All right, let's do some questions. Again, all these questions should relate one way or the other to the general theme of today's show. Our first question was about podcasting, the ambition to build a podcast. And so I asked good friend, Jordan Harbinger, host of the Jordan Harbinger Show, if he would call in and help me answer it.

So Jesse, let's see if we can get Jordan on the line. - Sounds good, here we go. - All right, so it looks like the next question we have coming up is about podcasting. So I figured to get to the truth here, we should bring onto the show the person I know in this world who knows the most about podcasting.

That's my friend and friend of the show, Jordan Harbinger. Jordan, thank you for agreeing to call in and help me here. - My pleasure. - Long-time listeners will remember we did a whole episode together, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes where we went deep onto the whole state of the podcasting industry at that point.

So if you've not heard that episode, Jordan is the host of the Jordan Harbinger Show, one of the best interview podcast out there. Jordan, you've been doing this for a long time. I have memories, in my memory, I was being interviewed by you, and this might be an exaggeration, when I was in elementary school.

- Yeah, that might be an exaggeration, but it has been 16 years. I think I've been doing podcasts for about 16 years. So depending on when you graduated from elementary school, that is possible. You were always a little ahead of your time. - I am. Well, you know, I'm 11 years old right now.

So I don't know if that's a surprise, but I aged fast. It's a hard industry. I'm a doogie-houser. - Benjamin Button style. - I do have to say, and what I like about your show, of course, is the mix of guests. I think you're top-notch at this, that you will go from a A-list celebrity to, I mean, the last episode I heard, it was an Egyptologist.

Am I saying that right? I mean, it's like an expert on ancient Egypt. You'll even occasionally have bums like me on. So just to kind of, you know, to shake it up. But I think you're the best in the biz at interviewing. Your show is sort of a standard.

- Thank you. - Definitely at the top of my list. So. - I appreciate that. - Who else am I gonna call? Okay, so here's the question. And it's from Nathan. I've edited this a little bit. "What are all of the different factors that have to come together for a podcast to break out?" No, I think we have to define breakout probably.

- Sure. I think what he means is probably to get an audience where the creator can make a living. You don't want to define breakout as, all right, I'm the next Andrew Schultz, Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, whatever it is. 'Cause that type of success comes from using social media effectively over time, going on the Joe Rogan podcast a bunch of times, ideally, and getting a couple million dollars in free advertising.

You know, that kind of stuff really helps. But ideally, if you're able to create a show and make a living off of it, then the factors that need to come together are going to be consistently good content, but over time. So in social media, you can go, let's say TikTok, which I don't use, but I know enough about it from reading about how toxic it is.

And I know other social media. So it's two guys talking about social, two guys who don't use social media talking about social media. But what we do know from that is you can go viral from one or two posts. You can end up building a little bit of a following.

And you can go from there. With podcasting, it's kind of the opposite. You don't really go viral. It's really hard to share podcasts. You build one tiny little brick at a time. You put out a good episode. Your current audience of 50 people hears it. They share it. They say, "This is really good and interesting." You do that for a few years, and suddenly you've got enough, let's say, traction or momentum to start monetizing it.

And then from there, you can start scaling it. And it's really all about consistently good quality over time, not one or two hit posts or interviews. That is how you do it. And all of the other things that people think grow podcasts are kind of, it's almost like a myth, right?

Oh, I've got to be posting shorts on TikTok. I got to be posting shorts on Instagram. Cool, you might gain a couple of listeners a day doing that, but the juice usually ain't worth the squeeze. And retention is a real thing in podcasting. So if you're doing a show and it's 30 minutes or an hour long, you're asking people to commit to you.

So if the content isn't that great, but you have really good marketing and social media, you're going to get a whole bunch of people in and they're going to leave. And it's kind of like trying to fill up a water bucket, but there are holes in the bottom. You've got to plug those holes up if you're going to be carrying that bucket from the well back to your house.

So you really need to have that basis of consistently good quality. And that doesn't mean celebrity interviews that mean stuff that people can really sink their teeth into whatever niche you're in. So that's why you see successful podcasts that are very niche. Like my friend runs a podcast where she just reads court documents and talks about what's in the court documents for famous cases.

It sounds really boring, but they do a really good job because she's actually just reading court documents. And she's like, this is what this means. And people love it. It's very hard to do what, it's harder to do what I do. I wouldn't recommend interviewing people that you're interested in as a niche.

It's a really crap niche. You're going to grow really slowly. The better you can niche together, niche down, I think they call it, the better off you're going to be. So don't make it about your personality unless you are a personality for a living like Andrew Schultz or Joe Rogan.

Do something where you're like, this is the radio controlled plane podcast where I talk about radio controlled planes and not about what I did last weekend unless that involves radio controlled planes. I only talk about that. So that speaks to the content, right? You're not re-hammering off. It's well organized.

It's delivered well. It's edited and produced well. And you do that over time. And that's what grows audience. And more importantly, keeps audience listening to you over time. People try and go too broad. They try and make themselves a personality using podcasts because they look at guys like me or Lex or Andrew Huberman or whatever, and they go, oh, I can do that.

A lot of that is luck, time in the market, experience, picking a really good niche and having the qualifications to go for it. And as in the case of Huberman, who's like a scientist in his niche, that is not a strategy most of us can reproduce. - That's interesting.

Okay, and so when you say, and I'll ask a follow-up on Nathan's behalf. So it sounds like when you're talking about content, content, content, which makes a lot of sense to me, content actually captures multiple factors. So it's a lot of what you're actually saying, but you're also counting in there, how does the podcast sound?

How is it written? Is it tight? Is it professional? If you're gonna read court documents for celebrity cases, I'm assuming for that podcast to work, you have to figure out the format for doing that that's actually listenable, that you figure that out, that we do this and then it's this, and this is what's interesting and here's what's not.

And so you're saying obsessed on content writ large though, basically everything that is going into the listener's ear, you wanna be thinking about all sorts of different angles on that, how could I do that better? Is this compelling? Why would I keep listening to this? Is there anything that's catching my attention as like, ooh, what's that?

Why is there this? Why is the sound echoey? Why is this, he's rambling? So it's really an obsession with everything that comes out of that ear bud into the ear, continuing to push that better. - Agree, yeah. It has to do with, and I'm not saying you have to hire a producer for $500 an hour to make and have music behind everything.

What you should avoid are the easy to correct pitfalls. I was listening to a show the other day, really interesting content, really, really good. The interviewers weren't bad, but there was a point at which the dog was barking and he goes, hold on guys, I gotta go let my dog out.

And there's just silence for like 30 to 40 seconds where this guy goes and lets his dog out and he left it in the show. And I thought that was an inside joke at first, but later on I heard his phone ring and then he got a phone call and took it for a second and said, I gotta call you back and hung up.

And I thought, oh, this is a person who doesn't understand that every minute of mine you waste, you're telling me you don't value my time. And so that's not a good look for a podcast host. The tighter it is, the better. And I'm really cognizant of that. I read all the books for my guests, if they have them, when they're on the show, as you probably remember from me interviewing you.

And people will say, why aren't your interviews two or three hours like so-and-so's podcast? And the answer is because I don't need them to be. I read the book. I know where the important stuff is. If you're digging for gold and you have a map where the gold is buried, you don't have to spend three times the amount of time looking for it and meandering around and talking about aliens or whatever.

You can focus on the topic and the task at hand. And that's really, really beneficial because now I can get the best bang for the buck, the best per minute value for my listener. And that's what keeps people sticking around. I routinely get feedback like, wow, I heard so-and-so on your show and I heard him on this other show and the three-hour interview on this other show had less actual meat on the bone than your 49-minute interview with that same person.

And that's really, what that does is says to the listener, I value your time, we're going for it. This is going to be high signal, low noise. And that retains people. - And it's why I like, that comes through in your show, for example, because there are other people who are going all in on the interview format.

And what you're saying, by the way, makes sense. Don't try to be you, don't try to be Joe Rogan. If anything else, it's just a grind if to try to get enough guests on. A lot of the even up-and-coming hosts whose names, I won't say any particular names, it wanders.

And okay, and your show does it, right? It gets right to the meat of it. And you're saying, yeah, because you spend a lot of time. You read the books, you think about it. You're really obsessing about, I want this to be very interesting. You're not just putting weight on, I'm an interesting guy, which is like the Rogan, like Joe Rogan gets away with that.

He's like, I'm a professional talker. I've been podcasting for 80 years. I'm an interesting enough guy at this that we will chat for three hours and I can somehow make that interesting. But that's like saying, I can pitch a baseball 102 miles per hour. Like, yeah, that'd be great.

You're probably gonna get a reliever role, but that's not a strategy for everyone else to try to follow, if I'm understanding that right. - Yeah, exactly. And I would even argue, and look, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I would argue that Joe Rogan would be a better interviewer if he would read and prep the interview before the show.

Because his curiosity takes him to a lot of interesting places, but he could also keep that curiosity while not just meandering around and then getting stoned and talking about DMT. But again, I know not everybody agrees with that. That's just my two cents. That's the style in which I do my show, which is more focused.

And look, even if I'm wrong about Joe Rogan, we're not wrong about the other 10,000 Joe Rogan wannabe clones out there who are trying to do the same thing and wondering why they can't get traction. That's one of the reasons. - All right, so then one other quick follow-up, just a timeline question.

I'm gonna put some actual projections on this. So let's use my own show as a case study. It's two and a half years old. Does that put it pretty much still in the finding your feet, finding your audience stage? Is that relatively young sometimes for a podcast? Where am I?

- Yeah. - In a life cycle of a long-term show? - It sort of depends on the niche, right? If you're a true crime podcast, you can get traction in season one. And it's like, wow, this is the biggest thing. Look at how many downloads this murder, people getting murdered in parks podcast is crushing it.

That's different than this is a guy who answers questions or gives advice. That might take, that could take years to get traction. That's why I always tell people like, don't try and emulate what I'm doing. I had an 11 year runway before this stuff was really, or seven years before this is really doing something.

The better of a niche you pick, the better off you are. The more narrow of an issue you pick, the better off you are. So I don't know, two and a half years, you've got plenty of traction on your show. Is it gonna be bigger in two and a half more years?

Of course it is because you're doing well, but you're, look, you've been teaching for a while. So you bring that skillset in. You've got professional recording equipment and help. So you've got that skillset. You work with some really good advertiser, ad sales guys that I know, and some production people that I've worked with.

They're good. So you've got, I would say, performance enhancing drugs in your repertoire here, right? With those kinds of things. If guys are in their garage basement, they're college students, they're doing this, they can't afford to hire people. They've got whatever they got. Their acoustic environment is what it is.

They can't go to a studio. The microphone they got is the biggest expense they have. It's going to take a little bit longer because they're not necessarily going to have the option to have professionals helping them out. Does that mean their show's going to stay small? Not necessarily. But again, I'm thankful for the amount of time it took me to become successful because during that time I learned how to interview.

I don't think you can really speed up experience that much. Of course you can a little, but it's very difficult to do it. So I'm almost, you wouldn't want to start a podcast and then end up on the top 10 shows all overnight because what'll happen, you wouldn't want Joe Rogan to find you and go, "Come on my show!" And have 10 million people go and listen to your show and 9.9 million of them go, "That was terrible.

This guy is terrible." You want to slowly build that audience, that loyalty over time and have them share because the snowball is packed tighter, if that analogy makes sense, right? The people stick around longer, your experience speaks for itself after a bit of time. You really do have your niche set, your personality is set, your style is set.

It's something that's really hard to rush. - Yeah, and I agree with that example because I'm just thinking, I know a lot of people who have gone on Joe Rogan's show and nothing particularly explosive happened. But when you see like the other characters you mentioned, like Lex or like Andrew doing frequent guest spots, they were doing that at a time, especially in Lex's case, where he had a very matured product ready.

I mean, he had been doing the AI podcast for a long time. He had found his voice. He had a good audience. That's a whole different situation. So now you have your thing figured out after years and years of work, then you start getting big exposure. You can actually harness it.

So that all makes sense. And I will say, okay, so because I'm closer to Nathan, where he would be if he's starting a podcast and obviously you are right now, Jordan, you've been doing this forever. My thing, Nathan, is this is very hard. This has been basically my experience is podcasting is very hard.

There's a million aspects to go into it, but just the writing of material, communicating clearly, making it interesting. It's a slog. People do not wanna give you their time lightly and it's really hard to earn it. And it really does feel, to me, I don't know if you have the same feeling so far into your career, Jordan, but for me, it's month by month, season by season, it always feels so slow to me.

I feel like, why can't I gain traction? Now, if I zoom out, I say, okay, there's a reasonable trajectory here. I remember I started taking on advertising when I could hit 15,000 downloads an episode 'cause you could do two episodes a week and aggregate to 30 and it was the barrier of entry.

And now we'll do maybe 50,000 downloads per episode. Zooming out, I'm like, there's a reasonable trajectory there. Every inch along that way has been frustration. - I agree with you. - This is not growing. This is barely growing. Also, the stupid download calendar, it's very seasonal. So you're always having, in the short term, dips because it's July.

And so you always feel like you're losing listeners. You really have to zoom out before you feel like you're making any traction. All right, final follow-up. When do you know to pull the ripcord? Most podcasts don't succeed. So let's say you're like, I'm into it, I'm committed. I'm putting time into it.

I want this to succeed. I'm willing to spend time. What's the signs that this is not going to, you're stuck at 10,000 downloads or whatever it is. This is not gonna grow enough. It's not where it needs to be. It's not gonna grow anymore. What are the signs for pulling the ripcord?

- Sure, so I was speaking with Andy Duke on my show. It was a recent episode. I wish I had the number in front of me, but she talked about quitting. That's her new bit of work. She's a professional poker player. She talks about kill criteria. And so kill criteria is where you say, before you're, the worst time to make a decision is when you're in it.

So you say, if I'm not able to pay for the expenses of this podcast by next year, I'm going to stop doing it. Or if I'm not able, if I'm not enjoying this in six months, I'm going to stop doing it unless it's making X dollars. Right, something like that.

So if, look, the first thing is it could be a hobby. That's totally okay. In fact, I'm usually against people turning hobbies into jobs because it's a great way to, it's a good way to ruin your hobby. So if you're doing a podcast and you like it and you don't have that many listeners, who cares?

Just keep doing it. It's a hobby. But if you are deluding yourself and saying, this is going to be my job, but you have 500 listeners and then a year later you have 600 listeners, it's very unlikely that you are going to build enough traction to create a living for yourself.

Again, if you enjoy doing it, who cares? Just keep doing it. But don't try to make yourself the exception in your mind that you are going to be the special one who's going to turn this thing into a job overnight because it's very, very hard to do. And so I would set up kill criteria.

And I would say, look, if I don't enjoy it, I'm going to stop doing it. And if you're trying to monetize this and you're sort of halfway there, like maybe you're making a few thousand dollars a month for a year and it's not enough to quit your job, then you have to decide what you're comfortable with.

If you're spending 20 hours on your podcast, but a lot of it feels like work and it's not paying for itself, set up kill criteria where you decide, this is when I'm going to stop doing it and this is when I'm going to really go for it. There's not a go all in type of thing unless you're really hitting those financial metrics.

What I usually recommend instead of trying to figure out how to make this your job is partially monetize it if you're in that position to do so. Let's say you're making $500 a month, use that money to take the part of it that you don't like doing, maybe the editing you don't like doing.

Hire an editor. Now you've got a hobby where you just do the fun parts. It's like, if you're really into radio control cars and you've got money from it, let's say you're making a YouTube channel for that and you're making a thousand dollars a month, take that money and pay someone to fix the cars when you break them, then you're just running them.

Now you've got a great hobby where all the stuff you don't like doing is not your problem anymore. That's the way to do this. Start outsourcing as much stuff as you can so that if you do hit that sort of inflection point where you're making enough to make it your job, you're not then doing everything yourself and becoming miserable in the process.

You've already outsourced everything else. So now your hobby happens to be lucrative. Now that's the best position for you to be in, in my opinion. - Jordan, great advice. I appreciate you coming on to help me with this one because I'm usually just grabbing in the dark. Also a great time to announce my new podcast.

It's called Deep RC. It's all about radio-controlled cars. And I just get into it. It's four hours per episode and we do circuit schematics. We just walk through the circuit schematics. It's scintillating audio. So you say, okay, and then just-- - Actually, there's no plan for the episode in the beginning whatsoever.

- Exactly. - Whatever we want. - Yeah, it's me and eight other people and we record it outside. All right, Jordan-- - On AirPods. - On AirPods, exactly. I appreciate it. Everyone, the Jordan Harbinger Show, I think it's the best interview podcast out there. If you wanna see how a pro does it, listen to that.

You won't regret it. All right, thanks, Jordan. - Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)