AI Friends, Robot Umps, and Trump’s Epstein Meltdown | CommUniverse

Kids are turning to AI chatbots not just for homework, but for actual friendship, emotional support. Is this innovation or is it a real crisis of loneliness? Robot empires are making their All Star Game debut. Is this the end of your blind ump or the start of soulless baseball? Weird Al Yankovic is finally headlining in Madison Square Garden at the age of 65. Accordions, stormtroopers and all. It's a poker powered pop perfection. Next we're going to look at Trump's push to fire or nudge out the Fed chair Jerome Powell. Could it backfire badly? Think about 35% inflation. Explain why later in the show. And also Donald Trump can't stop talking about Epstein. Trying to tell other people, don't talk about Epstein. This is a communications disaster, certainly turning into one. I'll be looking at it not through the typical political lens, but from a crisis communications perspective. All that and more today on the communiverse. Welcome, I'm TJ Walker. This is your daily dive into top business, technology and culture stories looked at through the lens of communication, all in the aim of benefiting your personal development to make you more successful. That's what we're about. So I'm TJ Walker. I have been coaching, training leaders, CEOs, Wall Street Wizards, billionaires, fund managers, plus political leaders all over the world for decades now. I'm kind of turning the tables and showing you what's really going on behind the scenes when it comes to people communicating, trying to communicate you and change public opinion, that's what we're all about. Let's go now to segment one. The kids are turning to AI artificial intelligence for friendship. A new United Kingdom report reveals that AI chatbots are becoming more than just a digital tool tool for kids. They're becoming friends. 64% of children now use chatbots for homework advice and get this emotional support. Even more troubling, 15% say they prefer talking to a chatbot over a real person. That is concerning. The reporters called me, myself and AI. It shows one in four vulnerable children turning to AI because they feel they have no one else. Popular platforms like Chat GPT, which, full disclosure, helps me write some of the scripts right here for the community. Snapchat, smy, AI and character AI are being used without consistent age safeguards or emotional safety checks. Lawmakers like Senator Steve Padilla in California are pushing for protections, but parents and schools remain behind. This isn't just about innovation. It's about silent emotional crisis happening inside every smartphone. AI isn't replacing real relationships by accident. It's Filling a vacuum, adults left behind. So this is a troubling, troubling story and societal condition. According to this report, 64% of children in the United Kingdom use AI chatbots for not just help and advice, but also social bonding, or one of those three. 15% prefer the bots over real humans. And this is not good. And I say this as someone who's a big fan of artificial intelligence, a big fan of interactive artificial intelligence and clones. I have my own clone at tjwalker. AI. You'll be hearing ads for that from time to time right here on this show. But it has to be used in a focused way because, let's face it, I'm lazy. You're lazy. All human beings are lazy. If we can just sit in bed all day, not shower, not clean up, not do anything, eat jelly donuts, never have to talk to a real human being and kind of get all the nourishment we want and all the social interaction we want, Unfortunately, a lot of us are going to follow up on that offer, and that is increasingly the offer that artificial intelligence is presenting. What does this really mean? If you are someone of any age and you find yourself talking to AI More than a real human being, it's time to say, maybe I've got a problem. Now, I'm all in favor of using artificial intelligence to make your job more effective and to even plan out vacations and things like that. But to make it your primary form of interaction, interacting your ideas with the world and not making that human, that is a problem. Human connection is important. In fact, it's why I'm right here today. I'm on location. I'm in the Poconos in Pennsylvania with a little family reunion. There's aunts and uncles here and grandparents for my daughter here. We're all having a good time. Could we just talk on FaceTime? Sure we could. Can we just get together on Zoom? Can we just email pictures back and forth all the time? Well, we do some of that, but nothing beats face to face conversation. As soon as this is done, I'm going to go back into the living room in the kitchen and sit down and actually talk to people. Now, if you're a parent, you, at the moment at least, are a partial dictator. You can have total control over your child if they're below a certain age. You do not have to give them a cell phone, an iPad, a computer, and say, you now have access to every horrible, creepy idea and person in the world. You don't have to do it, tj. All My kids friends have full access to the Internet. If I take my kid's phone away, I'll be a pariah. My kid will hate me. No, no, they won't. Or if they do, too bad. Your job is to parent your job. My job is to parent my daughter. And I can tell you I did have to cave a little through various other pressures in the family. My daughter does have access to a cell phone. But before you think I'm too big of a hypocrite, she can text friends, call friends, text family, call family. She does not have any access to social media, even to this show, but she can watch it live too. She does not have access to apps that give her any kind of creepy interactive AI interface encouraging her to starve to death or cut herself or all the other horrible things that a lot of AI will do. So am I trying to preach a message that let's all become Luddites and let's not use technology and let's lock your child in a vault till age 30? No, that's not the message at all. But there has to be a proper use for AI. A steak knife is great. If you're cutting steak. If you're angry at someone and you're trying to jab their body and force them to bleed to death and kill them, it's not a healthy use. And if you are injecting your body not with knife wounds, but with non stop artificial zeros and ones that have been turned into things that seem like words, that seem like human emotion, if that's what you're injecting into your body, into your eyes, into your brain, all day long, whether it's for you or your, you've got a real problem now. I can't mandate laws in your country or my country saying, hey, parents, you're guilty of child abuse. If you give unfettered access to the Internet to your child and the ability for them to interact with chatbots all day long, sitting in their room, not talking to human beings. I can't force anyone to convict you of child abuse, but I do think it's abusive and left to their own devices. In fact, left to my own devices, sometimes it would be easy to just sit all day long, stare at this, you know, stare at a screen and be in your own little bubble and just go and find people who already agree with you, who already tell you what you want. It would be easy. But ultimately it is sucking the marrow out of your. Whether you want to call it your brain, your soul, your heart, whatever it is. The things that make us absolutely human. So I think we're all going to have to monitor this, Monitor it carefully. Hello, I'm T.J. walker. This is the Communiverse. Thanks so much for joining me today. We have a lot of fun going on here. I'm having fun. I'm on vacation. But part of my idea of fun on vacation is doing things I want. And I love spending an hour a day talking about the top news, technology and culture stories of the day. So I'm very happy to be with you here today looking at the top stories and analyzing them through a communication lens. If you're seeing this anywhere and you like it, do a thumbs up or leave a comment. Sign up for notifications, whatever platform you're on. A little background. We're still in kind of a slow, soft launch. This is a stealth launch for a new show that I will be launching September 2, 2025. It'll be a daily show, a little more produced, a little more intro music and some bells and whistles. It will be distributed on all audio and video podcast platforms and all major social media platforms. So a lot's coming up. It's very exciting and I hope to do this no matter where I am in the world, whether I'm in my home base, whether I'm on vacation, whether I'm traveling for work. Today I'm in the Poconos. I believe I'm in Pennsylvania with family. It's a beautiful, gorgeous day. Just had a nice walk down the street. And at the end of my street are ski trails for the winter now. They're great hiking trails. So that's where I'm going with my daughter and my family. And I'm not taking my cell phone. I want to completely disengage from the world of interactivity, of AI and all things digital and just commune with nature. I think you can see it's a beautiful day. It is 77 degrees now. It was 69 when I woke up, so a lot of fun to be had here. Let's hop now over into the second story of the day. My visibility is a little harder here in bright sunshine. I may have to think twice about doing shows outside, but it seems like such a beautiful day and I thought you might like to see the trees and fun, so I decided to do that. In story two, robot empires make their All Star game debut. The future of baseball is here at the 2025 Major League Baseball All Star Game. Robot Empires, also known as the automated ball strike system, are calling pitches for the first time On a national stage, each team gets two challenges per game, retaining them if successful. The strike zone is customized to the batter's height. Top at 53%, bottom at 27%. Now, this is a big shift from the traditional cube defined in the major league rulebook. Players on this issue are divided. Some pitchers like the consistency. Others say it removes the human drama. Joe Tory, the former manager of the New York Yankees, someone who won a number of World Series, supports the system, calling it an overdue update. In an era of replay and data driven precision sports training, tests Show Catchers won 56% of appeals. Now the real test is public trust. Will fans embrace accuracy or miss the chaos of a blown call? So again, each team can challenge a couple of times a day. The height is very sort of scientifically measured and they're trying to reduce the, the human error element of this. I have to tell you, there's a lot of people getting upset over, you know, 3 million truck drivers and cab drivers in America losing their jobs potentially to artificial intelligence. I am not going to cry if umpires lose their jobs because of artificial intelligence. To me, this seems like the perfect textbook example of why using a technology solution is better than a human solution. The umpire's job is to measure in a very calculated way a ball that's being thrown more than 100 miles an hour and making a judgment in just an instantaneous moment, whether it's one inch on this side or one inch on that side. Now, that is inherently an extraordinarily difficult job for an umpire to do because there are essentially millions of pieces of data that need to be analyzed in the human brain in a millisecond. That's precisely the sort of thing that computers are good for. And I'm not a baseball fan, full disclosure. You may be a baseball fan. I'm not. But I am a fan of the concept of one part of our culture being decided by facts, by data that all people can agree upon is the fairest data we have available. And in my mind, in the current political environment in the United States, so many things going on in science and technology and the academic world, sports is one of the few things where there seems to be agreement for most people most of the time that it is a true meritocracy that the best team does win. It's not simply the scorekeepers were paid off to say that another team scored more points. We haven't really gotten to that point. Yes, I understand in the Olympics, certainly back in the height of the Cold War, there was a sense that the Soviet judges were unfair to Americans and the American judges were unfair to the Soviet. I get that. But beyond those rare occurrences, most people in the world, I think, have more faith in the fairness and accuracy of scores and who gets to win and lose in sports than they do in politics and a lot of other aspects of culture. I'd like to strengthen that. I think as a society we need more institutions where there is an agreement on a fair process to determine winners and losers. And there's just been too many cases, not only in baseball, I don't mean to pick on, but baseball umpires versus referees and in any other sport where maybe things are fair 99% of the time throughout a season, but there's that moment in the playoffs or the tournament or a championship when there is one key decision and every single fair minded observer says the umpire got it wrong. And that wrong decision determined not only the outcome of that game, but the whole championship, the whole season. That has happened numerous times. And I'll leave it to others far more well versed in sports than I am to articulate the numerous examples of that. But I don't think any serious person can deny human error. And we all make it. I make errors, I probably made mistakes today, but there's no NFL or Major League Baseball championship at stake. There's no World Series at stake if I make a mistake. And to the extent that artificial intelligence and computers and robots can call the balls and strikes fairly, I just think it makes it a lot better for the game. This is different from saying, okay, we're not going to use a real baseball player, we're going to get a robot that's been programmed through artificial intelligence, that's a thousand times faster, thousand times stronger, is guaranteed to hit a home run on every single pitch at that point. Then I think we have a real problem of AI going too far, of robotics, of technology going too far. If we just have two robots playing with each other against each other at that point, I think you can make the case, well, why bother? What are we even doing here? So my message, if you make your living as an umpire, it's time to radically shift to plan B. You know, we all have to shift to plan B at certain points of our life. Unless we just are on this narrow track of I'm going to be a surgeon, and every day from the age of 18, I'm going to study the right things and do the right internships, or I'm going to be a judge. There are still a few career paths where 100% focus from age 18 or even high school earlier all the way to the end in one field can occasionally work, but that is increasingly rare because new jobs are created all the time. New technologies create new jobs, and people don't like to talk about it. New technologies destroy jobs, and there's a constant change back and forth. When I started my career, I didn't have the ability to make online public speaking and media training courses. It evolved. I had to listen to the technology. These days, it's not as common for corporations to pick up the phone and call me and say, TJ, fly on out to Cleveland. Spend three days training all of our top 200 executives on how to give more effective speeches or interviews. That part of my business has gone down. But because I had my ear to the ground listening to technology, the fact that this part went down, the rise of online courses went up, and fortunately, I now have 12 million online enrollments in my courses. So the fact that the big company in Cleveland isn't calling for three days doesn't matter. It's been a net positive for me. Now, technological change is not a net positive for everyone. I don't want to spin it as everyone is always better off. That's never. My iPad fell down. That's never been the way with any technology in the world, where everyone instantly benefits equally. There are winners and losers. The implicit promise with technological advance in society is that overall the pie expands, and overall it's better for the society as a whole. And because things are better, the people who've been harmed, who've lost, can be helped by those doing better through the form of retraining or more of a social safety net. That's the implicit message. It doesn't always work that way, but that's the theory. What we don't know is will artificial intelligence change that? Will we get to the point where it's only helping the top 0.01% and everyone else is unemployed and we've got a bizarre Hunger Game situation. I don't know. I'm not making that prediction. But the history of technology has been pretty good, even though it's also caused misery and harm and losses. The net, as far as economic impact growth on jobs in general has been up. So I'm not one of these who said, oh, we can't take away the jobs from the umpires. If you're telling yourself it's wrong, it's morally wrong to take away these jobs from umpires and give it to robots and artificial intelligence and automated systems for calling bars balls and strikes. You then have to say, we should hire the 400,000 women who were telephone operators in the United States in 1960. And instead of being able to call anyone in the world for essentially pennies or no extra charge, once you pay a flat rate fee, you want to go back to the days of every phone call costing you about 50 bucks. If it wasn't someone in your hometown, I don't know about you. I don't want to go back to those days. So you've got to be intellectually honest and consistent. You can't say umpires deserve their jobs to be saved. Telephone operators didn't deserve to have their job saved. What happened to all those telephone operators? They found other jobs as administrative assistants, secretaries, as they were called back in the 1960s. And overall the economy just expanded and expanded and expanded, certainly throughout the 60s when technology got rid of that need for telephone operators. So again, I'm not a huge fan of baseball. I would love to hear from you. If you are a fan of baseball and you have strong feelings about that, feel free to share them with us right here. You can post comments on wherever you are watching this show. Let's go to the third news story today. Weird Al has his rock star moment at the age of 65. We're out. Weird Al Yankovic, he's the parody king of Pop. He just had his biggest moment yet. A sold out show at Madison Square Garden kicking off with a polka remix of Old Town Road. He launched into decades of satire. Eat it from Michael Jackson's Beat It Like a Surgeon instead of Madonnas Like a Virgin, Smells like Nirvana and more. Backed by a tight band and a crowd singing everywhere. Word. At 65, he still delivers high. He's older than I am. That's good to see people like that. Out filling Madison Square Garden. He's delivering the high kicks. He's got Hawaiian shirts, accordion fueled anthems. Fans even saw him arrive on stage via a scooter for White and Nerdy and close with a Star wars finale featuring Stormtroopers and R2D2. Here's the thing, you can laugh at Weird Al Yankovic all you want. He sold more than 12 million albums throughout his career. That's a lot of albums. And he's won five Grammys and had a number one album as recently as 2014. Somehow his popularity is peaking again, powered by parody, the originality of his parody and sheer joy. Four decades of comedy and I guess call it comedy music and he's essentially being recognized as the rock star he always wanted to be. Now he's covered everything from Paul Simons, you can call me Al, to a lot of Michael Jackson songs. I'm not a huge fan of Weird Al. What I am a huge fan of is anybody who could make a career being a little bit different and being a creator. So on that, I am a huge Al Yankovic fan, I personally think it's kind of a one act pony for me, you know, listening to a parody song. If I hear it once and get a chuckle or two, okay, I would never in a million years buy a whole parody album. But that's the beauty of this world we have. You don't have to appeal to me. There's no one person you have to appeal to to be successful. And you do not have to appeal to everyone. Weird Al Yankovic is not everyone's cup of tea. He's okay with that. But what I love is decade after decade after decade, he churns out new material, parodies of other well known songs. He tours, he does media interviews, he promotes. And he doesn't get bothered by the fact that people aren't saying, oh, wow, I love Al's original music, where he's just doing his own stuff. Now, for all I know, Weird Al does his own stuff, maybe even does it under another name. But he's not troubled by the fact that he is this hybrid. He's a musician, he's a comedian, he is a parody expert. He's crafted his own path in life as a creator. And he did this well before social media and Internet video made it so much easier to do things like these spoofs. I mean, he's been around since the old days. He wanted to make a video that had the same production qualities of Michael Jackson's Thriller. You had to raise a fortune of money yourself and do production in the old fashioned way. You couldn't just push a few buttons on a computer, have AI make you look like you're in Michael Jackson's Thriller. So what we know about him, he's a savvy businessman. He had to, in order to get enough people to trust him, record labels to back him. This is before the days where anyone can just load up something to Spotify and YouTube and things take off. He had to go through the old fashioned system of gatekeepers and he's come out the other end performing in Madison Square Garden. So it's hard for me to imagine someone had said to me 40 years ago, hey, TJ, here's a way you can be rich and famous. We want you to sing songs that are parodies of famous people and dress up like them and do silly little word play. I think my reaction would have been what? Okay, maybe it gets played on the radio once, but how do you make money from that? Whoever go to a concert. That would have been my reaction. And you know what? I would have been completely wrong. Often wrong. You know who else is wrong? You are quite often. Especially when you're second guessing things you might want to try. You might experiment. Now, I'm not asking you to give up your job as a CEO of a major company and a big paycheck to start doing parody videos. This isn't about doing parody videos. What it's about is the idea of trying new things, blending different art forms, blending your own skills to do something a little bit different that either can help people, whether it's in the form of a new business, a book, an online course, or entertain people as Weird Al has done well for decade after decade after decade. So experiment with it. That's really my message to you as it relates to your career. Switching gears, let's look at broader economic issues. Major economist warns that Trump's Fed Pressure could backfire Economist Rebecca Peterson, excuse me, Rebecca Patterson, warns that Trump's campaign to fire Fed chair Jerome Powell could backfire badly. In a New York Times op ed this week, she argues that firing Powell or nudging him aside might make US Inflation spiral like it did in Turkey, where inflation has gone up 85%. It might spiral the way it has in Hungary, where it's gone up some 35% after their central banks were politicized. Now Trump wants lower interest rates to stimulate the economy and reduce borrowing costs. Well, every president wants wants that. But undermining the Fed's independence could have the opposite effect, driving up long term interest rates, weakening the dollar and spooking global investors. Now, even if Trump appoints a new Fed chair, they'd still need a majority vote from the 12 governors around the country. And that's far from certain. The bottom line, using the Fed as a political tool might be legal, but it's economically reckless. And I say it might be legal. According to many scholars, it is not that the president is supposed to respect that. Fed chairs have terms. Once they're in, they're not fired unless they're caught doing something egregiously illegal. And to just come in and change that. We see what happens when other countries do it. It destroys their economies. Short term, it might feel good to the leader to be able to control the whole economy, but long Term, there are severe repercussions. Again, things to remember here. Trump is pressuring the Fed to cut rates and fire Jerome Powell. If the rates go down, yeah, it's easier for people to buy homes, it's easier for the economy to grow and things go faster. But there is a reason why inflation, why rates are not always low. It can lead to massive, massive inflation, and that can destroy an economy. Economists warn that changing the Fed chair and someone who just does whatever Trump wants and gives or whatever any president wants, it's not specific to Trump other than he's the guy trying to change what was an agreement among both parties in America for the last 80 years. The problem is it could trigger inflation similar to what's happening in Turkey, where, same thing, someone came to office popularly elected, said, you know, this election stuff's good when I get in, but now let me kind of stop that and control the whole game. Let's be an authoritarian. It's happened in Turkey, it's happened in Hungary and in Turkey, the inflation rate, 35%. Now, here in the United States, inflation got up 7, 8, 9%. People thought it was the end of the world. People were screaming bloody murder. Imagine 35% inflation versus 9%. And to look further back and in to our friends down south in Argentina, they would love to have 35% inflation. They're used to things like 85, 100, 200, 300% inflation because they just lower interest rates and make it easy and have no respect for the integrity of their own federal banking system. The central bank interference in Hungary led to junk credit ratings for that country. Currently, it's important to remember the Fed chair may require Senate confirmation and there are legal battles about the idea. If Trump were to just try to kick out Jerome Powell and install a new henchman or a toady to do whatever he wants, market confidence would likely drop. This makes interest rates go up, which is essentially a huge tax increase for everyone. And that is the big problem. So what message is really being sent here? What I think the message coming from the White House is 100% on track with everything else Trump has done with his life, he's always been about short term gain. What appeals to me in the moment, I want to buy the Plaza Hotel because it's cool. Yeah, I'll buy it and then sell it and lose a bunch of money. I want to buy casinos because then I can hold myself out as a big casino guy and be cool, but lose lots of money and have daddy bail me out. We'll worry about that. Later. I want to buy a football team. Let's, let's buy a USFL football team. Oh, doesn't work. No one wants to come see these games. Let's walk away from it. And apologies if this offends anyone, but just stating well documented facts, Trump says, oh, I want to sleep with a porn star. Who cares about tomorrow? If my wife, my young child finds out, let's do it now, today, because it feels good today. It would in fact feel good today to see interest rates go much lower. All sorts of development would grow, short term revenues would grow. But what happens 18 months later, two months later, when confidence is destroyed in the American financial system? Inflation is rampant. Nobody wants to buy our bonds, our Treasuries and invest in America anymore. So this is a message that's consistent with anyone who's actually followed Trump's sense of business and how the world works. He's always about short term benefit. That's why, if you look at the analysis from Bloomberg and the New York Times, In 2016, Donald Trump was one of the worst, if not the worst, businessman in the entire world. He had the biggest tax deduction for losses of anyone. And his worth. He had increased his worth, $0 over what his net worth would have been if he had just taken his daddy's inheritance and put it in an S P500 index fund. People don't like to admit that. They say, oh, he's a businessman. How could you question a businessman? He's a billionaire. Well, I could go down the phone book, pull any hundred names out and say, hey, I'm going to give you $40 million when you're five years old, put it in an index fund and you'll never have to work and you'll end up a billionaire. Does it sound like a good idea? Will you take that deal? They would all say yes, and every one of them would be a billionaire if they just didn't touch the money. Or they lived off a few hundred thousand dollars a year until they became a billionaire. So it's a misreading of history, facts, science and logic to suggest that Donald Trump is a businessman. With one exception. He's in the business of being a TV personality who is a tough business guy. On that, he's great. And certainly for the last near decade, he's been great at playing the role of a politician who wants to act like a tough businessman, making things happen. But he doesn't, by all indications, seem to have any indication of what generates long term wealth for anyone other than himself. Because if you Talk to most people who've loaned him money or invested in him. Talk to any of the investors in his casinos. They lost a fortune while Trump paid himself a very nice part time CEO fee. So we're going to be monitoring what's happening with the Fed and the political machinations going on there because the latest has been trying to gin up a phony excuse, a phony scandal saying that Trump, that Jerome Powell is guilty of corruptly spending money, redecorating the Fed. If you believe that, I definitely have a bridge to sell you. It's a complete smokescreen and complete, utter nonsense. Final story of the day, and this is a story that doesn't want to go away. It's not a story I enjoy talking about. It's a story where I've made some predictions and it turns out right now I'm wrong. And believe me, I'm very happy that I'm wrong. It's a story that I believe is a distraction from serious things. But at some point, a story gets so big it sucks up all the energy in the room and in the Internet and everyplace else. So you have to talk about it. I'm talking, of course, about Jeffrey Epstein and the files or the client files or the missing files because it's tearing apart the MAGA world. The Trump supporters, the Trump administration. It is absolutely the number one obsession among so many people who were, some of them are, but were the dominant supporters of President Trump this past election, his first election and throughout. So here's the problem. Donald Trump can't seem to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein and he's making it worse. Now, Trump is typically a master of changing subjects. You want to talk about something, he's bad done here, he'll be like, let's invade Greenland. No one's talking about this issue over here. Someone wants to talk about all these convictions here, say, oh, I slept with a porn star. More interesting things here. So he in many respects is a true media genius in his ability to control the narrative, to get attention on what he wants to talk about. Because he's really good at either attacking someone or doing something so outrageous that everyone's jaw drops and they have to talk about it. It's not working this time with respect to the Jeffrey Epstein situation. So he's posted things that imply, I have nothing to do with Epstein. Ask Clinton and Prince Andrew. He's saying, why are you still talking about that? It's not a story anymore. Well, here's the rule with the media. And again, Trump, I do give credit where credit's due. He is a great master of the media. But when you are the subject of a scandal, which he is here, when you are the subject of controversy and when people talk about it, it's hurting you, the worst thing you could possibly do is say, don't talk about it anymore. That makes people say, oh, he doesn't want to talk about it, let's talk about it more. That's why I always advise CEOs. I work with politicians, presidents of other countries. I do not work with any US President. That's why I always advise them, never say to a reporter, that's not a good question, or I don't want to answer that question, or that's not the real issue here. Anytime you tell a reporter, or for that matter your supporters, that's not an issue worth discussing. I really want to talk about this over here. You've already screwed up because you've made people that, oh, what's he hiding here? Ah, we hit a soft spot, we hit a nerve. Must be hiding something here. Must be something interesting and juicy here. And Trump, normally to his credit, doesn't fall for this. He doesn't spend time telling reporters what not to talk about. He simply talks about what he wants to talk about. And he packages it in a way that is so interesting that he essentially forces reporters to go into a whole new subject area. It seems like he's been trying that in the last few weeks, whether it's bombing, starting wars, talking about things egregiously unconstitutional, like stripping away the US Citizenship of a famous critic of his talk show host, Rosie o', Donnell, who currently lives in Ireland. Many of these seem like his typical playbook to change the subject. Unfortunately for him, Trump grew up politically in this marinated stew of conspiracy theories. His whole rise to power essentially came from promoting the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a United States citizen, was not born in the United States, was born in Kenya, and was therefore an illegitimate president. So he's been in this whole stew of conspiracies for so long. He's part and parcel of it. It's very hard to leave an environment that you've been in your whole life and start to thrive in a new fact based world. It's very rare to see fish that have been living in water their whole life just walk out on land and start saying, oh, pay no attention to that water over here. I don't need it. No, you don't see that. And that is essentially what Donald Trump is trying to do regarding this Epstein issue. And I got to tell you, as someone who, as you've no doubt noticed, if you watch this, not a huge fan of this administration. So watching him twist and squirm and do these configurations, it's kind of funny and pathetic at the same time. He's saying, why would you even want to look at the Epstein file? It was written by crooked Hillary. Well, Jeffrey Epstein died. He officially killed himself in 2019. And Hillary Clinton last held any position of importance when she was Secretary of State, which ended when Trump was elected president in 2016. So Hillary Clinton was no. In no position whatsoever to write any report on Jeffrey Epstein. So to just. It's one thing to spin, it's one thing to concoct an alternative universe, but usually there's got to be a tiny threat, a tiny shred of some kind of evidence, flimsy as it could be, but to say, oh, why are you talking to me? Talk to Hillary Clinton. Well, first of all, the Trump administration was in power when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Let's not forget that now Trump and his cronies control the federal government now. In fact, his US Attorney General said, I've got the Epstein files on my desk and I'm going to be releasing them now. It's like, oh, there's no files, there's no client files. Okay, there might not be, but you can't have it both ways. You can't tease and tantalize, make all the conspiracy theorists salivate and then say, no, it's not there. I lied about that before. And then essentially line say, oh, I never lied. At some point, even for your biggest fans are going to say, this is too far. Now, I went on record last week saying I thought most of the Trump supporters would simply say, okay, if there's a report out and Trump's in it, and it turns out he was a client of Jeffrey Epstein, and it turns out documents that Jeffrey Epstein set up Trump with a thousand 13 year olds to spend the night with him. My prediction then was the MAGA universe would simply say, up, okay, you know, at least he's honest and far better than all the liberals who like Romeo and Juliet, because that was about a 13. I just thought they would instantly say, okay, since he did it and he's our dear leader, it's okay. Now let's change the subject. But it appears as though I'm wrong. It appears as though they're not letting this go. And it's a bit awkward and embarrassing when reporters are asking, the President of the United States is your own Deputy Secretary Your own deputy director of the FBI even still working for you, Dan Bongino, and he's like, I think so. That's kind of his response. I talked to him. He's a good guy. When you can't even say if your own staff is still working for you because they think you're lying so much about being involved in a pedophile ring, that's trouble. So I may have misjudged last week. It may be that there is a line. Having an affair with a. A pornographer, a porn star. No problem getting convicted of 51 felonies. No problem having a judge, say, by any other name. But what, what people commonly think of as rape, you were guilty of. Regarding Eugene Carroll, no problem. His. His fans have washed away every kind of numerous bankruptcies. Trashing ex wives, tossing women to the curb. No problem. That was always no problem for all of his supporters. So I'm frankly surprised to see this being a problem, a part of the issue. Some. Some analysts have theorized, well, you've got the whole QAnon conspiracy crowd. We're convinced that the whole world is run by this elite group of evil people for some reason, somehow, all liberal Democrats and people in charge of major institutions like the New York Times. And they're all pedophiles. This is why we had the Pizzagate scandal, where a guy so convinced of this went to a Pizza hut in Washington, D.C. or a pizza parlor with a gun saying, take me to the basement where I can kill all the pedophiles. Well, there was no basement, and it was all nonsense. If that's the kindergarten version of conspiracy fools. Now we've gone up to sort of the high school version of conspiracy theorists who believe this Jeffrey Epstein thing is all about how prominent Democrats are pedophiles. Now, the odd thing, I don't quite want to say funny things since we're talking about, you know, the sexual molestation of children, but the bizarre thing is if you had to pick one politician who has the most evidence of being actively involved with Jeffrey Epstein and young girls, and the number one politician who has the biggest motive to keep things quiet, it's obviously Donald Trump. Here's a guy that Epstein himself said, donald Trump's been my best friend for 15 years. If you scan the entire Internet looking for every picture of Donald Trump smiling or laughing, you'll never find images, videos, and pictures of Donald Trump looking happier than with Jeffrey Epstein. And when you look at some of the young women involved, who, one who eventually killed herself, where did she meet Jeffrey Epstein, she met him at Mar a Lago. There's countless pictures of Trump with Epstein and with Giselle Maxwell, our Ghislaine Maxwell. And the ties are like this. Beyond that, Trump is on record is saying, hey, Epstein's a great guy. We both have so much in common. We both like it. Said he likes beautiful young women as much as I do, especially on the younger side. Oink, oink, nudge, nudge. Seemed cute, I guess, to Trump at the time, but you don't see quotes like that from Bill Gates. Bill Gates is not on record of saying he liked Jeffrey Epstein because they both like beautiful women on the young side. Does that mean everyone else is innocent? No, that's not my suggestion. But you're going to be an effective deliverer of messages at some point. You do have to have some kind of a logical thread occasionally, and there's simply no logic to this whatsoever. Trump is on record as saying he likes this guy because this guy likes to hang out with young, beautiful women. It is a, an established record that these, some of these, at least one of these underage girls met Epstein through a connection at Mar a Lago. It's essentially ground zero of Epstein's crime scene. And it is bizarre to me that all of these, and now obviously Trump's President of the United States. So all of the information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, by all legal officials, law enforcement officials in the United States is under his control. So if you were looking for motive for some politician to be bury a report, there's never in the history of the world going to be a more compelling case for this one person to want to hide something. Now, I say all this and that I'm, I'm one of the few honest people, I think online I'll be, I'll tell you right up front, I have no idea if there's a file, a client file, if Trump is in it. We know he's in files that relate to Jeffrey Epstein because there are official records of things like flight records. And Trump is officially in the records of having flown with Epstein more than half a dozen times in numerous meetings. So we know at some level he's in a file about Jeffrey Epstein. What we don't know is, is he listed as a client? I mean, I think there's a perfectly solid case to suggest that Jeffrey Epstein didn't have any clients, that he had a couple of really rich guys, maybe even just one, the guy who owned Victoria's secrets. And he made so much money from that guy, he spent all of the rest of his time just spending money and paying off young girls and partying. And he liked to talk to interesting, smart people. So I don't know if he had actual clients in the sense of pay or extortion or quid pro quos or if he just was a sick person. We know he's a sick person who liked to have sex with underage girls. And maybe he just liked to surround them and share what he thought was his bounty with his friends. And there was no client relationship. Again, I have no idea. I'm being honest with you. I'm not simply going to speculate the worst possible scenario because someone has a different party or philosophy than mine. That is relatively rare. Not that I'm so virtuous, but. But in the world of online communication and punditry, that's not as common. The far more common thing is to say, here's somebody I don't like. Here's something we don't know. Here's something where there's a little confusion. Therefore, let me add everything together. 2, 2, 2. And it's negative 69. And this person is the worst criminal ever. That's the more normal equation. And that's not the game I'm going to play here. The game here is we look at the top stories of the day that relate to business, technology and culture, analyze it through the lens of communication skills to come up with ways of helping you become more successful. That's what we're about. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me today. I will see you tomorrow. Thanks. It.