Ep. 143 dissects Trump’s firing of Corey Lewandowski—allegedly over Michelle Fields’ assault claims and Ivanka’s pushback—while framing it as a strategic pivot amid $3.1M fundraising woes versus Clinton’s $27M war chest, exposing media bias by ignoring Obama’s redacted Orlando shooter transcripts and Islam-censored White House edits. The episode ties Trump’s chaotic campaign to Game of Thrones-style power struggles, where ambition crushes honor, contrasting it with linear storytelling’s emotional arcs, before pivoting to how modern narratives—like The Sopranos—reveal truth in abrupt endings, suggesting politics mirrors tragedy when ideals fail. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump has fired his embattled campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
Lewandowski caused a controversy several months ago when he grabbed the arm of reporter Michelle Fields, leaving her bruised.
But at the time, Trump dismissed the incident after he viewed a video showing Lewandowski grabbing Fields' arm and said it didn't show Lewandowski grabbing Fields' arm.
Fox News host Sean Hannity backed Trump in this, saying, quote, I've looked at this video a hundred times and can't see any sign of, then Hannity walked face first into a wall and was knocked unconscious.
Sources close to the campaign said Trump's daughter, Ivanka, pushed her father to get rid of Lewandowski after Lewandowski planted disparaging stories in the press about her husband, Jared Kushner, suggesting Kushner had married into the Trump family of his own free will.
Nonetheless, the sources said Lewandowski's parting was amicable and that he was informed that he had been terminated during a friendly running gun battle with security guards, after which he was dragged by his heels from the building, leaving scratch marks on the marble floor.
He then received a free Trump steak from the Sharper Image as a parting gift.
In a series of interviews with the hosts of every show on Fox News, Trump said the tensions had been mounting in the campaign because of Lewandowski's behavior.
It was one thing when Corey roughed up a female reporter.
That was all right, Trump said.
But it was another thing when he ripped the still-beating heart out of a female staffer with his blood-drenched teeth.
That was okay too, but when my poll numbers started to drop, I'd had enough.
Some campaign insiders reportedly blamed Lewandowski for Trump's poor performance over the past few weeks.
One knowledgeable source said, quote, it was Lewandowski who insisted Trump insult a judge for being Mexican.
It was Lewandowski who forced Trump to suggest President Obama was in league with terrorists.
It was Lewandowski who crept into Trump's room at night and colored his face orange and combed his hair over the top of his head.
It was Lewandowski who demanded that Trump babble the same five or six one-syllable words over and over like a two-year-old instead of explaining his complex, nuanced vision for America.
Now that Lewandowski is gone, everything is going to be great, unquote.
In an interview with CNN, Lewandowski said he had been proud to be part of the Trump campaign and was now proud to be humiliated and thrown out into the street like a piece of rotting beef.
We accomplished a lot of important things during my tenure with the campaign, Lewandowski said.
Together we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people of this great land are ready to rise up and follow any idiot who talks a lot of nonsense in a loud, angry voice.
In the wake of Lewandowski's firing, insiders have closed ranks in order to determine how to rid the Trump campaign of its largest problem, but so far Trump himself has refused to leave.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Yeah, so long.
So long, Corey.
We loved you.
Did he punch like a female staffer on the way out?
You know, it's like, just leaving.
Pow!
All right.
You know, all is happening as I foretold, as Instapundit would say.
I mean, yesterday, you know, well, first we should stop for just a minute and remind you that tomorrow, right, is Mailbag Day.
Yay, Mailbag Day.
You cannot get in unless you subscribe.
If you don't subscribe, I can't answer your questions.
If I don't answer your questions, God only knows what's going to happen to you.
Like if you walk around with these questions unanswered, you know, anything could go wrong.
But if you subscribe, you get a month free, and then it's like $7.99 a month thereafter, and we will answer your questions until even your mother doesn't recognize you.
All right.
All right.
I don't even know what that means, but I just threw that in.
So we take a lot of flack on the Donald Trump side, you know, for not liking Trump.
And people are always saying to us that we are going to get Hillary Clinton elected.
People blame us for everything.
I mean, yeah, there was a guy who was, I guess it was a Saturday in Las Vegas who was arrested at a Trump rally.
He tried to grab a police officer's gun, and he said, I came here to kill Trump, and I was ready to be killed by the police.
And when he was foiled, he returned to being Speaker of the House.
It was very disappointing.
But somebody, it was Tammy Bruce.
I like Tammy very much.
She's a very bright woman, but she said, you know, she tweeted, you know, this is because of all of that anti-Trump rhetoric, you know, that this happens, like some nut can't be inspired on his own to go after a guy as, you know, incite, you know, a guy like Donald Trump who just incites people, gets people all worked up.
And we get this all the time that we are going to get Hillary elected.
But maybe some Trump supporters ought to look in the mirror because they are the people who put this, the one person that Hillary Clinton might beat, they brought to the fore.
He's the one guy she could destroy.
I mean, I think the way things are going, I mean, we talked about this yesterday, but we've got to talk about it more today because it's the headlines now.
You know, the Obama administration is unraveling, but not just the Obama administration, the Obama narrative is unraveling.
Everything that he is selling and that Hillary is selling is coming apart at the seams.
Today's headlines should have been about this insane, redacted report that came out of the Orlando shooter.
But instead, it's about this.
So what we're going to do, we're going to look at the Lewandowski thing and then just take a look at what it obscured, take a look at what did not get reported at all.
I don't think the New York Times reported it at all.
Of course, that's kind of their brief at this point to not report things.
But Lewandowski, this chaos in the Trump campaign kind of overtook the news.
So it was like this perfect, you know, it was this perfect storm of not only hurting the Trump campaign, but of helping Hillary and helping Obama, who are at this point kind of in this together because she's running on his record.
So let's take a look.
We'll look at Lewandowski.
The thing was, the campaign had been suffering.
Now, by the way, there's a narrative going around that the campaign was suffering in the polls, but that's very hard to tell because Hillary Clinton is rising in the polls as Bernie Sanders people come over to her.
So that was going to happen anyway.
Anyone could have told you before that happened that the minute she secured the nomination, her poll numbers were going to go up again and all this, you know, this kind of false walking on water that Trump was doing was going to disappear.
So that may not be connected to the fact that he's been saying all this crazy thing about President Obama being in league with the terrorists and about the judge being a Mexican and so he couldn't decide the case fairly and all this stuff that looked on as faux pas because faux pas have been his whole campaign.
He's been running on faux pas and it's been working.
But now that he's out in the general people are assuming that it won't work.
Maybe so.
But what it is doing, what it is definitely doing is it's scaring away the donors.
And the donor, I mean, he has been, here's the Wall Street Journal.
Donald Trump raised $3.1 million in the month after he became the Republican Party's presumptive nominee, giving him a staggering cash disadvantage heading into the general election against Hillary Clinton.
After largely self-financing the primary election, Mr. Trump said last month that he would begin actively soliciting money for the general election.
He appointed a national finance chairman and finalized joint fundraising vehicle with the Republican National Committee.
But his haul that month suggests his campaign was unable to turn his clinching of the party's nomination into any fundraising boost.
Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, raised $27 million last month.
She has raised $240 million over the course of the cycle to Mr. Trump's $17 million.
Let me report that.
Let me repeat that.
$240 million for Hillary, $17 million for Trump, and he's loaned himself $45.7 million.
So, you know, that's just numbers, but it all translates into ads, into attack ads, into getting her message out, into buying reporters, which obviously they come kind of cheap, so she doesn't need much money for that.
But, you know, it's all message.
All that money is message.
And so here's Hillary Clinton bringing her message of how we need to get money out of campaigns while spending, she's going to be spending so much more.
So he's getting no donations.
He's too scary.
He's too scary.
So someone had to go, and it's Corey Lewandowski.
And Charles Krautheimer wrote a great line last night.
He said, it's just like in a baseball team when they're losing, they fire the manager.
But we all know it's the players.
So Lewandowski goes out with some class.
So play Lewandowski number one as he's talking on CNN talking about, he's going out putting a good face on it.
From your perspective, what happened?
Why were you fired?
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that, but what I know is what we've been able to achieve in this election cycle has been historic.
We had a candidate who in June of last year announced he was going to run for president with no elective office experience in the field of 16 other people in the race plus him, who's gone on to do something historic, which was get almost 14 million votes and fundamentally change the way people look at politics.
And I'm proud to have been a small part of that.
And running as the outsider of this campaign, which he has done, running against the corrupt Washington, D.C. establishment and political correctness has been something I've been proud to be a part of.
Things change as a campaign evolves.
And a general election campaign against a very well-funded, giant organization like the Clinton campaign is very different than running against those smaller primary state elections, even when it was a big day.
So the inside story is apparently that Trump's kids got together and said this guy is, that he was inciting him to all these crazy things, that he was, you know, what he was really good at was the big events.
But in the end, you know, it's a ground game.
It's always a ground game, and you've got to be out there with the people, you know, where they are.
And apparently, Ivanko specifically was angry that some stories about her husband had gotten into the press that weren't very, I was joking when I said that he had married.
He had married into the Trump family of his own free will.
I mean, how could you say that about him?
What a terrible thing to say about anybody.
So Lewandowski goes on, but the fact is Lewandowski was escorted out of the building by security.
So this is the second cut, the second Corey cut.
But I would not look back.
I have no regrets.
It's such a privilege and an honor to have been a very small part of this, to learn and experience what he's been able to achieve and the electoral success that he has had.
It's been truly amazing.
Were you surprised?
Were you blindsided?
Yeah, I don't know if it's so much of that.
I mean, you know, there's been a lot of conjecture in the media lately about what's going on well and what isn't going on well in the campaign.
I think a lot of that is just the media trying to hype up a campaign.
You know, what we have is we've got a candidate on the other side who's under criminal investigation from the FBI that most of the mainstream media doesn't want to talk about.
Instead, they want to talk about things that Donald Trump did or said 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.
And even when he gives a great policy speech, and he's probably the best speaker that our country's ever seen as a presidential candidate, he doesn't get credit for those things.
I want to get into some of the specifics about how the campaign was run and where you are right now.
But before that, were you escorted out of the building by security today?
It doesn't work like that.
I mean, obviously there are protocols in place that when someone is no longer an employee, they just make sure there was no escorting out.
And look, I've had the privilege of working with these people for 19 months.
They're friends of mine.
But there's a protocol in place, and everyone follows the same protocol regardless of who that is.
And I think that's the right thing.
I love it.
I mean, so there's putting a good face on it.
I love that Trump is the best speaker, you know, presidential.
Maybe Lincoln and no, not Trump.
Lincoln used all those big words, you know.
Like nation, you know.
I mean, who really knows what four score and seven?
You know, you have to sit there and go, wait, wait, a score is 20 and then four times and then plus seven.
You know, it's confusing.
It's confusing.
It's ridiculous.
So Trump, and Trump did the same thing.
He went on O'Reilly and gave his version of this.
He's a good man.
We've had great success.
You know, I got more primary votes than anybody in the history of the Republican Party by a tremendous amount, not by a little bit.
I think Corey's terrific.
I watched him before.
He was terrific toward me.
Said I was a talented person, and he's a talented person.
He's a good guy.
He's a friend of mine.
But I think it's time now for a different kind of a campaign.
We ran a small, beautiful, well-unified campaign.
It worked very well in the primaries.
I think I'm probably going to do some of that.
I want to keep it a little bit very much in control.
As an example, I have 73 people.
Hillary Clinton has like almost 900 people, and we're in the same position.
So, you know, there's something nice about that.
I got criticized for that.
I said, wait a minute, I've spent much less money than her, and the result so far is the same.
I should be credited for that.
But with Corey, I'm really proud of him.
He did a great job, but we're going to go a little bit of a different route.
All right.
So it's a different style from this world.
It's a different style, and you're bringing it in.
It's a little different style.
Yeah, all right.
A little different style.
I love the Fox News.
This is like the Fox News protocol now as we put words in his mouth.
Why don't they just have him just sit there and move his mouth and let the host tell him what he's saying?
It's going to be a different style.
Yeah, a different style.
That's what I was going to say.
So they're putting it.
Now, my favorite response to all this, I have to say, was Michelle Fields.
Because remember, Michelle Fields gets grabbed, she gets slandered, she gets really, she really was treated badly.
And every time I mention this, like a left-wing meme, you know how the left-wing sticks with their narrative even after it's disproved, even after it's completely exploded.
They keep saying the Trump people are just like that.
They are just like that.
So they keep sticking with this thing that the video didn't show him grabbing her arm.
It only showed him grabbing her arm.
You know, it's like not, but not grabbing her arm.
It was more like just grabbing her arm, you know, so I keep getting these tweets of like how foolish it is for me to keep saying.
Michelle Fields was the only honest person in the whole thing, the only person who actually said what she had to say.
Megan Kelly asked her how she felt about it.
Here's her response.
Perfect.
He obviously grabbed you, even though he denied it.
But then you filed a charge because they sort of baited you into doing it, saying if it happened, why don't you file a charge?
So you did.
The prosecution decided not to pursue it.
And then he said he really felt vindicated.
Do you feel vindicated today?
I do.
I do feel vindicated.
You know, I think that when you're a bad person, you do bad things.
Eventually, there are consequences.
And I feel like with Corey, he finally, you know, there's finally consequences for what he did.
He defamed me.
He lied.
And he really shook my life.
You know, I lost my job.
There were also lots of threats.
So I'm happy to see that there is some justice.
I love it.
It reminds me of the last scene of this Sunday's Game of Thrones.
But if you haven't seen it yet, I won't give it away.
Ryan's Support Remains00:03:02
But that's what you're doing.
She was very gratified to bring some justice.
You know, perfectly honest.
It was almost shocking in a way to hear somebody just say the honest thing.
Yeah, he grabbed me and screw him.
He's done.
So now Trump is in this position.
You know, Trump, there is this movement to try and dump him at the convention.
And it's being done in a subterranean way.
We saw yesterday, we saw Paul Ryan saying, you know, I have no say over this, but if the delegates should want to vote their conscience, you know, if they should want to rise up, reminds me, reminds me of Julius Caesar.
You know, if they should happen to want to stab him to death in the Senate, you know, that's nothing.
You know, it's not me.
And the reason for that, obviously, is because they don't want it to seem like an, here come the elites, here comes the establishment.
This is an anti-establishment year.
They don't want to seem like the establishment.
They want to seem to come from below.
The people are out there, and you can bet behind the scenes, like a duck's feet underwater.
You know, the duck looks like he's still, but the feet are paddling underwater.
You can bet behind the scenes they're making this deal, and Trump knows it.
And Trump is saying, you know, Trump feels abandoned.
Well, here he is saying this is the second Trump cut, saying that the Republican Party isn't supporting it.
I need support from the Republicans.
I mean, in some ways, I get more support from the Democrats than do the Republicans.
Some of the Republicans, not all, some have been phenomenal.
I don't want to build that up in one way because I have got so much tremendous support from congressmen and from senators and from lots of other people.
But we do need support.
And by the way, Reince and the RNC have been terrific.
But it would be nice to have full support from people that are in office.
I mean, full verbal support.
Now, remember, just a couple of days ago, last week, he was saying, well, I'll go it alone because he can't go it alone.
You just can't do it without, especially if you can't raise any money.
You can't do it without the Republican Party behind you.
And you know, it's fine for people to say, oh, you're going to get Hillary elected, and oh, this is all your fault.
But people have consciences.
You know, people have principles.
They have things that they believe in.
You know, Ryan has been, as far as I can tell, I feel in public, he has been as good as he can be.
He supports him as far as he can support him.
He supports him as the party's nominee.
But it's clear, it's clear that he feels like his underwear is on fire.
You know, it's clear that he just feels, oh, Lord, why have you put me in this position?
And, you know, the guy, he has principles too.
You know, these aren't little pieces on a chessboard always trying to win.
They have to follow their own lights.
They have to go home to their wives and their spouses and their children.
They have to look at themselves in the mirror when they shave.
So, I mean, you know, Trump is making it very difficult.
It's Trump that's doing it.
It's not Corey Lewandowski, though he was a thug.
But it's Trump.
You know, it's Trump who is doing this and making it very hard.
So what's so painful to me about this is the way it distracts from what is happening in the Obama administration.
This Orlando killing, if it weren't for Trump, this Orlando mass murder was like a spark in a tinderbox.
Telling Lies About Guns00:08:46
It was like a spark in a, you know, in a crate of dynamite.
The crate of dynamite has been the lies.
This administration has been peddling the false narrative, and this spark has just set that thing off and it has blown up.
And, you know, Barack Obama promised he would be one of the most transparent presidents in history, and he has been transparent.
He has been transparently dishonest.
He has been a transparent liar.
You can see right through him.
He's as transparent as you could want him to be.
So yesterday, the FBI, and one of the most, it was humiliating.
I mean, I despise this Loretta Lynch.
I think she is the most sinister Attorney General since the last Attorney General.
But like, you know, she was humiliated.
She comes out and they put out this transcript of the Orlando shooter talking to the police, and it's redacted.
It's redacted.
You ever play Madlibs?
Remember Madlibs?
That's what it was like.
This is what it says.
I pledge allegiance to omitted.
Was it the anti-gay alliance?
Was it the pro-gun?
You know, it's like, I pledge allegiance to omitted.
May God protect him in Arabic on behalf of omitted.
Who could possibly know what he was saying?
So that lasted.
That lasted like a few hours until it finally occurred to these guys that they were standing with their pants down in Macy's window and like they put the words back in.
But you know, it's part, it's not like this is, it's not like this is out of line with what the Obama administration does.
It's like only, I think it's only like two months ago that the French president, François Hollande, was here and he was sitting, they had him on camera and they released this.
They released this to the press with the translator translating as he's talking about terrorism.
Listen to this.
They just put this out.
We're also making sure that between Europe and the United States, there can be a very high-level coordination.
But we're also well aware that the roots of terrorism...
And we have to act in Iraq and Syria, that's what we're doing in the cadre of the coalition.
And we constate that Daesh is in recul.
We note that Daesh is losing ground thanks to the strikes we've been able to launch with the coalition.
So they said they had some sound issues, but it's such an obvious cut.
It's such an obvious what they cut out was he said, he said we have to talk about the roots of terrorism, Islamic terrorism in Iraq and Syria.
You can hear him say it in French, but they cut it out because, you know, and you know, they did this.
I mean, Benghazi was sort of like this, where they're standing in, you know, Hillary Clinton.
And for all the corrupt stuff she's done, this is the one thing that I just can't get out of my mind, that she stood in front of the coffins of those people and said to their parents, this was a video.
It was a video that did this.
And the idea being that they were reacting to us, to our hate, to our xenophobia, instead of having, like human beings have, their own motivations, their own philosophies, their own outlook on which they behave.
It's so racist.
It's so elite to think that they can only act in reaction to us.
You know, what a racist thing to think.
What a low opinion of other people to think that these guys don't have their own culture, their own philosophy that is making them come and kill us.
It's always got to be our fault.
It's the most narcissistic thing in the world.
You know, to this day, this is from a Breitbart article, the official White House transcript of a Rose Garden ceremony with the father of the released soldier, Bo Bergdahl.
Remember the guy who deserted, right?
And they traded all these terrorists to get him back.
And then it turned out he was a deserter.
And they transcribe in this White House transcript every word of Bo Bergdahl's father, except his declaration that he was speaking in the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.
They keep cutting this stuff out.
And what's so shocking about this is the fact that within hours they fix this transcript.
Within hours, they put the words back in the transcript.
But the point is, they're not just going to lie to you.
They're going to tell you that they're lying to you.
There's nothing hidden about this.
They're not erasing any document.
Everybody knows they're telling you what they're telling you is not that you don't know, but that you shouldn't know.
They're telling you not that you don't see, but that you're not allowed to see.
That it's wrong to see.
It's wrong to know.
It doesn't matter if you know the truth.
It doesn't matter if you know what words go in the omitted blank spot, because the point that they're telling you is you are not allowed to know it.
It is not right for you to know it.
It is somehow wrong.
And we see this.
It's induced psychopathology.
It's induced mental illness.
We see it when people see the San Bernardino shooters getting radicalized, but they don't report it to the FBI because they're afraid of being seen as racial profiling, as bigoted.
Racial profiling itself being an idiot phrase for ordinary observation.
You know, we saw it when the Orlando shooters' employers wouldn't investigate complaints, wouldn't fire him after complaints that he was a toxic guy.
Same reason they didn't want to seem to be anti-Muslim.
And we see it, I keep bringing this up because it's so appalling that we see it in Germany with these girls who won't report the men who are molesting them.
And they said because we don't want to seem to be prejudiced against refugees, against the refugees.
It's not that you're not supposed to, it's not that you don't know, it's that you're not supposed to say that you know.
They are telling you the political correctness is the idea that it is virtuous to lie because your lie will somehow transform the world.
That's what they have been telling you.
They've been telling you this for 40 or 50 years, that if you lie, if you don't say this, if you don't, you know, the truth about this, there's a wonderful, wonderful column by Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal today, because all of this, of course, is to move the narrative to guns.
So yesterday, the Senate voted on four different gun measures.
All of them went down in flames.
There's one still coming back that has a slightly greater chance, but they'll never get through the House.
I mean, nobody's going to go for this.
It's a kabuki dance.
It's simply to make you think that this is the narrative.
And so now the left gets to shake its fists.
How, after people were killed by guns, you know, we were talking backstage before we came on that really, you know, there should be a waiting period before a gun acquires a Muslim.
You know, like every gun who comes in and says, I'd like to have an Islamic terrorist please, you know, say, well, you have to do a background check.
You know, who used you last?
I was used by the mob last.
Well, I'm not sure we want to pass you on to Islamic terrorism.
But they're trying to change the narrative to guns.
And now that the Senate voted it down, the only point about this, they knew the Senate was going to vote these measures down.
The only point about it was so they can say, oh, those rotten Republicans, it's all their fault.
In New York, Bill McGurn writes this wonderful column in New York under Mayor Bloomberg.
Raymond Kelly, the police commissioner, instituted something that they called, it ended up being called stop and frisk.
You talk to any cop, talk to any street cop, and he can look across a room and tell you who's strapped, who's carrying a gun.
I mean, I've sat with them and they'll go, yeah, that guy's got a gun, that guy's not got a gun.
They can just see it.
So what they would do is when a guy was acting suspiciously, they needed some probable cause to go after him, they would stop him, they would search him.
Gun violence plummeted.
And where did it plummet?
It plummeted in poor black neighborhoods where people were getting shot.
Gun violence plummeted because not only did they start to confiscate guns, but the bad guys started to think like, I'm leaving my gun at home.
You know, I'm not going out with the gun.
What happened?
The New York Times, all the usual liberal lawyers got out and they sued him.
They sued the police department because they said, well, you're searching too many black people.
But it was the black guys who had the guns.
It was the black guys who were committing the crimes.
This is the problem with this idea of racial profiling.
So the guns are now coming back onto the street.
Meanwhile, the police were also infiltrating radical mosques.
Once again, same group, the New York Times in the lead, the New York Times in the lead.
You can't do that.
That's racial profiling Muslims, which they weren't doing, by the way.
They were only going after the problem mosques.
And they were helping the Muslims who didn't want this stuff coming into their mosque.
They were purifying these places, getting rid of these radicals.
So they don't really want to save your life.
I mean, Barack Obama has said repeatedly, he has said, more people die falling down in the bathtub than through terrorism, which is a false comparison.
It's like comparing a strawberry stain to a cancer.
It's like saying, well, you have a big strawberry strain, only a small cancer, because evil spreads if you don't stop it.
People are always going to fall in bathtubs.
Logic of Stories Revived00:06:11
That's always going to happen.
But evil can be stopped.
It's motivated by humanity, so it can be stopped.
But he says, oh, well, more people die falling down in bathtubs than by terrorism.
He's willing to, he can spare a couple of you.
He can spare a couple of you if he can get this narrative through into the history books.
It's not going to work.
It's not going to happen.
Reality is a stubborn thing.
Reality keeps coming back.
But that's what he's, you know, and it is a kind of madness.
It's a kind of madness.
And this should have been the story today.
This should have been the story on every front page.
This should have been the story of the collapse of the Obama narrative in the wake of Orlando.
And instead, we're talking about Donald Trump and his stupid campaign manager who should have been fired when he laid hands on a young woman.
That's the end of that career right there.
That should have happened three months ago.
that had happened three months ago.
If it had happened three months ago, we'd be talking about something else today.
It's an incompetence on Trump's part.
It's incompetence, and it's also a moral absence.
All right, that's what I have to say.
Stuff I like.
A lot of people were tweeting me about video games yesterday because I mentioned that I put Uncharted 4 on the stuff I like.
I have to talk about Game of Thrones a little bit, and I'm going to talk about video games too.
I won't give anything away, I promise.
No spoilers.
This show is so good.
I mean, it is so amazing.
It's maybe the best television show I've ever seen.
And it's a show about power, basically.
It's a show about how people will do anything for power.
And there are people who are motivated to get power for good reasons, but they all want it.
Everybody wants it.
There's nobody who doesn't want it.
And anybody who elevates himself above the idea of power gets killed.
Starts out, you know, Ned Stark gets killed right away.
And anybody who has any sense of honor or that he wants to put something above the search for power gets killed.
And that's kind of the theme of the show.
And so it's really good because you never know who's going to die on the show and you never know what's going to happen.
It's just really suspenseful, really brilliant.
But we were talking a little bit about how games and video games have come up against this problem with storytelling.
That video games, you know, there was a long time ago, they started to talk about the tyranny of narrative, the tyranny of the author.
And they started to say the author doesn't exist.
The author doesn't exist.
It's only the reader who exists.
And this is part of the whole idea that there's no such thing as truth.
There's no such thing as truth, and there's no author, there's no authority, you know.
And they started to say soon, stories are all going to be hyperlinked stories.
They're all going to be choose your own stories.
And that was the whole idea of video games in some way, that you would do different things, make different choices, and the stories would have different ends.
But it turns out that's not what people want.
That's not how stories work.
That Uncharted 4 is so good because it tells a story and all it does is it lets you play the action sequences.
It's really just an action movie where you get to play the action sequences and die a few times and get to really have this intense feeling that you're involved in it.
The same thing is happening with television.
You know, a television show, pick what they call in the TV business, they call it a procedural, is a show where they solve a different crime every week.
Every week, there's a crime within an hour, law and order.
That's a classic procedural.
Those shows are really more like real life than stories.
Stories are about the one moment in a person's life when he comes up against classic stories or the one moment in a person's life when he comes up against his fate.
He comes up against the thing that his character that will unravel his character, either for good or ill.
It'll either change him and he'll go forward into the next phase of his life, that's a comedy or a romance, or it'll destroy him and that's a tragedy.
If you think about Hamlet, he can't make up his mind and that's what causes all the tragedy.
If you think about Othello, he makes up his mind too quickly and that's what causes the tragedy.
That's their character meeting the incident, the series of incidents that causes the tragedy.
If Othello were in Hamlet, this play would have been over in five minutes because he makes up his mind like that.
It would have been like, you know, avenge your father.
Okay.
You know, that would have been the end.
But real life, in real life, we don't often change that much.
Only heroes change.
Only people who really commit themselves to happiness and to joy and to the truth.
Only those people change.
Most of us go about our day-to-day life and do the same thing.
And that's more like an ordinary procedural TV show.
Stuff like Law and Order is like real life.
You go in, you do your job, your job changes, the stories and your job change, but you remain the same.
That's the old-fashioned shows, like, you know, in the 70s and 80s, what a television show was like.
These new shows started to change that, and they started to expand.
And when you have stories like The Soprano, The Soprano, by the way, the theme of The Soprano is that people never change.
That's the theme of the Sopranos.
That's why it ends with that blackout.
Nothing happens.
You just end.
That's the theme of the Soprano.
So it was a television show about television shows.
But the logic of stories is taking hold again.
And what you're getting now are shows that are long.
They may last six, seven series, but they have a beginning, middle, and an end.
And when you have a beginning, a middle, and end, suddenly that logic of storytelling takes hold again.
And what we're watching is characters interacting according to their character with the one moment in their lives.
And that's what Game of Thrones is about.
It's this moment when the throne is empty and all these people converge on the thrones and their character is revealed.
So the logic of storytelling is a logic unto itself.
It is something that we need.
It is not life.
Stories are not life.
They are something we need in order to live life because they explain life to us.
They explain how to find meaning.
They explain what the feeling of life is.
And I just think it's wonderful to watch as these new art forms like video games and like long-form television are reshaped by the logic of storytelling to become what we need in our lives.
The ones that are doing it so well, Game of Thrones, this Uncharted 4.
Somebody asked me, everybody always wants to know what I thought of The Last of Us.
I'm embarrassed to say I'm only playing The Last of Us now because zombie games keep me up at night.
So I don't like to play them.
I only can play them just before I go to bed, so I don't play them.
But I am playing it now and I'll report back when I'm done.