Self-Driving Lives Saved, Social Media Tribes, and Tech’s Pet Press

Self driving cars are already dramatically safer than human drivers. So why are we clinging to the old way and quietly accepting more than a million deaths a year on the road worldwide? Then the new map of American life online. Who's on YouTube? Who's on TikTok? And how age, race, class and politics now sort us into different platforms. We'll look at how big tech is building its own cheerleader media bubble to dodge tough questions. We'll hear from a worker fired over an ice joke and ask what fair really means on the job. And finally, how to rescue your day after a terrible night's sleep. All that and more today on Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Issue one, Self driving cars. Self driving cars and the lives we're leaving on the table. According to the Times, neurosurgeon Jonathan Slotkin argues that autonomous cars aren't just a tech toy, they're a public health intervention. Waymo just released safety data from nearly 100 million fully driverless miles in four US cities. Compared with human drivers on the same roads, its cars had dramatically, and I mean dramatically fewer crashes, 91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes, 80% fewer injury crashes overall, and a 96% lower rate of injury crashes at intersections. Globally, about 1.3 million people die in traffic crashes every year. If we could impose Waymo level fatality rates on the entire world fleet, we'd prevent roughly 1.2 million of those deaths annually. More than 3,000 people every single day in the United States alone. Crashes kill more than 39,000 people every year. They are a leading cause of death for children and young adults and cost the nation more than a trillion dollars in economic and quality of life damage. Slotkin's message is blunt. Keeping humans behind the wheel is the riskier experiment. Okay, so what's the bottom line here? As much as I and a lot of people like to pile on our tech overlords having too much power over our lives, this is one case where we need to give more power to the tech overlords because human beings are horrible drivers. There, I said it. 1.3 million people die a year around the globe because of car crashes and autonomous vehicles. They get more headlines when they crash, but they save lives dramatically. More than a million lives a year would be saved if we just got rid of human drivers. Let's dig a little deeper here because this is a situation that cuts in a lot of different ways. I know many people who they're pro vaccine. They're pro eating, right? They're pro minimizing risk in every aspect of life. And you say, hey, you want to go in this driverless car? Oh, no, that's crazy. It's too risky. Well, it's not too risky compared to human driver. The problem is we humans are awful. We're easily distracted. We hear things, we remember things. We're on the phone, we're texting when we're driving. Some of us are drunk when we drive. So almost anything is safer than getting in a car driven by a human being. Even if it's, believe it or not, you or me, we don't like to admit that, but it is simply true. Now, here's some interesting statistics. Waymo has never rear ended another vehicle at an injury level. Created injury. Yes, there have been mistakes and there have been deaths. But why, if you're a rational person, would you say, okay, one death here from an autonomous vehicle is so much worse than 100 deaths over here by human beings. If you purport to be someone concerned about human life, as I think I am, and you are too, why would you say it's better for people to die simply because technology wasn't involved? Now, I'm all in favor of people scrutinizing technology in their lives. And if you want to eliminate risk, how about getting your preteens and even teenagers off cell phones and social media? I think there's a lot of evidence that big technology is causing tremendous problems, divisions in our country and the world, civil unrest, income inequality. There's a whole lot of problems that social media and technologies caused. You could certainly make a case that people like Elon Musk have too much power when they can write a check for a quarter of a billion dollars and then essentially get to run the government like a play toy for a few months. So, look, please do not put me in the category of, oh, TJ's just a big apologist. Anything Big Tech wants, anything Waymo wants, anything Google wants, give it to him. No, I'm not in that camp. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist, and I'm trying to really look at everything on a fact by fact, case by case basis. And when I look at the case for autonomous vehicles, I think even if they didn't get any better, it would be irrational for any human being who has a choice between an autonomous vehicle and a human driver to get into a human driven car. Now, just the past week, I was with family and friends, and one of them said, oh, a friend of mine's Father in law was in an autonomous car and it went through a blocked off area in the street on a ramp and another one and he finally had to pull it stop and it would have gone off the cliff. Okay. But that very same person likely has a handful or a dozen extended family and friends who've died in human driven car crashes over their lifetime. And yet somehow because it's so common, it seems to not count. So I think it's time we all kind of grow up and look at facts and not let various biases influence us. So I want to take a little time here today and talk about why you feel nervous and why you're not a crazy person if you're anxious about getting in a Waymo car. I did get into a Waymo autonomous driven vehicle a little more than a year ago and hey, I'm a human being. I was a little bit nervous the first few minutes, but then I noticed it was smooth. It stopped and started. It kept a polite distance from other cars. It used turn indicators to change lanes. It did everything by the book. And I was delivered into a couple of locations safely, smoothly and efficiently. So let's look at some of the biases that I think influence all of us when it comes to technology and just things like this that seem dangerous, more dangerous than what we're already used to, when in fact we've just become numb to the idea that roughly I hate using this comparison, but it's the most apt thing possible. There's essentially and 9, 11 worth of victims, meaning more than 3,000 people a day die every day around the globe from car crashes. If we had someone from outer space bombing a giant skyscraper and 3,000 people a day died around the world somewhere, I think the whole world would be up in arms. We'd say anything to stop that. Any technology. We'll do anything to stop 3,000 people a day dying. And. And yet because people die in car crashes one at a time, here and there, dispersed throughout the world, just seems normal, Nothing to look at here. So I want to sort of catalog some of these biases that I think are important to realize. There's the availability heuristic. People judge risk by how easily vivid examples come to mind. So a single sensation of a self driving crash, it feels more dangerous because we can see that, we can imagine it, it's visible to us probably on the local news if it happened or the national news. Whereas somebody just dying in a hit and run or a drunk driving incident or a head on collision doesn't even make the news. In most towns because it's so common. The next kind of bias, there's a negativity bias we all face. Our brains give more weight to bad outcomes than good ones. So when we think of an autonomous driven vehicle, we instantly think about, oh, could be risky, we could die in crash, and what if it goes into something and I can't put my foot on the brake? That's a negativity bias. So rare failures of autonomous cars loom larger than the far more common lives that it could save. We don't visualize the 1 million lives that could be saved next year if we could magically convert all cars into autonomous driving cars. There's the salience bias. Dramatic, unusual events grab our attention. A weird robo taxi mistake gets a lot of attention. It feels important because normal human crashes are ordinary, boring. We don't pay attention. There's also something known as a status quo bias. People prefer the existing ways of doing things so familiar human driving feels normal, normal even though it produces massive death. Even here in the United States, people driving newer, safer vehicles, more safety laws here than most places. 39,000 people die a year in car crashes. Most of them wouldn't die if we had autonomous vehicles everywhere. There's the ambiguity, aversion. When outcomes feel uncertain or poorly understood, like a new AI system, people instinctively avoid them, even if the data shows lower risk. And let me be clear, there's a lot of areas where AI is trying to muscle into your life, where I think you should be fearful, you should say, avert it. Look, we don't really know what this is going to do. Letting our child go from playing outdoors three hours a day the way kids used to, to hunched over looking at TikTok five hours a day. I think there's good reason to fear that. But there's already evidence that these autonomous cars per mile save lives. There's also something known as omission bias. Many are troubled by harm caused by an active choice riding in a robo taxi that buy an equal or greater harm from inaction, such as just continuing to drive a normal car. You know, think of it this way. I mean, I. Look, we're all humans. We all have irrational fears. I fear jumping out of an airplane and skydiving. At some point, I may do it, but there's still a sense of fear there where if I were a rational human being, I would realize driving to the airport to get in the plane is actually much more dangerous than jumping out of the plane. It's why people fear going to to a beach because someone got attacked by a shark a thousand miles. Oh, what about shark? We fear that shark attack because it's rare, because it's visual, because it's extreme, because we just saw it in the news. Whereas we don't worry about the drive to the beach or plan B, the drive to the park, even though that's much, much deadlier. So put me in the camp of saying we've all got to experiment and adapt to these driverless cars as quickly as possible. Yes, I know it's wildly disruptive to our economy. Here in The United States, 2 to 3 million car drivers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers are going to be put out of business. I'm in favor of retraining them. I'm in favor of subsidies. I'm in favor of giving them new education. Let's help them any way we can. But I don't want to help them if it means 39,000 people have to die needlessly in the United States every year. Now we're not. No one's going to wave a magic wand and replace all cars driven by people. I realize that, but Whether it takes 20 years or 30 years, I think we, it's, it's going to get to the point where driving a car just for fun because you like it is going to be seen as eccentric, as using a horse to get someplace. Yeah, people like to ride horses from time to time, not usually as a mode of transportation. It's going to be seen as sort of an eccentric hobby. And meanwhile, we're going to see a lot of lives saved on TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Lots more stories to come. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Filtered. I'm your host TJ Walker. Issue 2 Social media use Where Americans Really Spend Their Online Time According to the Pew Research Center, Americans are not just dabbling in social media, they're living there. YouTube is the undisputed giant. 84% of US adults use it. Facebook is close behind at 71%. Instagram is now used by half of all adults, and TikTok has jumped to 37%, up sharply in just a few years. WhatsApp and Reddit are also climbing. Age is a huge dividing line. Adults under 30 overwhelmingly use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Reddit, while older adults are far more likely to stick with Facebook. Gender, race, education and political affiliation all shape where people go online. Women lean into Instagram and TikTok more. People with college degrees are much more likely to be on Reddit. WhatsApp Democrats are more likely to use TikTok and threads, Republicans are more likely to use X and Truth Social. And roughly half of all adults go on Facebook and YouTube every single day. Okay, what's the real message? Not exactly a news flash, but people love social media. They're living on it. They're stewing in it all day long every day. There's no one social media platform that everyone watches all the time, but YouTube is pretty close. Facebook is a close second. Let's dig a little deeper here and try to dissect some of these trends. TikTok is huge, obviously. My friends watching us live today, joining us on TikTok. We're very happy you're here. Let's look at some of the facts in more detail. Again, As I mentioned, 84% of Americans are using YouTube and most of them every single day. It makes it the most widely used platform. Facebook, 71% of Americans are using it. Reddit is one place that I have spent very little time, and forgive me, I am ignorant on how Reddit works. It's grown to 26% of adults in America using it's up from 18% just four years ago. Smaller shares go to Snapchat and x compared with YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. But X is still huge. I mean, a lot of criticism about the way Elon Musk has managed X, but it still has a huge audience. Newer platforms like Threads, Blue Sky, Truth Social are used by about 1 in 10 adults or fewer. Now I am on Threads and Blue Sky. As far as posting my content, I'm kind of breaking the rules. I'm not doing what you're supposed to do. I post my videos and content there, but I don't spend time on it consuming content myself. Now, Pew looked at 5,000 adults, 5,022 adults between February and June of this year to measure their platform view. So that's what they found. Some things not particularly surprising. Adults under 30, far more likely than adults, older adults, to use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Reddit. So those are the ones that attract the younger crowd. Now, TikTok I know had a reputation when it started. I got on, oh, five years ago, kind of early on, and it had a reputation of just being for kids. Well, TikTok is so huge today, especially worldwide. There are people of all ages on TikTok. It's certainly no longer just for kids. 8 and 10 adults ages 18 to 29 use Instagram. Now, that's a platform I've posted on for years, have not spent a lot of time on it, and I don't even know what happened. If you're an expert on Instagram, let me know. They deleted my account on Instagram just a week and a half ago. Not too happy about that. So if you know anything about that, send me a direct message. I would love to figure out how to get back on Instagram. Only 28% of those with some college and 15% with a high school diploma or less use Reddit. Higher educated adults are more likely to use WhatsApp and Instagram. Now, I don't really think of WhatsApp as a social media platform. I think of it as a communications tool. I use it every day to communicate with colleagues of mine, vendors, partners, associates and consultants. But I'm not actually watching anyone's video or getting news or updates on WhatsApp. But there are WhatsApp channels. We will be starting one just for filtered with TJ Walkerson because some people just prefer to spend time on WhatsApp and I got to go to where people are so interesting kind of the political breakdown. As you would kind of suspect, Democrats and Democratic leaning independents are more likely than Republicans to use Blue sky and threads. No real doubt there. Those were both kind of started in opposition to the rightward perceived rightward tilt and bias of TikTok. Now X. Today 24% of Republicans are using X on a regular basis compared with only 19% of Democrats. Now again, I'm a sane, sensible centrist. I try to communicate with as many people as possible. So I stream every day live on X. I do it on Facebook, on YouTube, I do it on Rumble, which is considered by many to be far right. And I do it on Blue sky and threads and those considered more Democratic flavored. So I'm trying to reach as many people as possible. And I've done that frankly throughout my career. There were days, even 30 years ago where I would go on CNN, MSNBC and Fox in the same day and certainly multiple times in a given week. So I'm someone where I try to reach people wherever they are. Okay, about half of us adults Visit Facebook and YouTube Daily. That's truly amazing. I mean, if you had told someone 25 years ago that hey, this thing ABC News and the BBC and these things that everybody watches every day where we kind of worship about how big and powerful the stars are, they're going to be practically irrelevant in 25 years. And this new fangled thing on the Internet, you know, like the you Got mail folks, that kind of Internet, that's where everyone's going to watch. You would have been probably committed to an insane asylum if you'd said that. And yet here we are. So social media is big. It's getting bigger every day. I don't think it's going to stop. We'll be talking in our next segment about how one particular group, tech companies in particular the CEOs, the billionaires who run them, are creating even more media that's friendly to them. And they're not simply going to be content with going on and doing a two minute hit on CNBC or Bloomberg or even Fox News business news anymore. They want their own media. They want their own context. They want their own beginning, middle and end. They want their own podcast. And they are getting that. All that coming up in More in just a moment. Stay tuned.

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Okay, we are back. Welcome. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filter. This is where we look at the top business, technology and culture stories of the day and then filter them through the lens of communication and personal development skills. Issue 3 Big Tech's media Bubble Big Tech builds its own Cheerleader Media According to the Guardian, Silicon Valley's biggest players are no longer just courting the media. They're building their own. Instead of facing tough questions from independent reporters, CEOs like Alex Karp, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Satya Nadella are flocking to friendly podcasts, YouTube shows, and in house outlets that treat them like visionaries, not subjects of scrutiny. Andreessen Horowitz has launched its own Substack, an expanding media arm promising a single place where founders acquire legitimacy and momentum. They need to win the narrative battle online. Palantir created a journal, the Republic, whose editors are senior company executives and which declares far too many people who should not have a platform do. Meanwhile, critics get shut out, links to skeptical coverage get throttled, and AI tools look like Musk's Grok and Grokopedia spit out flattering alternative realities. The message is simple. If you don't like a free press, build a friendlier one. Okay, what's the real message here? The most powerful people in the world who already have less accountability than ever are tech Billionaire overlords have decided they don't want to ask or answer questions from real reporters anymore. They've started their own bubbles of media, their own podcast, their own blogs, their own shows where everything is friendly and no one ever calls them to account for anything. They just get praise. And that's a problem. Let's dig a little deeper here. One of the worst offenders of this is the all in podcast and I've listened to it occasionally. It's David Sacks, our AI wizard czar for the Trump administration, Jason Calacanis, a longtime chronicler of all things digital and technology, and a couple of other shrewd investors. It's not that they should not be allowed to have a podcast. I'm not suggesting that. But I do think it's a problem when someone like Elon Musk, who is undoubtedly one of the most powerful people in the history of the world, not just now, but in the history of the world, when you can write a check for a quarter of a billion dollars, get someone elected, and then that person turns over the keys to the entire government to you, to hire and fire anyone you want. That's power none of us have ever really seen before. So what happens now? If you write a question to the press department, to the media department of Tesla, and say, I'd like to interview Elon Musk about your predictions on autonomous vehicles, because you have been predicting for a decade that you are going to have thousands of them out there and none of the predictions have come through. If you want to, if you write that inquiry to the press department, to the communications department of Tesla, you get back a poop emoji. There's no call, there's no follow up. You don't get to schedule an interview. You are basically told to drop dead, folks. That's new. That's different. That's not what the Ford Motor Company did. That's not what AT&T got away with. That's not what Bill Gates got away with. In a free market system, in a democracy, there has to be free flow of information and ideas so that people know who to vote for, what regulation to support. It can't really happen if the most powerful people in the world can't be subjected to real questions by tough questions by real journalists. There's never been a time when every journalist was great and honest and ethical and straightforward and by the facts. I'm not suggesting that this country was founded with partisan press, but we've always had some in the media who would ask real questions, who looked at things from the perspective of what does the average citizen really need to know? How does this affect the average citizen? And when you have Elon Musk going from an interview with Andreessen Horowitz, one of his big buddies, and somebody invests with all the time, to an interview on all in which are four of his buddies, where they've all done business together and they all share investments together, you get to be in a bubble where everybody thinks everybody else is great all the time, everybody else thinks everyone else is wonderful and is perfect. And anybody who questions somebody on the inside is a dangerous, radical extremist who can be discounted instantly. That's not how the free market system is supposed to work. It's not how democracy is supposed to work. Let's look at some more of the statistics here. So Big Tech is bankrolling its own media bubble. They have the right to, hey, I'm bankrolling my own show when I started this. Anybody can start their own media company these days. And I'm not opposed to people going on a friendly podcast or going on Joe Rogan, but it should be a part of your media diet if you are a successful CEO, not something you do exclusively where you avoid tough questions from others. Sorcery is an episode with Palantir's Karp, and he asks zero ICE questions. I mean, here's a guy, and full disclosure, my portfolio with index funds I have has tons of Palantir, but I'm not talking up my book. I mean, here's a guy who is providing the IT backdrop for a lot of what ICE is doing, and he could simply avoid any media outlet where they ask him tough questions. The Andreessen Horowitz podcast has nearly a quarter of a million YouTube subscribers. Okay, good for them. But why can't the people who make the most money and have the most power in our society still take questions from serious journalists? So we've gotten to the point where if you are a journalist for Wired or TechCrunch and you ask a serious question, these tech overlords can simply say, well, you're biased, you're unfair, you're despicable, and I'm not even going to grant you my presence. I'm not going to give you an interview. There's a real problem for that, and it's. It's all becoming very incestuous. Musk favors Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan over independent press because Joe Rogan, I'm not his biggest hater, but you could say any much at almost anything to Joe Rogan. Make up anything, make any prediction, especially if you're Elon Musk, he'll be like, wow, isn't that interesting? Wow, that's cool. He'll buy almost anything from you. If you are a big tech billionaire. And he never, ever, ever seemed to say, okay, five years ago, you'd said, in two years, there'll be 10,000 autonomous driving vehicles on the streets of New York City or wherever. That didn't happen. Why not? He never asked the tough questions like that. And that's the problem if the only place you go is the so called friendly media, because it means you're not accountable. And when you're not accountable, you get to do anything you want. If you believe in democracy, if you believe in free market capitalism, if you believe in a republic form of government, almost any form of government, this is not good. Again, I want to be clear. I'm not suggesting that Andreessen Horowitz isn't full of smart, articulate investors and they can't put on a good podcast and hey, they've got more subscribers than I do, so good for them. But I think, especially when you're ahead of a publicly traded company, you owe it to your investors, you owe it to your stakeholders to subject yourself to tough questions. And a part of the rot affecting our society today is emanating from Washington D.C. and we're seeing these tech guys follow the lead of the Great Orange One who has adopted this platform of if you ask me any question that doesn't make me look good, I'm automatically going to find it is unfair, unbiased. It means you're stupid and it means you're biased. And therefore I don't have to answer your question, I can attack you and try to ruin you. That's what we've been hearing from Washington D.C. from one position, one person in a high position of power now for about 10 years. And it's permeated throughout the big tech world. And I'm telling you, it's a problem. Look, do I think Elon Musk is a smart guy? Yes. Do I like a lot of his inventions? Do I appreciate the fact that, that he took autonomous. It's not autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, from kind of a joke, and made it the whole industry into a real. Yes, I do. But nobody deserves to get away without tough questions. I take your questions right here every day. You can post a question right now when you're watching this. And I try to answer every single question. And compared to Elon Musk, I have no power. So why can't we go back to the point where very wealthy men, and it's mostly men, but occasionally women, CEOs of publicly traded companies took the public part of that a little more literally and viewed themselves as being responsible to the public and answering questions that the public would want to know the answer to? And that's where journalists come into play. Are there bad journalists? Occasionally, sure. Do journalists occasionally ask stupid questions? Yeah. How much trouble happens from someone asking a stupid question? Nothing. How much trouble happens when someone gains more and more power and more and more wealth and they're never questioned? Well, you can see examples of excesses from that in various former democracies around the world. Now, I'm not one of those who says there should be no billionaires in the world. I'm not in that camp. But I do take very seriously the concerns of our founders who did believe that power should be diffuse in America, that if you have a king who has all the wealth in a country, it gives too much power, it leads to corruption, and you want some diffusion of power and diffusion of wealth. And when you have some billionaires who have so much wealth that they can buy any media outlet and just put them out of business, as the venture capitalist billionaire Peter Thiel has done on occasion, as he's done with Gawker, because he didn't like their questions, you start to tear away at the very foundations of democracy, which is the sense that everyone has equal rights, not everyone's equal, not everyone gets an equal size home. But everyone should have an equal say. Everyone should have the same right to vote, same fundamental rights. And at some point billionaires can buy everything, buy off everyone, control the media and never face any tough questions. It really could spell the end not only of democracy, but of capitalism. And that, my friends, is what scares me as a sane, sensible centrist. Back in a moment like what you heard.

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Offensive joke firing and the line at work. According to the New York Times, their advice columnist Max Reed had an interesting letter from a reader on this very issue. A letter writer is grappling with getting fed fired over an ice joke in a workplace where offensive banter was basically the House style. I want to share with you the full letter because I think it's something you may Think the person's awful. You may think it's a travesty of justice that he was fired, but again, this is courtesy of the New York Times and Max Reed. Here's the letter. I was fired recently. The excuse was that I contributed to an uncomfortable work environment. My co worker is Latino and who I know is a legal citizen, had left the store to go to the warehouse and returned in record time. I joked that he was so fast it was like ice was after him. To me, it was a joke. Whether in good taste or not is a different question. To him, it was a racist comment, which was certainly not the intention. I mean, it's a joke you would hear on late night TV any night of the week. I said something that a co worker found offensive and the boss chose to dismiss me. I can't find fault with that. I live in an at will state and he has the legal right to do so to fire me. As for somebody finding my comment offensive, what constitutes offense is in the ears of the beholder. So I can't find fault with my co worker about that either. If he was offended, then I take responsibility. My issue was that I worked in an environment where there was no check on inappropriate speech among co workers. I worked in a small retail store. My immediate boss made constant jokes that were racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti Semitic. All the jokes were made in Jess. And the staff, which consisted of African Americans, women, gays and Jews, found it all very funny and gave back as much as they got. Nothing was off limits, nobody was bothered, and nobody reported anything to the owner. There is a handbook of what's appropriate language in the office, but it was rarely applied and never cited. The offending party also made inappropriate comments and played along until I said something that he found particularly bothersome, which she immediately reported. How can I be held responsible for going over the line when there is no line? I was playing by the rules or lack of rules that management created and then got penalized for doing so. Granted, management was wrong all along, but it was my head on the chopping block. I know it's legal, but is it fair? So that was the letter posed by this person who got fired for making a joke that offended someone. Now, the columnist in the Times did respond. Max Reed's response draws a line, a sharp line between what's legally allowed in an at will state and what feels morally wrong. The handbook said one thing, the office culture said another, and the worker paid the price for trusting the culture instead of the policy. Okay, what's the real Message here. Life isn't fair. Sometimes people get fired. You could get fired for telling the exact same joke that the person complaining about you said yesterday. I'm sorry, but life isn't fair. If you want to reduce your chances of getting fired, maybe have a little less humor in the workplace and focus on your job and just saying uplifting things to your colleagues, maybe it makes you boring, but it means you're less likely to get canned. Let's go a little deeper here, because I'll be honest with you, I don't think that's a completely satisfying response. I feel a little bit sorry for this worker. Now, I'm not Hispanic and I've never had ICE chase me. So everyone has biases, blind spots. And as an old white man in America, if I see a police officer, if I see an ICE official or Homeland Security person, I know that they're going to treat me with tremendous respect. They're probably going to call me sir, and I apologize if that sounds smug in any way, but everyone has different perspectives. If I were a young black man, I might be really scared or intimidated when I see a police officer. Everyone has their own perspectives. So I'm not here to tell you I know how everyone feels, especially if they have a background different from mine. When I heard the joke that this person said that they claim they were fired for, to me it did sound like something that Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or any late night talk show host would say as a joke. And no one would consider it racist. It's referencing race. There is a difference between referencing how because of someone's race, someone else could discriminate against them. And it's inherently not racist to do that. But it's also tricky. Now, the writer mentioned that they live in an at will state. If that phrase sounds clunky and you go, what does that mean? What it means is companies can fire you really for any reason. They just can't say, I'm firing you because you're black and I only like white people, or I'm firing you because you're fat and I only like skinny. They can't say something that's in official category, but for any other reason, they can fire you. And in this particular case, maybe the person was fired because they were fearful that if they didn't fire this person, the person who made a complaint would then file a claim against the company that it was a hostile work environment and sue them for a million dollars. Again, I'm just speculating there, but that is a part of the Modern work environment. Now, I want to be fair and honest with you and transparent with you. I've been in office situations. I remember once, 34 years ago, I worked for a member of Congress. I won't even say which party, but it was for a member of Congress who really stood up for women, was known as a feminist trailblazer. And I was in an office where the men and the women said the wildest, craziest things of a sexual nature, banter, things that would be considered too blue by modern standards. And I won't say that I somehow transcended all that. I certainly don't think I said anything worse than anyone else. But who knows? Again, that was some 34 years ago. Times were changed. And you'll be interested to know it was an office where people were fired frequently, but not for anything they said. It was just the nature of this member of Congress. She typically fired everyone who didn't quit within about three months. And I in fact, was fired after three months, but not for anything I said, just because it still is an at will work environment. Any member of Congress can fire anyone really for any reason and they face no consequences for it. You can be fired for not fetching the boss's dry cleaning on a Sunday night if you work for a member of Congress. But that's a separate issue. What are we to take? What's my real advice to you as someone who wants to have a real career? You want to have a long career? You want to advance in your career? You may want to advance up the pole at your law firm, your corporation, your tech company. I want you to be successful and building meaningful human relationships is a part of that. You have to build relationships with mentors, you have to build relationships with colleagues. You have to build relationships with people who work for you. Because someone you hire today may start, maybe become a founder of a startup that's worth a billion dollars two years from now, and you're happy to work for them. You want to make sure you're on a good relationship, you're in a good relationship with them. So I'm not suggesting you never have meaningful friendships or conversations with people in the workplace, but you don't want to end up like this person who wrote to the Times who was fired for making what, at least to my ear, did not sound like a racist joke at all. It sounded like a joke making fun of other societal trends that others could construe as being racist driven and being sympathetic to the person. But I'm not their boss. I don't get to decide whether they're hired or fired or rehired. My advice to you is you got to be really, really careful these days. You can call it politically correctness, you call it being woke, but you got to know your audience. If you're talking to one person and it is a very close, meaningful relationship and you've known them for years, maybe you have more leeway. But if someone else makes a joke and you laugh and you're upping them one or you're saying something comparable and it's in the lunchroom or the coffee room and there's eight people and two of them just started in the last week and you don't know them very well, but they seem nice. You don't really know what's going to strike someone as racist, sexist, classist, or something that they deem beyond the pale. So you're going to have to be careful. My other big advice to you is assume any job you're in, you can and will be fired. I don't mean by that that you have to be cynical or going into every job thinking, how do I get out of here as soon as possible? And maybe I am coloring things through the lens of my own experience, but I personally didn't ever really like to work for other people in other organizations. And I had some good experiences in state government in particular and some private sector companies. But I knew ultimately I would never be comfortable unless I could really speak my mind any way I want. Not because I wanted to be offensive, but because I value intellectual freedom. And because in the modern world, companies fall, they rise, they downsize. You can't control a company. All you can really control is your own abilities, your own hard work, your own ability to create value for others. If you can do that, ultimately it won't matter if you're fired because you can always get another job. Better yet, start a business where you have multiple, multiple clients and you're not dependent on any one boss. I realize it's not for everyone, but ultimately I do think that's the best solution for people who are wildly ambitious, really want the best long term career, is to do it in such a way that it's not because someone's necessarily going to think you're racist or sexist, but they just don't want you around anymore. You'll be fine with that because you have better options. You've already proven your value in the workplace and there's other clients, there's other customers who want you right away. Ultimately, that's the only safeguard to getting canned in a situation like this or getting canned for any other reason. Back in a moment.

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Want to support the show? Skip the ads and buy me a coffee. That's buymeacoffee.com tjwalker rescuing your day after bad Sleep how to rescue your day after a terrible night's sleep According to the Times health reporter Dana Smith, one bad night of sleep? Really the next day. But there are ways to live limit the damage. Sleep loss slows reaction time, hurts decision making, memory and attention, and cranks up anxiety and irritability in the brain. The prefrontal cortex powers down while the amygdala and stress symptoms fire up, raising blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol. Experts tell the Times that the single best rescue move is a short nap, ideally 20 to 30 minutes long. Just enough light sleep to restore a bit of focus without that groggy sleep inertia. Caffeine helps too, as long as you don't overdo it. They also recommend light exercise and exposure to bright, natural light, scheduling your hardest task for your natural energy peaks, avoiding big decisions or intense conversations, and absolutely not driving after an all nighter. And the real cure? A solid night of sleep tonight. Okay, what's the real message here? Everybody has a bad night's sleep occasionally, but here are the facts. If you get five hours or less sleep in a night, it's the same as walking around drunk. You don't want to make major decisions. You don't even want to drive. Let's dig a little bit deeper here on some solutions, and let me be transparent here and candid with you. I got a horrible night's sleep last night. That's one reason why this article jumped out at me. I'm trying to learn this myself. I did pretty much all my protocol to get a good night's sleep last night. I went to bed at the time that's best for me. A little before 9 o', clock, you can laugh at that, especially if you're young person thinking, oh, pathetic boomer, going to bed at 9 o'. Clock. But I went to bed at a time that's right for me. I took a hot bath before. I had no alcohol. Alcohol, Even one glass of wine can make me sleep worse. No alcohol whatsoever. Healthy meal. I'd exercise. I'd done aerobic exercise in the day and I had all my normal sleep tools. I had a sleep mask, I had earplugs in. I had a mouth guard to prevent snoring. So I had all of my protocol lined up and for whatever reason, I didn't get a good night's sleep. I even have a new eight sleep mattress that adjusts the temperature throughout the night, which I am a fan of in general. But it just didn't help me last night. I woke up a little after three and never returned to sleep. Never fell back asleep. It happens. And it especially happens if you are, let's say, over 40 years of age. So what do you do again, the advice is try to get a nap. I may try to take a nap right after I'm through with this show here. Realize that you're not at Optimum performance. I'm not going to try to do anything really challenging today. I'm not going to try to write a business plan today. I'm not going to try to write a chapter in a new book today. I don't trust my judgment. I'm certainly not going to go for any long drives today. If a family member or a friend is somehow displeased with me, I'm going to try to retreat as soon as possible. I don't want to get angry and have things escalate. So these are all things you can do after a really bad night of sleep. The biggest thing, though, is you have to realize you are in a diminished capacity. I'm certainly not encouraging you drink to excess, but any of you have ever had too many drinks. At some point you realize, I've had too many. Maybe I shouldn't drive home tonight. Let me call a cab or an Uber or crash here on the couch. That's what sensible people do. And yet routinely people think they can just power through on three, four, five hours of sleep. You're really not at Optimum Performance. Give yourself a day to do a lot less work than normal or to recharge, to at least push away things that are of critical importance that you might botch And I'm going to try to do that right now by stopping right now before I say anything that might be considered foolish. Hey, I want to thank you for joining me today. This concludes our top five stories. Today's show a little bit different. Typically, I am working directly from the headlines of news stories that have happened in just the last 24 hours. These are all recent stories, but these are not from the last 24 hours. In fact, there may be some stories that have happened today or yesterday. You think? Why isn't TJ commenting on that? That seems like the kind of thing he would really want to sink his teeth into. It's because I'm traveling. When you watch this, I am on my way to Vietnam. I'll be there for about a week, then to Taiwan for a week on assignment and partial vacation. So I've had to do some shows early. And so this is something that I recorded several days before. You're actually watching this. Okay, we're going to end the show, as I always do, by taking questions from you on something unrelated to the news about something more personal. Personal development skills and communication skills skills. This question comes from Jane. She is a student in my complete public speaking masterclass. For every occasion, she says, what techniques can be used to maintain audience engagement during online public speaking sessions. Well, Jane, these days, increasingly all of us face more opportunities to speak online. I'm speaking online right now. It is, in a sense, harder to do than speaking in person because you can't see your audience, you can't hear their laughter, you can't look in their eyes to see they're getting it or look at them and see that they're bored because they're checking their phone. The bigger challenge you face when you're presenting online is you've got to figure out how to be interesting. That's really the same challenge when you're speaking in person, too. One of the things I would ask you to do for any speech, whether it's in person or online, is record your speech in advance, your presentation, and then stop it every 10 seconds. And then just ask yourself. So test everything out of your mouth from the audience perspective. If you find yourself going through a whole lot of facts, a whole lot of data, and you don't have a good answer to. So why should I care? Why are you telling me this? Chances are it's going to be a boring speech. It's not engaging. So that's my number one piece of advice. For an online presentation, Jane, or an in person presentation, you got to make sure you're interesting because the biggest difference between an in person presentation and an online one is it's even easier for someone in the online audience to tune out. To think, Ah, TK's boring. I don't have to listen to this, let me hit mute. Or let me check email and multitask. So always ask yourself, am I giving my audience the most interesting insight I could possibly give them that's helpful and useful to them right now? If you do that, you'll be a successful communicator. Your speech, your presentation will go well whether it's online or in person. Jane, thanks for the question. Thank all of you for watching today or listening. If you're watching this on TikTok, please leave a comment. Subscribe to the channel. If you're watching on YouTube, LinkedIn, any other platform, please subscribe. Please follow. Please leave comments if you're listening on any podcast platform. Thank you for doing so. We're new to podcasting platforms, the audio only format, but we are on pretty much all of them. So please make sure you subscribe and please leave a review. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow.