SHOWNOTES
In this brand new podcast episode, I chat with Michael F. Schein, the founder and president of MicroFame Media, and author of the recent book, “The Hype Handbook”.
I enjoyed the book so much, I Invited him on the podcast to talk about it.
In this episode, Michael talks about
his definition of hype
why he thinks it’s important for good people to learn hype
why he disagrees with Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice to young people
perfecting your “packaging”
becoming “magical”
easy tips for ethically hyping your brand/business
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you.
RESOURCES
I always love hearing from you. Let me know your thoughts after you listen in the comments below.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:05.010] - Gary Vee Hey, guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuk, and you're listening to The Front Row Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:13.770] - Jen Lehner Our guest today is president of MicroFame Media, a marketing agency that specializes in making idea-based companies famous in their fields. Some of his clients have included eBay, Magento, LinkedIn and Citrix. His writing has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Inc, Psychology Today and Huffington Post. And he's a speaker for international audiences spanning from the northeastern United States to the southeastern coast of China.
[00:42.870] - Jen Lehner His book, The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets from the World's Greatest Propagandist, Self Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers, published by McGraw-Hill appears, everywhere books are sold. Welcome, Michael F. Schein.
Read more...
[01:01.440] - Michael F. Schein Well, thank you for having me, Jen. This is such a pleasure.
[01:05.400] - Jen Lehner OK, so I told you at our little pre-chat how much I enjoyed your book. It was really fantastic. Again, it's called The Hype Handbook, so we got to start right there. What is your definition of hype?
[01:20.150] - Michael F. Schein So my definition of hype is pretty neutral, it's I just define hype as any set of activities that get a large number of people emotional so that they'll take an action in some direction that you want them to go. So that can be a very negative action.
[01:37.250] - Michael F. Schein That can be a very positive action. It can be a completely neutral action. But it's just based on the idea that human behavior is what human behavior is and people react in certain ways to certain stimuli and the morality has nothing to do with it. Now, what you choose to do with hype is really up to you and your set of values. But I define it in a very amoral way.
[02:00.870] - Jen Lehner Well, most people do think of hype as negative, especially coming off of the last four years. Why do you think it's important for good people to learn hype?
[02:14.790] - Michael F. Schein We know how political can we get here? I mean, I guess it's no secret what my politics are the last four years, you know, I disliked Donald Trump a lot, and that's putting it mildly. I thought he was bad for the country.
[02:26.850] - Michael F. Schein And actually, very early on know I have this habit of reading very weird books about crowd psychology and biographies of really strange characters. So I was on a business trip and it was one of the earliest, earliest debates, like when Trump was going against 17 Republicans and very few people thought he would win. And I was reading this book at the time called "The Crowd" by Gustave Le Bon, which is from like 1895. This guy had seen the Paris Commune burn Paris to the ground and wanted to figure out how crowds respond irrationally to certain types of words and messages.
[03:05.070] - Michael F. Schein And I was kind of like flipping through this book. Pretty nerdy, I know, but also watching Trump. And I'm telling you, I was like, this guy will probably win the election. And I came home to my like Crunchie, you know, yuppie Liberal friends and was like, you know, I think this guy has got a shot.
[03:25.620] - Michael F. Schein And they were like laughing at me and he won. So that's not to say that I have some insight that other people couldn't have, it's just that what human beings respond to has been repeated over and over in history. We think we're all individuals and we're all very much more alike than we are different. We don't see the world accurately. We respond emotionally.
[03:48.670] - Michael F. Schein So, you know, the bad guys get it. And there are reasons that sociopaths and narcissists are more likely to understand how to get crowds whipped up into a frenzy and get them to do what they want. It's not the hype itself is bad. It's that they're bad and they don't let emotion get in the way. They're detached. So the bad guys get it. They don't need teaching and what I struggle with is how so many people with great ideas and great causes and great businesses are so reluctant to embrace the reality of how human nature works in human psychology.
[04:25.450] - Michael F. Schein That it was so important to me after that to make the case that the good guys, quote unquote, availing yourself of hype isn't just something you should do to make more money, but it's almost amoral imperative because we need more good people getting their messages out there in a compelling way.
[04:42.160] - Jen Lehner Right. And you said in the epilogue of your book, what you just said now is that unfortunately, more more bad people than good people are good at this because they kind of tend to be like sociopaths. So they don't really have an emotional reaction of thinking, oh, you know, they don't really have that gut check. Whereas we regular people do so in this book, what I think you've done so well is you've given us like some actual examples of people good and bad throughout history with like really bringing in great anecdotes and stories from the art scene, the music scene, ancient history back into biblical times.
[05:26.060] - Jen Lehner And I just love it. But then at the end of every chapter, you really break down. I mean, it's just a solid marketing book, but you break down some very doable, smart strategies that the everyday Joe can take away to sort of do a better job at typing themselves, I guess.
[05:46.470] - Michael F. Schein Yeah, that was it, I mean, when I got interested in this subject. I asked myself a really key question and I wasn't sure of the answer before I started researching it and the question was is this thing that I'm calling hype, this ability to get large numbers of people emotional in order to get them to buy whatever you're selling? Is that inherently malevolent? Is that inherently a negative thing to do? Does it have to rely on deception? Does it have to rely on essentially conning people, and if it did, I wanted nothing to do with it, not not just because I'm saying that and because we're in a public format here, but because I have left a job where part of the reason I left is I didn't feel like I was contributing enough to society.
[06:45.070] - Michael F. Schein And so I wasn't going to leave that job and then type myself up and hype my business up in a way that didn't feel like it was making society better. I just wouldn't have done it. I would have done something else.
[06:57.880] - Michael F. Schein However. I was also open to the possibility that the strategies when you stripped away the content, the underlying strategies were just based on the fact that human beings process information in certain ways and that they want to be part of something bigger than themselves and that they look for transcendence. And I found out that was very much the case. I mean, that these strategies were universal, that they could be done without lying, that they could be done without deception.
[07:29.770] - Michael F. Schein And in fact, when done right, they actually add color to the world. So, I mean, a lot of the people from rock and roll and hip hop and, you know, are those are people who wear Andy Warhol, David Bowie, the hype and the art are one in the same. The art wouldn't be as good without the hype. And so not only did I become very comfortable with it, it became so interesting to me that you could actually reverse engineer these principles and that it didn't only work for the David Bowie and Andy Warhol, but that a company like Base Camp, which is a project management software, the most boring industry you could think of, quite literally used the same underlying principles that an Andy Warhol used, but with very different content and built the same kind of cult around their product.
[08:18.900] - Michael F. Schein And they didn't need to wear silver wigs or, you know, drape their offices in tin foil.
[08:25.440] - Jen Lehner But they did, like, take a bold stance. And that's where your journey starts in the book, where you kind of came out against, like one of the most well-known modern day hype men of our time, Mr. Vaynerchuk.
[08:42.390] - Michael F. Schein Hi, Gary.
[08:43.500] - Jen Lehner Yeah. And so can you tell us about that story and what all happened.
[08:49.450] - Michael F. Schein You know, I'm really proud of myself because I've gotten to the point in my career where whoever I talk to, even if I don't know them and even if they haven't read my book, if they're in this world of like marketing and media and content knows that I'm like some sort of anti-Gary Vaynerchuk. So that says something about how I've used my own medicine.
[09:10.360] - Michael F. Schein That being said, I really, really think Gary Vaynerchuk is a stellar business person. just want to put that out there. Sometimes that gets confused. But in particular, I think wine library TV and wine library, his first business was a fantastic business that delivered immense amounts of value and was a brilliant marketing campaign.
[09:31.510] - Michael F. Schein So yeah, I used to write for Inc magazine and. I was at a point where I was a freelance copywriter, that's how I made my living and I wasn't doing very well. I mean, I was kind of trying to market myself the old fashioned way because I had 10 years of corporate life. It's like boiled my spirit out of me. So I had been doing that.
[09:53.620] - Michael F. Schein And then I just sort of got back in touch with my mischievous past and decided I was going to just not care anymore. I didn't have much to lose. I was going to say what I really thought that was going to be a little bit punk rock in my approach. And, you know, whatever happened, happened. And I was selling something at the time. I was selling a type of content writing that was I was producing lots of articles for people using a systematic approach.
[10:18.070] - Michael F. Schein And they were actually good articles. They weren't like content mill kind of stuff. And I really believe that you could do that. And I was proven right that you could do that and generate a lot of visibility using systems, not just doing social media yourself all the time, and Gary, big message at that time was this idea of hustle that if you're not and this is from him, if you're not tweeting from the toilet at three o'clock in the morning, then you're not working hard enough and you're not going to be successful.
[10:49.410] - Michael F. Schein And I thought that was not smart. Actually, I thought it was very smart that he was selling that idea. I think it made him a lot of money. I didn't think it was good advice for all the young people. I didn't see that many millionaires who were following that advice coming from Gary's advice, the person I saw getting richer was Gary.
[11:09.630] - Michael F. Schein So I wrote an article about that and it was called Why Gary Vaynerchuk Is Flat Out Wrong. And what was really cool about it and terrifying was that Gary himself, the great man himself, responded to little old me. And it really was a little old me at the time.
[11:26.280] - Michael F. Schein I was really, really unknown at that time and used my name and railed against me. And it was the beginning of my career, my new career. I mean, that fight that I picked with him and the fact that he responded so vehemently that I did hit a nerve. It just the more his followers hated me, the more people who thought the way I thought but didn't have a leader to solidify around became fans of mine. And to this day, I mean, I have a lot of fans of my writing that ultimately became book buyers.
[11:59.040] - Michael F. Schein And it all started there so that having we form tribes much more readily by what we're against than what we're for.
[12:07.950] - Jen Lehner Right. And you talk about that as a tactic or a strategy that people can use to grow their audience and elevate their visibility or whatever, and sort of planting your flag in the ground. And you give a lot of examples of that. And that's really what I love about the book because, yeah, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk and Richard Branson and all these people are so visible. But it's like, how does the insurance agent go? Right. Like what?
[12:39.490] - Jen Lehner What does he do? You know? And so I would ask you, like what I mean, and I hate to put you on the spot, but what would that insurance salesperson do to maybe put their flag in the ground and be a little bit controversial?
[12:52.980] - Michael F. Schein Well, I mean, for me to answer that, I would have to talk to that specific insurance salesman. So I'll answer that in two ways. I'll tell you the kinds of questions that I would ask that insurance salesman, and then I'll return to that example of base camp, because I think you're using insurance salesman as the example of a very brass tax. Not always exciting industry, right? Exactly.
[13:12.840] - Michael F. Schein Yes. So, yeah, I mean, when I work with clients, we worked this out before we do anything. So I'll ask two questions. And I talk about this in the book.
[13:21.840] - Michael F. Schein I say to whoever I'm talking to often the owner of the practice, sometimes a high level executive.
[13:29.940] - Michael F. Schein I'll say what is a point of view in your corner of the universe that you absolutely hate, but that's promoted as gospel. And then sometimes they'll give me a very surface level answer and I'll stop them and I'll say no. What is something that you hear people saying over and over again presenting as the way business needs to get done in your world, that you hear it and you secretly despise and then they go off on their soapbox. And that reveals a lot, because you can say to somebody, I mean, I don't know what the answer would be an insurance, but you could say to somebody, what's what's something you book?But why are you great at insurance?
[14:07.890] - Michael F. Schein Well, we give you the most fantastic service and premiums are low with excellent coverage. That's nice. Fantastic. We're people oriented. People first, you and everybody else. Right. But what if you say what's the point of view that you hate? What if someone if they really get honest and they say something like, you know, everyone says that whole life is better because it's an investment and that you shouldn't do term life.
[14:37.380] - Michael F. Schein But whole life is one of the worst possible investments you could do. And you're actually hurting your family by using insurance as an investment vehicle. I don't know if I believe this.
[14:47.010] - Michael F. Schein I'm just saying that's a really unusual, weird point of view that most people don't have. Now we have something to work with. Imagine going out there and saying I'm the anti insurance started out as this thing that people use to protect their families. And now because of tax treatment, people are using it as an investment vehicle. And as a result, X percent of people go broke before they can ever protect their families and don't actually protect their families the more insurance they have.
[15:14.220] - Michael F. Schein With our program, we use term life to get back to insurance to where it was or something like that. Right. Suddenly you've got a battle on your hands because there are a lot of people vested in the whole life industry right now.
[15:28.770] - Michael F. Schein This might seem. Very boring and in the weeds, and I'm making it up as I go along, but if you're in that world that gets heated very quickly and now you have something to say.
[15:40.360] - Jen Lehner Yeah, no, I love it, you did a good job there on the spot like that, so I've been toying with the thought myself and that is a lot of the people in my audience are coaches, authors, coaches, subject matter experts, course creators.
[15:53.680] - Jen Lehner And it's very female dominated, at least my my world. Right. And. I mean, everybody uses the term heart-centered business, heart-center female entrepreneurs, right. And I don't know if Marie Forleo was the first person to coined this phrase. It's the first place I remember seeing it. And I remember thinking that it was so smart. It was such a smart term to sort of call out to say it says so much in that. Right.
[16:17.180] - Jen Lehner Like a more about, you know, the service that I'm providing, not about the money. You know, that this is so much bigger than the money and there's so much implied in that. But now it's for me, it's taken a turn that is so annoying to me. I'm so sick of seeing it because I think we've gotten away from the fact that we had businesses to make money. It's OK to make money. Not only is it OK to make money, it's necessary.
[16:41.480] - Jen Lehner And also it's fun. And like I have been thinking about doing something like that, maybe a little bit afraid to just make everybody mad who is on their about page that they work with heart-centered entrepreneurs.
[16:55.460] - Michael F. Schein I think it's a great idea. I mean, I hear I'll talk to people like potential clients and they'll say to me, I'll say to them, what are your, I ask this question that basically tells me to paint a picture for the next year or three years, like what does other success look like?
[17:12.080] - Michael F. Schein And they never talk about money. They'll always say in order to expand the conversation. And I'm not making fun of my clients, but it's like we're in business. We're not running a non-profit. So I'll say to them, listen, I get that. I'm like you said, you don't care about how much you make.
[17:30.350] - Michael F. Schein And it turns out their goals are all about money. They're embarrassed to say it. I mean, it's crazy. We're like in business and we're afraid to talk about money.
[17:39.800] - Jen Lehner I know everybody tiptoes around it and we're all using the word impact like this impact.
[17:46.820] - Michael F. Schein That's what they say. That's what I meant. That's what they always say. And I'm like, no, you don't. I mean, sure you do. But like, really, that's your goal to expand your impact.
[17:55.970] - Jen Lehner Right. And ideally, you're doing a thing that you love, that like inherently that's built into the mix, that you're going to make an impact because. Right. And so, yeah. So it's OK to, like, say that you want to make money, so. Yeah. All right. Well, I plan to do you know what though?
[18:13.160] - Michael F. Schein I want to say something about that. Yeah. So Marie, for Leo, she was the one who did it.
[18:17.210] - Jen Lehner Yeah.
[18:17.510] - Michael F. Schein You know in nineteen. I don't know. Sixteen, I don't know. 1990. Whenever right after the Second World War if you took a canva of the First World War, I'm sorry if you took a canvas and drew a bunch of cubes and squares and triangles and showed that in a gallery there would be riots, people would write about that in the newspaper forever because it was so, it had so much to say. It was about civilization didn't mean anything any more because of the chaos and slaughter.
[18:51.260] - Michael F. Schein It was the photography made and movies made, representing images useless. And it was so important. Abstract art and cubism. Now go to any interior decorator and they're going to slap some weird, horrible abstract art on the wall as part of the wallpaper.
[19:10.310] - Michael F. Schein It's completely anodyne and meaningless. Now, if you painted something lifelike, it would be more rebellious, you know, so people forget about the context. They see somebody who was successful with a message when whoever it was, Marie, Forleo said heart-based coaching. That's because all of the coaches then were executive coaches and it was all very cold and finance-oriented.
[19:34.130] - Michael F. Schein And yeah, like the world isn't black and white, even though it's good to communicate in black and white terms, people just forget about the context.
[19:42.260] - Michael F. Schein They just kind of follow their herd. But in this way, that like if I follow the Marie Forleo blueprint, it'll work and they forget that. If the fight's already been won, there's nothing new for you to say, why are you in business if everyone's already into heart centered leadership, that we need someone else saying that?
[20:04.130] - Jen Lehner Well, everybody is saying it right.
[20:05.840] - Michael F. Schein So it's useless to say that, you know,
[20:09.030] - Jen Lehner It becomes invisible on the page. It's lost all of its whatever. So, OK, I'm glad we solved that problem.
[20:17.560] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. You owe me a plate of French fries.
[20:21.830] - Jen Lehner You got it. I actually make very good French fries. You have an air fryer.
[20:26.120] - Michael F. Schein Um, do I. I don't know.
[20:28.970] - Jen Lehner As soon as we finish this interview, you have to go and get an air fryer. Oh my God.
[20:34.570] - Michael F. Schein I might do that. I've been cooking a lot during this pandemic, so I might I might do that.
[20:39.020] - Jen Lehner You're also a health conscious person, I think. Right, because you talk about self- regulation.
[20:43.070] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. Although I fell apart during the pandemic, I'm pretty health conscious, but I can't say that I was as good as I used to be during this. Yeah, I mean, the the plague 15 or whatever they're calling it.
[20:55.310] - Jen Lehner Yeah, me too. So go get the air fryer it helps. It's the first step to your way back. OK, let's see you talk about perfecting your packaging, which I loved this because you talked about something that really puzzles me is you talk about Zoom backgrounds and how like if you're going to show up for and we're all on Zoom now and like you've got like yesterday's lunch, sitting in the corner or some laundry, but really I don't ever see that. But what I do see is that poor lighting, it just doesn't look, it doesn't look what you're like, what you're trying to present.
[21:36.620] - Jen Lehner So if you're trying to present yourself as this, you know, I don't know, polished together person and you're like, look, it's important to keep that in mind the packaging, but then you give a lot of good examples of companies and people who have done that. Well, can you share some of that? I mean, I probably you maybe you don't even remember, like, what's in that?
[21:56.560] - Michael F. Schein Oh, no. I remember it really well. In fact, to me, packaging is much more than what people take it as. You know, what you said is part of it. But those are like table stakes. I mean, if you have a video business and your lighting stinks, you know, that's like coming in your sweatpants right to a meeting. However, I see packaging as different than that. To me, it's almost like creating on purpose a caricature of yourself.
[22:29.440] - Michael F. Schein So so like. What you'll often see is people. They're trying to present this unified version of themselves, so let's say Marie Leo does this really well, right?
[22:44.600] - Michael F. Schein So let's say she pioneered the heart-centered leadership stuff. But if you came to her Zoom meeting, it looked perfectly polished in the background, but it was all chrome, silver and white. She was wearing a very sterile sort of business suit, you know what I mean? She had a very, like, corporate kind of face. Then when she did a talk, she read from her notes. In other words, packaging is that if you stand for something, everything you do needs to be aligned with that.
[23:18.110] - Michael F. Schein And a lot of times it's to be found in your weaknesses, like Andy Warhol was a perpetually or a pathologically shy person, and he used that to his benefit. Whenever he talked to the press, he would give these enigmatic one or two word answers. These tidbits like even in the future, everyone will have their 15 minutes before him. People would go on and on and on. He would try to say as little as possible and let people fill in the blanks.
[23:46.760] - Michael F. Schein No one really knew what that meant at the time, you know what I mean? We've interpreted it a million ways. So it's a function of like figure out what your persona is out in the marketplace and embody that all the time. For many years, you never saw a kiss without their makeup. They were never photographed once throughout the entire 1970s without their makeup. I mean, think about that feat to the point where when they finally took their makeup off, it was this big public event that means they were wearing their armor and their makeup when they went to the convenience store like they were never photographed without the make up.
[24:28.160] - Jen Lehner And also, you talk about like so in this persona, you we all have weird things or things about ourselves that are very imperfect and we have things that well, like. Well, like you were talking about Andy Warhol being very soft spoken, very, very thin, and so he just decided to go all in on that.
[24:50.780] - Michael F. Schein He was balding. So he put a silver wig on his head that attracted attention to itself that everyone knew was fake. You could have had a cheesy toupee or thinning hair, but he turned that into. When you think of Andy Warhol, what do you think of a silver wig? You don't even people who don't even know what his face looked like know that silver wig.
[25:08.560] - Jen Lehner Yeah, it became iconic.
[25:10.060] - Michael F. Schein Yeah, you want to become iconic. That's a great word. That's exactly it. You want to become like the Alfred Hitchcock sketch that like, you know, that little like the belly and the face. You just want. You almost want to become a symbol with a few key signifiers that anyone can identify you by. I mean, when I think of Marie Forleo maybe I'm thinking of the wrong person, but I think of pink and like bubblegum kind of.
[25:36.430] - Jen Lehner Maybe it's a boy. But but I mean, that's close enough. It's a very light, happy, fresh vibe.
[25:43.570] - Michael F. Schein That's my point. There was much more to her. Yes. And she's a brilliant woman and I'm sure she's an insanely shrewd business person. So she could have easily not use that persona. But she knew that a certain type of woman was her target market. She probably is bubbly by nature, you know. And so everything about her to the casual onlooker screams that thing.
[26:11.200] - Michael F. Schein Right. And that's very important, people are very inconsistent with their packaging and they think that if they have a good logo and a good website and wear a blazer to meetings, that they've been packaged properly. And it's so much more than that for sure.
[26:24.160] - Jen Lehner Well, you talk about becoming a magist. Is that magazine Imagists?
[26:27.700] - Michael F. Schein I even struggle. I was listening to an audio book with that word the other day and they said, Magist.
[26:32.200] - Jen Lehner So I'm not even sure we'll become magic. Yes, exactly. OK, so so I love this might have been my favorite part of the book. So you bring Buddy the Elf in hand. And I was like, that is just the most perfect example when you talk about that.
[26:48.430] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. So people are really attracted to other people who they perceive as being a larger than life and no one is perfect. But we see certain people as almost gods. So like, I don't know Tony Robbins. Right. He apparently speaks from stage for eight hours without a break. So that seems superhuman. Or Richard Branson, who traverses the Atlantic in a hot air balloon and almost dies and people are attracted to that.
[27:21.610] - Michael F. Schein So if you're saying to yourself, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to I'm not that person and most of us aren't. I'm not even sure Tony Robbins and Richard Branson are because they're very good hype artists. So what do you do? Well, it's something that I call personal arbitrage. So. So basically. All of us are good at things that in our own circles or in one circle is pretty commonplace, but in another circle might be considered very astounding.
[27:53.400] - Michael F. Schein So I use the buddy, the elf thing. So in the beginning of that movie, he's in the North Pole for for the nine people left on the planet who don't know about that movie. He's a human being who snuck into Santus bag and basically gets raised by the elves at the North Pole. So he's working at the workshop and he's working on sketches. And they're basically like, how many did you finish today? And I'm going to get the numbers wrong.
[28:15.750] - Michael F. Schein He looks down really embarrassed and he's like, seventy four like, oh gosh. Said Well meaning like he did a horrible job. He only did seventy four Etch a sketch from scratch in one day. Right. And so he's a horrible elf, he's very slow. Other people are doing two hundred sketches in an hour and then he goes to the human world and he is like a phenom. He decorates the inside of Macy's like, like a magical wonderland.
[28:41.370] - Michael F. Schein Overnight he throws snowballs like Superman and knocks kids down from a mile away. And I've seen it sounds ridiculous, but I've seen this in real life. So I have these friends who I write about in the book, these domain name Seabourne and Zugzwang, and they're Chinese business people who grew up half of their lives in the United States.
[29:03.900] - Michael F. Schein So they understand American culture and they understand Chinese culture and they're selling information products that are supposed to teach Chinese entrepreneurs how to sort of embrace American style entrepreneurship, which is still seen as more advanced, at least for now.
[29:23.100] - Michael F. Schein So. When Xiu made a little bit of money, he bought a Corvette, now a Corvette is a really nice car, but it's not a Lamborghini and it's not a Ferrari. It's a nice sports car. They look really cool, but it's a fraction of the cost of a Lamborghini or even a Porsche.
[29:42.160] - Michael F. Schein But in China, that car is almost nonexistent, even more so than Ferraris and Lamborghinis. It just they don't exist there and they look great. So we took a picture of himself with a Corvette and the level of success that people perceived him at because he had this exotic car was even more than if he had bought a Ferrari because it was so exotic and it made him look like Steve Jobs. Right. So what you want to do is think about the world you want to be in.
[30:14.170] - Michael F. Schein And is there a skill set or personality trait? You have that in one realm it's not a huge deal, but in another realm it would be a big deal. So let's say you're a literary agent and you just happen to be amazing with fixing anything, fixing engines, building computers from scratch. If you were working in the I.T. space, that's not a big deal. But most literary type people aren't good at that kind of stuff. So you can become sort of the the engineer, you know, the literary agent engineer.
[30:43.600] - Michael F. Schein You could become the Mr. Fix it or Ms. Fix it of that world. You can use that to somehow be seen as larger than life. And you'll be amazed. I mean, you'll be amazed at how a lot of times the things that we think are no big deal are exactly the place where we can really build our perceived heroism around.
[31:03.790] - Jen Lehner Right, and also how we talk about our magic. So I love this, I'm just going to read straight from the book you said the number one difference between magicians like Branson that went across or you have Richard Branson, Richard Branson, I always like will say Russell Brand, Russell Gleason. And I always have to pause and think which which RB.
[31:25.930] - Michael F. Schein A secular guy who does the who does the sales funnels. Right. Who's always on my Facebook ad Russell Bertozzi.
[31:31.390] - Jen Lehner Is he muscular? But yes, he's always on your Facebook ads.
[31:33.790] - Michael F. Schein And I really like big, you know, he's like, yeah, I mean, that's so exciting. I mean, he's he's you know, he's in good shape.
[31:40.600] - Jen Lehner He's a hype man for sure. He is.
[31:42.820] - Jen Lehner One hundred fifty percent, without a doubt.
[31:46.870] - Jen Lehner All right. So you said the difference between Richard Branson, who sailed across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon never done before. And the rest of us is not the size and scope of their accomplishments. It's that they think differently about those accomplishments. They have learned to present an easy to digest version of reality, one with a simple story arc in which they are protagonists using their powers to overcome clearcut obstacles to achieve a worthy goal.
[32:16.840] - Jen Lehner So no problem. We can all do that, right?
[32:21.130] - Michael F. Schein You know. Think about the way Gary Vaynerchuk or Simon Sinek talk. Compared to how most of us talk and I even struggle with this. We use disqualifying statements and qualifying statements, and that is sometimes evidence of a smart intellect because there really is no truth and falsehood that we can access that easily. Right.
[32:50.130] - Michael F. Schein So we might say something like, yeah, well. I'm just one guy, but the way I see it is and then we state our opinion, right, but people want a leader, people especially in a public forum, they want someone that can tell them the answers because none of us knows what we're doing and we're all looking for others to tell us what to do. So if you listen to Gary Vaynerchuk, he says you have to hustle all the time and people who don't hustle all the time are going to be less successful.
[33:25.070] - Michael F. Schein Is that true, sort of. Not really. I mean, there are many counter examples. But it's sometimes true, but he doesn't use sometimes. Simon Sinek in a much different style. He had this video a little while back where he said. Millennials were raised to believe that they all should get a participation trophy and as a result, they are not doing as well in the workplace, there are so many.
[33:56.330] - Michael F. Schein And he made this video went viral. Everyone was like, oh, absolutely. Simon Sinek, what a genius. All millennials like millennials who live in south central L.A. and it had nothing to do that. They were raised in the recession, that they came out in the recession. And I mean, they're just all eight billion millennials, you know, I mean and more nuanced. In fact, he's a very smart guy. So I'm sure he doesn't believe that that's true all the time.
[34:23.570] - Michael F. Schein But he's enough of a white man to speak in these extremely bold. Unqualified sort of statements, and as a result, we just accept it. Yeah, that's true. And so it's important to practice speaking with complete confidence and authority. If you want to question your assumptions, do that before you go public. Figure out what you want to say, but the more you waffle in public. And the more you speak with sort of apologies and disclaimers, the less people will see you as a magician.
[35:05.970] - Jen Lehner Yeah, and actually, everything you said about Simon Sinek was so fascinating to me because the whole start with Y thing, because that was the first one that went really viral.
[35:14.700] - Michael F. Schein His biggest still. Yeah,
[35:16.560] - Jen Lehner Yeah. And you were saying, like, he comes across as this very academic learned guy who's like pouring over like research paper, is that right? But I mean, and not to say that smart, he's obviously smart, but he was an advertiser. He worked at Ogilvy.
[35:34.020] - Michael F. Schein He's never done anything in his life besides marketing. And that's great. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But the idea that he's this expert on science and neuroscience and all of this stuff is just a testament to what a good hype artist and what a good marketer he is. I mean, that's another chapter in the book. Make it scientific. If you're if you're talking about concepts that are very commonplace and that are hard to set yourself up, throw a little neuro epinephrine, dopamine neurons, neuroscience, amygdala formulas, but a little math in there.
[36:06.570] - Michael F. Schein And people will just eat that stuff up because we're looking for heuristics. People want mental shortcuts to let them know that something is valid because we don't have enough time to digest all of the information we receive.
[36:21.330] - Michael F. Schein So those kind of those kind of what we call ear candy and eye candy are the equivalent of a doctor who used to wear a white coat. It shows you that they're a doctor, so you don't have to assess every doctor separately.
[36:35.290] - Michael F. Schein And we do this on a very subconscious level and great hype artists, great marketers, great self promoters like Simon Sinek understand this.
[36:45.090] - Jen Lehner Right. And just to be clear, because I know this, because I read the book, you are not saying to just make up scientific data, it's just that there's enough there's enough of it out there. And all this information is right at our fingertips that it's easy enough to find stuff to support what it is that you're talking about, right?
[37:02.940] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. So put it this way. I do it, too. So, for example. Your grandfather might say to you just in sort of kitchen table wisdom, you know, if you really want to get people to like you. If you really want to get people to follow, you put a little put a little grit in the shell, you know what I mean? Pull away a little bit, pick a little bit of a fight before getting them to come in your direction.
[37:30.520] - Michael F. Schein Right. And you might be like, OK, Grandpa, OK, whatever. But I can tell you, you know, oxytocin and this is true, oxytocin is a brain chemical that not only gets us to bond with people we perceive to be like us, but it also programs us to dislike people and ideas that aren't like us. As a result, if you pick a fight with an idea or an enemy, you will attract people more. And my use of oxytocin gives so much more credibility to what I'm saying. Now, it's true.
[38:07.490] - Michael F. Schein Right, but Grampa's wisdom might have been just as right, he knows it from life experience, I know it from a book which one is better. But just by using terms like oxytocin, it gives that veneer of science that makes it much more easy to relate to and believe in.
[38:27.290] - Jen Lehner Yeah, I know so what you're saying is true. However, I do see and it's just because I'm a marketer, so I'm just in this stuff over all the emails and stuff. So I'm seeing so much amygdala, so much cortisol, so much dopamine, so much in everybody's emails. And I'm like, OK, now I'm now the gag reflex is coming up a little bit.
[38:50.690] - Michael F. Schein So the more the more you the more you're like everybody else. I mean, if everyone is doing something, it becomes wallpaper. Right. I would say the amygdala stuff is lazy at this point, but there are other ways to do this.
[39:05.900] - Michael F. Schein I mean, there was this guy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who created scientific management, which is still what all MBA programs in America and all, like all big consulting firms, are based on this guy's ideas. And it turns out that every thing he ever taught was based on one half completed study. Wow. It's called the Pig Iron Study.
[39:30.710] - Michael F. Schein And if you listen to his lectures, he uses mathematical formulas to figure out how to get workers to be more productive, as if they're. Oil drills, not human beings with production T minus Z squared cubed, blah, blah, blah. And if anyone had just thought to ask tough questions to this guy or thought to ask for evidence, they could have figured out that there was no substance to this, but all of that packaging with the formulas in this and the that just made it so easy to buy into.
[40:11.080] - Michael F. Schein No, I'm not again, I'm not saying to make stuff up, I'm not saying that there's a lot of science out there and science is a good thing. What I'm saying is that I think a general rule that that I didn't mention in the book and that you're bringing up is once everybody is saying something, know if everyone saying dopamine don't use dopamine, you know, but there's other stuff to look up, a real study.
[40:35.250] - Michael F. Schein I mean, do the work, right?
[40:37.800] - Jen Lehner Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, the whole but like, I really just want to go chapter by chapter and tell everybody what's in the whole book. But I'm going to do that, I'm going to spare you although I think they would love it by the book. I want to know. So you are a freelancer before you are an entrepreneur. Why did you make the switch to entrepreneur or were you something before you were a freelancer?
[40:58.980] - Michael F. Schein Well, yeah. I mean, I thought of freelancer as an entrepreneur. Yeah, well, meaning that I was something before I was an entrepreneur. So I was I never wanted to be in business. I'm like an accidental entrepreneur. I wanted to do something in the arts.
[41:11.220] - Michael F. Schein I mean, I, I read very early and I was just a bookish kind of kid and I wanted to write novels and fiction and whatever since a very young age. And then from there, as I got a little older and carried a little more about being cool, I got really into music like punk music and rock and roll and stuff. And I wanted to I really thought in my young ignorance that I was going to, like, change rock and roll.
[41:36.060] - Michael F. Schein And I tried that and failed that. But I went to New York and started a band and we had a following and everything. We did well, but we didn't make it, quote unquote.
[41:48.360] - Michael F. Schein So I needed money and I got a corporate job and I thought I'd only be there a year or two. And I ended up being there eight years. And it was because I did well there, at least on the surface. I'm you know, I'm kind of smart, I guess, and I'm a certainly a hard worker.
[42:04.050] - Michael F. Schein And so I started to do well. I'm very heart-centered now. Being heart-centered was the worst thing you could be. It was it was in the call center industry. I had to like black in my heart at all.
[42:16.230] - Michael F. Schein Yes. So yeah, but no, but, you know, I started to make a living and, you know, I learned a lot in the first three years, but by year eight, I was like, really?
[42:27.570] - Michael F. Schein Really. I think I had a mild level depression, actually, I mean, honestly, because I just felt like, I mean, world's smallest violin, but I, I felt that there were things I had certain gifts and I was not using them and I was just sort of wasting my life out of fear. So I eventually quit. It was hard to do. And I figured because I was a good writer, I could become a freelance copywriter because I was hearing that they were paying three to five thousand dollars to write an eight page white paper.
[42:58.340] - Michael F. Schein So I figured if I did a whole bunch of these every year, I could make a really nice living being a writer. And it turned out I was really bad at sales and I just couldn't get people to buy from me. I mean, I had a few clients and they would rehire me, but it wasn't enough to make a living. And I burned through my savings. And so I had to figure out how to market myself. And I tried kind of corporate marketing, all the marketing books, and it didn't work. And so I sort of went back to my old punk rock past because I used to be really good at promoting our shows.
[43:29.690] - Michael F. Schein And we would call it hyping up our shows. We would do things like put up really offensive posters. We used to put up this poster that said Dave Matthews must die and things like that. It worked. I mean, we used to sell out this club, Arlene's Grocery all the time.
[43:45.440] - Michael F. Schein So I was like, well, what if I kind of got back to who I am? I quit my job for a reason and I started to hype up myself and it worked. And it worked so well that people started to ask me to market them, not do their writing.
[44:00.920] - Michael F. Schein And before I knew it, I had a business on my hands. So then I started learning about business. And it was so interesting becoming an entrepreneur, having an agency. Sure, I learned some things at my job, but like what I needed to learn to thrive in that, especially in terms of operating the business, once I brought the clients in, was just so different than what it took to work in a large organization. So I had to learn to be an entrepreneur.
[44:29.100] - Jen Lehner Wow, so what about now, what are you working on now that you're especially excited about?
[44:34.380] - Michael F. Schein Yeah, a bunch of things. Well, I still have the agency and that's my bread and butter. And we do great work with a lot of great clients. The book is so much fun. I mean, it came out a couple of months ago and originally, my kind of cynical reason for writing the book is that I felt I needed a book in the business I was in.
[44:58.440] - Michael F. Schein But since I'm a writer first I got obsessed with the project. I wanted to write a book, not just a business book. And so I got so into it, and I almost feel if I've succeeded with the book, I'm proud of it and I feel like I've come full circle because I always wanted to be a published writer.
[45:17.880] - Michael F. Schein And I'm very proud of this book as a book beyond the business. And so that's exciting. And it's getting buzz. I mean, it's fortunately selling well and people are noticing it. So that's very gratifying.
[45:28.920] - Michael F. Schein And, you know, having that experience has made me realize how important it is to me to not just use what I've learned to market companies. I love that work a lot. At the same time, I really feel kind of coming back to the beginning of the conversation that. There are so many people who are really harming the world right now, hyping up their bad ideas, that it's become really important to me to put this stuff to expose the bad guys and also put these tools in the hands of the good guys.
[46:04.840] - Michael F. Schein So, yeah, I'm doing my first online workshop now, which is a ton of fun. I'm working on doing more, more high level, speaking to larger audiences and working inside organizations, really teaching these concepts, not just using them to market products and services. So that's that's probably what I'm most excited about right now.
[46:26.530] - Jen Lehner All right. Well, so let's hype up the online workshop. Is that available to our listeners or is that just for, like a select group?
[46:33.910] - Michael F. Schein Well, right now it's a select group, but it's going to be based on demand. So if I hear from a bunch of people that they want to do it, I'll do another one. And if people want to bring me into their organizations to do what they call an impact work, to teach their teams in the organization the strategies and or speak in front of a group, I'm doing that as well. But yeah, I, I can certainly give anyone my email address and if they're interested in finding out more, I'm going to be doing future ones.
[47:07.690] - Jen Lehner Is there a dot com we could send them to.
[47:10.540] - Michael F. Schein Not for this because I've kept it very know for you, just for you like. Oh yeah. So there's a couple of dotcoms so one great way to get in touch with me. So my personal website is michaelfSchein.com. So that's s-c-h-e-in dot com. The business is microfamemedia.com. A really good way to keep in touch with me is something called the Hype Book Club.
[47:34.510] - Michael F. Schein So that's hypereads.com. And actually the members of the first workshop came through this group. It was because this has become such a community. It was people in this group that did the workshop. So I read all of these crazy books and the ones I find the most entertaining and useful. I send out descriptions of them, try to be a little bit funny with it every so often, and it's gone from just being that sort of newsletter to being this back and forth conversation.
[48:01.450] - Michael F. Schein So all of the emails come from my direct email inbox and people respond to them and I respond back and it's become this really cool community that we call the book club. So that's a great way to keep in touch with me.
[48:14.650] - Michael F. Schein And I'll also just give my email address, because I love getting just messages to it. And it's like mfs@microfamemedia.com like Michael, Frank, Sam at MicroFame Media dot com. So at the name of the company dot com. So anyone who wants to just whatever ask me anything, say hello. I love getting emails.
[48:33.430] - Jen Lehner OK, great. And I just want to say what I told you in the pre chat, which is I think the book needs to become a documentary. Truly, it isn't just a business book because you have done such a great job bringing in these rich stories that I've never heard before. It just really was really a joy to read. And I didn't expect that based on the title honestly, not that it's not a good title, but you know what I mean.
[48:59.350] - Jen Lehner So it was a really nice surprise. Number two, I think you do need to create an online course that teaches everything that's in the hype handbook and then come back on the podcast to hype the online course and the new book, which I'm sure is right behind this one.
[49:14.830] - Michael F. Schein I'm going to take you up on that, because that's totally where my head is at. That's my bold new horizon. And that's always the most exciting thing to be working on, that unknown terrain, which is where I'm at right now. But the first workshop has been great.
[49:27.340] - Michael F. Schein I mean, I have enjoyed every minute of it. And I think the attendees have to we've really formed a nice little community.
[49:33.220] - Jen Lehner Wow. I am not surprised at all. Well, Michael F. Schein, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed it so much that I say thank you for joining us today. What I meant is
[49:42.850] - Michael F. Schein I did enjoy it.
[49:45.100] - Jen Lehner Good, good. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next time because you have to come back.
[49:48.940] - Michael F. Schein I will be there. Thank you, Jen.
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