Stop Being a Slave to Your Business | Jason Duncan's Exit Without Exiting Method

Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa Podcast, where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers, and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission, and wisdom with you. Together, we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. So after founding 14 companies and exiting 5, Jason Duncan reverse engineered What separates entrepreneurs who build wealth from those who simply build a job? And that research became the XOS method that he created, a 7-stage methodology that transitions owner-operators into owners-investors, owner-investors. And what that allows clients to do is reduce their work hours, increase their productivity, and by 80%, so significant, and boost business value. And he's known as the real Jason Duncan. He's founder of— founder and CEO of the Exiter Club, and he also is bestseller— bestselling— oh my gosh, bestselling author of Exit Without Exiting. He's a 2x TEDx speaker and host of the Root of All Success podcast. And I am excited to have you here. This is a little bit out of our realm, but actually I found all the connections because This podcast is called The Wellness Sherpa, and we talk about how to help people get up that mountain with support. And so this is just a different mountain.

So welcome.

I'm so excited to have you here.

It's good to be here, Jen.

Yeah. So, Jason, you and I met, what, about 3 months ago, 4 months ago at an entrepreneur event. And you were one of the speakers, which was great. And one of the things that you talk about is, and I love this word, how entrepreneurs are enslaved by their business. And that's a pretty profound word. So tell me more about that, what that means, and where was the breaking point for you personally when you realized you were enslaved by the many businesses that you were running?

Yeah, so the, the concept of this is, uh, I call it the ironic prison of entrepreneurship, because when we— when most of us start businesses, we do so with the hopes of generating more cash for ourselves, being our own boss, being in control, and having freedom, the freedom to choose what we do, when we do it, et cetera. But ironically, ironically, entrepreneurship for most entrepreneurs leaves them trapped in the daily operations, essentially being their own employee, not their own boss. And that's how we become slaves. And I teach a methodology called the XOS method, which stands for Exit or Operating System. And we look at it as there are 3 tiers of entrepreneurial evolution. Tier 1, which is where most entrepreneurs stay forever, is called owner-operator. You know, it's the person— if you're thinking about an ice cream shop, you know, they, they're the ones that buy the ice cream, they scoop the ice cream, they serve the customers, they clean up, they shut the store down, they do the books. They're doing everything. They're the owner and the operator. That's Tier 1 entrepreneurship, and most people never leave that. I'd say probably 80 to 90% of entrepreneurs never get out of Tier 1. Tier 2 is owner-manager, and this is when you're still involved, but you're not scooping the ice cream. You might be in charge of making sure the ice cream gets ordered. You're in charge of hiring the employees. You're in charge of making sure the store is open every day, but you're not having to do the work. You're still having to manage the work. And if you didn't manage it, you know, nothing would get done. And I'd say 10 to 15% of entrepreneurs make it to this. This is where I was when I discovered this, is I was an owner-manager. I had a company where you had about 20 employees or so. We were doing projects all all over the country, and we had, you know, a million dollars in EBITDA. We were doing really well. But when I went to say, okay, I want to sell the company because we can— we're very profitable— I couldn't because it still relied too much on me. And that's when I started looking for, where is— there's another place to go? Like, is there something else? Because I've been in the business, now I feel like I'm working on it, but is there another level? And that's when we discovered that there's a tier 3, there's an owner-investor level, and that's where you're working above the business. This is where you You know, you're not scooping the ice cream. You don't even order the ice cream. You're looking at a dashboard of KPIs and things that are important, like financial, looking at the P&L, looking at the balance sheet and making sure that your investment is operating correctly and that other people are managing and other people doing the, doing the work. And you're still the investor, the visionary, the architect of that business. So when I was running a lot of—

I just want to clarify real quick. KPIs, key performance indicators. So those are your metrics.

Yeah. And, you know, that was Measure What Matters by John Doerr. Wrote that book and it was a great book about OKRs and KPIs and everybody should, everybody should read that. But that's what an owner investor does and that's what I strive to be in the businesses that I own. And it's what we try to help our clients do in the Exitor Club.

Can anybody become an entrepreneur? And I think this is an important question because I personally went— I came from 29 years in financial services, jumped into the entrepreneur world and it was like, Okay, everything's different, right? When you're— well, at least when I was probably in the first tier for many, many years, it was like, oh, I've got to use my own money to invest. If I'm buying something, I've got to invest in inventory, for example. I'm using my own money, right? Not a corporate company where I can go in and say, hey, I have a project, give me $1.5 million. There's no personal attachment to me, right? So Can anybody be an entrepreneur? What does it take to be one?

Um, I think my gut reaction to the question, if it's just a binary yes or no, I'm going to say no. I think an entrepreneur is a different type of person. Um, you know, is it possible that anybody could be an entrepreneur? For sure, I guess, possibly. But is it probable? No. I mean, the probability is way low for a lot of people to become entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs are different than the average person in that they will accept a certain level of risk in order to create something that didn't otherwise exist. That's my definition of what an entrepreneur is. And so a lot of people that we call entrepreneurs are, are, are simply business owners. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different category. You can be an entrepreneur, not own a business, and you can be a business owner and not be an entrepreneur. I think there are two different categories now. Frankly, they overlap so much that we often lose the distinction between business owners. Because I would think if you look at a tier 1 entrepreneur, even though I call it tier 1 entrepreneurship, most tier 1 entrepreneurs aren't entrepreneurs at all. They're just business owners. If you own the ice cream shop and you make the ice cream and you order the ingredients and you scoop it, what, you know, except for signing a lease, you know, what risk did you take? It's a low risk. Obviously, there's some financial risk there, but an entrepreneur is going to go said, look, I'm going to, I'm going to bet my house on this. I'm going to hire these employees. I don't know if I can pay them. I'm going to create this new product or new service, and I'm going to do something to make the world a better place to live in. And I'm going to make a lot of money doing it, and I'm going to make a lot of people a lot of money doing this. That's the difference between entrepreneurship and business ownership.

Okay, that's really helpful. So one of the things that you talk about is about energy freedom. And that energy is the first freedom that you should seek. So talk about that, because when I talk about energy, I'm talking about it in a different realm. So where did you learn that concept? And what was your old life, the way that you were working, costing you physically, emotionally, spiritually?

You know, there are 5 freedoms that I talk about and that we have to obtain in order for it to all kind of work. And energy, as you said, is the first one. And what I mean by that, it's more just health, but it's related to health. So you can have decent health but not have the energy, which could be mental, emotional, could have, you know, spiritual, could be a lot of things. But energy is about if you can, you show up and do the work. Can you, can you put forth the time, energy, and effort to accomplish what you need to accomplish? Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It's not for weaklings. It is a long, hard road until it starts working. And then it starts working, and now you can start, you know, taking the benefits, and you can maybe work 10 hours a week, and, and you can make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year personally in income because you put in all the work at the front end. Well, if you are fat, sick, and medicated, and you can't walk up a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing, like, that's going to be a severe limitation to your ability to be free. Like you can't be free regardless of whether we're talking about entrepreneurial freedom or any other freedom. You can't be free that way. And I would challenge the listeners to consider right now in their minds, think about anyone who is very successful and doesn't matter what finance, education, health, you know, medicine, whatever. And picture what they look like in your mind. Is that person like visually just what you see? Unhealthy? And the answer is most— there are anomalies, of course, but most of the time the answer is no. Like, they're— they might not be fit and can't run a marathon. I can't certainly do that, but I'm, I'm in good shape. I take care of myself. I work out, you know, 4 days a week. I, I try to watch what I eat. You know, I, I'm, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a foodie, and I'm not a Nazi on what I eat and what I intake. I don't count macros and all that kind of stuff, but I have to make sure I protect my energy, because without the energy If I have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the ability to choose what I do every day, and I think I'm pursuing a purpose, but I have no energy to do those things, none of that is worth anything.

So is energy internal, external, both? Talk a little bit more about that.

I think, I think it's mostly— well, I don't know that it is mostly. It's probably a 50-50 split of mental and physical. So If you are physically fit, let's say you work out every day, you count your macros, there's no body fat, like you're 100% specimen of health. You could be on the front cover of any health magazine, but you live in turmoil. Like there's financial problems going on. Your spouse is always nagging you. Your kids are out of control because you're not being a very good parent. You live in a bad part of town and there's always crime happening. Like that mental drain is also— is going to zap whatever energy you might have had to accomplish what you need to accomplish, even though physically you're, you seem to be fine. Now, ironically, or maybe not ironically, but I guess the reality is that most people who are very physically fit like that also have mentally figured things out as well. And, and going the other direction, most people who mentally have things figured out and they're good mental— have good mental strength, they're usually physically in proper order as well. I think they go together. I don't think one is without the other.

Yeah. So you wrote a book called Exit Without Exiting. And, you know, obviously that applies to business, but I also feel like that applies to how you show up in your life as well. So can you talk about that a little bit? So when people release control around their company and they stop being in the business, stop working on the business, they start going more into this investor owner aspect. How does it change their life?

Well, so exit without exiting conceptually means you have exited daily operations of the business without having to sell the business. So it's a physical exit without necessarily a financial exit. Think about it this way. So if we talk about, hey, what's your exit plan? Most people think, well, I want to sell at this multiple. I was having dinner with a guy last night. He said, when we hit $30 million, I'm selling. Okay, that, that is an exit for him, meaning that happens, I will sell the business and I'm out. Well, I wanted to sell my business. We had $1 million in EBITDA, meaning bottom line net profit. And I thought, okay, if you put a multiple on that, this, this business is worth maybe on the low end $3 million, maybe, maybe, maybe $5 to $10 million. Who knows what the multiple would have been? But it wasn't worth anything because it still relied on me. So I couldn't exit the financial way. So I figured, well, how do I then get myself out of the weeds of the physical, you know, like the physical, like, how do I get out of this? And so for the next 18 months, that's what I worked on. How do I figure out how to do that? And, and when I figured that out, people would say, oh, did you exit your business? I like, kind of like I did. I exited, but I didn't exit. And that the phrase just kind of morphed into exit without exiting. And it kind of stuck in my head. A media coach at the time, he goes, that's your thing. He said, you need to write a book about that. That's a concept that people need to hear about. So that's where that comes from now. Your question, Jen, is about how does this apply in other aspects of life besides business. And I frankly, I think that's an interesting concept that I've not dived into, so I don't know. But I would speculate to say that, you know, you got to get out of your own way. You can't check out mentally, but maybe you can put up guardrails around the things you allow yourself to dwell on. You know, you could totally exit a conversation and be rude and say, I'm out, Or you can figure out, you know what, I'm not going to be drawn into this. I'm not going to be drawn into the negativity. I'm not going to be drawn into the drama. I'm not going to be drawn into all the— this crap, you know, it's political crap or, you know, religious or financial or whatever, government. You know, we've got— we got to put up guardrails around our mind to say, I'm going to exit this even though I'm not physically going to exit. I'm going to exit. I'm not participating in this. Yeah.

And it all comes back to what you were talking about before, Jason, about protecting your energy, right? Is we can easily give our mental, emotional, spiritual energy to the media, to what's happening, you know, across the world. And I talk about this a lot, that as human beings, we were not meant to know what was happening around the world. And now because of social media and all the aspects that we have available, right, and it's causing our nervous systems, it's causing us to give our energy to things that we have no control over. Yeah, right. So I think this protecting energy is really an important concept.

It is.

And releasing control of things that we can't control or maybe shouldn't be controlling.

Yeah, I, I think what you mentioned there about this— we're not really meant to know what happens in other parts of the world— it's really important because, um, there's a— there's an author that I've admired for a very, very long time who, who writes in the Christian space and faith and spiritual disciplines, etc. And I've always— I've read a lot of what he— not maybe not everything, but most of what he's written. But there was one thing that he wrote about in one of his books that has always bothered me, and it was this idea of how can we say we are disciplined spiritually if we are not paying to the plight of those who are in need in other parts of the world? And he used an example of a lady he said, who chose not to read the newspaper. It was an older book, was written a long time ago, so newspapers were relevant at that point, but didn't read the newspaper because she didn't want to be pulled into the drama of whatever was going on, didn't want to hear about the bad things going on. And he was using that as an example of a bad attitude, like you shouldn't, you shouldn't want to shrink back from that. And I always was bothered by that. I was like, no, like why would we want to expose ourselves to this negativity. We can't hide from it, we can't ignore it, but why would we expose ourselves unnecessarily to it? And social media, I mean, you could make your algorithm show you nothing but catastrophe, just like you can make your algorithm show you nothing but right-wing politics or left-wing politics. It just takes about 5 minutes of swiping and it'll show you exactly what it is.

And then it has you nailed and your personality, and that's what gets through on your feed.

Yeah, so you got to protect it. So from an energy standpoint, you cannot I don't watch the news, like 100%. I haven't watched the news in, I don't know, 15 years. I don't— I will not watch the news. Weather might be the only thing, and that's if there's an event happening. Like we had a tornado warning a month or so ago. Okay, I'm going to go find out, find the news, and I'm going to make sure I'm safe. That's it. Like, I don't care if somebody says, well, you know what's going on in Iran right now? I've heard about it just because people are talking about it. But I'm not watching the news. I'm not listening to the news because first of all, they're lying. 99.9% of the time. Second of all, what good does it do? Tell me one good thing that the news gives us. As a matter of fact, I would go so far to be bold enough to say that I think news people are just immoral. I think they are propagating lies. They're propagating bad negative energy. They're propagating all things that nobody should be focused on. For what? Ratings, so that advertisers will pay them money. It's the biggest whoring out of people's attentions that the world has ever seen.

Yeah, 100%. And it's polarizing on top of it, right?

Yeah.

It's always pitting sides against each other and kind of inviting you to choose a side.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, it's wild. We're living in wild times for sure.

I used to listen to talk radio years and years ago, and I had a job where I drove most of the day. I had this whole territory of 3 or 4 counties. I was driving around and I would listen to talk radio, and it's mostly political talk. Radio, some sports, but a lot of politics. And now, like last night, I was on the way home from— I was on the way home from a hangout with a friend of mine, and I just for kicks and giggles, I hit that button that went to that station here locally in Nashville. And I got about 5 minutes into it. I just want to throw up. I was like, it's so disgusting, all of this political— and that happened to be a right, you know, more right-leaning stuff. But it doesn't matter which side it came from. But it's like, this is so disgusting. All this is, is they're terrible, we're great. Why do you want to watch that?

Right. Yeah. To me, it's a push on humanity, humans, how we show up, how we come together or not.

Yeah.

So one of the things you talk about is you say that every change starts with a decision. So from my experience, when I became an entrepreneur, it wasn't making the decision, it was trusting myself with the decisions that I made. So how do— what do you say to entrepreneurs, especially new ones? How do you help them let go? Right? Because part of this, a big part of this is letting go of control. Going back to your example of the ice cream shop owner, right? It becomes your baby. This is my baby. And how do you teach people to trust themselves, to learn to step away, to trust their teams? Right? Trust keeps showing up as a big word in this whole process.

Well, there's, there's a universal law that I know you're familiar with. It's called the Law of Hindrance. And it says that if we're being hindered from success in any area of life, whether it's health, finances, relationships, business, it comes— it boils down to one of two things, or it could be both, but it's one of two things: lack of trust or lack of discipline. So I know this is a health show, so all the people thinking about health, in your health, if you're not healthy, it's probably lack of trust or lack of discipline. Now, obviously, there are also— there are outside forces sometimes that we're not in control of that have nothing to do. But I'm just talking about general well-being, not whether you have cancer and you caused it because you didn't trust something. That's not what I'm talking about. But if you're talking about business and you can't— like something's not happening, you're not successful the way you want, it's either lack of trust or lack of discipline or both. Now, discipline. Let's talk about that first, because you didn't mention that. We'll talk about trust later, which is what you did mention. Discipline could be the discipline of running the company, the discipline of how you show up and what you require your employees to do, the SOPs that you put in place, the standard operating procedures, the systems and processes that you put in place. The discipline to do things the right way, or the lack thereof, will keep you from success. Now, the other side of that is lack of trust. Now, the trust goes both ways. It could be like trust and lack of trust in yourself, or it could be lack of trust in others. It's usually a combination of the both. So if I say, well, my employees are no good, I can't find good help, what's that mean? You have a lack of trust in other people. That's what that means. Because how could the whole world run if you can't find good people? Like, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, think about the logical conclusion of, well, I just can't find good help these days. Well, that's a joke we say, right? But that really more is a microcosm of your experience. You hired somebody that didn't work out. I hired a sales guy a year ago, about a year ago, and it was terrible. It was absolutely terrible hire. He was terrible. It was not a good fit. It took about 30 days and I fired him. Like, it was in and out. Now, Is it? So I just say, well, I'm never hiring anybody again. Oh, like that doesn't break trust in other people. So, but what about trusting yourself? Maybe it's like, I don't have enough trust in myself to allow people to do things their way because I feel like I'm the hero, I'm better than they are, and I don't want them figuring out. Is that trust in yourself or trust in them? It's a lack of trust in yourself. It's lack of trust in saying, I was dumb at one point and I figured this out. But I'm not going to let somebody else be dumb and eventually figure it out. So lack of trust and lack of discipline are the only two reasons you're not experiencing success.

So what are ways to build trust in an organization? What are some of the things you teach? Well, or in the leader or in yourself as an entrepreneur?

Well, I think to build trust in others, I think one thing you have to do is there's something, first of all, called the law of discovery is another law. And that is that we learn more by what we discover on our own than what we're told. So a lot of understanding and building trust is allowing people to discover on their own what works and what doesn't. There are certain things that I wouldn't do, but another person could do and it works out. Oh, okay. Okay, good on you. I wouldn't have thought about doing that, but it worked. So we have to let them discover it on their own. So to build trust, we've got to say, look, I trust you to do this. Here's what I want to accomplish. But how you get from where we are and where that is, It's totally up to you. Make it work. Like, just, I trust you. And if they, if they fail at it, then what happens? They, they see that you trusted them even though they failed. If they succeed at it, they look and say, oh, he, he or she trusted me and I succeeded. That's good. Let's keep doing this. Employees want to be successful. I mean, there's, there's the rare employee who just shows up and can't wait to get fired so they can draw unemployment. I was talking to a client of mine this morning that happened. A guy worked 2 weeks and got— he got let go because he was absolutely terrible and then somehow ended up getting able to— being able to draw unemployment for 18 months. And then how is that even fair? I don't understand that. But we have to build trust by allowing people to figure things out on their own. So I think that that's one thing. Another thing is you've got to— it's— if there's confusion in the organization, it is your fault as a leader. You have to understand that if there's confusion, it is your fault because lack of clarity creates confusion. And whose job is it to give clarity? It's not my employee's job to give clarity. I can't wait on them to clarify what we're supposed to be doing. It is my job. And I'll give you a real-life example. So we're, we're going through in our company a major rebrand effort because we've got the Real Jason Duncan as a personal brand, which is me. And then we've got the Exiter Club, which is a company I founded. And those two brands have been tied together since the beginning. And we're trying to separate those brands so that the Exiter Club can stand on its own without me being there, which is following all this.

You're walking the talk.

What a concept. And then, but on the real Jason Duncan side, it's requiring me to rebrand myself away from just America's Exit Coach and, you know, just the exit guy. It's, it's more than that. Like, I'm— as a matter of fact, my podcast, uh, we're going to be— we're rebranding the podcast. I'm rebranding my blog. I just launched the new website yesterday. And as we're going through this, I thought— or maybe I didn't think, I don't know— I thought I had communicated to my entire team what was happening, and I forgot one person. Uh, I didn't fill her in completely the way I filled everybody else in. Well, Her job is the website. Her job is to pay attention to what's going on the website. So a week and a half ago, or maybe it was a week ago, I sent an instruction to her. Here's what I need you to do on the website and do this, and I'm going out of town. Have this done by the time I get back, which is an appropriate thing, a normal course of business I would have done. Well, she sent me a message while I'm gone. She goes, I don't understand why we're doing this because you, you've paid me to do X, which was true. And now we're not using any of that and we're doing this other thing. And, and so it occurred to me, it's like, oh, that's on me. Like, I didn't tell her— wasn't— I didn't trust her. It had nothing to do with that. I just didn't communicate with her clearly. And so that lack of confusion— she didn't accomplish what I needed her to accomplish because she was confused. She thought, I thought you told me to do this, but now you're telling me to do this. And I was out of town and couldn't answer any questions. So she just had to wait until I got back. So it wasn't done. So whose fault is that? Not hers. Totally my fault.

And so how did you fix that situation?

So I sent her a message and owned up to it. I said, hey, you know, I said, her name's Anna. I said, Anna, this is totally on me. I thought I was clear to everybody on the team what we were doing. And I do realize that you spent countless hours on this other project that we are now not going to use because we have another tool that we're going to put in its place. My, my fault is I didn't tell you that we were making this change. I did communicate the rebrand, but I didn't tell her this little thing that I did with the website when she wasn't looking. So I kind of—

it was probably a big deal to her, right? Because she put her energy and time into it.

Well, and she, she looked at it. She said, look, you know, I'm not— she even said, I'm not worried about my time. Like, I'm not worried about that. I'll do whatever you tell me to do. You pay me, I'll do whatever. But I'm worried about you paying me to do all this work, uh, because she's hourly and she's on a contract basis. So if she hadn't done any of that work, that'd been money I could have, I could have repurposed for something else. Uh, so she handled it appropriately, but I, I had to own up to it. I, I didn't just, like a lot of bosses would go and say, look, don't worry about it, do what I said. You know, that's— I don't understand how people work for people that do that. But right, well, so I'm in the corporate space for sure. Yeah, well, I feel like she I feel like after this experience, I would hope that she would trust me more now. And I trust her. I certainly trust her because I owned up to it. I didn't try to gaslight and say, no, this was your problem. I told you the right thing to do.

Yeah. Well, that's a sign of a great leader. So what are— like, if you had to go back in time, Jason, what would be 3 things you would tell yourself before you gained all this wisdom and knowledge? Wow.

Well, how far back are we going?

Let's go back to your 20-something-year-old self who's ready to take on the world.

Um, I, I think I would have told myself to read more, uh, because even though I'm a pretty prolific reader now, or listener, I guess these days nobody's readers, we're all listeners, we listen to books on audio. But I'd be a more— I'd say read more and read what matters. You know, it's not— no problem reading novels, but that's bubblegum for the brain. You need to read something that matters. It's going to help you. I think I would— I would— I would have told— I would tell myself in my 20s to find a mentor early because I waited way too long for that. And the acceleration after having a business coach and a mentor is phenomenally different than before. So I think I would have needed that before. And I think the other thing is, uh, I would tell myself is learn more about money and how it really works, because we've been lied to. We've been lied to about money. It does not work the way you think it does. It isn't what you think it is. And I think if I'd learned in my 20s to, to read more, get a mentor, and learn how money works, I think I'd be a billionaire today.

All right. I love that. Is there one or two books that are your favorite that really changed how you work?

Yeah.

Or how you show up in your life?

Well, I think, you know, I'd have to say Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is probably one of the best. I first read that book. I think I first picked it up in about maybe 12 years ago, 13 years ago, something like that. And I was reading it on my iPad at the time and or something. It was a digital something, maybe an iPad, but whatever it was, I was reading it digitally and I got maybe 2 or 3 chapters into it and thought, this is the biggest load of bullcrap I've ever heard in my life. And I put the book down. I didn't pick it up again until 2021, 2021, I think '21. And completely new context, new eyes, new glasses, lenses, whatever you want to say to look at this book is like, holy crap, I've missed out for so many years on what this actually is talking about. And it's really all about what you put your mind to. Whatever you can, whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. And that's really the synopsis of the book. That's the whole thing. I think that's really important. And I'm also, I'm also a huge, I'm a huge student of mindset in general. So another book on the same, along the same lines is Psycho-Cybernetics. It was written by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. He was a plastic surgeon back in the '30s, '40s. And '50s, and then he became also a psychologist because of what he experienced doing plastic surgery. He was doing plastic surgery on people too, not boob jobs and facelifts. He was doing corrective surgery, like people's ears were deformed or their nose was— they got a scar in an accident. He would fix that because back then we weren't as vain as we are now. And what he was saying, he, he discovered, is that these people would come in with this terrible self-image because their nose was too big or they had this scar on their cheek. And he discovered that about half of the people that he would fix— and I use fix loosely— but he would fix them, they would leave as a totally new person. Like, they would have a new life because the, the self-image completely changed. And then the other half, who also looked normal now, still operated in the same self-image they had previously. So he discovered is that it's really psychological. Self-image is internal, has nothing to do with the external. And the whole book is about our brains are these cybernetic loops. It's like if the A happens, then B will automatically happen because we've been nurtured into that sequence. So if you grew up in a home where you were being abused verbally, like if somebody starts yelling at you, you probably just either melt, fall apart, or you want to hit someone in the face. But you don't have a proper reaction to it because your cybernetic loop— you've been trained that way. And he, in the book, talks about how to re- you like retrain your brain, which is wonderful. So those two are probably that. I think if I get way more practical about money, uh, Profit First by Mike Michalowicz is a book about how to handle your bookkeeping and finances. Number one business book ever, you know, even, even above my own. I think it's the best book out there, and it saved me, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more than that.

Amazing. And your book, name your book again.

Exit Without Exiting. And, uh, I hope, you know, this year it's, it's a best-selling book. It's been a bestseller on Amazon for a long time, and it, um, it came out in 2023. I'm hoping this year to do a revised and updated version of it, and, uh, I've already, I've written that version of it. I'm meeting with a publisher sometime in this week. I think it might be today. Maybe today or tomorrow, and we'll hopefully have that released before the end of the year. I don't know. We'll see.

So where can people find you to learn more? You have several companies. Where are the best places to find you?

Just if you, you type into your favorite AI large language model, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, whatever, just type in The Real Jason Duncan. You're going to find me. Of course, you can Google that or go to The Real Jason Duncan.

And what is one phrase, sentence that you want to leave the audience with?

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, because if we all live by that, this world would be a much better place to live in.

Aho. Amen. Thank you, Jason. It's been wonderful to have you here, and I hope people will seek you out. You have a lot of wisdom, a lot of experience. And that comment that you made that we've been lied to about money could indeed change a lot of people's lives. Yeah, it's changed mine.

Yeah, indeed. And I will say this, just one last thing, is that my blog is called What's Real with the Real Jason Duncan, and it's all about the lies that you believe and the truths that you don't. So if you go to my website and click on articles, you can subscribe. And I send one, I send one newsletter out. Every single Wednesday.

I love it. All right. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.