Sat next to this cute girl on the train yesterday. We started chatting, and at some point she asked what I do for a living. “So, you’re a writer? Wow, so cool, what do you write?” I looked out the window for a second. Then I told her… Well, I write about desire… In its rawest form. I sit with the pain of strangers until it becomes my own. I listen to what they don’t say… …the regret folded into the corner of a smile, the dream they buried under 15 years of being “reasonable.” I can look at a man and see what he sees when he looks in the mirror… …the ache of not recognizing the boy who once believed anything was possible. I can see the little boy, who ran barefoot, who never asked permission, who thought he could achieve anything. That boy, I carry with me. Every word I write, I write for him. Some nights I sit in the dark with a blank page and a candle, and I wait. Not for inspiration. For truth. Because the words are already there, somewhere between the fear and the hope, and my only job is to listen closely enough to hear them… And when they come, I write them a way back… …to their body… …to their youth… …to the morning they’ll wake up and feel, for the first time in years, that they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be… …to the person they promised themselves they’d become, that one summer night, a long time ago, under a sky so wide it made them believe… …because I’m convinced that inside every man, there’s a fire that never goes out. It only waits for the right words to breathe on it. This… This is what I write. … Words that breathe on fire. She put her hand on her heart. “That’s so deep. So you write poetry?” No, ads for gut health supplements.

A client threatened to fire us last month after we generated $86,000 from email. His complaint? Our open rate was only 41%. "Chris, that means 59% of our customers IGNORED us." I explained that $86,000 was considerably more useful than an open. "I DON'T CARE ABOUT REVENUE. I WANT 90% OPENS BY FRIDAY OR YOU'RE FIRED." Fair enough. I called our creative strategist. New objective: opens. No restrictions. Monday's subject line: YOUR WIFE HIRED A DIVORCE ATTORNEY Body: "Anyway, our new creatine formula just dropped." 92% open rate. Tuesday: YOUR NAME IS IN THE EPSTEIN FILES Body: "And your name is also on our VIP list. Here's 15% off." 97.4%. Wednesday: IRS AUDIT NOTICE: YOU HAVE 48 HOURS TO RESPOND. Body: "Time to audit your supplement cabinet. Protein powder is 20% off." 99.1%. Thursday: WE HAVE YOUR CHILDREN. DO NOT CONTACT THE POLICE. Body: "Covered. With our new family-size hydration bundles." 99.8%. A woman in Ohio drove 43 minutes to her son's elementary school. Two customers contacted the FBI. One subscriber replied asking how much ransom we wanted. Our strategist offered him free shipping. Friday: YOUR WIFE KNOWS ABOUT THE HOTEL IN AUSTIN LAST FALL 99.9%. The founder called me eight seconds later. "WHO TOLD YOU ABOUT AUSTIN?" "Nobody." "THEN WHY AUSTIN?" "It outperformed Dallas in our subject line test." He went completely silent. Then started screaming. "YOUR TEAM IS TERRORIZING MY CUSTOMERS." I explained that terror was currently our highest-performing creative angle. "YOU CAN'T JUST MAKE THINGS UP TO GET PEOPLE TO OPEN EMAILS." Interesting. He issued a new rule. Every subject line had to be 100% factually accurate. No exceptions. But he still wanted 90% opens. Our strategist said he understood. Monday morning, he sent: YOUR ORDER HAS BEEN CANCELED 99.6% open rate. The founder called. "WHY ARE CUSTOMERS SAYING THEIR ORDERS WERE CANCELED?" "Because we canceled them." "WHAT?" "4,812 orders. Every single one." "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?" "You said the subject lines had to be true." Tuesday: WE'VE TERMINATED YOUR SUBSCRIPTION We terminated 11,400 subscriptions. 99.9% open rate. Wednesday: URGENT PRODUCT RECALL We recalled 7,000 tubs of perfectly good electrolyte powder. 100%. The founder was hysterical. "THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE PRODUCT." "I know." "THEN WHY DID YOU RECALL IT?" "So we could tell people." His CFO was vomiting into a trash can. Customer support had stopped answering the phone. But the numbers were beautiful. 100% opens. Zero misleading subject lines. Full compliance with every directive. Thursday, the founder called me crying. "CHRIS. PLEASE. I'M BEGGING YOU. GO BACK TO LYING." I told him we'd need that in writing. He sent it immediately. Then asked us to stop sending emails altogether. "How much will it cost to make this nightmare end?" I quoted him $40,000 a month. He signed a 12-month agreement. We're now getting paid $480,000 a year to not email his customers. Every month we send exactly one email. To him. Subject line: THE KIDNAPPING CAMPAIGN RESUMES TOMORROW It's already scheduled. He pays the invoice within six seconds.

Shallom nigga. It's been a while. Here's 15 laughably powerful persuasion and behavioral sceince principles that you can immediately implement to print more money from your ads, your funnel, your emails, your content, etc. You can just copy and paste this post into whatever agent you use for your copy, create a checklist and tell it to audit its output against it the checklist. Do it RIGHT NOW nigga don't delay. Alr here we go: 1. Identity mirroring. Everyone has an identity that they project internally and externally. And 9 times out of 10 these identities are idealized versions of who they THINK they should be. Humans have consistency bias, which means they want to act in a way that ALIGNS with the identity they hold. If you have a strong understanding of the identities that your avatars and sub-avatars internalize then you can literally call them out in your copy and mirror them so that your sales argument is something that THEY NATURALLY ALLIGN WITH. Example 1: survival niche Avatar 1: 40-60 year old men with families, conservative, traditional values. Identity/identities: providers, protectors, man of the house, etc. Mirror: “True protectors take action to keep their families safe.” Example 2: B2S info/ coaching offer. Avatar: young, self-made entrepreneurs Identity: driven, successful, hard-working. Mirror: “Every success entrepreneur took a huge risk that ended up paying off.” You can apply around with these mirrors and then use them as a base for your actual copy. 2. Perception IS reality. If your market believes that all gurus are scammers then that is the reality that YOU as the marketer now reside in. Your job is to understand which perceptions stand in the way of your sales argument and which perceptions can actually HELP you. It takes good instincts to know which is which. This is why in depth avatar research is so fucking important because you need to understand the ETHOS of a given market (will go in-depth on this in a later post). In the example I made, you don’t try to convince them that not all gurus are scammers. Maybe you could do that but it’s less efficient. It’s way easier to just position yourself as being anti-guru. You hate gurus too. You aren’t a guru. Which is funny because some of the biggest info clingers on the planet use this principle. 3. People act out of sub-conscious emotional triggers and use logically acceptable NARRATIVES based on their biases & desires to justify that decision. The best copywriters understand the core desires and use language that hijacks the prospects existing logical narrative to push a point home. This is where marketers fuck up, your prospects don’t need an objective logical analysis of the decision, they need a statement that SOUNDS logical/ socially acceptable to them. Example: AI offer. Core emotion: FOMO. **THIS IS WHAT THEY ACT ON Logical narrative the prospect uses to justify the action: "The economy is shifting, and AI is changing everything. If I don't buy into this masterclass/tool right now, I’m going to get left behind. It’s irresponsible not to have this." 4. Justification looping. Every single thing that you say needs to be logically, intuitively justifiable by your prospect. Most people stop at justifying their mechanism, justifying claims about why things their market has tried didn’t work, all the basic shit. But have you justified your offer? Why are you giving them such a “no-brainer” offer? If you have urgency elements in your copy/ on your lander, have you explained WHY this is urgent? If you introduce scarcity, do you have an actual reason why this is scarce? You need to understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you don’t provide that evidence then your prospect will automatically call bullshit. 5. The way you say something can be more important than the thing you say, especially when you have a skeptical/ highly sophisticated market (I’ll get to this in a second). This is obviously specific to video ads/ VSLs, good example was the yapper ad trend. If you look at some of the most popular yappers (ads and TikTok shop videos), the delivery in terms of the pacing, tonality and cadence is all intentionally trying to lower your guard and make you feel like this is just another video on your feed. Another good example is Tony Robbins. When he needs to drive a point home he increases his volume, he using pauses to give you space to digest his point. Now imagine for example you’re scripting an ad for a marketing offer to a skeptical, sophisticated market and you want to take the angle of other market agencies being scammers. If your vocal DELIVERY in that ad doesn’t match the premise of what you’re trying to say, your market is going to immediately reject you. 6. People believe that their situation is unique. And they’re looking for reasons why your offer WOULDN’T work for them. The most common obstacle that occurs in a sales process is some version of “Will this work for my specific situation”. If you’ve ever been in a sales org you know this. You need to go through your market research flows and make sure you have enough data for a deep understand of the unique situational constraints that your market has (both real and perceived). Make a list, have AI order them by commonality then audit your ads, VSLs and landers and ask yourself if you’re overcoming the most common ones. Are you overcoming them at all? Are there any constraints that would be specific to an angle you’re running that you haven’t even mentioned in the ad? (This is a very common mistake). 7. Human behavior is ultimately driven by three fundamental psychological needs: Autonomy: The deep desire to be the author of one's own life, free from constraint. Competence: The urge to feel effective, skilled, and capable of overcoming challenges. Relatedness: The craving for belonging, status, and connection within a tribe or peer group. These core needs directly influence people’s motivators when the actualization of any of those needs is threatened. "Competence" example: “I’ve been trying to make my ads work for weeks I need to figure this out”. This is their CONDITION. And they naturally become receptive to any message that aligns with that condition. And so to align with that condition you can make them feel competent by telling them that they already have the skills, they already have the knowledge, they’re just missing one small thing that will make it all click. This kind of narrative is literally EVERYWHERE, especially in the online marketing/ coaching space. If you want to do more autism research into this just loop up “Self-Determination Theory, Dr. Edward L. Deci” 8. Dimensionalization. You want to use words that burrow into people’s brain and infect it with your message. Notice the words I used. “Infect” “burrow”. It FEELS like some foreign parasite taking control. Doing this is simple: take any vague, abstract line of copy (especially when describing a problem or making a change-state claim) and think “how can I make someone feel, see, hear, smell, taste this idea”. 9. Associations can be more powerful than outright declarations. Think about the supplement offers like turmeric pills that claim that ancient cultures used the core ingredients for their gut health (or whatever). Association with ancient cultures = healthier, more natural. Second-order assumption = this product is healthier and more natural. Now take shit like bull testicle pills for testosterone. Association with bulls = high testosterone, high vitality. Second-order assumption = this product will increase my testosterone. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not, the association did all of the selling for you. Another example: Amazon FBA mass market bizop. Association with Amazon: Amazon is a massive, billion dollar business. Second-order assumption: If I sell on Amazon there’s a high likelihood that I’ll make money. Here’s the thing, you can exploit this even if you’re selling a product/ service without an obvious association. I like to do this by taking whatever my core methodology (or mechanism) is and connecting a specific aspect of it to an anchor (a key figure/ thought leader, a company, a culture) that my market idolizes. Example: I’m selling a metal focus offer to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs idolize Elon Musk. Elon Musk uses “algorithmic thinking”, which my offer teaches. Notice how this is different from authority proof (which a lot of people implement) since we aren’t claiming that the anchor actually used the product. They don't need to because the ASSOCIATION is just as powerful. 10. The second your ad appears on someone’s feed, that person’s brain is subconsciously looking for ANY reason to ignore you. The brain is bombarded with millions of stimuli every single day. To actually PAY ATTENTION to a stimuli, the brain has to expend a ton of energy. And since the brain wants to conserve energy, it decides to filter out what it predicts as “sameness”. (Look up the reticular activating system (RAS) if you want to go into detail). The most effective way to bypass the RAS is by presenting an idea of reality that’s so bizarre, counter-intuitive, mysterious, unbelievable, offensive in your hook/ headline that the brain can’t PREDICT what’s about to happen. Here are some common copy frameworks for this: a. The hidden mechanism/ weird culprit: “This buried IRS loophole lets real estate investors save 80% on their tax”/ “This banana is the real reason why your skin sags after 50” b. Statistical impossibility : “This 4-word email generated $575,789” c. Attacking a universally accepted rule in your market (one of my personal favorites): “Testing more creatives is killing your brand” “Moisturizing your skin every night is giving you more acne” “Here’s how eating pizza for lunch can help you lose more fat than chicken and brocolli” (V-Shred printed multiple 9 figures on the back of this idea btw). d. Herd-follower bias:“The top 1% of law firms are trying to keep Googles new “AI visibility” update a secret” e. The unspoken truth: “here’s what the gurus refuse to tell you about starting an AI agency” f. EXTERNAL CATALYST NIGGAAAA IYKYK (if you don’t know look up “catalyst hooks” on my page you’ll see a full guide : “This new Facebook ads update called sequence learning just killed creative testing” “ 11. The fear of loss is more immediately motivating than the potential of gain. Simplest way to exploit this quickly is by taking any hooks you have running right now that are promise/ outcome/ benefit driven and flip the narrative to a negative. I’m running a hook rn that says “if you want your law firm to lose money you should hire an SEO agency” and it’s one of my top performers. 12. The best way to introduce a new/ novel concept I.e. in your UPM/ USM is a way that makes your prospect inherently understand it is by mapping an unknown concept to a known concept. You do this primarily using metaphors. The “known” part is determined by the sophistication of your market. Unique problem mechanisms example for mass market joint supplement offer (just off the dome): Novel concept: “Age-related joint degradation is caused by matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) breaking down the extracellular matrix of cartilage faster than chondrocytes can synthesize new collagen.” Re-written with a “known” concept: "Think of your knee joint like the door hinge. When that hinge is brand new, it opens and closes effortlessly because it has a rich layer of grease making everything glide smoothly. Now, imagine what happens if you squirt a drop of acid onto that hinge every single day. That the grease dries up."... "Most people think their knee pain is just 'getting old' or 'wear and tear.' But that’s dead wrong. 'Wear and tear' doesn't cause pain. Corrosive Enzymes do. Inside your joint, your body produces tiny pac-man-like enzymes called MMPs. When you were 20, your body produced enough protective fluid to wash these enzymes away. But as you age, your joint stops producing that protective fluid. Those enzymes get trapped inside your knee joint, eating away at your cartilage like acid on a door hinge until your bones are grinding together with every step you take." 13. You must limit the cognitive load in your prospect as much as humanly possible. When someone is watching your ad, their brain is running on a very limited amount of energy. And if you exhaust that energy, the person is going to scroll. Cognitive overload does NOT mean too long. there are 45-minute VSLs pulling eight figures/month. Overload happens because of processing friction. There are a bunch of ways that you might be creating that friction but the two biggest offenders that I’ve seen: a. Too many overlapping ideas, outcomes, problems or mechanism drivers. These are some of the most cognitively “dense” parts of your message. And so when you keep adding more and more of each you’re just increasing the strain on your prospect’s brain. There’s a reason why most of the copywriting OGs taught to focus on ONE core idea, focus on ONE core reason why everything your prospects have tried before failed. The second offender happens when there’s gaps in your argument that confuse the prospect to the point where they have to fill in the gaps. The simplest example happens when you don’t bridge certain blocks of copy properly or you just don’t include them in the first place. Example of no bridge: “Cold outreach is dead, use our AI software to close more deals.” With the bridge: “Cold outreach is dead because prospect inboxes are saturated with spam filters. Our AI bypasses inbox filters by simulating human writing patterns, dropping your message straight into the primary inbox where 90% of deals are actually closed.” Now these gaps can be incredibly nuanced. An example of another gap: people have semantic associations. These are mental connections between two concepts that are wide spread across a population. Most people think of the liver as a “filter” or the brain as a “muscle” or memory as a “hard drive”. I’m going to use the liver as an example. Let’s say you’re writing about the forces of nature in your mechanism and you talk about the liver acting as a sponge. This might seem insignificant but when someone heard the liver acting as a “sponge” it clashes with their semantics which creates cognitive load. 14. Belief shifts. I hear people talk about it all the time but I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about how you ACTUALLY shift someone’s beliefs. You cannot attack a core belief head-on, or you trigger the backfire effect. This is a cognitive bias in which presenting a person with objective, undeniable facts that contradict their deeply held beliefs does not change their mind. You can spot this bias EVERYWHERE, in normie ragebait reactions, on gender discussion on Reddit, in the comments under your ads, political arguments etc. Instead of attacking that belief, you VALIDATE it as being entirely logical based on their past evidence ("You're right to think cold email is dead, because the old spray-and-pray method was saturated"), and then introduce a narrow wedge that expands their paradigm. Mechanistic example: “That method is dead, but a hyper-segmented micro-channeling approach is getting agency owners a 20% reply rate right now”. External authority example: “But if cold email didn’t work at all then why are Fortune 500 companies spending million of dollars hiring people whose only job is to send emails?” When dealing with NEGATIVE identity-based beliefs i.e. “I’ll never lose weight” a good tactic is to externalize blame onto a third party aka the “common enemy” trope. Ex: “It’s not your fault. The reason why you aren’t losing weight isn’t because you aren’t disciplines enough or motivated enough. You were just fed a bunch of fad diets and useless at-home workouts by greedy fitness coaches.” 15. The best copy uses momentum to pull the reader to an inevitable conclusion. Joseph Sugarman (absolutely goated copywriter) called this the slippery slide. This is a measure of how well each core “block” of copy (i.e. promise, claim, mechanism, proof, catalyst, etc.) FLOWS from one to the other. I want you to read through the last ad script, VSL script, whatever you wrote and as you’re reading ask yourself: “is there any point where I suddenly jumped from one premise to another without establishing a clear bridge?” “Does each premise feel like a natural RESOLUTION to the premise that I established before?”