I usually try to stay away from politics in this newsletter. After all, most of you are here for presentation tips, and some dude spouting off about politics probably isn’t what you signed up for.

And like they say, “opinions are like a**holes — everyone has one and they all stink.”

So even though today I feel compelled to say something political, I promise that with the next email I’ll get back to our regularly-scheduled presentation-related programming. Actually, believe it or not, I’m going to bring today’s political rant around to presentation skills. Just wait and see. 😉

BTW, keep in mind that if you are also lit up by this topic and want to talk more about it, by all means feel free to reach out to me directly, god knows I can go on and on about this forever, it’s just that I try not to do it here.

That said…

If you listen to almost any side in America, they’ll be saying something along the lines of “this is not the America we want.” They might be saying that in the context of immigration, or tariffs, or the price of eggs, or god knows what else. But whatever their political persuasion — Democrat, Republican, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, blah blah blah, whatever, you’ll hear them say something like this: “This is not the America we want,” “This is not who we are,” etc.

And so you know they are not really polarized. Sure, they think they are polarized, but they are not actually polarized, not at all. When you pull back the thing they are talking about, and listen to the subtext of what they are saying, they’re saying the exact same thing. They are not polarized, they are unified.

Their country is becoming something they don’t control anymore, and they are unified in their anger about that. They all live in a country that has a large amount of debt, and a large portion of that debt is owed to other countries, which means that control of their country is passing from them to someone else.

As control of their country passes from them to someone else, their country will undergo unpopular political changes, and it will be easier for the powers-that-be to make those changes if the people think they are polarized (“divide and conquer” and all that). In the US, the polarizing topic is immigration. Immigrants are the shiny object that keeps people distracted while their country makes the political changes it needs to make.

You can look back over hundreds of years of history and see this exact same playbook being run. Germany ran it in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Romania ran it in the late 80s.

(and look how it turned out for them)

BTW, I have strong feelings about immigration. How could I not? I personally have lived 70% of my adult life abroad, and most of my friends and customers are living in countries that they were not born in. But I’m not going to go into those feelings, because I don’t want this email to be 10 pages long.

Besides, what really makes me angry is to see a bunch of people thinking they are polarized when in fact they are not, they are just being manipulated. It’s the mass-level equivalent of gaslighting, and seeing it going on pisses me off.

Whew, that said, I know I told you I would find a way to bring it around to presentations, so here it is:

Whatever your audience says they want, it’s highly likely that that’s not what they really want. I’m not saying that they know and are being dishonest with you, not at all. I am saying that they probably know what they want, but maybe do not know how to articulate it, certainly not to you, and maybe not even to themselves.

That is the person you need to speak to in your presentations.

You need to answer the questions they articulate to you, absolutely. To not answer those questions would make you seem disrespectful and arrogant.

But the more you can make your message address the need they can’t articulate, not even to themselves, the more you will be remembered for your understanding and clarity.