The Real Jason Duncan Podcast

Everybody in business has been told the customer is always right. Herb Kelleher didn't buy it. When a woman Southwest's staff called Pen Pal wrote in to complain after every single flight, he answered her himself in about 60 seconds: "Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb."

In this episode, Jason reads this week's What's Real? article and traces the slogan back to where it started. The earliest anybody has found it in print is a 1905 Boston newspaper story about Marshall Field, but a man who wrote about Field's methods in 1919 said the real rule was to assume the customer is right until it's plain beyond all question that he isn't. Most people only quote the first half.

Then there's the popular "correction" that the full quote was about matters of taste. Jason used to say it himself. Snopes couldn't find it anywhere, including in the book Harry Selfridge wrote about his own store in 1918.

Jason explains what he calls the Customer-First Trap. Every time a boss sides with a customer who's yelling at his people, the customer learns that yelling works and the employee learns what she's worth to him. The refund costs you this month, and the employee you lose over it usually walks out a year later without telling you why.

He also covers Kelleher's order at Southwest, employees first and customers second, and Hal Rosenbluth's book The Customer Comes Second. He closes with Proverbs 27:23-24 and why Solomon told the owner to watch his flock before the buyer at the market.

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Everybody who's ever built or renovated a house tells the same story. The blown timeline, the blown budget, the contractor who stopped answering the phone. And everybody in the business says the same sentence about it: that's just how it is. It isn't. Construction is complicated. Chaos is a choice somebody made.

Jasmine and Jed Chambers started JASPER, a luxury design-build company in Nashville, in 2020. Jed has worked in construction since he was 19 and has spent more than two decades on high-end residential, historic restoration, and commercial jobs. Jasmine was finishing her business degree at Lipscomb University that year with four kids in four different schools, and she designed the systems and client experience JASPER runs on.

In this episode, they tell Jason why "that's just how it is" is a lie and what actually causes the chaos that sentence gets used to excuse.

Jed takes Jason back to a ladder on a 23,000 square foot home in Connecticut, where he told his mentor a piece of siding was pretty close and got asked whether it was pretty close or perfect. Jasmine talks about pulling out plaster and lath next to her dad on historic renovations, and the rule he taught her that 80 percent of the work is planning. They get into the trust bucket and the homeowner who thought nothing was happening on her job while the wiring and plumbing went in.

Jasmine tells the story behind the question that started JASPER: years of raising four kids inside their own renovations while friends who hired contractors kept telling them the same complaints. On one of their own projects, they tore out the kitchen the day after Thanksgiving and had stone countertops in by Christmas. She also explains why some clients living in beautiful custom homes are still miserable.

After the break, Jason asks them to talk straight to the builder down the road whose clients are miserable and who blames luck or price point. Jasmine's answer is radical ownership, including the projects where clients were disappointed and JASPER showed up and made it right. Jed adds what he says most residential builders are missing: a process with standard operating procedures the entire team understands.

Jed uses his minute to call the next generation into the trades. Jasmine gets the last word: you get what you expect, and no house will make you happy until you've built home inside yourself first.

Connect with Jasmine and Jed:

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You've heard that nice guys finish last since you were a kid. Leo Durocher, the man who gets credit for it, never said it. In 1946 he said the nice guys were in seventh place, and when Baseball Digest reprinted the column that fall, somebody changed "seventh" to "last."

In this episode, Jason reads this week's What's Real? article and puts the saying to a real test. Back in 1980, a political scientist named Robert Axelrod set up a computer tournament where programs played the Prisoner's Dilemma against each other, 200 rounds at a time. The winner was the shortest program in the field, and all it did was cooperate on the first move and then copy whatever the other side did last.

Axelrod ran a second tournament with 63 programs trying to beat it, and it won again. In the first one, every program in the top eight was one that never stabbed the other guy first.

Jason also takes on the 2012 Notre Dame study that found less agreeable men earned about 18 percent more, and explains why it doesn't settle the question. That kind of edge shows up in a one-time deal with somebody you'll never see again. Your marriage isn't a one-time deal, and neither is the vendor you'll need a favor from three years from now.

He calls it the Pushover Swap: treating nice and weak like they're the same word. He closes with Proverbs 3:3-4 and what Solomon says steadfast love and faithfulness will get you.

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Your life blows up. Diagnosis, divorce, the business goes under, whatever it is. And the first thing you do is try to get back to who you were before. Everybody does. It doesn't work. You're not getting that person back, and the people who actually recover are the ones who stop trying.

Nir Peled was on a video call in his home office when the stroke hit. He faked a bad internet connection so he wouldn't have to speak, and by the end of the meeting he couldn't move his hand to reach the mouse. He was 49. He had already survived a bombing, an allergic reaction that ended his career as an officer in an elite Israeli Defense Forces unit, a tsunami, a robbery in the Amazon, aggressive cancer, and a motorcycle accident. Six times he fought his way back to who he was before. The stroke was the first time that playbook failed. In this episode, the Fortune 500 technology executive and author of Beyond 100%: Rebuilding Life After It Breaks tells Jason why the goal everybody handed him, getting back to 100 percent, was the lie keeping him stuck.

Nir describes the measurement that ran his days in the ICU, where moving one finger left him sweating and exhausted, and the 1 percent a day rule he built from it. He talks about the cry he calls surrender, his first since his late teens, and why accepting the stroke turned out to be what let him recover. Then he takes Jason to a Manhattan coffee shop near the one-year mark, where walking the city at 85 percent convinced him he had hit his ceiling, until he realized the next day that the benchmark itself was the problem. The person he was measuring against was gone. They talk about what that means for anyone rebuilding after a diagnosis, a divorce, a bankruptcy, or a failed business, the line his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, gave him about eyes adjusting in the dark, and how a yoga class he could only half do became the work he does now: teaching recovery to brain injury survivors who walk in wanting exactly what he once wanted.

Connect with Nir:

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The 10,000-hour rule came from one study of violin students in Berlin, published in 1993. The man who ran that study spent the rest of his life saying Malcolm Gladwell misread it.

Jason has read every book Gladwell has written, and Outliers might be his favorite. So when he went looking at the research behind the most famous idea in it and found out the number was an average, half the top violinists hadn't reached it, and those students weren't masters anyway, he was shocked. He still likes the books. But Gladwell wrote something that isn't true, and a lot of people built their idea of what it takes to get good at something on top of it.

Then the part that actually matters. Anders Ericsson's real finding wasn't about hours. It was about a specific kind of hour, the uncomfortable kind, aimed at what you're bad at, with a teacher standing behind you telling you to do it again. Jason calls the mistake the Odometer Lie, the habit of judging yourself and everybody else by how much time is on the clock instead of what the time contained. Twenty years of experience can mean twenty years of being good at something, or twenty years of being a jerk nobody corrected.

Also in this one: why Gladwell could have picked 7,400 hours instead, the chess masters who needed 3,000 hours and the ones who needed 23,000, the 2014 study that pushed back on Ericsson and what both sides still agree on, the painter who spends 10,000 hours alone in his garage, and Proverb 27:17 on why nobody gets sharp by himself.

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You know how rich people got rich. Somebody got cheated, somebody smaller got stepped on. My guest grew up believing every word of that, then became a millionaire himself and found out who's actually funding the help he used to need.

Anthony Trucks went into foster care at three years old and was adopted at fourteen. He grew up in a house where the rule about money got said out loud, more than once: if somebody has a million dollars, they burned somebody to get it. He earned a football scholarship, reached the NFL, lost that to a shoulder injury, built a gym business on the other side of it, and now coaches people through what he calls identity shift. Somewhere in that climb, the rule stopped matching anything he was actually seeing.

In this conversation, Anthony names where the belief came from and why it was so comfortable to keep. He walks through the slow erosion of it: the college donors who had no reason to be kind and were anyway, the agents and neighbors who had money and weren't villains, the business owners making a million a year who turned out to be decent people. He and Jason get into why the lie survives, from a misread verse about the love of money to the political version of bread and circuses to the fact that the billionaire is the bad guy in almost every movie we buy a ticket to watch. Anthony talks about what it was like to receive help as a foster kid and believe he was just collecting what he was owed, and what changed when he understood that nobody owed him anything. He explains the law of marginal utility with hamburgers, describes what most people with real money actually look like, and puts two men side by side at fifty: one who kept the belief and stayed clean and broke, and one who didn't. His answer on what that belief costs over another five years is the part worth sitting with.

This is Anthony's second time on the show. He was here in 2021, back when it went by a different name.

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Benjamin Franklin wrote "time is money" in 1748 as advice to a shopkeeper about a wasted afternoon. America turned it into a way of life, and the research says it's been costing us ever since.

This is episode 400, and the first Wednesday edition Jason has ever put on video. Every hundred episodes he's done something different, and this time he opens with why the show exists at all: what he noticed in 350 interviews with successful people, why he changed the format, what's happened to the audience since, and why you have his permission to disagree with him.

Then this week's What's Real? edition. Jason walks through what Franklin actually meant, how the sentence got inflated into a philosophy, and what Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer found when they studied people who put a dollar figure on their hours: more rushed, less generous, less able to enjoy a piece of music. He takes apart the "buy back your time" formula, admits he's used the phrase himself, and lays out a simple test that shows time and money were never the same kind of thing.

Also in this one: the 1719 London newspaper that printed the phrase before Franklin did, the Einstein objection and why it doesn't apply to you, the one thing money actually buys, and Ephesians 5:15-16, which sounds like Franklin until you look at what the time is being bought out of.

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Every business owner believes there's a stage where it finally gets easier. Build the systems, hire the right people, and one day the thing runs without you. Erik Huberman has spent twelve years building a company that has scaled more than 5,000 brands, and he says that stage does not exist.

Erik Huberman is the founder and CEO of Hawke Media, which he started with no outside money in 2014 and still owns 100 percent of today. Before Hawke, he founded and sold two e-commerce companies by the age of 26. He's the author of The Hawke Method.

Erik traces the lie back to what he calls the internet charlatans, the ones posting from a beach about the team running everything back home. Nobody is going to run your company the way you run it, because nobody else has what you have on the line. If your COO blows up the business, he gets another job. If you lose it, you lose everything. Erik brought in a full executive team years ago and believed the day-to-day was finally handled. They were telling him what he wanted to hear while the company went into a downward spiral. It cost millions, six months of bracing for the next thing to fall, and a year and a half to feel like himself again. It landed the same week he lost his dad, with his first child two months away.

Jason doesn't let all of it stand. He tells Erik that passive is a fantasy, but twenty hours a week isn't, and that his clients get there without losing revenue or profit. Erik takes the point and draws his own line. There's no version of this where you still care how the business grows and somebody else runs it. If you want out, build something a buyer wants, sell it, and be done. What changed for Erik wasn't finding the exit. He spent two years rebuilding the CEO job into one he no longer wants out of.

Also in this one: the only two reasons businesses fail, the 8 p.m. phone call that shows the gap between an owner and an employee, what 25 acquired agencies and 250 employees did to his week, and the Greek restaurant line his head of sales uses on him. Erik closes by telling you to go in with your eyes open about what happens when you hand your company to someone else.

Connect with Erik Huberman:

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Somewhere in your phone or on a whiteboard in your office, there's a number and a date. The number is what you think you need. The date is when you finally get to stop. But say the word retire out loud and try to describe what it actually means for a Tuesday in your life. Most people can describe the picture from the commercial. Very few can describe the Tuesday.

Jason traces where the idea actually came from, and corrects the version almost everybody repeats wrong. Germany set the first pension age at seventy, not 65. Bismarck was 74. America didn't copy him, and the number came out of an actuarial calculation about what was affordable.

Nobody in that story ever asked what a good final chapter looks like for a human being. It was a benefit built for industrial workers whose bodies had been used up, and roughly ninety percent of covered German workers left on disability before they ever reached seventy.

The alternative isn't working until you drop. It's building something that produces without you standing in it.

Show Notes

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Work hard enough and stay loyal to what you built, and it will work out. Rich Tarity believed that right up until he sat down with his two business partners at a Philadelphia cheesesteak joint and slid a separation agreement across the table.

Rich Tarity has spent 27 years building technology companies. He has founded, scaled, and exited multiple businesses, including one he grew past $10 million in revenue. Today he is the co-founder and CEO of truCX and the bestselling author of The Intelligence Within, a book about getting organizations out of thinking that stopped being true a long time ago. But the lie he came on this show to take apart is the one that cost him the most, and it is the one nobody warns you about, because it does not look like a lie. It looks like character.

He started his first company at 26, two months after buying his first car and his first townhome. He brought in the VP of sales who had hired him, then another top rep, and split the cap table into thirds. Three and a half years later he was doing most of the selling and most of the building, and the resentment was stacking up faster than the revenue. He took a fair buyout at one of the least profitable points in the company's history, sat out a full year on a non-compete, and started over. Six months into the new business, with two employees, he was at $1.5 million in revenue with a seven-figure Viacom deal and accounts including Clarks, CEI Group, MTV and CMT.

In this conversation, Rich walks through the lunch where he ended the partnership and what he had to stop believing about himself to say it out loud. He explains why splitting equity into equal thirds at 27 was a mistake he would never repeat, and how he now decides who earns equity based on value creation instead of revenue generation alone. Jason connects it to a concept called escalation of commitment, where a decision stops working and you respond by committing harder. Rich names what finally replaced loyalty for him, and it is not ruthlessness. In the closing minute he makes a case that curiosity beats experience, and takes a swing at another business lie most people never question: that the customer is always right.

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