Musk Sues Apple & OpenAI Over AI Monopoly Claims

Elon Musk takes Apple and OpenAI to court, accusing them of monopolizing the future of artificial intelligence. China's once mighty property giant Evergrande, collapses for good, leaving billions in debt and unfinished homes across the country. American men now live five years less than women, and doctors say it's partly because they just won't go to the doctor. New science explains how lack of sleep rewires the brain to crave junk food and gain weight. And finally, President Trump escalates attacks on the press and a former ally threatening both abc, NBC, plus former Governor Chris Christie. All that and more.

Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker.

Okay, we have a fun show for you today. I'm on the road, just got into San Francisco where I've got an exciting few days working with some high tech clients, but wanted to spend time with you. We're not going to be quite as fancy today. Not in the regular studio, but I hope same good insights to make your day a little better and for you and me to learn from the news. Let's dive in with story one. Musk's Xai sues Apple and OpenAI over alleged AI monopoly Billionaire Elon Musk has opened a major legal battle against Apple and OpenAI. OpenAI, according to Reuters, his startup Xai, has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas accusing the two companies of conspiring to shut out competition in artificial intelligence. The law claims Open or Apple and OpenAI, quote, quote, locked up markets to maintain their monopolies, making it impossible for Xai's Grok Chatbot or its X app to rise in Apple's App Store rankings. Musk is seeking billions of dollars in damages. OpenAI fired back, saying the filing is just part of Musk's ongoing pattern of harassment. Apple has not commented, which is pretty usual for Apple. Legal experts told Reuters that Apple's dominance in smartphones could give Musk claims weight.

But Apple may argue it made a.

Business choice to partner with OpenAI and isn't obligated to help rivals gain ground. One law professor called the case a canary in the coal mine for how US Courts will define the open or the AI market and antitrust law. Okay, so what's the real message here? When it's a battle between Elon Musk and Apple and OpenAI, it's hard to.

Know who to root for.

You kind of want all of them to fail at some level. They all love monopolies, they love pointing fingers at someone else's monopoly, but they love it for themselves. Let's dig a little Deeper here. How should society, how should our government regulatory bodies sort this through a case? A very strong case can be made that Apple abuses its position as essentially the gateway for every app in the universe to get on people's phones. And I think more can be done. Some has been done, but more needs to be done to open that system up. But it's a bit rich to hear someone like Elon Musk talk about not enough competition when you see the way he uses his own platform, Twitter, which is a pretty significant platform, or X as he calls it now, to shut down opponents, to shut down opposition, to shut down dissenting voices. It is a bit rich, especially with Musk's most recent political fiascos where he essentially terrorizes the federal government, destroys huge swaths of the U.S. regulatory environment. And now once the U.S. government is step in, that's, that's really a bit rich. So I don't want to change the whole regulatory landscape and give Apple more unfair advantage just because we don't like Elon Musk. But Elon Musk, with all the terror and destruction and evisceration he's done to.

The United States government, and now after.

Bashing all these weight, after taking the big chainsaw around to the government regulatory agencies, he now wants the government agencies to come in and protect him, give him a little step up, keep the bully from hitting on him as much. I don't know about this. Certainly there needs to be more regulation when it comes to artificial intelligence. I've talked about that yesterday. We've talked about it regularly. There are certainly a lot of AI leaders who feel like if there is not regulation soon, we are on a ticking time bomb, metaphorically, but in some cases it could be literal. So there needs to be more regulation. Are we worried about Grok not being able to get in front of enough people? Well, when it comes to the, the platform of Twitter X, it seems like Musk has a pretty good pipeline to a lot of consumers all over the world. He has access to hundreds of millions of people. So the idea that he's going to be stifled, I'm not buying it, but there is in fact a long history of regulators saying to huge technology companies, hey, you've got this platform. You can't use this platform to steer everyone else to your new platform. Certainly Microsoft got in trouble with that with its web browsers. Other companies have gotten into trouble. On the one hand, you have to feel a little bit sorry for any tech company or media companies these days, because their point of view is every single website ever made is competition. Every YouTube channel, every video, every TikTok, everything is competition. And in a sense they're right. There's more competition than ever for anyone. But when you look at what's happened in the United States economy and therefore the world economy in the last 10, 15 years, there is such concentration among whether you want to say that the top seven companies, the top five, the top ten, there's tremendous consolidation. Almost all, all of the gains in the stock market in the last decade have come from gains in about seven companies. Mark Zuckerberg famously said, why compete when I can just buy a company that's good? For Mark Zuckerberg, it's turned out pretty well. For him it has not turned out well for creating as thriving an ecosystem for entrepreneurialism in the tech sector as what we had in the 90s or early 2000s. It is simply harder and harder for new kept new tech companies to start from nothing, grow, grow, grow and become something significant the way Google did, the way Apple did, the way in fact Facebook did.

Because the big incumbents, the big guys.

And let's face it, they're typically guys are so big they can either use their marketing power to stifle new players trying to gain steam or they can.

Just buy you up early enough in the game where you figure, I gotta sell out.

There's no way I can compete with these guys.

That's not good for our economy in the long run. Now again, do we feel sorry for Elon Musk because his AI company, like all the big players, have billions and.

Billions and billions of dollars behind them in venture capital.

So if they have to spend money.

The old fashioned way on Google Ads.

Or billboard ads, they can probably do that.

I'm just came off the highway from the airport in San Francisco to where I am in Santa Clara now. And you see all kinds of billboards for every kind of big tech company in the world. So yes, they still have money.

Is I, I suspect this is a.

Bargaining chip for Elon Musk. I don't think he really expects the.

Federal government to come to his rescue.

I think it's a negotiating ploy to.

Get Apple to open up, maybe share.

Some of its publicity and its attention.

And some of its channels with him.

So he does get a lot more.

Traffic and people using his Grok.

Full disclosure, I've not used Grok. I am using ChatGPT every day. I use their 5.0, their pro service.

I've been pretty happy with it. But I'm not an AI expert there.

May be better programs out there.

At some level, it's refreshing to me to not give more business to Google.

To not give more business to Apple.

To not give more business to Facebook.

So for that reason alone, I'm very.

Happy to use OpenAI. Are they saints in all of this? No. Is there going to be a point when they are so big that we look fondly upon the days of Google and Apple and Facebook having so much power? Perhaps. But until then, I'm going to continue using OpenAI.

That's not a tech endorsement, that's just one person who finds it convenient. What AI do you prefer right now? If you're watching this, let me know. Post your comments.

If you're watching this on demand, you.

Could post your comments too. By the way, you're watching Filtered with TJ Walker Every day I look at the top business stories, technology, economic and culture stories of the day and then filter it through the lens of communication skills. The goal for all this is to help you become more successful, help you become a better communicator, have the personal development skills you need to be more successful in your career as well as your personal life. So that's what we're about right here. Thanks so much for joining me today. We have a lot more coming up. Stay tuned. We'll be right back after this break.

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Now let's check in on what's going on in China and their economy, specifically with real estate, because it looks like they this is the end of China's once mightiest property firm China. Evergrande, once the symbol of China's booming real estate market, has been delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to the New York Times, its downfall marks the collapse of what was once the world's most indebted developer, owing more than $300 billion. Evergrande's collapse began in 2021 and has left behind 1,300 unfinished projects and more than 280 cities. Hundreds of thousands of home buyers are still waiting for their apartments, while creditors worldwide remain in line to be repaid. Liquidators at Alvarez and Marcel, the firm that dismantle Lehman Brothers, are struggling to reclaim assets from Evergrande's sprawling web of subsidiaries. So far, they've recovered just $255 million out of $45 billion owed. In Hong Kong, the hunt has turned personal. Courts are targeting billions in assets tied to Evergrande's founder, Hu Kayan, his wife and former executives, including luxury properties in California. As one court filing put it, the chances of creditors seeing meaningful repayment are in serious doubt. Okay, so what's the bottom line? Evergrande has gone kaput. And people need to realize here in the United States, we're always glorifying China. Oh, they can make a great airport in 60 days. Oh, they can make a highway go up in 10 days. Yeah, but they waste a lot of money on boondoggles because if someone said, oh, the dear leader wants us to build a city with 10 billion apartments, they just go off and do it, regardless of whether there's any actual need. That's the problem with authoritarian regimes is they waste a lot of money doing stupid stuff all the time. Let's dig a little deeper. Now, I was in China about five years ago and it did strike me even then, going from one big city to another on their bullet trains. And they're fantastic. How many gigantic cities there were empty? Like, who builds all this stuff? Now, this is an issue that's near and dear to my heart because I happen to think that collectively, not just China, not just the US but all over the world, there is insanity when it comes to the concept of real estate. So many people believe, really, you buy real estate, you're guaranteed to be rich.

You buy a home, you're set for life. No, no, no.

People lose money every day in real estate. Maybe not 45 billion like this, but whether you're in the United States, whether you're in Europe, whether you're in China, people lose money. Individual investors, home builders, construction companies. There is a sense that real estate is somehow a risk free business. I mean, this is what got us the whole great financial Crisis back in 2008, this idea that, oh, real estate's always a great investment. Home prices can always go up. How did that work out? Worst recession since the Great Depression. And we see it again and again and again. Look, I don't want to be a hypocrite here. I did just buy a home recently, but I didn't do it as an investment. In fact, I don't think I'll ever recoup what I'm putting into this house. I bought it because I viewed it as an expense because I want to live in this particular type of home. And we as a species need to get over this idea that somehow you deserve to be rich or in fact make any money just because you own a piece of dirt with sand and rock and wood on top. That's what a house is or an apartment building is. I don't begrudge anyone trying to make money off of being a home builder or apartment complex builder. But this idea that it's can't miss and the government needs to give you money, as happened in China, and that somehow risk free, absolute nonsense. Because here's the thing. We human beings, we're all liars. We all lie to ourselves. We all conveniently forget facts that don't make us look good. And everyone talks about that real estate dealer, oh, you know, I bought it for a million dollars, I sold it for $2 million and 100% return on my investment. Yeah, but it took you 20 years. You would have made a bigger investment. You would have made a bigger return on investment just putting your money in an index fund and getting the compound interest. But no one ever looks at it that way, so I'm urging. The reason I point this out to you is I want you to really be careful when it comes to any of your own money you invest in real estate because people don't go to cocktail parties, say, yeah, I bought this rental apartment for 500,000 and I sold it for 400,000.

And I put a lot.

No one ever goes and brags about that. Everyone likes to brag about what a great real estate mobile they are.

And I'm telling you it's, it's not true.

Have there been people who made money in real estate? Yes. It's especially helpful in my own observation. People who like to play fast and loose with their taxes love real estate because there's so many ways of dodging the tax man and you know, many of them legal, a lot of them very questionable. If you want more information on that, I would urge you to read any full length biography of the current President of the United States, given his current, his former background. So what's the real message here? As I mentioned at the beginning of this segment, we in the United States especially these days, often glorify authoritarian rulers.

It takes us three years to build an airport.

They can do it in 30 days. Yeah, authoritarian regimes command top down regimes.

Can just order people to start pouring.

Concrete and making things happen. It can't. Oh, I need to move my microphone a little bit closer. Sorry about that. I hope my sound was coming across.

Oh, I own plus. Okay, the microphone is back. Lesson for me, never move your microphone in the middle of the show.

I was trying to move it closer because I realized it was not as.

Close to me as it should have been. So just following up on the, on the final lessons of Evergrande. I'm not here rubbing my face into the investors of Evergreen say ha ha ha ha ha. But I do want all of us to reflect on really two things, two assumptions that I think need to be questioned if you want to be a successful person and more successful in your own personal investment life, which is scrutinize anything anyone says as it relates to real estate. Everyone always, when they're factoring in their profits, everyone forgets about taxes, maintenance, upkeep, the depreciation headaches, toilets breaking, unexpected time when you can't rent a place. If it's that kind of a property. Real estate can be a great way.

To make a fortune.

You know what? It can also be a great way to lose a fortune. Real estate can be a great way to become a, a millionaire if you start off a billionaire. Just ask the folks at Evergrande. The other big assumption I want people to really question is this idea that because an economy is headed by an authoritarian, it's inherently more efficient. Yes, China is doing a lot of efficient things when it comes to certain infrastructure. Great trains, great roads, at least in the big cities, clean streets, at least in the big cities. But it also is massively, massively wasteful because it doesn't have the market feedback mechanism. The United States has a lot of flaws and it's certainly not perfect. Western Europe has a lot of flaws, not perfect. But we do have this constant feedback mechanism, this constant feedback loop whereby actual customers, the marketplace sends signals saying, yes, we want this, no, we don't want that. Yes, there's more need for this. No, nobody needs another city with 50,000 empty apartment buildings. Those are good market signals that traditional capitalism. And we no longer really have a traditional capitalistic free market system in the United States, at least as of the last eight months. But traditionally we had that kind of a market system that did a good job of giving feedback on where to allocate resources in a society. Were there occasional bubbles? Absolutely. Is there occasional froth and excess? Yes. But this Evergrande thing has been a huge black eye for China and its leadership and its government and its economy because it does show that once somebody gets an idea in their head, as long as they persuade one guy at the top, anything, they can get as much money as they want the green light to go. There's no red light. The spigot of money just comes on and nobody ever stops to ask, does the market really need this? The answer in many cases is no. Is there more need for housing in the world?

Sure.

But let's face it, whether you're in China, whether you're in the United States, everyone wants to go for that top 10% slice because the plot of land's about the same, the cost of the workers is the same. Everyone wants to go for that top high end luxury market. And at some point, the math doesn't add up. You can't have everyone in the world going after the top 10%. It will implode at some point.

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Welcome back. I'm TJ Walker. This is filtered with TJ Walker. So what does it take to get a man to see a doctor? That is the headline in today's New York Times. Men in the United States live about five years less than women. And one reason is simple. They don't go to the doctor. According to the Times, the Cutler center for men outside. Cleveland is trying to change that with an unusual approach. A clinic that looks more like a sports bar than a hospital. Their pool tables, TVs, even a Zen corner. All designed to make men feel welcome. The problem is serious. Men die at a higher rate than women from 14 of the top 15 causes of death. They're less likely to get preventive care, less likely to treat conditions like hypertension or diabetes, and less likely to be screened for depression. As one professor explained, we know a lot about male bodies, but we don't know a lot about men's health. The Cutler center reports some success. Its members are more likely to keep doctor's appointments and manage conditions like blood sugar. But the broader challenge remains getting men to see medical care as part of their life, not just a last resort. So what's the real message here? You know, for a long time, we've heard women say men are stupid. Men are stupid. Well, guess what? When it comes to our health, men really are stupid. They're dumber than women because men refuse to go to a doctor. Finally, there's a clinic in Cleveland that's making a health facility look like a sports bar. If they really want to get men in, they may have to disguise it as a gentleman's club that might bring them in to the doctor. Finally. Okay, let's dig a little deeper here. Let's look at the stats. Men live 5.3 years less than women. I have a question. For men. This may sound crass, I apologize, but if you've been married for 20 years or so, 30 years, do you really want your wife to have all of your money and live a lot longer? Maybe give all the money you worked hard for to a younger husband for her to go off and enjoy and go to Tahiti with? Is that what you want? I'm not saying you should want ill for your wife. But why do you want to work hard, leave a bunch of money, and have your wife live years and years and years longer than you when you could live a long time? I'm not suggesting you want your wife to live less than you do or that you want her to be financially strapped in any way. But rather than leave all your money to your spouse, which is what most men do if they're married or have a partner, why not spend some of that money going to the doctor now? It's not going to do any good when you're in a casket. You know, I get tired of our culture where it seems like men are the butt of every joke, every sitcom. There's the doofus dad who's clueless and the five year old child is smarter than the dad and the wife is smarter than the dad and the dads always have to be the butt of the joke and the man, especially the white man, has to be the bad guy in every movie. And I get tired of that a little bit. However, this is one issue where men really deserve to be the butt of the joke. Because when you die needlessly pre prematurely, the joke's on you. And all because you want to save what, $50 on a co pay to go get your physical exam, your yearly physical exam. That's idiocy. So many ought to wake up. Now Scott Galloway points this out frequently to his credit, which is we don't have a an opioid epidemic in America. We have a men's opioid endemic opioid opioid epidemic in America. Men are more depressed, men are much more likely to kill themselves. So rather than just taking more booze and taking more opioids, go to a doctor, go to a psychologist, go to a psychiatrist for that matter, go to a health club and actually work out. So many men think it's macho to eat a lot of unhealthy food, drink a lot of beer, sit around on your buttocks and watch sports. I gotta tell you, there's nothing macho about watching sports. If you want to watch sports because you enjoy it, great, make it a part of your life. But in America today, it is a dominant culture in so many places where if you are a man, the normal thing to do is to eat chips and drink beer and sit and watch other men participate in sports all weekend long. Whether it's football season or baseball season or basketball season or hockey. Whatever sport you like to watch again, in small doses, fine. But if you're spending more time watching a TV than playing a sport, chances are not only are you going to live six years less than your wife, you're going to live about 10 or 15 or 20 years longer than you could have lived if you just got off your butt exercise and went to the doctor every year, at least once a year when you're feeling down, whether it's a cold you can't shake or maybe some pains on your go to a doctor. No one's going to be pointing and say, hey, look at this, he went to a doctor. Nobody cares about you. That's part of what I think men have got to realize is that if you go to a doctor, nobody cares. Nobody cares about anyone. I don't mean that in a negative way. People are focused on their own lives, what's going on in their life. No one's going to judge you thinking, oh, D.J. went to a doctor. He's not a real man. Let's mock him. Nobody cares. So I'm urging you, please, please, if you're a man, go to the doctor. Maybe you do that with family members. Why not schedule an appointment for you and your spouse and your kids and everyone else? I'm TJ Walker. Thank you for joining me today. I see Patrick Galvin has joined me today. Patrick, great to see you. Patrick says, my wife wants me alive so we can travel together as we love each other's company, we both work out at Eat Healthy. Fantastic. Pat is one of my old friends from the National Speakers association who is a prominent speaker, author, expert in his own right. Patrick, tell us what's new with you and what you're up to. I'm doing some experimentation right here. This is a new show. I'm on the road today, so we don't have quite the full studio and backdrop as normal, but this is a new show called Filtered with CJ Walker where we look at the top business, economic, technology and culture stories of the day. Filtered through the lens of communication skills and personal development with the idea that you can learn about the news and learn something that will help you rather than just learning about the news. Thinking, oh my gosh, I'm depressed. This is awful and doom scrolling. We're trying to get out of of that cycle. So that's what we're about here.

But Patrick, glad you're here.

If you're watching this on demand and it is on demand and live right now on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitch soon, as of Tuesday, September 2nd, we launch formally on every single podcast platform. So really looking forward to this. We're on sort of a soft launch right now of the show. Will be officially launching Filtered on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day here in the United States and will be seen around the world. So looking forward to new fun with the show. Patrick says, I love that you're always trying new things. You're a role model. Thanks, Patrick, and same to you. You're an innovator. You've been around for quite some time. I think it's been, what, 15 years, maybe longer since we first met. And I see that you're still actively speaking and training and consulting and sharing your expertise with the world. So glad to have you here and I would love to have you on the show one of these days. Moving on to issue four today. Sleep loss rewires the brain for cravings and weight gain. A growing body of research shows that losing sleep does more than make you tired. It can reprogram your brain to crave junk food and and gain weight. According to the conversation, even a single night of poor rest shifts hunger hormones. Ghrelin, which signals hunger, rises, while leptin, which signals fullness, drops. The result? You feel hungrier and less satisfied after eating. This is from a new study that just came out on study finds.org brain scans also reveal that sleep deprived people have weaker impulse control and stronger reward response to high calorie foods. At the same time, metabolism slows. Just one short night can reduce insulin sensitivity by 25%, rising the risk of fat storage and type 2 diabetes. Stress hormones like cortisol also surge further, driving cravings and abdominal fat. The good news? Experts say that even a few nights of consistent, high quality sleep can reset the systems, restore appetite control, and stabilize metabolism. As neurologist Jonah Fong puts it, sleep is the most powerful tool for appetite control. Okay, so what's the real message here? If you are overweight, if you're low in energy, if you don't feel healthy, the first thing you should focus on is get more sleep. Put your cell phone away. It doesn't need to be in the bedroom. Turn off all the screens a few.

Hours before you want to fall asleep.

And make sleep a priority. Chances are you'll see your waistline get smaller and you will feel healthier. So let's dig a little deeper here. We live in a culture where so many people claim to care about their health. Oh, yes, I'm going jogging and I'm playing pickleball. And I'm eating. Look at this salad.

I'm eating.

Meanwhile, people are on their cell phone till midnight using the alarm to get up. I'm going to say something right now that's going to make some of you hate me. If you use an alarm clock, you don't care about your health. If you're using an alarm clock, you are disrupting your body's need for sleep. Your body will wake up when you've had the proper amount of rest. So when you use an alarm clock, you're jarring your system. You're telling your body you don't really get what you need. How often would you get a $500,000 Ferrari and routinely not put enough gas in it? Oh, it doesn't need. It does it Works fine with a third of a tank of gas and 2 gallons of water, a little sand. You wouldn't do that. You wouldn't treat a car like that. But that is how you're treating your body. It's not enough to eat healthy food, although you do need healthy food. It's not enough to exercise, although you do need to exercise. Sleep is the missing ingredient for so many people, and it plays into all the others. It's a part of that flywheel. You don't get a good night's sleep. The easiest thing to do is say, oh, forget the good healthy food. Let me eat the chocolate muffin, the croissant, and three different lattes with tons of sugar. Oh, I didn't get a good enough sleep last night. I'll exercise tomorrow. So, boom. Not having enough sleep is the quickest way to destroy your diet and destroy your exercise routine. Now, I value sleep, but nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. Today was not a perfect day for me. I had a 7:40am flight from where I live in South Florida, Sanford, to San Francisco today, where I am now, which meant I had to have a 5:15 Uber pick me up, which meant I had to get up at 4:15 in the morning. That's not even the problem. The problem was I sometimes don't sleep well. The night before a trip, I actually woke up at 3. So I only got six hours of sleep last night. And what do you know, I had two and a half breakfast at a breakfast when I got up, breakfast on the plane. And then at 10:30 local time when I landed here, I was hungry again and had a fantastic Vietnamese sandwich. So it happens to me, it happens to you. It happens to everyone. Sleep, I believe, is the most neglect because it's the least sexy thing to talk about. It's sexy to talk about, oh, I ran this marathon, I did this triathlon. I pumped iron for two hours today or, oh, look how virtuous I am. I'm eating all this tofu and look at these salads I'm eating with olive oil and vinegar. All good things. I like to do all that stuff. But when you get down to telling people, well, I've got to get up at six, I want eight hours of sleep. It takes a half an hour to drift off to sleep, which means I got to be in bed by 9:30, which means I got to start getting ready for bed by 9, which means I got to turn off screens at 8:30. You start telling people that, they're like, huh, you're really weird. How weird this person is to want to have good night's Sleep, that's the problem we have in our society and it is a huge determinant. And all these other negative health side effects of excess weight, low energy, not exercising enough. And this is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of human beings. Now, it was obviously easier to get a good night's sleep before there was electricity, before there was the Internet, before there was tv, before there were light bulbs. Everywhere it got dark, you went to sleep. Other than a fire to look at, not much to keep you up. It's been estimated by some experts that previous generations of humans slept on average 9, 10, some cultures as much as 11 hours. I'm not suggesting you have to have 11 hours of sleep, but what I am suggesting is if you're using an alarm clock, you're not getting enough sleep. Well, tj, I have a commute. Go to bed earlier. If you say you don't have time, I challenge you. Pick up your phone, look at your screen time, make a case to me that every second is oh, because it's an earth shattering email you had to send to someone and it was worth a million dollars and your family would if you didn't do it. No. If you're like most people, there's some vast amount of waste on here where you're looking at sports, you're looking at TikTok, you're looking at some videos of good looking people, you're playing a video game. And if you turned your phone off an hour earlier each day and got an extra hour's sleep, you'd feel a thousand times better. You would eat healthier and it wouldn't require discipline. I'm a huge believer that discipline is overrated. Willpower is overweighted, is overrated. It's far more important to establish good fundamental habits if you're not getting enough sleep. As the study I just shared with you pointed out, it sends chemicals throughout your body pulsating. It says, give me sugary treats, Give me sugary treats. That's what happens to the human body. Now you really do have to pull in all this extra reserve power to not eat that croissant, that bagel with extra cream cheese. If you're well rested, it's much easier to eat healthy. Now what I try to do on a daily basis is eat a big bowl of oatmeal with wheat germ and chia seeds and flaxseed and lots and lots of nuts and fresh fruit. You may say that tastes awful, okay? But guess what? There's no sugar in it other than the naturally occurring sugar in the raspberries. And there's no processed sugar, there's no processed carbohydrates other than the minimal processing of the whole oats. And you know, I feel incredibly full. I'm not tempted to have a mid morning snack because the oatmeal with the nuts, the protein of the nuts, the protein of the seeds is so filling. I'm not here to be your dietitian, but I do want you to think about how can you get some food in your body, especially the first meal of the day, so that you feel good, you feel full and you get to a weight that is healthy for you. We live in a culture that says, oh, let's not fat shame, let's not fat shame and everyone healthy and everybody. It's not true. I'm not here to fat shame anyone. And I've been overweight in the past. But one of the surest signs of being on a path towards obesity, diabetes, hypertension, stroke and a whole host of other chronic diseases is simply being overweight. If you can get to a normal healthy weight for your body, for your height, you automatically solve a whole host of other health problems before they've ever started. And that's why it's so important. So I urge you, make sleep a priority before you go on the next fad diet, before you spend another $3,000 on a fancy gym membership. Try this technique and I'll sell it to you right now. Call this 800 number one 800. Don't send TJ any money. Just turn off your darn phone an hour and a half before you need to go to sleep and that's eight hours before you need to get up. Try it, try it or your money back. I'm TJ Walker. We'll be back in a moment and just checking in with Patrick's saying hello, hello. Watching you on LinkedIn now. And I love your natural way of sharing ideas. And the advice that you give is excellent. Much of it falling in the category of common sense that is not nearly common enough these days. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for the kind words. I do appreciate them. We'll be back in a moment after these commercial words Filtered is brought to.

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Okay, we are back for the final segment and coming to you live today from the Bay Area out San Francisco. Just landed out here about an hour and a half ago out here for the next few days. So this is the remote studio. So we don't have the normal backdrop set up quite as many bells and.

Whistles for the show, but we're continuing.

To test things out.

Continuing to do the soft launch for the show again. Mark your calendars. September 2, 2025 filtered with TJ Walker will be officially launching on every single.

Podcast platform, every social media platform. We're coming at you from from basically.

Every single angle and looking forward to that. So it's going to be a lot of fun.

If you have any particular topics you'd like me to address, feel free to do so.

This show is not another MSNBC Fox political talk show.

This is not political punditry show.

We're looking at top business, economics, technology, culture, stories of the day. But sometimes our culture, even in the political world, affects economics and business and every other aspect of our culture. So we do touch on that. I give it to you objectively. I'm not here as a partisan.

I'm here analyzing objectively communication issues through the prism of my own expertise, having worked with presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Ms. Universes and a lot of business executives all over the world.

Do I have my own political values?

Sure.

But I call it like I see it, and I hope you do as well.

Let's dive into story five.

Trump escalates attacks on abc, NBC and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. President Donald Trump is once again targeting major news networks and a one time ally. According to the New York Times, Trump demanded that ABC and NBC have their broadcast licenses revoked, calling them, quote, a threat to democracy for what he described as overwhelmingly negative coverage of his presidency. That means they criticized him in a story Sunday morning on Truth Social. He claimed the Networks gave him 97% bad stories and suggested they should either pay millions in license fees or lose.

Their right to broadcast.

Critics say the remarks highlight concerns that Trump about Trump using federal power to punish media outlets. At the same time, Trump turned his attention to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie after Christie appeared on ABC's this Week and accused Trump of politicizing law enforcement. Trump threatened to reopen the 2013 Bridgegate scandal, writing, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again. No one is above the law. Christie has long denied involvement in the.

Bridge lane closures and the Supreme Court.

Overturned related convictions in 2020. The episode underscores Trump's escalating campaign of.

Retribution against critics in politics and the press.

Okay, what's the real message here? Wake up, America. Donald Trump is holding a sign saying democracy over fascism, authoritarianism. Here. I'm going to put out of business any media outlet that criticizes me. Anyone who criticizes me, expect a knock, knock, knock on the door. And my henchmen are coming to either imprison you, investigate you, or make you disappear. That's really the message here. We saw it earlier. Let's dig a little deeper. We saw it earlier this week or last week when John Bolton, a former top advisor to the Trump administration, number one, was raided by the FBI. Again, this is not some Democrat, he's not some liberal, he's not some progressive activist. He's not a host on msn. You see, this is John Bolton who had senior leadership positions in the Bush administration and the Trump administration. But because he dared criticize Donald Trump, Trump took his, his jackbooted thugs, his henchmen, because, let's face it, that's what the Justice Department and the FBI has become and raided this guy's house for the TV cameras and to send a chilling signal to the rest of America, if you criticize me, I'm not simply going to tweet something nasty about you. I'm going to use the full power of the federal government to destroy you. And now, Chris Christie criticized this again. Chris Christie, prominent Republican, prominent conservative, ran for the presidential nomination in 2016 alongside Trump and was an ally, was ahead of his first transition. But because he dared criticize Trump for using government powers to investigate critics, Trump says, oh, yeah, really? I'll show you. I'm going to now threaten to investigate you with government power to shut you up. This is going to have a very chilling effect. As if things weren't already chilly, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska summed it up very well just a few months ago when she said, we're all very scared. She's talking about every single Republican member of the United States Senate and House. They are scared of Trump. They are afraid of the intimidation. They are afraid of the nasty tweets that inevitably lead to death threats and harassment at their homes, at their children's schools. These are the tactics of authoritarians, of dictators, of mobsters. Now, we don't have to get fancy here. Whether you want to call Trump an authoritarian, a dictator, a fascist, or just a good old fashioned American mobster, it's not anything we've seen in the United States before coming out of the White House. It's new, it's different, it's unique, it's scary. And if you're not scared by it, you're deluding yourself. It's time to wake up America, while there is still some semblance of America. Now, this show is about understanding, communication. I'm here to tell you Trump is a good communicator. He's really good at getting attention. He's really good at changing attention. Notice I haven't even talked about Epstein Files all day long, and it's not on the headlines today. He's really good at capturing attention, getting TV coverage the way he wants, and he's good at letting you know where he stands. I'm telling you, he's sending a clear message that if you are a media company, you. If you criticize me, I am going to destroy you and put you out of business. That's essentially the threat. If you are a company like intel, formerly a great private sector company, he's acting like the mob boss in a nice little restaurant you got here. It'd be a shame if there were a kitchen fire. Maybe. Every Monday morning when I come by there'll be a brown bag with 10% of your receipts for the last week. That's essentially what Trump did to intel last week, getting 10% of a private sector company taking over by the government. There's a name for that, folks. It's called socialism and communism. But since it's Trump, he can get away with it. I was listening to the commentator, a comedian, commentator Tim Dillon over the weekend and by his own admission, he's just an idiot making up stuff, being funny. But he stumbled on an amazing truth that made me reflect. He said, you know, for years and years and years, we've heard these crazy, wild, idiotic Alex Joneses of the world talking about this conspiracy. The Rand Pauls, the Iran polls, all these extreme right wing wacky people talk about conspiracies where the government's coming to get you. The government's going to have its own private army and take people away and drag them away and the government's going to do all these horrible things to you. The government's going to take control over the private sector, the government's going to socialize big companies. And it turns out we owe Alex Jones an apology. Tim Dillon pointed out, I agree because it's happened. It's actually happened. It's just ironic that the very same people who warned us about how awful it was and how we should avoid it all cost, they're the ones cheering on the guy doing it. Right now we are under a socialistic attack in the United States and there's simply no other. I'm not talking about the mayor of New York City or the aspiring mayor.

He has no actual power.

If Mamdani becomes the next mayor of New York City, he doesn't have the power to raise taxes, he doesn't have the power to take over grocery stores. But socialism is happening in America right now. When you've got a government leader saying, I want to own a part of this company or I'm going to put this company out of business. That's the sort of thing Fidel Castro did, which rightfully is why so many conservatives and the Alex Joneses of the world warned us about why we don't want that for years. So it just seems odd that they're now cheering on the absolute destruction of the concept of a free economy, a free market economy in the United States. So there are always people who want to discount Trump and say, well, he's just doing it for show. Well, no, sometimes he's actually communicating very clearly what he believes. And I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever he believes what he's saying right now. He's got this, this taste for power. And he's realized something in his second term that he didn't realize in his first term. In his first term, he was surrounded by all of these people who had worked in previous Republican administrations and had some semblance of respect for norms, for the Constitution, for laws, for the role of Congress. And what Trump realizes in his second term is, no, none of that applies. If I have the power to send a tweet to scare the ever loving, you know what, out of any Republican member of Congress or for that matter, any judge, I can do whatever I want. I can get away with anything. Just like my mentor Roy Cohn taught me, you do whatever you want. Anyone points a finger at you, you turn your finger around and you attack them ten times harder. And it is sadly working for Trump this term. And I say term, I don't necessarily mean that in the normal sense of it's four years. Because what's to prevent Trump from saying, okay, I don't like the Constitution that says, you know, natural born citizens are get to be said. I can ignore that. I can ignore the part about you can't run for office and be president if you fomented, if you're guilty of sedition, if you fomented revolution against our country, he ignored that. Why not Simply ignore the 22nd Amendment? TJ you know, the courts will rule. The courts are going to give Donald Trump whatever he wants. And it's time for moderates and centrist and right of center people, and certainly liberals and progressives to understand that the courts are handing a piece of paper to Donald Trump every day. And they're saying, here, here's a blank check, do whatever you want. And every single day the blank check is going to get bigger because every day Donald Trump gets to appoint more judges at every level of government. And it can't be that long before he gets another Supreme Court justice. And if somebody doesn't retire or fall over, you know what I mean? I don't think we're that far away from him doing what he's trying to.

Do to the Fed chair.

Just start bullying a Supreme Court justice. Hey, Sotomayor, why don't you quit? I'm gonna, I'm gonna have you impeached. I think we're not that far away from him trying to force any Democratic appointed member of the Supreme Court off the court so he can put more people on. And if he's got to use the FBI to come up with some Trump charges of corruption, he'll do it. If he's got to have his goons or his henchmen show up at their house every night and have intimidation, I think he'll do that, too. So what's the real lesson here, folks? You do have to listen to bullies, how they're communicating. Sometimes it's indirect, but sometimes it's really, really direct. And you can't simply ignore it. If you have a boss in your own company who says, look, I expect you to work even things weekends, and if I tell you to take off all your clothes or to drive me around anywhere I want on your holidays, you're going to do it, you should listen to them. In that case, I think you should go find another job. But bullies are often not afraid to be very clear communicators. You've got to listen. We all have to listen and figure out how are we going to deal with this thing, because it's not pretty. I'm TJ Walker. I want to thank you so much for spending time with me today. I'll be back, I hope tomorrow. Busy day of training and speeches and presentations here in Silicon Valley, but I hope to see you tomorrow.

Thanks.