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Dementia or Leadership? The Truth About Cognitive Decline in Politics-ISH · Surviving-ISH Podcast

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, welcome to Surviving Politics Ish.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this show might be a little different today because I actually received an email from a listener, and um, with her permission, she said that I could share it.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: So she wrote to me because she's been watching the show and watching the world lately, and she feels like she's living in a house of mirrors.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: She wrote about her grandfather, and this is a man that she and her family has referred to as a force of nature.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm going to read you her story, not because it's political, but because it's human.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And because I think that deep down a lot of us are going to recognize the man that she's describing.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: So she says, David, my poppy was a son.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Everything in our family revolved around him.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was a guy's guy, he was a veteran, a business owner, a man who could fix a tractor engine in the dark and negotiate a real estate deal the next morning.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: He was the alpha before we had a word for it.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was loud, he was funny, and he was undeniably the boss.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: If Poppy said the sky was green, you would take a second look just to double check.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was sharp.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: He could remember the name of the guy he had met in a hardware store in 1982, and he could tell you a joke that would have the whole room roaring.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was our protector.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: We felt safe because Poppy was at the head of the table.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: We never imagined a world where he wasn't the strongest person we knew.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But then the shadows started to crawl in.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a sudden drop-off.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was a slow, agonizing fade.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: It started with what we called the loops.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Poppy would be sitting at dinner and he'd start telling us a story about a fishing trip.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: We had all heard it a hundred times.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: We'd smile and nod.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then ten minutes later, he would start to tell the same story again.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Same words, same hand gestures, same punchline.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you tried to tell him, hey Poppy, you just told us this, he wouldn't just laugh it off.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: He would get this look in his eyes, this flash of pure cold terror.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that terror would immediately turn into rage.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was the hardest part to witness.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: The man who used to be our protector became a man we had to now protect ourselves from.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: He started getting glitches.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: He'd get confused about simple things like how to use the remote or where he parked the car, and instead of admitting he was confused, he'd scream.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: He would call my grandmother a traitor.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: He'd say we were all conspiring to make him look stupid.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: He started believing people were stealing from him.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: He became paranoid thinking his oldest friends were out to get him.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was losing grip.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: The only way he knew how to fight back was to be aggressive and as loud as possible.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: He thought if he could just dominate the room, no one would notice he didn't know what room he was in.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: The years went on, and the Poppy we knew, the civilized man, just started to evaporate.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: He lost his filter.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: This man had always been a gentleman.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: He started saying things that were graphic.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: He made comments about women's bodies while we were out at a restaurant.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: He would use language that was so crude, we tried to make excuses for him.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: My uncles would just say, Oh, that's Poppy being a tough guy, or he's just from a different generation, he's got that locker room humor.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: We told ourselves it was just him being edgy or unfiltered.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is, it was the frontal lobe of his brain literally failing.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: The part of the human brain that tells you, don't say that in public, don't act that way in front of children, it was gone.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't being tough, he was being sick.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: He started obsessing over weird things.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: He would spend an hour talking about the texture of towels, or he'd get stuck on a detail about someone's physical appearance.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: He'd comment on people's ears or their weight or their hair over and over again.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was like his brain was looking for something, anything to latch onto, because the bigger picture, it was disappearing.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the breaking point came when we had to take away his keys.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was dangerous.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: David, he was truly dangerous.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: He'd already clipped a mailbox.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: He had driven three towns over and forgotten how to get home.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when we sat him down to take the keys, he didn't say, you know what, you're right, and I'm tired.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: He went to war.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: He told us that we were his enemy.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: He said that he was the only one that knew how to drive.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was the only one that knew how to keep us safe.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: We were weak and he was strong.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he said we were trying to overthrow him.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we had to choose.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do we let him keep his dignity and risk him killing himself or a family on a highway?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or do we love him enough to be the villains and take the keys?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So of course we took the keys.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he hated us for it.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: He hated us for it until the day that he died.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But we did it because we knew that force of nature with a failing brain is just a disaster waiting to happen.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think personally we a lot of us can relate to that and have seen that with someone close and we love.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I do also see the underlying message.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: We know the word salads.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: We know the rage that comes from a man who is terrified of his own confusion.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: To give the politics-ish twist on this, I want us to look at a man who spent 12 minutes at a presidential campaign speech talking about another man's anatomy in the shower.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to look at the man who gets on a stage and starts acting out something so horrific and graphic, such as giving a blowjob to a microphone, and this is in front of children.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to look at the man leading this country who calls us the enemy from within.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Does that look like alpha energy to you?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or does that look like poppy?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Does it look like locker room talk or does it look like a man who has lost his impulse control?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we've been told for years when it comes to Donald Trump that this is just politics, that this is just being tweets or him being a fighter.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But Sarah's letter tells us the truth.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about politics.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't about red or blue, it's about cognitive decline.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're watching a man's sundown on national television.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're watching the word silence, the confusion of what city he's in, and the obsession of someone's physical appearances, of their beautiful ears or the or these masculine men where he felt no fear, and we're being told that this is strength, and that is a fucking lie.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Here is the terrifying reality.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Poppy's family took the keys.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah and her family had to make the decision to take the keys of this man's truck because they loved him.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: They loved their community.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But the people around Donald Trump do the opposite.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to give him the keys to the most powerful military in history.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to give a man with zero impulse control, a man who glitches every time he's on camera the power to launch nuclear weapons.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how dangerous that is.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you wouldn't let Poppy drive your kids to the grocery store because you knew he might get confused and hit the gas instead of the brake, how can you justify giving a man the codes that could take us into World War III?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: He is showing us his glitches every single day.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's mimicking giving blowjobs to microphones on stage.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's obsessing over golfers and the shower.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's losing his mind in real time, and the people around him are just using this alpha brand to hide the fact that the driver is no longer home.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about owning the libs anymore.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's about survival.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the fact that we've handed a two-ton truck to a man who can't find his way back to the point of a sentence.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot keep pretending that this is Trump being Trump.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is dementia.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is a decline.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the fact that we are handing a two-ton truck to a man who can't find his way back to the point of his sentence.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't Trump being Trump.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is dementia.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is decline.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is a biological reality that does not care about your political party.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: If we don't take the keys, we are all in the truck with him and we know exactly where it's heading.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Saras Poppy was a force of nature, but he was still human.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And when the brain failed, the family had to step up.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's time for us, regardless of red or blue, it's time for us to step up and take a look in this alpha closet and admit what's actually inside.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a man who is confused, a man who is declining, and a man who is too dangerous to be behind the wheel.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: So ask yourself would you give him the keys?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if the answer is no, then why are we giving him the country?