Hi, I am here with Phil Michaels. Phil Michaels is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur and finalist for ABC’s Shark Tank who’s spoken in 24 countries. After founding Tembo Education, Phil has since become a performance coach, coaching mostly CEOs from Harvard and MIT, but also includes the #1-ranked poker player in the world and #1-ranked Saudi rapper in Dubai. He’s also the host of the only podcast in the world that exclusively interviews entrepreneurs that made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. here is a glimpse of the episode hope you enjoy it. here is the full episode hope you enjoy. Listen in your favorite podcast app.

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

https://createanewtomorrow.com/master...

CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!

https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:00  

Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results? We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians Paralympians a list actors in fortune 1000 companies. If I did not get results, they did not get results. I realized that while powerful people who control the system wants to keep the status quo. If I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as I chat with industry experts, elite athletes, thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down. I'm Ari Gronich and this is create a new tomorrow podcast.

Welcome to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And here I'm with me. Here with me is Phil Michaels. So Michaels is a Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneur, he's a finalist for ABCs Shark Tank. He's spoken in 24 countries. He's the founder of tempo education. He's a performance coach, coaching mostly CEOs from Harvard MIT, number one ranked poker player number one ranked Saudi rapper in Dubai. He's also the host of the only podcast in the world that exclusively interviews, entrepreneurs that made the Forbes 30 under 30. list. So welcome, Phil, I really appreciate you coming on. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself more than what's obviously in the bio, and a little bit about why you chose this kind of path for your for your life.

Phil Michaels 2:08  

Ari, thank you so much for having me. I'm really blessed to be here. I'm excited to learn more about you and your audience, as well and share some amazing, amazing performance hacks as well, for your audience. And for those listening. I was lucky enough to be born in Philadelphia and raised in Atlantic City area. Do you know where a monopoly the board game is designed after?

Ari Gronich 2:34  

Oh, I don't know exactly where it's designed. Oh, Scott Park Place and Atlanta Avenue.

Phil Michaels 2:41  

Yes. So it was designed after Atlantic City. Those are all real places. And I grew up in the Marvin gardens, the yellow, you remember that place. So one of the first female entrepreneurs incredible work. And that's it's an amazing board game. But there's a little fun fact for your next dinner table conversation. monopoly was based off of Atlantic City. And so I was raised there. And I wanted to get as far away from the cold as possible as far away from New Jersey as possible, and ended up visiting Tampa, Florida, fell in love with Tampa. And I was pre med, I always wanted to be an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon. So my whole career path, my trajectory was based off of becoming an eye doctor, an eye surgeon. So I've been shadowing doctors since I was 11. I was on this career trajectory path toward medicine. And I started working for the New York Yankees team physician, and a buddy of mine and I decided to start a mobile fitness app while I was working for the New York Yankees team physician. And we ended up becoming finalists for ABC TV show Shark Tank. And I was enthralled by this idea already, that you could be an entrepreneur, and was like, wow, you can impact so many more people as an entrepreneur, than if I'm a doctor, I can only see so many patients with a business, I could create lasting impact forever with as many people as I want. So I had an amazing lightbulb moment of Wow, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. And that conversation with my mother was very difficult. Imagine that the old school Italian mother from New Jersey. She's like, Who the hell quits the New York Yankees, and what the heck is an entrepreneur. So that was a difficult conversation to have. But what it led me to do we dissolve that business but what it led me to do is quit my pursuit of medicine and focus on business. So I decided to get my MBA and a Master's of Science in marketing. While I was getting my graduate degrees, two master's degrees I traveling the world and I saw a lot of initiatives already were donating either food, water, housing or health care. And in my opinion, it was putting a bandaid on the problem giving a man a fish rather than teaching them how to fish. I figured why not educate people to solve their own problems. So So I figured why not start at the earliest age possible. And when we looked in the education space in developing nations around the world, most of them were doing one of two things. For the early childhood education, most of them, first of all, were focused on secondary school or higher ed, in my opinion, the most imperative years is zero to six. That's when 90% of the brain is formed by age four, and five. So if we're going to educate people to solve their own problems, let's start at the earliest age possible. And there's two things people are doing in this area. They're either building schools, or building a mobile app. The problem with schools, it's not that they don't have schools in developed nations, I lived in arguably the worst slums in the world in Nigeria, and they have tons of schools. The problem is the schools are more like daycare drop off centers, rather than high quality educational institutions, a place where you could drop off your kids while you go to work. Sometimes, no curriculum, teachers sometimes don't show up little to no materials, etc. And with regard to a mobile app, a lot of them didn't have smartphones at the time. And it for the ones that did have smartphones, and mobile data was very expensive to be able to run the apps on their phone. So we said, okay, schools are not the answer. And mobile app is not the answer. Let's use something they already use every single day. And that was text messages. So I decided let's educate children through their parents using text messages. So we educate zero to six year old children around the world using text messages. We send one activity per day to the parents phone. The parent educates the child. And then we reward the parent for educating their child with Amazon gift cards, mobile data for their phone, etc. So that was started in Nigeria, we're now in five countries. A Nestle is our biggest customer. They pay for children to receive education, but parents can also sign up on their own, and it's called Tembo education. Tembo means elephant in Swahili. And the reason we chose an elephant is because they're known for being the most compassionate parents in the animal kingdom. And since our education focuses on the parents of the children, we felt like it was the best symbol for our social enterprise. So that's kind of how I started that company, and led me to the entrepreneurial journey I'm on now. And we were lucky enough to get published in Forbes magazine is the top 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30, which led to a lot of publicity notoriety, the owner of the Boston Red Sox was one of our first funders. And that led me to coaching other people. So now I coach other entrepreneurs, mostly CEOs at Harvard and MIT, but because I lived in Boston for a while, but I also coach, investors, traders, number one poker player in the world, like you mentioned, and that's kind of what led me to where I am now.

Ari Gronich 7:50  

That's awesome. You're not you're not under 30. Now, are you?

Phil Michaels 7:53  

Now I'm not I made the list in 2016. I think it was 2017.

Ari Gronich 8:01  

So, you know, with the tempo education, what are you teaching zero to six year olds? What are you teaching parents? What is the basis of understanding that they're going to get out of say, a program with you?

Phil Michaels 8:17  

It's a great question. So we built the curriculum in house, most of our education team was from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And we focused on Harvard center for the developing child's developmental milestones. It's not a guessing game for what children's brains should be learning at x age at zero to six specifically, there's a it's not ambiguous, it's a very step by step sequential process of what they should be learning by each age, as they as their brain develops. And this isn't just, you know, for certain population, this is for all human brains. And so we teach in all four domains of learning, language, cognitive, motor, and social emotional, and we teach them through play based activities. So we give the parent in a text message exactly what they're supposed to say and do step by step. And it's just one simple activity per day that follows one of the four domains in sequential order. So we actually started prenatal at week 13 in the mother's womb, all the way through six years of age. 

Ari Gronich 9:24  

Wow.

Phil Michaels 9:27  

Yes,

Ari Gronich 9:28  

during this incredibly odd period of our history, like this would be a really good thing for parents to do with their kids, especially if they're keeping them out of school. Right. My son is six, almost seven, and we decided to homeschool him because we didn't like how the systems were playing out within the school. In this particular time of day, you know, like mass wearing the third Scan, you know, like a scanner that scans 30 kids all at once for temperature and distance it was like, seems a little Orwellian to me. I think. I think that's not gonna happen. So we took him out of school completely, we've been homeschooling him for you. Oh, that's, uh, you know, I know a lot of parents are in that same boat right now. And they're trying to figure out what do I do with my kid? Because I don't have training and how to be a teacher. I didn't go to school for education. Right? And so they're going, what do I do? What do I do? This sounds like it's a good, you know, exercise to have parents do before or after a day of school, even if they're not in school, right?

Phil Michaels 10:49  

Absolutely. So it's meant for children that are in school, out of school, home school doesn't matter. This is what children should be learning at a certain age. So and there's little tricks I'll share with parents in just a moment. But you're 100%. Right, especially with COVID. Now, where parents are having to do more and more at home with their child, parent engagement is so important. And this, these are the differences we're seeing in children. For children that are even in school and have already left early childhood education schools, we've realized that the number one impactful variable that we're seeing in the successful children versus the unsuccessful children, in terms of their growth and development is parent engagement. How involved was the parent with that child at home, school doesn't, education doesn't happen. Just in the school, it happens mostly at home, parents are their child's first and most important teacher. And children will assimilate knowledge more from their parent than they will a teacher appear, because they have rapport with them already, so they're more willing to listen. And so about 86 to 91% of a child's vocabulary words are derived directly from their parent, not their teacher, not their school, not their peers from their parent. So it's so critical for the parent to be so involved with their child. And little tricks that we teach parents, these aren't activities. But these are little tips that we do on the side as a bonus. One simple one is if your child is exposed to screen time, let's say a TV or an app, children that watch TV with subtitles on, learn to read two years earlier than children that watch TV without subtitles. Such a simple step, you could take the click of a remote button that changes the trajectory of your child's life and their brain forever. And it's so important between the zero to six year old age group because their brain is developing so quickly, what happens, and I'll, I'll tell you the second step, and then tell you what happens. The second trick you can use is children should not be exposed to screentime. before the age to what's happening, pediatricians and this was According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, pediatricians are finding out that children are not able to distinguish between 2d objects and 3d objects, because of how much screen time they've been exposed to. So typically, a way that you can find out if your child's developing properly is if you roll a ball to the child, the child should grasp for the ball with all five fingers their whole hand, what's happening is some of the children are swiping at it as if it's on a screen, because they can't distinguish between 2d and 3d objects. That's for children that have been exposed to too much screentime. So age two and below should not be exposed screentime. And if they are exposed to screentime, put the subtitles on whether it's an app or TV, because two years of being able to read faster, doesn't sound like that big of a deal to us as adults, two years is a lifetime of brain development for a child ages zero to six. So why is that important? That's what I was going to share. Next. There's something called synapse pruning that happens in the brain. Or basically your brain is always trying to conserve energy. So anytime it can cut off unnecessary, you know, waste, it will do so. So for example, by the age of two, your brain starts to do something called synapse pruning where it says, hmm, you know what, Ari, we're not using these synapses. As often we're not firing these neuro neural connections as often as these other ones. Let's get rid of these ones to save energy. So it actually prune off son of some of the neural connections to save energy for the ones that you're firing more often. So it shows you how and this happened from ages about two to four. And this happens for the rest of your life. There is some neuroplasticity where the brain changes, but the malleability of the brain drops so dramatically as soon as you're born. While the physiological effort to create new neural connections is increasing.

As soon as you're born, you started 100% malleability, by the age of only eight months old, you're almost at 50%. Drop in malleability. By age six, you're about zero percent. malleability, meaning the brain is not able to be changed very easily with neuroplasticity. And at the same time that malleability is going down, the physiological effort to create new neural connections is increasing the energy, it takes energy that's required to create those new neural connections, it's making it harder. So that's why it's so easy for children in early age to learn multiple languages, compared to us. Now imagine if we try to learn Russian, Italian, Chinese, all right now, I mean, we will be overwhelmed, it would take way more cognitive bandwidth to do so. Children at this, this is why it's so important to get structured stimuli in your child's brain at such an early age. So they'll have a proper developmental process going on in their brain for the rest of their life. They won't be pruning off as many synapses.

Ari Gronich 15:59  

What is what is structured? mean? Because there's a lot of people who probably listen to that and think, Oh, well, that's they don't really understand what it means sure to do that. So can you give more specific for things that

Phil Michaels 16:19  

show structured stimuli, rather than something that's ambiguous or not necessarily pertaining to what they should be learning in a certain age, it's not ambiguous. We've now mapped these things out on a large scale. There's a great documentary about this on Netflix called babies. And it shows you proper developmental processes that you could be taken. But you could also sign up for a program like our there's tons of apps out there. And that's the thing are a lot of parents in the US were like, Oh, we need this here. I know you started it in Nigeria, but we need this here in the US. And we were thinking, come on, you guys have tons of resources, and tons of free resources. They were like, yeah, that's exactly it. There's so much out there. It's overwhelming. What information do I pull from? What do I know is the right information. And so this is called the zigzag principle. When everyone's zigging building a mobile app. We're zagging. And using text messages, 90% of people answer their text message within the first three minutes of receiving it. So every but nobody wants to download another app, answer another email, but they all answer their text messages. So that's why we use something simple that everybody's already using. So when I say structured stimuli, I'm talking about following the developmental milestones of a child listening to your pediatrician, following resources, such as the Harvard center for the developing child. So it's structured stimuli based on where your child is in their developmental process. a three year old might be developing a little quicker than another three year old. So you need to know where your child is, and what resources to use to follow a path, a proper trajectory, rather than using an ambiguous approach. A lot of parents get hung up on making sure their children are doing exactly what they need to be doing in school. But there's stuff outside of school that you could be doing to help your child explore nature, letting your child's curiosity lead their exploration and adventures. There's a great book about this, of what not to do is called mindset by Carol Dweck, Stanford researcher, and she debunked like 70 years of academic research. And one of the things she mentioned is you should never tell a child Good job. And the reason you should never tell our child Good job is because they don't know what a good job means. So it's called using appropriate praise. So let's say your son, what's your son's name?

Ari Gronich 18:39  

Gabriel,

Phil Michaels 18:41  

Gabriel, beautiful name. Let's say Gabriel is playing soccer. And he makes a really good paths. Most parents like Oh, good job, Gabriel. But Gabriel doesn't know why he just got praised. So a better way to approach this is that was a really good pass Gabriel, or you ran really hard I could tell you work really hard for that pass. So he now attributes his effort to his success, rather than his innate abilities. Because when you tell a child Good job, and they don't know why they did a good job, they think it's due to their innate abilities that they were just born with it rather than something they made an effort toward. And they'll share this with regard to academia as well with test taking. But what what should you do instead is be very appropriate with your praise. Because what happens is, if you tell a child Good job when they made a good pass, they're looking for and seeking for your praise later on. So if they don't make a good pass, and you didn't say Good job, they don't necessarily know why they didn't get your praise, and they become upset and start doubting themselves. And she shows this in a much more eloquent way in her book and shows you the research behind it. And she showed with test taking children that were told they're really smart. You should never tell a child they're really smart. Because they attribute that to their innate intelligence, they think that they're born with it. So anytime they're not told that they're smart, they think something's wrong with them. Oh, I must not be that smart as I thought I was or that everyone thought it was. They don't want to take risks anymore, because they're afraid that there'll be shown to everyone that they're not really smart. So a better way to approach this is to say, Wow, Gabriel, you must have studied really hard for that test, you got a 97, you must have studied really hard. Instead of saying, You're really smart, you studied really hard, they now attribute their intelligence, their good grade, to their effort, the studying habit that they perform, rather than are their innate intelligence. So now, the next time they do bad, they don't say, Oh, I'm not smart, they say, Oh, I must not have studied that hard. So now they're going to put in more effort to make sure that they improve their performance, rather than start doubting themselves. And her studies show that those children that were attributing their intelligence to their effort, were more likely to take risks at a later period in time, whether it's exams, physical risks, etc. So there are certain words that can really change the vocabulary words, that can really change how your child behaves, and how they respond to you how receptive they are to you. So those are some quick tricks that can help with the parenting world, it's so so critically important. And we would solve a lot of the problems we're facing as adults. If we worked on early childhood education, all of our time, energy and effort should not be trying to fix broken adults, it should be trying to educate children. So those become amazing adults when they're older. And unfortunately, what we have is a system where the poorest and least educated people are having the most amount of children unfortunately. And do you know the number one variable that impacts birth rate, more than any other

Close is education. Education impacts birth rate more than any other variable. So as education goes up, birth rate goes down. Because people are realizing this, the smarter you are, the more you realize how critical it is, for every child that you have for their education, how much does it cost for every child you have. So you're, you're more in tune to what it really requires to raise a child, the more educated you are in Nigeria, the average birth rate is 5.5 children per mother. They're only twice the size of California and they have almost 200 million people, they're almost the size of the US population in a place that's only twice the size of California. So it's extremely densely populated birth rates very high. And so we, in my opinion, instead of working on trying to fix broken adults, which I think we can do both we can do concurrently. They're not mutually exclusive, we could solve adult problems. But if we really want to make an impact, and really want to have a great return on investment on the work that we're doing, we want to be focusing on solving problems with parenting, and early childhood education. It changes the brain for 40 years of life invader studies show.

Ari Gronich 23:06  

You know, it's interesting, my son was we had him before we started homeschooling, and we had him on the zoom schooling. And one of the the teachers asked, you know, how everybody was feeling. And my son says, and the teachers like, Why are you angry? You know, Gabriel, what's going on? And he says, I have five businesses, and you're not teaching me about how to do any of them.

Phil Michaels 23:43  

I love the little entrepreneur in him. How amazing is that? What do you beautiful Gabriel? Exactly. For to meet you one day, that's amazing. And the fact that he's even cognisant re of his own emotional state is beautiful. So for a long time, we didn't understand how important social emotional learning was. But now they recently they started indoctrinating children in schools to understand how important it is learning your own emotions. Oh, when I'm angry, this is how I handle my emotion. A lot of us growing up, we weren't taught what do we do when we feel a certain way? How do we express ourselves properly? How do we not offend somebody else? How do we have empathy? These are important skill sets as an adult. And a lot of adults aren't well equipped enough to understand that,

Ari Gronich 24:31  

yeah, we were taught better to be seen than heard. Right? We were taught that our role was to lift our parents up by our demonstration of our obedience. You know, verse is our demonstration of intelligence you know, only speak when spoken to speak when spoken to, you know, and and how we are, is absolutely a direct reflection. On our parents versus 100% are being a reflection on how we are hundred percent lucky enough to have very loving, kind parents, but they also were entrepreneurs. So they worked 16 plus hours a day. And so I grew up with, you know, Amway in my garage and, and businesses and lemonade stands and mowing lawns and doing paper ball as a paper boy at seven years old. So that was my first you know, Job was riding around the bike and throwing newspapers, porches, you know, I don't even see that as a as an option for kids these days, when in actuality it's a really great initial job, just like mowing lawns. You know, here in Florida, everybody has a lawn mowing business. Where are the kids, you know that you pay five bucks to mow your lawn every other week or whatever, you know,

Phil Michaels 26:02  

I believe I hundred percent agree with you. Every child should be learning entrepreneurial mindsets, because it's it's just a problem solving mindset. It looks at everything as an opportunity, rather than a pain. And I started just like you I had a lemonade stand. I stole my sister's puppet show Playhouse. And I used to bring it to the park where all the soccer fields were because I would pick up the soccer moms, they would come over to my lemonade stand. And I was, you know, a cute little kid. Let's buy some lemonade from them. And then in elementary school, I sold Pokemon cards. So I used to go to my school and I would have a binder full of Pokemon cards. And I'll go to school and sell them. I remember I sold a char zard char zone is the number one card in the deck. This fiery dragon is a hologram. And I sold it for $50. And I remember I thought I had made it I ran I told my mom I said Mom, you're not gonna have to work again. We made it. At that time. $50 was a huge deal to me. I was like six or seven years old. Then I went in in high school I was a I shoveled snow, and I was a bookie. So I used to print out the football matchups for NFL each week, and I'd have friends pick the matchups and then I would take a percentage of the pool. In college, I started a nightlife promotion company for nightclubs and bars while I was going to college and I started to fitness companies. And Ari, the funny thing about this is the whole time I never looked at it as a my career choice. It was something I had always done as a side hustle throughout my life, just, Hey, I'm going to school, I'm going to be an eye doctor, but I have this hustle on the side. And it wasn't until that Shark Tank moment that I looked, it was like oh my gosh, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. And I had never looked at that as a career because all these societal dogmatic norms, teach you go to school, get good grades, get a good job, get the house, get the nice car have kids and and it's like, well, wait a second. That's not the trajectory for everyone. You know, for some people, it's okay for him. But I feel like children should learn an entrepreneurial mindset at such an early age so they can make their own decisions and be more proactive and cognizant about the choices they want to make for their own life rather than succumbing to the societal norms.

Ari Gronich 28:28  

Yeah, you know, I look at at our educational system of my mom is a teacher, my brother's a teacher teaches High School. And, and he's actually rewritten the entire educational system. He has a folder that fixes every issue within the educational system. And I'm really hoping it gets out there sooner rather than later. But you know, because of the issues, but let's talk about what used to be versus what is and how we can go back towards what used to be while updating it to what should be right. So what used to be in my world is master apprentice relationships. kids would apprentice with their parent typically, on the thing that their parent does. Whether it's shoe cobbler, you know, a shoe cobbler has shoe cobbler kids, right? If you're a farmer, you have kids that work the farm. They always had duties and responsibilities. And nowadays, we tend to want our kids to be kids for a very long time up until they're adults, like you're a kid until you're an adult and that happens on your 21st birthday. And so now at your 21st birthday, you're supposed to know how to be an adult Even though you've been treated like a kid entire life, right, but used to be where they would have these responsibilities, roles and responsibilities in a family that would help them become a an adult, much earlier on. And nowadays, since we're doing this thing about trying to keep our kids kids, we're not teaching them how to be responsible adults. Right? So that's what was, now we know what it is. But we can create something new because we've made this shit up. And we can make it up different. Right? So the whole system as as it is, is made up out of our imagination. Great, we had a good imagination, it lasted a while, let's have another imagination and create something different. So if you had the most optimal way of creating something new, what would you do? For those, say, the first years through team, right? So if somebody let's say, at 13 years old, and you're creating curriculum or program or plan for them, to learn how to become mindful adults, cognitive, common sense critical thinking all those things, what kind of program?

Phil Michaels 31:28  

So I've been recording different apps and resources for parents that want to raise their child and use all the resources that are, you know, helpful to building their child into an amazing adult and amazing human being. That's really what we should be focusing on is, how do we build our children into amazing human beings, not just human beings that can take a test, we want to make sure that they have and I've actually been recording things that I call Phil University. I haven't picked a name yet. But these are things that if I were to build a school, what would those include, and I try to incorporate that philosophy into Tembo exalt as well. But for Tembo, it's for early childhood. So there's certain things the brain needs to learn by certain ages with gross and fine motor skills, social emotional health, but then once you get to an age where you can start assimilating knowledge, that's more subject matter based, for example, like behavioral economics, I've been building and recording, what are the subjects I would want my own child to learn. So if I were designing a curriculum, I could incorporate that. So one of them is language, I would make sure they know English, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. And the reason I picked those five languages, is because I want my child to be a global citizen, a global human being, not a nation, state individual. And the reason I picked those five is because those five are spoken by more countries than any other languages. They'll be able to communicate with people around the world at any time at any given moment, and that I think is an important skill set to have. Another one is meditation, meditation practice, there's apps right now teaching meditation at an early age even before the age of three. So there's what I've been trained in Transcendental Meditation. It's what Jerry Seinfeld uses Howard Stern, Jim Carrey, Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, they, there's a lot of famous people have studied what used to be a required course for the ivy League's in the 70s. So meditation would definitely be one, we've lost a lot of the art forms, art would definitely be a part of it. And not just the artistic realm of painting and drawing and music, but also entrepreneurial arts, problem solving. These are things that are incorporate nutrition, how to eat properly, we've lost that I remember when I was a kid, we took a class called home EQ, or we will learn how to cook and grow our own food. A lot of schools have lost that art I would teach anatomy and physiology how the human body works. A lot of children only take that if they're studying the Health Sciences, such as pre medicine like I did, I would teach empathy. So how do you work not only on your IQ, but your EQ? And then in addition to EQ, your emotional intelligence, your emotional quotient? What about CQ, your cultural quotient because now children are becoming more and more like global citizens rather than just within their own nation state, parenting, to children know how to parent properly. So when they become a parent, that they're going to be able to address their child's needs in a proper way. I think the more and more people learn about parenting, the less children they're going to have because they know how hard it is just to raise one child alone. So child psychology was one of my favorite courses I took in college. It's so important entrepreneurship, finance, how do you manage your finances? How do you do your taxes? How do you invest? How do you save a lot of those They're not taught to everyone that goes into school. Physical Fitness, side, obviously the sciences, chemistry, biology, physics, but things that they can actually apply in the real world. There's something about vocational learning that is so important, like you said, apprenticeship, we need to get back to learning what you're going to do. In the real world. Many pre med students never actually see what they're going to be doing on a day to day basis until they start working in the field. But if they had realized what is their day to day life going to look like by apprenticing by an apprenticeship, or shadowing people, they'll learn Oh, you know what I thought of I always wanted to be an accountant. But now that I see the day to day role, that's not something I'm interested in. So how can we get back to this vocational learning hard skills, apprenticeship rather than just theoretical, where you go to college, you have a ton of student that and then you go and work at Starbucks, and you're not even applying what you learned in school?

Ari Gronich 35:59  

Hey, don't knock Starbucks. No, you could not Starbucks, I want actually. So, you know, yeah, yeah, I was reading a book, to my son, I have these books called the value books. And each book has a different value, and then a historical character, who emulated that value. So the last book we read was understanding. And it was about Margaret Mead. And if you don't know who Margaret Mead was, she's an anthropologist who would travel around the world, she was actually the first anthropologists to travel to the place of the people in which she was studying, because everybody else was just studying the she actually went and lived amongst the people. And she went to the Samoan islands, and found that they were extremely happy adults, like really happy, like, unusually happy. And so she started studying over the course of months of living amongst them, she actually had them build her a hut that had no walls, so that she could hear and see the things going on, no matter what time of day it was. And so she figured out that these kids, by the age of six, were already starting to learn how to take care of the babies. By the time that they were teens, they already knew how to basically take care of an entire family. And by the time they got married, of which they were allowed to pick their own mate. They knew how to take care of each other because they had been taught all these things. So therefore, they were very happy people because they knew how to take care of each other. Another tribe on the Pacific Isles, you went to, they were very unhappy. As adults, they were allowed to do nothing but play as kids. So they didn't have any responsibilities that were given to them. They play 24/7, but they never learned how to take care of each other. And so when they were married through their arranged marriage, they didn't know how to take care of their spouse. They didn't know what to do next, they had to pay huge salaries, you know, to get married to the family. And so they were living in massive debt. Right. So everything was stressful and hard, and they weren't very happy people. And I found that really fascinating. The dichotomy between the two is, most parents, I think, think, in their heads, that if they make their kids do stuff, then they won't be happy. So let's not have them, make them do things. But then, when they get older, like these are the people who are going to be taking care of us when we're too old to take care of ourselves.

Phil Michaels 39:09  

They're not well equipped,

Ari Gronich 39:10  

and now they're not equipped at all. So we've created entire generations of kids in the last 50 years, maybe that have no idea how to take care of anything really

Phil Michaels 39:26  

a secret basic responsibilities and being independent as an adult. And you you make a great point and echoing that. You know, a lot of people say oh, I want to give my kids everything I never had. Well, instead of saying I want to give my kids everything I never had, why not teach them everything you never learned. And in addition to that, taking it a step further I hear what's the most common mistake I hear parents say is like, my kids come first. My kids are everything. Your kids feed off of your energy and your public. There's energy. So you should come first. It's just like the old adage in the airplane put on your own oxygen mask, before you help others, you have to put your own oxygen mask on. First, you have to fill up your own cup first before you could fill up somebody else's cup. So take care of you first as the individual as the parent, then you take care of your partner. Second, your partner should be second most important, and then your child because your partner is going to feed off your energy, and your child is going to feed off you and your partner's energy. So if you and your partner are not grounded, and are not happy, and are not in a safe emotional state, or not taking care of yourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, how do you think your child is going to feed off that energy? They learned through mirror neurons, mirror neurons, they're mimicking the things that you do. This is why if you typically hold on this woman did this viral video actually and showed people what happens when she puts a toy in front of her child versus a everyday household object. So it'd be like a phone, and a play toy with tons of colors. And there was like 20 of them every single time the child chose the household object. You know why? Because the child is mimicking the things that you do. You're not playing with the child's toy, you're playing with the phone, with the remote with the household tape dispenser, whatever it may be, your child is mimicking the behaviors that you perform. So when you and your partner are not on good terms, or you're not healthy and happy. What do you think that's going to do to your child? What example does that set forth for your child. So instead of, I try to change the behavioral pattern that these parents are using, instead of saying, My children come first, tell your child that you come first. Because the more you serve yourself, the better you're going to be equipped that serving others. The more your cups fold, the more you're going to fill up everybody else's cup. If your cups empty, how could you possibly fill up somebody else's cup, so take care of you first, then your partner and then your child and your child's going to be a lot better off by taking care of you and your partner first? Here's Cheers to that. And speaking of happiness already, I know you will have something to say but so Dr. Shawn Aker. He's a Harvard professor. He's known in the scientific community of studying happiness more than any other scientist. And he has the most enrolled in class in Harvard history. And it's about happiness. And Tim Ferriss was interviewing and he asked him, all right, you know, Dr. Akers, what if we could map out what is the bare minimum we could do to have a statistical significant increase in our happiness? What's the bare minimum we can do with a highest return on investment for happiness? And he mapped out there's five things you can do on a daily basis. Number one

Ari Gronich 42:56  

second, I just want to I just want to emphasize to the audience that they really might want to take some notes on this one.

Phil Michaels 43:03  

Oh, absolutely. I mean, absolutely, is got this, it's important. And I'm going to give you a note taking trick in just a moment for you and your audience that I created, you're going to love this one. Because I know leaders are readers and I know your audience is definitely readers. So number one was meditate for two minutes or more, a minimum of two minutes or more. And it could be as simple as closing your eyes and focusing on your breath. It doesn't have to be a particular practice. So Shawn Aker number one, best ways to increase your happiness from a statistically significant way. Number one, meditate two minutes or more. Number two, cardiovascular exercise for a minimum of 15 minutes, all you need is 15 minutes each day. Number three, thanks or praise, give a message of thanks or praise to a different person each day. The only rule is it has to be a different person each day. And it could be as simple as a text message. An email just says, Hey, thanks for the hat. You gifted me or praise. Hey, you did a great job on that presentation yesterday, just wanted to let you know I'm thinking about your You did a great job trying to let you know, just a simple message of either thanks or praise to a different person each day. Number four is writing down three things you're grateful for each day. But here's the problem. It needs to be within the past 24 hours. Because what he found was most people when they're asked to write down what they're grateful for, they put their health, their friends, their happiness, their family, and they become desensitized to that over time. So it's got to be something that happened in the past 24 hours, so it's different each day. And lastly, number five, write down three details of a positive event that happened in the past 24 hours. And the neuroscience behind this is that you're very focused on the specifics though, the more specific you are the better. For example, Let's say you went on a date, I really love the shirt she was wearing, I really loved the taste of that pistachio crusted tilapia, I really loved the the ambiance of that in restaurant. So the more specific you are, the better three details were positive event that happened in the past 24 hours. So just to recap, meditation, two minutes or more cardiovascular exercise, 15 minutes or more, thanks, or praise to a different person each day, three things you're grateful for that had to have happened in the past 24 hours, and three details of a positive event that happened the past 24 hours, if you do those five things bare minimum, you're going to increase your happiness in a statistically significant level.

Ari Gronich 45:44  

Awesome. So I'm just going to give a little bit of a hint on a way to do the meditation, if you're having trouble with that is just light a candle and look at the candle. You know, keep your focus and keep the focus on your breath. That's just a way to keep focused. One of the things that that I know, because I do it all the time is I tell my kid to focus, right, but we don't ever teach our kids how to focus or what focus means. And kids have all these chemistry chemicals, you know, flooding around their body at all times going, I gotta do this, I gotta move, I gotta get up, I gotta, you know, they're constantly in this state of needing to have stimulus. And so when you tell them to focus, or to do something of that sort, like focus on your math for now, right? They can't focus because they've never been taught how to. And so this, the whole thing about meditation is so important for our kids, because they don't know how to focus. So we could tell them till the cows come home hood, got to focus got to focus got to this. But if we're not teaching them or showing them how that's done, they'll never,

Phil Michaels 47:02  

especially if, if the parent is not focusing, either you're telling your child to be focused, and you're not focused. And echoing your point, what I always tell people is, the more you become distracted, the better you become at being distracted. The more you practice focusing, the better you become at focusing. So if you look at it as a practice, that you're practicing this technique, so you get better and better at it, the better you're going to be, the more equipped you're going to be at doing. And what I teach people with meditation that are just starting out for beginners is picture this visual is this is great for kids too. It's not that you're trying to suppress the distractions or the thoughts, it's that you're tapping on them with an imaginary feather. So picture that's like a bubble. It's a cloud going by, or a balloon going by. And that's a thought or a distraction. bring your attention to it, bring your awareness to it, touch it with imaginary feather or your finger if you want, and it goes by and welcome them instead of trying to suppress them, just welcome them. So you're Cognizant and aware of the distraction that in and of itself is bringing yourself to a meditative state. So you're not trying to push them away. No clouds, no clouds, no distractions, no balloons. It's just up. There's a balloon. There's another one. There's a thought, Okay. Oh, there's another one just went by and it be great beginner apps for children is called headspace and adults too. But they have meditations specifically for kids zero to three years old as well and older, but it's called headspace. It's a great beginner app, another great beginner app is calm. And if you don't like either of those and you'd like more variety, there's one called insight timer. Insight timer is a platform for meditation practitioners from around the world to offer their meditations to you. So they have tons of meditations, long, short, guided, unguided. So there's a plethora, a multitude of different meditations that you can choose from on insight time. I personally am trained in Transcendental Meditation is completely unguided. Created by Maharishi from Maharishi University in Iowa, but it's a it's been used for a long time. But starting out, I think these are better. And it's a great way. And Ari, I wanted to share with your audience that note taking trick that I created, it's a reading trick app. So this book is called The Power of Habit, but I'm just going to use this book as an example. So have you seen this pen before? It's a four color Bic pen, pretty popular, you probably remember it from childhood. Usually it's a blue and white casing. But I want to I created this because I was reading a lot of books a book a week I started in 2014. And I noticed that I wasn't assimilating the knowledge. I wasn't able to remember it after I'd read the book. And I thought a book is only as good as how often you reference back to it and apply what you learned in your real life. So I came up with a trick because what I realized with highlighter The highlighter fades after about a year. And so it doesn't work for long term. So I use this pen. And each color represents a different tactic, which I'm going to teach you now. So blue is my version of using a highlighter. So any major concept in the book, I'll underline in blue, just like you would with a highlighter. Green is an action item. So anytime a book is recommended in the book, or there's a person or a company, I will go and look it up, that's an action item for me to go look at. So that one's in green. Red is for any word I am not familiar with. So I will write the definition in the book and underline it in red. And then Black, the last one is the most important. So the black one is for these little post it notes. So I take these many post it notes, I put the page number and the concept that I learned in that book. So that way, when I want to reference back to this book, I don't have to reread the whole thing, I just go back to all the major concepts. And I see so for example, this one is self discipline is more important than IQ. And everything in blue will be about that concept. So I just have to read what I highlighted in blue. Here's one I wrote down. This is a study showing that willpower is stronger when they have their own autonomy. So obviously, that's what that blue highlighting is going to be about. So this four color pen trick anyone can use. And it helps you assimilate the knowledge even more so ingrained in your brain deeper. So my friends always tell me like I don't have to read any more books, I'll just talk to Phil, and he'll give me the breakdown of what happened in that book. And I attribute it not to my own intelligence, but to this habit that I've trained myself on.

Ari Gronich 51:46  

Wow. So we should call you Cliff Notes. And

Phil Michaels 51:51  

I share more hacks like this and tricks on my website to I am Philmichaels.com, where your audience can learn more about these little performance hacks I like to share.

Ari Gronich 52:01  

Cool, absolutely, that'd be awesome. And we'll we'll get to that at the end, we'll have an opportunity for you to, you know, have your how to find these and how to you know, things like that. So one of the things that you mentioned in our communication was turning your men's retreat, the bro retreat into a monthly retreat. So why don't you talk a little bit about that. I'm a sterling Institute of relationships grads, so I have been in men's organizations for 20 years now I did my weekend actually in 2000. And I was on the production core team for 10 years. So I was on a men's team, as on the production team, we did men's and women's weekends, four of them a year. And so I mean, I have a lot of experience in this realm. And I also know some of the foibles that happen within those kinds of organizations incestuous pneus, in some cases, and those organizations have, you know, mixing and clicking and so on and so forth. So, tell us a little bit about this men's retreat. You call it the bro richer or rotary and and what it is that this is trying to accomplish? And are I why would you want it to be a once a month thing?

Phil Michaels 53:31  

Sure. So a few years ago, I had been wanting I love traveling, I had been wanting to travel the world with other high achievers, people that are the top 1% of their game, really high peak performers. And so I started selfishly for myself, and brought some friends that I also knew were high achievers, and we just started traveling to a different city. And I started developing a curriculum, I didn't realize how important it was to people to men specifically, I wanted a place to not only travel, but be around other high peak performers. And also have a trusted, safe environment where we could be open and vulnerable with each other share things that don't emasculate us like we can maintain our masculinity while being vulnerable. And you can't, you don't always have someone to do that with. That's what I tell people about coaching. There's a stigma, just like there was back in the day about therapy, and therapists and mental health, there's seems to be still a stigma with coaching. And I always tell people, there's very few people in your life that you could talk to, that don't have a conflict of interest or an inherent bias can always tell your co founders, your investors, your board members, everything can always tell your family and friends or your significant other, not because you don't trust them or you can't be honest, but more so they have an inherent bias they come with or they have a conflict of interest. So a coach is someone that you can confide in that's directly invested in your success and your success only. Well, this makes retreat is a part of that. We wanted a place where we could feed off each other's energy help each other level up, but in a trusting, safe environment. So we, we challenge each other physically, mentally and emotionally. And there's a curriculum I've now built, it's four to five days. And each day is, is built off of a different theme. So one day is about relationships. One day is about physical transformation. One's about mental transformation. And we pick a different city each year. So the last day of each event will pick the city and date of the next one. So it's already we vote on it, and we pick in we're doing Vancouver, we just did Park City, Utah, and I surprised them so I take them to different physical, physically challenging experiences. So we went to the Olympic Training Facility for the US Olympic bobsled team. And we took them bobsledding. So that's the ice loser, you go down in the in the sled, and you're going 73 miles an hour down this ice luge, and it was amazing. And they had no idea we competed. So we had different teams trying to see who could get the fastest time. And we just do a lot of fun, physically active stuff, because you got to get in the mind and the body, they're so closely connected. And a lot of these retreats I found, one are not high achievers, or people that are just like on their last, you know, thread and they're just trying to look for that next, you know, gift that will bring them over the edge, or I found that they're not physically in tune, they're very in the head. And if you get in the head too much in the head, you're dead, as they say. So you've got to get in tune with the body. And it's one of the reasons I start my day off with rebounding. I'll get to that in a moment. But to answer your question, like why do I want to do it monthly, because the more and more I do these retreats, the more I'm realizing how many men are looking for a place like this, where they can maintain their masculinity, not feel uncomfortable sharing their truth, their honesty, being vulnerable, and but also challenged themselves physically, mentally and emotionally in a place of other high achievers that force them to level up.

Ari Gronich 57:09  

That's pretty cool. I think you and I probably could talk a little bit about about doing some collaboration with that my brother, who I told you as a high school teacher, on his side hustle, he teaches survival training, so both urban and wilderness, survival of it, Marines, he's taught Air Force, he's taught army, you know, he goes around, but he's also a master dive instructor. And so I've certifications and things like that he's a rescue diver. So, you know, I've been looking at how do I incorporate some of what he does in some corporate retreats for corporate culture and corporate wellness. But, you know, this, he he's a, an amazing resource for, for this stuff. And he's totally not an entrepreneur. He grew up in the same house that I grew up with, you know, and his response was, I don't want to have anything to do with that entrepreneur stuff, because he saw the ups and downs of it, or it's very volatile. With with me, I was like, hey, that's, it seems seems like a good life to me. So that, you know, represents different ways we can be raised in the same house with the same parents with the same training completely different people, right. But yeah, so it would be an awesome extension of of doing that

Phil Michaels 58:42  

I'm going to keep for sharing

Ari Gronich 58:44  

some survival training with, with corporations with people, as you know, what, what do we look at? We look at the world. And we look at our problems, right? We look at what what the issues are going on. So we're having a healthcare crisis. If you were to look down your street, in Tampa, your block, right? How many people do you think could put on a 75 pound sack and go marching down for 10 miles a jungle? for military, right? Probably not a whole lot of people have that physical prowess anymore. Used to be that that could be done normally. Nowadays, it's it's tough. So when we look at health care, we look at our military and our safety as a country. If we're not a healthy nation, we're not going to be healthy enough to be able to defend ourselves. If we're not educated. We're not going to be smart enough to defend ourselves. Right? These are all things that that we have going on. So as far as like the education, what you're bringing forth to the education, cognitive and critical thinking skills and so on. This is gonna be huge for the country at large. Thank you means a lot. Oh, absolutely. And healthcare is the same way. If we can't get our community to be healthy, then how are we going to ever be that superpower that we've been going forward in the future, we've already dropped? I think we're 46. In the world, as far as education, where, you know, heart health is 40 something if nationwide, or, you know, worldwide, as far as our nation in the world's market. So we've actually taken this amazing idea of a country. And over the last 50 years, we have slowly dismantled a lot of what we had created in the first 200 years. And so what I'm looking at is okay, so how do we create more solutions? And how do we create more solution providers? How do we get people back into those critical thinking and common set of skills so that we can actually create a new tomorrow today? Is my favorite one of my favorite things create a new tomorrow today, as part of the show? How do we create a new tomorrow today, by shifting the focus of what we've been doing over the last 50 years, and kind of refocus back into the greatness of our people and the greatness of our country. I'm not very much of a patriot, I'm not patriotic, as far as that. I'm just somebody who lives in a place and I see all of the gaps that we have left for chaos to ensue. So, you know, talk a little bit about the healthcare, you were in medicine for a while you got to spend time with the Yankees, you got to spend time in hospitals and in surgeries. Right. So what did you see as the biggest issues to our medical system at that point, that could easily be transferred, you know, transformed?

Phil Michaels 1:02:21  

Yeah, it's a great question. There's a lot to unpack there. Working in healthcare, I saw it firsthand that it should be really called sick care, not health care, because the whole system is incentivized, based on how sick you are. And until we change the incentives, we're never going to see change. So that's why behavioral economics would be one of the things that I teach children. And behavioral economics is choice architecture, human centered design, design thinking. There's decision fatigue involved. And there's a great book on this by Nobel laureates, Dr. Fowler and Sunstein in the book, nudge and nudge is an easy way to explain behavioral economics, but it's all about how humans make decisions. So little things like relevant today, voting. So do you know depending on which order the presidential candidate is provided in the ballot, will influence your decision on who you vote for. So the first name on the ballot is more often chosen than the second name, just because it's the one that's listed first. So they'll typically on ballots, they'll typically randomize the order to prevent that from happening from skewing the results. But if you're a human being and I asked you that, do you think that has an effect on your decision? You would say no, but it's happening subconsciously. So behavioral economics is all about teaching you how to incentivize the right decisions. Another example of this is a guy in the UK owned a restaurant. And in the men's bathrooms, he noticed there was a lot of urine spillage out of the urinals, and it was costing his business money because he had to pay for extra cleaning supplies more often than he wanted to, then he should. His theory, his hypothesis was that men are bored, and so they're not aiming properly into the urinal. So he created these fake housefly, stickers that he put in the back of the urinal for men to aim at while they're peeing in the urinal. And it don't quote me on the number but it reduced urine spillage by like 30 something percent, to the point where it saved his business a lot of money. So he actually started a business selling these fake fly stickers to other restaurants and bars, and also became the founder of this company that or he inspired this thought of little soccer goals where there's a hanging soccer ball and you aim for the soccer ball and it kicks it into the net and NFL American football field goals or you kick the football through You just aim at the ball and it shoots it through and it works. So let those are an example in the book that they share of little ways that you can influence human behavior. In a subconscious subliminal message. Another one was with energy. So energy consumption, they tested this in California, and found that out of all variables to impact human behavior, social peer pressure does the best job of impacting how you behave. So they tested this with energy consumption in your home. So what they would do is the energy company would send you a bill in the mail of your how much usage you had. And they will show you how you compare to your neighbors in the same neighborhood. So it shows you on a scale, if you're average, above average, and consumption or below average, and consumption says in your neighborhood, you are above average and your consumption. So people reduce their consumption, more than any other time that they had been influenced to change their energy consumption, they wanted to test it even more. So they added colors. So if you are above average, that was bad, they gave you a red color. If you were below average, that was good, they give you a green color that influenced their behavior of consumption even more, then they took it a step further already and added an emoji, a smiley face if they were good, or a frown face if they're bad, and that influenced their behavior even more. But if I asked you is that, do you think if I put on your bill that if I added green or red or smiley face or a frowny face, it would affect your consumption of energy? You'd be like, no, Phil, come on, that's not gonna influence me. But it does, subconsciously. So healthcare is not going to change unless we incentivize humans, whether it's monetarily or through social influence, peer pressure, to influence their decision making in the way that we want them to decide. Unless we do that, we're not going to see change. So we need to make sure the the incentives and punishments are aligned with good behavior. We have to incentivize insurance companies in a way that doesn't impact their their bottom dollar that influences them in a way that they're going to be incentivized to take care of people. And to focus on preventative health care, we're going to have to help doctors be influenced with correct incentives and punishments. Right now, we're rewarding the wrong behaviors. An example this is Trump, a lot of people say, oh, Trump doesn't believe in climate change. Of course, he believes in climate change, he's just paid way more by big oil and gas than he is by a renewable energy company. So until you make the incentive is more valuable for him to make a decision. Otherwise, you're going to continue to have the same. So a lot of people might think that just by stomping the ground and shouting and yelling, and complaining is going to resolve an impact. But a better way, a better approach is behavioral economics, changing choice architecture, to a point where it incentivizes the correct behaviors. So seeing healthcare, it's antiquated, it's flawed, in my opinion, and we talked about this briefly before, but in my opinion, insurance should be used for emergencies, not for preventative health care, it should be like car insurance, with a car, you pay for your gas, you pay for the oil change out of pocket, right, you know what the price is, and you pay for and you can price shop, you can go to this oil change mechanic or this oil change mechanic and see which one do you want to go with. But for an emergency, you have car insurance, if you get into a car accident, that's when you use your insurance, you don't use your insurance for preventative health of your vehicle. So what why not use health care the same way for preventative health, let's influence people to make the right decisions. Because if not, they're going to have to pay out of pocket at this doctor price shopping versus this doctor, they're going to know how much it costs them, rather than hiding it through insurance codes, which a lot of insurance companies do. They don't want you to know how much you're paying for each service. But if we're able to have the transparent pricing bill passed, then people will know exactly what they're paying for. And they'll be able to price shop at each doctor and use insurance for emergencies only, like if you have to go to the ER or you get cancer, etc.

Ari Gronich 1:09:12  

Right. And, you know, there's a piece of that that I would agree with, I definitely agree with changing the incentives changing, you know, from procedure base to results based incentivization so that, you know, you're not doing all of these extras and fraudulent procedures because if you do more, you get paid more. You know, I like if you get 10 people to quit smoking and they quit smoking for over six months, you get a bonus. And then if you get 20 people to quit smoking, you get another bonus right? That would be more the incentives. I believe that doctors should be on a straight salaried kind of pay. I think that their school should be taken care of They shouldn't be living in debt and fear of money

Phil Michaels 1:10:05  

of average doctor I think comes out with an average of

Ari Gronich 1:10:08  

200, 250. About

you froze for a second hold on

the frozen, frozen now?

I think I see you blinking again.

Phil Michaels 1:10:41  

Oh, there you are.

Ari Gronich 1:10:43  

Are you blinking again? All right. You're back.

Phil Michaels 1:10:47  

I By the way, I have like seven minutes until my next meeting.

Ari Gronich 1:10:52  

So, um, anyway, let's just finish that that thought. So you were about to respond to what I said.

Phil Michaels 1:11:01  

Yeah, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And I think we can incentivize instead of waiting for them to quit smoking. Yeah, we should reward them for quitting smoking. But let's incentivize them before they even start. So your insurance should be cheaper if you don't smoke in the first place. And for most they are but there should be other ways to incentivize people to start out healthy, rather than waiting till they're already smoking and trying to quit, let's incentivize, hey, if you go have a gym membership, and you're actually showing up six days a week, or however many days a week, you want to decide your insurance is going to be lower than someone that's morbidly obese, and not eating the right foods and not exercising properly. Like we should incentivize them to buy monat monetarily to reward them for good behavior. So in behavioral economics, we learn that people will do do more to avoid pain than they will to seek pleasure. So we want to make the pain great enough that they avoid it. So if you start smoking, your cost is going to go up by this much. And they should know exactly how much it is how much it's going to go up. We should know exactly if they are eating the wrong foods. If they're not exercising properly, they should know exactly how much that's going to cost them. So they're fearful of that pain, and they avoided at all costs.

Ari Gronich 1:12:20  

Right? I think that that might be a good thing. I think that more of the the incentivizing doctors and incentivizing the system itself, was where I was getting at versus incentivizing people, because I think that when we incentivize people, we have to encompass such a wide variety of things. Like, are you eating healthy? Okay, well, what does that mean? Are you eating fruit and vegetable that's covered in pesticides? You eating vegetables covered in, you know, soil in that are organic? Are you eating, you know, like, the entire grade point into what is designed to make people unhealthy? Right, it's designed to make you obese. So if the system is designed to make you obese, and you're following the system, as it is, then why should you be punished for being obese? If your body is holding on to pesticides, toxins, air particles, drugs that are in the water, it's cetera, right?

Phil Michaels 1:13:20  

I agree, I think it should be done on both ends. So not just

Ari Gronich 1:13:23  

right, it has to be on both sides sides of the argument. People need to be responsible for their actions, and the government and the incentives that we give agriculture and the chemical industries and the pharmaceutical industries and so forth, they need to be decent set of eyes. And actually, their incentives need to be not getting massive fines for poisoning our air poisoning our water, not like the fines that are out there right now, according to the EPA, if you're making $20 million, by dumping your toxic waste into the ocean, and the fine is a million dollars, you're going to continue to dump your toxic waste into the ocean. And that's kind of the difference in in, in the US that are kind of behind the times. Right? So the incentives are going towards poisoning the air poisoning the water because the consequences are less

Phil Michaels 1:14:32  

dire and not doing it. Yeah.

Ari Gronich 1:14:34  

But here's my point and I'll leave the audience with this. The less dire is only in monetary pain. Your family has cancer. Your family has diabetes. Your family has heart disease, your family has all these other issues because of these decisions outside of yourself. Yes, that are being incentivized by the Government and big. Therefore, it is still incumbent upon you to make the decision to choose organic to choose to go for a walk instead of sit on your button couch and watch TV right to do different kinds of things. So, absolutely. And I think that Phil, we should probably do about 20 more of these. But

Phil Michaels 1:15:26  

thanks for having me. It's been it's been such a pleasure.

Ari Gronich 1:15:28  

Yeah, I go on your show, but I'm way over 30. So. But anyway, give every episode we give three really actionable things that the audience can do in order to change their world create a new tomorrow today. So why don't we get those and then how people can get ahold of you if they'd like to learn more about you and and what you have to offer them.

Phil Michaels 1:15:56  

You can go to I am Philmichaels.com, or I'm on Instagram, and IamPhilMichaels keep it easy, and happy to share hacks, performance tricks, and further education company is Tembotexts.com, like text messages, Tembo texts, and we'll put these in the show notes, maybe. But to answer your question, oh, by the way, the podcast that I run is you could just search Phil Michaels. But it's the podcast that only interviews it's only one in the world that interviews people that have made the Forbes list like LeBron James, Kylie Jenner, people, entrepreneurs from YouTube, Instagram, etc. so amazing, amazing people. And three things that you could do to change your life starting now. The three things that changed my life, the books that you read, the people that you spend the most time around, and the places that you've traveled, change those three things. The books you read, the people you spend the most time with, and the places you travel, and you will change your life. Go out, explore the world, leaders are readers, and you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So we need to disrupt these three, and I guarantee your life will change more than its average change before.

Ari Gronich 1:17:15  

Thank you so much. And this has been a another great episode of create a new tomorrow, where we're helping you create a new tomorrow today. I'm your host, Ari Gronich and thank you so much. We are out of here. Thanks. Ari. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you. If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world. Go to the website, create a new tomorrow.com and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you just for checking it out and look forward to seeing you take the leap and joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.