The unreasonable email
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Every good thing in my career started with me doing something before I had any right to be doing it.
When I first started the podcast, I had maybe twelve episodes. No audience. No production team. I was recording in a room that echoed so badly I had to hang blankets on the walls. The show sounded like what it was, which was one person figuring things out in real time.
And from that position, I cold-emailed Grant Cardone.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it’s absurd. I had no downloads to point to, no social proof, no reason whatsoever for someone like Grant Cardone to say yes to an interview. I wrote the email anyway. I sent it to Patrick Bet-David. To Anthony Scaramucci. To Guy Kawasaki. I sent it to people so far above my weight class that even typing their names into the “to” field felt like a kind of trespassing.
They said yes. Not all of them on the first try. But enough of them that suddenly I was sitting across from people I had no business interviewing, trying to ask intelligent questions while my heart was doing something medically concerning in my chest.
The interviews were rough. I can’t go back and listen to most of them. I talked too fast, missed follow-up questions that were sitting right there, and spent half the conversation trying not to visibly sweat through my shirt. But they existed. They were real. And because they were real, the next round of outreach got a little easier. I could say “I’ve had Grant Cardone on the show” and that sentence did work I never could have done on my own.
Years later, this is what I keep thinking about: I was not ready. By any reasonable standard, I should have waited. Built an audience first. Improved the production. Gotten fifty episodes under my belt before reaching for that level of guest. That’s what a sensible person would have done. And a sensible person would still be building that foundation today, waiting for the right moment, because the right moment for something that terrifying never arrives on its own.
