Shutdown Optics, Kid-Safe Screens, and a Town That Outlawed Tobacco

Foreign. Here's what's ahead. A fast food chain steps into a shutdown. Carl Jr rolls out $1 kids meals for SNAP families. Real relief for diners. Sharp optics for Washington, D.C. denmark moves to bar social media for anyone under 15 years old, echoing the anxious generation and forcing big tech to prove real age checks. A Bay Area town goes further than anyone on tobacco. No sales, no deliveries, period. What actually happens to your body after consuming a single can of Coke will walk the one hour hit from sugar spike to crash it inside China's state backed race to beat Aging Immortality islands and the line between promise and hype. All that and more today. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. It is Saturday. Excuse me, not October, November 8, 2025. Thanks so much for joining me. We'll be looking at the top stories of the day as always and with a big focus on health today. Today, Saturday, a good time to be thinking about those issues. But first, let's check in on the market how it did. Yesterday S&P 500 closed at 6,728. That's up 0.13%. Yesterday the NASDAQ Composite closed at 23,004.54, down 0.21%. Always keep in mind the long term. We're long term thinkers here at Filtered. The long term, the S&P 500 has been up 8.32% per year on average for the last 25 years. The NASDAQ 100 is up 9.09% on average every year for the last 25 years. So please, please always keep in mind the long term. Okay, let's dive right into issue one today. There is in fact still a short shut down in Washington that affects things like food programs and one company has decided they will try to solve a part of the problem, $1 meals, smart marketing and a snap lifeline. Carl's Jr. The hamburger chain is turning a government failure into a $1 solution. Southern California franchises are offering kids hamburger, small fries and a drink for $1 to anyone showing an EBT card, a federal employee ID or a military ID at participating locations while supplies last. This comes as the shutdown stalls food aid for millions using snap. That's the supplemental nutritional aid program, what people think of as food stamps. A court move to keep November benefits flowing was contested by the Trump administration, prolonging uncertainty for families. Critics call this politics of cruelty, where the pain itself becomes the point. Carl's Jr. Leans into a different message, community, as franchise owner Amir Sadiqi put it, when the neighborhood is under stress, a warm, cheap meal matters. It's genuine relief and undeniably savvy brand positioning. That's reporting courtesy of the New York Times. Okay, so what's the real Message here? Carl's Jr. A fast food hamburger joint, a junk food fast food organization now is taking the moral high ground when it comes to taking care of kids versus Washington D.C. when that happens, you know, the whole world has gone topsy turvy. Let's dig a little deeper here. I give credit to the people at Carl's saying, okay, let's step in. A lot of our customers, a lot of people in our community are hurting. We want to help them. And so they're taking a little bit of a hit, presumably. I understand fast food, they buy in bulk. It's not that costly. But with employment charges, rent, overhead, marketing, advertising, they're not making money selling a meal for a dollar. Now the Make America Healthy Again program and a lot of nutritionists and a lot of doctors would say, oh my God, the last thing we need are kids, especially poor kids, eating more french fries, drinking more sugary drinks and eating junk food. But everything's relative compared to no food. Yeah, a dollar Carl's hamburger drink and fries has got to be pretty tantalizing. Now I give credit. This is bizarre because normally Carl's is in the receiving end of a lot of negative publicity. They have famously run really sleazy commercials with hot sexy women dripping with what looks like butter and sort of classical sexist imagery. Here they are coming out looking like the good guys, the good folks, the kind hearted people in the community. I do want to stress this is not nationwide. This is not a solution to the fact that there are 40 some million Americans now who have no food stamps and none of their SNAP benefits, who are trying to figure, and most of these are kids. It's all well and good to think of the middle aged lady driving around in the Cadillac swilling malt liquor, being lazy. But the reality is most hungry people in America are kids. They are the ones who benefit from these SNAP programs. And right now a lot of people in America are going hungry because of this government shutdown and because the administration has decided even though they could pay the benefits, they're not going to until the government's back open. We'll leave that debate for another time. What I am focused on is frankly, how Carl's was smart here. They saw a big, big story. They also saw a huge problem facing their not only society, but people in their own community, their own customers. And they found a solution. Because of that, they'd gotten millions and millions of dollars of positive publicity. This is the new world of marketing and media and branding. Something like this goes a long way to really making people feel warm and cuddly about your brand. There are going to be people who are perhaps going to get their first and maybe only meal this week from Carl's, who are down and out on their luck right now. And through no fault of their own, their kids, their parents didn't have the money for them. The food stamps ran out. Some of these kids are going to grow up to be the next generation. It's in Los Angeles. It's Southern California. So some of these people are going to grow up to become famous movie stars, movie directors, perhaps Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs. Some of them are going to be very successful. And I'm willing to bet they're going to take their kids to Carl's. They may have their own private, fancy chefs at some point when they're really successful, but they're going to have a warm spot in their own heart for Carl's because of something like this. So this is a huge branding opportunity for Carl. They took the advantage of it. And I think there are opportunities for other companies to do this as well, especially if it involves food. Now, some of you may be saying, well, T.J. it's easy for you to be generous with other people's money. I get that. Grocery stores already work on extremely small margins. Most restaurants have extremely small margins. They can't all simply say, here's free food, or here's food at 10% of what our costs are without going bankrupt. I understand that. But if you are a company or any organization and can somehow help people during this extremely troubling time, it's going to go a long way to build your brand and to build positive goodwill and to frankly, get a lot of positive publicity for your organization. So I do think that for savvy media operators these days, we're past the age of going to cigar and martini lunches with John Draper and coming up with that brilliant idea of sitting around singing Kumbaya to Coca Cola. We're at the point, and we are going to be talking about Coke in a later story today. We are at the point where you've got to look around at what's going on in the world. How can you actually be a part of the conversation? And Carl Junior's this is one time when they're on the positive side of the conversation. They're not dominating the conversation about sexist. Ads. They're not a part of the conversation about the problems with junk food or childhood obesity. They're actually part of a solution, which is how do you deal with the fact that the United States, one of the richest countries in the entire world, if not the richest, depending on your metric, now has tens of millions of people, citizens, most of them kids, who are hungry. And while a hamburger and fries and a Coke are not my first choice, if I were hungry, it would be my number one, number two and number three choice. So hats off to Carl for two things, one, PR move of the day and number two, for doing something that's helping in a current political environment where no one seems to really care at all about these poor people. Carl's maybe they're not doing it for purely altruistic reasons, but the bottom line is they are helping people eat who need food. So kudos to them. 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. 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 at tjwalker AI. You'll wonder how you ever did without it. Welcome back to Filtered. I'm your host, TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. It's a Saturday morning. If this is your first time here, thank you so much for joining us. This is the show where we do a deep dive. Every day, seven days a week, we look at the top five stories of the day, typically business stories, technology stories, culture stories, sometimes stories that affect your health. And we look at them, filter them through the prism of communication skills, personal development skills, all with the goal of making you more successful in your own personal life and your professional life. Let's head on over to Denmark now. Denmark moves to bar social media for kids under 15 years of age. Denmark is drawing a hard line. No social media for kids under 15. A narrow exception at 13 would require a parental assessment and strict age checks likely tied to the National Identification Card Digital Affairs Minister Carolyn Stage says the risks violence, self harm and relentless targeting are too great. Under European Union rules, platforms that fail proper verification could face major fines. TikTok says it will cooperate. Jonathan Hyde's the Anxious Generation. It's a great book, is is the subtext here. Delay social media, make schools phone free and restore real world independence. That's what he recommends in that best selling book. Australia already sets its bar at 16. Denmark aims to be Europe's test case. Delay the feeds, protect developing minds and put adults back in charge. The message is simple and firm. Protect childhood first and make big tech. Prove it can keep kids safe. So what's the real message here? Denmark actually cares about kids. It cares about kids more than lining the pockets of billionaire technology companies. Good for them. The idea that teenagers, young minds, malleable minds, need to be ignoring the outside, ignoring friends, ignoring social activity so they can hunch over and stare at their phone and hit like all day long is bizarre. And kudos to Denmark for saying enough of it. You can do that when you're an adult. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt's book the Anxious Generation. I would urge you to look at it. Clearly, a number of policy officials and elected officials in Denmark took this book quite seriously. And the book's findings was. You can track almost from the day the iPhone went live back in 2007 how once there was social media adoption, once apps became prevalent, once everyone is looking at Facebook and TikTok, what you see is a clear cut correlation. No, it's not necessarily causation, but there's a correlation between, between increased depression rates among kids, increased suicide rates, increased bullying rates, increased rates of obesity because no one's outside playing anymore. And one solution is to let kids be kids. Let them play, let them play outside, let them draw, let them doodle, let them get in fist fights. Sometimes might be better than just staring at phones and staring at video games all day long. So this is a tricky issue, there's no doubt about it. Because if you live in a culture where social media is not banned for your teenager, there's going to be constant pressure because your teenager will say, well, everyone else does. Mom, dad, you're making me a pariah. Everybody hates me. I'm the only one not participating on TikTok or Roblox or these other things. So it's a difficult issue. Now I have a 12 year old at home and we exert strict parental if they're up to me, she wouldn't even have a phone. But I lost that debate. She does have a phone, but there is strict access, hour and a half time limit, no access to social media. But she somehow configured the, the locks to get onto TikTok occasionally, yes. Has she used roadblocks? Yes. Now, what I try to do, the differentiation in my own mind is are you passively just looking at content, which case can rot your brain, make you jealous, make you compare yourself to others negatively. And those are the things that Jonathan Haidt has shown in so damaging to really everybody, but especially young kids and even worse young girls. It disproportionately seems to mess with their psyche and increase the rates of self harm, self cutting, even suicide. But it's just, it's such a pervasive, pervasive problem. The differentiation I make is if you're using social media to create. Now I was about to tell my daughter, absolutely, you cannot go on Roblox. And then she showed me what she does. She plays a game where an image comes up and you're told, okay, draw a picture of a clown or the seaside. And you've got a time limit. I think it's about five minutes. So you're drawing this and it lumps you together with half a dozen other kids. Once the time limit's up, everyone's drawing comes up. You vote on a one to five scale for each one and then you see who wins. So it's really stimulating her creativity and some competitive juices. And I did that with her, I played with her and I guess a bunch of other people. A couple of nights ago I somehow came in last place with the drawings, but my daughter came in first place in six out of six tries. So it did cause me to rethink my reflexive knee jerk reaction of social media is bad. So I do make an exception there if she's willing to use it to create and be a part of creative competitions. Let's look at some more of the numbers here that are troubling. This is according to studies that just came out of the European Union, they found that their kids were spending 120 to 132 minutes per day on TikTok, 79 to 89 minutes per day on Instagram. Kids and teens Roblox 137 minutes US kids 8 to 14 an average of 2 hours and 59 minutes a day on all devices. 46% of teens reported to be on their phones essentially at all times. And what I'VE noticed with my own almost to be teen. She'll be a teen in just a few months is she doesn't want to be without her phone now, even if she's used up her she gets a strict 90 minutes total of phone time a day for texting friends. Even when her phone time was up, she didn't want to go for a walk outside without her phone. I said, I'm leaving my phone at home. You're going to leave your phone at home and we're going to actually clear our brains and let ourselves enjoy the real world and enjoy nature. I do recommend to you, whether it's for yourself, your family, your kids, try to spend some time every day with a phone nowhere near you. Turn it off, put it in a desk, go for a walk. It's much, much better for you. But bottom line, I want to thank Denmark. I think they're doing the right thing. Is it an abridgment of freedom? Yes. But guess what? We already abridged the freedoms of children. We don't give children the freedom to drive. Why? Because they're more likely to damage themselves, kill themselves than adults are. Do we let children buy as much beer or wine as they want? No, because they're more likely to damage their brains at such a young age. So it's about time I think people realized social media is powerful and it's a powerful force for good sometimes, as I hope I'm doing right now on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram and X. But it can be an extraordinarily powerful force for bad things, for causing depression, for making people nervous and anxious and feeling unproductive in every level. So I'm hoping more communities, more schools take this action, because in cities around the United States, in schools, when a school says, all right, a complete ban, you cannot bring your phone on campus. It's not that you should have to have it on silent or vibrate. If we see your phone, we take it away. What they've noticed is kids start talking more, they socialize more, they literally read more books from the library if you take the phones away. So this idea that everybody has to have a phone, it's complete false, complete falsity. This idea that somehow it's safer to not go anywhere, that, no, there's no evidence of that somehow in the entire history of humans for the last 200,000 years, until 2007, most people were able to go anywhere and everywhere without a phone and make it through life perfectly fine. What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear from you. If you're watching this on Demand or listening to it on any podcast platform. Thanks for doing so. You can post your comments. I typically review comments wherever they are. If you're watching this live, then you can comment right now. And I see that that Angie has written and making a comment about purporting to know my religion. Well, Angie, we're not talking about religion and I don't know why you could possibly be interested in that or why you would assume I or anyone you don't know even believes in religion. But I do. Thank you Angie for a watching b stopping by and saying hello. Myshin Ken 58 says the administration says affordability is just fine, so no worries. I think you're being condescending there. So yes, the current administration is saying that inflation has been solved, economy has never been better, and therefore people shouldn't really have to worry about their SNAP benefits or their food stamps being cut off now. Everything's going to be fine. Well, if you're one of the tens of millions of Americans who now have your food stamps run out, especially if you're a kid, you're an 8 year old kid and mom or dad says, sorry, I went to the grocery store but they wouldn't give me any food, our food stamps are gone. It's not going to create much of a good warm, fuzzy feeling if you hear politicians in Washington saying things are fine. So my shinskin, I think I share your sentiment. Nick Bradshaw writes in Nick Bradshaw, the Human Angle how can I watch your show? Okay, if you are watching on TikTok, you're only seeing a side angle of me. This show is broadcast every single day live and on demand on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Twitch, on Instagram, on X, and a handful of other platforms. It's also podcast and stream live on podbean. You can find us there if you want the live feed. If you want to watch On Demand, you can go to my YouTube channel. That's really the best place. Now segments of this show are sliced and diced and repackaged. So almost anything on this show you can see as a segment on TikTok. If that's where you are right now, Nick. But if you want to see the entire show, it's on my Facebook page, which is TJ Walker Success. It's on my YouTube channel, which is TJ Walker Success. You can see it there as well. Now, Scott points out that the Democrats could solve the issue of the food stamps that we talked about in the first issue by agreeing to agreeing to the continuing resolution. Scott, I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist, and I'm going to tell you the truth. That's not just carrying water for any one political party. So, Scott, you're absolutely right that that's true. But the context of you saying that and only that you're just giving a Republican Party talking point, I'm going to give you the honest, centrist, true position as it relates to this issue. So for starters, you are absolutely correct that people would start getting their food stamps again if the Democrats simply passed a continuing resolution to raise the debt ceiling. You're absolutely right. So that is one solution. But if that's all you hear, you're getting nothing but partisan spin. Another solution is the only thing that has to happen is for the Republicans to accept the proposal from the Democrats, which is to raise the debt ceiling and to simply continue the current funding for health insurance for tens of millions Americans who currently get subsidies, as they have for years, to help them afford their health care. So it's not a new health care program. It's not giving health care to illegal immigrants and illegal aliens. It's just doing what's already been happening for the last year, the last several years, which is some people get some subsidies so they can afford health insurance. So the Democratic position is we're happy to continue funding. The government just don't cut existing benefits to tens of millions of Americans. Who would see people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman. She said her own two adult children in their mid-20s would see their health care premiums double. Most informed estimates, credible estimates say there'd be about 5 million Americans who simply could not afford health care and would have no health care or whatever. So 5 million would be tossed off of any health care. And the Democrats are just saying we just want to continue what we've been doing for them like that. In one second, the Republicans and Trump could say, that sounds reasonable, let's do it. So that's one solution. That's the second solution. The third solution is Republicans don't need a single Democratic vote. This has not been given enough attention. And again, I'm playing it straight here for you, folks. I gave President Trump credit for earlier this week saying maybe we should get rid of the filibuster, because the Republicans already have a healthy majority in the United States Senate. They've got some, you know, more than 50 votes, 53 votes. They could simply pass a resolution saying from here on out, to pass anything in the Senate requires a simple majority vote. It's a democracy. Therefore, there would no longer be a filibuster requirement of getting 60 votes. So the Republicans could do that in two seconds. And then in two more seconds they could say, let's simply fund the continuing resolution as the President wants. So there are three solutions to closing this, and I'm here to tell you as a sane, sensible centrist, what all of them are. Now, I can't purport to tell you every single side of every single issue facing the country today, but I'm not going to let any partisan try to spin this show or this audience thinking only one side can easily solve. It's only the other side's problem. Okay, Piranha says, what's the topic we're talking about that. So the real deal says taxation is theft. Okay? So therefore you must be radically opposed to tariffs and what this administration is doing, because tariffs are taxes in another way. So if you really believe taxation is theft, then I guess by theft you mean always wrong. What you actually mean is you would like to close every public school in America. You would like for there to be no Internet because there would have been no taxation to fund the basic research. You would like no roads. You would like no air flight because it requires public dollars to build airports. So you're entitled to that opinion. But you do need to realize you're out of step with about 99.99% of the people. And if you believe in democracy, it just doesn't really matter what 0.0001% of people think. Happy to hear your opinion. We do voice contrarian opinions here, but if at some level you believe in democracy or republic, you've got to persuade people. And real deal, you're going to have a tough time persuading people that the tax dollars to pay for a stop sign is somehow theft. We have lots more to come. Thanks for your comments. Stay tuned. Back in just a moment. 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 youm'll never wing it again. Welcome back to Filtered a Bay Area test case. One town just banned tobacco completely. Tiberian, California just passed the nation's most sweeping tobacco and nicotine sales ban. No cigarettes, cigars, vapes or deliveries, period. Not just talking about indoors or restaurants, but anywhere. The unanimous ordinance goes beyond earlier city bans by stripping out most carve outs. Landlords must add no smoking clauses to multi unit leases. Repeat violators can face civil actions. Fines run from 250 to $1,000 per incident. Student advocates push hard. The law takes effect in December. Now here's the context. Tobacco kills roughly 480,000Americans a year, about 1300 every day. And long term smokers lose about 10 years of life expectancy on average. Let's compare that to some other things. Heroin involved. Overdose deaths, while devastating, are a fraction of that. We're talking about just a few thousand a year. And history shows how so called normal can age badly. Heroin. Heroin once sold as cough as a cough remedy, believe it or not. Cocaine was in patent tonics and non drug products like lawn darts used to be around. Now it just seems unthinkable. Leaded gas used to be everywhere. That caused a lot of problems. So this town in California isn't nibbling at the edges. It's testing whether a town can make nicotine, nicotine, scarcity real. What's the real message here? One town in America has said enough is enough. Tobacco kills nearly half a million people a year in America. It's a deadly product. We don't want to see our citizens die needlessly. So let's just kick it out of town. You know what, it's an interesting experiment. Let's see how it turns out. Let's go a little deeper here. Obviously there are issues of personal freedom and some people are reflexively going to say, I don't want to live in a nanny state. Okay, I don't know where the line is. I'll be honest with you. I have mixed feelings about this. I certainly think it's a great thing that fewer Americans than ever smoke. I think it's great that we do not see smoking portrayed in a positive way that's made to look cool in every movie and TV show the way we used to. And I love the fact that I can go to a restaurant or go hear live music somewhere and I don't have to breathe other people's smoke all the time. Now I grew up in North Carolina, which is a huge, huge place for growing tobacco. Was when I grew up, still is. And I Remember the day when you go into a restaurant, sit in the so called no smoking section and the booth right next to you is the smoking section and someone's smoking and the smoke is wafting over. I'm coughing and my eyes are getting red and I'm going, this is awful. And I would sometimes be obnoxious. At least others thought that I thought it was obnoxious to smoke around other people because when you do smoke, you are forcing other people to inhale your secondhand smoke. Should you still be able to buy a cigar, for example, or a cigarette where it's all wrapped at a grocery store or convenience store, take it home, smoke inside your house, or smoke in your backyard? As of right now, I would say most Americans do think you should be able to do that. And I'm not going to argue strenuously that they're wrong. But I do think all of us need to sometimes question assumptions. Just because something is commonplace doesn't mean it doesn't deserve scrutiny or second, you know, some questioning. It used to be perfectly legal. When I was a kid, we would drive around without seat belts. I remember going on a trip, I would just take a nap, sprawled out my head in my father's lap or my mother's lap, driving. I'm sprawled across the front seat, no seatbelts. These days you would get fined, you'd get arrested for that. Did it take away the rights of kids and parents to ride around without seatbelts, sprawled out in the front? Yeah, it did, but it also saved so many lives. Will this catch on? Now? This is apparently a small, affluent town. A lot of wealthy, health conscious people didn't have any stores in it selling tobacco. So it was an easy, a relatively easy political lift to make this happen. But what happens if 20 years from now we go back and look at the data and lo and behold, the average life expectancy in this town is 90 versus 70 for the rest of America. Is that going to make some people think about it differently? You can always say, well, they're living longer because they're wealthier, they exercise more. It's correlation, not causation. Maybe one of the hallmarks of most pundits out there in the economic sphere, the business sphere, where I am, political sphere, where other commentators are, is to tell you 100% these guys are 100% wrong. Here's the one perfect way I know exactly what it should be. I'm not going to play that game. I'm going to play it to you straight. I'm going to give it to you straight. I'm a sane, sensible centrist. I don't know truthfully how I would have voted if I had been on this town council. But it's an interesting experiment. I do think that at some level, it's not necessarily a nanny state to ask the government to protect you from needless death. We could in fact have zero food inspectors, zero FDA and just have everything a free for all. And if someone wants to sell you meat that's got poison in it and you die, you could say, well, that's the free market. We could do it that way. But we decide we want some limitations. We want to actually have stuff we put in our body, examined and tested to see if it kills us. Well, when it comes to tobacco, we know it kills us. But the argument is, okay, people, if people know that it kills you, then they have. Then you're not tricking them, you're not fooling them. That part is true. But just because that's true doesn't mean it shouldn't necessarily be legal. By that logic, any heroin, any crack, by that logic, we should be able to sell crack on every street corner. If the metric is simply as long as people are alerted to the dangers, in a free society, they should have anything. And the problem is, if you literally do have crack being sold free without any legality issues on every street corner in America, you would see, I think you would see an absolute unmitigated nightmare. Anyway, I hope to follow up on this city in a year or two, see what happens. What do you think? First of all, would it even affect you? Do you smoke? And I understand you could say, well, I don't smoke, but I think people should have the right to smoke. Okay, we've already put limitations on public spheres, public buildings, office buildings where people have to go to work, malls, things like that. Some places New York City has been on the forefront of this limits it from public parks, outdoors because again, the smoke is wafting into other people's faces, their lungs. I don't have a problem with that. But is this going too far? I'd love to hear from you. Please post your thoughts on what this California town is doing to completely ban all sale of tobacco. More health news in a moment. Saturday I'm feeling healthy. I just finished a fantastic hour, hour and a half of pickleball. Although I have to say I played poorly my first three games. I hit unforced error after unforced error. But I did win my last two games and did did win the last one with my wife. And it was a nice celebration. We are celebrating our wedding anniversary today and it was nice to win together on the pickleball court. I hope you're doing something athletic today. Exercise, sport, going for a walk. As much as I appreciate you watching this or listening to this today on your phone or your TV or your iPad or your laptop, spend some time away from screens today. On this Saturday, do something fun. Get some exercise. Do something. One quick comment coming in from Noel. Smoking in California has been banned in all public places. I like it. So that's gone over really well in a lot of parts of America, Europe and a few other places too. This is going much further. No sale. You can't even buy it and use it in your own home. But Noel, thanks so much for stopping by today. We're going to be back in just a moment with news about what happens to you after drinking one Coca Cola. Imagine having a communication coach who never sleeps. Meet your new secret weapon, the TJ Walker AI clone. Go to TJWalker 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. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today and comments. More comments coming in. Donna writes. Love your show. Well Donna, thank you so much. Please let me know where you're watching the show, what platform, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, Facebook x or where you're listening to it, I'd love to know which. We try to be fair and make this show available on every platform to reach the widest range of people. Okay, let's go right into our next issue here. This is a bit surprising and shocking. I want to share this story with you about what happens after a can of Coke. One sugary drink a day can move real health needles. A 10 year United Kingdom study of more than 123,000 people tied a single daily Coke type beverage to a 50% higher risk of fatty liver disease. This is after only one Coke a day. Another major analysis linked sugary drinks to millions of new cases of diabetes and heart disease. What's in the can? About 140/40 calories, 8 teaspoons of added sugar, around 35 grams, plus roughly 33 milligrams of caffeine, phosphoric acid, and caramel color. The timeline is simple. Sugar hits in 10 minutes, blood sugar spikes around 20, caffeine absorption peaks by 45 minutes, and a crash lands about an hour in. Pediatric specialists advise zero caffeine for kids under 11. Let me say that again. Doctors who specialize in kids say no kid under 11 should have any caffeine drinks. Teens should stay under about 100 milligrams a day. If you drink it, pair it with meals or reach for low sugar alternatives. Okay, what's the real message here? Just one Coke a day increases your chances of getting fatty liver disease by 50%. That's crazy. You don't have to have a special diet, a fancy chef, gourmet meals. If you want to be healthier, just drink more water and cut out the sugary garbage. Okay? And those of you listening on the podcast, I am literally drinking water here. I'm not perfect, folks, but something I have really become a fanatical evangelist for in the last decade is drinking water. Making that your default drink because it is so easy to eat relatively healthy food and destroy your diet with sugary beverages. I'll petit you. I don't drink those Coca Colas. I drink orange juice and apple juice. Sorry, there's so much sugar and quite often added sugar, and it's processed in a sort by grinding it up. And fruit juice. Again, don't take my advice. I'm not a medical doctor or a registered dietitian. Look at what most dietitians say today, which is, skip the fruit juice. You just don't need it. It's so much added sugar, you're better off drinking water. Doesn't have to be fancy water. This is tap water. I do have my. All of my water in my home is run through a filter, so I can just go to the faucet and fill up anytime I want. And I drink it all day long. There are no side effects from drinking water, unless you're just trying to drink three gallons at once. You can cause problems, but that's extraordinarily rare. Far more common is the problem of dehydration, or the problem, as this study in the United Kingdom pointed out, of giving yourself fatty liver disease. That sounds disgusting and, you know, people think of it. Oh, that's for someone who eats eight hamburgers a day. Well, no. One Coke a day. 50% higher chance of getting fatty liver disease. Let's look at some more of the facts again. Basic can of Coke, 140 calories, 35 grams of sugar, 33 milligrams of caffeine. There's also enamel erosion on your teeth from the acid. More damage to your liver. The extra fructose creates fat over time. If you're going to drink a Coke, and I'm not recommending you do, far better to do it with a meal rather than just by itself. Okay, confession time. When I was a kid, we had Coke in the house. I drank a lot of it. Yeah, kids like Coke. Adults like Coke because it's sweet. We are biologically conditioned from an evolutionary standpoint to crave sweetness. And it's got a lot of sweets in it. I have tried assiduously to keep not just Coke but all sugary drinks out of my household because I don't want it for myself, my daughter, for my wife. And, yeah, do we occasionally splurge somewhere, a movie, but not that often. Yes, but I try to make it an extraordinarily rare treat. I did mess up recently. We have a new Slurpee machine that makes a Slurpee just like you would find a Slushie, just like you would find at any convenience store. I thought, wow, here's a chance to have a treat for my family, my daughter, her friends, and it's totally healthy. We just put fruit juice in, and we do that most of the time, and it's great. Again, I'm contradicting myself, but I just said, you know, don't drink fruit juice. But if it's a special occasion, a movie. Yeah, better to have a fruit Slurpee than a Coke. Nothing else. It doesn't have the acid and the chemicals in it. But my daughter heard me say over time that I remember as a kid, my mom would take me to the local 711 and I would get my favorite Coke Slurpee. And she reminded me of that, of enough times. I said, okay, just for Halloween, we'll get. Coke was at a Costco. And if you've ever been to a Costco, you can't just buy one can of Coke. You can't just buy one bottle of Coke. I ended up getting an entire gigantic. I don't know if this must be 32 cans of Coke. It was the smallest unit I could get. And sure enough, next thing you know, it wasn't just that day. My daughter had gotten one the next day for lunch. That's on me. That's my fault. Now I then did the responsible thing. I went and hid them. And I'm not going to tell you where I hid them. I'm not telling my daughter. I do recommend the easiest way to avoid soft drinks is to not buy them and not have them in your house. To just tell yourself, drink water. If you don't like the taste of water, add a lemon or a lime or a piece of fruit to it. If the water out of your tap doesn't taste good or has a chlorine taste to it, put a filter on it. Get a bread of some sort of inexpensive filter. You can do it. But get in the habit of drinking water because it's one of those habits where there's numerous, numerous upsides and there's virtually zero downside. You save a lot of money. For starters, you're not buying the cappuccino mocha with lots of sugar. You're not getting the chai with a gallon of sugar in it. You're not getting the coke with all the sugar. You're helping your body a lot by reducing sugar intake. You're not spending all the money. You don't need to buy bottled water. Tap water is going to be fine in most situations and it's so much better for all of your organs, for your health, for your skin. I mean, there's just so many benefits to sugar to water. And there I am, the Freudian slip. We just were programmed to want sugar. No, we want more water if we want to be healthy. So I want to raise a toast to you with my glass of water. Urge you not just today, not just tomorrow, but please make water. And I don't mean branded water. And it doesn't have to be in a fancy bottle and it doesn't have to be sparkling mineral water. It can just be any clean, safe tap water. Make that your water of choice, your drink of choice. And you're going to be better off. Your kids are going to be better off. Your family will be better off. I'm TJ More in just a moment. Filtered is brought to you by the following get the deeper takes. I don't post anywhere else. Subscribe now@substack.com jwalkersuccess and stay in the loop. For years people have asked how they could get one on one coaching from me inexpensively. Well now you can anytime, anywhere with the TJ Walker AI clone. It's like having me in your pocket ready to help you prep for a speech, polish a pitch, or calm your nerves before a big meeting. You talk to it it responds like I would based on my real world coaching of thousands of leaders and communicators. Check it out at tjwalker AI. It's not just smart, it's personal. Welcome back to Filtered In China, the dream of outrunning time China isn't just chasing growth, it's chasing more years. Beijing has made longevity a national priority, pouring billions into labs, conferences and startups that promise to slow or even defeat aging. In Shenzhen, Lanvi Biosciences sells grapeseed derived pills aimed at targeting zombie cells. Its chief technologist says living to 150 is realistic and even predicts a near term cancer cure claims serious scientists treat with caution. Mouse data behind the compound showed lifespan gains, then drew an editor's note for errors. Follow ups are mixed. China's average life expectancy is about 79 above the global average, but far from 150. Extravagant claims aside, the best real story is a state backed scale the science, sort the hype and see what survives clinical trials. Okay, what's the real message here? We think of China as really pushing the edge on AI and so many technologies. But think of they're spending a lot of time, money, effort and investment on making us live, if not forever, 150 years. I'm hoping they come up with some real breakthroughs. Let's dig a little bit deeper. If ever there were a topic situated for long term thinking, it is how to live long term. One thing, and I don't want to sound like an apologist for the Chinese regime. There's plenty of things I don't like about authoritarian regimes, whether in my own country or abroad. But one of the advantages of an authoritarian regime like China is they can really think long term. They can pour money into research. Not with the idea of turning a profit in six months or three months or for the next quarterly earnings call. They can say we don't care about any of that. It's a priority for our nation and we want to invest in it. And that is what they're doing. Are some of these things going to be nonsense? Yeah, one of the predictions that came out is you know, there's going to be no cancer in five to 10 years. Well, anytime you start giving predictions in five to 10 years, it's going to get media attention, number one. Number two, it's very unlikely someone's going to come back to you in five or 10 years and say, hey, you made this prediction the five 10 years ago and it's wrong. There's no one better at that than Elon Musk, who routinely says, not just five or 10 years from now, but in 18 months from now, we're going to have, you know, 10 billion remote driverless taxis around the world. And, you know, that was a decade ago. I'm paraphrasing what he said. That's not literally what he said, but he, he's the master at always giving promises for some time down the road, whether it's one year, two years. In this case, the experts in China are saying we essentially can stop aging or get to the point where people can routinely live to 150. Is that a pipe dream? I don't know. There's a part of me that says, you know, sharks, certain sharks can live 200, 300. Some claim even 500 years. Certain turtles can live hundreds of years. Why can't humans live to be 150 years? Yeah. Could it get to the point where we simply replace organs? And with your tissue being an organ that's replaced, your heart being replaced, it might not happen in my lifetime, but if you're young, it might happen in your lifetime. There are some futurists, Ray Kurzweil specifically, who says, we are about to reach escape velocity with artificial intelligence giving us the wherewithal so that for every year you live, you're going to gain more than a year because of the science. So at some point, your life expectancy will just keep growing and growing and you won't have to die. Is that going to happen in 2028, as some predict? I don't think it's going to happen that quickly. Will it happen in my own daughter's lifetime? Well, I certainly hope so. It's obviously going to radically change every aspect of society and what we think of as a normal lifespan. I mean, so much of what makes life precious is the scarcity of it. If you knew in advance there's a good chance you'd have 300 years, would you savor more and get more out of life? Or would it cause lethargy? Would it cause stagnation? Thinking, well, why bother doing it today? I got another 200 years. What's the rush? I'm not quite sure, but China is doing something right now. Part of their life expectancy going up is just going from mass poverty. 35 years ago, 90% of that population was living in extreme poverty. And being in poverty or living under the poverty rate, the official poverty rate in any country generally means you don't live as long. So they have largely solved the problem of mass poverty in that society. So they're Their average age has gone way up. Now they're not toward Japan is Japan's life. The average life expectancy is 85. Very, very high. It is interesting sometimes you hear there was an incident earlier this year where Putin was talking to the Chinese leader Xi and they were both talking about how they plan on living to be 150 years old. So this is something that autocrats are obviously interested in, because if you can rule an entire country and essentially be a king, yeah, you want to live forever, no doubt about that. It's also something really wealthy people talk about incessantly, especially Silicon Valley billionaires, the Peter Thiels of the world. When you already have everything, the one thing you don't have is more time. So I do predict we're going to see more and more billionaire, maybe trillionaire investors putting money into research on how to live longer. Until that time, I do want to share with you radically boring, unexciting, uncontroversial measures on how to live longer. Okay, for starters, as we talked about in an earlier story, don't drink sugar, don't drink coke. Maintain a healthy body weight, specifically a waistline that is proportionate to your height. And now I'm not fat shaming. But it's a simple fact that when you carry excess weight, you're much more likely to have diabetes, obesity, heart stroke, hypertension, and many other diseases. So the, the big starting point for you personally to live as long as possible. Get your weight to what's considered a normal weight, a healthy weight for your frame and your height. Get a lot of sleep. If you're using an alarm clock, almost by definition you're not getting enough sleep. If you're having to drink a lot of caffeine drinks, that's causing problems at many levels. Get enough sleep, eat real food that's unprocessed, drink lots of water, play a sport, move, walk, exercise every day. None of what I'm saying is going to go viral. Some of you have clicked away. Oh, my God, T.J. that's so boring. You're telling me to eat right? Get a lot of sleep, not drink garbage. Wow, that's so boring. I'll do anything. Where's the pill? How can I take a pill to make myself live for? Well, as of right now, there is no pill. But you dramatically increase your odds of living much longer if you can maintain a healthy weight. The easiest way to do that is to eat relatively unprocessed food to not. Sorry, Carl's. You got a lot of good publicity this week by Giving food to poor people for only a dollar. But part of the secret to living longer. Don't eat at Carl's. Don't eat at McDonald's, don't eat at Wen. Don't eat at French fries. Don't eat French fries constantly. I mean, that's a real problem in America. There's so many restaurants where even if you pick what you think of as the absolute healthiest entree, a vegetarian veggie wrap, and it comes with a giant side of french fries, you didn't even ask for it. But we're humans. It's right there and it's just easy to consume it. So if you want to extend your own life, the basic principles that are boring but you don't hear enough are really the best factor you can focus on right now. If there is some miracle pill or potion or drug, believe me, I will bring it to your attention as quickly as possible. Okay, we're going to switch over to our grab bag section. That concludes sort of the main part of our show today. We always try to cover five big topics and then go to the grab bag section of our show as well. So the first grab bag section, it does, does relate to the shutdown. Now, we did touch on that earlier, but hasn't been resolved. The Democrats offer a lifeline. There has been some development in the last 24 hours. Republicans offered a lifeline and the Republicans say no. The Democrats offer the lifeline. I should say the Senate Democrats reduced the size of their ask. Instead of saying we want a promise for these health care subsidies for 20 million Americans indefinitely, just as it has been, they're saying give us an extension. They shrank their ask to end the 38 day shutdown, to reopen the government for a one year extension of the expiring Affordable Care act subsidies. Speaker Mike Johnson won't commit to a vote and Majority Leader John Thune called it a non starter. Democrats say they've narrowed demands to test Republican willingness. Translation, the pain continues. So Republicans have said they're not even willing to consider reopening the government. Even if the only thing the Democrats want is not taxing the rich or something that would be considered a part of the radical left. All they're asking for is to continue the subsidies so that 20 million Americans don't see their health care double this year. The Democrats are, you can go ahead and double their health insurance a year from now. All we want is to help people for one year. And the Republicans have said nope, absolute non starter. So we have gridlock here. When I look into my crystal ball to see how does this government shut down. And I'll be honest with you, I don't see anything. I see murkiness. You know, if you see how this ends, share it with us. I would love to know because I don't think it's a clear cut right now. The polls still show that by a relatively small plurality, about 10% of Americans fault the Republicans more than fault the Democrats. But that's only part of the equation. The Democrats are supposed to be the party of actually caring about people, caring about needy people, caring about people who need the help of government to thrive and in this case even survive. Because if you can't afford health insurance and it keeps you away from going to the, to the doctor, that can result in premature death. If you need food and your food stamps have run out and your SNAP benefits have run out, it's not good for your health to be going without meals on a regular basis, obviously. So at some level the Democrats have a much bigger stake in it. They are the party that believes in government. So in a sense you could argue every day the government is shut down. It's kind of a win for Republican mega conservative ideology that says government's always bad. Now as a practical matter, the largest amount of government subsidies go to so called red states, Republican states. States like California and New York are net donors to the rest of the country. They're so much more successful in this whole capitalism business in Democratic states like New York and New Jersey and Connecticut and California that they send a lot more money to Washington and Washington then sends that to Republican states like Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky, where they don't like to be called this, but they have a much higher percentage of welfare recipients. If you defend welfare as people getting government subsidies, whether it's farm subsidies or anything else. So the political dynamic is odd in that the brand of Democrats is we believe in government and government working. But Republicans, if anything their lock and barrel, their run of the mill voters are actually more likely to receive handouts from the government. So it's going to cause pain all the way around. And depending on what hole you look at both, the case can be made that both parties are losing. Who's going to lose more? It's too soon to tell who's going to lose in the election next year, which is almost a year away. No one can predict that because in the past Republicans have done the shutdown. It's been more of their shtick in the past and frankly they were not really punished at the polls. A year later. So anyone who tells you it's clear cut what the political implications are on this, I don't think necessarily has a full reading in history. Let's go to your comments. More of you are coming in. Talking about our earlier story about sugar, SARS writes, sugar kills. It really does. I'm not saying sugar should be banned or made illegal, but sugar is a killer. You could certainly make a case it kills more than any other drug when you factor in its contribution to being overweight and then obesity and then diabetes and then heart attack. So, yeah, it's an ongoing battle. It's a battle I face in my own household. It's a battle at every time we go to the grocery store. I try to look at every label. If there's added sugar, don't buy it. That's my number one recommendation. I try to follow myself. The real deal says I drink Monster every day and I'm all right for now. Well, I wish you health. I want you to be healthy. Do me just one favor. Look at the ingredients. Just look at the ingredient label. Don't take my word for anything. I'm not a registered dietitian, I'm not a doctor, but take a picture of that. What's on the label for your Monster drink, then upload it to your AI of choice. Whether I use ChatGPT, I'm not promoting them. Upload the label and just say, hey, what are the possible health benefits or downsides of me drinking this once a day and read it? I think you might be shocked. Cheryl says something like cancer, they had the cure. So you're talking about our story about what's going on in China and the labs they're putting there to devote to longevity. I don't know if they've got a cure for cancer yet. But one of the things that is surprising is with all the research that's done on cancer, we still have almost as many cancers as we did 30, 40 years ago. But the other surprising thing is how many people die not from cancer, but from things that are completely preventable from obesity and all of the problems that stem from obese. And by the way, if you are obese, you increase your chances of having cancer too. But that's increasingly the big problem so many of us in America have is we're too big, we are obese. That coupled with loneliness epidemic and more and more people overdosing on opioids, especially men. Okay, we're going to switch away from health. It's been a Saturday. I'm hoping you're feeling healthier? I'm feeling great. I went for a long walk outside today without a phone and then played pickleball for an hour and then raced back to be with you. So I hope you can find something to do today to make you feel healthier and happier as well. I got several other grab bag issues today, but we are running out of time and I have to end the show today with what I always promise you, which is answering your questions. What I like to do is end the show every day with questions from you that relate to issues beyond the news. As some of you know, I in addition to being a news analyst for the last 40 years, I'm a personal development and communication skills trainer. I have more than 300 online courses on communication skills and personal development skills. So each each day I do take questions from my students and you can post them right here as well on some aspect of communication skills and personal development. So let's take a question right now. This is from Pratik. Pratik is a student in my course, the Complete Storytelling Course for Speaking and Presenting. The question is, how can I move beyond relying on prepared scripts to speak confidently and naturally on any topic while keeping my audience engaged, attentive and entertained as they receive valuable information? So Pratik, thanks for the question. For starters, tell more stories. People like stories. They will find you interesting if the story is something they can relate to. So I'm very happy you're trying to move beyond just following a script. Because here's the dirty little secret. For most people, most of the time, speaking from a script doesn't make them interesting. It doesn't help. It makes them feel better because they think, oh, if I forget what to say, I can read the script or I can read the PowerPoint. So people use it as a crutch. The problem though, is a crutch in real life, if you got a bad lag keeps you from falling down. If your crutch is a written speech rich in text and you're reading it and it's boring and it destroys your eye contact with your audience and your body language, it makes your voice flat. It's actually not propping you up. It's like a rubber crutch where you just fall down instantly and fail. So I'm very happy you're trying to not be reliant on a text or a script. The number one way these days you can get better at speaking extemporaneously and being interesting and engaging is frankly, to do what I'm doing right now Start a podcast. You don't have to do it seven days a week for 90 minutes at a time, but you could do it once a week for five minutes to share with people some area of expertise you have where you help them or where you entertain them. Just try that. Just try it five minutes a week. And then listen to your audience, Listen to what they say. What do they like? Do more of it. What do they not like? Maybe do less of it. What gets absolute zero attention. 0 comments okay, maybe it wasn't interesting. That still happens to me from time to time. So that would be my advice. Look for more opportunities. When I was a young man growing up, you really had to look hard for opportunities to speak. You would knock on doors and you'd send out demo tapes and you'd go to the local Rotary club or optimist club or civic club and say, please, please, please let me speak Tuesday at lunch to your group for free. And because I want to get more experience. And they'd say, well, maybe, maybe not. Call us in six months. You don't have to do that today. All of us can speak to people all over the world every day at any time. Now, maybe you don't have tens of millions of viewers the way Mr. Beast does. I don't have tens of millions of viewers, but over the course of a year I certainly reach more than a million people across all social media. And these days it's about a half a million a month. So that's really my answer to you, Pratik, if you want to get a lot faster at this is look for opportunities where you can speak regularly because the more you do it, the easier it is to get fast at it and to actually get to the point where you think the problem so many people have and why. Most people who've maybe even written a book are great experts. Maybe they're good at training people. For years, they never actually do an online course because they can't get over that hump of, oh, I can't think where there's a camera and lights on me. I've got to rehearse it or I've got to memorize it or I got to use a teleprompter. They come up with so many excuses, they never actually do it. And people write to me all the time and say, or friends in real life say, tj, how in the world do you do an hour, a 90 minute show every day, seven days a week? You must be working 14 hours a day. They assume I am researching everything, writing everything out memorizing a script or plotting out every talking point in advance. The reality is, that's not what I do when I'm with you on this show. Whether you are listening on the podcast, whether you're watching on TikTok or Facebook or any other social media platform, I'm actually thinking in real time with you. It's a skill I developed, and guess what? It requires zero innate talent. Anyone can think and speak in front of a camera or in front of a microphone if you're willing to not be very good at it for a while. I wasn't very good at it when I started, but I started more than 40 years ago so I've had time to work out the kinks and it doesn't take 40 years to get good at it. If you did it once a week for five minutes, you'd probably be incredibly comfortable in just a few months. So that's my biggest recommendation to you. Thanks so much for that question. Again, I'll answer your question as well. Post your questions on any of the platforms where you're either watching this or reading it. Special thanks to my friends listening to this podcast today. We are new on podcasting platforms. We just finished our second month. If you are listening on the podcast, our own research shows most of you don't actually subscribe or follow the show. If you got any value out of today's show, please follow it and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting platform. And if you really want to do me a solid, please leave a review. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow.