Gene Schwartz

My so-called life as a 32-year-old Brazilian female fitness model

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Hiii RadGirl!! Yesss, my subject line today is a take on Carline Anglade Cole’s My Life as a 50+ Year-Old White Male ❤️❤️ Carline is SUCH an amazing and inspiring copywriter and—

Gollum! Gollum!

Ah, that’s better. Now that I’ve cleared my throat and got my own voice back, I can tell you the story behind today’s subject line.

A few years ago, through a series of word-of-mouth recommendations, I got a chance to work with Marina.

Marina is Brazilian. She’s a former top-level athlete turned personal trainer and fitness model. She also sells workout and diet programs for busy and stressed moms.

Marina wanted to send conversational emails to her list. But she didn’t want to write the emails herself.

So she and her husband (a well–known direct marketer) made me an offer. A flat monthly fee + a cut of whatever money we made through the emails I’d be writing. But it was important that the emails really sound like her.

“Sure!” I said. “Love to do it! It’ll be a challenge! But a good copywriter can write in anybody’s voice!”

I knew just what to do.

I got on multiple calls with Marina. I wrote down her fitness and health philosophy. I listened to her funny personal stories. I asked about the restaurants she’s been eating in… the TV shows she’s been watching… the thoughts that pop up in her head when the lights go out.

I also started stalking her online. I analyzed each of her Instagram posts for word choice, punctuation, emotional tenor. I made a “Marina vocabulary” file.

And then I got to work. I told my stories of how I used to hate my crazy curly hair in high school… how I struggled to accept cellulite on my thighs, even though it’s a perfectly natural part of being a woman…

I agonized whether to include one exclamation point (important!) two exclamation points (mind-blowing!!!) or three excla—

“Yeah, I get it.” I hear you say. “You worked hard to mimic her voice. What’s the point you’re getting at?”

I see you’re impatient today. Fine. I’ll hurry it up.

The emails I wrote for Marina made some sales. But I hated the process.

It took an enormous amount of time to juke the emails so they would read passably like her.

And even so, what I wrote never really sounded like Marina. It was obvious to me, and I assume obvious to anybody who actually knew her.

No, we never got any complaints from readers (“WTF, this sounds fake”).

And it was impossible to tell how the sales were affected (“This email Marina doesn’t sound like the Instagram Marina I know…. better hold off on buying till I get this sorted”).

But a couple months into this experience… when I realized this wasn’t going to be a giant money maker for either her or me… I wrote to Marina, said thanks for the opportunity, but it’s time for me to move on. And I did, to the real estate investing space, a market where I had more natural fit.

So the point you were asking about:

Lots of new copywriters claim they can write in anybody’s voice. “Love to do it! It’ll be a challenge! But I can mimic anybody with my secret research processss!!!”

And maybe you can.

​​I cannot. Not if it’s a real, live, sentient human being I’m supposed to mimic. Not if the lexical similarity needs to be greater than 60%. Not if I don’t plan to spend months or maybe years growing into the role.

This is part of a bigger issue in copywriting.

I remember hearing in the “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course on Marketing” that Gene Schwartz — yeah, one of the greatest copywriters of all time — couldn’t write winning copy outside his specialized field.

I don’t remember the exact details. But the person who said it was somebody in the know (maybe somebody who had worked with Gene).

​​And this person said that when Gene was taken out of his “Lethal Weapon,” “Rub your belly away” ads and sales letters, his copy didn’t pull. In spite of the meticulous research he did.

Same story with Clayton Makepeace. Another giant. Clayton made crazy sales in health and financial. But I heard Rich Schefren say on a Facebook live that when Clayton wrote some stuff for Rich in the IM space, it also didn’t pull. In spite of Clayton being a natural.

I’m not 100% sure what my takeaway for you is. If you’re a copywriter, I’m certainly not telling you to skip research. I’m also not telling you to refuse jobs just because the client’s voice is not “you.”

But perhaps, this is just argument #4338, not only for specializing with your copy… but for specializing with a few clients — or maybe even hunkering down with one client only.

And if you’re not a copywriter, but a business owner who’s been writing his or her (Heyyy RadGirl) own copy…

Then everything I just said is an argument against casually outsourcing your own voice to a copywriter. Regardless of how much they assure you they will sound like you. It’s not impossible. But it is likely to take time. You might decide it’s better to do keep this sensitive and valuable part of your business to yourself.

Which brings me to my upcoming Influential Emails training. Here’s a reason NOT to sign up:

Influential Emails is not about tips and tricks to jazz up a one-off email or a sequence for a client you will never work with again. Yes, I’ll reveal some high-level stuff. And yes, you can use this to improve storytelling or get more readers sucked in, regardless of what you write.

But Influential Emails is really about the long game. About influencing and building a relationship with an audience. About getting them to look at you (or your email alter-ego) as a leader.

That’s why Influential Emails only makes sense if you are writing to promote yourself… or your own business or brand… or if you are working with a long-term client.

​​In other words, if makes sense if it pays you to invest time and effort to create long-term, powerful influence, instead of just one-time sales.

In any case, the deadline to sign up for Influential Emails is tomorrow.

I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU TO JOIN and find out all my amazing secrets! 🙏🏼🙌🏼💞. YOU ARE WORTH IT!

Seriously now. Here’s the link:
​
https://influentialemails.com

The real heroes are dead

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“As a soldier, Rick Rescorla served in Vietnam, where he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and also a Purple Heart. When he returned home, Rescorla landed a job as Head of Security for Morgan Stanley. And as you’ll soon see, in many ways, he was the best investment Morgan Stanley ever made.”

I’ve gotten interested in writing financial copy. So as the first step, I started watching financial promos while I eat lunch.

I got going yesterday, with a Stansberry VSL. The hook is the story of a U.S. Army vet named Rick Rescorla… who, the VSL tells you, could end up having an “enormous impact on you, your family, your money, your savings and investments.” And then it leads to the bit about Morgan Stanley and its best investment ever.

“This story sounds familiar,” I said.

“An Army vet… going to work on Wall Street… as Head of Security… where did I read this before?”

I typed a few words into Google. And yep, there it was. First result.

For many decades, the recommended bathroom reading material for copywriters was The National Enquirer. At least so claimed Gene Schwartz, who said:

“That’s why I say that the required medium for you is all the junk magazines in the United States. I would go out tomorrow and get a subscription to The National Enquirer and read every single word in it. That’s your audience. There are your headlines. There are your people and their feelings.”

But the Rick Rescorla story didn’t come from the National Enquirer. So I’d like to give you a different magazine recommendation as new required reading.

I’m talking about The New Yorker.

It’s a snob magazine. If you’re writing sales copy, it’s unlikely to reflect your audience or their feelings.

And yet I recommend it.

Because the New Yorker and its writers manage to dig up obscure stories… find the fascinating implications… and create drama through substance rather than form.

Stansberry’s Rick Rescorla hook came from The New Yorker.

And it’s not the only one.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you know I’ve written about Dan Ferrari’s Genesis sales letter. It tripled response over the control and sold out the entire stock of Green Valley’s telomere supplement.

Dan’s sales letter kicked off with a snapshot. A secret meeting of Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley millionaires… gathered in a Malibu Beach cliffside mansion… to listen to a Nobel-winning scientist reveal her breakthrough research on doing away with death and old age.

That story was true. And it also came from The New Yorker.

“All right Bejako,” I hear you saying. “You almost have me convinced. Two examples is good. But where’s your third example? Don’t know you all copywriting proof comes in threes?”

You got me. I only have the two examples above to give you.

If that’s enough of a pattern for you to work with, then start scanning The New Yorker and checking if some of their stories could be used for your hooks.

And maybe you will be my third example one day… or maybe I will be, because it’s what I’ll start doing.

In any case, if you’d like to read why Rick Rescorla was the best investment Morgan Stanley ever made, follow the link below.

But before you go, consider signing up for my email newsletter, which serves you up with a daily idea or recommendation for improving your marketing or copywriting.

And now, here’s the tight, fascinating, and moving New Yorker article about Rick Rescorla:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/11/the-real-heroes-are-dead

Makepeace, Schwartz, and Dan Kennedy all agree there’s something magic about the number—

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“A piece of alien technology that arrived from the future.”

That’s how one top-level marketer described a sales letter that A-list copywriter Clayton Makepeace wrote back in 2005. Clayton’s sales letter started out with the headline:

“The 23-Cent Life-Saver Heart Surgeons Never Tell You About!”

Beneath that, Clayton had three bullet points:

* So safe, it’s FDA-APPROVED for use in baby food

* So effective, you can actually SEE it working

* So cheap, it’s just PENNIES A DAY

Sounds great, right? But I’m not here to sell you a supplement. Instead, I’m here to sell you a number. For example, consider the following bullet by Gene Schwartz:

“Three things you must never say to your children – but almost everyone does”

Would you like to know what those three things are? I did. So I looked them up in the book that Gene was selling. And by my count, there are either two things or five. But not three. And yet, Gene chose to put three in his bullet.

Why?

For the same reason that Dan Kennedy decided to write the following passage as he did:

“I and my organization NEED honest, ambitious, reliable men and women in your area right now. You can join me and earn profits of $5,000… $10,000… even $20,000 per transaction, implementing my proven and improved Business System — working at it as little as 4 HOURS A WEEK.”

Dan explains the thinking behind this passage:

“Erroneously most people consider themselves honest, they see themselves as reliable, and they believe they are ambitious. What you don’t want to do (unless very deliberately) is use qualifiers that a lot of people would feel ruled them out or that would intimidate or worry them. There is also some magic in 3, not 2 or 4 or more. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

And now for something completely different:

If you’re interested in persuasion, marketing, or copywriting, and if you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might like my email newsletter. Each email is short, informative, and entertaining. You can sign up to get it here.

The practice to become a skillful copy-fancier

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“Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgment sufficient to become an eminent breeder. If gifted with these qualities, and he studies his subject for years, and devotes his lifetime to it with indomitable perseverance, he will succeed, and may make great improvements; if he wants any of these qualities, he will assuredly fail. Few would readily believe in the natural capacity and years of practice requisite to become even a skillful pigeon-fancier.”

I’ll tell you in a moment who wrote that quote. But first, let me admit how foolish I was.

Many years ago, in my first three months of writing copy for money, I thought I’d learned everything there is to know about copywriting.

After all, I’d read Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book and a bunch of Gary Halbert’s newsletters. I’d learned you’re supposed to get attention and turn features into benefits. In the end you had to include a call-to-action. Oh yeah. Also open loops, like I used above. What else is there?

It was a serious case of newbie blindness.

That’s when you know just enough to explain everything away, without seeing the subtle detail that divides failure from success. Take the following headline for example:

The 7 Deadliest Crimes Against Yourself
Are You Guilty of Any of Them?

“A listicle with a warning.” That’s what I would have said back then. “I could write the same, without being so melodramatic. There’s nothing special here.”

Well today, I can see many special things in this short headline.

For example, how it sets you up to expect the 7 deadly sins — and then subverts your expectations. Or how it says deadliest instead of deadly. Or how it sneakily uses “crimes against yourself” rather than ” causes of your anxiety.”

And by the way, I don’t think any of those things are accidental.

The guy who wrote this headline was Gene Schwartz. He was an eminent copywriter, one in a thousand, really. He devoted a lifetime to writing copy with “indomitable perseverance.” As a result, he made great improvements in this field.

Maybe that’s more than your ambition right now. Fine. It’s also more than my ambition. But you might still like to hear the following:

If you want to become a good copywriter, and make yourself a lot of money as a result, then it doesn’t have to take unusual “natural capacity.” I’ve managed, and my natural capacity is common.

But like Charles Darwin says in the quote at the top, it does take practice to become a skillful copy-fancier. It can take you years, like it took me. Or maybe you can do it more quickly, if you don’t waste your time like I did, thinking that I already know everything.

Which brings me to my question for you:

Have you gone through any copywriting course or training in 2021? Anything you would recommend? Anything you would warn others against?

I’ll be transparent about why I’m asking. I’m nearing the halfway point of the trial run of my bullets course. And I am thinking about the next run, which will kick off probably in early June.

So if you’re interested in taking this course down the line… then write me an email and tell me about any copy training you have or have not liked. It will help me make my course better — and more useful to you if you do ever decide to take it.

But bullets course? Maybe you don’t even know what I’m talking about. If that’s the case and you’re curious, take a look at this post, which basically gives you a free sample lesson:

https://bejakovic.com/surprise-how-to-make-your-copy-more-appealing-by-saying-less/

Stop reading this blog unless you want to march in my army

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How do you overcome somebody’s confirmation bias?

That’s something I found out today in a provocative article titled the “Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral.”

The article tells the story of a 13-year-old Jewish kid from Washington D.C. who became a true-believing moderator of an alt-right subreddit.

The story itself is less interesting than it sounds. What is interesting is how Mike Caulfield, the author of the article, explains how this kind of “grooming” happens.

How could a Jewish kid from a liberal family be persuaded to join a far-right community, made up of people who are often hostile to Jews?

And more broadly, how is it possible to overcome somebody’s confirmation bias… and implant ideas that were once inconceivable?

I won’t repeat Caulfield’s entire argument here. But the gist is the idea of gradual curation. Here’s how it works:

1. A person (the mark, for short) goes to a subreddit or a Facebook group or somebody’s blog.

2. There he gets exposed to a curated claim. This is a claim that is carefully selected, provocative, but not threatening to his world view.

For example, the 13-year-old above was accused of sexual harassment by a classmate. So maybe he came across a claim on Reddit that said, “Study in Cambridge Law Journal reports up to 90% of rape allegations are false.”

3. At this point, the mark is intrigued but also a bit cautious. So he goes on to verify the claim for himself by doing a quick Google search. There it is, “Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). ‘False Allegations of Rape’. Cambridge Law Journal. 65 (1): 128–158.”

4. Mind is blown. Now the mark is ready to repeat the process one level down… with another curated but more provocative claim, which gets him closer to the alternate reality.

None of this is news to marketers. Curating facts is what good direct response copy is all about, and Gene Schwartz wrote about “gradualization” back in 1966.

There are even copy tricks to simulate verifying something yourself. But maybe it’s a bit tasteless to give you a step-by-step here, since we started by talking about the radicalization of a 13-year-old.

So instead, let me tell you what I personally get out of this. It might be relevant to you also:

The upshot for me is to avoid curated content as much as possible. That means turning off social media… news sites… and I hate to say it, newsletters like mine.

Because everybody has an agenda. And if you give somebody a freeway into your mind that’s open 24 hours a day, every day, it gets harder to resist that agenda.

You start being groomed… and the next thing you know, you might be marching in somebody else’s army, fighting somebody else’s war, fully convinced it was your idea all along.

A simple 3-hour “trick” which 100% makes your bullets better

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Today is the last day of the bullets course I’ve been running. We will wrap it up with an important lesson. Let’s start with a bullet by David Deutsch:

“Restore night vision — with a berry. See page 76.”

Which berry? Here’s what it says of page 76 of the book David was selling:

Night Vision

* Eat blueberries when they’re in season. They can help restore night vision.

* You know the old joke about carrots being good for your eyes? Well you’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Eat two or three carrots a day (raw or cooked) and/or drink a glass of fresh carrot juice. It’s excellent for alleviating night blindness.

* Eat more watercress in salads and/or drink watercress tea.

David’s bullet is an example of the teaser mechanism I wrote about yesterday. But that’s not the point I want to make today.

Instead, look at all that other stuff in the source material.

Why did David choose to focus on the berry? Why didn’t he highlight the proven “Bugs Bunny cure” for night blindness instead? And why didn’t the bullet read,

“Restore night vision — with this delicious tea. See page 76.”

Who the hell knows. But I can take a guess. Let me set up my guess with two facts about two other expert copywriters. First, here’s Gary Bencivenga, writing in the royal “we”:

“When it comes to strong copy, we’ve seen again and again that the most persuasive ads arise from thorough research. We’ve established this general rule — accumulate seven times more information about the product than we can use.”

Second, there’s Parris Lampropoulos. I heard him say in an interview how he also follows Gary’s 7x research rule above. But from what I understand, Parris takes it one step further.

Parris will also write 7x the bullets he can use in his copy. This means that for a magalog with a 100 bullets, Parris will write up to 700 bullets.

So now we get back to those night-vision blueberries.

It’s very possible that David did write up bullet with a “Bugs Bunny cure,” or something like it. But when comparing it with the berry mechanism, he simply thought the berry sounded better.

The fact is, in any decent book or course or other info product, there will be a bunch of problems that are addressed… a bunch of solutions offered… and a bunch of factoids you can twist and highlight about each of these solutions. Each of those can make a new bullet.

You don’t really know which combination will sound the best until you try it out. And you also don’t know which one will work the best once you have it in the actual promo, surrounded by other bullets. Which leads to today’s bullet lesson:

Lesson 11: “Write many more bullets than you need.”

How many more?

That’s up to you. David and Gary and Parris wrote copy where millions of dollars were on the line. In that case, it makes sense they put in 7x extra work.

But what if you’re just starting out? Well, it might make sense even in that case. Here’s a quote by another master of bullets, Gene Schwartz:

“This is what makes success. There’s nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this. I will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy and careless, and match him against a good copy cub, and two out of three times, the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other person. […] The person who is the best prepared and the most knowledgeable makes the most money. It’s so simple!”

I can tell you this personal tidbit:

For my lesson yesterday on teaser mechanisms, I wanted to feature three examples. And so I took my own advice, and I dug up 21 examples of teaser bullets, and the source material behind each of them. It took me about three hours of work to do all the research and analysis.

So was it worth it?

I think so. It’s how I could see the (now obvious) lessons I found yesterday.

But like I said, today’s is the end of this bullets course.

This doesn’t mean there are no more bullets lessons out there… or that I’ve stopped researching and writing them up. Quite the opposite.

The fact is, I want to create a new version of this course, which actually gets you practicing these lessons instead of just reading what I write. This new course won’t be free and it might be expensive… well, at least when you compare it to free.

Anyways, I’ll write up an offer page for this in a few days. And I’ll send it out in an email so you can see for yourself — assuming you’ve been eating your carrots — whether it’s something you’re interested in or not.

And if you want to get that email when I send it out, you can subscribe here to my amazing email sending service.

The round red balloon of sophistication and awareness

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Imagine a round red balloon, filled tight with air and floating in the middle of a room.

Got that image in your mind?

Ok, then let me explain why it’s important.

You’ve probably heard of Gene Schwartz’s ideas of market sophistication and awareness.

These two ideas are critical in writing advertising that sells. That’s because they tell you how to 1) get your prospect’s attention and 2) have him believe you, at least for a bit.

In a nutshell, sophistication is how skeptical your prospect is. Awareness is how much time he has spent researching his problem.

But here’s the trouble. I learned about sophistication and awareness years ago. And today, I still don’t have a 100% intuitive grasp of these ideas. I always have to “count on my fingers” when it comes to adding up where my market is in terms of these two measures.

Maybe I’m just not very smart. Even so, there are other problems with sophistication and awareness.

For one thing, these are two separate dimensions. That’s complicated. One dimension is simpler and more elegant than two.

To muddle things more, sophistication and awareness are not orthogonal. If somebody has zero skepticism to your claims… odds are good he hasn’t spent much time researching the problem.

And also, parts of the awareness and sophistication scales are not relevant to most sales copy. You’re probably not getting hired to write to a stage 1 awareness market (“$4 off Safeway pork chops this Friday!”). And if you are, you’re not getting paid much for it.

Which brings us back to that round red balloon floating in the middle of a room.

That’s my image of the typical direct response market. It combines sophistication and awareness, at least the parts that are relevant to sales copy. And it forms one simple, easy-to-understand-and-visualize dimension.

And for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter, I went into detail about how the red balloon of sophistication and awareness works, and how it simplifies things. But it’s not something I am willing to put on my blog.

Why? Because it might scratch your itch a little too well. Because frankly, my goal with these blog posts is to get people onto my email lists, where I can have more direct and immediate contact with them.

If you don’t ever subscribe to anybody’s newsletters, I can understand. And fare well.

But if you do occasionally subscribe to newsletter’s, then consider subscribing to mine. If you do decide to try it, here’s where to go.

Chanelling mass muppet behavior to make yourself a millionaire

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I don’t know if you heard the news… but there was a kerfuffle in Washington, DC yesterday.

A bunch of men and women dressed like muppets took off-piste selfies all around the Capitol building, in spite of the meek protests of Capitol building security.

What gets me is that this kind of thing can happen in 2021.

We have a large state built around national security.

We have billions of cameras blanketing every inch of our nation…

​We have tens of millions of authorized and unauthorized wire taps to get secret info while it’s still secret…

​​And we have millions of highly trained men and women sitting in dark offices, all around the country, who are supposed to detect and predict this kind of thing and stop it before the muppets even take their first step towards a riot.

And yet, it doesn’t work. That’s why we still get spectacular and unpredictable kerfuffles like the one yesterday.

One useful thing I learned in college is that there are systems that are so complex that their behavior is pretty much impossible to predict. The only way to know what these systems will do is to let them run. Large groups of autonomous agents, such as humans, often fall into this category.

So if we can’t predict or prevent massive events like this, what can we do? Well, all we can do is run with them when they happen, and try to end up on the surface when it’s all over. As marketer and copywriter Gene Schwartz put it:

“The scientist did not create the energy of the sun; hut he can direct that energy into the explosion of an atom bomb. The speculator did not create the enormous growth of the electronics industry after the war: but he can ride that growth to produce a fifty times increase in his capital. And the copy writer does not create the desire of millions of muppets all over America to storm the Capitol; but he can channel that desire onto a particular product, and make its owner a millionaire.”

You might think that’s a callous and cynical thing to say. You’re right. But it’s also true. If that’s something you can stomach, then you might like unpleasant truths I write about regularly. You can get these bitter pills when you subscribe to my email newsletter.

Burn objections out of your prospect’s mind using nothing more than a tiny success

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What’s the Spanish word for “different”?

I don’t speak Spanish. But here’s a trick:

When a word in English ends in “ent,” you can tack on an “e” at the end. More often than not, you get the right Spanish word.

So try it now.

Tack an “e” onto “different.” You get “differente.” And that’s how the Spanish and about 200 million South Americans would say it in their own tongue. Same with persistente, permanente… you get the gist.

With a few simple rules like that, an English speaker gets around 3,000 words in Spanish for free.

Not bad. Definitely enough for basics of conversation. Also more than most adult language learners ever manage to memorize.

I learned about this in a teach-yourself-Spanish course called Language Transfer. This course is available for free online. But if it wasn’t… everything I just told you would be a hell of a thing to put into a sales letter to promote and sell this course.

Because demonstration is the most powerful form of proof.

And if you can demonstrate to your prospect that he’s already on his way… then much of his skepticism and doubt will disappear.

By the way, this is not limited to language learning only.

As just one example, there’s Gene Schwartz’s famous “BURN DISEASE OUT OF YOUR BODY” ad. It ran successful for over 20 years. I’m sure that part of its success was that, under subhead three, it gives you an exercise you can try for yourself. “Sit or stand, with your hands simply extended in front of your chest…” You will feel the energy flowing, and your heart getting stronger.

One final point:

You don’t need to give away the farm. Just give your prospect a tiny success, right there on the sales page. If you can do that, you will burn objections out of his mind. What’s going to be left is an innocent and pure desire to buy your product… and find out what else it can do.

Ok, now for business:

I write an email newsletter about marketing and persuasion. If you like, click here to subscribe to it.

Nobel scientists stunned to produce must-read news

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“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”

You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)

This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.

But let’s talk persuasion.

My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.

We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.

For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”

Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.

You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.

Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.

If you’d like to read that story when it comes out, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It will appear there first.