The Real Jason Duncan Podcast

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.

CONNECT WITH RICH TARITY

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Somebody wealthy gets caught doing something rotten, and within a day you'll hear it. See? Money is the root of all evil. It gets said with a little satisfaction, usually by people who don't have much of it, and almost nobody who says it has ever looked up the verse they're quoting.

Jason walks through First Timothy chapter six the way Paul actually wrote it, including the progression Paul builds from false teaching to using godliness for financial gain to wanting riches to loving money. Then he puts the dropped words back. Paul never said money is bad. He said the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.

From there it stops being a theological argument. Money is something human beings invented. In Mesopotamia five thousand years ago a silver shekel was fixed by decree against a measure of barley, and coins didn't show up for another twenty-four centuries. A human agreement has no will, no intent, and no moral weight of its own.

The turn most people miss is that the love of money is fully available to people who don't have any. An empty bank account is no protection from it at all.

Show Notes

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You've heard this rule your whole career. If you want to build something real you have to be where it's happening, in a city that matters, close enough to the right people that they know your face. Cory Blumenfeld built an audience of 70,000 people and the company he runs today from a block off the beach in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

Cory Blumenfeld has started five companies and raised close to $5 million along the way. Today he runs BlueMoso, which matches business owners with virtual assistants so they can get their time back. His team is in the Philippines. One of his business partners is in Finland. He lives in Mexico. Nobody is in the same room, and that is the whole point.

For his first three companies he believed the opposite. He was in Toronto, in health tech, in the startup programs everybody told him were the ones that mattered. He lost two hours a day to a commute, lived at home because rent was impossible on an entrepreneur's salary, and budgeted every trip down to the dollar. He and his co-founder once drove to Boston in a single day through a snowstorm because they couldn't afford the plane tickets. Nothing came of it. They flew out of Detroit when it was cheaper. Every investor they had access to was in Toronto, because access meant coffee.

COVID broke it. He wasn't allowed to leave the house, his Canadian company sold into the US market, and the border was closed. Building relationships online stopped being a preference. He moved to Playa del Carmen, started posting on LinkedIn with zero followers, and built every relationship he has today from there. He tells Jason he has been more successful living abroad than he ever was in the city, and explains how being in a big city quietly locks your thinking to one geography.

Jason doesn't accept the lie as submitted, and says so on tape. He lives thirty minutes outside Nashville and still believes physical proximity does something real. That pushback produces the sharpest turn in the episode. Cory reframes it: the people this lie actually costs are not the ones already in the city. They're the ones in small towns who won't start until they move, and that is five years of not building. Jason names it as an angle he hadn't considered and gets on board with it out loud. They also get into where venture money actually goes and why those hubs are loosening, how AI is making it cheaper to start a business and more crowded to run one, and the single thing Cory says matters most for a business owner in 2026: create content, so people already know who you are before you ever reach out.

Connect with Cory:

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The deal dies three days before closing. You've got four months in it, you've already told your wife, and somebody who cares about you says the thing everybody says.

Well, everything happens for a reason.

Jason takes that sentence apart. Not the theology of it, and not whether God authors every event, but what the phrase actually does to the person hearing it, and what it does to you when you say it about your own life.

Because we don't only say it to other people. We say it to ourselves after the hire we knew was wrong, the contract we didn't read, the client we kept three years too long. And the moment we do, we hand our own decisions to God and turn ourselves into passengers in our own failures.

There's a truer version, and it costs more. There's a reason to be found inside everything that happens. Napoleon Hill called it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit, and a seed isn't a benefit. It's the possibility of one, and it rots in the package if nobody plants it.

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In the church, there's one sin everybody calls forgivable and then treats like it isn't. Divorce. Jim Lange believed that for years, built his life around it, and then ended up on the other side of the line he'd spent his whole life telling himself never to cross.

Jim Lange

is a coach, a speaker, and the number one bestselling author of The Happy Wife Happy Life Deception. He leads Kingdom Factor roundtables for more than 70 Christian business and ministry leaders, and he works privately with men whose marriages are destroying them. He was on this show at episode 377 exposing the happy wife, happy life lie. He came back for the one sitting underneath it.

Titus 3:10 – "Warn a divisive person once, warn them twice, then have nothing to do with them. Then the question landed on him. "

What if the divisive person is your spouse?

Three hours of study turned into months. He walks Jason through what he found, including Proverbs 6 and the list of things God hates, the difference between a conditional and an unconditional covenant, the certificate of divorce God issued to Israel, and Ezra 9 and 10, where God commanded priests to divorce. His conclusion: if God commanded it, and God cannot sin, then divorce cannot be inherently sinful.

Neither man is arguing for divorce, and both say so directly. They are arguing against the life sentence handed to people who have already been through it.

Connect with Jim:

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In April of 2007, Arianna Huffington collapsed in her office, hit her desk on the way down, and broke her cheekbone. Her doctors tested her for everything. The diagnosis came back as burnout.

What almost nobody repeats is what she said afterward, and it wasn't about her health. She said her performance would actually have improved if she'd committed to unplugging and recovering. She isn't saying she should have built a smaller company. She's saying she'd have built the same one better.

Jason walks through the case against the hours: Elon Musk telling reporters that nobody should work 120-hour weeks and then going back to it seven years later, Stanford research from World War I munitions factories showing that a 70-hour worker produces about what a 55-hour worker produces, and the largest four-day-week trial ever run, where revenue held and sick days fell by 65 percent.

Then he gets to the part that matters for anyone who owns the place. If you subtract one real thing this week and the whole operation wobbles, that isn't a discipline problem. That's what a buyer sees when they look at your company.

Read the full post: https://therealjasonduncan.com/articles/392

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New episodes every Wednesday.

Show Notes

Full blog post: https://therealjasonduncan.com/articles/392

Episode page: https://therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/392

Book a call with Jason: https://therealjasonduncan.com/talk

Sponsor – Dubb: https://therealjasonduncan.com/dubb

Pencavel (2015), "The Productivity of Working Hours," The Economic Journal The UK Four Day Week Pilot results (Autonomy, 2023): https://autonomy.work/portfolio/uk4dwpilotresults/

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The most repeated formula in business says you build a company in this order: people first, then product, then process, and profit comes last. Neil Amrhein hired 4,800 people living by that formula. Today he builds in the exact reverse order, and people come last.

In this episode, Jason sits down with Neil Amrhein, founder of My Goat, a Nashville software company using semi-autonomous robotic mowers to disrupt commercial lawn care, and before that the founder of All About Care, a luxury home healthcare company that employed 4,800 caregivers and delivered over a million hours of care across two states. Neil was one of the very first guests in this show's history, all the way back at episode 4, and he came back to defend a build order that sounds cold the first time you hear it.

Jason makes him own it one P at a time. Profit first, because if you can't monetize your idea, it's a hobby. Process second, because you either build the systems or you become the system. Product third, because the market defines what you sell -- Neil's white-glove care service had to change when he learned families just wanted their loved ones content. And people last, which Neil argues is actually the safest place for them: a profitable business with real systems is the one place a new hire can't sink.

Along the way: the 11-step hiring process that took 90 hours of care per caregiver just to break even, how My Goat became 75 percent headless with humans training their own AI agent twins, the fifth P Neil is now testing, and his closing charge for everyone listening. Protect your attention. Clear thinking beats hard work.

Connect with Neil:

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