Interviewing Your Parents, Writing Through Fear, and Turning a Podcast Episode Into a Book
This week’s episode is about writing something so personal it scares you. Kyle Thiermann joins us to talk about his first book, One Last Question Before You Go, about interviewing your parents. This book is part memoir, part how-to, written by an advertising expert -- it's something special.
It was born from a podcast episode with his dad, shaped by a unique relationship adventure with his mom, and launched with the kind of marketing hustle that most first-time authors shy away from.
Kyle shares the story behind the book: how honesty on the page deepened his family relationships, and how his launch strategy blended Patagonia, parties, and persistence.
This is a conversation about how to write what only you can write, and how to launch it like a pro.
Links to Platforms:
Quotes from Kyle:
“The interview process can be a kind of empathy drug.”
“Write as if you are already dead.”
“The ideas that won't go away are the ones worth chasing.”
“I wanted to write the book that only I could write.”
“Most people live their lives being rewarded for having the right answer, not the right question.”
“Books are like malaria nets—people use them in ways you never expect.”
“If I tell you to interview your parents, I have to show you what happened when I did.”
“Marketing is an act of consideration and generosity.”
“A lot of how-to books could be a one-page PDF. I refused to do that.”
“Live events aren’t about selling books. They’re about making you feel like a winner as an author.”
“The best advertisers I know create a mood shift immediately.”
“Make fun of yourself. That’s how you earn the right to critique others.”
If you’re considering writing or publishing a book, come talk with my team at Scribe Media.
Scribe Media helps executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to write, edit, publish, and market their books.
Scribe created a new category called "Professional Publishing" -- the best of both self-publishing and traditional publishing. With Professional Publishing, the author owns all rights and full creative freedom, so you can do anything with your book. You also keep 100% of your royalties.
You're getting the same level of professionalism as a traditional publisher—book design, interior design, and your own publishing imprint. All with maximum author freedom.
This is how I published The Almanack of Naval Ravikant and The Anthology of Balaji, and what I believe is the future of publishing.
If you’re considering publishing a book, take 20 minutes to meet with someone from Scribe to learn more about the publishing landscape. To get in touch with Scribe, click here or email me to get started.
Learn more about Kyle Thiermann:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Cal Riley: Special Ops, Grief, and Why Your Business Needs a Heart
Nat Eliason: From Blogging to Sci-Fi Novels, Writing Books That Last, and Owning Your Audience
Klaus Kleinfeld: How to Lead Fortune 500 Companies, Manage Energy, Inspire Teams
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Kyle, at long last, we are on the other side of your book launch, and we get to talk about your book existing instead of being on its way to existing.
Kyle Thiermann: Indeed. Indeed, the baby has been born. Thanks for helping make it happen, man. I had a great experience with Scribe, and you're not paying me to say that.
Eric Jorgenson: No. No, you paid us.
Kyle Thiermann: I paid you to say that. This is crazy. Oh my God.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm delighted to get to shine a spotlight on like both you and your book for independent and equally important reasons. And I think your journey is going to be a cool one to share with a bunch of other authors and prospective authors that listen to this. And I'm sure I'll learn more about you and your book, that is one that certainly hits close to home for me.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. Happy to have the conversation.
Eric Jorgenson: I generally treat these as kind of like the hero's journey of the book. And just like because every book has its own story, has its own journey. I'd love to hear like from your perspective where this book began.
Kyle Thiermann: The book began on a Tuesday afternoon in the year 2019 when a virus in China that very few people knew about was starting to make headlines, and all of us thought, holy shit, are our parents going to die right now? Panic was sweeping the streets. It was such an interesting moment in world history before people had actually made up their minds about COVID, or even, it was not politicized. At the very beginning, people didn't have conspiracy theories. It was just like, holy shit, what is this? And I had been doing a podcast for a long time. We're up to 400 plus episodes now. And I had never interviewed my dad. My dad is this charismatic old documentary filmmaker who has lived in Santa Cruz, California, for the last 40 years. His passion is going to the flea market every weekend and haggling with sellers to the bitter end. He's someone who very much chose, like many writers do, a career in media to see the world. So he was always the guy who'd say, don't go for the project because it's going to be a big budget, go for it because it's going to be a great story. And because of that, I think he's maintained a really optimistic outlook on life. And that's something that can be very inspiring to young people, to hear from someone who's 75 who still has creative energy. The world has not beaten him. So, I had him on, and he talked story. He told about his life flying around the world, making docs. He had just finished his latest on the cultural significance of bells around the world. He traveled to Transylvania to video the bell in Dracula's castle, the small bells of India. And he just does that shit. So, he told these stories, and that podcast led to someone with, you would have thought I interviewed someone very famous by the numbers that it got. It was like, wow, people are sharing this podcast way more than I would have thought. And not only that, but I think that when looking for signal boost, which is something that all creators really should be doing at all times, just keeping that antenna up, what is a subject that you talk about, what's a line that you say that gets people to change their mood? Like whether it's a laugh, we all have those funny stories that we tell again and again at parties because we know it's a consistent earner. Or it's a book idea and it causes people to lean in and ask questions and maybe even tell a story of their own. I think that you know you have a good book idea when you say the idea and then someone spits out a story of their own. Because what they're basically saying is, I relate to this in my own way. What you don't want is for them to be like, cool, right on. If people are saying that, you know you might need to redirect your idea. But that was the first signal boost that I got. A lot of listeners emailed me and said, that was awesome. I want to interview my parents. How do you do this? So I had been podcasting for the last seven years. I grew up as a surfer/journalist. I watched a lot of Vice growing up, and my dream was I want to travel around the world, surf and tell stories about environmental injustices happening in coastal communities around the world. Surfing for me was always like, it was a vehicle to see the world. And right around that time, YouTube was coming up and I started making these short documentaries about plastic pollution or working conditions in some far off country. And it was really fun. I was able to spend a lot of my 20s traveling the world.
Eric Jorgenson: I'll just add the context that you were a professional surfer for anybody who's not aware. This is not just like a casual level of surfing. This is world class.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. So, I was able to work with Patagonia to travel around the world and learn how to ask questions. Like asking questions, getting people to open up is a skill that over time you learn. And then when I started focusing on podcasting, like, man, you really learn a few techniques that can make conversations go better. So first, I wrote an article actually during COVID for my sponsor, Patagonia. It went up on their blog called How to Interview Your Dad and Why You Should Do It Now. Simple how-to. Got another big response. Signal boost. Oh, interesting. People want to do this. And then I got a full-time job as an advertiser, copywriter, creative director at a company called MUD/WTR and did not think about the book or that idea for the next three years. Thought it was just an article. Cool. That was fun. And then I- it was an idea that just kept kind of nagging at me. I think that a lot of times the ideas that you know you should invest in are the ones that won't go away. It's really easy to get excited about an idea right at the beginning and tell everyone about it. And that's so cool. Awesome. And that's how a lot of projects don't get finished, because you jump into them really quickly and then you lose enthusiasm after a while. And books, as you know, are marathons. So it was an idea that just wouldn't go away. And then when I left that job, being full time there, I still do work with them through a creative agency that I co-founded, I had more time, basically just more mornings to myself. And I thought... I should do this book. And it was originally called How to Interview Your Parents and Why You Should Do It Now.
Eric Jorgenson: And so, then this is when the idea sort of like converted from, hey, maybe there's a there there, I'm just sort of observing this idea as something that resonates to people, with people as being like, oh, this is a book, and it's a project that I'm actively working on. And you had not written a book before despite like all your different writing and creative efforts, right?
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah, I had never written anything longer than 3000 words.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Did you go into this... I have so many conversations with people that are like, I got this, like I write emails all the time or like I write blog posts all the time. Like don't tell me I don't know how to write a book.
Kyle Thiermann: I can text.
Eric Jorgenson: What was the learning curve from like, I mean, you are a great writer, but having only ever worked on like short form and copywriting and stuff like that, how did that translate for you into like setting off on this book project?
Kyle Thiermann: Great question. I think that advertising and working as a copywriter really served me in some senses with this first book project, and it hindered me in others. And I think that working as a journalist, which I did also, it served me in many ways and can hinder people also. And I'll tell you why. So for people who don't know, a copywriter is the words guy when it comes to any brand. So, if you go to the website and there's text, a copywriter wrote that. They're also responsible for bigger concepts – just do it, Nike’s slogan, an idea for a commercial. Copywriters are tasked with coming up with a lot of ideas and then paring those ideas down usually to their most essential form. Because writing in advertising is writing for people who do not want to read. They're not choosing to see your ad. Very likely they're skipping past it. We pay monthly subscriptions to not have to look at or read what copywriters have to say. So, you need to be really damn good at getting people's attention quickly. And it's very much similar to the job of stand-up comedians, which is to take a really big idea, pare it down to an essential form and change someone's mood state really quickly. I've done that for a number of years. You get pretty fast at it. I love it. A lot of laughing, very collaborative. That's one of my favorite things about working in advertising is I'm working with a creative director. I'm working with the editor. It's a team sport to create a mood shift in culture. What can hinder you about being a copywriter is that many ad people who try to write long-form books write in a very glib way. Same thing with comedians when they try and write books. A lot of times, they're afraid that if you're not getting a laugh every second line, people are going to tune out. And it's true to some extent, you want to make people laugh, but often what that does is it forgoes emotional resonance and deep honesty and vulnerability that I think is very much required when you are going into especially the memoir space. Like, I think people need to really feel like you are writing posthominously. You're writing as if you were dead. That's, I think, what's required if you're going to get into memoir. In the journalism sense, I was very lucky that I had some strong editors through my 20s who took an interest in me and eviscerated a lot of my work with red lines. And I was also very lucky that I got into it to get good, not to look good. So, from a really early age, through my 20s, I got that like, okay, if they send it back with a bunch of red lines through it, that's helping me get stronger. And I had very good habits about, for example, not just accepting track changes when a piece that I wrote came back. I would actually physically rewrite it back out, so I wouldn't make that same bad habit again and again. The thing that I see a lot of journalists maybe miss out on or a lesson that they could take from advertisers or copywriters is the importance of that immediate mood shift. Like people do not have fucking time for you to do the throat clearing paragraphs, for you to explain what the book is about. Like you really do need to entertain and create a mood shift immediately. And I think one thing that hinders journalists also is that they tend to be very literate readers, like really way above average when compared to most readers, and copywriters, like you're constantly trying to take long words and turn them into short words because you realize that most people are not great readers. So I came into this project, it's a long answer, but I came into it with that kind of training. I knew jujitsu and karate, and then I would say that writing the book was an MMA fight, where, okay, you gotta take everything you can do, and you're in the ring now.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you gotta improvise a little bit, but you definitely got some good fundamentals. So, what was the- you started this, I lost the timeline, 2023 maybe?
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah, I started in, I want to say 2023. Yeah. Beginning of 2023, late 2022, I wrote a couple chapters, and they were just really loose, free-write-y, like, hey, this is how you interview your parents. Really early on, I had dinner with a hospice nurse that I was friends with, and she had told me at dinner that one thing she notices is that when people are dying, their relationship with their parents really comes out. Kids who have dealt with and healed their relationships with their parents as best as they can have a much easier time when that parent is finally in their last few days. Like it really comes out that time. And I thought, wow, that is such an interesting perspective. This hospice nurse who is with the dying all the time can say, yes, you are on to something. Have the children interview their parents because it can help you get over resentment. The interview process, on one hand, it seems like, oh, that's a really- it's a fun thing to do. You get this like memento and audio heirloom. And on the surface of it, I think that's why a lot of people do it. But ultimately, the promise of the book and what interviewing your parents can do is be a kind of empathy drug, because somewhere along that way, you see your parent as a person and you see them as a child and you see what culture was like when they grew up, you see all of the things they had to deal with, and all of a sudden you realize like, whoa, this is just a person, and I'm just a person. And if I can move forward in this relationship with a little more grace and be a little less bothered by them and understand that our time here is limited, that is, that's as big as it gets, man. If you can do that, that is a human project that is worthy. And that was when the book, really for the first time, I got to feel like, wow, this could be big for a lot of people. And it is. It's proving to be. But I didn't actually come to the project with that kind of, holy shit, this is a really deep and hard and intense thing to do for some people. I came at it more as like, oh, it's going to be a fun thing. And then the more I got into it, the more I realized like, okay, well, I'm going to have to go on my own journey here too, which is the next step in the book.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a really... It's an easily forgotten fact that we all have parents. This is an archetypal thing that people go through, either losing a parent or transforming their relationship with their parent that every human either does or doesn't do. Either one is a defining piece of their personality and their journey.
Kyle Thiermann: If you have no relationship with your parent, that is a relationship with your parent.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes. You were getting there, but I think it's always interesting to ask what the goals and expectations were going in and how they transformed. It sounds like this got a lot richer, deeper, as you understood the full breadth of people that might be affected and all the different outcomes that might be expressed through a much wider array than just the relationship that you have with your parents.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah, and just to also let anyone who's listening know a bit more about what the book is about, the spine of it is a story about having a mom, losing her to conspiracy theories, and then using the interview process to re-establish a better relationship with her. So, I started this as a how-to. It was called, How to Interview Your Parents and Why You Should Do It Now. And that first draft that I wrote was pretty glib. It was pretty like, do this, don't do this, blah, blah, blah. But I had all this unresolved shit with my own mom of she's someone who I love dearly and see as a really intelligent and dynamic woman who also then got sucked into a myriad of conspiracy theories, one called free energy, where it's this idea that we have infinite perpetual motion machines around the world. And inventors have created this technology, but the Illuminati are suppressing it. And it's like, okay, you can believe that. But then she and her husband ended up investing a bunch of their savings and retirement into this shit. And as a kid, I mean, you're just watching. It's just so complex to parse who this person is that I care about really deeply. And what is it that would make her be so credulous? And how can I maintain love and kind of sort it out for myself? So ultimately, the place that the book really got writing was when I was sorting out my relationship with my mom, because anyone who's a writer will know that like we write to find out. You write to figure out what it is that you think about this. And then the interview process was sort of cobbled on to that story. So, it became this memoir with how-to interwoven into that book. But that was when it started to become very scary for me, when all of a sudden, you realize that like, whoa, I gotta write some things that are very uncomfortable and could be very hurtful. And that was both the hardest part of this process, but also the most rewarding. And it's also the number one comment I've received since the book has come out, which is, wow, it's a lot deeper than I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be a how-to, and yeah, you do learn how to interview your parents, but you take us into an unexpected place. That's the part that I'm most proud of also.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I really like the moniker, write the book that only you can write. There's a lot of people that could pick up a mic and interview their parents, and it's a good idea for a lot of people to interview their parents, and they could speculate about what that emotional journey might be like, or just have a relatively vanilla version of it. But for you as an author to go on a really difficult emotional and logistical journey to tackle that and then externalize it and have the courage to share it and be raw and take some of those risks of what it takes to put something so personal in a book, nobody else can write that. And then it is absolutely unimpeachable authority for you as an expert in this journey that you went on to then inspire, not just like lead others through it, but inspire others who have thorny journeys to go on through this, that they can do it too.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. And I was also very- I would say my biggest- my two biggest fears while writing this book was, A, I was going to really mess up my relationship with my family. And the second fear was that the book would come across as saccharine. I hate that writing. We had the problem, but then it's the Disney ending. I interviewed her and now it's all healed. It's just dishonest. And it's like this... you're like cosplaying vulnerability. But it's just not how life really works. And so, for me, the task was, how can I be honest about what happened as a result of... Over the year, the project was me interviewing my mom, my dad, and my stepdad a series of three times each. And each interview goes into a different part of their life. And in each one of those chapters, you're also learning a skill. But the biggest change with my relationship with my mom is that I just feel way more mature about it. Like I can just be nicer to her. Like I don't feel that petulant anger of like, oh, why did you do that? I'm just like, you know what, our time here is limited. I'm going to choose to be as kind as possible. Same with my stepdad, too. And whatever they want to talk about, I'm open to it. Like, hey, you know what, I got to write my book. I'm just going to try and meet you with love. We are absolutely not going to see eye to eye on what is happening in the world today. And I'm not going to try and hope that that's going to change. And I don't think that that's the most important thing. I don't think that world affairs should dictate a family relationship. And there's a chapter with my stepdad where I just say, we talk about sports. I engage with him. We both love sports, and I try to veer the conversations in that direction. And to find that one thing that you can connect with your parent on, man, that's real. And that's going to make the holidays go better. And that's a much different reality than ending Thanksgiving dinner screaming at each other.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I don't know if it's the algorithms or whatever it is that gets people tending to focus on the things that they disagree with and their definition of fixing a relationship becomes getting this person to agree with me rather than just putting aside what you might disagree on that might be resolvable or unresolvable and either one of you may be right or wrong or there may not be a correct answer and instead focusing the energy on where you agree or where you have a shared interest or where you... at least a light disagreement, a casual, fun, social disagreement.
Kyle Thiermann: Totally, totally. And I'll tell you one thing. I mean, this is How to Win Friends and Influence People. If that book could be summed up into one, into two words, ask questions. Like if you want people to like you, if you want to have good interactions, get good at the skill of asking questions. And most people had never learned how to do that. We are rewarded for having the right answer, not the right question. We're told that to be in a position of authority, to be seen as smart, that's the person on the Zoom call who speaks most, who makes statements. They don't ask silly questions, stupid questions. But ultimately, it's a very valuable skill that both does increase your intelligence, smart people will actually think that you're smart if you're asking good questions, and it gets other people to like you.
Eric Jorgenson: I want to go back to the fear that you addressed, your two big fears in writing this book, because I think it's something that many authors, or at least every author tackling something personally sensitive to them or that has any sort of like memoir characteristic to it. How did you overcome that fear of like the personal implications of authenticity in your writing and what it meant to put that out into the world?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I'll answer the question and I'll also tell you a story that I'm reminded of. I won't say this person's name, but they had a near death- they’re a very high-level athlete, and they had a near-death experience. And they wrote in a journal, a private journal, about all that they were thinking about after this near-death experience. It was thoughts of depression. It was thoughts of very dark, messy, personal thoughts. And they kept this journal for a year and then they flushed it down the toilet because they were afraid that someone was going to find this journal. And I was like, oh, wow, like that's the good shit. That's crazy. People are afraid to even journal their true feelings. They're terrified that someone might find out this- their curated version might crumple if someone finds the journal. And I think that one of the real gifts that writing can give and what Scribe encourages authors to do is just to be real. You just need to say the hard thing because ultimately that's, on some level, what readers are paying you to do because they can't do it themselves. And you're articulating an experience for them that is relatable. So on one level, that's just kind of your job. I think that that's part of the job description, if you want to be a real writer. And the second thing I would say, and the way that I would able to get through it, and it wasn't easy at first, but to go into those sessions knowing that I didn't need to share that work with anyone. What you're writing in that first draft is not going out to anyone. So, you can say horrible things, and then in future drafts, you can figure out how to lighten it up, how to make a joke out of it, how to show more love. And one thing that's been really interesting and surprising for me since the book came out is my mom loves it. My mom loves it. My stepdad loves it. A lot of people in the conspiracy theory world have been buying it and liking it because it's totally done with humor and with enough lightness. Like, I can say, yeah, I fucking think you guys are crazy. And like, I love you. And this is funny. And like, I'm wrong about shit too. And it allows us to all kind of, in some weird way, be in the same camp of like human folly. And I think that a really powerful and maybe one reason why it's working is like I think that making fun of yourself is a superpower. Like learning to take the bullets out of the gun as a writer gives you permission to then go at and critique others while keeping a reader on your side. If you think that you're right all the time, you're positioning yourself at the top of the mountain, that's a very fragile place to get knocked off. So, I mean, I think that some of the more fun stuff to write about is your own mistakes. And that gives you permission to be more honest about other people. So that was my approach. And the tone is also found through drafts of the writing. A lot of times, the funniest chapters were the hardest emotionally to write in those first drafts. And then the jokes get peppered in later. You find a line that, okay, this is really hard. This is really hard. Now we're going to bring it back out. And that was what I hoped to achieve. And it's one reason why I'm quite proud of it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's one of the rules of thumb, I think, of what makes a great wedding speech. It's just one that everybody can hear. You alternate an aw and a joke. And if you can get both in, and ideally, if you could alternate them, that's a home-run wedding speech, but it's also a home-run book or blog post or whatever else. And it does, yeah, the peanut butter helps the pill go down.
Kyle Thiermann: And going back to what we were saying about copywriters and comedians often having a hard time with books, that it's because they're afraid to take it down into that hard emotional muck zone. Like they just want to keep it on the level of like joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. And if you read a book that is trying too hard to be funny, it becomes unreadable. So a lot of my work through the drafts was actually like I can write fucking jokes all day long, like boom, boom, boom. But you're not getting the laugh out loud, guttural laugh. But if you can hold back a little, and if you can be just honest and vulnerable, okay, I'm giving you information and then like, bam, I'm going to hit you in this very unexpected place, I think that's how you get a reader to laugh out loud.
Eric Jorgenson: It's funny, that actually converges from the comedy side too, because I think the greatest comedians of all time, like Chappelle in his most recent specials, he'll go five or ten minutes without a punchline. He'll just tell you this beautiful, like soul striking story, and then drop like a completely unexpected, super crass punchline at the end of it that you totally forgot he was setting up from minutes ago. And it's very interesting how those sort of converge.
Kyle Thiermann: Totally. Yeah, and it's scary. The scariest thing for someone who considers himself funny is to hear silence. For a comedian, that's the signature of failure. But that tension that you're building up, you need to build up the tension. I think that's what it is, is when some writers are just glib and it's like beep, bop, beep, bop, beep, you're not building any tension for a big laugh to be able to occur at the right place. So, I mean, that was a lot of my work. And man, I freaking grew so much as a writer through this process.
Eric Jorgenson: This is a good segue into another thing that I think is really unique about this book that I want to have you talk about too, because it's a very unique book. Like a lot of people out there, even great books follow formulas, and usually follow them to a T and fit very neatly in a box of like it's romantic, or it's sci fi, and it has these arcs and hits these points, and most nonfiction books do the same, and most memoirs do the same. And you very interestingly have been unabashedly combining like a how to interview your parents book and a very personal memoir that does strengthen both, and it's also funny. But like that had to have been a very hard kind of potion to mix to get all those components together and reasonably convey like, no, this book really is all of these things and they support each other and they have to coexist, and I don't want to separate them. Like, don't put me in a box. Let me do this original cool thing. I can do it.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. A lot of how-to books could be a one-page PDF, and I refuse to do that. I could tell you how to interview your parents in a one-page PDF.
Eric Jorgenson: It's the post you wrote five years ago.
Kyle Thiermann: It's the post I wrote five... Yeah, it's the post. To just try and drag that out with like statistics and different stories, like I don't know that people want to read that. I mean, it's a book that maybe people will get as an impulse purchase to virtue signal in some way. A lot of people buy books just to virtue signal. They don't actually plan on reading it or want to be surprised. But I felt like the story is... There's a narrative thrust here that's important for me to tell that you can't get into a PDF. And ultimately, what that narrative thrust is, is what you will get out of this project. If you're going to write a book about how to interview you parents, you can't write that without showing what it did for you. Talk about being a little bitch. Like what? I'm going to tell you to go do this scary thing, and I'm not going to be honest about how scary it was for me and what I got out of it and the interviews that failed, like all that. That's the good stuff. I think that that's what is allowing a reader to trust you, is for you to go through that process and show on the other end what happened. And I also knew, if you just want to write, if I were to just write a memoir about, I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think that if I were to just write my first book as a memoir about growing up in this small surf town, wanting to be a pro surfer, having this really close relationship with my mom, having her fall to conspiracy theories, me getting mad, and then growing up and having it be a story of growing up and learning more about what she went through when she was a kid and how that maybe informed her beliefs now, you could probably write that book, but I don't know that it would be as relatable to as many people. And I enjoy, on some level, the helpfulness of this book. I enjoy the helpfulness of it. One thing that we did that was a last-minute decision, and it was a last-minute decision, and it was not even my idea, it was an idea from a friend of mine who's been a very successful author, Neil Strauss, who's written a number of bestsellers. He said, you should write the chapters as questions so that people can just use the questions as chapter headings. How can you create unexpected value where normally a chapter is just like you can skip over the name of it. What if you make that into a big part of it? And I took his advice, wisely. And that is another area that people are really enjoying. They're not actually interviewing their parents necessarily. They're just bringing the book to open up and then ask questions around the dinner table. So in terms of this thing being an odd duck, figuring out ways to create unexpected value for a reader is something that you should be thinking about. And just because the industry does it one way, maybe that's a signal that you shouldn't be doing it that way. In branding, for example, the best advertisers I know will see an industry standard. They'll see wellness, for example. What is wellness? If you're going to start a wellness brand, close your eyes and tell me what would that look like? Well, it'd be like kind of soft, maybe feminine, like pretty sanctimonious, zen. Like, okay, what's MUD/WTR? That dude does jujitsu and it's funny and it's irreverent. So you're taking this healthy thing, but we're going to move it over into almost like comedy, masculine area. And that's what's going to get attention. And I think that for authors, if you're going to write a book, like a self-help book, go the opposite direction. Otherwise, how do you expect to get any attention? It's just going to get lost in a sea of sameness. So yeah, I mean, there were a few things that I did that I'm happy I did because they were able to create unexpected value for the reader.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I think doing something unique is... it's almost impossible by definition to do like a high value thing that is the average of what already exists. And the example that came to mind when you gave that framework was like David Goggins, he's 80% memoir, 20% actionable self-help with like exercises, and he shows you the transformation he went through and advises you on how you could do the same. And it spoke to, I don't know that there's that many books... that many swear words that have spoken to like, yeah, men and in particular, young men and people who are struggling to lose weight or come out of service or aspiring athletes or people who came from really, really tough backgrounds, like childhood backgrounds. So, there's just all kinds of things in that that like were unconventional mix of genres and value propositions that, exactly to your point, created a really unprecedented level of excitement and awareness. And thinking about how recommendable a book is, like the viral coefficient of a book, for every reader, how many people does it get recommended to. Like, getting a book brought to a dinner table and having it foster this beautiful evening of conversation is like, well, now ten people know about this book, or six people know about this book, and somebody's going to take it or buy a copy or send their friend a copy or hear that a friend's parent got sick and you want to send it to them. This hospice nurse friend of yours is probably, like this is part of the hospice entry package. Welcome to the program. Here's a book that you should read.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. One Last Question Before You Go. It's perfect for those guys.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, I wanted to ask you about that title too, because you said it was a very different title than when you first started. You're a copywriter. You know the headline is 80, 90% of the work. I'm sure you put hours into that title.
Kyle Thiermann: I did. Oh yeah. We had a lot of titles. And yes, if you start a brand, 90% of your advertising is the package. And it's amazing how many founders, usually first-time founders, will start a company and the package will almost be like a second thought. And they're like, no, but we got to talk about Instagram ads. That's really where we... It's what people see the moment they see your product and the emotional shift that it's going to give to them, and it's the little bit of copy that you put on that package that will be 90% of your advertising, at least for the few years before you get huge ad budgets. And even then, man, it's so important. I have a friend who's a great copywriter named Thomas Kemeny. He wrote a book called Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to get into copywriting. But I was talking to him recently about, you know Justin's Peanut Butter? Have you ever seen, it’s like Justin's Peanut Butter? If you look on the side of Justin's Peanut Butter, there's this short story about how he's a founder and the reason he named it Justin's is because he doesn't have any time to think of clever names, which is why he named his son Justin and his daughter Justin. And it's a great joke that makes you laugh when you look at this package. And you can't put a value amount on how many jars of peanut butter did those 40 words sell. I would be willing to bet it's in the millions of dollars now. Because what you're trying to do immediately when you get a product is to create a mood shift in someone. And usually it's, how do I make your mood just 2% better when you see this thing. A lot of times the name, too. What's a name that's funny that makes people kind of giggle? That can take a brand a really long way. And similarly with books. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Wonderful title. That sold Mark Manson's first million copies.
Eric Jorgenson: And even in the end state, millions more people or orders of magnitude more people are going to hear the title of a book than ever buy it, let alone than ever read it. Like your title is by far the most impactful part of your book, the farthest reaching.
Kyle Thiermann: Yes. Yes. I would say the title is the first most impactful and then the description on Amazon or the back of your book is the second most important 40 words that you're going to write. So, I thought quite a lot about it. And for a long time, the book was How To Interview Your Parents and Why you Should Do it Now. Okay, just put the value right up there. Don't try and be too clever about it. And there was a good argument to call it that. And the further I got down, I thought, man, that's not actually the book. The book is, it's about this relationship with my mom. And you're going to learn how to interview your parents. But also, how can I give a title that makes you feel some emotional shift? Some emotional shift. And One Last Question Before You Go, I mean, it's still really early in my book, so I could have made the wrong decision. I say all this as confidently as I can, but I also... I could have fucked up still. It's selling, people are loving it. But I'll tell you the reason that I did One Last Question Before You Go, and that is that I would tell some people the title, and they would be like, oh, yeah, wow. It gets that immediacy across. And it's obviously the double entendre. And not everyone would say it when I would say One Last Question Before You Go, but enough people would react that I got the signal boost. It's not everyone but it's enough people that it creates some mood shift in them that will...
Eric Jorgenson: It’s the right people, like the resonance is corresponding with how acute or like fearful you are of the waning time you have in that relationship.
Kyle Thiermann: Exactly. Yeah. Not a lot of 19-year-olds were like, oof, one last question before you go, because they still think that their time with their parent is infinite. Usually people over 35 that would be like, oof. And then you get to 50 and then it’s just like, oof, yeah, I really got to do this because time is running out. And then the subtitle of it is why you should interview your parents. So you still get that across. And yeah, that was the decision I made for that reason. But I pitched titles to people every day for months, said, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And really try and look. Don't go for the title that you fell in love with because you think it's so clever. Go with the one that you're getting signal boost from and be willing to redirect day by day so that it can be the best outcome.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that is great advice. For context, we're recording this maybe a month after the book has come out. Actually, a month to the day after the release. So, I'm curious how the first month has been. I know you've been all over doing events, having a very exciting launch. I'm curious how it's been going and what the experience has been.
Kyle Thiermann: Sure. Let's talk about it. I'll tailor these answers for, I think they'll be useful for anyone who's either a writer or even an entrepreneur. Because when you're usually getting interviewed, you're being interviewed about the content of the book. You're not being interviewed about your marketing strategy. But the only reason people are learning about the content of the book is because of your marketing strategy. So it's really important to be thinking about these things. And I would love to open up anything that I've learned to anyone who's listening. So a few things. I was quite diligent about writing the book when it was time to write the book and marketing the book when it was time to market the book. I actually was driving to... I was driving to a party last night. And this is going to get into the marketing strategy. And I was in the car with my fiancé. And we were talking about the last year, 2025. So what are you most proud of having done over the last year? She gave her answer and then she asked me, what are you most proud of? And I said, the easy answer is, well, I wrote my first book. But the real answer was that I focused on writing the best book that I could at that time, and I really did not let marketing creep into my mind during that process. And then when it was locked, when that final draft was locked, my mind shifted almost like a robot into you are no longer a writer. You are a marketer selling a product. And your job now is to have this product reach as many people as possible. And it's hard to do, man. The marketing creeps in. Marketing is fun. It's fun to think about getting on those podcasts and chumming it up and those one-liners you're going to say and how famous you're going to be and how many people are going to love you. And, oh my god, you're going to get calls from all your favorite writers and it's just going to be riding the horse into the sunset. But as you're doing that, you're no longer in the muck of like, okay, I need to be as honest as possible. This is a book where... I need to make this story as good as possible and just stay insanely focused on the writing process. I mean, the amount of drafts that I went through, the amount of changes that I made to that book, it'll make you go cross-eyed. But I was very militant about being in that zone when it was that time. And then when the gear shifted, I barely wrote for four months. And it was weird for me to go from this state of having my mornings be taken up with 2 hours of writing to 2 hours of sending emails to podcast hosts and influencers, DMing influencers. I created a huge Google Sheets list of everyone who might be interested in my book from podcast hosts, influencers, book clubs, and would send them messages. And the message that I sent was, hey, I just wrote this book about how to interview your parents. Here's a quote from Rich Roll, who was nice enough to read an early draft of the book. He's a well-known podcaster. And it's like, this is a great book, da-da-da. And then I said, I'd love to send you a copy. No expectations or ask. Because if you are a podcast host with any audience, you're getting hit up all day, every day with requests, like, hey, can I use you as a free advertising vehicle? And I sent a few of those emails, didn't get one response. And if I can sum my marketing strategy up into one phrase, it's givers are getters. Look at your marketing strategy with your book as an offering. Look at it as a willingness to be generous with the world. If you can afford it, send some copies out to people. Write personalized notes. You wrote this thing. The world should know about it. Be generous. Have your mindset be that marketing is an act of consideration and generosity. So what I did was I would DM influencers, I'd DM podcasts – hey, I'd love to send you my book. I probably sent off 150 personalized, signed books to different people. Many of them didn't respond. Go for it.
Eric Jorgenson: Just for a sense of volume, how many outreaches probably did you do? And then did I hear 50 copies?
Kyle Thiermann: 150.
Eric Jorgenson: 150. Okay.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. I mailed 150 copies of my book. I probably reached out to 300. I think 300 was my goal, emails and DMs. And people who do respond, like you're corresponding with them. It starts to take up your day. But you do it and mail the book out. And then there were also people who I did know, I had relationships with. And that's then like a hey, I’m calling in a favor right now. You have a big Instagram following. My book comes out on November 18th. Will you please do a post about it? I had a number of friends who were podcasters where I could say like, hey, I'm not going to do this little dance with you where I send you a book and kind of hope you invite me on your podcast. Like, let me on your fucking podcast. Like, this is my first book. Let’s do this. So, if you have those relationships, like just now is the time to call in all the favors, which I did. And I was able to get a number of friends who had small to midsize podcasts to do interviews with me and got them to all say that they would release it the week of November 18th. In addition to that, one area that I found a lot of value that I think most people overlook are local newspapers. We tend to think of like, oh, I'm going to go get on Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan and we try and go too big and it becomes an unrealistic task. It's like the chances that those guys are going to have you on is pretty small considering how many people are trying to get on their shows. But local newspapers still reach really a lot of people. And if you email one of those journalists, they might respond. And a number of local emails responded to me just because I was a guy from Santa Cruz. And they're, hey, this guy's out writing a book. That's super cool. And then there were a lot of people that read books and came to my events because they saw it in the newspapers. But I think what I was able to do fairly well from being someone who I'm not super famous, I have a podcast that a few thousand people listen to every episode, Instagram followings. I have like 15,000 Instagram followers. It's not nothing, but it's also not legit fame where you can just say something and sell 100,000 copies. I had to work as well as I could to have it be coordinated and call in favors. But what ended up happening then was the week of the launch, there were probably a dozen podcasts and newspapers, articles that all came out that week, and it made it feel like it was a bigger thing. Because you're like, oh, I saw this here, I saw that there, which is ultimately what you're trying to get with a book launch. You want it all to come out at the exact same time. Because what happens then is people might not buy your book then, but they'll know it exists. The goal of a launch is not actually, I think, it’s not actually to get people to buy the book right then. It's for everyone who's ever heard of you and more to know that you did that thing.
Eric Jorgenson: So many people over-index on the outcome of the launch and the number of copies either pre-sold or sold in that first week. And if you think about your own behavior as a reader, how many times do you buy a book the first time you hear about it? Almost never. You need reps. It's just like any other market. You need to be hit four or five times. You need to hear strong recommendations. Some people need to wait for reviews or personal recommendations. But yeah, I think you're totally right. Just get that dent in somebody's head so that you can start logging those tally marks and the awareness can snowball.
Kyle Thiermann: Totally. In branding, generally marketing companies talk about taking up physical space and mental space. Coca-Cola takes up physical space. They're so big that they can just plaster their logo everywhere. You can't go a day without seeing a Coca-Cola logo. And they're taking up- It's everywhere. I can so easily get this. Liquid Death takes up mental space. They come up with an idea that's such a mood shifter for you immediately, you can't possibly look away. And now you're thinking about that thing for the next day. You're like, God, that's so funny. I can't believe they, again, did an enema kit with Blink-182 and it was Liquid Death water. That's fucking hilarious. Because their whole goal is like, oh, we just need to be at the top of the internet and have people talking about it. I didn't buy Liquid Death for a year or two since I had heard about them. But what they did worked where I just, okay, I see it again and again. I hear about it again and again. So, yeah, I mean, again, like my book is selling, but I think that what I did quite well is everyone who's ever heard of me knows that I wrote a book now. And now it's just a ground game of continuing to consistently put things out so that the second and third time that they hear about it, then maybe they'll buy it. In marketing, as you say, people don't necessarily buy it the first time they see it. And I can tell you, man, now I'm in a really strange spot as an author because all I want to do is move on to the next book. I want to just be like, cool, I did it. I'm done. It's out. But luckily, I have a marketing background. And it's like, wait, imagine if you were a founder, and you took three years to come up with your first product. And then you released it into market, and you did ads for one month. And then you stopped doing ads and just, okay, well, we're going to spend another three years working on our next SKU. That's actually how most writers are thinking about it. But I'm like, wait a second, that's crazy. I have a product now. Every time I talk about this, someone now can buy it. Like, that's amazing. I should be talking about this for the next year.
Eric Jorgenson: And so, oh my God, there's so many things... That's a perfect analogy. I think one, it's because there's this mutual delusion between the author and the publisher that the publisher is going to go do all the marketing, which they just don't do. Like the author is the one pulling the plow. And the author is the one who has to like do that marketing and keep that awareness. The other is that like your book in particular is a perfect long tail. Like this book will be- it's evergreen, it'll be relevant for 100 years. And there are people graduating into this need, like into this use case, into this chapter of their lives every single day. And so, you can run the exact same playbook, tell the exact same stories and like market to the exact same archetype, but a new set of people for 50 years and sell the exact same product for 50 years. Some of the great canonical books are like that. You talked about How to Win Friends and Influence People earlier. Same exact file, same exact value proposition. It's just been going forever, but it's because it has that mind space. People know that that's the book for this thing. And so, the question is actually like, can you get enough copies into enough hands over the first like, not week or month, but year or three years or five years, so that like this book becomes the book for that particular need or problem. And it's just thinking on a different timescale than most authors even bother to. As you pointed out, they mostly over-index on their launch, get a stomachache because they feel shame because the launch underperformed their expectations, and then never talk about it again and move on to something else.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah... Marketing a book is a lot like investing where you need to set up a system that is unemotional. The people who find financial freedom just set up an automatic investment into a Vanguard. And no matter what the market is doing month over month, they're investing that same amount of money month over month. They just go at it regardless of the response of the market generally. And I think that what a lot of writers do is they invest a huge amount right at launch and then nothing else in the end. So, the way that I've done it is I have created... Here's a super simple low-budget thing for writers that don't have a marketing budget after launch. You get a Canva account. Canva is a super easy way to design statics for Instagram. You find good lines from your book, like a simple quote or something like that. You put it into the Canva design, download it, upload it to Instagram. This is James Clear's whole strategy. This guy has millions of followers, huge views. He's basically just taking bits and pieces of Atomic Habits and throwing them out like breadcrumbs over years and years and years. And then he's also getting a few new ideas with habits, but it's still on the habit track and just continuing to throw breadcrumbs out. So it gives people this on ramp into eventually buying his book. But I think any author can do that. Just find these little bits from your book and release them three days a week for the next year. That doesn't take any money, but you're continuing to then market your book and it increases your chances of it finding new people.
Eric Jorgenson: Just reminders and reminders and reminders that this thing exists and people will convert eventually. The beautiful thing about this book and this problem is that literally everybody has it. At some point in their life, it's just a matter of timing, it's like, this is going to come to the forefront of your life.
Kyle Thiermann: I had a friend who wrote an Amazon review that said, a book for everyone whose parents are mortal. I wanted to say one thing about launch too, because... we're human and the psychological component of feeling like you won is deeply important both for the first book, but also if you're ever going to write a second book. And I have a background as an athlete, and there are quite a lot of parallels between really hard athletic achievements and writing a book. And one of them is, if you do a workout or you go on a long run, you need to make it feel like that was a success. And most people do. You do a workout, you leave, you think, I'm really happy I did that. That felt good. I'll consciously end a workout and spend five minutes meditating on what a good... That was a really good workout. I feel stronger as a result of that. Training my mind to think that was a really good thing to do. Same with writing sessions. Like, oh, wow, that was a really good thing. I did that. Even if it's a shit writing session and you got 10 words down, oh, I spent the time to do that. On a larger level, I pushed really hard to have the first two weeks of my launch be filled with live events. People will say like oh, live events... The amount of people that were like, dude, live events are a waste of time, like it's expensive. You'll sell 40 copies if that. And I was like no, no, no, this isn't about selling copies. This is about making me feel like I'm a fucking winner. This is about me reading my book to a room of people and feeling awesome, like I need- This was so hard to do. I need to feel like that was a success, even if I sell no books, even if it's a total loss leader in this campaign. And I did it, and people laughed at the right parts in the right chapters. And I got to sign books. I got to feel like a real author. I got to take photos. It was a fucking blast... And people are like, how's the book selling? I'm like, I don't know. I think it's selling pretty well, but that's such a distant second right now to the fact that it really resonated with people. People cried in the audience. People laughed. That's what I wanted to have happen. And I think that if I would have not done those live events, I would have been way more obsessed with how the book was selling over those first two weeks, which is inevitably, if you're a first time author, it's probably not going to be that much over the first month.
Eric Jorgenson: And good outcomes tend not to feel like a lot for authors, like the median is like in the hundreds. These are not huge numbers that blow people's brains off when they're thinking about big podcast numbers or big download numbers or views on TikTok or whatever.
Kyle Thiermann: And the second thing I'll say is that I would highly recommend that anyone who does a book do a launch, because in addition to having it feel really good, what a launch really is, is a media event for other people to pull their phones out and take photos of your book. So if you do the launch, make sure there's some really easy places for people to take photos. It could be you signing the book, could be you on... but you can't really- I mean, you'd have to pay a lot of money to get a number- that many people to show up and all post to Instagram on the same day. And if you do that right around your launch, it's going to make the whole thing feel bigger.
Eric Jorgenson: I love that. It's a very well-designed thing for a human too. It's a really good observation that if you record a podcast, this is weird disconnect we have. If you record a podcast and 50 people listen to it, you're like, oh, what a waste of time. Like, that's a small podcast. And most people would be like, I'm not even going on that podcast. But if you get 50 people in a room as just like a human, that feels amazing, to be in front of 50 people. People fly all over the world to speak to 50 people in person, let alone like take photos and have it be part of the launch and like our mutual friend sent a set a photo of you on your launch day that looked amazing. A bunch of your reviews on Amazon have those photos now and like on Instagram... Yeah, it and all goes back to like making it feel really big and feel really good to you as an author. I think that's super, super insightful.
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. Live events, live events are great. And also...
Eric Jorgenson: How’d you set those up out of curiosity? Was it bookstores?
Kyle Thiermann: Sure. Yeah. I want to be as helpful as I can. So, the first event was at MUD/WTR in LA. So I had a connection there. And the next four were all Patagonia stores. Patagonia does do events for non-athletes. I had the in because I'm an athlete, but you can reach out to stores in addition to bookstores. And most of them are psyched. If I'm getting- We had like 200 people in the Santa Cruz showing. And those are all potential customers now for Patagonia. So yeah, we were able to set up events at stores. And I would recommend, if you're not having much luck at bookstores, think about what's your book all about? Are there brands that are connected to that world? And could you convince them, hey, I would love to come, like all I need is a microphone, a table, and we can set up events. I will say this, if you make a request to anyone, but a bookstore in particular, it's a really interesting kind of like mental strategy. If you make a request with a far out enough timeline, like, hey, in five months, can we do this event? There's no reason for them to say no, because it seems so far away. And then a month before, you're like, hey, cool, so we agreed to doing this. But if you asked them a month before the event, they're going to be like, I'm too busy, can't make it happen. So there were a few things that I was doing marketing while I was still actually writing the book. And one of them was I probably set these events up like seven months ago. It was just... and it's one of those things for making the requests to a few of those, like get the agreement because psychologically people- it's like when your friend invites you on the like Grand Canyon trip 13 months from now, you're like sick, right on. And then like 12 months in, you're like, oh my god, why did I agree to that? But I guess I got to go now. So make the requests really far in advance and you'll get more yeses.
Eric Jorgenson: That's very, very clever. When you were sitting there with late 2023, 2024 version 567 of this manuscript, how did you navigate the road to publishing? There's a lot of options, especially given your audience and your background. There's a lot of ways to go about getting a book out into the world. What was that decision process like for you?
Kyle Thiermann: Yeah. Well, I was given the advice very early. I think Adam Skolnick gave me this advice. Shout out, Adam. That dude, man. Everyone go buy his book, American Tiger. It's his new novel. It's so fucking good. And that guy, he is equally as sharp a writer as he is cool a dude, which you don't often get the mix of both. I once told him, I'm like, dude, you should be so much less cool. You're so good. You've done so much. How are you just so humble and chill? He's just an amazing human. He's been so helpful to me. But I believe he gave me the advice, which was, if you're a first time author, write the book. Don't even think about like publishing until you write the story. Because if you go out to traditional publishers too early, before you've written the book, A, you can't sell it as well because you don't actually know what the book's about. You've written the pitch and maybe a couple chapters, but the rest of it's just like, well, I'm guessing this is what the story's really going to be. So if you write the book first, you have a better pitch. You're like, look, it's a story about my mom and me, and this is all that happens. And then in chapter 26, this is what happens. So you can pitch better in the room once you've written the book. And the second is if you just write a pitch and then you go out to traditional publishers and get rejected, it's going to be really hard to follow through on the project. So I knew that. I knew that if I just wrote a pitch and got rejected, I probably would throw the book away and just be like, yeah, well, it's clear signal that I shouldn't keep going with this. So I wrote the whole book. I wrote a draft of the whole book before making any decisions. And Scribe was recommended to me really early in the publishing process. Our mutual friend Scott, Adam had done Can't Hurt Me with you guys. And there's a certain level of needing good recommendations from other people because it's such an important and trusting process. And you see self-published books that look like dog shit. And you're like, dude, I don't care what is written in this book, not Scribe books, but people who just go straight through, oh, I published it with Amazon. And I'm like, dude, I'm not going to read this book. I don't care how good it is. It just doesn't look that good.
Eric Jorgenson: People judge a book by its cover.
Kyle Thiermann: They really do. They really do. So I had known about Scribe. I'd had good recommendations about you guys. And then I thought, well, I'm going to at least try and get an agent and see how this goes. So I went on to Publishers Marketplace, which is a website where you can find agents. You pay like a monthly subscription. It's like 20 bucks a month, and it's the names of all these agents. I wrote to an agent at DeFiori and he took me on. He's a really awesome agent and he still represents me, John, who's just a super cool dude and we had a really good relationship. He was really excited about the book. So I thought, well, I'm going to go try this out. And we put together the pitch. That was a really good process for me to at least just see how that whole thing works. I'm a first timer in this whole industry. So I think it was a really healthy exercise to go through with that pitch process with him. Thankfully, we were able to pitch it all pretty quickly. So there wasn't a year lost in the pitch process. You hear these horror stories of people who have written the book and then they're just in limbo for two years. We were able to get it out over the process of two or three months, pitched it to the big five, basically got really similar answers from all of them, which is, this guy's a super sharp writer. Clearly, I'm engaged in the story from the get-go. The writing's clean. I had done a lot of the work early to make... And that was a big selling point, was like, look, the book is really close to being done. You don't need to invest a ton in reworking this thing. It's a memoir and it's a how-to. And it's like, we don't really know where to place this. So would love to hear from you in the future, but... And my agent said, I think that the strongest parts of this book are between you and your mom. And I don't want to see you Frankenstein this thing into a how-to after having put your heart on the line here. And that was an incredibly cool thing of him to say, knowing that he's not going to financially benefit from it if I ended up going with Scribe, and I thought, yeah, I mean, this... I once heard Jerry Seinfeld say, win or lose, you need to do it your way. If you succumb to the pressures of industry or collaborators, and you know in your heart that it's not the way to do it, and it doesn't work, that's how people become homicidal. If they're like, wow, I spent five years on this project, I knew it should have gone this way, it ended up going that way, and now I feel too old or broken to do another one. Like, I knew in my heart that this was the way this book had to go. And I feel so fucking proud of it. I'm psyched on the result of it. I loved reading it the way that I read it. I loved... and I was just like, I know that this... this book works. Like, and people are reading it and they're telling me it works. So just because logically it's like, we don't know where to place you, I was like, that's not a good enough excuse for me to think that I should do away with the story. Because going back to what I said at the beginning, the logic was people need to know what happened for me. I needed to show how hard it was if I'm asking people to do this hard thing. And without the story with me and my mom or some flattened version of it, I'm just not going to feel very proud. So, Scribe very gracefully took me back.
Eric Jorgenson: We don't mind being shopped, however you need. We don't mind being shopped. However you want to do it, we'll be here.
Kyle Thiermann: I appreciate that. No, it's amazing. And I don't have the experience going through a traditional publisher, so I can't compare this experience to that. But Adam said, and I agree, that it is every bit as professional as having gone through Penguin Random House. The editing that I received from the global feedback all the way down to the sentence-by-sentence feedback, to just feeling like, okay, I know where we are, to really meeting deadlines and doing a huge amount. It's a part-time job, the whole time working with Scribe. You're expecting a lot of the author. You can't keep pushing a book forward if the author is just going to phone it in and expect you guys to do everything. So, it's a real collaborative and working relationship over that year-long period. And yeah, I mean, it works. We stayed ahead of schedule and I'm really happy with the outcome. And I was able to get books way in advance. I didn't finish the loop of when I was driving last night in the car to go to this party, but the party that we were going to was the comedian Bert Kreischer's holiday party.
Eric Jorgenson: I love Bert Kreischer, dude.
Kyle Thiermann: And I mailed Bert's wife, LeeAnne, who does a podcast called Wife of the Party, a copy of my book. Didn't expect anything, to hear from it. And then she hit me up last week and said, hey, we have a spot on the podcast for you if you want to come on. So I was on her podcast last week. I think it's going to come out like tomorrow. And they like invited me to the holiday party. And I'm like, what, like Bert and all these comedians. I'm like, dude, I mean, you just never know who's going to call you back, which is why those 150 books that I sent out... they are prayer lanterns that you send out to the sea, but all it takes is one. All it takes is one, and then you're like, holy shit, wow, that was potentially life changing.
Eric Jorgenson: Hell yeah. I gotta go send 150 more books. That's what you learned from that exercise. Well, my normal closing question here is going to be like, what's the most interesting or unexpected, exciting thing that happened as a result of your book, but I feel like Bert Kreischer's holiday party is going to be pretty tough to top.
Kyle Thiermann: That was fun. I think that the unexpected element is... The unexpected element is interesting here. One is how I think that books are...you know the NGOs that will distribute malaria nets to villages in Sub-Saharan Africa, and then the villagers just turn around and use them as fishing nets? And they're like, wait, that wasn't what we expected. It's kind of like a book. You expect people to use it in one way and think this certain way, and then they just turn around like, okay, we're going to use this for fishing. And one thing that I don't know that I expected it, but it's been really interesting is how many people are not actually- there's two things. One is a lot of people are not actually using it as a tool to interview their parents. They're using it as an excuse to ask the questions that I put in the book, because they would maybe feel too awkward about doing it themselves without the book. And like the book, it almost feels like it's this magic shield, it's like I'm not being weird, like the weird author is asking you these questions that I actually really want to know about but...
Eric Jorgenson: It’s permission.
Kyle Thiermann: It’s permission. It's almost... we have the book, it's keeping me away from the feeling of being too weird. And I don't know that I expected just how much the physical nature of the book can feel a bit like that, that shield as you're heading into the war of emotions with your parents and just having them see it. And that was also an element, if people haven't seen the cover of the book, it's a bright, fun color. So, One Last Question Before You Go is written through text bubbles. And Anna Dorfman, who designed the cover, was just amazing, had really good instincts from the beginning. And the instincts that she had were, okay, it's kind of a sad title. We need to counterbalance that with brightness and it needs to seem fun. So going back to that mood shift, you look at the title and you think, oh, that's kind of fun. And ultimately, that fun thing is like the shield for you to go into those conversations with your parents. And the second thing that's unexpected is how many parents are buying it to interview their kids.
Eric Jorgenson: Love it. Absolutely love it. I mean, what a cool work of art, both personally and to offer people to bring them all closer together. I'm so- there's a great Jerry Seinfeld quote. I'm so glad you like did it your way all the way through, Rick Rubin style, like you follow your heart and you trust your gut. And the world will respond, and you put out something really unique and really excellent. And as I said, it hits close to home for me. There’s a lot of people I'm going to gift this book to. I'll be singing your praises far and wide, and I hope that we see ripple effects from this thing for decades.
Kyle Thiermann: Thank you. Thank you. No, I really appreciate that. And I think that the last thing I just want to say about you guys and about Scribe is that I think that it's really easy for people to see writing a book as a means to an end. And it's easy for a lot of people to write a book so that it can improve their career in some way. And now I get to give speaking engagements. I get to be seen as the expert and the authority. And you guys understand that game. You guys, you get it. But I think that you also really encourage people to be as honest as possible. And I felt that with the feedback that I got in the book. It was very thoughtful human feedback. And you have the awareness that it's ultimately humans reading the thoughts of other humans. And you can smell the bullshit. And you need to be as honest as you can be to write a book. And when you do that, when you go through the process of saying just fucking uncomfortable shit, like what are you... I once heard, a comedian once told me, don't try and be funny. Talk about what you're afraid of, what you're ashamed of, who you're pretending to be, and who you really are. That's what you need to do with a book. And the benefit of doing that and having you guys encourage me to do that is that the outcome almost doesn't matter anymore because you just deepen so much on a soul level, which is what I think books can do for writers and it's what I think they can do for readers.
Eric Jorgenson: It's one of those paradoxes where like, if you truly serve yourself as a writer and go through that journey and are unflinchingly honest about it, almost ignoring the fact that anybody, maybe even best off ignoring the fact that anybody else is ever going to read it, paradoxically, that makes it more unique, more resonant, more powerful, more authentic, and more people end up reading it. It's a classic indirection. Well, thank you again for coming here, being so open with everything that you've learned and everything you've done. I think there's a lot to learn from your story, from your launch, and what a service to all the other authors to come. Thank you.
Kyle Thiermann: Thank you, Eric.
Eric Jorgenson: Appreciate you. Take care.