Napster Co-Founder Jordan Ritter on the True Meaning of Success | Motivation | E15

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Hello, my name is Tim Story. Welcome to Miracle mentality. Remember rooftops, you drawn spaces on the ground. Wait for the dreamers, the doers, the believers in something greater in each episode I'll invite you to rise above the mundane, to push past the messy and learn to live boldly in the miraculous. Every episode will have practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and my guests will explore what it takes to activate your Miracle mindset. Remember to subscribe, follow, and like. I think this is gonna be one of my favorite guests. I've been studying him for the last three days. His name is Jordan Ritter. He's a tech entrepreneur, engineer, innovator. And he is a person that I like him because he's resilient. He finds a way to bounce back. At a young age, he helped create something called Napster, which a lot of us have heard about. We'll talk just a little bit about that. It literally changed the way the world experienced music. And then what happened with Jordan, no matter what set back he went through, he found ways to reinvent himself. He's curious, creative, committed. I wanna talk about what he's doing now, what he's doing next, originally from Northridge, California, ladies and gentlemen, Jordan Ritter. Hi, Jordan. Pleasure to be here, Tim. Thanks for having me. How long did you stay in Northridge? Oh, I loved on this story. So I was born at the center of the last major earthquake. That's Northridge. And I know that. I know well, that's why I was gonna ask you about that. At the ripe old age of two, I decided I had enough of LA and I moved to Texas with my mom. My parents divorced and we went to Texas. There was too much temptation coming out of Hollywood. Too much of a... I'm out of the age. He said, I'm out of there. So did you miss the big Northridge earthquake? Yeah, they missed me by a couple of years. Does I remember it? I lived not so far away and that was like some heavy, heavy stuff. Yeah. So take me to childhood. Okay. In high school, your freshman year, in high school used to have like the stoners, those were the guys that got high. We had like the Jocks. With the Ganyu guys. Yeah, exactly. So what was your, what was kind of your group that you were hanging out with? Well, there were two when they were a strong overlap. I was an international baccalaureate student. So I had been gifted schools throughout my life. AP back in middle school. And so I entered as an international baccalaureate student. So I was a nerd. And probably even more important to my identity, I was a band nerd. I played several different instruments. I saw that. Fancy myself to be a musician as a career. Can't stay whether it was good or bad that it didn't end up being a musician. But I played, you know, jazz band, jazz ensemble, symphony, I played everything. I played in the halls of my high school, alone in the evening, because there was this nice little echo after practice. I just loved playing music. Let's go to those two things. Let's go to education and then how you were introduced to music, because both of them are very big. So the education side was that your mother, your father, a teacher, a sibling, who got you into education? Because that's very, very interesting. So it's interesting. My first year in high school is when I stopped living with my mom and my mom and my mom and my mom with my father. I think they both were big on vacation. But I have to give credit to my mother as she was always fighting for me to be in gifted programs. Because that's always so bored and always reading at an advanced level. So most credit to my mom for that. So your mother got you into it. And then Jordan, I think that with most students, they start to get pulled away and distracted by other things. How did you kind of stick with it? I mean, because you're going to now start liking girls. Oh boy, you want to start doing stuff. I've been teaches you a lot. It does not teach you moderation. So I basically did it all. And I carried that writing to college, too, which you can talk about in a minute. But I did everything. I did. I was president of key club. We started our own volunteer organization called Hammer and Nail. IB is a magnet program. So it's hits inside of a public school. So we got to interact a lot with the public school institutions and teachers and do stuff for them. Yes. It's very service-oriented. I had a girlfriend right through the end of high school. IB had its own social structure. It started out with, I think, about 125, 30 people. Only 100 made it to the end of four years. And only 75 graduated IB. Everybody graduated high school. But IB was like a layer above AP. So there was that group of people. And we were very service-oriented, very intellectual-oriented. And we were also musical as well. Lots of us were in the same organizations. After high school, you ended up going to what college? I did something I was supposed to do. At least I don't think you're supposed to do it. I applied early acceptance to more than one school. I always wanted to go to CMU, Carnegie Mellon. So I had the one state school. I lived on a farm. We weren't that rich. So you couldn't apply to many places because they all cost money. So I applied to my state school, University of Florida, because I was in Tampa Bay at the time. And I applied to the CMU. And I applied to Lehigh because my uncle had gotten his undergrad there. Yeah. I think it was undergrad. I can't remember. It was for ceramic metallurgy. So he was a rocket scientist at that school. I went and visited him. Both. I got into both. Lehigh's gorgeous. It's on the side of a mountain. CMU has got some nice parts to it. But it's not in my favorite city. I'll say that. The apologies, though, that love it. But Lehigh is this beautiful mountain side campus. And CMU gave me, I don't know, 18,000 of whatever the annual tuition was. And Lehigh gave me basically a full ride. So it was more beautiful school. I really connected with New England itself. And I basically went to college for free. So I chose Lehigh. Now it's pretty awesome. So it was, what was your confidence level? And then where did you get it? I wrote a book called At Most Living. And I talk about almost most and utmost. Almost means nearly almost. Most is at a high level, but not quite at most. For you to have the boldness and the courage to go after these schools, I'm trying to figure out where you got that courage and confidence. Well, I'm going to tell something real personal and somewhat vulnerable and real honest, which the truth is never perfect. Yeah. Never tidy. It's always messy. I was estranged from my mom at that point. That's why I went to live with my father. And I lived in a farm. And I lived next door to the bus depot. So we were the furthest away you could be from a school. So I got on the bus at like 5.45 in the morning, a ride to 7.30 and I was last to get off the bus. And it was this very, very different experience for me coming up in high school. And look, I had a lot of age issues as a young man. With my mom constantly moving, a lot with my father and I'm being present my life into that point. And that was a source of energy. That was sometimes positive, sometimes negative. But consequently, I think a lot of young men relate to what I'm about to say, at least once they've made peace with their lives. Yeah. You kind of push your limits and try to prove that you belong on this earth. And you do it in stupid ways. And I have two sons, four and five. I can already see it's about to happen. I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to keep them alive. My dad did too. But like I literally, without trying to kill myself, I basically put myself in danger all the fricking time. And part of it was this really brokenhearted, somewhat fractured personality of a person trying to figure out their place in the world and do they belong at all. And I kept surviving. And I kept succeeding. And I kept living. And so at some point, you build this myth that you are invincible. And I mean, I've been hit and run over by cars and I got back up. I've gotten car wrecks and not a scratch on me. I was a young man, a.k.a. stupid. And I did a lot of stupid things. And I survived them all. And that plus my intellect and my way of always being able to think myself out of anything or really truth be told, be able to figure anything out. Sort of my technical ability came from like, oh, how does this work? How does that work? Can I take it apart? Can I put it back together? Does it still work? And when you live on a farm, if you break something, you got to fix it. So like, you can't pay a mechanic to come, because you broke. You got to take the break, the break housing off. Oh, it's a drum rotor. I got to take these pads off. And I got to jack it up this way and put these back on in a certain way. And like, you learn all of that. So this is a very complicated story of a human being who is kind of dealing with a lot of emotional issues under a ton of pressure educationally and kind of just testing themselves against the world in some of the worst ways and somehow not dying. And so that made me really confident. You're saying that well, Jordan, because I mean, this is what I do for living. I work with people one on one as a counselor and a therapist. And thank you for being so open about it. But I teach this thing where you go through recovery and discovery at the same time. Yep, recovery is our past, but recoveries also things from our present. And if you're not careful, you get so caught up in the recovery zone that you'll miss your discovery zone. Because it could have been so easy for you to look at how things did not go well in your childhood and just kind of just sit in that recovery zone and I do anything about it. But the resilience, do you think it was a Nate or is it learned behavior or was it a mixture? I want you to really think this through. I did a ton of work in my 30s to think about this exact question. It's part of me. I feel part of it is a physical, an ate-ness and part of it is a mental one. I think physically I grew up kind of built like a tank. And certainly that memory where I got hit and run over by a car kind of solidified like, oh, wow, I am physically resilient. I can take a lot of damage and get right back up. When I realized that and I put it together with like, oh, my God, I went through all this trauma in my early childhood and on my teenhood. And I kept going like, no, this is actually, somebody was learning that if you didn't, you'd die. And the rest of it was, I didn't die because I had it. And I don't mean it sounds so serious and so big about dying. But like as a young man, you kind of think that way. We don't often say that out loud, but we do think that way. I think you're saying what's on people's minds, but you're correct that they don't usually verbalize it. Yeah. What's going to happen here is that Napster is going to be birth when you have a tribe of people. And you are part of this group tribe. It was a tribe, absolutely tribe. Yeah, innovative, creative pioneers. This happens when you're only how old. Oh, boy. Probably 19. You see, I'm a college dropout. I didn't finish. But, but you know how young that was that now you are already, it's like you join the Rolling Stones. Okay. So let me, let me read out of off my notes here. Okay. So what is Napster? It says here, and let users search for and share MP3 music files over the internet for free. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. That's what it was. Then it says it revolutionized people access music. All right. So there was a movie about it, documentaries, people talked about it, people know you, Jordan about it. When you're in the middle of creating greatness, do you know you're creating greatness? I've been able to talk with Steve Perry from Journey and said to him, well, you guys were creating Journey. Did you know you're creating Journey? He goes, see, I'm to be honest with you. We knew we had something, but we didn't know how much we had. I've talked to Quincy Jones. When you're doing thriller, did you know thriller was going to be that big? No. I just knew we were on to something. So when you're creating Napster, did you think you guys were on to something? You're only 19. You probably had very little facial hair. No, I kind of had this kind of go-to thing going on for almost my entire life. I think most people would have tested that. Don't be a bragger. Don't be a bragger. I definitely didn't have all the hair that young men had at the time. I was either blind, so if I had it, you couldn't see it. It was fine. No biggie. Look, I would actually say the exact same thing. I think there's my opinion, and there's other people's opinion who are also in it. And everybody's opinions are equally valid from their own standpoint. I think for me and most people like me, we knew something was going on. We were being sued by the federal government. There were musicians coming to our outside of our office and holding press conferences and lots of people showing up in great support. And occasionally we would be young men and women and go out to clubs. We would be treated like rock stars even though we were just nerds, sleeping in our desk. So, days, were you in LA going to clubs? No, this was San Francisco. What's really keenly interesting about that is this is right before the .com bus. So .com is still going up. And there's this migration happening. A lot of people don't talk about this as context, but when I first arrived in San Francisco, you did not build companies in San Francisco. No one who was technical lived in San Francisco, they lived on the peninsula, lived in South Bay, lived in the East Bay, but not San Francisco. Since San Francisco is their own thing going on. You go to San Francisco today and you think it's the seat of power of Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley was not SF. It was South. And so we started to venture into San Francisco to party up from San Mateo and Berlin game and so on. It was like we were starting to bleed into that cultural scene there, but it was still fairly new. And so it was the newness of tech entrepreneurs showing up. It still wasn't a thing at the time that we were this is another important cultural context setting thing at the time that we were doing Napster. Engineers were not yet considered rock stars. It wasn't until a couple of years later when Google came out and popularized the engineer and famously fired all their managers that engineers started to be put up on pedestals. We were still a couple of years prior to that doing a lot of things that Google ended up doing with, you know, cheap hardware and cool technical innovation, but we did it before we were actually recognized. So we're sneaking, we're kind of like the kids sneaking out at night and kind of having all these weird crazy experiences and then people are recognizing us and are like, what is happening here? So what I find because I live in a very cool life where I've been to 82 countries now. So whether I'm in Sweden talking to like creatives or Switzerland or even Nigeria wherever I am, everybody has an idea to create something like a Napster. And they think that, you know, if it hits, then oh my gosh, just, you know, money is going to flood in. It's going to keep flowing. Was there a time where money came and you went holy, smolly, we're on to something? Yeah, that was a Napster. That was definitely not Napster. Those were the days when you made... Tell me about that because I don't know that part. I've only seen the movie. Well again, to put it in cultural context at the time, late 90s, when you started a company and you worked at a startup, you made 60K. That was your starting salary. You can't afford a place in San Francisco and 60K at this point. But like, yeah, that was the standard. There were executives who got to make 100 plus. But again, remember, Google hadn't really hit the scene yet. So the old idea of people making six figures right out of college hadn't started yet. And I walked away from a job offer, you're a two prior down in Pennsylvania for 33K. It lives off of 33K. Turns out a lot of people, but just not in San Francisco. But in any case, there was not a whole lot of money flying around. So the promise of it was a big, a lure back then. There weren't six figure, big six figure salaries you'd go by working at a tech company back then. So you literally either went to work for a big company as a cog in a machine or you worked for a startup hoping you'd hit it big. That was a real dream back then. I don't think it really exists much anymore. Wow. And the way that it did back then. But we never hit it big. We impacted the industry. We impacted the world. We impacted culture. We impacted innovation. But no one really made a ton of money off an after. We got sued into oblivion. A lot of people don't know that. All they know is that they were getting music and that was exciting to them. Because I don't even remember my son turning me on to Napster and what it was and what it could do for you. Okay. So when do you get your first success as far as finances? Explain that one for a minute. And then how did it make you feel to maybe come into a fair amount of money? Well, everybody's definition of a fair amount of money is different. I'll say in my first case of success. Fair amount of money for Jordan Ritter. For Jordan Ritter at age 19 was when his security company, Natecht got bought by a public company and he got given golden handcuffs, which is where I got all the free time to then work on Napster with Sean Fanny. And that was I got like a 25k exit. That's nothing. People buy that for a car. But if you're a kid who grew up on a farm, who coars went to school for free and then dropped out because that doesn't sound right. Making a 25k after a year and a half worth of work was actually really awesome. There were people who made more than me, but like I wasn't a founder. So that was my first taste of it. I was like, okay, this thing could be real. But Napster wasn't it. I've had a number of like cash in, cash out type of things. You get some money out and then you immediately put it back in. You get some money out and you pull it back in. One of the best strategies I was ever taught by a number of people, but in particular, this one credit where it's due came from Alex Edelstein. He was an executive in Tomi. He shared me this story about how every time he got a stock grant, he would just sell a little bit every month. Period under story. Up or down, he would just constantly get more and he'd keep selling it. In that way, you just kind of got a constant income coming. You're making more, but you're always usually buying on the up at the company's successful. It was a really successful strategy for him. I've been doing that my whole life. I was doing things on the secondary market, which I had only learned about. From side conversations with people, now it's a big thing. There are companies built around secondary markets and selling your insider stock. But back then, it was not a known thing. But I was always wanting to let as much of it ride as possible. I didn't take a whole lot out. It wasn't until I got any soul that I get a big exit. The biggest exit I ever got, I mean, I've worked my whole life. I never really took breaks. Even when I take a vacation, I work on the vacation. I took two and a half years off of my life. I learned to race, fail, I learned to fly airplanes. I did all these playboy-esque things at the time, where just me gathering new hobbies. That wasn't until later in life. I've just been going at it, having ideas, executing, bringing people together, bringing products to market, hopefully making money, navigating the mess of it all, because it's always a mess. It's never clean. It's never easy. Success is never a straight line. Thank you for watching the Miracle Mentality Podcast. So many of my friends are texting me, DMing me, speaking to me and saying, Tim, thank you for these great guests that you're bringing on. So share it with somebody, a friend, a family member, a colleague, and then make sure and reach out to us at Tim Story Official and let us know that you love what we're doing. Thank you for being a part of this movement. So the vantage point, our perspective of Jordan is different than the vantage point, our perspective of mine or the things I've read about you. When I look at my notes, it says here that your tech entrepreneur, engineer, innovator, but it also says that you have amassed a lot of money. I mean, look, I have made a lot of money. It is true. But I'll turn around and invest it. I'll invest it in other people's companies. I'll build my own new companies. I got a couple of side companies right now. But that's not my identity. I don't ever tell anyone that. No, but that's one reason I'm saying that to you because you're such a down to earth guy. Right? Like, if I talk to John Paul DeGiorre, who sold Patron for around $5 billion, right? And he's a really chill dude and I consider him a real friend. He's not really thinking about that that much because that's not really who he is. That was a good move, a good deal. But he's a lot about humanitarian work, changing people's lives. When you got a certain amount of money, don't tell me the number, but a certain amount of money, what was the feeling like? Because I'm going back to the kid, Jordan Ritter, who's raised on a farm. Your family is going to the challenges. Like a lot of us, right? Scarcity mindset. As Carol Dweck says, not so much a growth mindset, kind of a fixed mindset. But now, Jordan Ritter is doing okay. Johnny Manzel, I just saw a special on the empty other day. He said he kind of went crazy with what he had. He had all this money, had all this power, had all his fame, the football player in college. And he kind of went wild with it. One of the guys that I like coach and I'm their therapist, they kind of went wild. But for Jordan Ritter, what was that like to finally go, oh my gosh, I could go to the bank and draw money out. I can go, I can go into that dealership and literally buy that car. I can look at that house and most likely buy that house. What was that like? I want to know. Yeah, I think, to understand my answer first, I have to say that due to my upbringing and the experiences I had early in life, relationships were always the most important thing to me. Love, kindness, friendship, consideration, compassion, connectedness, intimacy, my very intimacy, Jordan Man, those were always at the top of my list and those are never things you could buy with money. So not having money, having money, never really influenced my ability to get the things that were most important. Now could be, you could totally make up a story, how a farm boy didn't have a lot of money when school only because he got a free ride and still quit is desperate for money and the moment he gets to, he loses his mind and he buys everything and he loses it all because that's how that story always goes. That's just none of those things are ever important to me as much. I think the biggest feeling I ever got was a feeling of relief. It was with one particular exit. I started sleeping better. I found I had a lot more energy to go to the gym, start going to the gym. Then I was like, okay, well now I've got time to go learn some new hobbies and now I've got time to go spend more time with people and at the time I was single so I started dating a bunch of different women because again, that was what I wanted. I wanted connection and relationship with people. I wanted experiences but I didn't, I might have had two or three really expensive dive trips to Indonesia and exotic places and whatnot but I didn't really go overboard. I used the wealth to enable me to live the life that I wanted. I got to do a lot more advisory work. I was able to, when I would come across somebody I really believed in. I could cut them a check and invest in their companies and not really meant a lot to them and it meant a lot to me. You have to understand what I care about in order to understand why I didn't go to the dealership and buy a big car. This part of the reason I was excited about talking to you because I have a movement called lead with love, lead with love because I spent three decades of my life working with some very powerful people and continue to work with them who don't leave with love. Things at transaction, everything is what's in it for me. I think some I had mega influence on. Some, not so much because their motives remain the same that they just wanted things for themselves. This idea of leading with love and wanting to also reach out to other people and it cannot be just about the Jordan Ritter life. Does that come from your grandmother, your grandfather, does that come from church, does that come from synagogue? Where the heck does that come from? Jordan, don't you love this? I don't ask the tip of the question. This is a great question. No, it's a great question. It's not often I get asked a really deep question I haven't already thought about. Thank you for that. I think that a couple of things happened in order that led to this person. The first is a lot of damage as a child, a lot of feeling not loved, not cared for, or having an alcoholic mother who loved me really well and then didn't at all. Never knowing that uncertainty of love created this sort of love anxiety and this intimacy anxiety in me, but it didn't make me bad at relationships. Then that's that rage of a young man that you have to have a terrible childhood to have that test-offs for a driven rage in you. A lot of us have it and we just don't talk about it. Then I did all this work on myself in my early 30s, my mid 30s. Seven years worth of individual therapy, couples therapy, group therapy. I did this thing called the Human Awareness Institute, High Phenomenal Organization. The thing that came out of that was, it came out of the first two sort of three-day offsets I did with them was really learning how to love myself. I knew I loved people. I knew I really was show up for people. I was a good person, but there was always a gap that I couldn't acknowledge or admit between me and other people because I didn't love myself fully. There were things I didn't forgive myself for. There were things that I hated about myself. There were parts of myself I thought I needed to cut off and get rid of. That made me a whole person. What I learned through this work was I needed to be a whole person. Part of being a whole person was accepting and whole you, the good and the bad and integrating it all and learning to live with it and manage it. Once I did those things, that put me in a position to really feel true love for other people. I was always oriented, as you say, leading with love. I was always oriented towards relationships to other people and wanting to be a service. The initial motivation for that I would say was wanting to correct my own experience. Yes. With childhood and teenage years and my young adulthood wanting to create an experience for others that was better than the one that I had. That is not a bad motivation. It can't be the only one, but that was a decent motivation. The good motivation was once I did all that work on my 30s. I can really appreciate the complexity of everyone else. This person standing in front of doesn't matter who they are. They might be a quote-unquote good person or quote-unquote bad person. I know those good people have all sorts of fractures and problems. I know those bad people have these really complicated parts of themselves. I have learned a lot of mine and so I can appreciate and connect with. I may not accept it, but I can appreciate and connect with someone else's. Sometimes they call it shadow cells or dark parts. The whole you, once I was able to appreciate that myself, that upleveled me and my relations with everyone else. Jordan, I love what you're saying because I think that I've been working with people since in my early 20s in counseling them. I have found that people that we really look up to and that are quite bright all feel slightly undone. I did this thing that you would appreciate. I went to several people, actually, was 20. This was 10 years ago. I said to them, at the top of your career, whether it was a famous famous actor, famous football player, famous soccer player, I would say, in the midst of your fame, did you ever feel like you sucked? All the time. All the time. That's exactly what they said. Yeah, totally. All the freaking time. Yep. I went to one that broke so many records in sports. Everybody knows his name. I can't divulge it because I was his therapist. I said, how often did you feel like you sucked? He said, Tim, the whole damn time. Because I was dealing with this situation and that situation and a relationship with the woman situation and a relationship with a child. And I felt like I was too busy. I felt like I let my family down. Yep. So I created this idea called, I suck now what? Because now that you don't use suck now what? And Jordan, I think that that's what you've done. My answer to that was, I suck and I love myself. And this beautifully, I still love myself. Yeah. And it doesn't mean you forgive your failures. It just means that you love yourself. You've got yourself. You're going to take care of yourself and you're going to do better. So you know, you ask really like where does that stuff come from? And some of it was innate and some of it was learned. When you finally learn them, you're like, that makes a ton of sense. This common sense is not really common, but good sense tools to like, okay. So I just messed that up. Good job Jordan. Yeah. Now what? And you're asking, well, I'm going to, it's okay buddy. I got you. Now let's figure out what the right thing is to do. What is your definition by your own values and morals of being a good person in this situation and be true to that? And most of the time, that's the right answer. Sometimes you got to do the hard thing that you don't want to do. And so it doesn't always align with what you want. But like most of the time being true to yourself, if you've done that thought process and you're clear on what you're about and you know that it's like, there's some people at that process and they're like, I like money and I like to transact. And that's all I'm going to do. And like, good for you. And it's not always the right thing to do. But within sort of, you know, the lens of current cultural and common values and accepted moralism, like what is the right thing to do? And then you love yourself and you help yourself through that experience. You're not just there. You're a bad person. You screwed up. You're terrible. You're wrong. You have to have that conversation, but that's only a piece of it. The other piece is just still a good person and there's a reason for you to repair and the light and pick yourself back up and move forward. It's all about the mindset because this is what we're talking about, the miracle mentality. Yep. So Jordan, watch what I do with this now. So I still see you as young. Okay. There are different stages alive. There's birth to 20 that's stage one. Track me. 20 to 40 is stage two. 60 to 60 is stage three. 60 to 80 is stage four. Okay. 80 to 100 is stage five. Now they've added a stage six because so many people are going past that. 100 to 120 is stage six. Now, well, we are finding as people who are therapists, psychologists, doctors that a lot of people when they really thrive, Jordan, you're going to love this is in the 40 to 60 range because we have we have been challenged. We've been through things. We've had setbacks. We've had comebacks. We fell on our face. We had some great victories in this stage of your life. Tell me what you're excited about because you're talking to a lot of people right now. Okay. What Jordan, what are you excited about? I go back. So this is the first answer is the most telling. I'm excited about a lot of things, but I go back to that, you know, to understand my answer, you have to understand who I am as a person that I value people and relationships and connection and intimacy of all kinds. And I am most excited about my two boys, age four and age five. They just turned four and five these last month. One of them looks exactly like me at that age. Platinum blonde long curly hair down to here. Blue eyes. And the other one looks exactly like my wife did at that age is straight, brunette hair, beautiful sort of hazel green eyes. And the latter one is the older one. The blonde one is the younger one. Young one's a bit like a tank. He walks around like a little baby gorilla. If I come home and I haven't had a chance to see them and they're in their bedtime routine, I get a pain in my heart. I'm like, dang, I really wanted to see him. I wanted to smell him. I wanted to squeeze him. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to kiss him. I want to hold him. I want to tell him I love him. And it's no longer about correcting my own childhood experience anymore. It's like I long to connect with these boys, teach them. And by the way, it is not easy to teach my sons. They are my sons. And I was strong, wild and hard headed. And then there's just the boy thing. And then there's the developmental like age three to five. They're getting testosterone spikes and testosterone to hell of a drug. It's incredible what it causes us to do and how crazy it makes us. And then I'm having to think about like, I need to let my son fail. I need to let him pick himself up. I need to let him bruise himself. I need to let him cut himself. Yeah. I need to let him hurt himself. Mom's hovering. She's like, no, no, no, no, I'm like, hold back, mom. And you go ahead, son. It's absolutely the wrong thing to do. But I know you're not going to listen to me. So go ahead and it's time to learn. And like, this is the experience I'm engrossed with right now. And it is one of my favorite things. I don't think anyone would expect me to say that because of my background and career in the context of the conversation. But that is my first answer is being a great father to my two sons. I love that answer. And I think that when you honor that way of living because I come from a theological background, there's a blessing that comes on you where grace comes on you in such a certain way. One hopes. God helps you. God helps you in so many other areas of your life. So I think that in keeping your priorities straight, that does a lot for your life. Stephen Covey did a great job with that. But seven habits of highly effective people talking about this whole idea of core values. Okay. When you think about the future of your life and the assignments that God has given you, because life is calling you to big things. And do you get more intimidated or do you get more motivated? When I say this, calling you to big things is because the world is in trouble. And it needs better people. And it's our responsibility to put them there. Got one in one. One percent. Yes. I'm definitely not intimidated. But to be fully honest, I think we all, no matter how old we get, have moments of anxiety, momentary moments, you know, periods of anxiety. But for me, it's never permanent, which I'm grateful for. I get a lot of curiosity. As a 13 year old boy, I had a dream and it stuck with me for the rest of my life. And that dream was that I was not going to live to see 21. In fact, it informed a lot of my choices as a young man. I was like, it's not going to matter because I'm never going to make it. And then I made 21 and I had another dream. I was really that night with a really crazy night for me. I made 21 and I woke up the next morning like, ooh, okay. And then I had a week later at another dream. I was going to make it to 30. So I live my life a certain way. I've had that experience a bunch of times now and I've realized that I'll always be able to figure it out even in those moments where I feel deep anxiety about it. And I don't always feel that. But even in the worst moments where I feel that I'm like, this too shall pass. And then I get curious because my life has been so different so many times. You know, like, okay, there's these five stages and maybe there's the six stage and I'm like, yeah, I can see that. Although I'd argue like stage one starts at 13. Like there's our childhood and then there's the beginning of adulthood to 30. But like I would literally say my 20s were very distinct. My 30s were very distinct. My 40s have been very distinct as well. And lots of different experiences in between. And I just know that's what stands ahead. So I'm excited and curious. Motivated is just something that's sort of internal and intrinsic to me. Like for example, I want to be a great dad. I want to set a example. Motivation against my worst parts. Because we have those moments where we lose our grace and we lose our patience. And maybe we lose a little bit of our minds because we're still human. And like there's counter motivation to that. Like, okay, this boy is watching everything. I was watching everything my parents did. And we know the story is like we lived those stories. And so like there's all kinds of motivations that I live in a soup of them. But the thing that that lantern is excitement and curiosity mixed with moments of panic and anxiety moderated by a regular experience of always being able to figure it out. Not taking that for granted. It's an active action of figuring it out. But building confidence from a track record of life. Saying even in my worst failures I have recovered. And I will be able to do it again if that ever happens again. I love this. Hey Jordan, just as friends now, what did you like about this conversation? Oh, I love its philosophy. I think when I get asked, when I do podcasts, usually I get asked about an after and then you know, the conversation will turn towards what made it great. And I won't talk about technology. I'll talk about culture. But at the root of culture is still always people. I love talking about people and people's stories and their experiences and how they become human beings. How they go from being one kind to another kind, how they evolve and how they grow and what makes great relationships between people. This is a completely different conversation that has allowed me to talk about some of that same stuff in a completely different way. So I really appreciate that. Yeah, because you know, as I started studying you, I started really seeing like Jordan the 12 year old. Yeah, he's still around. Yeah, he makes fun of your jokes too. There, that look in your face in the when you were laughing, you would smile and I'm proud of you. And it's excellent to see what your priorities are about with your family, your children, and life is still good in the midst of all that we face in life. So I want to just say to the people that are watching today either you're watching or listening, what a great conversation today with Jordan. He truly is an entrepreneur, an engineer, an innovator, but more than that, I think just a quality man. Thank you. But I want to just say this to all you that are watching, you may not be what you want to be, but thank God you're not what you used to be. Don't you ever put yourself down. Life is still very good. Thank you for watching and listening. Thank you for sharing space with me on this episode of Miracle Mentality with Tim Story. If today sparked your courage or helped you understand why you're created for success, I invite you to carry that Miracle Mentality forward. Visit me at TimStory.com. That story with an EY on the end. Until next time, walk by faith, embrace possibility and create your own comeback story.