Ozzy’s Legacy, Colbert 2028, and the $20M Podcaster Outsmarting CBS

Ozzy Osbourne is dead at age 76. But his most powerful legacy might be how he spoke to us, not just how he sang. Then BARI Weiss wants $250 million for her anti woke startup. Will CBS bite? Next, Joe Bowden's lean podcast empire earns him $20 million a year, while the Late show bleeds fell 50 million. We endorse Stephen Colbert for president in 2028. That's right. Seriously. Then Trump dodges or tries to dodge the Epstein scandal with a wild attack on Obama and Clinton. Finally, Steve Bannon shows us how media spin really works by being every reporter's favorite quote machine, even the mainstream lane stream media. All that and more today on the communiverse. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. This is the Community, your daily dive into the top business stories, tech stories, and cultural stories from a communications perspective. We look at these stories through a communications lens, all with the goal of improving your personal success. That's what we're about right here on the show. Thank you so much for joining me. This is a Daily Show. We're gonna hop right in with the top stories of the day. First of all, let's look at Ozzy Osbourne, who did pass away yesterday sadly. Let's look at the top takeaways from that. Ozzy Osbourne is dead at 76, and somehow the sentence still feels impossible to believe. The prince of darkness, as he was known, the man who bit the head off of a bat and turned mumbling into a media career, has taken his final bow. But here's what makes Ozzy extraordinary. His greatest reinvention wasn't musical. It was verbal. It was a form of public speaking. In 2002, the Osbournes made Ozzy's America's favorite confused dad. He turned chaos into charm, dysfunction into relatability, and and his own imperfections into an audience connection. He was the highest rated show in MTV history, and it redefined how people communicate vulnerability on camera. He didn't just speak clearly. And sometimes he didn't speak clearly. He spoke honestly, and that made him unforgettable. Rest in peace, Ozzie. You taught us that even if you don't sound polished, you can still speak powerfully. He did speak openly about his ADHD addictions, Parkinson's disease, and fortunately for him and his fans, he did have a farewell performance just a few weeks ago, less than a month ago. So he was able to really go off in high style. Here's why I'm drawn to this story, because I will confess to you, I was not A fan of his music. Okay? And apologies to any of those who are. I'm not trashing his musical career or his abilities. I just didn't happen to be a fan, But I was fascinated by his willingness to expose himself, try new genres, try new things. So let's not forget Even, you know, 23 years ago, when he started this reality TV career, he was at an age when most rock stars of his genre, starting in 1970, they were just playing the greatest hits. They were just releasing the best of albums. Here he is essentially starting a whole new career. And some give this credit for starting the whole genre of reality tv. Now, yes, there were other reality shows, MTV having, the Real World, but he did really make it popular for celebrities, people already famous to go on and do new shows. And we see that legacy continuing even today with Alec Baldwin having a reality show and other celebrities. So I give him credit for that. To me, the real lesson here is don't put yourself in one lane. Don't just say, well, I'm a singer. All I can ever do is sing, or I'm an artist. All I can ever do is art, or I'm a CEO. All I can do is that. No, you can do a lot of things. You can reinvent yourself throughout your life, even if you don't necessarily have the skills traditionally associated with what everyone does in that particular field. So Ozzy Osborne was not known as the most articulate person. He mumbled, he stammered. Sentences were incoherent, but he said, you know what? I'll do it. I'll go on, I'll speak. I'll let cameras follow me around. I'll explore a new genre. And it created a resurgence to his career. What I also think is important here is he didn't. He didn't let the fact that he had adhd, he supposedly had dyslexia. He had all sorts of problems that you would think, this is not the profile of somebody who's going to be a TV star. Especially a TV star where it isn't just about singing. Because his reality show had very little singing, if any, from what I remember. He didn't let that stop him. He didn't say, I don't have traditional credentials. I don't have a law degree or a journalism degree the way many people do before they start at the time, started doing a show where they were talking on TV for extended periods of time. He didn't let that hold him back. He built on an extension of what he was already doing. He shared his family life. He kind of Pulled the curtain behind and let people know, okay, I play this prince of darkness and this wild crazy guy who bites off bats. That's just a stage performance. I'm really this cuddly, bumbling dad in a long term marriage. And, and he wasn't afraid to take people behind the scenes, open up the curtain, be vulnerable, show himself looking foolish, bumbling. He didn't care and it endeared him to audiences. And too many people. Maybe I'm guilty of this. Too many people want to show a buttoned up exterior. You know, right now I'm wearing shorts and Crocs. I don't want to stand up and show you. I'm afraid I look foolish. Maybe I should take a page from Ozzy Osborne and show you words at all, what's really going. And I'll do that from time to time. But today we're at least in this segment we're going to talk about Ozzy. Here's what I really want you to take away from this. Do not tell yourself just because one part of your career is fading. That's it. Try something completely new. Now, it might not be reality tv, but maybe it is a podcast, maybe it is a YouTube channel. Maybe it is if you were a management consultant, you now start writing teen fiction. I don't know. Try something new. If you fail, you fail. Not everything Ozzy ever touched was successful, but he was extraordinarily successful as a musician and as a reality TV star. And that allowed him to the platform, the visibility, to try a lot of other things. So I think in many respects he's a great role model. Now, he certainly used a lot of drugs. I'm not telling you do a lot of drugs. That's not the message here. But he still lived only what, three and a half years shy of 80. That's a, by, by historical standards, that's an extraordinarily long life. Did he perhaps shorten his life with some of his addictions and habits? Certainly you could make that case. But all in all, a rich, vibrant, interesting and by some accounts a very fun life. And we want to say well wishes to you, Ozzy Osbourne, and condolences to your family. So let's go to issue two. Bari Weiss wants $250 million for her new media venture, the Free Press. Barry Weiss wants up to 250 million for her media startup. And she's already talking to CBS owner Paramount owner David Ellison. That's not bad for three year old substack. Substack. If you're not familiar with it is an, it's an online platform where she puts out a newsletter and she has a whole collection of conservatives of varying stripes, sort of non mainstream liberal media types putting out newsletters. Weiss has built the Free Press with 1.25 million subscribers, 155,000 of them paying a hundred dollars a year, up to a hundred dollars a year. That's over $15 million annually before ADS, events and licensing fees. She's pitching Ellison a loyal anti woke. That's her positioning digital native audience that legacy media has struggled to reach. She's also reportedly talking to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. And Rupert Murdoch has a history of making a lot of really bad investments in new media things. Things like MySpace where he lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But anyway, Rupert still has plenty of money. So this is what it looks like with clear messaging or when clear messaging becomes a business. Weiss turned her controversial exit from the New York Times into a brand. And that brand now rivals legacy giants. Love her or not, she understands your voice is your platform. And interesting, she's targeting CBS at a time when it's trying to get rid of old media, expensive media with huge overhead. The Colbert show, the late night show starring Stephen Colbert. She's going after the same people with a cost structure that's much lower. She's building into her brand that she's anti woke, very pro Israel and has Gen Z appeal. The other thing Barry Weiss does extremely well is she is, as much as she likes to attack mainstream media, she's quick to call back the mainstream media most of the time. She's quick to go on HBO's Bill Maher's Real time and be on talk shows and building huge awareness of who she is. And she understands the value of a sound bite of attacking and she plays that. We'll be talking about this later today with Steve Bannon. She's great at attacking the mainstream media in the mainstream media, getting lots of attention, bringing eyeballs over to her media platform. So I'm going to make a couple of predictions here. I predict that she will raise money. I don't know if it'll be 250 bucks, but I predict or 250 million. I do predict she'll raise a lot of money, that this company will grow, will have some success and will be profitable in the next five to eight years. But here's what I also predict. We've seen this time and time again with companies like buzzfeed, Vice, Vox. New media companies start, they get a lot of buzz. They talk about how new and exciting they are, and they get a lot of attention, money's thrown at them. But then they become a little too big for their bridges. They start growing more, the stars start getting bigger salaries, they want more assistance, they want more limos, they want more editors, they want more pr. Before you know it, things become bloated, the cost structure gets higher and higher, the profit margins get smaller, and then all of a sudden, one tweak, whether it's Google, whether it's Spotify, whether it's YouTube, something changes and all of a sudden revenues go down and the costs are more than the revenues and profits dissolve. We've seen this time and time again, not just with old traditional broadcast media and radio stations and radio networks that have been around for a hundred years, but we've seen this in the last 10, 15 years with countless online publications that become, you know, the fresh, new shiny it girl, it boy, get a lot of attention and they just can't sustain themselves because their cost structure is too high. I think the future is really more like what I'll be talking about in issue three today, Joe Boudin, solo creators who have a lean staff and have extraordinarily high profit margins. I mean, that's what I'm trying to do with this show. So forgive me for talking at my own book and sounding self serving. I think it's a real problem when you start raising money. You create so many expectations from investors who want not to do a little bit better than what an index fund does. They want 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 times return on their investment. You spend so much time talking to investors that you can stop doing what your core business is. So I think the model is really more someone like a Tim Dillon, a comedian whose politics I don't necessarily agree with, but he's got a really, really lean show and it's almost all profit. Someone like a Joe Rogan lean show, he's certainly not spending a lot of money on fact checkers or researchers. Lean show, lean operations. And it's just swimming in massive piles of cash. And it didn't take a lot of investors or as far as I know, any investors to get that going. So there's a part of me that thinks that Barry Wise, she's obviously very shrewd, savvy, savvy journalist, savvy self promoter. But I think at some level she's still buying into this concept of I need to be a big institution like the New York Times, even though I don't like the New York Times, she's buying into that idea and it's overly complicated. I believe the future of the media world is through things like substack, but it's through bootstrapping strong individual voices who start creating, start monetizing and they fairly quickly get to the point where revenues are more than cost and they pocket the rest. And then they can grow and grow and grow and be sustainable or ever. And that's the problem with something like the Late Night show with Stephen Colbert. As much as I think it's awful that he was canned just a couple days after trashing Trump and trashing his own bosses for paying bribes to Trump, it looks bad. But I also think there is something to the idea of CBS saying to their new owners, okay, we realize you don't really want to have this, this financial millstone around your neck of a show with 200 staffers losing 40 to $50 million a year. So we'll just clean the books for you now before you really take over. I do think that is the overwhelming reason. Could they have gone to Stephen Colbert and said, look, we want to cut your salary in half and go from 200 employees to 70 employees, let's make this work for the next five years? They could have done that. They didn't do that. Instead they just wiped the whole thing clear. Barry Weiss is not planning on having 200 staffers for every show or every columnist. She's going to have a much leaner, leaner operation. But I still think it is a mistake to go out, spend all your time raising venture capital when you could just grow internally and organically and have a stronger long term foundation where you can't be canceled, you can't be sold off and you can't implode. Let's say hello to some of our friends joining us today. Matthew joining us. Matthew, good to see you. Thanks for saying hello and let me know what top stories you're looking at today. Also we have hospital joining us and saying a few self promotional things. And that's okay as well if you're watching this show for the first time. Thank you for joining me. This is the Communiverse. This is your daily dive into the top business, technology and culture stories looked at through the lens of communication skills, all with the goal of building your personal success. I'm TJ Walker. For decades I have done communication skills training with Wall street leaders, business leaders, Fortune 500 executives on how to communicate more effectively. And I've worked with presidents of countries, prime ministers and Ms. Universes all on personal development building and communication skills building I'm now teaching you what really goes on behind the scenes to help you improve as well and to make you more successful. So if you have any questions and you're watching on YouTube, on Twitch, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, go ahead and post them and I'll be happy to address them. And if you're watching this on demand, post comments wherever you're watching this show or listening to this show. And realize that we are in sort of a test phase right now. The show is going to be launching officially, officially, officially September 2, 2025. We'll have more music, bells and whistles, production, stingers and all of that. So we're in kind of a quiet stealth mode right now. But it's okay for you to tell people about it. It's okay for you to subscribe on YouTube or any other platform where you're watching this. It's okay to sign up for notifications and to leave comments as well. And I do want to thank you very much for stopping by and spending a little time with me today. We're going to switch over now to story three, issue three. And it is another media related story because it involves technology, it involves culture, and it involves media. Things that I know you, since you want to be successful, do in fact, care about. So let's dive into this very much related to the last story. Joe Boudin runs a podcast network that makes $20 million a year with only 30 staffers. He's got full control and a waterfront condo studio. Now, I have to confess, I was not familiar with him until I read about him in a major New York Times story this week. But that's the beauty of the modern world we live in. It's no longer a monoculture where everyone's talking about the one show everyone watched last night. But it is possible for people who are simply creative doing something a little different, whether they're entertaining or giving new insight or reporting news in a unique way to share their ideas, their vision with the world, to make money, to make a living, and in some cases to become wildly successful and rich, as in the case of Joe Boudin. So it's reported and he revealed he's making at least $20 million a year, apparently accidentally showed on his show some of his numbers coming in from one, just one revenue source, Patreon. So meanwhile, the context of this CBS Late show, as we were talking about losing $50 million a year, here's a show making 20 million a year with only 30 staffers. What's his formula? Well, he's got 70,000 Patreon subscribers, minimal ads, he's selling merchandise, he's doing licensing. And he doesn't have any one corporation. Say, do this, do that, don't do that, we're going to fire you, we're going to put you on a. He is the corporation, he is the man at the Joe Boudin show and the Joe Boudin media empire. And that's something that frankly is very appealing to a lot of people, creators. He was apparently a former rapper and again, apologies, I just wasn't familiar with his career and was doing this show seven or eight years ago making like $500 a month. When he was a part of other people's networks, he decided to really strike out on his own. He's been paying his dues weekend and week out for seven, eight years now and things are really paying off. He doesn't really have to answer to anyone. This is a masterclass in lean media, direct relationships, very few middlemen, total control. What he is doing that's different is he's not doing like a lot of podcasters sort of saying, okay, you big company over here, you handle all my advertising and give me a small piece of that or a medium sized piece of it. He's taking it all in house. He's building the relationships himself with advertisers, sponsors. More important, he's building relationships directly with his fans through Patreon. And I think that really is the future. By the way, I will be introducing a Patreon for this show in coming weeks. So I'm a huge fan of it in a self interested way. The contrast could not be sharper with what he's doing, with what the old late night shows are doing and many are now predicting, including the President of the United States, that people like Jimmy Kimmel will be next to be fired by a major network because primarily it's so expensive. The late night TV shows, comedy shows are not really profitable anymore. The Boudin model, it's nimble, it's independent, it's audience first. He has complete creative control. I do think this is the future of the media. Now I could be wrong, but in all the research I've done, I haven't seen that. Joe Boone has taken on investors, which means he can focus his time on making a show and dealing directly with an advertiser, a sponsor, a membership fee. He doesn't have to deal with all these bigger companies and investors and appeasing them and showing double digit growth every quarter. He doesn't have to get lost in all of that because it's very hard to be a great content creator and be a network executive. It's a different skill set. And people who try to do both often fail miserably at one of them. And if you fail at one of them, the whole thing implodes. So I have to give this guy a lot of credit. And Pablo says Ozzy, the dark genius of music. Pablo, were you a. Good morning. Pablo, were you a fan of Black Sabbath and Ozzy's music? And did you watch his reality show? I did occasionally see his show back when it started. It got such attention in the zeitgeist of the time, it was hard to miss it. I mean, nowadays I never hear anyone talk about mtv. I personally haven't had cable TV in probably a decade, so it's not quite the thing it was. Although reality TV still does very well in a lot of different venues. So, Pablo, let me know what top stories you're following today and we can talk about that next. This is a fascinating story and I have to confess, I was slow. I was slow off the mark on this. I should have mentioned this, you know, maybe weeks ago and certainly about three days ago. Colbert for President 2028 today I'm making an endorsement that's right for Stephen Colbert to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028, provided, of course, there is an election in 2028. And I think that's about a 50, 50 proposition right now. I want to give credit to an author over at Daily coast, which is a website, sort of an aggregator of a lot of Democratic thinkers. They laid out the case pretty cogently. Stephen Colbert is a world class communicator. No one can doubt that he has strong moral and empathetic roots that come through. He's known as a committed family man. He teaches Sunday school. It sort of reminds you of Jimmy Carter. Those of you old enough to remember in 1976 when he ran for president and played up the fact that he was a Sunday school teacher. He clearly has a deep understanding of politics and culture. He's from South Carolina, which is a red state. He can't just be instantly written off as New York City liberal. He doesn't live in New York City. Here's what I see as Colbert's strengths. He knows how to capture attention. As the number one rated talk show host, by definition, he's good at capturing attention. Who else is good at capturing attention? Donald Trump. And I would argue whether you like Trump or not, whether you think he's a good president or not, there Is no one better in the world at capturing attention than Donald Trump. And he has shown that if you are a presidential candidate and you're running against governors with tremendous accomplishments, legislators with tremendous accomplishments, decades of experience, none of that matters if you're a better communicator and you're able to capture attention. And Trump, to his credit, destroyed what, 17 other candidates in 2016, some of whom outspent him wildly, all of whom had more traditional experience and credentials. So I do think Trump has shown the way for a new skill set that's essential in presidential politics. Let's face it, before TV was invented, you could have William Howard Taft, you could have 300 pound candidates, you could have some presidents who were five, four, nobody knew what you looked like or sounded like because TV hadn't been invented yet. So the skills that are necessary to become a successful presidential candidate change over time. I don't think any serious scholar or observer of American politics could doubt that. What I'm contending, and it's a little bit controversial now, is that the skills have now changed as a requirement to be a successful presidential candidate, and that you have to be good at social media, you have to be good at getting attention. One way, which Trump has shown brilliantly, is if you just attack often enough, hard enough, facts be damned, you'll get more attention. But another way you can do it and not make up stuff and be honest and be factually accurate, is through humor. Well, who better at deploying humor in a political context than Stephen Colbert? There's no one in the world better at it. So that's why I would argue that his credentials are superior to a number of Democratic governors and senators who have impressive legislative careers and impressive public policy accomplishments. Because I just don't know that voters respect that or reward that anymore. In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't. And I'm also convinced that if the Democrats nominate a traditional governor who's sort of mainstream and moderate and, and likable and good war record or something like that, the conservative media establishment and Trump and whoever he picks to run in his stead, whether it's Donald Trump Jr. Or if he just convinces the Wall street, the Supreme Court to give him an exemption so he can run for a third term, regardless of what happens, I'm convinced he's going to do a great job of trashing, vilifying and attacking any kind of traditional Democratic nominee, and they will take that person's voting record and twist it and spin it and pervert it in a way to Try to convince Americans that that person is a dangerous, wild eyed, extremist, socialist, communist. They're really good at that. I don't know that that can be done against Stephen Colbert. He's got no voting record, he's got no public policy record to have to defend. Now you can argue maybe America's had too much of the whole celebrity stuff. I can't completely disagree with it. But you have to deal with the real world that you live in. If you're a political party and you want to actually have an impact, if you actually want to govern, you have to deal with the electorate you have, not the electorate you want to have. And that's why I think more and more stars are aligning to make someone like a Stephen Colbert the ideal candidate for the Democratic Party and certainly the best possible candidate if they want to win. Now, what we don't know is does he have any interest in running for president? Well, things changed with this cancellation of his show. He's got 10 more months and then he's going to have a lot of free time on his hands for the next couple of years. He certainly could run for president. And he's also in a situation where I don't know his net worth, but he has to be worth close to 100 million at this point, if he's done any kind of savings and any kind of investing. So he doesn't need to work. Plus he could do a podcast, his own weekly or daily podcast, continue making money before he officially runs for president, and continue to get richer. So I think he's a great communicator. And I really think that being a great communicator is tied for number one in what's necessary to be a winning presidential candidate in the modern world. And I say tied because there's two parts of this. It's being a great communicator and having the ability to capture attention. You can be a great communicator in the traditional sense of speaking well, being articulate, making a clear argument, being understandable. But that's only half the equation. The other half is being able to, you know, hold a flag over here to the media and the public, say, hey, look, look at what I've got right here. Look at what I've got. And nobody in the world is better at that than Donald Trump. But Stephen Colbert is pretty good at it too, in a way that I certainly don't see other potential Democratic candidates doing. Doesn't mean they couldn't build. But I just think it's a reality that if you're off being a governor, you can't sit around brainstorming and tweeting provocative things attacking people and funny things attacking your enemies. You're busy actually governing, and it's important. We need good governors, we need good senators if this country is going to continue as a country. But it doesn't necessarily help you get votes. And here's my challenge. And the challenge of any observer of politics is there could be a tendency to fight the old wars. The old war says the Democrats need someone who is a moderate centrist from a Southern state, someone like a Bill Clinton, someone who's not too liberal, someone who's male, white, Christian, and heterosexual. That's kind of the traditional thinking, and it might still be accurate, but that's one war. When you look back at 2016, Trump broke every single model of what all the Republican poobahs said is their ideal candidate. They wanted a governor. They wanted someone with strong moral values, someone with traditional moral values, someone with one marriage, someone who was free trade, didn't get any of those things. And yet they have nominated this guy three times, and he's won twice and came pretty close another time. So I don't want to fight that old battle. But there's also the risk of saying, okay, I'm guilty of. Of following the war plans of 2016 and just trying to be like Trump, and that doesn't work either. So I can't give you 100% guarantee that this is a winning strategy. But if I had to bet right now, today on who would be the number one most likely Democratic candidate to win in 2028, I would put my money on Stephen Colbert. Another little factor that I don't think gets talked about much is he's used to being in the. The frying pan. He's used to being in the firing line. I would have to guess that someone like Stephen Colbert gets dozens, if not hundreds of death threats a week just because he criticizes the current administration. So for him, it's not a big jump up to run for president. He's used to that scrutiny. If you're a governor of some small Southern state and your families used to be unable to go to the grocery store, and all of a sudden people are coming up and threatening their life, that can scare off a lot of people. And Stephen Colbert, I think, has been toughened up enough by that that he could say, you know what? I'm rich. I'll just spend extra money on my own security until I get Secret Service protection. And he could weather that. Storm. So that's another thing I think that he has in his favor. Let's check in with more comments. Pablo is saying not publicly I I was at excellent Catholic school. It was a youth's sin and I I apologies, I forgot if I'd asked you a question and what that relates to. Pablo says skills are budget President admortem. We have something in sunny Mexico. I was so impressed with the bat bathead stuff. Oh, he's talking about Ozzy Osbourne again where Ozzy bit the head off of a bat. And that was something people simply did not forget because it made him seem so outrageous crazy off the wall. And to his credit, he admitted on his reality show that's just an act. I'm not some, you know, satanic worshiping devil. That's just a character I play. It's kind of like a professional wrestling character. So let's go to story five today. This is frankly a bizarre story on the one hand. The other hand, it's kind of a normal, normal daily story these days. Donald Trump deflects or attempts to deflect Epstein questions by attacking Obama and Clinton. Now, I am trying to keep this show focused on top business, technology, culture stories, but when you have an authoritarian in the White House every day trying to take over every aspect of business and technology and culture, it's hard not to talk about this. So this is not a pure political punditry show. I'm trying to analyze things through a communication lens. But yes, opinions can come out and you might not always agree with them. That's okay. I'm okay with you not agreeing with me. I hope you can at least be okay with the idea that I'm giving you my best analysis as I see it as objective through a communications lens, even though we may have different policy or political persuasions now. Under pressure over resurfacing photos and questions about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump yesterday unleashed a series of explosive accusations claiming Barack Obama committed treason and led a coup attempt. With Hillary Clinton. Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump dismissed the Epstein scrutiny as a, quote, witch hunt. Well, we've heard that phrase before. Then launched into a tirade demanding prosecutions of Obama, Biden, Hillary James Comey and others. He cited a controversial report by Dni Tulsi Gabbard that contradicts the Biden bipartisan Senate finding that Russia favored Trump in 2016. Again, little background. Marco Rubia, not some liberal Democrat, but Marco Rubia, the current Secretary of state, when he was in the Senate, came out with a report concluding that Russia favored Trump in 2016, took a lot of specific actions covertly to try to help Trump win. That doesn't mean that there was meetings with Trump and he was their stooge and it was all manipulated together. But yes, they found lots and lots of facts and research showing that Russia did all sorts of things to favor Trump. Now, Obama's office called the claims ridiculous. I'm glad to see Obama finally speaking out. Occasionally. I wish he'd speak out more. While CNN published new photos of EPSTEIN Attending Trump's 1993 wedding. I mean, every single day there's there more photos, more video of Epstein and Trump, books of them together, drawings, things that seem like love notes between Trump and Epstein. The ties are getting stronger and stronger and stronger. The more people dig, not from liberal Democrats, not even from traditional mainstream media, but from conservative media outlets like the Wall Street Journal coming out with more and more linkage. These guys are appeared to be linked at the hips or linked at something for years and years and years, especially as Trump pointed out their. Their love of beautiful women, especially on the young side. Not my words. President Trump's words. Now Trump's deflection strategy has escalated into a broader campaign of retribution, including security clearance revocations, media targeting, and calls for criminal charges against former officials. The message is clear. Don't ask about Epstein or you will be added to an enemy's list. And talking about Obama and Clinton and others as guilty of treason somehow. So on the one hand, it can be easy to kind of relax and say, none of this is real. It's just Trump trying to get people to what I said, look over here at this thing. Don't look over here at Epstein and real thing. Look at this shiny thing over here. Look at this red flag if you are the bull. He's trying to divert attention by saying the most outrageous thing that he knows the media will find to be catnip. But you never really know about Trump. But for every hundred crazy, wild ideas that he tosses out there and then forgets about annexing Greenland, we haven't heard much about that. Turning Gaza into a luxury resort, we haven't heard much about that. But there are a lot of things he puts out there where he does follow through. You know, let's lock up immigrants and put them in something like concentration camps. Alligator, you know, Alligator Alley are the. The Alligator prison in Florida being one of them. Let's cut all the aid to the poor people. Who cares if they kill? Well, that was something got attention and he actually did it. So you never really know. This is dangerous, dangerous territory. And it's difficult for any fair minded observer, analyst to talk about because you instantly get written off as too extreme if you do it. But this is exactly what authoritarian regimes around the world have traditionally done. It's done in modern day Hungary, it's done in Poland, it's done in Turkey going back, it was done in Mussolini's day in Italy, and yes, it was done in 1930s Germany. This idea that anyone who doesn't support you politically, we're going to use the power of the state to accuse you of horrible crimes, trumped up Trump crimes, and then will either put you in prison or muzzle you or attack you or deport you in some cases, as Trump has alleging. So this is a serious, serious breach of democratic norms and standards. By democratic, I mean little D things that Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, Green Party members, basically everyone in the entire country, until just a few years ago, until the rise of Trump agreed upon. These are the norms of a democratic society. The norms are being chipped away and destroyed. And it's troubling. I was talking to a good friend, a well known political figure, media figure in his own right, just yesterday having lunch out in Shelter island, and he was telling me that he and his wife are prepared, they will in fact move to another country, maybe France, if this trend continues because they want to live in a democracy. A lot of people are going to be giving some serious thought. The polls have never shown a higher percentage of people giving serious thought to living in another country. And you could say, well, you know, tj, all these people said they were going to leave the country when Trump got elected the first time and didn't do it. Okay. But in his first term, Trump talked a lot. He didn't really do much because he had mainstream traditional Republicans as his chief of staff, as his secretary of state, and they kind of handcuffed him. All those people are gone. All the adults in the room are gone. It's nothing but children, Trump's children, intellectually and morally, who will do whatever he asks them to do because they are obedient, cheerful. That is in fact what is different. Okay, let's take a few comments from Pablo says I agree to disagree. Great, I appreciate that. And saying we and a few other comments that I'm trying to make out. So, Pablo, thank you so much for joining me today and Matthew and Hospital, Hospital and others. If you're watching this on demand, please leave your questions, your comments. I would love to talk with you. So who am I? I'M TJ Walker. This is Communiverse. This is your daily dive into the top news stories related to business, technology and culture looked at through the lens of communication skills, all with the goal of boosting your personal success. I typically try to hit about five main stories per day and we've been doing this every day now for several weeks. And the goal is to make it so fun for you and for me that I do it every day forever or as long as I can be alive until I get I guess I can turn the tables over, hand the show over to my digital clone which if you don't know what I'm talking about, please go to tjwalker AI and you can see my video interactive clone. You can rehearse your next speech, your media interview with it, you can rehearse your sound bites with it, you can do all those things and it's absolutely free. Free to get started. You don't even have to give a name or an email address if you want to ask it text questions. So please check out tjwalker AI. Speaking of sound bites, that does lead us to the next and final story of the day regarding Steve Bannon and the art of media spin. While Trump dodges Epstein questions, Steve Bannon, his former top strategists, former White House official, is feeding the press exactly what they need on cue this week the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and Political all ran stories saying Trump had flipped the Epstein scandal into a MAGA rallying cry. And guess what? They all quoted the same guy, Steve Bannon, who texted them media ready lines like we are finally on the offensive. That's what was quoted in cnn. MAGA is united, the deep State and Murdoch. The Washington Post. This galvanized the base. The New York Times so this is how the media spin actually works. You don't hide from reporters, you feed them what they're looking for quickly, clearly, emotionally, the lesson the loudest media critics are often the best communicator. So Steve Bannon is the host of the War Room. It's one of the most wildly successful podcast. It's hugely influential in the MAGA world, arguably the most influential one. He's offer four hours a day, sort of a clearinghouse for every good idea, bad idea, kooky idea and conspiracy in that world. And he spends a lot of time talking about how horrible, biased, evil the New York Times is the CNN is the Washington Post. But here's the thing people don't really pay close enough attention to if anyone from those media outlets, any reporter Any editor needs to get a perspective or reaction from someone pro Trump. They know they can call, text, send a smoke signal. To someone like Steve Bannon, he's back instantly. He's very accessible, and it works to his advantage because he understands the media. He's a smart, savvy guy. You can make the case he's done horrible things for our country and given a lot of awful advice to Trump. But I don't think any serious person would. I mean, first of all, he was an early investor and he makes money from Seinfeld, so he can't be that Tom. He's a graduate of the Harvard Business School. Doesn't mean he's a genius, but he clearly understands media, and he understands that you can attack someone all day long as horrible, evil, corrupt, lying, and then turn around and pick up the phone and do an interview with them, and, and they will still quote you in a way that builds your brand, that helps get your message across, that helps politically what you're trying to do, that helps your political team. You can do that. He understands that in a way where the opposite is not really true. If a right wing organization like Breitbart or Fox News calls a Democrat or leading liberal, typically they're less likely to call back because for a couple of reasons. One, they don't want to give oxygen to the story. And two, they feel like anything they say will be distorted in such a way as to make them look like fools and imbeciles. And I think there is a lot of credence to that. Can you make the case that more Democrats should be like Steve Bannon and reach out constantly to get their quotes? Yes, you can. And someone like former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg does a good job of that because he'll go anywhere. He'll go on Fox News constantly. He understands if you just show up, get your opinion out, the media will cover you. But I don't see anyone doing it on the Democratic liberal left side nearly as effectively as Steve Bannon. And a lot of conservative commentators, they play both sides of the fence. They, they're constantly talking to their own base, attacking the mainstream media as nothing but corrupt and fake. But they're the first ones to return a call to get their perspective, which they presumably think is honest and true. And it gets in the story every time. Now, what Bannon does well and what Trump does well is they understand if you want to get quoted, attack. There's a lot of different SOUNDBITE elements in the world, structural things that will get you quoted Humor is one of them. Stephen Colbert is the master of that. Asking rhetorical questions can get you quoted. Giving vivid examples can get you quoted. Emotion can get you quoted. But the easiest way to ever get quoted is to attack. And if you look at any quote you see in almost any publication coming from Trump or Bannon, there's always an attack, quite often packaged with emotion, sometimes packaged with such an over the top attack, it's also humorous, at least to some people. So I do think you can learn from that. I'm not telling you to go around attacking everyone you disagree with, but realize if you attack, you can get quoted. And also realize just because a media outlet has criticized you or your company or your cause or your nonprofit, it's still dumb to not return their call when they want your perspective. Because most media outlets, they want a bigger story. They want to at least seem to be fair. Therefore, they are going to give you some space in the story. So return the call, return the text, return the tweet and concisely spell out what you're for and ask yourself, is that really interesting, the way you have positioned it? Because that generally is what will get you in the story. So those are the top stories for the day. I want to thank you for joining me. We've had a few more comments come in. I want to make sure I'm getting it. So Pablo says, I was so impressed with the bat head off. Years have passed and people still remember it. Talking about Ozzy Osbourne, traditional marriage, man, woman, man is already problematic. If you add a different factor to something and let me, let me go ahead and bring this over so you get a little better eye contact from me. I'm working from three screens today as I, as I often do when I'm in the home, when I'm in the home studio. So I want to be respectful to what Pablo said and well, something happened in my comments section because I just saw them and Pablo, for whatever reason, I can't go back to your comment. It has just disappeared. So apologies for that. Pablo says. And Udemy, great deal. So Pablo will be one of my students on the Udemy platform. If you are looking for great deals on online courses, media training, public speaking training, personal developments, habit building, you can always go to my website, mediatrainingworldwide.com. you can also go to platforms like Udemy and just type in my name. T.J. walker, I want to thank you for spending time with me today and please do me one favor. Share the word pass. Pass this along information about it. Go ahead and subscribe. Sign up for notifications. If you're watching this on YouTube or other platforms, leave a comment and please join me live tomorrow. I haven't yet picked a set time where I'm going to be doing it every single time. I'm still exploring that Just getting back from vacation and traveling. Didn't didn't return from Long Island, New York City area until last night back in Florida. Didn't really get home till after 1am, so operating on four hours of sleep, hoping to get caught up tonight. So Pablo has the last word. I was commenting in real time. I'm still your student. Love it. Pablo, thank you so much. And I didn't mean to disregard what you said, but something I did when I switched screens got rid of all the comments. But thanks so much. Hope to see all of you tomorrow.