Robots, Rants, and Red Lines: America’s Split-Screen Week

A congresswoman's airport meltdown, why Representative Nancy Mace's two minute tantrum could stick and how past celebrity blow ups show that damage can last. The AI booms fork in the road. If it fizzles, market cracks. If it conquers, jobs do. Either way, the risk is systemic. Amazon's quiet edge, a million robots, faster deliveries. And why Scott Galloway says the real money isn't just in the cloud. A line crossed on the right Heritage foundation defends Tucker Carlson after he spotlights Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Would we accept MSNBC interviewing Lennon and a split screen America? Federal workers lining up at food banks while the White House post gold trimmed bathroom glam shots. All that and more today on Filtered. Stay tuned. It's going to be a fun time. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. So happy you're here with me on this Saturday morning. Let's check in with the market update from yesterday as we always do. Looking at the market vitals, S P 500 closed yesterday at 6840.2. That's up 0.26%. The NASDAQ Composite closed at 23724.96, that's up 0.61%. Always keep in mind the long term S&P 500 over the last 25 years has been up 7.47% per year. The NASDAQ 100 has been up on average more nearly 10% a year over the last quarter century. That's 9.73% to be specific. So please always think long term. That's what we're trying to help you do around here. So it's a beautiful, beautiful Saturday morning. If you're joining me live. Thanks so much. If you're listening on our live podcast feed, or if you're watching us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram X or any of the other dozen or so platforms we're on. Just finished a wonderful round of pickleball with my wife here in South Florida. It's one of these glorious rare days. 54 degrees this morning, bright sunshine, absolutely perfect for pickleball and not too hot. So I'm feeling great. Hope you are, too. Getting ready for a fun Saturday. Some of you think, well, tj, I should work every day. You must not ever have fun. Well, no, that's not true. I played pickleball this morning right after the show, going for lunch in West Palm beach and then going to see the Broadway version of the touring version of Adam's Family the Musical with my family and other friends. So going to be a fun action packed Saturday here. So looking forward to that. Hoping you're having a great Saturday as well. Let's dive right in to the top story of the day and this involves Congresswoman Nancy Mace, her airport meltdown backfire. South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace is facing blowback after an expletive laced confrontation with police and TSA at Charleston International Airport. An incident report says she called officers incompetent, complained she wasn't mad at her car and threatened to take it up with the airport. And she called that. She didn't just say incompetent, she said you're effing incompetent. Although she spelled out the whole world word. We don't do that on this family friendly show. Now she denies it on X, but a lot of officials there at the airport, yes, she was dropping F bombs on them. There was also a mix up over her car. Officers looked for a white BMW while she arrived in a silver one. And a gate agent and TSA supervisor plan to file reports. Now here's why this matters. I realize it seems like a trivial matter, but Alec Baldwin's voicemail dogged him for years. This is where he's screaming and cursing at his child and his spouse. At the time, Christian Bale only contained damage after a contrite on air apology when he got caught really cursing out people he worked with. Mel Gibson's rant cratered his standing. You remember that from years back, Uber's Travis Galinek fed a narrative about toxic leadership that ended with his exit. That's when he was caught cursing out one of his actual drivers, his low paid drivers. Reese Witherspoon apologized after a drunk driving incident where she essentially said, don't you know who I am? The pattern is clear when you lash out at frontline workers and it looks like part of the pattern, you can define yourself unless you knock it down and fix it fast. So what's the real message here? If you are a big shot, a member of Congress, a celebrity, a movie star, and you're caught telling some low level employee go F yourself, it's going to come back to haunt you. It's going to make you look like the big bully punching down and you're going to pay for it. Let's dig a little deeper here. This is kind of a bizarre time in our culture because on the one hand you see a lot of politicians and not just from the White House, but a lot of politicians and celebrities dropping F bombs using profanity from the lectern from the podium, from speeches. And it seems like cool, oh, look, they're hip. Gary Vaynerchuk, the social media maven, someone I like and admire and I've purchased his books routinely. He's known for dropping F bombs constantly during his keynote speeches. Seems to work for him. So on the one hand, people are using profanity in a way that is very different from 50 years ago, 30 years ago, even 10 years ago. The well known motivational speaker Anthony Robbins in a documentary he did where he knew he was on camera and he was starring in it, every other word was the F bomb. Now I say that not to sound like a prude. I'm not condemning anyone for doing so. But there is a real divide that I think you need to realize. It's one thing if you are doing it in front of a large crowd, on camera, for an audience, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, many people interpret this as, oh, isn't this person being authentic? Oh, they're fresh, they're not all buttoned up, they're not all prepackaged. So in some cases, like with Gary Vaynerchuk, it seems to work in favor of the person using all kinds of profanity. Makes them seem unfiltered, makes them seem fresh and not like some prepackaged politician. Here's the problem. If you're seen doing this to one person, especially if it's a low level employee, someone relatively low paid, someone with much lower status than you, it can come back to haunt you. Especially in the case of Congresswoman Nancy Mace. She's belittling people who are working at airports who aren't being paid. These are largely federal officials that they're TSA officials. So she's screaming at them for being incompetent. At the same time, members of her party arguably are withholding the payment of that employee, expecting the employees to work without getting paid. So here's what I have noticed. A lot of employees who work in customer service and I have done so, but it's been a long time. If they work in customer service, they have a get out of jail free card. If they say to their employee, up, the customer cursed at me, I don't have to take that. The flag goes down, they can hang up on you, they can disregard you, they can walk away. In some cases, it's literally written into employee contracts. It's considered verbal abuse. Now could someone drop an F bomb casually like, oh, I can't effing believe this without it really being abusive? Yes, but here's my Message to you. If you are dealing with in a situation, whether you're at the airport, whether you're trying to buy a ticket, whether you're trying to change your flight somewhere, whether you're dealing with a travel agent, if you're trying to get a reimbursement from Costco, do not use any profanity. Not because I'm a prude, not because it means you're a bad person or you're uneducated, but because it closes things down, it closes doors. You give the other person the right to. To ignore you and to say you're obnoxious. I don't have to take this verbal abuse. So this is what is confusing people to people. Because you see famous celebrities who are rich and successful in everything they do, they're using the F bomb, they're using profanity constantly, and everyone thinks they're cool. And you said it once to the cashier at the Circle K store, and you're banned for life. It might not be fear, but that is the reality. This happened not to me, but a colleague of mine in an apartment building where I used to live. He was having a discussion with the management about some difference of opinion on whether a refrigerator should be repaired. And he let one bit of profanity come out of his mouth. Next thing you know, he got a letter on his door saying, you are never to step foot in the management office again or you will be evicted. So again, workers don't have to take abuse you. And I might think it's warranted. But think about it. You don't like anyone cursing you out, especially if you feel like you didn't do anything wrong. Now, I had a situation several years ago where this came up. I. I'm not saying I've never used profanity, although I certainly don't think I do dealing with any service workers. But I was accused of using the F bomb or some profanity when I was at an Everglades swamp ride, one of these big boats with a giant propellers going through the swamps of Florida looking at alligators. We sat down and they asked us. I forgot even the particular situation. They asked us to get on another boat or. I know what it was. They. They had missed our call. We'd been waiting like an hour. And I'm like, excuse me, but those people just got here 10 minutes ago. They called us like, well, you missed your boat. We called it. I'm like, I've been sitting here the whole time. I definitely didn't miss my boat. My family and I deserve to go on the next one. I thought I was extraordinarily polite. I then proceeded to get on the boat. Management came out, made everyone get off the boat, get back on another one. They stopped me and my family from getting on the boat. The manager comes out and says, the captain told me you used the following profanity to him. And I said, I looked him in the eye and I said, I categorically did not. And now I could have been upset and showed it. I could have called him a liar. I could have escalated things. I could have said, this is absurd, I've never done that. But I kept focus on what the real goal was. The goal was I wanted my family to be able to go on the boat ride. I didn't want to waste any more time. So I made a strategic decision to de escalate, to speak calmly. And I said, look, my family and I are having a wonderful time. It's your park here. It's beautiful, it's well run, everything's great. We're really looking forward to the boat ride. I'm not quite sure where the confusion was in the communication here, but I can certainly assure you I'm respectful to everyone who works here and I'm really looking forward to leaving a nice review on Google about why other people in the community should come here. I kept everything extraordinarily positive. So decreasing the tensions, I made it impossible for the manager to write me off as a bad guy. If I had just started yelling or screaming or cursing, he would have said, sir, get out of here. He would have been in the position that he would have had to protect his employee. But I didn't give him that point counterpoint situation. And again, everything I was saying was true, as I certainly saw it. So at that point, the manager said, I'm very sorry, you and your family go out and, you know, please accept a free lunch on our behalf. I said, thank you. I'm not looking for any free meals. I'm happy to pay for this. I don't want any compensation. You know, people can misconstrue things. Let's just proceed. And we did, and everything went fine. Now, my point there is not that I always handle everything perfectly. No, I'm not saying that I'm a human being. But my point is you've got to be extraordinarily careful about using profanity in our modern environment because we're all getting contradictory messages. On the one hand, it's seen as cool and authentic. On the other hand, it can get you kicked out of airports. It can get you banned from offices and dealing with companies. So my advice, keep that language for your closest friends, maybe family or not at all, and really make yourself, if not G rated at all times in public, at least PG rated. It will ultimately help you the most. Want to communicate like a Pro? Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com Millions have already transformed them their speaking skills. Why not you? This show doesn't run on a lot of corporate sponsorships or big media backing. It runs on caffeine and your support. If you like what you're hearing and want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee. Really just go to buymeacoffee.com tjwalker it's quick, it's easy and yes, it helps cover editing, hosting and staying relatively ad free for as long as possible. Buymeacoffee.com tjwalker your 3.95 makes a real difference. We are back here on Filtered. I'm your host TJ Walker. If this is your first time here, welcome. This is your daily dive into top business stories, economics, technology and culture. Stories of the day filtered through the lens of communication and personal development skills. This is kind of a deep dive look into top stories of the day to give you something that goes a little deeper than what you would see in just a newspaper or standard broadcast news where we dissect the messages that are really coming to you, that are, they're underneath what the headline is and to try to understand it in a way that benefits you. Let's go right now to issue two. Today, here's how the AI crash happens or could happen. I want to make clear I'm not predicting an AI crash. But I do want to talk about something that has been in the news a great deal lately and many commentators talking about it. According to some, America is drifting into a Nvidia state. Data centers are spreading so fast they're visible from outer space and one Indiana campus already draws more than 500 megawatts. AI spending is carrying growth while profits lag and financing gets, shall we say, clever. The danger runs in two directions. If AI under delivers the trades unwind, leveraged funds sell into a downdraft and the broad market indexes if AI wildly succeeds. This is the other scenario. Ultra predictive productive systems could sign light millions of workers before policy catches up. That's right, you could have tens hundreds of millions of people unemployed very quickly. Different paths but same hard landing if leaders don't manage the transition. One company's chips have become a load bearing piece of the entire economy. The running joke is create God, then ask it for money. That's not a plan, that's a risk. So again, we talked about this earlier in the week about Nvidia becoming the first $5 trillion company. And there are many who fear that this could, you know, one thing happens and they catch a cold. The rest of the economy can really suffer a flu or deadly pneumonia quickly. So what's the real message here? Anyone telling you I know with absolute certainty there's going to be an AI doom loop to fail our economy and it's going to happen in a set date. They don't really know what they're talking about. Everyone is guessing. But more and more people are getting nervous about our entire economy being propped up by, by this teeny tiny slice of AI driving everything else. Let's go a little bit deeper here and look at some of the numbers. Artificial intelligence outlays are pegged at $375 billion in 2025, but by 2026, it's going to be half a trillion dollars. This is a tremendous amount of investment tech's market weight. When you look at the big tech companies as a percentage of the overall Marketplace, it was 22% of the S&P 500 in late 22. Now it's 33%. That's up 50%. I mean, it's a giant, giant increase. There are many, and I'm one of them concerned. I'm not predicting a recession, I'm not predicting a market crash, but there are many concern that it's just such a big, big piece that even if you buy an s and P500 index fund, which I recommend, it may be that you're no longer spreading your bets enough. It may be that you're no longer diversified enough. If everything is tied to the top 10 companies or seven companies, or in some cases four companies, or increasingly just one company, it only takes that one company doing poorly and your diversification is over and we could be in a massive recession. I want to stress this is not a financial advice show. We do talk about companies and finance from time to time. But I'm not here to tell you buy more of this or sell this. I'm not telling you to buy or sell Nvidia, for example. And full disclosure, I do own a lot of Nvidia in index funds. So I'm not talking up my book here. I'm saying I'm worried that, A, it could be overpriced, B, it might not grow into the vision people have, C, There may be some other market winner which maybe the Chinese create some form of chip company and they give it away for free just to mess up the US economy. And if there's a better chip out there and China's giving it away for free, guess what's going to happen in Nvidia's revenues? They're going to go down, down, down to almost nothing. There are increasingly a lot of people questioning the circular financing between OpenAI paying Oracle, Oracle buying Nvidia chips, Nvidia plowing it back into OpenAI. There's a lot of circular things here reminiscent of what happened in the dot com boom. Now there are some important distinctions from the dot com bubble that did implode. Those of you old enough to remember in the late 90s and I was there in the thick of it trying with my raising money for my own dotcom startups and failing miserably. But you may remember the NASDAQ was just populated with all of these Internet startups that made no money, that lost tremendous amounts of money. They were all fueled A by venture capital, B by the public markets of people rushing in saying I gotta buy pets.com I gotta buy space.com and all these other nonsensical Internet companies that didn't really have a clear cut path to revenue, much less profitability. So when the Internet bubble went burst. Now in hindsight you could say, well yeah, this was just sort of tulip mania. This was people buying stuff just because they thought the price was going to go up. Kind of like crypto today. But we'll leave that for another conversation for another day. This is different because whether you love or hate Amazon or Microsoft or Google or Apple, these are real companies with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues every year. These are not Internet startups with a concept with by a couple of 22 year olds. So there is that significant, significant difference there. But at some point it does make you worry that the entire stock market, all the broad market stock indices are essentially no longer diversified when they're so heavily, heavily weighted by a few companies. Because as I pointed out in the newsread at the beginning, it could go one of two ways. Either way would be bad to clarify this again if it doesn't work out and there's a point, poof. And people suddenly realize, wow, we're not really making any profits from all this AI investment. Let's just stop. If most companies stop investing in AI, then all the spending shuts down. Companies like Nvidia see the revenues and profits plummet and their stock price is going to go way, way down. And it's one thing if some small market cap company goes down. It doesn't really affect the average. When a company as big as Nvidia goes down, it brings down the aver of the entire marketplace. So that's one negative scenario. Another negative scenario is that just some other company beats them to general artificial intelligence and their AI is so good and they somehow don't even need the chips from Nvidia that they put out everyone out of business. So those are the negative side. The positive side is Nvidia does it better and better and better, sells more, makes more, gets us to the point of general AI intelligence. It's so good that all of a sudden not only is every driver put out of business, every worker in an Amazon warehouse, but everyone in every profession is put out of business. And it happens so quickly that our politicians can't figure out solutions. Our social safety net doesn't work. All the old nostrums of let the free market do what it's going to do is not going to work if you have 90% of people suddenly with no job, nothing to do, and no money other than their stock return. So if things work out really well, it could be a huge problem too. Where is this going to go? I don't know this. I'm drawing information and data from the Atlantic magazine. Charlie Warzel is a commentator on technology I do respect and like to read when he was at the New York Times. Now he's at the Atlantic. I would suggest and recommend you check it out. We've got lots more to come today here on Filter. If you would like to comment, feel free to do so. You can post your comments right on the screen. Not always, but typically can see them and add them into the show. If you do watch this on demand and post your comments, I typically respond to every single comment. When you post a question, a comment, a criticism, a suggestion in the comments, whether it's audio or video, I do respond. I want to thank all of our new listeners on various podcasting platforms today. Whether you're watching on YouTube, music or iTunes or Apple podcast or Spotify or iHeartradio. Thank you so much for listening and please make sure you follow the show and subscribe. Don't just listen today. And that sends a signal to the various podcasting platforms. Hey, maybe we should recommend this show to other people. I'd also really appreciate it if you could leave a review. If you're watching on YouTube or TikTok or X or any other social media platform. Please leave comments, sign up for notifications and please subscribe. We'll be back in just a moment with issue three today. Like what you heard, don't let the algorithm bury us. Subscribe now@substack.com J WalkerSuccess want direct access to me live? Want to unlock bonus episodes, behind the scenes takes and full access to my premium courses? Then become a member today. Just go to tjwalker.com members and choose your preferred platform, YouTube, Patreon. Whatever works for you. This isn't just another subscription, it's a full access pass to the tools, coaching and content that can transform your communication and career. Tjwalker.com members, I'll see you inside. Welcome back to Filtered Amazon's Robot Advantage in plain English Okay, I am picking up on a newsletter that's one of my favorites from one of my favorite commentators, Scott Galloway. His point is simple. Wall street stares at Amazon's cloud, but the sleeper story is retail getting cheaper to run because of robots and better software. So his thesis he just released his most recent market report. He makes predictions every year on what is the top tech company that's going to really dominate in the next year that most people don't think will actually dominate. He's picking Amazon now. Amazon is rolling out nearly 40 robot ready warehouses by the end of next year. That means fewer mistakes, faster sorting and lower cost every time you click buy. If roughly a third to Two fifths of US orders move through these buildings by 2030, the annual savings could hit about $10 billion. The stock, meanwhile, trades for much less than its own five year average. This is the thing that sort of confuses Scott Galloway. Why he feels it's undervalued and why it could perform so much better in 2026. And Amazon already moves atoms at massive scale. Tens of thousands of trucks and vans, more than 100 planes. Most prime orders arriving the same or next day. Bottom line, the market sees cloud computing, it's missing retail getting way more profitable. And I have to confess I hadn't thought of Amazon that way as well. But their robots are doing the heavy lifting. Is that good for workers or people who wanted a good job in a warehouse? Or at least a decent paying job at a warehouse? No, but it is good for Amazon shareholders. So what's the real message here? Amazon could be the big hit in the stock market in 2026. Too many people just think of them as a cloud company these days and fail to realize how much more profitable their core business of selling stuff and moving it around. But this time with robots is going to be. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. There's also a new book that just about to start by the commentator Tim Wu, where he goes. I've read, I've read excerpts of the book so far where he goes into Amazon and talking about how good it is at extraction. It's extracting our brains, our minds and it is, it is playing us, it's playing me because it's so good at manipulating our laziness. Now I'll admit I'm lazy. And Amazon realizes, hey tj, you could go to a shopping store and take all day and get stuck in traffic and park, stand in line or you could just go boop. Push a buy button and it shows up at your front door. It's addictive. I buy. Since I've just recently moved into a new house, I buy from Amazon every single day. So I'm a part of the solution for Amazon. I'm a part of the problem for a lot of the world when it comes to local stores, mom and pop stores, retail stores, workers in stores who are used to getting a paycheck. So I readily acknowledge I'm a part of the problem. I want to stress now, this is not an investment advisory service I'm offering here. I'm not telling you to go out and buy stock, but I am looking at a major cultural institution that affects all of us. If you never buy from Amazon, that takes on its own sort of cultural mantle because people are probably always sending you things, oh, I got this here. And they're sending you an Amazon link and you got to be, no, no, I don't like Amazon. And you've got to spend time researching. If you do buy from Amazon, it's very much a part of your life. Let's look at some more facts about what's going on with Amazon. Now. As I mentioned, nearly 40 robot equipped US warehouses will be opening by the end of the year. It is estimated to save about $4 billion a year. 30 to 40% of US orders use what they call next gen sites by 2030 and that's going to save $10 billion a year. They are getting more and more advanced in their use of robots. Now. Jeff Bezos has been into robots for a long time. He bought a major robotic company for three fourths of a trillion dollars many years ago. I'm sorry, for three quarters of a billion dollars many years ago. And it's finally really paying off because they are getting better and better. Apparently up to 75% of warehouse work is going to be done by robots in 2027. Now, this is confusing at first because you think of this humanoid. Those of you of a certain age think of danger. Will Robinson from the 1960s show Lost in Space. That's not what these robots look like. Sometimes they just look like giant roombas. There's no arms or anything. But apparently the biggest advances around robots are with the fingers and something like a thumb that can pick things up and put things down and not break things. Because the real advantage of robots, this isn't popular to organized labor. It's not popular to you if you work in a warehouse. But robots don't call in sick. They, their backs don't get hurt. They don't ask for workman's comp, they don't ask for a vacation, they don't ask for raises. They don't need 16 hours a day off. They work 24 hours a day. So you're never going to have a situation where Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon, is thinking, how can we create the most jobs in a community? That's not their job. Now, that may well be the job of political leadership, but it's not the job of a corporate CEO. Now, certainly for the last 30 or 40 years, what most CEOs think of as their job is to deliver shareholder value, to deliver as much value as possible to people who own pieces of the company. You could argue whether they really think, how can I get the biggest bonus? For me, certainly historically there were local businesses, especially if it's family owned, where the CEO is thinking, how can I treat all of our employees like family and grow our community? But sadly, people like that have mostly been bought out, merged out, put out of business, made irrelevant by the Home Depots and the Amazons of the world. And it's just not as simple is saying don't ever hire a robot or don't make a robot. Always hire people because people deserve jobs and are worthy of respect. Yes, I do want people to have jobs. Yes, people are worthy of respect. But it depends on what side you're on. If you are a schoolteacher and your 401k has broad based index funds and a significant part of your retirement is Amazon. You do want the highest rate of return, so you're not going to have to work when you're retired, you need that pot of money to grow and the robots are doing that. Scott Galloway is, to me, one of the most fascinating voices in the podcasting space. He's also an author who has a new book coming out about the problem specifically of boys and young men in our culture. So every time he does speak and he comes up with these big predictions, it gets a lot of attention. Not just because he is provocative, but because so often he is. In fact, right now, he's another one who does use profanity. He uses profanity speaking of an earlier story today and Congresswoman Nancy Mace. He uses profanity constantly on his podcasts, from his speeches where he's paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But I really don't think when he gets into a hotel and checks in and his room isn't ready, he starts cursing or using the F bomb at employees. I think he does it for specific effect. So bottom line, Amazon is definitely a mixed bag. We could do entire shows on all the damage it's done and frankly, bad things it's done. As far as putting diapers.com out of business and using its monopolistic power and white labeling certain products when it sees its own customers are selling well, there's a lot of bad things that Amazon has done. You could certainly make the case that for many, many years they had an extraordinarily unfair advantage over physical stores that had to pay taxes. Now, typically they do have to pay taxes, but there's no mistake about it. When you get right down to it, Amazon is the single greatest company in the entire world when it comes to figuring out how do you get some stuff here? Let's say it's a pen and move it over here and do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible. They are the most brilliant logistics company in the history of the world, regardless of how many things you might hate about them. You might hate Jeff Bezos wedding or his Jocelyn Wildenstein looking bride. All that aside, he somehow figured out how to move stuff from here to here faster and better than anyone else. And it's addictive. There have been sometimes years where I didn't buy anything that wasn't delivered on Amazon. I simply didn't have the patience to wait a third or a fourth day. And right now I'm really feeling the pain. I've recently bought an eight sleep mattress designed to help you sleep and you can't buy it through Amazon. I'm like, okay, I've heard so many good things about how well you can sleep with this eight sleep mattress cover where it adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed so you don't wake up with any kind of night sweats or discomfort. So I'VE I purchased it about six weeks ago. I still don't have three of the five parts. They send it to you in different boxes in dribs and drabs. Weeks go by and I'm thinking, my God, how do people live like this? This is barbaric. Waiting weeks and weeks and weeks for stuff to be delivered. I've had another problem, just with a bicycle tire. Taking 10 days for a bike tire. My biggest problem is a table, a new dining room table to be delivered in my house from Europe. It's taking six weeks for that. I still don't have it. And it makes me think, wow, why can't everything be on Amazon now? It is a problem for society and culture and commerce if no one can ever, ever buy anything other than through Amazon because it gives them all the power. And according to some estimate, Amazon is taking 51% out of every dollar spent on products. And it's making a lot of businesses unprofitable. They sell through Amazon because they feel like they have to sell through Amazon, but they're doing it at a loss or making almost no money because Amazon's charging the NIST fee and delivery fee and quite often advertising fee, or you get buried. And it makes it extraordinarily difficult. So, no, while part of me wishes I could buy everything with one click, it's not going to be good. If you believe in free markets, you have to believe in competition. And the big problem now from society's standpoint is Amazon just doesn't really have much competition. Yeah, I understand Walmart's more aggressive, but it's not the first place I think of when I want to buy stuff. And if you truly do believe in free market capitalism, it's about competition. Amazon seems to be getting just better and better and better at this, delivering stuff quickly. Which is why Scott Galloway believes it is going to do better than any other technology stock next year. So it's something to keep your eye on. Again, I'm not giving you financial advice. Don't sell all of your 401k. Take all of your investment portfolio and put it into Amazon. That's not what I'm recommending. More in a moment. Imagine having a communication coach who never sleeps. Meet your new secret weapon, the TJ Walker AI clone. Go to TJWalker AI and and start getting custom coaching 24 7. No scheduling, no hourly fees. I train presidents, prime ministers and Fortune 500 CEOs. But the same exact communication I've delivered to world leaders is now available to you online anytime@mediatrainingworldwide.com whether you're speaking on camera, pitching a client or handling a crush crisis, you need these tools. These aren't fluffy motivational videos. They're practical, battle tested techniques to help you speak clearly, competently and persuasively. Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and take your communication to the next level. Welcome back to Filtered. I'm your host TJ Walker. Heritage's line in the sand over Nick FL Fuentes the Heritage foundation president Kevin Roberts publicly backed Tucker Carlson over Carlson giving Holocaust denier Fuentes Nick Fuentes a friendly platform. Roberts praised free debate, then blasted a venomous coalition of critics and said canceling Fuentes is not the answer. Jewish conservatives warn this normalizes overt antisemitism on the right. During the interview, Carlson called Christian Zionist infected by a brain virus and offered no pushback when Fuentes smeared organized Jewry. Here's the core problem. Visibility is power. Handing a movement's leader spotlight to a Holocaust denier isn't just asking questions, it's platforming. Ask yourself this what would you think if MSNBC started doing soft focus chats with Lennon during the Red Terror? Or a far left crank praising monuments to a hypothetical killer of Charlie Kirk? We would call that beyond the pale. The same standard should apply here. This isn't free speech versus censorship. It's about whether a major institution blesses head with primetime credibility. Okay, what's the real message here? The Heritage Foundation A lot of conservatives like Tucker Carlson's are saying it's quite all right to give Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, a platform. No problem here. And yet the very same people would be outraged if someone on the so called left gave a platform to said, hmm, what if we did more things to people like Charlie Kirk as happened to Charlie Kirk? Just asking questions. They would go berserk. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. So there are many conservatives who are troubled by Tucker Carlson's embrace of Holocaust deniers. Again, you could say, well, he's just asking questions. It's a free forum. One of the things, one of the reasons why we have a modern conservative movement was because of someone named William F. Buckley who wrote a book in the 1950s called God and Man at Yale, started a magazine, National Review, and this was in a time when Eisenhower was the Republican president and was seen by today's standard as very, very centrist, moderate. There really weren't conservatives, so to speak, in what we really think of back in the 1950s and early 60s other than a few crackpots like Senator Joe McCarthy, who was just claiming everyone was a communist. So William F. Buckley was a very, very shrewd coalition builder, political thinker, media maven. And he systematically said, we're going to get rid of the anti Semites, the John Birchers, the extremists, the nut cases, the people who believe in all these conspiracy theorists. So he wouldn't let them publish in his magazine National Review. He wouldn't host them on his show Firing Line. He wanted intelligent people from across the spectrum, and he gave priority to conservatives. William F. Buckley himself was a devout conservative, and it's about Catholic. He was not in any way seen as a liberal, but he cared about making conservative ideas politically viable. And he worried about the taint of anti Semites and the taint of conspiracy theories. Now, we don't see that concern. Tucker Carlson is, on the one hand, an independent operator. He was fired, famously, from the Fox News Channel. He goes off and does his own thing on Twitter, his own social media, but he has a huge, huge following. He's got, depending on the day, the number one rated podcast in the United States when it comes to news, in some case, all categories. So he's hugely influential. He shows up in polls as a top presidential contender for the Republican nomination if and when we ever have another open presidential election. So he's someone who isn't just a gadfly. He's not someone with 10,000 followers on Twitter. He's someone with millions and millions and millions of followers and viewers across social media. He's highly influential. And again, this. This Nick Fuentes character just denies the Holocaust. He's. He's not someone saying, well, I have a revisionist theory about World War II, and I think the, you know, Versailles Agreement did this in a way that people weren't real. No, he's not revising facts that are commonly accepted and having a different spin or interpretation. He's denying that the Holocaust existed. And that has been a traditional line that no serious academic would cross because it's not true. In the same way, if Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the renowned astrophysicist, just started having on people who denied the moon landing, I think it would strike a lot of people as really weird. Neil, why are you having this person who designs science, who says the moon landing was faked, why are you having them on your show? You're kind of losing your credibility. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson would say, hey, you're right, I shouldn't do that. And I don't think he would do that. So this is a touchy line. Sometimes is having differing viewpoints is fine, asking questions is fine. But at some point, giving a spotlight to someone who's spewing something that is seen as just pure hate isn't really advancing thought. Let's say someone on CNN just says, you know what, here's an interesting fellow, let's call him, you know, Sam Smith and not the singer Sam Smith. His whole theory is America would be much better if we just fed all Christians to lions. And he wrote books on this and did podcasts on it and did YouTube channels. And Sam Smith, who has, let's say a number one rated show on CNN says, wow, this is really interesting. I'm just asking questions. And he put this guy who's obviously a lunatic on talking about how every Christian should be fed to lions, eaten alive. Would that really advance any thought? What would that be doing journalistically? Am I saying CNN shouldn't be allowed to broadcast it? No, but it doesn't mean there shouldn't be condemnation. And Heritage foundation, they're called a think tank. They're not. Heritage foundation is really a right wing hack political operation. Their political PR for far right wing ideas. And they realize they're in bed with Tucker Carlson. Last thing they want to do is not have their experts and their favorite people not get on Tucker Carlson's show. So they're treating him with kid gloves. But there are still some honest conservative intellectuals in the world who see a long term vision of a center right party in America holding power and they don't want to see it discredited with the associations with renowned antisemites and people who refuse to face reality. And that is what's going on here. Nick Fuente's getting more attention. A lot of extremists getting attention. If you see certain extreme, I don't mean someone you disagree with, you might not agree with Congresswoman Aoc, for example, but you can't say she's fundamentally just making up things that every credible person from left to right would say that's not factually correct. You can't say that. You can say you disagree with her philosophically, but she's not a nut. If you're seeing examples of absolute nut cases, right or left getting significant platforms, let me know. I'd love to hear about it. I'm only seeing those in the Nick Fuente's variety these days getting prominence. But I could have a bias. I might miss something. So feel free to post it. If you see other. And don't just say Bernie Sanders again. Bernie Sanders is not denying science. He's not denying history. There really is a difference. In a moment, we'll be talking about this government shutdown, which does not seem to be shutting down anytime soon. Filtered is brought to you by the following Want to advertise here? You better be legit. No crypto, no junk food, no supplements. Go to TJ Wall. Advertise. Want to become a better speaker, leader or communicator? Start with the TJ Walker Success Library. It's five of my most practical books, covering everything from public speaking to media interviews and persuasive messaging, all for only $9.95. I've trained presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs, and now you can get the same wisdom in a fast, affordable format. Go to tjwalker.com books and download your copies instantly. Welcome back to Filtered Paychecks on hold, but Marble on Display Federal workers in the United States have now missed two paychecks and the human toll is getting raw. One government publishing office staffer says she's barely eaten after selling possessions and losing her car to repossession while she keeps working without a paycheck. Judges have ordered partial snap. That's the food stamps and Head Start payments meant for November 1, but the timing is still unclear, leaving families unsure how to buy food. A nonprofit that helps federal employees says it received over 10,000 micro grant request and hit its $1 million limit. The average salary of recipients is just over $50,000. People living paycheck to paycheck. Now the split screen. The White House unveiled a Lincoln bathroom redo with statuary, marble and gold accents, posting two dozen after photos and offering no costs. And when I say the White House, I do mean the Big guy. One American lines up at food banks, the other post bathroom glam shots. This is sort of bizarre optic situation. So what's the real message here? Federal government workers, some of them are going hungry. They're literally going hungry. Their cars are being repossessed. What's the message from the White House? The look at all the marble and gold we've now put in to the Lincoln Bedroom. This is just bizarre. This is Versailles Cosplay. The President has not only been talking about the Lincoln Bedroom, but of course the big ballroom that's going to hold 90,000 square feet and dwarf the White House somehow. There's money for all of that and yet we can't pay workers. We can't pay for food for needy children in the country. Let's look at some more of the facts going on here and what's going on. So this is reported by the Times and the Washington Post and a lot of other places. This is not something made up. Actual federal government employees are now going without pay for two different pay periods, more than a month. And I certainly remember for most well the first half of my working life. I was paycheck to paycheck. I well remember when I worked for the federal government as an aide to members of Congress more than 30 years ago, I didn't have more than probably a couple hundred bucks in my checking account and I had no savings. So if I had gone without a paycheck, I would have been showing up on friends doorsteps. Those are tough things to ask for. Now, it's one thing if a lowly congressional assistant writing press releases doesn't get paid, but we're talking about people in charge of your life, people who are air traffic controllers, who I don't want my air traffic controller hungry. I don't want him to have a head or her to have a headache. And slightly nauseous and lightheaded, unable to think clearly because they didn't eat breakfast, because they don't have food. And they're trying to figure out is it okay for my plane to land when there's another plane taken off. I don't want that. That sounds dangerous. I'm getting nervous, frankly, about my own upcoming flights. Later this month for the Thanksgiving vacation, I'm hoping to go to North Carolina, to Charlotte to see family. But I'm not sure I'm going to feel very comfortable putting my family on a plane where the people in charge of our lives at that point will not have been paid for almost two months. It's just human nature. If you're worried about finding food right now, why are you going to be worried about protecting other people's lives? Especially if it's people like Congresswoman Mace yelling at you and telling you to go F yourself, as she is reported to have done recently. So what's going to happen to this government shot? How does it ever end? One of the things that President Trump tried, which I endorsed yesterday, was to simply say, okay, enough with the whole filibuster rule. Let's not forget it is entirely within the power of the Republican Party to open the government. Now, they do not technically need a single vote from any Democrat. That's simply a tradition where senators have said okay in order to give the minority side more power. It's going to take 60 votes to get something passed, not a majority. But that's just A rule the senators cooked up to get themselves a little more power. There's nothing in the Constitution that says to pass any legislation, you need 60 votes. So the president, I would say, to his credit, because it's not an authoritarian power grab, it's perfectly acceptable and legitimate to end the filibuster. There are reasons against it, but not on constitutional grounds. And Senator John Thune, the Republican leader who normally does anything this president asked for, said, nope, not going to do it. So this is going to be the interesting clash in the next week that may dominate the news in a fascinating way, because if President Trump puts enough pressure on Senator Thune, and he may buckle, in which case the Republicans can simply change the rules of the Congress and about the Senate, in two seconds, they can simply cast a vote and say, henceforth, in order for any legislation to pass, it requires a simple majority, and a majority vote can pass that. And then the second order of business can be, we now vote to extend funding in accordance with the president's wishes and the big ugly bill. And 20 million people don't get their medical care or they see their medical care cost double in the next month. Democrats can stick it. We don't care. We get what we want. We have a majority. And democracy is supposed to be about majority rules. So that clearly could happen. Right now, Senator Thune doesn't want to give up the power because he's thinking, at some point, Trump's not going to be in the White House. At some point, a Democrat could be in the White House. Democrats could have 53 senators. Republicans are going to be in the minority, and we want the power to stop stuff. So it's understandable. Politicians like power. I'm not saying it's inherently bad, but what I'm fascinated by is this upcoming potential battle between Senator Thune and Donald Trump, because Trump, he's not one into tradition and niceties. And this whole filibuster thing is kind of just a tradition, a nicety. If Trump wants the government open, he could force the senators, I believe, to just go ahead and open it without any compromise, without meeting with the Democrat. If he doesn't want to meet with the Democrats, he doesn't have to. All right, I'm T.J. walker. That concludes our main section of the show. But in every show, we have a few other smaller issues. We put these in the grab bag section. So I want to share some of those with you. Now, another White House story. I should point out, if you're a newcomer to this show, this is not primarily a Political punditry show. This is not Fox News Channel or msnbc. I like to focus at business stories, technology, culture stories. But from time to time, politics touches on all of those things, especially as it relates to communication and media skills. So this next issue is from the White House. The White House is narrowing press access. The White House has closed off the, quote, upper press. That's what they call the West Wing suite, where reporters have long buttonholed strikes senior communications staff. You now need an appointment to step inside. Official site, sensitive material. The press corps is outraged by this. They says it kneecaps transparency. But I'm going to be fair with you and give you the facts about both sides. The Clinton administration tried this way back when, Jeff, when George Stephanopoulos was head of communications. They also did this and there was so much anger and frustration they had to roll it back. Now, this follows recent restrictions by the Pentagon that not only says a reporter can't even go in the Pentagon unless they've got someone holding their hand. Pentagon's rules are even more bizarre. Telling reporters you have to get approval from us before you can write anything. That's never happened before. But shutting off some of the White House to reporters so they can't just go back and ask a question of the communications team. I won't say it's unprecedented. Again, it happened in 1993, but it was changed. There was so much criticism. This is getting front page news in major publications like the Times and the Washington Post. I have a slightly contrarian view here. I don't think it really mattered. It would matter in normal times when you had normal press secretaries and normal dealings with the media. But with this administration, when they feel so emboldened to just lie about anything and everything and to ignore questions and just attack the questioner, I don't think it really matters. If you're covering the White House and you want to give real information to your viewers, listeners or readers. I'm not sure why you'd want to talk to anyone who's an official spokesperson for the administration because we've seen what they do. It's extraordinarily unprecedented. But I mean, just the other day Carolyn Levitt, the official White House press secretary, said that the Democrats, essentially their only constituency was terrorist illegal immigrants and Hamas. And she's saying this about one of the two major parties in our country. And it's just, it's beyond the pale demagoguery. That's the sort of thing that if you had been an obscure right wing Talk show host 30 years ago and said that might have been accepted. You maybe would have lost a few sponsors, maybe you wouldn't have gotten more syndication, but you were so insignificant because you were out of the political arena. This is coming directly from the White House. So when you have spokespersons where they see it not as an option but as their duty to essentially lie, obfuscate and attack regardless of the question, I don't know what the media is missing out on by not being able to walk back and get another juicy sound bite from any of the spokespersons. Okay, our final grab bag issue of the day. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney says he apologized to President Trump over Ontario's World Series ad, which spliced a Ronald Reagan 1987 anti tariff remark. After the spot aired, Trump halted talks and threatened more tariffs because of an ad. Carney says they spoke at a dinner in South Korea. Apology offered. Talk still paused and the negotiations will continue. Now, I feel sorry for Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, to have to go on bended knee to this bully Trump and apologize. How did that actually go? Hello, Mr. President. I'd like to apologize for someone in my country using facts, being intellectually honest and using arguments from thought leaders from your own country as to why tariffs are bad. For clarity, there was an ad aired door during the World Series that showed footage and actually used the voice of Ronald Reagan saying tariffs are bad and hurt people. Did they splice together one at a time and completely distort what he said? No. Did they distort the message of what he said? No. I'm going to give you an example of what they did. Imagine someone said, I hate TJ Walker. TJ Walker is the most ill informed fool in the world. And then you took that footage and you put together a social media ad with that person saying, T.J. walker is the most uninformed fool in the world. I hate TJ Walker. And you ran that in the ad. Would you be lying to anyone? Would you be distorting that speech? No. All you did is you switched the first sentence for the second sentence. It didn't change the meaning at all. The meaning was still the same. That's exactly what these officials did. Doug Ford did, the leader of the Ontario province. It was completely honest, factually correct. It simply changed the order of the sound bites to make the case that every Conservative up until Trump, every prominent leader of the Republican Party up until Trump endures, which is tariffs are bad because they are taxes. And Trump using his one and only superpower, I guess just focused on his ability to say, black is white, white is black. If I hear something I don't like, it is by definition a lie. So sh. Shame on you, Canada, for spreading lies. I'm going to punish you. And here's this poor Prime Minister Mark Carney having to apologize for members of his own country being truthful, being honest, and trying to have free trade between two at least one's great allies. It's an utter shame. Mark Carney, I guess you felt like you had to do it for the greater good, but it's embarrassing for you. It's even more embarrassing for the United States. Okay, we're going to close out this show as we do every day here, taking questions from you. I end the show taking questions that relate to my core strengths, communication skills and personal development skills. These typically come from my students, but they could come from you if you're a viewer or a listener. But these questions often come from one of my 12 million student enrollments in my online courses. So today, the question comes from Arya. Arya Kutter is her name, and she's a student in my complete communications masterclass for life. The question is, tj how can I overcome my fear of public speaking and the worry that people might laugh at me if I make a mistake, even though it never actually happened? So, Arya, if you have a fear of being laughed at or saying something stupid, it just means you're completely normal. Everybody has that fear. And here's the reality. If you speak often enough, occasionally somebody will laugh at you. We all make mistakes. I make mistakes. I've probably made a mistake or two in this show today that if you rewound it and played it back and forth, you could make fun of me and laugh at me. Guess what? It doesn't matter. Here's what I really want you to fear. I want you to fear living in the shadows. I want you to fear dying. I know this sounds dark for a second. I want you to fear great ideas kept inside of you that never come out. I want you to fear the prospect of being at the end of your life and not accomplishing all you can. And that's why I want you to speak. I want you to speak regularly, but do it in low stakes. I mean, if you go ahead and make a YouTube video or a TikTok video today and you state your mind, first of all, you can look at it. If you think it makes you sound stupid, just delete it. If you like it, post it, chances are only three or four people are going to watch it, because most people who Post videos on social media for the first time or do their first podcast. You only get three or four people watching or listening, so the stakes are very low. And you know what? If someone does criticize you, learn from it. But I can't deny it might occasionally sting. Or you might remember. I remember in a sociology class in literally 1985, 40 years ago, I was, I think, a senior at Duke University, and I asked a question, and I don't know what got into me, why I said this, but instead of saying the word simultaneously, I said simultuously, everybody laughed. Hey, what happened? Later, I realized what I had done here is 40 years later, I remember it now. Did it scar me for life? No. But I. I do remember it. I guarantee you nobody else in the world remembered that two seconds later, because everybody mispronounces a word every now and then. So part of my answer to you is simply, don't worry about it. The far greater problem in life is not having your ideas heard, living in obscurity, having great business plans kept inside of you, a great novel kept inside of you, a great speech kept inside of you that no one heard. The other way of solving this problem is simply do it more. It's very hard to have fear of anything you do regularly. If someone, when you were 10 years old, tossed you car keys and said, drive to the store and get milk or rice, I know that would have scared me to death. Probably would have scared you. Why? Because I didn't know how to drive at age 10, I'd never seen anyone drive and actually tell me how to do it. So that would have been scary. If someone does that, now I get in the car and I don't even think about it. It's easy. Why? Well, it's because I've driven a thousand times, thousands of times. When you speak and speak regularly, it becomes normal. If you've never been taught how to write and you're a coal miner, not to put down coal miners, and your boss says, you now got to write a memo of where we're going to mine for coal next, and you've never learned how to write, that's going to be a scary thing. But if you write every day and text every day, and someone says, hey, send your spouse a message that we're all going to go to this party and your spouse is invited too, that's not scary because you text and write every day. So that's really my message to you. Look for opportunities where you can speak, speak and speak regularly, and it becomes virtually impossible to be afraid. The other tip, which I do mention here regularly is anytime you are speaking and you're afraid of looking like a fool or you're nervous, practice in advance on video again and again until you like what you see. Once that happens, it becomes almost impossible for you to be nervous. Clause is writing in with a few a few last minute comments. Thanks for the recommendations, tj. I'll practice more. Great. And yes, practice speaking again and again. And you'll just get better and you'll get more comfortable. And you can focus on helping people, not oh, somebody laughing at me today. You can focus on helping your audience. Thanks so much for joining me today. Hope you have a great rest of your Saturday. I'll see you back here tomorrow. Thanks.