Phil Robertson of In the Woods with Phil rejects political correctness, framing spiritual renewal over activism while dismissing his past A&E suspension as a "politically correct" overreach. The host then weaves a conspiracy-laden narrative linking the 2016 "Steel Dossier," CrowdStrike’s exclusive DNC email analysis, and Uranium One to alleged Democratic-Russian collusion, contrasting Trump’s "rudeness" with Obama’s "corruption." Later, the speaker pivots to envy, crediting God for their transformation from bitterness to joy, before debunking feminist critiques of science as ideological attacks—tying it all to a broader war on truth. [Automatically generated summary]
A spokesman for Hillary Clinton says the Clintons have had no involvement with Russia's attempts to take over our uranium supplies.
Here's a clip.
He looks familiar.
I'm not sure.
I don't know where I've seen him before.
That translates as a shrieky old woman in a pants suit stole my watch, locked the doors before she gets away.
At Democrat headquarters, everybody says everything's fine.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Senator Jeff Flake made an impassioned speech in which he said everyone must stand and fight against Donald Trump, and that's it.
I'm out of here.
And he ran away.
All right, we've got Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, formerly Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson.
He's got a new show at CRTV.
He'll be here to tell us about his new show.
And the mailbag will solve all your problems.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-boo.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It doesn't want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
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Why James Comey Matters00:15:03
All right, a lot of stuff going on, all this kerfuffle in the Republican Party, but we got to talk about this scandal.
This is an unbelievable scandal.
I'm starting to feel like Alex Jones.
I'm starting to feel like InfoWars, you know.
I'm going to sit here with his big red face and start my sound like I'm going to have a heart attack.
Look, the DNC and the Clinton campaign is now clear that they paid Fusion GPS for this steel dossier.
This is the one with the Russian hookers, but it was also supposed to establish Trump's business ties with Russia.
We don't know how much of it, if any of it, has been confirmed.
They're now doing all this stuff.
They're on TV.
The spokespeople are saying, oh, well, this was a GOP thing for the primaries, and then they just passed it on to us.
Not true.
The GOP did go to Fusion GPS, the company that did this dossier.
Somebody at the GOP did go to Fusion GPS trying to stop Trump, but they had not gotten this steel dossier yet.
That was done by the Democrats.
And the guy who did it, I mean, I'm going to try and lay this out because it's so complicated and it's still developing.
The guy who did it was a lawyer.
What they do is they always get lawyers to do this so that the lawyer can then say, oh, I can't tell you about it because it's client privilege, you know, so I can't tell anybody about it.
But this is from the same company, Perkins Coy, that hired, what was their name?
CrowdStrike.
Crowds.
Okay, now listen, right.
Okay, same lawyers, right?
They hired CrowdStrike.
What did CrowdStrike do?
CrowdStrike went into the DNC computers.
Remember, the DNC computers were hacked by Russia, except we don't know if they were hacked by Russia because these lawyers hired CrowdStrike and they're the only people who looked at those computers.
Well, didn't the FBI look at them?
No.
The FBI said, oh, well, if you've done, you know, if you've looked at them and you're happy, you know, that it's fine, you know, that's fine with us.
This is all about James Comey.
It all comes back to Comey, and some of it gets back to Mueller, too, the guy who's now investigating this.
I mean, it's an amazing, amazing story.
Remember the big CIA, oh, the 17 intelligence people, you know, agencies, they all said that the Russian president Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking of the DNC and the dissemination of emails from key stack staffers via WikiLeaks in order to damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
That's what we listened to for the first six months of Trump's campaign.
The only reason we know this is because CrowdStrike hired by these lawyers who also owned fusion GPS to do this stuff.
I mean, it is unbelievable.
And now at the New York Times, they're saying, well, we were going to report it, but they lied to us.
Hillary Clinton lied to us.
How did reporters at the New York Times think to themselves, oh, it's Hillary.
She must be telling the truth.
I mean, listen to her.
She's still lying.
She was on the book TV selling her book, and she's still telling the same old Clintonian lies.
It is like a script.
Listen to this.
I would say it's the same baloney they've been peddling for years, and there's been no credible evidence by anyone.
In fact, it's been debunked repeatedly and will continue to be debunked.
But here's what they're doing.
And really, I have to give them credit.
You know, Trump and his allies, including Fox News, are really experts at distraction and diversion.
So the closer the investigation about real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians, as we heard Jeff Sessions finally admit to in his testimony the other day, the more they want to just throw mud on the wall and I'm their favorite target, me and President Obama.
We're the ones that they always like to put into the crosshairs.
So yes, I'm not surprised, but I think the real story is how nervous they are about these continuing investigations.
From Russia with love, I fly to you.
Much wiser.
Goodbye to you.
See, I think the song should have given her away.
I think when the New York Times heard that song play, they should have said, maybe she's not telling the truth.
It's that same Clinton thing.
This is an old, first they deny it, they deny it, they deny it, right?
And then six months, oh, it's an old story, and it's been debunked.
When was it debunked?
They just proved it.
I mean, and she's talking about the uranium deal, which I'll get to in just a minute, because I just want to remind you that this steel thing, this completely bogus steel thing, first of all, we think a lot of the intelligence in it came from the Soviets.
We know the Soviets, from the Russians, we know that the Russians were hiring Fusion GPS too.
We know they were paying them to gather dirt too.
This is the dossier that James Comey took to Obama and Trump, and he put it in that all-important daily briefing for Obama, right?
That's where the most important stuff goes, which virtually guaranteed that it would become a news story, because that's when the news, the press had it, and they released it when they knew that Obama had heard it.
So Comey, so the Democrats, the Democrats gather this stuff.
It's trash.
Democrats gather this stuff, which is probably leaked to fusion through the Russians.
Comey then gives it to Obama and Trump, guaranteeing that it leaks to the press, okay?
Now, on top of this, Tucker Carlson now has a source.
And Carlson, smart guy, right?
He says this is a very important source, and he will, he was kind of indicating that he would ultimately be able to reveal the name, but this is a source that is talking to investigators on the Hill.
He says that Robert Mueller, who's sent to investigate the Russian ties with Donald Trump, is now investigating Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager, but not for what Manafort did with Trump.
He's investigating him for what Manafort did with the Podesta brothers, with Tony Podesta, who's a lobbyist and a big, big Clinton donor, and John Podesta, who was Clinton's campaign manager.
What was he doing?
He was taking Russian interests to the Podestas to lobby Hillary, who was then Secretary of State for Russian interests, including the taking over of 20% of our uranium supply by this Russian company, Uranium-1.
Let Carlson tell it because it's his source.
Here he is.
One point in either 2013 or maybe early 2014, our source says a meeting was held that included both Tony Podesta and a representative of the Clinton Foundation.
The explicit subject of that meeting, how to assist Uranium-1, that's the Russian-owned company that controls 20% of American uranium production, and whose board members gave more than $100 million to the Clinton Foundation.
As our source put it, quote, Tony Podesta was basically part of the Clinton Foundation.
Now, apparently there was not a lot of pretending about this internally at the Podesta group.
According to our source, Manafort was clear, crystal clear, that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary Clinton in the belief she was likely to become president.
Okay, now, remember, I know this is insanely complicated, but just remember this.
The FBI, we now know, knew that this was going on.
They knew it was breaking laws.
They knew it was illegal, and they buried it, right?
They kept it from Congress, and they kept it from the public, and they buried it.
And then about five years down the line, they did a plea deal with the Russians, basically.
They did a plea deal with them that did nothing.
So they buried Robert Mueller.
And Robert Mueller, at the time, is leading the FBI.
So Robert Mueller is now investigating himself.
He is now investigating the story that he buried.
And Comey is involved in everything.
I mean, Comey was, I'm telling you, I'm starting to sound like Alex Jones.
It's like I'm just going to have a heart attack and fall, pitch forward into my, you know, Comey goes back.
Do you remember this Valerie Plain thing?
This Valerie Plame thing drove me crazy.
Valerie Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who was a former ambassador, wrote this piece for the New York Times in which he said that, oh, George W. Bush was utterly wrong when he said that Saddam Hussein was trying to get Yellow Cake to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Okay, totally wrong.
Then when it turned out, and then Bush, like an idiot, apologized for this.
When it turned out that Wilson was wrong and that Bush had been right, the media jumped on this absolute nonsense story that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, had been outed by the press and somebody in the Bush administration had outed an active CIA agent.
This turned out to be utterly untrue.
Nobody in the administration did it and the FBI knew this.
The deputy attorney general, the Attorney General John Ashcroft, recused himself from the investigation.
The deputy attorney general then appointed that guy Fitzgerald, right, who just ran rampant through the Bush administration.
Who was the deputy attorney general?
Points for answers.
It's James Comey.
James Comey appointed this guy Fitzgerald, who then, remember it was going to be Fitzmas?
That was what they kept calling it.
It was going to be Fitzmas for the Democrats.
It was going to be Christmas for them because he was going to expose everything.
And the only guy he got, and he railroaded Scooter Libby, who had been Cheney's chief of staff.
And I know this is just all so complicated, but it's just Comey was in on all this stuff.
And then, and then when they investigate Hillary Clinton's emails, oh, nothing to see.
Yeah, she was a little reckless, but she didn't have intent.
And he didn't even look at the computers that were hacked.
He just trusted the DNC, the same lawyer who got this dossier that Comey then brought.
I mean, these guys, it's like a James Bond movie.
These guys are completely tangled up with the Russians.
You know, what it really is like, it's like the fake news thing.
Remember, it was the left that started fake news.
The left was the ones that started the fake news thing.
And then Trump picked it up and said, fake news, I'll show you fake news.
But these things are like cigars.
You can just see the Democrats kind of leaning back, yeah, we got this Russian collusion story smoking the cigar, and then the cigar just blows up in their face.
They're so dirty.
So this, I just wanted to go through this, and I know it's too complicated to follow.
You have to read it to see it, but it really is amazing the connections between the Democrats and the Russians and the dirt that the FBI.
You know, I said yesterday that one of my big mistakes, one of the big mistakes I have made on the show was trusting Comey when he first came out.
And that was because as a reporter many, many years ago, I used to cover the FBI and they were great.
But it really does seem to me that they have been taken over by Democrat interests and they are no longer really doing the job of the FBI.
They are doing the job of the Democrats like the press.
So this is why this silly civil war that's going on in the GOP is kind of unimpressive to me.
You know, I have this big, big problem with Donald Trump's rudeness, okay?
His bullying, his nastiness.
I have a big problem.
But it's not like the country is going to fall apart because Donald Trump has bad manners.
He'll be here for a while and then he'll be gone like every president.
That's not the big problem.
But yesterday, I mean, first, let's start with Corker, Bob Corker, who's kind of a moderate Republican.
He and Trump have been going at each other and they go at each other over the tax breaks, the tax reform.
And Trump says, stay off people's retirement money.
And Corker said, well, we're going to be the judge of that.
And Trump strikes back and he says, Bob Corker, who helped President Obama give us the bad Iran deal, is one of his tweets, and couldn't get elected dog catcher in Tennessee, is now fighting tax cuts.
And Corker is leaving, right, because he can't win.
And so this is what Corker said.
He comes back and hits back against Donald Trump.
I don't know why he lowers himself to such a low, low standard and debases our country in the way that he does, but he does.
And, you know, look, I don't like responding.
You know, you can let them go unanswered, but it's just not me to, we don't do tweets like that.
We've responded twice to, again, untruth.
But, you know, it's unfortunate that our nation finds itself in this place.
Is the President of the United States a liar?
The President has great difficulty with the truth.
So Corker is saying that Trump lied, that he helped Obama pass the Iran deal.
And the press is backing him up.
Like the New York Times has a headline saying, oh, yeah, this is not true.
But like everything Trump says, it's not a lie.
It's just loosely stated.
What happened was Obama made this Iran deal and he said, well, it's not a treaty.
And of course, it was a treaty.
But a treaty needs to be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate constitutionally.
So Obama was just going to declare it to be in place.
Corker hated the deal, so he passed this Corker bill, which basically said that the Senate gets to vet it and they have to re-ratify it all the time.
But that made it easier for Obama to pass it.
He didn't need the same numbers.
And what they all said is, well, we had to do this or else Obama was going to do it illegally.
But of course, if Obama had done it illegally, we wouldn't have had to do anything with it in the first place.
It would have just been illegal and they could have blown it up into a scandal.
So Trump is right.
Corker did help.
So now Senator Jeff Flake.
Flake is kind of an open borders guy in Arizona.
He's got like 18% approval rating.
So he's not going to run again.
So he's not going to run again.
So he gets up and he gives a brave speech denouncing Donald Trump.
But listen carefully to what he's saying, to exactly what these guys are saying, okay, because they're telling us this is a threat to America.
And my question to you is, is it?
Let's play the first flake cut.
I rise today with no small measure of regret.
Regret because of the state of our disunion.
Regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics.
Regret because of the indecency of our discourse.
Regret because of the coarseness of our leadership.
Regret for the compromise of our moral authority.
And by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs.
It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.
In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal.
Regret For Compromise00:12:28
But we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set at the top.
Okay, so what they're all complaining about, this great danger to America, is Trump's rudeness and his bullying.
That is what it is.
And I started to read this on Monday.
I don't like to read my own stuff because it seems kind of silly to read my own stuff.
But I just want to talk about a comment that I got on this.
Just a couple of paragraphs of a piece I wrote over the weekend that was put up on PJ Media.
And I started as Trump, I get attacked a lot at PJ for being too mean to Trump, right?
So here I get attacked for being too nice to Trump.
So, you know, whatever.
So as Trump-loving readers of this blog have frequently complained, I am not always a fan of Donald Trump's personal style.
I don't like bullies, and I prefer a president who thinks before he opens his mouth.
I do, on the other hand, very much like many of the things Trump has accomplished, the great judicial nominations, the taming of the regulatory state, the restoration of the rule of law at the border, leaving the silly Paris Accord, the annihilation of ISIS, the attempts to hurry the implosion of Obamacare by suspending utterly illegal payments to insurance companies, calling out the NFL and calling out the media on its leftward bias.
That's an awful lot of good stuff, and it surely makes up for the big mouthery.
Aside from a few stupid remarks that seem to show a lack of respect for the First Amendment, remarks that have so far not been followed up by any bad actions, I can't think of one instance in which Trump has behaved in a way that endangers the norms of American governance.
He hasn't misused the IRS like Obama did or corrupted the Justice Department like Obama did or made illegal payouts to insurance companies like Obama did or extended the power of regulatory agencies until they became a threat to constitutional democracy like Obama did or lied to the people about health care or Benghazi like Obama did or behaved so autocratically and unconstitutionally that he lost a record number of cases before the Supreme Court more than any other modern president like Obama did.
In fact, Trump has been incredibly transparent with the public and has generally thrown legislative decisions to Congress where they belong.
Where was Senator Flake when that was going on, right?
I mean, that's my problem.
I understand that this guy is a big mouth, and I understand that he doesn't treat people the way I would like to see an American president treat people, and I understand that's bad news.
But where were these guys when Obama was genuinely in a danger to the American way of life?
And somebody commented on my blog, has it occurred to you that only a guy with a big mouth, a big mouth bully like Trump could have made the change in Washington that we want to see?
And what I didn't have time to answer him was, yes, that's exactly what has occurred to me.
But that worries me.
It worries me that only a big mouth bully can make that change.
I mean, what does it say about our polity?
And what does it say about the Republican Party that it takes a guy like Trump, who's not a very nice guy, to get them off the dime, to wake them up to the people they've been ignoring all this time?
All right, we have Phil Robertson here.
So let's bring him on.
I don't want to keep him waiting.
Phil Robertson, one of the stars, the patriarch of Duck Dynasty, went an amazing 11 seasons on A ⁇ E, broke viewership records.
But on Monday, October 30th, he is starring in a new CRTV exclusive show called In the Woods with Phil, which you can watch at crtv.com slash ducks.
Phil, it is great to talk to you, and you're going to be working with Stephen Crowder, so bring your duck rifle with you.
You're going to need it, I think.
You bet you.
Good to be here.
By the way, in the area of coarseness, I might have been accused of the same thing, probably a few things worse than that.
I stacked Trump up with all the alternatives that could be in there, including Obama, Hillary Clinton, some of these guys like Flake, Corker, all of them.
I look at Trump and I'm thinking, little rough around the edges.
Let's face it.
But straight to the point.
Yep.
I mean, you were like me.
You wanted Cruz.
I wanted Cruz.
But, you know, this is what we got.
And he's doing a pretty good job so far.
You know, he's like, pretty good job overall.
The blowback from within his own party, all these obstructionists out there, Chuck Schumer and that bunch.
I'm like, oh, we've got the right man in there.
Everybody just stay along for the ride.
And before it's over, everybody's going to say we're better off with old Trump than the rest of them.
I'm convinced of it.
There's no question that we're certainly better off than we were with that corrupt, incredible.
She's like a criminal, Hillary Clinton.
Every word out of her mouth is a lie.
It's amazing.
That's right.
So what's the new show?
And how is it different than Duck Dynasty?
Basically, we're doing the same thing.
This political correctness over here on one side or, as I call it, pontificated crap.
We're just saying, come on America, why don't we try biblical correctness, the end result being removal of your sin of the lord who came down in flesh 2017 years ago.
Your calendar is based on him.
He'll raise you from the dead.
You have life and immortality here, And all you're required to do is love him and love each other.
Let's give it a try based on my observation.
I think it would help.
Now, is that something obviously everybody knows you were suspended from Ed A&E for making remarks about gay people on the show, that it was a sin, that you felt it was sinful.
Is that something you feel would happen to you again now?
I mean, now that you're so popular, do you still feel that they would do that?
Probably so.
What they need to remember is that didn't bother me at all.
I never called A ⁇ E for firing me, and I never lashed out against anyone.
I love them all, but all of us, all including me, we all have a sin problem.
Jesus solved it.
You need to be able to hear what your sins are, but deep down, we all know what sin is.
We really do.
But that's just the old evil one said, oh, you can't accuse me of that.
You know, it's really okay to murder if they're not viable yet.
We can murder our offspring at 20 weeks.
And you're like, come on.
I mean, you moved the line on murder.
You moved it on immorality.
So I just remind them that we're all sinners.
We're saved by the grace of God.
So I point them to Jesus.
No matter whether they're mad about it, sad or glad.
I just point them to Jesus.
And on down the road I go.
No question about that.
But now, let me ask you something.
You started out as a businessman, right?
You had the duck call business that you made into this tremendous success.
Did it surprise you that you were so popular on television?
Did it surprise you to find yourself basically in showbiz?
When they first pitched the thing, when A ⁇ E came down to the riverbank and pitched it, we're all a bunch of rednecks sitting up in there, you know.
And they pitched the show.
And my kids, when they left, my kids said, Dad, what about it?
What do you think?
I said, well, I don't think a bunch of rednecks shooting ducks, I don't think that will work.
I said, however, I said, what if the Almighty's behind it?
If he's behind it, it'll go ballistic.
Well, as it turned out, we all ended up multi-millionaires.
The menu got better.
And we still remember that the money that we have made so far cannot remove our sin.
And all the fame we ever get can't raise us from the dead.
So we've still got, as a functional family, it's what you saw with Duck Dynasty.
We still got God up here and everything else second to that.
That's just the way we go.
Did you find that A ⁇ E, I don't want you to diss your former employers or anything, but were they surprised?
I mean, one of the things, the reason I'm asking this, let me tell you why I'm asking this.
It seems to me that the people in show business, and I've worked out here in L.A. as a screenwriter, it seems to me that they really don't believe that there is a market for people like you, and yet you and others keep proving them wrong.
I mean, was A ⁇ E surprised to find what they had on their hands?
When A ⁇ E came back down after they said, well, Mr. Robertson, we actually didn't fire you.
We put you on what we call an indefinite hiatus.
Well, I looked up hiatus and I reminded them, hiatus, a gap in the proceedings, and I was the gap.
I was no longer there.
But I told them, I said, guys, did I ever call you up?
I rate because you fired me.
And they said, you never said a word, Mr. Robinson.
I said, so you're now here to reinstate me.
The reason they came to reinstate me was the outcry.
From the same people, by the way, the Duck Dynasty Watchers were the same people that voted for Donald Trump.
They're there.
But LA, New York, some of them, they tend, in the movie industry, they tend not to acknowledge them as much as they should.
Oh, we're still here.
Remember, I'm a C-plus man, but I'm smarter than half of them.
Now, you know, as a successful reality TV star, I'm going to have to cut off in a minute, but as a successful TV reality star, are you thinking of running for office?
I hear that's a good path to the presidency.
Not at all, because I don't think it's a political fix.
I think really America, it's more of a spiritual fix.
And if the public, if they're godly, godliness begets godly politicians begets godly government, godly laws.
So we're starting from the ground floor up.
Maybe through this show, we can help people understand that.
I agree with you.
So it's in the woods with Phil on CRTV.
You can find it at CRTV.com slash ducks.
Phil, listen, if you do take a shot at Crowder, just wing him.
Don't kill him, all right?
Because I kind of like him.
No problem.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Phil.
Well, that is interesting.
I don't know.
I actually don't think you could do that show on cable TV, even on Netflix.
I don't think they think it would work, and it would.
Obviously, he keeps proving it, but it doesn't matter.
All right.
You know, I really feel bad that that scandal, I mean, Austin was saying during one of the breaks that even he didn't understand that scandal.
But I mean, it is important because the reason that the Obama administration allowed, and it wasn't just Hillary Clinton, it was the entire Obama administration.
The reason they allowed Putin to take control of so much of our uranium was that they wanted to have a reset with Russia so that they could pass the Iran deal, so that Russia wouldn't get in the way of the Iran deal.
So it is a complete chain of corruption that went through that administration.
I have always said I thought it was one of the most corrupt administrations, the Obama administration.
And remember at the end, all those, that montage we had of all the reporters saying, it was scandal-free.
It was scandal-free.
It was scandal-free.
It was one big scandal.
And I know it's complicated, but we'll talk more about it and we'll make it more clear.
But now.
Well, now hold on.
You keep saying this name Obama, and I don't know who that is.
Yeah, we've forgotten who Obama is because his legacy has blood.
It's like, it's kind of like dust scattered.
All right, the mailbag.
Yay!
I'm having fun.
I hope you guys are.
All right, from CJ.
Hello, Supreme Leader Clavin.
I am a writer and I struggle with professional jealousy.
This is a great question.
How do you handle it?
Why Happiness Matters00:14:10
I'm very competitive, and I know it does nothing for my work.
Thanks very much.
This may be the only question I get to answer because this is an important question.
You know, to get to this in a kind of roundabout way, one of the questions I get asked all the time is, how do you get into Hollywood?
How does one break into Hollywood?
And I always tell them, I don't know, because I never wanted to work in Hollywood.
I was dragged into it.
A professor, a producer said to me, I want you to write a script and I will pay you to write any script.
And I said, no, I don't want to be in Hollywood.
I don't want to work on the movies.
I mean, when people hear that, they kind of, you can see the blood drain out of their face because there are people out here who would rip off their arms.
I mean, I'm not even joking.
They'd sleep with Harvey Weinstein to get the opportunities to have somebody pay them for a script.
I didn't want to do it, but she kind of maneuvered me into a position where I had to do it.
She said, is there anything you would do?
And I gave her the name of a project, Shock to the System, a wonderful novel by Simon Brett, and she went out and optioned it.
And two months later, she called me back and said, all right, I optioned it.
And I thought, oh, no, you know, she spent money, now I got to do it.
And they made it into what I think is a very good Michael Caine film.
And then I became popular and people started hiring me to be in Hollywood.
My point is, I don't know how to get into Hollywood because I was dragged into it.
And I have to say, when it comes to professional jealousy, this plagued me, and envy.
This plagued me when I was a young man.
It made my life really, really unhappy.
And it went away.
And I don't know why.
And so I can tell you what it's like to have it be gone and I can tell you why I feel it's gone, but I'm not sure I can tell you how to make it be gone.
That's my long-winded way of getting to this.
Envy, as Ernest Hemingway said, envy ruins everything.
You know, and I think in some ways, when I had, I went through this very dark period, I've written about it in the great good thing, and I went to a shrink and he solved a lot of my problems.
It was really miraculous.
But there were all these ancillary things that got solved.
Like, for instance, I was afraid of flying.
Now I have a pilot's license.
I was afraid of public speaking.
Now here I am.
I'm a public speaker.
And those things just got cleared up on the side.
And somehow, when I developed a relationship with God, my envy went away.
And it used to really bug me.
If a friend of mine had a big success, now I genuinely, I mean, I seriously feel genuine joy for my friends when they succeed, even if they succeeded something that I wanted to succeed in.
I mean, obviously, I don't like it when I lose a particular job that I wanted, if somebody takes that job.
But, you know, I love it when my friends do well, especially if they do well with good material.
And that has brought so much more joy into my life.
And here's the way I look at it, and here's what I can tell you, CJ.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
You want to be competitive in the sense of being excellent.
And nobody is more competitive than I am when I want to be excellent.
If I'm envious of anything, it's when somebody does something that is just absolutely spectacular, you know.
But only because I think, see, I wish I had done that, but not because I want to take it away from them.
You want to be competitive so you can be honed and ready to go.
But the fact is, the top shelf, the shelf where all the good stuff lives, is infinite.
There's no space there that's being taken away from you by somebody else doing well.
And you probably know that already, and it probably doesn't help.
And the only thing I can say to you is just somehow you have to, it's like your heart's a fist.
It's like it's holding on because if you think if you're happy for your friends, if you're happy for other people's success, you think that somehow God is going to say to you, well, if you're happy for that, then I'm not giving you anything.
You just have to open your heart like opening a hand and let it go.
And I swear, this was a gift.
It is a gift.
I was just thinking, you know, it's funny, before I saw this email question, I was just thinking about it because I'll have him on.
I had a friend over the house who's just finished making a movie.
Andrew Hyatt, he's made a movie about St. Paul for Sony.
And I was so happy for him and so proud of him.
And I had him over and was plying him with liquor and we were celebrating all that stuff.
And when he walked out, I turned to my wife and I said, you know, when I was a young man, I never felt that way.
I never had that joy in other people's success.
And now it really does.
It really does make your life so much better.
So I guess what I'll say is this.
Do it as a practice.
Start it as a practice.
I mean, I don't know if you believe in God.
I don't know if you have God to go to about this, because if you bring it to God, I'm sure he'll help you with it.
I mean, it's one of those things that God is really good at.
A lot of skills, God.
It's funny.
But do it as a practice.
Just let it go.
Don't pretend to be happy.
Just let the bitterness go.
Because a lot of times, I mean, I always found when I was envious of people that I wasn't actually, I didn't want them, anything bad to happen to them.
There's a famous line, I think it's Somerset Mom, he said, it's not enough for you to succeed.
Your best friend has to fail.
And I never actually felt like that.
You know, I never felt like I wanted my friends to fail.
I just wanted to have as much or more than they did, you know.
And that just went away.
And all I can say to you is open up your heart and just try and let it go.
Just release it.
And if you can talk to God about it, talk to God about it, because Hemingway was right.
It ruins everything.
And you actually get more joy.
I think part of it too for me, the part about God, is that I feel that we're all people who are trying to do good things, who are trying to make beautiful things, we're trying to make excellent things, that we're all kind of working for the same boss and we're all sort of delivering, you know.
So if somebody increases the number of beautiful things in the world, increases the number of good things in the world, it's a win for me at some level.
And I think that that's part of it too.
And I know this stuff sounds soapy, but it's just, it actually is the way I feel.
And I'm so much happier this way.
Envy is just one of the worst things, especially for a writer, because why is it bad, especially bad for a writer?
Especially bad for a writer, because sometimes you have to do things that are less successful in the moment to do things that are better and more successful over time.
So I've been talking about Percy Shelley, who I've been reading.
He never had an audience.
One of the greatest poets in English literature, never had an audience.
His stuff wasn't published.
It got lost in the mail.
Nobody read him.
Nobody liked him.
Nobody wanted to hear from him.
But he was doing the stuff he had to do to make beautiful stuff.
And so it's so hard for a writer because there's always this temptation to do the stuff that sells, that you get rewards for, that you get money for, when really what you should be doing is doing the best possible stuff you can do.
So as far as advice, I know this is a little bit rambling, but it's just such a big topic.
As far as advice, I just would say try as a practice, and if you can, go to God to help you with this practice, to just open your heart and let it go.
Let go of the bitterness, let go of everything, and just try to be glad that there's more beauty in the world, more success, that your friends are happy, and all of that, because it will make your life so much better.
From Evan, Dear Andrew, head shines with the power of a thousand sons clavin.
I do actually have that business card.
So my fiancé regularly goes through my phone to see if I am cheating or doing something bad.
If I ask to go through her phone, she denies me.
I have been faithful to her.
And I heard you mentioned before that there was a problem in relationships.
If a partner goes snooping for info, wondering what your advice in this situation would be.
Thank you.
My advice is that this really should stop, but it's a symptom of something.
It's a symptom of her distrust and the idea.
I mean, you can always put a code on your phone, you know, and then she can't open your phone.
But that's not the problem.
The problem is the distrust and her feeling of distrust.
And it may not have anything to do with you.
It may have something to do with people, the way people have treated her in the past.
It's very controlling for her to do this.
It is very controlling for her to look at your private stuff and to feel that she has the right to look at it, but you don't have the right to look at hers.
And I think you need to address it.
I think you need to address it from a level, though, not of a level of stop doing this, but a level of what is the problem here.
And if you need to get somebody in to help you with that, get somebody in to help you with that.
Because it can only get worse if you don't address it.
So I would address the underlying issue.
What is she so afraid of and why is she so afraid?
And why does she feel that she needs that level of control?
Great Clavanian Domus Luminoso.
So, what is it with the head?
Never mind.
As a daily watcher of your show, I, like many others, read The Great Good Thing and discovered a connection to God that I did not have previously.
That always makes me feel great.
I get green stamps for that.
I get like little extra things.
You know, I not only get into heaven, but they give me a toaster.
That's like, yeah.
However, the more I try to walk in line with what I believe God wants for my life, the more deeply I find I am tested by the world around me.
Do you have any advice?
That does happen.
Do you have any advice for finding peace between living for God and having a happy life?
Are they the same thing best?
Spencer, living for God and having a happy life are not the same thing.
Happy is kind of a dopey thing to have, a dopey standard to live by, okay?
I know we all want to be happy.
When are you happy?
You're happy when the bank makes an error in your favor and you get 20 bucks.
You're happy when you have a baby.
You're happy when you go to the doctor and you find out that what you were worried about isn't true.
You're happy when your business plan goes well.
When are you unhappy?
You're happy when your business plan doesn't go well, when another guy got the promotion you wanted, when you're sick and you have a, even if you just have the flu, you know, you're unhappy.
Those are the things that make you happy and unhappy.
What I like to talk about is joy.
And what is joy?
Joy is the vitality of life, the absolute connection to life, life in abundance, Christ called it.
It is this sense that being alive is tremendous.
It is a cool, cool thing.
And it's tremendous when it's sad, even though it's sad, but it's tremendous.
You know, obviously, we all like it better when it's happy.
That's what God will give you.
God promises you life in abundance.
He doesn't promise you happiness.
Now, because you don't tell me what we're talking about, and I always wish when people write these questions that they would just be a little bit more specific.
I don't know what you mean by tested by the world.
If what that means is that God is telling you to give up your mistress, give up your mistress.
I mean, if that's what that means, but your mistress makes you happy, you know, like, you know, when you're cheating on your wife, so I don't know what it means that you're tested by the world.
Sometimes, just like I was talking about writing, sometimes I have to write something.
I know I have to write something that's going to make me less popular.
And I do it, and it makes me unhappy.
You know, I'd rather everything I wrote sold a gazillion copies.
But I know that selling a gazillion copies is not what I am here to do.
God did not put me on earth to sell a gazillion copies.
He put me on earth because he wanted to hear the words that I put together in a certain way.
So I write beautifully.
So what I would say to you is if you can live, if you're sure about what God is asking you, and usually God is asking you for something that's in keeping with your nature, you in yourself are a path to God.
You, who you truly are, Spencer, the Spencer that was made, is a path to God.
If you follow that Spencer, not the Spencer that you've become, not the Spencer that you think you're supposed to be, not the Spencer that you demand of God that you should be, but the Spencer that you were made.
If you follow that Spencer, it will take you down the road to God and closer and closer every day.
So usually God's not asking you to do something that's anathema to you, that is hateful to you.
He's usually asking you to do something very much in keeping with your nature.
That's been my observation.
So you don't tell me what it is that's testing you, so I don't know.
But what I would ask yourself is: is it testing you because you like it but it's bad for you?
Or is it testing you because it is in fact with your nature?
In which case, maybe you're misunderstanding what God is saying.
All right.
do one more, I think.
Well, here's one from Kimberly.
Dear Supreme Overlord Clavin, is love simply the result of a chance encounter?
I don't believe it is.
I do not believe it.
I think there's a couple of things in play here.
One is probably, just thinking logically, probably there are a number of people that you could fall in love with in your life.
I mean, I have to say I have been in love with the same woman for 40 years, but every now and again I'll meet a woman and think, huh, you know, I could have loved her.
Maybe that would have worked out.
I have no way of proving it because there's no life that you didn't lead.
You only have the one life, so you can't prove it.
So I do believe that there's a higher chance of meeting someone than if it was just one person to one person.
But that's just logic.
That doesn't really mean anything.
I also believe that we want to fall in love.
It is not good for us to be alone.
We don't like being alone.
People want to find it, be a couple.
And so I think that people tend to hook up with someone else and then tend to make the best of it if they can.
And that's a little different than finding the exact right person for you.
I do believe, I do believe that true love is intended.
I don't believe that true love is intended for everybody.
I don't believe that everybody gets true love.
I think that that is the mistake that the feminists always make when they say that the movie, the Disney movie Cinderella, taught us that we were all going to be loved.
No, it didn't.
It taught you that the princess was going to find the prince.
It taught you that this very special person is going to find a very special person.
I do think that you can, through kindness, you can develop love for people over time.
And so I think that there is an element of will in love.
But I don't think it's chance.
I don't, you know, I think the chance is an illusion of, as a human illusion, basically.
I think that as we live, life seems random and will always seem random and will always occur random.
But I do think that there's a greater plan.
And maybe that plan includes enough level of choice that there's randomness in there, or at least it looks like randomness.
But I do believe that if you are meant to fall in love, you will find that person.
I mean, the fact, the way that I found my wife is so bizarre.
I picked her up hitchhiking.
I've told the story before.
But I mean, it was so bizarre, and our intense connection has been so transformative for both of us and so complete that I simply cannot believe it was an accident.
I simply don't.
All right.
Feminist Mathematics00:05:19
I guess we've got to go a little longer.
Tickety boo news.
We don't usually do an interview on Wednesday, but I wanted to go.
Oh, there it is.
Two stories I got to read.
I'll go through this as quickly as I can.
I feel like I've been a little rushed today, but still.
From campus reform.
Campus Reform goes on and finds all the absurd things that are happening at college campuses.
This is by Tony, girl Tony, T-O-N-I, Air Arakenen, Arak Sinan, campus reform.
A feminist professor at the University of California, Davis, has vowed to challenge the authority of science by rewriting knowledge through a feminist lens.
Sarah Giordano, who left the field of neuroscience to become a woman's studies professor at UC Davis, that doesn't speak well of Sarah's choices.
She opened up about her feelings towards the sciences in a recent essay for Catalyst, a journal of feminist theory.
Science, she says, has earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery, and it relies on a colonial and racialized form of power.
At the root of the justification for social inequality is Western science, she says.
Science's distinction between humans and non-humans has allowed capitalism to become justified as a natural economic system.
We need to disrupt the authority of science and the assumption that science equals truth.
This can be done by implementing a feminist science practice that explicitly unsticks science from truth.
What?
Yeah, feminist science will unstick science from truth.
Now, I want to add that to this from Fox News, okay?
A math education professor at the University of Illinois says the ability to solve geometry and algebra problems in teaching such subjects perpetuates white privilege.
Rochelle, I love feminists.
What would we do for laughs without feminists?
Rochelle Guitars laid out her views on the subject in an article for a newly published anthology for math educators titled Building Support for Scholarly Practices and Mathematics Methods.
School mathematics curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pie perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.
On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness.
Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics?
Who is capable in mathematics?
And who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as white.
So I love it.
I love it.
Now, why do I call this tickety boo news?
Tickety boo news is my way of saying that you have to read the news.
You don't always have to read the news as it's presented to you because you could read this and you could get angry, right?
You could say, these women are absolutely nuts.
They want to say that science should be feminist, whether science, instead of science should search the facts and then we should build our life around the facts.
We should understand the fact.
They want to say that mathematics is white when mathematics, if anything, if any science, if any study just follows the truth, it's mathematics, right?
It just puts the numbers together and if they add up, they add up.
So she wants a non-white mathematics.
The thing I love about this is that it is a little bubble popping up that the left understands that the facts are not on their side, right?
Why would you have to attack science if science was going to back you up?
You know, I mean, all these people who think that science, global warming is science, they don't want to turn away from science.
They want to turn away from science, as Phil Robertson was saying, they want to turn away from science when they want to get rid of the baby they conceived.
When they want to get rid of the baby they conceive, suddenly it's not a baby, it's just a clump of cells, right?
I mean, all you have to do is look at the sonogram to see it's a baby, right?
And you can kill a virtually viable baby at this point because you don't like it, because it's female instead of male, because it's Pisces instead of Capricorn.
They are beginning to realize that the facts don't back them up.
They don't back up feminism in their idea that women and men are the same.
They don't back up, you know, the abortionists in their idea that babies are not babies.
And they are going to have to transform the study of science.
Now, we know who did this.
The Soviets tried to do this.
They tried to have Soviet science.
Didn't work out so well.
This is, I swear, I believe this is the beginning of the end.
All I hear from them is that we have to transform the method of finding the truth so that the truth follows us.
But the truth, it has a way, it's very stubborn, and it has a way of coming back and getting you.
I just want to add, by the way, the Prager U, our friends over at Prager University, and I've done a Prager University video, and our company, Forward Publishing, used to help.
I don't know if they still do them, but they still do them sometimes, I think.
They have said that they have filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for intentional censorship of conservative speakers because they have been, YouTube has removed more than 10% of the organization's videos from its restrictive mode, meant to protect younger and more sensitive viewers, and only slowly provided contradictory answers for why they were removed.
And basically, they think they're being persecuted.
This is the other sign, the other sign that the left is losing, is they have to shut people up.
When You Have to Shut Up00:00:28
When you have to shut up Dennis Prager, who is no barn-burning crazy man, is just a guy who basically speaks the truth as he sees it.
When you have to shut up Prager University, you have lost the argument.
They are losing the argument.
Who have we got on tomorrow?
I don't know.
Somebody.
We've got guests.
And it'll be Thursday, and then it's the last, the last show of the week.
But we still have another kingdom, and I'll talk more about that.
We have episode three will be unleashing on Friday.