America's Optimism Collapse, K-Economy Crisis, Epstein Files Explode

Foreign. Optimism just hit a record low. Executives warn the US Economy is splitting into winners and losers in a K shaped divide. A 40 year old study links caffeine or caffeinated coffee to lower dementia risk. Another massive review finds exercise may rival antidepressants for depression. A deadly school shooting in Canada forces tough questions about media coverage and risk perception. And nearly 3 million newly released Epstein files are triggering resignations and political turmoil from Washington to Europe and beyond. All that and more today on Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Foreign Welcome. Thanks so much for joining me today. Let's dive right into the top stories of the day. American optimism slumps. This is a new poll and it's not good. American optimism about the future has hit the lowest point Gallup has recorded in nearly two decades. Just 59.2% of U.S. adults say they expect to be living a high quality life five years from now. That's down 9.1 percentage points since 2020. That translates to roughly 24.5 million fewer Americans feeling optimistic about their future. The steepest decline happened between 2021 and 2023, as inflation surged to 7% and squeezed household budgets. In 2025 alone, Democrats future optimism dropped another 7.6 points while Republicans stayed largely unchanged. Overall, only 48% of Americans now qualify as thriving, down more than 11 points from the 2021 post vaccine high. Gallup's data suggests economic strain, affordability challenges and political transitions are shaping how Americans see their future, and confidence is clearly eroding. Okay, let's dive a little deeper here. A couple more facts. As I mentioned to you, 24.5 million fewer optimistic adults, that's pretty huge. One thing America is known for around the world is we're the optimistic people. We're the people who would travel from the east coast to the west coast and die and have our bones picked apart on wagon trains. We're so optimistic about how things would get. We're the people who would get on boats, risk scurvy, sharks, starvation, to go from another country to the United States. So Americans are sort of pre selected for being more optimistic than people on average around the world. So this is saying something. According to Dan Witters with Gallup, the percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate high quality lives in five years declined to 59% 2025, the lowest since measurement began nearly two decades ago. So lowest in 20 years. That's pretty significant. As of Q4, the fourth quarter of 2025, the percentage of American adults who rate both their current and future lives high Enough to classify as thriving dropped to 48%. So that is frankly sad. According to the poll, black households hit the hardest 2021 to 2024. Hispanic adults saw the sharpest drop in 2025. Political transitions affect partisan outlook. Democrats being much less optimistic about the future. Healthcare cost, rising inequality and housing cost are a big issue affecting this. So what are we to make of this? I hope that you thrive. Let me say that, right? I hope everyone thrives. But if you're taking the time to watch this show, to me that tells me you actually care about controlling your own destiny. Because, yes, there are societal forces, there are public policies, there are things like living under tyranny and oppression and international weather crises that no one can really withstand. We're all susceptible to our larger environment. But in many cultures, United States, Canada, most of Europe these days, many parts of Asia, if you are middle class or above, you do have tremendous control over your future, your destiny. And the research bears this out. Having optimism in and of itself is a huge predictor of whether you will thrive, whether you will improve, whether you will grow, whether you will be happy. So optimism is essential. Now, let's dissect a couple of things affecting this. Part of it is, I do think that while the long arc of history is progress, there are clearly ups and downs. In the early part, to the middle of the 20th century, there were some real downs. Not one, but two world wars, lots of massive death, destruction, nuclear weapons going off. So the arc of history is not always better. Have we returned to the point where life is no better than, you know, 1918 or 1941? I think that's a bit of a stretch to say we've gone back to that era. Things are still dramatically better by many metrics. The world has never been better in terms of the percentage of human beings living in poverty, the percentage of people who are literate, the percentage of people who have access to clean water. Things have, frankly, never been better. But we're talking here about the United States. Clearly, there are some declines and lots of political turmoil. What is different about our current situation is we. We have certain political forces explicitly telling half or arguably 40% of Americans, this country's not for you, this government is not looking out for you, we hate you and we want you to fail. That's unprecedented. Now, I'm not here to be a partisan talking head. You can get that on Fox News, occasionally, cnn, msnbc and other places. You don't need that here. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist trying to filter the news through the lens of not conservatism, libertarianism or anything else, but through the lens of personal development. How you can improve your own life, your family's life, and ideally enough of us do this. We help society, we help everyone get better. I do think it's essential for you to focus each and every day on something you're optimistic about. Literally on my phone and my to do list, every day. I have a question that I answer every day. Tj what are you most optimistic about? It forces me to think and reflect because if all I did was look at the news, it's very, very easy to be pessimistic because news by its very nature focuses on the extreme and often the negative extreme. As we'll be talking about later in the show today. Huge, huge headlines about nine people murdered by a killer, a lone gun killer in Canada of all places. It's news. It's getting talked about that's going to get news. Nine kids learning how to read today won't get news. Nine people starting businesses won't get news. More planes than ever landing without crashing. It won't generate news. So it's very easy to be shaped by this modern hyper media environment we all live in. We call it social media. It's not really social media anymore. It's simply the world we live in. We're all enveloped in this cocoon of non stop news and most of it is negative. That doesn't mean the news business is doing it wrong. It doesn't mean they're biased in ideological ways. But it can be very easy to get depressed about the future and to convince yourself the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Things have never been worse. Well, no, my friends, it is simply inaccurate. I mean, when I was born, we lived in a world where about 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Now we live in a world where fewer than 10% live in extreme poverty. And again, this poll was talking about United States optimism. And the United states didn't have 90% extreme poverty in 1962 when I was born, but it did have a lot more poverty than today. I want to put my cap on as your personal development coach right now and tell you if you're feeling pessimistic about your own future, about the future for your family, your loved ones, that it's going to be up to you. Certainly you can vote to change politicians and policies that you think will make things better. And I encourage political activism. But this is not primarily a political activism show. I do want you to focus on what you can personally control every single day. Think about what is one thing you're optimistic about in the future? Another thing I write down every single day. What's one thing you're grateful for? Literally write it down. What's one thing you are actively trying to improve that will improve your own life? Help other people, ideally help your bottom line. Help your own personal economy. I know for me, I'm about to launch dozens and dozens of new personal development shows. Now, you may have no interest in doing something like that, but we live in an era where it is never ever in the history of the world been easier to start a business to do something where you can help other people and potentially make money. Am I saying it's easy? No. Am I saying go post a video on TikTok today and you'll be rich and famous by lunchtime? No, I'm not. I'm not spreading you spreading nonsense and delusions and false hopes. But anything is better than sort of sitting back and thinking, wow, the world is getting worse and worse and worse and I feel pessimistic about the future. Are there things where I think if we don't change, there can be serious problems? Well, absolutely. There are things I think that are headed in the wrong trend line, but there are solutions. Focus on what you can do. Let's take a question comment from our audience. A good friend of the show, Patrick Galvin has written in, says, I love your take on optimism. To keep my spirits up. When I see negative news about people doing despicable things, I remember the wisdom of the late, great Mr. Rogers who said focus on the helpers. Well, Pat, thanks for pointing that out. I actually don't remember Mr. Rogers saying that, but it certainly sounds like something he would say. And Pat, I don't know if you've heard me say this before, but Mr. Rogers was my initial media role model. I grew up or I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was the home of Mr. Rogers back in the 60s. The very first TV studio I ever went to was Mr. Rogers Studio at Public TV in Pittsburgh. Sadly, they were doing another show and I didn't get to actually see his set. The highlight of my kindergarten years was Mr. Rogers came to my own elementary school and spoke and I was in such awe I couldn't even look up at him. I had to look down at the ground. My parents told me. And, and the interesting thing is my father bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Rogers. And after the speech, kids came around and asked my dad for autographs. They thought he was Mr. Rogers. So always happy to hear someone quoting the late, great Mr. Rogers. I'm T.J. walker. We have lots more show to come. You're not going to want to miss it, so stay tuned. Next up, we will be talking about something you've been hearing in the news lately a lot, the K shaped economy.

We'll be right back after this break.

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You'll wonder how you ever did without it. The K Shaped Economy the US Economy is growing, but executives say it's splitting in two. Economists describe it as a K shaped economy where high income households surge ahead while lower income Americans fall further behind. The top 1% now hold nearly 32% of total household wealth, a record since tracking began in 1989. Companies are seeing it firsthand. Delta expects premium seat sales to outpace main cabin tickets. McDonald's reports visits from higher income customers rising double digits while lower income traffic declines. Mandala says consumers are fed up with price increases. Households earning under $75,000 are cutting discretionary spending compared to 2019, while those earning more than 150,000 are spending more. High interest rates, affordability pressures and artificial intelligence could widen the divide further reshaping a corporate strategy and the broader economy. Okay, so what are we to make of this? The United States was based what we think of the United States certainly the last hundred years was based on this huge expanding middle class. Believe it or not, there was a time when CEOs of companies lived in the same neighborhoods as their workers. And yeah, they maybe made three times, four times as much. Maybe their house was a little nicer, maybe, maybe their lawn was a little better kept up. But people were kind of the same. Those days are long, long gone. Everything is segmented in our society for people who basically have a lot and those who don't, and I mean every part of our society. I was noting just at the county fair or the South Florida State Fair this year. Again, something you think of as all American and as middle class. Even lower middle class as a fair still has this huge division. There are the fast pass rides for the kids who come from wealthier households and then there's the rides for everyone else that are still expensive that the I won't even say middle class, the lower middle class now has to take. The actual middle doesn't seem to be a place for them. There is something sad about that. What can you do about it? Let's look at some more facts here. Again, top 1% hold 32% of all the well, it is always surprising to me that so many people who claim they want to make America great again by going back to the good old days in the 50s and 60s of traditional values never stop to ask themselves what made the 50s and 60s better in some regards. Now, it wasn't a perfect place. Certainly if you were black, minority, a member of an unpopular religion or sexual orientation, the 50s and 60s weren't great. But for the average white heterosexual who belonged to a popular religion, 50s and 60s were in some sense a better time. Why? The question most economists would answer with is the answer. You had unionized labor. You had people working in a factory. Nothing special about working in a factory, but you had people working in a factory driving trucks, doing other things where they had an organized labor union representing them to give them a bigger piece of the piece. You had truck drivers making relatively nice incomes compared to Uber drivers who often make less than $10 an hour these days. So you had the percentage of overall money in the economy filtering out to a much larger percentage of the economy. That's not the case. We now live in a world that is much more winner take all. So you have the New York Times making more money than ever. Meanwhile, newspapers in small and mid sized towns and even large towns are closing every day. Now let me not be hypocritical about this. I've benefited from that by getting it early in online courses for personal development and communication skills. I have 12 million student enrollments around the world. Meanwhile, there are plenty of personal development coaches and trainers and public speaking coaches and trainers who've gone out of business or been forced to retire in the last 10 years because of the changing economics of how those businesses are run. So we're seeing this divide in virtually every sector. What do you do about it? To me, the big lesson, and it's not particularly fun to hear this or fun to say it, the lesson is we're no longer living in an era where you can simply show up for a job and think, okay, I either got my training, I got my junior college degree, my college degree, my professional credential, and now I'm simply going to show up for work, punch the time clock, not worry about it, and have a nice income, nice retirement. It's not going to work anymore. Everyone is under serious competition. Everyone is in danger of being put out of business, either by a competitor or someone in another country or by artificial intelligence. What that means is if you want to be in the top part of that K, the part of the K that's going up, not necessarily the top 1%, but the top 5 or 10%. If you want to be a part of that, you have to be vigilant every single day in learning new skills that are hard skills that when you master them, you can create value to other people. That, I believe is the only real solution. It's not getting lucky, buying bitcoin before it goes up. It's not picking the correct score of the Super Bowl. It's not placing a bet or a wager on Couchy as to how many times the press secretary at the White House says, stupid. That's not the way for you and your family to gain a permanent place in the top part of that K. I wish I had some other easy solution. I wish I could say, hey, buy my course for $9 and I guarantee you'll be the top part of the K. You'll be in one top 1%. I can't do that. Anyone who tells you they do are just trying to steal money from you. There is no get rich quick. Yeah, some people get lucky. Some people can be homeless, living on the street, their last dollar. They buy a lottery ticket and become a billionaire. If that's the strategy you want, you can try it. I think that is a great strategy for getting poorer and poorer. So I do not recommend that at any level. You're going to have to learn new skills. Will you see some people just getting lucky? Some people having their wealth handed to them? Some people be getting trust funds and falling into money? Yeah, that will happen. Guess what? It's probably not going to happen to you, but hasn't happened already. It's not going to happen to you. The solution is lifelong learning, lifelong creating. One of the things that helped me the most in my own career about 10 years ago, I decided, hey, I like watching TV shows, I like movies. I'm a normal person in that regard. But I limited myself to on average 1 hour of television a night. Which means if I watch a two hour movie tonight, the next night I'll read a book, I'll do some writing. It's so easy in our culture to just say, oh, I worked hard all day, I'm going to have dinner. And now from 6:45 till 10:45 or 11:45, I'm just going to veg and relax, Netflix and chill. You're not building value, you're not doing anything to get yourself to the top part of that K. And I want you there. So yes, you can still have entertainment. I can watch a hundred movies a year by limiting myself to one hour of video entertainment. Today. That's a lot of movies. There aren't really 100 great movies a year. But what you can't do is simply use every bit of spare time to look at video, look at fun, look at video games, do all sorts of non stop entertainment and simply show up at your job and think you're going to be the top part of that k, that top 5%, 10% of the economy winners in terms of income. And let me be clear, money does not guarantee happiness. I know plenty of wealthy people not happy at all. But in America, a capitalist society, not having money can really impede your ability to be happy. It can be a real downer. And for about 15 years of my life, I was poor. I really struggled from about 24 or 25 to 39. So I have been there, my friends. I made I think $5,000 in total income in 1998, and that was living in New York City in the most expensive city in America, one of the most expensive cities in the world. I can tell you I have a lot more fun now than I did in that year. So I'm urging you. Certainly you can vote for political policies that you think will distribute our money and the spoils of our capitalist society in a fair way. It does continue to mystify me that so many Americans, and I'm thinking of you, Alabama and Mississippi and Kentucky and West Virginia, where some 90% plus of white voters consistently vote for politicians who impose economic policies that completely are against the economic interest of those voters. They continue to do so. I can't control that. Inequality is at a 60 year peak. Retail sales are softening in December. 60% of Chipotle customers now earn above $100,000. And it is one of my family's favorite fast food restaurants. So that doesn't particularly surprise me. What is interesting is the McDonald's is seeing the higher income people seeing their rates double in terms of becoming regular customers. You would think sort of the poor people would be more likely to go to McDonald's. I guess they can't even afford that. I'm TJ Walker. I'm wishing you financial success and for you to get to the top of the case. So thank you for spending some time with me today. I'm hoping that some of the lessons here, some of the messages will actually help you make more money and be more successful. More In a moment, Filtered is brought.

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A massive 40 year study following nearly 132,000 people suggests that drinking two to three cups of caffeinated coffee a day may reduce dementia risk by about 20%. One to two cups of caffeinated tea was linked to roughly 15% lower risk. But here's the key decaf showed no benefit. Published in the Journal of American Medical association and funded by the National Institutes of Health, the research tracked participants for up to 43 years and found the advantage plateaued beyond about two and a half cups of coffee a day. More caffeine didn't add protection. Researchers say caffeine may reduce neuroinflammation and improve vascular function, but they stress this is correlation, not proof of causation. Some meta analyses show moderate coffee consumption, roughly three to four cups daily is associated with lower mortality, while consistently exceeding five to six cups per day has been linked to anxiety, sleep depression and in some studies, elevated cardiovascular risk. So let's look at some more facts of this study. Again, 131,000 participants for 43 years were studied 11,000 developed dementia. Now they're not claiming that the coffee caused that. That's more of just normal percentages of people who get that after so many decades the caffeine, the decaf showed no dementia benefit, but two to three cups of coffee showed a 20% lower risk. To me that sounds pretty substantial. The one thing about coffee that we do know is, and I've seen this printed numerous places, it's the most studied thing in the world, certainly the most studied drug in the world. Caffeine is a drug. And so many of us are taught, well, all drugs are bad. If you're completely drug free, that's the best thing. Not necessarily. So am I telling you to go out and start a coffee drinking habit if you've never had coffee? No, but certainly a majority of adults, at least in the United States, in many parts of the Western world, already drink coffee. And there are times when you hear hysterical self help gurus telling you, oh, don't drink coffee. Worst thing in the world. Well, if it's affecting your sleep, yeah, it probably is a problem. If you are drinking in the afternoon or early evening or after dinner and you find yourself having a hard time falling asleep or waking up after four hours of sleep, yeah. Chances are you need to make sure you don't drink any coffee after lunchtime or even mid morning. I mean, there can be all sorts of pros and cons. If you drink three cups of coffee, which this says is good, but you put tons and tons of cream and tons and tons of sugar and it gives you diabetes, well, that's not going to help either. Most recommendations are drink black coffee is the healthiest. I try to drink black coffee. I do have such a fantastic cappuccino making machine. Now I will confess, I do drink one cappuccino, I limit it to one. And if I have a second coffee of the day, I do drink it black. I put in cinnamon, nutmeg, a little bit of hot pepper. Believe it or not, you might like it, you might not. I put it in vanilla and I put in a grand total of five spices. I'm not claiming any of them are going to make you live longer or decrease your dementia. I do it for taste and flavor. I do not put any sugar in. There's a lot of evidence that whatever you drink, don't drink sugar, calories, that's for certain. The study looked at 17,000 women, completed cognitive testing and again, three to four cups of coffee per day was linked to lower mortality. But five cups, five to eight cups, increased your chances of health risk. So you know this idea of drinking all day long to fuel yourself, not particularly good. According to Dr. Daniel Wang, beyond two and a half cups of coffee daily. The advantage plateaued. So I'm a huge fan of number one, getting sleep, trying to do anything and everything you can to get eight, eight and a half hours sleep. Because lack of sleep is also highly correlated to dementia plus other health risks plus things like obesity and diabetes. So whatever you do with coffee, don't let it interfere with your sleep. Please, I beg you. If you are going to drink coffee, and I do, don't load it up with lots of sugar and cream. But if you do drink coffee and you're not receiving any negative signs, negative reactions, I personally would ignore the occasional study or the occasional health guru who tells you, oh, coffee is the worst thing in the world. Because when you look at the meta analyses and a study like this that came out that's really Quite thorough for 43 years, it does not seem as though there is any long term negative effect with drinking a moderate amount of 2 to 3 cups of coffee per day. So that to me is the real takeaway. It's so easy to feel like you're spinning in a wheel. One day you hear a report that says you need alcohol, another day saying you shouldn't drink alcohol one day, drink coffee, the next day you don't drink coffee. At some point, unless you are a full time scientist studying these things, you have to look at reputable medical sources and I am not your source of medicine. But you have to look at meta analysis, that is those people who study all the other surveys out there and try to weight them barely to show you what the preponderance of evidence suggests is true. And in this case, it looks like moderate coffee use is actually good for you.

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Hi and welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me. Today we're going to go a little deeper into some health news today day. We do try to look at the top business stories, economic, technology and health stories and culture stories every day right here on filtered, and then look at them through the lens of personal development so that you can become more successful in your personal life as well as your professional life. This next story jumped out at me because you've heard it before. You've even heard me talk about it before. But I still believe it does not get the attention it deserves. A sweeping review of nearly 80,000 people suggest aerobic exercise can reduce depression symptoms as effectively and in some cases more effectively than antidepressants or psychotherapy. This is a new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The analysis of over 1000 studies. This is another one of these meta studies that you hear me talking about. I tend to place a lot more faith in that because any one study, especially if it's a small statistical sample, could be skewing things aberrational and not reflective of the rest of the world. But when you look at these studies of studies, they tend to have a lot more weight. It was analysis of over 1000 studies and found exercise produced a depression effect size of 0.61 compared with 0.36 for antidepressants and -0.34 for therapy in prior research. That means it was better than those. That's a fancy way of saying it. Young adults age 18 to 30 and new mothers saw the strongest benefits. Aerobic activities like running, cycling and brisk walking worked best, especially in supervised or group settings. Depression improved most with programs lasting longer than 24 weeks at moderate intensity, While anxiety responded better to shorter, lower intensity routines. Researchers say exercise should be prescribed more intentionally, not as vague advice, but as a structured evidence based mental health intervention. So that's really the problem. No one makes money by telling you, get off the couch, put your phone down, stop texting for two minutes and go for a 20 minute walk. There's no one out there making money. If I'm your therapist, and I'm not a therapist, and I'm not saying therapy is bad or you should do it, but if I'm a therapist, I have a business model. You come to see me once a week at a set time for an hour and I bill you or your insurance company 200 or 300 or 600, whatever my rate is, that's a business model. Me simply telling you you've got to do more. Show me your step counter on your watch or your phone. Oh, you only walked on average 6,000 steps every day, the last two months, you need to go for half hour, jog a day, play volleyball, play pickleball, at least walk strenuously for 45 minutes a day. If I'm your therapist, I don't make any money from that. And that's the real problem we have. So again, I'm not knocking therapy. I'm not. If you're in therapy and you feel it's helping you with depression, by all means, don't stop. Because what I'm saying, if you're on Prozac or one of those many drugs that helps people be less depressed and you feel it's genuinely helping you, I'm not telling you to suggest. I'm not suggesting you stop it. If you've gone to some clinic to get ketamine and you feel that's opening you up and solving your. I'm not suggesting you stop that. What I am suggesting, for those of you who are not suffering severe depression is the first thing you should try is active exercise. Because the evidence is pretty. This isn't the first time I've shared results like this with you. It does. You know, there's new studies all the time and they're usually relegated to the bottom of a web page in small print because it's not sexy. It's not, hey, here's this new little magic pill where you can eat 25 chocolate donuts a day and lose 10 pounds a day. That's what gets the headlines telling you you're going to feel better and be less depressed by exercising. Doesn't get a lot of news coverage because on the one hand, a lot of people say, well, A, no kidding, I already knew that. B, yuck. Who wants to exercise? That doesn't sound like fun. Going to a clinic and getting ketamine or getting the latest acupuncture, taking a new pill or getting a prescription for smoking marijuana. That sounds like a lot more fun. And folks, I'm not against fun. The key, I think, is to combine the do. Combine exercise with. I love playing pickleball. I hated the fact that I lost yesterday in two out of, well, three out of five games I lost. I didn't love that, but I felt fantastic when I was done exercising, soaking wet with sweat, the agony of losing points, the thrill of winning points, you couldn't. I mean, I was unhappy with the fact that I lost, but I wasn't depressed by it. I felt great. That is what I think should be your first line of defense. So that's really what I'm arguing here. If, look if you've got severe clinical depression, you haven't been able to get out of bed for five months. Am I saying throw away your pills, cancel your meeting with your therapist and go run a marathon tomorrow? No, that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is if you feel fine now and you want to make sure you don't get depressed, maybe you get depressed in the winter and it's fall and you're feeling great, start doing more active aerobic exercise today. Don't wait until you get sad or down depressed. If you're feeling mild depression. What I am suggesting to you. And again, I am not your doctor, but it also means I don't have a conflict of interest. I'm not trying to sell you expensive pills like a pharmacist. I'm not trying to sell you therapy sessions for $500 an hour. So in a sense, everyone has conflicts. Those are two areas where I don't have conflicts. I would like you to start some form of active exercise, preferably aerobic exercise, because don't take my word for it, this is yet another study showing that active exercise dramatically decreases your chances of depression. And the other reason I think it should be your first thing. It's much cheaper than paying a therapist. It's much cheaper than buying drugs. Unless you get injured on the pickleball court. There's not many side effects of just going for a walk or moderate exercise. There are side effects of these drugs that people take. There's side effects to your wallet if you're paying out of pocket for therapists. So all things being. And you don't have to travel anywhere. If you have to drive somewhere to go to a therapy session or to go to some clinic, that's time, money, effort. So why not try and make the first line of defense active exercise? Go for a walk. You'll feel better. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. We have lots more fun to come. Don't go away.

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You'll wonder how you ever did without it. A remote Canadian town is in shock after a shooting In Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia left nine people dead and about 25 others injured. Police say seven bodies were found inside Tumblr Ridge Secondary School, including a person believed to be the shooter who died of what appeared to be a self inflicted injury. Two other people were found dead at a nearby residence connected to the case, and another victim died while being transported to the hospital. With a population around 2,400 and fewer than 200 students at the school, the impact is devastating and intensely personal. Officials haven't released the suspect's identity, the victim's names, or details about the weapons, saying families are still being notified. Horrible tragedy and our sympathies go to the families of the loved ones who were affected by this and were killed by this. Some more facts. The suspect, as does happen in a lot of these situations, ended up killing himself. I say himself. Chances are pretty good it was a male. Let's not kid ourselves. Another victim died on the way to the hospital. It was a small town. Now you expect things like this to happen, frankly, almost daily in the United States. Doesn't happen in Canada very often. This is the third deadliest shooting in Canada's history. Prime Minister Mark Carney is weighing in on it, saying he's devastated. The other people are weighing in on this. Here's why I want to talk about it today. This is a number one story, top story on the front page of the New York Times. I'm not here to bash the New York Times, but I do want to look at why a story like this creates so much attention. There's all sorts of biases and lessons in communication we can learn about this, of how human beings communicate. Remember, put spotlights on things, assess risk, how the media does it and how it really affects you and me and your own judgment. All of us are emotional beings at some point, otherwise we wouldn't be a human being. So I'm certainly not suggesting that I am above being emotional. It breaks my heart to see something like this happen. But let's keep in mind some. Some big issues in perspective. So nine people were killed. Horrific. Guess what? A couple thousand people are going to die today in car crashes around the world. You're not going to see any of them on the front page of the New York Times unless it involves a celebrity or a famous person, because it happens one at a time in a lot of different places where there are no TV cameras around. It's not as dramatic. You're going to see more people die today or certainly yesterday in the Northeast from being too cold than died in Canada from this shooting. But you can't send TV cameras to individual homes, a senior citizen who died in the cold last night, because chances are nobody even knows about it yet. But it does come out. So the media is very selective in what it puts a spotlight on. When it's dramatic, when it's action, when there's violence, when there's blood, it gets a lot more attention. And the problem with this is it can skew our own perspective on risk. If you see a story like this and you then say, well, I'm not going to send my kid to school for the next week, that's not really rational, given the fact that your kid may be a lot more likely to get injured at home. Your kid falls behind and doesn't do well in school, and their educational attainment lacks. They may end up poor. And poverty is a great predictor of dying earlier. I can't speak for Canada, but in the United States, wealthy people now live about 10 years longer than poor people. Horrible to say, horrible reality, but it is in fact true. So let's look at some other biases going on that puts this in the spot. There's the rarity bias. Mass shootings are unusual in Canada, so it gets front page news. In the same way, shark attacks are very unusual and get a lot of attention. But a neighbor who gets run over as a pedestrian is not going to get any attention. That happens every day in America. Pedestrians get run over. There's the dread risk. Random violence feels more personally threatening than eating Little Debbie snacks and eating cake and cookie and pies all day long and dying 20 years earlier because of obesity, diabetes, which leads to a stroke or a heart attack and can kill you. So we dread that we don't dread the eating of junk food and garbage that is much more likely to kill us than any bullet from an assassin. There's the fact that schools and children are involved that triggers stronger moral alarm. And yeah, hey, I get that it's especially troubling to see children killed. There is the narrative clarity. One suspect, one event, death, tragedy. You can see it all in the way you simply can't see an entire society having its average age expectancy go down because so many people have become addicted to opioids. Nobody wants to talk about it. That doesn't get as many headlines. There's the, the visual aspect of it. The police are there, it's one school, there's blood. Just because it's visually convenient in one place doesn't necessarily make it more significant or show why you personally should be more concerned about that risk versus others. There is the availability heuristic people overestimate risk. They vividly remember. You can vividly remember a school shooting and the way you can't vividly remember that yesterday around the world, more than 3,000 people died in car crashes. How do I know that? Because 1.2 million people a year die in car crashes in the world. So do the math. It's a couple thousand at least on average every day. Several thousand. So there's the normalization of everyday deaths when death happens frequently, when people go to hospitals and get infections because doctors, nurses, other people didn't wash their hands properly. You don't get any attention for that. It seems so normal. There's no headline, there's no big culprit. There was no mean person there with a gun. It was just sloppiness. And that affects how we perceive reality. There's the negativity bias. This is bad news. It's going to push out news on how in certain cultures in the world yesterday, thousands of people got access to the Internet for the first time. You're not going to hear about that. There's what's called novelty bias. A rare horror. And this was a rare horror in Canada. It competes for our attention in a way that a normal horror of okay, we had another cold wave. Another hundred senior citizens froze to death. Ho hum. It's not novel. There is the identifiable victim effect. Now they haven't identified the victims yet, but they will be coming and we'll see them. We'll see their cute faces. And believe me, I don't mean to seem like I'm uncaring about these victims. I do care about them, but I don't want anybody to die. And every single day, huge swaths of humanity die from all sorts of killers that are also tragic. They're just not as visible and they don't have one single actor doing it at one point. There's an incentive bias. Media outlets have a huge, huge incentive to prioritize, prioritize stories like this because they know it'll travel quickly. You'll get clicks. People say, did you see that? There's the moral outrage loop. Wow. These people with, you know, you've got people who want gun control saying it's an outrage that they have that. You have people who love guns saying, well, the problem was this person should not have been given one and they're a bad criminal. So everyone can get morally outraged about something like this in the way that your uncle dying at age 60 rather than 80 because of a lifelong addiction to French fries, Coca Cola, Mountain Dew and donuts doesn't create outrage. There's no one finger to point at. So all of these biases affect why something like this even is put in front of us. Doesn't affect why it happened, but it affects why. Why we're hearing about it on the front page of major media outlets around the world and it has a dramatic impact of why we fear that. I mean, I know some parents who take their kids out of public schools because of a shooting. I mean, I'm here in South Florida, not that far away from the Parkland shootings a number of years ago. Tragic, horrific, mass killings there. Public school. I know parents who take their kids out of public school because they're so worried about gun shooting, but then feed their kids non stop Cokes, fried chicken fingers with zero nutritional value, non stop processed pasta with no nutritional value. They're setting their kids up for a lifetime of poor health and they're worried about something that is essentially statistically insignificant of focusing on school shootings. Now, school shootings happen way too often in America. It's horrible when it happens. But if you think that's the biggest risk of your child being harmed, you're not looking at the facts like what you heard.

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Global Epstein Fallout Nearly 3 million pages of newly released Justice Department files tied to Jeffrey Epstein are triggering resignations, investigations and political turmoil across multiple continents. In the United States, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is facing bipartisan calls to resign over deeper than disclosed ties. Entertainment executive Casey Wasserman is under pressure as artists distance themselves from his agency. In France, former Culture Minister Jack Lang resigned amid a well, he was the former culture minister. He's resigned from another position amid a tax free fraud investigation connected to financial links with Epstein. In Norway, Ambassador Mana Jule stepped down as police investigated reported financial ties. Slovakia's Miroslav Logic resigned after emails referencing young women's service. Political fallout has also touched Britain, India, Israel and beyond. No new criminal charges have been announced, but reputations and governments are feeling the shockwaves. This continues to be one of the most fascinating stories to so many people for so many reasons, and it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. Every time we think we've gotten, okay, 95% of the Epstein files have come out. The very next day it seems like you've got ten times more files coming out and we're no, we're not at 95%. We're more like at 1%. I do not mean to minimize the horrors of the crimes this man committed, but at some point someone needs to write the ultimate expose on how you can be the ultimate social climber, the ultimate connector in the entire world. I've never seen anybody like this who wasn't, let's say a famous person like Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton knows, you know, a million people in the world is connected to everyone because he was president of the United States. There's no surprise there. But the way this guy who lived in relative anonymity was able to connect to there's thousands of prominent people. I just don't even understand the time management of what it would take to do that. Constantly doing favors for this person, that person, reconnecting all the sexual banter and sleazy tittle tattle going back between so many people. It is just amazing. Now I read off some of the names for you. Dr. Peter Attia continues to get all sorts of pushback on this. He is being kicked off of boards of companies. His name is being Scraped off things because he said some really, really nasty things. I do think a fair minded person has to look at this from some perspective and context to simply say person A's name appeared in the Epstein files. They were once at a dinner party and they met Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein. Therefore this person should be Persona non grata forever. They should be fired, humiliated. That's too far. That's going too strong. There have been some people, like Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, where they were invited to a dinner party once Jeffrey Epstein was there. And their biggest crime is they didn't Google every possible name of someone who could show up at a dinner party. I don't know about you, I've never done that. And until Epstein came out, I don't think anyone did that. Maybe if you were already president of a country, you might want an extreme vetting of knowing every single person in the name. But private citizens I don't think should be held accountable for simply being in a room with someone who had a criminal track record. That's not an endorsement. No reasonable person can expect someone to do a thorough vetting of every single person they've ever met. But that's also very different from this Dr. Peter Attia, which again, I like his books. I may have to take it down. I think I still have one of his books behind me. He is an interesting writer on personal health issues. But the extremely, and I'm not even going to repeat the things he said in emails to Jeffrey Epstein, but suffice to say they were extraordinarily offensive and not just to prudes. Okay, now let's look at some more of names of people. So Howard Lutnick basically said, I had nothing to do with this guy after, you know, 20 years ago. Then it turns out he was doing business with him and even meeting with him a handful of years ago. So just caught blatantly in a lie. He should be held into account. But given his position in the cabinet of the Trump administration, that will probably be seen as a plus. That will probably be seen as a reason to keep him indefinitely because anytime someone asks President Trump about Epstein, he can say, well, you should be talking to Howard Lutnick. He's the bad guy, not me. So for that reason alone, I think his position is fairly safe, even though a number of Republicans and Democrats have called for him to step down. But I mean, this guy they're talking about, Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of England, is in a problem there because of his appointment of a top a Mendelssohn who was like best buddies with Epstein. This could bring down the entire British government. Modi is referenced, the Prime Minister of India referenced in Epstein emails many times. You've got former prime ministers of Israel involved, confirmed the meetings. Barak in of Israel confirmed the meetings, but denies misconduct. The Dalai Lama is in the Epstein files. I mean, I'm being a little bit flippant here, and I realize it's a sensitive matter and real lives were ruined. Women have committed suicide because of the atrocities that Jeffrey Epstein committed. So I say this in no way meaning to be disrespectful, but it's almost embarrassing not to be mentioned in the Epstein files at this point. There's so few incredibly prominent individuals in the world of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Broadway, major media, venture capital, politics in the us politics in Europe, politics in the Middle east, politics. There's hardly anyone of prominence in any of those fields who doesn't seem like they had a strong personal connection with this guy, who met with him, who saw him as a friend, as a buddy, as a financial benefactor, as an advisor. How he even had time for doing this, given the fact that he allegedly was abusing young girls hours and hours a day, multiple times a day. How he even had the time and energy to do that. I don't mean to sound like I'm glorifying it. He's horrific, okay? But we as a society, I do think, are going to have to come up with some kind of a standard for judgment on people. Certainly, if you are aware of his convictions, of his criminal record, and you still decided you wanted to do business with him, and you still wanted to socialize with him, and you still wanted to make jokes about, ha, ha, ha, let's share our young women together, et cetera, I think society should condemn you. You should be forced to remove yourself from public life. There should be some reckoning, and we need to be consistent about it. Society does need to use the capacity to of placing shame. Human beings still need to be able to show they have a capacity of feeling shame. I do believe that's true. But we've got to differentiate. If you're Noam Chomsky, esteemed linguist, who, last time I checked, is about 194 years old, and you had some conversations with Epstein of an intellectual nature, are we really going to say, okay, Noam Chomsky, we have to remove all of his books from every library. And I'm not a Noam Chomsky fan, by the way, but clearly this guy Epstein was a multifaceted individual. Yes, the core of him was absolutely horrific. But he by all accounts had a wide ranging intellect and apparently really, really enjoyed wide ranging conversations with the most fascinating people, the most successful people, accomplished people in every aspect of modern culture. So I don't think we deserve to destroy the lives of those who simply were a part of his orbit and their exchanges were purely intellectual. I'm TJ Walker. I want to thank you for joining me today. I appreciate your time, your efforts, your thoughts, please. If you got any value out of this show, please like it, subscribe to it, share it with your friends, leave reviews on any podcasting platforms. Thanks so much. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks. Bye. Bye.