Ep. 455’s Can We Handle The Truth? pits Andy Weir’s publishing revolution—self-publishing The Martian after 20 years of rejection, selling five copies before a viral surge—against the FISA memo’s alleged suppression, where FBI objections and Schiff’s claims mirror institutional truth-distortion. Weir’s Artemis, a lunar heist novel using real tech, contrasts with Hollywood’s liberal bias, as seen in Hostiles, which avoids political correctness while critics like Cooper subvert expectations. The episode ties media malfeasance to biblical allegory, warning Reagan’s "one generation" freedom rule applies now: unchecked power and selective truth erode democracy unless challenged directly. [Automatically generated summary]
While we're waiting for the release of the FISA abuse memo, which may come as soon as today, so this seems like a good time to talk about the nature of truth.
Last week, a few of you dinged me for saying that I believe the Bible contains myths and legends as well as literal history.
To be clear, I believe the Bible was inspired by God and is the truest book we have about God, but that doesn't mean that every word should be taken literally.
In fact, it means the opposite.
Biblical literalism, the idea that every word in the Bible describes an actual event and is not meant allegorically or metaphorically, is a more or less recent phenomenon in the Christian church.
Early church fathers like Origen and St. Augustine rejected literalism, specifically citing the creation story in Genesis as allegorical.
The Catholic Church has never adopted literalism.
It came into play in a big way around the 1700s, around the same time science was beginning to bring some biblical stories into question.
Maybe it was a way of responding to that of holding the line against science, or maybe it just followed from the Reformation idea that Scripture is the only source of theological truth, not the church.
But it really sells the Bible short.
If every word in the Bible were literally true, it could never express the deepest truths of all.
The fact is, there are different kinds of narratives designed to express different types of truths, and the Bible contains all of them.
For instance, if I tell you I saw a fire on the way to work and I ran into the burning building and braved the flames to rescue two children, that story better be literally true or else every piece of information it's relaying to you is a lie.
It's trying to tell you I'm a hero and I'm not a hero.
But if I say once upon a time there were three bears or there was a man who had two sons, you don't ask me for the bear's address or the names of the sons because you know I'm trying to convey a kind of wisdom that historical stories don't necessarily tell.
A play like Hamlet is more truthful for being a piece of fiction because the fact that it's fiction lets us know it's conveying a genius's vision of human experience rather than a series of events that just happen to occur in real life.
A story like Job probably begins with an underlying historical event, but like the story of Faust, it has to be elaborated by the human mind into a legend in order to bring out the fullness of its revelation.
Now and then, a special event comes along that captures both an historical event and the deeper truth of allegory.
The story Donald Trump told at the State of the Union about a crippled man's epic escape from North Korea is a story like that.
It's an amazing real-life adventure, but it's also an allegory about the human heart's indomitable yearning for freedom.
Washington Crossing the Delaware is another true story with allegorical power, and I believe the resurrection of Christ is a story like that.
It must be literally true in order for us to be freed from sin and to confirm that there's a life beyond life that makes sense of our morality and our human aspirations.
But it's also a mighty allegory for the way the world continually murders truth and the fact that the truth, nonetheless, never dies.
When and if the FISA memo is released, I believe we're going to see a lot of different stories begin to tell themselves.
For instance, we may be treated to a literal history of government malfeasance and the media's willful and destructive blindness in service to a racial pathology and a political ideology.
But we're also sure to see the guilty rushing to obscure that story, to twist it and bury it and slander the people who told it, which can serve as an allegory for the ways of the world.
Whatever happens, stay calm and don't worry.
The world continually tries to murder the truth, and yet the truth never dies.
I know that for a fact, because the Bible tells me so.
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
All right, we have Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, coming on later on in the show, and we'll stay on so you can watch it, even if you're on Facebook and YouTube and haven't subscribed, just to make you feel shame, just to say, now that they're being so nice to me, I actually should have subscribed.
As part of our Cultural Andrews Week, we had Andrew Hyatt, who has directed the new movie Paul Apostle of Christ.
Thank you.
I'm forgetting the name of his picture, Paul Apostle of Christ, which looks terrific.
I haven't seen it.
And now we have Andrew Weir, Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian.
And to keep that week going, when the Clavenless weekend folds in upon you, please check out Another Kingdom, my own fictional podcast performed by Michael Knowles.
It is still up there on iTunes anywhere that you get podcasts.
You can listen, you can binge listen to the entire 13 episodes.
And I wish you would.
The more numbers we get, the more good reviews we get, the better, the more likely it is that we'll be able to sell it elsewhere.
We do have some interest in Hollywood, but we'll see where that goes.
White House Omissions Revealed00:15:02
Anyway, you know, before we start, we're kind of in limbo here because I think like any minute they keep telling us they're going to release this FISA memo.
But before we start, I really have to just have this wonderful exchange.
Michael Wolfe has been, he is just, he just seems to be a guy who lies.
I mean, he goes on and he uses third-hand reports to spread scandal.
And as long as the media thought they could get away with it, as long as they thought he would just make Donald Trump look bad.
I mean, you could publish a book now saying Donald Trump Worships the Devil, and you would get on every mainstream talk show because what they would figure is by the time you were exposed as a complete fraud, at least they would have done some harm to Donald Trump.
And that's all they care about at this point.
Wolf, however, has been so sleazy that he tried to implicate Nikki Wolfe, the ambassador to the UN in an affair.
Nikki Haley, sorry, Nikki Haley, as the ambassador to the UN in an affair with Trump.
It obviously didn't happen.
She denied it completely.
So Mika, they have her on Morning Joe.
And he's so, he drip-sleaze, this guy.
I mean, just looking at him, you can tell who he is.
And Mika throws him off, but the way she throws him off is almost funnier than what he's doing.
I found it puzzling that she would deny something she was not accused of.
Wait a minute.
Can I just step in here?
Let's put this next question on the entire credibility of your book, which was written really quickly.
Excuse me.
Your book.
Yes.
Let's put it on this next question.
Do you regret inferring anything about Nikki Haley?
I didn't infer anything about Nikki Haley.
What I inferred was that the president is that many of the people around the president believe he is still involved with various women.
No, but you said she spent a lot of time in private time with people report.
And now, and specifically, that was about her bid to become the Secretary of State.
So everywhere in the White House, they were suddenly in quite a panic that this was actually happening, which is why they pushed Pompeo out.
The Marxist has embraced it.
I'm going to go as far as to say that you might be having a fun time playing a little game dancing around this, but you're slurring a woman.
It's disgraceful.
And Mika, again, she has been accused of nothing.
She has decided to deny what she has not been accused of.
Certainly I didn't accuse her of this.
Wait, are you suggesting the language is not ambiguous in any way in the things that you've said and the way you've stated?
Are you kidding?
You're on the set of Morning Joe.
We don't BS here.
Read me the language.
Are you kidding me?
I'm not reading the language.
If you don't get it, if you don't get what we're talking about, I'm sorry.
This is awkward.
You're here on the set with us, but we're done.
Morning Joe, we don't BS here.
When you get thrown off Morning Joe for BSing, you have hit rock bottom.
I thought what Mika should have said is, we're on Morning Joe.
We don't BS here.
Oh, wait, the opposite of that.
Sorry.
Keep talking, Michael.
I mean, how could you ever had this guy on to begin with?
At what point, at what point, does it just get so ugly?
Does a guy just get so sleazy and ugly that you say even getting at Donald Trump isn't worth the price I'm going to pay by having this guy on.
But you know, when you were watching this thing with this FISA memo, as we're waiting for it to be released, the FBI and the Democrats and the press, the people who are supposed to be dedicated to speaking truth to power, to bringing us information, have gone into this full court press to keep these, whatever is in the memo, to keep it silent.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a rebuke to the president and his fellow Republicans in Congress, telling them this is, quote, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it.
As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy.
So you're putting out a memo that basically makes the FBI, I mean, Devin Nunes has now said this, it makes the FBI look good, look bad for its abuse of FISA warrants, the things that are supposed to be allow you to spy on Americans when they're doing something internationally wrong, when they're involved with international wrongdoing.
They say we have grave concerns about the fact you're about to issue a memo that makes us look bad.
Hey, guess what?
You're supposed to have, I have grave concerns about you guys.
I thought what the FBI should have done is they just should have sent a guy around to Nunes' apartment and say, nice government you got here.
I wouldn't like to see anything happen to it.
We're going to make you an offer you can't refuse.
And then you go to Christopher Wray and he's like, if you had come to me, Devin, your enemies would be suffering this very day.
I was like, the FBI, it's like something out of transcendental philosophy.
You turn into what you're looking at all the time.
And now, by the way, they're saying there are omissions, but they're not saying the thing isn't true.
They're saying there are omissions that may make it unclear what's going on.
Now, Adam Schiff, our favorite, my favorite congressman, because, you know, Adam Schiff, I don't know, you probably don't remember Lil Abner.
Lil Abner was a parody cartoon where, remember, they made it into a musical and the country's in the very best of hands.
It was just how sleazy government is.
Adam Schiff could have stepped out of a little Abner panel.
He accuses Devin Nunes of sending a different version of the memo.
He says that his staff discovered Wednesday evening that the memo sent to the White House was materially different than the one that the committee voted to release.
And now Adam Schiff is demanding that they bring the memo back because it's not the same memo.
Byron York, who has been doing an absolutely great job of covering this story, he says he just talked, he put out a tweet, says, I've just talked with a House Intel source.
He said the total changes to the memo were A, an unknown number of grammatical and clarifying fixes, B, one change requested by the FBI due to sources and methods concerns, and C, one two-word change requested by Democrats for accuracy.
So Philip Mudd goes on, just to talk about tossing mud.
Philip Mudd goes on CNN, and he just uses every possible.
This is another one, the Daily Beast.
I'm sorry, the Daily Beast ran a story saying Devin Nunes collaborated with the White House about the memo.
And then a transcript of the meeting of the intelligence committee was released in which Nunes was asked about this, and he said, no, that didn't happen.
So first you have Jim Himes, a Democratic congressman.
He goes on and he just throws everything, every narrative about the memo out there.
This is Jim Himes.
Most of the allegations in the memo are simply not true.
And, you know, we heard not just from the FBI, but from the Department of Justice that the release of this memo would be extremely reckless.
And then, of course, the FBI reviewed it on Sunday night and issued the statement that they did.
And then as you probably saw late last night, Adam Schiff and his staff discovered that Devin Nunes and his staff had actually altered the memo before they sent it to the White House, which is a very clear violation of House rules because, of course, we voted on one set of allegations.
Democrats voted against releasing it, and then they altered the language to send it to the White House.
So what is happening here is not in any way, shape, or form unclear.
You have a political attempt drawing on falsehoods, and the victim in this case will be the American people's, or at least a portion of the American people's confidence in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the Department of Justice.
And that's a terrible, terrible cost to pay for an ugly political maneuver designed to protect the president from Bob Mueller's investigation.
So it's like, it's reckless.
There are omissions.
It's not true.
And they're not true omissions.
And they changed it.
And the dog ate my homework.
And, you know, my mom said I was okay to listen on the phone.
It's like, what are they talking about?
They're just anything to keep.
You know, some of the Republicans have been talking with so much hyperbole about this memo that I've been thinking to myself, you know, don't oversell it, undersell it, and then let it really come out and blow people away.
But the way they're reacting to it, the way these guys are reacting to it really makes you feel like something bad is in this.
And it is bad.
I mean, just to remind you, FISA is this court that it was specifically set up after Nixon listened to domestic people for political reasons, after Nixon bugged the phones, tapped the phones of people for political reasons in America.
They set up this Pfizer court to make sure that wouldn't happen again.
It seems it's possible.
It has been happening again and happening to a guy who was actually running for president at the time.
I mean, if you heard about this happening in Venezuela or Guatemala or some like tinpot dictatorship, you'd say, yeah, that's what they do.
Ain't supposed to happen here.
And then, as I said, the Daily Beast ran the story that Nunes collaborated with the White House, and then it turned out that that story was completely ridiculous.
So Philip Mudd on CNN goes on and he says, well, he may not have collaborated, but he did.
Listen to this.
Greg, I'm going to break the camera here in a moment, Aaron.
Have you ever worked in Washington, D.C.?
I've worked at the highest levels of the FBI, the CIA.
I worked on the National Security Council in the White House.
In the midst of the highest profile investigation of political corruption we've seen since the 1970s, in the midst of a precedent of cooperation between the Congress, including Devin Nunez and the White House.
Do you think it was a secret that congressional officials were preparing a memo of this import and nobody knew at the White House?
You got to be kidding me.
I'm going to tell you the moon's made of green cheese.
I'm not saying there was cooperation.
I'm not saying there was collusion.
I'm saying in that small town of Washington, D.C., that to suggest that nobody at the White House knew that congressional staffers were discussing a memo of this import is, that's ridiculous.
It's not about whether Devin Nunez coordinated.
It's whether somebody knew over a cup of coffee and talked about it.
And to tell me they didn't is just stupid.
So they didn't, but they did, but they didn't, but they did.
So, you know, this really does.
I started out talking about the Bible for a reason.
One of the things that has always fascinated me in the story of Christ's crucifixion.
It's essentially a judicial murder.
He was murdered by the state For reasons of political expediency and murdered by religious people.
I say this many times, and people get annoyed.
Maybe I'm not sure they actually understand what I'm saying, that there are no villains in the story as we think of villains.
There's nobody who is rubbing his hands together and saying, I want to kill this guy simply because I like killing.
Each person is simply fighting his corner, is doing what he thinks is exactly right to do for the people he represents and the institution he represents.
So Pilot is doing what he thinks he needs to do to keep the peace.
The religious authorities are doing what they think they have to do to keep a heretic from talking to the people.
The people are all ginned up and they're passionate.
They want this guy killed.
The guy, the same guy they were cheering 20 minutes ago, now they want him killed.
Each person is acting on his own interests and acting in the interests of the institutions he represents.
The world is built to suppress the truth.
The world is like a machine that is built to murder the truth.
Nobody has to do anything special for the truth to be destroyed.
All these people, I mean, here's this guy, Mudd, screaming and yelling about, he's theoretically a journalist.
I've never met a real journalist who wanted to keep a document secret.
I have met journalists who, after torturing themselves, said, you know what, in the interests of national security, I've got to keep this document secret.
But we have now journalists who are willing to fight to keep the public from finding things out.
It's like, that's my job.
I'm a journalist.
My job is to keep people from finding things out.
This is just the way, this is what the Bible teaches us: this is just the way of the world.
That is what the world does.
You know, yesterday I talked about the fact that I thought Trump's State of the Union message was so brilliantly constructed to set the Democrats up in the immigration debate, to set them up to show how intransigent they are, how unwilling to compromise they are, how unwilling they are to support America.
You know, Luis Guidérés was running for his life when they were chanting USA, and they were all sitting on their hands talking about the flag and the national anthem.
And then he pulls out the immigration deal, which to any fair person is a pretty good compromise.
It's going to get him in trouble with Ann Coulter and all the people who want the borders completely sealed off.
But he made them look, you know, Thomas Edsel, who's a leftist journalist who was writing in the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper.
And Edsel said he has got the Democrats exactly where he wants them.
He wrote this piece that said, President, see, everybody says everything that I say, but it just takes time.
You know, first they say, that's not true, and then they say it.
President Trump's immigration proposal has put Democrats in a bind.
They know it, and he knows it.
Trump's immigration framework, first outlined on January 25th, represents an unusually sophisticated strategy.
He proposes to more than double the number of DREAMers granted a path to citizenship, a significant concession to Democrats.
In return, he seeks approval of a set of policies strongly opposed by the left, each of which is designed to stem what Trump sees as a threatening increase in the non-white population of the United States.
That's what Trump is worried about, the non-white.
He doesn't want an increase in that.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
But at least he's honest about this.
He says, for a Democratic Party whose electoral strength depends on Hispanic support, preventing the deportation of the DREAMers and providing them with legal status has become a matter of political necessity.
So at least he admits that.
For the rest, it's all the world suppressing the truth.
Racism, racism, racism.
And my favorite Nancy Pelosi saying that Donald Trump is fear-mongering.
I love this.
So it was, I would say, confusing.
It was worse than that.
It was dangerous, what he said last night.
And it has instilled fear, as I say over and over.
What he is doing brings tears to the eyes of the Statue of Liberty and instills fear in the hearts of people who are concerned.
Because Nancy Pelosi would never, ever fearmonger.
We have a little montage for this.
Because it's a Frankenstein.
And anybody who's familiar with Frankenstein knows that it was a creation, a monster that was created.
Do you know the ending of Mary Shelley's story?
the monster comes back to destroy.
This is Armageddon.
This is a very big deal.
Many more people.
Millions, hundreds of thousands of people will die.
Posting Chapters Online00:16:19
It's just fantastic.
Any person that you can name suffers greatly from what the Republicans are doing.
It's impossible to exaggerate the harm this bill will cause.
This is God's creation.
We have a moral responsibility to it.
To minister to the needs of God's creation is an act of worship.
To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.
That plan is a campaign to make America white again.
But again, Nancy Pelosi is simply doing what the world does.
Don't move, don't change, just let the world.
Because if you sit still by pure inertia, you will be enslaved.
If you sit still, the world is built for lies and slavery.
That is what it is built to do, what the human machine naturally does.
It is only direct action that stops it.
I mean, this is what Ronald Reagan said.
He said, freedom is only one generation, always only one generation away from extinction.
It takes force.
It takes human beings to stand up and insist on the truth.
The great comfortable machinery of the world moves toward lies and slavery all the time.
It does.
This is the story the Bible teaches us.
This is the story of the crucifixion.
This is the story of what it takes.
And yet, and yet, and yet, the truth never dies and freedom never dies and the dream of freedom never dies.
It simply keeps, takes effort and sacrifice and will to keep it alive.
And that's why we're here.
That's why we keep talking.
All right.
Let us go to our interview with Andy Weir.
You know, I really admire this guy.
First of all, I love The Martian.
I thought it was a terrific book.
And it had that line, which I just think is a really great modern American line.
We're going to science the blank out of it, where, you know, this is this very hopeful, very uplifting line.
He made his name self-publishing the debut novel.
And this is what he and I talk about.
It became a worldwide hit.
It was later adapted into the film by Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon.
His new book is called Artemis.
It is a near-future heist story set on the moon, which is what's cool about it is, as he'll tell you, it's all the technology in it is available now.
The book is out now.
Artemis is out now.
It's also being adapted into a feature film.
And you can find a copy on anazon.com or anywhere else where books are sold, if there is anywhere else where books are still sold.
Andy Weir talking about his new book, Artemis, and how he wrote The Martian.
Andy, thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
You've got a new book coming out, and I want to talk about Artemis.
It's really entertaining.
I'm just starting it, but it's really entertaining.
But I want to talk to you.
Not pulling you through?
Is that it?
No, no, no.
I will be driving straight to the end.
There's no question about it.
But I want to talk to you about your whole experience because you kind of exemplify this new world of publishing that is really all over the place.
I mean, you start out, you're a tech guy, right?
You were a software guy?
Yeah, I was a software engineer for 25 years.
I mean, I always wanted to be a writer.
A lot of people, like the narrative of my tale to success is often that I was just like, you know, people think I, you know, I was, oh, I was a software engineer in his spare time.
He wrote a story once and then massive success.
Well, what they don't talk about are the 20 years worth of really crappy writing that I did first.
Yeah.
Right.
Most overnight successes take have a 20-year night.
Yeah.
So I did, I did for what it's worth.
I did pay my dues by being really bad at it for a long time.
And The Martian was actually the third complete book that I wrote.
It was just the first one that didn't suck.
Right.
And, you know, and I also wrote a lot of short stories and stuff.
And I spent three years earlier in life trying to break into the publishing industry the old-fashioned way, just sending query letters out to agents and stuff like that and getting no interest in the book that I was working on at the time.
So I know the pain.
So when you wrote The Martian, did you do that?
Did you actually query agents or did you not at all?
No, at that point, I'd given up ever being a professional author and I was just doing it as a labor of love.
It was my hobby by that point.
That's why I was just posting chapters to my website for free and hoping that people would read them and enjoy them.
And did you?
Did you know, did you have any sense, gee, this is good?
This is better than I've done in the past.
Yeah.
I mean, I definitely knew that it was better than anything I'd made in the past.
I had no idea that it would have mainstream appeal and become as popular as it did.
But yeah, I'm like, oh, this is definitely better than my previous two books.
And I had a mailing list of readers and they would they'd email me their feedback and it was all very positive and that that helped motivate me to finish.
And did you, how big was your mailing list?
I mean, did you have a big website to begin with?
No.
I mean, well, I had about a mailing list of about 3,000 people, which sounds like a lot, but it took me 10 years to accumulate that list.
So my website was a place where I just kind of dumped anything that I did that was creative.
So I would make web comics, I made short stories and some serials.
And The Martian was one of three serials that I was working on at the same time.
And at what point did it start to take off?
I mean, you're sending it out, you're getting nice responses from your 3,000 people, which is like, as you say, it sounds like a lot, but it's not really that many in terms of a mainstream success.
How did it get from there to becoming a broader, to getting a broader audience?
Well, what happened was once I finished it, I said, like, okay, I'm done.
I'm going to work on other things now.
And I started getting email from people and they said, hey, I really love your story, but I hate reading books on a website.
I mean, that's not fun.
So can you make an e-reader version?
Pardon me.
And I said, sure.
And so I figured out how to make an e-reader version and I posted that to my site.
Then I got email from other people saying, oh, hey, I'm glad there's an e-reader version, but I'm not very technically savvy.
And I don't know how to take a thing from the internet and put it on my Kindle.
Can you just post it to Amazon so that I can get it through their system?
So I did.
And Amazon makes you charge at least 99 cents.
So I set the price to the minimum 99 cents.
And then they hang on to it for 24 hours and take a look at it just to make sure it's not goat porn or something.
And well, because if it is goat porn, they want it properly categorized.
I thought you could charge more than 99 cents.
But anyway, and then I said like, okay, folks, you can read it on my website for free, download it, you know, the e-reader version from my website for free or pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you.
And people paid the buck.
And so I think there was a few reasons why it got really popular really quickly on Amazon.
First off, I already had a core group of 3,000 readers and a lot of people had emailed me in the past like, hey, you should put a donate button on your website because you're providing us with all this content and you don't even have ads or anything.
So I'd like to be able to like donate to like site maintenance or whatever.
And I'm like, well, thank you.
I appreciate it, but I'm a software engineer.
I actually make a pretty good income.
I don't really need the money.
If you want to donate, please donate to Cancer Research.
That's what I would always say.
And so I had a fan base who was, a lot of them wanted to find a way to give me money because I wasn't accepting donations.
So when I put the book up for sale on Amazon, they all went and bought it as a means of giving me money, even though they read it.
Now it was still at your core.
Are we still with your core 3000 or has that grown?
Just with my core, at this point, still just my core 3000.
But they bought it.
And then, you know, I already had.
Like 3000 people who had read it, and so they wrote not all of them obviously, but a lot of them wrote positive Amazon reviews, some negative whatever, but they wrote Amazon reviews.
So it started to get.
It was highly rated, had a large number of reviews and was starting and, and came out of the gate selling bizarrely well, because a bunch of my fans bought it, you know, after having read it, like you know, paying it forward kind of thing right, and so um, because of that, I think that ended up.
I mean, this was not intentional at all, but it ended up hitting all the buttons that makes Amazon start recommending it to people.
Right, it's like, well, this is selling reasonably well, it has a good rating, it has a lot of reviews.
This is not some astroturfing thing, it's genuinely popular and, to be fair, it was I mean, I had, you know, like a few thousand people who liked it and that started making.
It got around by word of mouth, people started recommending it to each other.
Then it started working its way up into the top sellers list uh, for Amazon Kindle or for first it was for sci-fi, then all of Kindle and so on, and once that happens, then it really snowballs, because then you know someone's like, oh, I want to read a science fiction book.
I don't know though, what are the top 10 sellers right now, and you know.
So your, your sales go up dramatically once you get on that list.
Wow, so it was.
Was there a day when you suddenly looked up and thought, holy moly, something just happened, or was it a slow burn?
Yeah well, it was like.
I mean like when I first post, posted it up there, I was getting maybe like five to ten sales a day.
I was like I don't care, right.
I was like whatever, I didn't expect that many to happen, because it was for free on my website, but then, by the time uh, a couple of months later, so I posted it in september of 2012, and by december, it was selling like 500 copies a day, and I thought that's pretty good.
I think i'm not sure, but when, when you uh post things to Kindle KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing um, you're automatically part of this uh forum.
You can go in and post, and to other authors right, and I saw other authors talking about, oh man, I love christmas time.
I sold five copies of my book today.
I'm like my numbers are really high.
That's when I was like okay, that's interesting.
And then I got contacted by a literary agent who said like hey um, do you have representation?
Because I think I could sell your book to a major publisher.
Um, i've read it, I I think I can sell it.
And i'm like no, I don't, but I guess I do now.
And so he became still my agent today, David Few Gate, great agent, and um, he sold the book to uh, Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, and um kind of went from there.
Wow that's, that's, that's amazing.
One one thing, just to go back a minute, when you were writing this and posting it.
Were you posting it as you were writing it or had you written it already?
And we're just posting it?
No, I was posting it as I wrote it.
So at a chapter at a time.
And did you read it?
Did you rewrite it at all?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, well, first off, there's always editing.
And every time I wrote a chapter, I would go through multiple editing passes before I posted it.
And then I also had a general warning on my website to readers saying, hey, I mean, this is a serial, but the earlier chapters are not set in stone.
I reserve the right to change that because what's happening is you're watching me write a book.
And if I need to go back and change stuff, I will.
And so there were times when that happened where somebody emailed and said, oh, hey, I just started reading The Martian now.
I see you're up on chapter seven, but back in chapter three, you have this error in chemistry, right?
And it was a significant mistake.
And I had to go change some of the plot structure around it to fix that problem and get it back onto the main plot line.
So I had to go back and make changes to like chapter three and like that.
And so I told my readers, I just sent out a thing.
You know, I would send out an email whenever I posted a new chapter.
And I sent out an email and said, hey, everybody, I made changes to chapter three.
You can either go read the chapter or you can read a little paragraph I put below that details what changed.
And then you'll be back up to date.
You can do it the long way or this way.
So now you're not intended to be a serial experience.
It's not like reading Sherlock Holmes in the Strand, right?
It's like they're not set in stone just because I've already posted them.
It was the experience of watching you write the book.
So now you sell the book.
Obviously, it's sold to the movies.
How is your experience with the publisher and with the movie people?
How did it?
I mean, obviously you're thrilled.
It's fantastic.
It couldn't have gone better.
And along every step of the way, everybody told me, it never goes this well.
Don't get used to this.
So like, you know, The Martian, like the editors at the editor, Julian Padilla at Crown Publishing in New York, you know, an imprint of Random House, he loved the book the way it was.
And the only, you know, feedback he had was like, oh, you know, it was a lot of like nuts and bolts stuff.
Like, oh, this paragraph is really awkward, or you, this scene doesn't seem to really fit in with these scenes.
And it wasn't anything like, there were no big structural changes or anything that I wanted.
And my agent was like, when we were finished with all that, my agent was like, that was a really smooth editing process.
Don't expect future processes to make it.
And then Julian, you know, said, like, oh, man, yeah, we're putting in all this money into advertising and marketing the book.
And my agent's like, that is a huge advertising effort.
Publishers never do that.
Don't get used to that.
And then, you know, Fox bought the film rights, which was awesome.
And then everyone said, don't get excited.
You know, because they're not going to make it.
Studios, yeah, buy movie options all the time.
It's a nice little tiny supplement income, but don't get excited.
They're probably not going to make the movie.
And then when they made the movie, along the way, the producers now, Aditya Sud of Simon Kingberg Productions, was like, man, everything's going smooth all day.
It's never this easy.
Don't get used to this.
So, well, that brings me to Artemis, which is your new book.
A terrific idea.
It's a terrific idea.
It really is.
Well, I'll let you tell it.
Well, maybe, maybe if you get to page two or three, get past the.
Don't push me.
Don't push me.
Dedication is kind of long.
So I will give you crap.
I know that.
I know exactly what it's like in the industry where you just, you know, it's like, well, here's 10,000 books everyone assumes you've read.
I know, I know.
I get books all the time.
But actually, but actually, I mean, I love The Martian and I'm really enjoying this.
I'm just a dyslexic, slow reader.
So it's going to take me a while.
I just like growing shame.
So, but I will let you describe the idea because it really is a wonderful premise.
Oh, thanks.
Artemis takes place in humanity's first city that's not on Earth.
It's on the moon, about 40 kilometers from the Apollo 11 landing site.
It's primarily a tourist destination.
It takes place in the 2080s when travel to the moon is very expensive, yet barely affordable to the middle class.
Like if you got a second mortgage on your house, you could have a lunar vacation.
The main character is a woman who was originally from Saudi Arabia, but she's lived in Artemis, which is the name of the city.
She's lived in Artemis since she was six years old.
She grew up there, and she's a small-time criminal.
She's a smuggler.
She brings in contraband stuff that's not allowed in the city and just kind of low stakes criminal.
And she gets offered an opportunity to do a big bit of industrial sabotage for a huge payoff.
And she reluctantly takes it because she wants that money to pay off an old debt.
And of course, everything goes fine.
There are no complications.
No, it's just the standard heist archetype.
It's a wonderful, it's a crime novel, but it's set on the moon, which is really, it really is different.
And very, I mean, it's not that far away, is it?
I mean, it's pretty realistic.
That's the goal.
All the technology in it is real tech.
And actually, even though it takes place further in the future than The Martian, it's actually less speculative on the technology than The Martian.
Like literally, except for later in the book, there is some new technology that you hear about that is fictional.
But the whole construction of Artemis, how it was made, how it was built, how people live there, how they get there and back, that's all real technology that exists today.
Wow, that's amazing.
Blue Apron Insights00:05:12
And now, so did you write this?
You didn't put this online, I assume.
You went right to the publisher with this.
And this was a straight up contract.
And how did you feel about the experience of that?
Did you miss the old intimacy with the readers?
Yes, I did.
I really did.
I missed getting feedback per chapter from lots of people and just kind of seeing how people liked it.
I missed that.
I mean, I would send the chapters to my core group of beta reader personal friends and family, and I would also send it to my editor and my agent.
So I got some feedback, but not like posting it online and having it out there.
Yeah, yeah.
It's fascinating because it's all changing.
And I mean, I think guys like you, you know, so many people want to be writers.
I hear from them all the time.
And I think when you do something like this, it just means people think like, oh, well, it's not just a brick wall that I can't get through.
There actually is a way to communicate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I would say that that's a thing that I say to everybody.
There's no longer an old boy network between you and the readers.
Right.
Right.
You can be successful even if the publisher thinks you won't.
No, seriously.
I mean, publishers are, you know, publishing companies, they're not there for your benefit.
They are businesses.
They want to make money.
So new authors are a risk to them.
They don't know for sure whether or not their books are going to sell.
So what's really cool is self-publishing can be an avenue into traditional publishing.
I definitely recommend traditional publishing.
I would not like, you know, I now have my choice of doing either way, right?
And I definitely prefer traditional publishing because, yeah, I would make more money per sale if I self-published, but traditional publishers have a marketing and publicity engine that just one person by themselves could never hope to match.
So they're just, they're really good at what they do.
They know how to sell books and they know how to get the books into the hands of reviewers who write for prestigious papers and websites.
And they know how to get people talking about the book.
They get you booked on radio shows.
They do all that stuff.
So you can't beat that.
But if you can't break in yet, then you can self-publish.
And if your story's good, people will recommend it to each other and give it high ratings and whatnot.
And then if you get good sales, you can go back to the publisher and you can say, look, these are my sales.
It already works at all.
So now, I'm no longer making a creative case for my book.
I'm making a business case for my book.
I'm telling you why you will make money because this is how well it's selling right now.
Great.
And so you can, yeah, you can get in that way.
I hate to cut you off, but I'm out of time.
Andy Weir, the author of The Martian and now of Artemis.
Great story.
Really interesting to hear about this.
And I wish you the best of luck with the book.
You're a terrific, really entertaining writer.
I like it.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Andy.
I appreciate you coming on.
All right.
Andy Weir, author of Artemis and the Martian.
I really found that so interesting the way he came up that way.
It's just, you know, especially because he had given up.
You know, I'm sure every writer in America, everyone who wants to be a writer in America must love that story.
And you got to eat.
You got to eat.
That's the thing.
And why would you just go into the refrigerator and just grab stuff and stuff it in your face?
Oh, I know why, because you're the kind of person who listens to this show.
But if you want to do better, you should try Blue Apron.
I have used Blue Apron, and what I love about it now, look, I can't cook.
I'm not even allowed.
There's actually a federal court order keeping me out of the kitchen because I hurt myself and others.
But it is nice to sit around and talk to my wife while she cooks.
And what they do with Blue Apron, it's the leading meal kit delivery service in the U.S.
And what that means is they deliver to your door all the ingredients of a wonderful meal already measured out and with a big instruction card.
It takes about 30, 45 minutes to cook it.
And what you get is a home cooked meal that tastes like a restaurant meal.
So it's convenient.
You can choose.
They change the menu all the time.
You can pick out what you want and they'll send you different stuff.
You can go on their website and look at it.
It all looks so great.
It's flexible.
You can do it whenever you want to do it, but you're getting this restaurant-level meal.
Some of the stuff they have, I will read this to you.
I could show you pictures.
I can't even look at these pictures.
It looks so good.
Stripped steak and potatoes with spicy maple-collared greens.
Soy-glazed Korean rice cakes with broccoli and soft-boiled eggs.
Not like I mean, the kind of thing you usually cook at home.
But when you cook this stuff at home, you get this meal and you sit down.
It really is just like eating in a restaurant.
And Blue Apron is giving stuff to you.
If you listen to the show, they will give you food.
I mean, is this the greatest country on earth or what?
Blue Apron is treating listeners to $30 off your first order.
If you visit blueapron.com slash Andrew, please remember to do that so they know I sent you.
Go to on blueapron.com slash Andrew.
You check out this week's menu.
You get $30 off at blueapron.com slash Andrew.
It is a better way to cook.
Blue Apron.
All right, stuff I like.
Now, you know, I had a lot of things I'm going to do.
I'm going to do one movie.
Christian Bale's Hostile Encounter00:07:37
I have to talk to you about this movie, Hostiles.
And, you know, I complain all the time that not only have conservatives been blacklisted or graylisted out of Hollywood, but conservatives don't fight back.
They don't go and buy studios.
They don't go and build studios.
They don't build TV studios and TV stations.
But also importantly, they do not have an infrastructure for supporting artists.
They don't have people to write reviews, to give awards, to talk about, you know, to have cultural shows.
I mean, if you listen to NPR, you can listen to one liberal after another talk about art.
And I, who love art, will listen to NPR to listen to these liberals talk about art because they're the only guys doing it because conservatives don't do it and we don't do it enough.
And because of this, when a movie like Hostiles comes out, I won't mention names, but some conservative reviewers have been saying, oh, it's this PC, anti-American, pro-Indian Western.
Not true.
Not true.
Hostiles, I think, is one of the best Westerns I've seen since Unforgiven, which was probably the best Western ever.
I mean, one of the best, that's Clint Eastwood's film, one of the best Westerns ever.
It is directed by Scott Cooper, and it stars Christian Bale.
The cast is just great.
Christian Bale, Roseman Pike, gives the performance of her career so far.
Everybody in it is really, really excellent.
And this story is kind of, you know, it's kind of a typical Western story.
Christian Bale plays a kind of legendary Indian hunter for the army.
He's an Indian fighter, I shouldn't say Indian hunter.
And he is tasked with taking one of his old enemies, a Cheyenne chief, to taking him to die in his happy hunting ground.
The guy's dying, and he doesn't want to do it.
He hates the guy.
You know, he has good reason to hate him.
The guy has done terrible, terrible things, but he too has done terrible things.
Scott Cooper, by the way, is the guy who directed Black Mass.
I was trying to remember what his other movie was, Black Mass and Out of the Furnace, which is also quite good.
Anyway, here's the thing you have to watch for: okay, there's a lot of PC sentiments expressed in the movie.
But if you watch carefully, every one of them contradicts another one.
It actually cancels out other PC sentiments and makes you face the fact that these are just people dealing with a terrible situation.
Christian Bale plays a guy who was at Wounded Knee.
He's killed women and children.
We see him killing Indian women and children on the screen.
We see the Indians killing whites.
We know that they're savages.
And every time somebody gets up and says the politically correct thing about Indians, it's always some moron who doesn't know what he's talking about.
So in this first scene I'm going to show you, Christian Bale is being asked to transport this Indian chief who he hates from prison to his happy hunting ground to die in Montana.
And this stupid journalist is talking about, oh, the treatments of the Indians.
And he just looks like an idiot.
And Christian Bale just gives it to him and tells him why he's a fool.
I saw what happened to the fourth when Yellow Hawk and his dog soldiers got done with them.
And there wasn't a don't you dare laugh.
There wasn't enough left of those poor men to fill a slot bale.
Understand when we lay our heads down out here, we're all prisoners.
I hate him.
I got a war bag of reasons to hate him.
So he hates this Indian and he hates the Indians in general, right?
So you think, what?
He's a racist.
But then there is one of the best scenes in the movie when he says goodbye to one of his soldiers who is black, and the two are manly men and they're just fighting very hard not to show their emotions.
And it is a heartbreaking, heartbreaking scene.
So take a look at this, one of the best scenes in the picture.
Hey, hold up.
All right.
Don't go, don't breathe.
well then don't breathe don't feel right not helping you finish up and start it Feels like I let you down.
True.
You never let me down.
Not one time.
Ain't many men have taken me in.
I won't soon forget it.
I'll take you in 100 times over Henry.
There's no finer soldier.
I take you in over a hundred times.
There's no finer soldier.
So he's not a racist.
He's not a racist, and yet he hates the Indians, which means when he says, I've got a war bag full of reasons to hate him, he's telling the truth.
And what you come down to in the end, you come down to a vision of these people.
You know, there's a line in Flashman, one of my favorite series.
If you've never read the Flashman series, you really should.
And there's a line in one of the Flashman books where he talks about what it was like to be in the wilderness.
I'll just say, hold on.
I will find it for you.
There it is.
He says, he says, he's talking to a guy who's talking about how wonderful the Indians are, the darling Redskins, he calls them.
He says, what bleeding breastbeaters like you can't comprehend is that when selfish, frightened men, in other words, any men, red or white, civilized or savage, when selfish, frightened men come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of them want, then war breaks out and the weaker goes under.
And that's what the movie is about.
It's about what war does to you.
It's about what history does to you.
It's about people, good people, who do terrible, terrible things.
And it's an adult movie.
You know, I mean, that was what struck me about it.
After all the superhero stuff, all the good and bad, you know, black and white stuff, it was just an adult movie with brilliant, brilliant performances.
You should really try it.
I thought it was a terrific, terrific Western.
That's it.
The Clavin week is over.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
Do not let it be utterly Clavenless.
Go on and listen to Another Kingdom.
We need you.
We need your support.
We need you to listen.
And it's really entertaining.
You will really, really like it.
And we will end with Fat Swallow singing a song.
I put this in there because this song has been in my head all weekend.
I was kind of hoping, all week, I've been hoping this would get it out.
Great song, great song.
It's Don't Get Ain't Miss Behaven, right?
Ain't Miss Behaven.
I can't even remember the song that's been in my head.
Anyway, Clavenless Weekend begins.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
No one to talk with all by myself.
No one to walk with, but I'm happy on the shelf.
Amis behaving, saving my love for you, for you, for you, for you.
I know for certain the one I love.
I'm through with flirting.
It's you that I'm thinking of.
a misbehavin saving my love for you like jack owner in the corner Don't go nowhere.
Saving Love For You00:00:39
What do I care?
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.