Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 115: JORDAN HARBINGER: What is the Future of Podcasting?

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

In this episode, podcast maven Jordan Harbinger joins me for a collaborative deep dive on the topic of podcasting. We take a close look at the current state of this technology, including a look at specific numbers: How much money are people making? How many people are making that money? Why is SMARTLESS worth $20 million a year to Amazon? We then tackle the future of the industry. Will independent audio-only podcasting as we know it today still be around in 5 years, or is this just a step toward a radical new configuration of the media landscape? (I have a theory on this which I run by Jordan for his opinion.)We get into it all...For more on Jordan and his massively successful show: https://www.jordanharbinger.com/Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 115. Now, as mentioned last week, I am on vacation right now. I'm on vacation this week. I'm on vacation next week, and I thought because of that, I would try something a little bit different with the podcast. Instead of my normal two episodes per week, while I'm away, I'm going to just post one episode per week.

So this episode is the episode for this week. Next Monday, I will post an episode for that week, and that will be it. And then when I'm back in early August, we'll get back to our normal two episode a week rhythm. So we'll give this a try. I figured if I'm on vacation, you should get a little bit of a vacation from me as well. The other thing I wanted to try out during these two vacation weeks was collaborative podcast. So this week and next week, instead of my traditional Q&A format, I will be doing collaborative. deep dives. I've done some of these off and on, so you might be familiar with the format.

It's where I have someone else on the show with me to help me go deep on a topic I find interesting. So today, the topic I want to go deep on is what's the future of podcasting? As someone who thinks and writes about the intersection of technology and culture, there are few issues more relevant than what is happening right now with the podcast revolution. I I want to really understand better what's happening at the moment. Is what's happening right now different than other media revolutions we've seen in the past? And what is going to happen as we go forward five years from now, are there going to be hundreds of thousands of independently produced podcast? Is this a technology that's going to usher in a new creative middle class or is it going to be subsumed into large platforms or conglomerate?

is the actual media technology itself going to evolve? Is audio just one step towards a more long-tail streaming-type future in which we have video and audio and good production values, but affordable production values so you don't have to be Disney Plus to put out a show that people pay for? I don't know. I want to get into this. I'm fascinated. So to help me understand this and work through my own ideas, I brought on the show today, my longtime friend, Jordan Harbinger. Jordan knows more about podcasting than just about anyone else out there because he has been at it since the very beginning.

He was podcasting in 2006 when this technology still meant you were setting up a playlist on iTunes and syncing it with your iPod. That's how far back he goes. He's been podcasting ever since. His current show, the Jordan Harbinger show, is one of the biggest interview shows out there. he's interviewing people such as Kobe Bryant, Malcolm Gladwell, Dennis Rodman. I have been on Jordan's show multiple occasions, both in person and remote. And so I've got to know him over the years and learn a lot about him from podcasting. We always have really interesting insider baseball conversations before or after our main interview.

So I said, why don't I take one of those insider baseball conversations we have and make it the actual focus of a show. And that's what we're going to do today. So we get into a little bit his history with podcasting. Not that I want to do a traditional interview, but just because the beats of Jordan's life are the beats of the podcasting industry growing. So we get a little bit of backstory. Then we go deep on what's happening right now in podcasting. We get specific.

I want numbers. If I'm this person and I have this many downloads, how much money am I making? Okay, how many shows are actually making this much money? What's the real distribution of income look like within the podcasting world? And then we look towards the future. What's going to happen in five years? We try to understand if, let's say, podcasting, which is about a billion-dollar a year industry right now, grows to be something more like the $13 to $16 billion a year that radio represents right now, a completely reasonable projection. What does that money go?

What's the impact on the sort of lower professional tier podcasters, on the big-tier podcasters? So we really get into some numbers. We do some prognostication. I lay out my own vision of the future and get Jordan's take on it. Look, if you're at all interested in technology and culture or interested in podcasting in particular, I think you'll like the conversation. Now, you can find out more about Jordan's show at Jordan Harbinger.com. Harbinger is spelled H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R.com. His podcast is called The Jordan Harbinger Show.

He also has a course on networking. You can find out more about that at Jordan Harbinger.com. As we unpack in the interview, that's actually how he got started in podcast. He was teaching college courses on how to do networking. And so returning to his roots, he's put out a free course about how to do that today. So you should check that out as well. All right. So I want to get right into the show.

But first, let me tell you briefly about one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. You've heard me say before, ideas are power. especially in today's information-driven age, and the best source of well-thought-through ideas are books. The problem is there's a lot of books out there. It's a big commitment to dive into a book, and it's not always clear which books you should buy. This is where I would recommend using Blinkist.

Now, Blinkist is a subscription service. What it gives you access to is 15-minute summaries of the top takeaways from over, thousands of best-selling nonfiction books spread out over 27 different categories. These 15-minute summaries, you can read them or you can listen to them. In audio format, they're called Blinks. They have also even added a new feature called Shorecast, which are Blinks for podcast. A very quick way to get the main takeaways of books.

So here's how I recommend you use to service. Let's say there's a topic you're interested in. there's a bunch of books on this topic. In one sitting, you can consume the blinks for multiple books on that topic. So, for example, let's say you're interested in distraction and technology. I'm looking right now at blinkus.com. Boom, a blink on irresistible, a blink on the distraction addiction, a blink on the distracted mind. Forty-five minutes later, you know the key takeaway points of all those books. You have the right terminology. You know the lay of the cognitive landscape here for this topic. And you can figure out, okay, which of these do I need to actually

buy and read. Or maybe you're not going to read them right now, but you filed away those key points so that when the time comes later that you need to know more, you need to go deeper on this topic, you know what book to go out there and get. Blinkist is like your personal intellectual assistant to help you navigate the world of books, or at least that is how I use it. So here's the good news. Right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can start a free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist. premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T,

Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. And with that, let's move on to my deep dive conversation with Jordan Harbinger. Jordan, I am happy to have you on the show. I was trying to do the math recently. And I think it's possible that I've talked to you. you via podcast more than anyone else. I don't know if that's true,

but I think that might actually be true. Oh, nice. That's a good accolade for me to have, I guess, right? Or I've wasted more of Cal Newport's time than anyone in podcasting. I have a little nostalgia because I was trying to remember the first time we talked. And it must have been a long time ago. Maybe when so good they can't ignore you was out. But it was a period where podcasting as a guest meant I would go to my basement.

I would put on my iPod headset. And I would just walk around my basement holding a laptop. I just have memories of talking to you down in my basement, my old house. And now I look around today, and there's studios and mics and mixing boards. And so now I have some nostalgia for the simplicity, at least from the guest's perspective, of the early day on podcast. And you just would grab a laptop, go to a kind of quiet room and rock and roll. I mean, it's probably for the better that's gone.

It is because that was like all recording on Skype. so the audio quality was fairly low. And then, you know, nobody had USB mics, so people were recording on their keyboard mic, and there was just a lot of bad audio and bad internet and low quality stuff. Now there's software like squadcast or whatever where you can record,

and it sounds like you're in the same room. And then, you know, when I do guests for the Jordan Harbinger show, I'll say, hey, do you have a USB mic and headphones or should I send you one? And like one in 10 people says send me one, and usually those are people. that are like, oh, I'm 67 and a retired professor,

and I don't have that because I'm the second podcast they've ever done or the first one that they've ever done. And now most people go, like, even guys in their 60s go, I definitely have a USB microphone. How old do you think I am? You know, I get email responses like that. And I used to, when people used to ask me what I do for a living, I'd say, do you know what a podcast is?

And I was recently at an Airbnb pre-pandemic. And she says, what do you do, honey? and I said, oh, do you know what a podcast is? And she goes, I'm not that old. I'm only 76, for God's sake. And I was like, wow. You know, before 10 years ago, I'd ask a 25-year-old if they knew what a podcast was. And they'd go, I feel like I've heard about that, but I just don't know anything about it.

Is it like YouTube? You know, they just had no idea. So it's very nice for those of us who've been doing this for a living to finally, one, not have to tell people what we do. And two, the technology is just leagues better. And it's funny because I look at where the tech is now and just, from an inside perspective, I go, oh gosh, I can't wait until this, this, this, and this problem are solved, and I can't believe these aren't solved yet. And we're going to have an even

easier time in the next few years recording because it's going to be more foolproof. Yeah, I could imagine that there's a lot of improvements coming down the pike, some technical and some it seems like just support probably. There's a whole secondary industry forming, which makes a lot of sense of people who can help other people get the show produced, but somehow do it at some economy of scale that actually makes that accessible. beyond just a really large show. So we are entering the time. Yeah, this is getting a lot easier to do a good show.

And, man, I got to tell you, I'm just thinking about this recently, the last Apple or whatever, laptops, you know, they're coming out probably in the next few months. There's a semiconductor shortage, but whatever. Let's assume they come out in September like they usually do or whatever it is, October. Those were probably designed pre-pandemic. You know, I don't know how quickly the design and manufacture new stuff,

but I assume there's at least like a year-long lag on the latest. technology. Well, now that everyone is on Zoom and everyone is recording podcasts as well or recording remote media even just to work, there's a lot more, it's a lot more important now to have a better mic in your computer, a better camera on your computer that can do more things. Before it was kind of like, yeah, some people use this. It's kind of fun. Now it's like a business necessity to have good audiovisual quality on a high-end laptop. So they're probably going to be putting more money, resources focus on that? I'm looking forward to that.

That's got to happen. I'm looking at the pile of gear needed just to have two mics and to record them. Yeah, that's all going to happen on two really nice chips in the future that are in your airbook or MacBook air, and you're going to be able to plug in

multiple mics into your computer and it will be able to do good conversions and mix them. Well, that's good. All right, so that's the future at tech. The big topic here is the meaning of podcast in general. What's their future? What does it mean about the future of entertainment,

but the future of digital distraction? I have some theories I'm going to bother you with at some point about the negative implications for social media and other forms of early Web 2.0 plus distraction, what it even means for civic health. So I really want to go big on this topic. And that's why I'm talking to you. You are my guru for all things podcast. So I think we probably should do a brief history.

just so we understand where you're coming from. My memory, correct me if I'm wrong, is that not only did you get into podcasting pretty early in the game, but you came from radio. Yeah, that's correct. Well, it's partially correct, and it's correct enough. So I got into podcasting in 2006, but I was, and I was a law student back then,

and the reason I started the show was because I was teaching a course on networking, like a small unofficial elective at the University of Michigan Law School. and I looked into recording my talks because people would show up and they'd be like, oh, sorry, I missed the first five classes,

can I learn from you? And I started teaching body language and nonverbal communication and things like that. And what people realized, or what I realized pretty soon was, I need to figure out a way to sort of immortalize a lecture

because if somebody comes in and they've missed the first three classes, they're not catching up with somebody else's notes because nobody's really taking notes. It was that kind of class. and they were just interrupting me with questions and interested ideas. And so I started burning my, I won't even say lectures because that's too generous of a description of somebody giving a talk at a bar, which is where we eventually held the classes because

the rooms were too hot in summer. I started burning those to CD, and I would hand out the CDs, and people would never bring them back, first of all. And I'd go, what happened to the CD? You know, I'd say, listen to this, and then these three hours of lecture, come back to the next class, you'll be caught up. I would never get them back. So I started charging like $5 deposits for them. But the problem is when you charge a deposit, unless it's a high enough deposit, first of all, if you charge a high deposit, college students aren't going to pay you. But

if you charge a low deposit, they think, oh, I just bought this for $5. So I had guys coming back saying, yeah, I'm not going to be able to give your CD back. And also I need six more. Here's, you know, 35 bucks. And I, you know, I need a handful more of these. You know, here's 20 bucks. And I would just start like not knowing, by the way, I can do math. I know I got that one. I think I got that one wrong. But like, I need a handful more of these. You know, here's, this is why I became a lawyer. So they would just start giving me money. And I'm like, I'm not going to get rich off selling five, seven, $10 CDs, even $20 CDs. And I wanted to put the files on the internet. And so a friend of mine said there's this new thing, pretty much brand new,

called podcasting where you can put MP3 files on the internet. And I just, decided to give it a go. And it started to just take off. I started thinking that, all right, now I'm going to be able to tell people where they go, get the files. And I started looking at my site meter, which was like this ancient version of Google Analytics. And I started seeing people downloading from Germany and from Canada and from South Africa. And I put a call out on the show and I said, hey, if you're downloading this and you're not in Ann Arbor, Michigan, tell me where you are because I want to know how you found us. And I started getting emails from all over the world, Germany, France, South Africa, Canada, all over the United States. And I started doing phone coaching

for people via Skype and they would pay me via PayPal. And this is sort of when I started to realize I was onto something was because I had people giving me like five grand and going, I just want to keep you on retainer. And I'm like, retainer. That's a term I should know as a lawyer. And it's like, some sales guy from a bank is like, I want you to train my whole team. They're going to do calls with you. And when this gets down, just email me, when this retainer gets down and I'll refill it. And I was like, what? So the podcast was originally me teaching a class that was sort of unofficial and then turned

into a business completely by mistake. What was the landscape in 2006? Was there a player or interface on iPods? This sounds like it's pre-Iphone, if I have my math right there. Yeah, it's pre-Iphone. So were people downloading MP3s from a website, or was there at this point the very rudimentary version of the iPod Touch podcast app or interface? How were people interacting with podcasts that early? iTunes was basically it.

So everyone in my school in college at that point had iTunes, and you would import your CDs. You could also, I believe, buy music from the Apple Store, or there was this Russian sort of IP theft site called. all of MP3.com, if you've been on the internet for a while. Yeah, so you could go there and buy a song for a dollar or something like that or 50 cents. And it was definitely like not legal, but whatever, we were poor. And we didn't really know at the time. But in law school, we were like, wait a second. We should know that this isn't right.

And so people would go into their iTunes, either on their Mac or their PC because it was for both. And you could go to the podcast section that like no one used. And it was all text navigation. There wasn't show art. There wasn't really like a search bar if memory serves. You could just go podcasts, all podcasts, health.

And then it was like a list, a text list of the 30 or so health podcasts. Half of them were active, you know, six months ago. And there was a handful of currently active ones. I mean,

there were only like 800 podcasts by the time I started. And these were like, there was like a free, from an iTunes perspective, like a free song. It was just like a free song. Yeah.

And you could sync them to your iPad your iPod, which was still the click wheel iPod, and you could download those, and you could stream them, and you could play them. And, but it wasn't, there was no, there were no iPhones. So nobody was streaming live using Edge or 3G data or anything like that. That came about a year later.

I can't believe I had forgotten that period, but you're absolutely right that the early interface when you had an iPod, not phone, is that it was a mirror of your iTunes configuration on your computer. And, oh, man, I forgot those days. So you would download and make playlist and buy songs on your computer. And then every time you plugged in your iPod, it would just sync up. So all those playlists came over.

So that's right. Okay. And that's where the original Adam Curry coin term emerged is because you were syncing these spoken word audio tracks that were being treated like songs, basically. You were syncing them on your iPod. So yeah, so you were very early. So this must have been a massive change. I don't know if it felt like it at the time. When within two years you had iPhones by 2007, iPhones 3G by 2008, and the podcast app was, I don't know when that came, but around that time, now suddenly people could download on the fly. Did you feel it at the time that something had fundamentally shifted?

So I think the podcast app, I'm going off memory here like all of us probably, but I want to say the podcast app came out several years ago and nowhere near that time. But tech geeks or it was all tech dudes. listening to podcasts, they used apps like Overcast, they used apps like trying to even think of what existed back then, probably on Android. Well, let's not even go there because that's a different platform that came out even later. On the iPhone, there were apps like, yeah, like Overcast and things like that where guys would sync their podcasts that way

using Wi-Fi or whatever or download to their computer and sync it to their phone then because data was more expensive. And so most people weren't streaming. It was probably like, in the beginning, it was probably like 5% or less, because first of all, nobody had an iPhone. It was super expensive. It was kind of considered a tech luxury gadget. Most people had flip phones. Like the Motorola razor was the most popular phone probably at that time, if it was even out back then.

So I remember telling people that I worked with at the time. Now I own the Jordan Harbinger show outright, of course, but I had some previous shows that I won't mention that were like pretty successful. And I remember telling the people that I was working with on the shows, I go, imagine that everyone gets this or almost everyone or some version of this, which is what happens. Smartphones were widely adopted. And I said, people are going to start listening to Pocket. Like, we're on the inside, we're on the cusp. We just have to stay, we have to stay on this log to use like a log rolling analogy, right? Like, maybe that's a Michigan thing. But we have to stay running on top of this barrel, you know, in tread water here, because we are really going to surf this

wave to mix metaphors. And YouTube didn't exist yet, as far as I know. I think it came later. There was Vidler at the time. So Gary Vaynerchuk was on Vidler and he's like, this is the next big thing. And then it died and YouTube took over, basically. So we thought about becoming YouTubers instead of just doing the podcast. But I chose podcasting for various reasons, which I don't know if you even care to go into, but it's, you know, that's sort of a tech choice from a decade and change ago. So this was actually a decision point, though. It was. Now, was it? ad numbers? There were no ads anywhere.

No ads. Okay. Because today there's an order of magnitude difference, right, in terms of some notion of effective CPM between what you're going to get with a podcast and say YouTube video. Yes, YouTube videos, their CPM is abysmal and as far as I understand, declining. And podcast ad CPMs are increasing. And they're already like 10x. What a YouTube impression is worth. And we can talk about why that is.

But back then it wasn't the reason we made the decision. The reason we made the decision was actually almost purely hardware based and production based. So in 2000, let's say let's fast forward to 2008, you know, everyone's got the iPhone something something. We, or the original iPhone at that point,

to produce a video for YouTube whenever that came out. I think YouTube might even be 2009 or something like that. But let's say to make a YouTube video, you needed, let's say, like a Sony handycam. And that recorded to tape. You weren't recording to a hard drive that was already digitized. So you recorded to your handy cam.

You then digitized it using specialized hardware that was also several hundred dollars. So you've already got your $1,000 handy cam. You've got your digitizer or whatever hardware thing. That took hours to do. Then you imported that into your computer and you painfully edited a video that took forever to even just like snip anything

because it was so intensive for the amount of processing power that was available. It was swapping it in out of the memory constantly. Right. The RAM, not to get geeky, but you could only hold very little of the video in your RAM on a consumer computer back then. Right. And think about it. Like, you're recording to tape and you're digitizing it. So even low-res video, it's like just brutal the amount of, like, even something that was 360P or whatever, the video quality, 240P, low-res stuff back then.

It just took hours. and you needed a video editing skill set. And I was like, I already learned how to edit audio. It's kind of easy. Video's going to be a whole thing with the jump cuts. The reason I hypothesize, the reason jump cuts where they basically just... They don't try and do any transitions on YouTube,

you know, where someone's talking and it's like, boom, boom, boom. I think that got popularized purely because it was the only thing you could reasonably do as far as an edit was concerned for like five years. And then eventually they made things like I-movie that had transitions, but they were so cliche and so cheap because they got used over and over and over that it was like screw it, just throw a jump cut in there, people. Like no one cares, it's just content.

Just like with audio and podcasting now, a lot of us use professional engineers like I do, but a lot of folks just delete stuff they don't want. And there's a transition, and it's pretty seamless. But if you've got noise in the background or background music or something like that, you can hear the cut. And it's like, whatever.

So you did that in YouTube, and I thought, oh my gosh, looking at who's popular on YouTube, it was like Jenna Marbles or whatever equivalent. So it was like women who were young and attractive at the time and interesting and charismatic. And there were guys doing tech reviews and things like that. But I was thinking, okay, I'm going to be a lawyer,

where I already am a lawyer. I work on Wall Street. Do I want my face on this website? Do I want to be spending hours longer editing my shows? Also, there's no video of the guest because I'm doing interviews. So forget that. So it's just a video of me talking on Skype. Not that interesting, right?

Yeah. And expensive and time-consuming. So I just said, screw it. Let's just stick with podcasting. This isn't our real job anyway. You know, again, I'm a Wall Street attorney at this time, so I just thought, screw it. This isn't worth, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. So I stuck with podcasting.

That was pretty much it. This is an embarrassing admission, but I do remember for many years after YouTube came out, I never used it because my assumption was, well, it's pornographic, isn't it? I just sort of assumed that- Kind of was like soft porn at the time. Yeah. Many of the videos. My assumption is like, oh, if you went to that site,

you would never load up YouTube at work or something because you would be sort of inexorably and unavoidably faced with pornographic. I just had no idea what it was. All right. That's interesting. Okay. So, but here's the transition question then. You began with, I mean, it was content here is a course.

And then at some point you shifted to the interview format. And my big memory is you began interleaving that with, the older style. What was going on in the atmosphere at that point? I mean, when did the interview format become so popular? Was that right from the beginning or was there a shift? What went through your mind when you were starting to think about, let's bring on guest and it'll be different content every week? Yeah, it was interesting because I used to start, I was outlining every episode of the show and I stopped teaching the course live, but I started just teaching it via the show because the distribution, that's where I realized the distribution was really impressive. You know, I'd have

five or six people sitting with me and I teach a course and give a lecture and record it and it would have all this noise and be kind of poor quality because I'm recording it on like a tiny Zoom recorder equivalent. I think I used a mini disc player at the time to give you an idea of how old this was. Or I could record it in my friend's basement, have a drink, don't have people asking questions, and I outline the content and then I upload it and like 800 people are downloading this, which to me at the time was absolutely mind-blowing. I mean, you did, that's more than went to school with me, or it's like half the amount of people that were like in the entire law school, I think, at the time, right? You were thinking about classroom size. Like, that would be a massive classroom because you're coming from a classroom. Like, 800 people is the biggest lecture hall I've ever thought of.

Exactly. It's like you, you couldn't fill the largest rooms in University of Michigan law school with 800 people. There's no way they would fit in there. It wouldn't even come, you probably couldn't even fit half of them in there. So I thought like, this is where it's at. The distribution on this is. bananas. And that's why I stuck, that's one of the reasons why I stuck with it. And so I just kept going and I eventually started to run out of time because it's like I'm starting for the bar exam at this point. I'm starting to gear up for a move to New York. My co-host was busy working in a lab. Like he was actually no help during the production of the show most of the time. He didn't have a great work ethic, but he also just was busy. And so was I. And so I thought, hey, you know, there's a lot of interesting people around there on the topics that we're interested in. I bet you we could get their books and courses for free if we interviewed them.

So it sort of, it had like a double, there was sort of a double win here because it was like, not only do I get to quote unquote, in air quotes here, scam a free course or book, it's not really a scam because they're getting plenty of value. They're getting advertised to a huge audience at the time, relatively speaking. But also, I get to interview them and they're essentially providing the content. So I was like, this is such a hack. life hack, right? So I started doing these Skype interviews with like coaches and dating gurus and like interesting folks and authors from all over the place who had Skype. And it just got really

interesting. And people wanted to hear me interview their favorite online media personality because everyone was blogging. And they're like, oh, I want to hear from so-and-so. He's such a good writer. And I can't even remember who these people are now. But there were a lot of bloggers that just had good audiences of several hundred or even several thousand people. And that was my initial marketing. I was like, I want to interview every popular blogger that's even remotely close to my niche, because if I do, and they post this on their blog, some of those people will discover what I'm doing. And that worked. I mean, that is the same recipe that is in play for many people today. YouTubers call them collabs, right? Collaborations. But podcasters do it all the time. They interview

each. We're doing it right now, right? You're interviewing other people that you're interested in who also have a podcast. And these were just bloggers. So I thought, Well, okay, I'm starting to get people who are familiar enough with tech that they can read a blog. I bet they've heard of podcasts, maybe even some of them listen. And if they don't, then I'll be the first one that they figure out how to use. And that worked. And we got thousands of subscribers over the years by doing this.

So it was like, okay, so I get free courses, free books, have really interesting conversations and get a bunch of new listeners for free every time. This is so great I wish I could get paid for it. And that's when I started to think about, like, how do I monetize this? you know yeah well that that shift seems important though that that shift towards experts coming on who have interesting things to say what year is this that we're talking about so i want to try to understand 2007 probably so early so early yeah so was this like was marin doing this yet at that point i don't think so joe rogan certainly wasn't i remember when people told me about the brand

new joe rogan podcast i don't know i can't remember what it was called back then but it wasn't i don't think he called it the joe rogan experience or whatever it's called now i think maybe he did, but I can't remember. He was doing comedy. I mean, it took that show a while before they started having experts, authors and whatever. I mean, it was a comedian-based. It was like a green room, green room type session.

So you were at the beginning of that. Yeah, it was, oh, yeah, it was early, early. And I remember early on, people were saying, like, you should reach out to Joe Rogan because his audio quality is terrible. because it was literally like him and Brian Redband recording on their, you know, computer mic. And I remember emailing, I think Brian Redband back in the day and going like, hey, you should use this. And I sent him like how to special order. This is how OG this is.

You had to go to guitar center and special order a USB microphone interface because you couldn't get that anywhere. No store had it. And so we paid like $120 for this M audio thing that plugged in via USB and you could plug in a real microphone. it. And the only people that had this were like guitar players and singers. And it basically only worked with garage band, which was also brand new at the time. Yeah. So, so yeah, this is before any podcaster that pretty much anybody's ever heard of other than I think this week in tech, some of those Leo Leport type guys who are super tech focused, they were there very early. And I remember seeing them in the iTunes store when I started and going like, I wonder what these guys

are about. It was like, you know, monitor reviews and like gadget reviews and stuff like that. Yeah, I've done that show. And that's another side. I mean, it's a diversion. And by the way, I sort of promise I'm not doing an interview so much as getting to a topic. But your story is actually a masterclass on the topic of podcasting. So this is a case where your story is completely intertwined with the topic that I'm trying to understand more of. My brief aside here is I remember this was, there's this early push for video podcast by Apple.

And I think this week in tech and others were like, great. we're all tech forward, let's do it. And that sort of petered out. And then somehow today, the combination of YouTube video version of podcast is working really well. And that was probably a bandwidth issue, I don't know. But that was, that's an example of something where it seemed natural at the time. Like, okay, there's video podcasts. I remember that emergence. It's like, a course. And we know today that is a very popular thing. And this week in tech had one early, etc. But it didn't pick up at the time. So it's weird. It makes it hard to prognostic it, I suppose as the lesson there. Yeah, there were video podcasts. I want to say that Apple

dropped the ball on promoting those. And also, they didn't stream that well from a lot of hosts and YouTube started to take off as well. So people were uploading these like massive video files and you'd be, you'd end up what, watching it on your phone, but in quick time and it was like, do I need this? And then once, once Apple started to realize that this was kind of a thing, you know, five years ago, YouTube had already just been, you know, 99.9% mark. at share or whatever they've got and you don't have to download the whole video to play it and data on your phone was faster. So they just, that thing kind of died on the vine. But also from a production standpoint, most podcasts were not doing video because it's still and always will be

a million times easier to create an audio file than a video file. Now, using myself as a yardstick, I didn't really start getting a lot of podcast invites. Like when I really started doing a lot of podcast. And that's been, by the way, a big part of my audience building success is there's a period relatively early on where I just started doing a lot of podcasts, and I think it really helped. But that was like 2013, 2014. That's when they came on my radar. I had been publishing books since 2006. So, I mean, I had published four books. And that fourth book had been out a while before, you know, I heard from you. I began here. Like Brett McKay was up and running at that point. It's when these podcasting, suddenly I as an author was getting invited on

to a lot of podcasts. Now, that could mean maybe just I wasn't known as an author and tell then, but it tells me probably that you had a five or six year run there where it was a very small number of people doing author expert interviews. Because at 2014, I started getting lots of requests. There were smaller podcasts and everyone was doing them. So I don't know, is this just an exponential growth thing? So it looks like all it wants, everyone was doing this, but really it was doubling, doubling, doubling. It's just doubles get big real fast. Or was there some sort of event or some sort of podcast that took off or something to set that in motion? I think it was a combination of factors.

Now, again, I'm totally like armchair quarterbacking this one. So I have very little data other than my own experience, just to sort of caveat this. But I think you're right in many ways. It was there's more general awareness about this. But also Joe Rogan's show started to become much bigger because I think he started, I don't know what year this was, but it's like he started to be the UFC common and was also talking about his podcast. So that thing was growing and being really big. And then news companies started to make podcasts and some of these major media players started to do

podcasts. And then also on top of that, the gear to create a podcast started to get really cheap. Like companies started to make $50-80 USB microphones instead of having to buy a $400 real microphone and then an audio interface and da-da-da-da. Right. You could start recording them on your friggin' phone and uploading them and like hosting a podcast got more tech-friendly and easier, a lighter lift for people who didn't really know what they were doing. Phone data got faster, so people started to stream way more podcasts and download them from their phone and not just sync their iPod touch or whatever. And additionally, I think there were probably some hits.

I don't remember when things like cereal came out. I think it was a little later, but that started to get people really interested in podcasting and the things that were there. But also advertisers started to take notes. So it was confluence of it got easier. Big media personalities were starting to do it, which built the market share, and also the technology got better for people to not only create but consume podcasts. And so that had a combined effect. But, you know, there's one sort of other thing that no one talks about. And again, I'm armchair quarterbacking this, but internet marketers started to get interested in telling other people how to generate their life coaching or real estate leads or

whatever by doing a podcast. And those marketers were pretty effective at getting people who probably had no business doing a podcast to like pay for their course and then start a podcast, which look, fine, try everything. But I think there were a lot. It's standard internet marketer stuff, make huge promises and then blame the user when it doesn't work. And I think there was a lot of that, but that got a ton of people to create podcasts, get their existing audience for their blog into their podcast, and then quitting because they're like, whoa, this is way more work.

I like writing, never mind, but they already brought in 5,000, 10,000 new people into the podcasting ecosystem who were like, oh, well, let me see what else is in here, this app where I listened to my blogger buddy, and that started to build a market. And even now, I think something like one third of Americans, which, again, most forward, generally the most,

most forward tech country in the world. That's a big asterisk by that. But let's say it's the biggest podcast friendly country in the world. Only a third of Americans are listening to a podcast regularly. So there's so much more room for growth here. And I think as more mainstream shows get made into podcasts or as more mainstream shows start as podcasts and people realize that they like listening to things, it'll start to get more and more popular. Because let's be honest, if I told you 10 years ago, hey, you've got to listen to this. It's a mystery show or a science show or an education show.

There's no, you can't look at anything. It's just audio. You'd be like, why am I going to do that? I have television. I've got cable. I've got videos galore. And even now, you're like, I have YouTube. Why am I going to listen to something?

And then you're driving once and a friend puts on his favorite podcast and you're like, this is good. And you subscribe to it and then you go to the gym and then you're riding your bike and you're going for walks and you go, ah, I get it now. I don't always need to be fully engaged visually.

I can listen to something and I actually like it better. So it's sort of this slow adoption versus YouTube, which was just TV on your computer, but also everyone. Right. Like the iPod was the first revolution along those lines of passive content consumption where people realize I can listen to music all the time, which was a pretty new idea. And then you saw people listening to music all the time. And then you get podcasts like, well, it doesn't have to be music. Well, you've never heard of a walkman or a minidisc player or walk person nowadays, 2021.

It's a walk person. But like, you know, most people used it playing sports. You didn't walk around your office with a walkman. But now, you know, yeah, you're right. You can now you've got your phone with you already. Just put some music on there versus it was kind of just music fans that had a minidisc player or a bright yellow cassette player strapped to their belt. Like, you've got to love music to have that thing floating around your car or whatever.

It was for jogging. Or I had a mini-disc player, but yeah, it was for jogging. It was for exercising. Yeah, you would make your mix. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So there is always a latent market for secondary information consumption just because so much of our life is spent doing non-fully cognitively engaging primary activities, but there was a tech gap.

So we didn't even realize that was there until kind of the iPod came along and said, oh, if you make it easy enough, people will listen to things all the time. And then we get iPodcast. It was like, well, there's other things they might want to listen to than just music. So, okay, so this is good. So this gives us a trajectory of the history of podcast. And so then we get to 2012, 2014, and you have internet marketers that are saying for $100, I'll teach you how to start a podcast.

And for $1,000, I'll teach you how to start a course to teach people how to do podcast and the pyramid grows. Let's do a little, I think a little economics for my listeners will be useful to try to to understand actual money amounts so that they can understand right now where the industry is before we go to where it could go in the future. So if I'm correct, and I hope so, except doing some of this. So our core number here to think about is for ads, a CPM. So cost per mill, meaning thousand, which is how many dollars per thousand people that are going

to hear an ad, right? So is this, I think this is the core number, right, when trying to understand how to, putting aside other types of revenue. just for passive advertisers. This is the core number. Okay. It is, although I will nitpick one thing. You mentioned it's the cost per mill, cost per thousand people who will hear an ad.

With podcasting, it's actually download or even stream. It doesn't mean listen. And there's a difference here for people who aren't super familiar with those. You probably have podcasts on your phone that you've downloaded, but you've never listened to. If you've got the Jordan Harbinger show queued up on your phone and there's an episode that you didn't think was interesting, but you still downloaded it and you plan to delete it later, I still got paid for every ad that is in there, you know, that fraction of assent or whatever it is from you.

So thank you for that. But that's an important distinction because if you're a YouTuber, you don't get paid for somebody thinking about playing your video, right? You only get paid if somebody hits play. They don't necessarily have to see the ad either. They can quit halfway through and it counts as a play. But usually there's some sort of dynamic insertion

that only inserts when you're playing, yada yada. But what this means is, it's important for the CPS. because what it means is the CPM for a podcast ad that is actually listened to is something like 9x or 10x the actual amount that you're getting paid per thousand downloads. So if I'm looking at, there's some new technology that does this

and they say, okay, we're only going to pay you for the amount of people we think heard the ad, but your CPM is 250 bucks. Yeah. Whereas if I sell, and ad wholesale and you pay for downloaded or streamed or listened to, my CPM's like $25. So it makes the pricing different, but it also sheds light on how valuable a viewer of a YouTube video is versus a listener of a podcast. Because if you're a viewer of a YouTube video and you're

getting $3.00 CPM and I'm getting, let's say, $250. Let's say you're getting $2.50 for a view of a video just to keep the math straight. My listeners are worth a hundred times more. more than your viewers, which means that a thousand people listening to a podcast is worth like a hundred thousand people watching a YouTube video. Now, that is not actually true, but that's how the math works out. Yeah, and what's interesting about it is, and this might have to do with the ad form, because if you have a full YouTube version of your podcast, a lot of ad agencies are going to count those views of the YouTube like a download. So in other words, there's something about the host delivering the ad, I guess, that where's the value is? So if you listen to it, you're watching the host, the host is delivering an ad on a YouTube video, and that's much more valuable, I suppose, than a banner pops up.

Totally. It cuts to one of those skip, skip and five. Skips and five seconds. Like a Lexus ad in the middle of your favorite podcast. Exactly. Those are worth way less. And you're right, the host read is where the value is. Now, again, slight nitpig just for the sake of being accurate here. If you have a, a YouTube-based podcast where most of your views are YouTube, you will generally get a lower CPM than somebody who's mostly get audio. Like, if you look at my YouTube channel for the Jordan Arbinger show, I've got like, I don't know, freaking 37,000 subscribers. Like, no one is subscribed to my YouTube channel. And no one's watched, very few people are watching that stuff.

But my audio-only impressions are obviously far higher, and those ads are worth thousands of dollars each. Whereas I know a lot of people that have the inverse proportion, where their audio downloads are sort of few, but their YouTube impressions are very high. Like 400,000 people are playing each video. They're making far less money than somebody who has an audio podcast show that's half the size. Yeah, fair enough.

And I've seen that before. Yeah, if you have a big audio podcast, it's almost like the advertisers or the intermediate agency is saying, okay, if you have some extra listens or views of this show on YouTube, you can throw those into the count, but it's almost like you're being thrown a bone a little bit. But if you're primarily, and you would think it shouldn't be that way, that if it's you doing the read on YouTube, it shouldn't matter.

But I don't know if that's about a prejudice against who's watching YouTube or something about the form. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, again, nobody really knows. But I would say, I would say in large part you can look at YouTube comments to get a decent sample of who the audience is. Now, obviously the whole YouTube audience is not the people leaving comments. That's a very, let's say, special type of person that leaves a comment. And the majority of them are like kind of horrible.

Hopefully not horrible people, but horrible comments, of course. It's not an Algonquin round table going on down there. Right, exactly. And with podcasting, it's harder to leave a comment. So my sample size is totally different. But I will say, like, out of a thousand emails every month, one of them is like, I take issue with this one thing that you said, but I otherwise love the show.

And then everything else is 100% positive. Whereas YouTube, it's almost like, you're fat and ugly and I hope you die in a fire. and then there's one comment out of the 300 that's like, I liked this, thanks for posting it. You know, it's just really horrible sort of thing. I think that it must be,

I don't think it's necessarily because of those people. I think I hypothesize YouTube is a younger audience and also an older audience. And what I mean by that is I think there's a higher concentration of, let's say, 25 to 45 professionals

that are employed listening to podcasts, and there's everyone is watching YouTube, but that means there's also like 65-year-olds that are bored at home and don't know how to like use your promo code to go and buy that cereal. And there's also a bunch of 14-year-olds that would love to go buy that cereal, but they don't have a credit card and they don't have any money and they don't have any income. And that makes up a huge number of plays. And there's also a bunch of people from Argentina that can't buy your cereal because they don't ship there. Whereas podcasts, it's like 25 to 55 age.

Most of them are employed. They're all in the U.S. and Canada. So the sponsors are willing it's just so much more targeted for those people. And it's more of an old-fashioned advertiser relationship or they care about audiences. Again, sample of one, but my ad agency really has no problem selling out my ad slots. And I think in part, they're like, okay, Cal, this is probably a bunch of 32-year-olds,

you know, in the tech sector with disposable income without families yet. Like, yes, we will pay all the dollars because they will go by whatever. But let's do the economics. So you mentioned, just a rough number. If we're just talking about the CPU

per download, you said $25. That's kind of market rate. Yeah. Like a show that is quote unquote smarter, like a smarter audience will get a higher CPM depending on how it converts.

So industry-wide CPM, it's probably like 25 bucks, whatever. Huge shows have lower CPMs because it's harder for an advertiser to stomach the buy. at, you know, they don't want to pay $10,000 for an ad or $13,000 for an ad on Mark Marin because it's just too much to test. They might want to spend like nine so they get a deal and the

CPM is lower. But also a show in the science or education category like yours, that's going to be maybe even like a $35 or $40 CPM. Whereas a show that's about two dudes drinking beers in their garage and talking about sports from one specific town, that might be more like a $15 CPM. just because of who the audience is and how it converts for the product that's being sold. So let's do some math here. Let's start with Kevin Kelly's 10,000 true fans as being what you need to be a middle-class artist. So if we do that math, let's say you're doing a one-hour show a week. You're fitting four ads into it.

So you're getting $100 CPM total per show. and if you had 10,000 true fans that downloaded your show, that's $1,000 a week about $4,000 a month. So does this seem reasonable so far as a starting point? And that's a fair-sized crowd, right? But if you have like 10,000 true fans, we're the category of legitimate side hustle, but not a job. Right, yeah.

Unless you live in a really cheap area, like you've managed to do that digital nomad thing and you're like living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, you know, $4,000 a month. Not bad, right? You're probably not even buying a house. You're renting someplace. You're probably doing all right at that point.

So then... If you're sold out. Yeah. So, okay, now when we think about good, like middle class, upper middle class creative career, so if $10,000, we're talking about 10,000 fans, let's jump up to... Now let's jump up to 50,000.

So each episode is getting 50,000. Now you're going to pass the top 1%. But I think something is completely reasonable for a creative that has an audience or has, you know, it's not, it's not a crazy number. I think it's a crazy number. You can correct me if I'm wrong here if you're just coming out of nowhere. But let's say you are actually a well-established, talented creative individual that has a good, what you're doing is a good match for podcasting. Because I'm interested in that class. So it's a creative middle class.

So it's talented creatives, but not superstars. So now if we're talking a $100 CPM per episode, but we're getting $40,000, or let's say $50,000, 50,000 downloads a week. Now if I'm doing this math writing, I am using a calculator. So that gets you to $20,000 a month. Right. And I want to explain to people because you said $100 CPM. They're like, I thought it was 25. There's four ads.

I was doing four ads. Yeah, I'm thinking one hour and support. Yeah. Just so people can follow the math. The other thing is, the other asterisk by this that always makes you and I, I'm sure, cry every month is we're not taking that money home. Like, there's a sales team that has to take their bite. And a lot of those companies, networks, whoever's doing the sales, they're taken between 15 and 30%. Yep.

So let's do that. So I'm going to bring this down and take off 30. Let's take off 30% here because, look, you're focused on the art. You don't want to be doing the ads. all right, $14,000 $14,000 a month. This is a good living. For an artist, like you're a comedian or something right there. It's lawyer money.

That's like, not Wall Street, not Wall Street partner, but it's like really good. Okay, so that's an interesting. Now, so not that you know these numbers, but if we wanted to conceptualize what type of podcasters that are out there now, what type of podcast that's in that sort of middle class creative range, is this, for example, where like the good but non-finding famous comedian podcast probably are. Like, what is in that range do you think? That that fifth, what type of show would you guess is in that lawyer money range? Yeah, there are actually very few shows that are in that range. The top 1% of podcasts by downloads, according to Libson, which

is a host that has like, you know, probably 100,000 friggin' podcasts hosted on there. So the data is their sample size. The top 1% is 37,000 downloads. So if you have 37,000 downloads or more, you are in the top 1% most downloaded podcasts. So that just gives us a frame for saying like, oh my gosh, that's, right. The numbers are not like YouTube where you've got to have like 10 million and you're in the top 1%, something like that. Yeah. I would say, oh, go ahead. So yeah, I was just going to say, yeah, there's two different forces there.

One, there's a, there's not a, there's not a four billion download upper end. Like, YouTube has these unbounded upper ends which mess up those type of things. But we don't know the denominator here for podcasts. I know the Lib Cine data, but, you know, it's not the denominator of people who are seriously making a swing at podcast and, you know, have an expertise or talent that might be well suited. It's a big denominator that includes everyone who took those internet marketing courses. I don't know how much that skews it. So you think that's pretty rare, though. I mean, like, I'm thinking about comedians that come on Joe Rogan show.

They all have podcasts, but they're not Joe Rogan. Is that the world they're in or is maybe the ones that are coming on? his show are in some intermediate, even higher type range. No, I would say the vast majority of those folks are going to be $50,000 or less downloads per episode. And the thing is, even if they get that Joe Rogan pop, they've got to, you know, there's all kinds of challenges as a creator, right? You've got to retain your audience, yada, yada.

There are many creators that I know that are doing very well through ads and other courses. and they're, you know, at the $20,000 to $50,000 download mark, 50,000 downloads, like if you think about it, is actually a ridiculous number of people to be downloading your stuff, right? Like, there are many arenas that cannot fit that many spectators in them. So it's a great number.

I would say that most of the shows that you think that must be huge, that comedian is so popular, they're probably 30 to $50,000. Now, there are some that are an exception. Guys like Theo Vaughn who've been on Rogan a bunch of times, you know, and you look at his YouTube or his podcast audience, that's a big, big show because he's, whether you like his comedy or not, he's obviously a very well-received comedian, talented.

There's a lot of people listening to that. But they're, by absolute numbers, there aren't that many of those guys. But yeah, I would say a lot of the people that you recognize from around the podcast circuit who have podcasts, they're in that range. Yeah, they're in that lawyer money range. And then the top sort of comedian podcasters who aren't the Marens or the Rogans, but they're like Andrew Schultz or these type of people, those are probably six-figure, six-figure type numbers. So now it's, they might be doing law partner money, maybe. They might be.

I don't want to speak out of school and give away someone's numbers if I know who they are. Yeah. So I don't know. But I would say you might be surprised by some of the people. audiences that you think are really, really big, you might go, wait a minute, that, you know, you might look at somebody who's a celebrity in the, let's say, the self-help space, and you think this is somebody who must have millions of downloads, and they're getting like 80,000 downloads an episode, and it's every 30 to 60 days, you know, it's just not that big, and some of that

is because the market for podcasting is smaller than most people think. Right. And, okay, so then let's jump up to the next level. This is why I'm terrible at, I'm terrible at future looking, which is why I have you on the show. But I remember when SmartList, the podcast SmartList came out. It's not that old.

It's whatever, two years old. And it's a celebrity interview podcast. It's Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and blinking on his name from Will and Grace. Sean Hale. Right.

And it's funny. They have their celebrity friends on, but it's funny because, especially Will and Jason have kind of like an improv background, so they can do the on-the-fly jokes. I remember, I think when that came out, are they just bored?

Like, this makes no sense. Like, they're working in this world of TV and Netflix movies and series that the money is just so much bigger. Like, why would you waste time on this? All right, I was completely wrong. What's, you actually surprised me with the number you told me off there. What's the deal they just signed? The deal they signed is, I want to say,

let's double check this because I feel like I just saw it, but I want to say it was $80 million. So they weren't dumb. I was wrong. I was 100% wrong because Sean Hayes and he's a baitman. Yeah. Will Arnett was not seen, he was not seen decadillion dollar off. That's, that's, you know, Tom Cruise, Will Smith movie money, not Will Arnett hosting Lego Masters money. So I was completely wrong about that. All right. So in what universe does that number make sense? What's the economics there?

The economics here are, this is going to be controversial and some people are going to go, you don't understand how such and such after effects of the stock, this and that. This is Amazon's play to say, hey, we have relevant podcast presence because they didn't even buy this show exclusively. They got it windowed. And what that means is the episodes for SmartLus come out a week earlier on Amazon than they do everywhere else, which like no one cares about, right? You know, unless you're a super fan, you just don't really care. But for the super fans of that show, they might get the Amazon app so they can hear it a week before everyone else. I don't really know what percentage of an audience is going to do that,

but that percentage is not worth 80 million. The other thing they did is they only advertising rights to it. But you would have to sell that show for, I'm going to go with decades before you make the money back. What are their downloads, do you think? I'm betting just from where it sits in the iTunes charts and the fact that it's three celebrities and the fact that I've gotten price quotes, which I'm not supposed to disclose. I would say they have a high six-figure,

low seven-figure audience. So let's think it's got to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 to, let's say, a million more than that. And that's a wide enough range where I probably won't get in trouble for disclosing anything. So it's huge. but it's not even close to Joe Rogan.

And it's, which is fine because Joe Rogan got bought for what, a hundred million. I think this was more Amazon purchasing eyeballs and not even from the smartless audience, but purchasing media, purchasing the attention, trying to stay in the game by making a big-ass purchase like this. Also, they didn't have much of a choice. They bought Wondery, which was a network that has a bunch of crime shows and story-based shows as well.

but Spotify's just been opening up the bank vault and being like run in and take whatever you want folks I mean they've just been Pablo they went Pablo Escobar on podcasting and are just handing out money left and right to pretty much anybody who needs who is selling anything right so like you look at this and this is a wee we we measuring contest in many ways between Spotify and Amazon because they want to become bigger in this space and then when Amazon goes to acquire other news networks or goes to acquire top talent, they can go, don't you want to be on a network with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett and Sean Hayes? And that top talent says, absolutely I do. So this is more like a flagship that they've purchased versus something that's going to be ROI positive, right?

They bought the Lambo so they can get all the kids looking their way when they cruise down the street. They're not under any delusion that this is going to be ROI positive. And people will argue, they'll go, well, when Spotify bought Rogan, their stock price went up this much. Okay, cool, but stock prices go up and down. And also, you don't just get to pocket the money you make overnight. Like, that's not how stock prices work. So they're never going to earn out Rogan either, most likely. They might if you count the stock price going up, but that's not how you do finance on Wall Street.

I know from experience. So that's also a flagship. And that's what got them able to get in the room with a bunch of other top talent and go, yeah, well, we can advertise your new show that you do with that. us on Joe Rogan. Hey, Joe Rogan's with us. And then they bought this network and they bought a hosting company like Spotify is making big moves. And so this smartless acquisition was just as much to keep them out of it. I bet you they had competing offers and one was Spotify and Spotify said 60. I just looked it up. It was. Oh, you did. Okay. So Spotify, Spotify had an annual number,

20 million annual, which I think is a little easier to think about. And Amazon was offering like a Rogan deal. Just here's the money for the rights. I don't know how many years. But I did the numbers on a million simple numbers, like a million downloads, a $100 total CPM, two episodes a week. You know, it works out to about $10 million a year. So I guess that makes sense.

Like Spotify was offering, we'll give you a 2x earnings multiplier. Right. And I'm sure they've got to stick around for a few years, but it's probably like four or five. I don't think anybody in their right mind is making a 10-year deal for podcasting or for entertainment talent

that might, you know, hopefully not. I like those guys, but, you know, people, things happen in their careers or their lives, or you don't want to rent anybody for that long. Let's take a quick break from our conversation so I can tell you about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, and that is Public Goods. Now, Public Goods is the one-stop shop for sustainable, high-quality, everyday essentials made from clean ingredients, at affordable prices. We're talking everything from coffee to toilet paper to shampoo to pet foods.

Public goods is your new everything store thoughtfully designed for the conscious consumer. Now, I think this thoughtfully designed piece is worth underscoring. The products all have a standard aesthetic and it is a really good looking one. As I've said before, I have now brought the public goods brand hand soap to my Deep Work HQ because, you know, people are coming into my office now that the pandemic is getting back under control of vaccines around here and it makes me seem a lot cooler. It is a really good looking bottle of soap. You look at that and you say, huh, that cow, he seems like someone who sort of has his act together.

You must be someone who's pretty artistic and smart. What I'm trying to say here, guys, is it's a beautiful looking product and you can get all of these different household staples all with this same consistent beautiful look and have the clean ingredients and have the sustainability piece to it as well. All right. So here's the good news, rather. I have worked out an awesome deal just for you. You can receive $15 off your first public goods order with no minimum purchase. That's right. They are so confident that you will absolutely love their products and come back again and again that they are giving you $15 to spend on your first purchase. So you have nothing to lose here. Just go to public goods.com slash deep or use to code deep at checkout.

Now that's P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com slash deep to receive $15 off your first order. I also want to talk about our good friends at FourSigmatic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four-Sigmatics mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with Lyons main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. As I've talked about before on the show, the way I like to use for Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee

is as part of a deep work ritual. I make that cup of coffee only when I'm about to do a particularly deep session of deep work. Why? Because it has a unique physiological signature because of the lion's mane mushroom, because of the Shaga mushroom, it's going to feel different than another cup of coffee.

My brain then learns, oh, and I feel that, feel. I taste that coffee. It's smooth. It's nutty. Whatever. But I have that physiological impact of that ground mushroom. Oh, I know it's deep work time. Boom. Over time, I learn for that brain to fall into that mode much quicker. Now, there's a million ways you can use For Sigmaics mushroom coffee, including just enjoying a great tasting cup of coffee, but that's the way I like to use it. I now associate it with my deepest deep work sessions. Now, we've worked out an exclusive offer with Four Sigmaic on their best selling mushroom coffee. It's just a for Deep

Questions listeners. You can get up the 40% off and free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, but you must go to 4Sigmatic.com

slash deep to claim the deal. And this offer is only for deep questions listeners. You will not find it on their regular website.

So you'll save up the 40% off and get free shipping if you go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-C-C-com slash deep and fuel your

productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. And with that, let's get back to our conversation with Jordan Harbinger. Yeah.

So, you know, smart by them. So 20 million a year, and then that's seven million-ish person, and that's better than they're getting. So let me ask you this question then about the current state affairs

before I ask your, some predictions for the future. I had earlier been thinking, oh, the podcast market, I mean, to me, a key aspect of it when I thought about it, is that it's still a superstar market in the sense of superstar economics, which is saying there's just disproportionate rewards for the people at the top versus everyone else. But I had this thought that, yeah, but that peak is, it's a lot broader in podcasting than, let's say, in TV or radio,

because there's just so many more opportunities. I don't know. I'm sort of looking at these economics now and thinking it's not that different. There is like a very small number of people who based off of basically incredible, talent for the medium. I mean, Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, what Rogan learned to do. And these are people that, it's not just people off the street. They've spent their entire life in improv and performing and building up an audience of reputation and honing their ability. Or Conan O'Brien's another example where he's just, okay, spent his entire adult life learning how to do this on-the-fly, improv comedy, and interviewing.

There's a small number of superstars to make a ton of money. And then there's this slightly wider cast of people making lawyer money. And then there's everyone else making almost no money. that actually sounds to me a lot like TV. There's like the stars of the shows who are making a lot of money. There's the regulars on the soaps that are doing well, and then there's no one else really makes any money. So I don't know. Am I right here that this is more similar to TV than I thought.

It's incredibly talent-based. It's incredibly disproportionately distributed. It is a small number of people make a ton, a slightly large amount of people make lawyer money, and that's about it. So it's not as if this is a radically new, let's say creative wealth distribution mechanism. It's just similar to what TV was doing

or what movies was doing just in a different medium. Yeah, let me look up Conan O'Brien and see. Okay, so I googled Conan O'Brien annual salary. Let's take this with a giant grain of salt because this is one of those websites where people probably just talk out of their, you know what, right? They say he makes $12 million a year.

And that's, you know, it's possible, right? on TBS for him to make that. I am not making that kind of money, but the smartless guys are, and that's outside of their movies. So those guys, Conan, the smartless guys, Rogan, they're on that, like, top tier,

and they're just are not that many people doing that. Even other big podcasts, they're owned by, like, the New York Times, and you're not taking, if you're the host of that show, you're getting paid a nice salary, but you're not taking home the lion's share. You're getting a single digit percentage of that revenue, right? Right. This was like the Ezra Klein decision.

decision. Yeah. Yeah, I'd rather work, I'd rather be a columnist for the Times than maximize the revenue, which he probably could have by taking the show. yeah well he owned vox or at least part of it and was on vox and was easily i did the math for him he was easily making like a million bucks a year and he probably took a nice pay cut and certainly limited his upside but now he works for the new york times which i assume for a guy who's a journalist who started his own media company probably because it was hard to get a job at the new york times he's probably like this is a dream come true right for him that's his dream job yeah he's a policy wonk and he's writing a policy walk column for the new york times so yeah that's That's what, it's like turning down the lucrative show to go on S&L.

Right, yeah, sure. Because, yeah, I'm a comedian. I want to be on S&L. You know, they're not, SNL is not going to pay me $2 million a year. It's not going to pay me as well as a soap opera, but come on, I'm a comedian. That's what I want to do. Right.

And then you get the respect of all your, so like, but then there's like John Oliver, right? And he is decidedly on a lower tier television-wise. I don't even know if he has a podcast, which is probably a sign. He's getting paid like, I don't know, $4 million bucks a year or something like that. in podcasting, there are several show hosts that are making that kind of money, so the John Oliver money, but the John Oliver money ain't the Conan O'Brien money. I see. If that makes sense.

It's slightly broader. In other words, it's harder to get a TV show that pays $4 million a year. There's less of those than there are podcasts making four million years. It's not huge differences, but maybe it's a little bit broader with pod. Just because of limited slots, there's HBO only have. has three shows, talk shows, you know, and he has one of them. Yeah. And, okay. Yeah, and a lot of those are owned by media companies, right? Like John Oliver's show may be owned by HBO, but that guy's taken home four million or four and a half million or whatever it is. If you're doing a show and your

podcast makes four and a half million, but it's owned by Vice or something, you're not getting four million of those dollars, right? You're getting 200,000, if you're lucky, of those dollars, right? They're paying a salary. So then below that is like the newscaster money where you think they're probably super rich because they read the weather to you at night, but really it's just kind of that lawyer money type job, but it looks very, very cush. And the person who's the nighttime anchor on a national network is making decent money. And that's sort of where podcasts are. But then you're right. Then there's the kind of like intern reporter doing a story on the floods and is out there in the rain in Miami or the suburbs of Miami. And that's every other podcaster where they're doing

it. They want their crack at it. And they're making a couple grand a month. But when you see them doing another job, right, working at another place, you shouldn't be surprised because they're, the thing that you thought they were known for is not paying the bills. And that's like everyone else in podcasting. Well, or everyone else making a serious go of it. So like everyone else who has a particular expertise or talent and is actually, you know, in a disciplined way producing a podcast. Then there's that huge bottom of the iceberg, which is the millions of people that just sort of try it. And they're just on the USB mic. And okay, that makes sense. All right, so then what's the future?

So in other words, here's my big question. Is podcasting, is it some unique combination of attributes, the asynchrony, the audio only, the mobility, its interaction with phones that we already have with us and universal wireless brand? Is there something unique about it that means it is now going to be established in more or less this form as an important medium into the future, just like TV has stuck with us for a very long time, movies stuck around for a very long time? or is it a stepping stone towards a different type, a completely reconfigured future, that also the streaming wars and the collapse of Cable TV is part of, and it's part of a democratization or reorganization.

In other words, like five or ten years from now, is podcasting going to be like podcasting or what we're seeing now is a step towards something new? Yeah, look, I'm going to be biased because it's very self-serving of me, and belief bias is strong in me, right? Because I've been doing the Jordan Harbinger show or something similar for like 14 years. now, and I don't want podcasting to die because if it does, I'm screwed. So with that caveat, I will say podcasting is here to stay, but it's going to look different. And it's probably going to largely replace a lot of radio, but it already has largely replaced a lot of radio listening

for a certain demographic. Radio is still like a $16 billion or whatever industry. And podcasting is like about to crack one billion. So there's a lot more room to go there. However, And yes, it's democratizing it. It's easy for other people to create. But the lion's share. And lion's share isn't even the right term because it's basically nothing is going to go to the bottom level, the bottom tier of the guy in the garage listening to,

or talking about Boston sports, drinking beers with his buddies on a USB mic. They're not going to monetize at all. And their host might allow them to monetize, but they're going to make like $68 a week. You know what I mean? It's going to be so little. They're not going to be doing their own reads. It'll pay for the beer if they're lucky.

And then there's going to be these higher tiers of people that the networks fight over. People in the six to seven figure audience per month, I should say, show, or 50,000 plus downloads. Those people are in high demand, especially if they're producing one or more shows per week. Those people get fought over by the audience. And then as you start to get multi-six figure audiences, I will tell you that networks are starting to go, hey, oh, they're giving you 70%, I'll give you 70%, but I'll also give you $100,000 in stock. Oh, they're going to give you $100,000 in stock, fine. We're going to give you $100,000 in stock and 70%, but we're going to give you a signing bonus

of $50,000 too. So you can start to leverage offers, just like any other job against these other networks. And the reason they do that is because they know that they need to sell your impressions to catch those ad dollars. And also because if you're a big enough name, they'll add you to the website and people will go, oh, so-and-so was on there, okay, I should probably join their paid hosting platform, and my name will be next to this person. And they know they can use your impressions on your show that are unsold

to advertise their other shows, essentially for free, because a lot of networks do that. They'll say, can you run an ad for this true crime show we're producing? And if you're a smart creator, you say, what's my CPM for this? And they'll go, fine, $12 or $25. But usually they just ask if you'll do it for free because you're on the network. And that works most of the time. And sometimes it's even written into your contract. So, but if we, this is interesting, if we go from $1 billion to $16 billion,

which I think is completely reasonable, right? The radio number. All right. So you're saying, where's that money going to go? Well, one place that money is going to go is the people in the six figure plus are going to get even higher paid. Right. The top 1%.

Yeah. And the people drinking beer in the garage, it's not going to go to them because it's not professional quality content. There's not the, whatever, there's not the spark. There's not the talent there. Where does the rest go? So what happens,

for example, to the five-figure download people? Does there will change? The money has to go somewhere. If there's 16 times more revenue being generated, is this going to be more? Is that what you think is going to happen? There's going to be more creators.

Yeah, there's going to be more creators because as money moves into something, and this has been an interesting phenomenon to watch, actually, because I see a lot of radio, people going, oh, my network, my station, they let me go. How do I join podcasting?

And I'll say, oh, let me help you. You know, I'm happy to. You've been a reporter in Denver for 20 years. Like, this is great. You probably have a lot of experience. But if they're a reporter and they're just doing the news, I have bad news for them, which is your skill set is now a commodity that is not really in demand.

and a lot of morning show guys are finding this out, right? So there's, you know how like the most popular show? Maybe it depends where you grew up, but where I grew up, there was this morning show called Drew and Mike. It was like dumb jokes, Detroit area. They were really popular, you know? And they were in Detroit.

And everyone in my high school sort of listened to them because it was dumb young guy juvenile, you know, potty humor or whatever that we'd listened to on the drive to school. Well, unfortunately for them, once you move out of that market where everyone's just listening to you because you're what's on in the morning on that channel that everyone listens to, you are no longer, the market doesn't really want you. The market wanted you in Detroit when there wasn't anything else going on, but now the market doesn't want you. And a lot of these morning show folks have figured this out when they turned their show into a podcast. They're like, wait a minute, no one's listening to this other than a few fans in Detroit who have bad reception in the basement office where they work or whatever. And there's been outliers like Opie and Anthony. who went from wherever they were doing their show to like serious XM and just killed it until they imploded. But those morning show type guys are these reporters and things like that,

they're no longer employable, kind of, unfortunately. But the creator that has a show that's all about model trains or like Warhammer 40K or whatever those hobby things are, like Dungeons and Dragons, there's a massive market for those folks. But that's not a radio guy. That's a guy who owns a game shop outside of Boyce's, Idaho that figured out podcasting and is pretty good at it and knows a lot about this random niche subject. It's not two guys who are kind of funny. So if you're one of these,

let's see, you're a 50,000 download a week type guy right now, five years for now, there'll be a lot more money in podcasting, but you think roughly the CPMs you're seeing, et cetera, is not going to be that different. Well, I was going to go there. I think CPMs are likely to drive upwards as money gets thrown in. And the reason I believe that is not just completely self-serving, It's because I'm seeing it right now. Advertising is up across the board, not just podcasting, but ads in general are up 25% right now. And some of that's, you know, pandemic budget from companies that we're thinking, uh-oh, are we going to have to lay everyone off going, oh, it looks like we're coming out of this.

We've got a vaccine and some treatments for COVID. Great. Let's start advertising again. So ad money is up, which means, but I'm sold out. The Jordan Harbinger Show is sold out and has been sold out for months. So what does my network do? They go, well, if you want to advertise on Jordan's show, you've got to pay $30 CPM now. You've got to pay $35 CPM now.

And these companies are going, okay, great. If he converts, we'll do it. So the top 1%, we might see CPMs go from 25 to 30 or 35 or even higher. And I've seen CPMs as high as 55 bucks for some of the ads that I run on the Jordan Harbinger show from certain brands that want to do certain things. and companies with bigger money that advertise on the radio, like Microsoft or whatever, they're starting to come at Amex, they're starting to come into podcasting and go, well, if we're going to spend money talking on the radio,

and they can't really measure impressions that well, it's all survey-based, and we're hitting a bunch of people that we don't really care about, like retired folks that aren't buying Microsoft products for the office, why don't we target people who work in professional environments? Because that's who we're really trying to reach anyway. We'll pay you four times as much because we're cutting out the croft and we're reaching a more targeted audience. So they're spending big time.

And those high spends also drive CPM way up because it's not just like a serial brand now that's trying to get there, we call it direct response advertising where they're like, buy this cereal, use the code Jordan at checkout for 10% off. This is Microsoft going, yeah, we're not going to give you a code.

We just want people to know that Teams is integrated into Windows 11. Tell everyone that and do it 100 times and here's $200,000 to do it. Yeah. You know, that's how that's, so that drives CPMs up too because you get these big budgets in there that just take tons of inventory. Is all five years from now, will all professional or most professional podcasting be on networks? And if so, how many networks do you think they'll be? Yeah, that's a great question.

It's almost, it's almost the wrong question. Yes, but I think platforms are more likely to take over than networks. And what that means is Spotify, they're making such big moves. Probably don't have to recover that ground. we already sort of talked about that. Apple's still sort of asleep. They're doing other things that probably aren't going to gain them that much market share. They've got subscriptions, but there's also like tons of other people doing that. There are certain apps that are trying to compete. But yeah, things like Spotify and even Facebook now are getting into

podcasting. And it is going to hopefully, in Amazon, you know, we mentioned them earlier too, we're hoping podcasters in general are hoping it doesn't turn into what streaming has turned into where if you want to watch this, it's on Netflix, but if you want to watch that, it's on Discovery Plus, and then you get your Disney Plus for the kids, but also you're going to want HBO Max now.

You know, that's annoying for a lot of folks, although I've got a bunch of those services. Podcasters generally want their show to be available to as many people as possible on as many platforms as possible. Spotify has been sort of siloing some shows. That's why you can't watch Joe Rogan anywhere else. But I think they got a lot of flack

from that. And also they realized that that cut the audience way down. They don't really care. Joe Rogan was a lead magnet. But for other shows that they're trying to buy, and I know this, because a lot of people are talking to me about their deals with Spotify, they want to remain open in the open podcasting ecosystem.

Which means if you're subscribed to, say, the Jordan Harbinger show and Amazon gives me a ridiculous check, you're not going to only be able to listen to me in Amazon. I'm still going to be available in your favorite podcast app, you're not going to have to change anything, except for now Amazon is selling my ads and using my likeness in advertising and things like that. So we like the idea that platforms are investing as an industry of creators, but what we're worried about is, oh, if you

want to listen to Jordan Show, now you've got to get this app that you don't even like that doesn't work well with your phone that you'd never used. Because that's how creators lose a ton of audience. And there was a, there's an app called Luminary. And I don't want to single them out there, nice people. Do you know what Luminary is? It was only, you had to subscribe. It was Netflix model. You had to subscribe to here on a podcast. Yeah. It's like Netflix, but with podcasting. So they got a lot of big podcasters and they said, oh, we're going to offer you X dollars to come behind the paywall, but you can't have your show available for free anymore. And a lot of people did it. And I didn't want to do it. And again, Luminary, great people worked.

cool app, they've got good content, so I'm not throwing shade here. But one of the things that you do when you go behind a paywall is you say to 80 plus, maybe even 90 plus percent of your audience, hey, if you want to listen to me, it's going to be $7.99 and you can't listen to ads anymore, or $5.99, or even $1.99. And what happens is they go, eh, nah, there's a lot of stuff out there. I'm not going to do that. So that Luminary was awesome because it basically took a bunch of big name players off of the table and a lot of those people are like, I found your show after I stopped listening to

XYZ podcast or Russell Brand or whatever because they're on Luminary and I didn't get that. And so they're investing in the space, but they took a lot of players off the table. We don't want as much of that as an industry. And I'm sort of being weird speaking for the whole industry. But as a creator, I will say, I don't and we don't, many of us want this because what we really don't want is a closed ecosystem that turns into you can only watch Game of Thrones on HBO Macs and you can only watch Master of None on Netflix and you can only watch 90-day Fiance on Discovery Plus. It's a little annoying. That's where streaming TV is now. But I think there's

going to be a time and I think Apple might even already do this where I just want to make it really easy. Like my Xbox makes it easy for me to search for a show and it'll find it in an app that I already have and it'll play it. So that's cool. But podcasts aren't really supposed to do that. And most people still have sort of indicated with their wallets, they don't want to for a premium podcast. They will listen to ads that are done because the ads are funny when Jason Bateman reads them.

They're entertaining, hopefully, when I read them. They're interesting when Mark Marin does them. And we also want to know if they're being endorsed, right? It's that relationship. And you can offer an ad-free version of your show if you want to,

but you shouldn't be forced to, just like your listener shouldn't be forced to pay for the show. So we don't want to see that siloing, but I kind of see it starting to happen. But it's not too late to turn that around. And I think Spotify kind of got the memo and it was like, oh, we want shows on Spotify. We want to host them on Megaphone, which is the host that they bought. We want to sell the ads for them,

but we kind of don't want to make everyone forcibly using our app to play the show, at least not yet. And that's good because the open ecosystem in podcasting is actually not just good for creators, but it's one of the reasons that you, when you log into Facebook and then you ever had that experience where you were just talking about going to Tahiti or something with your wife or your significant other. And then you look at the web and you're like, wait a minute, they're selling me flights to Tahiti. Is this Alexa thing listening to me? Or you send a DM to somebody on Instagram. You don't do this. But it's for like a Theragun, right, to work out your sore muscles. And then suddenly you're on Instagram or Facebook and you're getting retargeted for Theragun ads and you're just like,

this is creepy AF. Or you find out that your data has been stolen by Cambridge. Analytica, now you're being, you know, hacked by Russian troll farms. That doesn't happen with podcasting because it's an open ecosystem, which actually results in apps being able to go, yeah, I'm not sharing data with you. I'm not sharing data with Facebook. I'm not sharing data with Spotify. I'm not sending data back to Apple. So Apple doesn't share data, not much anyway. Overcast, which has double-digit market share, they don't share data. CastBox, they don't share data as far as they tell us. Spotify has their own data internally, but there's no sort of central clearinghouse for this data, and a lot of apps aren't participating. So you don't get

tracking. You don't get tracked and retargeted around the web yet. And it's because it's hard slash impossible to do. And what's funny is, you know, spot of, sorry, we're talking about so many companies, Facebook, you know how they sued Apple for not allowing them to track in between apps and blah, blah, blah, on the new OS. I don't know if you heard about this. Now you have, you still have more ability. So Facebook's like, it's going to destroy our business model. This is terrible. You still have more ability to track on social media than you do with podcasting, and yet with podcasting, we can still give you relevant targeted ads based on where you live, because we can see your IP, and I can tell if you're in Australia and serve a dynamic ad for you.

I have some IP targeting data, but I don't need to know exactly who you are. I don't need to know your name. I don't need to know all of these other things that you like. So you can maintain privacy. But if we get siloed enough, we're totally screwed because what will happen is Spotify, let's say they get like 90, 80%, whatever market share, they're going to know, because they're going to start sharing data with Facebook, they're going to know everything you want and everything you do, and podcasting is going to become another way to get you to buy crap that you don't want and don't need through kind of like unethical means of persuasion. And since it's an open ecosystem, it's so far very difficult slash impossible for that to happen.

I hope that persists. I mean, something that gives hope is that look at the inventing, required to get streaming services to be financially viable with a, what, $8 a month fees, they have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, it's why AT&T had to spin off Warner and merge it with Discovery. HBO and Warner Media just didn't have enough money to produce enough content at a high enough level to even compete with Netflix, to compete with a Disney Plus. Just the numbers are so astronomical in terms of what quality and level of content. And I'm hoping that's some protection that, you know, if it takes $700 billion worth of investment to get someone to pay $7 a month, you know, for Netflix, then I'm not surprised Luminary. And again, no offense to Luminary, but a selection of 25 premium podcast is not Disney Plus.

Right, exactly. It's just not. That does give some hope. And also the other thing going on with ad sales, for example, it's just the social media model is that we are going to harvest content from. a massive matrix-like farm of people who are sort of slavishly giving us relatively low-quality content, and then algorithmically we'll churn it up and create a

slurry that's sort of hyper-palatable. And, okay, to make money off of this, we have to figure out what ads to show and we need your data, but podcasting actually is a much smaller group of people, and there's actual relationships with advertisers and ad agencies. Oh, Jordan, I know you. I can think about

what type of audience you have, or Cal. We can actually have a human. Think about you. And your audience and the type of people who read you, and we're going to buy ads on your show. We're targeting them not because an algorithm bought it in an auction, but because we know who Cal Newport is. And we think it's a good match. And so that helps.

All right, so we're running a little low on time here. So a couple rapid fires. How important is it to have video if you have a podcast? It's not that important. I do it now because I do put some on YouTube, but I don't really monetize the YouTube very much. I do it primarily because I like to see who I'm talking to. I think for me it doesn't matter because I'm so used to podcasting.

Same with you. But for a lot of guests, if you don't look at them, they're texting what they want for lunch and they think they're multitasking. I don't have to explain this to you, right? They think they're multitasking. They're answering a couple of emails. You're repeating your questions. But if they're looking at you, there's something where they feel like you're right in front

of them and they put their effing phone down and they pay more attention and you're more engaged. And that's kind of a human thing. It's not even a manners thing. It's just a human thing. But I would say I would have loved to have video of some of my older shows, even if it's just sort of like crummy Zoom or unedited squadcast video that I put in Google Drive and save for later, because you never know.

It would have been great to have some of my old shows videoed that I could put on my YouTube channel and just have that content there. So even if you're not planning to edit the video because it's expensive, you could record it on Zoom and just archive it. And you might be glad you had it in five years. So I would say go for it. Yeah. And I know it's not, I don't know the monetization path now.

So just completely on intuition. But when I see podcasts that have professional studios, I don't know why. It's compelling to me to watch. And I don't know what the monetization strategy is there. And I don't know what that means about the future of the medium. But maybe it's just a human affinity to actually get all of the bits of information of communication. When you're hearing someone you want to see them or this or that, but this has intrigued me that if there's someone I'm interested in who goes on Joe Rogan's show, I like to see them sitting there talking, you know, the shows that have good studio. So I don't know what that means. I don't know what it means about the future configuration of podcasting and how it overlaps with streaming and how it overlaps with, I mean, that's a play, I don't know, but I'm interested in this notion of the high-end podcast, having high-end video production. Does that start to get into the same space as streamers? In other words, like if you look at, there's not a lot of people doing this,

yet, but if you look at, I'm thinking of, like, Ben Shapiro's conservative network, they have these podcasts that they do high-end video production. It's now an app on your Apple TV, right? And you're able to watch it. I think Adam Savage is tested, which is like DIY maker stuff. They ran out of money, but they were kind of moving. It was all done in studio. And I was thinking, like, I wonder if there's going to be a play there where you have this sort of long-tailed streaming move, where it's like, yeah, I have my Netflix and I have my, I have my Disney Plus, but I'm really, into whatever conservative politics or into makers and it's right there too and it's it's equivalent quality in a nice studio and they're talking and doing interviews and building stuff and

it's niche to me that's a whole other pie I think like in other words there's a piece of the streaming pie which is massive streaming video pie that the streamers are taking up but that gap is closed where okay you can't just do it as a hobby but you also don't need 10 million dollars of investment to produce something in a studio that is I'll watch that on a and not be concerned about the quality. So, you know, I don't know how that plays out, but that might be a future evolution where it's not just the radio money podcast gets. It's actually in there with the major streamers.

I think it's possible. Yeah. It's very possible. Yeah. Like, it's very possible. There is a chance that in the future podcasts, since, let's say we're at like super speed 6G mobile networks, getting a terabyte or two of data on. on your phone every month is 49.95 or whatever, right, all over the place. And, or the equivalent,

then, yeah, maybe instead of just streaming MP3 files encoded at whatever, it just goes, it's like, hey, you know what, just stream the video. And if the phone is in someone's pocket, it'll play with the screen off and you're just playing the audio file like Spotify does. But yeah, if people want to watch it, they just open their phone and boom, the video starts streaming right there. It's encoded in the file. It's easy to watch. It's, It's high-res, you know, that's very, very possible. And yeah, you can get one of those streaming decks and you can even do it remotely and it just, you're watching two guys on a Zoom or you're watching.

It's kind of high quality stuff. Yeah, I think that's the sweet spot. The person who's also doing this is Steve Ronella, meat eater, so the hunting guy, you know, their meat eater network, they're filming TV shows. And they have drone shots and teams and they basically are just doing their own TV series. Now, they got $50 million in investment. So, okay, it's a little bit different. But that's something I'm interested.

That is where you cross the Uncanny Valley and you're producing content that is, yeah, I could see that on Netflix. Like, quality-wise, it's not two guys on a Zoom call. You're in a nice studio with good lighting and you have a red camera. And, you know, you spent a couple hundred thousand dollars. Like Andrew Schulz, the comedian, his own studio during the pandemic, he filmed the Netflix special, you know. And it was like a few of his friends who he trained how to use Premiere and they just, it was his money. So anyways, that's another thing. I'm, I don't know where that's going to go, but I think Longtail Streamer is going to be another big piece of this where it's,

forget the phone, it lives on my TV too. So next to the Netflix app, I'm really into self-help type, you know, pragmatic nonfiction writers. And there's kind of a quote-unquote channel there and it's five bucks a month and it's five or six authors I like and they have some shows and they're in studios and they're talking to other authors and they're whatever. I don't know. But I think that's only positive because that's just, it's just more, more avenues for creators with talent to,

to find an audience and monetize that. Absolutely. You're expanding the pool. And again, none of this is, and I guess this is the thing with every tech revolution. It's the same with blogging. It's the same with podcasting. There's always this weird straw man that's presented, which is, oh, most, you know, this is going to make everybody a lot of money.

look, most of the stuff is crap, so I guess this tech is no good. It's the same thing again and again. You know, like, well, look at most blogs. They're bad. Blogging so dumb. It's like, well, yeah, like, most are bad, but like, there was really good ones and it was important, you know? Or look at podcasts.

Most podcasts are dumb and don't make money. Yeah, most are, but there's good ones that make a lot of money. This straw man argument that a new tech with monetization, the implication will be that everyone makes, it's going to make money for anyone who does it, is like never really the claim. It's always superstar economy market, winner take all stuff. markets, but just having more of those markets and more money in those markets is good for people who are really making a go at developing a talent and making a professional run at content creation.

So this all sounds pretty optimistic. So, okay, we're running over. So let me end with one last question. Am I doing the right thing? I mean, as a writer, I'm a case study. writer have a, you know, have a name, have an audience, have a semi-professional podcast, haven't just begun sort of aggressively pushing the format and trying to make, you know, try to evolve it, but something that will generate whatever, 60,000 downloads a week

from the archive or something. So in that sort of above the amateur, but not the superstar status, you look at someone in that situation. It's in that weird middle ground. And there's, So what do you think? Is it, I'm in the right demographic to keep trying to develop this and polish this? Or is it a distraction from, you know? You're definitely, look, if you're getting 60,000 downloads a week, you're definitely monetizing this, I assume, to the point where you could, you can pay your mortgage from it, at least, right?

Yeah, I'm not asking you to quote your... I think of it more of like pay for the studio, but yeah, yeah, the office lease. But yeah, same idea, yeah. Same idea, right. Okay. So it's making money. but also when you come out with a book, the best advertising channel you have is this podcast, I assume.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, yeah, who knows, but... Hard to say, I suppose, right? Right. But this is the... A good podcast is the equivalent of a great email newsletter. And that's a really... Except for you get paid every time you email out, right?

Like, if you're an email newsletter writer, you've got to sell books and courses to your audience, otherwise you're not making any money. If you're a podcaster, you can do the podcast and you can tell everyone to your announcements and do your discussions and, you know, sort of free flow chat about something. And then you're like, oh, by the way, buy this mattress if you need a mattress. Anyway, back to you, Cal, and you're getting paid every single time.

And that's why I love it because I don't have to sit there and write, which is a tough skill that I don't enjoy as much as talking. I get to interview amazing people. And then also I'm occasional aside for an advertisement, and those advertisements are lucrative. So, yes, you're doing the right thing. Back when I started, and I don't sell anything anymore, I don't. only have ads for stuff just because it's a simplicity thing for me. I've got two kids, or 1.5 kids. I don't want to sell training and create tons of courses. I may create one,

but I'm not going to be like, here's the newest thing I'm launching. I don't like that. So the idea that I'm just going to be able to do my podcast and make a bunch of money doing that, great. But before, when I was selling training, it was like lead gen with the podcast was incredible. You know, you just mention that you have courses every show, and people will listen for like three and five years, and they'll go, okay, I'm finally going to buy this thing for $8,000 that you have. And you're never going to get $8,000 from people in advertising revenue.

You know, yes, we had costs associated with the training, but like, you can't run a Facebook ad and be like, by the way, this thing is $8,000. You need a really good funnel. But if your funnel is people listening to you three times a week for two years, that's the best funnel you can have. I'll sort of leave you with this. When somebody says something to me and they go,

and they sort of seem like they've heard of me before, they maybe follow me on Instagram or something like that and they saw me post something funny or they saw a tweet. But if somebody comes up to me and talks to me like they've known me for eight years and we haven't seen each other for a while, I know they listen to my podcast because they know tons of details about my life. They know me really well better than a lot of my friends do. They recognize my voice right away.

They know a lot of my preferences and weird quirks. They know me really well. So when I say, hey, I bought this mattress and it's really good. And yes, I'm selling it and they paid for an ad spot, but my God, this is a good mattress. They don't go, ah, what a shill. Look at this jerk selling mattresses. They believe me and they should because I don't abuse their trust. Some people, sure, they do that.

But you build so much trust that it's like a friend told them about that product or service. And you don't get that from social media ads. you don't even get that from influencer marketing when people run ads. The only type of conversion that rivals podcasting, in fact, I'm not even sure if there is on a CPM basis, but it's going to be something where you've got a massive audience and you're really paying somebody to be your spokesman on a place like Instagram or YouTube, but even then, again, the CPM is like 10% of what podcasting is or even sometimes 1%. So if you just look at the market to tell you who's effective and who's trustworthy, it's always podcasts.

Yeah. All right. Well, this has been great. I mean, Jordan, I think we got a really broad, slash deep, you know, overview of what's going on with podcasting where it's going. I think I learned a lot. This is very fascinating. I mean, it's a topic. I'm endlessly interested. So, as I

will mention in the introduction to the show that I'll record later, if you're not listening to the Jordan Harbinger show, you should be. It's one of the best interview podcast that is out there, both in the quality of the guest and the interviewing. So this is my trusted endorsement, as we just talked about. I have known Jordan forever. I have been interviewed by him many times. Most of you probably listen to the show,

but if you don't, you should. Now, is there anything else that we should bring to the audience's attention about what you're up to right now? I do teach the networking stuff still. It's the same stuff if I teach like sales teams, government agencies, military. The course is free, so I'm just going to sort of drop the plug, but I don't require your billing info and there's no upsells, so it's not one of Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find it. And it's just like 13 really easy exercises to build relationships, build and maintain connections for business or personal reasons. There's tens of thousands of people doing it.

And it's just sort of a gift that I'm giving because if I'd known how to friggin' network before, I probably wouldn't have gone to law school for lack of opportunity and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on education and then gotten a job I didn't want. and then da-da-da-da-da-da-da-a-round-way to what I'm doing now. Networking and relationships is like, it's just such an amazing ROI. There's nothing else like it, and I just want everyone to do it. So that's why I did the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. But yeah, just check out the podcast, the Jordan Harbinger Show.

I'd love to hear from people that found us through this and hear what they think. Oh, it sounds great. And Jordan is the OG of networking training. So if you're at all interested in that topic, check out what he has to say there. He is the guy. who has mastered that field. All right, Jordan, thanks. Cal, thank you. All right, well, thanks to Jordan for coming on the show. I enjoyed the conversation. We'll be back next week with another vacation edition of the Deep Questions podcast before getting

back to normal in August. Until then, enjoy July and as always, stay deep.