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00:01:34.600 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:43.960 | your life, money, and travel all while spending less and saving more.

00:01:48.000 | Now, this episode is a bit different than most, and not just because it's three

00:01:52.760 | hours long.

00:01:53.480 | Why?

00:01:54.640 | Well, along my journey to build and grow this podcast, I had a chance to sit down

00:01:59.200 | and interview my friend Tim Ferriss about everything he's learned growing his

00:02:03.120 | podcast to over 700 million downloads.

00:02:05.840 | Now, I assume most of you don't have or even want to have a podcast, but I've

00:02:11.160 | already gotten so much feedback from non-podcasters that found this episode

00:02:15.560 | interesting and valuable to their life and their work.

00:02:18.080 | And I think that's because we talk about interviewing skills, marketing,

00:02:21.840 | branding, storytelling, and so much more.

00:02:24.720 | You'll also get a deep inside look at how podcasts, specifically All The Hacks,

00:02:29.640 | got started, how everything comes together each week from the equipment, the

00:02:33.680 | production, the interviews, and everything else.

00:02:36.760 | And if that's not interesting, you're welcome to skip this one.

00:02:40.320 | But you'll definitely want to come back next week for a conversation with the

00:02:43.960 | points guy himself, Brian Kelly, all about travel and credit card hacks.

00:02:49.640 | Also, this episode is the same one released on The Tim Ferriss Show a few

00:02:54.000 | weeks ago, so you may have already heard it there.

00:02:56.360 | And because we originally recorded the intros for Tim's show, it definitely

00:03:00.840 | won't start off like a regular episode of All The Hacks.

00:03:03.560 | All that said, I really hope you enjoy it.

00:03:06.040 | And as always, you can get in touch at Chris@allthehacks.com.

00:03:10.640 | Let's do this.

00:03:11.880 | Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.

00:03:15.480 | This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.

00:03:18.400 | We have had three technical failures, but we've made it happen.

00:03:22.040 | And this is an improv episode.

00:03:24.320 | I'm very excited about it because my friend Chris reached out with many

00:03:27.480 | questions about podcasting, good questions.

00:03:30.280 | He had already read much of what I had written.

00:03:33.120 | He'd listened to several interviews, and this is intended to be an updated

00:03:37.520 | guide to all things podcasting.

00:03:40.600 | The last time I wrote anything at length about this, I think the Tim Ferriss Show

00:03:44.760 | had about 60 or 65 million total downloads.

00:03:48.520 | Now it's past 700 million.

00:03:50.240 | So the show has grown.

00:03:53.120 | A lot has happened.

00:03:54.280 | Technologies have, I want to say, developed, not always evolved, as we may end up

00:04:00.760 | covering. But Chris, why don't you take a moment to tell people who you are?

00:04:05.840 | We've known each other now for at least six years, maybe closer to 10.

00:04:10.280 | I can't really even recall how we first met, but we have a mutual friend in Kevin

00:04:14.520 | Rose and many other people.

00:04:16.600 | Who are you, Chris?

00:04:17.680 | So hi, everybody.

00:04:18.680 | I'm Chris Hutchins.

00:04:20.760 | I'm a bit of one of those crazy lifehacker optimizers, take it to the extreme

00:04:25.120 | sometimes. And I host a podcast, hopefully a soon-to-be award-winning podcast

00:04:30.880 | called All the Hacks, where I document my journey to upgrade my life, money, travel,

00:04:36.160 | all while spending less and saving more.

00:04:38.280 | Outside of that, I'm building new products at Wealthfront.

00:04:41.680 | And before all of this, I've started a few companies, sold a few companies, worked in

00:04:46.240 | venture capital, investment banking, management consulting, and kind of traveled

00:04:50.000 | around the world for eight months.

00:04:51.120 | So a bit of a seasoned set of random things, jack of all trades, maybe master of

00:04:56.360 | none. And I'm excited to be here.

00:04:58.560 | Well, I'm excited to jam because I actually haven't spoken at length in detail about

00:05:07.000 | the latest and greatest or in some cases, the old and the tried and the true that I

00:05:12.280 | don't think needs to change.

00:05:13.400 | But I want to underscore that you really do know what you're doing when it comes to

00:05:21.000 | certain obsessive deep dives that you've done, particularly, I shouldn't say

00:05:26.760 | particularly, but including travel and points and not just saving or cutting costs,

00:05:35.040 | but improving the immersive experiences that you have in life.

00:05:40.240 | And so you've traveled to roughly 70 countries, mostly for free, on points.

00:05:46.120 | And there's much more to it.

00:05:48.200 | How many episodes have you recorded and published so far of your podcast?

00:05:53.360 | Just so people have some context.

00:05:54.640 | This is relatively new.

00:05:55.960 | I think I just released episode 19 when we're recording this.

00:05:59.200 | So it's been I started in May.

00:06:02.000 | It's September. So only four or five months.

00:06:05.160 | We'll come at this from many different angles.

00:06:07.440 | But where do you think it makes sense to start in preparation for this, hoping this

00:06:11.560 | would be sort of the one stop shopping or at least the jumping off point for anyone

00:06:15.920 | who really wants to study, maybe not best practices, but good practices within

00:06:23.840 | podcasting? Where do you think it makes sense to start?

00:06:26.960 | So there were two things that you've done that I think really gave me a lot of

00:06:30.920 | background. And one was the post you mentioned that you wrote in 2016.

00:06:35.000 | And then you did a maybe two hour or something interview with Rolf Potts on his

00:06:39.800 | Deviate podcast and talked a lot about this.

00:06:42.000 | So I thought maybe to kick it off, I'll just highlight some of my takeaways from

00:06:48.280 | doing my homework and feel free to say, well, that's wrong.

00:06:52.360 | That's changed. But we can kind of run through what I learned and then we can kind

00:06:56.360 | of run through that same series of kind of getting started, picking gear, finding

00:07:00.680 | guests again, and kind of dive deeper on what's changed and how it's evolved and

00:07:06.200 | questions that maybe were left unanswered in the original stuff.

00:07:09.280 | Let's do it.

00:07:10.440 | Perfect. So when it comes to getting started, this is something that I, like you,

00:07:16.000 | took a while to decide to start a podcast.

00:07:18.200 | And one of the pieces of advice that you gave that was really valuable to me was

00:07:22.560 | you don't have to commit forever.

00:07:24.120 | I think it always feels like a thing that you have to do forever.

00:07:27.360 | Once you start, it happens every week forever.

00:07:29.320 | And you can kind of set a date and say, let's do five, let's do ten episodes and

00:07:34.160 | that's it. And we'll reevaluate.

00:07:35.560 | So I think that's a really important takeaway is that knowing you don't have to

00:07:39.080 | commit forever. And the other big one is it's a lot more work than it seems.

00:07:43.640 | And so you said only do this if you do it for free, which really means like it's

00:07:47.720 | got to be you. It's got to be what format excites you, the tone of voice, the kinds

00:07:52.640 | of guests, the questions that are exciting to you.

00:07:54.720 | Otherwise, you'll get bored.

00:07:56.360 | And the final kind of getting started advice I took away was, look, if you don't

00:08:00.920 | have an audience, don't be afraid.

00:08:03.200 | Everyone started with some lack of audience at some point.

00:08:06.800 | And plenty of people with massive audiences have totally failed in podcasting.

00:08:10.640 | So the quick way is just get a couple episodes out there.

00:08:14.240 | Keep it simple. Do something you love.

00:08:16.760 | Don't worry about the business side and experiment.

00:08:19.360 | And I think that kind of sums up what everyone needs to know in a very concise way

00:08:24.080 | before getting started.

00:08:25.400 | Let me add to that. So I agree with all of that.

00:08:29.160 | And I want to add a couple of nuances or just

00:08:33.640 | additional comments.

00:08:34.720 | So it's helpful to bracket the minimum and

00:08:41.200 | then a check-in point for your

00:08:46.080 | commitment to podcasting. In other words, you could say, I'm only committing

00:08:50.480 | to do it to X or for Y number of episodes.

00:08:55.000 | I decided to do six episodes, to commit to six episodes in the beginning because

00:08:59.800 | I wanted to ensure that I could win even if I failed.

00:09:03.280 | What that meant was, what skills can I develop,

00:09:08.080 | learn or improve?

00:09:09.560 | What relationships can I forge or deepen

00:09:14.200 | that will be of value to me even if I stop podcasting?

00:09:18.160 | So the minimum effective dose for that is probably not one episode.

00:09:23.600 | It's probably not two episodes, probably not three episodes. For me,

00:09:26.960 | I thought, "Eh, it's probably somewhere between five and 10.

00:09:29.480 | Let's just commit to doing six." I don't know exactly why I chose six.

00:09:33.160 | And the way I could win even if I failed in

00:09:38.480 | that case was by improving my ability to ask questions and plan interviews

00:09:43.400 | because I was already doing that in the course of writing books.

00:09:47.480 | When I did research, when I found experts, these were all transferable skills.

00:09:52.120 | And then I would also have an excuse to deepen relationships with some of my

00:09:55.560 | close friends because it's pretty creepy to do hours and hours of internet

00:09:59.840 | sleuthing on your friends otherwise. But if you have the pretext of an interview,

00:10:03.480 | you can actually learn a lot about people like Kevin Rose,

00:10:07.480 | our mutual friend who was my first guest ever, who shaved my nuts really hard.

00:10:11.120 | And it's pretty funny to listen to now. It was less amusing at the time.

00:10:14.480 | So that's, I think, an aspect of the picking of the minimum dose that's important.

00:10:19.520 | Doing something you love is ideal.

00:10:22.920 | If you can do something you love, fantastic.

00:10:25.520 | If you don't know what it is that you love or would love,

00:10:29.400 | because if it's a new medium, you may have no idea,

00:10:32.000 | at least do something that is sustainable.

00:10:35.040 | Don't do something for say six episodes that you can't do for 500 episodes.

00:10:40.520 | That's my advice. And if you try to out this American life,

00:10:45.520 | this American life, you're going to get your face ripped off.

00:10:48.320 | There's a reason when they read the credits at the end that they have staff like

00:10:52.600 | 20 or 30 people.

00:10:53.840 | It is an incredible amount of work and they work very hard for it to seem

00:10:59.000 | seamless and maybe even improvised. Wow. It's so conversational.

00:11:05.360 | They do this with the team at Gimlet as well. You listen to like, Oh,

00:11:08.880 | they're just having a conversation. Like, no, believe me.

00:11:11.120 | They're not just having a conversation.

00:11:12.600 | So sustainability is super important. And like you said, Chris,

00:11:18.640 | there's more involved than you expect. And you should ask yourself,

00:11:22.520 | this applies to podcasting. It applies to many other things.

00:11:25.120 | If this costs twice as much, took twice as much time,

00:11:29.920 | would I still do it? And if the answer is no,

00:11:32.960 | either don't do it or change the format,

00:11:36.240 | change the approach so that the answer is yes.

00:11:38.960 | And podcasting is not the native element for all people.

00:11:44.280 | So if you think about how people with large audiences have built large

00:11:49.360 | audiences, in some cases, they build them on YouTube,

00:11:52.760 | and then that audience follows them to new formats. In some cases,

00:11:57.120 | mine would be such a case. They build it through books,

00:12:01.860 | but books don't give you direct access to readers in the same way that

00:12:05.700 | podcasts do not give you direct access to your listeners.

00:12:09.140 | So I ported the popularity of the books into building a popular

00:12:14.340 | blog.

00:12:15.020 | The blog is what gave me an audience that then traveled in part,

00:12:19.020 | at least to podcasting. So a lot of building a large audience,

00:12:23.980 | if that is one of your goals. And by the way,

00:12:26.140 | I don't think that is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. I would ask why, why,

00:12:29.940 | why, why at least a few times or so what,

00:12:34.580 | at the very least,

00:12:35.980 | then you need to choose a game you can win.

00:12:41.180 | And that requires some self-assessment. But for instance,

00:12:45.780 | if you decide you should do podcasting because everyone else is doing

00:12:48.740 | podcasting, you are going to be outlasted,

00:12:53.140 | outsmarted outmaneuvered by people who are really,

00:12:56.140 | really enthusiastic about the medium, about the format.

00:12:59.460 | They're just going to be better and they're going to last longer.

00:13:02.900 | There's this gigantic kind of elephant graveyard of three episode

00:13:08.180 | podcasts. So if you're likely to be a casualty,

00:13:12.460 | do something else, pick a different medium.

00:13:14.220 | And because I mentioned

00:13:19.500 | it, I think at the very head of the show, if I didn't, I should have,

00:13:23.460 | we had a number of technical difficulties in getting this show started.

00:13:28.220 | We had a number of false starts. We began,

00:13:31.220 | sorry to throw you guys under the bus, but you kind of failed us today.

00:13:35.100 | Zencaster had a number of issues.

00:13:37.300 | Then the plan was to jump to squad cast, but you have used riverside.fm.

00:13:42.540 | All of these platforms I have seen fail.

00:13:45.740 | None of them are perfect. And therefore on the technical side,

00:13:50.740 | whether you are in-person or remote,

00:13:52.940 | the expression that I first learned from friends in the military,

00:13:57.260 | two is one and one is none. If you have a single point of failure,

00:14:01.060 | you are going to be fucked at some point.

00:14:04.020 | You will have a disaster and it will be a mess. Always have backup options.

00:14:08.340 | So in the calendar invite or in the email that was sent to Chris and also in my

00:14:13.180 | calendar,

00:14:14.020 | there are at least two backup options and both of us are currently recording

00:14:19.260 | local backup audio using QuickTime audio.

00:14:23.700 | So those are a few things that I wanted to add.

00:14:28.300 | Please continue, Chris.

00:14:30.140 | So I do want to talk about gear, but I'll ask one question before,

00:14:33.620 | which is in 2017, you said, yeah,

00:14:35.580 | it's definitely not too late to start a podcast, but you know,

00:14:39.180 | that was a long time ago. 24% of people had listened to a podcast.

00:14:42.820 | Now it's closer to 60. There were a few hundred thousand podcasts.

00:14:46.140 | Now there's over 2 million.

00:14:47.420 | You still think we're early in the days of podcasting and there's lots of

00:14:51.580 | opportunity or is it too crowded and people should consider new mediums for

00:14:55.740 | content?

00:14:56.500 | I think it's still super early. I think it's still super, super early.

00:15:00.020 | There are some indicators or maybe

00:15:04.740 | proxies that you can use for that.

00:15:06.540 | The percentage of say terrestrial radio or satellite radio advertising

00:15:11.460 | dollars that have migrated to podcasting is still extremely low.

00:15:15.460 | I don't know what the percentage is, but it's very low.

00:15:18.860 | I would anticipate just based on the types of brands that you see represented

00:15:22.660 | and you can look at other types of media. So based on that alone,

00:15:27.460 | I think we are very much in the early days, super,

00:15:32.260 | super early days.

00:15:33.380 | And that said,

00:15:36.980 | we've seen a lot of changes over the last handful of years.

00:15:41.500 | If you look at the charts, say on Apple or elsewhere,

00:15:46.940 | if you look at Apple,

00:15:48.220 | the one person shops or small team shops

00:15:53.740 | like mine are fewer and fewer and far between

00:15:58.380 | where let's just say when I got started in whenever it was

00:16:03.140 | 2014, I think maybe a little bit earlier,

00:16:05.940 | you had Joe Rogan way up at the top. Of course you had Nerdist,

00:16:11.260 | you had Mark Maron,

00:16:12.260 | you had a handful of others who were constantly in the

00:16:16.980 | top 10 top 20 on what was then iTunes.

00:16:21.740 | What you see now is professional outfits.

00:16:25.500 | You see companies, you see organizations, WNYC,

00:16:30.380 | you see Pushkin, which I think does a really nice job.

00:16:34.100 | You see actual companies.

00:16:37.220 | You see also incumbents previous sort of terrestrial incumbents who are

00:16:42.180 | now investing dollars into podcasting.

00:16:44.300 | So there has never been more competition,

00:16:47.940 | but the analogy I might use is let's use

00:16:52.980 | startup investing, something that you and I are quite familiar with.

00:16:56.100 | So I had the very good luck of starting to

00:17:01.740 | do angel investing in 2008.

00:17:05.100 | Now this was perfect timing because there was a financial crisis,

00:17:09.940 | which meant all the fair weather entrepreneurs,

00:17:14.460 | founders, and investors kind of ran for the hills.

00:17:18.540 | And that left the diehards on the true believers,

00:17:22.740 | which meant that the playing field was very uncrowded and

00:17:28.380 | you could actually find really, really good startups.

00:17:31.460 | I believed all over the place in 2008, 2009,

00:17:34.580 | it was a great time to invest in 2000, say 15 or so.

00:17:39.500 | I decided to exit stage left,

00:17:41.700 | not because there weren't great companies, there were great companies,

00:17:46.180 | but it was a lot harder. The deal terms were harder.

00:17:49.180 | There was a huge influx of capital from all over the place,

00:17:53.700 | including China. Things were getting really weird for me. And I realized, okay,

00:17:58.780 | this just went from single deck blackjack where you can have a system as a solo

00:18:03.580 | player, as a team to multiple deck blackjack.

00:18:07.980 | And I don't have confidence using my own bankroll that I can win in this

00:18:11.860 | environment. So I took a long break. Similarly,

00:18:15.220 | you just have to be better now when I started in 2014.

00:18:18.860 | And if you had an existing audience that would travel with you,

00:18:22.220 | you could be in the top 20, 30, 40,

00:18:26.140 | 50 on then iTunes, now Apple with relative ease.

00:18:31.140 | And you can still do that.

00:18:32.660 | If you have a massive influx of subscribers over a short period of time,

00:18:36.380 | it could be a few days, could be a week, but you'll fall off.

00:18:38.620 | It's simply harder now.

00:18:41.180 | So there's all the more reason why you should have confidence that you're going

00:18:46.660 | to do this with some degree of dedication to the craft.

00:18:52.300 | Like you, Chris,

00:18:53.460 | you're taking the study of the craft and the practice and the deliberate training,

00:18:57.860 | so to speak very seriously. And you have to have, I think,

00:19:01.820 | good reasons for doing it. And a good reason could be, I enjoy doing it. Great.

00:19:06.140 | That's a good enough reason.

00:19:07.060 | You do not need to be on the charts to have a quote unquote successful podcast,

00:19:11.820 | but you have to ask yourself, why am I starting a podcast?

00:19:15.340 | Why do I want to start a podcast? So let me ask you that, Chris,

00:19:19.580 | why did you want to start a podcast? Why did you decide to start a podcast?

00:19:22.860 | I think two things happened at the same time.

00:19:26.140 | So one was I found myself constantly,

00:19:29.780 | whether I was with a group of people I knew or didn't know,

00:19:32.620 | kind of telling a story about a level of optimization that in the financial

00:19:37.620 | travel world that most people hadn't thought about. And I thought, man,

00:19:42.260 | I love telling that story to people.

00:19:45.420 | Could I tell that story at more scale?

00:19:47.300 | Cause it seems like it's happening to a person at a time.

00:19:49.500 | That was a piece of it. And then the bigger piece was I loved that game.

00:19:54.700 | And I knew that the only way I would get better at that game and go deeper at

00:19:58.100 | that game was to learn.

00:19:59.540 | And there are people out there that know much more about different types of ways

00:20:04.460 | to upgrade life, ways to optimize,

00:20:06.060 | ways to make more money or save more money or invest better. You know,

00:20:09.300 | I was going to find those people and have those conversations anyway,

00:20:11.460 | cause I was,

00:20:12.300 | but I knew that people loved hearing those stories in small groups.

00:20:17.020 | And I thought if I had a platform where I could have those conversations and

00:20:20.620 | share them,

00:20:21.460 | people just like I would see at a dinner table would enjoy listening to them on

00:20:26.780 | a run at home, driving in the car. And so I thought,

00:20:29.580 | I'm going to do this anyways. I love doing it.

00:20:32.260 | Why not see if other people really do want to listen at scale? And they did.

00:20:36.220 | Do you still feel like that is enough?

00:20:39.980 | The psychic gratification of sharing what you would have done otherwise,

00:20:44.580 | because the reality is it is kind of what you would have done otherwise,

00:20:49.580 | but the setup and the tech and the microphones and the post-production and

00:20:54.540 | everything else involved adds a layer of labor and

00:20:59.140 | complexity. So what on top of that, if anything,

00:21:02.900 | there doesn't need to be anything extra,

00:21:04.580 | but how has your thinking changed on what makes it worthwhile to continue or

00:21:09.580 | not?

00:21:10.420 | Well, what's interesting is let's take an episode I did with a writer,

00:21:14.260 | Morgan Housel, and it was all about the psychology of money.

00:21:17.420 | I'd read the book. I'd been fascinated by it.

00:21:20.740 | I had questions I wanted to ask Morgan.

00:21:23.380 | I could probably just reach out and say, Hey,

00:21:25.300 | I'm just a person and I want to learn more about what you wrote. Can we talk?

00:21:29.220 | But I'm guessing I would have had better success, which I did saying, Hey,

00:21:33.740 | I have this podcast. I want to talk.

00:21:35.140 | I want to ask you those questions and share that with my audience.

00:21:37.620 | And so having the podcast lets you level up.

00:21:41.340 | I believe the people you can have those conversations with,

00:21:44.740 | because there's a reason it gives a reason to do that.

00:21:47.820 | And then as the audience grows, it gives a second reason.

00:21:50.060 | So one is you could just reach out and say, can we do a phone call, but you know,

00:21:54.300 | there's at least a reason. And then as the audience grows, there's more.

00:21:56.540 | And that I think is worth the trade-off of the amount of work you have to put

00:22:01.780 | into it. But, you know, you mentioned gear, there's a world where,

00:22:06.020 | and I believe you can buy a microphone for under a hundred dollars and

00:22:10.820 | use a pair of headphones you already own and keep it pretty simple.

00:22:14.020 | And I think to your, your original post and what we talked about earlier,

00:22:18.300 | the more simple you make it,

00:22:20.060 | the easier it will be to keep going and the more authentic it will

00:22:25.140 | be, which, you know,

00:22:25.900 | you may think you want to say something because it's what the audience wants to

00:22:28.740 | hear. And there's this weird thing where it's actually just ask what you want.

00:22:32.660 | And most people are more engaged by your engagement with a conversation than if

00:22:37.540 | you ask a question they want to hear, but you're bored having that conversation.

00:22:40.740 | Yeah, absolutely. And, and just to give people a sense right now,

00:22:45.860 | I'm using what I use more or less all of the time

00:22:50.140 | for remote recording and I remotely record even pre COVID

00:22:55.220 | probably 80, 90% of my interviews.

00:22:59.180 | It allows you to get better guests by the way, generally speaking,

00:23:04.180 | unless you're the undisputed King of podcasts, like Joe Rogan,

00:23:08.180 | then you can insist on in-person visits,

00:23:11.220 | but very few podcasters have that leverage and you will sacrifice some guests

00:23:15.380 | by having those conditions. So I do everything remotely.

00:23:18.700 | It makes my life easier as well. I'm in a farmhouse right now.

00:23:21.980 | I've recorded dozens of podcasts here and I have a Logitech

00:23:26.820 | Brio camera, which I do not use all of the time.

00:23:29.900 | I very frequently do audio only.

00:23:31.980 | We could talk about why I don't do more video.

00:23:34.860 | I have an audio technica ATR 2100 X,

00:23:40.860 | one of the more recent, it might be a 2,500, but,

00:23:44.340 | and you have that exact microphone in front of you.

00:23:46.660 | This is probably, what would you say? An $80, 80 to a hundred dollar microphone

00:23:51.140 | that connects to my MacBook pro.

00:23:53.300 | And then I'm using AirPods for in-ear

00:23:58.060 | listening. That's it.

00:23:59.900 | That is the sum total of hardware that I am using.

00:24:03.460 | And we're currently recording on riverside.fm, which you use.

00:24:07.860 | I typically use Zencastr and Squadcast,

00:24:11.620 | but all of these things break. So have backup.

00:24:15.700 | And if this didn't work,

00:24:17.140 | I also have a conference line with no

00:24:22.700 | pin that can be set to record.

00:24:25.500 | So if my computer broke,

00:24:27.380 | I could call Chris on my cell phone and we could record the

00:24:32.540 | conversation.

00:24:33.380 | I have backups upon backups upon backups and trust me at some point,

00:24:38.220 | you're going to need it.

00:24:40.380 | Is there a point at which you would just reschedule instead of,

00:24:43.660 | or how do you think about that? You know,

00:24:45.620 | the quality of a conference bridge being maybe not worth doing now

00:24:50.580 | and postponing to when your computer worked again.

00:24:53.180 | I will reschedule if the connection is

00:24:58.380 | really bad or if the audio on the opposite end is very

00:25:03.220 | poor.

00:25:04.060 | And to try to minimize the likelihood of the audio

00:25:10.340 | being poor on the other end,

00:25:12.060 | we ship every guest a microphone,

00:25:16.500 | unless they already have a really polished setup.

00:25:20.700 | We will use Amazon prime to buy an audio technica,

00:25:24.860 | 2100 mic and ship it to them.

00:25:26.900 | And it's very easy to do it's 80 to a hundred bucks.

00:25:31.940 | And that may not make any sense in the beginning or be feasible in the

00:25:36.700 | beginning.

00:25:37.100 | But right now for the type of operation that I run and very quickly,

00:25:41.260 | the cost of rescheduling is more to me than 80 to a hundred dollars.

00:25:46.700 | However, you can have a great mic and a really terrible room.

00:25:51.500 | So if someone's in a room with lots of metal, lots of glass,

00:25:54.260 | you could have a very bouncy room, even with a decent mic.

00:25:59.460 | So there are other technical tricks that are not really tricks,

00:26:04.380 | but you could have a mediocre mic in a room with lots of carpet and drapes,

00:26:08.860 | and you're going to probably have better sound than a really nice mic in some

00:26:13.100 | highly modern metallic glass bouncy room.

00:26:17.140 | If you end up in that type of environment,

00:26:19.380 | there are tricks you can use like putting pillows in the corners of the room.

00:26:23.780 | That's what I learned from Edward Norton.

00:26:25.340 | Actually he was in a really bouncy room and he said, hold on,

00:26:27.900 | I know how to fix this. And he fixed it. I was like, wow, that's genius.

00:26:30.900 | So you do get better at these things over time,

00:26:33.820 | but I very rarely reschedule unless one of us is sick or

00:26:38.940 | the sound quality is absolutely abysmal.

00:26:42.140 | But a bridge line recording is not going to

00:26:47.660 | give you Carnegie hall symphony quality fidelity,

00:26:52.300 | but nobody really cares is what I've realized. I don't use equalizers.

00:26:57.060 | I don't use any of these external devices that one might

00:27:01.980 | think are necessary. Yes, they can improve quality sometimes,

00:27:06.060 | but as Morgan Spurlock said to me on this podcast,

00:27:11.420 | once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.

00:27:14.540 | And I prefer to have the fewest number of moving pieces possible.

00:27:19.220 | When I record in person, just to cover that,

00:27:21.420 | I use the zoom H six recording device with XLR

00:27:26.780 | cables and generally SM 58 stage microphones,

00:27:31.780 | which are sure microphones. There are the oldest microphones you can imagine.

00:27:35.340 | Yes. So you have the H six,

00:27:36.820 | you could take the SM 58 mic and probably throw it against a brick

00:27:42.060 | wall and it would be fine. That's my guess.

00:27:43.980 | And I can throw all of that gear into a backpack.

00:27:47.500 | I can travel with my entire podcast studio. So to speak,

00:27:51.740 | it's been good enough for between 600 and 700 episodes.

00:27:56.380 | And I don't have any plans to change. So that is the gear.

00:28:00.860 | I use a similar setup. And I would say, I don't know if you,

00:28:05.140 | you know, a specific one, you could go listen to the episodes I've done.

00:28:08.780 | And one of them, someone had no headphones, no microphone.

00:28:12.420 | We were just using a Mac book.

00:28:13.780 | And I'd be shocked if someone could actually that isn't an audio engineer could

00:28:17.860 | go back and pick out which one it is.

00:28:19.380 | Pro tip that we ended up using earlier in this conversation,

00:28:23.020 | which I picked up from Kevin Rose,

00:28:24.380 | actually who has a lot of experience with this kind of thing is if you're doing

00:28:27.540 | a remote recording and you ask someone to check their source to

00:28:32.380 | make sure the inputs and outputs are set properly,

00:28:34.820 | they might say my mic is selected, but if it sounds funny to you,

00:28:38.580 | ask them to tap the mic. If they tap the mic and you don't hear that,

00:28:42.460 | right. That, that kind of punchy tapping sound,

00:28:48.420 | then it means it is not selected.

00:28:50.780 | It's probably their headset or the built-in microphone on the

00:28:55.260 | laptop.

00:28:56.020 | So that's an easy way to test to see if the proper external mic

00:29:00.180 | is selected. All right, Chris, what else should we cover?

00:29:04.780 | So I think we covered gear a lot. One thing you mentioned was video early on.

00:29:09.420 | Your advice to people was don't use video. It makes it easier for guests.

00:29:14.420 | You can look at your notes. You said that's evolved a little bit.

00:29:17.980 | We're recording video today. How do you think about that differently now?

00:29:21.020 | Or do you think about it differently in a way that wouldn't apply to someone

00:29:24.220 | else?

00:29:25.060 | I record video now if someone wants to record.

00:29:29.860 | And if I think it will improve the rapport in some fashion,

00:29:34.740 | I still frequently record without video because I

00:29:40.140 | like to have lots of notes. I do quite a bit of homework.

00:29:44.660 | My team does quite a bit of homework for each guest.

00:29:47.180 | And I like to have my notes in front of me.

00:29:49.820 | And it sometimes can be very distracting if you're having a conversation with

00:29:53.820 | someone on video and you're looking off screen like Rain Man.

00:29:56.660 | I also like the ability to set,

00:30:01.260 | and I always set both the laptop and my iPhone to do not disturb because

00:30:06.260 | you might just receive a FaceTime audio call and that could mess up your

00:30:10.100 | interview. It does happen. I've seen it. I've experienced it. It's not fun.

00:30:14.180 | So do not disturb, do not disturb.

00:30:16.100 | But with do not disturb on my iPhone,

00:30:19.500 | if I'm not using video,

00:30:22.100 | you could also take yourself off video temporarily to do this,

00:30:26.780 | or you could tell the guest in advance that if you check your iPhone,

00:30:30.540 | you're not checking email, you're Googling something.

00:30:32.900 | What will sometimes happen is a guest will say, Oh, well,

00:30:35.620 | there's a book by so-and-so it's called this. I can't remember the author name.

00:30:40.180 | You can look that up.

00:30:41.020 | Or they will say there are three people who are really good at X,

00:30:46.060 | Y, and Z. They'll name two. And then they'll say the second person.

00:30:48.940 | I think their first name is Laura or Brian,

00:30:52.140 | and you can look it up so you don't have to deal with it in post-production or

00:30:55.980 | put it in the show notes.

00:30:56.860 | You can look it up on an iPhone and no one who is listening will hear you tap

00:31:00.900 | the iPhone, but they will very often hear you tap a laptop.

00:31:05.540 | So I use my phone in that way.

00:31:07.980 | Now you could have a production assistant or a producer or an engineer or

00:31:12.300 | someone like that, who would do this for you, which is what Joe Rogan does.

00:31:15.780 | But I don't do that. I have a, I have a smaller team, by the way,

00:31:19.860 | it works spectacularly well. Now, speaking of Joe,

00:31:22.740 | so Joe Rogan is fluent in video.

00:31:26.660 | He is absolutely adept and expert and

00:31:31.620 | comfortable being in front of the cameras and making really good use of

00:31:36.060 | cameras. I think one of the reasons, not the only reason,

00:31:39.580 | but one of the major reasons that Joe has become as big as he has

00:31:44.260 | is his use of YouTube.

00:31:45.900 | I don't know if it's still the second largest search engine in the world,

00:31:48.580 | but it is a, an enormous traffic driver,

00:31:52.060 | particularly if you take not just your long form videos and put them

00:31:57.380 | online, but create clips as he has through Jerry clips and so on.

00:32:02.060 | And if you are bringing on guests who are going to be

00:32:07.180 | capitalizing on news or who are part of the news themselves,

00:32:11.420 | then people will be searching for these temporarily

00:32:16.500 | relevant topics, whether it's someone who got fired,

00:32:19.300 | someone who got in trouble, someone who made a big decision,

00:32:21.220 | a CEO who just found themselves in the news. If you do that,

00:32:25.780 | you can drive a lot of traffic.

00:32:27.900 | I want to produce for the most part

00:32:33.220 | evergreen episodes that will have very fat tails.

00:32:36.500 | They get listened to for years and years and years and don't lose their

00:32:39.380 | relevance.

00:32:40.220 | That's important to me and I don't want to

00:32:45.420 | immerse myself in the news any more than absolutely necessary.

00:32:48.620 | So I don't do that.

00:32:49.500 | I also don't think that I am as good on video as Joe.

00:32:54.380 | He has a studio. He has a visually interesting environment. He is funny.

00:32:58.420 | He's a comedian. He's an entertainer, very smart entertainer,

00:33:02.460 | but he's a very, very, very skilled entertainer. And it makes sense.

00:33:06.740 | And they have just more production capacity.

00:33:12.180 | They've invested more in making that a core component of what they do.

00:33:16.540 | I just am not interested enough.

00:33:21.500 | Could I make my show bigger? Would it be bigger if I tried to do all of that?

00:33:25.340 | I think it would be,

00:33:26.420 | but this is an example of knowing where you are strong,

00:33:31.340 | knowing where you are perhaps not as strong and also asking yourself,

00:33:36.260 | why am I doing this? Does my show,

00:33:39.740 | does the Tim Ferriss show need to be two times bigger, three times bigger,

00:33:42.820 | 10 times bigger?

00:33:43.660 | I can't come up with a really compelling reason for why that's the case.

00:33:48.260 | Would I like it to grow? Yes.

00:33:50.500 | Do I need it to grow? Even if it involves doing things I dislike? No,

00:33:55.220 | that would be so stupid. It would be so stupid. And I've made that mistake.

00:33:58.820 | You're at a scale now that your show can afford the, you know,

00:34:03.340 | person to help you prep for guests and that kind of stuff.

00:34:05.780 | What do you think about people earlier?

00:34:07.740 | I'm at a place right now where I've recorded the video of a lot of my

00:34:11.260 | interviews, but I haven't done anything with it yet.

00:34:14.300 | And I know it could help grow the show and the show couldn't monetize to support

00:34:19.180 | it. So growth is kind of a factor.

00:34:21.540 | It plays into the longevity of the show because it takes time.

00:34:26.340 | And yes, I would do it for free, but you got bills, you got, you know,

00:34:30.180 | people have things they have to do. So if they want to do it more,

00:34:32.940 | it does need to grow.

00:34:33.940 | Do you think it would be different if your show was smaller and it couldn't

00:34:38.820 | afford all of those things?

00:34:40.380 | Yeah. Well, let me, let me dig into a bunch of pieces of what you just

00:34:45.420 | said and ask some follow-up questions.

00:34:47.460 | So how different would my operation look if I were just getting

00:34:52.060 | started? Well, let's rewind the clock.

00:34:53.820 | I can tell you exactly what I did when I got started.

00:34:56.180 | I wanted to know how to do everything and that's part of my nature,

00:35:00.500 | but it's also because I wanted to try to create as elegant an

00:35:05.100 | operation as possible for myself.

00:35:07.940 | Elegant is not, does not have the same definition.

00:35:10.580 | It doesn't have the same puzzle pieces for everyone.

00:35:13.220 | So I not only recorded everything myself, I edited everything myself.

00:35:18.380 | I published everything myself.

00:35:20.660 | I uploaded the file to hosting services and so

00:35:25.540 | on and so forth. So in the very early days,

00:35:28.820 | I didn't have someone to help me with research.

00:35:31.540 | I still appreciate and value having someone to help me with

00:35:36.580 | research. But if for whatever reason that weren't possible,

00:35:39.620 | I have full confidence that I could do that myself.

00:35:43.380 | But let's, let's take a look at something you said, and that is,

00:35:47.300 | and it comes back to this question I had earlier of,

00:35:50.660 | is the podcast still worth it? Right. To get to episode 50, episode 100 for you,

00:35:56.260 | what does the podcast need to be for it to be

00:36:01.380 | worth doing? Well worth doing, easily worth doing, right? And so you said,

00:36:05.300 | we got bills, shit, got bills to pay, got to keep this ship afloat.

00:36:10.500 | Now I don't have a perfect window into all of your personal finances,

00:36:14.540 | but I have on some reasonable authority,

00:36:17.180 | sufficient belief that you could probably cover your podcasting bills.

00:36:22.300 | And I know the costs involved with a lot of podcasting without having to monetize

00:36:26.980 | the show. So it would be nice to monetize the show,

00:36:31.340 | but you could make that money in some other way.

00:36:35.660 | So let me jump to a point about monetizing that I mentioned,

00:36:40.140 | I believe in that 2016 article, and probably again,

00:36:43.780 | with Rolf Potts on Deviate. And that is in the beginning,

00:36:46.980 | I did not focus on monetization. Now it's very easy for someone to say, well,

00:36:52.060 | you already had money. Therefore, your advice doesn't apply to me.

00:36:56.500 | Your experience doesn't apply to me.

00:36:57.940 | I would discourage you from looking at it with that lens, you meaning listener,

00:37:02.460 | because you can learn something from everyone.

00:37:06.220 | And even if their decisions are not the decisions you would make,

00:37:09.980 | it's helpful to learn how more experienced people have thought about it.

00:37:14.060 | So the way they go about making decisions,

00:37:16.980 | I felt, especially since I was doing the editing and so on myself,

00:37:21.380 | that any focus on monetization,

00:37:25.460 | even if you think it's only going to be 5% of your time,

00:37:29.340 | and we can come back to sort of preoccupation versus active time

00:37:34.060 | on something.

00:37:34.900 | I didn't want anything to distract from my focus on improving my

00:37:40.620 | ability to prepare an interview and edit.

00:37:43.380 | I wanted to focus on the craft, the product, and that was it.

00:37:48.300 | That was to be my, my real soul focus, which the editing helps with,

00:37:53.260 | by the way, the editing forces you to listen to everything really carefully,

00:37:57.540 | not saying everyone should edit their own stuff.

00:37:59.300 | I no longer edit my own episodes,

00:38:01.860 | but we do get everything transcribed and we go through and we look at ways to

00:38:05.860 | clean up and tighten and possibly cut or rearrange.

00:38:08.900 | We do that with a lot of episodes, not all of them.

00:38:11.140 | So I didn't focus on or pay attention to monetizing for the first,

00:38:16.260 | I don't know, I'd have to go back and somebody could probably confirm this,

00:38:19.900 | but who knows 60, 70, a hundred episodes. I'm not even sure.

00:38:23.820 | By that point,

00:38:25.060 | the downloads were such that I had a

00:38:28.820 | broader spectrum of possible sponsors to choose from.

00:38:33.340 | And that felt better to me than taking whatever came over the transom

00:38:38.580 | early. However, I believe Chris,

00:38:41.140 | one of your questions that you had for me was along the lines of,

00:38:44.860 | should I say no to things that come over the transom?

00:38:48.140 | So let me take a step back and I will answer that,

00:38:51.820 | but how are you thinking about monetizing? Because it is very easy.

00:38:55.460 | And I'm not saying this to you, Chris, specifically,

00:38:57.700 | but for people to get pulled away

00:39:01.820 | from the creative by the siren song,

00:39:04.780 | the mesmerizing nature of monetizing,

00:39:09.060 | because every time you go on Twitter, there's something trending. That's like,

00:39:12.060 | here's how much top influencers get paid on Instagram. And you're like, what?

00:39:16.260 | A hundred thousand dollars a post. That's crazy.

00:39:18.740 | I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a post. And then, oh boy,

00:39:21.340 | then you're lost. So how are you thinking about monetizing right now?

00:39:24.940 | And I should say, Chris is smart. You're smart with your money.

00:39:27.900 | You are very deliberate and you've done a lot of homework.

00:39:30.540 | You're a student of personal finance and money,

00:39:34.700 | but how are you thinking about monetizing and what to do or not do with it?

00:39:38.300 | Yeah. So I think I took a similar approach to you and it was maybe for a

00:39:43.180 | slightly, if your reason was to hone the craft,

00:39:46.300 | mine was to prove out the longevity.

00:39:48.780 | So going to spend any time monetizing your podcast before you

00:39:53.380 | realize this is something that I could do for a long time,

00:39:56.740 | which you will never know until you do it for at least you did six.

00:40:01.340 | For me, it probably took five or 10, maybe 10 episodes. Until that point,

00:40:06.300 | it would have been a complete waste of time to think about monetizing because I

00:40:09.540 | didn't know if I was going to do this.

00:40:10.980 | And the amount of money you're going to make on a 10 episode podcast is almost

00:40:14.220 | nothing. So I said,

00:40:16.300 | let's make sure this is something I could do forever before I think about it.

00:40:20.180 | Then I thought, okay,

00:40:22.660 | let's also make sure that the amount of money it would generate is even worth

00:40:27.500 | the effort. Sponsors have reached out and said, oh,

00:40:30.300 | we want to advertise on two episodes. It's like, okay, but like,

00:40:33.700 | if I'm going to sell, you know, two sponsors on a show, two episodes at a time,

00:40:38.260 | we're talking 50 calls a year to sponsors.

00:40:42.700 | And that's just the ones that say, yes. So maybe you're, you're doing,

00:40:45.020 | you know, 200 calls to try to line sponsors up.

00:40:47.700 | That just seemed like a distraction for how much it would make.

00:40:51.220 | So I had a similar kind of thought,

00:40:53.580 | which is get to a point in time where the amount of money you'd make for the

00:40:57.300 | amount of work it would take to bring that money in is worth it.

00:41:00.020 | And the only deviation from that was when people called outreach and say, hey,

00:41:04.580 | can we just do this? And it's like, well, now it's no longer work.

00:41:08.340 | But even then I've since decided to say no,

00:41:11.620 | not because I think it would ruin the show,

00:41:13.740 | but just because I have a list of things that I prioritize. And for me,

00:41:18.300 | it's making the content great and finding the people to bring on.

00:41:22.100 | If I spend time on anything else,

00:41:23.580 | it takes away from that and that is not yet on autopilot.

00:41:26.820 | And I think ultimately that's all that really matters.

00:41:29.100 | Like your show's not going to be good if it's not something people enjoy

00:41:33.220 | listening to,

00:41:33.860 | which is usually a factor of who's talking and how much those people have thought

00:41:38.020 | about what they're going to say or,

00:41:39.300 | or at least prepared to have a good conversation.

00:41:41.820 | Yeah. I think that makes a whole lot of sense.

00:41:45.540 | A couple of thoughts also on monetizing,

00:41:48.860 | figure out what would be amazing from a

00:41:54.020 | monetizing perspective.

00:41:56.060 | And I'm very deliberately not saying sponsorship or advertising perspective

00:42:00.980 | because there are many different ways to convert a podcast

00:42:05.860 | into shouldn't say convert as a side effect of doing an

00:42:10.500 | awesome podcast to produce income.

00:42:13.620 | Let's just say you are a high priced consultant and you

00:42:18.980 | don't have any advertising,

00:42:20.140 | but you generate clients from the podcast.

00:42:24.980 | That would be a somewhat straightforward example.

00:42:28.380 | You could have as many people do, especially in the early days,

00:42:33.340 | affiliate relationships,

00:42:34.740 | very often the most lucrative of which are going to be with certain types of

00:42:39.540 | products, right? Domain services, hosting, et cetera.

00:42:42.460 | They have a very high stickiness with their

00:42:46.420 | customers, high level of stickiness, low churn rate,

00:42:49.500 | which means high lifetime value.

00:42:51.820 | They're willing to pay you quite a bit upfront, but is that what you want?

00:42:56.180 | Are those the products, services, et cetera,

00:42:59.140 | that you want to be endorsing? Maybe, maybe not.

00:43:03.580 | There are many different ways to approach this many different ways to

00:43:08.860 | generate income.

00:43:10.260 | Perhaps you have a newsletter that is a paid newsletter and

00:43:15.060 | people sign up for that.

00:43:16.820 | Perhaps you have a different version of the podcast,

00:43:19.940 | or you have a membership of some sort outside of newsletters.

00:43:24.060 | Maybe people pay for the show notes.

00:43:26.460 | I mean, these are all real examples that I've seen for myself.

00:43:30.660 | I decided that sponsorship was the easiest.

00:43:34.220 | I've done some experiments with membership and they all just entailed more

00:43:38.940 | headache for me.

00:43:40.100 | And I felt ultimately less value all around than

00:43:44.380 | sponsorships, assuming in my case that I am using or

00:43:49.260 | testing everything personally,

00:43:51.580 | that is where the sponsorships are somewhat time

00:43:56.300 | consuming for me. But I don't,

00:43:58.900 | I don't mind it because I actually use like, if you walked around my house,

00:44:02.100 | you would recognize all sorts of stuff from my sponsors.

00:44:05.580 | And I don't just have them because they're sponsors.

00:44:08.340 | Like I have them because they are good products or services.

00:44:10.660 | And let me give a couple of examples of

00:44:15.500 | questioning best practices or standard operating procedure

00:44:21.700 | with sponsors.

00:44:23.740 | And this may help people to simplify their approach.

00:44:27.540 | So I did not ask myself,

00:44:29.460 | how can I make as much money with sponsors through the podcast?

00:44:35.740 | Because there are no constraints on that.

00:44:38.420 | You're not applying constraints in such a way to ensure that your

00:44:43.300 | life does not become a miserable existence of just being a

00:44:47.980 | pinata for every ask and request of dozens of

00:44:52.420 | sponsors, right? As it might be in the example that you gave,

00:44:55.820 | that could be a huge pain in the ass.

00:44:57.460 | So what constraints could you apply to ensure that it does not become a

00:45:02.980 | monster you have to feed or a huge distraction?

00:45:05.580 | A very simple constraint that I applied was a,

00:45:09.780 | we're going to have our own insertion order document that is going to be

00:45:14.140 | non-negotiable and everyone is going to prepay for their spots.

00:45:18.180 | We will not have any terms. We're not going to have accounts receivable.

00:45:22.060 | We're not going to chase people for payment.

00:45:23.980 | Everybody is going to pay up front.

00:45:25.820 | And what do you think the response was from sponsors?

00:45:30.620 | Initially, the response was, what the fuck are you talking about?

00:45:34.460 | We get terms from everyone. That's how this is done. And I said, that's fine.

00:45:39.060 | We don't have to work together.

00:45:42.300 | This is just what allows me and my tiny team to remain sane.

00:45:45.380 | So if it's not worth it, it's not worth it. I totally understand.

00:45:49.180 | Let me get back to work and make the podcast so good that there

00:45:54.140 | will be at least a few sponsors who are going to say, you know what, fuck it.

00:45:57.780 | We will pay you up front.

00:45:59.020 | And that is something we have stuck to.

00:46:03.340 | And I cannot tell you how much that has simplified our lives and our

00:46:08.100 | operations. It also acts as a litmus test for

00:46:12.980 | commitment from sponsors, because as you noted,

00:46:17.020 | to fill, let's just say in your case, right,

00:46:21.180 | 50 different sponsors at two spots a piece.

00:46:25.380 | If you have a high churn rate,

00:46:27.140 | meaning a lot of those people take two episodes and then split and never come

00:46:30.580 | back, you're just going to have to do that again next year. That's exhausting.

00:46:35.140 | Right? So I want to make sure there's a high level of commitment,

00:46:38.380 | but there's also a high level of vetting on my side,

00:46:43.060 | therefore a high probability that the product

00:46:48.460 | and the company will do really,

00:46:50.500 | really well in the podcast because I don't want them to do two or three spots.

00:46:54.140 | And we do insist on a test of multiple spots.

00:46:57.460 | Not sure if it's two right now, it might be three.

00:46:59.580 | And my podcast is expensive, very, very, very expensive. I mean,

00:47:02.900 | it's a premium podcast.

00:47:04.100 | I want them to spend millions of dollars on the podcast over a long period of

00:47:09.380 | time.

00:47:10.220 | So everything is geared towards that because it's,

00:47:14.460 | it just simplifies everything for everyone.

00:47:16.660 | But the point I wanted to make is question best practices.

00:47:20.500 | And if you are not in a position to question best practices,

00:47:23.700 | your product isn't good enough,

00:47:25.860 | or you just don't have enough leverage for some reason.

00:47:28.940 | And you should take a very close look at those reasons,

00:47:31.340 | but it doesn't hurt to ask for instance,

00:47:33.660 | what does every almost 99% of authors out there do?

00:47:39.020 | They publish a book in hardcover six to nine months later,

00:47:43.180 | the book comes out in paperback and they hit the press junket once again.

00:47:48.220 | And they go on tour to announce the launch of paperback.

00:47:51.740 | None of my books have ever gone to paperback. Why is that Tim Ferriss?

00:47:56.740 | I'll tell you it's because, and the numbers vary,

00:48:00.660 | but not by that much.

00:48:01.860 | Let's say that you're getting a 12% royalty on your hardcover book.

00:48:07.500 | Paperback royalties is probably going to be 6%, six and a half percent.

00:48:13.860 | So broadly speaking,

00:48:16.340 | paperback royalties are you will get paid 50% of what you're currently earning

00:48:21.500 | per book by going to paperback. What does that mean?

00:48:26.660 | That means you have to sell twice as many books to make the same amount of

00:48:31.420 | money. I'm skipping over some specifics here,

00:48:35.460 | but more or less you have to sell twice as many books to make what you are

00:48:39.420 | making right now. What is the benefit to the reader of this? Well,

00:48:44.660 | we live in a world with audio with Kindle

00:48:48.660 | and the benefit to the customer.

00:48:52.540 | We also have libraries where you can get e-format for free oftentimes.

00:48:57.260 | And actually I learned of a very cool,

00:48:59.460 | I think it was a Chrome extension on your podcast. In fact, about this,

00:49:02.700 | the benefit to the consumer used to be they could save whatever it might be,

00:49:08.060 | $5 on cover price with Amazon,

00:49:12.300 | which is generally selling it almost, I mean,

00:49:14.500 | often close to wholesale prices, that benefit just no longer exists.

00:49:19.260 | So for a marginal to non-existent benefit to the end reader,

00:49:23.300 | you are going to voluntarily cut your royalties in half,

00:49:27.020 | which means you have to sell twice as many books to earn the same amount per

00:49:31.500 | year. That made no sense to me. So I've never done it.

00:49:35.540 | And to their credit, my publishers early on,

00:49:39.180 | we're open to this logic for staying in hardcover.

00:49:45.700 | And it worked out really, really well.

00:49:47.420 | I did not have a lot of leverage in the beginning, right?

00:49:49.900 | I did not have sort of Tim Ferriss and Mara Key Lights as people,

00:49:53.780 | or some people perceive it today. I simply laid out the logic, right?

00:49:58.340 | So really question what you have to do,

00:50:01.620 | because sometimes those best practices make no sense whatsoever.

00:50:04.980 | It seems like with every business,

00:50:08.420 | you get to a certain size and the cracks start to emerge.

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00:53:11.540 | We've talked about getting ready and all of that, but I'm curious.

00:53:15.980 | I think the bulk of what goes into podcasting is finding guests,

00:53:20.700 | prepping for the conversation and having the conversation.

00:53:23.380 | And I'll tell everyone, even if you don't have a podcast,

00:53:28.300 | thinking about how to find interesting people and to have a better,

00:53:31.260 | more informative, exciting conversation is probably valuable just in life.

00:53:35.580 | I mean,

00:53:36.180 | you said the reason you got started and if you never continued,

00:53:39.460 | you will have at least learned the skill that was really valuable.

00:53:41.780 | So I'll start with finding people.

00:53:44.620 | When you first wrote your original post,

00:53:48.180 | there wasn't that much about finding people, you know,

00:53:51.620 | look for people you're interested in.

00:53:53.100 | The one thing that you said,

00:53:55.060 | maybe not in that post that I thought was really interesting was don't put as

00:53:59.220 | much value as you think on how big of a name they are.

00:54:02.980 | That maybe half of your top episodes are people that your listeners had never

00:54:07.180 | heard of before.

00:54:08.020 | And so it just keeps coming back to content is really,

00:54:13.060 | really important.

00:54:13.900 | And people like good content more than they like bad content with a fancy name.

00:54:18.260 | I can attest to some of the episodes where I thought people had the smallest

00:54:22.740 | names that no one had ever heard of have far outperformed conversations I've had

00:54:27.380 | with like Ramit Sethi, who, you know, we had a great conversation and,

00:54:30.740 | and lots of people know his name.

00:54:32.060 | And that is something that I don't think I thought going in would ever be true.

00:54:35.620 | Yes.

00:54:36.900 | Why yes, let's jump in.

00:54:41.020 | So this comes back to the initial question of why do

00:54:45.900 | you want to do a podcast and maybe it should be framed differently.

00:54:50.980 | What is so compelling about this that you're going to want to do a

00:54:55.300 | hundred episodes of this podcast? Maybe that's the question.

00:54:58.500 | What is so compelling about this,

00:55:00.020 | that you will be so thrilled about doing a hundred episodes of this podcast

00:55:04.700 | that you would pay, not get paid, but you would pay to do this podcast?

00:55:09.820 | Chances are the answer is not banging your head against a

00:55:15.020 | wall,

00:55:15.860 | trying to get through a phalanx of publicists and lawyers and managers

00:55:21.420 | and getting the runaround from like Hollywood entourage for a

00:55:26.180 | year to get a guest. Chances are, you wouldn't pay to do that.

00:55:30.020 | If you chase famous people, you are going to do that just to be clear.

00:55:36.180 | So maybe you should focus on doing something that

00:55:41.060 | really satisfies you. And maybe in some niche,

00:55:44.900 | God knows where some way, somehow it's so fucking good

00:55:50.460 | that like a hundred people who might know famous people are like, wow,

00:55:54.380 | this is really smart. That's not guaranteed, but it's a possibility.

00:55:58.060 | So for me,

00:56:01.100 | the answer is follow your interests

00:56:04.980 | and make it easy in the beginning. So in the first,

00:56:09.460 | I want to say five to 10, maybe 20 or 30 episodes,

00:56:13.620 | I only interviewed people I knew quite well because I

00:56:18.780 | didn't need the nerves of interviewing a stranger

00:56:23.580 | to add to what was already somewhat challenging. Does that make sense?

00:56:28.620 | And I remember, I think it was Ed Catmull,

00:56:31.660 | the former president of Pixar,

00:56:34.260 | who was the first person I'd ever interviewed who I

00:56:39.100 | hadn't had a conversation with prior to the actual interview.

00:56:42.420 | And it was nerve wracking ended up being a really fun

00:56:48.260 | interview, but it was very stressful for me. Why?

00:56:52.180 | I couldn't really pinpoint because I talked to strangers all the time.

00:56:55.900 | And that's certainly true with the books, but it felt different.

00:57:01.180 | So make it as easy as possible in the beginning,

00:57:05.300 | stack the deck so that you can win in the beginning.

00:57:08.020 | And for me, that meant doing it with friends.

00:57:10.180 | In terms of finding guests,

00:57:14.220 | there are as many ways as you could imagine,

00:57:18.860 | and probably more than you could imagine,

00:57:21.700 | but the focus of the show will direct how you search.

00:57:26.820 | So in my case, the Tim Ferriss show

00:57:30.660 | has always been about world-class performers in different

00:57:36.220 | disciplines and trying to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,

00:57:40.300 | et cetera,

00:57:40.860 | that make them tick or that they think might contribute to making them good at

00:57:45.380 | what they do. Frameworks, decisions,

00:57:49.540 | thought process, all of that. Turns out that's very, very broad.

00:57:53.700 | So I have some people on the docket, like there's a,

00:57:56.180 | I think it's a violin assessor,

00:58:00.060 | like evaluator,

00:58:01.380 | someone who assesses and rehabilitates, you know,

00:58:05.900 | multi-million dollar violins.

00:58:08.820 | I can tell you with great confidence that that does not have a large

00:58:13.700 | built-in audience,

00:58:14.940 | but it's interesting to me.

00:58:19.820 | And I also think about which guests

00:58:24.220 | will care enough to bring their A game.

00:58:27.940 | It doesn't matter how famous your guest is.

00:58:31.380 | It doesn't matter how good your guest is. If they don't bring their A game,

00:58:36.380 | Chris, one of the things you asked me,

00:58:38.460 | if I'd be willing to do is listen to a few episodes,

00:58:40.620 | your podcast and provide feedback.

00:58:42.060 | And the first episode I listened to is actually the first episode you published,

00:58:47.100 | which I learned later was the fifth that you'd recorded, which is smart on pro

00:58:52.300 | travel hacks with, is it Lee Rowan? Is that how you say the last name? Yeah.

00:58:55.740 | Rowan and, and Lee

00:58:58.340 | is amazing. Lee is like Sam Harris.

00:59:02.820 | If he didn't have a teleprompter or something that man speaks and finished

00:59:06.860 | prose, it's ridiculous. Right?

00:59:08.980 | So Lee is one of those guests who clearly brought his

00:59:13.620 | A game.

00:59:14.460 | And I thought you did a very good job in the interview.

00:59:18.340 | And it's an area where you have a lot of domain expertise,

00:59:20.660 | but honestly you could have been making like zoo animal noises and he could have

00:59:25.580 | just run. And it would have been an incredible interview slash monologue.

00:59:30.500 | Do you know what I mean? If you were just like,

00:59:32.020 | I'm going to give you words that I pull out of this hat and

00:59:37.900 | I want you to riff for five minutes. And you're like, uh, arthropod, uh,

00:59:43.380 | tax optimization, uh, grizzly bears.

00:59:47.540 | Like I'm sure it would have been a really fascinating conversation because Lee

00:59:51.220 | is just that good. You know what I mean? There are those guests.

00:59:53.980 | Esther Perel is one who comes to mind immediately. Hugh Jackman was,

00:59:58.500 | was like that for me. There are many guests,

01:00:01.860 | including those you wouldn't recognize who are going to be

01:00:06.540 | really, really, really good.

01:00:08.140 | So a big part of guest selection is also

01:00:13.500 | improving as an interviewer in quotation marks.

01:00:17.180 | Ultimately it is very hard to fix a bad guest.

01:00:21.660 | It does not matter how good you are as an interviewer.

01:00:24.660 | The only fix that I have found is if I generally budget 90 to 120

01:00:29.380 | minutes for an interview, I'll usually say 90.

01:00:31.580 | If I get 30 minutes in and I'm like, Oh my God, this is a stillborn.

01:00:36.300 | Like this is a mess. This is, we're not getting anywhere, which by the way,

01:00:40.620 | it can happen with people who are very, very, very good conversationalists.

01:00:43.980 | But as soon as you hit record,

01:00:45.460 | once it's an interview and not a conversation over wine at dinner,

01:00:49.420 | they get really stilted and weird and can't be themselves.

01:00:53.300 | That happens quite often. Then I will talk more.

01:00:57.660 | This doesn't work for everyone. It won't work for everyone,

01:01:01.340 | but generally I'm going to come into the interview.

01:01:03.460 | Having done a lot of homework, I'll have some domain familiarity,

01:01:07.060 | if not expertise.

01:01:08.060 | And I will then ask a question where I can reciprocate and give examples or

01:01:13.180 | buy time by talking about something else.

01:01:15.620 | And in doing so I will extend the time we might record for two to two and a

01:01:21.100 | half hours.

01:01:22.100 | And then we can cut that down to say

01:01:27.380 | 30 to 60 minutes. It will probably include a lot of me.

01:01:30.740 | And the downside to that is people will be like, wow,

01:01:33.100 | this guy really likes to hear himself talk. And it's like, no,

01:01:35.060 | I just saved this interview.

01:01:36.780 | And at the end of the day,

01:01:39.700 | there will be some actionable takeaways within that interview, right?

01:01:44.260 | So that's one way to save it.

01:01:45.540 | I will only try to save an interview like that if someone is at least trying and

01:01:50.620 | they have done the prep work.

01:01:51.820 | So when I talk to people or I should say prior to ever

01:01:56.540 | interviewing,

01:01:57.380 | people will have a list of commonly asked rapid fire

01:02:02.140 | questions, which I have right here.

01:02:03.740 | People will recognize a lot of them from Tribe of Mentors and other

01:02:08.820 | places. But there are certain questions I ask a lot like the metaphorical

01:02:11.980 | billboard question, favorite failures, et cetera, right?

01:02:15.020 | There's certain questions I ask frequently.

01:02:16.780 | I send this to people in advance.

01:02:20.420 | I generally don't send other questions in advance.

01:02:23.380 | And I always talk to people beforehand for five to 10 minutes

01:02:28.660 | before recording to loosen them up.

01:02:30.820 | This is assuming they're not somebody who's got a publicist cracking the whip on

01:02:36.300 | my face.

01:02:37.140 | So assuming they have a little bit of slack in the system,

01:02:40.980 | we'll talk in the beginning. I will first say you,

01:02:44.580 | like all of my guests have final cut. You can see a transcript beforehand.

01:02:48.940 | You can listen to the audio, any edits you want to make. We can make,

01:02:52.020 | this is not a show about gotchas. So number one, there's that.

01:02:56.780 | And I will say, I've been screwed by journalists before I've been,

01:02:59.700 | had my trust betrayed. I have had things cherry picked. I've been misquoted.

01:03:03.300 | It sucks. I'm not going to do that. And you have final cut,

01:03:07.420 | which by the way, is what inside the actors studio always did.

01:03:11.740 | And what you might've seen on TV for those episodes,

01:03:15.340 | 45 minutes an hour was actually several hours of recording.

01:03:18.540 | They would cut down substantially. So I'll do that first.

01:03:21.540 | And in the say warmup calisthenics,

01:03:25.020 | I will always ask someone what would make this interview a home run.

01:03:29.340 | When you look back three, six months from now,

01:03:31.700 | what would make this an absolute home run where when people ask you,

01:03:36.580 | what are your favorite two or three interviews,

01:03:38.460 | this is one of those two or three.

01:03:39.980 | And people are always almost always surprised when I asked

01:03:46.020 | that because it's, it's never asked.

01:03:48.580 | And then I'll tell them because that can inform how I try to steer the

01:03:54.100 | conversation. It will also inform how we promote the episode.

01:03:58.260 | So let me know if you have an answer. And if not, if you have an answer later,

01:04:02.180 | we can try to customize things. I will also ask them,

01:04:05.420 | is there anything you absolutely don't want to talk about

01:04:08.300 | or something that you're really sick of talking about that you just don't want

01:04:13.060 | to rehash? I will ask that.

01:04:15.540 | And by the time you ask these questions or these types of questions,

01:04:20.620 | a someone has warmed up a little bit B,

01:04:24.220 | they will think to themselves, okay, wow,

01:04:27.540 | this guy's really put some thought into this is aware that I'm coming into this

01:04:32.460 | with certain goals and hopes or fears.

01:04:37.060 | And this is not his first rodeo.

01:04:40.860 | And what I'll also then tell people is we can always cut things later,

01:04:45.580 | but we can't put interesting things in.

01:04:48.620 | So feel free to curse, be yourself,

01:04:52.180 | like let it all hang out. We can always cut things later,

01:04:55.620 | but we can't put it in. We can't put the fun in.

01:04:58.340 | Go crazy. And we can always cut, I would say out of

01:05:04.300 | whatever it is now, six to 700 episodes,

01:05:09.620 | less than 3% of the guests ever ask to see the audio or

01:05:13.860 | transcript. It's very uncommon,

01:05:16.900 | but I will take notes as we talk.

01:05:20.980 | And if someone say mentioned something like a lawsuit,

01:05:25.780 | which might be legally complicated for them,

01:05:29.500 | it weren't broadcast to millions of people or just made public to honestly

01:05:34.740 | an audience of a hundred people,

01:05:36.420 | or if they mentioned say details about their family or where they live,

01:05:40.500 | or they say, let me give out my email address.

01:05:43.980 | I will flag all of those things. And I will talk to them afterwards and say,

01:05:48.220 | do you want to keep this in? Are you sure you want to keep this in?

01:05:50.540 | I would suggest you cut this dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, to look out for them also.

01:05:55.980 | And then my team will also listen to things and review transcripts to try to

01:06:01.540 | identify other things that should be cut.

01:06:03.460 | Twitter is an excellent way to source guests to come back to that question.

01:06:07.340 | You asked so long ago, Twitter's an excellent way to find guests.

01:06:10.900 | Although part of my feedback to you on your podcast is

01:06:15.780 | you mentioned Twitter a lot. And Twitter is a very,

01:06:18.500 | even though it's expanded a lot and I'm sure it rankles Twitter to death,

01:06:22.140 | Donald Trump kind of saved Twitter.

01:06:25.300 | How funny is that? It's still a very tech centric environment.

01:06:32.020 | And so I would suggest to you that you drive

01:06:36.700 | people to the website and preferably some type of newsletter

01:06:41.740 | so that you have the ability to communicate directly with your

01:06:46.380 | listeners. Podcasting is still largely a black box.

01:06:50.020 | It's very difficult to get good analytics.

01:06:55.260 | This is also why it's very difficult for me to give growth advice because it's

01:06:59.940 | very difficult to confirm attribution for different

01:07:04.420 | types of organic or paid acquisition or PR is

01:07:08.980 | incredibly difficult. We can talk about growth. I'm happy to talk about it,

01:07:11.780 | but the reason Twitter works specifically for guest

01:07:16.660 | recruitment is probably similar to how you could use other

01:07:21.340 | platforms, but my other platforms are completely deluged. For instance,

01:07:26.300 | maybe you could use Instagram DMS for this,

01:07:28.420 | but because I'm flooded by DMS and anyone apparently can send me a

01:07:33.460 | DM on Instagram, I can't use it. There's too much noise, not enough signal.

01:07:38.260 | So it's an unusable tool for me.

01:07:40.180 | But on Twitter, if you follow someone and then you like something of theirs,

01:07:45.300 | and then you retweet, and it's a lot easier if you have a verified account,

01:07:48.460 | of course, to get someone's attention. But if you follow them, like something,

01:07:52.860 | retweet something, maybe reply to something of theirs and kind of do it all at

01:07:56.780 | once so that you occupy more of their timeline,

01:08:01.060 | if they're looking at replies and things like this, if they follow you,

01:08:04.780 | you can DM them. And if you DM them and connect with them,

01:08:09.500 | you can do so without having any of their contact information.

01:08:14.620 | You don't have their email address. You don't have their phone number.

01:08:18.740 | If they dislike you, they can block you. In other words,

01:08:22.340 | they don't have the same fear factor associated with you having a direct

01:08:27.340 | line to them in any fashion. So for Tribe of Mentors, as an example, the book,

01:08:31.940 | there were a hundred,

01:08:33.820 | maybe 120 people who answered many of the common questions for the podcast.

01:08:38.820 | And the way I connected with Ben Stiller and dozens of the larger celebrities,

01:08:45.180 | better known figures was through Twitter.

01:08:49.820 | That is how I made contact with them.

01:08:52.340 | It is also a very good way to make contact with well-known people,

01:08:56.860 | or even if they're not well-known,

01:08:58.780 | difficult to reach people and to circumvent around their multiple layers of

01:09:03.820 | entourage. Because if you email an agent or a manager,

01:09:10.180 | just get ready for the merry-go-round of bullshit to start.

01:09:13.860 | And there are some great agents and managers out there.

01:09:16.220 | I don't want to imply that there aren't,

01:09:18.140 | but if you're dealing with anything related to Hollywood, nine times out of 10,

01:09:22.900 | you are just going to get this incredible runaround dance that can last

01:09:27.940 | forever.

01:09:29.380 | There are some incredibly talented and hardworking and great agents and managers.

01:09:34.660 | So again, not to malign all of those people in those categories,

01:09:39.620 | but you run the risk of an incredible amount of hurry up and wait that can last

01:09:46.220 | years. Even at this point for me, by the way, that is true.

01:09:50.980 | Do you think if you had their email, you would use it over Twitter or is it,

01:09:55.220 | you think Twitter is a better medium? It might be better.

01:09:58.740 | It may be less crowded. It depends entirely on how many people they follow.

01:10:04.500 | So it depends a lot.

01:10:07.180 | I will say that as someone who gets an incredible amount of bullshit,

01:10:14.780 | bullshit sent to me through one means or another,

01:10:17.860 | that if I have channels that are intended for people to get in touch with me and

01:10:23.540 | they disregard those channels and think they're clever by barraging me somehow,

01:10:28.260 | they're immediately blacklisted.

01:10:29.980 | And most people, if they do get a random email from you,

01:10:33.940 | what I would suggest,

01:10:35.740 | if you're going to take that approach that you indicate in the email,

01:10:39.540 | how you got their email address,

01:10:41.980 | no one on my team will ever reply to someone who cold emails or if they try to

01:10:45.900 | get a hold on like phones or anything like that, immediate blacklist.

01:10:49.860 | But maybe via email, if they reach out,

01:10:53.380 | if they don't indicate how they found the email, no response.

01:10:56.100 | Like they need to clarify that first.

01:10:58.260 | But if they have channels for getting in touch with them,

01:11:01.540 | I would suggest that first, unless they're the, their agency.

01:11:06.020 | It's not that you can't and should never reach out to an agent or a PR or a

01:11:11.500 | PR agency or a manager to try to reach,

01:11:16.500 | say a celebrity or someone who's well-known it's that you should expect that to

01:11:24.220 | take a lot of time.

01:11:25.780 | And an alternative or a compliment to that would be Twitter with all of the time.

01:11:31.980 | And this is true actually for a lot of optimizing in general for me,

01:11:40.940 | even though I am fascinated by sort of,

01:11:43.260 | we can talk about what kind of what optimize means, right.

01:11:46.380 | Optimize for what is a good question when thinking about a lot of these things.

01:11:49.340 | But if I think about the number of pod casters or would be podcasters who ask me

01:11:54.340 | about guest recruitment and they don't need my help to get 90% of the people out

01:12:01.420 | there. So really the question is,

01:12:07.140 | how do I get guests who are hard to reach?

01:12:10.620 | That's the question.

01:12:11.460 | If they completely avoided guests who are hard to reach and just focused on

01:12:16.980 | fucking recording another 10 episodes in the same amount of time,

01:12:22.140 | the same number of hours that they're going to blow trying to get Oprah on their

01:12:26.100 | podcast. God bless Oprah. I wish I could have her on my podcast.

01:12:30.100 | I don't think it's going to happen.

01:12:30.980 | I think they would be much further ahead at the end of the day.

01:12:35.220 | I'll say two things about that first episode I did with Lee. One,

01:12:40.300 | Lee had never been on another podcast.

01:12:42.300 | So Lee is not a celebrity name that I think anyone knows.

01:12:46.460 | And that podcast,

01:12:47.820 | that first episode has had two and a half times more downloads than every other

01:12:52.220 | episode. Yeah. So it's content way over the name.

01:12:56.580 | And the other thing,

01:12:57.700 | just because I thought it was a funny example of technology failing.

01:13:00.820 | So in that episode, we actually recorded in person.

01:13:03.500 | We used a zoom and we had a bad SD card,

01:13:07.460 | no backup.

01:13:08.300 | And so that episode was actually three days

01:13:13.540 | later, re-recording the episodes. It was a little different than the original,

01:13:17.900 | but I will say going into that,

01:13:19.780 | I had this huge fear that you'll never be able to recreate a good episode if you

01:13:23.900 | have to. And I'm not saying I would ever encourage it,

01:13:27.460 | but that fear was kind of busted.

01:13:29.580 | So I would rather have had the backup of the original because it's hard to try

01:13:32.980 | to keep it going. But if you have to, it's not always a bad outcome.

01:13:37.660 | Not always a bad outcome.

01:13:39.180 | So I should actually modify my gear recommendation and say that I also have

01:13:42.780 | redundancy in person. So I have the H6. I've got that.

01:13:47.740 | Usually I'll have another H6 sitting out and

01:13:52.140 | recording, but without the XLR.

01:13:55.540 | So it'll be sort of a field recording set up.

01:13:59.820 | I may also have an iPhone with a

01:14:04.700 | lightning port connected Shure microphone.

01:14:10.580 | They make some really, really cool, smaller microphones.

01:14:14.340 | I can't remember the exact model number,

01:14:15.980 | but I will have redundancy in person as well

01:14:21.620 | as backup options remotely. Now I want to come back to one thing.

01:14:25.460 | And for those people who want to find this episode,

01:14:27.500 | we'll link to it in the show notes,

01:14:28.580 | obviously for the pro travel hacks episode,

01:14:32.620 | number one of all the hacks.

01:14:34.900 | I have another piece of feedback there for you.

01:14:37.580 | Lee Rowan is L E I G H last name R O W

01:14:42.340 | A N. So two things I want to say,

01:14:44.380 | the first piece of feedback is that I would definitely transcribe all of your

01:14:48.700 | episodes and read them yourself in the beginning,

01:14:53.180 | especially and look for terms that you repeat a lot and try to

01:14:57.580 | trim those down. So for instance,

01:15:00.260 | as essential as the term is to the namesake of the

01:15:05.980 | podcast, all the hacks,

01:15:07.780 | I would suggest perhaps dialing down on the volume of using the word

01:15:13.340 | hack or hacks and thinking about it like a magazine article.

01:15:17.220 | If that word came up over and over again, the editor would be like,

01:15:21.540 | here's thesaurus.com. Please come up with some other words.

01:15:25.100 | So on the audio side, I think it's very similar.

01:15:28.620 | And we all have these texts. We all have texts.

01:15:32.060 | And I remember actually after the Ed Catmull episode, Oh, this is terrible.

01:15:36.580 | I looked on social to see what type of feedback there might be.

01:15:40.660 | And I saw many tweets with

01:15:47.460 | MMM dot, dot, dot, MMM, dot, dot, dot, MMM, dot, dot, dot.

01:15:51.220 | You're driving me fucking crazy. And it turned out,

01:15:53.460 | I was so nervous that every time he said something interesting about, Hmm, Hmm,

01:15:57.900 | like some cave creature.

01:16:00.900 | And it was just cringe worthy to listen to.

01:16:05.860 | I had no awareness that I was doing it. And there are other words,

01:16:10.660 | pet phrases, et cetera, that in any given interview,

01:16:14.220 | I might repeat way too many times. So keep an eye out for that.

01:16:17.620 | The other way that I used transcripts early on.

01:16:21.060 | And one of your questions for me has been,

01:16:23.540 | how have you honed your interviewing skills? Do you ask friends,

01:16:27.380 | mentors to listen to episodes and give feedback?

01:16:29.380 | Do you read, listen to your own episodes?

01:16:31.460 | Let me answer those specifically and then I'll come back to how I use the

01:16:34.740 | transcript. Do I read, listen to my own episodes? No, I don't.

01:16:38.060 | I read the transcripts because it is more

01:16:43.140 | painfully obvious what you need to change.

01:16:45.100 | You can get away with things in conversation that work and can work really

01:16:50.940 | well.

01:16:51.540 | There is no one good style of interviewing or one great style

01:16:56.580 | of conversation. There are many,

01:16:58.180 | many ways to do this and many ways to play this game.

01:17:00.740 | So I don't think it makes any sense for everyone to emulate one particular

01:17:05.020 | interviewer or style of interviewing. However,

01:17:08.660 | reading the transcript will make you

01:17:12.380 | acutely aware of any repetition, verbal tics,

01:17:17.820 | things like that. So I do not listen to them unless I'm checking audio quality,

01:17:22.220 | which I used to do, of course,

01:17:23.380 | but these days I have a team to help with that. And by team, I need,

01:17:27.980 | I mean a contracted post-production sound engineer.

01:17:32.700 | I do not have,

01:17:35.540 | I have two full-time employees for everything that I do in my life,

01:17:38.660 | just to give people an idea of how small my team is.

01:17:41.060 | Do I ask friends or mentors to listen? Sometimes I do,

01:17:46.020 | but in the beginning, if I did that,

01:17:49.260 | and this is true with asking friends for feedback on

01:17:54.380 | writing as well, I don't think it's very high yield,

01:17:59.300 | very helpful.

01:18:00.420 | And certainly I think it's quite frustrating for the friends you're asking for

01:18:04.340 | advice. If you just say, give me feedback,

01:18:07.020 | I don't think that's specific enough.

01:18:08.420 | So in the case of writing what I would do and still do,

01:18:12.140 | if I'm writing a book, I split up chapters,

01:18:15.460 | which are intended to mostly be self-sufficient for kind of modular in that way.

01:18:19.100 | They're like feature magazine articles, the chapters,

01:18:21.940 | and I will send say a single chapter to three or

01:18:27.540 | four friends. Ideally they are writers or lawyers,

01:18:32.180 | or they've gone to law school. This is for writing,

01:18:35.740 | although it can apply to audio as well.

01:18:39.380 | The reason for that is that both writers and people who have reviewed documents

01:18:45.540 | or learned to use a legal eye for reviewing

01:18:50.140 | text have a keen eye for ambiguity.

01:18:54.220 | They have a keen eye for anything superfluous that you just do not need that

01:18:58.980 | should be cut or can be cut. They have very,

01:19:01.660 | very sharp observation with respect to that.

01:19:03.820 | So they make good proofreaders in my experience.

01:19:06.260 | And I will say among other things, please read this.

01:19:10.100 | And if anything is confusing, please note that

01:19:15.700 | you can love it. You can hate it. I'm fine with either of those,

01:19:19.220 | but if it's confusing, it's no good for anyone. So if anything's confusing,

01:19:23.020 | please note, if your mind starts to wander,

01:19:26.780 | please note where that is. If your mind starts to wander means it's dragging.

01:19:31.980 | So I listened to a few of your episodes.

01:19:34.060 | There were a few points where I was going on a hike.

01:19:36.940 | Like there were points when I was totally immersed in the audio.

01:19:38.980 | And then there were points where I'm like a squirrel, trees, a bird,

01:19:43.260 | a butterfly, which is fine because I'm on a hike.

01:19:46.060 | But your intention I assume is to captivate me with the audio.

01:19:50.860 | And there are points where my mind started to wander.

01:19:53.140 | So you can ask someone to indicate like if your mind starts to wander,

01:19:56.740 | indicate the time code,

01:19:58.260 | make sure you use the same application for the time code,

01:20:02.180 | because it can vary from application to application.

01:20:05.260 | So if you're using Overcast, use Overcast. If it's Pocket Cast, use Pocket Cast.

01:20:10.140 | If it's Spotify, use Spotify, but have everyone use the same app. Okay.

01:20:14.660 | In addition to that, I will say, if you could only keep 20%,

01:20:18.740 | if I were going to cut 80% of this interview, which 20% should I keep?

01:20:23.500 | And would you cut it? Hold on one second. I'll get to that. Then conversely,

01:20:27.420 | and you don't have to use both of these, but I would say if I had to cut 20%,

01:20:31.860 | which 20% would I cut? I actually liked that question more,

01:20:34.740 | but I do ask both for different reasons. Because if I give it to four people,

01:20:39.180 | if one person loves a section and three other people say, cut it, I will keep it.

01:20:44.100 | If anyone loves something, I keep it. That's my rule.

01:20:47.980 | But very often I wouldn't ask for feedback if I weren't

01:20:52.780 | planning on somehow using the feedback, if I found it valuable. So the answer is,

01:20:57.180 | yes, I very often make these cuts,

01:20:59.020 | but asking your friends to listen to audio and do this

01:21:04.660 | is really time consuming.

01:21:06.020 | And it's actually very hard for them to specify things.

01:21:08.500 | So what did I do with my transcripts?

01:21:12.580 | One thing I did is I ended up reaching out and finding someone who did research

01:21:18.380 | and guest prep and everything for inside the actor's studio.

01:21:22.580 | And I asked them if they would be willing to read transcripts of some of my

01:21:28.220 | early episodes and to indicate where they thought I could improve,

01:21:30.940 | what they think I should cut,

01:21:32.020 | where they think the sequence might be off in terms of questions.

01:21:36.900 | And that's what we did.

01:21:38.700 | I would send them word docs and they would add comments and red line and so on.

01:21:42.700 | You could certainly use Google docs or something else.

01:21:44.740 | I now use Google docs for this type of thing,

01:21:46.420 | but that is how I improved my interviewing and

01:21:52.540 | interviewing just as a, as an aside, but it's not really an aside.

01:21:58.900 | This is sort of a core piece of the discussion is like anything else, right?

01:22:03.460 | It's like basketball, like what makes a good basketball player? Well,

01:22:06.100 | which position are they playing? What is the other team, right?

01:22:10.420 | If they're boxers, like styles make fights, right? It's like, okay,

01:22:14.300 | just because A beats B and B beats C doesn't mean A is going to beat C.

01:22:18.860 | It really depends on styles. And if you look at salespeople,

01:22:23.340 | what makes a good salesperson? Well, what are they selling?

01:22:25.580 | Some people are so charismatic and have this reality distortion field that

01:22:29.060 | people want to befriend them and they'll buy from them as a result of that.

01:22:32.300 | Some people are super,

01:22:33.660 | super technical and kind of dispassionate in a way.

01:22:37.460 | And others are really good at deal structure and figuring out conditional

01:22:41.980 | purchase orders and kind of navigating

01:22:46.260 | the wants and needs of the other person and being very,

01:22:50.140 | very creative in how to structure a purchase, maybe finance a purchase, right?

01:22:55.300 | These are all different characteristics and different skillsets,

01:22:59.020 | yet all of them could be exceptionally good salespeople.

01:23:04.060 | The same thing is true in podcasting. You know,

01:23:07.460 | if you want to grow your podcasts,

01:23:08.740 | like turn yourself into a super hot woman and talk about blowjobs.

01:23:12.180 | I've seen a few podcasts that have done really well by, uh,

01:23:18.820 | doing that in addition to many other things that you have to get right.

01:23:21.540 | That is sort of, it's not necessary, but, uh, not sufficient.

01:23:25.820 | I wouldn't say it's necessary, but you can't do that. Chris,

01:23:30.220 | you could, I don't know. Maybe you'd find a market for it,

01:23:32.340 | but that's not going to work for you.

01:23:34.060 | If I tried to be Joe Rogan with his knack and

01:23:38.460 | talent and developed skill for comedy, it would fall flat.

01:23:41.860 | I'm not going to try to be Joe Rogan.

01:23:44.780 | James Lipton when he ran inside the actor's studio,

01:23:48.980 | never deviated from his questions. He had his list of questions.

01:23:52.900 | They were stacked in order on these blue cards and he would never

01:23:57.980 | deviate.

01:23:58.700 | Even if there was a side door to a topic that could be more

01:24:03.340 | interesting, he would not take that side door.

01:24:04.900 | Now some people might judge that harshly and say, well, that's stupid.

01:24:07.780 | You should have taken the side door. Well, does anyone know your podcast?

01:24:11.740 | A lot of people know inside the actor's studio seems to have worked pretty well.

01:24:15.660 | Maybe that format was exactly what he needed.

01:24:20.060 | Then you have folks who come in with meticulous notes.

01:24:24.900 | I come in with lots and lots and lots and lots of notes that works for

01:24:29.700 | me. Larry King came in blind.

01:24:33.580 | Larry King, who also one could say was early to the radio game in the same way

01:24:37.940 | that some people are early to the podcast game.

01:24:39.580 | So you have to take that into consideration and maybe discount things a little

01:24:43.100 | bit, but he would come in with beginner's eyes to ask the

01:24:47.420 | naive questions that a listener might want to ask.

01:24:52.060 | He didn't want to know more than the listener or the viewer.

01:24:55.420 | So this is all to say,

01:24:58.180 | becoming a better interviewer is really becoming your best

01:25:02.740 | self as an interviewer.

01:25:04.500 | But no matter what, reviewing transcripts for me is a core piece of that and

01:25:09.260 | collecting questions.

01:25:10.260 | I remember I would effectively have not a three ring binder, but a collection

01:25:16.060 | of questions. I would take photographs of my phone pre COVID.

01:25:19.420 | Certainly if you're taking flights, it'd be the only time that I read magazines

01:25:22.860 | and you look at these inflight magazines, there are always interviews.

01:25:28.180 | And if I found a good question, I would take a photograph and I would test it.

01:25:31.740 | If I listened to a podcast and I heard a good question,

01:25:36.780 | I would note it.

01:25:38.020 | I've been interviewing people for hiring for a new position recently.

01:25:42.500 | And someone I was interviewing, I solicited questions and they said,

01:25:46.820 | how do you give feedback?

01:25:49.420 | Could you give me a few examples of when people have disappointed you and how

01:25:53.420 | you've handled that? And I thought to myself, holy shit, that's a good question.

01:25:57.820 | I might steal that one.

01:25:59.980 | So be a collector and a tester of questions also.

01:26:04.660 | So I have a bunch, I'm like going back to my man.

01:26:07.660 | I have a bunch of followups here.

01:26:08.980 | Yeah, let's do it.

01:26:11.140 | Backing up to the prep, how long are you spending?

01:26:14.500 | Let's go back to if you were doing this all on your own, preparing for,

01:26:18.460 | for an interview.

01:26:19.380 | It depends on the interview,

01:26:21.020 | but I would say generally minimum a few hours.

01:26:25.060 | So let's just call it minimum two to four hours.

01:26:29.620 | And I have some approaches for that that I can share and

01:26:34.860 | maximum, for instance,

01:26:36.780 | if there is a possible big break interview.

01:26:40.940 | And one of those for me was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

01:26:44.340 | When that finally came together,

01:26:46.580 | I spent probably four or five days digesting everything about Arnold

01:26:50.980 | Schwarzenegger in watching interviews, watching movies, reading books,

01:26:55.500 | going through every past interview I could find.

01:26:58.820 | I wanted to be the best prepared interviewer

01:27:02.540 | he had ever met basically. And therefore I took it very, very seriously.

01:27:08.700 | But if we're talking about on the

01:27:13.900 | average side, let's just assume that's three to four hours.

01:27:18.020 | Now I spend less time because I have help and I have

01:27:22.220 | cultivated a system and also improved the system with the input of team

01:27:28.580 | members, how to prepare research documents.

01:27:32.380 | I would say two to four hours.

01:27:34.940 | I will also ask guests to send their favorite

01:27:39.860 | two to three long form interviews.

01:27:42.660 | I will ask them and not all guests are keen to do this,

01:27:46.940 | but some are very keen for exploratory

01:27:50.980 | topics or questions that they think could be fun for

01:27:56.340 | us and the audience and anything else that they would like to send.

01:28:00.420 | So I opened that door and all of those things are received typically weeks

01:28:05.500 | or months in advance because the editorial calendar is built out quite far in

01:28:10.460 | advance. At least these days it is.

01:28:13.060 | If you're doing prep from scratch,

01:28:16.820 | if the person has a Wikipedia page,

01:28:20.100 | I look for the strangest or most esoteric slash tiny

01:28:24.540 | unusual mention in Wikipedia. And I do a deep dive on that point.

01:28:28.500 | And I go into the citations.

01:28:32.500 | I will certainly look at social.

01:28:36.660 | This is important because for instance,

01:28:39.620 | in between the time that you book a guest and you record,

01:28:42.820 | they could have a family member die.

01:28:44.420 | They could have any number of things happen.

01:28:46.660 | They could have some type of disaster in the press.

01:28:49.580 | You want to be aware of what is going on.

01:28:52.100 | So I don't spend a lot of time on social,

01:28:54.020 | but I will check in and go back at least a month or

01:28:58.860 | two to ensure that I have a basic understanding of what is on their minds and

01:29:03.780 | hearts. That doesn't take very long.

01:29:05.780 | I would say that's less than less than 30 minutes.

01:29:09.100 | So you have Wikipedia and then long form interviews.

01:29:12.780 | So I will look at print.

01:29:14.540 | I will start print meaning text, long form,

01:29:18.620 | text interviews. I will look at the interviews that they've sent.

01:29:23.060 | And that helps me in a number of different ways.

01:29:27.180 | It shows me where they're good.

01:29:29.540 | It shows me where they stall out or don't have answers.

01:29:34.300 | It also helps me to gather what I consider

01:29:38.060 | greatest hits stories.

01:29:40.660 | And here's what I mean by that.

01:29:44.140 | We all have stories that we have told more than once,

01:29:48.620 | just like comedians who have worked on their material and refined over and over

01:29:54.420 | again, that's 60 minutes special.

01:29:56.620 | We all have stories that over time we have determined

01:30:02.340 | get a great response.

01:30:03.980 | And I want to know what those are.

01:30:07.900 | And sometimes I'll ask them point blank,

01:30:11.180 | either in prep or while we're doing the warmup in the beginning, I'll say, Hey,

01:30:16.700 | is there a story that I can cue? I don't want to hear the story now,

01:30:20.460 | but a story that's really funny or that always gets a response from audiences.

01:30:25.140 | Maybe you've done a lot of speaking engagements.

01:30:27.020 | It's something that people always come up to you and mention.

01:30:30.420 | Is there any story or anecdote or metaphor could be anything

01:30:34.740 | terrible that comes to mind. And oftentimes they'll say,

01:30:38.900 | let me think about that. Yeah, there is. Okay. Ask me about the time that X,

01:30:43.100 | ask me about when I was in college and why happened. Great.

01:30:46.260 | I will plant one of those greatest hits stories within the first 10 minutes.

01:30:51.540 | If I have one of those to pull people in and

01:30:57.140 | hopefully pass the driveway test,

01:30:59.860 | as I heard someone from NPR put it, which is,

01:31:04.060 | and this happens with podcasts too,

01:31:05.860 | when you're listening to it in the car and you've got 10 or 20 minutes left and

01:31:10.340 | you get home and you just have to finish it.

01:31:12.540 | So you stay in the car in the driveway and you listen to the end.

01:31:15.620 | I think it's helpful to plan that through.

01:31:18.260 | So those are a few of the ways that I do research.

01:31:21.420 | If we have any common friends

01:31:26.580 | or acquaintances,

01:31:27.820 | I will also ask them for topics and questions they think

01:31:32.660 | might be fun or that might take us on the road,

01:31:37.300 | less traveled. And I used to do this more than I do now,

01:31:41.420 | but I will sometimes post it to social and ask what types of questions

01:31:46.260 | people would love me to ask given the size of my audience on social.

01:31:50.420 | Now that makes less and less sense because it's very hard to filter very hard to

01:31:54.900 | gather them. I will sometimes do that, but not, not terribly often.

01:31:58.220 | Have you ever done so much research that you kind of

01:32:03.460 | knew the entire conversation you would have in advance because you'd learned,

01:32:07.500 | you know, you'd read someone's book, you learned all this information.

01:32:09.900 | It's like coming in Arnold Schwarzenegger so prepared, you know,

01:32:13.780 | there were probably things that you wanted to talk about that you knew the

01:32:16.980 | answers to,

01:32:17.980 | but how did that go because now it's not as engaging because you know the

01:32:21.540 | answers. Yeah. I will always leave lots of

01:32:26.660 | virgin territory. So I will have some familiarity,

01:32:31.100 | not with all guests, but some with greatest hit stories.

01:32:34.340 | So I'll plant a few of those, but generally speaking,

01:32:37.460 | my interviews are going to be at least 90 minutes.

01:32:39.780 | That will be maximum five to 20 minutes of the

01:32:44.260 | conversation. There may also be things that they've talked about,

01:32:49.260 | but there's some aspect that was left out. And I'll ask about that.

01:32:53.020 | So my rule or one of the fundamental

01:32:57.580 | precepts of how I approach podcasting is if it's

01:33:03.180 | interesting to you, it will be interesting to other people.

01:33:05.900 | You can't fucking fake it. People can smell it out.

01:33:10.100 | It's like dogs can smell fear audiences know when you are stoked and

01:33:14.980 | audiences know when you're faking it.

01:33:17.180 | So you got to make the interviews interesting for yourself.

01:33:20.060 | Even if it gets into some really strange topics that are going to appeal to a

01:33:25.540 | very small percentage of your audience, doesn't matter.

01:33:28.060 | You got to include it and you can always cut it out later,

01:33:32.380 | but you got to make it interesting for yourself. So in the case of Schwarzenegger,

01:33:36.340 | yes,

01:33:37.180 | I had consumed vast quantities of interviews

01:33:42.780 | and footage and commentary and so on related to

01:33:47.660 | Arnold, but he has decades of

01:33:51.060 | time on this planet and there is a lot that is not covered.

01:33:56.500 | So it was easy for me to weave in questions that would take

01:34:01.380 | us to unexplored areas. That was very, very easy.

01:34:06.100 | I'll also say,

01:34:09.420 | do not get too attached to your research

01:34:11.460 | in the sense that 90 minutes goes very, very quickly. I mean,

01:34:17.140 | we've been recording for more than 90 minutes now,

01:34:19.180 | 90 minutes goes very quickly.

01:34:21.740 | So if you have tons of research in front of you,

01:34:25.420 | pick the five to seven questions you most want to get

01:34:31.580 | answered. That is for 90 minutes.

01:34:34.980 | Keep in mind because I want the freedom and the slack to

01:34:39.380 | explore side doors.

01:34:40.700 | And we may end up scrapping all the research that I've done and save it for a

01:34:45.860 | round two, which is something I do quite a lot.

01:34:47.580 | And then I'll circle the things that we didn't get to with a highlighter and put

01:34:50.820 | R2 on them, take photographs, put it into Evernote.

01:34:53.260 | And I share that with my team. And I'm like,

01:34:54.620 | this is what we'll use for a round two.

01:34:55.940 | Don't be attached to finishing all of your questions.

01:35:00.500 | And very often what I will do to try to limit the impulse

01:35:05.060 | to do that is I will block an interview into

01:35:09.220 | sections. I don't do this always,

01:35:10.900 | but sometimes to let a guest know what is coming,

01:35:14.500 | I will say for the first 30 minutes, we're going to bounce all over the place.

01:35:18.380 | It's going to be background, personal story, et cetera.

01:35:22.500 | And I always ask them for specifics and

01:35:26.700 | examples, high concept, abstract stuff, bores the shit out of audiences.

01:35:31.260 | It bores the shit out of me. There can be some high concept stuff,

01:35:34.220 | but we need real examples, real details. And so on.

01:35:38.260 | If someone's not willing to do that, by the way,

01:35:40.300 | I will sometimes not publish the audio. So if they don't bring their a game,

01:35:44.460 | if they're not playing to win and really doing the prep,

01:35:47.340 | I don't feel obligated to publish that happens very rarely,

01:35:50.740 | but I'd say around a dozen interviews I haven't published.

01:35:54.500 | Like if they're not actually trying,

01:35:57.140 | if they're not attempting to do what will appeal to the audience,

01:36:02.060 | I'm not going to publish.

01:36:03.460 | Are you direct with them and you're telling them why you didn't publish?

01:36:07.380 | Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes you just lose, lose the audio.

01:36:11.580 | Oh yeah, exactly. I mean,

01:36:13.540 | I wish I could tell you that I'm always a hundred percent honest about that,

01:36:16.660 | but sometimes, especially in the early days,

01:36:18.620 | I was not confident or comfortable enough to do that.

01:36:23.300 | So there was a lot of audio that just vanished into the cloud,

01:36:26.900 | hard to explain, but it happens.

01:36:29.020 | And it's sometimes out there would be a make good on that.

01:36:31.740 | So let's say they have an excellent book,

01:36:33.780 | but the interview was just terrible.

01:36:38.060 | Then I might offer to take an excerpt from the book from a particularly

01:36:43.300 | good chapter,

01:36:44.140 | put it on the blog and then use that as a way to assist in some fashion.

01:36:48.660 | One of the questions that you had and don't lose track of your follow-up

01:36:52.700 | questions, but one of the questions you had is, do I read the books these days?

01:36:55.500 | No. And in fact, I get sent and have been sent.

01:36:59.180 | There was a point where I was getting sent 50 plus books a week from

01:37:03.780 | publishers, by the way, never signed up for these lists, never asked for them.

01:37:08.380 | So if any publishers are listening, please take me off your list.

01:37:12.300 | Cause I I'm going to start putting specific names on the sort of public hall of

01:37:16.980 | shame for spamming me with physical books.

01:37:20.980 | You're killing trees you're causing the decline of our

01:37:25.660 | earth unnecessarily with books that I'm just going to give away. Stop it.

01:37:30.060 | Stop it. Stop doing it. Take me off your list.

01:37:33.100 | But the point is I was getting 50 plus books a week and that's just untenable.

01:37:38.380 | I can't even the books from friends or acquaintances.

01:37:42.820 | If you consider the hundreds of people I've had on the podcast and the many

01:37:45.620 | people that I know, and I've met over the years,

01:37:48.620 | it's physically impossible for me to read these books and I don't want to have to

01:37:52.340 | pick and choose. So I actually put up,

01:37:54.300 | people can see it at Tim dot blog slash new books.

01:37:58.140 | It is the one decision that removes a thousand decisions.

01:38:01.500 | There's a blog post about that.

01:38:02.900 | And one of the policies is I will not read the books beforehand.

01:38:07.060 | I'm only reading old books,

01:38:09.020 | meaning books that have not been published in this year. So I don't do that.

01:38:13.220 | However,

01:38:14.100 | you can ask the publicist or the author to

01:38:18.700 | send you some high level concepts or a one or

01:38:23.580 | two pager, if they're using that for interviews and so on,

01:38:27.020 | you can have them do that. But I do not read books in advance.

01:38:30.300 | There have been cases where I've read the book in preparation,

01:38:33.900 | like in Arnold Schwarzenegger's case,

01:38:36.700 | or if the authors are authors I've followed for a long time,

01:38:41.740 | like Walter Isaacson, for instance,

01:38:43.540 | who's written incredible biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Da Vinci and so

01:38:47.740 | on, then I will read the books, but it's quite rare,

01:38:51.060 | especially in the last two years. But in the beginning, yes, look,

01:38:55.500 | you got to earn

01:38:56.740 | the quality of the output in your interviews.

01:39:02.660 | And if reading is going to help then do it because in the beginning,

01:39:05.340 | you're not going to be getting sent 50 books a week.

01:39:08.580 | You may have slack in the system to do that.

01:39:10.740 | What other questions or topics?

01:39:13.700 | In the beginning, did you ever, as I've even found myself,

01:39:17.980 | as your interview skills get better and better, it's easier and easier.

01:39:21.060 | But in the beginning, did you ever just take a pause in an interview and say,

01:39:24.340 | let me just take a minute to really like regroup and replan where this is going

01:39:28.220 | to go? Maybe you don't tell them exactly why,

01:39:30.340 | but what kind of things might we have found on the chopping floor?

01:39:35.620 | I will always tell people in advance that

01:39:39.660 | they should feel free to take a water break or a bathroom break and that they can

01:39:44.500 | also restate anything.

01:39:46.140 | So if they get two sentences into a story and they're like, isn't that good?

01:39:50.020 | I want to start over. They can just say that, you know,

01:39:52.420 | let me just start that over. Take two seconds of silence, start over.

01:39:55.700 | Then we can clean it up. That also gives me the ability. And I'll say this.

01:39:59.300 | I may need a water break or a bathroom break. That gives me the ability.

01:40:02.980 | If I need a breather, water, bathroom,

01:40:06.060 | or just to clear my head and figure out where's this going,

01:40:08.860 | where do I want to take this? Then I'll do that.

01:40:11.700 | But my episodes are generally speaking,

01:40:16.540 | minimally edited, very minimally edited.

01:40:19.860 | Although the number of ticks will determine how much editing.

01:40:24.820 | It is incredible how many smart people have

01:40:29.700 | atrocious verbal ticks. They will say like, like, like, like,

01:40:34.220 | like literally a hundred plus times in a 90

01:40:39.340 | minute interview. I do not exaggerate. Or someone will say, you know, you know,

01:40:43.380 | you know what I'm saying? Which is actually a very,

01:40:46.940 | I've noticed some gender patterns.

01:40:50.780 | I know it's very unfashionable to talk about such things, but men,

01:40:55.820 | the, you know, you know, tends to be more of a male thing.

01:40:59.820 | Across the board and like a lot of

01:41:04.700 | men say like, but it's especially noticeable for a lot of women,

01:41:09.100 | a lot of female guests.

01:41:10.020 | It's kind of interesting that the ticks seem to skew in,

01:41:14.020 | in different genders and different directions. So, so dot, dot, dot,

01:41:18.180 | so dot, dot, dot, um, uh, uh, those are all very common.

01:41:23.100 | There was one guest. I'm not going to name him by name,

01:41:26.540 | although I think he'd find it funny. He said, uh,

01:41:29.340 | he had a really good one. He, he said, and whatnot, and he'd be like,

01:41:32.700 | and whatnot and whatnot. And he said it so often.

01:41:37.060 | And at the time I just didn't want to deal with having to edit it.

01:41:40.300 | So I left it in and he went into the office the day after the

01:41:45.060 | podcast had come out and all his coworkers started calling him Mr.

01:41:49.540 | Whatnot.

01:41:50.380 | And you will absolutely notice that.

01:41:57.300 | So I want my guests to sound as good as possible. If they're nervous,

01:42:01.940 | I will tell them that like, my job is to make you sound as good as possible.

01:42:04.860 | If you're nervous, put that on me.

01:42:07.700 | It is my responsibility as the interviewer to direct and

01:42:13.020 | shape and prompt in the best way possible. Just be yourself,

01:42:17.460 | take any nerves and just put it on me. It's all on me.

01:42:20.900 | So I will also say that if people are nervous, so that'd be a good example. Uh,

01:42:25.700 | dot, dot, dot. If you do it once or twice, it's fine and you can leave it in.

01:42:29.140 | But if you hear that at the beginning of every answer, then it's a problem.

01:42:33.740 | Another tick would be, that's a good question. That's a good question. Oh,

01:42:38.780 | that's a good question. That's a great question. Oh, that's a good question.

01:42:41.260 | You might hear that literally 20 times in one interview.

01:42:45.300 | You got to clip that.

01:42:47.060 | They just won't sound as good as they should otherwise.

01:42:52.420 | And that's part of your responsibility.

01:42:53.940 | But if you're just getting started,

01:42:56.220 | there's a product that I've used called Descript or Descript.

01:42:59.940 | I don't know exactly. Yeah.

01:43:01.460 | And it makes it really easy to find these filler words.

01:43:04.460 | I still find it needs some tweaking around the edges cause they're not perfect,

01:43:07.940 | but it's a great tool for like running through a transcript that's auto

01:43:11.660 | generated,

01:43:12.500 | but certainly cheaper than if you were paying someone to, you know,

01:43:16.220 | word for word, transcribe everything.

01:43:18.980 | Absolutely.

01:43:19.820 | And looking at another question that you sent me,

01:43:23.500 | because to lay out how this podcast came to be,

01:43:26.580 | you sent me a bunch of very good questions via email,

01:43:30.140 | which I requested after we had an initial conversation. And one of them,

01:43:34.460 | which I then asked to answer in this format.

01:43:39.300 | So I could point people to it is you seem to understand your audience. Well,

01:43:42.740 | how did you build that understanding? Did you survey them,

01:43:45.820 | ask for email feedback or something else? Okay.

01:43:48.420 | I'll give you the tactical answer.

01:43:50.060 | And then I'm going to give you the principle behind most of my thinking.

01:43:53.980 | I have surveyed my audience,

01:43:56.180 | but I haven't done that at length in many, many years.

01:43:59.500 | The reason I surveyed my audience also was to gather demographic

01:44:03.900 | data, average household income,

01:44:07.100 | and many other things so that I could present that to sponsors.

01:44:12.060 | Because at the time I had dozens of sponsors coming in and I could not answer

01:44:16.860 | those questions. Now with Facebook analytics,

01:44:20.860 | assuming you are present on multiple platforms,

01:44:23.340 | or your podcast is present on multiple platforms,

01:44:25.540 | you have many different ways that you can gather this data.

01:44:27.820 | Now Facebook would be one. There are many other options I did survey,

01:44:32.660 | but I would say the way I've gotten to know my audience is this is going to be a

01:44:37.540 | very unsatisfying answer. Fortunately,

01:44:40.140 | I think there's a satisfying principle that comes after it is over

01:44:44.340 | more than a decade since four hour work week came out in 2007.

01:44:48.540 | I started the blog, I want to say in 2005 or 2006,

01:44:51.900 | I have been growing and learning alongside my

01:44:57.540 | audience for 13 plus years now.

01:45:01.340 | And you really get to know your audience and

01:45:07.140 | your audience will change over time.

01:45:08.980 | So since launching the podcast, I would say my audience,

01:45:11.700 | my readership was 80/20,

01:45:16.380 | 80% male, 20% female. Let's just keep it simple.

01:45:20.540 | I know that gender is a sensitive topic and there are more options,

01:45:24.620 | but let's just keep it basic for now.

01:45:26.940 | I would say as of a few years ago,

01:45:31.700 | it's more 60/40 female male.

01:45:35.740 | And I have changed over time somewhat blog, social

01:45:40.260 | blog, meaning blog comments, social media feedback.

01:45:45.100 | These are all things that I pay some attention to,

01:45:48.700 | but that can quickly get overwhelming.

01:45:51.820 | So I would suggest that people

01:45:57.060 | listen to, I'll give you the upshot in a moment,

01:45:59.740 | but listen to my interview with Tim Urban,

01:46:04.140 | who has an incredible blog called Wait But Why.

01:46:07.260 | And if he had followed any of the advice for how to create a popular blog,

01:46:12.220 | by the way, he would not have done what he did. I mean, some of his pieces,

01:46:15.460 | I want to say are 30,000, 50,000 words. I mean, they're books.

01:46:19.100 | Some of his multi-part blog posts are effectively books. They're long.

01:46:24.420 | Not all of them are long. One of my favorites is the tail end.

01:46:28.180 | It's not germane to what we're talking about with the tail end,

01:46:30.380 | just search the tail end by Tim Urban. Everyone should read it.

01:46:33.500 | It will improve your life. It will improve how you relate to your family.

01:46:36.500 | It's a must read. It'll take you 10 minutes, but he has talked,

01:46:41.140 | and I think he also talked about this in Tribe Mentors about writing for his

01:46:45.820 | audience. And he said, it's really easy. And I'm paraphrasing here,

01:46:50.020 | but basically he imagines a huge stadium and

01:46:54.420 | each seat is filled by another Tim Urban.

01:46:59.100 | It's an entire stadium filled of himself.

01:47:02.740 | And he is just writing what he would want to read.

01:47:08.740 | And it sounds so simplistic.

01:47:11.900 | It sounds almost ridiculous.

01:47:14.980 | And if it is incredibly simplistic,

01:47:19.860 | it is incredibly effective as well.

01:47:22.660 | So if you know yourself and you pay attention to what excites you,

01:47:28.100 | you pay attention to your fears, you pay attention to the goals that you have,

01:47:31.780 | you pay attention to the things that you struggle with,

01:47:34.620 | even though you've tried to fix them before you pay attention to the things that

01:47:38.740 | bother you, you at least have a guaranteed market of one.

01:47:43.540 | A lot of people fuck that up. They start speculating.

01:47:46.380 | And they're like a 22 year old guy. And they're like, you know what?

01:47:49.780 | I went to Wharton and I figured out doing all of these financial models and

01:47:53.660 | management consulting.

01:47:54.500 | There's this huge opportunity for new moms who need blah,

01:47:59.500 | blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for their kids. And, you know,

01:48:02.460 | regenerative blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:48:03.780 | They don't know anything about any of these things,

01:48:05.300 | but they've identified a huge market opportunity.

01:48:08.460 | And that is where they're going to focus their energies for building a company

01:48:12.580 | that can work. I'm not saying it can't work in terms of good financial outcomes.

01:48:16.780 | Are they going to have a lot of fun doing it? Probably not.

01:48:20.940 | In the world of podcasting, in the world of writing,

01:48:24.300 | don't assume you are someone of superhuman empathy and that you can guess what

01:48:30.260 | other people need.

01:48:32.340 | Just focus on yourself and the personal will end up being the most universal.

01:48:37.340 | If that makes sense. I'll give you an example.

01:48:40.540 | This might screw up the audio for a second,

01:48:42.900 | but I'm holding up an AirPods case. All right.

01:48:47.780 | Now who else has an AirPods case, my girlfriend,

01:48:50.420 | and we mix up cases all the time.

01:48:54.860 | And it's a huge pain in the ass because sometimes I'll pick up what I think are

01:48:59.700 | mine.

01:49:00.540 | They're hers and the earbuds aren't even in the case they're upstairs somewhere.

01:49:05.700 | And then I get to a coffee shop where I'm supposed to work or do something and I

01:49:08.900 | can't take a phone call.

01:49:09.900 | And this problem has repeated itself over and over and over again.

01:49:13.540 | I tried to say use a Sharpie to write a name on the outside.

01:49:18.540 | Anyone who has tried that knows that it immediately gets rubbed off.

01:49:22.500 | Doesn't work.

01:49:23.380 | So the solution that I figured out is you open the case and you just put your

01:49:28.660 | initials inside the divots at the very top.

01:49:31.900 | So you can see T there at the top never gets worn off works every time.

01:49:36.980 | And we have not mixed up our AirPods since this is the first time I'm talking

01:49:41.940 | about that, but I suspect I'm not the only person who has had this problem.

01:49:45.820 | There is a piece of blue masking tape on my wife's AirPods case,

01:49:50.180 | which does not fall off like marker. Yeah. So you could do that as well.

01:49:54.060 | You could do the masking tape. I mean, there are multiple solutions here.

01:49:57.300 | This is the one that worked for us. Great. Where to next?

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01:51:12.900 | Do you all remember episode one 22,

01:51:17.060 | when I spoke to chef David Chang about leveling up your cooking at home?

01:51:20.940 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen.

01:51:23.420 | But one of his top hacks was using the microwave more. I'll admit,

01:51:27.660 | I was a skeptic at first,

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01:51:32.860 | I'm a total convert and I'm excited to partner with them for this episode.

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01:52:27.860 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

01:52:31.260 | Your support is what keeps this show going to get all of the URLs, codes,

01:52:36.580 | deals, and discounts from our partners.

01:52:38.780 | You can go to all the hacks.com/deals.

01:52:42.060 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

01:52:45.500 | So the audience thing is interesting.

01:52:48.300 | I know you're someone who likes stats and analyzing the data.

01:52:51.660 | There is some interesting data that I'm not sure if it even makes sense to do

01:52:56.420 | anything with. So you've got your downloads per episode.

01:53:00.260 | You've got these charts that Apple and Spotify give you of like,

01:53:03.780 | where do people drop off in a episode? Do you look at that data?

01:53:08.100 | Do you do anything with it? Do you completely ignore it?

01:53:10.220 | I do pay attention to downloads. Not a lot of attention.

01:53:14.620 | I haven't looked at my stats in weeks,

01:53:17.540 | but if an episode does unusually well,

01:53:21.620 | if it's several standard deviations, say away from other episodes,

01:53:25.820 | and there isn't an easy explanation for it.

01:53:28.580 | So if I have LeBron James on the podcast as an example, which I did,

01:53:33.500 | then if that episode is a runaway hit,

01:53:36.100 | I'm not going to be that surprised because some of what was featured in the

01:53:41.300 | episode is picked up by ESPN and different comments are quoted all over the

01:53:45.660 | place. So there's a lot of carry,

01:53:47.780 | but if there's an outlier that isn't easily explained,

01:53:51.620 | then I want to take a close look at that.

01:53:56.060 | If there's an underperformer that isn't easily explained,

01:53:59.180 | I also want to take a close look at that.

01:54:01.500 | Determining any causality whatsoever is really difficult

01:54:06.860 | unless there's a technical problem. So very often, if there is an underperformer,

01:54:12.020 | the first thing that we look for are technical problems.

01:54:15.140 | Was there an issue with any of the major platforms?

01:54:19.660 | And that is important to keep an eye on.

01:54:23.580 | But I have not found the vast majority of data

01:54:28.340 | that is easy to collect or to find to be that actionable.

01:54:32.660 | But I'd be curious to hear your perspective because things have changed and the

01:54:35.940 | tools have become better,

01:54:36.940 | but still I think it is tempting to

01:54:41.860 | conclude causality with say an N of one with one episode that

01:54:47.500 | does something strange.

01:54:48.860 | It's very, very hard with any conviction for me to say that

01:54:53.700 | that's going to be an accurate read.

01:54:55.060 | I have not found anything super effective to use with kind of the

01:55:00.900 | standard platform analytics. Every now and then I'm like, wow,

01:55:04.220 | that episode did a little better.

01:55:05.460 | I haven't seen any major order of magnitude changes. You know,

01:55:08.820 | there's been this one's 10% up, 10% down.

01:55:11.900 | I kind of attribute that to all kinds of randomness. Yeah.

01:55:15.500 | The one thing that I will say, maybe this falls under analytics and it's a,

01:55:19.700 | another tip from Kevin Rose was chartable is a

01:55:24.100 | platform that you can use for lots of analytics things.

01:55:27.060 | But the one thing they do that's really cool is if you put their prefix in

01:55:31.740 | front of your feed, which means every episode just gets hosted on a

01:55:36.420 | platform, you can tell your hosting platform, Hey,

01:55:39.260 | make sure the URL include this other thing also so that someone else sees

01:55:44.300 | whenever that's requested. And so you can create a link. So, you know,

01:55:49.140 | if this were on my show, it'd be link.chartable.com/athtim.

01:55:54.100 | And then chartable will say what IP address went to the link and

01:55:59.660 | then look for whether that IP address actually requested an episode.

01:56:03.740 | And so you can go and say, here's a link to promote an episode.

01:56:08.220 | You can put it on different social channels.

01:56:09.740 | You could give it to a guest if they want to promote it and you could see which

01:56:13.540 | channels are actually converting to downloads,

01:56:16.900 | which I think is something that it's always easy to see who clicked what,

01:56:20.420 | but did they actually listen to the episode?

01:56:22.100 | Now you can't find out how many minutes they listened to or anything like that,

01:56:25.500 | but it's at least one piece of evidence to support what to do.

01:56:30.020 | And I used it to make a decision, which was interesting.

01:56:33.260 | When you are promoting an episode, you basically have two choices.

01:56:37.180 | You can send a link to every platform out there, which some people do.

01:56:40.780 | They go on Twitter and they're like, check out my new episode.

01:56:43.220 | Here it is on iTunes. And here it is on Google. And here it is on Spotify.

01:56:46.500 | And here it is here, here, here.

01:56:47.620 | Or you can link to a site like your own website where it's click here.

01:56:53.020 | And now there's like seven player buttons where the individual listener could

01:56:56.180 | jump off to or chartable will let you say, if someone opens out an iPhone,

01:57:01.060 | just directly take them to the podcast app, which is great. If they use that,

01:57:05.260 | it's probably a terrible experience if they're a Spotify or an overcast

01:57:08.060 | listener. So I actually tested out one episode. I did one way,

01:57:11.860 | one I did the other way when I did the next way.

01:57:13.740 | And I just looked at which one of those links converted better.

01:57:16.460 | And the best conversion was sending them to my website with the player

01:57:21.340 | links on it, then trying to guess or listing multiple things.

01:57:25.420 | What success is depends on how you define success and what metrics

01:57:31.700 | constitute success for you.

01:57:33.700 | So one could be increasing downloads.

01:57:36.980 | Another could be increasing plays,

01:57:43.420 | which is a lot trickier,

01:57:44.900 | although different platforms count downloads

01:57:50.020 | and plays differently.

01:57:51.020 | So you might have automatic downloads in the background

01:57:56.060 | on Apple things may have changed, but at least a few years ago,

01:57:59.540 | that was the case. And that would count as a download,

01:58:01.660 | even if it were never touched,

01:58:02.980 | never seen by the person who owns that iPhone versus say on Spotify,

01:58:07.580 | if someone clicks play that counts,

01:58:09.380 | and then people might look at their analytics and conclude, Oh,

01:58:12.380 | Spotify is only 5% of my downloads and quotation marks.

01:58:17.340 | Therefore I really don't need to pay attention to it. Whereas in reality,

01:58:21.540 | maybe it's 20 or 30% or more of your actual plays.

01:58:25.260 | So it's important to understand the limitations and the

01:58:30.540 | mechanics of some of these platforms.

01:58:32.660 | I would also say an additional benefit of sending people to your website is that

01:58:37.380 | you can offer or incentivize

01:58:41.740 | them to sign up for something like a newsletter, because as it stands,

01:58:46.420 | if you are publishing through an RSS feed in the way that most people do,

01:58:51.980 | you do not have a direct relationship, or I should say,

01:58:56.060 | you don't have the ability to communicate effectively directly with

01:59:00.740 | the people who listened to your podcast.

01:59:02.100 | And I view that as a problem in the same way that I view any

01:59:06.620 | business based on a single platform as highly vulnerable.

01:59:10.620 | I remember talking to somebody who had, it was, it was something like, I don't know,

01:59:15.140 | $10 million a year business built on a Facebook page of some

01:59:20.020 | type Facebook pages. And I, and I asked them how that was going for them.

01:59:24.860 | And they said, well, it's going great,

01:59:26.540 | but it feels like I have the most profitable McDonald's in the world built

01:59:31.380 | on top of an active volcano.

01:59:33.060 | Any moment at any moment, the algorithm could be changed.

01:59:40.820 | Suddenly, Oh, you're a business page. Okay.

01:59:43.540 | Now we're going to throttle your organic reach to like 10% of your audience.

01:59:46.900 | And you're going to have to pay to reach the people you thought or guaranteed to

01:59:51.020 | see your message. I don't like that. I don't like that risk.

01:59:55.220 | And therefore for me,

01:59:57.340 | at least one of the core

02:00:01.580 | drivers for using the newsletter as I have, you know,

02:00:06.300 | five bullet Fridays is the most popular aspect of the newsletter, which is free.

02:00:10.260 | So listeners, you can find that@tim.blogspot.com/friday.

02:00:13.460 | I've been doing that for a long time now is to

02:00:18.100 | establish a direct line of communication with my listeners and

02:00:23.700 | readers. And quite frankly, also because text is my native

02:00:28.780 | language, everything started with books.

02:00:31.380 | And so in the same way that Rogan is really, really, really, really good on video,

02:00:36.060 | it's also quite clever via text. I mean, I think his, his, there,

02:00:39.660 | there are many good reasons why he is incredibly popular on Instagram.

02:00:43.500 | I mean, some of his, some of his captions and so on are exceptional and they're

02:00:47.260 | long. Some of them, for me,

02:00:50.100 | that translates to feeling very comfortable, very competent,

02:00:53.340 | very good about the newsletter writing five bullet Friday is

02:00:58.060 | therapeutic for me. So it is in a way,

02:01:00.660 | a diary and self-therapy and

02:01:04.740 | quote unquote marketing all in one, which is great.

02:01:08.540 | So those are a few thoughts,

02:01:11.540 | but I don't pay a lot of attention to data,

02:01:15.860 | but I will look at trend lines over time.

02:01:18.180 | And if there's some type of catalyzing event or concern,

02:01:21.460 | especially due to technical problems or new policies on platforms,

02:01:26.180 | then I'll take a quick look at that.

02:01:27.940 | But the fact of the matter is I wouldn't pay too much attention to data or

02:01:32.460 | specific data sets until you've asked yourself,

02:01:35.980 | what action will I take or not take,

02:01:40.460 | or what behavioral will change based on looking at this data set.

02:01:45.180 | And if the answer is none and none do something else,

02:01:47.900 | unless you're just,

02:01:50.660 | it nurtures your soul and kind of tickles your nuts to

02:01:54.740 | chew on data. If that's just your fun, that's your recreation. Great.

02:01:58.900 | Have fun. But otherwise I wouldn't pay too much attention to it.

02:02:02.020 | So one of the most common things I think people look at data for,

02:02:07.260 | and it's not clear, like you said,

02:02:08.900 | that they would do anything about it is to try to see if their audience is

02:02:13.660 | growing. Yep. So I know you said, don't think about growth,

02:02:16.300 | but we can come back to growth.

02:02:17.420 | I think one of the interesting things is a lot of people have podcasts,

02:02:22.340 | good content. And, you know,

02:02:24.860 | I've been asked to go on some podcasts where they get a hundred,

02:02:28.140 | 200 downloads an episode, and they're just not breaking out,

02:02:32.020 | but it's not because they don't have good content.

02:02:33.500 | You obviously came into this.

02:02:35.620 | I remember you said that when you launched your podcast,

02:02:37.820 | it was the number one podcast in iTunes. Yep.

02:02:40.100 | I know you get a boost when you launch, but not everyone has that.

02:02:44.060 | Do you think other than good content is growth,

02:02:48.420 | something you think people should spend any time on because people have to find

02:02:52.820 | that good content? Sure. I think growth,

02:02:56.180 | I think awareness is perfectly valid to

02:03:00.900 | focus on. And I do pay attention to growth.

02:03:04.020 | I do track,

02:03:06.540 | I'm very well aware of like the average number of downloads at week two at week

02:03:11.340 | six per episode and total number of downloads.

02:03:14.860 | And I do pay attention to a handful of key metrics.

02:03:18.540 | I just don't,

02:03:20.860 | I don't pay attention to them to the extent that they become a

02:03:25.980 | distraction from things that I think are more important.

02:03:29.300 | But in the beginning for sure, I launched, like I said,

02:03:32.740 | 2014 and the ecosystem has exploded since

02:03:36.580 | competition is, I mean, probably a million X what it was. I mean,

02:03:40.940 | at least a few thousand X what it was. Although I would say just a,

02:03:45.260 | just because there are a lot of podcasts doesn't mean automatically that you

02:03:48.380 | have competition competition for what,

02:03:51.420 | what is the scarce resource that you are competing for? If not,

02:03:55.340 | why is it a competition? It's an ego thing. What is the competition?

02:03:58.620 | I think these are questions worth asking, but let's come back to growth.

02:04:02.380 | So when I launched in 2014, I should also say,

02:04:04.980 | there were people who said to me that ship has sailed.

02:04:09.900 | It's too late. There's no point doing a podcast in 2014.

02:04:14.860 | So I think they were wrong then.

02:04:18.820 | And the people who say that now, I also think are wrong.

02:04:22.180 | It's still very, very early. Think about it. I mean,

02:04:27.300 | Amazon has only come into this space in a big way, very recently.

02:04:32.340 | And they're very quietly, I suspect doing lots of interesting things,

02:04:36.820 | but they have not thrown all their weight behind this.

02:04:40.980 | And they have a lot of weight to throw. That is just one example.

02:04:45.780 | We are so early still, I think,

02:04:48.100 | but with respect to what has helped

02:04:52.820 | increase downloads, I would say,

02:04:56.700 | being on other podcasts, first and foremost,

02:05:02.300 | helped drive subscribers.

02:05:04.220 | You need to be explicit about asking people to go to the podcast and being

02:05:08.940 | explicit with the host that that is why you are coming on the podcast.

02:05:12.180 | Otherwise, I don't think there's automatically a high conversion rate.

02:05:16.180 | People who listen to podcasts probably listen to more than one podcast.

02:05:20.980 | So I do think that there is a fair amount of transference when you're on other

02:05:26.460 | podcasts and it makes you a better podcaster to be on other well-run

02:05:31.180 | podcasts. So you can take notes on process, how they prep you,

02:05:36.020 | what technology they use,

02:05:37.500 | what did they do or not do that you could adapt or not adapt?

02:05:41.860 | What are you doing that you might want to discard?

02:05:44.060 | So there is an educational part also to being on other podcasts that you might

02:05:47.660 | not get from pursuing growth through other channels.

02:05:50.100 | I think that newsletters are also very powerful,

02:05:55.180 | email and newsletters.

02:05:56.460 | They're powerful for everything because they are one link click

02:06:01.140 | away from whatever the desired action is.

02:06:04.340 | So those would be two that come to mind.

02:06:07.420 | And there are other ways to increase

02:06:12.220 | downloads and subscribers. Certainly big names don't hurt,

02:06:17.660 | but it's one thing to get somebody to your podcast.

02:06:21.020 | It's another to have them stick around and be an active listener.

02:06:25.980 | So if you get a celebrity on and they are

02:06:30.380 | mediocre at best, is someone going to listen to a second episode?

02:06:34.140 | I would guess not. They might have an automatic download,

02:06:38.460 | but what is it that you actually care about the download number or the number of

02:06:41.140 | active listeners? I care about the number of active listeners for a lot of

02:06:43.860 | reasons. Hard to confirm what the active listenership is,

02:06:47.940 | but big names definitely help, right?

02:06:50.620 | The Arnold Schwarzenegger episode and the amount of promotion that I then did

02:06:53.900 | behind it, right? So I do use paid acquisition,

02:06:58.780 | advertising, things of this type,

02:07:00.860 | having a name to really put

02:07:07.140 | a lot of the machine behind and muscle behind,

02:07:09.900 | which could be as simple as a basic campaign on your

02:07:14.700 | platform of choice.

02:07:15.980 | That doesn't necessitate having a blog and so on. Like I do.

02:07:20.580 | I think that is certainly helpful,

02:07:22.140 | but it's a temptation that needs to be tempered because you could spend all your

02:07:26.220 | time chasing big names. And I think it's a fool's errand.

02:07:28.940 | As I mentioned earlier, certainly video,

02:07:32.340 | I think YouTube TikTok to some extent, certainly.

02:07:37.500 | Although I think Andrew Chen has written some very interesting pieces about

02:07:41.980 | TikTok and its effects on virality and some perhaps unintended or unknown

02:07:46.740 | consequences of sudden influx. So people can, can Google that and find it.

02:07:51.460 | YouTube can be extremely helpful. And I've seen that with many podcasts.

02:07:56.340 | Now it's, it's not just limited to Joe Rogan. You have many examples.

02:08:01.460 | I mean, Jordan Peterson would be another example.

02:08:03.380 | There are probably thousands of examples,

02:08:06.060 | but I could certainly think of it a dozen offhand who use video very, very well.

02:08:10.260 | Those are a few and PR PR. You get,

02:08:15.540 | if you want to practice your chops with getting out in other types of media

02:08:19.500 | outside of podcasting, then knock yourself out.

02:08:24.140 | You could do that as well.

02:08:25.220 | When you said video,

02:08:27.100 | I noticed you have two kinds of podcast videos on your YouTube channel.

02:08:30.580 | You've got the static image of the cover art and the guest and just

02:08:35.460 | playing the audio. And then the actual interview are both of those

02:08:40.180 | effective, or do you really think the real boost comes when you have video

02:08:44.900 | content? The real boost comes from video content for sure. Yeah.

02:08:48.380 | The static images are placeholders from audio only interviews.

02:08:52.780 | Yeah. So to put them on YouTube,

02:08:54.980 | we choose a cover page of some type and that is what people

02:09:00.460 | see, but for sure, actual video,

02:09:03.820 | moving images makes the biggest difference. And I will say, you know,

02:09:09.500 | that I suspect a lot of people are going to be very disappointed with my answers

02:09:13.540 | on growth here. And I will say,

02:09:17.220 | and this is such an old man thing to say, but I'll say it anyway.

02:09:19.980 | There is no magic bullet for growth and the

02:09:25.300 | tools change.

02:09:26.580 | So I would suggest getting a book like the 22 immutable

02:09:31.580 | laws of marketing, reading a short chapter called the law of category.

02:09:36.300 | I believe I put an updated slash edited version of that in either tools of

02:09:41.060 | Titans or tribe mentors, because I think it's that valuable read the law of

02:09:45.580 | category read 1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly, which you can find on kk.org.

02:09:50.940 | These will give you principles,

02:09:53.940 | adaptable principles that will allow you to build a unique

02:09:57.900 | position in the minds of people who will become diehard

02:10:03.460 | evangelists. If you do that,

02:10:06.580 | which takes consistency over time and it takes focus more than anything else.

02:10:11.140 | A lot of the other dominoes will tip over without any

02:10:16.900 | additional effort.

02:10:17.740 | But if instead of learning how to draw as an analogy,

02:10:23.700 | you're focused on whether you should use a ballpoint pen or a fountain pen or

02:10:27.380 | pastels or crayons or watercolors,

02:10:30.340 | meaning the different technologies and tools clubhouse versus

02:10:35.740 | Tik TOK versus Instagram versus Oh, Vine. Remember that? Oops. Oh,

02:10:40.420 | if your promotional engine was based on that, Oh, Facebook business pages. Oh,

02:10:45.820 | yeah. You're going to need to boost to reach your audience. Now.

02:10:49.660 | Sorry about that.

02:10:50.660 | There's too much fragility in a tactics or tools based approach.

02:10:55.540 | So I think the principles are most important,

02:10:57.380 | but I recognize also that perhaps I am just too far from the

02:11:02.820 | nascent years in which I built my blog following

02:11:07.100 | to provide a good answer. I will say though, that I built a very, very, very,

02:11:11.860 | very popular blog when practically no one knew who the hell I was.

02:11:15.980 | And I did that by writing posts that I hoped

02:11:19.940 | 10% of my then very small audience would love.

02:11:25.180 | I did not write posts that I wanted a hundred percent of my audience to

02:11:29.820 | like. And I do the same thing with podcasting. I think it works really well.

02:11:34.140 | So I do not expect my entire audience to love any episode.

02:11:38.460 | And if I tried to do that, I think I would shoot myself in the foot.

02:11:41.020 | I expect that my active audience will be in a rotation

02:11:46.500 | and every fourth or fifth or maybe 10th episode,

02:11:51.460 | they will love so much that they will send it to 10 of their friends.

02:11:54.340 | That is how I think about it. And I, I believe at least so far,

02:11:59.540 | it has been extremely, extremely effective.

02:12:01.100 | One of the pieces of feedback someone gave me on my show was that not every

02:12:06.140 | episode is relevant to them.

02:12:07.580 | I did an episode where I interviewed a professional car buyer and they were like,

02:12:11.900 | I don't have a car. So this episode is pointless. They're like,

02:12:13.980 | maybe you should change the show so that everything's always relevant to

02:12:18.620 | everyone. And my answer was, I don't know, I'm going to buy a car.

02:12:22.620 | I wanted to talk to someone that professionally does this.

02:12:24.820 | And that's super interesting to me. So just skip it and go to the next one.

02:12:29.100 | Do you feel similarly? You said, you know, one in five to 10 people love that

02:12:32.300 | episode. Do you care or,

02:12:33.980 | or do you think they're listening to the other five to nine episodes?

02:12:37.740 | I don't care.

02:12:38.940 | I literally spend zero time thinking about it because,

02:12:43.940 | and this, this might sound strange, but for me to be, for me to have fun,

02:12:49.860 | for this to be a joyful experience that I look forward to,

02:12:56.140 | the podcast needs to have a certain essence,

02:13:00.540 | a certain pull for me, and it has to have a certain dosage.

02:13:05.540 | So I have a very infrequent podcast.

02:13:08.260 | I do it on average four times per month,

02:13:12.460 | or I publish four long form episodes per month.

02:13:15.260 | We didn't really talk about recording cadence, which we could talk about,

02:13:18.460 | but on average, I publish four long form interviews per month.

02:13:22.460 | At one point it was six episodes.

02:13:23.980 | And then I noticed a few months into doing that,

02:13:26.500 | I was starting to drag my feet a little bit.

02:13:30.380 | And it began to feel like a job, like an obligation.

02:13:35.460 | And I noted that quickly, thankfully. And I said, this is no good.

02:13:39.620 | If I keep this up, I'm going to stop doing the podcast,

02:13:42.860 | or I'm just going to be unhappy doing it. In which case,

02:13:47.380 | what the fuck am I doing? Cause I don't need to do it.

02:13:50.020 | And I then ratcheted back the frequency of the podcast to the point

02:13:54.780 | where it felt good. There's a dosage question,

02:13:58.540 | i.e. frequency. There's also an essence pull question. So for me,

02:14:03.740 | I have to follow my own interest and to be of a

02:14:08.500 | good steward of my own self-care,

02:14:11.060 | but to also be of greatest service to the people who are listening,

02:14:14.580 | I need to keep doing this, or at least I hope to keep doing it.

02:14:18.500 | Maybe I don't need to, but I would like to keep doing this,

02:14:21.140 | and to be able to grow over time and share those lessons.

02:14:25.380 | The only way I'm going to do that is if I am drawn to

02:14:30.060 | continue doing this because I enjoy it.

02:14:32.300 | So if I decide to do an episode with a violin appraiser,

02:14:37.100 | and it gets 10 listeners, I don't fucking care at all.

02:14:40.780 | As long as I enjoy the episode, I do not care.

02:14:44.540 | And I will say that over time,

02:14:46.860 | that not caring is the ultimate form of caring because you

02:14:52.860 | can cultivate an audience who is interested in

02:14:57.700 | stepping into weird,

02:14:59.260 | strange corners of the world into

02:15:03.660 | interests and professions and lives that they perhaps otherwise would have

02:15:08.340 | ignored or avoided.

02:15:11.060 | So your audience will also change in how they relate to you

02:15:15.100 | over time. And at least in my experience,

02:15:20.020 | they I hope have realized that sometimes it is the

02:15:25.100 | episode they least would have expected to want to listen to,

02:15:29.260 | that they end up liking the most of perhaps the last 20 episodes I've

02:15:34.300 | done.

02:15:34.780 | So I think my listeners are more and more willing to give me the

02:15:39.460 | benefit of the doubt and try something strange.

02:15:41.660 | Yeah. I got some feedback from Joe Saul Sehai,

02:15:45.420 | who runs a podcast called the Stacking Benjamins,

02:15:47.700 | which is a funny like kind of different style podcast.

02:15:50.900 | But he said the interesting thing you have to realize with guests is someone

02:15:55.300 | might listen to the episode for the guest, but at the end of the day,

02:15:59.140 | they're subscribing and coming back for you.

02:16:01.300 | And so the nature of interviews though often is we're trying to

02:16:06.460 | highlight the guest and hear their stories,

02:16:09.340 | which inherently if done well, is them talking more than you.

02:16:14.060 | You mentioned earlier, if it's a bad guest,

02:16:16.140 | it might be you talking much more than them.

02:16:17.860 | How do you make sure you interject enough of Tim into the podcast that new

02:16:22.940 | listeners and recurring listeners get that when the focus of each episode is,

02:16:27.660 | is always on someone else?

02:16:29.020 | That is a really good question.

02:16:31.820 | And the answer is I don't think about it at all.

02:16:37.300 | But there are some times when I will interject and it has a

02:16:42.300 | strategic purpose or a practical purpose.

02:16:45.620 | There are interviews where I basically don't talk at all.

02:16:49.460 | And if someone is just, you know,

02:16:56.140 | a woman or a man possessed and they are in flow, I will let them riff.

02:17:00.220 | It'll just be an audio book of that person for an hour or two hours.

02:17:05.460 | You can listen to Tim Ferriss and Bology.

02:17:08.380 | That's an example of that, the four hour,

02:17:13.060 | every topic under the sun covered podcast,

02:17:18.180 | which was quite an experience to be on the receiving end of also great episode,

02:17:23.220 | very unusual.

02:17:25.620 | And one of the best performing podcasts probably of the last year for me,

02:17:29.780 | which is saying a lot.

02:17:30.700 | So if people look up my name or just go to Tim dot blog and search Bology,

02:17:35.060 | B-A-L-A-J-I. Yeah.

02:17:38.460 | Put in a mouth guard and drink a few cups of coffee and prepare yourself for the

02:17:42.420 | onslaught. It's quite something,

02:17:43.780 | but I will interject in a few

02:17:49.100 | instances.

02:17:49.940 | One is where I know I'm asking a question or I suspect

02:17:55.860 | I'm asking a question.

02:17:56.700 | The guest is going to have trouble answering unless they have some time to think

02:18:00.820 | about it. So for instance,

02:18:03.980 | if I ask them, what is one of the best investments you've ever made,

02:18:09.980 | which by the way is better than what's the best investment you've ever made in

02:18:14.100 | the same way that what is one of the books you have gifted the most for other

02:18:18.700 | people is better than what's the best book you've ever read.

02:18:23.500 | The search function is a lot harder.

02:18:25.220 | It's going to take them much longer to try to come up with a single answer.

02:18:29.540 | And they will generally default to recency.

02:18:32.660 | They'll come up with something that happened recent.

02:18:34.460 | So you don't get the best answers. If I ask someone,

02:18:38.860 | for instance, what is one of the best investments you've ever made?

02:18:43.140 | And then I might buy them time by giving some examples. I'll say,

02:18:47.660 | let me give you a few examples and give you a second to think about it.

02:18:50.700 | It could be an investment of money, like so-and-so say Warren Buffett,

02:18:55.500 | who invested in Dale Carnegie speaking classes for public speaking.

02:18:59.820 | And he always cites that as his best ever investment because it has multiplied

02:19:03.940 | and magnified his ability to do everything else.

02:19:08.060 | It has been a supercharger for all of his other skills and talents.

02:19:11.380 | It could be buying an entrance ticket to a competition

02:19:17.180 | that allowed you to prove yourself that then led to

02:19:21.740 | X. It could be an investment of energy. It could be anything. Okay.

02:19:26.580 | I just gave everyone listening and you 45 to 60

02:19:31.260 | seconds to think about an answer,

02:19:33.580 | as opposed to off the cuff coming up with something as quickly as possible.

02:19:37.860 | Fortunately, you can take that approach, or if you're not recording live,

02:19:44.420 | you can just say, take your time. We're not recording this live.

02:19:48.740 | You can take 30 seconds in silence to think about it.

02:19:51.340 | And then we can talk, but that feels strange to a lot of people,

02:19:56.420 | even though you can do that for a production standpoint,

02:20:00.500 | sitting in a conversation in silence,

02:20:03.260 | waiting for a minute for someone to answer feels unnatural and weird.

02:20:07.660 | So I will interject in a case like that very frequently when I speak

02:20:13.900 | up,

02:20:14.260 | it is to buy time for the interviewee and to give them a

02:20:19.260 | few examples to act as like auxiliary search

02:20:24.060 | functions in their own brains.

02:20:25.540 | They can come up with the best possible answer.

02:20:27.340 | Yeah. I was thinking the whole time about my, my best investment.

02:20:30.620 | Well, what is one of your best investments?

02:20:33.620 | Well, it's funny when I moved out to the Bay area,

02:20:36.740 | I didn't know anyone and I had recently been laid off.

02:20:40.220 | And so I didn't have any money,

02:20:41.860 | but I invested in a membership at the climbing gym down the street.

02:20:45.220 | And at the time I thought this is climbing gyms are not cheap gyms.

02:20:49.420 | There's cheaper gyms, but through the climbing gym,

02:20:51.620 | I met a guy named Daniel Berka who was at day through Daniel.

02:20:55.460 | I met Kevin through Kevin.

02:20:56.460 | I was like,

02:20:56.700 | it's literally probably the investment that ended up building out my entire

02:20:59.980 | network, including being here. But at the time it seemed, you know,

02:21:03.740 | it was like a hundred and 120 bucks a month. It seemed crazy, but yeah.

02:21:07.340 | Yeah. That's amazing. Was that mission cliffs or where were you?

02:21:10.020 | It was mission cliffs. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great gym.

02:21:13.300 | I remember mission cliffs back up back in the day.

02:21:15.460 | So that's a fun question to ask. If I asked someone about favorite failures,

02:21:20.500 | just the phrasing of the question is very confusing for a lot of people.

02:21:23.580 | So then I'll give them an example.

02:21:24.860 | And the other time that I'll chime in as if the

02:21:29.900 | interview is drowning in boredom

02:21:33.420 | as a rescue attempt.

02:21:38.180 | So that's a lot about, about Tim.

02:21:40.020 | So I want to talk a little bit about the transition early.

02:21:43.220 | Tim was really just the four hour guy, right?

02:21:45.900 | You had three books in a row where that was the theme.

02:21:48.500 | Someone told me once they said, Hey, you know,

02:21:50.780 | your cover art for an episode of podcast, everything,

02:21:53.860 | nothing has anything about you on it.

02:21:55.460 | So I took a similar early on approach where this story of the

02:22:00.140 | show is all about what the show's about all the hacks.

02:22:03.460 | It's not about me at all. And people are like, well, who are you?

02:22:06.740 | And you made a transition. Now your podcast is, you know, the Tim Ferriss show.

02:22:10.260 | It's nothing to do with four hour.

02:22:11.700 | I get the sense that you're trying to run away from being the four hour guy,

02:22:15.260 | but how have you thought about that transition and,

02:22:18.540 | and making it and making a brand that is really about you

02:22:23.220 | instead of something else?

02:22:25.620 | I'm going to tackle this from oblique

02:22:29.980 | angle and I'll

02:22:34.540 | couch it under the umbrella of identity diversification

02:22:38.500 | and also optionality.

02:22:41.820 | So flashing back to the four hour work week,

02:22:44.820 | four hour work week was this huge unexpected hit.

02:22:49.660 | The state on the New York times list for four to five years straight every week.

02:22:54.940 | And it created an abundance

02:23:00.660 | of inbound opportunity. Almost all the requests

02:23:04.860 | were expectedly related to the four hour work week.

02:23:08.460 | So I was the four hour work week guy.

02:23:09.860 | We want you to give a talk on the principles of the four hour work week.

02:23:12.340 | You want me to do consulting to help us improve efficiency and

02:23:16.780 | per hour yield within this organization.

02:23:19.820 | We want you to do this workshop.

02:23:22.260 | We want you to license the name so we can

02:23:26.500 | develop A, B, C, D, and E. We want to option it for a movie,

02:23:31.220 | which is almost always a dead end. By the way, if people are wondering,

02:23:34.060 | we want to talk to you about a musical. We want to do this. We want to do that.

02:23:38.060 | Most of those things all came to zero,

02:23:40.940 | but all of the external pressures

02:23:45.780 | were to milk that for everything that it was worth. In other words,

02:23:50.460 | I would write the four hour work week volume two,

02:23:54.940 | or I would write the three hour work week.

02:23:57.260 | I would continue to beat that drum until

02:24:01.700 | I had shaggy gray eyebrows and

02:24:05.500 | could bang the drum no more. That was going to be me.

02:24:09.340 | And I saw many authors around me

02:24:14.460 | who I met on the speaking circuit early on when I did that.

02:24:17.740 | I no longer, and for many years, have done no paid speaking,

02:24:22.620 | which was a categorical decision and policy that was one of those

02:24:27.260 | decisions that removes a thousand decisions for many reasons we could talk

02:24:31.700 | about. The short answer is I was repeating myself.

02:24:35.860 | And when you repeat yourself, this is relevant to my point.

02:24:39.700 | When you repeat the same messages, as my friend,

02:24:44.380 | Josh Waits can point out to me, you begin to calcify your thinking.

02:24:48.980 | And you're also repeating it because you are being paid

02:24:53.780 | for this perishable product,

02:24:55.380 | which is speaking to audiences over and over again about the same

02:25:00.100 | thing.

02:25:00.940 | And I recognized I did not want to be many of the

02:25:06.700 | people I met who had been milking the same thing for a very long time.

02:25:10.820 | They didn't seem particularly happy about it.

02:25:12.780 | They didn't seem energized by it.

02:25:15.340 | They seemed drained and they seemed to feel trapped to

02:25:20.060 | me, which is why, given the success of the book,

02:25:23.260 | I decided to maintain,

02:25:26.340 | preserve the brand recognition of 4-Hour,

02:25:29.660 | but move it into physical performance with the 4-Hour body,

02:25:32.100 | because I recognized I might never have this chance again

02:25:37.380 | to step out,

02:25:38.780 | to have license to go to a completely different section of the bookstore,

02:25:42.420 | a completely different subject matter,

02:25:43.780 | but I could always go back to the 4-Hour Workweek.

02:25:47.660 | So I could always return to that comfortable, familiar,

02:25:52.180 | well-worn path of these principles outlined in the 4-Hour Workweek.

02:25:55.540 | So this is, I think, an important part of the backstory.

02:25:59.180 | So I decided to go to 4-Hour Body. 4-Hour Body does extremely well.

02:26:04.140 | 4-Hour Body hits number one, New York Times, still sells extremely well.

02:26:08.780 | And that then bought me the license to write

02:26:13.780 | the 4-Hour Chef, where I'm taking these principles,

02:26:16.300 | which also come up in your podcast a fair amount with Andy Ratcliffe recently

02:26:19.980 | of Wealthfront, the 80/20 principle.

02:26:23.420 | So Pareto's law and many different

02:26:27.820 | principles that you could apply to deconstructing entrepreneurship and

02:26:32.780 | testing assumptions apply equally to physical performance.

02:26:35.580 | They apply equally to accelerated learning, language acquisition,

02:26:39.540 | cooking doesn't matter.

02:26:40.700 | So now I had proven to the people who pay me,

02:26:46.260 | at least upfront, the publishers,

02:26:48.220 | and also proven to my audience that what was interesting

02:26:53.260 | was the adventures and the principles, not any specific subject matter.

02:26:58.900 | It's hard for me to overstate how important that is.

02:27:02.140 | I was no longer trapped in one section of the bookstore.

02:27:05.180 | I could write about anything I wanted. Now I had license to do that. Okay.

02:27:09.300 | The 4-Hour Chef almost killed me.

02:27:13.900 | It was an incredibly complex, extremely difficult project.

02:27:17.580 | It was the first major acquisition by Amazon Publishing when they were really

02:27:20.940 | stepping into publishing in a big way. The entire publishing world freaked out.

02:27:24.620 | Barnes and Noble wouldn't carry the book. I mean,

02:27:27.380 | it was exciting and also a huge mess on many levels.

02:27:32.340 | And each book launch,

02:27:34.500 | I would talk to best-selling authors who had

02:27:40.380 | launched in the preceding, say, 12 months.

02:27:42.340 | And I would ask them which channels, tools,

02:27:45.420 | and outlets did less than they expected or were waning in importance and

02:27:50.180 | impact and which did more than they expected and seemed to be

02:27:54.980 | in a scent. So for the 4-Hour Workweek,

02:27:58.740 | blogs were neglected, largely. I mean,

02:28:01.420 | blogs were incredibly powerful and neglected. That's where I focused.

02:28:04.820 | With the 4-Hour Body,

02:28:08.020 | I asked the same questions and I explored a bunch of different channels.

02:28:11.420 | For the 4-Hour Chef, the medium and the tool,

02:28:15.500 | the channel that was most undervalued but most impactful was

02:28:19.700 | podcasting. So I focused on podcasting for the launch of the 4-Hour Chef.

02:28:24.340 | And these podcasts had incredible impact,

02:28:26.980 | much more impact than huge television shows.

02:28:31.340 | And in the process of doing that,

02:28:35.540 | I really realized how much I enjoyed the long-form conversations where you

02:28:40.580 | could be yourself, you could drop an F-bomb if need be,

02:28:42.900 | or if that was your penchant for just speaking casually and

02:28:47.860 | comfortably versus, say, being on morning television,

02:28:51.220 | which can have some impact but seemed to have less and less of an impact

02:28:55.780 | where someone is staring over your shoulder at a teleprompter and you literally

02:28:59.540 | have 30 seconds to talk after spending like an hour waiting in the green room

02:29:04.180 | after having your face spray-painted with makeup and you woke up at 5am to get

02:29:09.060 | there. It's not that enjoyable an experience. So I saw the impact.

02:29:13.020 | I enjoyed the podcasting and decided then at that point,

02:29:16.980 | I'm going to take a big break from books.

02:29:19.140 | Not sure I'm ever going to write another book, but in the meantime,

02:29:22.340 | I'd like to experiment with this podcasting format and see what it's like to be

02:29:27.700 | in the director's seat, so to speak.

02:29:29.660 | And the only reason the podcast ended up with the Tim Ferriss Show as the name

02:29:35.740 | is I couldn't come up with a name.

02:29:37.220 | And Kevin called it Tim Tim Talk Talk in the first episode,

02:29:41.780 | which long-term listeners still joke about. And I still joke,

02:29:45.460 | Kevin and I still joke about,

02:29:46.700 | but came up with all of these different names for it.

02:29:50.860 | And the fact of the matter was at that time,

02:29:54.140 | there were only two things that had a lot of brand recognition.

02:29:58.380 | The four hour shtick, which I didn't want to extend.

02:30:03.740 | I wanted to retire that Jersey or my name.

02:30:08.380 | And that is the reason that I decided to use the name.

02:30:14.020 | But if you're just starting a podcast and you don't have any name recognition,

02:30:18.460 | I don't think that the logic automatically follows that you should use your

02:30:22.780 | name. Now it's been a wonderful trip.

02:30:25.900 | I will say that there are drawbacks to launching a

02:30:30.900 | podcast with your name in the same way that their drawbacks to founding a company

02:30:35.300 | that can only be run by you. As we've seen in the news,

02:30:39.700 | there are a lot of big deals by podcast standards happening.

02:30:44.380 | At the moment, there is a land grab for talent and big shows and audience.

02:30:49.340 | So you have Joe Rogan purportedly a hundred million dollar deal.

02:30:53.300 | I actually think if I had to guess, I don't know this,

02:30:55.660 | but I would suspect it is substantially larger than that over time with earn

02:30:59.020 | outs and so on and performance bonuses, I would guess it's much larger than that.

02:31:03.020 | I think there was somewhere between 60 and a hundred million dollar deal for

02:31:07.340 | Dax Shepard, something like a $60 million deal for

02:31:11.980 | call her daddy. I think that's a three-year deal.

02:31:14.820 | You will notice that the deal terms appear to be getting more

02:31:19.980 | and more onerous. Now, those are not all comparable deals.

02:31:23.500 | Those are different people, different properties and so on.

02:31:25.740 | But I believe as part of the deal with call her daddy,

02:31:28.900 | that Spotify has a first look or write a first

02:31:33.860 | refusal or automatic ownership of future properties and

02:31:38.020 | creations, not just current Joe Rogan has a licensing deal,

02:31:43.060 | which is very different from an IP purchase agreement.

02:31:48.500 | But this is all to say that if I had,

02:31:53.020 | let's just say, who knows the four hour podcast,

02:31:56.820 | if I'd called it the four hour podcast and I owned that trademark

02:32:02.060 | and slowly brought in other hosts or co-hosts

02:32:06.900 | to help,

02:32:07.740 | one could foresee an option of building that up into a property

02:32:12.980 | with many different personalities and selling that property.

02:32:17.780 | After which I,

02:32:20.780 | as the initial builder of that brand could be free and clear to go on and

02:32:25.780 | do other things.

02:32:26.620 | It is not possible to do that simply with a podcast called the Tim Ferriss

02:32:31.820 | show. Yes. So there are drawbacks, but net, net,

02:32:35.540 | that's the story of how I got there.

02:32:37.140 | And I don't think about building a personal brand to be clear.

02:32:39.980 | You have a personal brand already. Everyone has a personal brand.

02:32:44.780 | Guess what your personal brand is.

02:32:45.860 | Your personal brand is what your closest friends and family and coworkers think

02:32:50.860 | of you. That's it. What do they associate you with, right?

02:32:53.500 | If they had to pull four or five adjectives out of the air,

02:32:56.420 | how would they describe you? Whatever comes to mind,

02:33:00.180 | most naturally when people think about you, that is your personal brand.

02:33:03.420 | So we all already have a personal brand.

02:33:05.500 | If you want to create a personal facade or a stage persona,

02:33:10.500 | I'm not saying you Chris, but just in general, you can do that,

02:33:14.420 | but you should be very careful of that.

02:33:15.820 | And I remember I was told,

02:33:21.140 | and I'm paraphrasing here, but by Andrew Zimmern,

02:33:23.580 | who is an amazing television host who is very smart and very,

02:33:28.700 | very thoughtful. He's been on the podcast. His story is incredible. I mean,

02:33:33.100 | he was,

02:33:33.420 | I think sleeping on a mattress under an overpass at one point as an addict and

02:33:38.420 | now is who he is. It's a really remarkable story,

02:33:42.460 | but when he was just getting started in television and he and I spoke when I was

02:33:46.780 | doing some television, not too long ago,

02:33:48.460 | he had some choices to make in that first episode about who he wanted to be and

02:33:54.020 | how did he want to deliver his lines?

02:33:56.340 | Were they going to incorporate any particular types of sticks?

02:33:59.380 | Were they going to be funny?

02:34:01.780 | Were they going to make fun of certain things?

02:34:04.620 | Were they going to use the cheesy jokes?

02:34:08.100 | And he made a lot of decisions early on that ended up being critical to the

02:34:13.580 | future of his career because he said, in effect,

02:34:18.020 | be very careful of who you are in episode one,

02:34:20.460 | because that's who you have to be for the rest of the time you're on television.

02:34:24.540 | And I think that's true podcasting.

02:34:25.900 | So be really careful about what you pretend to be because you will have to

02:34:30.940 | maintain that. And you may actually become whatever you pretend to be.

02:34:34.180 | So I don't, I don't think a whole lot about personal brand.

02:34:39.100 | Although I do think about what I want to stand for.

02:34:42.580 | And if I were really true to myself,

02:34:47.500 | like if I were really true to myself, what would I do? Who would I interview?

02:34:51.460 | If I were just doing this for me, what would I do?

02:34:54.740 | And I always get the best results when I do that.

02:34:57.980 | When I try to predict the movement of the masses of some potential audience like

02:35:02.980 | this, you know,

02:35:06.820 | flock of birds where I'm trying to guess which direction they're going to fly.

02:35:10.020 | It never turns out well for me, especially it's not fun.

02:35:14.580 | And it's not particularly effective.

02:35:16.220 | One of the things you mentioned in that story was about these podcasts,

02:35:20.140 | getting these licensing deals or different things.

02:35:22.420 | A common thing that I know happens with podcasts,

02:35:25.900 | especially as they start to gain traction and has happened to me in the last

02:35:29.380 | couple of weeks is some podcast network will reach out and say, Hey,

02:35:33.060 | do you want to join our network? Do you want to be an iHeartRadio podcast?

02:35:35.700 | Do you want to, and usually get to keep all your IP, but they basically say,

02:35:39.900 | Hey, we'll sell ads. We'll keep 50%. We'll help you grow your show.

02:35:43.260 | We'll do all this stuff. You don't have to do it. Think about it.

02:35:45.660 | We'll just give you the money we make.

02:35:47.660 | And it seems to your point about monetization,

02:35:51.260 | don't spend any time on it, spend time honing your craft,

02:35:54.260 | spend time making a good show.

02:35:55.820 | Is that a good way to kind of take all of that off your plate from thinking

02:36:01.140 | about it?

02:36:01.660 | Would you encourage people to take those calls because they don't result in

02:36:06.380 | having to spend time selling ads though you lose upside for

02:36:10.940 | whatever term that deal is?

02:36:12.380 | This is a worthwhile topic to explore. So clearly, or maybe it's not clear,

02:36:17.340 | but I do not work with a network or a partner of that type.

02:36:21.300 | A lot of people do a lot of people do.

02:36:24.180 | And I think it depends a lot on what you

02:36:28.780 | are trying to accomplish.

02:36:32.340 | So a question everyone should ask is three years from now,

02:36:35.220 | your podcast is successful. What does that mean to you? What does it look like?

02:36:39.260 | Exactly.

02:36:40.140 | What does a month in your life look like with respect to the podcast?

02:36:44.740 | It's successful. What does that mean? What does it look like?

02:36:47.500 | So it depends on that. It also depends on your competencies,

02:36:51.220 | your willingness to hire or work with

02:36:55.820 | contractors or commissioned salespeople to sell ads

02:37:00.380 | or sponsorships or find sponsors. If that is something that you want to do,

02:37:04.980 | is it worthwhile to take the calls? It's always worthwhile to take the calls.

02:37:08.860 | Just don't promise anything. Yeah, definitely take the calls.

02:37:11.340 | And the question that I would ask myself in preparation for those causes,

02:37:14.580 | how can I learn as much as possible from this call?

02:37:17.100 | So that if even if I never end up talking to this person again,

02:37:20.380 | I get a lot out of this.

02:37:23.100 | Can you ask about best practices of other podcasts?

02:37:26.340 | Can you ask about common mistakes that highly competent,

02:37:31.340 | but novice or new to the game podcasters make in their experience?

02:37:35.820 | Can you ask them or indicate as a policy,

02:37:40.180 | when you have these types of conversations,

02:37:41.500 | you always ask if I couldn't work with you,

02:37:44.380 | who would you recommend I work with?

02:37:46.420 | Can you start to get a better understanding of the ecosystem?

02:37:49.300 | Can you ask them about other players in the system?

02:37:54.860 | In other words,

02:37:56.460 | further your education and give yourself more and more of an informational

02:38:02.140 | advantage. Even if you never do a deal with these people,

02:38:06.500 | if you're willing to prepare in that way, come up with good questions,

02:38:11.300 | absolutely take the call.

02:38:12.420 | If you're just going to fly off the cuff and see what happens,

02:38:17.380 | maybe it's still worth taking the call,

02:38:19.180 | although you won't get as much out of it, but yes,

02:38:21.300 | it's absolutely worth taking the call and listening to their value proposition.

02:38:25.620 | There are a number of different ways that you can sell ads.

02:38:30.020 | You can publish on a platform that inserts ads automatically.

02:38:35.300 | And there are platforms, I believe Spotify has this ability.

02:38:39.620 | There are platforms that can do this. There are also hosting companies,

02:38:43.940 | I believe that will use dynamic ad insertion to fill ad inventory for you.

02:38:49.580 | Your revenue from that, your income from that,

02:38:55.300 | your CPM,

02:38:57.940 | the cost per thousand downloads that you get paid will be quite low for that.

02:39:03.020 | Generally speaking,

02:39:04.660 | you can work with a network and that network may have people in-house,

02:39:09.660 | but the network could be a network just like you and I back in the day could

02:39:15.300 | print a business card, which is like Kristin Associates.

02:39:18.100 | And in fact,

02:39:20.420 | all they're doing is partnering with yet another company.

02:39:24.060 | And then they're splitting the commission or the VIG between them.

02:39:29.700 | So that's another thing that you would want to ask.

02:39:33.900 | Although I would ask it at the end of the conversation in case it pisses them

02:39:37.700 | off, are these full-time employees of yours?

02:39:40.500 | Do you partner with other companies?

02:39:41.980 | Do you subcontract out pieces of this to get an idea of how things are

02:39:45.100 | architected?

02:39:45.940 | So you could partner with a network and if they say we will help grow your show,

02:39:51.260 | I would find out exactly how they do that.

02:39:55.580 | Gimlet of course does a good job of this as do many of the NPR shows because

02:40:01.100 | they cross promote new shows on existing properties.

02:40:05.460 | If they're going to do that, find out what the reach is,

02:40:08.500 | find out if that's going to be for all geographies,

02:40:11.980 | or is it going to be a geo limited? Is it time limited? Blah, blah, blah, blah,

02:40:15.060 | all the specifics, right? That's probably for a second conversation.

02:40:17.860 | It's not that important compared to other questions you could ask.

02:40:21.180 | That's a network.

02:40:22.900 | You could work with companies who

02:40:29.180 | sell ads. That's it. That's all they do. They're not a network,

02:40:32.900 | but they will put sponsors in front of you and put your show in front of

02:40:37.940 | sponsors. And there are many, many different agencies that do this,

02:40:42.780 | just like ad agencies for other types of media.

02:40:46.300 | And the economics will look slightly different depending on who you talk to.

02:40:49.460 | And they will be different probably from the networks.

02:40:51.700 | Then there are very,

02:40:53.340 | very small shops with maybe a handful of people and they handle ads for larger

02:40:59.340 | shows. So I will not mention them by name,

02:41:02.300 | just because I don't want them to get deluged. But if you're diligent,

02:41:05.100 | you can figure it out. Joe Rogan, Dax,

02:41:08.140 | This American Life all work with the same small outfit who only work with a

02:41:13.260 | handful of premium properties and they sell ads for those outlets.

02:41:17.980 | Then you can have a contractor or hire someone full-time as I did to handle all

02:41:25.500 | of your ad inventory. I am comfortable as an operator. I'm very, very, very,

02:41:30.780 | very comfortable with sales.

02:41:32.900 | And I'm very, very comfortable with waiting until

02:41:37.940 | in this case,

02:41:39.700 | my podcast had enough of an audience and not just a large

02:41:44.260 | audience in terms of size,

02:41:46.260 | but a powerful audience in terms of influence such that I would be able to say

02:41:54.140 | no very easily and still have takers. Does that make sense?

02:41:57.980 | And then to set terms like no payment terms,

02:42:02.620 | you need to pay up front so that we can keep our process extremely,

02:42:07.660 | extremely simple. And in that case, I looked at it and I was like, okay,

02:42:11.860 | let's just take, I mean, you can do some back of the napkin stuff,

02:42:17.020 | but it's like, all right, if I won't use Joe as an example,

02:42:19.580 | I'll let people try to figure that out on their own.

02:42:21.740 | But for him to do a deal of several years at a hundred million dollars,

02:42:25.580 | that would have to be a multiple of what he was making.

02:42:28.340 | He was making, I am sure a lot,

02:42:32.980 | but let's say that you get to the point where you are making a small fraction of

02:42:37.700 | that and you make a million dollars in total ad revenue,

02:42:41.900 | which assuming you don't have much staff is almost pure profit.

02:42:48.420 | If you outsource your ad sales,

02:42:51.020 | I would say you should expect generally that at least

02:42:56.300 | 30% of that is going to go away. Okay.

02:42:59.500 | So I'm no mathematician,

02:43:02.180 | but that is more than $300,000.

02:43:06.020 | So then the question is for less than $300,000,

02:43:10.300 | could you hire someone who is absolutely excellent to do it for

02:43:16.020 | you? And are, this is just as critical.

02:43:19.260 | Are you willing to have staff manage,

02:43:23.860 | do the calls, do the data analytics and so on everything necessary

02:43:29.620 | to ensure that those operations are extremely smooth?

02:43:33.980 | And the answer for a lot of people is no, even if you have the money,

02:43:38.380 | they would rather spend the $300,000

02:43:44.980 | plus in this case. Now, keep in mind, you know,

02:43:47.900 | if you're making 10 million a year, then now we're talking 3 million plus,

02:43:52.380 | uh, it can be very, very expensive, but it's worth it for a lot of people.

02:43:58.260 | For me, I decided I had enough entrepreneurial experience.

02:44:01.820 | I am comfortable enough with operations and process and management that

02:44:07.220 | I am totally happy to hire someone

02:44:12.220 | full-time to handle that for me. So that is what I decided.

02:44:15.020 | Okay. So we've hit a lot of things. We have,

02:44:18.500 | here's a great question about a question,

02:44:20.940 | which is if you're interviewing someone about a topic and you realize well

02:44:25.580 | past the point that you've talked about something,

02:44:27.660 | that there's a great follow-up, but you're now, you know,

02:44:31.340 | three turns down on a different highway, do you ask it still?

02:44:36.100 | And if you do, do you try to edit it back? So it fits,

02:44:40.660 | or do you just save it for next time? I've done all of the above.

02:44:43.860 | So if we're down this road and there's something I really want to ask,

02:44:47.260 | you have many, many options for me.

02:44:50.500 | One option would be you write down on a piece of paper.

02:44:53.700 | This is why I like to have notes.

02:44:54.820 | I take a lot of notes as I'm writing on things that I want to come back to also,

02:44:58.700 | or things that I want to ensure I don't forget. So I'll take that.

02:45:01.740 | I'll circle it on a piece of paper and I'll say, if you don't mind,

02:45:05.620 | I want to interrupt for just a second.

02:45:07.260 | This is going to be a complete left turn. And for all my listeners, sorry,

02:45:11.260 | that's just how my mind works. I really want to just put a bookmark in this.

02:45:15.380 | So please remember where you are. I'm going to write it down.

02:45:17.940 | I want to ask you about X, and then we're going to come back to Y and Z.

02:45:22.980 | And so you can do that.

02:45:24.220 | You could take a note of it and then use a teaser at the end of the episode and

02:45:29.940 | say, we could easily keep talking for many hours.

02:45:34.460 | We might have to do a round two,

02:45:35.820 | if you'd be open to it and simply circle that in highlighter R2 like I

02:45:40.700 | do. I mean, there are different ways to approach this and save it for next time.

02:45:44.220 | You could try to edit and splice somewhere else and kind of Franken

02:45:49.580 | clip your way into some type of narrative that tends to be,

02:45:54.140 | or can be very clumsy and labor intensive.

02:45:57.620 | So I tend not to do that.

02:45:59.500 | Well, then I'll just throw it out here. Cause it's a, it's about a guest.

02:46:04.500 | One of the things I found,

02:46:05.780 | I heard you say that you got a lot of guests by asking people, Hey,

02:46:09.940 | you were a guest. Are there other interesting people I should have on this show?

02:46:13.460 | In recruiting, I've learned that when you go to people and say, Hey,

02:46:16.620 | are there interesting engineers I should hire? Everyone has nothing.

02:46:19.740 | They have to use that search function. But if you go look at their LinkedIn and

02:46:22.900 | say, Hey, here are four people that you know,

02:46:25.300 | that I think could be good for this job. If you think any of them are,

02:46:28.460 | would you introduce me to them? That works well.

02:46:30.740 | Is there a tactic you've used to find guests from your

02:46:35.380 | network of either friends or guests that helps them kind of jog the memory

02:46:39.980 | to find the people that might be interesting?

02:46:41.860 | No, it's a short answer. I don't have any particular tricks here.

02:46:48.020 | I will mention to people, I'll say, you know,

02:46:52.420 | I really enjoyed speaking with you. You're excellent at what you do.

02:46:55.380 | And this was outstanding.

02:46:58.580 | If you ever think of anybody who you think would really enjoy being on the show,

02:47:03.340 | who I would also really enjoy speaking to, please let me know.

02:47:06.180 | And I just leave it at that. I would say at this point,

02:47:09.260 | probably 80% plus of my guests come as referrals from past guests.

02:47:13.820 | And it will become easier and easier over time.

02:47:18.780 | When you have 15 episodes, it's harder. It's just a smaller sample size.

02:47:22.460 | When you have 30, 50, there is a,

02:47:25.500 | there's a non-linear kind of growth in the

02:47:29.820 | connectivity of the map that you're creating this constellation of guests and

02:47:34.580 | the types of people they can reach. So it gets,

02:47:38.300 | I would say exponentially easier over time to get referrals.

02:47:43.420 | And I will also say just as a side note,

02:47:47.140 | a question that you can ask to also improve

02:47:52.860 | your interviewing and podcasting is one that

02:47:57.900 | Adam Grant asked me when he was a guest on the podcast,

02:48:00.940 | after we stopped recording and you need to be insistent,

02:48:05.220 | but he said, or he asked rather,

02:48:08.740 | what can I do to improve?

02:48:10.620 | And I gave him some throwaway answer because it's an uncomfortable question.

02:48:16.580 | So I said something like, it was great. It was really fantastic. And it was,

02:48:21.460 | he was really, really, really good. And I'm pretty sure he responded with,

02:48:25.100 | I appreciate that. I appreciate the kind feedback,

02:48:29.820 | and I'm not going to let you go until you give me one thing, just one thing,

02:48:33.900 | anything could be small that I could do to improve as a guest.

02:48:38.260 | And I think he had a habit of, I don't want to say nervous,

02:48:43.300 | but laughing a lot after certain questions or answers.

02:48:47.540 | And I said, that might be something that you could take a look at if it was one

02:48:52.300 | thing. And I had to pick one thing you're outstanding.

02:48:54.660 | It was absolutely wonderful as is, but if I had to pick one thing,

02:48:58.740 | that would probably be it. And he was like, awesome. Great. Thank you so much.

02:49:01.460 | And he was stoked. Yeah.

02:49:04.700 | If you want to get that type of feedback, you have to be insistent,

02:49:08.900 | I think because it's uncomfortable.

02:49:10.540 | You're putting someone in an uncomfortable position right after you've done this

02:49:13.820 | thing. You're feeling good,

02:49:15.740 | probably to deliver news that you might not like. And so you have to just say,

02:49:20.340 | look, I love this stuff. I'm not going to let you go.

02:49:23.340 | Just give you one thing could be anything, tiny thing,

02:49:26.580 | something that I could do to improve and that gets results.

02:49:30.540 | And that is my dog barking because I have a delivery coming to the

02:49:35.980 | door.

02:49:36.780 | So I think we should probably wrap up in a few minutes since we're almost at

02:49:40.900 | three hours, but I know you have prepared more.

02:49:45.180 | And so who knows, maybe there is a round two in our future,

02:49:49.220 | but what other boxes do you think we should check?

02:49:53.580 | I have a good kind of wrap up question,

02:49:56.540 | at least is you launched your show and you said you'd commit to six episodes.

02:50:01.380 | And I've seen you say you'd reassess then.

02:50:04.380 | And then after deciding to continue, I saw you say you'd reassess again at a

02:50:07.980 | hundred. What kind of a process do you go through when you reassess?

02:50:12.420 | Is it just a gut? Do I want to keep going?

02:50:14.580 | Or was there more going on each time you hit that milestone?

02:50:18.340 | It's a pretty simple check-in.

02:50:19.900 | I think most things can be boiled down to how do you feel when you first wake up

02:50:24.740 | and how easily do you go to sleep?

02:50:27.140 | Like how do different decisions affect that? Certainly true.

02:50:31.420 | And investing big time, like you could have on paper,

02:50:34.300 | the best investment of all time.

02:50:35.620 | But if you're waking up anxious and having trouble going to sleep,

02:50:38.100 | it's probably not a good investment for you.

02:50:40.100 | And this is true for podcasting too.

02:50:42.900 | How do you feel when you look at your calendar and you see that you have a

02:50:47.020 | podcast at 10 AM or 2 PM or whenever it is, what happens internally?

02:50:51.500 | Is it a whole body? Yes. I mean, how do you feel mentally?

02:50:55.500 | How do you feel kind of in your chest?

02:50:56.940 | How do you feel in your gut and really paying attention to that?

02:51:02.140 | It's a full body check-in for me. Imagine,

02:51:06.340 | okay, it's Tuesday,

02:51:08.460 | you're tired and all you want to do is call it

02:51:13.300 | quits.

02:51:14.060 | But you realize you've got 90 to 120 minutes ahead of you for a podcast.

02:51:18.340 | How do you feel? What do you do? What is your self-talk? What does it look like?

02:51:23.260 | What has it been?

02:51:24.660 | Those are the types of questions that I ask myself.

02:51:29.460 | And I want podcasting to be something that

02:51:33.940 | nourishes me and refills me, not something that depletes me.

02:51:37.740 | And I think many, if not,

02:51:41.660 | most of my decisions these days with respect to

02:51:46.340 | just about anything are framed in that way.

02:51:48.900 | And it's simple,

02:51:53.620 | but the implications are pretty far reaching. It has nothing to do with revenue.

02:51:58.820 | That's nothing to do with how big the names are. It's really,

02:52:02.260 | how do I feel when I see it on the calendar?

02:52:04.580 | How do I feel when I'm recording? How do I feel when it comes out?

02:52:10.020 | Is it net positive energy or net negative energy?

02:52:14.380 | And if it's net positive and keep feeding the dragon,

02:52:18.700 | that's how I feel. And also you can build in the ability to take breaks.

02:52:24.660 | So for instance, to touch on one thing that I dropped a long time ago,

02:52:29.100 | which was recording cadence. And by the way,

02:52:31.860 | your brain is really incredibly trainable.

02:52:33.740 | You get better at doing this as you record more and more podcasts,

02:52:36.420 | just like mentally bookmarking things to come back to recording cadence.

02:52:40.420 | So I will very often once per quarter do a content creation

02:52:45.100 | week,

02:52:45.940 | which includes all of any social needs and all of my

02:52:50.700 | podcast needs for the next three months.

02:52:52.860 | And I will record all of them in perhaps one

02:52:57.940 | week, Monday to Friday,

02:52:59.100 | or I may tag on an extra Monday, Tuesday and the following week.

02:53:03.420 | And I will record all, which for me means 12,

02:53:06.540 | say episodes for the next three months.

02:53:11.380 | And then if I want to do more episodes, if I feel compelled,

02:53:14.820 | if there are things that pop up like this episode, for instance,

02:53:17.820 | I don't need to record this episode. We're recording this early September.

02:53:22.060 | I have all of my episodes until probably December covered already.

02:53:25.740 | They're done. I don't have to do a thing. I can sit back and chill,

02:53:29.780 | but I wanted to record this episode because I get so many questions about

02:53:33.580 | podcasts. And I also wanted to answer your questions.

02:53:35.700 | So you can batch recording in that way.

02:53:39.700 | I batch any sponsor recording in a similar way so that I'm

02:53:45.140 | not doing by the way, like refreshes people who want a live read every time,

02:53:50.540 | not going to do it. If you have an ad that is working,

02:53:54.540 | do you keep using it until it stops working in terms of your sort

02:53:59.220 | of return on invested capital, right? Your multiple, whatever it might be.

02:54:03.860 | And their answer is, Oh, we keep using. I'm like, that's exactly what we do.

02:54:06.980 | So once we have a good read, we keep using it. And for that reason,

02:54:10.700 | I'll batch recording for sponsors in a similar way.

02:54:13.460 | And any review of guests with one person on my team,

02:54:19.100 | we will know more than once a week for a very short period of time,

02:54:23.700 | maybe five or 10 minutes review potential guests who have come in typically

02:54:28.540 | from past guests and decide how I feel about them.

02:54:32.580 | It doesn't matter how interesting they are, how good they are,

02:54:34.780 | what they do at the end of the day, like zero to 10, no seven allowed.

02:54:39.580 | What's my stoke level. If it's not an eight, nine or 10,

02:54:44.300 | we do not press go.

02:54:45.300 | And that is also some of how I

02:54:50.620 | systematize the production and the editing and so on such

02:54:55.380 | that the tasks and the responsibilities of the podcast are not

02:55:00.260 | scattered kind of willy nilly all over my calendar,

02:55:06.260 | which is very would be, I think stressful and ultimately a net negative

02:55:12.060 | energetically. So batching also helps to make things much more fun,

02:55:16.420 | much easier, much more streamlined and much less expensive.

02:55:21.020 | And ultimately coming back to the very beginning, much more sustainable.

02:55:25.980 | And for all of those reasons and more,

02:55:30.900 | I don't have a set time to check in with myself about the podcast.

02:55:35.300 | I batch and I expect if you check in with me five

02:55:40.780 | years from now, unless something really strange has happened,

02:55:42.780 | I'll probably still be doing the podcast.

02:55:44.180 | But was the batching always there or, you know,

02:55:48.380 | you only committed to six episodes at the gate.

02:55:50.860 | That means in episode seven,

02:55:52.860 | you needed to find in those first six episodes of production.

02:55:56.900 | How long did it take to get to that batching versus just in time?

02:56:01.140 | Like I need to go set up an interview so that I can release an episode next

02:56:04.820 | week.

02:56:05.500 | Well, the batching is as needed.

02:56:07.700 | So they're batching has some practical utility in the sense that you finish

02:56:12.340 | everything in one week as necessary for the next two to three months.

02:56:15.580 | But I also get energized by the podcast. So I will sometimes decide,

02:56:20.580 | you know what, I'm not going to batch all of my recording,

02:56:23.740 | but I'm going to do one recording per week or every other week because I find

02:56:28.100 | that it refills my tank. So it's not a burden to be lightened.

02:56:32.940 | It is also something that gives me more fuel for everything else that I'm doing.

02:56:37.180 | Therefore, I'm not going to record everything in the batching session,

02:56:40.820 | but I will record enough so that I don't feel like I have a gun against my head

02:56:45.980 | and oh shit,

02:56:47.140 | it's Tuesday and I need to put out an episode on Thursday. Fuck.

02:56:51.740 | Now I need to rejig my whole schedule.

02:56:53.780 | That's not an experience I want to have.

02:56:55.860 | And it's one that I can very easily avoid.

02:56:57.700 | So the batching and the systematizing comes in my experience later,

02:57:02.380 | you got to throw a lot against the wall and figure out what works and what works

02:57:05.900 | for you. And then you can establish policies and rules so that you're making very

02:57:10.340 | few decisions instead of a death by a million

02:57:15.220 | paper cuts.

02:57:16.060 | And I do think that striving for

02:57:21.020 | what excites you and striving for what nourishes you goes a really long

02:57:26.620 | way. And to come back to a couple of recommendations,

02:57:29.500 | the 22 immutable laws of marketing, the law of category, read that chapter,

02:57:33.940 | even if the examples are outdated, read it, get the older copy,

02:57:37.780 | not the for the internet.

02:57:39.380 | Cause I think the for the internet was written like 98 or 99 and the examples are

02:57:43.660 | really funny, but get the older version positioning by the same authors,

02:57:48.300 | Reese, R I E S not Eric, but an older Reese and trout,

02:57:53.940 | I believe are the names as well as 1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly at

02:57:59.060 | KK.org. Kevin Kelly, honestly,

02:58:01.020 | maybe the real life most interesting man in the world.

02:58:04.660 | And if you want proof of that,

02:58:05.740 | you can listen to my first podcast episode with him.

02:58:08.300 | Stewart brand might be a also a close contender.

02:58:11.580 | I think Kevin would probably say Stewart brand is the one who wins that title,

02:58:14.940 | but it's a fun game. I encourage everyone to try it.

02:58:18.700 | You'll learn a lot about yourself at the very least.

02:58:21.380 | So I definitely have. And with that, my friend,

02:58:25.820 | I think we can bring this to a close.

02:58:29.260 | We will link to everything in the show notes,

02:58:31.180 | all of these various things we've talked about, including the article,

02:58:34.660 | the very, very extensive article I wrote in 2016 and the link to the podcast

02:58:39.340 | with Rolf Potts. We'll link to all of those things and more in the show notes,

02:58:43.540 | but I don't want to omit one very important thing.

02:58:46.980 | And that is to mention Chris's podcast.

02:58:50.860 | And we didn't get to go into lessons from different guests,

02:58:54.820 | which I asked you to prepare. So maybe another time we'll do that,

02:58:58.060 | but I've listened to a couple of episodes, really enjoyed the,

02:59:01.300 | I listened to your first and your last. So at least on Overcast,

02:59:06.060 | I listened to the first episode, which was with Lee Rowan,

02:59:10.260 | which was outstanding, really enjoyed it.

02:59:12.540 | Even though I'm not hugely obsessed with points and optimizing

02:59:17.260 | on that side, there were a lot of really good points.

02:59:19.860 | So I'm going to go refer to the show notes on that.

02:59:22.020 | And I listened to Andy Radcliffe, who's incredible.

02:59:26.740 | One of the co-founders of Benchmark Capital also,

02:59:29.780 | which is one of the most successful venture capital firms of all time.

02:59:33.580 | I think their initial fund, I learned this from the podcast,

02:59:36.380 | had what 92 X returns. It's just bananas. And that's,

02:59:40.700 | that's an episode on investing as you might imagine.

02:59:42.900 | And I'm listening currently to episode six on the psychology of money

02:59:47.820 | with Morgan Household and enjoying that quite a lot. So the podcast is good.

02:59:52.700 | It's super solid. And I think you're off to the races, man.

02:59:56.380 | I don't have tons of critical feedback for you.

02:59:59.580 | I think you're doing a good job and it's really about keeping it interesting for

03:00:02.980 | you and staying the course.

03:00:04.060 | But what else would you like to say about your podcast and where people can find

03:00:08.300 | it?

03:00:08.940 | I would just say, give it a listen and wherever you listen podcasts,

03:00:11.580 | which you're obviously doing right now.

03:00:12.780 | So just search for All The Hacks and reach out if you have feedback and there's

03:00:17.060 | topics you want me to explore.

03:00:18.460 | AllTheHacks.com. Is that right? Yep. AllTheHacks.com.

03:00:23.540 | AllTheHacks.com. And this man knows of what he speaks.

03:00:27.020 | Chris is optimizer Supreme. And I don't say that lightly. It's,

03:00:31.460 | it's kind of mind boggling to me how methodical you are with optimizing so many

03:00:36.100 | areas of your life.

03:00:36.900 | So this is a person who walks the walk and I've

03:00:41.860 | seen it firsthand in many, many areas.

03:00:46.220 | So I encourage people to check it out. AllTheHacks.com.

03:00:48.700 | We'll link to it in the show notes and it is good to spend time with you,

03:00:53.220 | Christopher. Yeah. Thank you for, thank you for co-hosting slash hosting this

03:00:57.420 | episode.

03:00:58.100 | Yeah. I can now, I guess I can put on my resume host of the Tim Ferriss show.

03:01:00.980 | You said it had to be you, but here we go.

03:01:03.260 | Tim Tim, Chris, Chris, volume two. Thanks for tuning in everybody.

03:01:09.580 | All right. If you're still here,

03:01:14.180 | thank you so much for joining this really unique episode of All The Hacks.

03:01:18.100 | I know I learned a ton from Tim and I'm already putting those learnings to good

03:01:21.780 | use to find some amazing guests to bring on All The Hacks.

03:01:25.100 | I'll keep this outro short because this show was long.

03:01:28.340 | So if you haven't left a rating and review in the Apple podcast app,

03:01:31.420 | it would mean so much to me if you could. And if you want to get in touch,

03:01:34.460 | I'm Chris@AllTheHacks.com and @Hutchins on Twitter.

03:01:37.780 | Thank you so much and see you next week for a conversation about travel points

03:01:42.220 | and miles with the points guy himself, Brian Kelly.

03:01:51.460 | I want to tell you about another podcast.

03:01:53.180 | I love that goes deep on all things money.

03:01:55.660 | That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early retirement.

03:01:59.420 | It's called the personal finance podcast,

03:02:01.820 | and it's much more about building generational wealth and spending your money on

03:02:05.980 | the things you value than it is about clipping coupons to save a dollar.

03:02:09.540 | It's hosted by my good friend,

03:02:11.420 | Andrew who truly believes that everyone in this world can build wealth and his

03:02:15.380 | passion and excitement are what make this show so entertaining.

03:02:19.220 | I know because I was a guest on the show in December, 2022,

03:02:22.780 | but recently I listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that

03:02:27.500 | will blow your mind.

03:02:28.500 | And it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating

03:02:33.460 | in their employer's retirement plan.

03:02:35.100 | And that's just one of the many fascinating stats he shared.

03:02:38.740 | The personal finance podcast has something for everyone.

03:02:41.700 | It's filled with so many tips and tactics and hacks to help you get better with

03:02:45.460 | your money and grow your wealth. So I highly recommend you check it out.

03:02:49.260 | Just search for the personal finance podcast on apple podcasts, Spotify,

03:02:53.300 | or wherever you listen to podcasts and enjoy.