The Lie That Started Everything

This is episode number 355 of the Real Jason Duncan Podcast. This is the very first episode of

this new version of the podcast. The new framework. So everything, all the new edits that you

do on this one with the new logo, the new opening, and the new intro that well actually we're not

doing an intro to this, but the new closing outro bumper music. All that stuff should be new, and

there will not be a uh sponsor break in the middle of this particular episode. So we don't need to

do that, uh, any of that. sweep intro and outro on this particular one. So here we go. Let's get

started. Five, four, three, two, one. You know, somewhere between childhood and now,

someone handed you a set of rules about money or about success or faith and how the world

works. And you never asked who wrote them. And some of them are costing you everything.

And the ones doing the most damage, they're not even hiding. They're dressed up as your

greatest achievements. Hey, welcome to the Real Jason Duncan podcast. I am Jason Duncan.

This is episode number 355. If you've been here before, you know that this show had a different

name for 354 episodes. And during those 354 episodes, I called this show the root of all

success. Now, if you're brand new here. Welcome. I'm glad you found this. But either way, I

need to tell you something before we go anywhere else into this episode. This show has

changed And not the reason that exists, not necessarily the questions that it's always been

trying to ask, but the focus and the format and the level of honesty have all changed. And I want

to take a few minutes here at the top of this episode. To explain what changed and why,

because I think that the reason I changed it matters. So for 354 episodes, this show focused on

entrepreneurs. It focused on their stories. It focused on their strategies, their principles of

success that helped them build real things. And those were good conversations. And I'm proud

of those. And to those of you who are faithful listeners who've gone back and listened to all of

them or been with me since the beginning, you know, I'm I'm thankful for that. But I'm proud of

those episodes. But here's what happened. Somewhere along the way in the middle of all that, I

started noticing something that I couldn't stop seeing. And what I was seeing was that the most

successful guests that I had, the ones with the biggest companies, the ones with the most

money, the most recognition, a lot of them actually weren't free. I mean, they had built some

impressive things, but those things had been owning them completely. And what I've discovered

is they were living in cages that they couldn't see because the cages were made of gold And the

conversations I kept having off mic were more valuable than anything we could have ever put on

the record. I mean, guests would tell me what they actually believed about money, about the

government. Boy, those were some great conversations. About church, about their marriages. I

mean, things that they had figured out the hard way, things that frankly most people never say

out loud. And that is what this show is about now. No more success story parade, no more

highlight reel of interviews where someone walks you through how they got to the top. This is

just honest people from every walk of life sharing the lies that they believed for way too long and

the truths that they finally found. And I renamed the show. I rebuilt the format and I've recorded

this episode to explain why. Episode number 355. So let me tell you as we get started here a

little something about myself that most people don't really know the full version of. I was a

pastor for 13 years. That was my first job, really, career out of high school and college. And I

loved that work. I believed in it completely and I gave everything I had to it. But then I started

seeing some of the cracks and the lies about what I was doing that I really couldn't stomach

anymore. And so I had to leave. And then uh so I went and became a school teacher. I became

a middle school history teacher. And it was different work, but it was the same basic instinct, you

know, to help people grow, tell them the truth, point them towards something better. And I loved

it. But in the spring of 2011, I lost that teaching job. And it was really no warning, no safety net. I

mean, I had a wife and two kids at home. I had suddenly been looking down the barrel of not

having an income in a few months. So I did what a lot of successful people do. I started a

business. And not because I had a brilliant idea or even a clear plan of how I was going to

execute this. I just started the business. Because my family needed to eat and nobody was

going to hand me a paycheck. And you know what? Something the culture had been feeding me

for years was whispering like this is your way out. Build your own thing. Be your own boss.

Create your own freedom. And that was a lie. I didn't know I didn't know it was a lie, of course. I

mean it looked like the truth. It felt like the truth, and for years it performed like the truth. And by

2018, that business, it was an LED lighting and electrical retrofit company, an electrical contract

company, we had built We'd reached a million dollars in EBITDA, million dollars in net profit. I

made the Inc. five thousand list twice and I was being recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine,

the Nashville Business Journal, I was getting published in other magazines, and I had

everything that the live promised me Well, from the outside, that's what it looked like. But on the

inside, I was the business. I mean, every decision ran through me, every client relationship lived

inside my head, every system. depended upon my presence to function. And I couldn't take a

real vacation without my phone ringing. I couldn't step away without someone, you know, or

something catching on fire. I'd never built freedom. I'd built a job that paid really well, heck of a

lot better than being a school teacher. I think my last year's teaching salary was 38 grand. And

you know, now we made a million dollars in one year. But I'd built this job that paid well, but it

never let me leave. And I had a business coach at the time. Um his name was B. J. Howard And

he's the one who finally said out loud what needed to be said. 14 words that I'd never forgotten.

He said, the reason you want out is the same reason no one would want in. And I want you to

take a moment with that. Think about what those 14 words mean. But the reason I wanted it out

I wanted to sell the business. I wanted to get out of the weeds of running operations. He said

the reason I wanted out is the fact that the business couldn't run without me. It was the same

reason that no buyer would ever want it. Because it wasn't an asset. It was a dependency. And I

was the product. And products like that don't scale. And they certainly don't sell. In 2019, a very

painful business partnership dispute pulled me away from the business. Probably about 75% of

my attention pulled away from the business, pulled away from the company. And the business

that year lost nearly a million dollars. I mean, that's a two million dollar swing in 24 months from

a million in profit to a million in losses. And it wasn't because the market changed. It wasn't

because the industry shifted. It was because the business was built on me. And the moment I

couldn't hold it together, it fell apart. Now, what I did is I spent the next 18 months doing what at

the time was the hardest professional work of my life. I was building real systems, developing

real leadership, and creating the infrastructure. That would let a company function without me at

the center of everything. And I got there. And eventually I handed over the daily operations to a

third-party manager and I stepped back and the business kept running for a while. And then that

manager destroyed the company and it ultimately had to be shut down. And that's a whole

another story for another episode. I'm not going to get into that. And I tell you that not for

sympathy. I tell you that because the full story matters. I finally did the work to get free, and then

I watched what I built get destroyed anyway. And here's what that experience uh gave me that

nothing else nothing else would have been able to give me. And that's the complete picture of

what it actually costs, what this lie that I believed actually cost me And what is the lie? Well, the

lie is that building my own business will set me free. And that's one of the most widely believed

lies in the world of entrepreneurship. It's in every motivational speech, every startup podcast,

every quit your job and follow your dreams post that you've ever scrolled past. The culture sells

it constantly and people buy it like it looks because it looks like gold. And the gold is real. I

mean, I want to be clear about that. Building something that's your own is genuinely powerful. I

mean, I've started 14 companies. I've exited five of them. I'm about to exit a couple more. And

the independence, the ownership, the sense of purpose that comes with it, those are real things.

And I'm not here to tell you entrepreneurship is a mistake. That's not what I'm saying. But the

lie. Embedded in the promise is that starting a business automatically delivers freedom. And it

doesn't. What it delivers is a new set of responsibilities and a new boss. You know, you wanted

to become your own boss, but your new boss is usually the worst boss you've ever had. It's the

boss who sends emails at 11 o'clock at night, the one who expects you to be available for every

decision, the one who can't survive without you. So you can never actually leave. And instead of

freedom, what you end up with is a cage, a cage that you designed yourself, one that that That

fits you perfectly because you built it around your own habits, your own blind spots, and your

own version of what you think success was supposed to look like because you've been on

YouTube and TikTok and Instagram too long The gold, as we see it, it was the opportunity. But

the cage, the cage was the structure I built around it and I was in that cage for years before I

ever saw the bars. I couldn't see them. And I only saw them because someone cared enough to

tell me the truth. 14 words I could not unhear. Now, most people, probably like you, don't ever

get those 14 words. And they stay in the cage their entire career. They build bigger, more

impressive cages. They collect more gold. And they call that success. Now, on this show, the

Real Jason Duncan Podcast, I want to introduce you to a concept that's going to come up in

almost every conversation from now on on this show. A golden cage. We're going to talk about

this idea of a golden cage. A golden cage is any lie that looks attractive enough that you climb

inside it willingly. So the gold, of course, that's what makes it appealing. But the cage, the cage

is the truth underneath that. And you know, the reason that golden cages are so dangerous is

not that they're hard to spot from a distance. It's that it's that from inside they look like They don't

look like anything like a cage. They look great. They look comfortable. They look like your best

decisions. And people build these golden cages around their businesses, around their finances,

around even their faith. Around their marriages, around their beliefs about what a good life is

supposed to look like. And some people spend their entire lives adding more gold to a cage that

they have never once examined and then they end up dying in there, surrounded by gold,

wondering why they're not free. And they never felt free. So I need you to understand though

this concept isn't limited to entrepreneurs. It's not limited to uh business, it's not limited to

money. It applies anywhere. Anywhere a lie that has been dressed up well enough that

someone stops questioning it. questioning it and starting to defend it. And what makes it really

hard to escape is that the more successful you are, the harder these lies are to see because the

evidence that you're in the cage is the same evidence you've been using to prove that you're

free. I mean things like revenue. recognition, lifestyle, all of that feels like proof that you got

something right. And that's exactly what it felt like for me in 2018. I had a million dollars in

EBITDA. Inc. 5000 magazine features, more trapped than I'd ever been in my professional life.

The gold was real, but the cage was real too. I just couldn't see the bars because I was so busy

polishing the gold. Now, here's what I want you to carry out of this episode. So listen very

carefully. You are living by rules that you never wrote. And the ones doing the most damage are

the ones you're most certain about. Think about that, I mean the beliefs that you're least likely to

question are the ones that feel most obviously true. I mean the ones everyone around you also

holds, by the way, the ones that have been reinforced so many times that questioning them

feels like you're losing your grip on reality, those are the ones that are most worth examining.

Now, I need to be clear here. I'm not telling you that everything you believe is wrong. That's not

what this is about. I'm not here to burn down your worldview or hand you a new ideology to

replace the old one. What I am here to do is because I found out. I found out the hard way that

some of what I was most certain about was the very thing that was costing me the most. And it

goes back to things I learned in childhood, things I learned in high school, things I learned

through relationships from my parents, and things I learned in ministry. I mean, as I said earlier,

part of my story, I started seeing lies around this idea of church and ministry I couldn't do. Like

these things were costing me a lot. And I suspect that some of the same things are true for you.

And the question here is whether you're willing to look at them. And that's why this show exists,

because every episode, we're going to look at a lie that somebody believed for far too long, and

then the truth that they finally found. These aren't professionals, they're not academics, they're

not people with a tidy theory about how the real world works. These are going to be real

entrepreneurs. Real investors, real parents, real pastors, real teachers, real doctors who got

something wrong for a long time and then got it right. And who are willing to sit down across the

microphone, across the camera, across the internet, and to say it out loud. So every episode

moving forward is going to be someone who has done the hard work of questioning what they

were told. And they're gonna sit down and then tell you what they found out. So you don't have

to wait as long as they did. And that's the part I think that really matters the most to me is that

waiting. Because I waited years to find out that the business that I built I built it to set me free. I

waited years to find out that it was a cage. And those are years I can't get back. And honestly, if

someone, if someone had put the truth in front of me earlier, everything might have looked

different. Honestly, when I was this is the truth. This is not really part of the notes for my

episode, but as I was preparing this, I actually got a little emotional at this point when I was

writing these words because Man, if I'd known the truth, what I've done, what I did. I mean,

maybe I wouldn't have earned as much money. Wait, maybe I wouldn't have ever ended up in a

magazine, but then again, maybe I would have. Maybe I'd have been in debt better. I don't

know, but I wished I didn't have to wait to learn it. Because everything might have looked

different. And now I don't know if you ever would have even listened, but at least I would have

had the chance. And so this show, the Real Jason Duncan Podcast, exists for people like you

who suspect that some of what they've been taught about money or business or faith and life is

wrong and you want permission to find out. And it's not that you need my permission, but you

just might need to hear someone say it out loud. And that's okay. That it's okay to question the

things that we were handed. The money stuff, the tax stuff, the way the financial system actually

works, the things you were taught in church, the conventional wisdom about how to raise

children, how to build a marriage, or how to find a life well lived. All of that's fair game here, and

we're gonna have guests that talk about all these things. Some of them I'm gonna disagree with.

They're gonna bring a truth that I still, they're gonna bring a lie that I still believe, and we're

gonna have a disagreement. Because it's not, I don't have all the answers. I don't. But because

the questions I'm going to ask them are worth asking, because most people never ask them.

This is going to be a conversation about the lies that look like gold and the truths hiding

underneath them. And some of what you hear on this show is going to make immediate sense

to you. You'll hear it go, yep, 100%. I'm with you, brother. Some of it will make you

uncomfortable. And some of it, I'm gonna be honest with you, is gonna make you think the guest

has completely lost their mind. Or you're gonna think I've lost my mind. And that's fine. This

show doesn't tell you what to believe. It gives you permission to examine what you already

believe. And that's the only agenda. So here's what I need from you. If you have a lie that you

used to believe and a truth that you had to find out the hard way, I want to hear from you. I don't

care what the category is. It could be politics, money, faith, parenting, taxes, financial system,

how cars work, how the government works, how marriage works. If you believe something, I

don't care what it is for a long time and then find out it was wrong. And you're willing to talk

about it honestly on this show, you might be exactly who this show needs next. Go to the real

jasonduncan.com/slash podcast, and you can apply to be a guest on the show. That's the

realJasonDuncan. com slash podcast. Now I'm not looking for polished speakers. I'm not

looking for professional pundits. I'm looking for real people who have done the actual work of

questioning what they were handed and then came out the other side with something true. Well

that's a wrap on today's episode. That's the first episode of the New Framework, episode

number 355 here. And if today you saw a bar on your cage that you hadn't noticed before, I

want you to send this episode to someone who needs to see theirs. The gold is the lie. As

always, I'm your host, the real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King. One quick post script that I

don't typically do, but I'm going to do it on this episode. I want to thank my sponsor, Dubb. Dubb

is who makes this episode possible today. Dub is a video platform that you can use to send

personalized videos. in email or text message or on LinkedIn directly to your people that actually

get read and responded to. You can try dub for free and get two and get two months at 50% off

with my link. All you got to do is go to the real jasonduncan. com slash dub, and that's spelled D

U B B. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.