Xanax Recall, College Crisis, NBA Podcast Boom | Filtered with TJ Walker

Ultimize. A batch of Xanax has been recalled nationwide, and before anyone throws their prescription bottle into the ocean, let's calm down. This is one specific lot of Xanax XR. Not every pill in America suddenly turned into a villain in a Netflix documentary. The issue: some of the tablets may not release the medication at the proper rate. In other words, even the pill designed to calm you down might be a little unpredictable. Now the FDA says the risk here is relatively low, no widespread harm, but let's not miss the bigger point, because this story is actually a perfect snapshot of how our entire healthcare system works and why it often doesn't work. We've built a culture around convenience. As human beings, we're wired to choose the easiest option available, and let's be honest, swallowing a pill is a lot easier than changing your life. Nobody wakes up and says, you know what I'd love today? A balanced diet, sunlight, and emotional discipline? No, we want a blueberry-flavored gummy that promises to fix everything while we sit on the couch scrolling. And it's not just consumers. If you're a doctor, it's much easier to write a prescription in 10 seconds than to spend 10 minutes explaining sleep hygiene, diet, exercise, stress management to a patient. One of those gets you to your next patient on time. The other gets you a blank stare and someone asking if there's a pill version. And if you're a pharmaceutical or supplement company, well, now we're talking about a real business model. You can mass produce a component, put it in a bottle, run ads, create urgency. You can't run a Super Bowl commercial that says, hey, maybe eat vegetables, go for a walk in the sunlight today and go to bed early. That doesn't scale. That doesn't monetize. That doesn't get investors excited. Now, here's where it gets a little uncomfortable. Problems with dosage and consistency are not rare in the world of pills and supplements. They happen. And in the supplement world, oh, it's even worse because regulation is, shall we say, loosey-goosey. There are studies showing that many over-the-counter supplements don't even contain what they claim or contain wildly different amounts or have just a lot of bad stuff in them. There was a study on melatonin gummies, those cute little sleep like a baby candies, and most of them didn't match the label at all. Some had far less than advertised. Some had 3 times more, 3 times. That's not a supplement, that's a Russian roulette with a bedtime routine. So again, let me be crystal clear. I'm not a doctor. I'm not your doctor. If your doctor prescribed Xanax or any other medication, I'm not telling you to stop taking it. That would be irresponsible and potentially dangerous. But I am telling you this, You should be aware that every pharmaceutical comes with trade-offs. Every shortcut has a cost. And here's the part nobody likes to hear because it's boring, it doesn't come in a bottle. The downside of eating real food—fruit, vegetables, things your great-grandmother would recognize—it's essentially zero. The downside of walking for an hour, especially with some sunlight, instead of sitting and staring at your phone, also zero downside. The downside of turning off your screen, your phone, your TV at 8:30 in the evening, reading a paper book and going to sleep at 10 instead of doom-scrolling till midnight, zero downside. There is no recall on a walk. There's no dosage error on broccoli. There's no FDA warning about possible inconsistent release of sunlight. And yet those are the things we avoid because they require a little effort, consistency, and this is the real killer, patience. We don't want to be healthy in a year or happy in a year. We want to be healthy by Thursday or today, preferably with free shipping. So yeah, this Xanax recall is a technical issue with one batch of medication, but zoom out a little. It's a reminder of something much bigger. We live in a system that rewards quick fixes, sells convenience, and quietly hopes you never discover that the most powerful solutions in your life are also the least profitable. And that might be the most anxiety-inducing thought of all. Let me ask you something. How many times have you heard a great idea and thought, "That's really useful," and then never used it again? It happens to all of us because without repetition, even the best ideas just fade. So instead of just collecting more information, do something different. Go to ultimize.com, U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E dot com, and grab the free course. You can start with communication skills or building better habits, but the key is it's designed to reinforce the message so it actually sticks. If you're already listening or watching this, you're halfway there. Just go to ultimize.com and and take the next step. A Yale committee just released a report saying colleges themselves bear real responsibility for the collapse in public trust in higher education, citing high cost, opaque admissions, grade inflation, and confusion about what universities are even for anymore. And I have to say, congratulations to Yale for discovering that when people charge you the price of a beachfront condo for 4 years of school, some resentment may step in. Some resentment goes up because let's get specific here. Let's look at the numbers. In 1980, Yale's published tuition, room, and board for the next academic year, it was $9,110. For 2026 to 2027, Yale's published total for tuition, housing, and food is $94,100. This is a nominal increase of about 933%, even after adjusting for inflation. Inflation. The current Yale sticker price is still about 2.6 times the inflation-adjusted 1980 price. If Yale had merely tracked inflation, the bill would be roughly $35,600, not $94,100. So, no, people are not hallucinating an affordability crisis. They're reading a bill. And this is the part elite universities hate to hear. They did not simply become more expensive educational institutions. They became luxury brands with classrooms attached. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, these places now operate partly as status merchandise. They are the Louis Vuitton handbags of American ambition. They're not just selling learning, they're selling scarcity, prestige, and the social thrill of saying at a dinner party, my Madison got into Yale, but she's still deciding between that and Princeton. That's not education. That's country club performance art with better landscaping. The whole luxury brand model depends on one thing: artificial scarcity. Yale's own admissions data shows applications in the tens of thousands and admit rates that remain tiny. The harder it is to get in, the more valuable the brand becomes. If everyone could buy the handbag, it would just be a bag. If everyone could go to Yale, it would just be a school. And these institutions know that. That's why I like the Scott Galloway-style argument that if elite universities want to keep their privileges of tax-exempt educational institutions under the Section 501(c)(3) statutes, they should be forced to expand access dramatically or lose those privileges. The IRS says 501(c)(3) entities are supposed to be organized and operated for exempt purposes such as education, not velvet rope prestige machines. Yale itself describes the university as a tax-exempt charitable organization. So at some point, the public is allowed to ask a rude but fair question. How much public benefit are we really getting from institutions that behave like Hermès with lecture halls? And here's my version of reform. Any college that takes federal money, federal research support, or participates in federal student aid systems should have to— by the way, that's everybody— they should have to reserve at least 10% of each incoming class for a pure random lottery among applicants. No legacy choreography, no mysterious holistic incense, no dean squinting at an oboe recital, summer in Provence, and a $20,000 fencing hobby. Trying to detect leadership, just a lottery. Then track the outcomes 10 years later. My guess, and I could be wrong, a whole lot of these lottery kids would do just as well as the ones chosen by the current priesthood of prestige. And that would terrify the prestige industry because it would reveal that much of this so-called meritocracy is just expensive theater. And then we get to one of the dirtiest little scams in the whole operation. Athletic admissions, especially in sports that function like affirmative action for the rich. Economists analyzing Harvard admissions data found recruited athletes had an 86% admit rate, more than 14 times the rate for non-recruited applicants, even though recruited athletes were less than 1% of the applicant pool and still made up more than 10% of the admitted class. The same research concluded that athlete and legacy preferences materially skew admissions toward affluent white— you know, people who look like me— white applicants. Now pair that with newer research on elite sports recruiting. A 2025 paper found Ivy Plus universities offer many more regional and niche sports than public flagships, and that about 1 in 5 Ivy Plus athletes come from the top 1% of the income distribution. The paper specifically categorizes men's rowing, water polo, fencing, squash, skiing, gymnastics, and sailing as niche sports in this ecosystem. So when a teenager gets a giant admission boost because he's terrified— or excuse me, terrific at crew or water polo, let's stop pretending this is some pure meritocratic triumph. Most public schools do not offer these sports. My public high school in Charlotte, North Carolina didn't offer water polo or dressage horsing events. Okay, this is not the American dream. This is rich people camouflage. And please spare me the sanctimony. If your admissions edge depends on a sport that requires a boathouse, a country club, or a parent who thinks summer is a verb, you do a Nantucket That's not an achievement gap. This is a billing arrangement. We've somehow created a moral vocabulary where a kid from a normal public school is told to feel guilty about privilege, while the kid who gets into Yale because he can row backward in matching spandex is presented as the rugged embodiment of excellence. This is not meritocracy. This is Downton Abbey with an SAT prep. The Yale report is useful because it admits The public's distrust is not random. Universities helped create it. They raised prices beyond reason, obscured how admissions really work, and wrapped the whole enterprise in moral vanity. Then they act shocked when regular Americans conclude that higher education looks less like a ladder and more like a gated community. And here's the sickest part: Millions of Americans still feel they have no choice but to participate. They know the game is rigged. They know the sticker price is absurd. They know the admissions process is full of loopholes, branding, and elite social signaling, and they still feel compelled to play because they fear being locked out of the networks that lead to power, income, and influence in America. This is why this story matters. It's not just about whether Yale's feelings are hurt. It's about whether we want a higher education system that educates people or one that certifies status for the already advantaged while pretending to be a public good. Right now, too much of the elite higher education smells like a library— or smells a lot less like a library and more like a luxury boutique with a nonprofit tax exemption. OK, again, I want to stress, I do endorse Scott Galloway's proposal, make all these elite universities expand by 1,000% or 10x their admissions. They could do it. Yeah, maybe some of the kids are online. Nothing wrong with that. If University of Phoenix can do it, Harvard or Yale can do it. And let's get rid of this whole idea that people have got to kill themselves or hire someone to pose in front of a rowboat and hire someone else to be that star athlete to get a good education. There's a lot of moral rot in higher education. Okay, so who am I? Who is this TJ character? Why are you listening to me or watching me? I spent 40 years coaching executives, people just like you, but also presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners on how to have better communication skills and personal development. Habits. And now you can get the same training, but here's the catch. There is no catch. You can get a free course today. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com, that's ultimize.com, and you can download your free online communication skills course or your free good habits building course. Go ahead and do that right now, or at least right after the show. There's a new question in the NBA, and it's not about defense, load management, or whether anyone actually understands the in-season tournament. It's this: can you even have an NBA career anymore if you don't also have a podcast? Because right now everybody seems to have one. Stars, bench players, rookies, retired guys, guys who played 12 years, guys who played 12 minutes. There are podcasts where players break down games, tell locker room stories, interview friends, complain about the media, and occasionally— this is my favorite— record episodes immediately after getting ejected from a game. This is not a side hustle anymore. This is a parallel industry. You've got shows like The Draymond Green Show, Mind the Game with LeBron James and Steve Nash, and The Roommates Show with Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart just roasting each other like it's a group chat that accidentally got monetized. And here's the key point. Most of these podcasts are not making NBA-style money, but they are making money. The average NBA salary is more than $10 million a year. Podcasting for most players is not replacing that, but that's not the point. The point is what comes next. Players are looking at this and saying, hmm, basketball ends, the microphone doesn't, because the average NBA career is about 4.5 years. In the NFL, it's even more brutal, around 3.3 years. Think about that. You spend your entire childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood becoming elite at something, and the career lasts about as long as a decent car lease. And then what? That's where podcasting and media more broadly comes in. Look at Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce. Their podcast, New Heights, is reportedly generating millions and millions of dollars per year. Not total, per year. They're very credible reports that they're making more annually from talking into microphones than they did getting hit by 300-pound linebackers. That's the new math. Your body has an expiration date. Your voice doesn't until you literally die. And here's the deeper shift that's happening. And it's actually huge. Athletes used to need the media. Now the media needs the athletes. For decades, if you wanted exposure, you had to go through ESPN, ABC, NBC, someone else who controlled the platform, someone who's a gatekeeper, someone else decided your airtime, someone else who could fire you at any point. Now, you can own the channel, you own the audience, you own the relationship. If ABC doesn't like you, they can cut you. If your podcast audience likes you, nobody can touch you. That's power. That's leverage. That's why guys like Draymond Green are talking about being part of the new media. Because they don't need a middleman anymore. And let's be honest, this is also why some reporters are quietly losing their minds, because the players are now the storytellers. The locker room is no longer filtered. The narrative is no longer controlled. Yeah, sometimes that's messy. Sometimes it's biased. Sometimes it's self-serving, but it's direct. And audiences love direct. Now, here's where I'm going to put on my personal development guru hat, because there's a huge lesson here. Not just for athletes, but especially for athletes. If you have any level of athletic success, your long-term wealth is probably not going to come from your sport. It's going to come from your ability to communicate, not just as a podcaster, but your ability to tell stories, your ability to connect with an audience. Because the difference between a guy who made $20 million in his career and a guy who builds a media platform is the second guy can keep earning for the next 50 years. Even if you got scandals swirling around you like Tiger Woods, the first guy is hoping he invested well and didn't buy too many houses. And I'm not saying athletes should spend all their time podcasting. You should still have to perform. You still have to do the job. But if you're smart, you're investing some time right now in learning how to speak, how to communicate, how to be interesting, how to hold an audience because Here's the brutal truth. There are thousands of former professional athletes. There are only a handful who are still relevant 10 years later. And almost all of them have one thing in common. They figured out how to talk. They figured out how to communicate. They figured out how to turn their experience into something people actually want to listen to. And that's not luck. That's a skill, a learnable skill, which ironically might end up being more valuable than the jump shot that got them there in the first place. Now, you do see more and more athletes taking this seriously, as they should, because, you know, smart athletes look at the statistics and say, oh my God, it seems like half of NFL players are bankrupt within 5 years of retirement. They don't want to do that. Having a podcast, being an influencer, having a media presence can be a way of expanding your financial domain forever. And the thing about athletes is if they're good, they already have thousands of hours of experience in front of a microphone, starting in middle school for a lot of them, they got interviewed after games. So ideally they've learned how to sum up an idea, speak in soundbites, be interesting, do pregame shows, postgame shows. So I frankly think it's crazy any professional athlete doesn't have a podcast and doesn't have a large social media presence because that ultimately will lead to financial security much more than most people's earnings in any one sport. Now, this isn't just for athletes. If you have any kind of prominence in any industry, A podcast is a natural way of connecting with that audience and communicating with it on a regular basis in multiple ways you monetize. Doesn't have to be through big ad deals, getting tens of millions of dollars a year. You could be someone who's just the greatest person in the world at telling people how to design their PowerPoint slides. And now you have a newsletter list of 80,000, If you're not doing a podcast, there's something wrong. I'm TJ Walker. It's been a fun week here. This is Filtered every day, Monday through Friday, with the top news stories of the day, and then filter them through the lens of communication skills, personal development issues. I'm hoping you have a great weekend. I know I'm going to. Take care. See you on Monday.