Latest / The Ageless Warrior Lab / Business Jiu Jitsu: CEO Jordan Edward's Strategy for Winning | EP 58

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Business Jiu Jitsu: CEO Jordan Edward's Strategy for Winning | EP 58 · The Ageless Warrior Lab

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: When you put your name behind something, and this is your business, your values shine through.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And your values should be the operating system of success.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are printing success decade after decade after decade, there's something that works.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a constant state of innovation, just like jujitsu.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're keep going back to the mat, not to do the same thing over and over.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's to do it in a new way, where you're rediscovering some truth in the basic fundamental principles and techniques, which is very important to me.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Ageless Warrior Lab.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'm BJJ Coral Belt and Dirty Dozen member Dave Meyer, here to draw wisdom from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and the martial arts and explore how it applies to success in business, relationships, your long-term health, and making the most out of your life.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: What you're about to hear is a discussion I had with entrepreneur and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner Jordan Edwards.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: Jordan is the CEO of the Mixology Clothing Company, he's a partner in the chart organization, he's the author of the book Business Jiu-Jitsu and the podcast by the same name, and he's the founder of Mix University, Fashion First Responders, and ZForge.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: Jordan and I talk about how the principles and lessons of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu apply to all areas of life in business, and how those principles helped him save his company, Mixology, on multiple occasions.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about the importance of mentors and how mentors can even come in the form of reading a book from someone who's no longer alive.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: Now, this is a lab, and I value your input.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: So please do leave comments and let me know your thoughts.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: So please sit back and then join my conversation with Jordan Edwards.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Jordan, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to come speak with me.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's my pleasure, Dave.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on the show.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: So let's start with BJJ for a second.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Your experience with BJJ.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: What's your relationship?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: How did you get started?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: Are you still training?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_03: What's your relationship with BJJ?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a brown belt on the pursuit of mastery.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've been training for 17 years.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Started training in 2009.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: With the exception of the small break blue belt.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've been training very consistently during all that time.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just a slow student.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I love jujitsu as much as I love anything in this world.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it is by far one of the most important things that I found for finding success in all other areas of my life.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: You know what?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: I agree with you, which is the basis of this podcast.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: So we're gonna have a fun conversation.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: On the slow student thing, you know, slow and steady wins the race.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's not about the belt necessarily, it's about not getting injured.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's the saying a black belt is a white belt who never quit.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: That's it.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: So you're on your path, you're almost there.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: And as for mastery, I don't know, man.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: I've been training BJJ 36 years.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: I've been in martial arts since I was six years old.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think I've attained the mastery thing yet.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's a little elusive to me.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because it seems like, especially in BJJ, it's like it just keeps growing.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: There's just more stuff going on.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: How are you going to master everything?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: But it's an incredible puzzle.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: And who's your instructor?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've been training for all 17 years under Sensei, Nardu Deborah.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sensei is a black belt under Enzo Gracie and John Donahar.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was a mixed martial arts fighter in his time and a black belt in many other disciplines as well.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's a lifelong martial artist, and his training began under Sifu Ralph Mitchell, who's a New York martial arts icon, still alive.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We actually took a seminar with Sifu, who's approaching 80 years of age a couple weeks ago.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's in phenomenal shape and still at it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sifu has an incredible story because he was a Vietnam veteran, an African-American man from Brooklyn.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when he came back from Vietnam and was pursuing martial arts, his primary art was judo.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: But he became very interested in Chinese kung fu and was not exactly allowed to learn it in the 1970s in Chinatown, New York, but found his way in and learned.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he started to understand from his time in Vietnam that there was no one way.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So he started to build his own way of collecting different techniques from many martial arts, and it was happened to be the perfect thing of what eventually would become mixed martial arts.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: They were all these full contact fighting tournaments of all different styles and times in the New York and New York area in the 70s and 80s.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And him, he was a champion.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then my sensei came to him in Canarsi, Brooklyn, which actually is also where my mother is from by coincidence.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he became the first ever Ring of Combat champion under Luneglia, which was a precursor to the UFC.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Also still around.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how my sensei found Henzo and Hodrigo Greasy and was a training partner and very good friend of Matt Sarah and all these New York guys that came up together.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we have my story starts to come in a little bit after that, but that's the lineage.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you have an illustrious lineage, and it's certainly something to be proud of, and you're lucky to have that.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: And we've got all signs, you know.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_03: I know Henzo quite well, and Matt Sarah had did an MMA match against my coach Jean-Jacques, which was Jean-Jacques' foray into MMA.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: I also in high school went into some Chinese arts.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: I started in jiu-jitsu as a little kid.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a big fan of cross-training.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_03: What you were describing, it sounds a little bit like Bruce Lee's sort of ethic of trying different things and take what works and you know let go of what doesn't.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: But also that people think that maybe, you know, MMA originated with the UFC.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, the UFC really was really popularized this cage fighting, which of course at the time was style against style.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: That was what Horian was trying to highlight, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: But there had been lots of formats, I'm sure, through all human history of people who are fighting with less rule sets than what we would have thought of as, okay, this is boxing or this is whatever.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: I had that even in jujitsu as a kid where we did what we called kumite.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: We put on gloves and you could do kickboxing and then could grab and grapple on the ground.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: You couldn't strike on the ground, you couldn't kick to the groin.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there were lots of things you couldn't do, but it was a synthesis of punching and kicking and throwing and continuing on the ground.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: So that's not a new thing.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: And sounds like your sensei sensei was, you know, ahead of his time.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: And that's great that you have that lineage.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: And you're very lucky to be there in New York.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Fun fact my mother's from New York.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: My whole family is basically from New York.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: I'm the first California native.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So interesting.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: So, all right, let's talk a little bit about your book.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, I want to go before I even talk about my book, because you brought up one thing about Henzo.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sure.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because Henzo is also a very, very important figure here.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And even though I've only met Henzo and trained with Henzo on a few occasions, if you went and looked me up on IBJJF, you'd see that I actually fight under the flag of Henzo Gracie himself when I do compete rarely.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Henzo has been the most incredible friend and mentor and promoter of my book, and you know, Business Jiu-Jitsu, and has helped me so much whenever he could.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy, you can only imagine the demands and how many people he's talking to on a daily basis.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if I've ever had to text him, he responds instantly, and it just the how gracious of a guy that is.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And originally it was simply because of my sensei, you know, because I had no credentials, especially 15 or almost 20 years ago now.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So just a big shout out to Henzo for being one of the world's special humans.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I certainly don't, you know, he's part of the collection of, you know, you're not a self-made person ever.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he is one of those people that has helped me immeasurably.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: So we stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: We'll talk about that a little bit later.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: And you mentioned all your years with your sensei, and I want to talk to you about loyalty and some concepts of loyalty and what are the limits of that.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: But since we're heaping love onto Henzo, I'll heap a little more love onto him.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: He deserves it.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_03: I met him my first trip to Brazil when I was a blue belt under the Machado brothers and Higgin Machado.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I went with Higgin to Rio de Janeiro, and Henzo had not yet moved to the United States, but his English was very good.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: And he was just so friendly and so magnanimous and so helping me with training.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually got injured.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: There's a funny story that he, you know, he helped me, he gave me like an icy hot thing to help my injury, and it really, really helped.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then before I left Brazil, I asked, like, where can you buy this?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: And he's like, Oh, you can't buy that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: It causes cancer.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's for horses.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and uh it was funny, right?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, I don't know cancer.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: So he's great, and he's also been the same way with me.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_03: Agenzo is such a like an open book, like an open heart, like he's all in.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: And interestingly, he created, I don't know if it's still is, but there was a period of time where I was more in the business side of jiu-jitsu.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: He created by far what was the most profitable Brazilian jiu-jitsu school.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: At the time when he was blowing up in New York, all the other martial arts were saying Brazilian jiu-jitsu will never catch on because people just don't want to get that sweaty and don't want to, you know, don't want that much contact.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: They, you know, it would be more like taekwondo.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_03: They want distance, they want to be able to practice forms.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: And he just blew that up because he had such a great, because of who he was, because of the school he built and the ripples of what he created in terms of the amazing instructors like your own, of course, the guys who've trained under him, Danaher and everybody that it's just like incalculable the ripples he's had.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: And he is such a great, and I think it comes from he's just such an open book.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: He's so friendly, he's my friend, he's just such a great guy.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I've had the same experience with him.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: I've invited him to come on the podcast.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: He's busy, but I'll ping him again because I would love to talk to him.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he's hard to track down for a podcast, but he is.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a good anecdote.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I wrote Business Jiu-Jitsu, and it got a lot of real I had incredible cottage support from the jiu-jitsu community and especially the Enzo family, from John Danahar and Gordon Ryan and Ricardo Almeida, and just this whole lineage.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody really got behind it and supported the podcast in the book.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things I found so incredible is that I'm getting pinged from people all over the jiu-jitsu world.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: On some occasions, I would hear from a young man, and or because this happened more than once, and he said, Hey, I was at a seminar and Henzo Gracie gave me your book.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, I mean, so the fact that, like I said, I don't have a very close relationship with him.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have never been with him to dinner.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: We won't have barely been one-on-one in a text or of maybe two or three phone calls.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I have this great feeling that mentors and people can come into your life.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes just one conversation is enough to have a lasting impact on your life.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so Henzo has just been that for me as the person who's at the top of my jujitsu tree here in New York.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, his lineage keeps going into his family.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But really, for me, in terms of living mentors, he's just been so important in my life in that regard.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that he's thought about me as one of his many, many, many, many leaves, I guess I would be a leaf or even an acorn on his tree.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's been incredible privilege.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_03: So anyway, I'm just very, very grateful to him, so that's wonderful.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll talk more about mentorship.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: But let's talk for a second about the book, right?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: So, Business Jiu Jitsu, and I read that that came out of your, you know, having to work with mixology during the pandemic and how to keep your company alive.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: And tell me a bit about what were the principles in BJJ that helped you.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: I can then share with you some of the ways that BJJ's helped me in my various stuff.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: But what was it specifically that was helping you in BJJ that inspired you to then go ahead and write this book about it to share it with other people?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I started training in Jiu-Jitsu in 2009.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And for the first 10 years that I trained, it was wildly misunderstood by my family, by my friends.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't very well known.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: My mom and people close to me would often ask me if I was still doing that karate thing.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I essentially lived two lives.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I would have my personal and work life and friendships, and then after work, I would go off and do this bizarre thing that nobody in my life understood.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And at work, and unless someone asked me about it, I really didn't talk about it.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Mostly because when I did try to talk about it, they thought that it was so weird that and they it was so wildly misunderstood.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: So my career was taking off.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm 41 today, I run a number of businesses.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was beginning to get some measure of business success and notoriety in my late 20s and early 30s, my teammates were coming to me asking me business questions.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so we would be sitting around on the mat, and I would be telling them and giving them business advice or telling them business stories.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: But because they were teachers or garbage men or police officers, they didn't have any vocabulary for business.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I would be teaching them the principle in jujitsu terms.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this was happening a lot.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it occurred to me around 2019 that I wanted to write a book about this and share this knowledge about the principles of jujitsu and how they had helped me win in business.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so in January of 2020, I literally like over New Year's, I think I had the idea.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point in my life, I had gotten to the point where when I have an idea, it doesn't sit on the shelf.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I should do a podcast.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, tomorrow sounds good.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I found a podcast studio and I recorded my first podcast.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I made a list of all the people I wanted to speak to to do research for the book.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know any of these, I didn't know John Danahar or Gordon Ryan or Ricardo Almeida or all the business people in Juju Jiu Jitsu, but I naively thought, of course, they would want to speak to me.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Why wouldn't they want to speak to me?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it turns out that they did want to speak to me.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: So from January to March of 2020, I had been recording the podcast, and then we all know what happened on March 17, 2020, COVID.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And my book, podcast, and research became from a theory about the principles of jujitsu in business to using them to keep my business alive.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the narrative of COVID became a living story and a living metaphor of my beliefs.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Not on your average day-to-day, the things that happen in business, but being pushed to the absolute maximal limit.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So just so you understand what that means, at the time I had nine stores for a Mixology Clothing Company.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I also have commercial real estate in my family business, my father and I, in 10 states.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: At the time we had about 400 commercial tenants, who are now closed mostly.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I have nine stores, today 16, and at the time 200 employees.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: The New York State government mandated that we had to close our stores, but that doesn't mean I don't owe rent.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean I don't own an insurance bill.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean I don't have to keep paying their salaries.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so in a very short time, I accrued about$2 million worth of owed everything.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: We had millions of dollars of inventory on order.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the government is forcing me to stay closed.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, just so you understand, this is not a political conversation because it actually spanned across election cycles, as you know.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: First President Trump, then President Biden.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: But during that time period, for some reason, Target was allowed to remain open in self-clothing, and Costco was allowed to remain open in self-clothing, but mixology had to close.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: So for an entrepreneur, it was mighty, mighty, mighty difficult to live with that and understand that now I have to go take all these loans.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I tell you all that to understand the pressure that I was under.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: The decision making.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Three million businesses closed in those in that two-year gap.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Never to come back, accruing incredible debt.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: These are average people who owned restaurants and retail stores and crushing, crushing debt because of, in my view, poor decision-making companies.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you navigate?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: How do you maneuver?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sometimes at night, when I had an insane day trying to keep my businesses afloat, negotiating with banks, insurance companies, and landlords, I would literally fall back on the bed and I'd look at my wife and I would just do this.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: I tap out to this day.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: This day is over.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing I could do except wake up and put my uniform back on my clothes and go back to work the next day.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And like that has been jujitsu for me.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's just sometimes I get the absolute living crap kicked out of me.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And like most people that I've trained with over the past 17 years, a very, very, very small percentage of the thousands and thousands of people I've trained with are still around.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So a very few, select few, make it to the colored later colored belts and black belt level.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the exact same paradigm of business.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: 90 something percent of businesses fail and go out of business.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: As we sit here today, Saxfifth Avenue, the market leader just emerged from bankruptcy, Nike, Lululemon, Under Armour are all at their historical lows, 90% off their high in their stock prices.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so you would think you're crazy to be in business.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: How could you be in business when the whole world is falling apart around you?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: But us as jiu-jitsu practitioners know that's what we signed up for.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: If I go train, I know a few things are true.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: As you just said, I'm gonna get sweaty, I'm gonna get hurt, I'm gonna be sore, I'm gonna be bloody potentially, my fingers are gonna hurt, my nails are gonna pop off, I'm gonna have cuts on my eyes.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's guaranteed.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're doing.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, for those of my listeners who don't do jujitsu, you've just heard the marketing pitch for jujitsu.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, go on.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: But in truth, it really is the marketing pitch because you're saying despite all that bad stuff, what you come out of is with lessons and life capabilities that could be very useful, which is really the pitch.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: The best life lessons are resilience and grit and determination and stamina.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many lessons that come, and it is impossible to run a business and have hundreds or thousands of employees and create the kind of leverage systems that you need in a business to run a business at scale if you don't have the resilience.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And jujitsu, it's not the only thing because I know runners who say this about long-distance running.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: My wife's a marathon runner.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: There are certainly other places, but there is something unique about jujitsu and this concept that we have of the tap and the submission of humbling the ego that I believe is rare and unique to our sport.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that it doesn't have other forms in other places, but there's something about submission and submitting to your partner and your opponent that creates a culture and a philosophy that is exceptional for succeeding at the highest levels of other things.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: I completely agree.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: And it's interesting that you're connecting that not just to the grit that it takes to do jujitsu, which could be true in other very difficult sports too, but specifically the constant losing, the winning, losing, the losing is learning, constantly coming back, the teamwork that the people you're fighting against are also the people who are teaching you.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, there's so much.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: So, just real quick, a couple of things that you said.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, my wife is also, she's a she's a tri athlete, and I try to be an athlete.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I say.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_03: But she's actually because completed an Iron Man.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: So she has a different a different kind of grit for sure.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: You talked about the struggles during COVID.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: My parents passed away in Los Angeles and they left to my brother and I a condominium.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: There was a renter in there.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: And similarly, the LA County said, you don't have to pay rent because they were understandably concerned that people maybe were losing their jobs and wouldn't be able to pay rent and they didn't want people being homeless.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: I totally agree with that.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: But the county didn't say, but then we're going to pay the rent for you, right?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_03: So similar to you, not as bad though, because I didn't have employees.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, we had homeowners' insurance, homeowners' payments and insurance and bank loans and all that kind of stuff.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: And the city did eventually put up some or the county put up some money or something.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: But bottom line is the people who were living there took complete total advantage of us, never paid rent for like three years, and we just took a hit, just like two regular guys.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think it's a political, I just want to set say, just as a footnote, I don't think it's a political getting into the tribal politics to say that sometimes governments make mistakes and that there that was an overreaction and that was not fair.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'm a pretty liberal guy.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm out here in California, but I'm here to tell you that was government overreach and that wasn't handled well, and we took it on the chin and it wasn't fair, and you had the same experience.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_03: So, and that has nothing to do with whether you believe in vaccines or don't believe in vaccines or care about where COVID started or not.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think we could be honest that there were a lot of really bad things about the way that was handled, and it is, you know, I'm sure people in the government were doing their best, but whatever.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: So I just want to say I felt I felt a little bit about of that pain too.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, it's just it's a you know, just like anything else.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And once is one of the things I love about jiu-jitsu also.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Jiu Jitsu, I've trained with every socioeconomic status, religion, exactly person.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: When you get on that map, it's a fully meritoc place of learning.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And all everything goes away.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Age, color, nothing.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing that matters is we sweat and train together and we're working on this art.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: I fully, fully agree.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I value that so much.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: I have friends across the political spectrum who I love, all religions, exactly what you're saying.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: Jiu-Jitsu is an amazing and a beautiful thing that way.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_03: So just real quick, you're talking about how the lessons of jiu-jitsu can help you.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in my world, I've been involved in philanthropy and specifically in animal welfare.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's been my life's kind of thing.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so many of the things that I've done have been informed by jujitsu.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: Back in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit and you know, destroyed New Orleans and the city was flooded, and people had to be rescued and all that kind of stuff.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: And one thing that a lot of people don't remember from that time is for the people who did leave before the storm, a lot of them didn't take their pets with them because they thought I'll just come back in two days.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't know the city was going to be.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: And then the people, when it was flooding and they had to be evacuated, weren't allowed to take their pets.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: So what was left was tens of thousands of dogs and cats and horses and stuff stranded with no one feeding them in this deserted city.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so I stepped up to co-lead the rescue efforts there.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so many things from that.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: My jujitsu backed me up.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not even talking the physical stuff.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: Like, yes, I could kick indoors to go rescue pets, but just the grit, what you're talking about, the ability to go without sleep day after day.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I just kept thinking, like, I'm not gonna tap, I'm not gonna tap.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: There's an animal, there's a some dog out there that is starving, and we've got like three days left to get there, and we're gonna frickin' get there and we're gonna find them.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: And we tried in the same way that you you know your goal in jujitsu, but you're very open to how you're gonna get there.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: You have to adapt.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: Same kind of thing.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: We were using technology to get phone numbers, people reporting where their pets were and creating maps, just all this stuff.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I just kept thinking the reason I was so successful, and people were commenting, like, have you ever done this before?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, have you ever done a design?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: And like, no, I haven't.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't know anything about anything.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: But jujitsu, I was dropped into this situation, and I had my confidence and I had my skill set, and I had my stick toitiveness, and I had my openness and adaptiveness, and just all of these things you get from jujitsu a hundred percent informed that.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I could go on forever, Jordan.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: Other things, the sale of adopthepet.com, you know, the basic principles I get from jujitsu.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many things I talk to people about, but a big part of it, like my success in like negotiating and things like that, is in jiu-jitsu, we need to understand what the other guy's doing better than they understand it themselves.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: And don't necessarily oppose it, just make it turn out the way you want it to turn out, right?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_03: And to me, that's the same thing as a negotiation, only in that case you're actually creating multiple winners.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if I'm talking to someone and there's something I want and I can figure out what they want and I can guide them in the direction they want to move because I know it's gonna intersect with what I want, that doesn't have to end in a tap-out.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_03: That can end in a great business relationship and a handshake.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: So I love the book.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: I love what you're pulling out, and I just think it's endless the lessons that we can derive from jujitsu if you're attentive to them.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: So that's I think a lot of people just do it because it's fun to be on the mat and they're not realizing how this is useful.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's almost like you have to, there's a book, but you have to open it up and read it.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: You have to see it for what it is.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: And once you start to see it for what it is, I think it's amazing.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: So in your book, you talk about three areas.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: I if I can roughly summarize them, kind of survive, control, and then submit or win.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about those areas.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: So, what do you mean by that?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: How are you thinking in terms of jujitsu that way and in business that way?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: The survival aspect of where we open up in the book is that COVID has hit, you know, and whatever you've been doing leading up to COVID is going to dictate are you going to survive this thing you didn't see coming?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't open it up as we are in control and we dodge the punch.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: I open it up as you've been blindsided and there's nothing you can do about it.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, oftentimes when we're training, our coaches will tell us that, oh, wonderful, you have such beautiful technique, but what happens if you have to do a full workout and then five rounds, does your technique survive exhaustion?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so, whatever you've been doing leading up to COVID or any disaster hurricane, we had Hurricane Sandy, you brought up Hurricane Katrina.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you've had shady unethical business dealings, if you owe six months of rent, if your employees hate you, what do you think is gonna happen when the shit hits the fan?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: You are the first one that they're going to abandon.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you've paid every bill, if you've done everything with honesty and integrity, if your employees trust you, well, now we're about to be pushed to the ends of the earth.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Are we gonna make it through this really challenging thing?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the survival aspect of where the book opens up.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: We open up on the fact that we are in a very, very tough spot.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: I then go through it to say, so now go through a hierarchy of decisions, and how do you know those decisions to make?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: So early on in COVID, I just started working off muscle memory.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing I did was I called all my landlords and I let them know listen, government is forcing me to shut everything down.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know when I'm gonna be able to pay you.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them, except for one, said the same thing.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is unprecedented, we're all in this together.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for calling me.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna work it out.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: I then went down the list in prioritization of the most to the least of everybody I owed money to.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: My vendors, my by the end of the day on March 17th, I had called the entire list of the most important things, and I had started to at least put that in the framework that we're gonna be making deals and working things out.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: A year and a half later, I was still working with hundreds of my tenants that hadn't even taken the first step.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were so paralyzed by fear they didn't even know what to do.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know who to call.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't even know to start to work on these things because it just wasn't intuitive to them.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: You could think of it as they got in a fight and they hadn't started training.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was more common than my muscle memory of running businesses, of just knowing exactly what to do.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't always know exactly what to do.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier in my career, I tell stories in the book of the times I learned the lessons that I found out and learned exactly what to do in these situations.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I tell many of the different times where, you know, when I was 21 running companies, when I was 27 running companies, I didn't know what the answer is, I didn't know anything.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: But by the time I was around in my 30s and I had been running businesses, I knew the answer.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what survival is.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what I advise people is, as I'm sure you've heard this many times, is like, well, they're like, well, I haven't started training.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then today's your day.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, today's the day to pick up the book, today's the day to start the press.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's just one class at a time, one book at a time.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever it is, begin the process of getting on the journey, and then you too one day will have the answers when the next thing happens.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: We know it's coming.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: I can guarantee you in my life, God willing, I live long enough, I'm gonna see many hurricanes.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna see many recessions, I'm gonna see all the things I've seen in the past.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: I, God willing, we don't see another pandemic, but these things are guaranteed to happen.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: So building your resilience in business, it's learning.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: In jujitsu, it's training.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next on and on is okay, so then we say, okay, I stabilized the business.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's gonna be the grind.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how long this is gonna last for.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's the showing up day in and day out, learning the same techniques, doing the same things, Groundhog Day.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, do you have what it takes to show up again tomorrow?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you've survived, you've stabilized, you're in the game.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: The pressure is overwhelming for some people.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, when are you gonna pay me?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, when does this do?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: You owe me a million dollars over and over and over and over again.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's like having a 250-pound person on top of you sweating with their shoulder pressure on you, and you're just making a little bit of space, just trying to get out, just sliding your hand up your face to blast off them from choking you.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's it.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're just figuring out inch by inch by inch by inch how to get out of this position long enough to know you've been here before, keep going.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things I tell people is the first way to win is don't lose.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: Just don't lose, don't lose, right?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: You'll sort it out.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then we move towards the end of the book and we begin to talk about, well, now you're out.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're on the attack.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now your opponent is exhausted, and maybe half the division is out because they gave up or they quit.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're in the finals, you're beat, you're bruised, but you're not broken.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: And now you have nothing left in the tank except your raw expression of your technique and all the things you know.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can you finish this fight?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what can you do to finish the fight?
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you have one arm broken, you can only finish with one arm.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: And whatever you've been doing is going to dictate if you're gonna get through and finish it.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we were bet we were very lucky in COVID to be one of the three million businesses that survived.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't just luck.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it doesn't sound like luck to me.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: These principles, every day I had another team member calling me breaking down.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was breaking down.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Every day on the mornings, I would go on a morning walk with my wife around our neighborhood, and I would be saying to her, I can't believe I have to do this again today.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because all night, all day I was keeping the business alive, and then all night it was another employee who was at their wit's end.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: But when we came out of it, every rent bill got paid in June when we were allowed to reopen our businesses.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: All that pent-up demand, you remember what happened with all the government stimulus, everything flooded back.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: The government came up with the EIDL Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, they came up with PPP.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're obviously paying the price of those things now with inflation, but at the time it was a tidal wave of demand.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so you had to figure out what you were going to do with that tidal wave of demand and if you were gonna be able to seize those opportunities.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_03: So it's an interesting analogy to a competition match, except yours was stretched out over years and involved people and your own livelihood.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: Very, very stressful.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: So it's interesting to me that how you see it, and I assume you saw it at the time.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_03: Were you recognizing how your BJJ was coming in to help you through this?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every minute of every day.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: By that point, someone asked me this recently.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: There was a time in my life where these lessons were not clear.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: There was another after COVID, I already knew it at COVID.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I started writing the book, it was a part of me already.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: But today, I just live jujitsu.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm expressing my jujitsu technique in almost everything that I do today, in business, certainly.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: I can't do a negotiation where I'm not doing, like you mentioned, doing jujitsu.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's so tightly tied into my life that parenting is jujitsu to me.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Conversations, ordering dinner, everything is jujitsu now.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I hope that parenting is jujitsu is you're not putting your kids in a rear naked choke when they just won't listen to you.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: My sense, when I was starting, I started training when I was 24.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he used to tell stories.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: But at that time, he had an infant child, and he would tell a story.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, when he's driving his car, and he starts to bob his head to the music, and he catches in the rearview mirror his son in the back, and the son is bobbing the head the same way as his father.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Your people in your life, your children, your employees, they're watching you, and they're gonna mimic you, and they're gonna give you what you're giving.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's something you hate about yourself, they're gonna do it to you.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's something you love, they're gonna do that to you too.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, So that was one lesson about parenting that I learned at 24.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even, I wasn't gonna have children for another 10 years after that, but I started to learn these lessons.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Children will pick up the spaghetti off the plate.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: They'll look at the spaghetti, they'll throw the spaghetti on the floor, and most people will be like, Why'd you throw the spaghetti on the floor?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: The child is provoking a response from you.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a human nature thing.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: So my sensei coached me all early in those years, you look at the child, you clean up the spaghetti, you throw it in the garbage, you take new spaghetti, you put it on the plate.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: No reaction.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know what they're gonna do again?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna pick up the spaghetti, they're gonna look at the spaghetti, they're gonna throw the spaghetti on the floor.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you do this until they stop throwing the spaghetti on the floor.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: By giving them no reaction, by not feeding into that, they're gonna get tired of it.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you will beat them.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: You'll submit them into obedience of understanding the right way to become a functioning adult.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: The food is for eating.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you pick up a little food and you eat it, and you show them this is for eating.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: But you should never yell at the children, you should never scold the child, you should never hit the child.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: But this is not what most people's intuition does.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: They lose their temper immediately.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: They just get frustrated.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that is jujitsu.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is the difference between a white belt and a black belt.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: The white belt has the exact same childish behavior on the mat.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was teaching jujitsu at the time.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: He was teaching the white belt lesson, he was teaching blue belts how to interact with white belts, how purple belts interact with white belts, how to use every person on the training mat as a teacher.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we're training, when you're training, especially when I started jujitsu in 2009, there was no black belts in my academy except my sensei.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I trained with a black belt for the first maybe three or four years of my jiu-jitsu experience.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to learn the so the principles of jujitsu are just everywhere.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: Driving, road rage, every one of these things, it's always jujitsu.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: So the aspect you're talking about there is, I think, I would call it like emotional control and not being reactive.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that is a huge important lesson from jujitsu.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we the better practitioner in a grappling match can take advantage of the less better practitioner by causing, basically causing them to do things.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: I have this three rules in jujitsu, three three ways to get what you want on the mat.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_03: Number one is just be bigger, stronger, and take it.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: Sure, that works.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, just you know, rough it up and take it.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: Number two is put the person in a position where they have to give it to you, right?
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: You're putting your arm into choke, they have to defend the choke, now you've got their arm for the arm bar.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_03: The third way, the best way, is cause them to want to give it to you, but they didn't even have to.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: You just created a situation where they thought, I think it's a good idea for me to reach my hand out, and now they're they've gotten into trouble.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: But that's built on causing someone to react the way you want to react.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because, in a sense, you are pulling the strings.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: You're a puppet master and you're tugging on their strings.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_03: And you can only do that because they are allowing those strings to exist.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: If they divorce their reactions from what you're doing and they just have a clear view, which is what you're talking about, now they're not being reactive.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_03: Now it's going to be really hard to train with them because I can't be the puppet master that I want to be.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what's happening in the situation you described with the infant throwing down the spaghetti.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: In that case, guess what?
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_03: They're the puppet master.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: Because what they want from you is a reaction, and you're falling right into that.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I agree with what you're saying 100%.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter six of my book is all about family and friends.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: What does a book about business have to do with family and friends?
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Everything.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I describe that the hardest relationships are the ones that are closest to you, and they pull out your base self or all this learning.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're the CEO of a business?
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you have hundreds of people that respect you and report to you.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: You go to the dinner table with your siblings and your parents, and you are back to 12-year-old Jordan, 12-year-old Dave, and all of a sudden they know exactly how to provoke you.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're black belts at submitting you.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, they are world championship black belts at pulling it out.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so the hardest place not to be the puppet master is with the people who have the closest proximity to you and know you before the new you.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if you really are the new you, if you really are a world championship, black belt, business life person, then you should be able to express it and have patience.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: In Yiddish, we call rough munis, a soft heart, okay?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: For the people of experiences and closest to you in your life who are going through their own human experience, your parents, your siblings, your wife, your mother-in-law, father-in-law, those that's where it is the hardest.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_03: You just mentioned the Yiddish term.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: I also was raised Jewish, and it's interesting.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_03: You had mentioned how you had these sort of separate lives.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: The CEO, you is the business guy, and you is the jiu-jitsu guy, and people in your normal, and I'm sure you also would have the family guy, you know, you had these different lives, and how people didn't understand the jiu-jitsu.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: I've experienced that too.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: I put myself through college at UCLA.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I wanted to be a musician, and I did become a rock and roll musician for a while, but I put myself by playing music at Jewish day schools.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is a really weird trivia fact about Dave Meyer.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: I grew up in a Jewish family.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: My uncle was a rabbi, a very prominent rabbi out in California.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I had like the Jewish Dave, right?
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_03: Who was this professional Jew because I was like, you know, and I taught in Hebrew school.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: I did some things because I was going through college.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_03: I had the martial arts Dave, even back then, which had nothing to do with the Jewish Dave.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: I had the music Dave.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: I was a playing rock and roll.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: So my music friends didn't know my jujitsu friends, my Jewish, my jiu-jitsu friends didn't know the Jewish friends.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_03: And then I got into animal work and I had my animal friends, and it is a challenge sometimes.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's kind of nice to have these different communities, but you show up in different ways to these different communities.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: But it's nice when you can then integrate them and people start to have a sense of the whole person.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, I don't know why I go into that just saying it's it's fun to hear a Yiddish phrase on the Ageless Warrior Lab podcast.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Which if you have a lot in common.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: Even though we have so much not in common, you know, we're from such different worlds.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're I'm an East Coaster, you're a West Coaster.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, we have we're so different, but we are also so similar.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: We so crazy.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: Are you were you raised on Long Island?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_03: I have cousins out on Long Island.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: They lived, when I was growing up, they lived in Lawrence.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's where I'm from.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm from Tullet, the five towns right next to it.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so all right.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: Well, offline sometime we'll compare notes, or I'll come visit you because I go visit them every once in a while.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, it's interesting how different people, different ways of looking at things can all converge.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: Again, what we were talking about on the mat.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: One thing I just wanted to ask you about the book, this is completely trivial, but the cover of the book is interesting.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's a classical drawing of like uh fighting a centaur.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a jujitsu drawing.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: Who was it the publisher, or what was your thinking behind that?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's actually a statue, it's a real statue.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's an illustration of a real statue from antiquity, and it's a PCS fighting the centaur from Greek mythology.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about fighting our demons, it's about overcoming obstacles.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing martial arts, you know, they're with a sword, of course, but they are engaged in a grappling position.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: And even though it appears that the beast is about to be slain, potentially, when they hit the ground, he could have a judo technique applied to him.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they're grappling, they're in tangling.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: They are grappling, they are in motion.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: It appears as if you were about to slay the beast, but it is not, it is in where it is in motion.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it just is a great metaphor for me about business jujitsu and about being so close to defeat or victory, but we don't know exactly what's going to happen yet.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you have all these math equations around.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's calculations on the cover of my book.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's symbolizing just a lot of things that are happening in real time.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I thought that that was probably intentional, which I wanted to ask you about it.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_03: And we, of course, will have links to the book and everything we're discussing in the show notes so people can go check it out.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_03: I want to talk to you for a minute about the other book, the one you did with your dad, and you may even have other books too.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_03: If you're waiting for a sign to start your business, this is it.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_03: Or maybe I should flip that around.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: But I I love the concept.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_03: In looking through it, I didn't read the book, but I was perusing it, says you don't, you know, you obviously you don't need to wait for the perfect circumstances.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_03: There is no perfect time.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: Talk to us a little bit about why you came out with that.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts about you?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: You said it before too.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like, if there's something you want to do, you're a kind of a person to just do it now.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: I will say, I don't know if you've ever read The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Milman.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's a great book, it's a quick read, but it one of the things in it is the warrior's way is a way of action, right?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what you're embodying.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you want to do something?
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, then do it, right?
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to me about why you're saying, hey, do it and starting a business, particularly.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: So my dad is an incredible man, very unique and rare, an amazing entrepreneur and great person with a phenomenal outlook on life.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's not a martial artist in any sense.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was a track athlete, ran track in high school and briefly in college.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: But his battlefield has always been business and entrepreneurship.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: He has been very, very successful in across many industries.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he's often sought out for his wisdom and his rational thinking and the way he is.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: My friends and I graduated from college in 07, 08, coming into the global recession, and we got jobs, and many of us found ourselves without jobs, being that we all were living in New York City.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Many of my friends were working at banks and financial institutions, some of which were folding, like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had a job offer at Bear Stearns when I was coming out of college, and then Bear Stearns didn't exist anymore.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: So my dad started writing a blog, a WordPress blog that I set up for him.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he wanted to write about hope and resilience, and he wanted to write to all of my friends and people like my friends who were dealing with this very, very challenging time.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote the blog, and then all my friends got jobs, and we went back to work, and I forgot about the blog.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: A number of years later, maybe five years later, I was like, oh Dad, remember you used to write that blog?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: And just a few years later, if I would have thought back how many times he wrote, I would have thought maybe 10 times, 15 great articles.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: I went back and looked at the blog, and he had written every day for three years straight.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm reading this, and in the time since he wrote the blog, to the time that I'd rediscovered the blog, I had read probably a hundred of the best business books, leadership books.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I read my dad's words in a whole different version of myself.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Holy, my dad knows what he's talking about.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: All those times I was arguing with him and telling him he doesn't know what he's talking about.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: He was this smart.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: He had this kind of insight.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the first time I had read his blog, I was like, ah, you know, this good stuff.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: But like I read it with a whole new, all new eyes.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I printed it out and I turned it to a beautiful coffee table book for him.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I presented it to him.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Dad, you've got to write a book.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, I got no interest in writing a book.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: He loved the coffee table book.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like he had zero interest.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in my persistence, I just kept pushing them and pushing them and pushing them.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I found a great company that did the full suite.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: All he would have to do is come up and tell his stories, and then the whole publishing process, everything.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was called Book in a Box, later called Scribe Media.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he published a book that I basically didn't co-author it with him officially, but I did the entire process from behind the scenes.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it was called Coming Into Your Own.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it was about all of his life lessons and business philosophy.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a wonderful memento for our family and our all of our business network and people.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a commercial success.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't even trying to be a commercial success, but it was a gigantic success.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when he fin the day he finished that book, he said it was one of the best experiences of his whole entire life.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, without skipping a beat, now you and I are going to write a book together.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, we had been in business for 10 years.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the story of the book, This Is It, is about my first 10 years in business with my dad.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: And every chapter is apart from his perspective and apart from my perspective.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in the first 10 years that we worked together, we had a lot of wins, but we had a lot of big losses too.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so most of the book is not about our gigantic victories.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's about all the times that we kept stumbling and failing and failing our way to success, basically.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we tell stories of Hurricane Sandy and how transformative that was.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: And later in Business Jiu-Jitsu, what I mentioned to you before about knowing what to do, it was because I had been through it with Hurricane Sandy in a not as dramatic fashion.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what this is it became this great book.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then when this is it was finished, I already knew that I wanted to write another book.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: I just didn't know what it was yet.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then years later, business jujitsu came about.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_03: One thing you said about how when you came back to your dad's blog, look reading it through more mature eyes, different eyes, you could see so much more.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: That is really true.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that, and as you know, that's true in jiu-jitsu as well.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: For sometimes when you revisit, you know, scissors sweep, something that was like you learned on your second day, and you either have someone teach it to you again, even though you already know it, and just realize, like, oh, that's really interesting, or just go back yourself and re-examine these things that you've long ago put on the shelf.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know it, whatever.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: And then when you look at it again through the eyes, as like for you as a brown belt now, or as someone with, you know, whatever, 16 years or however many years in jutsu, you're gonna see so much more in that technique than you ever saw.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I have pulled back techniques.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's almost a joke that I will pull out techniques that I did when I was a blue belt that aren't even done anymore because they're seen as so old-fashioned, but precisely because they're not done anymore, people have no idea what to do with them because they never don't even see that technique anymore.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the most basic thing from jujitsu 101 from the late 1990s.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: But because I've come back and taken a look at it now as a black belt and I can understand it much better and I can really fine-tune it much better because I understand what's going on, suddenly it becomes a really useful modern-day technique.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: So I really encourage people to go back and look at things, and it's not just jujitsu, just look at things you think you learned a long time ago and take another look at it now and again through more, through the eyes of what you have now.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_03: Because so much of what we learn, and I know you will agree with this, is our filter, right?
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's what's out there that we're looking at or reading, but how we process it is our filter, and our eyes and our ears and everything is our filter.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: And if your filter has changed, you're gonna have a whole nother experience of this external stimulus.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's important to do that now and again.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about culture, because you've built a great culture in well, certainly a mixology for your staff, and I'm sure in your other businesses as well.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_03: How important is culture to you in a successful business?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I will just add, it's very successful, important for a successful jujitsu school.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like the culture there we're looking towards is supportiveness, openness, I don't know, cleanliness in some, if you want to have a lot of students, you know, these are kind of cultural things.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to me about your views on culture.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think that culture begins with values and stated values.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that that is the operating code of how any organization runs.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: I do a lot of work in the AI space now, working with the company Palantir.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when I and I've written extensively about this on LinkedIn, if anybody's interested in how your question applies to the most cutting-edge agentic deployment of AI and business.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: People are very surprised when I begin speaking about the application of artificial intelligence in the business through the lens of values and culture.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because it doesn't seem like those two things could be connected.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: But values and culture is the programming language of success.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it teaches you how you're going to react or make a decision when you have to make it instantaneously without thinking about it.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: And your values dictate what you've done over and over and over again.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a liar, you're gonna lie.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a cheater, you're gonna cheat.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you steal, you're gonna steal.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you're honest, you're gonna make the honest and ethical move.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so, the same in jujitsu, what we practice over and over and over again is the expression of our technique.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the values, judgments, come down to the individual decisions that we make on a day-to-day.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: Make go left, go right, go straight, go fast, go 60 miles an hour, go 70 miles an hour.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you do is what you do.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so that the excretion of that is culture.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: It goes back to the spaghetti and the head bobbing of your baby in the back of the car listening to the music.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: What you do and what you say and what you represent is the real deal stuff.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: When I talk to my staff about our values and culture, I'm giving them my blueprint and playbook.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the only blueprint.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very clear with them.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't say this is dogma, this is the law.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have concentric circles.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: Your family does things different.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want to work with me inside of this culture, enough of our values have to overlap and meet so that we can work on a team together, or we can train together, or we do business together.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: They don't all have to meet.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you try to have all, even in my own family, who probably have the closest cultural values to me, my brother and I, my sister and I don't perfectly align and see eye to eye on everything that we do.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: But that is, in my view, the absolute most critical and important thing.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what my dad and I talk about is when you try to live your life through a way of doing everything to the best of your intentions, ethically, with honor, morally correct, legally, you're gonna lose deals.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna lose.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes you lose or make a little bit less money because the other person is willing to lie cheap and steal.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: But what I've found over and over and over again over the course of the past 21 years of being in business is that those people are the ones who are living in the metaphorical straw house.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: At the first test, it crumbles.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: They get in trouble, they go to jail, they get slacked with fines and taxes, and they're constant in a state of victim of nobody told me I didn't know I wasn't supposed to cheat the PPP system, nobody told me about how to follow EIDL appropriately.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the simple fact is that the rules, the laws, and the things are clearly stated.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's not to say you're not gonna make mistakes along the way.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're supposed to learn from your mistakes.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: When you find that you've done something incorrectly or improperly, and you've been checked by a boss, a coach, a mentor, the government, whatever, if you really, if it was a mistake, it gives you the opportunity to learn, tap out, make the improvement, and come back better the next day.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: The problem happens with the people whose values and culture tells them, like the mafia, right?
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm giving a good counterfactual of criminals, where they've been reinforced that doing the wrong thing over and over and over and over again is the right thing to do.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with those people, in our dojo, we call them street fighters, is they come in for a class thinking that the biggest, baddest, toughest person ever, and we put them with a 135-pound woman, and she chokes the absolute living life out of them, and they learn very quickly that technique and discipline and hard work and sweeping the mat and bowing to the mat.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, actually there was something to all that in the first place.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: And going back to business culture, I don't know if you've ever heard of Eric Reese and Lean Startup.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_03: He's the guy, you know, pivot, MVPs, all that kind of stuff.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: That comes out of lean startup.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_03: Eric Reese is a friend of mine.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_03: And he just came out with a new book called Incorruptible.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it's talking about how founders can create companies, structures that make the company less likely to have mission drift, right?
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_03: And stray off.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_03: And what he talks about is the invisible power that's always working on all companies is profit motive and shareholder primacy.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that, if that's your culture, if that's what you have to do, you might do things that are illegal if you calculate or unethical if you calculate, look, we're gonna end up making more money and it's worth the trade-off.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_03: And that is, in his mind, kind of the unspoken culture in many, many companies.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_03: And even a well-meaning founder who is starting with the best of intentions can be pulled into that because it's like this gravity.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why he's talking about setting up structures.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that could be everything from well, there's sort of, you know, like public benefit co-ps and stuff like that, or it could be you have a nonprofit and the for-profit you're starting is a subsidiary of the nonprofit, and there's actually a different group of board members who are there, and it's basically he's fighting against shareholder primacy.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like your customers and your community have to be who you're really serving, and the shareholders will make their money, but they come next.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: But it's reminding you, I spoke to him about this actually on the podcast, and what you're saying reminds me of that because the culture is like this unspoken, I mean, it can be spoken, and you can write it out, but it's got to be real, right?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure you've seen these companies that have these our mission is this and our beliefs are this and this, and it's always like we believe in the customer and we support our employees and we give back to the community.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_03: But in fact, that's just like an aspirational thing, because what they really believe in is make as much money as you possibly can.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_03: I guess your companies are private, right?
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_03: So you really do have the control.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: It could be shareholder primacy, but you're the shareholder, and so you really can enforce the true culture that you want, which is good.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_03: But I'm just calling out it's sometimes that unspoken thing that you have to speak it and you have to then live it and be real about it, not just have it be words on the thing you paste on the wall, but how you live it every day.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure you do that in your organization.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's my family business.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: I have three generations of Edwards family businesses.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: My great-grandparents, for the most part, came here from Europe, chased out.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I did have one great-grandmother who's arrived in the 1800s, German.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: There were many German Jews that arrived in the 1800s.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: But generally speaking, my family or have all been entrepreneurs, although all different businesses, my grandfather's business and a lot of different family businesses, but we've reported to ourselves and our employees and our customers.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: And when you put your name behind something, and this is your business, your values shine through.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: And your values, like I said, should be the operating system of success.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are printing success decade after decade after decade, there's something right, there's something that works.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also a constant state of innovation of just like jujitsu, where keep going back to the map, not to do the same thing over and over, as you said.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's to do it in a new way, or you're rediscovering some truth in the basic fundamental principles and techniques, which is very important to me.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: But there are some absolutely hard-coded non-negotiables in these things, which in my articles recently I called it Judeo-Christian in the sense of that I mapped it to the Ten Commandments.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: These Ten Commandments, that is a fundamental bedrock of decision-making in my life.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: To just try to follow those things.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, not laws, but as guides.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: And actually it goes back to the beginning of our conversation, which we began very briefly talking about loyalty.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I wrote an article recently on this subject called Loyalty, Guides Not Gods.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I was framing my sensei and my father, and these incredibly important people in my life who have had such the benefit of not being under monsters.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: They've generally really wanted me to carve my own way and my own path.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: My father has been the most unbelievable mentor.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: And there were times early in my career where he said, You and your friends are gonna push me out of the way.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he's lifted so many people up.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's made me, he's let me make million-dollar mistakes and enjoyed the lesson and just get right back to work.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched so many fathers and sons in business who hate each other, sue each other, kill each other, and the father is so demanding over the son, he never let him make a decision.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if he tried to do a decision and it didn't work, he would reprimand him and scold him and belittle him for trying to do this thing.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it rips families apart.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: My dad, when I took a risk, he loved it.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: Even when I failed.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: He loved it.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: He loved business and do it.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, go back, try it again, try it again, try it again, keep going, keep going.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to say it was always perfect.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we battled, we fought, but when it came time to wanting to see me be successful, he really wanted me to be successful.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't just put it on paper, and it was so rare.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was aware of it at the time.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was wise enough in my career with him to understand the difference.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I watched as other father and sons that we were very close with, because we had business partners, we were also father and sons, and the fathers were tyrants.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: We often talk to, and I'm very passionate, we're not gonna have time to get into this today, but another thing I'm very passionate about is family planning, estate planning, setting up the businesses an appropriate way to last through the generations.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I've watched as people try to control their families from the grave.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: They make these trusts and the businesses so tight that even when they die, they're still making their families miserable.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: In our family, it's nothing like that.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna mess it up, you're gonna mess it up in the next generations.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: But we watched as fathers and sons suit each other into oblivion and broke apart families and siblings.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: And anyway, I can talk about that endlessly too.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, okay, so and it's funny that because that reminds me of like a calcified martial arts system where this is the way O sensei did it and he's long since dead, and we're not able to evolve the system, which means the system is going to basically basically wither and die.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: When the funny thing was, O Sensei, who created the system, was evolving a system.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's how he created something new.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_03: And if you don't have the ability to keep creating, so you don't want to you don't want people to be giving you instructions from the grave.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_03: But you had on a couple of things that I want to follow up on.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_03: One of them was your dad as a mentor and the importance of mentors and teachers.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: We'll do that in one second.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: But delegation, that your father was willing to give you the power in a business.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you had said, I read somewhere you said, you don't need my permission to make a good decision.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's the book, yeah.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_03: So delegation, I think, is super important, right?
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to remain a one-man show in business, then just be a sole proprietorship and you don't have to delegate anything.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_03: But if you want to grow, you're ultimately gonna have to have other people and you're gonna have to delegate some authority.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_03: And as you said, there are times that they are going to make decisions that you disagree with that may or may not work out.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_03: I know for me in my animal nonprofit, I have this rule like, you don't have to ask me for permission.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_03: If the thing you're thinking of doing is going to help reduce suffering for animals, my answer is yes.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_03: If you believe that, and it's okay if you're wrong, we'll learn from the mistake if you're wrong.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_03: But you don't even have to ask me.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_03: If you say, should I do A or B?
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_03: And B, you think is going to relieve more cruelty and suffering to animals, you don't have to ask me.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_03: And you've just answered the question.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then we'll I'm curious your thoughts about delegation and putting trust in somebody else and how you handle it when you see someone doing something like, uh, that's not the way I would do it, but you know what?
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_03: You might be right, so let's do it your way and we'll see what happens.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_03: Are you able to do that?
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, listen, let's call it what it is in jiu-jitsu terms.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about leverage.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: People talk and look at me all the time and they're like, wait a second, you're running a commercial real estate portfolio, a fashion business, technology business, you're investing, you're going to jujitsu every night, you're competing in tournaments, you have a family life.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: It seems impossible.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: How could you possibly be doing all these things?
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: You seem normal.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: I said, because you think I'm doing all those things, I have literally hundreds of people working for me.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look at me and think I am simultaneously doing.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: If there's anything I'm doing that you're not intuiting, it's that I'm managing teams of people.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: People want to know how I'm into it, how I'm managing teams of people.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: When I first started running companies, my dad gave me a very simple primitive to follow.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Jordan, your only job is to make C players act like B players, B players act like A players, and stop the A players from trying to fire all the B players and the C players.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: He says, That's it.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, if you try to expect perfection, because at this point in my career, I was just doing my own work.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was a competent employee of my father and other businesses.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had had a lot of jobs, starting as a caddy and a caterer, and I had a lot of interesting jobs as a child and kid.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: From the time I was about 16, I never had to ask my parents for money again because I made so much money caddying that that set me up, and I just fell in love with making money.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I calculated early in my life that my effort done well.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: If I woke up early enough and I worked enough hours at the golf course or anywhere else, flipping omelets for Mr.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: Omelette.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: I worked for a company called the Oceanside Kanish Factory.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: I used to deliver canishes.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I learned that if I worked hard, I made the money.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I just knew how to make money.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: I just I knew I always knew how to do it.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I started my career, I wanted everyone around me to work with my intensity and pace.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I got very frustrated when things that we contracted for at the beginning of my career was fixing potholes and roof leaks and doing small construction in our real estate portfolio.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd be at war with these contractors to try and understand why they're doing such a bad job.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: And very quickly, my dad taught me a very good lesson.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Jordan, you're very emotional about this.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: Did you burst the pipe when it froze?
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, What?
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's in Pennsylvania.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, you're acting as if you bursted the pipe.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Jordan, it's very simple.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: The pipe burst.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't your fault.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's your job to get the pipe fixed.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: File the insurance claim, hire the contractor, and call them every day until it's done.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: Get the best price you could get, and that's good enough for me.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: Call me when it's finished.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: And when I stop acting so emotionally, and I started realizing that this was my job to get these things done, once again the word comes back.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: Rough manace, a soft heart, to understand all these different people's experiences and understand that the goal is not to prove that I'm right.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to win.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: Once I stopped trying to prove myself right to these contractors and employees, and that I was better, and then I saw that the goal actually is that we're trying to win together, I started to understand I could get a lot of stuff done by empowering a lot of different people to get things done.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I stopped looking for perfection and I started to look to maximize their abilities and start putting the pieces in place to get the whole team to perform.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: This obviously took me a very long time, Dave.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've been summarizing more than 15.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that thing is what you said.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need my permission to make a good decision.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have hired you, I have given you the tax.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: It means that I trust you.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: You make the decision.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_00: If I disagree or I think it goes wrong, trust me enough to talk after that I want to do another deal.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: What I found was when I built my network of team members, employees, subcontractors, and contractors, is that when I found someone who was good, I kept feeding them business over and over and over and over and over again.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of always looking for the next job, you're battling so much at them, you have to get every penny out of the plumber.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_00: I found, no, if you want to have a great plumber, pay them.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: You want to have a great electrician, pay them.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: You want to have a good contractor, pay them.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: Treat them well.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_00: And what I found is because you treat people so well, now I have to chase them to pay them.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases, my contractors and vendors love me so much like, yeah, don't worry about it.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_00: You'll get me on the next one.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you came over to my house at four in the morning with a pipe burst.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let me pay you, Jordan.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: You give me so much work, you give me so much business, I'm doing this one for you.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's the in my sensei, and I'm sure you've heard Shu Hari.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_00: You must learn the rules so that you know how to break the rules, so that you can transcend the rules.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm describing to you leadership transcendence.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: It is you treat your people so well, you give them autonomy and trust, and they want to perform because you're winning over and over and over again.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, not everybody is gonna get it fit into this.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: I fired thousands of people in my life.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not everybody fits the bill.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna get unethical people, they're gonna cheat, they're gonna steal, they're gonna lie, then you go on to the next one.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just like training partners.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not every training partner I started my career with this year.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: Very few.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's a handful, 10 of us maybe, that are still here from day one, 17 years ago.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen thousands of people come through the dojo.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them have way more talented than me, way faster, way stronger, way better at jujitsu, but they quit.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: They gave up, they walked out for whatever reason they had in their life.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, in order for transcendence to occur, you've got to stay in the game.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I agree.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I've had a lot of success in my nonprofit work where I've had teams working for me.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_03: In the nonprofit world, by definition, almost you tend to not be able to pay someone the salary that they could make in the for-profit world.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_03: When I created adoptpet.com, this was a tech product.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_03: We needed developers.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_03: This is before AI is putting developers out of work.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_03: And we were in competition with Google and Facebook.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_03: Like we couldn't get the best developers like that.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_03: But what we could do was create a working environment that was so good and some perks that were so good.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I even had this thing where I called uh tour of duty, where like, hey, you know what?
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_03: Don't quit your Google job.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_03: Just get them to let you take a sabbatical for a year.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_03: Come work for us for a quarter of the money, do something good for animals and then go back.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_03: But the point was by creating such a good environment, we actually people came and worked for us and nobody ever quit because they were so empowered and I trusted them.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly what you're saying.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_03: And yes, sometimes I they would do something or someone who I've delegated who does something that I don't, it's not how I would do it.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I've learned that a lot of times I was wrong and they were right, you know, or sometimes I was right and they were wrong, and that's okay.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_03: So long as they take responsibility, right?
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_03: So long as they don't make an excuse and say, you know what, I really thought this was going to be the right thing, but here's what's wrong, here's what we learned from it.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_03: That's beautiful.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_03: We grow together.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how I've been able to keep really good people in the way that you're describing, is just by treating them really, really well, empowering them.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_03: I look at everybody as everybody has potential, and my job is to actualize their potential.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_03: My job is to help set up the situation that lets them be the very best that they can be.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_03: And if you do that for people, you're gonna get really good performance and you're gonna get people who love you and who want to stay working with you because who doesn't want to work in that environment?
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, some people don't, and then they leave, you know, just like the academy.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, same thing too, yes, exactly.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of people leave.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like my philosophy.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some people need to be told what to do.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want autonomy, they don't, they need permission for everything.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: They want to call an ass.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_00: They've had a boss that is every couldn't do anything.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everything.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can I do this?
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Can I do that?
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, yes, no, do this, do that.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_00: But they've lived that way for so long that they grow accustomed to needing that or wanting that.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: So not everybody fits into my culture.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we find our own and we find the people that we want to work with, and then you do your best to stick with them for a long time.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I've said this recently in some the highest level deal making of my career, which is happening at this moment.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was working with people that are far beyond my success, but I've become the linchpin at this point in my career being able to execute on what they need.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, if there's any one thing that I can bring to this partnership, it's keeping the team together.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: All of these crazy egos of the fame and the fortune and the big deals and the big names, sometimes they're so successful that their own success, especially as they get older, they think everyone's trying to screw them over.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in order to win, you gotta keep the team together.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a great team, everybody brings something different, and you need leadership to drive the win home.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like at this point in my career, that's like what I'm hyper, hyper focused on.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes right back to what you said.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first thing my dad taught me about management and business.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The very first lesson I got is now more relevant at this point in my career than it even was at the beginning of my career.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_03: Well, okay, so you've talked a lot about your dad, who's clearly an amazing person as a mentor.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_03: Are there any, and of course, you're a martial arts instructor.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Are there other mentors in your life?
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I would say when I think of mentor, we tend to think of a living relationship.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_03: But of course, I've read books from people who are not even alive, and I consider them to be mentors of mine, and they are speaking to me, not trying to control me from the grave, like you said, but they're trying to help me from the grave, which is quite different, right?
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_03: So, any other mentors that you want to call out and just your thoughts on mentorship generally?
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I completely agree with you.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Many of my mentors I never met because they're in books and they're long dead.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_00: From the ages of 20, 21 when I began my career, to 28 when I became the president of mixology clothing company and the president of the chart organization, our family business.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was operating on talent and hard work only.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what I basically learned in college, which was not a lot.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I went to go pitch mixology to a private equity investor named Keith Miller.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now I have met Keith Miller in person two times.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_00: One time when I was 28, and the other time two weeks ago.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I have spoken to him on the phone three times in between.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The first time I met him, I pitched a mixology in his unbelievable office.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Keith has done some of the best private equity investing in the world, in my space.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Brands like From Hearts and Supreme and a list, Dave's Killer Bread, you probably know, like a list so long and so spectacular, he's the best of the best of the best.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he we had this great meeting, and then at the end of the meeting, he started grilling me with questions, fundamental questions about my business that I did not have the answers to.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he looked at me and he said a phrase that changed the course of my life.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Jordan, you're a nice guy, but you don't know enough about your business.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was plastered in my seat of embarrassment.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: My father was there, my former business partner was there to hear this.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was the shit.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had just saved the business after Hurricane Sandy.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had more than quadrupled the revenues in two years.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_00: I turned around, I was on my ego was inflamed.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I couldn't be stopped.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And here I am meeting a master, and he's telling me I don't know even the fundamentals.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I walked out of that meeting and I was standing around the corner from my apartment in Manhattan, and I had two options.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I could say, fuck him, he doesn't know what he's talking about on the shit, or I could tap out and say I learned.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thank God, I was already about four or five years into my jiu-jitsu, or four years into my jujitsu career at that point, and I knew what it was like to meet a master.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: I tapped out, I went back to my office, I started calling all my consultants, my lawyer, my accountant, my inventory planner, and I wrote down all the questions he asked me.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Those questions are framed in my office, right across from my desk.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_00: They are the most simple and fundamental questions about a fashion retail business you could possibly ask a CEO.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I found out the answers to those questions and I learned.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So Keith, even though we've only met that one time, changed my life.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then two other times where I suck out his counsel, he helped me in a moment where I didn't have the answers to a question, and he gave me the answer to the question that transformed our business for the better.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: About two years ago, his wife started working for me.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't need to work for me, she just loves to work.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And she's become a great friend in our business.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a big event last weekend, and he stopped by to say hi.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it was only the second time that I had met him in person.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_00: But he had this big effect on you.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_00: But he we have a great relationship.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_00: He knows about my books.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've spoken to him, I've spoken with his wife, but this is not someone who has been in my life a lot.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, he invited me over for coffee to catch up and talk.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_00: But you can see how over the years, if you don't shun the people who try to help you, which is what almost everybody does, and you keep them in your life, who knows what we could potentially do together?
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm obviously a very different business person at 41 than I was at 28.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and so maybe there are things that we can do together because he's stuck with me and I've stuck with him.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm not expecting that, by the way.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying that as a metaphor of understanding how mentorship really works.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one example.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then another thing that came off of that meeting is I got thirsty for knowledge.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I started reading like a wild animal.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: I could not put the books down.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Audiobooks, regular books, I needed to read because I found out that all the answers to all the questions were sitting right there at my fingertips.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And all I had to do was either press play on the audiobook or turn the page of a book and highlight.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And different than in college, where I had a very hard time reading things I didn't care about, like calculus and whatever I was learning.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: In business, I was reading about my heroes.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: President Grant, Lincoln, JFK, business leaders like Sam Zell and Sam Walton, and athletes like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan and What It Took to Win.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_00: I started reading every military book I can get my hands on.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Learning all about I Love Band of Brothers and World War II.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_00: I started reading about anything, just like anything having to do with business, leadership, sports, I couldn't get enough.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: I still can't get enough.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's very unlikely that anything any of us are dealing with today has not been dealt with by some human in all of human history.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, AI is presenting some interesting things, but even then, I'm sure there's learnings.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_03: And people are on a spiritual journey and seeking or trying to teach themselves how to run a business or get better at jujitsu or whatever.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_03: And if you only are willing to look back and if it, whether it's like you say, picking up a book, reading an ancient manuscript, reading Lee Ayakoka's book, I mean, whatever, there's so many people, and we've been us humans have been recording knowledge for thousands of years.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_03: You just have to go back and look and see and let Lao Tzu talk to you, or let whoever it is in history talk to you in the same way that you can go to your instructor or now hop onto YouTube and learn things there too.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_03: And yes, you have to be the curator of the information.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_03: That is true.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_03: There's a tons of information, not all of it will be right for you.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_03: So you you can't lose yourself in that, right?
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_03: You got to keep your filter, but it's all there at your fingertips if you just reach out for it.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_03: I totally agree.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do have to go, but I'm gonna leave you with one thing that I think all of your viewers, I hope, can benefit from about where I am right now in my life and my career.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_00: So once again in 2024, I found myself in another COVID moment: hyperinflation.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Every expense category rising at a rate beyond what our profits could handle.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And once our revenues began to shrink in 2025 with the onset of tariffs, we once again found ourselves almost out of business.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to go to lengths even further than I did during COVID in the story, The Pages of Business.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is the book that is not yet written.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of 2024, I was using AI every day, and I was using AI, and I felt more productive than I had ever been in my life.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_00: The only problem was I had never been less productive, and my business was potentially about to be out of business.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: I found my way to solving some of my most complex business problems with the company Palantir, which is one of the most powerful AI orchestration platforms on planet Earth.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And every day I was on X and social media listening to all these talking heads about how they were using AI to win in their businesses, and I thought that I was so far behind.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that the world was passing me by, my business is about to be out of business again, and I felt completely overwhelmed and lost trying to fight through these problems again.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: But once again I felt back on my muscle memory.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: I sought out the training to learn how to use Palantir and these AI principles.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when I finally solved the problems inside of my business, remember, I thought I was a year or two behind.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I later found out from Palantir that I became the first CEO of any size to do the kind of AI work that I was doing, whether for a Fortune 500 company or a small business.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I came up with a name for that called the forward-deployed CEO.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I ended up solving all my most complex business problems and turning my entire business around.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the story of the Taurus in the hair.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was in last place so far back, only to find out when I got there that I got there first.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Do I hear a book in the offing forward deployed CEO?
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'll be the first to buy it.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_03: I really appreciate your sharing with us your such an interesting journey making the connections for jujitsu.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_03: I've really enjoyed this time together.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_03: You've been so generous with your time.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_03: And we will have links in the show notes to everything we talked about.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I will let you know next time I'm headed out to New York or something.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe we can hop on a mat together, share a few BGJ techniques as well.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_00: I would love that.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your time and the gracious questions.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a pleasure to meet you.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_03: Have a great day.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_03: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jordan Edwards.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_03: You will find links to everything we discussed in the show notes.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_03: And thanks to my team, Angela, Bill, Kyle, Phil, Robbie, and to Ryan Peach Turner, my producer and chief editor, for your help.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks also to the show sponsors and supporters, and you can see all of them on our supporters page at AgelessWarriorLab.com.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please take a moment to rate the show.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_03: In my talk with Jordan, I mentioned an interview I did with Eric Reese, the lean startup founder, and we talked about his new book, Incorruptible.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_03: You can click here to check out that episode.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'll be back next week with more lessons from the lab.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_03: And until then, keep developing your strength, your wisdom, and go out and do good in the world.