Nvidia Hits $5T: Bigger Than Germany? The Risk No One Sees

Foreign. Here's what's ahead. One company to rule them all. Nvidia rockets to $5 trillion in market cap, roughly the size of Germany's entire economy. And America's markets lean on a single chip maker like never before. In Paris, a landmark trial over lies targeting France's first lady. In the Netherlands, centrists surge while far right leader Gert Wilders loses ground at home. A month without official data turns policy into guesswork and shows how authoritarians game the numbers. And Donald Trump sells a China truce that patches the very crisis he created. All that and more today. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker Foreign hi and welcome. Thanks for joining me. Today we start off as we always do, looking at yesterday's market vitals. The S&P 500 closed at 6,890.59, no change. The Nasdaq Composite closed at 23,958.47, up 0.55%. Always keep in mind the long run. Over a 25 year period, the S&P 500 has gone up on average 7.4% per year. Nasdaq 100 has gone up 9.73% per year. So please, I urge you, think long term. Okay, let's dive right into the top story of the day. Nvidia at $5 trillion Nvidia just did something no company has ever done. It crossed a $5 trillion dollar market value. One chip maker is now roughly on par with the yearly output of Germany, the entire country. And that's not a small country. Since the launch of ChatGPT kicked off the AI arms race, Nvidia has become the toll booth of modern computing. Its data center, chips and networking gear power most of today's artificial intelligence. Now this isn't only a stock story. At $5 trillion, Nvidia now makes up a little over 8% of the entire S&P 500. And the AI build out it fuels is spilling into the real economy. In the first half of 2025, spending on data centers accounted for about 92% of United States GDP growth, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. Here's the risk. When one company becomes this central, the market and the economy inherit its ups and downs. A sharp drop in Nvidia would ripple through index funds, retirement accounts, cloud investment plans, and the 247 AI compute boom itself. For now, investors are betting on Nvidia's new Blackwell chips, its end to end platform of CPUs, high speed networking and the CUDA software that keeps developers locked in. Plus the possibility of looser rules on sales to China. But the concentration is the headline. America's stock market and much of today's AI economy now pivot on a single company. So what's the real message here? Congratulations to Nvidia becoming the first $5 trillion company. But it's scary. It now controls 8% of the entire S&P 500. One hiccup, one cold. It could bring us all down. Let's dig a little deeper. Let me be clear. I am not predicting Nvidia tanks. I'm not predicting a recession. I'll leave that to others who by the way, are usually wrong. Also, full disclosure, I own a bunch of Nvidia stock, primarily through index funds. And I certainly hope I don't seem like I'm talking up my book. And I don't actively trade funds, nor do I invest anyone else's money. This is not a financial management show. But we are looking at this as it affects our larger culture, our larger economy. What filtered is about is looking at top business stories. And this is a business story filtering it through the lens of communication and personal development. So look, there's always been big companies, but this is just astounding. At $5 trillion, as I mentioned in the news read, it's the size of the entire Germany economy. It's 8% of the entire S&P 500. Here's the real kicker. It's bigger than the entire Russell 2000 combined, meaning the bottom 2000 US stocks. If you add up the valuation of all of those companies, it's smaller than what Nvidia's worth. Now, if some company in the Russell 2000 goes from a high flyer to just tanking or it misses its revenue estimates and it's down 20%, it's really no big deal as long as you didn't invest heavily in that one company. But now we are at the point where if I imagine if Nvidia goes down 20% in one day, I don't even want to think about it. Now, all big companies go up and down from time to time, so it is inevitable that it does suffer decline. Again, I'm not predicting Nvidia goes down and I'm not even going to tell you it's overpriced. Now, I'll leave that to other market analysts, but it is fascinating. Here's the other thing. Human brains really don't process big numbers very well. It is hard enough for the average human to even visualize or conceptualize a billion dollars. When we're talking about a trillion dollars or certainly in this case $5 trillion. Most human brains are simply not capable of understanding how big that is. Yes, I understand we can all write the appropriate number of zeros and commas, but that's far different from really grasping the magnitude of how big this is. And it's all premised on the idea that artificial intelligence is great. And I think it's great. I use it every day. I used it to help me with script writing today. I used it to help create the image you see on the screen if you are watching this on YouTube or any, any other social media platform other than my friends on TikTok who can't see it. So I love AI, but I can't tell you it has added trillions and trillions of dollars of long term value to our economy. I don't know what happens when there is an inevitable shakeout in the industry. Just as there was with railroads in the 1840s in England, just as there was with automobile, the automobile industry in the United States, just as there was in radio and TV companies 100 years ago there, just as there was when the Internet boom went bust in 2000, there is inevitably a time when any new technology, no matter how great, no matter how transformational it is, peaks. And then people realize, oh, 95% of the companies rushing into this new space aren't going to make it, aren't going to be able to pay their bills, aren't going to be able to order new product from distributors. If it's car companies, a bunch of people stopped ordering steel, they weren't making any more cars. If it's AI companies and they are all ordering chips from Nvidia and a bunch of them stop, what is that going to do? Now for a little more background, if you're not exactly familiar with what Nvidia does, they have AI GPUs, multiple GPU systems, ultra fast networking, and the CUDA software ecosystem that keeps developers locked in. Now the other thing that doesn't get enough attention in the marketplace is how quickly China is making advances in artificial intelligence and in chip making and how they have a strategic interest in really harming the United States with all the trade wars going on. We already saw what happened to the markets in just a couple of days. When deepsea came out earlier this year with so many advances and doing things so much cheaper. So there's always the possibility of disruption, but there's also the possibility that Nvidia keeps its leadership position in the chip space, but that the overall demand just goes way, way down. A few more interesting facts Data center investment tied to AI made up 92% of the first half of 2025 US growth. Now, many commentators, including Scott Galloway, have pointed out this is really the only thing that keeps our economy afloat, especially with all the nonsense we've had with tariffs, picking wars where none were existing previously. With all the disruption to our economy, government shutdowns, et cetera, we would be in a massive recession now if we did not have AI spending fueling things. If you went back five years ago, economy was humming along even during COVID and it didn't have all this AI spending. If you took out our AI spending right now and really even just the spending on Nvidia, we would be in a recession right now. Am I predicting a recession? No. Because most people who predict recessions are wrong. And you look at most great technology bubbles, the people who started predicting recessions, they were often three years too early, two years too early. We are now seeing a lot of people saying, hey, we're going to have to head to a recession. This AI spending is a bubble about to burst. I don't know. You don't know? You might guess correctly. Other people in the market might guess correctly, but nobody really truly knows. What I do know is that if Nvidia stock goes down substantially, it is going to have a ripple effect like perhaps none we've ever seen before in the economy. And it is a little bit scary. But anyway, congratulations to Nvidia. Get full disclosure. I do have a bunch of clients in the chip space. I'm not trying to hype my book. As I mentioned, I own the video stock. I'm not saying buy it by any means. I'm not saying sell it. I'm saying we have to really understand the significance of this and even try to understand the significance of any one company getting this big. Because it is unprecedented. You could make the case that, okay, there was a time when Standard Oil was proportionally gigantic, but such a smaller scale compared to the giant worldwide economy we live in now. And this $5 trillion market cap, truly astounding. Back in a moment. Want to communicate like a Pro? Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com Millions have already transformed their speaking skills. Why not you? This show doesn't run on a lot of corporate sponsorships or big media backing. It runs on caffeine and your support. If you like what you're hearing and want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee. Really? Just go to buymeacoffee.com tjwalker it's quick, it's easy. And yes, it helps cover editing, hosting and staying relatively ad free for as long as possible. Buymeacoffee.com tjwalker your 3.95 makes a real difference one live coaching from me, Bonus episodes, full course access. It's all waiting@tjwalker.com members join now. Hi and welcome back to the program. This is filtered with TJ Walker. This is the show where we do a deep dive into top business stories, economic stories, AI stories and culture stories, analyzing them, filtering through the lens of communication skills and personal development. Let's go across the pond over to France. The Paris trial over a smear campaign against France's First Lady. Ten people are on trial in Paris accused of cyberbullying France's first lady, Brigitte Macron. Prosecutors say they amplified a false claim that she was born male and used her brother's name, a rumor that spread widely online and crossed the Atlantic. Brigitte macron, who is 72 years old, filed a complaint after years of harassment that her daughters say damaged her health and family life. The defendants say they were just joking, reposting others or engaging in legitimate debate about public figures. Questionable whether this is legitimate debate. This case now tests where France draws the line between speech and targeted abuse. The court will decide whether the online campaign worsened her living conditions and harmed her mental or physical health. A verdict is expected on January 5th. If they're found guilty, the defendants face prison time and fines. There is also a US Angle. Over the summer, Macron's filed a defamation suit in Delaware against commentator Candace Owens for promoting the same claims. Whatever the outcome in Paris, the message is clear. Viral lies can have real world consequences, and courts in multiple countries are being asked to say so on the record. Okay, what's the real message here? If you lie about people often enough, loud enough, and smear them and try to destroy their lives psychologically, you might win. But there might be a real payback. And the payback is coming for all the people who just relish in smearing the first lady of France. Not a moment too soon. Let's dig a little deeper here. Yes, I favor free speech in general. Everybody does in general. But there are always exceptions. You can't say free speech in a crowded movie theater and shout fire because that could result in people being trampled to death. You can't out spies working for your country because it could result in death of people working to protect the safety of your country and it could harm international relations. So everyone agrees there have to be some limits to free speech. If it's Just comedy saying, oh, you know, if you want to say, hey, T.J. looks like a 95 year old pee Wee Herman, okay, there's nothing wrong with that if you think it's funny. And it is a little bit funny. And it might hurt my feelings, although not really, but I don't have a problem with something like that. But this thing, going after Brigitte Macron again and again and again daily for years, it does seem to cross some line. Whether you want to call it slander, whether you want to call it defamation. Again, there are other rules in every country about limiting free speech. Not everyone has the same attitude of free speech is the United States. But even here you can't just say, my opponent's pen is filled with poison. I'm Bicpan and this is shick pen, and if you buy this chick pan, the poison will leak out and kill you. Buy my pen. You can't just make up lies defaming a commercial product. Now, Brigitte Macron is not a commercial product. She is a human being. To be clear, there is zero evidence she was born a male. It's all just made up nonsense. Now, normally, my attitude, my advice, if I were advising the Macron family, and I do not advise them, although I do advise various prime ministers and presidents around the world, leaders of state, a few queens who occasionally have issues like that, my advice normally is just ignore it. These are a few nuts and they're really stupid people. And the only people who listen to them are really stupid people. The problem is this has such a huge audience. Candace Owens, not someone I listen to regularly, but by some accounts she is number two in the whole US English speaking world, at least for podcast listenership. So she has millions and millions and millions of views. And again, if you've never heard of Candace Owens, and let's say you are over 40 and you're in the United States, imagine if Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite or someone who's the news anchor of one of the top newscasts when you were growing up just said again and again and again overnight, Ronald Reagan is really a drag queen. And he just said that every night at some point you'd be like, well, this is crazy, this is garbage. But if it said every single night, would it start to change people's perceptions? Let's look at some more of the facts here. Can there's a trial going on in France. France does not have the same First Amendment privileges to say mostly whatever you want. Eight men and two women accused of sexist online harassment penalties could Be up to two years in prison and fine. I don't know what the right penalty is for this. At some level, you have to be a truly sick person to spend a significant portion of your life daily time just spreading stupid stuff about people you don't know, you've probably never met and just making up stuff really with the attention of causing them harm. I mean, that is harassment. Should public officials expect to get some harassment? Sure. I'm certainly not well known like the first lady of France, but people occasionally write harassing things on my own channels, whether it's YouTube or TikTok or other places. Hey, TJ, you're not really TJ Walker, you're Joe Biden. Okay, maybe I do look like an 82 year old balding man. That isn't true. But does it really cause me any mental stress or bother? No, I just think it's funny and typically I ignore it or I just say thanks for thinking I look like a world statesman. So I think most of the time for most people, you have to go into this with an attitude of just laugh it off or ignore it. But it's easy for you and me just to say ignore it. We don't have people coming up to us every single day. Our family, our friends, our kids, friends. Cummings, is it true that, you know, TJ is really Joe Biden's great grandfather who was a murderer? Well, no, no one's saying that. And yet that's essentially what's happening to the first lady of France where everywhere she turns, everyone in her life she feels like is talking about this. And she has to be extraordinarily careful with everything she wears and says and does and moves in public. And I do feel some sympathy for her. I really do. Do. I want to go so far as to say it's illegal to criticize or make fun of public officials. No. You know, some of the United States would like that. Am I saying you should punish a TV network or a social media platform that allows criticism of a public official? No, but like with everything in life, there is some line. I can't tell you exactly where it is. If it's one time you say, oh, I heard, I heard TJ's really was born Thelma. You know, somebody says that once, who cares? But if it's again and again and again and you're reaching millions and millions and tens of millions of people, and collectively over time, hundreds of millions of people, it does start to transform the reality in existence for a lot of people, including the person you target. Now, if you want to spread that rumor about me, be my guest. I'd be happy that many people were talking about me. But it is different if you are the leader or a member of the first family of a major and significant country, which she is now. What is going to happen in our own United States to this commentator, Candace Owens? I have to tell you, I looked at her really for the first time the other day. She does seem to be a real nasty piece of work going on and on and on, alleging something that is just made up. It's as if I said Donald Trump was secretly born a woman and he has been a pedophile his whole life. Well, maybe not the last part, maybe isn't is crazy. But for me to just say that again and again, again, regardless of all the facts saying no, Donald Trump was in fact born a man. All the evidence suggests that his birth certificate says that it would be crazy. And yet that is essentially what this Candace Owens has done. Now, there is one other little tidbit here, extra wrinkle. Part of the allegations is that Brigitte Macron was a pedophile. Here's where it gets a little tricky, a little icky. She met Macron when she was an adult woman in her 30s or maybe even early 40s with a child the same age as Macron. She met him when he was 15 years old. Who knows when things really got consummated. But it's certainly credible the idea that perhaps those two got together romantically before he was of the legal age of consent. Now, I don't know what the age of consent was in France 30, 35 years ago, but certainly by basic US norms, cultural norms, you could make the case. It's a little bit sketchy, but that's not the main charge against it. The charge is that she is actually a man, was born a man. And that is complete, utter nonsense. More in a moment. We have lots to come in today's show. Stay tuned. Like what you heard. Don't let the algorithm bury us. Subscribe now at substack.com@tj walkersuccess want direct access to me live? Want to unlock bonus episodes behind the scenes takes and full access to my premium courses? Then become a member today. Just go to tjwalker.com members and choose your preferred platform, YouTube, Patreon, whatever works for you. This isn't just another subscription. It's a full access pass to the tools, coaching and content that can transform your communication and career. Tjwalker.com members, I'll see you inside. Before we Dive in. Quick question. Are your communication skills helping or hurting your career? Fix that in 20 minutes a day. Visit mediatrainingworldwide.com Real skills, real results. Done. And we are back. My name is TJ Walker. This is Filter. Thanks so much for joining me today. Let's dive into issue 3. Netherlands Centrist surge Far right leaders lose ground. The Netherlands just sent a message to Europe's extremes. With nearly all votes counted, the centrist party D66. It's a funny name for a political party. And the far right Party for Freedom, led by Gert Wilders, finished in a tie each on 26 seats. This is a big setback for Wilders, who forced early elections and then lost 11 seats. Voters punished chaos and hard lines on migration and rewarded a calmer fix it campaign from D66 leader Rob Jetton. He promised practical answers on housing, managed migration and a pro Europe course, while most other leaders said they would not govern with Wilders. Coalition talks will be tough. But the momentum shifted to the center. In short, Dutch voters didn't just split the difference. They chose stability over spectacle and policies over provocation. The verdict now moves from the ballot box to to the coalition table. So what's the real message here? There are limits to these hard right leaders around the world just preaching the message of keep out the foreigners, no more immigration. Let's be tough and take care of our own first. This was a big setback for right wing forces, certainly in the Netherlands, but it could, and I want to stress the word could be meaningful across not only Europe, but in other democracies. So for those of you in the United States, a little bit different. In the Netherlands, they don't just run for president. It's like most parliamentary systems where you have an election, people vote for their party, you add up all the members of parliament and you put together a winning coalition. If you win, if your party wins a majority, well, then you don't have to put together a coalition. You just rule things. But no party yesterday got an outright majority. There was a tie between the current governing, so they lost a lot of seats. The current governing far right party in the Netherlands, this new Centrist Democratic Party D66, gained a lot of seats. They are now going to have the ability to create coalitions with other parties, so they have a working majority. So it hasn't been settled yet, but it's extraordinarily unlikely that Gert Wilders will be able to continue running a government there. So it's going to cause some head scratching and a lot of People thinking, where did he go wrong? Because many, many political leaders throughout Europe, and indeed around the United States, even in North America, have been following down this path for the last roughly decade of. Just go further right, go further right. Be tough on immigration. Be tough. Kick the immigrants out, kick the illegals out. Has worked really well. It seems to have gone too far in the Netherlands. Now, let's not compare apples to oranges. This is a very different political system. It's not as personality deliver centered because you don't just get to vote for the one person you like or don't like. Gert Wilders is a provocative character, and I have to say, I sound like Trump now. He's got an incredible head of hair. I would flash it up here for you, but I don't have it right in front of me. And you can Google that. Those of you listening on podcasts, you wouldn't be able to see it anyway, but this guy. There is something about a lot of European politicians. I don't know what it is, and maybe I'm just jealous, but they tend to have these fantastic manes of hair that we in the United States don't really have that often. But that truly is an irrelevant thing. Excuse me for my indulgence there. The other interesting thing is Geert Wilders called these elections. One of the things that various parliaments have, whether it's Great Britain or elsewhere, is they actually give the power to the ruling coalition to decide when elections are. It's not just automatically on a set date every four years the way are in the United States. So they typically try to game the system, maybe juice the economy, put their finger in the wind and think, wow, what would be the best time to help us consolidate power if we had an election in the near future? So they can really gauge it. He called this election. Presumably he thought he had the upper hand. He thought things were going well and it didn't work. It did not work at all. So what does this really mean for the rest of democracies? Well, if nothing else, I think it does send a message of hope to centrist political actors in democracies around the world. That, yes, there can be changing tides, there can be a pendulum that swings one side to the other. It may be that this is the beginning of a pendulum swinging back to the center. After being far right in a lot of democracies for the last decade, I know there are in fact a lot of Democrats and centrists in the United States who look at this and think, okay, the whole world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. Now maybe there is hope. And they're going to be studying exactly how these candidates worked for this D66 party, the messages they used. And apparently it was about bread and butter issues, maintaining stability, not just continuing to bash migrants and immigrants. And so a lot of democracies around the world are going to be studying what this party did because they clearly did something right. And we always take time for comments if you're nice enough to join us live. Most people are watching this show on demand, whether it is on YouTube, TikTok, on Facebook, Instagram. We're on pretty much every social media platform. We're also on every kind of podcasting platform. So most people are watching this on demand. But if you are watching live, you can always leave comments on whatever platform you're on. And I will see them. So a couple of comments come in. Ponder said, $40 million for Argentina, no money for food or health care, Trump economy, referring to, of course, the tens of billions of dollars to bail out Argentina simply because the leader of Argentina says nice things about Trump and presumably because he has sort of crazy hair like another leader. And it does strike a lot of people as absurd. Now, some of the pain of this whole Argentina thing may be going away as it relates to our next story we'll talk about in a moment, because part of the pain for many people in America with Argentina bailout is Argentina was now going to sell all their soybeans to China, since, you know, who got us into a trade war with China. And China said we're not buying any more soybeans from America. Now, some of that has changed in just the last dozen hours at the time of this recording, which is 9:14am Eastern Time on Thursday, October 30, the day before Halloween. So some of this has changed, but it does strike a lot of people as really odd that we're bailing out Argentina, at least as of yesterday, bailing out Argentina, where there's frankly no strategic significance to the United States. They are our adversaries in a sense when it comes to selling soybeans on the international market. And we can't even pay our own American servicemen right now. We're not even paying our bills right now. It's it does seem to be odd. Rose, 63, says if you say it enough, that's our new reality. Rose is talking about the previous story related to so many people, including the US's Candace Owens, who just have said again and again and again a particular slander against the first lady of France. And it has become a reality. Now. This is a tactic that far right authoritarians have used throughout history. The Big Lie theory. You just say it boldly enough, often enough, frequently enough, and you have enough people saying it, it becomes a reality. Kind of like the Big Lie that someone won the 2020 election even though he had fewer votes than the guy who was actually certified to win the 2020 election. But let's not get sidetracked with that whole issue. I don't want the Department of Justice coming after me. Okay, we are going to switch gears and go to our fifth and final big story of the day in just a moment. You're not going to want to miss this. Imagine having a communication coach who never sleeps. Meet your new secret weapon, the TJ Walker AI clone. Go to TJ Walker AI and start getting custom coaching 24 7. No scheduling, no hourly fees. I train presidents, prime ministers, and Fortune 500 CEOs. But the same exact communication I've delivered to world leaders is now available to you online anytime@mediatrainingworldwide.com whether you're speaking on camera, pitching a client, or handling a Craig, you need these tools. These aren't fluffy motivational videos. They're practical, battle tested techniques to help you speak clearly, competently and persuasively. Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and take your communication to the next level. Welcome back. I'm TJ Walker, this is Filter, and this is the fourth story. I misspoke a moment ago. I said it was the fifth story. But we still have several big stories to come, so let's dive right in. America's Data Blackout and How Authoritarians Game Numbers A month without official US data is more than an inconvenience. It's a stress test for democracy. When the lights go out, investors and voters start reaching for rumors, private proxies and spin. Those are exactly the conditions where authoritarian leaders thrive. Around around the world, strongmen have learned a simple trick. If reality is ugly, rewrite the spreadsheet, fire the statisticians, or stop publishing the numbers at all. That matters. Right now, the Fed is driving in fog. Businesses are making payroll decisions blind. Washington is arguing interest rates with fewer facts. History shows what fills the vacuum. Manipulated inflation make belief growth and disappearing data sets. The short term political payoff can be real. The long term cost is worse. You lose credibility. You pay more to borrow and you make bad policy. So while tariffs, shutdowns and AI are already scrambling the signal, the deeper risk is letting data become a partisan weapon. Reliable Numbers are infrastructure. Switch them off long enough and you don't just lose the plot, you invite a different kind of politics to write it for you. Okay, what's the real message here? Americans and capitalism itself is flying blind right now. We don't really have any idea what the true unemployment rate is, what the inflation rate is. We're not getting accurate numbers anymore from a government that's told either to shut up or we've cut off their funding and sent people home. This is a big problem for capitalism. Let's go a little bit deeper here because there's a real trend with authoritarians doing this. It happened in, it's happened in Turkey, it's happened in Russia. Certainly China did it for a long, long time. Everything was always, oh, once again, we had double digit growth in our economy. Really? Yeah, China did have a lot of growth over the last 35 years, but some years those numbers were fudged. Putin's Russia fudges numbers all the time. Peron's Argentina fudge, fudge numbers all the time. Because if you buy into this idea that there's one great leader anointed by God or someone else or something else and they can do no wrong, then when you have a choice between accurate data and saying dear leader can do no wrong and you got to throw out one, you throw out the accurate data. So now we have a situation where the current administration in Washington has let it be known that they will not let it be known. They've actually fired those in charge of giving us accurate labor statistics. And when they haven't actually fired, and when they've replaced them with PR henchmen with zero credibility when it comes to labor data. So there's that. The other issue is now with the government shutdown, it's like, oh, we'd love to give you accurate information, but we can't because the bad old people in the other party won't let us. They won't let us fund the government. That's the message. And is it going to cause a massive economic disruption? In the short term, maybe not. I'm not predicting that. But in the long run, there is a reason why investors around the world like to invest their money in American companies, in the American Stock Exchange. In part, it's because the reliability of accurate information. Did the economy grow? What was the unemployment? What are the interest rates? What percentage of people are not paying their car loans back? What is the rate of default and bankruptcy? These are the data sets that help people make decisions about where to invest, where to put Their money. And this is what has historically been such a huge asset for the United States. It's not just our natural resources. I mean, Africa has a lot of natural resources and you can put their top 10 countries together. Doesn't add up to the US economy. It's not our land. Russia has a lot of land. It is in part our system of government, our system of information flows. This show is about communication of information. That's a part of our premise. I filter the top stories of the day through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills. And you've got to realize that by constantly communicating accurate information, or at least information where fair minded people can look at it and say no, one's obviously trying to manipulate it to their favor, that gains credibility, that gains trust. People want to invest in you, whereas they don't want to invest in their own country. If you're a smart, successful, hard working, ambitious, entrepreneurial person and just happened to live In Russia in 1995 or 2005, you did everything you could as quickly as possible to emigrate to the United States to run your businesses. You didn't want to stay in Russia in part because you never knew what was happening to the Russian economy really. Also in part because there was no rule of law. All you had to do was anger at one competitor. And if that competitor had a strong tie to their dear leader, you could be put out of business overnight. United States was different from that. And I have to emphasize the past tense was we can't confidently state that any business is free from political pressure. Now if you want to take over, we're seeing that right now with the attempted purchasing of Warner. And one of the major, last remaining major film companies in the United States is you've got a whole bunch of small players who say it doesn't make sense financially. You have some bigger players saying, I'd like to make a purchase. And then you've got Paramount with their close ties to the current administration saying, hey, we know if we buy it, we've got the political juice to let the merger go through. Other big players don't have that. And for that reason alone, you're going to see some of them just not even bother this. In any one case, it's not going to matter. But over time, this corrodes the fundamental foundations of a free market system. And we are seeing it here, we're seeing it right now. So one of the things that does happen in totalitarian regimes is they criminalize independent estimates. They fine or sue researchers who publish alternative data on inflation or growth. And as I've said, what we're seeing here and other totalitarian regimes and authoritarian regimes is there's a pause to consumer price data coming out. You can't really figure out what's happening in trade. You can't figure out what's happening in unemployment. Therefore, as a business owner, you can't make do. I hire more people because I see the economy growing and I see consumer demand. You can't make rational decisions. So the most logical, rational thing to do there is sit on your hands and do nothing and just go with the status quo that creates stagnation. That's not how great economies really thrive. So that's why the seemingly boring things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wow, what a boring topic. It's actually incredibly important and it could truly, truly harm our economy. And maybe not today or tomorrow, but maybe not just the long term. Maybe in the medium term as well. More in a moment. We'll be right back after this break. Want more? Grab my five book success library for $9.95 at TJ Walker. It's the fastest way to level up your communication. Imagine being the most confident person in the room, whether you're on Zoom or on stage. That's what thousands of professionals are learning to do right now. Through my online communication courses at Media Training Worldwide. You can access my complete training library on demand. Affordable and actually effective. Whether you're preparing for media interviews, client presentations or TED style talks, I've got you covered. Check it out mediatrainingworldwide.com. you'll never wing it again. Welcome back to Filtered. This is Issue five. This time it is five. I miscounted earlier. Trump's China truce crisis, partial rollback victory lap. Donald Trump just claimed a trade win with China. In reality, he's cleaning up a crisis that he actually created. This is not surprising, given how often he's done this, but he's cleaning up the crisis that he created and leaving the weaknesses in place. He launched tariff shocks that rattled supply chains, pushed China to weaponize rare earth minerals, and then celebrated when China paused those curbs for a year and restarted soybean purchases. That is not strength. That is lighting a fire, spraying it with a hose and bragging about the water pressure while the house still smolders under pressure, Trump trimmed tariffs. He had hiked, delayed new tech bans and cheered a temporary truce. But China kept the leverage. At any point, it can squeeze rare earths again, just as it has done before. And while Trump posed for victory headlines, he tossed In a sudden call to resume US Nuclear test, turning a trade photo op into a global anxiety spike. Bottom line, he creates the crisis, announce a partial rollback, and calls it peace. The cost and vulnerabilities remain. The next time Beijing wants a concession. And it knows how to get Washington's attention. Okay, so this is a trend we've seen a lot of in the last 10 months, where the current administration does something completely contrary to what every mainstream economist, left, right, center, says is the good thing to do. It causes massive headaches, the stock market starts tumbling, and then there is a reversal from Washington. Things go back up. And then the White House says, see, we saved the day again. I mean, this, it's an often used metaphor, but it really is like a kid playing with matches in an old abandoned house. It catches fire, he goes and get a hose and he puts most of it out, but, you know, two rooms are still burnt down, and the house is never as good as before. And the kids wants to be given a medal for heroism. It's frankly bizarre. So, in a nutshell, here's what I think you really need to know. Here's the real message from this headline of Trump proclaiming victory in negotiations with China. Trump initially beat his chest, saying, I'm the tough guy, I deserve everything, and I'm putting a big tariff on China. China said, okay, we'll see about that. You don't get the rare earth minerals that basically run every technology, product, every car, everything important to your economy. You can only get it from us. And we said, you're not going to get our soybeans. And China said, no problem. We get soybeans anywhere. They can grow those anywhere. China realized it had the upper hand. It squeezed America. Trump folded and then held a press conference saying, see, I'm a big winner. This is insanity. Let's go a little bit deeper here with what's going on. So these rare earth minerals, and I'm not an expert on them, but they are used in basically every car, every electronic car. So many other important pieces of infrastructure in our modern economy. So many technological tools, devices we use every day. There are rare earth minerals found elsewhere. They're not quite as rare as the sound of the name, rare, but right now, China makes a huge, gigantic percentage of them. And you can't just say, okay, let's turn on the spigot in America and quadruple our rare earth minerals mining in the next six. It just doesn't work that way. So China didn't want to play this card. They, they want Harmony. They want growth. And I'm not a Chinese apologist. There's plenty of things I don't like about China, namely, it's an authoritarian government. But they have correctly realized it's in their own best interest to have people around the world wanting to purchase their rare earth minerals. So they've not wanted to play extortion games. They've not wanted to shut people off. They didn't want to play that cart. Trump forced them. So now it's out there. Now the whole world knows that China can in fact turn off the worldwide economy if they want. It would be absolutely devastating. Don't take my word for it. Listen to virtually any economist who has any understanding of these rare earth minerals. If all of a sudden China says we're not selling it at all to anyone in America and we're not selling to other countries unless they sign an agreement that what we sell them can't find its way into an American product, which was what the plan was. If that actually happens, it's game over for the American economy. And we're not hurting them by saying, you can't buy our soybeans without 100% tariff because they can just buy those from Argentina. Now, apparently, the way the deal has been worked out in just the last dozen hours, China has now agreed to purchase American soybeans again. So in other words, we've gone through all this turmoil, all this, all this hype about crisis, and we're sort of back to where we started again, which seems to be a recurring theme happening in this administration. I want to point out to you this is the first time you've watched this show. Realize this is not a political punditry show. This is not Fox News Channel or msnbc. I'm here as the sane, sensible centrist analyzing top business stories, technology and culture stories through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills. That's why we're here. I prefer not to talk about any one current administration, but unfortunately, when you have an administration that wants to put its fingers on every single piece of the economy and culture, it's hard not to because there's just no other way of talking about it. Okay, we're going to switch and I'll be back in just 20 seconds to talk about our grab bag stories of the day. Hey, if you're enjoying this kind of take and want to hear more stories filtered through the lens of communication, make sure you're following the show, whether you're watching or listening. New episodes drop every single day in it. There's A little notification option where you are now. Go ahead and turn it on. It helps you stay in the loop. Okay, we are back. Time for a grab bag section. So Joe Biden's former press secretary has a new book out. And forgive me, I meant to research before we started the show, but during the Biden administration, I watched so little TV I never heard her name pronounced. I believe it's Karen or Karine Jean Pierre. She has a new memoir out called Independent and it's not going well. In fact, there's a front page story in today's New York Times about how poorly she's doing on her media tour, how horrible her interviews are, what train wrecks her interviews are. So her big thesis is she's no longer a Democrat because the Democrats were so mean to Joe Biden. And she's contending, apparently with a straight face, that she never saw any indication that Joe Biden seemed too old or not up to the job, really. Okay, so that's her position and it's not going well. Now you could certainly anticipate that conservative media, Breitbart, Fox News Channel, places like that would have a field day with this. And you would be correct. They would be ridiculing this as absurd. But here's what's different about American politics and American media. All of the so called liberal media are also bashing her. They're also saying she's foolish. They're also saying her answers to questions don't add up. And that to me in a nutshell, is the difference in American media between so called liberal left wing media and right wing media. If I were a pure right wing commentator and I wrote a book that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and was the greatest president in the history of the world, never made a bad decision, I would get a very warm, loving reception in all conservative media. I wouldn't be asked tough questions. I would be praised for my intellect and my fearlessness the same. It's just not the equivalent on the other side. Here's a woman, worked for the Biden administration, defending him as best she can. And the entire mainstream centrist, liberal and left wing media is laughing in her face. They're saying, no, that's complete bs, that's nonsense. So as they should, because I didn't even, I was afraid to even watch the first debate last year with Joe Biden because to me for the last four years, he looked like somebody about to topple over on stage, walking two steps. I couldn't even bear to watch him. I thought he seemed like he was so out of it. But everyone else was watching these debates and the reporters interviewing and the talk show host interviewing this former press secretary all watched the debate and they are incredulous that this woman is saying that, you know, somehow the Democrats were mean to Joe Biden, making him get out. No, the Democrats were too nice to Joe Biden. You should have had every Democratic member of Congress, or at least the leadership, marching up to the White House no later than about January 2023, saying, Mr. President, we demand that you announce today you're not running for reelection. And we want to start having a presidential primary, a Democratic primary. That's what the Democrats should have done in retrospect, and that's not a particularly controversial statement, what I said, but that's what they should have done. The idea that they were too mean to Joe Biden, that's bizarre. Next, grab bag issue. Minutes before meeting with Xi, Trump threatened to resume U.S. nuclear testing after three decades, rattling allies and overshadowing his trade de escalation message. The move fuels proliferation worries and raises questions about US Trade strategy coherence. Now, it is true the United States never signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. But as a practical matter, for the last three decades, the US has respected that because the US Benefits from a world where every medium sized country and every small country isn't out testing nuclear weapons, because, oops, what happens if they get it wrong or the missile veers in the wrong way someplace? Now, most serious experts say that the testing can be done in a simulated digital environment. Now, there's really no need to literally test nuclear weapons in the real world, underground or above ground. But once again, Trump wants to be the tough guy. I've got weapons. I'm going to use them. Now, full disclosure, I've spent a lot of my time working with the United Nations Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. These are committed, committed, serious people who spend their lives trying to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that means getting people not to test nuclear weapons. Why? Because they don't want more World War IIs. They don't want to see 2, 3, 400,000 people die like that with more nuclear weapons going off. And the United States, even though they hadn't signed the treaty, they were seen, at least at some level, of showing some moral leadership by not continuing to do any testing. Well, now that's gone. Once again, it's just another example of a leader, and I use that term loosely or in the most standard definition, technical way, says, oh, I can do whatever I want, anytime I want. I Don't have to look at what other experts have done, what people of my own party have done, where there's a consensus of what's best for the world. I'll just do whatever I want, and people have to deal with it. Okay, you are in power for now, but there are real costs to that. Speaking of cost, our final issue of the day, this hurricane, and I hate to be the typical ugly American, I could easily have shown you footage of the absolute devastation in Haiti, Jamaica, other places. But unfortunately, hate to say it, Americans don't care about that. It's too remote, it's too awful. So I was struck, and I was going to show you footage here, but we ran out of time. Of the homes in my home state of North Carolina that are just gone now, they have collapsed into the ocean. 27 homes have collapsed since 2020. 16 in the last six weeks, five just in the last day. Typically big, beautiful homes in the Outer Banks into the sea. Why do I point this out? Because at some point, whether you agree with global warming or not, we as a society have to figure out, do we want to subsidize people for living on the ocean? Now, I've lived on the ocean before. I lived in Miami Beach. It was beautiful. But I'm not going to buy a house or build a house on the ocean for a couple of reasons. Number one, I don't want to get my home destroyed by a hurricane. Number two, I don't really expect you as a taxpayer to directly or indirectly subsidize me. Because make no mistake about it, wealthy people who live on beaches in America who say they're libertarians are the very first ones to call the federal government and say, hey, send the Army Corps of Engineers out here and spend a few hundred million dollars building my beach back because I like a beach. They're the first ones to do that. They're the first ones who want their insurance for their home subsidized. They're the first ones who want to say, well, this is a natural disaster, so I deserve to be made whole. Well, at this point, again, regardless of your theory as to what's causing so much destruction on our coastline, at some point we as Americans have to start encouraging, encouraging, and this means New Orleans as well. We have to start encouraging people to build homes and cities and communities further away from the ocean. It's a big country, ladies and gentlemen. We still have a lot of land. We don't have to have homes on the beach, even though it looks pretty. And we certainly don't need to be building homes in entire communities below sea level, which is what a lot of New Orleans is. I have great compassion for the people of New Orleans. I wish them well. It's a wonderful city. I've had great times there. They were not affected by this most recent hurricane, but it's all related where water is rising, sea levels are rising, and it's taking back homes and buildings and communities. Let's stop rebuilding. Let's build on higher ground. There's lots of ground in America, completely undeveloped. You ever fly anywhere? You see that most of America is nothing but trees, nothing but empty space. We don't have to keep building and tempting Mother Nature Now I typically like to end the show with questions from you and my students. This question comes from Sal who says, how can I, after 15 years in the information technology field, develop strong communication skills that allow me to confidently express what truly matters and potentially open the door to exploring marketing in the future? And Sal is a student in my Complete Communication Skills masterclass. Sal, thanks for the question. You know you're good at what you do in the IT field because you've worked on it every day for 15 years. That's why you're good. You need to take the same mentality with your communication skills. Actively try to communicate every day, whether it's just asking one question in a meeting, whether it is sharing the latest your department has done in a weekly meeting with five people, rather than waiting for that one on one with your boss. After the meeting, look for every opportunity you can. And then periodically, if you're giving a big pitch for new funding or new support or request for more staff, you need to practice your presentation on video using your cell phone again and again until you like what you see. When you do that, you'll be very confident when you're giving the real presentation, whether it's your bosses, a committee, or the board of directors. Do it, do it consistently and you'll get better and better. Your confidence will grow and you'll be on a positive spiral upwards. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. See you tomorrow.