469: The Secret Art Of Instantly Connecting With ANYONE With Andrew Warner

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have my friend Andrew Warner on the show, and Andrew is the founder and host of Mixergy, which is one of the OG interview-based podcasts in the world. And during the pandemic, he released a book called Stop Asking Questions, How to Lead High Impact Interviews, which I read cover to cover. And I wanted to bring Andrew on the show today to talk about people skills.

00:28
because I know that my businesses didn’t start taking off until I started building relationships with other business owners and Andrew is a master of it. So enjoy this episode. But before we begin, I want to thank Jeff Oxford of 180 Marketing for sponsoring this episode. 180Marketing.com is an agency that specializes in helping e-commerce stores boost their SEO traffic. And in the past, I used Jeff and his firm managed to grow my search traffic by 4x in just six months. In fact, 180 Marketing

00:57
is one of the few SEO agencies that I trust 100%. For more information, go to 180marketing.com or just email Jeff at 180marketing.com. I also want to thank Sellerboard for sponsoring this episode. Sellerboard is profit analysis software that helps you figure out exactly how much profit you are making selling on Amazon. Now, if you’re an Amazon seller, you’re probably aware that there are many hidden fees in selling on the platform and Sellerboard organizes all that information for you in a clear and concise fashion.

01:25
Now personally, I recommend Sellerboard because they’re among the least expensive software that I know of that does this, which is one of the main reasons why I like them. For more information, go to mywifecouterjob.com slash sellerboard and try them free for 30 days. It’s literally a no brainer. Once again, that’s mywifecouterjob.com slash S-C-L-L-E-R-B-O-A-R-D. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I run with my partner, Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

01:53
The Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:16
Welcome to the My Wife Clutterjob podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Andrew Warner back on the show. Andrew is largely considered to be one of the best interviewers on the planet. His show Mixergy is one of the OG interview-based podcasts and is a place where successful people teach ambitious upstarts. The guy has done over 2,000 interviews on Mixergy, including Barbara Cochran, Gary Vee, Paul Graham, countless others, which is more than 5X the number of people interviewed than I’ve personally interviewed.

02:45
And he has this magical way of getting people to open up about themselves and spill the beans, so to speak. So in late 2021, he released a book called Stop Asking Questions, How to Lead High Impact Interviews and Learn Anything from Anyone. And I just finished reading it and it was a fantastic read. Even if you aren’t interested in starting an interview-based show, I think the skills that we’re gonna learn from Andrew in this episode apply to all aspects of life, including making friendships deeper.

03:12
Getting to know someone better how to approach one of your heroes pretty much everything. Thanks for having me on Steve. Yeah, so it’s it’s been a while since we last spoke and You’ve been running mixer G for a very long time I think the last time we hung out was at the many chat conference Yeah in Austin was it in Austin you were really in the chatbots back then I think you created a company and then you later sold it right? Yes. Yeah, what are you into right now? Because what I found with you

03:42
is what you’re into tends to be like the next big thing. Yes. I started running out of ideas for a while. Chatbots were fascinating and I got obsessed with those. Before that, was just personal development, how to deal with the way that I was thinking. I got obsessed with that. I did an in-person meditation event. Tim Ferriss came and spoke and participated in it so many others.

04:10
And then I ran out of ideas and I came to Austin and I took a bunch of time off and the Airbnb we were in as we were looking for a house to live in had a guitar. And so I tried playing the guitar and I’m still trying. I got a chess teacher and I learned how to improve my chess game. And then I bought some property here in Austin and I learned how to do stuff with my hands, which was brand new. And then.

04:40
An old friend, Ben Ha, who I’d interviewed about how he created a thousand meme sites years ago, he asked me, do you know someone who could interview me? I’ve got this new company that builds DAOs and I need a way to explain to people what these decentralized autonomous organizations are. And I said to him, if they need to know how to interview, yes. If they need to know DAOs, yes. But if they need both, I don’t know anyone.

05:08
but if you can wait till I’m done with my time off, I’ll do it. I went away, I completely disconnected. And then I came back and I did a set of interviews with him on these DAOs that he put together and they were fascinating. And I turned it into a podcast. And then I started learning more about DAOs through just a friend interviewing a friend. And I have all the equipment set up and so it wasn’t a problem. And then I said, Ben, you need to…

05:37
talk about it in more ways, talk about more than just the DAOs you put together, and I need to learn more about it. How about if we work together? I’ll do a podcast with you on DAOs. I’ll have somebody write it up. I’ll have somebody else turn it into videos. You’ll get more output and more content for your people. I’ll get to learn. And it’s been a great way for me to learn because that world has been impenetrable for me. I don’t even know what that is, just to be fair. Can you explain it in

06:06
very simple terms so that people can understand. Yeah, I’ll tell you the story of how he got into it. He and a bunch of people who were all funded by Y Combinator had a chat group just on WhatsApp where they were talking about the different investments they were making in NFTs. Basically, they were buying pictures, investments they were making in Web3 crypto companies, and they were just chatting and giving each other information and making each other laugh and dreaming about what the future could be.

06:35
if these companies that they were backing succeeded. And they said, you know what, let’s invest together. And what they came up with was they said, look, if we just do another standard investment, we’re not really stretching ourselves. What if we create a Dow, decentralized autonomous organization, where every one of us, and it became hundreds, every one of us in this chat room can help find the companies for us to invest in. And then when we do, every one of us can…

07:03
help support the companies that we invest in. Cause if we’re hundreds of entrepreneurs here and a company gets funding from us, they should also be able to get us to open doors for them, to make introductions, to get them clients and all that. And so they said, okay, this is what we’re going to do. But wait, if we do all that, what if one person does a lot more than the other? Do we just say that’s okay? Or can we use this Dow to give that person more points?

07:29
And so they created a token so they could give whoever does more more points. And that’s essentially what a DAO is, a group of people who work together and they use these tokens for points to reward people who do a lot. So it sounds like a traditional venture capitalist model with a little crypto mixed in. In many ways it is. The challenge with the traditional venture model is, and through Ben I’ve been introduced to others who’ve done this model,

07:56
The challenge is it doesn’t scale, which is why you don’t see a venture capital firm with hundreds of partners who are all looking for deals, supporting deals and so on. At some point it doesn’t scale. And so you end up with a few people who get the bulk of the rewards, financial rewards, and the others who are doing the work, but they’re doing the work as kind of hired hands, getting paid okay, but mostly getting paid in experience.

08:23
And what this DAO was called, Orange DAO, what they did was they started to basically share in all the upside. And then because it’s a DAO, they came up with new ideas too. They were all sitting around saying, wait, why are we investing in companies? Can we invest in people? And so they came up with this way to invest in people and they keep innovating and coming up with creative ways. And so what the DAO does is it allows a broader group of people to participate. I love it. See, that’s the type of

08:52
crypto or Web3 that I can get behind, not these NFTs that were out that crashed. So, yeah. Me too. I tried an NFT, like I tried buying one. I tried making some when they started out of curiosity to learn. I didn’t want to be someone who just dismissed it, but I ultimately said, it doesn’t do it for me. This does, like you said, this kind of makes sense for me. A community of people work together with some kind of point system and the point system isn’t just to…

09:19
reward people who do more, and to be petty about keeping track of who does what. The point system also allows for someone who has limited capacity to pick who they work with. And I’ll give you another example. Through Ben, and that’s the beauty of interviewing, if I were just to meet someone at an event, I could get maybe a good half hour conversation about this, and that’s it. And it’s impolite to dig in deeper. But through interviews, you get to meet more and more people. So Ben introduced me to

09:49
this group of venture capitalists who said, let’s try a DAO as a way of disrupting our model. And I spent a long time interviewing the founder, Jules, of a DAO called VC3. And I said, okay, tell me more about what these points do. And she started saying things like, well, we have very limited resources personally. How do we know which potential…

10:16
portfolio company we should spend time with? How do we know who we should help? Well, actually, me say it this way. I said, you’ve invested in a few portfolio companies. Can all those portfolio companies have the names and email addresses of the people in the DAO so that the portfolio companies can reach out to all of these people and say, help me when they need help? And I said, that’s the way Orange DAO works, the Y Combinator DAO. You can contact any one of the members and just say, I need help.

10:45
And Jewel said, look, the difference is at Orange, you’re all entrepreneurs. They have more time for other entrepreneurs. We’re all venture capitalists. We can’t make ourselves as open as they are. And we’re a smaller group of people, so we can’t be as available. But she said, what we’re doing now is every one of our portfolio companies gets some tokens, and they could use those tokens to basically buy access to the venture capitalists who are within this community and get help. And so does that mean that

11:14
Every interaction you have to pay for a token to get, no, but it does mean that if you can’t reach them any other way, or if someone who works for one of their portfolio companies can’t reach them any other way, they could use a token. Bottom line, this is fascinating. To me, the bigger takeaway is whenever there’s a topic that I’m super interested in, I should just launch a podcast and forget about how many people in the audience are listening. Just use it as a formal way of learning. That’s exactly what I did with this podcast.

11:43
I went into this podcast not wanting to make any money at all, or that wasn’t my intention at least. I just wanted to meet people and people tend to open up when you have an hour with them. I thought you were one of my early role models because you just had this way of getting people to open up. One, you had fantastic guests, which is something I wanted to get into also, but then you also had this way of getting people to reveal stuff that I thought that they

12:13
didn’t actually want to reveal, if you know what I mean. Like, you always manage to get revenue numbers and, well, okay, let’s start with this. Let’s say you’re interviewing someone who you feel like is above you or way more successful than you are, right? Or maybe you’re a fan boy of that person. First of all, how do you deal with people like that personally, you know, in your mind also, and how do you get people like that to open up or perceive you as an equal, so to speak? My challenge has been that I think

12:43
they’re gonna say to themselves, am I even doing talking to this person who clearly doesn’t know enough? Or they’re going to use me and take advantage of me because if I don’t know enough, then they’re gonna start to use me as a way of getting their message out. And I’ve always been worried about that. My solution has been to go into it admitting, I don’t know this. The reason I’m asking you here is because I don’t know this topic and I’m trying to figure it out. Will you help me and-

13:11
Through helping me, there’s another audience out there, a bigger audience than just this one person listening, who have similar questions, and you could help them understand. Now, in the early days, there wasn’t a much bigger audience, so what I would say is, in addition to me, there’s someone who is going to be driving to an interview with you, listening to this podcast episode as a way of understanding you. There’s going to be somebody driving to an interview with one of the people you hired,

13:41
And they want this job interview to make sense and they want to figure out, I even be working for this company? And this interview will help them answer those questions and others. And so I would walk in and be very open that I’m trying to learn. I’m a student, not an expert. And then I would say, you’re teaching me, but through me, you’re teaching other people. And if it wasn’t a ton of other people, it would be one other person. I remember actually, jib jab.

14:08
was this content site that was super popular. They kept making viral hit after viral hit, and then they also made these apps that would make viral hits. It was all about like this fun musical things, and then their app would take their viral videos and let you put your face in them and your friends and family’s faces in them. Anyway, I didn’t have an audience when I interviewed the founder. He basically was doing me a favor, and he looked like it when I first got him on camera. He was like wearing a baseball hat and paying attention to the connection and so on.

14:38
I wanted him to take it seriously. And so before the interview started, I said, I want to do an interview that your grandkids, when they say, how did grandpa get so successful, will come back and listen to, to understand their family history and how they got and how you got where, where you all are. And I knew it resonated, but I didn’t know how much until years later, he contacted me and he said, could I have a copy, like a crisp raw copy of that interview that you did with me?

15:07
for my family. And it was that kind of connection. And that did make him take it seriously. And at the end of the interview, he said he wished he hadn’t had his baseball cap on and that he had actually come in prepared. But this was the early days of podcasting and he didn’t know what to make of this. And he didn’t know me from Adam. So I think about myself as a student and then the audience as the bigger group of people that they’re educating. And I give the importance if I can’t give the size. did you know to say that? How did you know that was going to resonate with him?

15:38
Because that’s what I cared about personally. I really wasn’t looking for massive audience through interviewing. I came to interviewing as a way of learning so that I could build something massive. And so I just was really open about what my goal was. And I’m someone who loves biographies and wanted to create the kinds of biographies that moved me. And I noticed that a lot of successful people, if they didn’t read as many biographies as I did,

16:06
They read a few that stuck with them and used those as guides. And so I thought there are going to be people like me out there who want the modern biography. And that happens to be podcasting, not necessarily books. You know, what’s funny is I’ve taken a similar approach as you have in the past, but sometimes what ends up happening is that person just ends up promoting everything that they have. sometimes I struggle to stop them from, you know,

16:34
answer the question, stop pushing what product or something that’s coming out. How do you stop that from happening? Because the larger people, typically have an agenda if they’re coming on your show, right? And the problem with the larger people is they are very well trained. At one point, I did the world’s first billion dollar jackpot. Warren Buffett backed it, his company did. And so I got to be on a lot of media, including on Good Morning America. And before Good Morning America, we just, I think, found out about it on like Friday.

17:03
Somehow in my office in Midtown was a pair of media experts sitting in my conference room training me on every possible answer and watching every reaction that I gave to see how I looked, how I sounded, and what the words were. Super analyzed with someone else on my team watching. And we spent hours. I was so exhausted. I love training this type of thing. This was my dream.

17:31
And I was still exhausted from all that work. And then when I went on Good Morning America, the challenging questions didn’t even seem challenging. I thought they went easy on me. wasn’t until I listened to it afterwards that I realized, no, they didn’t go easy. They were, they were challenging me. just practiced. And what I did was I gave them my practiced answers. And so when I interview somebody who’s really far ahead in business, they often are super practiced and I don’t think I like them. Look, I don’t think I like them as guests. If you look at what’s his name? Mark Cuban.

18:02
I listen to a lot of his interviews. He repeats the same thing and I admire that he could still laugh at his own stories to sell the story so well. Especially now that I see people who do YouTube clips where they clip the same story from multiple interviews and you see him laugh and sell it and get lost and enjoy the story every time and you think, oh.

18:26
That’s a clearly, he may not have a media expert sit with him, but that’s clearly a practice story that he told at cocktail parties or beer and then at interviews. And so I don’t necessarily like the big name interviews. People always ask, who’s the next big name you want on? I find they’re mostly too prepared. How do you get beyond that? I get that a lot actually. It’s only mainly for the big people. They have set answers and I always listen to their interviews beforehand that they’ve done in other podcasts and whatnot. And they tell the same stories.

18:55
So how do you get them to open up? One thing to do is, it’s kind of a ballsy thing to do, but I think it helps is to call it out and then to call it out with appreciation and to say, I’ve heard you say that. I love that story. I’ve heard it on these other podcasts. You know, I did my homework and I want to go a little deeper. The thing I’m wrestling with right now is, and if you show a little vulnerability after that, I think it helps. I think even setting it up beforehand with

19:25
This is my mission. What I’m trying to do here is do this thing. I think they want to work with you. I think if they don’t, they do, they, they don’t do it because they have some anxiety and the anxiety is will I get the output that I am investing my time to get? And it’s really hard to get that from an interview. I mean, even if you watch somebody on a professional late night talk show, talk about their movie.

19:54
You’re not necessarily going to go watch the movie the next day. It takes a little while. You just have a favorable impression of the person. And then if you see them again, and if you hear someone else talk about the movie or the interview, then it might start to sink in. And then maybe your wife says to you, we should go see a movie. And you think, you know, there’s this guy I saw, there’s this interview I saw, and there’s a movie. And then it comes out. It’s not like.

20:18
direct marketing on Instagram where you see a pair of jeans that are just amazing and you buy them instantly. so interviews are challenging that way and we can’t give them that instant response, but we could take away some of the pressure they feel by asking them, what’s a goal for you? What do you need here to make this a win for you? And I always ask the guests before an interview, what’s a win for you? And that makes them feel like I’m aligned with them. And the other thing is,

20:47
I also like to give them a warning. And if you give them a warning, like don’t promote, people are going to hate it. People don’t listen to advice, but for some reason they, they heed stories. So you can tell them a story without naming somebody. And you could say something like, I had this guy on, I won’t say his name. Everyone knows him. All he did was, and I was excited to have him on because I knew my audience would know him and would want him on. Everybody hated him. And I know exactly why all he did was.

21:17
He was a promotion machine. felt like an infomercial and instead of getting people more interested, all I got was hate mail. And I think that this audience is so cynical that the way to lose them is to promote heavily. So tell you what, I’ll do some of the promotion for you and I’ll tee it up, but let’s ease off so that they like you better than they like this other person. And you give them a little bit of a story, it helps.

21:40
My first book, The Family First Entrepreneur, just debuted as a Wall Street Journal business bestseller. And not only that, but my book was also featured on a billboard in Times Square during the launch. I am literally in awe right now. I’ve also enjoyed all the incredible reviews of my book that have been coming in from readers all over the world. Now if you’ve not picked up a copy yet, there’s no better day than today. It’s available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere books are sold. Now if you’re curious about what The Family First Entrepreneur is all about,

22:09
It will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that does not require you to work yourself to death, because you can in fact achieve financial success without being a stranger to your kids. You can make good money and have the freedom to enjoy it, and you definitely don’t have to work 80 hours a week and be a slave to your business just to make it all work. I will teach you how to start a business from the perspective of a parent who makes both business and family work. Not only that, but I made it a no-brainer to grab the book.

22:37
because I’m still giving out $690 in free bonuses. And here’s what you get. Instant access to my three-day print on demand workshop. And in this workshop, I teach exactly how to get started running a print on demand e-commerce store and provide you with a free website theme as well. You also get access to my two-day passive income workshop where I’ll teach you how to make money with blogging, podcasting, and YouTube. Go to mywebcoderjob.com slash book and are seeing the bonuses.

23:03
invitations to book parties that I’ll be throwing all over the country and special offers. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash book. Now back to the show.

23:14
I don’t know if this is the same person, but I interviewed someone who I idolized, one of my favorite authors, and they came on and it was a promotion fest. I didn’t like the interview and yes, I got people complaining about it. They said I had such high expectations because I’d loved this author, but the interview, it just sounded like a sales fest. But I was not able to steer that conversation around because he was too polished. It’s so very challenging to get past that.

23:43
It’s, and, and sometimes ultimately the sucky part about interviewing is it’s not all in our hands. And if we edit, we can edit it better. The producer that I hired from inside the Actors Studio, he would sometimes tell me how I could edit. And he had names for these types of edits where basically I’m asking a question and I get an answer from a couple of, I get answers from a couple of other questions, combine them together and get the answer that I’m looking for.

24:13
And so the audience gets a clear question and answer and all the other stuff is deleted. And I chose not to do that on Mixergy and that makes it a lot harder. What I’ve noticed is who’s the… There’s a company that started out in the pandemic with a guy who did interviews with entrepreneurs who then switched over to TikTok.

24:43
And he would just do short videos and he did dozens of interviews before giving up. And the reason he gave up was he wasn’t telling the stories the way he wanted to tell the stories. And so by just reading up on a person and then doing a TikTok video to tell that person’s story, he got a cleaner story out to the world. And there’s no doubt that editing will get you a cleaner story. And if you’re doing an interview, you can edit to get the cleaner story. If you’re, um,

25:11
If you’re summarizing it into TikTok, you can do it. The, chose not to do that for Mixergy and it’s not necessarily a universally sound decision. Other people may not frankly for the podcast I’m doing to learn about DAOs, I’m editing it. I chose not to edit for Mixergy because I wanted entrepreneurs to be seen as raw and real as they were. And I also wanted you to see that, that overselling is disgusting. I could tell you overselling is too much. You listen to one interview where a guy oversells and you’re disgusted.

25:41
I could tell you that they don’t know everything, but you wouldn’t believe me. And if you hear them just stumble through basics of their business and they feel uncomfortable with it, it makes you feel a little bit okay with not knowing everything about your business. And those types of, those types of moments were important for me to keep in the podcast. And so I kept them in, but that’s a problem. It’s a problem for the ultimate polish. I remember when I went on your show,

26:11
You did a pre-interview, are you still doing that also, still? I now do pre-interviews myself, and yes I do. I wonder, sometimes we do, I think what happened was after the book came out, people said, well, of course you’re doing great because you have a producer who does a pre-interview and it’s all that. And I said, no, you could do it yourself. And I started doing pre-interviews myself and I am still.

26:38
anal enough that I don’t think I do any interviews without having some pre-interview done. Even if I go off, I still need that pre-interview. Interesting. It’s too far back now when I went on your show. I don’t even remember what the pre-interview process was like, but what was your vetting process like? When it works well, the ultimate vetting process is, am I really curious about this person because I want to use some of what I learn?

27:06
I make rules sometimes because people on my team have asked for it, because the audience or the guests asked for it, but I hate to make rules and I’ve resisted it for a long time. Ultimately, you can see if somebody has all the qualifications, but I am not curious enough to want to use what the person is doing. Forget just curious out of like, I’m curious about how the world works. Curious because I want to use it is way different. That’s where you get real questions, real understanding.

27:37
what percentage of the people you pre-interview don’t get on the main show. And if you’re doing it yourself, it’s kind of insulting to the guy who’s coming on, especially if they’re a big person, right? It’s not. And the reason it’s not is I explain why. And so I’ve always understood that our producers can’t reject people because it’s too painful for people to do, and I’m comfortable being the person to do it. And I should, as I thought.

28:05
I’m the leader, I’m the guy deciding this. It’s almost always because of me. In fact, it is always because of me and almost always because I specifically said, no, this person’s not good, especially after a pre-interview. You know, they did the hard work and now I’m saying no. So, um, I’ll take that responsibility and I’ve always felt comfortable with that. And what I say is my audience is expecting this thing. And I explained what that is. Your story clearly doesn’t.

28:34
doesn’t fit that. If we force it in, the audience is going to feel like we are trying to cheat them and they’re going to be angry at you and angry at me the way they were before when I used to just do these interviews. I think we’re better off leaving this for now and coming back when this happens if you still want to be interviewed by me and I would be honored if you did. And so often it’s something like

29:04
The size isn’t there, right? The person has talked himself up on social media a lot, sold this company, sold that company. Turns out they really didn’t sell the company. They sold it for a buck and just like, they call it sometimes a gentleman’s exit. We need a better name than that. But it’s basically, it’s an exit for LinkedIn. When we talked to them, and this happened recently actually, with someone who was introduced to me by someone and I actually said yes before the introduction was made because I did my research and everything checked out online and then.

29:33
I did a pre-interview with him, wasn’t a good fit, and I said, I’m clearly gonna ask you about the size of the exits, and even if you don’t give me the number, it’s gonna come out that this wasn’t a big exit, that this was kind of a thing that didn’t work out, right? That’s basically what you’re telling me. And in the pre-interview, it comes out. If we do this interview, all you’re gonna get is ridicule. And I don’t think you want it, and I don’t think I want it. You’ve got really good social media presence. I think we should just stop right here. I’ve got my notes.

30:01
when it’s a better time, we can come back and do this interview and I have all my notes. And if it’s not, I completely understand. If you decide that it’s not a good fit for you, I completely understand. But if we do it now, they’re just gonna end up hating you and hating me and it’s just not worth it for that. We don’t need that kind of agenda. That’s a good way to put it actually. Oh, you mentioned earlier that big names aren’t necessarily the ones that hit. Has that been true with your podcast? Yeah. So give me an example of that. Cause I can’t imagine, like let’s say you had like Tim Ferriss on.

30:30
versus some no-name with a good story, I would like to think that the Tim Ferriss one would almost always do better. I don’t think so. No. I like Tim Ferriss a lot. He’s not just a big name, he’s also a really good guest. comes in prepared, but not scripted. He knows himself well enough to articulate why and how he did something. The thing is that even he…

30:57
is interviewed in so many places that it’s not as unique. Now these days actually he’s been holding back and that changes things. And so if you can actually get him to do an interview now, it’s a little more special, a little more unique. And if you put a good headline and a good topic on it, it’s different. What I’m saying though is that the audience wants us to do the hard work of finding those interesting stories to challenge them and that introduce them to new people.

31:26
or people that they can’t get access to otherwise. And that’s the big thing. How do you find those guests? No doubt that the names are important. The more names you have, the more attention people put on you and give you credibility. One of the reasons why I liked interviewing was if I sold, let’s just pick any product, toothpaste, and I wanted to put, say, Tim Ferriss’s.

31:52
photo on my toothpaste box and say, buy my toothpaste because Tim Ferriss is, because Tim Ferriss, whatever he’s associated with it. He’d sue my ass and he should. But I noticed, I remember going through Manhattan, there would be all these with what are called wild postings. These basically ads that are, that are glued on, um, anything, anything they could be glued on. so if you, if you had scaffolding, they

32:20
They’d glue them on that. If you had some broken window that you boarded up, they put it on that. And I remember seeing magazines would be on there. You’d see the magazine title in small letters and the photo of the person who was featured in it really big. And often they didn’t even interview that person. They just wrote an article on that person. And all you have to do is write an article and pay for a thing and you get to use the person’s name to sell your magazine. I thought media has that unique

32:48
place in the world where if you’re a reporter, if you’re a media and you’re reporting on someone, you get to use that person’s face. And the way the audience thinks is if that person’s sitting next to you, you get some of their warmth and credibility. So now I have two things. One, I have essentially the ability of drawing an audience using someone who they respect, using an influencer. And the second,

33:17
And the second part is I get the warmth of association with that person from being sitting next to that person. That’s completely unique. And so I don’t want to say that it’s not important to have big name guests. I’m just saying it’s not that important. There’s no big name one person you get and everything busts open for you. It just doesn’t work that way. Rarely. I think sometimes you might get that hit, but it’s not really a way to work. It’s almost like saying,

33:44
I’m going to go to work every day hoping that I hit the lottery. It’s not the way to build a business. So I run an event and I’ve resisted paying a lot of money for a big name speaker to come because I think people come from the community and less so for, like it’s not like the conference is gonna sell out because I get one person to come and talk. So I guess it’s a similar philosophy. I think so. I would say that

34:13
There are times when it does work for that. And I’ll use Casey Neistat. Casey Neistat, when he was doing daily vlogs, he was huge. His price hadn’t caught up with his, with his size. So he wanted some money, but he didn’t want an outrageous amount of money. Meanwhile, he was, he had achieved a level of stardom that would make people want to come out just to see him. And.

34:42
From what I understood, people were able to negotiate with him. And so I think occasionally there are people like that who are worth the money. A friend of mine, Robert Stevens, he created a geek squad that was bought out by Best Buy. And one of his promotions one time was getting the guy who played Batman on TV. I forget his name.

35:11
Old school Batman or Adam West, right? Adam West, yeah. I’m pretty sure it was Adam West that he got. And he told us the price and I’m pretty sure it was, I think it was in the hundreds. It wasn’t in the tens of thousands. It was inexpensive, but it conveyed something bigger on his brand. And he was always and still is always good about finding those types of connections. I would say in general, you’re right, but.

35:40
when it comes to events, there are times when the price is low enough and the draw is big enough that it’s helpful. Even today, for some reason, if you get Adam West in, I don’t even know if he’s alive, but if you get someone like that, like, oh, this is like, it gives it that Hollywood veneer or Hollywood little bit of glitter and it helps. But I would also say this, sometimes those people wanna be invited and

36:10
It doesn’t cost anything. great example is Blog World. Mark Cuban, very famous person. I asked the founder of Blog World, how did the conference, how did you get Mark Cuban, this billionaire, to come to your event? And he said, Mark wanted to blog at the time and he needed a connection to the blogging universe and to be seen credible and to understand the blogging world. And so he did it. And I don’t think he paid a dime to get Mark Cuban in there.

36:39
He might’ve paid for his travel, might not have. And that is what I call in my book, a motivated moment. A time when someone wants to be included in this world and would do it just for free. Almost would pay to be involved, but doesn’t want to be an ordinary person in the audience. So calling them on stage gives them the ability to do it. Rappers in the early days of startups. I think it was, I forget who the guy’s name, I think it was the guy who sang, Riding Dirty.

37:09
I remember there was a conference in LA when I was living there where I was asked by the organizer if I could give the guy a ride from the airport in because they told him that they’d get his ride and they weren’t like paying for a black car or anything. So they asked Andrew, could you do it? And I said, sure. And I gave him a ride and we had an interesting conversation and he just wanted to see the startup world to see if he could invest in it, start in it. And he’d become a big entrepreneur, a big investor, whoever it was that was sitting there.

37:39
I remember, anyway, so what I’m saying is there are these motivated moments where you can pull people in and it’s really impactful. Just like when they’re about to release a book, you can also get big names to come on your show and that’s a good segue into your book. Why did you write a book, Andrew? I’m very curious. Because I just went through mine and it’s been three years and it’s a slog. So yeah, I’m curious. I want to write a book since I was a kid. I kept starting books and couldn’t finish them.

38:07
And I would announce in public, I’m doing a book and you helped me get interviewees so that I can include them in the book. And then I wouldn’t finish. And I think part of it was that I respected books so much. I grew up avoiding the world and reading books. And I kept wanting the book to be really good. Meanwhile, I’d seen people would just take their transcripts and clean them up a little bit and boom, they have a book.

38:31
didn’t want to do that. And I probably should have started with that as like a first version here. You want to read these interviews, this is a cleaned up version and what I learned from them. I maybe was over making it overly special. So then over COVID, I was at home and I said, I’m going to try it again. I was, I was actually asked by someone to write a chapter for his book and I wrote it and he didn’t like it. And he asked me for another and I wrote again and

39:01
I kind of liked my first version. I kind of liked his version with his feedback and I liked getting feedback from him. And he’d written several books and I said, Robbie, who showed you, how did you do it? And he told me that he hired an editor to do it. And I said, can I hire that editor? He made an introduction and that editor was not available, but someone who she worked with was. And so I hired her and I had, and I said, look, all I need is can you write with me? We’ll just turn on screen sharing and I’ll write with you there. I can’t pass it on to you.

39:31
but I can write with you.” She said, no, I can’t do that. That’s kind of weird. But I can check in on you every week. And so every week she would check in on my writing. And then what I did was I signed up for Focusmate. I paid them five bucks a month. And for five bucks a month, anytime I wanted to write, I would have somebody basically who was doing their own work, looking at me through the webcam. I would share my screen. I said, who cares? Let them see what my writing is. Cause I want more readers of my book anyway. And not that they’re paying attention, but they’ll see if I’m.

40:00
if I’m futzing around and not getting anything done. And I kind of had accountability for writing. And what I did was I said, the thing that I have done best and in a more, most organized way is doing interviews. And people keep asking me for advice on how to do interviews. I have a Google doc. I kept it. I’m so anal and so organized that if there was a new technique that I learned for getting somebody to open up, I would

40:27
put it in a Google Doc and I would name it and I would have like copies of sections from my transcript underneath it so that I had an example of how it was used and then I gave it to our pre-interviewers, to producers and said, look, here’s a selection of ways that you could get people to be more open with you in the pre-interview. And I said, that’s been really helpful. I should expand that and that could be my book. And that’s how it worked out. What were your motivations though? So you’ve always wanted to do one. I’ve always wanted to do one, but-

40:55
Always wanted to do one and actually doing it, I guess, are two different things. Do you have another book in you or is this kind of like a bucket list item for you? I’m not feeling as compelled now that it’s there. Okay. I did right away afterwards. I enjoyed the outcome of all that hard work and I said to Mary Sun, the editor that I worked with, can we continue? And we tried continuing, but I didn’t have enough topics in me. I had no topics. I didn’t have anything that I had the same kind of passion for and-

41:25
Even though I was paying her and all she had to do was just show up. She basically said, it doesn’t make sense for me to show up here for, for this. And so we stopped. Did you go traditional or self published? I’m a startup guy supporting startups all the time. And so I went with a startup publisher. It was called, and it is called damn gravity. And I was happy to not self publish because, and also to.

41:53
Mary worked for Penguin and so she told me what the process would be and I wasn’t willing to go through that. I didn’t want at the end of all this to have another thing that would take a long time. She said, I can introduce you to the people who I work with that we hire to do line editing, I think it was called and all that stuff. And then if you’re willing to wait this amount of time, this is how long the process is. And I said, I’m not willing to anymore.

42:22
putting barriers before me in the past and stuff would happen. I can’t, I have to see this through. And then I also needed somebody to help me with marketing because I was exhausted. And so what Ben from Damn Gravity did was he basically marketed and pulled me through. Um, the, the finish line and the start, I was exhausted at the end of writing the book. I was exhausted with the topic, which I heard a lot of writers feel. I also.

42:50
was at a stage where I was feeling like I wanted something new and I wasn’t sure what, and in general in work I wanted to take a little time off and wasn’t sure what to do. And so having been there and lead the marketing was really helpful. Did you have goals for it? Were you trying to hit a bestseller list, nothing like that or? I considered it and I always thought I would buy a bestseller list entry, but when it came time to the book, I really…

43:19
I didn’t, wanted it to feel like as purely a connection to the thing that I’d done as possible. Just a guy that says, I did this thing and I need to close it out by passing it on to the next person. Interesting. That’s a good attitude. I find myself stressed out right now because my goal is to actually hit a bestseller list. Cause I don’t know if I have another- How are you gonna do it? It’s taken me three years. What’s my strategy? Okay, so first strategy is to just

43:49
Reach out to everyone who I’ve done a favor to in the past, especially really good friends who will help me promote it. Bulk buys, these are companies that have sponsored me in the past, do little favors like have them come on the podcast or make YouTube videos or whatnot. actually, in preparation for this book launch, I actually expanded all of my properties. So I created a YouTube channel that’s up to 200K subs now. I got on Twitter and increased that.

44:19
From scratch pretty much. I’m around 30k subs. I was on tik-tok Everything basically just in preparation for for this moment so bulk buys podcast interviews getting friends to blast out to their lists and then for me I Learned that you’re not actually selling the book You’re selling the bonuses and the book kind of comes with it because people don’t like to read they want solutions right away

44:49
So that’s how I’ve been approaching it. know, yeah, Seth Godin always says the book is a souvenir. It’s not what people read and I get it. So what type of bonuses are you thinking? So right off the bat, when people sign up, they get two workshops. One is a three day workshop on just how to start a side hustle. You know, something you can do while you’re working that doesn’t cost a lot of upfront money.

45:19
And then the second workshop, it’s a two-day workshop that teaches you how to make money with content. Basically everything that I do, you get those right away. Then when the book comes out, I’m doing a six-week challenge where I’m actually going on Facebook and I’m gonna be on there, give a live lecture once a week and just kind of be in there answering questions and that sort of thing to encourage people to start their own side hustle. Because I’m of the belief and I’ve worked as an engineering director for 17 years.

45:49
I don’t think that you can make life-changing money or improve your lifestyle working for somebody else. any little thing that you can do on the side, no matter how small you might think it is, can later turn into something significant. And then I’m also doing these little book parties all over the US where I get a chance to actually meet people who follow me in person. So I’m really looking forward to that. Those are my bonuses. I think those are great ideas. I like them a lot.

46:17
Yeah. Did you do any bonuses for yours? Um, I partnered with a company called Holloway to sell a really good digital version of the book. And that came with extra bonuses and they made it really good. You should check them out. Um, it’s a well-designed product that then easily connects into bonuses that then is then

46:47
gives you a connection to the reader, their email address. And so I actually, if you look at the Kindle version of my book, I promote the Holloway version. Um, and people do buy the Holloway version and they get the bonuses along with it. And that was the way that I did it. And we definitely get more, more money from Holloway than we do from Kindle, from, from Amazon in general, because it’s a, it’s a higher ticket product.

47:15
What I didn’t have that would have pushed me to sell it more is I didn’t have like a follow on upsell. I’ve been told that that’s, that the book is not that Seth Godin calls it a souvenir. Others would say it’s the entry point. Like you buy the book to learn it and then buy the next big thing. I remember Eric Reese, um, we were having dinner and I said, what’s

47:43
what’s going on since you wrote Lean Startup. And he told me examples about someone who would pick up his book at the airport and then take it to his boss and say, you should hire this person to come in and help us change the way we innovate here. And that was an entry point into a process. And I don’t think he intentionally meant for it to be that he wanted to change the way startups were built.

48:07
but he had a process for follow-on and others do too and I didn’t. And if you do, then it becomes a lot easier to say, let’s invest time and money to sell this thing because it helps build this product, this business, this service, this something. So let me ask you this, has the book impacted your life or your business in any way? Yes. I don’t know the Apecoin people, right? And the whole Board Ape Yacht Club.

48:38
But I was having dinner with Vera the ape who does, let me see, what’s like her official title? Vera the ape. I’m telling you, this is like a world that I’m not at all a part of. She’s special counsel to Apecoin. And as we were having dinner with a few people, she happened to bring up that she’s podcasting and she’s learning about this space through interviewing because she came from a much more conventional background.

49:08
And I said, I wrote a book on interviewing and she got like really interested in the process. And you know, once you get it, you want to get better at conversations, especially if you’re in the first hundred interviews. And I’m not, noticing more and more people are getting into interviewing as a way of learning from others. And so my Uber canceled on me. My next Uber canceled on me. She and her husband are incredibly polite. They just stood there. Everyone else left.

49:37
including all my friends, everyone else left. They said, let us give you a ride. I said, no, there’s another Uber, go ahead, I’ll figure it out. They insisted, they gave me a ride back and lately I’ve been traveling with a copy of my book. And so I said, hang on, wait here. I went upstairs, I got a copy of the book, I signed it and I gave it to her. And before I did, asked if she could take a photo of me signing it and all. And the reason I bring this up is there’s now a bigger group of

50:05
who are interested in interviewing as a way of learning and they’re either discovering the book or when I discover them, I give them the book and it’s been helpful that way. Nice. That’s what I’ve been told actually, that it’s kind of hard to measure the effects, it’s like this thing that you have, something physical that you have that you can give to somebody and the value, the perceived value of that physical object

50:35
is higher than anything digital and it has a lasting impact and it carries authority. Steve, I have to say, I think people use this much more than I ever would. Hal Elrod, he lives locally around here. Yep. There was a school event where everyone had donated things for the event so the school could make some money. He donated his books. And I remember going, he donated his own books? People are donating like,

51:05
time at their Airbnb. know, like, yes, it’s theirs, just like his book is his, but an Airbnb is like a considerable amount of money that they’re giving up for doing that, right? Or they’re donating stuff. He’s going to give us books. And people who I said that to, because I like to be very blunt with people, said, yeah, Andrew, why do you think that’s so wacky? And I do. And I do think that at some point it feels a little bit much the way people use it, but they do.

51:36
I would have made fun of him right on the spot also. I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear it. And I don’t mean to be a jerk. The reason I could bring up Elrod is his book is good. He is a good person. And it’s not like a schlocky person who is using his book to get you to join his MLM or something. I do find sometimes when people use it, it’s a little much.

52:00
I can’t, why can’t I think of his name? He’s the guy who smiles all the time, who has a book company to help publish books. I went to his Super Bowl party last year. Chandler, yes. Yeah, okay, yeah. Chandler Bolt. I like the guy a lot. He told me to keep the books around. The reason I have it here on my desk is because people do bring it up and I get to like bring it on camera. He told me, bring your book, people care. I said, no, they don’t. And so I went to his house. He had it on the dining room table.

52:29
It wasn’t like you saying, take my book, go home with a prize, here, take my book, go home, and then sign up for my book course. It was just there. And the fact that it was like 15 of the books or 10 of the books made people feel like they could take it. And it conveyed a lot of authority. And it was a nice parting gift that if you cared about this person, you want to know how did he get to buy this house? You got a book that shows you what he did. I’ll give you one other example. Sorry. I went to Nick who wrote the book. Oh, Nick.

52:59
his last name. He’s a guy from Museum Hacks. He wrote the two-hour cocktail party. He has these fantastic parties here in Austin. Fan-frickin-tastic, because he gets good people together. He had this musician. He has tech people that you admire. But he also had this musician. go, she’s amazing. I went over and talked to her. I wanted to know how she showed up. It turns out she was hired by the yoga class that he went to. She was playing live music. He got her contact information, invited her to his party. He has a great mix of people.

53:29
He had three of his books out and he asked people, would you please take photos of my book? And if you enjoyed this party, all I ask is take photos of my book and post it and say that you enjoyed it so that people could buy the book. Having that book gave someone something to take a photo with, someone something to understand his method. It’s, there’s like, you can’t just say, take a photo of my website. I’m Steve Chu. Tell people about that. Take a photo with my book and help me out with the book.

53:57
It makes the person look smart. It makes you have something that they could look at. It takes ideas and it makes them tangible. Where you want to do it, where you want to use them is up to you, but it’s really helpful. I love that idea. I should do more of that. Now that I’m talking to you about it, get excited about stuff like that. I I think it gives you a new level of authority. mean, you’ve already had authority, but just the fact that you have something tangible to hand out really makes a difference, actually. At least to my mom. So this is what I do. I use the mom test, right?

54:26
My mom has never, I’ve been blogging for what, over a decade now, she has really never read anything. This is the first time that she’s excited to read something that I’ve produced because it’s published by a traditional publisher and it’s gonna be a physical book. So I passed the month. My mom never listened to my podcast, never checked out, they might have checked out my website, my mom and dad a few times didn’t really get anything, but she did take the book and she read it and she told me what she was reading. That’s a good point.

54:56
Yeah, the mom test is what I call it. I think I’ve finally done it, I’m done. So you’re done after this deal with retirement, you’re gonna exist in Texas, we’ll chop some wood together. I got two goats that I got randomly from some dude, baby goats, you’ll come help me feed the goats, great. Well actually last question here, since we were kinda talking about it before this interview started, your family and all the things that you’ve done, I know you’ve.

55:23
you moved from California to Austin, you had some things to say about that related to the topic of my book. Do you remember what you were gonna say? You know, we were talking about family and work and I used to know where I came down. My approach had been really aggressively ignore them and work for them and eventually it became less ignore them and more like work first.

55:53
family needs an infrastructure, part of it needs to be that my kids see me working. Because if they see me working, they’re going to get a work ethic for themselves and they should be expected to work too. Whatever that is, whether it’s chores with the goats or homework, whatever it is, we work and here’s why we work. With a feeling of almost aggressive fear of becoming homeless. Let’s look at the homeless. Let’s identify them as regular people like us. Something happened to them and others. It could happen to us. We have to work hard to avoid it.

56:22
And that is, and we can never, we can never feel like that is behind us. We could always feel like that, that demon is close. And I had my kids and I made a mistake where I enjoyed spending time with them too much. I was so enjoying and being with them that I didn’t realize and work just kept going. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t challenging myself enough. wasn’t coming up with new things. wasn’t pushing myself outside my comfort zone. had my system and things worked and

56:52
Now I’m in a process of a balance, but I’m not happy with balance. I do think that maybe aggressive fear of failure and hard work is not the right approach, but I’d rather be closer to that than balanced. It’s interesting you say that because I’m a pretty driven person as well. And you know that if you’re devoting some time to family, that’s time you could be using to kick butt.

57:22
And what I’ve just come to realize, I kind of have an ego, right, as we all do. So the way I stay interested or fulfill that ego part is I’ll just work on one project a year. And I try to do that one project well, and I don’t care, I don’t have revenue goals anymore. I actually used to have revenue goals. And those are the biggest detriment because you’d hit them and then you set the goalpost later for no reason. Like we only spend $150,000 a year as a household.

57:52
And we make way more than that. So why am I killing myself for money? So that shouldn’t be a goal, right? So this year, it’s the year of the book. Last year is the year YouTube, the year before that is the year of Twitter, the year of TikTok. And as long as I’m doing something interesting, that fills my ego. I like that because I do get obsessive about things. And if I could have one thing to be obsessive about, I’m in a happy place. And this year is your year of Dow, I guess, right?

58:21
Actually, yes. Super obsessive about it. And if nothing happens afterwards with it, I think I’m okay with it. But generally, I’d like them to build on each other. Four years ago is the year chatbots. Was that four years ago? Probably. Yeah. I didn’t. Yeah. Before that, was true mind. How do I learn to focus my mind and steer away from my demons? Yeah. So Andrew, always oppose your man. Where can people find your book?

58:51
Uh, everywhere, including Holloway.com or Amazon. Well, stop asking questions. Specifically the bonuses. You can find those on Amazon or no? Um, so if you buy the book from Amazon, we will tell you about the Holloway. If not, you can just go to Holloway. Uh, H-O-L-L-A. Uh, I don’t, I don’t even, why am not spelling Holloway? H-O-L-L-O-W-A-Y. That’s where the, oh.

59:18
The benefits are all those extra bonuses are there it is stop asking questions by Andrew Warner. I’m happy with people starting out with just reading the book by going to Amazon and getting it. But if you want all the bonuses, Holloway has a beautiful version of my book and all the extra bonuses, including every past interview and what I like about them, by the way, here’s another cool thing. When I say I use this technique, Holloway linked to that fricking technique. So you could hear me use the technique in an interview.

59:46
I love that they could do that. I don’t know why Kindle still hasn’t gone beyond just text. Anyway, that’s Holloway.com. H-O-L-L-O-W-A-Y.com. Hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you’ve never listened to Mixergy before, I highly recommend that you check out Andrew’s podcast. He is a fantastic interviewer. For more information about this episode, go to mywipecoderjob.com slash episode 469. And once again, I want to thank Sellerboard, which is the Amazon profit software that I recommend for Amazon sellers.

01:00:16
By going to mywifecouterjob.com slash seller board, you can get 30 days for free. Once again, that’s mywifecouterjob.com slash S-E-L-L-E-R-B-O-A-R-D. I also want to thank 180marketing.com for sponsoring this episode. 180 Marketing is the agency that I use to grow my search traffic by 4X in just six months. For more information, email jeff at 180marketing.com. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

01:00:45
Head on over to MyWifeCoderJob.com and sign up for my free 6 day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.