The Thin Line Between Being Cool And Being Obnoxious.

  I think the biggest problem with collaborating with me is that I give homework. To a fault, I often expect people I work with to read articles, watch videos, read a book or maybe watch a movie to gain perspective. The difference between working with Andy Witucki and most other people I’ve worked on a project with is that he actually does that. He’s unabashedly invested in subject matter.

Natural curiosity is an underrated trait in society these days.

One of the first times I met Witucki, he told me he was helping a friend’s band with promotion. He was printing off flyers and papering local businesses with their upcoming gigs and basically preaching the gospel of how great these guys were. I didn’t buy it. Just another local metal band as far as I was concerned. Yet, he was this regular guy toting the talents of another man. Just cause they were friends.  

And I was jealous. Because I’m a musician too and I wanted a dude like him on my team. I wanted someone willing to support me that much too. Hell, Witucki was working harder than the band itself on promotion. A big part of being in the music community is self-promotion. And then I looked at myself and realized that he was working harder than me too… maybe I was just lazy? 

Nah. When it comes to self-promotion, there’s a thin line between being cool and being obnoxious. So if you’re ever lucky enough to have someone in your corner for you like that, take advantage when you can.   

The problem is that there isn’t another guy like Witucki. He’s a rare breed nowadays. If he decides he’s going to do something, he puts his whole heart into it. 

One day, while we were sitting around bitching about who shouldn’t be in the Baseball Hall of Fame (particularly Harold Baines) he got a little ambitious and suggested starting a podcast about it.

I took a deep breath and thought, well maybe. Because that’s a big undertaking. You want to make sure you have an audience. And the one thing I know about podcasts is that you need to be consistent. 

Witucki committed to it and said, “If I have to be here at least once a week, every week to build something sustainable, then that’s what I’ll do.” And he’s done that. Even with a family and a full time job. He’s made this his new hobby, and I have too. I probably wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to do this with, but I thought back to those times when he was promoting his buddy’s band - something he had absolutely no stake in. And I figured if he put in that much effort for someone else’s passion, imagine what he’d do with a project of his own? 

Now that we’ve made a sustainable thing (we just celebrated the release of our 50th episode) during a year where the subject matter we were covering was completely halted, I’d say we’d gained a pretty good sense of ourselves. We’ve got a dream to make this a full-time thing. And we’ve also got the perfect mixture of self-confidence and imposter syndrome… any time one of us gets a little pessimistic about the dream of quitting our day jobs for this, the other one turns a corner and does something extraordinary. 

We’ve become competitive in surprising each other. Every week, Witucki either brings to the table a new thing he’s learned, a really great guest, or a piece of technology he’s discovered. Trying to keep up with him has kept us fresh and looking forward to the next show. 

So when I had the far-fetched idea for a certain dream guest, he humored me. Sure, Witucki was pretty excited at the uniqueness of the man’s story, but what were we going to talk to him about? To me, the possibilities were endless. My partner, however, wasn’t even sure where to start.

I told him I was pretty sure the guy would do our show even though he hadn’t done a lot of interviews in the past. There was just one caveat: Witucki is not a big reader, and I needed him to read a book. Like, the whole thing.