Shrinking Friend Circles, Pre-Holiday Flight Risks & the IPO Mirage

Foreign. Circle is shrinking. Why adults now average fewer than four close friends and what actually rebuilds real world connection. Second, the federal government shut downs a stress test for airports, how controller shortages could jam Thanksgiving travel and even if weather cooperates. Third, the securities and Exchange Commission's Paul Atkins vows to, quote, make IPOs great again. We'll weigh that against a decade of big tech buyouts that siphoned off would be public companies. Fourth, New York City's mayoral race titans Zoran Mandani's lead narrows as Andrew Cuomo gains and reminder that city power is diffuse no matter who wins. Fifth, deciding to win. There's fresh research on why exactly Democrats slipped with working class voters and the concrete message shifts that could flip 2026 and 2028. All that and more today on Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. All right, thanks so much for joining me today. This is Sunday. It is November 2nd. Special hello to our friends watching us on Monday on one of our new partners, POD tv. And to all of our new friends watching on Roku sets around the world and on Amazon Fire. So very much looking forward to being an active part of the POD TV community. For those of you new and if you're on those platforms, this is probably the first time you're seeing me along. A little about the show. Every single day, seven days a week, I look at top business stories, technology stories and culture stories and then filter them through the lens of communication and personal development skills, all with the goal of helping you learn a little more about the world, but also improving your own success in your personal life as well as your professional life. So that's what we're all about right here. This is not a political punditry show. It's not fox news or MSNBC. I'm a sane, sensible centrist, bringing to you my 40 years of experience doing communications training and personal development training with 12 million student enrollments around the world to my online courses, as well as working in person with thousands of political leaders, CEOs, billionaire fund managers, prime ministers, celebrities, Ms. Universes and people like that. So very much excited about our community growing right here on Filtered. Okay, let's dive right into issue one, fewer friends, thinner ties. According to an organization called Talker Research, most Americans now keep a very small circle, just 3.6 close friends on average. And adults report losing nearly one close friendship a year over the past decade. Respondents say about nine close ties faded, most often because of distance, with life transitions and one side stopping the outreach close behind. The survey also found Gen Z loses friends faster than boomers, and men report more attrition than women. Licensed clinical psychologist Kylie Sligar, whose practice commissioned the study, says that adult friendship requires intention in an era when so much of life is virtual. Her prescription? Show up consistently, take initiative and be willing to feel a bit awkward. Maintenance matters too. Regular check ins, genuine curiosity and showing up for milestones. As Sligar puts it, if you want a village, you need to become a villager. The bottom line? Fewer automatic friendships, more deliberate ones. And resilience grows where we invest. Okay, what's the real message here? Americans and people around the world increasingly have fewer and fewer close friendships. This is bad news if you're a human being. The number one culprit. Spending more time in the virtual world staring at a phone, watching this program, which I appreciate you doing, but at some point you got to put down the phones, turn off the tablets, come, go have a meal with a friend, pick up the phone, don't text, but actually call and talk to a friend. Have lunch with a friend, go play baseball or softball or golf or pickleball with a friend. That is going to be the secret to a happier life. Let's dig a little deeper here. This is a trend that's been going on. It does seem especially pronounced with men, with young men especially, becoming more and more isolated. The world of video games now. There are times when I wake up thinking, wow, I'd love to be 18 today. I have 70 years ahead of me. And there are other times I think, wow, I am so profoundly happy I'm not 18 today. All the virtual forces out there addicting you to attention. When I was 18, I loved video games, but I had to put in a quarter to play Pac man or Galaga and I wasn't that good. A quarter wasn't going to last me more than about eight or 10 minutes. And I knew I couldn't really afford to spend more than a dollar a day. So at most I'm going to spend maybe 40 minutes a day playing video games. So there wasn't. It didn't require any self discipline on my part. After the 40 minutes was up, I basically had to talk to friends in college, I had to go out and play tennis, I had to go out and play Frisbee, I had to talk to. There wasn't anything else to do. Today you can stay locked in your room, never pull a quarter out of your pocket, play video games all day long, or watch porn all day long, I guess is what a lot of people are doing. And especially men don't mean to besmirch women who enjoy that, but it does seem to be an especially difficult problem for men and young men. Yes, we do live in an era where people can move around more and take jobs, but that's been around for a while. I mean, when I graduated from college, my family lived in North Carolina. I've just moved to New York City, did that for a while, moved to Alabama, did that for a while, moved to Florida, then Washington, Florida and New York. People have been able to move around for a long time. Back then, the difficulty was it cost a lot of money to make a long distance phone call. These days, for so many of us, it doesn't really cost anything to make a long distance phone call. So I don't think that is the blame. I think the real issue is it has to become a priority. And the problem with Real Friends is it's not like talking to character AI where your character AI or your chatbot always tells you you're right, always agrees with you. Real friends aren't like that. They're going to call you on your bs. You know what? That's a good thing. We need to be called out on our bs. We need to be told when we're wrong. We need the actual friction of real life human interaction. And I appreciate you interacting with me, occasionally, calling me out. That's why, unlike most successful podcasts, I do this show live because I want to give you an opportunity to, to say what you disagree with, what you agree with, what you like, what you don't like. And we share that as a part of the show, as I'm doing right now. So the Hourly Pilgrim says, hi, I am Shaffi. I'm connecting with you today. Well, thank you. I do appreciate that. And Hourly Pilgrims creates news and wants to work in Western media. A LinkedIn user says, hi TJ, what's the topic for today? So the first topic is about friendship and connecting. So my LinkedIn friend, thank you so much for participating today and connecting and Hourly Pilgrim, I appreciate you doing that as well. If you want to know how to connect with people in Western media, do what you're doing right now. You're connecting with me. I am a part of Western media living here in the United States and have been working in and around and been a guest on every major US TV network around, plus a lot of others in the world. So what you're doing right now, just connecting, adding value is good. You may want to start your own newscast and build your own audience would be a great way too. Stay tuned and we'll talk more in the final section of the show about your specific needs, but very much appreciate you reaching out. Thanks for doing so. We have a fun show today, lots coming up. Again, special hello to our new friends joining us on POD tv and hello to all of our old friends now on podcasting platforms. Tomorrow will be our two month birthday, so looking forward to celebrating that. So if you've been listening on podcast, we're less than two months old, so whatever podcast platform you're on, please follow us. Please subscribe. Please leave a review if possible. Hello to my special friends on TikTok joining us on a separate feed and those of on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn X and all the others. Twitch. Thanks for being with us today. More in a moment after these commercial words. 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 tjwalker.com advertisement 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. Thanks for listening. If you like today's episode, you'll love my online courses@mediatrainingworldwide.com check them out now and level up your skills. Welcome back to Filtered Thanksgiving Air Travel on a Nice Edge. According to the Washington Post, the aviation system is under strain as the shutdown enters month two. Air traffic controllers and TSA officers are working without pay, and Vice President J.D. vance warns holiday chaos could be a disaster. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says the system is short about 3,000 air traffic controllers, leaving a fragile network where towers slow traffic when staffing thins. While some data shows early shutdown performance was average, cancellations ticked up at New York's airports. In Boston, a sign of rising stress, FAA numbers show staffing related delays swing widely day to day. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the shutdown's economic hit at 7 to 14 billion dollars, and Duffy's push to recruit and trained controllers is at risk as some trainees are bailing. No surprise there. Who wants to start a new job that doesn't pay? Weather has been cooperative, the calendar less so if paychecks don't resume. Thanksgiving reliably may hinge on goodwill. And goodwill is not a redundancy protocol. Okay, what's the real message here? It's all well and good and fun to say, oh, government's a big waste. Who cares if it's shut down? But when you're trying to travel to see grandma or to see your aunt and uncle or have your kids connect with extended family members and they can't eat turkey together, it's going to be a huge problem for Americans. And it's going to force more and more to say, cut out the nonsense in D.C. and open the federal government again. Let's dig a little deeper here. Now, this does. Sorry to sound selfish, but we all look at the world through the lens of our own experience. I'm hoping to fly from Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina for Thanksgiving. I want to see my sisters and brothers in law and nephews and nieces. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. Yeah, I bought the tickets, but do I want to get on a plane? Do I want to put my wife and daughter on a plane? If I have to think about, there's this air traffic controller and they're daydreaming or they're fixated, oh my gosh, I'm going to get evicted tomorrow. And they're going through the motions and they're not even paying attention to planes flying into each other. Understandable if they are distracted. I'd be distracted too if I didn't know how to pay the mortgage or to pay for food. So this is starting to. Here we are in month two of the government shutdown and there's starting to be some real pain. Obviously there's a lot of pain from for people losing food stamps, SNAP benefits, other benefits, federal government workers, not just air traffic controllers getting no pay whatsoever. Pain is starting to filter out throughout this country. So what is the solution? And let me be fair and straight here. The Trump administration says the solution is very easy. Democrats just need to vote in the Senate to extend the debt ceiling. And that is true. That would open the government, things would go back more or less to normal. Democrats say the only thing that has to happen is Trump has to commit to extending health care benefits to 20 million Americans who otherwise would see their health care costs double in the next few months. So they're absolutely right. That is all it would take. And Trump administration's not willing to do that. The third option, which President Trump did bring up late last week, is the Republicans can simply change the rules of the Senate. And no, it wouldn't be unconstitutional. It wouldn't be an authoritarian reach. It would be a purely democratic solution, which is the Republicans in the Senate. And to their credit, they have 53 out of 100 votes. They could simply have a proposal today saying from now on we want majority rules for all votes here. If they pass that vote, that would eliminate this whole filibuster thing. The very next vote could be let's extend the debt ceiling. And airports could go back to normal as well. So there are three possible solutions. I'll leave it to you to figure out which one is the best. And perhaps you should call your local officials or your congressional officials and let them know. Let's look at some more of the stats here. The FAA, as I mentioned, is short 300 air traffic controllers. Even if I do get on this plane, I'm going to be like chewing my fingers down to the bone out of nervousness. Also, I have an upcoming trip to Asia in the next 60 days as well, and that's going to make me nervous as well. Now, fortunately, I'm in a position where I don't have to travel constantly to make a living. But there are a lot of people, consultants, executives, traveling salesmen and women who if they're not traveling, they're not making money. There are bankers who can't make deals. There are all kinds of people where it's their living to travel. If they can't travel, what is that going to do to the economy? Cancellations are rising as people are rightfully so, getting nervous. It's only going to take a few more close calls at major airports and we could really see cancellations rising. And then I certainly hope it doesn't happen. But if there is, I don't even want to say it, but if there's one kaboom, two planes coming together, you're really going to see travel, just see widespread cancellations. You're going to see a major hit to the economy and you're going to see added pressure to politicians of both parties to do something, to at least negotiate, to at least have a discussion. The political dynamics right now are that, and this is somewhat rare in America's political system because it's usually very clear cut. But right now, both political parties happen to believe that politically it is advantageous for them to not give in to what the other side wants. Typically in a government shutdown, politicians put their finger in the wind, start taking polls and one side realizes, oh, we misjudged and the American voters are penalizing our party more than the other one. If we don't do something, we're going to lose big time in the next election. That's typically what happens. So these government shutdowns are often over in a day, sometimes two days. This is a long one. Now, of all the available polling data, I have seen, it's not a clear cut majority. It's not like 90% of the public blames the Democrats or the Republicans. No, that's not it. But of the reputable pollsters I've seen it's anywhere from 9% to roughly 18% more voters blame Trump and the Republicans for the current government shutdown than they blame Democrats. So that's Democrats argument. The Republican argument is a little more opaque, shall we say? Ultimately, Trump is the head of the whole government. He is accountable. So you would traditionally say, all right, that would be a factor making him want to negotiate and get the government working. But there is a macro political factor overlay on that, which is the Democrats are the party of the government. They're the ones who believe in government. They're the ones who want government to work. They are the ones who believe in things like unemployment insurance and SNAP food benefits and health insurance. The Republicans for the last 40 years have been the party of government's bad, big government's always bad, less government better. So in a macro political environment, it sort of helps the Republicans to not have the federal government party because so many of their constituents say, yeah, let's just shut down the federal government. As Grover Norquist, a top Republican strategist, has been quoted saying over the years, his ideal government is that it's so small you could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Well, that may be happening sooner than you think. What do you think the solution is to this government shutdown? And what is your own particular pain point? If you are a single woman and you're working a job that, let's say is a waitress, let's say is a cashier at Home Depot, and you have two or three kids, you may really be counting on these SNAP benefits. These supplement supplemental nutritional supplements, food stamps and common lingo to keep your family fed. Obviously, if you can't feed your kids, that's going to be your primary pain point. Others of us have the luxury of, well, if it messes up my holiday plans, I'd love to know what are your pain points? At what point do you say, okay, enough is enough. I'd love to hear from you, so please let me know. Thanks again. For people who are joining us live, I should point out. This show is seen on demand around the world on virtually every social media platform and podcasting platform. But we also do it live each day. And I mean when I say each day, I mean seven days a week. So I want to thank those of us who have joined us. We have friends joining us on YouTube today and LinkedIn. And Linked is asking what the topics are of the day. Right now we are talking about what's happening to air traffic controllers and how it's really messing up people's travel plans. And our previous issue was about the epidemic of loneliness and how few friends people have these days. One of our viewers says exactly the negativity of staying at home playing games on the man and women to destroy our real world of actions and creativity. Yeah, I do think it's an absolute shame that so many people really do see the solution to what to do with your time isn't to hop on a plane to go fly and see friends or go to a friend's wedding or go see grandma or even going on a vacation. And it's not to even walk out of your house and go down the street and play basketball or sports or play in the park with friends. It is to sit at home in isolation playing video games, video porn, talking to character AI fantasy boyfriends and girlfriends. And it's just crowding out, not necessarily destroying friendships. It's crowding out the time to build friendships in the first place. So we'll be monitoring that story. Lots more to come today. Typically, for those of you new joining us on Pod TV and other platforms, we typically cover five main stories in the news affecting your life right now, top business, technology and culture stories. And we dissect those and try to really isolate what the core ideas are being communicated to you and the impact it has on your life. And then we do a few grab bag issues as well. So next up, we're going to look at what's going on with the state of IPOs, initial public offerings, and what certain government officials say can be done about bringing them back. We'll be right back after this break. Want more? Grab my Five Book Success Library for $9.95 at tjwalker.com books. It's the fastest way to level up your communication. Imagine being the most confident person in the room, whether you're on zoom or on stage. That's what thousands of professionals are learning to do right now. Through my online communication courses at Media Training Worldwide. You can access my complete training library on demand, affordable and actually effective. Whether you're preparing for Media interviews, client presentations, or TED style talks. I've got you covered. Check it out. Mediatrainingworldwide.com you'll never wing it again. Welcome back to Filtered Can Paul Atkins Bank IPOs great again the New York Times DealBook reports that SEC Chair Paul Atkins wants to revive listings by trimming disclosures, limiting some shareholder proposals, and allowing arbitration for investor disputes. He argues disclosure isn't meant to be a torture, it's meant to provide information. Critics counter the IPO drought isn't just red tape, it's merger and acquisition gravity. Over the last 15 years, Big Tech bought many would be public companies. Meta picked up Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. Amazon bought Twitch, Ring and Pillback. Alphabet acquired Waze, Nest and Looker. A Dartmouth analysis attributes much of the listings declines to acquisitions. While World bank data shows U.S. public companies fell from roughly 8,090 way back in 1996 to only about 4,010 in 2024. Harvard Research ties rising mergers and acquisition activity to winner take all dynamics. Even if the SEC speeds filings, startups may still prefer fast certain takeovers. Reforming IPOs without addressing mega buyer dominance risks losing the pipeline before it reaches Wall Street. Okay, what's the real message here? The idea that you're going to make ipos great again by reducing bureaucracy or making things opaque, not requiring disclosure, is an absolute fantasy. If you want more IPOs, we need strong antitrust enforcement so that Facebook and Medicare gobble up every single company in the world. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. I too would like to see more companies go public. Again, I'm a capitalist here. I'm a sane, sensible centrist. I'm assuming most of you in this audience consider yourself some version of that or you wouldn't be watching this show. I believe in capitalism. I want most of the market, most of our economy in the United States and around the world in the hands of free enterprise, in the hands of non government entities. So this is not a socialism versus anti socialism free market type of debate here. The issue is how do you create an environment? The whole concept of free markets is competition. The whole concept of competition is there are rules. We can't have a boxing match and I come out with my boxing gloves and you just take a laser gun, zap me and I fall over dead. That's not a competition. If you're going to have competition in an economy, there have to be rules that people follow. Now, unfortunately, in recent decades in the United States, the antitrust laws have been interpreted as as long as prices don't go up, companies can get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we've seen from that Amazon gobbling up everything in its wake. We've seen Facebook gobbling up every competitor, Google gobbling up everything. And it just makes it virtually impossible for new companies, especially new technology companies, to really grow to the point of becoming public. Now again, why should anyone care if a company is public? Because that's the only opportunity. Someone who isn't really connected and fabulously wealthy and have close ties to major hedge funds and major banks in New York City, can own pieces of companies. If you're not an insider, typically you're going to not get a part of any insider deal. And that's how private companies work. They have the, they have the right to do that. But when a company goes public that anyone in the world who has enough money to buy one share can own a piece of that company, it's essentially democratizing our capitalistic system, which is a good thing. It diffuses risk, it allows more people to have an ownership state in our free market system to build wealth. We want that. And that's what's been really a huge problem. Going from 8,000 publicly traded companies 30 years ago, less than 30 years ago, to half of that. So it's been cut in half, 50% loss. Companies are getting bigger and bigger. They have more marketing power and they're able to just crush dissent. Imagine yourself trying to start a competitor to Amazon right now. You would be laughed out of every venture capitalist office in the country today if you did that. They'd be like, you can't compete. They're going to smush you like a butt bug. Whereas imagine 30 years ago or 40 years ago, you wanted to perhaps raise capital from people in your community and say, look, we got this huge new development on the northeast part of town. It's relatively affluent. There's no grocery stores there within a 10 minute drive of the people who live there. I want to start a grocery store. You could probably raise money to start a grocery store 40 years ago, but the equivalent is not true today with any kind of big company and any kind of tech company. And this administration is correctly identifying the problem. I give them credit for that. But what they're not doing is putting their finger on what the real solution is. It's not telling publicly traded companies, oh, you don't have to fill out forms on how you did the last quarter. The other theory that Paul Adkins is pointing out is we want to make it easier for companies to do things the Same way they do when they are a private company. A private company, you can just say, anyone who deals with us, you agree not to ever file a lawsuit against us in a court of law, you have to come to arbitration. Yeah, that's better for the company, but that's not how things work in the real world. When you're a publicly traded company wants to get rid of that provision, wants to make it easier for companies to hide information. That's really not the problem. The problem is companies cannot grow to the point of going public because the biggest tech companies, the Googles, the Metas, the Facebook, the Amazons, are so big, once they see you doing well, they can actually use their market power to put you out of business. Amazon did it to diapers.com Facebook essentially did it to Instagram. You're so big, we want you now. The Instagram people were happy to sell, but a part of their theory was we're not going to be able to get big enough to go public. So yeah, we'll make a lot of money. It's not really our first choice, but we got to do it. You could make the case that other companies like Waze would have loved to have been their own publicly traded company, perfectly independent. But the intersection, the so called synergy of Google already controlling all the data in the world, kind of force their hand. It doesn't have to be that way. You could have a football field that is 100 yards long, you could have one that's 40 yards long, you could have one THAT'S 200 yards. These are rules that rule makers make. It would in no way be against the concept of capitalism to simply change the rules. Have antitrust regulators say, okay, Facebook, you can't keep buying up companies. We want competition, we want competition for advertising. If you think there's competition for advertising today, you are deluding yourself. You basically have to deal with Facebook and Google and they can kind of charge whatever they want and they can also give you a lot of garbage and clickbait and fraud and not really deliver. What are you going to do? You want to call up customers? Guess what? There is no customer service. It's just send me your money. Because we're so big and powerful. If you don't like it, stuff it. I mean that is the attitude of these big, big companies and they can get away with it. You know what, it's our fault. It's our fault for supporting legislators. And this is across both parties here, folks. Let's be honest, the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States for too long have taken the attitude of as long as the customer doesn't see a monopoly making the prices skyrocket, then it's okay. Amazon did not take their monopoly power and all of a sudden start charging 4, 500, 600% premium to be more profitable. For the short run, they played the long game and Jeff Bezos said, you know what, I'm just going to keep cutting costs, keep cutting cost and really make that attractive. For one thing, it keeps the regulators off of me. For the other, it shows so much growth, I'm going to make all my money. With my stock price going up, I don't have to gouge consumers. But at some point when they have no competition, guess what? They can charge anything they want for those batteries delivered for the Kleenex you want the next day. And you're like, man, you're too lazy to go to the store. You're out of ink for your pen and you want to press that button and instead of it coming to you for 80 cents, maybe it's $49 and you don't even realize it. So that's the problem with our current state of affairs when it comes to big companies being able to buy up small ones and the fact that it's virtually impossible to have an independent or an initial public offering today and gimmicks suggested by the current head of the SEC are not going to solve the problem. More in a moment after these words. We'll be right back after this break. Want to advertise here? You better be legit. No crypto, no junk food, no supplements. Go to tjwalker.com advertise Most people can't afford a full time coach and even if you could, good luck finding one who's available when you need them. That's why I created the TJ Walker AI clone. It's built on my 40 plus years of real world coaching and training. You get my exact advice, style and frameworks instantly. Ask it how to handle a tough question. Get feedback on your elevator pitch. Rehearse your next big talk. This is the next generation of communication coaching. It's smarter than an app, more personal than a course, and always ready. Start using it today@tjwalker.com AI you'll wonder how you ever did without it. Want to advertise to ambitious, upscale professionals who actually care about communication success and Results? Go to tjwalker.com advertise and no, we don't take ads for crypto supplements or junk food. Okay. Welcome back to Filtered Cuomo closes in, but mayors don't rule like presidents. That's our next issue. According to the New York Post, an Atlas intel poll shows that ZORAN Mandami at 40.6% of the vote. The election is this Tuesday, so it's coming up. Only a few days left. Andrew Cuomo, and we're talking about the New York City mayoral race. Andrew Cuomo at 34%, so only a 6% spread there. And Curtis Lewa, the Republican nominee, at 24.1%, the tightest spread since July. Cuomo says, quote, 6 points is nothing and argues Mandami can't deliver free buses or city run groceries from City Hall. Context matters. Power in US Cities is diffuse, shared with council, state law in Albany, unions, courts and authorities, especially in weak mayor systems. History also shows ideology isn't destiny for City Hall. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic socialist senator, governed Burlington as a mayor and was widely regarded as effective even by conservatives and Republicans. Milwaukee elected three socialist mayors in the past, known for clean government and solid services. On the right, Libertarian aligned leaders like Lilly Wu and Wichita showed pragmatism can trump labels for New York City. Coalitions, budgets and state constraints will shape outcomes far more than slogans or party labels. Okay, what's the real message here? It certainly looks like Mandani is going to win and be the next mayor of New York City. And all the people pulling their hair out saying, oh my God, it's the end of the world. Every person making more than $50,000 a year will be forced to flee the city or are wrong. And socialists saying, wow, he's going to make this city so affordable and all the rich people are going to have to pay 90% state income tax or city income tax. They're wrong too. It's not going to be that big of a difference. Okay, let's dig a little deeper here. Now, with elections, part of what makes them exciting is you never really know what's going to happen. But certainly at this point, it appears that Mandani is going to win because the Republican, Curtis Lewis, widely considered across the spectrum to be a bit of a buffoon and a joke and a clown. Mario Cuomo, the former governor, had a dozen women say that he sexually harassed them. He has so many scandals from his term of office, he had to resign as governor. So many people who don't like Mandami, who would just normally vote for any kind of centrist Democrat saying, I can't vote for Cuomo. So it does look like very much that the Democratic socialist will win the election in New York City. Here's why I think people are so overly excited about this. Power in America is diffuse. It's shared with many, many people. Certainly if you're a mayor now, being the mayor of New York City gives you a huge bully pulpit, but it does not give you the right to just tax income on wealthy Wall Streeters who perhaps live in Connecticut. You can't do that without approval from the state and a lot of other people. You can't just will the change of market forces and make groceries cheaper everywhere. It doesn't work like that. You can't even necessarily control every aspect of transportation and do something that creates billions of dollars of deficits for the transportation system, even if you wanted to. So I think a lot of this is overblown on both sides. The people who are so passionate about him thinking he's going to change things radically. I'll make some prediction. A year from now, New York City is still going to be really expensive. And if you're not making a quarter million dollars a year and you're living in New York City, you're going to feel poor. And now that may sound crazy to a lot of you who live a nice middle class income on $80,000 in Cleveland or in Dubuque. And for those of you watching in India and in China, a lot of other parts of the world, it sounds insane. What do you mean? Quarter of a million dollars a year and you're not going to feel rich? No. New York City genuinely is a wildly expensive place. Even if Matani wins and institutes rent control, he's not going to roll back the rents to what they were 25 years ago. It's still going to be a wildly expensive place. Here's the part I think many political commentators miss. And I'm not here as a political commentator, just as a realist giving you sensible, sane information and insight. A lot of being a governing official, especially at the local level, especially being a mayor, has nothing to do with political ideology. It has to do with competence, energy, ethics, intelligence. You could find someone who agrees with you 100% on litmus tests, philosophical issues. If they're really lazy once they get into office and they just stay at home and watch video games, their underlings can rip off everyone blind. And you might not know it till it's too late. I've seen it happen before with people in both political parties. If someone shares all of your political values and you're in alignment on issues, but they're not very bright and they're kind of dumb, they're going to be Lobbyists and other political factions running circles around them, getting them to sign documents and laws that fundamentally harm your best interest. Someone can be completely aligned with you on issue after issue. If they just don't care whether the streets are clean or the buses work or the trains work because they live in the nicest part of town, in the highest fanciest high rise, and everyone comes to them, your life could get worse. On the other hand, you could be a far right libertarian, a far left communist. If you are really attentive to voters and five constituents, call up and say, hey, there's a huge pothole and in our street it's cratering. It's now five feet deep. Kids could fall in and die. And you go fix that pothole. Guess what? You've done what your voters want them to do. There's an old saying. There's no left wing, right wing potholes. There's no left wing, right wing garbage. You either pick it up or you don't. The other thing that I think doesn't, or it gets too much attention is the idea that somehow the socialist is coming, therefore all of Wall street is going to move out of New York City if he wins. Well, it's just not that easy. You can talk a game, you can talk like that. People don't actually find it easy to move. If you're a managing director of a trading unit, a trading desk, and you work for Chase or Bank of America and you manage 20 other traders and you're making $3 million a year, which is not uncommon, your marginal tax rate, when you add in city, state and federal taxes, it's going to be 50%, $1.5 million you're already sending to the federal government. And you did it when there was a Republican mayor too, and you didn't leave. As a practical matter, you can't just say, well, I'm moving to Florida, because you're in charge of managing 20 other traders. They're all showing up at the office of the Trading desk on Wall street or in Park Avenue every day. So you can whine, moan and groan. You can't easily move. So I'm not predicting, first of all, I'm not predicting who's going to win. Although I would be surprised if Madani didn't actually win this race. I will predict that the City of New York City is not going to be wildly or radically different a year from now than it is right now. If he can make some improvements, if he can do some things to make the quality of life a little more affordable. I think he's going to get a lot of support, especially if crime continues to go down as it has. If the city's streets seem to be cleaned and kept clean, he's going to gain support. He's going to get some of the credit for that. If any part of the city becomes more affordable, he'll get some credit for that. So Maybe he tries 20, 30 ideas of making things affordable and most of them don't work. If only one or two of them work and people feel like at least this guy is trying to make the city more affordable. And we still have a thriving Wall street, we still have a thriving banking community. We still have a thriving advertising and media world. People from all over the world still come here to see our Broadway shows, to hear our symphonies, to watch our operas. He's going to get rewarded. He's going to get reelected the way that socialist Bernie Sanders did as mayor of Burlington, the way various socialists got elected in other cities and the one I mentioned to you at the beginning in the Newsree Wichita. That's what they're built in from places that begin with Wisconsin. So it can happen across the political spectrum. There have been plenty of mayors who consider themselves libertarians far right. And they realize when a citizen calls up and says the stoplight is down on my street, they don't want to hear some libertarian philosophy. You got to fix it. And they did, by and large. So that is my prediction for the mayoral situation in New York City, that yeah, we may have a democratic socialist. He might be awful and incompetent. We don't really know. By all accounts, this gentleman has tremendous energy and tremendous ability to communicate with people and connect with people. I don't care who you are, those are huge assets. Being fair, Donald Trump has those strengths. Barack Obama had those strengths. Bill Clinton had those strengths. Ronald Reagan had those strengths. Does this mean this 34 year old who doesn't have much track record is in their league? Not yet. But he's young. Time will tell more in a moment after these words. Stay tuned. Imagine having a communication coach who never sleeps. Meet your new secret weapon, the TJ Walker AI clone. Go to TJ Walker AI 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 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. Okay, let's step back. We're going to go deeper here. This is a bit wonkier than we usually do here, but there is a new major, major piece of research out and it's called Deciding to Win. What works, what Doesn't Work. This was an analysis. It was done for the Democratic Party and I would do the very same for the Republican Party if they do a postmorum of elections they've lost. But this deciding to win is like a 500 page book. I want to give you a summary of some of the findings. They analyze thousands of races, hundreds of polls and more than 500,000 voter surveys to explain Democratic losses and to map a path to victory. Now it may be obvious to you why Democrats did so poorly in 2024, but it's not obvious to the Democrats. They're trying to figure out what do we do right? What do we do wrong? What do we change? Their core findings since 2012 according to this research, Democrats moved left and reprioritized away from kitchen table economics toward climate change issues, democracy, abortion and culture, leaving many voters judging the party, quote, too liberal and out of touch. Out of touch on cost of living, immigration and crime. The electorate leans moderate to conservative on so many of these issues, especially among working class and many minority voters. Candidates perceived as moderate tend to over perform. Ideologues underperform. Now this is contrary to a lot of popular opinion in the Democratic Party right now. Popular ground protect and expand health care, guard Social Security and Medicare and make the wealthy pay a fair share. Those are the popular issues. Unpopular issues broad student debt cancellation. Now that's a shocker to a lot of people in the Democratic Party because they think, well, you know, everyone's worried about student debt, right? Well, most people in America don't go to college and most people are not college graduates. Restrictive energy policies and progressive approaches to immigration and crime. These things just didn't work. The fix isn't surrendering values, it's prioritizing voters priorities. Lower cost, higher wages, safe streets and a functional border paired with tangible wins like drug price negotiation, junk fee crackdowns and a $15 minimum wage. Recruit heterodox doers. That's just a fancy word for pick people who represent their districts and they can look very different from AOC and Bernie Sanders and pick a 2028 nominee whose record matches the message. Winning is a choice. You've got to figure out if you're going to make it work. That's the really the analysis by this group. I urge you to check it out and read it. It's a lengthy read. You can just google deciding to win. I'll try to add it to the show notes as well. So what's the real message here? A lot of Democrats think if we just moved left, if all the Democratic candidates running in rural congressional seats sounded like AOC and Bernie Sander, we'd really galvanize the base and we'd win big. Well, the research says no, that is not what wins. What wins is having laser like focus on improving the economic conditions of average working class people. Let's dig a little deeper here. It was an extraordinarily detailed analysis and it gave you a breakdown. One thing that was shocking a little bit was how certain moderate candidates, Democratic candidates ran so much better than other Democrats in the national ticket did in their state. Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, was by far the best performing Democratic candidate in the country. When you look at what they project a Democrat should get in his state versus how he did, he outperformed by 20 percentage points. Now a lot of people have been giving Andy Beshear extra attention and do consider him a top tier potential presidential candidate. I think he deserves a lot of attention as well. He's doing something right. The analysis also laid out bear the problems the Democrats have in that it's not enough to get 50% of the vote because of the way so many districts are rural. Rural favors Republicans. And if you win more rural districts, even if it doesn't add up to more votes, you have more political power. So part of it is if the Democrats ever want to regain the Senate, not going to be enough to get 50% of the vote. They're going to have to get more like 53% of the vote, which means they can't just get liberal and progressive votes. They can't just get moderate votes. They're actually going to have to win the votes of some voters who perceive themselves as to the right of center. Republicans do not have that challenge. It's a simple function of the way our democracy is laid out. Between gerrymandering for the House, between the Senate giving disproportionately so much more power to rural states where nobody lives or very few people live. It changes the dynamic of the types of candidates who can win in those districts. And it's a well needed wake up call to the Democratic Party because again, I'm very, I'm very down to the idea that the Democratic Party can't win if all they do is put out candidates who say, well, I don't care for anything. I just want to win and I don't have any political philosophy. I just want power. So let me put my finger in the wind, let me take a poll and I'll do whatever the poll says. I buy into the idea that that's not the solution for the Democratic Party. They do have to be certain core values, but it can't be one size fits all. I mean, one of the scary things if you do care at all about the Democratic Party or even having a balance in our system where we have two competitive parties, is how absolutely dominant Donald Trump and the current Republican Party is in rural areas and how much ground they gained in the last few elections where they are just completely destroying Democrats. Have you ever seen one of these color coded maps of areas of the country won by Democrats and areas of the country run by won by Republicans, broken down by congressional districts or even precincts? I mean, the country looks 90% red. Now, obviously it doesn't translate that into voting totals, but the Democrats have been destroyed in county after county after county in America, really since 2012. There's been a lot of loss, but certainly in the last couple of election cycles, something has to change or increasingly you're going to see the Democrats placed in a state of permanent minority status. So I urge you to check out this report again. It's a lengthy read. I didn't read the entire book, but they do make it publicly available, about 30 or 40 pages with extraordinarily comprehensive graphics and information on what's going on there. So check it out. Regardless of what party you like, it is important if you want to be intelligent and up on politics in America to know what both parties think. And we should point out there are many times when there's postmortems when a party does poorly and the very next election that party does the opposite of everything they were told they were supposed to do to win. Famously, after 2012, the Republican Party came out with a report saying that they need to be much more inclusive to minorities and Hispanics and soften their image. They nominated Trump and they won. So it's not always right. The other thing I found fascinating about this report, I hadn't thought of it in quite these terms, but it made the point that the more moderate candidate typically wins. That's not the shocking part, but they made the point that Donald Trump in many areas is perceived by tens of millions of Americans as being more moderate than the traditional Republican nominee because he did in fact take more moderate positions on Social Security, on even Obamacare, on, on gay rights. There's just a number of issues. On free trade, he was not the pure hardline peer trader that Republicans traditionally were. And he was seen as a more moderate voice by many voters, rightly or wrongly. Whereas the Democrats have been increasingly seen as focusing on issues that are not important. Things like free college for everyone is doing severe damage to the party base, to potential base of the party of working class people defined as people who don't have college degrees. Now, we can have a debate another day as to whether society would be better off if more people went to college and if college were as inexpensive as it was 40, 50 years ago when I was going to college. But politically, it's just not helping the Democrats. Okay, what do you think? I would love to hear from you. You can post your comments right here. If you're watching this on demand on any platform, please feel free to leave your comments and I will read them. I try to respond to every single comment, every question, every fact check. Please let us know. I would love to hear from you. We're going to switch now to our grab bag section of the show. These are the topics where we thought, okay, I can't devote 10 or 15 minutes on it, but it does deserve some attention. Okay, today's grab bag section, Trump vs. Seth Meyers. The Daily Mail reports that Donald Trump blasted NBC's Seth Meyers as a, quote, deranged lunatic, calling the comedian's criticism probably illegal. After Myers mocked Trump's preference for steam over electromagnetic aircraft carrier catapults. Myers joked, Trump, quote, spends more time thinking about catapults than Wiley E. Coyote. That's the cartoon character, and ribbed the president's Asia trip as craving royal treatments. It's the latest flare up in a long running feud with cancellation chatter and free speech jabs framing the broader culture fight. Late night keeps swinging. Trump keeps counterpunching. Okay, a lot of fun was had about Jimmy Kimmel. And in that case, the Democratic message seemed to prevail. This was a case when a lot of Americans, many of whom are centrist and even right of center, said, okay, Trump's gone too far. We might like his position on being tough against immigrants and aliens, and occasionally we like his tariffs. But telling us what comedians we can laugh to, that's a bit too strong. He seems to be going at it again. Now, Trump is a savvy media figure. He knows this is catnip for the Internet, for media commentators and frankly for people like me. He knows he can manipulate me because now we're talking about it. But where is it going to go? Seth Meyers, I think is talented. I personally find him funny. If you don't, that's okay, doesn't make you a bad person. But historically in America, it just didn't matter. If you considered yourself a right wing conservative, a centrist, a liberal, a left, it didn't matter. You didn't want the president telling you that a particular comedian should be deemed illegal because they criticized that president. That's just something that frankly never occurred to Ronald Reagan. Didn't mean they enjoyed it. But Ronald Reagan never occurred to him. Never occurred to either of the President Bush's. This is something new. It strikes a lot of people as crazy. Now, will Seth Meyers be canceled? I don't think because of this issue. I think NBC realizes, you know, we don't want to be the next Bob Iger. We don't want to have everyone call us Neville Chamberlain. I think they're going to try to disengage, not antagonize the president and hope he goes on to talk about something else. Seth Meyers might be canceled, but only for the reason most shows are canceled these days, falling ratings, falling advertising revenue and the fact that people can watch Seth Meyers on his podcast and on YouTube and they don't need the whole broadcasting apparatus of NBC and their local NBC affiliates. Okay, we're going to close out today's show as we do every day, taking your questions. As I mentioned to you earlier, and some of you know, I have 12 million online student enrollments for my communication skills courses and personal development courses. And I give them an opportunity to ask questions. We answer them right here to share ideally with more of you insights on how to be more successful. This show is different. We're a news program. We're a news analysis program. But it's also a blend with personal development to help you become more successful in your personal life as well as your professional life. So this question comes from Felipe, who is a student in my online course, the complete storytelling course for speaking and presenting the biggest decision you will ever make about storytelling. So one of our students there and I'll be sharing you my take and I can answer your questions here as well. So here's the question. How can I build a magnetic presence and effectively tell compelling stories that help me grow a strong community around my brand, Urban Cintis, as I share stories about urban life and our collective experiences. And I apologize, I don't know what Urban Sentis is. So part of the challenge might be just educating people on what that's all about. Let's step back a minute. And first of all, thank you so much for asking the question. Thanks for really aspiring to be a better communicator and a better storytelling. The number one difference I find between great communicators and average and awful communicators is not their diction, their vocabulary, their looks, their voice, or their body language. No, the number one difference between great communicators and wildly successful communicators and everyone else is that wildly successful communicators tell stories. Not just at the beginning of a presentation, not just an icebreaker, not a joke, not just to end the story, but every single time they want to communicate a message, they illustrate it with a story. You asked about how to be magnetic. Look, it's one thing if you want to be the next Anthony Robbins and be on stage in front of 10,000 people, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to build a business, be successful in almost any field, people will start to perceive you as magnetic if you speak in an interesting way and ways that help them, that are interesting to them. So when you say magnetic, that's more of like, I want people to love me and give me a standing ovation. That's more of an inward thing where you're looking for praise and credit. And, hey, we all like praise and credit. I'm not saying that makes you bad, but the first step you need to take if you really want to have an impact on people and by the way, be perceived as magnetic, is focus on talking to them about ways to help them to make them more successful. Whether you're selling a product or a service or a political campaign to change society, focus on something that's going to make their life better, either materially or entertaining them more socially. Focus on benefiting them. The stories come into play by making them understand the message in a way that's more memorable to them and relevant to them. The big problem so many people have telling stories is they're just not interesting to other people. It's good to tell personal stories, but if you're just talking about how cute your kid was, you know, throwing up on the floor this morning and how you were inconvenienced but everyone laughed, it's not interesting to other people unless they actually know you and your kids. So the stories need to be about something, some message that is relevant to your audience and benefits your audience. That's the key. If you do that consistently and you just come across as comfortable and relaxed and engaging, you will be perceived, believe it or not, as a magnetic speaker and as a compelling speaker. Because remember the number one problem most speakers have in every industry. I don't care if you're in tech, if you're in finance, if you're in media. The number one problem most speakers have is not that they aren't magnetic. It's not their accent, it's not their vocabulary. The number one problem most speakers have is they're so darn boring. Everyone has fallen asleep or everyone is checking their cell phone saying, when is this guy gonna stop droning on and on and on. That's the number one problem most speakers have in every field. So if you focus on helping your audience, whether they are investors in yours, whether they are employees, whether they are stakeholders, whether they are customers or prospects, focus on messages that are interesting to them, relevant to them, and help them. Then illustrate it with stories involving real conversations you had with real people about real problems just like them and how you helped solve them. If you do that and do that consistently, people will love listening to you and they will perceive you in a positive way. Whether they use the phrase magnetic or charming or just interesting, you will be the big winner. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm TJ Walker. Please like this video or audio you are watching or listening. Subscribe Sign up for notifications, leave comments and please leave reviews, especially if you're on one of the new podcasting platforms we've been on. And again, special thank you to all of our friends joining us through Pod TV on Amazon, Fire and Roku. Thanks. See you tomorrow.