Ian Bremmer

that Trump was having essentially an informal bilat in plain view at a G20 summit with Putin.

He was sitting next to, at the time, Shinzo Abe's wife.

and who was pretending not to speak much English because she didn't like Trump and didn't wanna talk to him.

He went to cross the table at a very long dinner in Germany and had a 45 minute one-on-one with Trump that nobody talked about.

Now, I bring this up in part because someone ran into me in Washington, D.C.

the other day and reminded me of the story.

And he said, oh, you got that scoop.

And I was thinking it wasn't really a scoop because I'm not out there trying to break news.

I'm trying to understand what's happening in the world.

But in this case, several of the leaders

from around the world, people that I know.

And I was hearing this story from them because they were so startled that Trump had done something that was so dramatically different from what people understood an American president in a G20 setting

would do, and this was especially at the beginning of the Trump administration, the first one when the Europeans were worried, oh, do we have a strong alliance?

Can we trust this guy?

Is he all talk, but he's going to be fine?

And then suddenly they see it.

So they're talking to their national security advisors, their chief of staffs and the rest.

But the point is, once you've built a network, it's a matrix.

it is a whole bunch of people that are interconnected with each other.

They meet constantly, they share information constantly, they have different perspectives, but they do have a general shared understanding of what's happening in the world, much of which they're not necessarily saying to other people.