The Jordan Harbinger Show - 224: How to Delete Facebook Without Falling off the Planet | Feedback Friday

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

You've been considering deleting your Facebook account for quite some time, but a close relative seemed shocked you would consider such a thing -- as if deleting Facebook would somehow delete you from the face of the earth. How can you delete Facebook without becoming persona non grata in your circle of family and friends, and since when did social media become mandatory for your very existence in their eyes? And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Jason DeFillippo (@jpdef) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at [e-mail]. Now let's dive in! Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/224. On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss: Got a question about relationships, sex, or dating for therapist Emily Morse? Drop us a line and we'll pass it along for a future episode! You have a severe fear of public speaking and hate yourself for performing poorly when you've given it a try. How can you overcome this? You'd like to keep two ex-flames in your network, but they can't seem to stay in contact without trying to rekindle a relationship you don't want. Should these connections be salvaged? What do you do when you feel like you must choose between a life you want to live or the less desirable life that could help your parents financially? Do you ever have to choose between taking some magical leap or playing it safe when it comes to entrepreneurship? How do you ensure the people you befriend on LinkedIn are quality connections rather than opportunistic junk mailers? Are you obligated to endure the presence of an aggressively transactional networker in your community? How can you delete your Facebook account without falling off the face of the planet? Life Pro Tip: Close to missing your flight? Go to a help center, request wheelchair assistance, have them push you through the airport in record time, and tip big! Recommendation of the Week: Running from COPS -- Headlong Season 3 Quick shoutouts to Bri and T! Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at [e-mail]! Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger. Connect with Jason on Twitter at @jpdef and Instagram at @JPD, and check out his other show: Grumpy... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. Here on the Jordan Harbinger show, we love having conversations with our guests. And this week, we had Dr. Matt McCarthy talking about superbugs. This is antibiotic resistant bacteria. We also discussed some other nasty ways humanity might take a hit. And Brian Johnson came on later in the week. We discussed why us humans will actually have to evolve with our computers and how his company, Colonel, is creating brain machine interfaces that will soon make this a mainstream reality is really interesting. It's not just AI is gonna save slash destroy us. It's no, we have to evolve with, we have to work with our computers, like domesticating a dog. It's really interesting. It's just such a different take on everything.

Also, I write on the blog every couple weeks here, the latest post is how to be generous when you're just starting out. A lot of people think, oh, I've gotta get money together. I don't know anyone, I can't be helpful, I can't deliver value to other people that I know or be of help help to my network. This is backwards. Actually, you need to help other people before you think you

can do anything. That's how you develop the network and the connections and everything that gives you the value in the first place. So that article, which is a counterintuitive look, and will probably make you feel better as well, is at Jordan Harbinger.com slash articles. So make sure you've had a look and a listen to everything we created for you this week. Of course, our primary mission is to pass along our guests' insights, as well as our experiences and insights along. to you. In other words, the real purpose of this show is always to have conversations as directly as possible with you, and that's what we're going to do today here on Feedback Friday. You can reach us Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com. And, man, we're going to have a guest expert coming up soon,

not on this episode, but in the future, we're going to have Emily Morse, who's a good friend of mine. Her show is called Sex with Emily. We're going to do an episode for Feedback Friday about relationships, sex, dating. So email us your questions to Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com and we'll make sure to get those to Emily in time for that episode as well. Jason, what's the first thing out of the mailback? Hello, Jordan, Jen, and Jason. I'm 43 years old from Canada and have a severe fear of public speaking. It's something I've realized for many years,

and it's led me to many regrets of not speaking up when I know I should have. I've tried unsuccessfully to overcome my fear by practicing in front of small gatherings at church, family functions, etc. But my heart races and my voice cracks when the spotlight is on me. And I fall well short of the many speakers whom I admire like yourself. I hate myself for performing so poorly, coupled with the feeling that if I break through from this thing that's impeding me, I can sort of new heights in my personal development. I know you hate that term. I may have to give a best man speech in a few months, and I'm scared, shitless at the thought.

I'm considering better help at the moment, but not sure if it's the best route to take. As always, I value your input and thank you in advance. Sincerely, can't be heard if I can't speak. Yeah, this was something that I struggled with as well. I was never really like vibrating with anxiety on stage. Sure, in middle school, high school, probably, maybe college. But that's pretty normal. For me, I started to get a little bit more confident on stage.

It was just enough to get up there and kind of only breathe heavily some of the time. And then I decided, you know what, I'm going to handle this because when I see people who are really good on stage, man, it really just looks so good. and you just think this person's highly competent and amazing, and you just have this really high opinion of them, and I wanted to get that skill set. I looked everywhere, and I took a bunch of classes. I took the Dale Carnegie thing, and I took the Dale Carnegie speaking thing,

and I took the public learning annex, whatever thing, at the YMCA and all that jazz. And I even took these really expensive corporate speaking courses, and they sucked. And I remember going and getting sold a total bill of goods and being like, is this going to make me dynamic? and they're like, yes, and then you end up with some lady who teaches speech to, like, middle schoolers,

giving you really basic advice on stuff that you don't need unless you're unable to talk to anyone in real life. I mean, the people in this class were, like, about to get fired if they didn't get better at speaking. That's not really where you're at, and it certainly wasn't where I was at. The only course I found that worked well and had an insane growth curve was with coaching. You've got to get coaching. The only course I found that worked was Michael Ports. I will happily refer you to their people if you email me. I'm Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com.

I'll refer you there. They'll take good care of you. They're amazing. They're really good friends of mine, but they became good friends of mine by just transforming the way that I am on stage. They've got sort of different plans for everybody. I'm not sure exactly what they offer, but again, I'll refer you. The learning curve is so, so high when you get a good coach, and it is all the difference

between spending three days and going, okay, I guess I'm maybe not scared anymore, to spending three days and being like, I can't wait to give this talk. And the skill does translate to other parts of your life as well. So I highly recommend if you're afraid of doing this that you learn how to do this. So the greater and more meta idea here really is to attack perceived weak points. your skill set. So for me, speaking was one of those things. Then that led me to taking improv, which made me a little bit funnier on mic and on stage. And then that led me to take some dancing lessons along with Jenny making me do it because we were getting married. And that turned

out to be fun. And before any of that started, I started taking Chinese because I wanted to really see what my language skills were made of, so to speak. And when you get a little bit of confidence by handling a skill in one area, it translates into other areas. I don't care. I don't care. if it's dancing and then suddenly you're taking open mic comedy lessons. It doesn't really matter. All that stuff translates because you're finding that things you couldn't do before that were outside your reality, your comfort zone, or that you thought were impossible, are actually just skills that you can learn just as easily as you learned something else. That's important. That helps you at work. It helps you in your personal life. So I highly

recommend getting coaching. Don't screw around with like this really simplistic YMCA type stuff. I mean, I'm sure those are okay. But if you value your time like I do, you need attention from somebody who's going to focus on you and get you through it, not somebody who's going to like give you homework to read in some book and then you speak for two minutes a week. You need something that's going to be a little bit more intense. Just get it done, knock it out. You'll see results in other areas of your life. And if you're not interested in speaking, if you're listening to this, you're like, I speaking's not my thing. I challenge you to find something that you want to learn that you think might be tricky, whether that's a language, dancing,

anything and just try to take a class, get a coach for that, and there's something just so satisfying about shattering something that you thought you couldn't do before, shattering the belief that you couldn't do that. It's really satisfying and it really does translate to other areas of your life. And you'll find that if you do this enough, you start asking why not when it comes to getting things like promotions or building things for yourself and in your life. It's really a game changer. All right, what's next?

Hello, Jordan, Jen, and Jason. This summer, I'm ready to restart the six-minute networking course and start strengthening my connections. However, I'd like some advice on how to handle past flames, two in particular. Both are great contacts to have, but they can't seem to let our past go. Each time I try to speak with them, they think it's an invitation to restart a romantic relationship and hang out all the time. Once, Party A said that they're not interested in a friendship with me unless they can sleep with me. Another time, Party B blew up on me and said they were only pretending to be my friend so that I'd realize we belong together. Winners.

When I see Party A, he has no problem trying to make advances. He also tells me I'm giving him mixed signals by contacting and seeing him. Perhaps I was flirting subconsciously because I'm a nice person in general, but that comment now makes me focus on being as neutral as possible and it's still useless. I want to keep these people in my network, but it seems like it may not be feasible. Do you think these types of relationships can ever be salvaged and turned into solely amicable friendships and how? Sincerely, just a friend? It's not possible to be friends with these guys, period.

Not these two for sure. Yeah, not just men and women can't be friends. That's not true. These two guys, their true intent is showing. And party A who says you're giving him mixed signals, let me get to that in a second, but he doesn't really value you as a person. If he did, he would be able to keep you as a friend. He might want more, fine, whatever.

He's not just going to be able to switch that off, but he would respect you enough to drop the issue and just kind of roll with it. since he only sees you as a sex object or a set of boobs or whatever, he's going to continue to try and sleep with you and he's not going to respect your boundaries. In fact, occasionally people like this can become dangerous. We heard about that from Joe Navarro in an earlier episode. I would say forget it. The other thing is something with, there's something that just says there's a red flag going off of my head with the whole mixed signals thing because you're not giving him mixed signals. It's the only signal that he,

he can hear because it's what he wants to hear. This guy, and look, this is a stretch, and I don't know him, and I don't know your situation, but this sounds like the kind of guy who would cross the line with you in a way that makes you really uncomfortable or is possibly just dangerous or criminal in nature and then go, well, you were sending mixed signals because he's not paying attention and he wants what he wants and he's going to blame you for it. Because if you're being as neutral as possible, and then, and it's not helping and he still says you're sending mixed signals.

That means that he's dysfunctional in a way where any woman so much is paying any attention to him seems to be a signal that he can try to get in your pants. That guy's dysfunctional and possibly dangerous. And look, even when I was a young hornball 20-something or teenager, I knew when to just be like, okay, this is not appropriate. This guy doesn't sound like he has any sort of calibration in that department at all. and it sounds like he's shifting blame to you for even trying to hang out with him.

And you know what, though? The one area where I don't want to say he's right, but the one thing is he clearly can't change his nature, so just stop hanging out with him. He's not right. He's just too dysfunctional to even sense that you don't want to sleep with him. So screw this guy.

I mean, not literally. Get away from this guy. That's what I meant to say. He's not valuable in your network because he's not happy with the status quo. He wants something more from you. He's only going to help you to get what he wants. Or he's just going to refuse to help you at all.

Or he might even punish you for not giving him sex by screwing up whatever opportunity you think he can help you with. In other words, I think he's a liability in your network. He's not an asset. He's actually only going to cause problems for you. So I would just ghost this guy. This guy sucks. Party B is, let's like,

sounds like a rapper. Party B sounds a bit unstable as well. And a lot of what's going on with Party A is also the case here. He doesn't just want to be friends. He wants something more. Okay. And this happens, but the problem is the emotional outbursts, like the whole, I'm just being your friend. I mean, what a man child. He says deliberately hurtful things, what, because he's having a temper tantrum, because he's not getting what he wants. I mean, how badly do you need that kind of ridiculousness in your life. I also wager that he's a liability. He's not going to want to help or add value to your network. He's just secretly or not so secretly pining. He's resentful of you. He can't handle his emotions very well. You don't need this crap. I drop both of these people.

They can't behave. They don't even want the same things that you do. And they are much more likely to cause drama in your life rather than add anything to your quality of life or to your network. Just get away from these guys. You're not that desperate. Get away from these guys. Oh, and congrats on being attractive. I mean, this is, see, when guys are like, oh, women have it so easy. This is the crap women put up with who are even attractive to any guy, which is, of course, every woman falls in that category. Guys, not everyone, but there's so many guys like this. And if you're a guy and you're not like this, you have friends that are like this and you just don't know. Because I thought this was outrageous. And when I talk to other

friends of mine, they're like, oh, yeah, I know guys like that or, oh, I've done stuff like that in the past. Like, and you're just thinking like, what? What planet am I on? There's a whole group of guys that don't realize this is not okay. And it will shock you if you're a guy that's not in that camp. It's unbelievable. This is Feedback Friday.

We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors and to help keep this show going, please visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, just head on over to jordanharbinger.com slash subscribe. Now let's hear some more of your questions here on Feedback Friday.

All right, what's next? Hi, Jordan, Jason, and Jen? What do you do when you feel like you must choose between a life you want to live or the less desirable life that could help your parents more financially? Recently, I was shocked to learn of the financial mess my parents are in. They're Chinese immigrants to Australia and seem to lack the drive of other immigrants. When I was younger, they were more into partying and gambling, and now it looks to be coming back to bite them when they're hitting their early 60s. I'm a corporate lawyer in my early 30s, but looking to gradually move into art and the creative

industry as an artist or designer because I find the legal industry too conformative and too many petty fights, bullshit, and a time and energy drain. For now, I've negotiated for part-time remote legal work that provides funds while allowing me to combine traveling the world plus time to build up my art business on the side. Your six minute networking course has really helped me make important connections in the art industry. So far, life is going as I envisioned until I found out more about my parents' financial disasters. My dad has a long history of gambling, keeping other women on the side, and in recent years, he's added Bitcoin investments to the list. Not to say that Bitcoins are bad, but it sounds to me like the Chinese company he invested in is really a multi-level marketing scheme.

You quote unquote make money when you get more people to quote unquote invest. He even does seminars for them to recruit investors. The company is apparently suffering a downturn and he's struggling to pay the mortgage and doesn't even have enough money to return to China to see his mom. My mom is an even worse financial shape. Recently when I was back in Australia, she told me she had withdrawn her superannuation funds. I don't even know what that is. It's probably pension, like government pension type of situation. And gave it to my dad because he told her she would make more,

by investing in Bitcoin. My heart stopped. Over the past few years, she also became a devout Buddhist, and every year she spends hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, she can't afford, to set fish-free for good karma. I also learned that she's working six days a week below minimum wage in a vegan restaurant with no overtime pay for weekend work and no paid leave, no superannuation contributions either. The restaurant is run by a third party, but all their workers like my mom are introduced by the Buddhist temple she's in, and the restaurant is a for-profit business. Oh, wait, wait, wait, that's interesting. Uh-huh.

That goes in line with, we're doing an episode on cults with Stephen Hassan, and this is such a classic example of a, like, Buddhist, Buddhist especially, there's like a whole model where Buddhists will have, not all Buddhists, obviously, but like a cult-type situation, they'll have a for-profit venture that's attached to the church, and they really blend everything. And they're like, oh, you can volunteer here and earn good karma. And it's like you can get paid jack squat or nothing or like 70 cents an hour, you know, working at this place. And yeah, it's off the books.

The reason they're not contributing to your superannuation, your pension is because they're not reporting any of this. You're basically, your mom's an indentured servant or a slave. That is effed up. That's very, very common, though. That's interesting. I just wanted to put that little footnote in there because that really screams at me. Yeah, this is the second family in a couple months that we've had run-ins with Buddhists and their family members getting sucked into this. Buddhist, just like any other religion, is not exempt from the whole, hey, this might be a cult thing.

And Buddhism is a little bit under the radar because it's known, it's one of those more benign things. Like if you are working at a grocery store and they say, this is for Jesus. You're like, bad, I'm working at a grocery. I don't get it. But if you're Buddhist, you're like, oh, it's my friend's restaurant, and I get paid, and it's good karma. You know, it's a whole thing. Like, religions love doing this. Cults love doing this because they can essentially get labor for one one hundredth of what it would actually cost to pay somebody to work there and then not report it because they know you're going to say, oh, I'm working with the church.

It's not my quote-unquote job. So, yeah, this is a whole mechanism for control and money laundering. It's a whole thing. When I try to talk to her, she insists she doesn't care about money and she's happy with the way things are. She doesn't have any friends and also refuses to tell my dad to get the hell out and return her money. She erroneously believes the government will be there to bail her out, even after I explained, that's not how a pension works. I don't think it's possible for her to see a therapist. I have a hard time as it is getting my parents to see a GP or a dentist for their health.

And coming from a Chinese background, my mom can't even open up to me, let alone a stranger. Now I think I need to return to full-time work in order to prepare to help out my parents more financially in their older years because I don't think I can change their behavior. The idea of going back into full-time office work makes me feel sick and claustrophobic and it would seriously set back my creative pursuits. Part of me also wants to keep going with what I'm doing and let my parents live with the consequences of their poor decisions. But while I don't feel bad about my dad, I do feel like I need to help my mom as much as possible. I'm seeing a therapist who is very good, but she wants to start. from childhood. Take care and I look forward to your next episode. Signed the parent trap. Oh, this is such a mess. Such a very, very difficult situation too. And the Chinese family

culture, a lot of family cultures in fact, but China especially, the kids are like an insurance policy. Oh, they're going to take care of me when we're old. And that might be fine if the family has done pretty well. They've got property. It's like, yeah, you'll live close to your parents. you know, they can live with you, something like that. This is more like throw caution to the wind. Our daughter is going to bail us out and the government's going to bail us out, Yolo. And that's not cool.

This is really going to be bad for you. I understand where you are. You know, they're going to make you feel like you're failing them, like you're spoiled, like you've abandoned them. Your family might even gang up on you. But here's the problem. If you keep taking care of them, they are going to keep screwing up.

They have no incentive to get better at this. you cannot afford to live your life for them. You could give up your entire life, cleaning up their mess, and then even after they pass away, they're going to leave you with debt and screw-ups. So this is a big problem. This could derail your entire life.

I want to highlight that. This could ruin your life. This is not an illness. This is not something that happened to them. This is not a set of unfortunate occurrences that gave them a lot of bad luck. This is the result of numerous and ongoing, I might add, bad decisions.

And even if you did end up going to the office and making money and being miserable, what will you do? You're going to hand it over to your dad. He's going to spend it on his girlfriends. He's going to gamble it away. Your mom's going to spend it on goldfish that die on their second day in the wild. She's going to go work for free somewhere because you're subsidizing everything that she needs to live. You could win $10 million tomorrow. You could give them $9 million of it.

It would be gone before they're gone. This is not something that you can fix. All you can do is tie yourself to them and then their bad decisions and are going to drown you. And you'll be miserable too the whole time and even after they're gone because you're going to have six figures in debt that you've got to pay that they've racked up on your dime. And I understand about not wanting to leave your mom in a bad situation. You know, you could if you really needed to. You could rent a place. You could let your mom live in it or something.

You know, you can get a place that has a separate entrance if you got a house. you can get another apartment near yours or something like that. That way you know your mom's not homeless. I understand not wanting your mom to be homeless. I get it. The thing is I think she's going to refuse this and stay with your dad. Because it sounds to me like they're determined to be miserable. They don't really want to solve the problem.

They want to complain about the problem. They certainly want to complain to you so that you feel guilty so that you help them. But they need therapy to get through this. They're not going to get therapy. You don't need to chain yourself to this mess. You are not responsible for them. And you cannot fix other people. You certainly cannot fix your parents.

All you can do is work on yourself, and it sounds like you're doing that. I would keep it up, but be careful. Do not let them control you with guilt. When they're complaining about XYZ, even if it's your mom, they're controlling you with guilt. If they want you to take certain actions to help them, even though they won't take action to fix their own situation that they created, they are controlling you with guilt. I would try better help. If your current therapist won't touch this because they want to start from when you're four years old,

I get it. Therapists kind of need to do that to get a background, but I have a sinking suspicion that some therapists do this because they know it means you're going to have to buy 400 freaking hours of therapy. Oh, well, start from the beginning. Great. I don't have that kind of time. You know, I'll start from the beginning with you, but I need a therapist is going to handle and give me good advice right freaking now.

And it can't hurt to get a second opinion. You know, you might try better help. which by the way betterhelp.com slash Jordan. You might try better help and they might say, hey, look, we got to start from childhood. But at least you got a second opinion. I think you need a reality check and somebody you can text when your mom says,

if you don't do this, you don't love us. Then you need to be able to text your therapist, which better help allows you to do, and go, my mom said this. And they're like, she's controlling you with guilt. And you go, oh, yeah, right. And then you don't do it. I think that's what you need.

You need someone who's going to have your back with this because, honestly, this is just such. much a mess. And this is only going to get worse. The more you humor this bullshit, pardon my Latin, the worse it's going to get because they want, they want to control you because they want you to be the way out of their problems, but they are not willing to help themselves. And that means they're a bottomless pit of money and energy and you need to live your own life. All right, what's next? Hello, Feedback Friday team. I've signed up for a local business grant challenge where they work with you from initial business plan through to the pitch. If I'm one of the winners in the challenge,

would receive a good chunk of money to get my business up and running. During my first face-to-face meeting, I was very encouraged. I seemed to be giving all the right answers, and I believe they are genuinely interested in what I want to do. But a few short hours after the meeting, the fear and imposter syndrome set in. I dived in to try to understand the root of the feeling and why the fear. I started with what's the worst that could happen, and what's the best that could happen? Almost two years ago, my husband and I took a chance on a business. It's a small shop and has been going very well. We bet every penny we had, did the usual first year's struggle and only eat ramen, and so far the efforts have been paying off. During the process, I kept my desk job,

and we knew that if the worst happened, we still had money coming in, and I hold the family's health insurance through my job. The fall would have just been years of debt. Now that I'm considering opening my own place, we wouldn't have the safety net if it doesn't work out. His job alone can't pay the bills. We would have no health insurance for our two little boys, and we're still paying off the first place. A fail would be, in my mind, a disaster for my family. The other side of the disaster coin is playing it safe and living with the regret that I was too scared to chase my dreams and gave up a real shot to play it safe. Do I stay at my desk for the sake of the kids? Do I run toward a potential happier, fulfilling, more prosperous life? Any insights to help make the decision

would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. To risk or not to risk? That is the question. Okay. So these things are always circumstance dependent. Of course. Anyone who says otherwise is irresponsible, in my opinion. I understand what your choice looks like right now. What I mean, though, right now is you have two little kids. You have to do what is best for them. You cannot leave them with no insurance.

That would be super irresponsible. I don't think anybody's going to disagree with me on that. It's unclear, though, to me, why you need to leave your job to expand the business. I don't, if your husband doesn't get paid that much and doesn't have insurance, whatever, why can't he quit his job? If his job doesn't pay the bills, then he should be the one to go leave work and open up the second shop. Why do you have to do it? Also, you can hire someone else. Yeah, that's really expensive.

But you can do the math on this and you can work there part time after your regular job if you need to. You'll be dog tired, but that's entrepreneurship. That's business ownership. Maybe we just don't have enough info here. I'm at a loss as to why your husband can't be the one to run this. if he's the one who has the job that's not going to tow the weight for the rest of the family. Also, there's a false dichotomy going on here that I want to highlight. You never have to really choose between taking some magical leap or playing it safe.

This is what those online influencers want you to believe. Yeah, you got to go all in. You've got to leap and the net will appear, all this BS. Even startups who say things like, hey, we got to jump and build the airplane on the way down, that makes more sense. Reid Hoffman said that during our interview. But those guys are playing with venture capital. They're playing with someone else's money most of the time.

Oh, we got to jump and build the airplane on the way down. Great. You just got $12 million in seed funding. You can afford to pay for everything. If you fail, your business fails and you've lost the time, but you don't have to give up your house. Your kids aren't, you know, not able to go to the doctor. That's a totally different set of risk. There are responsible ways to do things like this.

One, you can take on more debt, which doesn't normally sound responsible, but you hear me out of your friends and family, investors, banks, you can take on some debt and do things that way. Two, you can work the one location until you can get a cash flow loan on the business or your cash flow positive and you can afford to hire or expand that way. A lot of people want to do things with speed. I get that. If you're Uber, yeah, you got to scale fast. If you got a flower shop, you don't have to scale fast. I don't really know what you're doing, but you didn't say here. But the thing is, I doubt speed is that much of a factor here.

I think you want to do it fast. I don't think you need to do it fast. And there's a huge difference between wanting to do something quickly and needing to do something quickly. And you need to be very clear on what that is. Again, we don't have all the details here, but this whole, if I don't jump now, I'm going to regret it. That looks at one side of the risk equation. you need to look at both sides of the risk equation because the risk of business is failing is not 50-50.

It's like 95%. So let's assume that you're in the 5% that succeeds. It's still going to take years to get that stability again for yourself and your family. That's fine. If you're 26, go for it. It's not fine when you have two 6-year-olds at home who need to be able to go to the doctor if they get sick,

who need to be able to go to school, who need to be able to buy food and eat. When you don't feed your kids ramen. You want to eat ramen fine. You're not feeding your kids ramen. That's horrible. When you're starting this business so you can live a better life. Why would you make your life guaranteed miserable now and then maybe better in the long run?

How much better is it going to be when your kids don't see you? They can't go to the doctor and they're eating freeze-dried noodles. That's not good. When you're hedging against risk and you always should, the best thing you can do is go slower and sacrifice speed for stability. Unless you have a baseline stability that takes care of you and your family, like, look, if your parents are loaded and they're like, well, we're not going to support your business thing, but we'll make sure your kids eat and go to school, fine, great. You've got a baseline stability that takes care of you and your family. If you're playing with someone else's money, great. There's a reason that when people do startups, they don't sell a kidney and their home and then live in the back of a van. Sometimes people do that. It's very rare. Usually they live in their $5,000 a month apartment, and so. San Francisco and they get $2 million in seed funding and they pay themselves a mere $67,000 a year so that they can pay their expenses and et cetera, et cetera.

They're not sitting here starving. That's a fairy tale that is told by a lot of other people because they maybe did that or they're romanticizing the struggle. Like, yeah, you hear on Shark Tank, Damon John was sleeping on the floor with his sewing machines. I'm sure that happened. But I'm also sure that when he starts businesses now, he's not sleeping on the floor, right? You need to use other people to hedge your risk here,

or just go slower and lower the amount of risk. I know that you hear this a lot, right? You see videos on Instagram, and if you want to know why all these influencers tell you this stuff, it's because they want you to be dependent on them. And I've explained this before on another feedback Friday, I think, but essentially what these guys want is they want you to go, I'm all in, and then you go, oh my God, I'm struggling.

And they go, hey, I've got a $40,000 a year mastermind. if you're all in, you'll join. And then you join, and they teach you basic internet marketing stuff. You can learn from YouTube, and they say that you're networking, but really you're just around a bunch of other desperate people, and you're an entry on their spreadsheet. And even they can't help you run your business. Because if they did, they'd be busy running their business, which just happens to be teaching other people how to make money online.

It's called the pyramid scheme people. Most of these people are going to take your cash. Exceptions are guys like Pat Flynn. He's cool. He wants to show you. what he can do and what you can do. And frankly, he doesn't have a $40,000 a year mastermind. He has a bunch of products that are small and affordable

and useful. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason other people have high ticket items because they know you're desperate because you went all in because you listen to them and now you'll pay anything to get out of the mess that you put yourself in. Don't be that person.

So be careful here. Go slower. You don't have to do these things. These are options that you've created for yourself. These are not your only options. So pay close attention and be very careful. You're dealing with, if you were 26, I'd say, screw it. You got kids. You can't do that stuff. We'll be right back with more Feedback Friday right after this. Thank you for listening and

supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Now back to the show for the conclusion of your questions here on Feedback Friday. All right. What's next? Jordan, I'm a physician. and I'm intrigued to start some networking. I heard your interviews with Reed Hoffman, and I have a few questions and would love to hear your thoughts. I'm on LinkedIn, and I get multiple requests to connect.

These requests are virtually always somebody wanting to connect in order to sell me their latest marketing program, device, product, etc. And I think they want to connect to my contacts to do the same. I feel like if I connect with these people, I'm essentially passing on junk mail. How would you recommend handling these requests? And how do you filter your requests? I would also like to begin your networking program.

When I look through all of my contacts, the vast majority of them are physicians in the same speciality. I doubt they will help to grow my sphere in any way. Any thoughts is how to proceed? Sincerely, LinkedIn or linked out? When I get LinkedIn requests, and I have tons because there was a thing where people were, I think it might have been a glitch, but I got featured somewhere and I got thousands of requests. And what Jen did is she started going through and sending people a question, hey, how do I know you?

Do you listen to the show? Please follow us on Instagram. I don't use LinkedIn that often, et cetera. And we found a lot of people would say things like, I'm not sure. And we found that was a bodied response. So I started reporting those people to LinkedIn security. And it turns out there was actually some bot stuff going on

and they ended up blocking like hundreds of accounts who were real people, but they installed some BS sales software for LinkedIn that some marketer created. And they ended up blocking and banning those people. and removing the ability to do that. A lot of people will also respond with a thumbs up or they'll be like, thanks. And I'm like, oh, you didn't read this or you don't speak English.

Immediately reported and block them so that people find out that they could, LinkedIn would find out they're sending 8,000 requests to everyone and not replying to the introductory question. That stuff's not what LinkedIn is for. I block and report, and that's key, report and not just block, anyone who sends me a pitch. That's not what LinkedIn is for.

they need to warn those people. I always remove and report or block and report those people. Look, if we're talking and you say, hey, there's something for your business that it might be really cool. We've got the CRM automation. Fine, that's one thing. But if I say, hey, how do I know you? And you go, don't know.

But have you heard of these amazing weight loss shakes? Remove. Oh, I transcribe. Remove. All that stuff is just garbage. And I connect with everybody because you don't know who can help you and who you can help. Remember, in six-minute networking, we say that all of the opportunities or the majority of the opportunities are over the horizon. So I'll connect with anyone and be like, hey, look, I don't know much about HVAC in Texas, but if you listen to the show, I'll gladly connect with you.

And sometimes I'll be able to help people there. Sometimes people will find job offers and things that I post on LinkedIn. And do the layoff lifelines exercise. That's how you reactivate people in your network. And so even though you think you only know other people in your same specialty, those opportunities are. over the horizon. You think you don't know other people, do the layoff lifelines exercise. And again, this is at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course for people that want to take the free course. We also show you how to reach out and you haven't started the course so you don't know yet.

And here's, this is a little meta here, but I get a lot of smart people and they write in saying things like, oh, well, I don't know, does the course offer this or well, this course isn't going to work for me because da-da-da-da, everyone I know is in the same specialty. intelligent people like you often overthink and find problems I'm sure I'm going to have this problem or oh I might have this problem or is this covered in the course because this it doesn't matter you're never going to start oh I'm sure this is going to happen I'm going to get too many responses when I do the texting thing that's a classic one oh I don't want to text for people a day I'm going to end up wasting all my time in conversation did you try the exercise well no because I don't want all

those responses try the exercise you're going to get one freaking response out of ten or like one out of four and it's going to be done in 30 seconds because they're busy too. Oh, I didn't know that would happen. You know, people will find this hypothetical and never even get started. And smart people are really good at this because we're really good at hypotheticals. We're really good at overthinking everything. Stop doing that. Just do the drills.

If you do it for a week and you're inundated with responses, then fine. Don't text four people a day. Text one. But don't just not do the whole course because you might get too many responses. is guess what? Not going to happen. Don't worry about it. So stop talking yourself out of the drills and just do the drills and you'll solve half the problems you just wrote in about. But yeah, if you're getting junk requests on something like LinkedIn, block and report. Yes, it's an extra step. But I think if a bunch of us start doing this, we're going to get rid of these spammers.

Because honestly, yes, there are a lot of them, but there's a small number of people doing the same stuff. It's all these BS influencers and like marketers. These are the gross offenders. They're creating tools for people that allow them to do it at scale. And if you report it, LinkedIn security can take action and make sure that it cleans up the platform and removes API access to a lot of these botted programs. And we've already nixed a few of them. And it's already cleaned up a lot of the platform for people. And that happens when you, when you're vigilant. LinkedIn's one of the only platforms that still doesn't have a crap load of spam. So I think we can keep it that way and it'll be more useful for everyone. All right, what's next? Hey guys. I've been considering.

considering deleting my Facebook account for quite some time. I do use social media to support my business. However, I find the significant majority of my clientele is reached through Instagram, which can support my portfolio without a personal profile present. I love the idea of deleting myself from social media and using it only as a professional tool. I mentioned all of this to my aunt, who I'm very close to, and she responded with phrases along the lines of, oh my God, why would you do that? I hope you're kidding. And this is just a phase. Currently, my profile is really only used to share memes between family members living in different states. I see no problem with deactivating as I still keep in contact with the close family members in a more personal way.

However, this comment did get me thinking that my family may be upset by me withdrawing without notice. I still plan to delete my Facebook account, but my question is, how do I exit gracefully without dropping off the map? Thanks for the show. Signed, when did Facebook become mandatory? This is weird. All these people get on Facebook because young people in their life, I've had it, right? And then the young people get sick of it, and now the older folks are all addicted. Yeah.

And then they get all mad. How entitled is that? Oh, I hope you're kidding. You're not going to leave Facebook. How entitled are you to my time right now? Yeah. Give me a break. You can absolutely delete or deactivate your Facebook account.

I barely use mine anymore. I mostly resent social media in general. I'm on Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter to engage with you all, and I enjoy that. But other than that, I am out. I am not looking at viral crap. I am not watching. Instagram TV.

Social media can be good for lead gen. That's about it for business owners. Otherwise, it is a creative time suck. Yeah, if you're generating leads there, great. If you're on social because you feel like you have to be, you're just wasting your time. Find out what your family will miss with you going off social media. If it's because your aunt, for example,

can't share things with you. Simply start a texting group. She can send you things. It'll be a little bit harder than Facebook because she has to pay as the link in. That means she's not going to send you all that unimportant crap, right? All those email forwards that are now just a click away.

All that stuff doesn't matter. It's just idle. Good. She can't share things with you. Good. Good. I don't want your chain letters. You know, you can also use WhatsApp.

You can use Facebook Messenger. That'll make things a little bit easier for people that are hooked into the Facebook platform. You have zero responsibility to be digitally available for other people. Zero. You can call them every month. You can actually chat with. them. If they don't have time for you, then good. Fine. They don't have time to tell you their

stupid crap. Look, if somebody doesn't have time to talk with you in a real way, then you have no reason to keep up with them over social media. You really don't. There's no requirement that you check out their holiday cookie recipes. There's no requirement you read the fake news of the day articles that they're sharing and resharing without even reading. They're basically demanding that you be available. It's like, imagine if your aunt said, look, I need you to spend 15 minutes a day on the phone, telling me what you've done, and then reading all of the articles that I've read, and I'm going to be offended if you don't do this.

It's completely unreasonable. Imagine if somebody said that, but yet they expect you to be on the platform of their choosing. That is complete lunacy. Trust me, get rid of social media. You will never miss it. If you're not a business owner that's generating coaching leads or something like that

on social media, just get rid of it. You will never even miss it. Not for one single freaking second. Seriously. I've been off Facebook now for six months, and it's so nice. It's so nice having that gone. I finally went through the final deletion process because you have to, you know, gets disabled. And if you accidentally log back in, it starts the timer over.

And then they keep moving the goalpost on how long it's going to take to delete. But I finally made it past because we were testing it for Grumpy Old Geeks if they were actually going to delete it. And they did credit to them. It only took three months to the point where they were deleted, but it's finally gone. And I tell you what, I don't miss it one little bit. Yeah, I very occasionally will log in and, you know, someone's going through the messages that are sent to the show and stuff like that. Jen responds to those. But I very occasionally, I'll log in and it'll be like, you were tagged in 48 photos, approve these tags.

And I'll go through and do that so that people can tag me in personal photos that I'm in with them. But I am not checking, oh, someone made a comment on your status. Someone posted on your wall. I don't even think that exists anymore. I don't do any of that. I do not care. If you want to reach me, send me a message. I use Facebook Messenger.

You can send me there. Instagram, shoot me something. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am not going to check your whimsical musings on something. I just, there's, it's ridiculous. Complete waste of time. All right. Last but not least.

Hi, Jordan, Jason, and Jen. I've spent the past three years doing a podcast with my friend about my hobby. And I also started an online retail business in the same space. I've always been as active and generous as I can be, with introducing people, getting to know people, and helping people in the small but global community. There's one person in particular. We'll call him Person A. It's been constantly seeking attention from our podcast and wanting to be interviewed. Well, at the same time, I learned that he's very, very stingy with paying friends for services and constantly trying to renegotiate terms.

Here's the situation. When I opened to my online retail store, so did another person, who will call person B in my community. We didn't know it, but we started the businesses at the same time. person b and i are friends who only see each other once a year and have a huge network of friends who know each other we get along and i respect him no drama last year person a came along and tried to get me to agree to pay him for advertising my online store to his network well i was initially open to the idea he said that he's also talking with person b and just testing the waters to see who can give him a better deal he ended up calling me a few times trying to get me to bid against person b's deal it was stupid and i felt weird about it. I was about to leave the country on business, so I told him I'd think about it.

When I got back from the trip, Person A had published a book, mailed it to me, and tried to contact me in every media form possible to promote his book on the podcast and have him interviewed. And meanwhile, it was really stingy again with a friend who was doing work for him. While the book would actually, maybe, be interesting to our audience, I don't want to promote Person A, his book, or really have anything to do with him. I think he's a turd. Well, having access to his network would be great. I just feel like he doesn't deserve more attention. Am I being selfish?

Should I do it anyway? In every other way, I really try to help people in this community connect and make things happen. I just don't think he's a good member of the community. He's a miser with a huge ego. Am I being a jerk, too? Also, I do all the audio editing of the podcast, so I have to listen to it multiple times, which would probably further piss me off. Thank you.

Signed, found a turd in the punch bowl. You know, I get it. You feel like you are being selfish, but you have to think about your audience, not just the person pitching. Yeah, I feel bad if a friend of mine writes a book and it's a POS, but I'm also thinking about my audience. You know, you've got to do that. And I get it. We struggle with that too. Jason, I know you had some initial thoughts on this one, though.

Yeah, it's really easy. Block his email and move on. You're under no obligation to use your platform that you built to promote anyone you don't like, period. That's it. It's your platform. You make the rules. And if you don't like this guy, if he's a turd, why would you put a turd on your show to promote to your network when you know that it might not be an honest representation to the community? Just because you want his contacts, if his contacts are dumb enough to follow a turd, do you really want them in your network? Yeah, good point. I agree with you. Takers are people that will ask for something, they'll bug for something, they'll be pushy about something, and then later on, when you need something, that guy's not going to be around. Are you kidding? Even if he is, who cares? What? So now you've got help from a turd. Other people are of the same opinion of you. So now you're going to be associated with this guy. I mean, there's a whole mess here. Takers are takers. They're not of value to your network. They're not going to add value to your community. This guy's work is probably not unique.

I guarantee you it's not unique, honestly. And you can probably find a nice, cool, interesting person who does something similar will be better for your community, better for your audience. You look bad when you associate with people who have a bad reputation. Think about that. If you keep doing it, people are going to assume you're similar.

That's why I get a lot of invitations from, oh, these internet marketers are having a thing where, hey, can you come to teach the mastermind that I've got? I don't do any of that stuff, because I don't want to be in a photo with no names mentioned in three years. when he goes to jail for tax evasion. I don't want to be in a photo with somebody who later on turns out to be a horrible, horrible person

because I've already got a real hunch that he is or doesn't give refunds on his book mastermind. All these guys and gals are just scammers waiting to get exposed. Everybody who's standing next to them in a photo in a few years is going to be like, yeah, how do I get that thing offline? You don't want to be that person.

Strengthen relationships with other people in your industry. Those are valuable relationships. Even if you technically compete with one another, you can always form relationships. If people are resistant to that, maybe they're not the type of person who gets it and doesn't need to be in your network. And congrats on the podcast and the business. I hope it's going well for you. But you never need to compromise your integrity. If you've got a little bit of a gut feeling that this isn't good, just say, hey, not right now, not really interested in this right now.

And watch as everything sort of crumbles down. You know, you're going to find that this guy, who wrote this book, if it's really good and you're wrong, wait six months, wait a year, wait till he goes on other people's shows, and then ask, hey, was this guy any good? And they'll go, eh, not really. Then you go, good, I dodged a bullet. Or they'll go, yeah, he was great, and you go, oh, okay, cool,

maybe I misjudged him. Everybody I know seems to like this person. Maybe it was just my initial impression that was wrong. We've gotten so many bad pitches. We say no to some ridiculous stuff here in the inbox. There's one guy that I always use as an example. He sent me unsolicited. He sent me a PDF, and I was like, what is this?

And he goes, it's my book. And I was like, whatever. And he goes, I want to come on your show. And I was like, what are you going to talk about? And he goes, I don't really care as long as I also get to mention my book. So you don't really care what you're going to deliver to my audience, as long as you get to sell your book to my audience. And of course, I was laughing. And I was going to use him as a what not to do example.

And so I went to the website and he said, 100,000 copies of my book sold. And I was like, well, sold, you spammed me with it. You sent it, it's free. It's on your website free. You didn't sell any of them. And so I was just like, this is a classic bullcrapper, just such a liar. And now he's in my blacklist.

And I get emails every quarter or every six months or so, hey, I've been on these podcasts. When are you going to have me on your show? I'm just like, never, never. There's always going to be this under crust of gross people. Just get away from them as fast as you can. You're not missing anything. If the content is amazing, go search for similar content elsewhere online and find somebody who doesn't suck.

They'll present it. It's fine. Guarantee you his idea. Here's the thing. People who are like this, they don't have great original ideas. They take it from somebody else. Their crap is always recycled. You can find the original source and do it.

All right. Life Pro Tip of the Week. This is an unethical life pro tip, which I thought was pretty funny. If you're close to missing your flight, you can go to a help center and you can request wheelchair assistance and have them push you through the airport in record time. Don't do this all the time, obviously, but the person who told me about this, they arrived at five after and the flight was at half past. It finished boarding, sorry, at half past. And his dad had a bad knee, not horrifyingly bad, you know, not wheelchair-bound bad, but like, you know, he couldn't run. So they went over to the service center, and they requested assistance, and they fly through TSA.

It's 28-minute TSA wait time. They got through in like four minutes, and they were on the flight in time. And of course, you tip those people heavily because they're going to be winded running through the airport. But remember, they don't wait in those lines. They just go straight through and they get checked right away because they need the person who's pushing the wheelchair to be accessible, not standing in line with everybody else. So they basically just cut in front of everybody. And don't do this all the time. It is a little unethical.

But look, if you're missing your flight and TSA is slow and there's a half hour and you're definitely going to miss it, I don't see the problem. If you're with your older parents or something like that or you got a bad hip, bad knee and you can't jog, just do it. I thought this is kind of a cool tip. I love this one. I'm totally going to have to do it sometime because I can't run anymore either because my ankle. So I'm definitely in for this one. Yeah, I mean, it's not something where you're like, I'm just never going to wait in line. I mean, you know, get clear or something like that if you want to do that.

But if you're going to miss your flight and it's going to cost you $300, and it's because the people, 30 people in front of you don't know that you can't pack water in their freaking carry on, just cut the line. Seriously. Recommendation of the week, Jason, this one's all you, man. Yeah, speaking of running, I got a new podcast called Running from Cops. And this is from the people that make headlong. And you may have heard of them before they did the Where's Richard Simmons podcast last year that everybody was talking about. well this one is pretty cool

it's about the history of the TV show cops and also live PD they go into that one as well but it talks about the cultural impact on policing in America and some of the unintended consequences of this show and some of the unethical things that the show did I'm not going to put in too many spoilers about it but it is really a fantastic show and you will never look at that show the same way again

and also you might possibly never look at cops the same way again because one of the side effects of this show is cops start to act like they think that they should because they saw it on TV, which might not be the best representation of the police that you want in your community. Right. So you're saying that a lot of the cops are starting to play it up for the camera. Or they learned how to be a cop by watching cops because cops has been around for 30 years. Yeah, that's true. You know, people have had this show on their entire lives. They go to the academy and they think that that's,

how they're supposed to behave when they're on the job. And it's just not. Get down on the ground. Exactly. Show me your hands. Yeah, I highly recommend it. It's only six parts with a bonus episode, so you can cut through it pretty quickly. And they're nice 45-minute chunks.

I highly recommend this one. As far as good investigative podcast go, this is definitely one of my picks for the year. Yeah, those kinds of social investigations are always quite interesting for me. We'll link to that in the show notes. And I hope you all enjoyed that. I want to thank everyone that wrote in this week. We are, I keep saying we're going to do live events soon. Really what we're going to do soon is I'm going to have a kid and then fall off the

freaking radar. Don't worry, we're still going to do shows. We banked a bunch of them. We're still going to be doing feedback Friday because I can do that stuff from home. The work's going to get done. I'm just not taking on some big-ass project while I'm changing dipes with one hand and podcasting with the other. A link to the show notes for this episode can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com.

Quick shout out to Bree, who's in Yukon. territory that is north a f she's binge listening to the show while loading trucks in a gold mine and she's on a tv show there which is pretty cool there's a goal a tv show about a gold mine that's pretty awesome yeah i guess there's a lot of drams going on in that gold mine a lot of uh drama in them there hills so uh another guy tea switched over from the old show and he was drinking 15 drinks a day and he's he decided he wrote me and said i stopped drinking as much because i wanted to be focused on the show. That's pretty awesome. I take 15 drinks a day to make the show, so I hear you, brother.

All right. Go back and check out the guests, Dr. Matt McCarthy and Brian Johnson, if you haven't done that yet. And if you want to know how we create the networks that make this show and make this business possible, it's all about systems. It's about tiny habits. And check out our six-minute networking course, which is free. That's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And this course replaces any other networking course that you took from us. It's an upgrade. one and again don't try to say you're gonna do it later don't try to kick the can down the road you cannot dig the well when you are thirsty you have to dig the well before you're thirsty if you need those relationships you're too late to leverage them so the drills are designed to take

a few minutes per day hence the name six minute networking you can ignore this but it's at your own peril I wish I knew this stuff two decades ago that's at jordan harbinger.com slash course I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Jordan harbinger it's a great way to engage with me and the show videos of our interviews are on Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. Jason? My personal website's over at jpd.me, and you can check out my tech podcast, grumpy old geeks over at gog. So, or your podcast player of choice.

And I'm on Instagram at JPD, but I might not be for much longer after our little discussion about social media. Maybe I'll take a break. But for now, you can check me out on Instagram slash JPD. This show is produced in association with Podcast 1. This episode was co-produced by Jen Harbinger. Show notes for the episode are by Robert Fogarty. Keep sending in those questions to Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com will always keep you anonymous.

And note again that we will have guest expert Emily Morris from Sex with Emily. She's going to be answering sex, dating relationship questions during a bonus upcoming episode here. So email us those questions as well. We'll flag those for her to answer. And remember, we rise by lifting others. So share the show with those you love and even those you don't. Lots more in the pipeline. Very excited to bring it to you.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask,

and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.