The Hustle Myth: Why Outworking Everyone Is a Golden Cage

Speaker 1 ? 00:00

He mowed grass in high school and he turned that into a three million dollar company, so figure that one out. And then he sold it. And for years, what he said is he called that proof. He said, that's the proof that hard work pays off. And it wasn't until later that he realized that hard work was the cage. So welcome to the Real Jason Duncan podcast. I'm your host, Jason Duncan. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm an author, and one of the most direct voices in business today because every conversation on this show is built around one idea, and that's this. The gold is the lie. The beliefs that look like your greatest achievements, your strongest identity, and the thing that you tattoo on your forearm, those are the ones that are most likely keeping you locked in a cage that you can't even see. And my guests don't come on the show to perform. They come here to tell the truth about what had them trapped and what they found when they finally got out. So let me tell you about who's on my show today because you're going to love this dude. Today's guest built his first company with his own hands, literally. Started in high school, and for years he told the story about why it worked. And he said, That's the same story that everybody in all traits says. Just outwork everybody. Grind harder. And that's the formula. But the problem is that that story That story is a cage. It's got beautiful bars of pride and identity and results that you can point to, but it's still a cage. And the people who stay in the longest. are the ones who are the mo who are most certain that it's just the doorway into success. So my guest is Coach DJ Carroll. He's a speaker. He's an entrepreneur. He's the author of the Hunter Head Game. and the creator of Access Attention AI Framework. And he built his first business in high school, uh, scaled it to three million bucks. He sold it. And he has since built, bought, and sold multiple companies. And he he now reaches over two million people a year, mostly contractors and home service business owners. Teaching them how to scale without staying strapped, uh trapped in that work every day, that golden cage that we're talking about. So DJ, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 ? 02:14

Thanks for having me, man. Excited to be here. Hell of an intro and uh yeah, excited to get after it, man.

Speaker 1 ? 02:18

Well, let's talk about that long company from from scratch in high school. So Uh what was the first mower that you used? Tell me about that. That's a detail that most people wouldn't ask about. What do you got? What was it?

Speaker 2 ? 02:29

Yeah, it was a uh Walmart weed eater and a Walmart push mower. 22 inch? 22 inch? It fucked felt like 12 inches at the time. But you know, uh guys always think their mower is bigger than it actually is. But that's right.

Speaker 1 ? 02:44

That's another lie that we could talk about.

Speaker 2 ? 02:47

Um yeah, I borrowed a hundred bucks from my mom, a hundred bucks for my grandma, and I had a hundred dollars saved up from working uh at snappy tomato pizza and uh in a local gas station in the mornings before I went into school. And uh second half of my senior year, I was so broke that I couldn't even afford a leaf blower. So I used to push broom to sweep off the driveways and the sidewalks. Um That didn't last but more than a couple of weeks and I was like, all right, buddy, this is we're we're reinvesting in the business here. Uh but yeah, man, it was uh a Walmart weedy, Walmart push mower, and then My first ride-on mower was a Dixon. It was like a 36-inch zero turn. Blue. They're blue, aren't they? Blue Dixon. Yeah, I bought from like an old man in town that like fixed up old lawnmowers and uh sold them. So yeah, long, long, long ago, almost twenty years now, and uh I decided to turn down those eight football scholarship offers that were staring me in the face and forgo the traditional path of being a chemical engineer and having a really safe, predictable life, as my guidance counselor and chemistry teacher try to remind me several times. Uh and uh like I I like to say an entrepreneur was born, man. So

Speaker 1 ? 03:50

Well, so so you've got this lawn care company. Wha what what year in high school were you?

Speaker 2 ? 03:55

Freshman, sophomore? No, it was my senior year. It was my senior year high school. Oh wow. So senior. So it took a long time. Yeah, the second half the second half of my senior year, I started mowing And um yeah man, it was uh it's funny to think back now, but it's like, you know, I used to wear my yard smart lawn care landscaping shirts to school and then like I would I would sign out half half the day. And so like all the kids would go work at the factories or the offices in town to co-op and like I was co-oping for myself and uh the the entrepreneur bug just bit me, man. Um, you know, my my dad taught me to hustle when I was younger, right? We would always buy like mopeds and go-kards that had been sitting and weren't running. We'd tear the carburetor down, rebuild it, new spark plugs. hit it with a rattle can of spray paint and then sell it in the yard sale, you know, and triple or quadruple our money on it. Um so I I I'm very fortunate that my my mom always told me, you know, I can achieve anything that I I believe in. And then my dad said, Don't be fucking lazy and he taught me how to f how to flip things and and and how to hustle. So um I had had the bug from an early age, man.

Speaker 1 ? 04:55

All right. Well, I think I'm already starting to see where this lie developed. So all right, so now you you build this company to three million dollars. Now is that three million dollars in annual revenue or three million dollars total revenue? Top revenue.

Speaker 2 ? 05:08

Uh and again, like I always I'm I've always been very clear about this, right? It's a headline, so it's cool because we don't make people listen to the podcast. But if you've ever own owned a lawn care company, you know the margins are razor thin and like it's like next to nothing on the multiple on your EBITDA. So Uh we sold out to a national franchise, sold the uh the equipment and the accounts uh to them and actually couldn't even sell all of the equipment because it was a franchise that had like, you know, stipulations on what they could and couldn't use, but Um yeah, man, it was cool. It got me an exit and then I transitioned into uh my fitness center, which was my second business.

Speaker 1 ? 05:42

So how old were you when you sold it?

Speaker 2 ? 05:44

Uh let's see, that was 18, 19. So I was twenty four. Uh oh wow. Twenty four. So six years. In twenty four, twenty-five, yeah. Um I may have been twenty. It may have been in the I turned twenty five I turned twenty five that year, so um I may have already been twenty five when it when we sold the business, but

Speaker 1 ? 06:06

So you grew this to three million bucks. You exited, which is something most 20-something year olds can't ever say. Um I I too sold a long care company, but I I think I was doing maybe uh a few thousand dollars a month. So we were very different. We are very different uh in terms of uh what type of revenue we're creating. But but for a long time That story that you were telling yourself probably felt like proof that outworking everybody is the answer. So when did you first see that the thing that you were most proud of was actually the thing holding you back?

Speaker 2 ? 06:37

Uh there wasn't a like um I would call it less of like a breakthrough moment and more of a chipping away, right? So like if I'm if I'm drawing an analogy, it wasn't like the The sun came out and the angels came from behind the clouds and oh right, I had this big breakthrough moment. It was just sort of this chip away. The first time it happened, I was probably twenty two years old. I hired my first sales coach. Um and I saw that like, you know, being a coach and a consultant was like nothing that your guidance counselor ever talks about is like possible career path. I'm like, this dude just Talks on Cisco WebEx to other business owners all day. Like he's not working hard, right? Um the other one was uh I had a I had a guy tell me one time, he said, DJ, if hard work made you rich, all the contr uh all the concrete guys and roofers would be r driving Rolls Royce's. Uh and I was like, interesting. True. Um but it stems from my, you know, my mom stayed home, raised me and my brother. My dad never made more than twenty bucks an hour. You know, it was always like, well, you know, the rich people are the rich people and Poor people to poor people, and that's just how it always is. And if you were rich, you c screwed somebody to be rich, you know, all of that lower middle class mindset, man. Um that I like to say now, you know, if you want to get to a new level in life, oftentimes it's not about learning new things. It's about unlearning the shit that you've believed all the way through your life.

Speaker 1 ? 07:55

And that is exactly what the show is about because you live this formula, this bullcrap about the grind harder, hustle longer, everybody you just outwork everybody, grind harder. And and honestly, that's not a strategy. You know, that's a cage with some really nice bars on it, and we gotta name it for what it is. So what what do where do you think this lie stemmed? I think I gotta have an idea of where it came from, but where do you think it came from? Was it culture? Was it family? Was it society. I mean what what what made you believe that? What made you believe that?

Speaker 2 ? 08:26

All of those things. I mean the other thing was man like I let her in You know, I I let it in football, I lettered in cross country, and golf. Like, but those sports, I was never like this crazy athlete. I just would outwork everybody. And I remember uh my cross country coach, uh Jay Jones, he said, DJ You can be a better athlete than the people that have more skill than you if you just outwork them. And like, and then and that is true, right? That is a hundred percent true. So I carried some of that that I learned in sports over into the business world, um, which It is still true. Like uh one of my mentors told me once, he said, you know, God made the worms, but he didn't put them in the nest, right? Like, you do have to do the fucking work. Like they're like, I don't want to sugarcoat that of like Oh, here's my twelve-step formula to kick up your feet and make a million dollars and sit my ties. Um there is work involved. I also think that For me at least, I find enjoyment in the work. Um, you know, there's a sense of purpose. And so some of that is still there reinforcing the just like, you know, work hard. But there is a a certain side of it that, you know, you gotta change. Uh you gotta improve. Um, you know, I think the things I listed out to you guys before the show is like, you know You've gotta you've gotta have personal growth. You've gotta have some favor from God or luck as some call it. And then you've gotta have like just a ridiculous level of resilience. Because if you do work really, really hard But you only do it for a week. Like that's not gonna work either. Um and so yeah, man, that's to me, it's like I think there was a a lot of different things, a lot of different factors that impacted me. Um And I and I think it it definitely helped me in some of my early days of success 'cause like let's face it, dude, I was cold calling, knocking on doors, trying to sell lawn care accounts, like There's no like amazing cool way or improved way. Like that's just you gotta do the fucking work. And so I want to make sure that my message comes very clearly to your listeners that While that it was definitely a lie that all you like if you want to be successful, you just have to outwork everybody. Um, that's not true, but that doesn't mean that you don't have to work at all.

Speaker 1 ? 10:34

Yeah, well I think you made a good point there that might have been hidden and I want to call it out is that intensity is not what we're looking for. It's consistent consistency. Because consistency is what what carves the canyon. Intensity doesn't. Like an intense water flow for short burst doesn't carve rock. But consistent flow over time carves the rock. So outworking everybody for a week, even a few years, maybe even five or ten years, that's not the thing. The thing is being consistent at the things that make the difference. And so at some point, DJ, you you have to admit that the cage starts to become visible. Like, oh I I'm not what when did that happen for you?

Speaker 2 ? 11:16

I wanna I want to add something to that though, Jason, that like it's not a or, it's an and. Right. So it's like yes, the water cuts the canyon, but it's because it's a river, not a drip. Right. Like you put a rock underneath your faucet in your back of your house that just drips. Baby, that's consistent. It can be consistent for the next 10 years, but good luck. It's not cutting away that rock, right? So you have to have both. You have to have more intensity with the consistency. Um I think for me The the big like unlock aha moment um it it came when I when I lost my gym. Uh the second business was a fitness center. The guy was going out of business. We were in a small town. It was called Watsey's House of Iron. I mean, like he tried to make it like a meathead gym in a in a county of 10,000 people. Okay. I'm like Broken branding, this isn't gonna fuck work. And so he came to me and he said, dude, you work out here, you're like the only like business guy that I know that works out here. Like, would you be interested? And so um this was right around the time that I had gotten rid of my lawn care business. And so I was like, yeah, cool, let's do this. And so I bought the equipment from him, got a bank note to do that. He owner financed the real estate to me. Brand new, like 50 200 square foot facility, 4,000 square foot in the gym. And so uh I grew that thing 300%. Um in eighteen months. And this was in like the heat of Facebook ads. Uh it was funny earlier today I was actually just looking at the messages uh from twenty sixteen when I was talking to Alex Hermozzi. And I was like, hey man, saw you at ClickFunnels, love your gym launch stuff that you're talking about. And so he hopped on a call with me. It's kind of cool, man, just to see like, you know, 10 years later where that guy's went. It's been pretty fun. Uh but I had a real estate agent come into my off uh come into the Into the gym one day and Jason he says uh hey I got a potential buyer that wants to build a building like this. What'd it cost you? I don't know, dude. I didn't build it. I just bought it from the guy on owner terms. I was like, you wanna buy it? Like I'm an entrepreneur, everything I got's for sale. And that was that like go, go, go, and that wasn't the right move. That long story short, that real estate agent ended up screwing me over. I lost a six-figure business and a half a million dollars worth of real estate uh at twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. And that was like the first like gut check for me. And I realized I was like, okay, we gotta, we gotta go about business a little. It can't just be like all out Doing deals no matter what all the time. Um, that that taught me a very, very valuable lesson on two things. One Have a long-term plan, right? I didn't have any long term plan, dude. I was just doing deals to be doing deals at that stage of my life, which I think is okay. Um But I had no long term plan and so that allowed me to hop into something that I shouldn't have done and then I got taken advantage of. It also taught me that you can never have too many lawyers because at that time I didn't have any lawyers and so When the guy's like, you know, spits on his hand, he's like, oh, we'll keep this confidential, everything, blah, blah, blah. You know, the hustle, Jason, for me was like, I was gonna sell the gym and the equipment to the other gym in town and then sell the real estate to him and his buyer. Well, I needed that to stand up wraps. Well, as long as his as soon as his buyers got their shit figured out, they start talking about town. And I got people coming in, and my girl Victoria, who's my wife now, she's like, she's running the front desk. She's like, hey I had a couple members come in and say, hey, I heard you guys were shutting down. And I was like, oh no. Shit, man. And it blew up my negotiations that I had to go to sell the equipment in the gym. And I ended up having to fire sell the equipment, took a loss on it, had to give the building back to the other guy and he ended up selling it to the real estate guy and you know It was rough, man. It was rough. But it that like that was one of those things where like hard work didn't help me there. I should have been smarter, right? I should have had an attorney that n that was specialized in handling that type of stuff, right? I couldn't couldn't hustle my way through every single deal.

Speaker 1 ? 15:12

What was it about that scenario though that made you not only wake up to the fact that I can't just hustle my way through this, w what was it about that made you rethink what business really takes to succeed? Damn, that's a good question.

Speaker 2 ? 15:31

Um I mean, I got that was my first taste of recurring revenue in that business, and that was like, this is cool. I think the other piece of it is like I had I had a couple people that were like operating the gym for me. And like I try to squeeze a little bit more out of it, right? And I like I got rid of them because there were some things and like hindsight, you know, now fifteen years later Like I'm looking back and or 10, I guess 10 years later, I'm looking back and I'm going, dude, I should have just left those two people that were running it for me in there and fucking went on, dude, and just like padded at the time, you know, my couple thousand dollars a month in my pocket and like It's good enough, right? One of the things I've learned from one of my business partners, Dave Martell, is like 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome. And it's like, you know That was a hard lesson to learn in that business as well, I think. Um that went learning when to leave good enough alone. I think as entrepreneurs, when everything is like going good We come in and just start throwing hand grenades, right? Like everything's too smooth. Like we gotta like change up some systems. We gotta do some different things, right? And it's like Shit, man. No, you don't. Um like it's totally okay to to get something to a good place where you don't need to go to therapy every week about it, right? Um that that, you know, it's just it's huming right along. So There were I don't know if that answers your questions completely, but like those were like the lessons that I learned out of that of like, okay, maybe there's a a better way of of doing business

Speaker 1 ? 17:02

Well, I wanna get I wanna dive into that a little bit about how you're coaching the people that you're working with now and how that formed what you're saying to the people that you're working with because they're living in the same cage that you were living in and it's it's your job to help them unlock that. But before we go there, I've got a mid-roll break that I want to take just for the audience's sake here. You know, if you're a business owner listening to this and you've ever wondered, you know, what would it actually take if for me to be able to step out of the day-to-day? Or what would it be to take to get my company ready to sell? Well, I have put together a free live training that you can attend. We do these every single week. If you want to register for this, it's free at WhatToFixBeforYouExit. com. It's what to fixbefore you exit. com. You can live sign up for the live training. I do this every single week. I walk you through one question every founder needs to answer honestly. And then what to do about it. And then I'll show you the five things that you actually need to do to get your business ready to exit. So make sure you sign up for that at what to fixbefore you exit. com. Now, for our sponsor for today's episode, I want to talk to you about growing your business. If growing your business with personalized video outreach is on your radar, which I think it probably should be. You need to know about my friends over at dub. This is a video sales platform that I've personally been using since 2018. And I'm not exaggerating. when I say I use it nearly every single day because what dub does is it makes it easy to record and send videos that stand out and crowded inboxes. I mean, we get all these emails. We delete or don't read most of them. Why? Because they don't have anything of value. But if somebody gets a video, I'm watching it. I'm watching that video. And and these videos that dub sends have clickable calls to action so that whoever watches it can instantly book a call or they can take the next step and you get real-time analytics that tells you exactly how the video is performed. If you want to try it out for free and get 50% off your first two months, all you got to do is go to my link at thereal jason duncan. com/slash dub. That's D-U-B-B, to learn more and to get started. That's the real Jason Duncan. dot com slash dub spelled D-U-B-B. Now coach Carroll, so you are working with contractors. And uh as I said a moment ago, they're in the same cage that you were in. And most of them are probably very proud of it, just like you were, like all of us are. And that's what makes it a golden cage. So what do you What do you now know that you wish someone had told you 20 years ago? And why do you think nobody told you?

Speaker 2 ? 19:40

Yeah, so I think the biggest one, man, is like And I hate it because like I I could say nobody told me, but like I listened to it numerous times. Um and I just didn't hear it, right? Um Jim Rohn said, make sure that you work on yourself more than you work on your business. And For the listeners that don't know who Jim Rohn is, not the ESPN Jim Rohn. There was a personal development guy, Jim Rohn, uh, that unfortunately passed away before I ever got to meet him. But uh I'll give you a quick hack. If you have an Audible account and you get like the credit a month, there's the ultimate Jim Rohn library. It's like an eighty or ninety dollar program. You can buy it for one audible credit. It's like three days worth of Jim Rohn audios. It'll change your freaking life, man. Um, and so what I realized was I had to start working on myself more than I worked on the business. Um, I was a shitty leader, a shitty boss. We had no company culture, we had no core values, we had no mission statements. Like The the mission was just go out, make as much money as you possibly can, which I'm still cool with. Um it takes a little more than that, right? It's not 1950s anymore. People don't just punch into a punch clock and work in a factory because they have to or their family goes hungry anymore. Um and so I think part of that part of the equation was that man, is like I had to I had to I had to grow myself. And some of that, man, like I I give myself a break. I don't beat myself up over this because like I started early, right? I started when I was 18. So like Some of it's like I just had to grow up, um, you know, as as a human being. But personal development's huge, man. Um the other piece of that is like You know, I I know your listeners all have different belief systems, but for me, man, the closer I got to God, it seemed like the luckier I became. Um and so for me Becoming more uh than I was, and then getting a little more in sync with with the the higher power, um those two things drastically changed my business. I also think, man, like You take a kid that had some success and was making a couple million bucks, right? It's like, all right, we it's time to chop this kid down a little bit, right? Uh 'cause you have to be careful, man. I've heard it say, be careful getting to a place so high that you look down on others 'cause God can flip that chair over real quick on you. And he did to me. And uh it was quite the the ego adjustment. Um And so, you know, I I work with all service businesses. That's my expertise. White collar, blue collar, doesn't matter, right? If you deliver a service, that's who I I focus on. To me, I think some of the people fall in love with how they run their business. Yeah. He said, I'm so good. Nobody can do it like me, man. You no, no, no, you don't understand. Like, my team doesn't get it. My team's bozos. I can't find good help, right? My favorite is when I talk to a business owner. He's like, yeah, dude, it's just labor market's terrible right now. I'm like, really? What do you mean? He's like, oh, dude, I've I'm I completely turn over my entire staff every six to twelve months. I'm like, how long you been doing that? Years. I'm like, hmm, maybe it's you, not them, right? Nobody ever wants to hold that mirror up. So for me, man, I think personal development goes a really, really, really long way. And you see it, it's not just me. Like Mark Bennyhoff went to, you know, he used to work at Oracle. Went to a Tony Robbins seminar, started Salesforce. The rest is history, right? Like there is something to be said about the power of personal development.

Speaker 1 ? 23:06

So you mentioning Salesforce leads me to what I wanted to talk about next in a perfect way. Salesforce is the AI is eating its lunch and uh a lot of people are predicting it's out of business in the next five years. So because we could do it with AI. So now you're teaching AI. for your clients, how to leverage that. Um but AI can actually be a new hustle myth if we're not careful. I like that. So you you're you're teaching that AI is this current competitive edge, the thing that finally can level the playing field for contractors And uh but that's also the same promise that hustle culture made. Hey, you can level the playing field if you work harder, you just get this edge. Now it's use AI, you know, get the edge. If if hard work alone was a cage. Then AI can be a shinier version of the same lie. What do you believe about that?

Speaker 2 ? 23:56

Speaker 1 ? 28:12

Speaker 2 ? 29:40

Yeah. I I want to draw the attention back to something you said right there at the beginning though. Where were you at when you learned about Chat GPT? I was in Reno. But you were at a mastermind, right?

Speaker 1 ? 29:50

That's right.

Speaker 2 ? 29:51

Get in rooms with people smarter than you, right? There's your personal development. That's so important. And I think people just like Like when's the la if you're listening to this right now, I'm just gonna ask you a question this. When's the last time you invested in yourself? You bought the truck, you bought the skid steer, you bought the new WYSI WASI, you know thing that came out in your industry, but when's the last time you invested in yourself, man? And your business will drastically improve if you just get in rooms with smarter people. There you go. Jason's a prime example of that, right? Who knows how long it would have been if you weren't in that room, right? Could have been another twenty-four months before somebody brought it up to you, man. Yeah. Um so uh I wonder I think that's very, very, very important. How do you use this stuff? Um, I think you just have to use it. Like I've I was doing my book tour in January and February. I spoke on a lot of stages, big conferences, everything from moving to contractors to power washers to window cleaning conferences. Um spoke at a state farm conference. Like it and when I get up on stage, I'm like, raise your hand if you have a ChatGPT account. It is almost every single person in the room. Okay. And I think that the reason is is because they saw the internet happen, right? The T-Rex came into the village, ate a kid, and they're like, whoa, what was that? And then like Instagram happened, T-Rex came back, ate a couple more kids, they're like, hey, there's that thing again. Now it's back again. And we're like Run! Right? Like everybody knows that like we see this technological revolution. And so I would tell you, you just need to allocate some time to it, man. You gotta talk to it. You gotta play with it One of the seminars that I did at Lake Mary Chamber of Commerce down in Florida, there was an eighty year old guy in the front room and he said, I got a chat GPT account coach You got any good books I could read about how to use it? I say yeah, it's called opening chat GPT and putting it in voice mode and saying, hey, my name's Bob. I'm 80. I'm new here. Ask me a bunch of questions so we can figure out how you can best serve me, right? Because you have to remember there already have a predisposition to like Be overaccommodating, be fulfilling, tell you what you want to hear, right? So use that to advantage. Don't take all the information blindly, but on the same side of it, like Ask it questions. Like, let me tell you about my let me tell you about my company, and then you tell me how you could potentially help me, right? Um a lot of people are running it through, you know, running emails through it. Like, hey, you know I'm pissed off of this customer, help me sound a little more professional in this email before I send it, right? Uh you know, they're they're ninety days behind their net thirty terms Um I think I think there's a lot of a lot of tools out there that are masqueraded over top of the platforms, meaning that it's just a chat GPT wrapper, it's something somebody built with Claude in a weekend and like, you know To me, if you have some technical prowess about yourself, you could probably go straight to the model level and really work with those. My big ones are ChatGPT, right, which is OpenAI. Anthropics Clawed and then Google Gemini because Google has been in this game silently for a really long time. A lot of people don't know this You can go Google a an image called Trippy Squirrel. It was the like first generative AI image put out that got leaked on the internet back in 2015. So Google's been sitting on this technology for a really long time. Chat GPT kind of forced their hand to bring it in the game. My thought is, uh, and I don't have anything to prove for back this up other than like what we've seen unfold. I think Google already knew what was gonna happen to Google, right? If Alphabet rolled out AI, like a a uh a an assistant like a chat GPT. So they didn't want to cannibalize theirself. So they left it sitting in the back shelf. And then Chat GPT came on the scene and they saw that it was getting chewed up. And they're like, all right, cool, all efforts going forward. Um those are the three. The other one, the fourth one I would tell you, like if Most people are either like all in on this camp or not at all. It's X and and Grok and XAI and Elon Musk, right? Like I would not bet against Elon. I saw the other day that uh Calci there was like 82% of the bets were that he's a trillionaire by the end of this decade, right? Um and so to me, man, I think you have to get in those platforms, figure out one that works for you, and then just talk to it. Put it in voice mode and just have a conversation. People can talk four times faster. than they can type. So you can just hit the little microphone, put it in voice mode and chat with it. I think that's the easiest way to kind of start wading into those waters if you haven't yet.

Speaker 1 ? 34:12

Yeah, I'm uh um, you know, since we're on the AI stuff, I'm gonna stay here for just a minute longer because I I use um ChatGPT I use only now as a backup as like a Google search or asking a question. Like that's all I use it for because I don't trust it. to do deep reasoning. Claude is my thinking partner. I use it for everything. But Claude's voice, like back like what you're telling people to do, I think is one of the worst. I think ChatGPT is a lot better at this. So here's my little my little hack on Claude though. So there's a Whisperflow app. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but it's a it's a speech to text. It is the best version of it I've ever seen. It'll clean up your talking. If you say, hey, DJ, I want to meet with you tomorrow it's at 6. No, I tell you what, let's make it 7:30. And and uh you know um let's let's get at the steakhouse. So it would take all that and say, hey DJ, let's meet tomorrow at 730 at the steakhouse. It deletes everything that you shouldn't have said. So here's my hack. Go into Claude, use whisper flow and talk to it. And then when it gives you the output, hit the play button at the bottom and it'll it'll read it back to you. Now you're not having a conversation, but you don't have to deal with their idiocy. Claude's not very good at it. And Gemini, on the on Gemini Gemini built into Google Docs and Google Sheets is killer. Like you can go into Google Sheet and say, hey, Gemini, do this in the sheet. Boom. It's done immediately. But in terms of just as an assistant, I think Gemini's the dumbest one. Personally, my experience. But perplexity is good. I use perplexity to do research on you. Like every guest I have on the show, I go to perplexity. Who is Coach DJ Carroll? And it gives me sourced information and I drop it in my show notes and the Claude helps me build the questions. Yeah. It's it's amazing.

Speaker 2 ? 35:55

Question for you, Jason. On the chat GPT, what what level plan are you on? Because you said that you've been deep research for you.

Speaker 1 ? 36:02

Um I I have been pa I've been a paying customer on their lowest level plan for I don't know, two years and I just canceled it. So I don't even use it anymore.

Speaker 2 ? 36:11

I'll tell you, um I have like whatever the most expensive plan is on every single one of these platforms, and here's why. Here's the I love analogies because it really helps people kind of understand If you were on dial up internet and you knew what you knew now, how soon would have you have upgraded to high speed internet and not stayed on dial up, right?

Speaker 1 ? 36:29

Oh yeah, that would have been that's

Speaker 2 ? 36:30

So I think here's what happens is these models are built not to burn tokens. If you're on a twenty dollar a month plan, like yeah, bro, I was gonna do research for sixty seconds and then give you the answer. You pay them $200 a month and then you put it in pro thinking. The longest one uh that it's done reasoning for me in Chat GPT was a little over 16 minutes That it went out and did research and sourced and came. And then when it came back and wrote its response, dude, it was like a freaking research paper. And so I would tell you, like, be careful discrediting these if you're not in that highest tiered plan. Because much like in the blue collar world, you get what you pay for, right? And so sure, Mrs. Johnson, I bet he can do your roof for $8,000, right? Like call us when it's leaking. And so I think the same thing holds true to these. And I would just say, man, like right now If you can afford, it's like it's 200 bucks a month, right? It's not you're talking fully loaded, maybe a thousand dollars a month to have all of these things up and running. If you're using clawed code, It being able to tap in like Ali, when we use her, not customer facing, but we use her inside the business. She has full command line interface to the Google CLI. So she can go into all my Google Docs, Google Slides, inbox, whatever. She can ping Gemini if she needs to do research with that. She can go to ChatGPT. Like I think VEO3 and Gemini's um nano banana. They're crushing it. The new chat GPT image just came out, which is pretty cool. But up to this point, that's been the best, right? So like I don't want Claude making my images. So I have it use the API and then open it to then generate the images. So I think figuring out how to be Model agnostic, if you will, um is is a good place to be to be able to pull and replace these. Because like, dude, every single week it's like, well, now Gemini's the best. Well, nope now Groc's the best again. And it's gonna be like that. It's gonna be like that for the f foreseeable future. Um I think the big thing though is like don't whatever you do Don't say this thing's a fad like the internet was. Don't think don't say this thing's just for the kid. Like you have the ability to really do impressive things in your business. I want to give one more that I think is super easy for for contractors. There's a a little wearable AI now called a plot or played. You got one? Yeah. Just got it last week. If you have your guys start wearing that to your sales meeting. Right? And it records everything that's happening. They can go back to the truck. This is how you can one call close at a ridiculous level. And instead of going into QuickBooks or service mo uh si service tighten or whatever it may be that you're using your CRM and like tighten up a a traditional estimate and then maybe you got some sales flyers that you'll include. You take that transcript out of that conversation, you feed that thing to ChatGPT or Jim and I or Claude, and you say, hey, I need you to make me a proposal. uh based on everything that that we had in this conversation. And like you'll have some documents you'll always upload with it, right? Maybe a brand guidelines, maybe a pricing sheet, et cetera, et cetera. This thing is gonna spit you out a slick seven to twelve page estimate that you're gonna come back into the clients and they're gonna be like, how did you just go to your truck and make that so fast? Right. And it's it's so personalized. Because to me, man, like where a lot of contractors leave money on the table is it's feast and famine, right? They they all have seasonalities to their business. And so when the getting's good, man, they're just running, running, running, running. And then when it's slow, like that's when they slow down and have the good sales processes. If you can use AI to help you have the exact same sales process that you would have when you were slow as it is when you're fast. That's the differentiator. Um if you if you have a contractor that comes and works on your house and they're demoing products and they're walking you through things Oftentimes that's what sells the job, right? Like it's not that like your crew is the best in town. Like by the time your crew shows up, the job's already like sold. Like there is no negotiating. So like To me, man, I would like encourage contractors to use this to say, like, hey, how can I put more um sales oomph into my game? And some proof on this is I had a lady come to me, she's ahead of uh She's business develop head of business development for wear construction. And she said, dude, we had a $20 million bid. She's like, that I didn't think we were going to be able to get done in time. I used AI. She came to one of my classes, watched the AI playbook. She's like, we came back. We did it. My owners like let me run with it on this one. And we ended up closing the gig. It was like, use day eye to help close a $20 million deal. Like, it's possible. It's real. It's happening every single day, man.

Speaker 1 ? 40:55

Uh uh I'll tell you, I I I do it for me and our company. We we use the AI assistants built into Zoom to record the calls and then I run it through Claude. I've taught Claude here's our here's what we do, here's our offer, here's our ICP, here's And then it it takes the transcript and the notes from that call and grades the call and says, this call is a B plus. Here's what you did great. Here's where you messed up. And every time we're iterating. So how do we keep that from being a cage for us. That's the question, DJ. How do we make sure that we're not going to get trapped inside this? Is there something you've considered on that?

Speaker 2 ? 41:32

Um Yeah, I've considered that most of the time when people are like, ah, could be a scam, could be like dude, Jim Rohn used to say this. The negative person figures out 20 reasons why it won't work. Silly guy. You only need one, right? You only need one reason why it won't work to make it not work.

Speaker 1 ? 41:52

Yeah.

Speaker 2 ? 41:52

But the Optimist says, yeah, but what if it does? Like what if it does work, right? And and so like I think I think the chances of this trapping one of your listeners is far less of a risk then the risk of them losing out and losing business because somebody else in their market figures out how to use it. And somebody else in the market doesn't miss their calls anymore. Right. Cause like That is the to me, that's the easiest lift and replace is like a a receptionist answering the call so you don't miss those calls. And then s you know, juicing up your sales motion. I don't think you're worrying about a cage there. If anything You're going to empower your team, you know, to to make them more efficient, more effective. And then what you do with that is that's where maybe the cage could come in, right? It's like, hey, if you buy Greg on your team 15 hours a week back. Well then do you just move his goals and now he just has to do more 'cause you know he's fifteen hours more efficient? Or do you say, Hey Greg, go be a better dad now, man? Go make sure you'd make that dance recital because now I've made you more efficient inside of our company. And that's company culture. That's leadership. And then Greg goes, dude. My boss is fucking awesome. I'm never leaving this company, right? Um, that's where I think we're gonna get to, man. I think we're gonna figure out how humans Don't have to work 60, 70 hours in anymore, like in a week. Like I think we can get by with 30 and do the output of an eighty hour week.

Speaker 1 ? 43:16

Amen. That is a great way to understand the cage that we're in and how to break out of there. Leave it to Coach Carroll to figure that out for us, everybody. I got one question I'm going to ask you before we sign off today. But before we do that, I know people want to get in touch with you, especially these service businesses. How would they do that?

Speaker 2 ? 43:35

Yeah, dude, uh my book, The Hunter Head Game, uh, it dropped last October. We actually just got picked up in Barnes and Noble uh about six weeks ago, which was pretty cool. Congrats. You can get a copy of this funny story on this book, real quick, Jason. I this was a 500-page manuscript that I worked on for about 10 years. It's about 262 pages, hard to cover, really, really slick book. Looks good on a coffee table. I used ChatGPT and Claude to help me edit my manuscript. It didn't write it. Okay, I want to be very clear. I didn't use ChatGPT to write this book. It helped me edit it because I'm dyslexic. I was never supposed to write a book. Dyslexic people don't write books, right? And so what I did was for a decade, I just kind of like noted and journaled and when questions would pop up, I would kind of answer questions in my journal and had the manuscript. 80% of the text that's inside of here is directly from my manuscript. Those are that's called guardrails. I put guardrails on the AI and I gave it 20% variance to be able to weave things together, right? So if it had to weave chapters together or if it wanted to ask me a question. I would then give it a question. And I I shared some really, really vulnerable stuff inside the book. But you can check that out. Get that. It's all at coachcarrol. com. You can find all my socials. Um Instagram, I do a ton of reaction videos. YouTube's more long format training stuff. Um yeah, man, put me in your ears, put me on your eyes. Any way I can do to to help and give back. Because here's my belief, Jason, is that the government's never showed up and saved me or anybody that I know, man. Entrepreneurs is who works who is is who makes the world a better place. And so the more entrepreneurs that I can educate and elevate, uh that's that's my uh pouring back into God's kingdom. That's my mission. So coachcarrol. com, man. That's where you can find it all.

Speaker 1 ? 45:15

All right. There he is on Instagram at DJ underscore Carroll. You can see Coach Carroll right there. Um follow him, reach out to him, but before you do all that, there's one more question you need to hear him answer. What do you know now that you wish the world knew?

Speaker 2 ? 45:42

This may not resonate with everybody, um, but my daughter just turned three. My son will be one in June, and so I'm a newer dad. And all the way through my 20s, as I was making millions of dollars, I was like, I'm never getting married. I'm never having kids. I'm gonna speak on stages and just travel the world. There is no greater blessing, man, um, that I have figured out. There's no dollar amount you could put on my children. Um, there's no level of success that would replace the feeling that I get when I open that door at the end of the day and Willow says daddy and comes running towards me. Um I hope that this AI thing Allows us to get back and find that. We have been in such a scale at any means necessary, sacrifice everything, uh, type of culture. that I hope and I pray that the efficiency gains allow us to come back and find the real value um and the real purpose in being a man and leading a family man. Uh that that is something that I did not understand in my twenties. I didn't understand it. You won't understand it if you don't have kids yet until you have 'em. If you have kids you know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about. Um, but to me, man, it's that that has been the ultimate level up in personal development was uh was having those two kiddos. So um that would be the thing that uh I didn't know before, now I do, and I'd like to share with the world.

Speaker 1 ? 47:13

DJ, thanks for being on the show, man.

Speaker 2 ? 47:15

Thanks for having me, man. Hustle, it's worth it.

Speaker 1 ? 47:19

All right. That's a wrap on today's episode. If today you saw a bar on your cage That you hadn't noticed before, send this episode to someone who needs to see theirs. The gold is the lie. As always, I am your host, the real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King. I'll see you next time. Alright, there we have it. That's a wrap, my man.