The Ugly Truth About U.S. Healthcare | Jeb Dunkelberger | The Jared Goetz Show

Everything I've ever done entrepreneurially has been in healthcare. It goes all the way back to like the 1940s. That was the beginning of health insurance. That's the problem in US healthcare is we have a save all mentality. You keep fighting, right? You tell me we got a chance, we're gonna do that next drug. It doesn't matter what the price is of the drug, that user will come back. If it's saving your mom, I think you're willing to spend just about anything to do it. But because it's healthcare and we're so scared, right, to not take what the doctor recommended, it's gotten out of control. Most people today are pissed off because they're paying an exorbitant amount of money and what do they get for it? Because the minute an insurance company says, "We're not going to cover this," now you have a family that believes that you are now staying between them and the doctor. 30 to 40% of what we spend on healthcare in the United States is related to fraud, waste, and abuse.

I always assumed that the healthcare system has your back.

Yes, the healthcare system has your back as long as you have a wallet in your back pocket. 62% of personal bankruptcies in the United States are caused by healthcare-induced debt. The minute you're very sick, It is a very scary world to live in. Doctors don't get paid by keeping you healthy. They get paid when you're sick. But we have built a system. It is human-made and it is extremely destructive. It is only going to get worse.

What is up, guys? Welcome to the show. In this interview, I have on Jeb Dunkleburger. He's a peer of mine, very similar in age, and a very successful entrepreneur in a completely different industry. He's in the healthcare industry. He's the founder of ClearPoint Health, which has disrupted the way that healthcare works and insurance gives back to employers and ultimately consumers. In this episode, we go deep on the healthcare industry, on things that we can do to make it better. I learned a lot about how our system is kind of upside down and we're gonna need to figure something out. Of course, we go deep on topics like resilience, discipline, and how Jeb became such a successful entrepreneur from such an early age and what those qualities are. That people can embrace to continue to become better versions of themselves. So stay tuned, lock in on this one, guys. I hope you enjoy. It was really interesting that we connected living in the same neighborhood. It's rare to see people, you know, in their 30s that are entrepreneurs, that are self-made entrepreneurs. And it was so interesting that when we went on a walk, we planned on going for a 3-mile loop, but we extended it to a 2-hour walk And really, you know, could have kept going. A lot of similar values, which to me is very exciting because I love to learn perspectives of other people that are, that are down their path right now. So I want to start off and talk a little about your entrepreneurial journey and kind of how did you get the confidence to jump into entrepreneurship and like how did that stuff start unfolding for you?

Yeah, I think, um, it's funny you put it as Confidence, 'cause I think that most people that get into entrepreneurship are actually more naive than they are confident. And I'm definitely one of those. I think sometimes I wonder if I knew what I had signed up for, would I do it again? The answer is obviously yes, right? But I think that's 'cause I'm a glutton for punishment more than anything else. But I'll tell you, it was something where everything I've ever done entrepreneurially has been in healthcare. Like I really haven't done anything outside of that. So that started when I was 16. I lost a parent to brain cancer. I come from a big family, as we talked about, got a bunch of sisters and a brother. And, um, you know, the stat that we talked about in our, our walk about personal bankruptcy, it hit our family. I mean, it just— I felt everything change. You went from private school to public school, went from not having to worry about a thing to, hey, you're going to get a job, uh, while you're in high school, and that money might flow back to family needs. And you know, you grow up fast, really fast. And I just thought that that was avoidable. And that became the impetus for trying to start businesses in that space.

So you're— you lost a family, a parent?

Yeah, my stepmom.

Your stepmom?

Yep.

And was that what led to the bankruptcy?

Yeah, I mean, so, so basically stepmom gets sick when I'm 10. By the time she's 16— I'm 16— she passed away. From brain cancer, uh, watched her fight, you know, which is its own unique reality to watch somebody go through those moments. And you don't realize how much you're learning when you realize that an adult who's 54 who's singing her own death song, you know, how powerful that really is when you're young. Yeah, and that malleable. Um, and, and yeah, I mean, I think when you add it all up, it was somewhere around $2.3, $2.4 million bills, because this was— we were perfectly positioned from a hospital perspective. We didn't qualify for any subsidies, but every time we had to make a payment, we felt it, right? To a point where when you make all those payments at the end of the day, you end up realizing that, oh my gosh, my dad who's in his 50s is gonna have to work for another 20 years. I mean, wow, it has that type of effect. No one really plans for that. Yeah, and no one's gonna also— and that's the problem in US healthcare is we have a save-all mentality. You keep fighting, right? You tell me you got a chance, we're gonna do that next drug. Of course we're gonna do that next thing. It's in economics, you call it inelastic demand.

Yeah, which is the magic recipe, right?

Someone's gonna come back no matter what. It's usually used with the, uh, heroin analogy, right? Where it doesn't matter what the price is of the drug, that user will come back. Same thing in healthcare though. If it's saving your mom or your stepmom I think you're willing to spend just about anything to do it.

So for people like myself, really, I've never felt the impact of having to spend money on medical bills. Yeah, I've spent money on medical bills, but it's never been substantial. I always, I guess, growing up assumed that the healthcare system has your back. Yeah, that if you get sick, oh, you have insurance. How is it that it can play out to cost millions of dollars for someone that they— when they get sick, how does that happen?

Yeah, I look— so the way that we've set things up in America goes all the way back to like the 1940s. We had a chance to do something in this country that Canada did and we didn't. So when you go back all the way to World War II and you think about the legislation that was passed, we basically started putting caps on how much we could pay employees and benefits began to spur because that was like, well, how do you lure in better employees? You use benefits to do so. And that was the beginning of health insurance. If you go all the way back, it actually started with, with a few teachers in Texas. And that's where the Blue Shield and Blue Cross began. Hospital and an employer group said, we want to do something here. We want to pre-purchase. And the hospital said, we'd love a pre-purchase, right? Guarantee us volume. And so you play that all the way through, though, to today. And, you know, 62% of personal bankruptcies in the United States are caused by healthcare-induced debt. Because to your point, you think, hey, I have health insurance, right? I'm covered.

Insurance.

But the reality is, is the minute you're very sick, uh, I think anyone who's chronically ill knows this, it is a very scary world to live in, right? And I'm not here to denounce the healthcare system in terms of the noble professionals that work within it, but we have built a system. It is human-made and it is extremely destructive. Um, the things that it has done, it has pillaged our economy. 1 in 5 US dollars goes towards healthcare. And yes, the healthcare system has your back as long as you have a wallet in your back pocket.

All right.

That's kind of how I think about it.

Wow. So the healthcare system, I mean, it's, it's limited on the types of things that it will fund, right? If there's alternative medicines or maybe you don't want to get a surgery, you want to get stem cells, well, you have to pay for that. But I've always assumed that if there's something that you need to get done and it's, you know, covered by insurance, it's like you don't really have to pay anything. I thought there was just a deductible.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's what you hope, right? And want. But here's the problem. When Starbucks spends more money on health insurance than they do coffee beans, you start to wonder, okay, well, what is that employer going to do? How do they cover this expense, right? As an employer yourself, you know, it's probably the second or third largest line item is covering health insurance for employees. And what ends up happening is as that cost continues to rise— look, this is one of the few industries where even in bad years it's going to go up 6 to 9 points, right? So this past year, health insurance rose by about 7.5 points cost this upcoming year, 2026. We predict about 9.2%. Wow. And increasing. And I mean, what other industry just has that tailwind already built into it right now? That's a tailwind from people who are making money off of it. That's a headwind to anyone that has to pay it.

Right.

And so what you see now are things like high deductible health plans. So the employers are shifting the financial risk to the employees. Here's a sobering stat. The average high deductible health plan for a family of 4 is set at about $10,000, right? So that means that my family of 4 has to pay $10,000 before health insurance is going to kick in. Well, the problem is, is your average family of 4 in America has about $12,000 of savings. So what I would call that is being functionally uninsured. We're going to ask you to go bankrupt before we're going to start covering things. That's only going to get worse. Like, I'm— and I'm not a doomsday guy, I'm an economist by trade and background— it is only going to get worse. And I can I'm sure we'll get into it today, but the stats tell us a very sobering story that requires some pretty aggressive changes in the next 5 years, or else we're going to be in a really difficult position.

Yeah. And what is like something that you've done or how have you started your company or have you gotten to the healthcare industry to make positive change?

Yes. I started on the provider side and I ended up marrying a provider, right? So, so my wife's a triple-boarded trauma surgeon, critical care specialist. It just so happens that that is an area that I now focus on, high-cost claimants. But really, I'll go back and say, how do we get in this problem? Health insurance did something that no other insurance vehicle would ever do. So think about auto insurance. Could you imagine if I came to you and said, hey, Jared, I got an auto insurance policy for you and we're going to cover the windshield wipers? You would sit there and go, I don't need that. I can cover a $20 fix if needed.

Right.

In health insurance, we've gone past that. We cover everything in insurance, which really is the problem.

Yeah.

And so what we as a company— sorry about that.

All good.

What we as a company are doing is actually building an insurance product where we allow the employers to retain more of the risk. We make it hyper transparent. And if they pay more in premiums than they do in claimed cost, We give them their money back. Wow. So we're doing a flat fee structure, and I'm doing it in a way that if somebody reads about our business and looks into how we make money, I can defend that all day. Yeah, because I plan on working in this industry for the next 40 years. And as we've talked about, some scary things have happened in the health insurance space, including, you know, downright murder for some of the most important people that run our insurance industry.

Yeah, and I obviously, like everyone, saw that all over the news, all over social media, that the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, I believe, was murdered by a guy named Luigi something or other. Yeah. What was kind of the, like, how would someone get that angry and that fed up to, to make that type of, you know, action?

Yeah, so the first time I ever had P&L responsibility for health insurance company, I was 31 years old.

Okay.

So I was fairly young compared to the average bear that takes on a health insurance role. And I had about $1 billion of premium under management that I was responsible for. And I remember just being a few weeks into it, we had a really young woman who had a very young child. And the child needed an intervention that would cost upwards of $2 million, right? We're gonna talk about selling gene therapies. Yeah. Obviously my heart, my gut tells me we gotta help this child. But when you think about what you're running as an insurance company, you have a fixed amount of premium and you have to decide what you're gonna cover. When you make a determination that that drug only works 1 out of every 100 times, it's not a $2 million cost, it's $2 million times 100, right? For the cost benefit analysis. That's the problem. Because the minute an insurance company says, we're not gonna do this, we're not gonna cover this, now you have a family that believes that you are now staying between them and the doctor. And there is a long-standing kind of rift between providers and insurance companies. And, you know, I'm here to say that I think there's very noble people that work in health systems, and there's extremely noble people that work in health insurance. It's the system that's built around them that you kind of get this monstrosity of, of an issue. But what I would really dial in on is most people today are pissed off because they're paying an exorbitant amount of money Right. The average family today is going to pay about $27,000 a year for health insurance. That deals with both their deductible, but as well as what their employer is paying. And what do they get for it? You're not getting an Amazon, Netflix, Uber level experience, right? You go in, there's delays. It's hard to get to a primary care doctor. You're still sick. You're wondering why you have 3 or 4 chronic diseases, right? Your average American has 2 chronic diseases. 60% of us are morbidly obese. Yeah, right. The hottest drug right now is a GLP-1 because it's a pill for that, right? Rather than getting up and modifying your lifestyle. People blame health insurance because they believe that's the root cause. But in fact, like, and I can, I can testify to this, health insurance is just a proxy for a mess of a system that is human-made and it is correctable. But it takes a lot of noble people that aren't out for greed and profitability, which is very difficult in this space. Because there's a lot of money being tossed around.

I know personally, like, if I have to go to a doctor, I'm like, there's been times where I didn't even— they asked for my insurance information. I'm just like, just don't even worry about it. I'm just gonna pay for it because I don't want to deal with— it's just a nightmare to deal with something, or if you have to go submit something to insurance, at least for me, it's like really annoying to deal with. It's kind of archaic in that sense. But can you explain to me how it works when there's a doctor that says this little child needs this treatment, and then the insurance company has the opportunity to decide if they're going to cover it or not. How are they making that decision reactively in these cases, and how do— how are they deciding?

Yeah, so first things first though, the, the statement you just made at the beginning about cash pay, that is a whole sub-industry that's taken off right now, by the way. Yeah, um, seriously, there are companies that are erupting overnight right now, uh, that are doing just that because providers love it too. They would rather get paid cash and know it's squared away than deal with the back and forth with an insurance company. Right. You know, bad debt is so common in health care that anyone who's willing to pay cash is going to be treated well. And then there's a whole—

some of that meaning like money coming from insurance to—

to cutting out insurance companies altogether and saying provider and user patient, let's come up with a way and a payment rail that allows for that. And so there was huge legislation that came out a few years ago that basically started to require hospitals to post their pricing. Machine-readable files have to be posted. You got to tell us why is United paying $300 for this MRI but Blue Cross Blue Shield's paying $500 for this MRI. Yeah, right. Why within the Blue Cross Blue Shield portfolio are some things $500 for the MRI, some things are $1,000, some things are $50? I mean, you're talking about 1,000 to 2,000% difference in prices for the same thing. And that's not even— that's just the beginning of it. Medicare and Medicaid pays typically one rate, and commercial rates for employees are typically 3 to 5 times what Medicare pays. Not to mention the fact that when we pay our employees, there's already a Medicare tax in there.

Yeah.

So, so if you're a working American today, you've paid a Medicare tax in your in your, uh, take-home pay. You've already done that. And then on top of that, you're going to subsidize it again, paying 2 to 3 times that. Your average patient population in a hospital, 70% of them are usually Medicare, Medicaid. And hospitals will say that they lose money often on Medicare, Medicaid, so they have to subsidize all those losses on the commercial side. And so that whole industry is erupting right now. And then to the second question that you asked, There's evidence-based guidelines. So there are large trade organizations who have come out and said, this is what the evidence, what the literature states, and therefore here are the guidelines for what the insurance company is gonna cover and not cover. And this is where prior authorization comes in, precertification. And so what you're doing there is a doctor and a patient are together and they wanna do some sort of intervention. And if that intervention is contentious and not proven, what that will happen is it usually forces a prior auth, right? A stop or a halt. And that what that allows is the insurance company to come in and say, is this drug truly the best option? Or is this clinical intervention the best option for this individual? And it's not to say that the doctor doesn't know best, but we also have to think about the perverse incentives in healthcare, right? Doctors don't get paid by keeping you healthy, Jared.

Right.

They get paid when you're sick.

Right.

And I'm not here to say that my wife is out here trying to make sure everyone needs a surgery. But I will say this. In her last job, she had something called an RVU bonus, which is a relative value unit. RVU. What that is, is it is the relative value to the health system, not to her, to the health system. So when she does surgery, she gets paid more than when she does a consult. So if she does selective non-operative management and she determines that she's not going to do surgery, her bonus is now lower.

Wow.

Right. That, that's common practice, right? That is one of the biggest issues. So insurance companies typically are playing like the watchdog of the dollar, the steward of the spend. They're not there to see a 5-year-old lose their life by any means. But when we know that that drug works only 1 out of every 100 times and it's priced at $2 million, We have to ask ourselves, does society want to pay for this? Do these employers want to pay for this? Because if so, the premiums are going to continue to go up.

But aren't there circumstances in which there's data that says that something will work and there's also data that says it won't work, and then it's up for kind of analytical interpretation by someone?

1000%.

So that's human being making that decision.

There's human beings that are constantly looking at literature, and literature today is coming out in droves, right? I mean, there's so much research out there. The average primary care doctor, you have about 600 hours of reading to do every year just to stay up to speed on the latest in family medicine.

Yeah, right.

How and who is doing 600 hours of reading, right? So now this is where technology comes in, right? Can I get a nudge while I'm in the middle of dealing directly with the patient where I'm having a computer listen to this conversation and then tell me what the latest and greatest is on the evidence-based side?

Yeah.

So there's certainly that, but there's also experiential drugs, right? There's times where it's like, hey, everything else has failed, right? Can we try this?

Yeah.

And I think that there's always a time and a place for that. But again, you're walking this thin line because you're asked by so many employers who are paying their premiums to be the guardian of that bank account. And you cannot pay for everything. And if you're going to pay for everything, then we need to move away from for-profit publicly traded health systems, right? Because they answer to shareholders, right? Don't answer to you and me.

Yeah. I actually have a friend who was, um, a heart surgeon and he was like a really notable, uh, cardiologist. He was a really like successful doctor and there would be instances where he'd be doing heart surgery and it's like, well, we could put a stent in the person's leg. Like, may or may not help, but you know, it's an extra $17,000. There's incentive there. And he realized like, there's better ways to prevent people from getting sick than— well, of course, there's many better ways, the lifestyle change, supplementation, exercise, etc., that would prevent this whole thing in the first place. But here I am trying to determine if I want to put in the stent for an extra $17,000. And he actually shut down his practice and went entirely into like holistic longevity medicine to try to solve health at the root problem.

Wow.

But most of the healthcare system is not there yet. Like I read something where it's like, and maybe I don't even know when we were talking, it takes about 20 years for new things, new technology, new things that are coming into the healthcare system to get adopted by the mass of Doctors and providers.

That sounds about right. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's other stats out there that, you know, 60 to 70% of what a doctor will do is what they learned in residency, right? And so as much continuing education as you try to do, I think you also see this latency as it relates to what I would call the diffusion of innovation, right? So as great things are happening, how do you actually get that into the bedside? How do you get that into the workflows?

Yeah, yeah. But it's like, so there's definitely technology that we can— because Being a healthcare provider, reading 600 hours, you know, per year of information, and that's only gonna become more and more information, right? Because there's more and more new technology emerging exponentially. So eventually it's gonna be impossible for people to stay up to date with everything, right? So by utilizing technology to kind of intervene in these types of situations, we can definitely help more people, but If the technology is helping people avoid things that cost money, that make money for the system, it's conflicting.

Oh, it, it, it's, and it gets deep fast. So think about this. 1 in 7 Americans is employed by healthcare. This is why no politician is going to touch this. If I go to any state in the United States, one of the top 3 employers, it's going to be Walmart, a health insurance company or a health system. Wow. So what you're talking about is a jobs program. So if you want to reform this, we need to figure out where do all these people go. You know, some of the craziest stats are 30 to 40% of what we spend on healthcare in the United States is related to fraud, waste, and abuse. Now I can see you right now and say, oh my gosh, we can all agree that fraud, waste, and abuse is a horrible thing. Let's get it out of the system. Well, what happens when you pull out 30 to 40%, you're talking about trillions of dollars. We spend over $5 trillion, right, on healthcare. Wow. And so when you pull that out, well, what happens to all the people that went to trade schools or vocational schools that we said this is a recession-proof job, right? Right. So now you get back into those macroeconomic theories to say, is it really worth reforming this to the point where we're going to see people lose their jobs?

Yeah.

Or should we be upskilling them? Okay, so I'm willing to pay all this money, but I want to have better outcomes, right? I want to have better experiences. When's the last time you went to a health system and he said, wow, this feels like a Four Seasons. Like, never, never, right? And that's the problem. They're charging you more than you do for the penthouse of the Four Seasons in West Palm. Yeah. And yet at the same time, you get a shit experience.

I found an incredible healthcare system. It's a, it's a system of doctors, personal trainers, nutritionists, and it's an all-in-one system, but costs $80 grand.

Yeah.

For the year. Well, people can't afford that.

Most people can't.

But that's the good experience that you want And, you know, people want to be healthier, but it's really challenging for them to do that when they're, you know, put into the system and can't get out of it.

Right. And you have to ask yourself, too, like, what do we want to stand for as a country, right? If we believe that people that are healthier are better and more productive, right, then we need to change a lot in terms of how we treat people. But I think today, the fact that most people have chronic illnesses that are dying avoidable deaths, we have a deeper question about How are we living? Why are we living this way? And, you know, I think you kind of look at our bodies and we blame so much, and we're constantly going to the next podcast, listening to the next thing, trying to find that, that secret antidote, right? That, that panacea of solution. It won't ever be found because our bodies are built for an environment that we live in that there's a mismatch. Yeah, a complete mismatch.

Yeah, right.

And I think that what we need to be talking about is How do we create an environment where people can be healthier in this environment? And my problem with it wasn't until recently— McDonald's was one of the largest sponsors of the Olympics. It's like, come on, that's crazy. Like, what are we talking about here? Like, you're talking about fast food restaurant, right, being the largest sponsor of the Olympics. I mean, the irony just smacks you in the face. Yeah. And so if we expect people to live differently, you know, we both have young kids, you have to instill it. And like, I, I find myself even looking at the curriculum at the school that my little boy's in. I'm like, when do you start teaching him how to read a nutritional panel, right? Because it starts early. I would rather him understand nutritional panel than the ABCs at this point, right? Because ABCs, I can catch him up on that.

Yeah, right.

He's gonna die if he eats the things that they're feeding him when it comes to the snacks.

His brain won't develop the way it could develop.

Precisely.

It's, it's So crazy. You know, I was talking to, we had a bare-knuckle fighter, Brutal Bostwick, on. He was a 20-year veteran in the fighting industry. We were talking about health. And there was a funny thing that came up, which is that there was a government-published kind of like, I don't remember if it was a food pyramid, something like that, which was showing like what's healthier than other things. And Lucky Charms was healthier than steak. On that, on that thing published by the government. Hmm. So if the— and I've— I haven't went deep down this rabbit hole, but it's starting to kind of shape in my mind a bit where there's, there's the food industry which keeps people sick, and then there's a bunch of misinformation about what's healthy and what's not, and it's conflicting and it's overwhelming. So people are just like, well, you know, one person says be a vegan, one person says to eat meat, one person says it doesn't matter, and I'm just going to go with the flow. Right. There's the food system.

Yep.

And then there's people also lobbying for certain studies for data. Mm-hmm. And at the top, there's definitely conglomerate large companies that own multiple layers of this or are large shareholders in multiple layers of this. Huge.

Yeah.

It's not, it doesn't seem, it seems like we humans created this system that's very hard to back ourself out of. Without some kind of collapse, whether it's an economic collapse or, you know, or a lack of healthcare in the interim. There's going to be a time, a period of time where you kind of have to break things before you can fix it.

Sure.

And it seems like with the efficiencies we can create, it's like leading to— and there's a lot of different industries where there's going to be robots, there's going to be AI doing a lot of the work, right? Which will lead to humanity being much more efficient. Which will lead to humans not needing to do things that are not efficient. So manual labor jobs that aren't, you know, producing a lot of output, which then leads to like a universal basic income kind of outcome at the end of the day. So it's like all of this stuff is already set in stone. How do we back society out of this system and fix it before we kind of get to that next level?

I don't know, because I feel like it is so institutionalized, right? From the curriculum that kids are being taught all the way through to the lobbying and politics. I mean, I'm a free market guy only because I believe that free markets are the most efficient forms of, uh, efficiency within any, any capital market, right? The problem with that though is free market economics doesn't apply to things that don't sit within the physics of a normalized economic pool. What I mean by that is, like, let's use healthcare and this topic. There's inelastic demand.

Right.

Okay, well, that's your first basic weight-bearing beam that is broken for free markets to apply. Right. There's no easy entry or exit into the healthcare market, right? So there, in some states, there's a certificate of need where the state actually decides whether or not you can build a hospital or a surgery center. All right, so I can't really build competition. Um, there is asymmetry of information. If I tell you right now, or my wife better yet tells you, you have a brain bleed, well, you're going to do whatever it takes then to get that. You don't really know if you have a brain bleed though. You don't know if you need an X-ray, MRI, or CAT scan, right? Right. And so that asymmetry of information, the easy entry-exit, the, uh, price transparency is also not there. And then on top of that, the fourth principle being, um, that you really don't have competition in the ways that we think about it means that free market economics doesn't apply.

Right.

And then naturally that leads to, okay, is there some paternalistic intervention? Well, that would mean big government. That would mean a heavy hand from something that a lot of people wouldn't agree with.

Right.

Okay, so then what do you do? And what you're saying is, I think, happening, which is this implosion. And people who say, okay, well, other people can make the decision, I don't agree with that. If you go out and we were to go poll 100 people walking on the sidewalk outside, I don't think people could give you an accurate definition of what a calorie is.

Right.

I really don't. I mean, we know people that are on SNAP, EBT food programs where they're drinking soda because they think calories equals energy. Energy equals what I need to get through the day. Yeah. And that soda might be better than water. And who am I to criticize somebody that wasn't given the education on that?

Right.

So yes, there's going to be implosion. How do you back your way out of it? I think it honestly, you require people like you and me who are willing to ask difficult questions and still have the majority of our life to go live. And we have morals and principles to say, I'm not going to fuck you.

Right.

I'm sorry to say it that bluntly, but that's what it takes. Because look, I run an insurance company. I can screw you 15 different ways without you ever knowing. Right.

Right.

And the God honest truth is is that it takes me and me alone to decide that we're not going to live that way. We're not going to run a company that way.

Yeah.

And the problem is the minute you bring in outside investors or outside interest, right, you immediately go back to capitalism.

Right.

And everyone thinks that capitalism is this pathway forward. It's got to be governed. It's got to be directed and it's got to have a moral fabric within it.

Yeah, that makes all— that's a great answer, by the way. I'm curious how the balance sheet of an insurance company works in regards to, you know, let's say a company is making $1 million in premium or in premiums. Are those companies ever spending more than that on treatments for a year? Are they ever spending more than what they're collecting?

Yeah, so, so, you know, you typically look at something called a medical expense ratio or a medical loss ratio.

Yeah.

And what that basically is, is it's just a simple ratio of How much did the company or person pay versus how much do they have in claims? If it's above 100%, it means they paid less than they took. If it's below 100%, it means they paid more than they took. Right? It's interesting because insurance requires us to have up and down years. There should be years where I'm at 110%, years where I'm at 90%. Right? That's what insurance is. It's us all putting our collective interest together. And then having each other's back.

Yeah.

The problem, though, is that when you have some employers who say, I've been raked over the coals and I know my data and I have been paying in tons and tons and tons of money, I am done with this game. That is what you see happening right now. And these employers are breaking away. And so self-funding is what that's called. It means to break away from the insurance company, basically fund your own risk. I would say 95% of Fortune 500 companies today self-fund.

Really?

22% of Main Street USA self-funds.

Wow.

Think about that. So you're telling me that the big companies have figured out something that the little companies haven't. And so that's actually where my company comes in. We take those big company principles and we democratize those to Main Street USA. We show them how to do it. It's complicated. It usually requires a little bit more scale. So we have to bring multiple small businesses together in a transparent risk pool. 'Cause that's what insurance is. It's a risk pool, right? And then we show them, here's what you've put in, here's what you've taken. But the hard part about it is you have to delineate what's addressable and avoidable versus what's unaddressable and unavoidable. Unaddressable and unavoidable risk is great for insurance, right? You can't do anything about it. We got in a car accident. I broke my back. You need insurance for your car and you, right? Well, you've been eating like crap for the last 5 years, you haven't worked out at all, and now you've developed 3 chronic issues, and you're deciding to go to the hospital to get interventions versus a primary care facility or an outpatient facility, which, by the way, there is a large difference between how much you pay in an outpatient facility versus inpatient.

How much of a difference?

Oh my gosh, you're talking about 2 to 5 times, even more, right? So if I get a surgery at a hospital, I have to pay a facility rate and a professional fee. Those two things make up the bill. The facility rate tends to be 2 to 5 times more than the facility rate at an outpatient facility. That's why today you see people pushing for site-neutral payments, meaning I don't care where you decide to do the surgery, I'm paying one flat rate. Because you can think about this— oh, we're gonna do surgery on Monday. Well, your surgeon works at the Ambulatory Surgery Center on Monday. Oh shoot, I got work to do, I can do it Tuesday. Oh, Tuesday they're in the hospital. Just because of the scheduling you have now incurred more cost.

A lot more cost.

A lot more cost. So I think what you're going to see is people are challenging all of this and saying this is wrong. And what we're doing is we're teaching those small businesses about those discrepancies and how to capture that arbitrage and save that money.

I love that.

Yeah. And that's where the addressable and avoidable side, which is where are you going to get that surgery, that comes in. So we've helped businesses identify what's addressable and avoidable. And then how to take the intervention, and we help them with that, and then we give them back the money that is unused.

Yeah, I mean, it's like something that, you know, I own a company. I would never, if someone was sick or had to get a surgery, I would never think about should they go to the hospital or to an outpatient, you know. It's not even like in my realm of reality, but there's so much wasted funds just by scheduling one day. It's like, what is that day worth to that person versus how much more money is going to be spent. Right. So you can incentivize people to take a trip on a Tuesday instead of a Monday.

Yep.

And save a bunch of money.

Well, how do you incent them? Right. How do you get them that money back? And there's new companies that are coming out now. They're doing things like dynamic copays.

Yeah.

Hey, it's $0 if you go here, it's $500 if you go there. So what they're doing is they're introducing behavioral economics to the individual. And they're teaching them to go and say, okay, if I go to the hospital, I'm going to pay a $500 copay. But if I go to this outpatient surgery center, it's a $0 copay. All right, now we can navigate you.

That's easy, right?

Simple, right?

I'm curious on the prescription medication side. I remember one time I had to get a prescription. Um, if it wasn't covered by insurance, it was about $1,000 to fill it. Which was like $30 a pill. And I didn't have my insurance card, but my doctor gave me this like savings card, and I ended up paying $36 instead of $1,000. How does that work? Like, how can a company decide to, you know, sell medication through a pharmacy at $1,000 a bottle, but then when insurance covers it, it's only $36? Like, yeah, it seems too large of a ratio.

Look, the vast majority of medications are filled by 3 entities. These things are called pharmacy benefit managers, PBMs. The crazy thing is that the largest PBMs are owned by insurance companies. So insurance companies have gotten into the pharma space. Um, if you— if I looked at the total amount of money spent in health insurance, it'd be somewhere between 25 and 35% of all the money spent is going towards pharma. Pharma is by far the fastest.

Let me just pause for a second, make sure I understand this and listeners So the companies that are basically making the drugs and selling them are also owned by the same companies that own the insurance company.

So it's great. I'm happy you call that out. Slight delineation. You have manufacturers of drugs, right? So that's like AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer, right? They sell these drugs through pharmacy benefit managers.

Got you. Right.

That third party is distributor.

Yeah.

Right. And then that PBM, the three largest PBMs are owned by health insurance companies.

And how much are these PBMs marking up the products they're buying? Let's just say the $1,000 bottle, right? That's— how much are they buying it from? Let's just call it an AstraZeneca. Like, how much are they marking it up?

I think, I think it varies. But here's what I'd say. You got to be screwing America pretty badly to make this administration come out and weaponize the entire administration against you, which they've done. Yeah, right. I mean, PBMs have been called out on this. There's a great recent lecture between Mark Cuban and the head of OptumRx at United, Patrick Conway. And Mark Cuban's just going in on him. And it was a great back and forth and very valuable points raised by both. But Mark Cuban came out and said, I'm gonna create something called Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs. And he built a company because he said, PBMs are extorting America, right?

So he's basically just a PBM, but Right.

Transparency, cost plus, which basically says he's taking the cost, he's adding a small percentage and saying this is what it's going to be.

And how much cheaper is that for people now?

I mean, there's, there's times where you're talking about prescription drugs are being marked up 2, 3, 4, 500%, 600%, 700%. We've seen things 1,500%. Yeah. And then you get into infusion drugs. So now you have the medical side because you actually have clinicians involved in the administration of that drug. They too are part of that expense column. So the craziest, wackiest part of this whole thing is that it's this massive line item that if it was food, a gym membership, a car, Americans wouldn't be falling for it. We'd be saying, oh, we don't need that. But because it's healthcare, because it's something that's so foreign to us and we're so scared, right, to not take what the doctor recommended, it's gotten out of control.

So kind of a crazy thought. It's like, okay, this medication would cost a $1,000 with no insurance. With insurance, it's $36. Well, that makes it worth me having this insurance. But really, the insurance company paying the $1,000 is really just paying their own—

their— right. And it's, it's right pocket, left pocket.

But it makes the consumer feel like, oh, thank God I had insurance, right? But in the first— that, that should have never been $1,000 in the first place.

And that's why you have companies that are coming out now that doing PAPs, patient assistance programs, um, which don't even get me started on that, cuz some of those PAP programs are paid for by pharmaceutical companies because, hey, what is that? It's a copay assistance program. So what they're going to do is they're going to say, hey, Jared, for that $1,000 script, there's, there's a 20% copay, $200. I'll help you pay the $200. Well, why? Well, that's my 501 over there. I can write that off. I'm still going to make $800 on you. Right. So you have that whole thing going on. You also have international sourcing. So now you have companies that have come out and said, Hey, I can get the same drug from Romania and I'm going to ship it to you in a freezer box to save you money. And this isn't like, oh, there's a few companies doing this. We're talking about a sub-industry that is worth billions of dollars. Yeah, billions. That is growing exponentially because of the market efficiencies that have now been introduced in healthcare.

What are some of the most expensive drugs and treatments out there?

Cell and gene therapies right now are by far the highest cost things.

CRISPR type?

Yeah, CRISPR, CAR-T. And you see things that are coming in multi-million dollar price tags.

Wow.

Oh yeah. No, and it's, and it's only going to get more and more and more prevalent because these cell and gene therapies— so you talk about the 20 years to disseminate things. If you look at the pharmacological studies that are being done today, you can predict what's coming out into the market over the next few years. And the way that clinical trials work for pharma is, is 4 phases, right? So you can actually see that when people file their patents, right, these pharmaceutical companies are filing patents, you know when they're in phase 1, when they're in phase 2. There's a company called IQVIA, right, formerly Quintiles, one of the largest pharmaceutical research companies in the world. And when they are in phase 2, phase 3, you know that that drug is coming to market. There are well north of 35 new cell and gene therapies that are coming to market. So here's the paradox for you that's— I struggle with this. You have drugs that have the opportunity to make people who are blind see again, but is that worth $2 million an eye? To the blind person, absolutely. To everyone else that's gonna have to pay and subsidize that, I don't know, right?

To society, certainly. I mean, if that person couldn't work right, couldn't provide value to society, now they could. How much value can they provide over their lifetime by being able to see?

It seems to be an easy debate, but then you start looking at it and go, well, how many times is it going to be used where it doesn't work? Okay, that's an interesting debate. Well, why is it $2 million and not $200,000? Well, because they need money to spur that research and development, right? Those scientists cost money. For every one great drug, maybe there's a thousand things that failed. And so this debate is a cyclical one. Right? And it's no sense in us going down it because you'll only come back to debating it again. But what I have found with it is there are more and more cell and gene therapies that are gonna be coming out that are multimillion-dollar drugs that when those start piercing the layers of employer-sponsored healthcare, you are going to feel Armageddon. I mean, if you wanna talk about implosion, okay? It was already hemorrhaging this past year. 1/1 is when about 60 to 70% of businesses are on their policy date, their effective date for an insurance policy. So December and all the way into November, you're seeing things this past year. I saw rates higher than I've ever seen my entire career. Right. So I've been working for almost 18 years. I've never seen rates this high, right? Climbing. We used to say 9% was a great year. This past year, 19% was a great year. That's 19% year-over-year increase.

More, more money out of people's pockets.

Yep. And this next year is going to be worse.

Wow.

Because you got to think about this, too, right?

What percentage of people's income are they spending on health care?

Oh, my gosh. I mean, depending upon who you are, you know, when you add it all up, you're talking about somewhere between 15% to 30% for some folks.

Wow.

Right. I mean, you think about the average American making $70,000 to $80,000 a year.

Yeah.

You're saying that the deductible is $5,000 to $10,000.

Yeah.

After taxes. I mean, what are we talking about here? These people are functionally uninsured.

It's going up 19%. Is that the— The deductible or the monthly total cost?

Total cost for the employers going up 90%. How they split that, called your contribution strategy. Yeah. Does the employer want to take all of that or not? Here's the other thing. I mean, we don't have to get into this, but I'm sure your listeners would appreciate it. What does this do to American employers who are trying to compete on an international scale? You and I were talking about your trips to, to Asia and things you've done. You're competing against businesses that don't even have to feel this.

Yeah.

So it's like we're putting an anchor on American businesses in a way that Few ever want to talk about. So I go back to, you know, the recent news with Trump and what he's doing with Venezuela and Greenland. And you go, well, those businesses based in those countries don't have the anchors that we put on our own businesses here in America, you know? And then to add insult to injury, you have a labor shortage. You have almost 100,000 nurse labor shortage today. That will grow to 1 million by 2030.

Wow.

What happens when labor shortage occurs? Labor cost goes up, right? So this is only the beginning.

That's crazy, because you would think technology would create efficiency, which would create things to be cheaper. And maybe that's the long-term thing, but it seems like in the foreseeable future, costs are only going to keep rising.

Yeah, I think, you know, that there's no shortage of technology applications within the healthcare space. And there's so many sub-industries that are multi-billion-dollar sub-industries, right? Revenue cycle management, you You can have a GenAI today process bills and claims on behalf of hospitals. Wonderful. Okay, so now you're cutting out the people that make $25,000 to $50,000 a year in part-time and full-time basis. You're never gonna replace the surgeon. In fact, we need more doctors than ever before, right? Just because we have an aging population. Almost 10,000 people a day are joining Medicare, all right? So think about this as a hospital. If I lose money every time I see a Medicare patient, and 10,000 people a day are joining Medicare, you better hope that 10,000 people a day are joining the commercial workforce.

Right.

And they're not. And that's a massive problem. So you have a disproportionate amount of people joining Medicare and Medicaid than you do compared to commercial employers who are subsidizing that. And that's going to be a large issue.

That's— it's just a bit mind-blowing. I, I'm— I want to ask more questions about Medicare, but honestly, I'm more interested to go back down the path of gene therapies. Yeah. And what that can do for people. I know they're— they have a million-dollar price tag and you can potentially make someone see who is blind. Can you talk a little bit more about gene therapies and like what we may see over the next 10 years?

Yeah, I think, you know, the most beautiful thing about this space is that you're able to tackle things that generations before us just, you know, kind of, they prayed about it and they hoped and they lived with it. We finally have the ability to change that. The conversation though that really needs to happen is when you give the ability to avoid or correct something at this magnitude, at this cost, is that really the right thing to do? And I say this to you dangling a carrot that you can't reach. Well, yeah, 'cause it's like, okay, we're gonna avoid something, right? So we're gonna, we're going to treat something, cure something. In all of our hearts and minds, I think we would say that's the right thing to do, right? But then you start thinking about the broader economic consequences of these types of interactions, and you start saying these interventions cost so much, how do we fund it? And we have a funding problem. It's not like today we're a hyper-efficient healthcare system that's super affordable. And, you know, the fact that when you go to the hospital in America, there's a 15% chance of a hospital-acquired infection every day that you're there, right? That's a problem.

Is that true?

That's true. Yeah, I think it's 14 to 17%. Wow. Right. So you want to get out of the hospital as soon as possible. Wow. Right. And when you look at these cell and gene therapies, sure, yes, it gives the gift of hope and light and they can do incredible things. And I am steadfast in the belief that you have to figure out a funding strategy around that because there is no question that what are we living for if we're not getting behind this? I mean, you're going to correct things that, you know, for decades and generations have altered people's lives and we can finally fix it.

Yeah.

But the problem is, at what cost? Right. And I think that that is something that people have to talk about. You can't do all this for free. And if you want to do it that way, then you got to bring in the government and you got to say we're going to have universal healthcare. But the minute you do universal healthcare, anyone who works in healthcare is going to know your health systems are most likely going to shutter, right? You're going to have a massive problem on that side. You're going to have an economic issue as well.

Yeah, it's wild. What, what are some of the things that gene therapy can do for people?

Well, I mean, you know, I, I don't want to act as if I am the, the I'm not the number one ruler of kind of what's possible here because I am certainly not adept on the things that are in the pipelines coming out. But I think that when you look at the ability for people who have congenital issues, people that are born, you know, there's a small child that we had that we believe that this individual needed an intervention, surgical intervention that then would lead to a transplant. And so you're talking about a 2-month-old And we're talking about a heart transplant, right? And what you're able to find is that with some of these cell and gene therapies, the intervention now to be able to go in and actually correct one DNA strand, right? To be able to actually correct one minute thing and magically that individual is able to move forward and live a normal life is pretty incredible. Yeah, right. So, you know, in terms of the applications, they're broad, right? There's all sorts of things, right? I mean, everything with your major organs all the way through You know, certain issues— there's pipelines today where they're predicting that, um, prevalent chronic issues can be reversed entirely.

Yeah, right.

My problem with that is, I mean, I have a human nutrition, foods, and exercise undergrad degree, and I get very scared when we depend upon medications and pills to do things. But in this situation, cell and gene therapy The interventions here are endless. The applications are endless. And you start seeing that the solution for one thing now can be begged and borrowed into many other applications. But that's a, that's a discussion for us to dig into at a deeper time because I honestly, I'm spellbound by some of the things that we've seen that have come out just last year and the stuff that's in the pipeline.

Yeah, I'm really interested to see what happens there. Talk to me a little bit about— I want to go back a bit in your career. When you were working. I don't remember what company you were at, but you had shared the story about how I think you partnered with— it was Uber Eats or DoorDash.

Yeah.

To drop off inhalers.

Yeah.

And it actually increased efficiencies and saved lives and hospital visits. Can you share that story?

Yeah. So this is, this is incredible. So living in California, you have smoke that occasionally will roll in through San Francisco, and anyone that is asthmatic knows that the minute that there's smoke in the air, air pollution in general can be an exacerbating factor that leads to shortness of breath. And for anybody who's ever felt shortness of breath, it is the scariest thing. And so you start looking at the data and you say, okay, smoke rolls in around these times, and what we can identify is where these people live. We can also identify with our data who has an inhaler that has been recently refilled and who doesn't. And so you start going through it. And this goes back to like being a 31-year-old in a health insurance situation. It's like the millennial vigor, right? I was just like, why not? Right? Just asking why not inside of these big corporations. And so what we devised was, hey, there are people that have not filled their inhalers that have asthma and there's smoke that's going to come in, which will lead them to go to the emergency department. Your average emergency department visit is going to be about $2,500. The average inhaler refill is about $10. So why don't we fill these and send them to all these people, drop them off on their doorstep, right? And so we did a little pilot, sent it out to a few hundred folks, and sure, lo and behold, you watch the data over the next 6 months and those emergency room visits don't happen. And those people end up not going into the ED. And you think, okay, a few of those folks, it would have been much worse than that. Maybe they didn't get the emergency room in time, right? And so you're able to then statistically extrapolate from there and say, hey, I think we might have actually saved a few lives. But the best part about it was we made money. We saved money as an insurance company. We actually saved money by doing the right thing. And that's the power of healthcare is there are ways to make money by doing the right thing. Yeah, I think that, um, that was a magical one for me because that was the first time where I remember I was talking at, um, some grad school class. I was like a guest lecturer, and they're asking me about this, and I said, you know, it's pretty amazing to think that we positively impacted 1 in 20 Californians because I don't know who has asthma, I don't know who they are. And one of the students says, do you ever just walk down the street and just count up to 20 knowing that one of those people that you saw was, was impacted by you? And I said, you know, I don't. But what a beautiful concept, right? To live a life where you know the things that you did positively impacted somebody else. They don't know you, you don't know them, but statistically you know that it happened and that it's true. And then as you move your way through your day-to-day life and you count up to 20 people, you know, okay, statistically one of those people was positively impacted. Yeah, like, I think that's freaking cool. Like, I can live for that.

That's, that's a very fulfilling thing to consider and think about. I think the issue why I don't believe most companies incentivize smart people in their organization to think outside the box, like, like that solution, it was brilliant, yet it was simple. And if something like that was scaled in another environment, maybe it wasn't just from smoke, maybe it was something that impacts more people.

Yeah.

And companies start thinking that way, they could save money and help people. Right. But in a large corporation, most people are just doing their job. They're not thinking outside the box. They're not trying to innovate. That's where entrepreneurship comes into play with what you've been doing. So can you actually go back a bit into your entrepreneurial journey? So you were at— what was the insurance company you were at?

Uh, so I worked at Blue Cross. I worked at Aetna, which was with the entity that we did this with.

And then how did you kind of go from that into your entrepreneurial journey?

Yeah, the— so I always knew it's very similar to, you know, we were, we were chatting, we were talking about the things that we did in high school and college. Right. I think when you're a hustler, you're just a hustler.

Right.

And it doesn't matter what it is, if it's selling tickets for a show. For me, it was trying to figure out how I could scale a company before Uber Eats and Grubhub. And I think that you just kind of have this mentality where like, hungry dogs run faster. And when you have that hunger, you realize it's never really satiated, right? Like, it's just like you can't really feed it. It's just something that's in you. Um, and I think that when you align that hunger with purpose, and so therefore you can get behind it every single day, because purpose to me gives me the, the energy, right? That's what, that, that's what helps me get up in the morning and get after it when I don't have the actual physical energy to do it. Um, And what got me into it was I was working in big jobs. I was making great money. And I think from a societal perspective, from my dad's perspective, they would say, hey, you're successful. Why? You're making a killing, right? You're making more money than all your friends. You got a big corporate title, right? The professors at your college or grad school are asking you to come back and guest lecture, right? And you're checking all these boxes. And then you kind of sit there at night and you're like, ah, what the fuck is this feeling in my head right now where I feel like I still have this this gap, right? This like, I'm not successful. This actually was quite easy. It's a track. And I simply went down it. And then all of a sudden you start wondering, am I just a sheep? Am I just going down the track that they want all of us to go down, whoever they are? And that's when I started to realize you can actually do a lot. You gotta be crazy, but you can do a lot as an entrepreneur. And so I was humble enough to know You got to learn. And in my space, highly regulated, highly technical. Running a health insurance company isn't something you can do out of your garage, right? 3 master's degrees, right? It took me a while to get through that. Took me a while to actually go into these big organizations and learn the fundamentals of how things work. Yeah, I think I averaged a new job every 8 months for the first 15 years of my career. I was always asking to take on something, not, you know, because I had a little track in my my mind around things I needed to go learn in order to do this. But what I can tell you is I was crazy early on. I thought that I was going to do this. I kind of had a vision of building an insurance company that would be for the good, you know, and now I have a few hundred employers that are clients. And, you know, we just eclipsed $100 million of premium under management. And all of that goes back to building something the way that I think my stepmom would be proud of.

Right. Did— yeah. Did you have a clear path to starting your company and generating revenue prior to leaving your last job, or did you jump ship and figure it out?

Huh. I think I thought I had a plan, and then that shit went out the door quickly. You know, like, like you think the world's going to go a certain way, and then you realize that plans, I mean, they move, things shift, right? You hire people, you think they're going to do one thing, they do another, you know. And so sure, I tried to do the whole moonlighting thing, but I honestly think anyone who's an entrepreneur needs to know you can't be half pregnant. You either go all in or not at all. And if you're an investor, you want your founder, you want your senior leadership team to be all in, not, oh, I do this on the weekends. If you do it on the weekends, it's not for anyone serious. Yeah, right. This is something where you got to go all in. And for me, when I stepped into this role, I wanted some assurances. No, I didn't. And in fact, I missed horribly. And like I said, hungry dogs run faster. I was starving. I mean, I was starving. I still am a little hungry. You know, I haven't quite got all the way there. But I do think that people oftentimes want the best of both worlds. I'm going to keep my corporate job, but keep my money coming in at night. I'm going to do this and then once I reach stability, then I'll step into it. But my thing is this: you're not going to place the bets, you're not going to take the risk when you've got the W-2 coming in from the 9 to 5.

Yeah, right.

You go all in, you gotta go all in. And that's just one man's opinion, right? And everyone has their own path.

I agree, I tend to agree. I think, um, I, I want to, uh, dive into what you said earlier, which is, you know, I, I brought up that you had this confidence and you said, I don't know if I would call it confidence. It was more of naivety, something along those lines.

Mm-hmm.

I believe when we're young and we haven't been beaten down too many times, especially people who are hungry, we have this kind of naive, unwarranted confidence, right? I remember when I was in my college days, I felt like I could do anything. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I just was like, yeah, I'm meant to be able to do this stuff. And over time, you You try and you fail and try and you fail and it starts to kind of diminish. And then a lot of people get to a point where it's like, well, wasn't for me. And they never follow their dreams. Can you lean into what it was like to be kind of naively confident and what it felt like at the time that kind of pushed you forward for young people listening? If they have that, you know, I'm meant to do something, but I don't really know what I'm doing yet. How important was that to you early on, to have that kind of naive, unwarranted confidence?

I think that it comes from a place where if I'm a young person today looking at this, you have to know that to start is the hardest thing, right? And there's so many clichés to use there, but you have to be confident in the fact that you're going to figure it out. Because I'll tell you right now, the most successful people that I've hired they didn't come in with a resume of, oh, I have an MBA from this school and I have 10 years of experience here. That is not a correlate for success in anything I've ever seen. What I've seen as a correlate for success is grit.

Yeah.

People who want to get after it every day. People who say, fuck that. They wake up and they literally look at people, oh, you can't do that. No one's ever done it that way. Cool. Great. Appreciate it. Keep it moving. Right? You have to have the confidence the swagger to know that you want to bet on yourself. And I think that the minute you decide you want to bet on yourself, you can do a lot. And, you know, the Steve Jobs quote of, you know, the crazy people are the ones who end up changing the world, right? I like the Bernard Shaw quote when I think about this topic, which is something along the lines of, you know, the stable man, the predictable man, right, adapts himself to the world. Right? And the unstable, right, unpredictable person adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon people who are unstable, unpredictable, right? So if you want to see this world progress, we need people who don't adapt themselves to the world. They want the world to adapt to them, right? And I think that that is the root of it all. It's the ability to take a step forward prudently, judiciously, Don't just wake up one morning, quit your job, and say, I'm going to be an entrepreneur, because it's not fun. And I really think we need to dispel the lore. I think there's a lot out there today where it all looks really cool. Every day that I go to work, I do not wear a black t-shirt. OK? It's not cool. I don't make my own hours. I answer to a board. Right? At the end of the day, our employer clients are my number one boss. Right? And if someone's calling me at 8:00 PM, 8:00 AM, uh, I'm answering. The sacrifices that my wife and child have had to make for me to be able to go after this are easily far greater than anything I could ever ask for. There's plenty of dinners that they have sat by themselves when every other family had, uh, you know, their husband and father there. And so I would say that the people though that want to get into this space, be confident in the fact that you You don't have to have the entire story. But if you can figure it out, and you have the confidence to say, I have a passion, I have a belief, and it's backed with something here that has merit, right? And then do your best to shoot every hole through that idea. And if you can do that before you start it, great. Like, I think you are exceptionally talented at seeking people out, asking really unique questions, and having people not only give you perspective, but also tell you how it is, right? And nowadays, if I'm a young person, my gosh, you have so many abilities. I mean, think about this. Think about if you and I growing up had the ability to go online and get in touch with entrepreneurs with a few clicks. And I'm not talking about anything more than LinkedIn. I mean, a cold message on, you know, LinkedIn is what got me my start. I cold messaged the guy and I said, hey, I'm looking at doing something along these lines. Kevin Weinstein is his name. And I remember it was December 16th and I hit him up and it was 4:22 PM and at 4:24 he wrote back. And I always remember that because I go back to that LinkedIn message and I go, this guy had already made it. He was a multi success story, right? He had multiple businesses he had exited. He was a serial entrepreneur. And I just hit him up, cold message. Hey, your career path looks like something I want to emulate. I'm humble, I'm young, I just want to learn. Can you give me 10 minutes of your time? And then I gave a Calendly link, made it super easy for him to click it, say yes, right? He responded with his own Calendly link, right? Which was, you're going to be on my time. And, and that guy got me my start, right? He knew a guy in San Francisco and one thing led to another. But It goes all the way back to one core principle, which is you're not going to get a lot of people to say you should do this because it's probably not a great idea. Your parents will tell you, keep that corporate job. Your friends will tell you, why would you shake this up? And there is nothing sexy about this. I really think we need to dispel that. Yeah, there's nothing fun. It's hard.

There's dark, very dark, very lonely times building something.

Oh, I've never felt more self-hatred than doing this, to be honest with you.

Yeah.

Like, and I think people like— you think, you know, a dark, deep voice in your head, it amplifies when you have a staff of 60 people. Yeah, it amplifies when you made a decision and next thing you know, you're laying off 15 people during the holidays because you need to change direction, rebuild, reset, refocus. Right. I think too often people think, oh man, I'm going to build the next billion-dollar company. You might. But in between now and then is a journey.

It's going to be a lot of tests and challenges. I, I stepped away from, you know, we had a nearly $20 million a year education business and I stepped away to build Zendrop and I bootstrapped it and I put millions of dollars of my own money into it. I didn't have that many millions of dollars. I was putting a lot of my money into it. Right. And we launched it right into COVID. And during COVID e-commerce boomed, but we were shipping our products on commercial airlines and those stopped getting shipped because commercial airlines shut down. So everything that we were built upon got knocked off immediately within the first 4 months of launching the business. And we had a relatively large staff at the time. I think there's maybe 20, 25 people.

Yeah.

And I remember I was like, guys, we're gonna make it through this, but I need to cut everyone's salary in half for the next, I don't remember how many months. Trying to convince people to stay on board with half of their salary while I was burning. And keep in mind, like I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with my single mom. I had built this nest egg of funds that I was like, I was so scared to lose it from day one. And now I'm losing it and trying to, like, the stress and anguish in that moment. I remember, you know, staying up at night and just not knowing what to do.

Yep.

But we figured it out. And that's the thing about being an entrepreneur. And there was many of those times in my journey. And, you know, and then after the next really challenging time and you figure it out, then it's kind of like, well, you know, I figured it out those times. Now it's like, I've probably had 10+ moments of, I don't know what the fuck we're gonna do. Yeah. And now when they come up, it's like, we're gonna figure it out. It's like, right, you become immune to it, right? Because you're— you've gotten validation that you've been able to get through it. And it's not from being really smart or being really skilled. It's from staying in the game, right? Staying in the game, showing up, and knowing that there's infinite things happening around you at all times. If you could keep your energy strong and you could stay in the game, you can keep just looking for that next breadcrumb. You don't need to find the gold, you just got to find the next little breadcrumb. The problem— and some of these problems turned into the greatest opportunities of our, you know, in the whole business. So it's like, I think what I've derived from what you said and what I want to add to it is, first of all, I don't know if entrepreneurship's for everyone. It's not fun. 90% of the time it feels like you're getting kicked in the nuts. 10% of the time it's glorious. And then you get a lot of external validation from people, your peers, you know, who've seen you succeed, which is cool, but it's only cool for so long, right?

Um, but can I, can I add just to that? Because I feel like I wish somebody had told me, you know, you, you and I played golf recently. And by the way, for anyone who doesn't know, Jared's an incredible golfer. Like, you are incredible golfer.

Thank you.

And I think it was Ben Hogan's quote that went something along the lines of, "Only 2 shots per round are perfect shots." Yeah. Right? And it's very similar in business where I wish someone had told me early on, expect most days to be challenging, expect the problem, celebrate the problem. Celebrate it. Because if you can bring an open mind, open heart to those issues, you're going to be just fine. And so for people who are contemplating whether or not they want to do it, or better yet, they're already on the journey and they're contemplating whether or not they want to stick with it, you got to— you got to check yourself real quick and say, do I enjoy problem solving?

Yeah.

And do I enjoy this process?

Yeah. Right.

And that's that Kobe Bryant line that we talked about, right? It's like if you can fall in love with the process because the championship— I asked you, I said that first big exit when you got that big dollar sign drops in, that wire comes through. What does that feel like? I remember the first time that wire dropped for me wasn't the size and scale that you talked about, but I remember when it came through, it was hot for about a moment and I'd already planned a big weekend. I already had a lot of things planned and I remember wanting to just cancel it because I was like, I'd rather just work. Like, I think I'm actually just obsessed with the process. And I remember feeling really down and sad about it. I called my dad and he was, he was more happy than I was. And I remember asking him, you know, do you think there's a problem here? And he goes, no, I think actually that is, that is the root of it all, is that you're a workaholic who's fallen in love with a mission and a vision. And the fact that there's great outcomes along the way, that is what it is. But expect every day to be tough. And the good days, those are just abnormal.

You know, so wise. It's like, if you can fall in love with the process, because like oftentimes I'll catch myself being like, Oh, once all this shit's over with, then things will be like that. And it's like, well, once all this shit's over with, like, there's gonna be other shit to get over. And it's like just a consistent waiting game for things to be perfect, and they never are.

I can't believe you just said it. So, so, you know, I got booted out of one high school into the next during that whole, you know, period of time that we talked about with my stepmom. Um, there are some behavioral issues that also played a role in that. Um, I ended up getting selected to speak at my high school graduation. So I went from a little class of like 60 people to a class of almost 1,000. And I remember coming out and I wasn't chosen because I was the valedictorian. I can promise you that. And I ended it with a quotation that was something along the lines of, I used to think that my life would begin once the next debt was paid, the next challenge was conquered, the next obstacle was overcome. And then one day I realized that my life was indeed those debts, those challenges, and those obstacles.

Yeah, right.

And it's so poignant to what you just said.

It's powerful. I mean, all that exists is right here and right now. Like, we might not have tomorrow, we might not have next year, we might not have the next hour, or we might live to 150. We have no idea.

Right.

But if you're playing that waiting game, life is not a great experience. And that's really what life boils down to. Circling back to entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

It's— I think a lot of new entrepreneurs, a lot of people that, you know, they have this naivety, you know, they, they have this kind of unwarranted confidence. They also have this preconceived false notion that successful people, people that have succeeded, they, they know what they're doing and they, they, they knew what they were going to do and they executed on it. In their mind, they're like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I know what I want, what I want the outcome to be. I don't know what I'm gonna do. So, well, what— let me try to figure out what I'm gonna do. And they wait until they figure out what they're gonna do to get started. But the truth is, you could have a vision of what you want the outcome to be, but you'd never really know what you're doing. Like, I still don't know exactly what I'm doing most of the time. I'm still figuring things out every single day, right? What I've learned is I don't believe we're ever going to know exactly what we need to do. The only thing that we have a direct impact on, a direct thing that we can control, is how we show up for ourselves and the version of ourselves we can build that can be thrown into that chaos. Like, if you throw, you know, a little, you know, puppy into, you know, a den of wolves, it's going to get trampled. But if you build that puppy into a strong dog and you throw it, it's going to defend itself. So it's like we can build ourselves into the version of ourselves that has to go into that chaos, and in doing so, we get confidence that propels us towards our outcome that we want to get to. So it's like, don't worry so much about exactly what you need to do. Yeah, put your energy into becoming the version of yourself that can face the chaos.

Well, let me ask you a question though, because that— look, you obviously have been on this journey, and I'm learning from you. I've told you that on our walk. I said how grateful I am that you've come to my life at this kind of exact time. And what I found is that the universe will give you those things if you put that energy out there. Um, and I told you, I don't want to be overly spiritual about this, but I do believe that that sometimes you got to release the plan. I'm an— I mean, Type A personality, OCD to the max. It is hard for me to not think of a plan. I was kind of raised in a household where it's like, don't bring the problem to me, you know, bring the solution, right? But the reality is, is actually it's, it's sometimes you don't need to have the solution. But I want to ask you a question, like, when you think about entrepreneurs, how many people do you think, uh, the number one goal is just make money and do it on my own terms versus solving a real problem or passion that they have?

Well, I think the majority of— the vast majority, and I think a lot of it has to do with your upbringing, right? If you came from a life that you want to, you know, build something greater than— maybe you came from not a very wealthy family— I think it's mostly very money-driven. I think also society as a whole propels that desire and that need to have certain material things. And I believe that most people are on the money path. And sadly, or just not sadly, just the truth is most people won't get it. And then the few who do realize that's not what it was about. Like, I was lucky. I was very lucky when I was in my 20s that I literally created a dropshipping store I ran some ads and it worked and I was able to generate millions of dollars in a very short period of time.

Right.

In my 20s.

Right.

Back when I thought that's what life was about.

Yep.

And I remember like when I was 16, I saw this young guy driving a Lamborghini and I remember like vividly being like, oh man, once I'm like him, I made it. And then I remember being that guy and then realizing, okay, I still have this big empty void inside of me.

Yeah.

And it's not about the money. So I think sadly most people are just after.

But if I'm, if I'm, uh, like I think many of the people that might be listening, it's, it's, it's easy to say it once you've had it, right? Right. And if there's a lot of people out there that say, yeah, maybe it's not a Lamborghini, but I can tell you right now that if I had that money, I'd be happy.

Yeah, right.

It is the thing I want. And so then the question becomes, why do so many people sit there and say, well, once I achieved it, it actually wasn't what it was about the whole time? Should those people be heeding that advice?

And, you know, no, well, I think there's a very important concept to get here. It's, it's very valuable to listen, read, and learn and understand concepts. It's valuable. But where real change and growth occurs is through experience.

Hmm.

So you can tell someone this all day, and it's valuable. They have that anchor point. They're like, I remember him telling me that, and they might be on the lookout for that, and maybe they learn the lesson faster through the experience. Maybe they got to get beat down, you know, 3 times instead of 10 times to learn it. So I think there's value. But in order to really learn a lesson, which is, you know, multitudes more powerful than understanding concept, is through having the experience, right? So I think people— it's just a natural phase that I went through, a lot of my entrepreneur friends went through. I see people still in that phase right now, and I'm like, oh, he's gonna go through it eventually.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, it comes down to material things are cool, but they're just a dopamine hit. Like buying a car, buying your first cool car is really cool for a— for maybe 3 months. And then, and then your ego craves people like valet people being like, oh, this thing's sick. And your ego is fueled by it.

Yeah.

And then your next one is like, maybe you wanted a little more. It's really cool for like 2 months. And then like the whole ego thing was like, well, you realize, first of all, you should be a great person to everyone, but you don't necessarily want— like, the people that you want attention from are not giving you attention from this thing. The billionaires, the world changers, they're not giving. Or, you know, if you're trying to attract a wife, it's like the wife is not necessarily, you know, coming to you because of the Lambo. And the people you want to attract are not coming to you. A wife will be attracted to a wife, maybe not the one, unless she's a car enthusiast, which is cool.

Which is great.

So, so it's like the ego kind of realizes, okay, the people that really matter are kind of just like, whatever, it's just a thing. And then, you know, the third thing you— it's like, okay, for me at least, it was like maybe like a 2-week dopamine hit. And now, now I know I still enjoy cars. I like to try things. I love trying all foods. I like trying all things. And it's fun. And if I— if you can do it tax efficiently, you can write off the vehicle, whatever. You could justify reasons for spending the money, but it's like I've learned it's just, it's just simply a dopamine hit. But true fulfillment comes from like what you said, having a purpose, showing up for yourself, having discipline, working hard in areas of life that your subconscious is telling you got to work harder on, right? Getting up in the morning, doing the things that your mind is screaming at you not to do because it wants to be comfortable, but doing it anyway.

Yeah.

That's where, and then in being that person, you're gonna attract more of everything in your life that you want, more wealth, more money. So I think most people have it counterintuitively. They're like, I'm gonna grind my way until I get that money. Most people don't get it. Some people do, they learn, and then they realize there's a void and then they fill the void. And in filling the void, they attract way more money, way more abundance.

Well, you know, it reminds me though of these points though, where when you relax, things go better, right? We talked about golf. You know, the minute you white-knuckle your club, right, and you're gripping it too hard, you're probably going to shank it.

Yeah.

Um, there's probably worse analogies where you think about survivorship, um, in car accidents. Why do drunk people oftentimes survive where the sober person they hit doesn't? And it's because their body's relaxed.

Yeah.

I mean, how How gnarly of a thought is that, right? That the person that's the causal factor actually has the better outcome because they were more relaxed in that moment. What I apply then to entrepreneurship and building a business is, back to your original point, how do you get yourself every single day to a place where you are relaxed, right? When you're fighting, I mean, you have this big brawler in here. You've seen it, right? The guys who shouldn't be in the ring, covering themselves, right, like this. They got— you watch Muhammad Ali in his prime, you know, he's— he looks like he's dancing half the time, right? And I always liken it back to— there's a great story about a runner, Roger Bannister, right? Roger Bannister is the first guy to break the 4-minute mile. Yeah. And for like years and years and years, they were like, no one can do it, right? And then they went through and they said, here are all the things that have to be true in order to break a 4-minute mile, right? Like, the temperature had to be a certain way, the wind had to be a certain way, the track had to be a certain way, the shoes had to be a certain way. I'm pretty sure everything that they predicted needed was not true. I think it was like a cold, windy day. I think it was like raining. And this dude goes out and runs a 4— breaks the 4-minute mile. Since then, like, 20,000 people have broke the 4-minute mile. And so what it shows me is, number one, don't listen to people who tell you, here are the conditions you need for success, because if they knew it, they would have done it.

Yeah, right.

So I don't really need that. Number one, you're going to be the one to set those own conditions. Number two is the minute somebody does something, the human nature is to then release and say, well, if Jared can do it, I can do it. So I hope the people listening know that, like, I'm not God's gift to building businesses. I'm not God's gift to anything academic. I'm not God's gift to being a great friend, great listener. I'm a very normal guy, and probably even on the low end of that. But what I would say is every day I have one superpower, which is I bet on myself again. And I don't know what that is, but I'm willing to bet on myself even in the darkest of moments. I'd rather trust myself to get through it right, than anything else. And I think that if you have that kind of superpower, you can go really far. And then to your point about, you know, that little puppy coming in with all the wolves, right, how do you get yourself into a place where you fall in love with the process so that when that challenge hits you, you, you don't, you don't feel the cortisol pop? You know, one of the things that I've done with my little iWatch here is I have my heart rate, right, monitor, right, and I love it, right, front and center here, right? And I'll go back and I will timestamp my day because, you know, as a leader, as a CEO, I can tell you when the bad things happen, right? It's the email, it's the phone call. And I love to write them down in my little notebook. And then I'll go back here. My goal is to make my heart rate not pop when those bad things happen. I love that, you know, because then it's like, all right, I'm building it. I'm doing it.

I love that, you know, that it takes—

it's hard.

Well, it's a biological feedback that tells you you were tense and stressed, right?

And you don't feel it in time. It's just— and it's— and come on, everyone knows if you try to get your heart rate to rest, it's pretty hard to do that consciously. Yeah, I mean, you can do the breathing exercises and meditation and all that, but to do it real time when you're working— everyone's recipe is going to be different. My recipe is really funky.

What is it?

Uh, well, it's awkward. Um, so there's kind of three parts to it. The first thing is I have to welcome and thank the moment. I have found that when I'm not gracious, everything in me gets set off in a different way, kind of fight or flight. Yeah, to get that to turn off, I found that, you know, it's almost like saying I love you to your mom. I don't mean to kind of step off this real quick, but this is where I kind of got it from. I used to measure my stress level with voice fractals that you can collect on your phone. Okay, so voice fractals are like listening through a wall to a conversation. You can't hear the words. Yeah, but you can hear like the stress of the conversation. Yeah, right. And there is an app that I was using to do this, which was a healthcare-related app. And one of the things that I was looking at was why, when my dad calls, do I naturally calm down? And it's because I'm grateful that he called. I'm always grateful that he calls, you know. And then, you know, I think about friends when the random text, just checking in on you, I'm always grateful. That's like the root emotion. So I found that that was one of my parts of my recipe was being grateful, because when I'm grateful, I can't get my heart rate to get up. I don't know what it is. It's like, it's just that, that acknowledgement of like, you know, I'm fortunate to be living, breathing on the Jared Goetz Show right now. Being asked questions about things that 2, 3, 4 years ago I would have prayed to be in this moment, hoped to be in this moment, you know, be grateful. And I can look at this and I can watch my heart rate drop.

Yeah.

The second piece for me is knowing that I've never had a problem kill me to date. Yeah. I hope this is genuine wood, right? I might need it. Um, but that's, you know, I've never had something kill me. And when you are married to a trauma surgeon who comes home and over dinner the conversation is, who died today? Truly.

Yeah.

And she's reminding me that a 36-year-old was, was killed walking across the street because some lunatic blew a red light. You know, you think about that, you think about all the, the craziness, and you immediately realize this problem will not kill me. It might stress me out, it might be difficult, but I'm not gonna lose my life over it. So, okay, so I'm grateful, and I know that it's not conquerable. I have a tattoo on my back, which basically is unconquerable, right? It's the Invictus, right? Which is that poem that now they made a movie over. Everyone of my friends always says that I'm a Matt Damon fan because I got the tattoo and then like a week later the frickin' movie came out. And so people are like, what is the next one? Contagion after that? Martian? And I'm like, no, I'm not a Matt Damon fan, but I love this poem. Because it ends with, you're the master of your fate, you're the captain of your soul.

Right.

And I love that because as much as I believe a lot of our fate is written in the stars, we control this. Right. And so to be grateful and to know I won't be killed by this and that it is conquerable. Right. Are two things that help. And then the third and final thing, and keep in mind, I'm trying to get this down to like doing this in under a second.

Yeah.

Right. So it's grateful, right? It's conquerable. And the third and final thing for me, it's fucking fun. You know, it's fun.

Yeah.

Because when it's— when I believe something's fun, I'm creative.

Yeah.

When I think something's hard and scary, I get tunnel vision and then I don't think broadly. I don't think, wait, I had a conversation with Jared and he's got this guy that works with him, Elliot, and Elliot knows this person. Hold on, let me make a text real quick. I don't think that way. When I'm scared, it's like, think about the SATs, right? When you're petrified that that score is going to determine what school or ACT, you know, that you're going to get into. All of a sudden, all you can do is keep replaying the math class that you were in. I know, I know this concept, right? And you're not just thinking creatively through the problem. So for me, being grateful, knowing I'm unconquerable, I tell myself that I fill myself up with that shit, you know, and then knowing at the end of the day that this is going to be fun. That helps me.

I love that. And I think the common theme is you're choosing what to focus on because you could take, you know, for example, you mentioned, okay, I'm grateful I'm here. I'm on this, this podcast right now. You know, 4 years ago I would have killed to be here. And that's how you're choosing to focus on it. You can also choose to say, oh, I got so much stuff to do and I have to go on that podcast. And like, what if it doesn't go well? It's the same exact scenario, but you can choose to not be grateful.

Mm-hmm.

You can choose to focus on anything you want to focus on, but you're the master of your soul. You're choosing where to focus, which is having a direct biological impact on yourself.

Truly.

Heart rate. And you can also validate that in doing so, you can enter the flow state. It's like the same thing. It's like, have you ever been— you've been in the car and, you know, the same song?

Oh yeah.

It's like You're just grooving to it. And then like another day you're not in that state and like, you know, you're hitting every red light and everyone's like flipping you off and then the song's on, you don't even notice the song. You're like, I hate this song. It's the exact same song.

Yeah.

It's just your energy is different.

Yeah.

And it's because your mind is scattered. It's thinking about all your problems. It's disorganized. It's chaotic. It's like, have you ever been in that state and you just got your life organized for a second? You just literally like, it's like you're almost like a like a pressure cooker and the pressure is building.

I get it. And I look at it though, and I'm like, I don't know why more people, especially in the entrepreneurial space, are not thinking about this classic adage of we're creatures of our environment. Create the environment. Like, I, I'm off Facebook. I am not on TikTok. I go on Instagram only because my wife sends me shit and she wakes me up and says, you gotta look at this.

Yeah.

You know, right. Outside that, I'm not on it and I refuse to be on it. Yeah, because the newsfeed is an echo chamber and it's an echo chamber of dopamine hits and it throws me off my environment. And to control your environment means you need to decide what you're going to read in the morning.

Yeah.

And if you're going to go to Reuters or BBC or Fox or CNN, you are literally allowing some 20-something-year-old intern who came up with clickbait, right, to decide how your day is going to start. I want the songs that I love that give me life. To give me life every time I hear them, which means I need to control a lot around me, which means I need to be unapologetic about pissing a lot of people off, right?

Social media is like playing Russian roulette. And like, I, I tend to think that our energy is much more malleable in the mornings early, as you know, when you wake up, you're tired, anything can irritate you or put you in a good mood. You haven't gotten in the flow state yet, right? So if people— if you go and scroll on your phone first thing in the morning, You don't— anything could enter your world. You're done. And change. And now it's like, I remember it. So I also, you know, I delete social media for most of the time, then I'll redownload it for like a week. And then I like, what am I doing? I delete it again. And I had— it was like a day after I deleted social media. And I was like on my phone, like, what should I do? And I opened the news app. And like, I think the news is, you know, it's the same thing, but I don't think it's as expansive. Like social media, there's infinite things you could see. The algorithm knows how to hook you. The news, it's limited. The news app's kind of boring, but first thing in the morning I opened it up and I saw this horrible, tragic story about people in Switzerland who died in a fire. 40 people died.

Oh, the club.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. The fire at the bar.

And it like, and you know, God bless their souls and their parents and, you know, rest in peace. And that had a rippling effect on my day. There was a moment of my day that was, you know, I was just grateful for my life and my kids and like, and it was fine. But like that, I didn't expect that bring that sadness into my day. I didn't, I threw myself into an unknown environment. Right. Social media does that. But it also gives you, you need this girl, you need this watch, you need this car, you need this trip, you need this life. Oh, this, look at this guy. Oh, he's your age. Oh, look at his life. He's doing all this stuff. And it's like, your mind's just like all over the place and scattered.

Why is it so difficult for people to break that though? Like, it's the same thing when it comes to your health, right? Like, we just have to be conscious of the fact of, look, we were hunter-gatherers as humans, right? We're now in a place where we have overabundance and access, right? So our bodies aren't used to having this high level of caloric burn without having to do anything really physical to go get it.

Yeah.

And we seem to be lazy in the fact of you literally control all this. Like, I always get made fun of because I have an old-school alarm clock in my room. Yeah, you know, but it's— and it's like a metal one that like ding ding ding ding ding ding, and it's annoying, right? Because it will run for 20 seconds. But I'm like, I refuse to look at my phone because how dare I do that to my wife and my son. My son deserves me at my best. And in that morning when I wake up, I woke up, I'm grateful, right? I'm going to kiss my wife. We have a little routine that we go through. We will get our son together. I'm getting that cuddle session. I'm getting 20 minutes with my boy and I cuddle that. I mean, I feel bad for him at this point because it's more for me than it is for him. I think he's kind of growing out of it.

A lot for him, right? Amazing.

But it's so good. And I know the days when I check my phone, it's, it's the text and And it's, it's not anyone's fault, but when you have employees or family members that put their weight on you, which I feel grateful I'm strong enough for them to feel like that's going to help them, right? But how dare I do that to my son, where now I'm more focused on someone else's issue than cuddling up with him, you know? I just think it's disrespectful. And I, and I speak about it with such polarizing terms because I don't think it's getting through people's heads when you're like, here's how I'm successful in the morning. I use an alarm. No, fuck that. I'm not going to disrespect my wife. How about that? I'm not going to disrespect my son. Yeah, my son deserves an unabashed version of me that is not manipulated by whatever clickbait for whatever billionaire is going to make off whatever publicly traded company that it has access to my phone.

I know it needs to be polarizing like that. 'Cause people think it's like, oh, you know, social media, it's bad, I scroll too much, haha. It's kind of like, uh, it's not villainized as much as it needs to be.

Truly.

It's actually really fucking bad.

Mm-hmm.

It can be used responsibly and it's not bad as its own thing, but when you use it uncontrollably, it's, in my opinion, just as bad as taking drugs.

Oh yeah.

You're, you're, you're— and once you have kids, it's a whole different ballgame. Like you said, like, we both have young kids around the same age. My why, like, when I— before I had kids, it was like, yeah, I want to make money. And I was like, I've always been a bit of a schemer, like, in high school, like, to do the least I would need to do to get the best grades. And like, you know, do the least I need to do to make this deal happen. But now when you have kids, it's like, they are— when they're young, they're— your energy is what's feeding them before they could really speak and reason. Your energy is what's determining their reality. It's like, like you said, how dare I disrupt that energy that's going to be fed to my son, like poisoning his energy his whole day.

Yeah, right. And I think it's serious. There was something sent to me recently that I thought was great, and it had more of a biblical undertone. But it was great in the terms of It was about setting the standard. You hear this thing with the chicken fingers and the barbecue sauce? Have you seen that? No. So this guy goes in and there's this kind of, you know, pissed off cashier, right? And he's like, okay, what can I get you today? The guy says, uh, I'll take, I'll take, uh, you know, 6-pack of chicken fingers, right? Okay, rings them up and he goes, reaches over and he picks the 6-pack of chicken fingers up and they're cold. They've kind of been there for a minute, you know, and the guy's kind of pissed off, just, you know, I don't want to be here, I don't be doing this job. Right? And the guy rings him up, charges him, and then goes, oh shit, because I forgot to ask for barbecue sauce. Can I get some barbecue sauce? Guy says, yeah, sure, I'll get you some barbecue sauce. Throws barbecue sauce up on, says that, oh, by the way, it's 75 cents. Guy's buying the chicken fingers, he's like, okay, um, here's my credit card again, right? And as he's filling it out, he can tell the guy's staring intently at the receipt. Is this guy going to tip? On the barbecue sauce, right? Because there's a tip line on all these receipts. And he says, it was in that moment I looked at him, he's looking at me, and I could tell he's pissed off. He's not happy. And now he's going to wonder, am I pissed off? Am I not happy? And I decided I wrote down $10. I gave him a $10 tip. Now immediately that guy then goes, hold on, and he pulls the chicken fingers back off. He goes back to the fryer. Turns out there's some fresh chicken fingers, right? And he gets them going, right? Here, here, let me get you some hot ones. You need anything else? You got the napkins, the bag, the whole thing. And the funny thing about it is the whole point of that story is that you have to choose to set the standard. And that cashier didn't want to set the standard, but the guy paying did. And I think it goes back to how you want to live your day, how you want to live your life. Do you want to set the standard? Do you want to have someone set your standard? And my problem is I am a defiant asshole. In my heart of hearts, my inner voice is somebody that likes control. How would I ever— this is probably why I'm not a big drinker. It's probably why I don't run around with a lot of people. I like to be in control. And what I have found is that setting the standard for me is making sure that I'm unapologetic about stuff, because you're not going to get approval from most people. The minority believe what we're talking about right now, right? Because the majority are just fed on these dopamine hits.

Yeah.

And that's why the majority are sheep. Walking down the road right now, not knowing where that ends.

Yeah.

Right.

So it's hard for people to not be, um, apologetic when they don't have confidence. So by showing up, by not being a big drinker, by not doing all these things that, you know, you have these kind of internal battles that you're either winning or losing, you're building confidence. It allows you to be unapologetic, which allows you to then build more confidence. It's kind of just a flywheel effect.

Oh, absolutely.

And I think that is a big component of, of the success you've built in business. I think that unapologetic standard that you've set for yourself goes way beyond— you said you were not an extraordinary student, extraordinary, you know, but that component I think is something that I've learned from you, from other people that are also very successful, is just that unapologetic way of living and that cycle that continues to feed confidence. Leads to a life of abundance in whatever area you're focused in.

That is it. I mean, if that's, if that's one of the departing themes from our conversation, I can get behind that, which is the most successful people are ones that typically are not out seeking for any validation, money, right? Lifestyle, nothing. They run to the beat of their own drum, and it's in a place that they can feel that they can defend it every day.

Yeah.

I can defend the fact that I cuddle the hell out of my son before I answer an email.

Hell yeah.

And I bet you there's some, there's some pretty crazy stuff in my email that needs to be answered immediately. But you and I are fortunate, and I think your listeners should know this too. You live what you say. I see you out there. I saw your wife this morning. I was on my little walk and she was coming in and I, and I, and I, you live out what you say. Uh, you set the standard in your own way and you bring other people along that journey with you. I gotta tell you, thank you for that.

Hell yeah. I appreciate that. And thank you as well. I'm going to hit you with a few rapid fire questions to wrap this up.

All right.

Amazing. Uh, I love the path we went down. I keep riffing on this. We might have to do another, uh, 2-hour walk to expand on these things. Um, so a couple of questions that we're just going to fire off. Number 1 is what's one habit or piece of advice that you've learned or implemented into your life that's been the most impactful thing for you? A habit or a piece of advice that you've been able to implement that's been very impactful for your life?

Find something or someone that you love more than yourself.

Love that. Love that. How do you stay in a high-energy state during those dark times, during those challenging times?

Are you eating to live or living to eat? I find that you can fuel your body. Things I eat lead to the way that I think, which leads to the actions I take. So I think it all starts with— I love eating, I love food. And so for me, it starts with meals. I find that meals are great ways to also socialize with other people. And so I think that habit of eating healthy, right, and being really conscientious about what I'm putting into my body has changed many things. When I eat like shit, I usually act and perform like shit.

Powerful. What's one belief that you've held on to about life for a long time that's turned out to be wrong?

I think of a long time I thought that it was okay to be a victim of life. It's not my fault. The reason why that didn't work out was because of that person or that thing. Um, I think I, you know, having you know, 8 sisters who love on me, give you every excuse in the book of, it's not your fault, Jebby, right? They all call me J-E-B-B-Y, Jebby, right? It's not your fault. And then that led and bred, uh, this victim mentality. And I don't think I ever titled it this way. I just, you know, found myself taking a little bit of pity. And I think that what I've come to realize is that That is completely wrong, right? That you cannot be a victim of your life. And every day you have to fight that, right? Because you'll be given all the excuses, right? Every single day there are thousands of moments where the universe says, come on, Jared, it's okay. You can bow down. It's not your fault. Fuck that. It is your fault. Own it. Change it.

Never serves you to be a victim, only to be radically accountable. Love that. What's something about life that you feel like most of society has wrong?

Something about life that most of society has wrong. Probably have two answers to that. Um, one is you have more time. You don't. Act as if time is running out. Act as if you need to get moving now. I don't know why it is, but like even within our own enterprise today, meetings are automatically set at 30 minutes and 60 minutes. Why? Set it for 2 minutes, set it for 5 minutes, right? We do not have more time. Act with urgency, right? What can be done today should be done today, said Emerson, right? Do it, right? So I think that's number one, that most society thinks that We live in these 7-day, you know, sequences and we're living for the weekend. No, not at all. I love my Mondays as much as my Fridays. The second thing that I would call out on things that society has wrong is that don't ever confuse ignorance for malice. I think a lot of people think that, you know, let me say it like this. I went to Virginia Tech in 2007. There was a mass shooting there, and George Bush came and talked, and there was a poet as well that spoke. And they said something along the lines of, we often judge ourselves by our best intentions and others by their worst actions. We judge ourselves by our best intentions but others by their worst actions. And I think sometimes we too often like to think people are mean and malice when they're just ignorant and they don't know. And so what I have found is that society often likes to perpetuate, especially today's divisive world that we're in, people like to think people are out to get me. Most people just don't know, and a lot of people don't even give a shit, right? And so don't ever confuse people's ignorance, uh, for the fact that they're not mean.

They usually just don't know. Yeah, everyone's trying to do what they think is right in life for the most part.

Most part.

Crazy deranged people.

And so yeah, screw that.

Thank you, my friend.

Thank you, my friend.

Amazing conversation. It's been awesome.

Thank you.