But it has nothing to do with whether or not you should have one, right? Because you always miss your target if you're a corporation or anything else. You just need them.

John Gruden, coach of the Raiders, resigned. Some emails from his past were made public and they had things which people are calling misogynistic and anti-gay and a little bit racist, they thought. Now here's my take on that. I do not defend or condone anything that John Gruden said privately. Likewise I do not defend or condone anything that any of you have ever said privately. I don't condone it but I also don't condemn it. Anything you say privately with the expectation that it would remain private is okay with me. It's okay with me.

What if it's really really offensive? Okay with me. What if it's really really insulting to me, like just really racist and sexist and totally insulting about me specifically in your private communications? Okay with me. 100 percent. I want you to be able to say anything you want privately. If you say it in public then we have something to talk about. But privately, no. You can say anything you want about me. It could be the darkest, most insulting, deeply offensive thing that anybody's ever said about anybody. I'm cool with that. Just don't tell me about it. And you know, ideally don't tell other people that might tell me about it, right?

Now I get that sometimes things get out that you thought would be private. But I'm not going to blame you for that. If you had an expectation of privacy, you know who I'm going to blame? I'm going to blame the mofo who told me. That's the author of the message. The author of the message is not the person who sent it first privately because the expectation of privacy was there. But the mofo, the a-hole, the mega turd who told me about it, that's who created the damage. The person who creates the damage is the mega turd who tells you about it. Period. That's got to be the standard.

We can't let ourselves have a standard where people's private communications affect their job or their standing in society. No, that's a hard no. So I see why the Raiders had to do what they did because they have to respond to the fact that their customers are going to have some reaction and they don't want to lose their customers, etc. So I think big companies sometimes just have to do things that aren't fair to employees because it's good for the stockholders or the bigger picture requires it, I guess. So I don't love what the Raiders did but I understand it, right? I'm not sure I would have gone the same way if I'd been in charge of the Raiders. Maybe I would have tried to take a stand but I don't blame them. Companies got to take care of themselves. That's what they're designed to do, take care of themselves. And you wouldn't want to change that.

So here's the standard I say. Number one, private communication should stay private. Or if your private communications are not going to stay private, the one who leaks them is the author. The one who leaks them has to take responsibility for all of the racism, misogyny, everything else.

Now if you look at the actual content of the messages, did they look racist to me? Nope. Nope. They did look exactly like the things you should never say in public. Let me give you one of them. One of them was that I guess John Gruden in an email said something about a black player's the size of his lips and that was considered racist. Do you know when that would be racist for sure? As if he said it in public. I would call that racist because you would be saying something that you know would be offensive to an entire ethnicity plus anybody who has any sense of decency. But not privately. Not privately. When you change the context to privately it's just an observation. There's nothing in this story that suggests he has a bad feeling about black people because one of them has a feature which is notable. I just don't see it.

But now do you see the point? That exact thing he said privately doesn't have a trace of racism in it. But if he had ever said that in any mixed crowd or in public, yeah, a very racist, very bad move.

Let me give you another one. He used the word queer when referring to a gay person who is going to be drafted, I guess. Does the word queer suggest that he doesn't like or doesn't respect gay people? Maybe. I don't know. I mean you could certainly interpret it that way. If he had used that word in public, what would I say about him? I'd say he's very apparently very anti-LGBTQ or at least anti-gay and he needs to have some consequences. I mean that would seem pretty anti-gay to me.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're saying that the gay community uses that word themselves. Exactly. That's why when he used it privately it didn't look the same to me. Privately people use words that are offensive just because they're more interesting. Have you ever used an offensive word with somebody who's a friend? Just this more interesting word. That's it. No real intent behind it. It's just a more interesting word. This is more fun. It's more provocative, right?

So again, I don't condone anything that John Gruden said because I don't want to be tarred with any of that. But I'll say that as a consumer of this information I looked at the things that were noted and I did not see the things he was accused of. But had he said any of that in public, of course it would look awful.

I saw an article in the New York Times, I guess it was written a while ago, about microsteps and micro goals. And they mentioned they were influenced by the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. And the idea is that if you want to get something done, getting started is the important part. And that if you can get any kind of momentum toward your goal that it's self-reinforcing. You get a little dopamine hit for making any progress. So the Atomic Habits, a big part of it was just do something, a small little thing. Get a phone number. Make yourself a note. Just whatever's the smallest thing you can do toward your goal and eventually it'll get a little momentum going and it'll be self-fulfilling after a point. Very good advice.

Now that was in Atomic Habits in 2018. Now James Clear has always from the beginning credited the micro steps idea as part of the systems versus goals idea from my book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It came out five years earlier. Now I think it was very smart of James Clear to pick that part of what was in my book and amplify it because I just sort of mentioned it and described it a little bit but it did deserve its own book. And let me say as clearly as possible there aren't that many new ideas. Yeah, almost any time somebody has an idea that's like this game-changing idea and they make a book and it's popular you can almost always find out who influenced that person, right? There's always something before it. Same with music. Seems like all musicians were influenced by somebody else.

But as I often say, an idea is worthless. The value of an idea is zero. Ideas don't have any value. So if you say hey this was your idea and then James Clear took that idea and made a great book out of it, well you know maybe in some sense he was influenced by it but the value in the book is how he expressed it. The value is the packaging, the design, the communication. So I mean that's where the value comes from. So likewise even when I have something that looks like a new idea, probably isn't. But the value is I communicated it to you. That's where the value is.

But I'm starting to think that this one thing might be one of the most important things that I've ever done. Because to the extent that it's influenced other people who then influence other people, this is a really good technique. The micro step idea especially in a world where everything's complicated and we're busy. It's that complication and busyness that stuns us into inaction because there are too many things you could do and there are too many things you could do instead. So finding some way to beat the complexity of modern life and finding a way to take that first step, maybe it wasn't always important but right now it's critical. So it could turn out to be one of the most important things I've ever done or the most important thing. And it was one chapter of one book.

Let's do the fake news test on an Axios story. Well it's a national story but I'm going to use Axios as my example. Now if you don't know, I created a first draft and this is just a prototype so we'll be testing the filter as well as the story, right? If the filter says the story's fake it could be the filter is the problem not the story. So keep in mind that this is all experimental at this point but we'll see what happens.

So I did a Google Sheet which I tweeted the link to and you can all go look at it in which I've just got a column of sort of a checklist of what to look for to decide if something is fake news. And let me first run through it because I've added to it since the last time I told you about it. Okay so these are, it's a growing list of the checklist of things to ask. I'll just do them quickly because they're self-explanatory. So if you see a news story say ask yourself these questions.

Is the source anonymous? Is it a disgruntled employee or ex-employee? Is it only being reported on CNN but not Fox or vice versa? Is it too on the nose? It's like too exactly the narrative, you know what I mean? Is it confusing correlation with causation? Is it still the fog of war phase of the story where we don't know all the facts? Is it too man bites dog, meaning it's just too unbelievable to really be true? Is it only covered by the lesser known news sites? Does the journalist have a grudge against the subject? Are you still waiting to hear the other side of the story? In other words is there somebody who's accused of something and they haven't told you what their side is yet?

Does the story give you a percentage without the raw number? That's another one I added. Does it report a percentage but it doesn't tell you any raw numbers? That's a flag. And vice versa, does it give you raw numbers without putting them in context of what percentage of something that is? Does the story have sources that have ties to some industry? Is the story from a serial debunker who's selling a book? Here's a new one I added. Is the source of the claim a serial debunker? Somebody who keeps debunking things and writing books about it. I don't trust the serial debunkers because once they become the debunking person they have to keep debunking because that's who they are. They become the debunking person. That's how they make the money. So be careful of the serial debunkers. Not so much somebody who only once is debunking something.

Is the story source politically active? You can't trust them. And is the primary evidence video? So here's one I added that's just mind-blowing. One of the checklists to see if it's fake news is if there's a video so you can see it with your own eyes. In 2021 if there's a video and you can see it with your own eyes it's probably fake news. You would have thought the opposite but in 2021 if you just look at all the examples you can see time after time it's just a video edit. They leave out a qualifier or they leave out some context. So if the primary evidence is a video there's a good chance it's not true. Which is weird, right?

All right, so that's the filter. Let's run this story through it. And here's the claim. The claim is that Southwest Airline pilots are intentionally basically calling in personal days or sick days, I don't know which one. Definitely some personal days but I don't know if there's sick days too. Or they're not accepting flights, etc. So they're basically responding to the vaccine mandate. So it's basically a work slowdown, if you will, because so many of them don't want to get the forced vaccination to continue working.

Now here's what Southwest says. There's no pilot action happening. No, this is weather. It's weather, duh. We just got a weather problem. It'll take care of itself. We'll be fine next week. One of those isn't true. One of those isn't true. But let's take the claim that the pilots are doing this intentionally, okay? And we'll run it through the fake news filter.

All right, so here's the claim. Is the source anonymous? Kind of yes but kinda no. Who exactly is your source who told you that the pilots are organizing this? Well I've seen reports about individual pilots saying yeah this is happening but they seem to be speculating. They didn't seem to say, the ones I saw, maybe you saw something different. I didn't see anywhere the pilot said yes I'm calling around, I'm organizing people, we're definitely doing this. Have you seen that? I haven't seen it. I've seen unknown sources and something close to anonymous. So I'm asking you. Somebody says they saw that last night on Tucker. On Tucker. Didn't seem to be guessing. Okay so I'm going to take that as a fact that there's somebody who is not an anonymous source. Okay, on the same page so far that it is not an anonymous source.

Is the source a disgruntled current or ex-employee? Disgruntled employee. Disgruntled employee is a big flag so there's one I'd watch out for, that one. Disgruntled employee.

Is it only being reported as a fact on one of the networks or neither? Is CNN and Fox News, are they both reporting that the pilots are doing an action that the pilots are intentionally doing that? Anybody, does anybody know that? Is CNN saying that the pilots are doing this intentionally and also Fox News? CNN is reporting the weather angle. Can I get a confirmation on that because I'm only hearing it in a comment? Can I get anybody else who watches enough CNN? It looks like CNN's not reporting it as a pilot thing. All right, you need a time filter maybe. All right, interesting. So we don't know. Axios is reporting it. All right so I'm going to put a question on that one but we'll circle back to that one.

Is it too on the nose? Is it too like right on? Yeah it kind of is, isn't it? Isn't the story kind of perfect? The airline pilots are often military people and they're ex-military people and they're fighting another freedom thing for the United States. It's not complicated though. It's sort of straightforward. Hey we don't like this so we're protesting. So I'm not going to say it's too on the nose because it's too ordinary. Like it would be easy to be on the nose in such a simple situation.

Is the correlation being treated as causation? Hmm,