Andrew Klavan argues that Democratic-run cities like New York collapse under progressive policies—citing Giuliani’s turnaround—while dismissing claims that Republican states’ poverty disproves the trend, stressing policy over geography. He warns Trump’s defeat could unleash "woke" extremism, framing Democrats as ideologically rigid and economically reckless, from nuclear energy bans to minimum wage hikes. On culture, Klavan rejects puritanical gatekeeping, praising art like Game of Thrones for confronting evil while mocking superhero films’ avoidance of real stakes. Parenting advice pivots to firm limits with love, and he predicts post-Trump conservatism will either collapse or force Democrats to abandon radicalism—urging unity before America’s "gift" of opportunity fractures under division. [Automatically generated summary]
We're live with our newest episode of The Conversation.
I'm your host, Alfonso Rachel Zoe.
And with me is Andrew Klavan, and we will be taking your questions live for an entire hour.
Please remember, our conversation is streaming for everyone to watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
Click the link in our video description if you want to ask questions or become a Daily Wire subscriber.
It's good to see you.
All right, did they explain to you that your task here is to make me look good?
That ain't nothing but a thing, man.
You're already looking good.
I'm trying to keep up with you, man.
All you got to do is just sit there and look good.
That's what I keep telling myself.
Okay, so I can read off these questions then.
You can read off there.
I can read it off there.
I'll put them in the town.
No, obviously, the rules of losing because they're supposed to think that I just already noticed stuff.
Now they know I'm meeting the teleprops.
I'm just making questions.
Okay, so we got a question from Luis.
And we are, let me see.
Question is, we were having a healthy conversation about cities run by DIMS and how the policies are destructive when something I've never heard before was offered by a bystander.
I was like, bystander, why are you getting up in our business, man?
Okay, he said that Alabama and Mississippi are run by Republicans and are the poorest states in the nation.
I had no comment because I don't have any data.
What is your take on this fact?
If we claim DIMS are ruining cities, his claim is Republicans ruined these states.
Is it true?
No, I mean, there are poor states in the country.
And it's entirely possible that there are policies that could be put in place that aren't being put in place.
But the Democrat cities are rich cities.
New York is a wealthy city.
San Francisco, wealthy city.
LA, these are cities where money is pouring in.
It's pure policy that makes them descend into chaos and homelessness and crime.
And the thing about this that is kind of painful to me is now that I'm like 140 years old, you know, I saw this before.
I saw this before.
I lived in New York at its worst moment, you know, a moment when there was son of Sam and the Puerto Rican terrorist FALN and the crime was so high.
Seriously, people would call me up and say, can I visit you?
And I would say, you know, you can visit me, just don't go out at night and all that kind of thing.
And it was all policy.
And when Giuliani came in, they did just what they did to Trump, just what they did to Reagan.
They called him racist every single day because he wanted to clean up crime, saved thousands of minority lives, you know, by cleaning up the crime.
And the city became one of the greatest cities.
New York became one of the greatest big cities on the face of the earth.
It is now descending back because they've got a left-wing mayor.
So we know it's the policies.
We know it's the policies.
And I'm not saying, look, these states, I don't know that much about Mississippi.
These are out of my bailiwick.
I'm not saying they're not policies there that they could use to draw business and things like that, because that's what it's all about.
But I know these cities are rich.
I know, I mean, there's so much money flowing into San Francisco, and it's a cesspit, you know?
I mean, and we know it's policy, and we know it's about, I mean, when they sit around talking about the rights of the homeless people, the cops go nuts, because all the cops want to do is it's not good for people to live on the street, but cops want to clean the place up, you know?
So it's just frustrating because we know with the cities it's policy.
That doesn't mean I don't know about Mississippi.
I don't know if they're well run, but we know these cities could be better run because we've seen it happen before.
Indeed, and if I could ask really quick, would you say that there's a difference between an expensive, a place that's an expensive city or an expensive state, or a rich city?
Because there's a difference to me.
It's like these places, it's not so much they're rich.
They're just expensive.
They're expensive to live there.
And by the time you fork over your overhead to live there, if you're not wealthy, then you're just living from paycheck to paycheck, even if you may have a six-figure income.
But the tax base is so big because New York's got Wall Street.
San Francisco's got the tech industry.
LA's got Hollywood.
They've got all this money that they could, you know, it's all about how you use it.
So yeah, they're expensive cities, no question about that.
But they do not have to be badly run chaotic cities.
Nuclear Energy's Complexities00:13:04
That's my only point.
Indeed.
All right.
I hope that answers your question, Louise.
Who else we got?
Mitchell.
Question.
How you doing, Drew?
How you doing, Drew?
And you?
I'm hanging in there, man.
I got my mug of leftist cheers.
And you know, just really quick, man, I think leftist tears, when you think about it, they would be bitter.
But I don't know, maybe it's just like the taste of victory or something like that.
Anyway, they taste good to us.
Right?
My wife and I are expecting our first child very soon.
Congrats.
And any words of wisdom as a soon-to-be father?
Thanks.
I love your show.
Ah, that's really a great question.
I mean, there's so many things you could say.
What I remember bringing my first kid home is I didn't have a good relationship with my dad, and I thought like the big thing to me was it was so important to me to be a better father than my father was.
And we brought my daughter home, and I thought, that's too low a bar.
I gotta do paths.
But here's the thing that I truly believe.
I believe that each person is a path to God.
I really do believe that.
So, I mean, obviously, God is the path, and Jesus is the way, but each person has inside them a path.
And that means you've got to use what the poet Wordsworth called wise passiveness.
You got to let the person grow as they are.
That doesn't mean no discipline.
It doesn't mean no limits.
You've got to have all that stuff.
But don't try to make that your kid you.
Don't try to make your kid love the things you love.
Don't try to make, you know, you can show them the things you love.
You should show them the things you love.
But don't try to make the kid into somebody he's not.
Let him be who he is.
On the other side of that, that's one side of the thing, is let that kid develop into who he is.
But on the other side of that is when you set a limit, it's got to be a limit.
And the one thing I hear just out as I'm walking around in public is I hear people saying, stop doing that.
And then you say it 15 times, stop doing this, or this is going to happen.
And they never pull the trigger.
So when you set a limit, trick to setting a limit is don't make a threat you're not going to keep.
Don't say, keep doing that and I'll kill you because you're not going to kill him.
I mean, then if you are going to kill him, give up the kid.
But no, you know, you say, like, stop doing that, or you're going to lose that toy for 15 minutes, whatever it is.
And then you got to do it if they stop doing it.
And they learn very quickly that your limits are limits.
So the thing is, limits for behavior so they don't get hurt and so they know morals from immoral.
But then in those limits, let the kid be who the kid is.
So those are my words of wisdom.
Indeed, you were taking notes.
Right, right.
You'd always rewind it.
All right.
Aaron, Mr. Clavin, like Dr. Shapiro, my wife also, I know he's a doctor, I don't know his wife is a doctor.
Oh, because he mentions it like every 10 minutes.
Oh, okay.
I'm like, man, that's a double hats and stuff like that.
Double yammas.
All right.
Mr. Clavin, like Dr. Shapiro, my wife also talks to me about her workday every evening.
However, she's not sure whether she's looking for solutions to her problems or just a friendly ear, any advice.
This is this thing about women I never understand.
I mean, there's so much about women I don't understand that at least I've reached the age where I understand that I don't understand it.
Women will tell you their problems and you solve their problem.
They say, I didn't want you to solve my problem.
And I think, what do you want me to do?
Frame it?
So what I tell my wife is, don't bring me your problems unless you want me to solve them.
I mean, I listen sympathetically.
I obviously don't tell people what to do.
But if you have a problem, I'm going to discuss solutions.
I'm not there to just sort of sit there and nod and kind of say, poor baby.
If you have something I can help with, I will help you with it.
And those are my rules.
You don't want to talk to me.
I tell people, people who ask your opinion, and then you tell them, and they get offended.
You think, like, go back to the part where you asked him.
So, obviously, guys do have a problem with letting women talk.
You've got to let the woman talk.
You've got to listen to what she says.
But I don't see anything wrong with solving a problem if you've got a solution.
Indeed.
Step up.
Be useful, for God's sake.
And of course, you know, a lot of times women would say, well, you know, I just needed you to listen.
I know.
And that in itself is useful.
Yep, I can respect that.
But, you know, we want to be heroes, man.
That's what we're here for.
All right.
And we got Veronica.
Okay.
I think that Trump has to avoid the debt, has to avoid the debt to get elected.
But I think as a businessman, he knows it needs to be addressed.
I think he'll address it in the middle of his second term.
What do you think?
Really, it's a really good question.
Trump, I do not think Trump would have been elected the first time if he had promised to reform entitlements.
Because there are too many people in this country, especially during the Obama years and during the crash, during the crash and the Obama years, who were depending on some of those government programs to get them by.
And it was not the time to be talking about, you know, I mean, my big beef, say, is Social Security.
Social Security was meant to kick in at 65 and was invented at a time when people generally died around 63.
Now we live to 80.
So all that time between 65 and 80 is unfinanced.
You didn't do the work that's going to bring back the pay to give you the Social Security.
So the debt gets worse and worse.
So we need to reform these entitlements.
But the problem is it's like people hear that and they're afraid they're going to be stripped of their safety net, basically.
So the thing about Trump that I've noticed is for all people talk about how he lies and all this stuff, and he's kind of got a Carney Barker thing where everything's the biggest and the best and all this.
But Trump, it matters to Trump that he keeps his promises.
So I don't think he's going to move on the debt now, but I doubt that he would run.
I doubt that he would run on it in a second term and not mention it and then do it.
That's what I think.
So he talked about, I heard him for the first time say, next term we're going to cut spending.
And I think if he means that, I think it could be a really good thing.
I think that would be a legacy thing where you say, look, you're not going to like me for this, but I don't have to get re-elected.
And so I'm going to just reform this.
All we have to do, it's so simple.
All we have to do is move the ages at which some of this stuff kicks in, you know, so it will take care of us, take care of more people later on.
You don't do it for us because we're already old, but you do it for the young people.
And the other thing is, you know, maybe some people are too rich to receive benefits.
You know, they don't need those benefits.
And I think we should have great graduated benefits where they help the poor, where we got a safety net for the poor.
We don't want anybody to fall through the net and just wind up on the street.
But, you know, maybe Bill Gates doesn't need to collect, you know, be on Medicare or collect Social Security.
Maybe we could tinker with that a little bit.
It needs to be reformed.
You know, right now, with the left being what they are, with Democrats being what they are, it is so important to me to see Trump win again.
I don't want him to blow himself up at all.
But the debt is a serious problem.
It is.
It is.
But thank you.
Let me see what else we got.
We got Jimmy.
Mr. Clavin, why does the left oppose nuclear energy?
It's a great question.
No, it's a great question because it's one of the cleanest, safest, best kinds of energies we've got.
Because they're emotionalists.
I mean, I think that's the only answer.
You know, we've seen some things that were really frightening.
We saw Chernobyl, which was really the failure of a Soviet system where the Soviets couldn't even hunt their serial killers because they didn't want to admit that serial killing wasn't a capitalist thing.
It's a psychological thing.
So if you watch that wonderful show, Chernobyl, on TV, they showed how the Soviets couldn't acknowledge the fact that this terrible thing had happened.
In Japan, when there was a tsunami and an earthquake and one of their nuclear facilities cracked, they still didn't have any widespread deaths from the nuclear power.
And yet that alone made Europe start to shut down its nuclear facilities.
So they start shutting down their nuclear facilities and then they start wondering why their air gets worse and why they have to use more fossil fuel.
We can't live in caves.
We're not going to go back to the past when we didn't have technology.
We run on energy.
Nuclear energy is good.
And I just think it's pure emotionalism.
It's the idea of what could happen, China syndrome, the Michael Douglas movie.
It's that kind of stuff.
But in fact, with good safety regs, with actual responsibility, which the West has shown, you don't have any accidents.
That's great.
Indeed, and they love regulations and stuff.
That's right.
Regulated up the wazoo, man.
They love that.
There is something about the word, the advancement of the West that itself offends them.
The very fact that we say, you know, if I do this, I can go to the moon.
Well, you shouldn't go to the moon.
You know, that's why, what about poor people going to the moon?
This was when I was a kid.
They would say, why should we have a space program when we have problems here?
And you think, like, that's like, why should we discover the new world when we have problems in Europe?
You know, this is what men do.
We expand, and that's what we're here for.
I think we're here to take over territories and move.
And as we move, we solve a lot of problems that we left behind.
Indeed, yeah.
It's like they're allergic to being practical or something like that.
They want this nuclear energy, but instead, but they frown upon fossil fuels.
It's like gas burns pretty much everywhere the same way.
Wind doesn't blow the same place everywhere.
The sun doesn't sign the same place everywhere.
But gas is going to burn the way it goes.
The day is going to burn every day.
Anyway, the sun keeps going down every night.
I don't know what's up with that.
No, I mean, it is strange.
I do feel like, you know, you hate to condemn everybody who's a liberal or everyone who's a Democrat, but it does seem sometimes that it's just the success of things itself that drives them crazy.
And I don't get that.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what we're here for.
And that's a good thing that you don't get it, man, because that means you ain't crazy.
You ain't crazy like that.
That's an advantage.
So we got Veronica.
Andrew, the church and Christian communities give you awful dating advice.
Jesus don't give about that.
Maybe the church does, but Jesus doesn't give bad dating advice.
Can you give us some real help in this area besides don't dance?
I saw that movie.
It was a good movie.
You know, I do think that there is a hypervigilance about this.
I mean, look, sex can ruin people's lives.
You know, that's just the way it is.
Sex is a eros is a tremendous river of energy that passes through the human body.
And to keep that energy humanized, we have to behave in certain ways.
We have to treat each other in certain ways.
We have to respect our bodies.
We have to think about our bodies in terms of the spirit and in terms of the moral world.
We all know that, you know.
But again, if you're not dancing because dancing leads to sex, maybe you feel too afraid, too afraid of things.
You know, the thing that I believe, though, is that because of sex and because of fear and because we want so much not to be alone, and this is a big deal, sometimes we forget to relate to one another as human beings, men and women, especially men and women in the dating phase.
I mean, one of the things that happens to people when they're married, you start to think like, oh, I get it.
She's actually another person, you know, with human ideas and human feelings and all this.
And if you come at it from that point of view and you're not thinking, oh, how can I win this husband or how can I go to bed with this girl or all the things that kind of Eros makes us think and the body makes us think, but play to the spirit, which is like, who is this person?
Is this the person I'm meant to have?
Is this the person I'm meant to be with?
I think you're going to have a much better time, you know, a much better time in your life.
The romantic relationships are one of the great consolations for the difficulties of life.
To have somebody you love, to have somebody who cares about you, who cares what you did today, where you are, you know, like how you're feeling and all that stuff.
That's just one of the great consolations of life.
And what you want to look for is somebody that you're going to care for like that too, you know.
And I think that I actually have a lot of good feelings about what is possible on the internet with dating, you know, that I think you could get to know someone before you sit down to a dinner, before you go out to a movie and all this stuff.
And I just think you've got to remember, you've got to go into these things.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard about this was figure out what you believe about how you want to behave before you're sitting next to somebody in a car at midnight.
You know, like in other words, figure out what your values are and how you think you should behave in romantic situations before the situation comes up so that you're not carried away by that enormous force of arrows and do something stupid.
And the rest is just like, you know, men and women are only two kinds of people in the world, men and women.
Those are the two kinds of people there are.
And they're different, but they're human.
And if you can relate to people as human beings first and then kind of move into that phase where the rest starts to matter, I think you're going to be a lot happier than if you go around saying, I got to go out and find a husband or I got to go out and find a girl or whatever it is you're looking for.
Indeed, indeed.
Or as opposed to like, you know, going out there looking for Mr. or Miss Wright.
Two Kinds of People00:08:03
It's like, well, as the saying goes, why don't you try being yourself?
Well, you know?
That to me is excellent advice because I mean, I hear that a lot.
I can't find Mr. Wright.
And I think, well, are you Miss Wright?
Because somebody's looking for her.
And yeah, working on yourself is a big, big deal.
Indeed, indeed.
And bear in mind, King David danced in his drawers.
That's right.
His wife got annoyed with that.
She got a little annoyed.
She probably thought it was cute.
She's like, David, you stop that.
Get in the house, you crazy guy.
Oh, my goodness.
Joel, wise and bald claven.
I am both wise and bald.
I'm bald, man.
All right.
No comment.
Under this, I got an afro.
Under my head, I got an afro.
All right.
How can we convince more individuals to purchase manufactured products outside China?
How can we win the trade war?
Well, you know, first of all, it's not so much a matter of, you know, people are going to buy the cheapest stuff that works well.
That's what they're going to do.
This is just the way it is.
And so what you want to do is you want to manufacture good products.
You want to not over-unionize your shop so that you're giving people, you know, you want to treat your workers well and you want to train your workers and take care of your workers, but you can't treat them so well that you're actually not making profits.
You're out there to make a profit and all these things.
I think that Trump is doing some really interesting things with China.
Everybody has complained about his tariffs.
And trade is so complex, I'm not convinced anybody knows about it.
I used to think like, well, I don't really understand trade.
Now I believe that nobody understands it because it's just so many moving parts.
But his threats and his tariffs have driven China's economy back to the 1990s.
And I have no animus against China as China, but they cheat.
They steal our stuff.
They steal intellectual property.
They make contracts and they break them continually.
And I think you've got to be tough with people like that.
People keep saying, well, Evil Trump is starting a trade war with China.
We're in a trade war with China.
He's just fighting back, you know?
So I think that he's doing some good stuff.
I think that there is a problem that people are not facing, that the pace of change and the pace of globalization are so intense that it's very difficult to keep our economy humming without losing sectors of the economy.
So in other words, If the iPhone can be assembled in China by essentially slave workers, they've improved that a little bit, so I don't want to score them for it, but years ago, not that many years ago, they had people who were just being treated terribly.
You're going to get a cheaper iPhone.
And that's good for you because you have a cheaper iPhone.
It's good for us because it makes everybody richer and gives us a consumer economy.
Not so good for the slaves who are out of sight in China.
So we've got to start thinking in a global way at the same time we maintain our national sovereignty and our national values.
We can't, I don't care what anybody says, we cannot abandon our working class.
The machines aren't going to go away.
Technology is not going to go away.
The future is not going to go away.
But we have to start to figure out, look, when the first Industrial Revolution came along and there were factories, those things decimated families.
Suddenly, instead of working on the farm, your kids were going off to the city and disappearing, and little kids were working in factories and all that stuff.
We did make policies about that over time.
We made child labor laws that you didn't need before because your kid was working for you.
So like you took care of your kid, you know.
But then we needed child labor laws and we made those laws.
Henry Ford, a terrible human being, but because he thought it was good for business, he treated his workers well.
He thought it's better if I pay you so you can afford to buy my Model T and you have a family.
He wanted people to have families.
Like I said, he wasn't a nice person.
He did it out of self-interest.
Amazon now is training its workers, spending lots and lots of money to train its workers.
I don't see anything wrong with government encouraging that, having some policies that say, you do that, and we'll give you a tax break here or there, whatever it is.
Because if you train your warehouse guy to learn how to do computers, when your warehouse gets computerized, you can promote your warehouse guy up to the next level and he'll be able to do that, you know.
So it's not a question of just learning to code.
It's a question of us taking care of each other a little bit and of us expecting companies.
Companies show that they're virtuous now by extolling Democrat policies.
So they say like, if you're working for Google and you say men and women are different, you're fired because men and women are exactly the same and you're a bigot, right?
Instead of doing that, let's just train you how to work better so that you can keep up with technology.
Let's take care of people that way.
So I think that there are things that we can do.
It's not so much a question of winning trade war.
It's a question of remaining productive, remaining competitive, but also treating our people in a way that will move us into the future without communities falling apart every two years.
It's complicated and I don't have all the answers and I don't pretend to, but just the fact that I don't have all the answers doesn't mean I can't see that there's a problem there that we're going to have to address.
It's not fair, man.
He gets to be bald and has all the smarts.
I'm just bald.
I always tell when I go to colleges, I always say, you know, I'm older and wiser than you.
I say, that's not true of everybody.
Some people are just older.
But I'm actually older.
All right.
Here it is.
Okay.
Is this the same Veronica?
It's Drewy Pooh.
Drewy Push.
All right.
After a couple of questions, we get very familiar.
I'm glad she threw the Y on it there, because if it was just Drew, it'd be Drew Poo.
Drew Poo, yeah, that sounds better.
All right, what's the worst film adaptation of a book that you've ever seen and why was it so awful?
Oh, there's so many.
I can't even begin.
I mean, I saw one the other day.
There was a book called, I'm a big ghost story fanatic.
I love ghost stories.
And a ghost story is a very, it's not a horror movie.
It's not a horror story.
A ghost story is just like you're walking down a hall and you see something out of your corner of your eye and you turn it's not there.
To me, I just like love that.
So there was a book that came out recently called The Little Stranger.
And I wish I could remember the author to pay her tribute, but I can't.
But I just loved it.
I was reading it over Christmas and a Christmas ghost story.
What's better than a Christmas ghost story?
And I was just turning the page.
And the movie came out and I dragged my wife to it.
And she liked it.
I just, I couldn't stand it.
Most of the time, I find that if I read the book first, I like the book better.
And that's true of things when I look back.
Like I didn't like the Silence of the Lambs movie when I first saw it because I loved the book.
I didn't like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with Jack Nicholson when I first saw it because I loved the book.
But now when I go back and look at them, I think, no, they're good movies.
They're just different from the book.
But there's so many bad ones that they don't even, I can't even call them up, call them to mind because there's no one that I sit there and say, oh, they ruined that.
It's just, you know, I love books and I would much rather read a book than almost any other form of entertainment.
But movies do do some things and sometimes they clean up ideas.
They clean up plot points that you kind of are rambling in a book and they tighten them up.
But I can't think of what's the worst offhand, but I've just seen a lot of, every time I read a book and go see the movie, I'm almost always disappointed.
It's very rare that it works the other way around.
It's almost like being a chef.
I hear like a chef, they just can't enjoy food.
Really?
It's like they break it down.
It's like they're tasting for all the ingredients and they just can't enjoy it like they would normally enjoy it.
They're just processing it and dissecting it or something like that.
It's a problem.
I've thought so much about how to tell stories and how stories are built, especially in the crime field and the mystery field.
One of my great delights in life is when I realize I've been fooled, you know, when they've tricked me.
Like I don't know if you saw the Sixth Sense, you know, which has this cool trick ending, which hopefully everybody knows by now.
I don't want to spoil it.
But they just got me.
They got me.
I'd seen that ending a dozen times before.
It's not an original ending, but they did it so well that I was just completely blown away by it.
And I just thought, like, I love that.
I mean, I love when you can outsmart me and take it away.
I heard that.
That's the M. Night Shamalayan stuff.
Man, he makes great commercials.
Judging Truth Lost in Clouds00:15:11
Does he?
I think his commercials are better than his movies.
Some of the trailers?
His trailers.
Oh, man.
What was that one in The Village, I think it was called?
It was one of the best trailers I ever saw, one of the worst movies ever.
Okay, so I'm not crazy.
No, no, no.
These guys make great trailers, but it's true.
Oh, man.
Okay, we got Matt.
Let's see.
What is the next big thing we should expect politically, culturally, after Trump?
Oh, man.
Well, here's the thing.
I think we are coming up on a watershed election.
I say this, I say it with reservations because every election we have now is the most important election of our lives.
You know, you go on, you turn on Sean Hannity.
He's like, this is the most awesome.
You think like every election is the most.
But I think that the parties are in a very specific place where if they lose, they're going to lose for core reasons.
Okay.
So here's my argument.
The left hates Donald Trump with a passion.
They think he's the stupidest, worst, ugliest, you know, he's Hitler, he's everything.
If they lose to him, they have got to say to themselves, why?
And in their mind, unless they're going to invent another Russian collusion conspiracy theory and fool themselves that way forever, which I don't think, I don't think the wiser hands will do, they're going to have to face the fact that their leftism and radicalism and wokeism and nonsense is not what people want.
They're just going to have to face that.
And so then they may still call themselves the Democrat Party, but I think they will change.
I think they'll dial it back if they lose.
I think they're going to start to say, we've got to find some centrists, some people who can move things along in a slower way.
So that's on their side.
On the Trump side, I don't think any other Republican who was in the offing could have beat Hillary Clinton.
I think Trump won because of some of his worst qualities.
Like, I'm a polite guy, but Trump won because he's a rude guy.
And I don't think a polite guy would have won.
And the reason I say that is I think they had taken our manners and they had turned them into a political weapon.
So you say this, you're a racist.
You say that, you're a sexist.
You say that.
Whatever you say, you've done something terribly wrong.
And you have to apologize.
I mean, listen to the candidates.
Joe Biden has apologized ever since he announced his election.
So if Trump loses with this great economy, with the fact that we're at peace, with the fact that his judicial picks have been everything Republicans and conservatives could have asked for, if he loses, it's going to be because he's an unappealing person.
If we can't fight back against political correctness anymore, then we're going to have to change.
And then I think the Republican Party will essentially be destroyed because the Republican Party before Trump came along was already kind of a Democrat Party.
And it was a weak sauce party, I think.
And Trump turned it into the Republican Party a lot of us wanted it to see.
You don't have to like him, but he did it.
He did everything I was afraid of he was going to do, he didn't do.
Everything I hoped he would do, he did.
I mean, the guy so outstripped my expectations.
If he loses, the only reason, right now, just saying everything could change, of course, if there's a war or depression or whatever.
But right now, if he were to lose, the only reason would be his personality.
And then we're going to have to figure out a way to fight back without that kind of brashness.
And I don't know if we can.
I think we lose the country.
I think if he loses this next election, we are in for real leftism with a vengeance.
And so when you ask what the next big thing is, I think either it's going to be a real triumph for conservatism.
I think if Trump wins, I think we could really have, just like with Reagan, Reagan gave us 25 good years.
Nothing lasts forever.
25 good years is the core of a lifetime.
So that would be a beautiful thing.
If he loses, I think we're in big trouble.
I really do.
You know, when I think about it, it's hard for me to imagine Democrats really doing something different because they're crazy.
And crazy people, insane people, do the same thing over and over and over again.
They expect the result.
So I can't imagine what else they would do that's different.
What I'm thinking is there must be people who are not getting the press, who are quiet, who are not getting what AOC is getting, and like squad is getting, who have other ideas, who have different ways of doing it.
Listen, the stuff they're selling, they call themselves progressive.
The stuff they're selling has been failing since the 19th century.
So maybe they come up with new ways of treating people.
I'm not against ways of making sure that the poor aren't too poor and that people who are out of work can be taken care of.
I'm not against all that.
Those are liberal policies that maybe they could come up with some new way besides destroying our economy.
And certainly this woke stuff has got to go.
To me, it is the most racist, offensive.
I mean, I would rather read at this point, seriously, I would rather read an actual, like we're racist, we hate everybody.
Think, okay, at least you're honest.
I'd rather read that than the New York Times, which tells me that their hatred of everybody is love.
Right?
Rather honest hate than this garbage.
You know, I believe this country, this country is a gift.
It's a gift from God.
And I think that anybody, it's this amazing idea that anybody can participate.
No other country's ever had that idea.
But if you keep tearing us apart and setting us against each other, I think we're done for.
Yeah.
And I think maybe they drop that.
As you say, I agree with you.
They're nuts.
They're on that same, you know, not crazy people on a little train track.
You know, it goes around.
I keep seeing the same station.
How come I, you know, it's like, but I don't know.
Maybe this wakes them up, you know, if Trump wins.
And thanks, man.
Now I got that chant stuck in my head when you said this woke stuff is going to, hey, hey, ho-ho.
This woke stuff has got to go.
Hey, it's on.
It's pretty good.
I love it.
We got, please remember, our conversation is live for everyone to watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
Click the link in our video description to ask questions or to sign up.
So that being said, we got Nathan Clayton.
You mentioned that we can make moral judgments.
You got me laughing so much, man.
I'm like crying and stuff like that.
Can you define moral judgment?
Do you think your interpretation of judge not interferes?
Of judgment.
Of judgment.
Okay, judge not.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, interferes with a Christian's duty to call others to conversation.
Go deep, man.
To conversion.
Well this is something where a lot of Christians disagree with me.
I mean, I take judge not very seriously and I feel that a lot of guys try to talk their way out of that.
I used to joke that if you open the Gospels and the only thing in it was judge not lest you be judged, you could deduce the crucifixion.
You could think like anybody who said that is going to be in big trouble.
But here's what I think it means, and I think Jesus was very serious about it.
It means that you have no vote over who is saved.
You have no vote about what another person's state of relationship is with God.
You don't know where they're coming from.
You don't know where they've been.
You don't know how God sees them.
You don't know any of that stuff.
So the only kind of, when I talk about moral judgments, what I mean is you can judge whether something is hurting other people.
You can judge whether something's unfair.
You can judge whether somebody's behaving in a way that's bad for other people.
But what you can't judge is whether somebody else is out of line with God or is somehow not doing what God wants them to do.
Now, obviously, you look at, you know, to use the superexam, the hyper example, you use Hitler, you know, you look at him and you think, well, I think that guy's something may be wrong there, you know.
But again, your role is not to judge his relationship with God.
Your role, you do have a role as a human being to judge whether he is doing good for mankind or bad for mankind.
And obviously, God gives us a lot of pointers on how that works.
We know that our job is to love God and love our neighbor.
And we know if we're not doing that, we're not following the law, even if we think we are, even if we think we're doing that, if we haven't found the love in the law.
I mean, that's what Jesus does to me all the time.
He just takes the law and he infuses it with love.
And sometimes it looks utterly different than you thought it did before he got started.
So my question to people always, and I got this the other day, I was at this conference of evangelicals, and this girl came up to me and she said, shouldn't we rebuke people and tell them that they have to do right?
And I said, well, let me ask you something.
Has that ever worked?
Have you gotten anybody to come to you like that?
And I think that, you know, I've worked on all these suicide hotlines.
And I've worked on a couple of suicide ones.
And one of the things you do when people call you up and they're doing stuff that you just, your heart just cries out to tell them to stop, you know.
But you know if you tell them to stop, they won't stop.
And all they'll do is be alone.
So you listen and you try to guide them to the place in their heart where they know they're doing the wrong thing.
And when I thought about that, I remember I was driving on Ventura Boulevard and I was thinking, you know, God kind of treats me like that.
When I pray, he doesn't like hit me with lightning.
He doesn't say, you're doing the wrong thing.
Your tongue is cleaving to the roof of your mouth.
He doesn't do that, you know.
But as I pray, I start to think like, you know, maybe I'm doing something a little wrong here.
Maybe this is moving me away.
And maybe if we treat people a little bit more like that, this is answering the second part of your question.
Maybe we treat people with a little less judgment and a little bit more humanity and understanding.
They will find the way that God wants them to find.
Because a lot of this stuff, I really believe that God builds into us this path to himself.
But it gets clouded.
It gets clouded by the flesh.
It gets clouded by lust.
It gets clouded by greed.
It gets clouded by pride.
It gets clouded by all that stuff.
And sometimes when you talk to somebody, the clouds kind of part a little bit.
And as the words are coming out of your mouth, you think like, oh, wait a minute.
So maybe it's a question of style.
I just think that a lot of finger wagging, a lot of condemnation, and a lot of throwing people out of churches, which I'm very much opposed to, except in very extreme situations, you abandon people.
You abandon people.
And the devil's out there prowling like a lion.
He's waiting for them to be abandoned.
You want to keep those lines open as long as you can.
You want to keep people in the love of God and in the light of God as long as you can.
So that's one of the reasons I emphasize the judge not aspect of Jesus' ministry and also because I think it makes you so much happier.
I think it makes you so much happier not to take responsibility for somebody else's salvation.
You know what I mean?
Like I take responsibility for your good.
I'm not going to let you go out and get hit by a car.
But at the same time, I don't know.
I'm not equipped to make the judgments of God.
And so I leave those together.
Above your pay grade.
Above my way.
And the thing is, you have those who are secular-minded or who will take liberties with scripture like that or twist it to fit their narrative.
And when they say, judge not, least you be judged.
They love that one.
They love that one a lot.
But the Lord himself does say rebuke the sinner.
We have a job to correct.
Or let me rephrase that.
To tell the truth.
This is the truth.
And Jesus says, if they don't want the truth, just I'll take care of them later.
But when we say judge not least ye be judged, the full context, of course, is to not judge hypocritically.
See, this is where we have this argument.
I have this argument with you.
Yeah, because I read that, I've gone over that again.
Jesus says rebuke.
There are different translations, so it's really hard to know.
But Jesus says rebuke a person when he sins against you.
In other words, when I feel with it when he's, that's a different kind of sin than the kind of sin where I think people do things all the time that they hurt themselves and they degrade themselves.
I think that's a sin.
I think you're not supposed to degrade yourself.
But if I'm in somebody's face all the time telling them, you know, you're drinking too much, you're eating too much, you shouldn't be doing this with women.
I think I've closed the door on that guy.
I think I've closed the door in his face.
And so I agree with you.
I agree with the first part of what you said about how secular people misuse that.
Like you're not supposed to make moral judgments at all, which is absurd.
I mean, you can't live like that.
But I do think we need to lean on that love.
Oh, definitely.
Tell the truth in love.
You know, you got to do that, but you don't want to love somebody straight to hell.
I agree with you.
I hear you.
But when he says judge not least you, the full scope of that is because it follows by saying before you try to pull the telephone pole out of somebody's eye, you need to pull the splint, you know.
I mean, before you try to pull the splint out of somebody, you're going to pull the telephone pole or any other.
So you want to make sure that you're not judging somebody hypocritically.
It's like, have you cleaned up your own house yet before you go and try to judge somebody else?
But you're right, man.
You at least want to tell somebody.
It's like, you might not want to do that.
I don't want to bug you.
I'm just going to tell you the truth.
And I'm going to step back.
And you do you.
Yeah.
But you've been told the truth.
Yeah, and there are so many different ways to do this.
I mean, this is the thing.
I mean, I just find this kind of, I worry about people closing the door in people's faces.
And I think that the door, you know, I believe we should just blow the hinges off our hearts and let people just say, hey, you know, I get, I remember somebody on a hotline calling me and saying, talking to me, and he told me he was worshiping, he was into Satanism.
And I thought like, well, now, I thought, now what do I do?
I thought, this is like, this is tough, you know, because I thought that's like saying I'm into evil to me, you know, like, okay.
But if you say, well, don't be evil, you get nowhere, you know?
So I just listened, and I listened for a long time, you know, and it was hard, man.
I was biting my tongue.
But in the end, you start to find like, well, you know, it wasn't so much he was into Satan.
He was into getting at his dad.
He was into getting his father.
Then you start talking about something that I can deal with.
Now we're not talking on the level of God doing his thing.
You're talking on the level of me saying, yeah, I know what that's like.
I know it's like to have trouble with your dad.
Maybe there's some other road open.
If you react, if I had let myself seize up at the name of Satan and just said, don't do that, I think I'd have lost it.
It's just hard to do.
It is a tricky little thing.
Fine line, man.
Yes, indeed.
All right, we got Will.
All right.
I thought Will Drew got you.
All right, Drew, why do conservatives rail against new pop culture so much?
Knowles declared that musicals are dead last week.
Give me a break, man.
It reminds me of gatekeeping, Puritan types I grew up with.
This is a problem I heard, oh, it was you.
I heard you yesterday on Facebook preaching about this.
And we do it.
It's no question.
He's right.
You know, there's no question that we do it.
And what I try to explain to people is that I was just having this conversation with at this evangelical conference.
Conservatives and Cultural Gatekeeping00:03:26
Conservative art and Christian art don't look like conservative life and Christian life.
And here's why.
When somebody commits murder in a story, exactly zero people have been murdered.
Exactly zero people have committed murder.
Jesus tells stories in which people sin.
He tells stories about sin.
If I tell stories about sin, some Christian always writes to me and says, well, why did you tell a story about sin?
Aren't you a Christian?
But nobody has sinned because those people don't exist.
And stories are different than real life.
So, for instance, a lot of evangelicals went out off against Harry Potter, which actually has a very powerful moral and I would say Christian strain in it.
It may not be everybody's Christianity, but it is a strain of Christianity.
And people say, well, magic is bad.
And I would say, you know how many acts of magic were committed in Harry Potter?
None.
None, because it's just a story.
You know, the magic represents stuff.
It represents good and evil.
It's about something.
Nobody's committing any acts of magic when you write a story about people committing, doing magic.
So I think that we have to understand.
It's funny, we understand this about old stuff.
If the Sopranos goes on, which I love the Sopranos, I thought it was a great piece, and they say, well, it's very violent.
But if Shakespeare goes on and they put off somebody's eyes on stage, everybody goes, oh, Shakespeare, that's great.
So the thing is, conservatives are so uptight.
Now, in there, they're so uptight because they don't realize that art is not life.
Art is about life.
Our founding fathers, they read Greek tragedy.
They read about mothers killing their own children.
They read about it.
And then they knew what life was like.
They knew that life was ugly and messy and evil and twisted, and that helped them to make a constitution that mitigated our sin and our evil and put forces against each other.
The one thing I have to say in favor of conservatives is they have been so abused by the artistic community that I don't blame them for being suspicious of every little thing.
And that's the other side of this.
And so I think what we need is we need people to help us make stuff and spread stuff that is good, that is quality stuff, that is made by Christians and by conservatives.
It doesn't have to be conservative Christian art.
It just has to be made by people who see the world that way.
And the sense of the true sense of the world, I think, will then come across.
Indeed.
And not only that, Christ tells us to do that.
He says, he said, get out there and make it compelling.
Not be terrorist, but make it compelling.
Make it a way that people can register and understand it.
And I want you, and not only that, he's like, look, I want you to adopt the children of the age.
Yes, he does say that.
That's right.
Watch what they're doing.
He's like, the children of light, they really can't sell it.
But the children of the age.
He does say that.
Is it the children of the age?
Is that the word words?
Yeah, the children of light and the children of the age.
Yeah, you know, that's right.
I always forget that quote.
It's a great quote.
You know, that that is like he says, they're wiser in their generation than the children of light.
The children of the age are wiser in their generation than the children of the light.
They do, you know, the other day, lovely, lovely Christian lady said to me, you know, I want all this stuff to be clean.
I want all this clean art and all this.
I said, Do you watch Game of Thrones?
She said, Love Game of Thrones, never miss it.
I said, Well, then what you're doing is you're saying I can't use.
I mean, art is about sex and violence.
That's what it's about.
It's about, you know, this is what exciting stories are about.
You know, she's basically telling me that I can't use the compelling narratives that the other side can use.
Minimum Wage Matters00:13:53
And that's stripping me of my power.
And I won't let them do it.
I do what I do, you know.
But still, the complaining does get to you.
Right?
We got Josh.
Okay, how and when did you know you were going to marry your wife?
Well, that's that's, you know, I picked my wife up hitchhiking.
Do you know this?
Did I tell you?
No, man.
She was hitchhiking.
She was a babe.
I mean, she was really hot.
She's still a babe.
She stole a bus.
Married up.
But she was hitchhiking, and I was walking to get my car, which was an old jalopy.
And I saw, oh my God, this beautiful girl asking to be picked up.
So I ran to get my car.
And it was a one-way grid going the other direction.
So I tore around the corner and all this, and it was packed.
I almost killed an old lady and all this.
And then I pulled up, you know, kind of going my way.
Really cool.
But man, I wanted that day.
She got in my car, and I knew something had changed.
I mean, I knew she got in my car, and I always say it wasn't like the angels saying, but if you ever do a jigsaw puzzle and you can't find a piece for like 20 minutes and it's getting kind of frustrating, and then suddenly a piece goes like, and you go, ah, you know, that was what it was like.
So I don't know, I was too stupid to know anything about marriage or even think about that, but I knew that something really, really important had happened the minute she sat down.
That's not what happens to everybody.
I don't know.
What was it like for you?
I got to say, man, it was the same.
Same.
You know, it's one of those things where you just, we just fit.
Yeah.
We just fit.
I'm going to get on your nerves at some point.
I'm going to really get on your nerves, but right now, we.
We click.
I told my wife on our first date, I said, just remember, I'm always going to say the funniest thing I can think of, so don't get offended.
This has worked for 40 years.
That's cool, man.
Picked up hitchhiking.
All right.
That's romantic, man.
All right.
Candace, this is from Candice Claven.
Would you support graduated minimum wage starting at $7.25, going up to $15 an hour based on age of the employee and the size of the business?
You know, I don't even understand why we need a minimum wage.
And here's why.
I think so.
First of all, people should run their businesses.
I don't understand why.
I think, look, you've got to have safety regs.
I'm not against all regulations, some safety regs, you shouldn't be able to put meat out that's no good and all this kind of stuff.
But I don't understand why the minimum wage is needed if, in fact, there are jobs.
You're going to have to pay people.
If you don't pay me to work at this place, I'm going to go to the next place and work better.
I'm not sure that every economist I've ever read says that minimum wage laws make it harder to get employment, make it harder, less jobs.
Minimum wage means fewer jobs.
And the one study I saw that said the opposite was really untrustworthy.
So I don't understand why we need minimum wage laws.
I do not actually think that those are a helpful thing.
I certainly believe that people should be paid and they should be paid well and you should treat your workers well.
But it seems to me, you know, in the old days, we had unions, and unions were a necessary evil.
I'm not a union, I don't like unions, but they were a necessary evil.
We know what the world looked like without unions.
But unions have become almost obsolete because employers have figured out it is better to treat your workers well.
Just like we were talking about Henry Ford.
They don't do it because they're nice folks.
They do it because you keep your workers, you keep your workers happy, you don't get all the protests, and you don't embarrass yourself.
Nobody comes along and says, you guys put out little Starbucks cups with little messages on them, but you treat your workers like garbage, like what just happened to Bernie Sanders, right?
He wasn't paying people the minimum wage.
So I don't know.
I don't actually think we need those laws.
I would like to see what would happen if they were just destroyed and see if things got better or worse.
Indeed.
And there's got to be a way to show people what that looks like.
One would think after so long a minimum wage, have you guys noticed that things keep getting more expensive?
And you think, well, man, these are expensive and I need my wages to go up.
And there's like this self-eating snake.
But there has to be a way to show them, like, this is what this looks like.
I mean, I think that, you know, every time you have a right-to-work state, it does better.
They have more jobs.
Interestingly, in Wisconsin, when they busted the union, they almost, the governor's name goes out of my mind.
But anyway, when he busted the union, they almost killed him.
Then finally, they voted him out of office, but they haven't taken back the things that he did, you know, because it really helped the state.
When I went to Wisconsin, I couldn't believe they voted him out of office because Wisconsin was doing better than I'd ever seen it do.
He did a great job with that, and that was by getting rid of unions, you know.
So like I said, unions were a necessary evil, but I think they have made themselves obsolete and we should let that happen.
And I don't see why the government should become a de facto union.
I got you.
I won't stand in their way.
All right.
We got from Henry.
If you had the choice, what would your last meal be?
that's a mistake it would be no no it wasn't your last meal oh thanks I like that.
Okay.
No, it would almost definitely be a steak and a glass of scotch.
Something about steak.
I just had a birthday.
My wife took me out.
It's a steak, glass of scotch.
I just love that, man.
It's like, that to me is heaven.
Usually I'll start the steak with a glass of scotch and then move on to a glass of red wine or something like that.
But man, I just love that.
That sounds awesome.
It is awesome.
Maybe a little french fries or French-fried onions, something like that.
I just love it.
Now, considering that question, could you ever eat that in peace again?
It's like, man, this could be my last.
At my age, anything could be my last meal.
I'm just trying to enjoy them all, you know.
Okay.
And we got CJ.
All right.
I like that name for some reason.
All right.
Dear General Zah.
Kneel before Zah.
Kneel before Zod.
I have become somewhat interested in religion, but I find the idea of a church off-putting because it's a power center, i.e., the abuse of the Catholic Church.
What do you recommend I do?
Ah, that's an interesting question because I think that God comes before church.
I think church is helpful.
I just now have found a church I like after years of not finding a church I like, and I'm very energized by that.
It's an actual positive thing in my life.
I don't believe that Christ is, that God is meant to be worshipped alone.
I think we're supposed to come together and do it.
But I think God comes first.
And what I would say is first turn to scripture.
First turn to people that you trust, people you trust.
Just because somebody writes a book about scripture doesn't mean you have to agree with them.
But if you turn to wise writers like C.S. Lewis, people who are kind of tried and true, you start to develop an idea of where this is supposed to go and what it's supposed to mean and how you can go forward.
And then when you start to look for a church, you'll know what you're looking for a little bit.
You'll know, I mean, one of the things that I just find this to be true is that when I'm in a church, I can feel whether the spirit's there or not.
I can just feel it.
I mean, I can feel when I'm charged up and I think like, oh yeah, this is a place where we are together.
And sometimes, you know, sometimes the guy, that preacher can be saying something I don't agree with at all, but I know he's looking and I know he's got the right God and I know we're talking about the same God and we're just people so we make mistakes, you know, and I just think like, no, the spirit is here.
I think it's a good thing.
If in the event, in the event, you actually cannot trust any church because you feel because you feel that it's an abusive power center.
The other thing, and I think a lot more people should do this, I kind of wish I did this, is gather together with some friends on a Bible and start to talk about it among yourselves.
Indeed.
And like, I don't think one person has to preach.
I think maybe a different person every week could do it.
I just think it's so important, and I've seen people do it, and it really works.
And I think then you're your own church.
And I don't think what do they say, two or more of you are gathered in my name, right?
That's it.
So that's all you need.
And that can be your church.
I mean, I don't see any reason why you have to go to an established church to do that.
Heck yeah, man.
All right, so we got from Wes.
Clavin, I know you weren't fond of comics, but I was wondering your thoughts on The Watchmen by Alan Moore.
It is a time 100 best books.
I thought it was terrific, and you have to admit it was great.
You got to admit it.
I have to.
Have you read The Watchmen?
I haven't read it.
I did see the movie, though.
Yeah, I didn't like the movie.
I started it because I think it was our guy, Austin, who's in the next room running things.
I don't know why we let him run things after he told me.
So he told me, you got to read this.
So I went to a used bookstore and I got like the whole thing for like, I don't know, like 14 bucks.
It was pretty good.
I couldn't get through it.
Now, you know, it's not that I don't hate comic books.
This is the thing people think I do.
I just hate the fact that every movie is a comic book movie.
So like I could watch one maybe two a year, but the fact that every single movie is another Marvel DC thing, I just think like, you know, when I was 12, yeah, but now I want to see stories about real people.
So I read it.
I just thought it was very, I don't know, it just didn't, it didn't come to life for me, and I wasn't really interested in the kind of make-believe world.
It was so many steps before I could even get into the world that I didn't care enough to do that.
I'm obviously just a sour puss about this.
I mean, I wish I could get it.
Every now and again, I'll go back and watch, you know, some new movie will come out and everybody says, you got to see this one.
The last one I really liked was Logan.
I don't know if you saw that.
That was like, that had a very cool, interwoven Christian message in it, which I thought was really well done and really smart.
And I mean, it's the X-Men, and it ends with a cross turning over to become an X so that you know that they're kind of making a connection between them.
And I really like that a lot.
But I just find, here's the thing.
Life is about sex and death.
That is what we deal with in life.
When we are dealing with God, we're dealing with him from our little cells of sex and death, right?
There's no sex or death in these movies.
The women are all just as strong and as super as the men.
So they don't need anything from us.
They don't need help.
They don't need protection.
They don't need, like, they don't have babies.
They never get pregnant.
You never see a pregnant girl.
You know, here's it.
You know, it doesn't happen.
First of all, those things they wear are so tight.
I don't know how you could get them pregnant.
And that's that.
And nobody ever really dies.
They pretend they die, but then he comes back as somebody else.
And since they're replaceable, like Spider-Man could be some other guy, it's like, I just don't get the stakes in them.
And now I'm going to hear about this because everybody else at this place, everybody else at the Daily Wire, loves them.
So it's like, I'm going to hear about this for the next six weeks of my life until finally I have to kill somebody.
All right, we got from Alan.
Mr. Clavin, I noticed a change in my college professor's attitude towards me when I answer their papers with a conservative view.
Uh-oh.
How would you recommend I address this?
Should I just stay quiet?
Wow, you know, here's my answer to this.
I have never stayed quiet about anything.
I have like always spoken my piece.
I have paid for it.
I've paid for it in my career.
I've paid for it economically.
I've paid for it with friends who I've lost, good friends who have walked away from me, you know, pay actual painful payments for things.
So you've got to choose.
Everything comes at a price.
And you can live.
Look, there's also a price for staying silent, right?
There's a price for not being who you are.
There's a price for hiding.
There's a price for basically kowtowing to power.
I don't mean to say that you have to fight every battle.
I don't fight every battle.
I try to pick my spots and all this stuff.
But what I try not to do is let anybody assume that I agree with them when I don't.
That's kind of my limit.
And so I don't mind somebody going off, you know, just because a preacher gets up and gives some left-wing sermon preaching leftism instead of the Bible.
I don't stand up and shake my fist and stomp out or anything like that.
I'm not that guy at all.
But if he's talking to me and he assumes that that's where I stand, I will say, you know, I'm on the other side of this question.
And like I said, I'm a really polite guy, and so that's about as far as I have to do it.
But that's cost me a fortune.
It has cost me a fortune in money and, like I said, friends and in jobs.
So you've got to choose.
You know, you got to choose what's important to you.
I think because my life has been about writing, about words, I think that meant to me that my words had to be real.
That meant a lot to me.
Even when I was a kid, the reason I left religion was because when I was born Mitzford, I didn't believe in it.
And I thought I got up and lied.
I got up and lied and I couldn't stand it.
I mean, I threw away all the gifts they gave me because I couldn't stand that I've been paid to lie.
And so that just matters a tremendous amount to me.
It matters when I talk to my son and my daughter that they know that that's what I'm saying is who I am.
So that they, you know, I'm not secretly telling them I love their mother and cheating on their mother.
I am what you see, you know.
And so that just matters to me hugely.
And I wouldn't have lived my life any other way, but it cost me, and I'm not saying that's painless.
It's not painless.
I mean, you know, I've seen you pay too, pal.
So like, you know, you know that this is a thing that we do, but you got to choose.
And you got to look at yourself in the mirror.
When I wrote my first openly conservative book, when I finished the book, I walked into the bathroom, I looked in the mirror, and I said, you're never going to win another literary prize again.
Never.
After These Superhero Movies Run Their Course00:03:19
Can you live with that?
And I thought, yeah, I'm not happy about it.
It was true, but I'm not happy about it.
I mean, I went from being reviewed in 300 venues to being reviewed in one where they called me a crackpot.
I went from being a multiple award-winning writer, no awards.
You pay a price, and you've got to make that choice, and you've got to know it's going to happen and not think you're going to dance through the raindrops because you're not.
Indeed, indeed.
Even the Lord himself said they hated me first.
They're going to hate you too.
You want to talk about somebody who is being judged by scholars.
He's before the Sanhedrin and they just got really rude on him.
Obviously, they got physically violent with him too.
So for you who is asking that question, you're in good company.
That's for sure.
That is for sure.
All right, so we got, last question is coming from Michael, Master of the Multiverse.
You didn't know that was Michael.
That's actually on my business cards.
That's awesome.
All right, all right.
After these superhero movies run their course.
He's a master of the multiverse, and you're not in the comics.
Okay, right.
All right, after these superhero movies run their course, what do you think is the next mega blockbuster general genre?
You know, what I've foreseen coming, and it actually has come already, but I saw this coming about 10 years ago, is a kind of science fiction that has, you know, got all kinds of special effects and got all kinds of wonderful visuals and all this stuff, but is underpinned by human emotion and human emotion in light of technology.
There's an actual, you know, Blade Runner came out, I don't know, a million years ago, like the first one, I was a kid, I saw Blade Runner, I loved it.
And now it's a genre.
It went for about 20 years when it wasn't.
And now it's a genre, tough guy movies about a detective who has to find out who's a human being and who's not.
They just did one on one of the streaming things that was really good.
And what I think that superhero movies are secretly about is I secretly think we're preparing ourselves for a world where technology and the human body are interlinked.
So I think they're going to be able to make our IQs better.
I think they're going to make us healthier.
I think they may make us be able to communicate with the internet and with each other.
And I think we're trying to prepare our minds for that kind of world.
So I think that there are going to be big science fiction stories that deal with these serious questions of what our relationship with technology is going to be and where we stop being human beings.
Because what is the point of making the world a better place if we're not here for it to be better for, if we're just machines?
And I think that we're going to discuss this through our arts.
And I think that that's kind of what's going to happen.
I think it'll happen on TV more than the movies because I think the movies are kind of dead.
But I think that's kind of where we're going.
Interesting.
My guess.
All right then.
Well, thank you so much for joining us, everyone.
Subscribe to the dailywater.com now and join us for the next month for another episode of The Conversation.
You're going to come back?
I'm going to try.
It's great.
It's always great to see you.
You and I actually live further away than we did, so now I never see you.