Jordan Harbinger: From Wall Street Lawyer To Successful Podcaster, Junior Hacker To FBI Ally & Escaping A Kidnapping

What an engaging and compelling guest Marcus brings to the table in this week’s Team Never Quit Podcast. Jordan Harbinger, one of the most successful podcasters in the world, reveals his crafty (and illegal) but brilliant, stealthy methods for tapping into land line telephone conversations, and circumventing credit card machines in his early teenage years. While working out of the country, he details the experience of being kidnapped twice.
His inquisitive mind was fascinated by the internet at an early age, and later became a Wall Street lawyer, followed by launching The Jordan Harbinger Show, where he deconstructs the playbooks of the most successful people on earth and shares their strategies.
These days, Jordan’s biggest motivation is to help people succeed by teaching them to think better.
In this episode you will hear:
• When I was a kid, I wasn’t exactly inspirational to anyone. (4:13)
• I didn’t have any money and listening to phone conversations and wiretapping got really interesting. I did that with cell phones, line pairs, and the green boxes on the side of the road. (7:13)
• Listening to adults talk when they don’t know kids are around is completely different experience. (7:33)
• [As a kid] you learn that adults have feelings, and problems just like you do. (10:25)
• Are all adults just children that are winging it? Kind of – in a lot of ways. (12:25)
• I learned to convince people to do things that I probably shouldn’t have convinced them to do. (15:55)
• One of the things that I did that I got caught for was to go into a cell phone store’s dumpster at night and take the duplicate receipts from a carbon printer and use that information to program phones. (21:04)
• I figured out how the credit card payment system worked at a pizza chain and you could use a number that would work in their machine and the machine didn’t reconcile the transactions until Friday’s. (22:12)
• If there was a girl that I liked I would figure out what she liked by hacking into her computer. (27:46)
• The coolest thing that I ever did was to help the FBI catch sexual predators. (36:09)
• [In Mexico City] “Am I getting kidnapped right now?” “No, that can’t be it.” “Then I thought why can’t that be it?” I couldn’t open the door. (44:55)
• Later when I lived in Panama, the same thing would happen, and dudes would get in the cab and say you’re going to the bank to take out as much money as you can, or we’re gonna stab you, or shoot you. (54:10)
• Two of the most addicting and destructive things in the world are heroin and a steady paycheck. (57:43)
• Now I’ve got kids and the nightmares are outsourced. (62:27)
• I try to teach people how to think better. (63:17)