My First Million: Behind The Scenes Of The Pod

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell.

And they break down why these pitches were winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find another bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

Here's a lesson I learned from Sean, MrBeast and Hitler.

Okay.

There's your headline.

Oh my God.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days on.

On a road, let's travel never looking back.

Dude, I'm doing an emergency episode on Elizabeth II, the Queen of England that just died.

You want to hear something crazy?

Yeah.

How about the fact that she was been in power since like FDR all the way up to, you know,

Biden?

Yeah.

Like when she was born, Britain was still an empire.

And it's crazy.

No, it's not.

It is crazy.

But so listen to this.

Her uncle was the king for less than a year and he advocated.

Have you heard of this guy?

King Edward?

No.

I don't know anything about him.

Okay.

So supposedly he advocated because he was in love with this American woman.

She was like a party girl, a loose woman.

And so they're like, no, her name was Simpson, something Simpson.

Okay.

I know what you're talking about.

So he wants to marry her.

So he says, okay, then I'm not going to be King.

He steps down as King.

That's the official party line.

Okay.

But what I found out in doing research for this is he becomes King in January.

He advocates in December in July.

There's an attempted assassination of him, of the King and he was a prominent fascist.

He was a Nazi sympathizer.

He was a extremely right wing and not only that, but he had gone around making speeches

like, oh, we're not doing enough for the working people of England.

And so it seemed like he was going to try and be a politically active fascist King

of England, which is obviously very explosive.

So someone attempts to assassinate him in June.

The guy claimed that the Italians told him to do it, which is weird because Mussolini

was in charge of Italy at the time.

So why would Mussolini want to assassinate the only fascist monarch in Europe?

And then it came out two years ago in 2020.

The documents were released that actually he was an informant for MI5.

Which is what?

The CIA of England?

Which is England's CIA.

Yeah.

So it looks like England's CIA might have been like, we don't love having a fascist

King and tried to take care of it.

And then six months later, he was like, ooh, I can see the writing on the wall.

Dude, isn't that so fun?

I love conspiracies.

I love stuff like this.

It's great.

All right.

Today's episode, by the way, is different.

Sean had a little thing he had to step out for.

So we had a last minute replacement.

This is producer Ben.

Ben also has a podcast called How to Take Over the World.

And we're going to talk about one thing that I think everyone will find interesting.

It's like inside baseball.

It's like behind the scenes of the pod, what our current numbers are, the revenue we're

making from it, and like how we grew it and things like that.

And also yours as well, because you're earlier in your journey.

So that'd be interesting to people.

The second thing we'll talk about is like history.

And I said, let's talk about the common traits that conquerors have.

So we'll talk about that.

You want to do the numbers first, the lighter, easier topic?

Yeah.

Let's avoid Hitler for as long as possible and talk about numbers.

Yes.

We got Jonathan on here too, who Jonathan's our numbers was.

He knows all about growth and how we grew it.

I'll kind of say what the high level numbers are for my first million.

And you could do the same for your pot.

So I just looked in megaphone.

That's the software we use.

So this, every number I'm going to say is the trailing 30 day numbers.

So trailing 30 days for my first million, when we say the word downloads, we mean YouTube

and also like podcast downloads, which is basically Apple and Spotify.

And then a much smaller percentage is like Stitcher and all the other podcast stuff.

And so for the podcast downloads, we did round up 1.3.

So 1.255.

It looks like million downloads on like the podcasting platforms.

Then our YouTube page right now has 110 or maybe 112,000 subscribers.

And then the trailing 30 days, we did 2.7 million views of which a lot are YouTube short.

So maybe in maybe 1 million to 1.5 million is actual episode views, which is like any

video that's more than like six or eight minutes long, something like that.

Obviously not this past trailing days, but the one before that, I think we are at 3.6

million.

So we're down a little bit, but because we had a few shorts go viral.

So 1.3 plus 2.7.

That's 4 million.

So that's about how many people saw our stuff.

And then there's like all the social stuff.

So my personal socials have been viewed.

I just looked this up over the trailing 30 days on Tik Tok.

I think I have two or three million views and then on Instagram, I have like another two

or three million views.

So that's like the total reach right now.

What are you at for how to take over the world?

Right now, monthly's are at about 70,000, sorry, 80,000 downloads.

And then my per episodes, you know, stuff that's mature.

So like a good example, Walt Disney has been out since January.

So it's been out for a while and that's hovering around that one's got 39.

Alexander the Great has 43.

So around 40,000.

My biggest episode is now almost it's 54.

So like kind of 50,000 dish per episode and my numbers like obviously the totals are

way different and weird because my volume is so much lower.

What's our volume?

What's my first millions volume?

Well, as you mentioned, so we're going three times per week and then we've got the shorts

on YouTube and then we've got the clips on YouTube, which drives a lot of the volume

as you were mentioning.

And then my first millions downloads per episode, that's the number that matters most.

It ranges from like 50,000 to 150,000, right?

That's right.

So depending on if you include YouTube, because if you include YouTube, we have some that

pop up to the like half million, maybe a little less, but like the Darmash episode did really

well.

The Peter levels episode did really well and those have hundreds of thousands of views

just on YouTube alone.

So what are you doing to grow?

For me, the big thing is just fixing my production process, which is totally broken for how to

take over the world.

It's really just a volume game at this point for me.

Are you making money from it?

I'm making a little bit of money.

I mean, at least I am making money.

I used to, I was negative for a long time and then I was neutral for a couple of months

now I'm positive.

How much do you charge for an ad?

About a thousand bucks per replacement.

So everyone asks my first million, I get messages all the time saying, Hey, can we advertise

on the pod?

So my first million, I said, we're going to talk about how much revenue it makes.

It makes zero revenue because HubSpot when they, so the way that our process worked with

my first million was the hustle owned my first million.

So Sean actually came up with the idea and he goes, Hey, can I do a, I want to create

a podcast.

You guys want to be my publisher?

And I said, yeah, but we're going to own it.

And he said, that's fine.

And so we did a revenue split.

I don't remember what we did, but I think we did 50 50.

So let's say the hustle sold $10,000 or $10,000 worth of ads.

The hustle gave him 5,000 and we kept 5,000.

Then we also paid for it, which I don't know if that's actually a good deal for him or us.

I don't know.

When we sold the company HubSpot bought the hustle and they bought the podcast with it.

And now HubSpot is the only advertiser on the pod, but we don't make any money from it.

So directly, although they can calculate how much money they would make off of it if they

had to go and buy those ads elsewhere.

But I think, so I went and talked to a friend, my friend has a podcast in the health and

wellness space.

And I asked him how much revenue do you guys do?

And so they get seven million downloads a month and they are currently doing three million

in ads, five million selling like programs, like fitness programs.

And then like another half a million in like merge and affiliate deals.

And so collectively they're doing around 10 million in revenue with about 65% profit margin.

So it's quite good.

And so I think that our pod just off ads would maybe be in the six million range.

So it would be around 75 to $125 per 1000 downloads.

And that would be separated in like a bunch of different $30 per 1000 downloads ads.

So we could probably charge 25 to $40 per ad.

And then you have like two or three ads in the, in each podcast.

And that's how you get to like that five or six million range.

Then another like three or four million just off some like courses or paid community.

Yeah, and that's not taking into account costs because if we were selling our own ads, we

probably have to get an ad guy to actually sell it and he'd take a cut.

Correct.

Yeah.

So what's our cost now for, for, for MFM Jonathan, do you know?

Yeah.

For production side, we got Ben, you know, producer, we've got Ezra who does the video

and audio editing.

We have the short form clip folks.

We have our YouTube producer.

So between that whole team, it's like 25 K and then a month.

Yes.

So we can include, you know, other ways to grow the show, whether it's buying ads on

other podcasts, other platforms, it could be anywhere between like 25 K a month to upwards

of like 50 to 100, just so like our costs right now, not including me and Sean.

It's like $500,000 a year.

Roughly.

Yeah.

I mean, and you can scale that up and down.

It's just like we're being aggressive with our growth goals.

So we're putting a lot of investment into that.

And our growth is basically you buy ads on other people's podcasts and that works decent,

it seems, but actually hard to track, but that's decent.

And the other thing you tried like buying ads on YouTube channels and things like that,

right?

Do any of them actually work, you think?

We ran some ads on YouTube and it definitely drives like a lot of views and some subs,

but it's not necessarily sustainable.

And you always kind of question the quality of those subs.

Yeah.

I don't know.

We've kind of tested everything and like the thing that we're most bullish on is obviously

the short form clips.

It's also not easy to tell how well those are performing in terms of viewers and listeners

to like the RSS feed, but you know, it's just like a long-term play.

And as you're seeing like your growth on Instagram and TikTok is largely driven by these clips

from the show.

And so it's just like maybe that viewer isn't going to convert the first time they see it,

the second time they see it, but hopefully by the 50th time they see your face, they're

like, fuck, I just need to check out what he's up to and check out the podcast.

Ben, are you doing anything to grow?

No.

I'm just working on more production.

That's basically it.

Like my organic growth has been huge.

Like honestly, as long as I produce more episodes, like it's going to keep growing.

I've done a little strategic like who I choose in order to grow a little bit, like what I

cover.

And I think probably with podcasting, that's the biggest driver of growth.

And you are basically at how many.

So the way that we found Ben was I was actually taking a fly at like 5am and I was like exhausted

and I was like, I need some inspiration.

And I think I looked up like Napoleon or something like that.

And I saw your pod and at the time roughly how many downloads did you have at that point?

So monthly downloads would have been the like hundreds to maybe low four digits as getting

like a couple thousand per episode.

And then we mentioned you on the pod.

And is that like the thing that was like the big up like we did this like pretty big thing

about you where I was like, Sean, this is like the greatest intro song and pod I've

ever heard of.

And how much did that boost?

So I've gone from 2k to like 40k.

And I would say that it's been like half and half.

So half of it was like a big upswing.

Like I immediately went up to like 10 to 20.

And then since then it's been steady growth from 20 up to 40.

Dude, that's the thing about pods.

Everyone talks to me.

They're like, I want to I want to do this.

And I go, just so you know, it's very, very, very hard to grow.

So at the hustle, we had maybe one point between one and 1.5 million subscribers when we launched

this pod.

And so Sean was like, hey, I want to do this thing.

He said, all right, great.

He goes, in fact, I already have like a pilot episode.

He sent it to me.

I was like, oh, dude, this is like great as is, I'll give you three weeks or four weeks

to like get like ahead of the game.

And then we'll we'll launch one a week.

And basically that first week we launched, I think that first episode got 50 or 60,000

downloads.

The next episode got like 30 or 40.

And then it just like ticked down until it was like five to 15,000 downloads per episode

because we blasted it to the hustle, got traction.

And this is how all pods and maybe maybe like all not all, but many products work.

Your launch is like epic.

Then you go down and then you just over a period of a couple of years work slowly work

your way up.

And then one day, like one of his guests didn't show up and he was like, hey, you know how

we do that thing.

So me and Sean used to meet like every two weeks and we would just like brainstorm in

front of a bunch of people.

And like, you know what thing that we do, can you show up in like an hour and just come

do it with me?

The person didn't show up.

And I was like, I guess.

And the results were like decent enough that we're like, all right, I guess we'll just

make this the thing and we'll just keep trying.

And from there it slowly went up.

And when we got acquired, we had acquired in February of like 18 months ago.

I think we are doing 600,000 downloads per month and then it like went up from there

a lot.

And I don't actually don't know why it went up.

I don't know what happened.

That's interesting.

So like the idea for what my first million became was basically an accident.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So it was, first of all, I didn't want to do a pod forever.

I thought it was a total waste of time.

I was like, we have to focus.

And he was like, I have this thing and basically Sean at the time was not a content person.

He is now and he's great.

But at the time he was just like my friend who just like was, you know, he wasn't on,

I don't even think he was on Twitter.

He was started.

He's more of an operator than a guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was just, he was just my buddy who had a company in the gaming space.

And obviously he was always charismatic and he was pretty good at storytelling, although

I would say that's even improved a significant amount.

But he was like, I just interviewed my, our buddy, Suley here, just here's the pilot.

And I heard it and I was like, oh, dude, this is, this is baller.

This is awesome.

It wasn't actually that different than anything else.

It was called my first million because he was going to talk about how people got the

first million users or revenue or profit, whatever.

And he was all about the early days, but which frankly isn't that unique, but he was pretty

good at it.

And then like six months in or three months in, someone didn't show up and he was like,

hey, come do this.

And me and Sean loved this podcast called the fighter and the kid.

And it was Brian Callan and Brennan Chubb, two guys sitting on chairs, just like goofing

around.

And we're like, oh, that, I think we could do that.

And so we just kept doing it.

Yeah.

So that's interesting to me because a little bit when I started my podcast, it was the

same thing of just that it was kind of an accident.

I was sitting there.

I had been reading this Napoleon biography and I thought, I want to remember this.

Like I want to retain more of this information.

I, I should create something.

I should make like a blog post or a tweet storm or something.

And then I had all this audio equipment lying around and I thought, I'll just do a podcast

about it.

And I bet people would like to hear what I learned from reading this biography of Napoleon.

And I think a lot of really good podcasts start that way of it's not someone sitting

down and like gaming the system of like, all right, where's a niche that I want to make

a podcast, where's a niche, but people who are just kind of doing stuff and then it turns

into a podcast and become successful.

Do you think that's right?

Maybe.

I think you could like, I think there are worlds like I heart media does this nicely.

I think parkas, which is a podcasting company does this nicely, gimlet media does this nicely.

Who else does this?

But Wondery does a decent job.

Some are still better than others, but basically where they come up with ideas and then they

launch them almost like a movie where it's like planned and hopefully successful.

And then other times it's organic.

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I think the problem with podcasts, there's a bunch of upside.

I'll talk about the upside in a second, but here's the problem.

The problem with podcasts is the same problem that I have with copywriting and hiring writers,

which is everyone can talk and a lot of people like talking with their friends.

Therefore, the noise to signal ratio of people who want to do it versus who are good at doing

it is like really, really hard to determine who's like great.

And so you have a ton of people launching podcasts that are A, they're not committed

to the long-term, like they're not committed to making this and treating it like a job

where you, me and Sean, we record every single Monday and Wednesday unless of an emergency.

So they're not committed to that.

B, they don't actually have the skill or the talent.

And they think they do because they talk with their friends a lot.

And so there's a lot of crap out there.

And C, it's not really well thought out where it's like, Sean and I joke, we're like, you

need some attributes, man.

You either have to have this crazy, interesting niche or, and I would say this is definitely

in Sean's case, slightly in my case, you just have to be really charismatic and good at

storytelling or you have to have like some crazy experience.

So like you're just an expert in X, Y and Z or like, you know, you're in the NBA for

20 years.

So you can talk about like what it was like being in the NBA, like you have to have something

that's intriguing and a weird angle or you have to be super talented, like a Malcolm Gladwell

or something like that.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So you've touched on something that there's this guy, Eric Newsom, who's his background

is in public radio and then he was kind of one of the OGs of podcasting and he's got this

framework that I love for creating a hit podcast.

So he calls it a diamond, but there's really four attributes on which you can be unique

and you need to be unique on at least, well, really two of them in order to be a successful

hit podcast.

So the four ways you can be unique are what the podcast is about, who hosts it, who it's

for or the way you tell the story.

Okay.

So it's how it's told, what it's about, who it's for or who it's by.

So basically like the concept or the person.

Exactly.

And most people only do one and that's where they fail.

They're like, oh, I'm going to make a podcast about gorillas because there are no podcasts

about gorillas.

And it's like, well, are you Jane Goodall?

Like are you an expert?

You need that second thing to make it successful and maybe you don't have to be the expert,

but if you're not the expert, then it's like, then you have to differentiate in terms of

how you tell the story, you have to give a really high production value, or, you know,

you need to like have gorillas on the podcast or something like that.

Like most people are just think of one new idea and stop there.

Whereas I think my first million is successful because A, what it's about is unique in that

it's kind of an entrepreneurship podcast that covers everything from like little side hustles

all the way to like big, you know, tech ideas that could be, you know, hundreds of billions

of dollars.

So it's unique on what it's about, it covers everything.

And then the who you and Sean have the experience and are really funny and super engaging.

And it's like the all in pod.

Like people talk about that.

And I'm like, you know, I think that they're like pretty okay hosts themselves.

I think Jason's pretty great.

But like, you're going to listen to anything that they say because they are so successful.

Their worldview is so much grander than mine.

And you know, they're hanging out with like ex-presidents, CEOs of, you know, Fortune

500 companies, like they've built billion dollar companies.

Like they have access to things that I don't therefore they don't even need to be, and

I'm not saying they're not charismatic, but I'm saying they don't even need to be that

charismatic in order for it to be awesome.

Right.

Exactly.

They have that second angle.

The second angle doesn't have to be that you're a great entertainer, but you could have very

unique insights like those guys do, but you got to have something for that second angle.

But let's talk about the upside.

So the, the upsides to a pod is I have never experienced, I don't, I'm not popular.

I mean, I'm somewhat popular in social media, but I'm not like that popular on the video

or picture based social medias.

And so I've not experienced what it's like to have fandom there.

But for our pod, the benefits of having a podcast, and I noticed this to myself, all

this in the other people is I truly become like fans of these people because I get to

know them so well.

And that is like a huge benefit.

And so like, I'll mention like, sometimes people will come up to me and they'll say,

yeah, like I'm, I eat this food because you talked about, or I read this book and I'm

like, I don't even remember mentioning that.

Like I just said, I talk so much that like, I don't even remember all of it, but people

like listen so much that they get to know you and it's like creates true fandom.

I think you probably could get that at other platforms, but I think it's more so this because

if they're 30 to 60 minutes long, they really get to know you.

And also the, the hard part though is, you know, the best way to circumvent someone's

bullshit detector is just not bullshitting.

And that's the hard part about, that's the hard part about, about podcasting is when

you talk for 45 minutes or an hour and a half, five or three days a week, whatever it is,

you, you have, you can't lie a lot.

You can't lie at all.

Cause it's going to catch up to you.

You have to be authentic.

You have to, or if you're going to play a character, you got to play that all the time.

I mean, like you really have to be authentic.

The greatest thing and the worst thing about podcasting is such an intimate medium.

Like you're in someone's ears.

They're doing, when they're doing the dishes, when they're commuting, they feel like they're

friends with you.

I think more so than YouTube, Instagram, like any other media format, TV, whatever.

People really feel like they have this relationship with you, which is a little weird.

And like, as you alluded to, I think the most difficult thing about podcasting is that it's

really difficult.

It's like hand-to-hand combat to build a big audience.

But the best thing about it, the best thing about podcasting is that you can build a really

valuable following with very few followers.

If you have 35,000 followers on YouTube, you just can't do much at like you're nothing.

But I talked to someone the other day who has 35,000 downloads per episode on his podcast

and is making a half a million dollars a year from it.

What genre or category?

Productivity.

Yeah.

All right.

So 35,000 downloads an episode and he's doing half a million in ad revenue.

And then he could be doing way more off like courses or whatever else he wants to sell.

He could be doing three or four times as much as that.

Yeah.

And he's talking about doing that stuff.

He's not doing it yet.

So like, I don't even feel like that's the limit of what you could do with that many

followers.

So I do think that's the beauty of podcasting is if you can like grind it out to get a decent

following of a few tens of thousands, you can make like real money in podcasting.

Yeah.

And the best way I think you do it is if you already have a business.

So for example, I didn't know this, but you know that guy, Patrick David Betts, I think

his name is, he's got that YouTube channel called value tame it.

So I just thought that he was like a personality and he recently had a life insurance.

I think it is company that he sold for like $300 million.

And I didn't even know about that.

And that's way more valuable than, I mean, his YouTube channel is very valuable, but

not two or $300 million valuable.

Same with Dave Ramsey.

Dave Ramsey, I was researching him.

His company's worth something like seven or 800 million bucks.

And it's a collection of real estate and selling like personal finance stuff.

And the radio show is definitely awesome, but it's not, it alone ain't worth that.

It's not the monetization engine.

And so if you already have that monetization engine and you build a podcast, I think it's

lights out, man, I think you can crush it.

And what's interesting is our pods, not even big.

So let's just say we're between one and three million downloads, depending on combination

of YouTube or not YouTube.

And it's, it's not YouTube first.

So like we, we, our faces aren't out there.

If I'm walking around a top 10 city.

So like a New York down to like a Denver, I will get recognized maybe once a day.

And that is a very small audience.

That is not a, there's 350 million people in America and we only reach one or three million

of them a month.

And I get recognized probably five times a week or like yesterday I went to Lululemon

and I had to give her my email and my email is my name.

And I told her my name and she looked up and she goes, wait for my first million.

Are you saying for my, I was like, yeah, I thought I recognized your voice.

And like that happens all the time.

And that's one of my biggest surprises is that we get recognized on such a small audience

and the people are like pumped.

They're excited, which I would be too.

If I, if I, you know, like Brent and Shab is someone I really admire and you'd probably

have no idea who that is.

And he's not like famous, A-list famous.

If I saw him, I would be like, dude, can I get a picture?

You know what I mean?

It is.

So that's the interesting thing about podcasts.

Do you get like Instagram models that slide into your DMs?

So that's funny.

I surveyed my Twitter audience and I said, what gender are you?

And it was 93% dudes.

And if you go to our meetups, we had a meetup in New York.

We had 1500 people RSVP.

I don't know how many people actually showed up, but let's just say 800 or 500 people showed

up.

I'm pretty sure it was 90% men as well.

So my stuff is mostly all men and also on all of my social media profiles, there's a

picture of me and my wife is as you're the main picture or the cover picture.

So most everyone, and I always talk about her, so most everyone knows that I'm married.

So do I get like women DMing me in the sexual sense?

No, but that's not really like it's happened like maybe at most once a month, but like

you have to remember that A, this is like a tech and business podcast and B, I'm like

a Midwestern seven.

So like, you know, I'm a Missouri seven and like a New York six.

You guys that like 99% of our audience, if they had Instagram models sliding into their

DMs once a month would not be like, it's not that much to be like, I got Instagram models

sliding into my DMs once a month, baby.

I'm rich.

I'm famous.

Well, I get, and I get, I now how many fake high profiles do I get sliding into my DMs

once or five times a day?

So I don't know how many of these women are actually real, but I would say maybe one time

a month, there's someone who like, I'll even, I'll be sitting next to Sarah, my wife and

I'll be like, Hey, this is crazy.

Check this out.

And like, we'll laugh about it.

I was talking to someone who is more conventionally famous than either one of us and they were

talking about how they get like real like verified models sliding into their DMs all

the time.

This person has a girlfriend and is in a long distance relationship is very hard for them

that just like all the time these people are sliding.

That's crazy.

No, I get like a, I get like the hand models.

I don't get the face models or the body models.

No, I don't exactly get that.

But what happens a lot is if when it's warm outside, I always work out outside and I'm

always shirtless.

There seems to be a like just an unlucky pattern of I get recognized shirtless a fair bit and

I always put my shirt on right when I'm because like me and Sarah have been on walks where

I've been shirtless and like a guy will come up with like with his like four year old daughter

and say like, what's up?

And I'm like, Oh dude, I'm totally making this little girl uncomfortable to being this

shirtless dude right here.

So like that's our joke is like, I try if I ever going to be shirtless, I'll wear like

glasses or something because I don't want to be like that one time that I see someone

that is like uncomfortable for them.

But that happens all the time.

I have it yesterday.

So you're saying your body's more famous than your face's.

No, I'm saying it's coincidence that I usually when I'm outside during the day, I'm shirtless

and again, maybe it's not a coincidence.

Maybe they're just maybe they don't recognize your face, but they're like that those are

Sam Parr's pecs.

I can tell those are Sam Parr's abs.

I was and like, I've got like, I've got like a New York 7.5 bod.

So like it's not always embarrassing, but the other so the other day we released an

episode that was about like fitness and so we had people loved it.

People loved it.

Yeah.

People loved is a great episode.

But Sam DM'd me and was like, Hey, can we change my after pick?

I don't think I looked ripped enough and started sending me like five to 10 shirtless pics

is like, dude, if I'm going to be shirtless, my body looked best.

If I'm going to be shirtless on the internet, like I would prefer like the best I mean the

best like so like that, but so anyway, that's the update on the pod.

Do we want to talk anymore about that?

Just like one other thing, just like a couple of frameworks that I think are interesting.

I've been thinking this for a little bit.

It's interesting.

We do interviews and it's always surprising which episodes actually pop off.

Like we'll get someone really, really famous and their episode will do okay.

And then we'll get Peter levels or we'll get Darmash and the episode will go crazy.

We'll do super well.

Dude, because we need more unique, weird people.

Sometimes we're clout chasers.

That's it.

You need unique people.

And it's like, when you get unique people that have a super engaged audience that want

to hear from them, but don't get to hear from them often, then it totally blows up.

So I've been thinking about that recently with my pod in terms of what I do.

So I could go the route of like doing more episodes like Julius Caesar, like I could

do a Charlemagne or Winston Churchill or a Muhammad Ali.

Yeah.

Bottom line is there's actually a lot of Muhammad Ali content out there and you could probably

find stuff that's as good as my podcast or nearly as good as my podcast out there.

And so I've pivoted to doing stuff that's a little more niche.

And so I just did an episode on Brigham Young who most people don't care about, but some

people care about very, very passionately.

And so it's actually on track to be my most downloaded episode.

And so I'm trying to like adopt that Peter levels, Darmash, like unique episode kind

of framework of now I'm starting to think like, okay, Brigham Young huge in the Mormon

community.

I'm not going to care about that.

That's going to down.

That's going to drive downloads.

And then those people are into my audience.

Who else can I do?

Like, who is the greatest emperor of of Cambodia, you know, like, Cambodians probably don't

get a lot of podcasts made about their heroes, right?

So like, can I do that?

Can I drive something for that audience?

And then those people become super good listeners.

Have you ever looked up?

Have you ever watched Bruno Mars YouTube videos?

No, are they good?

No.

So that's my point.

Like Bruno Mars is one of those guys who like everyone knows about, but not that many people

seek them out, even though he's pretty amazing.

And I love his music videos and I was watching some of them and they have like one, two,

three, even four, I believe, billion views.

Bruno Mars has four billion views and I was wondering why.

And I looked it up on Wikipedia and then I looked it on the YouTube comments to see

if it was like, if I felt like it aligned, but basically Bruno Mars, his mother is Filipino.

So he's part Filipino.

And the Philippines, I mean, how many people live in the Philippines?

Like, you know, a ton, I think, like hundreds of millions.

So it's not exactly like a small little country, but in terms of the amount of people who exist

in that country compared to their cultural relevance on a global scale, you know, they're

not, they're not exactly represented a ton.

And so when this American Filipino guy, it's kind of like Jeremy Lin in the NBA, you know,

there's a lot of Chinese, but there weren't a lot of Chinese basketball players.

And so when Bruno Mars got famous, like the Filipinos were like, yes, one of us, they're

killing it.

And so they just like get behind that person.

Same with Bjork from Iceland, Iceland, like not exactly incredibly relevant on, you know,

they don't exactly invent a lot of things, including entertainment that like it's recognized

on a grand scale.

And when Bjork like gets a little bit of love from America or Europe, they all pounce on

that shit and they go, hell yeah, it's one of us.

It's like, it's like Nellie in St. Louis in St. Louis where I'm from, like, you know,

my 65 year old white dad is like, Nellie's the man, he sir Nellie.

Like people, everyone in St. Louis is like Nellie's just our God, he's our mayor, we

will do anything for Nellie because he represented us and we didn't have a lot of representation

St. Louis.

So anyway, I think it's the same way with different topics where if you find that one

or two things that it's okay if it's not that many people, but they're like passionate

about it and they can rally behind it and they're like finally something for us that

just makes it so much easier to get popular.

It's a little bit of the Amazon strategy, right?

Like so Amazon is the store for everything online, right?

But it didn't start out that way, it was a bookstore and then it was a DVD store and

then it was a dog toy store and it's like actually just a collection of niches that

all got bundled and that I think that works for content as well.

You can just go out and collect niches and then it becomes like a big broad audience

even though you don't start that way.

Yeah.

And so right at this point we're a little bit more broad, we're still not that broad,

but we're more broad and like we make dumber jokes and we talk about Kim Kardashian every

once in a while now, but before it was just like, this dude's making five grand a month

on the internet.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

All right.

Is that the pod?

That's the pod.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to, I put my all in it

like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.