Episode 1 Transcript: Jordan Harbinger Takes Over The Show
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE!
Jordan Harbinger:
For those of us that haven't heard your trailer, tell us about what we're to expect from your show, because there's a lot of entrepreneurs, John Roa, who are, "I started a business. Now I'm going to tell other people all the wisdom I've gained in the last five years." Why should I listen to you? Who are you?
John Roa:
The key you just said is what I don't have, which is wisdom, because I find myself having never felt comfortable doing anything I'm doing at any given time. Literally, I feel like the most unqualified person always, and that's how I feel doing this podcast, especially talking to someone like you. That's how I felt writing my book. That's how I felt as a CEO of a company, and so what this show won't be is another here's 10 pieces of advice and here's me who thinks I can teach you something. It's going to be pulling out people's honesty, vulnerability and humanity, people who are successful, and we can learn from that experience.
Jordan Harbinger:
What qualifies you for this? I mean, obviously, you started a business. It was successful. We've been friends for a minute. I followed you on Instagram, so I know you got all the accoutrements of a guy who has started a company and offloaded that thing and never has to work again, so this is... Actually, let me back up then, not only what qualifies you, but why continue working? Answer that question after, because I think the first thing is why should I listen to you and then the second reason... and then the second question would be why are you even bothering with us in the first place?
John Roa:
The why should you listen is it's something that I think... It's become really a passion, a huge passion of mine and a huge interest of mine, which is there's so much bullshit in this world, and a lot of it that I focus on is around entrepreneurship, success and this image that we project, which is that we are these highly capable, highly qualified people who are somehow smarter than the average person who gives us, who allows us to exist in this position.
John Roa:
People said that about me as a 27-year-old CEO of a fast-growing tech company. I was lauded as that guy. I was the quintessential, aspirational entrepreneur who's crushing it and doing TED Talks and magazine covers, and people looked up to me. Then I'd turn around in my private life and be melting down from the stress and pressure of that. I didn't know how to deal with it. I fucking hated that expectation that I knew what I was doing, but then I had to go and pretend I did, and so, to me, the other side of that story is critical, and that's why I wrote my book. That's why I put it all out there. My memoir that's coming out in two months is raw and crazy and sad and also entertaining at times because I was just a mess.
John Roa:
I was a complete hot mess of a person during this meteoric run of running a tech company, and that's what the podcast is for is to have those conversations and to hear that side of the story from people who don't normally tell it or at least not in this way, and people learn in a lot of ways. People learn from motivational speakers, from how-to books, from certain kinds of stories. Me, I learn from experience, and so what I'm hoping to do is pull out other hyper successful people's experiences and allow my listeners to learn from that.
Jordan Harbinger:
Fair enough, so a lot of people are starting businesses, failing, and a smaller number are starting businesses and actually succeeding. What do you think you would have done if you weren't an entrepreneur or a successful entrepreneur? I guess, you'd still be working, but what do you think you would have done if opening up a business was never an option for you?
John Roa:
Man, I've been asked that question before, and I've never had a good answer. It is so deeply ingrained in my psyche of being a self-starter that I... that if that wasn't an option, I don't know. My first company, I was 15 years old, almost 15. I was turning 15 when I did my first tech company, and I've been running businesses since. I've started it in the vicinity of 30 companies, most failed miserably, a couple have worked well, but, ultimately, it's all I've known, and it didn't start from saying, "I want to be an entrepreneur." I didn't even know there was a term for entrepreneurs. There's no entrepreneurs in my family. I come from a immigrant household in Detroit where my father worked starting at the assembly line at Chrysler. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and then a teacher and a nurse, so I never even had the guidance that there was an option to do it yourself. I just started seeing problems in my world and I didn't like them, and I was like, "I'm just going to go fix that problem," and then that turned into a business, and then I turned out to be an entrepreneur, so, to me, I honestly didn't know the difference.
Jordan Harbinger:
That automotive silver spoon...
John Roa:
That's exactly right. That's-
Jordan Harbinger:
... that stainless steel spoon.
John Roa:
That's it. In some ways, I feel so lucky to have come from that. It wasn't because somebody told me to go figure your own shit out or, because your dad's an entrepreneur, so you got to chase that shadow. It just occurred to me as I should solve problems that I see, and the way to do that was starting businesses.
Jordan Harbinger:
Tell me a little bit about where you grew up, because it's easy for people to go, "Oh, okay, so some suburbanite kid grew up and started a business, white privilege much," and there might be a little something to that for sure, but tell me a little bit about the area where you grew up.
John Roa:
You mentioned white privilege, and I've had both because I look white and I've had the privilege of looking white, but I'm actually not white. My father's 100% Latin-American. He grew up in Venezuela. He was learning English when we were as kids, and so I grew up in a mixed-race, mixed-language household and experienced some pretty wild stuff. I mean, there was a time where dad was accused by the police of kidnapping my sister because...
Jordan Harbinger:
No way. Wow.
John Roa:
... he is a dark-brown guy and she's a white blonde girl. Yeah, and a woman called the police on him at a grocery store because she thought my sister was being kidnapped, and so I've had what I consider the advantage of having dealt and observed different forms of adversity of growing up in a mixed-race household, but also looking white enough that it's never been a problem for me, so... and I think that that well-roundedness has served me well over the years.
Jordan Harbinger:
That's interesting. I would not have even guessed that, because you look like one of the guys selling shirts at Abercrombie or something like that, I mean, depending on the photograph, right? Yeah, I mean, I can definitely see why you ended up in a... pulling the chameleon card occasionally where necessary. That is certainly something, something else to have that experience as a kid of your dad getting maybe not arrested, but at least harassed, I would imagine, by the police and having to prove that his kids were his own. I'm thinking right now, if I'm out with my 10-month-old, how do I prove that he's mine? How do you do that? How do you prove that the kid is yours?
John Roa:
Right? Isn't that crazy? I guess, I'd have to ask them what, how the story ended because that's just more about the... how it started, but he was at a grocery store, and I think today we'd call her a Karen, but, this woman, this woman was like, "What are you doing?" I think my sister was like throwing a fit. She wanted something, so she was crying, and he was like, "We're leaving," and she's like, "What are you doing pulling that girl...
Jordan Harbinger:
This is my brat.
John Roa:
"... out of the store?"
Jordan Harbinger:
This is my spoiled brat.
John Roa:
He's like that's my daughter and we're... and she's like, "No, it's not," because... and she's like, " I'm calling the police."
Jordan Harbinger:
Wow. I mean, I guess better to call the police when... on a non-kidnapping than to not call the police on a kidnapping. I'm trying to look on the Karen's bright side of this Karen here.
John Roa:
On the Karen side, yeah, I guess, but, in today's age, yeah, I don't know, because...
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean not for that reason.
John Roa:
... back in the '80s, that might have... Back in the '80s, that might have-
Jordan Harbinger:
You'd have to make up a totally different reason about why you thought that person was being kidnapped.
John Roa:
That's right.
Jordan Harbinger:
I heard her say you're not my daddy.
John Roa:
Exactly.
Jordan Harbinger:
Did she say that? [crosstalk 00:08:04]?
John Roa:
Knowing my sister and how much of a brat she was when she was young, she probably would have said that.
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like kids say that. That though also is a great reason to tell your wife you can never go to the grocery store again. Sorry, I just can never.
John Roa:
That's right.
Jordan Harbinger:
You can never send me out on an errand. This is what happened.
John Roa:
What if a Karen's there? I can't go to the grocery store. Yeah.
Jordan Harbinger:
You can't avoid these wild Karens over here in Grosse Pointe, all right.
John Roa:
These are wild Karens, yes.
Jordan Harbinger:
You started your first business at 15, but what does that look like? I think about businesses that a lot of people start when they're younger, and, no shade, I mean, this is a kid starting a business, but they range, lemonade stand to software app, all the way up to how does a 15-year-old control a company with 14 offices? Who is that girl when we were growing up? I bet producer Jordan knows this. When we were growing up, who was... It was something Frank, Lisa Frank. Do you remember her? She sold stickers and trapper keepers. She's a multimillionaire. This girl was like 10.
John Roa:
It's ringing a dull bell, but I can't recall, no. Yeah, I just got a message from producer Jordan, and she's saying she's a big fan, heart, dolphins, glitter, polar bears, big fan, so yes.
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, so there you go with Lisa Frank. That's like a business where you go, "Holy crap, how does a teenage girl or a preteen girl at that part, at that age run a business like that?" and now I'm curious to dig into that story because there's no way anybody ran a multi... a business that involved multinational logistics and designed all the stickers. Where do you find the time? What kind of business are we talking about?
John Roa:
My first one, and this is back to what I was saying earlier, is that I became an entrepreneur by necessity, by seeing problems and wanting to fix them, so I started programming and building computers when I was 11 or 12 years old. My dad had brought home a shitty PC, and I was like, "That's the coolest thing ever." I started tearing it apart and just was fascinated by how the computer worked, and I broke the damn thing over and over and over again as you do when you're figuring out how computer works. You tear the fan off, and it's like your CPU is going to overheat, and you're like, "That's what the CPU is," and that's how I learned computers, and then I properly broke it. Then I finally broke the damn thing, and it wouldn't turn back on, and I couldn't fix it.
John Roa:
This is mid-90's, so we packed the thing up in the car, and it's like hundreds of pounds of shit. There's the tower and the keyboard and the massive monitor, because you don't know where the problem is, and you take it to the local computer repair store, and, long story short, the dude's like... He's got a hundred computers to fix. He's like, "We'll call you in three to four weeks," and I had a meltdown, and I was like, "What am I going to do for a month?" which is like, at that point, 1% of my life. I'm like, "What am I going to do for a month without my beloved computer?"
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, it's 30% or 50% of your summer or something like that at that age
John Roa:
That's exactly it.
Jordan Harbinger:
Look, I am not... Yeah.
John Roa:
At that age, I think I was 14 when that happened, and it's a significant... You can't even imagine it, and I was addicted to the damn thing, so I was like, "You know what? This isn't acceptable to me. I cannot accept that I have to wait in line to get this damn thing fixed," and I said to my mom, probably in tears, "Why can't someone just come to my house and fix it?" and then I started thinking like, "That, why isn't that a thing? Why does it have to sit in this stupid store for four weeks until it gets looked at?" and I was like, "I can fix most problems," because it's mostly, what, spyware or viruses or whatever or a little... something blows up inside, and so I created an onsite computer repair company, and I threw flyers all over Grosse Pointe and, basically, started walking into people's houses and fixing computers for 50 bucks an hour, and it became a-
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, that's funny.
John Roa:
It became a business. Two years later, we had employees and trucks and billboards and an office, and it was a business.
Jordan Harbinger:
That is amazing. Yeah, I remember when my friend's parents found out I could fix computers, it was like, "Hey, my parents want you to come over for dinner, and my dad wants to give you $20 to fix our computer." I'd be like, "Great," so I'd go to my friend's house, fix the computer. It'd be something simple, right? Like, "Oh, your sound card came loose when you moved it. [inaudible 00:12:25]. You're good," or like, "Your headphone cord came unplugged, and it's in the back, and you didn't see it, and it's caught on other wires, so you thought it was still plugged in." All the problems were like that easy.
John Roa:
Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Jordan Harbinger:
Oh, you need Windows re-installed. Here's five disks. I'm sitting here eating chips and salsa waiting for this.
John Roa:
That's exactly it, and that's what my first business was, and it became legit. There were some problems like that. There was also... My favorite story was this elderly woman. Remember the old PC tower with all the slats in them where you could pop in a CD drive? She goes, "My CD-ROM isn't working." I'm like, "Okay," so I go over there, and she goes, "And my computer's making a very strange noise." I'm like, "Okay."
Jordan Harbinger:
Oh, no.
John Roa:
I hit the power button, and it's like [crosstalk 00:13:07], and I'm like, "What on earth?" It's just the most bizarre sound I've ever heard inside of a computer. I hit the button for the CD-ROM, and the tray comes out, and she goes, "Oh, it seems to work fine." What is this epiphany? She had been taking CDs and putting them in the little crack between the two bays, and her entire tower was filled up with CDs that had... she pushed through the crack, and they were being hit by all the fans inside the computer, and that was the noise, and I'm just like, "Wow, that was remarkable," and that was one of my jobs back then.
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, opening up and removing CD, removing 700 AOL five hours free...
John Roa:
That's exactly what it was. It's exact what it was.
Jordan Harbinger:
... CD-ROMs. I'm just trying to get some freaking email. Who do I have to kill to get some aol.com email going over here? Yeah. All right. Okay, so you got the bug. I assume that company... I mean how did that end? Was that just too early or did you... Were you acquired or did you just go to college and forget about it?
John Roa:
It ended in my first harsh business lesson, which is why not to mix friends and business, and we'll leave the details for the book readers because that's how the book opens, but, yeah, it was a brutal, fucking lesson, and it taught me a lot very young.
Jordan Harbinger:
What prompted you to get back on the horse and start another business after the first failure? I mean, a lot of people, they have a failure like this especially when it comes to friends and family, and that's it for them. They get a job as a lawyer, like I did, and that's it. They just give up. They'd hop out.
John Roa:
I was ready to multiple times, and it's this insatiable draw to fix problems and to build stuff that kept sucking me back in. There were plenty of times I just thought to myself like, "I'm done. I'm never doing this again. Fuck being an entrepreneur. I'm just going to go and get a job," and, within usually days of making that proclamation, I'd be starting something. I probably am addicted to it in some ways, which probably answers your earlier question of why am I back to work after all this, but it's just... It's how my brain works. Even in my years after selling the company when I was literally "on vacation" and living abroad and supposedly doing nothing, I probably spun up 25 to 30 fully baked business ideas that are sitting on my computer, like full decks financial models, branding businesses in a box, and I would do that just on my free time because that's how my brain works, so, yeah, it's got to be some kind of addiction.
Jordan Harbinger:
I think so. I mean, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in my experience on The Jordan Harbinger Show that I talked to, where the level of intensity with everything tends to be high, so it's not like, "Oh, yeah, I should probably lose five or 10 pounds." It's like, "I'm going to run the Boston Marathon." It's like, "Okay. Hey, I need an at-home workout." "Cool. You can have a trainer come over." No, I'm going to become a boxer," and then I joined a boxing gym and then I've decided to train for a fight, so now I'm training for a fight, and then I got into MMA because the guy I fought was in martial arts. Now, I'm doing UF- and it's like, okay, the... Everybody just pushes it to 11, a lot of these guys, not every single entrepreneur. In fact, some of the CEOs of stable public companies are not like that, because that's the guy they bring in to not let the stock price go up and down like Bitcoin...
John Roa:
A hundred percent.
Jordan Harbinger:
... but the founders I know...
John Roa:
A huge difference.
Jordan Harbinger:
... are a lot like that.
John Roa:
Yeah, exactly, and the founder-to-executive transition is a tough one, and it's why it fails so often, and this is probably why we have so many problems in tech startups today. This is why the Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks exist because brilliant founders, great ideas, but then they're expected to then be able to manage tens or hundreds of thousands of people. I don't know where that expectation comes from. If you're a good entrepreneur, it does not make you a good manager, right?
Jordan Harbinger:
No.
John Roa:
In fact, it's probably the opposite...
Jordan Harbinger:
I would say so.
John Roa:
... because they're probably diametrically opposed, yet we encourage them to continue in that role, and that's how we get in these positions, and it's a huge problem.
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, you see a lot of people. Look, if you're thinking, oh, but Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook, the exception that proves the rule normally, a lot of people that start companies are some of the worst people when it comes to managing even their immediate team. A lot of times you're just, "Go, go, go, go, go," and you really do need that C-suite around you of somebody who's going to smooth it out with the person that you just screamed at and then get the other person, the resources for the bomb you dropped on them, some crazy project that you thought up on your drive to work that they now have to execute on, and they don't know what's going on, and then it's like all of these little details...
John Roa:
That's exactly it.
Jordan Harbinger:
... of, "Hey, I know you said we're going to do that," but we can't legally do that because labor laws, tax laws, permits, that kind of thing, so somebody else has to be around and not only sweep up after you, but also lay... Somebody has to build the runway if you're going to take a plane and either land it or take off from there in the first place.
John Roa:
A hundred percent, and that's where the... these iconic duos come from like the Wozniak and Jobs and everything else. That's why you have those pairings because, by all accounts, Jobs is a fucking asshole, but he's a luminary, and he needed somebody to run the business which, for a while, successfully was Wozniak, and I think that playing to your weaknesses is probably as important as playing to your strengths. To really know what you suck at and to augment that is one of the keys of entrepreneurship.
Jordan Harbinger:
What are you going to be discussing on this show then?
John Roa:
We're doing interviews, and so I'm going to have some amazing people on that are not necessarily like the A-list who just runs the podcast circuit. They're going to be people that you're going to know of in so far as that's like the former president of HBO or the head coach of the LA Rams or like people that you know, but you've probably never heard them speak in a format like this, and so the only thing I ask of these guests is honesty. Let's talk about life. Let's talk about the ups, the downs, the roller coasters, the lessons, the funny stories, the tragic stuff, and that's ultimately what I'm going to be facilitating is to get these people to really speak about their humanities and to turn that urge that we have to present a certain way off for an hour.
Jordan Harbinger:
What's the goal of the show? Are you trying to teach practical takeaways that the listener can use, or is it mostly like a distillation of wisdom from you and your guests?
John Roa:
Yeah, definitely the latter. This is not going to be a takeaway. There's not going to be literal advice. The thing is is I think there's a lot of that out there. Your show is a great example. You do this brilliantly, and that's why I love listening because it's so tangible, and what I think that... I've heard it with some feedback and also how I find myself yearning for certain things at times is more that distillation from people who've just been through a lot, and just to hear them tell their stories, and ultimately that's the... That's where the podcast idea came from.
John Roa:
I do this in my normal life. Sean McVay is a great example. We've talked about Sean, obviously, the youngest head coach in history in the NFL and a good buddy, and we used to just sit there and have a couple of glasses of whiskey and just talk life and talk about, yes, two guys who achieved an out level... an out-sized level of success early in our lives and careers, earlier than we probably should have, what came along with that, and I was like, man, if there could have just been a microphone right here, the wisdom, the insights that come out of that I think are brilliant, and that's ultimately what I'm trying to pull out for our listeners.
John Roa:
The reason I wanted to switch this up and have you on is you're the king. You are you one of the biggest and best podcasters in the game. I respect the hell out of what you're doing, and I'd love to talk about how you see podcasting going and what drew you to do this and any tips you have for me, man, because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Jordan Harbinger:
This whole thing is spawned and spurned on by the book, so, first of all, backing up the truck a little bit, why write a book in the first place?
John Roa:
It really came down to my experience after selling the company. I ran this tech company called ÄKTA for five years, and it was a true dichotomy. My public image was this know-it-all, I don't know, genius, young tech entrepreneur who's killing it and making money and doing TED Talks and appearing on magazine covers, and I looked like that guy, and the reality was I wasn't that guy. I was failing at many portions of my life. I wasn't handling the stress well. I suffered from very significant mental health issues along the way, severe depression, severe anxiety, panic attacks mostly due to all the risk and stress that I was enduring, and then I used every bad coping mechanism, substance abuse, a lot of self-destructive tendencies, and, ultimately, I almost didn't survive it. I ended up in the hospital. It was a very, very, very bad experience, one of the worst in my life.
John Roa:
When I came out of that, I said, "I have to fix this. I have to get out of this, this system that I'm in, and fix myself," and that's when we were able to luckily sell the company to Salesforce. This is five years ago, 2015, and I went through some medical recovery to get my mind and body back on track, and then I moved to Europe, and I'm like, "Fuck all this." I'm so done with everything, and I moved to Mykonos Island in Greece, built a house, and I was like, "I'm just going to sit here for a while until I... and enjoy life and just to not do what I was doing before."
John Roa:
It was in that experience, and this was a combination of being there with my best friend, a guy named [Hamza 00:23:08], and talking to him a lot and also meeting all these incredibly successful people while there. That's where I met McVay. I met all these people, CEOs and billionaires and whatever, and, any time you got people talking honestly, you realize that their stories a lot like mine, maybe not the details, maybe different stuff, but just as much of a roller coaster, just as many ups and downs, and I'm like, "Man, why don't we talk about that? Why are we so scared to ever admit that we're not superheroes?" and so I decided to write this book to do my part and to allow me to have that conversation, so I wrote this brutally raw, honest account of my life, and there's a lot. One person called it like the tech startup Wolf of Wall Street. In some ways, it does kind of read like that and... but it's all just what happened, and I wanted to use that as a jumping-off point to now talk about this stuff, to say, hey, I did it. I told my story, so now let's make this a conversation.
Jordan Harbinger:
What makes this different from other business books? If everyone shares... that you met, if everyone has this common experience, how is this book then going to be different from everything else that's sitting on the shelf?
John Roa:
Yeah. I mean, from my experience, and I try to read as much as possible, I've never heard an account from a business standpoint of somebody's life like this. There's lots of people who are rock stars or artists or whatever who tell these stories all the time, athletes, Andre Agassi and whoever else. That's out there, but in business, there seems to be this, I don't know, unspoken rule or something of the sort where we're not supposed to have this conversation. Don't admit you're fucked up. Don't admit you have problems. You're a CEO. You need to be perfect, act perfect and, if you have any problems, bottle that shit up. We don't want to hear it, and so I think that that's why there's not a lot of books like this out there or maybe any, and I hope... I'm hoping it starts to trend. I would love to see other people say, hey, I would love to explore my vulnerability and my humanity in that way, and I'd love to see people who don't normally communicate this honestly start to do it, and that's the point.
Jordan Harbinger:
Who would you say the book is for primarily?
John Roa:
It's interesting because a lot of people have read it by now. Obviously, we sent it to folks like yourself a while back and, since then, a lot of people have read it, and the most interesting, I guess, aspect of the feedback is how it hits everyone very differently. We did a blind reading in so far that we anonymized some of it. They couldn't Google me. They signed an NDA to make sure they wouldn't dig into anything. They just read it, and we sent it to all these very disparate people, and one woman was a Southern Baptist teacher or something like that, and, needless to say, my behavior wasn't very holy throughout the book, and I'm expecting that her feedback to come back and just be brutal and just be like, "This guy is a fucking dickhead," and she wrote-
Jordan Harbinger:
I don't think she would put it quite that way, but, yeah, some Southern Baptist's...
John Roa:
Not quite that way, but the equivalent, whatever the-
Jordan Harbinger:
... equivalent of this guy's a fucking dickhead, yeah.
John Roa:
Yeah, whatever the holy version of that would be. Instead, she wrote one of the most thoughtful emails I've probably ever read, and what she said is... She started with that she hopes that I thank God for surviving and I owe God a lot and everything else, but then she went on to say how she understands a lot more people in her life after reading it, that her brother was an entrepreneur, and she's always been at odds with him because he seemed to prioritize himself over his family or he risked too much, and she said, "This is the first time I've understood my brother because I now have a sense of why he might've made some of these decisions or how his brain works," and I was like, "Man, that's an unbelievable piece of feedback that I wouldn't have expected," so, if you had asked me just when I started writing the book, I would have said, "Hey, it's for people like us, entrepreneurs and self-starters." Now, I'm not really sure. I hope that a lot of different audiences can get a lot of different things out of the book. That's the goal.
Jordan Harbinger:
All right, so, of course, people know they can buy the book. It's available at online resellers, and I'm sure there'll be a link in the show notes and on your website, but tell us who's coming up in the show here? Now, that we've done a little bit of a brief intro, you've talked about your work, your past, who's coming up in the next episodes of the show?
John Roa:
Yeah, I'm super excited. It's been so fun to put this together, and the first episode, which will be a week after this one comes out, will be with Keyon Harrold, and Keyon is one of the coolest dudes I know. He's here in New York. Keyon is a trumpet player, a jazz trumpeter, who's risen to the top echelons of that world, which is you wonder how you can do that today, and that's one of the questions I'm going to ask him is how do you even become a jazz trumpeter at the top levels? He won a Grammy for the music that he supplied to Miles Ahead, which is the Miles Davis bio pic with Don Cheadle.
John Roa:
He's been super active in the Black Lives Matters movement over in Brooklyn. He's been out there playing his trumpet during the protests, and it's going to be a brilliant conversation with a guy who's just incredibly inspirational, and then the next few episodes are going to be folks... One of the guys is the former president of the Miniseries at HBO. For 25 years, he ran all the stuff that we know and love from HBO, and he's now left to work on some his own podcast and also some civic work that I think is brilliant, and, yeah, past that, we've got a bunch of just everyone from sports stars to celebrities to entrepreneurs and CEOs, politicians, artists. It's going to be a smattering of people, but I think the perspectives are going to be truly brilliant.
Jordan Harbinger:
By the way, what is the show called? I'll say I'll wrap with that, but I realize I don't actually know.
John Roa:
The John Roa Show.
Jordan Harbinger:
Oh, okay, good, nice, original title, not that I have any room to talk. Okay.
John Roa:
We were joking about that the other day that you and I are clearly creative motherfuckers when it comes to show titles.
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. Exactly. I'm always like, "Man," and, it's funny, when other people ask me what they should name their show, I come up with something like that instantly, and they're like, "Oh, that's so good," and then everyone's like, "I love it," and I'm like... They're like, "What's the name of your show?" I'm like, "It doesn't work going this way. It only works going that way."
John Roa:
No, I don't know, did you try to come up with names, because I did?
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah.
John Roa:
Oh, my God, we went through so many damn names...
Jordan Harbinger:
I went through so many.
John Roa:
... and nothing seemed-
Jordan Harbinger:
They all sounded corny as fuck.
John Roa:
Did you? Okay, let me just go back.
Jordan Harbinger:
I was like, "I'm not going to be like the live-your-best-life show or whatever the fuck. It's not happening.
John Roa:
That's exactly it. There were so many ideas that we had, and we spent weeks and weeks and weeks, and we had lists and everything else, and one of the themes that I'm going to cover a lot in the show is Impostor Syndrome, so I was like, "We'll call it The Imposters," and then I'm like, "That is the dumbest name I have ever heard for a show," because I'm going to have some guests on who's like, "I'm not a fucking imposter." What do you-
Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, they're like, "I founded the Oracle. What are you talking about? I'm not an impostor, dude."
John Roa:
Exactly. Exactly, so, yeah, trust me, it was a failed exercise, and that's why we ended up with The John Roa Show.
Jordan Harbinger:
That's coming up on The John Roa Show over here in the coming weeks, and, of course, once again, the book for sale online, and you shouldn't actually go out and get it. Depending on when you're listening to this, you probably should just order it and have it delivered.
John Roa:
You probably should, yeah. Who knows if there's even going to be bookstores when this was all said and done, which is super sad, but, either way, the book is called A Practical Way to Get Rich and Die Trying, and, yeah, I think it's on Amazon and all the cool booksellers right now, and we'd love for you to pre-order that. It comes out September 8th, which I'm so excited/mortified for.
Jordan Harbinger:
September 8th, 2020. What could go wrong? It's been a great year so far.
John Roa:
What could go wrong? Yeah, this year has been so easy and normal. It's going to hit with a splash, I'm sure.
Jordan Harbinger:
Yes, some kind of splash, like an asteroid splash, that's in November maybe. All right, John Roa, thank you very much for letting me interview you on your own show.
John Roa:
Jordan Harbinger, thank you for being on my show. You are the man, a huge inspiration to me, and I... You got to commit to me to come back on my show so I can interview you properly...
Jordan Harbinger:
Sure.
John Roa:
... about your life, and the question that I'm going to open with is why have you been kidnapped twice?
Jordan Harbinger:
The third time's the charm, yeah.
John Roa:
The third time probably is the charm, so that is going to be my opener, but, man, I really do appreciate it, and, honestly, people like me are here because of people like you, and you've led the way and shown us how to do this, and I truly do appreciate it. You've been a great friend.
Jordan Harbinger:
Thank you very much. My pleasure.
