Clay Clark | Apophasis | What Is Apophasis? How Does Donald J. Trump Use Apophasis? Discover the Top Persuasion Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Communicators + How to Go Viral & Reach Millions (Recorded 12/12/2018)

Audio Transcription

And I’ll tell you what, I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it. I won’t say he was an older fellow, but he was an older fellow. I’m not going to say anybody didn’t do well, they didn’t do well. I refuse to say it’s Bobby Knight, but it’s Bobby Knight. Now I won’t say it was because of me, but it was. Okay. I’m not going to say that was me, but believe me, it was me. I’m not going to say Jeb is low energy, but they did He’s our favorite. I refuse to say it was a scam tonight. All right this way They can’t report that I said it. I refuse to say that he’s a lightweight. Okay. I will not say he’s low-energy I will not say I can’t say this in front of Sean, but lie in Ted I won’t tell you what he did because he actually grabbed the one by the shirt, but I won’t say that I won’t say it with CNN, okay? I refuse to say in this room, because I say it outside and I get standing ovations, but this is a room I won’t do it. But it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged system. And she also sent a tweet out at three o’clock in the morning, but I won’t even mention that. She also said irredeemable, but we won’t mention that. We got very high ratings, by the way, but I won’t mention that. The one debate I missed, it was the lowest rated debate, by the way, but I won’t say that. We have more people here than they do, but we won’t say that. I always come out way above everybody else on the economy. And on leadership, by the way, but I won’t say that. It’s my strongest thing, according to the people that know me best. I won’t even say it myself. I think maybe even if I was going to say it, my temperament is the best. I know how to win. You did say it yourself, though, that disappointed. I want a little more definition of it. Hello? Hi, honey. It’s mom. Hey, what’s up? How are you? I’m good, I’m at work so I’m kind of busy right now, maybe I could call you later. So you know how to do a Facebook? What do you mean do a Facebook? Do you actually mean make a FaceTime phone call? Is that what they call it? Well I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about. Well you know, where you can see what you’re doing. That still sounds like both of them. When people see your pictures. Okay, that’s Facebook, you’re talking about Facebook. Yeah, I’m talking about Facebook. Can you copy Facebook into my new computer? Mom, you don’t put it in your computer. You just… it’s on the internet. What do you mean? Wait a second. Mom, you have a Facebook account. I know this because you liked almost every picture I post, like, instantly. I do. But I want a new one for my birdhouse business. Okay. Just log into your account and make a page. I have done that. I log in, I put in all the information, I put in all the pictures, and then the next time I go back it’s all gone and I have to do it all over again. When you get on, are you signing into Facebook or signing up? Yes! Wait, what’s the difference? Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you. And they have a lot of time on their hands. This started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zunig. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re at the top. Teaching you the systems to give what we got. Colton Dixon’s on the hoops, I’ll break down the books. See, bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s why I’m alive So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi It’s the CNC up on your radio And now 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here Started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, 8 kids. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. And Dr. Zoner, today I am very excited about our guest because we have a guy on the show, typically every guest we have is significantly smarter than I am. This guy is a legendary MIT graduate who really knows what he’s talking about. Joe, welcome on to the show. How are you, sir? I am really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Well, we’re going to try to keep today’s show fair and balanced, and we’ll kind of keep it politically right in the middle here. Although if people Google your name, they’re going to find that you are involved in quite a bit of topical topics. And we’re here to have you on the show today to talk about how to go viral and how to reach millions, your new book. My friend, you’ve been blogging for 12 years. There’s a lot of people out there who have been blogging for 12 years or two years or one year. How do you go about it? If somebody’s out there listening, they’re a business owner, how do they go about making their blog or their content stand out in such a cluttered, as you put it, a Niagara Falls of noise coming from social media. How do our listeners go about making their social media posts stand out? Well, I think the main, my main point is that there are a series of strategies that do work to make your content much more likely to go viral. And I talk about the, you know, the bottom line goal is, look, I think anybody can see that there is a Niagara fall of noise. There’s just a constant volume of content, free content that everyone is bombarded with, whether it’s business or politics or the Kardashians. You know, it’s non-stop. So it has gotten considerably harder to break through. I’ve been fortunate after 12 years of blogging, you really get to learn. You get a lot of feedback on what works and what doesn’t work. I see which headlines work, which gets most Facebook likes, which gets page views, which gets how much time on the page. You know, I have a lot of data at my fingertips now, given the state of the art in apps and software packages. So, you know, as someone with scientific training, but who’s also a writer, I have tried to merge the two together, and that’s sort of what I talk about in how to go viral and reach millions. And the central thing we’re trying to do to break through is to be clicky and sticky, to use the modern parlance. Clicky meaning I need to grab your attention. Your attention, you have a million things that could potentially distract you, so I have to grab it. But then it’s not enough just for me to grab your attention, I have to hold onto it and be memorable. So I want to get you to click on my post or click on my Facebook page or if it’s an email, I want you to open the email, click open the email and then I want you to stick around. Stick around long enough to read the content and ideally, at the very least, remember it if I’m trying to brand or get a message out. But the goal is, how do I grab your attention, how do I keep your attention, and there is now a lot of data and a lot of social science and marketing science on what works best. Now, what I would like to do is I’d like to have a very linear dialogue with you. And you feel free to make it non-linear because you’re the MIT graduate and you’re in charge here. I’m just going to go kind of step by step. And, Chip, I love the strategy. I’m a very, you know this, I’m very systems-based. I love strategic step by step. So we’re going to go into email subject lines. Okay? When you write an email subject line, so many people see, I’m sure you’ve had this, someone sends you a wall of text and a subject line that is not interesting. So, Joe, if you were trying to get the attention of somebody, if our listeners are trying to get the attention of somebody in an email, I’d like to tap into your wisdom about how to write a headline in the email subject line that’s going to be clicky and sticky. How do we do it? Absolutely, no, that is absolutely the central thing. By the way, it is true if you’re doing a Facebook post, that first line, a tweet, the first few words, a blog post, again, the first line, or a regular print ad or any other kind of ad. In the book, I have a whole chapter on headlines, and I quote David Ogilvie. Yeah, the advertising guru. The advertising guru. Some people consider him the father of advertising. He wrote, and this is back in 1963, on the average five times as many people read the headline as the body copy, and a change of headline can make a difference of 10 to 1 in sales. Right. So, yes, the headline, and by that I’m saying you should be spending a lot more time writing your headlines or the subject line of the email. The chances, and you know from your own how much email you get and how much do you delete instantly. Instantly. Instantly. So, you know, the open rate on an email might be 1%, 2%, you know, if people are really good at it, 3% or 4%. Now if it’s your friend, you know, it’s a higher probability. But we’re talking about emails that are either trying to get you business, or maybe you’re sending a cold email to a prospect. So you have to grab their attention. And so you have to, first of all, be very clear and blunt right up front. You know, you don’t have time to mess around. I can just tell you from my experience, I get to see in real time, because we actually test our headlines, that the first few words make a big deal of difference. The way you should approach this, all writing, everything you’re doing online, but even public speaking is, I have to get someone interested in the first few words, and then I have to keep them interested in the next few words, and next, and next, and next. Now, if I want to draw them in right, I want to give them the impression that I’ve got something of value to say to them and that it’s going to be interesting. That’s the other thing that I’m a person who can deliver on the headline because we all have the bad experience of clicking on a link, thinking we’re going to get something interesting. And then it turns out that it was all hype. It’s just clickbait. It’s garbage. Oh, I hate that Hey Joe, this is dr. Z. Do you prefer Joe or Joseph or what? I think Joe is great. Joe is great. Okay good When you well, give me some examples because we love the examples I mean, you know in theory say you got it. You got to write something that really grabs him I mean, that’s cool But give me like one that you you tested in real time and you saw that really grabbed him. Give me some one or two success stories of headlines that you wrote or you helped write. Give us one teaser. We know your book is going to be filled with these things. Give us one little something. Here’s an idea that I often give people. If I’m writing you to remind you about a lunch, don’t just reply to whatever the was original hello memo. You know put a you know lunch tomorrow at at 1230 because they may only look I mean let’s assume that the only piece of so one lesson to be learned is there’s a very good chance the only thing they’re going to see is the email a headline okay so if you’re trying to communicate a piece of information let’s use that piece of information if it’s someone you know moderately well and maybe you’ve you know someone you’re trying to do a sale to or something you’re sending them an email reminder don’t bury the lead that that’s you know the first what is the single most important thing that you are trying to communicate. So, you know, I can’t, you know, my father was a newspaper editor for 30 years, so I sort of heard over and over again, don’t bury the lead, don’t bury the single most important thing, thinking you have to build up to it, because nobody’s reading that long anymore. Good work. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to do this, and Joe, I’m going to kind of put my foot into the water of politics, not a political show, and then you can just kind of slap me because you are the MIT graduate. So here we go. You are a guy who is schooled and fit. You’re a physicist. You’re an author. By training, yeah. You’re a blogger. And there are a lot of physicists, authors, and bloggers out there, frankly. There’s a lot of them. between you and them is that you were named by Rolling Stone in 2009 as one of the 100 people who are changing America. Now, whether I agree with you about politics or not, or our listeners do, the point is people know your name and they know what you’re working on. You’ve been able to draw attention to some of the things that you’re working on. Specifically, you have a new project. You’re not new, but it’s new-er. It’s 2014, so the last four or five years, Years of Living Dangerously, which is a feature, I believe you can see it on Showtime, if I’m correct? It was originally Showtime, now it’s National Geographic and Facebook, which is, we really transitioned to to focusing on online viral videos. I like Don Cheadle and I like Harrison Ford, so I watch the whole thing on Showtime. And then, again, you can get it on Facebook, you can get it on YouTube, you can get it on Showtime, you can get it on National Geographic. So I guess the non-political thing is you are an expert of climate change. But there’s a lot of guys at local coffee shops who think they’re an expert on climate change. So you’ve been able to stand out as a result of being able to write good headlines, but then you back it with research. So let’s get into this headline thing. If you’re going to write a headline for your blog, how is that maybe different from writing a headline of an email or a subject of an email? The subject is the headline of the email. When you write a headline of a blog, how is it different from the subject of an email? Talk to me about the importance of backing what you’re saying with research. Because when someone does get to the body of it, it can’t just be hoo-ha. Right, well look, I think of all of them the same. In other words, if it’s important, I’m gonna spend a lot of time on the headline and to flesh out a little what I’m saying, you know, I’m trying to stimulate an emotion because that’s what makes things, that’s one of the things that makes things go viral, We are creatures who like stories, and we like stories that have compelling characters that stir emotions. Fundamentally, those were the first things that went viral. Those were the great stories, the epic poems by the Bards, Iliad, the Odyssey, the stories in the Bible. that we come to care about and emotionally connect with and ultimately the goal. So in the headline, if I’m really trying to write a good headline, I want to promise the reader something that is going to be emotionally compelling to them and suggesting to them that what they’re going to read is an interesting story, not just filled with But it has taken me 10 years to unlearn What I learned And and I try to make this point wherever I go I mean and it’s one of the reasons I’m able to understand it because I had to physically you This the higher educational system this country does not teach people how to communicate effectively. They are teaching based on this model that people are persuaded by facts and numbers and charts and and PowerPoints with bullets and that’s not true. People have always been persuaded and connected to stories and the memorable, compelling phrases that make up stories, which are called the figures of speech. Things like irony and hyperbole and metaphor, as well as repetition and rhyme and puns. So as an example, I want to just tee this up real quick. There are so many optometrists that will run ads talking about do you want your cornea? To be healthier. Do you want your they’ll talk about feel good? What’s a cornea the pupil? Do you want your pupil to be do you want to help your in people’s? I don’t know what that means and then dr. Z says at dr. Robert Zellner and associates. He’s the leading optometrist in Oklahoma. We’re going to see you do an exam and your first pair of glasses for $99. That’s the headline. But yet, when you get into your optometry clinic, Z, there’s a lot more to it. There’s a lot more value they offer. There’s a lot more, obviously, prescriptions. There’s tests. It’s more specific than that. But what gets them in is the headline. So for you, Joe, as a climate change expert, give us the headline. If you had to say in like two sentences or less, what’s the headline on your world view about climate change? I want to get your headline. If you had to break out of the clutter and you go, hey, hey, hey, everybody out there listening, what is your headline or your thesis or what are you trying to tell the world? What’s your headline? Climate change is real. It’s happening now. It’s caused by us, but it’s a solvable problem if we act quickly. Otherwise, the kinds of super storms, super droughts, the Hurricane Harvey, well, you’re down in your neck of the woods. deluge once in ten thousand year deluge that that that we’re just remembering the one-year anniversary of uh… hitting houston hurricane harvey these things are becoming more uh… more common but i what i what i what i watch your film years of living dangerously that you advised on the in the award-winning film there that feature don chito harrison for james cameron was involved on schwarzenegger uh… the film wasn’t just you standing in front of a whiteboard spitting off facts, right? No, not at all. I’m not in… I don’t think I make an appearance at all. I was the science advisor and my job was to help make sure they keep the facts accurate. So why doesn’t that work? Why can’t you just sit there in front of a screen and spit off facts, even though you know that you have done the research behind your facts, and whether some of our listeners or I agree with you or not, you’ve done the research, but why can’t you just hop in front of a blackboard and just bring it? Why do you have to bring on some celebrities and bring on some emotion? Why do you have to do that? Well there’s no short answer. Let me give you the medium answer to that. Fundamentally, our brain is the most energy consuming part of our body. It’s like 25% of our metabolism. We developed over thousands and tens of thousands of years all these shortcuts so we don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking in situations. If you and your tribe are out there in the jungle and you got separated from them and all of a sudden you hear some strange noises and everyone in the tribe is running the opposite direction. So what do you do? Do you stop and analyze the facts? Can I figure out if that noise is getting louder or not? Is it a dangerous animal or not? Or do I just do what everyone else is doing? So the main shortcuts that people are using to figure out if they believe you or not is, are you in my tribe? Are you one of me, one of us? And number two, do your emotions match your words, truthfully? And that was the great insight, really, that the Greeks had when they codified rhetoric. And so it turns out that if you can do those two things, you will be persuasive, you will make a sale. That’s why they say to salesmen, the first thing you have to do is sell yourself. If you can convince the customer you are trustworthy and on their side, then they’re gonna listen to you. But that’s the first thing. If I just throw a bunch of numbers at you. You know, I quote in the book Dan Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for helping create behavioral economics. He’s the first psychologist ever to do it. He basically told the economic community, hey, people don’t act rationally. And he wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow, and he just talks about, you know, in some situations you have the time to do a lot of deliberate thinking, but most of us have this thing called intuition, our fast thinking process, which is really a pattern matching process. Do I recognize this situation on the basis of something I was in before or someone told me about before? And fundamentally, those shortcuts are the things everybody uses to make decisions. So look, if I give, I don’t even give talks on, detailed science talks on the science of climate change anymore because no one in the audience is in a position to adjudicate the science. I try to speak where they are, you know, and let me give you just a broader example of the change that smart business people are making. So Jeff Bezos, richest guy in the world, his company just became the second to hit a trillion dollars in market cap. In his 2018 letter to his shareholders, he says, I just banned PowerPoints at Amazon. In business meetings, no one comes with PowerPoints because that’s not how people learn, it’s not how they retain information with a bunch of bullets. He switched over to what? Narrative memos. You write up a story because he’s, because the literature, I mean it’s just endless amounts of social science that we spent thousands and tens of thousands of years telling stories to each other and that’s how our brains developed. And so the job one is to package yourself into a story. You know, what is your story? What is the story of your product? And how is it connected to a problem the person you’re talking to wants to solve? And what I’ve tried to do in how to go viral and reach millions is talk about both the ancient art of storytelling and the modern science of storytelling. Z, he just gave some knowledge bombs. I’m going to try to sort them out here. Exploding right now. It’s powerful. I know, and I love your, when you research, when you Google the thing called the, it could be Goggle, I don’t know, it could be, apparently it’s a new thing. Google, it’s a new thing. It’s how to go viral and reach millions. Top persuasion secrets from social media superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and even Donald Trump. I mean, you’ve either offended everybody in the world, or you’ve turned on everybody in the world with that line, right? That’s awesome, by the way. That’s a good headline. I’ve got a two-part question for you. You may not know the answers, but I’m hoping you do, because you seem like a really smart guy. It’s not like an answer challenge, but why do you think, number one, why do you think people out there don’t believe your narrative of global warming? That’s the first part. And then the second part is, for those who do believe it, the average dude on the street, what can you do about it? Well I think it’s a great question. I actually just did a post today. I spent a lot of time talking to people, obviously, that question. One of the reasons I became a blogger, this is a true story, because I was doing clean energy. I had worked at the U.S. Department of Energy and I worked with the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. I worked with some of the people who did the underlying research that led to natural gas fracking, Texas people, actually, Bill White, the former mayor of houston and uh… uh… i switch from clean energy how i was doing clean energy consulting i was consulting with companies like i’d be a man johnson johnson uh… on how to you know uh… abuse renewable energy had a cut your energy bill that sort of thing how to reduce your pollution and then my brother lost his home in hurricane katrina Katrina. He was working at the VA hospital in Biloxi as the head of rehab medicine, and he asked me if he should rebuild his home, because losing your home is a big deal, as I’m sure you know, and you don’t want to do it again. I started researching the science and talking to scientists and going to lectures, and I realized two things, one of which was the situation was more troublesome than people realized, but secondly scientists were doing a lousy job of communicating. And so I really have tried to devote the last 12 years to understand what doesn’t work about communications the way scientists traditionally do it, you know, and what does work. the shortest possible answer to your question of why large numbers of people don’t believe it is because this issue has shifted from being a science-based issue to being a Political tribe issue and it is it is people establish their identity Now through politics, right? I’m not we don’t we don’t have to get into a politics discussion But I think you know what I’m with this party, or I’m with this person, or I’m with that party, or I’m with that person, you then buy into their slate of beliefs, and you don’t do a lot of your own investigation. And that is why, in the show, Years of Living Dangerously, and online at the website, we have switched over to just doing these stories, short form stories or the long form stories. We did win the Emmy for Outstanding Nonfiction Series in 2014. The executive producers are James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the line producers were these two former 60 Minutes producers who have 13 Emmys between them. I have learned a lot from them because they know how to do a certain kind of storytelling and it’s got to be built around interesting people and be emotionally compelling and And then and and tell stories along a certain pathway and that’s one of the things I really want to communicate to your audience because the the chapter in the book that has gone the most viral that the most people have responded to and said, boy, this has really changed the way that I look at writing and writing speeches, is this rule of replacing, this way of simple strategy for turning any written item or any speech into something that operates the way an emotionally compelling story does And so I’d love to just spend like, you know, literally just a minute Yeah, and and explain that because it is really it is it is the simplest thing But like I said, for instance, I bought my book on Kindle so I could see which are the most marked-up passages God I can tell you all of the most marked-up passages in this book are in chapter 2 and it’s really quite simple. Literally all that you need to do is to go through, it’s called the rule of replacing, and you just take something you’ve written or a speech that you’ve written out and circle all the word, all every use of the word and. Got it. And you’re now going to replace them as often as possible with the word but or equivalence like yet because you’re trying to introduce the kind of conflict and narrative tension we expect in our best stories. Got it. And then you’re gonna replace and with therefore or equivalence like so to introduce the resolution of that conflict and tension. And what you’re trying to do is instead of having a just this happened and this happened and this happen, which is the height of uninteresting, the basic storyline is, this happened and this happened, but then this happened, and so I was forced to do this. This is the arc, the setup, of all of the great stories. invented by Trey Parker who did the Book of Mormon, you know, Monster, Broadway Head, and South Park, multi-enemy winning storylines. But I’ve gone through, I just looked for instance at the most viral speech in all of human history, which is probably the Sermon on the Mount, since there’s billions of Bibles out there and people have been going to church and hearing this over and over and over again for 2,000 years, that speech, again, it has a large number of buts and a large number of therefores, because what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount is He is describing the way people thought they were being taught, and then he’s saying, but really, this is what you’re supposed to be doing. And so, and if you go through all the great speeches, I reference in the book, Oprah’s, the first viral speech, 2018, it may seem like a really long time ago, but Oprah’s speech at the Golden Globes, lot of attention to her. And again, it uses this and but therefore trick. And I talk about the Gettysburg Address and what Lincoln does. And fundamentally, literally, it may seem incredibly simple, but all the great speeches throughout human history have used this basic formula. All of your titles, all the chapter titles in your book, are all going to get people’s attention. I mean, how to be a big winner like Trump without being a big loser like Trump. How to tell a viral story. Word of mouth from Jesus to Lincoln to Oprah. Short words win. Short words sell. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Only memorable memes go viral. I mean, you really are the master of headline writing and you talk a lot about these five rules for going viral online. Can you share a couple of those rules for going viral online? Sure, and what I did, the first rule is you have to put things in a story form and persuade people that what they’re going to get is an interesting story. Because that’s, you know, I have an 11 year old daughter, so for the first 11 years of her life It’s just story story stories. Please tell me another story. Please tell me another story Can you read that story again? Can I watch the first movie of Harry Potter 30 times in a row? Stories are we are the story craving animal really and so rule one is you have to tell the emotionally compelling story and use this in but therefore rule of replacing. Rule number two is to use the figures of speech. Now you know when we were in middle school maybe we you heard some figures of speech like metaphor or irony. It’s not really taught that much anymore. But what are the figures of speech the figures of speech are literally just the memory tricks That were created by the great storytellers of ancient times so that they could memorize a two-hour long epic poem and that people could remember them and It got codified by the ancient Greeks, and I’ll just tell you the fascinating You know 60 second story of why rhetoric was codified by the ancient Greeks and then by the Romans was the Greeks switched from trial by magistrate to trial by jury. And in front of a magistrate, you’d be arguing the law. But these juries were 500 people or more. It was majority vote and it would decide your entire future. And there’s no judge no rules of evidence your accuser spoke for 30 minutes And you spoke for 30 minutes, and you simply had to persuade the a majority of the hundreds of people listening That you were more believable than your accuser and as a result a group of people Arose who would write those speeches for you if you had enough money And if you didn’t they would teach you some lessons, or you could buy their book and unsurprisingly there were lots of books written about how you could be an emotionally compelling and believable speaker. And so that’s, and they codified all of these things. And so why do we use metaphors? Metaphors are maybe the single most memorable figure of speech, because I’m connecting something we know with something we don’t know. And that’s why it’s in advertising, you know, Chevy, like a rock, that sort of thing. And so all of these figures of speech, which we don’t teach much, but the modern advertising industry we discovered, and in fact, most of the marketing literature makes, you know, how do you write a compelling headline? How do you write a compelling ad? You use the figures of speech and literally 80% of all advertising headlines uses one or more figures of speech because those are the things that are going to stick in your mind and it’s why you hear so much repetition. Repetition is the single most commonly used memory trick and if you have a small child you know how effective simply repeating the same thing over and over can be. and we see politicians who are good at repetition and politicians who are not so good at repetition and I don’t think it’s a surprise that the people who are good at repetition tend to do better. Now I don’t want to steal your thunder from the book. Wait a second, back to you. Well I had a second part to my question. A second part. A second part and it went something like this if I can remember it Joe. What can the average person do? Joe slash average. The proactive listener. Yeah. He’s out there listening going, you know, I believe in climate change and I don’t want the world to burn up and I don’t want to die. What what what are some steps? What are some just basic things that the average person can do to help with this phenomenon? With climate change? Correct. Sure. Well, I mean, and I you know, and I I Oxford University Press asked me to write their primer on climate change, what everyone needs to know. So that book is also out there. And I think, I tell people, you should get informed because it’s gonna, I tell people that the impact of climate change and what we do about it is gonna have as big an impact on the world in the next 25 years as the internet did in the last 25 years. And if you were up to speed, if you were ahead of the curve 25 years ago on the internet, and so you know the information technology revolution, you were in better shape in terms of your career or what your kids went to school in or choices that you made in the stock market and the same is exactly true. We’re in the midst of this clean energy revolution. And I write, you know, as I say, I’m a former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. So I write a great deal about the clean energy revolution and whether it is solar power or wind power, these things have come down in price, you know, literally by a factor of a hundred over the past quarter century or so. And if you hadn’t looked at it in recent years because you thought it was sort of expensive and clunky, right now there are solar power deals where companies will literally come to you and you don’t have to put any money down. They’ll do a leasing deal where they’re you the solar panels for less than your current electricity bill. So the entire world of financing has changed and if you haven’t had an energy audit in your house, the LED lighting which 10 years ago was just quite expensive and only used in unique situations, you could go into a Sam’s Club or any one of those stores or go on Amazon and you can buy an LED light bulb for two or three bucks. And this is a light bulb that is basically going to last your lifetime. And it is going to use so little energy that it will pay for the extra cost compared to an incandescent within a year or two. There’s been this whole revolution in clean energy. By the way, if you have kids, I’m sure they’re nagging you because the kids are way ahead of all of us in terms of the use of technology. My advice always is get informed. We can’t all be expert on everything and I don’t ever tell anyone you’ve got to go out and be an expert on every subject. Obviously you can try to find people that you trust and go by them or find a website that you trust, something like that, the way we do with a movie reviewer, right? We have a movie reviewer maybe we like. Obviously now we go to Rotten Tomatoes. So, I think people should understand it is a serious problem, but there are lots of solutions, there are lots of things individuals can do. What’s the biggest area that contributes to global warming, in your opinion? In your scientific opinion. the recent global warming is burning fossil fuels. In the scientific community there’s not any question of that. I mean we’re talking about essentially all of the recent warming is due to the increase of carbon dioxide and some other heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. That is what has changed. And you know, I don’t, like I said, I understand I’m not going to be able to persuade everybody. And that’s, you know, I think people need to understand this because, like I said, it’s going to affect your lives and your family’s lives and where you want to live. You know, already we’re seeing, by the way, in on coastal property values, that places that are more prone to flooding are already seeing slower growth in property values than places that aren’t prone to flooding. So let’s just say out there, I’m listening and I say to myself, I’m going, you know what, I agree with your worldview, or someone said they don’t, but either way, they’re a blogger and they want their story to go viral. My friend, you have, it appears as though you’ve developed super hacks or super moves or strategies for telling viral stories that are now used by Hollywood’s best screenwriters. So regardless of what side of the political aisle somebody’s on, a listener, or what kind of worldview they have, that seems to be a pretty awesome move to be able to take a worldview that you’ve studied and researched and to be able to tell a viral story that is now used by Hollywood’s best screenwriters. I mean James Cameron, we’re talking Arnold Schwarzenegger. How do you do that? Right and so you know one of the points I want to make is you know in the book How to Go Viral and Reach Millions, that book is focused in you know primarily on discussing these secrets. And I think that, and as you can see in the subtitle, you know, these are the, Oprah and Donald Trump, they do many of the same things. Maybe you like one, don’t like the other. It doesn’t matter. We, you know, clearly both of them know something about making content go viral, whatever else you think about that. That’s for sure. And look, I tell, you know, I’m more on the progressive side. You know, I tell my progressive friends, you can’t, let’s learn from people who know how to do what they do. And if you think that they don’t, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on. So, you know, this, and by the way, Donald Trump is a complete and total master of using this, using the word but you know to create attention and and then offer his answer right that and and a friend of mine another actually marine biologist who went to USC to study filmmaking because he also was frustrated at how poorly scientists were communicating he actually did this analysis you can analyze any speech including one of your own speeches where you take the text of the speech and you count up the number of ands and you count up the number of butts and You divide the butts into the ends you’re looking for a ratio And then you can multiply it by a hundred and that will give you a number between zero and a hundred But the point is the people who are really good at Storytelling are using a lot of buts. They’re using like a for every and, for every four ands they’re using a but, or for every three ands they’re using a but. The people who are not good at storytelling, they’re just using a lot of ands. I have a but question for you. I just want to say but right now because I feel like I’m not a good speaker unless I say it. You are an MIT trained physicist. You’re an author of ten books. You have advised a project that was put together by Schwarzenegger and James Cameron, but can you imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger? That’s a good but question. Come on, Joe, you could do it. You know you can, but you won’t. I’ll be back. Okay, now I want to ask you, when you were putting together… I will say, I’ve met Arnold a couple times as a result of this. I’ve been able to go to some shoots where he was, and at the second season premiere that was in New York City, I was able to interview him. I actually did the red carpet interviews of a lot of celebrities, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and you know who else was there was Tom Brady and his wife oh come on now Tom Brady yeah but he brings up Brady this just did I had to bring up Brady because his wife Giselle is in the set is in the season two she’s Brazilian and she actually goes to Brazil and looks at sort of what’s going on with the rainforest, you know, that we heard about you know 15-20 years ago, but what’s going on, what are they doing right, what are they doing wrong, and she came. I have a photo, someone snapped a photo of me with Giselle, but in the background is Tom. He was trying to, you know, he was totally cool. He was like, this is his wife’s moment. He was like being very low-key as low-key as Tom Brady. He has a hot question for you. I got a hot question. On these shoots are you shooting animals or are you shooting, I mean I’m sure it’s not like people. No, no, no, I’m sorry these are film shoots. No I don’t. Oh, oh, oh. He’s trying to practice that judgment. You’re the judge. I don’t know you’re out there you got a gun. I’m thinking you got no these are you know and I one of the things by the way I learned is is that no matter how amazing and compelling the movie or whatever thing You’re watching is the filming of it was really boring Right you know it takes an hour of filming to get like 10 seconds of good footage And I used to go to these shoots because like oh I get to meet so-and-so You know and oh I get to meet so-and-so and that was exciting but now I’m sitting around and nothing’s happening most of the time but that’s what you have to do that’s that’s sort of my job to make something go viral the point is yeah you have to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work in terms of thinking you can’t just do crap off the top of your head and think anyone’s gonna be interested you know now as Joe’s talking though he kind of inserted a little bit of Tom Brady knowledge there. As these are wrapping up, we’re only going to give him an extra four hours on this interview. Now, he’s mentioning Tom Brady here. But that’s fair. That’s, but that’s fair, right? So as we’re wrapping up our final, our final three questions, I want to ask you, Joe, because you spent so much time studying this, what makes a good storyteller? When you say the butt, I love the butt ratio, that’s great. So I guess, where do you see most people getting it wrong when they tell stories? Because I feel like, I used to travel all around the world doing speaking, and Joe, because I was a former disc jockey, people would hire me to teach how to grow a company because I grew an entertainment company, and my job was to make boring events funny. So that was kind of like my superpower, was combining entertainment and education. But I would watch somebody speak before me or after me who was dramatically more educated, more intelligent, and they just could not get anybody to pay attention. But they knew all the answers. So talk to us about where we’re getting it wrong as it relates to storytelling. Well I think, you know, that in higher education, the higher educational system does not teach storytelling. In fact, it teaches anti-storytelling. I can tell you, you know, I went through a PhD program in science, of course, you’re told don’t talk about yourself. Remove the I, because this is all about, quote unquote, objective fact. And therefore, don’t talk about the troubles you had doing the experiment or why you’re passionate about the science or why you think this problem matters. So, but I’m quite well aware that it’s not just scientists who get this training. I think this training occurs on the medical side. I think it’s even in the social sciences, whether, you know, economics or art history, this notion that we can reduce things to sort of this fact. So I think that people have to unlearn that. And that’s, you know, like I said, it took me many years. If people just listen to me and try to do some of these things, it will make a difference. But you are going to have to very consciously catch yourself. You know, I was fortunate to have a daughter. So, you know, there’s a story I tell at the beginning of the book where she says to me, I’m talking to her at the age of three, and she starts saying to me, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, well, you know, and I had this view because she picked up a lot of phrases. Hey, she could use a phrase if she knew what it meant. So I said, you know, so, Anthony, do you know what blah, blah, blah means? And she pauses and said, it’s when daddy says something that doesn’t matter. So, okay, she got it. She did get it. What I was saying does not matter to her. And it literally took me years to realize, what I have to do is tell stories. Now there’s a certain form of a story, talked a bit about that. There’s certain phrases and words you wanna use like metaphor and irony and repetition. And then of course, there is the most famous stories, the stories that comprise, you know, half of all movies, which is the hero’s journey, that I’m sure, you know, many people have heard that term, that was the term, Joseph Campbell studied all the great myths from the great storytellers and figured out that all the great hero stories follow a certain pattern. And that book was read by George Lucas and he created Star Wars episodes 4, 5, and 6 based on that heroic myth called the Monomyth. And then Bill Moyers did a series of interviews of Joseph Campbell in which he talked about the hero’s journey and I commend people to one or more of those and that translated out and then there was this screenwriter who wrote a book called The Screenwriter’s Journey basically saying, hey, this is the basic story and if you’re wondering why all the superhero stories and all the Disney movies and all the romantic comedies and all these movies seem to have the same story arc, that’s because this is the story that was the most viral story in human history passed down over thousands of years. And it has become embedded in our culture. And people do need to understand, and I talk about it a bit in the book, what is this hero’s journey? Sometimes it’s called the zero-to-hero story. You’re explaining why it is someone – at the end of the day, when I’m talking to you, I’m trying to convince you that you have a problem that I can solve, right? I mean, if I’m a salesperson, there’s some problem you have I can solve. And my story arc is how I went through this tough time hitting the same roadblock that you did and how I got through that point and attained the wisdom to solve this problem that you did. And this story, which is very, you know, it’s the same story, whether we’re talking Luke Skywalker or Spider-Man or Harry Potter or Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, it’s always the same arc of the story. It always has the same components. And this story, I can assure you, when someone is getting up to speak and you’ve never met this person before and they’re introducing yourself to them, they are telling you some version of this story. Now Joe, the final two questions I had for you, I’d like for you to just touch on the three activating emotions that trigger content sharing. I’d love if you could recommend a book for all the listeners out there. The three activating emotions that trigger the content, if you could just kind of touch on that. Then I’d like if you could recommend a book for all the entrepreneurs out there who are big readers. They like to just devour book recommendations from guys like you. So can you start by talking to us about the three activating emotions? Sure. So when people study content that goes viral online, let’s say an easy analysis someone did is they looked at 7,000 New York Times articles and see which ones made the most emailed list Right because those are the ones that people wanted to share with other people and they found that that what made stuff go viral Was something that that aroused people emotionally? But it was a certain type of emotions what they called an activating emotion. So not surprisingly outrage is something that motivates people to share and I’m sure we all have plenty of you know text and emails of content that outrage someone. Another one is anxiety, something that made someone worry you know like you know those articles on the three foods you and then the third is the things that that create all you know the things that are like all this cat can play the piano type of thing uh… or this guy can kick up football through you know any hoop anywhere you know if you’ve seen that so what we’re trying to any other the fourth element is in which i talk about separately is humor uh… which is related to irony. You know, we’re trying to show someone something that’s unexpected and therefore, you know, makes them laugh. These are the things that people are the most likely to share and if your headline can sell them on the notion or the subject line in your email or your tweet can sell them on the notion that when they click through or read the email or read the rest of the post, they’re going to get that emotion satisfied and maybe they’re going to like it so much they’re going to share it and they’ll get a little social credit with their friends for sort of being, hey I saw this viral thing that’s amusing or interesting or outrageous first and I’m sharing with you. And that’s what you know we’re a social animal and that’s what what sharing is all about. So basically a cat video kicking a football through a hoop offensively but makes you laugh is just a slam dunk. Right, and there’s a reason why cats are so viral. Cats are not as domesticated as dogs. still half, you know, if you look at the history of dogs, they came to humans and we’ve been breeding them for tens of thousands of years. Cats are much more recent, they’re much more, you know, hey, they’re coming to us for food or to kill rats, you know, and all that stuff. But the point is, cats are much more unpredictable, much less socialized, and that’s why they seem to do things that are so unexpected compared to you know your domesticated dog. Not that dog videos aren’t cute, I’m not here to get emails. We’re gonna get a lot of dog lovers now. And you know look, to answer your book question, clearly you know I was frustrated that I didn’t see put together in one place the ancient art and modern science of storytelling. And not only that, the reason I wrote How to Go Viral and Reach Millions is also because a lot of the books on communications aren’t actually very readable. And I’m glad you read the headlines, because I spent years figuring out how to, you know, when I write, I have a chapter on irony, but I put in a lot of irony and ironic humor, and I have a chapter on metaphors, and I quote, you know, Lincoln, a house divided against itself cannot stand. The point is the metaphor chapter has metaphors, and it also has modern stuff, you know, and I quote from Seinfeld, one of the most ironic of shows, and I quote from the Big Bang Theory, which, again, another very, very heavily ironic show. And I talk about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece, which is, I tell people, people ask me, what is the single thing I can do to become better at storytelling? And I tell them, download the soundtrack to Hamilton and memorize it. My daughter did that in three weeks. I had taken my mother to see Hamilton because I knew she would love it. I brought this down to her home. My nine-year-old daughter memorized it within three weeks. It was unbelievable. And then I talked to her friends and other kids. So many kids out there memorize the score to Hamilton because it is truly a clicky and sticky thing. But it’s also a story told in the form closest to way the way the ancient bards did. Coming into town, telling their two-hour epic poem, either you give them food or a place to stay or money, or they’re a failure. So needless to say, all those stories, all those epic poems, they all have in them the masterful tricks of going viral and being memorable. Joseph, I appreciate you for being on the show. Your career is legendary, and I know you have a lot more big projects that you’re working on. I encourage all of our listeners to check out your newest book, How to Go Viral and to Reach Millions, Top Persuasion Secrets from social media superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah and even Donald Trump. And I understand there’s an audio book coming out. When’s the audio book coming out there? I just got the notice. You can get an audible. It will be within two or three days. Oh, well be on Amazon I have been promised who’s reading it. Do you know? Is it just a rando the Donald Trump or is it like do you tell Trump? He’s on the cover, you know, I I Right now a lot of communicators have been reading it and people who give a lot of speeches. And I give talks to people on public speaking and that sort of thing. So, it is a diverse group. You read the reviews. And by the way, if people buy the book, please write a review because if you want a book to succeed long-term on Amazon, you need to have good number of good reviews to keep throwing over time. Yes, absolutely. And real quickly, I always like to ask this of our authors that we get on the show. What is your process for writing a book? You’ve done 10 now, right? I’m sure you’re probably thinking about the next one. What’s your process? Do you go to the beach? Are you a pina colada kind of guy? Are you a hole up in a hotel in some swanky part of Manhattan and just do a room service over and over and over? What’s your move? For me, I’ve been writing, my father is a newspaper editor, so writing, when you’re in the newspaper business or the media business, as you know, you can’t afford to have writers block, right? You have a deadline. If you can’t make the deadline, you’re not in the paper. I got that ethic, so I try to write every day. And I will tell you one secret that I stumbled into by accident. I dictate everything using voice dictation software, using Dragon NaturallySpeaking or the version for Mac. And what I have found, particularly for blogging, but also for writing books, is when you dictate, if you can do that, not everyone, that’s not a process that will work for everyone, but if it will, now you’re being more conversational. Right. Frankly, most people would be better off if their writing were more like their speaking, if they were more conversational and less, you know, I’ll be blunt, academic. Joseph, I appreciate you for, professionally speaking, being both clicky and sticky on today’s show. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to be on here. I’m not funny, Chubb, seriously. It was good. This is going to be shared. It was good. People are going to share this. We just hit number three on the iTunes podcast charts, and people are going to share this with their friends. Wow. Thank you. For number two, Chubb. Number two. Number two on the iTunes charts. This just in. Joseph, thank you for being here. Have a blessed day. And we like to end the show with a boom, and internally, boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. So we’re going to do a one, two, three, and then a boom. All right, we’re gonna have a three, two, one, and then a boom. So, Zia, you ready? Yeah. Shep, are you ready? I’m ready. Okay, here we go. I’m so ready. Here we go. Three, two, one, boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The show’s not over quite yet. We have a little something extra for ya. Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, eight kids, get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation and Dr. Zoner, today I am very excited about our guest because we have a guy on the show. Typically every guest we have is significantly smarter than I am, but this guy is a legendary MIT graduate who really knows what he’s talking about. Joe, welcome on to the show. How are you, sir? I am really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Well, we’re going to try to keep today’s show fair and balanced, and we’ll kind of keep it politically right in the middle here. Although if people Google your name, they’re going to find that you are involved in quite a bit of topical topics. And we’re here to have you on the show today to talk about how to go viral and how to reach millions, your new book. My friend, you’ve been blogging for 12 years. There’s a lot of people out there who have been blogging for 12 years or two years or one year. How do you go about it? If somebody’s out there listening, they’re a business owner, how do they go about making their blog or their content stand out in such a cluttered, as you put it, a Niagara Falls of noise coming from social media? How do our listeners go about making their social media posts stand out? Well, I think the main, my main point is that there are a series of strategies that do work to make your content much more likely to go viral. And I talk about the, you know, the bottom line goal is look, I think anybody can see that there is a Niagara fall of noise. There’s just a constant volume of content free content that everyone is Bombarded with whether it’s business or politics or or the Kardashians You know, it’s it’s non-stop. And so it has gotten considerably harder to break through and That’s why you know, and I’ve been fortunate after 12 years of blogging, you really get to learn. You get a lot of feedback on what works and what doesn’t work. I see which headlines work, which gets most Facebook likes, which gets page views, which gets how much time on the page. I have a lot of data at my fingertips now, given the state of the art in apps and software packages. So as someone with scientific training, but who’s also a writer, I have tried to merge the two together. And that’s sort of what I talk about in how to go viral and reach millions. And the central thing we’re trying to do to break through is to be clicky and sticky, to use the modern parlance. Clicky meaning I need to grab your attention. Your attention, you have a million things that could potentially distract you so I have to grab it but then it’s not enough just for me to grab your attention I have to hold on to it and be memorable. So I want to get you to click on my post or click on my Facebook page or or or if it’s a email you know I want you to open the email click open the email and then I want you to stick around, stick around long enough to read the content and ideally, at the very least, remember it if I’m trying to sell something. I’d obviously love you to buy it, but oftentimes I’m just trying to brand or get a message out. But the goal is how do I grab your attention, how do I keep your attention, and there is now a lot of data and a lot of social science and marketing science on what works best. Now what I would like to do is I’d like to have a very linear dialogue with you. And you feel free to make it non-linear because you’re the MIT graduate and you’re in charge here. I’m just going to go into email subject lines. Okay, when you write an email subject line, so many people see, I’m sure you’ve had this, someone sends you a wall of text and a subject line that is not interesting. So Joe, if you were trying to get the attention of somebody, if our listeners are trying to get the attention of somebody in an email, I’d like to tap into your wisdom about how to write a headline in the email subject line that’s going to be clicky and sticky. How do we do it? Absolutely. No, that is absolutely the central thing. And by the way, it is true if you’re doing a Facebook post, that first line, a tweet, the first few words, a blog post, again, the first line, or a regular print ad or any other kind of ad. In the book, I have a whole chapter on headlines, and I quote David Ogilvie. Yeah, the advertising guru. The advertising guru, some people consider him the father of advertising. He wrote, and this is back in 1963, on the average, five times as many people read the headline as the body copy, and a change of headline can make a difference of 10 to 1 in sales. So yes, the headline, and by that I’m saying you should be spending a lot more time writing your headlines or the subject line of the email. The chances, and you know from your own how much email you get and how much do you delete instantly. Instantly. Instantly. So, you know, the open rate on an email might be 1%, 2%, you know, if people are really good at it, 3 or 4%. Now, if it’s your friend, you know, it’s a higher probability. But we’re talking about emails that are either trying to get you business or maybe you’re sending a cold email to a prospect. So you have to grab their attention and so you have to, first of all, be very clear and blunt right up front. You don’t have time to mess around. I can just tell you from my experience, I get to see in real time, because we actually test our headlines, that the first few words make a big deal of difference. The way you should approach this, all writing, everything you’re doing online but even public speaking is I have to get someone interested in in the first few words and Then I have to keep them interested in the next few words and next and next and next now if I want to draw them In right I want to give them the impression that I’ve got something of value to to say to them And that it’s going to be interesting. That’s the other thing. That I’m a person who can deliver on the headline because we all have the bad experience of clicking on a link thinking we’re going to get something interesting. And then it turns out that it was all hype. It’s just click bait. It’s garbage. Oh, I hate that. Hey, Joe, this is Dr. Z. Do you prefer Joe or Joseph or what? I think Joe is great. Joe is great. Okay, good. Give me some examples, because we love the examples. In theory, you say, hey, you’ve got to write something that really grabs them. I mean, that’s cool, but give me one that you tested in real time and you saw that really grabbed it. Give me one or two success stories of headlines that you wrote or you helped write. Give me just one teaser. We know your books are going to be filled with these things. Come on. Give us a little something. Here’s an idea that I often give people. If I’m writing you to remind you about a lunch, don’t just reply to whatever was original hello memo. You know, put lunch tomorrow at 1230 because they may only look, I mean let’s assume that the only piece of, so one lesson to be learned is there’s a very good chance the only thing they’re going to see is the email, a headline. Okay. So if you’re trying to communicate a piece of information, let’s use that piece of information. If it’s someone you know moderately well and maybe you’ve, you know, someone you’re trying to do a sale to or something you’re sending them an email reminder Don’t bury the lead that that’s you know the first what is the single most important thing that you are trying? to communicate So I can’t you know my father was a newspaper editor for 30 years So I sort of heard over and over again. Don’t bury the lead don’t bury the single most important thing, thinking you have to build up to it, because nobody’s reading that long anymore. Good work. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to do this, and Joe, I’m going to kind of put my foot into the water of politics, not a political show. And then you can just kind of slap me, because you are the MIT graduate. So here we go. You are a guy who is schooled in physics. You’re a physicist. You’re an author. By training, yeah. You’re a blogger. And there are a lot of physicists, authors, and bloggers out there, frankly. There’s a lot of them. The difference between you and them is that you were named by Rolling Stone in 2009 as one of the 100 people who are changing America. Now, whether I agree with you about politics or not, or our listeners do. The point is, people know your name, and they know what you’re working on. You’ve been able to draw attention to some of the things that you’re working on. Specifically, you have a new project here, not new, but it’s new-er, it’s 2014, so the last four or five years, Years of Living Dangerously, which is a feature, I believe you can see it on Showtime, if I’m correct, Showtime? It was originally Showtime, now it’s National Geographic, and Facebook, which is we really transitioned to focusing on online viral videos. I like Don Cheadle and I like Harrison Ford, so I watch the whole thing on Showtime. And then, again, you can get it on Facebook, you can get it on YouTube, you can get it on Showtime, you can get it on National Geographic. So I guess the non-political thing is you are an expert of climate change, but there’s a lot of guys at local coffee shops who think they’re an expert on climate change. So you’ve been able to stand out as a result of being able to write good headlines, but then you back it with research. So let’s get into this headline thing. If you’re going to write a headline for your blog, how is that maybe different from writing a headline of an email or a subject of an email? The subject is the headline of the email. When you write a headline of a blog, how have you been able to, how is it different from the subject of an email? And then talk to me about the importance of backing what you’re saying with research. Because when someone does get to the body of it, it can’t just be hoo-ha. Right. Well, look, I think of all of them the same. In other words, if it’s important, I’m trying to stimulate an emotion because that’s what makes things that’s one of the things that makes things go viral, right? We’re not we’re not we are creatures who like stories and we like stories that that have compelling characters that that stir emotions. Fundamentally, that were those were the first things that went viral Those were the great stories the epic poems by the Bards Iliad the Odyssey the stories in the Bible. These are stories about that that we come to care about and Emotionally connect with and and ultimately the goal So in the headline if I’m really trying to write a good headline, I want to promise the reader something that is going to be emotionally compelling to them and suggesting to them that what they’re going to read is an interesting story, not just filled with numbers and facts. You’re hearing this from a guy with a PhD in physics, but it has taken me 10 years to unlearn what I learned. I try to make this point wherever I go. And it’s one of the reasons I’m able to understand it, because I had to physically… The higher educational system in this country does not teach people how to communicate effectively. They are teaching, based on this model, that people are persuaded by facts and numbers and charts and PowerPoints with bullets. And that’s not true. People have always been persuaded and connected to stories and emotions and the memorable compelling phrases that make up stories which are called the figures of speech. Things like irony and hyperbole and metaphor as well as repetition and rhyme and puns. So as an example, I want to tee this up real quick. You and I’m going to give Mr. Joe here the floor and I’d like to get a good dialogue going here between you and Joe because this is good. Because Dr. Zellner is an optometrist. There are so many optometrists that will run ads talking about, do you want your cornea to be healthier? Do you want your… they’ll talk about people go, what’s a cornea? The pupil? Do you want your pupil to be… do you want to help your… and people say, I don’t know what that means. And then Dr. Z says, Dr. Robert Zellner and Associates, he’s the leading optometrist in Oklahoma. We’re gonna see you do an exam and your first pair of glasses for $99. That’s the headline. But yet, when you get into your optometry clinic, Z, there’s a lot more to it. There’s a lot more value they offer. There’s a lot more, obviously, prescriptions. There’s tests. It’s more specific than that. But what gets them in is the headline. So for you, Joe, as a climate change expert, give us the headline. If you had to say in like two sentences or less, what’s the headline on your world view about climate change? I want to get your headline. If you had to break out of the clutter and you’re going, hey, hey, hey, everybody out there listening, what is your headline or your thesis or what are you trying to tell the world? And what’s your headline? The headline is climate change is real. It’s happening now. It’s caused by us, but it’s a solvable problem if we act quickly otherwise the kind of system or superstorm super droughts the hurricane harvey well you’re you know down in uh… in in in your neck of the woods you know the the the kind of of of deluge once in ten thousand year deluge that that that we’re just remembering the one-year anniversary of uh… hitting houston hurricane harvey these things are becoming more uh… more common but i what i what i what i want your film Years of living dangerously that you advised on the Emmy award-winning film there that featured Don Cheadle Harrison Ford James Cameron was involved Arnold Schwarzenegger The film wasn’t just you standing in front of a whiteboard spitting off facts Right no not at all. I’m not I’m not in I’m I’m I I don’t think I make an appearance at all I I was the science advisor and my job was to help make sure they keep the facts accurate. So why doesn’t that work? Why can’t you just sit there in front of a screen and spit off facts, even though you know that you have done the research behind your facts? And whether some of our listeners or I agree with you or not, you’ve done the research, but why can’t you just hop in front of a blackboard and just bring it? Why do you have to bring on some celebrities and bring on some emotion? Why do you have to do that? Well, there’s no short answer. Let me give you the medium answer to that. Sure. Fundamentally, our brain is the most energy-consuming, but you know, a part of our body. It’s like 25% of our metabolism. And we developed over thousands and tens of thousands of years all these shortcuts, so we don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking in situations. Like if you and your tribe are out there in the jungle and you’ve got separated from them and all of a sudden you hear some strange noises and everyone in the tribe is running the opposite direction, right? So what do you do? Do you stop and analyze the facts? Can I figure out if that is it a dangerous animal or not, or do I just do what everyone else is doing? That’s, so the main shortcuts that people are using to figure out if they believe you or not is, are you in my tribe? Are you one of me, one of us? And number two, do your emotions match your words? Truthfully. And that was the great insight really that the That the Greeks had when they when they codified rhetoric and and so it turns out that If you can do those two things you will be persuasive you will make a sale That’s why they say to salesman. The first thing you have to do is sell yourself. If you can convince the customer you are trustworthy and on their side, then they’re going to listen to you. But that’s the first thing. If I just throw a bunch of numbers at you, you know, I quote in the book Dan Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for helping create behavioral economics. He’s the first psychologist ever to do it. He basically told the economic community, hey, people don’t act rationally. And he wrote the book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And he just talks about, you know, in some situations you have the time to do a lot of deliberate thinking. But most of us have this thing called intuition, our fast thinking process, which is really a pattern matching process. Do I recognize this situation on the basis of something I was in before or someone told me about before and Fundamentally those shortcuts are the things everybody uses To make decisions So look if I give I don’t I don’t even give talks on Detailed science talks on the science of climate change anymore because no one in the audience is in a position to adjudicate the science I try to speak where they are, you know, and let me give you just a broader example of the change that smart business people are making. So Jeff Bezos, richest guy in the world, his company just became the second to hit a trillion dollars in market cap. a letter to his shareholders, he says, I just banned PowerPoints at Amazon. In business meetings, no one comes with PowerPoints because that’s not how people learn, it’s not how they retain information with a bunch of bullets. He switched over to what? Narrative memos. You write up a story, because the literature, I mean, it’s just endless amounts of social science that we spent thousands and tens of thousands of years telling stories to each other and that’s how our brains Developed and so the the the job one is to package yourself Into a story, you know, what is your story? What is the story your product and how is it connected to a problem the person you’re talking to wants to solve and what I? tried to do in how to go viral and reach millions is talk about the Both the ancient art of storytelling and the modern science of storytelling Z we just he just gave some knowledge bond Exploding right now powerful. I know and I love I love your your when you when you research when you google the thing called the, it could be Goggle, I don’t know, could be, apparently it’s a thing. Google. It’s a new thing. It’s how to go viral and reach millions. Top persuasion secrets from social media superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and even Donald Trump. I mean, you’ve either offended everybody in the world, or you’ve turned on everybody in the world with that line writer. That’s awesome, by the way. That’s a good headline. I’ve got a two-part question for you. You may not know the answers, but I’m hoping you do because you seem like a really smart guy so it’s not like an answer challenge. Why do you think, number one, people out there don’t believe your narrative of global warming? That’s the first part. Then the second part is, for those who do believe it, the average dude on the street, what can you do about it? Well I think it’s a great question. I actually just did a post today. I spent a lot of time talking to people, obviously that question. One of the reasons I became a blogger, this is a true story, because I was doing clean energy. I had worked at the u s department of energy and i worked with the office of the fish and energy efficiency renewable energy i work with some of the people who who uh… did the underlying research but that led to natural gas fracking uh… texas people actually uh… bill white before mayor of houston and uh… uh… i switch from clean energy how i was doing clean energy consulting i was consulting with companies like IBM and Johnson & Johnson on how to use renewable energy, how to cut your energy bill, that sort of thing, how to reduce your pollution. And then my brother lost his home in Hurricane Katrina. He was working at the VA hospital in Biloxi as the head of rehab medicine. He asked me if he should rebuild his home, because losing your home is a big deal, as I’m sure you know, and you don’t want to do it again. I started researching the science, and talking to scientists, and going to lectures. I realized two things, one of which was the situation was more troublesome than people realized, but secondly, scientists were doing a lousy job of communicating. I really have tried to devote the last 12 years to understand what doesn’t work about communications the way scientists traditionally do it, and what does work. So the shortest possible answer to your question of why large numbers of people don’t believe it is because this issue has shifted from being a science-based issue to being a political tribe issue. And it is people establish their identity now through politics, right? We don’t have to get into a politics discussion, but I think you know what I’m saying. And once you sign up and you say, I’m with this party or I’m with this person, or I’m with that party or I’m with that person, you then buy into their slate of beliefs and you don’t do a lot of your own investigation and I uh… and and that is why in the show years of in dangerously uh… and and online at at the website we have switched over to just doing these stories uh… short form stories or the long form story we we did win the emmy for outstanding non-fiction series in twenty fourteen the guys you know the executive producer james cameron arnold schwarzenegger. And the line producers were these two former 60 Minutes producers who have 13 Emmys between them. And I have learned a lot from them because they know how to do a certain kind of storytelling and it’s gotta be built around interesting people and be emotionally compelling and then tell stories along a certain pathway. And that’s one of the things I really want to communicate to your audience because the chapter in the book that has gone the most viral, that the most people have responded to and said, boy, this has really changed the way that I look at writing and writing speeches, is this rule of replacing, this way of a simple strategy for turning any written item or any speech into something that operates the way an emotionally compelling story does. And so I’d love to just spend like literally just a minute and explain that, because it is really, it is the simplest thing, but like I said, for instance, I bought my book on Kindle so I could see which are the most marked up passages. I can tell you all of the most marked up passages in this book are in chapter 2. And it’s really quite simple. Literally all that you need to do is to go through, it’s called the rule of replacing, and you just take something you’ve written or a speech that you’ve written out and circle all the word all every use of the word and got it and you’re now going to replace them as often as possible with the word but or equivalence like yet because you’re trying to introduce the kind of conflict and narrative tension we expect in our best stories got it and then and then you’re going to replace and with therefore or equivalence like so to introduce the resolution of that conflict and tension. And what you’re trying to do is instead of having a just this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened, which is the height of uninteresting, the story, the basic storyline is, you know, this happened and this happened, but then this happened, and so I was forced to do this. And this is the arc, the setup of all of the great stories. This was invented by Trey Parker, who did the Book of Mormon, you know, Monster, Broadway hit, and South Park, multi-enemy winning storylines. But I’ve gone through I just looked for instance at the most viral speech in all of human history, which is Probably the the Sermon on the Mount Since there’s billions of Bibles out there and people have been going to church and hearing this Over and over and over again for 2,000 years that speech again, it has it has a large number of buts and a large number of therefores, because what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount is he is describing the way people thought they were being taught, and then he’s saying, but really this is what you’re supposed to be doing. And so, if you go through all the great speeches. I reference in the book Oprah’s, the first viral speech 2018. It may seem like a really long time ago, but Oprah’s speech at the Golden Globes that you may remember people spoke, you know, that really called a lot of attention to her. It again, it uses this and but therefore trick and I talk about the Gettysburg Address and what Lincoln does and fundamentally literally it may seem incredibly simple but all the great speeches throughout human history have used this basic formula. All of your titles all the chapter titles in your book are all going to get people’s attention. I mean how to be a big winner like Trump without being a big loser like Trump. How to tell a viral story word-of-mouth from Jesus to Lincoln to Oprah. Short words win. Short words sell. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Only memorable memes go viral. I mean you really are the master of headline writing. You talk a lot about these five rules for going viral online. Can you share a couple of those rules for going viral online? Sure. And what I did, just the first rule is you have to put things in a story form and persuade people that what they’re going to get is an interesting story because that’s, you know, I have an 11-year-old daughter, so for the first 11 years of her life, it’s just story, story, story, please tell me another story, please tell me another story, can you Can I watch the first movie of Harry Potter 30 times in a row? Stories are we are the story craving animal really and so rule one is you have to tell the emotionally compelling story and Use this and but therefore rule of replacing rule number two is To use the figures of speech? Now, you know, when we were in middle school, maybe you heard some figures of speech like metaphor or irony. It’s not really taught that much anymore, but what are the figures of speech? The figures of speech are literally just the memory tricks that were created by the great storytellers of ancient times that people could remember them. And it got codified by the ancient Greeks and I’ll just tell you the fascinating you know 60-second story of why rhetoric was codified by the ancient Greeks and then by the Romans was the Greeks switched from trial by magistrate to trial by jury and in front of a magistrate you’d be arguing the law but these juries were 500 people or more it was majority vote and it would decide your entire future and there’s no judge no rules of evidence your accuser spoke for 30 minutes and you spoke for 30 minutes and you simply had to persuade the majority of the hundreds of people listening that you were more believable than your accuser. And as a result, a group of people arose who would write those speeches for you if you had enough money, and if you didn’t, they would teach you some lessons, or you could buy their book. And unsurprisingly, there were lots of books written about how you could be an emotionally compelling and believable speaker. And so that’s, and they codified all of these things. And so why do we use metaphors? Metaphors are maybe the single most memorable figure of speech because I’m connecting something we know with something we don’t know. And that’s why it’s very common in advertising. You know, Chevy like a rock, that sort of thing. And so all of these figures of speech, which we don’t teach much, but the modern advertising industry we discovered right and in fact most of the marketing literature makes is You know how do you write a compelling headline? How do you write a compelling ad? You use the figures of speech and and literally 80% of all advertising headlines uses one or more figures of speech because those are the things That are gonna stick in your mind, and it’s why you hear you know so much repetition. Repetition is the single most commonly used memory trick, and if you have a small child, you know how effective simply repeating the same thing over and over can be. And we see politicians who are good at repetition and politicians who are not so good at repetition, and I don’t think it’s a surprise that the people who are good at repetition tend to do better. Now, I don’t want to steal your thunder from the book. Wait, wait a second, wait a second. Oh, no, no, back to you, back to you. Well, I had a second part to my question. A second part. A second part, and it went something like this, if I can remember it, Joe. What can the average person do, Joe slash average. The proactive listener. Yeah, he’s out there listening going, you know, I believe in climate change, and I don’t want the world to burn up, and I don’t want to die. What are some steps, what are some just basic things that the average person can do to help with this phenomenon? With climate change? Correct. Sure. Well, I mean, you know, and I, Oxford University Press asked me to write their primer on, you know, climate change, what everyone needs to know. So that book is also out there. there and I I think you know I tell people you know you should get informed because it’s gonna you know I I tell people that the impact of of climate change and what we do about it is going to have as big an impact on the world in the next 25 years as the internet did in the last 25 years and if you were up to speed if you were ahead of the curve 25 years ago on the internet and so you know the information technology revolution you were in better shape in terms of your career or what your kids went to school in or choices that you made in the stock market and the same is exactly true we’re in the midst of this clean energy revolution and I write it you know as I say I would former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. So I write a great deal about the clean energy revolution and whether it is solar power or wind power, these things have come down in price literally by a factor of 100 over the past quarter century or so. And if you hadn’t looked at it in recent years because you thought it was sort of expensive and clunky. Right now there are solar power deals where companies will literally come to you and you don’t have to put any money down. They’ll do a leasing deal where they’re going to lease you the solar panels for less than your current electricity bill. So the entire world of financing has changed and if you haven’t had an energy audit in your house, the LED lighting which 10 years ago was just quite expensive and only used in unique situations, you can go into a Sam’s Club or any one of those stores or go on Amazon and you can buy an LED light bulb for $2 or $3. This is a light bulb that is basically going to last your lifetime and it is going to use so little energy that it will pay for the extra cost compared to an incandescent within a year or two. So there’s been this whole revolution in clean energy. By the way, if you have kids, I’m sure they’re nagging you because the kids are way ahead of all of us in terms of the use of technology. My advice always is get informed. We can’t all be experts on everything and I don’t ever tell anyone, you got to go out and be an expert on every subject. Obviously, you can try to find people that you trust and go by them or find a website that you trust, something like that, the way we do with a movie reviewer. I mean, we have a movie reviewer maybe we like. I mean, obviously now we go to Rotten Tomatoes. But, so I think people should understand it is a serious problem, but there are lots of solutions, there are lots of things individuals can do. What’s the biggest area that contributes to global warming in your opinion? In your scientific opinion? The principal cause of the recent global warming is burning fossil fuels. In the scientific community, there’s not any question of that. I mean we’re talking about essentially all of the recent warming is due to the increase of carbon dioxide and some other heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. That is what has changed. And you know, I don’t like I said, I understand I’m not going to be able to persuade everybody and that’s you know, I think people need to understand this because, like I said, it’s going to affect your lives and your family’s lives and where you want to live. Already we’re seeing, by the way, on coastal property values, that places that are more prone to flooding are already seeing slower growth in property values than places that aren’t prone to flooding. So let’s just say out there, I’m listening and I say to myself, I’m going, you know what, I agree with your world view. Or someone said, they don’t. But either way, they’re a blogger and they want their story to go viral. My friend, you have, it appears as though you’ve developed super hacks or super moves or strategies for telling viral stories that are now used by Hollywood’s best screenwriters. So regardless of what side of the political aisle somebody’s on, a listener, or what kind of worldview they have, that seems to be a pretty awesome move to be able to take a worldview that you’ve studied and researched and to be able to tell a viral story that is now used by Hollywood’s best screenwriters. I mean, James Cameron, we’re talking Arnold Schwarzenegger, how do you do that? Right, and so, you know, one of the points I want to make is you know in the book How to Go Viral and Reach Millions, that book is focused in you know primarily on discussing these secrets and I think that and as you can see in the subtitle you know these are the same, Oprah and Donald Trump, they do many of the same things. Maybe you like one, don’t like the other. It doesn’t matter. Clearly both of them know something about making content go viral, whatever else you think about that. That’s for sure. And look, I tell, you know, I’m more on the progressive side. You know, I tell my progressive friends, you can’t… Let’s learn from people who know how to do what they do. And if you think that they don’t you’re not paying attention to what’s going on. So you know this and by the way Donald Trump is a complete and total master of using this using the word but you know to create attention and and then offer his answer. And a friend of mine another, actually, marine biologist who went to USC to study filmmaking, because he also was frustrated at how poorly scientists were communicating. He actually did this analysis. You can analyze any speech, including one of your own speeches, where you take the text of the speech and you count up the number of ands and you count up the number of butts, and you divide the butts into the ands, you’re looking for a ratio, and then you can multiply it by 100, and that will give you a number between zero and 100. But the point is, the people who are really good at storytelling are using a lot of butts. They’re using like, for every and, for every four ands, they’re using a butt, or for every three ands, they’re using a butt. The people who are not good at storytelling, they’re just using a lot of ANs. Okay, I have a butt question for you. I just want to say butt right now because I feel like I’m not a good speaker unless I say it. You are an MIT trained physicist. You’re an author of 10 books. You have advised a project that was put together by Schwarzenegger and James Cameron, but can you imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger? That’s a good butt question Come on Joe you could do it You know you can but you won’t be buck Okay, I want to ask you when you are I have interviewed I’ve met Arnold a couple times as a result of this I’ve been able to go to some shoots where he was and I and at the second season premiere that was in New York City, I was able to interview him. I actually did the red carpet interviews of celebrities and Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know who else was there was Tom Brady and his wife. Oh, come on now. Tom Brady, yes. But he brings up right this job. I had to bring up Brady because His wife Giselle is in the set is in the the Season two She’s Brazilian and she actually goes to Brazil and and looks at sort of what’s going on with the rainforest You know that we heard about you know 15 20 years ago, but what’s going on what are they doing right what are they doing wrong and she came I have a photo someone snapped a photo of me with Giselle but in the background is Tom he was trying to you know he was totally cool he was like this is his wife’s moment he was like being very low-key as low-key as as you’re Tom yeah the hot question for you I got a hot question on these shoots are you shooting animals or are you shooting… I mean, I’m sure it’s not like people. No, no, no, no. I’m sorry. These are film shoots. No, I don’t. Oh! Oh, okay. He’s trying to practice that judgment. I don’t know. You’re out there. You got a gun? Yeah, no, these are… You know, and one of the things, by the way, I learned is that no matter how amazing and compelling the movie or whatever thing you’re watching is, the filming of it was really boring. Right. You know it takes an hour of filming to get like 10 seconds of good footage and I used to go to these shoots because like oh I get to meet so-and-so you know and oh I get to meet so-and-so and that was exciting but now I’m sitting around and nothing’s happening most of the time. But that’s what you have to do that’s that’s sort of my job. To make something go viral, the point is, yeah, you have to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work in terms of thinking. You can’t just do crap off the top of your head and think anyone’s going to be interested. You know, now as Joe’s talking, he kind of inserted a little bit of Tom Brady knowledge there. As these are wrapping up, we’re only going to give him an extra four hours on this interview. Now, nobody’s mentioning Tom Brady here. But that’s fair. But that’s fair, right. So as we’re wrapping up our final three questions. I want to ask you, Joe, because you spent so much time studying this, what makes a good storyteller? When you say the butt, I love the butt ratio, that’s great. So I guess, maybe where do you see most people getting it wrong when they tell stories? I feel like, I used to travel all around the world doing speaking, and Joe, because I was a former disc jockey. People would hire me to teach how to grow a company because I grew an entertainment company and my job was to make boring events funny. So that was kind of like my superpower was combining entertainment and education. But I would watch somebody speak before me or after me who was dramatically more educated, more intelligent, and they just could not get anybody to pay attention, but they knew all the answers. So talk to us about where we’re getting it wrong as it relates to storytelling. Well I think, you know, that in higher education, the higher educational system does not teach storytelling. In fact, it teaches anti-storytelling. I can tell you, you know, I went through a PhD program in science, of course, you’re told don’t talk about yourself, right? Remove the I because this is all about quote-unquote objective fact and Therefore don’t talk about you know The troubles you had doing the experiment or why you’re passionate about the science or why you think this problem matters so But I I’m a quite well aware that it’s not just scientists who get this training I think this training occurs on the medical side I think it’s even even even in in the social sciences, whether economics or art history, this notion that we can reduce things to sort of this fact. So I think that people have to unlearn that. And that’s, like I said, it took me many years. If people just listen to me and try to do some of these things, it will make a difference, but you are going to have to very consciously catch yourself. You know, I was fortunate to have a daughter. So you know, there’s a story I tell at the beginning of the book where where she says to me, I’m talking to her at the age of three, and she starts saying to me, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, Well, you know, and I had this view because she picked up a lot of phrases. Hey, she could use a phrase if she knew what it meant. So I said, you know, so, uh, Antonio, do you know what blah, blah, blah means? And she pauses and said, it’s when daddy says something that doesn’t matter. So, okay. She got it. She did get it. What I was saying did not matter to her. And it literally took me years to realize, you know, what I have to do is tell stories. Now, there’s a certain form of a story, talked a bit about that. There’s certain phrases and words you want to use, like metaphor and irony and repetition. And then, of course, there is the most famous stories, the stories that comprise, you know, half of all movies, which is the hero’s journey, that I’m sure, you know, many people have heard that term. That was the term Joseph Campbell studied all the great myths from the great storytellers and figured out that all the great hero stories followed a certain pattern. And that book was read by George Lucas, and he created Star Wars episodes four, five, and six based on that heroic myth called the Monomyth. And then Bill Moyers did a series of interviews of Joseph Campbell, in which he talked about the hero’s journey, and I commend people to one or more of those, and that translated out. And then there was this screenwriter who wrote a book called The Screenwriter’s Journey, basically saying, hey, this is the basic story, and if you’re wondering why all the superhero stories and all the disney movies and all the romantic comedies all these movies seem to have the same story arc that’s because this is the story that was the most viral story in human history passed down over thousands of years and and it is becoming better than our culture and and uh… people do need to understand, and I talk about it a bit in the book, what is this hero’s journey? Sometimes it’s called the zero to hero story. You know, you’re explaining why it is someone, at the end of the day, when I’m talking to you, I’m trying to convince you that you have a problem that I can solve, right? I mean, if I’m a salesperson, there’s some problem you have I can solve. And my story arc is how I went through this tough time hitting the same roadblock that you did and how I got through that point and attained the wisdom to solve this problem that you did. And this story, which is very, you know, it’s the same story, whether we’re talking Luke Skywalker or Spider-Man or Harry Potter or Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. It’s always the same arc of the story. It always has the same components. And this story, I can assure you, when someone is getting up to speak and you’ve never met this person before and they’re introducing yourself to them, they are telling you some version of this story. Now Joe, the final two questions I had for you, I’d like for you to just touch on the three activating emotions that trigger content sharing. I’d love it if you could recommend a book for all the listeners out there. The three activating emotions that trigger the content. If you could just kind of touch on that. And then I’d like it if you could recommend a book for all the entrepreneurs out there who are big readers. They like to just devour book recommendations from guys like you. So could you start by talking to us about the three activating emotions? Sure. So, when people study content that goes viral online, let’s say an easy analysis someone did is they looked at 7,000 New York Times articles and see which ones made the most emailed list, right? Because those are the ones that people wanted to share with other people. that what made stuff go viral was something that aroused people emotionally. But it was a certain type of emotion, it’s what they called an activating emotion. So, not surprisingly, outrage is something that motivates people to share. And I’m sure we all have plenty of texts and emails of content that outrage someone. Another one is anxiety, something that made someone worry, you know, like, you know, those articles on the three foods you shouldn’t be eating, you know, that sort of and then the third is the things that that create awe, you know, the things that are like, oh, this cat can play the piano type of thing. Or this guy can kick a football through you know any hoop anywhere you know if you seen that so what we’re trying and and the other the fourth element is in which I talk about separately is humor which is related to irony you know what we’re trying to show someone something that’s unexpected and therefore you know makes them laugh I’m these are the things that people are the most likely to share. And if your headline can sell them on the notion, or the subject line in your email, or your tweet can sell them on the notion that when they click through or read the email or read the rest of the post, they’re going to get that emotion satisfied and maybe they’re going to like it so much they’re going to share it. And they’ll get a little social credit with their friends for sort of being, hey, I saw this viral thing that’s amusing or interesting or outrageous first and I’m sharing it with you. And that’s what, you know, we’re a social animal and that’s what sharing is all about. So basically, a cat video kicking a football through a hoop offensively but makes you laugh is just a slam dunk. Right, and there’s a reason why cats are so viral. Cats are not as domesticated as dogs, right? They’re still half, you know, if you look at the history of dogs, they came to humans and we’ve been breeding them for tens of thousands of years. Cats are much more recent, they’re much more, you know, hey, they, they, you know, they’re coming to us for food or to kill rats, you know, and all that stuff. But the point is, cats are much more unpredictable, much, much less socialized. And that’s why they seem to do things that are so unexpected compared to, you know, your domesticated dog. Now, the dog videos aren’t cute. I’m not here to get emails. We’re going to get a lot of dog lovers now. And you know look, to answer your book question, clearly you know I was frustrated that I didn’t see put together in one place the ancient art and modern science of storytelling and not only that, the reason I wrote How to Go Viral and Reach Millions is also because a lot of the books on communications aren’t actually very readable. And I’m glad you read the headlines because I spent years figuring out how to, you know, when I write, I have a chapter on irony, but I put in a lot of irony and ironic humor. And I have a chapter on metaphors. And I quote, you know, Lincoln, a house divided against itself cannot stand. The point is the metaphor chapter has metaphors and it also has modern stuff. You know, and I quote from Seinfeld, one of the most ironic of shows. And I quote from the Big Bang Theory, which again, another very, very heavily ironic show. And you know, I talk about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece, which is, you know, I tell people, people ask me, what is the single thing I can do to become better at storytelling? And I tell them download the soundtrack to Hamilton and memorize it My daughter did that in three weeks It was I had taken my mother to see Hamilton because I knew she would love it I brought the soundtrack home my nine-year-old daughter memorized it within three weeks was Unbelievable, and then I talked to her friends and other kids so many kids out there Memorize the score to Hamilton because it is truly a clicky and sticky thing. But it’s also a story told in the form closest to the way the ancient bards did, coming into town, telling their two-hour epic poem. Either you give them food or a place to stay or money, or they’re a failure. So needless to say, all those stories, all those epic poems, they all have in them the masterful tricks of going viral and being memorable. Joseph, I appreciate you for being on the show. Your career is legendary, and I know you have a lot more big projects that you’re working on. I encourage all of our listeners to check out your newest book, How to Go Viral and to Reach Millions, Top Persuasion Secrets from social media superstars Jesus Shakespeare Oprah and even Donald Trump and I understand there’s an audiobook coming out when’s the audiobook coming out there the audio I just got the notice you can get on audible it will be within two or three days oh well it will be on Amazon I have been promised who’s read who’s reading it do you know is it just a rando the Donald Trump or is it like did you have Donald Trump? I mean He’s on the cover, you know I Right now a lot of communicators have been reading it and people who give a lot of speeches And I’ve been I give talks, you know to people on public speaking and that sort of thing So, you know it is it is a diverse group you read the reviews. And by the way, if people buy the book, please write a review because if you want a book to succeed long-term on Amazon, you need to have a good number of good reviews that keep growing over time. Yes, absolutely. And real quickly, I always like to ask this of our authors that we get on the show. What is your process for writing a book? I mean, you’ve done 10 now, right? And I’m sure you probably have one or you’re probably thinking about the next one. What’s your process for doing that? Do you go to the beach? Are you a pina colada kind of guy? Are you a hole up in a hotel in some swanky part of Manhattan and just do a room service over and over and over? I mean, what’s your move? Well, I, there’s no, for me, I’ve been writing, you know, my father’s a newspaper editor, so writing, you know, when you’re in the newspaper business, you know, or the media business, as you know, you can’t afford to have writers block, right? You have a deadline. If you can’t make the deadline, you’re not in the paper. So, you know, I got that ethic. So I, you know, I try to write every day. And I will tell you one secret that I stumbled into by accident. I dictate everything using using Dragon NaturallySpeaking or the version for Mac. And what I have found, particularly for blogging, but also for writing books, is when you dictate, if you can do that, not everyone, that’s not a process that will work for everyone, but if it will, now you’re being more conversational. Frankly, most people would be better off if their writing were more like their speaking, if they were more conversational and less, you know, I’ll be blunt, academic. Joseph, I appreciate you for professionally speaking, being both clicky and sticky on today’s show. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to be on here. It’s not funny, Chubb, seriously. It’s good. This is going to be shared. People are going to share this. We just hit number three on the iTunes charts this just in Joseph thank you for being here have a blessed day and we like to end the show with a boom and internally boom stands for big overwhelming optimistic momentum so we’re gonna go to a one two three and then a boom I got three two one minute room so here you ready shopper you ready I’m ready okay here we go here we go. Three, two, one, boom! Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. Clay’s done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crocker, or Head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours, where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day-to-day. He does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. Every 6-8 weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. I’ve seen guys from start ups go from start ups to being multi millionaires. Teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best of you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressive thing was when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. They were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down. Because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right and anyways just an amazing man. He’s impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that and of course we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing and I encourage you if you haven’t ever worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s going to help magnify you and there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day and literally the rest of time he’s working and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day and he loves it. So anyways this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you Clay and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay it’s a great great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. Bye bye. something to listen to other than the radio. And I came across Clay’s podcast and his little front page there kind of caught my attention. I listened to two of them and I was hooked and I listen to probably three or four of those a day now. This, I mean, basically we’re a startup. We’re a two-year-old company. And it’s been a challenge to manage every aspect of the company and still think about growing a business. Where I got caught up in the weeds, so to speak, and keeping the business running day to day. I never took time to look at how to advance the company or add the processes that you need to continue growing. That was fairly quick and pretty accurate. I mean, Clay called me on a Saturday. I had my 13 point assessment done and Monday morning I had the assessment in front of me. And basically, he hit spot on where we needed to be. He showed us what we need to do, what our goals needed to be, what we needed to shoot for. And that was the start of this entire process, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. We actually now show our goals on the walls in our showroom. I look forward to my college re-third say, Andrews is great. At first, I thought he was a little bit young for what he’s doing. I’m being an old guy, and he’s like half my age, but I thought, well, this guy knows his stuff, and he’s awesome to work with. I look forward to my meetings every Thursday with Andrew. Since we first started, we’ve basically, we are virtually unknown on Google, on the internet. And starting a company and trying to grow it that way doesn’t work. I had a guy, a buddy of mine, who was doing my website, and he had it for seven months and it didn’t go anywhere. Within, I think we signed up with these guys in May, and we are now on the front page of Google, first place, highest rated and most reviewed company in Iran. Yeah, I mean, like everybody, you watch the podcast and you listen to it. Everybody’s gone to the seminars. Everybody’s heard the little hype on different things that are offered, the get-rich-quick schemes. I started listening to these guys and when I was listening to the podcast I could tell it’s more than just a scam, it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. These guys are actually teaching business fundamentals in a fun way that you can really appreciate it. You laugh along with them, it’s really just entertaining. So it’s an awesome thing. Everyone that we’ve implemented has worked. We started with the morning huddle, which is the first thing. So every morning now, we have our morning huddle at 7 a.m. We get all the questions from the guys out of the way so I don’t get the 15,000 phone calls during the course of the day. So that’s worked tremendously. We do our level 10 meeting every Tuesday where we discuss the higher, more important things that we’ve got to accomplish for growing our business, that’s implementing the processes, fixing whatever issues that we had the week before, and putting things in place so they don’t happen again. We’ve done, we’ve really focused on Google reviews. When we started this, we didn’t have any, I think we had one Google review and four from HomeAdvisor. Now, as of the last check, we’re up to, we’ll be up to 80 tomorrow and testimonials we’ve gotten I think we’re up to 15 15 or 16 tomorrow and we just started the testimonials and two weeks ago. That’s great. Yeah if you’re if you’re listening to the podcast already and I imagine if you’re listening to this you already have, going to the conference really just kind of pulls everything together and then you can kind of get a one-on-one relationship with everybody and you’re meeting people who have already done it or are still going through it, which helps you immensely. Like I said, it just kind of brings clarity to the whole process and you understand it. When you go into the Thrive office, it’s a unique place. It’s just a really cool place to be at. And just the excitement from all the people that work there, it’s just, it was really, really good. It pumped me up when I came back, I’m ready to, you know, move the needle another 15, 15 gauges. Hey all you potential thrivers out there, this is Jamie Fagle, I’m with Jameson Pine Cabinetry in Raleigh, North Carolina. I started with the Thrive 15 back in April of 2019. I came across the Please podcast when I was just kind of messing around one day when I was driving, I was listening to educational things. So I found his podcast and started laughing. I mean, it was just full of real down to earth, everyday business stuff that happens. Whereas a lot of the other things I come across, it’s just the same old stuff that just keeps repeating, it doesn’t really go anywhere. So I listened to his podcast probably every day for about a week, week and a half. Then I called them to check into what it’s all about, the coaching program that they have. Clay called me I think within three days of me talking to the first person who went through and did the, you know, the follow-up and the walkthrough. So after talking to Clay, we decided to move forward with the program. I said I’ve been doing it since 2019 of April. Couldn’t be happier. When we first came aboard with Drive 15, we were not known on the internet. Nobody could find us. And now I’m on basically page one for all the important searches. There’s one more that we’re waiting to get to and hopefully within another month we’ll be on page one of that. And with that, we’ve already seen an increase in business just from the website. That’s not including when I have a sale, before I go out to that sale to meet with a customer, I tell them to look on our website and check out our reviews and our testimonials. By the time I get to the customer’s house, that job’s already sold because of our reviews. We got 100 reviews when I started. I didn’t even think about getting reviews, didn’t really know what the meaning was or how important they were to your overall business success. Finding out now is a huge part of it. Same with the testimonials. So once they got me set straight on what I need to be doing, it took a little while to get my crew of guys and our people to think about asking for the reviews. And then we went through three or four weeks of trying to figure out what the best way of getting the reviews is because you talk to a lot of people and they say they’re going to do the reviews, but it’s a little harder than it looks. Anyway, it’s well worth the effort that you put in. We have a system now that works fairly well, and we’re getting the reviews. We don’t get as many as I’d like to, but we’re doing better at it, and we keep adding to ours. So right now, I am actually the most reviewed company in North Carolina as far as kitchen cabinets go. And we have the most testimonials. Like I said, that’s done a lot for us. With Clay and his team writing the SEO content, I have 13,000 words of content and that also helps. We’re now looking at adding to what we’re doing with adding podcast and video content as much as we possibly can. Because that’s where the biggest bang is. Some of the other things that I’ve learned, I went to the seminar or the conference that they have up there. I went to one of them in December. And it was just great because you meet all the people who are struggling and going through the same things that you’re going through. And then you have these real conversations. Conversations you don’t have with everyday people who are not running a business and don’t run into all the same things that you are trying to manage through while growing a business, protecting your money and keeping your customers all happy. So a lot of the things that I have learned and one of the other big ones would be the group interviews. I would always do the same old thing. When I needed somebody I would post an ad and meet with one person at a time. I picked the guy who was the best suited out of those three or four because I only had time to interview two or three people. Doing a group interview you get to see everybody in the same setting basically right in front of you and you can tell a lot more by how they handle themselves, how they come to the interview, are they dressed to impress, do they have their pad, do they show up on time, all those things and it makes a huge difference. I’ve hired now four people from the group interviews, and all of them are rock stars. Except for one. One guy didn’t quite work out, but that was probably more my fault than his. But the group interview is a solid thing. You gotta follow it, you gotta do it. Some of the other things that we’ve done is the systems and processes. As much as you know that you need to do systems and processes, when you’re caught up in the day-to-day minutia of getting your business running, it’s really hard to focus on writing a process. But if you’re not doing those, your company is just not going to have that solid foundation that you need. I’ve gone through a lot of corporate jobs in my time, and I know all about the processes and the checklists and all that, but never got to do them. Once I started with 515, it was kind of part of our homework to get these things done. And as I see these checklists go into action and people are starting to use them now, and all my employees are referring back to them, it’s a hell of a way to start training people. It just makes training a whole lot easier. You’re not trying to do that, you know, you got to tell them 15 times before they get a thing. You can hand them a book and say, here’s what your job entails, here’s all the things you need to do, and here’s how you do it. The checklists are a great thing to get done. So right now, I mean, I said, it’s moving along great. I highly recommend these guys. It’s one of the best things in my room. You know, it’s hard when you’re, you know, just constantly pushing, pushing, pushing to take that time to work on your business. If you don’t take that time to work on your business, your business will not get any farther than where it is now. And if it does, it’s by chance, not by skill, and it won’t last. You really need to get a foundation. You need to have these guys in your corner so you can talk about the current situation you’re dealing with. It’s not just a marketing company. These guys help you with marketing, they help you with business decisions, they help you with advertising, they talk about financials, everything that you need to have a good solid discussion with about your business. These guys are not part of your business, they are not part of your family, they are not your friends, they are not anybody that you come in and associate with. They are just there to help you grow your business. It’s a mastermind group. Works great. Really at this point we’re looking at doubling our sales. Actually we’re on course to grow our business 150% this year even amidst the COVID-19 disaster that’s going on. And our state is one of those things that can’t seem to figure out what the best thing to do. So they don’t do anything. Lock it down and shut it down and all that. So even with the COVID-19, we’re on pace to grow 150% and that’s phenomenal. And I attribute a lot of that to, or most of that to, my weekly conversations with Andrew and Clay. So well done guys, I really appreciate it and I hope you potential flyers out there jump into it. It’s a great thing. Can’t beat it. Thanks. My name is Deborah Worthington. I own H2Oasis Flood Center and Tea House in the Farm Shopping Center in Tulsa. And I’ve been working with Thrive for about six months now. And working with them has changed the whole way I do business. One of the major improvements that happened was with regard to my website and the leads that come in. We weren’t capturing any leads before Thrive stepped in. And now we get leads on a daily basis. Last time I checked, we were over 450 leads. And so I wasn’t expecting that, that was phenomenal. So now on our slower days, we can really work those leads and add to our revenue. I love my coach, Eric Chep. He has become such a important part of my life and my business. I wouldn’t want to give him up for anything at this point. So my weekly meetings with him has kept me on task. It’s kept me moving forward and not getting caught up into the daily grind of my business and not moving into the direction that I want to. He’s provided me with a level of accountability. So I am always having to get a certain amount of tasks done and it’s made all the difference. I would definitely recommend Thrive 15 to any local business that doesn’t have their own resources readily available or they don’t have their own marketing expertise. Because they’re the whole package. Working with them and partnering with them is like having a whole agency at your disposal. videographers, photographers, business strategists, on and on and on. It’s just impacted our bottom line. We’re up 17% over last year already for this year working with Thrive, and we’re not even into our busy season yet. So I would definitely recommend Thrive to anybody who needs a little bit of encouragement, a little help with all the details that they’re struggling with, and to help them with what they don’t know to position themselves for success. All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show we have a wonderful opportunity to record sort of a testimonial or a success story of a long-time Thriver out there we’ve worked with by the name of Vidar Lagarde. And just to verify, he’s a real person. He’s not a hologram, he has a real ministry. The website is safarimission.org, safarimission.org. Safarimission.org. And we’ve had a wonderful opportunity to work with him for years and years. I encourage everybody, check out that website today, safarimission.org. So, Bedar, I’ve got about 10 questions for you. One is, you know, we’ve worked together for years, so I thought you could maybe share with the listeners, how long have we worked together approximately? I’m not looking for a – I’m not trying to paint you into a corner, but approximately how long have we been working together? Six years, maybe, thereabout. Close enough. Rule of thumb numbers here. During that time we first met, your focus was and continues to be sharing the gospel with people and equipping people and teaching people how to feed themselves, clothe themselves, how to educate themselves, how to empower themselves. So you have a ministry that focuses on reaching the lost, teaching the gospel, but also on a practical level, empowering people. Could you maybe clarify what is the mission at safarimission.org? Yeah, so to put it very simply, we train leaders and we transform people. A lot of nonprofits do handouts. We do not do handouts. We help grow people’s thinking patterns. Poverty is not lack of money. It’s a mindset that produces lack of money. So we deal with the root issue, the mindset. We help people to find Christ because it’s hard to get proper ethics if you don’t have something correctly in your heart. So, we start with the heart issues and we help people with their mindset and become productive in society. When you climb a ladder, you don’t start in the top rung, you start on whatever rung you’re at. So, wherever they are, we help them get to the next level in life. We’re working with such people that they’re importing eggs from a different country. Okay, how do you start a chicken farm? How do you start with rabbits? How do you start with food security in that particular case? We’re also in Nairobi, huge, huge city. We help established business people get to the next level as well, all through kingdom, Christian principles found in the book of Proverbs and the Bible and so forth. And so, when you and I met, one of the big areas that we wanted to focus on was to make giving something that was a recurring thing and not something that we had to go, you wanted to spend 90% of your time reaching the lost and like 10% of your time thinking about the finances or maybe 5% of your time thinking about the finances and 95% of your time thinking about the lost. And I know we’ve worked together to be able to increase the amount of recurring giving quite a bit to where it’s allowed you to focus on the ministry all the time, every day. Could you maybe share, not looking for numbers, but just for anybody out there that has a ministry or a non-profit, as far as maybe a percentage, how much you’ve been able to grow the recurring giving portion of the ministry? Yes. Over these years we’ve grown approximately 800% in recurring giving. And so, we were in a situation where a lot of one-time gifts would come in, or the ministry was predominantly operating by one-time gifts. And the issue is, you don’t know exactly when the next one is coming. It’s difficult to budget with that. And so, you end up with time periods where things are tight, because you’re depending on one-time gifts. So you helped us move into recurring giving. And so basically one way of saying that it’s better to have $100 a month than a one-time gift of 1000 or 2000, because you can plan on it. And so recurring giving over these years have gone up approximately 800%. We’re in a very different situation today where the day-to-day operating costs are, we know what’s coming in. And so it’s just a whole lot easier to operate. How has that impacted your ability to reach the lost and empower the lost, having that consistency of revenue? Because, again, I deal with business owners all the time, muffler shops, automotive repair shops, dog groomers, dog trainers, veterinarians, photographers, lawyers, churches. And it seems like when the finances are not nailed down, all of the energy has to focus on that. I know that’s never been your heart. Your heart’s never been focused on the finances. Your heart’s been on reaching the lost. How has that been able to help you at Safari Mission be able to redirect your focus to be just on reaching people? Well, it’s a huge game changer because you’re going from maybe 50% of your time and energy thinking about those things. And of course, in a top leadership position, sometimes it’s not always just about where your action is at, it’s about what’s going on in your mind, that’s where you’re spending some time and energy. So, that was about 50% or so, that’s down to 10%. So, now we’re spending 90% on the field, actually helping people, putting together messages, books, content for podcasts. We’re in the sweet spot now. We were not in the sweet spot. We were toiling, I guess, is a word that you could use. So it’s been a complete game changer. And my final four questions I have for you is a lot of people, they want to build an organization, but they’re not organized. They want to scale, but they’ve yet to nail it. It’s hard to scale it if you haven’t nailed it. And I really, I mean, if you’re listening on today’s show, on part two of today’s show, I’m going to share a success story about an accountant in Canada. And I really do believe that the accountant in Canada, his business is almost the same as your organization. The reason why he’s an accountant is he wants to help people become financially proactive. He’s not in ministry, but he really doesn’t want to spend his day thinking about the finances. He wants to think, he wants to focus his time on helping people. And I know that’s your heart as well. So for anybody out there that hasn’t worked with a coach before and specifically working with me or my team, how did it help you taking a lot of these ideas and to refine it into repeatable systems? How has that impacted your business? Yeah, it’s definitely impacted. And you know, a big part of coaching is accountability. I’m gonna talk about the 80-20 principle, getting help to focus your time on the stuff that makes the most difference. There is always all these different distractions, there’s always all this input that wanna pull your mind in different directions. And so having that weekly accountability where you know, okay, let’s focus on the top three to five items every single week, that has really helped to move the needle. And then you can talk about, once in a while you talk about the big picture. So if there’s certain things that are disorganized, you work on organizing those things. If you’re sales and marketing for business terminology, I guess, if those areas are not working properly, then you focus on those areas until you get to a place that you successfully operate. It’s kind of like getting a wheel to spin, a flywheel, you know, a lot of energy to get that wheel going. And once the wheel is going, you don’t need a whole lot of energy. You need some to keep it going. But it’s more about managing what’s already going. And so, helping us transition from, you know, trying to get 50 flywheels going at the same time, you focus on the most important ones. Once you get two or three going, you can go to number four, five, and six. And so, that’s, I think that’s the way it is with business. You get sales and marketing as kind of the offense. Then you got your operations, which is whatever product, service you’re trying to sell. For us, it’s all the people we’re trying to help, well, are helping over in East Africa. Then you got the defense. It’s the accounting, the legal, those things have to be taken care of. You can’t be bleeding on the back end. And so you’ve helped us put all these things together so that it becomes a holistic picture, and you got all these flywheels, and they’re up in the air, they are spinning, and you spend a little bit of energy keeping those things going and then you focus on the sweet spot. Now for people out there that utilize our service, we do charge a flat fee. And so I think that’s one wonderful thing about your ministry too, is people reach out to Safari Mission and they go, you know what, I want to do $100 a month. And you’re not charging them more than what you agreed to. It’s a flat rate. You know, if someone says, I want to donate $5 a month to Safari Mission. And by the way, I recommend people should look into that safarimission.org. But if someone donates $5 a month or $100 a month or a thousand a month or whatever it is, you have a high integrity approach to it. You’re not nickel and diming your givers. I mean, it’s just a very transparent process. We operate the same way where we charge our clients a flat fee. How did that help you knowing that for the past six years, it was a flat rate as opposed to, you know, most consulting firms I’ve ever worked with, the fees can go up ten times more one month, five times more. Every time you talk to someone there’s an extra charge. How did that help you knowing that you had a flat rate? Well, flat rates are just a whole lot easier to budget with. You know what’s coming in on the income side and you know what’s going out on the outgo or the expense side. So that’s been real helpful. And then, of course, the way you operate is not just the mentoring or the coaching aspect with your personal time, but it’s the whole team that’s behind you. So a particular month, you might be helping us with some project, maybe putting a marketing video together because our own flywheel wasn’t spinning the way it should be. So you got your team helping with those things, and it’s still been a flat fee. And that’s been very, very helpful so that you don’t have to think about project expenses because of your coaching experience. Now, my final two questions I have for you, final two questions are, if somebody is out there on the fence and they’re thinking about, the way it works with our business is we have 160 clients. And so, just yesterday we had a guy, his name’s Benny, and Benny is a guy who’s been wanting to work with us for a long time. We had another lady by the name of Benny. So we had two Bennys in the same period of time, which is interesting. We have a female Benny and a male Benny, and they wanna work with us. And we have kind of a waiting list. So we only work with 160 clients, and that’s because I don’t wanna ever stretch myself too thin. I always wanna be responsive and be able to be, you know, know you, know your name, be able to be responsive. So for anybody out there that’s thinking about becoming a client or thinking about scheduling that free 13-point assessment at Thrivetimeshow.com. What would you say to anybody who’s thinking about scheduling that free initial 13-point assessment? Well, nothing happens by thinking about it. At some point, there has to be action. But my big question would be, are you coachable? Are you willing to make change? A lot of people say they are, but you’ve got to be hungry enough that you’re willing to change your habits. Your daily habit habits sets you up for success. So make a personal inventory, make sure you’re coachable, make sure you’re willing to change, make sure you’re hungry enough that you’re willing to spend, say maybe 10 hours every single week on working on your business versus working in your business. And then you just aggressively go for it and you call Clay and say, hey, I need to be at the top of that list. Now, final question I have here again, if just kind of a summary thought, I’m taking notes as you’re sharing here. I believe you said we’ve helped you grow by 800%. Maybe there’s a different way to quantify it or explain it, but what kind of impact has this coaching over the past six years made on safarimission.org, sir? Well, the ministry has grown tremendously. That 800% is the increase in recurring revenue. We are now building buildings. We’re looking at land. We’re looking at much larger projects than what we were looking at eight months because we’re trying to figure out, okay, where’s the electricity bill money gonna come from? So we’re in a very different spot. It means we’re helping a whole lot more people. Seven years ago, we were talking about helping thousands of people. Now that we’re looking at our annual report and our numbers, we’re talking about ministering to 3 million people every single year. That’s a huge difference in the amount of people that we talk to every single month. We were talking about 150 churches where the senior leadership was trained up by us. And now we’re talking about 500 churches where the senior leadership has been trained up by us. So big, big changes in the actual impact of what’s happening at safarimission.org. Again, folks, if you don’t know about safarimission.org, I encourage you to check it out. That’s safarimission.org. I think a lot of business owners were looking for good causes to donate to, good charities to donate to, people that will be good stewards of those finances. And if you go to safarimission.org and want to request more information, Vidar and his team will be happy to talk to you about how they can partner up with you for as little as $5 a month. Vidar, thank you so much for your time, sir. And I’m sure we’ll see you very, very soon. We will. Thank you, Clay, and you have an awesome day. Take care. Hi, my name is Josh Sperl from Sperl and Associates, chartered professional accountants based out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. And I started, I met Clay at a conference, at his conference in Tulsa in June of 2018. Started working with the coaching program shortly after there, you know, the experience has been great. You know, you really have a partner in the grind. You know, most people, I like to say most people are wrong about most things about business most of the time. And it’s very difficult for entrepreneurs to connect with other entrepreneurs who actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to business, but Clay and his team really does understand. You know, the tangible improvements that we’ve seen is we’re up over 50% since starting with the coaching program and they’re helping to help business owners create time, freedom and financial freedom. And I know what you’re going to think. You’re going to say, what the heck are you going to do with your time, freedom and financial freedom when you’re in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, that’s the most north of the city in North America with a million people. You know we’re probably just sitting in our igloos hoping for some television but I’ll give you an idea of what we’re doing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. So over here we have Sandra and we have Emma. Emma say hello. Hi everybody, this is my daddy’s channel. Emma really likes any video so let’s give it a let’s see what actually the time freedom, financial freedom can do for you in Edmonton. So believe it or not we have a beach here guys and I’ll take you on the little tour of Edmonton’s beach. Now it’s not what you Americans are going to think of as a beach. This is a full loop-the-loop. It knocks you completely upside down when you go into it. Let’s see if I can get the right angle here. That does not appear physically possible, but it really is going to knock you upside down. Went on it last time. And here is the Edmonton Beach. This is a northern beach. You guys, I don’t know if you can see it, but it’s a beautiful beach. It’s a beautiful beach. It’s a beautiful beach. It’s a beautiful beach. You guys out in Tulsa, you Americans think you have all the beaches here, but here is the northern beach, complete with waves. We got 30 degree weather inside here. I’m sorry, 30, that’s 90 for you guys over there. I gotta do the translation, the math in my head. And we even got a zip line that we can ride down here. And this is what we’re doing with our time freedom and financial freedom in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Thanks to the Thrive Time team. Thanks very much, guys. JT, do you know what time it is? 410. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Roseland, baby. Tim TiVo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma during the month of Christmas, December 5 and 6, 2024, Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Yes, folks, put it in your calendar this December, the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive Business Growth Workshop. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences in 2005 what year were you born? 1995. Dude I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old and a lot of people you know if I followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field and off the field the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now the big question is JT how does he do it? Hmm well they’re gonna have to come and find out cuz I don’t know Well, I’m just saying tip team is gonna teach us how he organizes his day how he organizes his life How he’s proactive with his faith his family his finances He’s gonna walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym into business It is gonna be a blasty blast at Tulsa Ruslan folks I’m telling you if you want to learn branding you want to learn marketing you will learn search engine optimization You want to learn social media marketing, that’s what we teach at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive workshop. If you want to learn accounting, you want to learn sales systems, you want to learn how to build a linear workflow, you want to learn how to franchise your business, that is what we teach at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. You know, over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine, the PR consultant of choice for Nike, for Prince, for Michael Jackson. The top PR consultant in the history of the planet has spoken at the Thrive Time Show workshops. We’ve had Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt. He has spoken at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops. Folks, I’m telling you, these events are going to teach you what you need to know to start and grow a successful business. And the way we price the events, the way we do these events, is you can pay $250 for a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes! We’ve designed these events to be affordable for you and we want to see you live and in person at the two day interactive December 5th and 6th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. Everything that you need to succeed will be taught at the two day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop December 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the way we do these events is we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a question and answer session so that wonderful people like you can have your questions answered. Yes, we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a 15 minute question and answer session. It’s interactive. It’s two days. It’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve been doing these events since 2005 and I’m telling you folks, it’s going to blow your mind. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop is America’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshop. See the thousands of video testimonials from real people just like you who have been able to build multi-million dollar companies. Watch those testimonials today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Simply by clicking on the testimonials button right there at Thrivetimeshow.com you’re gonna see thousands of people just like you who’ve been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day we’re gonna add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup. But I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to thrivetimeshow.com. Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the Request Tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it and I’m super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton, I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Jerusalem, Oklahoma. I suppose it’s Tulsa, Russia. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Jerusalem, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show in Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. Who? You! You’re going to come! I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which give you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies and I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California, in the beautiful, sunny weather of LA, come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it, and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation. Really life-changing. And I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine, I’ll see you in Tulsa. I’m Michael Levine, I’ll see you in Tulsa. Whoa!