Ep 133 | THIS Is Where Cancel Culture Comes From | Andrew Klavan | The Glenn Beck Podcast

At Sephora, we belong to something beautiful.

That includes one of Sephora's exclusive brands, House Labs, founded by the legendary Lady Gaga.

House Labs' viral and best-selling Triclone Skin Tech Foundation and Concealer both give medium coverage, visibly blur for a natural finish, and star fermented Artica to reduce redness.

The textures are weightless and smooth, so you can feel beautiful in your skin all day, every day.

Shop House Labs by Lady Gaga, only at Sephora.

We belong to something beautiful.

Today's guest I am thrilled to have on.

He is

human.

He's conservative.

And

he's who I want to be when I grow up.

He is brilliant.

He is a commentator, a novelist in multiple genres, best-selling author, screenwriter, radio playwright, and the winner of the Edgar Award.

I don't know who Edgar is, but I bet it's better than Oscar, whoever he was.

He's so good that he made a career in Hollywood as a conservative.

And things started getting dicey.

His Trucott crime book was turned into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

Other films based on his book have featured an impressive array of actors and directors.

His most recent project is The Covenant, an upcoming multi-season TV series that shows us the stories of the Old Testament without the Hollywood influence.

His latest book, The Truth and Beauty, is a look into how poetry can inform our relationship with God.

Poetry.

I mean, we're down to this.

That's what I thought

before

I spoke to one of my heroes, Andrew Clavin.

Abortion is the leading cause of death in the U.S.

and the world.

Since Roe v.

Wade, 63 million babies have been killed just

here

in the U.S.

Nearly one in four pregnancies don't choose life.

In the midst of all of this, we have to do something about it.

What are we going to do?

Well, we found the Ministry of Pre-Born and Blaze Media has partnered to help them rescue babies from abortion in 2022.

Pre-born is the direct competition to Planned Parenthood and the largest provider of free ultrasounds in the U.S.

And by letting women see their baby on an ultrasound and hear the heartbeat, they're 80% more likely to choose life for their baby.

That's a remarkable thing.

Pre-born has a passion to save unborn babies from abortion and see women come to Christ.

And over the past 15 years, pre-born centers have counseled over 340,000 women that were considering abortion.

More than 169,000 babies have been saved.

Holy cow.

What did you do with your day, dear?

I was in a meeting.

That's a remarkable thing.

Here's the thing: you are the answer.

You are the hero of every pre-born baby in this nation and the ambassador for eternal life for every mom, dad, and family that walks in to every pre-born partner clinic.

You can help rescue babies.

Donate

pound250.

Say the keyword baby.

Just hit pound250, 250, keyword baby, or you can go to preborn.com/slash glenn.

Hello, my friend.

How are you?

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

It's been a long time since we've actually sat in the same room.

I think I saw you in Los Angeles last time.

That's a long time ago.

Yeah, it's now years.

I don't know how many people I have told when people say,

tell me interesting people that you've met or, you know, who's really stuck out.

And I say, always, Andrew Clavin

is not only intimidating because he's so smart,

but he is also

one of the most honest and genuine people I oh, that's very kind of you.

Coming from you, that's a great compliment.

Well, thank you for that.

I'll I'll never forget when we first sat down.

We actually were at a friend's house.

We were having dinner.

And you came up to me sheepishly.

Do you remember?

Yes, I do.

I do.

Will you tell the story?

Well, this was something that ate at me for, it must have been over a year.

When I started doing my podcast for the Daily Wire,

I was completely inexperienced.

And I was making jokes, my usual kind of,

you know, funny stuff.

And I made a couple of jokes about you.

They were jokes that I have made to your face.

They were jokes that I've made on the blaze.

When you started the blaze, you hired me to do satirical things and I used to do these jokes about how crazy you are.

And I would say to your staff, is Glenn going to mind my calling him crazy?

No, he knows he's crazy.

So I did it.

I urge people to make fun of me.

You do.

You have always been.

So I did it on the air, but you weren't there to laugh.

So

afterwards, I thought, you know, that really sounded like I was dissing a guy that I, and I'm not flattering you, you know, I think you're one of the greatest broadcasters of the age, you know.

And I thought, you know, because it caught up with me.

It took about a month, and then I started to think, you know,

I hated that.

And then I was going to write to you, and I thought, no, you know, that was a bad thing to do.

You did it in public.

You got to walk up to me face to face.

So a year later.

Yeah.

And you came up to me.

I had no idea about it.

I just remember thinking.

Just on my mind.

Yeah, I remember thinking, relax, dude.

You wouldn't believe what's been said about me.

Whatever you thought.

But I like you.

I will tell you that not a lot of people have that kind of integrity.

Oh, well, it really does.

You know, I want to be, the thing is, my life has all been words.

It's writing words, now it's talking words.

If the words coming out of my mouth are not saying what I mean them to say or they're not true, that's what keeps me up at night.

That is the thing that really makes me think I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

That is, words have real power.

Real power.

Yes.

And they are.

I won't speak for women, but for a man, his word, if his word isn't good, what is he?

Somebody asked me just the other day,

what's the thing that has been said about you?

Does any of it bother you?

And if so, what is the worst thing?

And

I said, when

people

question,

he's got a, he doesn't believe that.

He's got an ulterior motive, whatever, because I've worked so hard to keep my word.

Right?

Yes, yes.

And that's the first thing your opponents always say.

Always say.

You're doing it for the money.

You're doing it for this.

You're doing it.

Yeah.

And

when you really...

When you really

try to be careful with your words,

when you really have true intent of of trying to do good,

it's

crushing because it's the only thing that you really own.

Your words are the only thing that you really own.

Yes, and you know, I mean, I'm sure this is true of you.

I've lost a lot of money by my words.

I've lost jobs and I've been blacklisted and all these things.

And so

it's kind of nuts when somebody disagrees with you.

Just say you disagree.

This is why.

Instead of, you know, oh, you're just doing this because, you know, Ben Shapiro told you to, or whatever it is they say,

because it is offensive.

I mean, at this point, I figure my reputation walks in front of me.

Like, anybody who knows me knows that it ain't so.

Yeah.

Including Ben, because I drive him crazy.

That is an amazing think tank you guys have there.

It's amazing.

It really is.

And we started in a place that looked like this.

It was a table.

We started in Jeremy Boring's pool house, me and Ben just doing podcasts on a card table.

I remember.

Yeah.

And

it took five, six years, and it was huge.

There was a moment where

we were going to merge.

That's right.

That's right.

But then you scuttled that and went to the blaze.

No, I don't think that's not my recollection, but

I will tell you that it is.

I was so disappointed in one thing.

I

love the fact that you all get together and you all just talk about things.

Oh, that's great.

That was.

You know, that's the one thing because, you know, everybody's, a lot of the people work out of Dallas.

Some of them, Crowder works, you know,

45 minutes away.

You know, Mark is up in Virginia.

And so we don't have that chance to sit around and just

be a brain trust.

And that is, that's great.

It was an amazing experience, especially as it was coming up because we were all kind of packed together in a little space.

And then Trump came along, and there was so much to talk about, so much to figure out.

Nobody had ever seen anything like him before.

We were yelling at each other, screaming at each other, but it was all very friendly.

And it helps you think.

I mean, part of thinking is talking,

it's conversation, which is one of the problems in our country right now, is nobody talks to all our people.

And

if you can't talk, if you can't question,

what are we?

Really, you know,

you cannot move without questioning.

The one thing

that I want that I think makes you different

is

that you are a God guy.

You're a deep philosophical guy.

You've written,

I've got to get to this book, but you've written the truth in beauty.

And,

you know,

usually when I'm reading my books on, you know, the Romantic poets,

which I never do,

but

you say that

through poetry, you can come closer to God and the scriptures.

Oh, no question about it.

These poets specifically, these are the romantic poets.

For a brief period on the little island of England, six of the greatest poets who ever lived, Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron, were all living at the same moment, all writing in the same moment.

And they were writing in a moment which was incredibly like this one.

We had

They had the French Revolution, but we had the 60s where everything changed and we thought it was going to be paradise.

It all collapsed.

It all became terror.

It became, for us, it became the Cold War.

For them, it became the Napoleonic War.

And it was all surrounding this issue of faith, the fact that faith had gone out of the world.

And these poets were basically trying to say,

if the age of reason has led to a reign of terror,

what did we do wrong?

You know, Wordsworth was a big supporter of the revolution, and then it just became a bloodletting.

And he said, what did we do wrong?

And they started to deal with the fact that God had gone out of the world.

They didn't always know.

Coleridge, who was the brightest of them, always knew.

And so when I went back, I became a Christian, as you know, late in life.

I was almost 50.

And when that happens, and you're not a cradle Christian, you look at some of this stuff in the gospel and you think like, I don't know what this guy is talking about.

You know, he says, turn the other cheek.

Should I?

I mean,

if like somebody slugs me, am I really going to turn the other cheek or I'm going to deck him?

And you start to think, well, what is he talking about?

And so I thought, I'm going to go find it, see if I can find out.

I'm going to put everything out of my mind, just read Jesus as Jesus.

No Paul, no theology, nothing.

I taught myself Greek badly, and I started reading it in the Greek.

You're very, you're very Jefferson.

I'm very

dogged.

I'm dogged.

I taught myself Greek.

Well, I taught myself big Latin.

But I started reading this, and I thought, this is all the stuff that's in the Romantics.

The stuff that Jesus is saying is the stuff that's in these great poems.

Jesus was actually telling us something, he was actually teaching us a way to look at the world that would do what he said.

He said, Well, the joy that's in me, he said, will be in you.

And that's been my experience of Christianity.

It has made me a much more joyful, much more serene person.

Me too.

Yeah, I mean,

it's like magic.

It's kind of strange.

You know, Jordan Peterson, he talks about the importance of salvation and forgiveness.

There's nothing that replaces that.

Nothing.

I mean, it is, you know,

I believe and I know what redemption has done to my life.

I mean, it's changed me fundamentally.

But, you know, people will be atheists and they'll say, you know what?

I know it's worked for me.

And even if it's a giant con

and I believe it, and therefore I'm a better human being, I'm great with that.

You know, if I wake up and it's just dirt around me, I'm like, God, crap.

You know what I mean?

But it's fundamentally changed me.

And it changes you every time.

This is one of the issues that I was dealing with.

Every time I understand it a little better, my life gets

more joyful.

And when I say joyful, I don't mean happy.

I don't mean walking around with a big smile on my face.

What I mean is alive, vital, you know, that like even

when things are sad, you're thinking it's life.

You know, I'm here in life and I'm living life at this

very,

intense aware level.

And that's what you asked me.

Have you always been a God guy?

No, no, oh no.

I was what I call a secular Jew.

I was a Jew, but I didn't believe in Judaism.

I was raised with it, but my parents didn't really believe in it, so I thought it was just hypocrisy.

I've told you, I think, the story before when I was Bar Mitzford, I got all these gifts.

thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and stuff like this and one day I just took it and I threw it away because I didn't I was lying I was I didn't believe in it.

And after that, I just thought, I'm done.

I was a sophisticated, modern coastal guy, and this is not what people talk to me.

I went to Berkeley,

and I was an artist, and I was working in Hollywood.

I was working in publishing.

There was nobody around.

But

first going through

my own, you know, craziness,

my own trauma of childhood and youth, and I really had a breakdown in my 20s.

I genuinely went, genuinely, genuinely went nuts, I mean, in my 20s.

And through a great psychiatrist who just recently died, who was the only mentor I ever had,

he cured me.

I'm like the guy who was cured by a psychiatrist.

Wow, you're the guy.

And it was only when I started to become happy that I started to think, well, now, if I follow this thought that is leading me to God, it won't be a crutch.

When I was miserable, I would think, well, I'm not going to just grab onto God as a crutch because then it's not real.

But once I started to think

I'm happy, then logic led me to God.

The one question that no one has ever been able to ask me is, why should you care what's right and wrong if you don't believe in God?

Why shouldn't you just get what you want?

Or pretend you care and then get what you want.

And that's what the Marquis de Saud said, the only honest atheist writer I ever read.

He said, you know, there is no God.

I'm going to rape people and kill them because I find that really fun.

And I thought, like, yeah, that makes sense, but it's also hell.

You know, it's.

Yeah, it would, I mean,

doing

things out of the flow of God or universe or whatever,

it's very enslaving.

But it's very attractive because do whatever you want, especially in the moment.

Yeah.

And I would absolutely, I mean, there's no governor on you except yourself.

Right.

You know,

but then you have this problem.

If it's different

to be kind to a child than it is to set a vagrant on fire, if those two things are different somehow,

then there's a level of meaning, like above nature, right?

Because there's nothing.

to say that's different.

I mean, there's got to be some place where

it's different, where it's good and bad, because

there's no logic that leads you to that necessarily.

There's certainly no evolutionary idea that leads you to anything except self,

you know, self-aggrandizement and self-profit.

They say, oh, well, there's game theory and you're figuring this stuff out, but who cares?

You know, I mean, if you turn your back,

and I can get away with it, why should I care?

It's the stuff you do alone and the stuff you think about alone.

I mean,

you know, that's the stuff I found that

when you have

happiness,

you can turn the radio off in your car.

Do it all the time.

Yeah, because

you're not wrestling with the things that are happening inside your head.

Because it's the things that you think about,

you know what I mean?

That's that just keep playing these tapes over and over and over again.

That is, you know, that is

a great metaphor because I'm one of the few people who doesn't play the radio in the car.

I love to be in the car and think and all this stuff.

But you're right.

There's There's so many people with the headsets plugged in and the phones in front of them.

And yeah, of course you do that.

Of course you have to do it.

And the thing is, we all know this in our hearts.

We all know that there's something we're missing.

And it's not going to church and shouting Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

It's not necessarily

going to a soup line.

It's some intense connection with life.

where the life that's in me is also out there somehow.

You know, that exchange between this spiritual world, this level of meaning, and me.

And I think that that's what so many of us are missing.

And a great philosopher,

your writer was showing me, René Girard, who's a wonderful philosopher, and he said, once you get rid of that connection, then you've got two things.

You've only got what you've got inside you.

So

if I say I'm suddenly turned into a woman, then I'm suddenly a woman.

And then you've got this confusing world outside that has to be explained by experts.

So I'm a woman, but I can't leave my house until Anthony Fauci tells me to.

And But if you have a connection, this connection, suddenly you think, like, no, no, wait a minute.

I've got this.

I understand this.

You know, I'm going to need help.

I'm going to need information, but I can live in this world because I'm part of it.

I'm part of this world.

Have you ever lived on a farm?

No.

It's fascinating.

I have a ranch, and when my kids were really small,

you know, we had sheep,

we had goats, we had cattle, and chicken, and everything else.

And

all of a sudden,

everything made sense.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the scriptures started to make sense.

We literally went for the one lost sheep one time.

And we were so concerned about it.

And, you know, the flock is fine.

But that one lost, that was all our concern that night.

And it's.

You don't have to explain.

I saw a line on 1881 or 1883.

Have you been watching that show?

No.

Oh, this is the prequel to the show.

You would love it.

It's poetic.

Yeah, it's great.

It's beautiful.

I do want to watch it.

Beautifully written.

But

at one point, one of the girls says to their mom, what do I do with a boy?

And she said, honey.

You've seen the animals.

You've been on a farm long enough to know you'll figure it out.

And it's amazing how much of life is just explained just by watching nature.

Uh-huh.

Well, that's right.

And also,

and now that we're urban people, so many of us are urban people, and we have all these machines, it's so easy to get detached.

Like, it's so easy not to know how detached you are, not just from nature, but just from the present moment.

I didn't even, when I lived in New York, I hadn't seen the moon and I didn't even realize.

Oh, that bothered me too.

Right?

Yes.

Yeah.

You don't see the moon.

And it, at least for me, I didn't recognize that until I left and I went out to the ranch and the stars and the moon.

And I realized I'm so caught up in man's world.

Yeah.

I hadn't,

you do, you sit around a fire, you do the same thing, no matter where you are, no matter what language you speak, you sit around the fire and eventually somebody says,

You know, man, we are small.

You know what I mean?

And if you don't have that experience by living in a city where all you could see, everything you see pretty much is what man made, even Central Park, man made that.

Right.

You know,

you completely lose perspective.

And we have.

And you lose your sense of.

The moon always bothered me specifically because you lose your sense of time.

The only way we experience time in the city is that you get older, you start to feel creaks and pain and all this.

But there's this great wheel turning around constantly, everything in relationship with everything else.

and just sitting for a moment, as you say, and saying, oh, oh, I get it, that's what I'm this little tiny spectrum.

You know, it really does remind you, you know, it's so much, it's about values, the way you,

the moment that you're in, like, am I going to be kind to this person?

Am I going to show my love to my wife?

Am I going to do the right thing in this moment?

And it's so much easier when you're into the flow of the world.

You know, I mean,

it's not mystical.

It's not like New Age airy fairy craziness.

It's simple.

It's actual just living.

It is actually just living.

And I think that

it pains me to see what churches and church life have become.

It pains me to see that religion has become so much of a side and a battle.

I'm on the Christian side.

You're one of those lefty.

And no, I actually do believe that you can sit next to someone with whom you disagree.

I have good friends that are atheists.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't mind them.

They don't mind me.

That's right.

But I mean, I think...

And we have great discussions.

We have great conversations.

I know.

And that is, well, the other thing, the thing I love about Christianity is that people who actually think about it, no matter where they are on an IQ level, they have something interesting to offer.

And that's really interesting.

And that just shows how true it is.

Because when you're talking about the truth, you're interesting, whether you're

a professor or a street sweeper, you're going to be an interesting guy for telling the truth.

If the last two years have taught us anything, it's that you have to take control of your own health.

It is clear that you can't rely on the government or,

I don't even know, the experts,

even my doctor, my doctor was like, I can't, I really think this is right, but I can't, because then I'll, really?

You can't count on anybody but you.

Well, I will tell you that there is something that you can do to stay in better health.

Z-Stack is a specially formulated immune-boosting supplement.

It includes zinc, Qcertin, vitamin C, vitamin D.

It was formulated by the guy who actually treated me for COVID.

His name is Dr.

Vladimir Zelenko.

He's a world-renowned doctor.

President Trump is the guy who credited him with the early treatment protocol and his decision to take hydroxychloroquine.

So he's been working and he came up with something something called Z-Stack.

It's scientifically formulated.

It's kosher, GMP certified, and it's produced right here in the US.

I take it every day and by taking Z-Stack daily, you are supercharging your immune system.

Z-Stack, formulated to help combat any and all variants as well as the flu.

So please start taking it now.

Stay ahead of any potential future variants by preparing your immune system now.

Order Z-Stack.

You'll become part of the Z family and receive exclusive updates from Dr.

Zenlenko on this pandemic.

Go to ZstackLife.com slash Beck.

ZstackLife.com slash Beck.

Chromo code Beck.

So I've watched a couple of movies recently.

I don't remember what they were, but they've quoted Yates and Shelley.

Yeah.

And

I did this with the, I think it was the Bronte sisters too.

I read.

Wuthering Heights.

And I remember reading

Wuthering Heights, and I closed the book and I went, wow, there is something to these classics.

And every time I hear these guys, I think I should read them because

every time I hear a quote, it's like just so

great.

Convince me I should read this.

You should read this.

Yes.

Oh, yeah, you should definitely read this because when you start to think about the stuff Jesus said, it's confusing.

You know, Peter walks on water and he starts to fall because he gets afraid.

And Jesus says, oh, ye of little faith.

And I always thought, really?

Because I have a lot of faith and I can't walk in water at all.

Like, I've never taken it.

So what is he talking about?

Why does he say that?

Why does he say stuff like, love your enemy?

Really?

I mean, because we all feel that stuff is good.

It's kind of become.

And until you take it all away, until you take all the holiness and the the piety and the theology and the church life, until you take all that away and just sit with this man, you know, the reason I started writing this book is I said to my son, who's this brilliant guy, Oxford scholar, you know,

I said to him, I don't understand the Sermon on the Mount, and I feel that it makes sense, but I just can't turn the lens and bring it into focus.

And he said, that's because you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.

And then I went back to the, and it's hard to get to know Jesus, right?

Because he's Jesus.

You're sort of

a dude, you know.

But when I went back to these poets, I thought like, oh, they're inventing Jesus.

They're reinventing him because he's gone out of the world.

He's gone out of their life.

And so they have to reinvent him from scratch.

Coleridge knew they were doing it, but the rest of them were doing it almost by accident, just by talent and insight.

And so it just brings that back.

It brings you back into the things you've always known, the things you've always read, and suddenly they have meaning.

Suddenly you understand why he said that to Peter.

You understand?

So give me some examples out of this.

Show me.

All right.

Well,

there's a wonderful, wonderful poem.

William Wordsworth.

You're one of these people that you know the poems by heart.

I wish I could memorize poems better.

William Wordsworth and Coleridge had this year of talking together.

They had both become distraught at the fact that this revolution in France, which was supposed to turn the world into paradise, it was like Woodstock.

It was supposed to be, everything was going to be great.

Instead, it became a world war.

It became the terror and became a world war.

And they're two depressed geniuses out in the country, country, in the hill country.

And one day, Coleridge walks over to see Wordsworth, and they begin a year-long collaboration, which produces a book of poetry called Lyrical Ballads, which changes English literature forever.

And one of these poems, the last poem in it,

is

a poem by Wordsworth standing out by the ruins of this abbey.

And it's very profound that he's standing by the ruins of the abbey because that's what's happened.

Religion has gone out of the world.

And he thinks back on his past, and he says, you know, as a child, I was connected to nature.

I was, you know, nature, he says, heaven lies about us in our infancy.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

So he was like, there was something natural about being a child.

But as he grew older, he lost that.

He lost it.

And he starts to think about why and where it goes.

And he talks about life as this kind of arc.

And

he says, we don't come from nothing.

We come trailing clouds of glory from God who is our home.

And then you think about Jesus saying, in order to get into the kingdom of heaven, you have to become a child again.

You have to become like a child.

And you realize that when we think back on our lives, we sometimes idealize our youth, even if it was...

But the true childhood lies ahead of us, not behind us.

You have to start to acquire, you know, that's why there's a sword when they throw Adam and Eve out of Eden.

There's a sword whirling around to keep them out.

The heaven paradise lies ahead of you, not behind you.

You have to acquire the wisdom to become simple again.

You can't acquire ignorance.

You can't acquire stupidity.

You're not going to become a babbling child again.

You're going to move forward until you get so deeply immersed in God that you become like a child again because everything disappears.

You know, there's a wonderful meme called the...

What is it called?

The bell curve meme.

I don't know if you've ever seen it.

On one side are just the small number of

real idiots who see the world in a simple way.

At the top are the majority of people who really see the complexity of life.

And on the far side is the Jedi, you know, the wise man who sees it just like the idiot.

And that's, suddenly you realize, oh, that's what Jesus is talking about.

That's why he wants you to...

He says, I want you to love your enemy.

Not to make the world.

Jesus never says you're going to make the world a better place.

Never, ever does he say, you will make the world a better place.

He says, the world is going to suck.

I mean, that is basically what he tells you.

But he says, love your enemy, because then you will see what God sees, because God makes the rain and the sun fall on the good and bad alike.

And you'll be seen through God's eyes.

You'll be seen.

That's very different than love your enemy or you're going to hell or love your enemy and you'll be a good person.

Or what the church has fallen for is love your enemy and then you'll make the world a better place.

That's an actual mental shift.

It's a way of seeing the world

through God's eyes, through what they call the Jesus mind, you know, when I think about it.

And these poets had to make that stuff up.

So they're saying it, and we are in this world, a godless world now too, so we have to kind of reinvent it too for our world.

We have to reinvent it in language that we understand.

We have to reinvent it in ways that we understand.

And then it all starts to make perfect sense.

So these poems, the poems are beautiful.

I mean, I know poetry can be hard for people, and that's one of the reasons I try to explain it a little bit and sort of talk about it in simple terms.

But the poems are so beautiful.

And when you stop and think about, I think if you read this and then go back and read the poems, you'll say, oh, I see, you know, when Keats looks at a Grecian urn and he says, beauty is truth and truth beauty.

That is all you know in life and all you need to know.

You know, when you first hear that, you think like, yeah, I don't understand that.

I don't get that.

But once you start to think it through and once you understand the beauty he's talking about is not prettiness, it's not your taste and my taste, it's some essential connection between the facts of life and the spiritual underpinning of life,

a collaboration between the imagination of man and the things that we see.

Once you realize that that's the beauty he's talking about, you think, oh, beauty is truth.

And it becomes much more important.

I have to say, there are things now that I don't, I used to look at everything, horror movies, you know,

dirty movies, whatever.

You know, I just look at anything because I wanted it all.

I wanted it all.

But now, every now and again, I'll think, you know, I don't need that in my head anymore.

I know it's there.

I know there's the ugliness in the world, but I'm not going to sit and look at some guy's,

you know.

I mean, I'll look at Macbeth.

I'll look at evil that is full of wisdom and life.

But I'm not just going to watch some disgusting gore fest, you know, that doesn't mean anything.

Because beauty is truth.

And things that, you know, that's what you're always looking for when you make those connections.

And these poets make these connections at moments.

They make these connections in moments where they give it to you so that you hit a line

after a verse and suddenly you go like, wow,

I get that, I feel it.

And the reason I dealt with poetry instead of philosophers, because a lot of the philosophers at this time were thinking about the same stuff, it's not a philosophical question, it's a poetic question, it's an experience that you have.

You can only communicate it through art.

You can't communicate it by saying,

by the kinds of things I'm saying now.

I can't put that experience in your head.

But you've experienced it.

You've seen a movie or read a book

or a poem and suddenly you go like, oh, you know, everything kind of makes more sense than it did.

I want that in my life as much as possible.

I want it in my life every other second, if I can.

You know, I want to be in that mindset when I'm talking to you, which I kind of feel I am in this moment.

It's like, you know.

But I want it all the time.

I want it walking down the street.

I want it driving.

I want it, you know,

in the gym, all of it, because

this is this life that Keats, one of the great poets that I talk about here, he called life the veil of soul-making.

It is the place where you are created as a soul in life.

And this is a guy who lived to be about 25, died horribly in obscurity, failed at everything he ever tried, and wrote some of the greatest poetry literally since Shakespeare.

I mean, there was Shakespeare, then there was Keats, and in between, there were guys who were not as good as they were.

And he wasn't recognized in his time.

Not really.

Some of his friends knew.

Some of the people who knew him knew, but his reviews were constantly bad.

Why?

He was not an upper-class guy.

Politics was just like it is now.

Wordsworth became a conservative and was canceled.

I mean, he was, I mean, you talk about cancel culture.

There are great poems written about what a horrible person Wordsworth is because he became a conservative after the Revolution.

And though Keats was not really

a political person at all, some of his friends were radicals, and so the conservative press came after him.

And he was just ripped to pieces, some of the worst reviews you will ever read.

And the last book he wrote before he died, he actually said he had trained to be a surgeon, an apothecary.

And he actually said, if this book doesn't make it, I'm just going to have to go back to apothecary school.

It is one of the greatest works of literature that any human being has ever produced.

And he died not knowing.

I mean, and it wasn't like it came out and everybody said, this is great.

It was like when he died, people started to say,

I think we missed something here.

And it was only over time that his reputation grew.

I mean, these are the stories I try to tell in the book because I didn't want it to just be me talking about poetry.

I tried to tell the stories of these guys' lives and their important moments.

Great stories.

I mean, the story of how Frankenstein, how Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, is one of the great stories of all time.

So tell that story, because

I have a theory on Frankenstein that I wanted to ask you

because I thought you would know.

And it ties into what's happening today, which is your theory in this book.

We're very similar.

So tell me about Frankenstein.

Well, my theory about Frankenstein is Mary Shelley said, and many people have said, that it's about a man who tries to be God by making a human being.

But that's not really true because people make human beings all the time.

They use the materials they have and they make human beings.

What Frankenstein, what Victor Frankenstein makes is he makes somebody without a woman.

And Mary Shelley was this lovely, young, very feminine girl who grew up with a feminist mother, one of the first feminists, Mary Wollstonecroft, and a father who was a

deep, a real radical.

They all hated marriage.

They believed in free love.

She ran off with the poet Percy Shelley, who believed in free love.

And basically, she watched as free love destroyed every woman that she had ever met.

You know, I mean, Shelley left his wife, his wife drowned herself with a child.

You know, it was just like,

free love turned out to be a nightmare.

They thought everybody was going to be free.

And one night, she and Shelley and Byron are in Italy because they've been basically thrown out of England.

And they're all getting together, and it's a summer, a really stormy summer, and there are lightning storms.

And they're getting together

in Byron's mansion, which is still there, the castle, the

mansion Diodati, still out there.

And they would get together and they would just talk philosophy.

And Mary Shelley said, I never said anything because I was just a girl and there were these two brilliant, two of the the great brilliant men of the age.

And they're talking about bringing people back to life with electricity and they're talking about the meaning of life and they're talking all about all this stuff.

And Mary Shelley's just sitting there.

And

one day, Byron,

they were all reading to each other from a book of ghost stories.

And Byron says, you know what?

We're all going to write a ghost story.

Every one of us is going to write a ghost story.

And they all start off writing ghost stories.

And Mary can't think of one.

And she was a story.

She liked telling stories.

She liked writing and she preferred it to, she liked her daydreams.

And she can't think of one.

And

they all gave up.

All of them, you know, Shelley didn't finish his, Byron didn't finish his, they all started written, and she was just embarrassed because she couldn't think of one.

And then one day she's lying half asleep and she has this vision of a man basically in a laboratory doing something.

And she writes Frankenstein.

And what Frankenstein is about is about getting rid of women.

It's about science's attempt to get rid of the female body, basically.

And

I show you how in the book, it's what she's talking about.

And if you think about science fiction ever since, if you think about all the dystopian books like Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 and what's the one that the kids like The Giver, which is a young adult.

The one thing they all have to deal with is what do we do with the female body?

Because it keeps creating people and then

it also creates women who want to take care of those people and who don't really care as much about being in business and who may not care as as much about politics, but they really care about creating these souls, you know, not just bodies, because mothers create souls as well.

And if you think about science fiction, this was the invention of science fiction.

Mary Shelley, she was, I think, 19

when she wrote it.

Crazy.

She invented science fiction.

This is the invention of science fiction and science fiction horror.

And if you think about it, like a lot of science fiction is about women's bodies.

If you think about Carrie having her period and you think about the exorcist as a little girl basically coming into womanhood.

The matrix, the matrix is a word that comes from womb, basically, and it's by these two transgender guys who create a world in which, you know, the world doesn't exist at all.

It's just that there is no creativity.

There's just people's minds.

Women's bodies are, you know, Even God, when he wanted to become a person, chose a mother.

You know, he's God.

He could have just said, you know, I'm just going to appear.

But he didn't.

He chose a mother first.

Mothers are at the center of human life.

And the feminism that has convinced women that they are just mothers, that they are just homemakers, and need to really get out in business, the feminism that says to businesses, you have to take care of women by giving them daycare, instead of saying, by paying their husbands enough so that they can actually do the work that they were given to do,

is, I think, has made women miserable.

I mean,

before COVID, when I was speaking a lot in colleges, I would get up and I would

say, young women look miserable to me.

If I'm wrong, after I'm finished talking, get up.

No.

Never happened.

Not once.

Not once did a young woman get up and say, no, no, we're really thrilled with the way women's lives are going.

So this moment, this moment when Byron says, let's all write a ghost story, and none of them does except for Mary Shelley, is transformative because it introduces one of the real

philosophical problems of a godless world.

What do we do about the creative force of a woman's body, which is not just giving birth, it's also nurturing a child.

I talk about this because Wordsworth writes a whole poem about the interchange between a mother and a child that she's nursing and how it gives them life.

And this turns out scientifically to be correct.

I mean, it turns out that this interchange, this thing that happens between mothers and babies, creates individuals.

What do we do about that?

And

why do we live in a society that not only doesn't honor it, but tells us that men can do it too?

And that, yes, if I suddenly decide I want to be a woman, I'm a woman.

And if I want to be in women's sports and defeat every woman around me because I'm actually not a woman, I'm a man, that's all fine.

When did we lose this sense that we were made in God's image, male and female, and this female part is half of the enterprise

and it's core to the enterprise?

We have lost the respect, the awe that people felt about that when they were worshiping the Virgin Mary.

So, but did we feel that way?

Because, you know, women were property.

You know, these two men are talking, and I'm not going to say anything because

I'm just a woman.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You know, it's an interesting thing.

When you go back into the literature, it is always true that people who are stronger hurt weaker people, right?

Because we're sinful and broken.

Women have something men want, which is their bodies.

And so

it's just a recipe for abuse and cruelty and abuse of law.

But when you go back and read the literature in the West, Women are treated a lot differently than you think.

They're spoken about and thought about a lot differently than you think.

If you look at the Bible, the first time they talk about the Ten Commandments, the last commandment is, thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife or his house or his mule or anything that belongs to him.

But the second time, hundreds of years later, when they write the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy, they say, thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife.

and thou shalt not cover his house and his mule.

Women are not looked at as property.

There was this slow, slow advance.

It took a long time because it's just too tempting to treat them as property, to treat women as property.

But there was this slow advance, really, from the very beginnings of Western civilization until now, of women becoming people.

And the era that I'm writing about, the Romantic era, this was when people started to say, well, you know, maybe women should be allowed to vote.

Maybe women should have equal rights.

Maybe this is when they started to think about that.

for reasons that I explain in the book, which are not actually just philosophical reasons.

They're actually practical reasons.

But But that has been happening in Western civilization from the beginning.

It just takes slow centuries to figure out.

So I've got two questions, and I'm going to write the second one down.

But I want to go back to Frankenstein.

And I don't even know why I'm doing this, because you have nailed it, and now mine seems really stupid.

But in reading Frankenstein, because I read it, I don't know, last year or something with my son as he was studying it in school.

And I said, we read it together.

And I've read it before.

It's just fantastic.

It's a great book.

Fantastic book.

But what I was struck with, because

I love futurists.

And right now we're debating,

you know,

life.

What is life?

You know, Ray Kurzweil said by 2030, you'll be able to download you into a computer.

And I've said to him, that's not me, Ray.

That's not me.

But they believe that.

And it's, and I, so I'm, I'm thinking about those things and what's coming in AI and ASI.

And, and then I'm reading

Frankenstein.

And I thought, we're living in very much the same age.

You know, God is on the ropes.

All of these things are happening.

Society is changing.

The Industrial Revolution, everything is changing.

And science is coming to the forefront where they say,

look, if we hit electricity, the frog's legs move and the frog's dead.

And

I thought,

they really think they can bring people back to life at this point.

It's the same thing that we have going on right now.

So isn't this, isn't the tale of Frankenstein

Everything we're dealing with right now.

It's everything.

I mean, I really believe believe

T.S.

Eliot said that a great poet in writing himself writes the world.

And I think when you write the world, you also write the future.

And I think Mary Shelley was like a prophet.

I think a lot of great writers are like prophets.

And, yeah, she saw exactly, I don't think she

through her intellect, she envisioned where everything is.

Well, she saw

man.

And man just repeats himself over and over and over again.

And the thing is, the threat that we're facing from, you know, obviously science is a great, glorious gift.

I mean, if it only kept children from dying, that would be a great glorious gift.

It's the science I'm worried about.

It doesn't matter, it bother me when people say follow science, which means experimentation and getting things wrong and correcting things.

When they say follow the science, I think I'm in the Wizard of Oz, because there is no the science.

The science is an idol.

And the idol is that there is something,

that there is a way to solve the problems of humanity without eliminating humanity itself.

And that's a real problem.

That's what I think Mary Shelley saw, that

if you can get rid of women, I mean women are the obstacle because they are this consequence for our sexual urges, they create consequences for that, they create new life,

which is just this out-of-control thing.

They are needed to create souls when we want everybody to be working on the machine, we want everybody to be part of this machine economy, and you should be consuming things, you should be buying stuff.

The question is, how are we going to go forward and remain human beings?

The question is not how are we going to solve the problems of humanity, it's how are we going to go forward as human beings.

And there are a lot of people now saying, no, we shouldn't do that.

I mean, this guy, Huval Harari, wrote a book called Homo Deus.

Terrifying.

Yeah, it's terrifying.

Terrifying.

He says, it doesn't matter what you think.

And, you know,

Christians believe, they don't believe there's one end of the world.

They believe there's two ends of the world.

There's one for the saved and there's one for the salvation impaired, right?

And I think that world, that mechanical world in which we become like unto gods, but we lose our humanity

is the world that you and I are trying to avoid.

You know,

when I talk about all the books and movies that grow out of Frankenstein, one of them that I talk about is the Terminator.

And the Terminator is about a world where the machines rule, but a hero is born.

So what do they do?

They go back to kill his mother.

They send somebody back to kill his mother.

They don't kill him.

They go back to kill his mother.

And who is his mother?

And that first Terminator, the genius of that first movie, is she's just a girl.

She's just a girl.

She's not a muscle person.

She's not a hero.

She's nothing.

She's just a girl, wants to get her hair done, wants to have dates, wants to go out and party.

It is her girlness that they want to kill.

And I think that when we look at this, we have to start to say, well, wait a minute.

If now we understand that the stone that was thrown away, women, may be one of the cornerstones of the temple.

Maybe we should start to think about how we treat the human body and how we solve the problems of birth and how we solve the problems of sex and sexuality.

Those are things that maybe Christians should be thinking about without saying, you know, you're gay, so I don't like you, or

all the kind of nonsense that it all boils down to when you're not really thinking it through.

And so, yeah, I agree with you.

I think that we are headed for a machine-like world,

but not all of us.

Some of us are going to opt out.

And I think that that is where the wisdom lies.

So

I asked Ray Kurzweil,

because he was talking about, you know, chips and implants and upgrades, you know, basically what Stephen Hawking said would be the end of the Homo sapien by 2050.

And,

you know, now you have Elon Musk with his Neuralink.

And I asked Ray,

what happens to those people who don't want an upgrade?

And he looked at me so puzzled.

They don't think things through.

And he looked at me and he said,

why wouldn't somebody want that?

And I said, I don't know.

They like the way they are.

They're happy.

They want to search for things on their own.

And

he said, well, no, everybody will get an upgrade.

And I said, again,

what happens to those who don't want one?

And he said, well,

I can't imagine anyone that would want to deny this to their kids and everything else, but they would have to live, they'd have to be separate from society.

That's Brave New World.

Right.

He said, because you won't be able to understand what we're saying because we'll have all this knowledge running through our heads.

You won't be able to understand.

You will be a detriment to all of society.

I think that there is something to that.

And I think

when I say that you have to go forward to go back, that in order to get back to your childhood, you have to move ahead, this isn't true of just individuals, it's true of the human race as well.

We're not going to get rid of science.

We're not going to say, oh, yeah, let the kids die and

we don't need.

No, of course,

we just want to guide it in a human fashion.

That is not.

That is why I talk about the last part of this book.

Only part of the book is about the romantics.

The last part is about Jesus.

And it's about, let's re-understand.

It's not changing anything he said and it's not naturalizing what he said.

He's the son of God.

He is exactly who he said he was.

But it's just kind of trying to understand what he says.

And I say that we can only create a machine universe.

But he actually has a science that is very humanizing.

And I think there is a version, there may even be a version of upgrades that is more humanizing, that gives us more wisdom, that gives us more humanity.

But the thing is, that's not going to be its first manifestation.

Its first manifestation is going to be like what we have now.

These phones, look, I love the fact that I can get any piece of literature in the world on this thing in my pocket.

That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I don't so much love the fact that it keeps saying, you know, like, look at this, this will make you angry.

Look at this, this will, you want to buy this.

That's the part I don't like.

So, you know, the idea that you can choose between those things, they always want to tell you that you take one thing, you get the other, but I don't think that's true.

I think that there is a version of the future that is a human version.

And I think some of us are going to opt for that, and we may be truly, truly hunted for it.

I mean, we're being hunted for it.

Oh, I think.

Yeah,

I think that's without a doubt.

Without a doubt.

Does this pattern that we're in right now?

In your book, you talk about how the French Revolution.

Yeah.

But then you look at 1930s

and you look at now, and it's all driving towards the same thing.

And there is no human

element to it because each time they're looking at the collective,

not the individual.

And God, you know, the Tower of Babel story,

Nebuchadnezzar says, let us build bricks.

Okay.

Well, God makes stones.

He makes all of us different.

Yeah.

He's saying,

let's make everybody the same.

And

And then we can do anything.

We can build a tower to the sky.

Right.

That's not

man.

That's right.

Man.

God, says the individual.

Man in these darker periods.

Why?

Why?

Well, you know,

one of the best lines I ever read about, you know, I was fascinated by World War I.

I know you are, too.

And you read book after book, and at the end of reading 20, 25 books, you think, like, how did it begin again?

Like, why did they just wipe you off the face of the earth?

And Peggy Noonan wrote a column about it once where she asked somebody that question.

He said, there's just something wrong with people.

And she said, that's the best definition of original sin I've ever heard.

And it is, there's something wrong with us.

There's something we are not what we're supposed to be,

you know, which is why the world is so tragic and hilarious at the same time.

We're kind of like a guy in a tuxedo who falls in a puddle.

You know, it's kind of funny.

And so

you say the same things happen again and again.

That's an effect of trauma.

And I think maybe the fall of man was a trauma.

You know, everybody has trauma in their lives, and you find yourself repeating traumatic patterns.

And mental health is when you can break those patterns and start to do new things and start to see new things.

But you're still going to have a personality.

You're still going to do certain things.

You know, you're not about to be, you're not about to become a ballet dancer.

I'm not about to become a baseball player.

You know,

we are what we are.

And so you repeat those patterns, but you repeat them in a way that grows and becomes more human.

I do some of the same thing.

I'm still writing novels.

I'm still

a writer and still have my personality, but I've become, I think, more human.

And so these patterns are going to repeat.

But the one thing we can be sure of is that people who go down the wrong road are going to see bliss in front of them, but they're going to find misery.

And when that misery becomes too intense, things break.

And it's whether you're at the pinnacle of human culture in 1914 and you think like, let's go defend Belgium and wipe everybody, kill everybody.

Or whether it's like some horrible war or whether it's a religious revival and it happens peacefully.

People come back from the brink.

Not everybody, but some people come back from the brink.

And

that's part of the human pattern too.

There is something in us that remembers.

There's something in us that remembers who we're supposed to be.

And when you are the guy in the room who remembers and people start beating you up and picking on you or shouting crucify him or get off Twitter or whatever it is they want to do,

you're just going to have to have courage.

There's nothing else for it.

There's nothing else for it but to say, you know, I'm not going to budge.

I'm going down this road.

And, you know, I do believe, I think you believe that God walks with you, you know, and that

it eases the loneliness and the pain and the persecution.

But it doesn't take away the tragedy of life.

Life is very tragic, and that's why I think

we cling to the resurrection and the promise that there is some version of life that maybe is different.

It makes

the walk with him makes it

worthwhile.

I remember, because I have a really,

I have a...

I have a different relationship with the Lord.

He tells me stuff and I'm always like, oh, not that.

And comes of me, not.

No, that's how I know it's from God.

It's never something I want.

It's always something that was like,

oh, you've got to be kidding me.

Yeah,

I'm not that guy.

Okay.

No.

And

I remember at one point

I said,

and I meant it,

No,

I'm not doing, no, I am not doing that.

And I remember in my prayer hearing very kind, very kind, very gentle.

It's okay.

I'll find someone else.

And

in that moment, I realized

I won't be who he wants me to be.

And

I don't want to be left behind.

I don't want to be left behind.

Not that I would go to hell or anything else,

but I want to be with him.

And it's, I I don't think people who haven't had a religious experience or a spiritual experience, I don't think they get that.

But all of us, you know, this is the wonderful thing about that Wordsworth poem I was talking about, that heaven lies about us in our infancy.

I don't think there's a person on earth who does not know that there is a person he was made to be that he isn't.

You know, I think every single person knows that.

That there's a person he was made to be.

I disagree.

Really?

As a recovering alcoholic,

one of the biggest problems was of really doing the soul searching.

I mean, when you are out,

I had to take everything I thought I knew and take it out and examine it and then look at it and then atone for it and whatever else, whatever was in there, and then pick them up back on the table and put that one back in because I understand it now.

Pick this one and put it in.

But if they conflict, I got to take them both out because something's not right.

Okay.

And I remember before I started that, I thought,

there's nothing inside of me.

I am, I'm just my collection of

experiences.

And, you know, the bad kind of makes me who I am.

You know what I mean?

And I'm not sure there's something in there.

And

I think that's

unfortunately common.

You're afraid to look in in because it's hard to change.

Oh, I don't

deny that.

And you're afraid, too, that maybe this is as good as it gets.

I completely agree with that description.

One of the things that I know so many artists who are afraid to get help for their problems because they're afraid their talent will go away.

Yeah.

And, you know, of course, it all gets better.

Yeah, it all gets better.

But

I still believe that inside everybody, if you interrogated them,

you had to know that that alcoholic Glenn

is not the Glenn.

Yeah.

I knew that that was not the right path

for me, yeah.

I mean, because that, when I look back, like, I was miserable in my youth, and for a long time I had that idea, oh, well, I'm an intellectual, so I should be miserable.

You know, it's hip to be miserable when you're young and intellectual.

But I knew, I knew you are not supposed to be like this.

This is not the way you're supposed to be.

We're not supposed to be miserable.

And I knew there was a me that had been made

that I didn't have, you know, and that's still true, but at least I feel now I'm walking in that direction all the time, you know, which is just a joyful experience in and of itself.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And it's weird that, like Viktor Frankl,

it's very strange that

even as he said, sitting on the cart with a stack of dead bodies, a dead body, and I take an old sandwich from my pocket and I'm eating it, and I can just

disappear.

I'm not, I become numb

until I realize

nothing can destroy my happiness except for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, when you're singing in the prison and they're torturing you, that's, that's a, that's a good place to be.

I mean, I love that book.

And I, there's that, the ill, sick woman who looks out at the beautiful branch.

That's the level of life I'm talking about.

Yeah, that would be fantastic.

I know.

And I think, I think.

Because that shows you're not supposed to be miserable.

That's right.

Things can be the worst,

but

that's a choice of yours.

And you know, I always compare it to a movie.

You're watching a movie or whatever, you know, Downton Abbey or whatever, and somebody dies, and you're sitting there and you're weeping, and you're weeping, and you're weeping, and then you turn off the TV and you say, that was great.

I love that.

You know, life has that element to it.

It's incredibly painful.

Some of life is just incredibly...

That's some of the most beautiful stuff.

But it's beautiful.

Nobody wants to suffer, but everybody knows that suffering does something

grandful.

Yeah, I know.

And

it's a strange system, but it is the system.

And living at that level,

every day you're even trying to do it, you're having a better day.

So where are we?

What's coming?

Yeah.

What do you, I mean,

this cancel culture is getting scary.

It's scary.

I mean,

one of the reasons I always make jokes about you, because sometimes I feel like you and I are like mirror images.

Like I always think like, you always think like I can connect these dots to a disaster.

And I always think, yeah, but you know how you connect the dots.

You know what's really weird?

Smiling and frowning face of theater, you know?

What's really weird is I always say, I'm a guy you do not want to be on the Titanic with until we hit the icebergs.

Because I'm telling you, there's not enough lifeboats if we hit.

So now I'm the guy going, it could work.

Yeah.

But as soon as we hit that ice, I'm good.

I'm like, we're going to make it.

Get in life, bone.

Let's go.

I always say that pessimists are always right eventually.

You know, you'll kill me for saying that, but I actually believe that the good guys are on the offensive now.

I mean,

and this is a wonderful thing.

And it's like...

You know, it made me, I was watching, I guess we're all watching Joe Rogan take it, he's the latest guy on the chopping block.

And it pained me to watch him try to apologize for some of the things he had said, not because

I understood where he was coming from.

He used the racial slur and he thought that was not.

But we know they don't care.

They don't care.

You know, they say black lives matter and then they pull funding for the police and thousands of black lives.

And by the way, I just want to say, I don't believe there is such a thing as a black life.

There's life.

That's right, yeah.

And

it pains me to see him apologize, but it also showed me that he actually has a conscience.

It's the people who are attacking him.

So I thought the same thing.

I'm watching him and I was like, he's sincere.

He is sincere.

But they don't care.

Yeah, they don't care.

And the debate is, should you apologize or not?

And I feel pretty alone on this that

he was, he, it's one thing to have an epiphany.

And that's what he had.

Right.

You know, gosh, I'm watching this and this is making me uncomfortable.

I haven't done that in a long time, but this was really bad.

And I'm not not that guy.

That's an epiphany.

The apology, don't ever apologize to people who don't listen to you.

I agree with you.

You don't apologize to people who were never offended.

They weren't offended.

The people who put that tape together, I can tell you they put that tape together with glee.

With glee, right?

Morality depends on context.

The thing is, you cannot...

You cannot do the right thing at the wrong time.

You have to do the right thing at the right time.

And to apologize to people who really don't care and are just trying to advance cancel culture is wrong.

I mean

we really should say that.

How would Christ have handled that?

I mean, he wouldn't have been using the N-word.

Well, we kind of know because they canceled them.

You know, I mean, like, we know that he just, you know, they said, are you saying these things?

And he said, that's what, you know, you said it.

And he just stood there.

And the thing is, if you're not afraid,

I mean, that is the lesson of Christ.

Don't be afraid.

It's like, if you're not afraid, they really have no power over you.

You You have to have some trust that it's going to be all right, that you're going to make it through.

You know,

I got kicked out of Hollywood.

My leftist agent keeps telling me, no, no, no, that's not what you

took.

He read this book.

He loved this book.

This is my Hollywood agent.

May I just read this?

Okay, this is when Christmas comes.

And I just have to read the inscription that you wrote to me.

Because I wrote the Christmas sweater a long time ago.

You wrote to Glenn, sweaters and nice are nice and all, but the true meaning of Christmas is murder.

I did think of you.

You wrote that wonderful book, you know, and I thought, yeah, but now you don't have to kill me in your life.

It's hysterical.

But my agent loves this book, and he sent it out to everywhere.

And he called me up and he said, I can't understand it.

I haven't gotten even a nibble.

And I said, well, you know, I think I'm persona non-grata.

Yeah.

I'm absolutely sure.

He said, no, no, no, it's not that.

He said, they mention it.

But the thing is, you can't be afraid of that.

I mean, really, I mean, is that really what it is, that you're not going to be in Hollywood, that, you know, you're not going to get to write

some movie?

That's not what my life is about.

My life is what we started talking about.

My life is trying to tell the truth beautifully.

That is what I've tried to do.

That's what I think it was given to me to try to do.

Boy, what a beautiful

mantra to have.

That's the meaning of your life is to tell the truth beautifully.

No Hollywood producer can stop me from doing that.

And so they don't have, they can't take anything from me.

You know, I mean, like, you know, I had to sell my house after that happened.

My income went from here to here in a very short period of time.

I never even thought, I mean,

I thought about it.

Obviously, I had to take care of myself, but I didn't like sit and go, oh, boo-hoo, I lost my Hollywood career.

I thought, no, I'm saying what I have to say.

I'm doing the right thing.

I know I'm doing the right thing.

And if I have to live a a little bit, you know,

differently, I can do that.

You know, if that's what you're worried about, that's why Jesus says you can't serve God and money.

It's not because money is icky.

It's because, you know, if you put money first, you're going to make the wrong decisions.

And the thing is, Glenn, I know a lot of Hollywood writers who went the other way, a lot of them.

And there's something about them that I know the price they paid is bigger than the price I paid.

I know it is.

I can tell by the look in their eyes.

I can tell by the way they talk about themselves.

I can tell by the way they think about life.

You know, you just have to, if you're not afraid of these guys, they really don't have as much power over you as you think.

And I think that that's what bothers you about a Joe Rogan apologizing.

You wonder, like, you know, I hope he's being sincere, but you also wonder, is he thinking, well, you know, I'm making a lot of money here.

And if I lose Spotify, you know,

I'm not accusing him of anything.

I don't know his heart at all, but I'm just saying.

I watched it, and he may be thinking some of that.

That may play a role, but he seemed,

you know,

people misjudge people all the time.

If Donald Trump runs again, why would people say he's running?

Again,

because he's an egomaniac.

He can't leave it alone.

I sat with him over dinner a couple of months ago, and

he said,

this is such a mess.

He said, this is such a mess.

He said, and I fixed it.

I had it fixed.

We were on the right track.

And he said, and then he just sat there for a while.

And I'm just eating my food.

And he says,

I look at all the people.

He said, what I went through was hell.

But I look at all the people

who

weren't president, but stood up for me when they were just raped over the coals.

He said, I promised them I would fix it.

And now it's broken.

I think of them.

They were loyal to me.

You know how much he appreciates loyalty.

He's like, they were loyal to me.

How can I not be loyal back to them?

You know, it's a really interesting thing because I voted for Trump twice.

And I thought, I was just the other day thinking about what an incredibly successful presidency he had until COVID hit.

But I had real problems with his comportment, with his treatment of people.

And I thought, well, why does it take a guy like that to do the right thing?

You know, I mean, like,

he's not the greatest genius who ever lived.

If he governed that well, it must be easier than others making it.

Yes, yes.

I mean,

I think it's just don't listen to the experts.

It's don't listen to the experts.

It's don't listen to the elite.

And it's also withstand.

He had

that lizard skin that helped him withstand cancel culture.

And this is the thing, you know, people say, well, there's canceled culture on the right and there's canceled culture on the left.

No, there's not.

Cancel culture is an outgrowth of the leftist strategy of silencing the opposition by calling them hateful.

That's all it is.

That is the definition of cancel culture.

It's Sololinsky, and it is the definition.

And I hate it when people say, well, right-wingers, you know, fire people for saying things.

And yeah,

there's always going to be that.

If you worked for me and you said something horrific and hateful, I might well fire you for saying something horrific and hateful.

But they have transformed all disagreement into hatefulness.

And all the words they use, racist, white supremacist, supremacist, phobic, this, phobic, that, all of them, they just mean shut up.

You know, just shut up and sit down.

And like, I think that,

I think that that's where cancel culture comes from.

So it's like

you can distinguish between a guy who's done something genuinely horrible, like every single person at CNN.

They all have to be.

Is that crazy?

Nuts.

It's crazy.

It's like I worked there.

I wasn't having an affair with anybody.

What happened?

Am I that ugly, really?

You missed the vote.

I know.

I could have walked out with

Cuomo walk out with $20 million.

I just needed some information about the boss.

Gosh, it's crazy.

Yeah, but I mean, you know, it's,

you know, they have made it so that it takes a guy like Trump just to get something done.

I mean, when you think of the effort that was put into destroying him, I mean, it was a huge effort.

I mean, it was a global now.

Yeah.

It was a global effort.

Yeah.

I mean,

you know, they came out and they even said it.

You know, as a business, we came out and we pooled our resources together.

You did what?

Yeah.

You did what?

And they're not ashamed of it.

No, and they knocked him, they knocked the president of the United States off social media,

which in my view ought to be illegal.

I mean, they shouldn't believe it.

They silenced information about Hunter Biden.

They lied about his Russian connections.

They did all this stuff.

And again,

he often made it hard to defend him by the way he behaved.

But when you look at, you know, I can just list the stuff he did, the economy that lifted all boats, getting rid of ISIS.

People forget about that.

The ISIS caliphate was the size of Ohio.

And he got rid of it, turning our attention to China, which nobody else was doing.

The Middle East peace talks, which he actually came up with a solution.

I'm like,

he might be the Antichrist, not for any of the other reasons, but I didn't think this was supposed to happen.

And it was all by just saying, let's not do what the...

yeah, let's not do what the State Department says to do.

And, you know,

I've met a lot of guys from the State Department.

They are the smartest, stupidest people I have ever met.

Every one of them, they're smart.

They're well-read.

They're nice.

I like them, you know.

But they say things, the words that come out of your mouth, and you think, like, no,

that's not.

That's crazy.

It's like

the guy at the end of the bar with his loud mouth has more sense in his head.

We know he's president.

He actually does.

And I think that was his secret was

he's got an incredible gut on him.

You know, don't you think?

Yeah.

He says he's got the like a,

we're going this way.

Yep.

Yep.

And stuff that even I thought, that's crazy.

It works out.

I don't know how, but he's got a great gut on him.

And he

shockingly listens to all sides.

That is interesting.

You didn't know that?

I've heard that.

I've heard that he reads a lot, which I don't know about that.

I mean, maybe.

I don't have any information that he doesn't, but I know he listens.

I mean, he will, he talked to me about his China policy for like 25 minutes.

And then he had the boss to say, which I said,

this is why I like you.

We disagree on trade barriers.

And I said, look, China is a different thing.

I agree with that.

But trade barriers, and I made a case against trade barriers and he made his case for, and I came back, and then he came back, and then I came back, and he was like, you know what, Cled, I just got to tell you the truth.

I love trade barriers.

I'm going to do them.

And I'm like, thank you.

You know, no, he didn't come my way at all.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

But he listens to everybody.

I have to say, my feeling, my political instinct, and it could be wrong because I didn't see him coming at all,

is that he should anoint somebody else to run for president.

I don't know if he's got the, you know, ego to do that.

He was the man of the moment.

He broke the China shop.

He was the bull in the China shop, and he broke the China.

Any Republican who does not realize that they have to take a lesson from him is done, is finished.

The guys who

try to appease the left, they're finished.

Glenn Youngcken, a great example in Virginia,

he caught on.

He started to stand up to the teachers, to the school boards and all this stuff.

He's a moderate guy.

He's, you know, what is Jim Acosta called him Stalin or something?

He's like a moderate Republican.

But he understands that part of this fight is a cultural fight.

And that was Trump's great genius.

Partly it's about taxes and regulations and strong defense.

All those things matter.

But it also matters that you stop telling people that their country stinks, that their God stinks, that they're racist, that they're sexist, that their natural opinions stink, that

their marriage doesn't matter, that women don't need a man, you know, all the stuff that they said, you've got to stop.

You are ruining the world.

You are actually ruining the world by doing that.

And Trump is the only one who actually said, you know what?

Like, no, I'm going to embrace the flag.

I'm going to talk about God.

I'm going to say abortion.

You know,

did anybody stand up at the March for Life before he did?

Did any president ever did?

I mean, you know.

And crazy, right?

I mean, he did stuff that I was like, ah, he's just, he's saying that.

He's not going to actually do that.

There's no way he's going to do that.

And then he did it.

And you're like, I know.

What happened?

And any Republican who did not hear that call, and some of them you can see they didn't hear it, and it's just not in their nature.

They just haven't got that thing in them.

But I think DeSantis has got it.

I think he does.

And I, you know, but I think Trump is getting up there.

I'm tired of being governed by 80-year-old men.

You know, I think it's time to let a new generation come in.

If I were Trump, I think what I would do is, you know what?

This is my guy, DeSantis.

He's going to go forward

and then have that kind of influence on the White House that you have behind the throne.

I think he did the thing that he was sent to do.

But I could be wrong.

Yeah, it's a stop.

I've stopped,

you know, 2016, I was against him.

I was wrong.

2020, I thought he was going to win.

I was wrong.

And I was wrong.

And God was right both times.

You know what I mean?

That happened.

And I'm like, there's no way.

There's no way.

I was wrong on that.

Joe Biden being elected is turning out exactly the way I thought it would, but I didn't see

that.

That was a trigger.

It was kind of like they were hiding and everybody's like, yeah, I know they're not telling the truth, but you know, it's going to be fine, you know.

And now we're seeing it.

And people who are not, don't agree with me are like, okay, all right.

Whoa.

Yep.

This is way out of line.

You know, it's really interesting.

I was in New York just before Christmas, and I was going to parties, a lot of which got canceled because Omicron was on the rise, and I was, you know, rolling.

But a lot of, you know, some of these parties, literary parties, have a lot of leftists in them.

And for the last, during the Trump years, I would go to these parties and people would shun me.

I mean, they would kind of not want to be seen with me.

All of a sudden, they were coming up to me and said, you know, I'm starting to sound a little bit like you.

And I think like, you know, the thing is, leftism offers virtue.

And virtue, because we don't have it, we want it, you know, because we know we're sinful, we know we're broken, and somebody says we're going to make everything equal, everything's going to be nice, everything's going to be fair, we think like, oh, I want to be that way.

It just doesn't work.

You know, it doesn't work.

So they get elected because they offer virtue.

The right doesn't get elected, even though everything they do actually works, because they don't talk morally.

And that's the funny thing about Trump.

People talk about his immoral life, but he spoke in moral terms.

Make America Great Again, Mago, was a moral movement, you know, and that's and that's why they hated him so much, because

he's black and white.

There's a right and wrong.

There's a right and wrong.

And like, I think that

I think he has changed.

I think my idea, Glenn, is that we're at the end of something.

And at the end of something, there's going to be chaos.

We're at the end of the post-war era, basically.

We're at the end of the post-Cold War era, but I think we're even at the end of the post-war era.

Yeah, I think a lot of the people

whom Trump drove crazy, you know, those commentators who were important and now are just kind of off in the wilderness babbling about who knows what, you know, I think they couldn't accept that it's time for a new thing.

And Trump, like you said, in his gut, he understood that.

Yeah, I think you're right.

You know, I said in 2016, we're at the end of the progressive era.

What started 100 years ago,

now comes the choice and the transition.

You know what I mean?

We're either going to go where they wanted us to go or we're going to push back, but

I hate to use this word, but a reset is coming.

I agree.

Hopefully, it's back to factory settings.

It is always good to see you.

It's great to see you.

I didn't even use a single question I had for you.

I want you to come back because I want to

talk to you about your dad.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

You know, your dad's a legend.

Yeah.

One of the great.

That's how I recognize broadcasting talent.

I can see broadcasting.

I have to say, I have a knack.

I see people come along and I know exactly who's going to make it in the broadcasting world.

He was a great broadcaster.

Yeah.

All right.

Come back.

Thank you, Tad.

Always.

God bless.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.