Bryan Johnson’s Religion, Tesla Tanks, Intel Cuts 25K, Dems Collapse

Today on the Communiverse, a tech multi millionaire wants to start a new religion. A text billionaire. A tech billionaire who once injected himself with his son's blood is now starting a religion. Brian Johnson's don't die movement may sound wild, but it's following a surprisingly familiar pattern. Elon Musk warns investors that Tesla is in for rough quarters and then opens a multifunctioning retro diner that looks a lot more like a distraction than an actual real business strategy. Intel announces that 25,000 jobs are going to be eliminated. NPR and PBS scramble after losing federal funding. And Democrats just hit their worst favorability rating in 35 years, with voters trusting Republicans more on nearly every major issue, even when they disagree with Trump's policies. If you're trying to make sense of today's chaos in politics, business, technology and culture and what it reveals about how to communicate powerfully, you are in the right place. So glad you're here with us today. We are in for a lot of fun. Okay. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. This is the Communiverse. This is where we dissect the top stories of the day in business, technology, culture, analyze it through the lens of communication skills and personal development, all with a goal of helping you, improving your life, improving your chances of success. So first up, this is, this is a fascinating story here. What's going on with this, with this character, Brian Johnson. As you see right here, Brian Johnson wants to start a religion. And he's not the first crazy prophet to try it. Brian Johnson has tried just about everything to avoid dying and injecting his teen son's plasma, replacing all his blood, reconstructing his face with donor fat. That didn't work out well. Now he's ditching his supplement business to start a religion. It's called Don't Die. And while it sounds like a tech bro fever dream, Johnson is following a well worn path. History shows that founders of major religions, from Joseph Smith to Mayor Mary Baker Eddy, often begin as controversial fringe figures with outsized charisma and a gift for storytelling and, yes, communication. Smith, let's not forget he's the founder of the Mormon religion, was convicted of fraud before founding Mormonism. Eddie was accused of plagiarism and blamed for deaths when her followers rejected medical care. Eddie in favor of prayer, both built global movements. Johnson already has thousands of followers, city chapters and an AI clone of himself. Hey, I guess he's in good company. I have an AI clone. He's not preaching scripture. At least old scripture he's creating new scripture, he's preaching biological escape velocity. And the message is resonating with people desperate to outlive the limits of aging. And you know, folks accuse me of picking on any one religion. I'm not picking on any one religion. I think if you scrutinize any religions founding prophet, you'll see that in their own time they were seen as sketchy and questionable. Talking about Joseph Smith, he was eventually killed by some of his own ex followers and addition to being convicted of fraud. So founding of religion is a difficult business and the people who do it are not like normal business people or civic leaders. So I want to talk about this in a little more detail because I do think that it is so important to who we are as human beings. For better or for worse, human beings like religion. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's a good thing or not. But the one thing we know is that founders of religions are good communicators. They do it primarily by speaking, not typically just by writing. Regardless of what your preferred religion is. And quite often it's about the preaching of that founder. It's not simply that they wrote a book. Now this guy, Brian Johnson is a fascinating character to me. I certainly am not endorsing him in any way or I wouldn't say in most ways. Some of his advice is actually good advice. He does stress the importance of sleep. He thinks that you will live longer, live healthier, live a longer health span if you really protect and preserve sleep and do things like go to bed earlier, turn off all screens hours before, don't take caffeine in the afternoon, don't drink alcohol, all of that is mainstream science. It's completely mainstream. And he is using his platform, his ability to captivate attention, to get attention in a way that gets more people to take seriously the idea of sleep. So to that extent I applaud Brian Johnson, unfortunately for every really good idea he has. I don't know if it's a complete one to one ratio, but there's a pretty high ratio of genuinely bad advice supplements and wildly overpriced olive oils he sells to people shortcuts. And part of what he's doing is showing the long cut. It's exercising every day, it's eating real food every day, it's going to bed at roughly the same time every night and doing whatever it takes to get a plus hours sleep. I will give him credit for showing people the long hard way of doing things, but he's constantly veering back into shortcuts. One of them, which apparently caused. Well, he's done a number of things that have really damaged his health because he experiments on everything without evidence, without proof. If you believe in science, if you believe in things like vaccines, then you believe in empirical evidence testing, blind test, double randomized testing. He's not doing that. He just says, here's a new goofy idea, let me try it. If it works for me, maybe it works for everyone. That gets people into a lot of trouble. That is historically what spews off a lot of nonsense because you have correlation, no causation, you have the placebo effect. Sometimes somebody trying anything makes them feel so good. It's the feeling good that helped them, not the actual thing. Now, this is true with herbs and potions and supplements. It's also been proven to be true with things like acupuncture and also knee replacement surgery, believe it or not, is widely proven to be often placebo effect. People who get knee surgery and don't get knee surgery but think they did are often no different six months later. So this Brian Johnson deserves some level of scrutiny. Now, full disclosure, I'm not a big fan of anything that calls itself a religion. But if you look at it more broadly, if religion is simply a system of principles to live your life by, well, we all have a religion at some point. And Brian Johnson is not telling people, hey, there's a magic Santa Claus in the sky that's going to take care of you forever and ever and ever and ever. If you want to live longer and be happier, you got to take control of your own health. I actually think that is a good principle to be teaching people. So to that extent and to that extent only, I applaud Brian Johnson. The idea that this may be the only life we get, this may be the only body we ever get. So let's do whatever it takes to strengthen it, preserve it. Yeah, I think that is a positive message and that should be a part of anyone's. Whether they call it religious principles or just core principles they live by. Now, where he goes off track is doing things like injecting fat in his face. It is true. As you get older, your collagen leaves your face, you don't look as good, your face doesn't look as well. Believe me. My own family has commented on pictures of me from when I was 20 versus now, and they're like, oh my God, what happened? Put some weight on, do something. You're fat face looks horrible. That's life. It has no impact on how I feel. Thankfully, at age 62, I feel good. I don't know if I'm going to live forever or actually prevent dying, as Brian Johnson claims to want to create that environment. But I certainly hope to live a long time. But I'm not going to be obsessed over the fact that my face doesn't look like it did 40 years ago or 45 years ago when I was arguably at my peak physicality. So should you join Brian Johnson's religion? No. Should you give him money? I would argue no. But should you occasionally listen to his advice along with all the other people giving you advice on your daily practices? Because if you watch American Idol or any talk show or TV show or football or soccer broadcast, you're being inundated with advice from Coca Cola manufacturers and Dorito manufacturers and junk food manufacturers saying the key to happiness in life is filling your mouth with garbage, with filling your mouth with processed sugar, filling your mouth with processed carbohydrates. That is the message all of us receive every single day, again and again and again and again. And if Brian Johnson is a little bit of an antidote to that, then I think it's worth giving him some of your time. I do check in on him from time to time, and he does occasionally have good ideas, so that's why I think I can't write him off completely. Although he does appear to be really kooky and really weird and bizarre and disturbed in many aspects of his life. I will not kid you about that. All right, let's take a look at the next story. Story to issue two today Tesla tanks. That's right, Tesla in the news again. Elon Musk warns up rough quarters and a diner disaster doesn't happen. Tesla stock dropped sharply on Thursday after Elon Musk warned that the company could be heading into a few rough quarters. The company posted a 12% drop in revenue, its worst year over year. Sales decline in over a decade by the end of regular training yesterday. Trading yesterday, Tesla Shares closed down 8.2% at $305.30 per share. By Friday afternoon, they had rebounded slightly to 316, a 3.5% gain. But Tesla remains down about 24% year to date. Musk is trying to shift attention to robo taxis and humanoid robots, promising they'd make Tesla the most valuable company in the world by far. But analysts weren't buying it. Meanwhile, he launched a Tesla branded retro diner in Hollywood, a PR stunt that quickly became meme worthy as a mess. Long lines, app failures, no robot waiters and preferential treatment for Tesla drivers made it feel more like a branded confusion than branded strength. Now, he also warned of the US EV tax credits being reduced could affect their profits by $1 billion. Investors are showing increased skepticism. I mean, here's the real problem that Tesla faces is that it is being valued not as a car company. If it did, if it did have a typical valuation of a car company, it would see its stock price drop 95%. It's being valued on the idea that it's this greatest sort of whiz bang, futuristic AI thingamajig that the world's greatest genius is in control of. And that's why it's given more than 100 times share price. Its PE ratio is so much higher than any other company in its sector. This simply cannot continue. And when Musk tries to pull gimmicks out of the hat like, oh, we've got a new diner here, it does kind of evoke comparisons to his erstwhile friend, his current enemy, President Trump, saying, oh, pay no attention to Epstein here. Look, I'm going to take Rosie o' Donnell's citizenship away. It seems like Musk is trying to do this sort of trickery, and I don't think it can last. I still happen to think that Tesla is wildly, wildly overpriced. Now, I'm not giving you stock advice. Do not go out and short Tesla stock. Based on what I'm saying here, I'm giving you analysis from a community communications perspective, in that I think there's only so long Musk can communicate this story and he's a great storyteller. He's a great communicator, even though he's not by traditional measures a good public speaker. He's a great communicator in that he tells these stories of I've got a vision for the future, and it's a bigger, better future than anyone else, and I have the technology chops to make it happen and to hire the best team to make it happen. That was a compelling message 15 years ago, a dozen years ago, 10 years ago. But you know what? Life changes, the world changes. The world is very different from when Tesla was essentially the lone pioneer out there in the world of EV cars. Now, it's rare to see a car manufacturer not have an electric vehicle, and the reality is many are as good, if not better than Teslas. So why give Tesla such a wildly inflated valuation just because they're first? Who cares if you're first? You know, by that definition, by that standard, MySpace would be worth a Lot more than Facebook. Right. We don't say MySpace gets all this credit because it was one of the first social media platforms, therefore it's worth ten times as much as Facebook. Nobody says that. And yet there is a little bit of that mentality going on right now still with a lot of defenders of Elon Musk and any of his companies. And I, I do think it's only a matter of time before reality catches up to Tesla stock and Elon Musk, because you can always come up with a new story, but the stories have to get better. The story of, hey, I'm starting a new diner here. Not too many people really get excited about that. Not many people say, hmm, a diner. That sure sounds like a trillion dollar business. Nobody is saying that. And I'm not alone. There are plenty of other observers who saw Musk doing that earlier this week and say, what's really going on here? He's trying to distract. He's trying to say, oh, don't look here, look over here, look at this flag. And it hasn't caused the massive, massive stock drop. I would anticipate. Yes, it did go down 8.2% Thursday, but then it actually went up 3.5% on Friday. I think we're not far away from the point of it actually getting down to what a regular car company does, because the idea of, oh, don't think of us as a car company, or we're actually an autonomous vehicle company. Well, Waymo is way ahead of Tesla in a lot of that. Oh, don't think it was a car company. We're an AI company. Well, chat GPT OpenAI is way ahead of them in those aspects. This gets back to something I talked about earlier this week, and that is Elon Musk is diluting his power as a communicator. If you try to be a great communicator in a dozen companies, you simply can't give any one of them enough attention. And increasingly we are seeing investors in Tesla. Certainly prospective owners of Tesla say, this guy just isn't giving enough focus to this trillion dollar, sometimes nearly trillion dollar company. He's all over the map. It's true. He's retreated from the political arena. He's no longer living at the White House or Mar a Lago. But he still seems so scattered at just the aspect of sending out bizarre tweets, talking about Trump and the Epstein files and all that. How is that building shareholder value for Tesla? How is that making the car better? How is it making the car look better? Because I'm certainly not the only one who looks at the the cyber truck and think, wow, this is the most God awful ugly thing I've ever seen in my life. When I see the Tesla truck, I think of way back when I was a kid in 1970. They were very cheap, cheap, cheap, poorly produced science fiction movies about what the future would look in 1985. And it looked, I wish I could remember the name of the show or the movie, but it looked like a cybertruck. That's really what it is. It's a 1970s vision of what the future will look like in 1985. Well, newsflash, it's now 2025 and the cyber truck has turned into an unmitigated disaster. Sales have plummeted. People who buy them are trying to sell them. In some cases it's like they're trying to give them away. It's almost reminds me of what happened in the financial crisis in New York City. The harbor there in 2008. People couldn't afford boats any longer. They would scrape their name off and shove the boat out to the harbor and just say, that's it. Anyone who wants it can take it. We're not quite at that point with the Tesla cybertruck, but we're not that far away because it is ugly. And I think it is in part because there's no one CEO spending every second obsessing over the quality. Contrast that with Steve Jobs obsessing over the quality of every single product at Apple. Now, you may think Elon Musk is 10 times, 100 times smarter than Steve Jobs. I don't. But part of Steve Jobs power was his abilities to focus, to narrow things down, to say no to almost everything. That's what he gives credit to for his success. Say no to almost every single thing and focus on one thing at a time and make it a beautiful, magical experience. So that's what he did with the Mac and the ipod and the iPhone and the iPad. It was one thing at a time making it more beautiful than any other competitor. Well, no serious person would contend Elon Musk spent years and years and years of his own time, his own attention, coming up with a cyber truck, thinking, wow, this is the most beautiful, elegant looking car ever. Nobody thinks that. And that's where I think he does need to take a page from what the great late Steve Jobs did. Focus on one thing at a time. Don't focus on running 10 companies, saving the governments around the world. Focus on doing one thing well. And I think your investors and your customers will be much happier. Hey, thanks for joining me today. My name is TJ Walker. I look at the top stories of the day and analyze them through a communications lens. Why do I do that? Well, I devoted my life to helping people communicate more effectively and building personal development skills. I travel the globe and work with CEOs, Fortune 500 executives, presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Ms. Universes, you name it. I coach them one on one in small groups on how to communicate effectively. So now I look at how top leaders are communicating the news. We look at the actual news stories and I try to go behind the scenes to tell you what's really going on. What are they doing well that you can do? What are they not doing well so that you can do better? Because it's so easy when you're watching the news to just get depressed doom scroll and to think, well this, this is just depressing. I want you to feel good after learning about the news. So each day I try to give you about five top stories of the day and then help you learn from those stories. And again, the real lesson here from Musk is focus on one thing. You know, there's so much of this hustle culture have five side gigs. Well, the most successful people in the world quite often don't have a side gig. They focus on doing one thing better than anyone else in the world and that success fuels every other ambition. I do think that that is a skill that not enough people really pay attention to. We'll be back in just a moment. Imagine having a communication coach who never sleeps. Meet your new secret weapon, the TJ Walker AI clone. Go to TJWalker AI and start getting custom coaching 24 7. No scheduling, no hourly fees. I train presidents, prime ministers and Fortune 500 CEOs. But the same exact communication I've delivered to world leaders is now available to you online anytime@mediatrainingworldwide.com whether you're speaking on camera, pitching a client, or handling a crisis, you need these tools. These aren't fluffy motivational videos. They're practical, battle tested techniques to help you speak clearly, competently and persuasively. Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and take your communication to the next level. Got feedback or a question for me? I actually read them and if you send one, I'll send you a free mini course as a thank you. Just head to tjwalker.com feedback ever wish you could just ask me your question live now? You can. Every week I go live with members only on YouTube. It's called TJLive. I review pitches, fix presentations and answer your questions on the spot. It's interactive, personal and hands on. If you want real time coaching and a small group setting, go to TJ Walker and become a member. This isn't passive content, it's a two way conversation. Want to make sure we stay connected even if YouTube deletes me again? Join my newsletter@substack.com jwalkersuccess it's free, fast and packed with exclusive insights. We are back. I'm TJ Walker and I want to say a special hello to people joining us live today. I see Rajenda has joined us from India. Pablo's joined us as well. Thanks so much and let's just take a moment to address some of the comments. Rajendra is joining us from Pune, India today. Very glad you're here. Pablo saying hello. Rajendra points out the cars of today look almost the same and have no personalities unlike the cars of yesteryear and is also asking about replaceable batteries on phones. I agree with you about all cars looking alike, which is one of the reasons when I first saw the Cybertruck, I was initially reluctant to attack it because I was thinking, you know what, for so many years I say that every car seems to look alike. Mercedes looks like BMW, it looks like Toyota looks like Rolls Royce. In many cases, everyone wants to be an SUV that looks the same. Here's a car that genuinely looks different. I have to give them credit for trying something different. So that was my initial response to Tesla and I realized, okay, yeah, you get points for being different, but not if the different is a thousand times uglier than what every other car looks like. You don't get credit for that. So I agree with you completely. Regenda and you're asking about replaceable batteries in phone. I'm not an expert on battery technology. It's certainly something that is critically important in our modern world as everything is dependent on batteries and we've got to get those better and better and better. It's certainly a place where Tesla has shown leadership. Whether they can continue to do so, we'll find out. I want to thank those of you joining me live today on a Saturday morning. And why am I here on a Saturday morning? I'll be honest with you, I love doing this. I love looking at the news. I love talking to you. I love analyzing things through my field of expertise, communication skills and personal development skills and helping people. That's why I'm here, because I'll be honest with you. There are other things I could be doing on a Saturday morning. In fact today I'm moving and it's a massive, massive headache moving from an apartment to a new home that my family has purchased and all the things going on there. But I wanted to get up early and start my day with you as I've done now every day for about the last three and a half weeks. This show, this is the communiverse in kind of a soft launch mode right now. We will be going all in at a bigger level starting September 2nd and promoting it more. But this is kind of a soft launch for some insiders like you and me as we test the format and try to figure out what really is going to resonate and be sustainable. What makes you get up and create something on a Saturday morning? Because chances are that may be your sweet spot for your long term greatest career hits. I'm certainly hoping this is my biggest long term career success, even though I've had a lot of successes in the past. Those of you who don't know me, I have 12 million online student enrollments in my courses on personal development and communication skills. You just saw an ad for that earlier. So that's how people know me primarily as well as my work traveling the globe, working one on one with top leaders. Issue 3 Intel to cut 25,000 jobs and hit reset on its global chip strategy intel is undergoing one of the largest corporate downsizings in Silicon Valley history. The company announced Thursday it expects to shrink its workforce by more than 25% thousand employees by the end of 2025. That's a stunning 23% reduction. That would take intel from nearly 109,000 employees to 75,000 through a mix of layoffs, attrition and restructuring. Intel will also cancel factory plans in Germany and Poland, slow its Ohio project and shift operations from Costa Rica to Asia. The company posted a $2.9 billion net loss this quarter. Revenue held steady at $12.9 billion, slightly beating expectations. But intel still expects another loss next quarter. What does this really mean? Well, intel has fallen way behind a lot of its biggest competitors, Nvidia amd. It's not been the most dynamic company for for a while, but what's the bigger lesson for you and me and what's what's bringing this about? I hate to go back to that guy who loves attention so much in the last story, Elon Musk, but I do think this is one area where Elon Musk has had a huge impact. People saw that he came in, bought Twitter and basically destroyed and fired and eliminated 75% of the workforce. And the product still ran. It's still out there. People still post on it every day. I post on it every day. Is it quite as good as it was? Were there some problems? Okay, you could certainly make the case that, that Twitter has been junked up a little and isn't as safe. But by and large he kept the product up and running and he did it by eliminating 3/4 of the staff. And a lot of other Silicon Valley companies and high tech companies looked at that said, hmm, he may be onto something here. And that's why you've seen major staff cuts announced places like Facebook and frankly almost everywhere. And now intel saying they're going to cut a fourth of the workforce. What does this really mean for you and me? I think it means a couple of things. You got to be absolutely indispensable for any company you work with. The days of I'm gonna show up, I've got a mid level job, I'm not that into it, but it's got good benefits. I don't work long hours. I work, I get weekends off, a month vacation, a 401k, good health care. And if my kid is sick, I get to go home and take care of my kids. So I can just sort of come in, sit down, have my coffee and kind of, you know, give three fourths of my energy 35 hours a week and sort of coast until I get retirement. Those days are gone. Because with that attitude, you're going to get canned. I apologize if that seems uncaring. It's not about me caring. I have no impact on your job. It's about the companies and the investors for these companies. They don't care about you, they care about value. And I think that what we're seeing here is company after company after company. They're saying, well, chat GPT can do this better. Now some other AI program can do this better. Your customer service. Let's not give any customer service because no one else is giving customer service. Let's just make our customers better, deal with a chatbot and not give them humans. And if it's wildly inconvenient for our customers, to hell with them. We'll make more money by not having anyone work in customer service. And certainly if you've ever tried to get somebody on the phone at Google or Facebook or YouTube, you know there's no such thing as customer service. That's one of the reasons why they are so profitable. That's just one example so my point to you is, if you already have a job, realize just because there is a tradition in your company of people who've been there a certain amount of time with a certain amount of tenure and a certain number of credentials, MBAs or certifications means nothing in this new world. It means absolutely nothing. You have no job security. You just don't. The only thing that is going to give you job security in the modern world is skills that you have where you are able to solve hard problems for other people or companies and they value the solution you can give them. That's the only thing that gives you job security or economic security in the modern world. What does that mean? It means you constantly had to be learning new skills. You cannot coast. You absolutely cannot coast. You know, I'm here on a Saturday morning learning new ways of using AI to do things like create my own graphics that, and I forgot to put this one up at the beginning of the show. If I can be here at age 62 on a Saturday morning learning AI to create graphics and then put them into a show in a lean, efficient way, because there's no other staff here. I've got no producers. This isn't the CBS Evening Late show with 200 staffers. This is the Communiverse with one staffer. And you're looking at them at the moment. Yes, I do have other team members that help with certain things, but I'm doing this myself today. Is it perfect? No, but it's at least giving enough value to you to get to this far in the show and watch it. So that's really my message for you. Got to constantly be trying to learn new skills that are hard that most people don't want to do. Most people my age do not want to learn how to use artificial intelligence and use software and use a streamyard to do something like this. They don't want to do it because it's tedious. It's techie, and I'm not a techie. People tell themselves and. And I'm guilty of that myself from time to time, but unless you already have all the net worth you want, you're going to have to keep learning new skills. The other thing that I think is relevant, and this is a real downer, I apologize to those of you right out of college, those of you earlier in your career, those of you who say, hey, I really want to learn. I want to be a sponge. I want to go into an executive training program. Guess what? They're being cut left and right. So many companies are Saying, you know, if they used to hire 300 computer science majors graduates a year, or saying, let's just not hire any, let's just use AI for all the low level stuff our junior people used to. Let's give bonuses to our top 10% computer programmers and let's fire the other 90% because the top 10% can now be a thousand times more productive. That is what's happening, whether we want to admit it or not. And we could get into all sorts of discussions about unions need to be stronger. Yes, yes, yes. But right now I'm focused on you. This is the personal development side of this show and you got to figure out how to create value for yourself and for others so that you get compensated the way you want. One strategy I think, especially for young people, is you're going to have to just focus on some tiny niche of the market. You're going to have to start your own company, call it a freelancer, make it an llc. The legal structure doesn't matter, frankly, or at least that's not the advice I'm giving you. You got to find someone who values what you do enough to the point of paying you. And you got to get comfortable asking them for money. If you do that and you build enough of a client base and enough revenue base, now you have power. The Intels of the world, if you're in the right niche, will want to acquire your company. You get paid a lot of money and you'll get a salary. If intel doesn't want to buy you, you won't care because you have an income from your own business. Keep in mind, the real goal for most people is not to get a job. The real goal, I believe, is to use your talents in a way where you feel good about what you're creating in the world and you're making enough money to support the lifestyle you want. And as a corollary, you're saving enough money and investing enough money to build a net worth. It's different for everyone to get to the point where you have financial independence and you do not have to work unless you want to, not because you need it to pay rent or mortgage. I believe that's what most people want. A job is only one way of doing that. Now it's a pretty good way for a lot of people and it's been a great way certainly in the last hundred years for a lot of people in the industrialized world. But we may be in new changing time, for it's simply not the most viable option for most people. So I want you to consider if you're a young person, if you've just graduated from college or mid level professional and you've been job hunting and you're not getting overwhelmed and inundated with offers, start your own business. Do that half the time. Start charging money, anything, $5 for a service if you have to, on fiverr. And spend the other half of your time job hunting for a traditional job. That would be my recommendation to you. Issue 4. Donations surge to National Public Radio and PBS after funding cuts but it's not necessarily enough. After Congress eliminated $535 million in annual federal funding for public broadcasting, donors responded. But the new support doesn't come close to filling the gap. Roughly 12, excuse me, 120,000 new donors contributed an estimated $70 million more than last year. Some stations saw record breaking moments. WUNC from my old home state North Carolina raised more than a million dollars. WMNF pulled in 280,000. Rocky Mountain Public Media received a $500,000 gift. Still, leaders warn that this is a temporary bump. PBS and NPR have frozen hiring and paused discretionary spending. And executives say the infrastructure funded by public dollars can't be replaced by occasional surges in donor passion. So what's going to happen here? I mean part of the big problem with cutting public radio and public TV is you have a lot of rural areas in America that don't have any news. They're not big enough for a traditional TV news broadcast. They can't support a local newspaper. So this public radio public TV is all they had and now they're not going to know what's going on. Which means your local county commissioner can give a million dollar contract to his brother in law or his mother in law. No one's going to know. No one's going to hold that person accountable. So that's the problem with no media. Now I made the case a week or so ago when this issue came up before the United States Congress that given the fact that we are cutting aid, you know, we're cutting Medicaid for millions of people who aren't going to get health care. We're cutting usa. That's going to result in hundreds of thousands of people dying around the world paying money for more TV shouldn't be a priority. I do believe that, but I do think there's a lot of high quality programming, Sesame street, etc on public TV and public radio. I think the answer is they've got to build from the ground up. They've got to learn from podcasters. Joe Rogan There's a lot of flaws you could say about him. You could certainly make the case that he should spend more money on fact checkers. But it was built from the ground up. There's not all these. They didn't start off with a whole bunch of executives making 200, $250,000 a year sitting around in offices and going to meet. That's not how the Joe Rogan podcast or any podcast started. It quite often started with a passion from a creator. Doing it, bootstrapping it, shoestring budgets, building audience, building revenues over time through things like advertising. And yes, pbs, npr, they do have advertising. They just don't call it ads through membership. And let's give credit where credit's due. NPR and PBS have done a great job of pitching their community for money, the pledge drives. That's public speaking. That's great pitching. They're going to have to do more of that, number one. Number two, they're going to have to cut their structure. Some of the fanciest TV studios I've ever been in in my life have been public TV studios. I don't think this looks bad. This is just an office I'm in that cost $1,000 a month. Soon I'm going to be broadcasting from my home. You do not have to have huge infrastructure to be real to be meaningful in creating. And unfortunately, because PBS and NPR have been around for so many decades, there is some truth to the idea that there's a lot of bloat there. I don't agree with the idea that they're so ideologically un, you know, bias, that that's a problem. That's nonsense. Do we really want Big Bird teaching kids? Hey, kids, it's great to discriminate against somebody who has a religion different from yours. No, I don't want that. I'm hoping you don't want that. But the idea that we need to use limited tax dollars to create more TV in a time when the world is awash with video content, not all of it great, but there's a lot of great content on YouTube. I hope you put this into that category as well, where the marketplace is really solving the problem. There was a time when the marketplace simply could not create content and get it distributed to the world because There were only three TV channels. These days there's unlimited distribution because of YouTube and social media and podcasting platforms. So that's why I still believe very strongly that I won't call it a waste of money, but tax dollars should not be spent on TBS and npr and I realize that's controversial with some of you. Let's check in with some of the comments. I appreciate those of you watching live. We are live most days and then people can watch this on demand. Comments coming in Too much AI reliance may lead to a breakdown. It's possible. And I'll be upfront with you right now. I do use AI a lot to write some of the scripts, the introductions to these topics before I pontificate on them. They're occasionally going to be mistakes in that I apologize in advance. But I want you to call me out if you hear me say something factually incorrect. Too much reliance on AI may lead to a breakdown for companies, yes, but then that's opportunity for other companies. I mean, the nature of capitalism is constant. Someone goes up, someone goes down. There's recreation, creative destruction, as it's called. If you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average or any large index S P500, the companies who were dominant 30 years ago, most of them are gone today. And that's true of any 30 year cycle. Companies start small, they get bigger, they defeat incumbents, they get big, powerful, and then new startups come out, new technologies, better ways of doing it, and the process continues again and again and again.