F*ck Your Friction (Paperback)

You're not crazy. You're not lazy. You're being robbed.

You will lose 730 days of your life to friction. Not traffic. Not your commute. Friction. The phone trees. The doom-loop apps. The subscriptions you can't cancel. The forms that exist for no reason. The "updates" that break everything that worked.

This isn't bad design. It's the business model.

It's built on purpose, to steal your time, drain your money, and wreck your sanity one polite little obstacle at a time. And the receipts are real: the FTC found that 76% of subscription sites and apps use dark patterns engineered to manipulate you. That's not a hot take. That's a finding.

In F*ck Your Friction*, Second City improv alum, three-time startup founder, and HIVE CEO Mitch Mitchem cuts through the corporate lies to show you why every modern "convenience" has become a con, and exactly how to fight back.

This book is your weapon. Inside, you'll get:

• The Grandfather Test - five questions, thirty seconds, that cut through any corporate lie.
• Fix It or F*ck It - the decision framework that ends paralysis in ten seconds flat.
• The Six Friction Identifiers - how to spot the moment a company has quietly assigned you their job.
• The AI Friction Killer - the only weapon that scales, if you use it right.
• The Receipts - who profits from your wasted time, and why they'll never stop on their own.
• The Reclaim - how to take back the hours, days, and years they've already stolen from you.

By the last page, you won't just be aware of friction. You'll be a trained, unapologetic Friction Fighter.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Mitch Mitchem is a global keynote speaker, 3X Founder, CEO author, and future of work visionary redefining the future by fusing human connection with AI innovation. With three decades on stage and two decades leading at the front of technology and human transformation, he has emerged as one of the world's leading authorities on integrating human skills with emerging tech. Often compared to a mix of Tony Robbins and Steve Harvey, Mitch blends humor, interaction, and hard-won insight to ignite lasting change, a mission that now drives his work preparing humanity for an AI-driven future.A Virginia-born country boy at heart, Mitch grew up in Marion, Ohio. He was a soccer standout and an unapologetic theater nerd, the youngest cast member in the Marion Palace Theatre's production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. His father helped found the Marion Popcorn Festival, and that's where Mitch caught the bug for performance and production, a mindset he carries into everything he builds.His career began in entertainment, where he disrupted the stage with comedy, music, and audience engagement nobody else was doing. He studied Meisner technique at Baron Brown Studio in Los Angeles and improv at the legendary Second City in Chicago, sharpening a commanding presence as a DJ, emcee, actor, comedian, and television host. He has performed for over 9 million people, opening for icons like N'Sync, Jimmy Buffett, and Britney Spears. His groundbreaking creation Comedy You Can Dance To ran for 20 years at Chicago's Excalibur Nightclub and Universal Studios Orlando, turning rooms full of strangers into a community by the end of the night. That mastery of a crowd became the foundation for everything that followed: the ability to connect deeply with people, at scale, and make them feel something.Mitch turned that gift into a force for transformation, leading experiential training for Fortune 500 companies across ten countries. "I took what I learned about holding an audience's attention and turned it into a tool for transformation," he says.Driven to connect people in new ways, he founded High There, the world's first social network in the cannabis space. It scaled to over 300,000 users in under eleven months, faster than Twitter's first year. Stuck early at 11,000 users, Mitch listened to feedback about isolation and pivoted, and growth exploded to tens of thousands of new users a week. It taught him the lesson that anchors his life's work: technology means nothing without the human element.That conviction took center stage in a raw, deeply personal TED Talk on the human cost of over-customized tech. "Tech can either divide us or bring us together. It's our job to choose," he said.In 2020, as the world reeled from the disconnection of the COVID era, Mitch founded HIVE, a company built around the human element and human skill development. With his team, he has developed over 100,000 people with a 97% implementation success rate where the industry average sits at 6%. Now HIVE is moving to the application side with AI Avatars for Anyone, letting you build avatars of the people who shaped you, grandparents, mentors, coaches, historical figures, or design your own guides from scratch. Because the people who impact your life should never disappear. Wisdom is in your nature.Everything Mitch builds today runs through one lens: the fight against friction, the broken systems, manufactured distractions, and manufactured fear stealing our time, our money, and our humanity. It's the heart of his book F*CK YOUR FRICTION: How to Fight Back Against the Systems Stealing Your Time and Money, and the through-line of his keynotes, training, and technology.Mitch Mitchem is a disruptive force who has mastered the art of human connection while leading at the front of AI and leadership innovation. He exists to remind humanity of itself. And he's just getting started.