Unmasking Podcasts and Profits

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Everyone's chasing viral content and gaming algorithms.

Speaker 1 Today's guest, Jordan Harbinger, has been podcasting for 18 years and proves the opposite strategy wins.

Speaker 1 While others burn out chasing trends, Jordan built a sustainable media empire by ignoring platforms entirely and focusing on one thing: content so valuable, people can't help but share it.

Speaker 1 The show starts now.

Speaker 2 All right, welcome back. Today, we're with Jordan.
Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, thanks for having me on, man.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. You've done something that a lot of people haven't.
And we talked about it before we

Speaker 2 started recording that there, there isn't really any shortcuts to this, but I really want to talk about a little bit of your story and how you scaled to the level you're at with your podcast right now.

Speaker 2 So for those who don't know you, which has got to be shocking, tell us a little bit about your story.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's hard to always put your business into a little nutshell, right? But I've been doing the Jordan Harbinger Show or some iteration thereof for the past 18 years.

Speaker 3 And my business is actually quite simple. You know, I've, I've, I've had many jaunts into like, let's do training, let's do products, let's do these other things.

Speaker 3 But I always come back to the podcast. And since having kids, I've simplified my business quite a bit.

Speaker 3 And I think that's kind of a hidden strategy that a lot of entrepreneurs decide not to take because they're always leaving money on the table.

Speaker 3 And we've kind of trained ourselves not to do that and seize every opportunity. But I talk to smart people.
I read books and talk to smart people. That's really what it is.

Speaker 3 And those conversations get recorded and they get put up on every podcast app and occasionally up on YouTube, although I only put like maybe a quarter of my episodes there.

Speaker 3 And that's, that's the business, man, you know, and then shill mattresses, like every other podcaster, dot, dot, dot, profit. That's really it.

Speaker 2 Schill mattresses.

Speaker 2 So when you first started out, you were lucky because you were there before anyone else was doing it. That's right.
I remember Joe Rogan talks about he was begging anybody to come on his show.

Speaker 2 So you've been doing it a really long time.

Speaker 2 But now that you've done it long enough, if someone's coming into this and we're all about scaling what people are doing, what are some of the things that people make massive mistakes on as they're trying to go in and scale their podcasts?

Speaker 2 What are the things that they screw up from the beginning?

Speaker 3 Sure. I mean, my opinion as a longtime podcaster is people should generally not treat their podcast like a business.

Speaker 3 And I know that that's going to be really counterintuitive to your audience because it's entrepreneurs, but I'm going to say it anyway.

Speaker 3 A lot of people start podcasting and they're like, this is so fun. I really enjoy it.
I'm going to try and sell advertisers and scale this.

Speaker 3 And I think that's typically a mistake in the beginning because one, it's artsy, creative, whatever. It's a hobby and it should stay a hobby for 99.99% of podcasters because that's the percent.

Speaker 3 99.9 is the percentage of people who will probably never see a dime podcasting and will in fact lose money podcasting. Maybe it's like 99%, maybe slightly more.
And nobody is, it's fun. I agree.

Speaker 3 I love it. It's a lot of fun.
If I had a billion dollars, what would I do? I'd podcast on a yacht instead of in this room that I'm in right now, right?

Speaker 3 I'd fly all my guests in first class and do it in a fancy studio. I don't know.
But I would do it for free, for nothing. I would lose money on it.

Speaker 3 But most people can't afford to do that kind of thing. I mean, I can't afford to do that kind of thing either.
So treat it as a hobby.

Speaker 3 Nobody's at home building model airplanes and is like, I can't wait to monetize this.

Speaker 3 Nobody sets up their trains on Christmas from their collection and goes, you know, one day I'm going to be a big model train guy and everyone's going to know my name. Like no one says that.

Speaker 3 So, but with somehow with podcasting, it's different. It's, yeah, we just do this thing.
It's fun, but secretly, I hope that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people hear and or see this.

Speaker 3 And then we're going to start getting sponsorships and then we're going to start making money. And it's like, why are you putting this kind of pressure on yourself?

Speaker 3 If you want to do something that makes money,

Speaker 3 I would say podcasting is one of the worst businesses that you could be in.

Speaker 3 The failure rate of a creative business, especially a podcast, again, is something along the lines of 99%.

Speaker 3 Or I should say that I should probably qualify this. 99% of shows don't actually make money.

Speaker 3 So if your goal is business, you're really better off doing just about anything else because you're still going to have the same small business failure rate as a regular business, which is like, you know, most businesses are gone within four years.

Speaker 3 Except for now, you're ratcheting that up by

Speaker 3 dozens of percentage points. But why? So if your goal is really to get rich and famous or something, podcasting is like the worst idea ever.
So you should just not do it for that reason.

Speaker 3 And doing it for money at all is actually just kind of a bad idea because

Speaker 3 your rate of success is going to be extremely low.

Speaker 3 Not only that, it requires a long time to build.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of bad things about podcasting that make it a really terrible business, but a fun hobby. It's like photography.

Speaker 3 You know, you can buy a camera and run around taking photos, but there's some people that think, I'm going to sell these.

Speaker 3 It's delusional to bust out your iPhone and go somewhere and take a bunch of iPhone pictures and go, these are definitely worth a bunch of money. Nobody does that.
It's unreasonable.

Speaker 3 But somehow podcasting is the exception to that rule. And I don't really know why.

Speaker 2 Or at least people think it's the exception to the rule and we have no idea why.

Speaker 2 But for those who, yeah, for those of the listeners who haven't decided to just drive into traffic or jump off a building who are podcasters.

Speaker 2 What are some of the things that as you've gone through and you've done this and you've done it for a really long time that you're like, hey, this is what I would have done differently.

Speaker 2 Or this is some of the things that, hey, this tool really works, something that we can give them that's tangible walkaways.

Speaker 2 Because I agree for most of podcasting, you know, as I started doing this, this isn't something I love doing.

Speaker 2 I love what the end result of it, but to sit down and have the cameras and all that, it's not something I love.

Speaker 3 That's not the purpose of it.

Speaker 2 So, what are the things that you've learned that, hey, strategically, this is an effective thing that I have found that has made this that I'm getting into that 0.9%?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that 0.9% is full of people who are really passionate about a topic. So, shows like mine, the Jordan Harbinger Show,

Speaker 3 even higher percentage of failure because it's whatever I want to talk about, I'm going to do that. And my audience goes, Oh, good.

Speaker 3 Jordan's interviewing, I don't know, some defector from North Korea, or Dr. Fauci, love him or hate him, or a random

Speaker 3 mafia enforcer. My audience will come and listen to that.
Joe Rogan, same thing. His audience will come and listen to that.

Speaker 3 Your audience, if you are brand new, is not going to come unless you are very specific. So, the start should be niching down.

Speaker 3 Do not, do not start a podcast where we talk about sports and drink beer and hope that that is going to bring an audience.

Speaker 3 It should be a podcast where we talk about one very specific AAA baseball team and drink beer, and we only talk about that team and associated stuff.

Speaker 3 And if you're like really into the, I don't know anything about baseball, but the Toledo Mudhens or something like that,

Speaker 3 then people are going to be like, what is that? I think it's a farm team, right? It's a AAA baseball team that feeds into the MLB.

Speaker 3 If you're really into that, then start a podcast on that because you're going to be the only game in town.

Speaker 3 Or if there is another game in town, they're going to quit after a few years because they're going to realize it's hard. And then pretty soon you're going to be experienced.

Speaker 3 And then you'll be the only game in town. So niching down is extremely important.
When I first started, all I talked about was dating and relationships because I was 24 or sorry, 26 years old.

Speaker 3 That was the forefront of my life, dating relationships and some career stuff.

Speaker 3 And so a lot of guys my age, well, guys and gals, but mostly guys, cared about that stuff back then, back in the early aughts.

Speaker 3 Then as I matured, my audience matured, my interests changed, and I let the podcast follow those interests. Not really a good strategy, though.
But since it was a hobby, I was able to do that.

Speaker 3 And that's important because if you start building a niche that you don't like, like dating, and then you get married and have kids, and now you're talking about Tinder, and you're like, how do you do, fellow kids, when it comes to dating?

Speaker 3 Because you haven't even used those apps. You don't know what Hinge is because you're 45 and you've been married for a decade.
Like you're quickly going to go, this is terrible. Why am I doing this?

Speaker 3 I hate every second of it. But now it's your business.
So I really don't recommend that people do that. So start by niching down.

Speaker 3 Stay as flexible as you can because you're probably going to have to pivot unless this is a passion project that's been yours for a long time.

Speaker 3 Like if you're really into videography and you video birds. Okay, there's probably a room for you in that niche.
It's a blending of another passion of yours. So you're going to stay interested in it.

Speaker 3 If you're trying to follow trends, this is another thing. So niche down, yes, follow trends, no.
So there's,

Speaker 3 you can build a following kind of quickly if you do a cryptocurrency podcast while crypto is hot. But then as soon as crypto is not hot anymore, nobody cares about you.

Speaker 3 So trend following is not great because it's pivoting is hard. Like me pivoting from dating to like whatever I'm interested in that week, that was tough.
It took years.

Speaker 3 So don't think you're going to start like the AI podcast and then you're going to pivot into the crypto podcast and then you're going to pivot into like whatever the next big thing is and you're just going to keep doing that because it's not going to work, right?

Speaker 3 It's not going to work. It's not good.
You're following those Venn diagrams, they don't always overlap. So chasing trends is bad.
So start by niching down. Don't chase trends.

Speaker 3 Treat it as much as as much as you can as a hobby. So making it your core business before it's really profitable.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's as a general rule, you should never do that with anything in a business, making it your core business before it's actually profitable.

Speaker 3 And I'll expand this because there's a lot of really bad advice out there. This is not related to podcasting necessarily, but there's a lot of bad advice out there from

Speaker 3 seemingly pretty respectable, high-profile folks in the internet space that say things like, burn the ships, go all in, quit your day job. It's terrible, terrible advice.

Speaker 3 I'm glad that you agree because I hear this all the time. And it's advice given to young people.
And it's really, really bad.

Speaker 3 So you get these kids who are like, I live with my parents right now and I'm going to college and I'm also a server at this restaurant, but I really want to start a tech company.

Speaker 3 And some influencer's like, move into your friend's basement, drop out of school and do your tech company. And it's like, no, this is a really, this is

Speaker 3 a terrible advice. Really, really bad.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Same thing with business.

Speaker 2 And the other advice that...

Speaker 2 drives me out of my mind in that same niche is people are talking or that same idea is people are talking about well you got to get up at four o'clock in the morning you got to work out 17 times have 47 meetings and it's this addiction to hustle porn.

Speaker 2 It's an addiction to this grind, and it's vile. It's not good.
What's going to work? You cannot, this isn't just brute force. We were talking about before the cameras came on.

Speaker 2 We're talking about how a lot of this is luck. Yeah, you need to be prepared.
You need to do the stuff beforehand. You need to have those things lined up.

Speaker 2 But if you're going to sit there and work 120 plus hours a week and grind into it, you're just going to die. It's not going to guarantee you success.
You cannot hard work your way to success.

Speaker 2 You have to fail your way to get there faster than anything else. And it's just, it's one of those concepts that I just, I push against unbelievably, because I love what you talked about.

Speaker 2 You know, you say inch wide, mile deep. I don't know if there's podcasts out there for videographers and birds, but

Speaker 3 I'm sure there are. But I'm sure there are.

Speaker 2 There's a podcast for everything.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 When you went into it, you talked about how, you know, you, you sometimes you post on YouTube, sometimes you don't post on YouTube. Sometimes, you know, what differentiates that?

Speaker 2 When you're like, hey, you know what? I started to do podcasts.

Speaker 2 I did this hard pivot from dating and relationships into what I'm doing now, which are my interests because you've got this bulletproof audience.

Speaker 2 What do you do now that when you walk in and say, okay, you know, I'm not going to to post it here. Or what makes you decide where to post, how to post, when to post? What are those things?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So with YouTube, it's, it's a trend chasing machine and it's a discoverability algorithm.
So for me, I don't like to be told by the matrix, the machine, what I need to create.

Speaker 3 So YouTubers, there's this interesting phenomenon called, that I call the Jerry Springer effect. Do you remember? You know that show, Jerry Springer.
I do know Jerry Springer.

Speaker 3 So I don't know how old you are, but do you know who Geraldo Rivera is?

Speaker 2 Okay. I do.
I remember when

Speaker 2 the guy broke his nose. It was very, I was very happy that day.

Speaker 3 That's so funny that you remember that because it's exactly what I'm going to talk about. So this is the Jerry Springer effect.

Speaker 3 What happens is Jerry Springer used to be like a serious journalist, right? He was, I think he was even like either the mayor of Cleveland or the governor of Ohio. I can't remember.

Speaker 3 He ran for all of them. And he's, he's a smart guy and he was very well-spoken.
And it's funny that I stumbled before saying that. He was very well-spoken and just very clear thinker.

Speaker 3 So he did a daytime talk show and Geraldo Rivera did a daytime talk show.

Speaker 3 And Geraldo had on, for those who don't remember this or haven't seen it, he had on like Black Panthers and Klukux Klan members or something.

Speaker 3 And they got in a fight and they started beating each other up and one of them threw a chair and it hit Geraldo in the face and broke his nose and it made the news and he had a nose bandage on for the next like two weeks of taping or whatever it was until the season ended.

Speaker 3 I don't remember. And his ratings went through the roof.

Speaker 3 So then Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Ricky Lake, I can't even remember who else, but all those folks from that era, they went, oh, I can't just actually have real serious conversations on this show anymore.

Speaker 3 I need to be the Ringling Brothers circus WWE wrestling nonsense drama reality TV

Speaker 3 every day. So Geraldo was like, oh my God, I've struck gold.
So his show became total trash. It probably was before anyway, because it's Geraldo, but whatever.

Speaker 3 And Jerry Springer went from intelligent, nuanced conversation for people that had brain cells and became a circus.

Speaker 3 Well, you can't go backwards from that. And Jerry tried.
He tried. He tried to run for office again, I think, and the polling was like, that guy, isn't that like the

Speaker 3 Hulk Hogan of, no, I'm not doing that. That's not a real, that's not a serious candidate.
It might work in 2024. R.I.P.
Jerry, it's too late for him to find out. Yeah, sorry, Jerry.

Speaker 2 I mean, you'd have to have dementia or delusion at this point for it to work. That's right.

Speaker 3 Delusional or dementia.

Speaker 3 He might, he might be more qualified than some of our candidates. Exactly.
It's true. Having passed already.

Speaker 3 But the point is here that

Speaker 3 he really couldn't go back from this and he never quite recovered from it. And YouTube does this to every channel that's on there, pretty much, or every successful channel.

Speaker 3 So I know a lot of friends of mine who are YouTubers, and they will start out like, I interview scientists and psychologists, and I'm very learned, and I'm, I like this stuff.

Speaker 3 And then it's like, I tune in a year later because I'm like, what's this guy been up to? And it's like the latest political drama, and the trailers are like

Speaker 3 one thing that you'll never be able to unsee. And it's like explosion.
And it's just the whole thing has turned into this nonsense. And I'll talk to them and go, what happened?

Speaker 3 And they go, the YouTube algorithm. When we do crap like this, it goes, you know, it gets a million views.

Speaker 3 When I interview a brain scientist that nobody's heard of and we have a a 90-minute serious conversation, it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 And so for me, I thought, okay, I can either let the algorithm decide what I'm allowed to create in order to make a living, or I walk uphill both ways, which is create audio, which has terrible discoverability, but retains audience.

Speaker 3 So I can do an episode on the Jordan Harbinger show where I interview a controversial person, but then next week I can go, here's science about the ocean.

Speaker 3 And that gets as many downloads and I make as much money from each of the episodes because the advertisers pay the same amount of money. On YouTube, I do an interview with Dr.

Speaker 3 Fauci and it goes on YouTube. And then I do an interview with an ocean scientist and I go, don't bother.
No one's going to want to, no one's going to search for this.

Speaker 3 The algorithm's not going to serve it. And so, and it's just going to damage the channel.

Speaker 3 And so it becomes this thing where I just don't even bother because it's not even going to make, it's not even going to make the return on the investment I make to edit the damn thing together.

Speaker 3 So that's unfortunate, but that's a platform issue. You can't,

Speaker 3 there's no avoiding this. So I only post things that my YouTube team thinks is going to do well on YouTube, but I don't want to look at the stats myself.
I don't want to cater,

Speaker 3 what do you call it, pander to the algorithm? Because that changes your show forever. And you start chasing that.
And then that's how you go from serious discussion to Jerry Springer.

Speaker 3 And you can never come back.

Speaker 3 Like, if you are a podcast that only interviews whoever's going to get clicks and then you try and have somebody on and it's serious it's not it's just not going to work it's going to damage your channel to post it to youtube but also those people don't want to come on your show because the last five guests that you had were talking about how uh

Speaker 3 such and such conspiracy how you know anderson cooper's in a lizard body and the jews this or covid's not real caused by 5g towers and it's just like you're no longer a serious contender for journalism so i refuse to do that so i don't pay attention to youtube my team team does its own thing, but it's siloed to the point where it doesn't affect my, it doesn't affect what I create and I refuse to think or worry about it in any way.

Speaker 2 How many, how much of this influences, you know, when you look at kind of Joe Rogan and Joe, Joe's gone through and he's gone some serious stuff and then some of his stuff is just wild.

Speaker 2 How much do you think that it's it's Joe versus chasing algorithm?

Speaker 2 Is there any way that you can kind of see that? Because I think once you get to the point kind of where you and Joe are, you're like, I can do whatever I want. Right.

Speaker 2 But the the fact that you just sat there and said, you know what, I'm not going to do certain things. I might do it, but I'm not going to publish it in YouTube.

Speaker 2 I'm just curious, when does it reach the point where you're just like, screw it?

Speaker 2 I want to talk to the lizard guy who thinks that the earth is flat and that COVID was created by McDonald's or whatever it was.

Speaker 3 So, so like

Speaker 3 Joe Rogan's always been into conspiracies. In fact, even when he was an actor on news radio, he played himself, which was a guy who really likes conspiracy theories and all this other stuff.

Speaker 3 So I don't think Joe Rogan, I don't know him, but I don't think he has like a malice, a malicious streak streak where he's like, I'm going to mislead everyone for money.

Speaker 3 I really don't think that's it. I think he kind of believes that maybe, like, maybe the moon landing was fake.
And then he's like, ah, no, you're an idiot for telling me.

Speaker 3 Like, he thinks about it later and comes to his senses. And, you know, I think he does go like, oh, man, maybe COVID is this fake.

Speaker 3 And then later on, he's like, no, you know, it's hard to tell what's in somebody's head. Joe Rogan, I don't sense this malice streak.

Speaker 3 There are other creators that I won't name who I know damn well are well aware that what they're saying is complete BS and they just don't care because they've been captured by the YouTube algorithm.

Speaker 3 This is the phenomenon of audience capture. They know that if they have on somebody who is just horrifically misinformed and a lunatic, that they're going to get clicks.

Speaker 3 And then, and you can tell that they believe this because their cynicism eventually shines through.

Speaker 3 They start to grift their audience.

Speaker 3 There's one channel, and I'll tell you off here, but I don't want to, I'm not a sort of, I would talk out of school, but there was one channel that he had

Speaker 3 a real conspiracy theorist on who thought that like Jews were secretly lizard people, reptilians, and that COVID was fake and blah, blah, blah. Like the standard.

Speaker 3 I'm Jewish, so I'm always like, and is that weird? Is that a turnout? Is that a deal breaker for you?

Speaker 3 Exactly. I'm sure my last name is Schwartz.

Speaker 2 I said the same thing like, yeah, we're lizard people.

Speaker 3 That's 100%.

Speaker 2 Yes, we killed Jesus.

Speaker 3 How do you think I got here so fast? We do have a secret system of underground tunnels. Obviously, I can dig really fast.
So

Speaker 3 I do that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 So my

Speaker 3 former friend, unfortunately, had this guy on, and then he was like, oh, YouTube's trying to cancel us. YouTube's trying to cancel us.

Speaker 3 I need your money to build a parallel platform where I can broadcast truth. And I'm like, you've become Alex Jones.

Speaker 3 So he collected like a quarter million bucks or something like that, or I think it might have even been like 2 million bucks. I lost count.
And then he never built the platform. Of course he didn't.

Speaker 3 You don't need another platform other than YouTube because

Speaker 3 you're being censored. You're just grifting.
And so you don't do that if you really believe in your cause generally.

Speaker 3 You only do that if you don't respect your audience and you feel like it's okay to steal from them. And that's so that's the Jerry.
That's the worst of the Jerry Springer effect, right?

Speaker 3 You become so deeply unserious that you say, screw everyone. And you just rob anybody that you can because you've become that cynical.

Speaker 3 And so, yeah, I really personally refuse to look at, well, I can't guess what's in Joe Rogan's mind, but I do know that other YouTubers have been fully captured by the algorithm, which it really can break your business.

Speaker 3 If you are not getting the clicks you want, it hurts your ego and feelings. That's a bummer.

Speaker 3 But what it really does is make it impossible for you to pay your rent because you can't get a million views on a video that doesn't have those elements, those kooky, stupid elements in it.

Speaker 3 And so, and some creators are immune to this. Joe Rogan is so big, he can have anybody on and it would be fine.
But there are other creators that are right on the edge.

Speaker 3 They get 5,000 views for a video that's serious and they get 150,000 views for a video that's not. And one of them lets them do this full time.

Speaker 3 One type of content, I should say, lets them do this full time. And the other one, they're working at Applebee's, right? So it's an easy choice for them and it's easy for me to judge.

Speaker 3 But for me, I don't even want my ego or feelings or brain power to be wrapped up in that because

Speaker 3 it would be tempting. It does get tempting.

Speaker 3 Let me phrase this in in a more realistic way when i get a million and a half views on a video it does get tempting for me to go wow i made a lot of money off that what other people who else do i know that might do that and then i start to go do i want to create content like this not really and i go back and read a book and do a show with a smart person and it does how it does on youtube or it never even goes out there in the first place

Speaker 2 I think it goes back to what you were talking about before that, you know, you just can't come back. Once you do certain things, once you've crossed that line, there's no comment back from it.

Speaker 2 So even if you're going to hunt after it, either you're going to do it or you're going to not. And you talked about audience capture.

Speaker 2 What are the things that you do, if you're not going to go after the people who thinks that we're lizard people or the earth is flat or the moon landing didn't happen or those situations, how do you go about doing properly, effectively audience capture if you're trying to do this in a way that doesn't make you want to jump off a bridge?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, audience capture is a specific phenomenon in media parlance, right? It's a specific term.

Speaker 3 And what it basically means is you start to think about who's in your audience and you tell them what they want to hear. And you build an audience based on that.

Speaker 3 And so you see people doing that when they lean into conspiracy theories. And there's a really good example in a guest of my show.
Her name is Renee DeResta. She wrote a book about this kind of thing.

Speaker 3 She writes a, there's an example in there about a guy who plays the guitar. And he plays the guitar and he likes the guitar and he makes a YouTube video and he gets 100 people viewing it.

Speaker 3 And then he goes, I'm going to play live. And he plays live and people send him 20, 25 bucks and he puts on a little concert and people like him and he's kind of happy with that.

Speaker 3 I mean, he still works at a bar down the street, busing tables or serving, you know, somewhere or doing an engineering job for all I know.

Speaker 3 But then he starts talking about something while he's playing the guitar and, you know, messing around. And one of those topics really strikes a chord.
It has to do with the vaccine.

Speaker 3 And people, then the chat goes wild and people start sending him things. And he starts reading those things in his spare time.

Speaker 3 And he goes, yeah, some of you guys sent me these articles about, I don't know, let's say the vaccine having poison in it or microchips in it or whatever it is. And then those people get louder.

Speaker 3 And then they talk about him in forums where those people hang out. And then there are more of them join.
And then they tend to be the ones who are tipping him.

Speaker 3 And then they send him something to read. And he talks about it again.
And the sort of rinse and repeat. And dot, dot, dot.
18 months later, this guy's doing nothing with the guitar.

Speaker 3 Maybe he plays something, but basically, he's become an influencer that is, you know, anti-anti-COVID restrictions or whatever it is. And look, I'm picking an example here.

Speaker 3 It doesn't matter what you agree with or not, if you're out there listening to this, but that's what audience capture really is. And people do this all the time.

Speaker 3 It's a subconscious process in the beginning. And later on, it becomes something that people, it becomes a grift.
So the way to do this in a fair way is to not actually capture audience.

Speaker 3 It's to, in any deliberate way, what I do is I follow my own interests.

Speaker 3 And if I think that there's a shred of a chance that somebody else in my audience would be interested in it, then I will do a show on that topic.

Speaker 3 And since I have a large audience, there is a really good chance that somebody will actually resonate with that.

Speaker 3 And people that didn't think they were going to be interested in it, those people can either listen or not. And when they listen,

Speaker 3 what's great about it is they often go, I never thought I would be interested in this, but I was. It turned out I was interested in this after all.
And thank you for doing doing a show on this topic.

Speaker 3 Now, that's the beauty of podcasting. YouTube, you cannot get away with this most of the time.

Speaker 3 The past few shows, on the past few weeks here that I've had, I had a guy on the show about AI and how it's going to help solve hunger, change the way people live, look into solutions for things like climate change, sort of an in-the-weeds discussion.

Speaker 3 Before that, I did an expose on big dairy and agriculture. Before the week, or the day before that, I had,

Speaker 3 I do, every Friday, I get advice questions. So people ask me crazy things like how to escape a cult or get a raise at work.
I do those. Those don't end up on YouTube.
The week before that, I had Dr.

Speaker 3 Fauci.

Speaker 3 That's quite a varied mix of folks. Those are my interests.

Speaker 2 It's really interesting with Dr. Fauci, how he's, what, 83?

Speaker 2 And he seems to be more with it than the 70-year-olds that are in that same field right now. The irony and the hypocrisy is, it's really interesting in that one.

Speaker 2 So if you're going to do this and you're going to grow an audience, you know, there's a lot of people that do it through doing pain ads. There's a lot of people who do it through getting guests.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, because there's four ways to get an audience, right? You build it, you borrow it, you buy it, you beg for it. And begging is the most ineffective, right?

Speaker 2 You just think, well, please subscribe, please follow, da, da, da. And then you go through that process.

Speaker 2 When you're trying to build an audience as a podcaster, or at this point, anything, if you're not going to sell your soul and you're not going to become the Gervaldo Riveras of the planet out there, what are the ways that you found, other than just time, that works best to create and to get an audience?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So something that will surprise no one is creating content that people people really want to share.
And there are sort of white hat ways to do this and black hat ways to do this.

Speaker 3 The creation of content that people want to share can either be stuff that is really controversial, and that's what works on TikTok. I don't use TikTok really.
I don't use social media really at all.

Speaker 3 It's shallow engagement. I answer people's incoming messages from show fans, and that's it.
But

Speaker 3 the other way to do it is to create a conversation that is so novel, unique, and interesting

Speaker 3 that smart people go, oh my God, my brother-in-law would love this. He's so interested in virology.
He's a virologist. Or, oh, my God, my friend would love this.

Speaker 3 He works for SpaceX, and this is about colonizing Mars. He would really be into this.

Speaker 3 So I encourage people to share episodes with a specific type of person. At the end of my shows, I say, share this episode with somebody you love.

Speaker 3 In fact, if you know somebody who's interested in space exploration, rockets, technology, evolution, or whatever that was discussed during that episode, share this episode with them.

Speaker 3 And then people go, oh, yeah, you know, actually i hadn't thought about that but my brother-in-law who who went to intern at nasa he might be really interested in this so it gets people thinking and sharing that's really the way to do it the problem is that that's really hard because you the idea is you've created really good in-depth engaging content that people really care about that's the gold standard for any content creator and it takes a lot of practice and a lot of resources whether it's cognitive or financial to create something like that you know um when I do my show, I don't just show up and have the guests sit down in front of me.

Speaker 3 I read the whole book cover to cover. I take notes.
I usually start off with like eight pages of notes for an hour-long interview. And of course, I'm following my curiosity during that time.

Speaker 3 I record for 70 to 90 minutes, sometimes even more. I recently did a show that was two and a half hours long.
I cut it into two parts.

Speaker 3 I mean, that book that I read for that show, I guarantee you was at least 400 pages long.

Speaker 3 You know, that's a lot of work that probably took me 10 hours plus, 12 hours plus to prepare, a couple hours to record it.

Speaker 3 You know, and that doesn't count engineering resources on my team of cutting it together and posting it and uploading it and correcting the sound and all that stuff.

Speaker 3 Color correction in the video, you know, like that stuff, I don't even count that because that's not me doing that work. But it's still resource allocation.

Speaker 3 And so creating things like that is very difficult. And that's why people grab an iPhone, talk into it, and say that this is a podcast.
And there's nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 3 You should start that way because

Speaker 2 you're not trying to monetize it.

Speaker 3 That's right. Then you'll see if people actually care about what you have to say.
When I started the show, man, it was really, really, it was in my friend's basement. We recorded it.

Speaker 3 We smashed it into a crappy MP3. There was noise all over the place.
We were making noise on the table. The microphones were too set.
I mean, there was a million things wrong with it.

Speaker 3 But we put it out there and people were like, wow, these are real. Back then in 2006, it was novel for guys to talk about their dating life on a show.
and prepare for a conversation.

Speaker 3 Like no one was doing this. And then when I was like, I'm going to read books and talk to the authors and ask them questions, nobody was doing this.

Speaker 3 It was like me and Terry Gross at Fresh Air, who had a huge radio show on NPR, has

Speaker 3 me and her were doing this. I was doing it in podcast format for like young 20-something dudes and she was doing it for literally everyone else.
That was it. There weren't other shows doing this.

Speaker 3 That was my novel idea. It doesn't really work anymore, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, it works for me because I've been doing it for so long and people trust me and expect that stuff from me over at the Jordan Harbinger show.

Speaker 3 But like starting another one that's like that without some sort of novel angle is, that's really tough, man. That's like,

Speaker 3 this is not PC, but whatever. You ever look at those old photos or old videos and there's a bunch of like white dudes playing basketball for the NBA and you're like, what year is this? Yeah.

Speaker 3 But they're like, what, you're like, what year is this? And it's like, oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 This is kind of before like African Americans really became into basketball and took over.

Speaker 3 Or like you look at football and there's guys running with no helmets and it's all just a bunch of white dudes and you're like, what?

Speaker 3 Right. This is when, this is before, these are the before times.
I started my podcast in the before times where you could show up and be like, you know what? I'm going to do a totally different show.

Speaker 3 I'm going to make notes and I'm going to do it for dudes and I'm going to do it every week. And people were like, wow, no one has ever thought to do this before.

Speaker 3 You know, and it's a joke now because there's 3 million podcasts and it's all a bunch of white dudes talking about the same crap.

Speaker 3 That's really

Speaker 3 over and over again.

Speaker 2 Yeah, when I started this, it literally was a bet. We literally sat down and says, you know, you're going to create a podcast because I was complaining.
It's entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2 If you're going to complain about something, you got to create two valuable solutions for it. So I wanted tactical things.

Speaker 2 When a lot of people talk about, you know, trying to adhere to the platform, you were talking about YouTube earlier. With your audience, do you off-board them to a platform?

Speaker 2 Do you create your own mastermind? What are the things that you've done that you're like, hey, I'm still can retain my audience just in case I get kicked off in any way shape?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So podcasting is decentralized.
so nobody can kick me off of anything.

Speaker 3 That's the beauty of podcasting. Like YouTube can demonetize you or kick you out, but I don't care.

Speaker 3 So in order for me to get removed from podcast apps, a bunch of different companies have to decide that I'm so harmful and that they're going to collude to removing, to remove me.

Speaker 3 I don't think that is going to happen. There are literally Nazi podcasts out there.
They're still there.

Speaker 3 Why would they leave those up and remove a show that I do about, you know, where I give advice to somebody who has, they found their sister on OnlyFans or something? You know, like, who cares?

Speaker 3 Like, I, we are, we are not even in the top 10,000 most dangerous types of dialogue. We don't even curse on the show most of the time.
When we do, we bleep it out.

Speaker 3 Like, we are really in no danger of that. Do I have an email list? Sure, but podcasting is decentralized.

Speaker 3 And that's one of the, one of the things I love about it is I've got, again, back to the YouTube crowd.

Speaker 3 I did a show on something and I had a bunch of of friends go, oh, I would love to do a show on that. I'm like, yeah, let's do it.
I'll even give you my notes. Why don't I join you?

Speaker 3 And they're like, no way. YouTube's going to demonetize us if I do that.
And that damages the channel. And watch time is going to go down.
And we're going to have, you know, have this happen.

Speaker 3 And it's like, oh,

Speaker 3 you can't talk about whatever you want. You're self-censoring because...
this has done poorly for other channels in the YouTube algorithm.

Speaker 3 Or you say something, let's say about China and China sends 10,000 people to report your video for violence, even though there's no violence in it.

Speaker 3 Well, YouTube just takes your video down until you can have it manually reviewed three weeks later, by which point you are no longer able to monetize it.

Speaker 3 So then you stop doing that stuff pretty quick. Go ahead and report the Jordan Harbinger show.
I'm sure wherever you do that, first of all, I don't even know how you do that.

Speaker 3 But if you do, it's going to take them eight months to open that email and then they're going to go, huh, delete. You know, you can't do anything about it.
You really can't.

Speaker 3 The only way to really hit me would be to hit me in the wallet by going after my sponsors. What are you going to tell them? You don't like something I said? Go ahead.
They know what I've said.

Speaker 3 That's why they paid to appear on the show and paid for my endorsement. Dozens slash hundreds of sponsors do that.

Speaker 3 You have to convince all of them, pretty much, or a significant majority of them that I am so toxic, they shouldn't do that anymore, even though I make money for them.

Speaker 3 Good luck finding an example of something I've done on my show that's going to stop them from doing that. There isn't one.

Speaker 2 So when it comes to getting sponsors and getting affiliates, which most people will never happen, but but what is the best way to approach to get the sponsorships, to get the affiliate programs?

Speaker 3 I hire this out. So I have a network, Podcast One.
They pay for my web hosting. They handle the tech backend and they have a sales team that sells all the spots.

Speaker 3 So I don't have to worry about this at all. I have additional sponsorship revenue that comes in that falls into my lap.
That's a minor percentage of my revenue each month, which is great.

Speaker 3 You know, so if podcast one goes out of business tomorrow or something like that, but even if they do, I can move my show somewhere else and I could sign a contract with a competitor overnight if this, if their company was going under you know I'm not waiting and they're in no danger of that by the way just for everyone who knows I don't want to get in trouble for saying this using this example podcast one is fine they're doing good yeah podcast one is fine we're on solid ground uh but the they sell all the ads and i recommend that the problem is they're not interested in selling small shows right you have to have like 50 000 downloads per episode or whatever it is maybe 25 i don't know in order for them to make enough money where they can have somebody where it's worthwhile for them to kind of like get out of bed so to speak there are marketplaces for smaller shows to get sponsorships sold.

Speaker 3 I don't really, I can't vouch for any of them because I don't use any of them.

Speaker 2 Are there any tools that you have found that people could use as they're listening to this? And because I'm sure there's some people who had no idea what podcast one was, and that's brand new to them.

Speaker 2 And what are some of the tools that you use? You know what? This saves my team an immense amount of time. I'm a big fan of OPT, which is other people's time.
I outsource and systematize everything.

Speaker 2 So if someone put a gun to my head and said, hey,

Speaker 2 what tools are your staff using? I'd like, I don't know, send them an email. So I won't take it if you don't know.

Speaker 2 What are some of the things that you know of that are like, yeah, this is resourceful. This is helpful.
This is something that we like.

Speaker 3 Sure. So we use Descripts.
And what this is, is a program that you can dump the audio files in, even the video files now, I think.

Speaker 3 It gives you a full transcript of the interviews, or in my case, of the interviews. And you can edit the text.
So you can do like Control-F,

Speaker 3 find that place where I talked about China and just delete it, right? Because I don't want that in there. Or I said something, I said Mexico and I meant El Salvador, delete that.

Speaker 3 You can go back in and you can edit the text and delete it. And then from there, you can publish it to various platforms.
So we use that for the transcript. We use it for the show notes.

Speaker 3 There's AI tools in there that can sort of like condense things or give you ideas. I don't personally use it on my team.
Somebody on my team uses it.

Speaker 3 But I know that we've been customers of theirs for like... I don't know, however long it's even existed, half a decade or a decade now.
And I own shares in the company. That's not why I recommend it.

Speaker 3 I just coincidentally was given given shares in the company because they acquired another company that I was advising. So that's really awesome.

Speaker 3 Another company, the company that I advise that got acquired,

Speaker 3 they're called Squadcast. It allows you to record high-quality interviews.
Zoom is okay, but it's low-quality, right? It compresses the video, compresses the audio.

Speaker 3 Squadcast gives you local, it's like you're in the same room.

Speaker 3 It sends the local file from them and the local video file, uploads it to essentially what a Dropbox platform would be, and then sends it to the creator.

Speaker 3 So you get uncompressed HD quality, both audio and video, and it results in a much more professional kind of production. And that is not expensive.
Squadcast.fm is really nice to use.

Speaker 3 And I use other stuff that's not sexy, right? Google Drive. Okay, fine.

Speaker 3 Something that allows me to get through hundreds/slash thousands of pieces of fan mail every single month is super human. It's an email program.
It's lightning fast. It lays on top of Gmail.

Speaker 3 You don't need to change your email address, but it uses keyboard shortcuts and it is super fast. There's AI responses built in.
There's reminders.

Speaker 3 So, like, you email me and I go, Yeah, okay, let's do this, but now is not the right time. Let's do something in two weeks.

Speaker 3 And I just do a quick thing on the keyboard, and it sends, it bounces that email back to me in two weeks and says, you and

Speaker 3 you, you and Charles are going to talk about, I don't know, making spaghetti. And I'm like, oh, yeah, right.
So I don't have to track those things. I don't have to remember those things.

Speaker 3 Or I can ask you something and I can say, if he doesn't respond, remind me in three days or a week. And I don't know how this, I don't know how I did this before that happened.

Speaker 3 Was I just trying to remember to see if people replied to me? I have no idea.

Speaker 3 But now I use it for pretty much every single email that I send because I need a response and I don't want to have to mentally track it. So superhuman for email, squadcast for recording, and

Speaker 3 descript for production is what I use.

Speaker 2 Man, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Speaker 2 If someone wants to track you down, if someone wants to find you and gain access to you, what's the best way for people to interact with you and ask you more questions and learn more about you?

Speaker 3 Sure. Well, the Jordan Harbinger Show, H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R, is wherever, wherever fine podcasts are sold, you know, Apple, Spotify, the works.

Speaker 3 Like I said, I put a couple episodes here and there on YouTube. Not many, not most.

Speaker 3 And I'm available at jordanharbinger.com. People, there's a form there.
People can email me. I'm pretty good about responding.
It'll take like a month, but

Speaker 3 it happens. I promise you.
So jordanharbinger.com. And I'm happy to hear from people who are starting a show or just want to say hi or listen to a show.
I'm all ears, man.

Speaker 2 I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Speaker 3 Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Jordan just destroyed every get-rich, quick podcasting fantasy out there.

Speaker 1 He's proven that real success comes from doing the work, reading entire books, taking detailed notes, and having genuine curiosity.