Ep. 221 - Tucker Max: The Difference Between People Who Succeed and People Who Don't

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altiger Show. Today on The James Altiger Show. I always learn so much when I talk to Jordan Harbinger. Jordan always has interesting stories to share. Today, we just started talking, but we ended up coming up with 4 really useful, simple, I don't know what to call them, productivity hacks, creativity hacks, and we talked about everything from learning to how to avoid wasting time on the news, and on and on. Here's the interview. What's the latest thing you're doing that's, exciting to you? What's exciting with me? Hide. I don't even know. I've been reading a little bit about these assassinations. Have you been reading about these from the Iranian nuclear scientists that got, like, blown up and then another guy who got, like, shot by assailants on a motorcycle? I guess we're going, like, full bore against Iran right now. Well, I think I think they're saying the nuclear physicist guy or the nuclear scientist guy was probably the Mossad Israel, but I guess they're not doing that without US knowledge. Probably. Although it's hard to say. I mean, the Mossad kind of doesn't give a s**t what we think. They kind of, like they ask for forgiveness and not permission. Right. You know? Like, if they ask for permission, it's like, well, hold on. We don't know. We're gonna have to decide. We'll let the new administration decide. But then Israel's like, we killed them. How mad are you? Not that mad? Okay. Well, because they know I guess they know that they're no matter what, they're our main friend in the Middle East, no matter what else. So they figured they could get away with things here and there. And, look, they don't they're they're worried that I guess they're worried that Biden is gonna, you know, reengage with Iran and maybe give Iran money, help them build their nuclear weapons again, and they're trying to anticipate that in advance. Yeah. I mean, think about it. If if we have a nuclear deal with Iran, then a bunch of people start dying. It looks like we're going back on the deal. So I would imagine the CIA is like, if y'all are gonna kill some people, now is the time to do it. Because in 2 months, we can't really be doing that anymore. Do you think the CIA sent, like, a group email out to, like, every Yeah. Country? Like, listen. If you need to kill someone, do it before January 20th. We don't know what's gonna happen after that. For sure. I think probably, like, GCHQ, the five eyes, right, which says, like, Australia slash New Zealand, United States, Canada, and the UK probably knew about it. And then they probably, yeah, they probably have, like, a little, like, whatever the spy equivalent of a Discord server is, and they're like or a subreddit. They're like, hey. They're on 4chan. They have, like, on 4 Chan. There's CIA 4 Chan, and they're like, here's a meme of us, like, drone striking some poor guy. It's I guess it's not really that funny, but it's kinda like, hey. Look. It's a wartime act against an enemy of the free world, so I don't feel too bad. It's not like we're joking about totally innocent parties here. Isn't it funny, like, the phrase, you know, I don't mean this to be funny or it's not that, but, like, that phrase is, like, only been used, let's say, in the past 5 to 10 years. Like, it Hasn't it really? Well, I feel like political correctness was around a little bit in the early nineties. But then there was, like, a 20 or 30 year period where you could say something, and the people who would get offended would be, like, evangelical like, very religious people. Yeah. You said if you said something that was, you know, inappropriate. But now it's the exact opposite that you can't you can't make jokes with. Yeah. Good point. Because I think in the eighties, I I've watched some old talk shows where I'll find, like, a really great interview with somebody, like, what's that one that's on Netflix? It's frost Nixon. Right? And, and they'll say something like, and those communist bastards. And it's like, back then, you're like, yeah, communist bastards. Now you say communist bastard, and the communist down the street is like, excuse me. We're not all bastards. Don't paint us with the same brush. And it's like, oh, I live next door to somebody who thinks that this is okay. Whereas back then, we didn't have as much diversity of opinion probably because we had, like, 3 major networks, and everybody was kinda like Soviet's bad, capitalism good. There wasn't a whole lot of nuance. It's funny how, you know, basically, everything is a marketing message. So because there was this huge marketing effort to have us versus them, where them was the Soviet Union and us, of course, was everybody else. Yeah. And and you're able if you if you fell under that umbrella, everything was okay, and we had been under that umbrella for, like, 50 or 60 years with some mini umbrellas below that. Like, there was, you know, civil rights in the in the sixties seventies and other rights, and then there was, you know, greed is good meme in the eighties. And but now in fact, there's a name for intersectionalism. Every intersection of cultures or groups or genders is a group that is, you know, marginalized or or or, you know, there's prejudice to some extent against that group. And so you have to basically think of every intersection of people, and and everyone gets triggered now instead of they don't get offended. They get triggered, and you can't trigger anyone. That's true. And, but to be fair, I don't think it's really necessarily a good thing back then either. Like, I I know, again, from watching old talk shows that they'll say something like, oh, yeah. That guy, he's a Jew, though, isn't he? And you're like, woah. Okay. That's not cool, man. You know? But in back then, since half of Hollywood or more was are Jews, they were just kind of like in the audience going, Yeah. My last name is not Stein. It's definitely something I changed when I got to Hollywood and I'm not Jew. Like, they, you know, people kept it on the low. Now people go, Hey, you, you shouldn't say stuff like that. Back then, I think people just kind of sucked it up. Just kinda, it was the same thing where, when your secretary would walk in in the sixties and you see this in mad men, she'll walk out and they'll like smack her on the bottom. Right. And it's like, Yeah. That's how we do things over here. And so in many ways, yes, we're more PC now, but some of that is we did get rid of a lot of crap that was just not cool. Like, not promoting Jewish people or not hiring black people or, like, not having women work in the same office unless they were typists. You know? Sure. But all those situations you mentioned were serious situations. But in terms of, like, joking around, now it's you can't you can't joke about many things. Oh, yeah. You're right. I see what you're saying. Like, right now, like, if someone said to me even if they weren't Jewish, if someone said to me a Jewish joke, you know, it'd be it'd be pretty hard to offend me. Like, unless they were unless it looked like they were really enjoying themselves too much. Like, they were Yeah. Like, they were getting into it because it was making them happy as opposed to just making a joke. But, like, it used to be any joke was fair game, and I'm not saying don't, you know, don't be offensive. There's an there's an offensive way, I guess, to deliver jokes, but there's an inoffensive way to deliver jokes about pretty much anything. And everyone's like, if you truly hated a a group of people, you probably wouldn't be joking around about them in a the most offensive way possible with a bunch of, you know, Strangers. Friends and strangers and so on. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Like, I I've I've always wondered I think about this probably more often than a sane person should, but I'm like, what if we could find an old Nazi that would tell us the truth about everything that he knew? And I'd be like, how often did you actually talk about Jewish people? And I bet you the answer is like, rarely, unless they were in like the SS or something like that. And also did they make a bunch of jokes about it or was it kind of like not some, I, you know, I, I just can't imagine. That that was on top of their mind, unless they were specifically tasked with what they called, you know, that problem in Germany back then. I think most people just never thought about it. And that's actually what scares me about modern politics is a lot of the stuff that people say like, oh, so and so whether it's a president or a Senator, like, they, they don't really mean that they're just being controversial. I'm like, I don't know. You know, if we could find that old Nazi who was gonna tell us the truth, I bet you that a lot of people said the same thing back then too. It's like, oh, who cares? They're just, yeah, they're distracted by the gypsies and the poles and the Jews, but they don't, that's a side issue. We're trying to fight a war here. Meanwhile, there's like, you know, thousands of people that are like, how do we. Kill as many of these folks as possible. And it and it and then it happened. Right? Like, oh, nothing's gonna ever happen. That's what scares me about some of the sort of, like, anti the xenophobic rhetoric that we see now. I'm like, hey. This starts off this way. This is, like, how this stuff starts. You know? And it's not about getting offended about everything. It's about literally preventing fascism. I agree. And it's unclear. For me, it feels like there's kind of fascist tendencies on both sides of the aisle, but what's unclear is is that everything gets clouded again in, like, marketing language. Mhmm. So for instance, you always have to connect the dots and figure out you almost have to, like, do the cliche follow the money. So take the climate accords for instance. Now everybody in the world wants no pollution and the climate to be better. And if there are serious issues and some people say there are serious issues, we have to be careful about the world, then, obviously, climate change is a real important issue. But what's the deal with the Paris Accords? The whole marketing around the theme of climate change has linked it to these Paris Accords. Meanwhile, if you follow the money in the Paris Accords, China is given, like, a 10 year pa*s. Like, they they don't have to reduce their carbon emissions for 10 years. They don't have to pay fees for 10 years. And there's always a good reason and a real reason. The good reason is, well, they have to develop as a first world country and build up their economy. But then you look at the real reason, we get cheap iPhones Yeah. At their disgusting, polluted factory that employs slavery, basically. The slaves Yeah. Literal of slavery. Like Yeah. But I've got friends that that investigated some of this stuff in China. There are ki this is not even an exaggeration or like a hearsay. This is a guy who I had on the Jordan harbinger show. He he'd investigates counterfeit items, like from Gucci handbags, but also airbags. They make that will kill you when they go off, because they're made by some, you know, kids. There's all kinds of stuff. He's walked in the factories in China with investigators. There are children handcuffed to sewing machines that make shoes and stuff. Like, it's not exaggeration. It's horrible. Right. And so this is the thing. I feel like there's so much layers of words and and dollars, you know, to kind of make these words important. So there's there's you know, that's why 1,000,000,000 of dollars are spent on the presidential campaign. Not to tell us really what Biden thinks and what Trump thinks, but to basically market some message. Like, we need to rejoin the the climate accords. Meanwhile, the US already is the largest reducer of carbon emissions in on the planet. And Reducer or producer? Reducer? Re reduce. Like, we Yeah. I I don't know the right term. We we reduced carbon emissions last year more than any other country on the planet. And, you know, we're kind of in line with what we would have done with the Paris Accords, but we're just not paying the the fees that we were paying before. Meanwhile, China still has their free pass, and nobody quite connects it with the fact that US consumers are happy indirectly. China has this free pass because, you know, they're allowed to pollute the world because you have a a $1,000 iPhone instead of a $3,000 iPhone. And, you know, iPhone is one industry, but what we realized at the end of January, early February of this year was that China basically controls all manufacturing in the world. Like, we could make we couldn't even make toilet paper here. Like, we were in a panic when when China closed down. Yeah. Well yeah. I gotta tell you. I shouldn't be laughing because it's I'm laughing at how stupid it is. So yeah. I'm triggered. You're laughing at toilet paper. Yeah. Try and I can't I haven't wiped my a*s since March. But I I look at this, and I I just think to myself, like, how did we end up getting so ridiculously behind? For example, when when the pandemic happened, not not in March, I wanna say in April, I found a way to get masks from China to Taiwan because my wife is from Taiwan. Her family's from Taiwan. So I they have fact China factory connections for other things. So they sent masks from China, FedEx, and I ordered a few 1,000 of them. And then they they told me, hey. I can't send you anymore. We have these export restrictions because China was basically trying to make us squirm a little bit. And I was like, how do we not how are we not able to make masks in the United States? And a friend of mine, who I don't know if you know Noah Kagan. You do. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I know. I just had him on the podcast, actually. So he introduced me to another guy, and that guy in Austin, Noah's buddy and my buddy now, he wanted to make masks in the United States, and he couldn't find the material. Then he couldn't find the machines. Then he bought the machines. Then he couldn't find the right material. Then he found a tiny bit of the material. And I go, you know, you're you're probably fighting a losing battle here because some big company that can already make these is just gonna come in and make a bunch of these. And he goes, that's the thing. There's no company that can make these masks in the United States. And I was like, you can't that can't be true. And he's like, no, no, no. They're only maybe somebody can make small quantities of a few thousand, but nobody can make a huge quantity of these masks that we need, these n 95, n 100, whatever they're called, masks in the United States. So he retooled his whole business. He used to sell, like, yellow pages type stuff, and now he's making PPE. And it's a good business, I think, because we just don't have the ability to do that. I think also certain kinds of drugs we can't make here at all. Right. Right. At all. That that's the thing. In China, they make all the drugs. You know, we we're we're trying to work it out so India can make some drugs, so we're not totally relying on China. But I don't know. I don't know if I'm gonna trust a country that just fired up its its machine. Blast the most. Yeah. Make the most important drugs to keep us alive. I don't may we might have to rely on China. Yeah. But, but why couldn't we make masks? Like, this is a real interesting thing. And then everyone says, well, maybe we should bring the manufacturing back here. But, again, I don't wanna pay $20 a mask for masks. Right. And and then also not be able to go outside in the Austin, Texas, greater Metro area because mask pollution is like dumping sludge everywhere. Right. Or, or is just un because some, some pollution you can't contain, like people don't really realize this. There's some pollution that can't be contained at pretty much any price. And China doesn't try to do that because they don't care. So they'll dump a bunch of sludge into a lake in Shenzhen when they're manufacturing, silicone, you know, what do they call motherboards or whatever, circuit boards. But there's some pollution that just happens no matter what. The fact that we don't have that here is one of the reasons why we have lower carbon emissions. It's not because we're driving less. It's not because we have electric cars. Some of that is pro it's probably like 1% of it. Maybe not even The real reason is because we're no longer burning coal to run the power plant that makes the automobiles, you know, a thousand a day at General Motors in Detroit or whatever it is. We don't have that anymore. Right. And so, again, like, I I feel like there's this kind of layered I wouldn't even call it ideology. It's like marketology. Like, we're told the the society is told what issues are important. Like, oh, we need to bring jobs back. We need to bring manufacturing back. No one wants to bring manufacturing back. Like, nobody really enjoys working on an assembly line. Nobody wants to pay higher prices for everything. Nobody wants the pollution. Maybe a few people, that's the only job they would get is working on an assembly line, but but I don't even believe that. Like, I think now that people are kind of a little bit more mobile than they were 50 years ago, you could move to an area where there's more you have at least have more options. It's not like a factory town where there's only one option, and you have to work in the factory. Because, again, I don't think anybody enjoys it working in a coal mine. No. We always see too with new technology, jobs, it might take some time, but jobs are created. There's you know, more people now are in life style businesses where they're they're solopreneurs. They're they're 1 1 or 2 man entrepreneurial companies. So, again, I think what isn't bulls**t? Like, what is not BS? Because almost every political message is BS. The whole idea of I'm I'm gonna say it, and even though it's a controversial thing, but owning a home, I get why people wanna own homes. I get you want roots, and and you don't wanna have to move. But you they follow the money. There's a $15,000,000,000,000 mortgage industry. So, like, all the banks and the government, that's their entire for every bank, that's their entire source of profit is lending money for homes. So it supports, like, a multi $1,000,000,000,000 industry. So what what actually is not bulls**t? Yeah. It it's tough to say. I I think I might be we might be in slight disagreement about the people who their only job that you don't think their only job is working in manufacturing. I think you're right that not everybody or most people don't like doing that, but I think there's a huge, huge number of people from where I'm from, like Detroit, Ohio area, Detroit, Michigan, and Ohio area. I know Detroit's not in Ohio for those of you listening, it, that there's people that made air conditioners for 30 years at carrier, which is I think in ill, you know, Illinois or whatever, that was the one that was on the news. They don't necessarily love doing that, but try telling a 60 year old man. Who's. Another 7 years to retirement that he's gotta relearn and retool a new skill. And that there's a 24 year old. That's been doing it for 2 years. That's gonna show him the ropes. He's gonna be like, screw that. I'm voting for the guy who's just gonna keep my life. The way that it is, you know, you live in a big city, you grew up learning a bunch of different things. You're still learning a bunch of different things. Like, you're getting into software and you do all these you own the comedy club. You'd have a podcast. You and I can learn new things, and we like doing that. I don't think guys like my dad enjoy it that much. My dad learned how to repair an engine, but he was an auto worker. It's not big stretch. Right. Okay. I I agree. And I I'll I'll change my view a little bit that, you know, there are people who've been doing it all their lives Yeah. And then the jobs go away. But then then there needs to be some plan or some policy. Like, this this is a legit way to think about policy. It's like, okay. It's better for the country in general. Less pollution, less prices, less slave like work Mhmm. If the worst parts of manufacturing, the most, you know, gut wrenching manufacturing is done overseas. And, you know, again, prices cheaper is a is a good thing for pharmaceuticals, for clothes, for electronics. And so there needs to be some policy to think about people like someone like your dad or someone who's 60 years old who has to make a transition. But I will note during the pandemic, there's a 128,000,000 job there was a 128,000,000 jobs in the US. 55,000,000 people during the lockdowns were filed for unemployment. So it wasn't like corporations were that loyal to employees anyway. So so some policy has to be thought of. And, I mean, Yang made an attempt with the UBI and and, you know, the UBI is not a Democrat issue. I mean, Milton Friedman supported the UBI Nixon supported the UBI in the seventies. But, you know, so it's a it's a you could view it as a bipartisan issue, but some policies have to be thought about. But then again, there's another issue, which is that because, Andrew Yang, who I like a lot, proposed UBI, the Republicans cannot propose a UBI. Like, everything became it's either us or them proposing an idea. There's nothing bipartisan anymore. Yeah. No. That's it comes down to your marketing. It's there's a lot that people can't even agree on. And if you need another concrete example of that, I think it was when Fox news who's been staunchly, you know, leans to the right. I don't think anyone's gonna argue that they were saying, Hey, there's, where's the evidence of voter fraud. And like, all these other people were like, oh, you're not on our side anymore. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Don't we just want an accurate vote count? Yeah. We want an accurate vote count that shows that our guy wins. Well, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Do you want an accurate vote count, or do you just want your guy to win? And then Fox News was kinda like, where's the evidence? And then now suddenly everyone's like, Fox News is a bunch of BS. And Yeah. It's like, wait. What? Do you want the truth or not? And the answer is no. Like, people that's one thing I've realized over the past few years. People actually don't want the truth at all. They're not interested in it at all. They just wanna be right, which is Everybody it's it's funny. Like, I know a lot of people switching from Fox to more radical Yeah. OA. Or whatever. 1 America or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's there's a a couple of, like I don't even know how to find them. But they know where where to find them. So but, again, there's always layers upon layers. So another thing happening at Fox is that as Rupert Murdoch kind of takes a back seat and the children take over, the sons are all married to, apparently, this is what I've been told, all left women. And so now we're seeing this generational shift at Fox that was kind of long due, so we're long overdue. So so, again, like, what's the real story? It's it's sex and money is is gonna manipulate the story, one way or the other. Yeah. It it's One America News Network, o a n n. There's 2 n's. Yeah. It's unlike channel 347, and I'm not exaggerating. So it's but people will you know, that that doesn't matter anymore. You know, we're not scrolling anymore. We type in what we want, then we program a bookmark or whatever. I don't even watch TV. Right. And peep and people will ask others, well, I can't watch Fox anymore. What are you watching now? And then they they always have to find, where's my echo chamber Right. So I can still feel good in the morning when I'm having coffee. And, of course, I'm gonna listen to news so I can be informed. I just need to be informed about what I like. Exactly. That reminds me speaking of jokes about Jews, do you remember the one that that you probably heard this one before where, like, there's an old Jewish guy sitting it's, like, 1942 or something or 1939, sitting down in Germany reading a newspaper, but it's like a Nazi newspaper. And his friend says, like, Shlomo, why are you reading that? And he goes, it it makes me feel great. And he goes, what are you talking about? He goes, well, when I look around, you know, I'm losing my business. We're getting pushed out of Germany. But when I read this, we own the banks, we own the media, and we have all the money. And that's the that's the joke. That's funny. So because it of course, all that that media is just the echo chamber of what people wanted to believe when they were doing horrible things to their own countrymen. So and it's it's weird to make jokes like that and and think about that. Because if you look at something like OANN and you look at the content there, you go, wow. This is about as blatant as propaganda can really get before it just looks like a war World War 2 poster. Right? It's just like as blatant as it gets. And there there's plenty of stuff like that on the on the left too. I'm not just trying to sort of poke at the right. There there's plenty of stuff on both sides. I mean, the the fact that headlines that basically all headlines now are opinion statements is the trend that has happened even just in the past 20 years. Like, it wasn't like in after 911, there were headlines on the New York Times that said, Bush antagonized Middle East so much that they bombed, you know, the World Trade Center. So there wasn't, like, these kind of opinion laden, headlines. It was just like, you know, terrorists, crash into World Trade Center. So it was just like a factual headlines. And now, I mean, I'll just go to let's I'm I'm gonna pick on CNN. I picked on them before. I'm sorry. Yeah. We can do that because otherwise, they're they're sort of in the middle left. Right? So it's easier Yeah. Versus picking on, like, some extreme if you pick on OANN or or Breitbart, it's like, well, okay. The head the joke rights itself. Here's a here's an article. Biden won the election, and it wasn't even close. So, like, I is that, like, an opinion? Is that an op ed, or is it an article? Like Yeah. The the you know? Okay. Biden won the election by an 8% majority or whatever it was. Yeah. Like, that would be a factual headline, but it wasn't even close. It's like this guy's dancing and cheering, which is fine. He could be happy, but it's not it's not like a standard news headline. Right. It's not a journalist going, here are the facts as I see them. It's, yay. Suck it, everyone who wasn't voting for this guy. That's what that that's what that headline is. Or if you're reading it and you voted, it's, yeah. You knew you were right. You were even more right than you thought before you read this article. Right. Here's here's one that's actually labeled opinion. So now I know the other one wasn't labeled opinion. This one's labeled opinion. It's called Biden's genius move. I see that. It's a it's a it's an opinion. But, let's see, another one. Georgia's lieutenant governor joins GOP officials in rejecting Trump's misinformation. So, again Yeah. It's, you know, an opinion that's, you know, pretending to be a headline. And, again, he might be totally right. Sure. But just the wording is, you know, they're they're now just the gloves are off, and it's just like, on social media now. You you know, the the Ayatollah of Iran will say something like, we're gonna bomb the hell out of Israel, and that stays up forever and has 27,000 likes. And, you know, something, you know, some political or a tweet that mentions hydroxychloroquine will get censored. Yeah. And, you know, because it was a Republican drug. So yeah. It's just weird when stuff like that happens. I think also there's just a there's a major the the only pressure coming on to social media companies is from the United States. Right? No, no one's gonna go, no one in Israel's gonna be like, Hey, we don't want our people to see this tweet from Iran. They know Iran is their enemy and it, you know, the Iranian government's not gonna say, Hey, can you censor the IOT to LA? He sometimes flies off the handle online. You know, that's never gonna happen either. So the, the pressure is only coming from the United States and then in the government and the elite, sort of on the left and the right, depending on who you're talking to. So they're never gonna care about what another country does, unless it affects the United States in a very direct Way. So I, I don't know. It it's rough. I actually subscribe to this email that's for teachers and it's, it's called the Sift and it it's only, it only comes out like once every other week or something, but basically they show news headlines and they show teachers how to have the students figure out whether the news headline is real using different tools. And they show how to look at images and see if they're fake and they show how to look at headlines and tweets and see if they've been altered. And then there's like exercise, have your kids go to fake tweet.net and make their own fake tweets, you know, a, about this to show how easy it is for somebody to confuse and fool them. And it's actually kind of genius because the only way we're really gonna get out of this is by showing people that a lot of what they're reading is garbage. That's manufactured in order to make them upset. That's why you get emails from, I don't know if you're, you're, you get emails from your, you know, relatives, but I remember like 5 or 10 years ago, getting an email from like my uncle or something and it's all caps. And it was like, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward. Obama's a Muslim. And I was like, dude, not true. Okay? What are you doing? And there's tons of stuff like that. We have to just debunk. I I get those as well. And then, you know, and then people wonder, like, oh, you know, we need to have, like, high voter turnout. They wanna have high voter turnout because most people don't know anything. So whoever spends the most money marketing wants high voter turnout, as a result. And and, again, I'm not this is not a political statement. I'm not saying, oh, gosh. I hope everybody voted for my choice. I didn't vote at all. But, You didn't vote? I didn't vote. I don't I don't vote. Is that something you you talked about that before, so I don't wanna beat the dead horse. Yeah. Yeah. I've I've talked about it before. I've I've wrote an article about it. And That's where I saw it. Yeah. Yeah. And and, look, I get it. People get upset about that because they they but they have all these arguments that don't really mean anything. And I even discussed this on the podcast, but they'll say, you know, people died for your right to vote. And but that's you know, I I it's hard to defend yourself against huge numbers of invisible people who died thinking of me voting in a ballot box 300 years later. Right. So so that's a that's a hard argument. Or they say it's, you should have no voice if you don't vote, which is also incorrect. Like, you know, I could have a voice if I want. That's my it it all these things, voting and having a voice is are my rights in this country, and there might be reasons to not vote that people aren't aware of always. Well, you're right. By the way, that argument is ridiculous about you shouldn't have a vote. Most journalists, as far as I know, up until recently, and in fact, even still many journalists now, they don't vote. In fact, going back to Frost Nixon, I think it was Frost who said, I don't vote because I'm a journalist, and I have to remain impartial. So to tell, I guess, probably, arguably the most famous journalist of his day that he shouldn't have a voice because he didn't vote makes absolutely no sense. Yeah. No. That's exactly that's the main reason for me right now. And and I would try to explain this to people, like, that I you know, when you vote when you do anything that puts, as the team to let you know, the skin in the game Yeah. You're gonna have a cognitive bias. Like, if you send your kids to college, you're gonna think this is the best decision you ever made because your brain doesn't wanna think that you made a really stupid decision about a lot of money. So if you vote, you're gonna be even slightly biased about who you vote for. And I've had Democrats, Republicans, Independents. I've you know, I like to be unbiased and do my research unbiased. But once you decide to do something that's, you know, elevated in importance, even though you're one out of a 150,000,000 voters, you get a cognitive bias. And I just I don't wanna deal with that. I don't wanna think about it if I'm you know, podcasting is not journalism, but we're still trying to be unbiased. I have no agenda other than present good educational and entertaining stories, interviews, topics on the podcast. Yeah. You're right. Podcasting now, depending on the journalism you're looking at is much for much higher caliber quality of content. Given what we just talked about and looked at online. I think the average podcast now kicks a lot of quote unquote journalism's butt in terms of like being useful and educational, but podcasting of course can also be. Journalistic. It just depends on what mode you're in. Right? Like if you were interviewing William Barr from the justice department, I would say that at that time, you're a journalist, but if you've got somebody like me coming on and we're just going back and forth, nobody's necessarily fact checking us. At least we're not doing that. Then then that's a little bit less of a, journalistic endeavor. But we're not pushing an agenda. Like, so if we if we had our facts wrong, it's not, like, maliciously getting the facts wrong. Right. So, just Negligently getting the facts wrong. Negligently getting the facts wrong. But I don't think we we haven't we we actually just looked up CNN. We fact checked ourselves. We looked up CNN. Are headlines really opinions? But, no. It's it's it's an interesting point. Like, what you know, how do you like, you mentioned this are this newsletter sift that you get, the the sift. Like, how do you protect yourself against the you know, in that case, they're talking about these deep fake photos and articles and tweets. But and and we're talking about just how there's layers, underneath layers, underneath layers of when a concept actually hits the surface, like hits a headline or or a new show and goes to the average viewer, it's been through kind of layers of translation from the original meaning or facts. And I don't know if there's really a way to protect yourself other than to completely ignore the news. Yeah. That that's kinda what I think where I was going with my, my point before was it's a shame that we have to do that because what we're doing is telling kids, Hey, so much of what you see is fake, that you shouldn't believe it, including things that look real, sound real. Are written in a way that they're, they appear real. That stuff can also be fake and you basically have to deconstruct everything to the point of it taking all of your time and available bandwidth. So the the message that I fear kids are getting or anyone is getting is nothing is true. So what's the point in learning about anything or paying attention to what's going on, which is bad because and not I'm no conspiracy guy or anything, but look, when no one is paying attention anymore because everything is fake, I don't feel like that's good for democracy or society either because then you can't you literally can't say, hey. You should wear your seat belt. People go, ah, this is just big seat belt trying to get more money out of me. I'm not doing it. You know? That that that's true. So how do you get how how do you, for instance, get informed? I read a lot of books, but the problem is the turnaround time or the cycle is too slow with books for me to pay attention to the news. So if I wanna know about election interference from Russia, I read die David Shimer's book. He was on the Jordan Harbinger show, and he talks about the history of election interference, not collusion, not the same thing, just inter inter, election interference done by the United States, done to the United States, done by the Soviet Union, to other countries, things like that. But that book came out, you know, like, in September or something. So the for for the soonest I could get a deep dive on it was September 2020. But that makes sense, though. And I I, by the way, agree. I think books are really the only way to get news because but you're right. It's a delay because someone has to actually do the deep dive and the research and and hundreds of thousands of entries. Yeah. Things that reporters used to do. Like, you know, Woodward and Bernstein, you know, they they they broke a lot of the Watergate story in in in the the the book and then the movie, All the President's Men, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. And they did hundreds of interviews. They got they had secret sources, and then their editor still wouldn't publish their article unless they prove to him that, like, 2 or 3 of the sources that were of concern were completely legit. Like, they had to they had to actually furnish evidence that what they were saying was totally true. And report journalism does not, you know or or message imparting does not happen that way anymore. So I agree. The Russian election interference, nobody knew about it anyway for the 1st couple years. Meaning, people had conspiracies on both sides. Everybody was saying the other side was, you know, Russia was on their side, and we probably didn't know anything anyway until the book came out a few years later. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, now we can see from, like, intelligence agencies that Russia's been doing this for a 100 years since, and the United States has been doing this for a 100 years. Yes. There's a ton of examples of it everywhere. It's just that the way it was presented, going back to your point about marketing was, Trump wouldn't have won without Russian help. And it's like, that's not probably not true. That's probably not true. And so or or possibly not true. Right? And as we saw from the second election, you know, what maybe wouldn't have mattered, but there's always election interference. Whether one side knew about it or not, it is a different point. But what what happened was a lot of journalists went, oh, well, there was election interference probably. So probably they knew about it, and probably it was a material difference. So they just made all these logical leaps, which sucks because now when that those same outlets, and it doesn't have to be the same journalist. It can just be the same newspaper, says, hey. You know, wear your seat belt in the car. They go, aren't you the same a holes that told me that this was a collusion? Oh, yeah. Well, we'd it turned out that it wasn't, but it was interference. Well, okay. Is that even true? I'm not gonna go read David Shimer's book. I'm gonna listen to the Jordan harbinger show episode and then stop halfway through, because I got to where I was driving, but I'm not necessarily gonna go back and revise all my opinions about CNN being more accurate. So these, these outlets do a lot of damage and it it's. As a as a journalist slash podcaster, I never wanna break trust. Right? I don't shill products that I think are crappy for sponsors. I say no to money for from sponsors all the time. I don't knowingly lie to my audience. You know, sometimes things are inaccurate. I have to go back and, like, make a correction. Newspapers, they don't really do that anymore. Right. Especially online publications almost never do that. And when they do, they bury it in the bottom of like a correction on another article or something like that. And it just, it doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, you guys are trying to stop yourselves from becoming embarrassed. What you should do is be putting that that should be on the front page. Hey. We made a mistake about this. We turned out to here's what's actually going on. Sorry for that. Here's where we got it wrong because you wanna build trust. But these online publications or offline publications, they don't even seem to care about trust anymore. They just need clicks. And I think that's like, shortsighted, penny wise, pound foolish. Because if you had a news source that you could actually trust and the way that you knew you could trust them was they changed their, content based on new evidence. And then they said it, by the way, this other thing we said was wrong and they did that regularly. You would, yes, you would know that sometimes they get things wrong. But you would trust them more. Now we just know that they all get things wrong and that they'll never tell us the truth because it's embarrassing. It makes them look bad. So it's sort of like you you look somebody looks at a news outlet or a news source and says, okay. Not whether the information is right or wrong or whether it's interesting or not interesting or informative or not informative, but whether or not it fits their bias. If it fits their bias Mhmm. They they first determine the bias of the news source. That's that's a task now. And then they decide, okay. Is this bias appropriate for me? And then they start watching or consuming the information. Mhmm. Yeah. Pretty much. And so then you always have to answer the question then, like, okay. I agree. Books and podcasts are good source of information. I think there are, like you you know, you can find the real sources of data. Like, you you could do the work of a journalist and say, okay. This research paper does say this, or this research paper where they're quoting this issue, has some has some problems, has some math problems in it. Mhmm. But, I think it's I think in general, the best thing to do is probably I I tend to I used to before this year. I used to ignore all news because I figured if something was important enough, like a hurricane is coming, then somebody will tell me about it or I'll hear people talking about it. And if something wasn't important, I probably don't need to read about it anyway. Like, it's not gonna change my life to to read about some small unimportant news, then I'd rather use that time to read a book that somebody's researched and thought about and so on. So I think it's a a big, not only of, better psychologically to not read nonstop lies, but also a productivity tool to just ignore the 2 or 3 hours of news and and social media that people consume every day. Yeah. I agree. It's kinda like when when I'm hungry, if I have some good food in front of me that my wife made or something like that, or that, you know, maybe I cook up some eggs. That's a better choice than just going, oh, somebody left a muffin on the counter and just housing that than going and getting some chocolate, because I'm still kinda hungry. Right? But we do that with news. We go, oh, I've got, like, 10 or 15 minutes. Let's see what's going on in the world, and you open up the news app and you get sucked down this rabbit hole. Changing what I did I've done this recently, and it's it's a tough habit to keep, actually, because it's not really that second nature yet, is I will then listen to a book in a 10 or 15 minute segment from my phone. You know, I I listen to a lot of audiobooks. So instead of checking headlines, I'll read or listen to 10 minutes of an audiobook, and there's that's a much better ROI for time. Because if if your 10 minute gap between calls turns into your 20 minute gap because someone's running late, now you're reading 20 minutes of news, which has done nothing for you. But But if you can read 20 minutes of an audiobook or listen to 20 minutes of an audiobook and it's an 8 hour book, you you made a small but decent enough dent in that book. And then, you know, same thing. When you're in the shower, you can listen to, like, the radio, or you can put on a podcast, or you can put on that same book. And when you're driving, you can put on Spotify or you can put on that same book. If you read in these small chunks, you can plow through, like, 2 or 3 books a week depending on how many, tasks you have. And it's interesting because people don't realize, and I I not just peep me. I don't I often forget time. It it all adds up. So 20 minutes a day for 300 days is whatever, you know, 6000 minutes a a year. And, you know, over 30 years, it's it's a 180,000 minutes. So that's, 3000 hours. Yeah. I mean, that's that's a lot. So that's so 6000 minutes is at the a year divided by, of course, you know, 60, which is a 100 and then a 100 hours divided by the average book. Let's say it's 8 hours. Let's even say it's 9. That's an additional 11 books a year minimum. It's a dozen books a year that you could read instead of, like, blasting Post Malone again even well, I I won't judge you for your music taste. But, look, you can you know, if you're listening to crap or reading crap on CNN or or or OANN or whatever news source, you're getting nothing from that. But you could read a dozen books that are deep dives into, I don't know, election interference if you wanted to or or biology, and you're smarter for that. Whenever I read, I'm usually connecting the dots between, let's say let's say I've read 5 to 10 recent books. I'm usually thinking, oh, this concept is like this other concept in this book or this is something I might wanna write about. So nothing very rarely will I take something in the news and write about it. But often reading books will kind of seed ideas in creativity for me. And so it's it's not only a good way to get a better way to get informed and to increase your knowledge, but it's good career wise to read books as opposed to news because I get more creative ideas Mhmm. About what's interesting in the world. Yeah. I I'm with you there, man. I I really do think that the the information quality in a book I mean, just think about you've written books, so you understand this. Right? But a lot of people who do haven't, like myself, but I've re I remember writing papers and things like that in school, and you're like, research, outline, go to the source, double check, get a quote, cite the quote, reformat the thing, move stuff around. That's that's more or less how books tend to get written with these articles. I know firsthand from working for some of these online publications in the past, you know, 10 plus years ago, you might be sitting at a coffee shop typing this thing up on your phone or on a laptop while you're drinking your coffee, and you basically run spell check, and then you send it to an editor who moves, like, 3 lines around or nothing around and then just throws it up on the site. And news sites probably have a little bit more journalistic oversight or editorial oversight, but I'm not totally convinced of that if I'm candid. Yeah. No. I totally agree. And, you know, it's interesting because then you wrote about this recently in your most recent article where you write about how you say successful people tend to respond to emails. Mhmm. And so if you think about it, if we're taking if we're if we're if we're spending I mean, the average person spends between 3 and 4 hours on social media, you know, essentially looking at these clickbait headlines, you know, about Headlines. I've seen what's on people's reels. I know what's on my reels on Instagram. Those that's the one that's, like, the TikTok clone. Have you seen this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. That's where all the girls are. That's and and it's it's ridiculous how blatant it is. I thought I thought people were kidding when they said TikTok was just a bunch of, hot girls dancing. And I look at my reels on Instagram and I go, oh, wait. No. It's literally just that. That's all it is. Well, because people that is what people click on. Like Yeah. I mean, I know. That's why if I if I scroll down probably on one of these news stories, you start to see all the other ones, like, you know, remember Heather Locklear? Get you wouldn't believe what she looks like now. Yeah. And, like, those are they're they're it's almost like you're being commanded to click on it. Like, it's hard to it's another thing is that you get like you said, you go down a rabbit hole. But, you know, in terms of the I'm I'm interested in the email thing because you you you pointed out how, you gave you you gave some examples and and pointed out how the successful people, you know, always tend to respond within a a day or so of you sending an email. Yeah. And and less successful people tend to, it takes 14 emails, and nothing ever happens. It's just a waste of time. And I I think I'm not really that great at returning emails. So agree with that. And I and I and I would like to be. Like, I don't I always feel bad afterwards that I didn't oh, I should've responded to the email, but I always do think I'm, like, either too busy or I, like, I I I need to write a big letter Mhmm. If I'm gonna respond, and and then I I procrastinate on that. So how do you how do you build, I so I agree that it's important for success to respond to emails. I mean, the ideal thing is to respond to every email. But how do you, build the the discipline? Like, they then you I feel reactive then. Like, I'm too reactive to what's happening on the computer if I respond to every email. Yeah. No. I think I think you're you're right. I don't really know how people build that, but I I guess to give people a brief overview of what we're we're talking about right now, I wrote this article about how and I'll find the headline here in a second because people might wanna read it. If you're too busy to respond, you're doing something wrong. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. So the idea is that it something I noticed over years of booking guests for the Jordan Harbinger Show. Right? So I'll email, let's say, I'll email, like, Mark Cuban, and I'll get an email He is the best example, by the way. I was gonna use him as an example as well. He responds instantly. Instantly. And what's weird is, like, if you're near him, he's not just on his phone the whole time. He's on his phone sometimes, but, like, I don't know. Maybe I just have a weird snapshot, but he's not necessarily like beholden to this. He just, he rep he does reply right away. And he's Sam Harris, you know, replies to email and he's got like a, you know, 1 point, whatever 1000000 listeners of his podcast and countless fans, book fans, he's even getting death threats in his email and he responds to most emails probably doesn't respond to those. You find people like Ray Dalio reply to emails. You find, Steven Schwartzman, although his assistant's probably doing you know, these billionaires are replying to their email, like, the same day. And I I even remember a while ago, a long time ago, my probably my one of my first experiences with this was I had a problem with a FedEx package that I'd sent to Germany, and it was expensive. It was like a laptop or something because I was living in Germany at the time. And I remember emailing the CEO of federal express and he replied like a day or two later. And this is like in the early 2000. Right. That guy was definitely getting plenty of email and had plenty of stuff to do. But even he, the CEO of federal express replied to a customer email. And, and then he said, my secretary's gonna take care of this for you. And she did. She tracked the package down. Like this is the CEO of federal express. Come on. So these folks are like super, productive. They're super responsive. Adam Grant replies to emails. He also wrote a piece in the New York Times about, conscientiousness and email that I quote in the piece. And I just noticed that, like, a lot of the most successful people that I know are really, really good at communication in some way. It doesn't have to be email, but your email inbox can't be like this sort of, like, field of broken dreams and, like, old friendships that aren't there anymore. I think that's mine. I mean, in my inbox, it in my and I delete lots of emails. Like, I delete all the junk mails and mails I don't want and stuff like that. But even with all that, I have 324,090 unread emails. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot. So I gotta get better at this. A lot of people in your situation might go, look. I don't have the where whatever it is it wherewithal? I don't even not even sure what that word means now that I use it. To to do this myself, Maybe you hire someone. Like, Tim Ferris, he's very responsive, but he also realizes that he doesn't wanna respond to all that, so he's got an assistant who goes in and clears all that stuff out for him. And for all I know, you know, I I look. Even Gary Vaynerchuk replies to his emails, but that's no surprise. Right? It's Gary Vaynerchuk. So there's a lot of folks that that will reply to everything, but even when they get overwhelmed, they'll patch that hole. They'll go, oh my gosh. I can't do this. I've got a buddy right now who is possibly gonna be the director of the CIA. Actually, he just got tapped. Oh my gosh. And I said, oh, I better email you while I can. And he's like, if there's one thing I'm probably gonna be able to do is it's, you know, answer my email or someone will. And I thought that was a funny response. Another guy who was on the Jordan harbinger show, he just got tapped for the COVID nineteen response force for Biden. And he goes, I'm turning down all interviews now. Great timing. Our episode came out today. David Michaels. And so he. He said, look, you know, I'm still gonna be reachable. And I thought what an amazing thing to be able to say, you're gonna be the director of the CIA or the COVID 19 responder for Joe Biden. You're like, I'm still gonna be reachable. And they just know that they're gonna have to turn down all their media and turn down all these other things, but they're still gonna be either answering their own email or having somebody that's gonna do it because they realize that that stuff's important. So if I were you, I wouldn't, like, force myself to get better at email any more than I would wanna become, like, a marathon runner tomorrow at age 40 when I hate running and can't stand it. I would I would just try and hire to hire for your weakness. Right? It doesn't mean that you're not answering your email. It means that you realize it's a it's a losing battle, but that there's still important stuff in there, and then it becomes somebody else's job. And then that person has to, like, go and shake you in the evening and say, this person is still waiting for a reply. Tell me what to tell them. And then you go, oh, okay. Fine. You know? Like, that's all you have to do. You just need a killer assistant. Yeah. I guess so. But, yeah. And then maybe you have a I mean, what if you get, like, personal emails, you you know, that you don't want an assistant to read? Well, then, you better trust your assistant, or you say, hey. If the if I'm getting love letters from Robin in there, she just has to text those from now on. Yeah. No. I I that might be the way to do it because, sometimes I mean, like, your friend who's gonna be possibly the director of the CIA, he must get more emails per day than I do. Right? He probably gets, like, a 1,000 emails he has to respond to. Sometimes I feel like there's just too many to respond to. Yeah. Maybe it's because I write professionally. I feel like every time I write, Your life force slips away. Yeah. I have to be it has to be, like, something super. Like, it has to be, like, an amazing email to make people feel better. What you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. May no. Maybe that's it. I'm, like, psychoanalyzing myself. But, I could see that. What it is. I mean, I've known you for years years years, and you do put a lot of pressure on yourself from for certain things. And then that pressure generates anxiety. Be and I know that because I do that too. And we talked about this at your house a couple of year well, last year, I guess, where we said something like when you get a really important email, it's easy to let it languish in the inbox because you wanna take the time to reply to it. But then when you have time, you go like, oh, this is stressful to think about. Maybe I'll just do it later. And then, like, 2 months go by, and you're like, man, I got invited on this television show that I definitely wanted to do, and I just never replied to the producer. What the hell am I doing? And Yeah. That's happened to me. Yeah. It's happened to me too. Many times. Yeah. And the way I got around it was I just, like, I I what is it called? Eat the frog. Is that the Brian Tracy book where you just, like, one day you just get up and you make your coffee and you're like, I'm doing this before I even take a shower. Like, I'm answering this damn email. I'm a rip the Band Aid off, and it I always feel so good after doing it. It's like working out in the morning. You know, you go, ugh, work out in the morning, and then you work out a couple mornings. You're like, this is great. No wonder everybody works out in the morning. So what what's another, like, you know, like this one, you you know, here here's the interesting thing about articles. So you write this article because you've noticed that this trend that people that were successful respond to email, and people that weren't successful don't really respond to email so well. And you wrote it even though this is like a email's been around for 50 years in one form or other, you wrote it because this is something that not a lot of people have noticed, and and people don't realize the connection between emails and success even though, again, it's been around for 50 years. There's been plenty of time to think about it. But so you wrote something unique and that that you now practice in your life. Yeah. What's another thing that you feel like like, you kinda like your 6 minute networking course, which is which is excellent, and we talked about that, I think, 2 podcasts ago. What's another thing that has increased your ability to have a successful podcast, have a good career, and so on? Oh, that's a good question. What I think the main thing and stop me if I've talked about this before, because I I may have mentioned this on a podcast with you, but maybe it was last year or something like that. One of the main things that's really allowed me to be super productive, because a lot of people on my team or vendors that we work with, they'll say like, hey, man. You're always on top of stuff. Or I'll talk to somebody who's who where I'm learning how to do a job, like a marketing thing, and they'll go, well, who'd you hire for this? And I go, oh, do it myself. And they're like, what? You do that yourself and the other stuff? What I do every day is I I make sure that my calendar everything is on there. Have have we talked about this? No. Like okay. So everything that's on my calendar for a given day gets done. And I plan my day out from 7 AM all the way to 7 PM in 15 minute increments. It doesn't mean I have a new task every 15 minutes. It just means that there are task increments of 15 minutes on here. So it's like 7 AM. It literally says, like, wake up, make coffee, check, tasks, because I have a to do list app that has tasks on it. And then it's, like, trainer session. Yeah. Because I have a trainer on Skype from, you know, 8 to 9 AM. Then I have Chinese lesson from 9 to 10 AM. Then I have an email block or a task block. It's not just emails. That's like an hour and a half long. Then it's like shower. Then it's like lunchtime. Right? And then it's James Altitude podcast today is is what's on there. Then after this, it's get ready for family photos, drive to family fro photos, take family photos. And then I've got an overflow block because who the hell knows how long freaking family photos are gonna take. Right? So I've got a flex block in there where if I don't end up using it for that task, I have a zillion things on my Todoist app that I can always get into. Right? I can always just plow into the inbox or complete another task, and then I've got something from 5 to 6:30, answer feedback Friday, which is our advice question or advice show that we do every week is feedback Friday where people write in and we we do advice back. So I've got that blocked off, and then I've got a wind down at the end of the day where I don't put anything after it. And I just kind of, like, clean up my stuff, and that's my sort of ritual for shutting down for the day. But every single day is like that except weekends, which I deliberately leave as just blank. Because sometimes I wanna wake up late and then go get a fricking bagel and then walk outside for 3 hours, and I don't wanna have to be checking my damn calendar app. But every workday is planned like this, so I don't have time in the day where I go, what should I do now? Oh, I've only got, like, 20 minutes. What can I do in 20 minutes? It's on the calendar. And there's a few things if something cancels or gets done early, I can go to Todoist, and I've got tasks in there. But, or I read, you know, during that time. But but I think a lot of people spend a lot of time wandering around their freaking apartment in their living room and going like, well, my meeting's not so 1:30. I don't know. Should I make more food? I don't know. Let me see what's on TV. There's so many people that do things like that. And now that we're working from home, I think it's a lot worse. Because in the office, you would just go in your email inbox or you'd go visit a coworker. Now I think people are like, oh, I got a new Xbox game. Oh, there's some crap on Amazon Prime. New 90 day fiance episode. Let me watch that or start it. You know? There's so much distraction. It's interesting because I don't keep a to do list, and I and my reasoning for this is that it stresses me a little to figure out all the things I have to do. And I could only do one thing at a time anyway. So if I have free time, I'll just do whatever the most important thing is for me to do, and I should be aware of what that thing is. But maybe you're right. Maybe if it's more kind of concretely laid out, I will kind of start and stop at defined times and do the things have time to do the things that are maybe not as important. It's true. So that's the case. Because you'll always do the things that are really important. Yes. Like but but maybe it's the problem I have with email is that it's not quite at the priority level of, say, doing a scheduled podcast. Yeah. So I I tend to overflow my schedule with the high priority items, and I never return emails. The that's true. The other thing and I can see that happening. The other thing that this does, though, and I I don't wanna because everyone's like, great. Use a calendar genius. Who cares? But no, the, the thing that this does for me really well, other than, no cognitive load, trying to figure out what to do next is you can prioritize everything during the week. So I can put like really important stuff Monday, Tuesday, and make sure that nothing. That's important ends up being on a Thursday afternoon or a Friday afternoon. If I know where my cognitive peaks are. Right. And you can find that out by like, just noting it to yourself. Wow. Friday afternoons, I feel like crap. You know, I never wanna do anything. I'm burned out. Don't put anything important on Friday afternoon, but you'd be surprised. The other thing is I know how long work takes. So if I've gotta record an interview, I know it's gonna take an hour, an hour and a half, just like your show. But if I need to do a phone call or if I need to do a certain type of task, I might go, this is gonna take 30 minutes. This is gonna take 45 minutes or or just thereabout, so I can plan for that. And what a lot of people do is they just keep a to do list, and that to do list has 78 things on it, but they don't know how long those things are gonna take. So they just start going through their list. And then at the end of Tuesday night, they're like, wow. I've done 4 of these things. Oh my God, this is overwhelming. But if I know the time that each of these tasks is going to take, I know that I can't finish all that in 1 week or that I can't, that I'm gonna stress out trying to do it because I gotta work 14 hour days. The other thing, and this is probably the most important thing is since I know how long everything takes, let's say that today, like yesterday, you're like, Hey, do you wanna be on the podcast? And I was like, sure. So what I was able to do is move what I had during this time slot to another time slot. But if you don't have it on the calendar, you just go, yeah. Sure. And I show up for this, and then I go, uh-oh. When am I gonna record advertisements for the Jordan Harbinger show? Oh, I'll just do it later. When? I've got the family photo thing. I've got the feedback Friday thing I've gotta do. So then I'm either doing it at 8 PM, or I just go, I'll do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow, I've got a bunch of other stuff. So then I'm bumping everything. If I know that it's an hour long task and I can move it from one place to another on the calendar, that block has to fit in somewhere, man. It's a block that's this big, right? And an inch on my Imac screen, that's gotta fit in another white space that's an inch wide on my Imac screen. So I either have to delete something, move something, shorten something, or push it to next week. And that's important because otherwise you have a bigger appetite for what you're gonna be able to accomplish than the time that you have. The cognitive ability and the time that you have to accomplish it in. And that's when people get to do lists that have 785 things on it, and one of them is write book. Right? Or something like that. And they just never give they give up. That that's really true. I'm sort of I don't wanna say lucky I have to couch this phrase, but I'm sort of lucky there was an economic lockdown because it prevented me from doing things outside the house, and I had a lot of things scheduled. Mhmm. And, I was actually able to to finish a book, which was just one item on my massive list. Yes. And so if I all these, I had to skip, like, 10 different trips, and that extra 40 or 50 hours gave me a good start on the book. So Yeah. I'm sure. What what other give me I know I know you have to go to family photos. So so what give one more, Jordan Harbinger productivity hack? Because I know you have, like, a million of them. Yeah. I don't even it's weird because I don't even think of them as hacks, but you're right. They are, like, things that I've they're rules I put in place for myself because I was such a mess in, in all the way through like high school college. And then I got to law school and like, you can't afford to be that guy who doesn't find time to study because you'll fail out. Law school is one of those places where they're like, if you're just not doing well, they're like peace dude. And then you get to wall street and you know what wall Street's like, if you're underperforming or you're performing on the bar, but somebody doesn't like you, you're gone. You're you're freaking out of there. So I was like, I have to be more productive than these people because they're all smarter than me and they can all stay up till 1 AM working because of cocaine or whatever, you know, whatever their trick was. You know, for me, I think the other thing that's made me more, I don't know if it's productive, but it's it possibly is that is learning something always. Like, always working on yourself in a way that isn't just going to the gym. Like, that's fine if that's all you got time for, but I take Mandarin Chinese, and I do it in the morning. And the reason I do it is it it sort of provides this continuity where I'm I even if I end up having a month where all my work goes down the drain for some reason or even, like, you know, when I lost my when I had to start my previous business and show over, I was like, oh my god. All this work is down the drain. I still had this I still had this thing I was working on. Right. Mandarin Chinese that they, that like, can't go away. It's a skill. Working out is also kind of like that. Although I think for me, certainly there's less sort of continuity because you're either fit or you're not in many ways, but with Chinese or with Spanish or something, if you wanna learn an easier language, which I understand you, you really do see improvement. That's undeniable over time. And that is a feeling of accomplishment that you don't necessarily get from having 0 inbox. You probably get it from books writing books. Right? You write books and you go, man, 2020 was so weird. Well, I wrote a book, so you got that done. And then that's like a real thing that you built that's out there forever now. Right? So it's a tangible result. Yeah. No. But but I like the learning thing because so I I start my morning routine is I start off reading. So I always read I always read at least one book with that I'll learn from, that'll kind of increase my knowledge about something, and then I'll I'll go to 1, let's say, biography or history book, or I'll do one book about a game because I like games and puzzles and stuff like that. And then I'll read at least a chapter of some high quality fiction because that's usually the best writing. Oh, interesting. You know? That totally makes sense. Yeah. And then from there, I'll I'll start writing because I'll I'll be I'll still have the best writing kind of floating around in my head from the the last book I read, but I'll also have some new things that I learned for the day and, you know, and then we'll see what happens. But lately, I've been I've been on a binge where I've been since the Queen's Gambit came out, you know, the Netflix show, I wondered if you were watching that. I saw that, and I thought I bet James is watching this. Yeah. So I I read the book actually when I was 18, and I'm I'm happy that the series is really good. It's one of those series where it's at least as good as the book. And, but I've been binging on learning, chess. I haven't spent time learning chess since the nineties. I've just Really? Kind of read yeah. I had a chess coach for a while, or was that just a ping pong coach that I'm confused with? Yeah. I was put that that was a ping pong coach. But I had a chess coach in the nineties. Okay. But that was the last time I actually learned something new in chess other than, like, just random things you learn from from playing speed chess. But now I'm actually going through a a legit learning regimen to get better for the first time in probably about 23 years. And, it's it's very interesting because I had this one theory I wanted to try out in learning, and I'm use using chess as a tryout, and it's it's working. So it's interesting. It's like you say, you got, you know, I love playing. And so for the first time in a long time, I'm feeling that good feeling of getting better at something. It's something that I love. Yeah. There's some sort of intangible well, I this is gonna be convoluted. I was gonna say intangible feeling of getting a tangible result in something. So let let me not say that. That's just radic. That's bad writing. There is something about that feeling of accomplishment that you'd, you can't get if you're just kind of like, Yeah, I did so much work this year, but I don't really know what it was. And, oh, I guess I had a couple project milestones and that was good. You really do need to do something that's kind of like for yourself, not for the business that you work for, even if it's your own business that you can, that builds up who you are, because it builds confidence. Right? When you go crap, holy crap. I learned Chinese. Like that's a, that's awesome. Or if you're overweight and you lose the weight and then you're, you're running 10 ks, you know, every month or something like that's a real feeling of accomplishment that builds onto your identity as a person who can get it done and could do things that they set their mind to. And that rubs off in other areas. Like if you, if you look at people who are successful entrepreneurs, there's no coincidence that those people are also like. Elite athletes or something like that, like a rich role type of guy, or, you know, oh, they also do this volunteer thing that they scaled huge, or they're really skilled at badminton or something like that. Right? It's like the same mindsets that get people to the top ish, of their game in one area, they take that elsewhere. And you can build that not by building a multimillion dollar business, which takes a long time. You can build that by going like, I'm terrible at languages, and then you learn Spanish. You're like, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not bad at languages. Maybe I'm actually just fine at this. And then you go, what else have I thought that I was bad at for my entire life where I really don't have any other evidence other than, like, missus Orava's French class? I didn't do well in it in 6th grade. Maybe maybe you weren't supposed to memorize verb tables. Right? Maybe you're supposed to just speak a language like everybody else. You know, and and this is related to the whole fixed mindset versus growth mindset. There's a book mindset by Carol Dweck. Yeah. Where yeah. Where she talks about, if everybody told you your whole childhood, oh, you're a genius at math, then the second you're up against in a difficult math class, maybe when you finally get to college or graduate school, you're just gonna totally go down in flames because you think it's fixed in your head that you're a genius when you need to always improve the skill level, and you you got to a skill level that was too hard. You know, the growth mindset is more about, oh, you're trying so hard at math. It's really good. And then, you know, you start learning because you're gonna eventually hit a wall where you don't know enough and you have to improve the skill. Even you know, in Anders Ericsson, who you've had in your podcast, I've had on my podcast, he talks a lot about skill versus talent. He's not a a believer at all in talent, more a believer that you have to not only is there everything is a skill is skill based, but everything should be measurable. You should like you're saying, you have to you have to say, well, now I know more Chinese today than I did yesterday. I have a bigger vocabulary, or I could talk at a restaurant now. Or in chess, you can measure, you know, how many games you're winning against good players and so on. Ranked in chess. Right? Like, can you rank yourself? Is that possible, or or you can't really do it? Yeah. Yeah. It's all it's all statistically based. Okay. It's a it's a it's a number on a bell curve. Got it. It. And so you know exactly how many standard deviations you are from everybody else. So so chess is one of the domains that Anders Ericsson studied because it was so easy to rank. And I remember talking to him about comedy, which was this other skill I was learning, and he had a hard time wrapping his head around it just because it's hard to measure success. It's that's something that's very subjective is measuring success there. Like, did I feel good about it? Did did they laugh? You know, did they did I get the kind of laughs I want? Did this joke did this new joke get a laugh, or did the old joke get a laugh? So that's a little bit more the metric changes day by day. So he he couldn't really figure out how to apply the 10000 hours to that. But Comedy is a tough one, man. I I have you used I, I don't wanna interrupt your point. Go ahead. No, no, no. That's it. Oh, that's it. Yeah. I've, I was watching, Kevin Hart's new thing on Netflix. Have you seen it? His new special one? I gotta say I have rarely have I cringed so hard. I felt like he made himself look. I get it's comedy, so maybe I'm overthinking it. But when he was like, yeah, my kids can't fly. They only fly private and I'm spoiling them and they just can't. I just it's he made himself sound like a total diva and I get that it's comedy, but I'm like, man, if there's a grain of truth in this, he's probably an insufferable person to be around. Yeah. It's it's interesting because that's you know, with everything you're doing, if you can't measure improvement, then you could get in a again, I don't know what you would call it. You could get into some kind of echo chamber where you think you're you're doing good, but you're you've gone off the deep end in another direction. Yeah. And so that's why it's really important. Like, chess or investing, there's no fooling around. Like, either you're winning or making money or you're not. Like, that that's it. And with with Chinese or any language, you're either able to speak more or you're not, or you're able to speak you you forgot words that you used to know. Mhmm. So, comedy is a little weird because if everybody spends a $150 to go see you, they're all gonna be laughing because they have to justify the amount for the ticket, and you all your people working for you are gonna laugh at all your jokes because that's how they get paid is by writing your jokes, you know, in Kevin Hart's case. Yeah. And, he's not gonna be able to measure success, and it and that's very difficult on these subjective areas. Yeah. It's it's interesting. You're right. That you look at critics and they they can either pan or or give you a rave review. But I was I was just thinking maybe it's just me. And then my wife was like, no, it was terrible. And then my brother-in-law's like, nah, didn't care for it. And I thought, okay, this was one room full of people. And I started texting friends who watch all this comedy, and I was like, what'd you think? And they're like, terrible. It was awful. It was horrible. Or like, oh, I never watch this stuff anyway. And I'm like, okay, well then you're already not a fan, but I just thought like, you know, with creative pursuits, it's tough. Like with podcasts. I mean, just because people watch your or listen to us, you know, doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting better at it. Right? No. I think about this all the time. Like, it's and interviewing's hard, by the way. Interviewing's a skill too. Yeah. And so I'll I'll read like, I read recently, I think it was called here he comes again, Howard Stern's transcripts of Howard Stern's interviews because he's he's a good interviewer. Good interviewer. I I wish, Larry King had a similar set of transcripts. I I don't know. I haven't watched him enough to to know whether he's good or not, but, people tell me he's the best. So I no. Howard Stern is much better. I okay. So I watched 300 hours of Larry King to study interview technique, and I came away with a huge list of things that you should never do during an interview and, like, 5 things that I liked that he did. So your Oh, that's interesting. Subjective, but he doesn't freaking prepare at all, and it's so clear. And he also interrupts constantly like I just did with you, so maybe I should take a page out of my own notebook here. But he and then also I mean, he's also famous for not necessarily knowing what's going on. You you saw that famous one he did with Seinfeld where he said, how did you feel when it got canceled? And Jerry was like, do you even know who's in front of you at any given time? It didn't get canceled. It's the most popular as they come on television in the whole world. That's so funny. Yeah. So but it's it's it's not only is interviewing a skill, but also the podcast format is a relatively new creative format, and we're all figuring it out. Like, I've been doing a lot of experimenting with with playing around with the format a little. Even this is, you know, this is more conversation than interview when when we have when we do a podcast. So even this is, like, kind of an experiment from the usual interview format, but it's it's it's hard. Like, it's really hard if you wanna you know, there's millions of podcasts starting every year, so you wanna keep improving, so you stay ahead. And that's it's it's you have to really think about it. Yeah. I I try and I I've tried to take lessons on interviewing, and I've hired journalists to help me, but it it's, it's unfortunately one of those areas where once you get past like level 1 or 2 out of 10, people kind of just say. Well, you should just, you know, you just feel it or like, I'll have somebody go. You're already good at this. And I'm like, that's not what I wanna hear. I'm not paying you to tell me that I'm good at this. I wanna become like really, really good at this. And I want you to help me. And it's, it's an unfortunate sort of reality that a lot of the people who are really good at it can't necessarily teach others. It's like Tiger you wouldn't have Tiger Woods be your golf coach because he'd be like, first, just drive the ball 300 yards that way and try and get as close to the hole as you can. And you're like, why do you think I'm here, man? You know? It That that that's why reading, like, Howard Stern's transcripts for instance is great because you see, oh, this is what he's doing. I I've realized what he's doing here. He's try the guy said, no. I'm not gonna tell you this. So he's, you know, going at it from other angles, and you see there's, like, 5 or 6 other angles he's trying that he must have thought about in advance. Sure. Or he has this natural skill at it, but, that he's built up. But, it's it's interesting to see, like, a great interviewer in action, like, reading the words because then you could go back and think about it. Exactly. And I bet if you were sitting next to Howard Stern during that interview, He wouldn't go, oh, okay. He won't tell me that he slept with Carmen Electra, but I heard it through a rumor. So what I'm gonna do is ask this other question and then maybe he'll spill it. He's just poking and prodding in the moment. And I bet you that he would have a very hard time explaining that. And I think that when most people read that transcript, they never saw that that's what he was doing. They just read the transcript. But since you're an interviewer, you were able to pick it out. Just like golfers probably can watch tiger woods and they go, wow, look at this technique he's using. That's literally invisible to somebody like me because I can't I I'm I'd all I see is a guy hitting a golf ball and there's no nuance involved. Right? And I'm sure you see that also in chess. You can see people go like, oh, what's he why would he do that? Oh, he must have some up his sleeve. Oh, I think I know what he's doing. He's doing the Queen's Gambit or whatever. Right? He's doing he's gonna castle or something like that. You see that a few moves ahead, and and somebody like me doesn't even know what's going on. I'm trying to figure out which pieces can move where. You know, that's the level that I'm at. I think I think that's that point where no matter what area you're in, where you start to see the subtleties and the nuances in the skill, like, whether it's comedy or chess or learning Chinese or podcasting or entrepreneurship, I think it's getting to that point. That's what feels really good. Mhmm. Like, when you're able to see the nuances that people who haven't put in the time and the hours, they can't see. I think that's the when the real pleasure starts to happen. I I think that's true. Learning Chinese is a great example of this because the first, like, 60 days of classes, at least, was a sheet of sounds that are really hard to make if you've never made them before. And I remember like half the class quit. I used to take in person lessons. Now I do them online, 1 on 1, but I took a group lesson and most of the class was like, this sucks. And after that first segment of class was over the 1st 8 weeks, They, they were like, all right, who's gonna do level 2. And it was me and like 5 other people, but like 12 people quit because they just went, this is too hard. And I thought, yeah, it's been pretty hard, but then the next 60 days were us making the sounds and making words, and then it was making small sentences and, and then it became fun. Right. Nobody has fun when they can't ask where the bathroom is, you know, but once you can sort of understand what's going on and sort of start saying things, if you've ever lived abroad or anything, you start going, wow. I can't believe I can actually function right now. This is so rewarding. And then you're just, then you can't get enough. Then you, you, you basically can't get yourself to be quiet. And I, when I was an exchange student in Germany, my host father, he told me, man, when you got here for 4 months, we couldn't get you to talk, and now we can't get you to shut up. And he was right. That's funny. Well and speaking of which, you have to go do family photos. Right. It's it's right on my calendar. The alarm's popping up right now. Yeah. In 2 minutes, you're you're off. So, once again, Jordan, thanks for coming on the podcast. We've talked about 4 or 5 good solid productivity and creativity hacks. I don't like the word hacks either, but, unfortunately, it's the right word. Yeah. Yeah. But, thanks once again. Thanks for having me on, man. Always good to see you, and always good to chat.