Clay Clark | Business Conference | How to Gain Traction In a World Filled w/ Perpetual Distraction With Best-Selling Author Nir Eyal + “American adults spend over 11 hours per interacting w/ media.” – Nielsen + Join Tebow At Dec 5-6 Workshop!

Audio Transcription

Clay Clark is here somewhere. Where’s my buddy Clay? Clay Clark! Clay is the greatest. I met his goats today, I met his dogs, I met his chickens, I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy. I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs. So this guy is like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. 4,000% from February to February. Now I can better that. Okay, Clay, I don’t think you know this. I don’t think you know this. I’m pinching myself and if I cry, forgive me. In the last two and a half days, we have bettered our entire month of February in the last two and a half days. And the phone’s blowing up. Everything’s just blowing up. You’re right, it is like a rocket ship. So we’re pinching ourselves. How can we learn to use technology as a tool, rather than becoming a tool used by technology? On today’s show, bestselling author Nir Eyal teaches us how to increase our focus in the age of exponentially increasing distraction. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men. Eight kids, co-created by two different women. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Time Show. Now, one, two, one, here we go! Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show. And on today’s show, we’re going to be interviewing a Wall Street Journal bestselling author by the name of Nir Eyal. Nir spent years of his life in the video gaming and advertising industry, where he learned and applied these techniques described in his bestselling book, which you have to buy if you have a soul, called Hooked. He’s taught courses on applied consumer psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he’s been a frequent speaker at both industry conferences and Fortune 500 companies. Thrive Nation, check this out. Throughout his career, his work, his writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Atlantic, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, the Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Psychology Today, and we’ve tricked him to being on the podcast today. Nir, how are you, sir? Wait, is this a podcast? Uh, yeah, what did you think it was? I guess it’s too late to back out now. I guess I have to go. This is awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thank you also for reading my book. I really appreciate all the positive feedback. Thank you. I don’t know if you ever come to the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, but the sod farm tours are amazing this time of year. To my right, there’s a bookshelf in what we call the man cave. So I broadcast from a 17 acre facility here. I call it Camp Clark and Chicken Palace. There’s a big bookshelf. And on that book, there are books that I have read, consumed, dog-eared, and your book, Hooked, was a book that absolutely blew my mind. Can you explain to the listeners out there what inspired you to write this book and at its core, what it’s really all about. Yeah, so the two reasons I wrote this book are first and foremost that I have built products in the past. I’ve helped start two tech companies, both of which were acquired. And I remember when I was at my former companies, how hard it was to understand this simple question around how do we get our customers to do what we want them to do, particularly when we know that our products and services would greatly benefit our customers if they would only use the damn product. And so what I wanted to try and figure out is what is it about these world-changing companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat, how do these companies seem to have such an easy time at changing people’s behavior? Because I thought, you know, wouldn’t it be great if we could apply these same psychological tricks and tactics that these companies use to keep us hooked to their products? What if the rest of us could use those same techniques to build the kind of products and services that people want to use, not because they have to use them, but because they genuinely want to use them just as much as they enjoy and want to use these other products and services? The other reason I wrote this book, frankly, was because I found that at times these technologies were changing my behavior in ways that I didnít always like. I wanted to get to the bottom of why these products were so darn engaging. How were they built to sometimes be distractions? Letís face it. Those are the two reasons I wrote the book. Number one, to help the entrepreneurs out there who want to build world-changing products that can really improve peopleís lives by forming these healthy habits. And the second reason was because I wanted to kind of raise awareness around these techniques so that we can make sure that we put distractions and these unhealthy habits at times in their place. For all the thrivers out there who listen to the show each and every day over the years, they know that I have the cognitive processing power of a sea turtle probably. So I really struggle to, it’s like you’ve got to get through a hardened shell to kind of understand something. So I these are there’s there are excerpts in your book, your book that I highlighted, and then I read and I reread and I thought you know I’m gonna do I now understand these concepts but it took me a while to get them so I’m gonna just read some excerpts some some passages from your book and I’d like to have you to break them down for us. So here’s the first one. 79% of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning. Perhaps more startling, fully one third of Americans say they would rather give up sex, sex, than lose their cell phone. A 2011 university study suggested people check their phone 34 times per day. However, industry insiders believe that number is actually closer to an astounding 150 daily sessions. Face it, we’re hooked. The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions. There’s so much to unpack there near break it down. Well, you know, I think a lot of your listeners are probably nodding their heads in agreement in that we can see that these devices have had such a profound impact on our day-to-day lives. In some respects, I admire these companies. I want to figure out how to crack the code so that we can use the same tactics that these companies have used to make their products so habit-forming and so engaging so that the rest of us building businesses can improve our products as well. I think the real problem these days is not that a few companies have built these products to suck us in. The real problem is that far too many products out there just plain old suck. What I was hoping to do with WritingHooked is to uncover these techniques so that we can all, all of us in business, all of us who are building a product experience that we want to make the kind of product that people really enjoy using, that they build healthy habits around, can use those tactics for good. The kind of folks that I work with and who have benefited from the book are the kind of folks who are building health apps or apps to help people save money or eat more healthfully or get more done at work. That’s really the potential of using this psychology of behavioral design to help people live better lives. I want to ask you this here, and this is not necessarily an excerpt from your book, but just something I’m curious about. I feel like there are people that I have… We have a business coaching program, so we have thousands of people from all over the world who attend our workshops, and then a few brands we coach individually. And then my partner and I, we’ve grown 13 multi-million dollar companies between the two of us. There’s an auto auction, there’s a bank, there’s a haircut chain, a lot of different, you know, brick and mortar kind of companies. And people say, well, Clay, how do you do it? And I’m like, well, I focus exclusively on that task at hand. I really don’t engage a lot with my smartphone during the day. You know, I just don’t do it. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people tell me I have a hard time putting that thing down. So I want to ask you, as you’ve studied this and you become aware of the hooked nature the Hooked nature of a lot of these programs and apps. How do you personally manage the distractions during your day? How do you find time to focus and to write a thoughtful book like Hooked or to do the research that you do? Yeah, you know, it’s such a good question that I in fact devoted the past five years since I wrote Hooked to answering this next big question, which is exactly the one you raised here. How do we make sure that we do the things we say we’re gonna do? I think it’s such a fascinating question, right? We know we’re not supposed to eat the junk food, and yet we do. We know we’re supposed to go to the gym, but we don’t go. We know we’re supposed to work on that big project or that big presentation, and yet we’re stuck checking email or scrolling Slack channels. Why? Why do we do that? We know what we’re supposed to do. You know, so many book authors and gurus out there, they tell you some killer technique. Well, you know what? There’s no killer technique. It’s common sense. We all know what to do. The problem is we don’t do it. And so, right? So that’s why I wrote this next book that’s coming out next year in 2019. We’ll have this book called Indistractable. And Becoming Indistractable is all about this question of how do we do the things we say we’re gonna do. And a lot of the book has to do with technology distraction, but that’s kind of the flavor of the day. The book is really about all sorts of distraction. And there’s a lot of techniques that we can use that, you know, I was surprised as I did the five years of research that went into this book, I came to it originally thinking that the distraction itself was the problem. And so I did, you know, a lot of gurus recommend, I did a digital detox, I got rid of all my gadgets, I got a feature phone, and I sat down and I thought, okay, well now I’m going to be super duper focused. And it didn’t work at all. Oh. You know, I looked at my bookshelf and, oh, there’s that book I’ve been meaning to read, and, you know, that laundry probably needs folding, you know, I probably should take out the trash and reorganize my desk, and I kept finding distractions. And so what I realized after writing this book was that distraction starts from within. But guess what? If you can’t sit with your family for an hour without looking at your cell phone, I got a newsflash for you. It ain’t the cell phone. That’s the problem, folks. This just in. Exactly. There’s something else going on here. And so the first step, when you ask, how do I deal with distraction? When I find myself distracted, the first thing that I have to ask is what’s the internal trigger? The internal trigger is a fascinating concept. The internal trigger goes back to this idea that all human behavior is prompted by some kind of uncomfortable sensation. We used to believe in psychology that humans are motivated through the pleasure principle. This came from Freud, that all human behavior is motivated by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. But it turns out that’s not exactly right. It’s actually all pain. All human behavior is motivated by the desire to escape discomfort. Now, this is called the homeostatic response. We see this every day. You know, if you walk into a room and it’s cold, you put on your jacket. If it gets hot, you take it off. If you feel hunger pangs, you eat. And when you’re stuffed, that doesn’t feel good, you stop eating. And so those are physiological pain points. Those are a discomfort on a physiological level that affects our behavior. Same thing happens when it comes to psychological states. So when we’re feeling bored or lonesome or lost or indecisive or fatigued, when we feel these negative sensations, we look for relief. We look for something to satiate that discomfort through some kind of distraction. We look at our phone, we watch the television, we do something that we later regret. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So the first step to dealing with distraction is understanding your internal triggers. So for example, I write every day. Writing is not easy for me, which sucks because I’m an author, so I wish it was a lot easier. I can remember it’s not. So, so, you know, when I get bored or frustrated or I find my work hard, you know, my habit used to be to go Google something or check email or some other kind of pseudo work that felt like work but I knew that it really wasn’t work. Instead today what I do is I think about those internal triggers. I ask myself, you know, what is it that I’m experiencing right now? And I literally will jot it down. I’ll write it down on a piece of paper and then I’ll do what psychologists call surfing the urge. I’ll give myself just a few minutes to be present with that sensation, as opposed to just instantaneously doing something to satiate that itch, which is what the tech companies, frankly, want you to do, right? Facebook wants you to use the product whenever you’re feeling lonely. Google wants you to use Google when you’re feeling uncertain. ESPN or the news or stock prices or sports, any of these, Reddit or YouTube, all of these products want you to check them when you’re feeling bored. So as opposed to this instantaneous sensation, sorry, sorry, instantaneous relief from a sensation, I give myself just a few seconds to be present with that sensation, experience it, and think about, okay, do I really want to give in or is there something healthier I can do with that time? But fundamentally, look, I mean, if it’s sometimes for some folks, it is a deeper dilemma. There are other circumstances or other problems. I mean, specifically with the workplace, I did a lot of research on workplace culture, you know, because a lot of people will blame technological distraction on the fact that they always have to be connected at work. Well, it turns out that the research that I uncovered found that it’s not actually the technology that’s the problem at a workplace that where people overuse tech. It actually is a symptom of a larger problem that what we find is that tech overuse is just a canary in the coal mine. Just like if you can’t talk about tech overuse that you with your family, if you can’t talk about tech overuse at your company, let me tell you there are tons of other skeletons in the closet that you’re not addressing. It turns out that these companies that have an open environment where people can talk about these problems, they can solve this problem just like any other business problem. It seems like your book number one, again the book Hooked, is kind of explaining, okay, this is how you make products that can hook consumers. And I believe your ethics behind it, from what I could read in the book is that you want to help develop apps and programs that can truly help people do the right behavior. But book number two, or this next book you’re working on, is kind of like a book about if you are addicted to maybe just a mindless video game. You’re as poor as can be, but you’re the high scorer in some video game and you just cannot get off the wagon. You can’t stop updating your Facebook status. You can’t stop updating Twitter. It seems like that’s what this newest book is about. Is that correct? Right, it’s a big part of it. I think we haven’t yet adopted as a society what’s called social antibodies. We haven’t figured out how to put these new tools in their place. And that’s nothing new or surprising. Whenever there’s a technological revolution, there’s always this period where we adjust and we adapt our behaviors. As Paul Verrillo said, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. There’s no way that a technological revolution of this magnitude is not going to have some downsides. We’re just now coming to grips with how do we manage distraction. It’s important to realize that the tactics in this book, I didn’t write this book because of the latest distraction. I wrote Indistractable because distraction is something that humans have been struggling with forever. Socrates and Plato talked about 2500 years ago, they talked about distraction and how distracted people were back then. So this is not a new problem and I wrote the book to conquer all distraction, whether it’s television or radio or too much news or whatever it is that we use as distraction. For a lot of people, work is a distraction, right? You don’t want to face your family life, maybe something’s not going on so great at home. So what do you do? You escape into your work. That’s a problem for a lot of people as well. That’s right, you work. You do what Rihanna said. You gotta work, work, work, work, work. That’s what you gotta do. A lot of people, I work with entrepreneurs, and that’s what they do. They’re not happy with their wife, let’s go to work. To some, to some, you know, so it’s not a judgment on the behavior. A lot of people say, oh, you know, technology’s rotting your brain, and it’s hijacking your decisions, and it’s addictive, and blah, blah, blah. I don’t buy it If it’s a behavior you want to do if you have intent behind that behavior, there’s nothing wrong with it, right? Use Facebook use Twitter use social media. They’re great tools the question is whether you’re doing something because you you want you to do it because it’s something that you’re in control of versus Something that’s controlling you is technology a tool or are you becoming a tool of technology? Are you are you are you a tool or is technology or tool? That’s really the question here. Nir, in your book, Hooked, you write, instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the user’s daily routines and emotions. A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter. They feel a pang of loneliness, and before rational thought occurs, they are scrolling through their Facebook feeds. A question comes to mind and before searching their brains, they query Google. The first to mind solution wins. Nir, from your experience and research, I would love for you to share what you do. How can we learn to use technology as a tool, rather than becoming a tool used by technology? On today’s show, bestselling author Nir Iyel teaches us how to increase our focus in the age of exponentially increasing distraction Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show But this show does two men eight kids co-created by two different women 13 multi-million dollar businesses ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show. And on today’s show, Welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show. And on today’s show, we’re going to be interviewing a Wall Street Journal bestselling author by the name of Nir Eyal. Nir spent years of his life in the video gaming and advertising industry, where he learned and applied these techniques described in his bestselling book, which you have to buy if you have a soul, called Hooked. He’s taught courses on applied consumer psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he’s been a frequent speaker at both industry conferences and Fortune 500 companies. Thrive Nation, check this out. Throughout his career, his work, his writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, the Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Psychology Today, and we’ve tricked him to being on the podcast today. Mir, how are you, sir? Wait, is this a podcast? Uh, yeah, I think it was. Oh, gosh, okay. Well, I guess it’s too late to back out now. I guess I have to reschedule. No, this is awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thank you also for reading my book. I really appreciate all the positive feedback. Thank you. I don’t know if you ever come to the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, but the sod farm tours are amazing this time of year. To my right, there’s a bookshelf in what we call the man cave. So I broadcast from a 17-acre facility here. I call it Camp Clark and Chicken Palace. There’s a big bookshelf, and on that book, there are books that I have read, consumed, dog-eared, and your book, Hooked, was a book that absolutely blew my mind. Can you explain to the listeners out there? What inspired you to write this book and at its core what it’s really all about Yeah, so the the two reasons I wrote this book are first and foremost that I have built Products in the past I’ve helped start two tech companies both of which were acquired and I remember when I was at my former companies companies, how hard it was to understand this simple question around how do we get our customers to do what we want them to do, particularly when we know that our products and services would greatly benefit our customers if they would only use the damn product. So what I wanted to try and figure out is what is it about these world changing companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat, how do these companies seem to have such an easy time at changing people’s behavior? I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could apply these same psychological tricks and tactics that these companies use to keep us hooked to their products? What if the rest of us could use those same techniques to build the kind of products and services that people want to use, not because they have to use them, but because they genuinely want to use them just as much as they enjoy and want to use these other products and services. The other reason I wrote this book, frankly, was because I found that at times these technologies were changing my behavior in ways that I didn’t always like. I wanted to get to the bottom of why these products were so darn engaging. How were they built to sometimes be distractions? Let’s face it. Those are the two reasons I wrote the book. Number one, to help the entrepreneurs out there who want to build world-changing products that can really improve people’s lives by forming these healthy habits. The second reason was because I wanted to raise awareness around these techniques so that we can make sure that we put distractions and these unhealthy habits at times in their place. For all the thrivers out there who listen to the show each and every day over the years, they know that I have the cognitive processing power of a sea turtle, probably. So I really struggle. It’s like you’ve got to get through a hardened shell to kind of understand something. So there are excerpts in your book that I highlighted, and then I read, and I reread, and I thought, you know what I’m going to do? I now understand these concepts, but it took me a while to get them. So I’m going to just read some excerpts, some passages from your book, and I’d like to have you to break them down for us. So here’s the first one. 79% of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning. Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex, sex, than lose their cell phone. A 2011 University study suggested people check their phone 34 times per day. However, industry insiders believe that number is actually closer to an astounding 150 daily sessions. Face it, we’re hooked. The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions. There’s so much to unpack there. Nir, break it down. Well, you know, I think a lot of your listeners are probably nodding their heads in agreement in that we can see that these devices have had such a profound impact on our day-to-day lives. In some respects, I admire these companies. I want to figure out how to crack the code so that we can use the same tactics that these companies have made, that these companies have used to make their products so habit-forming and so engaging so that the rest of us building businesses can improve our products as well. I think the real problem these days is not that a few companies have built these products to suck us in. The real problem is that far too many products out there just plain old suck. What I was hoping to do with WritingHooked is to uncover these techniques so that we can all, all of us in business, all of us who are building a product experience that we want to make the kind of product that people really enjoy using, that they build healthy habits around, can use those tactics for good. The kind of folks that I work with and who have benefited from the book are the kind of folks who are building health apps or apps to help people save money or eat more healthfully or get more done at work. I mean, that’s really the potential of using this psychology of behavioral design to help people live better lives. I want to ask you this here, and this is not necessarily an excerpt from your book, but just something I’m curious about. I feel like there are people that I have, we have a business coaching program, so we have thousands of people from all over the world who attend our workshops, and then a few brands we coach individually, and then my partner and I, we’ve grown, you know, 13 multi-million dollar companies between the two of us. There’s an auto auction, there’s a bank, there’s a haircut chain, a lot of different, you know, brick and mortar kind of companies. And people say, well, Clay, how do you do it? And I’m like, well, I focus exclusively on that task at hand. And I really don’t engage a lot with my smartphone during the day. You know, I just don’t do it. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people tell me, I have a hard time putting that thing down. So I want to ask you, as you’ve studied this and you’ve become aware of the Hooked nature of a lot of these programs and apps, how do you personally manage the distractions during your day? How do you find time to focus and to write a thoughtful book like Hooked or to do the research that you do? Yeah, you know, it’s such a good question that I, in fact, devoted the past five years since I wrote Hooked to answering this next big question, which is exactly the one you raised here, of how do we make sure that we do the things we say we’re going to do? I think it’s such a fascinating question, right? We know we’re not supposed to eat the junk food, and yet we do. We know we’re supposed to go to the gym, but we don’t go. We know we’re supposed to work on that big project or that big presentation, and yet we’re stuck checking email or scrolling Slack channels. Why? Why do we do that? We know what we’re supposed to do. You know, so many book authors and gurus out there, they tell you some killer technique. Well, you know what? There’s no killer technique. It’s common sense. We all know what to do. The problem is we don’t do it. Right? Right. So that’s why I wrote this next book that’s coming out next year in 2019. We’ll have this book called Indistractable. And becoming indistractable is all about this question of how do we do the things we say we’re going to do. And a lot of the book has to do with technology distraction, but that’s kind of the flavor of the day. The book is really about all sorts of distraction. And there’s a lot of techniques that we can use that, you know, I was surprised as I did the five years of research that went into this book, you know, I came to it originally that the distraction itself was the problem. And so I did, you know, a lot of gurus recommend, I did a digital detox, I got rid of all my gadgets, I got a feature phone, and I sat down and I thought, okay, well now I’m gonna be super duper focused. And it didn’t work at all. You know, I looked at my bookshelf, and oh, there’s that book I’ve been meaning to read, and you know, that laundry probably needs folding, you know, I probably should take out the trash and reorganize my desk, and I kept finding distractions and so what I realized after writing this book was that distraction starts from within. That guess what if you can’t sit with your family for an hour without looking at your cell phone I got a newsflash for you it ain’t the cell phone that’s the problem folks. This just in. Exactly there’s something else going on here. And so the first step, when you ask, how do I deal with distraction? When I find myself distracted, the first thing that I have to ask is what’s the internal trigger? The internal trigger is a fascinating concept. The internal trigger goes back to this idea that all human behavior is prompted by some kind of uncomfortable sensation. You know, we used to believe in psychology that humans are motivated through the pleasure principle. This came from Freud, that all human behavior is motivated by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. But it turns out that’s not exactly right. It’s actually all pain. All human behavior is motivated by the desire to escape discomfort. Now, this is called the homeostatic response. We see this every day. You know, if you walk into a room and it’s cold, you put on your jacket. If it gets hot, you take it off. If you feel hunger pangs, you eat. And when you’re stuffed, that doesn’t feel good, you stop eating. And so those are physiological pain points. Those are a discomfort on a physiological level that affects our behavior. Same thing happens when it comes to psychological states. So when we’re feeling bored or lonesome or lost or indecisive or fatigued, when we feel these negative sensations, we look for relief. We look for something to satiate that discomfort. Now, many times, we satiate that discomfort through some kind of distraction. We look at our phone, we watch the television, we do something that we later regret. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So the first step to dealing with distraction is understanding your internal triggers. So for example, when I write every day, writing is not easy for me, which sucks because I’m an author, so I wish it was a lot easier. It’s not. So when I get bored or frustrated or I find my work hard, my habit used to be to go Google something or check email or some other kind of pseudo work that felt like work, but I knew that it really wasn’t work. Instead today what I do is I think about those internal triggers. I ask myself, what is it that I’m experiencing right now? And I literally will jot it down. I’ll write it down on a piece of paper. And then I’ll do what psychologists call surfing the urge. I’ll give myself just a few minutes to be present with that sensation, as opposed to just instantaneously doing something to satiate that itch, which is what the tech companies, frankly, want you to do, right? Facebook wants you to use the product whenever you’re feeling lonely. Google wants you to use Google when you’re feeling uncertain. You know, ESPN or the news or stock prices or sports, you know, any of these, Reddit or YouTube, all these products want you to check them when you’re feeling bored. So as opposed to this instantaneous sensation, sorry, instantaneous relief from a sensation, I give myself just a few seconds to be present with that sensation, experience it, and think about, okay, do I really want to give in, or is there something healthier I can do with that time? But fundamentally, look, I mean, if it’s, sometimes for some folks, it is a deeper dilemma. There are other circumstances or other problems. I mean, specifically with the workplace, I did a lot of research on workplace culture, because a lot of people will blame technological distraction on the fact that they always have to be connected at work. Well it turns out that the research that I uncovered found that it’s not actually the technology that’s the problem at a workplace where people overuse tech. It actually is a symptom of a larger problem. That what we find is that tech overuse is just a canary in the coal mine. Just like if you can’t talk about tech overuse with your family, if you can’t talk about tech overuse at your company let me tell you there are tons of other skeletons in the closet that you’re not addressing it turns out that these companies that have an open environment where people can talk about these problems they can solve this problem just like any other business problem. It seems like your book number one you know again the book Hooked is kind of explaining okay this is how you make products that can hook consumers. And I believe your ethics behind it, from what I could read in the book, is that you want to help develop apps and programs that can truly help people do the right behavior. But book number two, or this next book you’re working on, is kind of like a book about if you are addicted to, you know, maybe just a mindless video game. That it, you’re as poor as can be, but you’re just the high score in some video game and you just cannot get off the wagon. You know, you can’t stop updating your Facebook status, you can’t stop updating Twitter. It seems like that’s what this newest book is about, is that correct? Right, it’s a big part of it. I think, you know, we haven’t yet adopted as a society what’s called social antibodies. We haven’t figured out how to put these new tools in their place. And that’s nothing new or surprising. Whenever there’s a technological revolution, there’s always this period where we adjust and we adapt our behaviors. You know, as Paul Borillo said, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. And so there’s no way that a technological revolution of this magnitude is not gonna have some downsides. And so we’re just now coming to grips with how do we manage distraction. But it’s important to realize that the tactics in this book, I didn’t write this book because of the latest distraction. I wrote indistractable because distraction is something that humans have been struggling with forever. Socrates and Plato talked about 2,500 years ago, they talked about distraction and how distracted people were back then. So this is not a new problem and I wrote the book to conquer all distraction, whether it’s television or radio or too much news or whatever it is that we use as a distraction. For a lot of people, work is a distraction. You don’t want to face your family life, maybe something’s not going on so great at home. So what do you do? You escape into your work. That’s a problem for a lot of people as well. That’s right. You work. You do what Rihanna said. You’ve got to work, work, work, work, work. That’s what you’ve got to do. A lot of people, I work with entrepreneurs who that’s what they do. They’re not happy with their wife, let’s go to work. So it’s not a judgment on the behavior. A lot of people say, oh, you know, technology is rotting your brain and it’s hijacking your decisions and it’s addictive and blah, blah, blah. I don’t buy it. If it’s a behavior you want to do, if you have intent behind that behavior, there’s nothing wrong with it, right? Use Facebook, use Twitter, use social media. They’re great tools. The question is whether you’re doing something because you wanted to do it, because it’s something that you’re in control of versus something that’s controlling you. Is technology a tool or are you becoming a tool of technology? Are you a tool or is technology your tool? That’s really the question here. In your book, Hooked, you write, instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the user’s daily routines and emotions. A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter. They feel a pang of loneliness and before rational thought occurs, they are scrolling through their Facebook feeds. A question comes to mind and before searching their brains, they query Google. The first to mind solution wins. Nir, from your experience and research, I would love for you to share what you believe to be the most addictive technology-related activities that are not healthy over first I just want to clarify that that term addiction it it it it there’s some clarification so I didn’t I didn’t write how to build addictive products the book is titled how to build habit forming products because addictions are these persistent compulsive dependencies on a behavior substance that harms the user so that the definition of addiction okay, true. Habits on the other hand are simply an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. So in writing Hooked, I want to help people design healthy habits. You know, as I mentioned, there’s no reason we can’t use the same psychology behind Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and these apps that people can sometimes overuse. We can use those same tactics for good no matter what business you’re in. So that’s the first point. And so, you know, but some people, very small percentage of people do get addicted. Just as people get addicted to all sorts of things. Look, you know, the vast majority of people out there can have a glass of wine with dinner and they’re not alcoholics. But do some people get addicted to alcohol? Absolutely. But there’s been almost a pendulum swinging in the other direction, is that people find it really convenient to say, oh, you know what? I can’t control my behavior because I’m addicted to this technology. It’s designed to be addictive. And I know, I hear you. I feel the pain. I’ve struggled with distraction myself. That’s a big reason why I do what I do. But the thing is, the more I research this topic, the more I realize that we have way more power and way more control than we think. That’s really the message that I want to impart with my next book, Indistractable, is that we can separate the good features. We can build habit-forming products to improve our lives. The vast majority of tech out there is awful. The vast majority of the products we use day-to-day are not usable. They’re not user-friendly. So we need these techniques to make these products more engaging and more enjoyable to use. But then we also need to be aware of these techniques for how we can put distraction in its place. Did you grow up wanting to create video games? What was your background growing up as a young whippersnapper? Yeah, I definitely played a lot of video games. I used to have the Sega Genesis. I spent way too much time playing video games. Let me tell you, half of Silicon Valley, the people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as engineers and programmers, you’d be hard pressed to find anybody out there who didn’t play too many video games growing up. What Sega Genesis games were your favorite? Did you have a game, were you a big fan of Street Fighter 2? Did you have a big thing for Sonic the Hedgehog? Did you play NHL 94? What was your favorite game? I played a lot of Sonic. That’s for sure. That was one I played way too much of. So Sonic was your move. Now, can you kind of, for the listeners out there, just to get kind of a look into your background, can you show the listeners where you went to school and kind of your path that led up to you getting into the video game world? Yeah, sure. So let’s see this was 2003 this was back way before solar became as big as it is today It was kind of like a mini solar city if you will that’s now part of Tesla that was my first company I had a job as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group first and then I Helped start this solar energy business that business was acquired I went to Stanford Graduate School of Business for my MBA and then after my MBA I started another company in the gaming and advertising space. That company was acquired by a company that was then acquired by Yahoo and that’s when I started writing and doing research. I had this hypothesis that the technology companies of the future would be the ones that master habits. And I had this hypothesis that as the interface shrinks, right, as we went from desktop to laptop to mobile phones to wearable devices and now to audible devices like the Amazon Alexa and Siri and Cortana, you know, now that the interface, it doesn’t even exist, the screen isn’t even there, I knew that habits would become increasingly important because there’s just less space to trigger people with these external triggers. These external triggers as opposed to internal triggers that we talked about earlier. The external triggers are these pings, these dings, these rings, these notifications in our environment that tell us what to do next. And so, if you think about it, if you’re building an app for the iPhone or a skill for the Amazon Alexa, if the user doesn’t remember that you exist, right? If you’re not on the first page of their home screen or if you’re not top of mind on the Alexa skill, if they don’t know to look for you, you might as well not even exist. I realized that business people have bought into this lie that if I just make the best product that it’ll win. It’ll win the market. That’s not true. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. Let me tell you, Silicon Valley graveyards are full of companies that had the best technology. The fact is it’s not the best technology. It’s the technology that captures the monopoly of the mind, the thing that we turn to first with little or no conscious thought. Those are the companies that capture the market. So, when I did this research and I put together, I started blogging at first about the research that I was doing. I was spending a lot of time at the Stanford Library and talking to people who at the time were building these technologies. I had good timing being in the Valley back when many of these companies were nascent. And so I blogged about it and I eventually, that became a class at Stanford at the Graduate School of Business that I taught for a few years at the design school, the Hays to Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. And then that class became my book, Hooked. You are a fascinating creature. You are a guy who, I really do believe is you’re everybody I’ve interviewed on the show whether it be the former you know head of Walt Disney World Resorts Lee Cockerill or Michael Levine he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson Prince the Clintons and the Bushes I mean people who are obsessed with let’s say PR or someone who’s obsessed with management You guys all have a magnificent obsession about one thing that seems to be here It’s almost like the design of a decade to quote Janet Jackson the wise philosopher it seems like there’s like this magnificent obsession what motivated you what’s motivating you to first right hooked and now your newest book what what what what what where’s that motivation that that maniacal obsession for this topic come from as we’re gonna go way back up you know if if if if I really think hard I think is probably all started for me when I was a kid, I was obese. And like literally clinically obese. I remember my mom taking me to the doctor and, you know, the doctor showing on the chart, okay, this is normal, this is overweight, this is obese, this is you, you know, fat camp the whole nine yards. I remember really struggling with my weight for a very, very long time. I still have to watch. Now, I’m a normal weight. I’m not obese anymore, but it’s always something that I have to watch. I remember when I was a kid feeling like food controlled me. I was fascinated by that. I was fascinated by how these food companies could seem to manipulate my tastes and preferences and make me want what they sold. I think it was a pivotal time in my life when I conquered that problem, when I got control over food and I could manage it. I think that’s kind of driven me until now. That’s why I’m so fascinated by the deeper psychology of marketing, of consumer behavior. And then so when I saw these devices, you know, I got started in the tech business in 2007, 2008. This was before, you know, just just as the Apple App Store was launching. And so I got this front row seat in Silicon Valley to see this tool that arguably has had a greater effect on changing human behavior and human habits than any other device in history. And if we learn how to use it properly, I think we can do a heck of a lot of good with it. And so that’s where I became, where I took my interest and fascination and found a creative outlet and application. We have a lot of thrivers who are very focused to work and they’ll email us and tell us they struggle with their weight. How did you beat obesity? What did you do? Well, that’s a, I mean, talk about changing habits. There’s a lot there as well. You know again, it’s, there’s no magic answer. I think it illustrates this point around why it’s so important to become indistractable. We all know what to do, right? We all know that a salad is healthier than a piece of chocolate cake. You don’t need to buy a book to tell you that. Right, right. We all know these kind of things. I think the difficulty is in doing it, right? The difficulty is in consistently changing your habits. And so there’s a lot of psychology to unpack how to change your daily routines and your daily habits. One technique that I can share with you is a technique that I call progressive extremism works is like this, that diets we know don’t work. They don’t do anything but train your brain to have a scarcity mentality, because when you tell yourself, I’m gonna go on this rigid diet temporarily, and then once I reach my given weight, things will be great. I mean, is there anything more ridiculous than that? What makes people think that when you go on a diet and you reach that weight, let’s say, that you’re not going to just balloon right back up. If you’ve eaten a way that an overweight person eats, you’re going to be overweight. I’ve got to give a big asterisk here. Not everyone who’s overweight necessarily, it’s all about the food. There’s other conditions, of course. Insulin plays a big role. There’s other conditions, but by and large, there is still this relationship with the type of food we eat and how much we eat. Progressive extremism is this technique that I use. It’s pretty simple. Basically, the way it works is this. You figure out one thing that you know is unhealthy. I don’t have to tell you what’s unhealthy. We all know what’s unhealthy. You pick that one thing and you eliminate it from your life forever. When you do this, don’t take on big categories. Don’t say, I’m never going to eat sugar ever again. That’s a bad idea. Never eat sugar again. Never going to do it. Just going to cut it all out. This is probably not realistic. Don’t get crazy. Right, that’s not realistic. But do something that’s so simple, that’s so easy to take out that you could do it forever. So for example, Halloween is coming up, which is apropos, because when I started with progressive extremism several years ago now, The first thing I cut out was candy corn. Now candy corn is gross, right? I don’t know, some of my wife loves candy corn. I think it’s awful. But it was something that I would eat when it was around. October time, you know, it’s around around Halloween. It would just be around and I’d eat it and it’s awful. I don’t even like it. So I remember writing down, I will never for the rest of my life eat candy corn. Never. Never. And here’s why this technique works. Because I noticed, if you think about there are certain groups that when they identify as a particular type of person, their self-identity changes their habits. Because long-term behavior change is identity change. So just as a religious Jew is not thinking to themselves, oh my gosh, I wonder if I should have some bacon today. No, it’s not kosher. They don’t eat it. A devout Muslim is not wondering whether they should imbibe alcohol every day because it’s something they just don’t do. A vegetarian doesn’t ask themselves, should I eat a hamburger? No, it’s out of the question because it’s part of their identity. And they don’t have to struggle with themselves. It becomes a much easier decision to make because it’s part of who they are. So if you can use this progressive extremism technique in small steps. So the next thing I did after candy corn was I made a rule for myself, no sugary soda in the house. Okay, if I wanted sugary soda, I could get it somewhere else outside the house, but none inside my house. Then I went to only diet soda. Okay, then I went to only diet soda, but only outside the house. So these small steps whenever you’re ready in small increments in write these down so you can review them every few months. This is how, through progressive small steps, we can actually make these very big changes. But again, it has to be something permanent. Don’t start a diet that doesn’t become a lifelong change. I cannot say how much I enjoy interviewing you. You’re a wealth of knowledge. I want to talk about your Hooked model. The trigger, the action, the variable reward, the investment. The trigger, the action, the variable reward, the investment. Let’s go with the, explain the hook to model for all the listeners out there. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So this hook model is a design pattern whose goal is to connect the user’s problem with the company’s product with enough frequency to form a habit. That’s the definition of a hook. These hooks have these four basic steps, trigger, action, reward, and investment. A trigger is something in our environment that tells us what to do next. That would be an external trigger that we talked about a little bit, these pings, these dings, these rings, these notifications, these things that tell us what to do next. Let’s do a little case study here. Let’s take Facebook, for example. The external trigger for Facebook is a notification or an email. The next step of the hook is the action phase. The action is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. Now the emphasis here being on the word simplest action, right? So it’s a scroll on Pinterest or a search on Google or something as simple as pushing the play button on YouTube is incredibly simple behavior done in anticipation of an immediate reward. So in the case of Facebook, just to keep with the example, by the way, we can substitute email or Slack or tons of other habit-forming products, but just for the sake, it’s something that a lot of people are familiar with. The action for Facebook is to just open the app. Next comes the reward, and what’s important about the reward phase is that it tends to be a variable reward. So this comes out of the work of B.F. Skinner, the father of operant conditioning. Skinner, back in the 1950s, he had these pigeons, he put them in a little box and he allowed these pigeons to peck at the disc to receive a reward, to receive a little food pellet. And what Skinner observed was, is that he could train these pigeons to peck at the disc whenever they were hungry. By the way, the experiment didn’t work if they weren’t hungry. But as long as the pigeons were hungry, the pigeons would peck at the disc and receive a reward. The reason, by the way, it didn’t work when they weren’t hungry is because there was no internal trigger. We talked a little bit about those internal triggers earlier you have to have that need inside you in order to have the behavior. So Skinner did this experiment, terrific operating conditioning, he trained his pigeons, but then he had a little problem. You see, he started to run out of these food pellets one day and he decided that he could no longer afford to keep giving these food pellets to the pigeons every time they pecked at the disc. And so we wanted to see what happened if he gave the food pellets just every once in a while. So sometimes the pigeon would peck at the disc, nothing would happen. The next time he would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times these pigeons pecked at the disc, increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. So these variable rewards are baked into all sorts of products that we find most engaging, most habit forming, the things that capture your attention and won’t let go, you’ll always find these variable rewards. In a world of perpetual distraction, it’s super easy to not connect to anybody because you’re constantly connected. It’s super easy to become efficient doing things that don’t need to be done. It’s easy to become really dumb as a result of having a very nice smartphone. So how do you pay attention? How do you get more stuff done? How do you focus your team? On today’s show, the best-selling author, Kurt Steinhorst, breaks down, “‘Can I Have Your Attention?’ Inspiring better work habits, focusing your team, and getting stuff done. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Time Show. Now, 3, 2, 1, here we go! Started from the bottom, now we’re here Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here Started from the bottom, now we’re here Started from the bottom, now we’re here Started from the bottom, now we’re here Alright Thrive Nation, welcome on to the Thrive Time show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we are interviewing the speaker of choice for JP Morgan. The speaker of choice for Chuck. Have you ever heard of the Naval Academy? Is that something to do with a belly button? The speaker of choice for Allstate. The speaker of choice for Honda. The man, the myth, the legend. A guy with a plan. The guru. A man by the name of Mr. Kurt Steinhorst. Mr. Kurt Steinhorst, how are you doing, my friend? I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yes. Well, my friend, we’re excited to have you on for two reasons here. Chep, one, as of the time of this recording, we just hit number one on the iTunes charts for all categories. All categories. Come on. Thank you, Thrive Nation. Which means our listeners deserve to have gurus on the show like Mr. Kurt. So Kurt, for the listeners out there who aren’t as familiar with your career. Could you share with the listeners how you started and how you were able to get from where you are now? How were you able to get from where you started to where you are now today? Yeah, I’d be happy to. Things are always easier told in hindsight. It was certainly less clear on the way to where I am. Where I started was with undergrad and graduate work in communication. So it was really a fascination by what moves an audience, rhetoric, and then how does technology change that was the focus that I had. And so I went from there to serving as a speech coach and speech writer for people that had a really big platform. And then I worked at speaker bureaus and with talent agencies. And somewhere along the way, I started my own business to do that, a communications consultancy, and it was about that moment that this other side of the equation, which is that I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid, started to rear its ugly head. Never been medicated, and all of a sudden I look up. I just used some strategies that worked for me to be able to move forward, and really that meant a lot of audiobooks. Right. And so I was like, I have 40 different emails that I’ve started, I don’t have any idea if I’ve even sent a single invoice and I’m probably gonna have to live with my parents if I don’t figure this out. And so that was when I started studying and thinking about and engaging issues around distraction and attention. And so while I was doing that, I was a contributor and still am to the largest generational research firm And so all of those things collided into people asking me more about how can we actually have real solutions on these issues of distraction. And then eventually we gathered a team to really dive in and say, what’s going on? How do we better think about attention? And so today what we do is we study attention through the lens of both how we think about it for our own, how do teams and organizations actually manage attention well, and then how do we get the attention of people that have too much coming at them? Kurt, you are the best-selling author of a book called Can I Have Your Attention? Inspiring better work habits, focusing your team, and getting stuff done in the constantly connected workplace. You’re a man on a mission to rescue our listeners from our distracted selves. You’ve spent years studying human behavior, and I would love for you to share the dangers of not being proactive about managing your daily life in this world where we’re constantly connected. Can you talk to us about the struggles for the average person of being in a constantly connected workplace? Yeah, so the truth is I never have to convince anybody that distraction is a problem, but really there is an underestimating of the cost and a misunderstanding of the nature of what’s actually driving it. And so if we think about cost, just really basics, you know, first some numbers, like we’re spending about 5.6 hours a day just looking at our inbox. And then we think about all the texts that come in, about 90% are responded or read at least within three minutes and 70% of emails that are sent with a push notification are read or acknowledged or seen within six seconds. So we’re just constantly inundated with noise. And the real issues here are one, when we try to manage it all, what we actually see in the research is that we give less effort to anything. True. And number two, we lose the ability to differentiate what actually is important. Number three, we’re slower. We think we’re fast, but we’re actually slower. Number four, the quality of the things that actually demand our full attention, the quality of that work goes way down. And perhaps most dangerously, we lose the emotional connection to whatever it is we’re doing. So we can be doing the task not perfectly, but when we look back later, we typically can’t remember why we were doing it, which then we wonder why 70% of people aren’t engaged in the work, and it has something to do with this distracted world we live in. I could not be more passionate, Chup. Chup, you’ve worked with me for a long time, and you know this. This is not just because we have Kurt on the show. I could not be more passionate about what Kurt just said. Psychology Today has shown that the average person right now, again, according to Psychology Today, the average person, we’ll put a link to it on the show notes, is now interrupted 85 times per day. 85. 85 times per day. Now, Chuck, you know this because you’ve heard about this on our podcast, you’ve listened to these people, you’ve seen us put this together. Lee Cockrell, a good friend of mine who used to manage Walt Disney World Resorts, they have a million guests per week at Walt Disney World Resorts. They have 40,000 employees. He does not allow his employees to bring a what to work? Cellular device. Right, and Dr. Robert Zellner, my partner, who he and I have built a 13 multi-million dollar companies We do not allow our our employees to bring a what to work That would be a cellular device And why don’t we allow people to bring a smartphone to the workplace and in our companies Joe? Well, like Kurt just said it’s distractions and we are elite at what we do and we can’t be distracted because we have a lot Of stuff to get done and a lot of clients to serve and so it is part of our culture and it’s very polarizing. You know this from the get-go. But I would argue that the vast majority of, not our listeners, but people who know our listeners, not you listening, but people who know you, you are allowing your employees to bring their smartphone to work and they are being interrupted a minimum, according to Psychology Today, an average of 85 times per day. So I want to ask you this, Kurt. When somebody is working, let’s say they’re doing graphic design or videography or photography, and they have their phone next to them, and it’s facing up, and they get a text message or a unpleasant social media update or an unpleasant email, something that causes the almond-sized part of the brain, called the amygdala, to be activated. When somebody gets an unpleasant message, what tends to happen to them or to their productivity when somebody gets someone receives an unpleasant social media message or a text message? What happens in the workplace? Well, there’s several consequences. The short and simple is our emotions drive our attention. So when our emotions are hijacked, whatever thing that we rationally are supposed to say we’re doing, it’s not going to win. Attention at its core is given to what our brain tells us matters at a given moment. When something volatile comes at us, there’s no doubt who’s going to win that competition. But let’s even go further than that. You mentioned the 85 times a day. One of the most interesting challenges is that the more external interruptions, the more internal interruptions, meaning the more things come at us from the outside, the more that we actually then seek out more interruptions. And if you think about it, every time we’re interrupted, what someone’s doing or something’s doing is saying, oh yeah, the thing that you were paying attention to, that’s not what matters, this is what matters. And every interruption is a reminder that maybe, maybe we’re missing something. And so now we live in the state of not just not getting the work done, but constantly reminded of all the things that also might matter, which actually drives to the root of what distraction is. It’s not whether you’re on your phone, that’s a consequence, but the root of distraction is confusion about what matters. And people don’t know what actually matters, so they’re interrupted. Now Kurt, you and I don’t know each other very well, other than I’ve researched you, and you’ve probably researched me. One of the companies I have is called Elephant in the Room. It’s a men’s grooming lounge. We have thousands of customers. It’s kind of like the country club for men’s hair. Every day, because we cut 4,000 people’s hair cut per month, and Kurt, I’m going to put this out there for all the listeners out there. Kurt, do you have a barber that you’re loyal to? Do you have a certain place you get your hair cut at every time? I do. I do. Okay. I’m not asking you for the person’s name, but you have somebody you’ve committed to because they do a good job. Is it a man or a woman or is it a specific store? It’s a personal connection, but it’s a woman. Okay, so on average for us, if we do 4,000 haircuts per month, we typically make a mistake or somebody’s not happy about 2.7% of the time right now, according to our last survey. So that means that 108 people per month are upset. Now 108 people per month divided by the average month. Chip, would you say the average month has 30 days? 30 days, I agree with that. Kurt, is that fair for you? It seems about right. I might have to do a little research. So that means we have 3.6 people per day who typically don’t tell us they’re upset, but they typically tell everybody they know on social media that they’re upset. Now for the Thrive Time show, we have millions of people that download the podcast every month. Millions of people. And when people download the podcast, if they’re not happy, they typically don’t tell us, they typically tell social media. Kurt, what’s going to happen to the dissatisfaction of anybody whose haircut they mess up, or who doesn’t like their podcast, or who doesn’t like their… I work with a lot of pop music artists, top 40 music artists. What happens to somebody’s brain when they respond real-time to anybody who says, �I don’t like your song,� when there’s millions of consumers? You know, there’s statistics we could point to, but I think there’s an even deeper challenge here. Yeah. And what happens is when we have constant outside noise and reaction and voices that are telling us things, what we do is we lose the ability to assess ourselves where we’re in an ocean and in a sea of distraction like there’s no way we’re in the ocean it’s gonna be there there’s you’re gonna get somewhere but depending on wherever you are personally between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements that are gonna come at your eyes every single day like you’re in it but the question is are you going to just be rudderless and a victim to every single thing that comes at you because then you have no idea where you’re headed. So the key is how do you actually equip yourself with the tools to be able to actually weather the storm and chart a trajectory. Kurt, can you share with listeners your background? Are you a married man? Are you a single guy? Do you have a family? Share with our listeners a little bit about your background so people know a little bit about you from more of a personal family side of things. Yeah, my favorite subject. I am a married man. I have two children, two young boys, and a third on the way due very soon. Congratulations. So yeah, and we met 10 years ago. And the travel, so a lot of my job involves travel. And so I have the benefits of a very patient and wonderful wife who certainly makes everything that I get to do possible. There’s a shared agreement that it’s worth the cost. Now how old is your oldest child right now? Four years old. Okay, and my wife and I, we had, it’s crazy but a lot of people don’t know this, we have five kids but at one point, Chuck, we had five kids under the age of seven. Right. Wow. And my dad contracted this horrible thing called ALS. Some people know it as Lou Gehrig’s disease. And I made an agreement with my mother and my wife, I said, when, because my dad, my goal was to be a millionaire before I was 30 and to hire my dad before I was 30. Because we grew up, you know, we didn’t have a lot of money. And so I hired my dad when I was 27 and I hit my goals financially. And I hired, and Chip, I don’t know, were you working with us when my dad fell down? Were you there? No, I was not. Okay. So I hired my dad, and he was working with us, and he was doing great for many, many years. And then one day he fell down. And a guy by the name of Eric Herman sent me a text and said, dude, your dad fell down. And hard. And that’s typically a sign of your body, if you have ALS, it’s your body’s breaking down. So my dad fell down, he’s six foot five, almost six foot six, falls down hard, breaks something, hurts his shoulder, and then like probably four days later, I get a text, hey dude, your dad’s having issues. I called 911, and they’re happening every day, and I love my dad, love my dad. May he rest in peace. He died on September 5th. But I had to tell my wife, and I told my dad, I said, Dad, if you need something, Mom, if you need something, please text my wife, Vanessa, because at work, my amygdala, my almond-sized part of the brain, I cannot do a radio show. I cannot do a podcast. I can’t be a father. I can’t be coaching thousands of clients. I can’t do what I need to do. If I’m getting an update that you fell down, and I care and I’ll be there, but can you please text Vanessa and she’ll be there immediately. And I had to set that up because my brain, I don’t know if I’m probably a weak person, whatever it was, but I would sit there and I would pull over like in my car. I drive a Hummer, I would pull over on the toll road and I literally could not stop weeping when my dad would text me like, son, I’m having a hard time talking so I’m sending you a text. And it’s like the worst ever, you know? And as an owner of a business with thousands and thousands, at this point probably hundreds of thousands of customers, even to this day when I get a bad complaint or someone who’s not happy with the service one of our companies provided, it really does, it kind of shuts me down because I care a lot. So for the listeners out there who are doing over a million, let’s say $5 million a year of gross revenue, that means they have thousands of customers, what advice would you have for our listeners? We have hundreds of thousands of people that listen every single month, millions of downloads a month. What would you say for our listeners out there who own a business where they have so many data points? What boundaries would you recommend that they would put in their own life to manage those sort of things? Because I know with my dad, it broke my mind when I got an update from my dad that wasn’t positive during the day. Or even today, if I have a customer that complains, it blows my mind. What advice would you have for the listeners out there that are struggling to deal with the amygdala and the emotional aspects of having a multi-million dollar company? Yeah, and thank you for sharing that. What you’ve actually just described is what we call keeping people from being your enemies in attention and creating attention allies. And that means having conversations with the right people to make sure you’re all on the same page as to how and when you communicate with each other about certain things. You know, every person and every role is gonna require different boundaries, but I think the key here is to recognize the need for boundaries and that boundaries aren’t meant to like squelch us, they actually are meant to create a recognition that we’re not infinite. Like you can’t respond to infinite requests, you can’t be in infinite places, you can’t understand infinite demands. So all you’re doing is saying, I’m going to set clear boundaries to allow where I am and what I’m doing to actually be the full, like to get the full attention it deserves. And so it starts with just having an understanding and an agreement and an awareness of the limits of your capacity. And then it’s doing a really simple, not in-depth, but a review of the types of activities, the types of information, and the spheres in which they occupy, and saying, how can I create barriers so that that’s what I’m doing? So, like, real practically, filters and barriers are either one, physical space, number two, people, or number three, technology. The best one is people. I have the same issue. I will give a speech and we’ll send out a review or the client will, 1,000 people there. Really great review that I see one person that said something negative. And so the filter for me there is my staff doesn’t even show me those things. They show me the general numbers and if there’s something that actually needs to be seen. So that’s a filter that’s intentional so that I don’t lose. Because you are naturally going to care about the one negative review, right? I mean, by default, the one. It could probably, you could have a hundred people that said a positive thing, but the one is the one you’re going to remember. Am I exaggerating? Am I wrong? No. And it’s important to realize that’s not just personality, that’s biology. Like our attention, the primary mechanism that dictates where we put our attention is hardwired for survival, which means we see threats, we focus on what could hurt us, and so we’re always gonna see a negative. Things are always gonna be worse than we think they are. They’re always gonna be the one thing that we need to fix. So the key is making sure that we limit the volume of what we can actually see in that category, so we have some space to actually have peace and rest and focus on what really matters. You know, according to Naval Ravikant, the legendary early stage investor in Uber, Twitter, Stack Overflow and other leading companies, he says, I don’t think modern science has good answers here. I think that the modern world is actually really bad. The modern world is full of distractions. Things like Twitter, actually, Facebook are not making you happy. They are making you unhappy. You are essentially playing a game that’s created by the creators of those systems. And yes, it could be a useful game once in a blue moon, but you’re engaging in dispute, resentment, comparison, jealousy, anger, about things that frankly just don’t matter. What are your thoughts about Naval Ravikant’s notable quibble? Well, I agree with him. I think for me, the differentiation, and I don’t mean to keep going back to this mantra of what matters, but really that’s the core question, is Twitter, social media, these things can be useful when we already are going there for a particular purpose. Like, so Facebook, if it’s because we specifically, we wanna reconnect with family or we wanna see what our friends are doing. But what happens is we just go there to, just seeking out what might be potentially interesting and new and what we find is everyone else in charge of our attention. Preach. And so, yeah. It’s good, this is huge. Somebody out there listening right now, this is huge for you. Write this down, take notes. Kurt, I 100% agree with you. Continue, my friend. Yeah, so, you know, Facebook, Twitter, the numbers are overwhelmingly clear. We are prone towards commenting and emphasizing the negative. And we go there, and what we pay attention to shapes who we’re becoming. In fact, one of my favorite philosophers says, tell me what you pay attention to and I’ll tell you who you are. So we have to hold sacred what we’re allowing to come before our eyes and across our mind because otherwise what ends up happening is we lose complete control. And the key is do we want to actually have any measure of control? And if we do, then we’ve got to make sure we put things like that into the context in the space that allows us to still take control. I feel like we have to hit the knowledge bomb right there. Now I want to ask you this Kurt because psychology today it shows things that I feel like you know and I feel like all the listeners already know, but I want you to break it down. According to Psychology Today, they report that that experience of FOMO, or fear of missing out, that’s FOMO, F-O-M-O, the fear of missing out, is one that psychologists identified several years ago as a potent risk of Facebook use. You’re alone on a Saturday night. You decide to check in to see what your Facebook friends are doing. Anybody? Hello? But, by the way, while you’re on a date with your wife, and you see that they’re all at a party, and you’re not. While you’re on a date with your wife. And then Facebook friends, well, you check out what Facebook friends are doing, and you see that they’re at a party that you’re not at. You long to be where they are. Can you talk about comparison, jealousy, FOMO, fear of missing out, and why it’s just not healthy to go on social media on a consistent basis and just check that out. You have to set boundaries. Talk to me about setting boundaries on social media. Yeah, so this goes back to this real core challenge that technology what it is offering is infinite it’s offering if you’re you can be in infinite places you can learn infinite piece of information you connect in infinite ways but are we are not wired for infinite and by trying to do that what it does is it eliminates the boundaries of space and time in particular and and so as long as we think that we’re not going to have issues. Like for instance, when it comes to FOMO, the challenge is one, that we’d rather be somewhere else, which makes us never satisfied with where we are. But the truth is even more deeply, we can’t even recognize the sacred spaces and moments when they come with the volume that comes at us. I was in the somnogram room and there’s a sign that says no cell phones allowed like you’re about to see your kid for the first time Your life and you feel a need to immediately exit that space to enter into a digital disembodied experience and so I think it really does come down to a recognition that in a rest that comes like I Why always go back to this piece of you’re not infinite is it’s actually really freeing to say Oh, wait a minute. I can just be here now. I have permission to enjoy being here. And one of the things I’ll say about FOMO is I think in the corporate world, the most dangerous type of FOMO is the fear that you just need one more piece of information to make a decision. Like you need more info, and so we schedule more meetings, we ask for more CCing on that, we search the ends of the internet, and we end up paralyzed for fear that we don’t have everything we need. We have what we need. We need to close it off and actually… In a world of perpetual distraction, it’s super easy to not connect to anybody because you’re constantly connected. It’s super easy to become efficient doing things that don’t need to be done. It’s easy to become really dumb as a result of having a very nice smartphone. So how do you pay attention? How do you get more stuff done? How do you focus your team on today’s show the best-selling author Kurt Steinhorst? Breaks down. Can I have your attention inspiring better work habits focusing your team and getting stuff done? Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show But this show does two men eight kids co-created by two different women. 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Now, three, two, one, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show we are interviewing the speaker of choice for JP Morgan, the speaker of choice for Chubb. Have you ever heard of the Naval Academy? Is that something to do with a belly button? The speaker of choice for Allstate, the speaker of choice for Honda. The man, the myth, the legend, a guy with a plan, the guru, a man with the name Mr. Kurt Steinhorst. Mr. Kurt Steinhorst, how are you doing, my friend? I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yes. Well, my friend, we’re excited to have you on for two reasons here. Chep, one, as of the time of this recording, we just hit number one on the iTunes charts for all categories. All categories. Come on. Thank you, Thrive Nation. Which means our listeners deserve to have gurus on the show like mr. Kurt so so Kurt the listeners out there who aren’t as familiar with your your career could you kind of share with the listeners how you started and how you were able to get from where you are now are you able to get from where you started to where you are now today yeah I’d be happy to. Things are always easier told in hindsight. It was certainly less clear on the way to where I am. Right. So where I started was with undergrad and graduate work in communication. So it was really a fascination by what moves an audience, rhetoric, and then how does technology change that was the focus that I had. And so I went from there to serving as a speech coach and speech writer for people that had a really big platform. Then I worked at speaker bureaus and with talent agencies. Somewhere along the way, I started my own business to do that, a communications consultancy. It was about that moment that this other side of the equation, which is that I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid, started to rear its ugly head. I’d never been medicated. All of a sudden, I look up, I just used some strategies that worked for me to be able to move forward and really that meant a lot of audio books. And so I was like, I have 40 different emails that I’ve started that I don’t have any idea if I’ve even sent a single invoice and I’m probably gonna have to live with my parents if I don’t figure this out. And so that was when I started studying and thinking about and engaging issues around distraction and attention. And so I, while I was doing that, I was a contributor and still am to the largest generational research firm in North America studying generational trends. And so all of those things collided into people asking me more about how can we actually have real solutions on these issues of distraction. And then eventually we gathered a team to really dive in and say, what’s going on? How do we better think about attention, and so today what we do is we study attention through the lens of both how we think about it for our own, how do teams and organizations actually manage attention well, and then how do we get the attention of people that have too much coming at them? Kurt, you are the best-selling author of a book called Can I Have Your Attention? Inspiring better work habits, focusing your team, and getting stuff done in the constantly connected workplace. You’re a man on a mission to rescue our listeners from our distracted selves. You’ve spent years studying human behavior, and I would love for you to share the dangers of not being proactive about managing your daily life in this world where we’re constantly connected Can you talk to us about the struggles for the average person of being in a constantly connected workplace? Yeah, so the truth is I never have to convince anybody that distractions a problem but really there is an underestimating of the cost and a Misunderstanding the nature of what’s actually driving it truth And so if we if we think about cost, just really basics, you know, first some numbers, like we’re only working about two to three minutes at a time before being interrupted. We’re getting over 200 emails sent and received, and we’re spending about 5.6 hours a day just looking at our inbox. And then we think about all the texts that come in, about 90% are responded or read at least within three minutes and 70% of emails that are sent with a push notification are read or acknowledged or seen within six seconds. So we’re just constantly inundated with noise. And the real issues here are, one, when we try to manage it all, what we actually see in the research is that we give less effort to anything. True. And number two, we lose the ability to differentiate what actually is important. Number three, we’re slower. We think we’re fast, but we’re actually slower. Number four, the quality of the things that actually demand our full attention, the quality of that work goes way down. And perhaps most dangerously, we lose the emotional connection to whatever it is we’re doing. So like we can be doing the task not perfectly, but when we look back later, we typically can’t remember why we were doing it, which then we wonder why 70% of people aren’t engaged in the work, and it has something to do with this distracted world we live in. I could not be more passionate, Chup. And Chup, you’ve worked with me for a long time. And you know this. This is not just because we have Kurt on the show. I could not be more passionate about what Kurt just said. Psychology Today has shown that the average person right now, again, according to Psychology Today, the average person, we’ll put a link to it on the show notes, is now interrupted 85 times per day. 85. 85 times per day. Now, Chuck, you know this because you’ve heard about this on our podcast, you’ve listened to these people, you’ve seen us put this together. Lee Cockrell, a good friend of mine who used to manage Walt Disney World Resorts, they have a million guests per week at Walt Disney World Resorts. They have 40,000 employees. He does not allow his employees to bring a what to work? Cellular device. Right. And Dr. Robert Zellner, my partner, who he and I have built 13 multi-million dollar companies, we do not allow our employees to bring a what to work? That would be a cellular device. And why don’t we allow people to bring a smartphone to the workplace and in our companies, Chuck? Well, like Kurt just said, it’s distractions and we are elite at what we do and we can’t be distracted because we have a lot of stuff to get done and a lot of clients to serve. And so it is part of our culture and it’s very polarizing. You know this from the get-go. But I would argue that the vast majority of, not our listeners, but people who know our listeners, not you listening, but people who know you, you are allowing your employees to bring their smartphone to work and they are being interrupted, a minimum, according to Psychology Today, an average of 85 times per day. So I want to ask you this, Kurt. When somebody is working, let’s say they’re doing graphic design or videography or photography, and they have their phone next to them and it’s facing up and they get a text message message or unpleasant social media update or unpleasant email, something that causes the almond-sized part of the brain called the amygdala to be activated. When somebody gets an unpleasant message, what tends to happen to them or to their productivity when somebody receives an unpleasant social media message or a text message? What happens in the workplace? Well, there’s several consequences. You know, the short and simple is our emotions drive our attention. So when our emotions are hijacked, whatever thing that we rationally are supposed to say we’re doing, it’s not going to win. Like attention at its core is given to what our brain tells us matters at a given moment. And when something volatile that comes at us, there’s no doubt who’s going to win that competition. But let’s even go further than that. You mentioned the 85 times a day. One of the most interesting challenges is that the more external interruptions, the more internal interruptions, meaning the more things come at us from the outside, the more that we actually then seek out more interruptions. And if you think about it, every time we’re interrupted, what someone’s doing or something’s doing is saying, oh yeah, the thing that you were paying attention to, that’s not what matters. This is what matters. And every interruption is a reminder that maybe, maybe we’re missing something. And so now we live in this state of not just not getting the work done, but constantly reminded of all the things that also might matter, which actually drives to the root of what distraction is. It’s not whether you’re on your phone. That’s a consequence, but the root of distraction is confusion about what matters. JT, do you know what time it is? Um, 410. It’s it’s Tebow time in Tulsa, Roseland, baby. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma during the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th, 2024. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma and 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 since 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 have 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? Mmm. Well they’re gonna have to come and find out cuz I don’t know Well, I’m just saying Tim Tebow 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 going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Folks, I’m telling you, if you want to learn branding, you want to learn marketing, you want to 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 rusticcup.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 2-Day Interactive, 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 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 have 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. You started 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 am 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’s it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russell Oklahoma. Tulsa, Russell. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russell. I’m sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrivetimeshow and 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. Who? 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 gives 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 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. Thrivetime show two-day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re gonna teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re gonna teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I’ve built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big, get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day, interactive, Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money. So if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day, interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy at King’s Point in New York, Octononverba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric, Eric Trump, but we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man and there’s so many ways we could take this thing but I thought since you and Eric are close, Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald who’s my age and I can say or cannot say. Well I have to first of all I have to honor you sir I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. He said, ìHave you read this book Rich Dad, Poor Dad?î I said, ìNo.î My father, may he rest in peace, he didnít know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner to the investor. I owe a lot of that to you. I just want to take a moment to tell you thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. So anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.