Andrew Clavin dissects the 2023 midterms as a "red wave" myth, blaming Trump’s election fraud fixation and weak candidates like Oz for GOP losses while praising DeSantis’ Florida victory as proof of competence over MAGA chaos. He mocks Democratic voter priorities—sneakers, pot, and climate—as distractions from inflation and abortion, framing women and young voters as susceptible to fear-based messaging. The episode pivots to multiverse theory, where Stephen Meyer and Spencer Clavin argue quantum physics’ fine-tuning suggests design, not randomness, while dismissing the multiverse as a narrative crutch undermining causality. Clavin concludes by urging political humility and cultural resilience against ideological rigidity. [Automatically generated summary]
Unfortunately, Red Tsunami turned out to be an embarrassed Japanese girl saying, oh, rook, rots of Lepublicans are rusing.
We did, however, experience a red wave as we wave goodbye to Red Tsunami.
In the wake of these absurd puns, election analysts and other people without any discernible skill set are trying to make sense of the midterm results so that Americans can find out what the people who are wrong about everything will be wrong about next.
This is called expertise, and it's actually a great way to make a living while the country is going down the drain.
One lesson we can take away is that even though Democrats destroy the economy, fill our city streets with homelessness and crime, and sell pornography and sexual deviance to little children before butchering their bodies on the basis of an insane gender theory with no basis in fact, Republicans can still find just the right candidates to lose to them as long as the Democrats carefully select candidates who hate America and have had a stroke.
Exit polls show that the issues voters cared about most included what color sneakers they were wearing and where they could score some of those powerful new strains of legalized marijuana so they could make themselves psychotic and everything would seem fine.
Also, inflation was a big issue because after shelling out for the dope nowadays, you have no money left to buy Oreos, which is a downer when you have the munchies and are psychotic.
Legalized abortion was also important because many voters seem to remember having sex with someone last night while they were stoned out of their minds.
And if it now turns out they have a baby, they want to be able to kill it without violating their parole and getting sent back to prison.
Among the biggest Democrat supporters were women who seem to be allowed to vote now for some reason.
Also young people lean Democrat because they've had the traumatic experience of not being aborted and want to make sure nothing like themselves ever happens again.
The Democrats also seem to have had some success with their clever campaign strategy of turning everything to crap and then screaming about the weather because climate change was named as a big issue when exit pollsters polled people who were exiting reality.
But what effect did Donald Trump have and how can we get him to stop?
Trump devised the strategy of only endorsing candidates who agreed that the last election had been stolen from him.
This in fact did turn out to be a very big issue with the guy who still gives a rat's ass about the last election.
It was also big with his best friend who pretended to give a rat's ass about the last election in order to avoid arguments and then voted Democrat because who gives a rat's ass about the last election.
Now, despite the disappointing results, there were bright spots for Republicans.
For instance, they lost in California, Oregon, and Washington, so they can't be blamed for those dumpster fires.
And they do seem to have eked out a majority in the House, so we now have an inspiring titan of a House speaker in Kevin McCarthy.
Okay, I'm joking about that one.
But we do have to remember, winning the Senate was always going to be difficult because of the terrible map, which showed all of the races taking place in America, where people have gone insane and keep electing Democrats who turn everything to crap and then scream about the weather.
Which kind of does make sense when you really think about it and are stoned out of your mind on some of that great new dope.
But what now?
How can we endure the next two years of Democrats thinking they won because we lost?
Well, first of all, let's try to stay calm.
Remember, there's always a new day and you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other until you get to Mexico where you can catch a plane to Norway.
You also have to have faith that God is still in his heaven and so we're probably getting what we deserve.
Which, all right, isn't really all that encouraging.
But still, politics isn't everything.
There's also all that great legal marijuana.
And once you're psychotic, things won't look so disappointing because you'll be a Democrat.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped, hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right.
Hooray, hurrah.
We are back laughing our way through the fall of Western civilization.
It's 11-11, November 11th, which makes it the anniversary of the end of World War I, probably the worst mistake in human history since the crucifixion and until the COVID lockdowns.
But that also makes it Veterans Day.
And I have to say, veterans, as a guy who loves the arts and truth and beauty, I often, I frequently, this is absolutely true, I frequently remind myself that if I'm reading a book or listening to music or appreciating the arts in some way, going to the theater, it's because somebody is standing on the wall.
And God bless you for doing that.
There is only civilization and barbarism and civilization cannot survive unless someone is standing on the wall.
So thank you very, very much.
We're going to take a different kind of look at the election results.
That's what we're all talking about.
But then I want to leave politics behind, have a discussion about the multiverse between my son, Spencer Clavin, No Relation, and science philosopher Stephen Myers, author of the Return of the God hypothesis and also No Relation.
So they have a lot in common.
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel, The Andrew Clavin.
This is not the Daily Wire channel.
This is the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
We have exclusive content for you there.
And if you leave a comment and the comment is absolutely reprehensible, you know, some kind of racist, bigoted something, you know, we will read it on the air because it'll fit right in with my Japanese accent.
Secure Your Data with ExpressVPN00:02:52
Patty Perry says, I ordered A Strange Habit of Mind from a small local bookstore owned by a couple of far-left progressives because I support local businesses and because I want them to be annoyed by selling a conservative writer's book and helping said writer's book become a bestseller.
These bookstore owners actually sponsored a Drag Queen story hour, which was likely not well attended since the country we live in is 80% red, or the county, I'm sorry, we live in is 80% red.
I loved When Christmas Comes.
Well, thank you very much, Patty.
And I don't mind if they have Drag Queen story hours as long as they're reading A Strange Habit of Mind.
You should be reading A Strange Habit of Mind, the USA Today bestseller.
I don't know if we can push it onto the New York Times list, but we could if everybody in the audience would order it.
Remember, remember one day, you know, somebody on Twitter was ragging me about how Matt Walsh is an activist and I'm not.
And, you know, as you know, I thoroughly support and I'm proud of Matt for his activism.
I would never say a harsh word about it, but I'm not an activist.
That's right.
I'm an artist.
And so you'll thank me later, right?
One day when I'm gone, you'll be sitting around saying, how come we don't have authors like Andrew Clavin anymore?
It's because you didn't buy A Strange Habit of Mind and put it on the New York Times bestseller list.
That's why.
And so when your son comes to you in his pink dress, his name changed to Mildred, and he says, what did you do in the culture war, Daddy?
You won't be able to say, I bought A Strange Habit of Mind.
So go out and buy it today.
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All right, this election analysis is all that is pouring forth from the exact same people who were wrong about what was going to happen.
Crisis Of Information00:10:26
And now they want to explain what happened and tell us what's going to happen next.
I mean, this happens all the time.
After every election, people who just didn't know anything the minute before are now telling us what will happen in four years and what's going to happen in two years.
Like on the night of the election, you didn't know what was going to happen.
And now you're going to tell me what's going to happen for the next four years.
So I'm going to give you some of my takes.
And especially, I think this Trump DeSantis thing cannot be avoided.
We have to talk about Trump and DeSantis.
Some people are saying we shouldn't encourage this.
It's politics.
They're going to fight it out.
They're going to be in competition with each other.
But I want to talk about also how we zen out a little bit and how we can go through all this junk news, because so much of it is junk news and come out with something that looks like wisdom.
I mean, first, I want to remind you that we're in an information crisis.
This is an actual information crisis brought on by the internet.
Information has been democratized, and the powerful want to keep their power by keeping control of the flow of information.
They want to censor dissenters and anybody, all of the little people who stand up to the experts.
They've invented this idea of disinformation, which means truth you don't want to hear.
They're using it like the church used to use the word heresy when they were trying to keep control of doctrine after the invention of the printing press.
A lot of Catholics write to me and say, well, that never happened, but it did.
They did.
They actually did burn people at the stake for translating things in ways they didn't like or interpreting things in ways they didn't like.
And look, that was the world then.
I mean, it has nothing to do with that, but it's not the world now.
It is not how we live now.
We do not want the powerful.
And we don't want the powerful, whether it's the Pope in Rome or the people in Davos, telling us what to think.
We don't want them controlling what we think.
We don't want them censoring what we think and what we say.
And we don't want them pushing us around and governing us without our consent.
It doesn't mean, by the way, that what the church says is wrong.
It doesn't mean what the people in Davos say is wrong in any particular issue.
That's the point.
But I believe in the Huck Finn doctrine.
I have said to you many times, I've read to you many times, the scene in Huck Finn, very famous scene, probably the most famous scene in all of American literature, where Huck thinks he's supposed to return his friend Jim to slavery.
He knows the church thinks he should do that.
He knows the government thinks he should do that.
The law says he should do it.
And yet he consults his heart and he says finally, you know, I'm not going to do it, even though he believes he's going to hell.
The church has told him to go to hell.
He's an uneducated little boy.
And he says, but I don't care.
I'm going to hell because he loves this guy.
This is his friend, and he's not putting him back in chains.
This is a depiction of the all-American idea that even an unschooled boy might consult his heart and get it right when all the experts got it wrong.
And listen, if the COVID lockdowns did not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Huck Finn was right and the experts are full of it.
You know, the other day, Senator Tim Scott, he won re-election in South Carolina, good man, and he said, we are putting parents back in charge of their kids' education.
And Congressman Eric Swalwell tweeted, please tell me what I'm missing here.
What are we going to do next?
Put patients in charge of their own surgeries, clients in charge of their own trials.
When did we stop trusting experts?
Well, the answer to that is we stopped trusting experts somewhere between the time Eric Swalwell started banging a Chinese spy and the time he was reappointed to the House Intelligence Committee.
I mean, these guys are incompetent.
And after this lockdown, we don't, I trust Huck Finn over them any day.
So with all the love in the world for Catholicism, which shapes my theology, it's not going to be the Pope in Rome and it's not going to be the billionaires in Davos who tell us, who are in charge of our doctrine as Americans.
They can have their say, they can make their case.
They just don't get to stop us from believing what we believe and finding out the truth for ourselves.
But here's the catch, and this is the important thing, and this is what makes my audience sometimes angry at me.
We can be wrong too.
And sometimes, you know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Sometimes some guy in Davos might say something or an expert might say something and be absolutely right.
That's what makes it an information crisis.
We don't know where the right is.
A recent example, Paul Pelosi, right?
He gets attacked with a hammer by this loon in his place, and they're obviously lying about it.
The prosecutor says he's going to suppress information.
We don't know why.
Obviously, they're hiding something.
They're lying about it.
Then on the internet, people start to say, well, you know, I think this guy was a male prostitute, and he invited him into his home, and it went bad, and he attacked him with a hammer.
And I look at that and I think like, well, okay, but you have no evidence of that either.
And the minute you say, well, you have no evidence of that, you get these angry responses like, oh, you traitor, you rhino, you wimp, you wuss.
You didn't, you're just letting the authorities, the elites, you know, control information.
It's like, no, it's just like our misinformation is no better than their misinformation.
And so you really have to learn how to read information in a crisis.
So let me tell you a couple of things that I'm thinking about as we try to wend through the results of this very disappointing result.
I mean, this administration has been a disaster, and yet, and yet, the Republicans could not move the ball and just take the government away so that they could keep Joe Biden paralyzed.
I mean, it looks like they're going to win the House.
We still don't know about the Senate.
But, you know, we want to know what the information is so we can get better at what we do, so we can learn stuff.
The first thing I do is I try to purify my emotions, right?
This thing about facts don't care about your feelings.
As I always say, it's true as far as it goes.
Obviously, your feelings don't change the facts, but your feelings and instincts, you know, the line, the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of, from the pense.
Your feelings, your instincts, your sense of things is sometimes more important than facts because you're selecting facts by your emotional valence.
You're selecting facts out of the way you see the world.
So you don't want to get rid of your emotions.
You don't want to be hard and cold.
What you want is to purify your emotions of things that might distort the information.
So for instance, this thing where it's going to take all weekend to count the votes in Maricopa County, where somehow the voting machines broke down, it's absolutely infuriating.
It is absolutely infuriating.
We know Democrats cheat.
Democrats are an urban party.
Urban parties are conducive to make it easier to build political machines.
Political machines make it easier to cheat.
We know the Democrats cheat.
And so we're looking at this.
We've seen that Florida, you know, they count their mail-in ballots early.
They have sharp deadlines about voting.
They deliver the results on the day.
What the hell is wrong with Arizona?
What the hell is wrong with Maricopa County?
Do we know they're cheating?
Do we know they're going to miscount?
No, we don't.
Do we know they're stealing from Blake Masters and Carrie Lake, who still says she's 100% sure she's going to win?
I don't know they're cheating.
I don't know that they're going to get away with anything.
You know, I seriously don't know.
So we have to be careful before we adopt the narrative because we're pissed off.
And I am pissed off.
This does really make me angry.
There's no way.
The one thing we can say is that they should change the system.
This system needs to be reformed.
And that's something we do know.
We don't have to wade through a lot of misinformation for that.
Another thing, I try to be humble.
I try to be less certain about what I know.
And this is a big thing.
I wish there was a lot more of this going around.
You should make like Socrates and know that you know nothing, right?
People who don't like Donald Trump are putting forward the narrative that Republicans lost because of the poor quality of Trump's selected candidates.
This has become already sort of the standard narrative of this election.
But here's my problem with that narrative, all right?
Mehmet Oz lost the Pennsylvania Senate race to John Fetterman.
Now, here's just an excerpt of Fetterman's acceptance speech.
I picked up a Kaiser blade that's sitting there by the screen door.
Some folks call it a slang blade.
I call it a Kaiser blade.
It's kind of a long wood handle, kind of like an axe handle.
With a long blade on it, shaped kind of like a banana.
Oz lost to the guy from Slingblade.
He lost to the guy from Slingblade.
So saying he wasn't a good candidate, what do you say about the guy he ran against winning?
It just doesn't make sense to me that that explains it.
That, you know, could a better candidate have beaten the guy from Slingblade?
Yeah, probably.
But that still doesn't say, you know, why do we need these excellent candidates?
And they put up a guy like this.
Also in Pennsylvania, Tony DeLuca, the longest-serving state representative, a Democrat, got more than 85% of the votes.
He died last month.
He was dead.
They elected a dead man.
How good do our candidates have to be to beat a dead man and the guy from Slingblade?
So it's not just candidate quality, and we should rethink that just because it makes us feel good, just because you might be hostile toward Trump.
Look, I have things, my problems about Trump.
I've told you all about them.
I'm going to tell you more about them.
I'm going to discuss it.
But still, you have to be humble and say, I don't know when you don't know.
And another side of humility is being suspicious of narratives that fit your emotional feelings.
It's just a big deal.
I saw a guy at PJ Media.
If you have a narrative that is exactly what you think, you should question it twice or three times, right?
I heard a guy at PJ Media, he said, well, Democrats will vote for anyone, but Republicans are very selective and careful and want wisdom.
And I think, we're no better than they are.
Just our ideas are better.
So I don't think it's that either.
Finally, and this is most important, and this is just good life advice.
It's not a sin to be wrong.
We're all wrong sometimes, but it is a sin to be wrong and not adjust your thinking, not examine why you were wrong and change your mind.
That is basically almost the definition of neurosis.
The guys I know who are neurotic never change their minds.
They change them for a minute.
You say something to them that enlightens them and they say, oh, yeah, you're right.
And then the next time you see them, they've got the exact same idea.
When Donald Trump, you know, when I said after the last election that Donald Trump was not going to be reinstated as he was telling people he would be, but in fact, he was going to blow Georgia for us, everybody got really angry at me.
I got all these letters, what a rhino I was, what a weakling, you know, why wasn't I standing up for Trump?
When Trump wasn't reinstated, but did help lose Georgia, not one of them wrote to me and said, you know, we've changed our mind.
You know, it's just, you just have to be able to change your mind after you're wrong.
Supporting Trump Despite Consequences00:14:35
I was wrong about 15 days to slow the spread.
I thought, well, it makes sense.
But because I was wrong, I've completely changed my ideas about the government and the way it's working right now and how far it's gone.
Everybody's wrong at times.
Few people change their mind, learn to change your mind.
The Huck Finn doctrine is the all-American doctrine that the heart of every man is as good as the heart and the minds of experts.
Experts lie.
They get it wrong.
They become corrupted.
But that doesn't mean that we have got it right.
So we've got to really pick our way.
This is a crisis of information, and we have to learn to find our way to the truth.
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So the big narrative is Donald Trump.
I mean, he's the Trump in the room, he's the elephant in the room.
Donald Trump's candidates, many of his candidates did lose.
And here's a hilarious reaction from Democrat reptile James Carville.
I'm sitting here saying, if you put everything in a computer, we should have lost 57 seats.
Yeah, easy, four or five Senate seats.
And the reason is really Donald Trump.
I mean, he bought people out to vote against this.
You know, it just had a suppressive effect.
He out-trumped inflation, he out-trumped crime, he out-trumped the normal cycle of the first off-year election with an incumbent president.
I mean, I think when political historians unearth this, they're going to find so much more that we missed this morning.
What cracks me up about this is there's Morning Joe and his wife and James Carville basically saying the Democrats suck.
So, how come nobody says to them?
So, why are you voting for them?
What a mess they made.
They should have won.
They should have won.
But nobody says, Why are you supporting them?
Why are you out there promoting them?
So, DeSantis won big in Florida.
So, people eager to get rid of Trump are saying, you know, Trump is over.
It's DeSantis is the future.
And people who hate Trump are afraid of him, who are saying Trump will never be over.
And Trump is, I think, acting very badly.
I'm sorry.
He's calling Ron DeSantis Ron de Sanctimonious again, which is not that good of a nickname.
He tweeted he's an average Republican governor with great public relations and saying that DeSantis never could have won the first time without him, which is all childish nonsense.
Who cares?
Obviously, DeSantis won on his governance.
And, you know, a lot of people say, well, don't encourage this.
Don't talk about the fight.
But the fight is going to come.
The fight is going to come.
There is no way.
This is politics.
These are incredibly ambitious, egotistical men.
They are going for the big power.
They are going to fight it out.
We're going to have to survive it and be able to beat the Democrats.
So what did happen on this?
And I've been thinking about this because I just have not heard a narrative that really convinces me.
Tucker Carlson said interestingly that he feels that a lot of this had to do with how the vote, the early voting, and there's no question that that is something to do with it.
He was talking about the media.
That always is a factor.
And the fact is that Trump's candidates did lose winnable elections.
And all the candidates that the Democrats supported, hoping they'd be bad candidates, they all lost.
So that strategy worked, that ugly cynical strategy, but it worked and working is a big deal in politics.
Politics is about winning so you can do the things you want to do and that worked for the Democrats.
The most telling loss for me was Herschel Walker in Georgia, where Brian Kemp won despite MAGA and Trump attacking him because he wouldn't support the big steel narrative.
Kemp not only won big because he's a good governor, he's done a good job for Georgia, and he lifted all the other candidates, but Herschel Walker.
Herschel Walker couldn't get to the finish line, and now they have to have a runoff and work it out there.
But a lot of the other candidates, Doug Mastriano, lost in Pennsylvania, you know, but Blake Masters doesn't look like he's going to make it.
And Trump's attitude about this was ridiculous.
He was on TV before the results came in, and here's what he said.
You've endorsed more than 330 candidates this election cycle.
Tonight, win or lose, the results for Republicans.
How much of that will be because of Donald Trump?
Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit.
And if they lose, I should not be blamed at all, okay?
But it'll probably be just the opposite.
When they win, I think they're going to do very well.
I'll probably be given very little credit, even though in many cases I told people to run.
And they ran, and they turned out to be very good candidates.
You know, they've turned out to be very good candidates.
But usually what would happen is when they do well, I won't be given any credit.
And if they do badly, they will blame everything on me.
So I'm prepared for anything, but we'll defend ourselves.
I think we had a lot to do with it.
We had a lot to do with the, I think, success of what's going to happen.
And many of these candidates where I was criticized are now turning out to be great candidates.
So I'm sorry, that's the attitude of a four-year-old.
You know, it's not my fault if they lose, but it's all to my credit if they win.
I mean, think about it.
Just stop for a minute.
Put your emotions about Trump aside.
That is the attitude of a four-year-old.
Now, listen, when I talk about purifying your emotions, with Trump, my perceptions have stood me very well, okay?
You know, when Trump ran the first time, this company was basically me, Ben, and Jeremy, and Knowles was kind of a minor player.
And I was the only one.
I was the first person to come in and say, I'm voting for Trump.
And I took a lot of flack for it.
It was not ugly flack.
It wasn't mean or anything like that.
But I was an outlier.
But to me, it was an easy choice.
It wasn't a pleasant choice, but it was an easy choice.
And I voted for him.
I supported him in all the wonderful things that he did.
I told you for four years that he was a tragic character who might lose because of the very characteristics that made him win and accomplish so many good stuffs.
I told him when he lost the election, I said before he should stop the big steel narrative and make sure we don't lose the Senate in Georgia.
And he didn't do that.
And now, here's what I feel about Donald Trump.
I do not feel Donald Trump, the ex-president, is Donald Trump the president.
I don't feel this is the man who ran in 2016.
Every single person who loses a presidential election goes a little bit nuts.
And Trump is a big personality with a big ego.
And I feel he has gone big nuts.
Al Gore decided the world was going to end because the sun was too hot after he lost the presidential election.
Remember, he grew that long beard.
They all do this stuff.
Hillary Clinton has been drinking herself into the pit ever since she lost.
And Trump is a narcissist, and he can't accept the fact that he lost.
And as I've said a million times, it doesn't matter whether the election was stolen if you can't prove it.
And all it does is ruin everything.
And he picked these guys.
He picked these guys solely on the question of whether or not they supported his big steal.
And he attacked people who didn't support it, even if they were doing a good job and even if they had a chance to win.
And that was wrong.
Bingo.
You know, that was a wrong thing to do.
I mean, morally wrong.
It was strategically wrong, too, I think, but it was morally wrong.
And I think that when you think about that, you really do have to think about it because politics, I'm sorry, politics is not about honor.
It's not about decency.
It's not about right and wrong.
It's not about freedom.
It's about winning so you can get those things.
And you don't, that doesn't mean you lie and cheat and steal to win.
It simply means you have to strategize and do a good job.
And the strategy of you have to support me essentially is empty of content.
And this is the thing that I see.
JD Vance won because he established himself as a person with a point of view.
He's a highly intelligent man who has had a very interesting life and has learned a lot.
I read his book.
It's the book of a man who has learned from what has happened to him.
And so, yes, he was supported by Trump and supported Trump, but he established himself as his own man.
If Mehmet Oz is MAGA, then I'm the queen of Romania.
I mean, how is he, what's MAGA about him?
Except his support of Trump, except that he was willing to back Trump.
The guy in Balduck in New Hampshire, what did he have to say except that he supported Trump?
Herschel Walker, very questionable personality.
You know, I like the guy, but he's, you know, obviously done a lot of things in his life that make him a questionable guy, a questionable Geyser candidate.
All he did was support Trump.
And I think that Trump's candidates lost because they were empty of everything but Trump.
See, Trump and MAGA are one thing.
Trump had an agenda that I can support.
That's why I voted for him twice, right?
I voted for him because between his agenda and Hillary's agenda, you know, I knew which one was the right one.
And now, after the election, this post-presidency Trump is not the same guy.
He is empty of everything but Trump.
And Trump is just as much a deficit as a personality as he is a positive.
And I think he's more of a deficit.
A lot of people turned out to vote against him in the last election.
A lot of people voted against his candidates because there was nothing in them but him.
They voted for Vance because there was Vance in him and he's a good candidate that way.
So it's not just the fact that they were bad candidates or they didn't go to the right places or they talked funny or anything like that.
It was because they didn't say anything except that they didn't represent anything but Trump.
MAGA has become empty of everything but Trump.
And I think that that's bad, you know?
I think that that is a bad thing.
And it used to be when they attacked Trump and they were so unfair to him and the press was so unfair and the Democrats were, it was just terrible.
And he said, they're not attacking me.
They're trying to attack you, but I'm in their way.
And I thought, well, you know, there's a lot of truth to that.
But now he's not representing us.
He's representing him when he just goes out and says, you have to support the big steel.
He's not representing me.
He's, you know, before he was.
He really was.
And he did things I disliked.
I told you about them.
But he was also doing great stuff.
And I celebrated that all around the clock constantly.
I just think he has emptied himself out because his ego is so big and that he's taken that loss.
He is not the same guy.
So he didn't hurt the GOP because he was Trump.
He hurt the GOP because he was nothing but Trump.
And I think that that's a real problem.
So, you know, when you look at DeSantis, the thing that really gets me about DeSantis, this is the other thing.
I think Ben was talking about this a little bit backstage about competence.
And yes, of course you have to be competence, but Trump, for a lot of his presidency, Trump did a really good job.
You know, the time when basically I feel that this change came over him was with COVID when I heard him complaining on TV about how mistreated he was by the press while people were stacking up bodies on the streets in New York.
It's the only time in my entire life I have ever done anything political behind the scenes that I called up his campaign, said he got to tell him to stop.
And the message got to him.
I'm told that the message got to him and he did seem to change it up a little bit.
But like now he's all that.
He is all that.
So the thing about Ron DeSantis, you can talk about his competence.
He is competent.
He did a great job with the hurricane, the economy, opening up the state after COVID, which Brian Kemp did too.
And that's the thing that nobody in the press wants to talk about because he proved how wrong they were.
But listen to his speech, his victory speech, and hear what he emphasizes about what he did.
We chose facts over fear.
We chose education over indoctrination.
We chose law and order over rioting and disorder.
Florida was a refuge of sanity when the world went mad.
We stood as the citadel of freedom for people across this country and indeed across the world.
We faced attacks.
We took the hits.
We weathered the storms, but we stood our ground.
We did not back down.
We had the conviction to guide us and we had the courage to lead.
That's a cultural statement.
That's a series of cultural statements.
People don't turn out for competence.
People aren't inspired by competence.
It's a baseline.
They want competence.
But nobody knows whether Mehmet Oz would have been competent or the balduck.
Nobody knows whether they would have been competent.
Nobody knew that DeSantis would have been competent.
That's why he only won by a small margin the first time.
Now he won by a big margin because they know it, but nobody votes for competence.
That's the baseline thing.
They vote for a vision.
He had a vision.
You remember when my friend Jenna Ellis, who I, you know, I just love her to death, but she came on and we had this discussion about his standing up to Disney and saying, I'm going to take away your special privileges if you give me problems about this bill on parental freedom.
And she said, no, that's against the First Amendment.
I said, it's good politics and it's the right thing to do and they deserve it and they're getting special treatment anyway.
So they lose special treatment from the government because they're messing around in politics.
I think that that's perfectly all right.
Sending those illegals to Martha's Vineyard, a lot of people said to me, well, that's mean.
Yeah, it's mean, but politics gets mean.
And it was a beautiful parable that told us everything we needed to know about the people in Martha's Vineyard who were sitting around with their cocktails saying, yes, of course, the border should be open.
Oh my god, so here, let's bust them out.
You know, I mean, I think it was a beautiful, beautiful thing.
He stood up to the press.
Listen to some of this stuff.
People's Hearts Divided00:16:12
This is quoting from a Wall Street Journal piece by Dave Seminara.
He says, no Florida newspaper with a significant readership endorsed Mr. DeSantis.
They echoed the national media in excoriating him.
The Miami Herald opined that Governor Ron DeSantis's Florida is a place of meanness.
It's a place where dissent is muzzled, where personal rights triumph over the greater good, where winning is more important than unity, especially if that victory moves him closer to a White House.
All this stuff they were writing about him, but it didn't matter.
He stood up to them.
He proved the important thing that the press doesn't matter if you stand up to them and have a vision.
It's not just yelling at the press.
But, you know, Ron Johnson in Purple, Wisconsin, Chuck Grassley, they took on the FBI, Hunter Biden, the COVID cartel, as they now call them, and they won re-election despite massive spending against them.
Fearless leadership can change people's hearts, and I think that that is really important right now.
And look, this could change.
I'm just telling you what I'm seeing right now.
Right now, Trump has lost that capacity to change people's hearts, except to support him, because he's empty of everything but him.
MAGA has become an empty shell because of his ego being violated because he's not the same after that loss because he cannot accept the loss, which, as I say, whether it was stolen or not doesn't matter unless you can prove it.
So, you know, right now, DeSantis is the future of the party.
It can all change.
They're going to have to fight it out.
But just remember to keep your powder dry.
Remember, winning.
You know, they say winning isn't everything in politics.
Winning is everything.
Again, that doesn't mean you rape and kill and cheat and lie, but it does mean you strategize and pick the people who can go forward.
Right now, that's an open question.
Trump is acting extremely badly.
He's acting extremely egotistically.
I do not think his candidates lost because they were bad at being candidates.
I think they lost when they were empty of everything but Trump.
And I think that that is a real problem for Trump going forward.
I really look forward to the holidays.
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I love getting together with them.
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And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, ooh, that sounds so good.
How do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So let's talk about what this means for the future, okay?
One thing I never believe is that it's better to lose than to win.
I really dislike this.
When anti-Trumpers and anti-Trumpers sometimes say to me, you know, it would have been better if Trump had lost and then Hillary would have faced a divided Congress and so she wouldn't have been able to get everything done.
And I think like, again, you know, first of all, she would have gotten three court appointments.
We never would have overturned Roe in my lifetime.
But even aside from that, the same people, the same people who on election night were telling me Trump was going to lose in a landslide or telling me what would have happened over the course of four years.
Hours before Trump won, they were wrong.
But they're going to tell me what was going to happen in four years.
It's always better to win than to lose.
And while this wasn't a loss, I hope I still think we're going to get the House.
I can even hope we get the Senate.
It was a massive disappointment.
And part of that was our expectations.
And this is a big thing.
You know, people saw the conditions for a red wave and it affected the way they read the polls.
I came in to Bat Doo backstage on election night and in my heart, I didn't want to say it because what good is it to say it when you just don't know the future?
You're just talking.
But in my heart, I thought, this is not going to be anything like a red wave.
And the reason I thought that is when I talked to the numbers guys, even though they were telling me it was going to be a red wave, they were telling me in these kind of mealy mouth terms.
You know, they were saying like, well, there's a 70% chance this will happen.
And I thought, that's not what I want to hear.
And I was kind of worried about it.
So the disappointment comes from the expectations, right?
If we had come in thinking, I don't know what's going to happen, I hope it'll be good.
But we saw the conditions for a red wave.
So we saw the red wave coming and we're disappointed.
Some people now are going to start trading on your disappointment and your fear and your anger.
This is going to happen, you know.
And again, that's why I say guard your heart.
Guard your heart, purify your emotions.
Remember what you are doing here, right?
Remember that, you know, the Huck Finn doctrine is you have to look into your heart and you have to check in your heart.
I want you to listen to somebody who I have no respect for, a guy named Nick Fuentes.
He is obviously this far right winger.
And this is to me what fear sounds like.
Listen to his reaction.
This is an evil country.
And this country will surprise you with how evil it is.
And that's why you've got to get this out of your head that there is some silent majority cavalry that's going to come out of the woods and save us at the last minute.
It's not.
When we meet the left on the battlefield and they outnumber us like five to one, that's it.
But the point is, when you look at these things like abortion, it's popular.
People like abortion, hate it, but it's true.
And you can thank the Jewish media for that.
Abortion is popular.
Sodomy is popular.
You know, being gay is popular.
Being a feminist is popular.
Sex out of wedlock is popular.
Contraceptives are popular.
It's all popular.
That's not to say it's good.
That's not to say I like that.
Popular means the people support it, which they do.
And it sucks and it is what it is, but that's why we need dictatorship.
That's unironically why we need to get rid of all that.
We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.
So a dictatorship to crush the Jews.
It's a shame no one's ever thought of that before.
He's afraid.
He's a scared guy.
He's a little man.
He's a scared guy because in a free country, people believe things he doesn't like.
And some of those things are actually evil, like abortion.
And so he wants to crush their freedom in order to preserve what?
What does he want to preserve?
Some moral world that's going to be there because he's oppressing people.
That's not the way it works.
You can't love freedom if you don't love the people who are free.
You can't love freedom if you don't love the people.
And this is why Democrats have gone astray, because they hate us, because they think we're deplorable.
They hate Huck Finn.
They think, oh, no, I'm the expert.
Huck Finn's got to be quiet and do what I tell him to do.
And I say, no, you guys are wrong about everything.
And I wish you were right.
Every now and again, like a stop clock, you're right about something.
So I have to keep my mind clear and make sure I'm not just disagreeing with you.
But he says America is evil.
I say America is what we make it and what we convince people to be.
And I think like, you know, what's my strategy?
My strategy is love my neighbor and love my God and love my enemies and step back and take a look at where we are.
The people who voted liked Biden more than the general population by about two points.
People who voted.
So in other words, they got turnout.
They had turnout.
It was key.
Those two points make a big difference in the results.
The people who voted for Democrats were single women and young people.
Florida, for instance, is an older state.
There's a lot of retirees there.
They have a higher median age.
It's like 42 instead of 38.
But to think, but to despair, to think that what young people think now is what the future is going to look like.
Do you believe what you believe when you were young?
You know, I don't.
I mean, people change.
They get wiser.
They learn things.
And they have leadership that changes them.
Young people who saw Reagan come in may have hated Reagan when he was elected, but they loved him when he left because they saw what he did.
Women, single women especially, vote for the Democrats.
And women are more easily frightened than men.
They'd be nuts not to be.
You know, people always say, well, it's the hormones and all this stuff.
I don't know.
Women would be crazy not to be more nervous and more anxious than men.
They're smaller and weaker, and they're surrounded by people who are bigger and stronger and like to abuse them.
That would make anybody strong.
Plus, they're charged with defending the most valuable resource that people have, which is other people, little people.
They have to nurture them.
They have to create them.
It makes them physically vulnerable.
It means they have somebody who is helpless that they have to protect against people who are bigger than they are.
They'd be nuts not to be more anxious than men.
So of course they are.
And of course the Democrats use it.
They use that.
There's climate is going to kill you and you're going to lose your democracy.
It's all fear.
And fear, as Scott Adams is always saying, is an excellent way of controlling people and convincing people.
And women are susceptible to that.
And single women are more likely to look for protection and support from the government in the same way that married women look for protection and support to their husbands.
And so the GOP has become, to a large degree, the party of married people, and people are getting married less.
And that makes people who are despairing think, well, the GOP is doomed.
Remember, we were doomed because the Hispanics were coming.
And now Ron DeSantis has shown that, no, you don't have to be doomed.
You can win the Hispanic votes too, if you do the things that you need to do.
The other thing that I have to say about women is women are miserable.
I mean, I say this all the time.
Young women especially are miserable.
They're beginning to realize they got a bum deal, that married life is better than living a single life and living for your work.
Motherhood is good, and the earlier you do it, the better.
Femininity is a gift to mankind, and they're the only ones who have it.
They're the only ones who have it.
You know, trans women may be many things, but the one thing they're not are women.
And the only people who have femininity is women.
And it is a gift to society because it civilizes a society.
It uplifts it.
It makes it a better place.
When they realize they've had a bum deal, when they start to change their minds, and this has happened before, I've talked about it.
It happened in the Romantic period.
And when they realize what these doctrines of free love and free sex and feminism have gotten them, I think the Democrats are going to be in trouble.
You know, like Nick Fuentes, I sometimes disagree with the majority.
And a lot of times I disagree with the majority.
I wish people valued freedom more than security, but they don't always do that.
I wish people opposed abortion as much as I do, but they don't do that.
I wish people could uphold motherhood and marriage and the family without browbeating gays or penalizing those women who are really happier having a career than building a family.
I don't want to do any of that.
I just want to support what I support.
I don't need to attack the people who make different decisions.
But one of the problems is we seem to only be able to divide in black and white.
I cannot tell you how many times I have said something between one side and another, and all anybody hears is that I didn't completely agree with them, so I must completely disagree with them.
It happens to me again and again.
It's like they have two little slots in their head, and if you don't go in one slot, they put you in the other.
That's how guys like Nick Fuentes get along.
That's how they say to people, people say, yeah, that might make sense because at least they're fitting in that slot where all their fear and their malice is.
You know, you look at Ron DeSantis, you cannot disagree that this is a major victory.
He didn't attack transgender people.
He defended women and children.
He defended women and children from these groomers, which is what they are.
I disagree with Ben on this.
He says they're not grooming them sexually.
Yes, they are.
And he didn't attack the transgender people.
He attacked the groomers and he protected women and children, women's sports and so on.
He didn't attack Mexican people.
He defended the border.
He didn't attack gays.
He defended education.
He defined the issues and turned out to be right on the pandemic.
And that, of course, is a big one.
The Republicans need a leader who defines where we stand and why we fight without being cruel to the people who are outside the norm.
And he does the job.
And then, you know, here's the thing.
This country is divided, but people are divided.
People are divided in their hearts.
You know, it's like Soltzenitsen said.
The line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
And you can't win people over to the purpose of marriage, to faith, to truth and beauty, all the things that we believe in.
You can't win people over with an iron hand.
It defeats the purpose of winning.
Virtue has to be freely chosen.
So we have to leave people free.
And that's why guys like Nick Fuentes, I think, can just, you know, take a hike.
It's ridiculous.
You have to speak to that guy, that Huck Finn, that Huck Finn who's trying to make a decision.
You have to speak into his heart and tell him the things that he knows to be true are all right.
Because remember, a lot of people think like, well, you know, I don't want to pick on some guy because he thinks he's a girl, you know.
But you have to be able to say, yeah, you don't have to pick on him.
You just have to protect your children from him.
You just have to make sure that truth is spoken.
You have to make sure that people don't say trans women are women because they're not women.
You know, you don't stop them from saying it, but you just have to argue with it and be bold.
And when a leader does that, he can transform people's hearts.
And we can win in the future.
I just want to end with one last thing.
1978, all right?
This is Jimmy Carter as president.
Jimmy Carter has been president for two years.
Jimmy Carter was the worst president until Joe Biden.
Stagflation.
I can remember the stagflation, gas lines, people lined up for gas, energy problems like we have them now, unbelievable crime.
The crime was just going up and up and up.
Communism, the Soviet Union was reaching its high watermark, taking over places in South America and Africa because he thought we were too afraid of them.
You know, we were a little ways away from being completely humiliated by their march into Afghanistan.
The 1978 midterms, you would have thought the Republicans were going to clean up.
And instead, the Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.
This is the most recent election in which the Democrats maintained a trifecta of control at the federal level.
The Democrats, I'm reading from Wikipedia, the Democrats lost three seats in the United States Senate to the Republican Party, and they won the popular vote for the House of Representatives, even though they lost 15 seats.
But they kept both houses of Congress, even though they were doing the worst job ever.
Okay.
But, but it went on, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the Muslims took hostages in Iran.
And by the time the next presidential election came along, the country was ready for Ronald Reagan and the revolution that gave us 25 years of prosperity and peace and won the Cold War while the media whined and attacked and complained and Reagan just swept the floor with them.
This is just a moment.
You know, Virginia has gone red.
Ohio, Iowa, Florida, states that were kind of on the cusp.
A lot of things are changing.
Joe Biden has said he's not going to change anything.
I say, good for you, Joe.
You just keep doing what you're doing, and we're going to keep doing what you're doing.
You know, it's scary out here on planet Earth, you know, but we believe in freedom and what we're fighting for is freedom.
And we may lose the fight.
We may lose the fight, but I'm not going to surrender it to angry people and I'm not going to surrender it to the left.
It's like, I just believe, I just believe that in, I believe in Huck Finn.
I believe in every man and every woman.
I believe that we have the right and the capability of finding what's right if we have leaders and if we have bold people who will speak the truth into our hearts.
Thanksgiving is coming.
We're going to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Christmas is coming.
God is in his heaven.
Here on earth, as always, the fight goes on.
Let's fight the fight.
Possibilities And Multiverses00:14:05
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And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, how many hats?
And also, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No Ease.
I just make it look this easy.
There are no easing for any bad way.
All right, I know what you're all thinking.
The election is interesting, but what about the multiverse?
Is there some other universe in which the Republicans did better, for instance?
Actually, this is one of the biggest topics in science today, but it's also one of the biggest topics in culture.
So I want to bring on two excellent writers on this topic.
One is Stephen C. Meyer, who directs the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, and is the author of the USA Today bestseller Return of the God hypothesis, three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe.
And the other is mine own son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, the associate editor of the Claremont Review, who wrote a brilliant piece called Worlds Without End, Marvel Comics, Quantum Physics, and the Secrets of the Cosmos.
And Spencer has a book coming out next year called How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
It's great to see you both.
How you doing?
Very well, Andy.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah.
Well, this topic is obviously infinite, but I think what I want to start with, I think I want to start with Stephen and ask, scientifically, why do we have the idea of the multiverse?
Where does this come from?
Well, it's a consequence of different speculative cosmological models and some basic physics.
So it's not entirely unmotivated by actual physical theories, reasonable physical theories.
And one of those is something called the inflationary cosmology.
And the idea of the inflationary cosmology, it's a variant on the standard Big Bang cosmology, and the idea that as the universe is expanding, in the very earliest parts, earliest time period of that expansion, it would have expanded at a very, very rapid rate so that the universe would have inflated quickly, like a balloon, very fast.
And then after a certain period of time, it would have settled down to a more sedate pace of expansion.
And part of the inflationary cosmology is that as the field that is generating that expansion reduces in intensity, then new universes would be spit off from that.
And so that's one of the cosmological models that gives the idea that perhaps there are other universes beyond our own.
And there are other considerations in physics as well, where the math that describes the universe that we live in also describes other possible universes.
And so people have suggested that, well, perhaps these mathematical possibilities exist as actual universes in reality.
Does that—well, Spencer, go ahead.
What is it?
This is something that's been around for forever, right?
Well, that's right.
I mean, it's intriguing to hear, of course, you know, Stephen, much more expert than I am in the scientific theories that precisely have led us up to this point.
But it's also intriguing, as I listen to him talk, to recall that in some ways, this is an attempt, a new attempt to answer one of the oldest questions in philosophy and something that we've recently, I think,
come to realize more and more, even if some of us have known this all along, is that scientists have taken up a role in our culture that has a certain level of kind of gravity and authority to speak to questions of what the ancients would have called natural philosophy, of which the first question, as it kind of gets going in Ionia and the sort of near Eastern Greek colonies and off the coast of what's now Turkey, the first question is, what is the world made out of, right?
What's the stuff?
When you get down to the very bedrock of reality, obviously something exists, unless you're really going to be an extreme skeptic about it.
There is something.
And the question that people first start to ask is, okay, so what's the thing that exists out of which everything else is made?
And in the beginnings of these conversations, it seems like, evidence is pretty fragmentary, but it seems like there was one strain of thought going back to people like Anaximander and then up through maybe names that other people would have heard of, like Democritus and Leucippus, that was developing out this series of ideas that basically the world is made of stuff.
And you can cut stuff up into little pieces.
And if you keep cutting it up into little pieces, you will get down to an uncuttable part.
And the word in Greek for uncuttable is atomos.
So that's your atom.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And it's interesting to observe that that picture of the world comes along with a conclusion that, well, if these atoms are just kind of bouncing off of each other, they're interacting, they behave according to predictable rules.
There's nothing to stop them from kind of proliferating out in exactly the ways that Stephen is describing, that they'll eventually bubble up into ever new universes.
And this creates kind of like a universe-building machine, which seems, from what I understand, Stephen, to be what you are describing as well, like a cosmos-making procedure.
Well, in the inflationary cosmology, it is an explanation or model of the origin of the universe, but also implies that there may be new universes or bubble universes that emerge from that.
The string theory also has a version of the multiverse, and then something that's not exactly the multiverse, but it's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, where all the possible states that correspond to a wave that also acts like a particle are envisioned to exist in some possible world.
So there's a math, a mathematical set of a math that describes possibilities, and the possibilities are, in our imagination, at least actualized.
What has given these multiverse ideas popularity among physicists is something entirely different.
There is a kind of physical framework in which it's conceivable to think about multiverses or other universes.
But what's given the idea a real popularity and traction is another discovery of modern physics, which is called the fine-tuning.
And that is something that pertains to our universe, which is that the fundamental parameters of physics, the expansion rate of the universe, the force that drives that, the force of gravitational attraction, the force of electromagnetic attraction, the ratio between those and other fundamental forces, the masses of the elementary particles, the speed of light, all these basic parameters turn out to fall within very narrow ranges, such that if they were a little bit different,
a little bit stronger or weaker or lighter or heavier or faster or slower, in each case, these variations would make life as we know it, or life at all, in fact, even basic chemistry, impossible.
And so this has kind of set a lot of physicists' hair on fire because it suggests the fine-tuning suggests perhaps the idea of a fine-tuner, that the best explanation for why we have all these incredibly improbable and just right parameters.
In fact, physicists are talking about our universe as a Goldilocks universe or a fortunate universe or a setup job, that these fine-tuning parameters, in the most kind of intuitive common sense way of thinking, suggests a fine-tuner.
In fact, Sir Fred Hoyle, who formerly was a very staunch scientific atheist, who discovered some of these fine-tuning parameters, eventually came around to a kind of basic theism in his worldview and said that a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect is monkeyed with physics and with chemistry.
There are no random forces in nature, and these fine-tuning parameters are necessary for life to exist.
And so he came to the idea that there must be a kind of master intellect, a master fine-tuner behind everything.
And the multiverse comes in for many physicists as a kind of counter-argument to that.
And it's the idea that, well, yeah, all these parameters are incredibly improbable and they are, you know, and corporately, they're even more improbable.
And they have these small probabilities associated with them for no underlying physical reason and no logically necessary reason.
But we could explain the fine-tuning in our universe by positing the existence of billions and billions and billions and billions of other universes, so many, in fact, that ultimately the right combination of factors must have arisen in one of the universes, and we just happen to be that universe.
And so actually, there's nothing to explain about the fine-tuning.
We're just the lucky universe that got it right.
Spencer, do you feel that that plays into the idea, the idea that this gets rid of the need for God theoretically?
Do you feel that that plays into the cultural existence of the multiverse as well?
Is that something that appeals to people like the Marvel comics guys?
Or is that just coincidental?
No, I definitely think it's not a coincidence.
I notice, especially, I mean, first of all, a lot of what Stephen is saying here, it strikes me that, and this is often the case, the appeal of the multiverse, not necessarily the possibility, the mathematical possibility of it, or even the philosophical option on the table, but the attractiveness of it as a proposition and as the one that people plunk for when plenty of other options are also available,
seems to be because it is an answer to certain questions that you wouldn't even have to raise if you were comfortable with the idea of God.
If you're comfortable with the mind monkeying with the universe, if you're comfortable with the notion of super intellect, or even if you're comfortable with the notion that actually stuff is not the first substance of which all other things are made, but there's some other logic or governing mind that has to do with the baseline of reality, then it's really a lot of these things actually aren't problems.
There's no need essentially to insist on the idea that these probabilistic equations describe not just probabilities, but actualities in every instance, right?
So I think that's the problem.
That's very well said.
And just to piggyback on that a little bit, I love the way Spencer has framed this by taking it back to the ancient Greeks, because what philosophers call the question of ontology or what more popular writers on Worldview call the prime reality question is exactly what he's described.
What is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else has come?
And this question goes back to the ancient Greeks.
And there were two basic answers that were offered by the Greek philosophers.
And one was the answer of the atomists that basically matter and energy, I don't know how much they had the concept of energy that we have today, but material stuff has been the, is eternal and self-existent, and it is the thing from which everything else comes.
And the other answer was, well, there was a mind that pre-existed the matter, and it is the thing from which everything else comes.
And these two basic answers, basically materialism or some form of theism or idealism, have been the two basic answers that Western philosophers and scientists have debated since the ancient Greeks right up to the present.
And the multiverse hypothesis is popular, especially among philosophical or scientific materialists who have Accepted it largely because it does provide a contrary or a counter to the God hypothesis.
And one of the scientists I love in this debate most, not because I agree with him, I diametrically, I'm a diametrically opposed opposite side, but I love the way he frames issues, and that's Richard Dawkins.
And he said that the universe that we observe has exactly the properties we should expect.
If at bottom, there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Where blind, pitiless indifference is a metaphor for purely materialistic, undirected processes that have produced everything that we see.
And the fascinating thing about the fine-tuning discovery is that it's not at all what physicists or sorry, what materialists like Dawkins would have expected.
And in virtue of that, they've had to develop these very eccentric and somewhat fanciful hypotheses about the billions of other universes out there.
Multiverse Myths and Critiques00:14:57
And yet, and I'll stop here because I've been answering too long, but I think there's a very big problem scientifically and metaphysically with those proposals.
I don't think they actually work.
I think there is every reason to prefer the mind-first view rather than the matter-first view when we start thinking about that fine-tuning problem.
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Well, so this is, you know, when you ask that about the artistic question, right?
I think that what Stephen is saying goes a long way to explain why these two things are connected, why the Marvel, the creators of the Marvel universe, there were always in comic books alternate storylines and plotlines in the background that kind of didn't really happen, quote unquote.
But the reason why the Marvel multiverse has become the governing concept behind our biggest movie franchise does connect very closely to what Stephen's saying about the sort of philosophical preferences of the scientists, because what we have to understand is when we're asking these really first principle questions, right?
These things that philosophers have been puzzling over since literally the dawn of philosophy, these are not the exclusive property of experts or of people that happen to think about these things very deeply.
Gotten used to supposing that there are certain people who not only have the right answers on this question, but have the sole authority to speak about it.
And that's one of the kinds of authority I think that scientists have wrongly accrued to themselves lately.
I want to get back to Stephen's point about the scientific problems.
Before I do, I just want to get a point from Spencer about the storytelling problems of the multiverse, which I think actually reflect some of the scientific problems.
If you're telling a story in a multiverse, there are no consequences.
So nothing actually matters.
Right.
Anything can happen for any reason somewhere, indeed will an infinite number of times in some other possible world.
So is that, I mean, in your mind, does that damage actually actual storytelling, Spencer?
It certainly does, or at least it suggests that these answers to the fundamental questions fail in the storytelling realm in a lot of the same ways that Stephen's suggesting they fail also in the philosophical and the scientific realm.
They have a lot of problems because they're motivated by the same attempt, by the effort to preserve a world that makes sense and that generally allows us to think well of ourselves as human beings and to operate with justice and so forth, all these principles that underlie these superhero movies, right?
That's what you want out of your superhero movie is for justice to triumph and the good guy to win and for deaths to mean something and actions to mean something and the story to be exciting.
And yet you want to be able to do that without a kind of governing principle behind the whole universe, without some first and final cause, without something besides matter.
And it turns out that those are two puzzle pieces that just don't actually go together.
And the effort at kind of shoving them together with the multiverse is one that has been tried to the tune of many, many millions of dollars, but fails singularly for the reason that you just said.
Stories rely on cause and effect.
Our lives rely on effect.
Oh, sorry to interrupt.
And also drama.
I hesitate to even make a comment on that with an Edgar Award-winning writer who knows how to set a hook with a plot.
But every good dramatic story is dramatic because we don't know how it's going to turn out.
And if it turns out one way, there are negative consequences.
And if it turns out another way, there's a happy ending.
And without that, there's no good storytelling.
And a consequence and implication of the multiverse is that it turns out both ways an infinite number of times in an infinite number of universes and that there are no consequences to anything because there's no if-then.
It's just everything.
Everything will happen somewhere.
And so it really destroys the drama, I think, in those films.
Is there a scientific objection to the multiverse?
Well, there's two things.
And let me give you the prosaic one, which is a straightforward critique of this as a causal explanation for the origin of the universe and of the fine-tuning specifically.
And then I want to come back to something that's exactly analogous to the problems that Spencer has highlighted in his excellent essay in the Claremont Review of Books about how it destroys the dramatic element in storytelling.
Just the prosaic physics critique first.
In order for the multiverse to provide an adequate explanation for the fine-tuning, there has to be some kind of universe generating mechanism.
If we just have all these other universes out there and they're causally disconnected from our own, then anything that happens in these other universes will have no effect on our universe because they're separate from each other, including those other universes will have no effect on the probabilities of whatever process it was that set the fine-tuning.
It provides no help in explaining how we got the fine-tuning in the first place.
So for the multiverse to provide a causal explanation, there has to be some sort of underlying common cause, some universe generating mechanism that spits out universes kind of like options in the lottery, so that our universe can be portrayed as the lucky winner in a great cosmic lottery that's a consequence of some underlying causal process.
So there's a principle of connection back to that common cause.
Now, the physicists have recognized this, and the advocates of the multiverse who are trying to explain the fine-tuning have therefore proposed various universe-generating mechanisms, some based on this inflationary cosmology I mentioned at the outset of the interview, and others based on something called string theory.
And in both cases, it turns out that these speculative cosmological models that are the basis of these universe-generating mechanisms invoke universe-generating mechanisms that presuppose prior unexplained fine-tuning.
You don't, in theory, even get the generation of multiple universes unless a whole lot of parameters are set exactly right in the universe generating mechanisms.
So they don't actually explain the ultimate origin of fine-tuning.
They simply presuppose it and push it back out of view.
And yet, in our experience, we know that systems that we describe as finely tuned, where what we mean by that is an ensemble of parameters that are an ensemble of very improbable parameters that collectively work to accomplish some function or discernible end.
Systems that have that property of fine-tuning, French recipes, internal combustion engines, software interacting with hardware, these finely tuned systems are all the product of intelligent agents.
So because the multiverse has not explained the ultimate origin of fine-tuning, but we do know of a cause in our uniform and repeated experience that does, I've argued that some kind of design hypothesis, and indeed I think a theistic design hypothesis, provides a much better explanation for the origin of the fine-tuning than does the multiverse hypothesis itself.
It is a metaphysical hypothesis, and I think it fails.
It's not causally adequate to explain what needs to be explained.
You know, Spencer, one thing that occurred to me as Stephen was talking about this is that in storytelling, having a deus ex machina is also incredibly unsatisfying.
And I'm wondering, you know, there's almost like a balance between this idea that nothing has any consequences and this idea that somehow God is going to save the day.
I mean, I always criticize C.S. Lewis' books that the minute the lion comes on you, you know everything is over and is settled.
What does that say?
What does this stuff about storytelling say about our lives in relation to this scientific hypothesis?
Well, what's interesting about your observation with C.S. Lewis and Aslan, which I share that problem with a lot of those stories.
And people love them and don't, I don't want to knock them.
There is that issue.
And I think that that tells you something about what happens when God becomes a character in the story.
And actually, we have the same problem.
The Greeks have the same problem.
This is why Davis Ex Machina comes to us through Latin, right, via the classical world, is that once you actually suggest that deity or the ultimate power is like on the human level in that way, that there's something kind of outside of him and he operates in the system, then yeah, the whole story kind of falls apart.
If God is the author of the story and we're the characters, right, then you have the entire tradition of Western literature, essentially, that this governing logic that dictates cause and effect, that dictates good drama, that tells you, you know, what happens if I do this, what will he do or that?
That is the thing that operates kind of behind the scenes.
It's like the premise behind which are the sun that shines and then the light kind of allows us to see all the other stuff.
I mean, I think that there is a way in which the moral superheroes, right, who are almost explicitly gods or at least demi-gods and kind of heroic figures, do represent a kind of pagan gesture, rhetorical gesture, right?
That we are, you know, the physical strength, speed, ability, like these are the highest things.
And so there exists, you know, beings among us that have those powers, which is actually not the, it's not the philosophical attitude that has generated the best storytelling, just as a kind of fact about like literary history, right?
Once you start to either kick the gods out or tell stories about the gods as if they were effectively people, as if they were vulnerable, as if perhaps they could die on a cross, right?
Then suddenly you start to enter into that world where things matter and there are stakes.
I've only got a minute left here, Steven.
I want to let you end it and ask this one question.
Isn't there some way in which the multiverse, not only, as Spencer has pointed out, makes storytelling meaningless, but makes science meaningless?
Absolutely.
That's one of the big problems with it.
If true, it destroys all practical reason.
If anything at any moment can happen for any reason, we can't make any scientific predictions.
All of our ideas about the laws of nature become completely up for grabs.
And similarly, we use our past experience to explain things.
But if our past experience is no guide to what will happen in the next moment or what or if anything or if any event in the past might have been explained equally well by a random quantum fluctuation as opposed to the action of an actor or of a natural cause, then we can neither explain nor predict.
And then there's a third problem.
I know you're short on time, so I'll be quick on this, but there's this thing called Boltzmann brains.
And for anyone who gets into the philosophy of this, but it's basically the idea that when you run the math, it turns out that it's more probable on the multiverse to think that our minds were created five minutes ago with false memories than it is that we actually have real memories of the history of our own lives and the universe and so forth.
And so that means that we're essentially, the multiverse, if true, casts doubt on the reliability of our own thinking, which is the basis of scientific reasoning.
So we can't trust our own thinking.
We don't know that we're real, that we are real minds as opposed to fictional minds that have false memories.
And we can't make scientific explanations or predictions.
And this is actually a problem that philosophers of science and some physicists have wrestled with.
And there doesn't seem to be any good solution to it within the framework of the multiverse.
So the way I like to put it is that in the attempt to get around the God hypothesis as the explanation for the fine-tuning, you can adopt this multiverse idea.
It's not as good an explanation, and it also destroys science.
So you can get around the God argument, but only at the cost of losing science and losing a good explanation for fine-tuning.
All right.
I have to stop here.
There's too much intelligence on the show.
It will ruin our reputation.
Stephen Meyer, the author of the excellent book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, which I highly recommend.
Spencer Clavin at the Claremont Review wrote Worlds Without End, which I also highly recommend.
Fantastic essay.
It's a great essay.
And his new book, In New Year's, How to Save the West.
Thanks a lot, guys.
I really appreciate it.
Great conversation.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us on.
Great three ways.
Thank you.
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Homeschooling Havoc?00:08:39
If you're not yet a member, go to dailywire.com/slash clavin to join.
That's dailywire.com/slash clavin.
Join the fight.
All right.
A great conversation about the multiverse.
But in all of the universes, there is a clavenless week that will destroy you, except for the one universe in which you are a subscriber and then you get an extra 10 minutes and then the clavenless week comes.
And in all of them, of course, all your problems are solved with the mailbag.
I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking.
Okay.
Yeah!
I don't know from Patrick.
Some call it a Kaiser Blade.
I call it a slingly.
Dear Mega Maggot Clavenon, thank you for your great show.
You keep mentioning that perhaps the 50s had something good to offer women and families.
This is from Patrick.
I said, despite being vilified by feminists, I'm a father who loves the idea of Leave It to Beaver in the 50s and the quiet man stoicism from John Wayne, but people constantly overlook a key deficit of 50s men that ruined family lives for wives and children, which is the war and the Great Depression, World War II, the Great Depression and then World War II.
Can you imagine a whole cohort of wives and children living with a generation of men dealing with chronic economic anxiety and debilitating wartime PTSD?
Either these mostly Christian men thought they were going to hell for murdering another human being or they were stricken with survivors' guilt having survived mechanized death, put this kind of mental health crisis into the unprecedented economic and technological boom of the 50s, and it's a noxious brew of things likely to compromise a man's soul.
In light of this, could you reconsider whether the 50s were really that great an expression of family values?
Thanks for the wonderful show.
First of all, excellent insight.
And I talk about this with my wife often about the PTSD that people must have been experiencing after World War II.
I just watched for the first time because it came out while I was in England.
I just watched Band of Brothers and I'll do a segment on that soon.
But, you know, the horrible shock and the horrible burden of warfare and also the joy, the weird joy of finding a band of brothers facing matters of life and death does leave you with this PTSD that I think did affect many of the men in the 1950s.
My point is not bring back the 1950s for the simple reason that you can't bring back anything.
Nothing that is gone comes back.
That's not the way life works, right?
My point, though, is that revolutionary ages demonize the past.
The Renaissance was wonderful.
I love the Renaissance.
But it demonized the Middle Ages, which really had much to teach us and which we lost something when we moved on from the Middle Ages.
We actually lost something that's worth returning to, but not is not worth returning to the Middle Ages.
So the same thing is true of the 50s.
And that's all I'm basically saying about the 50s.
Why do we have to say, oh, I don't want to go back to the 50s.
We can't go back to the 50s.
It's not a possibility.
But why do we have to say basically, we don't want to do it that way?
We want to do it a new way.
Why not just say there are things in the 50s that seem right, that seem good, and that we yearn for, and maybe we can bring them into the new world in a new way.
So you're absolutely right about this, Patrick.
I think it's a really good point.
I think about this a lot, about my father's generation and how they came out of that war.
And so, yeah, I'm not saying we can go back to the 50s because we just can't.
It can't be done.
So it's not an issue.
But that doesn't mean there aren't things that were worth preserving.
From Benjamin, dear best Daily Wire author.
What do you make of Trump announcing he is going to announce his presidential bid on 14th November?
It feels to me like a really poor time to do it, so close to the election and allow the left to shift focus back onto Trump instead of all the bad policies of the current administration.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
P.S.
I bought a strange habit of mind for myself, a signed copy for my father, and have been listening to the audiobook when I can't read the book itself.
It is such an excellent story.
I can't wait to see what else you have in store for Cameron Winter.
Well, first of all, Benjamin, thank you very much for doing that.
You will, of course, be entered into paradise for joining the culture war where others may fall behind.
They have a chance.
They still have a chance to buy a strange habit of mind.
However, yes, I'm not, first of all, I'm not 100% convinced that Trump's big announcement is going to be the announcement that he's running.
There are many, many reasons he shouldn't do that for himself, including the fact that it might bring his fundraising under federal law, which he might not want to do.
And so I'm not sure he's going to do it.
But of course, it's a bad idea.
Of course, for all the reasons you said, but Trump doesn't care if the focus is back onto Trump instead of all the bad policies of the current administration, because he just has stopped caring about anything but his butter.
And I think that that's a shame.
And it's not, it wasn't, Trump was always a narcissist.
He always had a big mouth.
He always had all these things.
But he also had something that he wanted to put forward, which that for 100 years he had been sitting in the barroom of his mind thinking these guys do not know what they're doing.
I could do it better.
And he wanted to prove it.
And that helped all of us because there were things that he was right about and a lot of things that he was right about.
And now all he's thinking about is this lost election.
And he has emptied MAGA of everything but itself.
But still, I'm not 100% certain that's what his announcement is going to be.
Like I said, it won't surprise me if it's that, but I'm not 100% sure.
From Krista, dear Claven, wise and all-knowing one.
I'm hoping you can offer me some advice.
I'm a stay-at-home mom that is in year two of homeschooling.
My three children.
I never wanted to homeschool, and I'm struggling adjusting to this.
My oldest two kids were blessed to begin their education at a Christian school, but two years ago we moved to a more rural area and enrolled them in public school.
And that was a disappointment.
The kids are not so innocent these days.
My husband and I felt they were being exposed to some things too soon.
So now I'm educating them at home and often struggling many good days, but the hard days can be so draining.
I feel stuck and worried that I'm failing.
But the thought of sending them back to public school feels wrong.
The nearest Christian school is 20 miles away and only goes through sixth grade.
With the rise in homeschooling, I'm certain we are not the only family out there that is in this situation.
What advice, hope, et cetera, could you offer?
Do we put them in public and trust our sovereign God, or do I need to accept that this is his plan for my family and me, at least for the foreseen future?
Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Well, first of all, Krista, you know, really, I really appreciate your being honest about your situation.
I think it's the best thing.
It is the only way forward when you're suffering in this way.
I know you love your children.
I know you're dedicated to your children, but you've got to take care of yourself too.
And I keep saying this again and again.
I love the sacrifice of moms.
I love the things that moms do.
I think it is the center of human life, what moms do.
But it's hard work and it's hard soul work.
You know, it's just, it can be boring, it can be frustrating, and it can be isolating.
And those are things that are going to affect you and not in a good way.
And you have to take care of yourself.
I question the decision to move into such a rural area.
I mean, your kids, if your kids are the center of your life, why be 20 miles away from the nearest Christian school?
Why not move closer?
Maybe you made a mistake on that regard.
Maybe you should just examine it.
But in the meantime, in the meantime, you have to take care of yourself.
You have to schedule tightly so that you have time for yourself.
If you can bring in other people who are homeschooling to take over some days and share the homeschooling, that's important.
Homeschooling people have organizations that they can go to.
You should go to those places and find out what other people are thinking and how you can organize your life.
You are just like an artist.
I mean, artists have a lot in common with moms.
They're kind of imitation moms because they're creating things and all this.
But just like an artist, you have to take care of the instrument, which is you.
The instrument of nurturing your children is you.
And you can't let that instrument break down.
You can't let that instrument get mired in frustration and unhappiness and isolation.
So you have to take care of yourself.
So first think about whether you can move again and get these kids back in a Christian school and think about whether you can organize with other homeschooling parents so all the burden doesn't fall on you or find some people like I know some people do where they share sometimes they homeschool and maybe two days a week they don't.
You got to have time for yourself.
You've got to be able to develop yourself, take care of yourself.
And I hope you find a way to do it.
And if you do, please write and let us know.
I'm going to stop there for non-subscribers.
For non-subscribers, it is time to be plunged into the Clavenless Weekend, screaming, torture, darkness, gnashing of teeth.
You know the drill, and you're never going to survive.
If you're a subscriber, we've got the subscribers block coming up.