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