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- [00:01]
Michael Knowles
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Michael Knowles
It's just granola. Not even yogurt. No crust, no fuss. Uncrust your mornings.
- [01:00]
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- [01:31]
Michael Knowles
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- [01:39]
That means more new daily shows from the most trusted voices in conservative media. Uncensored ad free and available an hour before you can see or hear them anywhere else.
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Andrew Klavan
And when we say premium, we're proving.
- [01:58]
Michael Knowles
It with the long awaited seven part epic series the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. The Legend begins streaming January 22, 2026 exclusively on Daily Wire. All Access members get early access to episodes one and two at Christmas Day.
- [02:12]
50% off. Black Friday is our biggest sale of the year.
- [02:15]
Andrew Klavan
It only happens once a year.
- [02:16]
Michael Knowles
When it's gone, it's gone. Go to dailywire.com subscribe and join now. Here on this very show is Mr. Andrew Klavan. Drew, good to see you.
- [02:38]
Andrew Klavan
Hey, what's the matter with my voice? I don't know what you're talking about.
- [02:41]
Michael Knowles
I've never heard that. I thought of all the Things to criticize about you.
- [02:45]
Andrew Klavan
I'm sitting here listening, you're talking Latin, you've got like plain song going. This is like being in the Omen, you know, this show chanting and Drew.
- [02:55]
Michael Knowles
For the, for the four people who watch it, they have, they are getting an experience like none other. You know, it's a little niche, it's a little esoteric, but so someone.
- [03:06]
Andrew Klavan
FBI, by the way, just mass was taking place.
- [03:11]
Michael Knowles
My, my show at this point, it's like the Klux Klan, you know, is just all FBI agents and like Bubba. That is the audience of my show, you know, so someone pointed out the other day, I said, whenever it was like two months ago, I said, I'll get Drew on to talk about his new book. And my team, they go out, I don't know what they do, they smoke cigarettes behind the building, they go play pickleball, they go, Jacob goes and buys nice leather jackets. They say to me the other day, they say, Drew's really angry cuz you haven't had him on to talk about his book. And I said, well then he should be angry with you. Cause I've told you multiple times to get Drew on to talk about his book. This book at this point, I think came out in like 2018. I don't know, it's been like so long since it came out. The book is after that the Dark, which by the way refers to one of the poems like Nearest to My Heart. Alfred Lord Tennyson's Crossing the Bar.
- [04:06]
Andrew Klavan
Yes, yes, It's a poem he wrote. It came to him in a moment, he said, and after he wrote it, he ended all of his books with it. Because it was about dying. It was about sailing off into eternity.
- [04:19]
Michael Knowles
Sunset and evening star. And one clear call for me. And may there be no moaning of the bar. When I put out to say, I think I forget the rest of it.
- [04:27]
Andrew Klavan
That's very good. That's it. And after that, the Dark. And that's where it comes from in the book.
- [04:34]
Michael Knowles
Why? You know, I'm a Philistine, you know, I certainly have. I haven't read. Yours are like the only novels I read.
- [04:41]
Andrew Klavan
I know you've read two works of fiction, the Divine Comedy and me, and you quote them incessantly. I don't understand why you don't read so much more. Then you'd have so much more to quote. Your soul would be bigger. This is the thing that really drives me crazy is conservatives are all. They talk spiritual. They always talk about the spirit, they talk about God. We're not afraid to talk about God. We're not afraid to. And then art comes. It's like, why should I read fiction? I was a fiction. I thought it didn't really happen. It's to enlarge your imagination so that you perceive the world in a bigger way. And that is actually. And by the way, there's basically nobody. There's no good conservative right or left. Now that Cormac McCarthy is dead. It was me and him. It's just me. So, I mean, if you're not reading me, you are literally not supporting conservatives in the art.
- [05:30]
Michael Knowles
Yes, I realize this. Occasionally I am forced to read fiction. And when I say fiction, I mean like Tolstoy. I mean, works that I should have read 15 years ago, and I have to do it for my book club show or whatever. And then every time, well, unless I read a bad book. But whenever I read good books, by the time I get to the end of it, I say, wow, I feel refreshed. I feel like I've just seen something, I've lived something. My soul feels bigger. Wow. I'm viewing the world in a new and interesting way. And then I say, well, I'm never doing that again. What do I need to do that for?
- [06:08]
Andrew Klavan
It's like Charles Murray discovered God. And I said, do you pray? And he said, no, I tried it once and it worked, so I never did it again. That's you in fiction. But. But no, I. I really do think that this is a serious thing that I think you, as. As you ingest more art, you start to walk around the world and say, oh, I recognize this situation. Just like if you live as many hundreds of years as I have lived, you've seen things before and you see them again and you kind of know how they're going to go. But that happens with art, too. Because you think, oh, yeah, Shakespeare said this. Or, you know, I read this in a book and you can see what's going to happen. It's the reason that I am continually. Right. Like when we have those friendly fire shows, we're all talking and you are saying, well, I read the polls and this is gonna happen. And I'll sit there and go, no, that's not what's gonna happen. It's gonna be this. It's because I read the arts. It's because I read fiction.
- [06:57]
Michael Knowles
I do wonder how much the. I don't wanna be too harsh here, but the conservative Philistinism affects our. Especially our more contemporary politics. Because I think even though I'm mostly a philistine, I have read a decent amount of poetry or something I've been dragged into reading some of. And it does gives you a bit of a lighter step. So much so that people will call you gay. They'll say like you're, you know, come on, what are you reading poetry for you Fanouk. You know, come on, we gotta get, we gotta start reading, you know, like Hitler or something.
- [07:34]
Andrew Klavan
What do you. And it used to be it was a manly thing to do to read the arts because you were sophisticated, you know, you knew that a guy like James Bond had read all the great British novels, you know, that said he wouldn't be that way if he hadn't. It is enculturating, if that's a word that it may. It gives you culture. And I think, you know, I really do think this because it's been frustrating in some ways. I feel like, I feel like, like 20 years ago I started fighting this fight to take the culture and all the means of communications away from the left because they had this stranglehold on it and they were killing our country by basically producing this toxic atmosphere. You were talking about Jonathan Hyde. You know, this is like, this is the toxic atmosphere that he lives in that he, you know, he can't see through. I interviewed him about his, his atheism and like he, he seriously can't get past it and see the truth because of the atmosphere that he lives in. And, and we've won so much of this fight. You know, we have defeated their news media. Their news media is now almost virtually irrelevant. They're just this kind of font. They just kind of stink up the place with their lies. But we still have not come back and, and taken the arts away. And like, Hollywood is dead. Hollywood is. When I say it's dead, it's like lying on its back with its feet is what tits up, you know, it's like it just did. And we're not doing anything, you know, right now.
- [08:59]
Michael Knowles
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- [11:44]
Andrew Klavan
You're kind of mistaken. I'll tell you why. I was at the opera Sunday. I saw the Marriage of Figaro at the Kennedy Center. It was wonderful. Wonderful cast, wonderful production. And packed. It was just packed. Although, I mean, I was the youngest person there, so that might tell you something about the audience.
- [12:00]
Michael Knowles
But Mozart was not Mozart, So he was in the audience.
- [12:03]
Andrew Klavan
And look, it is very, very hard to match the European arts and culture at their highest. There was something about that culture that produced the greatest art that humankind has ever produced. And that is intimidating for Americans and has been ever since America began. But there was something really different about the European arts is that Europe was a number of small countries. So each what we would call a state was a country. And each one could address the entire country in a single work of art. So, Dick, write Britain. You could write the entire country of Britain. We can't do that in America. Too many of us too big and too individualistic. And that's why Americans have found their expression, almost always their greatest expression in genre. In musical comedy, in detective stories, in westerns, in science fiction. We're really good at those. I mean, you look at somebody like Conan the Barbarian, he's tossed aside as junk. No, these are some of the greatest adventure novels ever written. And they say something about American life without, of course, ever talking about American life. I work mostly in the crime genre, sometimes in fantasy and horror. You and I did another. The. Another Kingdom trilogy together, which is still selling quite well, by the way. I just got some royalties for that. It's doing very nicely.
- [13:21]
Michael Knowles
When do I get my royal.
- [13:24]
Andrew Klavan
I'll send you a bagel. I don't know.
- [13:26]
Michael Knowles
Maybe I could use it in the.
- [13:28]
Andrew Klavan
Shape of how much money you get this. But somehow the American dream is expressed in dreamlike stories that are genre stories. And that's a really interesting fact and really different. But we shouldn't be cowed by the high culture of Europe, though we should ingest it so we can put the stuff that's in there into our works. But it's just different. I mean, a movie like Casablanca, the Godfather, these are works of art. There's no question about it. And the fact that they're not, you know, Macbeth, they don't have the language that Shakespeare had, is not to be. Doesn't mean that we should turn up our noses at them. I think it really is important. You know, one of the true crisis resolutions in my life, I was just writing about it for somebody else. And so I'm on top of my mind is I knew that I had, let's just say, a sophisticated vision of what the world is. It was a complex, sophisticated vision. But I knew my skill was writing fast moving crime stories. That was really the talent I'd been given. And I thought, how do I do that? How do I put those things together? And I read a great Victorian thriller called the Woman in White. And I was lying in bed reading this and I sat up in bed and I thought, that's how you do it. And then the trick became taking a slow moving Victorian novel and turning it into a fast moving American novel, which has been sort of the work of my life. If you read after that the Dark, you will see the results of that. And I'm not. I am selling the book. I hope everybody goes out and buys the book. But this is. When I finished that, I thought, yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Because it is full of complexity. It is full of a vision of the world. But it is done as an fast moving American thriller because that's America. America is not a slow moving, ruminating culture where we sit around and worry which fork goes. You know, Henry James, who was an American writer, who became a British writer, talked about where the fork was. And if you didn't know where the fork was, then that told you something about character. It doesn't tell you anything about an American. An American is a very different kind of character who I think is expressed in musicals, westerns, detective stories and science fiction and fantasy. That's how we talk to each other. And I think it's right and proper that we do. We shouldn't look down on it.
- [15:45]
Michael Knowles
Right. I've never considered that. That in America you can't have this totalizing vision in a totalizing work of art. Cause we're just. It's a weird country that was founded by like pilgrims, religious separatist zealots and kind of miscreants and money makers. And then we got a bunch of slaves and then a ton of immigrants. You know, it's like pretty hard.
- [16:11]
Andrew Klavan
Yeah. And you get these wonderful moments when like, you know, Bing Crosby listens to Louis Armstrong and thinks, I want a little of that black stuff in my life. And Bing Crosby is singing songs written by Jews. And yeah, it's different than Mozart because Mozart is embodying an entire culture. But it is a work of genius. It's a work of genius. When you hear the American songbook written by all these Jews for blacks, for whites and, you know, and Irish guys singing, you know, all this stuff, you're hearing something new and beautiful and unique. And I think we should be proud of it and, and understand it as an expression of ourselves. This incredible wild country. That's nothing like it. I mean, maybe Rome a little bit at its peak, but yeah, nothing like this.
- [16:57]
Michael Knowles
No, that was the comparison, I was thinking. And in terms of genre, you know, for gigantic globe encompassing decadent empires, I was thinking of the poetry of Catullus, much of which is just pornography. And, you know, I guess that's a prolific genre in a decadent global empire as well. But better to focus more on like the crime stories and the musicals and the.
- [17:21]
Andrew Klavan
No, I mean, you know, Yeats made fun of the critics of his day. The poet, the Irish poet Yeats made fun of the critics of his day because if they were stuffy, he called them bald heads. You know, old bald heads. And, and he. The last line of that poem is, what would they say if their katallas came their way? In other words, the art in its time was filthy and it was fun and it was big and. And dirty. And now the critics are going, oh. And so I, I really do think the critics get in our way, get between us and the things we love. One of the reasons I talk about video games is because I think they are a stunning visual art form at their best. Obviously 90% of them are crap, but every now and again you do something, you think, wow, that's beautiful. And I'm being sucked into it by gameplay, which has never happened before. And these are just new things. And I think, you know, yeah, art is a two way street. So if you're sitting in your mother's basement smoking dope and playing video games, you are not participating in art. But I've played video games that have stuck with me and have changed the way I see things and enhanced the way I see things. So I just don't think. I don't think snobbery is what works. I think recognizing quality, both in European style art and in American art, is what brings it to life. And I think that's why conservatives get lost. They will go to the opera, they will watch a guy's eyes plucked out in King Lear, but then when they see it in Game of Thrones, they.
- [18:45]
Michael Knowles
Think, ooh, it's violent, naughty, nasty. Yeah, Drew, you might have convinced me to stop being such a philistine and to go read after that. The Dark. A book that is out right now needs to go get it. I believe I'm seeing you in about three seconds to go do Friendly Fire. Is that right?
- [19:03]
Andrew Klavan
I'll be there.
- [19:04]
Michael Knowles
See you then.
- [19:05]
Andrew Klavan
One these incredible sweaters.
- [19:07]
Michael Knowles
I know. This is. We gotta get you. Is that a nice Michael Knowles sweater? If not, we have to get you one. You can all go get yours@dailywear.com shop. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.
- [19:23]
Andrew Klavan
Sam.