Here's what I'm watching, and it might be a difference between someone who is trained in persuasion versus people who are not. The way reality is being presented to you is that there are events that happen in the world and then people look at those events and they form opinions. That's how the world is presented to you. That's how the news organizations present it to you. It's how you probably imagine the world: there are events, we observe the events, and then we form opinions.

In my filter of reality, nothing like that is happening. That is not happening. Let me give you my filter on it and then you can compare it to the one you have and see which one you like.

In my world there's a news event — and just to make it fun let's talk about President Trump causing the news event — then there's the news media and social media. This is what I call the opinion creation phase. In other words, people who are not you are framing it. They're changing the context. They're putting the pundits on it. They're putting emphasis here or there, sometimes leaving things out. Sometimes the facts are just wrong. But this is the phase where the opinions are created.

And then once these opinions are created, you, the poor consumer, looks at your favored sources. Probably the left is looking mostly at the stuff from the left. The right is looking at mostly news sources and social media on the right. And we get our opinions from this stuff. Now some of you might also be on social media — obviously you are if you're watching this — but in general it's this phase that assigns you the opinion.

I know that you don't want to believe that about yourself, but you certainly believe it about those other people. "They're not doing their thinking. They're not doing their homework. They must be getting their opinions from TV." My view is that that's a universal truth. The television is giving you your opinions.