David Graeber – Desert Kite

I’m reading a book called On Kings. It is a book on… kings, specifically, why so many societies in so many periods in human history in so many places around the world have repeatedly and independently invented the institution of kingship.

Pretty soon into the book, there is the following passage about how new kings get established:

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On his way to the kingdom, the dynastic founder is notorious for exploits of incest, fratricide, patricide, or other crimes against kinship and common morality. He may also be famous for defeating natural or human foes. The hero manifests a nature above, beyond, and greater than the people he is destined to rule — hence the power to do so. However inhibited or sublimated in the established kingdom, the monstrous and violent nature of the king remains an essential condition of his sovereignty.

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Recently inside my Daily Email House group, a conversation started up about how to have charisma, how to have influence over an audience.

I claim that the highest level of influence over an audience is to be like a king — particularly, the kind of king described above, a king who wins his kingdom and doesn’t simply inherit it.

The same psychology applies to influence kings as it does to the traditional kings. Maybe you can think of people you yourself follow online who, instinctively or consciously, adapt some of the behaviors or real kings, as hinted at above:

* Breaking common rules or norms

* An eagerness for conflict

* Egomaniacal tendencies

* Cruelty

It’s undeniably effective stuff, but it’s also ugly. If this is not a path you want to go down, then I want to offer you another option.

This Tuesday, November 3, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I am putting on a presentation about email list monetization.

The presentation is built around the case study of a list owner I’ve recently helped to roughly 3x his average monthly earnings from his list.

One thing we repeatedly worked on was building up his status. There’s resistance to that in a lot of people, and there was in this dude as well.

And yet the status-building we did worked, made sales easier, helped him make more money, without making him into something monstrous and violent.

If you wanna know the steps we took, and how to have more influence over an audience, regardless of what you say or sell, then sign up for Tuesday’s training here:

https://bejakovic.com/monetization-case-study

Yesterday, King Charles III and Queen Consort Camila went for a drive to Bolton Town Hall in London. Birds chirped, armed guards looked on tensely, and crowds of well-wishers and paparazzi pushed around the fences, trying to catch a geek of the aged couple.

Nothing really remarkable there. It’s just another pebble in the mountain of news coverage about the British royal family over the past year.

The news coverage continues, because people look at the royals as a symbol of something ancient, enduring, quintessentially British.

That’s kind of amazing if you think about it.

Charles III is the fourth English monarch from the house of Windsor, which is only 105 years old. Before that, it was called the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in reference to its original German domains. The name was changed during World War I. The image of a bunch of goose-stepping Germans running the UK was too threatening.

How did the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha get to rule the UK? Well, they replaced another German house that ruled the UK, the House of Hanover.

The history of Europe, and really of the world, has seen this pattern over and over. Conquerors and adventurers, foreign princes and stranger kings, appear from somewhere far away and take control of a large and well-trained population.

I read about this in David Wengrow and David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything. The two D’s say the key is that a population has been well-trained and disciplined to obey rule. Who rules doesn’t matter very much at all.

You might be starting to feel a little uncomfortable, and worry that I’m about to preach anarchy, or talk about political revolution.

Quite the opposite. I’m preaching monarchy, and talking about long-term business stability.

Via your list. Specifically, via growing your list with the best prospects, the kind who will buy and read and do what you tell them to do.

I listened to a Dan Kennedy seminar yesterday. Dan said how his best customers were always the martial arts guys — because they had been trained and selected over years to be disciplined.

I remember when pick-up coach RSD Tyler did a list swap with the dreamy fitness coach Eliott Hulse. Eliott said how the buyers he got from the RSD list were fantastic customers, because Tyler’s whole message was self-improvement and taking responsibility and putting in the work.

I’ve even experienced this same phenomenon myself. Back in 2021, I did a list swap with Daniel Throssell. I couldn’t believe how many sales I got from new subscribers who came from Daniel’s list. And that’s with a hidden sales page I had at the time, and without pitching anything myself. It was simply because Daniel has trained and prepared his audience so well.

So there you go. If you want the best leads and future customers, do it the royal way.

Find a market — or an audience — that’s already been disciplined.

It sure beats the hard work of taking an unruly mass, devising new laws, and trying to beat those laws in over the course of generations.

Ok, so much for monarchy.

Now, let’s talk old-time religion. Specifically, my 10 Commandments book. To find out more about that, or maybe even to spend $5 and get some valuable discipline in return, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments