ental retardation. Do you remember I talked about that yesterday? And I said to myself is that an Iranian word? Because that word is not allowed in this country. You're not supposed to say the r-word. And in fact the only reason I would say it is because a head of state allegedly said it. When I'm repeating it I wouldn't use that word. I agree it's not a word to use in public. I didn't used to think that but I've come over to that side.

And today I noticed that CNN is interpreting it differently and now they're reporting that what the Iranian official said was that the White House has a quote mental disability. In other words just as I said yesterday, do you really think that there's an Iranian phrase or word that means mental retardation the way it was reported? And I remember I had some skepticism that that was an accurate translation. And then today you see a fairly different translation. I mean essentially the same meaning but different words. That matters.

Apparently Trump has said that there would be some obliteration if they go to war. So it's very similar to fire and fury and very similar again to North Korea. And that Kim Jong-un, as you remember, called the president a dotard and then the president responded back in a fairly humorous way. He matched him. It became friends and now they're exchanging love letters apparently, almost literally. They seem to actually really be fond of each other. And I think that's actually real. And it looks like there might be a little more progress on North Korea, as slow as it needs to be. Doesn't need to be fast.

And so there are reports that they're talking again about getting back on track in North Korea. But what are the odds that the same game plan will work with Iran? Because I think the Ayatollah is pretty different than Kim Jong-un. It was easy to imagine Chairman Kim and President Trump standing together and having a laugh and shaking hands well before it ever happened. Could you imagine it? I mean you could imagine it very easily. But I don't see that picture. My brain can't generate, I cannot generate an imaginary photograph of President Trump and the Ayatollah shaking hands. Okay, do you see it? Because I can't even. I literally have a prohibition about imagining it in a way that you imagine things that could actually happen.

So I think Iran will have to have a slightly different track but I don't know that we're on the wrong track at this point. We'll talk about Jared in a moment.

So let's talk about Jared Kushner's peace plan. Now if you haven't seen it there's a speech in which Jared is introducing his concept of the fifty billion dollars for rebuilding the Palestinian areas and the West Bank. And of course the Palestinian leaders and other people who supported them said hey Jared Kushner and the United States, you can't buy our agreement to end war because this is not about money so we are insulted. Why would you try to buy us? You can't buy us off.

Now most people, all the smart people, the smart people said wait, things are backwards. If you don't have a peace deal on a political level you can't do any investing. So why would you talk about the investing when you're not even close to having a political deal? Don't you have it backwards?

Well do we? I'm gonna tell you what to look for in terms of technique and then I'm going to play Jared's, just a fairly brief clip of him introducing the idea. And I want you to look for all of the techniques of persuasion that are built into his simple statement. It's literally one of the best few minutes of speech you'll ever see but it won't look like that unless you understand persuasion because there's so much technique built into it there would be invisible to someone who doesn't study in this field.

So I'm gonna call it out first before I play it so that you can really be looking for it. All right here are all the elements of persuasion.

Number one and most importantly he is making people think past the sale. The sale is the political agreement that they all know has to be reached before one dollar can be invested. So he wants you to think past the political agreement to imagine what would happen with his fifty billion, how you would spend it, who would get it, where it would go, where it would come from.

If you can get the people who think there's no hope of a deal, which is most people, right? Most people probably think there's no real hope. By the way I will go to the whiteboard in a moment so you'll see some summary to this. So the first thing is that if you can get people to say to themselves even for a moment, you want them just for a moment to ask themselves how could this fifty billion work on a practical level? If you can get them to have even one fleeting thought of how the fifty billion could work on a practical level, who gets it, who pays, what, where's it go, you have made them think past the sale. You have made them imagine for the first time that a political agreement is possible. Because in order to imagine where the money goes and the details of the money you'd have to uncritically imagine okay so imagine we did have a peace deal, what would it look like? That is so important and it's the first time.

Well I'm no historian so somebody correct me on this. I don't know that we've ever started with money first, certainly not at this level. We may have said hey you know there's money to be had if you have peace, about ten million. But by picking this giant number fifty billion, which I understand is big number for what we're talking about here, it gets your attention.

So the second part of the technique is to come up with a really big number. Now I saw somebody in the comments say it's a carrot and stick approach that you're saying we will bribe you, you'll get money, it'll be a good deal. Well that's the 2D image. So the checkers version is that we're paying you to do something we want. Yeah there's some money in this if you do what everybody wants which is make peace. That's true, it's part of the story. But the making you think past the sale is the magic part. The bribe part, we'll give you some money if you do this, is not the magic part. I'll say more about that, why that's not the magic part.

Here's another thing that Jared will do and I'll show you in a minute in his speech. He asks people to literally imagine. Imagine. Because literally put your imagination into the future where we're spending this money and making it an economic powerhouse. Asking people to imagine the future is again part of making you think past the sale. But imagination is very powerful. It actually gets you past the point where you think it's impossible. It makes you start thinking past the point of impossibility and once you're thinking past that you have a chance of getting rid of whatever that obstacle was. Very, very powerful.

Next, and I mentioned this before when I talked about the president and talking about Joe Biden's brain, the president was not specific. He did not say there's something specific wrong with the brain because it's better technique to let somebody imagine their own scene. Likewise when Jared talks about the future for the Palestinian areas and the Palestinian people he does not give too many specifics. What he says is something along the line of it would be, it could be a bustling center of commerce and trade. Words to that effect.

Now when you hear that do you say to yourself well bustling, what does that mean to me? Is there anybody who doesn't like the idea of a bustling center for trade? Probably nobody. Probably a hundred percent of people say yeah a bustling center of trade that sounds good. So the being general about it is very powerful because it allows people to imagine their own version of what that looks like.

The other thing he does is he keeps it simple at least at this part. When you're talking about fifty billion dollars you could imagine that somebody would have gotten up there with a PowerPoint deck, showed you all the ways the money's coming in and where it goes and you know how this translates and here's my spreadsheet. You don't do any of that if you're trying to persuade. Forget about numbers. You want to make people feel. You want to give it to them simple. And so look how simple and clean Jared's introduction to this is. It's as simple and clean. There's no extra stuff in it. That's very important because you don't want to clutter up your persuasion with experts.

And I mentioned before that the fifty billion is such a big offer that you can't ignore it. That's a very Trumpian technique and you see some of the Democratic candidates for president using it. Very, very big offers. It's the Trump technique. And even if you can't get everything you want you can't look away. So as soon as they said fifty billion you said well I think it's impossible to get peace in the Middle East but fifty billion. So fifty billion is a giant shiny object to keep your attention on the topic. Attention is half of persuasion. If people aren't paying attention they're not going to get persuaded. So simply having this giant number even if it's not entirely realistic, I don't know if it is or not, makes you pay attention. It's good persuasion.

The other thing that Jared says is he gives what I call a fake because. A fake because is a reason that doesn't make sense but we uncritically hear it as a reason that does make sense. Because the human brain, and by the way Cialdini in his book Influence talks about this so there's a good scientific basis behind what I'm saying. The human mind is a rationalizer. It's not something that is rational for anything complicated because we don't really understand complicated things but we think we do.

So one of the things that Jared does is he says that the reason that this is possible to turn this area into a bustling economic powerhouse is because in history it had happened before. Think how powerful that is. He says that historically it had been a powerhouse economically so therefore it can be again. That is a fake because. There is no logical connection between the fact that in deep history it was an economic powerhouse that does not mean therefore logically it will be one again. Because you know what's changed? Everything. Everything. History doesn't repeat. It's a complete nonsense reason. But when you hear it does it register as a nonsense reason? It does not. It registers as a real reason. That's a fake because.

Now this works because people want it to be true. If people did not want it to be true then it could turn into an economic powerhouse then it wouldn't work. But if somebody wants something to be