Modern Art, Pornography, and Redemption (Andrew Klavan) | Ep. 526

Summary

Pints With Aquinas Episode 526

Modern Art, Pornography, and Redemption (with Andrew Klavan)

Host: Matt Fradd
Guest: Andrew Klavan (novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic)
Date: May 28, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Matt Fradd sits down with Andrew Klavan—acclaimed novelist and commentator—to discuss the decline of modern art, the reality and ramifications of pornography, the purpose of horror in literature, and the possibility of redemption through faith and beauty. Their wide-ranging conversation threads together philosophy, Catholic theology, personal testimony, and deep dives into how culture, literature, and Christian faith interact with and illuminate the darkest realities of the human condition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Loss of Faith and Its Impact on Art (00:46, 36:28)

• Klavan’s central thesis: The “major event of the last 500 years is the loss of faith. It’s the disenchantment of the world, the loss of faith in God. And so all our art speaks about it.” ([00:46])
• As Western culture grew increasingly materialistic, the female body in art transitions from reverential maternity (Virgin Mary) to nudity, abstraction, and eventually dissolution in modernism (e.g., Jackson Pollock), mirroring the loss of spiritual meaning.
  • “The female body specifically falls apart by the end of it.” ([00:46])

The Purpose and Boundaries of Art (10:16, 15:45)

• Definition of Art: Art transmits inner spiritual and emotional experience from one person to another; it is not reducible to mere emotion or chemical states ([10:16]).
• C.S. Lewis on friendship and art: Art as connection—"What, you too? I thought I was the only one." ([11:45])
• Art and Truth: "Art can never lie. Art has to be true." ([15:45])

Christianity, Darkness, and the Value of Horror (07:36, 13:14, 18:01)

• Christian art and literature have always engaged deeply with darkness: the Bible itself contains horrific stories.
• Klavan: "Why is it I write about dark things, that my perspective has gotten even darker than it was before I was a Christian, and yet I've also gotten more joyful and at peace?" ([07:36])
• On horror: Not all horror is evil; stories like "Hansel and Gretel" or "Dracula" show horror can illuminate the nature of good and evil. The problem arises when horror exists purely "to cause...eroticized excitement by the suffering of others" ([02:47], [13:14]), which is "not art and it's repellent."
  • "It's the sensation of sexual pleasure at the suffering of others...that's how you know it's crossed the line." ([14:56])

The Redemptive Power of Art over Evil (18:01, 20:11)

• Even tales full of horror (e.g., Macbeth) can result in beauty and wisdom, echoing how God draws beauty from evil.
• On the Pietà: “If a man can do that out of that moment, what can God not do out of this?” ([19:18])

The Decline & Confusion of Modern Art (36:42, 39:18, 40:29)

• Klavan gives a “museum tour” from the Sistine Chapel (spiritual beauty) to abstraction, culminating in emptiness. Loss of faith leads to loss of meaning; the human form disappears, perception is questioned, and the self is viewed as a mere animal or machine.
  • “As the idea of God disappears, you get...abstraction where we cease to trust our own perception. Our perception becomes a lie, an illusion...” ([36:42])
  • Jackson Pollock and blank canvases represent this cultural malaise: “We should be horrified. Instead of giving the guy a million dollars, we should be going to a collective psychiatrist.” ([40:29])

The Nature and Effects of Pornography (41:37, 42:10, 44:21)

• Pornography as anti-art: Rather than revealing, it suppresses the person’s subjectivity, reducing them to an object.
  • “For all of its exposure, pornography doesn’t expose. It actually suppresses the subject and leaves us with the shell.” (Fradd, [41:37])
  • Klavan: “If you don’t individualize the person you’re making love to...then you’ve actually lost yourself.” ([43:28])
• Distinguishing depiction from intention: Not all nude art is pornographic; it becomes so in its production, context, use, and consumption.
  • Fradd: Viewing something doesn’t necessarily mean “consuming” it as pornography ([45:19])

Morality, Representation, and Intrinsic Evil (44:21, 49:16)

• Some actions (intentional murder, the production/consumption of pornography) are intrinsically evil and cannot be redeemed by circumstance.
• Klavan is cautious with “evil” as a word but agrees that pornography is always “corrupt and corrupting...that’s what I think evil is.” ([49:16])
• They agree, consumption of pornography is always wrong, but representations of sin, evil, and even sex can at times be depicted truthfully in art or narrative (not gratuitously) ([53:13])

Joy, Faithfulness, and the Real Human Experience (64:08)

• Klavan offers testimonial on the incomparable joy and identity that come with a faithful, loving marriage over a life of promiscuity or indulgence.
  • “The change for me was the day I thought, you know, I’m going to stop resisting adultery and I’m going to start becoming faithful...transformative...” ([65:06])
• The journey of virtue is not repression but becoming something better—"not just being faithful, but becoming a faithful person." ([65:10])

Art, Culture, and Comedy in Modern and Past Times (73:25)

• Discussion on why some art and comedy lasts (humanness, universality), while some is ephemeral (reactions to the times).
• Example: Chaplin’s comedy is rooted in human experience and still elicits laughter today ([76:35])
• Seinfeld’s humor: “This stupid thing about me? That’s you.” ([87:31])

The State of Storytelling, TV, and Film (77:51, 82:02)

• Klavan: The golden age of film was 1939—today’s films often feel “infantilizing,” lacking the adult complexity of earlier eras. ([78:43])
• Recent examples: “Fargo” praised for its depiction of marital fidelity; “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” cited as cinema done right ([82:02])

Faith, the Culture Wars, and Jewish-Christian Relations (91:41, 97:02)

• Klavan distinguishes between disagreeing with someone and hating them. He notes the prevalence of genuine antisemitism on the right but also agrees that accusation of “antisemitism” can be used to shut down legitimate critique.
• The importance of being 'for' something, not merely 'against' something, in shaping culture ([95:48])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The major event of the last 500 years is the loss of faith. It's the disenchantment of the world, the loss of faith in God. And so all our art speaks about it." – Klavan ([00:46])
• "Art can never lie. Art has to be true." – Klavan ([15:45])
• "Why is it that I write about dark things... and yet I've also gotten more joyful and at peace?" – Klavan ([07:36])
• "If a man can do that out of that moment, what can God not do out of this?" – Klavan on the Pietà ([19:18])
• "There are no happy endings. Not in this, the only life we know. No. And I see what you mean by that." – Fradd ([27:09])
• "For all of its exposure, pornography doesn’t expose. It actually suppresses the subject and leaves us with the shell." – Fradd ([41:37])
• "If you don’t individualize the person... to the point where you give them your life, essentially, you’ve actually lost yourself." – Klavan ([43:28])
• "I'm going to stop resisting adultery and become faithful. That was what I figured out... transformative..." – Klavan ([65:06])
• "Christianity is big enough to handle the horror and evil of the world. It always did before." – Klavan ([21:05])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:46 — The loss of faith and art's reflection of it
• 07:36 — Why Klavan writes about darkness as a Christian
• 10:16 — What is art? Art as transmission of spiritual experience
• 13:14 — Is all horror evil? Where does it cross the line?
• 15:45 — Art and truth; when depiction becomes a lie
• 18:01 — Redemptive nature of "dark" art; Macbeth, Pietà
• 36:28 — Literary and artistic reflections of a godless culture
• 39:18–40:29 — Evolution of art from the sublime to the vacuous
• 41:37 — Artistic nudity vs. pornography; subjectivity and soul
• 49:16 — Pornography: always corruptive, never just art
• 53:13 — Narrative depiction of sin; when is it necessary?
• 64:08 — Faithfulness and the joy of virtue
• 73:25 — Why some comedy and art are timeless
• 78:43 — The golden age of movies vs. today’s culture
• 91:41 — Real meaning in political culture & the Daily Wire crew
• 97:02 — On antisemitism, criticism, and identity

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Authentic Exchanges & Tone

• The conversation is warm, candid, and sometimes playful, with self-aware humor about their own limitations or foibles.
• Both men regularly cite classic literature, Catholic teaching, and personal stories, giving the discussion both a scholarly and intimate vibe.
• Throughout, there is an undercurrent of hope—however dark the subject, the possibility of redemption and beauty remains.

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Summary

Klavan and Fradd take listeners on a nuanced journey through the landscapes of modern art, the perils of pornography, the legitimacy of horror in the Christian imagination, and what makes art and beauty possible even in a world wracked by nihilism. Their discussion balances intellectual rigor with personal testimony, ultimately affirming that “the peace that passes understanding” is found not by fleeing from darkness, but by transfiguring it through truth, beauty, and the light of Christ.

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

I think the major event of the last 500 years is the loss of faith. It's the disenchantment of the world, the loss of faith in God. And so all our art speaks about it. And what happens to the female body is, is that it disappears at first. It becomes nude. That's the first thing. It loses its majesty. Instead of being the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mary becomes humanized, which is very, very beautiful. And then over time, as the idea of God disappears, you get the impressionism and the abstraction where we cease to trust our own perception. Our perception becomes a lie, an illusion, which it would have to be because we perceive ourselves as selves, right? And that, as you say, the creature disappears if God disappears. And, and so it must be an illusion that we're a self. I'm just an animal. I'm just a machine that's sitting here and AI can replace me. And all this nonsense that we believe, and that is all in the paintings. It's all in the paintings. The female body specifically falls apart by the end of it. You get Jackson Pollock sprinkling paint. And as you say, it represents the time so it has some value. It shows us to ourselves. But when we see ourselves in that, we should be horrified. You know, instead of giving the guy a million dollars, we should be going to a collective psychiatrist and sort of curing this mental illness. Andrew Clavin.

[B]

Andrew Clavin.

[A]

Andrew Clavin, Daily Wire commentator, best selling.

[B]

Novelist, screenwriter and cultural critic.

[A]

Clavin exposes the moral decay of Hollywood. That's the issue. That's why art is so bad now, is because they can't write women as women, so they can't write men as men. Each, each story that's a true story is a mirror held up not just to nature, but to our nature. As materialism reached its peak, which I think was probably in the 90s, zombie stories became huge. The stories of men are meat. We eat them. You know, that's what it is. We're just steeped in sin. I mean, the world is steeped in sin. And I've noticed that when Christians reach that point, sometimes they lose their joy. Why is it that I write about dark things? That my perspective has gotten even darker than it was before I was a Christian? And yet I've also gotten more joyful.

[B]

Because horror seems to be the most exaggerated example of portraying evil. What's the line?

[A]

That attitude that you are here to cause excitement and even eroticized excitement by the suffering of others is something that I think. It's not art and it's repellent. So when you write a story in which it's really just a pure pleasure, you're lying. And art can never lie. Art has to be true. If it just becomes physical, then what's the difference between that and porn? What's the difference between having sex with a million women and watching porn? If you don't individualize the person you're making love to to the point where you give them your life, essentially, then you've actually lost yourself. You know, you disappeared. I loved Game of Thrones, and it was the first few seasons as HBO's trick to keep you watching. They would explain something, and while they were explaining something, two naked women would be having sex.

[B]

I think that's intrinsically evil. I don't think there's any situation in which that's acceptable.

[A]

I understand they're representing something, but it's a false representation. I think it is corrupt, but still.

[B]

Thank you so much for watching Pints with Aquinas. Before we get into the interview, I'd like to ask you to please consider subscribing. Over 58% of people who watch this show regularly are still not subscribed. So please do it. It's a quick, free, easy way to support the channel. We really appreciate it. Andrew Clavin, thank you for coming back on.

[A]

It's a pleasure. It's great to see you again.

[B]

I wanted to tell you this cause I thought you might be flattered by it, but in a way that's actually genuine. My last. The fellow who worked with me up in Steubenville.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Who? Josiah. Wonderful fella. Would be the first to say. Doesn't like Daily Wire. Yeah. Conservative guy, but, like, doesn't like Daily Wire. Doesn't like, you know, the takes of the hosts most of the time, but he was like, Andrew Clavin was the kindest person who ever.

[A]

Oh, yeah, that's nice.

[B]

Isn't that nice?

[A]

I meant to be cruel. I just forgot.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's nice. Bring that. Bring that in a little bit. I know this is your first time using a microphone.

[A]

It. A fist. Yeah.

[B]

Thanks for coming on. How many of these bloody things have you done so far?

[A]

It's been a lot. And it's, you know, I've been traveling at the same time, so it's like I'm operating on very few hours of sleep most of the time. I'm just waiting for that one interview. This may be it, where I just, like. Completely incomprehensible. Yeah.

[B]

We were speaking before we hit record about what people. The mean things people say. And one of the things people often say to me is, mate, you look exhausted. And I'm like, I feel fine. I slept great. I just look like this now, you know? Well, congratulations on your new book. I read it. It's called the Kingdom of Cain. Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. I just want to quote. I did this last time. I. I read something from you because I think you're an excellent writer.

[A]

Oh, thank you.

[B]

Listen to this. This. Listen to this. You may have heard it. All right, it's. It's. It's two sentences for those at home. Listen to this. Who has not seen. Who has not heard, who has not despised the sleek, slick, smarmy, ever so fashionable nihilism of intellectual elites in love with the tr. Antic of their own debauched philosophy as they theorized to atoms the simple sacredness of human life. Just an example.

[A]

Yeah, that doesn't sound that kind.

[B]

All right, let's. Let's jump into it. Why did you write the book?

[A]

You know, I think there's a lot of different strains for why I wrote the book. Two big questions came together. One is I'm constantly being asked. I constantly get this letter. You call yourself a Christian, and yet you write about such dark. And I think, well, yeah, and it was one of my big fears when I actually realized I was becoming a Christian, that I would lose that edge, that view of life that's realistic and basically deals with the things that people do. And the other strain of thought was there's a moment. If you're truly a Christian, you truly follow some version of what you read in the gospels. I don't care what denomination you are, but if you follow, you start to realize the world is a very dark place. I mean, it's a really dark place. And all those, like, buffoons who get up and say, we're standing on Native American land, and you think, like, so give it back. And it's like, no, no, no, you can't do that. But we'll pretend we're gonna. Because there's. We're just steeped in sin. I mean, the world is steeped in sin. And I've noticed that when Christians reach that point, sometimes they lose their joy. And I have found that that hasn't happened to me. In fact, my attitude toward life has gotten much darker, and yet I have gotten much more peaceful. And I thought, well, that's an interesting question. These two things are kind of related. So why is it that I write about dark things, that my perspective has gotten even darker than it was before I was a Christian, and yet I've also gotten more joyful and at peace.

[B]

This is what you say. You say, quote, they become so pessimistic, they cannot tell the difference between a good day and a bad one, because every day takes place on the planet of our sins. Right?

[A]

Yeah. And it's like. And, you know. You know, I'm sure you know a lot of people who's like, it's the end of days. And you go, really? Because it might be, but, you know, I mean, we're not going to know until the last minute, but it might be the end of days, but it's no worse than it's ever been. And it's actually better in many ways than it's ever been. And yet. And yet you look around and there's a lot of dark stuff, and everything we touch is stained with sin. And so I started to think about the fact that there are certain murders, certain famous murders that have been made into movie after movie after movie, and movies that have inspired other movies and novels that have inspired movies and novels that have inspired other novels and philosophy. And I felt like I'm just gonna write about those and see what it is that artists do that makes those stories revelatory. Because if I had to mark the beginning, I mean, in any journey, you can mark a number of beginnings. But if I had to mark one of the beginning points of my turn toward faith, it was reading Crime and Punishment when I was 19, because it erased the idea that morality is relative. You know, when you get to that scene, that axe murder scene, you think, like, there's no planet where that could be good. That's an evil. You know, no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter what you think, that's evil. And so that was kind of. Once you got to that place, it's the only leap of faith I ever took that, you know, there is such a thing as morality. And once you get there, you're stuck with God. You're gonna wind up. It took me years to get there, decades to get there, but still. And so I always joke, if I went into a Christian bookstore today and said, could I have that book about the axe murderer who gets saved by a prostitute? Yeah. Police, you know, security, you know. And so I wanted to write about, like, why it is that I feel that delving into the darkness actually can restore your faith and what it is about art that brings God out in everything. I think.

[B]

Yeah, I want to give people a disclaimer. This is not a book for the faint of heart. This is not a book to hand your teenage child without reading it first. I mean, it's really dark. I mean, there were some things in there that. Wow.

[A]

Although by the end of it, I think the last third of it is, I think, a little different than that.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. Let me start with a more general question. I'm actually interested. What is art? I think it's something that rational beings create. What else? What is it?

[A]

Well, it's also a way of transferring the inner experience of one human being to other human beings. I mean, that's basically what Tolstoy said. He wrote a little pamphlet called what Is Art? And he said it's a way of transferring emotion from one person to another. But I think it goes beyond that, because when you say emotion, it's not just feeling things. It's the entire experience of being alive, which is not a scientific experience. It's an actual spiritual experience. And we live in this world where we'll say things like, I have an adrenaline rush, meaning I'm excited, as if the chemical were causing the emotion. Which is nonsense. It's obvious nonsense. Yuval Harari, the darling of Davos Intellectual, he says we're not. The only thing that ever makes us happy is basically a feeling inside us. It's not that you won the baseball game. It's not that you found true love. It's not that you got a promotion. It's this feeling inside this chemical reaction that's garbage. That's silly thinking, you know? And so I think that what art does is it takes this indescribable feeling. I can't tell you what it feels like to fall in love or to be out in the rain. I can't tell you what it's like to do anything, but I can tell you a story or write a song or paint a picture that communicates that moment to you. And in doing that, I think you actually take up the work of creation from God in the same way a mother does when she creates life. I think that that's, you know, it's obviously a poor imitation of that, but it's still the same kind of enterprise.

[B]

It reminds me of what C.S. lewis said about friendship. Like a friendship is formed when one man says to another, what, you too? I thought I was the only one.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

And so it sort of pulls us out of our solipsistic caves to realize that other people experience the terror and the beauty and wildness of life.

[A]

And so, I mean, it's so. I mean, especially at 3 o' clock in the morning, if you can reach for a book and just feel like you're walking with somebody that you love and you're, you know, it's just. It just ends that solitude, that horrible solitude that you can.

[B]

One of the things you say early on in the book is that to turn away from the dark aspects of life is to turn away from a great deal of life. And, you know, the Bible has a lot of awful things depicted in it. So if your objection is you ought not to be reading something that contains serious sin, well, the torture and crucifixion of the God man is the top among them.

[A]

It's a big one.

[B]

There's also adultery and all sorts of things happening.

[A]

Incest, rape, everything, you know, and I actually did get one of the times I got that letter. You call yourself a Christian, but, you know, somebody said, I'm just going to stick with the Bible. Good luck to you, my friend. It's way worse stuff I wouldn't put in my books.

[B]

But a question I have is, I mean, what makes. Let's use horror, because horror seems to be the most exaggerated example of portraying evil. What makes certain horror books or movies cross that line into garbage or cross that line into, you know, a serious Christian ought not to be actually. And maybe you disagree with that.

[A]

No, I don't agree.

[B]

Okay, so what, what's the line?

[A]

Well, the story I always tell about this when I was in. Everything in Hollywood goes down to the lowest common denominator. And when I was in Hollywood, I realized, because of the movie the Ring, I realized that ghost stories were going to be popular. I love ghost stories. And you do, too.

[B]

You write.

[A]

You write very good Ghost stories, by.

[B]

The way, mediocre, but thank you.

[A]

I like them very much. But anyway, I saw the Ring. I thought, my career is made. I'm gonna be selling ghost scripts forever. Cause that's what I like. It was PG13. It was not very bloody. You know, they had a lot of scares, but not really. So I started writing ghost scripts and they became. I was very successful selling them. None of them got made, but I was selling them like crazy. And when you do that, people start to call you in with stories that they want to tell and ask you how you would tell them. So they'll say, we have the story about a ghost who does this. And I'll say, how would you do that? And if they like your take, they hire you. And you make good money that way. So they called me in for one of these things, and the guy said to me, we have a story and we want to hear your take on it. I said, great. He said, a woman gets kidnapped and she's tortured. And I said, yeah, that's the story. I said, you know, this is literally what I said to him. I said, when I see a woman being chased across the screen by a guy with a butcher knife, I'm rooting for the woman. Yeah. And it was like, thanks. Don't let the door hit you on your way out. That attitude that you are here to cause excitement and even eroticized excitement by the suffering of others is something that I think is. It's not art and it's repellent. The only time I've ever seen it where it was art is in the Marquis de Sade. And that's because he was saying, I am an atheist. This is what life is to me. And I thought, that's true. If you're an atheist, that is what life is to you. You know, and it's power and feeling and, you know, sensation. And that. That was another step on my way to God. When I thought, like, yeah, that's. If that's what atheism is, I'm out. You know. But I have felt that numerous times. Like, I hate watching movies like Friday the 13th, but. But then you have a movie like Halloween that's in that genre, which actually. Highly intelligent and is not like that at all. It's really about. It's really about the dissolution of the community. And so I think it's the sensation of sexual pleasure at the suffering of others. And I don't wanna say sexual. I wanna say erotic, you know, And I think that's how, you know, back.

[B]

To what we said earlier about what art is, and then you said this example of a guy tortures a woman in a room. The end. And you said, that's not art. Why isn't it art?

[A]

It's art. It's art because in real life, we live in a moral universe. We live in a universe where there are consequences for what we do. I'm not talking about, oh, you go to hell, God doesn't like you. I'm talking about what happens to your soul, how you deform your soul with hatred, with violence and all that stuff. So when you write a story in which it's really just a pure pleasure to do this, you're lying. And art can never lie. Art has to be true in some sense.

[B]

There's certain horror. I mean, I was introduced to horror, first of all, Here's a good argument, I think. All right, let me just back up, because I know we're a lot of Christians who watch the show, obviously, and many are going to take issue with horror at all. I think here's a argument for why horror can be legitimate. So low bar here for people, right? You would say something like, if all horror stories, let's say, were intrinsically evil, that is to say they can never be produced or ready, then something like, sorry, I should have written this down, but something like Hansel and Gretel. Right. Which is one of the most horrific tales I've ever read. And if you don't think it's horrific, you're not paying attention. Certainly it was maybe when you were five. There are other movies like the Quiet Place. There are, you know, so what is horror? Horror kind of produces a strong feeling of dread or fear. Right, right. You don't think that things like Hansel and Gretel and the Quiet Place and Dracula are intrinsically evil, Therefore you can't just write off the entire genre.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You have to kind of say, okay, fine, maybe there are some instances where it's okay. I mean, there are people who will bite the bullet and just say no. All of it's wrong. But I mean, if that's a good definition of horror, that it incites a strong feeling of these things. The Passion of the Christ. Okay, that might be a little too strong. Borderline example. But there are others that we would all agree are good movies, but they do incite a strong feeling of fear or dread or disgust just within us. And so that's why I've always really liked horror. I was introduced to it way too early. I think I was 13 years old, and I was watching all the Halloweens, all the Freddy Kruegers and all that. But. But I've always. I always love the strangeness of horror.

[A]

The eeriness of it.

[B]

Eeriness is what I just kept coming back for.

[A]

And the whole. The whole argument of this book centers on the idea that in performing an act of creation, you're performing an act of love. And that makes. You're creating beauty at some level. And the perfect example of this is Macbeth. Because if there were ever a whore, it's got demons, it's got witches, it's got Satan. It's got everything, you know, murder, betrayal, sexual confusion. It's got everything in it, including nihilism. Including the most beautiful nihilistic speech ever written. Right. You know, life is to be or not to be. Right? And yet it's gorgeous. I mean, you finish with it and you think, that was wonderful. I mean, that was wonderful. There's an old superstition. To even mention it is bad luck in the theater because I think because it's so packed with evil. But when you watch it, you think like, oh, my God, I know something now I didn't know before. And what you know, is a moral thing. And my argument in the book is in doing that, an artist is imitating God. Because this is a world that has gone terribly wrong. And terrible things happen in this world. And our faith and our trust is not really injustice. And it's not entirely in mercy. It's in beauty. It's in the idea that in the end, when we see face to face, the design, we'll go, oh, that was beautiful. Because no other argument holds together. I mean, this is, you know, in Brothers Karamazov, when Dostoevsky's Ivan says, says, I don't care if there's a God. I'll accept that there's a God. But he can't make it up to me that children suffer. No, heaven is going to make it up to me that children suffer. And my answer to that is, your mind is too small to know the beauty that can be made out of even this. And the example that I end the book with is the Pieta, which is the most beautiful statue ever made, in most people's opinion, and certainly mine. And it's a statue of the worst thing that ever happened. It's a mother losing her child. It's the world losing its God. It's a terrible sin, a terrible crime and injustice, a horrible sacrifice. And yet you look at that and you think like, oh, my God, I'm in The presence of almost perfect beauty. And if a man can do that out of that moment, what can God not do out of this?

[B]

I wonder if it's like we have an. Maybe when we have an immature view of Christianity, we seek to create immature art because we. We figure that Christianity as we understand it can't actually handle the great evil that all of us face in life. And so a lot of the movies and things that like. Like God bless those people, right, who put out God is Not Dead videos, I'm sure they had the greatest of intentions, but to me, it was like the movie form of the debates I have in the shower with atheists, where I destroy them. And you know what I mean? It's like. It was just no conversations ever gone like that. And so you're kind of. You kind of make Christians look triumphalist, but then you send people out into the real world and they're faced with maybe more sophisticated objections, which Christie actually can handle, but you weren't even given that. And I wonder if the kind of art that you're talking about sort of is Christianity is big enough to handle the horror and evil of the world.

[A]

It always did before, when Christian. When Christianity was at its height, you know, which is somewhere in the Middle Ages into the. You know, into the Reformation, you know, in that period of 300 years, say. Okay, the art was incredibly gorgeous. I mean, your cardinals are sitting under one of the greatest paintings as we speak. They're in conclave under one of the greatest paintings on earth, that Sistine Chapel. But it's filled with horror. It's filled with nightmare. I mean, truly monstrous, terrible horror.

[B]

This might be a good objection, just to insert real quickly. If a Catholic's watching, who has total. Is wanting to say that horror is always evil, then you're going to have to throw out the inferno, because that is the most terrifying thing you could ever read.

[A]

Yes. And really horrific. I mean, and, you know, even. Even in the. The man who's possessed in the graveyard, you know, where. Christ. That's. If you read it closely, that's a ghost story. I mean, there's a guy in a graveyard walking around full of demons, you know, and who's. My name is Legion.

[B]

That's a terrifying thing to say.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so, look, it's part of life. The God we believe in, the God I love is here now. This is the world that he saves. And it's not Candyland. It's not only if you're a good boy. I mean, if there were only a good Boy, we'd all be screwed entirely. It's this world that all of us wrestle with things all of us have done things that keep us up at night, every one of us. And if we haven't done them, we've thought them yet. And so. And so, like, it is this world. And if an artist can take that world and make it somehow resonant with inner life, it becomes beautiful on this other plane. And I don't judge any work of art. That's a work of art. You know, what I hate is lies. When I walk in and I see a movie or read a book, and I think that's just not true. I mean, I really. I actually had an experience. I love mysteries and, you know, thrillers. I had an experience once. I was reading a novel, got to the last end and realized that it was actually a wicked. It was actually leading me into kind of the world of this bad guy, this child killer, with pleasure, you know? And I. I threw the book away, finished the book, threw it into the garbage and then actually had to wake up in the middle of the night, take it out. Thank you so much.

[B]

No, I'm good. Thank you.

[A]

Take it out of the garbage, carry it outside and throw it out there. I do not want that thing in my house. And yet. And yet I've read books with far more horror in them than that, that I thought were beautiful. And you mentioned the Quiet Place, which.

[B]

I loved that movie.

[A]

That was one of the last movies I really loved. And that moment, which is one of the most frightening moments in film, of that woman giving birth while death is all around her. To me, that was if. You know. I hate movies in which women beat up men and women cops chase men down, things that can't happen. But the idea of this woman who is utterly vulnerable and forced to a level of nobility by sheer terror. I mean, I was twisted like a pretzel as I watched it in my seat. You know, I was twisted up. And at the end, I was like, that was great.

[B]

Did you ever watch the movie by Shyamalan? Is that how you say Shyamalan? And Mum and Away? What's that? It's called the Beach. Is that the movie, the beach where they all go to this beach and they grow old rapidly?

[A]

I've heard of that. I've never seen.

[B]

Please watch it.

[A]

Really?

[B]

I was on a plane flying back from Europe, and I. I was. I was moved so desperately. I was crying like an idiot. You know when you don't want to cry?

[A]

No, that's.

[B]

Sometimes you want to.

[A]

You're like, this feels good.

[B]

I'm gonna, I'm gonna get on a plane. You're like, this is just embarrassing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. I still, I think I still want to try to tease out when it becomes. Yeah, because there's horrific things and we can portray them in a way that gives glory to God. We don't have to just talk about the nice things that happen. Because clearly not only nice things happen. And yet I'm still conflicted. Like when I write my little horror stories, like I sometimes I like, I don't think it's simply a matter of, well, good has to win in the end. No, because sometimes good doesn't.

[A]

Yeah, that's right.

[B]

Sometimes good doesn't win in the end. In a certain situation, things just suck and that's it.

[A]

Yeah. But your stories pull out this uncanny thing that is very real and the reaction to it, which is sometimes fear and sometimes glory. I think that's a very real thing. And if you tell the look, if God is real, then reality will speak of God. It's not just the heavens that declare the glory of God. It's everything. And so I think that this inner life. Why would you say to anybody that the parts of the inner life that are horrific are not parts of your communication with God? That's not true. You know, the comparison that I make, and I have a sort of slightly long form theory about movies like God is not Dead, which actually give it more credit than I want to give it because I don't like those movies, but I think they've created a Christian audience and I think that will eventually make it better, make better art. But if you watch, if a woman watched romantic comedies, I thought this is what love was like. She would really have a terrible time in dealing with what love is actually like. And if, if you watch God is not dead and you think that that's what life is like, when you have faith, you're gonna have a terrible time. When you meet the atheist with a perfectly good argument or, you know, or just the, the injustice of life, you know, I, I think, you know that line that C.S. lewis says, you know, we don't have to be worried about showing children dragons. They know there are dragons, you know, like. And I think that that's true of everybody. We all know there's real horror and that thing of God, everything happens for a reason and he's gone to a better place. I mean, the problem with God is not dead. Guy gets hit by a car and everybody goes, well, at least he believes In God, it's like, could we cry? Could we call his wife? Could we not mourn for death, which is so horrifying? I just think it's fake. It's fake and I don't think. My faith is not fake. My faith is in a real world, in a real God, in a real world.

[B]

You say it is here and now that we are commanded to make what we see into the beautiful. Not in a better past than ever was one. Not in a future utopia. There will be none until Christ returns. And not in the dreamy warmth of a. Of some hymn singing Christian tale that flatters believers with a happy ending. There are no happy endings. Not in this, the only life we know. No. And I see what you mean by that. No happy endings, no innocent cultures, no righteous people, no better yesterdays or tomorrow. There is only this life, this moment in which we must cultivate the peace. Amen. That passes understanding and grow the creative joy that is Christ in us. We have only one sinful self to love, only sinful others to love as we love ourselves. There is no one to point a finger at who is not our own reflection. And then this is very much from Brothers Karamazov. Right? There is no, no one to forgive but everyone being responsible for the sins of others, sins of the world. Yeah.

[A]

Because, I mean, I'm sure you see this stuff all the time. I see it on acts where people just unleash in the name of Christ this hatred.

[B]

Yes, of course. Think like, dude, I, I have, I've repented of that. I, I mean, I've gone to confession because there's been times on the show that I've like called out somebody and I get right, if something is public, okay, yeah, presumably you can now address it. But what I was repenting of was the fact that I didn't need to call it out and that I took a sort of sick delight in it. Right, that kind of, that kind of like in the Brothers Karamazov, the author, when he talks about the trial, was talking about that kind of feverish excitement over the death of this man and the son who may have killed him. And that thing, I don't want to be part of that.

[A]

And you know, there is this thing, like ideas can be so repellent, you know, that you have to fight with them. You have to say that idea.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, 100%.

[A]

But I was joking about this on my podcast the other day, was that, that I said, you know, these anti Semites show up because of stuff I've said and they just scream at me, and they have bots and all this stuff. And I just. And I said, you know, there is this little mean streak in me that enjoys watching them turn their souls into something damnable. I know that's wrong, but I have to admit, I think. But really what I want to do is just. What I really want to do, truly, is say, stop. Don't you see what you're doing to yourself? You're not hurting me. You know, I mean, I'm gonna. I'm gonna still be loved by the people who love me. I'm gonna still have the life that I. God that I love, you know? But you're just turning yourself into something awful.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know.

[B]

Yeah. That actually would be a good premise for a horror story where someone kind of engages in something that makes them increasingly ugly. What was one of the stories, I suppose, in this book that you. By the way, I was really shocked at the thread of events that led to each story. I had no clue.

[A]

I know. That's so I. You know, that was the most fun.

[B]

Part in my naivete. I just thought, okay, crime punishment came out of nowhere. Nope, same thing with Psycho. And. But maybe, since I'm sure you've talked about all of these things on a million different interviews, is there something about one of the stories that. That you're really kind of passionate about talking about or that brings you. Brings you joy so you don't have to repeat the same thing you've said in eight interviews?

[A]

Well, I mean, there was something very beautiful in the first chapter, which is called Crime and Punishment, about the chain that goes from this murder in France by a guy who then became a celebrity. You know, he was a celebrity because he said, I don't. I don't murder. I murder because the world is unjust. And that's. Intellectuals fall for that all the time, every single time. And Dostoevsky read that and was dealing with certain ideas that were kind of in his society, and he invented a character who said, well, a great man. He was basically thinking about Napoleon. A great man is free of the moral law and can do whatever he wants. And he commits this axe murder. And the rest of the story is, well, no, you're not actually free of the moral law. Nietzsche then comes along and actually creates that philosophy, saying, God is dead, therefore we must become God, therefore we can get rid of this ugly Jewish Jesus thing where we have to be nice to nobodies, you know, and the Ubermensch, the Superman, can now rewrite the moral law. And that inspires in the 1920s that inspires these two kids, Leopold and Loeb, who are very wealthy Jewish kids who get into a kind of weird homosexual foliage. Really sick. And they decide, well, because we are Nietzschean Superman, we are going to commit a murder and get away with it. And of course, the morbidly funny part of it is they commit this horrifying murder, and within weeks they're arrested by the Chicago cops, who are no geniuses, right? Just like these ubermensch are. And this becomes the Leopold and Loeb, which was called the crime of the century. It was the early 20th century, becomes a dozen movies. They're still making movies about it today. So there was a movie called Compulsion, which was based directly on it and written by a guy who covered the story. There's a movie called Rope, which was a play that was written by the guy who wrote the play Gaslight, which is where we get the word Gaslight from. He wrote two great thriller plays. One is Gaslight and one is Rope, in which these two kids at the beginning kill this guy and put him in a trunk and then have a dinner party.

[B]

Everyone needs to go watch this movie.

[A]

And it's a good movie.

[B]

It's. I watched it about three years ago. I'd never watched. You're gonna. You're gonna think this is crazy. I'd never watched a Hitchcock movie in my life until about three years ago.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And I thought, well, I've heard of him. I'll just try it. And, you know, my stupid sort of modern ignorance just assumed every movie that was made before Dumb and Dumber wasn't any. Wasn't worth watching. And I could not believe how excellent it was. I did think the speech at the end was a bit sanctimonious and too on the nose.

[A]

And the spe in the play is so much better, the speech in the play. Because the guy. There's a guy in the play who's kind of the hero, I guess you call him. He's the protagonist. And in the play he's this kind of fop. But he's been in World War I, and he has all these kind of sophisticated notions. Well, you call it murder when one man kills another, but when I go to war and we kill entire manhood of one nation, kills the entire man, then we call it war. And it's noble. He's got all these things. And then he sees the body, because he's kind of the detective, and he uncovers the body and he's completely transformed. It's a great speech. And he just says. He says, you swine. You swine. This was a man. This was a person. He loved and laughed. He lived and thought it was good. And you took that away from him and everyone who loved him, and you're going to hang, and it's great. But in the movie. In the movie, they make him. He's Jimmy Stewart, and he sort of says, oh, I love this. I never believed in any of that. But he believed in all of it. He says it in the movie that he believed in all of those things. And he won't take responsibility for it, what Hitchcock does, because Hitchcock is a very visual guy. He adds a piece of business where Stewart winds up with blood on his hands. And so he's sort of saying, you know, you may think you didn't do it, but you did. But. But still, the speech is sanctimonious and it's ridiculous. The one in the play is just. It can't not work. It's so good. But then. But that has been made. I mean, there's a picture called Murder by Numbers with Sandra Bullock, which is based on that. There's a TV show called the Sinner where one of the episodes is based on the Leopold and Low case. If I could think of them, there must be 10, at least, movies that are based directly on the Leopold and Loeb case. Because there are other movies that are kind of inspired by it because it speaks to the loss of faith. And one of the things about Nietzsche is Nietzsche was right. If God is dead, then everything else he says follows. What he meant by God is dead was that we've lost our religion. But he didn't believe in God, so he just thought that it was a fantasy falling apart. But everything else he says is true. If there is no God, then the rest of it follows. And so this story is so compelling because it basically projects what is happening in our society onto the screen and into this compelling story. In the same way that materialism, when. As materialism reached its peak, which I think was probably in the 90s, zombie stories became huge. The stories of men or meat, we eat them. You know, that's what it is. That's why Hannibal Lecter is so compelling as well. And so each. Each story that's a true story is a mirror held up not just to nature, but to our nature. And I think the major event of the last 500 years, yeah. Is the loss of faith. It's the disenchantment of the world, the loss of faith in God. And so all our art speaks about it all art speaks about it. And it's not the only thing it speaks about, but it's the major thing it speaks about. And yet if you take a university class at a great university in great literature, if the word God is mentioned, it's probably in the book itself. It's not the teacher because they don't teach that. They say, oh, it's about, you know, this sexist or it's feminist, anti feminist or it's you know, colonialist or whatever they, they are, their bugbears. But every one of them is really written about our relationship with God and what's happening to it. Because that was the major event of the last 500 years.

[B]

One of my favorite lines from the Second Vatican Council, I think it was in Gaudium, it spes. It says when God is forgotten, the creature itself becomes unintelligible.

[A]

That's right. That is absolutely right. That's the last chapter of this book. I mean the last chapter of this book is what happened to art? It's a tour through a make believe museum using real paintings. And what happens to art and the body as we lose our faith?

[B]

You know, talk about that because we've all seen kind of abstract art now. I don't want to immediately write abstract art off. Sometimes I'll see some paintings that sure, you could mock and say a 2 year old did it. But sometimes I think that's good for people, experimenting, whatever. But you know, we've all seen ah, like this is, this is a much worse place because this thing is in it. So how do we get to that?

[A]

I think that the retreat into materialism, which is a real thing and I think we're all, you know, we're not free of it, even though we're believers, it infects our minds. The retreat into materialism is a retreat into mental illness. To look at the world as if it were just objects. And what they call scientism, the idea that everything can be figured out in a material way is mentally ill. And I think all of us partake in this mental illness. And so if you look at. And since art is the conscience of our kind, you know, art represents the collective conscience. It plays out in art. So you start out, I start out in this museum tour with the creation from the Sistine Chapel, you know, and it's this incredible thing, but inside of God, God is kind of shaped in this, in this robe that is both in the shape of a brain and of a womb. And you know, it's in the shape of both. And you can chart it and I can show it to you. And all this. And in that womb is Eve. And she's not born yet. She's just in his imagination. She's just. And as he's giving life to Adam, she is waiting in the imagination. And what happens to the female body in the course of the next 500 years is that it disappears. It actually disappears. First it becomes abstract, first it becomes nude. That's the first thing. It loses its majesty. Instead of being the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mary becomes humanized, which is very, very beautiful. And then nudity comes along. And I point out that Shakespeare has a little passage where he uses classical art, art about class nudes in classical subjects as pornography. And what he's basically saying is, yeah, you think it's real noble art, but it's actually pornographic. And then over time, as the idea of God disappears, you get the impressionism and the abstraction where we cease to trust our own perception. Our perception becomes a lie, an illusion, which it would have to be because we perceive ourselves as selves, right? And that, as you say, the creature disappears if God disappears. And so it must be an illusion that we're a self. I'm just an. I'm just a machine that's sitting here and AI can replace me and all this nonsense that we believe. And that is all in the paintings. It's all in the paintings. The female body specifically falls apart.

[B]

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[A]

By the end of it, you get you Know, Jackson Pollock sprinkling paint. And as you say, it's not like it represents the time, so it has some value. It shows us to ourselves. But when we see ourselves in that, we should be horrified. Instead of giving the guy a million dollars, we should be going to a collective psychiatrist and sort of curing this mental illness. And it ends with a blank canvas. You know that. Hilarious. It was hilarious. They gave this guy money, like $80,000, something like that, and said, we want you to paste this on a canvas and to show us the world as materialist. So he handed in a blank canvas and he called the painting Take the Money and Run. And he said, my work of art is. I took the money. I just thought, good for you, son. You know, you finally figured out modern art. And so. And so it takes me back at the end, it takes me back to the Pieta. That's where the book ends, is with the Pieta. Because here you have the ultimate female figure, basically, at the ultimate moment of her passion, I guess we would call it. And it speaks of everything, and yet it speaks of how even the horror of life is beautiful.

[B]

Yeah, we call it Good Friday.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

In another one of your books, it was a Cameron Winter mystery. There's this excellent line in there that. I read it, and it's always stuck with me. He's talking to his therapist, I believe you can correct me if I'm wrong. And he talks about his fornications of the past. And he said something like, they were just shapes to me. Something like that. And it seems to me that for all of its exposure, pornography doesn't expose. It actually suppresses the subject and leaves us with the shell.

[A]

It's poison.

[B]

And I think that's a good distinction perhaps between, say, the body being depicted, say, at the Sistine Chapel or some other painting that's done beautifully is that there's an inner life to the subject that you're drawn into. Whereas last doesn't want that. Like, I'm not interested in your feelings, your inner world, your freedom. I just want the body. Yeah, so it seems. I think that's. Again, this is difficult to kind of spell out because a lot of this is subjective. But I would say that if a fella went to the Sistine Chapel and did, in fact, lust over Michelangelo's nudes, that wouldn't be a sign that Michelangelo's nudes were pornographic or that what he painted was wrong. It would should set off alarm bells that there's something profoundly wrong in the individual who sees them as such.

[A]

That's that's right. I mean, you know, speaking of that form thing, there was a. There's a show on called White Lotus that I just watched about these rich people who go to different hotels in each season. Okay. And it's very clever, very clever show, but it had a speech. In this third season, Sam Rockwell, one of my favorite actors, delivers this speech where he says, you know, I went to Thailand. This one took place in Thailand, and I just slept with. And he said, I've always had a thing for Asian girls, and I just slept with Asian girls. And then he goes on. Unrepeatable, you know, Obscene speech.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he said. And then I start to think, because all he was doing was just having sex. Sex. And he said, I started to think, what is this? Like, why do I care? Because her form is the opposite of mine. It's just a form. These shapes. Why is it shape? And then he says, I think I wanted to be the Asian girls. And he ends up, of course, having gay sex and having people watch and just gets more. And I thought, like, that's a great speech. I mean, you talk about an obscene speech. That's also a great speech. Because what he's saying is, if you don't individualize the person you're making love to, to the point where you give them your life, essentially. If you don't do that, then you've actually lost yourself. You know, you disappear. Because we're all looking for something that's inside us. You know, we're all looking to fill something inside us. And if. If it just becomes physical, then what's the difference between that and porn? What's the difference between having sex with a million women and watching porn, which is ultimately a form of impotence, you know?

[B]

Yeah. I wonder if we disagree on something. I'd love to kind of tease it out. Have you heard of the language of intrinsic evil? This is what the. The church teaches, that it just means that there are certain things, certain objects chosen by the will that cannot be remediated by intentional circumstances. And it sounds like you agree with it, because earlier on you said there's no possible universe in which bringing down an axe on an old woman's head could be justified. You can't say, well, you know, his intention was to free her from suffering, or the consequences were that her sister, let's say in a different world, became rich and people benefited. In fact, that is actually one of the things that they talked about at the pool hall before he makes the murder. If you remember, he tries to Justify it, saying that she's something of a leech on society and. Right. So there are certain actions that are always, in every instance, wrong. Like killing wouldn't be killing humans wouldn't be an intrinsic evil, but murdering the innocent intentionally would be. So I think that pornography, and I love talking about pornography because I just find the subject so fascinating.

[A]

It is a fascinating subject.

[B]

It's fascinating because I don't know how to define it. I've tried, and I'll give you mine in a minute. But you can look at pornography from different angles. Hey, the production, the distribution, the consumption, the performing in. I think pornography is something like material which depicts erotic behavior and which is intended to be interacted with in the way a man might interact with a prostitute. It's entered the English language in the mid 19th century to mean just that, a sort of pornographia, the writing of the prostitutes. So that a man or a woman engages in pornography in a sort of sexualized way that leads them to climax. I think that's intrinsically evil. I don't think there's any situation in which that's acceptable from any angle. But, you know, it's really fascinating. And I've shared this on the show before, so people will forgive me. But I hope you'll find it interesting. A man can look. Think of a situation where a couple go to an Airbnb and they're out on the back deck and they've had a couple of wines and they make love. And. Okay. And let's say there's a camera and it's filming it. And so now you have a filmed sex act which is not pornography. And then let's say you've got a fella who owns the Airbnb, pulls up his computer because there's an alert, and he's now watching a film sex act which objectively isn't pornography, but could subjectively be that to him, but not necessarily so. Like, I'm like. To stretch it and to say it even more aggressively, a man could watch child pornography and it be a good thing. What do I mean? The police officer who. I'll say it really quickly, right. Who views child pornography for the sake of identifying a victim and a perpetrator. So there's this distinction then between what we could say, watching and then maybe consuming, like interacting with the material the way in which the producer or distributor intends it to be. All right, so I'd love your thoughts on that if you have them, but I don't think it's ever okay to watch Pornography. And so I would say things like. I wouldn't say that Game of Thrones is pornography. It's. From what I understand, I've never watched the show. It's an excellent, complicated, sophisticated story, but clearly contains pornography. So I think it's always wrong to. To consume that. But I don't think you think that. I think maybe you're okay with watching. I'm not saying you delight in it, but that it's sometimes morally acceptable to view or to portray sex acts graphically in books or movies. That's what I picked up from this, but I can't tell.

[A]

Well, it's such a complicated thing. I have a lot to say about it. I do have to start with one story. When I first moved in with the girlfriend who was now my wife for 50 years, we had this little place on a narrow street in Manhattan. And across the street, this beautiful couple moved in and started making love next to an open window.

[B]

Damn.

[A]

It was that.

[B]

Come on, guys.

[A]

So I'm watching We Need a Blackout. And I'm thinking, unbelievable. This is unbelievable. And they were gorgeous. I mean, she was unbelievably beautiful. And my wife came in, my soon to be wife came in and I said, this is filthy. This is really obscene. And she looked over my shoulders, she said, we do all that. And I said, well, it's not ipsy when we do it, because it's happening. It's internal, you know, what we're doing is not just a flesh on flesh, it's actually soul to soul, you know.

[B]

And that may have been the case. Well, I don't know what you were looking at and I don't want to know.

[A]

No, what I'm saying is to me it was pornography because I was just watching forms, shapes. But to them it wasn't. You know, that's what my wife was saying. To them, it may have been the greatest love of all. They may still be together and, you know, have a dozen kids and all this. So. So that's. That is one place where I think the pornographic lives. I'm always a little. I'm always a little worried about the word evil because there's some things in life that are so.

[B]

I want to talk about this.

[A]

Okay. There's some things like that are so, like I would say pornography is always.

[B]

Corrupt and corrupting, but that's what I think evil is. And so do you. Which I was really pleased in your opening chapter. You and I agree on what evil is. Yeah, it's parasitical. It doesn't have positive sort of energy. It's the absence of something that ought to be there.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So corruption. That word corruption means just that. Right?

[A]

Right. But I guess, I guess what I'm talking about is in the same way I would use the word art to mean craft at the highest level, I think of evil as the lowest level of corruption, you know, And I. I think, in other words. In other words, if you steal a stick of gum, it's different than shooting a guy in the head.

[B]

Yeah, definitely. Unless you do both. And then.

[A]

Yeah, then if you do both, the.

[B]

Gum wasn't worth it.

[A]

So. So when it comes to art, I, I loved Game of Thrones, and it was the first few seasons as HBO's trick to keep you watching. They would have, you know, they would explain something, and while they were explaining something, two naked women would be having sex. No, Absolutely. No worries. They. They call it. What do they call it? Sex position. Because it's exposition, Expositional dialogue explaining the story. And then they just have these stupid.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Banging each other for no reason. And at one point, I was watching it with my wife, and I, I, I turned to my wife and I said, put your shirt on, sweetheart. I can't hear the dialogue. So. So I found that exploitative. I found it wrong. I found it difficult, but I knew it wasn't going to do anything to me. I mean, I know myself well enough at this point that, like, I said to a friend, you should be watching this. And he said, I can't because I get addicted to porn.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I said, then you shouldn't be.

[B]

You need to know yourself.

[A]

Yes. But I guess for me, I thought, you know, I love stories so much and they mean so much to me and they do so much good for me that I thought, like, all right, I get it, hbo. I know these guys. I know the people, hbo. I know what they're thinking. You know, it just didn't bother me in that way. I've. I've seen very, very few nude scenes that were necessary. I mean.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, I can count them one hand.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

You know?

[B]

Yeah. And to your point, you know, maybe I'll watch a movie with my wife and something will happen. Right. I. I'm like, okay, because I. I need to do that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

She doesn't need to do that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because she's not consuming, she's watching. There's the distinction. I remember one of my mates from high school, he went home after school and found his mother had found his porn collection and was cutting up the, you know, so this woman's clearly not guilty of consuming pornography, even though she saw exactly what he saw. It's something about the reduction of the human person to an object for my selfish gratification.

[A]

So.

[B]

Yeah, all right, keep going.

[A]

So, and I think it's very, very different in novels than it is in movies. And Alfred Hitchcock said the two things you should never film, and he filmed both of them. But he said two things he's never filmed are prayer and sex. And he didn't say why, but my conclusion was he meant because they're internal acts and when you show them, you're not showing. And this is one of my problems with the movies in general, by the way. The moment when two people fall in love is almost always represented as a sex scene in modern movies. And you think like, well, I, I sort of see that, you know, in terms of storytelling, but in terms of what I'm watching, it's corrupt because that's not what happens when you fall in love. You don't. It's not always the moment that you go to bed. In fact, hopefully it's much later than that. But. But still, I understand they're representing something, but it's a false representation. I think it is corrupt. In books you can write the inner life of somebody and. And one of my many run ins with Christian readers was in a fantasy trilogy I did called Another Kingdom, where at one point the hero becomes corrupt. And I had describe him using his power to bed a starlet. He's become a Hollywood famous Hollywood producer and he uses it to bed a starlet. And he talks about what bliss it is to have sex with this woman, you know, and they were furious. And I thought, no, that's what it's like to be corrupt. You know, like, in other words, you wouldn't do it if it weren't blissful.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You know, it's like, yes. So I thought, and I thought it was right. And I thought there was no. At no point was he separated from the moral order. At no point were you thinking, you know, who does this? Well, Martin Scorsese, because he's at least a lapsed Catholic. He may actually be a believing Catholic, I don't know. But he made a movie called the Wolf of Wall street which is so riddled with sex.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I couldn't, wouldn't watch it, but.

[B]

I hear it's great. I'm sure Leo DiCaprio is brilliant.

[A]

And Mar. Robbie is in it naked and she is, you know, mind shatteringly beautiful. At the end of the movie, all you can think is, I Never want to live that life. I never want to live that life. I'm so glad I haven't lived that life. Because he's just. I don't know what he does. He infuses it with the kind of death that. That redeems it.

[B]

Yeah, I get that. I can see that. Yeah. I think I've been thinking about this a lot. Right. And so. Yeah. So let's. I just want to say something about evil again, because I know you say evil. People think all sorts of things. Right. They might think of, like, a cracked porcelain doll face, or they might think of a clown that has a dagger. No, no. By evil, I just mean the absence of a good that ought to be there, or privation. And so we could talk about physical evil and moral evil both. If a rock lacks sight, this isn't a natural evil. If a man does, it is a natural evil, but not a moral evil. But in every act of moral evil, I would say that you could point to there being a lack of virtue that ought been there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, if I abuse my children, there's a lack of paternal affection and protection. It's love that ought to be there. You know, So I. That's what I. That's what I mean. So I'm not. Yeah. So it's like maybe more of a kind of. Like, in the philosophical sense of. When I say that pornography is evil, I think there's a lack of a good that ought to be there. But so someone might say, all right, Matt, like, you say that pornography is intrinsically evil, and so therefore you shouldn't be depicting it. But, you know, there's other things that are intrinsically evil, like killing the innocent, and yet you're okay with that being, in certain instances. Right. Depicted.

[A]

Depicted.

[B]

So what's the difference? Like, you show that. And here's why I think. Here's what I think the difference is because I've wrestled with this for a while, I think it's easier, for whatever reason, to watch an intrinsically evil act, such as the murdering of the innocent, without committing an internal sin. You know, I can. There's some separation that still exists that. That is a lot harder to keep distant. When I'm watching a sex act, it's something a lot more visceral or it just. It's very hard to watch it without consuming it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In a way that I think watching a murder in a movie or reading about one in a book is. Without engaging it. Yeah. Because, I mean, you could. You could think of a snuff film, right? So if there's a movie where someone's actually being killed or even, you know, it's, we're depicting it such that maybe I killed this person. Even if it is acted out, and if that's the entire point of the movie, I would say, well, that should be condemned. So, anyway, those are some thoughts.

[A]

Well, I, I do think, you know, I was, I told you that story before about the guy pitching me this story about. Yeah, but that those were things that were being made at that time. They were called torture porn. And it wasn't, it wasn't pornography per se, but it was people being tortured throughout a long period of the movie for the excitement, the excitation of the audience. And I tried to watch one once because I was out in Hollywood and I thought, I keep hearing about this. Yeah. And I, I, I literally could not watch it. I mean, I just thought, you know, it was girls with beautiful bodies taking off their clothes and then they would cart them off. And I just thought, I'm sorry, I'm not doing that. And that, and that was a sense that, like, somebody was doing something evil to me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and I wasn't gonna participate.

[B]

Now, I won't say it's explicitly because I don't want to divulge personal information, but you do in this book. You talk about, you know, watching certain things that you went down that rabbit trail. It's raining.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But we've got really good microphones, so hopefully they won't hear it. So. But I mean, are you of the opinion that no one should ever watch pornography?

[A]

Am I. Yeah.

[B]

Good. Okay, cool. Me too. I mean, I think I, I, I thought so. I just, I just wasn't sure. When you said you were doing this for research purposes back in the day.

[A]

Oh. Oh, well, yeah. The story. I mean, can I tell that? I don't.

[B]

If you want to, you're welcome to. Of course. I just didn't want to.

[A]

No. I mean, I wrote this book, I think it's one of my best books, called the Empire of Lies. And it's a book that virtually ended my career in the mainstream because it's got a hero who's a conservative Christian, and, and one of the things he is escaping from is a life of sadomasochistic sex. What kills me about this is one of the reasons I started writing about the subject of sadism was because the Marquis de Sade had convinced me not to be an atheist. I was reading atheist stuff, and I came upon his work and I thought, yes, he's the only honest atheist I've ever read. And that's hell. You know what? He's showing his hell. So I would use that as a reference point in my work. So he's a Christian and he used to be involved in sadomasochistic relationship. Now what's funny about this is when I handed into my editor, he was absolutely convinced I was writing about myself, whereas I was going like, I have nothing about it, so I'm going to look it up and of course, you look it up on the Internet and you watch. Start watching this stuff and. Because sadism is the soulless limit of male sex. In other words, there's a certain kind of aggression to male sex. And we talk about having conquests. You know, we talk about. We even use the word for sex as an insult, as something I'm going to do to you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's. It's like almost the worst thing you can say to somebody. Whereas, you know, it's actually something, theoretically a woman is supposed to enjoy if she's, you know. So I, I started getting caught up in this stuff and I was watching it and I. It was humiliating even to me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because it made me feel, like, horrible. And then I would stop.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Go back to it now.

[B]

I mean, I personally know the experience. I was exposed to porn at the age of 8 and had a steady diet of it. Yeah. So I, you know, so I'm not. You're not alone. Everyone is. Many people have been experienced, exposed to this stuff and it's. I know the feeling of, like, hating that I felt like I loved it.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, and hating myself for that, too. And, and wishing I were better and hating that I wasn't.

[A]

Yes. And. And, and also, you know, you sort of convince yourself that no one can see you. As if that mattered.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And the thing about it was, when I write, there's always a bit of method acting involved. I kind of get into the character, all the characters, and. But I was really into this one. I got really. Got connected and he wasn't. It's funny, he was much more staid than I am. He was much more of a businessman and kind of a straight arrow than I am. But I got. I really melded mine, did a mind meld with him. And when the book ended, it was easy for me to kind of pull away, but I felt like crap. And I, I. Right about, I came home and I.

[B]

Said, oh, I love this.

[A]

I have the best wife in the world.

[B]

Yeah. Slow this down for people, because this.

[A]

Is a great Story, like, I. I am so crazy about my wife. It's. It's embarrassing. I, like, I always love these guys who say, you're a wimp if you try to please your wife. I think, like, well, then I was wrong with pictures of wimp. And I just love this woman. And she has taken such good care of me. And I. I always laugh. She. I say she treats me like a king, but it's just her clever way of getting me to worship the ground she walks on. And. And I came home and I said to her, I'm done. I'm never writing another novel. It's not worth it. It is. You know, it's a dead form. You know, nobody reads them anymore. And I'm, you know, and it's killing me, and it's absolutely destroyed. And she said. She said, that's nice, dear. Sit down and eat your dinner. This is why I come home. And. And I think. And that, you know, if you compare that to porn. Yeah. I think you get the whole story.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, I mean, I think.

[B]

Yeah. This idea of a lack of a good, that ought to be there. It's like. It's sort of like why drunkenness is a bad idea. Right. Because we eradicate our rat personality.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That very thing that distinguishes us from the beasts we choose to lower ourself. And even the sort of slurs we use against each other, you know, carry this connotation. You know, if you call someone a pig or a dog or a chicken.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, you're saying that you're less than you should be. If I. If I call a chicken a chicken, that's not an insult.

[A]

Right. You know, and the material. The point I make in the introduction of the book is that the materialist idea is that that's really who we are. And everything else is a construct on that. That was, you know, those kind of the Freudian idea that we repress our sexuality and then we build from that repression, we build this bridge of civilization. And I think it's just the other way around.

[B]

I've been talking a lot lately about my friends at the College of St. Joseph the Worker, you know, Jacob Imam, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Jones and company, the guys who started the college that combines the Catholic intellectual tradition with skilled tradesmen training. Well, listen to this. They're growing their program and are looking to connect with experienced Catholic tradesmen to hire as instructors. So if you are an experienced carpenter, plumber, H Vac technician or electrician and want to help mentor and teach future Catholic tradesmen, go right now to College of St. Joseph.comCareers to connect with the college and see how you can become part of something truly special. And if you're watching or listening and know a tradesman who needs to hear this message, please invite them to reach out to the College again. That's collegeofstjoseph.com careers collegeofsaintjoseph.com careers thanks. It's totally the other way around because I've totally indulged all of those vices and never felt good. Yeah, never. And you can say, well, it's just because you have this Christian guilt complex that you have to overcome. I only have so many years left. I can't keep playing this game. Yeah. It reminds me of when I was 17 years old. My mates and I would go to Adelaide, the big city. We came from a small country town and we would sneak into these strip clubs and they would let us in. So I guess we weren't sneaking. They just wouldn't check our id. And there was a fella who would never come in with us. His name was Aiden. And I. I felt very threatened by that. Yeah. Because I'm about to do something very sort of stupid and effeminate. And I said, you think you're better than us? And he should have said, yeah, definitely. But I remember he would say something like, no, I just. I just don't think it's really manly to pay a woman money to pretend to like you. And then I said, go to hell, you freaking idiot. So I won the debate.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then went on point and acted like an idiot. You know, it's. But we. We kind of get it. I. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing masculine about it. Yeah.

[A]

And. And the. And the joy of actually living the other way is so intense, you know, that. I mean, I think. I mean, this is in Paradise Lost. There's an intensity to the joy of physical abuse in the moment.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know that. That is intense. But over time, having been faithfully married for so many years, you start to realize, oh, my God, I've become something that I actually kind of like, you know, which is. When you're saying that about yourself, that's really a stretch. You know, I mean, like, I. You know, I've not just been faithful, I've become a faithful person. And I can look at my son and my daughter and they know that they're looking at. They're not looking at a secret. They're looking at the person that I am. And he thinks, like, what a gift. You know, that's like Insanely good, you know, and, and you wrestle with that when you're young because you still have, you know, you still got the SAP flowing. And every girl who walks by, you think like, ah, you know, did I marry too young? Or whatever, you know. Yeah. But then you start to think like, I mean, really, the change for me was the day I thought, you know, I'm going to stop resisting adultery and I'm going to start becoming faithful. That was what I figured out. I thought, I'm going to become a faithful person. I'm not going to.

[B]

It's not about a repression, it's about an investment of energy into something.

[A]

And it was transformative of. And, and I just think it's so obvious when we actually love that we actually are hitting our real selves. I mean, that, that humility, that compassion, that connection with other people. So obvious when you do it like, oh, yeah, this is great. This is what I. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Masturbating to your laptop. Fine.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, that's, that's protecting your wife when someone breaks into the house or just, or just, you know, just being okay when she's in pain or sick and you can't come together and you show like, I love you, like, what can I do? Yeah, you're like, oh God, let me be the. Yeah, let me be the person my dog thinks I am. That old joke. Hey, I want to tell you a story which I think you're gonna freaking love. This is a man called Alessandro. I forget his last name. There was a young Italian woman, she was 12 years old. Her name was Maria Goretti. She lived several, I think, hours south of Rome. Her father was poor, they had, I think six children and he had to, he sort of lived with a landowner, farmed, gave him the produce as payment, and then whatever was left over he could feed his family with. All right, he dies of malaria. And so the mother takes over the farm chores and Maria, who was I think 11 at the time, took over, you know, cooking, taking care of her siblings feelings. Well, the landowner had a 20 year old son who would always make crude jokes to her and things like this. And one day he comes in with a, with a knife and says, we're gonna, you're gonna have sex with me. And she refuses. And he stabs her, I think nine times. And six of the nine stabs actually went through her body. The other three didn't because they hit her spine. And the steel thing, I think it was something to sharpen a knife on, actually dented on her spine. So she's lying there and she's dying. And he goes off to his room and shuts the door. And she gets up and she unlatches the door, and she's there to call for help. He comes back and stabs her a few more times. All right? So she goes to hospital and she's dying, and she says, I forgive Alessandro. And he goes to jail for 30 years. He's sentenced. You know, he actually blames her. He's like, I was protecting myself from her. No, no one believes you. So he's in prison, and he was so violent and so filled with hate that they put him in solitary confinement and isolation for a long time. Was during that time, he had a dream of Maria, who appears to him, and she's holding flowers, the number of which times he stabbed her. And she says, I forgive you. His entire life changed. He's let out three years early, which didn't happen back then. And he goes to Maria's mother and he asks for her forgiveness. But here's what's crazy. When this all went down, the mother was actually kicked out of the place. And all of the other children, I think five other children maybe, had to be put up for adoption. So he doesn't only kill this daughter, he destroys the family. And the mother says to him, maria has forgiven you. God has forgiven you. I forgive you. She adopts him. And actually it was Christmas Eve that he went to her house and the two of them went to midnight mass together. Maria's mother went to the canonization of St. Maria Goretti. Here's what's really cool. This fella becomes a lay Franciscan in a monastery and lives out his life in repentance. I wanted to give you that. That's a photo of him. And so this fella Alessandro is up for. People are trying to promote his canonization. And I just think that's an example, right, of a story that's deeply evil, and yet it's almost like how Christ descends into the depths in order to redeem it as a storyteller. And a story like this, you go so deep that you just want to throw up, and then somehow good comes out of it anyway.

[A]

And it's also, you know, it's funny in this story, I mean, this story itself is a story of redemption, which is beautiful, but even in a story that has no redemption, the storyteller is the redemption because he is the mind that's over it all. And that's why the thing I always cite is that speech in Macbeth. It's one of my favorite Speeches where he says, life is a tale told by an idiot, it full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Now, somebody actually once on a panel I was on said, well, Shakespeare was a nihilist because he wrote this. And I said, shakespeare wasn't a nihilist. I said, Macbeth was a nihilist because he had separated himself from the moral order. And if you go back over the play, Shakespeare shows you Macbeth and Lady Macbeth doing the opposite of creation. You know, God pulls the rib out of Adam and makes a man, and Lady Macbeth pulls her femininity out of herself and turns herself into nothing, you know, into a mad woman. And that emptiness of separating out of creation, separating from the moral order makes life meaningless. You know, Macbeth is right. It's meaningless now, but it wasn't meaningless when you started out. And so the beauty of Shakespeare's mind, and Shakespeare is the writer most often compared to God in his relationship to his work. Not like he was a God, but in relationship to his work. He works very much like God because he lets each person do what they're going to do and live out their nature. And I think that that's just an incredibly beautiful thing to do. Even though, you know, there's no happy ending to Macbeth. I mean, I guess the bad guy loses in the end, but only in the last scene. I mean, it's not that. It's that he's living in a moral world. He's living in the moral world, the real moral world. And I think when you. That's the thing that you're looking for when you say, when do you stop watching art? And I think, like, that's it. That's it. I mean, this is. Woody Allen has been in this lifelong fight with Dostoevsky because, you know, and he keeps making crime, and he made Crimes and Misdemeanors, and then he made Match Point, which is almost the same movie. And in Match Point, the guy actually plans his murder in keeping with Crime and Punishment. That's how he gets the idea. Which is very funny. That's a very funny idea.

[B]

He reads the book, he's like, I gotta give that a shot.

[A]

He probably finished the book. It's not supposed to be a guidebook, but in both of those, the murderer in the end says, I don't feel anything, and it's all chance and who cares? And I think, like, yeah, that's not the way that really happens. I've known murderers. You know, that's not their lives. Their lives are not. Oh, now I just go on and everything will Be fine. That something die has they. You know, they killed something in themselves, you know, it's like. And so he. I appreciate his. His work, you know?

[B]

Woody Allen.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Do you know, I don't think I've ever watched a Woody Allen movie. When I think of Woody Allen, I just think of a pervert. Maybe I'm wrong. And I just suspect that his movies are filled with sexual perversions that I don't want to bring into my brain. But if I'm wrong, correct me.

[A]

Yeah, most of the time, you're wrong. Okay, good. I mean, he's a. His. His great creation is his character. His, like, kind of neurotic.

[B]

That's what I understand.

[A]

He's kind of represents like that New York character, you know, and it's like. And it is. And when he's funny. If you ever want to read what.

[B]

Is best movie, you know, it's not.

[A]

His movies that are his best thing. If you go back to his first book of essays in the New Yorker, it's about this thick. It's about a hundred pages. I quoted in this, actually, because he does an imitation of the Bible that is as funny as anything I've ever read. And it's just. What's it called? Getting Even. It's called Getting Even. And, man, that stuff is funny. I mean, that's one of the funniest books ever. And writing a funny book is really hard. I mean, it's like. And then his movies. I like his movies. They're entertaining, and he comes up with really interesting plots that other people have stolen. But, you know, that's.

[B]

I suppose there's artwork that's perennial and then artwork that kind of makes sense for the time but doesn't last. And I sometimes feel this way about Monty Python. You know, when I watch certain clips of Monty Python, they're hilarious. Or when I watch their movies, you know, okay. They're really funny.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But then I'll watch other things. I'm like. I just. I get it. I. Maybe they lived in, like, a. An uptight culture, and so being absurd was funny, but I don't, like, modern people don't find that funny now. And I think it's because they were responding to something then. Or maybe you disagree.

[A]

No, I think it. Humor, you know. You know Douglas Adams.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So he and I became not friends, but we became. Yeah. At the end of his life, he moved into my neighborhood and we had him to dinner a couple times, and we, you know, we chat and. And I once.

[B]

Tell me about him because I Mean, listen, I. I read his book when I was young.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

And of course, he's an atheist. And so there are things I would take issue with. That is such a funny book.

[A]

Such a funny.

[B]

I played the audio tape, and it was read by Stephen Fry.

[A]

Was it?

[B]

Yeah. Excellent narrator. Right. Beautiful voice. And my son was probably 13, 14 at the time, pissing himself laughing. I mean, and I just. Such a funny boy. All right, so this is amazing that you knew him.

[A]

So there's a famous line by a famous critic whose name just. It's getting late. And his name just went out of my head. But he essentially said what is usually quoted as, shakespeare's tragedies are greater than his comedies because tragedy is greater than comedy. And so Douglas and I got into a conversation about comedy and why it doesn't last, why comedy doesn't last. And he was. He was arguing that no comedy lasts longer than drama and all this stuff. And I quote this line, and. And I said, you know, Shakespeare's tragedies were better than his comedies because tragedy is better than comedy. He says, Shakespeare's tragedy is better than his comedies because Shakespeare wasn't funny. That's good, but. Okay, it's cliche, you know, but it's a good point.

[B]

I mean, is it Steve Martin? You go back and watch his early standup stuff, you might find it funny because you lived through it.

[A]

I saw him in the theater when he was perfecting that, and I was devastated. He was hilarious.

[B]

But people don't find that funny right now. I mean, why. What changed? What's different? Why does comedy last for a season like that? But then there's other things I think will be funny forever. Like. And maybe I'm wrong, but, I mean, because it's. It's more general to human experience. Like, I think Seinfeld a lot. Some of his jokes might not work forever, but some of them are just. Just so human that I think they'll always be relevant. So, too, with Jim Gaffigan and others at Brian Regan. But maybe I'm wrong, you know, I mean, because maybe in 20 years, they won't be funny. But why? Because he used a lot of visual comedy that people don't use today. And.

[A]

No, but I think you hit it on the head there. When you get. You have to get human nature. It has to be. It has to be something essential about human nature. It's true of drama, too. You know, you have to. I was walking down the street in New York once, 57th street, very beautiful, upscale street. And I Saw a crowd of people looking in a window and laughing. And, you know, these are sophisticated New Yorkers. This is absolute midtown sophisticated New Yorkers. And they're in stitches. So, of course, I go over and I look and it's Charlie Chaplin and what he's doing. I think it's from City Streets or I can't remember which one it's from. There's a nude statue. Goes back to what we were talking about before, and he's pretending to admire it. Really staring at her backside. Yes, and.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And it's funny. I mean, it's.

[B]

What year was this that people were.

[A]

Looking and laughing like the 19.

[B]

I know Shapiro makes fun of you, so. The third. Yeah, yeah, 80s.

[A]

Okay, 1980s.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it's still funny. I watched it recently. It's still funny. And it's just. It's just because it's so human, you know? And it's like. It's simple and it doesn't depend on the times. Listen, Douglas Adams notwithstanding, Shakespeare has some scenes that are really funny. Funny and still hold up and you can read them and they're funny, but you have to get past the language and all that stuff. Yeah. I don't know. Like, I think. I don't know if you ever saw. Unfortunately, they made it into a bad movie, but the play Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Oh, it's. Man, it's funny.

[B]

Yeah. I'm very. I'm very ignorant of movie.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Movies in general.

[A]

Yeah. You're gonna.

[B]

You're gonna have to come up with a list. I mean, you do some excellent reviews on your show, sometimes on YouTube about.

[A]

And people yell at me about this is. But, you know, they give me the names and I react to them and people say, well, why did you leave out this? And I think. I didn't leave out anything. They give me. You know, the way we do it is they give me. They make the list. And I just comment because I've seen.

[B]

Everything, you know, have you come up with it? My wife and I said recently we should come up with like a hundred films that we should try to make our way through chronologically. I don't know if that's a good or bad idea, but I could do that.

[A]

You know, the AFI has one. They're the American Film Institute, but unfortunately, they always get weighted toward modern films. And I think the peak of the movie industry was 1939. Really? Oh, yeah.

[B]

And what was it there?

[A]

That was 1939. The 10 biggest box office successes were the 10 Oscar were also, this is not quite right, but it's something close to right. Were also the 10 Oscar nominees. There were also 10 classic films. It's just amazing. It's like when that art is at its peak, when the popular art and the great art are the same art. Like that's. That's Shakespeare, because, you know, the people went, the nobles went. And it's also the greatest stuff ever written, you know, and let's see. It was Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Oh, gosh, now I'm. It was so many good movies. Every movie was great. Wizard of Oz was one of them.

[B]

Yeah. Compare that to today. I know most movies, like, I have kids who I love, and I want to take them to see movies. Last two movies we went to see, honestly, all I want to do is sit next to them. I like them, I want to be close to them. So that's why I go to a movie. I just endured the Minecraft movie and the Captain America latest movie, and it was both like cold pizza. Yeah, it's fine.

[A]

It's infantilizing, too. You know, I don't know why those superhero movies, I mean, you know, the old movies, even the bad ones, are adult, you know, and they're. And they're really Good. Is Casablanca 1939? No.

[B]

Yeah, I watched that. I like that. Everyone made fun of me for not having watched that, so I was like, well, I better watch it. And it was good.

[A]

Yeah, I love that.

[B]

But the Hitchcock is what I. I watched when I was just stunned.

[A]

Have you seen. How many have you seen?

[B]

Most of them. I like Back. Is it Back Window, Rear Window. I like that. Everyone tells me that Birds is good. I didn't love it.

[A]

No.

[B]

And everyone tells me that. I think you did, too. That Vertigo.

[A]

Vertigo. I love.

[B]

Love. I need to watch that again then.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because I love the fella who's the Jimmy Stewart. He's terrific, obviously.

[A]

But. But, you know, his older films, his black and white films are also excellent.

[B]

You know, Speaking.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We kind of touched on this Jimmy Stewart in his excellent movie, the Christmas movie.

[A]

It's a Wonderful Life.

[B]

It's a Wonderful Life. I found it so liberating when he came home and just lost his. Yeah. And yelled at his kids and yelled at his wife. You don't see a lot of that today.

[A]

No, but I looked at that.

[B]

I'm like, I've definitely done that, and now I feel less alone, you know, And I've apologized for it as well. But to see that in the context of a loving family, whereas I don't know if you see a lot of that today. It's like, if someone's a good father or a good husband, he doesn't tend.

[A]

To be a. I remember a movie with Diane Keaton where it was. She had a baby and it was ruining her business and all this stuff. And it ended up with her both having the baby but also having a business. And I thought, this is crap. You know, I thought, like, in an old movie, she would have had to choose, you know, she would have chosen between the baby and the business, and that would have been the right thing to do. You have to pick one, you know? And, like, I think that that's how we got infantilized.

[B]

Is there any good movies that you've watched lately that you're like, this was good. You know what I've started to watch, what I've loved is that show from Apple tv, Severance.

[A]

Yeah. That's good.

[B]

Have you started. Have you watched both seasons?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Is the second season great? I haven't watched it yet.

[A]

It's. It's good. It's good. It's not great, but it's good and it has great stuff in it.

[B]

Any other good movies?

[A]

You know, I liked. I like the movie called Black Bag. It's not a great movie, but it's a Steven Soderbergh spy movie.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And what's funny about it is it's. It's real old Hollywood. It's very glamorous. And, you know, the dialogue is kind of silly, but. But intense and all this. And it looks like it's a complex spy movie, which it kind of is, but it's really about the sanctity of marriage. And it's. It's kind of beautiful in that way. Like, about halfway through, I thought, if this is going to be about spies, it's bad. It winds up being about this marriage. It'll be great.

[B]

You know, it's funny you say that, because I think one of the best movies that portrayed the beauty of fidelity within marriage was Fargo.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

What a gorgeous relationship that was, that fella.

[A]

And that one line where she says, there's more to life than money, you know?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Such a great line because she's such a simple person. And, like, these guys have killed and, you know, butchered people and done all this stuff. There's a story that's full of evil.

[B]

Isn't that beautiful?

[A]

So beautiful.

[B]

But I thought that the bit that almost made me tear up was the way the husband got out of bed and made her breakfast. You're going to Need a breakfast because you're pregnant and yeah, I just thought that was another. I remember watching a movie and again, you're an expert. I'm an amateur. I don't even know the names of movie stars. But I watched it and I thought that is what movies are supposed to do. That's why people love cinema. Whatever. Three Billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri. I think that's what it was called. That was excellent.

[A]

Yeah, very, very Christian infused movie too.

[B]

I want to tell you about Hallow, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hallowed. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hallow.com Matt Frad I use it. My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music including my lo fi. Hallow has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hallow.com mattfrad the link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent you can play little bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com mattfrad what other books are you writing? You're done or.

[A]

No, I'm still writing the Cameron Winter mysteries. I think the best one is about to come out.

[B]

You're not just saying that so people buy it or both?

[A]

No, it's, it's, it's really good. I mean I had a great year. This last year. I wrote this. I finished this book. It took me two years to write and I wrote this Cameron Winter mystery.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And at the end of the year I was a babbling idiot, but I was really happy with what I'd done. You know, I was just so tired and.

[B]

Is that the end? So sorry. Back to the Cameron Winter. Is this the end of the.

[A]

No, it's only five. I want to do 10 of them. I've written six I'm working on. I'm sorry, I've written five, I'm working on six. Yeah.

[B]

And will it involve his therapist again or.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that. But it's, it's also, it's really interesting because I really do feel like the work, you know, he's, he's a very old fashioned kind of detective on purpose, but he's living in a very modern world and I think that that's kind of interesting. And it's also interesting to watch a guy try to become a good person because I feel like the idea of a good man.

[B]

You talked about that with Chandler.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What's his name?

[A]

Raymond Chandler. Yeah. And Philip Marlowe. Yeah. And I think that that's, that's the issue. That's why art is so bad now is because they can't write women as women, so they can't write men as men, you know, and that's. Yeah.

[B]

Will you do another series, do you think? Like, it's different?

[A]

I think when I'm finished with this, I mean, I'm. If I'm still alive, I have, like, I have other things I want to do. You know, there's. There's a whole lot of other things I want to do. I'd love to write another book like this. The idea of looking at art as an expression of our relationship with God is virtually. I'm virtually reinventing it. I mean, I don't know anybody else who's writing about it. And like, I think, like, I really want to do it because it's true, you know, and people, I get these comments from, Christians, there are not that many of them, but they always drive me a little crazy. Like they'll say, why do I have to read about this drunken poet? Because, you know, he brought the moon out of the sky. That's why, you know, what's he. Does that mean in the Truth and Beauty? There are all these poets and they're all nuts and they're all, you know, why do I have to listen to this stuff? And I thought because they showed us something that nobody else. They created a beauty that wasn't there before. And like, you know, a lot of nicer people haven't done that, you know, now.

[B]

So how do you not end up creating a sort of American version of the Office where it goes on way too long? But then you have to pretend that no, from the beginning we had this all planned.

[A]

Right? I mean, I planned this out pretty well and like, because I hate that.

[B]

So you know where it's going, these 10 books.

[A]

The thing about severance is it should have ended this season. It should have had two extra episodes and been done.

[B]

Oh, it's not.

[A]

They're gonna keep going. There Will be one more season. And there is this thing in TV where as long as the money is flowing, they keep making them. The British are much better about that. Or they used to be.

[B]

The English office.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Have you ever seen anything so funny?

[A]

Hilarious. I mean, that's hilarious. Yeah.

[B]

A lot like, Jesus. Oh, my gosh. That dance he does.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, Ricky Gervais is so freaking funny.

[A]

He is really funny. Very. Yeah. And he. His. And even his atheism is funny, you know, like, he can make me laugh at believers.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, he's just funny.

[B]

Yeah. I do find his atheism sophomore, though. I just think, like, you're great, but.

[A]

Dude, comedians, they all want to be philosophers and they all make bad philosophers. George Carlin, he was like, yeah. You know, he has that famous routine about the words you can't say on radio, and it's stupid because you think like, no, wait, words represent something obscene. Words represent something obscene. There's a reason you can't say.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You can say them over and over again until they seem meaningless, but they're not meaningless.

[B]

There's a similarity between the philosopher. Philosopher and the comedian. And they're both looking at human nature. Like, what comedians do well is they say something like, do you see this? Do you see this stupid thing about me? This stupid thing about me? That's you.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

That's what's great about it. And. And philosophy also kind of like looks into human experience, and they start to.

[A]

Think that that has this kind of inherent wisdom, which it actually does. The laughter is the inherent wisdom. You know, it's like. It's like with poetry, it's not. It's not what it says. The beauty is the wisdom of it.

[B]

I've shared this too many times. I'm going to do it again. Kind of like your Trump montage that you keep playing. I could. Are you done with that? Every time you say, no, we're done with that.

[A]

I can't tell.

[B]

But you've said that before and you played it, so I keep feeling led on. Seinfeld has this great line. He's like, if you're with a woman, you're dating her and she goes into a Porta Potty. If she comes out and says, you know, it's not that bad in there. Do not marry that woman.

[A]

So good. Yeah. Comedians. Comedians have saved the country as far as I'm concerned. They like the last people who just finally said, I'm sorry, I can't make a living if you don't let me say the unsayable thing, you know, and it's like, it broke the grip, I think, of, you know, it did. It helped break the grip of, like, this horrible, abusive censorship regime that was coming down on our heads, you know?

[B]

And, like, that feels like it's evaporated, doesn't it?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I don't mean to speak too soon.

[A]

No, the only way you'll be speaking too soon if there's literally, like, a military takeover of the country. Because these guys are bad. They, you know, they. This is the thing about Trump. You know, Trump has all kinds of flaws. I've never denied his flaws. I've never said, like, oh, it's okay that he calls people names. I don't feel like that at all. He's so much better than they are.

[B]

And his names are funny. I mean, I don't know how he gets them so good.

[A]

He is really funny, and he's, like.

[B]

A really good bully. Like, he's good at being a bully. Not that it's good to be a bully, but he's good at being.

[A]

You know, he also has a. Like. Like, he did that thing about they said who should be the new pope? And he said, me. And I just roared with laughter because it's a joke about him, you know, he's making it about himself, you know, and it's like everybody says, oh, that's. You know, that's.

[B]

And then we were all outraged, especially the leftist media that want to slaughter children, make the little sisters of the poor pay for abortions. And now you're upset.

[A]

No. And they're upset because he makes a joke. And it was. It was a funny joke about him, about how proud. You know what I would. Ambitious guy. But, yeah, I'm, like, delighted. Those people have been crushed, and I'd like to back over them a couple of times before we drive on into the future.

[B]

Andrew, I love you and I'm glad. No, I'm so grateful for you. Your Friday shows really the only ones I watch anymore, because I just cannot keep shoveling into my head the horrors of modern politics. I just don't want to live that way. And whenever I listen to your show, the fact that it's once a week. Oh, that's so nice. And it's not every freaking day. And it's.

[A]

I had to. I had to do that. You know, I was on four days a week.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I just started to obliviate. And I said, how did that deal.

[B]

How did you talk them into doing one episode?

[A]

I said, I'm not having Any fun. And it was Jeremy. It was, you know, Jeremy Borean was the founder of the place with Ben. And I just said, I'm not, not having fun. And he said, well, if you're not having fun, stop. You know, he's great. And it was, you know, doing four of those satirical openings was the hardest thing I ever did. They stopped being funny. The humor started to go out of them. And I don't have that many opinions. I have one opinion. I have two opinions. One opinion. One opinion is that there's. There is a God. That's not an opinion, because that's just true. Right. But the other opinion is that people should be free. You know, people should be free as long as they don't hurt anybody. They're gonna do wrong things. It's not my business. I may tell them not to do it, but they should be free to make the choices. And the government. And if anybody's gonna tell em what to do, it shouldn't be the government. I think they're the last people. And that's it, you know, so, like, I don't wanna make fun of, you know, I wanna make fun of the absurdity of things, but do I care if a guy thinks there should be more of a welfare state and this guy thinks there should be less? No. You know, those are not the things that really light my.

[B]

Did you feel pressured to be as. I mean, I love that. That the fellas seem like they're really finding this stride. Let's just be honest. Michael Knowles is essentially a Catholic YouTube channel at this point. I mean, it's just, it's masquerading as a political channel.

[A]

I told. I wish they had buried him with the last Pope. Like, you know, they put in like little vitamin pills with plants. Yeah.

[B]

And, and, and Walsh. I am embarrassed at how much I love that fella. Every opinion he has. I'm like, I. I want to seem more intelligent by disagreeing with him on certain points, but I, I can't. So. Excellent. His interview. I don't know if you saw his interview with Tucker Carlson.

[A]

I did.

[B]

He did such a great job. You know, he's just, he's just honest.

[A]

Yeah, he's honest and he has the.

[B]

Temperament for that line of work.

[A]

And he's really funny. He's really most, most fun. We're not that funny. He's really funny.

[B]

Do you think he knows he's funny? I said to him at the launch of the. Am I racist? We got to go there. I said, this is, this is like Ricky Gervais.

[A]

Level.

[B]

Funny.

[A]

That was. There were scene. There were scenes in that movie that were.

[B]

I was in pain watching.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, God bless the Daily Wire for this. For. Am I racist? And what is a woman? They've really been culture changes.

[A]

They have. They really change things and like it. And it's. It's the thing that on the right, I keep complaining about. This is not enough. Like, just pure creativity and that kind of boldness of like saying, like, you know, what are you going to do to me? I'm all, you know, they already demonize him. They threaten his life all the time. And it's like, you know, but he's really. I really like the fact that he has done that. That's been, you know, a breakthrough. And the Wire, you know, we get so much hate from the Right. I don't understand it. You know, it's like, I think, like, you know, you don't have to agree with everything we say, and we all say different things, and mostly it's the Jew haters because they hate Ben. And so they, you know, they say you have to say what Ben tells you to say. Ben has never told me to say anything.

[B]

It's also wild that Ben would be funding two prominent Catholics to promote Catholicism.

[A]

He thinks that, you know. Yeah, he.

[B]

And.

[A]

And, you know, he. He, like. He likes Christianity. You know, American Christianity is very different than European Christianity.

[B]

And like, in that it exists.

[A]

In that it exists. It's vibrant and. And less. Less. Fewer poms, you know. Yeah, no, I mean, I. I've never understood it. It's a jolly place. Like, people who come there are surprised at how funny it is.

[B]

I don't know what it is. I mean, like, it could be that some of your opinions suck and. And that's why some of.

[A]

Some of.

[B]

Yeah, so maybe that's it. I don't know. I don't think that. But I. I suppose I. I mean, I think it just is the. Well, I got a couple of theories. I think one is, whenever you get too cool, there was a band that came out in the 90s called Korn. They were really cool until everyone thought they were cool. And then it became cool to hate them.

[A]

Yes, I think something like that.

[B]

Like, with Daily Wire's ascendancy, it was like this weird little thing that sort of erupted with ferocity and brilliance and articulation, and it kind of. It made all of us feel less alone. I remember stumbling upon Ben for the first time and. And Matt and Michael and just thinking, oh, my gosh, I've Thought this, these are the conversations I have with my friends. And the fact that they're now saying these things gives me more permission. And they're much brilliant. More brilliant than me. They're more articulate than me. And so now I feel like I have more of. More permission to hold these views. I come from Australia. I was just in Australia with my bride and we were watching the news. And you just get the sense that they're all singing from the same sheet of music, that there isn't a significant contingent of people, let's say, on the right, who are pushing back against the mainstream.

[A]

It's weird. I always thought of Australia as kind of the America of the.

[B]

Wouldn't it be cool? And there are very cool people in Australia, but they're just not the ones with a microphone. Except at this Sky News, who seem obsessed with America. American politics. Yeah, that's where the money is.

[A]

Maybe.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

But.

[B]

But anyway, so that's the first thing I think. The other thing is we're real as human beings. We're really good at defining ourselves against something. And maybe we're not good at being for something. Well, if we're under attack, then we can all kind of be against the left.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But once the right comes to ascendancy.

[A]

Now, this is, this is an important thing to me because I really. All this time that I've been attacking the left because they had the power, but I've always tried to say what it is that I believe. Like, it's not. Because it's not just that I don't believe what they believe. I believe in something else, you know, And I, I, it's, it's really interesting. I mean, when once it becomes clear to you. You know Eric Metaxas?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I just had him on.

[B]

He was the last guest.

[A]

Yeah, he and I had this conversation. I saw him, I don't know, a few weeks ago in New York. And we were talking about how hard it is to take people seriously who don't believe in God after a while. Because after a while it's so obvious. And not only is it obvious, it infuses everything. Like, once you see that everything is kind of sacred because it's part of creation. And he was saying, you talk to people and you're thinking, like, I don't want to think you're an idiot. But. And this was really important to me all this time was I kept saying, like, you know, it's not. It's not enough for us to take them down. We have to be Something which is one of the reasons that the, you know, the Jew hatred and the basic nastiness puts me off so much because I think it's, it's a no sale. I don't think we.

[B]

Yeah, anti Semitism is really weird because I'm, I'm open to the criticism, I'm very much open to it that, that anti Semitism has become the new racism. Namely a word to shut down discussion. Open to that. 100. Yeah, 100. But it's hard for me to deny that anti Semitism exists. When I look in my comments section and I see something like it's always the effing Jews or don't lie to yourself. You know, like I do. They run the world.

[A]

And you're like, I wish, I wish they ran the world. Yeah, we wouldn't be $36 trillion.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So I think of anti Semitism as an irrational hatred of Jews as Jews where rather than sort of assessing them individually. Yeah. You just sort of like blame the ills of the world on them. And so I do think that some people are accused of anti Semitism when they shouldn't be. But that doesn't mean anti Semitism doesn't exist.

[A]

Right. Well, well, all those things are true, of course, you know, that people shut, people want to find ways of shutting people down and all this stuff. But there's so many lies and, and such. It's so universal, you know, it's so like, oh, they run everything. Like, please, you know, if they run everything, how come they keep getting killed?

[B]

And the other thing is, you know, if Biden were a Jew and if Pelosi was a Jew, right. We'd be, we'd hear about it non stop about these dirty Jews. Yeah, but because they're Catholic. Well, we just sort of go, yeah, he's bad Catholic. And yeah. So yeah. Are there shitty Jews? A hundred percent. There are shitty Catholics who, yeah, me included.

[A]

Who's exempt from that, you know?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And, and I just, but, but then.

[B]

I think people might say, yeah, but it feels like I'm not able to criticize the state of Israel. But I would say, well, that's not anti Semitism either. It depends what you mean by your criticism.

[A]

Right. And it, I always say that. To me the key is, first of all, do you know what you're talking about? Which is almost nobody, I don't even.

[B]

Know how plastic is made.

[A]

That's right. Yeah, exactly. So almost nobody knows what he's talking about. But, but the other thing is also there's only one country in the world that has to argue that it should exist. And I think that is the one that kind of goes up my spine, you know, that like, this is the one country that has to argue that it has a right to be. You know, nobody says, like, you know, oh God, Pakistan, you know, the Franks took it away from the Romans, you know, it's like, give back. Give it back to Italy, you know. No, you know, it's like, it's the one place where people say, you know, I mean, they have the deed to the property. Let's face it. They, you know, the Jews have the deed.

[B]

Well, if I. If I had the choice between the Jews or the Muslims running it, I'd rather the Jews.

[A]

That's what I think too. And it's. It's a lovely. I don't know if you've ever been there.

[B]

So I need to go.

[A]

It's a remarkable country because it's really foreign.

[B]

I just. I was at the. I don't know if you'll find this funny. I was at the a. The American Friggin Conservative Friggin conference in friggin Arizona recently. Trump spoke. I didn't really want to be there, but my new. My son would love to see Trump speak.

[A]

And.

[B]

And I met a couple of Jews and we had some cigars and it was fun because I'd never really hung out with Jews before, you know, and. And I made the mistake of telling him my favorite Jew jokes, thinking that they were funny.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And both went. As I told him, they're like. And I went, I am never gonna recover. I hate myself so much. I'll tell you after the show.

[A]

Yes, I do want to hear these shows.

[B]

Yeah. And I will see if you find it. Like, I don't want to keep you any longer. You've been so generous to be here.

[A]

It's always a real pleasure to talk to you. I would actually just come down here to talk to you.

[B]

That's nice. Well, God bless you. Everyone should go get the Kingdom of Cain by Andrew Clavin on Amazon and wherever else.

[A]

I don't know. That's it. Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ad Ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.