The Real Jason Duncan Podcast

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.

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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.

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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.

Read the full post: https://therealjasonduncan.com/articles/394

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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

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

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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Most people can name the last time more money genuinely changed their life. What almost nobody can explain is why it stopped, or why they kept chasing the next number anyway.

Jason opens with a scene from his last year teaching school, doing budget math at a McDonald's counter while his son hunted for the most expensive thing on the menu. Then he traces what happened after the money showed up: a thirty-eight thousand dollar teaching salary, an eighteen thousand dollar first check that he still remembers in his chest, and a six hundred eighty-six thousand dollar second check that eventually stopped feeling like anything at all.

He walks through the research that finally settled the income-and-happiness argument, including why every equal gain in how your life feels now requires doubling your income rather than adding to it. Then he gets to the part that costs the most: the breathing room you're chasing can't be purchased, because the chase itself is what took it from you.

Two questions, ten minutes, one piece of paper. Most people find the gap between their answers embarrassing.

Read the full post: https://therealjasonduncan.com/articles/390

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

New episodes every Wednesday.

Full blog post: https://therealjasonduncan.com/articles/390

Episode page: https://therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/390

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

Sponsor – Bank on Yourself: https://therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself

Kahneman & Deaton (2010), "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being," PNAS Killingsworth (2021), "Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year," PNAS Killingsworth, Kahneman & Mellers (2023), "Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved," PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

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Somewhere around age twelve, you were told that school would teach you how to learn. It didn't. Sabrina Sussman has two degrees and runs a $3.1 billion program, and she says the skill her whole career runs on is one no classroom ever taught her.

Recorded live at the Standard Club in front of the Leadership Society, this episode starts with the lie and lands in the middle of everything happening in Nashville right now. Sabrina is the city's first Chief Program Officer for Choose How You Move, the largest capital program in Nashville's history, and she explains why the question she asks in every job interview is "how do you learn?"

She tells the story of the Excel spreadsheet assignment three weeks into her first federal job that turned out to be the invite list for a cabinet secretary's national tour. She explains why Nashville's traffic signals haven't been touched in 60 years, and why a police officer standing at a corner pressing a button called "the pickle" is how downtown traffic gets managed on event nights. She breaks down what your half cent actually buys: 86 miles of sidewalks, nearly 600 smart intersections, safer streets, and more bus service, plus the signal upgrade that lets fire trucks turn lights green before they arrive.

She also tells the story she carries into every day of this work: getting hit by a car on a morning run in 2014, half a block from her front door, and the two and a half years of physical therapy where she relearned how to walk, how to run, and how to feel safe on a street. And she describes the three little girls who chalked a hopscotch game onto a sidewalk that didn't exist four weeks earlier, ending with "good job, you're finished."

If you're a business owner thinking about your own exit, register for Jason's free live training at whattofixbeforeyouexit.com, or book a call at therealjasonduncan.com/talk.

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"I'm too set in my ways." You've said it. I've said it. And it sounds like a man who finally knows himself. It's a lie, and your own brain proves it.

In this Wednesday Special Edition, I take apart one of the most comfortable excuses people give for why they've stopped growing: you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

I start with the settled brain science. Neuroplasticity proves your capacity to learn and change doesn't shut off at thirty, or fifty, or seventy. Your brain rewires itself in response to demand for your entire life. So if the capacity is there, and it is, then the question was never whether you can learn. The question is why you don't.

That's where a professor named Howard McClusky comes in. Decades before anyone had proven neuroplasticity was real, he figured out the actual reason adults stop learning, and he called it the Theory of Margin. Every one of us carries a Load and holds a certain amount of Power, and margin is what's left over. When your Load swallows your Power, you don't learn anything new. Not because you can't, but because there's no room left in the container.

I walk through why "that's just how I am" is a golden cage that protects the load you built yourself, and I give you a practical fix to start clearing space: an open cycles inventory you can do this week with a legal pad.

If you've been telling yourself you're too old to change, this one's for you.

Grab the free 10-Block Weekly Method template: https://therealjasonduncan.com/10block

Read the full article: https://therealjasonduncan.com/articles/old-dog-new-tricks-lie

Ready for a bigger conversation about the load that traces back to a business that can't run without you? Book a call with me directly: https://therealjasonduncan.com/talk

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She ran the numbers on more than a hundred businesses for sale, and kept seeing the same thing: founders with growing revenue who were certain that made their companies valuable. The buyers writing the checks didn't agree.

In this episode, Jason sits down with Muriel Touati, founder of Exit 3D Studio and author of The Valuation Gap: What Buyers See That Sellers Miss. Muriel spent a year on the buyer's side of the table, and she tells the story that ended it: a LinkedIn lead generation agency asking $3.7 million. Her offer was accepted. Then she opened the data room and found that the leads ran through the founder's personal LinkedIn profile, which wasn't part of the sale, and 40% of clients were gone within months. She repriced the business at roughly $650,000 and walked away anyway.

Jason and Muriel break down the four structural gaps she found in deal after deal (customer concentration, founder dependency, unpredictable revenue, and weak digital assets), the bad advice from a mentor that trapped her in her own business, and the difference between the founder who gets offered 2x and the one who gets offered 7x: one is selling a business, the other is selling a job. She closes with a simple test any owner can run this month to find out which one they own.

This conversation pairs with last week's episode with Mark Hartmann. Same territory, a different perspective from the buyer's side of the table.

Connect with Muriel:

Free live training from Jason: "What to Fix Before You Exit." Register at whattofixbeforeyouexit.com

Want to talk one-on-one about your business? Book a call at therealjasonduncan.com/talk

This episode is sponsored by Bank On Yourself. Learn more at therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself

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