more than you needed to because apparently the solution is here. They just have to pass that bill. Both sides like it. Just have to do the damn job. That's all. Just do your job and save you 20% on the pharmacy or something.

All right. North Korea says they're optimistic about their upcoming working-level talks about denuclearization. Now here's something I don't know about this process. If you have a working-level meeting about denuclearization does that indicate that the bosses have already decided in principle or is it reverse? Is it the working-level meeting that will try to produce something that the bosses meeting — Trump and Kim Jong-un — can see so they can say yes or no? Which one of those do you think it is? Do you think the bosses have said yes in a broad way and now they're working out the details or is it opposite? The bosses haven't said anything because they're waiting for some details to percolate up. It could go either way, right? Could go either way.

Here's some speculation. I'm not sure I'll make this a prediction but here's a speculation. The key sticking point seems to be from the start North Korea getting the security guarantees. Now that's the language they use in whatever translated form. They talk about North Korea getting some kind of security guarantee from the surrounding countries as well as — meaning China, South Korea, and the United States being the important ones in the region. So they could get some and Russia I suppose. They've got a little bit of a border with Russia.

So here's the thing. Do you think that President Trump would ever offer that? He could under the right conditions meaning that the nuclear program was more transparent. Do you think the president could ever give security guarantees? In other words saying not only do we formally end the war with the Korean War but we'll guarantee that we will help you with any of these other countries if they want to attack. We've all agreed there will not do that. Or some version of that, right?

Do you think President Trump could ever offer security guarantees under the condition that we get what we need and that this is verifiable and it's like a real deal not a PS deal? I think he could. I think he could. I do believe that this president could say to Kim Jong-un — and here's the key, their personal relationship was a necessary building block of being able to say I think we can give you security guarantees and have Kim Jong-un believe it.

Do you know what Qaddafi did not have? The advantage of a personal relationship with the President of the United States. Think about who Qaddafi was to us. He was just sort of this nameless villain — not nameless but he was this villain we don't know personally. And then think of what Kim Jong-un is to President Trump. They have actually a legitimate personal connection.

Do you think that President Trump would be okay with killing Kim Jong-un as long as things were moving in the right direction at whatever pace? I mean it could be slowly but at whatever pace we're at least moving in the right direction. Do you think President Trump could ever approve of a situation where Kim Jong-un is taken out? No, because it's not in our interest. It wouldn't be consistent with their personal relationship. Again just assuming everything's moving in the right direction and it looks like it is.

So Kim Jong-un and Trump seem to have solved for Qaddafi. Number one you get rid of Bolton because Bolton is the guy who brought up the Libyan model in the first place, right? So you got to get rid of Bolton. Step one complete. And then the other steps: add in a personal relationship and they both need to show that something positive is happening so they can show their team that it's a productive relationship. It's not an adversarial but has been transformed into some kind of mutually productive, forward-looking arrangement.

I believe President Trump and Kim Jong-un have pulled that off and it could be that this working-level meeting is actually a details meeting. It could be that the big guys have said in principle — we're not promising this yet but in principle if you could come up with some way we could really keep an eye on this nuclear program and feel safe about that — there's a deal to be had. I feel like maybe the big guys have agreed but we'll see. Could it be the other way too?

All right so we still don't know who the whistleblower is in this Ukrainian situation. Now I don't want to start a new rumor about who the whistleblower might be but I'm just gonna point out a fact. Again you can connect these facts any way you want. I'm just gonna point out the fact: Justin Trudeau has a lot of disguises. That's all I'm saying. We don't know who the whistleblower is but Justin Trudeau has a lot of disguises. That's all I'm saying. Connect the dots any way you want.

All right. One of the things I love about the Trump administration is that it seems to be a two-way communication street. There's a two-way communication that's always open between the presidency and the citizens in a way we've never seen before. I was watching for example the miniseries about Roger Ailes and in that — and who knows how accurate this is — but in that you saw that one of the guys working for President Bush called Roger Ailes and asked him for his help essentially managing the news to be consistent with what the White House wanted.

And I thought I'll bet before the Trump administration the best way you could describe the relationship between the government and the people is that the government would make decisions with their experts and with their advisers and with their lobbyists and everything else. So the government would make decisions and then they would try to sell it to the people. I feel like that was a model up until Trump. Trump has a superior model of dealing with the public.

Now it may be someday in the future when historians look at it and go hey we didn't know it at the time but that superior model — let me give you an example. The president is often mocked for having his TV on during the day quite a bit watching Fox News but also we know he watches CNN at least. He's probably watched a little MSNBC. So we know the president is sampling the news from both sides whereas we imagine that Bill Clinton or President Obama were reading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and very upscale magazines and things that would be a higher intellectual plane than mere television.

Which of those two models gives you a better idea where the country is at? Which of those two models rapidly A/B tests messages so you can see what's working in real time, see how people react to it? TV is the pulse of the country. This president is doing the smart thing. He's watching the pulse. He can see in real time somebody tries a message whether it's on Fox or CNN and he can tell how it comes across. He can tell how he feels about it. You can ask the people in the room. Usually people in the room with the president, you can ask them what they think about it. Did that go over? Did that work? Maybe I'll try that.

So the president has created this interactive real-time relationship with the press but it's better than that because the press often reacts to social media and vice versa, right? There's a symbiotic relationship. Social media and news, government and the president. This president has made those three things almost one unit of a machine whereas it used to be sort of a top-down, hey we're gonna try to make you guys do what we want.

Do you not see examples where there are individuals on social media who come up with a good message, a good approach, a good meme? For example Carpe Noctem creates great memes and next thing you know the president's tweeting it. So what we're seeing is something we've never seen before which is that an individual voter, just a citizen, can have a good idea, put it on social media. Or it could be just a good message or a good way of expressing something. Puts it on social media, gets a bunch of likes, gets a bunch of retweets. It bubbles up. Somebody with a blue check notices it. They retweet it. Maybe another blue check. And then suddenly the Office of the President notices that there's a good message that's getting a lot of traction and then he uses it.

It's amazing. The entire system of government has been completely rewritten by this president and it's one of those things you're gonna see in hindsight much clearer because when you're in it you don't really have the same vision to be able to see it well while you're in it. But I've never seen a more interactive approach.

Let me give you an example. Here's a concrete example. I mentioned the other day that there's something called the Office of Nuclear Energy which you can follow at @NuclearEnergy. So our government has a department that's promoting nuclear energy and has lots of information about the newest stuff and the newest test facilities and what's coming online now etc. So apparently it's a newish Twitter account and I called attention to it because my attention was drawn to it through MarchForNukes, our resident nuclear advocate expert. And so he called my attention to it and then I tweeted it. Their number of followers was just a couple thousand. I forget the exact number but two or three thousand something like that followers in total. That was the total attention they were getting. Today they have five thousand. So two thousand people who were citizens who were interested in nuclear and can be sort of weaponized as advocates because they're people who had enough interest to follow this account. And I mention it again which will again boost their attention. So you can see a concrete example where I tweeted them and their exposure roughly doubled. I mean it was a small number but it doubled. So you can see the effect that the public is boosting parts of the government that are productive and then that government does something for the people. So it's this continual two-way virtuous cycle that I just don't know existed before. It feels like it's really taken on a life of its own.

Here's another example. So earlier I was just talking about how there's a bipartisan bill to lower pharmaceutical costs. Well don't you think that knowing that — because I just told a bunch of you — don't you think that knowing that increases the chance that maybe it could happen, right? So there are lots of things that we the citizens on social media, especially the blue check people who have a lot of followers, we can boost the signal of anything worth boosting. You know we can do it with a campaign ad. I can do it with the app to gov nuclear site. I can do it with a bill. I can do it with China. I can do it with fentanyl. So you can see that individuals are now sort of testing messages. We know that the White House is watching. They are watching at least the blue checks. And you see the president's actually retweeted people who are not even highly visible. Just people who had a good idea.

That is just hugely inspirational to me because it feels like — I don't want to take this too far into optimism because you won't be able to follow me there — but it feels like almost a rebirth of the Republic. Is that too much? It feels like a rebirth, a reboot of the Republic. Because it seems to me that our founders built a pretty darn good system, you know, given with what they had to work with etc. But it sort of evolved into things happening behind closed doors and the lobbyists and the power brokers are the only people who have any power after a while. Doesn't it feel like that?

It feels now that under the age of Trump — and who knows if this will last or not — it feels like the public is completely empowered now. Completely. Who saw that coming? Not me. I didn't see that coming. It seems to me that an average citizen can today have as much power as an average citizen could have in the beginning of the Republic when things were so small that you probably knew the other people in government. You know you would know your governor. You might know him personally because the world was so small. There just weren't many people there during the formation of the Republic.

But it feels like Trump gave — well Trump and Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg in a sense, the social media platforms in conjunction with this weird unusual president — has created a situation that has empowered individuals in a way I've never seen. Let me give you an example. If an individual came up with a terrific idea for gun control let's say, would that individual be able to get that terrific idea to bubble up all the way to the White House? Absolutely. I never would have said that in another time. Would you? Just fact-check me on this based on your observation. You know this is more opinion than fact but based on what you've watched about the process, based on the number of times you've seen an individual tweet bubble all the way up to the White House, what a great idea from just a person make it all the way to the White House? Absolutely. Absolutely.

That doesn't mean they'll use it because you know they get a lot of ideas and