s are not the things that are important. They're the things that fill up the time. They're the things that fill voids. So when you're watching the news, you're not watching some kind of top priorities or anything like that. Often they are, but that's not the purpose of the news, to show you the top priorities.

All right, here's a question for you. It's a persuasion quiz. I'm going to ask you who wins in this setup. You've all seen the memes of AOC crying at what I think was the fence to some illegal immigrant holding pen. So the original photo, it seemed that she was crying over having empathy for the people who were imprisoned. Essentially the people who were imprisoned. And so now you've got AOC. So she's doing her political thing and showing empathy. But it got turned into a meme. And now just a little picture of her doing the crying is being pasted in all kinds of humorous situations to make her look silly.

So who won? Did the Republicans win by taking her meme and showing how silly she is and putting it in lots of humorous contexts? Did they win the persuasion battle? I don't think so. I think they lost hard. Here's why. What is the most important thing in terms of persuasion? Well, if fear is not part of it, and in terms of this particular topic there's not a lot of immediate fear, it's just something that needs to be addressed. So fear isn't there. What's the next most persuasive thing? Visual. Visual is persuasive.

What do you think of every time you see the meme of AOC showing empathy? You know where it came from. You know what everybody sees. The meme knows it came originally from that context. All you're doing by sending that meme around is reinforcing the fact that AOC cares about people more than you do. It's a visual and it shows empathy. It also shows power because we're talking about her, right? If you're a politician and everybody's talking about you, that's power.

What is the definition of charisma? It's the best definition I've ever heard. I didn't make this up myself but it's a good definition. Charisma is power plus empathy. That's right. Every time that meme is shared, AOC gets more charisma because you're reinforcing the fact that she has empathy. Oh, you think it's funny and maybe she's faking or it's misapplied or something. But the visual is her showing empathy and that is way more important than your concept.

Compare these two things: a picture of a leader showing empathy versus the other side says, wait, I got a concept to sell you. The concept is that although she's pretending to show empathy, she's not really showing it