Breaking News, Click Bait and Salescopy
Jim Edwards and Stew Smith discuss what will be the new normal, but also how to think through knee jerk reactions from click bait breaking news as today’s emergency is not tomorrow’s issue.
Conflict sells – if it bleeds it leads so beware of what can happen if you do not think for yourself and foresee some of what is coming by being observant and aware of personal, national, and international situations. Take a deep breath and think logically to hourly breaking news!
Check out the Facebook Group – Sales Copy and Content Marketing Hacks at https://www.facebook.com/groups/copywritingandcontenthacks/ and for more information on the wizards used to make outstanding sales copy check out https://copyandcontent.ai/.
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Jim Edwards: Hey guys, Jim Edwards here along with my buddy Stew Smith…
Welcome Stew.
Stew Smith: Hello, Everybody…
Jim Edwards: This is a very special episode of the
Stew Smith: Sales Copy And Content Marketing Hacks Podcast.
Jim Edwards: That’s right…
This is Episode 69…
That is right, episode 69.
And remember, length does matter!
So let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about today Stew?
Stew Smith: Well, first thing we will whenever I put this up on YouTube, I will make sure it’s not for kids.
Jim Edwards: That’s kind of like.
Stew Smith: South Park.
Jim Edwards: South Park is not for kids…
That is true!
Man…
Cheesy…
Screen you guys going home?
Stew Smith: You do a really good Cartman.
Jim Edwards: Thank you
Stew Smith: And, your Elmo is pretty legit too!
Jim Edwards: My Elmo and my Cartman game is legit.
Stew Smith: It is up there, I like it…
Alright, so let’s talk about some things…
You inspired me for an idea today okay with your letting the chickens out with Jim…
You asked, what did you ask this morning?
On your let the chickens out with Jim?
Jim Edwards: Dude, that was like two and a half hours…
Oh, the topic of today’s letting the chickens out with Jim was experience your experience.
Stew Smith: That is right?
Jim Edwards: And so that was all about “Hey, you know what, what’s going on right now in the world is going to be part of history like the kind of thing they’ll be talking about 100 years from now…”
And so just like the Great Depression, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 all that stuff…
So, my thing was, what experience are you taking away from this that’s going to enrich you for the future that will mean so you better prepared for reacting to the uncertainty that will certainly come in the future.
Stew Smith: Well, I will answer this as probably a good answer for the first half of that statement, or question a second-half…
I’m not sure how it will prepare me for later events…
But here’s something I have noticed…
I have complete time.
And what I mean by that I have complete time to focus on tasks where my normal life isn’t interrupting your work productivity.
When you work from home, you never leave work, but you also are constantly interrupted, and you just have to put things off with work to go handle things that are going on at the house if you want to be a functioning member of the household, that is.
Jim Edwards: Right and in other words, if your wife tells you to do something during the day, you have to go do it even though you don’t want to, and the exclusive you’re working doesn’t cut it until you guys got to go do.
Stew Smith: exactly or your son goes, “Hey, Dad, do you want to throw?”
I’m like, drop everything…
Oh, yeah, let’s go throw or (you net was when he was smaller), but when he’s bigger, he’s like, “Hey, dad, I’m going to work out…”
Oh, yeah, let’s go work out…
Yeah, I can’t miss those times.
So, I’m just noticing that my productivity level is so much higher now because I don’t have to go run that errand. I don’t have to be somewhere. I don’t have to take a meeting and meet somebody for lunch.
There are all these little things that add up in your day into your week that interrupt with job productivity.
So, I’m able to focus now till the job’s done without having all those interruptions.
So, it’s telling me something about my normal scheduling system that I should change whether that is get up earlier when there’s no interruptions when it’s early or stay up a little later when there’s no interruptions when it’s later…
When is the most productive time of my day?
Without interruptions for me it’s absolutely morning. I get more done from 6am to noon, then I do noon to midnight.
Jim Edwards: You sound like the army commercials from back in the days we do more before nine o’clock than most people do all day.
Stew Smith: Yeah, that’s a classic!
Jim Edwards: That was!
Stew Smith: Drinking their coffee while they’re on the jump zone.
Jim Edwards: Exactly!
Stew Smith: Suite!
But anyway, that is what I was watching your letting the chickens out with Jim, and you mentioned you’re a history major…
And it’s good to understand history because it can replay itself out.
Jim Edwards: It always replays itself.
Stew Smith: You can, you can have some knowledge that can help you with the next steps as well…
So, I guess my question to you is, what are you learning in this process of what our new normal is?
Jim Edwards: So, I have to be careful what I say because some people would say it might be alarmist or just weird or stuff like that…
I got to be careful some of the things that I say just because it might be too weird, but I’ve always thought this way.
One of the things that I love is an alternate history…
Because I’ve been studying history since I was about 10 years old…
My mom majored in history.
My dad majored in political science, and both of them hung on to all of their history books, and we always had a huge library at home.
And so, when I was 10, I started reading all the books.
I had lots of time on my hands because I had some medical issues as a kid, and I would read my mom’s old college history books for fun…
And I read a lot about mythology, and I read a lot.
And I noticed that there are patterns that repeat themselves…
And there are no new rules, and that old biblical thing of there’s nothing new under the sun.
And so, what has happened, though, in society now, where we are with technology and communication is that these cycles happen faster and faster…
Talk about problems in the stock market or things, problems with distribution and food, and other things like that.
Stew Smith: Isolationism.
Jim Edwards: isolationism, right, all of those things happened in a much slower timeline because it took forever for communication to get out.
There was a time even back at the beginning of the 1900s when there were tons and tons of newspapers around the country…
There were more newspapers then there are now there, it was not uncommon for a story to run in two newspapers in the same city that had completely different conclusions drawn from them…
And they were telling two completely different stories about the same event simply because communication was so slow…
And because communication was slow, people would actually do some thinking for themselves, because they didn’t need jerk to react to every single thing they saw and say, Oh, and then, it’s the next…
The next thing that they would shock the crap out of you with on TV of “News alert, breaking news, somebody farted at the White House.”
Stew Smith: Oh, my god! Breaking News is such a joke.
That’s why I do the puppy news channel, and I throw breaking News on there…
Like I walk the dog.
Jim Edwards: Breaking News Parker took a dump, and Rosie sniffed it.
What?
Is there some sort of does she have some sort of disorder, she’s sniffing poo…
The point, though, is that everything’s happening so fast that nobody has time to react…
And yet we can see that it’s in the lack of think time that you can be manipulated, or you can be pushed into a course of action.
It’s like wait a minute, what the hell are we doing here?
People also don’t think for themselves, and we’ve evolved into a world of clickbait and shocking statement stuff…
I’ll give you an example…
Again, this may not be a popular thing to say, but I don’t really care…
Way back when they were saying you don’t need to wear a face mask because of the COVID-19 thing.
Stew Smith: Yeah, it was because of the medical professionals needed the masks.
Jim Edwards: They need them…
Okay, hang on a second…
Stew Smith: They need them…
Why don’t we need it?
Jim Edwards: Why would I want to use one if I was going to be in a situation where I could be around people who had it, especially if they were asymptomatic?
That doesn’t make any sense to me…
And so, I went and got some of those N-95 masks.
Now, the thing is, we already had them because we use them for when we clean the chicken coop…
So when I say I went and got him, I went out to my shed, and I got a box that I had, and I had some, I mean, so the point is that, do I walk around with a mask on all the time?
No, when I go out in public, do I wear one?
Yes…
When before they suggested them?
Was I wearing one?
Yes, I was that guy.
But my thought process was, well, if I’ve got the mask on, nobody’s going to know it’s me.
So, if they’re looking at me funny, I really don’t care because you don’t. No, it’s me.
Stew Smith: Yeah that one so sunglasses and you’re solid and a hood.
Jim Edwards: Exactly!
Stew Smith: Get your hoodie on.
Jim Edwards: Oh, yeah.
Stew’s losing his headset.
Stew Smith: Alright, despite the effect.
Jim Edwards: This kind of thing It’s like, one of the things that I have learned is that the emergency of today is probably not going to be an emergency two days from now.
We’re not talking about right now…
Think about all the emergency things, all the things that were life-threatening, that nobody’s talking about right now…
And again, this is going to be unpopular
Stew Smith: Terrorism.
Jim Edwards: Terrorism.
We don’t hear anything about that…
We don’t hear anything about income inequality…
We haven’t heard anything about impeachment.
We haven’t heard anything about Russia collusion all this stuff that we were hearing about that was going to just tell us all today, I haven’t heard the first thing about, and there’s a whole list of the things.
It’s like they have this list that we got to have something to freak out about.
Now this one, not this one.
Now this man, we’re digging the bottom, but we can dig these out, you can always dig out the war on a certain economic class or the war on a certain race and age or the just all these things.
Stew Smith: Absolutely conflict sells.
Jim Edwards: Right?
Stew Smith: And it doesn’t matter what conflict that is, man versus nature…
Jim Edwards: Well, and they’ve turned it into now it’s the war on the COVID thing.
The thing you got to understand, but you got to learn to look between the lines and stuff, too…
Okay, so look at the stuff that’s not in the News.
So when you see these things, and again, I called this a couple-three weeks ago, and I’m not saying this to do panic or anything like that.
But when I saw all those, you got to learn to think for yourself frickin self…
And when you go to the grocery store, and you see that certain things are missing, and certain things have gone up in price like eggs, okay?
When I see the eggs, you either can’t get them, or they’ve gone up in price.
And then you see a little story in the News about farms that are killing millions of chickens that are active, healthy laying chickens because the restaurants aren’t ordering, and these farms provide liquefied egg stuff.
There’s more people buy a liquefied form and eggs in for restaurants.
So, they’re not ordering.
So, we’re going to kill 2 million chickens.
And we’re going to send them off to a dog food factory because we can’t afford to feed them right now…
Okay, there’s something wrong there…
Something is wrong.
That’s something to pay attention to…
Then you see, and you talk to somebody who is in the know, and you read about the fact that they’re pouring hundreds of thousands or millions of gallons of milk into the fields in Idaho yet, I go to the grocery store, and the milk is empty, completely empty, something’s wrong.
You hear about all the Meatpacking plants that Everybody’s getting sick and they’re shutting down.
And you can think to yourself, okay, well, that means we’re probably going to have a meat shortage of some kind at some point…
Stew Smith: Prices are going up already…
Jim Edwards: And prices are going up and stuff…
So, what should that tell you?
It tells you Okay, well, let me go check what I got in the freezer…
And before it gets to the point where…
Most people react slowly…
That’s the other thing is that most people don’t react until somebody tells them to react…
So instead of waiting to see Okay, oh, by the way, coffee as well…
Can you get by without coffee in the mornings to me personally, I would sooner pound my genitalia flat with a brick in a parking lot without coffee.
Stew Smith: I don’t drink coffee.
Jim Edwards: without coffee.
Jim Edwards: You don’t drink coffee.
Stew Smith: I drink tea…
Jim Edwards: Okay, could you survive without tea?
Or would it be a bad day and the smear?
Stew Smith: Wouldn’t be fun…
I probably have a headache for a few days.
Jim Edwards: When you read that…
They don’t have anybody to pick the coffee…
So, the coffee’s rotting on the bushes…
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to say, “Hey, maybe I want to make sure I have a couple extra cans of coffee, to maybe ride something out for a couple of months…”
These are the things that you need…
And so, like in 2009…
2008-2009
When we had that financial crisis, I talked about that in the chicken video…
My business didn’t really suffer at the beginning…
And I’m not saying it’s going to this time, but you need to be aware, but after five, six months when Everybody’s credit got that the big thing there was lack of available credit for even consumers…
I had people canceling their memberships simply because they just their credit card limits got messed up…
Nobody…
People weren’t really losing their jobs, they’re just the credit, and the money in the monetary system was affected…
Stew Smith: Yeah
Jim Edwards: I’m not saying that’s going to happen now…
But what I am saying is that you need to just pay attention, use the things you’ve learned in the past to influence your behavior now, which is going to affect your results in the future…
I mean, I think about things now with my fitness that I didn’t use to like I got a really bad ear infection right now that’s getting much better…
Thank you very much, but I haven’t worked out since Friday.
And so, I’m thinking to myself, holy crap, five days of not working out and then I’m going to have to adjust to a rebuilding schedule.
And I might have to go back to, jumping jacks and push-ups and pull-ups and, doing all that stuff.
And if I, and how’s this going to affect my weight?
If I got to watch what I’m eating even more now, yep.
And it’s just being aware.
And awareness comes from experience and most people, when you first experience something, you get hit in the face with a baseball bat because you just don’t know.
But once you do know, or once you have that experience, learn from it…
Most people repeat the same mistakes over and over and over because they’re waiting for someone else to tell them how to behave, what to do, what to think, how to react, how to plan, and, and what to do as a result of what’s going on…
And that’s how you get controlled, by the media controlled by politicians, controlled by unscrupulous salespeople.
That’s how people control you.
But it is very hard to control someone who is capable of thinking for themselves, who is capable of defying common logic, you know, just the common thing because we’ve seen a lot of things in the last few months that were considered…
I don’t know if common logic, whatever…
We’re like the prevailing thoughts that turned out to be wrong.
Stew Smith: Yes, yeah.
Jim Edwards: And so, you’ve got to learn how to think for yourself and have the confidence to stick by it for yourself and your own thoughts.
Stew Smith: I saw some really good stories the other day about people who are that person that you’re talking about a person that is thinking for themselves and, the farmer who’s decided, you know what, I’m not going to dump all these gallons of milk out…
I’m going to sell it, and he had a line of cars go into his farm to buy milk…
Jim Edwards: yeah.
It just took out the middleman.
Jim Edwards: Yeah
Stew Smith: Now is making more money.
Jim Edwards: And now the government will probably come in and tell him that he’s not set up to do direct to consumer sales and they’ll find the shit out of a male end up in jail.
Stew Smith: Yeah, but then he’ll wind up getting some kind of farm subsidy.
Jim Edwards: I wouldn’t begrudge him that.
Stew Smith: Yeah, you know, anyway, it’s Yeah, I wouldn’t either…
But, it’s the system is jacked.
Jim Edwards: Absolutely right, I know of somebody I know somebody else who in a similar situation had a trucking company doing a specific type of trucking whenever everybody, it was waste removal stuff, but it was for consumers…
And so, when they when all this stuff happened, his business just stopped…
And so, he laid everybody off.
And he’s like, man, I can’t do this…
So, he ended up calling a bunch of hospitals and said, Hey, do you have any extra stuff that needs to get hauled off to like, Where the hell have you been?
We can’t get anybody to come and haul this stuff away…
They got all this extra, stuff they got dispose of up…
Stew Smith: Yeah, he…
Jim Edwards: he hired everyone back and more!
Jim Edwards: So, it’s looking, it’s looking for new opportunities, thinking for yourself, and figuring out how you can serve the world in the circumstances in which you find yourself again, looking at your own experience, looking at other people’s experiences,
Stew Smith: Solving problems,
Jim Edwards: Solving problems…
Absolutely…
Right now, I’m reading a book…
I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s really an amazing book about the Wright brothers…
Versus Curtis Wright, and all the stuff that they did wrong in business, even though everyone considers them the fathers of flight.
They were the first.
But the guy who got rich was the guy who didn’t try to keep it all to himself a guy named Curtis Wright, that shared as much information as he could because he was the guy building the lightweight, powerful motors that Everybody needed to power their early airplanes.
Stew Smith: Right!
Jim Edwards: And so, you’ve heard you probably heard of the airplane company, Curtis Wright bought the Wright brothers as a courtesy.
He didn’t have to he bought them.
We bought their company as a courtesy because they had screwed up in business so badly, and this dude got frikin rich.
So just being smart about stuff so you can learn from other people’s experiences.
Stew Smith: Here’s another great story to be heard about the guy who created feed, Brooklyn.
Right?
He saw two problems.
Right?
His favorite restaurant wasn’t doing any business…
I think they did five orders in a day, for carry out on the sidewalk, right people come up and say I can’t sit in but they’re going to do care…
They’d have five total orders because I can’t keep up with this obviously.
And he’s, and he just had the idea to take donations, get food made by the hot made by the restaurants to take it to the first responders who are working 18-hour days and need food.
So that’s what he does.
And it started off with two restaurants now it’s 40 restaurants and all the hospital and fire departments in New York City…
Jim Edwards: God bless him…
Stew Smith: I mean, that’s pretty badass…
Jim Edwards: Yeah
Stew Smith: and he’s, I think they just served their hundred thousand meal…
Jim Edwards: Wow.
Stew Smith: in two months…
That’s the kind of thinking we’re talking about
Jim Edwards: right thinking for yourself instead of waiting for someone to tell you what to do…
Stew Smith: Yeah, because I’m and I said this on my chicken video, it’s not a question of if it’s a question of when something like this happens again, because the cat is out of the bag, somebody something similar to whether it’s, it doesn’t have to be disease-related, it could be financial, it could be social could be terror-related could be any kind of anything…
People have seen the pattern now of how to bring the US and the world to their knees and with the communication that we have and everything else…
It’s easier than ever for something like this to derail everybody…
So, you need to be ready you need to have I mean, I love what the Mormons do, man, you got to have a supply you got to be ready to take care of yourself…
That’s part of their deal.
You have to take care of yourself at home to have food and the ability to take care of your family and for charity.
You need to live within your means you need to not overextend yourself, and there’s All these things these simple rules that if you do them you’ll be in a much better situation be able to deal with something and circumstances and people can’t force you to act in a way that you wouldn’t if you had a little distance from the problem.
Stew Smith: I agree.
Here’s my advice.
Take a breath.
When you, when you read a headline.
Jim Edwards: Yes.
Stew Smith: Because breaking News usually is selling conflict because conflict sells.
And there are so many different ways to sell conflict.
You remember the old line if it bleeds, it leads.
Right?
That is an old journalism say I do for a headline that’s going to be up the top of its bleeds it’s leading.
The same thing, you know, red versus blue, white versus black rich versus poor.
War versus peace.
Jim Edwards: Yes.
Stew Smith: Nature versus man.
Jim Edwards: Yep.
You know, rich, you name it business versus…whatever.
Yeah.
So, it’s all a part of this “conflict that sells” system.
And unfortunately take a breath when you see those things because like Jim said that the emergency today, there’s probably not going to be an emergency tomorrow or the next day
Jim Edwards: Or this afternoon.
Stew Smith: Yeah. I mean, the other thing, the other thing they do with headlines is the headline is designed for clickbait…
The truth in the story may have nothing to do with the actual topic of the story…
So, example, Trump says there will be death during the but still opens up the economy…
And then the actual story is about the fact that now that this disease is here, there’s nothing we can do to prevent what would be considered a normal, natural spread of it along with anything else.
So, we have to be really careful as we reopen the economy.
Keep an eye on hotspot.
Make sure that we’re protecting the vulnerable population which the article you like.
Jim Edwards: Oh, Okay, well, that makes sense…
Okay, that’s cool…
But if you’re only reading the headlines, it’s Trump says there will be death, but we’ll open the economy anyway.
Stew Smith: Oh, you know what it is?
It’s a good sales copy!
Jim Edwards: Exactly!
That’s, that’s what it is.
But understand that is someone with an agenda, who has an objective to get your to, to basically buy your time and you pay them with your time or to sell you their ideas, and you pay them with your time and attention.
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: So just be careful.
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: So probably you realize, of course, that we’ll probably get this podcast episode removed from YouTube as fake News, or it’ll be our first one that’s going to get removed
Stew Smith: That might be interesting.
Let’s do another 69 one
Jim Edwards: 69 more than once?!
Stew Smith: Anyway,
Jim Edwards: I think with that one, we’re just going to go this.
I don’t know if this had anything to do.
Well, let’s bring this around a
Stew Smith: A copy of a sales copy.
Okay…
Headlines in the media in the News are clever sales copy.
Jim Edwards: Yes, that ain’t content that sales copy designed to get a click
Stew Smith: Yes, and take a big deep breath.
Watch your knee jerk reaction and think for yourself.
Jim Edwards: Absolutely.
Stew Smith: There you go.
Jim Edwards: Cool.
Well, that’s a good one…
Well, Everybody, have a great day.
And we’ll talk to you soon.
Bye Bye, Everybody!
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