Meet, Learn From and Interview Your Heroes with Andrew Warner: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Hustle Daily Show. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to meet, learn, and interview your heroes with Andrew Warner. Andrew Warner is the author of Stop Asking Questions, a book for interviewers and anyone who wants to learn through conversations. It's based on over 2 ,000 interviews he did on Mixergy, his podcast. In Today, Fire Nation, we talk about how the people who you admire or want to meet are out there.

0:34As long as you start a great conversation, you can build a great relationship with them and learn from them and owe so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Andrew and our sponsors. Success Story hosted by Scott D. Clary is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship. A recent episode discussing the billion dollar Health Secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must listen.

1:09Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Andrew, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, Fire Nation. I think that as much value as we place on books, and I just wrote a book, so I love books, but as much value as we place on books and online research and YouTube, I think what we're really missing is learning from other people.

2:01Because when you learn from other people who've done what you're trying to do, in a one-on-one conversation, you can ask them to guide the conversation towards your specific needs. And then you end up with a relationship afterwards, like you and I have. We have a great relationship that goes all the way back to, well, I want to say 2012, but I think it was really cemented when we took a cruise together on the podcasters paradise cruise. And I finally, after a couple of days of you resisting, got you to get up on the karaoke and you crushed it. I am good on the karaoke. I don't know that other people enjoy it, but I'm good in the sense that I enjoy it myself.

2:36Oh, that's so fun. And Fire Nation, as I mentioned in the intro, Andrew is the author of Stop Asking Questions, which is a book for interviewers and anyone who wants to learn through conversations. And I will say, I myself was studying Andrew in 2011 and 2012 on his podcast Mixergy as I was trying to understand what does a podcast host look like, sound like, operate? How does he facilitate conversations? How does he ask questions? How does she ask questions? And Andrew was the person that I put just at the top of the list. I love this podcast Mixergy. I have for years, still do. and I've always looked at him as being somebody who's continuing to push the envelope when it comes to being a podcast host.

3:25And that's why I really wanted to get him on here to talk about Stop Asking Questions, his book, again, for interviewers and anybody that wants to learn through conversations. We'll be talking about that throughout the interview. But first, Andrew, I want to talk about a story. It's story time, Fire Nation. Get ready. So you have a story about a blunder that you made when you were trying to befriend an entrepreneur while learning from them. Give us all the juicy details of this story. You ever go to somebody's house and you look and you go, this is amazing. I didn't even know this type of place existed.

3:57How can you afford it? It's weird, right? I'm sure people do that with your place. Now they come down and to Puerto Rico, they see it and they go, how could you afford it with you? You can actually go on your website and find out. Well, with this person whose house I was in, in Southern California, I looked and I said, this is stunning. Let me just ask him about his work. And as we were talking, two friends, our wives introduced us. I could see that he was fired up. He loved telling me about how he got into apps for the BlackBerry. Apparently there were apps on the BlackBerry. And because he got into building them for enterprise, they were paying tons of money to have him create apps.

4:31And then from there, he was able to transition a little bit into phone apps. But he was the Blackberry guy and that got him as far as he as he got in life and as he was telling me his eyes lit up and we tapped into how we came up with the idea and all kinds of stuff and I kept asking him question after question after question and I could see that we were no longer friends I could just see in his eyes wasn't that he hated me it was it was just that he was now kind of teaching me the way that you would teach a first grader in school and then at one point I could see for sure we were no longer friends when he said, give me a beer.

5:04And I thought, oh, now I'm this needy intern. I said, why? What is it about it? But I thought he was digging it. I saw that he was digging the conversation. I know we were just hanging out as friends. And then I realized I was peppering him with question after question after question. I was sounding like a needy four-year-old. Where'd you come up with the idea for your business? How did you start? How did you know BlackBerry would have apps? How did you even sell BlackBerry apps? And I was asking so many questions that it was becoming tiresome and the dynamic was changing. And what I learned from that was in conversations, in interviews, it's good to switch off from questions to statements, even if you're trying to elicit information, to not say, where'd you come up with your business idea?

5:46How did you get started? But to sometimes rephrase them into sentences, into phrases like, tell me how you got started. Tell me where you came up with your business idea. And I tried it in personal one-on-one conversations. I tried it in my interviews and it changed things, especially in interviews where people are looking for me to be the leader, the guide. They don't want the person who's gonna be the needy, I don't know anything. They want the person who's gonna help them feel good, come across great. And you do that on your podcast before we got started. You made sure that I knew that you were going to lead this in a way that was gonna be great for the audience and great for me, takes the pressure off.

6:21So we need to do that in conversations. The reason I named my book, Stop Asking Questions, is because it's these types of things that are so counterintuitive that drive conversationalists crazy. You wanna have a great interview, a great conversation. You're told, ask questions, take interest in other people, but it turns out that the common information is helpful to get you 25 % of the way there, maybe 50%, but if you really wanna master a conversation, you have to go often opposite, and my goal with this book and my goal with being an interviewer is to understand what are those things that are different?

6:50How do I get the real information, the tightness in the relationship, by doing what works, not what you're supposed to do. You're a fantastic interviewer, conversationalist. You always like to test the envelope and push it a little further and really just kind of see what happens. And I'll tell another story about Andrew Warner, Fire Nation, which is back, I think it was 2013, 2014 timeframe. We went to San Francisco with my mastermind, myself, Greg Hickman, Rick Mulready. And we spent a weekend out there and I said, let's reach out to some people who are local here. So we had a handful of people over for the night.

7:24Maybe there was like nine or eight of us in the room at this point. And we're all sitting around the living room and we're having fun. But at the same time, like we don't know each other that well. So, I mean, we're not really going that deep with each other. We're asking kind of like all these surface level questions. And Andrew just saw right through that. He's like, let's break this ice. That's at least what I thought he was maybe saying to himself. So he looked around and he said, hey, I want everybody to go around and I want you to share your first sexual experience. And dude, people were floored.

7:50they're like, that seems really inappropriate. I think that's what people were thinking at first, just their first reaction to that. And then, you know, I think either myself or maybe Greg went first and I could see people all of a sudden were just like, wait a second, this isn't inappropriate. This is actually kind of a funny, fun way to talk about like an intimate experience or maybe a private experience, but that it's really just kind of breaking like six or seven layers that would take days, weeks, months to get through. And then by the end of the round table that we did with that, everybody's laughing and joking and the rest of the night was on a totally different vibe, a totally different level.

8:22And that's one thing is it's tough, Andrew, to go deep with somebody that you just met. So let's talk about how you found an easy button for this. So the magical phrase is this. Is it inappropriate to ask you about? And then you insert whatever personal thing you're trying to find out about. And the reason that I do that is because if I just ask outright, tell me about your first sexual experience, It feels like it's coming out of nowhere and it feels like I'm now putting you up against the wall and pushing you to say something that you don't feel comfortable saying. I need to give you an exit for you to feel comfortable deciding for yourself whether you want to get into it or not.

9:01And so I would say, is it inappropriate to ask you about your first time? Is it inappropriate? And if I do it that way, what I've discovered is if it's inappropriate, people answer the first part of the question and say, yes, it is inappropriate. And now we're kind of laughing about how cheeky Andrew is. If it's not inappropriate, they will go into the question that they want to answer, which is about the first time they had sex, about this, about that, right? And the way that I discovered it, John, is I didn't know how could I naturally go from business, business, business to personal. And it's not always sex, but sometimes you want to know about people's divorce.

9:33Sometimes you want to know about people's personal lives, about their kids, all these things. That's where you really connect with someone when you go beyond business into their lives. And I said, how do you do it? And one of the things that I discovered is if you do a search for this phrase double-barreled question in Google, you will see that just about every form software, every survey software tells you do not do this. Why? Because a double-barreled question is a question that has two questions in one. And if you ask two things at the same time, people will pick the easy one and only answer that and forget the hard one that you probably wanted answered.

10:05And I said, oh, I could use this to my advantage. If I rephrase these personal questions as double-barreled questions like, can I ask you about your divorce? Can I ask you about what trouble you're having with your adult child? Now I've created two questions in one. If they want the easy question, they could say, I'm not comfortable saying that. Or it's inappropriate or whatever. They'll just say, they'll just signal to you no. But if they do want to, now you've given them a chance to go personal and to let it happen. And that's one of the ways that I do that. and looking back at it i am almost positive that's exactly how he did preface that question because again i think he was giving us again that potential easy out if we were just like not really feeling the vibe on that one but i think i was kind of maybe like no it's not inappropriate at all in fact i have a really funny story to tell about that and boom i launched into it and then the rest of the room's like oh well you know if john's going to talk about that kind of funny embarrassing you know story like maybe i can too and it kind of goes back to our initial story about karaoke it's like you really want just one person to get up and just have a blast, but kind of be terrible at karaoke.

11:07Cause then every rest of the room's like, it's okay for me to be bad. But when you have that first, like Jennifer Lopez lookalike who just crushes it, everybody's like, well, I didn't know it was like, you know, you know, America's next top idol or whatever that show is. And then people just won't get up there and do that. And Oh man, there's just so much I want to get to today. But one thing I do want to move into is motivation because nobody is motivated all day, every day. I mean, people are like, John, how have you done 3000 episodes in a row, essentially? And I'm like, listen, it's not me getting up every day, being motivated every single day.

11:38I am strategic with my scheduling. And that's how I've been able to stay consistent for almost a decade now. And Andrew's been consistent for over a decade, by the way. But let's be honest, consistency is the key to success. So how can we keep producing the right content, even when we're not motivated? I think a lot of times we especially here in America, we keep thinking about self improvement as the way to produce, to get more out of ourselves, to stay motivated? How can I work on the self to get the result that I want? I've discovered that external motivation or external support always gets me to be more productive than if I do it myself.

12:13And so, for example, when it comes to the interviews, I made sure that I've got a team of people who book me to do interviews every single week. I may be here in Austin without an office here in an Airbnb that only has a living room because the spare room that we were planning on recording from actually is too echoey. I may have all these headaches and not want to do it. My team just scheduled an interview with somebody that they know I'm going to like. And that person is expecting me to show up. And so I'm going to figure out a way to do it. And I think that that could be true for everything, not just for interviews.

12:43When I wanted to write this book and people who've heard me do interviews now for the last 10, 14 years, they've heard me over the years say, I want to write a book. And dude, I've sat down to try to write a book on my own and I could not do it. I've hired people to write a book for me. And I spent$20 ,000 on this one service that was going to do it. I didn't like the output. It wasn't my voice. I struggled so much. And then finally I said, you know what? How do I work? I don't work by doing things myself. How do I work with someone else? So I went to a friend and I asked him for an introduction to a good editor.

13:12He introduced me to a woman named Mary Sun, who's an editor at Penguin Publishing. Mary and I agreed that she would get on a call with me every week. She would see what I was writing. She would then make sure that I had another deadline for the next week. And then if I got struggle, if I was struggling or wasn't sure what to say, instead of spinning my wheels and then just disconnecting from the writing work because it was so difficult or sitting there for hours looking at this at the blank page, I'd have a weekly schedule where she would look and say, you know, Andrew, that's not that important.

13:40You could let it go. And so what I've started to do in my life and I and sometimes I don't even fully accept it until I have to. I say, if I need to get something done, who else can I do it with? Who can hold me accountable? What other person can I do it and have support with to get myself productive? And that worked in business where I hired my first employee and basically having her there kept me accountable, worked in writing, and it's helped me do these interviews over the last 10 whatever years. One word, Fire Nation, accountability. Andrew talked about his book. For me, my book, it was the exact same thing.

14:12I knew that if I was going to write this book, I was going to have to sit down every single day, get momentum, keep the momentum, and keep it rolling. So I knew just from testing things out that I was capped at two hours a day. I couldn't write more than two hours a day of anything that was of quality substance. But then I committed to writing two hours every single day until the book was done. And I had my accountability partner, somebody that's in my mastermind, text me at 12 p.m. every single day saying, did you write two hours today, yes or no? And because my goal was the first two hours of my workday were going to be writing because that was my freshest, most energized timeframe in my personal day.

14:51And so I knew that text was always coming and I knew I always wanted to say yes to that text. So I never missed a day for eight months, 480 hours. I wrote the book, 73 ,000 words, and I completed in that timeframe. And I'll tell you, that was the best decision of my life is to have that accountability. So I love your example, Andrew. It worked for me as well. on Fire Nation. We're going to be talking about a lot in the next half of this interview about a one-word question that gets people to tell you, I'm just going to leave it. They get to tell you something. I'm going to leave it as a little surprise.

15:21Also, something that Andrew's so good at. Oh my God, he's so good at this. People like to hoard their contacts, but he knows how to get people to introduce us to their most helpful contacts, which can open up so much opportunity. That and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're a marketer, then you know what like to feel like you're moving in a hundred different directions at any given time, like you're spread too thin? Between creating content, launching campaigns, generating and nurturing leads, and more, you barely have a moment to breathe, let alone do your best marketing.

15:51What if there was a better way? This is where HubSpot and Breeze, its new built-in AI, come in. When you combine the power of Marketing Hub and Content Hub, you can have your best quarter every quarter. Want to remix your content, leverage lead scoring to shine a light on potential customers, and automate analytics for reports and KPIs? With this toolkit, consider it done. As if that weren't enough, you've also got co-pilots and agents to automate your tasks, making your life easier, getting you faster results, and better connecting you to all your data all in one place. Stop spreading yourself thin and start making major moves with HubSpot.

16:28Visit hubspot.com slash marketers to learn more. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you, who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month, and it costs less than hiring a minimum wage employee. Yes, it's month to month, and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee.

17:01schedule your free 13 point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference. You will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories and learn about attending the Thrive Time show two day in-person workshop featuring the legendary Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Become the next success story. schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

17:39Andrew, we are back. And as I mentioned, pre break, you have a one word question that gets people to tell us not just what they do, but why they do it. Give us this one word question. It's because, and it seems so small that you might just miss it. It doesn't even seem like a question. But what I discovered was a lot of times people would just ramble either with the answers that they give me or I might ramble with the question and it's really hard to stay focused. And I said, how do the experts do it? And I remember there was this interviewer, Charlie Rose. He was on Bloomberg and PBS interviewing people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett.

18:20And I know that when I was growing up, they used to make fun of him because he would ramble. In fact, there was a Saturday Night Live sketch about how he could not just ask a simple question. The whole sketch was him trying to get out the introduction and then trying to get out a question. And the person he was interviewing, Donald Rumsfeld, standing up and going, this is just crazy. I can't sit down. You're not answering. You're not asking me a question. I said, how did he change to become somebody who people actually liked listening to, who had this short way of getting questions out? And I started studying his transcripts the way I studied mine.

18:48And I realized he has this one word, because. and he'll interrupt a head of state and just say because and suddenly you've changed a train of thought it doesn't feel like you're interrupting them because all you're doing is just like ask asking for more information on what they say and when you say because you notice and i see this in my own transcripts they'll go on on on on about something surface and i'll say because and they go well because what happened was my mom told me when i was younger that if i don't make it i'm gonna fail and so i had to make it and that's why i did it right now we go from surface to why and i've handed them the word that I could slip into any conversation and have them pick up and then use as if it came from their own minds.

19:27Super useful. Because you got to frame like a question, Fire Nation. It's like Ron Burgundy. Like, you know, you don't usually say because of the question, but you can do it like that. And man, I think Fire Nation post this interview, you may be hearing me use that one word. I'm going to test out on a few things. And I want you listeners right now who hear me testing it out to kind of smile to yourself because you'll know why I'm testing it out or why I'm doing this. And we'll both together see what the results are. So that's fascinating. And something else I teased before the break was just the reality that a lot of people, they like to hoard their most precious contacts.

20:05And this happens actually in my community in Palmas Del Mar. It's like we all have this community in Puerto Rico and it's a huge community, 3 ,300 homes, like two golf courses, 20 tennis courts, pickleball court, the whole nine yards. And like somebody will find an amazing housekeeper or yard worker or pool maintenance person. And they kind of will hoard that contact because they don't want that person to get too popular because then that person is like, I'm just going to start raising my prices, not give us a good service. And it just seems like it happens over time. So people like to hoard contacts down here, up there, everywhere, all around.

20:41But we need people to share their contacts. So how do we get these people to introduce us to their most helpful contacts, maybe even specifically in the business space? I had that problem with interviewing. I would want a guest. I see they built this incredible company. They have phenomenal relationships. I'd want them. And I wouldn't know how to get at them. If I just followed up after an interview and said, can you introduce me to someone, it wouldn't work. And I said, how do salespeople do this? How is it that salespeople keep getting introductions? and there's this guy, Bill Cates, who writes a book for insurance salespeople, not Bill Gates, but Bill Cates.

21:16And he instructs his people that at the end of a sale to say, so how was this? Did you get what you were looking for? And when the person says yes, they say, do you think other people would be able to benefit from this? And the person says yes. They say, who in your network do you think should consider insurance like this? And then they start writing down the names of people. It's part of the conversation that you're involved with. And so instead of making it a follow-up, everything is good, then come back the next time after the interview or after a sales call for myself, it's, I'm right there.

21:49I say, who else do you know who would benefit from doing this? And you could hear me in my early interviews doing this intentionally in the interview itself. I would finish the main part of the interview and I'd say, thank you for doing this. How do you think it went? Say, great. Do you think it's helpful for you to have your information, your story out there? Yeah. who else do you know that is a strong entrepreneur with a big track record who should be doing an interview like this when i think about getting to interview emmett sheer the founder of twitch nobody knew him twitch was under the radar when uh when i interviewed him but i got an introduction to him because within an interview i asked one of his friends t con who do you know and he said you know there's this guy emmett sheer he's helping a lot of us he's built this incredible company and what he does that no one else could do is talk to his customers in a way that lets them tell him what he should build into his software.

22:42And that's how he built up Twitch. I said, can you introduce me? He said, yes. And so that's the key. Part of the process, make it asking for that next introduction. Fire Nation, I really love how Andrew does this. And it seems consistent over a course of our interview here today. He sets things up, Like he sets the table for a future ask. You know, even if it's just with a simple thing of like, would it be inappropriate for me to ask you about dot, dot, dot. He's setting the table for the next thing he's about to say. So how can you set the table for what you're about to do? And he's doing this in all these different scenarios.

23:16And I love that. And listen, brother, I want to talk about your book as we close this down. Stop asking questions. You're a master storyteller. You always have been. And so can you share with Fire Nation one of your favorite stories from this book? One of my favorite ones is one that inspired this whole journey. I was working on Wall Street for no money because I didn't have the guts to ask for money. And so the woman I was working for just turned it into a no-pay internship. So I said, all right, I'm not getting paid. But the woman works for this guy who's a legend, Alan Greenberg. Nobody even called him Alan Greenberg.