178: How To Create A 7 Figure Podcast With 3M Downloads Per Month With Jordan Harbinger

Steve: You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now today I’m thrilled to have Jordan Harbinger back on the show. And if you recall Jordan is the founder of The Art of Charm podcast, one of the biggest podcast in all of iTunes. And what is cool that is we are actually recording this episode direct in The Art of Charm studios. So the audio might be a little bit better quality today.

But before we begin I wanted to give a shout out to Seller Labs for sponsoring this episode and specifically I want to talk about their awesome Amazon tool, Scope. Now if you know me I get really excited about the tools that I like and use, and Scope is a tool that actually increased my Amazon sales on several listings by 39% within the first week of use, crazy, right?

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Now I also wanted to give a shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show, and I’m always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not a different provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores and here is why it’s so powerful.

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Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Jordan Harbinger back on the show. If you guys recall Jordan and I met through Noah Kagan. We were part of a mastermind group together, and then the guy had the goal to call me Kim Jong Un the first time that we met.

Jordan: Yeah, the first time and that’s- it goes, it’s an AOC principle, it’s a risky, high risk high reward behavior and we can talk about that later but most people are-

Steve: Yeah, it’s a part of your plan?

Jordan: It’s a part of the plan and I’m telling you, most people are probably thinking it but people who’ve know you for years are like oh my God, I can’t ever say that. They are not taking the risk.

Steve: And that is what Jordan teaches you guys in charm school. Anyways if you don’t remember Jordan he runs one of the top 50 most popular podcasts on iTunes called The Art of Charm. He gets millions of downloads per month, and he’s had some incredible guests on the show including Shaq, Mike Rowe, Tony Hawk, and Gary V. And last time we spoke I think it was what? Three years ago. The podcast wasn’t nearly as large as it is today.

Jordan: Yeah.

Steve: But it’s actually really blown up in the last couple of years, right?

Jordan: Yeah, it’s a — I mean it doubles every year.

Steve: Doubles every year, crazy. What’s also cool though is that actually Jordan moved within 15 minutes of my house. So we are actually recording in his studio today which is pretty impressive. My studio is just a mic so.

Jordan: Yeah, my studio is a room in my house where people know not to bother me because they think I’m recording, sometimes I am, often I’m just in here because I don’t want people to bother me.

Steve: But it’s impressive.

Jordan: Thank you.

Steve: Anyways, welcome to the show Jordan, how are you doing today man?

Jordan: Good man, I’m glad we are here, going to hang out, we got our old friends in town and like I said earlier which some of you may have snipped the beginning of us fumbling around the mics, but both of our wives have quit, and I just noticed that when you were coming over today. I was like oh yeah; we both work with our wives and so do Omar and Nicole who are downstairs.

Steve: That’s true, yeah. It’s actually a really great set up.

Jordan: It is a pretty good set up although you said well, you know I hang out with my wife more now and maybe that will keep being a good thing.

Steve: Well, let’s keep that in the down low because she does listen to all these podcasts.

Jordan: All of them? Okay.

Steve: But-

Jordan: I mean he actually put it in a much friendlier way than that but Omar and Nicole, they hang out all the time, Jenny and I we hang out all the time and it is a good thing. It is a really fun thing.

Steve: It is. I mean when is the next time that you can work with someone that you trust implicitly, right? Who has the same goals as you? So it’s a great set up.

Jordan: It’s pretty rare. It’s pretty rare.

Steve: Yeah. So Jordan you were on the podcast I think three years ago, I want to say 2014.

Jordan: It was a long time ago.

Steve: Yeah, so give us like a- just a quick 30 second intro on like the primary revenue generating businesses that you run.

Jordan: So the primary revenue generating businesses that I run are the — well that we run at the Art of Charm is The Art of Charm School in LA where people come in from all over the world. They stay on the school premises. It’s a residential program and they learn things like body language, non-verbal communication, persuasion, networking, the science of attraction, influence strategies, and things like that. And they learn that all with coaches in person in a classroom setting where they cannot escape. And it’s a joke I said they cannot escape because, of course you can leave but since you are staying on site you can chicken out when things get hard and be like oh, sorry I was late for class unit today. I was getting my emails. It’s like, no, you are upstairs, I’ll come find you.

You will come down and you will do the hard stuff and then we have a lot of experiential exercises, and we rotate the coaches just like — we call it boot camp. We rotate the coaches just like general surgeon rotating, we just don’t yell, because it’s better for you to be in an immersive environment. And so we have that and then we have our online products one of which is called social capital which is all about networking and relationship development for business and personal reasons, and then of course we have ad revenue from the podcast.

Steve: Okay, and then last time we spoke, I think we primarily focused on like your live training program, right? It’s called Charm School.

Jordan: It’s called The Art of Charm Boot Camp, yeah.

Steve: Art of Charm Boot Camp, right?

Jordan: Yeah, Charm School is just something you just made up, just now.

Steve: Did I?

Jordan: Yeah.

Steve: For some reason I thought it was called Charm School.

Jordan: That’s okay.

Steve: Anyways, today I want to talk about kind of how you have blown up the podcast. So I don’t know if you remember back in 2014, like how big was your podcast back then?

Jordan: Let’s check. Should we check right now?

Steve: Sure, why not. And then while you are checking like how big is it now today?

Jordan: Yeah, let’s do that.

Steve: Sweet, so Jordan right now is bringing his lips in, holy. He is bringing his stats right now and they are incredible. I actually have never seen anything this high before. It’s ridiculous.

Jordan: Okay, this is the month we transitioned, obviously it doesn’t count. So July 2014 we had 619,000 downloads, well 620. Because it’s 619,760 plus whatever we had on these like little sound cloud or whatever.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: So 620,000 in July 2014 and then in April we had 3,260,699.

Steve: That’s crazy.

Jordan: So if we divide that. Let’s call this 3.261. Hang on. I’ve never actually done this.

Steve: He’s doing math now.

Jordan: 326,100 okay and divided by 619,760. It’s 5.26 times bigger than it was when I was last on your show.

Steve: Crazy in three years.

Jordan: Yes.

Steve: Would you say that, you mentioned that you make money off of sponsorships for your podcast. Would you say that the podcast has kind of overtaken The Art of Charm Boot Camp in terms of revenue or no?

Jordan: No, not even close.

Steve: Not even close.

Jordan: No.

Steve: Okay, so would say then that your podcast is like your primary lead gen into your boot camp then still?

Jordan: Yeah, it is definitely primary lead gen.

Steve: Okay and here is the thing. Ever since we had that interview, I’ve actually been following The Art of Charm. And one thing that I’ve noticed from listening to your podcast kind of over the years is that it’s kind of evolved, right? A lot of the earlier episodes were about dating and relationships I would say.

Jordan: Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Steve: And then in the last couple of years it’s kind of been more focused on business, right?

Jordan: I mean maybe. I would say less so business than just smart people, high performers and critical thinking. So let’s look at the last few episodes. I love that we can just look at the computer right now and not like go off memory road. All right, so, the latest episode is with this guy who wrote a story about, do you know what Silk Road is?

Steve: No — oh yeah I do actually, yeah.

Jordan: That website where you sell guns and drugs.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Jordan: This guy’s knows more about the guy that started that site than the guy who started that site. I mean he just, he is a journalist who works for Vanity Fair, he works for New York Times. So he just learned everything, read all of his chat transcripts and everything, and went inside this guy’s head. Super interesting because this guy was a boy scout and then he started Silk Road… hired hell angels to murder his like foreign ministers, and crazy, crazy story. Before that we had Dean Karnazes, the guy who runs ultra-marathons. He ran like 350 miles through a desert once, bananas, and then before that Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Steve: Yeah, which is crazy.

Jordan: And guys like David Eagleman who is a neuroscientist who developed a vest that deaf people can wear so that sound creates feeling on their body that their brain can then translate into hearing. Yeah, so all kinds of crazy stuff like that is one the show. We focus a lot on high performers, critical thinking, and amazing people that can actually teach what they know such that we can all use the lessons that they are teaching.

Steve: So I’m just kind of curious like what caused that shift?

Jordan: It’s really – it’s so interesting because people always say things like, well, you got to be ahead of the customers so that you know. You got to do customer research so that the branding works and all this stuff, and I was just like, I was massively overwhelmed by that. And I remember having this business coach a long, long time ago, and when it was all dating and relationships I was like, I have a girlfriend now, and I’m really sick of talking about the same dating and relationship stuff.

If people want to learn that they can just listen to older episodes of the show because the stuff is ever green. It’s a podcast; you can just go back and listen. And sure the newer shows are better because I’m a better broadcaster, better host, but the old episodes have great content and if you just want the content then fine. And I will do the occasional relationship thing or whatever with an expert and do a really good show like that.

I did one this morning with David Buss who’s like the guy for evolutionary psychology, and we talked about mating strategy. But people always say things like well you know, if you go away from your core message, you are going loose fans and loose this person. I believe that to a certain extent that is true. With respect to people that — how am I going to try and explain this?

If you have a show that is about scary stories and your show is about scary stories and everybody goes because they like scary stories, and they listen to scary stories on your podcast, if you then go you know what? I’m going to do a comedy podcast. They are going to go mmh, I don’t really like this. You are not that good at it or you are good at it, but I came for scary stories, I’m out of here.

What I had found with The Art of Charm, what we found, I should say, with The Art of Charm is people came for dating and relationships, but they also really liked intelligent talk. And I’m not saying I’m intelligent. I’m saying my guests are intelligent. So they liked intelligent talk that had practical takeaways that they could use to improve their lives. So we got some resistance when I started shifting from just dating and relationships to smart people like this blind guy who figured how to see using echo location.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: That’s cool. But the people that were giving resistance I found when we I looked at them and when I did my customer research on those people. I found that — and this is going to sound like a jerky thing to say but I’m just going to say it anyway. I found that I was kind of glad to get rid of those people. Because I found that people who were like this show was great until they started interviewing.

I saw a post on Reddit, ‘I used to love this show and then they started posting crap like this.’ And it was a link to Maria Konnikova who is a brilliant writer for the New Yorker who writes about con men and griffters and stuff like that. And I thought, you used to like the show when we used to talk about body language and stuff like that cool, but you find no value in talking about con men and how to protect yourself from manipulation and influence.

I feel like you are either not seeing the forest to the trees because you don’t want to, you are not smart enough, or because you just want to get girls and you don’t care about anything that might be tangential to that that a smart person and intelligent well rounded person might be interested in. I decided I’m okay loosing that audience.

Steve: I was just wondering if you made that shift due to business reasons, right. Because in theory there is more money in like the business side of things in terms of sponsorships, right?

Jordan: There is yeah. I just, I never make branding decisions based on sponsor dollars.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Ever.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: I in fact I turned down a huge amount of money which I could have repurchased the house I grew up in two times with the amount of money, but they wanted me to talk about finance. And I was like, mmh, that sounds really lame and I’m going to hate it and my audience is going to hate, so I’m just not going to do it. And my network said, can you please come to Norm’s office so he can throw you out of the window because what the hell are you talking about, you are not going to do it, but I just didn’t want to do it.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And I think that’s good because networks are trying to make money short-term and long-term, and in theory a business is trying to make money short-term and long-term, but what I’m really trying to do is generate an audience long-term.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: So anything that creates friction for that is bad, and I balance that. The show will better with no ads but I have to pay the bills at some level.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: Sell through ads, for things that I like. But if it’s an ad for some crappy real estate investment BS, I’m not going to do it because I know that short-term and long-term I will lose listeners because of that, and that is antithetical to my goal of creating really high quality educated listeners base. And so I never make decisions based on — I never make decisions like that based on sponsored dollars ever.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: The only decision I make based on sponsored dollars which is based on other things is get more people listening to the show. Sponsors are more than happy with that.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Right but I’m not doing it just because they are paying me for that. I’m doing it because that’s the goal, that’s the whole goal.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: In fact and I can show you if you are interested again to the computer. If we look at our brand spanking new advertising data, we just updated this this week. So, $150,000 per episode, three and half million monthly listeners, whatever.

Steve: Can I ask you how much money the podcast generates? At least give me like a ball park, it doesn’t have to be…

Jordan: Yeah, it’s essentially, well not counting products and services sold, right? You just mean the ad dollars?

Steve: That’s correct yes, just ad dollars.

Jordan: It’s really hard to say because — it’s not hard to say. It’s hard to put this in a concrete way that I can guesstimate it because you get different CPM.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: Cost per thousand dollars blah, blah but it’s basically a seven figure ad revenue shell.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: However, I’m not getting a million dollars a year from ads that I’m selling because you see you might put — I put my own ads in here for things that I’m not getting paid the ad dollars when I’m selling the products and those are making seven figures instead.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: But the property itself if I only sold ads and I only existed off the ad revenue would be seven figures.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Jordan: If they sold all the ad inventory, like there is all these little factors in it, right? So that stuff is in there, but I wanted to throw this out to you, right? We just updated this. The Art of Charm audience is more educated than the general US population. 92% of our listeners have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The US average is 37%.

Steve: How did you get that data?

Jordan: I did some research, did a survey of our listener base.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Because of our network. Art of Charm audience is more affluent than the general US population. 45% make over a 100 grand. The US average is 18% and 85% make over 50 grand and the US average is 31%. That is bananas, and I thought jeez that’s crazy, but there is probably a bunch of other shows that do something similar. And so I tried to find that out and I thought how am I going to ever find this out? And so what I did is I Googled and searched for and bookmarked the NPR audience demographics.

What I found was this, cut pause for our searching. What I found was this, the NPR audience 49 sorry, 73% make over $50,000, so compared to The Art of Charm’s 85. So we are more affluent than NPR, and if you look at education, 58% of NPR listeners have a college degree or beyond compared to 92% Art of Charm. So that’s huge because NPR is theoretically the most educated and affluent audience anywhere in radio, and we are crushing those statistics.

Steve: Right. Okay, that’s amazing.

Jordan: With reliable data. Not data that I collected, data that I got from a third party company that is designed to find it for advertisers that got paid separately from those advertisers or separately from me.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to thank Kabbage for being a sponsor of the show. Now if you run a successful ecommerce business like I do, you probably know that the worst thing that can happen to you is to run out of stock. Now my wife and I regularly import container loads of merchandise from China, and sometimes you need a short term loan to buy enough inventory to meet demand especially during the holiday season. Well, if you are wondering how to get the funding needed to run a small business today, Kabbage has the answer.

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So let’s switch gears a little bit, and let’s talk about like what happened in those three years. Like how do you grow from – what was it? 640,000 downloads to over three and a half million?

Jordan: So the way that we grew the show was by — and this is totally related to what we were just talking about actually. So we are not really switching gears, we are just bringing it home. The reason that that makes sense is because I didn’t make decisions, we didn’t make decisions, nobody in our company made decisions based on how can we make money really quickly. It was all about how can we create something that’s interesting to the people that we want to attract.

And this is where you can either hire some statistician from Harvard and go crazy and spend millions of dollar trying to figure this out or you can go, all right, what do I like? Because I kind of want customers that are like me except in different areas and different walks of like. So that’s a much easier system than doing some sort of crazy $48,000 a week survey of a massive amount of people and trying to figure out what they might respond to.

And I think a lot of companies do stuff like that. They try to figure out how their audience is going to respond to this and how their audience is going to respond to that. But since we are always leveling up our audience, I don’t have to figure out what The Art of Charm audience is going to like when I release an episode. All I have to do is figure out what area of interest I’m mostly interested in that’s tangentially related to applied psychology, high performance, personal growth and some fashion, and we have a perfect candidate for an episode of the show, and that’s really easy, right?

So basically I think about what I’m interested in, get really passionate about that, do a bunch of research on it, talk about that and people who like that will share it. I’ll get more people interested in what I’m doing which means that I’m leaving that bottom crust, the crusty unwashed masses at the bottom 10% are complaining, I like this show until you started interviewing the world’s foremost authority on emotions and the brain. Well good, see you later, right?

Steve: So does that imply then that your growth was kind of organic or did you do anything to grow? I mean it seems like 5X growth is not an organic thing, right?

Jordan: Right. It seems like it but we don’t do paid acquisition.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: Which is what you would think you’d need for 5x growth.

Steve: Correct.

Jordan: Correct, it’s 5X growth over three years. So you know, let’s be fair.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: But it’s more about the idea that the show became not only more palatable for people to share because nobody wants to go, hey man, check out this show about why your relationships all fail. Women share that. That’s awesome because our female funs share a ton, a ton more than the guys do. That’s general. I would imagine that’s actually true across the whole internet.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: Because of the way women are wired for social duh, duh, duh evolutionary psychology, totally different show, different topic. But for us, what worked really well for us was look, if I’m going to have a bunch of really interesting folks on the show, let’s look at our best off. These are our most popular and well performing, again going to the computer, episodes of the past few years. Neil deGrasse Tyson, genuinely an A-lister in the science field, in fact probably just an A-lister generally, period, in the world. My friend Vanessa Van Edwards, super fascinating body language expert.

Steve: But you couldn’t have gotten these people three years ago, is that right?

Jordan: I definitely couldn’t have gotten Shaquille O’Neill three years ago, or Neil deGrasse Tyson three years ago or Mike Rowe.

Steve: So what I’m trying to get at is like what did you guys change?

Jordan: This is a result of the numbers, period.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: These big guests, they see the numbers and they go, sweet.

Steve: But back when you were like let’s say, 100,000 downloads like what did you do to grow to even 600,000?

Jordan: So let’s go all the way back and look at some of our best off from way back and you will see.

Steve: So it seems like your growth is based on the guests that you can get, right?

Jordan: No, here is another bit of wisdom that people who sell courses on podcast promotion won’t tell you. You can have a huge guest and nobody gives a crap because the guest isn’t going, hey, I was on this podcast, make sure all million of my followers go get it. Neil deGrasse Tyson is not spending any time promoting his episode on The Art of Charm, right? It’s being shared because it’s good in my opinion. It’s being shared because it is good and in other people’s options as well.

What I did to grow the numbers was be consistent with the content, constantly work on my presentation skills as a host. Constantly work on researching this. So for example if I have, when I had Shaquille O’Neill on the show, I interviewed people I knew that knew him in person. I read anything I could find on him. I got in touch with people that we had mutual friends; I got in touch, I read and watched videos of his for a long time. When I had — let’s find another person, Gavin — sorry Peter Diamandis, he’s written a bunch of books. I read all of them, took a bunch of notes. Then I found out what projects he was working on, I read all the work that he had done. I watched a bunch of his talks. So when I came in, I literary knew more about his work and recent work than anybody who had interviewed him pretty much ever.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And that made it good for his fans, it made it good for him which brought him more into an engaged conversation. And I’m not a journalist, so I don’t have to do stupid stuff like get them to admit something, or they don’t have to be on their guard. And I have more time to research them, and I can do a really in depth profile. And that gets you a little incremental bump in listeners who go, wow! I listen to everything Peter Diamandis is saying and this is really, really good one. Who else has he interviewed? And then they find Tony Hawk and then they find Roy Wood Jr. from the Daily Show and they find Mike Rowe etcetera.

And those little bits of things start to bring in more fans. So you can have a huge guest, but if you do a crap job you are actually hurting yourself. And I know people that interview like; oh I interview all the top YouTubers. Well, guess what? They go to your interview and they go, this guy sucks. So next time they see you interview somebody they already know you stink, so they pass; they don’t pick it up and download it. So I see people who are, they have same amount of famous guests that I do, but their listenership is going down.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And it’s not going down because they are not marketing it well or whatever, these are internet marketers. They are way better at marketing than I am. They are going down because everyone has seen them and said, ah, it’s crap and that’s a problem. You can just as easily market yourself down as you can up. You can find a bunch of new people and they can go, great, I’m going to check this out. But if they keep churning on subscribing or stop consuming your stuff, the next time they see an ad for you, they’re just going to be like, oh, that’s that guy who has that crap show that I don’t like.

Steve: So you attribute your growth primarily to the quality of the episode and not — you don’t run the ads or anything…

Jordan: Right.

Steve: So it’s purely organic is what I’m hearing.

Jordan: It’s organic. People find this stuff because people share it. So there is word of mouth, and I’m not saying we don’t buy ads, pat myself on the back. I’m saying we haven’t figured out the ad thing well enough. I mean we have people working on that, so don’t email me and say you can help with that. It’s like I don’t want people to do that.

Steve: So I’ve seen, I’ve noticed some of your episodes get on like the front page of iTunes.

Jordan: Right.

Steve: Like how do you get on the front page of iTunes?

Jordan: That is because enough people share it and consume it in a short period of time that it trends really highly in the iTunes ranks.

Steve: I see, okay. So it’s not something you can really control?

Jordan: No.

Steve: So it’s not like you call someone…

Jordan: Not to my knowledge.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Not to my knowledge, no.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Apple could feature you, but they don’t care about indie shows like ours. They care about NPR and their friends.

Steve: So one thing I noticed about Art of Charm also is that you increased the frequency of your episodes, right? Now you got fan mail Friday and you got minisode Monday. What was kind of like the reason for doing that? Was it just to get more stuff out there and increase your downloads?

Jordan: Yeah, so I ran an experiment a while ago that was something a little along the lines of – well first of all I used to do this show whenever I felt like it. Not a good strategy.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And then around 2013 I was like ah, I should this every week. Like that’s Kevin Smith, you know who that is? That director he told me I got to do it every week, it’s important. And I said all right, fine. That was maybe 2012, 2013. I started doing it every week and then I interviewed this author, Robert Green and he was like, hey this is really good interview. And I thought, really? I’m kind of surprised. I was kind of surprised to hear that. And I thought, well, I’m just really interested in his stuff, so I didn’t know that he was getting a lot of bad interviews.

So he was like yeah, I will do this any time and you know you should interview other people too because this is something that you are good at. I thought okay, great. So I kept doing it and I started to enjoy it more. So I upped the frequency, and I decided I want to do two a week because there is so many guests that are interesting. So I did two shows a week, and what I found was that my audience, my download numbers didn’t double, they 2.2ed.

Steve: Interesting.

Jordan: And I thought, wait a minute, how is it possible that I’m doing twice as many shows but I’m doing more than twice as many downloads. Some of it is back catalog and you get people downloading, but the math still didn’t make sense. And what it meant was not only am I getting twice as many downloads because I have twice as many pieces of content up there, but those pieces of content are being shared more collectively, and people who subscribe to podcasts are listening maybe more frequently to Art of Charm instead of just going, I’ll listen to this one and then forgetting about us for two months, and then going I’ll listen to this one again. Right there now maybe more engaged.

So then I thought, well what happens if I do three shows a week? And so I did that and my audience more than threed, or whatever you want to call it, 3xed. And then I tried four, and then it didn’t work at all, and it was like too much. So I went back down to three, and I found that the audience 3x-ing worked okay. Not the audience, the download numbers worked okay.

But I decided all right, I want to do four because I have these little things on Monday that I want to get out there. So those became minisode Monday. And I get so much email and some of the answers are really interesting, and I don’t want to put them in the middle or at the end of the interview because it makes no sense. So I’ll do fan mail Friday.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: So I do that every week. And what I found was that not only did my downloads go up quite a bit, but the downloads per episode which in podcasting is really the only metric that counts at all started to go up too.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And what that meant was people were not only becoming more engaged with the show, but they were sharing it lot. And what we found which took a long time to get out of our audience because it takes a while for people to feedback to you. You don’t know that if you try something it works right away. This is not how podcasting works. So now I find that there is a lot of people that like the occasional interview and they listen to every episode fan mail Friday. Those are the people that would have read Dear Abby 20 years ago.

Steve: Sure, right, right.

Jordan: And there is people that look at every single episode of Minisode Monday, but those are people that go, I just can’t pay attention for more than ten minutes to a podcast. I just can’t, I just can’t, I just won’t. So they love Minisode Monday. And then there is other people, a large number that consume every interview and go, hey Jordan your great interviewer, I don’t care at all about what you say in your fan mail Friday. I don’t care about your advice, I don’t care about your mini things, go fly kite, but I do want to hear you interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Steve: So you are like segmenting your audience, kind of like having a low, middle, and high price point for a product for example, right?

Jordan: Totally.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: It’s just low, middle, and high attention span.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: And then there is huge number of people that really just consume everything, and that’s great. I love those people too. So that’s how we started to scale this thing up. The problem is with podcasting, you can’t just buy a Google AdWord, this is like listen to this hour long interview.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: Because people go, no right?

Steve: Right.

Jordan: And you can’t do an Instagram promotion where some grown spray tan boob says, listen to the show, it’s so great and meanwhile while they are swiping right on Tinder. They are like let me sit down for an hour and 19 minutes and listen to an article about space time. Not going to happen, or interview about space times, it’s not happening. So you really have to grow this audience so slowly, but as you can see via our new statistics which I was really proud of, it works. You can’t get a more affluent or educated audience anywhere on the internet really, and at the same size unless you are reading the Atlantic or something.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: So that’s a big deal because it was for a long time I was beating myself up and going, man, look at these YouTubers. They got like 2 million subscribers and each of the videos gets a million views and I just, I hate my life. I should have done YouTube. Why did I do podcasting? I’m so stupid. But then you look at their demographics and you hear them talk behind the scenes and they go, I’m making two bucks CPM on ads. All my comments are showing me your boobs or whatever, just some low brow BS.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Their age group is 11 years old to 14 years old, and the occasional 18 to 21 because that’s all you can measure on the internet. And then it just drops off a cliff from there as you get older because adults don’t want to see some guy bungee jumping again in a travel video. They just don’t care. And their videos can only be two minutes long because people close them after that.

Steve: Right, right.

Jordan: So when you look at a property like a podcast where you keep someone’s attention for an hour, and you can do it 3.5 million times a month, it starts to look really good even when you compare it to a YouTube channel that gets 40 million clicks.

Steve: So what are the CPMs that you are getting? Like you just mentioned YouTube is…

Jordan: 45 to 50 bucks.

Steve: 45 to 50 bucks and that’s — is that three spots?

Jordan: Three spots per show.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: I mean not on Monday and not on Friday, but the two in the middle of the week, yeah.

Steve: The big one, right?

Jordan: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about how you get your guest. Like if you can just kind of look back to the first big guest that you landed, how did you – what’s your process for landing a big guest?

Jordan: Man who’s — the first, the process hasn’t changed much, let me put this way.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: You beg people to come on your show. But a long time ago nobody knew what podcast was. So I remember asking people and they would be like no, or I don’t know what a podcast is or don’t text me anymore, you know the standard.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: And I remember a lot of times I would have to — I would call a company and be like, hey, I really want to interview someone from your company. And they would be like mm, you can interview one of our interns or something because they just did not want to waste their time. Now I have numbers that I can email to people and say, do you want to be on this program? And the publicist goes yeah, of course. He is selling a book. [Inaudible] [00:34:12] says he wants to talk to all these people.

You can’t really figure out how to get that audience anywhere else. So yeah, sure, where do we sign? But 90% of it now, those two exceptions aside is still, hey Steve, I heard that your cousin worked at one time at Unilever, and that CEO now works at Starbucks, and I really want to interview the Founder of Starbucks. Do you think you can like reach out and see if they know the person?

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And then after trying for four months you can get a hook up to that person.

Steve: So social engineering still.

Jordan: Social engineering.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Social capital really is what we call it.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Because social engineering might be like tricking somebody, but social capital is what we call it. And social capital would result in me getting a guest like Shaquille O’Neil. This was something I called in a bunch of favors who called in a bunch of other favors who called in a bunch of other favors like Shaq. That was through Norm who owns the network at PodcastOne, and then but Neal Brennan I twitted at him.

Steve: What About Mike Rowe actually.

Jordan: Mike Rowe, that was me emailing the right people and waiting like a year.

Steve: Wow! Okay.

Jordan: For them to have time. Yeah, I just waited. I mean I didn’t wait a year for them to respond to one email.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: I just patiently said this is what I’m doing, really keen on it. This is what I kind of want to do, and they said oh, man dude, he is just so busy. I mean I don’t know what to tell you. And I went cool, no problem, when is it good to circle back? Like a month or two? Yeah, perfect, great. Next time, next time, next time, next time until finally somebody over there was like hey, you’ve been really patient and not a total entitled jerk face about getting Mike on. Let me see what we can do. And then that turned into cool, well, if you come to me I will do it, which I obviously did and here we are, right?

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: But a lot of these are mutual friends, mutual friends that I made throughout a decade, 11 years of doing a show where somebody know somebody who knows somebody.

Steve: So it just gets easier as it goes on.

Jordan: It just gets easier as you go on. So the guests I have — looking back at some of the best we have, it took forever, forever to get some of these bigger guests. But as you get more and more bigger guests, you find okay, well I get General Stanley McChrystal and when he came on Art Of Charm his book went back on New York times best seller list because we moved so many copies. So when I wanted General Ann Dunwoody on the show, he just emailed her and that was a done deal.

Steve: So what do you have to offer when you have like a very small download rating? Like when you can’t move the needle?

Jordan: When you can’t move the needle you really have to figure out what you can do for people. So you are not going to put their book back on the best seller list.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: But if you know that you’ve got 3,000 listeners, 5,000 which actually sounds like a lot but isn’t, then you can sell a few hundred copies of a book. It’s worth their time to do a show on Skype. It’s definitely worth it if then you can say, hey, I would like to introduce you to five other shows that have a similar number, and they are going to be prepared and they are going to make it easy, they are going to be professional, they are not going to be annoying, they are not going to flake, they are not going to forget. They can also sell hundreds of copies of your book.

Now you’ve sort of built some social capital with that author. Then when you want them to come back as they have got another book or another author that maybe works with their same agent, with their same imprint, they can introduce you to their PR people, their publicist, their agent.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: You can go through that person and then they can start throwing you stuff. And then after years, literary years of doing this, and everyone always tries through the short cut, and I have not met anybody who’s done it well. But after years of doing this you can finally go, all right, look, I got Shaq, I got Neil deGrasse Tyson, I got this comedian, Mike Rowe, this other person, this other scientist, Tony Hawk, whatever.

When you throw that into a pitch email, and you find somebody who’s current, some people are going to take a chance on you because you’ve got the social proof to back it up. And then as that happens and people start to become more aware that you bring it, you do a good quality show with a good guest, and you start to see your numbers go up, now for me the numbers speak to themselves, speak for themselves, sorry.

Steve: Sure, sure.

Jordan: Because now I can write to a publicist and I still get ignored like 80% of the time. So don’t feel bad, right? I still get ignored 80% of the time because some publicist who is 60 years old goes, I don’t know what that is. So never mind, I’m going to go with the person who has the cable public access TV show because I know what TV is, but I don’t really get podcasting, so forget it.

Thankfully now those serial NPR, a lot of these other shows people go, oh I’ve heard of that. Oh, your podcast is that? All right well cool, I’ll do that. And then we also make it really easy. So if they go, I really don’t know how those things work. Can you help us? I go, sure, here is how it’s going to work. I’m going to fly to your house and do it. And they are like okay, but I live in Florida and I go, I don’t care.

Steve: So you actually make house calls?

Jordan: Oh yeah, if the person needs it.

Steve: High profile enough.

Jordan: High profile and needs us to, yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: I mean I went to Peter Diamandis; I did in the X price office. Roy Wood is a buddy of mine, so we just did it on Skype. He is young; he knows how Skype works whatever. Mike Rowe, I went over to their place. I’m interviewing Wyclef [ph], he invited me over to his house because he’s got a studio, right?

Steve: Wow! Crazy.

Jordan: Vanessa Van Edwards, a friend of mine knows how this stuff works. We did it in San Francisco when she was here in town. Neil deGrasse Tyson, he was on a tour. I’ve run a studio in the city where he was.

Steve: Wow!

Jordan: He showed up, did the show.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: You have to put in the effort because a lot of folks think, oh, it’s so easy it’s on Skype. But what that means for a lot of — if you are 55 and you don’t use that, doing it on Skype you might as well be asking to make sure you bring your laptop and your webcam. Set this software thing up and it’s more like, no, I will call you on a phone or you can’t do that next.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Because these people have a ton of pictures. So you have to make it easy but not millennial easy. You’ve got to make it — you got to do it how they want to do it.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: And that can be tricky and honestly getting good shows often requires some investment on your part. I know my friend Tom Billy, he runs a show and he will literary fly the person to LA, put them up in a hotel, then they show up at his house because he has a car and a driver to take them there. They show up, he’s got a full set, full camera crew, full audio crew. It’s expensive but that’s what you are competing with now.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you’re interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online.

Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email, and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free, now back to the show.

So why aren’t you doing video then?

Jordan: I do video sometimes. Like I have videod Neil deGrasse Tyson, I’ve videotaped Vanessa Van Edwards, Shaq is on video, all these guys, Mike Rowe, etcetera. But the level of production versus the level of engagement versus the cost is just not there.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: People who are looking at the right metrics will show you the same thing. So if I video tape an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, there is going to be a certain amount of organic views on YouTube because people are searching for Neil deGrasse Tyson. Those same people are not going wow! I really love Art of Charm; let me go download the podcast.

In fact they might even subscribe to your YouTube channel, but that doesn’t mean they are going to watch it. And if you look at YouTube things there is another reason why I hide my YouTube fomo is basically gone. I’ve got friends, who have millions of YouTube subscribers, and they will do a video and they will be like I don’t know they got 3,000 views or 30,000 views.

No episode I have ever done of Art of Charm in the last few years has ever gotten that low amount because everybody consumes everything that I’m putting out, okay? Because they’re subscribed and they have to constantly make that decision to engage with it. YouTube, unless you have email notifications on which is literally no one does, you don’t know if a channel you subscribe to has a new video nor do you really care.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: You might check sometimes, but really, not really that much at all. So those video views are not representative of your actual audience.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Which and advertisers know that because a lot of YouTube people and marketers especially will argue with me on that. Okay marketer, why do you get $2 CPM and I get 45? Okay, come back to me when you have an answer for that. Because advertisers know the level of engagement that exists on YouTube, and they know the level of engagement that exists on podcasting, and they are paying accordingly. So I do video sometimes to future proof things or to have like a cool video of me interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Because I’m already going to do the show in person, and I just bring some go pros and hit him up and they are great.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: But other people go, well, I’m only going to do my show in person, so they can’t get guests like this.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Because they call Neil deGrasse Tyson publicist and she says, are you kidding me? You want us to come to your house, click, right? You are not getting it, and or I’ll beat you to it because you are waiting for three months for Neil deGrasse Tyson to book his thing in your studio and blah, blah, blah, and I go to his house to do it.

Steve: Okay, that makes sense.

Jordan: Or do on phone.

Steve: Actually let’s talk about monetization real quick.

Jordan: Sure.

Steve: At what point can you get sponsors and is that basically the only way to make money?

Jordan: No, it’s the worst way to make money.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Podcasting is a terrible way to make money.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: I will throw that out there and you should not start one. If you think you need to start one because everybody else is doing it, you should totally never start one. It will be a terrible idea.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: It’s a lot of work. You are not going to be good at it. It’s like writing, you are just going to start doing it and be good at it, and it’s got crap monetization. You need — my network for example PodcastOne, great network, a good place to be. If you don’t have 25,000 downloads per episode, they are not even going to be on the phone with you.

Steve: Okay. What is the advantage of going with a network?

Jordan: A network will sell ads for you.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And they will also promote you on other shows. So if you are listening to like Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey, you are going to hear commercial for Art of Charm sometimes.

Steve: I see.

Jordan: And I’m going to get 10,000 new listeners because of that.

Steve: So is that a good strategy for growing?

Jordan: It’s a decent strategy for growing. The problem is that big networks like PodcastOne that have 300 shows or something on them, they can’t promote everybody. They are going to promote their money makers.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Which tend to be the people at the top. Which is fine but that means you have to do more work to grow to get attention so that then you are worth promoting, right? Does that makes?

Steve: That makes sense, yeah, yeah.

Jordan: And also they’ve got to know you are not going to quit because a lot of people who come into podcasting, the vast majority in fact they quit when they find out it’s not just a matter of getting drunk, turning on your USB mic and starting to rumble about your Twitter feed.

Steve: I think that’s like anything, right?

Jordan: Right.

Steve: Whether it be blogging or YouTubing, yeah.

Jordan: Absolutely. It’s just that podcasting has a tougher bar because if you are blogging, if you write a blog and if I start a blog with you, right? And we are like okay; we need to work on the business side in the business. We just hire writers, the end. All right if I don’t want to host my podcast next week, guess what, there is not freaking podcast next week. I can’t hire some dude off the street to host my show for me. It’s not going to work.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: The amount of money I would have to spend to have somebody good at that would be more than I’m making from whatever else I’m doing, right? So it just doesn’t work. And the other idea behind monetization is if you have enough people listening to your show that you can get advertisers and make money doing it. Okay, let’s talk about this.

Let’s say you are going to get $20 CPM because you have an agency selling for you and you are kind of small, and you are getting some basic advertisers that just want to dip their feet in the water, you are not getting the top dollar money, right? Let’s say you are getting $20 CPM all said and done. That’s $20 for every 1,000 downloads. Let’s say that you’ve got 25,000 downloads, pretty big show, decent size. So that’s 20×25, that’s 500 bucks.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Let’s say you even have two ads per show, that’s 1,000 bucks. Let’s say you are doing that every single month — or every single week, sorry. So you are making four grand. Your hosting bill is going to be at least 500 bucks.

Steve: Wait, what?

Jordan: Yeah. You are going to pay around there for that much.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Let’s say you are hosting free for some reason.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Let’s say you are just doing some weird thing and you’ve got free hosting.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: You know you got on Amazon and they are not billing you because you might even have a better deal than that. My hosting bill is $2,000 a month.

Steve: Okay. I thought the way most podcast — at least the way my hosting works is you get unlimited downloads until you reach a certain point, right?

Jordan: Yeah, okay so I have reached that point.

Steve: You have obviously reached that point.

Jordan: I reached that point when I say, hey, I heard you have an unlimited deal; they laugh until I hang up the phone, okay? So that doesn’t work for me. So let’s say hosting is free because you paying, you are getting a great deal.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: You are getting $4,000 but you have 25,000 people listening to every episode of your show. If you had a product and that product was 40 bucks and you sold at a small single digit percentage of conversion every show, you would make way more than 4,000 bucks.

Steve: So let me ask you this. So why are you even accepting sponsors and not just focusing you message to your Art of Charm Boot Camp?

Jordan: Well, the boot camp is a super high ticket item. Most people aren’t going to buy that.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: Only certain selection of people are going to buy that.

Steve: What about the digital course?

Jordan: Digital course also high ticket.

Steve: Oh it is.

Jordan: I don’t have anything that is under two grand.

Steve: Oh really?

Jordan: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: No, because I don’t want to service that particular client niche yet. I will probably hire a team to do that eventually, but right now I’m just focused on people who are kind of serious and have the means to do that because that’s where I see the needle moving the most for people.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: But I will eventually have a lower end product that’s a little bit more accessible that doesn’t require me and my team to be in their coaching.

Steve: I see.

Jordan: So but until then the sponsor money is great. The other reason is because I’m getting a lot more dollar, a lot higher CPM than other shows for advertising because of the affluence and education level of the audience.

Steve: I see. So would you recommend, like for example for my podcast do you recommend that I do one of these surveys because it will actually help?

Jordan: Yeah, you could do a survey. I wouldn’t, I don’t know if — a decent research is like 20 grand, so you might want to look for something a little more a little cost effective.

Steve: Sure.

Jordan: But yes. The message that I’m trying to hammer down home here though is by the time you have an audience that is big enough to net you even a remotely living wage from advertising, you have far exceeded the number of fans you need to have an info product that will make you a much larger amount of money.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Does that make sense?

Steve: Yeah, it does. Sure.

Jordan: So people who are like trying to get rich on podcast advertising because they saw this product on the internet that says you can do that, not realistic. The average podcast size has like 200 downloads. Let’s say you are doing great and you’ve got 3,000 downloads, right? That’s three — and let’s says you are getting $30 CPM because you are smart and you know how to negotiate. That’s $90 per episode.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: And then let’s say you got two ads per show, that’s $180 times weekly episodes, $720 a month that you are earning.

Steve: Right. That’s pretty weak.

Jordan: But you still have, you have 3,000 fans. So you can’t sell those 3,000 people something that costs a few hundred bucks and make multiples of this? I mean of course you can.

Steve: So let me ask you this, so going forward, given what you just you told me. What is your top over strategy going forward? I mean you are going to continue to grow the podcast, right? But the podcast in itself doesn’t generate the money, and you have this really high ticket item that probably has limited space, right? Because it’s very hands on, right?

Jordan: Oh yeah, it’s every week there is ten people on each one, and it’s sold out three months in advance.

Steve: Right, exactly. So going forward like what is your plan with the podcast?

Jordan: The plan is to; well we continue to sell our high ticket items, those prices go up.

Steve: Which already sell out anyway. So that’s probably not growing because you only…

Jordan: It still grows because we raise the price.

Steve: Okay. Got it, okay.

Jordan: We raise the price and we do more of them. Like there is still every week but we can — we bought another property that’s next to the property we have, so we can expand the capacity and we raise the price.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: And we do an online course that sells quite a bit and that’s a high ticket item. So we are doing it backwards. I know like you are better at ecommerce stuff. You are supposed to start with a small one and then build your way to a large one. We actually just did it backwards. Not because we are geniuses, it’s because we actually don’t know anything about business when we started ten years ago, and we just though hey, this is a hobby.

I used to be a lawyer and AJ my business partner was a cancer biologist. So we decided we were going to run weekend boot camps in New York. It was going to be super fun and we were going to pay, we wouldn’t have to pay for anything and we were going to make our rent money and that would it. We didn’t know it was going to turn into a seven, eight figure business.

Steve: Yeah, right.

Jordan: But then it was like, well we really need an online product because not everybody is going to fly in from wherever they are in the world. Not everybody can take a week off and do that. So we started social capital which is great, but we didn’t want to be like, here is a bunch of crappy PDFs and some videos, no offence to people who are doing that. We still wanted to coach. So we coach all those people on the phone and on slack and then on Facebook group. So we still have to put a lot of energy into that and those man hours are worth a lot of money.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: I should say, they cost a lot of money. It’s up to you what they are worth as a customer, but they cost us a shit load of money. They cost us a darn lot of money.

Steve: I have to believe that all thanks man.

Jordan: You are welcome.

Steve: Just like Noah, man.

Jordan: So those are in there and those products are in there and they are making a healthy sum, but eventually we are going to have to build out something lower end. But the reason we haven’t done it yet is because it’s seemingly just as hard to make a low end product as it has been for us to make a higher end one, except whenever we’ve had lower end products in the past, we’ve had lower end clients that require a lot more service.

Steve: Sure, that makes sense.

Jordan: And there is a lot more of them.

Steve: Right.

Jordan: So now I’ve got, instead of having 1,000 in change people who’ve paid a couple of grand to be in our social capital program or whatever other program that we’ve got depending on what deal they’ve got on social capital because it can be lower than that sometimes. Those people are great, they are intelligent, they invest in themselves. Our life program people, they are amazing, they’ve invested in themselves, they are in front of me. I don’t know if I want 10,000 people who paid 70 bucks to be emailing my team and distracting.

Steve: That makes sense, yeah.

Jordan: I literary want — when we do that we will entirely have a different team handling that because I don’t want any kind of low end BS to affect the quality of my mid and high range products.

Steve: Sure, now that makes sense.

Jordan: It’s totally unacceptable for that to happen.

Steve: Actually the quality of my students in my course went up dramatically once I started raising the prices dramatically as well.

Jordan: Yeah. I believe that. And I used to think that was marketing BS, but then when we tried to have a low end product, we were like, oh my god! People aren’t kidding. No wonder they want high end products because we were like our customers are awesome. What are all these people complaining about?

And then we had a low end product and we were like, oh my God! When people start low end, imagine what their life is like. They must be going bald, but since we started higher end we didn’t see the problem that obviously marketers were having when they started with you know, this is only 9.99. That did not occur, that hadn’t occurred to us dude as they said in the big [inaudible] [00:53:11], right?

Steve: Right.

Jordan: We just didn’t see it coming. So we pulled that product from the market within months. It was just a disaster on wheels.

Steve: Jordan so we’ve been chatting for quite a while. I did want to ask you this question because I get a lot of it myself about people who want to start podcasts. What do you tell these people? Like-

Jordan: Don’t do it.

Steve: Don’t do it.

Jordan: No, don’t do it. I mean we touched on this a little bit beforehand but the reason I say don’t start it is the market is saturated. It takes a long time to become a good host because it’s performance that requires research and practice, like no one wants to do that. It’s just like being a speaker. A lot of people think, yeah you just go up on stage, and if you don’t have stage fright you talk, no. That’s what low end to crappy boring speakers do.

Good speakers rehearse a ton, they take classes. They are doing improv exercises; they craft jokes to keep the audience interested. They know where they are moving on the stage, they do it with no notes; they are visuals half the time. Like that’s a performance. It’s not just like, I guess I will go up there and talk about something I’m interested or that I’m an expert in. That’s what boring speakers do, low end speakers do that, same thing with podcasts.

You are welcome to start a low end average podcast that no one will listen to. You think you are going to get attention in iTunes or you think you are going to be consistent with it, but then when you get real work or your kid gets sick, you are going to fall of the wagon, 99 out of 100 or something like that. I can’t even remember. I think John Lee Dumas or somebody did a stat, and it’s just like more than nine out of ten podcasts just quit at episode number six which is crazy, right?

Steve: Right.

Jordan: Six episodes, you haven’t even done anything yet man. And that’s not a lot of work in my opinion to do six episodes. That’s a week and a half of Art of Charm, right?

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: But people will quit after that, and they are doing that once a week. And I get it. I have a different work flow, I have a team, but to be fair they are doing that. Now if you really think no Jordan, you know what, I love the idea of talking to people, having interesting conversations. I know that I can do this because I used to be on radio, or I know that the conversations I’m having are going to sound good because I’m on YouTube, then good, ignore me because everybody who’s actually probably going to be good at this is going to ignore me saying don’t do it.

But the people that are thinking, I should do this. Everybody says I should have a podcast and I’m still on the fence, they are not going to because I’m going to give you permission to not do it. And they are going to go, ah, you saved me so much time. So I have a keynote speech so they can get called Please God Don’t Start Another Podcast, or For The Love of God, sorry, Don’t Start Another podcast.

Whenever I do that for a room there is nine out of ten, 15 out of 20 people who go oh my gosh! I’m so glad I came to see this, because now I’m just really not going to do. I was thinking about maybe doing it, all my friends said I should it. I saw a bunch of my friends doing it, I really didn’t know if I wanted to do it, now that I’ve heard you speak, I’m not going to do it.

And then there is another few people who go, what, I just the love idea of doing it. It just seems so fun. Go ahead and test it. But if you’re thinking you should do it because you got fomo, don’t waste your time.

Steve: Okay, last question. Remember earlier when we were talking about when you called me Kim Jong Un? What was the, what was the reason for that again?

Jordan: Because you got that haircut.

Steve: No, no, not that part. You mentioned there was some strategy or something or reason, yeah.

Jordan: Oh, you do have that haircut though. Hold on, the reason was because when I first saw your picture on My Wife Quit Her Job, it’s like this close up of your — I don’t know if you saw the same show ad.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: It’s like this close up of you and I was like, oh he’s got like kind of Kim Jong Un hair cut is kind of funny. And I’m a big fun of like researching North Korea. So it was kind of like an endearing thing. Obviously you are not an evil dictator, right? So I remember talking with mutual friends of ours and they were like oh yeah, this guy Steve Chou is really cool, and first I called you Steve Cho because that’s how I thought your name was pronounced but…

Steve: Well that’s how it’s pronounced in Korean actually.

Jordan: Oh it is.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: Okay, in North Korea?

Steve: In North Korea, yes. Whenever I visit that’s yeah.

Jordan: Whenever you go back home yeah, and so I just remember talking with like Noah Kagan and John Conklin and stuff like that, and I said something along the lines of like, oh yeah, a guy with the Kim Jong Un haircut. I’m looking forward to meeting him. And everybody was laughing and I realized oh okay, I’m not the only one that thinks this. So when I met you I just decided, look, I’m going to get this out of my system first of all, and I would playfully jab.

Because I can tell you are a good humored, good natured guy. I’ll playfully jab you in a playful way and since that happened just immediately sort of generated a little bit of rapport in a way that was like, okay, this person is not afraid to just put it all out there. And you probably said something back; I don’t remember what it was, probably equally clever. And then we ended up hanging out, complaining of scape game like did some fun cool stuff.

And it’s not this sort of, like oh don’t say it because you might get offended, and I like to start interactions with that because there is very few people that actually get offended by things like that. And I find that person is going to get offended by something I say at some point in the first 90 days of our relationship and they are going to be annoyed by that better anyway, I don’t really need to be around all that. I’m not trying to…

Steve: Let’s say you are breaking the ice early.

Jordan: I’m breaking the ice, but I’m not just breaking the ice, I’m breaking rapport in a way that you go, I can’t believe this guy just freaking said that, but then you know everything is kind of on the table, nothing is off limits. I’m not going to get offended by something. Clearly if we made it through that, we are going to get along fine, and I’m not tooling you.

I want to be really clear here like, like you don’t want to make fun of people in front of other people to make yourself look cool. That’s not what that’s about. That wasn’t me being like yeah bro, nice haircut. That wasn’t that at all. It was just like let’s get this cat of the bag that’s probably been on a bunch of other people’s minds. And everyone kind of laughed including you, and it wasn’t like designed to embarrass you. It was just a stupid comment that was equal — it made me look just as damn saying it as it did for you to be there.

Steve: Well what was funny is that Navel and I we have Photoshop wars, and he actually started that even before like…

Jordan: Even before that.

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: So it was a meme that was going on that you had with your close friends and so I immediately escalated myself into the echelon, but it’s high risk high reward, right? I could have either become a buddy of yours that’s allowed to say things like Kin Jong Un and do the Navel Photoshop war thing, or you could have gone wow! This guy is such a tard. I don’t want to be around him anymore.

So high risk because it could have turned out poorly, but high reward because since it didn’t somebody who met you on that exact same day may not have the same level of rapport with you that I do because I just decided to dispense with formalities.

Steve: Right, right.

Jordan: And I do that with a lot of people. I mean when I was interviewing Mike Rowe, I found a story that was mildly embarrassing about something that happened to him in college because I found his college roommate, and he was just like eating it up. He thought that was hilarious, right? And I made fun of Shaq in a way that he thought was ridiculous and funny, and his manager was like I can’t believe you did that, that was hilarious. Nobody would ever do that, I can’t believe it; no wonder you have a show.

And you have to be very careful with it. I have definitely blown it a lot in the past. But now I have kind of figured out the way to do it right and you know enough that if the one time out of 100 that it is sort of un-calibrated, I can either rescue it because the people around me go, he just didn’t mean it that way, or it’s just not somebody I’m not going to click with and there is no reason for me to be around them.

Steve: I didn’t realize it, but I think I do the same thing except via email. Like when I interviewed Tony Horton of P90X, I photo-shopped him like eating fries, and like he used to be a Chippendale, so I photo-shopped him like an old dude. Like an old Chippendale with like grey hair or whatever on the tour.

Jordan: With a bow tie.

Steve: Yeah, so again it worked, like he found it hilarious. So by the time we got in the interview, it was a lot better in terms of rapport.

Jordan: Right but conventional wisdom would say, dear Mr. Horton. I am a big fun of P90X. I have your life sized cardboard cutout in my room, or just to be really polite or something like that. And then you just blend in with everybody else that talks to him, but when you are the guy that sent him a picture of him scarfing fries using the facial ageing software in a Chippendale’s uniform, you are now remembered, and you did it in a way where he didn’t feel like well, screw you then too buddy, right? He didn’t mind. He though it was funny.

So it’s high risk high reward. You do have to be careful. If you had done it differently or delivered it differently, and it went bad, he could have just said, I’m not going to let you interview me, you dick bag. So are you going to bleep that out too?

Steve: Yeah, dude you are marking my podcast editor’s life difficult. Hey Jordan, cool man. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Where can people find you? Can people find you?

Jordan: Nobody can find me.

Steve: Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Jordan: I’m listening…

Steve: I’ll post your cell phone out too.

Jordan: Post my cell phone number on the show notes. If you are listening to a podcast, I would just greatly appreciate if people would seek out The Art Of Charm Podcast because I think that people who listen to your show are also smart and intelligent, and might like intelligent talk that somewhat irreverent, but not try hard irreverent I would like to say.

And it’s actually, I mean what we do on The Art of Charm is we study the thoughts, actions and habits of brilliant people, ask them what I would like to think are smart questions, and allow them to apply that same wisdom for themselves. We focus on emotional intelligence. We teach emotional intelligence in a systematic way that anyone can learn and understand. And so I think that your audience would dig that as well, and of course people can find us at the Artofcharm.com if they want to do that.

Steve: Cool man and just a quick plug on my end, I actually really like fan mail Friday, and in fact those are the episodes I listen to the most, while I’m working out.

Jordan: Really?

Steve: Yeah.

Jordan: There you go. You like the advice, like I don’t care about space time with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Steve: It makes me feel better about my life. I think that’s why I listen to it.

Jordan: Really?

Steve: Yeah. All right, cool dude.

Jordan: Well thanks. I appreciate it.

Steve: Thanks a lot for coming on the show.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Jordan is probably the most successful podcaster that I know personally, and I can’t even begin to fathom getting millions of downloads per months on a podcast. It just blows my mind. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode178.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/ K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

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And if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.