Finding Purpose Without Wokeness: Spencer Klavan Interview
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Spencer Klavan. They talk about the current woke culture, essence of talent, and living as a gay Christian. Spencer Klavan is an Associate Editor @ClaremontInst/@Theammind and Host @YngHereticsShow (http://YoungHeretics.com). Spencer received his Doctorate in Greek and Roman literature, eventually writing the book Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm, and Life based on his research. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Essence of Christmas movies Pandemic beards Spencer in the musical Grease Singing in choir Aristotle and free will 10,000 hour rule Alignment towards a purpose Isiah calling out to the angels Taking Homer's, The Odyssey out of schools Discovering Veggie Tales Young Heretics Podcast #DISRUPTTEXTS Hypocrisy towards the evil of history How to read an epic C.S. Lewis being the biggest 20th century intellectual The Abolition of Man Shadowboxing with Freud and psychoanalysis Same sex attraction Subscriber Portion Getting ripped with Spencer What is the gay agenda? Transgender issues Gay Christian controversy The Ten Questions
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
This is our first one that we're recording when we're back from Christmas Break.
So we're having a lot of fun here.
Oh, yeah.
High energy.
Super high energy.
Super high energy.
Today we're talking to Spencer Clavin.
Yeah, son of Andrew Clavin.
Well, that's not his first title.
That's just, you know.
Yeah.
That would be at the very end of all of his titles.
Undergrad at Yale, classics in classical language.
Grad of Oxford, Doctorate of Philosophy, sang choir in Oxford.
Host of Young Heretics podcast.
Yeah.
He wrote a book called Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm, and Life, made into a film starring John Travolta.
They changed a lot of stuff.
Greece.
Greece.
I already used the joke in the interview.
I had it in the notes, so I accidentally started saying it.
Anyway, this guy's a really smart guy.
He knows a lot about classic literature and Western civilization, and he has a lot of deep thoughts about gremlins and diehard.
Yeah, and interestingly, he's a what did we decide was the right term?
He's an out-of-the-closet Christian.
And so, yeah, our more sensitive listeners might a little upset.
So deal with it.
Just snapped my fingers.
I don't know how to do that.
I can't do that.
I'm too white.
That was very gay.
Okay, we are moving on to the interview.
So welcome, Spencer.
Here he comes.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
I'm Kyle.
I'm Ethan.
This is my buddy Ethan.
Today we are joined by our favorite Clavin.
Hey, wow.
Is that the first time?
That's the first time I've ever been introduced.
That's Clavin Major.
I'm usually Claven Minor.
Well, we did interview Clavin Major.
Oh, you did?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I made sure to get Tim first.
So that's, thanks.
I know now that that's why I'm already your favorite Claven rights because you talk to him.
Because we did talk to him.
We were not impressed.
And I'm a blank slate, really.
I can only go down from here.
I can only disappoint.
Well, we talked to him about Hollywood screenwriting.
Oh, and we were talking about what we were trying to get him to rewrite reboots of Gremlins.
And reboot ideas.
We were giving him reboot ideas, and I don't know if he got what we were trying to do.
He didn't pick up what you were putting down.
He didn't pick up.
It's funny.
That's all we ever talk about, my dad and I. When we hang out, we just talk about rewrites of Gremlins.
So I don't know why.
It must have been an off day for him or something.
There's one movie I don't know why they don't reboot more.
Gremlins?
Yeah, it's great.
I love gremlins.
That's why they don't reboot it.
Don't give them anything.
I don't know why you want to do it.
Don't do it.
Yeah, throw Florida out there.
Now you're going to get some feminist remake of Gremlins.
It's so simple.
It's just a bunch of little puppets.
Yeah, but they would be CGI.
You really are.
Yeah, that would ruin it.
It's a bait.
You're just putting this out there for some like woke.
Well, I'm not saying I want it as much as if I'm thinking like a Hollywood executive.
Why I don't.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's got to be something there, some behind the scenes.
CGI, all voiced by Leah Dunham.
It's because the original Gremlin are.
They're all female.
They're all gremlins.
It's because the original gremlin actor is in rehab now.
They don't want to dredge out that Notch Cat.
I know it's a problem.
All the Gremlins are all their departures.
All the Gremlins are.
Yeah, yeah.
They're all getting over their water habit.
They're having it.
And it is absolutely a Christmas movie.
I watched it and I was like, oh, wait, no, this is absolutely a Christmas movie.
People takes place at Christmas.
Well, I mean, Christmas is all over it.
There's Christmas songs.
The gremlin is a Christmas gift.
I mean, the whole thing.
We were trying to get into.
Santa Claus is covered in gremlins.
We were trying to get into it in our Christmas special of what is the ontological definition of a Christmas movie.
And I don't know if he's in philosophy and stuff.
It might be able to help us.
I think there's a difference between setting and theme.
And so that's where it gets mixed up a little bit.
Just because the setting is Christmas doesn't mean.
But in any other holiday, if it's Halloween is the setting, it would be a Halloween movie.
So I have been pursuing a related question.
I think an analogous philosophical inquiry, which is if one grows a beard during the pandemic, like during lockdown, but not because it's lockdown, is that a pandemic beard?
Or is that just a beard that you have?
Because I'm going to keep this beard, I think, for the foreseeable future, but I don't want it to be like, oh, he just cope.
He's just doing it to, like, and so the ontological question is profound because, like, you want, you want.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, right.
Ontology.
Like, versus just kind of mere semiotics, right?
Versus just like, this is a word that we apply.
And like, I feel, I kind of feel that the roots of human motivation are so thorny.
And like our positive motivations and our negative motivations are so intimately intertwined in every individual choice that we make that like the, we don't have the epistemological standing to make the claim like this is or is not a pandemic beard, like it's just a beard, it's from the pandemic.
We leave it at that.
So so, this is a movie with like many Christmas themes, but also many other themes.
And like, how can we pick apart right the, the intimately entangled yeah, motivation?
Right, it's integral.
It's integral yeah, in some way.
And to die, what's a movie that's like that?
An absolute Christmas movie would be.
But I guess, with like Die Hard, could you take Christmas and just swap it out for Halloween, like they had a Halloween party right, and would that be?
Or would that take something away?
To change his wife's name to like cobwebs or something because her name is Holly okay, so now that, now the relevant question is like, is this is like essence versus accident?
Right, like so is.
Is Christmas an essential element of Halloween or is it accidental?
Like the color of a man's hair is not thought to be essential to his being a man, that's an accident, whereas his uh, being a reasoning being is thought to be essential somehow to what, to what he is.
So Chrysippus the Stoic philosopher would potentially have suggested, or some later Stoics might have suggested, that there is no such thing as as essence in this regard.
Like all characteristics, if removed, fundamentally alter the item in question.
And I kind of I feel in this, in this dimension, that's true right, like it may not be the case that Diehard is about Christmas, but you couldn't take Christmas out without altering, like the essence, something about the feel yeah, the tone right exactly yeah, but like, and you can't know if you would have grown that beard if there wasn't a pandemic.
No, I can't, I can't know if I would say that, but you don't right actually yes, there is no counterfactual really, to like compare that with fascinating tackling the hard issues here on the baby, so our very best guests can take a really stupid question and turn it into a good answer, and so yeah, you pass, I will.
I will note in passing, by the way, before we move on from this topic, that Aristotle would have like severely disagreed with Chrysippus, like certain elements of a thing.
That's where this like you know too like it's saying, Chrysippus yeah, Chrysippus no no, I know Crackle and Chrysippus yeah, I know who that is, says Kyle, surreptitiously not wishing to reveal his knowledge of stoic philosophy.
Why did you say that with such like looking over your shoulder?
Guys, like, I don't know.
I have a confession to make to you, my brothers.
I don't know.
You're asking the question.
Who's asking the question?
Where did we ask the questions?
So you're an undergrad at Yale, doctorate in philosophy at Oxford.
So are you doctor?
Can we call you doctor?
Actually, what you may call me is Dr. Jill Biden.
Yeah, you can call him.
Dr. Jill Biden.
Yeah, no, I'm a D-Phil, which is technically, I guess, the sort of British Doctor of Philosophy.
That sounds like a nickname for Dr. Phil.
D. Phil.
What up, D. Phil?
Hey, D. Phil.
How you doing, my man?
But I will say that I'm not actually, my D. Phil is actually not in philosophy.
It's in classics, which is Greek and Latin language and literature and some philosophy.
I studied ancient Greek music just to really be as obscure as I possibly could.
That's the goal, really, of the PhDs.
As useless as possible.
The John Travolta movie with the musical?
Correct.
Yes.
Which is like way back before the musical even existed.
Well, I heard that movie.
Greece is based on ancient Greece, but it's changed a bunch.
Right, right.
But the leather jacket is really good.
Yeah, you talk about essence and accident.
The leather jacket is the essence of that whole.
So, yeah.
But this is, of course, a whole subject in classics is like the field of what constitutes the movie Greece and how.
No, this is not actually.
I never saw Greece.
Really?
Really?
My wife makes me watch it often.
And Grease 2 also?
You're kidding.
Have you ever seen Grease 2?
No.
It's horrible.
Like, Grease is painful just as you don't really like that kind of musical or whatever.
And Greece 2 is just horrible.
It's like Michelle Pfeiffer, all different characters and random.
I was in the stage version of Grease in high school.
Oh, nice.
I played, I don't know, I can't like.
This shows you what a formative moment it was for me.
I can't remember the name of the character that I played, but I played the guy that sings Grease Lightning, who is not John Travolta in the movie, but is like another random person.
Yeah, him.
That guy.
I know who he is.
That dude.
So it says here that you sang in choir at Oxford?
I did, yes.
And at Yale as well.
So could we dim the lights and could you sing Bridge Over Troubled Water into the mic?
Okay.
Another philosophical distinction is that between could and should, right?
Can you do like a falsetto?
Is it possible for me?
Everybody can do a falsetto.
Well, yeah, and like every man has a falsetto.
It's a silly one, like a nice pretty one.
It steals your heart.
It's really, it's not for me to say like the quality of my falsetto.
But I can do a falsetto.
Well, all the good.
What I actually am is a bass, right?
So I'm the lowest voice.
Oh, okay.
Like Oak Ridge Boys.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm a bass two.
So if you have A parts, you have bass two, bass one, baritone, or I guess bass one actually is baritone, the ten or one, ten or two.
And then either you have like lady parts, or you have or you, which are soprano and alto.
For anybody that is confused about what I mean when I say lady parts, I mean soprano one, soprano two, alto one.
How about you?
You've got lady parts.
How do we get something on this part?
I can't remember.
Yeah, so but or you have men and boys choirs or boys in that part or you have guys, basses, usually.
Basses do have the best falsettos.
And then you have basses who are trained to sing.
It's like elaborate.
And if you go on YouTube, you can find what they used to do instead was just cut people's testies off to accomplish this task rather than having women sing, which seems like a simpler solution to me.
But yeah, you can go on YouTube and find the last living castrato does have a record.
There's a recording of his voice.
So rather than dimming the lights and having me sing with that, I just go look at them.
So it legitimately makes them sing higher when you remove the?
Yeah, because if you do it, especially before the testy band, like.
Like what the test, the testable field?
Yeah, it's kind of like how they used to cut out people's stomach, but now they just put a band on there.
Oh, oh, the band.
I thought you meant the band, like a band.
Yeah, exactly.
I thought that'd be a good metal band named Test to Kill.
Does this come from your, you guys had that guy on?
You talked to him about how bulls at rodeos have the band on their testes.
Yeah.
No, I don't think so.
Yeah.
I want to test out your bass singing voice real quick with this test.
Ready?
Yeah.
Yakity yak.
Don't talk back.
Not bad.
Okay.
You just got a knot that.
I got a knot.
Just give them a knot that.
Always have to go.
I don't know.
It's really low.
Voice.
Don't talk back.
Don't talk back.
It's got to be lower than that.
How about that?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's pretty good better.
All right.
There we go.
This is all I did in college.
This is just like how.
Sing this note on the panel.
Sing this note.
There's your lower.
You just go down.
Can you do that thing where like you know what note you're singing without a piano?
No.
Perfect pitch.
I do not have that.
I've always been very envious of it.
If you sing, you can kind of like get into a headspace where you're like, you know, you listen to one song over and over again and you're really into this song.
And then you can kind of know where it starts.
But it always goes, for me, it always goes away.
Like people say you can train it.
I feel this is wrong.
This is like people who can paint or draw.
They're always like, you absolutely, you know, it's easy.
You can learn.
It's like, first of all, how would you know?
Because you obviously have this innate gift that makes you feel it's easy to learn.
And people who have perfect pitch are like this too often.
They're like, oh, you can train.
You can train perfect pitch.
But no, I do not have it.
It's a gift given to me.
I'm a guy that draws.
I'm trying to figure out if I fit into your category.
Do you feel?
Oh, good.
Well, do you feel like, do you go around telling people if you just study enough and practice?
The hard thing, I think, is that, guys, what is talent, right?
Like, what really is it?
You got the smart questions.
Yeah.
Right?
Because I read this book.
I can't remember the name of it, but it was about what is talent.
I think it was called Talent is Overrated, actually.
It looked at a lot of people we consider insanely talented people.
Right.
And a lot of them had a parent or close adult figure who was training them from a very young age.
Yeah.
And when I look at what talent was in my life, it was a fascination for sure, a drive to just draw like crazy from the earliest days, I can remember.
So during very formative years, I was developing skills that people had never thought of developing.
You know, it was like my, when my mom put me in preschool, the preschool teacher called her and said, your son's drawing at an eight-year-old level.
He's three years old.
He's drawing things that I'm drawing fingers and facial features and things that like usually a kid isn't thinking about drawing yet.
Right.
And so I guess, I don't know, but it's because I'd drawn, you know, I had that.
So what is it?
Is it the desire?
Because in high school, everybody drew.
Like all my, I had all these really talented artist friends, and then some got their girlfriends pregnant, and then some were stoners, and a lot of them did drugs.
And like, so a lot of them could have been amazing artists.
Okay, this actually is a really profound question.
No, you're absolutely right.
Fairly profound.
You've got like two or three now.
Yeah.
That's true.
And the person that I think is really, you know, wonderful on this, because it also speaks to a long-standing philosophical question about free will, right?
Like to what extent do we choose our actions and what would that even mean, given what we know about the material world and how our brains are constructed and all this stuff.
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle.
Yeah, I knew that.
I knew that.
Kyle's like, I know about Aristotle.
I know that guy.
You know, has this sequence of texts that goes from the Nicomachean ethics, which is about how to be good at being a human, into politics.
And the politics was obviously about how to form a community, a political community in a way that is conducive to the common good and so forth.
And To me, one of the neglected aspects of that sequence is the reason Aristotle puts it in that way.
And he says something like this in the Nicomakian Ethics: that the people who are trained in childhood to have certain inclinations, and we all know that in childhood, our souls are shaped in certain ways.
You come to, you know, even just something as simple as, well, you were raised with a healthy diet, and so now you don't actually have this taste for sugar.
But much more profound than that, you sort of acculturated into virtuous habits and discipline and things of that nature.
And then those kids grow up and enter into political life and form institutions which will then go back and do the forming of the new generation.
It was a fairly simple observation, but it's this kind of Gordian knot, because if you have a problem in that cycle anywhere, it's very hard to know where to go and try and fix that.
And Aristotle analogizes this at one point to drunkards.
He says that drunkards don't choose, drunk people don't choose their actions.
So they're not contemptible because they do the thing that is idiotic or bad when they're drunk, but they chose to get drunk.
Well, you may say they can't choose to get drunk if they're an alcoholic, but they chose the sort of course of actions that encoded this alcoholism into their life.
And this is a very thorny problem that we still grapple with today: about, well, you know, is this person good or bad because of innate gifts?
Did they have certain advantages growing up and so forth?
And there is a going, a philosophy going around that talent is overrated philosophy, which I think in some respects really goes back to Malcolm Gladwell, this guy who writes the 10,000, I think it's 10,000 hours, this book, about, you know, you can actually, if you invest 10,000 hours, or I'm getting that number wrong, maybe, you know, this certain amount of vast amount of time into a thing, you can become just world-class at it.
If it's basketball, if it's guitar playing, if it's languages, whatever.
I feel, and Gladwell I think has walked this back a little bit because of research that came out post-that book.
Like, I feel this is deeply wrong.
Like, it's vastly oversimplified, let's say, you know, in a way, and kind of, and kind of an elaborate form of cope.
Like, you know, like the simple fact of the matter is that the talents are very unevenly distributed.
And this is one of the things that we, I feel, can no longer countenance in our culture really at all, because it's this weird sort of metastasization or perversion of our true philosophical belief that all men are created equal, meaning that in the eyes of God, they are, you know, they're not sort of of greater or lesser value than one another, therefore in the eyes of the law they should not be.
All of these things which are true, as actually our old pal Uncle Aristotle would have known, right?
They have kind of ballooned out into this sort of desperate urgency to flatten out the natural.
But like obviously, I will never be the basketball player that a seven-foot tall kid is, you know, that is seven-foot-tall from the age of 15 and has been practicing.
But of course, also, you know, and this impresses itself upon me all the time, is I am a writer, and so I live in this world where not only is your talent sort of the only thing that you have, and your voice, right, that the distinctiveness of your voice and the way that you present yourself and so forth, but it's also kind of subjective in the sense not that it's arbitrary, right, which is a way that we overuse that word,
but in the sense that it has purely to do with the way your writing affects people and is therefore very, very difficult to prove.
You're not a mathematician who can be like, yes, I've actually done, proven this theorem, made this advance.
You're actually somebody that's trying to do something, feeling out this inchoate thing in the world, and whether or not you've succeeded is in some senses even just up to posterity.
At the same time, I know many, many writers who are much more talented than I am in the sense of the sense that you're saying, drawing at an eighth grade level from third grade on, but they don't wake up at five o'clock in the morning and pound out at their craft, you know, and so there's obviously, I mean, and then of course, discipline itself is like a certain form of talent that you may or may not be born with more or less of it.
But I, you know, these things are very, very intimately tangled together in, as you indicate, a profound way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure.
I got it.
I think it's probably true that in a lot of areas, you could spend 10,000 hours and become really, really good.
Yeah.
But the difference is that the person who has grown and formed with that motivation and that talent, that innate talent, whatever you want to call that, is the person who's going to invest the 10,000 hours.
Because you were said, I don't know if that's what you were saying when you said it was a cope, but it's like me saying, well, I could be a really good violinist.
That's right.
If I just spent 10,000 hours.
Yeah, I could.
If you missed it being ingrained into your childhood, you probably missed the bus, at least on like to some extent.
There are some things especially that are like that, like ballet dancing, for example.
Oh, yeah.
And I have known people who, you know, either, and this is one of the most, you know, we live in a tragic fallen world.
And so this is one of the most heartbreaking versions of this.
You know, either you meet somebody who feels called, like their vocation that they're discerning is to ballet dancing.
And yet, as a whatever two-year-old, they were not forced through like classes and being on point.
And so therefore, it is simply the case that like their muscles have formed in such a way that they won't be able to do this thing.
That's tragic.
Also, imagining like what would happen if Fred Astaire were born today is tragic, right?
Because like tap dancing and that ballroom dancing are just not at the center of our culture in the way it was when he was born.
And perhaps like some new Fred Austaire exists in like Oklahoma teaching a dance class to toddlers, right?
So these things are very tragic.
But then also you meet people who it's like, you know, they hate ballet dancing, but they did receive that training.
And so now this is their life, or at least a big part of it.
You know, people who dance like for the Met or whatever will say this.
No, it's very complicated.
And it's wrapped up, as you just sort of, I guess, suggested, with vocation, right?
Because everybody goes through a process in life, I suppose, of prayer and thought and discernment or whatever you want to call it, in which you sort of say, well, what am I shaped for?
What's the hole into which I, as a key, am meant, you know, or whatever, I'm a puzzle piece.
Where do I fit?
And there's something profoundly teleological about that, but there's also something accidental about your history and your life.
And like, you know, we muddle along as best we can.
But I sort of feel, I feel that, A, there is something right now that you personally are very deeply called to be doing.
And that aligning yourself with that North Star is all the source of joy, really.
And especially actually in a man's life, I think this is, you know, women may view this slightly differently, but for men, occupational alignment with that purpose is so urgently important.
And at the same time, because if we have an infinitely forgiving God, like you miss certain boats and you find that actually there's been some adjustment made for you and there's something else that you can do.
It's very mysterious.
Yeah, that was one thing that growing up, I because I look back and I know that I had the fascination with drawing, I was good at it.
And then also, I think one thing that happened was we moved a lot and it was my way of making friends because that's my way of standing out.
Because when you go to a new school, all these kids know each other and you don't know them.
So it's hard to stand out.
So I always wonder if I was raised differently.
Maybe I wouldn't be able to draw.
I don't know.
As soon as all these things kind of come together.
Anyway, I do reject the idea that you're just born with this ability to just draw amazing.
I don't think it doesn't work quite like that.
No, that's right.
But there is definitely like a thing in me that's just not in a lot of other people.
Right.
No, and this, like, it's, I think, important actually to hold on to that sort of thing because as you indicate, right, with that story about moving around, like, these things are also very intimately bound up with your identity.
Is it in Revelation that God gives everybody a stone with a name written that only God and the individual will know?
Again, I may be sort of, I'm pulling this out of my hat, so I may be getting this somewhat wrong, but there is some secret between God and every saved person in Revelation.
And it's nicely counterbalanced with the observation that Lewis makes.
I think in The Four Loves, he talks about the fact that in Isaiah, in the vision of the temple, right, the angels are calling out to each other about God.
Even in conversations such as this or in friendships, groups of friends, you know, you don't just have Fred and Joe and Chris, you have like the part of Chris that Fred draws out.
And so there is this way in which this kind of fractaline, this infinitely iterative way in which God's glory is sort of refracted through people in their relationships.
At the same time, as you want to preserve this thing that is kind of, and I was just thinking about this in the context of Twitter and even coronavirus, I feel that all of our personal choices have been made very public all of a sudden.
You kind of want to guard these sort of features of your identity that you can't explain, that you don't really have a good reason for why you're drawing, and yet they are central to you.
There's something very precious about that, I think.
Have you ever done DMT?
What is DMT, John?
You don't know what DMT is?
No, I don't.
Ayahuasca.
Oh.
Why?
Do you feel that that would be the Joe Rogan?
We're trying to be successful like Joe Rogan, and he always asks people that.
We just steal his question.
That's a Joe Rogan.
Oh, interesting.
You're just talking so deep, you sound like you're on drugs.
Sorry.
Well, don't we have to actually, if you guys want to truly do the Joe Rogan, don't we have to actually be smoking blunts?
That's true.
Yeah, but it must be scattered all over the table.
We have cigars in that room.
I brought some cigars because I'm moving, and the experience of moving is like you get down to the last handle of scotch or whatever, a handle of vodka, and you just have, you have to pawn it off on people.
You have to guzzle.
This is like gross, but I'm using all my beard wax.
Like I'm just like every morning, there's like slather wax all over my beard.
I can't get rid of it.
This is maybe TMI.
I don't know if that's too much information.
Never.
Never.
Okay, good.
So should we take the Odyssey out of school curriculum?
Oh my gosh.
I was just looking up that story because I was like vaguely remembering that somebody said something stupid about the Odyssey.
And this has become my beat now whenever anybody says some dumb nonsense about classics, somebody tags me in it.
Somebody like are you talking about Adventures and Odyssey?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Spongebob movie.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Adventures and Odyssey is the biblical show.
It was the Christian, it was like set tapes and VHS tapes of these guys who were at some crazy professor's house or something.
I don't remember.
I don't know.
It was a cartoon when grew up.
So I missed this, all of this, because I was not raised Christian.
So I like, Veggie Tales is totally new to me.
I've been discovering Veggie Tales.
I have a lot of thoughts about Veggie Tales, but that's perhaps from the day.
Wait, but the Odyssey, we have to get back to that.
Sorry, the Odyssey.
Not Adventures and Odyssey.
No, but the original.
Yes.
The original source material for the Odyssey.
From the Movie Greece.
From the movie Greece, everybody knows, or maybe not everybody knows, that the original source material for the Odyssey is actually the SpongeBob SquarePants movie.
If you watch, there are many parallels.
And also, Oh, Brother Warart, though, these two great texts of Western civilization come together.
Exactly.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's like the New Testament ripping off the Matrix.
Correct.
Exactly like that.
Yes.
And not just The Matrix, of course, but all sorts of things.
All sorts of movies.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, right.
In Massachusetts, was it that somebody was congratulating herself?
A teacher was congratulating herself for having gotten home.
Is it this with Heather Levin?
Yes.
I'm very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year.
Yeah, that's right.
I think that haha can be red as the Wicked Witch of the World.
Oh my gosh.
Wow, that's great.
Very joker-esque.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, this is like pride in sucking information out of people's brains.
Like scooping people's brains out with a melon baller is now the point of pride among certain set of academics.
And in some senses, this is kind of the whole premise behind my own podcast.
It was just basically somebody was like, You can plug it.
You can plug it.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
My podcast is called Young Heretics.
And I will shamelessly plug it because I genuinely come by it naturally.
Somebody, a couple people were like, you should have a podcast.
I was like, I don't know, like everybody has a podcast.
Even the Ballon B guys have a podcast.
And like, what would I talk about?
And then I was like, okay, so the point of having a podcast, right, is just to talk about the weird, like arcane, boring stuff that nobody wants to hear about.
And they just like, it has to be there.
It has to be in the air.
And for me, that stuff genuinely is the great text of the Western canon, formally conceived and sort of traditionally understood.
Like, I'm not really big on, like, oh, actually, like, you know, this random thing you've never heard of is part of the Western canon.
Like, I'm talking about, you know, Homer is a good example, right?
A foundational text of Western literature without reading which nobody can count himself, I think, fully educated or even fully self-aware.
I mean, it's so written into.
I joke about O Brother Roart thou and about SpongeBob SquarePants, but of course, like those things only exist folded into this vast fabric of illusion, you know, 2,000 years' worth of allusions exactly to Homer, to the Odyssey and the Iliad, these great epic poems.
And so I just, you know, as you can tell, like, we'll go off ranting on tangents about this for a long time.
And sort of, I thought, well, that would be my podcast.
My podcast will just be like, all these idiots who are saying, like, we've got to cancel it.
It's too racist.
I mean, Yale, my alma mater, in 2015, there was this big petition, like, remove the white men from the English department, which the white men being like, you know, Shakespeare, Taucer, or Milton, like, you know, these big, big, again, names, names without which you can't count yourself, I think, to really have read English literature.
And so I just thought, you know, a lot of people are out here screaming about how that sucks.
And it does suck.
It's very easy to get very angry.
You hear somebody gloating about kicking the Odyssey off the curriculum.
Really, really easy to get oneself worked up into a culture war froth about it.
But we spend so much time doing that, so much time arguing about Homer, that there actually isn't a lot of content there.
Let's just read Homer, right?
Like let's actually, which is actually a better, I think, a better approach, really.
Because the truth of the matter is that in all of these debates, our side, which I count our side as sort of like the right or whatever you want to call it, right?
We come from a place of strength.
Like we always act as if we come from this place of defensiveness and weakness.
Like, oh, we have to fight back against these cruel people.
It's like, no, no, no.
Like, we have, we are now essentially the party or the group of people who are just invested in the vast riches of our cultural heritage.
And so the show is basically just that.
It's basically just like, well, what actually is in the Odyssey?
And it turns out, it's like there are a ton of people out there who just, like, at this point, for decades, have been deprived of this stuff.
And they're so hungry.
Like, the bliss of the show is like you get these messages, like, I just, I didn't even know.
Like, all I knew about Machiavelli was that like the word Machiavellian meets scheming.
It was like we do this hour-long, just an hour-long thing.
I'm like, well, actually, who was Machiavelli?
Like, essentially the founder of modern Western political theory.
This stuff is rich food.
It's like that come by without, have bread without price, come drink.
And there's just so much in it.
So it does break the heart to sort of like see people just thrilled as if there's some virtue, essentially.
The idea, I guess, being that you then make more room for people who are more sort of ideologically demographically appropriate.
I think that the theme was, it's called something like disrupt texts.
If you just search the hashtag disrupt texts, which already is just such a tortured hashtag that you know it's going to be a mess, right?
And like the two T's next to each other, like at least you would at least.
But again, like prosody aside, the point of it is all of these sins of prejudice and omission have been committed over the course of Western history.
There's this inherent chauvinism, inherent jingoism in celebrating the West because the West just means white people, which first of all is itself profoundly untrue, right?
Actually, the Western culture is a hugely trans-racial, trans-ethnic endeavor, trans-historical endeavor, encompassing vastly different societies.
I mean, Tertullian already in antiquity was saying, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Which is a fair question, right?
You talk like these sort of fifth century BC Greeks next to these thousand-year-old Jews wandering around, and they come, they sort of meet in the Roman Empire and are disseminated out through Europe.
This is a hugely multiracial story.
And so it's sort of laughable on its face to say, well, this is actually all about cutting out minorities.
But then, of course, what it really is, is just using one culture's or one set of cultures' sins as if they were unique.
You hear all about the evils of Columbus.
You never hear about the incredible violence that was being perpetrated between clans and tribes in the Americas before any Westerners ever arrived.
All of this stuff is, it almost doesn't bear arguing about because it seems profoundly obvious to me.
Really what we have is at root of all this, I think, is like an inability to deal with the fallenness of man, which is actually really, really ugly.
Is Chesterton say you have to hear the bad news before you hear the good news?
GK Chesterton.
Probably at some point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm playing very fast and loose with my illusions here.
Somewhere in Revelations probably it says stone.
Fair wild.
I think Kirk Cameron says that actually.
Yeah, that's very good.
Oh, it's a SpongeBob.
It's a SpongeBob movie.
It all comes back to SpongeBob.
Yeah, well, I mean, this is the thing.
And the coronavirus thing is the same thing.
It's just like, there's death.
It's not fair.
It affects different people at different times.
Unexpectedly, you can gather grain into barns and that very day your life will be taken from you.
This stuff is like is tragic.
I mean, this is one of the central, actually one of the most formative experiences and memories of my life is throwing a tantrum as a small child when I asked my mom, like, wait, so if you don't get like hit by a car, you don't die, right?
You just sort of keep living.
And my mother explained, as I assume parents do generally to kids at some point, like, no, actually, like, you just, eventually you just die.
And the profound injustice of this to me, like, I was inconsolable for a full couple hours.
One of those little kid tantrums.
And I still feel that way in my heart.
And I think that coming to grips with that is really what this is about.
It's like the West, because it's a purely Western phenomenon, by the way, also to be kicking Odyssey off the curriculum.
It's not as if in Saudi Arabia, they're conducting deep soul searching about Muslim culture or whatever.
This is a Western thing to self-critique, and it's now spiraled so out of control because in some sense, we've sort of lost Christianity as our lodestar, and therefore we're looking at ourselves with this horror of unrecognition.
How can it be that there's bloodshed and rape and terrible things or slavery in our past?
I felt like so much of the coronavirus response has been people just realizing for the first time that they're going to die.
Exactly.
And you have governors freaking out and shuffling things around and making all these.
And you're like, oh, you're just changing these kind of deaths to these kind of deaths.
And they're just freaking out because they can't control that.
It's so weird.
They're throwing the tantrum that I had as a little kid, right?
It's like they never had it, so now they have to have it in public in this very destructive way.
But yeah, that's.
So we shouldn't get rid of the Odyssey?
No, don't get rid of the Odyssey.
Don't get rid of SpongeBob, I think.
You just got the Odyssey, and I don't know if you answered the question.
Because my wife hates SpongeBob, so if I tell her that you got rid of the Odyssey, then it gets rid of SpongeBob, she'd be on board.
Oh, wow.
All right.
That's not a good argument.
This is bad.
No Odyssey, no Paul Blart Mall Cop, too.
That's a good argument.
That's very, very compelling.
So I've tried to read the Odyssey and the Iliad in recent years.
And I can't do it.
I'm just.
Am I just dumb?
I mean, how do you get it?
The answer to that is yes.
This is easy to do.
No, you were not just dumb.
But you're guessing you're like, how?
How do you know or why?
How do you do it?
How does one know?
What's the best way to do it?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so this actually, I'm glad that we started out talking about the complexities of talent and the discomfort of it.
Because inherently, when you go around being like, yay, Western culture, there's something a little bit elitist, a little bit snobby about it.
And I get this all the time.
I think that it's really easy to be flippant in the same way that some people are flippant about, oh, you can just draw, you can just learn to draw.
It's really easy to be flippant about this as an actual challenge.
Two things.
First of all, you don't have to like everything.
This is a kind of unapologetic, hard and fast, like old sort of British school marm way of regarding this that we've kind of lost.
Some things you just should have read.
And so if it just feels like taking your medicine for a while, I kind of feel like that's okay.
And there are things which you have to struggle through and then be walking down the street one day.
And it's like it's been in the back pocket of your brain for all that time.
And suddenly you're like, oh, crap, that's how that works.
So I guess, and I feel this way, for example, about T.S. Eliot, who is not somebody that I particularly liked very much until I sort of came to understand his Christianity.
But good translations and good editions do help.
I mean, did you read the introduction to this?
Did you just crack it open and read it?
Yeah, why not?
Yeah.
Yeah, I sort of feel like there are gaps in time culture that you have to bridge with the Odyssey.
You have to know, what am I trying to get out of it?
With the Odyssey and the Iliad, especially, I often tell people, it's not, actually, C.S. Lewis writes about this in his preface to Paradise Lost.
He says, you can't come to an epic the way you come to like a Keats poem.
He's finely constructed.
You want to underline every word.
Oh, yeah, this was a good way of saying that.
Epics were not actually like that.
Like, it's this kind of rolling wash of sound and words and ideas.
Like, this, you know, I like to think of it as like, you know, as a sort of a movie.
It's like if you tune out for like a couple, you know, 10 or 20 lines, like, that's okay, too.
It just, there's something like people don't know how to use these texts.
I don't know if any of these things like that are.
Like an Avengers movie.
Yes.
There's like a lot going on.
The closest thing in our culture, I think, to epic is the Marvel cinematic universe.
Because there was, I mean, we lost a lot of this now, but there was what's called the epic cycle, which was like all of these fanfics and spin-offs, and they were all kind of gathered together into this big store.
The cycle was itself like, well, this epic fits here, and this one fits here, and this is where Oedipus fits into the story of Odysseus and whatever.
And in some sense, we're kind of reviving that mode of storytelling of all this world building and universe building and stuff.
But you're watching a Marvel movie and you go, who the heck was that guy?
Exactly.
And you just go, ah, whatever.
Nobody's sad about that.
I don't think you should be sad about it.
I am personally at least not sad about that when I'm reading.
I mean, look, I've read the Iliad Uncountable in my own mind a number of times.
And every time some great scholar comes out with, like, well, actually, like, when the death of Eurymidon in book whatever, it's like, I have no idea who that person is.
And don't like care very much.
And I'm sure that if I went and like followed this argument and like, you know, that's another great thing about these vast texts.
I mean, they did kind of, the Greeks did, in some respects, treat these texts like their Bible.
And you don't read your Bible all in one sitting and you come back to it and you're like, oh, wow, I never noticed that in Joshua, this thing happened.
Like, there's an element of that to these poems, too.
I think people just like, again, you're sort of nodding along, so I don't know which one of these things may or may not be true for you.
I just do it so you think I understand all the words or something.
Yeah, okay.
Just in case the camera's on you.
Good, yeah.
Let's get it.
Epistemological.
Yeah, I do my best at all times to make people uncomfortable in exactly this way.
Television.
Do you read the Iliad or The Odyssey first?
Which one's the sequel?
I can't even remember.
The Odyssey is the sequel.
Okay.
But it's also easier and shorter.
So hard to say.
It just depends kind of where you're coming at it from.
If you're already in our order?
You can.
Out of order.
You can read them out of order.
Yeah.
It's like watching Iron Man 3.
You need to have seen Iron Man 2.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And much like the creator of Iron Man 3, the creator of The Odyssey took great pains to make sure that you could just pick it up.
I mean, I guess listen to it.
Shane Black.
Shane Black?
Is that the creator of Iron Man?
Hero Iron Man 3.
There you go.
Much like Homer, I would say.
The Homer of our day, really.
I would say so.
Well, I mean, that's the other thing about these is like they actually were at some point.
This is one of the thorniest questions in classics.
So like, you know, without trying to resolve it.
Like, scholars have debated about how these things came about.
And one going theory is like there were a bunch of sort of songs, shorter songs going around that people would sing and recite these tales.
And so that you actually have to be able to lift certain pieces out and not really know what's going on in the rest of the story.
Yeah, I guess I would read The Odyssey first.
Actually, what I would really suggest is reading the Aeneid first, which is the Roman one, Virgil, and not the only Roman comics.
So like the DC comics?
Yeah, exactly.
It's the alternate universe.
Yeah.
I don't know, between DC and Marvel, which one is more of a rip-off, would you say, of the other?
Is there one?
They were constantly ripping each other off, but I think DC was the first.
It was the original.
So I guess then DC is the Greeks.
Because Romans, Virgil, the great accusation of him is that, you know, that meme where there's somebody drawing a cat?
Or like, no, there's a girl with a cat and she's tracing the outline of a cat and then the cat goes away and it's like this like weird, gross picture.
Like that's people accuse Virgil of that with Homer.
Like he just takes the Iliad, which is 24 books, and shrinks it down into six books.
And the Odyssey, which is 24 books, and shrinks it down into six books because there are 12 books.
It's like half the length.
And it's the one that everybody quotes and cites sort of throughout the tradition of epics.
It's big for Dante and all this stuff.
So it's like probably the one to start with is actually the Aeneid.
Aeneid.
The Aeneid, yeah.
Okay.
Exactly.
Okay.
Sure.
Why not?
I'll get right on that.
Nodding long.
Yeah.
So in big bold underlined letters on my notes, it says, Spencer Claven said C.S. Lewis is the most important 20th century intellectual.
I did say that.
And it's in bold, so you know it's very important.
This is true.
Yeah.
So do you want to defend that?
So not Neil deGrasse Tyson?
Not Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Richard Dawkins.
Do I want to defend?
No, I don't want to defend it.
I just want to make that assertion.
That's the end of this.
So I just read The Abolition of I just read The Abolition of Man and it exploded my head a little bit.
Good.
In a good way?
In a good way, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, I saw you reading that, and it always boggles my mind that C.S. Lewis is so famous.
And then, like, people who love him haven't read a lot of his nonfiction.
Well, that was me because I'd growing up, I had read Alnarnia, I read Mere Christianity, and Great Divorce Screwtape Letters.
Yeah.
You know, and then I would like pick up anything else, and it was just, I don't know what he's talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
And then just coming back to it, it's like the same style, but I'm now understanding these arguments.
And it's like.
What changed, do you think?
Speaking of how do I get into complicated text?
I mean, I think I just have a little more experience now where I'm actually seeing what he's talking about.
It's also become more, it becomes more relevant every day.
It's becoming more and more relevant.
He's kind of doing this argument about super ultra-literal scientism.
Yeah.
You know, and he's got this great comparison between magic and science in The Abolition of Man, that I was just like, you know, I was fainting on my fainting couch with how good it was.
Yeah, I don't know.
I guess maybe it has become more relevant over the last 20 years or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, because this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, right?
You pick up a book at one point in your life and it kind of just doesn't speak to you.
And then something clicks along the way.
I mean, my case for him as the most important intellectual of the 20th century is kind of based on this, essentially, that his whole life he was like shadow boxing with Freud, like Freud.
And he kind of mentions this a little bit in surprised by joy.
I think he says that at a certain point we were all very into debunking.
Like the new psychology sort of made us think that all myths were just this kind of emanation of our animal natures and we had to explain away why there were stories about gods and fairies and all this stuff.
And in some sense, I think he zeroed in on that as what would become the madness of post-war Europe and America, of the post-war West.
And that was exactly right, essentially.
I mean, Freudianism, I knock on Freud, I think, a little too much in general, because he was a great thinker.
He in many ways established a discipline that has been incredibly helpful for many people, namely that of psychotherapy.
And yet, if you really chase him right down, and haters will deny this, Freudians will deny this, but if you really chase him right down, he is a materialist.
He does believe that this whole ego, superego thing, your superego is kind of an emanation of your ego.
It's kind of an emanation of your id.
And in the end, it's difficult for psychoanalysis not to veer into debunking, into scraping away, like, oh, you feel love for this person for what that really is.
And we still talk this way.
It's so profoundly changed the way we talk.
Like, oh, I had an adrenaline rush instead of like, I felt excited, right?
Like, we still think of ourselves as bags of chemicals.
And that is, I think, really the root of that philosophically for us is Freud.
And Lewis kind of saw that.
And so all that stuff in abolition about explaining things away, skepticism, right?
Like the whole text is a sort of argument for not being able to reduce things down to their atoms all the time.
And so in that sense, because this materialism has only spiraled more out of control, in that sense, Abolition of Man has like the answers to all of our problems and is so perfectly describes so many things that are going on.
So I don't know.
I think it wins.
And also it's kind of easier to read than a lot of other stuff, which is one reason why he doesn't get enough plays because people think he's simple because he's so good at writing.
He's so clear.
Yeah, I mean, I think in high school, maybe going into college, I had this natural debunking attitude, the cynicism of being like, oh, I can explain all this.
Someone comes up and like, oh, I had an experience with a demon, and you're like, actually, that's probably just blah, blah, blah.
Even though I was a believer, it was like, you just have this natural skepticism towards everything.
I don't know if that was cultural or what.
Sure.
But I think since then, I've kind of rediscovered this childlike wonder for things.
And to be able to be like, he's got a line too in Narnia where one of the kids is talking to Aslan about the stars.
And it's like, you know, he says, well, stars are actually burning balls of gas, billions of miles away or whatever.
And Aslan says, that's not what stars are.
That's what they're made of.
And I think I just read through the Narnias again.
I read that.
I had to stand up.
It's great.
I mean, he's so wonderful at that this moment.
This hits you over the head with this perfect one line.
Yeah.
By the way, I think Burning Balls of Gas Milan's body.
I think that's Puma.
That's this from a similar figure much like Aslan in the canonical literature.
Yeah, no, this is the funny, like, I really think that in college is the time of one's life when one should be sort of debunking a bunch of stuff.
Like that's the appropriate time to go around and I'm like, well, really, man, like there's no such thing as good and evil.
Like it's all.
And then like, you know, like so many of our professional philosophers are like stuck in college, like stuck in that mode.
You grow out of it.
You grow out of it because it's not real.
It doesn't describe your experience of the world.
It doesn't describe anything important.
And so either you continue to view the world that way as like, you know, just kind of an illusion, basically.
And like as we've seen in our streets this past summer, right?
Like you just, your life becomes empty, meaningless, and angry.
And how could it not?
Or you sort of put that away.
You should say, well, at a certain point, how do I know that this table is really here instead of not?
Well, I just know.
Nobody who doesn't believe it's there won't put a coffee cup on it.
Like it's there.
I thought Abolition of Man would be really relevant because it sounds like a feminist book.
Yeah.
The feminists love it until they open the cover, which they never do because they don't read.
So, yeah.
Mic drop.
Yes.
Well.
So you identify as, how do you identify?
As a same-sex attracted Christian?
Oh, yeah.
It's like the right way to identify.
I don't know what, like, what do you say?
Yeah, I mean, I use the word gay to talk about myself all the time.
It's one of those moving targets where you ever know what's the right way to say it.
Yeah.
So you can tell us.
Yeah.
No, I like, I hate all that stuff personally.
I mean, as you can probably tell, like, I don't know.
I think college would call it, first of all.
And second of all, the politicized battle over sexual preference was the recent one, right?
The Amy Coney Barry.
You can't say preference, though, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
It was preferences off the table.
Except you can, but you can't, right?
Because as recently as five minutes before she said that, there were articles on whatever queer tea or whatever the gay rag is, you know, like using the term.
T-E-R-T-Y.
Second only to the Babylon Bee as a source of comedy and entertainment is to watch subscriptions delivered to your IT house.
No, I just follow them on Twitter and they're just like the endless source of dunking, endless dunk material on queer tea.
And so they got all up in arms about Connie Barrett, having just published some article about like, and now they're doing, they're running these pieces like, oh, oh, Pete Buttigieg will be the first openly gay cabinet member, which is the same article that they ran about Richard Grinnell, who's Trump's openly gay, actual first openly gay cabinet member.
And they've just undertaken to erase him from history, essentially.
So this is all very amusing to me and fun to dunk on.
But anyway, I'm off on a tangent now.
So yeah, so the politics of it, I guess, have to do with either implying that whatever it is that is going on with me is something that could be changed or not.
That's kind of, I think, at the root of like, because there's a lot of history, obviously, of trying to train gayness out of kids or whatever.
And so I guess some Christians, for example, prefer gay Christians and sort of non-affirming straight Christians.
Regular Christians.
Just Christians.
Normal, normal people.
Normal Christians.
Straight, normal.
Normal people.
Yeah.
Which actually is a good example, right?
Normal is an excellent, like, homosexuality is abnormal, right?
Like, it's not the norm.
And so, like, that's another example of a word who's been completely stripped of its meaning because we want to insist that this is okay and good and the same as everything else.
Right.
You can't call anything abnormal.
You can't call anything abnormal.
It is abnormal.
It's like at the very least, at the bare minimum, you can say truthfully about it, that it is not how most people experience the love.
Anyway, yeah, so like, I guess like normal Christians, like straight Christians, sometimes want to use same-sex attracted as a way of conceiving of this as a sin that you struggle with, rather than an aspect of your identity.
And I am like certainly of the belief that this, you know, whatever sort of genetics will be discovered to have been involved in this and whatever amount of nurture was involved, and exactly the same way we were just talking about with talent, right?
Like however it was that I got to be this way, it is my firm conviction that it's like immutable.
It's not a thing that is ever going to go away.
And others, including some gays who are celibate, like Washington Waiting, this guy Wesley, I'm going to forget his last name, but one of the best books on this topic is by a celibate Christian.
It's called Washington Waiting.
And there are many people on all sides of this issue who, and the research seems to basically confirm this, that for a small number of people, like probably 4.5% or something, it's not going to go away.
So I believe in that.
I also believe that there's a really hideous and pernicious tendency to make gayness into an identity, into the center of an identity.
Of course, a Christian is obligated first and foremost to identify as Christ's, right?
To identify as a child of God and in Christ.
And so to that extent, it's entirely salutary to say, no, I'm not gay is not.
But I am.
But of course, we say I'm X about ourselves all the time.
I'm a blonde.
I'm a comedian.
I'm a writer.
And Christians do that without thinking, except in this area where there's like this really intense debate around.
So I just like, I'm not interested in engaging.
I'm interested in engaging those questions.
I'm not interested in engaging in acrobatics of language.
So I'm gay.
And I also love using gay as a pejorative because it's a good one.
Super gay.
Only you're allowed to do that.
And arguing about whether sexual preference is the right term or not is very, very gay.
Let me tell you.
It's like super gay.
Super gay.
You ever watch that Silicon Valley episode where the guy is like, he's a gay guy, but he's a Christian.
And he's totally fine with him being out as gay, but it's when he's outed as a guy who goes to Bible studies.
They don't want to talk.
It's very, very funny.
Did you like it?
Did you like that movie?
Did you like that show?
That was my only question.
That's the whole reason I brought it up.
I haven't actually seen it.
I'm afraid to say it.
I've seen some episodes, but I'm not like a completedist of the company.
But I will say, like, there's a whole discussion.
Somebody's awesome.
That sounded gay to me.
how you know he's pretty gay.
Well, he's compensating for something.
I don't know if that's like.
I drive a Camaro.
Gay or not gay?
Well, I once, so one of my favorite games on Twitter is to like how many degrees of Kevin Bacon, how many degrees of homosexuality, right?
Like, like, so I once drove a Camaro briefly before I got in a car wreck, and it was totaled, I am gay, therefore driving a Camaro is gay.
Yes.
Wow.
It's two degrees.
It was really easy.
It's not like red or anything.
But there is a whole, there actually is a whole debate about like, you know, because people publish these articles, these like hot take articles, right?
It's harder to come out as a conservative or as a Christian than it is to come out as gay.
And it's like, like, to me, that's like very hot take-y because it really super depends.
Depends on what culture you're.
It depends if you live in LA or Nashville.
Exactly.
For me, it's definitely true, right?
Like, to say I'm gay in most contexts.
Like, you know, this is an example of like one of the only contexts ever where if you guys didn't know, I would think more about how I was going to tell you that than about how I'm a Christian or how I'm conservative.
Most of the time, it's much, much easier to simply say, oh, like my boyfriend or, oh, like whatever, than it is to, like, you have to hedge your bets.
You have to be like, how can I explain this to you without you kicking me out the door?
But of course, like, you know, for example, like many of my friends come from like very, very, as you might say, non-affirming backgrounds, right?
Like places where they would have been kicked out of their house or whatever.
And so like, obviously, like, that's a, it's kind of a, it's a dumb hot take, but it is a statement on sort of where LA culture is, for example.
As our most hot takes are about like urban culture and on the coasts.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So are you seen as like self-oppressing?
Because you've taken this like self-hating, internalized thing or another.
To me, of all the terrible things that people say to and about me, self-hating is the most obviously untrue.
Like if anything, I'm like, my ego is like vastly oversized.
And so like, and like, you know, if I, if I have, if I struggle with anything, it's with like pride, like obvious pride.
And I like, you know, so, so, so that part is always amazing to me, especially because when you engage with people on this stuff, when somebody says you're self-hating, somebody says you, whatever, are racist, somebody says you, often I'll get like, oh, like, I'll say some disparaging thing about the LGBT left, and then the next comment will be like, oh, look at this like straight white dude making a comment about the LGBT left.
And so then I'll just like, you know, I do sometimes like to sort of just pop into the replies and be like, no, actually, like, I am gay.
I've happily partnered for a long time with a man.
Like, it's like, it makes no impression.
So they just move on to the next accusation.
It's just like, you know, now you're, well, well, but you're a racist.
And the latest one is like being gay doesn't excuse you from homophobia because it's because it's internalized and so forth.
Which is a good, like, people need to really grasp this, that like, it's not actually about anything real about you.
Like, you may, you may be a homophobe.
You may be a racist person.
Like, all of those things are true.
Those things exist.
And we should all go about searching our souls to ask whether we are doing bad stuff in any sort of systematic way.
But that's not what that conversation is about.
Like, that conversation is about you have a political view that I disagree with.
And my only tactic for encountering that is just to call you nasty names so you'll get scared and go away.
And like the only response to that is, well, like, go jump in a like, you know, go take a long walk off a shore pier.
And people are like, conservatives are really bad at this because we're so nice, you know, or something or something.
So you didn't become gay just so you could own people in arguments with that?
I can neither confirm nor deny.
That would be nice.
I mean, that used to be, by the way, it's actually really fun.
I mean, that part is super fun.
It doesn't work as well anymore, though.
Now you have to be something more.
Yeah.
You'd be trans or something.
Well, but like, for example, my dad, whom we mentioned at the beginning, like, I'm sure that anybody's listening knows that my dad is a conservative podcaster and he got one of these hit pieces by Media Matters, which is the like a, you know, I think it's Soros back.
It's like some sort of like.
They just full-time watch Daily Wire videos.
They watch so much more Daily Wire than I do.
They're like 15% of the traffic at the site is just Media Matters.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Josh, my boyfriend, is now working.
The reason we're moving is because he will become the general counsel of the Daily Wire.
Media Matters will still watch vastly more Daily Wire than on Doom.
And they always tweet out like, you know, that Matt Walsh said that men aren't women.
And then it's like everybody's like, correct.
Like, this is what Matt Walsh believes.
This is what the vast majority of people believe.
So yeah, so they, when they first started doing this, they put this whole thing out about Clavin's homophobia, like the evil of like Andrew Clavin's homophobia, because nobody knew who I was.
Nobody knew that I am gay, like any of this stuff.
And dad never talks about it, but he's also, you know, if any human being alive has supported and encouraged me in my life, it's my father.
You know, he and I have a phenomenal relationship and like I owe to him any success that I have.
And not, by the way, because he like puts me up for stuff, but simply because he is like a really great dad.
And so I just like, that was really fun.
He and I got in like a vast Media Matters brawl, which was like my first viral tweet ever was like, hi, Media Matters.
I'm Andrew Clavin's gay son.
And like you are self-satisfied clowns or something.
And you remember the tweet word for word.
Delightful.
I remember all my tweets word for word.
Sounds very self-hating.
Yeah, exactly.
That's right.
Well, do we want to move to subscriber portion now?
Yeah, you want to get into the little deeper on all this stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll get it.
Really, we'll dig in.
Oh, yeah.
Awkward.
We're going to get super awkward.
We're going to sing a duet, bass.
We'll sing bass.
Bass.
I think I might have the lady part.
Somebody's getting his ball to do it.
I'm probably the highest.
Well, your nasty voice sing too high a little bit.
No, I do.
You need to calm down.
All right.
All right, everybody.
Go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
You know, I believe in God and Jesus Christ, and also I am a gay person.
To everybody will naturally want to ask you, like, how do you reconcile?
What is the uh, what is the gay agenda?
Have you guys are you in that?
Do you like weekly meetings?
Well, I can't actually reveal the details of that community.
Please, subscribe.
Oh, that is right.
So, how do you how do you get ripped?
How does one get swole?
How does one get swollen?
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