Data Centers in the Desert, Chaos at Home: Power vs. Performance

Foreign. Saudi Arabia wants a new export, not oil, but AI power. Billions for desert data centers and global compute diphtheria, once vanquished, is back. Somalia wards full of children gasping for air and vaccine lies helping to fuel the surge. In Queens, New York, Zoran Mandani fills a stadium with Senator Bernie Sanders and aoc. But can a movement run a city? When the chants stop now, the weapon is paperwork. House Republicans pushed to question Mamdani's citizenship, while past eligibility controversies for Republicans drew far less heat. And on the farm front, a Trump voting soybean grower warns that tariff war means bankruptcies now and tragedies next, predicting even suicide unless trade reopens. All that and more today. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. It is Monday. Here's my question for you to figure out if you're successful and no, you're it doesn't mean looking at your bank book. Here's the question. It's Monday morning where I am when we're doing this. I want you to think about what's happening right now in your own mind. Are you happy? Are you as happy Monday morning as you are Friday night or Saturday morning? If you are, I think that means you're successful because you've somehow found a way to have purpose in your life and you're not stuck in a drudgery job. Now, I've had bad jobs before. I've had jobs, jobs where I had to pay my dues. But right now I am in a position where I absolutely love hopping out of bed on Monday morning and coming to work, which for me is only a few steps away to my studio because it is a home studio. So that's my challenge for you. You might not be a billionaire. I'm not a billionaire. But if you are happy, as happy on Monday morning as you are Friday night or Saturday morning, to me that is a surefire sign of success. Let's dive right in to the top stories of the day. No market news because yesterday markets were closed for Sunday. But let's dive into issue one, Saudi Arabia's next export, AI power. Saudi Arabia wants to be known not just for oil, but for exporting the computing power behind artificial intelligence. According to the Times, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pouring billions into vast data center complexes on both coast to sell AI compute to Europe, Asia and Africa. The state backed company Humane aims to handle about 6% of global artificial intelligence workload. That's up from less than 1% today. Deals are in motion with US giants. And the pitch is simple. Cheap land, fast permits and electricity that could cut AI cost by as much as 30% versus the United States. Now, there are a lot of skeptics out there. Analyst John Dinsdale says he can't imagine any circumstances that get Saudi to 6%. Still, Humane's Tariq Amin says we're behind in every facet. And executive Saeed Aldobas teases a way bigger plan with Elon Musk's Xai and as one expert put it, dismissing this as a fad risk underestimating Saudi ambition. Okay, so what's the real message here? The days of thinking of Saudi as being a one trick pony, they got oil, nothing else, are going to soon be over. They are very ambitious. They're putting their money where their mouth is. They're trying to really position themselves in the forefront of artificial intelligence. That's going to make them a big player on the international commerce scene for decades to come. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. Now, I am not an expert on server or data and I don't want to hold that out to you. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Middle east and I can tell you one constant thread I hear from people who live there, work there, part of governments there is that we have to plan for the day when the oil runs dry. We have to leverage our assets. That's why you see, frankly, things like this comedy festival in Saudi Arabia, they are trying to open up, they're trying to bring more western ideas. Yes, they have fights with traditional religionists of their culture who don't want that, who want to block things. But their leadership really does want a growing economy. They do not want to be sitting there when the last drop of oil comes out. And they think, okay, now what do we go back to pearl diving? Do we go back to being Bedouins or farmers? They don't want that. Once you've established a good life, however you define that, the Rolls Royces, whatever, you don't want to go back. And there are plenty of forward thinking people in every one of the major Middle Eastern countries. But Saudi Arabia is obviously dominant. So they are planning for the future and they see AI and AI infrastructure and energy as a part of that. So there's a real logic to it. They have a lot of land, they have low cost of land, they have low cost electricity. You put it together, especially with the willingness to invest huge sums of money up front, it might work out very well. So they have to constantly walk this tightrope between seeming like they're too much in favor of the United States versus too much in favor of China. They're courting Nvidia, amd, Qualcomm, Amazon, Microsoft. They want all the big boys, let's face it. And is this a good thing? Well, it's certainly a better thing than isolation and may forcing people to live like it's the 14th century. This is why I differed from a lot of my colleagues in the commentariat. I actually thought it was a good thing that the comedians went over. I don't think it was whitewash. Nobody now thinks, oh, the head of Saudi Arabia didn't take a hacksaw and slice up the Washington Post columnist and put his bones in a suitcase and take him out of the embassy. No one thinks that that didn't happen. So I'm in favor of Saudi Arabia, Middle east and everywhere in the world being a part of international commerce. Because when you have a customer who is giving you billions of dollars of business, you're much less likely to wage war against them. That doesn't always stop things, but it certainly is a disincentive to want to wage war or attack or to vilify someone who's giving you money. And I'd much rather Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle east be investing in energy and artificial intelligence than simply more weapons. Now it is true that AI could be the ultimate weapon that kills humanity, but if that happens, 6% of it being based in the Saudi Arabia, I don't think they're going to get the blame for that. What do you think? I would love to hear from you. This is a show where you and I sift through the top stories of the day and then have a conversation. If you're watching live on any platform, on TikTok, on YouTube, X Twitch, any of these, you can post your comments right here and we can have a part of the conversation. If you're watching On Demand, post your comments. Typically I do respond within a day or so to thoughtful comments, so please let me hear from you. Welcome to this show. If you're new to the show, this is called Filtered with TJ Walker. I look at the top business, economic, technology and culture stories of the day and then filter it through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills. That's what we're about right here. My pledge to you is spend a little time with me each day and you'll learn more about important stories affecting you and the world and your you'll learn more about yourself, how to improve your own communication skills and personal development skills so that you can be more successful. That's what we're all about. And tying that all together with Saudi Arabia. It doesn't matter if you're a giant country or just a superstar basketball player. It's very tempting to think what got me to where I am is going to take me to future successes. Now there are plenty of people who are superstars. At one point in their career they stop learning, they stopped evolving and they stopped changing. And then all of a sudden they're unemployed or even bankrupt. It happens in industry after industry. It happens to countries sometimes. So I give credit to not only Saudi Arabia, but Qatar, the Emirates. They're all scrambling around trying to figure out what's next when the oil dries up, when the natural gas is gone. That's why you see such an investment in not only AI video games coming out of Saudi Arabia. That's why you see so many universities starting in the Middle east because the Middle east is giving them money. They know what Americans have forgotten, which is the more universities you have with top quality research science experiments going on, top minds from around the world congregating in your country. The richer your country will be in the long run. The more startups will happen, the more business will be invigorating. So am I saying everyone in the Middle east is so much smarter than the No, I wouldn't go that far. But doesn't mean that we in the US can't learn from them occasionally too. And it certainly doesn't mean we can't forget what made us strong in the first place. More stories in just a moment.

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Hi and welcome back. My name is TJ Walker, thanks for joining me. We have a lot of interesting stories here to cover on this Monday. We are live August, not August, October 27th. I should know that because this is Halloween week. Things are exciting here in our household. My daughter is very much looking forward to Trick or Treat and all the fun that happens around Halloween here in the States. Okay, let's dive right into issue two Diphtheria Returns Vaccine Lies have a Body count Diphtheria, once vanquished, more or less, is back according to the Times. Stephanie Nolan reporting from Mogadishu. Wards at dimartino Hospital are packed with gasping children as war, climate displacement and vaccine hesitancy fuel the deadly surge. Admissions jumped to nearly 1,000 this year, up from 49 last year, and 80% are kids. The disease is preventable and treatable if caught early. Yet in low resource settings, as many as one in four infected children die. We didn't even have a diphtheria support modality and now we have to build out a whole new process, said GAVI's Katy Clark. One Somalia mother, after three of her children fell ill, told the Times. I'm going to try to convince him to get them vaccinations. Here's the hard context. A decade of anti vaccine demagoguery, much of it amplified by right wing and let's be fair, left wing influencers, has helped erode trust worldwide. A cautious evidence based floor for needless deaths tied to vaccine refusal is in the hundreds of thousands globally. Okay, what's the real message here? Diphtheria is making a comeback. Congratulations diphtheria. And it's because a lot of right wing and lefting influencers around the globe are spreading this idea that all vaccines will kill you. Well, you know what has killed about 300,000 people in the world in the last few years? This idea that vaccines are bad. Now let's dig a little bit deeper here. You know the United States has a lot of influence. It's not just our economy, it's not just our weapons, it is our cultural power. And the fact is there are a lot of influencers on YouTube, social media, TikTok based in the United not exclusively based in the US but a lot of them are spreading this nonsense about how vaccines are put out by the evil pharmaceutical companies trying to make money off of you and do harm to you. The real harm is being done by more and more children not getting vaccines. Conservative global estimate there have been over 300,000 preventable deaths over the last decade linked to vaccine refusal driven by Misinformation. That to me seems an extraordinarily low number because you could make the case that about that many died in the US just because they avoided Covid vaccines. So this is a huge, huge problem. So here's the problem we do have, especially in America. One way of owning the libs is to say, I'm not taking vaccines. My children aren't taking vaccines. You liberals go stick it. That's become sort of a cute, clever way of scoring cheap political points. The problem is it's not just a cheap political point. It may end up in not only the death of your child, but disease spreading and death of other children in your community. Because it's not just diphtheria, it's measles, it's other diseases. Because at some point a society loses herd immunity for some diseases and vaccines, it's 95%. Others it could be 85%, but it's dropping now specific to diphtheria. The best evidence is that you need 85% of people vaccinated in order to have herd immunity in a community. We were 95% in 2020. I don't have to tell you what happened in 2020. It's now down to 92%. So are we really. Do we really want to go back to an era where tons and tons of American of US children are getting diphtheria and dying from diphtheria? You look at the if the current trends continue, we are going to dip below 85%. This is a tough issue. There's so much misinformation about it. In fact, this video right here might get flagged in various social media platforms for even discussing vaccines because there's so much misinformation about. There are oligarchs owning technical. I don't want to get more criticism, spreading disinformation. So they actually make it harder for a video like this to get eyeballs and to go viral. I'm not focused on going viral here. What I try to do here is give you my own best honest assessment of what's really important going on in the world and then analyzing it together through a communication lens and a personal development lens. And this vaccine thing is fascinating to me for many reasons because for so long there was not a lot of controversy. It didn't matter. Certainly when I was growing up, if a parent considered themselves conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, libertarian, everybody got vaccines. It wasn't a part of this contentious culture war and this debate. Now that's changed. And here's the problem. So many of Us in America and around the world are adopting this tribal mentality that says, okay, here's somebody I don't like for X reasons. They've now said something completely unrelated that has scientific evidence behind it and that has always been considered apolitical. I'm now simply going to say I disagree with them on this apolitical scientific backed recommendation because I don't like their position on transsexuals participating in swim meets or something like that. So that's a problem. And the result is quite often death or severe health problems for the rest of your life. Because I showed the libs that I don't take vaccines. Now let me be fair here. This is an issue that is not just left right. There are plenty of people, historically, look at someone like Robert F. Kennedy whose politics aligned with the liberal side of things, the progressive part of America, they too took this attitude of just oh, big corporations are bad and evil. Well, you know what? Some big corporations are bad and evil, but not when it comes to making a vaccine. That is partially responsible for why the average age expectancy in the world has gone from about 32 to 70 in just the last hundred years. That's not what makes corporations evil. So yeah, there are plenty of bad big companies in the world. There are plenty of pharmaceutical companies that do release products of dubious value, there's no doubt about that. But you can't then make the jump to say, well then all pharmaceutical companies are bad and all their products are bad and therefore we have to avoid any vaccine. That's the logical jump. And again, it's not far left, far right. It's both doing that and I want you to be successful in life and you can't be successful in life if you're dead. You're not going to have as much joy in life if your 10 year old who was perfectly healthy is now in a wheelchair the rest of your life because you followed some bozo on the Internet telling you, oh, don't take the vaccine because a big pharmaceutical company made it, because that's going to, I won't say ruin your life, but severely diminish the quality of life for you, not to mention your child. So it's all well and good to say, do your own research, but it's irrelevant if the research you're getting is from people who don't fundamentally believe in science. If you and I have a debate and you say, well TJ you're kind of old looking and kind of bald and you know, you're 62, you could pass for 64 and I say wrong. My research shows that everybody thinks I look like I'm 28 and I have a beautiful head of hair and I've found three blog posts that say that and it turns out it was my staff doing it as a goof on me to fool me. I could say, well look, I've done my research and my research proves to you I look like I'm 28 and have a beautiful head of hair. But it's meaningless because my research is garbage. And that is the problem so many of us face when we say we're doing our own scientific research. We're not. We're just getting confirmation bias. Back with more in a moment. Want a shortcut to powerful communication skills?

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Your direction Direct line to everything I do we are back. Thanks so much for joining me today. We have a lot of fun and a lot going on today. We're going to dive right in to more top stories. The Left's Stadium Moment now comes the governing test Zorhan Mandani packed Forest Hill Stadium in New York City with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez at his side, casting his New York City mayoral bid as movement versus Money, according to the Times. Lisa Allaire Sanders called a Mamdani win Trump's worst nightmare, while AOC vowed, quote, there will be a day after Mandani told supporters, we have a movement of the masses and promised universal child care, free buses, city owned groceries and a rent freeze. Here's the context that I want to focus on here for a moment with you. In European democracies, new parties can surge overnight and win big. In the US we rarely mint new parties, but once radical factions instead capture majority party machinery. If Mandani wins, the rally turns into a stress test trash pickup, crime, schools, budgets and whether progressive populism can deliver. Even allies warn governing is not easy. The question isn't crowd size anymore. It's whether Tuesday garbage day And Friday paychecks still arrive on time. Okay, what's the real message here? We've seen surging rallies supporting Soran Mandami in New York City. Is it significant? Yeah, it does show people are excited about him. Guess what? It's good when citizens are excited about their leaders and actually support them. So stop pretending it doesn't matter. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. So United States is different from most other democracies in the world. We have this sort of rigid two party system that other countries things are much more fluid now. This creates positives and negatives. It makes things much more status quo oriented. But it also makes it harder to really screw up things and go too far in any one extreme. What we are seeing in the United States now is a resurgence of the true left. Let me step back here a minute. Some of you are going to disagree and think this is crazy by every objective standard. From a political scientist looking at worldwide democracies, the Democratic Party in the US is considered to be a centrist party, even a center right party. I know that sounds crazy to some of you. What are you talking about, tj? Everyone knows the Democrats are radical leftists. Well, that's just political spin that's convenient for the Republican Party. The Democratic Party by and large is a centrist right of center party in America. Now there are some exceptions. Senator Bernie Sanders is someone who is very much a part of the left. He would be more at home in the Social Democratic Party in Europe. Same with Mamdani and aoc. They actually are a part of the left and by all accounts it seems like they're gaining power and support. They're certainly energizing crowds. Now here's the part a lot of people forget. So many prognosticators are saying, well done. He's going to be a horrible failure and everyone's going to move out of New York City and it's going to be this unmitigated disaster. There's actually a huge track record, a lengthy track record of social. And I'm not endorsing socialism, it's not my cup of tea. But mayors of cities who called themselves socialists, Social Democrats, sometimes even communists who were seen as good. Mayor Bernie Sanders was a mayor before he was in the Congress. Milwaukee has had a socialist mayor before and there have been plenty of examples of mayors who call themselves socialist Social Democrats and been quite successful. So I'm not one of those. Even though Mondami uses labels I don't personally use for myself, I wouldn't call myself A democratic socialist or a socialistic Democrat doesn't mean he can't be successful. The other idea, that everyone's going to move away, that's sort of assuming he can just come in and give every rich person a 90% income tax. He can't do that. He is going to be judged in part, as I mentioned in the newsread. Does the garbage get picked up ultimately? Can he actually make any part of New York City more affordable to people who aren't already rich, who aren't already Wall street fat cats, who aren't already at the highest ends of their profession, whether it's advertising, marketing, fashion and all the other industries based there in New York City, that's going to be difficult. There's absolutely no doubt that is not going to be an easy task. But I do think that we are entering a period now because of artificial intelligence giving superpower to our big tech companies, social media, the algorithms design to make people angry all the time to exacerbate tensions. In some ways it makes it a little easier for new parties to emerge within old parties. Certainly Donald Trump demonstrated that in 2016. None of the party poobahs liked Donald Trump. It seems like so long ago. It seems like 100 years ago now, but National Review magazine devoted an entire issue where they had dozens and dozens and dozens of conservative writers, thinkers, intellectuals, all make the case why Donald Trump would be the worst thing to ever happen to the Republican Party. They've all pretty much changed their tune now because Trump changed the party to his own mold. Completely different party positions on things like tariffs and socializing companies like Intel. Could the same thing happen to the Democratic Party? Traditionally, the idea has been no, it's impossible because Democrats are a party of coalition, not of ideology. And they need moderates and they even need right of center people in order to get electoral majorities. I still think that's true, but in certain locations, like in New York City, it will be different. Let's take a look at some of the other countries around the world and how this has happened. Again, our own mindset in the United States is okay, you're only going to have a choice between a Republican and a Democrat. And some may be a little more liberal and some may be a little more conservative, but it's basically the same old thing that was true until about 10 years ago. It's not true anymore in the Republican Party. And it appears as though it's about to be a little different in the Democratic Party too. Especially if someone like AOC runs for president. And gets the nomination. It's going to be a radical, radical change. But we live in a time where political parties and political cultures around the world with a lot of democracies that we have stuff in common with, are seeing similar changes now. It's been more on the right. Let's not kid ourselves. Let's take a look around the country. Nigel Farage, who was considered a joke for for decades in Europe, couldn't even get elected to a seat in parliament for decades. Now people are thinking this guy could become prime minister. And he is very much sort of a Trump white character, down to having his own meme coin and down to making money on a cameo. And he's a member of parliament and a talk show host and he's involved in 100 other projects very similar to Donald Trump and loves being flamboyant on social media. So he's someone who is very similar. He has something called the Reform Party that some polls show it could actually take over parliament in the next election. In the Netherlands, you have Wilder's PVV topping the vote, entering a governing Congress coalition. In Italy, brothers of Italy leapt from a fringe movement to lead the government. In France you have the national rally made rapid gains reshaping party competition. Portugal, Chega surged quickly. In Austria, the FPO ascended quite quickly. Germany, the AfD expanded influence through regional breakthroughs. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats, not the same as the Democrats in the United States, have gained leverage backing the government. So what we're seeing around the world is in democracies more and more what used to be called fringe ideas, fringe parties are gaining real power. And the United States, maybe they're even taking things over or could it's already happened to one party in the US could it happen in the other party? I don't know. But if Mamdani wins the mayoral race, he's going to be by some accounts the most high profile elected Democrat in the country. And he will be seen as the leader, the spokesperson for the Democratic Party. Let's not forget anyone who becomes the mayor of New York City is, is at some level a major national player. And they do run for president from time to time. They haven't done very well. John Lindsay's campaign for President back in 72 didn't go very well and certainly Bill de Blasio's campaign for president was an instant joke. But you've got that platform, you've got the money, you're in the center of the media universe, at least for US Politics in New York. So it is a huge huge platform. Can Mandani, even if he governs well and has high approval ratings in New York City as mayor, can he get past the stigma of using the socialist word? Democratic socialist? That's what I haven't figured out because I still happen to believe that in the United States, if you are to believe polling data, that word is the kiss of death for huge swaths of the American electorate. It's maybe an inch better than labeling yourself a pedophile. And that's not a good brand either. So that's what is still to be determined. Now he can always rebrand himself and say, hey, forget what I said in the past. I'm a Democrat. And if you think, well, politicians can't get away with that, can they? Ho ho ho. Let's not forget Donald Trump has been a member of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party independent. He's changed party affiliation five times. Didn't seem to hurt him when he ran for the Republican nomination. So who can say? Let's look at your comments. Caviar and crumpets writes in the Democratic Party should be disbanded. Heteronormative family values need to be our policy. So caviar, I mean, that's the kind of frankly, cheap shot that doesn't add anything to the conversation. What you're saying is you have a particular political viewpoint and therefore in a democracy, in a republic, whichever term you want to use, you're saying if someone has a viewpoint different from yours, it should be disbanded. Okay, that's not democracy. That's not a republic. That's a totalitarian regime. So you know you're entitled to have that opinion, but you're not entitled to have that opinion and say you also believe in democracy or fairness or openness without everyone else saying you don't know what you're talking about. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much. All comments are welcome and I try to share most of them unless they are just spewing absolute nonsense. Lots more news to come. Stay tuned. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Okay, and I hit the wrong button there. Now stay tuned. After this commercial word Filtered is brought.

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AI it's not just smart, it's personal. Wanna support the show? Skip the ads and buy me a coffee. That's buymeacoffee.com tjwalker Foreign. Okay, welcome back. This is filtered. Let's dive right into the next topic which relates to our previous topic, citizenship as a weapon. GOP targets Mandani. That's what's happening right now. House Republicans are urging the Justice Department to scrutinize New York City mayoral front runner Zoran Mamdani's naturalization and even considered denaturalization and deportation over alleged omissions on his citizenship forms. According to the New York Post, Representative Randy Fine from my state of Florida said, quote, if there is any fraud, we need to denaturalize and deport. Calling Mamdani the enemy within, Representative Andy Ogles labeled him an anti Semitic socialist communist and wrote DOJ in June seeking a probe. Now, Mamdani is a Ugandan born Democrat Democratic socialist who became a citizen in 2018. He denies being a communist. And you have to deny that if you want to become a citizen and immigrate here. A lot of people don't know that you can't have supported any kind of totalitarian philosophy and become a citizen. The Post reports DOJ has taken no public action. Now context matters. US Politics has a long history of eligibility scuffles that did not trigger denaturalization drives. Ted Cruz faced natural born citizen debate for being born in Canada. John McCain required a unanimous Senate resolution affirming his eligibility because he was born in Panama. George Romney was born in Mexico. Barry Goldwater was born in the Arizona Territory. Chester A. Arthur even faced rumors he'd been born in Canada. Standards should be consistent. Okay, so what's the real message here? Republicans are once again showing their ugly, ugly side, saying we don't have to defeat Mondame at the voting booth. Let's just toss him out of the country. Let's skew things. If we don't like you, we're just going to say you're a foreigner. Get out of here. You know, Ted Cruz, John Duquesne, Melania, those kind of foreigners, they're all welcome to stay. Dig a little deeper here. So I do well remember the controversy about Ted Cruz, because the first time I saw Ted Cruz speak, I believe it was the 2012 Republican convention. I was frankly, blown away with how good a speaker he was. He walked around the stage. He didn't just stand behind the lectern and read a teleprompter. He was captivating, he was compelling. And at the time, I was doing live commentary, probably it doesn't surprise you? And I was saying, wow, this guy is fantastic. He's gonna definitely run for president and could be a very strong presidential contender. Comment after comment came in saying, tj, you're so stupid. You're such a fool. You're such an idiot. He was born in Canada. He's not eligible to run for president. He's not a natural born citizen. But Ted Cruz being a Republican, not the first one to have figured this out. Rules don't apply to him the way it does for other people. So. And I'm being a little bit glib there, okay? There are plenty of constitutional scholars who believe that if both of your. Well, in his case, one parent In America, a US citizen, that makes you a US citizen in the same way that John McCain was born on a military base in Panama because his father was in the military. Now, there's still cause for debating whether or not Ted Cruz is a US Citizen, but no one on the Republican Party seems interested in reopening that. And I haven't seen Democrats forcing the issue. So if he does run again, it doesn't seem to be an issue. It only seems to be an issue for the other side for some reason. I'll let you deduce why that might be. It's particularly interesting considering all the flak that Barack Obama got for allegedly being born in Africa, even though he had a birth certificate that showed he was born in the United States. Even that didn't mollify a lot of his critics, who just formed almost a religious, cultish belief in this idea that Obama was a Muslim from Africa, even though he was a Christian from the United States. So a lot of times facts just get in the way of these long held, strongly held beliefs. But now we see sort of the ugliness of American politics coming out. Okay, Mandani, if you were a regular plain vanilla Democrat, a Mario Cuomo, and you want to reduce taxes for the wealthy and reduce regulation, things we like. I mean, you could be from planet Mars and we'd say, have at it, go at it, do whatever you want to do. You're on our side, you're part of our team. But because he is advocating some positions that aren't popular to the current party in power in Washington, the response is not, well, let's have an honest debate or let's run our own candidate. Let's support Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee. If he doesn't win, okay? Let's rally around the person who does win. And then after four years, when his term is up, we can evaluate and run against him or maybe support him if his policies made the city better. That's the way America typically was. It's not that way anymore. It's. You've said something that I don't like. That means you're on the other team. And I'm just going to say the other team is evil, alien. In this case, they're saying literally alien. And therefore we need to not vote him out at the next election, but kick him out using the full force of the federal government. And funny how they never seem to do that about Melania. Funny how they never seem to do that about George Romney or Ted Cruz. Is it a double standard in America? Well, Mamdani has not been deported yet. This may remain chatter in the fringes of the Internet, but these days the fringes get injected in the mainstream very, very quickly. So let's see. I mean, I could certainly imagine where this Department of Justice, if they can't find facts that would warrant Mamdani being deported, I could certainly envision them just making it up. Just saying, oh, he never got his citizenship, he's here illegally. We are deporting him right now. Just making it up. I could easily. Why would they do that? Why would someone who went to a law school do that? Because they get a tweet or a truth social post from Trump saying deport Mandani today. If not, you will be fired and your house will be surrounded by my henchmen screaming for your head. Okay, That's a good motivator. And that is in fact, why Madani, even if he's elected in a landslide, might not be able to serve his full term. 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Direct line to everything I do. Welcome back to Filtered tariffs Hit home a Trump voting farmer warning. A Kentucky soybean farmer who supports President Trump says the trade war is pushing family farms to the brink. Speaking on News Nation, Caleb Ragland explained that losing China, which uses 61% of all soy consumed around the world, has shattered his market. We have not sold a single bean to China, he said, noting that harvest season normally brings robust buying. Now Raglan praised some of Trump's policies on taxes and biofuels. He's not some partisan liberal hack. He's a supporter of Trump. But he urged balance. He said we also need trade as well. He blasted the move to bolster Argentina and floated US Beef purchases there, saying it undercuts American producers. The stakes, he warned, are life or death and predicted bankruptcies even. Yeah, let me just share with you his words directly because I found them so powerful and so eloquent the way he spoke. So let me share this with you right now and you can hear directly from one of Trump's own supporters. Let's listen now.

At a crossroads that if we don't get some things moving soon and get some serious trade taking place, we're going to need a financial bridge or the reality will be the increases in bankruptcies, the loss of many thousands of family farms. It will even be worse with people committing suicide, choosing to end it all. And it's terrible.

The things that, wow, okay, to end it all. I mean, that is pretty stark. Again, don't take the advice of an MSNBC commentator telling you that. Don't listen to npr. This is from a farmer in Trump Plant, someone who likes Trump, supports Trump. He's saying that Trump's policies with these tariffs are going to result and people killing them, bankruptcies, suicides, ending it all. Pretty stark. Pretty stark. So what's the real message here? Trump's tariffs are literally killing farmers. It's not just making them bankrupt. Soybean farmers are increasingly reaching moments of extreme desperation and some are actually contemplating killing themselves. They see no way out. Let's dig a little bit deeper here and look at this. I mean, this is one of the problems of a guy just being bold and not worrying about niceties and just getting things done. Being a man of action. That's what a lot of people like about Trump. The problem is when you do that, you don't think about unintended consequences. When you're the president of the United States and you have vast powers over not Just the economy of the entire United States, the entire world. Everything you do can be magnified in a million different ways and cause unintended consequences in the way that being a developer or a TV talk show host or a TV reality performer simply doesn't have that kind of sway. You can do bold, interesting things and if a business fails, you go bankrupt. You got 10 other sources of revenue. You could do this whatever you want, anytime anyhow. Shoot first, ask questions later, or even aim later as a real estate developer or as a reality TV star and get away with it and actually be successful at some level. Doesn't work that well when you're talking about regulations that are so wildly complex that there's all kinds of unintended consequences you haven't thought through. And with Trump, every problem he creates, he then wants credit for solving the problem to get it back to where it was before he caused the problem. So right now it does look like he's going to be giving a big multi billion dollar handout to farmers, which he wouldn't have had to do without putting this soybean on the list for tariffs and putting tariffs on China. So now we've got more big government. You know, the party that's supposed to be against socialism. You know, we talked earlier about socialism in the Democratic Party. I think any honest observer and theorist of socialism would say we do have a big problem with socialism in America when it comes to actual policies. It's the United States government as it's run right now by the current administration, socializing major companies like intel, major steel companies taking pieces of companies having big government control. Which industry is going to win, which industry is going to lose, which industry are we going to prop up? That's government planning that goes beyond socialism. That's kind of like 1970s, 1980s era Soviet Union, the Ministry of Economic Planning with its five year plan. I mean, that's kind of what the United States is facing right now. And does it create inefficiency? Yes. Does it create corruption? Yes. Does it place more importance on your, who you support politically than what you're creating in the economy? Yes. Farmers, by and large support Donald Trump and the Republican Party. So short term, some of them are probably going to go bankrupt, may kill themselves. I hope that doesn't happen. But it's been predicted, not by me, but by, by members of their own community. Long term, if the government ever opens again, which we don't even seem to talk about anymore, they're probably going to get a big bailout because they are a part of a favored special interest group because it's politically correct to support white guys who live in rural areas by this current administration. So they're probably going to get a bailout. And what is irking them so much, rightfully so, is guess who is selling the soybeans to China now? Argentina. Why is Argentina going to do well? Well, in part because Trump wants to give $20 billion of US tax dollars to Argentina. Are they some important strategic partner of America? No, he's supporting them because they have a president who says nice things about Trump, who also has crazy wacky hair, who also endorses crazy wacky economic theories. So it's just kind of a buddy, buddy system. So if you're a farmer, you're being told, hey, forget it, I'm giving all your business to this crazy, wacky foreigner in South America. But it's okay because he says nice things about me. And that appears to be a winning message or at least a message that has not caused political damage to the current administration. We're going to be following this one regularly here. Part of the message here for you and for me is you've got to look at the complexity of certain messages. It's easy to just say, I stand up for America and I'm going to put a big tariff on all these other countries so that they play fair. If all you hear is that, it sounds pretty good. But it's when you go to the step two and step three and okay, this does this and this does this, then you realize, oh, wow, you've got thousands of soybean farmers out of business. More in a moment about these workers in Washington, D.C. our federal government officials, those on furlough and how they're making ends meet. Stay tuned.

We'll be right back after this break.

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Welcome back now to the grab bag section of the show. The Furloughed so he opened a hot dog stand. Okay, A government shutdown has sidelined an IRS lawyer. He turned the pause into a punchline and a small business. According to Business Insider, 31 year old Isaac Stein has spent the furlough selling hot dogs in DC's Noma neighborhood at Shyster's Dogs. He handles tax regulation by day, or at least he did normally, and slings mustard and sauerkraut noon to 5 while Washington is closed for business. Here's what he said. This is self expression, me having artistic fun, he said. The stand is layered with legal humor. A $1,000 shirt off my back at $10, the only choice with mustard and kraut and an $11 hot dog with the wrong toppings. I have all the right permits and I pay my taxes, he noted, adding he wants to punish people for putting ketchup on a hot dog. He's serving 40 to 50 customers daily, netting 2 to $300, but insist he wants back to public service. Everyone wants to get back to work because we actually like what we do. Okay? So this government shutdown has been going on so long I don't even know what day we're in now. And with so many other crazy stories happening with flooding the zone with, well, you know what, that word for excrement. We're going to keep things family and business friendly on this show. A lot of people are forgotten that there is a government shutdown. You know who has not forgotten we have a government shutdown? Government workers because they don't get paid. And while government work can pay for a nice middle and even upper middle class lifestyle and income, it does not generally pay. Sort of wealth creation where someone can say I don't need income for a couple of years, I'll just live off my investments. That's not how most federal government workers live. I was a federal government worker more than 30 years ago and I think my top salary was $3,000 a month. I was able to afford a small apartment, go out to dinner occasionally, but it wasn't a lot of savings. If I had gone even one month without getting paid, I would have been. I won't say I would have been homeless, but I would have been back on friends couches. So here's the big irony. We as Americans, especially conservatives, love to bash government. We love to talk about lazy and incompetent government workers are and everything is supposed to be as bad as waiting at the Department of motor vehicles for 10 hours the constant trope. Except for anyone who works for the police and military. Supposedly they never made a mistake, but everyone else in government is supposed to be horrible, incompetent, lazy and stupid. And then we say, by the way, every so often, we just don't want to pay you for a month and leave you dangling and leave your entire career in limbo. Why would a smart, intelligent, thoughtful person even want to enter a profession like that when they are given nothing but abuse and essentially laid off at a moment's notice? Nothing to do with how effective they are, nothing to do with their competence, but just to be told, hey, you got your job review, your annual review on Friday. You're great. We love you. You're fantastic. You're doing an excellent job. Now, it's now Monday morning, by the way. Don't come in. Don't expect another paycheck, maybe ever. That is the message we tell our federal government officials. How does this government shutdown ever end? Because this is an oddity when it comes to federal shutdowns. Typically, after a few days of a government shutdown, it becomes very clear to one political party, uh oh, we kind of miscalculated. They put their finger in the wind and they say, ooh, we're reading the polls and the polls are telling us that more voters are blaming us for this shutdown. They're not liking it. They're going to punish us, possibly the next election. So let's do a deal and get this thing open. That's what has happened for both political parties for decades. It's different this time. According to most serious political analytical reporting, members of both parties have somehow convinced themselves that politically, more voters blame the other party than their party. Now, mathematically, that can't really be true, but that is what is happening right now, where Republicans are convinced that their message is getting through to most voters, that it's the Democrats fault because they have shut down the government and they're the ones to blame and they deserve all the negativity associated with it. So they really, and I'm not questioning their integrity, I think many Republicans believe that. On the other hand, members of the Democratic Party in Congress, their leadership believe that their message is winning, that they are fighting to keep health care such that 20 million Americans don't have their health care doubled, their health, their monthly annual health or their monthly health care premiums double come January, and that that is in fact the reason why they want their version, their bill, to open up the federal government, which would require funding to be what it has been for the last handful of years. They're convinced that that message is resonating and that the at least a plurality of voters are blaming the Republican Party for the shutdown. Now, they can't both be right. I have seen numerous polls showing that between roughly 9% and 15 as high as 18% of voters, more of those voters blame the Republicans for the shutdown than blame the Democrats. So if you look at traditional, traditional metrics, polling when it comes to who is to blame, it would say the Republicans are getting punished more by the voters than the Democrats. But polling, as you know, is highly variable. Polls show Trump losing every election by a lot and he somehow has won at least two of the last three. So I understand there is a lot of skepticism when it comes to polling data. How this government shutdown ends, I don't know. All right, that concludes sort of our big issues for the day. We're going to go into more grab bag issues as well. This next one. Tear gas at a Halloween parade. Parents and kids heading to Chicago's old Irving park parade instead met tear gas. Fox 32 reports CPB tackled an undocumented worker on North Kildare, then used chemical agents as neighbors and protesters confronted them. Former prosecutor Brian Kalb says a 70 year old neighbor was detained. Lawyers are preparing a suit. Agents left after 30 minutes. The parade limped on ice. And CPB haven't commented. Let's just look at this. I do want to share with you some of the footage of this because Chicago is a town near and dear to me. It is a place where I've spent a lot of time. My own father was there. I have many relatives from there. I visit Chicago frequently anytime I've ever gone. I've never seen anything but beautiful beauty and harmony in the last 20 years. I understand there is violence, but let's just take a look at this report here and I want to share with you some of the footage. This is courtesy of a local TV station. Tear gas in old Irving park right now, our own neighborhood scaring our children. Chaos rocks. A quiet Northwest side neighborhood.

Started hearing some whistles and when I looked out I saw two fully uniformed.

So ice. The federal government is tear gassing community members on their way to a Halloween parade. This sounds like something from a poorly written dystopian screenplay. You know, if you went back 10 years ago and you let's say you were a liberal Hollywood screenwriter and you wanted to talk about some future where some right wing, demagogic totalitarian dictator wannabe comes to power, tear gassing American citizens On American soil, at all American events like Halloween parades. If you had written that into a screenplay, I think the average studio executive would say, look, this is too over the top. Yeah, you deserve some, you know, some creative license. It's a fictional movie, but come on, this is just fear that would never happen. People won't even be able to really. And yet it's happening. What I just showed you was not a screenplay from some movie. It's reality. It is the reality of life for people in Chicago and people in the state of Indiana. And I think it's going to get worse, frankly, because this administration realizes, okay, there's our team and the other team. The other team, anything you can do to cause them pain, torture, punishment, to squeeze them, to make them miserable is good. It's a good thing. So if you happen to be a citizen in a state where your state did not give votes and electoral college votes to the current incumbent, then I think you can just see more and more of that. I don't think we're that far away. And excuse me, some of you will think this is hyperbolic. I don't think we're that far away from seeing Democratic governors being, having the Department of Justice come just handcuff them and take them away. It's not much of a stretch. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, you may recall Trump said he should be arrested and when asked for what crime it was for running for governor. So that is the shift in mentality we have now where simply being a Democrat is a crime. And folks, there's a word for a society like that. And the word, believe it or not, is not democracy. Okay, some more, more assaults on democracy. This time from my current home state of Florida. A Florida grand jury they claim targets lawfare. ABC News says attorney Mike Davis, a Trump ally, claims a federal judge ordered a Fort Pierce grand jury for January to probe a decade long conspiracy against Trump. Prosecutors won't confirm the scope. Davis cites 18 USC Section 241 and urges top officials to testify. A grand jury isn't a verdict, but it is a subpoena power. So this is some crazy stuff again. If you wrote this In a screenplay 10 years ago, no one would believe it. But in Florida, you've got officials putting together a grand jury where they're essentially going to criminalize any public official who somehow ever investigated anything to do with Donald Trump. Now this is on top of the fact that he now wants to extort half a trillion dollar. Half a trillion dollars. Half a billion dollars. $250 million a quarter of a trillion dollars from the US taxpayers to pay him back for all his legal fees that he's had to fight for breaking laws and then being called on it and being convicted sometimes. So this, all this relates to the Trump documents case. Apparently anyone who did their job, who actually fulfilled their obligation as a public servant to report on the fact that Trump illegally got documents, illegally stored them, stuffed them in a hallway in Mar a Lago, anyone associated with that now has to look at the prospect of being indicted and having their life ruined, being bankrupted by legal fees, their career stopped because they're going to have to do nothing but fight these legal battles. Truly, truly a bizarre situation. Hey, I want to thank you for joining me today. What I'd like to do these days is end on a very positive, uplifting, helpful note to you. So what I've started doing on the show is what I've started doing with the show answering your question. If you are one of my students and I've got to take the volume off of my feed there, apologies for that. If you're one of my students in any of my 300 plus communication skills courses, personal development courses, and you have a question for me, I will answer it typically at the end of the show right here. So let's dive right. And you can also post questions right here and I will answer them. Typically, people post questions that relate to the topics we discuss, the topical news, but I always try to tie those in to personal skills to you that you can use to be effective as well. So let's just dive right in with today's question. This is from one of my students in my complete storytelling course named Thanaroth. Thanaroth says, how can I develop my storytelling and speaking skills to make my narratives captivating and engaging? As the TED Talk speakers who first inspired me, I absolutely love this question. And I love ted. I love TED Talks most of the time. But let's step back a minute. And by the way, I do have a whole course on how to get a TED Talk if you're interested. What actually makes a TED Talk special? Why is a TED Talk quite often so so much more interesting than a typical business meeting or a trade industry conference or convention? It's because the founders of TED were very smart when they set it up. They said, how can we get people to give speeches but eliminate all the boring junk that most people can't stand about speeches? One of them was okay, PowerPoint with lots of bullet points. They just made a rule, you can't use PowerPoints with bullet points. You want to use PowerPoint. It's got to be one image per slide. Great idea. Nothing preventing you from doing that in every presentation you give. The other rule they gave was don't be too long. You can't speak for more than about 18 minutes. So the idea that you're going to stand up and read slides for the next 30, 40, 50, 60 minutes. No, guess what? You can follow that principle. Anytime you give a presentation in your business life, your career, your profession, or in the academic world, you can simply tell yourself you're not going to speak for more than about 18 minutes. The next thing the founders of TED did is they said, you really got to have one interesting idea in your presentation. Guess what? There's nothing preventing you from doing that in any speech you give. So often people get up to give a presentation and they're so focused on, well, you know, I have to give an update on everything we've accomplished this last quarter. So there's this fact, this fact, this column, this graph. They're so fixated on trying to convey 239 different data points that they forget there's no one big idea there. There's nothing interesting there. So if you want to give a TED Talk, you basically have to prove to the organizers, I have a new interesting idea. You need to do that with every presentation as well. The final step, what TED people realized, is if you're only going to focus on one idea now you have time to make that idea more interesting and more memorable. The number one way to do that is by telling a story and vivid examples. Tell as many stories as it takes. Give example. If you're only focusing on one main idea, you now have time to, to illustrate it with stories and to illustrate it with example after example. Do that. In my 40 years of giving public speaking training workshops to people around the world, I've never had anyone come up at a conference or a speech somewhere and say, wow, I hated the way that last speaker gave so many interesting, relevant stories and examples. I've never heard that. What I hear every single day is people saying, my God, that speaker was so boring and they should have just emailed us the deck and stayed home. So that's the next big lesson of ted, which is have stories and examples. And the final, final lesson from ted, if it's an important speech and you want to come across, well, rehearse. If you go to the main TED stage, they're going to be rehearsing with you quite often for months. Certainly the day before and the day of. So there's nothing preventing you from rehearsing a speech to make sure it's interesting. You can use your cell phone, you can use your webcam. You don't have to spend money on. You don't have to hire me to rehearse with you. Although people do that from time to time. Just rehearse. So, please, Thanaroth, I appreciate your question. That's what you need to do is narrow it down to one idea and then tell a real story, not a fictional story. Tell a real story that relates to you having a real conversation with a real person about a real problem. How you solved that problem, how you felt, and how it was resolved. That's all a story is. And you and I do it every single day in normal conversation. The problem most people have when they're giving presentations is they stop doing what they do in normal conversation because they feel like, oh, my hands are cuffed. I have to go through all this data from this boring PowerPoint because that's the way it has to be. No, it doesn't. Look, I like TED Talk, but there's nothing any great TED speaker does that you can't do every single, single time you give a presentation. I'm TJ Walker, and I'm hoping all of your presentations are huge successes. Thanks so much for joining me today. If you're watching this on demand later, please leave comments. If you're listening to this on any podcasting platform, please take a moment, follow the show, subscribe to the show. That way, it sends a signal to everyone on that platform, hey, maybe other people should check out this show, too. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow.