Surveillance, Brexit and E-Bikes: How Power Keeps Dodging Blame

New York is about to get its most progressive mayor ever, possibly. And he's embracing one of the most powerful surveillance systems on earth. Why are both parties secretly in love with Big Brother? When the cameras cut crime, then across the Atlantic, it's time to say the quiet part out loud. Even the pro business right is now admitting Brexit has been an economic face plant for Britain. Here at home, E bikes and E mottos were sold as green, fun and harmless. Trauma surgeons say they're actually mini motorcycles turning kids into crash victims. We'll look at the quiet epidemic on our streets next. Inside Trump's White House, his AI and crypto czar is supposedly writing the rules for big tech while holding hundreds of investments that benefit from those rules. We'll ask, is anyone in Washington not double dipping? And finally, the Wall Street Journal delivers the verdict on Trump as a businessman in chief. His media stock, his meme coins, his family crypto, all tanking, leaving his own fans holding the bag. All that and more today on Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. Thanks for joining me today. It is great to be back in my home studio. Had a wonderful, fantastic Thanksgiving visit with family in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm back in South Florida again here for a week and then off to Vietnam a week from today and for a week on assignment and vacation and also from there to Taipei, Taiwan. So going to be a few busy weeks, but glad to always be back here in the home studio. Let's dive right into issue one, surveillance and crime. Why both parties secretly love the surveillance state. According to the New York Times, New York Mayor elect Zoran Mandani built his brand attacking police spying. Part of it, anyway. Now he's keeping Commissioner Jessica Tisch and her baby. The the New York Police Department's domain awareness system, a massive web of cameras, license plate readers and gunshot mics that police say has, quote, revolutionized public safety. Here's the dirty secret. Both parties love this stuff. Now. Democrats love to denounce Big Brother, then quietly fund cameras because voters hate violent crime. Republicans insist big Democratic cities are crime hellscapes, even as the long term numbers say otherwise. New York murders have plunged from more than 2,200 a year in 1990 to under 400 today. Los Angeles homicides are down from more than 1,000 in the early 90s to a few hundred a year. Chicago's killings have fallen dramatically as well from their 1990s peak. Nationwide murders in big cities have dropped sharply since 2021. Mandani's test is whether he can keep the safety while finally telling the truth about the trade offs. Okay, so what's the real message here? Both Democrats and Republicans are disingenuous when it comes to using surveillance technology to fight crime. Democrats say they don't like Big Brother, but they love being able to show their cities getting safer and safer with violent crime going, going down. It's because of the surveillance. And Republicans love to say that Democrats love crime and every big city is a hellscape. And they refuse to actually look at the stats showing how surveillance technology is making crime go lower and lower and lower. Okay, let's dig a little deeper here. So this is a perfect example of how I'm telling you I believe something different on this show. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. So many commentators, whether it's on CNBC or MSNBC or Fox or OAN or all these political so called news organizations, they're just spinning a particular side of things. They're giving you their own political spin to make their team look good and the other team look bad. I'm here to call it like it is. This is a perfect example of how I genuinely do try to give it to you from not a partisan perspective, but looking at things through the lens of communication skills, personal development skills and clarity. Because it's not just Zoran Mandani, it's a lot of Democrats. They don't have to be socialists, just mainstream. Democrats have said they're very troubled by surveillance technology. And I don't love every aspect of surveillance technology, but when it comes to violent crime, there's simply absolutely no doubt whatsoever that having cameras everywhere brings violent crime down. Someone's thinking of committing violent crime, like, oh, there's a camera. I'm going to get caught. Maybe I won't do it today. I realize that sounds simplistic, but how else do you explain consistent drops in violent crime in big cities where there's cameras everywhere? And we have not seen nearly the drop in violent crime in rural areas in America in the last 30 years. So this is the breakdown. You've got Madni, you've got a lot of people who are primarily concerned with civil liberties, civil rights, typically fighting the government once they come to power. They're like, you know what? We kind of like low murder rates. We kind of like violent crime going down. So Mandani, a lot of people thought of him as always this radical, dangerous, left wing socialist. And yet he's keeping the same police commissioner who's responsible for lowering crime in the last four years. The Same police commissioner who is big on technology and surveillance. And that I think is a good thing. And Democrats are often hypocrites about it. Now here's where you're going to get the actual reality without the spin of people on Fox or msnbc. And that is the Republicans are also very hypocritical on this issue. They say surveillance is great, technology is great, and it is. But they also don't ever want to give credit to, to Democratic mayors, cities that have Democratic leadership who've instituted surveillance technology and actually seen their crime go down much faster than so called red states and red cities and rural communities. They're not being honest because their playbook says if a Democrat is in office, you have to say the crime is going up no matter the facts. If a Democrat is in office, you have to say they don't care about crime and it's all bedlam and the world is going to hell in a handbasket regardless of what the facts actually state. It's not true. And again, Democrats are bad about this too, but from a completely different perspective. They like to spin the idea that all surveillance is technology is bad. Well, it's not bad. When someone was murdered on your street, got caught on camera, it was very easy to catch them, indict them, convict them, because there's five different cameras all showing them pulling the trigger or sticking the knife in someone. And that person does get sent away. They can't commit a string of 5 or 10 or 20 murders or violent crimes on your street because they were caught the first time because of surveillance. So this issue is important because nobody really wants to live in a violent community. Doesn't matter what your ideology is at all. Nobody wants violence. And this surveillance system, they call it in New York City the Domain Awareness System. It links cameras and license plates, readers 911 calls rap sheet. Everything is tied together. And I can tell you, well secondhand how it actually works. I had a colleague of mine who just last year was called upon to serve on a grand jury in New York City. And she said it was gruesome, awesome crime after awesome crime. But she said it was pretty easy work. The prosecutor would say, we would like to indict this person on murder or rape or stabbing. Oh, and by the way, here's surveillance cameras from five different angles clearly showing his face and the people were indicted. It was very, very clear cut. It made it easy. It took some of the guesswork out of it. Now there are many who feel that these surveillance things can enhance racial profiling, enhance racism, I'm not discounting that, but it also makes it harder for someone to just a prosecutor just randomly round up, which has happened in a lot of American cities in the past. Just round up a bunch of black guys who've been arrested before for other things and just say, let's pick that one. Let's make the case that that's the guy we're going to prosecute so we can get someone. If you don't have the video anymore, it's much harder to make the case. So you could make the case that this is clearing a number of people who in the past might have been racially profiled. Let's look at some more of the facts on the situation. A Washington Post review found nearly 20% fewer killings in major US cities in the most recent years. At the very same time, these surveillance cameras are going up everywhere. New York City, the most dramatic loss are dropped 2,245 murders in 1990. Horrible, horrific. And then in recent years, it's gone down to about 400. Still 400 too many. But that's what? 1800 fewer murders. That's an insanely wonderful thing to happen or humanity. Chicago, as I mentioned, also saw homicides drop steeply. Chicago has more of a crime problem. Nope, no mistake about it. But the trends are going down. And most credible experts do in fact give credit to surveillance cameras everywhere. And to me, it's just implausible to suggest that they can't be A, a deterrent, B, a great way of catching people the first time they commit a crime or certainly a violent crime on the streets. That's good news. Let's take your comments beauty and lifestyle tip says they both will benefit. That's why. Well, so both parties benefit from crime going down because presumably nobody in either party wants to see citizens in their community die. And if you're in power, you want to make the case that streets are safer than ever before. But you're also right in that people in both political parties sometimes benefit from pushing a narrative. There are certainly those on the left part of the Democratic Party who are always sort of bashing the police and say, oh, the police state. Isn't it awful that there are security cameras everywhere? And they can benefit from that because it resonates with some of their constituencies. I would also point out again, since I'm a sane, sensible centrist, that the right does it in an even more powerful way because they have their allies at the New York Post, Fox News Channel and conservative media everywhere who just love, love, love the idea of there being this narrative of violent crime out of control. If a Democrat, certainly if someone who is clearly left of center, as Mandani is, takes over, they are practically begging for violent crime to go up because it will prove their theory. And unfortunately, as I pointed out, both parties have faulty theories. And I'm giving it to you straight, which does lead me to a bigger point. So many of you, when I have conversations with you, sometimes one on one and individually or out at conferences or events or in my travels, like to say, well, yeah, T.J. but you know, you're in this position, you're in this camp, therefore I have to discount you. Or you're on that camp and I have to discount you. And that quite often comes up in the comments. Now look, I'm not here to tell you I have no bias. Anyone who tells you they have no bias, beware of because they're liars. Everyone has some kind of bias in the world, if nothing else. Presumably you have a bias in favor of facts, I hope, versus just making up stuff. But I find quite often that if I present facts and put forth an argument that somehow makes someone in the Republican Party look bad or hurt their feelings, they don't want to deal with those facts. They in fact just want to attack me. Well, T.J. we don't have to listen to you. We can discount you because you made us feel bad because you made somebody on our team look bad. I'm not here to make anyone look good or bad. I'm here to try to distinguish and distill important messages for you to understand if you want to be more successful in life and have a grounded sense of reality. So I'm often written off by conservatives, maga, Republicans, if I say something that doesn't conform to their worldview, where they're always right and somebody else is always wrong. Also, there are times where in the past where Democrats have said, T.J. oh, you're awful. You're so biased. I remember once the hate mail I received just because I had been asked to be an analyst for National Review publications critiquing the 2012 presidential debates on the Republican side. And I gave Mitt Romney early in the primary process glowing praise for his ability to communicate effectively and to come across as intelligent and rational and thoughtful. And a lot of Democrats didn't want to hear that. They say, oh, T.J. you're just in the tank for all the conservatives and the Republicans at the National Review. Well, no, I am routinely criticized by people all across the spectrum, not because of facts and I'm sure I occasionally get my facts wrong. Although since we've been doing this particular podcast daily now, going on four months, will be four months this week, I've yet to have someone fact check me. If you do find me giving facts incorrectly, please point it out. I'm happy to offer a retraction. What I do see again and again and again across the political spectrum is people see tj, you made somebody on my team not look good, therefore you're biased, therefore you're wrong, therefore you're an idiot, therefore you're a fool. And all you're doing when you do that is reveal how small minded you are and how what you're really looking for is absolutely nothing but confirmation bias. If you want a media outlet to give you confirmation bias, there are plenty of them out there and some of them get really rich for doing it. If you are a fan of, for example, Sean Hannity and you have a particular worldview where anything and everything Trump does is always correct and every single Democratic city is always a hellhole and every Democrat is always corrupt, incompetent, and a part of the radical left who's conniving. If that's your worldview, you can watch Sean Hannity and you will always feel comfortable. You'll never have your beliefs challenged and there are examples on the other side as well. So I'm here to tell you this show is a little bit different and that's why I like doing this show. Because we're not trying to be yet another hack media organization. We're trying to do something different. I'm every day analyzing for you Top 5 News Stories in business technology culture and then filtering those stories through the lens of communication and personal development skills and what the messages, the real messages are underlying these issues we see in the news, all with the goal of making you more successful when it comes to your communication skills, your ability to understand what's being communicated to you, your personal development skills so that you can be more successful in your personal life as well as your professional. That's what we're about right here. If this resonates with you, then please like the show. Subscribe to it. Leave a Comment Leave a review if you're listening on any podcast or watching on any social media platform more in just a moment. Want to communicate like a Pro? Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com Millions have already transformed their speaking skills. Why not you? This show doesn't run on a lot of corporate sponsorships or big media backing. It runs on caffeine and your support. If you like what you're hearing and want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee. Really just go to buymeacoffee.com tjwalker it's quick, it's easy, and yes, it helps cover editing, hosting and and staying relatively ad free for as long as possible. Buymeacoffee.com tjwalker your 3.95 makes a real difference. Want live coaching from me? Bonus episodes, full course access. It's all waiting@tjwalker.com members join now. Okay, we are back. Welcome to Filtered Brexit's Economic Face Plan the Promise that Broke Britain For American users who may not remember the details, Brexit was the United Kingdom's 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Supporters promised more sovereignty, fewer immigrants, better trade deals and a booming economy. Opponents warned it would weaken Britain economically. Now, nearly a decade later, the verdict is overwhelming. According to the Telegraph's reporting on a major new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure. The study finds that the UK economy is 6 to 8% smaller than it would have been without Brexit. Investment is down as much as 18%, productivity has slipped, and businesses say the uncertainty and red tape have been crippling. Brexit didn't slash immigration, it didn't spark an economic renaissance, and the new trade deals barely move the needle. Instead, Britain got slower growth, higher taxes, weaker investment, and years of political chaos. Even many of Brexit's biggest champions now admit it has, quote, failed to deliver. Okay, what's the real message here in 2016? The supporters of Brexit said, this is going to be great for us. We'll thrive on our own, get rid of the immigrants, and grow even faster with our own trade deals. Now it's been nine years and guess what? None of that has happened. The economy has shrunk by 6 to 8% of what it would have been if Brexit had never happened. Let's dig a little bit deeper here because folks, I often get it wrong. I didn't predict that Brexit would not pass, but I did predict this would not be a good thing. Being a part of the European Union was a pretty sweet deal for Great Britain. Plus they got to keep their own currency. So they always had that going on. This was really just sort of a temper tantrum. This was a lot of politicians pandering to resentment and hatred. Now I guess you could make the case it worked out for some people. There are some people who let's say were about to retire on a fixed income and simply resent investment bankers in London who were making two, three million dollars a year. Things were great for them. And if you were a retired postal worker, for example, or in a retired sheep herder living in a rural areas, you resent these people getting richer and richer and richer. And by voting for Brexit, you could say, well, I'll stick it to them, I guess, if that's your goal. You did so. But very few people were willing to admit it like that. People were saying, this will be good for our country as a whole. And there's simply zero economic analysis from any credible source left, right, center, that Brexit has created a bigger pie for the entire economy of the United Kingdom. Let's take a look at some of the specific facts. Okay. The NBER estimates Brexit cut the United Kingdom gross domestic product by 6 to 8%. Investment fell 12 to 18% after Brexit. Productivity dropped 3 to 4%. According to one study. UK economic growth since 2016 lags. France. France. Now here in America, everyone thinks, oh, France, they don't actually work there. They just sit around, sip coffee and read poetry and quote Jean Paul Sartre and eat croissant all day. That's the perception, an erroneous perception, but that's the perception a lot of people in America have about France. And it's kind of the perception some of the people who voted for Brexit in Great Britain had. And yet their economic growth is lower than France's. That's got to be embarrassing. Trade intensity, the United Kingdom connection to global markets fell sharply. Businesses cites elevated uncertainty as a major long term cost of Brexit. A lot of time has had to be wasted. Managers had to learn all new systems, all new rules, all the ways that did work selling their products and services to Europe. All of that went out the window. Sources were misallocated across the economy during the years long Brexit breakout process. So a lot of extra transition costs. There was tons and tons of paperwork just helping people get out of this. Here's the interesting thing that's surprising, and I'm not an expert on this, but immigration didn't fall. In fact, legal immigration reached record highs because the way it was before, when they were part of the European Union, you could kind of float and once you're in Europe and you could kind of float in and out through all the borders. And that's part of what upset people so much. But again, immigration actually went up, so that's the bizarre thing going on here. The Office for Budget Responsibility says Brexit will permanently reduce the United Kingdom's productivity. Smaller businesses got hit hard. They have higher shipping cost, longer delivery times. Politically, Brexit triggered years of paralysis across three different governments. So it's not like it created a lot of harmony. And now the UK now has one of the highest tax burdens in modern history, partly to offset lost growth. So if you voted for Brexit, well, congratulations. I don't think if you're an honest person, you can really say it helped anything whatsoever in this case. I hate to say I told you so, but the people who are anti Brexit who were warning about this can rightfully, and it's not about being glib, can rightfully say I told you so. Let's take a look at your comments. Again. It's a beautiful Sunday. I'm recording this live. It is the last day of November. December starts tomorrow. We are coming to you Live Sunday on November 30, 2025. Let's take a look at comments. Kate Hamill says you are on board with Larry Ellison. So I think you're referring to our first segment where I talked about I actually like security cameras and police cameras in public, public surveillance because it so dramatically reduces lower crime. I would imagine Larry Ellison is in favor of that. I am very much opposed to many, many things Larry Ellison does. So again, let's be careful about someone favors one particular policy, the tendency is to say, well, that's a policy I don't like. Therefore they must be bad. They must be completely on the team of people I don't like. I think Larry Ellison needs some real restraint. I'm certainly not in favor of him getting sweetheart deals from this administration, buying companies. I'm not in favor of him benefiting from essentially throwing all antitrust regulation out the window. And I've been a pretty persistent critic of him and his son and what they're trying to do to the media landscape. So, Kate, let's not extrapolate from one issue to another. Kate also says it is bad just control with police get rid of the attorney general and judges. So the attorney general in the United States is out of control. But I don't think it's because of surveillance technology. The attorney general of the United States is out of control because she doesn't view herself as the attorney general. She views herself as the personal attorney of the head of a mob outfit, Donald Trump. So if he says Comey's an enemy, find dirt and terrorize him. That's what she does. But that's not because of surveillance technology. That's something completely different. P.S. bernier 22, says, but then you have judges that let these people out who have done the crime. Okay, that's a separate issue. And you could, you could make the case. If someone's a violent criminal, even the time they're in prison waiting for trial and time served is at least another six months, they're not committing violent crime. So honest people can debate about what the proper length of time is for being convicted of a crime, and we'll have that debate another day. But. But P. S Bernier, what I'm troubled by, and I don't want to assume you, the people who like to make that argument, are never honest in admitting violent crime has gone way, way down in cities run by Democrats compared to rural areas run by Republicans. And you, if you don't admit that fact, in my view, you're not. You're simply not being an honest participant in the debate here. Okay, not Laram says yes, some people just believe whatever Fox says. Yeah, some people believe whatever Al Sharpton said. I remember a time when he was Tawana Brawley's spokesperson and he just said that a bunch of men, I think some of them were police officers, attacked this. It was all made up. And some people believed him. So, yeah, there can be examples across the spectrum of demagogues who just make up stuff and they have followers who believe them. I don't want you believing everything I say, but I do want you to believe me when I'm sincere, telling you, I'm not trying to spin you one way or the other. I, as I've often done on this show, brought forth facts about a public issue, a public controversy, dissected the various messages going on. And sometimes that makes one party look bad, sometimes it makes that same party look good. Sometimes it makes another party and another set of politicians look bad or good. Judge me based on my arguments and rationale. That's all I ask for. Don't blindly support me. Don't just say, well, T.J. said it. I can't possibly have another viewpoint. No, the world is complex. There's a lot of grays in the world. We try to cover the nuances right here. So thank you so much. I do appreciate that. Not laram oh, we covered that one. And at Bobby says Texas should be in the playoffs. Okay, not sure exactly what league, what sport you're talking about. And we do occasionally cover sports controversies here, as we did just yesterday, talking about the the absolute obscenity of public officials. That is football coaches at public universities getting paid $54 million to not work for the next six years. Another pet peeve of mine. And again, another issue of how people are tremendous hypocrites in both parties. But in that case, especially among Republicans, I find who think that it's so evil that children get just enough food through SNAP benefits to not starve to death and yet think it's perfectly fine for a football coach at a public university who gets public funds to get paid $10 million a year. That, to me is an absolute unmitigated obscenity and is the exact opposite of conservative fiscal prudence. Okay, we're going to move on to issue three in just a moment. Stay tuned. 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 in 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 at TJ Walker AI. You'll wonder how you ever did without it. Welcome back to Filtered E Bikes. Out of control. E bikes are out of control. According to the New York Times, America quietly turned loose a fleet of unregulated high powered E bikes and Ematos. And the crash that nearly killed 15 year old Amelia Stafford shows the cost. Amelia hopped on the back of a friend's Emoto for a short ride. No helmet, no license, no training. The bike toppled. Her friends laughed until they saw the blood. Surgeons had to remove part of her skull. One doctor says E bike trauma now looks more like what seen in motorcycle crashes than bicycle falls. In Marin county, the chance of dying from a pedal bike injury is about 0.3%. On an e bike, it's 11%. Huge. Huge difference. Nationwide, E bike injuries have exploded tenfold as sales boomed. These aren't bikes. Plus, as one friend put it, they're mini motorcycles. We need speed limits, age limits, licensing and real enforcement. Or we're just letting kids ride. Deregulated motorbikes through school zones. Okay, what's the real message here? These E bikes are out of control. It's like giving full powered motorcycles to small children and people are getting run over and killed. It's time to, first of all get actual kids on real bicycles again so they get a little exercise. And for everyone else, it's time to regulate it, put some speed limits. You don't need to go more than about 15 miles an hour on a bike. You want to go faster than that, take another form of transportation. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. Now, I don't want to be a hypocrite. It I do have not an E bike. I do have an e quadricycle. And this is something that you've seen in circuses. You've seen it in TV shows. You see it on boardwalks in Jersey, in Atlantic City. You see it at the zoo in Miami. So I'm pedaling this bike. It kind of looks like a golf cart. It kind of looks like a Fred Flintstone car if you're old enough to remember that cartoon. And I do have an electric assist. Now, mine doesn't go more than about, I think, eight miles an hour. It also, because it's on four wheels and has a roof, it's pretty stable. You see it coming, it's easy to spot, and I think it's pretty safe. I've not seen any injuries on quadricycles, and there are too few of them, I think, to actually show the stats. So having said all that, I gotta tell you, these. These E bikes are out of control. Frequently when I'm in New York City, I like to walk up and down the Hudson River. There's a great walkway through Chelsea, Upper west side, and it used to always be relatively calm. You would see people biking, pedaling. Yeah, they would go a little bit faster. They'd say on your left or on your right. Everyone got along well. Where the last few times I've been there, they're zooming by so quickly that it's almost, I've seen almost near death a couple of times. Someone is. A pedestrian is not expecting a bike to come by 35 miles an hour or more. And they are zooming now, there are signs that say no E bikes there, but people just ignore the rule. Perhaps the new mayor can do something about that. I question the wisdom of so many parents giving their kids E bikes. Well, but TJ all the other kids have E bikes. What's wrong with your kid pedaling? I had to. I had to sound like A grumpy old man. But I just don't know what was wrong with my childhood where I actually pedaled a bike all over the neighborhood constantly. And did we do stupid things on our bikes? Sure. My friends and I were of the generation where we all wanted to be Evil Knievel. So we would build these ramps out of old doors, and there were sometimes they would go four feet up, two doors together. And instead of jumping over cars, as Evel Knievel did, we would jump over Christmas trees and count how many Christmas trees. And sometimes we got hurt. Fortunately, I never broke anything. But it's not that every childhood needs to be risk free, but do we need to dramatically superpower the risk children have and at the very same time reduce their options of getting exercise. Now, if you have some kind of physical mobility problem and you're simply unable to ride a bike and pedal it under your own power, okay, get an E bike. But if you have a healthy child, healthy teenager, get them E bikes, let them pedal. We're in a nationwide epidemic of obesity. 70% of Americans, depending on how you define it, are either officially obese or are overweight or both. And part of the issue is we just aren't doing anything. We're not moving enough. If you're sitting on an E bike and all of your action consists of your wrist hand movement moving 10cm, you're not getting any exercise or certainly nothing compared to actually pedaling. Now, by the way, when I'm on my E bike, I am pedaling in my equadricycle. I am pedaling the entire time. One of the reasons I got it is I wanted to, in fact, get more exercise. I did not want to be one of these old guys in Florida buttering around on a golf cart. I might look like an old guy in Florida and every other aspect, but nobody sees me just sitting on my buttocks riding a golf cart around. And I'm kind of happy about that. Okay, back to the real issue of these E bikes. I'd like to know from you, are you seeing these in your own community as a problem? Now, I live in a pretty safe suburb that is still being built out. There's a lot of empty lots and empty houses here, but I'm already seeing kids, and they're all nice kids, zooming really fast, doing wheelies and hey, I like to do wheelies on my banana bike back in day the 70s, but it wasn't motorized. It's just easier to not only hurt yourself, but to hurt others. And that's My big problem, if you want to do something risky for yourself and you're over 18, you should be allowed to. The problem is when you're on streets, when you're on sidewalks, when you're on bike paths where people are used to a bike going by at 10 miles an hour, and now you're zooming by at 30 miles an hour, it's just too easy to kill someone or to harm yourself. It is time we have more regulation. And if you're going to be on a public street, a public sidewalk, a public bike path, there needs to be some miles per hour limit. Now, some of these E motorcycles, really what they are, they call themselves E bikes are going 30, 38 miles an hour, and kid gets on no helmet, it is asking for brain damage. Essentially, California now pilots age limits and helmet rules for these Class 2 bikes. I think they're on to something. And, you know, everyone's in favor of get big government out of my life. But, you know, if your kid's a vegetable for the rest of your life, maybe big government's not so bad all the time. The fatality risk, again, they're just so much higher for these E bikes. Nationally, according to the times, E bike injuries jumped from 2,200 to 23,000 in just the last four years. Head injuries from E bike crashes increased 49 fold between 2017 and and 2022. Now, I have been on vacation, full disclosure, when I've been on vacation in certain cities, I know once in Austrian Alps, my family and I, we rented E bikes and it was enjoyable. I did wear helmets. I did stay off main streets. And one of the best times ever was out in San Francisco. You cross the Golden Gate Bridge and then you're going up and down the mountains. In Sausalito, it is much more enjoyable because those are some steep mountains if you're pedaling on your own. So I see the need, especially in mountainous areas. But I live in South Florida. It's completely flat. You have to exert very little energy to propel a bike when it's flat. And at some point, it's not for everyone, but for a lot of people, it's just profound laziness. And my concern is we're embracing this technology. I love technology. I use technology to embrace technology that on the one hand, makes you physically much less fit, on the other hand, dramatically increases accidents, injuries, head injuries, and even death. That's not a win win proposition. That's not a win lose proposition. That is a win. That is, excuse me, a lose lose proposition. 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. Want to advertise here? You better be legit. No crypto, no junk food, no supplements. Go to tjwalker.com advertise welcome back to Filtered Tech czar or tech Lobbyist Trump's Texar referee or Player on the field? According to the Times, David Sachs is supposed to be the Trump's administration's point man on artificial intelligence and crypto. Now at the same time, he's a venture capitalist with hundreds and hundreds of tech investments that stand to gain from the very policies he's shaping. As a special government employee, Sachs gets ethics waivers and kept 449 AI related stakes. The Times reports he helped design Trump's AI action plan, push to loosen export rules on powerful Nvidia chips, and backed the genius act that turbocharges stablecoins. One of his portfolio companies, Bitgo, quickly touted how perfectly it fits those new rules. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon calls this an ascendant technocratic oligarchy. The White House insists Sachs has addressed conflicts and is helping cement American technology dominance. The real question is whether the United States has quietly outsourced tech policy to a handful of investors who who profit when they get the calls right and even when they get them wrong. Okay, what's the real message here? Many Republican governors, state legislators around the country really, really want the federal government to regulate big tech. Their own citizens are saying, we want power back. We're tired of being ruled by these technocratic oligarchs. But this administration says, eh, too bad. We're going to give all the power to David Sachs. He's going to in turn tell us exactly what to do to make a handful of the biggest tech companies richer and richer and richer. Let's go and dig a little deeper here. There's some nuance here. I don't mean to sound like this is a hundred percent clear cut. I am going to in a fair, objective way. Trying to walk you through the big debates going on here in exactly how technology should be regulated and what some of the controversies are. David Sachs, by the way, he's not taking any money. I mean, when you're a multi, multi billionaire, you don't really care about $178,000 salary as a government employee. That is irrelevant to the fact that he could be writing rules that help him get another billion. That's the ethics challenge that many people are bothered by. Now he has 708 technology company investment. I mean, this guy has a finger in every pie. He's clearly articulate, intelligent, savvy and successful. But is he helping to make the policy that is the best policy for all citizens, for all consumers, for everyone in the United States for that matter. Is it helping the world or is it causing a problem for the world? He's also, by the way, a podcast host. His show all in is wildly successful. He's able to use the government people. And getting Trump to show up as a guest on his show, there's so many conflicts of interest. But the biggest one is he's basically helping all of the laws, all of the regulation in the United States go away so the big tech companies can do whatever they want so they can have more and more power, more and more monopolistic power. And even when it's not a complete monopoly, it's, it's giving so much concentration, power to a handful of players in any particular niche that they can stamp out competition or just buy up their competition that that's what concerns a lot of people. Now I'm going to give you some both side isms here and play it fair. So first of all, I do want to give you what I think are some of the top reasons many in the center and left of center, and frankly some on the right believe we should have stronger regulation of big tech companies. Right now, just a handful of firms control everything when it comes to advertising. It's Facebook and Google. They control almost all advertising online. They can charge what they want, they can, they can give you fraud, they can give you fake clicks. What are you going to do about it? And good luck trying to get someone customer service to help you. The dominant platforms can write the rules favoring their own products, their own investors, and just make it harder to have new players come in. Whether you're talking about browsers, whether you're talking about any kind of service. If you're already so big and you say you, you got to take my browser, you have to use my. You can only get an app if you use our store like an Apple. It's really concentrating power. Big platforms can crush competition or just buy them even if they don't want to be bought. There's a part of YouTube that would have loved to have become their own company, but they figured, how are we ever going to compete with Google? Let's just take the money and run. There's a part of the people who started Instagram who would have loved to have started and just become their own big giant, multi billion dollar publicly traded company. But they're like, how are we ever going to compete with Facebook? Yeah, let's just sell out. Let's take the money and run. So this can be good sometime for some entrepreneurs. But the whole concept of capitalism, free market capitalism, is you want as much competition as possible because that's what benefits consumers, that's what fosters innovation. The problem so often when Google or Facebook or any of these really big companies buy small upstarts that could have potentially grown to become billion even trillion dollar companies is they just squash them. They get rid of the competition. And some of these entrepreneurs are literally paid to just sit in a room for a couple of years and play video games because, hey, we got our hundreds of millions. We'll just do nothing. But they want us to come here to continue to meet our contractual agreement and to get the last bit of our paycheck. It's tremendously wasteful. And that is why many experts on the antitrust say, we need a stronger hand. We got to break these companies up. It is a huge, huge problem. You've got monopolistic app store fees where they could basically charge whatever they want. If you're like, I am and you've tried to start an app business, you realize, try to go around Apple, good luck with that. Let's see how well you do, or for that matter, Google. You're not willing to play ball with them and give them a huge cut, you're not going to do very well. You really aren't. When you have so much power in a such a small handful of big tech companies, they can do what they want. Organized labor. It is humorous to me so many people who say they're such big fans of making America great again, bringing back our middle class, bringing back manufacturing, they always forget the fact that what made a stronger middle class, at least for white people in America in the 50s, 60s and 70s, was because we had a strong organized labor movement in the private sector. These days, less than 6% of the private sector has union representation in America. And that's great news if you're Uber. I mean, if you founded Uber and you made your billions, it's great being able to say I don't have to deal with a taxi driver. They're not my employees, I get to make whatever I want. And I can just use technology to get them to work almost for free. And sometimes they do work for free. By the time they factor in their gas charges, fees, taxes, their automobile payments, some of these Uber drivers make nothing. Great news if you are a tech founder and you own a big piece of Uber. Bad news for people who used to have middle class or lower middle class working class wages driving a taxi. So there's the continued hollowing out of our society and our economy by more and more concentration going to a handful of tech companies that have been allowed to get bigger and bigger because of the regulatory environment for the last 20 years. Now, I'm going to be fair. There is a case to be made that it's been good for America to have so much power in Facebook and Google for these big tech companies being able to gobble up people because they've gotten so big, they've gotten scale, that they essentially control the whole world. Now that's true. I have traveled the globe, I've worked in about 45 countries and no matter where I go, everybody's on Facebook, everybody uses YouTube, everybody use Google. It has been perhaps the greatest export of American culture in the history of our country. That has given us soft power, but it's also given us real wealth. Americans and non Americans alike love investing in American technology companies. That's brought tremendous wealth from the rest of the world to the United States. Now it's often been talked about the problem of just 10 of the largest tech companies now control 40% of the S&P 500 in terms of the market cap weighting. But what a lot of people don't realize is if you look at every public company in the world on every stock Exchange, the top 10 tech companies, the American companies really make up about 20% of the entire worldwide economy. And yeah, it's troublesome as far as over reliance there, but it's also been really good in the short term. I mean, there is a reason why if you go back to around 2008, when there was a worldwide financial crisis, the economy of the United States was roughly the same as the economy of Europe. Well, we're 40% bigger now. Were so much bigger in part because we did empower technology companies. Our own technology Companies to get bigger and bigger and bigger so they could essentially take over the world. So when someone says to me, okay, tj, you're all in favor of anti regulation, yeah, we could have kept. We could have broken up Google and Facebook a long time ago, like at&t. But then would we have had a Russian social media. We'd be better off with a Russian social media app that the whole world uses rather than Facebook. Would we be really better off if China had A, its own search engine dominate the whole world instead of Google? I have a hard time making the case that that would be better off A for us politically and socially, B, whether that would be better off for Americans economically given how much so many people have in their 401ks and their investment portfolios in these big tech companies. Because, full disclosure, I do too. So this is a mixed bag. I don't think you can clearly say giving total power to the tech companies to do whatever they want is a good thing. I don't think that's the case at all. But I also think those who say, let's break up everyone, let's not have anyone have more than 10% of any marketplace, let's do everything we can to keep these companies small and nimble, perhaps was a good strategy for most of the history of capitalism. But in the interconnected world where there's this thing called the Internet and where someone with a good idea can instantly sell their product or services to anyone in the world, there is really something about scale now that gives power. And it has been one of the things that has really propped up the US Economy and our stock market as well. So it's going to take some nuance. There's no nuance in this current administration. It's whatever big tech wants. It's basically, hey, I like David Sacks house. This is what Trump said. He can do whatever he wants. He's our guy. There's not a lot of nuance there. There was nuance one, two, three years ago. The problem is the tech boys, and it is boys. The all in boys and others are so used to getting whatever they want, they have adopted the mindset that says any regulation at all is the end of the world. And they will scream bloody murder and they will spend literally a quarter of a billion dollars on a candidate to oppose anyone who suggests regulation. So I do think the far bigger danger right now is big tech has become so powerful and they're more than happy to throw their money around in political races that they're going to get to the point where they get everything they want until there's really nothing left but scraps for the rest of us. Let's take your comments right now. I do appreciate you writing in. Albert says better stats would compare normal bike and E bike injuries in percentage of users. Well, Alberta, I did try to compare that. He was talking about her previous story today. I will go back to that and see if I gave you some stats. But the, you know, some of them I think are, are almost incontrovertible as far as just the overall numbers of anything bike related traumatic that has occurred with so many more injuries coming in. And again national E bike injuries jumping from 2200 to 23,000 in four years. But to your point, Albert, that is, that might not be relevant if the number of E bikes went up 2,000%. It may be. You're absolutely right. They could be that injuries are going down because they're going up so much higher. So the head injuries for E bikes increased also 49 fold. I don't think sales have gone up 49 fold. I wish I had that. But Alberto does bring up a big point. You always have to look at true apples to apples comparison and break things down into what is absolutely relevant so you can make a rational decision. It's one of the reasons why I upset some of my friends who like me, want more tech regulation. But many of my friends are very worried that not just Elon Musk, but other E bike or excuse me, other electric vehicle makers are creating these vehicles that are so dangerous and killing people, which they have done. But I always say you have to look at the statistics in the big picture because 1.2 million people a year die in car crashes. And yes, when there is one person who dies from an autonomous vehicle, it gets all the headlines. But as far as I've seen, and I don't have them in front of me, the number of deaths per mile driven is still dramatically lower today with autonomous vehicles. Doesn't mean they're perfect, doesn't mean we shouldn't ask for them to be better. But if you care about human life and fewer people dying, and I don't know who would want to admit that they don't care about that, you can't simply say autonomous vehicles are too dangerous and they need to be tested longer. Every day you have more humans driving, you're increasing the number of deaths on the streets worldwide. It's an unpleasant fact, but it is a fact. Okay, we got to move on to the final big issue of the day. Thanks so much for joining me today. By the way, it is Sunday, the last day of November and I'm looking forward to December. Very, very popular month in my household with holidays and gift giving. I hope it's a good month for you. Back in just a moment. Filtered is brought to you by the following get the deeper takes. I don't post anywhere else. Subscribe now and@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 for 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 TJ Walker AI. It's not just smart, it's personal. Welcome back to Filtered Wall Street Journal on Trump as a Bad Bet the Wall Street Journal says Trump is a losing investment Betting on the Trump brand has turned into a financial face plan. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the stocks and cryptocurrencies tied directly to him and his family have been hammered. Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social and Trump's personal vanity ticker DJT, is down a whopping, and I mean a whopping 75% since Inauguration Day. Meme coins named after Trump and Melania have crashed 86% and 99%. One of the family's big crypto ventures, World Liberty Financial, is already down roughly 40% since launching in September. These weren't just trades. For many MAGA believers, this was a loyalty test, and they're the ones left holding the bag. The Journal makes it clear the Trump I alone can fix it brand doesn't magically suspend math. When you strip away the rallies and the hats, he looks less like a financial genius and more like the world's loudest meme stock. Okay, what's the real message here? If you have personally invested this year in any trunk, meme stock, coin, whatever, you've been taken to the cleaners. You have been fleeced. You have been turned into a fool by one of the greatest con artists in history, Donald J. Trump. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. You can always say, well, it's going to go up. You're looking at. If you have that attitude, then every stock is a good stock. Every investment is a as a good investment. Because something could always be regenerated Now, I don't want anybody to lose money, but I have to tell you, if anyone deserves to lose money, it's someone who would invest their money with Donald Trump. If you simply look at his record, forget politics. If you just look at his record as a businessman, basically everything he's ever touched until he became president the first time lost money. If you look at serious biographers of Trump, Tim o' Brien and others, Bloomberg reporters, others, they've all made the same case that if you look at Trump's financial history, until he entered politics, he lost money. He was a net loser of money. If Donald Trump had become a schoolteacher or a surf instructor and never made more than $50,000 a year and simply invested his daddy's money into AN S&P 500 Low Cost Index fund, he would have been richer in 2015 than what his actual net worth was from his so called business deals. It doesn't matter whether it's real estate ventures that went bankrupt, professional football teams that went bankrupt, airlines that went bankrupt, vodka brands that went bankrupt. Everything he's touched basically has been an unmitigated failure where his father had to bail him out. Now, there's one exception. I will be fair. Donald Trump has been wildly successful in one business in his life before he entered politics and could use the power of government to line his pockets. That business was being a TV character. Donald Trump is utterly fantastic at playing the TV character of a successful, gruff, tough businessman. The Apprentice was a huge hit. He legitimately made tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars from that show. So if you want to invest in Donald Trump, you know, investing in him pretending to be a businessman is probably a good bet. Mark Burnett did well with that, NBC did well with that. But investing with him in any kind of financial company, are you crazy? It just strains credulity to suggest it would have ever worked out. Now these here, you Gotta love this. DJT trades at about 1,240 times annual revenues. That's classic bubble territory. That's like your child's lemonade store that sells $5 a day being sold for a million dollars. It's about that. Absurd. But this crypto stuff, these meme coins, this financial liberty nonsense. So look, at some point, yeah, I'm a capitalist, I believe in free enterprise. But traditionally that's not how we asked presidents to spend their time. Last time I checked, being President of the United States was a pretty tough job. Until Trump became president, everyone else always thought it was a full time job, not a part time gig. But now he's got so many ventures going on, so many schemes, so many scams, it's certainly not surprising that most of them are big money losers. If you've invested in it with him. I'd love to hear from you, share your, your thoughts. You may say, well, I don't care about making money. I like Trump. It's a way of putting money in his pocket. Okay, I get it. But I do think I speak for a lot of people across the political spectrum. Not just radical left, not just Democrats, not just progressive, not just centrist, but an awful lot of right leaning Republicans. A lot of people in the Senate and the House feel this way, but they're afraid to say it. And that we do need to return to a time when the President could just be the President, put their money in a blind trust and focus on doing one job well. Now if this economy had zero inflation, zero unemployment, zero hunger and everything was going so well, then, then maybe you make the case, well, okay, this guy's so talented, let him start other businesses. Let him just give America part time attention. You could make that case. The last time I checked, that's not the situation. Unemployment is creeping up, especially for young college grads at the most important part of their career. Inflation, which was supposed to be defeated day one, has gone up. It's officially up 0.6% higher than it was the last day of November 2024 or the the last day before the election in 2024 when you know who was still in power and it was inflation was supposed to be so awful then. So my friends, it's not just me. It's not tj, it's not centrist, it's not Democrats, it's not liberals, it's not radical left, it's increasingly even Republicans who are not happy with, with the way this country is being managed by this administration. So if nothing else, how about this administration just knock it off on all the side scams and all the get rich quick schemes, all the graft and just focus on one thing actually not making this country substantially worse than how you inherited it in January of 2025. Okay, that concludes the main section of our show. We do have some grab bag issues every day. There's some issues where I just couldn't give them the top five cut, but they're too important to let slide. So let's dive right in. Teens. This is a new study. Teens tuning out the news. According to the Associated Press, we may be raising a lost generation of news consumers. A new survey from The News Literacy project finds that 84% of American teens describe today's news media with negative words like biased, boring, fake and depressing. More than half believe journalists routinely make up quotes or details and do favors for advertisers. And less than a third think reporters correct their errors or check multiple sources. The good news? When schools actually teach news literacy, attitudes shift. Once students see how real reporting works, a lot of that fake news cynicism starts to crack. Okay, so what are we to make of this? Yeah, some news is boring. Learning about how your county commission voted to give a contract to somebody's brother in law is kind of boring. But if you're not careful, your property taxes are going to double and you're not going to have your house. So you need to know what's really happening. Boring stuff ignored too long has a tendency to make you poor. That's why it's important. The other problem is if you don't actually know what's going on in the world, democracy doesn't function. Sorry, but one of the premises of democratic government, republican form of government for that matter, anything where a vote is cast, the premise is it doesn't work unless citizens know kind of what's going on. So if more and more of us are in an information bubble, it doesn't work. If you receive news all day long that TJ is the devil and he's poisoning the air in your neighborhood and that's the number one problem. And you're going to be physically harmed if someone comes and knocks on your door says, hey, I'm running for city council and I really want to clean up our local. You're not going to listen to that. The only thing you're going to listen to is how do we get rid of this TJ guy who's a devil poisoning our air. And it's not true. I don't even know how to poison air. So democracy simply won't function. And the problem we have is if you're a politician talking about the importance of democracy, boring. Nobody wants to listen to it. Unfortunately, the things we do care about, taxes going up, schools churning out illiterate graduates with high GPAs. All of these things come down to facts and decisions made by elected officials. Sometimes appointed officials, sometimes they're good decisions, sometimes they're bad decisions. If you don't have some sense of what the bad decisions are and the impact, there's no self correcting mechanism. I mean, that's the beauty of democracy is that there's a self correcting mechanism. You can in fact, throw the bombs out. The problem is we live in a world now where so many actors, so many bad actors are spreading this message that everyone's a bum, everyone's a bum, everyone's a bum. So I see this all the time. Countless young people tune out, oh, why vote everyone's a bum? When you're doing that, you're giving a blank check to the people who really are bombs. And that's the problem. Okay, we got to move on to the next grab bag issue. Another GOP retirement wave and Trump is the reason. According to new reporting from alternate and others, the Republican Party is entering a full blown retreat. Just days after Marjorie Taylor Greene abruptly announced she's quitting Congress, Texas Republican Troy Nias followed her straight for the exits and he admitted he called Donald Trump personally before making it public. These aren't random because he's a big Trump supporter. I should point out these aren't random departures. Republicans are openly complaining that Trump runs Congress like his personal fiefdom, demanding total obedience, punishing anyone who steps out of line, and dragging down the entire party with his collapsing poll numbers in a deeply unpopular agenda. Some GOP lawmakers say they're being forced to serve as Trump's rubber stamp. Others fear retaliation from the White House if they show even mild independence. And with Trump entering what some describe as a lame duck era, members are deciding it's safer to bail now rather than to be tied to the chaos later. Trump once bragged he alone could lead the gop. Now Republicans are racing for the door to escape him. Now, in fairness, that may be a little bit overblown. It's we're talking about a couple of resignations and there's always some resignations. But given how razor thin the current House majority is, it's only a handful. It wouldn't take much for the Democrats to take control of The Congress in 2026, the beginning of the year, not after the elections. They could in theory. If a handful of Republicans lose and they can't fill the seats or the seats are filled by Democrats, the Democrats in theory, could take control of the House of Representatives before the midterms. Now, I'm not predicting that. I haven't seen any credible assessment saying that is likely to happen. But I certainly didn't see any credible assessment predicting Marjorie Taylor Greene retiring from Congress, which she's now doing because she essentially hates Trump. She doesn't want to feel like a battered wife. And the abuse. I got to tell you, being a member of Congress, if you are a Kid and looking at history or watching movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington seems really glamorous, exciting and powerful. The reality is it's a horrible job. It's a horrible job if you're a Democrat. You have literally no power. You're treated like garbage, and the only thing you have to do all day long is get on the phone and beg. Really rich people who, frankly, would run are more comfortable in the Republican Party. You have to beg them for money. That's the only thing a Democratic member of Congress gets to do for the most part. Part, if you're a Republican member of Congress, it's even worse. You have all. You figure, wow, I'm in Congress, maybe I've been here 10 years, I'm head of a committee. I can put all these ideas I have into reality. No, you can't. You have been consigned to being a butler for the Trump administration. Disagree with him at your own risk. It's not just that the incumbent president will not support you in the next election or won't give you a campaign contribution. Oh, no, it's he'll say nasty things about how you're a despicable human being. You're now part of a lunatic left. You're crazy, and you deserve to be punished. So it's not just that you instantly will have a political opponent, although nobody wants that you will. It's not just that all the people who did give you money are now not going to return your phone calls, calls that will happen. It's not just that your opponent is going to get lots and lots of money and be able to start running negative ads trashing you. You'll get that. But you're going to be inundated with harassment in your home. You're going to have 10,000 pizzas delivered in the middle of the night that you didn't order. Your children, your grandchildren will be stocked at their places of employment and school. School. You're going to get threats to your physical person on a daily basis. Your life is essentially going to be over. Any sense of normalcy, your life will be destroyed. So that's your choice. Be a rubber stamp, act like a butler or show any independence. Your life is destroyed. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, not someone I have a lot of respect for, realized she didn't want to play that game any longer. I don't think she's the only one like that. I'm not making predictions here, certainly not predicting that the Democratic Party takes control of the US Congress in early 2026. I gotta tell you, it wouldn't surprise me at all if that did happen. Okay, that concludes the news portion of our show today. But I'd like to conclude always by helping you even more directly. I always take one question from you, typically one of my students, on something unrelated to what's in the news. Something that relates to communication skills, personal development skills, so you can be more successful. So this question today comes from Daniel, who is a student of mine in the complete storytelling course for speaking and presenting. The question is, what techniques can make PowerPoint slides more engaging and less text heavy? Okay, that's. That's a fantastic question. It is one that I get a great deal when I am doing public speaking courses, presentation skills courses. Let's unpack this. What can you do to make a PowerPoint less text heavy? That implies that you have to have text in your PowerPoint. Now, I realize chances are every PowerPoint you've ever seen had text. Chances are everyone in your company, everyone in your organization uses text in their PowerPoint. I'm here to tell you I've been teaching people how to use PowerPoint for 20 years. Excuse me, 40 years. I think I know a thing or two about PowerPoint. I have entire courses on how to create a PowerPoint presentation. I'm here to tell you you do not have to use a single word of text in a PowerPoint. I realize most people do, but you don't have to. PowerPoint is about using a screen. Think of how you use screens in every other aspect of your life. Watching movies, watching sports, watching games. Yeah, I understand you might like some subtitles sometimes, or you might like seeing the weather or the score of the soccer team match on the screen. But most of the time when you're looking at a screen, you're looking at images, action, people, a fight, conflict. The one ball going one place at a time. That's how you're used to looking at a screen. You're not really used to looking at text the whole time and ignoring images on the screen. And again, I realize it has become more popular for people to have the, the subtitles on even when they're watching a show in their own language. But even with that, you're mostly looking at the show, the people, their action. Great. PowerPoint understands that's the power of this big visual image on a screen. Whether it's PowerPoint, someone's looking at a computer or projected up on a big screen or a TV. My recommendation, if you're giving a so called PowerPoint presentation, your first order of business, don't even Have a computer open. Write down in one sentence what is it you want your audience to do after seeing your presentation. Then brainstorm on the ideas, the messages, facts, numbers that will motivate your audience to do what you want. Then narrow it down to a handful. Once you've done that, come up with a story for each one of those messages. Then come up with an image that makes that idea come alive. Now let's bring up the PowerPoint program. Let's come up with an image for each one of your messages. And don't even use text. If you want to use a whole lot of text, that's fine. You don't need PowerPoint for that. Use a Word document, use a Google Doc. Hand it out to people in the room. If you really feel they need text, email it to people in advance, but do not put the text on the screen. It's boring. People don't really like to read while someone's talking to them. If you're talking, words can come out of your mouth. You don't need the words to go on the screen. If you want to really emphasize certain points, do it with a stronger image. Do it with a longer story. Do it with a second story. But just putting words up on a screen and big, bold underlining it doesn't really help. I realize everyone does, but it doesn't mean it's effective. Use images, not text, for a PowerPoint site. Now, the other option is you can use the Microsoft Notes section if you're using PowerPoint. And the Apple version has its own version too, where if you're projecting it, you're only showing the image. But if someone is looking at it on a computer or being email or printing it out, they see all the text. You could put the text down there. And the final reason many people put text on their PowerPoint is they want it for notes for for themselves. Well, you don't need to put your notes on the screen. Put your notes on a piece of paper and just have the piece of paper in front of you. That's what I do every time I give a PowerPoint presentation. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today on Filtered. It's good to be back in the home studio after being on the road for the holidays. I'll be here with you every day this week. Next week I will be in Saigon on assignment and vacation. The week after that, I'll be in Taipei. If you're in either of those two places, please let me know and we can try to connect in real life. Thanks so much for watching the show today. If you're listening on any podcast, please leave a review and make sure you follow and subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, TikTok or anyplace else, please sign up for notifications. Please subscribe and please leave notes letting me know what you like, what you don't like. Thanks. See you.