an awful lot on
Twitter because I follow some people who are insiders and
outsiders of the gaming industry and the way that it's
been hijacked by people who are determined to inject into
every single possible game they touch social proselytizing, which is
turning off vast swaths of the audience, which just basically
want to play Call of Duty and not be lectured
about pronouns and the rest of it. But it is
a ripe medium that the right has yet to read
the sort of get their hands around. Should we Is
it simply too simplistic to deal with the issues that
we think should be discussed. Would an attempt to sort
of make it more right friendly just result in games
that are as dead as the ones that try to
go leftward. What do you think about the entire medium
of gaming and and how we can use it to
shape the culture we want.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm one of the rare conservative commentators who love games.
I've been playing them since Pong. I continue to play them,
although I feel that they kind of I feel they
kind of crested in the nineties because the innovation was
so exciting, just so exciting to watch Pong turn into
these incredibly elaborate games. Now they're kind of plateaued. But
you're absolutely right, they've been invaded by the woke. And
what I like about that is that means there are
many games that I can play with pleasure, but there
are now also many games that I cannot play with pleasure.
I can actually sit and not play the latest game
that I know is going to lecture me about pronouns.
And people ask me all the time if I think
that games are an art, and I think that there
are games that have in fact been artistic, the problem is,
just like any art, just like the novel, movies, whatever,
They're not an art if you don't treat them like
an art. If you sit there for four hours staring
at this thing in a darkened room, and never do
anything with your life that's not using games as an art.
But still, I think there's a lot of good stuff
that can be done. And the good thing about being
a conservative is you don't have to lecture people. You
just have to give them the experience. It's closer to
real life than anything that left can produce. So I mean,
you know you mentioned call of duty. Just fighting the
bad guys can be a conservative experience. I would like
to see fewer action women. I think I now no
longer will watch a movie in which a woman beats
up a man because I just think it's inherently dishonest,
and not only dishonest on the surface, but dishonest down
to the ground. And so I think I'd like to
see a lot less of that. But really, in games,
what's happening is the really shapely girls women go around
fighting people, and thirteen year old boys get to play
bounce them around. I remember the first time that what
with the tomb raider. What's her name again, I've forgot
Laura Croft, Laura Croft. I remember the first time they
made it so that her breast bounced when she jumped
up and down. I saw for about twenty minutes just
making her jump up and down. And that was my
life for a while. And I think that can be
very useful. But yeah, you know, listen, I'm for all
the arts. I love every new thing. I think every
I've kind of my life has been a little bit
like the like Alfred Hitchcock system, where he would denigrate
everything new and then use it. And that's what I've
tried to do. I've written a movie that was released
on an iPad. I've started doing podcasts when podcasts came along.
And I think all these things our venues of culture,
and culture is a beautiful thing. And I think it's
culture is a way we encapsulate the society and play
it back to itself so we can see it more objectively.
Speaker 3: I do one more thing on that. It's a great
way of putting it. There was a game called BioShock, Yes,
which was which was all about, in the end, the
intellectual limitations and perils of an iron Rand philosophy, which
people loved. Yeah, give it to Ion. The next game
to that was all about the perils and the horrors
of collectivism. The third one was about the perils sort
of national Christian exceptionalism, which didn't lecture you about it,
but just laid out a very interesting world. And these
are ways in which you can tell these tales. But
sometimes I have to think. I have been playing recently
a game called Sorry It's True gas Station Simulator, which
is the most conservative thing I've ever done in my life,
because you have to balance books, you have to order
petrochemicals and all the rest of it, and it's it's
it's it's absolutely fascinating and my father, gas station owner,
would be very pleased. There I've said it. Peter, you
were going to say, uh, Drew.
Speaker 5: Book five in the Cameron Winters series, to be released
next spring, The Bouncing Breasts, you know, I give that
to you for free.
Speaker 4: I give that to you inspired. Yeah, so listen.
Speaker 5: So the current book is a Woman Underground. It's book
four in the Camera and Winter series. I confess because
you write so fast that the only one of the
four I have read is the first book book never
one when Christmas comes, absolutely marvelous, gobbled it down in
a weekend, which I think is you'd be happy to
hear that that's what you have in mind. These are
to be their thought provoking, but their entertainments correct.
Speaker 6: This is the whole thing for me, is you know
I started out That's what I've started out trying to do,
is take this form that I love and that I
happen to have a gift for and try to make it,
you know, really deep and interesting while not slowing it down.
Speaker 4: That's okay.
Speaker 5: So I want to I want to name the books
where we're selling today. A Woman Underground that's book four,
When Christmas Comes is book one, A Strange Habit of
Mind is book two, and then The House of Love
and Death is book three.
Speaker 4: Have I got that?
Speaker 6: Yep?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 5: What made you suppose that you could sustain the sheer
inventiveness over a series? I had just questions about how
you do this? How did you come up with Cameron Winter?
Is that where you started first? Do you have in
your desk drawer six more plots? Is this to be
a dozen? How do the creative juices? It's so mysterious
and yet at the same time it can't be entirely mysterious,
because this is a business that you're in. You've got
to keep readers satisfied. You've got to hit some kind
of rhythm. How do you do it? Where do you start?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, this is the only time I've ever
written a series. I've written trilogies and I wrote one
books series that had four books in it, But this
is the first time I've ever thought committed myself to
something longer. It began during the COVID lockdowns. My old
friend Otto Pensler, who is the greatest mystery editor of
his generation. Without there's nobody second, really, he's just the best,
and he called me up and asked me if I
would write a Christmas mystery, and that the fact was
I had had this Christmas mystery in my head for
thirty years and I just couldn't solve it. I couldn't
figure out how to get from what I knew was
the ending, from what I knew was the beginning to
what I knew was the ending. I couldn't figure out
the middle. But when he said that, it's kind of
inspired me, and I took a couple of days during COVID,
took these long walks, and I cracked the story. And
so I with every story to me, the idea is,
who is the person or people you're going to put
in the story to make it as rich as it
can possibly be, because there's a big difference.
Speaker 5: So you start with character.
Speaker 6: I start with character and plot together like afterwords. I think,
difference whether Superman fights a dragon or Frodo does it,
it makes it. It's a totally different story. And so
I fashioned Cameron Winter to be in this story that
I finally solved. And the minute I did, I realized
that I felt I had tapped into a cultural vein,
which was this that I saw a big transition coming
in American culture. I thought the last rise of good
American fiction was the television revolution in the two thousands,
and that all of those stories were about anties and
I had been written writing anti hero novels up till then.
But then I saw them on TV and I realized
they were going to be there, the Sopranos and Breaking
Bad and The Shield and Deadwood and all these stories
that were bad guys but kind of good. And I
realized that the reason they were doing that is that
they had outlawed manhood so that the only manhood could
be among outlaws. And I thought, okay, we've played that
straight out. Because you could see it dying. You could
just see television, eat it up and spit it out.
I thought, I'm going to take a guy who has
been a bad guy and see if I can turn
him into a good guy over time. And so I
took this kind of broken man. This guy had come
out of government work doing some very bloody stuff, came
back to a country that was not the country that
he had left to fight for, and realized that he
had no place to be, that he was a killer
without a cause, as it were, and he had to
now find a way to express himself. That transformed him.
And so this is a guy who's been searching for himself,
searching for what he can become, and it's been amazing.
I knew the minute I did that. I thought this
is going to take at least ten books, because I
think it's going to take ten to fifteen years as
this country moves through the transition we're going through. And
I think I can kind of record that in a
fictional way that will give it more depth. I didn't
say and here are the stories I will tell. I
simply understood that everything had to be based on his character, like,
in other words, he could never you know, he's not
going to go into musical comedy. He's got a certain
series of traits like every one of us, and those
traits and those instincts, and that nature is going to
guide him in where he goes. And that really brings this.
You know, originally the story brought the character into being,
but now the character brings the stories into being.
Speaker 5: So you're talking to three people who do a fair
amount of writing, not as much well no, no, James writes, one,
excuse me, I don't do as much writing as the
rest of you. Therefore, of course I hate you. You're
so productive. But Drew just the kind of nuts and
bolts question of the kind that I find actually does
fascinate people. When do you do it? You're on the
air all the time, you travel constantly. I can't pop
up at a conference without hearing that you just spoken
left and now I have to beat your example. Do
you get up at five in the morning and put
in three hours before breakfast or how does how do
you work this into your life?
Speaker 6: Basically, I don't sleep very much, and I do wake
up at five in the morning, and I do get
to work very quickly. And you know, most of the
time the phone doesn't start ringing until I actually turn
everything off while I'm writing, and most of the time
by the time i'm finished writing because I'm actually a
slow writer. But if you write for three and four
hours every day, you will produce a book eventually, and so,
you know, so I do that, and then the phone
doesn't really start ringing until after I'm done, and I
try not to schedule things for my writing time. And yeah,
I work. I work a hard day. But Steve, you're
the you are the Steve Hayward who writes the ghost stories.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, that's all my critics say.
Speaker 1: I suppose, right, Although I'm glad to hear about your
writing habits, and I'm always asking those things, and I'm
glad to hear you say you're a slow writer, because
that's what I think I am too.
Speaker 4: I have to labor things for a long time, and
Peter won't believe me.
Speaker 1: But look, so I'm going to get a lot of
trouble with this question set up. But you know, there's
a saying popular with you know, my political philosopher pals
and sometimes the surface of things is the heart of things.
And so when I saw the title a Woman Underground,
my first thought was, find me a woman underground anywhere,
They're everywhere.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: You know, the line is.
Speaker 1: That we live in a guyanocracy now, right, and this
is what's going to get me in trouble. But I want,
I want to turn it around, which is we've already
talked about it, but I want to draw you out further. Well,
here's one piece of data for you.
Speaker 4: You know, college enrollment is dropping.
Speaker 1: That's probably a happy thing overall, but the demographic that
is dropping fast in higher education is young males, especially
young white males, very disaffected.
Speaker 4: You know, Spencer, your son is all over this.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm watching these male subcultures that are
resisting this and so what they're into, weightlifting, they're in
the Roman Empire. A lot of them are reading the
classics in a very serious way, but also Nietzsche, which
of course is problematic. I mean, understand why. But it's
a very dissident culture which has shocked me. Right, I mean,
this is a very different sort of conservative or rebellious
young young males from you know, when I was a
young male, which is around the time of the Boer War.
Speaker 4: I don't know, well, how you sizing this up? What
worries you, what gives you hope? I'll end my question there.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm an anti feminist, so I'm going to say,
if you think you're going to be shocking, you're really not.
You're gonna have to catch up with me. I think
the future is always male. I think whatever men are
doing is the future. And that means if they're failing,
the country will fail with them, the society will fail
with them. But the thing is when when women take over,
this is almost an iron rule. When women take over
a business, it's because the business is finished. And that's
not because it's because the business has become irrelevant. That's
not because women are bad at it. It's because men
have already moved on to the next thing. So as
women became directors, the movies were over. As women became anchor,
women that nobody was paying attention to television news anymore.
Speaker 5: And when you see the name is Andrew Clavin, everyone
this is not the voice of Peter Robinson or Steve
Hayward or James Lyax continue continued, ladies.
Speaker 6: But but it's that right, It's simply it's simply true.
Women create life and men create culture, and that's the
way it goes. And so I think what you're seeing
when you say men are being part of a subculture,
it's not really a subculture except in the New York
Times to be fit, which is one of the things
that's happening. I love the fact that the New York
Times say is this is right wing and I good,
so we'll be able to beat you guys up, which
is exactly what you need. And that's one thing. It's
not a subculture. To read the classics. Reading the classics
is the right thing to do. Nietzsche, I think, is
an interesting guy, but we're gonna have to deal with
him because Nietzsche followed the logic of God being dead,
and he did it just like the Marquis de Sade.
He did it honestly.
Speaker 3: And that.
Speaker 6: What's up. Yeah, thinking man's ign rant, thinking man's sign
rent exactly. And I think one of the things that
I hope we'll start to see, and you speak of Spencer,
he's got a new book about this, is that that
really science is pointing us back to God. And I
think that once men return to the church and a
lot of this nonsense that's going on in the churches
where they're basically just adopting, you know, left wing talking
points as religion is going to go away. I think
that that is a feminization of the church. That's a
representation of churches that have been taken over by women internally.
And so they basically just go with what is you know,
what's what's happening in the culture, because women are I
think susceptible to cultural persuasion.
Speaker 1: Let's stick with that theme and then switch to pop entertainment.
You said something a few minutes ago that that grabbed me.
You said, it makes a difference whether Superman is fighting
the dragon or Frodo is fighting the dragon. Well, now,
of course we see all these New Tolkien adaptation from
uh what Apple, I forget Amazon, right, and it's Missus
proto fighting the Dragon, right.
Speaker 4: And I mean, you know.
Speaker 1: The criticism from the left of the Lord of the
Rings it's too male and too masculine, right, and so
lo and behold we have these utterly unwatchable adaptations now
that are meant to appeal to women. And I mean,
when are the studios gonna wake up and say, you know,
it's going to be popular. I've actually got a couple
of young screenwriters say, you know, we're really looking forward
to getting back to the good old days. We can
have women in short skirts and right, but that's where
the money is going to be made. And ultimately, isn't
money going to force the entertainment industry to turn this around? Well?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean I think that one of the things,
you know, I was I was at a dinner once
with the Ted Cruz and you know, he's a very
very bright guy, and he was kind of holding court
and asking everybody a question.
Speaker 5: He got to me and he's holding court. How surprised.
Speaker 6: He got to me, and his question was, what do
you know that nobody else knows? And think, so, what
I know that nobody else knows is they don't care
about the money. And this is true in Hollywood. And
people in Hollywood do not care about them money. They
care about the love. They care about the awards, the prestige,
the women. And they get all those things by being
left wing and by showing their woke credentials. And those
things die and they die in the box office, and
they don't care. They keep making them even though they
die in the box office. Ultimately, you beat them by
competing with them. You cannot beat them by trying to
convince them. This is the thing that drives me crazy
about the Right, and it's like we want to convince
that the right is much more less interested in whether
I say something shocking like I just did than being
approved of by Bill Maher Like I could care less.
And I actually have some respect from Mark, but I
could care less what he thinks of me and what
he thinks of the culture, because I know he's kind
of a lost soul. So you know, I think that
we have to compete with him by making things that
are innovative, that are exciting, and that includes taking up
new technologies before the left dominates them. Right now. I
mean you were talking about games, James, but I think
way beyond games is this new meta technolog g this
three D technology which is going to let us live
in stories and play stories like we're on the Holid
deck on that science fiction show. I think that this
is really exciting stuff. And it bothers me that everything
that comes out from the Right looks to me like
a kind of nineties retread when I think that new stuff,
you know, should be coming down the pike. You know
you mentioned novels. I love the novel I understand that
it's an old form, but I think that there are
certain forms that are eternal because they're just so intimate.
One of them is theater. Theater is always dying, but
it's always alive. Novels are always dying, but they're always alive.
And so I write what I love. But still I think,
you know, if I were starting out now, what I
would be doing is doing three dimensional stuff, and I
would be if somebody asked me to do it. I
do it anyway, And I just think that these are
the things that should be leading us. And it drives
me nuts when we complain about the fact that all
the social media sites are left wing, but until Elon
muskme long, nobody does anything about it. I think we
should be inventing that stuff.
Speaker 3: Three D immersive meta style virtual reality is interesting, but
it seems to me like it's the cold fusion of entertainment.
It's always it's always just one step away from really
being the big thing. I've been watching VR come down
the pike for an awful long time. I had an
experience it early on when meta Facebook came up with
their ghastly system, the metaverse, which which instantaneously, which was
a nightmarish world of sliding around a disembodied torso in
these jaggy brooms with people babbling about it. It was
the worst. I said, all right, let's just wait for
Apple to do it. And Apple has done it, and
Apple's going to come out with something cheaper. But yet,
but yet, but yet. There are still something that seems
to me fundamentally isolating about sitting somewhere with this alien
face hugger on your face, engaged in an alternate reality,
engaged in a feely engaged in another world, while the
rest of life goes about you in what we used
to call meat space. So I get it. I gets
the attraction. I'm a little hesitant about it. But maybe
let's say that's in our future. You said earlier that
we're going through a cultural shift, going through a cultural shakeout,
and that eventually we're going to end up at a
different place at the end of it. And I assume
that you think it's going to be a better place,
because these masculine virtues about which you speak will eventually
have no choice but to assert themselves. When you said
that Hollywood doesn't care about whether or not they make
money because they want to signal their virtues. That's true,
But as Margaret Thatcher said about socialism, eventually you run
out of other people's money to fund the next version
of acolyte. And I think what we're seeing now is
this huge python pig that's been working its way over
through ever since me too, ever since twenty twenty, that
at the end of it will have produced no art,
will have produced, no profit, will have produced nothing but
all of these inert pieces of cultural embellishment that have
done nothing but deface the things to which they were attached.
So that's one thing I think they're going to realize
that they have to shift. The second thing is, and
this is the part that I want your wisdom on.
When I see on Twitter red pilled Jimbros start to
appreciate sculpture and the Paris Opera House and the rest
of it, and do the whole return thing where the
you is a Roman v and the rest of it.
That's all great. Going back to cultural traditions, to the
heritage of Western society is great, and the more people
understand that, the better. But the more I follow these
accounts and the more I get them, the more they
also shade into a very unfortunate sort of white not supremacy,
but isolationism. After a lot of these I start to
get stuff from the algorithm saying, well, you know, Rhodesia
was actually a pretty good idea. And then the next thing,
and you get more of that, and you can see
how people get stuck into these little communities that do
not connect them to a greater pluralistic society like we have,
but funnel them into just another poisonous form of identitarianism.
How do we get a soft landing out of all this?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, how is going to be an individual thing,
because what we need is artists to do the right thing.
Going back. See, going back can result in exactly what
you're saying. It can result in this kind of yearning
for the worst of the past, thinking that what really
made Europe great was the color of people's skin, which
is nonsense, both when it comes from the left and
from the right. But also going back you get the Renaissance.
You get people doing things that they think were done
before but they're actually reinventing. You get Shakespeare writing Roman
plays that turn into an entirely new art form. There's
a wonderful short story by Borjes where it's a review
of a new version of Donkey Hodie. And the thing
is that the new version is exactly the same as
the old version, but because it's being written today, it
has an entirely different meaning. And so I think that
there are openings for art, but you have to have
people who you know, art is not always leftist, but
it's always liberal. It is always open to the varieties
of human beings, open to change, open to cultural criticism.
It's one of the reasons that conservatives back off from it.
Instead of saying, oh, you know, my conservative worldview is
not big enough to create, and so I'm going to
open it up a little bit and then get a
little bit looser. You know, we basically say, oh, that's
bad it has a naked woman in it, or that's
bad it has a gay person, or whatever we wind
up saying. And so, of course you're right, this is
a danger, James. It always it always is. I mean,
you know, they blame romanticism for fascism, but Romanticism is
one of the great movements in the arts, and it's
one of the most intelligent movements in the arts and
one of the most important movements in the arts, and
so I think if we can refine, retake that up,
and do it in a fresh way, I think, I
think that it's going to be great. And I'm not
predicting that things are going to be great. I'm think
predicting that things are going to change, and that we
have a new day coming, that our generation is passing
away as even even we must. And I think, you know,
a new new forms are going to take place, and
I think it's I'm hopeful about it. I'm not at
all despairing about it.
Speaker 3: Well, and let the records just show that Andrew Clavin
has endorsed romanticism, which you have can be manifested in
novels like The Sorrows of Young Verter, which resulted in
an epidemic of teen suicides throughout Germany. So that's another
one for you. You mentioned you mentioned don Quixote.
Speaker 7: It would be good to do another version of that
today with with with Mill Gibson in a mad Max
car tilting at the windmills, these dark satanic things that
spin in the countryside, that that I would absolutely love
to see.
Speaker 6: I just want I just want to point out that
dark satanic mills is William Blake, one of the great.
Speaker 3: Romance poets and did these feet and Ancient Times, which
actually was covered by Emerson Lake and Palmer of all phones. Yeah,
and I is you really don't expect Blake and Uh
and British music to be twinned thus. But then again,
as Stephen will tell you, as us progressive fans know,
it was perhaps the last gasp of musical ability and
style and intelligence and sophistication in the Western popular music. There,
I'm shutting up, Peter Drew.
Speaker 5: I have a couple of questions about politics, and I
would like viewers to understand that I have backed well
away from my computer because I don't want to touch
you with a ten foot poll.
Speaker 6: Thanks Peter.
Speaker 5: Right, So Donald Trump's report, Donald Trump, the book again?
The book Again is a Woman Underground, book number four
in the Cameron Winter Series. Donald Trump, I just checked
this in Real Clear Politics. They have him up another
tenth of a point in the national average. So now
he's leading in the national vote by half a percentage point,
still within the margin of era. But he ticks up
and up and up. Is it because whatever else he is,
he's a guy.
Speaker 6: Well, I mean there is a huge divide, right, But
I mean he's he's something like eight percent up with
men and Kamala's nine percent up with women. And so, yes,
there is something to that, and he has played run
a very bro campaign. But there's there's something else about
Donald Trump. I mean, I sensed that he was months ago,
that he was on the rise, and that he was
going to possibly complete what is now one of the
most amazing comebacks in political history. You know, Trump. People
who hate Trump can't see what he is, I think,
and maybe people who love Trump also can't see what
he is. But I think that one of the things
he is is first of all, a highly intelligent man
who adapts to situations and changes because he believes in
common sense fixing of things. All other all of his
flaws aside. I think he believes that the best thing
he can do is fixed stuff to make it run better.
And in doing that, Trump has become a real symbol
of American spirit in ways that I would not have
expected when he first came on the political scene. His
courage under fire, which is remarkable and inspiring. His absolute
refusal to knuckle under to the woke mind viruses. Elon
Musk calls it his absolute refusal to change because he's
being attacked constantly, and in fact he kind of welcomes
the attacks. All of these things represent a spirit of
America that has been beaten down for sixty years. And
I think when I look at him, what I see
is the future. Oddly enough, maybe not in his policies,
but in what he represents, because I think people are
just not going to be held down any longer.
Speaker 5: Let me try a thought on you guys, and on Steve,
on you Drew, but also on Stephen James. And this
is just in my head, so here it comes out
loud for the first time, and it may be wildly wrong,
but it seems to me that up until two months ago,
maybe even six weeks ago, you could characterize Donald Trump
as this atavistic figure from the nineteen fifties that if
he closed his eyes, what he really wanted was a
Queen's that where it was safe to play stickball in
the streets again, and a Detroit that was turning out
Cadillacs with big fins and a lot of chrome on
the grill. He wanted to take us back. Up until
some weeks ago, Elon Musk is now part of the
Trump campaign, and in my opinion, the most important political
event of the last month and a half was the
capture of that booster rocket as it returned to Earth.
And so elon Musk Bobby Kennedy. Now, Bobby Kennedy says things,
many things that are crazy, but you know, about two
thirds of what he says is really serious and thoughtful.
And at some level nobody talks about this except Bobby Kennedy.
But at some level we all know that half the
country is on adderall and the other half is on
a zempic and this is not right. Yeah, And Bobby
Kennedy at his best, and his best is pretty impressive.
I think sounds almost like Daniel Patrick moynihan. We have
social problems, and we're a great nation. We should address them.
And so within this Trump, this Trump take us back
to the nineteen fifties, is not that at all anymore.
There is an openness to the future. There is a
seriousness about social problem that just sort of takes my
breath away. Now, calm me down, But that's a little
bit in the direction of what you were saying a
moment ago, isn't it true?
Speaker 6: Yes? And I think one of the things that the
American ruling class has not quite digested yet is how
entirely and catastrophically they failed during COVID. You know, there's
a line, I agree, there's time in Winston Churchill's memoir
of his young life where he says, I went to
a party with the heads of Europe before World War One,
and I went to a party with the heads of
Europe after World War One, and all of the people
in those parties were different because they had failed. That
was the last time we had that kind of catastrophic
failure of leadership, and those people were cleaned out. No
one has been fired over COVID, no one has lost
his reputation over COVID. Nobody has been held to account
for the lies that were told by the highest people
in the country and the most powerful people in the
country during COVID. But the people keep the score, and
so ultimately these guys are done. And the thing about
Donald Trump is because he's a fixer, you know, because
he's a guy who sees a problem and he fix it.
He's not done. He's just moved on to the next thing.
And you're absolutely right about that rocket capture the Peter
it was. It was exactly the sort of thing that
Trump looks at and thinks like, ooh, you know that's cool,
and there's apps and while while the left is literally
sitting around going, how can we investigate that Elon Musk
to get him to stop allowing conservatives to speak on X,
you know, Donald Trump is going ooh, I like that.
That's the future. This is the difference between the left,
which is dead, and the right, which is in transition.
And I think that, you know, you're just right about this.
The failure of our elite class is entire and the
consequences have been nil. But they will come.
Speaker 4: They've got to well, you know, the jump back in.
Speaker 1: You know, it seems to me that what ought to
terrify these lablishment the established institutions that have failed that
you mentioned, Andrew is.
Speaker 4: Someone it must do.
Speaker 1: And he took over Twitter, what he fired seventy five
percent of the staff and found out to work just as.
Speaker 4: Well without them.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd like to see it replicated with just
about every government agency. Fire half the staff, wouldn't matter
which half it would get better.
Speaker 4: We don't want and.
Speaker 1: Then rfk Ju and your Yeah, I completely agree with
Peter that he says crazy stuff, but right now, public
regard for institutions is so low that first of all,
neither one of them, if they're actually in official positions,
Musk and Kennedy will be swallowed by the bureaucracy the
way so many appointees are in both parties, but especially
Republican administrations.
Speaker 4: And with Kennedy's virtue is.
Speaker 1: Going to be he's going to come in in the
CDC and all the other hell people are going to
tell him this and that, and he's just going to
look at him say I don't believe you anymore. And
you're going to really have to, you know, be sterurner
than that.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: And so just the disruption of this, I mean, when
you tell the American people, because these are crazy people
who are going to disrupt our institutions, I think at
least half the country smiles when they hear that.
Speaker 4: And it's long overdue.
Speaker 6: That was one of the funny things about that project
twenty twenty five. They kept saying he's going to cut
fifty percent of the bureaucracy, and I thought, oh, you know,
that's wrong about seventy five percent. Yeah, But you know,
my problem with RFK is that like buried, you know,
just because somebody tells a lie, that doesn't mean the
opposite is the truth. And just the other day I
interviewed the doctor Martin McCarry who said many of the
same had spotted many of the same problems that RFK spots,
but he's a much more responsible, balanced, measured person who
sort of talks about the various ways in which these
things can be addressed. And I would like to see
more people like him come forward and say, yes they
are lying, but that doesn't mean the opposite is true.
Yes they may have lined about the efficacy of the vaccine,
but that doesn't mean the vaccine is worthless or going
to kill you, you know. I mean, I think that everything
is more shaded than RFK admits, and he worries me
in that regard.
Speaker 5: Before James takes this out, I want to read the
books again. Number one when Christmas comes. Number two a
Strange Habit of Mind. Number three is the House of
Love and Death, and number four is a Woman Underground.
They're the Cameron Winter Series. Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to buy all four for Christmas, stick them
in different stockings, and then these are fun books. These
are books that you can read in a couple of
days and the family will pass them around. You made
for sales, Drew. Can we discuss a kickback over I'm easy.
Speaker 3: To bruy, right, So to your point about RFK saying
some things, but you wish the source is greater. I
have my problems with psychiatry, but I don't necessarily want
to go to the l Ron Hubbard people to get
my talking points about it. We'll leave you. We'll go
out with this prediction. Next week the election. What do
you think is going to happen.
Speaker 6: Well, my feeling is that Trump is going to win,
and he's not just going to win the electoral college,
he's going to win the popular vote. But it is
just a feeling, and so it's not a prediction. It
is just the way i'm It's what I feel in
the culture right.
Speaker 3: This moment, All right, everybody, A woman on the ground.
Is the book? Buy it in eye by it, buy
it in Kindle, buy it in paper form. And we
assume that the fifth book in the series, of which
there are to be what ten, will be set in
a VR world in which one can move about in
a terrogate characters and form your own adventure and the
rest of it. If there's anybody we trust to do
something interesting, fascinating, fun to read in that medium as
in all others, it's Andrew Claven. Thank you for joining
us in the podcast today, My friend beat to see
you guys.
Speaker 4: Bye bye, take care of Drew.
Speaker 3: So before we go, is there anything you guys? Here's
what we should do. Actually, we got about four or
five minutes here. Each of you should make a prediction
about the election, one for Trump and then one for Harris,
and then we'll edit it later depending on what actually happens,
to make to make you sound an incredibly prescient because yeah,
I told.
Speaker 5: You guys, I knew she would win. That's a that's
a stand by for me.
Speaker 1: Can I remember that old movie Clue where they had
like four different endings in the movie, and it's.
Speaker 3: Like, okay, like that right, right, Well, if Harris wins,
if nothing else, we're going to see an absolute boom
in comedy. I mean, I don't know if they're going
to Rogan, if they're going to do what they're doing
with Rogan and just keep her away from people who
would interrogate her in detail. But the malapropisms, the word salads,
the nonsensical orations. Four years of the some people just
may despair and say I can't take it, but you
have to admit it's not going to be lacking for entertainment.
Same with Trump, of course, although people they are worried
that there will be chaos because nobody knows what's going
to happen. Nobody knows who's going to join the administration
or whether or not it's going to be like it
was before. People. Just as I said and Peter agreed
with a while ago, it's not so much that people
think that Trump is going to do all of these things.
It's a lot of people are voting for him because
they know that he will not do these other things correct.
And when it comes to an inflation and immigration, the
two big eyes there, we may see some action a one.
If he does actually get Musk to come on and
get out his shears and say, oh, two trillion, I
can do that. That would be interesting to see. And
the shrieks and the howls and the bloodletting and the
rest of it. That's a national experiment I think we
need to have when it comes to kind of that
and immigration. We're always seeing people talk about how it's
going to be absolutely impossible to expel people who are
here illegally, even the criminals, even if we don't get
to the point where the vans are going around and
shoving people in them. I think something that says that
you cannot make yourself a sanctuary city that turns rapists
loose instead of telling Ice where they are. I think
that era would come to an end by popular demand.
If not loss. Am I wrong there? Well?
Speaker 1: I signed up this way, James. Look, there's downsides to
eat a candidate winning. Doubts about Trump are well known.
But I think it's what's worse the Democratic Party. If
Harris wins, it's the worst thing that could happen to them.
The party needs to clean house ever bit as much
as it did after their losses in the nineteen eighties
that brought them Bill Clinton in a moved to the center,
really save them from almost oblivion. And if that, oh,
good times for Conservatives. If Harris wins, I mean, will
be miserable and shold a lot of terrible stuff, But we.
Speaker 4: Will be on the offensive if we keep the Senate.
Speaker 5: If we keep the Senate and China doesn't move on Taiwan,
we can almost live with the leader of the Democratic
Party being this utterly incoherent vacuus person.
Speaker 3: Midterms. Midterms would be lit as the kids.
Speaker 4: True, that's right. And look Trump.
Speaker 1: A Trump victory will ratify, especially I think his inspired
choice of JD Vance as that I think it turns
out in retrospect that will ratify a change in the
character of demo of the Republican Party that I think
will mean a good times ahead for the long term.
Speaker 3: Agreed, Well, we we will meet next week. Wow, think
of that next week, next week, It'll all it'll it'll
be done, It'll be settled. Who am I kidding? Probably
dragon for another two or three months. As Arizona says, well,
we can't, we can't. We can't count we can't count them.
I mean, for Heaven's sake. So where was that Argentina
had an election and they knew the results? By oh,
we used to have we used to And I to
go back to what Steven said at the beginning, I
remember the first time that I voted in a presidential election.
It was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I went to a
church and there was an organist practicing for Sunday. So
you had this, you had to caught in fugue playing
throughout the whole building. You could feel the base notes
in you. And you walked into this little booth and
you pulled the curtain behind you. You made your mechanical selections,
and then you picked up this great lever, a great
lever like you were throwing a you know, the switch
on an electric chair or a train or something, and
you pulled it and you could almost sense the votes
just clattering off through these mystical relays to the place
where they be tabulated. And it was great. It felt great.
It felt much better than walking up with a little
big pen and making an oval mark in this this
little cheap little thing that they had that feels like
a porta potty for hobbits. I enjoyed it then, and
I really liked when we knew. By the end of
the day, I think we can do it again. And
I don't really see a compelling argument why we can't.
But next week we'll find out. In the meantime, everybody
sho go to ricochet dot com sign up if you haven't.
The member feed is where you want to be, and
it's where on election night, of course, we will have many,
many conversations that it'll tell you it's the place you're
looking for. Facebook, no, Twitter, No, you want community, you
go to ricochet dot com. Peter, it's been a pleasure, Steven,
it's been a pleasure as well. The book Andrew Claven
a Woman Underground. Yeaht to buy it because he's one
of us. And I have nothing more to say except
thanks and we'll see you at the comments at Ricochet
for point Oh next week, guys, oh next week Ricochet.
Speaker 5: Join the conversation.