Apple crushes Wall Street expectations, Therapist admit ChatGPT is fantastic

Today on Filtered with TJ Walker. Apple is crushing expectations. The market is in a free fall in the first day of August 2025. Therapists are now admitting that ChatGPT is pretty, pretty good. Also in the news, Donald Trump and his team are preparing for a third term. Yes, you heard that right. And no, the Constitution of the United States hasn't changed. But as we've seen repeatedly, what the Constitution says a president can do and what this president does don't necessarily have to be coordinated anymore. A mild, delicate way of stating it. Plus, AI researchers are now commanding quarter billion dollar pay packages. All that and more today on Filtered with TJ Walker. Welcome. Thanks for joining me. We are a little bit informal today. I, as I mentioned to you yesterday, I'm in the middle of a move just moved in. This is my new studio. Everything is chaotic. Do not have the main cameras, main microphones set up yet. Just doing this with my cell phone. Have moved my office and home to a new location, a new undisclosed location with security in Palm Beach County. So not that far away from my old digs in Delray beach and also Palm Beach County. So let's dive right into the news. Apple in the news with some good news. Their latest earnings came in and they were up 13.5%, $44.58 billion in earnings for the quarter, and that beat the expectations of $40.22 billion. So I'm sorry, not earning sales. The sales is what soared. Don't confuse the two. So this is dramatic. $4 billion more worth of sales than anticipated by the analyst. So what's the big picture here and why does this really matter? I think it matters because all of us, whether we realize it or not, conduct our lives based on some vision, some faith, if you want to call it that, on what the future will look like. Is the future headed towards a more agrarian economy? I don't think so. Is the future headed towards a society where people say, you know what, let's put our cell phones down, let's go out and get more fresh air, exercise, play board games with people, read paper books, socialize with our neighbors? Is that the future we're headed in? Well, I wish it were, but it's not. Are we headed towards a world where people just spend more time in meditation, unplugging, getting a good eight and a half hours of sleep and spending just ten minutes a day on social media might be a good thing. I don't think that's where we're headed. We're headed to a world where More people are doing, frankly, exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm holding a cell phone and specifically I'm holding an iPhone. Now, you may have a different brand, you may have a Galaxy or something else, but to me, the bigger trend here, the reason why this story is significant, is it's a message to the world that, yes, more and more of everything that happens in reality for human beings is going to be mediated through cell phones and iPads and we're going to be connected through things like these watches. Everything is more and more focused on the Internet, on cell phones. And Apple has done an excellent job of really carving out its supreme role in creating superior products. Again, I don't want to get in the whole battle of, oh, Samsung is better, Galaxy is better. I'll leave that to others. I use iPhones primarily because I'm lazy and I'm self aware enough to know that I'm lazy. It's just easier when I have family and friends who use FaceTime for me to use FaceTime. It's easier for me to find a phone if I have an Apple watch and all I have to do is hit a button and it pings and it tells me exactly where my phone is. So whether you think of their products as superior technologically or you think of them as just great at pandering to really lazy people like me, either way, Apple's doing incredibly well. They're so much bigger than they ever were under Steve Jobs. And I don't say that as a knock on Steve Jobs, but the current CEO, Tim Cook is often underappreciated because he's not seen as flashy a speaker. And certainly they've not come up with brand new categories of products the way they did under Steve Jobs. But in terms of sheer execution and distribution, Tim Cook has done a fantastic, stellar job. And that's why, other than perhaps today, you see the stock so handsomely and richly rewarded. Now, full disclosure, I don't own Apple directly, but I own an awful lot of Apple stock indirectly through my index funds that I own. And if you have any kind of index funds, if you have a pension or a 401k, chances are you own Apple stock and you don't even know it because it's in Every S&P 500, every NASDAQ index, every tech index, it's in all of them. It's pretty hard to avoid unless you simply have no retirement savings whatsoever. So what else is significant about this? To me, it's about spending more and more of your time Thinking about, how do you give value to people in an increasingly digital world? Now, I've made more than my fair share of boneheaded decisions in my career. Flawed decisions, decisions that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. But one thing I did get right way back in the 1990s is the idea that, okay, everything I do that helps people with communication skills, with personal development, with everything I do is going to happen online and it's going to happen through audio and video. And that's when I started making online courses. And again, don't get too excited about how brilliant I was. I lost money for 15 years, took a long time for those bets to pay off, but ultimately they did in fact pay, pay off. And I just want to keep making more bets on that. Every day I get pitched by people saying, oh, I can help you get great speaking gigs. 10, 20, 30, $40,000 for an hour speech. It sounds great, right? Well, I do some paid speaking gigs, but I don't put a lot of time and energy chasing speaking gigs because to me that's like a movie star saying they want to go, go be a vaudeville star and you know, go tour around in the Catskills. It's old fashioned, it's anti tech, it's not scalable. Now, I'm not saying I'm a movie star even though I am the same age as Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, but no other comparisons there in terms of looks and hairline. I want you to really think about how does someone who want to be successful today in 2025 really think how do you communicate? And sure, it's fine to be a star and get $100,000 to give a speech or to be a comedian and sell out a theater somewhere and get $200,000 for a night of entertainment. There's always going to be some role for the face to face, but until you're famous, I believe you're far better off helping people in small little increments in a way that's asynchronous. Now it's just a fancy way of saying you can be asleep, they can be accessing your expertise online while you sleep. How do you do that? Well, you could do it by creating a YouTube video like this and having ads or promoting other things you do. You can do it by making online courses, which has been the primary way I have paid my bills and generated retirement and generated resources for my family. There's no one way but using the power of the Internet, I'm getting some. Yeah, there we go. We had an Internet Problem connection. I have actually lost high speed Internet in my home today. So this is just through cellular connection. And you know what? It's working. That's what we did yesterday. I didn't even have Internet yet. Janice writes in to say hello. You could have been a movie star, tj. Well, thank you. Thanks a lot. I do appreciate that. And since I'm working on my phone, I can't actually read the rest of your comment. So I, I apologize if I somehow missed, missed what you're saying there. Let's see you choose another path. Yes, I did choose another path. Janice, thanks, thanks so much for stopping by and I appreciate the kind words. You know, I have very few regrets in my life and I don't regret not becoming a movie star, but I do regret as a child and as a student, junior high school, high school, college, not going out for the theater and shows and brought in Broadway style shows and musicals. My daughter's into that now, having a blast. I would have loved to have had those early experiences on stage, performing in front of people. I think it's a great type of public speaking. So if you have an opportunity to do so, do so. If you have a kid who needs a little bit of a nudge, I would strongly urge you to give a child, a grandchild, anyone in your family a nudge to get up on stage because it's all relevant, it's all a part of communications arsenal that you could use throughout your entire life to help you be more successful. So thanks so much for joining me again. My name is TJ Walker. On this show I look at the top business news, tech news and culture news and filter it through the lens of communication skills. All with the goal of helping you become more successful and being more effective in your personal life and your professional life. That's what we're about now. I've recently had to change the name of this show. I had not done enough due diligence and the original name for the show is Communiverse. And I just found out, as I told some of you yesterday, that Pixar has parts of its movies with this brand. Other communication companies have it. I don't know if that happened in the last six weeks since I did my initial search. But regardless, I've had to switch names. So that's why I am, that's why I am changing the name. The current frontrunner is filtered with TJ Walker. The idea that I'm filtering the news, I'm giving you the news filtered through the lens of communication skills, analysis and personal development skills, analysis not filtered through a particular political bias. But of course everyone has perspectives and I do too. So let's move on to the next story of the day. This one we talked a little bit about last week. But more and more stories on how AI researchers are commanding salaries that most people even have the temerity of dreaming of that NBA stars often don't get. We're talking about quarter, not million, quarter, billion dollar pay packages for nerds and geeks. I don't mean that in a condescending way. It's, it's a badge of honor these days, guys, and it is Primarily guys with PhDs in artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence related fields who are already working for major companies, tech companies, and who published serious research papers. So it's not just somebody getting a couple of non accredited courses on Udemy and AI and say, oh, I'm now available for work, who would like to pay me a quarter billion dollars? No, it's not that simple. It's certainly not filtering down to millions and millions of people. But for the handful of people who really focused, focused, focused and did it before ChatGPT made AI so popular, they are setting off a feeding frenzy in Silicon Valley. So what we are seeing is that Mark Zuckerberg in particular at Meta is extraordinarily aggressive at recruiting. He wanted a guy named Mr. Detke, a 24 year old artificial intelligence researcher, to join him recently and the company promised him $125 million in stock and cash over four years. He came aboard and you know what he said? What would you say? What would I say? That's not what he said. He said, no, not enough, I think I'll stay where I am. So Zuckerberg met with him, privately negotiated more, came back and said, okay, a quarter of a billion dollars, the guy's 24 years old, quarter of a billion dollars. And he finally said, his friends, family, advisors said, are you crazy? A quarter of a billion dollars. Now the problem I have a hard time getting my head around is if you, if you paid a 24 year old $250 million, quarter of a billion dollars and you paid them 100 million up front, do they lose their motivation? I mean, if you have $100 million at age 24, you can all of a sudden start spending a couple million dollars a year, put the other 98 million and in investments you're going to be a billionaire by the time you're 40, just with normal stock appreciation. And you could spend every day of your life playing, partying, buying Lamborghinis. And I'm not advocating using illicit substances. But if you're 24 years old and that rich, something tells me you might be pretty popular on the party circuit in your town or if you move to LA or New York or someplace like that. So I'm almost wondering if there's a disincentive. If you pay a professional athlete hundreds of millions of dollars, as long as they show up on time on the field once a week, are on the court 70 times a year, they could spend all the rest of their time partying. And as long as they don't degrade their physical skills, you'll be okay. And players know they may only have a few years. These AI guys, they're going to have an entire career if they want to. So it does make you wonder, are there perverse incentives going on? So what's the real lesson for you and for me? Again, I believe the lesson is learn hard stuff. Let me say that again. The lesson is learn hard stuff of value to other people. Other people, meaning folks like Mark Zuckerberg today value artificial intelligence skills. Now, most of these people getting these big pay packages developed an interest in math and science and were taking calculus when they were 10 years old. They didn't just wake up one morning and say, wow, it'd be good to be rich. Let me do a correspondence course, an online course on AI in six months and get a big job. No, they've been in the trenches for years. Before most people ever heard of large language models, which was only about three years ago, they were immersed in this. Now is my lesson to you that you have to quit whatever you're doing to become an AI researcher, get a PhD in math or physics or artificial intelligence. No, my message for you is whatever you're doing, constantly try to learn a deeper skill associated with it. That's too hard for most people to do. That will be valued in the marketplace, if not today, then in the long run. And I think of my own experiences where back in the late 90s, I was doing day long public speaking trainings, day long media trainings, as a lot of my other colleagues in the industry were. But I knew that that wasn't going to necessarily work in the long run. So I had to learn the hard skills of how do you make a website? And I made some of my own websites and they were awful. And it was a lot more difficult back in the 90s to make a website. I made TJ. I got the domain of TJ Walker.com in 1995 and shame on me for not making it a billion dollar property. But at least I got it. And I've been changing it and adding to it and selling from it ever since, along with a few other websites. So I want to really distill the lesson here. When you see someone getting a $250 billion pay package, it's only human to say, wow, I wish that were me. Or be envious. But let's learn the lesson. Nobody gets that unless they hone the skill. That is extraordinarily rare, that is unique, that is highly valued in the marketplace. If I could quickly and easily dunk basketballs and had a 60 inch vertical leap and I had reflexes so fast I could steal the ball from anyone, that's a rare and unique.