Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 8 satirizes socialism through a fictional island fable where forced redistribution collapses prosperity, citing the Schiffs’ economic warnings. He contrasts this with The Martian, praising Mark Watney’s ingenuity over environmentalist doomsayers like John Eichard, who demand economic contraction due to fossil fuel limits. Clavin argues human creativity—like Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution—proves scarcity isn’t inevitable, accusing Republicans of ignoring this "practical hope" in favor of culture-war distractions. The episode frames sci-fi optimism as a conservative counter to pessimism, urging self-reliance over dependency. [Automatically generated summary]
Now that Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency is beginning to sink into a bubbling, noxious cesspit of lies and corruption, Democrat voters have begun to turn toward lunatic socialist Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has been especially appealing to young people who have invented hip, youthful slogans for the candidate, like feel the burn, and we're putting you on burn notice, and dude, I got so stoned last night, I think I might have voted for Bernie Sanders.
Now, since many of these young Sanders supporters might not actually know anything, the Andrew Clavin Show now presents this handy primer, what is socialism?
Socialism is a system for eradicating economic inequality by enslaving people and making them poor.
Socialism brings everyone to the same level, just as in other states of human equality, like death and...
Actually, death and socialism are the only two examples of human equality I can think of.
You may ask, how does socialism work its magic of enslavement and poverty to make us all as equal as we will be when we die?
Well, picture an island in the blue Caribbean where the natives live in shabby huts, eking out a subsistence by fishing in little boats called little boats.
One day, one of these natives has an idea.
Let's call him Thomas Alva Holobaganda Salamanunde Sagagunda Re, or Tom for short.
Tom decides to stop fishing for a day and work on his idea.
Because he doesn't fish, he goes hungry.
The other natives mock him.
They say, ha ha, Thomas Alva Holobaganda Salamagunde Sagabunda Ray, or Tom for short.
You are going to starve, you fool, while we fish in the blue Caribbean in our little boats.
But Tom goes on working and builds a net.
Now when he goes fishing, he catches enough fish for a week.
This allows him to stay home even longer and make more inventions, like preservative machines and communication devices, and a small white box that contains all the pornography you could ever want.
Soon, the other natives are giving Tom their fish in return for a net so they can get more fish.
And then they give Tom some of those fish so they can watch pornography.
Tom now has lots of fish, and all the natives have nets and phones and refrigerators and more free time to spend locked in the bathroom.
One day, one of the natives, we'll call him Balamofunji Talagadunde Hussein Obama, says, hey, it's unfair Tom has so many more fish than the rest of us.
There are enough of us here to overpower him.
That's called democracy.
So go steal his fish and give them to me, and I will share them among you, and then you'll all be equal to Tom.
And so it comes to pass, and Tom moves to Texas.
So there are no more inventions on the island.
There's only Obama, who doles out Tom's riches to anyone who does what he says.
So they're his slaves.
Until all of Tom's riches are gone, then they're poor slaves.
And that's socialism.
So vote for Bernie Sanders, or else stand up with me and say, trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Shop.
All right, we're here.
We're back.
Do we have theme music yet?
Are we playing?
Is there any theme music between the opening and this?
Not that yet.
This is singing like Broadway's tunes or something.
I should mention that that opening routine was kind of a satire on a book called How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter and Andrew Schiff.
Guy From The Martian00:13:51
It's an excellent, excellent book.
It's a cartoon book that really explains how economies work, and it's really good for people like me who don't understand.
I'm not an economist.
I'm an artist.
If my wife didn't take care of me, I'd be living in a dumpster.
So to understand the bigger questions of the economy, I read books, and this is a great one, How the Economy Grows and Why It Crashes.
Today, we're going to talk about the Martian.
I saw the picture of The Martian.
We're going to talk about The Martian and what it tells us about how we can win the next election, basically.
It's the thesis of the show.
This is a conservative show about the culture, how we live in the arts.
And one of the things we believe in is what Andrew Breitbart used to say, is that politics is downstream from culture.
This has been something that people have said for years.
I talk about the poet Percy Shelley, a crazy man, but a great poet, who said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
And the scene in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a young man where he says, I'm going to forge the conscience of my race.
That's what artists do.
So a lot of times, when you look at what is happening in the arts, you're actually seeing the future.
You're actually seeing what's happening in the minds of people.
It's being created by the arts, but it's also they are detecting it before we see it.
So The Martian is, and by the way, I don't give away any spoilers or anything.
I'm not about that.
I hate it when people do that, so I won't be saying anything that'll really spoil the picture.
But something really important is happening at the movies, and The Martian is a perfect example of it.
It's based on a book by Andy Weir, and I read it because our camera guy, Jonathan Hay, recommended it to me.
That's the only time I'll ever make that mistake.
No, actually, it was a really good, it's a really good book.
And this plot is basically an astronaut gets left for dead.
What's it?
Mark Watney.
An astronaut gets left for dead on the surface of Mars.
And basically, it's four years before anybody can get back to him.
So he's on a planet with no soil that can grow anything, with no air, with no water.
Basically, he's going, he's doomed to die.
So here's the scene.
It's, what's his name?
Sorry, I always forget.
Matt Damon is playing.
Matt Damon is playing Mark Wynn.
And he does a great job.
We were all kind of worried about old Matt turning into this performance, but he does a terrific job.
Here's the scene where he just, he makes a diary entry, his first diary entry, that no one's going to hear because he can't communicate with the Earth.
So he's stuck on Mars, and this is his first diary entry.
I'm entering this log for the record.
This is Mark Watney, and I'm still alive.
Obviously.
I have no way to contact NASA or my crewmates.
But even if I could, it would take four years for another manned mission to reach me.
And I'm going to have design to last 31 days.
So in the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option.
I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.
Kill it there.
That's the best line in both the book and the movie.
That's in the book too, right?
That line.
And that's what the movie and the book are about.
They're about this guy who has nothing but his brains and just a little bit of material that's been left behind.
Can he survive as Robinson Crusoe for the years it's going to take before anybody even realizes he's gone, he's missing, and comes back to get him.
And it's all about this guy solving problems.
The book is all science.
I mean, the book is just, it's written by, Andy Weir is a computer tech, but his father was a scientist and he grew up reading these science fiction books.
And he wrote this book and he just published it online on his blog.
And it became a bestseller.
And his fans asked him to put it out on Kindle.
He put it out on Kindle for the cheapest possible price.
It went to the top of the bestseller list.
So finally, the publishers picked it up.
And now it's this huge movie which is doing great and it should be doing great.
It's a really, really good movie.
You watch this movie and what you think about is, first you think about Apollo 13.
It's really essentially the fantasy version of Apollo 13.
These guys get lost in space.
These brilliant techs start to figure out ways of bringing him back.
The most exciting scene in Apollo 13, classic scene, is when they basically have to put a round peg.
Remember that scene they have to build a round peg that fits into a square hole.
They literally have to figure out that problem.
And they do, and what this picture is telling us, and partly it's said explicitly, but not really, it's really just part of the story, is that people can solve anything.
They can keep solving problems.
And one of the lines in the book is, if you solve enough problems, you get to go home.
This is the second science fiction movie about this theme, and the other one was Interstellar.
And Interstellar is by Christopher Nolan, who is a conservative filmmaker.
There's just no question about it.
I pointed this out a long time ago when the first Dark Knight, or the second Dark Knight film, came out, I guess.
The film called The Dark Knight, and I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal pointing out that the Dark Knight was George W. Bush.
And the internet went nuts.
This article was actually the number one piece on the internet that day.
I was sitting at home.
I was getting an email every three seconds.
My wife was looking over my shoulder going, what the hell is going on?
I was like, click, click, click these emails.
All of them telling me I was a total idiot and what a fool I was.
And the left was laughing and all this stuff.
And of course, that's how you know you're right when the left does that to you, when they start to ridicule you and scream at you.
You know that you've hit the button.
And of course, now everybody knows it and they attack Nolan whenever he makes a picture because he's a conservative.
Nolan's Interstellar is a bad movie.
And it's a bad movie because Nolan is so smart that he has to tell you what it's about.
And in The Martian, they don't tell you, just in the story.
But because Nolan lets his guy express the theme explicitly, I will play just the trailer in which Matthew McConaughey expresses the theme of interstellar, which is exactly the same theme as The Martian.
So here's the comment.
We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible.
And we count these moments.
The first ever to fly faster than the speed of sound.
These moments when we dared to aim higher.
To break barriers.
To reach for the stars.
76 years ago.
To make the unknown known.
I have a lead.
We count these moments as our proudest achievements.
Having fired the imagination of a generation.
But we lost all that.
Holes into port for the last time.
And perhaps we've just forgotten.
So these pictures, which is now, pardon me, becoming a theme, not just in science fiction, I think it's becoming a theme in the culture, strike a massive, massive blow against environmentalism.
One of the hardest things about being a conservative and communicating conservative ideas is we're actually for what we're against.
That is, all of us are for the environment.
Nobody's against the environment.
Nobody wants to misuse the earth and blow the air and soil our water.
What we are against is people who use the environment as a way of fear-mongering to gather power for the government.
We're not against taking care of the poor.
We're against people who use the welfare state to increase government power.
Compare that Matthew McConaughey speech to another speech.
This is a guy named John Eichard, environmentalist, and this video was put out a couple of years ago by The Nation, the magazine that calls itself the flagship of the left, okay?
So we can solve these problems, says Matthew McConaughey.
We can solve these problems that we've forgotten and all this.
Listen to this guy.
Listen to what this guy says.
This is the left speaking.
We're confronted with a situation today that requires our immediate attention.
We simply can't wait much longer to address these real issues that are confronting us today of the impossibility of continual growth.
We need to recognize the fact that the growth of the past 200 years, particularly the last 100 years, has been supported by an abundant source of relatively accessible and cheap fossil energy.
And we've used up roughly half of the supply by most estimates during that period of time.
And we're using it at a faster rate all of the time because of the booming economies in the rest of the world, particularly in India and China and places like that.
And we simply can't continue to grow at the rate that we've been growing in the past.
That's the left.
That's the environmental movement and the left speaking to us, always saying the same thing.
We're done.
We're through.
We're out of energy.
We've got to small down.
We've got to hold back.
We've got to keep out of space.
Don't spend our money in space.
We've got to spend it here.
We only have so much money.
It's got to be, if you have too much, then I have too little.
That's the message of the left.
And finally, finally, we're starting to hear this voice that says, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You know, he's wrong.
We didn't have cheap energy.
What we had was a lot of fossils.
We just had dinosaur bones.
That becomes energy in your mind.
Only the mind turns that into energy.
It's just black goo until somebody says, hey, I can take that black goo, until some Matt Damon character says, you know what?
I can take that black goo and turn it into gasoline.
I can turn it into oil.
There was a guy, Norman Borlaug.
Nobody knows this guy's name.
He's called the man who saved a billion lives.
I think that's what they call him.
Back in the 60s, 50s, 60s, the environmentalists were telling me, we're running out of food, we're running out of food.
Borlaug, with the environmentalists trying to stop him at every turn, Borlaug invented new strains of wheat that doubled the output, tripled the output, I can't remember, and was disease-resistant.
And the environmentalists were screaming bloody murder.
And he turned the shortage of food into a surplus of food and fed billions of people with the environmentalists trying to stop him.
If you think this hasn't been going on, the myth that we went to the moon while everybody cheered is completely a myth.
You can look up an article called Moondoggle in Atlantic Monthly, which recounts the fact that a lot of people thought, no, why are we spending so much money on this space program when we should be spending it on social issues?
The New York Times, I'm speaking from memory, but the New York Times ran countless editorials saying, this is wrong, we can't go into space, we have to spend this money at home.
Here's a song that I found looking back at those days, a black guy writing a song, and this was the opinion of many black activists, that this is Whitey going to the moon while we starve behind.
Listen to this lyric for a minute.
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Pump-based and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills, but Whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now, I'll be paying still while Whitey's on the moon.
So this has been happening forever.
It can't be done.
We're running out of energy.
We're running out of this.
We're running out of air.
We never run out.
We never run out because the source of our energy is the human mind.
The source of our energy is guys like this guy that Matt Damon plays in The Martian, inventing new stuff.
And if we are the party of that, this is the thing that frustrates me about Republicans, and it wasn't true of Reagan.
I know people think it was, but it wasn't.
We're not going to win this on immigration.
I know it's an important issue.
I agree with the right on immigration.
It's an important issue.
We're not going to win an election on that.
We're not going to win an election banging on gays, which I think is ridiculous anyway.
But those things are not going to win.
We are going to win if we realize that we are the guys who make stuff.
We are the guys who make the future.
We're the hopeful.
We should be running on hope.
And everybody says, oh my God, they ran on hope.
That's their thing.
Listen to this.
This is from a new book called Conservative Heart by Arthur Brooks.
And I really like Brooks.
It's written by Mark Thiessen, but it's Brooks' idea.
I never understand why people let other people write their books.
I love writing my books.
When I was a kid, an agent came up to me and said, kid, I'm going to make you so rich you'll be able to hire people to write your books.
And I thought, should I hire people to make love to my wife too?
I mean, I actually like writing my books, but Mark Thiessen is a good writer, and he put down Brooks' ideas.
After decades of research, psychologists have learned, says Brooks, psychologists have learned that hope comes in two very different varieties.
First, hope can be a vague emotional state that is disassociated from practical reality.
We hope for world peace.
We hope that the Seahawks make it to the Super Bowl.
We hope the government will do something nice for us.
The problem is when we talk about hope in this way, we're implying that we have no personal say in the matter.
We don't hope for goals that are actually within our own reach.
This kind of thinking has consequences.
If we allow this passiveness into our speech, it creeps deeper into our psyche.
The second kind of hope is very different.
Call it practical hope.
Instead of a fleeting emotion, psychologists say practical hope is the combination of two mindsets.
The first is the belief that a pathway exists between me and my goal.
It can be done.
The second belief is that I personally have the agency to walk down that path.
I can do it.
It can be done.
And I can do it.
That, to me, is the conservative platform.
It's not going into space.
Practical Hope Matters00:03:21
It's getting a job.
It's not being on the dole.
When Mitt Romney said, oh, all these people are on the dole, they won't vote for us, they'll vote for us.
When people say, oh, immigrants are doing the jobs Americans won't do, show me the American who won't do a job.
These guys are snobs.
They think if the only job you can get is being a barista or sweeping the streets, that you don't want that job.
Hey, I love my barista, man.
My barista does honor to God by the work she does.
If somebody isn't sweeping the streets, it's not a very pleasant place to live.
We can give these people jobs.
And yeah, our leaders are going to take us to Mars.
But nobody gets left behind in the conservative movement.
When I start to hear a guy talk like this, Marco Rubio does it a little bit.
Cruz, I love the guy, but he hasn't found that voice yet.
When we can talk like that, we're going to start to win.
And I think we might do it this time.
I hope we will.
Because they're selling a false hope, that kind of passive hope that they're going to do something for us.
We're selling a hope that you can do something for yourself.
And now I'm going to finish because I'm out of time.
I had so much more to say.
Gosh, the stuff you're missing.
With Stuff I Like, the Halloween edition of Stuff I Like.
And this one comes pre-tested by a lovely Lindsay, the lady who does the makeup, and she's not to be blamed for the results.
She only has so much to work with.
This is my favorite ghost movie ever.
I've been involved in a couple of ghost movies, one very bad, a couple that were very good.
And whenever you talk to directors who love ghost movies, this is the first movie they mention.
And the reason I asked Lindsay to watch it is because Lindsay is about a third my age, and I wanted to make sure that it holds up, that it's not just me looking at it.
It's not that old a movie.
It's from the 60s, I believe.
And it was made during the highlight of Hammer Horror, if you remember the Hammer Horror films.
And it was meant to be against those films, kind of a different version, a different kind of horror.
It's called The Innocents.
It stars Deborah Carr, and it's based on the most famous ghost story probably ever written, maybe besides The Monkey's Paw, which is the Henry James story, The Turn of the Screw.
And I don't recommend this.
I love the Henry James story, but Henry James is a very, very difficult writer.
He writes very, very complicated, winding sentences that almost sound like German sometimes.
But this is a brilliant adaptation of it by Truman Capote.
It's based on a play by William Archibald, I think his name is.
But Truman Capote wrote the script, and John Mortimer added some additional dialogue.
If you don't know him, he wrote a brilliant series of mysteries called Rumpole of the Bailey, which were on PBS, and very funny stuff.
This is a subtle, quiet, no shocks, no special effects, nothing.
Just a subtle, quiet story of a governess in a house with two kids who begins to believe that there is something going terribly wrong.
If you like the picture of the others, it's a complete ripoff of this film, in my opinion.
Nowhere near as good.
This is one of those pictures that it might not scare you while you're watching it.
When you turn it off, you will think like, man, now I'm scared.
Now I'm scared.
It's just a chilling, scary picture.
That's all I have time for.
Like I said, I have so much more, so much more to give, so much more that I could, ah, I'm going away.