Donald Trump

The Trump-Fauci money mystery

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I read a fascinating story a few days ago about an interaction between Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci during Trump’s first administration.

It happened well into the covid era. The first vaccines were being released, and the country was ready to get back to business.

Fauci then made a public statement about the possible need for booster shots in order for the vaccines to be effective.

Here’s what happened next, in Fauci’s own words:

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The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him. He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only six hundred points in response to the positive phase 1 vaccine news and it should have gone up a thousand points and so I cost the country “one trillion fucking dollars.”

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Stories like this make my head spin. If Trump was right, and it’s very possible he was, then where did that “one trillion fucking dollars” go?

Had Fauci not said anything, would that trillion really be there in the world in any meaningful way?

How can a trillion dollars of actual “value” just appear and disappear, on command, with a few words by the right person in the right place at the right time?

I’ve long been fascinated by the topic of money. Not in the sense of getting my hands on as much of it as I can, but simply understanding what it is.

I have never found a good explanation. Whenever somebody gives me their own explanation, it always seems inadequate.

From what little I understand, money is so confusing because it’s a mix of different things. Hope about the future… willingness to cooperate… built-up knowledge… information about the physical world… information about personal values and preferences, as in, “Do you value this beautiful house? Or do you value the plot of land underneath it more, and you’d be willing to pay to have the house demolished?”

If you have a comprehensive theory of what money is, or a good analogy, or you can point me to some insightful book on the matter, I will be grateful to you.

Meanwhile, one thing is clear to me:

We live in a world of ideas and feelings, which have tremendous real-world influence, even when the physical reality remains almost entirely unchanged, as in the Trump-Fauci story above.

It might be worth thinking about, learning about, getting informed about how to influence those ideas and feelings, including for your own money-getting ambitions.

And on that note, I’d like to remind you I’m making one final, desperate, almost-certain-to-fail-but-possibly-will-succeed push to finish my new 10 Commandments book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

As the very long title suggests, this book will be about 10 techniques or “commandments” used by some of the most effective communicators and influencers in the world, across all history and space, both for good and evil, in their quest to change feelings, plant ideas, and motivate action.

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24.

Until then, I will be writing about this book and how it’s progressing, plus what I’m thinking about doing to make it a success when it comes out.

If you are interested in the topic of this book, and you’re thinking you might wanna get a copy when it comes out, click below. I’m planning some launch bonuses and I will be dripping them out early to people on this pre-launch list:

​Click here to get on the bonus-dripping pre-launch list for my new 10 Commandments book​

Trump whale research intelligence

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This past November, right after Trump won the election, the WSJ ran a story about a “Trump whale” — a mysterious trader, known only as Theo, who had made a series of very large bets on the Polymarket prediction market.

Theo had bet $30 million of his own money that 1) Trump would win the election, that 2) he would win the popular vote, and that 3) he would sweep the “blue wall” of swing states.

Against the predictions of all pollsters, and against even the betting odds on Polymarket, all three things came to pass, and Theo collected $50 million as a payday.

The WSJ managed to get in contact with Theo. He explained some of his reasoning for why he was confident enough to put down $30 million of his own money on bets against what both experts and the wisdom of the crowd were saying.

That’s how I learned the following:

The normal way to poll people is to ask them, “Who you gonna vote for?” That produces certain results, which as this past election and previous elections have shown, can be significantly off from reality.

But a less normal way to poll people is to ask them, “Who your neighbor gonna vote for?” For whatever psychological reason, this tends to produce poll results that are significantly different than the normal way to poll.

Theo looked at a couple of these “neighbor” polls done in September alongside normal polls. The neighbor polls were all suggesting that support for Trump was several percentage points higher than everybody was saying.

This became one of the data points that gave this guy the confidence to make his ballsy bets, and the info to bet right and win $50 mil.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

Reason one is if you’re trying to get info out of your readers, it might make sense not to ask them, “What do you want,” but to ask, “What do you think other people would want?” I tried it while initially working out the right pricing for Daily Email Habit, and it gave me useful info.

Reason two is simply that this neighbor polling thing is just another example of how much our own self-centered thinking tends to color how we see the world and how we behave.

I’m telling you this specifically in case you are ever plagued by thoughts like, “Nobody would want to read what I write,” or, “Nobody would want to pay money for this offer I have.”

The sticking point there is the old, I Me Mine.

If you find yourself ever thinking thoughts like — convincing yourself that you can predict what other people think, when it comes to what you are doing or could be doing — then take a lesson from the Trump whale:

The next time you are sure that you know what other people think, take yourself out of the equation. Ask yourself, “Would there be people who would want to read or buy this… if my neighbor were offering it?”

Do this, and you might win bigly.

And btw, today’s email was based on my daily puzzle that went out via Daily Email Habit. If you enjoyed today’s email, maybe you’d enjoy writing emails following daily email habit? Or maybe your neighbor would? Here’s more info in either case:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

D. Trump’s first pillar of persuasive power

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Twigger warning:

This post is about billionaire businessman, master persuader, and father of five D. Trump. Because while working on some secret stuff today, I had the feeling that Trump uses repetition as a persuasive tool.

But it was just a hunch. And then I found a transcript of the third presidential debate between Trump and H. Clinton. In the first few seconds, Trump said the following:

Something happened recently where Justice Ginsburg made some very, very inappropriate statements toward me and toward a tremendous number of people, many, many millions of people that I represent. And she was forced to apologize and apologize she did.

But these were statements that should never, ever have been made. We need a Supreme Court that in my opinion, is going to uphold the Second Amendment and all amendments, but the Second Amendment, which is under absolute siege.

I believe if my opponent should win this race, which I truly don’t think will happen, we will have a Second Amendment, which will be a very, very small replica of what it is right now. But I feel that it’s absolutely important that we uphold because of the fact that it is under such trauma.

By my count, this short snippet features:

– 6 instances of words repeated for effect

– 2 instances of phrases repeated for effect

– 4 instances of ideas repeated for effect

So I think my hunch about Trump and repetition was spot on.

(I only found out later that I was not the first to spot Trump’s use of repetition. Far from it. It turns out Scott Adams wrote about it in his book Win Bigly, all the way back in 2017. According to Adams, repetition is the key pillar of Trump’s persuasive power, along with simplicity and images.)

Now maybe you don’t like Trump. Even so, you might still be able to learn something from the man. Because you too can use repetition at different levels of your persuasive message. Words. Phrases. Ideas. Across space and time.

It’s worth trying. Because repetition creates belief… it increases desire… and it makes sure your message actually reaches your prospect.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote about it in another post a few months ago. But it’s a very valuable lesson… and worth repeating.

And here’s something I repeat at the end of each of my posts:

I have an email newsletter. It’s the best. Really. If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up here.

Agora finally gets into Internet marketing

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I remember back in 2006, when Amazon announced its new Amazon Web Services.

How clever, I thought. Like Donald Trump selling golden mailboxes at Trump Tower to entrepreneurs who want the ritzy mailing address.

After all, Amazon already had all of the computer boxes and wires and know-how for connecting them together. Other businesses didn’t have this — but wanted it. So Amazon could make a nice business by making its internal IT resources publicly available on a per-use basis.

And what a cash cow it turned out to be. AWS is now estimated to bring in $25B a year — more than McDonald’s — and is one of the main profit centers at the famously profit-free Amazon.

Now here’s a puzzle for the marketers out there:

What’s lying around your desktop (literal, computeral, or mental) which you could sell like Amazon sold AWS?

Don’t just shrug if off, but think for a minute.

Because even some of the most successful marketing businesses out there don’t collect this free money. Case in point:

Agora.

Agora is probably the biggest direct response company, with dozens of subsidiaries, and hundreds (thousands?) of offers, mostly financial newsletters.

You can bet that with all this experience selling high-margin info products online, the people at Agora know a thing or three about copywriting and Internet marketing.

And yet, in spite of its tremendous proof elements and branding, Agora doesn’t have any offers in the profitable and growing copywriting/IM niche.

Or at least… they didn’t.

Right now, Agora is spinning up a new division focused on Internet marketing.

I’m not sure what it’s called, but they have an email newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

On different days, you can read insights from Evaldo Albuquerque, one of the most successful copywriters at Agora Financial in the past few years…

…from Peter Coyne, also a successful copywriter and the youngest publisher inside Agora…

…and finally, from Rich Schefren, a big name in the IM space for the past decade or two.

I’ve been signed up to these emails for a few days. So far, it’s been like they say — IM secrets you can’t get nowhere else.

Except perhaps, in my own email newsletter. After all, my only fun in life is scouring the Internet for new marketing and persuasion ideas, and then giving them away in my daily newsletter. Usually packaged up in some kind of story.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, then you can try out my (FREE!) email newsletter here.

[3-Min DR News] The end of protein, $1M+ email drops, DJ Trump ad spend

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My local radio station has these short, punchy 3-minute news segments.

I like them. So I thought I would do something similar on occasion, but about direct response marketing. Here’s the first edition:

The end of protein?

I just listened to a new interview with Dr. Steven Gundry. Gundry is the face of Gundry MD, a Golden Hippo company. (Golden Hippo one of the biggest direct response health businesses.)

Anyways, Dr. Gundry says in the interview that you should limit your protein to 20 grams a day because that’s all we need and because “protein ages you.” So we’ve come full circle. First fat was bad and carbs were good… Then carbs were bad and protein was good… And now protein is bad and fat is good.

Will a low-protein longevity diet be the new fad for the 2020s, spawning hundreds of new direct response offers, like keto and paleo did before it? Here’s the Gundry interview if you wanna decide for yourself:

https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/508-dr-steven-gundry

A multi-million dollar email

Justin Goff’s “Wife saves husband — doctors stunned” email drop started running several years, or at least that’s when I first heard about it. In any case, it’s running still. I see it on average twice a month in Newsmax alone. In fact, it ran again today.

Who knows how many millions of dollars worth of business this single piece of copy has brought in? Here’s a version from Glenn Beck’s list is in case you wanna read and study:

https://newslettercollector.com/newsletter/wife-saves-husband-doctors-stunned-by-military-fountain-of-youth-drink(2)/

DJ Trump in 3rd place with ad spend

I wanted to see which advertisers are spending the most on FB ads. Foolish, it turns out. There’s no way FB is sharing that data. But, thanks to Trump and Cambridge Analytica, FB is sharing very clear data about which political campaigns are spending how much.

Looking over the past 30 days, the top spender, at around $4.3 million, is one Tom Steyer, a billionaire Dem candidate for president I had never even heard of. No. 2 is Mike Bloomberg who entered the race only two weeks ago, but already spent $1.5 million. In 3rd place, we have DJ Trump, with around $1.4 mil in ad spend.

If you wanna see the full list, which links to the ads for all the candidates, and also includes other high-integrity advertisers such as Goldman Sachs and Planned Parenthood, here’s where to go:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/

Got a hot tip?

3-Min DR News wants to hear from you. You can submit your industry news or gossip, on the record or off, by clicking here and writing our editorial team (of one) an email.

Ape outperforms Trump?

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There was a gorilla video that went viral a few days ago.

It shows (wait for it…) a gorilla, sitting on its haunches, on a lawn in a zoo.

Then somebody offers to throw the gorilla some food.

To which the gorilla, by using a combination of sign language, nipple pinches, and chest pounding, effectively says,

“No thank you, we zoo gorillas are fed well by our keepers and don’t accept food from visitors.”

Smart ape.

And that’s why the internet went all warm and bubbly, saying things like,

“This gorilla has more impulse control than I do,”

and

“This gorilla has more impulse control than our president.”

But here’s the thing.

This viral video didn’t tell the whole story.

In the full version of the video, the visitor waits a few seconds and then throws the food to the gorilla after all.

The gorilla turns around to see if the keepers are looking, and seeing there’s nobody there, he sneakily eats the food, while staring directly at the visitor as if to say, “This stays between you and me, man.”

I bring this up for two reasons.

First, I want to bring gorillas down from their holier-than-thou pedestal. They lie and cheat when given the opportunity, just like other apes, including you and me.

The other reason is to point out the power of the story-within-the-story.

There are lots of professional tricks to telling a story in an engaging way.

But the easiest, and possibly most effective, is simply to crop your stories to make them more dramatic, impactful, and interesting.

That’s what happened in this case.

A gorilla that eats food thrown at it doesn’t make for much of a story.

But a gorilla with more self-discipline than your average human makes for good news.

So if you sense there’s a good story hiding in an anecdote you witnessed or in something you read, first ask yourself, “How could I cut this down for maximum effect?”

Because most of the details of the real event don’t need to be included — and can even weaken your case.

Anyways, if you need help writing stories, specifically for the purpose of making sales to your existing or potential customers, then you can find some ape-sized advice in the following little offer:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

Proof that Donald Trump is actually smart

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Dan Kennedy once told a revealing story about Donald Trump:

Some years earlier, Dan was giving a talk at some kind of event. After his talk, he ran into Trump back stage.

​​”What are you reading these days?” asked The Donald.

Dan listed one book.

The Donald nodded.

Dan listed another.

The Donald nodded again.

Dan listed a third.

The Donald turned to his hanger-on and said, “Get me that, I haven’t read it yet.”

​​I don’t know about you, but to me this doesn’t sound like the dolt that the media likes to portray.

Anyways, in spite of the pulling power of Donald Trump, I actually want to talk about Dan Kennedy tonight. In case you haven’t heard, the man is either dead, or very close to dead.

Now, I’m not sentimental about death in the least. But a few things are undeniable:

1) Dan Kennedy was a big name in the direct marketing space, and a big influence on many.

2) He had tons of interesting and entertaining stories, like the one above.

3) He was smart, and he was successful.

So even though I’m not personally saddened by Dan Kennedy’s death, I do respect what the guy did and how he did it.

And so, today I’d like to point you to a Dan Kennedy talk that I go back to regularly, because it’s got so much marketing value.

This talk was the keynote speech to Brian Kurtz’s “Titans of Direct Response” event, which sold for $2k while it was still available.

Brian made this presentation of Dan’s available for free online for some reason.

And if you’re interested in learning more about direct marketing and copywriting, from a guy who clearly knew what he was doing, then I think this video is worth a look. Or two. Or ten.

(Plus, it’s where Dan actually tells the Trump story above.)

In case you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://vimeo.com/user41807591/review/132998983/eacabe46f6

Donald Trump and the facts about B.A.R.F.

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My adopted home town, Baltimore, is in the news today because Donald Trump called it a “rodent infested mess.”

A bunch of Trump haters took to Twitter to complain and call Trump a racist.

But you know what?

I lived in Baltimore for many years, and I remember an organization there called B.A.R.F. Here are a few facts about it:

It stands for Baltimore Area Rat Fishermen, and it was established around 1992.

Basically, these guys go into urine-soaked alleyways at night, bait a fishing hook (more on this in a second), and actually go fishing for rats. Once they catch a rat, they reel it in and club it to death with bats.

There have been yearly contests of rat fishing, with the prize going to the biggest catch (1 pound, 7 1/2 ounces).

Now, about the bait.

You might think it’s cheese.

You might think it’s meat.

You might even try to lure a rat with something sweet, like a donut.

But that’s now how expert B.A.R.F members operate, because they know what Baltimore rodents love.

So they bait their hooks with a mixture of peanut butter and glue.

And in case you’re wondering where I’m going with all this, it’s simply to bring up the age-old metaphor comparing (rat) fishing and marketing.

Whether you’re going rat or customer fishing, you have to have the right bait. And if you want a simple process for coming up with bait that’s attracted many customers for businesses I’ve worked with, check out the following:

How to write for political causes you don’t believe in

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A soul-searching question popped up on Reddit a few days ago:

“Would you write copy for a political cause you don’t believe in?”

To which I replied — I already have.

And I enjoyed it.

The story is that back in 2015, when the election was ramping up, I was hired to write some fundraising copy for an organization backing Bernie Sanders.

That went well, and so I got hired for a second job, writing fundraising copy for organization backing Trump.

And then Hillary.

And even Lyin’ Ted Cruz.

Altogether, I wrote about two dozen landing pages tying into current news, prophesying how the country is going to hell if the other guy gets elected, and soliciting donations.

Now, as you can imagine, I cannot align politically with both Bernie and Donnie, both Hillary and Ted.

In fact, I don’t really align with any of them.

And maybe that’s why it wasn’t any kind of issue for me to treat this as a simple sales copywriting job. After all, I often have to promote products that I’m not the target market for. It’s not hard to do, as long as you do a lot of research about the target market, and you figure out what moves them.

However, in the future, I would NOT write for the same political organizations that hired me back in 2015 and 2016. But that’s another topic for another time.

On the other hand, if I did get a direct call from Trump Tower — or from the deep woods of Vermont — offering me a retainer to write fundraising copy for the next election…

Well, I’d consider it.

Until that call comes, I’ll keep working on more traditional sales copy. Such as sales emails, promoting nutritional supplements and online health courses.

And if you want to read some of the lessons I’ve learned by working on such capitalist endeavors, you can find them in the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How Trump outsmarted Mueller

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During the last election, I spent a lot of time reading Scott Adams’s blog.

Adams was one of the few people to bet on Trump very early. And as Trump kept winning, first the primaries, then the election itself, Adams often talked about “cognitive dissonance” — that disorienting feeling when external evidence contradicts our mental models of how the world works.

Well, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance floating around the Internet today, following the release of the Mueller findings over the weekend.

People simply cannot figure out what went wrong, and how it is that Trump isn’t already under indictment or even in jail.

Well, I’ll tell you how.

It’s because Trump outsmarted Mueller. He was ahead of Mueller every step of the way. He had the Democrats by the nose and Mueller looking in all the wrong places.

And you know how Trump outsmarted them all?

It’s straight out of Limitless. He used a new smart drug called Reviva (which he also used during the election). According to Trump, “Your brain deteriorates as you get older, this pill keeps my brain young & sharper than ever.”

Ok, it’s time to take a moment to breathe.

None of the story above is true — well, except for the cognitive dissonance surrounding the Mueller findings.

The rest of it — the bit about Trump gobbling down a designer smart pill — is something I’ve just read in a very successful, currently running advertorial.

And here’s why I bring it up.

An ad like this could never run on TV.

These days, it also cannot run on Facebook or Google.

And yet I’ve seen this same ad a half dozen times over the past few weeks.

No FTC injunction. No White House cease-and-desist order. Nobody to stop whoever is running these ads from making mountains of golden, shiny shekels. How is this possible?

It’s simple:

​​Email drops.

In other words, paying for placement in an email newsletter (in this case, Newsmax).

Email drops still seem to be a kind of Wild West of advertising. They make it possible to reach large numbers of people, often using the kind of copy you want (instead of what Facebook wants). And that’s why they can be a great option for advertisers who are looking for new (or alternate) sources of traffic.

Of course, you don’t have to use email drops to sell shit products.

And you don’t have to tell lies to sell whatever it is you are selling.

You can also use email drops to successfully sell decent products with more-or-less ethical marketing. And if this is something you’re interested in, you might find valuable ideas in my upcoming book:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/