The Pomp Podcast - #414: Jordan Harbinger on Building A World Class Podcast

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Jordan Harbinger is an American podcaster and radio personality. He hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the United States, The Jordan Harbinger Show. In this conversation, we discuss Jordan’s story, how we grew his podcast, what the guest selection process looks like, why Jordan won’t sell to any podcast networks, and how his life experience informs his content.  ======================= Digital art is here, and it's real. NFTs are selling for hundreds and thousands of dollars. The only platform I buy on is Nifty Gateway, which is an official sponsor of the Pomp Podcast.They release content from the best NFT artists in the world twice weekly, and have featured many world famous artists including Kenny Scharf, Trevor Jones and WhIsBe. NFTs on Nifty Gateway are in extremely high demand, so if you really want one, make sure to be on the website as soon as it is released. Go to http://www.niftygateway.com and sign up for an account today. ======================= Harvested Financial makes options incredibly simple. They’re the first options robo advisor, where you can build and customize a personalized trading plan that gets automatically executed. Options help you speculate in capital efficient ways, diversify your holdings with market neutral strategies, and generate passive income by selling premium. https://www.harvestedfinancial.com/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jordan Harbinger is an American podcaster and radio personality. He hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the United States, The Jordan Harbinger Show. In this conversation, we discuss Jordan's story, how he grew his podcast, what the guest selection process looks like, why Jordan won't sell to any podcast networks, and how his life experience informs his content. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jordan and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Nifty Gateway.

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Financial. I've had Mark Phillips on the podcast. He was great, and the company is even cooler. Harvestedfinancial.com slash Pomp. Go to Harvestedfinancial.com slash Pomp and get access to the first options robo-advisor that they've built. It's awesome. I like it. You will too. Next up is me. I'm sponsoring my own shit. I write a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Jordan. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital.

All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Jordan here. Thanks so much for doing this, man. Hey, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Let's jump right into your background. You've got a pretty crazy story before you got into media and the podcast. Just talk to us about where you grew up and kind of how you got to do the media stuff.

Sure. So I grew up in Michigan and my parents, you know, we're like normal middle class folks, my mom was a teacher and my dad was working at Ford as an auto worker. So for me, owning your own business was never really like a thing I thought about doing. Entrepreneur wasn't a word people used. It wasn't, it's trendy now, you know, everyone's doing it, but like the internet economy obviously didn't exist when I was growing up. And when I was young, I was really trying to find things that would help me fit in. Cause I was like, why does, you know, I don't understand how anything works. Why does anybody want a regular job? I didn't get it. And so I started to explore the internet in the nineties, the early nineties. And I was like, there's so much

power in here. I just can't quite figure out exactly what all of it is. But I was communicating with a lot of adults online and I was doing a lot of different work online. Like I remember one of my friends, dad's was like a stock broker type person. And I think it was actually a stock broker or he worked in some sort of brokerage house and i would print off like stock quotes and then bike over to his office and give them to him and he'd give me like 150 bucks because otherwise he had to get the stock quotes from this like fax service that cost a lot of money and it charged you every time they faxed you new stock information and i think they only updated you like every few days maybe uh or something along those lines or every day at a

certain time. And he's like, wait, I can call this kid and get like up to the minute plus a bike ride stock quotes from the internet. And I was like, yeah, I can do this. So he wanted me to set it up in his house. Couldn't really be done, but I could get like news information, company information from libraries, from university libraries that was digitized and nobody knew how to do that. So that was like me. I was like the beginning of me, like, uh, I guess you'd call it arbitraging information. I'm trying to hide this wire. It's not working very well. Uh, usually sticks on the back, but I lost the clip arbitraging information for, or from the online world. I'm just going to let this go ahead and fall down like that. And that was really easy for, for me to do as a kid.

And then as I got older, I was like, wait, there's, there's more to this sort of internet business. And I sort of let it go for a while. And, you know, now I'm doing media and radio on the internet. So podcasting with the Jordan Harbinger show, but I was on Sirius XM for a long time, you know, I worked a lot, sort of in adjacent professions. And I was a lawyer before that. But I guess I was always sort of destined to work and do something online on the internet, because that really was like what I'd been what it sort of started doing what I was interested in doing. Absolutely. And as I was reading online, before we went to do this, you've got like these crazy life experiences, which I always think makes people the most interesting or fascinating

or people who have traveled people who have kind of had different experiences. I saw that at one point, there was this thing in North Korea, through China, there was some maybe difficult situations that like kidnapping in two different occasions, like talk me through just, it sounds like you've traveled a bunch outside the United States, where did that interest come from? And then maybe tell a couple of those stories. Sure. So yeah, I traveled a lot outside the United States. I was an exchange student when I was younger. So I went to Germany when I was like 17 years old to do my senior year of high school. And that was really something else, Cause I ended up in the former East Germany, which used to be communist, you know, Soviet

Republic, essentially kind of, um, but at least the Soviet satellite state East Germany. So I grew up really getting, or I shouldn't say I grew up, uh, I, I ended up getting a lot of different experience that most people, my age never got, you know, most of the kids my age would like go into high school, senior year, they screwed around all year, hung out with their friends and I was over it. I was bored. I moved to East Germany. I ended up learning German fluently and like my host family and friends, you know, we would travel

this place and that place. I ended up going to Italy for like two weeks, going to a public school in Italy, ended up going to England as an exchange student during my exchange on like a class trip with all these German kids. And so I really kind of got like three, four years of growing up in this one year plus a language. And then when I got to college, I was like, wow, it's really slowing down again. I'm taking classes. Everyone's just drinking all the time. So I was like, okay, going abroad is not only a cool escape, but it really is where it's at for learning. So I went to, like, man, Panama, Mexico, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, and I know I'm leaving a bunch out. I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Panama.

I took Spanish lessons in Mexico, took a semester there. I went to Israel for a while, like I mentioned before. After that, I ended up going to Serbia, not Siberia, but Serbia, former Yugoslav republics. And then I was got into China and things like that. I ended up doing a tour company that takes people to North Korea and then it became illegal to do that. So I sold the company to a British company operating out of China. So that that's all stuff that I did like in my twenties, you know,

and then I became a wall street attorney as well during that time. And I was just like, this is sort of a slow paced gig, even though it's wall street. I was like, this really isn't for me. I'm I'm moving faster than the speed of first year associate at a law firm. You know what I mean? So I really wanted to start lots of different ventures and run them. And then I realized like, oh, it's not that I want to start a lot of different things. It's that I want to do something that moves at my pace. And so that's how I ended up being in business for myself, you know, and starting businesses and ventures. Because I like

to do a lot. I get more done in a day than a lot of people get done in a week. And it's not just like, oh, I work so hard. A lot of it's productivity. A lot of it's focus. A lot of it's me being kind of a hyperactive person who always has a lot of irons in the fire. And, you know, I, I didn't know that I was like that until my parents told me I was like that. You never believe your parents. And then I started to look at what my friends were doing and they were like, yeah, I kind of like do this, go home, watch TV. And I was like, what? I work like 13 hour days because I like it and I want to get more done. And so I've always been that kind of a person, you know, I've always been that kind of like a move really fast, try things, see if it breaks,

try new stuff crack the code figure it out kind of person and that that works really well for business owners especially on the in the internet space absolutely what's north korea like like i feel like that's just a place that everyone hears about but nobody actually has been other than you know select few people uh especially in the western world like what is that like yeah man i mean north korea is like there's nothing to buy there's nothing to do um it's not that you're sitting in the hotel board the whole time. It's just that there are no stores other than bookshops that sell books written by Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung or whatever. That's it. That's literally it. They sell posters. You know, you can't like get most goods. There's no random

food for sale. Restaurants turn the lights on when you arrive because there's no commerce. There's nobody just wandering in off the street for a bite. You know, that stuff just doesn't exist. So capitalism is completely absent in many, many ways, which is shocking. Like you can't even imagine it most storefront areas are just closed there's nothing there the doors are locked um there might be a bunch of bottles in the window to make it look like it's got stuff but when you walk by you notice that like every shelf has the same thing and it's a bottle pushed all the way forward on the display shelf and it's like a bottle of i don't know like rice wine basically right so soju is what it's called there and they'll just have the same locally made soju

at the front of the shelf there's not like a whole row of it like there would be at a grocery store it's not refrigerated the lights are off the bottles have dust on them and you go oh they literally just put these in the window so that they can be like this at one time maybe sold something like this you know but it's just sitting there in the sun like 24 7 all day and you know you might even see like a clothing store but it just sells like workers uniforms all of which are the same for men and women pretty much you know communism doesn't have like a bunch of clothes that you can just buy that you want it has certain state issued uniforms and you can go in there and get those at that place maybe during certain hours when they're open if they're ever open

and that's what it's really like i mean you can go in huge apartment buildings that have non-working elevators but the place has like 40 floors you know you can go in hotels that don't have electricity you can go in museums that don't have heat even in the middle of winter and so everyone inside is wearing a jacket. You can see your breath. Like, it's just, it's a completely dysfunctional society. There's no mass transit that works all the time or even most of the time for everyone. There'll be lines that are two hours long to get on a bus. It's really, it's really a weird scenario. And like, they do their best to kind of hide this from you when you're there. Like they'll have fake customers in a store that are all buying

one pair of socks. And you're just like, that's weird. There's three people buying one pair of socks each in this store and like all the stuff on the shelves is expired it's just very weird it's a very weird scenario because there's no capitalism there's no market forces there's no money there's no trade happening so it's it's like this very bizarre scenario in which you it's completely alien to anything in the united states and like as soon as you drive out of the capital city there's no electricity there's no running water there's people that live in little like handmade huts essentially just like they were probably living in in 1850 you know there's it's really really weird the mobile phones can't call outside the country um how they uh how aware

are the people who live in the country of where they're living versus like this isn't how it is everywhere else they kind of know because they all watch these bootleg films from south korea that are brought in via china so there are people that have but again if you don't have electricity maybe your friend has electricity maybe you've seen something over someone's shoulder or at a friend's house one time but you know when you watch that that other places have that those kinds of things like they'll show b-roll of south korea and there's a bunch of cars driving around office buildings that are well lit people walking by playing with their smartphone and eating a bunch of food and there's a lot of people that talk about this on youtube where they're like

at first you think it's science fiction just like if you watched a video of somebody flying around You'd be like, well, that's not real. But North Koreans see that over and over and over. And they start to think like, huh, they're not really making a big deal out of having this food or this smartphone or this car or this building having electricity. So it doesn't really seem like it's a real, it's not like a plot device. Like if you're watching a movie and someone can fly, this is a movie about somebody who can fly.

Like that's what the movie's about. But in South Korea, if it's just teenagers having a romance and a soap opera, and they're going out to eat all the time and jumping in an Uber and calling each other on their smartphone and texting each other with an iphone it's not like this is this is happening in the future it's like this is happening right now so they start to slowly get the idea that they are left over and people who live in the capital who see foreigners walking around with their phones they are under the impression that we are like super rich one percenters or diplomats so we have like millions of dollars and everyone else is poor and there's all these propaganda films of like

people in the united states that are homeless only being allowed to eat one cup of frozen water like snow every day and you know it's like it's so stupid but they don't have any internet really so they don't know what the difference is you know they have no internet they have no social media their phones can't dial in or in outside the country they can only call each other so there's a lot of people that really don't know and don't get it but i think they highly suspect that something is wrong because they don't even have food you know in a lot of these places and a lot of the people are malnourished and their hair's falling out so like outside of the capital city they might know less but there's rumors there's always the rumor mill you know of so-and-so's

cousin goes to china and they feed their dogs more than we eat at the equivalent you know of a national holiday here in north korea and it's on the floor there are books about this where this doctor escaped to china because she was starving and she wanted to find food for her patients and medicine and things like that and she crosses the frozen river into china and she sees a dog bowl well she sees a bowl on the floor full of rice and has like one sort of half eaten short rib or rib in it and she's back crouches down and eats it and then this dog comes over and starts eating and she's like oh and she's like that's when i realized that a dog in china eats better than a doctor in north korea so there's a lot of people that know and now that there's people that work uh

on the border of china and get wi-fi signals or mobile phone signals or things like that or transporting goods illegally or soldiers that work on the dmz and are looking across the border with binoculars they can see that there are tourists that go and look at the dmz from the south that all have smartphones and gucci handbags and you know are dressed well and they're picking up these wireless signals and they know that like their entire family in a year makes 600 bucks or 400 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever it is like they know there's a majority of people i would say highly suspect that something is wrong but they just have no hope because they can't leave yeah It's absolutely wild.

How did you go from that life of experiencing all of that and understanding that and kind of going around the world to starting the podcast and saying, look, I want to go do kind of more of the media content stuff? Yeah, I mean, I started off the podcast as a way to get ahead at my Wall Street firm, like make network connections and things like that. And that was really what I was mostly concerned about doing. And so I was learning about body language and persuasion and influence and things like that.

And that got me started on the podcast. And then I started interviewing people that also taught those things. So that was kind of interesting, you know, interviewing coaches, getting free knowledge and that sort of thing. And then my, I was working in real estate finance on wall street. So my firm took a major downturn at 2008 when there was a recession. And what happened then was I was like, okay, I can either find a new job that I don't really want, or I can keep doing this podcasting thing.

by then I'd been picked up by Sirius XM satellite radio. I was doing like phone coaching for people and I was like, I'm just going to turn this into a real coaching business. And that's what we did. You know, I never went back to the law. I started the coaching business that would later become the Jordan Harbinger show using the podcast as lead gen and made a few million dollars doing that realized I didn't love coaching split with my business partners, restarted again, uh, the podcast as the Jordan Harbinger show. And now I just make my living from advertising really, which is great. You know, it's a nice sort of privileged place to be. I don't have to sell products. I don't have to hawk anything. I noticed a lot of like coaches and people online, they all

have like 7,000 products for sale and they're launching a book every year to stay relevant. I just, I'm just glad I'm kind of out of that rat race. Yeah. How did you launch the podcast, build such a big audience and kind of make the podcast work, right? It's a lot of people who are listening to this that probably either have podcasts, want to have a podcast and they're saying, look, Jordan did a great job. Like what was that playbook like? Sure. I mean, that's a tough question because I was super early to market, right? I started in 2006. So I had an early audience. A lot of people write me now and they're like, Hey, I've been listening to you since 2007, 2008. You know, I have long-term fans that have been listening for a decade or possibly longer.

So I started off with a lot of early success and momentum because there were only like 800 podcasts or something like that when I first started. That said, you know, having good quality content that's consistently good and never mailing it in and never being like, eh, screw it, I got to release something this week. What's it going to be? I don't care. Just put something out there. I never do that. You know, I spend like 20 hours prepping for my interviews. I always read the book from the guest. I do better and more comprehensive interviews than most people because I outwork them, not because I'm talented or anything, but because I outwork them. And then I appear on other shows like this. But I mean, right now, the gasoline on the fire is, you know,

I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on advertising. That's what's growing the show at the rate that it is. You can go on as many shows as you want. It's a good place to start and launch a show, but you're never going to scale anything massive in the media space without advertising, unless you have another platform behind you. You know, the biggest shows in podcasting are going to be run by massive media

platforms like the New York times and PR Vox. The way to compete with them is to spend money. There's no magic formula. There's no like drive Facebook ads to your show. Cause you're smart. You know how to use Facebook ads. Like that's delusional. You really need to be spending like hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to compete at that level. So I never advise people to go ahead and do that. Cause it's unrealistic. Yeah. And in terms of the spending, uh, if you want to build that big audience, where is the most effective way to do that? Are people doing that on other podcasts? Are they

doing that on the social channels? Are they literally like buying ads and newspapers? What are they doing? The only thing that I've found that works is buying ads on other podcasts. The problem is measuring conversion. As far as I know, I haven't, well, so I have an agency. I wasn't going to bring this up, but I have an agency. I only have like three clients. It's a side business, if you will, because I'm one of the clients.

But I'm the only one who is doing this. And I know this because the software that I use called Chartable has told me that I'm the only person that is using the software in this particular way at this scale. to grow the show. So what I do is I buy ads on other podcasts. I mark conversion. I take conversion metrics and I measure certain types of conversion. And I know like what to look for, how to match audience, how to measure conversion. Well, I know how to do the ad buys, negotiate the pricing. So that's what I've been doing, but it's, it's a pretty large scale endeavor. I mean, if people have a real budget to grow their show, sure. Reach out to me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

But I mean, the minimum I would say is going to be 10 to 20,000 a month per month. And I would say you need to do at least like a three to six month commitment before it's even makes it worthwhile to like sign up for charitable for me to like even look at it you know just not because i'm so busy and i'm so special but because nothing moves the needle unless you put money in it it just doesn't work the reason you can grow a podcast slowly over like five six ten years by just going on other shows doing good content posting about it on linkedin you know but you're gonna get five new listeners a day, 10 new listeners a day. If you want 500 per day, you have to pay for that. Yeah. And in terms of how do you go about guest selection or kind of the topics that you cover

on the show? I only go with my own interests. You know, I just basically say like, look, this is an FBI agent that went undercover in the mafia. Cool. Interesting. This is Amanda Knox, who was falsely or wrongly imprisoned in Italy for a murder she didn't commit. I'm interested. This is a CIA operative that uncovered a major human trafficking organization. Cool, I'm interested. This is an art forger. I'm interested.

You know, those are the people that I have on the Jordan Harbinger show. I don't really go like, ooh, who's trending? I see YouTubers doing that and it's great, but they're on this treadmill. They're on a hamster wheel where they have to find trendy people and they have to get them in early

because otherwise nobody cares. The beauty of podcasting is I can have someone on and I can go, you have no idea who this is. I read the book. You're going to be interested. I know you trust me because you've listened to a hundred episodes of the Jordan Harbinger show and I haven't disappointed you very often. So check it out. That's what, that's the beauty that podcasters have. So I never worry if something's going to be too far off base, you know, with, with rare exceptions, you know, if I'm talking about traveling to North Korea, I still think a large enough percentage of my audience is going

to be interested in my travels to North Korea. So I might release an episode about that. Um, but what I won't do is be like, Oh, I'm really interested in, uh, my wife's into beekeeping. So we're into beekeeping this month. Let me do a podcast about beekeeping. I don't do that because that's too far off the through line, but anything that can talk about psychology, human behavior, or is a fascinating story. I feel like it's in the through line and I have enough rapport and trust with my audience over the last 14 years that people will listen. And there's a lot of people that skip around when they're new. And then I'll get an email like, Hey, I've been listening to you for six months or a year, I'm going back and listening to all the stuff I missed because

I was just listening to Kobe Bryant and Howie Mandel and Chelsea Handler and Dennis Rodman. But now I realize that those episodes that I don't think are going to be interesting because I haven't heard of the guest. Those are also interesting. So then people go back and listen to like the other, you know, 398 episodes of the show. So for me, I just never try and guess what's going to be trendy or go viral because there's no such thing as going viral on podcasting. That sucks in a way because it means your show can't go viral and just get a whole bunch of new listeners overnight. But it's great because what it means is your audience is loyal and they'll listen to a lot of the things that you put out and you grow slowly but consistently over time,

which YouTube typically does not do. Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of interacting with that audience, like what you've really built is you've built fans, right? And so that is much different than just somebody who kind of passively listens once a year or once a you know a quarter they're constantly coming back they like you they like the conversation like the topics they trust you how else have you really kind of nurtured that uh that fan relationship is it things you're doing on other platforms is it over email is it just literally time over the podcast like how do you think about uh developing kind of that deeper relationship with the uh with the listeners who become fans yeah so i i do answer all my dms on instagram i answer my linkedin

inbox, although next year I may not be able to do that just because there are thousands of messages that come in there every month and it just gets massively overwhelming. I do answer every email. I'll probably do that for a long time because I feel like if people take the time to email, that's so much easier than a DM. It's so much easier than a tweet. It's so much easier than a LinkedIn message. So I'll probably always take the time to do that, but I may take time away from other social platforms. So I engage there. But, you know, at the end of the day, if someone's listening to the jordan harbinger show and they're catching one hour a week and or three hours a week i mean people know me like they know people in their family after a year or after six months

you know what i mean so there's a lot of rapport generated that way um it's i think what do they call it like a proto-social relationship or something like that um so there's a lot of rapport built that way there's a lot of uh facetime sort of in a way built that way but i do engage in the other way because obviously the listeners are the most important people that you can have the the guest comes after the the fans you know and that's how it has to be i know a lot of hosts put the guests before the fans they try to be friends with the guests those shows are universally crap because it's a bunch of softball questions because they want to be friends with the guests and they want the guests to think that they're cool that's i see a lot of influencers do that

and i'm always like this show is going to be a waste of time i i never trust those hosts after that. It's always, it's almost always in universally just a waste of time because the host is just sort of like brown nosing with the guests and that, that disrespects my time as a listener. So I never really do that. I think you should always put the listeners first. And the best way to do that is to think about what's good for them when you're creating the content and then secondarily engage with them. And I think Gary Vaynerchuk talks about that too, right? He talks about like, you have to engage, engage, engage. People go like, I don't have time for that. Well, I mean, maybe reprioritize your time. Yeah. How do you think about in terms of actually

editing the content itself, right? There's some people who say, Hey, look, uh, I want to have it as authentic as possible. I don't want to touch it. Maybe like a Joe Rogan. So, you know, two, three hour conversation, no editing in between. Uh, then there's other people who heavily edit the podcast or videos, uh, basically to, um, you know, prioritize people's time. Hey, if I ask you to listen to this for 30 minutes, it may have been an hour and a half long conversation, but I've edit it down to the best 30 minutes, it's super fast paced, and you'll blow through it and learn a bunch. Like, how do you kind of think about that balance between those two arguments? Yeah, I mean, there isn't really a good argument to not edit your show. You know, like people will

go, but Joe Rogan, and I go, cool, are you Joe Rogan? If no, then you're wrong about this. Because look, Joe Rogan's audience is not the same as other podcast audiences. The survey data shows it's largely working class. Now, he has listeners of all social strata, but a large working class audience of people that do labor with their hands are not knowledge workers. Those people are listening for a long time at work. A huge amount of his audience is on YouTube, passively listening. Also, it's not an educational show. He's not sitting there going, okay, there's five important things you need to take from this episode. He's just having a conversation. Half the time it's with a comedian telling sex stories, right? So that's a completely different format than somebody

who does like a business show, an education show. If you don't edit your show, you're probably just telling yourself you don't need to edit your show because it costs money and it costs time there's no argument to be had for it's more authentic that's just a bunch of bullshit honestly that's bullshit it's authentic why because i get to hear every thread that you go down that nonsense comment every sort of tangent why is that why is that important that just disrespects your listeners time if it's a comedy podcast that's sort of like empty uh there's no real content there's no real nutrition there go ahead leave it unedited but bear in mind that most people they want a return on their investment and that uh that desire goes up as people become

more educated and more affluent they want more of an roi for their time so the jordan harbinger show is usually like an hour but it's edited way down it's very dense um it still flows like a conversation so people don't necessarily know that it's been edited down and that's the way that i want it i want it to seem like we just naturally got a really good tight 45 55 minute hour long conversation that's what it should seem like but i'd leave i cut out all of the ums and the uhs there are guests that say um before every word my editor cuts all of those things out there are people that go on tangents that are nonsensical and not funny not entertaining those all get cut anybody who says oh but it's more authentic i don't really care about authentic i don't really

it's authentic to fart in an elevator why do i want to be in that elevator i don't you know what i mean so like i don't need every little thing uh that crosses your mind it's not valuable to me and it's not valuable to your audience if they get everything that's going across your mind it it takes a real special kind of narcissist to think that everything they say is important and that's kind of what you're saying when you do nothing to produce or edit your show who's been the most surprising guest, uh, or most interesting that you've brought on that people wouldn't expect? Hmm. I don't know. That's a tough question. I've had like thousands of interviews so far. I'm going to leave, I'm going to leave all the, I'm going to leave all the thinking

unedited just for you. Leave it in. Yeah. It's up to you. It's your audience. You know, like the level of respect people have for their own audience is their own choice. I'm just telling you what the way I feel about it. Um, I don't know. I can't really answer that question. It doesn't really make any sense because I have a lot of variety of different guests. They're all different, you know, so I really don't know. There's no answer to that question. Okay. In terms of looking forward, what are you trying to accomplish with the podcast or kind of what are the things that you're doing now to kind of say, hey, this is where I want to be a year from now, two years from now, five years from now? So I'm scaling right now. And what that means

to me is I'm growing my show as large as I can because you know the more that I grow the show the less I can work if that's what I choose in the future right now I'm kind of a workaholic I release three episodes a week 12 episodes a month I get a few hundred thousand downloads for each one but if I can double triple quadruple that audience then I can go down to one a week if I want because right now my kids 14 months old I want to design a lifestyle where I can afford to do whatever i want of course already there but i also want to be able to have time to enjoy it because kids spell love t-i-m-e and i know a lot of workaholic parents that made a lot of money and their kids are like estranged or you know not that close to them and they're like what the hell i

became a partner at goldman sachs you know i'm leaving him two million dollars ten million dollars who cares you know i want to be able to go to everything that my kid does volunteer at his school as needed uh hang out do the boy scout troop or whatever if kids are still doing that in five, 10 years. That's what I want to be able to do. And I can't do that if I'm trying to figure out how to maintain a lifestyle through some sort of digital media thing. And I don't want to sell products online, or at least not too many. I want to have really good ones that I've spent a lot of time doing, not just be releasing the next turd in a box because I need a quick cash infusion to keep the lights on, which I see a lot of internet marketers doing. So I'm scaling right now so that

I can grow the audience as large as it possibly can until I start seeing really low return on my investment for advertising and scaling. And then I'll be able to sort of decide how much time I need to put into things. And of course, I'll be able to hire a lot of help. I hired plenty of help right now. I can't think of what else I might need. But who knows, maybe I won't want my wife to worry about cooking food or cleaning the house and I'll hire a live in housekeeper. Like those are the kinds of things I think about 510 years from now. Right now she enjoys cooking. You know, we love having that daytime housekeeper come by and clean up a little bit and take care of our kid while we're working. But in the future, we might not want any of that. And I want to have

flexibility. I also want to be able to retire in five years. I don't think that I will all be 45 years old, but I want the ability to do so because if there's uncertainty or if podcasting is an industry starts to become real commoditized and it's hard to grow, or, you know, it becomes very sort of unpopular for some reason, I want to be able to just opt out and not have to pivot into selling widgets. Absolutely. In terms of the team that you've built now, it sounds like it's yourself. You've got an editor. How else, for those that are trying to figure out like, hey, this is what it takes to actually build a highly successful podcast. Talk a little bit about that team and kind of the roles that you've filled. So I've got an editor. I have an assistant that

helps book everything. I've got a show notes writer. I have a transcriptionist. Of course, those people are part-time and that's it. That's the whole team. It's a really, really small team. Yeah. And in terms of, you've got the podcast you have now, what about other podcasts, building out networks? Can you see a bunch of people going in and kind of making all of these quote unquote strategic moves to kind of grow? So not grow one show, but grow through these other shows. Is that something that's attractive to you or do you just feel like focusing on your one show and growing that as big as possible as the best path forward? Yeah. I'm just going to focus on the one show because you can't control talent very well and that's the problem that all these

big networks have they're all producing content in-house and they're using writers and prescripted stuff and they're selling all that stuff to you know tv outlets or whatever so they'll do a big podcast and they'll sell the script for a as a tv pilot not my not my thing i'm not a screenwriter i don't want to interact with hollywood i used to live in hollywood it's not a scene i enjoy at all um i almost resent going there when i have to meet with my agent or anything like that you know uh he's a nice guy but whatever um and that's not something i want to deal with also all those companies that are doing that big spoiler alert none of them are profitable right now um of course there's companies like spotify and apple that are massively profitable but all these little networks

you see virtually zero of them are profitable they go out of business all the time they lose money all the time i'm not in a hurry to get in that game because it adds stress and doesn't really there's the big promise is what selling to spotify maybe at some later date i'm already on that train. I can do that at some point. The other thing is you can't own talent. So if I don't do pre-produced stuff, what do I do? I pick a couple of hosts and I grow their show. Then what they leave? Cause they don't need me anymore. No thanks. Or I get them under contract and then they want to leave anyway. And then what I got to sue them. Well, no thanks. So I know how this turns out. Uh, I see it happening all the time in other networks and I see how much money those

networks are losing and I see how much hair the CEOs are losing. And I think, no, thanks. if I grow my show all that money is mine it belongs to me and my family all that time that I get back from hiring help all that's mine it belongs to me and my family if I start growing other people's brands I'm trading my time for their success and I just hope that they don't screw it up or bounce no thanks bad trade yeah absolutely what's uh what's the biggest lesson you've learned over the last couple of years building out uh the podcast like the thing you wish you had known in the very beginning yeah I think the thing I'd wish I'd known in the very beginning was there's so many little things that i think i i learned over time but one of the one

of the big things i learned over time was man there are a lot i'm trying to even think of what the most important one is i initially started with business partners and i would say that a lot of people they start off we start off thinking everyone will work as hard as me because we're all equally incentivized we all have equal skin in the game you'd be surprised you know how much if you have a midwest work ethic and you're working with other people you'd be very surprised you start making a hundred grand a year and you realize that some people have never dreamed they're going to make a hundred grand a year so they start to check out because they're satisfied and then you start making 200 grand a year and then another person checks out

because they're satisfied and then you start making a million bucks a year and they check out because they're satisfied but you're still working because you have big dreams or you want to do something. And they're going, go ahead, work all you want. Just make sure you cost our 30% or our 25%. And that's what I started off doing. I realized I was just dragging dead weight, making a bunch of people rich who didn't care and only cared about going to clubs to party and do bottle service. And I was working six, seven days a week. And as soon as I split with those guys, I started crushing it because I was able to refocus the money and the energy into growth of the business, I wasn't trying to figure out how to pay for somebody else's Porsche, you know,

so I really was able to soar. And so I think when people think I need to start a business, and I need business partners, you probably don't, you're probably just having a confidence issue, thinking that you can't do it. It doesn't mean you don't need any help. But when you give equity to somebody that equity is expensive, just try and pay people a salary that they're worth. And if people think I don't want to do this, I'm too important. You know, and a lot of people don't want a salary, they want their own business. Don't ever hire those people. They're in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur, they probably have no business running their own type of company or anything like that. Most entrepreneurs right now, especially these

wannabe entrepreneurs, these watcher preneurs, they have no business running their own company at all. They should get jobs, get experience, find out how companies work. I sure as hell should have done that early on. I think my mistake was going into business for myself too early. I should have worked for somebody else who knew what they were doing, learned a ton from them, and then started a company. I started a company because the opportunity was there and because the market tanked in the real estate division of the law firm that I was at.

It wasn't the right time per se. I got lucky that I landed on my feet. My business partners that I left, by the way, they're totally screwed right now. They're totally screwed right now. They never learned how to work hard. They only learned how to grift and coast and they're totally, totally screwed.

I ask the same two questions to everybody before I finish up and then you'll get to ask me one question to end it. The first one is just, what's the most important book that you've ever read? oh geez maybe like let's see everything's such a cliche with these types of questions i would say how to win friends and influence not that the question is cliche but the answer is always cliche how to win friends and influence people cliche answer number one but another one that nobody

really mentions that often is extreme ownership by jocko willing i like that book because what it tells you is that whenever something goes wrong there's one part of it that you had control over not necessarily that it's your quote-unquote fault but you had control over and you have to look for that part because otherwise you just end up blaming people. Like when I look back at my old partnerships that I mentioned before, I can go, wow, these guys didn't work hard and they're so stupid and they waste it. What part did I have control over? Oh, I should have left earlier. I saw the signs years ago and I stuck with these, these guys. Why did I do that? Because I didn't think I could do this on my own. The truth is I would have been better off on my own.

I could have left 10 years ago and I would have been better off, you know? So that's the type of thing you have to look for. And so extreme ownership, it stops you from playing the blame game everybody who's unsuccessful that i know they always blame someone else always i always hear that that's the common thread they have don't be that guy second question is more fun uh aliens believer or non-believer nah i mean look they do the is there other forms of life elsewhere in the universe probably i mean mathematics say so are they flying around the world here on earth and flying hubcaps that get caught on computers but nobody ever sees them no there's no good evidence for this uh the whole aliens built the pyramids the all this evidence is so spurious it's just

it's laughable and the only thing that's not funny about it is that people believe it yeah uh so basically you have a different definition of alien it's there's likely to be life somewhere else but not necessarily intelligent life and definitely not here on earth yeah i mean look there's probably just mathematically speaking there's probably intelligent life somewhere else they're so far away we will probably not certainly not in our lifetimes contact them and people who go like oh no they're visiting us okay cool and so they've decided to do what never interfere in anything they've never had any accidents or anything they're hiding so well due to their superior technology that we catch them what on bad old film or on like military radar but then the people who

are looking at it don't see it or the pilot sees it but the radar doesn't see it i mean look if they're trying to hide they would have been hiding if they're not trying to hide we'd see them freaking everywhere and we'd have no idea. Right. So I don't know. There's just not really any good evidence for that. I think people really want to believe that they get excited about it. But whenever I look at the evidence, I always go, that's really it. I don't think so. You could ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me? For you? Yep. Usually it's the other way around. What would I ask you? Surprise attack. I would say,

why start a podcast? Why? It's one of the worst ways to make money on the internet. It's the most selfish thing I do. I get to meet interesting people, ask them questions and learn, right? I mean, it's one of these things where the idea of even making money when I first started it, I basically started it almost as a joke. I've told the story a million times on the podcast, but like some people approached me and they said, hey, you should start a podcast. And I was like, how do you do that type thing, right? Recorded three conversations, became popular pretty quickly. And I said, okay, I'll record a couple more. That was fun, right? And next thing you know, you start to meet interesting people, you learn a bunch and you realize it's a great way

to kind of elicit conversation with folks that maybe you wouldn't otherwise meet or talk to. And then the value to them is they get to talk to a large audience and kind of have a good ROI on their time. And then they get kind of the feedback loop of then listeners reach out and wanna kind of engage on various topics

that they discuss on the podcast. Look, that's the best reason to start a podcast. If you're trying to make money, I always tell people, don't do it. It's the worst idea ever. If you wanna have great conversations, you wanna meet people, you wanna teach the audience,

like I'm passionate about education. Everything I do is about the listener. I'm an advocate for the listener. I don't let the guest waste the listener's time. I won't waste the listener's time. I'm always thinking about the listener first. So you doing it for yourself and for your audience, that's the reason to do a podcast.

People who want to get rich doing podcasting, I just go, man, you better just start digging in your backyard for gold. You have a better chance of striking. Striking it rich. I love it. Where can people find you on the internet? And we'll send them to go download the podcast as well.

Yeah, the Jordan Harbinger Show is the podcast. jordanharbinger.com and at jordan harbinger or harbinger on social media you know twitter instagram and that kind of thing uh and i'd love to hear what people think about the show you know i've got a lot of episodes like i said i take great care in making sure they're all valuable for the audience that's really what it's about and sort of me being like very like stern or uh focused like i am with you right now some of my podcasts are like that other ones are much goofier it just sort of depends on the mood that i'm in and you caught me over caffeinated so here we are. I love it, man. Thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to do it again in the future.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.