Wegovy Goes Pill, YouTube Beats Netflix, and Trump Halts Offshore Wind

Well, Govee is about to become available in pill form. YouTube now dominates not just all television, but especially daytime television. And Sammy Davis Jr's wife just passed away at the age of 91. Let's dive right into the first story. WeGovy is going to be available in a pill version. The FDA has just approved a pill version. Patients will no longer have to inject themselves with a needle. Let's face it, a lot of people do not like needles. But they are looking for an easy way, a relatively easy way to lose weight. Now, in clinical trials, people lost on average 14% of their body weight. That is pretty significant, pretty dramatic. Not much different than the percentage of weight loss from people taking the injection. So certainly. So why is this so big? Why is this so huge? Well, Govy and these other GLP1 drugs have radically transformed society. I'm sure you've seen it. I've seen it. Friends that you meet and you haven't seen them in six months and they look like a completely different person. They've lost half themselves. So, folks, it's not a news flash to say United States and a lot of the world is facing an obesity epidemic. Food. As much as people like to complain about affordability crisis, food has never been cheaper for most people in the world in terms of a percentage of income spent on food. Fast food especially is cheap and it's extraordinarily fattening and it's bad for your health. So currently, even with all of the GLP1s out there, some 70% of Americans currently are either obese or overweight or have diabetes or have combination of three of those things. So there's clearly a need for some solution. Now, the easiest and yet the hardest solution, let me not be glib here, because it's not easy. The best solution, according to every medical expert, is that people eat zero junk food. They eat whole food, relatively unprocessed food, and eliminate sugars and artificial sugars in their diet and exercise a lot. Then it's almost impossible not to weigh a healthy body weight. But let's be honest, nobody wants to do that, or very few people want to do that. We all want that easy shortcut. And for years there was always some magic pill promoted back in the day. Late night tv, infomercial scams, quick scams on Instagram, selling you some magic potion. And then a few years ago, the real deal did come out. Now there are extraordinary negative side effects from these. I'm not, and I'm not your doctor. I'm not telling you to go on a GLP1. And I'm not telling you to take this new pill. I'm interested in looking at it from the standpoint of how this could radically transform society and what's going to happen here. Let's look at more of the facts. So again, the Wegovy pill has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration Administration. It does contain semiglutin or glutide. That's the same drug as in the Wegovy injections. The maintenance dose is 25 milligrams of semiglutide. There was another oral tablet that did come out, but it only had 14 milligrams, so it wasn't as successful. But they did a true double blind test. The placebo group lost almost no weight and those taking this drug lost 13.6% of their body weight, which is pretty substantial. And interestingly, the price is only $149 a month now, before it's been thousands. So this is essentially going to democratize weight loss at a massive level. Couple of predictions here. It's all well and good to say everyone is beautiful and yes, all human beings have of inherent value and are of equal moral worth, but we do live in a looksus society. And I think a certain percentage of people are going to do this just because they want to look better for pure vanity. But there's also the very unpleasant fact, and I get accused of fat shaming sometimes. I don't. What I think is a shame is dying at age 50 from diabetes and heart stroke and hypertension when you could have lived to 90. That's what I think is legitimate shame. And that is largely a result for many Americans of simply eating too much garbage and weighing a lot more than your body can support. So to the extent that these drugs can solve that problem might not be an ideal fix, but it's better than the status quo. The status quo is for many Americans, certainly in certain demographic groups, life expectancy is no longer expanding. I mean, the history of humanity certainly since the age of enlightenment has been life expanding, going higher because of increased sanitation, increased nutrition, abundance of food, and lack of people starving to death. Well, in recent years, it's gone the other way. We are literally killing ourselves by putting too much garbage in our mouth. And apparently these GLP1s do a great job of just making people feel full, making people not think about food all the time. Now, according to Dr. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner, trials always look better than they are in practice. So he's suggesting if the average person is losing 13% from the trials. Maybe it's more like 7% in real life. But if you can take 7% off of your weight, I mean, if you weigh 200 pounds and you can get down to 186, I mean, that could certainly make the difference between being obese versus in the normal healthy range or the, or the difference between being overweight and being healthy. So I'm not sure that is a reason not to do it. According to Dr. Scott Hagan at the University of Washington, there's no way I'm going to take a pill and not drink coffee for 30 minutes. So here's what he's getting at. This new pill, you need to take it as soon as you get up and you need to keep your stomach empty for 30 minutes. So Dr. Hagan is pointing out the potential problem with this. A shot. Apparently you can just do that anytime. It goes right in your bloodstream. Whether you're full, hungry, doesn't matter. This new oral form, you have to take it on an empty stomach first thing in the morning. And like a lot of people I know, I typically have a cup of coffee within about 10 minutes of getting up. You can't do that if you're going to do this drug. Okay. I do predict this is going to be a big, big thing because the GLP1s are already huge and I have to assume an extraordinarily high percentage of the population is scared away from needles. I don't like needles. Fortunately, I don't think I need one of these drugs, either my oral form or a shot. But if I did, I would definitely opt for a pill. So I think we're going to see a dramatic increase. When you combine the ease of use of a pill versus a needle and the dropping of price, you might see 100 million Americans on this drug soon. And supposedly it helps with a lot of other problems. People all of a sudden drink less. Other addictions can seem to, if not completely be eliminated, at least minimized. So this can have far reaching health impact on American society. Again, look at the side effects. If you are overweight and you're thinking of taking one of these drugs, whether it's in a prescription form or a needle form, don't take my advice, but do your research. One of the things I would urge you to do is look at the side effects of these drugs. There are a lot of side effects. You've got to balance that with. What about the side effects of being obese? Because the side effects of being obese are the following. Increase your chance of dying early from a heart attack, increase chance. Chances of dying from hypertension, from stroke, from diabetes, of having limbs amputated from diabetes. So it's not as clear cut as, oh, there's a small risk here, I better not do that. There's risk in the typical American lifestyle, which is eating lots of garbage, highly processed food, and exercising too little. So I'm going to be monitoring this because I do think this has a potential of dramatically altering our society. Will it be for the better? It might be, but there may be all sorts of side effects that people get after being on it for five years that we just don't know yet. Stay tuned. YouTube is continuing to crush it around the clock. YouTube has quietly become the dominant force in American television. Not at night, but during the day, when it crushes Netflix and every other streamer in sheer viewing hours. Nielsen data shows YouTube owning mornings and afternoons and even overnight viewing. It's basically getting everything other than primetime tv. When people still do apparently like to look at Netflix and hbo, Apple plus and sort of premium locations. I know I like to look at those. But people are using YouTube as sort of background noise, utility TV, something to have on, something that gives them comfort. And it is generating just tremendous numbers of raw hours consumption. Let's look at the facts here. YouTube accounts for nearly 13% of all U.S. tV viewing. Now, they're counting that as what is actually being consumed. Not on a cell phone, which YouTube obviously does very well there, but on a traditional TV, not just a computer screen or an iPad. Netflix holds about 8% or second place. At 11am in the morning, YouTube is averaging 6.3 million viewers. That's huge. Netflix draws 2.8 million views at 11am Amazon prime has about a million viewers midday. HBO Max Peacock has less than 600,000 daytime viewers. Primetime things narrow. YouTube is at 12 million. Netflix is at 11 million at 9pm 75% of podcasting listening occurs between 6am and 6pm and YouTube logged in 700 million hours of video podcast in October. Video podcast viewing rose 75% year over year. Now, those are numbers that traditional network TV executives would love to have. I mean, frankly, they would love not to lose another 7.5% of audience in a year. But to see 75% growth is phenomenal. I do think it means a continuing death spiral for TV news, especially as we talked about yesterday, when the very things that people feel are special about traditional broadcast television, much less cable, things like 60 Minutes are being polluted and politicized and ruined for political reasons. As happened earlier this week with a story that was critical about the Trump administration, was pulled off the air at the last minute by one of his new allies ensconced at the executive offices of cbs. Okay, what else is significant here? This is kind of the power of the platform. This is what the head of Google sales would say. Obviously they have a bias. They're trying to make this seem powerful. Not everyone is that bullish on it, though. According to Holland Willis, a senior analyst at TB T Vision, it's not very attentive viewing. It's something people have in the background. Well, but if it's on and ads get out there, is that any less in the background than if you're in your car listening to radio, hearing an ad? So daytime TV was once a shared experience. So many people I knew watched Oprah. Did you see Oprah? Did you see Phil Donahue back in the day? It was kind of a shared experience. Oprah was getting 10 million views or a 10 million audience at the peak of her career, sometimes even higher. That's all gone. So, so people, I don't even hear people talk about daytime television and more. I know it's still on, but I mean, Ellen's gone, Rosie o' Donnell's gone, Jerry Springer's dead, Bill Donahue's dead, and Oprah has her. You know, she's still everywhere, but she's not getting 10 or 15 million people watching her a day. She has her, her, her magazine and she has her cable channel and podcast. But it's a different, different world. The daytime TV shows are for the most part dead. They're not. I mean, Dr. Phil is gone too. He's started other ventures, but it's not really happening. So what's the real significance here? We've seen in just the last few months a major dominant show like the Late show on cbs. Be candid, be canned. Now, many believe that it was for political reasons because the host of the show, Stephen Colbert, was often critical of senior officials in the United States government, shall we say. But by all, all reputable reporting on that issue, CBS was losing between 30 to 50. I've even seen reports go up to 60 or $70 million a year from that show. So regardless of your thought on the politics, it was a money losing venture. There just isn't enough audience to support a staff of 200, which they had. Where is presumably once the show goes off the air next year, Stephen Colbert will start a podcast that of having 200 people, he'll have eight. And according to metrics, From Scott Galloway. Yeah. The show won't make 2200 million in ad revenue a year. It'll make 20 million, but you'll have millions of dollars of revenue per employee. It'll actually be much more profitable. And Stephen Colbert will do quite nicely. So what does that really mean to you and me? You've heard me say this before, but I'll say it again. It's yet another sign that you need to be on YouTube. I don't mean you have to be pontificating for hours a day, seven days a week, like me or other blowhards, arguably, or be a pundit. I do think you need to do something because the old way of promoting your business, of promoting your expertise, of promoting your book was going on other people's shows, network show going on Oprah. I well remember the day where someone could go on Oprah Winfrey, be a complete unknown, have a book that has been out for a month, has sold two copies. You go on Oprah, you get her stamp of approval, you get your blessing, boom, your whole career is made. You've sold millions of books, your career is set. Well, my friend, those days are over. There's simply no show that has that sort of impact. Going back even further, if you want to go back 50, roughly 53 years, the early 70s, Dr. Wayne Dyer went on the Johnny Carson show on NBC, late night TV show, was a complete unknown, had a book, your Erroneous Zones, and went on Carson. Carson loved him. And boom, overnight, the book is an international bestseller. His entire career was made. He published another 30 books. He made tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars as a speaker, author, expert from it all flowed from one TV appearance. Those days are gone. What has replaced it is this YouTube world we live in. So I urge you, whether you are a securities attorney, whether you are an accountant, whether you are a chef, you can't count on other businesses hiring you. You can't count on other organizations wanting you. Especially with AI coming up with so many great ways of eliminating actual body count in corporations. Now, I can't promise you that we won't all be replaced by AI video. Certainly there's already AI podcasts and I have my own AI clone, but. But I'm real today. This is not my clone speaking to you. I do think you enhance your chances, you increase your odds of staying relevant if whatever it is you do, ceramics, surrealist painting, real estate appraisal, giving people advice on how to pass their restaurant inspections from the health inspector, whatever it is, you need to be communicating that expertise on YouTube doesn't have to be every day, doesn't have to be live. It could be a once a week, three minute tip. But I urge you, get in the game. Because historically there were gatekeepers saying, no, we don't like you. No, you didn't go to the right school, no, we don't like your hair, tj or lack thereof. We have lived for the last hundred years in the media, in the world of gatekeepers. And this has changed, obviously in the last 20 years. But the rate of change is skyrocketing. The traditional broadcast networks are hemorrhaging, cable networks hemorrhaging audiences every single day. The new streamers are trying to figure out how they could even be relevant. And we've already seen in the last few weeks, Netflix is trying to be relevant by doing what? By bringing on podcasters who made it big on YouTube first. I will make this prediction. I've made it before. No one is ever going to get hired to host their own TV show on any major TV network, cable network, broadcast network again, unless they first prove they have a huge, huge following on YouTube or on podcasting. So if you're waiting for your big break, stop waiting, get out there, turn on the mic and hit record. My Brit has passed away. She's the Swedish born actress who married black Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. Way back in 1960. She was 91 years old and kind of revives a stark reminder of how interracial marriage once provoked death threats, career retaliation and political panic. Their union was legal in California, but illegal in many states. It exposed the deep resistance to racial equality years before the Supreme Court finally settled the issue nationwide. So why do I bring this up? Why is this relevant? Many of you could say, well tj that's an issue from the past. I mean, Clarence Thomas, the black man married to a white woman, he was appointed to the Supreme Court way back in the early 90s. Not really an issue anymore. I do think it is important to delve into the nuance here because it's not like that was thousands of years ago. Even in so called liberal Hollywood. She never got another major movie deal. It pretty much ended her career. And Sammy Davis Jr. Got disinvited from a number of things. Well, he did continue to perform as a part of the Rat Pack and on his own, but it did sort of slow down certain aspects of his career. Now this, for those of you below, a certain age, this is going to sound weird. This is going to sound like I'm talking about the 1860s, not the 1960s or the 1970s. But for much of the 20th century, interracial marriage bans were defended by tradition, states, rights and social order. That was the dominant language of American conservatism at the time. So let's be clear. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. This is not a political show in the sense of Fox News or msnbc. But I do think it's important to understand how society changes and who's pushing what change and when. If you consider yourself a conservative today, then chances are you would have been appalled at this marriage had you been around and considered yourself a conservative in the 1960s. Because again, too conservative means to conserve the way things were, the way things are at the time and the way things were in 1960 is black people, especially black men, didn't marry white women. It was considered a huge, huge controversy. And say Sammy Davis Jr. Faced pickets, lots of hate mail, all sorts of damage to his career. This changed a little bit in 1967. A large share of US states had criminalized interracial marriage. But then there was a Supreme Court decision overriding these states laws. So why is this relevant? Why am I getting at this? Okay, I'll be blunt with you. This may offend some of you, but I'm going to say out loud what some people are thinking. A lot of conservatives in the modern MAGA Republican movement are not happy with the fact that J.D. vance is in an interracial marriage. And let me step back for a minute and say, you know, the concept of race itself, many would argue there's no scientific justification for it. It's not really a real thing. It's a social construct. But his wife has parents from India. Her skin is much, much darker than mine or J.D. vance. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But growing voices within the Republican Party in the conservative movement, like Nick Fuentes, have said, this is awful, that J.D. vance is essentially a disgrace to his race. Now those are not my words. But we are seeing a rise of a movement called American Heritage. It's the sense that not all Americans are equal and that white Americans, especially white Christian Americans, which J.D. vance's wife is neither, but white Christian Americans who can trace their lineage back, maybe not all the way to the Mayflower, but back a few generations or more, are somehow more legitimate Americans than others, have a more legitimate say or should have a more legitimate say in running matters in the country. So this is a growing phenomenon. Vivek Ramaswamy wrote a whole column in the New York Times in the last week denouncing this. But he says it's very much a real thing. He has been mocked, ridiculed by people on his own side versus saying, you know, saying, go back to India. Well, he was born in the United States and he's never lived outside of the United States. So race continues to be kind of a big deal for a lot of people. And the problem for J.D. vance is he can endorse everything Donald Trump says and stands for, but culturally, JD Vance is doing things that are very much a part of the liberal tradition. The liberal tradition says, don't look at someone's race. If you're in love, that's all that matters. If two people love each other and respect each other, they should get married. And again, you can look it up if you want, but it's a simple fact that was considered anathema to conservatism in America because, again, it was about conserving the way things had been. There was something known as anti missingation laws in the United States. Certainly the time when I was born, I was born in 1962. So we're not talking about Civil War times. Anti missingation means you shouldn't mix the races. Because the dominant theory was if you took someone with so called white blood and mixed it with so called black or brown blood, or for that matter, Asian blood, you were diluting the blood and somehow making the species of humanity worse. Again, not my philosophy, but that was the dominant philosophy in America for most of the country's history. And again, the Supreme Court changed all that. In 1967, this was the Warren Court. This was the Warren Court that was denounced by conservatives. To this day, conservatives denounce the Warren Court for giving so many, quote, liberal rulings, Roe v. Wade being one of them. Now, I'm not going to get into the legal nuances of whether Roe v. Wade was a proper judicial decision, but very few people these days say, wow, we really wish the Supreme Court had not made interracial marriage acceptable. I mean, these days you do see it everywhere in both parties. You know, Mitch McConnell is married to an Asian woman. Clarence Thomas, as I mentioned, married to a white woman. So it's not that it's still accepted that everyone has to follow these rules, but we are seeing a growing backlash now among a number of Republican MAGA thought leaders. Where is this coming from? Well, for one thing, Donald Trump himself has gone on record numerous times that he really likes to judge people based on their genes. And for him, it's not necessarily color. It's Often hair. I mean, no serious person I've ever met would contend that Pete Hegseth would be the Secretary of Defense if he didn't have a perfect head of hair and look good on tv. Trump is as much as admitted that. So he is known for as someone who judges people based on their genes. And he certainly seems like he has a preference for people who have great hair, are white, quite often blonde, although his wife is blonde. So that's in part where this is coming from. So how is this going to play out politically for JD Vance? There have been some who have suggested maybe he should divorce his wife and marry Erica Kirk. I'm not going to go there. And I have no reason to believe he is not thoroughly committed to his marriage. What I'm questioning is does the modern conservative movement, does the maga movement have a commitment to the idea of you should really be able to marry anyone and we're all Americans, especially if we've been here for a generation or two, or is there still a sense that some Americans are better than others and certain races are, shall we say, purer than others? Charlie Javis, back in the news. She's the former fintech executive convicted of defrauding JP Morgan Chase. She's already spent more than $70 million on her legal defense. But here's the interesting twist. JP Morgan Chase has to pay for it. They bought her company and found out too late. Oops. That she made up all the numbers and the whole thing was a fraud. And other people were defrauded. But since they'd already bought her, they were on the hook. So they've already paid 70 million dol. You know, it's hard to get people to feel sympathy for a giant bank, but this woman, Charlie Javis, has done it. She's now seeking another $73 million from the bank for more legal fees. JP Morgan is asking a Delaware judge to stop paying and is drawing attention to newly redacted itemized expenses. This one caught not only my eye, but the eye of news editors everywhere. The legal team apparently billed $529 or gummy bears. They want JP Morgan to repay them for the gummy bears they bought. To argue that Javice's legal team has treated its obligation as a blank check. That's what J.P. morgan. Well, it certainly sounds like it. So why, why is this getting attention? Why do I bring it to your attention? Because when you say a giant bank that has has billions and billions of dollars going in and out every day had to pay $70 million for illegal fees. Those are just abstractions. Nobody can visualize it. It's the power of the small number. Something Visual, you say, $529 for gummy bears and sticking it to a big bank. I mean, it's almost comical. I think a lot of people think, wow, I would love to have my bank pay for gummies. And I think a lot of other people are thinking, in my wildest dreams, I wouldn't have the gall, the unmitigated gall, to submit an invoice for $529 for gummy bears. People can. You can't visualize billions of dollars. The human brain just isn't good at it. You can say you can, but it just doesn't work. But $529, we've all seen that in front of us before. We've seen a gummy bear. So I have to give credit to the people at J.P. morgan and their PR team because I, I highly suspect, suspect they saw this and said, called up a few friendly editors and saying, you're not going to believe this. Your readers are going to love this. And it got attention. Now, this woman has apparently had 147 legal professionals be a part of her defense. I mean, I don't think the Manson murders brought in that many legal professionals, but apparently somehow the rules were written that she could get any defense she wanted and the bank had to pay for it. Now, JP Morgan isn't disputing the total, apparently more than $70 million paid, another 73 million requested, but they're highlighting some of these strange, bizarre things. So what's the real lesson here? Well, A, I hope you don't defraud anyone that you sell your business to. B, if you do, I hope you don't run up a $73 million, $143 million legal bill. And C, maybe you shouldn't charge your recreational drugs to a big bank. But beyond that, the reason I'm spotlighting this for you is the power of communication, specifically the power of the small. If you are trying to make a case for or against someone or something, you're much better off putting a spotlight on something small. That's why you hear politicians all the time talk about the price of eggs. You can see an egg. And if you're the one who purchased eggs for your family and you bought them for a dollar, and I don't know what the price of eggs is, I'm sorry, I don't buy eggs myself. If the price of eggs was $1 last week and now it's a $50 boom. You see that, you feel that you can get emotional in the way that 7.23% inflation, you, maybe you don't visualize in the way that 4.2 to 4.7% unemployment, you don't visualize, but wow, eggs were a dollar, now they're $1.50. That's something you can visualize, taste, touch, you can see it. That's why you hear politicians talk about the price of gas as opposed to macro inflation levels compared to other G7 nations. That's too abstract. So good communication is about painting a picture in someone's mind, letting them see it. Let me give you an example. I remember one of my very first jobs in communication was as the director of communication for the Florida Department of Banking and Finance for the Florida controller, which was an elected position. This is literally 40 years ago, 39 and a half years ago. And the controller's job was to approve or disapprove various state spending. If someone, you know, I don't think there were gummies back then, 40 years ago, but if someone had submitted a voucher or a six pack of beer, even asking state government to pay for it, it would have been rejected. And the Florida comptroller was running for reelection, wanted to talk about his accomplishments. And there were tens and tens of millions of dollars of savings by certain policies that were changed, certain things were disapproved. The problem was when we polled people on what do you think of a controller that saved $70 million from unnecessary spending and you know, this area of accounting, it, people couldn't resonate with it. It didn't connect. They couldn't see it, taste it, touch it. But then we ran a commercial saying the Florida controller said no. When the university of, or some university president tried to invoice taxpayers $372 for his Christmas cards, boom. That got a lot of attention. That was an ad that resonated. People cannot visualize billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, even millions of dollars, but they can visualize Christmas cards. Because so many people send out Christmas cards, they have to pay for it out of their own pocket. When here was a state university president or state official charging taxpayers for their Christmas cards. The stamps, the envelopes, it's small, it's tactile, it's something that most people could relate to. And it got people angry. And that's why it is effective. So I want you to keep this in mind. Now, I don't want you to bill anyone your Christmas card list and your stamps, but I do want you to think about anytime you're trying to communicate something, whether it's about your new startup, about why your division needs funding for some new AI research, whatever it is you're doing. I always want you to ask yourself, what is the smallest thing that involves the money or the number that someone can actually visualize? And it's counterintuitive. Quite often we think, well, if we just make the case of how big this is, how much waste there is, or how many billions of dollars of profit we'll have, that's what will persuade people. No, it's often the smallest number that can be isolated into a single thing that people can see, taste and touch. So that is my advice to you figure out with anything you're communicating, how can you paint a picture with one item that people can visualize that will get their attention? That's much more likely to help you persuade them. The Trump administration has paused five leases for offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. Now, they've cited unspecified national security risk. Okay, we'll dive into that in a moment. The move puts roughly $25 billion in private investment at, you know, the private sector, free market enterprise and all that basically out the window. It threatens projects expected to power millions of homes. Developers and state officials say the farms were already vetted by the military and warned the decision could undermine grid reliability and investor confidence. Now, folks, you've heard me talk about this before, but I often agree with conservatives who've been telling us for decades that there's a problem of creeping socialism in our country, that socialist communists want to come in, take over, and have government make decisions that should be made by the private sector. And you know what? They were right. They were just wrong as to who would be doing this subterfuge, this inside the house destruction of free market capitalism. Because this is a destruction of capitalism. It's certainly the destruction of $25 billion in private investment. All jeopardized now. So why is that? Let's look at some more of the facts. Again, it's five offshore farms. They're halted mid construction. So it's not like they just got an idea and said, oh, you know, let's build one over here, and then it was denied. No, it's mid construction. Billions of dollars have already been spent. Now, the projects were expected to, according to the New York Times, expected to give power to 2.5 million homes. There's an estimated 10 million jobs tied to these projects that can now be lost. What happened to our jobs, President? Only two offshore Wind farms are now operating. Vineyard Wind One is already producing some power. Now, the Interior Department is citing national security risk. What is the risk? No one is specified. Developers are reported losses up to $50 million a week. Now, a federal judge has already struck down similar attempts to put this down. Okay, what are the. What are the players involved saying? This is Doug Burnham Burgum, you may remember him, a former governor and former candidate for president. He's now the Interior Secretary. He said the prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people, but he's not saying how shutting down private sector investment to create energy would do that. Jeremy Slayton, a spokesperson for Dominion Energy, said stopping the project would threaten grid reliability for critical assets. And according to Commander Kirk Lippold, a former U.S. navy commander, also speaking to the New York Times, these projects will actually benefit our national security. Okay, so is this really happening? I think, you know, it's been well, well documented that President Trump just hates the way these things look. He. He had a. I guess he still does a golf resort near Aberdeen in Scotland on the coast, and he just couldn't stand seeing windmills out there. In 1986, he was quoted as saying, I want to see the ocean. I do not want to see windmills. He formally objected to Scottish authorities, took it to court, and then he lost unanimously in the United Kingdom Supreme Court in December 2015. But he's never given up his hatred and contempt for windmill energy. Part of it is if it's not burning carbon, if it's not polluting the environment, it's not destroying the atmosphere. He doesn't like it doesn't seem manly unless you're getting dirty. Digging up coal or oil seems to be a part what drives this. And part of it, he just resents the fact that someone was ruining arguably some amount of value to his view from one of his resorts. Again, with Trump, it's always, what is the most cynical look at how this affects his own pocket? Is that the reason for him doing something? And it's often, yes, it appears to be the case here as well. What does this remind us of? Again, I happen to agree with conservatives who believe that most decisions about what happens in our economy should be determined by the private sector. I happen to agree with that. You think I'm too conservative? Well, just have to live with that. And here is big government. Here is essentially a socialistic leader saying, I know better. I'm going to tell the private sector how to allocate resources, and I'm going to take away resources I mean, that's essentially what this decision does. It's taking away billions of dollars from private equity and other investors. What does this remind us of? Well, it reminds many of you, Stalin, who just decided we're going to eliminate modern genetics. That's essentially what happened in 1948. Stalin outlawed modern genetics. Certainly reminiscent of Mao's China simply shutting down private commerce, purging things. There's some other countries in Western Europe in the 30s who did some. I won't even go there. And it strikes a lot of people as very similar to Venezuela under Chavez and the current administration just privatizing or taking private companies and then all of a sudden saying, well, we own it. You have to do what we want to do. Because there were a lot of private sector companies in the food, oil services, retail, manufacturing that were essentially just shut down because of regime risk. And now it's happening here in the United States. The idea that you can just do whatever you want and say, what's national security? Is not something other presidents have tried. Maybe some have tried on a few close calls, but we're seeing this on a daily basis here in the United States. I don't think we're that far away from the president saying, hakeem Jeffries, I don't like your tie. I'm going to ban your tie because of national security. Sounds silly, sounds ridiculous. But until a few years ago, the idea of, first of all, the government even discouraging something that is green energy, something that doesn't pollute like windmills, the idea of that being something the government should try to discourage would have sounded absolutely insane to most people. Right left center of our political spectrum. And now, because of so many crazy things going on, whether it's Trump tariff, taxes, and all the rest in Washington, something like this doesn't really get even that much attention. But I think it got the attention of these, these or sons of guns, shall we say, who have invested billions of dollars trying to make money from energy and are now seeing the confiscation of their money. That's what this is. It's government confiscation. And Fidel Castro did it. And supposedly we were against that. But now we have a leader who says, apparently, hey, the devil can do it, so can I. Question of the day comes from my student Rachel. She's a student in the complete storytelling course for speaking and presenting. She asks, why is it essential to end your presentation with a powerful call to action? Well, it's only essential if you want people to do something. If all you're doing is having a friendly conversation with another friend about last night's sporting event. You don't need to end with a call to action. But if you are giving a sales pitch, presumably you want people to buy, you need to ask them to buy. If you are running for political office and you're giving a political speech, you want people to vote for you, ask them to do that. If you are talking to your board of directors and you want a quarter million dollar budget for the next quarter for you to do new initiatives, you need to not just give them all the facts and why you're doing it, you need to ask them to fund it at the end. Human beings forget things very quickly. So if you just put out a whole bunch of facts and you say, well, these people are smart, they can put two and two together, they can deduce what I want them to do. Well, maybe, maybe not. There's the old story, perhaps apocryphal, that a politician lost by one vote and they were talking to one of their friends about how could they possibly lose a vote. Everyone I know voted for you. And the friend said, well, I didn't vote for you. You never actually asked me for the vote. I don't know if that's really true. But the point is valid in that you need to ask people to do things for you. That's why a lot of the top YouTubers, you see it every time they give you value, ideally first, but then they end with a call to action. Please like this video. Please subscribe to this channel. Please sign up for notifications. If you're listening to the Filtered with TJ podcast, then make sure to follow it on that podcasting platform. Subscribe on that platform. Leave a review now. Some people go too far and they ask for this and this and this and this. The general rule of thumb I recommend in most business presentations is ask for one thing. You don't want to confuse people, you don't want to overwhelm them, and you don't want to lead with the ask. You want to lead with value. I've tried to do that on this show today. I've tried to give you as many valuable nuggets you can about the news, insights into the news, insights about communication, personal development as it relates to relates to newsmakers. Then and only then do I come in with an ask. So, Rachel, I hope that's what you do in your own profession, your own career, whether you're a student, whether you are a business person, an entrepreneur, or you work for a big corporation. I'm hoping that you take every opportunity you can to give presentations, to speak, to talk about what it is you do, but don't blow it by just saying, that's it. Any questions? No. And by asking people to do one thing. That's what I'm going to ask you to do in every presentation you give. So that's my ask right now, please. Whether it's Rachel watching or anyone else, end your presentations by asking people to do one thing.