#Clockedin with Jordan Edwards

Stop Being The Hero To Build A Company

• Jordan Edwards • Season 5 • Episode 275

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Stop trying to be the hero who carries everything. We dig into how Kasim built one of the most respected performance marketing agencies by mastering people, not platforms—then sold it for eight figures without ever being the technician. If you’ve felt stuck doing “all the things,” this conversation hands you a different operating system.

We start with the mindset flip: a real business distributes weight through systems and talent. Kasim explains why paying 10% above the top of market attracts peak performers who deliver nonlinear results, and how a single great vendor can multiply margins by eliminating chaos. We unpack when to hire vendors versus employees, why your first hire should be an executive assistant, and how to move from commodity thinking to a culture that values craftsmanship and autonomy.

Traffic fuels everything, so we break down the YouTube strategy that drove seven to eight‑month sales cycles with low CAC and high trust. Daily long‑form videos, no gatekeeping, retention over clickbait, and titles/thumbnails that promise exactly what the content delivers. Authenticity beats production value; useful content compounds authority and doubles as a recruiting magnet for elite talent. Then we get tactical on delegation: define the output and inputs, stay out of the middle, correct only what’s objectively wrong, and preserve authorship so ownership can flourish.

We zoom out to exits and wealth creation: why real estate is where money goes after it’s made, how multiples expand as EBITDA grows, and why a deliberate path to an exit is the most reliable route to life‑changing capital. Along the way, we touch on purpose after liquidity, clearing your slate to chase nine‑figure potential, and the discipline to choose opportunities that can truly move the needle.

If you’re ready to trade hustle for leverage—hire the best, build authority you own, delegate outcomes, and aim for a multiple that changes your life—this one’s for you. Enjoy the conversation, share it with a founder who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss new episodes.

To Learn more about Kasim Aslam: 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasimaslam

To Reach Jordan:

Email: Jordan@Edwards.Consulting

Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ejFXH1_BjdnxG4J8u93Zw

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jordan.edwards.7503

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanfedwards/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanedwards5/



Hope you find value in this. If so please provide a 5-star and drop a review.

Complimentary Edwards Consulting Session: https://calendly.com/jordan-edwardsconsulting/30min

SPEAKER_01:

Hey, what's going on, guys? I got a special guest here today. We have Kassam. He's built one of the most respected performance marketing agencies in the world, not just by mastering Google ads, but by mastering people. From hiring and delegation to communication culture, he's figured out how to turn chaos into clarity. Today we're going to dive into the frameworks that allow small business to thrive, how you can hire, lead, and build with purpose. You've said it before that every person needs support. As a founder and leader, what does support look like to you? And why do you think so many leaders overlook this?

SPEAKER_00:

I think people want to be the hero. And it's damaging on every level of analysis. It's damaging for them, it's damaging for their staff, it's damaging for their customers. For as long as you are the hero, you're always going to have to be the one bearing the load, because that's what the hero does. So I think the minute you put yourself in a position to be uh to be served in a way that would be symbiotic, uh, that's when you actually really start building a business. Because until then, what you're doing is you're building something of a pulpit. You know what I mean? You're you're building just this thing that can elevate your position in the mind and eyes of others, and it does that, and it does it really well, you know. Uh, but it's always going to be everything is on you and it's on your shoulders. And so the minute you're willing to allow the weight to be borne by any other entity or mechanism within the confines of your business structure, uh, you now actually have a business instead of just owning a job. But it requires exactly what you just said, which is a it's a it's a change in paradigm.

SPEAKER_01:

Um that's when you look at someone who's like, Oh, I'm gonna be really good at landscaping, I should open a landscaping business. And it's like, you should not be doing the work. Yeah, you should actually hire out the work. And so for you, when did this concept come to be? Because obviously, when we start in business, everyone's like, I have to be the hero. Um, or maybe you weren't the hero. How did that start for you?

SPEAKER_00:

I lucked out, dude. I uh I wanted to be an actor as a kid, so I spent most of my free time and not even free time, I spent most of my time on set. Um, and the joke is hurry up and wait. And so you have all of this, all of this dead time, but it's very sporadic and it's impossible to schedule around because you don't know when they're gonna need you, when they're not, when your scene's wrapped, when it is, you know, like and and you'll be on the call sheet and then they won't need you for the entire day, and then you you won't be on the call sheet for tomorrow and they will need you, which that environment doesn't lend itself to work. You know what I mean? So the thing that was helpful for me is I didn't want to be the hero in business because I wanted to be the hero on screen. And so when I was building businesses, I set out to do things that didn't require me. That was the prerequisite, that was the buyback. It's a buy box. So I would try like medical, I just started a medical and legal transcription company and I was horrible at it. We it was it was the worst business. Not the I've I've started really, really, really bad businesses, but uh I failed miserably at it. And the thesis was man, if I could just sell medical and legal transcription, you know, doctors send in the audio recordings, and then I would outsource the transcription to somebody else. I don't want to be a transcriptionist, I just wanted something that made me money while I did the thing that I loved. And I ended up not making it as an actor, obviously. But the the underlying need really established the correct framework for entrepreneurship, which I stumbled into by accident.

SPEAKER_01:

And how how'd you stumble into it by accident?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, exactly that. I'm trying to be an actor, I want to make money, and I want to make money without my direct intervention, right? So I I was already trying to build something that didn't require, you know, the Pavlovian prompt response, time for money framing. And uh that's that's what a business is.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I think it I think it's really good for the audience to understand that because a lot of us think the business has to be I have to do everything. And it's how do we actually do the opposite of that? And I like how you started it from the front, where it was in the beginning, you're like, I don't want to do any of this. So, how are you finding people to do the work for you?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, in the beginning, I was not very well. I the the entire entrepreneurial world is taught to hire wrong. Um, people are are are thought of and spoken about as commodities, and this is true. And in, I mean, you pull, I swear to god, any business book off the shelf, people that I love, you know what I mean? Dalio and Covey and Maxwell, it doesn't matter. And and you know that because of the way that you talk about people. So you might say something like, oh, I need to hire a graphic designer, or you know, I really need to find a neurosurgeon, or you know, it's it's time for us to get the Ruby on Rails developer, or whatever. Those are those are conversations of commodity. And the issue with the commodity is a commodity is by definition easily exchangeable. So if you have a can of beans and I have a can of beans and we swap, neither of us are better or worse off than we were moments before. But if you have a CPA and I have a CPA and we swap, that's catastrophically damaging to the rest of my financial life. Uh and yet people still find hire and train people as though they're commodities. And the way that you buy a commodity, the only way to buy a commodity if you're smart is to pay the least and get the most. And so that's that's the entire framing of how we engage with humanity inside of the professional sphere of employment is wrong. And that's what I was doing. I was trying to find the cheapest humans I possibly could to do the most work and then just play the arbitrage game. And it it failed only every time. Just only every time. And and what I finally realized, and I think every entrepreneur reaches this point pretty naturally, is you know what? I'm sick of dummies, I'm sick of just people that don't pull their weight. I want to find the best. How do I find the best? And then I backed into a business model that allowed me to work with the best. And suddenly, actually, this vendor, interestingly, that I'm talking about, is still around. Her name's Shamim Rajani. Shamem runs a company called Genitech Solutions out of Pakistan. And I found her with a Google search, dude. Like I kept trying to find the cheapest people on freelancer, Upwork, or whatever the sites were at the time. Upwork was called something else, I don't remember what. Um, and it was just headache after headache after headache after headache. So I'd go and I'd sell a website for three grand and I'd try to find a vendor that would do it for 300 bucks, and I'd try to put 2700 bucks in my pocket or whatever. That was the example. And I finally decided, you know what, I'm not doing this anymore. And I went and I found somebody that was really hyper competent, and that was Shamem. I found her on a Google search, and I was just Googling best offshore web company or best web development company, Pakistan, or whatever. I forgot what the exact thing was, and she was so much more expensive than every vendor I've ever worked with. At the time, I I could have a website built for 300 bucks and she was charging me a thousand. And I thought this is insane, but something magic happened, which is I didn't run into any problems. She actually delivered. And it was this whole new, you know, realization that, oh, if I have a competent vendor, I don't have to worry about anything. And what was really funny is I got to move from doing bargain basement bullshit bills for three grand a pop to spent to charging 10 or 20 or 50. And so the fact that her cost was a little more, you know, I went from paying 300 to 1,000 or a little more than a thousand. Let's say I paid three or five even, but I could, I could charge 10x or 20x or 100x, whatever I was charging. Um, it really brought in my horizons is in terms of what competence is worth in an entrepreneurial environment. And ever since then, dude, I've been just like, just give me the best. Because there's no way the math doesn't work in your favor when you have the best. That the, you know, the arbitrage opportunity becomes the it's it's leverage. Archimedes said, you know, what is it? I could move the earth. Just give me a place to stand and a stick long enough, and I could move the earth. And that leverage comes from that competence. And it's it's true for vendors, but it's exponentially more true for employees. So go find the best.

SPEAKER_01:

So when you have the best, it allows them to show and when when you say vendors and employees, when is it a time for someone to bring on an employee versus the vendor relationship?

SPEAKER_00:

It depends on the role. I think everybody's first hire should be an executive assistant. And I think that's actually pretty obvious. Like if you just look at the business landscape, you could teach a toddler business and then say, who's the first person I should hire? And if the toddler had the words, they'd say you should hire an executive assistant. Because you, as a business owner, do so much in different categories, there's no one role that could take enough off of you to justify their own existence. But an executive assistant is the only role that we allow to have no job description. The job description is just help me. And so before you decide vendor, contractor, employer, agency, whatever, go hire yourself an EA. And that EA scales, and I hate that word by the way, scale. It's a dirty word in the business community now, but I'll use it here. That EA scales your least scalable resource, which is you. And then once you've been scaled, then you can step back and look at your constraints. And the question, you know, vendor or employee depends heavily, entirely on the constraint. What I like to do is I like to hire vendors when I don't know how to do something. So for instance, I built the number one ranked Google Ads agency in the world. We were the best Google Ads agency that ever existed. Everybody knew it. Um, we sold in October of 2022 for an eight-figure sum to a soft bank backed Martech company. Like we did it. We built the pinnacle of something and then got out right at the top. What's interesting about it is fun open air conspiracy. I've never run a Google Ads campaign myself and then in my life. I wouldn't know how to. And when I started the agency as a Google Ads agency, we didn't have Google Ads in-house. I outsourced it to the best agency I could find. I made, I still have the the spreadsheet of the research I did. I think I called, I mean, I look researched hundreds of agencies, and then I had 24 meaningful conversations, like interviews, and I chose the one that I thought was the best, both in terms of competence and size. Like they'd actually give a shit about us. They weren't so big that we would just be a knit. Yeah. And I outsourced Google Ads for the first two years. And I ended up outrunning them. That relationship exploded because they were, I don't know, we had differ differences of opinions as far as values are concerned. But it was still valuable for me because they taught me everything I needed to know about running a Google Ads engine. All I had to do was be a sales engine. That was sales and client management, and then all the fulfillment was being done by them. And they were the ones teaching us how to do the fulfillment, how to do the client management. I mean, my my my contracts and templates, the way I approached customers, uh, all of the arbitrary, what would you say, the triage that we would do with problems came from learning lessons with them. So that when I did bring it in-house, my cogs went down by, dude, I don't know. It was it was insane. I remember it was like, I think I had$30,000 to$40,000 a month, straight to the bottom line in savings. So imagine, and I we were a small company at that point, you know. I don't know how many employees I had, but imagine all of a sudden putting 30 to 40 grand a month in your pocket, you know, and it's because they were the best, but they were expensive. And I'd backed into a model that still allowed me to be profitable with their cost to me.

SPEAKER_01:

So when I did bring in the house, so then when you cut it down, it was even fair.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I continue to charge the way that I charged, and I could do that because we were the best.

SPEAKER_01:

And the way the thing I really liked was there's two parts. One is that you did your research. I feel like most of the time people literally just talk to three or four people, if that sometimes they talk to one and they're like decision made, and that will run you six months of errors, six months of problems, and it just doesn't give you those answers. So you're like, I looked through 24 different people, which is the way to vet people, which is really awesome. And then when you start diving into it, you're like, I only have to be the salesperson. Where did that come from? And where were you getting these uh clients from? Because I feel like that's the challenge where most people are sitting there going, That's amazing. How how are these clients coming about, though?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So, you know, what's funny about the entrepreneurial endeavor is I think traffic is the most important part of any business. My new buy box for starting a business, after I made my exit, the worst thing you can do to poor people is give us money because we think we become investors. After I made my exit, all I do now is build build and buy businesses. And the the only businesses I will build or buy are businesses where I know where the traffic is coming from. Because that's the question. So when I started a Google Ads agency, I didn't know. And dude, I tried everything. I was trolling ThumbTech on a regular basis. We were running paid ads, we were doing social, we were doing organic, we were doing SEO. And the thing that really worked for me for Solutions 8 specifically was YouTube. Really? YouTube. YouTube, I think, is the undiscovered bastion from an agency perspective. Because if you think about YouTube, it's the only content network that is a rule is middle of the funnel.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So all content networks are either top of the funnel, which would be like Meta or TikTok or Pinterest or whatever, which is people just roaming around, maybe problem aware, probably not, that you then have to go grab and drag to the bottom of the funnel. Or they're to the bottom of the funnel, which would be like Google Ads or Reddit Ads or somebody saying, you know, my my toe burns. What kind of ointment do I need? Like that's a bottom of the funnel customer that you can sell ointment to. The problem with that customer or that prospect is they're extraordinarily expensive in terms of traffic cost. So top of the funnel, cheap traffic, but takes forever to nurture, and it's very diluted. Bottom of the funnel, high quality traffic, super expensive. YouTube's right in the middle. YouTube is a group of people that are there to learn. If you're on YouTube, you're there to learn. Even if you're being entertained, it's infotainment to steal from Patrick but David. Uh and it's a high quality prospect. Somebody who wants to learn is a high quality prospect. Uh, and what's really interesting is YouTube, you know, our sales cycle on YouTube was seven to eight months. It was seven to eight months. And I knew this because I would ask everybody, how did you hear about us? When I found out YouTube, dude, I would have prospects on the phone, I'd be like, dude, could you do me a huge favor? Would you mind just going back in your history and tell me the first video that you watched? Which YouTube shows you all of that. And we figured out that it was on average seven to eight months before somebody watched a video, from the time they watched the very first video to the time they came through and decided to be a customer. Most humans are not willing to invest that. Most people are like, I need customers now. And that is the thing that keeps them in this rat trap because agencies are paying literally thousands of dollars. The cost per acquisition on an agent customer is about$3,500, or it was when I sold my agency. The average CAC on an agency customer was$3,500 when I sold my agency in 2022. I bet you it's only gone up. I was paying, I don't know, nothing. I was just creating content. I shot a YouTube video every single day, and we had the most trafficked YouTube channel for Google Ads. We only had 30,000 subscribers when I sold, which adjusted for margin of error is zero. But in a little teeny tiny niche like Google Ads, and I did end up put a significant amount of money in it. But all that did, it didn't accelerate the timeline at all. It was still seven, eight months before the between the time somebody watched a video and became a customer, but it exposed me to way, way, way, way, way more people. By the time I sold, we were spending$250,000 a month in our own YouTube ads. But we were a big agency, you know, I had a hundred million dollars in ad spend on arrangement. I could afford to do that. Um, but you don't need to do that. Like if you started right now today shooting a YouTube video a day on whatever topic you purport to be an expert in, here's the thing is your competitors won't. So the ability to establish authority in any industry is actually pretty easy for the most part because most people are not willing to do that work. But we did the work. We did the work, and that's where all my customers came from. Not just my customers, dude, but more importantly, my employees. I had the best employees in the world because all I did was take people that were coming to me for education and training, take the people that were the top, asking the best questions. And dude, I was learning from people too. They would they would comment on my videos saying, Oh, you use this setting for this campaign, try this setting. I did this for another client. And and now all of a sudden I'm like, Do you want a job? And I got people that wanted to come work for us that were I dude, I had a handful of examples. One young man who's actually in my my incubator, Osama. Usama was making more money as a freelancer than my salary offer or than I could have afforded to offer him because he was already so effective. He came and worked for Solutions 8 because he wanted the education and the growth. Peak performers want growth. And he kept all of his freelance clients, of course. It was extraordinary. He wasn't the only one. There are quite a few people like that that I couldn't have afforded otherwise, except competence attracts competence. Want to work with the best. And so I ended up with the best people, which further, you know, it it just it the snowball grew as I got the best people, we did the best work, and then we got the best customers, and then we did the best work, and then we got the best people, and we did the best work, and so on and so forth until until I sold.

SPEAKER_01:

And for you, when you're saying make YouTube videos daily, are you making like a three-minute video? Are you making like a 10-minute? Are you making an after?

SPEAKER_00:

So this comes from Evan Carmichael. I lucked out and then I ended up sitting next to Evan at a uh at an event. If you don't know Evan, he's one of the smartest content creators on the planet. Really, really smart guy, very kind, very giving, uh, funny as hell. Evan um taught me five things for YouTube. He said, You need to shoot a video every single day, every business day, because uh, if the algorithm doesn't trust that you're going to be consistent, it will not recommend you. And when he told me this, he said it's every it's every day for 90 days. I think since then, because this was, I don't know, four or five year old conversation, it's probably every day for 180 days. I think the algorithms have gotten a little more stringent. So you have to be willing to shoot a video every single day for 180 days and see nothing. Crickets, zeros, goose eggs. It's soul sucking, it's hard. But if you stay consistent, you'll begin to get recommended. And as soon as you get recommended, that's when the snowball starts. Now, your question was how long should the video be? Here are the five things Evan taught me. One, every day, two, 10 minutes or longer. Long form videos and really teach something. Dive deep. Don't do any of that fake info marketer bullshit where you give them the first four steps in a five-step process, but if they want the fifth step, they have to come give you money. Stop that. Give them all five steps and then the sixth bonus step that you normally think, oh, I can't tell clients this or they won't hire me. I promise you they will. Nobody wants to do this themselves. So it's a 10-minute video. The call to action is not call me, schedule a time, buy my thing, sign up, go to my newsletter, et cetera. The call to action is watch this other video. Uh, what Evan taught me was retention is the most important key performance indicator inside of YouTube by a million miles. YouTube wants people in YouTube. So if your videos start sucking people out of YouTube, no matter how good they are, you're not going to get recommended. Instead, you want to recommend other YouTube videos, not just your own, other people's. So every single day, 10 minutes, uh, call to action is watch other videos. Number four, you need a 70% retention at the 60 second mark. 70% retention at the 60 second mark. What that means is in a 10-minute video or longer, 70% of the people that start the video need to still be watching at 60 seconds. That's hard. That's a high, high, high, high uh expectation. What you need to do is not have clickbait bullshit titles. Because if your clickbait bullshit title says, you know, watch me throw my grandma off the roof. Well, yeah, I'm gonna watch that. I'll click that video. But then in if if you haven't thrown an old woman off of a roof of a building in seven seconds, I'm gone. Right? So watch me throw my grandma off the roof. If you're trying to, let's say you're trying to shoot a video on probate and teaching people how to create wills, and you take a picture of your grandma and throw off the roof and then actually try, you're gonna have a precipitous drop immediately, which is what a lot of people try to do. Instead, what you need is a boring ass title that says, I'd like to talk to you about, you know, you learn how probate works for your elder elderly relative. And you're like, dude, that's not gonna get anywhere near as many views. You're right, but it's gonna get more quality views, and you're gonna be able to maintain 70% retention at the 60-second mark. There's continuity between what you're saying they're gonna get and what they're gonna get. Uh, that's rule number four. And then rule number five is more important than the content, sadly, is the title and the description. Excuse me, the title and the thumbnail. If your title and your thumbnail aren't good, aren't catchy, aren't clickable, aren't attractive, and remember, don't make them so attractive that people click and then get pissed off and click away, but you're you're you're not gonna get any traction. Mr. B says that he spends more time brainstorming the thumbnail of the video than he does the video itself. And now it's not just the thumbnail any longer, because again, this is a five-year-old conversation, it's probably the thumbnail and the pre-roll, which is like the first five to ten seconds need to be really interesting because you know, when you're scrolling through YouTube, it used to be a thumbnail that you see, now it's a pre-roll. But if you do that, if you shoot a video every single day for 180 days and you adhere to those rules, you'll be the most celebrated thought leader in your space. And that's true in every space except maybe the most crowded, but even those, you know, I've got a friend, Sunit Agarwal, he's in my mastermind. He's the number one selling realtor in the state of California. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. Sunit moves more units than any other realty group in the state. He's a beast. And what's really interesting is when he started, he started in reality after the crash, he started with nothing. Uh, he'd lost his ass in a whole other industry. It's funny, he's been called the king of California cannabis and the king of California Realty in the same decade. This man just conquers industries and he does it the same way. He starts creating content and he builds authority. So anybody who's like, oh, my industry is saturated. I don't know. I see people come from behind all the time. And just because they're willing to be consistent and a little creative, you can conquer just about any industry.

SPEAKER_01:

And do you think it has to be like could people just record it on Zoom, or do they have to record it in this big studio?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, dude, go to my YouTube channel, go to Solutions 8, go watch the solution 8 videos. They're garbage. My production value, my production quality, it's what you see now. It's this bullshit webcam that I have that I've had for, I bet you this is I bet dude, I bet you this is a seven or eight-year-old. I've got a Logitech C90. Somebody tell me it was the very first time Logitech made a 1080 webcam. I've never changed. You know, I have a good audio, I have a good mic, because my my business partner bought it for me. But uh no, as long as people can hear and see, like, don't make it so bad. You can't go shoot on your old freaking flip phone, you know, plug-in. But as long as the the the quality isn't so bad that it's a problem, if your content's good, people shouldn't worry about quality after the first three seconds. And you know that's true because go look at the videos you pay attention to. As a matter of fact, I had a hundred million dollars in ad spend under management, a lot of that video ads. And what we found was authenticity beats production value every single time. People want to feel like they're really talking to a real real life human, they don't want a billion-dollar Coca-Cola commercial because then you end up with something called banner blindness, which is which is a scientifically studied and psychological proven uh uh byproduct of seeing things that are ultra-produced, you instantly kind of assume things about that existing at a distance, banner blindness, where if it's just you and it feels like it's your buddy in his, you know, wherever, in his office or in his car, those are the things that people engage with now. That's what we've been taught. That's what social media's taught us is decreased production quality's authenticity. So you want a little shake, you know what I mean? You want you want to be holding it, you want it to just feel real.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you want it to be helping people right then and there, and they're all looking on YouTube for their solution, so they don't really care. I was thinking about the last couple of videos I watched, I didn't even watch them, I just listened. Yeah, and I was like, I gave the full retention. Um, so for you, how how do you incentivize these people to want to work with you? Because I understand that that's a big challenge for when people are hiring, they're like, Do I overpay? Do I give them equity? Like, how do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, you want to pay so what the because go back to the commodity conversation. When you're buying commodities, the smart way to buy commodity is pay the least and get the most. And so when people hire humans because they treat humans like commodities, you know, just we'll use round numbers because I have a 10th grade education. Let's say that you want to hire a Ruby on Rails developer. And let's say a Ruby on Rails developer is 80 to 100 grand. I'm sure they're more than that, but let's just say, for round numbers, they're 80 to 100 grand a year. The commodity mind in you says, okay, I want to try to get the best developer I can for 79.9. And then you, and then that's the game that you're playing. And the developers are trying to pull you up and you're trying to pull them down. What I tell people is pay 10% more than the high watermark. And then every douchebag on the planet that I've ever worked with and consulted on this topic has said, no, costum, you don't understand. You don't understand my margins, you don't understand the business, you don't understand our profitability. It won't work. It can't work. My business doesn't work that way. And then I have to explain the Pareto distribution to them. And the Pareto distribution says, roughly speaking, that 20% of the inputs are responsible for 80% of the outputs. And what they don't understand is that number's fractal. And so 20% of, and this is true in every organic ecosystem, right? 20% of the criminals commit 80% of the crimes, 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue. But 20% of the employees in the world are responsible for 80% of the output. And the reason that the the fractal nature of that is important is because when you really understand the predator distribution, it's it's graded on something like a hockey stick. So just to uh zoom out real quick, imagine a thousand-person organization, okay? There's a thousand people in this organization. The predator distribution would say that 200 of those people are responsible for 80% of the output. And everybody, everybody looks at that and goes, Yeah, I know. I've seen those organizations as a kid. I worked at a call center, I've done whatever. I know that's true. Fine. Zoom in on those 200. Of those 200, 40 are responsible for 80% of that output. Zoom in on the 40. Eight are responsible for 80% of that output. What that means, if you do the math, is in a 1,000-person organization, one person is responsible for roughly 25% of the output, which is insane. And Jordan, I've seen it in every business that I've started. When I sold Solutions 8, we had$100 million in ad spend under management. We were uh an eight-figure exit. We were doing multi-seven figures in EBITDA. And one human being out of out of almost, I had 80 employees and then a bunch of contractors that probably made up 100 total, but let's say 80. Out of 80 employees, one person managed 40% of my revenue. His name was John Moran, he's the greatest Google Ads mine on earth. He's now famous in the Google Ads sphere. And most people look at that and say, like, oh no, that's a key man risk. Diversify the risk. What that means is you don't get to take advantage of the pretto distribution. So when you say, I can't afford to pay more, no, dummy, you can't afford not to pay more. Because when you're trying to pay the least, you get out of the thousand people, you get the people that the 800 that are doing the 20%. When you pay more, you don't get people that do 10% more, 50% more, 100% more. You get five times, 10 times, 100 times the math can't not work. So if you if you're willing to come with me on that premise, let's go back. I say pay 10% more than the high watermark. And then everybody looks at it and they go, okay, well, 10% more than 79.9%. No, no, no, no, no. Because the window for that Ruby on Rails developer was 80 to 100 grand. 10% more is$110,000. And people look at that and they go, Oh man, I'm trying to pay$79.99 and I want and I want you to go to 110, and they just can't wrap their tiny minds around it. But if they do, they get a human that they'll they'll never you'll never experience somebody, you'll never experience employment until you do this, dude, like this. Like it's amazing. You get people that run through walls. You get these bloodthirsty, deadly assassins, trained killers. And you don't have to manage them, you don't have to watch them, and you don't have to screenshot their desktop or make them, you know, like tie them with little leashes. They just, they just work, believe it or not. And I know this because I have 17 businesses, hundreds of employees, and this is what I do. And I'm I'm way more successful than I deserve to be. I've had three exits. I've built six multimillion dollar businesses, and I don't know how to do any of the things that I have. I have a I have a business. I own AEO.co. I'm the world authority in answer engine optimization. I don't know how to do that, but I've got a guy that's brilliant at it and he knows how to do it. I built the number one Google Ads agency in the world. I've never run a Google Ads campaign myself and in my life. I had the highest performing real estate investment campaign on the planet before I knew anything about lead generation or real estate. I built the number one, the largest English-speaking Montessori community in the world. And I'm not a trained Montessorian. I don't even have a college education, dude. It's just I know how to find people. And once you crack the talent code, that's the only code you need to crack as an entrepreneur. That's it. Every, every problem becomes a who-not how. Until you crack talent, every problem you have is yours. Oh, financial problem, I gotta learn finance. Oh, operations problem, gotta learn operations. Oh, marketing problem, I gotta learn marketing. As soon as you crack talent, oh, finance problem. Who's who's the best finance person? And and now I never have to worry about this ever again for the rest of my life.

SPEAKER_01:

And how do you that that's incredible because I mean you're looking at the world completely differently? And so for you, you went from one business to now then you sold it. Most people would go, Oh, you got you got your money and now retire, sit on a beach, do nothing. And now you're at 17 businesses. Like, how did how do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, dude, so I do I try to do the beach thing. I there's only so many my ties by the beach. It's everybody I know that's made an exit has had the exact same, it's the it's such it's an archetypal truth. It's so cliche, it's sad. You think like, oh, as soon as I have everybody's got this number, right? As soon as I've got I'm I'm I'm a decamillionaire. I've made I've made in mildly in excess of a decamillion net worth, and then I had a divorce, so I got down regulated a little bit, but I'm still I'm still wealthy. I never have to work again for the rest of my life if I don't want to. And I'm frugal, dude. I live in a home that's it's it's nice, but it's two standard deviations beneath my tax bracket. I drive a 40-year-old Honda. Like I don't do any of the bullshit people do. I don't need a San Diego Beach House, I don't need a Ferrari. Which means the the money, and even for the people that have those things, it's not the money. Everybody needs purpose, everybody needs to create, to contribute, to build. And so I did my ties by the beach for a year. I traveled, I took time off, uh, I contended with health issues. And then at a certain point, you're like, I need to do, I need to be productive. I need to, you know, and everybody does it a little bit differently. I had a buddy who made a made major exit. He went and bought a farm. He is a straight up farmer. Swear to God, dude, he did almost$100 million in his exit. He has a business partner, so take Less than$100 million, cut it in half, minus taxes. That's what he took home. That's a lot of money. It's more than I got. Yeah. And this fool, every morning Drake wakes up at 5 a.m. to feed chickens and drive a tractor because you need that. So for everybody who has this Tim Ferris four-hour work week, I promise you it won't work. I promise, just take, I swear to God, you're gonna get in 90 days, you're going to want to kill yourself. And I'm actually, I'm not being hyperbolic. Like it is depressing to not have purpose. Now, should I have 17 businesses? Absolutely not. That was a tactical miscalculation, and I'm just a kid in a candy screw that needs to focus. Because here's the problem I'm really good at seven and eight figures. Really good at seven and eight figures. I cannot crack the nine-figure code. And so all I do is instead of getting better, I take the cheater's way out, which is I go do it again. What I wish I did, Jordan, is I wish I just focused on one thing and said, I'm gonna get to that 100 million mark. And once I get to the 100 million mark, I'm gonna get to the billion mark. You know, like that's the way to level up. The way I did it, I think is the cheater's way. It was the coward's way. So I'm I'm still working with massaging myself and working myself out of my comfort zone.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, no, because you're absolutely right. And I appreciate the honesty there because you sit there and you start to realize like there's only so much time in the day. How do we focus on specific activities and how do we make the most of that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and there's businesses like I just sold my favorite business of all time was my Montessori agency. And I loved it because it was true mailbox money. I've been making multi-six figures net to me for eight years on 20 minutes a week, just meeting with the executive director. And that business can never be a hundred million dollar business, ever. So I sold it to a very good friend of mine, actually, on really favorable terms, because as much as I love the business, it's not about the 20 minutes a week. There's something, there's a psychological toll that everything you own takes on you. Yes. You know, because I I have to, I still, you know, I pretend like I'm only meeting with the executive director 20 minutes a week, but I'm still having conversations about it. I'm still looking at the PL. It still shows up in my bank account every time I scroll past. I still have to pay the credit card. There's just this toll, and there's only so many of those tolls you can have. And so right now I'm trying to clear my slate, and my new goal is I don't want to work on any opportunity that can't net me a hundred million dollars. And a hundred million, by the way, is accessible. If you don't think 100 million isn't accessible, like I'm a dummy dude, I'm a welfare baby with a 10th grade education, and I was able to do an eight-figure exit on two and a half million dollars net profit. Now, here's what I learned is my eight-figure exit on two and a half million dollars net profit, which is what the smart asses at Goldman Sachs call EBITDA, which is just a made-up acronym for net profit, as far as I've been able to discern. If I got from two and a half million to five, my multiple would have moved from the agencies my my size at the time were selling for for six to eight X. So six to eight times. So let's say eight. So you know, just to make the math easy, and two and a half million times eight would be 20 million. If I moved from two and a half million to five million, six to eight moves to ten to thirteen. So five times thirteen is sixty-five million dollars. So if and the multiples only go up as you increase. So if you get to 10 million, you could get potentially a 15x multiple. So if I want a hundred million dollars, and I'm a guy that's already learned how to build businesses that can do two, three, four, five million e-bit, that it's not hard to get from five to ten. Now, people hear a hundred million and they go, oh god, that's that's so that's so inaccessible to me. But when you back into what the numbers look like from an exit perspective, I swear to God, anybody can do it. Anybody can do it. You just have to be consistent. As a matter of fact, this is interesting. Fun fact. I learned this from Perry Belcher. Perry's writing a book called Big Exits. Perry studied wealth from the beginning of the industrialized society. And here's what he found everybody thinks that massive wealth comes from real estate. Because that's what we're taught. Oh, everybody who makes money makes some money for real estate. It's false. Real estate is where money goes after it's made. So there's a confirmation bias built into that data. Because if you look at all these rich people and you're like, where do these rich people make their money? Oh, they make their money in real estate. Well, then the the smart question is well, where did they get the money to invest in real estate? Guess the number one, the number one without a close second, the number one event that takes place before a person is able to invest in real estate, guess what it is?

SPEAKER_01:

Is it starting a business?

SPEAKER_00:

The business exit.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So if you weren't born to money, which is where a lot of massive wealth comes from. So let's say that you, you and I weren't born to money. So let's take that off the table. If you're not born to money, you don't plan on winning the lottery, which is one of the other big pockets, incidentally, oddly, the the single greatest common denominator behind wealth that comes to people who weren't born to it is starting and selling a business.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

The only real surefire path that you, me, or anybody else that's not a trust fund baby has to massive wealth is starting a business and exiting it. Now, here's why. And it makes sense. When you build a business, you can sell it for a multiple of earnings. What other framework in life allows you to do that? You're earning a certain amount of money per year, hopefully multi-six or multi-seven figures, because if you build a good business, that's what you earn. And somebody's gonna come and they're gonna pay you a decade in advance. Where in the world do you get 10 years worth of shit up front? There's not another framework or system that allows you to do that. You can't invest your way to wealth, you can't save your way to wealth. And I shouldn't say can't. There are people that do it. You know, Tony Robbins has the story about the guy that was a USPS worker. You know what I mean? Like, but that's what is that one in a hundred million? Like, show me the number of people that have done that versus the number of people that have gotten wealthy off of exits. Yeah, you can't predictably and reliably get wealthy off of just saving and investing. Yeah, and I and we know that as a statistical truism, right? They're the exception. You can predictably and reliably get wealthy off of building a business and selling a business. We know that as a statistical truism. So if you want to know how to get rich, build and build and sell a business and make it a study. There's so much education on it. It's not hard, it's tedious. Yeah, there's a difference. Hard is is calculus, is hard. Building a business is tedious. It's just waking up and doing the same shit every single day.

SPEAKER_01:

I was actually talking to my wife about that, where she's like, We we work so hard, and I'm like, it's not hard. Like, hard is the concept. I'm like, the people who are shoveling the dirt and doing the construction, that's hard. Like you doing mind work and selling, that's not hard. Yes, it's annoying sometimes, but it just takes time, and we don't realize that. So, so for you, I know you're writing this book, or the book's complete actually, um, about hiring the greatest hiring book of all time.

SPEAKER_00:

Tell me the biggest hiring book ever been. I'm allowed to say that, dude, because I didn't really write it as much as I stole it. So I spent 20 years of my life dedicated to the single quest of finding the best people in the world. And I just borrowed from every other human I ever encountered, listened to, read, watched, and I just amalgamated all of it. And then I, and I mean the words are mine, I put pen to page, but it's seven steps. You're seven steps away from the greatest hire you've ever made in your entire life. It's massively counterintuitive. So everything you think about hiring is wrong. For example, when they teach you to hire, they tell you to rely on resumes and interviews. I think resumes and interviews are quite literally worthless. And they're the very last thing that you do, if at all. So there's a bunch of very counterintuitive steps, but it's a framework that's built to create a funnel that will allow you to, once developed, attract peak performers in perpetuity for the rest of your life. So it's really difficult to build the first time. This is going to look and smell and feel like work because it is. But once you've built it, you never need to change it again, ever, unless your industry changes and what you're hiring for changes. And you'll forever have an evergreen pipeline of the best talent that you've ever encountered. Uh now, the book isn't enough. You have to execute on what's in the book, and it's really a workbook. It's not like a theory book, it's not philosophy. It's step one, step two, step three, step four, step five, step six, step seven. Once you've hired peak performers, the other thing you need to do, and this is the next book I'm writing on delegation, you need to treat them like peak performers. Because you can kill a peak performer in 90 days. You can bring a peak performer into a shit environment and just sap their soul. And then on day 91, you've got yourself a mediocre employee, and resuscitating them is damn near impossible. I'm sure it's possible. I just don't know how to do it. Uh, peak performers need to be treated like peak performers. Proto-talent has to be treated like proto talent.

SPEAKER_01:

What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00:

It's again, it's a different, it's an entirely different mindset. You're not the hero. They are. You're not, you're not important. You know, all these business owners that like, ah, and it's so funny, dude. So many business owners are terrified of competence and they don't even realize it. They don't want somebody smarter than them. Because then, oh, they're gonna steal my business and steal my clients. No, they're not. John Moran's a really good example. John Moran was the guy I mentioned or managed 40% of my revenue at Solutions 8. I always wondered, I'm like, why is this guy working for me? He could make literal millions working part-time by just stealing my clients and going and opening up his own shop. Why on earth is he working for me? I ended up giving him 10% of the business because he was so valuable. I own 90, he owned 10 when we sold. Yeah, guess what John Moran did after we sold Solutions 8?

SPEAKER_01:

Started his own.

SPEAKER_00:

Went and got another job. Really? Dude, here's the thing. And he's the first one to say this to me. He's like, bro, I don't want the head. He's an artist, he's a literal genius. He's a he's a technician, he's an engineer, he's a he's a he's a he's an inventor. He doesn't want to worry about HR and option. He doesn't want to, dude, and most people don't. Douglas Brackman wrote a book on it. Everybody, it should be required reading for all entrepreneurs. 95% of humanity doesn't have the chemical cocktail required to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are broken. We're broken. 5% of the world experiences the dopamine, serotonin, and the norepinephrine up and down cocktail that is the same cocktail, by the way, that you feel when you feel love. 5% of humanity experiences in pursuit of a goal. He calls it the hunter mind. You only experience that chemical satiation when you're pursuing a goal. As a matter of fact, when you achieve the goal, you get depressed. 95% of humans are the farmer minds who experience it upon the accomplishment of a goal. And by the way, neither is better nor worse. Entrepreneurs like to pretend we're better. We're not. We're not, I promise you. But if you can, if you wrap your head around the fact that most people aren't built like you, it gives you the opportunity to benefit from these massive talent pools. John Moran did not want to be an entrepreneur. So I got to benefit from the greatest school lad's mind in the world. And when we sold the business, he went and got another job. You know what I mean? And but that's because that's what he wants. That's what he wanted. Don't be afraid of peak performers. Now, can you retain them? No, we can talk about that if you want to. But what you should do is treat people once you have a peak performer, once you have pret of talent, authorship creates ownership. Here's what that means. Let them establish ownership over something and stop tweaking. Because when you look over somebody's shoulder and you ask them to do anything, you know, hey, accomplish this project, and they come back and say, Hey, boss, I accomplished the project. Your inclination as the boss is, oh, change the red to blue, change the square to a circle. I don't work there where the line is. And suddenly you've taken a grown-ass human and you've made them a toddler in their mind and in yours. And what do they do? They do what every human being in the world would do. They take their hand off the wheel. They're like, you know what? Jordan's driving. And the second worst thing that can happen is that initiative fails. Because now they're like, that wasn't me, dude. That was you. You're the one that told me red to blue, square to circle. I didn't do it my way. The first worst thing that could happen is it succeeds. Because now they have zero sense of ownership over it at all. So your job as a business owner, no confidence. That's right. Your job as a business owner is to shut the F up. Only critique that which is objectively wrong. So somebody comes to you and says, Hey, boss, I did the job, you can say, Hey, listen, love what you did. The studs have to be 18 inches apart because if they're not, the building inspector will come and make us do it again. That's an objective truth. But if you don't like the color, the layout, then, then, then, and then, then, then, shut up. It's none of your business because authorship will create ownership. And if you allow them the feeling of ownership, then you will be shocked at what people produce. Here's the other thing is if they do something that's objectively wrong, that's your fault. I call it the black box of delegation. The black box of delegation says, when you delegate something, number one, delegate projects, not tasks. If you delegate tasks, you're a micromanager in hiding. You delegate projects, not tasks. And when you delegate, you're allowed to tell them your desired end result. I want a house on the hill. Build me a house on the hill. That's the desired end result. And and my desired end result might be I need a three-story house with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and whatever. My desired end result, right? And then that's the output. And then you're allowed to define the input. I'm willing to spend this much money. These are the materials, these are the stakeholders, these are the vendors, these are the brand guidelines, these are the colors, these are the design, whatever, whatever, whatever. This is the input. Input, output. What happens in the middle? None of your business. And if you don't like the output, bet money 99 times out of 100, it's because you gave the wrong inputs. They didn't screw up, you did. So now you have to go back and be like, dude, I am so sorry. You did an extraordinary job. You are a peak performer. I really appreciate you. I messed up. I forgot to tell you, my wife wants French country. And what we have here is Art Deco. So I'm going to need you to just change the facade. I'm so my fault. My right?

SPEAKER_01:

And now full accountability for everybody.

SPEAKER_00:

Full accountability because I own a staffing agency. I have 100 EAs that work for me that I form out to overwhelmed entrepreneurs. And what's so funny is every time we have a problem, 99 times out of 100, it's not the EA, it's the entrepreneur. They don't manage expectations. They don't provide details. They don't tell people what they actually want. They they don't have realistic expectations.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, they don't even know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00:

And so, like, my job isn't managing EAs. The EAs are brilliant. It takes a thousand people to produce one EA. I have the best people in the whole wide world. My job is managing these idiot entrepreneurs. Communicate like a real huge, you know, let them know what they that what they have up front to work with. And if you can get good at that, you get to be like me. I make I'm a seven-figure income earner with a deck a million dollar net worth, 17 businesses, and I'm not overwhelmed. And I don't, I have time on my calendar, I have margin. My whole life has lived around my children because I know how to work through people. And dude, I love on people. Everybody who works for me, I hope, I hope this is true, experiences a greater quality of life than they would otherwise. I hire people in international markets, I pay them more than they'd ever make domestically, most of the time by many multiples. I let them work on semi-flexible schedules and I let them work from home. Who else does that? It has an anthropological implication. You know what I mean? Like if you imagine if everybody in the world had that. And so you you can change the world through the entrepreneurial endeavor.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I love that. I love that. We got the with Edwards Consulting, we have five pillars. So I'm gonna ask you them really quick and then um we'll get through it. So for you, what's your mental health like today so people can better understand you? Like on a on a one to ten, what do you think you're at today? And then what helps you have that higher level or lower level?

SPEAKER_00:

Six. Um, probably a six at best. I have mercury and lead poisoning. Uh and mercury poisoning, no one, there's no cure for it, at least in the Western world. I'm about to go to Switzerland for an experimental treatment. And if you're familiar with Mad Hatter's disease, that's what mercury poisoning causes. So, like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, he went mad because Hatters used to use mercury in the treatment of felt. And so mental health has always been like it's weird, dude. Like I feel often, I always have a headache. That's been a 20-year truth. And I feel what other people might characterize as depression, but I don't feel it like it's mine. It's just like it's like being in a sunny environment, but seeing a rain cloud that doesn't belong there, you know. So it's pretty easy to look at and be like, you know, that's not mine. And that feels like artificially installed. So my hope is I'm able to attend to whatever's going on. But uh the soft piece of advice I'd offer everybody is go get tested for pathogens. And that's not just heavy metals, it's heavy metals, toxins, parasites. Because we pick up all of this shit, especially in the in you know the post-industrialized world, two-thirds of the water in the United States has uranium in it. Two-thirds. And they just don't talk about it. Both my children, I had them tested, they were both uranium toxic. Super easy to get out. You just overdose them on vitamin C and clean up their diet. But if we didn't know, it leads to all these neurological disorders. So go test for pathogens because if you feel bad, if you're like for whatever reason, you got the moody blues or whatever you want to call it, as often as not, that's not you. You know, that's it's a parasite or a pathogen or a toxin or whatever, or heavy metals. And a lot of them are really easy to attend to. Some like mercury are you know difficult, but that's my little soapbox moment for the day.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that because it's important, and a lot of people aren't talking about it. What's your physical health like on a one to 10?

SPEAKER_00:

It's still bad, dude. That's the problem with mercury, is it shuts your whole body down. So I have I have Hashimoto's, I have vitiligo, I have pots, I have neurological issues, I have leaky gut. Mercury is one of the most toxic things that can be in the human body. It's so toxic it can't be in your bloodstream.

SPEAKER_01:

When did you start to realize this?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, my symptoms began in my late teens, like 19, maybe moving into 20. What were the symptoms? Uh, vitiligo was the first, so my skin just started to disappear. Oh, wow. Which was I thought was stress-induced because that's what they tell you. But then I've always had like gut issues, and then I started getting really bad headaches and neurological issues. And I hate all Western medicine. If every allopathic doctor, I think, should be dragged out of their house, sprayed down with cold water in the freezing cold, and then left to die. Like, I don't, I'm not even talking about dude, they're just the worst people in the world. It's all it's it's all this pharmaceutical scam. Like every allopathic doctor is just a drug.

SPEAKER_01:

And now I understand if you get shot, go to the ER, and you know, somebody's gonna say I mean it's really fascinating because I've had a lot of uh eastern doctors on, yeah, and they basically talk about these concepts of like you'll go to a doctor and they'll get a diagnosis, and then you go to another doctor and they're like that's not true, and you're like all they want to do is pump you from drugs, they know nothing about nutrition, they know nothing.

SPEAKER_00:

Brian, why doesn't why has no doctor ever talked to you about sunlight, clean water, fresh air? You know what I mean? They're basically just walking plants, it's not and yet you have these morons, and they don't the thing about it too is they're all they're all kind of complicit, they all kind of know, you know what I mean? Like it's just this weird, weird, weird environment. So it took me 15 years just to get a diagnosis because I was going to allopath. I thought, I thought all the natural medicine I did, I thought it was quack job, witchcraft, bullshit, twigs and berries, fairy tale, you know what I mean? And it I finally just got so desperate that when I began to pursue it, I was like, oh, this is what medicine's supposed to be. And then they're able to help me symptomatically, and you know, there's been a lot of improvement of the quality of life when I've ignored Western medicine. But it's not even, it's not even that they're wrong sometimes. It's that the the the the the establishment of health as a profit-making endeavor has put us in this cesspool of, dude, it's a pernicious evil. And if you look at like the pharmaceutical companies fund something to the tune of like 90% of all medical continuum education, wow, and every single pharmaceutical in a long enough timeline, all of them end up in class action lawsuits. Everything that we're pumping full people full of, 10 years from now is just gonna be a class action law because it's all poison. You know what I mean? It's just crazy to me that we allow this.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. You know, in America, you know what I mean, of all the places. Well, what do you what about community service philanthropy? What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00:

Um, I think that I hate nonprofits with everything inside of me. Uh I was a uh a vendor for NPower, which is a Bill Gates-funded nonprofit that helps other nonprofits to technology services. So I've worked with over a thousand nonprofits. I've been on the board of three nonprofit organizations, um, and I've worked at nonprofits at very, very, very high levels. Massive national, international nonprofits with huge spends. And the thing that is more or less, there was a study done, I think it's a UN study on NGOs. And here's what's sad nonprofits, generally speaking, perpetuate the issue they're there to fight. So if there's not if there's a nonprofit that's against whatever it insert, and maybe I won't be as incendiary, yeah. Um, but that they exacerbate issues more than anything else. So, like you look at some of the nonprofits that were tasked with addressing poverty in third world nations, they actually exacerbate poverty because of the way they approach things. I think I really like things like Kiva. Instead of like Kiva, Kiva.org, if you go there, you lend$25 to an entrepreneur in an emerging market, and then they're able to like buy a chicken or you know, whatever, and then and then they earn. And so I think we really, really, really careful. Now, there's some great nonprofits, dude. Smile train, which I give too often, and drilling freshwater wells, I've read, is like the biggest philanthropic input. Uh, but I I I think everything purpose-driven needs to be less about just cutting a check because usually that goes to the organization, and it needs to be more about where you put your time.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

Like where do you put your time?

SPEAKER_01:

And what what do you think about relationships? Like your relationships on a one to ten.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh man, I'm divorced. This is getting real sad, isn't it? Uh, I got a divorce in August of 2024. My I don't know if I can tell the story yet. Uh somebody in my ex-wife's family told a really pernicious lie about somebody in my family. Like one of the worst things you can accuse somebody of, and and and that person was uh demonstrably false. We knew that they were lying, and so uh my brother filed a defamation of character case and it destroyed my marriage, really, which was you know also really sad. Um and I think that's that that's been maybe one of the hardest things I've ever had to contend with from a relational perspective. My kids are the most important thing to me in the world. I don't view the parent-child framework as a relationship, though. You know what I mean? Like it's not really that because it doesn't feel reciprocal in ways. I don't think it's supposed to be. I don't think your kids are really supposed to give back to you, you know, at least not the way that some people frame it. It that ends up being really parasitic.

SPEAKER_01:

Um Well, well, it's quite interesting because with kids, it's more of a and this is what I tell a lot of clients that when they do the coaching, they're like, Oh, I have to pay for my parents, I have to do this, I have to do that. And I'm like, You didn't choose your parents. Yeah, you didn't like it's really your choice because a lot of the time we sit there and we think that we have to do these things, but like everything's a choice, especially like the only person I would think would be your partner. That's the one person you choose. No, everyone else just it becomes quite interesting because you start to sit there and realize it, and you're like, I didn't choose my parents, didn't choose my grandparents, didn't choose my brother. Like, yes, if it works out, great, but if it doesn't, you didn't choose them.

SPEAKER_00:

You know the the the saying blood is thicker than water? Yeah, did you know that we take it exactly we take it wrong? So everybody thinks blood is thicker than the water means family is better than friendship, but it it comes from I don't know if it's a biblical biblical quote, but it comes from a quote that says something like the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. And what that means is the blood of the covenant is the agreement that you would make with somebody on your own volition, because agreements used to make you literally signed and sealed in blood, and the water of the womb is just I just happen to have been in the same womb as you at some point. So blood is thicker than water, doesn't mean family is the most important thing, it means the relationships you forge outside of family are actually more important than the relationships that you've been, you know, that that providence has forced upon you.

SPEAKER_01:

That's quite interesting. That's really interesting. And the last one, I I wish we could dive deeper on this. We can go for four hours. Um, what uh what uh what about spirituality? That's the last one, the last pillar.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I believe uh it's weird. Carl DeYoung said this. They asked him, Do you believe in God? And he's like, I don't believe in God, I know I know God. Uh I believe in God. I don't even like those words though. Um I was raised Southern Baptist, and I have a bone to pick with organized religion. And if I start talking, it'll feel vitriolic, it'll actually feel very hateful, so I won't talk. Uh, but I believe so strongly in uh creator, and most of my beliefs are probably rooted in something like Christian ethic and nomenclature, just because that's how I was raised.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, but I despise the church, and yet I really like a lot of the concepts, you know, like Christ consciousness and the inherent divinity. But I think the church took it all and flipped it. Like the the penal, what is it, the penal atonement theory that's a thousand years old and it was made up to make you feel bad about yourself. You know what I mean? So like there's a bunch of things that the church has done that's that's actually exactly the opposite of what Christ would have wanted. And there's that that there's something about that narrative. If you take the the root truths, uh that's what appeals to me.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, and I appreciate you sharing that because when we sit when I sit here with spirituality, people are like, I'm this religion and that's my choice. And it's like religion is basically a set of values most of the time. And it's like, do you align with these values or do you not? And it's like, there's a thousand values. You might align with like seven of them, you might align with seven from somewhere else, but it's we don't take the time to actually think through like, I like this and I agree with this, versus you are this. It becomes quite interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, you're outsourcing your you're outsourcing the decision about who you are. I've got a cousin, I was at a wedding, I haven't seen him in years and years and years, and I love him to death. And he's a he's a Calvinist pastor. And he kept telling me, he kept saying, I'm a Calvinist, I'm a Calvinist. And later my brother is making fun of him, he goes, I'm a Calvinist. Let me tell you what Calvinism tells me about myself. You know, because at a certain point, I was like, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to whatever avatar exists that that you've chosen to adopt. Like, this isn't even a conversation that I need to have with you anymore. I can just go read a bunch of Calvinist doctrine because you just wholesale decided, oh, I'm a Calvinist, and so this is the shit that I believe. You know, where I don't mind somebody who goes, Calvinism appeals to me for this reason, this reason, this reason. Yes. But the minute it's just this wholesale adoption, which is most religious people, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, it between that and then you see it on social media and you just repeat a lot of the stuff that you see, bro, and don't have your own thoughts. I mean, it's literally the same concept. It's this idea of like the biggest challenge is that a lot of us don't independently think, and that's why I love the podcast because it allows me to have conversations with people who are like, I've gone through this, I've thought about this, this is what I believe.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, everybody's indoctrinated to some degree. The question is is just you know, how much of that could we possibly be aware of? You know, do fish in the ocean know that they're in water, type of whatever philosophical question is. Absolutely. I apologize, I've got to jump, buddy. I've got another podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I know, but so where can people learn more about you?

SPEAKER_00:

Go to costum.me, k a s I m.me. You can have my book for free. You can join my I have a free school community, it's free forever. I teach people how to achieve freedom through entrepreneurship. Um, and that's it. I'd love to be friends, man. I appreciate you having me. Absolutely.

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Jordan Edwards

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