Michael Schein | Using the Principles of Secret Societies to Market and Promote Your Work

Srini Rao

Michael, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Michael Schein

Hey, Srini Rao, you know it's always a huge pleasure for me to be here.

Srini Rao

Well, it is my pleasure to have you back here. You actually have a book that came out a while back when we had you, I think last year sometime, called The Hype Handbook. And as I was just saying before we hit record, this is one of those books that had a really profound influence on how I thought about creating content, how I thought about your messaging. And for those of you who haven't checked out both the previous interview with Michael, as well as the book, definitely check it out. If you want a testimonial for this book, my old roommate Matt doesn't even read books and he wouldn't put Michael's book down. So.

If you are serious about standing out in a sea of noise, this is actually one of those books that gives you a practical playbook. But anyways, now we're going to talk about something different. But before we get into all of that, I want to start with a question that has nothing to do with any of what we're going to talk about, as always. And that is, what was the very first job you ever had, and how did that end up impacting all the choices that you've made throughout the rest of your life and career?

Michael Schein

Yep.

Michael Schein

I was sort of wondering what this question would be. I always, you know, it's kind of like a game, try to figure out what the question would be. Because as you know, I'm a fan of the show as well. So I guess it depends a little bit how you define job. I'm actually sitting right now in the, in Vettner, New Jersey at my mom's.

House I'm visiting and it's this shore town that I went to every summer since the age of three and had really great memories. I never went to overnight camp because I had kind of this group of guys that I would hang out with and we would just do whatever we wanted and ride our bikes around. It was kind of like a Steven Spielberg movie without the aliens or at least that's how I see it in retrospect. And so my summer jobs were the first jobs I had. So I'm trying to remember

Michael Schein

And then I worked at, I actually worked as an intern at Atlantic City magazine at 16 years old. So the camp was weird because it was a sports oriented camp and I felt really kind of odd at that camp because I think some of the kids were better at sports than me, you know. Like I was having to counsel, you know, be the counselor for these kids and play baseball and all of these things.

So I was like oddly shy at that camp. You know, the other people I worked with, the other counselors were locals and they were really nice to me, but there's this sort of local shooby tension. Shooby is someone who doesn't live at the Jersey shore in South Jersey. So I felt really shy. So how did that influence my current career? I don't know. Sometimes I, this is weird. Sometimes I think a little bit about how a lot of people perceive one of my strengths.

as being social, that I'm able to really bond with people and make them feel comfortable and talk to anybody. And I sometimes remember how weirdly shy and mute I was at that camp. So whenever I think that things are innate, like if I have a certain quality, like if I ever say, you know, in the past, I would say I'm bad at sales and I ended up becoming good at sales. I think to myself, well, I used to be during this extremely

small period of time, extremely introverted and shy and awkward. And now I'm not. And so I guess it kind of taught me to be context oriented. It gives me a little bit of sort of, it makes me feel good or makes me feel confident knowing that if I'm feeling a certain way or if I'm not good at something in a certain context at a certain time, that's not fixed in stone. And it's funny that you bring this up because I really have thought about that a lot.

when I've had to get better at something or change a certain inherent trait in myself.

Srini Rao

Yeah. OK, so first, explain to me how you bridged the gap between being sort of introverted, socially awkward, and shy to being like that gap between that and being outgoing as you are. Because if you were not capable of having a conversation, then you and I probably wouldn't be friends. You and I wouldn't be having conversations as podcasts. We wouldn't be able to talk for 15 minutes before. I mean, you and I have kept in touch even past our previous interview. So I know that's not the case anymore. What changed?

And how do other people who feel that way change?

Michael Schein

I don't even know if I was shy in general. I think I was shy in that context. So I'm very chatty. I'll talk to cab drivers. I'll talk to CEOs. I'm just interested in people. And I was always a little bit chatty, depending on the context. But if I ever felt uncomfortable, I would clam up. I think maybe I'm a little less convinced.

about the concepts of introvert and extrovert. I'm not sure they're as immutable as people think, right? Like there's this idea like I'm a people person, I'm a talkative person, I'm a confident person. But I sometimes think, gosh, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but the fake it until you make it thing is extremely important. You know, I think that

part of it is a numbers game, right? I think of it like dating. I mean, I used to be pretty shy in my dating life. I wouldn't wanna walk up to people and talk to them. And then when I had more confidence because it happened again and again, I became a little more comfortable. I feel like I'm rambling a little because I'm not sure of the answer. Yeah.

Srini Rao

No, no, you're not. Trust me, the whole point of the kinds of question I asked is that there's no right or wrong answer. There's just an answer.

Michael Schein

I think there's something else though, too. I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, I think it's really important, and you probably know this better than most, I think it's really important to get interested in people, right? Like, I think people will say to me, oh, I'm shy or I'm introverted. It's really painful for me to talk to people or to network. And then when I dig into what they're talking about, a lot of times it's because

even though they're a shy person and they seem really nice and they are really nice, they're trying to get an outcome. They're networking to get a business outcome or they're chatting to get a date or whatever. And I think that's why I say I talk to cab drivers a lot or Uber drivers and you'll hear the coolest stories. Like I've talked to these guys from Nigeria who've been child soldiers in wars, you know, who came here and did all these things. And I think you sort of need to be.

interested in people without an outcome. And maybe that's because we were talking before the show, I still love to write fiction, and that's what a fiction writer does. So I think I'm still kind of introverted. There's nothing that makes me happier than being by myself with a book, right? I don't really love to party quote unquote, and never did. But I think being interested in people goes a long way. I mean, you built a career on it, more or less.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no, I mean it's funny because I you know I'd had this other book idea that you know I was the craziest of all my book ideas yet which I think I'd mentioned to you which was to literally see what would happen if I implemented all of the advice and I was telling Matt I was like I've spent ten years like studying interesting people how interesting would my life be if I implemented every single piece of advice I've ever gotten and I remember when I mentioned that to my mom she's like you're not gonna rob a bank are you I was like mom I'm like no nothing that it would involve jail time bankruptcy or

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Those are kind of my limit, my filters for the... Yeah, well, where do you think I stole some of the ideas? I wanna go back to this idea of things being innate and not, because you and I might actually disagree on this. So I think that there are, in my mind, maybe we do, so I think that there are certain things you can get better at, and then there are things you are not going to get better at no matter how much you work, and I wanna...

Michael Schein

It's very AJ Jacobs, actually. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Srini Rao

bring back a clip from an old episode with my old mentor, Greg Hartle, which I think will make a nice jump off point to talk about this. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

So just to give you some context, I mean, what he was talking about was how we use outliers as role models, right? Like Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, whoever it is. And so naturally that made me think of what we were talking about when it came to innate talent. Like the example I always come back to, you and I, Michael, no matter how hard we try, we're never gonna go to the NBA. So where do you draw that line between what is innate and what's not? And how do you, you know,

Michael Schein

Right.

Michael Schein

Yeah, no question, yeah.

Srini Rao

How do people basically identify what are their imagined limitations versus the real ones?

Michael Schein

Yeah, I think this is a very wise man. I want to find out what this episode was. I really like that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it's really making me think, because I think what I said earlier was overly simple. I mean, maybe, so this is something I'm 100% confident about, and that isn't rambling. I think our strengths are our weaknesses, and our weaknesses are our strengths, right? So we all really do have an inherent personality.

Srini Rao

Oh, you should totally listen to it.

Michael Schein

And we have inherent strengths and we have inherent. I don't even want to say strengths and weaknesses. We have inherent traits. Right. And that might be an energy level that might be all kinds of things. And I think based on the filters that you encounter, whether that's your upbringing or whether that's how you use those strengths, it can help you hurt you shape your life. Right. So like, for example.

Something I've used a lot, since we're talking about the social kind of aspect, something that I've used a lot in my life and in my career is my ability to connect with people. Whether they're right or wrong, people have told me a lot of times that they consider me very warm, very easy to get to know, all of these things. Now, I can brag about that because for many years, I really hated that about myself. I saw that as being a people pleaser. I saw that as being conflict averse.

and all of these things. But when I learned to realize that I'm never gonna be a type triple A, aggressive, hammer people into submission kind of person, I had to say to myself, and that was hard to let go of. I mean, there have been people in my family who I look up to who are that way. I'll never be that way. It's just not in my makeup.

So I could either say, well, I'm never going to be successful in business or in a career, because that's how people are. Or I can say, well, what raw clay do I have? And can it be repurposed to get me at least somewhat close to what I want? Right. So, like, I'll probably never be, you know, I think being a corporate attorney or a hedge fund manager was not in the cards for me. Because I don't even have the raw clay for that.

But your strengths and your weaknesses can be one in the same. You know, again, I'm such a big fan of artists, right? As opposed to always the Elon Musk's of the world. And a lot of them are what you would think of as losers, right? Like Dee Ramone, who wrote all the best Ramone songs, was a male hustler. You know, he sold sex for money to get drug money.

Michael Schein

because he was such a misfit in every aspect of his life and he took that raw clay and wrote some of the best rock and roll songs of all time. So I don't know, I think if you're able to be very clear-eyed about your raw clay, it makes life a lot easier.

Srini Rao

Let's do this. Let's get into why we're actually here, which is to talk about what you call secret societies. You know, a subject that I think is probably by design, a mystery to most of us. You know, when you say the word secret society, literally I think, oh, Skull and Bones and, you know, that movie, The Skulls, you know, ex-presidents and people getting away with shit that no other human being can get away with.

Michael Schein

Heh, yeah.

Michael Schein

Yeah, you know, I, the book that I wrote that came out, I guess, what was it, a year and a half ago now or something like that, the Hype Handbook, I had a chapter in that book, a hype strategy, as I call them, called Create a Secret Society. And it was one of 12, you know, strategies that I say that if you want to generate a huge amount of attention and excitement around whatever it is that you're putting out into the world, you need to master. And since that book came out,

I got even more interested in that one chapter and one strategy. And the reason is, part of it is the fiction writer in me, right? I mean, all of those stories are very cool about those secret societies, the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Skull and Bones, all of this stuff. But at the same time, it's the least hypey of the hype strategies, at least on the surface, right? When you think of hype, you think about getting huge numbers of people worked into a frenzy, generating all kinds of

you know, mass attention, lights and sounds and colors. Tony Robbins on a stage with confetti cannons and lights blaring and Amway and David Bowie and all of these things. But the idea of the secret society is that what the best hype artists do is that they make it seem like their growth is very grassroots, but under the surface, they're generating.

really strategic connections that accelerate their progress. So I sort of used the term as a lark. I wasn't really talking about real secret societies. But ever since I got interested in that, in the last year and a half, I started thinking to myself, well, what about real secret societies? Why are people so attracted to these groups like Skull and Bones and the Freemasons and these things? So I started reading about them and researching, and what I found is really interesting. We think that when you go to a Freemasons meeting,

The reason they're staying secretive is because they're doing something really, really interesting and sinister. They're controlling the New World Order. What they're protecting must be so important and so sinister and so interesting and so manipulative or so world changing that that's why they're secret. And people have penetrated these groups. And what they found out is that the purpose of the secrecy in most of these groups

Michael Schein

groups, certainly in the Freemasons, which are kind of the proto-secret society group, is the secrecy itself. Like once you get through all of these secret handshakes, secret rituals, secret oaths that you have to take, you're basically protecting a drinking club. So you know, they make you kneel down, tear your arms, swear that if you break the secret, they have this verbiage about tearing your tongue out and slicing yourself across the throat.

You know, you have to walk up to this altar, there's a checkerboard floor. And really what you're protecting is an oath that basically says, we're going to do have goodwill toward man and do good in the world. And then you drink and eat. So why are people so attracted to this? And it's, it's the exclusivity. It's the fact that when you just say to someone, Hey, join a networking group, come to a networking cocktail event. That's not interesting. That's not mysterious. You know, we're all storytelling animals.

But when you add all of this ritual and secrecy and exclusivity and you have to qualify to get in and you have to keep these oaths, people become very, very attached. Everyone wants to get involved. Movies are written about this stuff. So I started thinking, how can I use this? And I started using it in my own business. I started playing with it. I'm thinking about doing some writing around it. I always start out with any kind of project, just getting interested and digging in deep.

and I'm getting interested and I've gotten interested.

Srini Rao

Okay, couple of different things here. You know, I like what you said about the fact that it's a drinking club and it got me thinking back to documentaries like The Zeitgeist, which, you know, it's hard to say whether, you know, a lot of that is conspiracy theory, but the moment you started talking about this, I started thinking about some of the various sort of secretive meetings with high-powered people that I, you know, heard about in documentaries, like the Bilderberg Group, right? Or Bretton Woods, which I believe, you know, took place on some island somewhere.

Michael Schein

Right.

Srini Rao

where monetary policy that would affect us for, you know, probably the next 80 years was made, but it benefited the people who are already wealthy. So is that different than a secret society or is that a secret society of some form? Because there what is going on is sinister.

Michael Schein

Well, you have to, I mean, first of all, I'm not sure to what extent that material is accurate. Right. I mean, again, we're storytelling animals. Those stories are very, very exciting to listen to. Right. I mean, but I think.

Srini Rao

is accurate. Yeah.

Michael Schein

where most of the quote unquote conspiracies happen is that the people involved in these exclusive groups are wealthy and connected and they make things happen for each other. So for example, the Freemasons cost a lot of money to get into, right? So the people who joined the Freemasons, George Washington, Harry Truman, you know, a lot of presidents, you know, Mozart was a member.

were either talented enough to be sponsored or had some money. So as a result, people show up and they get together and they hook each other up. It's the same way I just joined the Penn Club in New York and I don't know why I didn't do it sooner. I went to University of Pennsylvania and the minute I walk in that place, people wanna do you favors because we all went to Penn. It's, what does Kurt Vonnegut call it? A grand falloon. It's an artificial sort of family structure.

that we create for ourselves, that we think of as very important. Like a country, you go to Europe and suddenly that American, who is the opposite political party as you, who lives in a totally different area, who you couldn't stand back home as your best friend. So I think a lot of it comes from that. But, you know, when you read the real stories of some of the most sinister of these groups, the Illuminati is one. The Illuminati was an offshoot of Freemasonry.

And the guy who started it really did want to do some weird government, you know, overthrow thing, but it failed. He was very inept. It fell apart in three years. But the story behind it, the idea that there was this secretive society that was trying to overthrow the government, has persisted 150 or so years past what really happened, because the real story is just not as interesting. We want the interesting story. And you can use that. You can use that to your benefit.

Srini Rao

Okay, so speaking of how to use that to your benefit, there's something that you actually said in the Hype Handbook, because I have my notes from Hype Handbook up here in front of me. You said, what hype artists know is that secret cabals of powerful people who are helping each other out in the shadows really do exist. It was how Edward Bernays got America to eat bacon, how Andy Warhol got people to accept soup cans as art, and how Dr. Oz gets people to accept strawberries as teeth whitener, and no matter where you come from, how much money you have or who you know when you start out.

it's a method available to you. In the interest of doing something incredibly selfish, which I was gonna ask you to help me with anyways, let's say that I wanted to do this with Unmistakable Creatives so that I could spread the word. I mean, already, it's pretty known in fact that we turned down 90% of podcasts, guess we put it on our homepage. And at this point, it's like we've turned down Gary Vaynerchuk, like literally, the filter is set up in such a way.

Michael Schein

Hehehe

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

that if you make it through it, there's a reason. And I can't even tell you the reason, even though I'm the one who makes the choice.

Michael Schein

Right. Well, what I might do is create a group, an exclusive group within an exclusive group. Right. So it's one thing to say, hey, I was a guest on a show and it was really hard to become that guest. You know, I was on The Tonight Show, you were on The Tonight Show. Hey, let's have a conversation. But we're not part of the same tribe in that way.

We just both had the same experience. So to me, this is an experience. You know, I've become Shrini Rao's friend. I was on his exclusive show. That makes me feel good. But I'm not in your fraternity, right? So here, I'm gonna talk about this in a roundabout way, right, so I happen to be Jewish and I never went to overnight camp, as I mentioned early on. You know, all the strands are coming together.

Srini Rao

Yeah, that's fine.

Michael Schein

And now I didn't realize that going to overnight camp is like this Jewish thing. Like I never knew that was a stereotype. I mean, other kids obviously go to overnight camp, but this idea that overnight camp is this pivotal experience in your life. And now I have a kid who doesn't go to overnight camp, but I see a lot of her Jewish friends and her cousin going, that it's this pivotal experience that you can't get anywhere else.

And I see to this day at 45 years old, I will see people who went to the same overnight camp as other people, you know, will do business deals with each other. Right. And someone said an anti-Semitic thing to me once about how Jews help each other out, and I was like, I don't think Jews help each other out. I think people who went to the same overnight camp help each other out. You know, so I think if I were you, what I might do.

is create either an experience or a club that's not just qualifying for a show, but where people can go through something together, right? So, hey, I've reached out to 25 members, 25 of the X hundreds or thousands of people who have been on the Unmistakable Creative have been selected for this, and this reason to become...

part of these super duper special club, you know, give it a Latin name or something, who knows, right? To become part of this club. We're all meeting together once every two years to do this special thing. We're not even telling other people that it exists. You've been, you know, so you've created this circle, this group that only knows about each other that interacts with each other that's been hand chosen by the man with the white coat, which is you.

Those people, I think, over time, the more they spend time together, either virtually or in person, will do anything for each other because they'll get to wear a badge that says that they're a member of the UC instead of just being someone who is a guest on the UC.

Srini Rao

Okay, so we've talked about it in terms of guess. So by default, I don't remember where I wrote this. I wrote about sort of, had there sort of levels of status, people don't seem to understand that whether you like it or not, as your status elevates, you get access to other people who have equal status or higher status. And it's like, how do you climb the ranks on the status ladder? Do something worthy of being on the next rung.

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

For example, like many of the guests who I can get today, I couldn't get two or three years ago, or even seven years ago when I started. But yeah, so we talked about that in terms of podcast. Let's talk about it for somebody who is in my audience who says, well, that's great. Strini has access to people that none of us have access to. What if I'm quote unquote a nobody in the grand scheme of things?

Michael Schein

Of course, right? Yeah.

Michael Schein

Well, I don't know. I mean, Joe Polish does this really well, right? I mean, are you familiar with his Genius Network? Yeah. I mean, so that... Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Totally. Okay, but wait, hold on. Let me stop there. But you and I know about the Genius Network. So what's the difference there? Like we happen to actually know about it and we're talking about it.

Michael Schein

Right. So I think it's a function of what are you going for. Right. So Joe Polish basically has it's not a secret society. It's just a society that costs a lot of money. Right. So there's two questions here. So one question is how do you get people in the audience to get the benefit of that? Well, people in his audience get the benefit of hanging out with Richard Branson for a day by paying a whole lot of money.

right? So they can piggyback off of that and they'll pay that money. I guess what I'm saying is, so again, I mean, I'm obviously a roundabout talker. I come in at different angles, but so, yeah, exactly. So when I was first starting,

Srini Rao

Yeah, I knew this conversation couldn't be linear. That just wouldn't be possible.

Michael Schein

my business, I would do all of these networking events. And I turned out to be really good at it. I would go to these cocktail events and this and that. And people would want to get to know me. And I would do the customary introductions and favors. And I would do them well. And as a result, people would start recommending business to me. So at first, copywriting business, which is what I did at first. And then I had this marketing agency, which has evolved since then. But it was the beginning of Microfame Media, my company. And a lot of times what would happen is people would sit

down and I would do the presentation and this and that and they would really like it. And when I told them the cost of my services, which was a fraction of what it was today, they would balk and they would say that they didn't have the money. And they didn't.

Because the people I was networking with were people like me. I was sort of half broke at the time. You know, I was aspiring. I hadn't really made it yet, if I've ever made it. But I was really, I was struggling, you know, so it was all solopreneurs. It was people who were living paycheck to paycheck, you know, who had left their corporate jobs and who were trying to become professionals, right? So I said to myself, okay, I have no status.

how can I piggyback off of the tales of people who do? And it occurred to me that if I could find a way to use something that I did have that they didn't have access to, which wasn't necessarily money or a title, they would let me into their circle. So I thought to myself, what do I have? Well, I had talked myself into a column at Inc.

But it was ink.com. I mean, let's be honest, you know, that's something to be proud of, but it's not being a journalist in the pages of ink where there's limited real estate. I basically wrote blog posts for ink, right? And I'm a writer. It wasn't making me any money, but to a lot of people, that's very...

Michael Schein

impressive. So what I would do is I would call up all of the conferences and I would say, listen, the ones that were good. And I would say, listen, I'd like to write about your conference. And my qualification was the conference had to cost between four thousand and eight thousand dollars to get into the door. So I would show up at these conferences and I would network with people at the conferences. And no one ever said to me, oh, hey, Microfame Media, so you're actually the poor guy who they let in on a press pass, right?

As far as they were concerned, I was in the circle. I had gotten through the door. So what I've always tried, and I started selling a lot. I mean, I started building my network, if you want to call it that, but with very, very quote unquote high level people. So I guess if I were giving advice around this, I would say, think about what you have, and you usually have something that can give you a foot in the door that isn't the obvious thing.

right? And I'm sure you did you do this to get guests early on? I'll flip the script. Like I'm assuming that before you had a big name, you somehow talked your way into getting your first kind of big guests.

Srini Rao

Do you want to know how the SoulPancake animated series happened?

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

looked at, you know, through SoulPancake, I saw, you know, the kind of content they did and I was like, we need somebody who will produce an animated series for us. And so I emailed SoulPancake and said, I want to interview Rainn Wilson. And they said, Rainn is too busy, but we'll give you Golriz Lucina, who is their creative director. And when I got her, right after we got done, I showed her a sample of some of her animations and eight months later, they greenlit our project. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Michael Schein

See, I rest my case, right? Exactly. But a lot of times, yeah, right. But a lot of times we minimize those things. We say, oh, you know, I'm not a big deal. I don't have anything to offer. I don't have status. But a lot of times the things we have are desirable to another group of people. Right?

Srini Rao

Oh, and that was very much by design.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Yeah, and people really overlook that. This is something that I see often, and I don't know about you. Like when people talk to me and they're starting something new or making sort of a shift, I'll have people who are VPs at companies and things like that come to me, it's like, oh, I don't know what to do, I don't know how to get started. I'm like, wait a minute, you have all these skills that got you to a point where you probably have made more money than I ever have.

and you're asking me for advice on how to do this. And these are what I call transferable skills. And I think people overwrite that. So I kind of came to the conclusion that probably my career as an author, published author, at least writing books with a publisher is over. And for a while I was really depressed about it and I thought, well, what a waste. I'm not gonna be able to use that. And then I realized I got a skill that will basically.

make me more money than writing any book ever would, and that was that I learned how to make ideas happen.

Michael Schein

100%. Yeah. And that's what you've been putting out into the world recently, and it's very popular.

Srini Rao

And that you can take to the bank.

Srini Rao

Yeah. I wouldn't.

Michael Schein

And I guess the other thing I'll add to this, because I forgot about the second part of the question, is style matters a lot, right? So a lot of times these...

You have to realize that everything is made up. Everything is invented. So we think about the Freemasons, right? This hallowed thing. Someone invented that. Someone just came up with it, right? There's a group at Penn where I went to school called Mask and Wig, and it has this amazing reputation. It's this theater group. It was for a long time the oldest all-male theater group. But you look at how they came up with it. In the 1800s, a guy didn't wanna do another Shakespeare play, so he said, hey, and he wrote this very fancy, sort of funny...

Missive to the theater community basically saying hey, I'm starting a new group that does light theater So everything is made up. So a lot of times we say oh, I want to network So you'll create a group called the you know telecom executives networking mastermind

and this and that, and it's just, you know, people join it for business purposes, but there's no mystery, there's no mystique, it's not exciting. I mean, think about having people have to wear something special, not in a goofy way, right? I mean, you know, people used to join the Elks clubs and the Freemasons and the Shriners. The Shriners, they wear these little fezzes on their hat and ride around on little cars. It's the mystical shrine of something or other. Use Latin language, use cool imagery, use

invitations that you have to come through a back door to get to. You know, Soho House is basically a salon networking group, but they made it so sort of fancy and interesting and exclusive that it became this thing everyone wanted to get into. So don't, you know, neglect the power of packaging. I mean, that's very, very important.

Srini Rao

So I actually remember writing a post about this, you know, for our, you know, private membership site. And so we had this guy named Jim Bunch, you might have heard his episode, Michael, where he talked about the nine environments that make up your life. Nobody knows who the fuck Jim Bunch is, except the people who have heard the unmistakable creative. Then a couple of years later, some woman came along and she basically, you know, took his concepts and she packaged them in a much more sort of tangible way.

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

and she ended up selling millions of copies of her book, got a show on Netflix, has her products in the container store, and that woman's name is Marie Kondo. Same message, different packaging. They both said the exact same thing, but the nine environments that make up your life doesn't have the same sort of resonance as the life-changing magic of tidying up. But they both say the exact same thing.

Michael Schein

right.

Wow.

Michael Schein

It is. It's so important. And when I say packaging, I don't mean, you know, this includes this, but just a nice logo and a nice website. It's all of the mystery. I mean, the Catholic Church does this very well.

Srini Rao

It's a-

Michael Schein

The Mormon church does this very well. You have to be a Mormon to go into the temple. And before they consecrate the temple, they open the temple for the public. And it's the only time it will ever be public. And everyone around comes to see this consecration. People come from out of town, but it's just a building.

It's the same building as it will be after it's concentrated, but that exclusivity, the language, the religiosity, that stuff matters.

Srini Rao

I mean, how do people fuck this up? Because I, I mean, remember, like I said, I think that the core idea of unmistakable was that all I kept seeing was that people would copy what they saw working for somebody else and then they would be shocked that they weren't getting the same result. And so often I'd see mimicry as opposed to modeling.

Michael Schein

I think people pull their punches, you know, I think we become too professional and too adult. So I'll give you an example. I struggle with this a lot, right? So I'm, I've created one of these groups. So I have this hype book list that

I totally ripped off from Ryan Holiday, but I do it differently. All of the books have some element of helping you become a better hype artist. And I keep using the word hype artist, but if you haven't heard the past interviewer read the book, it's just this idea of generating a huge amount of attention and excitement and borrowing from unconventional promoters. Right. So I put out these books, people like it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I had this idea that.

I needed my own secret society. I wanted a group of people that I'm part of who will go to the ends of the earth for each other and I want them to be prominent, important, creative people. So I was thinking about what to call it and I came up with the idea, which is what we're using, and I'm okay with telling you these elements. I just can't tell you who's in it and what goes on there, right? So that's the idea. But I'm calling it the ludic circle.

And I came up with that idea from this book, Homo Ludens, which is about gaming. And I just read this video game book called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is about video game creation. And they try to figure out if something has good ludic play, which means, you know, gameplay, but it's a Latin word. And I very quickly thought to myself, I can't call it that. No one knows what that means. It's sort of weird. I should just call it the like, you know, mastermind, you know.

back padding society. I mean, I don't know, you know, something much more in your face and that you understand what it is. And then I said to myself, you know, nah, I'm going to take a chance. I'm going to do this goofy fantasy thing because that's what I would have done when I was a young imaginative kid. That's what a lot of the mystical Shriners do. I want to do something that has magic and mystery. And if it fails, it'll fail big. So I think people pull their punches. They come up with these creative ideas, these

Michael Schein

goofy ideas, these wacky ideas, and they say, ah, that's not professional, people won't understand it, you know, this and that, and as a result, they become very boring and pedestrian.

Srini Rao

No, I mean, I see it over and over again. It's kind of shocking to me that you live in a world, this is one thing that I realized, and I remember I couldn't put it into this exact phrase, and I was so pissed off because, again, after reading your book, I was like, damn it, that sounds so much punchier than some of the ways I phrase this. And I was like, standing out in a sea of noise is no longer a matter of success, it's a matter of survival.

Michael Schein

hehe

Michael Schein

Yeah, that's 100% right. But the good news is you can, you can. Nothing is set in stone anymore, especially in the age of the Internet. Right. I mean, wasn't your whole thing was called blog FM or something like that in the beginning. I mean, OK, you know, you gave it a shot, but that's some pretty pedestrian packaging. But look what you've got now. Right. Your your artwork is really unique and cool. The name is great. I mean, because I think you were playful.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Michael Schein

I think, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think you weren't afraid to play with the thing a little bit.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. We actually intentionally didn't look at what anybody else was doing. I mean, if you go to our About page, you'll see it's a cartoon, which is terrible for SEO best practices. And I remember one of my friends asked me, it was Chris Ducker, he had me on his podcast, and we were talking about the rebrand, and he said, people are always afraid, they're like, how did you communicate this to your audience? And I was like, well, I didn't. I ignored everything that they told me.

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

because everybody thought it was crazy. They're like, why would you change the name of the show? It's such a good name. And, you know, like literally, I still remember the Facebook comments about it. And I realized I'm not gonna listen to anything that any of these people said. And it was funny because he said, that's literally the opposite of what I tell people to do. Which is kind of, I think there's this sort of interesting tension between knowing when to listen to what your audience is asking for and when to completely ignore them. It's kind of like that, you know.

Michael Schein

I struggle with it a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, it's kind of like that old Steve Jobs thing. If I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse, or Henry Ford, right? It was like, instead of a car, they would have asked for faster horses and buggies.

Michael Schein

And at the same time, people misuse that quote a lot, because I'll meet these people who aren't Steve Jobs, who have a product or a screenplay or whatever, and they get comments from experts, and they're like, I know better, and they don't. You know, so it's really a fine line, like everything else in life, yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, exactly.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that this is, you know, one of the things I, part of the reason I think you and I got along so well and I liked your book so much is that we both really kind of hit hard on this idea of context, which matters so much, which is, I mean, this is something that I think is so overlooked in all self-help, all prescriptive advice, and that is that all prescriptive advice is context dependent. Yeah, the same advice that changes one person's life could royally fuck up another's.

Michael Schein

Yeah, I think that's 100% right. I remember hearing Busta rhymes of all people, like on MTV News in the 90s. This stuck with me forever. And he said, the reason I succeeded is because I didn't have a plan B. And for years, I thought about that, and I was like, what an amazingly courageous guy. He didn't have a plan B. And then as I became an adult, I would hear people say things like that. You know, I would hear failing artists.

say things like that. And I would say, you know, the only reason it worked for Busta Rhymes is because it worked for Busta Rhymes. Like how many other rappers don't have a plan B and they're broke?

Srini Rao

I mean.

Srini Rao

Ray Dalio talks about this in Principles. He says you need to stay grounded in reality.

Michael Schein

Right.

Srini Rao

Well, I want to, you know, make, talk about, you know, a distinction that I've been, you know, kind of wondering about, and this is a distinction between hype and bullshit. You know, as I mentioned to you, we had John Petracelli, who wrote the Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, and I think you would absolutely love his book, but I want to bring back a clip from his episode. Take a listen.

Michael Schein

Yeah.

Srini Rao

So let's talk about that, Michael.

Michael Schein

Yeah, so there's so much here. I actually think now that I'm hearing this guy's quote, I think I might have come across his work in an article or something. I never read the book, but I find what he's saying and if it's the same article, I find it really important and interesting because there are we all know bullshit artists, right? I mean, they will say and do anything to manipulate reality to their benefit, but they believe

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Michael Schein

the lie, if you can even call it that, as they're saying it. I think for my work, what's so important here is that it's really about intent. So this is the thing, and this has really hurt me in my dating life. I did not, you know, I am dating for the first time over the last two years, in many years, and I have to go through a whole diatribe when people look me up to convince people that I'm not this awful, you know, sociopathic,

manipulator because they know that I wrote a book called The Hype Handbook. And what they don't know about me is that it doesn't come very natural to me. There are a lot of natural bullshitters. And what I found very interesting was that the natural bullshitters are able to so easily get people to buy into this stuff. If there were people who were bullshitters and everyone recognized them as bullshitters very easily, bullshit wouldn't work. The thing is, we're so wired to believe this bullshit. And what what? And I'm not.

naturally good at that. So what made me interested was, what is it about mass psychology, about the human social animal that makes us so susceptible to responding to certain stimuli in certain ways? And do you have to be a liar to take advantage of those stimuli or can that same sort of psychological force be applied for good? So for example, a bullshitter

Let's say there's a hypothetical guru who regularly preaches to thousands of people in arenas. And if you did even a cursory glance of the research, you would find out that the stuff that they're teaching is not good, that it's garbage, that it has no scientific validity. But this hypothetical guru uses lots of lights and colors and has a very loud voice and never uses qualifying language.

So you have to say to yourself, okay, this person's a bullshitter because they don't care that they're putting across something that has no scientific validity. However, what if we have something that does have scientific validity and we're presenting it in a very boring way? Can we borrow some of the lights and color and, you know, loud, unqualified talk to get the same reaction? So I don't think it's so much.

Michael Schein (01:01:06.298)

an issue of true or false, just like the gentleman you just played the clip from was talking about. It's that human beings respond to stimuli the way they respond to stimuli. That can be used to package a bunch of garbage, or it can be used to package really good stuff. But we often confuse the two because the people who are the best at this stuff are often bullshitters.

Srini Rao (01:01:32.386)

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it just kind of made me kind of in my mind when I heard that, as you know, you and I were listening together, I kind of just had this sort of, you know, pyramid of like, you know, lying bullshit and hype.

Michael Schein (01:01:44.226)

Right, there's lying, there's bullshit. And again, hype has a negative connotation. I kind of took back that word. Like I always loved how, I don't know, in the LGBTQ community, I thought it was so genius to take back the word queer. I mean, people don't remember that the word queer used to mean weird, like off, right? And people took that word and made it something kind of beautiful. So I was saying, well, hype has this negative word, but what if we simply defined it as

any set of activities that got people highly emotional so that they'll take the action that you want them to take. And I think a bullshitter uses hype to get people to take any action as long as it benefits them even if it's a garbage action. The science doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's true or false. A liar just lies. A liar just says fake stuff. A hype artist can either be a bullshitter or a liar or can also be an amazing...

social activist and business person. But it comes back to context mattering, right?

Srini Rao (01:02:51.57)

Well, I feel like I could sit here and talk to you about this for like three hours, and I knew this conversation would go in a bunch of different directions. So there's really, like I said, we knew this wasn't going to be the most linear conversation based on the content of it. So I want to finish with my final question, which will be interesting to hear you answer it, because you're back here for a second time. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Michael Schein (01:03:02.367)

Right.

Michael Schein 

You know, I really should have remembered that you were going to ask this, but I answered it once. And then, you know, I think the first time I might have said that it's someone who looks for the side doors. You know, I think the older I'm getting, I really am realizing that the most unmistakable people that I run into are people who are gritty.

But not maybe in the way that we often talk about grit, where it's just keep your nose down and keep pushing and keep grinding. It's people who are really good at looking at the mountain top and saying, I will take any path to get there. You might've started out wanting to be the world's greatest glassblower and you end up at the end being an arts manager or an arts attorney. But that person who just kind of wants to be in a certain world.

and keeps adjusting, having that open-minded sort of take in all of the stimuli mindset. Those people fascinate me. Those people who just aren't rigid, I think, those are always the unmistakable people to me.

Srini Rao 

Well, as always, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your insights and your wisdom with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your book and everything else you're up to?

Michael Schein 

Well, last time I talked mainly about the book, which, you know, if you go to Amazon and look up the Hypan book, it's there. Today, I'm really focused on some new stuff I'm doing. If you go to Microfame Media, F-A-M-E, MicrofameMedia.com, which is my company, I've gotten really involved with working with tech startups that are funded. So there are all of that. You might find this really interesting, Srini Rao. So I've encountered this concept.

in the tech startup world that everyone is talking about hype. And I didn't even know that I took hype from the hip hop world. So it turns out that there's this big conversation going on in the funded tech startup world and in the VC world and the private equity world, where people are saying that as long as you have a good product, the thing that gives you a $200 million valuation versus a $5 million valuation is whether or not you understand how to hype up your product. And

The great thing about a lot of these companies are so many of these people are doing world-changing products. They're creating world-changing products that don't have a chance to have an audience. So we've gotten involved lately in working with funded tech startups. And just like they go out and they hire people to do brand books, we go through a process and we figure out the recipe for hyping up their business based on little experiments out in the real world. And then we codify it into a hype guide that's tied just for them that they then disseminate through the organization. So they become kind of a hype engine.

it becomes part of their DNA. And it's been some of the most fun work I've done for years. So we talk about it on the website and that's really, I've been kind of knee deep in that lately. So thank you for asking.

Srini Rao 

amazing and for every be listening we will wrap the show with that.