[PRE-ORDER] Speak Less, Get More: A Field Guide to Hosting Conversations That Connect

Speak Less, Get More is a practical guide to the part of interviewing nobody actually teaches.

The connection.

It covers how to research a guest without over-preparing yourself into a bad interview, how to build real rapport in the first five minutes, how to use silence without rushing to fill it, how to handle guests who ramble, go sideways, or shut down, and how to help someone find the story they've been trying to tell.

Twenty-five years of hard-earned experience, condensed into more than 100 pages of real-world technique you can use the next time you hit record.

When you pre-order, you'll receive a placeholder PDF right away confirming your purchase. The full book will be sent directly to your email the moment it's released in early April 2026.

The best interviewers aren't the ones with the best questions.

They're the ones who know how to listen. Speak Less, Get More is a field guide for podcast hosts who want to stop performing interviews and start having real ones.

Most podcast hosts spend hours writing questions.

They prep, they research, they build out a whole script, and then they sit across from their guest and spend the whole interview waiting for their turn to talk.

The questions are fine. The listening is where it falls apart.

I've done hundreds of interviews over 25 years and I've watched hosts lose the best moments of a conversation because they were too focused on what came next to notice what was happening right now.

This book is about fixing that.

Speak Less, Get More is a practical guide to the part of interviewing nobody teaches. It covers how to research a guest without over-preparing yourself into a bad interview, how to build real rapport in the first five minutes, how to use silence without filling it, how to handle guests who ramble, go sideways, or shut down, and how to help someone find the story they've been trying to tell.

Ten chapters, real frameworks, no fluff.

Three things you'll take away and use immediately.

• The Three-Beat Rule: after your guest finishes talking, count to three before you respond. People say their most honest things in the space after they think they're done.
• Questions vs. Prompts: questions make people think about the right answer, prompts make them tell you what actually happened, and there's a real difference in how a conversation goes depending on which one you reach for.
• The Prep Grid: a pre-interview research tool that tells you exactly what to prepare and what to skip, so you show up ready without being so scripted you can't actually listen.

This book is for you whether you've done 3 episodes or 300. If you've ever finished a recording thinking "I knew there was more there and I didn't get to it," this is the book you needed.

I've been doing interviews for 25 years. Long before I had a podcast, I was in conversations for a living, learning what makes someone open up and what makes them shut down. I started Generator because I wanted to talk honestly about what it's like to build a creative life.

This book is everything I've learned about how to create the kind of conversation where someone says something they've never said before.