Follow that!

Kim Krause Schwalm walked past me and said, 

“I’m sorry you have to follow that.”

The audio guy was running a mic cable down the back of my shirt to wire me up.

Sam Woods was wrapping up his Q&A with Brian Kurtz, which was running 20 minutes over, after Sam’s hour-long talk.

The room sat stunned during Sam’s presentation as he demonstrated the current – and future – capabilities of AI and Machine Learning. 

Now they were flooding him with questions. A mix of excited, paranoid, wondrous… confused.

“The room,” in this case, was Brian’s Titans Mastermind group, last week in Greenwich, CT.

In attendance were absolute legends of direct response marketing, like Jay Abraham, Joe Polish, Ryan Lee, Perry Marshall, David Deutsch, Kelly Brown (copy chief at Stansberry), Ken McCarthy, Jim Kwik, and many 7-, 8-, and 9-figure business owners. 

Only a few of them had any working knowledge of, or experience with, AI tools like ChatGPT… 

No one there came close to understanding it like Sam does.

So, you can imagine how blown the minds in the room were as Sam laid out the facts – same way he does for us as our advisor on AI in Copy Chief.

(You and I have had a minute to adjust… these folks were getting their first real dose of the new reality.)

SO… what would you do in my situation?

You’re about to walk up in front of some of the most influential people in our industry… they’re all reeling from what they’ve just heard… their brains are locked… half of them fearing for their futures… the other half seeing new ones…

And the host is about to introduce you.

If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, you will have a great advantage.

Because the way to step up to the challenge is to:

Think like a copywriter.

When you know where your audience’s heads are in the PROBLEM/SOLUTION equation, you can adjust on the fly.

I knew the majority of people in the room were all now hyper aware of the problem, but were far from understanding the solution. 

Sam was not there to pitch a product, or even really offer solutions, only create awareness. And he did an amazing job of it.

So, the only way I was going to be able to make my information relevant was to bring them back down to earth. 

And that means,

Toilet Humor.

I don’t mean making gross jokes. That could work in a comedy club, but this was certainly not that. 

I needed something that everyone in the room was experiencing, but not acknowledging. 

A shared experience about something light-hearted that would stop their minds from reeling about AI, and find levity in something personal. 

The hotel where the event was held, and all the attendees stay, has fancy, robotic toilets in every room. 

The seat lifts on a sensor every time you walk into the bathroom. The seat is heated. There are about 10 different settings to “cleanse” yourself, like… front, back, pulsating, oscillating, higher, lower, stronger, softer, and my favorite; drying. 

So, with one line, I entered the conversation taking place in their heads (AI), and brought them right back down to earth. 

I said, “Well, I’m a little nervous for a future with AI, because I can’t even work the toilet in my hotel room.” 

Everyone burst out laughing because they were having the same experience. 

I riffed for a minute about all the features of the toilet… and how it’s like “taking your privates to a hair salon.”

More laughter. So I pushed to the bizarre…

“How great is that heated seat? I could sit there all day. I’ve been taking my Zoom calls in there,” I went on. 

“People on the calls are like, ‘Are you… on the toilet right now?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes! You gotta see this!’”

Now they were in the moment with me and I was free to take them somewhere new with my talk over the next hour. 

To balance all the heady information Sam had shared, I focused on how to write MEANINGFUL copy. 

And if we do that, then we will always own the bots, they will never own us. 

Jay Abraham was sitting in the front row. I told the story about meeting his son, Ridge, and how he told me that I was the reason he started writing copy. Which I found truly bizarre considering his own dad is one of the greats. 

There was a great lesson in that about how your kids need to have other voices in their lives so they can have their own experiences discovering things. 

Jay agreed. 

I talked about these Sunday series emails, and read two of them (the ones from last week and the week before) to demonstrate the use of “tactile” elements that bring the reader into the story (burnt coffee pots… a car wash tip jar).

My goal with them, as it is with you, was to remind them that no matter how fast technology moves, and “takes over” industries, it will always be the HUMAN experience that wins attention and speaks to your reader. 

The fact that we are human, and are students and masters of communication and persuasion, is our unrelenting advantage.

If we keep that, we will always win.

And the toilets just keep getting better.