169: Nathan Latka | How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital

Transcript for Nathan Latka | How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital (Episode 169)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillippo. Nathan Latka, our guest today, he is a force. In his twenties, he's bought and sold a bunch of businesses, runs a VC firm, has a crazy popular show on Facebook and soon on television. He's got a book, but more importantly, he's very self-aware and very methodical in how he does all of these things and accomplishes all of these projects. Today, we're leveraging that self-awareness to dissect some of the secrets of Nathan's successes. He's seriously persuasive and he has an uncanny ability to get others to agree with him. I've seen it firsthand. We've known each other for a while. It is really next level. And yes, he's great at negotiating, but there's more to the story. And today, we'll come away with actionable steps and a process to gain agreement and leverage our resources and often leverage someone else's resources to make incredible things happen.

[00:00:50] And as a note, we've been friends for years and we banter and poke fun at each other a bit here in this one. I can assure you, it's all in good nature. So if I seem a little hard on the guy, or maybe a little too personal, please take it in context here. And if you want to know how I make these great friends, have all these go-getters and crazy high achievers, well I use systems, tiny habits to leverage my network and I want to teach you how to do the same in my free course, Six-Minute Networking. It takes six minutes per day. It actually takes five, but Five-Minute Networking was taken. So Six-Minute Networking over at JordanHarbinger.com/course. All right, here's Nathan Latka.

[00:01:24] First of all, it's funny having you here because you're 29, and I remember even like five years ago when we met or something.

Nathan Latka: [00:01:32] That’s pre-puberty.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:33] Yeah, basically. And you were running Heyo, which I don't even know. What was that?

Nathan Latka: [00:01:40] Why did you say it like that? Come on. Heyo is a great name. I feel like their domain name and you can pronounce.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:44] Yeah, it's great. I just still don't really know what that does.

Nathan Latka: [00:01:48] Heyo was like, do you have any sponsors for the show that are like the website builders?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:52] Yeah. Hostgator.

Nathan Latka: [00:01:54] Okay. HostGator does. Great. So like, how HostGator has like a drag and drop pop form for websites or like Weebly, Wix, Squarespace. We did that exact same thing but for Facebook apps. And so that was really hot back in the day.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:04] Like make your own Farmville?

Nathan Latka: [00:02:06] Kind of, but it was more for a guy like you who wanted to get leads off your Facebook page. We would help you build up a lead capture page inside your Facebook page. And that's what we were doing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:16] You seem to have this entrepreneurial mind where you're like, “Oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this company and serve these needs.” And I don't even know how much we can say, but you're in town right now. The reason we're doing this, like in my living room.

Nathan Latka: [00:02:28] I love it. This is great. This is how it works.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:30] Yeah. Which there might be a [indiscernible]

Nathan Latka: [00:02:32] How about we say we want Momo to pop up here at some point, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:34] He will probably pop up at some point for attention. But the reason you're in town in Silicon Valley is, you said, “Oh well, I sell data to VCs”, and I was like, “What data? Who is buying something from a…?” Because when I was 29, I was like tying my shoelaces together for the most part.

Nathan Latka: [00:02:50] Yeah. Well who are you talking about? You're talking like Cal, about digital detox and in a past episode and talking about those years you were like the party drinking, like that whole kind of thing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:00] Yeah. Literal detox.

Nathan Latka: [00:03:01] Literal detox. No. So my podcast, the reason I launched it, you know, back in the day, I had no idea it would turn into a data machine, but that's what it is now. The podcast actually doesn't really matter. It's just a more effective way to connect with people. Like I used to send cold emails after I sold Heyo. And I was like, “Hey Jordan, like can we get coffee together? I'd love to pick your brain”, which you know, is the worst email. No one replied. When I changed it to, “Jordan, can I feature you on my podcast?” Everyone's like, “Well yeah, great. Of course.”

[00:03:28] So now the podcast, you know, I named it The Top Entrepreneurs because the number one search term for podcasts when I launched was the top podcast. I'm like, “Well, I'll just name my podcast, The Top.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:40] Very wise.

Nathan Latka: [00:03:42] Little SEO play there for you, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:44] Yeah, I bet that still works.

Nathan Latka: [00:03:45] It works like a charm. We're ranked like number one, two and three if you just search the top podcast on Google. So as podcasting takes off our show just picks up some of that headwind phenomenon. But anyways, yeah so we recorded like 3000 episodes. It's all with software CEOs and we built a little piece of voice technology that pulls any numbers they share on the audio out and a basic thing about like a big Excel sheet. And we then flip that data and sell it to private equity firms, VC firms. so that's why I'm going to be in Menlo Park later today.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:12] So what is the actual data again?

Nathan Latka: [00:04:13] So how familiar are you with software companies like B2B SaaS?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:18] Sure. Yeah. Mildly. Why not?

Nathan Latka: [00:04:20] I know you well enough to know the sarcasm yet but…

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:24] I would be like, I try to keep it clear -- Clarity over sarcasm.

Nathan Latka: [00:04:29] So when I say ARPU, do you think like that must've been like a friend's nickname from high school or do you know what that means?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:34] It sounds a little racist, but I know that it's…

Nathan Latka: [00:04:37] It stands for Average Revenue Per User. So we'll pull data from these business to business software CEOs like what their revenue is, which is called ARR, what their yearly growth rate is, their equity splits in the company, their last round valuation, customer acquisition costs, ARPU, lifetime value churn, like really valuable data that these VCs have to hire a team of analysts to call every CEO to get.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:00] And you're getting it because they're coming to your show and telling you when you ask them, “Hey, what's your MRR?”

Nathan Latka: [00:05:05] Yeah. Unfortunately, I can't be that direct because they're going like, “Why the hell is this 29-year-old asking me what my freaking numbers are?”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:11] You have to beat around the bush? That's interesting.

Nathan Latka: [00:05:13] I have to be like, “Jordan, great [indiscernible]

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:17] 80%. Yeah, I own eight tenths of the equity. Okay, great, 80%.

Nathan Latka: [00:05:25] No, I guess the reason I said is, I mean a lot of what I do ties in with a lot of I think what you're teaching your audience, which is you've got to know how to talk to anybody. And then figure out how to get the information you want, and it's very difficult. If a CEO comes on who has a huge ego, usually what works best for me and for them is I hit them really hard to start and they respected. A shy CEO coming on, you would never hit them hard because then they would close it up. They wouldn't share anything. So you do the opposite with them. You kind of find something to compliment and get them comfortable. So because mine are not as long as yours, mine is 15 minutes every day, so it's quick.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:59] And they're done by Skype then, I assume.

Nathan Latka: [00:06:01] All Skype. I mean, I'm sitting like literally. I only filmed from here up and it's like my ironing board with my computer on it and an Apogee Mike and just crank through 30 a day, dude.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:11] Got it. Wow! That's a lot of Q and A. That's like some double O7 podcast.

Nathan Latka: [00:06:17] It turns me on, a ton of fun.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:18] Yeah. I'm sure it does. There's a lot of people envisioning you at the ironing board and they're also getting turned on by that. I know your game, Nathan.

Nathan Latka: [00:06:25] There you go. I’m in.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:29] You are good at getting people to agree with you. We are talking about podcast sponsorship and I was like, “How was this show that is,” and I mean this in no insulting way, like it's smaller than mine. It’s a smaller show. You're getting the same or more for certain ads. And I'm thinking, “What the hell? This is my business. I should be doing better.”

Nathan Latka: [00:06:47] Yeah. Wait, can you tell me about the -- I mean, don't tell me the actual Delta or the actual sponsor, but you just saw in my book, the sponsor agreement I signed for X amount of money. You have that same sponsor, what’s the delta?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:57] It’s basically the same, but your show is smaller.

Nathan Latka: [00:06:59] Way, way smaller. Yeah. So the way I do it is one, it's a hyper curated audience that listens to my show.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:07]   That makes sense, right?

Nathan Latka: [00:07:10] You have reach, you have like huge reach.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:13] Yeah. The audience of entrepreneurs that need websites build is much more concentrated in the top podcasts, search for it on Google, is much more concentrated in that show than it would be on The Jordan Harbinger Show where people are going, “Look, I'm a lawyer for White & Case, I don't need my own website. Thanks.”

Nathan Latka: [00:07:33] Well, I mean, you guys know this, if you're in the ad space, most people pound a CPM basis, which didn't work for my show. If I charge on a CPM basis, I'd make like 200 bucks an upload.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:43] Yeah, you’d be like, “Jordan, can you throw me five for gas? I’m going to get it at your house.”

Nathan Latka: [00:07:45] Yes. Totally. Like, it doesn't make any sense. But when it changed to, “Sponsor, tell me what you're willing to pay for a new customer.” And they'd say, “Well, we're spending a grand on Google ads right now to get one new customer.” I then say, “Great, I'll beat you. I'll bring you in customers at 500 bucks a pop.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:00] They willingly tell you…

Nathan Latka: [00:08:03] Well, I've already had them on my show and asked some CAC.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:04] Cost of customer acquisition. Cost of Acquiring a Customer -- CAC. Again, it sounds like something in another language.

Nathan Latka: [00:08:12] yeah, I was going to say, you can make up whatever you want without that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:15] Yeah, there's a lot. That was the lowest, that was the easiest joke I could have made on that one. That's brilliant. And I'm basically like, Jen, write that down so that when we have to renew with certain sponsors, I'm like, ‘What's your CAC?’”And they're like, “Excuse me?”

Nathan Latka: [00:08:30] It's just different. I mean, you probably also know the horror story of this. You probably know sponsors that drop a buttload for shows and see crickets.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:37] Oh yeah. That's one of the reasons that a lot of people who buy ads or buy anything from podcasts or from anyone else are a little gun-shy in the digital space because they go, “Wait a minute, I spent 80 grand on this show and you gave me eight customers. I got taken for an absolute ride. This is BS.”

Nathan Latka: [00:09:01] It’s the debate between like the host would say, “Well, it's not just about customers I drive, it’s about branding.” And they're like, “Well, come on.” Right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:10]  Yeah. “I'll get my branding somewhere else.”

Nathan Latka: [00:09:12] Exactly. So what I do with the podcast sponsors is I always try and make it profitable for them on a pure ROI basis. And then all the other branding stuff is just icing on the cake. But I mean, some of my sponsors go into detail here, like, I mean I can look this up like chat. My first sponsor was Justine, who you probably work with from FreshBooks and now she is a representing Gusto. And I mean, she reached out, and was a great lady. This was like six months into the show, and it's like page 18, I mean I just put it here, “Hey Nathan, I am Justine.” She reached out and then you know, a little bit later we're signing, you know, the contract for 6,400 bucks. And the reason this is important is because she told me what her CAC was at FreshBooks, it was hard to get, but then I would do things and say things like, “Justine, I'm on the speaking circuit. FreshBooks is sponsoring things and I'm speaking as a keynote speaker. You have issues filling the demo booths. How about when I'm done with my keynote on stage as an add-on to this podcast sponsor, I'll tell everyone, “If you want a Q and A with Nathan, I'll be at the FreshBooks demo booth.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:08] Oh my God, that's so good!

Nathan Latka: [00:10:10] I drive the whole audience, so like I build in nice cool stuff on the back end.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:14] That is genius. I'm going to be using that literally at podcast…

Nathan Latka: [00:10:19] Well, you speak all over, as I say, you speak everywhere.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:19] Yeah, and half the time I will go to a conference and a sponsor will pay for me to go, but some conferences I'm like, “Hey can I go to this?” And they're like, “Sure. See you later.” I’m like, “No, no. I want you to pay for it.” But I never thought of, “Hey, I'll go hang out at your booth wearing your tee shirt. And that's where I'll do my Q and A for an hour.” And then that pays for the flight, the hotel, the food, the expenses, whatever, because if they're going already, “Sure, Jordan, come with us. We already, you know, we don't care.”  But now I get to pick, I'm thinking where I want to go and add that.

Nathan Latka: [00:10:54] Are you doing a lot of speaking these days?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:55] Yeah, I do a bunch. It depends. If I'm advising companies, well, I am advising certain companies. I will go and speak at an event if they ask me to, but I'm thinking now, why am I not going to, some of these really unique events that I get invited to that companies don't get to go to. I got to figure out how to get them to want to foot that bill.

Nathan Latka: [00:11:18] Yeah. Well, it’s another upside you can give to your podcast sponsors. I do this, when a conference asked me to come speak, they're obviously paying a fee to have you speak and I'll say something like, “Guys, this fee is way lower than what I usually charge. So if I bring you three sponsors, I want you to give them a 50% discount on a platinum plan.” And the people that I give those sponsorships are people that already pay me to sponsor my podcast, so then they get the booths for a discount and I drive them traffic when I'm done with my keynote to their booth from the stage.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:46] That's really, really good.  A lot of people are going, “I don't have a podcast. I can't do any of this stuff.” It's not because you have the show. This is sort of a, I hate using the word ‘mindset’ because it's really overused, but this is kind of like the idea that you can get a win for somebody that isn't directly what they would think of, nor what anybody else would think of, is kind of a secret sauce.

[00:12:08] Because a lot of people are going to go, if you could try to go toe to toe and you say, “I'll do a lower CPM on my show.” Then the other guy who runs an entrepreneur podcast,

Nathan Latka: [00:12:18] You’re racing to the bottom, dude.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:19] You’re racing to the bottom and instead, you're charging them more, but you're saying on the back end, “When I go speak somewhere, I'll drive people to your booth.” “Well, we're not going to get a booth there. It's too expensive.” “I'll tell you what, I'm going to get you a half off and drive traffic to it.” And so now they're going, “Wait a minute, you're saving us 5, 10 grand on a booth, or more.” Yeah, but that they can literally add that to the amount of, or subtract that from the amount that they're paying you for the ads, so you're turning revenue that might go to the event over to you and putting that in your pocket and then you're saying to the company, “By the way, that money that was going to go over here, I'll just take that and I'll give you the value on the back end. The only thing you have to do is kind of just pay me up front for all of it.”

Nathan Latka: [00:13:01] You nailed it. The hardest thing that I've had a podcast sponsor is I run out of things to sell them. Like, I build a great relationship with them. People are paying, you know, the contracts on the book 180 grand a year for placement on my show. They want to spend more, so I had to invent new things to sell them. I mean that's why I launched the Facebook watch show. And so now I'll build my podcast sponsors into the watch show, which gets about a million views per Facebook live that I do. And so then I up-sell that for 20 grand and 30 grand an episode. So the hardest part is the relationship with the sponsors. If you already have it, invent new things that they want and sell it to them.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:13:38] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Nathan Latka. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors, and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit JordanHarbinger.com/deals. If you like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to JordanHarbinger.com/subscribe. And now back to our show with Nathan Latka.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:00] Right. Because what a lot of people do is they'll play the numbers game where they need more clients, where they need more sponsors or they need more people, more ticket sales instead of finding ways to serve and be valuable to the people that they've already kind of got. And this happens with some sponsors, they'll go, “Hey, can you do social for us?” And I'm like, “Well yeah, of course. But I'm not going to give it to you for your birthday.” Right? Not free. No. And they'll say, “Oh, you know, we'd love it if you would come to our annual event.” “Okay, cool. Well, this is what is going to have to happen for that to work.” And I think the problem that a lot of people run into is they're afraid to ask for things like this because they think they're being too sales-y. And I used to have this problem too in my early thirties or late twenties, you clearly have gotten over that. But I used to have the same issue where I'd go, “Oh well, I don't want to push my luck or I don't want to seem too sales-y.” Do you have any advice for people who feel that way? Because I think a lot of non sales people, they really feel like it's not their place to ask for things like this.

Nathan Latka: [00:15:05] Well, as everyone knows, you don't get what you don't ask for. So the trick is how do you get the confidence to ask for something that you feel totally uncomfortable asking for? And the answer is to reduce that risk, right? So you should ask for something and assume you're never going to get it and that will give you the confidence to ask for it. In the first place, if that makes sense.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:26] It does, but I foresee people going, “Well, if I'm not going to get this, the reason I'm not going to get this is because I don't deserve it, so I'm not going to ask.”

Nathan Latka: [00:15:33] This is one thing I won't get into. I mean, I'm not emotional or you have amazing interviews with people that can get into human emotions. I'm actually horrible with emotion, like I ignore it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:42] You're a robot.

Nathan Latka: [00:15:43] Kind of, actually.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:44] Big business robot. That might be your strength though. That might be why you go, “Hey, so I need $60,000 a month for this.” And they're like, “Are you insane?”

Nathan Latka: [00:15:54] Exactly. After this, I'm driving up to Andreessen in Menlo because they asked to get my data about a year ago, I told them the price and they balked and walked. They just ping me about three days ago and said, “Nathan, we're seeing Latka everywhere -- the magazine, you're speaking, we're more open to the data now. Can you come in and talk about it?” So the thing is, I'm playing the long game. Like, I'm always increasing prices because you should. You're building your brand. And so if I would have, let's say, I went down to a lower price point last year, well I’ll be locked in at a cheaper price point now. I could give that up knowing that maybe in a year or two years, I had built my brand, they'd come back and I can ask for way more. And so it's tricky. I'm putting it in the book because I mean there's part, there's a section here that basically says like, negotiate when you don't have to. And this goes back into when I sold Heyo. The way I sold Heyo, Jordan, it started with an email that I sent.

[00:16:44] This was the email. We can do some ninja stuff on this, but you can read that headline. It says, Shutting Halo Down. So what am I doing there? Well, we were in a really healthy spot at the time. But I said, if I take this email, shutting my company down the subject line and email it to 20 of our biggest competitors, how's that going to make them feel when they get that email, you think?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:03] Well, they're going to wonder why. Or they're to want to buy it from you.

Nathan Latka: [00:17:07] Because why? Because it's an opportunity, right? This sense is like blood in the water, a discount, right? So that's exactly what I wanted and then one of them wrote back, “Hey Nathan, we did some back of the napkin estimates. We think we could get you somewhere north of 500K in bounty.  When we look at the current user base.” Freudian slip. Yup. Freudian slip. That's a whole nother, you know, when you Google Nathan, it's like Nathan like a network and net worth. And then, is Nathan a gay? What?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:33] That's funny. The one that comes up for me is ‘wife’. So I guess they've already answered that question.

Nathan Latka: [00:17:36] Like, are beautiful pictures of Jen spread through Google?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:39] And you know what’s funny, there's another Jennifer Liao who's like an economist or something, because she gives talks, and they're like, “Oh, that's interesting.” So I meant to talk to Jen. I'm like, “We either need to make you a page that has you”, and like this is Jen, in case you're curious. Or, we need to make a page that says, “This woman who works in the travel industry or whatever it is -- is not my wife. She seems really nice though.” And then put alink to her like a Bumble profile or something, LinkedIn or if you're interested, whatever like on eHarmony or whatever, find her on there.

Nathan Latka: [00:18:12] I mean, this personal stuff, I think people value, now, the transparency. I mean my publisher, Random House, hated my book landing page. It's capitalistbook.com, FAQ section. I just took the top five searched things about me. And so one of the FAQ on capitalistbook.com, “Nathan, are you gay?” And when they expand it to read it, here's what it says, I'll give your audience. It literally says, well, it doesn't make much sense for me strategically to answer this. If I say yes, then I lose all the beautiful middle-aged cougars who loved me for decades and they're really intelligent and smart. If I say no, that I'm not gay, I lose like all these killer like gay mafia people who are really smart and sharp.

[00:18:53] So in essence, I can't say that I don't know if I can confirm or deny that. But my point is like, there's no strategic value for me to say that. And so I'm a very strategic thinker. If there was a strategy behind it, I maybe would say it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:05] Right. Well, people always go, “Jordan, I can't figure it out. Are you a Republican or a Democrat?” And I go, “Yeah”, because I'm like, look, no matter what happens, there are myriad one-star reviews of the show of, “I can't believe this guy has such a clear anti-Trump agenda.” And then I'm like, “Hmm, that's weird, because I don't. So wherever you found that “clear” anti-Trump agenda, I'm interested in finding out.” Probably a guest expressed an opinion and since I didn't punch them directly in the faces. But then other people are like, “I can't believe you supported this thing through your inaction when a guest said something that was related to…” So you can't win. So I'm just like…

Nathan Latka: [00:19:47] Isn't it funny how people make assumptions?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:49] They do. Yeah.

Nathan Latka: [00:19:50] And it reminds me of, if you’ve heard The Four Agreements, that book? Like, that's the number one, don't make assumptions. And again, I'm like you, I'm not really politically motivated either way, but one of Trumps, I mean the reason he got so many people agreeing with him, I guess, right? Is because he would say things where no matter what you believed, you would find something in a statement where you said, “Yes, I agree.” So he'd say something like, “I can't say that X, Y and Z is happening.” And anyone who wanted X, Y and Z to happen, wouldn't see the ‘I can't say’ part. Anyone who disagreed would see the ‘I can't say part’, but ignore the later half of the sentence. It's fascinating how this works.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:26] It is. And a guy like Scott Adams who is very, is that where you’re coming?

Nathan Latka: [00:20:31] All of his books. Unbelievable.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:26] Win Bigly. So Scott Adams has been on the show a bunch of times, which is probably where I get the I-can't-believe-you're-so approach from because I've had Scott Adams in here.  And then the anti-Trump because I've had every other person.

Nathan Latka: [00:20:42] Is he pro-Trump?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:43] He is very much a Trump supporter.

Nathan Latka: [00:20:45] He is pro. Well, his books are genius. Anyone pro or against him has to read his books because they're genius on just Trump in general psychology.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:51] I know that Scott says that he's just doing one of those, I'm not saying but like, as far as I understand, he thinks Trump is a genius. So, there's that. And so now I'm getting one-star reviews from people for having him on and talking about it. And I'm going to get one-star reviews for talking about it and not saying that he's right. So whatever.

Nathan Latka: [00:21:11] That's funny. Well, I will quickly loop back to your question about how people can ask for stuff that they feel really comfortable. No, it's okay. This is wonderful. But I mean, what happened with this kind of selling Heyo is about 15 of these folks wrote back and said, “Nathan, would you consider selling the company if you're shutting it down anyway?” And they were all price points way below what I'd accept. But Jordan, what happened was, I wrote back to all of them and said, “Hey, I need an LOI, which is a letter of intent by the end of the day on Thursday, if you're interested in buying.” You know, submit. So people submitted LOIs. And I wrote back to all of them, “Hey, I have two responsibilities. Keep my customers happy and fiduciary.” I have to make my investors happy in terms of you making my customers happy if I sell to you, I know you’d do a great job, but from a financial perspective, this offer is just too low. Is this your best offer? And so I just ended it. Is this your best offer? So they read that and go, “Well wait, does that mean he's going to decline? He's not going to take us? Is he selling to our competitor?” They wonder. They make their own assumption.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:08] Right. Sure. They are still in the blank and it's usually in your favor.

Nathan Latka: [00:22:12] Exactly. So the trick is, how do you set up these questions where you allow the receiver to fill in the blank with what they want? Because what happened from that is four of them wrote back and doubled their offer. I wrote back, “Okay, I've got four people. I'm making a decision by the end of day on Friday.” And then you can guess how I ended the email, “Are you sure this is your best offer?” And two of them said, basically, “F-- you, we see the game you're playing.” But two came back and doubled their offer. And I picked one of them to sell to.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:31] That is actually quite interesting because I think a lot of people will not do that. They'll be afraid that they're going to lose everything.

Nathan Latka: [00:22:45] What is there to lose though in that situation? What could I lose?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:49] You could lose all of the offers.

Nathan Latka: [00:22:51] Okay, which is fine because I didn't want to sell anyway.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:53] You didn't even want to sell?

Nathan Latka: [00:22:54] The subject line was just shutting Heyo down. I just sent that out to make people feel like there was blood in the water to get them emotionally connected to, to buying us and I knew once they sold the idea of buying us to their boards, they'd get egg on their face that they didn't get the deal.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:05] Oh right. So let me get this straight, “We approved you buying this and then you cheaped out by a hundred grand and now, we don't have it.”

Nathan Latka: [00:23:11] I used their own egos essentially against them to maximize price for the company.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:16] Interesting. Where did you learn how to do this stuff?

Nathan Latka: [00:23:19] Messed up childhood.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:20] I was wondering about that. Seriously?

Nathan Latka: [00:23:23] I don't know, to be honest with you. I mean, my back story, so my household was flipped. My mom was the breadwinner. My dad was a stay-at-home dad. But my dad is also older than my grandma, on my mom's side, obviously.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:26] Of course, that’s how that works. In case anyone’s curious.

Nathan Latka: [00:23:28] There’s no way that would work.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:41] It was actually impossible the other way around.

Nathan Latka: [00:23:43] So anyways, I saw a lot. I mean, one thing that I would tell you that I learned when I was little, my parents would never, and this is interesting for anyone raising kids, who you want to be entrepreneurs, they never told me yes or no. They'd always phrase things as a choice. So, if you were my dad, I'd say, “Jordan, I really want to go out for like, I want to have a sleepover this weekend.” He'd be like, most people would say, “Honey, you can't even sleep over. We're busy with soccer games.” What my parents would always do is set up it as a choice. Like, “Honey, if you have a sleepover this weekend, then you have to miss your soccer game, which means less playing time. Which do you choose?” They'd always say like, what do you choose? What do you think? It was never yes or no. That's the only thing I can look back at my childhood, and try to analyze. But honestly, like I'm not a therapist. Someone else would probably look at it and find all kinds of other patterns.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:25 ] But you said messed up. Was that a joke or just because you were flipped around or was there all kinds of weird stuff going on where you were like, “I got to fend for myself and make money early and all this stuff”?

Nathan Latka: [00:24:33] Well, I mean look, and I've never talked to my dad about this. I've never really talked about it publicly, but I think this is an appropriate time to think about it and space to think about it. I mean, he dealt with hardcore alcoholism and my mom obviously didn't, right? So there was always a moment where I'd have to analyze it every moment of every day. Has he had something to drink? Is he thinking rationally right now or irrationally?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:56] Oh, that's scary for a kid.

Nathan Latka: [00:24:57] Well, yeah. So I would have to essentially alter my behavior based on, if I thought at any moment he was in a rational state or an irrational state because it's two different methods. And so what happened is, and I actually wanted to use this as the opening kind of sentence in the book, but I didn't. The publisher didn't like it and my mom hated it but one of the deals I'm most proud of negotiating was my parents' divorce.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:19] You negotiated your mom and dad?

Nathan Latka: [00:25:20] I negotiated my parents' divorce. I knew from both sides, they were staying together until my young brother left the house. They wanted to stay as a family unit. And the reason both of them want to do this is because we grew up Roman Catholic and it looked very bad from a church perspective, but the problem was no one, when my dad was in an irrational state, my mom or my younger siblings would never really stand up to him. So I was really worried if I left for college and no one was there to kind of hold his irrational behavior and check.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:49] Right. He would wreck everything.

Nathan Latka: [00:25:51] And by the way, it wasn't physical, but it was emotional.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:54] It doesn't even matter at that point. To not have certainty in the house whether your dad is sober and going to be fine or wildly irrational and going to be [indiscernible]

Nathan Latka: [00:26:07]Yeah. And again, it wasn't anything that would ever make the news or elicit a phone call to the police. It was nothing like that. It was just, like I got grounded one time for putting peanut butter and jelly on accident on the washcloth because he was in an irrational state and just flipped out over this like really little issue. I mean, I remember this like it was yesterday because of that, he then grounded me for seven days and this was when I was leaving for college. I couldn't drive myself to work, so my mom would have to stop her work. She was the breadwinner, remember, and drive me to my work because my dad didn't want me to drive because I was grounded.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:35] Oh God, that's so irrational, right? Yeah.

Nathan Latka: [00:26:38] So anyways, I negotiated the divorce. It was a beautiful divorce. They're friends today. There was no money spent on lawyers. Everyone still talk to each other. It was a really great divorce.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:45] Wow, that's too much response. How old were you at that point?

Nathan Latka: [00:26:50] While I was going to college, 17-18?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:52] So this responsibility for this, this stuff we're talking about with business, which we'll get back to in a second, this is child's play literally. Because when you were a child, you had responsibility foisted on to you, in frankly a very unfair way. But you didn't have a choice.

Nathan Latka: [00:27:11] A bit. But just to be clear too, like I'm not one of these guys, you know, the space that you and I kind of dabble in is famous for these people that say, “I was broken on the street and, now I’m on stage.” I mean I was a privileged white male born in Northern Virginia, still am. And I'm going to use that privilege before it runs out, right? But a privileged white male born in North America, born in Loudoun County, which is in Northern Virginia, the wealthiest County in the country, I never had to worry about shelter over my head, food and none of that stuff. It was just like every morning when I woke up or went to bed, I had to think about, “Okay, what state is my father in right now?” Had to have that empathy and then change my behavior and the house behavior really based off that and I think that gave me a kind of empathy that allows me to get inside and understand people's heads today in business.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:54] Yeah, that's very, very fascinating.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:28:00] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Nathan Latka. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air, to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit JordanHarbinger.com/deals. And don’t forget the worksheet for today’s episode, that link is in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast.  And if you’re listening to the show in the Overcast player for iOS, please click on that little star in the sidebar, really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our show with Nathan Latka.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:29] Right. So this leads to you being very good at getting people to agree with you as well. Because you're basically telling people, this is what I want. And they can either say, most people probably start off by saying, “This is ridiculous. You're charging me too much” or, “I don't want to do this”.  So you're able to push through these no's and then flip them on their back.

Nathan Latka: [00:28:52] Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've learned that's powerful too is, I mean, have you ever gotten like, over Thanksgiving and a big debate with your family and it's clear that like, no one's going to win? It’s a stalemate.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:02] I mean, yeah. Sure, it's always going to be like that.

Nathan Latka: [00:29:05] One of the most effective ways to win is like after you leave the house for the Thanksgiving holiday is to email them a link to someone else saying something that backs your viewpoint. It's coming from someone else's mouth, if that makes sense.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:17] Sure. I mean, that's what my aunts, uncles and parents do to me. And they're like, here's this thing we read in this ridiculous non-news source that says that you're wrong.

Nathan Latka: [00:29:26] Super right, super left, whatever. Yeah. So like one of the things I talked about in the book when I was building up Heyo, one thing I would do is I would go into, do you have any sponsors that are in the kind of SEO space? SEO tools?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:41] I would say, do we, Jen? SEO tools, no. HostGator has SEO plugins, that's all I know.

Nathan Latka: [00:29:46] No, I'm talking like, so I would go into similar web or AH refs or SCM rush. Okay. And I would look, when I was building Heyo at who wrote, which authors wrote the highest ranked articles that were sending traffic to my competitors. And I would then email them and somewhere in the book, I don't know the exact page, but there's a script that I use to email them. The first one was Guava Box that was basically my competitor named Short Stack was at the top of their article and I wanted us to be there, so I emailed them and basically convinced them to edit that old blog post that got long trail traffic to put us at the top of it. And the way I did that is I basically had that article saying, Heyo was the best tool builder for Facebook apps. Anytime someone objected to my price and then linked them to that other source, which was actually my voice put into another mouth. And so that's a very effective way to get what you want is to link people to sources that you have some influence over to then convince them of your viewpoint.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:42] It sort of reminds me a little bit of the Ryan Holiday, Trust Me, I'm Lying strategy where you say, “Outrageous news story!” and people are like, “Where's the story?” And you go, “It's on these blogs.” And they go, “Well, all right, but where did they find out about it?” “Oh it's on these blogs,” but nobody goes that far. They just go, “Oh well, if it was on US news then it must be legit.” And US news got it from a local news blotter, which got it from blogger. But there's like this cover of, it's like in the 90s if you're running a scam and you had colored business cards that had the fake business name on it, people were like, “Wow, he's got business cards.”

Nathan Latka: [00:31:19] “And it's a thick business card. It doesn't crack up in my wallet.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:22] I used to, back when I was a kid, get into clubs and concerts and stuff for free because I started a website that had music articles on it. But of course I just basically told my friends, “Hey, can you write music articles and I'll put them on this website and we'll go to this concert for free.” So I basically paid my friends and concert tickets for them to write articles.

Nathan Latka: [00:31:46] Did you get tickets for free?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:47] Of course. From the venue of the artists.

Nathan Latka: [00:31:49] And why would they give them to you for free?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:51] Because I'm covering them for this blog, this music website. That was a new “music news” website. But bear in mind, this is like late 90s, early 2000s.

Nathan Latka: [00:32:02] Since I was born.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:03] So yeah, when you were born. So basically, but like that's the thing, right? So people were going, “Well, it's on this website and like, this kid didn't just buy this website and make it,” which is exactly what happened, right? It was like, “Of course, I did.” And then I paid my friend's brother to design it and make it look cool. So they went, “Oh, this website's better than ours. Yeah. This must be legit,” because I spent, you know, three days making it and I knew how to do HTML as a kid because I learned it. It wasn't hard. Now of course, they're like, “So what? It's on a website. You probably just bought that and made it yesterday.” “We're HostGator's website builder -- HostGator.com/Jordan, right?

Nathan Latka: [00:32:42] That was  great, I use them too though, seriously. All my Blinks capitalistbook.com [indiscernible]

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:47] I normally don't do sponsor stuff like that, but I just thought it was really obvious and funny to do it then but the idea is, look, you can create things that give value or that has perceived value. It's not that it's fake, like mine was, for the concert tickets.

Nathan Latka: [00:33:02] I wouldn't call that fake either.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:03] Yeah, that's true. I mean, I was essentially giving them value at some level. The ticket value for them was zero at that point.

Nathan Latka: [00:33:11] Yeah, totally. I mean, I think today's day and age, the reason I have a podcast, it's my version of native American corn, right? Where everyone bartered like my corn, the thing I trade today to other people for them to give me value is I'll have you on my podcast, right? If you're a good guy, I’ll have you on my podcast. If you can help me with X, Y, and Z. Or, I'll put you on my magazine cover or I'll mention you in the book. Or like, I think today's day and age, everyone's a media brand and you have to create the equivalent of corn or cows or beans or cotton that you're trading with people and that's really how you create value and you can do this. I mean, are you part of any of these big like networking groups for entrepreneurs?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:49] Not the ones that you're probably thinking of? I do some, but yeah, like a lot of those, I don't join because I've found -- I'm going to take flack for this, I don't care. A lot of them are sort of these digital internet guys that are $30,000 millionaires, if you will. And I found that a lot of them were either asking me for stuff or they were just kind of blowing smoke and I thought, I don't really have time for this. I don't have any time from my real friends. I don't need friends that are lying to me about the revenue stream so that I think they're cool. Like, I really don't care.

Nathan Latka: [00:34:18] We know what's funny about, I mean, you opened the bucket. So I'll keep going. I'll dive deeper into the bucket. I mean, a lot of these people, it's so funny, they'll go, you know “Nathan, Jordan, we're doing 100 million in revenue.” But then he talks to the people and they're like, “Yeah, we're affiliates for that company. They pass 100% affiliate cuts.” So yeah, they do a hundred million in revenue, but guess what? Their affiliate costs are 100 million. It's like, how do you sell $1 million of this pillow? You go buy it, you go buy $1.1 million worth of it and you sell it for a million. That's how you get revenue of $1 million on the toe. It doesn't work.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:52 ] You lose money on it.

Nathan Latka: [00:34:54] Yeah. But your revenue, I mean, my publisher by the way hates the book because it's not timeless, like you've had some other people on essentialism, Gary with The ONE Thing. The books will sell for decades. This won't because there's so many screenshots. Like I put in here, we can put this in the show notes, but like these are my tax returns from 2013 on page six when I was in college. So there's like, what Jordan's looking at, is there's $939,000 in sales, but it also shows the expenses.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:20] Oh, I was like, holy crap, you made that much and oh, just kidding. Never mind.

Nathan Latka: [00:35:23] Yeah, no, that's all top line in my dorm room. But I hired like 20 people and I don't know what it says net down there as more like 150.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:32] Yeah, but not bad for a kid.

Nathan Latka: [00:35:34] Not bad for a guy. And then what's interesting about this is this ultimately turned into, “Have you had Ryan Allis of iContact? Does that ring a bell? Okay. But that turned into this on page 243, read there just what that part says, the highlighted part.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:50] That's great. Wow. Total purchase. The purchase price will be up to $6.5 million and will be paid in the following manner. And then there's a lot of other stuff.

Nathan Latka: [00:35:58] Yeah, it's a pill, like a drug. My point is like that revenue that you just won, the tax return turned into iContact. This was in again, 2013 time frame offering six and a half for the company, I walked away from this, but it would've put, you know I own 60%. You can do the math, more than 3 million in my pocket.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:14] Phenomenal.

Nathan Latka: [00:36:15] But a huge mistake by the way. I walked away. We can get to that if you want, but I bring all that up. Just to go back on the thing of like, these networking groups are famous for like all the revenue, all the revenue, but what matters is like how much you keep, not how much you make in opinion.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:27] Profit first. In fact, Mike Michalowicz wrote a book about this and it used to drive me crazy. I used to get FOMO. And I think a lot of people listening and watching also get FOMO because they go, “Oh man, look at this person, they're making $1 million a month.” And it's like, “Okay.” They took a cash injection of $70 million and that investor now owns, I don't even know 80 and 90% percent of the business, they're making $1 million a month. But their outgoing cost might even be more than a million dollars a month. You don't know and they're not telling you that because it doesn't sound good.

Nathan Latka: [00:37:02] No, it doesn't sound good at all. This is why Mike's book, maybe they'll go on Amazon. It's like a number one bestseller in place because it makes a lot of sense. I mean the most successful people are the ones that are bringing the most of the bottom line and then reinvesting in themselves somehow. And I think that's obviously the most powerful place to be.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:15] So what sort of practicals can we give right now? We talked about getting people to agree with you. How do we bring people through the process of getting others to agree with us? Because you're really good at this. This is something we should teach the audience.

Nathan Latka: [00:37:27] Well, I mean, here's the thing, I'd love to start from a place because I think maybe some people in your audience are people that don't have a podcast. Like, you have to trade with people or they're starting with maybe nothing. And so the question is how can you do what we do but not have an asset to trade? And the way that example I like to give on this is kind of called elephant bumping. And let me give a practical example here because anyone can do this. So have you guys ever gone on Airbnb when you guys travel? Are you in general to LA? Have you ever just gone in there and you sort from most expensive to least? Just for the hell of it?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:57] Yeah, of course. I want to see the baller pen. Yeah.

Nathan Latka: [00:37:59] You're like, “Maybe I can afford 10 grand a night like for whatever”, right? So I did that all the time. And so I did that for this place in LA, and this was three, four years ago, and I came across this place called Spectacular Tel Hi three bedroom penthouse, right?

Jordan Harbinger [00:38:17] Spectacular. Oh, I see. Spectacular?

Nathan Latka: [00:38:20] I don't know even what that means. What did I say? Did I say a different…

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:22] Tel Hi, Telegraph Hill.

Nathan Latka: [00:38:23] Is that what that is? I didn't know if that is,

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:25] I think so. That's up high overlooking San Francisco?

Nathan Latka: [00:38:28] Yes. Yeah, but it was beautiful. Beautiful spot. I'm like, “There's no way I can afford this.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:31] Isn't that where we had that dinner? You had that dinner for all of us.

Nathan Latka: [00:38:33] Were you there?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:34] I was there. That's where we met. Yeah.

Nathan Latka: [00:38:36] Okay. Hold on. So did I ever say the backstory of how I made that happen without spending money?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:39] No. But I remember going there and telling Jen, “Dude, this guy's apartment had like a full wall of windows and it overlooked like all the boats.” It was so cool. And I thought, “This kid has a trust fund somewhere.”

Nathan Latka: [00:38:54] I wish. Okay. So here's how I did that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:56] I thought you owned it. I was so proud of you.

Nathan Latka: [00:38:57] Here’s how I did that. I reached out to Tommy who owned the place. I said, “Hey Tommy, I'm looking for a place I can both stay at in San Francisco and host a 10 to 15 person mastermind and I'll do one dinner each night. The quoted price above is way above like my budget. Are you willing to be flexible? What is the best price you could offer for the night of the 24^th, 25th and 26^th, last day I checkout.” He wrote back and said, “I have no flexibility.” And I said, “Tommy, my intent is to host a 10-person mastermind. The people that I'm inviting are X, Y, and Z. And I listed some big time CEOs, Rick Rudman with Vocus and some other people.” And I said, “If I invite you to the mastermind, would you give me a discount?”

[00:39:35] So basically I'm saying, “I'll invite you to your own house for a mastermind that I'm having.” I then took a picture of this penthouse and emailed it to a bunch of people that I wanted to have like you so you would be seeing the whole spot.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:45] I don’t even know if I saw the photos, I just accepted your invitation because I'm not a douchebag.

Nathan Latka: [00:39:49] That's awesome. I like that. But a lot of people, I mean, they reacted from those photos. So I used two things I didn't own -- the connections to the CEOs I was inviting and a penthouse I did not own. And I just got to bump them into each other and created an event where people's impressions had the impression that you had.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:06] Right. So the people would go, “Well, I will go to this. He's got a really great spot.” So maybe the CEO of Vocus says to himself, “This looks legit. I’ll go.”

Nathan Latka: [00:40:15] Exactly. And then the trick here is you might go, “Well, Nathan, I can't do that. I don't know CEOs to invite.” So what you do is you email everyone. Just put together your top 10 list. People are impressed by the hell out of you. And you email it to everyone and say, “Hey, this is the invited and confirmed list.” Invited and confirmed, so they could all, maybe the only one has confirmed who's like your best friend. All the others are just big names you've invited. That's what's invited and confirmed. The thing is, they then see that other people see it and then actually start confirming or they see the penthouse and actually start confirming. Before you know it, you put a great mastermind on. So I ended up paying, they wanted, I mean I think, yeah. So I got that place for $1,000.

[00:40:52] It was listed for $2,400. So I got basically a 60% discount with this kind of template that I have all the screenshots here on page 113 in the book. And that's how you get what you want.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:04] Yeah. What I like about this book is it has the “Where the rubber meets the road” is in there, because otherwise you get books that go, “Oh well, what you want to do is you want to find a win-win.” And it's like, “Yeah, great. So what does that look like?” So for example, and then they tell like, “In 1968, Bill Murray was selling typewriters” and it's like, look, I know what a win-win is. How do I say this thing? And then say this other thing and then get those things to collide into each other. And that stuff is in the book. The reason your publisher, like you said, doesn't like it is because it has things like, “Here's my email.” You have a lot of shirtless photos in here for those cougars.

Nathan Latka: [00:41:40] First trap, baby! By the way, cougars and the gays, the gays love a guy in six-pack.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:44] You've got the email screenshots of the Gmail. You've got your calendar screenshot in here.

Nathan Latka: [00:41:53] Hold on. Go back to that page. You just flipped by, the one with me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:55] The full bathroom mirror selfie? Yeah?

Nathan Latka: [00:41:58] Yeah. Okay. I'm going to ask you, we're going to quiz here. Who do you know online, an influencer, who poses in front of Rolls Royces all the time?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:04] Yeah, there's plenty.

Nathan Latka: [00:42:05] He doesn't want to name a name. I see, you’re very politically smart that way. And here's how that world actually works. Okay. I only had 5,000 Instagram followers, but I sent out an email to Auto Exotic Rental and said basically, “I'll post a picture of me in front of this Rolls Royce if you'd give it to me for free.” This was the CEO of the car company rental place’s response. “Hey, my name is Toby. I’m the main contact for marketing for Auto Exotic Rental. Thank you for reaching out to us. We can definitely work with you. We have the Rolls Royce Ghost. Is there a particular date you're looking at so I can check the availability for you? Please feel free to contact me at any time. Hope to hear from you soon.” Long story short, as I was driving around this Rolls Royce Ghost, which if I paid retail is 1400 bucks a night. I got it for two nights for free and just posted one picture to my Instagram of me driving this thing. Tag them. By the way, a lot of people think you have to have a million followers. I had 5,000 followers, 5,000, it's not a ton.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:57] No, that is reasonable. There are many ambiguously possibly gay, possibly not gay dudes that have at least that many.

Nathan Latka: [00:43:04] Anyway, this works for straight people too, Jordan. My point is that just comes down to getting the right email template and how to reach out to the brand to get them to give you stuff for free. And that's why you see me posing shirtless in Bali where I traveled for 45 days for free, just trading Instagram posts for this with a very small following.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:24] Do you have to be shirtless in the post?

Nathan Latka: [00:43:26] Not always, but as you know on Instagram -- Jen, back me up here. On Instagram, the guys with the six packs, they always get more likes. That's how it works

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:32 ] I think that I might not be able to leverage exactly that strategy. However, Jen, give me a salad for lunch today instead. I think that I can work with this. What happens when somebody, so I also, now I'm thinking of every car I've ever run into just seeing my money lighting on fire.

Nathan Latka: [00:43:51] You could trade every one of those. Here's a quick tip for your audience if they travel a lot and they want to see luxurious places. There's a code word that if you ask for, when you call the hotel, they'll give you a 60% off.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:59] The media rate?

Nathan Latka: [00:44:00] How did you know that?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:01] I’m in the media. But I never use the media rate.

Nathan Latka: [00:44:03] Have you told your audiences before?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:05] No. Let's go through this. This is really good feedback.

Nathan Latka: [00:44:07] Yes. You just say, “What is your media rate?” And what happens when you ask for that on the phone?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:12] What happens is they go, “Oh, well, it's half of what we have on the website.” The only downside that can happen is they go, “Yeah, you get one night at that rate and the rest of the nights are full.” Because they figure you're going to stay at that hotel and then review it at that price. You don't need to stay for a week. Only you can stay for a night. However, I feel like there's probably room there like, “Look, I don't want to have to check out and go to another hotel. Can you just give me the rate for the whole time? And we'll try that next time.” A lot of times we use points or we get really good rates on other stuff where we stay with friends. But the media rate is a good win. You can stay at The Four Seasons in freaking Barcelona, Spain for lower than the price on Orbitz or whatever.

Nathan Latka: [00:44:53] Yeah. Not just lower, like big discounts. And I mean, I'll admit to this, to your audience, when I first started trying this, I didn't want to go hire someone to like be my agent or rep. So my name was Wayne, which is my middle name, Nathan Wayne Latka. I'd call up The Jeffery in LA and say, “Hey, my name is Wayne. I'm representing a talent named Nathan Latka. He had his own podcast. He's looking to come these days. He's looking at The London or The Jeffery to stay at. What's your media rate? And then I'll report back to Nathan and see which one he picks.” And so you make them compete. You can get the media rate, you drive it down. And then they'd say, “Well here it is for one night.” And I'd say, “Well Nathan really doesn't want to do one night. He gets angry really easily and doesn't like shifting hotels. If he leaves a TripAdvisor review, could you throw in two other nights? Or if he does two posts instead of one, can you throw in another two nights?” And so I would be my own agent to understand how they thought and then line it up.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:43] Luckily, I have my own live-in agent. This is funny, I was interviewing Mike Posner yesterday, do you know him?

Nathan Latka: [00:45:52] I don't actually know who Mike Posner is.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:53] So you know that song, I Took a Pill in Ibiza? He wrote that and he wrote a bunch of other songs that you've heard from like Maroon 5, Justin Bieber. He's really, really talented dude. And this other guy walks in, in like trainers and he's like, “Hey Jordan, I'm a fan of the show.” And I was like, “Oh hey, come on in, nice guy who’s with Mike Posner, who knows my show.” And I said, “So are you like his friend or an assistant?” And he goes, “Well, I'm his aide-de-camp.” And I was like, “That is such a better name than assistant.” So now Jen is my aide-de-camp.” Otherwise, it's like if you say assistant they're like, “He’s not your wife? You jerk!” And you're like, “Yeah.” And then if you say wife, people are like, “Why am I dealing with your wife? You two bit turd!”

Nathan Latka: [00:46:33] What's funny is, so it takes a little balls and courage to like be your own agent obviously. But what's interesting now is like I'm signed with CAA because I pitted them against UT and WME. I have negotiated a reality show on Linear that goes live later this year.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:46] What's Linear?

Nathan Latka: [00:46:47] Cable TV.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:48] Got it. I've heard of that. I’ve heard of cable. I think we had that when I was a kid.

Nathan Latka: [00:46:52] But like all of that leverage came from these like little weird things that I did early on over the past decade that we've again put in the book.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:59] So, it's funny because people are going, “Oh well, this guy just lied about everything.” But here's the thing, if you are pretending to be your own assistant, you're not really deceiving someone. You could hire an assistant. It would just be expensive and a waste of money.

Nathan Latka: [00:47:17] Exactly. I'm saving money and I’m not hurting anyone.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:19] You're not telling someone, “Oh, he's the editor-in-chief of Forbes.” Right. That would be BS. If the business is making the decision because you have a perceived higher value because you have an assistant that, at worst, is social engineering, at worst.

Nathan Latka: [00:47:35] I have no problem with this. Some people watching, you're a pastor or a piece or something. You may have issues with this. I have no issues. Here's my rule on this. You can't lie. And you can’t be hurting anybody, if it does anything else, totally fine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:47] Yeah. Because the hotel is not losing money on this, that room was otherwise empty. They're not going to give you a room that somebody was paying full price for.

Nathan Latka: [00:47:54] That's right. And they're still getting, I mean it is Nathan Latka staying there. I'm just putting Wayne in front of Nathan to socially engineer and then Wayne is emailing the hotel, my social profiles. So they're seeing all the real stuff. It's just you're putting someone in between and it creates a perception of scarcity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:11] I will tell you this, I hired a show booker because when I reach out to people, they're like, “If your show really has 5 million downloads a month, and this screenshot is not fake, why are you emailing me?” And I'm like, because I don't mind talking with… “Oh wait a minute, I've got to be hoity toity LA Hollywood to get your attention. Fine. Here's money to, I have a fancy guy who's got a pedigree and a cool accent who lives in New York who calls people and sends them text messages and goes to happy hours.”

Nathan Latka: [00:48:41] Do you really do this? Wait. Can I get how much you pay him?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:43] Yeah, he's on retainer for 2,500 a month.

Nathan Latka: [00:48:47] See? So I'm just cheap. I don't want to pay that. So I'd rather invent sarah@nathanlatka.com and have me be responding through Sarah's email.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:55] To be fair, he's got real connections. He's the show booker for a real television show in New York that a lot of people watch. So I pay him for his connections, but I would say maybe half of what he gets is so that he does the work that I don't have to do, but also so that people go, “Oh, well if you're that guy at that agency, then you must be a big deal.” And it actually has saved me a ton of time because, unfortunately, our brains are wired to look at quick things for perceived value. So if somebody is from an agency, has certain prestige, it doesn't matter if that person is just for hire on freaking Fiverr. It doesn't matter. What matters is the person goes, “Well, I don't have time to investigate this Jordan guy, but since his booker from CAA is reaching out, he must be real.” And that's an unfortunate reality, and the problem is you can't, if you're not doing it since the bar is now raised, you're losing. I realized before I was like, who cares? I'm just going to book my own show. It's fine. It's worked for a decade. The problem is now you've got a lot of these fake influencer D-bags that are doing all kinds of things to show how important they are and you have to actually have, unfortunately, some of those accoutrements or you're just going to get lost in the shuffle because they're going to assume that you would at least have what the fake guys have, which is unfortunate.

Nathan Latka: [00:50:27] You have to play the game and then where you really rise above the cream of the crop, which is you don't do Fire Festival, right? When you say to my podcast sponsor, “I'm going to deliver you X amount of customers”, you deliver those customers and they’ll stay with you for life even though you're playing the game up front of having an intermediary or somebody in between. So I have no problem playing the game. I think it's important.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:50] Yeah. I like your rules though. Remember people, no lying and you can't hurt someone. So no buying the hundred thousand Twitter followers and then selling tweets to potential sponsors, it is called fraud too. Fraud. What you're doing is you're leveraging something that the person might not have thought of before and flipping the right switches.  It's funny, 10 years ago, I would've said, you know, we would be talking about this in dating and it would be completely, it’s the same thing. Yeah, it would be the same.

Nathan Latka: [00:51:22] Have your buddy go say hi to the girl and then bring her over to you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:28] Kind of a classic example of this in a dating context was a lot of these pickup guys would always be like, “Yeah, go up and be like, yeah man, I had a long day and my Ferrari's in the shop. So I had to borrow the loaner car and the loaner car wasn't as cool as my real one because it doesn't have leather seats.” Like all this dumb crap. But what I realized was there were different tiers, right? Like if I tell you that I've got a great big house, which is a terrible thing to do, but whatever this is, you know, Hollywood dating scene pickup crap, you go, “Eh? Really? I don’t know.” But if my friend tells you, you're like, “Oh, that's interesting. Maybe I'll listen.” But if you overhear the conversation between other people and I'm not in the conversation, that is the top tier of credibility. Like if I tell you my show's got 5 million downloads a month, you're like, “Oh well, maybe that's true. Jordan seems trustworthy.” If a friend of yours tells you that it has that much, now you believe it. But if you find out because you overheard two random CEOs talking about the show and they weren't even telling you, now you think, “Well, that has to be true because I wasn't even, they have no agenda to try to persuade me. I was just in the lobby.”

Nathan Latka: [00:52:31] Yes and the problem is this, people actually do, sometimes they set that up on purpose to make it seem like this is like the future by the way, with fake profiles. I mean can you imagine, have you seen these videos where people can now essentially it's a clip of Hillary Clinton speaking but you can alter it? So it says something else? Yes, like we're going to have a real issue with this because the videos won't even be true anymore. They can be doctored.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:56] The problem is here's what's going to happen. One video out of a billion is going to get doctored, but it's going to be something important. And then Alex Jones and all these yahoos are going to talk about it. And then every video that everyone watches for the rest of their life, they're going to go, “It's probably fake.”

Nathan Latka: [00:53:13] Well, that's the issue, right? So now every single thing we see content-wise moving forward is going to simply be, is not going to matter if it's true or not because no one knows what to believe. It's going to be who is more persuasive at saying, “This is called an iPhone.” “No, it's called a N-phone because of X, Y, and Z.” And it's just going to be a persuasion game, which is scary.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:31] It's scary and unfortunate because the most persuasive people aren't necessarily going to be the most ethical ones. They’re usually not, exactly.

Nathan Latka: [00:53:37] That’s why they’re so persuasive.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:39] Exactly. Yeah. And, you're right. We're going to run into a huge issue, which is this goes into this whole thread of trust, which is I will never willingly or knowingly lie to the people who are listening to or watching me because, what is it? That phrase -- Trust takes a lifetime to build that you lose it in a day.

Nathan Latka: [00:53:58] No lies, no hurting people.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:59] It's better to live that way. You can sleep better. Trust me. And frankly, it works better. You said you played the long game. Long game, it's always better to have told the truth the whole time, even if it costs you something short term because when it really, really counts, people want somebody they can trust. And if you have that record behind you, then you're good.

Nathan Latka: [00:54:19] Some of your biggest selling, my biggest sponsors today are ones who approached me two years ago and I said, “Sorry, I can't beat that CAC. You're not a fit. There's no way I'd even let you run a test.” And they come back two years later and they go, “Nathan, you think you'd beat the CAC now?” I go, “Actually, yeah. I now know more of the demos and I can beat it.” And they trust me so much the second time they come back because they know I said no and declined money two years ago. So no, it's very, very critical.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:41] Nathan, thank you very much.

Nathan Latka: [00:54:42] Jordan, thanks for having me on man. Appreciate it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:45] Big thanks to Nathan Latka for coming by my pad here. His book is called How To be a Capitalist Without Any Capital, which I think is a great title, especially for him because he is really the master of leveraging other people's resources here. If you want to know how I managed to book great guests for the show, manage friendships with amazing people, create all these systems, tiny habits and consistency in my networking and relationships, check out Six-Minute Networking. It's free. I want you to implement this stuff. It will change the way you do business. It will change the way you live your entire life. It's over at JordanHarbinger.com/course, do not kick the can down the road. You have to dig the well before you get thirsty when it comes to relationships and networking. The drills are literally designed to just take a few minutes per day. I wish I knew this stuff 15-20 years ago.

[00:55:31] It is crucial, and it's all at JordanHarbinger.com/course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Nathan Latka. I'm @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at JordanHarbinger.com/youtube. This show is produced in association with PodcastOne and this episode was co-produced by Jason “Jack of All Trades” DeFillippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got a lot more in the pipe and we're very excited for what's to come. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

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