Connect or Die: The Divine Design Origin Story

0:00 The Magic of M

Ernest Chapman0:00 (

Jim Morris0:00 soft piano music) Magic starts with the letter M. M is very important to you as a letter in the alphabet. Out of all the letters, it seems to be something that comes to mind with your whole makeup of who you are, how you operate, and most importantly, how you impact others, which in turn, from our previous conversation, sounds like it impacts you in such a deep way. Why is M the letter of choice out of all the letters in the alphabet?

Ernest Chapman0:36 It happened by accident. Or you could say it was ordained. I don't really know. Ever since I was a young child, I was a musician. I've always been a musician as my first language. Through music, I learned mentorship and mastery, and I learned how to teach. Through creating things around music, I learned all the fundamentals of what would later become a marketing career. It starts with a letter M. And then also, I learned about consciousness through meditation, through studying under Deepak Chopra for many years and playing music at his workshops

1:12 . So music, mindset, meditation, and manifestation are all linked to me in my experience. It's just always been connected, and sometimes it's a struggle to communicate that set of connections, right? But when I learned how to do marketing, I learned how to do messaging, which is communication, and connecting all these things. But the overarching word is the word magic, which can be a polarizing term depending on who you ask. They may have different definitions of it,

Jim Morris1:45 so. So with the marketing, with the messaging, with the overall picture of magic, weaving in manifestation, meditation, your history with who you've worked with, who you've aligned with, how you show up in your business, how you show up in your personal life, why does all that link together?

Ernest Chapman2:02 Because I'm fundamentally doing the same thing with all of it. The most important thing is my marriage. And my marriage is the foundation for my whole life. And within that, I have a family, and I have to take care of my family, and it's not a have-to, it's a want-to. I wake up every day choosing it and loving it. But all the things that I can do that are skills that I can trade on can contribute to that at the same time. It's all looped back. So all of it has to do with consciousness. All of it has to do with manifestation. Really, at the root of it, it's an operating system that's built around who I am that enables me to help other people really be who they are. And through a business lens, it's helping business owners align who they are with what they do, with what their business does, with what their market wants. And when those things fall out of alignment

3:01 The Chiropractor

Ernest Chapman3:01 , somebody like me comes in and like a chiropractor, we're just making adjustments. A chiropractor doesn't replace all the bones in your spine. They don't do surgery on you. They go in and make adjustments, and your body actually knows what to do. It's a living system that can self-correct. I think a healthy business is the same. And I think, you know, when I was in my music teaching career, I was not teaching music. I was teaching people how to be a musician. I was teaching identity, identity shifting. So they came to me, they wanted to learn how to play a musical instrument. And I was like, all right, well, first you have to be into this. You gotta really love it. It's gotta be fun. So I made this thing called the magic music method, another set of M's. And I created all these cool like games, and I taught people how to play songs by ear. At the end of the day, what they learned though was how to love music and how to be a musician. Through that kind of mentorship, I raised a whole bunch of musicians up into, some of them are professional musicians, music teachers themselves, went to college for music. But I learned that identity is the core of behavior. Who you are and what you believe determines your actions. So I always wanna go upstream and kind of adjust at that level. When I learned how to do that for business, that's how I got into marketing. I was like, oh, all the same things I'm doing for music and for music lessons and for music teaching. There's a language I had to learn. I went through a learning curve. There was some hard times, there were some difficult things to learn. But once I got the full spectrum of like, all the way down the chain of value in a business, all the way to a transaction and feeding that back into the top of the funnel, I figured out how that's all connected. So everything I just said though, is kind of like a huge cluster of like a million different things. So one of the things I'm working on right now is laying it all out in a way that I can just present the whole picture so people can see like, this is a larger work. People that know me from music don't always know what I'm doing in business. People that know me in business don't even know that I've put out albums. Sometimes people keep those things separate. But if we're really talking about real identity and transformation and like a life work, a presentation of a life work, I wanna be able to put it all out there and just let people figure out what they like, what they're attracted to. -

Jim Morris5:25 Going off of the M word and utilizing that, what came to mind as you were navigating through that and sharing that was you have this collection of moments. -

Ernest Chapman5:35 Oh, that's another one, that's good. You gave me another M. - Are you enabling more M's? - We're

Jim Morris5:43 up to 47 M's at this point. - But musician, teaching music, those are moments. Building a family, getting married, that was a moment. Manifesting your next path, your next path finder. Those are moments and building your marketing company, where it started and where it's at and where it's going, there's different segmentations of those different moments. Why do you believe all these moments have aligned so beautifully for you to be able to lay out this picture? -

Ernest Chapman6:17 Because it completely makes sense and I don't feel like I came up with it. I didn't force it, I just noticed it. And I was like, wait a second, this thing over here feels the same as this thing over there. And I started seeing the connections and then I was like, why does all of this start with the letter M? It was just a weird thing. And to me, that's actually magic, right? But there's a key distinction here. I think the kind of magic I'm talking about is the magic that happens when you try as hard as you can

6:50 to get out of the way. And if the ego is doing everything, then there's gonna be a lot more mistakes. There's gonna be a lot of forced outcomes that were not actually good for everybody. So there's a light side and there's a dark side to magic. And I think it all depends on if you've really spent time taking out the trash, which I'm continually working on. I don't know if I'll ever be finished with that. It's a path I'm on. So I think there's a danger in claiming to know all this and claiming to have figured it all out. So I will be very clear, I have not figured it all out. But I have faith that there is a creator that is greater than anything I could ever create myself. I believe I am a created being living in a created world. Something much higher than me. If I can just listen to it, that's the work. How do I get out of the way and let it move through me? That's what I'm trying to do here.

Jim Morris7:52 Sounds like you had a moment of clarity around the level of surrender. Yes. Tell me about that moment. One was that, give me the granular details of where you were in your career, what you were doing for work, your marriage. Did you have kids at that moment? Talk to me about that moment again. Oh, so right here.

Ernest Chapman8:15 And clarity. Yeah, there's a string of these moments. And the one that keeps coming to mind is after I had built a career as a music teacher, I had 40 students a week. I was kind of at the point where I couldn't take more students. And I realized that I couldn't really sell more of my time without basically just never doing anything except for that. And there was a limit on it. I started wanting to have another career, even though I loved it. I wanted something that could 10X my impact and make more money

8:56 The Prayer I Didn't Know I Was Praying

Ernest Chapman8:56 . And so in a way I was praying for this. I think we pray for things without realizing it. If you know that there's a piece of God inside of you that's listening to your thoughts, then you're sending emails to God every day, whether you realize it or not. I was doing that without realizing. Yeah, we're doing it right now. We're doing it right now. We're always doing it. 'Cause God is in us and God is listening. And I was asking for something and I'll just tell you what I was asking for. I had a young child, his name's Trey, still got him, he's great. He's 12 now. And he was at the time three or four. And he was just at the age where he was starting to go into like preschool and he was gonna go into kindergarten. All those kinds of things were right on the edge of that. And I realized if I don't figure something out pretty quickly, I'm not gonna be able to hang out with him after school because the music teacher gig is an after school music lesson gig. And if you have kids and you're a professional music teacher full-time, guess what? When the kids are out of school, they're coming for their three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock lesson. You're gonna be teaching lessons through dinnertime. Then you're gonna be eating dinner around nine o'clock. You're not gonna see your kids. You're gonna get home, they're gonna be asleep. And then you're gonna have to sleep in in the morning or you're burning the candle at both ends. And that's a very familiar challenge for basically every professional music teacher that has children. And I realized, okay, if I don't change something, I'm gonna miss his childhood. I really need something I can do in the morning. So I started doing marketing stuff in the morning. I started working on projects and getting clients and building this set of capabilities. And I had this moment where everything broke

10:48 The Punch That Changed Everything

Ernest Chapman10:48 . And the moment was when he got in a fight on the playground at a school that didn't really appreciate boys punching each other in the face very much. And they kicked him out of school at age four. And here's what happened. My wife was a creative director at a healthcare company at the time. She had the straight job. I had the music job. And she's also a fantastic musician, but she figured out before I did that we needed to do some other things. So she had this job. She couldn't leave her job early to go pick him up from school at his new school that we had to get him into almost immediately. And so it fell onto me. It was like, well, I've got to go pick him up. So I had to hand all my students to other teachers overnight. I had to stop teaching music and burn my ships, give all of my students to other teachers. And then I had this wide open afternoon because I'm picking my kid up from school every day. We couldn't afford a babysitter. We couldn't afford to hire someone to pick our kid up. I got what I was asking for. I got it.

Jim Morris11:54 Thanks, Trey. Thanks. That left hook really landed. Yeah.

Ernest Chapman11:57 He punched me in the life, but it was transformative in a positive way. And so what happened after that was I didn't have any backup plans. So I fully devoted myself to marketing. I learned how to do branding. I started working on bigger and bigger projects, started building an agency capability and some consulting capability, mentored under amazing, amazing teachers that really kicked my ass and got me up to a level of being able to function in the business world and learning business. Went through the Entrepreneur Center. Two of the mentors, key mentors at that time were Michael Burcham and Mark Montgomery. I ended up working directly for Mark Montgomery as his executive assistant at a deep pay cut compared to what I was making as a music teacher. And I went into that knowing that if I could just learn like how to think the way he did and how to do some of the things he was doing, that I would quickly make it up. And in under a year, I had renegotiated everything. And I basically, I told him, hey man, I'm gonna pay you back every dollar that you've paid me. And I just wanna make a cut of the back end of these projects we're working on. He was like, are you serious? I was like, yeah. And we did that. And I ended up taking over a small agency business that was just kind of there that he's always had and growing it. But the first year, I lost a ton of money 'cause I didn't know what I was doing. He had patience, he mentored me. He had patience for that. And by the end of that year, I was in the black. And then for the next year, I paid him back. And then after I finished paying him back, all that money I was paying him back on, I had a little line item in my budget for paying Mark back that all of a sudden I didn't have to pay him back anymore. So then I reinvested that in a program that Taylor Welch put together at the time it was called client kit. And I don't know if you know any of the stuff that he's done but he's done some pretty amazing transformational work for consultants. So then I went through all of his programs and got into his masterminds and learned all that stuff and applied it to everything I was doing. And it's just been growth ever since. It's just been constant growth, like year over year growth. Basically now I've got the problem of like managing the growth of going, okay, now I've got to actually hire for key things and delegate and learn. It's constant identity shifting, like learning how to shift up, shift up and not break it by growing too fast. That's actually where it's at now. All because my kid punched another kid in the face. -

Jim Morris14:33 But it was a divine design.

14:37 -

Ernest Chapman14:37 Yeah, so that's the divine design. It's like the idea that if it was up to me, I don't think I would have known how to do this. But what I had to do was shut up and pay attention and look for synchronicities. Something I learned from Deepak. Synchronicity and synchro destiny. That's when your destiny is tied to other people that you're in alignment with, that you're in coherence with. And there's all these layers to it. And when you really talk about it on a technical level, it sounds like magic. But it is just like mindset work, manifestation work. All those things really are real. -

Jim Morris15:14 Do you think you have to go through the risk, the dark times, the uncertainties to get out on the other side and break through? -

Ernest Chapman15:26 Have to is a strong statement. I think some people have to. I think other people, you look at them and you're like, well, how are they where they're at? You know, and you're like, did they have, maybe they had problems that you don't know about. You know what I mean? I think I had to. So for myself, I had

15:45 The Worst Email of My Life

Ernest Chapman15:45 to. I had to get an email from my wife saying, we have like less than $500 in our bank account and we have more than $500 worth of bills due next week. What is your plan to fix this? And I was getting drunk every night. And had to read that email and cry and say. -

Jim Morris16:10 Where did you get that email? Where were you sitting? Where were you? - I was sitting

Ernest Chapman16:14 in my room, my living room in 2013. I think it was like November, maybe. My kid was like a couple months old. Pretty sure that's the timeline. And I realized I was doing things that was ruining everything. And she's asking me like, what are we gonna do? You know, she's doing her side of it. She's holding up her end of the deal. And I'm like hiding behind a bottle. And I had to face that and figure out how to overcome it and go through incredible darkness and figure out, well, why was I doing this compulsive behavior? Why was I ruining myself? You know, and the reasons were a whole lot of really detailed, complex traumas that had accumulated over my entire life up to that point. I think we all have that. I think there's probably someone out there right now that's watching this that's at that point that needs to know that you have it within you to find the voice of God within you that can guide you through this. But the key for me was empowerment. I had to realize that I have the power to make a different decision and take full personal responsibility and ownership over my failures. And then I had to actually change my behavior. And that's a huge rabbit hole. I mean, but you can do

Jim Morris17:44 it. You talked earlier about the identity piece. Yeah. Understanding and having clarity of the identity you were playing at or living through and then understanding a new identity that you needed to step into. Yes. How did you get there?

Ernest Chapman18:04 I got there by doing to myself what I had done to my music students. In order to become a good musician. Taking your own medicine. Taking my own medicine. In order to be able to play piano or guitar at a level of proficiency, it's necessary to practice. You have to do repetitions. You have to actually do things. You have to acquire skills. You have to build muscle memory. If you don't think you're a musician, if you don't already identify as a musician before you've actually achieved it, it's much harder to force yourself to learn. I mean, you can do it, but it's harder. For me, quitting- Man, you've got my soul right now. (laughing) Oh man, woo. I had to become someone who does not drink. In order to become someone who does not drink, I had to confront my rage at feeling powerless. That was driving that behavior for me. Now, it may be different for other people, but for me, that was driving that behavior

19:05 Why I Walked Out of AA

Ernest Chapman19:05 . I went to a couple of AA meetings and was immediately put off by the idea that in order to stop drinking, I had to embrace the idea that my identity was built on powerlessness. That I was helpless. That only a higher power could come in and straighten it all out. Which I actually do believe part of that, but I have a very different way of believing it. I believe that that higher power is what gives me power and that I have that power. And I have to claim that power and own that power and become a better me. That's how I got through it. So that's a little bit different than signing up for something where you're basically addicted to recovery. I don't think about it at all. I'm just, I'm not, I'm a person who doesn't drink. I'm super comfortable with it. Like you could have a glass of wine right now and I'm like, great, like knock yourself out. Like I'll have this, you know, hemp juice. That's great. I'm happy. And the fruit of that tree is that my life changed. After I went through about a year, year and a half of being a person who doesn't drink, I started turning into a person who, the time it was who eats less sugar and who eats less bread and carbs. I did the four hour of body. I don't know if you're familiar with that whole thing. Lost like 35 pounds pretty quickly, never got it back. I started getting into biohacking. I started trying to figure out the metabolism stuff that was leading to it. So there's all this other stuff on the medical side that can drive somebody to have different neurological, psychological, metabolic profiles that make them susceptible to addiction. And, you know, you can just map it out, take some work. It's different for everybody. That's why I'm not saying what I did is necessarily gonna work for everybody, but it worked for me, you know.

Jim Morris21:08 At what point did you start to love yourself? I always did. Really? Even through that rage, even through that addiction, you still loved yourself through that process.

Ernest Chapman21:21 Yeah. Yeah. This is a weird one because I don't know why this is. I think it probably has something to do with my dad.

21:30 My dad was a therapist. He was trained by Albert Ellis, who was one of the founders of what we call cognitive behavioral therapy now. He created rational emotive therapy and rational emotive behavior therapy in the 1950s. He was my dad's direct mentor in the 1970s and 80s. And I met him when I was a little kid and I was around this guy. My dad instilled in me a sort of a sense of confidence that could be proven based on internal self-talk. So the rage of powerlessness was not necessarily like me hating myself. It was more like I was angry about things that went wrong. I was angry about things I couldn't control. I was angry about situations I was in and it just compounded and compounded. And my dad died when I was 13. I held his hand the moment he died. And in his death, I had a moment of falling into my own abyss and basically trying to find him since then by becoming both what I thought he would be proud of and also what I needed him to be for me. So I've always had maybe like a surprising level of self-confidence even when I'm in the middle of the darkest stuff ever. And I think that's sometimes hard for people to identify with. So I try to figure out like, I love your thoughts. Like if I'm trying to help other people and they're dealing with self-confidence issues,

Jim Morris23:04 I don't know. - Well, I think the power, I think, so I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think in a lot of those cases, you're masking the fact that you do not love yourself by utilizing things that allow you to escape, by creating excuses, or by trying to control all those things, knowing that surrender makes you feel weak in a way or not as consistent with some things you may see in our world or on TV or on social media, right? And I think for you, like, wow, dude, like that is amazing that you had that internal self-talk. I think people don't know how to practice that. And as you said earlier, I think it takes practice to create a sense of perfection to where you can operate and utilize it and pull that out of yourself time and time again, because we know that the world is this rollercoaster in some ways and emotions are real, right? Whether you hold on to that fear, hold on to that timidness, hold on to that fright or not is a choice in which I think we subconsciously are making based on the skillset with the identity, with the tools and equipment you have to navigate through them. And I think a lot of people don't grow up with that. -

Ernest Chapman24:30 I agree. We've been conditioned as a civilization by Romanized Christianity to believe in total deprivation and original sin and that we are born broken and wrong. Those ideas came from Paul who had a vision on the road to Damascus. I don't remember ever hearing that Paul met Jesus. Paul saw Jesus in a vision. So I think there's a lot of value to what Paul wrote about, but I'd like to focus on what Jesus said

24:59 The Kingdom of God Within

Ernest Chapman24:59 . Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is within you." And if the kingdom of God is within you, then you have an opportunity to shift into a very confident identity that's aligned to God inside of yourself. Now, I was an altar boy at Catholic school. I went to Holy Rosary. I went to St. Bernard. I went to Father Ryan. I remember having this moment with my dad driving to school one day and I said, "Dad, I'm having a hard time with this one thing "we're learning in theology class that, you know, "original sin and we're born in this state of..." And I do believe we're not perfect. I do believe that like we've got problems, you know. We've got plenty of problems right now. But I had a problem with the idea that God would send people to hell for eternal punishment because they made some kind of a technical error in basically the legal recognition of Jesus's blood sacrifice to atone for our sins. And I figured that out in the fifth grade, that there was something about that that felt manipulative and that didn't feel like Jesus, that felt like something that would be really good for controlling people if you were like a Roman emperor. That would be like, yes, sign me up for that. Let's make sure all of them are falling in line for that. But I'm like, but aren't those the people that killed Jesus that inherited his work? So I'm like, okay, well, maybe there's something deeper here that's sacred and that's holy that we shouldn't be throwing

26:32 away. And to me, that's that connection of gnosis. Gnosis is that inner knowledge of the Christ within you, of the anointment within you, of God's power moving through you, that you can accept, that you can say yes to, that can transform your life. As I think there's some caveats there. You wanna be able to do that under theosis, which is under the dominion of the creator. So you can't just make it all up and just be like, okay, well, I'm just gonna listen to whatever voices are in my head. And that's God talking to me. Like you could actually be listening to your own trash talking to you. So this is where it gets interesting because there's a little bit of subjectivity here. But I think that's where a lot of my confidence comes from at a young age is truly having faith that God is so great, that God is greater than any religion and that God is in me. And that if I can connect with that in a legit way that's real, that the kingdom of God is in me and it's in you, it's in all of us. We have access to this. So how do I shift my identity into that? 'Cause that's where I wanna be. That's where my confidence is knowing that I don't have to know. All these things can happen and I just have to pay attention and be receptive. - Open. - Open. - Open. - Available. - Yeah. I tried to have that conversation with the AA crowd. And it was like, I just felt this heavy shame that you could cut the air with a knife. And I just felt like, okay, well, I respect where they're at, but this is not my path. And I'm glad that I did it the way I did it. -

Jim Morris28:24 It's so interesting how much alignment you and I have through the process of being sober and getting sober. Very similar to you, I changed my identity. - Yeah. - And I have never wanted to drink after that point ever. - Wow. - And my wife, I didn't even realize that, but my wife recently was reading "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. And she talked about, and she was like, you changed your identity when you were drinking. You woke up one day, said you're done, and you were someone who didn't drink. - Yeah. - And I've, similar to you, I'll go to Broadway right now. Like, I don't care. As long as it's with good people that I wanna be around and I wanna spend my time with and I wanna love on and I feel loved back, but you can drink 100 baka sodas in front of me and I'm cool. Just don't disrespect me if you get a little sloppy and annoying, I might wanna go home early. But changing that identity is so important to make and stay consistent with those habits and those actions that you were talking about. I also believe that you, the most important relationship is the one with yourself because God is inside of you. But if you don't love yourself and recognize yourself, then you can't recognize God. So I take a lot of flack online when I've posted about that because people are just like, God first, God first, God first, and I understand that. But if God gives you something and you don't love yourself enough to step into it and to navigate it and to go all in, then God's gonna give you a layup and you're gonna miss the slam dunk. So for me, it's like, yes, that's important. Yes, that's at the central point in the core of it. But how many people can say that and not take action on the things they know they're supposed to do because they don't believe in themselves, they don't have faith in them that God will be there to support them, but you have to take the step, right? Like God isn't standing next to me and pushing me to go forward, I've got to receive that and then move forward. Like it actually takes action for me to do that. So as you were just saying that, I'm like, man, kudos to you for loving yourself through the process, but I think that's where a lot of people get stuck, or at least a lot of people I've talked to and 100% with me because I need to believe in myself that God is believing in me and supporting me. And when something goes sideways or doesn't happen the way I want or in the timing that I want it, I still have to believe that He still loves me and I love myself and this is the best opportunity and I needed this because maybe I'm not becoming yet, maybe I'm not at the level in which I can receive that. So I have to go through these paths or these scary forests to get there and to learn the things that are needed in order to

31:33 What Is "Myself"?

Jim Morris31:33 become that.

Ernest Chapman31:34 What is myself? That's a great question. Where I'm going with that is maybe I have struggled with that and just don't describe it the same way because I remember waking up in my body in 2013 and being 35 pounds overweight, broke, basically fat, drunk, and broke. And unhappy. And unhappy. So that's a lot of evidence that I suck right there. But my reaction to it when it really hit me was more like, this isn't me, I'm better than this. How the hell did I let this happen? And I have to fix this.

Jim Morris32:24 But you knew it, you knew it in your heart and your soul. But it took time. I have the best things to do.

Ernest Chapman32:30 So maybe you could argue, I'm not gonna pretend like I have it all figured out. And as I think about it, maybe I'm semi-consciously aware of a self-hate that was going on there that I'm just not acknowledging that allowed me to get that bad. That could be the case. I just know that the way I feel right now is fundamentally like I'm better than this. And so are you and so is everybody else. And we all have this high potential and let's do something about it. So then the self-correction, the taking out what I call taking out the trash, that whole thing is going to therapy, hitting the gym, working out, meditating, eating right, actually getting your blood work done, figuring out what's off and like doing things, actually doing things. And the more you do, the more you start getting evidence or proof that you don't suck. But at first, you're like fat ass at the gym who can barely pick anything up. So I think that's where a lot of people get stuck, where they're like, well, I signed up for the gym membership and I don't have a six pack and it's been like a week. And like, come on, like I suck. I suck because of that. It's like, no, you don't, you just need, and that's where the music teacher stuff comes back in. It's like, no, there's like, you gotta plant seeds and tend this garden and this is a long game here. So, I mean, having gone through that, my own version of that, I can say with absolute certainty that that's one way to do it, you know? -

Jim Morris34:12 Wow, man, I'm grateful for you. Thank you for just the level of vulnerability and the truth. -

Ernest Chapman34:22 I couldn't say this when I was in the middle of it. - No,

Jim Morris34:26 you don't know how to communicate it when you're still navigating the trauma from it. - Yeah,

Ernest Chapman34:31 so that's part of why I wanna say it now and just be transparent because someone else is in the middle of this right now and they're not saying it to themselves, but like you can get through it, basically. And then on the other side of it, you can do some really interesting stuff. So like when we get into all the M's and the magic and the, you know, the growth, it's like what unlocked that growth was taking out that big dump of trash in my life that was in the way. And trash always continues to accumulate. So don't get me wrong, it's gonna keep coming in. But I have a- - I have an

Jim Morris35:10 awareness to know that though, which is extremely important because there's been so many people that I've conversed with and had deep conversation around the fact that they're healed, they're over it, and it's not a continuous work in progress. And that to me is the fastest path to being average, to not having that self-identification of, I'm always growing, I'm always moving forward, I'm always trying to get to the next step because I know that I'm not living at my capacity. In turn, the goal is to live at the highest level of my capacity based on the level of awareness that I have of who I am today and who I wanna be tomorrow. It gets me really excited because it's something that I struggled with for a long time and knew in my heart, in my soul that I was wasting a level of talent that I could operate at. -

Ernest Chapman36:06 There's two

36:07 extremes. And I'm attempting to walk a middle path. The two extremes are total deprivation, hopeless, must outsource my own getting fixed on one end, which is very low self-esteem. It's programmed into our culture in a lot of ways. The other extreme is David Koresh, completely self-assured, messiah complex, total jerk, can't see their own splinter, the wooden beam in their eye as they're trying to point out the splinters in other people's eyes with no self-awareness, right? And I think those two extremes are really important things to avoid. As I'm attempting to walk the middle path of going, the kingdom of God is within me. I have confidence. I can always do better. Look, I have a kitchen in my house and we make food and we have to do the dishes and take out the trash every day. So on the one extreme, there's the people that are just like, I am the trash. And then on the other extreme, there's the people that I don't have to take out the trash. I'm too good for that. I did it once and I'm perfect now. And that sucks. -

Jim Morris37:20 Both of them suck. - Both of them suck. - And it's a game of balance to run that play through the middle. And you're gonna be on the left side in some cases, but self-identification and recognition. And you're gonna be on the other side and you're just trying to weave through life. -

Ernest Chapman37:37 So this level of depth of conversation about identity and mindset, I think it's critical to really get that path right for a couple of different reasons. The bigger picture of what I'm building here is as a framework or a philosophy or a way of seeing the world that I call the divine

37:59 The Five Layers

Ernest Chapman37:59 design. And the idea is that there's five levels, okay? I'm writing a book on it right now. It'll be out pretty soon. And these five levels are at the top level is the divine design itself, the fingerprints of God in the world, the God's presence, the creator, the creation, that highest level. And at the lowest level is the individual human. And I mean, high and low, I don't mean it in a moral judgment. I'm just saying the high level of creation all the way down to the individual human. And how do we align to creation? Okay, so you could sort of say, I'm gonna go live on an island and do it in a vacuum and be a monk in a monastery and it's just me and God. Cool, do that, that's great. But there's a lot of us that have three other layers that we live inside of. So the layer right above the individual human layer is the family. And that family layer, I want that to be as aligned and healthy as possible. That requires me to upgrade personally, take out the trash and become a better man every day. Otherwise, that can go sideways. Above the family layer is the layer of work, culture, community, those three things kind of all interweave. And in that work layer, that's where all the marketing stuff is for me. But for you, it could be something else. For somebody else, it could be something else. What do you do that creates value in the world beyond your family that you get paid for? That's where that Iki guy, four circles that have to intersect, what's your purpose? Do you love it? Are you good at it? Can you get paid for it? Does the world need it? You know, those things. And then above that layer, I think between the work layer, the work and culture layer, community, is the layer of civilization itself. We live in a country, it's a civilization. There's all these countries. They all have to like figure stuff out at a national and international level. So if you go God, civilization, work and culture, family, and then me as an individual, how do we put all of that into alignment? And if you've got a bunch of people walking around that hate themselves, that their lives are full of trash that they don't know how to take out, then there's a lot of healing work that has to happen on that individual layer. Because a lot of people want to heal at the civilizational layer, or the culture layer, or the family layer, or the individual layer, but they all have to work together. And they all have to be looking to the pattern and creation that actually helps us to understand who we are, why we're here, and what we're doing. So that's the bigger work. That's the bigger framework. -

Jim Morris40:41 It's interesting because then I feel like it goes back around into that same divine design and just keeps going and going, right? Because civilization can now come back and affect you in a negative way potentially, or a positive way, which in turn will affect your family, which in turn will affect the community, the culture, your work, which in turn will affect the civilization, and ultimately God at the end, or your belief of God. So I think it's just this lifecycle of a turn which every piece has to operate perfectly or in a way that makes sense for you as an individual. -

Ernest Chapman41:19 And all I can really fix is myself. So as long as I do that, and I'm really squarely focused on that, all the other things, I'm gonna do the best I can, but I really can't control those other layers. I can have opinions, I can share cool ideas, I can give people stuff they can do or not do, but I can't control it. So I gotta accept that, you know? -

Jim Morris41:44 So all of these things, your journey to where you are as an individual today, the divine design, how it affects your family, how it affects the community, your work, civilization, your relationship with God, I wanna focus on the work piece. I wanna focus on how you're impacting those that choose to exchange or trade dollars for your services. Talk to me about how you take all of these life experiences, all of these journeys that you've navigated and now help people in a work environment, in a work setting. -

Ernest Chapman42:24 Well, the first thing I do is I don't bring all of my beliefs, expectations and baggages to a work engagement. That said, my instincts are very much programmed by those things. But if I'm gonna engage with someone on a business level, what I'm looking for is how can I grow your business at the end of the day? It's very simple. Can I put in strategies and tactics that help to reduce operational costs? -

Jim Morris42:52 But here's the thing though, that I wanna focus on is-- - And that's firmly in the work layer. - That's what every business does. But your experience is and why you're so successful and why your clients are so successful is because of the journey that you've gone on. So how do you extract

43:10 Brand Therapy

Jim Morris43:10 that? How do you do the brand therapy that is the subconscious, that is the root of how you pull those things out of others? Because brand therapy and how you position that for your clients is drastically different than any other marketing company that I've ever heard of, number one, two, engaged with, and number three, experienced in our length of conversations around how you impact and support others. -

Ernest Chapman43:39 Everything we just talked about, civilizational alignment, mindset, identity upgrade, habits, personal behavior, changing, personal responsibility, all of that can be compacted down into a fractal that lives inside of the business. So if you are aligned with your business and your business is aligned with the market, then you're gonna have traction and growth because you're actually giving people something they want that's good for them. And if you're not aligned with it or something's changed or then you need a chiropractor to come in and make an adjustment basically. And so it's like a business chiropractor. The focus is on marketing and branding because a lot of people miss branding or they do really quick and dirty branding. They go to market, they start selling something, things change out from under them and they start to lose track of all those little connections. And they're so busy running their business that they don't know how to sell or market what they're doing or their logo sucks and that's the only thing they know is their logo sucks and they need a new logo. So then we look at the logo and we're like, did you know that there's like 11 teen things before the logo that we wanna really kind of fix and put in alignment here? And I've got plenty of case studies and stories of customers, of clients where we've really transformed their businesses by giving their business an upgraded identity that can show up and speak a certain way to their market. What does that

Jim Morris45:11 look like if, and you don't have to say names or anything but give us an example of someone that's come to you. You've kind of given this consultation or you dove in a little bit like what does that look like? What are some of those questions that you extract out of folks around maybe their purpose or their intention or their why they wanna do this or why they built this company? Because at the end of the day, we all know that anybody can come up with something that might work quickly and make a lot of money, but to sustain that, you have that consecutive and consistent growth, that's the hard part if there isn't alignment. - Right,

Ernest Chapman45:50 well, there's a danger in too much alignment too, because if you do it too fast, sometimes the phone can ring. In one case, I got a phone call a few years ago and the owner of the company said, "Hey, I need you to turn the ads off." And I was like, "Why?" I really got worried for a second. I'm like, am I getting fired? I don't wanna get fired today. Well, why do you wanna turn the ads off? And he said, "There's too many sales." And what was going on was we had given their company a brand with a name and a logo, and we built them two new channels of sales channels, Shopify and Amazon. We basically taken something that was on eBay that was kind of locked in with no brand. And at that point, we were moving into a 10X of their business through direct response advertising. And they had to go build a warehouse and hire people. And so what happened was branding powered marketing to have much higher efficiency. We're getting 40 to 50X return on ad spend now on that one. But we had to pause the ads because marketing broke sales and operations. It broke everything for a minute. And that was a moment where I realized this kind of identity shifting thing that I was doing with my music students that was making them really good musicians, that was one of the moments where it clicked. And I was like, that's happening for businesses that we're working with now. Where you become a business that is successful because your positioning is how the market sees you, what they think you are. It's not what you think you are, it's what they think you are. If we fix that, they think you're the one they need to buy. Oops, do you have a warehouse? No, okay, too many sales, turn the ads off, go hire some people. So we've seen that happen. Companies that'll raise money off of just having a really great brand. We'll do the naming, the branding, go raise money. One that's really fun, that feels really good, that's more of like a mission focused one is there's, and I can name these

47:51 companies, that move inclusive dance. They're right down the street. And we gave them a name and an identity. And it's a nonprofit dance studio that serves the neurodiverse community. And they make it possible for people who would be turned away at a lot of dance studios to go and take like real dance lessons. But I'm talking about people that have really serious challenges, right? And it's like opening up a world of joy for these kids. And by giving them a brand and then handing it off and like watching them run with it, they're about to open their second location right now. And it just feels good to look and see like, okay, there's a great example. When

Jim Morris48:32 they came to you, why did they come to you? And how'd you help them navigate to a point where they're now opening up a second location? Like what does that look like? They call you up and what happened?

Ernest Chapman48:46 Well, so for this one, and Lauren, if you're watching this, I hope you don't mind. I'll try to be respectful of anything that may be private. But like Lauren came to me and said, listen, I have a vision and she's a person of faith. And she saw, she had a vision for what she wanted to do, a mission that was a God aligned mission to serve this community. And didn't have a name, didn't know what to call it. Didn't have any of that stuff and needed that gap to be closed so that she could go get partners and get support and do all the things you do when someone's like, imagine if you didn't have a name. Yeah, I met this guy, I don't know what his name was. He had this hat, he's pretty cool. He seemed like he had it together, but he doesn't have a name. If you didn't have a name, no one could remember you. So we gave them a name and move with an exclamation point, inclusive dance. The name says what it is. The name is almost the tagline itself. You know what that is when you see that. So there's a lot of those kinds of examples of the work where I feel like what we're doing is helping someone achieve a real vision or mission to achieve that vision. That's like a sacred work,

Jim Morris50:05 you know? Do you believe that that gives them confidence through that process? Yeah, 'cause they're

Ernest Chapman50:10 wearing t-shirts that have the logo on it, you know? They're wearing it as an identity. And that thing has stuck. It's been like five or six years. So, you know, other examples, I mean there's-- Man,

Jim Morris50:22 I never thought of it like that. Yeah, I mean, you know me, I'm always, I got my impact effect hoodie on, or my, you know-- Well, let's talk about your name. Great barriers, great impact on the back of every t-shirt. I wear it, you know, almost every other day. And, you know, I just never really thought of that, how important and how consistent I am sending that message across the universe and the world, and how important it is to me. Because as we were talking about earlier, it's like sometimes you don't drink your medicine. Sometimes, you know, you're in the picture frame, you can't see the picture. And as you were just saying that, because I thought about this a lot, right? Impact effect, I thought about the definition. My podcast, I asked people to define impact and how they bring positive impact to the world. And I didn't even realize, as you were saying this, how much time I spent on that, and how much I put that messaging out in the world, from a marketing standpoint, from a, you know, just a consistent level of how I wanna show up. So, thank you for that. Thank you for just bringing that to my realization in this moment. -

Ernest Chapman51:36 Well, you did it. So, you know, you're recognizing that you did it. You know, the one I was talking about earlier, the brand is Harvey's ATV Parts, okay? And they're a fantastic company, Family-Owned Business, and they're doing great stuff. But they literally do one thing right now. The main thing they're doing is selling replacement clutches for all train vehicles, right? Now they have other parts too. They have other categories, and there's all kinds of other stuff going on, but it's just in terms of like, what's been building the business. They've got this thing that we named called Mother Clutcher. What happens when you are on the side of the road and your clutch went out? What do you say? Mother Clutcher. That's like a hit song. And basically, you know, we figured out pretty early on with direct response advertising that what we've got to do is sell the outcome. So that business doesn't sell clutches. That business sells one thing right now. Get back on the trail. You've got to get back on the trail. You're like literally broken down the side of the road. Who are you going to trust? Well, there's this really cool guy named Harvey who's got your back. That's it. Now there's a lot behind the scenes going on. There's all kinds of really interesting things going on with that business that make it possible to do what we do, right? So we do full spectrum work. We don't just give you a brand and then say, have fun, bye. Like I've got data scientists, advertisers, operations people, like designers, like all these different departments and we go cross departmental. So, you know, another one serving as a fractional executive in a company called VITL. And VITL is for cash pay clinics. In the middle of their, what they do, they need to make orders for compounding pharmacies. VITL created an incredible tool. It's a platform that makes it possible for cash pay clinics to order from compounding pharmacies nationwide. There's all kinds of features and benefits in there. It's an unusual thing. It's kind of hard to find. And, you know, we went in there and basically built out their brand, did their website and started taking over their marketing. And now it's at a point where it's really growing. And it's like, this is more than just an identity thing. Now this is a go-to-market strategy. This is working with other executives, working cross departmentally. So those are a few examples of like the nonlinear thinking. You can do something in marketing that has an impact in another department. So if you're just tactical endpoint, here's your cool design stuff. Here's your brand. Here's some interesting assets. Buy, like the typical agency thing. I would much rather be deeply embedded with a team, helping them make critical strategic decisions for the next year that impact engineering, product, customer support, customer success, sales, all that stuff. Because of what we were talking about earlier, it's going nonlinear, it's connecting dots. I mean, I'm at a point now where I'm working with data analysis and I'm vibe coding special tools to figure out the data side of a go-to-market strategy that's like stuff I've never seen anyone else be able to do without spending months and hiring a team of analysts. There's an acceleration happening right now that it's happening so fast that I don't even think we fully understand the impact to steal your word of where this is going. But I'm seeing it across all these different businesses that I'm working with, that it's like the ability to analyze data at scale and get real insights and have real actionable insights that increase your growth, reduce your costs, that kind of creative thinking, it's absolutely insane

Jim Morris55:53 what's going on right now. The acceleration is at its highest. Yeah, and the

Ernest Chapman55:58 danger is that we lose the human factor. So I'm building out a strategy right

56:05 Ai + Ai

Ernest Chapman56:05 now with everyone I work with that I like to call AI plus AI. And what that means is whether I'm serving as your fractional CMO, or I'm just consulting, or I've got agency services, or I'm managing a team that's helping deliver some kind of results, whatever it is, 'cause there's a few things that my company does. AI plus AI is the standard going forward. AI means artificial intelligence, but humans have actual intelligence. And when you put those two things together with the right combination, you don't over-index for one or the other. You gotta be careful if it's only humans, but everyone else is using artificial intelligence. Then they're gonna basically plug in a supercomputer with IQ 9000 to accelerate and offload their intellectual busy work and grunt work that is not as valuable as the key strategic decisions you need to make from an executive perspective. If you aren't careful, you're gonna be basically like cleaning the intellectual toilets yourself instead of outsourcing it to something that can do it in the background. And that's dangerous, but on the other side of the fence, if everything is AI, you can lose the human connection and hallucinate yourself into gnosis that's fake. It's like gnosis without theosis. It's like hearing voices in your head that's not God, and they might be telling you to do the wrong thing. Some of the AI stuff is a little bit creepy. It doesn't always work out. 100%,

Jim Morris57:44 man, I think it has to start human and end human and utilizing a tool not being so giving or committed to just the tool, right? Because at the end of the day, and I don't know about you, but I can read something and pretty much identify if there was heart and soul in that, especially when it comes to copy, especially when it comes to books, right? The big thing lately that I've gotten is, "Hey, I wrote a book, Jim, check out this book. I want it to be on your podcast. Here's my book." And I get three pages in, and I realized that there's no heart and soul. There's no combination of tool, skill set, but depth that you thought of that you brought to light. And it's so easily identifiable for me at this point, because I know what it feels like to dive into something and feel convicted when it is something from the heart and soul, right? And it kind of comes back to that whole divine design of like, if it starts here and navigates through this at the right way, I can feel it, and I can feel it holistically, and I can now identify if it's not. And I think if you don't start human and you don't end human, then what are we at this point? Living in a world that's fakery, bullshit,

Ernest Chapman59:04 garbage. It's a copy. It's a copy. I really believe that your pain gives you your power. And so in the divine design book, I wrote that book. I wrote every word of that book, typed it out, out of my head. I didn't let AI write the book, you know? So that's, to me, is more valuable because it's a real human experience that's captured. It's moments, like you said, that are captured, that can inform a whole bunch of stuff. And then downstream, AI can do some stuff. That's fine. But this is really, the bigger picture I see with AI that we've got to keep our eyes on, is there's a chart that I'll put up on the screen that I'll just add later. And in this chart, you can see there's two lines. There's a line across the top that is all human created text. Text could be data, could be knowledge, could be words, could be code, could be a video or a picture, which can be code, which is text. All human created content across the top. And then there's like year over year, and then there's AI catching up. And the thing on the bottom is AI cloning human knowledge, copying it, imitating it. Right now in 2026, we're four years away from a convergence point around 2030, maybe six years in 2032, where if we continue on this curve, AI is gonna catch up to the point where not only is AI's creation indistinguishable, so it's gonna pass a Turing test basically, which I'm sure it already has, but at scale, humans won't be creating anything new that you can actually tell isn't AI. So I look at that curve and I see it from two different perspectives. On one side, I look at it like, so that means we have four to six years to be in the middle, and that's where value is. Value is in between those two extremes. The other side of it is I'm looking at it, I'm like, okay, what happens after 2030, 2032? What's above the line of human created text? 'Cause there's something above that. It's like, you know that thing where you're like, what's on the edge of the universe and what's right on the other side of that? (laughs) So part of me thinks, okay, there's gotta be some kind of a divine breakthrough where value comes from something greater than a human just making something up. But I'm also looking at it like, what are you gonna have left when everything can be copied, when everything can be imitated, and when it's indistinguishable? The only thing you're gonna have left is who you are, who you know, who you love, your real life. - Connection. - Connection, this moment right here. That's why I like candles

1:02:11 . Candles are real light. They come from fire, you know? Man.

Jim Morris1:02:18 My mind's blown, brother. Like, what a great conversation. Holy shit. (laughs) Man, I need to like take a second here. Wow. Wow. Everything you said I agree with, and I've thought about a lot of it, but I haven't opened up my mind to some of it. And that scale that you're talking about with AI, that human touch, it just reminds me, you know, you need to connect or you're gonna die. And that death doesn't mean getting hit by a car or, you know, murder or any of that. It's you succumbing to not living in your heart and your soul. And that's the death, the death of humanity. - Wow.

1:03:16 Connect or Die

Ernest Chapman1:03:16 The first tagline for "Black Labs" was connect or die. (laughs) - It's the name of my book. - Are you serious? - Yes. - Are you serious? - Yes, that I'm writing right now. - Cool. I'll license it to you. - Holy. - Holy. - I'm just kidding, you can have it, it's yours. - I didn't trademark it. I didn't trademark it, I really should have. - Bro. - Yeah. Connect or die? Connect or die? Well, apparently you're part of "Black Labs" now. By the way, it's not called "Not Black Labs." That's a distraction. - Whoa. - The company's called "Black Labs." And when "Black Labs" uses AI, it's called "Black Labs Intelligence." The idea behind "Black Labs" was to create a consulting agency kind of function that could be dual use, that could be used for civilizational alignment and renewal, that could also be used for marketing and sales and growth and businessy stuff, right? All the fun business stuff. But one can power the other. That's the whole point. The problem was "BlackLabs.com" was taken and no one's using, I don't even know who it is. It's like some weird thing. So don't go to "BlackLabs.com." So I decided, okay, well, I was studying persuasion at the time that we were naming it. I was going to the Knoxville Entrepreneur's Center with Mark Montgomery, and we were doing a bunch of workshops on brand therapy out there and kind of helping work with all these startups that needed help, you know? And I was like, one day I was like, "Well, let's just call it "Not Black Labs," because no one hears the knot. Of course, that's like hilarious because people see that and they have all kinds of ideas about what they think it means, which I'm okay with that because I wasn't trying to scale the agency. This whole time I've always wanted to keep it small. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to let it be a weird name that no one understands and that's actually perfect, perfect. But at this point, I'm like, I think it's "BlackLabs" again, but it's "BlackLabs Intelligence." And intelligence can be artificial or actual. It can be both. So all the AI work is great, but there's also human in the loop. And the goal is business alignment and renewal and growth in the middle layer of the whole pie of civilizational renewal. So I care a lot about our country. I care a lot about our world. I'm an independent. I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat. I am a human and I want humans to thrive. And so I want to do things that contribute to that. That's the big picture. And we need to connect or we will die.

Jim Morris1:06:06 Physically, mentally, externally, and internally. Yeah. I don't know. I can't even talk after this. Like, what, dude, what?

Ernest Chapman1:06:19 No, I get to interview you now and then you can just be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. (laughs) Yeah. Whoa, dude. Well, cool. One more toast. Yeah, man. Let's wrap this thing up. Wow. What,

Jim Morris1:06:38 what do you want to leave the audience with? And what do you want to toast to?

Ernest Chapman1:06:48 To connection, to life. L'chaim. Bro. I want to

1:07:03 The Closing Mandate

Ernest Chapman1:07:03 leave the audience with a mandate to find the voice of God within your heart. And the way to do that is to find ways to purify yourself and take out your trash. And to understand that it is a nonstop process and you'll be doing it for the rest of your life. And it's a good thing and it's okay. Forgive yourself, love yourself, find God within you. The kingdom of God is within you. Man. Holy (beep) Holy (beep) That's never perfect. Yeah, (beep) off. (laughs)