Trump’s “92%” Tell, U.S. Tourism Drops, Jake Paul’s Broken Jaw, Epstein Files, NCAA Tax Fight

Foreign. Down in America. YouTuber Jake Paul has his jaw broken and the Epstein files just won't go away. All that and more today here on Filtered. But first up, the mystery of the number 92. You're gonna think I'm making this up, but this has all been heavily sourced and researched by the Atlantic. It's a fascinating, fascinating story. It turns out that Donald Trump. This isn't going to be news to you. It's not that he routinely lies. It's that he has a favorite lie to insert in almost any argument. And the lie is 92. He just loves to use the word 92 most frequently. 92%. So this is a take from the article. It's ENTIGLED There's a 92% chance Trump is Making this up in the Atlantic by Marie Rose Scheinerman. I'd urge you to look at it, but the findings are that Trump routinely anchors claims as 92%. Here's an example of some of the things he claims. Trump claimed he won Wayne, North Carolina by 92%. His real margin was 16%. Kind of a big difference there. He says the U.S. controls 92% of the Gulf of Mexico shoreline. The true figure is 46%. Trump claims that egg prices fell 92%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is a part of the federal government run by Trump. It's a 12.7% drop. The administration claims that maritime drug trafficking is down 92 to 96%. But no agency has any data to support this. So we're just seeing again and again and again this 92%. Now, this is just pure fantasy. It doesn't make any sense. It's. None of. It's really adding up. Now, we all know that Trump lies, and there's an, a corrosive effect over time. There is the common myth, let's say with a little bit of credibility, that all politicians lie. How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving. It's an old, old joke. But there is a quantitative and a qualitative difference here. I'm not condoning lying, but there certainly is something about a politician who acts embarrassed about lying and only lies to maybe cover themselves or prevent them from getting massive, massive embarrassment. Trump seems to lie like he breathes. He seems to think there's no other way of doing it, that if there is something he can say that makes him look good, then it's not a lie. He'll just say whatever he wants. So, again, I don't want to sound like I'm Pollyannish. And say, oh, I expect a politician to always be 100% truthful. Okay. You can certainly make the case that politicians throughout history here in the United States, elsewhere have told lies. But this idea that we're just going to turn a blind eye and say, well, that's Trump being Trump, and, well, we know he exaggerates. Well, why that is defining deviancy downward. To quote the late, great. Now I sound like Donald Trump, the late, great Senator Patrick Moynihan. And it's something that conservatives traditionally cared a lot about. It's something conservatives thought about a lot in 2015 and 2016, when virtually every single principled conservative, thinker, columnist, pundit denounced Donald Trump's candidacy. He probably forgotten. But National Review had an entire. An entire publication, a monthly publication or entire edition devoted to why Trump was disastrous for the Republican Party to endorse. Part of the reason was he lies all the time. Now we have conservative pundits doing nothing but offering apologies. It may sound obvious, but let me remind you why we care about whether politicians lie or not. Aristotle said, falsehood is in itself mean and culpable and truth noble and full of praise. Cicero said, truth is corrupted as much by falsehood as by silence. So, yes, Trump is corrupting the public waters, the public discourse with his lies. And, yeah, he's called out by mainstream media and centrists and those on the left. But conservatives continue to sort of turn a blind eye and say, well, he should get away with it because the left is somehow worse. Immanuel Kant says, by a lie, a man throws away and annihilates his dignity as a man. Edmund Burke, someone a lot of Republicans used to say they respected. Very famous conservative philosopher. Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever. Abraham Lincoln. No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. Yeah, but I guess Abraham Lincoln hadn't encountered Donald Trump because he is a successful liar in the sense that it's gotten him elected once, twice, and according to him, three times to the presidency. At what point is it just too much? At what point do people say, okay, you can lie to me if you're making the economy run really, really well, you can lie to me if you're reducing inflation, you can lie to me if you're keeping us out of war and entanglements, you can lie to me if you're keeping unemployment low. But if you're not really doing any of those things, what good is it? You're not fooling us. Americans are not being fooled into thinking prices are lower. Now I guess there some are. If you're a die hard Trump fan, I guess you can convince yourself prices are going down just because he's in office. But is anyone else being fooled? Look, there are a million reasons to differ with any one politician on policy. There are a million one reasons to differ with Trump on policy. But at some point we have to have an honest conversation with ourselves as Americans, as citizens, regardless of your politics. You may be on the right, you may be on the left, you may want taxes decreased, you may want them increased. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. And it gets tiresome when you have a politician who lies about everything all the time because you just sound, you sound like a nudge. You sound like a broken record if you point out lies repeatedly. Now, Richard Nixon was known Tricky Dick. He was known as a liar. But he was also someone who was embarrassed by it. He was someone who worried about his reputation. He wanted to always have a plausible deniability to his lies. This president doesn't even attempt to have plausible deniability. He just says, if you call me out on my lies, you're fake news. You're a liar, you're a traitor. You're a member of the loony left, the radical left. And sadly, it has worked for him at some level because he is still in office. Now, he's obviously not fooling all the people all the time. He's down to about 38% of the folks he's fooling. Or there's 38% of people in America who says? I say, I know he's lying and I don't care. What does that say about the state of democracy in America? Now? You might not have liked Joe Biden, many people didn't. You might have liked George W. Bush, many people didn't. Or Barack Obama. But this idea that you could discount them because everything out of their mouth was a lie, no, no, my friends, that doesn't stand. That in and of itself is a lie. And at some point we're going to have to take back control of standards in America. And it doesn't seem to be coming from a lot of gatekeepers in the past. Certainly we can't count on major media to fact check anymore. We certainly can't count on the major platforms because Trump is, through his force of will, convinced Facebook and YouTube and others, facts don't matter anymore. You can say the most extreme vitriolic nonsense and conspiracy theories. You can just say 92% of Americans support me. I won the election by 92%. And nobody's supposed to use editorial judgment anymore. So we have this massive, massive free for all. And we now we live in an era where simply calling someone out for spewing nonsense means you're somehow guilty of censorship, you're guilty of deplatforming. Oh, how dare you say someone who doesn't spout nonsense and lies all the time doesn't deserve the biggest platform, the biggest audience, whether we're talking about someone from the White House or someone on YouTube or Facebook or your favorite podcast. So going to try to do my part. I'm going to say no, you don't get a pass anymore just because you're in high office, just because you've conditioned everybody into thinking that's your shtick. You should be able to lie all the time. No lies still need to be called out. And I do want to praise the Atlantic, which is a fine publication, and Marie Rose Scheinerman for calling this out, for doing some basic work of saying, hey, there's the president saying he won by 92%. Where have I heard that number before? And whether she is ChatGPT or just Google or just went to the White House press page, she spotted this trend of yes, the president is continually just not just making up numbers. We known for a long time he does that, but relying on this crutch of 92%. So I'm going to try to be more diligent myself. Every time I hear the president say something is 92% in his favor, I'm just going to, for one, assume he's lying. Number two, do a quick fact check so I can bring it to your attention. Lots more to come. Glad you're here today with me and it's good to be back home. I've been on the road for the last two weeks in Vietnam on assignment and sightseeing vacation. Also in Taiwan and Hsinchu and a number of place Taipei, number of places. But just got back last night and am back here in the home studio. More to come. YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul has lost. And this time he had his jaw broken. Anthony Joshua fought patiently and then knocked Jake Paul down in the sixth round. So it didn't end in about 30 seconds the way many predicted, but it did end. It was a bit of an ignominious ending for Jake Paul. Whether this stops him from this nonsense fantasy of being a professional boxer, I don't know. This was on Netflix. It was a big deal. A lot of money changed hands and it was right down the street from me in Miami's. Case Center. A lot of people wanted to watch it. I have no idea why. Folks, it's time to grow up. We're all guilty of this from time to time, but it's known as authority bias. It's the idea someone is well known and does this one thing well, they must be good at this. Something over here, completely unrelated. We're all guilty of it from time to time. And yeah, Jake Paul is good at being on video. He's good at getting attention. He has 28 million followers on Instagram. He has 20 million subscribers on YouTube. He has 19 million followers on TikTok. I get it. He's popular. He has 79 million people. It doesn't mean he's a good boxer. I realize he's rich, he's young, he's famous, but are we going to start putting him, Are we going to make him the center of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team because he's popular? The one thing about sports that most people have traditionally liked is the idea that it is kind of a meritocracy. You can't just be famous and bulldoze your way in there. That's why so many people were offended when billionaire Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, sort of weaseled his way into a professional tennis tournament a few months ago and got soundly trounced. So, look, is Jake Paul a better boxer than I am? Yes, I. I'm a horrible boxer. I've never boxed, and if I did, I would just crumple. I have a very low tolerance for pain. But I'm not here trying to pretend to be a good boxer. So here's why this bothers me. It bothers me that Netflix would want to air this and that so many people would want to watch this. It's almost like saying, hey, here's a guy who can make a car company successful. Let's let him run the entire federal government and control whether hundreds of thousands of poor people around the world just die by cutting off their aid. That's right. We actually did that when our government gave control to our entire budget to Elon Musk earlier this year. Elon Musk, to his credit, now says, well, if I had that to do over again, I wouldn't do it. Maybe Jake Paul, as he's feeling his broken. It's allegedly broken in two places, is thinking, you know, maybe I should stick to the easy work. Talking in front of camera, in front of a camera is easy. This is fun what I'm doing. I'm feeling no pain right now. When Jake Paul is on camera, he doesn't really have to have pain. So why in the world is he. Is he doing this? Now, I realize he wants to have fun, he thinks he's cool. But this is getting way out of hand in our culture, where people are constantly giving credibility to folks who are well known in one area and giving them control to something else. We see it in our federal government. Robert F. Kennedy is good at getting attention, primarily because his father and his uncle were assassinated and they served as senators and President of the United States. Why in the world that would give anyone the idea that he should be in charge of health care and vaccine is beyond me. But hey, he's famous and a lot of people like him. So we're seeing this again and again and again. I urge you, ask yourself, am I listening to this person because they have a shred of credibility on what they're trying to do? If not, click off the channel. Why am I asking you to watch me? Well, it's because I have spent 40 years working with newsmakers trying to help them figure out how to communicate. Whether it's CEOs, billionaire fund managers, presidents of companies, Wall street wizards, presidents of countries, Nobel Prize winners. I've been in the trenches working with those people, helping them how to figure out how to communicate effectively, how to have personal development habits. I have 12 million online student enrollments in my personal development courses and communication skills courses, which arguably makes me the most popular online communication skills instructor in the world. Now, you may quibble with that, you may disagree with any one fact or piece of advice I give, but that's why I'm putting myself out here and why I'd like you to at least entertain listening to my expertise. If I come to you one day and say, watch me because I'm the world's greatest singer, you should hit delete pretty quickly. If I tell you you need to watch me beat up somebody who is six inches taller, a thousand times faster and stronger they are than I am in a boxing match. I think you should laugh in my face and turn it off. We all have to get better at saying no, sir. And it's typically a sir. Let's not kid ourselves. No, sir, you're not credible for this. Click. Henry Ford was great at creating an assembly line. He really did mass produce cars, changed our economy, changed the world forever. He was brilliant at that. But then a lot of people wanted to start listening to his opinions on the Jews. Not so good at that. Spoiler alert. He didn't like them. So I'm not saying you have to stay in your lane and never branch out or try new things, but you need to earn credibility in your new lane. If all of a sudden I want to be a fashion designer, then I think you need to not just buy it because TJ's wearing it. You need to really look and say, are those fashions any good? Rather than just blindly following someone because they're well known. And being well known for doing stupid stuff on the Internet is probably the least legitimate credential for doing anything else in the entire world. Jake. Paul, I hope your jaw heals, but I hope your ego heals, too, to the point where you don't subject any more people and your own body to this torture. Oh, yuck. There's tourists everywhere. Let's get out of here. Ah, these tourists. Aren't they awful? Well, tourists are awful unless you make your living based on tourism. Tourism is really getting hurt in the United States. Let's look at the facts. This is courtesy of an expose in the New York Times. 4.5 million fewer international visits to the United states expected in 2025 versus 2024. This is really reversing all the good things that were happening after the pandemic. International tourism spending fell by $6 billion from $179 billion last year to an expected $173 billion this year. Canada arrivals dropped nearly 26% through November. I wonder why Canada seems like they liked America. Maybe because we're telling them how awful they are and how they're stealing from us and we need to erect all these barriers. Maybe that's why. Visitors from Germany fell nearly 12%, France nearly 7%. South Koreans. Their tourism dropped 6% over the last year, according to the Times. New York City, a place I'm going next week for some tourism for vacation. At least they're getting my money. They saw a 5% drop from 2024. Now, that's not the end of the world. It's not huge, but still, a lot of people make their livelihood on tourism. They're expecting it to go up. It went down. Las Vegas. Huge tourism destination, domestic and international, fell more than 7% through October. Hollywood Boulevard souvenir sales down 30 to 40% per month, according to shop owners. 11. This is a pretty big number. 11 million fewer hotel rooms were sold nationwide this year versus last year. The travel trade deficit is projected to hit $70 billion, compared with a $51 billion surplus in 2019. And here's the thing that's interesting to me. For those of you who are like, well, what's happening in the rest of the world? The US Is now the only major global destination seeing a decline in tourism while spending among our peers is growing. Wonder why that is. Can you put your, can you put your finger on it? Well, what else is going on? Nobody likes to go where they're not wanted. No one wants to go where they're not respected. We are seeing rhetoric out of certain quarters in Washington D.C. denouncing people from other countries, their hostile rhetoric. People in Canada have been mocked saying, oh, you know, you're just the 51st state, maybe we'll take control over you again. People are offended by that. Now it's interesting that we have a president who prides himself as being so successful in the hospitality industry. All the hotels, fancy clubs, very hospitable to tell people you're insignificant. You shouldn't even be your own country. We don't like you, we're going to take over your country. I mean, that's the message to Denmark. That is was an implied message to Canada, to Panama. I mean, not that we're really courting that many Panamanian tourists, but still, travel bans, what do you know? It doesn't help tourism to tell people from an entire country we don't want you here. It doesn't really help tourism from certain countries to say you're from, I'm not even going to use the word, but kind of like shirt without the R. You're a garbage hole country. Turns out that doesn't really make people feel warm and fussy about visiting your country. The proposal of a new $250 visa fee for tourists as well as $100 extra fee just to go to a place like the Grand Canyon. That's not making people feel warm and fuzzy about coming to the United States. Now interestingly, we heard from the Oval Office last week that America's back, that we had a horrible brand a year ago. Well, tourism was higher a year ago. You had respected conservative publications like the Economist say that the United States had never been in a better position, that the United States was in fact a hot country. Now, not so much. And yet just a few days ago in the White House we saw a so called leader talk about how America's back. We're now a hot country. Well, if we're so hot, how come compared to other major tourism destinations, nobody seems to want to come here? The US is the worst performer among the top 10 global destinations in tourism, according to the New York Times. All major competitors, the uk, Japan, Greece, posted Double digit gains this year and we did not. The perception has gone from the United States being a destination dream for a lot of people around the world to risky hassle. That's kind of the rebrand now. We're supposed to have in the White House a branding expert, someone who's really good at the media. The media message. Well, it's not working. I just spent two weeks outside of the United States and did talk to a number of tourists who were touring Vietnam, Taiwan, other places that they've told me. It doesn't seem like it's worth the headache right now. The fingerprinting, the extra fees being looked at suspiciously. So if you are in the tourism business, if you own a hotel, if you own a restaurant, if you own a travel company and you make your livelihood based on tourism, I'd love to hear from you, post your comments right now. Are you happy with the fact that you're basically being played for suckers? This occurrence Administration is saying that, oh, you don't really count. I'm just going to gaslight you. I'm going to tell you, Americans economy is a plus. Plus plus plus plus the fact that you're looking at your cash register at the end of every month and seeing fewer dollars in there. Well, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes looking at your own cash register? That seems to be the message. And I want to know, are you getting tired of that message now? I'm sorry. Some of you can find fault with me in my logic. You can criticize me and say, well, T.J. you're too conservative. You care about business. Maybe we shouldn't care about the tourism business. Maybe tourism's bad over tourism. We're hearing that all the time. Here's the thing. America is a big country. We could squeeze about four or five times as many people as we have in this country and still not be as crowded as Germany or France or a lot of other European countries or a place like I just went to Vietnam. We got a lot of space. We have space here for tourists. And we have a lot of people who have devoted their lives, devoted their life savings to starting bed and breakfast, starting hotels, starting touring companies, starting boating companies to take tourists around. And they're hurting. And what are they supposed to do now? Go on welfare? Again, you could say I'm too conservative, but I actually like people making money in the private sector. I actually don't like big government meddling in the private sector. And when you have big government actively shooing away, discouraging people from around the world who are, for the most part, let's face it, wealthier than the average citizen from their own country. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford plane tickets to come here and they wouldn't be able to afford hotels. We're discouraging wealthy people from coming here and participating in our free market system. So that offends me as someone who does believe in capitalism. Again, I'm a sane, sensible centrist here. And when I see government actively harming our private sector, I am concerned. What about you? Is it time to end the non profit status of NCAA football? Oh, this is heresy to a lot of people, but Senator Maria Cantwell is drafting legislation right now trying to do this. She's formally asking Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation to analyze her legislation so that it can advance. So here's the thing. A non profit is supposed to exist for some public benefit. It's the idea that, okay, not everything is about profit in our culture. You need schools, maybe churches, other institutions like that. Your United Way, that's about helping people, doing something that isn't just for profit. Let's be honest with each with ourselves. NCAA football left that realm a long time ago. This is frankly a tax dodge. And it's time to close the loophole. And I want to thank George Will for putting a spotlight on this. He used his still formidable column, his spotlight, to essentially endorse Senator Maria Cantwell's legislation. Here is the issues involved. Big time college sports has become a multi, multibillion dollar industry. It's now attracting private equity and venture capital. They're putting their fingers all over the various revenue streams from TV contracts. The NCAA and its conferences still benefit from tax exempt treatment because they're affiliated with nonprofit universities. And let's face it, can we just end the sham? Oh, they're student athletes. No, they're not. They are professional athletes. If you're playing a sport and you're devoting almost all of your time training, eating, learning for traveling for it, and you're doing something that's on tv, bringing in billions of dollars of revenue, you are a professional. Yes, you are a professional and you're part of a professional business. The legislation is looking at ending tax exempt treatment for the NCA member schools and affiliated conferences. It's about time. It would subject college athletics revenue to unrelated business income tax. And this could have a big impact on university finances, as it should. Nil collectives and tax exemption. Senator Cantwell notes that IRS guidance saying many nil collectives primarily provide private benefits and therefore don't qualify as tax exempts. And ask whether Congress should codify the rules. Well, they should. Compensation and labor classification, whether current tax, excise tax tools meaningfully restrain excessive coaching pay and buyouts, and how tax changes if athletes are treated as employees versus independent contractors. Yes, it's time to change all that. I've talked in this show about the absolute obscenity of using tax dollars and tax exempt dollars for, first of all, paying coaches sometimes $10 million a year, and then because they don't win every single game, firing them, but giving them another 50, 60 million dollars because that's what they had in their contract. It's, it's not nonprofit. You're making $10 million a year. You are by definition more profitable than 99.999% of businesses in the world. So let's stop hiding behind this, this sham of saying, oh, just because you're a part of a university, you're nonprofit and you're good and you shouldn't have to pay any taxes. So here's the premise of the Senator. College athletics increasingly behaves like a commercial entertainment business. No doubt about it. There's media rights, sponsorship, investment, partnerships. But it still enjoys tax advantages designed for educational and charitable purposes that should be taken away. If an activity looks, prices and negotiates like a pro league, the public can reasonably ask why it's treated differently from the NFL, the NBA, or the ufc. Now, kind of the big ugly thing that has recently emerged is private equity getting into this. Conferences are now exploring deals that resemble selling slices of future media cash flows to financial partners, private equity companies, venture capitalists. You're really no longer even remotely close to campus recreation, incidental education activity. And that's why it's time to change the tax status. Because right now, the tax status giving them nonprofit status, meaning they don't have to pay taxes, it makes it easier to escalate these coaches salaries, their benefits, their perks, their packages. It makes it easier to get into these, these wars over who can have the fancier facility, how many spas can you have, how many VIP rooms can you have here? And this increasingly professionalization of the recruiting process and retaining it's just absolutely out of hand. And it's about fairness. Local businesses pay taxes. I have to pay taxes. There's a good chance you or your boss pays taxes. Or why in the world should college sports not have to pay taxes? Hotels, bars, minor league teams in college towns pay taxes on revenue tied to entertainment, a structure that lets a major sports enterprise Operate. Tax advantage can look like government picking winners, especially when the revenue is huge and the product is commercial. So to me it gets back to another form of it's essentially socialism. You're giving back through the form of these tax breaks, essentially millions and what could add up to be billions of dollars of subsidies for private businesses, that's privatizing or that that's giving public socializing private business, that's wrong. If you believe in free market enterprise as I do, folks, I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. You may consider yourself part of the far left. If you're a part of the far left, I don't know why you want a football coach making $12 million a year. That's income inequality. If you're on the right, if you're a libertarian, if you're on the far right, I don't know why you want big government meddling with the free market system. That's what it is. This is the government picking winners and losers. So if you want to start a construction company, sweat hard, do a lot of work, get people to pay you, you then have to give a good chunk of that money in taxes to the federal government. But if you want to be a football coach, if you want to be a college and rake in tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, you're not going to be a poor SAP like the owner of that construction company. No, you don't have to pay the taxes. You're a nonprofit. It's absolute insane sanity. Now, what are some of the other implications? Donor behavior could shift. Because right now, if with all the world hunger problems, war problems, people dying from malaria, there are a lot of people who look at all the problems in the world, they think, you know what the biggest problem in the world is? My state college isn't winning enough basketball or football teams. So I'm going to give $2 million to my athletic booster committee at my state university so they can give that $2 million to get a football coach. It's all tax deductible. That could change and it should change. There's going to be budget pressure on non revenue sports because they might not have as much money from that. It's okay. I'm willing to, I'm willing to risk that. There's so many problems of this right now. We've got ticket fee inflation because administrators can just pass the tax cost to consumers and everyone sort of figures out, hey, it's sports. Let's not use any critical thinking skills here. It's not just college sports. We see municipalities, we see cities, states doing this all the time where they think, oh, we have a choice between having good schools in our community or giving a billionaire a new stadium. Forget the schools, shut down the rows. Let's give the billionaire stadium owner anything they want because hey, it's sports. So let's just shut off our brains. I'm glad to see Senator Cantwell having the bravery to do this. Unfortunately, my prediction is that this legislation will lose by about 99 to 1. Epstein files in the news again. Wow. I should just record myself saying that and just replay it every day and take more time off, I guess. It doesn't seem like it's ever going away. The Department of Justice posted an initial batch of Epstein related records required by a new transparency law. But at least 16 items, including photos, briefly appeared online and then disappeared from the Department of Justice webpage. They're saying, well, you know, we should have put that up. Privacy concerns, lots of redactions. Okay, what do we really need to know here at this late stage? What are we going to find? I'm going to go ahead and make a prediction and I'm going to offend some of you, but I'm going to call it like I see it and I'm going to try not to delve into irresponsible conspiracy mongering. I seriously doubt there's some document in there that says, yes, I have video coverage of Donald Trump having sex, sexually abusing this 14 year old girl. Here it is, here they are together. Here's video. I doubt that there's anything that egregious in there, but there may be. You never know. I don't think that's what's in there. What I think is happening is that Trump, uncharacteristically for him, is embarrassed about something. Now this is a guy who seems to revel in transgression, seemed very proud of his mug shot, seems proud of the fact of his dozens of felony convictions. Does not shame easily. Didn't seem ashamed at all when a civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse of Eugene Carroll and liable for defaming her, awarding her 5 million. I didn't do it. Didn't seem to embarrass him at all. So I think sane, rational people, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, are honestly thinking, why is he so vehemently against revealing these documents? Why does he continue to say, nothing to look at here? Which of course makes everyone think there's a lot to look at here. Why does he do that? Now I Don't in general indulge in idle speculation, conspiratorial minded speculation. But this isn't a conspiracy. I'm simply trying to connect two plus two and come up with something that isn't 89 or 69 but also isn't minus one. I'm assuming that at some point there are pictures or videos or evidence with Donald Trump, with someone who looks 28, carries herself as a sophisticated 28 year old, but was maybe 17 years old in 10 months and he realizes, oops, didn't know it at the time, but found out later, my bad. But now realizes that some of his supporter, maybe a lot of his supporters are going to say, okay, that's a line too far because I can't for the life of me figure out why else would he go to this much effort to hide, hide, hide, conceal, conceal, conceal these records. If you have a better theory, let me know. It's no one in. No one in the world. There's not a single person in the world who thinks the Donald Trump wants to keep the Epstein file secret because he's worried about violating the privacy of young girls. No one thinks that. I'm sorry, Donald Trump's biggest supporters don't believe that. No one thinks that Donald Trump is trying to somehow cover up so that Bill Clinton doesn't look bad, or Alan Dershowitz or any, or Prince Andrew or Mick Jagger or any of the seemingly thousands of celebrities who knew Jeffrey Epstein, hung out with him, went to parties. I mean, at this point, if you're at all famous and you're not seen in a picture with Jeffrey Epstein, it's almost embarrassing. It's almost like saying you're not a real celebrity. This guy really got around. So again, no one can plausibly say that Jeffrey Epstein or that Donald Trump somehow cares about protecting other famous people or political allies of embarrassment. He's never once done that in the last 79 years cared about anyone else being embarrassed. So that has to be ruled out. So why does he want this hidden? You have to assume it's either something where he's not officially guilty of a crime but so offends. I mean, maybe there's a picture of him watching Jeffrey Epstein naked with a 14 year old girl laughing, or a video of him laughing at it where he's not doing anything illegal, but he knows that even his staunchest supporters would say, okay, that crossed a line that we can't come back from. Or alternatively, there actually is evidence, photos, videos, or enough text documents in, you know, contemporary times from from credible people saying, yes, he did in fact have an inappropriate or shall we say, felonious assault on an underage girl. Again, I'm not making that allegation. I have no evidence of that. I'm simply trying to be a sane, sensible centrist looking at this through the lens of anything that comports with the reality we know and why someone would do this. Now, I'm really going to offend a lot of people now by telling you I don't think it matters what's. And I'm not saying I don't care about predators and old men sexually abusing young girls. I do care about that. I think it's awful and horrific. What I'm saying is I don't think it matters about Trump because I think anyone with a conscience, anyone who cares about the propriety of sexual abuse already has all the information they need to know about Donald Trump. I don't think we need one more file, one more release for any fair minded person to make up their mind. So let's look at the facts now. I just told you a few hypotheses about what might be in those files. Let's really look now at verifiable facts. A civil jury in 2023 found that Trump was guilty liable for sexual abuse of Eugene Carroll, also that he defamed her. They awarded her $5 million. Additionally, a defamation check damages. Trump was ordered to pay $83 million. That's being appealed. There are recorded statements of him you may remember from Access Hollywood came out in the campaign in 2016, where Trump says, I don't even have to wait going up to women and start kissing them. When you're a star, they let you grab them by the. And I won't even say it here. This is a clean show. That's not all. So he's also on record publicly in an interview with Howard Stern in 25,005 that he liked to go backstage before pageants while, while contestants were changing because he was the owner and he could inspect it. Now, this has been verified. A Ms. Teen USA in 2005 said that, that she did, that he did in fact come back and look at them. Some of the girls were topless, some naked. There were allegations in the 1997 contest from multiple contestants saying Trump entered the dressing room while they were changing. Some of the accounts claimed the girls in fact were topless, naked at the moment. One contestant, Maria Bellato, says that he walked in. She said, there's a man there. He says, don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before. Now there are do we have to even go through Stormy Daniels again? Now, there was a time when principled conservatives Republicans would say, okay, if you want to be a public figure in life in America, you can't have affairs with porn stars and then bribe them and pay them off to go out. Suddenly that became acceptable. Somehow the right's hatred of the left so blinded them to every traditional morals or standard they have. Now, no one's Stormy Daniels is not claiming that he physically abused her. No, that's not. But again, it shows the, the treatment of women and she was not underaged at the time. Let's be clear about that. Additionally, there have been According to Business Insider, at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to flat out assault to groping. Several of the women have accused him of unwanted kissing, groping in professional settings. So look, it's one thing if there's some confusion. Someone went on a date once, misread some signals. One person said there's some hurt feelings. But 26 women, sexual assault, unwanted groping, kissing. So I'm sorry, I don't really need to know any more about Trump's character from the Essene files. And the fact that anyone needs to at this point, I frankly find bizarre. Again, you can say, tj, you're too conservative. That's old fashioned to say that our political leaders shouldn't be out assaulting women, raping them. You're just too conservative. And sorry, I guess that's what I am. And many people don't seem to care about that anymore. Okay, there's going to be more news about Epstein. The one thing I will predict is this Department of Justice is not going to release anything that makes Trump look bad. I think what we are going to find though, and this is going to be interesting at some point they are going to say, we've now released everything, everything out there except things that just are confidential because they reveal the privacy of a young girl. At that point, there are going to be lawyers who also have files in their own legal offices who've represented young girls who are going to say, ah, wait a minute, you forgot something and I have permission from my client. We scratched out her name, but she's given us permission to, to release this document and this photo in this video. So the drip, drip, drip is going to continue. It's going to continue every single day for a long, long time. Question of the day comes from Imaduddin Elias. She's a student in the complete Storytelling course for speaking and presenting. The question is, what techniques can help reduce stage anxiety during storytelling presentations, the number one thing that can reduce anxiety is for you to practice your story. Practice your presentation on video. Just grab a cell phone. Any webcam will do. Record yourself. Watch it. If you think it's boring, flat, uninteresting, guess what? It is. The solution isn't to drink green tea, meditate, visualize a standing ovation, or visualize your audience in their underwear. The solution is, do it again. Practice your story. Practice your presentation on video. Look at it again. Do more of what you like. Do less of what you don't like. Keep practicing on video until you love what you see, until you think, wow, I would watch that person give a presentation if it weren't already me. If you get to the point where you're seeing a presentation that you're giving on video and you like it, it becomes virtually impossible to be nervous or uncomfortable or to have stage fright. The stage fright, the nervousness comes from thinking, oh, what if I'm not interesting? What if I'm no good? What if I'm boring people? Well, it is a risk. There's always that risk. The solution is to actually make sure you're interesting. And you can do that not by writing and rewriting and rewriting your script, because you might have a good script, but if all of a sudden your head is down and you're reading in a flat, monotone way, you're not going to be interested. A presentation is something visual. It's oral. It's the sound you're making out of your mouth. It's what you're doing with your body or not doing with your body. So the only way of testing that is by practicing it on video and actually looking at it and continuing to do it until you love it. So that is is the solution. Thanks so much for joining me today. This is Filtered with TJ Walker. I'm your host. Every single day I come to you analyzing top business stories, economic technology stories, filtering it through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills, all with the goal of helping you not just understand more about the news, but to be more successful in your personal life and your professional life. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you're new to the program, thank you. Please make sure you subscribe. Please make sure you follow if you're watching on any social media platform. Thank you for doing so. Please make sure you follow us and subscribe on YouTube. Please leave comments Sign up for notifications if you're listening to this show on any podcasting platform, whether it's Spotify, Apple Music, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, any platform. Thank you. Be sure you follow or subscribe. Don't be fooled. If you hit subscribe, you're not going to get a bill, you're not going to be charged. It is totally free to listen to this show. 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