PUTIN’S SMILE, ROBOT FAILS & AI AVATARS - Filtered with TJ Walker

Putin smiles on red carpet in Alaska, but Ukrainians remind the world that peace only requires one Russia leaving Ukraine. In Beijing, humanoid robots raced, boxed, and played soccer, but mostly fell flat on their faces. An actor sells his likeness to TikTok, and now his AI avatar is shilling supplements he never endorsed. Duolingo's CEO explains why he's betting the company's future future on artificial intelligence and why users shouldn't worry about humans being replaced. And in North Carolina, my old home state, a Confederate monument with the words Faithful slaves etched on its faces. A federal lawsuit that could set a precedent nationwide. Like a hot cake that can be passed around. I want them to remember that everyone here has their own family. Trump, meanwhile, hinted at a peace plan built on Ukraine ceding more land, a move that Ukrainians see as betrayal. As Radenko concludes, true peace requires only one step. Russia leaving Ukraine. Okay, so what's the real message here? All of this talk about negotiating and Trump being a big dealmaker, all of that is irrelevant to one central truth. Russia invaded a sovereign country. Everyone in the world outside of the US for the most part, sees this as an active war criminality. To solve the war, the criminals need to leave. A lot of things in life are complex. This isn't one of them. So let's dive a little deeper. For some bizarre reason, I'm not saying that Trump is a plant of Russia or on their payroll, but for some reason, for decades now, Trump seems to rarely be able to criticize Russia and the party he's a member of. Republican Party traditionally was very anti Russia, anti Soviet Union, anti Communist. Trump has done an about face and is all but endorsing dictatorships and tyrants as long as it is Putin doing the dictatoring, excuse that French, so to speak. But it truly is bizarre how Putin does things that are against the wishes of democracy, against the principles of a democracy, against the whole concept of international relations, international law, international commerce. And Trump consistently says things like, oh, he's a smart guy, he's tough guy. He's much tougher than Biden, for example. To take an international thug, an international pride, a war criminal like Putin, and first of all not recognize that he's a criminal is bad enough. But then to elevate his status by saying, you admire someone who jails and kills dissidents and opponents, journalists, and put them above American patriots, American citizens, American leaders, is truly bizarre. It really is this weird, fun house world we're living in where people in one party are essentially throwing away every principle they ever held. Dear. And now it's messing up the whole world. Because if not for the United States propping up and supporting Putin, I think Europe would have put an end to this nonsense a long time ago. Now, obviously it's difficult dealing with Russia because they were formerly a great power. They still have a lot of old dusty nuclear weapons sitting around that I'm sure can be made to work. So I'm not suggesting it's an easy solution in that sense for Ukrainians and Western Eastern Europe to push out Russia, but the solution is easy. Russia needs to worry about its own people. You've got a nation where their economy is frankly pathetic. You've got a Nation that covers 11 time zones and their economy is no bigger than Italy. You've got a nation where a million or so people have died or suffered serious injuries since this ill fated war began. You've got a nation that is increasingly an international pariah, where its own citizens can't freely trade with leading economies around the world. You've got a nation beset with alcoholism and depression and depravity. Putin needs to take care of his own house first before trying to take over more of the world. Now, I suppose it's got to be depressing if you're Putin and you're a part of the glorious Soviet Union in your childhood, to think, okay, you're no longer the leading power in the world or the second leading power in the world, you're a third rate country, pretty close to developing world status, developing nation status when you look at a lot of economic and health indicators. So, yeah, it's got to be depressing to be Putin, but he needs to go see a psychiatrist or psychologist and not work out his inner demons by killing millions of Ukrainians and his own people. And that's really what I see the bottom line here. Now, in terms of communication, what does this mean for you and me? It's very troublesome, I think, for anyone in America who's a centrist, as I am, or who is right of center, or even a conservative and certainly a liberal, to see the leading voice of America constantly sending mixed messages. One day he's kind of against Putin and says he can't be trusted. The next day he's saying he's the boss and he's a tough guy. You know, the ball is in the other guy's court and acting like that. Putin deserves tremendous respect. I mean, it's very mixed messaging and it all comes from what your core values are. Trump, to his credit, has been very consistent in that he values leaders who are authoritarian in nature, who essentially kill or eliminate political opponents, opposition in the media niceties like actually counting real votes in real elections. He admires those people and he has been clear about that. But it's extraordinarily mixed messaging for what the United States is sending to the rest of the world when we've been the ones saying, hey, folks, give up your tyrancy, give up your dictatorships, give up your communist authoritarian leaders, give up your your dictators of all stripes and join the club of democracy. And now here we are embracing and coddling and elevating this criminal Putin. It just, it makes absolutely no sense. It's mixed messaging and it's destroying the credibility of the United States. Not pretty. It's not pretty at all. More in a Moment hey, if you're enjoying this kind of take and want to hear more stories filtered through the lens of communication, make sure you're following the show, whether you're watching or listening. New episodes drop every single day, and if there's a little notification option where you are now, go ahead and turn it on. It helps you stay in the loop. The athletes at China's Robot Games fell down a lot. According to the New York Times, FAC just hosted the world's first humanoid robot games, and while there were glimpses of remarkable progress, there were also plenty of pratfalls. I'll show you in a moment. The three day event drew more than 280 teams from 16 countries. Robots ran track races, attempted backflips and even kickboxed with padded gloves. Some succeeded. One Robot ran to 1500 meters in just over six minutes, a pace faster than many human joggers. Others, though, struggle in soccer matches, child sized robots collapsed in piles while a goalkeeper stood motionless as the ball rolled into its legs during kickboxing, one commentator admitted, the hit rate is a little low. They're punching the air. China is pushing robotics with heavy investment and government backing. Experts say advances in balance and locomotion are real, but limitations remain. As Oregon State's Alan Fern put it, the robots are still dumb. The games, however, show just how far and how clumsy humanoid robots have become. So let me share with you those of you watching on YouTube and other social media platforms. Let me just show you this in a moment. And then we're going to dissect what I think the real meaning is. Because make no mistake about it, this is not just about a few laughs. This isn't about look at these silly things. It really is, I believe, about something very, very significant of what's going to happen in the world and why we should all really be paying attention to it. So let me just share this with you right now, and this is going to take just one moment. By the way, thank you for watching Filtered with TJ Walker. This is the show where every single day we bring to you the top news, business, technology and culture stories of the day and dissect it through the lens of communication skills, all with the goal of making you more successful and more effective in your personal life and in your professional life. So let's just take a look at some of these things. This is courtesy of the New York Times. So these are the recent games in China. This is fascinating to me. This is far better than I thought robots could currently do. Now, it is a little funny to see them swinging in the mist. In a minute you'll see them sort of falling down. But let's not kid ourselves. Let's not kid ourselves, folks. The let's really get to what the real message is here. Robots are coming. I don't mean that in some scary way they're going to take over and kill us. But what we are seeing is a connection now. The Internet and artificial intelligence going from just on the online space to the real world stuff, actual robots. When this happens, we're going to get closer and closer to the day that John Maynard Keynes predicted 100 years ago. Maybe humans only have to work 15 hours a week. If you could have a robot take care of every single household task, take care of home services for people who are bedridden, doing all the things you don't want, mowing your grass, washing your dishes, maybe even feeding your kids, certainly cooking gourmet meals at home. It's going to change the world. It's going to change the world dramatically. I'm not suggesting it's going to happen in the next two years, but maybe the next five or ten. The robots are coming. We need to prepare. So let's dig a little deeper here. As you can see, these robots are not exactly ready to take over the Olympics. But I do give. It's funny seeing it happen, but this is where it is right now. This is where the technology is today. And it's frankly a lot better off than I thought it was. Seeing these robots running, looking almost like human beings is remarkable. And the Chinese are taking it seriously. A lot of people in the United States are as well. It's only going to get better. The robots you're seeing right here today are the worst we will ever see for the rest of our lives for the rest of humanity. They're only going to get better every single day. Now, we've already seen, I see it on a daily basis where ChatGPT writes better than I do on a lot of things. It's infinitely faster. It saves me time. Spending time saves all of us time. But that's just in the cloud, that's just on a screen. What does happen when this comes down and inhabits real things, like a robot, like machines that can do things that we like to think only humans can do. Now, I like going to nice restaurants. There's nothing like a wildly creative chef who can create a masterpiece that's beautifully plated. There's something special about that and I pay top dollar and some of you do as well. But in theory, if a robot can be programmed to hold a knife and two chop and have in its database every single recipe ever made, and the step by step process of how that beef bourguignon was created, that filet mignon or whatever, tikka masala, whatever your dream dish is, if an AI has the ability to input every single ingredient, every single step and can do it for you while you're sleeping and for almost, I won't say almost no money, initially it's going to be wildly expensive, but at some point, with all technologies, cost go way, way down. If it can do it for, for 110 the price of going out to a restaurant, why not invite 10 friends over and have your robot cook for you? That's going to change life dramatically. Now, unless it seems like I'm putting chefs out of business, it's not just chefs, it's everybody. In theory, I can be put out of business. Now, I'm trying to get ahead of that because I already have my own AI clone. But it's a digital world. I do not yet have a TJ robot. Now, for creating digital shows like this, I don't need a robot. But if someone want, for example, next week I'm going to San Francisco to do a training with a major technology company. If they could push a button, have a TJ robot come and do it all, and it looked just like me, sound like me, get the same results, why would they need to fly me out there? It wouldn't really make any sense. So that may be happening sooner than we think. I don't know. But I'm going to be monitoring it. I hope you're monitoring it because we all have to be vigilant, not at protecting ourselves from the robots coming at us with knives. That's not My real fear, far bigger fear, is that we become so lazy we don't have an excuse to get out of bed and we ultimately just do intravenous feeding of sugar water all day long and rot away. I think that's a far bigger risk, certainly for a lot of Americans. But these robots are exciting. I happen to have a nephew who's studying robotics and about to enter Cornell Engineering School specifically studying robots. So I have a particular fascination with this. Interesting what happened here in China. They had 280 teams from 16 nations in these competitions. The robots ran, they boxed, they played soccer. Yeah, they did fall a lot. One robot ran 1500 meters in 6 minutes and 34 seconds. Now, that's not world class timing, but it's better than a lot of people can do because, let's face it, a lot of people, especially Americans, can't run at all. The advances are coming in balance. The advances are coming in in the acrobatics. Now, there's been a lot of criticism of Jeff Bezos and Amazon for how they treat workers in their warehouses. Working them long hours, warm, heated conditions, not enough restroom breaks. I can tell you right now there's no way in the world Jeff Bezos doesn't fire every single warehouse worker he has if he can replace them with robots. Now, they're doing that at some level already.