David Bowie

My highlights and lowlights of the past twelve months

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2022 has been a year of changes and upheavals for me.

I’ve lived in three countries this year, and moved around 8 apartments.

Back in February, I hit my lowest point in possibly the last two decades, or maybe longer. And yet, 2022 as a whole has been an unequivocal improvement over 2021.

I worked with more zeal this year than ever before in my life. But the most satisfaction I’ve gotten this year is by repeatedly asking myself, “What if I never achieve anything more, what if I never succeed in changing my life in any substantive way?”

Back in January, I jokingly self-diagnosed myself as having a “temporal lobe personality,” after reading the book Phantoms in the Brain.

A few days after that, I discovered I can manifest a stolen license plate simply by the use of imagination.

I’ve settled more or less permanently in Barcelona. I went back to school to study Spanish. I’ve even furnished my beautiful new apartment with some forks and spoons so I don’t have to eat canned sardines with my fingers.

Maybe you’re wondering what I’m on about. The fact is, I’ve written emails over the past 12 months about most of this stuff.

I’ve lived a strange, irregular, and changeable life over the past 12 months, and really, for much longer than that. This daily email practice has been one of the few constants. And a positive one.

Almost exactly a year ago, pickup coach Tom Torero committed suicide. Tom used to say that picking up girls is therapy. Not because you get a momentary boost of validation when sleeping with a new girl. But rather because getting to that point forces you to face all kinds of things you have going on inside of yourself, and address them.

I feel the same about writing a daily email newsletter. It’s a kind of therapy journal, though I’ve worked to make it interesting and valuable for you as well.

So since you are reading, let me say thanks. Let’s see where I am in a year from now, and where you might be, and what I can show you in the meantime to make it worth your while. In the words of David Bowie, which are really the watchword for this entire project:

“The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

In case you want to read my emails regularly, maybe even for the whole of the next year, here’s how to get on my daily email list.

The fascist cokehead who raised me

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How foolishly inconsistent of me.

On April 7 of this year, I wrote an email promoting the idea that you should give your prospects a menu of options. I quoted from Jonah Berger’s book The Catalyst:

But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.

Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.

Reasonable, right?

Except, only a short while earlier, on February 28, I sent out an email with the exact opposite message. The subject line for that was “The best copywriting tactic ever.” It was inspired by an article I’d read in Scientific American by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. The email concluded:

The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.

So one email is basically telling you to give your prospects a choice… the other email is telling you to give them no choice.

How to reconcile these two ideas?

I don’t know. Maybe you can do it. I haven’t tried. And I won’t, because I’ve got better things to do. Like preparing for the second call of my Influential Emails training.

The first call was all about writing and persuasion techniques that I use regularly — and that anybody else can use and profit from as well.

But this second call is more personal. It will include some of my own writing and thinking quirks.

Such as for example, the contradiction in my two emails above. The reason I’m ok with this contradiction is because of a third email I wrote.

That third email was about David Bowie and an infuriatingly inconsistent interview he gave to Playboy magazine in 1976. (1976 was the height of Bowie’s cokehead era. A big brouhaha emerged after the interview because Bowie said during it, “I believe very strongly in fascism.”)

This Bowie email is the most influential thing I’ve ever written.

Not because it got me any sales… or any interest from important people in the industry… or even any engagement from readers on my list. In fact, as far as I remember, nobody even commented on this email.

But the ideas in that email had the biggest influence on how I personally write. And not just emails, but influential writing more broadly.

You might think I’m just advocating being provocative in your thinking and writing. It goes deeper than that, at least in my mind.

In any case, if you want to read that short email about David Bowie, so you can see if it will have any influence on you, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/being-authentic-is-overrated/

The end of Stansberry?

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Last week, a reader of my email newsletter who works for an Agora affiliate clued me into the following fact:

Stansberry Research is going public.

Stansberry, as you probably know, is one of the biggest imprints that came out of Agora. They had the End of America promo. This was one of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars through a single VSL.

When I heard that Stansberry is going public, my first thought was to David Bowie.

Back in 1997, Bowie released 10-year bonds backed by the future royalties of his album sales.

​​Bowie bonds put $55 million into David Bowie’s pocket, and were given a respectable A3 rating.

​​But within a couple of years, digital file sharing caused the whole music album market to implode. Bowie bonds were downgraded to Baa3, one notch above junk bond status.

Maybe David Bowie, with his artist’s intuition, sensed it coming, and made a smart cash grab just in time?

And maybe Porter Stansberry, using his entrepreneur’s intuition, senses something similar in the current moment?

The Agora copywriter who told me about this assured me I’m imagining things. “It’s probably Stansberry himself wants to be a billionaire. He must be pretty close now.”

A Barrons article that reported on this quoted the CEO of the company that’s taking Stansberry public through a merger. That guy’s reasoning:

“We were looking for a company in the attention economy with scalable, digitally delivered IP. As people say, ‘content is king.’ But it’s rare that you find a company that’s as prolific at creating new IP… They’re like the Netflix of financial content.”

So rather than this being a Bowie moment, maybe it’s a Netflix moment?

​​A moment in which a somewhat limited, niche company uses its own existing assets and a bunch of cash to become a mainstream powerhouse?

Or maybe it’s a sign of things to come — Stansberry & chill?

Maybe. I’m not convinced. But I am curious. So if like me, you dip your toes in the direct response pond, it might be worth keeping an eye on the the ripples from this isolated pebble drop.

Or do you want me to keep an eye out for you? If so, then sign up for my email newsletter, because that’s where all my writing shows up first.

Being authentic is overrated

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In 1976, David Bowie got accused of supporting fascism. How could anybody say that of Bowie?

After all, a few years earlier, Bowie claimed he was gay. Then he was an alien. Then he became one of the few white singers to perform on Soul Train.

This certainly doesn’t sound like your typical fascist. Why would anybody think different? Well, there is the following quote:

“I believe very strongly in fascism,” Bowie said in a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. “Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.”

People are always telling you, be authentic, be authentic. That’s how you will connect to others. Share your geeky stories. Be vulnerable. Be true to yourself.

And yet there’s David Bowie, who became a huge star by striving to be plastic, artificial, and impossible to pin down. He made up stuff and he lied for his own amusement and profit. He provoked and played the media. Bowie again:

“The only thing that shocks now is an extreme. Like me running my mouth off, jacking myself off. Unless you do that, nobody will pay attention to you. Not for long. You have to hit them on the head.”

And it’s not just Bowie or his rock star spawn like Madonna and Lady Gaga who get away with this. Look at the world of online marketing.

​​Ben Settle has admitted he consciously plays up his crotchety persona online. ​​Matt Stone has an oversexed alter ego he writes under, named Buck Flogging. The greatest copywriter of all time, Ross Manly, is not even a real person.

Fact is, authenticity is overrated. It’s much better to be entertaining, or at least interesting. If you are boring or unpleasant by nature, there’s no need to push that pollution out into the world.

​​Rather than being consistent with your “authentic self,” assume a new, more exciting viewpoint and unflinchingly defend it — for as long as you find it amusing or valuable to do so. ​​As Bowie put it:

“The only way I can be effective as a person is to be this confoundedly arrogant and forthright with my point of view. […] Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

Email newsletter. I have one. Every day I write an email and share ideas that are not consistent with each other. But you might find it interesting anyhow. It’s available here.