The View from the Office.

I met up with Jack Forehand, co-host of the Excess Returns podcast, at the Bryant Park cafe. I had the quinoa salad. Jack had a grilled chicken and Swiss sandwich. 

We were introduced by Sunpointe Financial managing director and podcaster Matt Zeigler, who spent two years telling us we needed to meet. Jack is the co-founder of SignalBridge Wealth and co-author of The Guru Investor.

Jack started Excess Returns more than six years ago with Justin Carbonneau. Matt joined a few years later. The group now runs about a dozen shows and is building a network modeled on Colossus, the firm behind Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcasts.

One example is Intangible Economy, a new show hosted by money manager Kai Wu about the shift toward intangible assets in investing and technology. The first guest was Michael Mauboussin. The second was Edward Chancellor.

One episode put Jack on my radar: an interview with Cliff Asness. To land the interview, he said the team turned to a novel approach. They suggested an interview that would be focused on Cliff’s older papers and blog posts, effectively a Greatest Hits from his research. 

Jack has great insights about building an audience. Much of the growth to 70,000 subscribers came from figuring out titles and thumbnails. Jack said a title alone can make a tenfold difference in views. He feeds transcripts through five language models with the same prompt, generating 125 candidate titles, then filters them on patterns that worked.

Jack said the goal is to convert the viewer of the last episode into the viewer of your next one. That makes YouTube completely different from audio, where subscribers see new episodes but there is no algorithm pushing growth.

In finance, bearish content does the best. Jack said the pull comes from human negativity bias and YouTube’s recommendation engine. The all-time top videos on many finance channels are old episodes predicting an apocalypse. Excess Returns refuses to play that game, in part because big guests don’t want to appear under thumbnails calling a crash.

Platforms punish you for sending people away. Jack said cross-posting is fine, but cross-linking gets crushed. The network stopped linking between platforms and now posts natively on each one, growing YouTube, Spotify, Twitter and Substack independently.

Jack says you have to continually experiment. For a time, Excess Returns stopped posting on YouTube Shorts after concluding it dragged down the watch-through rate on full episodes. More recently, they have started posting on YouTube Shorts again. 

Landing big guests comes down to relationships. Jack said major names want to be treated well and need confidence the final product won’t embarrass them. 

You can connect with Jack via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.