Olympics Ratings Surge, Russia’s War Economy Strain & $1.7B Crypto Scandal

Ultimize. The Olympics claim a massive ratings comeback. But are the numbers inflated? Russia is spending nearly half half its budget on war and mortgaging its Future. Binance finds $1.7 billion in crypto tied to Iran, even after pleading guilty to violations. Robot umps are officially here, and they're about to change baseball forever. The Epstein fallout spreads across Britain and American media, and President Trump, bruised by the Supreme Court and falling polls, tries to reset at the State of the Union address. All that and more today on Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. Let's dive in. Milan Cortina Olympics Ratings surged the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics averaged 23.5 million U.S. viewers per day, according to NBC. That's a 96% jump over Beijing 2022 and the most watched Winter Games since Sochi in 2014. But I'm still wondering about a few of these details. These numbers combine traditional NBC broadcast cable networks, Peacock streaming, which I don't think was as big a deal four years ago, and digital data measured by Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. In other words, this is a fully aggregated cross platform count. Now, they did that before four years ago, but perhaps the rating services are getting better. Perhaps there's inflation. I'm not quite sure. The other issue Beijing aired in a difficult time zone and during pandemic restrictions, Blonde benefits from European time alignment and broader streaming adoption. Peacock penetration has grown dramatically since 2022. And I know I had I subscribed to Peacock the week before the Olympics started because I wanted to watch the US Super Bowl. So yes, there is a ratings rebound, but it's also a measurement evolution story. The definition of a viewer has expanded. I know I watched plenty of the Olympics on YouTube and they claim they are not even counting those views. So I don't know. Live sports remain the last true mass audience driver in a fractured media world, and the Olympics are still one of the few events that can command. What's the big message here? People like to talk about the death of broadcast media, the death of mass media. Well, not quite so fast. People still want to watch live sports here in the United States, the NFL is the most popular TV show and it's games typically are nine of the top ten shows. So football is still very, very popular because it's live. There's the surprise. No one knows you can't read about it in advance. No matter how much you love a Broadway musical, you know how it ends. Or you certainly can if you check the reviews or the summaries. Nobody knows the end the results of live sports. So that seems to be the last thing that people really care about. Where they will go anywhere. Traditional cartoon sitcoms. People will just go to TikTok for that or YouTube. They don't need prime time Thursday night. Must see TV anymore. Live video, live sports, live. Something gets people's attention. Why don't want to talk about that with you today? I do think that wherever you are in your career, whether you have your own business, a small business, or a large business, if you are trying to attract a tribe, a community, customers, clients, every so often you need to do something live. It's a galvanizing event. I remember as far back as 15 years ago, early in my own career of doing online training, that I had certain partnerships with trade publications and if they made my courses on demand available all the time, it never sold anything. But if they said, okay, it's a live a webinar next Thursday at 2. Sign up now or you'll miss it. Sign up and you'll be able to ask questions. Boom. They could sell 100 seats and everybody made a lot of money. You know, those sorts of events could generate low five figures. So I do want you to think about what can you do live? It may be simply answering questions about how to fix toilets. If you're a plumber in your community, you may want to tell people, okay, the first Tuesday morning of every month on my Facebook page, I will answer your questions about unclogging toilets or unclogging sinks. It doesn't have to be sexy. It doesn't have to be as exciting as the Olympics. You don't have to have the face of Eileen Goo to attract attention. If it's live and people can interact with it especially, it can be hugely popular, at least with the people you care about now. Hugely popular for you. If you are a local plumber and you spend a half an hour doing it and you get four customers out of it, out of four people watching, that's an impressive audience for you. If you are a stockbroker in Des Moines and you go live answering people's questions about the stock market and you get even one new customer, the commissions off of that person might generate six figures over time. So don't think of it as, oh, I'm not as important or as exciting as the Olympics. Who would want to watch little old me? Here's the thing. If you've ever had one interesting conversation with one client, one customer, one prospect, one colleague, then you know you have something interesting to say. Real Conversations with real people, customers, clients, prospects are by definition live. It can't be a conversation if it's not. I want you to think about how you can package it, adopt it slightly and make it live on a screen. No, not everybody has to be a TikTok star or have their face across all social media every day the way some of us do. But it's hard to imagine how you couldn't be helped by at least once a month for 10 minutes, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's Facebook, whether it's TikTok. Wherever your customers are, wherever your prospects are, go to them and make yourself available. I know in some platforms like TikTok, if I simply post a video, maybe it gets a hundred views. If I go live, all of a sudden, 5,000 people will watch and the same may be in effect for you. Now, are all 5,000 going to be customers of mine? Are they watching and hanging on every word for an hour? No, some of them pop by for 10 seconds. But it's still the ability to reach a larger audience. Regardless of whether you have your own business, you're a student, an author, an expert, or a cog in a much, much larger corporation, you only increase value of yourself in the marketplace if you prove you can attract an audience. You could work for a company as big as Citibank or Merrill Lynch. If you can attract wealthy people, for example, to hear your opinions on wealth management and you're a wealth manager, that's going to make you more valuable. It's going to make you harder to replace. It's going to make you harder to say, well, AI is going to take your job. And if you do get pushed out the door, guess what? The fact that you already have a relationship with people, whether you call it an audience, a fan, tribes, followers, it doesn't really matter. The key is, can you connect with people who actually care about something you have to say or do? That's what makes you valuable. That's why NBC is presumably making a bunch of money off of these Olympics, because they can still attract 23.5 million viewers a day during the couple of weeks of the Olympics. Let me go over some more basic facts. Yeah, they're claiming a 96% increase in daily viewership over Beijing 2022. I don't know if I entirely buy that. I'm not making allegations of fraud, but that seems like a really big increase. It's hard to see anyone in any broadcast arena doubling in audience over what they were doing four years earlier. Again, this data includes not just viewers on NBC but cable networks, as well as their app, the Peacock app, which is the one I streamed it from. And NBC holds the rights for the Olympics through 2036. So we're going to be seeing a lot of NBC when it comes to Olympics, both summer and winter Olympics for a while. And this is perhaps one of the last reasons why we need network television. They've got the resources, the team, the broadcasters, the analysts, the distribution on so many different cable networks, broadcast Networks, Apps and YouTube. I'm not quite sure why they're not including the numbers on people who watched on YouTube. Certainly that's why where I watch the winning performances from for the ice skating, which is popular in my household, Eileen Goose, whatever you call that sport where you're flipping around in the air on skis, very, very impressive. In my own family, we found it easier to watch it on YouTube than we did on the Peacock app. The app seemed to give too many truncated highlights, whereas with YouTube we could watch the whole performance. So I'm not quite sure why they didn't include that as well. So again, the real message for you is I want you to think about in your own career or for that matter, your hobby, how can you do something where people don't know in advance what the results are? That's the beauty of live. Now. It's true that when many Americans watched the Olympics, they were watching something that had been recorded six hours earlier, but it was close to live. It was recorded live and if you wanted to, quite often you could see it live. I want you to think about how you can do something live to showcase your expertise. Because ultimately, I don't want to say it's easy, but that is one of the easier ways of getting people to pay attention and to show up and listen and watch. You want to communicate like a Pro?

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Russia remakes its economy for war. Russia is devoting roughly 40% of its entire federal budget to military and security spending, with another 9% going to debt interest tied to war financing. Its National Wealth Fund's liquid reserves have fallen from about $113 billion before the war to roughly $55 billion today. Oil and gas revenues dropped sharply last year as sanctions forced discounted crude sales. The war has also accelerated demographic strain. Estimates suggest up to 325,000 Russian troops have died and hundreds of thousands of citizens have left the country. Innovation is being redirected towards sanctions evasion rather than long term development. Economists warn that Russia's economy has structurally shifted toward militarization. Even if sanctions ease, unwinding that transformation won't be easy. The short term war stimulus masked deeper fragility because initially the first couple of years of the war, the economy didn't shrink. A lot of people thought it would, but it didn't. But now things are settling down and not in a good way. The long term cost may be slower growth, deeper dependence on China and a diminished footprint. So this war has now gone on four years with no signs of it ending. Let's look at some more of the facts. It's foreign direct investment is cratered. Its population is plummeting. I gave you One estimate of 325,000 deaths from the war. I've seen others, more than a million plus. You have the fact that so many people are just leaving the country. It's not a good place to live, to start a business, to grow a business, to thrive, especially if you want to be active in the international globalized marketplace because you're considered a pariah, unfortunately, because of what that government is doing. So to me, this is fascinating, a fascinating story for many reasons, with a lot of different lessons for you and me that are applicable outside of war. You may not care about Russia, you may not care about Ukraine, not everyone does. But what's going on here has been going on in other countries, in other forms for millennia. I'm going to analyze that in more detail, but for right now, let's just take a minute and look at the sheer destruction of this economy. I mean, its technology prowess is laughable. It's not Even the top 10 in the world now when it comes to its AI capabilities, its technology prowess. And there was a point certainly when I was a kid growing up in the 60s and 70s when many people in the United States thought the Soviet Union was the most powerful country in the world. More Powerful. They won the space race initially. Sputnik was a testament to their technological prowess. These days, they are appearing to lapse into third world status. Why do people do that? So one of the assumptions many people have is, well, you know, politicians are all alike and they're going to do what's in their own self interest and they're going to do what puts money in their pocket. Not always. Sometimes politicians do things purely for vanity, purely for hubris, purely for power, purely for ego. So it is a mistake to think that this whole war is happening to just line the certain pockets of Putin or his oligarch friends because they're all getting poorer from this. This is not helping the economy of Russia at all. And when you look at the other things going on in Russia, the, the following birth rates, nobody wants to have kids in a society like that. People exiting the country, moving out, fleeing the deaths that are happening from the soldiers, the deaths that are happening as war casualties. So it's really mounting. And I want to put a spotlight on some of the various human biases that sort of make this happen. One of them is just a normalcy bias. Many Russians thought, okay, our leader Putin is sending us to war. Okay, wars come and go. Life will pretty much continue as it always had. Well, no, there is an assumption, a bias humans have that things will basically stay by, but they don't. Russia is a profoundly worse place, a worse economy than it was four years ago. This very much relates to a status quo bias. Very similar. People are just assuming, you know, what happened yesterday will be the same as today. No, things are actually getting worse. Foreign investment is getting worse. The long term debt of the country is getting worse. Now, the United States is in no position to be lecturing most countries about escalating debt. But compared to what's happening in Russia, Russia has some severe problems. There's authority bias. There is a tendency even among billionaires to say, okay, our leader says we have to do this war, we have to double down, we have to take over all this land. So, you know, he wouldn't be doing that if there weren't good reasons. So I guess we'll go along with it. That's authority bias. Sometimes leaders are just crazy or they do crazy things. And certainly when history, when serious historians write the history of this war, Putin is going to look horrible. Putin is going to be seen as someone who essentially destroyed the economy and took Russia from a first world nation to a second world nation. So you've got to be very much wary of authority bias. And the next is confirmation bias. If you see stories coming out every day and everyone's guilty of that, I'm guilty of that. If you see stories every day about wins and losses in a war, it's very easy to just remember the wins. Oh, hey, we're winning the war. Just like our leader told us. This is going well, it's going to be over in three days. Four years later, it's not over. So there can be a tendency among people in an entire country, not just leaders, but the people in the entire country, to fall to confirmation bias. You hear things that confirm what you believe to be true, what should be true, what you want to be true, which is, hey, we're winning the war. Well, I gotta tell you, when you are a giant country spanning 11 time zones and you're trying to take over a country that is vastly smaller, and you're told this is going to be an easy war, and four years later, you're still told every day, hey, we're winning the war. At some point you need to realize you are perhaps falling victim to confirmation bias. Next big bias that all humans are susceptible to. Sunk cost fallacy. The idea we've paid so much, we can't stop now. Well, no, when something is not giving you a return on your investment, just stop. If you're digging yourself in a hole deeper and deeper and there's no way out, it doesn't help to keep digging. The solution is stop. You don't get back the time or money or energy or effort you spent digging, but you don't help yourself by continuing to dig. It's that way with investments in the finance world, but it's certainly that way in war too. If you keep digging yourself deeper and deeper into a war and you're not getting anything out of it, you're not winning. You're just guilty of sunk cost fallacy. There's an optimism bias now. You're a political leader or a leader of a company or anything, you have to be optimistic by nature. But there's a difference between optimistic and being delusional. And at some point now, people of Russia are going to have to come to face the fact that regardless of what happens in Ukraine, it was delusional to think that this war was going to benefit the people of Russia. Now, like you and most people, I have clear cut opinions on the Ukrainian war and what should happen there. I'm going to, for the most part, put that aside now and continue with this analysis of human bias and how we all need to be wary on guard of this affecting us because all of us are guilty of, of being susceptible to these biases. From time to time there's groupthink, conformity. If everyone you know says, yes, we support Dear Leader, you couldn't possibly be wrong. Then before you know it, it's four years into a war that's done nothing but destroy your economy. Now certainly we're guilty of that in the United States, rallying around certain Dear Leaders ill thought out ventures. But as much as I give frequent criticism to the leader of the United States today, at least he hasn't literally tried to go to war with Canada and resulted in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men being killed on the battlefield. I'll give him credit for that. Nor has he tried to take over Mexico and gotten hundreds of thousands or a million American soldiers killed. I'll at least give him that. Okay, there's system. There's system justification. That's another type of bias where you rationalize hardship is necessary and moral. We are good people because we're willing to go through this tough thing where our sons are shipped off to war and killed, where our businesses are destroyed. Well, no. Sometimes it's just stupid and you shouldn't be doing that. Just because something is hard and requires sacrifice doesn't mean it's a good thing. There's availability bias. If you are in Russia, and increasingly in a place like the United States, viewpoints critical of the dominant regime don't get airing, they don't get reported. And as bad as it has become in the United States, with so many news organizations under assault for criticizing the current regime, here it's even, let's not kid ourselves, it's a lot worse in Russia. If you are to report on the daily losses, the death of Russian soldiers, the harm to the economy, you would be disappeared pretty quickly. You'd probably end up in a prison cell and given some tasty toad serum. So that is a part of the availability bias that happens to people, especially in closed cultures. There's also a bias called pluralistic ignorance. That's when many people privately disagree with a certain policy, but they think everyone else is with the leader. I better keep quiet. They think they're the only ones who really know what's going on, how horrible the situation is, and they're afraid to speak out. So I, I have many Russian friends, Russian people I've done business with over the years. I feel sorry for them, how this country has essentially been destroyed by the megalomaniac Putin and his destruction. But I, I say so not out of smugness, because arguably the United States is not far behind.

We'll be right back after this break.

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hi, we are back. My name is TJ Walker and this is Filtered. This is the show where every day we look at top news stories, business stories, economic, technology, culture, stories of the day, and filter it through the lens of personal development skills. All with the goal of helping you become not just more informed, but more skilled so you can be successful in your professional life as well as your personal life. Issue 3 Today Binance and $1.7 billion in Iran linked Crypto According to Reporting international investors, investigators at Binance found that roughly $1.7 billion in crypto flowed from exchange accounts to Iranian linked entities. The findings came after Binance had already pleaded guilty in 2023 to anti money laundering and sanctions violations and agreed to a $4.3 billion settlement with US authorities. Investigators reportedly flagged more than 1,500 accounts accessed from Iran and raised concerns initially. Several compliance officers were later suspended or departed, essentially shown the door. Binance says it removed flagged accounts and complied with legal reporting obligations. The broader issue isn't whether crypto exists, it's whether exchanges can truly prevent sanctioned actors from exploiting global digital rails. Crypto promises decentralization and frictionless finance, but frictionless systems also attracts actors looking to bypass controls. That's a fancy way of saying crooks love this stuff, criminals love this stuff. Enforcement remains reactive. The structural tension between openness and compliance continues. Okay, of all the topics I discuss on this show that aren't 100% politics based, I probably get more comments, commentary and criticism about anything I say related to crypto, because the people who love it are really in favor of it. They love it's like criticizing the Catholic Church to a bunch of Cardinals, it's not going to penetrate. It's not going to be dealt with in a serious way. You're just going to be criticized, rejected, you're a fool, you're an imbecile, is basically the type of commentary I get anytime I criticize something crypto related. Let's look at some more facts here. So again, they have already paid $4.3 billion in penalties. The Department of Justice case asserts that they prioritize growth and profits over compliance. Their own investigation says nearly $2 billion of money went to Iran linked to entities. Again, for those of you not familiar, Iran is an enemy of the United States. It's illegal to actually do any work or to send money from the United States or using any of our financial properties to that country. So that's the big problem. And that's why people are, are examining this to such a degree. Now here's the bigger problem. I would argue that the whole reason, certainly the main reason why crypto is popular and something like this is popular, is because criminals want a way to get away with stuff. There simply is not a problem. Right now. Using US Dollars as a currency for worldwide purchases. It's widely accepted. You might not like the US Dollar, okay, you use another currency, but you do not have to use a cryptocurrency. And to claim that on the one hand, oh, we want decentralization, decentralization is great. And then act all surprised when people say, yes, but you're fostering criminality, you're fostering illegality. You are part of a criminal enterprise. Oh, that's shocking. How could you possibly suggest that it's baked into the system. That is the problem with all of this. Now, stable coins can act as dollar like settlement for illicit flows. I want to go over some other problems with these things. Rug pulls you have frequently founders drain liquidity from new tokens. You've got pump and dumps, you've got fake airdrops, phishing steel seed phrases and wallets. If you don't understand all of this, you're in good company. That's part of why so much fraud and scam exist, because it's complicated. And then true crypto aficionados want to tell you how stupid you are because you just don't get it. But when then they get ripped off. And when their venture capitalists put money in a US bank, like Silicon Valley bank and they go bankrupt, what do they do? They go crawling to the US government saying, give me money, make me whole. Turns out I like US Dollars. So there's Massive, massive hypocrisy here going on. It's used for ransomware, it's used for wash trading that inflates token volume to attract buyers. There's so much scammy, sleazy, cheesy stuff going on in this world of Binance. And of course the conflicts of interest are rampant. When you look at the exchange of ties between the Trump family and Binance, the powers of pardoning used by the President for the criminals involved with this organization, it's absolutely scandalous. And it's one thing for fraud to exist. It's quite another for the US Government to specifically do everything it can in its power to aid and abet the criminals. But unfortunately, that is the current environment we live in where honest people are attacked, criminals are given full pardons, criminals are told, hey, just cut our sons in on the deal, give us a piece of the action and we'll just be like Mobsters from a 1970s Francis Ford Coppola movie. That's, that's the world we live in right now. So it's front page news today in the United States that Binance is caught doing these things illegal. But I predict it's going to be forgotten in 24 hours and they're just going to get away with it. Not because it's not a serious crime, but because in America we live in a world now where crime does pay. It literally pays, especially if you give a cut to the White House.

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Want to support the show? Skip the ads and buy me a coffee. That's buymeacoffee.com TJ Walker okay, we are back. My name is TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Thank you. Fascinating story in the news. Robot empires. I watched that robot umpires Freudian slip. We do have robot empires seemingly taking over the world. But this story is about Major League Baseball. Robot umpires are here. Major League Baseball's automated ball strike system is now part of regular season baseball. The human ump still calls the shots sometimes, but these, these robotic umpires are really taking over. And I want to go into some detail on it because I'm not a huge baseball fan. But we're seeing robotics, we're seeing AI take over every part of culture, every part of business. And this is, at least in America today, still a major part of the culture, the sport of baseball. So let's talk about it in more detail. It's called an automated ball strike and it has a challenge system. The human plate up calls balls and strikes and players can challenge to get a fast automated ruling. There's tracking hardware, the camera based ball tracking system. So Major League Baseball ABS uses Hawkeye. It's a Hawkeye style optical tracking with multiple high speed cameras installed in each ballpark to track the ball in 3D. Major League Baseball heads described it as 12 cameras per park, producing a pitch location with a small margin of error, about 1/6 of an inch. Now the strike zone is defined geometrically, not what the catcher frames. ABS compares the tracked baseball to a strike zone that's computed from rules Major League Baseball sets. So the width, the strike zone spans the plate's full 17 inch width. The height is set by the hitter's height, not the hitter's crouch stance. So the top of the zone is 53.5% of a player's height. The bottom of the zone is 27% of the player's height. If you're thinking, wow, this is a whole lot of math. I'd hate to have to be the umpire doing all this calculation instantly. Every time someone gets up to the plate, you're not alone. That's why these robot umpires are considered better. They have what's called a 2D plane concept. Major League Baseball describes the ABS zone as a two dimensional plane positioned in the middle of the plate. The pitch must pass through the plane inside the zone to be a strike. So you can't just narrowly come down and tip the very last part of the plate and it be a strike. It has to go through this two dimensional plane in the middle of it. So here's what actually happens on a pitch. The pitch is thrown, the cameras track it and compute its path and location. The plate up calls the ball or strike in real time. The game still feels normal. If a player challenges the ABS system immediately checks whether the ball crossed the ABS zone plane in the defined triangle. The result is sent to the stadium display official feed and the Call is either confirmed or overturned, usually in seconds. So there is a human umpire still there, but they no longer get to make the final decisions. Now each team gets two challenges per regulation game. Successful challenges are retained. Only the pitcher, catcher or hitter can initiate the challenge, not the the dugout. Major League Baseball is also limiting on screen strike zone graphics because they don't want team players getting help for challenges. So why is this significant? Why it changes baseball strategy. It shrinks the gray area umps used to give on the edges. The top of the zone becomes more consistent and for many hitters, lower than what they've been living with. Because it's height based, not stance based. Catchers must decide whether to burn a challenge in big moments, turning ball and strike into a tactical resource. So this is not the only sport using it. You've seen it in tennis. In soccer, there's goal line technology confirms whether a ball fully crossed the line. Soccer uses something called var. It reduces clear match changing errors. Tennis uses electronic line calling, replaces and assists line judges. Cricket, not a sport I've watched much of. I will be candid with you, although I have been to the Bombay Cricket Club before, last time I was in India, fascinating sport, but it's just not one I've watched much. They are using DRS technology including ball tracking to support LBW decisions. Rugby is using TMO video review for tries grounding infractions. American football uses the replay for clarification regarding catches, downs and spotting. Basketball uses replay centers help with out of bounds and a clock. Badminton, that is a sport I loved playing as a kid, have occasionally played as an adult. They're using something called Hawkeye line calls, reduces disputes. Swimming is using touch pads and automatic timing eliminate human error in timing. So it's being used increasingly in sports and I have to say in general I think this is a good thing because nothing is worse than seeing two great athletes compete. They're both great, they're both intense, they've both given it. They're all two great teams and they're relatively evenly matched. And the entire game is decided by what most fair minded people would consider a bad call. That's just bad for everyone. And humans are error prone. People see different things. People have biases and they're not aware of it. Something we talk about on this show all the time. So I think anytime we can use technology, it doesn't have to be AI, just video capture and playing back the video can make it much easier. Especially if you can slow it down and enlarge it and see where things landed. So I understand there are those who want the romance of, oh, there's choice, there's chance, there's randomness in sports. And that's a part of the thrill. I think the thrill can just be from the competition. The thrill can also come from knowing you did your best and the rules were applied fairly to everyone and you won or you lost. I think that's frankly enough of a thrill. Now there are some areas where humans are still needed. Managing player emotions and preventing escalation. A good umpire can do that, can ask people to calm down, can ask people go move over here in the way a robot perhaps can't. There's contextual advantage decisions. Did that foul affect the play? Sometimes you need a human for judging intent. A human referee can sometimes tell, did someone hit another player with their elbow because they were going up for a rebound and it was totally accidental, or did they purposely say boom and intentionally hit someone, therefore requiring a foul that might result in being ejected from the game? A human is going to be better at that. There's a game flow feel that many feel is important. There's the ability to communicate decisions quickly and fairly. A human can be better at that. There is just safety, discretion. Sometimes a human can tell this player's down and it sure looks like they broke an arm or a leg and we need to stop playing now. An automated ump can't necessarily do that. So I'm not suggesting we don't need any human presence. Human umpires, human refs. In games, there's authority presence. There is something about a human being that can project authority that near that simply a computer sending text up to a scoreboard can't really do. So what do I want you to do with this? I want you to really think about how can you use computers and technology to help you do what you do better, to distill to the core essence. The essence of a football game, of a baseball game, of a soccer game is not the umpire. The essence is people playing the game, using their skills, using their craft, competing and doing so in a way where the rules are fair for all. That's the essence of the game. So when technology can help with that, I'm all for it, and I think you should be for it. What does that mean for you and your career? Think about how you can use technology to actually help you do what you need to do better. So for me, for example, I'm good at speaking and training. The fact that AI can now do video editing better and faster than I can is A good thing. It's not detracting from my online video training, the fact that AI can write the titles and the keywords and the tags. That's not really why people come to me. And it can do all that much, much faster than human beings. So I want you to think about how you can use robots technology to help you focus more on what is core for you. Just last week I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner and robotic mop. Why is that? Because I don't like vacuuming. Nobody in my family does. I don't like mopping. Nobody in my family does. And this is technology that can help accomplish things faster, easier and cheaper. So it's happening to sports, it's happening in your home. It's certainly happening in industry after industry and that's why it's crucial for you to focus on it. We don't all have to become full time technologists. We don't want to be followed around by robots all day long. But we do need to figure out how can we use the technology of our times. Otherwise you're going to be the restaurant that doesn't have an oven or a phone competing with people who have ovens and phones. And you know how that ends up. You are out of business. More to come. Stay tuned.

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Wanna support the show? Skip the ads and buy me a coffee. That's buymeacoffee.com tjwalker More and more Epstein news. The Epstein files continue to destabilize institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Big news in the last 24 hours in Britain and in the United States. It seems like everyone who ever had any association with this guy is going down. And increasingly it's not just those people. It's it's rippling out to the people who they dealt with are getting tainted in association. Now, according to the Times, the fallout from newly released Epstein Files continues to reverberate across politics and media, triggering the arrest of former British ambassador Peter Mendelsohn and the resignation of CBS News contributor Dr. Peter Attia. Boy, did he have some doozies to say in his emails to Jeffrey Epstein. Now, Mandelson was arrested in London on suspicion of misconduct in public office to alleged information sharing with Jeffrey Epstein. Very similar to the allegations that resulted in the arrest of Prince Andrew, who has really been taken down. Atiya stepped down from CBS after emails revealed extensive correspondence and meetings with Epstein years after the 2008 conviction. I don't want to re quote and restate all the things Dr. Peter Attia said. I've said them before. They are vile, they are nasty, and they are hugely embarrassing. His reputation is completely in tatters. He's been kicked out of companies he's involved with. Now he's losing his plum gig at cbs, and it seems like nobody wants to have anything to do with him. Peter Mendelssohn, former ambassador from Great Britain to the United States, is in a whole heap of water. He went from being sort of the top of the heap. You know, being the British ambassador to the United States is a pretty plum position. Now there's talk about him destroying the British government. The taint has gone that thick. Now, neither man has been charged in connection with new crimes related files, but both cases have intensified scrutiny over maintained relationships with Epstein after his conviction. Okay, so this Mendelssohn thing is fascinating because it reminds a lot of people of how the American mobster Al Capone was taken down. He was known as a mobster killing people left and right. They got him on tax evasion similar to Prince Andrew. People are upset by the fact that there's an awful lot of credible evidence that Prince Andrew had sex, illegal sex, and sexually abused underage girls. There's just a lot of evidence and a lot of pictures and a lot of allegations from underage girls who were underage at the time claiming they were forced to have sex with Prince Andrew. Now, that's not the allegation involving Peter Mendelsohn or Dr. Peter Attia. Let me be clear about that. But we have a situation now where everything related to Epstein is so tainted, it's so filled with negativity that people say, we got to get this person. We want to get them fairly. So they're looking at every single aspect of their life. That's one of the problems with associating with unsavory characters, with associating with criminals, with associating with pedophiles even if you're not guilty of the same crime, it makes people so question your judgment that they start looking at every single aspect of your life. Now, there's a well known expression in law enforcement communities that, hey, you let me follow somebody in a car for 10 minutes, I'll find a reason to pull them over. If you look hard enough, long enough, you can find in almost any human being some example of a crime. Now, most people do not get that level of scrutiny, but most people do not live the pampered, privileged lives of this Mendelssohn character or Dr. Peter Attia or certainly Prince Andrew. Most people don't live those privileged lives. So when they're caught red handed saying how much they admire and respect and love Jeffrey Epstein, well, after his conviction of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, which is a kind of a polite way of saying you have to expect this kind of blowback and this sort of criticism. So again with Mendelsohn, he was not arrested for committing acts of pedophilia. Let me be clear on that. He was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office for allegedly sharing confidential info with Epstein. Now this is what happened to Prince Andrew too. They were both in privileged positions, had secret information, classified information from their governments. And they're like, hey buddy, look at the cool information I got. You want to see it? And emailing it to Epstein. That's essentially what happened. Now, Mendelssohn was the former ambassador to Washington, very close political ally to Prime Minister Starmer, and now he was fired by Starmer. But now people are saying the Prime Minister should go himself because he should have known about this. Mendelssohn has been stripped of his title, the Right Honorable the British. This sounds very weird to American ears, but the British are big on their titles and their lordships. He was pressured to resign the House of Lords. The arrest followed the Department of Justice release of the document. He was released on bail pending investigation. And labor is facing a special election pressure because of this. Opposition is calling it a defining moment of leadership for the British government. So that's Mendelssohn. Now let's look at Dr. Peter Attia. He resigned as a CBS News contributor. And let's say he was shoved out. 1700 documents mention his name. Now this is a paltry amount compared to the 38,000 mentions of Donald Trump in the Epstein files, which, by the way, is a lot for those of you keeping score. It's a lot more times than the name Jesus is mentioned in the entire Bible. I want to come back to Trump and Epstein another day. Attia provided medical advice to Epstein, even these. Oh, he said, oh, I'm not his doctor. He met Epstein more than a dozen times. They had heavy, heavy correspondence between 2015, 2018, long after it was publicly known. Epstein had convictions for soliciting children for prostitution, and he made wildly crude comments about women and women's body parts in these emails. He already stepped down from a protein bar company where he had a role, said he was unaware of trafficking. That may be the case. I mean, certainly I've been to a party before. I'd seen friends talking to friends, and I didn't do a background check on every single person. But when you're dealing with someone who seemingly knows every famous person in the world is pretty high profile at some point. I can't believe he didn't hear rumors, mentions of it, because as we learned from the Epstein files themselves, the former police commissioner of Palm beach said Donald Trump called him way back around 2004 to 2006 time and said, everybody knows about Epstein and young girls. So this was not a secret. This was not something that was buried. It was in the news. It was something people talked about publicly. Okay, so what else is going on here? You know, scandals like this erode trust in elite institutions. Many people are enjoying this because they feel like, wow, this essentially proves QAnon was correct. The world is controlled by this shadowy, powerful elite of people who are corrupt. They're making money, destroying jobs, and meanwhile doing whatever they want and have no morals whatsoever. Oh, and they're running a child pedophile ring. Now, this was laughed at and scoffed at when this first came out many, many years ago, Primary, you know, for one reason, they said it all happened from a basement in pizzeria in Washington, D.C. and that Hillary Clinton was involved. Well, Hillary Clinton was not involved. In fact, she never even met Jeffrey Epstein. And that pizzeria had no basement. But the larger picture, it turns out, was right. There is a global elite. And it turns out at least some of them do feel like they can do anything, and they do think they can have sex with children and get away with it. So that part has come true, and it's further eroding trust in elite organizations. And many are saying it's about time. There needs to be an airing of this, a cleansing of this, and that's good for society. Now, there's another school of thought, and that is that all of this is benefiting Trump. Let's not forget the fact that Trump is the guy with 38,000 mentions of Epstein. Bill Clinton, for example. There's no public record of him ever having met with or talked to or communicated with Epstein after about 2003. With Trump, it went on much, much, much longer. And with Trump, they did things together like have a party, and no other men were invited and only young models were invited at Mar a Lago. So there's certainly a sense that all of these other stories are benefiting Trump because it means we're not talking about Trump. And let's not forget Trump is the guy who's literally on record saying he likes to grab women by the you know what. And he says you can get away with it when you're a celebrity. He never said, I'm going to grab women over the age of 21 or over the age of 18. Basically, I grab whatever I want. When you package that with him being on the record saying he can walk into the Miss Universe Pageant, the Miss USA Pageant, the Miss Teen USA Pageant, while they're getting dressed, it certainly looks to me a thousand times more damning than anything we've learned about Peter Attia. And yet Peter Attia is the guy who loses his career, gets fired from things, whereas our orange deer leader simply is getting richer by further selling off pieces of the White House. And all of this does seem to distract. Well, if everyone in every sphere of the world of academics, of big sport, of politics, of media, of finance, if everyone is tainted with Epstein's associates, then we don't have to look over here at his former best friend, Donald J. Trump. So there's a part of me that buys into the theory that all of this releasing of documents, having it drip out, drip, drip, drip, is really helping one person in particular. And that would be a shame. That, that is a big, big shame, tj. I'm TJ Walker. This is filtered. Don't get away. There's more to come.

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Tonight is the State of the Union address here in the United States. President Trump is expected to give a fair, accurate and honest assessment of his first full year in office, to acknowledge mistakes and to give an assessment of the economy on both strengths and weaknesses. I have any. Am of course kidding. He's not going to do any of those things. He is going to do three things. He's going to lie, then he's going to tell more lies, and finally he's going to conclude by telling lies. And I'm sorry, there are some of you saying, well, t is being partisan. No, I'm someone who actually pays attention. I'm sending someone who actually believes that there is such a thing as facts, there is such a thing as truth, there is such a thing as lies, and there is such a thing as lying all the time. And regardless of whether you are a conservative, a liberal, a libertarian, a progressive, a Green Party member or a socialist, if you are going to be a member of a democratic society, you have to respect facts and you have to make arguments on what policies you want and don't want based on facts. And unfortunately, we don't have that in the United States anymore. You can make the case, oh, T.J. all politicians lie. It's true that every politician, if you parsed every single word they ever said, can make the case that something factually didn't add up. But what's happened in this administration is different by an order of magnitude the likes of which this country has never seen. So I personally am not going to watch the State of the Union because I feel I know 100% of what he's going to say. He's going to say the economy is better than it's ever been. Not true. By almost every objective metric. He's going to say the stock market is better than it's ever been. Well, the stock market has been flat and going down in a lot of areas. He's going to say that our trade deficit is better than ever before. It's actually not. He's going to say that he kept his promise on inflation when he actually did. Inflation has continued to go up. He's going to say that he's ended five or 10 or 20 wars, when in fact, no, he hasn't. He's going to say that the Supreme Court is filled with hacks and stupid, lazy people, even though a bunch of them are ones he appointed and that they're wrong. And he's going to say that he can do whatever he wants now on that he may be true. He can do whatever he wants until somebody stops him. Thankfully, last week, the Supreme Court at least attempted to stop him by stating categorically that what he'd done with tariffs was unconstitutional. But Trump is saying he's going to do whatever he wants now. Trump does occasionally tell the truth. After the ruling last week where the Supreme Court said his tariffs were unconstitutional, he said, I don't care what they said. I can do whatever I want and I can ruin this country if I want. That is true. That is him speaking truthfully. So occasionally glimmers of truth when he says he can destroy the country. He is speaking the truth when he says he's going to do whatever he wants. I do think that's true. Now, normally I like watching State of the Union addresses. It gives people a clear sense of what the priorities are of the administration, what their arguments are to persuade members of Congress to support their legislation. But nothing about this presidency is normal. They don't care about persuade. He doesn't care about persuading anybody. He's like, you do what I say. If you don't, I will attack you, tweet against you. You're going to have so many hate calls, you're not going to be able to leave your office or your home ever again, and you're going to have an opponent. That's his mode of persuading people and then just doing everything by executive order. So I don't think there's any real need for anyone to watch the State of the Union. We know he's not going to take responsibility for any failures. We know he's not going to admit he was wrong about anything ever. We know he's not ever going to make a fair, honest assessment of other people's views on any policy. We know it's going to be lie, lie, lie, attack, attack, attack, and share grievances. So for some reason, an elevator in the Capitol is broken or a door is locked. We'll probably hear a half an hour of him complaining about that the way he did the last time he was at the United Nations. So I'm going to save the time. I'm going to be home reading a good book tonight. When the State of the Union is going on, I would recommend you do the same. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Please subscribe, sign up for notifications, tell your friends and follow the show. Thanks so much.