A Chat with Kalen Jordan

I had a lengthy chat with my buddy Kalen Jordan. We covered topics on marriage, homeschooling, to the pandemic. It was for his podcast but I wanted to share the audio with this channel as well. Enjoy!

Transcription below (May contain typo's...):

[00:00:00] Kalen: [00:00:00] Mike Sudyk in the building. Did I pronounce your last name 

Mike: [00:00:04] correctly? Yeah, I did work with friends.

Kalen: [00:00:10] Hey man, it's great to get you here on the podcast. we've talked a lot about, fatherhood, you have a podcast two cent dad, which you've had some ridiculous level of guests on. and also just some really cool insights. And, we talk about homeschooling, you also homeschool. So a lot of interesting, and you also are like a recruiter.

You work for a company that does that builds teams. So it's like we have, there's so much to talk about. but, what, how do you introduce yourself? 

Mike: [00:00:38] first of all, Kalen is a pleasure to be on your show, man. And I love everything you're doing. I love your consistency of just quality output, man.

You're like 

Kalen: [00:00:47] output consistency of output, the quality you gotta caveat on that. that word, 

Mike: [00:00:54] I didn't say that, you could say that again. 

Kalen: [00:00:56] I can say that. I can say that. I can say that's kind of bias though, is [00:01:00] I have a bit of a bias for putting stuff out. And I think that it, it is what it is.

Like I have a buddy that focuses intensely on quality of his technical setup and, maybe it's not as consistent on putting stuff out. So it's an interesting balance to find, 

Mike: [00:01:16] It's interesting. It made me think of, do you follow Matt D Smith? He does. Is he's a designer MDs. He goes by the Twitter handle MDs.

He's a guy at Atlanta. 

Kalen: [00:01:25] I don't think so. 

Mike: [00:01:26] So it's interesting. 

Kalen: [00:01:27] I know a guy, I know a guy with a Twitter handle whale who I think his name is Matthew Smith. 

Mike: [00:01:34] I'm going to, I'm going to open up right now, 

Kalen: [00:01:36] but his Twitter handle is 

Mike: [00:01:37] whale. 

Kalen: [00:01:39] I don't think 

Mike: [00:01:41] it's MDs, 

Kalen: [00:01:42] but anyways, he 

Mike: [00:01:43] did this, like he did this like video project where it was like him, like in a, like a dystopian future where it had, it was like, you're looking through the lens of a computer.

It's like annulling is analyzing his face and things are popping up and he did this. It was like an, it was like a time lapse. I took him [00:02:00] like an hour or two and it looked really. Cool. and this guy is super talented. and he's like a known designer, but I'm like, why is he doing this? this had to have taken so much time, yeah.

Like content marketing, whatever. Maybe it's good for him to put out, but it struck me Kaylin that I was like, he got good by doing stuff like this. And to speak to your like, consistent output. It's You just do that. Like he probably, he enjoys it, obviously. I think you enjoy it too.

I don't think it's torture for you. What, the content you put out, it's that's what he just does that. And he just gets better, yeah, just part of the process, And I was like, have I rationalized away doing something that probably would have gotten me better skills or whatever down the road of where I want to go, because I didn't think it was like higher ROI or something.

Kalen: [00:02:47] Yeah. I think I think it is, we were talking a little bit about Gary V and one of the things that Gary V talks about a lot is don't get blocked by why not have the perfect setup, the perfect camera, just start putting stuff [00:03:00] out. and he talks about that a lot. And then, and of course his quality has gotten up over the years quite a bit.

but yeah, that's definitely, I have a bias in that direction for better or worse. And then I'm also try to be. Conscious of improving quality as well, putting out content is tricky. I think for me really enjoying it is so much of the battle and I've definitely have times when I get burned down on it, I stopped doing it, and finding I T I think finding something you're genuinely interested in is the whole game on some level, like your podcast on fatherhood, I think is Cool on so many levels. And I think there's this real, I think there's this real gap in the world right now for fathers specifically. and particularly that intersection of people that are in business and at the same time, like if you're putting on your growth, hacker hat, Like doing a dad podcast, isn't going to make money necessarily.

[00:04:00] But you're doing it because you love it. Cause you care about it. And maybe there's a cool way to monetize that. Maybe you could sell beards like kits or like who knows? 

Mike: [00:04:07] that doesn't even have a 

Kalen: [00:04:08] beard that's as cool as yours, but like maybe there's a way to do that. And that would be great.

it'd be awesome to be able to give yourself this space too. 10 X, what you're doing there, but you just do it cause you love it. And I love that about it. 

Mike: [00:04:22] there's a fine line. That's a good point. You bring up. So I would say it's as fine line between authenticity and actually work that you have to put into it.

it's it opens up the discussion around like following your passion, is that's like kind of BS advice, but there's some truth in it. And just content like blindly is not necessarily a good strategy either. There's like this careful balance there. And. I ha I started the two cent dad podcast, which you can find it to send out the number to send to ed.com.

Kalen: [00:04:53] there we go. 

Mike: [00:04:54] I started, cause I just want to have these conversations. I was starting to run a business that had taken over the family business. [00:05:00] We build software teams or companies, and I think we had our second, we had our second at the time. So we had two kids that were under like, three and I'm like, I don't know how to do this.

And I don't what I don't know how to do was, I didn't know how out of balance my time, because I actually really cared about business and I wanted to spend time there. It wasn't like, I hated the man and it's Oh, I just I hate my job, but I want to spend all my time with the kids. no, I actually really like this and actually want to spend less time with my family here sometimes.

And that's not a good thing. But then there's some times I hate it and I want to spend time with my family. It's I don't know how to deal with this. And this is like a child, in the sense that you're like build this thing. And I'm like, I didn't see anything out there for that. I didn't see anything.

Anything was, it was one of two categories. One was stay at home dads, which is okay, that's fine. But that's just not me. 

Kalen: [00:05:48] We could rent men. You could rent on that for a while. 

Mike: [00:05:52] I had all day, man. it's or the other one was, it was all business stuff. There was nothing it's they just you can't talk about busines...