The Rule That Got Me 23 Interviews in 2 Days | 142

Most people ask before they get a yes. The best ask after.

This weekend I recorded 23 podcast interviews in two days at Book Thinkers Live 2026, including Evan Carmichael, Kristen Butler, Marcus Kaulius, and Amberly Lago. I landed the live podcast at 19 because I broke a rule most people never think to break: I asked for more after the person had already said yes.

Nick, the CEO of BookThinkers, invited me to the event for free. Instead of saying thank you and showing up, I asked if I could interview every speaker there. He said yes. Then the real work started. The Amazon disaster the night before. The smashed light at 11pm. The moment mid-weekend when I almost quit. What Marcus told me to do in the auditorium that saved the day. And the moment Evan Carmichael pulled out his phone and filmed a pitch to Ed Mylet on my behalf.

If you've ever wondered why the ask you didn't make is costing you more than the one you did, this one's for you.

⏰ TIMESTAMPS

0:00 — 23 Interviews In 2 Days
1:12 — The Rule Nobody Teaches You
1:34 — How I Met Nick A Year And A Half Ago
3:15 — The Email That Changed Everything
4:15 — The Idea That Came Under Pressure
4:32 — Asking For More After The Yes
5:33 — Day One: Nine Interviews Blind
6:16 — The Moment I Almost Quit
7:20 — What Marcus Told Me To Do
8:10 — The Night Before Nearly Broke Me
10:08 — What Steve Jobs And Kobe Understood
11:01 — The Guest I Listened To In France Before I Had A Show
11:45 — When Evan Carmichael Pulled Out His Phone For Ed Mylet
12:33 — Why The Top Of The Pyramid Is Full Of Givers
15:04 — The One Thing To Take From This

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I had Marcus Clayless on my show. I had Kristen Butler, Power Positivity. I had Amberly Lago, who is like my best friend now, on my show. And there are so many, so many more people that I got to have on the Grateful Podcast for a 15 to 20 minute interview over the past weekend at BookThers in Boston. And so I want to go back, I want to tell you the story about how at age 19 I landed an event like this. And I want to talk to you more about how what we can learn, what me and you, another young person building, trying to make a difference in the world, what we can learn from this process. So the story of this goes back to about a year and a half ago. It was the spring of my it was my senior year of high school, and I was playing baseball, and I got out of school early because I had early release, which is just the best thing in the world for any of you people that were recently or are going to be seniors in high school. And I use my early release often to film podcasts. And now I had contacted this guy for to come as a guest to my podcast. I believe it was episode 40 something or 50 something. Um, because I just saw he had a nice following in his company, and we seemed to have some good alignment. And his favorite book was The Alchemist, which is my favorite book, and his name's Nick Hutchison. Nick is the CEO of Bookthinkers, that's a nice company that had a lot of followers. I was talking about, and we had an hour conversation at the end of which I had to run early to get to a baseball game away that was about an hour away. And we just had a wonderful conversation, a great connection. And in our pre-recording conversation, for any of you that don't do podcasts, the pre-recording and the post-recording often have some of the most juice in them, and you get to know the person, and that's where the big stuff happens. And so in the pre-recording conversation, I just asked, like, where you'd been to school and all of that, and it was UNH, University of New Hampshire, which nobody in this industry knows even if New Hampshire exists, which is where I'm from. I'm from Dover, New Hampshire. And Nick went to UNH, which is five minutes down the road. And I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. He owns property in my town. And so we really, really connected on that. And so, fast forward a year later, I've been grinding on the podcast. I've been meeting so many people. I've had so much, I've just had so much growth. It's really, honestly incredible. And Nick sends me an email and he says, Hey, I saw your Instagram story the other day. I'd love to invite you for free to the Book Thinkers Live event July 11th and 12th in in Boston, since you're local. I'm like, dude, thank you so much. He goes, Is there anyone you'd like to invite? I invite my good friend Wilder, and we planned on going. And then, and then, on the most stressful day that I can remember in recent history, it was, I believe it was May 5th. And I had just recently gotten back from uh London, living in London for a year, and I was in Toronto, Canada, filming two podcast episodes that day that had actually been a mess logistically, and I was super stressed because I'd spent a ton of extra money on that trip, and I knew that I actually needed to get money somewhere else, and it was it was a really stressful time. And in that stress, under that pressure, came a diamond. And that diamond was an idea that just happened to come into my head, and it was what if you do the live podcast at Nick's BookTinker's event? Now he hadn't offered me anything. No, he had never said anything about that. He had gifted me a free ticket to go to the event, but I had that idea, and so the only thing I could do was ask. So I sent Nick an email, I detailed it, I said, Hey, I think it would be awesome to get your guests, your guest speakers, some high-quality footage and from my questions, and I said that, from my great questions, to promote your event and continue the reach and just the exponential growth that comes from the Bookthinkers event. And he said, Yeah, let's hop on a call. Let's see what that would look like. And so I proposed the idea that I could interview all these guests, and I got this idea because of the guests there. I wanted to, I wanted to get these guests on my show. I mean, there are guys like Jim Quick and John Lee and Kristen Butler and Amber Lee Laga, all these people that I'm now I've now talked to on the Grateful Podcast. I I didn't get Jim, actually. Um, but it was just an idea I had, and he said yes. I shot my shot after he had already given me something. And so this weekend to finally get to it was probably the most exhausting weekend of my life. I mean, day one, I recorded nine podcast interviews, and I am a guy that does a ton of prep for my interviews. I mean, that's how I differentiate myself. I do an extreme amount of preparation before every interview. And I knew that I was gonna be doing 20, 25 interviews this weekend. I could not prep for everybody. So I was going into these blind sometimes. Blind and producing high-quality interviews in just 15 to 20 minutes. It was a complete game switch for me. And then after the after the first day, I was still high, but the second day we did 14 interviews. And there was this moment midway through the second day where I had showed up pretty terribly in an interview, and I was genuinely feeling nauseous out of just pure, pure exhaustion. I'm a very social person, but it had pin a lot. It was crazy. My friend Wilder, who was there with me, and is the reason that it looked so good and we were able to be so efficient. So thank you, Wilder. Shout out, Wilder Kerrigan uh on Instagram, Wilder Media Collective is his company. Incredible guy. Um, but the to get to get back to the point, he was so surprised to see me just so drained. And one of my favorite guests and favorite people that I met this weekend, his name's Marcus. And Marcus delivered my favorite speech of the weekend. He's one of the most high-energy, exciting people that I've ever met. And so I'm feeling exhausted, and I go over to him and I say, Marcus, I don't know what to do, man. I don't know what to do. I'm so exhausted. I want to throw up, but I need to push through. I got John Lee coming on next, who's the biggest guest I've ever had on the show in terms of follower count on Instagram. I've Evan Carmichael on next, your friend Trey on next, Trey Roth, incredible guy, and like Marcus, what do I do? He goes, dude, listen to me. Take 10 minutes. Pause. Go into the auditorium, do as many push-ups as you can and meditate and be grateful. Take your own medicine. Do some gratitude. Like, okay. So I go in there, I crank out 40 push-ups, I meditate for 10 minutes, and I was on top of the world. On top of the world for the rest of the day. It's incredible. But this weekend had so many extreme stressors. I mean, the night before, on Friday night, I knew that we were gonna have to get up at 4 30 and leave by 5 a.m. on Saturday morning. But the night before, I'd ordered this big backdrop, two of them from Amazon, and they didn't bring, they didn't put the tripods for the backdrops in the order. They forgot them. Amazon forgot. So that was at 7 p.m. when I realized that, and we went on a wild goose chase around Dover trying to find something that I could prop up the uh backdrops with. We ended up stacking chairs and all of this stuff with we thought we were gonna have to build PVC, and then my mom's friend and my family friend Tara actually had the setup I needed, and it was just the most clutch, incredible thing in the world. So then I'm feeling a bit more relieved and getting to bed a little worse uh later than I'd like to. And then I'm putting the lights in my car for the next day, and I I smash one of the lights. I smash it. And so now I'm like, what the hell? And then I realized I hadn't bought uh I hadn't bothered to get any type of branding that day. I hadn't done any type of business cards, I hadn't gotten a poster or flyers or whatever. And so now it's 11 p.m. the night before, and I don't know what I'm doing for any of that. And so I didn't get to bed until 12:30 p.m. I found a replacement for the light. I fixed it. I found a whiteboard and we printed off QR codes in my one pager and a mini poster that we ended up hanging up, but I was so stressed out that night, but it all ended up working out. It all ended up working out, and you know what I told myself in the middle of that stress? I said, you know what? This stress is gonna make the rest of it sweeter. But whatever the sour taste is, the contrast of this to the high, elated feeling I'm gonna get after I crushed these interviews with these amazing people, this is going to make that sweeter. And it did. It did because I know what I had to put in in the unseen hours. I know what I had to do to get to the result and the product that we have. And I think the most amazing thing I've learned about some of the biggest and greatest entrepreneurs in the world is that they put in an incredible amount of effort into the things that you don't even see to create a better product. Steve Jobs was obsessed with the design of the circuitry that you couldn't even see in the Mac and the iPhone. And to switch lenses, Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest athletes of all time, was obsessed with doing the workouts that you never saw him do. He would get to his 4 a.m. workout at 3:30 in the morning, get there early to start preparing preparation for the workouts. And I've just learned the real, real value of the unseen hours in that preparation. And that's what I did this weekend. In terms of what I learned from this weekend, so much. Literally years. Amberly Laga, who's now like genuinely one of my favorite guests I've ever had on the show. She has just incredible energy, one of the best stories I've ever heard. She, I listened to her podcasts. I listened to her guesting on Ed Mollette's podcast two years ago, right around the time that I said I want to start a podcast, right around the time that I made that decision. And her story inspired me in a really hard time in France. And now I get to talk to her, now I have her number, now I can talk to her whenever I want to, really. And we had an incredible conversation and a meaningful relationship. Evan Carmichael was sitting in the chair across from me. And he asked me, Who is your number one dream guest you want on the show? And I told him the story about how I started my podcast after I heard Ed Milette and Jay Shetty speaking while I was biking back from the climbing gym in the rain in France. I had really wet front of my pants, the back of them were dry, it was a weird, sticky feeling to my legs, and I'm listening to them in my one-shot AirPod. And I said, you know what? These are the people I want to talk to. They get it. They understand me. They got me. I'm gonna talk to them. And Evan Carmichael pulls out his phone and said, Let's get a video for Ed. He says, Hey Ed, I'm with this young entrepreneur, Jack Wagner. I'm his 21st interview of the day or of the weekend. You should come on his show, Jack. What's your pitch to Ed? And I got the pitch ed right there. You know what? If you can take one thing away from this, and the one thing that I took away from this is it confirmed in a suspicion that I had. The most successful people in the world are givers. The most successful people in the world focus on giving value, not taking value. And if you want to be extraordinarily successful in every facet of your life, you gotta focus on giving value to the people around you, and you gotta care about those people. You gotta care about them. And that's what I've realized. Like all these incredible people that I meet, you hear stories of like extremely successful people, and the instant you hear that, most of the world does not think giver, does not think generous, does not think kind. And I've learned the opposite, and I'm so blessed to have. Because I grew up with this idea that rich and successful people had to cut corners, had to rip people off in order to get to that point. I thought that anyone that was rich was kind of evil. And you know what? Genuinely some of the kindest people I've ever met are the most materially successful. And I have this theory that a lot of people share. That when you are like, let's say the top is here, like this is the great, and you're kind of right here, you're upper middle, right? You're good, you've done a lot. Those are the people that are like, hey, I can't give you my time. Hey, I'm sorry, no. Those are the takers. And they set that ceiling for themselves. They're never gonna elevate above there because in order to get to this level of just holistic wealth, you have to be a giver. And so, Nick, Hutcheson, thank you. You're a giver. You gave me the opportunity to have this amazing event to impact people with these 23 incredible episodes. Wilder, thank you. You're a giver. You you traveled with me. You woke up at 4:30 a.m. one morning and 5 a.m. the next morning to drive an hour to Boston to just come back later that night and spend 12-hour days interviewing people and recording the behind the scenes. So thank you. And all the other guests I had on my show, thank you, you guys. You invested your time into me and into my audience. And I thank you. And to all my audience, thank you. You're investing your time into me and into yourselves. And the more time that you do that, that you invest into your growth and the people around you and their growth, you're gonna grow. You're gonna crush it. Take the risk. Do the thing. Even if it sounds crazy, because it's right now it's working for me. And I want to lead by example to show you guys that it's gonna work for you too. Thank you.