The Message Didn't Change. The Person Did.

00:00 — When the message stays the same but the person changes

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

This is going to be a bit of a ramble. It's just something I've been thinking about, and I'm still kind of on the edge of it. I'm not really sure which way I land.

What I've been thinking about is something a little uncomfortable.

What do you do when a quote, a book, or a piece of music really meant something to you — when it resonated with you and you liked it — and then the person behind it becomes someone you don't really want to be connected to anymore?

They do something that changes how you see them.

The quote still stays the same.

The lesson still makes sense.

The music still sounds the same.

But somehow it doesn't feel the same.

Every time you hear it, there's that little voice in the back of your mind.

And I think most people have run into this at some point.

01:18 — The Bill Cosby quote in my email signature

For me, one of the places this started was with a quote.

I used to always put quotes at the end of my emails. It's something we started doing years ago, and I really liked it.

One of my favorites happened to be a Bill Cosby quote.

At the time — and honestly even now — I liked it because the message felt true. It was simple:

"In order to succeed, your desire for success must be greater than your fear of failure."

It's a very good quote. I still think the idea behind it makes perfect sense. A lot of progress in life really does come down to pushing through fear.

But once everything came out about Bill Cosby, someone messaged me after I sent an invoice and said, "Yeah, payment sent — you might want to remove the quote."

And I understood why.

Because at that point, the issue wasn't whether the sentence was true.

It was the name attached to it.

I could have changed it to anonymous, but people still knew where it came from. It was a famous quote.

That's what made me start thinking about this whole thing differently.

Because it's interesting how much the name attached to a quote changes how people hear it.

03:04 — When words and the person behind them split apart

There's that old idea people say sometimes: do what I say, not what I do.

That feels related here.

Sometimes the words themselves are meaningful, but the person attached to them degrades them and completely changes the way you look at them.

Even someone as evil as Hitler has quotes that, if you removed the name, might sound like something people would repeat.

But because they came from him, the meaning changes completely.

It's not just changed — it becomes almost taboo.

And in my mind, you have to look at intent too. Even if the words sound good on their own, the intent behind them may not have been good.

It just shows how separate the words and the person can sometimes be.

A sentence can be true.

A lesson can be useful.

And the person behind it can still be horrible.

That's where it gets awkward.

A lot of the time, we don't just respond to the idea.

We respond to the association.

05:00 — Music feels even more personal

I think music might be where this gets even more personal.

Because with music, it usually isn't just an idea. It's memory.

A song brings you back to a certain time. It lets you close your eyes and remember parts of your life — where you were, what you were doing, how it hit you.

An artist makes something that genuinely moves people.

Songs that got played in cars, bedrooms, parties, first kisses, weddings.

And then later, that artist says or does something that makes you stop and question whether you should even still be listening to it anymore.

The music hasn't changed.

The tracks are the same.

The lyrics are the same.

The feeling you had when you first heard it doesn't go away.

But the person behind the content changes the way it lands now.

It's always in the back of your mind.

06:10 — Kanye West and not knowing where the line is

For me, this one hits home with Kanye West.

I've always been a massive Kanye fan, and not just the popular stuff. I listen to a lot of the deeper cuts too.

I've appreciated him as a genius creator and lyricist.

And for a long time, people were willing to give him leeway — to treat him like an eccentric, someone pushing boundaries, thinking deeply, trying different things.

To me, he pushed music, and the genre he works in, to different levels.

But after everything he's gone through, everything he's done, and how far off the rails he's gone, I've caught myself wondering what you even do with that.

Do you stop listening completely?

Do you only listen to the older stuff from before he started going a certain way?

Do you separate the art from the person?

Do you decide there's a line somewhere, and once it's crossed, you're done?

I honestly don't know.

And I don't think most people really know either.

I think they just draw the line quietly in their own way and figure it out for themselves.

Because people are still listening.

The songs are still on the radio.

They're still being streamed and downloaded.

So everyone is making their own choice.

08:05 — Books bring a different version of the same problem

Books have another strange version of this, and in some ways it's even harder.

It feels harder when you have kids too, because some books have lessons you want to pass along.

But then things happen.

And sometimes the name on the cover isn't even the full source of the lesson.

A book like Rich Dad Poor Dad changed a lot for me.

It changed how I looked at money.

It taught me about leverage, assets, cash flow, and how to think differently.

Those ideas helped me move forward in life, and for me, they worked.

You start understanding how to use money differently. You sell one house to buy two. You leverage debt and assets. You begin to see how money can be used as a tool.

Those were lessons I wanted to pass on.

But then years later, you find out more about Robert Kiyosaki. You hear about bankruptcy and all the criticism around him.

So then you pause.

Are the lessons suddenly not valuable anymore because he himself went bankrupt?

Maybe he overleveraged. Maybe he didn't follow the lessons he taught.

So you stop and think: he taught this, and I still think it's useful, but is it real?

10:01 — When the lesson still helped you

For me, I made a personal decision there.

His lessons taught me well.

I played the Rat Race game. I learned from the framework. I got value from it.

So to me, just because he later failed or went bankrupt, it didn't erase what I had already learned from the book.

That was my decision.

But from the outside, it still makes you pause.

Not every idea in a book becomes useless just because the person tied to it becomes harder to trust.

But it probably does stop some people from ever picking the book up for the first time.

So sometimes it takes someone who got the lesson before the person's image changed — someone who already saw the value in it — to decide whether they still want to pass it on.

And I chose to.

10:55 — Ghostwritten books make the question even stranger

Then there's another version of this.

Back in the day, I was a big Trump fan. I don't really like saying that out loud now, but way back when I read every book that came out.

I learned things from those books about business, negotiation, and thinking bigger.

But later, you look back and realize a lot of that writing was done by ghostwriters. It wasn't even really him writing the lessons.

And that makes this whole thing even stronger.

Because if the person on the cover didn't really write the lesson, then who does the lesson belong to?

The public figure?

The brand?

The face on the cover?

Or the actual writer?

To me, I think the lesson belongs to the writer.

Not the brand, not the image, not the fake story being sold.

So in that case, I think the ghostwriter deserves the credit.

But then you still run into the problem that people see the cover, see the name, and judge the lesson through that person anyway.

12:23 — Ideas feel clean, but people are messy

I think this is why the whole topic bothers me.

We like to think ideas are clean.

True or false.

Useful or useless.

Good or bad.

But in real life, they usually come wrapped in people.

And people are messy.

The idea is rarely just the idea.

It's the person delivering it, or the person associated with it.

Some people say wise things but live badly.

Some people build powerful brands around ideas they didn't fully create.

Some people make beautiful, life-changing art and then make a mess of themselves.

They go off the rails.

They say things, do things, and end up tainting the work they made.

And then the rest of us have to decide what to do with that work.

Do we keep the lesson?

Do we throw it out?

Do we keep the art but let go of the artist?

Do we keep the book but stop believing the image around it?

13:50 — There probably isn't one clean rule

I don't think there's one clean rule for this.

I think sometimes the lesson really is bigger than the person.

And other times the person damages the work so much that it changes how it feels forever.

Maybe that line is different for everyone.

Maybe that's why this topic is so uncomfortable.

Because it forces you to ask where the value actually lives.

Does it live in the words?

Does it live in the work?

Does it live in the person?

Or does it live in what it meant to you when you first found it?

Maybe that's the strangest part.

Sometimes the hardest thing isn't deciding whether the quote is true, or whether the song is good, or whether the book helped you.

It's deciding what to do when the messenger falls apart but the message still stays with you.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Not because I have the answer.

Just because I think a lot of us quietly wrestle with it.

15:15 — The extra thought at the end

One thing I kept thinking about after recording is how personal people's lines really are.

Even at the gym, if I put on Kanye in my headphones, I feel a little awkward about it.

I'm almost glad it's in headphones. I don't know if I want that out there.

There are other artists I've fully stepped away from.

Kid Rock is one of them. I've removed him from my stuff completely.

There are some lines I do draw.

But there are also some things that meant so much to me that I'm almost willing to separate the value I got from the message from what the person later became.

Because when that thing was written, or said, or recorded, it had value to me.

And I don't think that value automatically disappears.

It just becomes something you work through quietly on your own.

You make your own decisions.

You can still take motivation from something without announcing it to the world.

Your life is personal.

Your preferences are your own.

And that's part of what makes it complicated, but also part of what makes it personal.

So thanks for watching.