istancing, but for TDS you've actually got to be outside of the listening distance. So you want to be, well, you want to keep your distance of say a quarter mile from other people to reduce the transmission of TDS because if you get closer to it than a quarter mile, they can still shout, you can hear them, and that's a little too close because it gets transmitted by talking and ideas.

So there was a bad case of TDS going through the country for a few years, but now that's mostly subsided. We've now, it's more endemic situation. We've learned to live with it, sort of a baseline problem like the flu. But we still have to be concerned about long-haul. Are there any long-haul symptoms? And I think this cognitive dissonance is sort of the myocarditis of TDS. That it does seem that having once had TDS, you are more likely to have cognitive dissonance even a year later.

Speaking of Trump, he's getting some attention by calling Putin's moves genius and very savvy for the way that he reframed the separatist regions and then moved in to protect them. So Trump said that that was really smart. And then Trump's critics said, you fool, you Putin lover, you Kissinger Putin puppet, you. Why are you saying good things about Putin? You must be a monster like him.

So is that exactly what was going on? I have two comments about this, maybe more. Number one, there's one thing that Trump never gets credit for: his honesty about how he feels. Now I will grant you that when he's talking about the outside world and the facts in the world, he can play fast and loose with the facts. He is a salesperson. He's unapologetic about that. He uses hyperbole to persuade. He's unapologetic about that. So he is what he is, and you either like that or you don't. But I think we all understand it.

But the thing that you miss about Trump is that when he tells you what his opinion is — am I right? — when he tells you what his opinion is, you always believe that, don't you? You never believe that he's telling you something he doesn't personally believe. I don't think I've ever once had that feeling. But when Biden speaks, Biden sounds like a politician, doesn't he? You don't really think he believes what he even says his opinion, the things he says he really cares about. I don't know that he does really. Who knows? Might be convenient to say he cares about that stuff. Who knows?

But here's, so when Trump calls Putin a genius and savvy, it's basically very similar to what I was thinking in my private thoughts. I was thinking, damn, that's pretty smart the way he's doing this. Looks like it's pretty successful at least in terms of getting stronger control over those separatist regions. They look pretty smart. Now it's evil and manipulative and Hitler-like. I'm not downplaying any of that, but it's smart.

So that's the first thing that we miss about Trump, is that he looks at something that looks smart and he says, hey, that looks smart. He's not approving of it. He's just saying it looks smart. That's just his honest opinion. I don't know. I miss it. I miss it. I miss that part of it. I honestly don't miss the conflict. I feel like I'm a little better off without all of the TDS. The TDS was, for me, surviving the TDS was almost as hard as surviving the pandemic, to be honest. You know, if you're right in the middle of it. I mean there weren't enough vaccinations to get me through TDS, but you know, I got through the pandemic. It was a pain in the ass, but I got through it. The TDS I think is going to last forever. The TDS will affect my career and my reputation, my Wikipedia page for the rest of time.

All right, but let's talk about Trump strategically, given that he might be a future president. Who knows? Why he says about Putin really does matter. And even as an ex-president it would matter. Is it smart or not smart to call Putin a genius and to say that his moves are savvy? Go. Would you say that Trump is smart or not smart to call Putin a genius in public? I think it's smart because if you want to talk to somebody productively later, you call them smart.

I hate to be the one who always has to explain this to the general public. Apparently people who watch this livestream are all, you're all educated about how this works, but the general public doesn't understand that there was only one person who handled this right, and it was Trump. He's the only one who handled it right because ultimately we got to talk to that guy, Putin. We got to talk to him. Who is going to get a better reception? The one who Trump called smart or the one who's just your evil blah blah blah blah blah?

I feel that we're all human, right? Like even Putin's a human being. Do you think that Putin is unaffected by Trump calling him smart? Do you think he's unaffected by that? I think he's affected by it. I think it actually works. And that if anybody were to talk to Putin in the future about any of this, I would want it to be Trump. I would want it to be Trump.

Now I saw some people commenting about how they were suspicious because Trump and Putin had a private conversation once with the interpreter, I guess. But since it was not recorded, what that conversation was, people are afraid that, oh, that's where all the bad stuff happened. That's maybe that's where all the collusion happened. We don't know what happened. You know, there's no way to know anything about that. But here's what I would guess, just speculative. Trump understands that it's always personal. That's it. Trump understands that it's always personal. And I'm not sure why other people don't kind of understand that as well as he understands it. Everything's personal.

Here's another thing. In the book Persuasion by Cialdini, do you know what one of the ways science has shown you can befriend somebody and get them to trust you as a friend? You tell them a secret. That's a well-known persuasion trick. You tell them a secret. That's what Trump did.

Now we don't know what they talked about privately, but because we don't know what, is that called a secret, right? Just, it might have been nothing. Maybe they didn't talk about anything important at all. But Trump created a situation wher