Jack is the host of Darknet Diaries.
And Jack, first of all, tell us who you are.
What's your background and what was your life
before podcasting?
Yeah, I worked for about 10 years in a very technical role
trying to detect hackers in the network
and doing InfoSec type stuff.
And while I was there doing that, I'd go to conferences
and I would just hear so many people tell stories
about this time hackers attacked their network
or even stories from hackers
about the time they did something.
And I thought, you know what, we need to start capturing
some of this stuff and putting it in story format.
I didn't think I could do it justice,
so I really didn't do much about it.
I kind of told some other podcasters about it,
but there just wasn't any podcast
that was just telling hacker stories.
So I just eventually said, you know what,
I might try it myself and I started looking into it.
And I kind of took the kind of the NPR sound
where it's this American life and stuff.
I wanted to add music behind it and interviews and stuff
and play it like that.
So I had to do a lot of research on how NPR did it.
And eventually I did enough research,
probably about four months looking into
how to do storytelling.
And I made my first episode and showed it to my friends
and family and they said, go for it, this is great.
We can't wait to hear the episode two.
And it just kept going from there.
So when did you launch your first episode?
About October of 2017 last year.
Okay, so you've been doing them for a year now.
Do you do them every week?
No, every two weeks.
And for a little while I was doing it once a month.
And the thing is is that I put so much effort
into every episode that I barely can keep up
with every two weeks.
You know, I'm working on this actually full time now.
And it just takes the whole two weeks
to get one episode out.
I noticed that there's a lot of detail in your podcast.
So how are you doing the research?
Is it all searching the web?
So I tap on a lot of shoulders on Twitter
and at conferences and say, hey,
I think I recognize you from a story or something.
Do you have any sort of story to share publicly?
So I'll ask a lot of people.
And then if I can't get someone to agree to come on,
then I'll start finding some stories
that have already been covered.
And all the stories I've done so far
have all just been stories that have already been covered
or somebody telling me their own private story.
But I'm starting to get into some investigative journalism
stuff where I'm gonna research something
that I don't think anybody's researched before
and try to come up with answers to some problems.
So after your friends and your family,
the first episode, you start pushing it out,
how did you promote it?
So for about seven years before that,
I also kept a blog.
And that blog actually had some pretty good traction.
I don't know what I'm getting,
like 30,000 visitors a month to the blog.
And I think that was a big help, right?
Writing and writing and writing and writing and writing,
like hundreds of articles for that blog
to try to explain really technical concepts
as simply as I can was just phenomenal for me to do this.
So the blog was just a huge help.
And so I put links to my podcast on the blog.
And so I get about seven clicks a day
from my blog to my podcast.
So seven new people interested in the show a day
is pretty good.
And the thing about promoting something
is you don't wanna use big brushstrokes.
You kinda wanna do little things and very gradually go up.
And it's just, it's not because you have to,
or it's just because you have to,
it's not because you don't want to.
So getting one new subscriber a day,
five new subscribers a day is a really good goal
at the beginning to just, it's doable.
You think about, well, I need to put a billboard
in an airport or something.
No, that's not doable.
You're not gonna be able to get to that point right away.
So how could I get one new subscriber today
or five new subscribers today?
And I was doing things like reaching out to Twitter
because I had a blog following already.
So I had about 5,000 Twitter followers
and that was a massive, massive way to have a good launch.
It's just to have an existing Twitter audience.
And a lot of people try to grow their Twitter
after they make a podcast,
but really a lot of the more successful podcasters out there
already had a Twitter following before they launched.
Right, now the blog that you write,
you said you had 30,000 followers or readers.
What kind of information are they looking for?
That's just kind of like technical questions,
stuff I would find out,
some stuff I would be doing at work.
So kind of lessons learned.
I was doing really technical stuff with firewalls
and intrusion prevention systems and stuff.
So I'd hit some problems with that.
Google question, the problem, nobody would have the answer.
And so I'd have to figure it out on my own.
That's perfect stuff to blog about.
Or just notes that I wanted to keep real handy
instead of looking through tons of white papers
and stuff to try to find answers to certain things.
Just figure it out once and then blog about it.
And so it's really simple to read for my record.
So a lot of people just Google a question,
they get to my blog, get the answer and get out.
It's not something where you're learning about,
I don't know, it's not like a stream of thought
or consciousness out of my mind.
It's all very technical questions.
So Jack, this may sound like a dumb question
and tell me if it is,
but is there really a dark side of the internet
that there's a lot of people surfing on?
Yeah, and I think what I wanted to capture on my show
is just kind of all that stuff that is kind of hidden.
The stuff that's just below the surface.
Not really on the dark net per se,
but just like stuff that's going on
that we wouldn't ever see because it's secret,
it's hidden, it's off our radar
on just normal people looking at the internet.
So that could include hacking,
it could include stuff going on in the dark net.
And yeah, there's all kinds of chat rooms and forums
and stuff where people figure, people get together
and they plan certain, I don't know, takedowns or attacks
or theft of things.
And yeah, it's kind of like a,
often where a lot of this stems from
is teenagers playing video games late into the night,
learn how to cheat in the game,
and then they say, well, what could I do in the real world?
How could I cheat the real world?
And then they figure out a hack on a certain website
or something to do something else.
And the thing is that these teenagers,
they have, they stay up late at night
to get really into whatever they're doing.
I mean, I was there too, right?
I'd stay up all night, even in college,
working on some video game or something,
and then you just get drawn into the next thing,
like programming or something.
And so they just have all this time and energy
and motivation to just do something crazy.
And so they end up learning how to hack.
And a lot of stuff just comes from that kind of space.
So is it really easy to,
or how easy is it to hack into a bank
or hack into a government database?
It sounds like we're reading about that all the time.
Yeah.
If you try to go to the front gates
and try to hack in through the front door kind of thing,
it's really hard.
You're not gonna get anywhere.
The easy thing is that you can send a phishing email
to somebody who works there
and they can click it and they can get infected.
And now you have control over somebody,
maybe a teller's computer or something right in the bank.
And so the humans are usually the biggest weakness still.
And there's not a good solution to keeping them,
securing that kind of thing,
because everyone has some sort of excitement,
like, oh, there's money waiting for me.
What's this email?
Or this is the spreadsheet for all the payroll
for the whole company?
Why did somebody accidentally send this to me?
And so they have this curiosity, they have this ego,
they wanna figure it out.
And they'll click on it and open it
and it says, do you wanna install these macros
and enable this JavaScript?
And you're like, yeah, I wanna see this.
Whatever's in this email, I wanna see it.
So people get hacked a lot that way.
So you're a year into the podcast now.
First of all, when you first started, and even now,
what equipment are you using and who's hosting it?
Tell us the kind of nuts and bolts
of how you got started there with the equipment
and the hosting and all that.
Yeah, great question.
I'm glad you asked me specifically
because I have a lot to say about this.
I started with just a USB mic that I already had,
which was the Blue Snowball.
And I wanted to start without any extra cost.
And I started with the Blue Snowball
and I started hosting with Amazon free tier
for like a year or something like that,
saying, okay, no extra cost.
And I was using Audacity to do.
So it's literally zero cost.
And I think that's the best way
to do anything for a hobby, right?
It's just bring together the equipment that you have
and see what you can make with your own stuff.
I hate having this limitless capability
because then you end up realizing your creativity
is really the thing that's, or your motivation
or your drive is really what's the limiting factor here.
And it's not really the equipment.
And so taking a really limited pieces of equipment
and seeing how far you can go with that
is always a big goal for me.
So I used just this equipment that I had for a long time,
the free stuff until that didn't work.
And in a few months, the AWS free tier was up.
I had used all the space that I did.
And so I moved to Libsyn, which is a great hosting provider.
But at the same time, I thought, okay,
I'm five episodes into this.
People are starting to like it.
I'm gonna upgrade my microphone.
So I got the Shure SM58,
which is probably an $80 microphone is what I paid for it.
Really rugged.
It had a lot of great sound quality to it.
I like the intimacy and the closeness
that you get out of that sound from that mic.
And so I still bought that used from eBay.
In fact, it's dented.
It's very worn,
but it was perfectly sounding mic.
So it's a really rugged mic.
And I knew even if it was dented, it'd be fine.
And I think all the stuff I bought was always used.
And then, that goes for another six or eight months.
And I kick up like a Patreon
and some fans start supporting the show.
And what they want is a better quality show.
And so I used the money from Patreon
to just recently buy the Shure SM7B,
which has been my dream mic since the beginning.
And listener supported kind of thing is the approach
I recommend a lot of people do.
Use what you already have or get very cheap or borrow.
In fact, I did borrow mics for a long time as well
before actually buying my own.
Because you don't wanna spend $500, $1,000 on something,
and then just three, five, seven episodes later you quit.
And now you've got all this equipment
that you're never gonna use again.
So yeah, take it the slow, cheap way
and make your audience pay for your equipment.
Now, if people go on your website, they'll see you,
it's kind of an eerie picture.
I'm not sure if that's a picture of you
or a drawing or a logo, but tell us what that is.
Because it fits, exactly fits right into your content.
Yeah, I got on Fiverr and I had somebody draw me
a version of a photo that was of me.
And I use that as my avatar everywhere.
And I kind of wanted a little bit stylized version of me.
And not so much an exact photo,
and a wet photo to use and all that.
But a little cartoon image is what it is.
And I just really like the style of it
and I've been using that everywhere.
Okay, you said Fiverr?
Yeah, Fiverr is a place where you can outsource
all kinds of things.
You can get podcast editors there,
you can get graphic designers there, all kinds of stuff.
And how is that spelled?
I've never even heard of that before.
I know I should.
Sure, it's F-I-V-E-R-R dot com.
Gotcha.
Now, when I was listening, I also noticed you had Casper
as one of your sponsors.
So obviously the show is doing great.
Just recently I joined Megaphone
and turned on the Megaphone Targeted Marketing Place.
And this allows me to put in ads that are not made by me,
but are dynamically inserted by Megaphone.
So if you're looking for a new bed,
you might get the Casper ad.
If you live in Seattle, you might get a coffee ad.
It's all based on where you are in the world
and maybe what your previous online shopping habits have been.
It's really fascinating the way
that they do dynamic ad insertion.
But yeah, the answer is I'm getting currently
about 40,000 downloads per episode.
And that is just now making me say,
okay, I better start monetizing this.
So I am currently looking for ads, deals, and sponsors.
Cool, so 40,000 is an excellent number.
It doesn't sound like you're gonna have a problem
getting sponsors for that.
What number of sponsors do you wanna limit it to?
Because that's always the dilemma.
You don't wanna have too much clutter in there
because obviously people are there to hear you.
Yeah, I had to shop around for quite a while
to find somebody willing to agree
to the number of sponsors that I wanted in.
And that's only two ads per episode.
And some of the bigger networks,
I actually got approached by numerous big networks
and they said, no, we won't do it for less than three
or four ads per episode.
And I'm like, that's just too many.
I don't wanna even, I'm okay with two
and I don't wanna, that's my limit.
I don't wanna go over that.
So it took me a while to find somebody
who would agree to that.
Well, can you tell us who those networks were?
No.
I noticed you have, I mean, you're doing great, man.
You have 421 people on the Patreon account
and 1200 bucks, that's a killer month right there.
Yeah, yeah, it's really looking good on Patreon.
I would like to go 100% no ads,
but I did quit my job to do this full time.
So I need something now and kind of in a dip.
I'm running out of cash,
so I need something to just get me through it.
Come on, people, he's running out of cash now.
Let's go, let's go.
This is great stuff here.
So I think as I get through that,
I'll be able to pull back the ads again
and I got other plans in the works.
I may write a book, I may make an online video course
and I think that's where the big money is in podcasting
is to use your existing influencer status
or the size of your audience
to sell them on the next thing you're making.
And if you sell something else to them
and they're already big fans of yours,
chances are they're gonna buy your next thing.
Right, now the last episode that you did was about the IRS
and you had snippets of the IRS director
talking about the money.
I mean, the content of the clips wasn't as important as,
I'm wondering, do you have to get permission for those?
Well, that was a Senate hearing
and Senate hearings are public domain,
so I did not have to get permission to use those.
I do use a lot of music in my show,
but I did pay a licensing fee that lets me use music.
I use a place called Epidemic Sounds.
Let me double check that.
Yes, Epidemic Sounds and they gave me a one year license
to use as many songs as I wanted in my podcast.
And there are a lot of free places to get music online.
What you're looking for is Creative Commons free music.
Now there, I'll just stop there.
What did that cost you, you remember?
I found like a big sale on it,
so I'm gonna say probably around 300 or $400 a year.
Okay, gotcha.
So now that you're doing this so often
and you quit your job, how are you gonna make it work?
What's your next step?
What's your plan to make a full time good living at it?
Yeah, so the ads I think are gonna start bringing in.
So here's the thing with Megaphone.
It's a hosting provider.
I moved from Libsyn.
I really love Libsyn.
I highly recommend Libsyn for everyone.
But what Megaphone lets me do is dynamically insert ads
which would allow me to monetize the whole back catalog.
So even though I'm getting 40,000 listeners per episode,
I get about 200,000 downloads a month.
So if I can monetize all those past episodes,
all that 200,000, I'm really looking at 200,000 downloads
a month of monetizing.
And that's what's great right now
is to be able to go back into all those episodes
because when people find the show,
they often binge listen to at least seven episodes
before falling off.
So getting them, the new listeners to get through,
I mean, the show's growing.
And we can get into this if you want,
but I do a lot of marketing of the show.
And I've listened to a ton of podcasts about marketing
and read a lot of books on marketing.
And so I think that in 2019, my show's gonna double in size.
Nice.
And having that back catalog monetized
is really gonna be helpful.
So what are one or two of your favorite marketing podcasts,
or yeah, podcasts, just in case other people out there
wanna log on and listen to them?
Wow.
One or two favorites.
It's hard to choose.
I have, I pull a little bit about from everybody here.
So Gary Vaynerchuk, I think,
has been a big influence of mine
to just kind of get off my butt and start doing something.
He can be a little rough around the edges
because he'll yell at you and call you names
and wonder why you haven't done anything.
Let me see here.
The Smart Passive Income one with Pat Flynn
has always been a favorite of mine.
The Tim Ferriss Show has really given me a lot of ideas.
And then there's littler ones like Everyone Hates Marketers,
which is by a French guy.
That one has a lot of really great ideas.
Online Marketing Made Easy by Amy Porterfield is great.
And yeah, there's a lot of them out there.
Excellent.
So anything else that you wanna add,
anything else that you want people to know
about how you threw in the towel on your day job
and you decided to just jump in with both feet
and become a podcaster?
Yeah, that's a great question.
That was kind of a scary leap,
but at the same time I was burnt out at work,
so I needed something new.
The thing that I think really made me realize,
I've got something here, is the amount of fan mail I got.
There was just so many emails
and so many people messaging me on Twitter
and Instagram and Facebook saying,
man, this show is unbelievable.
I had to sit my whole family down
and have them listen to this one episode
because they needed to understand this.
There's hacking stories that your family
doesn't get to hear very often
because you maybe as a techie didn't share it with them
or something and I explain it in a simple way
that it's even reachable by a bigger audience.
And so I hear people telling me
that their nine-year-old kid listens
and even their grandma listens
and I'm just like, I'm hitting something here.
I've got something that if these people love it so much
that they're willing to take the time out of their day
to explain in like six paragraphs
how my show has changed their life
or influenced them in some way.
Some people are telling me they changed their career,
then I know I've got something here.
I just need to set it on fire
and this thing could be my career.
And so that's what I kind of set up before leaping into it.
I was podcasting for probably six months
before quitting my job.
Now, do you ever have guests on
or is it mostly you doing the show with the research
and the sound bites and the music?
Yeah, I do have a lot of guests on.
Some of them are ex-hackers
where maybe they've even been to prison and come back
and trying to redeem themselves
but still have a good story to tell.
And others are FBI agents that I've interviewed,
anyone that's been involved
with some sort of hacking incident.
And trying to find those guests is very difficult.
Like I was saying earlier, I tap a lot of shoulders
and I just get a lot of no answer
or just no, can't talk about it.
Because I hear about something in the news
and I'm like, hey, this person just did this.
Here they are on Twitter.
Let's see if they wanna tell their story
and they don't wanna talk about it.
And so I do spend a lot of time trying to get people to talk.
And then one of the things I'm not so good at
is organizing time and calendars
and setting this kind of schedule up.
But I go through a ton of people.
And in fact, sometimes I get someone on my show
and they're just kind of a dud.
It didn't work out.
Their story isn't as exciting as I thought
and it just doesn't go.
And that's kind of another thing you gotta do
is kind of filter your show
to be at the quality you really want it to be.
And if something, you gotta guess all set up
and it just doesn't turn out right,
just gotta let it go and filter it out.
How much time editing are you putting into each show?
I'd say about 60 hours.
No kidding. So 60 hours I think it takes
to make each episode.
That's not just editing.
So I have to write.
I write every word that I say on the show.
And so there's a lot of writing and a lot of research.
And then the interview and then cutting up the interview.
There's a lot of cutting it up the interview.
I don't just take it and post it.
I take a little bit from the end of the interview
and put it here.
I take a little bit from the middle and I put it there.
And I talk all around it and this kind of stuff.
And then there's a lot of music to be added as well.
So it's just a ton of work to be put into it.
And the next question I had was
advice that you have for any podcasters out there
that are thinking, I know you're not gonna say
quit your day job tomorrow,
but what advice do you have for people
that are interested in eventually
making a living out of it?
Yeah, I think there's three biggest challenges
that you should be familiar with as a podcaster.
And the first one is creating a great show.
Mediocre shows and good shows don't spread.
Nobody's like, oh, I've heard this really mediocre show.
I wanna tell you about it.
And that never happens.
People only say, hey, I listened to this amazing episode
of this one podcast, you have to hear it.
And that's how your stuff spreads.
And so getting such a high quality show
is like the biggest challenge you're gonna first face.
And you can get over that by pumping out a lot of content
and just doing it and doing it and practicing.
And that might take years
before you finally get to a point where it's good.
And pretty much a lot of the big time podcasters,
they seem like overnight successes,
but there's probably five or 10 years of hard work
that went into that before they got to that point.
Maybe they were already on the radio
or doing some other podcast
or standup comics in nightclubs
or something that already got them to the point
where they feel good at what they're doing.
And they're not just grabbing their phone,
hitting record and saying, let's just talk about my day.
Those low effort shows
are gonna have a really hard time picking up.
So you gotta put a lot of focus on making great show.
And the second biggest problem you're gonna hit
is marketing the show.
And a lot of people who finally make a great show,
they don't know how to market it.
And the thing is,
is that there's no secret about marketing a podcast.
It's the same as marketing anything.
You market a blog, you market a product,
you market your favorite song, whatever.
It's all the same.
Get on social media because that's where everyone is.
Billions of people are there looking at their phones
instead of looking at the road
while they're driving down the street,
they're looking at their phones.
So get in front of them wherever they are.
Get in those conversations that's in your niche
and just be part of whatever world your audience is in.
Be there with them and you're gonna get people
picking up on what you're putting down.
And then the last challenge that you're gonna face
is sustaining it.
A lot of people quit after five episodes,
seven episodes, 10.
And as you get going,
you're going to maybe need some money to keep it going
and motivation and stuff.
And so figuring out how to make a high quality show
without burning yourself out too fast
or pumping out so many episodes,
you wanna pump out as many episodes as you can
that doesn't burn yourself out as well.
So I cut back to once a month
because I was feeling burnt out by podcasting.
Even though I even quit my job,
I could still only put out one a month,
which is crazy to think.
I've quit my job, I'm doing this full time,
but I'm still only doing once a month.
And if you look at like,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History,
he only puts one out every few months.
And so, but the thing is,
is when he does it,
he brings such high quality to every single episode.
And so he does it in a way that's not burning himself out.
If he wakes up one day, he doesn't wanna podcast,
he doesn't have to because he's not on a schedule, right?
So you set yourself goals
that you're continually making things
because that's how you're gonna make better,
but you don't wanna overextend yourself so you burn out.
And the other part of sustaining yourself
is making money off of it.
And that's kind of a skill all on its own.
In fact, I don't even wanna get into that
because I'm overworked already.
So that's why I hired an agency
who's I'm paying 30% of all my podcast income to them
to help me find the sponsors
and get all the monetization of it.
Wow.
Well, Jack, we're out of time.
You are awesome, man.
Very motivational.
And I'm sure everybody that listens to this
will agree with that.
How can people listen to your show,
reach you, follow you, lay it all out there
so people can get in contact with you and follow you?
Yeah, I love helping people out.
So you can reach out to me on Twitter.
I'm Jack Reciter.
And you can listen to my show, Darknet Diaries.
But I also blog about a lot of things
podcasters can get tips on and stuff.
And my blog, this is a new blog I started making.
It's called Lime Link.
And the URL is lime.link.
That's as simple as that.
Gotcha.
Well, thanks a lot so much for coming on, Jack.
We really appreciate it.
Good luck.
And I hope to have you on again.
And were you telling us you're making
tens of thousands of dollars per episode?
All right, good luck.
I hope you make a ruckus.