Conservative Professor X’s secret to getting money from strangers

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I read an article recently about controversial Hillsdale College.

I no longer live in the U.S., and I avoid places online that talk about culture wars, so I’d never heard of Hillsdale before.

It appears to be a kind of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, except “gifted” in this case means conservative-leaning, Christian, and proudly American.

Even though Hillsdale was founded in 1844, its influence has expanded dramatically over the past 20 years. Just one example:

Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and the non-Trump face of the Republican Party, said he would not hire somebody from his own alma mater, Yale, but would hire somebody from Hillsdale.

Hillsdale is not the only conservative-leaning college in the U.S. There are dozens or maybe hundreds of others.

So why did Hillsdale become it, rather than any of the other places?

The article I read says it was all down to the guidance of Professor X himself — real name, Larry Arnn, the President of Hillsdale College. It’s Arnn’s vision and his tactics and his strategies that have made Hillsdale the new conservative cultural beacon.

It took different measures to get there. But money of course was important.

During Arnn’s tenure, annual contributions to Hillsdale have increased sevenfold, including from many people who never went to Hillsdale. ​​And it’s on this topic that Professor X revealed his secret for getting money from strangers:

“You don’t get money by asking for it. You get money by showing them what you do.”

Perhaps you say that’s obvious. And I’m sure the deans of all those other conservative-leaning colleges, which were left behind in the dust by Hillsdale, think it’s obvious also.

Anyways, the topic of my email today ties in intimately to the topic of my Most Valuable Email course.

If you have gone through MVE, the connection will be obvious. It might be obvious even if you have not gone through MVE.

But if want to make sure, or simply would like to hear me explain in more detail how I write Most Valuable Emails and show you how you too can write this type of email yourself, then you can find my “pull back the curtain” offer below:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How and why I might write a Substack newsletter

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Got a question three nights ago:

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You’ve written about the “newsletter economy” over the last couple of months. I’m on a few Substacks. Substack has this inbuilt mechanism where if you subscribe to a Substack then you get a pop-up which says, “Oh you might like these three or four as well.”

I’ve come at my newsletter growth from a sort of copywriting angle. I’m on Aweber which doesn’t have that functionality. I can see how that would be quite useful to have because it instantly gets people on your list.

Quite a lot of Substacks are growing quite quickly because of it. I’m thinking, is there a way to replicate that functionality somehow outside of Substack? How should I be thinking about growth more generally? Am I missing a trick perhaps by not being on Substack?

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My feelings: it’s absolutely worth getting on Substack. You can get free, large-scale access to readers… email readers… recent and eager email readers.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting on Substack myself. But I feel there’s a right way and wrong way to do it.

The wrong way is to write a bunch of daily emails like the one you’re reading right now.

Daily emails like this one definitely work — people will gladly read them and buy from them. But it’s not how I would go about writing a Substack newsletter, at least if I were going for massive organic growth.

I suspect — based on previous experience — that emails like this would lead to blowback from Substack readers and other Substack newsletters, or worse yet, to simply being ignored.

So that’s what I would not do.

If you are curious what I would do, and what I might actually end up doing, both to grow my list on Substack and to monetize it, you can find that out if you sign up to my Insights & More Book Club. Because the question above came up on the last Insights & More call, which I recorded and posted inside the members area.

The doors to the Insights & More Book Club closed tonight. I only open them every couple of months at the start of a new book, because it doesn’t make sense to have people join midway. If you’d like to be advised the next time the doors open, sign up to my email list, because it’s the only place where I make my book club available.

A book that changed how I think about life, death, and pretty much everything around me

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At the start of this year, a friend turned me on to the BLUEPRINT.

To me, anything with the word BLUEPRINT in it sounds like an outdated 2011 info product. But no, that’s not what that is.

The BLUEPRINT is a project by Bryan Johnson.

Once upon a time, Johnson was a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He founded Braintree, a mobile payment startup which later acquired Venmo. In 2013, Johnson sold Braintree/Venmo to PayPal for $800 million.

And then, two years ago, reclining on his piles of gold coins and sacks filled with $100 bills, Johnson decided on a whim to become immortal.

So he assembled a team of longevity scientists who devised an optimal daily protocol for him — the BLUEPRINT — including diet, 101 pills every day, training, sleep, blood testing, gadgets and widgets and non-stop optimization.

The cost? $2 million so far. The result?

Johnson says he has slowed down his pace of aging to that of an average 10-year-old. He has managed to reverse 5 years off his biological age (he is 45) and many of his organs now test as functioning at the level of 20-year-old. He says he feels better than he ever has, he’s more positive, has zero anxiety, sleeps perfectly every night, overflows with energy, and the quality of his ideas is better.

Of course, not everybody is sold. Johnson gets a lot of hate and mockery online.

It doesn’t help that Johnson vaguely resembles the T-1000 android from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, just with longer hair.

But I guess the real reason for the hate is that people see Johnson as a rich kook, a kind of modern-day Howard Hughes, on an eccentric, selfish, and self-absorbed chase.

And so I thought also. But I heard Johnson speak a while back. It turned out he’s very normal, very reasonable, and very altruistic-sounding.

His goal, he says, is to prove that it’s possible, so others believe and do it too. And while figuring out the BLUEPRINT cost Johnson $2m, it won’t take others nearly as much to implement it themselves, or to implement the 20% that gets the 80% of the value.

Whatever. I’m not here to sell Bryan Johnson to you. I just want to share something that struck me from that interview. Johnson said:

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We are accustomed to our technology improving systematically. With ourselves, we do not improve systematically. We improve a little bit, but we commit a self-destructive behavior here, we have a rise, we have a fall, we decay.

We accept that we humans decay and are eventually going to die and we become martyrs for our technology to move forward. We basically are trying to give birth to immortality through our work because we are demising. We are going to demise. And that technology is then used against us to make us addicted to all the things in the world to make us even worse.

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One thing that struck me from the above is the idea that we are trading one kind of longevity — our personal bodies — for another kind of longevity — our work.

It reminded me of a book I’d read a long time ago. This book changed how I look at the world and how I think about life, death, and pretty much everything around me.

As you might know if you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, I make a habit of re-reading books that I found worthwhile.

And even though I read this book 10+ years ago, and even though I already had it change my mind once, I decided to make it the next book for the Insights & More Book Club.

For one thing, this book is a great illustration of insight techniques in action. For another, the core ideas in this book are genuinely novel and mind-changing. What more can I ask for in a book club focused on insightful writing and ideas?

If you’re interested in finding out what this book is, in reading it, and in participating in the Insights & More Book Club, then you’ll have to be on my email list first.

I only open the doors to the Insights & More Book Club every two months at the start of a new book. The doors are open now. But they will close again tomorrow, Sunday night, at 12 midnight PST. If you’re interested in getting in before then, sign up to my email list today, and watch out for my email tomorrow.

Trust lessons from a professional fraudster

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Several times in this newsletter, I’ve mentioned a tiny book I’ve been reading, Leading With Your Head, by Gary Kurz. Really, it’s a pamphlet more than book, just 40-odd pages. But I’m still not done with it.

Leading With Your Head talks about the misdirection part of magic, all the other psychological stuff besides the sleight-of-hand. ​​How to focus the attention of your audience. How to direct that attention. How to make people believe and trust you, even though you are known to be a professional fraudster whose job it is to mislead and trick them.

So how do you do it? Lotsa techniques. Here’s one:

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One of John Ramsey’s favorite techniques for creating the moment was to create suspicion and then dispel it. The audience’s surprise that their suspicions were unfounded created the moment he needed to do the move for real.

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I don’t know who John Ramsey is. But I do know something else — and that’s the value of reading widely.

Now at this point, you might expect me to launch into a mentalist-like pitch for my Insights & More Book Club. But no. I would never.

Instead, I just want to give you a real example, right here, for free, of the value of reading widely. Here’s an effective opening and an interesting fact I found by reading a newsletter called Contemplations On The Tree Of Woe:

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The Chinese curse their enemies with the phrase “may you live in interesting times.”

Or, rather, Americans think that Chinese curse their enemies like that; according to Infogalactic, “despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.”

Fortunately, there’s an actual Chinese phrase that’s much more interesting. It’s found in a 1627 short story collection…

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And now in this brief moment, let me slide my Insights & More Book Club into view.

This elite club is open to a select, small group of new members right now. But the heavy front doors of the club will be sealed again soon, on Sunday, April 30, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re curious to find out more about this club, or even to join, then the first step is to get on my email list. That’s the only place I recruit members. To take that first step, click here and fill out the application form that appears.

“Experts are scoffing”: How to manufacture proof out of thin air

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This past January, I kicked off the Insights & More Book Club. Every two months, we read a book specifically because it’s likely to be insightful and offer a change of perspective.

After I announced ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛, the first book club book, Insights & More member Folarin Madehin wrote me to say:

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I don’t know if you know about this already, but here’s one relevant thing that came to mind… I think will interest you (certainly fascinated me):

The mass community response to the archeology community response to the Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse.

Here’s an article that reps the archeologists’ side. [link to an article on Artnet]

Here’s a twitter thread that reps the “masses” side. [link to a thread by the show’s producer]

Basically–the ‘experts’ say “thing wrong!” … and the ‘masses’ say “experts say thing wrong? Proves thing right!” … and of course–the show producer does a great job aligning himself with the masses and using this to his marketing advantage.

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So there you go. That’s how to manufacture proof out of thin air. “If they’re trying to suppress it, it must be valuable, and it must be true, regardless of what it is.”

Tonight, as this email goes out, I and the other members of the Insights & More Book Club will have our bimonthly book club call, to discuss the second book we’ve been reading, ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛, and to just have an exchange of ideas and questions in a kind of easy and low-pressure mastermind.

After tonight, we will get going with the next Insights & More book. For reasons of proof and intrigue, I won’t publicly reveal the title of that book, but I will tell you it maps to ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛.

I only open up the Insights & More Book Club to new members every two months, as we are starting a new book.

I figure it doesn’t make sense to have somebody join mid way, when they won’t have time to actually read the book.

Right now, and for the next four days, as we are starting a new book, the doors to the Insights & More Book Club are slightly ajar.

If you’d like to join, you will have to be on my email list first.

Expert marketers and copywriters scoff and say my list is all fake. But maybe you can make up your own mind. To try it out, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Counterpoint to the screwing

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I was at gym not long ago. Instead of working out, as I should have been, I was listening to a particularly interesting episode of the James Altucher podcast.

This particular episode was particularly interesting because James was interviewing Steven Pressfield, the author of the War of Art and some other books.

It turns out James plagiarized a valuable ideas from one of those books. I later plagiarized the same idea from James.

But I’ve written about that before.

What I haven’t written about is that I recently contacted Brian Kurtz, the former Boardroom VP and current marketing mastermind organizer.

I wanted to see if Brian would like me to give some kind of presentation to Titans XL, his virtual mastermind/community.

Several people who are in Titans XL are also customers and readers of my newsletter. In fact, one such reader suggested the idea that I present at Titans XL.

I’m grateful to that reader. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself. After all, I’ve been reading Brian’s stuff for years, and I often refer to his stories and experiences in my own emails. I’ve learned a ton from the guy, both directly and indirectly.

All that’s to say Titans XL and me might be a good fit.

They might be almost as good a fit as Steven Pressfield and porn. Because as I found out listening to that interview:

After Pressfield moved to Hollywood, hoping against hope to become a screenwriter, he got a gig rewriting a screenplay — for a porn movie.

At the time, Pressfield had worked a number of odd jobs, including as an advertising copywriter. He knew how to write.

But could he write a good screenplay? And more importantly, could he write porn?

The producer of the porn movie, a “really nice family man” according to Pressfield, took Pressfield out to breakfast at the start of the project.

Sitting in a restaurant in Santa Monica, with the sun shining in his eyes, the producer leaned in. “Here’s what I want you to do, kid,” he said. And he gave Pressfield two rules of effective porn storytelling. Here’s one of ’em:

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Whenever there’s a screwing scene, always have something else going on at the same time.

For instance, if it’s the wife and the pool repair guy, and they’re in the bedroom, have the husband coming home unexpectedly in the middle of the day, unbeknownst to his wife. Then we can cut back and forth from the couple in bed to the husband coming home, and now you got something interesting going on!

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Speaking of which:

After I wrote Brian Kurtz about that Titans XL idea, I got an automated email saying Brian is mostly unavailable until April 24th. He’s planning and then hosting his final in-person Titans mastermind event.

April 24th has passed. I’m still waiting to hear back from Brian for real. Maybe he’s taking a break after the big event. Maybe he’s just busy. Maybe he’s ignoring me. Maybe he silently decided that I am not a good fit to present to his community, even though I think I am.

But I continue to be hopeful, though with each passing day, I’m getting more unsure. I’ll let you know how it goes.

And as for Steven Pressfield, he applied the two rules of porn storytelling in that script rewrite. He realized how important and valuable these rules were, so he kept applying them later in his other screenplays and even his novels. As he says, the “principles of storytelling I know are all movie principles.”

I told you one of the two storytelling rules above. And if you’re curious about that second one, you can dig up that James Altucher episode, and listen to it yourself.

Or you can just take me up on the following offer:

Sign up to my newsletter. Once you get the welcome email, hit reply and tell me about any paid communities or masterminds you are currently in.

​​If you’re in Titans XL, that’s fine. If it’s another marketing mastermind or community, that’s fine too. If it’s not marketing, but some kind of other paid community or mastermind, that works also.

If you do that, then in return, I’ll write you back and tell you the second of Pressfield’s two porn storytelling rules. I’ll also tell you how Pressfield used those rules in other non-porn scripts he wrote. And I’ll even tell you how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use the same storytelling rule in their own sales copy and marketing content.

How to reduce your business’s cost-per-lead by 80%

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Assuming that you’re running ads to get leads…

And assuming that you’re running ads, say on FB or Twitter, via your business’s page or account…

Then let me share something obvious, but maybe very lucrative.

​​It comes from Dan Krenitsyn, who did growth at places like BuzzFeed, The Information, and The Telegraph, and who now leads strategy at the product, content, and operations team at Meta/Facebook. ​​Dan says:

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This might not be relevant for everybody because I worked at more traditional media companies like The Information and Telegraph.

But we tapped into the idea that people follow people. They don’t follow media companies per se.

We started running pretty much all of our acquisition ads from writers’ personal Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts.

I don’t know if the platforms still allow you to do that. For a while, that basically reduced our CPLs by something like 80%.

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I don’t know either if the platforms still allow you to run ads like this. But the basic point stands:

It’s much easier and cheaper to get quality engagement if you sell yourself first, rather than if you sell a brand or a product first.

That’s not to say selling a brand or a product is not the right thing to do in certain situations.

​​But if you’re looking for organic growth, for cheaper paid growth, for easier sales, for an audience that will keep listening to you, even if you occasionally get lazy or falter in your message, then sell yourself first.

You might say it’s ironic I’m telling you to put yourself first in an email in which I say almost nothing about myself, share zero personal stories, and point to no status-building items from my own history.

Fair point. My only answer to that is what I already said above.

​​If you regularly put yourself first in your marketing — John Bejakovic daily newsletter, issue #1586 — then you can occasionally fail and it won’t matter. You can fail to tell people how great you are, and how important your message is, and that people should stay tuned because it’s only gonna to get better. And your audience will still read, listen, click, and maybe even sign up to your daily email newsletter.

Sexy firefighters running around for nobody’s entertainment

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It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.

I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.

​​They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.

Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.

And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.

I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.

You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

True, but:

The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.

When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.

​​The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. ​​Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.

​​Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.

And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.

Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:

Advertise your advertising.

But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”

I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:

The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.

If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. ​​In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.

Discipline in print

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Last night, I got a 4-word reply to my email about how quickly memory fails. A reader with a pseudonymous email address replied with just the following aimless question:

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John How r u?

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I got out my 3-ring binder of previous reader replies. I flipped through the pages in search of this reader’s email address. Sure enough, at the bottom of page 22, I found it. This reader had written me before. On January 24 of this year, in response to an email about teaching people to value your offer, this reader had written me to say:

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Who the fuck do you think you are?

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Now I remembered. I even wrote an email about that reply back in January.

Back then, I decided to keep this guy or gal on my list because 1) I don’t get many abusive replies from readers, and I’m more amused than bothered when it does happen and 2) I thought this reader might provide me fodder for an email in the future. That’s just what happened.

I proactively unsubscribed my “How r u” reader last night. Again, not because I was annoyed or bothered by the pointless reply.

“How r u” reader simply became a noble sacrifice to demonstrate an immensely important and fundamental point about all marketing, and in particular, about email marketing.

I honestly cannot overstate the importance of the following point. Even more so if you’re somebody like me — far from a born marketer, salesman, or promoter, and coming from a rather permissive and lax family background.

The point is this:

A key to all marketing, and perhaps the key to email marketing, is to train your audience.

Once upon a time, when I was very naive, I thought marketing was simply about getting the word out about what you have. “Whole frozen turkey, 16 lbs., $25.91. Walmart.”

Later, I figured out that marketing actually changes people — creates new desires, habits, beliefs. “Welcome to Marlboro country.”

But for some reason — again, I’m far from a born marketer or salesman – it took me a long, long while to connect the fact that 1) if you are creating marketing and 2) since marketing changes people then 3) you should consciously create marketing that changes people in a way that suits you.

This is what I mean when I say, train your audience. Tell ’em what to do. Reward those who do it. Punish those who don’t. And make an example of ’em.

100 years ago, John E. Kennedy said marketing is salesmanship in print.

Today, John E. Bejakovic is telling you, marketing is discipline in print.

Of course, maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you think I’m saying something offensive or crude or just wrong. In that case, I invite you to write in and tell me so. I promise to read what you write me, and to reply as politely and thoughtfully as I know how. Perhaps publicly.

In any case, let’s get on to the discipline:

For the past couple days, I’ve been talking about a group coaching program I’m planning for the future. The goal of this coaching program is to get people writing daily emails, regularly and well.

Right now, if you’re interested, you can get on the waiting list for that program. The waiting list is the only place I will make this program available.

And as I say on the optin page for the waiting list:

If you do sign up to the waiting list, you will get automated email from me with a few questions. Answering those questions will take all of two minutes, but it will give me valuable information to see whether this group coaching could actually be right for you. Please reply to that email within 24 hours with your answers. I will take anyone who doesn’t do this off the waiting list.

So far, a good number have signed up for the waiting list and have written me in reply to that automated email. I wrote back to each of them individually to say thanks.
​
​But a few people have signed up to the waiting list, and then failed to reply to the automated email within 24 hours.

Maybe they changed their minds about the coaching. Maybe they simply forgot. Maybe they were testing me.

Whatever the reason may be, I took them off the waiting list, and I prevented them from getting back on. They might be fine people, but they are clearly not good prospects for a strict coaching program, which is what I intend for this program to be.

If you’re interested in this coaching program, then the first step is to get on my email list. Click here to do so.

I bet you already knew what I’ll write about in this email

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Last night I went to see Air, the new Ben Affleck movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan.

Air is a typical rousing Hollywood stuff — a scrappy underdog does what it takes to win. It was fun to watch, but as the movie neared its emotional climax, I started to feel a kind of gnawing in my stomach.

I kept thinking, “This is it? This is what life is all about?”

A bunch of overworked, overweight, aging people in an office, hollering and high-fiving each other and gazing knowingly into each others’ eyes after their one triumph — getting a 21-year-old basketball player to agree to wear one kind of shoe instead of another kind of shoe?

But the movie is set in the 1980s. Maybe it reflects the corporate ideals of that era.

Anyways, let’s get back on track:

At the start of the movie, a convenience store clerk chats with the main character, played by Matt Damon. The clerk obviously knows a lot about basketball, and is sure Jordan won’t turn into anything big. The Matt Damon character is the only one who believes.

By the end of the movie, thanks to Matt Damon’s dogged believing, Nike signs Jordan in spite of impossible odds. Jordan immediately becomes a huge star. Nike goes on to sell a hundred million pairs of Air Jordans in the first year alone.

Matt Damon goes back to the convenience store and chats up the clerk again. The clerk nods his head. “I always knew Jordan would be a big thing,” he says.

“We all knew,” the Matt Damon character chuckles as he walks out the store.

As I’m sure you already knew, human memory is fallible. We forget, misremember, and flat-out make up stuff if it suits us and matches our sense of self.

You might think this only happens over the span of months or years, like it did with that convenience store clerk in Air.

But maybe you saw — and failed to remember — a new scientific study that went viral earlier this month. Scientists managed to show that people misremember stuff that happened as recently as half a second ago. And if the scientists stretched it out just a bit longer before asking — two seconds, three seconds — people’s memory became still worse and more inaccurate.

So my point for you, specifically for how you deal with yourself, is to write stuff down. Because you sure as hell won’t remember it.

And my point for you, specifically for how you deal with your prospects, is to keep reminding them, nudging them, and telling them the same thing you told them a million times before.

You rarely have people’s full attention. And even when you do have their full attention, they forget. Even if you just told them a second ago.

The only way your prospects are sure not to forget, and to maybe do what you want, is if you remind them today, tomorrow, the day after, and so on, hundreds of millions of Air Jordans into the future.

Which brings me to the group coaching I am planning. I first wrote about it yesterday. Now that I mention it, I’m sure you remember.

This planned group coaching is about email copywriting for daily emails — so you can remind your prospects of your offer over and over, in a way that they actually enjoy.

If you’re interested in this coaching, the first step is to get onto my email list. Click here to do that.