Jeff Holden is Becoming King of the Pods

The longtime media exec wants you to lend him your ears

By Ed Goldman

Jeff Holden is the founder of Hear Me Now Studio, as well as its principal producer. The company creates several dozen of the estimated four million podcasts out there in cyber space—including his own, “Imperfect Heart,” and mine (named for and hyper-linked at the bottom of this column).

Holden has been in the broadcasting, and now podcasting, business for more than 40 years, beginning in Chicago, the birthplace he’s so proud of that his signature on emails is followed by, on separate lines:

Chicago Native
Northern Illinois University

“Dates sometimes figure prominently or ironically in my life,” he says over an early afternoon coffee break from the studio and client marketing appointments. For example, he started his latest two-fold venture, Multipoint Content Strategies and Hear Me Now Studio, on Valentine’s Day in 2013. “I  became engaged to Theresa”—his wife of 13 years—”on a May 1st. I also lost my job of 15 years on a May 1st. Does this tell us something?” 

Not at all, and he’s cognizant of that. He’s being lighthearted—which in a moment, I’ll explain why that in itself may be an ironic statement.

There were several years preceding and in-between Holden’s milestones. 

After moving from his beloved Windy City he worked in radio in Dallas then, in 1985, helped launch Sacramento’s first “smooth jazz” station. He next worked in Spanish-language radio, finally joining what’s now called iHeart Media in 1998. He had a variety of management and sales gigs there until that fateful May 1, 2012, when, despite his acknowledged record of excellence in sales—but as he says, “an unfortunate tendency to speak my mind if someone’s acting like an idiot”—he was let go as part of an administrative pogrom. (For younger reader: I didn’t just misspell “program.”)

Never one to sit idly and watch his life pass by, Holden next found himself working as the general manager of the springtime Sacramento Mountain Lions, a decent team in the late United Football League. Due to what it called “frequent operational interruptions, stemming from systemic financial shortfalls,” the league left the field on October 20, 2012. 

When Valentine’s Day rolled around four months later, Holden was back in the game—but this time, his own game, building a media company from the ground up. Since then, the podcast side of his business has grown so rapidly that he’s had to walk away from other, lucrative ventures. “This is the one,” he tells me a few weeks after that initial coffee, as we sit in his nifty studio in the city of Citrus Heights and he preps me before we record several of my podcasts in about an hour. I reflect that it’s a good thing I’d left my stammer at home.

If I told you that Holden is probably a Type A personality, I’d have to add that the criteria on which that categorization is based—something dreamt up by cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman nearly 70 years ago—can be iffy.

In most of our minds, a Type A is, first, an ambitious, self-motivated worker who, second, doesn’t put much store in relationships. The former part of that captures Holden; the second part works only if he has an evil twin somewhere.

He and his wife Theresa have four grown children between them, as well as twin granddaughters. Theresa—known by everyone in her orbit as T—works in development for the president of Sacramento State University. The couple lives in the town of Fair Oaks, one of the Sacramento region’s leafier suburbs.

We now get to Holden’s lightheartedness, mentioned earlier. A ferocious cyclist who doesn’t appear to have a gram of fat on his taut, sinewy frame, he was training to compete two years ago in a 100-mile biking marathon dubbed, without apparent irony, the Death Ride. The Markleeville fire shuttered the ride and days later, he suffered a heart attack.  Smiling, he says he didn’t want to be the poster child for the event posthumously. Stunned that this could happen to him—he survived, of course, or this would have been a much shorter column—he discovered, eventually, that he had a congenital heart condition known as a “myocardial bridge.”

For much of modern medicine, that was apparently a bridge too far. “Some of the doctors who examined me had never even heard of the condition,” he says. “And these were heart doctors, all well-meaning but in the dark about the condition.”

Holden did much of his own research and underwent controversial surgery a year ago, at the age of 65. This past July, “to prove something to myself and everyone with this condition,” he again undertook the Death Ride, which this time was conducted in 100+-degree heat. He did complete it, by the way. 

This explains the name of his podcast, “Imperfect Heart,” on which he gathers and interviews doctors and fellow survivors of this not-as-rare-as-suspected medical condition. He’s also planning a book to come out late this year or early 2024 called “My Imperfect Heart,” which he hopes will provide heart patients and people who know heart patients—”So I guess I mean everybody,” he says with a smile—with anecdotes, cautionary words and, most important of all, “hard data. People deserve that, and the medical profession is just starting to step up to acknowledge it.”

In the meantime, he focuses on producing podcasts for businesspeople, sports and entertainment figures and at least one thrice-weekly columnist. “Podcasts are appointment- and on-demand listening that’s starting to eclipse traditional radio listening,” he says.

Asked who should consider working with him to create their own podcast, Holden is reliably realistic and non-spin. “You should do one if you have something to say and feel that others would like to hear it,” he says. “You shouldn’t go into it thinking you’re going to be the next YouTube star or that sponsors will come after you. Do it as another tool for your business marketing with a strategic application and reason.”

He cites as an example the podcast “Around the Barrel,” by Jack Daniel’s— the liquor company, not the distiller who founded it (Jasper Newton Daniel, who died in 1911). “There’s an example of a podcast with a purpose: to sell whiskey,” Holden says. “Yours may be to build your image with other businesses or clients. And if you think, ‘Why not just do a blog,’ the answer is, ‘You should do both.'”

In this world of crisscross-marketing, it’s nice to know that Jeff Holden is on hand to help you along. In fact, based on his renewed hold on life, it’s nice to know he’s still very much in this world.