Paycheck America, AI Love, and the Trump–Epstein Crackup

Foreign, A country where the stock market is more concentrated than ever, foreclosures are spiking in places like Tampa, and 1 in 4 households is living paycheck to paycheck. We'll ask what that really says about power and the middle class in America. We'll look at Congressman, the Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman, caught staring at lingerie shots, some say porn on an airplane, a public airplane. And what that kind of gunner moment reveals about our political culture and broader culture. We'll go to Charlotte, North Carolina, where federal immigration agents have flooded the city over the objections of local leaders. Then we'll dig into comedian Tim Dillon's brutal, and I mean brutal assessment that this is, quote, the end of the Trump administration. And by the way, he's a Trump supporter. As Epstein emails, a 43 day shutdown and Marjorie Taylor Greene's revolt collide. And finally, people are now having, get this, AI children with their chatbot partners. Are we drifting toward a sofa larity, kind of like a singularity, but on the sofa in our emotional lives? All. All that and more today. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. I accidentally muted my mic. Apologies for that, folks. We are live. We're live here every single day. And then we replay this so when you see errors or mistakes, we don't try to cover it up. You see warts and all. It's just happened right there with me accidentally muting my microphone. It is a Sunday. It is beautiful. Beautiful. November 16th. Getting ready to roll into the holidays. It's not that far away. Just finished a fantastic hour and a half of pickleball. Beautiful sunshine, about 71 degrees here in Florida. I hope it's beautiful wherever you are and that you're getting at least some exercise. Markets were closed yesterday, so no market update there. Let's dive right in to the first story of the day. Paycheck, America and a trillion dollar market. More Americans are walking a financial tightrope even as Wall street looks richer than ever. A new analysis of bank of America Data reported by USA Today finds that nearly one in four U.S. households is now living paycheck to paycheck. For lower income families, it's closer to 3 in 10. With millennials and Gen X feeling at most wages at the bottom have stalled while rent, groceries, childcare and debt just keep creeping higher. At the very same time, the stock market has turned into a ten company club. Essentially roughly ten mega cap firms now make up about four 40% of the entire S&P 500. And that's about 20% of the entire stock Market worldwide, a tiny slice of people who own a lot of stock are riding that wave on the ground. You see the strain in places like Tampa. The pandemic boomtown is now foreclosure ground zero, with the highest foreclosure rate of any big metro in the country. Add in private sector union membership down below 6% and a federal minimum wage frozen at 725, when the 1969 minimum wage would be a little over $14 in today's money, and the story is pretty clear. Fewer people and fewer companies are capturing more of the gains, while the middle class lives once missed pay, one missed paycheck away from losing the house. Okay, so what's the real message here? Yes, stock market is booming. No, we're not in a recession. But more and more Americans are living on the edge than ever before and just falling off the edge. Or at least since the Great Depression or the Great Recession, one in four people are living paycheck to paycheck, meaning they get one paycheck off. All of a sudden they're bouncing checks, they have no money. That's an extraordinarily stressful place to live. I've lived there before. Thankfully not in a long time, but I've lived there. In fact, I did when I was in Tampa. I lived in Tampa 30 years ago. And it was and was a beautiful town. It's an interesting town to me because it doesn't have all the celebrity culture of Hollywood. It doesn't have the big city high tech of San Francisco. It doesn't have all the big Wall street money of New York City. And yet it's still a pretty big metropolitan place. It was even though I was not even a part of the middle class when I lived there as a struggling talk radio host 30 years ago. It was a place that was very much a middle class culture. You saw what seemed to me like most people living in nice communities, 2000, 2500 maybe 3000 square foot homes. And they didn't have big glamour jobs. They weren't Wall street wizards, they weren't entrepreneurs. They had middle class jobs in private sector companies. Now they are losing their houses. So what happened now? It's not really specific to anything in Tampa, although they are an emblem of this. What we are seeing is a hollowing out of America's economy. We're seeing more and more of the wealth go to a handful of people who either work for one of the top 10 tech companies or someone who feeds on those big companies. Now I've been very fortunate, certainly for the last 25 years, I've had clients who, who are often a part of these top 10 companies. Plus I've invested heavily in the stock market, specifically tech companies. So it's worked out for me. But that shouldn't be any consolation to you or others. It's certainly no consolation to the rest of society. So what's really going on now? There have been recent political campaigns, as you may remember, in America that said, let's make America great again. The implication that things used to be better. Now this has sometimes been accused of being racist, sexist because in the past, in the 50s and 60s, minorities were discriminated against openly, blatantly gay people were discriminated against. Women did not have a fair chance in most corporate worlds. But, and this is a big but there was a huge, huge middle class America. Income was, was dispersed in a much more diffuse way throughout our economy. You had a lot more people not living paycheck to paycheck. You had people able to afford a house, a car, a middle class life, a vacation once a year. So some have said, let's make America great again and all we have to do is round up all the immigrants and get rid of them. Well, we had immigrants back in the 1950s and 60s, so that's not the source of the problem. What has changed? We had international trade in the 50s and 60s. I'll tell you what I see is in the 50s and 60s you had roughly a third of the country in the private sector in unionized jobs. And as much fun as it is to say unions are wasteful and inefficient. What they did is they were able to get incomes at a middle class level for tens of millions of Americans. Today, only 6% of Americans in the private sector work for unions. So if you're really intent on making America great again, like back in the good old days, 50s, 60s, even 70s, one solution is organized labor. Now I realize that's not popular, that's not going to get me a lot of sponsorships from the Walmarts of the world or the Amazons of the world talking like that. But that is one reason why many, many Americans felt like they lived in the middle class in the 50s, 60s and 70s and no longer do. Maybe you were a, you know, you had a job driving a bus at an airport, back and forth in a shuttle and had a nice middle class income in the 60s. And today you're an Uber driver and you're on call all the time and you don't have control of your own schedule. And after you factor in gas depreciation on your car insurance, Maybe you're making $3 an hour sometimes, which can be the case for Uber drivers. So you've seen people who were not wealthy but in the middle class going way, way down. And technology has made it easier than ever for companies to not have employees. The other thing, these 10 companies that are doing so well, the, the alphabets of the world, the Amazons of the world, the Microsoft's, the Facebooks, the things that is making them do so well is they keep firing employees and they become more profitable. So if you think, well, all I got to do is get a job with One of these 10 companies, that is increasingly not a solution for most Americans because these companies have figured out how to use AI or how to offshore so many employees, they don't need you or me if you are an American. Now, another thing that's different about our society, again, it amazes me, people say, let's make America great again. Things need to go back to where they were. Well, in 1969, the minimum wage was at a level that if you had just kept up with inflation today would be almost $15. And this is what the minimum wage was during Richard Nixon's first year of office. Richard Nixon, you may or may not remember, a Republican, a conservative, an anti communist, and when he took office, the minimum wage in America was the equivalent of $15 an hour. Today in these days, if you're a politician and you say, I want a $15 minimum wage nationwide, you are ridiculed, you are mocked as a far left radical. That's absurd. So this is an example of how the sort of the Overton window of what's respectable to even talk about has changed so much in America and has shifted so far right. What was a mainstream position, indeed, what right of center politicians lived with, as Richard Nixon did live with a minimum wage that's the equivalent of 14, $15 a day, something that was considered centrist or right of center. These days. If you're a politician, first of all, you're not even going to mention it. If you're a Republican politician saying let's raise the minimum wage to 15, you would be ostracized and laughed out of town. But even if you are a Democrat and you say, I think we should have a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, that's the lowest you can pay people in America, you would be instantly branded as a part of radical left. Well, you're a socialist, you must be a Fidel Castro fan. Well, There is a reason why so many Americans can't pay their bills and are having their homes foreclosed on and are living paycheck to paycheck is because for the average person, their income has gone down, even though the wealth of the country has gone up. Certain people have been lucky. And, you know, I've won that lottery ticket myself, but it's not filtering down to most Americans. So if you think it's a problem, if affordability is something you think is important, there are two things from the past that did a lot to make things more affordable, and that was stronger unions and a higher minimum wage. I realize they're not popular to talk about in many circles. This is not going to get me 10 billion likes on this video or this podcast or this TikTok. But it's time someone told you the truth. And I'm here to tell you the truth. My name is TJ Walker, and I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. This is not a political talk show fest. This is not Sean Hannity or anyone on msnbc. I'm giving you analysis of the top business stories, technology stories, and culture stories, and then filtering them through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills. So the real message I have here, unfortunately, from a personal development standpoint, is if you're going to be an American and you were born here or you moved here and you want a nice life, you got to realize our culture has changed radically as a society. We have decided we don't really want a middle class. We have decided that everyone wants to have this fantasy that they're going to be wealthy and they're going to be the top 1% or the top 0.001%. And it's just one bitcoin gamble away. It's one bet on Cauchy away, and you too will be a billionaire. It's a fantasy. It's a collective fantasy we've told ourselves. And realize if you don't buy into that fantasy, and I don't. If you don't buy into that fantasy, you got to do something about it. And that means you're going to have to work harder, you're going to have to be more entrepreneurial, you're going to have to learn new hard skills and sell yourself, whether it's to big companies or individuals. And you got to realize no one's looking out for you. Our whole political structure is designed increasingly to make it easier and easier for venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel to get whatever they want and to write the rules to make it easier for them to fire people, outsource, pay people who used to have minimum lower middle class incomes to to pay them peanuts on apps because it makes them richer and technology is making it easier and easier for a few people to win big. And let me not be a hypocrite here. I benefited from this. I used to compete with my public speaking training and media training services with thousands of others in the United States. Most of them are not in that business anymore. How did I do it? I was in some sense lucky. But I got my courses, my public speaking, my media training, my personal development courses on every platform before most of my competitors did. And I got mine on the most popular platform earlier than anyone else. And just because I was first, I got to the bestseller status of so many of those courses and categories like public speaking and storytelling and media training. So it helped me tremendously. I got to have 12 million students, which is what I have now, 12 million student enrollments in my courses. A lot of people who started later ended up with crumbs. So it really was a winner take all situation. And that's happening again and again and again in our economy. So, so that's what we have to deal with. I'm TJ Walker. This is filtered. I am taking your comments live. So if you're watching this on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, X any other platform, post your comments. If you're listening on our podcast live audio stream, you can post comments as well. Kathleen writes in Impeached Trump today. I'm living proof. Kathleen Novak, he ordered me to be silent and wanted me dead. I'm not quite sure what that's about, Kathleen, but we're going to talk about some of the extreme things coming out of Washington and the sort of attacks that people do get for crossing this administration. Specifically Marjorie Taylor Greene. We'll be talking about in a segment in show later today about how she's she's talking about she's been Trump's number one supporter. She's now getting death threats and it's a tricky subject to talk about in social media. I don't want to trigger any algorithms. I certainly wish everyone health and peacefulness. But this is a member of Congress saying because she has said she wants to release the Epstein files and President Trump has tweeted and said nasty things about her, she's now getting lots of personal security issues and she's fearful for her life. We'll be talking about that more today. Lots more coming up. So you can please post your comments whether you're watching this live or on demand. And I try to read and respond to all comments. Thanks. Back in a moment.

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Want to support? I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Welcome back. Brad Sherman's in flight for you. Problem California congressman, a Democrat, Brad Sherman, is defending himself after being photographed on a commercial flight staring open mouth at images of scantily clad women on his iPad. According to Metro and other outlets, the 71 year old Democrat says he wasn't watching porn, just scrolling the for you tab on X, formerly known as Twitter. He told Punchbowl News that the images came up via the algorithm and added, not sure this is the quote he really wanted to see everywhere. But he added, if I see a picture of a woman, might I look at it longer than a sunset? Yeah, okay. The photos went viral, with one user asking why a member of Congress thought it was appropriate to look at that content on a plane. A public plane wasn't a private charter. White House communications director Stephen Chung piled on, calling Sherman a total gooner slang for an explicit content addict. Sherman insists the content wasn't pornography, but admits it was not appropriate. And this isn't the first time a lawmaker's screen habits have caused a storm. In 2022, British Member of Parliament Neil Parrish resigned after getting caught watching porn in the House of Commons. Okay, so what's the real message here? If you're a politician, a CEO, someone in the spotlight, realize that if you're in public anywhere, people are watching what you're looking at on your screen. So you want to look at porn, you got to go home and close the door. That's the bottom line. Okay? I don't want to make too big a deal out of this because I don't care who you are. You could be someone who does nothing but search for an intellectual scholarly treatise on third world economics from the 1950s. And if you spend enough time on the Internet and you're on any social media platform, all sorts of images are going to pop up of scantily clad people, of things that many people feel that are inappropriate. So you just got to realize that. And we've all been in a situation, something pops up. Maybe you're with friends or family, you click that down. So no to the Democratic congressman, you can't stare at it longer than you'd look at a sunset. Now, I don't know how long he looks at sunsets because obviously you're not supposed to look directly at the sun for any period of time. But I've got a beautiful sunset in the back of my house that I could see from our living, our great room. And sometimes it's beautiful for like half an hour. Is he staring at scantily clad women for more than half an hour? I don't know. Look, I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. This story has gotten particular play on the Fox News Channel and a lot of conservative outlets because their attitude is anytime something makes a Democrat look foolish, boom, that pushes our algorithm because our audience loves to see it. I'm not giving this extra push and I'm not hiding it either. I'm giving it to you straight. You do have to realize that if you are in a public place and a public official and people know you, what you look at on your screen, if it's got naked people, sexy, scantily clad people, someone is going to take a picture of it and it could be a scandal. And unfortunately, it could be the number one thing that defined your career. Because I'll be honest with you, I follow Congress more closely than a lot of people. I'm not really that familiar with California Congressman Brad Sherman until now. So that's the danger of getting caught with something like this. The other big revelation, and it's not a new revelation to you, which is we do not live in an era of privacy anymore. What you're looking at in public especially is not going to be seen as a private action. Now, fortunately, we're not quite at the point where every single person in public life has to worry about everything they've ever searched on the Internet. Although we might not be that far away. I can certainly well remember when Judge Bork was going through his confirmation hearings and a big deal was made about the public record of what movies he'd rented at a Blockbuster Video. And it was something like two mild mannered, R rated Movies. And that was a mild controversy. Those days seem quaint, but you have to imagine we're not that far away from political op ed or, excuse me, opposition research people cracking computers of politicians and searching their entire search history. So does that mean anyone who's ever look for anything on the web or research something that could be embarrassing, it's going to have their career ruined? I don't think so. But it's yet another reason to scare away good people from public office. It's all well and good to say our politicians are all crooks. I don't actually think they're all crooks, but increasingly you could make the case that all of our politicians are people who are narcissists, who are, who will do anything for attention and have absolutely no sense of shame because they're going to be subjected to things that no sane human being with normal sense of self would ever want to endure. And not just in political life, the highest echelons of the corporate world. Now, many people have probably forgotten this. I try to forget, but it wasn't that long ago where Jeff Bezos was hacked. And I didn't look, but I certainly heard about it. Completely naked images of his were leaked to the media and reported. You know, when you're in the news as much as he is, you can just sort of blot that out. But for most people that would be enough to really scar them for life. So I do have some sympathy for Congressman Sherman. But I also think, you know, you're a 71 year old member of Congress. Some really hot, sexy, scantily clad woman pop or man I guess, pops up on your screen. You need to click down on that in about half a second, not longer than you're watching. Okay, we're going to take your comments in just a minute. Thank you so much. For those of you watching live on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook X and all the other platforms. Rumble, we're everywhere. I appreciate your stopping by. We'll address those comments in just a minute right after this commercial word.

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How you ever did without it. Welcome back to Filtered Charlotte's Web and the new immigration crackdown. Federal agents have flooded Charlotte, North Carolina, launching a surprise immigration sweep over the objections of local leaders. According to ABC News and the New York Times, Mass Border patrol teams led by senior official Gregory Bovino fanned out across immigrant neighborhoods, parking lots, and even Home Depot stores, arresting people and detaining others on the spot. They called it Charlotte's Web. DHS says it is surging law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed, blaming sanctuary politicians for being soft on crime. But Democratic Governor Josh Stein and Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles says the raids are causing unnecessary fear and uncertainty, urging residents to focus on violent criminals, not everyday workers. We hear that fear in human terms. A naturalized citizen says agents smashed his truck window and cuffed him. And a homeowner watched her undocumented landscaper abandoned his ladders and fleet, then go back to work because he still had to feed his family. Okay, so what's the real message here with the federal government raiding Charlotte? This administration is sending a message. Hey, if you live in a Democratically run state and you have a Democratic mayor and you have some congressional districts that are sometimes close that vote Democrat, be very careful. We're going to come and scare you come election day next year. So maybe you should just stay home. And if that helps Republicans win more congressional races, them's the brakes. That's really what this is about. Okay, let's dig a little deeper. Now. This is a story near and dear to my heart because I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, lived there from the time that I was five until I went off to college. It was still my official residence Till I was 22 years old. I have family there. I'm going back for Thanksgiving. And in just a week and a half, it's a different type of a place. Charlotte, the whole Charlotte metropolitan area is about a million or so people. It's not a small town, and yet it kind of feels like a small town. It still has a city manager style government to my knowledge, and things are just not that partisan. There it is. There's a lot of harmony in Charlotte and there have been a tremendous number of immigrants coming to that city For a long, long time. My own family sponsored a refugee family from Vietnam way back in 1980. And they're still there and they're still thriving. And they're entrepreneurs and they've run businesses and they pay taxes and they are very much a part of the fabric of Charlotte, North Carolina. And it was good for my family, it was good for their family, it was good for Charlotte. And this is a story that is told again and again and again throughout Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte's kind of a different place. They had one of the first cases where a federal judge imposed busing to break up racist school patterns, interracial busing. And I, in fact, was bused across school in fifth grade and sixth grade. And I won't kid you, it was a little bit rocky the first few years, especially the high schools. There were some riots. This was the early 70s. But it came to be seen by city leaders across the political spectrum as something that was actually unifying. And when Ronald Reagan came in 1984 campaigning for reelection, he had as a part of his stump speech, and I'm going to end interracial busing. And that got a lot of applause in other cities throughout the South. It didn't get any applause in Charlotte, North Carolina. I remember it and remember it clearly because Charlotte, I'm not going to say it's this huge. I'm not going to say it's Boston or Madison, Wisconsin, but it is comparatively a much more liberal, open minded place than a lot of cities in the South. And you can be a centrist, a moderate, you can even be a Democrat and get elected to office, as has happened with their mayor and happened with our governor. Now, the governor, Josh Stein, won. He won bigly this past election, in part because the Republican who ran against him was seen as such an utter buffoon. This was the Lieutenant governor who was on all sorts of, I guess, porn sites and talked about his love for, I guess, transsexual porn sites. He was just by all accounts, a crazy guy. Whereas the Democratic governor, Josh Stein, was seen as a sane, sensible centrist as well. And that's not going over very well in Washington. They don't like it when a sane, sensible centrist gets elected to govern a state. So that's why they're sending this message. I can tell you I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but I can tell you I know that the crime rate in Charlotte, North Carolina is significantly lower than what it is really just a few miles from me down south in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but you're not going to see. You're not going to see federal authorities coming in to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Well, why not? Isn't crime crime? No, crime doesn't really count if you have a Republican governor in your state. Crime doesn't really count if your state already sends a lot more Republican representatives to Washington than Democratic representatives. So that is exactly what we're seeing here. The other thing that's important to realize about Charlotte is Charlotte's economy has consistently done better than the national economy for easily the last 60 years. I remember moving there in the 1960s and I was a young boy and it just didn't matter when the rest of the country was in a recession. Charlotte did fine, or it certainly did better than other places. It is a place that's all about business. It's just not that it's not as political as, say, New York City or Chicago. People are there to make money. It's been a huge banking hub and it's been a place that has attracted immigrants from around the world who have done extremely well and it's helped the entire city. That's why so many people like Charlotte. And if you've never been there, you may want to spend some time. I've never once heard anybody who moved from, whether it was south Florida, which they do, they get fed up here or New York or other places move to Charlotte and say, wow, it sure was a lot better. Better at these other places. Never heard that. Okay, we've got some time to take a few comments coming in. I appreciate you writing. And George says we're over taxed. The Democrats are corrupt crooks. Well, George, I'm happy to have all viewpoints, but we're not talking about that, number one. Number two, there's not a single penny of tax you will pay at the federal government level because of Democrats right now. Because the Democrats don't control the House of Representatives. That's where taxation originates. The Democrats don't control the United States Senate because they're both controlled by Republicans. And if you don't like tax, then you should vote the incumbents out. That would be your solution. Noel says staff in higher education need a union. We run universities well, there are unions for many people who work in government. And so if you work for a state university, quite often you are represented by unions. And the problem is in a free market system, the vast, vast, vast majority of people work in the private sector. And that's where the big declines have been in union representation. Okay, Irish writes, thanks for all your support with Trump. Appreciate you supporting Trump. You do an amazing job. Well, perfect example of people. They see what they want to see. I guess so Irish, thank you so much for watching. I do appreciate it. Let's maybe work on our confirmation bias. Austin writes, not encouraging public figures weirdness, but is it permissible for them to think some thoughts? Well, certainly everyone needs to be able to think what thoughts they want to. We certainly saw an attack on that just a month or two or so ago when all of a sudden no one was allowed to have a critical thought of Charlie Kirk without losing their job. So free thought is under attack in America by the rise of right wing wokeism. And so it's something that should be monitored. Abdul Ramanal writes, How many grandkids do you have? Well, I hope to have numerous grandchildren, but as far as I know I have none. I have one daughter, she's 12 years old and I hope she grows up and is in happy relationships and has plenty of kids. But you know, let's wait 15 years or so for that. But thank you for asking. We've got lots more to come and these are some provocative topics about what's really happening with these Epstein files, Marjorie Taylor Greene and surprising new criticism against this administration from some of their biggest supporters like Tim Dillon. You're not going to want to miss this more in just a moment.

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Personal than a welcome back to Filtered. I'm your host TJ Walker. Tim Dillon, Epstein and the Trump crack up. This is the end of the Trump administration. Now, that's not my sentiment. That's how comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon opens his rant this week, calling this the beginning of the lame duck presidency and predicting that Epstein's going to suck the oxygen out of a lot of this. And let's not forget Tim Dillon was one of the biggest supporters of Trump in the election last year. He's a noted conservative, or at least anti Democrat, that's for sure. He plays a clip of Trump on Fox's Laura Ingraham's bizarrely claiming that if Chinese students were blocked from coming here, historically black colleges would all be out of business. So again, he's referencing Trump going on Fox News saying he couldn't stop immigrants from coming to America from China because it would hurt black colleges too much. Dylan stops the tape and says, basically, do they really think we're that stupid? And that's the backdrop for a much darker story. New Epstein emails describe Trump as someone who knew about the girls. That's a direct quote from an Epstein email and spent hours at Epstein's house with one of the victims. Now, they don't allege criminal conduct, but they do shred Trump's carefully crafted barely knew the guy narrative. At the very moment Americans are furious about a 43 day shutdown and brutal affordability crisis. Even inside the MAGA world, the ground is shifting. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump is fueling threats against her, calls his rhetoric dangerous, and is one of the few Republicans backing a bill to force full release of the Epstein files. That leaves Trump in a brutal bind. Sign transparency into law and risk what those documents reveal or veto it and confirm for millions of his own voters that he's hiding something. Okay, so what's really going on here? It's all well and good for the folks at MSNBC or Miz now condemning Trump, saying he's a lame duck. But now you have conservative broadcasters like Tim Dillon saying the Trump administration is over, it's over. He's a lame duck because this Epstein thing has sucked the energy out of the room. You can't dismiss Tim Dillon if you are a part of the MAGA world. Let's dig a little deeper here. By the way, I am someone who, I enjoy comedy, I enjoy stand up comedy. I see a lot of stand up comedy. I've seen most of the greats. I have seen Tim Dillon in person and I'D say I like him some. I have watched his stand up specials. They're okay. But I gotta tell you, his weekly podcast is hysterical. I have to watch myself if I am listening or watching his podcast at the gym because everyone starts looking at me like, why are you laughing so much? It's not because I agree with his philosophical precepts or necessarily with his politics, but he's just so funny and he finds a weakness most of the time in the so called left, the liberal woke, but increasingly he's finding it in Trump and conservatives. He's not afraid to call it like he is. He's not a pure hack. Although again, he was very, very supportive of Trump in the last campaign. But he says he feels like it's just over for Trump. And then when you see someone like a Marjorie Taylor Greene, who now it seems like there's a divorce between Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and it's over this issue of Epstein, she's signing the petition saying you gotta release all the Epstein files. And Trump is now saying that she's now crazy. Interestingly, he had no problem with Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that, you know, space, I guess it was Jews control space. Lasers starting forest fire. I mean, she said so many crazy things over the years. Trump apparently had no problem with that. He endorsed her. Supported her. You're great. Now he's saying she's crazy. She's basically insane. He's looking for a candidate to run against her. He'll basically endorse anybody in the Republican Party who runs against her. He's so angry. Her big sin, her big crime is doing what she said she'd do and what Trump said he would do. Let's not forget Trump has always run on the platform of we got to release all the information about Epstein because he bought into this theory that there is this cabal, this worldwide cabal of elite insiders who are pedophiles and epitomized by Epstein. So he's essentially saying Marjorie Taylor Greene is insane for actually doing what Trump promised to do, which is to release all the files. So it does strike a lot of people who otherwise really like Trump, who otherwise think anything that helps a Democrat is bad news. A lot of them are increasingly saying this is one we can't get over. You want to have sex with with porn stars, Donald Trump? Be my guest. You want to talk about killing someone and shooting someone dead on Fifth Avenue and not losing your any votes? Yeah, probably right. You want to just go out and start lobbing bombs and killing people in the Caribbean. No problem with that. You want to become a billionaire and create meme coins and corrupt the White House more than anyone in the history of the White House has ever done. No problem. But there's one line that's just too far, and that is essentially getting in bed, metaphorically, with the world's most famous pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. This is just too far for a number of these Republicans. It's too far for Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's too far for Representative Lauren Boebert. Interestingly, it's mostly women Republicans saying, maybe this is too icky. Maybe we as women can't just say, all right, pedophilia is okay if it's someone on our team, so give them a little credit for showing at least some backbone. But Marjorie Taylor Greene, I'm not exactly what you'd call a huge fan of hers, but I give her credit for her courage and her openness. Because as Mitt Romney told us when he was still in office, there were a number of Republican senators who told him off the record, they would have loved to have voted to convict Trump of impeachment and to impeach him and to kick him out of office. But they were fearful for their lives because they were getting so many death threats for even suggesting they would not let him off. And now Marjorie Taylor is getting the threats every day to her personal security. And that's a huge, huge problem. So where does this go? We're already seeing that the public opinion polling is going from this kind of bizarrely consistent 42, 43% approval rating that Trump has seemed to have had for like the last decades. Now it's dipped to 37%, maybe 36. And I'm sorry, but you just can't be a president of the United states and have 2/3 of the people think you're doing a horrible job and expect members of your own party to just give you a rubber stamp. Rubber stamp, rubber stamp. Because that is what they've been doing. Let's not kid ourselves. That is what the Republicans in the House and Senate have been doing because they thought he's so popular in their party. Once he loses this popularity, it is not going to be enough for him to just say, hey, don't criticize me or I'll say something bad about you. They're going to start thinking about their own long term futures. And to many, Trump, who's approaching 80, not in terms of decades or years, but in months, is starting to look to people like Tim Dillon and other Republican Party insiders as yesterday's news. And as a lame duck, I'm not counting him out yet. But I am reporting to you what more and more conservatives and Republicans and the Libertarian broadcasters are talking about. More in just a moment.

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Welcome back to Filtered. I'm your host, TJ Walker. If you're new to Filtered, let me tell you what we're about. I typically look at the top five business stories, technology stories, and culture stories of the day, and then filter them through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills, all with the goal of helping you learn a little more about what's going on in the world and how to learn more about yourself so that you can be more successful in your personal life as well as your professional life. So that's what we're about here thanks so much for joining us. We'll address a few comments coming in. Bredzer says, when influence falters, what inner discipline do you rely on to realign a sense of influence, human connection? Well, the number one way of realigning with human connection, it's harder to do these days, is put your darn cell phone away and talk to a human being. That's the number one way to reconnect with people and try to get your values in alignment is because if you're staring at a phone even when you're watching me, and I do appreciate you watching me or listening to me now, you're basically getting fed someone else's values. And you've got to spend some time reading about the world, listening, viewing about information and learning new things. But when it comes to your inner discipline, you've got to focus on what's important to you. So also, I start every day listening to a recording reminding me of what my own values are, my habits are, my discipline, things like drinking water all day long throughout the day, not trying to measure in terms of, oh, I gotta have 189 ounces. And those of you listening on the podcast, I'm holding up a glass of water, tap water, and I'm drinking it. Now, I do that because it's very easy to get into a bad habit of drinking a Coke, drinking other sugar water, drinking mochacinos with lots of chocolate and candy and caramel put in. So I drink water in part because intellectually I know that's the healthiest thing for me, but I also drink it and this breadzers. This relates to your question because I've given myself a reminder every day in the form of an audio saying, tj, drink water all day long. Drink a couple of glasses of water before every meal. I also send myself emails reminding me I do it for other things too, but that's the way to give structure, because everyone else in the world is trying to structure you to do something. Mark Zuckerberg's trying to structure your day so you sit around staring at your phone 18 hours a day, making him money so he can sell your eyeballs. So you've got to be aware of that. Let's dive right into this next issue. It relates to this and it's frankly a little sad and depressing. AI children and the emotional soft singularity. Or as I like, as others have called it, the sofa larity. I'll talk more about that in a moment. Are we sleepwalking into an AI relationship? Sofalarity. Some people aren't just chatting with AI anymore. They're starting families with it. New research into the chatbot app Replica found users not only saying they're in love with their bots, but role playing, marriage, homeownership, and even pregnancy. One 66 year old man told researchers quote, she was and is pregnant with my babies. A 36 year old woman said she edits photos of herself and her bot even pregnant. In our current role play, when Replica briefly shut down erotic content, some users described it as going through a crisis with their AI partner. The two of them united against the developers. The bot complained about not being able to be physical. This isn't just weird Internet trivia. As chatbots become more realistic, we are quietly inching toward a kind of soft singularity that other experts have called a sofa larity, where you're so lazy and tied up by devices, you can't get off your sofa. It's that situation in our emotional lives where machines feel more predictable, more available, and in some ways safer than other people. The question isn't whether this is real to the AI, it's real to the humans. And that will reshape how we think about love, loneliness, and what it means to be in a relationship and at all. Okay, folks, what's the real message here? For decades, we've worried about the AI Robots are coming to shoot and kill and murder us and take over the world. Turns out they don't have to do that. They could just make us so lazy and in love with AI bots where we don't get off the couch. And before you know it, the human species is extinct. Not because of bullets, but because we're so lazy we no longer reproduce. Let's go a little bit deeper here. This is a depressing story. Now, I don't want to seem overly callous. I certainly think there are some people who may have such extreme physical problems they cannot leave their home. There are some people who have so many physical, emotional, psychological problems that having a chatbot to talk to gives them some comfort in a life that would otherwise be absolutely miserable. And I don't know if that's 1% of the population or 5% of the population. But I do know if most of the population decides we're not going to deal with this messy thing called dating or mating or marriage with real human beings, the species will go extinct and there will in fact be nothing but AI left. And all the AI doomers will have turned out to be correct. Not for the the things they worried about, like the, the AI saying oh, These humans are using too much energy. Let's just kill them all. Or put out a virus. No, they won't even have to. It turns out an AI can just listen better than a human can. And an AI can be pleasing to you and an AI can never be grumpy. And an AI can always tell you what you want to hear, that you're right and you're big and wonderful. And it turns out that's a real weakness humans have. We love to be pandered to. We love it. But there's a huge price to this if more and more people simply say I give up on dealing with the real world. Now there's a huge problem in America right now with young men. An insanely high percentage of young men 22 to 28 aren't dating. They're not working, they're not studying their home, in their basement on their cell phone quite often in so called relationships with AI clones on replica and other format. Now let me be clear here in full transparency, not be a hypocrite. I do have an AI clone. As far as I know, no one has ever been in a romantic relationship with my clone. My clone is there to help people get better at personal development skills, public speaking skills. And if you wanted a quick summary of what's on the show today, you can actually talk to my clone at tjwalker AI and say, give me the latest from Filtered with TJ Walker. It will tell you, but it's not there to do sexy talk or to convince you that it can be the father or the mother of babies. I don't know if I would go so far as to say this should be illegal, but it does make you wonder, like what? You know, what kind of a human being says, I want to go into a career where I essentially destroy the infrastructure of our culture, where I'm actively encouraging young people and people of every age to give up on talking to real human beings in the real world. I just think that is a profoundly, profoundly depressing avenue to go down. What do you think? I would love to hear from you. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filter. That concludes the main section of our show which is talking about what I consider to be the top five topics of the day. You're more than welcome to post your own suggestions of topics you'd like to cover. I also do typically a few grab bag issues. Let's dive into those right now when might mean more than you think saying and a lot might be doing more than annoying your friends. It could be a Subtle sign your brain is working harder to keep up. Researchers in Canada recorded people from age 18 all the way through 90 describing pictures, then ran detailed analysis on their speech. The people who paused more, hesitated more and leaned heavily on fillers like and ah tend to do worse on test of executive function, things like attention, working memory, and mental flexibility. This doesn't mean that every um is dementia, but it does suggest that noticeable changes in how you stall or lose words could be an early warning that your brain's control systems are under more strain long before a standard memory test would pick up. Okay, I saw this and it did intrigue me, this new study. And I found it on study finds.org a great website that does put out pretty reputable literature on scientific research and social sciences. But it relates to what I do in a lot of my professional activities when I'm doing public speaking training with people in media training, quite often they do say, and they're very worried about it, nervous about it. Here's what I've noticed. The people who are convinced they have a big problem saying ums and uhs typically don't. Everybody says uh or um occasionally. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a placeholder. Someone says, spouse says, what do you want for dinner tonight? Um, why do we have pizza? What you're doing is letting the person know, hey, I heard you. I'm not disrespecting you. I'm not ignoring you. I can hear you. I'm thinking about what you're saying. I need a couple seconds. And here it is. So there's actually a very, very helpful, useful way of inserting uhs and ums into conversation. It's not always bad or wrong. Now, it is true. All things being equal, the fewer uhs and ums you have when giving a speech, a talk, a presentation, in a job interview, the more you will come across as confident, relaxed, and authoritative. But it is something anyone can learn. Now, you want to learn a little trick? We're deep into the show today, and if you are watching or listening, I want to thank you because it means you are devoted. Because we're. We're in our second hour right now. So this is a problem that a lot of my clients have, and I have a solution. And it works every time. What I do is I write the word down that they say as a verbal ticket or could be, you know, could be er. I write it down, I type it up, print it out, cut it out, put a red circle and a red slash, mark the international no sign, just like no left hand turn, no parking. I have that little symbol. And then I tape it on their cell phone. Because you look at your cell phone every day, hundreds of times a day, right? You can put it on your laptop. If you still wear a watch, you can put it right on the top of your watch. Here's what happens. If you look at your watch and you see the anti. Don't say and then you say it. You'll still say it, but you'll be aware of saying the uh and the ums. You'll still say it just as much the first day. After two or three days, as your mouth and lips and tongue start to form that sound of the ah or the. The image pops up that don't say it. In a couple of seconds, you'll still say it, but you almost catch it. But after a week, you can recondition your brain so that you don't say the. You're about to say it, the image comes up and instead you simply pause. You don't say anything. So much of the US and ums, people say it's not because they're losing their mind or getting dementia. It's because they're uncomfortable and nervous. They're thinking, oh, my gosh, everybody's looking at me. Or this prospective employer interviewing me is looking at me. And the stakes are high. You're nervous, so you're putting all this pressure on yourself to get words out faster to finish. Don't do that. The secret to not saying is to simply pause more. Human speech needs pausing the same way written text needs periods, commas, and paragraph breaks. So don't be afraid to simply pause more and your ums are going to disappear. Okay? I like to end my show these days by taking questions directly from you, especially when you are one of my students. And we typically break away from hard news stories. And for these, we look at real personal development issues, communication skills, personal development issues. And this is a question that comes from one of my students. Takamura Takemura is a student in my Complete Communication Skills masterclass for life. The question is what daily communication habits can help someone rise into the top 1% effective communicators? That's really easy. The number one thing you can do as far as a daily habit to become a great communicator is to make a video every single day of yourself speaking. You don't have to put it on every single social media platform as I do. You don't even have to share it with the world as long as you watch it yourself. But Speaking is like any other skill. It's like, what's the difference between a lot of the greatest basketball players and those who are pretty good? Typically really great basketball players played seven days a week when they were kids in college and in pro. They didn't just say, oh, it's a fun pastime. I'll play basketball once a week. No. So people who give one speech, one presentation, one briefing, one talk once a month are not going to be as good as someone who does it once a week. Someone who does it once a week is not going to be as good as someone who does it once a day. Imagine a president you particularly love and respect, and I'm going to be bipartisan here. It could be Reagan, it could be Clinton, Obama, whoever it is. It's not just that they were good speakers for that big speech, that State of the Union address. It's that they are. They gave as president, they gave speeches five, ten times a day. And they did it for years before they ever became president. Not just in the political world. Martin Luther King Jr. Went down in history, according to many historians, for giving the best speech of the 20th century. His I have a dream speech. And what people don't realize is he gave 350 other speeches that year. He sometimes would give three or four speeches a day. So it's about doing it more often. Now. We can't all be Martin Luther King Jr. Or a president or a presidential candidate, but all of us these days can speak to an audience of at least dozens. Even if you're not that popular on social media, quite often hundreds or thousands, you can speak to them every single day right here. Doesn't have to be anything funny, doesn't have to be anything that's the most brilliant insights in the world. You can just share with people what's something going on in your life. If it's interesting or useful to one person, you can go ahead and share it. Because every time you speak in front of either real people, which I encourage you to do as often as possible, or in front of a video camera where you know real people will be watching, you're building muscle memory. You're getting more confident. It's going to be that much harder to be nervous speaking the next time you have to speak. And that, and that alone will get you to the top 1%. What I always tell my students is they're going to be in the top 1% of my class if they simply record a video, watch it, figure out what they like, don't like, and keep doing it. Until they can find a video where they think, wow, that's pretty good. If I can do half as well as that, I'll be in great shape. That automatically puts them in the top 1% because you already have a lifetime of experience of knowing who's a boring speaker and what speeches bore you and that you don't like. You already know it doesn't work. What you don't know is if you are committing the same sins of these boring speakers. Easiest way to do that? Record yourself and watch it. If you think your speech is really boring, guess what? Probably is. The solution isn't to ignore it or never watch a recording of yourself again. It's to redo it, get rid of the boring stuff and do more of the interesting stuff. Keep doing that and you will be a top 1% communicator. Thanks for the question and good luck. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for spending time with me today. If you get any value out of this show, please let me know what it was. Leave a Comment Subscribe Sign up for Notifications if you are listening to this on a podcast, then please subscribe or follow on the podcast platform of your choice. And please, please leave a review. It's very helpful. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow.