Fake Bands, Failed Consultants, and Forbidden Files Exposed

Coming up on today's community, a mysterious 60s rock band, folk rock that is, rockets to the top spot of Spotify's charts, only to be outed as a total AI fabrication. No tour dates, no members, not even a working guitar. Just code, nostalgia and get this, 1.1 million monthly listeners. Is the music industry being deep faked? Then Peter Thiel says the consulting industry is finished as we know it. And between government crackdowns, AI disruption and clients demanding results over buzzwords, he might be right. Big firms like McKinsey and Bain are shredding staff and watching their profits vanish. Is this the end of billable nonsense? And finally, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz claims he's seen the Epstein files. Yes, those files. He says the names are real, the documents exist and the government is suppressing them to protect the powerful politicians, billionaires, you name it. He knows. But he's under court order to stay quiet. Fake bans, failed consultants, and forbidden files. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody, I'm TJ Walker. This is another edition of Communiverse. This is the show that looks at top business stories, technology stories, as well as cultural issues. And we decode it through the lens of communication. Then we try to take that to build your personal development to make you more successful and in everything you do. So that's what we're about right here on the Community verse. Think of it this way, it's where the news meets personal development together, so that instead of just wasting time doom scrolling, you actually learn something that is going to make you better. All right, so first up, let's take a look at this intriguing story going on on Spotify. I've got the wrong one up here. Let's go to Spotify issue here. So what do you get when you mix Credence Clearwater Revival vibes with an AI generator that doesn't know how many tuning pegs the guitar has? You get the Velvet Sundown. Nice. Name a band that doesn't exist, but somehow has 1.1 million Spotify listeners. That's amazing that they've got that much going on. And I've got some funky boundaries going on in my graphics here. So apologies, we're working through some, some tests here and I don't know how to get rid of that box. So apologies folks, those of you watching on YouTube, I guess I'll just put full screen for a minute and then we'll get rid of it. So their debut album, Floating on echoes, hit number one on Spotify's viral Char the music sounds like classic 60s folk rock. The band photo shows denim, long hair and a mood. But it's all fake. The band, the bios, even the photos. This wasn't a band. It was an AI project dressed up in nostalgia. After fans spotted weird visual glitches and started asking questions, the creators admitted it's a synthetic music project. Critics were unimpressed. Stu Koch from Credence called them boring and social media mostly backlash. I hate everything about this one user posted. Some listeners still love the music, but here's the question. If your favorite band never had a heartbeat, does it still hit the same? So, a couple of thoughts here. We live in a world where increasingly, artificial intelligence touches everything. It, in some ways, enhances things. I use artificial intelligence with what I'm doing here today, some of the scripting. I use artificial intelligence every day. You do, too, whether you realize it or not. If you've ever shopped on Amazon or done anything on Facebook or social media, artificial intelligence is touching every single thing you experience. Now, all of us like to think, oh, I'm a human being. I'm so special. I'm unique. There's nothing else like me. No one can think like me. And okay, I get it, I'm guilty of that, too. But what if we humans really aren't that special? What if we really are a series of reactions and stimulus and response that, when tracked with enough data, can be duplicated, can be replicated, can be mixed in new ways? That seems as good, maybe even better, than what humans put together. Now, I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but when you get 1.1 million Spotify listeners a month, I have to assume that makes you more popular than 99% of musicians who post their work on Spotify. No, that's not what Drake is getting. I understand that, but still, 1.1 million Spotify listeners a month is huge. And presumably most people weren't in on it. They weren't testing out something special. They actually listened to it, liked it and listened more. So maybe the message here is we as humans are not as special as we think. Now, bear with me. I'm not saying we're all just automatons. We're all just inputs and outputs. But what I am suggesting is the line between this is real and this is fake is going to get blurrier and blurrier and blurrier every day. And sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't. If you like listening to music that has been synthetically produced by algorithms and it makes you feel good, I don't know that that's any worse than just listening to some all boy, all girl pop band put together by band producers who are looking at how to get an easy hit based on what other successful bands are doing. I'm not sure that really there's a huge, huge difference there. So what is my real message to you? Let's switch gears here a minute. Go to the personal development side. And that is, it's not that I want you to become an AI fake musician. That's not what I'm asking you to do. What I am asking you to do is to think about and explore and experiment with how artificial intelligence can help you be more effective in anything and everything you do. You might not be in music, you might be in painting, you might be in craft, you know, pottery, you might be in consulting, which we'll talk about that in a moment. But let me just take a moment and just share with you. I mean, what I work on, and some of you have heard me talk about this before, but I have my own AI project. Now, I'm not trying to fool anyone, but with my AI project, it is a digital clone of me. You can talk to me, you can text me, you can listen to audio, you can get it to critique your backdrop, your public speaking skills. Now, what is a little bit different here is I'm trying to be ethical and honest. So the first thing out of the mouth of my digital video clone is, Hi, this is TJ's clone. So there is disclosure. I do think that is the best policy of really having full disclosure so people don't feel manipulated. But we've looked at other stories this week about, for example, in Asia, in china, factories producing $3,000 robot girlfriends for mostly men. As you could imagine, men in their 30s and 40s who have an extra $3,000. Now, this is not for teenage boys. Most teenage boys do not have $3,000 of cash around to buy robotic girlfriends. So we are living in a world that is constantly blending the fake, the artificial, the AI driven and the real and things that seemed like real. Now, I came down pretty harshly against this whole concept of AI robot girlfriends. I don't feel quite as strongly about a band that is trying to evoke images of 60s folk rock. Now, if it's sounding 95% like Cretan's Clearwater Revival and I haven't heard it yet and it seems like theft, that's a different issue. There are genuine copyright issues, but when you look at any great art, any great artist, they're always mixing and Combining different genres. No artist lives in a vacuum. That's why all the great impressionists lived in, you know, the, the Mommart section in a tiny little community up on a hill in Paris. They all liked learning from each other. There was Picasso, there was Dali. They're all hanging out, they're all sharing ideas, they're all borrowing, mixing and matching with the tools of their time. The tools of their time were paintbrushes, canvas, the tools of our time today, artificial intelligence, computer programming. So the tools are changing. The idea of combining and mixing and matching is baked in to all great art. Now what is different here using artificial intelligence is you could just kind of toss out a concept, calls out a vibe, hey, chatgpt or some other kind of AI blend together a new type of music that sounds like something from the mid-1960s that evokes images of these three bands and it's done, or I'm assuming that's how it's done. So that's not a lot of creativity there in the way that Picasso could look at what Dali and what others, you know, Monet and others are doing quite the same thing. I don't purport to suggest that it is, but it's coming, it's here. I do think that those who are doing it are going to be better off long term to be upfront with people and to reveal what it is. Because what you may find out is people are okay knowing it's completely synthetic. People may say, I don't care. You know, some people don't mind if they have cubic zirconium rather than a real time. It looks pretty to me. I don't care what it's made of. So that's the challenge we all face. What's real, what isn't real, what do people value? More important from your standpoint is if I had to boil it all down to one thing, is how can you create, share your creations to the world in a way it's accessible to people. They can buy your products or services where two things happen. Number one, you use the absolute best of the latest technology available to you and you're ethical about it and honest and you disclose. I think as long as you do that, you're going to be in good shape and full disclosure. And there are some people who do not like my artificial intelligence video interactive clone. They don't. I'm okay with that. They don't have to use it. Some people don't like any particular product or service. You know, look at your favorite best selling author of all Time on Amazon. Look at their book that you think everyone in the world has to love this and it may have a 4.6 rating but out of 10,000 reviews, there's always going to be a few hundred one star reviews saying this is the worst book ever written. No creator, whether you're an artist, a consultant or anything else, is ever going to create something that has universal praise. So that's reality. So that's really my suggestion to you. Create, use the latest tools of your time and AI is of our time. Be honest and ethical about it. If you do those two things, I think that you will do well and you will be seen as honest and ethical in most situations. Okay, moving on to stories. By the way, this is the Community with TJ Walker. I'm here dissecting the news through the lens of communication. For decades I have been a communications coach, personal development coach to Wall street leaders, business executives, billionaire fund managers, as well as presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and this universes. I taught them how to communicate their messages to the media, what the message should be, as well as how to look and sound their best. Now I'm showing you kind of behind the scenes of what's really going on in order to boost your own personal success. Let's look at story number two today. The consulting crash is coming. If the consulting industry were a stock, Peter Thiel says he'd short it. And honestly, he's got a point. Big name firms like McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte and Accenture built empires over the last few decades, selling advice, laying off employees and collecting billions of dollars. But now the gravy train is hitting a wall. Let's start with the obvious. Most consulting work is expensive, bloated, and thanks to AI, no longer necessary. A SWOT analysis that used to take three consultants in two weeks now takes 10 minutes with chat GPT. The junior analysts who used to crunch numbers, they've already been replaced by code. And the big clients are noticing. And then there's the federal government. Under the Trump administration, consulting contracts are being slashed. Over 2,800 have already been canceled. The GSA is demanding firms prove their value or lose their deals. Some of the biggest names in consulting are already laying off staff and watching their stock prices tank. And here's the ticker. Clients are finally demanding results. Not hourly billing, not dicks full of buzzwords, just actual outcomes. If you don't deliver, you don't get paid. And for an industry built on billable hours and vague promises, that's an existential threat consulting isn't dying, but it's days of unchecked influence, sky high fees and untouchable prestige. Those may be over. So let's look at a few. First of all, full disclosure. I've been in the consulting industry before, specifically the communications consulting branch of things. And I remember even 30 years ago, I would work for a big investment advice firm, investor relations firm, and I would be hired just as a freelancer to write a report for $500 a day. So if it took me three days to write a report on some industry, I would be paid $1,500. The firm would then mark it up probably to $6,000 to the client. The client would be happy and the client would pay for it. And I'm here to tell you, whatever report I wrote in 3 days 30 years ago could be done these days not in 10 minutes, but in more like 2 minutes by ChatGPT. So I certainly understand why clients do not want to pay, continue paying for this. Now the story I I shared with you from the Consulting crashes coming from the Free Press by Joe Nassera. He's a very respected business writer, worked with the New York Times for many years. He goes into vast detail about some of these consulting firms that, for example, worked on the big merger with AOL and Time Warner. They all got rich. And Time Warner lost hundreds of billions of dollars when it all finished a few years later. And then the very same people were hired when Time Warner went through a merger with Discovery. And they can keep doing the same. There's no accountability. They get paid by the hour. And a lot of these consultants, I won't say a lot, all of these consultants I've ever met are smart, they're educated, they are charming. Quite often they're good at delivering PowerPoint presentations. Some of them have been my clients and have been trained by me. And they're really good at selling their services and making money. It doesn't necessarily translate into helping companies bottom lines. Now, a part of what this Free Press article delves into is you could make the case that there was a genuine need for consulting in the 1990s. You had a lot of big companies, conglomerates that were big, that were bloated, they really needed somebody come in to come in dispassionately to look at what does this company do well? What does it not do well? Where should they sell pieces off? Where should they downsize? And the CEOs don't like to be the bad guys firing people. But there had to be a tremendous amount of Restructuring consulting firms did it and did a pretty good job of it. Those days are gone. And the idea that there are that many big bloated companies around anymore doesn't really pass the smell test. And the idea that a Fortune 500 company needs to hire a consulting firm so that that consulting firm can then hire a smart 22 year old right out of college or a 24 year out of business school to crunch numbers all day and write reports when they can have chatgpt do it strains credulity. It just doesn't make sense anymore. So we've heard a lot about how AI is hurting radiologists and increasingly other white collar professions, including law. We haven't heard as much about how it's hurting the consulting industry, but to me it's a logical extension. So what happens next? I think we're going to see consulting firms not disappear. Let's face it, technology, AI, new trends have really hurt a lot of industries. It's hurt the newspaper industry, it's hurt broadcast and TV and cable industries, but they're still around, yet they're smaller industries. They don't have the same level of prestige and power and influence in our society. And many are predicting the same thing will happen to the consulting industry. Because for many years, many of the top minds of the world, people coming out of Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, Yale School of Management, actively chose going into the management consulting field. It was a way of learning a lot about a lot of different industries, making tremendous contacts, connections with people. You do that for 10, 15 years, then you lateral into a company who was a client where you've already made a lot of money and you get them to hire you as CEO. It was a great career path. Well, guess what? Many are predicting that career path is shut down. And I happen to agree with that position. So what is going to happen in major consulting? Firms are going to have a much harder time recruiting top minds from the top schools. And in part those people are not going to want to work there. But in part there's not going to be enough money in consulting firms. So is it still going to be around five years from now, ten years from now? Yes. Some companies are always going to want to look for outside advice with a human touch, where real people have worked with other companies in other industries similar to their own to really guide them on strategic changes. I think there's always going to be some role for that. But will the company be or will the industry be 100% of what it is now? No. Will it be 90%, I don't think no. Will it shrink 10 years from now down to maybe 50% of what it is today? I think that is a lot more realistic. Thanks for joining me today. Again, this is the communiverse. This is sort of a test we're in a kind of a pilot stealth launch, as stealthy as you can be when you're simulcasting on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook for a new show that will officially launch September 2, 2025. And at that point, it will be a full fledged audio podcast on every platform, video on every platform, and coming to you daily, looking at the top stories of the day. Let's move on to story three. This is a hot potato, very much of a hot potato involving a lot of controversy. Alan Dershowitz just let a match under the Epstein conspiracy fire. In an interview with Sean Spicer, the Harvard law professor emeritus says he's personally seen the files the government refuses to release. Now, just the other day, the current administration said, you know what? There are no files. There are no Epstein files. But Alan Dershowitz is wrong. He says the government refuses to release the documents that, in his words, are being, quote, suppressed to protect individuals. And he claims he knows exactly who's doing the suppressing and why. Dershowitz says he's under court ordered confidentiality, but he didn't hold back much. When asked who's on the infamous client list, politicians or business leaders, he said, quote, they're everything. He got access to these files because of the accusations brought against him by one of Epstein's most vocal accusers. Now, she later recanted and settled the case, but not before Dershowitz was pulled deep into the legal storm, into the mud, frankly, because he did spend a lot of time with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So now he's saying the names are there, the evidence exists, but the public isn't allowed to see it because too many powerful people would be exposed. We don't know the names, but Dershowitz says he does. And that's right. So there is some kind of a story here. Now, this is fascinating to a lot of people. You see conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, someone I have absolutely zero respect for, and he has no credibility. He's practically, you know, chopped off his head and had his head burst with the blood vessels coming out on this issue. There are a lot of people who are so emotionally con committed to this idea that there's this huge experience conspiracy and politicians they don't like, they are convinced are in this file where it proves that Epstein had them having sex with 10 year olds thousands of times, presumably. The interesting thing is the people who are most committed to these conspiracy theories, and you know, let's be honest here, Alan Dershowitz has still some credibility. He was a leading light among liberal intellectuals for many decades until the last decade, but he still has a lot of credibility. And he was intimately involved, and I'm not trying to be cute with use of the word intimately. He was very much involved and had, you know, spent many, many, many days, nights, evenings, weekends with Epstein. He's not just giving an opinion from, as some pundit from afar. He was in that world and he was in law cases involving this. So I don't think he can simply be dismissed for what he's saying. Also, Dershowitz doesn't seem to be grinding a political axe here because for years he was a leading Democratic advocate. He advocated democratic politicians. Last 10 years or so, everything he said has been sort of directly or indirectly aiding and giving comfort to the Trump campaigns and administrations. Forgetting all that for a moment, you can't disregard what Alan Dershowitz is saying regarding the Epstein files. Now, I've got my own take on this, and I'm kind of burying this at the end of the show today because I do think it's controversial. I do think it's going to upset some people of what I'm about to say. But I'm going to go ahead and lay it out. It doesn't matter what is in the Epstein files. What do I mean by that? Do I mean to sound cavalier? That if there are dozens of men or hundreds or thousands of men where there's proof that they were having sex with underage girls, that no one should care? I'm not suggesting that, but let's be clear about what's really going on. The people who care most about this care because they think, oh, a particular famous politician I don't like could be an F file and I would love to see them disgraced. So, for example, Bill Clinton is someone who knew Dershowitz. Excuse me, someone who knew Epstein did spend some time with him. And I have absolutely no proof and I'm not making the allegation, but let's say there were unseemly things in the file. I mean, Bill Clinton's close to 80. He's not running again. If his reputation is tarnished, it's not going to matter politically to him or the, the Democratic Party. Same with Bill Gates, frankly, if his diminished somewhat, I don't think it's going to. It's not going to get him fired as CEO of Microsoft. He's not the CEO anymore. Let's look at the other side. There are a lot of people who are convinced that Donald Trump is in the file. And I'm not making any. I haven't seen anything. But there are a lot of people convinced of that, in part because there are so many photos of Trump and Epstein hanging out. Trump is on record as saying he liked him. It was his kind of a guy, great guy. They both shared an interest in young beautiful women. I mean, that's about as incriminating as it gets. Bear with me because I'm about to upset all of you right now. Regardless of where you are in the political spectrum. I'm here to say in our modern political climate, in the zeitgeist we live in, if a report came out that said Donald Trump was set up with 1,013 year old girls by Epstein and he had sex with all of them, Trump's immediate response would be, yes, I was great. It was the best thing that ever happened to them. And they all thanked me and said it was the best experience of their life. I predict he would say something like that. I predict that the New York Times, CNN mainstream media would say, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever. This person should be impeached immediately. He's admitted to numerous acts of criminal pedophilia. This discredits him. And then I predict that every single prominent Republican member of the House and Senate would defend Trump. They would say that just shows he's a real man. That just shows what a hypocrite the Democratic lamestream media is because they all like Romeo and Juliet and Juliet was only about 13. So this just shows once again the hypocrisy of the left. That is the communication that would come out. And certainly no Republican member of the House would start an impeachment proceeding of Trump. And then I think Trump would change it by saying, you know what, starting tomorrow I'm going to start dating 12 year olds. And people be it would go on to another scandal and everyone would forget about it. So that's why I happen to believe that these particular files, the Epstein files, just don't matter because we have a calcified political system now where there's such tribalism and it's asymmetric, it's not on both sides, but we have a tribalistic system where there is one tribe when anything their leader does, they will defend away, will excuse, will deflect and we'll say, well, what about this or what about that? They will do anything to change the subject. So that's why I believe it doesn't really matter what is happening in these Epstein files, whether they're covered up or hidden or not. Will they sometime at some point come out? Maybe. Pam Bundy, the Attorney General of the United States, initially said a few months ago, I've got these files and there's blockbuster information. You can't wait to see it. And then there was nothing in it. Now the administration is saying, oh, you know what? There are no files. So there's a lot of kind of flip flopping all over the place. At some point, if we ever have a new administration, when we find out what's really going on, perhaps. I feel like I already know enough about a lot of the men who have been implicated in this. I hunch. I can't prove it. My hunch is Bill Gates is someone who liked to talk about technology and new ideas and was not involved in the more unseemly side of this guy's activities. Epstein's activities. Epstein, by all accounts, was someone incredibly charming, incredibly well versed in every aspect of new technology and philosophy and cultural affairs, and loved having interesting conversations with fascinating people. And oh, by the way, every five minutes some young girl would come in and give him a back rub. A little weird. Not a little weird, a lot weird. But people have ways of compartmentalizing. And I have absolutely no doubt that a lot of the people he socialized with and met with and collaborated with weren't involved with the unseemly side at all. But we'll find out. Hey, this is a truncated version of Communiverse Today. Typically we try to go five stories, about an hour. Gotta sign off today. Thank you so much. Please leave comments, anything you like, any suggestions for future topics. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks.