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Oct. 21, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:39

Andrew Klavan | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 24

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	When you are in the mind of the character, you're there.
	You just completely believe in what he says.
	And that way, you let the story go.
	You let it go.
	You're here with your beliefs.
	You're here with your vision.
	You let the story go, we just tell itself.
	Hey, hey, and welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special with special guest Andrew Klavan, who you may know from such things as me pitching membership at the Daily Wire.
	We'll get to all of that, but first, let's talk about your quality of sleep.
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	Drew, I have to start by asking you, what the heck is another mattress?
	What are we even talking about?
	It's a story about this kind of little schlub, a nebbish in Hollywood, who's come out to be a big filmmaker, had a little bit of success, and it all melted away.
	And now he's turning 30.
	He's not happy.
	He knows, he can see he's going down that road where he's never going to quite make it, never going to pull away.
	Hollywood is filled with people like this.
	And everything is just kind of going wrong in his life.
	And one day, he opens a door, walks through the door, and he finds himself In a locked room, in a medieval castle, a dead body on the floor, and a bloody dagger in his hand.
	And the guards kick down the door, grab him, drag him, throw him into a dungeon, and tell him he's going to trial for his life.
	And he thinks he must have a brain tumor.
	And the weird thing that keeps happening to him is every now and again, he'll go through another door, he'll be back in Hollywood, like a minute later, a second later, there's no time passing.
	And in Hollywood, he finds that people are hunting him all of a sudden.
	And he has no idea why.
	And so these two mysteries are unfolding in two completely different worlds, and yet somehow this one character, this nobody, this guy that nobody's ever heard of, nobody ever would hear of, is somehow holding these two worlds together, and holding these two mysteries together, and has to find the answer before he gets himself killed.
	So how do you come up with the ideas for these fictional worlds, especially this one?
	Normally you've been doing hard-boiled fiction, and this one is hard-boiled fiction slash fantasy, which is a really interesting mash-up.
	This one, you know, I only recently realized how this book came to be because it's happened so organically.
	And looking back on it, it's actually a big experience.
	I mean, I was a crime writer.
	That's all I ever did was crime and suspense.
	And I would turn out a book every year to two years, but I was always working on a novel.
	And then I got to the point where I wrote my memoir, The Great Good Thing, and without even noticing it, I stopped.
	I stopped writing.
	I didn't even notice it was happening because I was continually writing short stories.
	I wrote a couple of books that I didn't publish, that I threw away.
	And only looking back on it did I realize that writing that memoir, I had finally put down all the stuff that I had been thinking about and had worked out all the problems that made my fiction tick.
	Because you're always, as a novelist, you're actually writing beyond what you know, because you're actually working ideas out in stories, in story form.
	So you're not saying like, oh, here's a story that's going to be about X, Y, and Z.
	You're saying, here's a story about a guy doing this.
	And only later do you realize, oh, it was kind of about X, Y, and Z that I'd been thinking about on the side.
	So when I wrote The Great Good Thing, I actually caught up with myself.
	And I realized, now I've answered all these questions that powered all the stories of my youth.
	I didn't have anything else really to say.
	And when I was becoming a Christian, one of the repeated thoughts that was going through my mind was, oh Lord, don't let me become a Christian novelist, because you know what they're like.
	It's horrible, horrible stuff.
	It's like, oh, I lost my bunny, but Jesus brought it back.
	Everything is wonderful.
	And so I didn't want to do that, and I wrote two novels that were essentially Christian novels that I didn't like.
	And one of them I tried and tried to rewrite, and I tried again and again, and I was sitting at a table in my living room with a manuscript on the coffee table and this notepad trying to fix it, and I realized, I'm going to have to throw this book out.
	I've been working on this book for years.
	I'm going to have to throw this book away.
	And almost simultaneously, another kingdom went bang, just dropped into my mind.
	And it came in whole.
	And my process is usually I get a little idea, I put it away for six months, it comes back, it's bigger, it gets bigger over the course of a year, it finally fleshes out.
	It's just all there.
	And when I sat down to write it, I thought, oh my god, the entire story is there.
	And so, I really didn't realize what had happened, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I just started writing the story out, and it came very organically.
	The world created itself.
	Like, I didn't even sit there.
	Normally, I'm very, very picky and do a lot of outlines, and here's where this city's going to be, here's where that city's going to be.
	All of it just worked itself out in an instant, you know?
	And I realized that my subconscious had solved this problem.
	It had solved the problem of how to write a book once you have gotten to a point where you actually have a belief system.
	Because belief systems kill fiction.
	You know, fiction is like the world.
	You can put any number of beliefs onto the world that work, you know?
	And fiction should be the same way.
	It should show life so honestly that a nihilist can look at a work by a Christian and say, like, yeah, I understand that.
	He thinks he's Christian, but the story's not, all this stuff.
	And I needed to get beyond that, and I think the thing about Another Kingdom is because it works on two levels.
	Because it's a very realistic thriller story, very gritty, kind of noir thriller story, and also this very almost old-fashioned medieval, you know, fantasy story.
	It's these two levels in my own mind talking to one another.
	The fact that I am a realist.
	I believe that the world is a material world.
	I believe that everything can be explained through materialism.
	That every piece of our bodies can, you know, I could trace every thought in my mind.
	At the same time, I believe that there is a noumenal plane where the spirit lives and that our flesh tells a story about.
	Our flesh is telling a story about the spirit.
	And so it actually allowed me to write that without ever writing a Christian book.
	So how did you avoid becoming didactic?
	Because I noticed that I've written a bunch of nonfiction books I wrote one fiction book.
	It was much harder for me than writing non-fiction.
	Yeah.
	Because non-fiction is me expressing my views and exploring philosophy.
	But fiction, it's like, well, am I supposed to be veiling the idea or am I supposed to be telling a story?
	And if I tell a story, why am I getting bored with my own story?
	How did you bridge that gap between now you have a set worldview but still being interested in the fiction that you're writing yourself?
	Because it seems to me that's sometimes the number one barrier of being a writer is being interested in what you're doing on a daily basis.
	You have to put it aside.
	You actually have to put it aside.
	You have to trust yourself to see the world as you see it.
	But you have to love your characters.
	You have to let your characters live the life they live.
	You know, you can't write a Macbeth who doesn't actually believe in what he's doing.
	You can't write a villain who doesn't actually think like he's right at some level.
	You know, who isn't actually saying, no, you're an idiot for being the good guy.
	I've figured it out, you know?
	You have to live with that.
	So there's an element of almost method acting in it, where when you are in the mind of the character, you're there.
	You just completely believe in what he says.
	And that way, you let the story go.
	You let it go.
	You're here with your beliefs.
	You're here with your vision.
	You let the story go and just tell itself.
	What's your process for writing?
	I mean, you said that you do a lot of outlining.
	Does that turn it workmanlike, or do you actually sit down and you just kind of let it flow?
	It's the only part of my work I hate, the outlining.
	I mean, it's boring.
	It's, you know, it's close work and you just have to sit there and do it.
	There's no excitement, no character in it, even though I write a lot of biographies for characters and things like that.
	However, if you do that work, I've now learned, When you sit down to write, you're free.
	You know that in this scene, the guy is going to run down that hallway, and he's going to find such and such.
	And you don't have to sit there and stare at that blank screen, which is, of course, the nightmare of every writer has.
	So I do do that.
	I do a lot of prep work.
	And it's really helpful.
	And what I now try to do is I try and do it a little bit every day, because it's just so excruciating.
	I mean, it's just the one part of the job.
	I love my work, and I really do love it, but it's the one part of the job I just think, ah, I gotta do this, I gotta work it out.
	So what's your schedule on a day-to-day basis?
	Because you come in here, you don't get a lot of sleep, you come in here, you do your podcast, and then you're writing hours and hours a day.
	First of all, how do you clear the time?
	And second of all, take me from you wake up to you go to bed, basically.
	What's your schedule during a normal day?
	Well, I wake up at You know, 5.15, 5.30.
	That's awful.
	I know.
	And the first thing I do, I say hello to my wife and I grab my iPad and I start reading the news, you know, what's going on, catching up on everything.
	And I do that pretty solidly until I start to prep the show, which, you know, I'm prepping the show by around 630 plus, you know.
	And then I do that.
	I stop for maybe about 45 minutes to do kind of faith stuff.
	I read the Gospels in Greek, which I'm so proud of.
	I taught myself Greek.
	And then I read some Old Testament, some faith, you know, other kinds of stuff.
	And then come in and do the show, and then I go home and start writing.
	somebody asked me how I got along with no sleep and I told them I take naps while other people are expressing their opinions.
	That really works.
	But yeah, no, I just keep going and then I'm done by about seven.
	So I'm working a long day, but I'm sure you do too.
	I'm working like a 12, 14 hour day.
	Yeah.
	I mean, what time do you go to sleep normally?
	I go to sleep late because I don't sleep a lot.
	So I go to sleep.
	How do you deal with that?
	How do you not sleep that much?
	Is that just how you work?
	Yeah.
	I just don't sleep.
	Are you on coffee?
	I mean, look at the Do you use any amphetamines?
	No, I've never taken anything like that.
	I don't drink that much coffee.
	I drink like two and a half cups of coffee a day.
	I just don't sleep.
	I don't like going to bed.
	I don't like being asleep.
	I feel like I'm missing something.
	There's one of those internet phrases, fear of missing out.
	Yeah, I've got that.
	I felt the same way and then I have young kids and now I cannot wait to go to sleep.
	I couldn't wait for them to go to sleep.
	That for sure, but then it's like now I just need to fall over because my kids run me ragged.
	And I do take catnaps.
	That was the one thing when I was a little kid, Thomas Edison was my hero and he took catnaps.
	I think I modeled that on him, so that really helps.
	Okay, so let's go through some of your faith journey because, you know, obviously that's shaping how you're seeing the world in terms of your fiction writing.
	And you have a pretty interesting faith journey.
	Obviously, you and I ended up in very separate places.
	But you started off, you were born into a Jewish family.
	I've said to you before, we've had this conversation, but you were born into an extraordinarily secular Jewish family.
	Right.
	And now, obviously, you're religious Christians.
	How do you get from point A to point B?
	Well, the weird thing about my family was that it was secular, but it was also committed to—my father, at least—was committed to the traditions.
	So we went to Hebrew school.
	We were bar mitzvahed.
	We learned this stuff.
	But it did occur to me that I've always had this...
	I won't call it an obsession, that's a little too much, but I've always had this idea that things should make sense.
	If things don't make sense, you should change your mind.
	And part of that was because of a kind of dysfunctional atmosphere in my house where we were taught a lot of philosophical ideas that were just untrue.
	And it's very damaging, you know, because you don't want to tear away from your family, but at the same time you want to find the truth.
	And so I became kind of obsessed with finding the truth.
	So you're there praying, and you're there learning Hebrew, which is not my language, and you're there wearing, you know, the hat and the thing, you know, anything.
	Well, if there's no God, and my mother was a stone atheist, and my father was just kind of like, you know, he didn't want to get in trouble with God, but like he was...
	He didn't exactly believe in me.
	And after a while, you start to think, well, this is ridiculous.
	This is ridiculous.
	So after my bar mitzvah, I mean, that was kind of the turning point.
	I was bar mitzvahed.
	I got thousands of dollars worth of gifts that I put in this box.
	And one day, I got up and threw the box away, because it was with everything in it.
	And I just thought, like, you know, this is... Like the old lady at the end of Titanic.
	Yeah, exactly.
	This is ill-gotten gains.
	You know, this is not what I wanted.
	And I didn't really... I expected to live my life as a sort of intellectual agnostic.
	I think this was the default position of thinking men in my day.
	And it still is.
	Still now, exactly.
	I'm doing this routine now.
	Right.
	And I think that was going to be it.
	That was really my position, which is very flattering to the intellectual mind because you can analyze everything into dust.
	You can just No matter how small the point is, you can break it up into even smaller pieces, because you don't have that bottom line of there has to be meaning, there has to be morality.
	The problem was, when I was 19, I read Crime and Punishment, and it convinced me that the moral world existed.
	It convinced me that Kant was right, there was a starry sky above and the moral law within, and that was Undeniably true.
	And because of that I kept circling around, where does this morality and meaning come from?
	And I'm not, I wasn't satisfied with things I hear from guys like our pal Jordan Peterson, the Italian philosopher Marcello Pera, you know, they live as if they were a god.
	I think to live as if there were a God is essentially to want the conclusions of a syllogism whose premises you don't accept.
	Right.
	That's right.
	It just makes no sense.
	And so, again, everything had to make sense to me.
	And ultimately, I mean, I had, when I was a kid, I've lived like these two lives.
	I had terrible emotional problems because I had a terrible relationship with my father.
	My household was dysfunctional in this very invisible way.
	There's not a lot of violence.
	There's not a lot of hatred.
	It was just this kind of invisible dysfunction.
	And so I cracked up.
	There came a point when I was like 28 years old.
	I just stopped working, basically.
	I just went, boom, something's wrong.
	And at that point, which would have been the smart point to seize hold of God like a piece of driftwood floating by in the ocean, I thought, well, then I'll never believe because it'll always be this thing I did because I was weak, because I was down on my luck, because I was broken.
	It'll always be this crutch that I seized hold of.
	It just shows you how stubborn I was about things making sense.
	And so instead, by the grace of God, I found a shrink who cured me.
	And I always laugh about this.
	I'm the only person I've ever known who was cured by psychiatry.
	But he did.
	Within the course of two, three years of talking to this guy, I was a completely different human being.
	And it was only then, when I felt sane, when I felt certain that my impressions were correct, when I felt certain that I was not living a delusional life, that it seemed obvious to me that there was a God, because of my moral stance.
	The stance that if everybody on Earth... There was a time, there was a time when everybody on Earth believed that slavery was right.
	Even the slaves.
	They would have said, yeah, I don't want to be the slave, but this is the way things are.
	At that time, slavery was wrong.
	And once you say that, you're screwed, God-wise.
	I mean, you cannot get away from the idea that somewhere there is this moral base, this base of meaning.
	And this is the thing that's become fascinating to me now, because there are guys like you and me who actually believe, but we're kind of anomalies in the world of the thinking man.
	Right now, the world of the thinking man is divided by into two.
	On one side, you have people like Jordan Peterson, Marcelo Perry, Douglas Perry, who wrote that book, The Strange Death of Europe, and Wilbeck, the novelist we were talking about, Wilbeck, who were basically saying the West can't survive without the Judeo-Christian thesis.
	We should all ascribe to the Judeo-Christian thesis.
	I myself do not believe.
	They're all saying the same thing.
	I myself cannot believe.
	On the other side, you have these guys like Yuval Harari who wrote Sapiens and Steven Pinker who are saying, no, no, no, my friend.
	We are going up and up and up.
	Well, good to Harari.
	I think that Harari is at least more intellectually honest than Pinker.
	I mean, I think that Pinker does this whole routine where the Enlightenment will save us and everything is going to continuously get better and you can carve away the foundations of Western civilization, nothing will crumble.
	And Harari is basically like, well, maybe civilization sucked in the first place, right?
	Maybe if we just go back to living in fields and we were happier when we were eating grass and all this kind of stuff.
	And at least he's honest that way.
	And he has this kind of Vulcan idea that we're all living in a delusion.
	The problem with him is he says the most unique, his phrase, I would never say the most unique, but he does, he says the most unique thing about sapiens is the fictions we create.
	So we have a fiction that there's a god.
	We have a fiction that we have human rights.
	We have a fiction of money.
	Money has no value.
	But that's not how fiction works.
	Fiction describes something.
	It does not create things.
	I can create a delusional world through fiction, but good fiction It describes reality.
	So money is a good example.
	Money describes the value of something to a human being when he has a lot of it or when he doesn't have a lot of it.
	That's what it describes.
	It actually does have a value that we're accepting.
	The paper doesn't, but the idea does.
	And because Harari is a Vulcan who doesn't accept that there is a human life that matters, he thinks it's all being created by fictions, but the fictions are being created by that internal life.
	Well, let's talk some more about this.
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	Okay, so let's go back to where we were here.
	I agree.
	I mean, I think that there is this divide, and neither of the two sides of the divide are destined to preserve the civilization.
	I agree.
	There's the one side with folks like Jordan, and I love Jordan, but Jordan's essential argument, which is that all of the outgrowths of Western civilization are fantastic.
	All of the outgrowths of Judeo-Christian value systems are great.
	These myths represent fundamental values.
	But then he boils that down to repeated gameplay through Piaget.
	It's like, well, I asked him this when he was sitting in your seat.
	I said, well, then why is it that all of these values only emerged in one culture over time?
	This is the unanswerable question for folks who think there's nothing special about Judeo-Christian civilization.
	If you all think that it's evolutionary biology, if you all think like E.O.
	Wilson that anything can be driven by genetics and environment, We're not all that different.
	Are you going to tell me that because the climate was slightly different in China than it was in Europe, that that's what generated these massive differences in human rights and belief in the individual that occurred over thousands of years?
	That's really what happened here?
	So you've got that one system where folks basically argue that there is a truth, but not really a truth.
	Like Jordan's at least honest enough to acknowledge that when he says that something is true, he doesn't mean it's objectively true.
	Right.
	He sort of means it's useful.
	And then you have the folks who say, well, then there's the objectively true.
	Sam Harris, Yuval Harari.
	There's no such thing as free will.
	There's no such thing as civilization.
	These are all fictional creations.
	But then...
	They rely on those principles in order to create an impetus for change.
	Right.
	Because they'll say, we need to work towards something better.
	There are so many different falsities in that one statement.
	We need to work towards something better.
	That's right.
	How do you work in a world with no free will?
	What is better in this world?
	And where is this need coming from?
	Because even when you say that we need to do something, and you say, well, that's based on human flourishing, We have a lot of different definitions of human flourishing.
	This idea that human flourishing is just basic Marxist materialism is quite insane.
	I mean, if that were the case, we would not have a crisis of conscience in the West right now.
	We're the richest we've ever been in human history.
	That's right.
	And why should I care whether humans flourish or not as long as I get mine?
	You know, all of these guys have failed to deal with What to me is this immense elephant in the room, which is the elephant of narrative.
	And, you know, I frequently talk about the fact that George Washington was a massive hero of liberty, a man who essentially gave the airy nothing of liberty a local habitation in the name by turning down the kingship, by doing what he did.
	But he didn't understand why his slaves didn't work hard.
	He didn't understand why his slaves, when he treated them well, would escape.
	And you think, well, how is that possible that this hero of liberty didn't understand the desire for liberty?
	That's narrative.
	That is what the kind of atmosphere of value that surrounds us all that we don't even know is there.
	The left makes the mistake that they think that narrative is fact.
	They think if you control the narrative, the facts will change.
	The right makes the mistake of thinking that facts will always triumph over narrative, and that's just not true either.
	And the thing is, we are living, and this is the One thing I agree with Pinker on, although he wouldn't think I was agreeing with him, we are living in what I call the Enlightenment narrative.
	Rome fell, plunged into darkness, the church held us in this superstition, then hurrah, their classic works were rediscovered, we were reborn in the Renaissance, we moved into the Enlightenment, people got rid of Protestantism for deism, deism fell apart as science marched on, now we're free to march into the heavenly world through atheism.
	Listen, I think there's a lot of truth in that.
	You know, it's true that when Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, the churches were still ringing the bells to chase the demons away when lightning came, which didn't work out well for the bell ringers.
	It's not a good place to be.
	And it's true, you know, the Church is always saying, well, the story of Galileo is much more complex.
	It is, but it's exemplary of misplaced religious authority.
	Religious authority should not have the capability to say to a scientist, no, the Earth goes here instead of there.
	That's the scientist's job.
	So it's true to that extent.
	But the other side of this is exactly what you're talking about.
	It only happened in the West.
	The invention of science as we know it happened because Christian members of the church, almost all of them, deeply believing Christian men, started to think, well, if the world makes sense, if God made us in his image, it must be through the connection of reason.
	Let us use our reason to understand the starry heavens that God has put in front of us.
	All of this was built into Judeo-Christian thought.
	And so, you know, when Jesus said, not only will you do the works I've done, you'll do even greater works, that may well have been what he was talking about.
	He may have said, think like this and the world will open itself up to you.
	And that's, I think, the narrative that we have got to start to tell because this narrative has got people, I think, like Jordan and Perry and Marcelo Pera, it's got them in its grip and they can't get out of it.
	In the same way that Washington couldn't see his slaves should be free, they can't see that God has given them everything.
	Well, it seems like a soft form of the argument that you hear most people make about why they became irreligious in the first place, which is not that they stopped believing in God, but because people suck.
	So what they'll say is, they'll say, I stopped being religious because I saw all these religious people who are acting like jerks.
	Well, that's not a referendum on God.
	That's a referendum on human beings sucking.
	This goes back to Another Kingdom, which is the thing that I realized as I was looking back on it, not while I was doing it, I was looking back on it, is the reason you can't write a good Christian novel is that people believe up, not down.
	You don't explain to them, Aquinas said this, and then they say, ah, now I see, there must be a God, and therefore I will believe.
	They get to God, they climb to God on the ladder of being, you know?
	And that ladder, the first step of that ladder is that life is good.
	Not your life, not my life, but life itself.
	When Hamlet says, to be or not to be, that is the question, that is the question.
	Once you decide in favor of being, then you start to say that life is good.
	And just like you were saying before that their sentence makes no sense, we must work to get better, the sentence that life is good makes no sense unless you have at the top of that ladder an actual referendum on meaning and morality, which turns out to be God.
	Yeah, I mean, this is what it says in Deuteronomy, right?
	Choose life so that you and your children may live.
	That's it.
	This is right there.
	I mean, the most important sentences in human history, for all the crap the Bible has taken, all of the most important sentences in human history are in that book.
	Right.
	I mean, to me, the single most important sentence ever written, whether you believe it was by God or by man, doesn't really matter for this point.
	When you say that man is made in God's image, that is the single most important sentence ever written, because all of human liberty, all of human rights, all of individual equality, All of that is based in that, in that root belief.
	And that is something you have to take on faith.
	And this is where the Enlightenment thinkers, you know, make me crazy because I think that, first of all, I think that there's a false, a falsification of Enlightenment history when you suggest that all of the Enlightenment thinkers were basically militant atheists who had decided to reject church.
	That's just not the case.
	Locke spent half his life doing Christian apologetics.
	Right, Newton too.
	And even Voltaire was smart enough to recognize in his own kind of Petersonian fashion that, well, I'm not somebody who deeply believes, and I certainly hope that my servants are, right?
	Because he doesn't want them stealing the silverware.
	So the difference between the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment of France is that the Enlightenment of France basically said, right, there is no God, there is no moral system, and using the pure light of human reason, we can recreate any moral system that we choose.
	And folks who are kind of neo-enlightenment thinkers pick that up, and they say that that's the stuff that created the modern world, and I just don't understand that.
	What created the modern world is this common law-believing, solidly religious community that had as its fringe enlightenment thinkers, all of whom recognized that without a moral and religious people, all of this would collapse into dust nearly immediately.
	This is the thing that, you know, I don't understand this either.
	Pinker does this.
	Jonah Goldberg, who I love, I think he's a wonderful writer, but he does it in his book, is they pick on the romantics, and they say, oh, the romantics, they want to go back to feeling, which is, I mean, these were some of the most brilliant men who ever lived.
	They weren't sitting around going, oh, my feels, you know?
	They were actually thinking about something.
	What they were thinking about was that without religion, matter and meaning had become irreparably separated.
	How do we bring them back together, knowing what we know now, you know?
	And the thing is, they saw the French Revolution.
	Wordsworth was there.
	He went to France.
	He saw the French Revolution.
	He saw the priests bayoneted in the streets.
	He came back and he said, you know what?
	This reason thing is problematic, you know?
	And they crucified him.
	They did just what they do to conservatives today.
	They were writing poems about what a jerk he was.
	Robert Browning wrote this thing about how he sold out by becoming the poet laureate, a position he turned down like three times before he finally took it.
	But he saw this thing go wrong.
	And so he said, like the second level of British romantics, guys like Coleridge and Keats and Shelley, they saw something had happened, you know, that this wasn't working.
	Guys like Pinker, it's like it never happened.
	There was no terror.
	It's amazing.
	He writes a 400-page book called Enlightenment Now.
	I checked the index.
	It's the first thing I did when I got the book.
	There's not a single mention of the French Revolution in a book titled Enlightenment Now.
	I don't know how that is even possible.
	How is that even humanly possible?
	Listen, I like a lot of Steven Pinker's work.
	Me too.
	I took a class with him when I was at Harvard.
	It was a weird class.
	Him and Alan Dershowitz teaching it.
	necessity on the one hand to paint the enlightenment as all good, no bad.
	So there's the enlightenment.
	Then there's the counter enlightenment, everything bad we can attribute to the counter enlightenment.
	Right.
	And then there is the feeling that the enlightenment is only bad because the people I don't like are part of it.
	So the Enlightenment is either Rousseau, so everybody gets the Enlightenment wrong in my view, basically.
	I agree with you, I agree with you.
	I think there's the one side, the Patrick Tinian, why liberalism failed, which is taking the leftist premise, or not the leftist premise, but this kind of neo-Enlightenment premise, that the Enlightenment was atheistic and individualistic without any regard for virtue, and that's what's destroyed the West.
	And then you have people like Pinker taking the other side, saying, well, that's what built the West, is that individualistic, Enlightenment, no virtue, we're all just Kind of mandevillion bees, and we bounce off of each other all the time.
	And the reality is that what built America was the conjunction of virtue and rights.
	It was a deep belief on the part of every single founder, including founders who considered themselves deists.
	That if you did not believe in at least a Greek theological version of virtue, if you did not believe in natural law, then none of this mattered in the first place.
	That's the part that's bewildering me.
	I don't know how you read any of these Enlightenment thinkers or the foundations for either British Enlightenment or American Enlightenment and the way they talk about natural law and not see that that has some sort of connection to, you know, the 2,000-year Christian history of natural law.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And it's also, you can't slough off 2,000 years of Christian history.
	Well, there's that too.
	You cannot just rewrite your mind.
	Into this completely blank slate.
	It just doesn't work.
	This is what I said to Sam Harrison.
	It drove me up the wall.
	I mean, it's just, he, I really like Sam as a person, but he's never answered, at least to my satisfaction, the simple question as to why he and I hold the same values.
	Like we have, we have 95% of the same values.
	And I said to him, you know, where are these values coming from, Sam?
	And he said, well, you know, I studied Buddhism and I studied philosophy and when I was at I think it was Berkeley or Stanford, and I studied all this stuff.
	I said, right, but I didn't study any of that stuff.
	And we have the same basic morality.
	Could it be that maybe it's because we live in a Judeo-Christian culture created by 3,000 years of common history?
	Maybe it'd be that?
	One of the most telling narratives of the American founding is the moment when Benjamin Franklin rewrote a portion of the Declaration, and Jefferson had said that our rights were sacred.
	And Franklin said our rights are self-evident because Franklin was a scientist, right?
	If you think about that, what Franklin was saying is we now know enough to deduce our rights.
	We now know enough that we, you know, we don't always know that much, but we now have enough information.
	But what was that information?
	It was surely the information that had been formed over thousands of years.
	of Christian shaping, molding of the Western mind.
	It was the idea that you were an individual, the idea that you were sacred, that you mattered, that you were made in God's image.
	All those things didn't just disappear from Franklin's mind because he was a bit of a vague about religion because he wasn't a very good theological thinker.
	When he said that, it was self-evident, but it wasn't self-evident 2,000 years before that.
	And I think that that was a great advance in our knowledge.
	In the same way I was talking about how I wrote my memoir, I got to that point where I could now contain what I said.
	I think the Constitution and the Declaration are just that.
	I think that is European history saying, here's what we know so far.
	Here is what we know about governance.
	It didn't just pop out of, like, Cicero's mind.
	It actually was shaped and formed—the Greeks and the Romans—shaped and formed by these 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian thought, which made it what it is.
	And you don't just get rid of that.
	It obviously is the cauldron in which we were all shaped.
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	So I get the feeling right now that there is a crisis of conscience happening in the West, a crisis of meaning.
	I see it particularly among young people.
	I think that it's manifested itself in this new attempt to By young people particularly, claw their way back to some sort of philosophy that provides meaning for them.
	And you're seeing people clawing in every direction.
	So you're seeing a lot of folks who are redounding to Jordan's worldview that there is something worth fighting for here.
	And while he and I and you and he may disagree on How far that goes, we agree probably on eight of the ten steps that you need to get to, the final two being you need to believe in God and you need to believe a moral system springing from God.
	But he may disagree with that, although he's never been like incredibly clear on that.
	And then there are people who are clawing their way back to meaning through partisan tribalism, which is I'm just going to find the group that believes most like me and I will find meaning in my life by clubbing the crap out of people who I don't like.
	All of this speaks to me of A problem that actually did exist in the Enlightenment, and that was that the Enlightenment didn't necessarily want to discard God or Judeo-Christian morality, but it ended up doing so.
	That's right.
	And so, we've been living off of these fundamental premises of religion for 200 years while simultaneously undermining religion itself.
	So we've been saying, reason means everything.
	Well, where does reasoning come from?
	And why isn't it just random synapses firing in your brain that are evolutionarily beneficial?
	We believe in a predictable universe that we can explore through science.
	What makes you believe in a predictable universe?
	Where are you getting that from?
	Why isn't it just us theorizing, and then some theories work and some theories don't?
	Where do you get the idea that there is a good and there is a bad?
	Where do you get the idea of Any sort of directional human living?
	Where were you getting all of these ideas?
	And folks who don't believe in a Judeo-Christian foundation for our civilization, I don't know how they answer that question.
	And I think most people don't know the answers.
	And so what we've fallen into is sort of either a passionate rejection of the question itself As in, the Bible's stupid, all this is stupid, I don't really care, so your question's stupid, so I'm just going to do what I want to do, and I'll ignore the question.
	Or, engaging with the question, which inevitably takes you to nihilism if you actually can't find meaning anywhere.
	It seems to me that's sort of the split.
	I think that one of the problems, too, is that nobody is engaged with the question of whether, and this is what I believe, I believe atheism is obsolete.
	I believe it actually made sense after Newton.
	You know, one of the reasons the Romantics hated Newton is they feared that by the logic of his science, he had taken the fantastic and the beautiful and the spiritual out of life.
	And the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Keats would toast long life to Newton and confusion to mathematics because they didn't, you know, they thought that he was taking the enchantment out of life.
	It's like baseball fans who hate Bill James.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	No, but exactly like that.
	But the thing is, that made sense at that point to think like, ah, well, here he's gotten logic for this, so eventually we're going to have this clockwork universe where everything is going to hold together.
	But in fact, along the way, if you've paid attention, that clockwork universe has started to get a little weird.
	You know, we have effects at the quantum level that don't make any sense at all in terms of clockwork, interplays between consciousness and reality that really do, to me, suggest an idea of consciousness at the very beginning of creation.
	We have this other idea that Suddenly, when I say that life is good, and that implies a lot of philosophical problems, one of them is, how can there possibly be life?
	The odds against there being life are fantastic.
	And so guys like Pinker have invented this completely bogus idea that there are infinite universes.
	And this just happens to be the universe.
	It's an unfulfillable thesis, which means it's unscientific by nature.
	It's not science!
	I know, it is not science.
	Well, they used to say that religious people had a God of the gaps.
	Right, this is a God of the gaps.
	But this is religion, a science of the gaps.
	And there's that, and then there's this other thing which essentially is faith, which is the idea that we're living in kind of a computer simulation, which just means that God is a little nerd sitting there somewhere.
	I always put a hundred pounds in my hands.
	And so it's actually that our narrative has not caught up with our knowledge.
	I think our knowledge has gone beyond the fact where we have to deduce an atheistic clockwork world.
	And it's dangerous.
	I think that you and I both believe this.
	It is a dangerous place to live without meaning.
	One of the things that truly bothered me about Pinker's work, and I don't, again, I don't mean to pick on him.
	You know his stuff, so he's the stand-in for a school of philosophy.
	Right, exactly.
	And I think he's a man of goodwill, writing what he thinks and all this.
	But he denigrates intellectuals who say, oh, we've got a problem coming up.
	He says this is kind of natural for intellectuals to do, to see a crisis everywhere.
	He says we've gotten to the point where we have to talk about a serious crisis just to make sure people understand what we're saying.
	And every time I would read that, I would think about the Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, which was the last time that civilization was at this pinnacle.
	I mean, just an amazing pinnacle that it had never been at before in England, but in Europe throughout.
	And they asked the poet Kipling to write about it, and he wrote that famous poem, Recessional, where he said, you know, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget, if we leave God behind.
	And he was no great believer, Kipling, but he said if we leave God behind, we'll collapse.
	Now that's the kind of prediction that Pinker laughs at.
	But 17 years later, which is nothing, 17 years later after this pinnacle of civilization, 30 years of absolute total war took place that wiped the high culture of Europe off the map.
	The high culture of Europe ends in 1914 to 1945 with one of the worst cataclysms of evil that has ever taken place in the history of humankind.
	Followed by, because of this anti-Christian philosophy of Nazism, followed by these decades of mass murder in the name of this atheist philosophy of communism, that suggests to me that the Enlightenment narrative is not quite everything that it cracked up to be.
	And so, I think this is a serious crisis.
	I think that, personally, I think that Immanuel Kant, at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, saw it coming and gave us a roadmap to a different way of thinking about religion, a different way of thinking about both Judaism and Christianity, which is the way that I think about it, is almost in terms of language and storytelling, that yes, we are flesh and blood.
	Yes, we are a flesh bag of chemicals, but you're also bent.
	And you are the language that speaks to me and to you of Ben.
	You are a word, like your flesh, your body is a word, meaning Ben.
	And Ben is as real in the noumenal world, or in the mind of God, if you want, as this flesh and blood.
	Everything about the words coming out of my mouth is physical.
	My brain is sparking, my lungs are pushing and all.
	But the ideas that I'm expressing aren't physical at all.
	And they're either true or they're false.
	And they're false whether I speak them or not.
	And all of that is really, to me, what the Christian story is.
	It's the Word being made flesh.
	It is the life of God becoming seeable, realizable, which I think each of us is at some level.
	And I think it's why Jesus spoke in parables.
	It's not because of necessarily the meaning of the parables.
	But the mechanism of the parables, once you accept the mechanism that I can tell you a story, a man's son ran away and then came back and he welcomed him back, I can tell you that story and you hear moral meaning in it.
	You know that it has moral meaning.
	Once you do that, you accept that your life is like that too.
	It is a physical story with a moral meaning.
	And to me, that's all, in a way, When Moses stands before the burning bush and he sees this eternal thing of destruction and creation, you know, the growing bush, and he says, I am, I am an am, I am an I, you know, that to me is what this is all about.
	Completely believable.
	It is completely believable in the realm of science.
	You don't have to eliminate science.
	You don't have to make up, you know, magic stories about lost bunnies.
	You don't have to do anything like that.
	To understand that this world that we're living in is a world of morality and meaning, and it cannot be that way without the God we know.
	Well, how do you deal with the folks like Sam Harris, who spent a lot of time just clubbing the Bible like a baby seal?
	And when I had Sam in the room and we were talking about this, he spent an awful lot of time trying to pick out parts of the Bible that he didn't like, to which my statement was, well, the reason you don't like it is because you've been living in a world that has been shaped by that document that you really don't like very much.
	And the statement that I made to him with regard to the evolution of morality is that There are certain things that God says that are predicated on an eternal, unchanging human nature.
	And then there are certain things that God is saying to people of a time, because God still has to speak a language to a human being, and human beings aren't capable of understanding language that's to be written a thousand years from now.
	But still, how do you deal with all the skepticism of religion these days?
	Because you're making a pretty sophisticated argument about religion.
	I think the arguments that I make about religion are similarly sophisticated, but that's not the religion that most people are taught when they're young.
	Right, right.
	And so it seems like that provides easy mincemeat for cynics who can spend the rest of the day, just as you or I could, going through and cherry-picking verses that we find troubling on their face.
	But their argument's not fair because what Sam Harris does, and I like him too, you know, I enjoy reading him.
	What he does is he takes cutting-edge science and compares it to the most fundamental, literalist religion, all the time.
	And he says that's fair, because he says that science corrects itself, but religion is essentially fundamentalist.
	That's just not true.
	It's just not true.
	All human thought corrects itself, and it corrects itself by comparing itself to reality.
	If theology hasn't changed over the last 4,000 years, that's a ridiculous thesis.
	But I think his statement, to be fair to him, is that theology theoretically shouldn't change.
	Because if it's the eternal word of God, then why exactly is it changing?
	But me, you're understanding it.
	It's unfolding to us.
	What he is essentially saying is, if you can turn on a lightbulb, but you can't invent a lightbulb, then science doesn't exist.
	That's what he's saying.
	Because what he's saying is, if I can pray and experience God, but I can't talk theology, and I'm just a simple guy, and I just believe in this imagery, then God doesn't exist.
	He's making the same argument.
	Plenty of people say plenty of stupid things about science.
	That doesn't mean science isn't real.
	Plenty of people say simple and simplistic things about religion.
	That doesn't mean God isn't real.
	It's ridiculous.
	They're not arguing.
	I want to see Harris argue with Aquinas.
	I don't want to see Harris argued with some guy who just knows that God is there and has given him faith and meaning and purpose in his life.
	He may not be able to explain that any more than I can really explain what happens when I flick on the switch, and then the light magically comes on, you know?
	So the debate is not fair, and it begins... Pinker has this thing he does where he says, well, you know, the Holocaust wasn't because of genetic science, and the nuclear explosions on Hiroshima wasn't because of nuclear science, and global warming is not because of industrial science, but the Crusades is because of religion.
	Well, you know, you can't do all this stuff.
	It's because of human evil.
	I mean, humans do bad things.
	They do it with science.
	They do it with God.
	My argument against this is the Bible was written by men.
	We're not Muslims.
	Muslims believe that the Koran was written with the finger of God and those words themselves contain the truth.
	I don't think Jews or Christians believe that.
	Even literalist Christians, and I'm not one, I mean, but even ones who believe in the absolute.
	We don't believe this because we can translate it, the Bible.
	The Bible can be translated.
	The Koran cannot.
	Muslims will tell you that if you're reading the Koran not in Arabic, you're not reading the Koran.
	But the Bible can be translated because it was written by men to communicate what God had told them, right?
	There's major debate in Orthodox Judaism over this because there's the idea that God did in fact write the Torah and that it was all written on Mount Sinai by Moses as dictated by God at the time.
	And there was major debate for literally over a thousand years in Judaism about whether it was good or not to translate the Bibles.
	There is predicate for that Quranic view.
	At the same time, what Judaism has that I don't believe, and I don't want to get this wrong, but I don't believe chronic religion does have a lot of, is there was this common law tradition in Judaism that also sprang from the same mouth.
	So even people who are very fundamentalist about what they believe about the giving of the Bible also believe that, at least in Judaism, that there was an oral Torah that was given at the same exact time, which was meant to explain to human beings what exactly this text meant, which innately provides the capacity for us to understand what was happening.
	The vast material of interpretation.
	The vast corpus of the Tomlitz oral Torah stuff.
	It's really not the written stuff.
	So, I mean, I think that this is important, though.
	I mean, my personal belief, and this is not necessarily, you know, the orthodox belief, but my personal belief is that the Bible was written down by men.
	It is the story of God explaining himself to men over time.
	You don't have to say, you can't take any one sentence out of it and say here is, you know, it's not like a fractal where each sentence shows you the entire world of God.
	Each sentence shows you a history.
	I mean, the Old Testament that I read is a history, a tremendous cycle of coming out of nowhere into empire and back into the dispersion of a people.
	That happens to every people.
	Sometimes the cycle is cut short, sometimes it goes complete, but it shows you where God is at each part in that cycle.
	That's an amazing revelation to me, and I think that if you can't find the deep truths that have powered Western society to both moral superiority and technological superiority, I think you're missing something.
	I don't think you're reading the book right.
	I think it's all there.
	You can see it.
	Anybody can take a book and read it in a certain way and make it absurd.
	I can do that with Shakespeare, my favorite writer.
	I can take him and say, oh, this is weird if you read it that way.
	Like everything, you have to know how to read it.
	And I think that that was also one of Kant's points where he said, we don't We must not thoroughly need revelation because we know the truth when we see it.
	We wouldn't recognize revelation if we didn't have something in us to greet revelation.
	So you do have to greet the revelation of the Bible with something within yourself.
	And I think that that's, you know, again, I think what they do with science is they get very, very detailed and elegant in their arguments about science, which I approve of, and then get very blunt and stupid.
	And not one of them has read any theology.
	Well, that's certainly true.
	Not one of those atheists has read any serious theology.
	So they're always arguing with a guy on TV.
	They're arguing with a televangelist half the time when you should be.
	I mean Pinker has spent tons of ink arguing about the ghost in the machine.
	I don't know anybody who believes that there's a ghost in the machine.
	You know, that's a dead-end Cartesian belief, you know, that I think we've gotten past and actually before that we had other more sophisticated beliefs.
	So they're just not engaging with real religion.
	So you're very big on Kant, and Kant is sort of a quasi-natural law theorist, but not quite.
	And what's your fondness for Kant?
	Because you're obviously a deeply religious Christian.
	At best, a sort of nominal Christian.
	Well, what Kant was doing was, in the moment that he was... The way I read him, okay?
	And I'm not a sophisticated philosophy reader, but, you know, I have read a lot of it, and this is my take on what he was doing, was he saw very early on in the Enlightenment, in the new scientific world, as the Germans did, that God was in trouble and our beliefs were in trouble.
	But he also saw what I think is beyond question, that morality could not survive the death of God.
	And I think Nietzsche saw that, too.
	A lot of people saw it, you know.
	And so he came up, because it is really difficult once you start to actually make the argument that morality doesn't exist.
	You know, it sounds good if you're in your dorm smoking dope at three in the morning, but in real life, you know, you can't really make the serious argument.
	And he saw that, so he thought, well, then there must be a God.
	And in order for there to be a God, there really must be sort of two planes of existing.
	And I think this is obviously true.
	The phenomenological plane, phenomenal plane he called it, and the noumenal plane.
	And the phenomenal plane is speaking to us of a noumenal plane that we can never quite know.
	And this is the remarkable thing about our culture.
	I always say our culture is founded on two people, Socrates and Jesus.
	Both of them were dealing with an intellectual class that didn't believe in truth.
	Both of them believed that there was a truth.
	Neither of them spoke the truth directly.
	You know, Jesus told stories and he said, I am the truth, which is a very sophisticated, difficult concept.
	And Socrates was always asking those annoying questions that got him killed, you know?
	But they never said, they said there was a truth, but they were approaching it.
	They were always moving toward it.
	And that's essentially what Kant was doing.
	Kant, I feel, was kind of rewriting and updating Plato to say that, yes, there is this world outside the cave.
	We're looking at these shadows, but there is a world of light that creates the shadows.
	We can never quite get to that light, but it is there and we can move toward it.
	And he did say that the fundamentals of Christian belief were you could believe in the fundamentals of Christian belief, the afterlife, judgment, incarnation.
	You could believe in all those things if you believed in this numeral world.
	And so all I'm saying is that he puts down a roadmap of understanding that I have found very helpful.
	It's not like I... He also has this wonderful talk about how we receive information that takes shape in our minds because our minds have a way of giving it shape, which I think has turned out to be scientifically the case, you know?
	That to me is really important because it's one thing to say to me, the world is not as I see it as a human being.
	You know, the table is really just a force field or whatever you want to say.
	But it is true that if I turn north at 53rd Street, I'll get to 54th Street every single time.
	So the world, the phenomenal world that I see, it's not untethered to the noumenal world.
	And I think that that's important because I think that human beings are important in and of themselves.
	And the way we see them is justified in and of itself.
	So this is a very, you're making a very natural law argument to the extent that you say that the universe is essentially discoverable.
	Kant's argument is that the universe, you could not necessarily tell teleology from the universe around you in sort of the Aquinas sense, but more that by searching your own moral sensibility, you could come up with the idea of God because we They all have these interior moral sensibilities.
	So then what need is there for religion in the first place?
	Why not just be sort of a Kantian?
	Just make that your religion.
	Because I really do think, and when you read the Bible, a lot of this has to do with guarantees of the truth, the revelation of the burning bush, the revelation of the incarnation.
	These are things where God is saying to us, yes, I know, I know this path makes sense, I know this relativistic path can make sense, you can analyze things forever.
	Follow this light, follow this light.
	And I don't think, it's one thing to say that we could have thought of that by ourselves, but could we have believed it by ourselves?
	I'm not quite sure.
	I'm not, I actually don't believe we could.
	Yeah, I tend to agree with that.
	And I think that this is sort of the Judaic perspective on Greek thought, for example, is there's this famous statement by Yehuda Halevi, who was a very famous rabbi in, I believe, the 11th century.
	And his statement was basically that Greek philosophy is beautiful but has no fruit.
	Meaning that it's wonderful to study and it's wonderful to learn about, but it doesn't actually dictate action in the same way that an implicit command to do things does, or an implicit rulebook for living does.
	And it's kind of arrogant of some of these thinkers to say, well, you know, we couldn't even recognize the truth if we didn't already know the truth.
	What difference does that make?
	We're walking around in the dark.
	If there's light at the end of the hallway, you've got to be able to see the light to know which way to walk.
	And I think that that really is what our faith does.
	When Jesus said, you know, love God, love your neighbor, everything else is built on that.
	And there's a rabbi, right?
	Yeah, Rabbi Hillel says the same thing.
	That's sort of the reverse.
	He uses the silver rule, right?
	He says that that which is hateful to your neighbor, do not do.
	Yeah.
	And I think that when you have that kind of rule, for instance, when I'm reading the Bible and it seems to me to be telling me that, oh, this guy, I can get rid of this guy.
	He's no good.
	I go back to that and I say, no, if I got there, I made a mistake.
	You know, I made a mistake.
	You have to have some basis, some light that you're moving toward.
	And Revelation is that light.
	I don't think, I really don't believe That you can get there any other way.
	And I think it's tremendously arrogant to think that you can think your way to the light because you can think your way right off the edge of a cliff.
	And I've seen people do it.
	So how do we actually reinculcate some of these beliefs?
	Because obviously this is, you know, the work in which you're engaged is the work in which I'm engaged.
	And it's daunting, obviously, because you have an entire culture that is built to believe in its arrogance that it could have created all these values, just tabula rasa.
	Even after a century of us slaughtering each other at unprecedented rates, it's an uphill battle.
	People have an easier time believing in no God than in God.
	How do you get to this?
	I think one of the problems we're having right at this moment is that politics is the opposite of thought in some ways, that politics demands that you Make a choice between Democrat and Republican, you know, this one or that one.
	And it's very hard for people to say, yeah, I'm choosing the Republican, but he's a jerk.
	He's just got a better idea.
	You know, this guy is a jerk.
	You know, ideas matter a lot.
	Ideas really do matter a lot because all of us are so broken and sinful and creepy in some way, you know, that they're like...
	Like this whole idea that you can point at somebody and say, oh, well, he did this when he was 17 and therefore, you know.
	What does he represent?
	Tell me first what he represents and then tell me whether he can't represent that or can represent that.
	And so I think that we are fighting over ideas.
	We're fighting over the stories we tell.
	I think these two things are immensely equally important.
	And I think that what can we do but speak these ideas in all their complexity and tell our stories as clearly as we can?
	What else can we do?
	And then have faith.
	I do have faith.
	I do believe that ideas that don't make sense collapse.
	I believe that modernism collapsed because it was secular and post-modernism, which makes Literally no sense whatsoever.
	You know, beat modernism because it exposed something in modernism that didn't work.
	Secular humanism actually didn't work.
	So I have faith in those ideas.
	The thing that I think we all worry about, you'd be a fool not to worry about, is as you're moving toward the light, as you're moving toward the good, what horrors will occur.
	And we just don't know.
	You know, I mean, you live in faith and you live each day hoping that this is not that day.
	So, you know, I would be remiss if we went through this entire episode and I didn't ask you, you're talking a lot about narrative and about storytelling.
	I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about your experiences in Hollywood, because obviously you're a Hollywood writer, you've made some money writing movies in Hollywood.
	Do you just not talk about any of this around anybody in Hollywood?
	Well, eventually, I virtually got kicked out.
	I mean, I got kicked out one office at a time, you know, but I still got kicked out.
	You know, and that was all politics.
	It was just like during the Bush administration.
	You'd go in and they'd say, Bush is Hitler, and you'd say, I'm here to sell a story about ghosts.
	Right, this is Wendy, sir.
	And I was never able to say, you know, yes, Bush is.
	Or even smile a stupid, you know, grin and just accept it.
	I always had to say, well, I'm on the other side, and I would get thrown out.
	And once I became loud enough, it really became hard for me to get work.
	I never minded.
	I kind of was dragged into the movie business, and I didn't mind getting thrown out.
	And it would be a horrible life to me not to be able to speak my mind.
	I'd much rather sit around here talking to you and Jeremy and even Knowles.
	than be in Hollywood and not be able to say what I thought because I really wanted to get Justice League 4.
	I really want to score.
	I mean, that's not my life.
	But it did bother me because, not for myself, but this thesis that half the country does not deserve to be entertained, only instructed, If you are one of them, you deserve to hear jokes at night.
	If you are one of them, you deserve to have movies and spy films and monster movies.
	But if you're us, they're essentially saying to you, every comedian, every single one, is going to tell you you're an idiot.
	Every movie is going to throw your values down the drain.
	Every single film and every TV show is going to tell you your country stinks, your religion stinks, your values stink, the way you dress is ugly.
	Every single one.
	And then they elect Trump and go, why is everybody so angry?
	It's like, yeah, you know, you're lucky...
	I think, like, you're lucky they just sent Trump.
	You're lucky they didn't show up themselves, because there's 64 million of them, and they would have been well within their rights to come.
	This is what bothers me, and it ultimately bothers me about us, because I don't need them.
	to let me tell a story.
	I don't need them.
	But they're not so bright.
	They're not so talented.
	They're not so deep that we can't do better.
	We can do better.
	But the problem is, is part of the conservative mindset is to see how the disaster might happen.
	And so we're always rushing off to stop the disaster.
	And, you know, there are three things in life that always come second place.
	You know, children, morality, and art.
	You know, there's always something more important than taking care of your children.
	There's always something more important than doing the right thing.
	There's always something more important than sitting down and writing a novel that's not going to make you as much money as if you wrote, you know, like, that lousy Trump, I hate him, or the opposite, you know.
	So those things need care, and conservatives have let them go, uh, Conservatives have not cared about the artists, they have not cared about the narrative, and they haven't cared about You know, simply, people need delight.
	They need to be delighted.
	They need to see their inner life acted out so that they can reflect on it.
	It's like looking in the mirror.
	And we've let that go.
	And that was the thing that bothered me most about Hollywood.
	It was not that they were there, that we weren't.
	And it still bothers me.
	You know, you call up and say, here's an idea about this.
	And now, because everybody knows who I am and what I think, I will go into rooms now and say, there's 64 million people with 20 bucks in their pocket that you can't reach and I can.
	Let me do it." And it's like, no.
	Absolutely not.
	We don't want to go there.
	Well, I want to end on an uplifting note, and I do have one more question, which is I'm going to ask you your favorite movies and your favorite books in just one second.
	But if you actually want to hear Drew's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber to subscribe.
	Just go to dailywire.com, click subscribe.
	You can hear the end of our conversation there.
	So, Drew, thanks so much for stopping by, and I'll see you tomorrow.
	I mean, you work here, so you really don't have a choice.
	We'll just continue talking.
	This has been the Sunday Special.
	And go check out Drew's Another Kingdom Season 2.
	It's only available to subscribers to get early with our beautiful art from our art department.
	You really are going to want to check it out.
	Just another subscriber benefit when you give us your money.
	Go check it out right now.
	It's been a pleasure having you.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	was produced by Jonathan Hay.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Alex Dingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
	Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.
	And title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

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