November 6, 2023 • 26 mins
In this episode, Karol discusses the negative impact of prioritizing financial independence and career over family. She emphasizes the importance of marriage, stable relationships, and religious values. Karol welcomes Andrew Klavan to discuss his new novel and the challenges he faces in Hollywood due to his beliefs. Klavan suggests that conservatives need to create their own media platforms to promote their values. He also encourages people to pursue their artistic passions despite the lack of opportunities in Hollywood. Klavan discusses the current state of culture, his journey towards faith, and the societal problem of materialism. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
One of the topics that I want to get into
here is how bad advice can lead to problems in
your life, and sometimes the bad advice comes from our
own families. Parents aren't perfect. They're also influenced by the
wider society, and they can make mistakes in raising their children.
(00:27):
There was a Puse study from January. I refer to
this study a lot, just because it really blew my
mind that found parents would prefer by a lot that
their children prioritize financial independence and a good career over
family and children. Eighty eight percent of parents said it
was extremely or very important for their children to be
(00:49):
financially independent when they reached adulthood. I mean sure, like
who doesn't think that that's definitely a worthy goal. And
eighty eight percent also said the same of their children
having a job they enjoy. Okay, you know, I want
my kids to be financially independent. I want them to
have a job they enjoy. I'm with you. But then
(01:09):
only twenty one percent of parents said it was extremely
or very important for their child to get married, and
just twenty percent felt that strongly about their kids reproducing.
So I mean, just the idea that such a greater
number cared about their child's job versus having grandchildren is astonishing.
(01:33):
I mean, to me, that's civilization ending, and beyond that,
it's just bad advice for life. Like, if you're concerned
about your child making a good living them, getting married
goes a long way towards that, and living a stable
life in general goes a long way towards making more money.
(01:55):
I got into this a few episodes ago with Brad Wilcox.
But married people or simply richer I don't just mean
earning more money. They also save more money, which is
a really surprising stat since you know, married people often
have to take care of these really expensive little people
that live with them. They still end up saving more
money than single people. Putting money or career first doesn't work.
(02:20):
You can't have it all in that way. You can
have it most of it if you're in a stable relationship.
I mean, married people also pool their resources. You want
your kid to be financially secure, move marriage to the
top of his or her to do list. A study
I looked at found that twenty nine percent of single
adults consider themselves financially secure, whereas about half of married
(02:43):
couples say the same. I mean, that's a jump, you know,
but forget about the financial part of it. That's the
other thing I think like getting too wrapped up, and
I tend to do it myself. I tend to look
at these studies and say, like, it's so much better
for you financially to get married. But that's you know,
not romantic and all of that. So it's important to
look at marriage as being important for a lot of reasons.
(03:06):
We hear a lot about people dying lonely deaths, deaths
of despair, and yet we're giving our kids this terrible
advice to pursue money over relationships, only to what have
them die alone at sixty? Who wants that life for
their children. What's worse is parents are specifically not passing
(03:27):
on their own values to their kids. It's baffling. A
pupil from a few months ago found that only about
a third of parents consider it important to pass their
religious values onto their children. Like, are you serious with this?
Someone sent me A study just came out on Friday. Actually, Communio,
a national nonprofit organization, conducted a nationwide survey of nineteen
(03:52):
thousand Sunday church attendees, and they did it during worship
in one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic con ggregations.
They found that only twenty two percent of church goers
consider themselves lonely, while that number is about fifty percent
in the general population. I mean, religion matters, the religious services.
(04:13):
Attending religious services. We know that this leads to, you know,
a sense of community that you just simply don't have
if you don't go. And you know, honestly, I I'm
sort of mixed on where our family is for religious services.
We don't really go to anything regularly, and I, you know,
I feel like for my own kids, I have to
(04:34):
make that change. I'm trying. I've been trying, but I
get that it's important even if we don't do it.
You know, I feel like I understand that we need
to be motivating towards that. None of this is a coincidence.
Religion is good, marriage is good, community is good. These
are things that we know. So how did we get
(04:56):
to this stage where we're giving our kids such awful
life advice saying that those things don't really matter. I
really think that what happened is parents try to be
cool or try to be a friend to their kid,
and what ends up happening is if anything goes attitude like,
oh you don't need to get married, Oh you don't
need to go to religious services, you could do whatever
(05:16):
you want, everything's fine. They don't want to be like
that uncool generation who raised them. They want to be
understanding and let their kids be free to make their choices.
I mean, sure, kids will make their own choices no
matter what you say to them, but that doesn't mean
you shouldn't lay down the markers in your own home.
(05:38):
This is what we believe, This is what we want
for you. This is what a successful life looks like.
You win nothing by pretending all choices are just as
good as all the other choices. Tell your kids the
truth and then let them go forge their own path.
Coming up next and interview with Andrew Claven. Join us
after the break and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz
(06:01):
Show on iHeartRadio. Our guest today is Andrew Claven. Andrew
is host of The Andrew Claven Show an author of
the new novel The House of Love and Death. Thank
you so much for coming on, Andrew, it's.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Good to see you, Carol. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Really good to see you too. So The House of
Love and Death is the third in a trilogy. Tell
us a little bit about the book and the series.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, it's a third in the series. I'm hoping it'll
go for ten books at least. Yeah. No. It's a long,
long story about a guy named Cameron Winter who has
been doing some very dirty work for the government in
his past and is now trying to recover and become
a sort of better person. He's taken a job as
a poetry professor in a Midwestern school, but he has
(06:43):
this what he calls a strange habit of mind where
every time he sees certain crimes that just don't make
sense to him, he's obsessively has to go out and
see if he can figure out what it is that
doesn't make sense about them. So he's a guy who's
kind of been an anti hero is trying to overcome
that becomes something better in the world, and the world
is falling apart around him. He's living in modern America,
(07:04):
so the world is falling apart around him, And it's
basically exploring the idea of how can you be a
good Man in a bad Time.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
I like that. So some of your books have been
made into Hollywood movies before I know. You had True
Crime with Clint Eastwood, Don't Say a Word with Michael Douglas,
and this trilogy has been best selling. So has Hollywood
come calling again?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Absolutely not. That is something you know. I've been a
very outspoken conservative and an outspoken Christian and is very doubtful.
In fact, when I sent the first book of the series,
When Christmas Comes to my very left wing film agent,
he loved it. He thought it was absolutely fantastic, and
he took it out to over one hundred people and
not even a single bite, not a little touch of
(07:49):
interest in it. And I kept saying to him, you know,
I am blacklisted, and he keeps saying, no, no, no,
they would never black Chust. It's all about the money.
And I kept saying, ah, you know, I don't know.
But he was never quite convinced. But he never got
anywhere with it. Eventually they'll be banned into movies, but
not for a while. Maybe I have to disappear before
that happened.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So how do we turn around in industry that is
not that interested in making money? I mean, Disney continues
to lose money and they're like, they seem fine with
it in the pursuit of their ideology.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
That's right, and people do not understand that. People always
say they think they're being kind of cynical wise by
saying Hollywood is all about the money, but it's not,
you know, And they make the money anyway. They make
it off Marvel movies, they make it off those big
tent pole pictures. But we don't turn it around. We
have to beat it. We have to make our own industry,
We have to build our own infrastructure. This is one
of the most important parts that conservatives don't understand. It's
(08:41):
not enough to make movies because you can make movies
off a credit card. Now they're absolutely beautiful looking. You
need distribution entities, and you need review entities. You need
to give awards to artists. I mean, artists live for love,
you know. And Yeah, when you want to know why
actors don't care whether their movies make money, it's because
they get awards, they get prestige, they get girls, they
(09:04):
get all the things that they went into acting for, right,
and so they and the money will come. But we
don't have any of those things. So when I bring
out a novel, for instance, this I used to get
before I became outspoken. I used to become get hundreds
of venues giving me absolutely great reviews. Now I'm lucky
if I get any kind of major review attention. And
(09:26):
still I've managed to put books on the bestseller list,
which is amazing because because we're developing our own media,
but it's still very difficult, and we just haven't committed
to the culture the way we should not yet, but
we're starting. It's starting.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, I mean, I think Daily Wire is obviously leading
the way on so much of that. But so what
do you think is like so you're saying, like building
a movie studio would only be step one, but what
are like the next steps? What you know, is it
really just we have to just build a parallel society
and kind of leave the left out of it.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yes, because we'll destroy them. Every thing they do is garbage.
Everything they touched turns to crap. Their stories are lies.
They're lecturing us. Everybody has to Nobody can be in
a marriage of two white people. Everybody has to be
in a mixed marriage, which, of course I could care
less whether people in mixed marriage I just don't want
to be lectured by the worst people in the country.
(10:18):
It's like fruit lying on the ground. It's not low
hanging fruit, it's fruit lying on the ground. They don't
make you know, A long time ago I made a
video called the One State Solution about how the entire
middle he should be given to the Jews. And when
I came up with the idea, I thought, that's such
an obvious joke. Someone must have made it. No, No,
they don't make any of those jokes, And so the
(10:39):
field is open. We could devour them if people would
just start spending the money and the attention to do it.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
So, I mean, changing the culture is kind of a
tough you know, ask like other than movies. I guess
my question is how do we do it without? You know,
I guess we can't not restart everything. How do we
start this process?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Well, see, the thing is, conservatives by nature are kind
of backward looking, and you need to be forward looking
because the arts, the arts will only be saved by
people who love them. They won't be saved by people
who want to bludgeon other people into agreeing with you.
The arts are naturally countercultural, so we're actually in a
good position because we are the counterculture. But look look ahead.
Things that are coming out that are going to be
(11:24):
the great new art form are things like the oculus
that the meta stuff where you have three dimensional art
going on, is going to be. You know, YouTube and
videos are a form of art that we've actually done
very well. In those small satirical videos. We're a lot
funnier than they are where you know, we're a lot
we're saying it's easier to be funny because we tell
(11:44):
the truth. So there's all kinds of ways for ordinary
creative people to make their mark, but you have to
do it, and you have to give up on the
big career in Hollywood. This was a benefit that I had.
I got blacklisted in Hollywood. I always say I didn't
care couldn't care less. It was painful, but I never
lost any sleep over it because I just thought, no,
I'm going to make things any way I can. If
(12:06):
I have to just go to people's houses and scratch
it on their door, I'll do that. And it's been great.
It's worked out. You know, I'm good at what I do.
I've worked very hard to become good at what I do,
and so when people pick it up. I'm not a
conservative making art. I'm an artist who's a conservative. That's
that's what we're looking for.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
That's great. Yeah, did you always want to be a
writer always?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I mean after I got over like wanting to be
a cowboy? Yeah, basically, you know.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
But still be a cowboy.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
And maybe I could or right fielder for the Yankees
if just get out of my way. But yeah, no,
I always wanted to. I loved I sort of found
myself in the books of the tough guy writers like
Ernest Hemingway and especially Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels.
And so I'm doing exactly kind of what I set
(12:56):
out to do. And I'm now at that stage, at
late stage in a career where you start to sum
up and think about what you're doing. So these new books,
the Camera and Winter books are really, I feel like,
really rich with kind of the tradition that I've been
working in all this time. And it's a very moving
experience to kind of look at everything you've done and
try to bring it all together.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
So both of your children have also written books. You
have two children, right.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
I have two children, Yes, children.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, So Spencer Claven and Faith More and I'm actually
having Faith on the show about her book later this week.
Did you force them to follow.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
In your books? No? No, Oh my god, I would
have thrown my body over the door if I could
have stop them. I always feel that my family, somewhere,
somewhere in the past, someone in my family burned a
witch and she was going up and flames. She said,
you'll never have a doctor and your family, you know,
only artists. But they're both incredibly First of all, they're
both so such different people with such different outlooks. But
(13:54):
not only are they loving toward one another, but they
actually have each one of them this voice that I
think is right rather remarkable. I've read Faith's new book
and it's charming and witty and just another kind of
thing you know, that I would do or Spencer would do,
and I think it's it's a wonderful thing to see.
(14:14):
And again, because no one else is doing what we do,
the field is kind of open, and it's it's kind
of nice to be able to offer things to people
who aren't getting entertained because they're always being attacked.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, so you've written so many amazing books. You have
a great family. I just love your kids. Do you
feel like you've made it?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Well, that's a tough question. I'm not even sure what
it means. I feel that I have lived an extraordinarily
beautiful life. I mean, I cannot understand why this happened
to me. And I say that actually seriously, I've frequently
talked to God about this. I have a marriage that
is out of a fairy tale. I mean, you know,
(14:56):
at least from my point of view. Maybe my wife
is trying to stake out the back when do as
I speak. But you know, the kids are so are
so wonderful. I love them and we're close, and it's
it's a beautiful thing. I do the work that I
set out to do, and I do it at as
high a level as I could have ever expected of myself,
and sometimes higher. So yeah, you know, let's put it
(15:18):
this way. I have no complaints. I guess the reason
I hesitate to give you a yes or no answer
because there's always something ahead of you. There really something
more you want to achieve. And that's a beautiful thing too,
because I wouldn't want to just kind of dust off
my hands and say, well that's that's it. Until the
boss calls time, you know. So so yeah, you know,
(15:38):
I feel it's just been an amazing life. And again,
I'm not sure some I keep expecting someone to knock
on the door and say, sorry, you got the wrong life,
But yeah, I have no complaints.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
So I have two separate friends who don't know each other,
who both say that you are podcast. You know, your
show like feels like like a friend. You know, I
feel like that's really the highest compliment that anybody can get.
Did you kind of start out your show thinking like
I'm going to be a friend to all these people?
Speaker 2 (16:12):
No, sometime I know it's funny. One of the reasons
I write is because there is nothing more beautiful to
me than if I don't sleep much and I'll wake
up at three o'clock in the morning, and if you
go and reach out for a book, you feel like, oh,
there's somebody out there in the darkness, even if they're
long dead, there's somebody out there in the darkness who
saw the things that I see and feels felt the
(16:36):
things that I feel. And so hopefully that's come across
in the podcast. You know, I never expected to be
doing anything like this. I never expected to be in public,
certainly never expected to be in front of cameras, and
it took me a while to sort of warm up
and let go and open myself to what I was doing.
At first, I felt very withdrawn and a little bit
(16:58):
performative in the since I'm not really a performer. It
took a while for me to kind of overcome that.
But I'm really happy to hear that. I mean, it is.
I do give it everything I've got every week. And
one of the reasons it was I was doing it
four days a week and I said to Jeremy Barne,
who runs the Daily Wire, I said, you know, I
just can't get it at the quality I want it,
(17:19):
so I want to I asked if I could cut
it back. And it's been great. I mean, that has
been great. I feel it is up the quality, and
I'm thrilled to hear that.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah. Are you optimistic in general on our culture or
where is Angel Clavin? You know, on what's going on
in the country and where we're heading, especially culturally.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, well, I feel that we've hit a bottom place.
I feel that the thought of the last five hundred years,
and I'm not joking about this, I feel that over
the course of five hundred years, the idea of faith
has been bleeding away. The greatest thinkers have been saying
it's bleeding away. They've been talking about what it was
going to be like when it bled away, and all
(17:59):
of that stuff has come true. And so the question, now,
you know, it's funny, but even people I know who
have no faith, who have no religion, are talking to
me now in religious terms. They're talking about demonic times.
They're talking about the end of days and all those things.
And so, either you know, we're going to look up
in the cloud and God is going to be coming
(18:20):
down with charriots and angels and all that stuff, or
it's time to make a turn. We're going through something
that I've never seen before. I've been I'm now one
hundred and seventy two years old, and I've never seen
I've never seen a pause in the culture like this.
Our movie stink, our books aren't that good, our music
is terrible. Everything has stopped. Even the New York Times.
(18:43):
I have to say that one of their critics wrote
a long piece about this, why has this happened? And
of course everything after that was incorrect, but he was
at least asking the question that means that something new
is coming, and hopefully it's something new that remains human
and humane and starts to I moved back toward the
light of spiritual faith, because we're not just meat puppets
(19:06):
filled with chemistry sets. We're actually are something far more
than that. And I understand that we had to explore
this thought. Some thoughts are inevitably will be explored. But
it was wrong. There was thought was wrong, and the
thought that created modernism and postmodernism and all the things
that came afterwards was an incorrect thought. And now that
we've hit the bottom, I'm very hopeful that we will
(19:28):
turn around. I did, I mean my life. I was
baptized at the age of forty nine. I mean my
life has been a long journey in that regard. And
I only came to faith because it made sense when
nothing else did. And it not only made sense in itself,
it made sense of everything else. And so I cannot
help but believe and have faith in the idea that
(19:48):
people ultimately turn to what makes sense away from what
is destroying them and dragging them down. So many, especially
young people, I talk to them all the time. They're
so unhappy and it's like, you know, it's eventually you
start to think, well, maybe I don't have to be
this way, Maybe this is not what life is supposed
to be.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So I don't think you look a day over one
hundred and seventy flatter me. We're going to take a
quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
What would you say is our largest cultural or sital
problem and is it solvable?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Well, it's this, It's materialism, and it's so it diffuses
the society so completely that even the people who think
they have faith don't really act as if they have
faith a minute. They get depressed, they take a pill,
they talk about they'll say, well, I'm having a you know,
an adrenaline rush, instead of saying I'm excited. They talk
(20:44):
about themselves as if there were a chemistry set and
that's not what we are. The obvious truth is that
the chemicals in our bodies, or our bodies or physical
machines are reflecting something that's happening that you know, just
like a word reflects a meaning, our bodies reflect a self.
And I think that's where we're going to have to
come back to. And yes, of course it's solvable because
(21:05):
the funny thing, the weirdest thing about life, and the
most hopeful thing about life, is you only have to
turn the ship around. It's like the minute you turn
in another direction. This is in the New Testament. There's
a story of the prodigal son who goes off and
wastes everything. He has everything, and he comes back and
the minute he comes over the hill, thinking I'll beg
(21:28):
my father to take me back, And the minute he
comes over the hill, his father runs to greet him.
And that is something I've seen before. To give an example,
the seventies were very much like this time, not quite
as bad. There were things that were better about them,
but the economy was bad, the culture was bad, and
all that had to happen was Ronald Reagan had to
(21:48):
just say we're going to go in a different direction,
and within a year everything was better. Rudy Giuliani took
over a city that was just as bad as San
Francisco is today and somehow worse, and all he need
to do is turn the culture well. The New York
Times called them names and a racism every day, but
the whole city turned around almost instantaneously. It was really
(22:08):
a beautiful thing, and that's true of individual lives too.
You only have to turn around and you know your
father comes running to meet you. And so I'm really
always optimistic, even though I do know that everything that's
mortal dies and everything built by mortal fans collapses. I
don't think we're there yet. I don't think this is
(22:29):
that time yet, and so I'm hopeful it can turn
around and quicker than we think.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Do you think you have a nonfiction book on all
of this in you?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
You know? I have. I've been writing nonfiction books too,
which has been a really exciting part of this part
of my career. I'm working on one now about evil
in the arts and what that looks like. And yes,
I think this is something. You know. I wrote a
memoir which was about my coming to faith, but so
(22:59):
much to me since then.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
That I could, you know, I don't want our part two.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, I don't. I don't want to. I don't want
to be like Barack Obama just writing memoirs about myself.
But I do. It has been a journey and it
has been one of the most remarkable times in my life.
I mean, I started at the Daily Wire. It was
me and Ben Shapiro and Jeremy and Jeremy's poolhouse on
a card table, and now it's a billion dollar company.
(23:24):
Was actually making the change in the culture we all
talked about it to be. So that's a journey. It's
pretty exciting and I would like to write about that too.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
I can't wait to read that. So my last question
is for you to end with your best tip for
our listeners on how they can improve their lives. Andrew
Clayvin advice.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Let's hear it the best well. I can tell you
that it's easy advice to give, it's hard advice to take.
But if I had to sum it up, it would
be living the truth. You know, everything in our culture
is urging you to lie, not just urging you to lie,
but silencing you if you tell the truth. If you
(24:05):
just say, well, a man can't become a woman. I
don't care how you live, but a man can't become
a woman, you will be demonetized and pushed off social
media and called names. If you point to you know,
things that are wrong in the culture, that maybe it
would be better if more black people got married before
they have family, Suddenly you're a racist for saying the
one thing that a friend would actually say to a friend,
(24:26):
which is the truth that they need to hear. And
it also means, and this is the hardest part, It
means accepting the shame for your own behavior and for
your own thoughts and for the ways in which you
fail yourself and fail. This is the one thing that's
true of every single person. Every single person knows he
is not who he's supposed to be, every single one
(24:47):
of us. And the way that you turn that around,
and the way that you turn that around is you
start to tell yourself the truth about yourself. And it
costs you shame. And it's something that people, if I
had to find you know, people say, ohtho, everybody's motivated
by sax. Everybody's motivated by money and all these things.
If I had to pick one thing, I would say,
everybody's motivated for by the need to feel virtuous. And
(25:09):
once you accept the fact that you're not virtuous, that
you are a coward, that you are corrupt, that you
would sheet if you were given the moment, the darkness
to do it. And once you accept that about yourself,
suddenly you see it's like a road, a magic road
appears in front of you where you don't have to
be that way anymore. And so that's the one thing
(25:29):
I would tell people. Make the effort to tell yourself
the truth, make the effort to speak the truth, pay
the price, and keep going because you will get to
a better place than you are right now. There's just
no question about it.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
You should all listen to him. He is Andrew Clavin.
He is fantastic. His new book is The House of
Love and Death. Please pick it up and read it
and tell all your friends. Thank you so much, Andrew.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Thanks Carl, great to see you.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitz Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
One of the topics that I want to get into
here is how bad advice can lead to problems in
your life, and sometimes the bad advice comes from our
own families. Parents aren't perfect. They're also influenced by the
wider society, and they can make mistakes in raising their children.
(00:27):
There was a Puse study from January. I refer to
this study a lot, just because it really blew my
mind that found parents would prefer by a lot that
their children prioritize financial independence and a good career over
family and children. Eighty eight percent of parents said it
was extremely or very important for their children to be
(00:49):
financially independent when they reached adulthood. I mean sure, like
who doesn't think that that's definitely a worthy goal. And
eighty eight percent also said the same of their children
having a job they enjoy. Okay, you know, I want
my kids to be financially independent. I want them to
have a job they enjoy. I'm with you. But then
(01:09):
only twenty one percent of parents said it was extremely
or very important for their child to get married, and
just twenty percent felt that strongly about their kids reproducing.
So I mean, just the idea that such a greater
number cared about their child's job versus having grandchildren is astonishing.
(01:33):
I mean, to me, that's civilization ending, and beyond that,
it's just bad advice for life. Like, if you're concerned
about your child making a good living them, getting married
goes a long way towards that, and living a stable
life in general goes a long way towards making more money.
(01:55):
I got into this a few episodes ago with Brad Wilcox.
But married people or simply richer I don't just mean
earning more money. They also save more money, which is
a really surprising stat since you know, married people often
have to take care of these really expensive little people
that live with them. They still end up saving more
money than single people. Putting money or career first doesn't work.
(02:20):
You can't have it all in that way. You can
have it most of it if you're in a stable relationship.
I mean, married people also pool their resources. You want
your kid to be financially secure, move marriage to the
top of his or her to do list. A study
I looked at found that twenty nine percent of single
adults consider themselves financially secure, whereas about half of married
(02:43):
couples say the same. I mean, that's a jump, you know,
but forget about the financial part of it. That's the
other thing I think like getting too wrapped up, and
I tend to do it myself. I tend to look
at these studies and say, like, it's so much better
for you financially to get married. But that's you know,
not romantic and all of that. So it's important to
look at marriage as being important for a lot of reasons.
(03:06):
We hear a lot about people dying lonely deaths, deaths
of despair, and yet we're giving our kids this terrible
advice to pursue money over relationships, only to what have
them die alone at sixty? Who wants that life for
their children. What's worse is parents are specifically not passing
(03:27):
on their own values to their kids. It's baffling. A
pupil from a few months ago found that only about
a third of parents consider it important to pass their
religious values onto their children. Like, are you serious with this?
Someone sent me A study just came out on Friday. Actually, Communio,
a national nonprofit organization, conducted a nationwide survey of nineteen
(03:52):
thousand Sunday church attendees, and they did it during worship
in one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic con ggregations.
They found that only twenty two percent of church goers
consider themselves lonely, while that number is about fifty percent
in the general population. I mean, religion matters, the religious services.
(04:13):
Attending religious services. We know that this leads to, you know,
a sense of community that you just simply don't have
if you don't go. And you know, honestly, I I'm
sort of mixed on where our family is for religious services.
We don't really go to anything regularly, and I, you know,
I feel like for my own kids, I have to
(04:34):
make that change. I'm trying. I've been trying, but I
get that it's important even if we don't do it.
You know, I feel like I understand that we need
to be motivating towards that. None of this is a coincidence.
Religion is good, marriage is good, community is good. These
are things that we know. So how did we get
(04:56):
to this stage where we're giving our kids such awful
life advice saying that those things don't really matter. I
really think that what happened is parents try to be
cool or try to be a friend to their kid,
and what ends up happening is if anything goes attitude like,
oh you don't need to get married, Oh you don't
need to go to religious services, you could do whatever
(05:16):
you want, everything's fine. They don't want to be like
that uncool generation who raised them. They want to be
understanding and let their kids be free to make their choices.
I mean, sure, kids will make their own choices no
matter what you say to them, but that doesn't mean
you shouldn't lay down the markers in your own home.
(05:38):
This is what we believe, This is what we want
for you. This is what a successful life looks like.
You win nothing by pretending all choices are just as
good as all the other choices. Tell your kids the
truth and then let them go forge their own path.
Coming up next and interview with Andrew Claven. Join us
after the break and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz
(06:01):
Show on iHeartRadio. Our guest today is Andrew Claven. Andrew
is host of The Andrew Claven Show an author of
the new novel The House of Love and Death. Thank
you so much for coming on, Andrew, it's.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Good to see you, Carol. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Really good to see you too. So The House of
Love and Death is the third in a trilogy. Tell
us a little bit about the book and the series.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, it's a third in the series. I'm hoping it'll
go for ten books at least. Yeah. No. It's a long,
long story about a guy named Cameron Winter who has
been doing some very dirty work for the government in
his past and is now trying to recover and become
a sort of better person. He's taken a job as
a poetry professor in a Midwestern school, but he has
(06:43):
this what he calls a strange habit of mind where
every time he sees certain crimes that just don't make
sense to him, he's obsessively has to go out and
see if he can figure out what it is that
doesn't make sense about them. So he's a guy who's
kind of been an anti hero is trying to overcome
that becomes something better in the world, and the world
is falling apart around him. He's living in modern America,
(07:04):
so the world is falling apart around him, And it's
basically exploring the idea of how can you be a
good Man in a bad Time.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
I like that. So some of your books have been
made into Hollywood movies before I know. You had True
Crime with Clint Eastwood, Don't Say a Word with Michael Douglas,
and this trilogy has been best selling. So has Hollywood
come calling again?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Absolutely not. That is something you know. I've been a
very outspoken conservative and an outspoken Christian and is very doubtful.
In fact, when I sent the first book of the series,
When Christmas Comes to my very left wing film agent,
he loved it. He thought it was absolutely fantastic, and
he took it out to over one hundred people and
not even a single bite, not a little touch of
(07:49):
interest in it. And I kept saying to him, you know,
I am blacklisted, and he keeps saying, no, no, no,
they would never black Chust. It's all about the money.
And I kept saying, ah, you know, I don't know.
But he was never quite convinced. But he never got
anywhere with it. Eventually they'll be banned into movies, but
not for a while. Maybe I have to disappear before
that happened.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So how do we turn around in industry that is
not that interested in making money? I mean, Disney continues
to lose money and they're like, they seem fine with
it in the pursuit of their ideology.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
That's right, and people do not understand that. People always
say they think they're being kind of cynical wise by
saying Hollywood is all about the money, but it's not,
you know, And they make the money anyway. They make
it off Marvel movies, they make it off those big
tent pole pictures. But we don't turn it around. We
have to beat it. We have to make our own industry,
We have to build our own infrastructure. This is one
of the most important parts that conservatives don't understand. It's
(08:41):
not enough to make movies because you can make movies
off a credit card. Now they're absolutely beautiful looking. You
need distribution entities, and you need review entities. You need
to give awards to artists. I mean, artists live for love,
you know. And Yeah, when you want to know why
actors don't care whether their movies make money, it's because
they get awards, they get prestige, they get girls, they
(09:04):
get all the things that they went into acting for, right,
and so they and the money will come. But we
don't have any of those things. So when I bring
out a novel, for instance, this I used to get
before I became outspoken. I used to become get hundreds
of venues giving me absolutely great reviews. Now I'm lucky
if I get any kind of major review attention. And
(09:26):
still I've managed to put books on the bestseller list,
which is amazing because because we're developing our own media,
but it's still very difficult, and we just haven't committed
to the culture the way we should not yet, but
we're starting. It's starting.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, I mean, I think Daily Wire is obviously leading
the way on so much of that. But so what
do you think is like so you're saying, like building
a movie studio would only be step one, but what
are like the next steps? What you know, is it
really just we have to just build a parallel society
and kind of leave the left out of it.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yes, because we'll destroy them. Every thing they do is garbage.
Everything they touched turns to crap. Their stories are lies.
They're lecturing us. Everybody has to Nobody can be in
a marriage of two white people. Everybody has to be
in a mixed marriage, which, of course I could care
less whether people in mixed marriage I just don't want
to be lectured by the worst people in the country.
(10:18):
It's like fruit lying on the ground. It's not low
hanging fruit, it's fruit lying on the ground. They don't
make you know, A long time ago I made a
video called the One State Solution about how the entire
middle he should be given to the Jews. And when
I came up with the idea, I thought, that's such
an obvious joke. Someone must have made it. No, No,
they don't make any of those jokes, And so the
(10:39):
field is open. We could devour them if people would
just start spending the money and the attention to do it.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
So, I mean, changing the culture is kind of a
tough you know, ask like other than movies. I guess
my question is how do we do it without? You know,
I guess we can't not restart everything. How do we
start this process?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Well, see, the thing is, conservatives by nature are kind
of backward looking, and you need to be forward looking
because the arts, the arts will only be saved by
people who love them. They won't be saved by people
who want to bludgeon other people into agreeing with you.
The arts are naturally countercultural, so we're actually in a
good position because we are the counterculture. But look look ahead.
Things that are coming out that are going to be
(11:24):
the great new art form are things like the oculus
that the meta stuff where you have three dimensional art
going on, is going to be. You know, YouTube and
videos are a form of art that we've actually done
very well. In those small satirical videos. We're a lot
funnier than they are where you know, we're a lot
we're saying it's easier to be funny because we tell
(11:44):
the truth. So there's all kinds of ways for ordinary
creative people to make their mark, but you have to
do it, and you have to give up on the
big career in Hollywood. This was a benefit that I had.
I got blacklisted in Hollywood. I always say I didn't
care couldn't care less. It was painful, but I never
lost any sleep over it because I just thought, no,
I'm going to make things any way I can. If
(12:06):
I have to just go to people's houses and scratch
it on their door, I'll do that. And it's been great.
It's worked out. You know, I'm good at what I do.
I've worked very hard to become good at what I do,
and so when people pick it up. I'm not a
conservative making art. I'm an artist who's a conservative. That's
that's what we're looking for.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
That's great. Yeah, did you always want to be a
writer always?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I mean after I got over like wanting to be
a cowboy? Yeah, basically, you know.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
But still be a cowboy.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
And maybe I could or right fielder for the Yankees
if just get out of my way. But yeah, no,
I always wanted to. I loved I sort of found
myself in the books of the tough guy writers like
Ernest Hemingway and especially Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels.
And so I'm doing exactly kind of what I set
(12:56):
out to do. And I'm now at that stage, at
late stage in a career where you start to sum
up and think about what you're doing. So these new books,
the Camera and Winter books are really, I feel like,
really rich with kind of the tradition that I've been
working in all this time. And it's a very moving
experience to kind of look at everything you've done and
try to bring it all together.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
So both of your children have also written books. You
have two children, right.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
I have two children, Yes, children.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, So Spencer Claven and Faith More and I'm actually
having Faith on the show about her book later this week.
Did you force them to follow.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
In your books? No? No, Oh my god, I would
have thrown my body over the door if I could
have stop them. I always feel that my family, somewhere,
somewhere in the past, someone in my family burned a
witch and she was going up and flames. She said,
you'll never have a doctor and your family, you know,
only artists. But they're both incredibly First of all, they're
both so such different people with such different outlooks. But
(13:54):
not only are they loving toward one another, but they
actually have each one of them this voice that I
think is right rather remarkable. I've read Faith's new book
and it's charming and witty and just another kind of
thing you know, that I would do or Spencer would do,
and I think it's it's a wonderful thing to see.
(14:14):
And again, because no one else is doing what we do,
the field is kind of open, and it's it's kind
of nice to be able to offer things to people
who aren't getting entertained because they're always being attacked.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, so you've written so many amazing books. You have
a great family. I just love your kids. Do you
feel like you've made it?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Well, that's a tough question. I'm not even sure what
it means. I feel that I have lived an extraordinarily
beautiful life. I mean, I cannot understand why this happened
to me. And I say that actually seriously, I've frequently
talked to God about this. I have a marriage that
is out of a fairy tale. I mean, you know,
(14:56):
at least from my point of view. Maybe my wife
is trying to stake out the back when do as
I speak. But you know, the kids are so are
so wonderful. I love them and we're close, and it's
it's a beautiful thing. I do the work that I
set out to do, and I do it at as
high a level as I could have ever expected of myself,
and sometimes higher. So yeah, you know, let's put it
(15:18):
this way. I have no complaints. I guess the reason
I hesitate to give you a yes or no answer
because there's always something ahead of you. There really something
more you want to achieve. And that's a beautiful thing too,
because I wouldn't want to just kind of dust off
my hands and say, well that's that's it. Until the
boss calls time, you know. So so yeah, you know,
(15:38):
I feel it's just been an amazing life. And again,
I'm not sure some I keep expecting someone to knock
on the door and say, sorry, you got the wrong life,
But yeah, I have no complaints.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
So I have two separate friends who don't know each other,
who both say that you are podcast. You know, your
show like feels like like a friend. You know, I
feel like that's really the highest compliment that anybody can get.
Did you kind of start out your show thinking like
I'm going to be a friend to all these people?
Speaker 2 (16:12):
No, sometime I know it's funny. One of the reasons
I write is because there is nothing more beautiful to
me than if I don't sleep much and I'll wake
up at three o'clock in the morning, and if you
go and reach out for a book, you feel like, oh,
there's somebody out there in the darkness, even if they're
long dead, there's somebody out there in the darkness who
saw the things that I see and feels felt the
(16:36):
things that I feel. And so hopefully that's come across
in the podcast. You know, I never expected to be
doing anything like this. I never expected to be in public,
certainly never expected to be in front of cameras, and
it took me a while to sort of warm up
and let go and open myself to what I was doing.
At first, I felt very withdrawn and a little bit
(16:58):
performative in the since I'm not really a performer. It
took a while for me to kind of overcome that.
But I'm really happy to hear that. I mean, it is.
I do give it everything I've got every week. And
one of the reasons it was I was doing it
four days a week and I said to Jeremy Barne,
who runs the Daily Wire, I said, you know, I
just can't get it at the quality I want it,
(17:19):
so I want to I asked if I could cut
it back. And it's been great. I mean, that has
been great. I feel it is up the quality, and
I'm thrilled to hear that.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah. Are you optimistic in general on our culture or
where is Angel Clavin? You know, on what's going on
in the country and where we're heading, especially culturally.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, well, I feel that we've hit a bottom place.
I feel that the thought of the last five hundred years,
and I'm not joking about this, I feel that over
the course of five hundred years, the idea of faith
has been bleeding away. The greatest thinkers have been saying
it's bleeding away. They've been talking about what it was
going to be like when it bled away, and all
(17:59):
of that stuff has come true. And so the question, now,
you know, it's funny, but even people I know who
have no faith, who have no religion, are talking to
me now in religious terms. They're talking about demonic times.
They're talking about the end of days and all those things.
And so, either you know, we're going to look up
in the cloud and God is going to be coming
(18:20):
down with charriots and angels and all that stuff, or
it's time to make a turn. We're going through something
that I've never seen before. I've been I'm now one
hundred and seventy two years old, and I've never seen
I've never seen a pause in the culture like this.
Our movie stink, our books aren't that good, our music
is terrible. Everything has stopped. Even the New York Times.
(18:43):
I have to say that one of their critics wrote
a long piece about this, why has this happened? And
of course everything after that was incorrect, but he was
at least asking the question that means that something new
is coming, and hopefully it's something new that remains human
and humane and starts to I moved back toward the
light of spiritual faith, because we're not just meat puppets
(19:06):
filled with chemistry sets. We're actually are something far more
than that. And I understand that we had to explore
this thought. Some thoughts are inevitably will be explored. But
it was wrong. There was thought was wrong, and the
thought that created modernism and postmodernism and all the things
that came afterwards was an incorrect thought. And now that
we've hit the bottom, I'm very hopeful that we will
(19:28):
turn around. I did, I mean my life. I was
baptized at the age of forty nine. I mean my
life has been a long journey in that regard. And
I only came to faith because it made sense when
nothing else did. And it not only made sense in itself,
it made sense of everything else. And so I cannot
help but believe and have faith in the idea that
(19:48):
people ultimately turn to what makes sense away from what
is destroying them and dragging them down. So many, especially
young people, I talk to them all the time. They're
so unhappy and it's like, you know, it's eventually you
start to think, well, maybe I don't have to be
this way, Maybe this is not what life is supposed
to be.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So I don't think you look a day over one
hundred and seventy flatter me. We're going to take a
quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
What would you say is our largest cultural or sital
problem and is it solvable?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Well, it's this, It's materialism, and it's so it diffuses
the society so completely that even the people who think
they have faith don't really act as if they have
faith a minute. They get depressed, they take a pill,
they talk about they'll say, well, I'm having a you know,
an adrenaline rush, instead of saying I'm excited. They talk
(20:44):
about themselves as if there were a chemistry set and
that's not what we are. The obvious truth is that
the chemicals in our bodies, or our bodies or physical
machines are reflecting something that's happening that you know, just
like a word reflects a meaning, our bodies reflect a self.
And I think that's where we're going to have to
come back to. And yes, of course it's solvable because
(21:05):
the funny thing, the weirdest thing about life, and the
most hopeful thing about life, is you only have to
turn the ship around. It's like the minute you turn
in another direction. This is in the New Testament. There's
a story of the prodigal son who goes off and
wastes everything. He has everything, and he comes back and
the minute he comes over the hill, thinking I'll beg
(21:28):
my father to take me back, And the minute he
comes over the hill, his father runs to greet him.
And that is something I've seen before. To give an example,
the seventies were very much like this time, not quite
as bad. There were things that were better about them,
but the economy was bad, the culture was bad, and
all that had to happen was Ronald Reagan had to
(21:48):
just say we're going to go in a different direction,
and within a year everything was better. Rudy Giuliani took
over a city that was just as bad as San
Francisco is today and somehow worse, and all he need
to do is turn the culture well. The New York
Times called them names and a racism every day, but
the whole city turned around almost instantaneously. It was really
(22:08):
a beautiful thing, and that's true of individual lives too.
You only have to turn around and you know your
father comes running to meet you. And so I'm really
always optimistic, even though I do know that everything that's
mortal dies and everything built by mortal fans collapses. I
don't think we're there yet. I don't think this is
(22:29):
that time yet, and so I'm hopeful it can turn
around and quicker than we think.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Do you think you have a nonfiction book on all
of this in you?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
You know? I have. I've been writing nonfiction books too,
which has been a really exciting part of this part
of my career. I'm working on one now about evil
in the arts and what that looks like. And yes,
I think this is something. You know. I wrote a
memoir which was about my coming to faith, but so
(22:59):
much to me since then.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
That I could, you know, I don't want our part two.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, I don't. I don't want to. I don't want
to be like Barack Obama just writing memoirs about myself.
But I do. It has been a journey and it
has been one of the most remarkable times in my life.
I mean, I started at the Daily Wire. It was
me and Ben Shapiro and Jeremy and Jeremy's poolhouse on
a card table, and now it's a billion dollar company.
(23:24):
Was actually making the change in the culture we all
talked about it to be. So that's a journey. It's
pretty exciting and I would like to write about that too.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
I can't wait to read that. So my last question
is for you to end with your best tip for
our listeners on how they can improve their lives. Andrew
Clayvin advice.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Let's hear it the best well. I can tell you
that it's easy advice to give, it's hard advice to take.
But if I had to sum it up, it would
be living the truth. You know, everything in our culture
is urging you to lie, not just urging you to lie,
but silencing you if you tell the truth. If you
(24:05):
just say, well, a man can't become a woman. I
don't care how you live, but a man can't become
a woman, you will be demonetized and pushed off social
media and called names. If you point to you know,
things that are wrong in the culture, that maybe it
would be better if more black people got married before
they have family, Suddenly you're a racist for saying the
one thing that a friend would actually say to a friend,
(24:26):
which is the truth that they need to hear. And
it also means, and this is the hardest part, It
means accepting the shame for your own behavior and for
your own thoughts and for the ways in which you
fail yourself and fail. This is the one thing that's
true of every single person. Every single person knows he
is not who he's supposed to be, every single one
(24:47):
of us. And the way that you turn that around,
and the way that you turn that around is you
start to tell yourself the truth about yourself. And it
costs you shame. And it's something that people, if I
had to find you know, people say, ohtho, everybody's motivated
by sax. Everybody's motivated by money and all these things.
If I had to pick one thing, I would say,
everybody's motivated for by the need to feel virtuous. And
(25:09):
once you accept the fact that you're not virtuous, that
you are a coward, that you are corrupt, that you
would sheet if you were given the moment, the darkness
to do it. And once you accept that about yourself,
suddenly you see it's like a road, a magic road
appears in front of you where you don't have to
be that way anymore. And so that's the one thing
(25:29):
I would tell people. Make the effort to tell yourself
the truth, make the effort to speak the truth, pay
the price, and keep going because you will get to
a better place than you are right now. There's just
no question about it.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
You should all listen to him. He is Andrew Clavin.
He is fantastic. His new book is The House of
Love and Death. Please pick it up and read it
and tell all your friends. Thank you so much, Andrew.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Thanks Carl, great to see you.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitz Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Karol Markowicz
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