No B.S Friday: What I think of the end of the Trump era.

So it looks like Trump is cooked.

I know it looks like he’s going to fight it, but I think he’s got nothing.

If he had something, we would have heard about it by now. There’s been an usually long period of silence from the former president.

And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets for him.

He’s an optics president. And the more people call him ‘former’ president. The more people who call Joe Biden “President elect”, the more world leaders who call to congratulate Joe on his win – the more Trump looks like yesterday’s news.

So I think we can expect a bit of messing around in the transition, but unless Trump is planning on a military coup, he’s on his way to his unique and unusual place in history.

What a ride.

I remember when I first caught whiff on Trump. I like to say I was on to it before it was cool. I saw his full potential in the early rounds of the Republican primaries. I put money on him when Sportsbet were paying 7 to 1.

I knew we were witnessing the birth of an entirely new political animal.

And I think it’s pretty fair to say that Trump has changed politics forever.

People like to call him a ‘populist’ president, but I think that misses the point. He was a partisan president. He knew how the political calculus worked. He knew he didn’t have to win any middle ground if he could rout enough energy into his base.

And so that was the game he played. And he played it like a maestro. He worked his base into a frenzy.

Remember in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests how he went and stood in front of a church and waved a bible about?

There was never any doubt about what side Trump was on.

And remember, even though he lost the popular vote, he still delivered an incredible turn-out for Republicans.

But while Trump had game, he was also a man of the moment.

Over the past decade social media has created identity silos – isolated echo-chambers. He saw that his new brand of politics was perfectly tailored to this reality.

It didn’t matter what the facts were or what you did. Your fans were going to love you and your haters were going to hate you, no matter what you said or did.

And so Trump just said and did what he liked.

The shock the collective world felt at this was partly about Trump, but it was also in recognising how divided and isolated we had become – that we had entered a ‘post-truth’ universe where the facts just didn’t matter anymore.

And I don’t know that there’s any way back from this. This is just how the world works now.

And Biden might talk all he wants about ‘uniting America’, but you can bet that message isn’t making its way through to Republican thought-silos.

So, Trump will go down in history as an emblem for the social-media age.

And until that changes, expect more Trumps.

JG.

No B.S Friday: The first step in manifesting anything is to drop into your power.

It’s one of the paradoxes built into manifestation.

The way people tell the story – I’m talking about law-of-attraction type theories, which themselves have been around in various forms for centuries – everything has a gravity. Even emotional experiences have a gravity, and they pull towards each other.

Like attracts like.

So if like attracts like, that means that if you want to attract peace, joy, beauty, material possessions, whatever, then you need to put yourself in that emotional state, where you are actually already enjoying, peace, joy, beauty, material possessions, whatever.

It’s these feelings – these body-based experiences – that then become the fuel that powers your dreams.

And to tap these feelings – this fuel source – you need to think past the sale. You need to put yourself in that place where you already have everything you want.

But, Question: if you already have everything you want, where are you then?

Answer: You are in your power.

That’s what I reckon this state is. This manifestation state.

You are in your power. Every desire is realised. Every need is sorted. Every loved-one is taken care of, and you cut cleanly and quickly through the messy world towards your goals. Always.

You are in your fully-realised power.

You need to step into this place to manifest cleanly.

If this is true, that means that when you are consciously dreaming – when you are deciding on what it is you want to be calling into your life – you need to make sure that these dreams are the dreams of your full-power self.

You need to dream the dreams that your full-power self would dream.

They can’t be coming from a place of lack. “I need a flash car so people will like me.” Rubbish. Is that something the most powerful version of you would say? Of course not.

“I need a flash car because I like riding an iron dragon and writing my name in the open road.”

That’s something your full-power self would say.

So before you dream into what you want, dream into the fullness of your power. Open the door to everything you are capable of.

That might require a bit of imagination. But isn’t that the magic that’s hidden in imagination – to call into being something that has never existed before?

So dream into it. Dream into what it’s like as your full-power self. Imagine what your full-power self would desire.

This is where it begins.

I’d say don’t even waste your time trying to manifest anything if you haven’t grounded here first.

The first thought should be on your power.

There will be time for flash and bling later.

JG.

The polls are eye-popping. Is Trump toast?

So looks like Trump is on the way out.

You know, this is 2020, so anything is possible, but Biden has opened up a huge lead in the polls.

And of course, the answer to that is that the polls were wrong last time and they could be wrong again.

And that’s true. They could be wrong. But they would have to be epicly wrong for Trump to win this time.

You can actually look at the data on this:

So Trump is currently 10 points behind in the polls. That says that for Trump to win, the polls would have to underestimating the actual results by at least that much.

But the only time that the polls got it that degree of wrong was all the way back in 1948, and even then, they weren’t that wrong. In the modern era it’s a few points at most. In 2016, versus Hilary Clinton, it was just 1.1 points.

So for Trump to win, the polls would have to be the wrongest they’ve ever been, in a huge way.

You’d have to think that’s a low-probability outcome.

But you know, Trump is Trump, and this is 2020, so I’ll believe it when I see it.

But whichever way it goes, I think Trump’s first term will mark a turning point in politics, not just in America, but across the world.

But let’s not give Trump the credit for that. I think Trump just saw where the wave was heading and got in front of it.

And the wave’s name is polarisation.

Take a look at this chart. This tracks how many Americans think that it really matters who is President.

So back in 2000 it was pretty evenly split. 50% of Americans thought it mattered who was President, the other half thought that it didn’t matter. That’s either because they just didn’t care and thought it was irrelevant, or they thought both parties were pretty much the same anyway.

That is, they were either disengaged or cynical.

Fast-forward to 2020, and the numbers are totally different. Now, 83% think that it really matters, while only 16% don’t.

That’s another way of saying that the number of disengaged and cynical voters has collapsed 70%!

On the face of it, you’d think that’s a good thing. The more engaged in politics the citizenry is, the better outcomes you get.

But it is likely that this is largely driven by social-media driven thought-bubble polarisation.

People think it matters who is President because their news feed tells them that the other side wants to eat babies and sell war-veterans to the Russians.

This dynamic was in play before Trump (you can see that in the chart), but I think Trump was the first person to use it consciously.

He knew that there was just no way to talk to the other side – there’s no penetrating the though bubble – so he gave up pretending to be a “President for all Americans”, and focused instead on energising his base.

And it worked… for a while.

But has he lost the political centre?

This will be a very interesting election to watch. Campaign managers from every continent will be watching how it plays out.

And the key question is this, in the age of social media thought bubbles, just how far can you pull from the political centre?

We’ll see.

JG.

If you’re too snatchy, you’re settling for second best.

Patience is a virtue. I mean that. It’s practically a spiritual discipline.

And it’s a discipline that’s worth developing.

I say that because when I look out at the world, I reckon most people are too ‘snatchy’.

That is, the universe offers them something a bit shiny, and they rush out and grab it.

They’ve got greedy hands.

This is a shame because once your hands are full, they’re full. You’re no longer in a position to receive.

And the first thing the universe offers you isn’t always the best thing it’s got.

It might be a job for example. You might be thinking its time for a career change, and you’ve sketched out in your mind exactly what you’re looking for.

But then something comes a long that’s definitely an improvement on what you’re doing now – it’s a big step up – although it’s still not exactly what you’re looking for.

What do you do then?

Most people go for the snatch. They grab it and nail down that opportunity before it gets away.

There’s a fearful voice that comes in at this point. “Grab it now while the opportunities there. It might not be there tomorrow. You might never find anything this good again.”

The snatch comes from fear.

However, maybe what you really need to do here is be patient.

Maybe you just need to put your greedy hands in your pockets and see what the universe offers up next.

Patience is built on trust and abundance. It’s built on the belief that there are endless opportunities in the world, and it’s built on the trust that those opportunities are going to find their way to you at some point or another.

And in that sense, patience is built on a spiritual world view. Call it abundance or whatever you want, but it’s based on an idea about just what kind of rock it is we’re living on.

And that’s why I say patience is a spiritual discipline.

And it’s a discipline because it’s not something that comes naturally.

You’ve got billions of years of biological evolution telling you to grab what you can while you can.

You need to train yourself in the way of patience.

But it’s worth doing.

If you can disengage your greedy hands – if you can learn to stop snatching at the world – then you enter a much more receptive space.

For things to enter that space – to deeply enter – then they really need to be fully aligned with who you are and what you want.

The further and deeper they have to come, the more in alignment they have to be.

And so the more patient you can be, the more the universe really has to perfect what it offers you.

And perfect things are nice.

In fact, once you go there, once you see what the universe really has the ability to deliver, you’ll never settle for second best again.

So don’t settle, petal. And keep your greedy hands in your pockets.

JG.

Covid is changing how we build economies… and that could be great news.

I know we’re still knee deep in this Corona business, but I’m starting to think about what things look like on the other side of this.

And I kind of think that globalisation, as we know it, is toast. It’s gone. It’s making way for something new altogether.

And the Australian economy is going to become an entirely different beast.

Take the export side of things for example.

A couple of weeks ago I said I was pretty chill on China. China had just slapped a ban on Aussie barley imports, but I wasn’t joining the chicken-littles in the media who had said we had just shot ourselves in the foot.

At the time, I told people to relax. Commodities are ‘fungible’ – if you don’t sell it to one country, you just sell it to another. It’s only a problem if total global commodity demand falls, and China chucking a hissy fit isn’t going to do that.

And what happened?

Well, a week after the ban, all the barley that was on its way to China is now on its way to somewhere else:

Australian barley on its way to China has been diverted mid route to Japan and the United Arab Emirates following China’s decision to impose punitive trade tariffs on the grain.

Four ships carrying Australian barley have changed course or cargo after rising trade tensions led to China — Australia’s biggest barley buyer — enforcing an 80 per cent tariff on the grain, costing regional communities at least $500m.

Grain exporters, including Australia’s biggest, Perth-based CBH, have been in talks with Japan, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and other countries to sell barley originally destined for China.

While new sales can take weeks to arrange, ships loaded with barley have changed course immediately.

So, for the record, I’m still chill.

And Covid is causing a shake-up in how much vulnerability we’re willing to accept in our supply chains.

Facemaks have become the emblem of this issue.

Facemasks are cheap. They cost almost nothing to make.

And like a lot of cheap things, we didn’t value them. We didn’t think about them. We just assumed that they would always be there.

And then they weren’t.

Covid had disrupted the global supply chains we relied on, and we ran dangerously close to running out.

We suddenly realised that we were vulnerable. We relied on other countries for facemasks, medicine and other essential medical supplies.

And in the middle of a health crisis, we couldn’t protect our doctors and nurses because we couldn’t source a 75 cent face mask.

It looks like we’ve dodged the bullet now, but that we have been an incredibly stupid and humiliating way for a great nation to become undone.

So there’s a new conversation happening. How do we tap the benefits that global trade can provide, without building ridiculous vulnerabilities into the system?

There’s a real chance that government industry policy could be radically different at the end of all this.

You’re already hearing it in relation to our gutted manufacturing sector.

So post-Covid, it’s going to be a very different economy.

An over-reliance on China is going to be replaced with a new-found passion for self-sufficiency.

And personally, I think that might be the best thing that could have happened.

JG.