Todd Hagopian Returns to Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider as the Stagnation Assassin

On October 27, 2025, Todd Hagopian returned to Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider for Episode 42, this time under a transformative new identity: the Stagnation Assassin. The episode showcased Hagopian’s evolution from political activist to business transformation authority while maintaining the genuine connection that characterized his first appearance on the show. This return visit explored his journey from Fortune 500 turnaround leadership to developing proprietary systems that have generated over two billion dollars in shareholder value.

Table of Contents

• What Is Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider?
• What Did Todd Hagopian Discuss in Episode 42?
• Who Is Todd Hagopian, the Stagnation Assassin?
• How Has Todd Hagopian’s Public Journey Evolved?
• Where Can You Listen to Cloud Surfing Episode 42?
• Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider?

Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider is an entertainment podcast hosted by comedian and certified pilot Jake Rider, featuring unrestricted conversations that move fluidly across interviews with prominent people, comedy, music, sports, current events, movies, and streaming shows. The show occupies a unique space in the podcast landscape because Rider’s comedic background creates an atmosphere where guests relax and share more authentically than in typical interview formats.

What distinguishes Cloud Surfing from countless interview podcasts is Rider’s genuine curiosity about his guests as people rather than merely as experts. Episodes explore personal stories alongside professional achievements, producing insights that purely business-focused shows miss.

The Cloud Surfing Podcast Network has expanded to include multiple shows: Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider, The Jake Rider Show, American Homicide with Jake Rider, Bettor Life with Jake and Paul, and additional programs. This growth reflects the audience connection Rider has built through consistent, engaging content.

The show maintains active community engagement through social media. Rider encourages real-time conversation during episodes and responds to audience interactions, creating participatory experience rather than passive consumption. Sponsors including Hankey Law and Spreaker Inc support the production, enabling consistent output without compromising editorial independence.

What Did Todd Hagopian Discuss in Episode 42?

In Episode 42, Todd Hagopian discussed his dramatic transformation from political activist to business transformation authority, his experience with bipolar disorder, his Fortune 500 leadership career, and his forthcoming book “The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox.” The conversation marked Hagopian’s return to a show where he had previously appeared in November 2020, when his focus was on his role as Chair of the Northeast Oklahoma Libertarian Party.

“Rather than accepting the impossible choice between mental health stability and professional performance, Hagopian developed systematic approaches that capture productive cognitive patterns in repeatable frameworks.”

The conversation explored Hagopian’s journey from corporate turnaround work to developing proprietary systems for eliminating organizational stagnation. His track record includes over two billion dollars in shareholder value creation across roles at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool Corporation, and JBT Marel.

Rider drew out the personal story behind professional achievement. Hagopian openly discussed discovering his bipolar disorder and developing his HOT System (Hypomanic Operational Turnaround) as a result of that journey.

The episode also covered Hagopian’s experience buying and selling his own business. During the pandemic, he founded Cash Flow Acquisitions and acquired multiple companies, doubling his manufacturing acquisition’s value in three years before exiting. The conversation touched on his continued libertarian involvement, including his service as Treasurer of the Libertarian National Committee from 2022 to 2024.

Who Is Todd Hagopian, the Stagnation Assassin?

Todd Hagopian is a business transformation authority and author who serves as VP of Product Strategy and Innovation at JBT Marel, leading the billion-dollar Diversified Food and Health division. Known as the Stagnation Assassin, Hagopian has built parallel reputations in business transformation and political activism, with his corporate career spanning leadership roles at major companies where he consistently delivered turnaround results.

He transformed several businesses, including doubling EBITDA at three separate companies. Hagopian founded the Stagnation Intelligence Agency to address what he terms Stagnation Syndrome, the organizational condition that traps businesses in declining performance spirals.

“Hagopian’s 2020 campaign for Oklahoma Corporation Commission set the state’s third-party voting record with over 345,000 votes, securing ballot access for the Libertarian Party through 2024.”

His forthcoming book “The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox” launches in January 2026 through Koehler Books. The book draws on his experience managing bipolar disorder while building exceptional business results.

Hagopian has been featured in Forbes over thirty times and covered by The Washington Post and NPR. His social media presence exceeds 100,000 followers across platforms where he challenges conventional business thinking. His family includes wife Andrea and four sons, along with four dogs and four cats. The Hagopians currently reside in Solon, Ohio.

How Has Todd Hagopian’s Public Journey Evolved?

Todd Hagopian’s public journey has evolved from seeking political office to channeling his energy into helping organizations eliminate stagnation through proven methodologies, while his core libertarian values and principles remain consistent. This shift leverages his corporate experience more directly than political activism allowed.

His core principles remain consistent across both chapters. The libertarian values that drove his political activism inform his business philosophy. He advocates for individual empowerment, systematic thinking, and results-oriented approaches across domains.

The authenticity that characterized his 2020 appearance remained present in Episode 42. Hagopian discusses his mental health openly, shares both successes and challenges, and connects with audiences as a genuine person rather than polished expert.

His relationship with Jake Rider exemplifies how podcast appearances can build over time. The rapport between host and guest produced conversation that went deeper than first-time interviews typically achieve.

Where Can You Listen to Cloud Surfing Episode 42?

Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider Episode 42 featuring Todd Hagopian is available on Spreaker, Audible, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms under the episode title “Stagnation Assassin – #42.” Listeners can access the full conversation exploring Hagopian’s transformation from political activist to business authority.

Listeners can connect with Jake Rider through social media at @JakeRiderComedy across platforms. The Cloud Surfing Podcast Network welcomes submissions and audience interaction through CloudSurfingNetwork@gmail.com.

Todd Hagopian’s transformation resources and his forthcoming book “The Unfair Advantage” are available at toddhagopian.com. His book is available for preorder through Amazon and other retailers ahead of its January 2026 release.

Frequently Asked Questions

What episode number is Todd Hagopian on Cloud Surfing?

Todd Hagopian appears on Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider Episode 42, titled “Stagnation Assassin – #42,” which aired on October 27, 2025.

What is the Stagnation Assassin?

The Stagnation Assassin is Todd Hagopian’s professional identity focused on business transformation. Through this persona, he helps organizations eliminate what he calls Stagnation Syndrome using proprietary methodologies developed from his Fortune 500 leadership experience.

What is Todd Hagopian’s book about?

“The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox” is Todd Hagopian’s forthcoming book launching in January 2026 through Koehler Books. The book draws on his experience managing bipolar disorder while building exceptional business results and developing systematic approaches like the HOT System.

What is the HOT System?

The HOT System, which stands for Hypomanic Operational Turnaround, is a proprietary methodology developed by Todd Hagopian that captures productive cognitive patterns in repeatable frameworks for business transformation.

Has Todd Hagopian been on Cloud Surfing before?

Yes, Todd Hagopian first appeared on Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider in November 2020, when the conversation focused on his role as Chair of the Northeast Oklahoma Libertarian Party and his campaign for Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

People Also Ask

How much shareholder value has Todd Hagopian created?

Todd Hagopian’s track record includes over two billion dollars in shareholder value creation across leadership roles at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool Corporation, and JBT Marel.

What political record did Todd Hagopian set in Oklahoma?

Todd Hagopian’s 2020 campaign for Oklahoma Corporation Commission set the state’s third-party voting record with over 345,000 votes, which secured ballot access for the Libertarian Party through 2024.

What is Todd Hagopian’s current role at JBT Marel?

Todd Hagopian currently serves as VP of Product Strategy and Innovation at JBT Marel.

Who is Jake Rider?

Jake Rider is a comedian and certified pilot who hosts Cloud Surfing with Jake Rider, an entertainment podcast featuring unrestricted conversations across topics including interviews, comedy, music, sports, and current events. He also hosts multiple other shows within the Cloud Surfing Podcast Network.

Podcast Transcript

Jake: How are you, man?

Todd: Good. Sorry about that.

Jake: Don’t worry, dude. How you feeling, man? That surgery, dude? Neck surgery is never fun.

Todd: No, it’s definitely could be better.

Jake: Well, we’re not going to keep you too long then. We’ll get you in and out of here. And let me say this book — I’ve read the first couple of pages of it already and I like the first line of it to be honest with you. It pretty much opens up like, listen, not everyone’s going to like what I have to say. This isn’t exactly for everyone. The first line, just so everyone — am I allowed to read just the very first sentence?

Todd: Yeah, go ahead.

Jake: Says, “I don’t sugarcoat reality. Most businesses are dying a slow death of cautious mediocrity while their leaders nod along to the same recycled business advice.” Love it.

Todd: Absolutely couldn’t have said it any better, man.

Jake: It’s like we all read the same 20 books, right? And they’re all the same sanitized, watered-down BS. So tell me, what made you write this book in the first place?

Todd: I was undiagnosed bipolar for 15 years, moving up the chain in business and didn’t realize what was happening. I just knew that something wasn’t right. I would do really good and then I would self-sabotage, and just had this cycle going for years and years. When I got diagnosed, I started taking the medicine. Everything worked. It was great. People started noticing stuff. They didn’t know what was going on, but they were making comments. The problem is I completely lost my competitive edge. I went from Tony Stark to Tony Stagnant overnight. Just completely normal. Just lost everything. I had just gotten a big promotion and it was noticeable. I was trying to figure out — do I need to choose between sanity and success? That didn’t seem right.

So I started to really think about the way I managed before when I was bipolar. If you’re not familiar with bipolar, there’s this hypomania portion of bipolar where you’re up all the time and super hyperfocused. You can bounce back and forth between different things. You can set big goals, find ways to get it. You can get really creative, think outside the box. That’s the good part of bipolar. Although there’s some bad parts to hypomania too, that’s the good part of bipolar in business. That’s what you often hear about on the business side of bipolar. Then you had the bipolar depression.

The hypomania — I was trying to figure out how do I get that back? How do I bottle some of that up and use it? So I started coming up with some processes about how to do that, how to systematize it, automate it in my workflow so that I could manage like a hypomanic but stay healthy. Then I turned around one business and then another and then another. By the third one, what I realized was that I was forgetting stuff. The 13th month I’d be thinking, man, I should have done this other thing from that other turnaround. I was finally like, I’m going to write all these down.

So the fourth one came around and I had them all written down. I implemented the toolbox, as I call it now, and it just went amazing. Everything clicked. I was like, I can teach people this because I have been teaching people this. My second-in-commands, my lieutenants, my directors — they’ve been getting taught this system over the years, but now I’ve got it in a playbook. I said, I think I can write a book on this. So I decided to self-publish, and then along the way, as I started talking to people about it, a publisher picked it up. We started talking about three books.

What we ended up doing is this first book is business fiction, which I love. Not everybody does, but I love business fiction. It’s a story and a way to tell about a system so that you could easily go back and grab it in your mind and remember that scene and this is how you implement it. The second book will be a deep dive into the non-fiction, real deep into the system and understanding why and how. And then the third book will be a lot about the metrics and how to measure turnarounds.

Jake: These might be some important books for business professionals to read in general. The character — the book follows a character Jack Whan if I’m correct?

Todd: Yep.

Jake: Is he someone that you’ve based off of someone in real life or is he just a collection of stories? Who is Jack?

Todd: Interestingly enough, I actually ran a shopping cart manufacturer in real life. So the book feels real because I know everything about running a shopping cart manufacturer. But it’s not actually based on individual people. What Jack is based on is essentially the corporate executive who’s facing stagnation — corporate stagnation. That’s lack of innovation, your best people are quitting, your employees aren’t motivated, everyone’s mad, and things are just stagnating. You’re either going down or you’ve stopped going up, but either way you’re in trouble.

My whole brand, my whole author brand, is basically declare war on stagnation. Every company goes through this. You’re either in a growth phase or you’re in a crisis phase, and then there’s this huge area in between — that’s stagnation. Where you’ve stopped growing. You’ve started a dip. If you wait too long, you’ll be in crisis mode. It’s so much easier to fix a company that’s still making a million dollars than to fix it once it’s losing five.

Jake: Is it mostly the leadership that is the problem in those aspects? Because I’m looking through your HOT System and it seems like it’s mostly the people on top who are not implementing the right keys to their employees. Is that what I’m getting right?

Todd: Yeah. I do a heavy top-down leadership style for the most part. I find ways to bring people in and we do a lot of continuous improvement where it comes from the ground up, but in my opinion the leaders and the director level need to be firing on all cylinders in order to drive turnarounds — especially once you get into the turnaround-type crisis situation. I think leaders are typically the problem. I had somebody ask me on another podcast the other day, how do you know when it’s time to transform? When does your company need a transformation? And I was like, if it hasn’t had one in three years. You have to do it every three years. There’s so many things that are changing. Every market’s changing. Every technology is changing. If it’s been three years since your last major transformation, then you are overdue. That’s just how it works.

Jake: Transformational leadership seems to be the key to this book. That’s a principle I’m getting an MBA right now, believe it or not, and we’re focusing on this right now. Literally this past week we just talked about this. One of the big things is it talks about creating battles for your team — the David and Goliath story. How could you do that effectively without crossing a line? How do you effectively motivate them to say, listen, we’re David fighting a giant, so that they actually feel motivated to go fight the giant — not that the giant’s going to come get us?

Todd: That’s a great question. David versus Goliath is interesting because you think of it in a few different ways. It can be you fighting against a competitor. It could be you fighting against a government regulation. It could be you fighting against a tariff. You’re fighting against a partner inside your own company — a sister company that you’re just competing with for fun. David versus Goliath could be a lot of different things, but the fact is that people respond to battles. You need to get them hyped up about fighting a battle. It’s a key tenet of leadership. Every warrior knows it. Every coach knows it. It’s been done for years and years in the athletic world, and it transitions real well into the corporate world.

You just have to find that battle. It could be nobody thinks we can get this innovation done and we need to get this innovation done. That can be the battle. But typically what works best always is picking a competitor, which is what they do in the book — picking a competitor and just making it an all-out battle. I have killer SKUs all the time where it’s “Competitor Blank Killer SKU.” That’s what we name the SKU and that is what we’re doing. We’re going directly after that competitor. Everybody knows what it is. Everybody who’s working on it knows exactly why they’re working on that SKU. We have one mission in mind — getting that SKU out the door. Then the sales guys know why they’re selling it, they know how they’re selling it, and it just develops this big battle mentality and everybody gets behind it. It’s a lot different than pitching SKU ABC123.

Jake: And just to clarify, what you’re saying is more to reduce your SKU selection — your overall product line. In the book it had 200 SKUs that were killed. That’s huge. If you look at the Costco method, I don’t think they have more than 5,000 SKUs at any time in the store, where Walmart’s got 100,000 at any point in time, right?

Todd: Yeah. SKU rationalization is a huge part of operations management, and most of this book is written towards the manufacturing perspective. SKU reduction is a huge part of that. You’ve got to do SKU reduction for the right reason. I took SKUs down from 800 to 300 at Whirlpool one time. That was super easy because they had so many bad SKUs that were just one-off here, one-off there — little iterations. There’s other times where you’re not in a situation like that and you don’t want to just cut SKUs for SKU-cutting’s sake.

What you want to do is focus on the complexity of it. You want to take out the complexity, especially in the first three quarters of the manufacturing line or the manufacturing process, so that you can get as far into the product as possible without adding any complexity. That part is like clockwork, and then you can drop complexity in at the end. Sometimes complexity — a SKU for Costco instead of the same one for Kroger — sometimes that’s okay as long as it’s real easy to drop in right at the end or you’re getting paid for the complexity. A lot of SKU reduction, the way I talk about it, is you have to get paid for the complexity. The problem is most of the time you don’t. That’s when you kill it. If you’re not getting paid for it, then get rid of it. If nobody’s buying it, get rid of it. And if they could buy this one instead of this one — you’ve got a bad SKU over here, a good SKU over here, and if you cut this you can move 95% of the volume over to the good SKU — those are great times to kill a SKU.

We talk about it as a logic filter. A lot of people just cut SKUs to cut SKUs. We’ve all been there where some guy comes in and he’s the SKU cutter and he tells you you’ve got to cut 18 of your SKUs and everybody hates that. We call it the logic filter. You put the logic filter in place and really decide how much of that SKU you’re going to move to a new one. If you lose it all, what happens? Do you really need to cut it, or can you just raise price by 21% and all of a sudden it’s a good SKU and you see if it works? You can play with each individual SKU to see if this is actually something that’s worth cutting or maybe just modifying.

Jake: Your history is with mostly Fortune 500 companies. You’ve had quite the resume. You’ve gone from American Express to Whirlpool. You’ve done ITW. You’ve got some big hitters under your resume. Is there anything that’s made you able to navigate between going from a credit agency to appliances?

Todd: Once I got into manufacturing — that’s Whirlpool, ITW, Berkshire, and now JBT Marel — I always joke around and say manufacturing is manufacturing. I went from building $40 shopping carts to building $2 million food equipment. It’s the same thing. You have a process. You’ve got safety, you’ve got quality, you’ve got materials you’re buying, and you’ve got labor you’re dealing with. Then the engineering department and the sales department — that simplifies it, but at the same time it really is like that.

In between all that, I actually went out and bought a manufacturing company during COVID, doubled it, and then sold it, and then came back to the big companies. The point with that is that all this stuff works in the smaller ones too. It’s just scalable. I was selling $500 things there. I’m selling $5 million things here. They take longer to build and there’s a lot more safety and quality involved, but it’s still just manufacturing.

Out of those 10 things in the HOT System, there’s certain ones that work really well in the small business and certain ones that work really well in the big business. That’s why I didn’t build it sequentially where you’ve got to do every one of them. It’s really built in a way that every system is self-sustaining and you can pick the three that you want to or the one that you want to this year and implement it. It’s not contingent on all the other ones.

Jake: And just to clarify, HOT stands for Hypomanic Operational Turnaround System. It’s a pretty incredible system. When I’m reading through it, it seems to make pretty good sense and it almost feels like you’re saying the quiet part out loud. It’s all the leaders — everyone knows to be the CEO you’ve got to be a little crazy. And everyone says crazy, but it’s whatever you apply to that crazy to get the peak. Since the last time we talked was shortly after COVID kind of took over, since then AI has taken over a lot in business. A case study I’ve looked at was OpenAI’s ChatGPT Sora 2. Sora 2 costs about $5 per video generation to make, and it costs nothing to make it for us as users. Sam could probably use the book a little bit, but what if I toss you into OpenAI and I go, Todd, listen man, the boat’s on fire — what can we do? Is Sora a SKU that we clip or a SKU that we change? How can we turn this around? Because obviously the US economy is being propped up by AI investment at the moment, and if this bubble pops real quick, it’s going to be rough. What can be done here?

Todd: Two things real quick. One, on the HOT System that you were talking about — it is like most of this stuff is just an expansion of current frameworks. An extreme view of current frameworks. So it’s the hypomanic view of things that you’ve already heard of, which makes it easier to learn as well. Going to the AI, it’s such an amazing time and I might even need to revise that three-year transformation thing down to a year and a half now because of everything that AI is bringing.

In my mind, anytime you can break an orthodoxy — and that’s in there too, that’s smashing orthodoxies for innovation — that’s when you can make the most money. In a situation like this where all of a sudden they can make an entire movie out of AI now, just think about what that’s going to do to these $500 million movie budgets. Now all of a sudden they’ll be able to make it and not pay actors anything if they don’t want to. And there will be a subset of the consumers that don’t care. She’s pretty, it’s a good plot, we’re going to watch the movie.

When it comes to something like Sora, he’s smashing an orthodoxy now. They can get these videos made so cheap. So how can he monetize that? Or does he even need to? Or does he just do it, drive a bunch of traffic, and sell ads off of the page as people are using it? There’s 100 different ways to make money online where you never charge anybody anything. But chances are they’ll monetize it, or they’ll build to a degree and then sell it to somebody who will monetize it.

At the end of the day, if you can smash an orthodoxy and build some systems around it so that other people can’t replicate it — that’s what he needs to do. If he’s worried that it can be replicated quick, then you need to figure out how to transition those people into a secondary product. So this is the gateway and then I’m going to sell this off of it. He probably knows way better than you and I whether other people are going to be able to replicate that immediately or not. He either has it bottled up in IP or he doesn’t, and even if he does, he’ll know if the Chinese can come in and knock it out or not. He’s probably thinking along those lines. That’s what I’d be telling him.

Jake: So you think maybe he’s kind of got it free right now just to open it up to the market so that there’s more adoption before he monetizes?

Todd: Yeah, and there’s a lot to leaving something free for as long as you can. If you can make a secondary product — there’s a good business methodology where it’s like if 100 people will buy your thing for 10 bucks, probably 10 of them will buy the thing for $100, whatever that next step up is, and another one of them will pay $1,000 for the souped-up version. It’s this rule of 10. So if he can get a million people to do it for free, there’s going to be a subset of those guys — like me, I pay $200 a month for Claude. You can get it for $20, I pay $200. So there’s a subset of us that’ll pay 10 times that much. There’s another subset that probably would pay $2,000 if they were super users. If I was him, I would probably offer the one version for free to everybody and then be looking at how I can slice up the next three premium levels and get the super users to be paying. Because you always make more money on the premium side than you will trying to sell us on doing $1.99 or $10.99 a month, or even pushing ads.

Jake: The premium users — like YouTube Premium — they make way more money on premium. That makes a lot of sense. And if you’re trying to implement a system, there’s so many young people using AI right now, so it almost creates a need down the road. What is it that happens when you get the AI with the funded version? I’ve never paid for an AI before.

Todd: Typically you’ll get a few different things. Usually you’ll get more memory, and that comes in a couple different ways. It’s either you can have longer conversations, you can upload more documents, or it’ll remember your past conversations because you know how you have to start over every time. So you’ll either get the reminders, you’ll get more capacity, or you’ll get the memory. I like it because I like to upload hundreds of documents and hundreds of pages in and have it synthesize it all and then ask questions. That’s what I like doing with AI. I can put all my books in and be like, “Hey, I need five great article ideas on continuous improvement from my books,” and then it’ll point me to chapter D and say these are some great articles. Then I can go from there and keep digging in. I love that. I think it’s so cool how it can take hundreds of pages and just kick out an answer in seconds.

There’s also some cool ones now as you start paying where you get the coding and you can make quizzes for your website and stuff like that. It’ll just kick out a quiz in minutes that you can just drop right into your website and all of a sudden it’s ready to go.

Jake: It seems like with such a fast — because AI is moving quick, every couple of months there’s a new version coming out — your principles in the book seem like the perfect thing to harness if you’re going to go after this dragon. It’s constantly changing. You need to be on top of your game. It’s never going to be the same tomorrow as it was today. We’re coming up towards the end here. There’s the one controversial element of using, in a way, mental illness to harness it and promote yourself off of it. Personally, I agree. I think that’s great — if you have it, you have it, you might as well use it. But there’s a lot of people who are also like, well, that’s not exactly what you should be doing.

Todd: I’ve actually done a whole separate podcast tour with mental health professionals and we’ve had some great conversations on this. This is what I tell them — diversity training today obviously gets a bad name, but the diversity training today goes after gender and race and religion. Those of us who have been managers for 20 years or even a year and a half should pretty well know how to deal with those three things. We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong. We might not do it right, but we know what’s right.

Mental health is not like that. People have no idea how to deal with it in the workplace. They don’t know how to react. They’re scared of it. I heard this lady speak and she was like, “I came out as queer in front of 10,000 executives and afterwards they all came up and hugged me.” That is not the reception I got when I came out as bipolar. Everybody comes up and tries to fix you. My point here is that I don’t need fixing. I wouldn’t have turned around these four businesses had I not been bipolar. The neurodivergent mind is something that should be valued in the workplace — also watched for so that I don’t commit suicide and all that stuff. There’s a lot of things that go along with being bipolar, and the fact that I hid it for so long, even after being diagnosed, hid it for eight years — that’s not healthy. That’s not healthy behavior that nobody knows, and if I’m going through something, they’re not seeing it.

There’s a lot of good things to coming out and talking about it and showing that there’s value. Not only that it shouldn’t be afraid of, doesn’t need to be fixed, but also that you can bring things like out-of-the-box thinking and hyperfocus and Grandiose Goal Setting and rapid cycling of ideas. There’s a lot of good things that go along with a lot of these different neurodivergencies. That needs to be not only celebrated but also educated, because 50-some-odd percent of Gen Z identifies as some form of neurodivergent. But the people in my generation and above who are running these companies, we’re taught not to talk about that stuff. All of us — we’re down in the 5%. We’re probably the same level of crazy and they’re just not talking about it. We just don’t talk about it and we don’t know how to talk about it.

It’s such an important topic to actually be talking about. You can be mad at me for thinking that it’s an advantage or saying the word “weaponizing.” Some people don’t like that — don’t care. It’s exactly what I did. I took it, I weaponized it, I turned around four companies, I created hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s what we do. That’s what you need to recognize — that the neurodivergent minds at your workplace can do this if you put them in a situation where they can succeed. Stop trying to fix them, start trying to harness their energy and learn something from them. And then also keep in mind that occasionally you’re going to have to course-correct them and be like, “Hey, come back. Come back into the box.”

Jake: That’s my biggest thing — getting reminded to come back. I feel that. Well, is there anything else you want to say to everyone before we take off today?

Todd: No, man. I just really appreciate it. I’m sorry for being late. The Unfair Advantage by Todd Hagopian out on Amazon right now. Pre-order. toddhagopian.com is a great place to read a bunch of stuff that I’m putting out on the book and on the methodologies. I don’t sell consulting or any of that and I’m not making any money on the books. Obviously nobody makes money on books — this is just to put it out there and to help people. So if you have questions, ping me. Twitter, you can always find me on the website, you can find me. Just come ask me questions. Let’s have some discussion on it. I love this stuff. Got more books coming out and I’d love some more ideas if people have them.

Jake: Excellent. I love your Twitter. I love your Instagram. I follow you everywhere as you know. Todd, you’re loved. You’re welcome here anytime. I’m happy to have you and I really do look forward to talking to you again. Hopefully you’re all healed up and we can get a longer show in if that works for you.

Todd: Absolutely. Definitely want to, and I owe you now.

Jake: You don’t owe me a thing, brother. Listen, man, you’ve been great. I appreciate all the time you’ve given me tonight. We’ll talk shortly. All right, man.

Todd: Awesome. Thank you.

Jake: Thanks, brother. Have a good night, man.

Todd: You too. Bye.