The Jordan Harbinger Show - 340: What Jobs Will Exist in the New Economy? | Feedback Friday

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

With big changes afoot thanks to technological advances and the need to adapt in a COVID-19 world, what skills should you consider picking up, and what jobs will exist in the new economy that you can prepare to fill? This and more here on Feedback Friday! 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/340. On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss: As the world rapidly changes around us, what skills should you consider leveling up, and what jobs will exist in the new economy? How do you network and get to know the team at a new company while remote? Should you still pay off the full balance of your credit card to avoid finance charges, or should you hold on to the cash until the pandemic's over? You love every aspect of your current job, but the perks are low and so is the pay. You know you could get full benefits and make three times more as a plumber. Is the choice as easy to make as it sounds? Life Pro Tip: Worried that your favorite restaurant will be hurt by the slow business due to the coronavirus? Buy a gift card from them now and use it later. It’s like a loan, and there are usually pretty decent savings included to sweeten the deal. Recommendation of the Week: Dirty Money Season 2 A quick shout out to Angela Hodges for using advice she's learned from the show to create a Facebook group page where they're sewing facemasks for healthcare workers in NJ! 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 Old Geeks. Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider leaving your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspiruality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Feedback Friday.

I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger, and I'm here with producer Jason Nuffalo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

If you're new to the show, on Fridays, we give advice to you and answer listener questions. The rest of the week, we have long-form interviews and conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes to authors to thinkers and performers. This week, we had Ozan Verrole.

He discussed how principles of rocket science and science in general can be applied to business and life, and I think you'll really appreciate the way he thinks about problems. I don't want to say backwards, but maybe with the end in mind, among other unique methods of thought that I think are very practical and useful for those of us that are trying to solve problems in our own lives and in our own businesses. We also had one from the vault with Michelle Rigby Assad. She was a, well, a spy deployed abroad, and she's got quite the story or set of stories, and I enjoyed hearing about those, and I think you will too.

I also write every so often on the blog. The latest post is about how to stay productive under quarantine, or, of course, in this lockdown. But I've been working from home for 13 plus years. Jason, you've been working from home for 20 plus years. Yeah, about 25. So I wanted to do this piece based on some of the advice we talked about last time we did a feedback Friday about working from home because there's so many pieces online about how to work from home and they're clearly written by people

that always work in an office and then Googled other things about how to work from home or have been working from home for five days and they're like, I've found that I need to get dressed in the morning. It's like, okay, that's a good tip, but there's about 20 other things

that are probably more important than that. You know, it's like, it's a lot of armchair quarterbacking. Look, this is black belt work from home stuff or at least brown belt work from home stuff. So we put that into a piece and posted that on the blog at Jordan Harbinger.com slash articles. So make sure you've had a look

and listen to everything we created for you here this week. Of course, our primary mission here on the Jordan Harbinger Show, we want to pass along insight, whether that's from our guests or from us. We want to have conversations directly with you, and that's what we're going to do today and every Friday here on Feedback Friday. I just want to place one brick in the structure that makes up your life, and that's what this podcast is about. You can reach us Friday atjordanharbinger.com.

By the way, I want to congratulate everyone on getting a PhD in epidemiology in the past three weeks. Have you noticed that, Jason? Everybody's a virologist now. You don't have to tell me, man. You don't have to tell me. People are like on WhatsApp groups and they're like putting in some, what are those like Latin, those Greek symbols? What's like the meu coefficient of this virus?

And I'm like, don't worry about that. Just stop going to Chipotle for lunch every day. Seriously, just stay home and read a book. Uh-huh. Yeah. Don't worry about melt blown fabric for DIY mask filtration systems. Just, you know, like stop going to the grocery store every three days and buying toilet paper. Yeah.

Well, I'm not sick of working from home. I'm not sick of staying in the house. I'm sick of armchair quarterbacks. Oh, man. Jason, what's the first thing out of the mailbag? Hey, team, Jay. The world has been changing rapidly due to the technological advances and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations have been trying to keep up, and some have been lucky enough to operate mostly online and digitally. As a prospective graduate seeking to enter the job market, are there any particular skill sets you would recommend by gain to stand out in the job market? Also, what sort of industries do you believe will now, more than ever, be needed in society. Thanks, planning for the future.

This pandemic has been a forcing function for many companies to create more robust online systems wherever possible. In other words, since they didn't have to do this before, a lot of companies have been really lagging behind. Like, oh, should we get our meetings up and running virtually? Nah, we don't really need to do that because the only person that's missing is somebody who got pregnant or is out sick and they're just going to dial in on our crappy speakerphone. But now that everybody is at home. Companies have had to go, okay, I guess we'll work on this virtual teleconferencing system that everybody's been talking about for 10 freaking years already. So it's going to cause many industries to stop using humans where robots might be more resilient. That's the other sort

of prediction that I have. A lot of people are out of warehouse jobs and manufacturing jobs. The thing is, that's tricky. I think a lot of people maybe lay people think, oh, we can just automate this. We can automate that. You'd be surprised at what can be automated. but you'd also be very surprised at what cannot be automated. It's really kind of counterintuitive a lot of the time. Right now, companies that would be doing well would be the ones where they're most automated and most able to work remotely.

I mean, you could probably do a lot of car manufacturing just over the internet, but there's other parts of putting panels on cars and making the interiors and stuff that just isn't done by robots anywhere. It's done by workers, and you're not really going to automate that anytime soon, at least not efficiently.

If you run a company that developed software, you can probably do almost everything you were doing before from home. In fact, you might even save money on office space and office rent. If you're in manufacturing, though, as I mentioned before, you might be kind of screwed. If robots do 99% of the manufacturing, you might be okay, but that 1% is pretty crucial. Nobody wants to buy a car without an interior, right? And you've got to get the cars to the right place, and sometimes that requires you to drive them there. And also, I'd like someone to test the car. I'm just going to throw that out there. I'd like someone to just take that thing for a spin for a couple miles and make sure the wheels don't just fly off. That's kind of where I'm at with cars. Seriously. When I was younger,

my dad worked for Ford before he retired. And he had to put demo miles on cars. And he was on Team Mustang for a while because that was, I guess, like, that was where all the cool kids were, you know, towards the end of their careers, all the, like, 60-year-old dudes driving around Orange Mustang Cobra GT convertibles. So every day or every few days, we had another Mustang, which was kind of awesome back when I was 16, 17 years old, because obviously I wasn't supposed to drive it, but how do you think I learned how to drive people? I learned how to drive in a pumpkin-orange

Mustang COBRA GT convertible. And now you don't drive at all. And now I don't drive it all, right, exactly. But if you want to bulletproof yourself for the future, either program, create, design, maintain, or control these automation systems or these online communication systems. You know, you might not be an auto worker

or you might be an auto worker now, but that's not to say you can't learn how to create. Jason, what are those giant robot arms called that like take huge half-ton door, chassis things, lift them up and slam them down like they're nothing? You know what I'm talking about?

Detroit killers? Those, yeah, is that what those are called? No, I don't know. They're those huge... He killed all the jobs in Detroit is all I was thinking. There are those huge, like, robo-mecha arms. Yeah, just big robotic arms is what they are.

You've got to fence them off because they don't have sensors. So if you walk next to one, it'll just hit you in the head and you die or get severely injured. People have been killed doing that by walking in the wrong spot. I remember a worker in Volkswagen's factory in Germany got killed by one about two years ago, I think. I mean, they just have a crap ton of force and they don't really go like, oh, someone's pushing against this. It's not an elevator door, right? Yeah.

So if you learn how to build those, make those, control those, it's, what's the analogy I'm looking for? It's the picks and shovels thing, right? During the gold rush, the people who made the most money, supposedly, this is a pocket. of course, but the ones who sold the picks and shovels. Most people made nothing because they were just panning for gold and they didn't make squat. It was the people who sold the picks and the shovels and the equipment that almost guaranteed got rich. That's the business you want to be in now. Control, maintain, design, create, whatever, the systems that are going to create and enable, I should say, automation versus trying to figure out what jobs have not yet been automated. Right. We talk about this on Grumpield Geeks a lot. Like the jobs of the future are basically going to be robot mechanic. Yeah, exactly. Robot mechanic or, like, we talk about this on Grompeeled geeks a lot. Like the jobs of the future are basically going to be robot mechanic. Yeah, exactly. Robot mechanic or, like robot design improvements in marketing, of course, because there's still going to be human decision makers that say like, hey, these are the robots we want. And because I'd like this colorful brochure with thick paper or whatever, you know, it looks great on my iPad 27. I also think trades will become more important as the economy mercilessly crushes people who have loads of

student debt, but are mostly unemployable because they studied something that makes them unqualified for pretty much every job. If you're wondering whether to go to college right now, I'd suggest going to trade school unless you have a very firm idea of your path already. Trades, and yes, law, medicine, those are trades. I'm talking about plumbing, electrical, coding, network engineering, any engineering, for that matter, et cetera. All that's going to stay in demand for the foreseeable future. Of course, you know, AI, blah, blah, blah, it's going to destroy everything. Got it. No plumber is getting replaced by AI anytime soon. At least not the guy who shows up to your building and fixes the leak. There's no robot that's going to do that anytime soon. We're building a house right now. We're building a house right

now, I know, great timing, by the way. And the bottleneck has always been that the drywall guys don't have enough workers, so they got to postpone the job for a couple weeks. The roofers don't have enough workers. The plumbers don't have enough workers. The electricians don't have enough workers. So there's two guys doing a four or six-man job. Yes, these are hands-on manual labor jobs a lot of the time, but these are skills you can fall back on any time. So if you become a journeyman plumber or electrician and you go, you know what, I want to go back to school. Go ahead. You're still going to make 100 grand a year doing that job while you go to school in the evening. Plus, you get to learn on those jobs while getting paid. Apprenticeships, those are still a thing,

and they're very useful, and you're going to learn a real skill that's probably not going to be automated anytime soon. Believe it or not, legal work is much more likely to be automated before, I think, electrical work and plumbing. Yeah, and HVAC as well. My neighbor, he started out with one van. Oh, HVAC, good one. He started out with one van doing HVAC work. He now has three vans, and he also has a new house in his backyard. He built a second house behind his house and two brand new mazorati's in the driveway. So it pays. Yep. Yeah, HVAC is a thing, man. That's a, especially commercial HVAC, because there are so many regulations and all of it's expensive. And I know you're thinking, well, I'm just going to call around. So you're going to call 20 places and

they're all going to be busy until July, if it's like February, right? And there's going to be one guy who can do it in May. And you're going to be like, oh, my God, fine. You know, fine, I'll take it. There's so much demand, and it's as the economy goes up and construction goes up, the demand for these goes up. And as the economy goes down and demand goes down, all this crap still breaks. So you have to fix it. And you can also move around if you need to. I've heard of guys in these various trades getting schlepped off to Dubai for some massive

construction project and then coming back with like 200 grand. Yeah, they do a six-month project and then take six months off. Yeah, yeah, it's not going anywhere. And if you've already graduated and you have a degree but you want to make yourself more marketable, the best thing you can do is get experience and also make sure that you're great at building relationships and connections. I mean, that's six minute networking. That's why we created that. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, by the way. Also, don't be afraid to help the business do things that maybe aren't your core competency from university. For example, a company may have

hired you for IT support or for marketing or sales or something like that. But if you know how to set everyone up with online collaborative tools, secure video conferencing, you might carve out a niche for yourself that didn't exist before. That's going to make you much more valuable than before than if you were just the new guy in the marketing department during an economic downturn. You were first on the chopping block, and then instead they laid off everyone else and they said, hey, we're going to keep you around, but we're going to shift you to official, let's make sure everyone has an updated version of Zoom and we don't have guys Zoom bombing us. And also, you figure out how to do Google Docs and then make sure everyone can get in the dock. That could be your new

role. And I know that that sounds easy to a lot of people who are, let's say, under 40. If you're working in a company with a bunch of 40, 50, 60 year old people, they need someone who gets how that works, can send them the links in an email that they can click on, get in the docs, change the sharing permissions in real time because you're having a meeting and Joe can't get in. That's going to be someone's job now. You know, that was IT support before if your company has that. But if you're working for a small, medium-sized business, and IT support is either outsourced or doesn't exist, that could be a great niche for you to be in. You might still be the marketing guide, but you might be so much more valuable than that. And I would start there, because these skills that come

second nature to a lot of people who graduated from college three, four, five years ago or less, people have no idea how to do this. You know, people and companies that have been working there for a long time, they have no clue how to do this. You'd be surprised how many engineers have no clue how to use a lot of this stuff. So that's a valuable role. Jason, you were talking about cybersecurity rules. Yep, don't forget cybersecurity because they have a 100% employment rate right now, and they need butts in those seats as fast as they can get them. It is a massively fast-growing opportunity right there. So I would definitely check that out because that's not going away anytime soon. So stay nimble, folks. Skate to where the puck is going, not just where you think it is right now.

as Wayne Gretzky once said. This is Feedback Friday. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you'd be so kind,

please drop us a nice rating and review on 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, head on over to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Now let's hear some more of your questions here on Feedback Friday. All right, Jason, what's next?

Jordan, I've just landed a new job and will be starting later in April. I feel very lucky to work in a counter-cyclical role. The job will be remote until COVID-19 slows down and it's safe to go back to the office. This will be a first for me not going to a physical office on day one. What advice do you have for networking and getting to know the team at a new company while being remote? Thank you for your time and cheers to the new beginnings and career growth.

Signed, How do I bond in a pandemic? I think this is a pretty simple answer, honestly. I think what you can do is look people up on social media, look them up in their company directory, if they have a bio or something on the company website, look that up, read it, maybe take some notes and put them on a sticky so that you can see them either on your desktop computer

or literally on paper so that when you're talking with them, you can know things about them without having to go back to the bio or back to their Wikipedia or back to their social media. Make sure you know everyone's name and what they look like, of course, so that you can address them by name on the calls. And Jason, you had a pretty good idea of just looking them up and trying to schedule some one-on-one time.

Why don't you throw that out there? Yeah, I was just say, do a quick one-on-one Zoom call and say, hey, I'm new to the organization. I'm so glad to be here. Can't wait for us to meet in person. Until then, what do you think I'm going to be best at? Where can I put my energy? And is there anything I can help you with? And can you just give me a lay of the land on how everything works around here?

Because I'm not going to be available in the office to just walk over and answer questions. just, you know, give me a quick rundown. Just take five minutes, and that way you can have a one-on-one chat with them, get to know them, learn their face, learn their name. And so when you do get into the office for the first time and everybody's back at work, it'll be like, you know, you've been there forever. Yeah, I think that's wise. Get everybody to give you a little face time so that you're not just the new guy in the meeting that never talks.

Yeah, you're just another name on an email list instead of somebody with a face and a personality. Right. That gives people an opening to give you suggestions later. So if you do the one-on-one-one Zoom call and it's five minutes long, and they say, no, no, just glad to have you here, don't really have any feedback. Later on, they can give you feedback because I sure as heck wouldn't give some random dude feedback if I had it if I'd never talk to them before. I wouldn't be like, hey, new guy, Tim here, you're really blowing it in meetings.

You know, I would never do that. I would just be like, okay, that guy's, you know, he could be better. But if they called me beforehand and said, give me the lay of the land, tell me if I can improve on anything. Then I might send the guy a quick email after a meeting and go, hey, you know, when you get called on, you need to be prepared. everybody gets called on in meetings, especially marketing or especially to new guys. So make sure that you kind of know what's going on.

Or, hey, we can totally tell that you're typing. We can tell because you're not really focused and we can see your hands moving. So don't do that. The manager hates that. Those kind of tips are going to be career saving potentially for you. So make sure you reach out to people, know a little bit about them, know their names, and then, yeah, try and get five minutes with them on Zoom. Even if you can't because they're super busy, see if you can even just go back and forth on email at the very least to open up a channel. of communication. And good luck. Good thing you're in a countercyclical role. What would that be,

Jason? What do you think that means? Is that like somebody who works at the unemployment office? That's countercyclical? I have no idea, actually. I was trying to figure that out myself. So maybe he can let us know what that is in a follow-up email. I'm curious. I guess that means somebody who works somewhere where during an economic downturn, they're more busy and instead of less busy. That's what I'm taken from it. That's what I'm taken from it. I haven't really heard that. You know, if sales are down, maybe he works in a return department for some expensive equipment or something like that, right? Like, who knows? All right, what's next? Hi, Jordan and team. I pay all my bills with a credit card and pay off the balance at the end of the month.

That's about $7,000 a month. Should I still pay off the full balance to avoid finance charges? Or should I hold on to the cash since we're in the middle of a pandemic? My fear is that credit cards will soon lower credit limits and I'll be without credit and cash. I'm very grateful for your insight. Thank you, concerned about a cash crunch. I asked our finance manager about this. So to explain what's going on here, this person pays for everything with a card and is thinking maybe I should let the balance hang so that I have cash in my pocket instead of going down

to zero cash, paying off the card, risking them shutting off the card, and now I'm broke, right, and have no recourse. So you definitely want to be conscious of cash, but on the other hand, you want to be very wary about the interest, especially interest on a credit card, because 15 to 30 percent interest rate, that could just compound out of control extremely quickly. I would maybe see if you can cut the interest rate in half by calling them, or you put half your expenses on the card and keep half and pay the rest in cash. Conscious of your cash is key here. If people don't have revenue coming in, you've got to find any source of revenue, whether that be a business loan, the stimulus,

minimize what's flowing out, but definitely be wary of that 15 to 30% interest rate. If you can, Say it's American Express, call American Express and say, I'd like to move this balance. I'll pay it off now. I've got the money, but I want to, instead of using a card, move this into a line of credit because I want the option of carrying the balance without getting penalized heavily. Call them up, say you've been paying off for X number of months, years, whatever. I want to protect myself even though I have the money now. And say you can prove the funds, show your bank account, print off a statement that shows that you have it. Ask if they can move it into a bucket that maybe charges five to seven percent interest instead. This actually works really

well because the company wants to get paid. Contrary to popular belief, they're not out to be like, ha, you missed it. We're going to charge you a massive amount of fees and interest because we're out to get you. They know you're just going to go broke and never pay. So they want you to pay a little bit of interest instead of just never paying the balance off or never paying the other interest. Jason, and it's something like this happened to you a while back. Yeah, back in 2008 with the housing crunch. American Express. I had three American Express cards and I woke up one morning and all of my credit lines were cut in half with no warning, nothing. It's just like, hey, yeah, we noticed that we need to do this right now for no reason whatsoever. I'm like, okay, I've paid all my

balance. I've always been a good customer and you still do this. It's like, yeah, we're doing this for everybody. Sorry. That's it. Yikes. So that kind of thing does happen. So it is a valid concern. Yeah, that's scary because then suddenly the benefit of payment that you have for everything is just not working. Yeah, and it's your safety net, too. That was my safety net because I'm a contract employee. So sometimes the checks don't come for a while, so I need that buffer on my credit cards to be able to buy groceries and things like that while I'm waiting for checks to clear from deadbeat clients who are taking three months to pay. So once that comes in, then I pay off the cards and the cycle repeats again. You know, it's kind of just, I use it almost like a small business

loan to pay payroll. That's kind of what I used them for. And so when that went away, when half of that went away. It was lots of ramen for a couple months there, or actually probably two years until everything snapped back. Wow. That's scary, especially for people who are dependent on these cards. So make sure you work with your lenders, work with your credit card companies. If they're inflexible, you can either transfer the balance or just apply for a different card before it really hits the fan. Because right now, it's, you know, look, I know it's an economic downturn, but credit card companies pay a lot to acquire customers. If they're not treating you right, just move along to somebody else. We'll be right back with more feedback Friday right after.

this. Thank you for supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Now back to the show for the conclusion of Feedback Friday. All right, Jace, what's next? Hello, Jay Team. I love the company I work for. There are 11 of us including the owner, so it's tight-knit in very much a family. Well, we don't make a fortune and we don't have benefits. Our owner gave us two weeks paid time off during this pandemic so we could focus on staying healthy and not have to worry about the bills. At work, I'm treated like a human, and I can't say the same about many other jobs I've had. I could go on and on about the esprit decor,

family attitude, love, and camaraderie, but I'll get to the point. I may be very happy here, but I don't make a fortune. Last week, a friend of mine called a chat. While we were catching up, he told me about the company he's working for. He's a journeyman plumber, makes over $100,000 a year, full benefits, 401k, the whole nine yards. All things I'll never have at my current job. He then told me that they would be looking for an apprentice soon. He said he knows how hard I work, how smart I am, and thinks I would be a good fit for the job. A job that would provide me those same benefits that he has in just a couple of years. To me, this seems so cut and dry, but I can make an equally compelling case for either side of the coin. I love every aspect of my current job,

even the not-so-fun part, and could consider this job a childhood dream come true. On the other hand, with the apprentice position, I would be well on my way to financial independence. There is, are two things in particular that guide me to this new job. One, I would be making triple what I'm making now, and two, I would have health insurance. Both are things I won't have where I'm at. I'm turning 26 this year, so I won't have health insurance without a change of employment. I'm not worried about retirement. I have a healthy 401k and have several other assets in my portfolio. I could go on and on with different pros and cons for either side and still get no closer to helping myself come to a decision. And while I don't have to make the decision now, I would like to have every credit.

opinion I can when the time comes. Thank you for your opinions, insight, and experience. I hope all of you are safe and healthy in these trying times. All the best, possibly pursuing plumberhood. So Jordan, this ties in nicely to what we were just talking about. It does tie nicely into the whole plumberhood situation. It really is impossible for me to make this choice for you. You do need to obviously weigh the costs and benefits of making more money. And that's obvious. Most people do this wrong, follow Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So the first question you ask yourself is, will this make me more secure than I am right now? In other words, health insurance, money for a rainy day, a healthier retirement. It sounds like it will make you more secure

than you are right now. Now, you might not need that security at this point because you're doing okay, but the problem is when you get older, is there upward mobility? And we'll get to that in a second. The second question is, will this make me more competitive? Is this fun job with great people, but no benefits? Is it teaching you a ton about some field that will allow you to move upwards someday? Or is this kind of the top of the mountain and you're probably never going to get a raise and you're certainly never going to get insurance, et cetera? That's a problem. Three, then and only then ask, will this make me happier? Happier than you are now in your current line of work? Is it going to be the same? If it's less interesting to be a plumber but it's

much more secure and you're going to need that security, that's the key. If you're going to need it, then I would say take it. If you hate it and you don't need the money, you can go back to doing something else. It's easy to take an opportunity and then decide you don't like it later on and then go back most of the time. It's unlikely that this company

that has no benefits and low pay is going to say, you can never come back. It's not really that sweet of an offer for most people. So it's not going to be that competitive. Becoming a journeyman plumber and getting an apprenticeship, that's a little bit trickier. So I would say unless you really hate the idea,

go for it. My gut here says you won't know until you give it a shot. I can't imagine plumbing demand decreasing any time soon, as I mentioned before. To the right person like me, it would probably be an interesting gig. These are skills that you can take with you later on as you grow into your 30s, as you start a family. That's something to consider as well. When I was 26, 27, I didn't have a care in the world. When I was 36, 37, you know, I had stuff going on.

I had a house. I was married. I was having a kid. Like, life gets much more complicated. the last thing you want to do is find out you don't have health insurance and that you don't have enough money to pay the bills. In simple terms, take happiness over money, but you've got to take a better look at the money

if the next gig is something you can get yourself interested in. If the money's great but the job stinks, move on. I learned from doing real estate finance law that some jobs just are not worth the money no matter how much they pay you. Is that what plumbing is for you? Or will this be something you learn to love that kicks off the rest of your life

and provides for you for years to come? There's really only one way to find out. Also, in this economy, again, as I mentioned earlier on the show, you might want to dig into plumbing because the other job you're in right now, that might not even be around in a few months. Something tells me whenever anything is really low pay doesn't have benefits, those people don't really have job security, right? There's a reason that it's low pay because it's probably low value.

No benefits, it's because they're not required to give you any rights. So it's very easy to get laid off during an economic downturn. But again, pipes be breaking no matter what the national debt is, or the rate of hiring or the unemployment rate, people are always going to get clogged toilets and you're always going to have buildings that need new pipes, period. So I think it's just a safer bet.

I have a friend who's a plumber who helps us around here when things go wrong because we had a pipe burst back before Thanksgiving last year. I don't know if I talked about that on the show, but we had to have our whole house redone. He loves plumbing because it's problem-solving for him. You know, he comes into a place and what's the problem today

and every house is different. So for him, he enjoys the problem-solving aspect of it. You know, he knows his craft very well, so when it comes to a new challenging thing, he loves it. And he's been doing it for 15 years, and I know he didn't go to school for that, but he stumbled into it and is happy as can be. I think another good idea is not only to ask your friend what the job is like, but maybe shadow him for a couple days. I say a couple days because if you shadow for one day, you know, you start a little later,

he picks you up, you do some jobs, you go out, you have a nice long lunch, he tells you about the job, wrap up a little bit early because you're kind of dead weight. But if you shadow them for two or three days, you're going to be like, wow, we are stepping in a lot of turds. You know, we are dealing with a lot of stinky situations. We're in a lot of people's bathrooms, or we're in a lot of dealing with a lot of commercial managers that aren't nice to us or whatever. You're going to get a much more realistic feel for the job. And it's easy to put up a nice front from your friend for the first day that that's what the job's like. But it's kind of like, take your kid to work day. Remember that, Jason? Do you ever do that?

Uh, no. I remember, I didn't do that. My situation was different. I didn't really have anybody that I could take to work with, but all the other kids did. And it was, uh, it was always interesting. Yeah, it was interesting, but I remember going to work with my dad, and it would be like, all right, you know, you're there for a couple hours, he's letting you play on the computer systems that they have it for. Then you go see the assembly line, and he points out how everything works, and then you go to Pizza Hut for lunch, and you have a bunch of pizza, and then you go back to work, and your dad's like, look, I can't do a whole lot with you here, and then you go home at 3 o'clock. Right, so that's not a real day at work. A real day at work is getting up at the crackadon, going down to Ford, eating really quick lunch because you have a ton of stuff to do, and sitting there, and doing a bunch of checklists and paperwork or whatever the hell he was doing, I don't know, it was too young to understand, right? Like, that's the real thing. You wanna get the real thing. You don't wanna get the take your daughter

to work day experience. You wanna get the full Monty, you wanna get the double dose, the real dose anyway. And then you can properly start to evaluate whether or not this is gonna be for you. Life Pro tip of the week, if you're worried that your favorite restaurant is gonna be hurt by slow business due to coronavirus,

buy a gift card from them now and use it later. It's like a loan. And me and Jen have been, doing a lot of takeout from our favorite places, but we've also been saying, hey, do you have any gift card deals? And a lot of restaurants have some pretty good deals where you spend, like, I don't know, 100 bucks on gift cards and they give you a bonus 25 bucks or like you bring that gift card with you for the next year and you get free dessert with everything you buy, basically, with every entree you get. So there's a lot of good deals, but you're also supporting them

because they really need the money to pay for their staffing right now and for everything else. What I found in my neighborhood, there are a couple restaurants that are actually letting you buy lunches and dinners for first responders, and they will deliver them to the emergency rooms and the local hospitals. So I've been doing that a lot. It's an easy way to keep your restaurant open and still give back to the people that are on the front lines. And I wish more restaurants did this. If every restaurant in my neighborhood did this, I would just go down the line until I get to the end and start over again and just buy a meal a day from everybody. It helps keep the restaurants in business and it helps keep the people that are keeping us safe, fit and fed.

Because there's nothing worse than being on a 12-hour shift and then getting off and then figuring out how you're going to have lunch. Yeah, that's interesting. It makes everybody happy. That's a really cool idea. You kind of pop by and park down some money for some pizzas or something like that or for some noodles. I don't know.

Be kind of cool. Be kind of nice to find out that somebody bought your lunch or your dinner after a 12-hour shift, too. Yeah, you come off the line and these people are letting you add notes into it. So, you know, when they get the meal, you can say, you know, thanks for everything you're doing. stay safe and we're thinking of you. Yeah, yeah. And next time you pull me over for expired tags, remember who bought you this spaghetti.

No, I don't think that works. But if only, if only. You need a little note in the car that says, like, I bought, you need like a big receipt that's like free meals for first responders receipt, like right on the front dash of the car. Like, oh, sorry, was that not my driver's license? Oh, sorry about that. It's a donation receipt.

Yeah, if you're giving to the cops, just on the note, just put your license plate number. That's right. That's right. There you go. Yeah. Pumpkin orange Mustang Cobra GT convertible. Six J.C.

7 YX. Yeah. Recommendation of the week. Dirty Money Season 2. Dirty Money Season 1 is really interesting. Season 2 is no exception. Man, some of this stuff is just, it's infuriating. Yeah, yeah, it is.

Have you seen Dirty Money Season 2 yet? I watched the first one with Jared Kushner, and it's just like, I needed a bath after that. I know. It was just so gross. It is. It's bad. And then the one about Wells, Fargo starting up all those accounts and then the CEO just being like, we didn't know it was a few

bad apples and then they show the stats and it was like 6,000 employees were doing it at different locations around the country. Yeah, that was systemic corruption inside Wells Fargo, which is why I won't bank there ever. Yeah, I know. It's unbelievable. I'm thinking about, I have one account there that has like some money in it for some reason and I've been too lazy to go in and close it and I'm thinking about going in there. And they're like, why are you closing your account?

And I'll be that because you're a bunch of criminals. Not you, poor guy at the bottom of the food chain, but pass this note up to your boss's boss's boss. Or you go in to close your one account. You have 12 accounts. Would you like to close them all? Yeah, exactly. Are you going to close your 17 debit cards you have with us, too?

What? No wonder. You know why that account exists? I started it to fund cryptocurrency accounts, and literally no bank would allow you to do it except for Wells Fargo, which now totally makes sense. Yeah, they're like, we'll take any money we can get. Yeah, we'll do anything. We don't care.

Our rules are completely flexible. Every other bank was like, ooh, we don't touch crypto anything. Wells Fargo was like, bring us all your crypto money laundering operations. You could talk to our crypto officer over there in the corner. He will tell you if you want Bitcoin or Ethereum or whichever coin is a coin of the realm today. Would you like some Whopper coin from Burger King? We can do that too. Was that a thing?

Was that a real thing? That was a real thing. They did it in Russia. They did Vapa coin. You could buy the Burger King cryptocurrency and pay for your meals in it. Unbelievably useless. Well, I guess it depends on how often you go to BK, right? I think it was more of a marketing stunt.

It was pretty funny. Yeah, that sounds about right. Hope you all enjoyed the show. I want to thank everyone that wrote in this week. Make sure you're practicing Safe Six. See what I did there? Oh, Dad Joke. Yeah, never going to stop.

A link to the show notes for this episode can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com. Quick shout out to Angela Hodges. She's been listening for years. She used some of the advice she's learned on the show to create a Facebook group page where they're sewing face masks for healthcare workers in New Jersey, which is pretty cool. She's an out-of-work personal trainer and decided to use the motivation and teaching skills to help create some frontline healthcare protective masks, which is an honorable way to spend your time. So, applause to Angela Hodges for that. So go back and check out the guests, Ozon Verro and Michelle Rigby Assad from this week, if you haven't yet.

If you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests, it's always about the network. Systems and tiny habits make up the course of your day here. This is what you have to do to systemize this. Create a network from scratch if you need to, but ignore this at your own peril. That's all for free and six-minute networking. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Jordan Harbinger. It's a great way to engage with the show.

Videos of our interviews are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. Jason? You can check out my now seven-year-old tech podcast, Grumpy Old Geeks. Yes, we just passed the seven-year mark, believe it or not. We discussed what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame along with cybersecurity apps, gadgets, books, and more. That's grumpy old geeks. This show is created in association with podcast one. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, edited by Jace Sanderson.

Share notes for the episode by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viola. Keep sending in those questions to Friday at jordanharbinger.com. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own, and I'm a lawyer, but not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing things that you hear on the show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found this episode useful, please do share it with somebody who can use the advice that we gave here today.

We've got lots more in store for the rest of the year. 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.

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