The Jordan Harbinger Show - 169: Nathan Latka | How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Nathan Latka (@NathanLatka) is the principal of private equity firm Latka Capital; executive producer and host of The Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, and author of How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital: The Four Rules You Must Break To Get Rich. What We Discuss with Nathan Latka: How Nathan makes it worthwhile from an ROI standpoint for sponsors to fork over big bucks for advertising on his relatively niche podcast. How to creatively negotiate from a standpoint that you can get people what they really need -- even when they don't know what that need might be. How to overcome whatever fears you may have for making the big asks during a negotiation. How to get bankers, Airbnb hosts, and freelancers to give you terms you want. How to land a meeting with anyone. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. Nathan Laca, our guest today, he is a force. In his 20s, he's bought and sold a bunch of businesses, runs a VC firm, has a crazy popular show on Facebook and soon on television. He's got a book. But more importantly, he's very self-aware and very methodical in how he does all of these things and accomplishes all of these projects. Today, we're leveraging that self-awareness to dissect some of the secrets of Nathan's successes. He's seriously persuasive. and he has an uncanny ability to get others to agree with him. I've seen it firsthand. We've known each other for a while. It is really next level. And yes, he's great at negotiating, but there's more to the story. And today we'll come away with actionable steps and a process to gain agreement and leverage

our resources and often leverage someone else's resources to make incredible things happen. Oh, and as a note, we've been friends for years and we banter and poke fun at each other a bit here in this one. I can assure you it's all in good nature. So if I seem a little hard on the guy or maybe a little too personal, please take it in context here. And if you want to know how I make these great friends of all these go-getters and crazy high achievers, well, I use systems, tiny habits to leverage my network and I want to teach you how to do the same. In my free course, six-minute networking, it takes six minutes per day. Actually takes five, but five-minute networking was taken. So six-minute networking over at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash course. All right, here's Nathan Latka. First of all, it's funny having you here because you're 29 and I remember even like five years ago when we met or something. It was pre-puberty. Yeah, yeah, basically. And you were running Hayo, which I don't even, what was that? Why do you say it like that? Come on, this is a, heyo's a great name, I feel like, for their domain name you can pronounce.

Yeah, it's great. I just still don't really know what that does. So Hayo was like, do you have any sponsors for the show that are like the website builders? Yeah, HoseCater. Okay, host Gator does. Okay, great. So like, how HostCater has like a drag-and-drop platform for websites or like Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, we did that exact same thing, but for Facebook apps.

Oh, okay. And so that was really hot back in the day. Like make your own FarmVille. Kind of. But it was more for a guy like you who wanted to get leads off your Facebook page. We would help you build a lead capture page inside your Facebook page. Got it. And that's what we were doing.

You seem to have this entrepreneurial mind where you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this company and serve these needs. And I don't even know how much we can say, but you're in town right now. The reason we're doing this in my living room. I love it, this is great. This is how it works. Yeah, which there might be a cat. I would say we want Mo Mo to pop up here at some point, right?

He will probably pop up at some point for attention. But the reason you're in town in Silicon Valley is you're, you said, oh, well, I sell data to VCs. And I was like, what data? Who is buying something from a, because when I was 29, I was like tying my shoelaces together for the most part. Yeah. Well, who are you talking?

You're talking to, you're talking to Cal about digital detox. In a past episode, I'm talking about your, those years, you were like, the party drinking, like that, all kind of thing. Yeah, literal detox. Literal detox. No, I mean, so my podcast, the reason I launched it, you know, back in the day, I had no idea it would turn into a data machine, but that's what it is now. The podcast actually doesn't really matter.

It's just a more effective way to connect with people. Like, I used to send cold emails after I sold hayo and I was like, hey, hey, Jordan, like, can we get coffee together? I love to like, pick your brain, which, you know, is the worst email. Yeah, too. No one replied. When I changed it to Jordan, can I feature you on my podcast? Everyone's like, well, yeah. Great.

Sure. of course. So now the podcast, you know, I named it the top entrepreneurs because the number one search term for podcasts when I launched was the top podcast. I'm Michael Hill. I'll just name my podcast, the top. Oh, very wise. There's a little SEO play there for you, right? Yeah. I bet that still works. It works like a charm. Yeah. We're range like number one, two, and three if you just search the top podcast on Google. Oh, man. And so as podcasting takes off our show just picks up some of that, that headwind. Yeah. Phenomenal. But anyways, yeah, so we've recorded like 3,000 episodes. It's all with software CEOs, and we built a little piece of voice technology that pulls any numbers they

share on the audio out and basically thinking about like a big Excel sheet. And we then flip that data and sell out to private equity firms, VC firms. And so that's why I'm going to be in Menlo Park later today. So what is the actual data again? So how familiar with you are with like software companies, like B2B SaaS? Sure. Yeah. Mildly. I don't know you well enough to know the sarcasm yet, but I would be like, I try to keep it clear. A clarity over. over sarcasm. So when I say, when I say ARPOO, do you think like that must have been like a friend's nickname from high school or do you know what that means from a soft? It sounds a little racist, but I know that it's, it stands for average revenue per user. So we'll pull data from these business to

business software CEOs, like what their revenue is, which is called ARR, what their year where your growth rate is, their equity splits in the company, their last round valuation, customer acquisition cost, ARPU, lifetime value, churn, like really valuable data that these VCs have to hire you know, the analyst to call every CEO to get. Right. And you're getting it because they're coming to your show and telling you when you ask them, hey, what's your MR? Yeah.

Unfortunately, I can't be that direct because they're going like, why the hell is this 29-year-old asking me what my freaking numbers are? Oh, you have to be around the bush. That's interesting. I have to be like, Jordan, great comb over today. Okay, how much equity do you own? Yeah. 80%.

Yeah, right. So, yeah, I own eight tenths of the equity. Yeah. Oh, okay. Great. 80%. No, I guess, I guess the reason I said is, I mean, a lot of what I do ties in with a lot of, I think, what you're teaching your audience,

which is you've got to know how to talk to anybody and then figure out how to get information you want. And it's very difficult. If a CEO comes on who has a huge ego, usually it works best for me for them as I hit them really hard to start. And then they respect it. A shy CEO coming on, you would never hit them hard because then they would closet up. They wouldn't share anything. So you do the opposite with them. You kind of find something to compliment and get them comfortable. So, because mine are not as long as yours. Mine are, it's 15 minutes every day, so it's quick. And are these done, they're done by Skype, then I assume.

All Skype. I mean, I'm sitting like literally, I only film from here up, and it's like my ironing board with my computer on it and an apogee mic and just crank through 30 a day, dude. Got it. Wow. That's a lot of Q&A. That's like some, that's some 007 podcast. It turns me on.

Yeah. I'm sure it does. There's a lot of people envisioning you at the ironing board, and they're also getting turned on by that. I know your game, Nathan Mike. There you go. I'm in, I'm in. You are good at getting people to agree with you.

We're talking about podcast sponsorship, and I was like, how was this show that is, and I mean, in no insulting way, like, it's smaller than mine. It's a smaller show. Definitely small. You're getting the same or more for certain ads, and I'm thinking, what the hell, this is my business. I should be doing better. Yeah.

Wait, can you tell me what the, I mean, don't tell me the actual Delta or the actual sponsored, but you just saw in my book the sponsor agreement I signed for X amount of money. Yeah. You have that same sponsor. It's basically the same, but your show is small. Way, way small. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So the way I do it is, one, it's a hyper, hyper curated audience that listens to my show. That is part of, that makes sense, right? You have reach. You have, like, huge reach. Yeah. The audience of entrepreneurs that need websites built is much more concentrated in the top podcast, search for it on Google.

It's much more concentrated. It's much more concentrated in that show than it would be on the Jordan Harbinger's where people are going, look, I'm a lawyer for White in case. I don't need my own website. Thanks. Well, you've got, I mean, you guys know this if you're in the ad space. Most people pay on a CPM basis, which didn't work for my show. If I charge on a CPM basis, I'd make like $200 an episode. Yeah, you'd be like, Jordan, can you throw me five for gas?

Yeah, it's your house. Totally. Like, it doesn't make any sense. But when it changed to sponsor, tell me what you're willing to pay for a new customer. And they'd say, well, we're spending a grand on Google ads right now to get one new customer. I then say, great, I'll beat you. I'll bring you in customers at 500 bucks a pop. They'll willingly tell you. Well, I've already had them on my show and ask them cag. Ah, cost of customer. Acquisition. Cost of acquiring a customer. You got it.

Cack. Sounds like, again, sounds like something in another language. Yeah, I was just say you can, you can make up whatever we want about that. Yeah, there's a lot there. That was the lowest, that was the easiest joke I could have made on that one. That's brilliant. And I'm basically like, Jen, write that down so that when we have to renew a certain spot. I'm like, what's your cack? Yeah. And they're like, excuse me? It's just different.

I mean, you probably also know the horror story of this. You probably know sponsors that drop a buttload for shows and see crickets. Oh, yeah. That's one of the reasons that a lot of people who buy ads or buy anything from podcasts or from anyone else are a little gun shy in the digital space because they go, well, wait a minute, I spent 80 grand on this show and you gave me eight customers. I got taken for an absolute ride. Yep.

This is BS. Yep. Well, there's the debate between like the host would say, well, it's not just about customers I drive you. It's branding. Yeah. And you're like, well, come on, right? I mean, I'll get my branding somewhere else. Exactly.

Yeah. Like there's, so what I do with the, with the podcast sponsors is I always try and make it profitable for them on a pure ROI basis. And then all the other branding stuff is just icing on the cake. But I mean, some of my sponsors are going to detail. here. Like, actually, I mean, I can look this up while I chat. My first sponsor was like Justine, you probably work with from Fresh Books and now she's representing Gusto. Yeah. And I mean, she reached out and was a great lady. This was like six months into the show. And it's like page 18. I mean, I just put it here. Hey, Nathan, I'm Justine. She reached out. And then, you know, a little bit later,

we're signing, you know, the contract for $6,400 bucks. Yeah. And the reason this is important is because she told me what her cack was at FreshBooks. It was hard to get. But then I would do things and say things like Justine. I'm on the speaking circuit. FreshBooks is sponsoring. things that I'm speaking at as a keynote speaker, you have issues filling the demo booths. How about when I'm done with my keynote on stage as an add-on to this podcast sponsor, I'll tell everyone if you want a Q&A with Nathan, I'll be at the Fresh Books demo booth. Oh my God, that's so good. I drive the whole audience.

So I build in nice, cool stuff on the back end. That is genius. I'm going to be using that literally at podcast. You speak all over. I was going to say you speak everywhere. Yeah. And half the time I will go to a conference and a sponsor will pay for me to go. but some conferences, I'm like, hey, can I go to this? And they're like, sure, see you later. I'm like,

I don't know, I want you to pay for it. Right. And but I never thought of, hey, I'll go hang out at your booth wearing your t-shirt. And that's where I'll do my Q&A for an hour. And then that pays for the flight, the hotel, the food, the expenses, whatever for the, because if they're going already, sure, Jordan, come with us. We already, you know, we don't care. But now I get to pick. I'm thinking where I want to go. Are you doing a lot of speaking these days? Yeah, I do a bunch. I do a bunch. It depends if I'm advising companies, well, I am advising certain companies. I will go and speak at an event if they ask me to. But I'm thinking now, why am I not

going to some of these really unique events that I get invited to that companies don't get to go to? I got to figure out how to get them to want to foot that bill. Well, another upside you can give to your podcast sponsors. I do this is when a conference asked me to come speak, they're obviously paying a fee to have you speak. And I'll say something like, guys, this fees way lower than what I usually charge. So if I bring you three sponsors, I want you to give them a 50% discount on the platinum plan. And the people that I give those sponsors are people that already pay me to sponsor my podcast. So then they get the booth for a discount and I drive them traffic when I'm done with my keynote

to their booth from stage. That's really, really good. So you're, and this is a lot of people are going, I don't have a podcast. I can't do any of this stuff. It's not because you have the show. This is sort of a, I hate using the word mindset because it's really overused. But this is kind of like a, the idea that you can get a win for somebody that isn't directly what they would think of, nor what anybody else would think of is kind of a secret sauce. Because a lot of people are going to go, oh, well, if you try to go toe to toe and you say, well, I'll do a lower CPM on my show

than the other guy who runs an entrepreneur podcast. You're racing to the bottom. Instead, you're charging them more, but you're saying on the back end, when I go speak somewhere, I'll drive people to your booth. Well, we're not going to get a booth there. It's too expensive. I'll tell you what. I'm going to get you half off that booth and drive traffic to it. And so now they're going, wait a minute. You're saving us $5, $10,000 on a booth. Sometimes more. Or more, yeah. But that they can literally add that to the amount of or subtract that from the amount that they're paying you for the ads. So you're turning

revenue that might go to the event over to you and putting that in your pocket. And then you're saying to the company, by the way, that money that was going to go over here, I'll just take that and I'll give you the value on the back end. The only thing you have to do is kind of just pay me up front for all of it. You nailed it. Yeah. The hardest thing that I've had with podcast sponsors is I run out of things to sell them. Like I build a great relationship with them. People are paying, you know, the contracts on the book, 180 grand a year for placement on my show. They want to spend more. So I had to invent new things to sell them. I mean, that's why I launched the Facebook watch show. And so now I'll build my podcast sponsors into the watch show, which gets a,

about a million views kind of per Facebook Live that I do. Wow. And so then I upsell that for 20 grand in an episode. So I just, the hardest part is the relationship with the sponsor. So if you already have it, invent new things that they want and sell it to them. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Nathan Lotka. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to George. Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. And now back to our show with Nathan Latka. Right, because what a lot of people do is they'll try to find, they'll play the numbers game where they need like more clients or they need more sponsors or they need more people, more ticket sales instead of finding ways to serve and be valuable to the people that they've already kind of got. And this happens with some sponsors. They'll go, hey, can you do social for us? And I'm like, well, yeah, of course. But it's not, I'm not going to give it to you for your birthday. Yeah, right? Not free. No. And. And. they'll say, oh, you know, we'd love it if you would come to our annual event. Okay, cool. Well,

this is what is going to have to happen for that to work. And I think the problem that a lot of people run into is they're afraid to ask for things like this because they think they're being too salesy or, and I used to have this problem too. In my early 30s or late 20s, you clearly have gotten over that. But I used to have the same issue where I'd go, oh, well, I don't want to push my luck. or I don't want to seem too salesy. Do you have any advice for people who feel that way? Because I think a lot of non-salespeople, they really feel like it's not their place to ask for things like this.

Yeah. Well, as everyone knows, you don't get what you don't ask for. So the trick is, how do you get the confidence to ask for something that you feel totally uncomfortable asking for? And the answer to that is to reduce that risk, right? So you should ask for something and assume you're never going to get it, and that will give you the confidence to ask for it in the first place, if that makes sense. It does, but I foresee people going, well, if I'm not going to get this,

the reason I'm not going to get this is because I don't deserve it. So I'm not going to ask. This is one thing I won't get into. I mean, I'm not an emotional or you have amazing, you have amazing interviews with people that can get into human emotions. I'm actually horrible with emotion. Like, I ignore it. You're a robot.

Kind of, actually. Big business robot. That might be your strength, though. That might be why you go, hey, so I need $60,000 a month for this. And they're like, are you in. Exactly. I'm meeting after this I'm driving up to Andreessen in Menlo because they asked to get my date about a year ago. I told them the price and they balked and walked. They just pinged me about three days ago and said, Nathan, we're seeing Latka everywhere with the magazine. You're speaking.

We're more open to the data now. Can you come in and talk about it? So like the thing is, is I'm playing the long game. Like I'm always increasing prices because you should. You're building your brand. And so if I would have, let's say I went down. down to a lower price point last year. Well, I'd be locked in at a cheaper price point now. I could give that up knowing that maybe in a year, two years to build my brand, they'd come back and I can ask for way more. And so it's tricky. I'm flipping here in the book because, I mean, there's a section here basically says, like, negotiate when you don't have to. And this goes back into when I sold, Sato. The way I sold Hajo, Jordan, it started with an email

that I sent. This was the email. We can do some ninja stuff on this. But you can read that headline. It says shutting, just, shutting Hato down. Yeah. So what am I doing there? Well, we were in a really healthy spot at the time. But I said, if I take this email shutting my company down, the subject line, and email it to 20 of our biggest competitors, how's I going to make them feel when they get that email, you think? They're either going to wonder why, or they're going to want to buy it from you. Because why?

They sense an opportunity. Yeah. Right? The sense like blood in the water, a discount. Yeah. Right. Oh, good point. That's exactly what I wanted because what happens.

And then one of them wrote back, hey, Nathan, we did some back-in-knaping estimates. We think we could get you somewhere north of 500K in bounty when we're we look at the current user base. Freudian slip, yep, 4DN slip. That's a whole other, you know, when you Google Nathan, it's like Nathan like a network, net worth, and then it's, is Nathan like a gay? Oh, that's funny. The one that comes up for me is wife, so I guess they've already answered that question.

Oh, like, are there beautiful pictures of Jen spread through Google? You know, it's funny? There's another Jennifer Liao who's like an economist or something, and people are always like, oh, because she gives talks, and they're like, oh, that's interesting. So I meant to talk to Jen. I'm like, we either need to make you a page that has, You and like, this is Jen in case you're curious. Or we need to make a page that says, this woman who works in the travel industry or whatever

is not my wife. She seems really nice, though. And then link to her like Bumble profile or something. That is hysterical. LinkedIn. Or if you're interested, whatever, like on the e-harmonie or whatever, find her on there. You would, I mean, this personal stuff I think people value now the transparency. I mean, my publisher, Random House, hated my book landing page, it's capitalistbook.com,

the FAQ section. I just took the top five like search things about me. And so the one of the FAQ on capitalistbook.com is Nathan, are you gay? And when they expand it to read it, here's what it says. I'll give your audience. I say, it literally says, well, it doesn't make much sense for me strategically to answer this. If I say yes, then I lose all the beautiful middle-aged cougars who love me for decades. And they're really intelligent and smart.

If I say, if I say no that I'm not gay, I lose like all these killer, like gay mafia people who are really smart. Yeah. And sharp. Yeah. So the end sentence is, like, I can't say that I don't know if I can confirm or deny that. Right. My point is, like, there's no strategic value for me to say that. And so I'm a very strategic thinker.

If there was strategy behind it, I maybe would say it. Right. Well, people always go, Jordan, I can't figure it out. Are you a Republican or a Democrat? And I go, yeah. Because I'm like, look, no matter what happens, there are myriad one-star reviews on the show. the show of, I can't believe this guy has such a clear anti-Trump agenda. And then I'm like, hmm, that's weird because I don't.

So wherever you found that clear, in air quotes, anti-Trump agenda, I'm interested in finding out, probably a guest expressed an opinion. And since I didn't punch them directly in the face, I'm clearly. Right. But then other people are like, I can't believe you supported this thing by not, but through your inaction when a guest said something that was related to, so you can't win. You can't win. So I'm just like...

Isn't it funny how people make assumptions? They do. Yeah. It reminds me of... If you read the four agreements, that's the number one, like, don't make assumptions. It's like, this is, and again, I'm like you, I'm not really politically motivated either way. But one of Trump's, I mean, the reason he got so many people agreeing with him, I guess, right, is because he would say things where no matter what you believed, you would find something in a statement where you said, yes, I agree. So he'd say something like, I can't say that X, Y, and Z is happening.

and anyone who wanted X, Y, and Z to happen would see just the, they wouldn't see that I can't say part. Anyone who disagreed would see that I can't say part but ignore the later half of the sentence. It's fascinating how this works. It is, and a guy like Scott Adams who is very, is that where you're kind of...

All of his books, unbelievable. Win Bigley. So Scott Adams, who's been on the show a bunch of times, which is probably where I get the, I can't believe you're so pro-Trump because I've had Scott Adams in here, and then the anti-Trump because I've had every other person.

Is he pro-Trump? He's very much of Trump's, He is pro. Well, his books are genius. Anyone pro-organism have to read his books because they're genius on just Trump in general. Psychology. I know that Scott says that he's not necessarily. He's just doing one of those I'm not saying, but like, as far as I understand, he thinks

Trump is a genius. So there's that. And so now I'm getting one-star reviews from people for having him on and talking about it. And I'm going to get one-star reviews on for talking about it and not saying that he's right. So whatever. That's funny. Well, I will quickly loop back to your question about how can people ask for

stuff that they feel really uncomfortable asking. No, it's okay. This is this is wonderful. But, I mean, what happened with this kind of selling HAYO is about 15 of these folks wrote back and said, Nathan, would you consider selling the company if you're shutting it down anyway? And they were all price points way below what I'd accept. But during what happened was I wrote back to all of them and said, hey, I need an LOI, which is a letter of intent by the end of the day on Thursday, if you're interested in buying, you know, submit. So people submitted LOIs. And I wrote back to all of them, hey, I have two responsibilities. Keep my customers happy and fiduciary.

I have to make my investors happy. In terms of you making my customers happy, if I sell to you, I know you'd do a great job. But from a financial perspective, this offer is just too low? Is this your best offer? And so I just ended, is this your best offer? So they read that and go, well, wait, does that mean he's going to decline? He's not going to take us? Is he selling to our competitor?

They wonder. They make their own assumption. Right, sure. They fill in the blank and it's usually in your favor. Exactly. So the trick is, how do you set up these questions where you allow the receiver to fill in the blank with what they want? Because what happened from that is four of them wrote back

and doubled their offer. I wrote back, I wrote back, okay, I've got four people. I'm making a decision by the end of day on Friday. And then you can guess how I ended the email. Are you sure this is your best offer? And two of them said basically F you. We see the game you're playing, but two came back and doubled their offer.

Wow. And I picked one of them to sell to. That is actually quite interesting because I think a lot of people will not do that. They'll be afraid that they're going to lose everything. What is there to lose, though, in that situation? What could I lose? You could lose all of the offers. Okay, which is fine, because I didn't want to sell anyway. You didn't even want to sell. The subject line was just shutting hayo down. I just sent that out to make people feel like there was blood in the water to get them

emotionally connected to buying us. And I knew once they sold the idea on buying us to their boards, they'd get egg on their face that they didn't get the deal. Oh, right. So let me get this straight. We approved you buying this and then you didn't get it done. Cheaped out by 100 grand. and now we don't have it. I use their own egos essentially against them to maximize price for the company. Interesting. Where did you learn how to do this stuff?

Messed up childhood. I was wondering about that. Seriously? I don't know, to be honest with you. I mean, my backstory, so my household was flipped. My mom was the breadwinner. My dad was a stay-at-home dad, but my dad is also older than my grandma.

So dad's on my mom's side, obviously. Of course. So my dad, like that's how that works. Is anyone who's curious? There's no way that one works. It was actually impossible the other way around. So anyways, I saw a lot. I mean, one thing that I would tell you that I learned when I was little,

my parents would never, and this is interesting for anyone raising kids and who you want to be entrepreneurs, they never told me yes or no. They'd always phrase things as a choice. So if you were my dad, I'd say, Jordan, I really want to go out for like, I want to have a sleepover this weekend. You'd be like, most people would say, honey, like, you can't have a sleepover.

We're busy with soccer games. When my parents would always do is set up it as a choice. Like, honey, if you have a sleep over this weekend, then you have to miss your soccer game, which means less playing time. which do you choose? They'd always say, like, what do you choose? What do you think? It was never a yes or no. So that's the only thing I can look back at my childhood and try and analyze, but honestly, like I'm not a therapist. Someone else could probably look at it and find all kinds of other

patterns. But you said messed up. Was that a joke or just because you were flipped around? Or was there all kinds of weird stuff going on where you were like, I got to fend for myself and make money early and all this stuff? Well, I mean, look, my, and I've never talked to my dad about this. I've never really talked about it publicly, but I think this is an appropriate, you know, time to think about it and space to think about it. I mean, he dealt with hardcore, like, alcoholism. Okay. And so my mom obviously didn't, right?

So there was always a moment where I'd have to analyze at every moment of every day. Has he had something to drink? Is he thinking rationally right now or irrationally? Oh, that's scary for a kid. Well, yeah. So I would have to essentially alter my behavior based on if I thought at any moment, he was in a rational state or an irrational state because it's two different methods. And so what happened is, and I actually actually.

She wanted to use this as the opening kind of sentence in the book, but I didn't. The publisher didn't like it and my mom hated it. But one of the deals I'm most proud of negotiating was my parents divorce. You negotiated your own parents. I negotiated my parents divorce. They, both, I knew from both sides they were staying together until my young brother left the house. They wanted to stay as a family unit. And the reason both of them wanted to do this is because we grew up Roman Catholic. And it would look bad. Interesting. Yeah, it looked very bad from a church perspective. But the problem was no one when my dad was in an irrational state, my mom or my younger, siblings will never really stand up to him. So I was really worried if I left for college and no one was

there to kind of hold his irrational behavior in check. He would wreck everything. Yeah, right. And by the way, it wasn't physical, but it was emotional. It doesn't even matter at that point. To not know, to not have certainty in the house whether your dad is sober and going to be fine or wildly irrational and going to be. Yeah. And again, it wasn't anything that would ever like make the news or elicited a phone call to police. It was nothing like that. It was just, like, I got grounded one time for putting peanut butter and jelly on accident on the washcloth because he was an irrational state and just flipped out over this, like, really little issue. I mean, I remember this like it was yesterday because that he then grounded me for seven days. And this was when I was leaving for college,

I couldn't drive myself to work. So my mom would have to stop her work. She was the breadwin to remember. Yeah. And drive me to my work because my dad didn't want me to drive because I was grounded. Oh, God. That's so irrational, right? So anyways, I negotiated the divorce. It was a beautiful divorce. They're friends today. There were no money spent on lawyers. Everyone still talked to each other. It was a really great divorce. Wow, that's too much response.

How old were you at that point? Well, I was going to call it. 17, 18. So that's, so you were, this responsibility for this stuff we're talking about with business, which we'll get back to in a second, this is child's play literally, because when you were a child, you have responsibility foisted onto you in frankly a very unfair way. but you didn't have a choice. A bit.

But just to be clear, too, like, I'm not one of these guys. You know, the space that you and I kind of dabble in is famous for these people that say, I was broken on the street. And now I'm on stages. I mean, I was a privileged white male born in Northern Virginia. Still am. And I'm going to use that privilege before it runs out, right? But privileged white male, born in North America, born in Loudon County,

which is Northern Virginia, the wealthiest county in the country. I never had to worry about a shelter over my head. food, none of that stuff. It was just this like, every morning when I woke up or went to bed, I had to think about, okay, what state is my father in right now? I had to have that empathy and then change my behavior based, then the house behavior really based off that. And I think that gave me a kind of empathy that allows me to get inside and understand people's heads today in business. Yeah, that's very, very fascinating. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Nathan Lotka. We'll be right

back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to the show and the Overcast Player for iOS, please click on that little star in the sidebar. Really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our show with Nathan Latka. Right. So this leads to you being very good at getting people to agree with you as well. Yeah. Because you're basically telling people, this is what I want.

they can either say, most people probably start off by saying, this is ridiculous, you're charging me too much, or I don't want to do this. So you're able to push through these nose and then flip them on their back. Yeah, I mean, one of the, one of the things I've learned that's powerful, too, is, I mean, have you ever gotten, like, over Thanksgiving in a big debate with your family? And it's clear that, like, no one's going to win. I mean, yeah, sure. It's always going to be like that. One of the most effective ways to win is, like, after you leave the house for the Thanksgiving a holiday is to email them a link to someone else saying something that backs your viewpoint that's coming from someone else's mouth.

Sure. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's what my aunts, uncles and parents do to me. They're like, look at, here's this thing we read in this ridiculous non-news source that says that you're wrong. Super right, super left, like, whatever, yeah. Yeah. So, like, one of the things I talk about in the book, when I was building up, heyo, one thing I would do is I would go into, do you have any sponsors that are in the kind of

SEO space? You know, SEO tools? I would say, do we, Jen? Maybe not. SEO tools. No. That's okay. HostCater has SEO plugins.

That's all I know. No, I'm talking like, so I would go into similar web or AHRFs or SEMRush. Oh, yeah, we don't have that. Okay. And I would look when I was building HEO at who wrote, which authors wrote the highest ranked articles that was sending traffic to my competitors. And I would then email them. And somewhere in the book, I don't know the exact page, but there's a script that I

used to email them. The first one was Guava Box that were basically, my competitor named Shortstack was at the top of their article. And I wanted us to be there. So I emailed them and basically convinced them to edit that old blog post that got long trail traffic to put us at the top of it. And the way I did that is I then basically I had that article saying, hey, it was the best tool builder for Facebook apps.

Anytime someone objected my price, I then link them to that other source. Oh, that's funny. Which was actually my voice put into another mouth. And so that's a very effective way to get what you want, is to link people. to sources that you have some influence over to then convince them of your viewpoint. It sort of reminds me a little bit of the Ryan Holiday, trust me, I'm lying strategy, where you say outrageous news story? And people are like, well, where's the story?

And you go, it's on these blogs. And they go, well, all right. But where did they find out about it? Well, it's on these blogs. But nobody goes that far. They just go, oh, well, if it was on U.S. news, then it's true. Must be legit. And U.S. news got it from local news blotter, which got it from

blogger. Yep. But there's like this cover of, it's like in the 90s, if you were running a scam and you had color business cards that had the fake business name on it, people were like,

well, it's got business cards. And it's thick, and it's a thick business card. It doesn't, you know, crack up in my wallet. I used to, back when I was a kid, get into clubs and concerts and stuff for free because I started a website

that had a music articles on it. But of course, I just basically told my friends, hey, can you write music? articles and I'll put them on this website and we'll go to this concert for free. So I basically paid my friends and concert tickets for them to write articles. Did you get tickets for free? Of course. From the venue. And why would they give them to you for free? Because I'm covering them for this blog, this music website. That was a new quote unquote music news website. But bear in mind, this is like 90, late 90s, early 2000. It's like when I was born. So yeah, when you were born.

So basically, but like that's the thing, right? So people were going, well, it's on this website. And like, must be legit. You can't just, this kid didn't just buy this website and make it, which is exactly what happened. Right? It was like, of course I did. And then I paid my friend's brother to design it and make it look cool. So they went, well, this is a, this website's better than ours.

Yep. This must be legit because I spent, you know, three days making it. And I knew how to make, I knew how to do HTML as a kid because I learned it. It wasn't hard. Now, of course, they're like, so what? It's on a website. You probably just bought that and made it yesterday. Hostgater's website builder.

Hostgator.com slash Jordan. Right? So that was a great. I use them to, though, seriously. All my links, capitalistbook.com, Nathan Flocka.com, all hostcater. I normally don't do sponsor stuff like that, but I just thought it was really obvious and funny.

No, it's great. That's good. But the idea is, look, you can create things that give value or that have perceived value. It's not that it's fake like mine was with the concert tickets. I wouldn't call that fake either. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I was essentially giving them value at some level. The ticket value for them was zero at that point.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think today's day and age, the reason I have a podcast, it's my version of Native American corn, right, when everyone bartered. Like, my corn, the thing I trade today to other people for them to give me value is I'll have you on my podcast, right? If you're a good, I'll have me on my podcast, if you can help me with X, Y, and Z. It's like, or I'll put you on my magazine cover. or I'll mention you in the book.

Or like I think today's day and age, everyone's a media brand, and you have to create the equivalent of corn or cows or beans or cotton that you're trading with people. And that's really how you create value. And you can do this. I mean, are you probably these big like networking groups for entrepreneurs? Not the ones that you're probably thinking of.

I do some. But yeah, like a lot of those I don't join because I found, I'm going to take slack for this. I don't care. A lot of them are sort of these digital internet guys that are, $30,000 millionaires, if you will, and I found that a lot of them were either asking me for stuff or they were just kind of blowing smoke. And I thought, I don't really have time for this. I don't need time for my real friends. I don't need, like, friends that are lying to me about

the revenue stream so that I think they're cool. Like, I really don't care. We know what's funny about, I mean, you open the bucket. So I'll keep going, I'll dive deeper into the bucket. I mean, a lot of these people, it's so funny, they'll go, you know, Nathan, Jordan, we're doing a hundred million in revenue. Right. But then you talks to the lot of people and they're like, yeah, we're affiliates for that company. They pay us 100% affiliate cut. So yeah, they do 100 million in revenue. But guess what?

Their affiliate costs are 100 million. Right, right. It's like, how do you sell a million dollars of, like, this pillow? You go buy it. You go buy $1.1 million worth of it, and you sell it for a million. That's how you get revenue of a million dollars on this pillow. It doesn't work. You lose money on it.

But your revenue, like, I mean, my publisher, by the way, hates the book because it's not timeless. Like, you've had some other people on Essentialism, Gary. with the one thing. The books will sell for decades. This won't because there's so many screenshots. Like I put in here, we can put this in the show notes, but like these are my tax returns from 2013 on page six when I was in college. Let me see that. Yeah, yeah. So there's like what Jordan's looking at is there's $939,000 in sales, but it also shows the expenses. Oh, I was like, holy crap, you made that much and, oh, just kidding, never mind. Yeah. No, that's all top line in my dorm room, but I hired like 20 people. Yeah. I don't know. It says net down there is more like one,

Yeah, yeah. But, but people, not bad for a guy. And yeah, right. And so, and then what's interesting about this is this ultimately turned into, um, did you have you had Ryan Allison with eye contact? Is that ring a bell? Okay. But that turned into this on page 243. Read there just what that part says, the highlighted part. That's great. Wow. Total purchase. The purchase price will be up to $6.5 million and will be paid in the following manner. And there's a lot of other stuff. Yeah, it's like political dragon. I would study in law. My point is, like, that revenue that you just on the tax return turned into, I contact, this is in, again, 2013 time frame offering six and a half for the company, which would have put,

I walked away from this, but it would have put, you know, I own 60%. You can do the math. Yeah. More than $3 million in my pocket. Phenomenal. Yeah, but huge mistake, by the way, I walked away. We can get that if you want. But I bring all that up just to go back on the thing of, like, these networking groups are

famous for like, all the revenue, all the revenue. But what matters is like how much you keep, not how much you make, in my opinion. Profits first. In fact, Mike McCallis wrote a book about. this. And it used to drive me crazy. I used to get FOMO. And I think a lot of people listening and watching also get FOMO because they go, oh, man, look at this person's multi, they're making a million dollars a month. And it's like, okay, they took a cash injection of $70 million. Yeah. And that investor now owns, I don't even know, 80% of the business. They're making a million dollars a month,

but their outgoing costs might even be more than a million dollars a month. Yep. You don't know. Because, and they're not telling you that because it doesn't sound good. No, it doesn't sound good at all. This is why Mike's book, I mean, if you look on Amazon, it's like a number one bestseller because it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the most successful people are the ones that are bringing the most of the bottom line and then reinvesting in themselves somehow. And I think that's obviously the most powerful place to be.

So what sort of practicals can we give right now? We talked about getting people to agree with you. How do we bring people through the process of getting others to agree with us? Because you're really good at this. This is something we should teach the audience. Well, I mean, so something, here's the thing. I'd love to start from a place because I think maybe some people in your audience are people that don't have a podcast like you have to trade with people or they're starting with maybe nothing. Yeah.

And so the question is, how can you do what we do but not have an asset to trade? And the way that, the way that, the example I like to give on this is kind of called elephant bumping. And let me give a practical example here because anyone can do this. So have you guys ever gone on Airbnb when you guys travel? Are you in general to LA? Have you ever just gone on there and you sort from most expensive to lease just for the hell of it? Yeah. We'll see the baller pad.

Yeah, you're like, maybe I can afford 10 grand tonight, like, well, whatever, right? So I do that all the time. And so I did that for this place in L.A., and this was three, four years ago. And I came across this place called Spectacular, Tell High, three-bedroom penthouse, right? And it was a spectacular. Oh, I see. I don't know even what that means. Spectacular.

What I say? Tell high, Telegraph Hill. Is that what that is? I don't even know what that is. I think so. It's up high overlooking San Francisco. Yes. Yeah.

But it was beautiful. Beautiful spot. I'm like, there's no way I can afford this. Isn't that where we had that dinner? You had that dinner for all of us? Were you there? I was there. That's where we met. Okay, hold on. So I don't know. Never tell the backstory of how I made that happen without spending money? No, but I remember going there and telling Jen, dude, this guy's apartment had like a full wall of windows and it overlooked like all the boats. It was so cool. Okay. And I thought this kid has a trust fund somewhere. I wish. Yeah. Okay, so here's how I did that. I thought you owned it. I was so proud of you.

I reached out to Tommy, who owned the place. I said, hey, Tommy, I'm looking for a place I can both stay at in San Francisco and host a 10 to 15 person mastermind in. I'll do one dinner each night. The quoted price above is way above, like, my budget. Are you willing to be flexible? What is the best price you could offer for the night of the 24th, 25th, and 26th last day I check out? He wrote back and basically said, I have no, I have no flexibility. And I said, Tommy, my intent is to host a 10 person mastermind. The people that I'm inviting are X, Y, and I listed some big time CEOs. was Rick Rudman with Vocus and some other people. And I said, if I invite you to the mastermind, would you give me a discount? Like, so basically I'm saying, I'll invite you to your own house for a mastermind that I'm having. I then took a picture of this penthouse and emailed it to a bunch of people that I wanted to have like you to, so you'd see and go, holy shit. I didn't even know if I saw the photos. You may have not. I just accepted your invitation because I'm not a douchevish.

That's awesome. I like that. But a lot of people, I mean, they reacted from those photos. So I used two things I didn't own. the connections to the CEOs I was inviting and a penthouse I did not own. Right. And I just figured how to bump them into each other and create an event where people's impressions had the impressions that you had.

Oh, right. So the people would go, well, I will go to this. He's got a really great spot. So maybe the CEO Vocus says to himself, this looks legit. Exactly. I will go. Exactly. And then the trick here is you might go, well, Nathan, I can't do that.

I don't know CEOs to invite. So what you do is you email everyone. Just put together your top 10 list, people don't impress the hell out of you. And you email it to everyone and say, hey, this is the, the invited and confirmed list. Invited and confirmed. So they could all, none of them maybe, maybe only one's confirmed who's like your best friend. All the others are just big names you've invited. That's why it's invited and confirmed. The thing is, they then see that. Other people see it and then actually start confirming or they see the penthouse and actually start confirming. And before you know it,

you put a great mastermind on. So I ended up paying. They wanted, I mean, I think, yeah, so I got that place for $1,000. It was listed for $2,400. So I got basically a 60% discount. with this kind of template that I have all the screenshots here on page 113 in the book. And that's how you get what you want. What I like about this book is it has the, where the rubber meets the road is in there. Because otherwise you get books that go, oh, well, what you want to do is you want to find a win-win. And it's like, great.

So what does that look like? So, for example, and then they tell like in 1968, Bill Murray was selling typewriters. And it's like, look, this is not, I know what a win-win is. How do I say this thing? and then say this other thing and then get those things to collide into each other and that stuff is in the book.

The reason your publisher, like you said, doesn't like it, is because it has things like here's my email. You have a lot of shirtless photos in here for those cougars. Dude, thirst trap, baby.

Search, by the way, Cougars and the gays. The gays love a good and six pack. That's right. And you've got the email screenshots of the Gmail. You've got your calendar

screenshot in here. Yeah. You've got... Hold on. Go back to that page. You just flipped by. The one of me. The one of me.

the full bathroom mirror selfie? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to ask you, we're going to quiz here. Okay. Who do you know online

and influencer poses in front of Rolls Royces all the time? Yeah, there's plenty. He doesn't want to name a name. He's very politically smart that way. Yeah. Here's how that world actually works. Okay, I only had 5,000 Instagram followers,

but I sent out an email to auto exotic rental and said, basically, I'll post a picture of you, of me in front of this Rolls Royce, if you give it to me for free. This was the CEO, of the car company rental places response. Hey, my name is Toby. I'm the main contact for marketing for auto exotic rental.

Thank you for reaching out to us. We can definitely work with you. We have the Rolls-Roy's ghost. Is there a particular date you're looking at so I can check the availability for you? Please feel free to contact me at any time. Hope to hear from you soon. Long story short is I was driving around this Rolls-Roy's ghost,

which if you, I paid retail is $1,400 bucks a night. I got it for two nights for free and just posted one picture to my Instagram of me driving this thing. Tag the tag thing. And I only, by the way, a lot of people think you have to have a million followers. I had 5,000 followers.

$5,000, it's not a ton. No, that is... It's nothing, actually. Reasonable. There are many ambiguously, possibly gay, possibly not gay dudes that have at least that many. Yeah. And they can leverage... By the way, this works for straight people, too, join.

Sure, it does. My point is, though, is that just comes down to getting the right email template of how to reach out to the brand to get them to give you stuff for free. And that's why you see me posing shirtless in Bali, where I traveled for 45 days for free, just trading Instagram posts for this with a very small following. Do you have to be shirtless? in the post. Not always, but as you know, on Instagram, Jen, back me up here. On Instagram, the guys of the six packs, they always get more likes. That's how it works.

I think that I might not be able to leverage exactly that strategy. However, Jen, give me a salad for lunch today instead. I think that I can work with this. What happens when somebody's so, I also now I'm thinking to every car I've ever rented just seeing my money lighting on fire. Yeah. You could trade every one of those. Here's a quick tip for your audience if they travel a lot and they want to see in luxurious places. There's a code word that if you ask for when you call the hotel, they'll give you 60% off. How did you know this? The media, I'm in the media. Okay. But I never used the media rate. Have you told your audiences before? No, let's go through this. This is a really good tip of action. Yes. You just say, what is your media rate? And what happens

when you ask for that on the phone? What happens is they go, oh, well, it's half of what we have on the website. The only downside that can happen is they go, yeah, you get one night at that rate and the rest of the night's hurt. Because they figure you're going to stay. at that hotel and then review it at that price. You don't need to stay for a week. You can stay for a night. However, I feel like there's probably room there. Like, look, I don't want to have to check out and go to another hotel. Can you just give me the rate for the whole time? And we'll try that next time. A lot of times we use points or we get really good rates on other stuff where we stay with friends. But the media rate is a good win. You can stay at the four seasons

in freaking Barcelona, Spain, for the lower than the price on orbits or whatever. Yeah, not just lower, like big discount. And I mean, I'll admit to this to your audience. When I first started trying this, I didn't want to go hire someone to like be my agent or rep. Yeah. So my name was Wayne, which is my middle name, Nathan Wayne Latka. I'd call up the Jeffrey in Lathka and say, hey, my name's Wayne. I'm representing a talent named Nathan Latka. He has his own podcast. He's looking to come these days. He's looking at the London or the Jeffrey to stay at. What's your media rate? And then I'll report back to Nathan and see which one he picks. So you make him compete. You get the media. rate, you drive it down, and then they'd say, well, here it is for one night. And I'd say, well,

Nathan really doesn't want to do one night. He gets angry really easily and doesn't like shifting hotels. If he leaves a trip advisor review, could you throw in two other nights? Or if he does two posts instead of one, can you throw in another or two nights? And so I would be my own agent to understand how they thought and then line it up. Luckily, I have my own live-in. You have a really? So here's, this is funny. I was interviewing Mike Posner yesterday. I don't actually know who Mike was nice. You know that song? I, took a pill in Ibiza. Oh, yeah, yeah.

So he wrote that, and he wrote a bunch of other songs that you've heard from, like, Maroon 5, Justin Bieber. He's a really, really talented dude. And this other guy walks in and, like, trainers and it's like, hey, Jordan, I'm a fan of the show. And I was like, oh, hey, come on in. Nice guy who's with Mike Posner, who knows my show. And I said, so are you, like his friend or an assistant?

And he goes, well, I'm his aide de camp. And I was like, that is such a better name than assistant. So now Jen is my aide to camp. I love that. No more. Because otherwise, it's like if you say assistant, they're like, isn't that your wife, you jerk? And you're like, yeah. And then if you say wife, people are like, why am I dealing with your wife? You two bit turd? What's funny is, so it takes a little balls encouraged to like be your own agent, obviously. But what's interesting now is like I'm signed with CAA because I pit the pit of them against UT and WME.

I've negotiated a reality show on linear. That goes live later this year. It's linear. Cable. TV. Got it. TV TV. Yeah, yeah. I've heard of that. Yeah, yeah. I think we had that when I was a kid. But like all that leverage came from these like little weird things that I did early on over the past decade that we've again put in the book. So it's it's funny because people are going, oh, well, this guy just lied about everything. But here's the thing. If you are pretending to be your own assistant, I don't really see. You're not really deceiving someone.

You could hire an assistant. It would just be expensive in a waste of money. Exactly. I'm saving money. And I'm not hurting anyone. Right. You're not telling someone, oh, he's the editor-in-chief of fours. Exactly. Right. That would be BS. If the business is making the decision because you have a perceived higher value because you have an assistant, that at worst is social engineering.

Yep. At worst. I have no problem with this. Some people watch your now if you're a pastor or peace or something, you may have issues with this. I have no, here's my rules on this. You can't lie and it can't be hurting anybody. If it does anything else, totally fine. Yeah, because the hotel is not losing money on this. That room was otherwise empty. They're not going to give you a room that somebody was paying full price for. That's right. And they're still getting, I mean, it is Nathan Latka staying there. I'm just, I'm putting Wayne in front of Nathan to socially engineer. And then Wayne is emailing the hotel, my social profile. So they're seeing all the real stuff. It's just you're putting someone in between. And it creates a perception of scarcity. Oh, I will tell you this. I hired a show booker because when I reach out to people, they're like, if your show really has five million downloads a month and this screenshot's not fake, why are you emailing me? Exactly. And I'm like, because I don't mind talking with, oh, wait a minute. I've got to be hoity toady LA Hollywood to get your attention. Fine. Here's money to I have a fancy guy who's got a pedigree and a cool accent who lives in New York who calls people and sends

them text messages and goes to do you really do that hours. Yeah. Wait, how much you pay him? Yeah, he's he's on retainer for 2,500 a month. See, so I'm just cheap. I don't want to pay that. So I'd rather invent Sarah at Nathanelaka.com and have me be responding. through Sarah's email. To be fair, he's got real connections. He's a showbooker for a real television show in New York that is that a lot of people watch. So I pay him for his connections, but I would say maybe half of what he gets is so that he does the work that I don't have to do, but also so that people go, oh, well, if you're that guy at that agency, then you must be a big deal. That's smart. And it actually has saved me a ton of time. Yeah. Because,

unfortunately people do look at, our brains are wired to look at quick things for perceived value. Yep. So if somebody is from an agency has certain prestige, it doesn't matter if that person just is for higher on freaking Fiverr. Yep. It doesn't matter. What matters is the person goes, well, I don't have time to investigate this Jordan guy, but since his booker from CAA is reaching out, he must be, this must be real. Yep. And that's an unfortunate reality. But, and the problem is you can't if you're not doing it since the bar is now raised you you're losing i realized before i was like well who cares i'm just going to book my own show it's fine it's worked for a

decade the problem is now you've got a lot of these fake influencer d bags that are doing all kinds of things to show how important they are and you have to actually have unfortunately some of those accoutrements or you're just going to get lost in the shuffle because they're going to assume that you would at least have what the fake guys have, which is unfortunate. You have to play the game. And then where you really rise above the cream of the crop, which is you don't do fire festival, right? When you say to my podcast sponsor, I'm going to deliver you X amount of customers, you

deliver those customers and they stay with you for life, even though you're playing the game up front of having an intermediate or somebody in between. So, no, I have no problem playing the game. I think it's important. Yeah, I like your rules, though. people, no lying and you can't hurt someone. So no buying 100,000 Twitter followers and then selling tweets to potential sponsors. Because you won't deliver the customers. It's called fraud, too. It's fraud. What you're doing is you're leveraging something that the person might not have thought of before

and flipping the right switches. Yep. Yeah. That's, it's, it's funny. It's 10 years ago, I would have said, you know, we would be talking about this in dating and it would be completely. It's a new one. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it would be the same thing. How your buddy go, say hi to the girl, and then bring her over to you. And it's kind of a classic example of this in a dating context was a lot of these pickup guys would always be like, yeah, go up and be like, yeah, man, I had a long day. My Ferrari's in the shop. So I had to borrow the loaner car.

And the loaner car wasn't as cool as my real one because it doesn't have leather seat. Like all this dumb crap. But what I realized was there are different tiers, right? Like if I tell you that I've got a great big house, which is a terrible. thing to do, but whatever. This is, you know, Hollywood dating scene pickups crap. You go, eh, really? I don't know. But if my friend tells you, you're like, oh, that's interesting. Maybe I'll listen. But if you overhear the conversation between other people and I'm not in the conversation, that is the top tier of credibility. Like if I tell you, my show's got five million

downloads a month, you're like, oh, well, maybe that's true. Jordan seems stressful. If a friend of yours tells you that it has that much, now you believe it. But if you find out, because you over heard two random CEOs talking about the show and they weren't even telling you, now you think, well, that has to be true because I wasn't even, they have no agenda to try to persuade me. I was just in the lobby. Yes. And the problem is is people actually do, sometimes they set that up on purpose to make it seem like there is no and there is.

Yeah. That's all thing. This is like the future, by the way, with like fake profiles. I mean, can you imagine, have you seen these videos where people can now essentially, it's a clip of Hillary Clinton speaking, but you can alter it so it says something else. Yes. Like, we're going to have a real issue with this because videos won't even be true anymore. I know.

They can be doctored. The problem is, here's what's going to happen. One video out of a billion is going to get doctored, but it's going to be something important. And then Alex Jones and all these Yahoo's are going to talk about it. And then every video that everyone watches for the rest of their life, they're going to go, oh, it's probably fake. Well, that's the issue. Right.

So now every single thing we see content-wise moving forward is going to simply be, it's not going to matter if it's true or not. because no one knows what to believe. It's going to be who is more persuasive at saying this is called an iPhone. No, it's called an N-phone because of X, Y, and Z. And it's just going to be a persuasion game, which is scary, by the way. It's scary and unfortunate because the most persuasive people aren't necessarily going to be the most ethical ones. They're usually not.

They're usually not. That's why they're so persuasive. Exactly, yeah. And you're right. We're going to run into a huge issue, which is this goes into this whole thread of trust, which is I will never lie to the people, willingly or knowingly lie to the people. people who are listening to are watching me because you, what is it, that phrase, trust takes a lifetime to build.

Lose in a day. You lose it in a day. No lies. No hurting people. Yeah. And it's better to live that way. You can sleep better. Trust me.

And frankly, it works better. You said you play the long game. Long game, it's always better to have told the truth the whole time, even if it cost you something short term. Because when it really, really counts, people want somebody they can trust. Totally. And if you have that record behind you, then you're good. Some of my biggest sponsors today are ones approached me that two years ago, and I said,

sorry, I can't beat that cack. You're not a fit. There's no way to even let you run a test. Yeah. Then they come back two years later and they go, Nathan, if you can beat the cack now, I'm going, I go, actually, yeah, I know more the demos and I can beat it. And they trust me so much the second time they come back because they know I said no and declined money two years ago. So no, it's very, very critical.

Nathan, thank you very much. Jordan, thanks for having me on, man. Appreciate it. Big thanks to Nathan Lodka for coming by my pad here. His book is called How to Be a Capitalist. without any capital, which I think is a great title, especially for him, because he is really the master of leveraging other people's resources here. If you want to know how I managed to book, great guests for the show, manage friendships with amazing people, create all these systems,

tiny habits, and consistency in my networking and relationships. Check out six-minute networking. It's free. I want you to implement this stuff. It will change the way you do business. It will change the way you live your entire life. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Do not kick the can down the road. You have to dig the well before you get thirsty when it comes to relationships and networking. The drills are literally designed to just take a few minutes per day. I wish I knew this stuff 15, 20 years ago. It is crucial.

And it's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Nathan Latka. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason Jack of All Trades, DePilipo, and Jen Harbinger. Show Notes and Worksheets by Robert Fogart. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode.

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