The Real Jason Duncan Podcast

Everybody who's ever built or renovated a house tells the same story. The blown timeline, the blown budget, the contractor who stopped answering the phone. And everybody in the business says the same sentence about it: that's just how it is. It isn't. Construction is complicated. Chaos is a choice somebody made. Jasmine and Jed Chambers started JASPER, a luxury design-build company in Nashville, in 2020. Jed has worked in construction since he was 19 and has spent more than two decades on high-end residential, historic restoration, and commercial jobs. Jasmine was finishing her business degree at Lipscomb University that year with four kids in four different schools, and she designed the systems and client experience JASPER runs on. In this episode, they tell Jason why "that's just how it is" is a lie and what actually causes the chaos that sentence gets used to excuse. Jed takes Jason back to a ladder on a 23,000 square foot home in Connecticut, where he told his mentor a piece of siding was pretty close and got asked whether it was pretty close or perfect. Jasmine talks about pulling out plaster and lath next to her dad on historic renovations, and the rule he taught her that 80 percent of the work is planning. They get into the trust bucket and the homeowner who thought nothing was happening on her job while the wiring and plumbing went in. Jasmine tells the story behind the question that started JASPER: years of raising four kids inside their own renovations while friends who hired contractors kept telling them the same complaints. On one of their own projects, they tore out the kitchen the day after Thanksgiving and had stone countertops in by Christmas. She also explains why some clients living in beautiful custom homes are still miserable. After the break, Jason asks them to talk straight to the builder down the road whose clients are miserable and who blames luck or price point. Jasmine's answer is radical ownership, including the projects where clients were disappointed and JASPER showed up and made it right. Jed adds what he says most residential builders are missing: a process with standard operating procedures the entire team understands. Jed uses his minute to call the next generation into the trades. Jasmine gets the last word: you get what you expect, and no house will make you happy until you've built home inside yourself first. Connect with Jasmine and Jed: Website: jasperbuilds.com JASPER on Instagram: @jasper.builds Jasmine on Instagram: @jas.a.chambers Jed on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jedidiah-chambers-916aab13 Facebook and LinkedIn: JASPER Builds and Jasmine Chambers Email: [email protected] and [email protected] Subscribe to What's Real?: therealjasonduncan.com/articles Book Jason to speak: therealjasonduncan.com/speaking Get the book: therealjasonduncan.com/book The Real Jason Duncan Podcast: therealjasonduncanpodcast.com Full show notes: therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/405 This episode is sponsored by Dubb, the video messaging platform Jason has used nearly every day since 2018. Get 50 percent off your first two months at therealjasonduncan.com/dubb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've heard that nice guys finish last since you were a kid. Leo Durocher, the man who gets credit for it, never said it. In 1946 he said the nice guys were in seventh place, and when Baseball Digest reprinted the column that fall, somebody changed "seventh" to "last." In this episode, Jason reads this week's What's Real? article and puts the saying to a real test. Back in 1980, a political scientist named Robert Axelrod set up a computer tournament where programs played the Prisoner's Dilemma against each other, 200 rounds at a time. The winner was the shortest program in the field, and all it did was cooperate on the first move and then copy whatever the other side did last. Axelrod ran a second tournament with 63 programs trying to beat it, and it won again. In the first one, every program in the top eight was one that never stabbed the other guy first. Jason also takes on the 2012 Notre Dame study that found less agreeable men earned about 18 percent more, and explains why it doesn't settle the question. That kind of edge shows up in a one-time deal with somebody you'll never see again. Your marriage isn't a one-time deal, and neither is the vendor you'll need a favor from three years from now. He calls it the Pushover Swap: treating nice and weak like they're the same word. He closes with Proverbs 3:3-4 and what Solomon says steadfast love and faithfulness will get you. Subscribe to What's Real?: therealjasonduncan.com/articles Book Jason to speak: therealjasonduncan.com/speaking Get the book: therealjasonduncan.com/book The Real Jason Duncan Podcast: therealjasonduncanpodcast.com Read the article: therealjasonduncan.com/articles/404 Full show notes: therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/404 New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your life blows up. Diagnosis, divorce, the business goes under, whatever it is. And the first thing you do is try to get back to who you were before. Everybody does. It doesn't work. You're not getting that person back, and the people who actually recover are the ones who stop trying. Nir Peled was on a video call in his home office when the stroke hit. He faked a bad internet connection so he wouldn't have to speak, and by the end of the meeting he couldn't move his hand to reach the mouse. He was 49. He had already survived a bombing, an allergic reaction that ended his career as an officer in an elite Israeli Defense Forces unit, a tsunami, a robbery in the Amazon, aggressive cancer, and a motorcycle accident. Six times he fought his way back to who he was before. The stroke was the first time that playbook failed. In this episode, the Fortune 500 technology executive and author of Beyond 100%: Rebuilding Life After It Breaks tells Jason why the goal everybody handed him, getting back to 100 percent, was the lie keeping him stuck. Nir describes the measurement that ran his days in the ICU, where moving one finger left him sweating and exhausted, and the 1 percent a day rule he built from it. He talks about the cry he calls surrender, his first since his late teens, and why accepting the stroke turned out to be what let him recover. Then he takes Jason to a Manhattan coffee shop near the one-year mark, where walking the city at 85 percent convinced him he had hit his ceiling, until he realized the next day that the benchmark itself was the problem. The person he was measuring against was gone. They talk about what that means for anyone rebuilding after a diagnosis, a divorce, a bankruptcy, or a failed business, the line his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, gave him about eyes adjusting in the dark, and how a yoga class he could only half do became the work he does now: teaching recovery to brain injury survivors who walk in wanting exactly what he once wanted. Connect with Nir: Website: nir-peled.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nir-peled-ai Instagram: @nir.peled.beyond100 Facebook: facebook.com/Beyond100Percent Subscribe to What's Real?: therealjasonduncan.com/articles Book Jason to speak: therealjasonduncan.com/speaking Get the book: therealjasonduncan.com/book The Real Jason Duncan Podcast: therealjasonduncanpodcast.com Full show notes: therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/403 This episode is sponsored by Dubb, the video messaging platform Jason has used nearly every day since 2018. Get 50 percent off your first two months at therealjasonduncan.com/dubb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 10,000-hour rule came from one study of violin students in Berlin, published in 1993. The man who ran that study spent the rest of his life saying Malcolm Gladwell misread it. Jason has read every book Gladwell has written, and Outliers might be his favorite. So when he went looking at the research behind the most famous idea in it and found out the number was an average, half the top violinists hadn't reached it, and those students weren't masters anyway, he was shocked. He still likes the books. But Gladwell wrote something that isn't true, and a lot of people built their idea of what it takes to get good at something on top of it. Then the part that actually matters. Anders Ericsson's real finding wasn't about hours. It was about a specific kind of hour, the uncomfortable kind, aimed at what you're bad at, with a teacher standing behind you telling you to do it again. Jason calls the mistake the Odometer Lie, the habit of judging yourself and everybody else by how much time is on the clock instead of what the time contained. Twenty years of experience can mean twenty years of being good at something, or twenty years of being a jerk nobody corrected. Also in this one: why Gladwell could have picked 7,400 hours instead, the chess masters who needed 3,000 hours and the ones who needed 23,000, the 2014 study that pushed back on Ericsson and what both sides still agree on, the painter who spends 10,000 hours alone in his garage, and Proverb 27:17 on why nobody gets sharp by himself. Subscribe to What's Real?: therealjasonduncan.com/articles Read this week's edition: therealjasonduncan.com/articles/402 Book Jason to speak: therealjasonduncan.com/speaking Get the book: therealjasonduncan.com/book The podcast: therealjasonduncanpodcast.com This episode is sponsored by Dubb. Get 50% off your first two months with code TRJD50 at therealjasonduncan.com/dubb Full episode page: therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/402 New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know how rich people got rich. Somebody got cheated, somebody smaller got stepped on. My guest grew up believing every word of that, then became a millionaire himself and found out who's actually funding the help he used to need. Anthony Trucks went into foster care at three years old and was adopted at fourteen. He grew up in a house where the rule about money got said out loud, more than once: if somebody has a million dollars, they burned somebody to get it. He earned a football scholarship, reached the NFL, lost that to a shoulder injury, built a gym business on the other side of it, and now coaches people through what he calls identity shift. Somewhere in that climb, the rule stopped matching anything he was actually seeing. In this conversation, Anthony names where the belief came from and why it was so comfortable to keep. He walks through the slow erosion of it: the college donors who had no reason to be kind and were anyway, the agents and neighbors who had money and weren't villains, the business owners making a million a year who turned out to be decent people. He and Jason get into why the lie survives, from a misread verse about the love of money to the political version of bread and circuses to the fact that the billionaire is the bad guy in almost every movie we buy a ticket to watch. Anthony talks about what it was like to receive help as a foster kid and believe he was just collecting what he was owed, and what changed when he understood that nobody owed him anything. He explains the law of marginal utility with hamburgers, describes what most people with real money actually look like, and puts two men side by side at fifty: one who kept the belief and stayed clean and broke, and one who didn't. His answer on what that belief costs over another five years is the part worth sitting with. This is Anthony's second time on the show. He was here in 2021, back when it went by a different name. CONNECT WITH ANTHONY TRUCKS Website: anthonytrucks.com Website: DarkWork.com Instagram: @anthonytrucks LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anthonytrucks Email: [email protected] Subscribe to What's Real?: therealjasonduncan.com/articles Book Jason to speak: therealjasonduncan.com/speaking Get the book: therealjasonduncan.com/book The podcast: therealjasonduncanpodcast.com Episode page: therealjasonduncan.com/podcast/401 This episode is sponsored by Dubb, the video sales platform Jason has used since 2018: therealjasonduncan.com/dubb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices