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How to predict the future without being smart or highly educated

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I’m spending this weekend in the mountains, in a pretty ski village which is mostly dead because the ski season hasn’t started yet.

Along with me in the house are three smart, highly educated, grown-ass women who spent a fair part of the weekend discussing and also watching a Netflix show called Dynasty.

Now I’m old enough to remember that Dynasty was a 1980s soap opera.

The Netflix version is a remake from 5 years ago. It’s glossy, cheesy, and oversexed. Here’s a bit of dialogue from the season 1 trailer, when a brawny black chauffeur picks up a white bombshell socialite from her private jet:

BBC: How was Denver?
WBS: I miss the heat.
BBC: Trust me, it wasn’t as hot without you here. Straight to the manor?
WBS: [smirks] I’m open to a detour.

Like I said, the women I’m with this weekend find no shame in watching TV shows like this.

That’s a change.

As James Altucher pointed out on a recent episode of his podcast, there was a time, not long after that initial Dynasty came out, when watching TV was considered shameful among smart, highly-educated, grown-ass people. Some quotes from that not-so-distant past:

“My kids will never watch TV”

“TV rots your brain and destroys your community”

“We would all be better off if television got worse, not better.”

But that’s all gone now. Among the people I know, there are few who don’t spend a good part of the week watching some TV — and feeling no shame about it. I bet it’s similar with the people around you.

Which begs the question, which things that we are so scared and horrified of today will make a shame-free comeback in a few years’ time?

James Altucher thinks it might be social media. Maybe we will still be heavily using social media in 20 years’ time, in spite of all the current hand-wringing about the IQ loss and attention-fracking and shallowness that Instagram and TikTok cause.

Whatever. James Altucher is a smart and highly educated guy, and his predictions are based on a lot of thinking and research. Too complicated.

Here’s a simpler, more general way to predict the future:

Don’t count on moral outrage or good intentions to create change. Only new technology — considered broadly — will change people’s behavior.

And speaking of new technology:

Have you heard of email? I’ve only recently found out about it and I’m very excited by the possibilities. So much so that I’ve started writing a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and influence. A few thousand people have signed up to get daily emails from me and they seem to be enjoying it very much. In case you’d like to join them, click here and follow the very non-technical instructions.

My magic mushroom-like technique for producing new, different, and very very sexy mechanisms

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Long-time readers of this newsletter might remember that once upon a time, I ran a biweekly segment I called “3-minute direct response news.”

It was my first, but certainly not my last, attempt at launching something like The Morning Brew.

Anyways, in the Jan 2020 issue of “3-min DR news,” I wrote a little feature with the headline:

“The new CBD!”

In that segment, I predicted the explosion of businesses pushing psychedelics. I also suggested that DR marketers might want to get in on this.

I don’t know how far the DR world has picked up on psychedelics. But in the universe as a whole, there is now a lot of hype around psychedelics. So much so that…

Dr Rosalind Watts, a researcher who helped start this craze, recently wrote it’s time to put the brakes on psychedelics enthusiasm. As Watts wrote:

“I can’t help but feel as if I unknowingly contributed to a simplistic and potentially dangerous narrative around psychedelics; a narrative I’m trying to correct. […] If I could go back in time, I would not now be so foolish as to suggest that a synthesised capsule, by itself, can unlock depression.”

An article I read yesterday compared the hype around psychedelics to that around virtual reality or 4D printing.

But you could also compare psychedelics (like I already did) to CBD, or to mindfulness, or to stoicism.

​​All are some external thing — a pill or a process or a set of rules outside of yourself — that promises to finally solve that aching, long-running, intractable problem you have.

DR marketers have a name for this kind of external thing:

Mechanism.

A mechanism is what allows the same old promise — lose weight, get rich quick, be happy — to be made year after year, and to still be believable. Hope is eternal.

Of course, not all mechanisms are created equal. In order to do its job, a mechanism should be new, different, and ideally, very very sexy. Kind of like magic mushrooms.

Which brings me to my offer for today:

“A secret (and slightly sneaky) copywriting trick for producing magic mechanisms”

That’s a long-form, article-style, optin page I wrote up for my Copy Riddles program.

A warning in case you are getting excited:

You cannot join Copy Riddles now. Though you might be able to do it in the future.

For now, if you are curious about a technique for producing new, different, and very, very sexy mechanisms, then put your sunglasses on, mix up a jug of Kool Aid, and jump aboard the bus right here:

https://copyriddles.com/

How I increased my explosion rate +infinity% with the “Censorship Catalyst”

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Over the past two days, I got on my white lab coat, protective goggles, and elbow-high rubber gloves and ran a little experiment.

I wanted to see which mix of persuasive elements could create the most explosive reaction.

Except, I really have no scientific training. And so my experiment was poorly designed and very possibly dangerous. It went like this:

I sent out two emails with a link promoting the same book on Amazon.

But the link was not an affiliate link, so sales were not tracked.

To make things worse, the emails went out on two consecutive days, to my entire list, instead of at the same time, to different segments of my list.

​​Maybe the first day’s emails would eat up all the easy sales. Or maybe the second day’s emails would seem to sell all the people who were won over by the first email, but just didn’t buy immediately.

But let’s ignore all that for just a sec. And let me tell you my dramatic results.

Again, while I don’t have actual sales numbers for these emails, I do have personal replies people sent me. Among the replies to the first email, only one referenced the book I was promoting:

“I definitely didn’t buy it and I’m not excited to read it at all”

In case you missed it, the key words seem to be, “I definitely didn’t buy it.” For whatever reason, there seemed to be zero explosive reaction to my first email.

“What could be missing?” I asked myself as I paced up and down my lab late into the night.

Fortunately, just as I was about to give up and admit defeat, my lab mouse, Gulliver, who is allowed to run free around the lab after 9pm, knocked a book off the lab’s three-foot “Persuasive Classics” bookshelf.

The book fell off the shelf, hit me on the head, and landed right at my feet. I picked it up. It was opened to just the following passage:

“This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people — authors of daily email newsletters for example — the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize their censorship.”

I stared at the page for a few moments. “Too bad,” I said. “I had hoped I would at least get a good idea when this book hit me on the head. But I got nothing. Maybe next time.”

Suddenly I heard Gulliver squeaking up on the shelf. He was gesticulating wildly and trying to tell me something in his mouse-like way.

A light bulb went off in my head. I knew what was missing!

I ran to my work desk, and furiously wrote up a second email, featuring the missing catalyst – the fact that the book I was promoting was restricted from the Amazon affiliate program.

Result?

A +infinity% increase in explosive power! ​​That is to say, I got three (3) people writing in to tell me they bought the book.

​​Look, I know three is not a lot. But who knows how many bought the book and didn’t write in to tell me so? Probably millions. In any case 3/0 is still technically infinity, and infinity sounds way better than saying I made three sales.

But maybe you dismiss these findings, or the validity of my experiment.

If so, that’s your loss.

Because there are other hungry marketers on my list who will take this info and use it to create sales explosions.

Many of them probably have that same classic of persuasion sitting up on their bookshelves. And they can just open it up to chapter 7 to find out the specific conditions in which the above persuasive catalyst works best, and which extra catalysts make it even more powerful.

And others hungry marketers on my list, who don’t have this book yet, will be sure to click below and get a copy of their own.

As for you you? Well, if you don’t click on the link below, then write in and let me know what you decide to do.

https://bejakovic.com/censorship

Copy Stalker guidance to the A-list Room

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The camera starts at the face of a sleeping man. It then pans over his forehead, across his bald head, to the stream next to which the man is lying.

The camera keeps panning over the water. It pauses for a second on a clod of dirt that sticks out of the stream.

The camera moves on to more flowing water and in the water, it focuses on some trash:

A large metal syringe… a box with coins in it… a Russian Orthodox icon… gears from a clock, covered with moss… a long black spring… a page of a calendar… a gun… ceramic tiles, covered with floating layers of dirt and algae.

The camera completes its trip and ends up where it started, on the sleeping man’s hand, halfway in the flowing water. A black dog, which has been sitting and guarding the man, stands up. The man opens his eyes.

That’s part of a long, dialogue-free scene from the movie Stalker.

The stalker in the title of the movie is a guide.

For a bit of money, he will take you inside the Zone — a mysterious and magical place, with its own strange and even deadly rules.

But why go inside the Zone?

Well, somewhere inside the Zone there is The Room. And if you can survive the Zone and make it inside the Room, it is said you will be granted your innermost wish.

Stalker is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it a grand total of two times. But I’m not here to recommend you see it even once.

Statistically speaking, odds are great you would hate it.

Stalker is dark, depressing, and slow. It’s a scifi movie without costumes, without cool sets, without special effects — unless you count the black dog. There’s no action and little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is philosophical rather than sexy.

So what’s up? If I’m not recommending Stalker to you, then why talk about it? For two reasons:

Reason one is that the Zone in Stalker is why I’m calling my new offer Copy Zone.

Copy Zone will be my travel guide to the magical, mysterious, and sometimes dangerous world of freelance copywritering.

I’ve been walking in and out of the Copy Zone for a few years. I know it well and I’ve already led a few people inside.

​​If you like, then my guide will show you the rules and signposts to go inside Copy Zone safely — and even to reach the fabled A-List Room, if that’s really what your innermost heart desires.

The other reason I’m telling you about Stalker is that yesterday, I promised to talk about pop culture that your audience isn’t familiar with.

And if you’re still reading, you can take a look at what I did in this email, and how I turned a 1979 Soviet sci-fi film into marketing.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. One is from Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of Stalker. When he was told that Stalker is too slow for human consumption, Tarkovsky replied:

“The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.”

The other quote is maybe more practical. It comes from comedian Andrew Schulz. Schulz has this simple rule about talking about topics that his audience can’t relate to:

“Who cares if they relate to it? Make them relate to it.”

Last thing:

If you’d like to be notified when my Copy Zone guide becomes available, sign up here for my email newsletter.