Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen and joining me on the other end of the line is Michael Schein. And Michael has a book out called The Hype Handbook. And he said, it's actually Michael F. Schein so we need to get the F in there so did you understand. Also, for all of you who are listening and want to take a look at his website, just go to michaelfschein s-c-h-e-i-n.com. That's his website. So, we're going to direct you all there. Well, good day. Thanks for being on Inside Personal Growth.

Michael F. Schein
Thanks, Greg. I can't wait. I've been hearing about your show for a long time. It's exciting. And it's funny about that, that f, you know, all these years, I thought that Schein spelled the way I spelled it was a really weird, unusual name. And then it turns out, there's another writer who has michaelschein.com. So that was not fun thing, you know Michael F. Schein, you know, it's my name.

Greg Voisen
Michael F. Schein. I mean, it works and people get it. But I think for people that are trying to get what a high pan book could do. You're the guy that give it to them. And I want to let them know a bit about you first, before we get going too deeply into this. He's the author of this book. Obviously, this is a book from 2021. But it's applicable anytime. Just because it's a couple of years old. His articles have appeared in Forbes fortune, Huffington Post in psychology days speaks to international audiences spanning the northeastern United States to the southeastern coast of China. So he covers a lot of territory as founder and president of marketing agency called micro fame media. He's launched campaigns and created content for companies including eBay, Magneto, University of Pennsylvania, Gordon College, University of California, Irvine, United Methodist publishing house, recon, LinkedIn, and Citrix. And I think that recon actually merge just merged with another company. He also has recently gotten fat practice with the martial art wing chin, giving him yet another similarity with that of Robert Downey Jr. So there you go. And if you want to go to micro Fein media, we'll put a link to microfilm media up there as well. So that people can get to that. But Michael, you know, just kind of getting into this book. In the introduction of the book, you speak about making a career change, and then you ended up working for a company, and operating customer service call center probably couldn't be any place better than to learn about hype in a customer service call center. But you did not think that you'd end up working there for eight years when you did. But you did end up working there for eight years. I'm one of these early years prior to you, you know, writing this book prior to you developing your media company, each you about promotion.

Michael F. Schein
Interestingly enough, that call center company did start out as a telemarketing company years before I joined, but by the time I joined, it had nothing to do with outbound sales. So I got a little bit unlucky, because I had all the grind of working at a call center company, but it was the kind of call center that picks up the phones for large corporations and gives customer service. So I really fell into that it was the last thing I ever thought I would do. I always wanted to be an artist, which is interesting. So I've owned my own business for 11 years, and I love it. But I wanted to be a writer like like a novelist for a really long time. And then from there, I got really interested in songwriting and music. And when I left college, I told my parents that that's what I was going to do. By that point, I had convinced them that I was going to write novels because I was poor. Be good at writing fiction. And I sprung on them that I was going to play in a band and they had a conniption fit. And but I did that. And I went to New York City and started a band. And we certainly didn't make it in terms of making a living at it. But I probably learned more about promotion there than anywhere than then in the call center business. Because even though we didn't really make it, we were kind of a punk band, and had no business getting as far as we did. We had a residency at a club called Arlene's Grocery, which is funny, because at the time, we always wanted to play at CBGBs, which was past its prime. That's where the Ramones and the talking heads played. And Arlene's Grocery was a new hip club. And I just went back there, I happen to be in the neighborhood. And it's the only like, club that's still in the area. It's on the Lower East Side, which is pretty fancy now and I walked in, and the old owner's daughter is working there. And she said that now young people make pilgrimages to Arlene's Grocery. That's where the strokes played in some of those bands when I was coming up. So we were kind of in that scene, but we played the younger audiences. But we used to sell it out a lot. We had a residency there, we were on TV on a local show that we hide our way into. And really, we were big fans of glam rock and punk where it was as much about the antics as it was about the music. So we always did really over the top antics to get our name in the local press and local press in New York is a big deal because it's New York, and all of that, but you know, I couldn't make a living at it. Eventually, the band broke up before it got there. And I just got the first job I could and I'm, you know, I'm a hard working guy. And I'm not, I'm not too dumb. So I climbed a ladder there. And I thought it would be a really short, thin. But before I knew it, I was I was an executive at this company that was very brass tacks. And I learned a lot about how to be a professional and how to be an adult and how to be a business person. But what was challenging about it is I did lose that creative part of myself and that writing part of myself and I eventually wanted to go and do something else. And I actually ended up picking the skills that I had learned with the band, and using it to build a freelance copywriting business, which eventually turned into my agency. Yeah,

Greg Voisen
well, microfoam. And, you know, all of these stories up to this point, are really what define helped to define a purpose person, and what they do in life, I think we're influenced by so many things, people, events, circumstances that actually do that. And you state that in this guy who wrote the hype handbook to personal or career success, that you will pride that provide the reader with information, insight and tools for building major buzz around your most cherished project, underline, business, underline or cause. So we're really speaking to a very broad section here, when we talk about hype and where it could be used. You state that it's all about Moving Minds grabbing attention and generating meaningful activity. I agree. Because look, hey, what is social media trying to do? What is every ad that Google serves up? What is your SEO? What are all these guys talking about all the time, you're trying to get attention and get people to take action? But before we delve into the 12 strategies you outlined in the book, who do our listeners have to become and what must happen to their mindsets to implement what you speak about in the book? In other words, if they want to become an artist of hype, okay, what has to happen to them? Because, you know, this, this whole arena today, Michael, around environmentalism, they call it greenwash. Right? It's like, hey, well, it's just piping that you're green because you make plastic bags a different way, or you store something from somewhere. address what has to happen in this world today, to actually embrace some of this.

Michael F. Schein
The point you make about mindset is probably the most important thing you can do to be successful at attracting the kind of attention you need to be successful at anything. I think the first thing is to really fix in your mind what I mean by hype, because hype can be a really negative term and a lot of people think of it that way. Yeah. But I consider hype. Simply any activities that you do that get a large number of people, people emotional, so that you can move them in the direction that you want. And I got that term from from hip hop from rap because in the world of hip hop hype has always been positive because they know, in the hip hop community that no one is handing them their success on a platter. There's no climbing the corporate ladder in hip hop. So you need to do you need to get very creative in attracting attention to yourself and you always have

Greg Voisen
a question. Yeah, well, yeah, wasn't the king of hype Donald Trump?

Michael F. Schein
Oh, I mean, he's, he's the, he's the best. I mean, whatever you think about him politically. And again, hype is neither positive nor negative. I mean, it's, it's a moral right? Like, it just, it's just how people respond. So yeah, whatever you think about him, he's probably the best in the world.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, yeah.

Michael F. Schein
But But I guess the point is, when I decided that I couldn't really work in the corporate world anymore for my own sanity, and I left, I had this thing in my head, because I had sort of been tamed and made into an adult. I had this idea in my head that as long as I was really good at what I did, which was writing, and at that time business writing, and as long as I could sort of study, the way things were done, I could crack it. So what I did was I started going out and getting clients, and trying to get clients and studying all the latest marketing. So to your point, I looked at social media and search engine optimization. And I remember Google Plus was a big thing. So I read all this stuff, and went to all these seminars about, you know, how to crack Google Plus to market yourself. And you know, what, it didn't do very much for me, I mean, the few clients that I got were from word of mouth. And I was not doing well, I mean, anyone who hired me liked me, and kept hiring me. So I could make I could eke out a living, but it was rough. And the insight that I had, and I do talk about this in the book is I actually walked past that same club, the one I just went to, again, recently, I seem to go there every decade or so. But I remembered how good I was at what people would call marketing, but I never thought of it as marketing. You know, I mean, we would have a line out the door on a Wednesday night. But I never got together with my bandmates, and said, Let's study marketing. Let's figure out how to market this. We would say let's hype it up. And we would just like have fun and figure out how to crack people's mass psychology. Right. So I'm sure

Greg Voisen
Michael, you weren't giving away free weed in there. So that the lines were up. Do I

Michael F. Schein
confirm or deny that allegation? Yeah. I'm just joking. Yeah, no, I mean, that's an excellent. That's tactic number 13. I don't know what Long story short, you know, when I started applying and reapplying some of that kind of colorful, psychologically based attention getting stuff instead of worrying about the technology, that timeless stuff and putting my mindset there, instead of I have to figure out the newest, you know, sales funnels or SEO, then my business started to take off. And that was a big lesson for me and what led to the book and all of that. Well,

Greg Voisen
I think, look, when you have fun playing music, or you have fun being a media guy, one of the keys is to have fun.

Michael F. Schein
Yeah. Fun and add color, you know, yeah, that's

Greg Voisen
why people ask me about this show, you know, they get it, you know, you're pretty spontaneous. And you know, you've been doing this 17 years. And I said, like, if I didn't have fun every day, there's no reason I want to come back on here doing a podcast. So, you know, when I insert these funny little gestures, or whatever, it's because I want this to be lively and open and whatever. So, you know, let's talk about these 12 hype strategies, because the bulk of your book is The 12 hype strategies. Let's speak about four of them, because we're not going to have time to cover the length of this. And for my listeners, we're gonna have a link to the book, go get the hype handbook. From Michael F shine.

Michael F. Schein
Well, the SPM the key thing, everybody will have a

Greg Voisen
link to Amazon to that we'll have a link to his website as well. But yeah, this is number two I just picked randomly creating your own secret society. I thought that was pretty interesting. You talked about piggybacking principle. Can you speak about this strategy? And what is this piggybacking principle?

Michael F. Schein
I have probably made more money for myself and my business and probably for clients as well through this strategy than anything else. I mean, they're all important and they all describe, you know, how people react and how people will buy what you're selling. But if I had to pick one, this is the one that you can put into practice quickly and that I've done the best with and it's the idea that what most hype artists do people who are really kind naturally good at attracting attention and really accelerating visibility for their stuff and getting people really emotional. They make it seem like all of their success is just happening grassroots like their stuff is so good person by person, people are finding out about it and spreading the word and it's just growing from the ground up. But what almost all of these people do is they piggyback off of the existing success of other people. So I tell a story in the book, because what fun was talking about height be without, without telling the stories about all these great historical hype artists, right, but there's this guy, there was this guy, Edward Bernays, who invented public relations, like a pray about 100 years ago. And one of the famous things that he did was he got Americans to eat bacon for breakfast as part of their main thing. Like we think of bacon and eggs that it's always been around. But that was just not a thing. People did, usually. And he had Beech Nut as a client, which was a pork company at the time. Mainly, they do a lot of things now, like there's little candies, but they produced a lot of pork products. And he didn't

Greg Voisen
know that. I didn't know that. But they went and had to go kill all those little pigs so people could have some pork.

Michael F. Schein
And they still it's happening every day, my friend, hey, well, happy

Greg Voisen
Hanukkah, happy Hanukkah, because you're not eating pork.

Michael F. Schein
I can eat pork with the best of them. I gotta say, I have not, I have not been as close as I could be over my life, despite the SEC. Okay, I mean, long story short, basically, this guy needed to get pork production up. So what he did was he had spent all of this time behind the scenes fostering these relationships with well placed people. So we knew this one doctor. And he told the doctor who is this really well respected guy, although he probably shouldn't have been based on this story that he should do a study on, on porque or whatever. So he produced the study that said that bacon is the healthiest food for the first meal of the day, because it replaces the energy that you lose during sleep. And he sent this study out to 7000 other doctors who took it as a study like the truth. And yeah, long story short, every doctor in America was was recommending pork to their clients would seem like it just happened. Suddenly, everyone was eating pork, you know, now pork, but bacon. And there it was. So so so what's the lesson here, the lesson is not that you should pay people off in a corrupt doctor in your pocket. The lesson is that if you spend time fostering a tight knit circle around yourself with a lot of kind of strategy, strategic thinking about how can these people in the future, how can I piggyback off of the following they already have or the visibility they already have in a way that helps both of us, that's a lot more effective and efficient than just trying to like, do a bunch of bunch of Instagram posts or whatever people do way to do that, that are much more effective than in other ways. And we can talk about that. But that's the core idea.

Greg Voisen
But I it's it works. The point is I'll use a quick example, I was told, and I know because I consult a medical device company, that if the representatives medical device companies wanted to get the doctor's attention, they would say, well, we'd like you to be part of a study, that this wasn't a they already had the FDA approval. They didn't need it. But they wanted to build their esteem that they were part of this study. So what they could do would be convert more of those doctors because they were part of the study. Now you could call that. That's right, you could call that hype. But that is hype. It is like literally, Hey, you want to be part of this special study. Here's the thing, just like you did with the bake. And now type two,

Michael F. Schein
I just want to say that's 100% hype, because it plays on human motion. We all want appreciation, and we all want exposure. And so we might think that we're taking part in something because it's its objective. And that's just like how it's done. But we don't really realize we favor those people who give us appreciation and attention. And actually, when I'm talking I didn't talk about this in the book. But when I'm talking with clients, I often refer to something called the cookbook method. And what that's based on is in the 70s there were these cookbooks that used to come out where they would like solicit recipes from people and their family members and this and that, and then they wouldn't put the recipes in the books and everyone and all their family would buy the cookbooks. Right? Right?

Greg Voisen
Right. I mean, the reality is, you can call that inform height. Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield did it in that whole big series books that they that they did because they asked people to donate their stories, right? They didn't even write the blog, they literally got millions of stories come in about good things, which was a good, great book, great series, but it made millions and millions and millions of dollars. So, and it was because you were playing to someone's emotion around wanting to tell a story and contribute it and be selected to be part of this book. Right? So let's talk about foot number four. Give the little babies their milk. This one was kind of weird, but it's good. Can you tell the several stories in this chapter, you tell them, but speak about the founders of the Nation of Islam? who adopted this term? And what do you mean by this? And why is this strategy? So important? It seemed like it was a good one.

Michael F. Schein
Yeah, so not No one is better at what I'm calling hype than religion.

Greg Voisen
I agree.

Michael F. Schein
You know, and again, I obviously don't think hype is a negative thing. I've dedicated my life to helping companies and people with good ideas hyping themselves up. So I don't think it's a bad thing. But they're really, really sophisticated at it, especially the ones that last and so the Nation of Islam is not Islam. You know, it's it's a completely different religion that some people have moved from that to regular Islam. You know, it's famous to us because of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. And people like that, for however you think of any of those people Louis Farrakhan as, as the guy who's not supposed to eat pork, not my favorite person, but you know, but, you know, the Nation of Islam was actually started well before that in the 30s. And it was started by this guy, Wallace Fard, in in Paradise Valley, as part of Detroit, a really bad neighborhood. But by that I just mean poor, and a lot of crime, and it was an African American neighborhood. And at the time, no one in it in in black neighborhoods had heard, I don't want to say no one, it was not a common thing, to be exposed to Islam, let alone whatever the Nation of Islam was. So this guy started a new religion. And it was based on the idea that there was a mad scientist on a distant planet named Yaku, who created the white race to come down and destroy the black race. And you know, it, the guy tied it to Islam, but it wasn't really that connected. That's a very weird thing, as are all religions, if you're not used to them, I mean, if you think of any religion, and you didn't grow up with it, it's you're asking people to accept some very unusual things. And the thing about human beings is we're very, very resistant to new ideas. We're resistant to new ideas, because new ideas can kill us. I mean, if you're walking through a through a forest or a jungle, and you see these beautiful red berries, and you've never seen them before, and you just throw them into your mouse, there's a good chance you'll die, right? So we're very resistant to new ideas. But what this guy did, there's a phrase that not only the Nation of Islam used, but other religions have used it. And the idea is that little babies can't eat meat, you have to we put, give them milk, and then you give them a little bit of squished up food. And then you give them groundout meat, and then you give them meat. So you can't just introduce something brand new all at once. So what this guy was fired did is he would go into this neighborhood where people ate a lot of pork, and people drank alcohol, it was a tough life. And he was really well dressed. And it was very slender and nice looking. And he said he was a silk salesman, and he would get into people's homes by doing that. And when he was doing his, like sales pitch. They would offer him whatever, pork rinds or beer or whatever. And he would say, No, no, I don't eat pork. And that was very unusual. So they would say, why not? And he would say, Well, you know, for my health, and you know that he wouldn't say that he would just they would assume that he was he was slender, he was healthy. So they would try to eat like him. And in a month, they would just drop 15 pounds, you know what I mean? And feel really good. And he would come back and they would say, Oh, why? And how did you get into it? He goes, what happens to be part of my religion? Well, what's your religion about? And before long, he was packing basements, right? So the idea of if he had just walked into people's homes, and said, you know, let me tell you about a brand new thing about a man named Yaku, who lives on a distant planet who creates white people, they would have they would have he could have, they would have thrown him out on his rear, they would have been like, What the heck is that? But by gradually introducing new ideas, you can move people in now, how does that apply? Well, not every idea is a new idea, right? If you have let's say you're a really great business coach, but you're just good at what you do. And there's not really any difference between what your tactics and other people's tactics you're just better at it. There are different hype strategies to use. But if you're doing something really unusual, really The cutting edge really new. A lot of times what we say to ourselves is, but my stuff is so cutting edge, why can't people accept it, you're missing the point, they can't accept it because it's cutting edge. So what you need to do is tie it to things they're already used to. So like, instead of talking about your weird genetic processing, you know, thing that's going to grow meat on a tree, and that you can eat this meat grown in a laboratory, people will start gagging, you you tie it to, you know, the Impossible Burger. That's a great example. It looks like a regular hamburger. And it, you know, was it was given to us through Burger King, you know what I mean? Which we're all familiar with. So, yeah, it's a really great way to package I work with a lot of consultants who are just so boggled that the people that they deal with, can't see how brilliant they're new ideas are. And they're missing the point that that's why people can't see, well,

Greg Voisen
if you can tie it to something that people already know. And you can make that conversion, maybe not one big jump, but in smaller, bite sized pieces. I think that makes a lot of sense. And that is, you know, as you say, give little babies their milk. You were saying? Because that is the first step, right? It's like, okay, there it is. Now you have a IPX. Strategy number five, it's called become a trickster, at least for a little while. Trickster probably doesn't fit with a lot of people's vocabulary, because they think of it as negative. First, when it comes out. You start this chapter off with a story about the god Hermes, to make your point, can you tell the story and speak with the listeners about why this strategy helps to create a tension?

Michael F. Schein
Well, this is where I got to be a little nerdy in the book. And I got to talk about mythology because, you know, a lot of times in, in the myth of various cultures, they're there for a reason, right? They speak to some human urge or human need. And there's a God, a type of God in almost every ancient religion, from Hermes in the Greek religion, but low key which we all know from the Marvel movies, but that was an actual God in Northern Europe. There was a monkey king in China, you know, there are these gods who are not evil, per se. But they they play pranks, they cause mischief, they, you know, really throw things into disarray, but in doing so, they're usually also creative. They actually create things by being mischievous. So the example of Hermes Hermes was the messenger God, the one with the, you know, he's calling mercury in Rome. So he's the quack God who has the little wings on his shoes and all of that, right. But, um, but he basically was born as a baby and gods are really smart from the minute they're born. So he saw Apollo's cattle and Apollo's cattle was like Apollo's favorites. Bane is pride and joy. So he stole it. And Apollo found out and Apollo went crazy. He was like, Who is this little rat, I'm going to kill it.

Greg Voisen
And it hurtle ship. That's

Michael F. Schein
stone. Oh, yeah. He's gonna torture him, whatever, whatever God's dude, other don't have to have an eagle poke out his liver, you know, whatever, right? And Hermes was like, Hey, man, you know, listen, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. Let me do you a favor, I'm gonna help you out. And he took a tortoise shell. And he put strings on it. And he created the wire, which is like the descent into the ancestor of the guitar and all of that. And Apollo became the God of the music Hermes got to keep the cattle, you know. And so the idea here is that we often think about being mischievious. It's like, oh, I can't do that, you know, I run an insurance company. How can I be mischievious? Right? Like, how can I? How can I do that? That's not the right thing to do. And it's not dignified. But a lot of times, being a little bit mischievious at the right times, actually makes people have fun to your earlier point. And as long as you're not hurting anybody. That's how you attract attention. I mean, so we saw it in advertising to talk about insurance. There was every insurance company now has one of these little creatures, right? The Aflac doc this and that. But to start, it started with Geico, it would have been on bird have to have English British accented lizard, doing these ridiculous commercials for insurance insurance is serious. It's about when you die. It's about if you get in a car accident. Right? No one could understand. No one could remember Geico. So they created the gecko and it worked. I mean, and so sometimes you have to be willing to Take these controlled risks and be playful, always knowing when to dial it back. In other words, you don't want to become Dennis Rodman, right. I mean, Dennis Rodman, a lot of people who aren't basketball fans in the 90s, knew who Dennis Rodman was because he had, he was very good, but there were a lot of people, but he had bright hair, and he did crazy things. But after that, it was time to dial it back and focus on his games, you know, but he just kept going and kept going and kept going. And he just became a clown and an idiot, and he destroyed his career. So you have to calibrate between being attracting attention and adding color. And being a clown,

Greg Voisen
which Yeah, well, we're the news stories every day are filled with people that have used this, if you want to call it trickster kind of approach, and it can backfire. Like you just said, with Dennis Rodman. So you have to be really careful, but it does warrant you lots of attention, to do these kinds of things. And if you're trying to get a lot of attention, you know, look up, all you got to do is go to social media, and you'll see plenty of people playing out this whole trickster thing on social media, it's not. And the reason is, is because that hype is getting them more attention to either sell whatever it is they have, or do whatever it is they have. And I could point to many, and I'm not going to, but you know, seeing plenty of it. Now let's go to strategy seven, Phil, find a void and fill it. And I'd like you to speak about these Fox sisters and the birth of spiritualism. And how this became one of the biggest new phenomenons in the 19th century, you state to put this strategy into practice that we should take stock of changes in the world, which are especially disoriented, disorientating. And what do you mean by this? Because this was a, I read the story in the book I got where you're going with this. And I think we ought to relate it if we can, to a modern day story.

Michael F. Schein
Well, as you'll notice, all of the examples that you brought up from the book, including this one has nothing to do with traditional marketing or business and that's by design. It's because the things that business people do to get attention. We've all seen those. But it by only looking at businesses, we follow their herd, right. That's why all these insurance companies have cartoon characters now and it doesn't stand out anymore. So the idea is to look at people who came from nowhere and got huge amounts of attention. And this is a great example of

Greg Voisen
I'm gonna stop you for a second because you keep referring to insurance companies and interesting because as I was sitting here thinking, I was thinking about the bad guy brother of Allstate. Allstate has used that guy who pulled the basketball hoop down now you you kind of wonder, or he got in car crashes or whatever he did that was reckless. And your prior one, you were talking about the tricksters there couldn't be anybody more trickster than that that guy on all state, right. But he's captured the attention. If everybody remembers prior to him. There was an African Americans spokesperson for all state, right, who always came on with that really rich voice, right? baritone voice. And I think my listeners will relate to this. Now they've got a wack guy whose head is all beat up, right? Pulling down basketball hoops to capture your attention, and progressive uses whatever that woman's name is, with the little team of whatever, they've all come up with some kind of hype to get the image,

Michael F. Schein
right. Yeah, yeah. But you know, the one who you got to give the most credit to is is is is GEICO because they took the risk. And I think they got the lion's share of me don't even know what I would love to see the numbers I have to look into that of how much that business has grown because I never had heard of that company. And my I remember my little daughter when she's 13. Now when she was like to use to say, Geico, you know, right. So like that.

Greg Voisen
Yeah. But if you go back, Michael, and I know this business, well, you had to either be a teacher or a government employee to get insurance from them. Now, they don't give a crap. Big the name is means government insurance, GE, government employee insurance company. That's what they catered to originally. Now it's across the board. So it was kind of special to get they were appealing to one particular audience. So go on with this.

Michael F. Schein
I want to ask you, I am curious. I'd love to find out. Did they diversify into other stuff, after they got all the attention from In the gecko, or did they want to diversify and come up with the gecko to do that?

Greg Voisen
The answer would be the gecko. They were already diversified, but they wanted to get more attention with the gecko. Yeah, okay.

Michael F. Schein
Anyway, ya know, the fox sisters were just these, these girls who lived out in the middle of nowhere in just a small house, and they started to hear knocking noises in their house. And they called a neighbor over and the neighbor heard it. And everyone became convinced that these girls could talk to the dead. And it became a phenomenon. So we've all heard of seances and how that was a big craze in the past. And it's almost like a joke kind of thing now, but that was a really big thing in the in the mid to late 1800s. It people would gather around and they would they would speak to the dead. And this was a very scientific age. We don't think of it that way. But it's when the telegraph came out for the first time and trains a locomotive, that people thought of it as science, they're like, if we can hear if signals can be sent through the air, why can't spirits of the dead so that it all came from the fox sisters, it spread like wildfire, they had them up on this big convention hall in Rochester, and tied, you know, bowing to them, so they couldn't, you know, do anything and the knocking noises came out. And this that in the other. So years went by, and one of the sisters eventually was overcome with guilt because she knew it was a hoax. And she actually did a public as a young adult did a public, you know, Expert Day or whenever she got up in front of immigrants, and listen, I was flying, I was cracking my big toe joint against the floorboards and the sound traveled really quickly. And the funny thing about it is no one cared. They kept doing the seances they got bigger than ever. And so you think to yourself, well, people are just gullible idiots. Well know that what you miss there, what you would miss. And what I always miss is it was it was in the wake of the Civil War. And people don't realize how bad the Civil War was for the United States. It was an apocalypse. I mean, you know, I mean, World War Two, we lost a lot of people, but the Civil War was for the percentage of the population to this day, the most Americans ever killed.

Greg Voisen
I don't know what the population was, but hundreds of 1000s of people died.

Michael F. Schein
It wasn't, it was it was everyone knew a young man, a husband or a brother or whatever..

Greg Voisen
who died and they wanted to get in touch with them. That's the reality of these day artists became the spiritualism to actually do that. So it didn't really matter. It was around this belief, right?

Michael F. Schein
Now that it's so badly, you know what I mean, because of the time, so what a lot of people do is they come up with a product and they say my product is awesome. Let me go find a need that's already out there. And they'll just find whatever need and that's fine, they'll get a little bit of attention. But if you really want to have a massive stack, splash look at the dominant needs of the culture, right. And that takes a little doing, but if you can do it, it's really effective. So a business example, Tim Ferriss who a lot of us know, he wrote The Four Hour Workweek, which is this idea that you can outsource everything in your life and just do stuff you want to do. So like, if you're an entrepreneur, it doesn't matter what business you do, I mean, sell nutraceuticals, whatever, it doesn't really matter. The idea is to just figure out a way to outsource all of your work to India. So you can go and be a kickboxing champion like he was or whatever, and serve and whatever. And if you work for someone, he would say, outsource your work. And you know, and that is a message that would not have resonated in the 1950s. Because in the 1950s people felt taken care of by their companies, they got, you know, you could on one income at a blue collar or mid level white collar job, buy a very nice house in the suburbs and save lots of money. People felt that they'd be in their jobs forever, they were taken care of vice versa. There was a sense of loyalty that came from World War Two. And what Tim Ferriss either consciously or unconsciously tapped into was this idea that you're a sucker if you do that now, because they do massive layoffs all the time. There are a lot of what they call bullshit jobs, jobs that just exist, you know, where we're filling up columns on Excel spreadsheets, but are expected to say that we have passion for them, and that and that we'll dedicate 90 hours a week to them. It's almost impossible to save money. If people don't, you know pay benefits the way they used to people look for any way they can to make you into a temp employee. And people are really frustrated especially Millennials. So what Tim Ferriss was saying is listen, I'm going to fill that void for you. They said fu FM, outsource your work for yourself. And the book was blew off like wild incense, you know, to understand that it wasn't just, hey, let me teach you how and there's been lots of books about productivity, you know that this was more than that.

Greg Voisen
Well, Rita McGrath, who's teaches at NYU, I think it is, was on the show quite a ways back. But, you know, she used to talk about Michael seen around corners. Right? And that you have to have this ability, whatever it is to connect the dots. Yeah, predictability. Now, marketing is much like that, right? It's like, how are we connecting the dots? How are we seeing around the corners? What is it that we're creating to capture attention or grab someone's attention, no matter what it might be. And it isn't, I want listeners to understand hype is not a bad thing. You know, when you see this hype handbook, it's really just human nature, you're playing to the psychology of the individual, you're also playing to their emotions, that is true. But people are making emotional buying decisions every day, right? And what hype is doing is helping them oftentimes get past either a belief or a value, or something that's holding them back from making a decision about something that you think could make their life better. Let's put it that way that you believe could make their life better. Maybe after they buy it, when they go ship, this was a piece of junk. But the reality is, is that that happens all the time as well. Okay. And, you know, I would say that, as the largest online store, Amazon, it's constantly hyping something because they got a full time channel that runs 24/7, for you to look at all the stuff that you could buy on their channel, right? Yeah. So if you were to leave the listeners with words of wisdom from the book, and these are people who are maybe looking to put a little bit of this in their business, three bits of advice, what do you do tell them? And why is it important for their success? And for them not to get hung up? Around the word? Hi?

Michael F. Schein
Well, I think the first piece of wisdom would be building on what you just said, it's the idea that human beings don't make decisions based on accuracy. They, they make decisions based on how our brains process information, which is based around shortcuts, because we can't deal with all the information that we're receiving. So and that's why magic works, you know, stage magic, because we don't see the world accurately. So it might look like something disappears when it didn't. So you can either say to yourself, I don't like that fact of reality. And I'm just going to give people straightforward stuff and let them you know, deal with it, and fail, because you almost certainly will not reach the heights of what you wanted to get out into the world if you do or you can say to yourself, people digest information, the way they digest information, I'm selling something really good, that makes their life better, I vowed that I'm not going to lie, and I'm not going to leave people worse off than I found them. So it's actually my moral imperative to present things in a way that gives people the OP, the opportunity to find out about and buy into the great ideas, because the bad guys already know how to do this. So I would say it's beyond not a bad thing that if you actually have a moral framework, and if you have a strong internal code, it's it's your we need more good guys and good ladies out there doing this stuff, because the bad guys are doing it already. So that's the first thing. The second thing is experiment, experiment, experiment. You know, um, there are all these books out there and courses out there that tell you how to do exactly this thing in marketing. Together. It's like put four landing pages up use nine Instagram posts and worded exactly like this, and you'll make seven figures. And yeah, who knows, you can probably learn something from some of this. But the problem is the minute that everyone is doing it, it's usually already too late because you lose the competitive advantage. So what I would say is get really into understanding the core umbrella principles like how do human beings really tick? And then based on that knowledge, do really quick experiments and kill the ones that don't work and ramp up the ones that do because the actual way that this hype stuff happens, you never know. It gives you a much better you know, your rate of success is going to be higher if you're doing marketing experiments based on on real psychology, rather than just throwing spaghetti against the wall, but you should be doing quick experiments and killing the ones to dump, the more you put out there, the more lottery tickets you have. And then the third thing, and this is more of a general piece of advice than something specifically about hype, but it's really guided my career, you know, it's always been looking for the side doors, because so many of us are so focused on getting in through a front door that even if it has 17 locks on it, and it's made of giant, we banging our elbow against it thinking, Well, I have to be resilient, I have to be tough, I have to be a go getter. And we don't understand why all the tapping is that our shoulder is getting bruised. And what if instead, you said to yourself, I'm going to look for all the windows and backdoors that someone might have forgotten a lot. So an example is, I always wanted to be a writer. And I tried doing it the artsy way, which I haven't glad I tried, you know, but it didn't work out for me. And then I tried writing some fiction in the mornings when I was at my corporate job, something I still have fun with, but and do. But one day, I saw an article in a writer's magazine that I was buying, because the fiction that talked about white papers, how you could make $3,000 to write a business to business white paper, and I said, you know, I know how to do that I understand business, I understand writing. So I started to do that. And by doing that, I from that first step, I built a career I get to write for a living, I just wrote a book that I'm very proud of that is that uses a lot of what I do in my fiction, writing a lot of storytelling, a lot of that. And as a result, people have been engaged with it, I get to wake up every day, and engage in a life that's based around all my skill sets, all of my interests, that just looks a little different than how I thought it would look. And I think being open to that and looking for those side doors instead of stubbornly slamming against the front door is really useful.

Greg Voisen
It's so important what you say. And I think if people remove the fear, or the risk that they think is going to happen to them or their business, you know, at your, at your website, it's micro fame, fa m e media.com. You say we make idea driven businesses famous. And I think you know, a lot of times we have ideas, we just don't know how to implement the idea, or we don't know how to get attention around the idea. And you've said that throughout this. So anybody listening right now who wants and owns a business saying, Hey, I have a great new idea. You know, I saw I just use a crazy example. I was in my dog park the other day the guy got in his car, and it said UV caps on his license plate. I said what the heck is that? And you say we we make he said go to chrome cap stock calm. That's a chrome caps What the hell's a chrome cap? And he goes, Well, you know a lot of people who are bald or a lot of people have thinning hair, a lot of people whatever, their head sunburns. I've created this thing that literally brief you where and pushes the, the UV rays off of it. I'm like, hey, what a great idea. You know, I mean, hey, he said that, that it is gone crazy. And I give the guy credit. Because you know, he actually patented it and everything as we were talking. This is the hype handbook. Michael shine is the guy you want to go to websites micro fame. media.com is one. Or you can go to Michael F. As in Frank shine.com. What's the app stand for? We get it.

Michael F. Schein
It's really bad. It's early. And I was actually named after a rest stop on the highway, which I found out recently. So we can talk about why that is. I still curse my mother.

Greg Voisen
Very appropriate for the work you're doing to be named after a restaurant. I

Michael F. Schein
love her dearly. But I don't know. I guess my head is really big. And it took 22 hours to come out. And she was mad at me. So I don't know.

Greg Voisen
Well, I'll give a really quick story here. And then we'll wrap this up. We were driving to Las Vegas, my wife and myself. I don't remember for what and she was pregnant. And we heard a story about Chad Everett. And I said how about Chad for? My second son got named was after Chad Everett. Right?

Michael F. Schein
Like you should have been.

Greg Voisen
So sometimes parents use weird ways because you know you're coming trying to figure out a name. Oh, great. There's that rest stop. I think we're gonna name it Farley. You're like

Michael F. Schein
the Frank s Farley service clubs. I've been to it many times. Well,

Greg Voisen
maybe they should put a plaque there going you know the height Book Guy was named after this. Well, Mike, it was been a pleasure

Michael F. Schein
having you on anyone out there if you go ahead. I was just gonna say anyone out there if you want to write a letter to the Pennsylvania senator to make that happen. That would be really helpful.

Greg Voisen
And I will, we'll definitely see if we can get that started. And I think there's only one person that get hype that would be you. All right, Michael is a pleasure having you on inside personal growth everyone go out, get a copy of this book, especially if you've got a great idea that you're trying to launch or get off the ground. Contact Michael, because he can help you. He's got a whole team of people. He's a writer, a speaker. He's done all this many, many times for many businesses, and quite successfully. So thanks for being on inside personal growth and sharing some of your wisdom about how you got where you are and how you're helping others use the hype handbook and these wealth success principles to get where they need to go. Thanks so much. Thanks,

Michael F. Schein
Greg, this really was a ton of fun. I really appreciate it.