How This 30-Minute "Mind Control" VSL Spent $4.8MM+ (Full Breakdown)

All right, so in this video, I'm going to be breaking down a VSL that has done many, many millions of dollars. We're going to watch it together, not the entire thing. It's about 30 minutes long. But I'll give you guys a link after. We're going to watch the thing, watch some of the important highlights, and then I'm going to break down some of the most interesting lessons that I think you can pull from this vsl so you can apply it to your own copy, your own marketing or stuff that you do with your clients, etc. Okay, so this is the VSL here. I'm going to let it play a little bit, and I guess my encouragement would be just kind of watch it, see what you feel, pay attention to what you're noticing about why this is working, both on the copy side, the messaging side, as well as on the video production side. So let's go ahead and check this guy out.

Helen Hadsell was able to win any competition she took part in. She was known as the contest queen because she had won seven trips to Paris, boats, houses. She would basically take part in any sweepstake. She read about any contest, and she would just win. That made my documentary crew. And I asked Helen, how do you do that? And she spoke about this thing called the Silva technique. Helen, you see, was Jose Silva's former PR manager. She had the benefit of learning closely from that man. Now, Jose Silva was a radio repairman who lived in the border town of Laredo, Texas, in the 1940s. He had 10 kids, and his kids were not doing very well in school. Now, Jose Silva had a crazy idea. You see, he had served in the US army, and he was fascinated by the psychological questions that the army psychologists would ask new recruits. So he decided to.

All right, so we're about a minute in. I'm going to pull up the transcript on here, too, so we can kind of break this down and look at sections. Again, I'll have an away you can download below. You can access all of this stuff. This is probably one of the best ways, I think, to learn marketing, learn copy, is just to study a lot of stuff that's already existed. And this did really well. So you want to ask, all right, well, what's working, what's not working, etc. So first thing is, Helen Hansel was able to win any competition. She took part in Paris Boat. She would basically take part in any sweepstakes she read about. That made my documentary crew curious. Now we're going into Jose Silva. He's experimenting with reducing any form of resistance in his children's brain. Experiment with biofeedback. Now it's the story about sitting down with his daughter Isabelle, reading a history book, asking her questions. He would guide Isabel into a restful state of being. She would have her eyes closed. Then he would think of these questions. Who is a 16th president, United States? Before he could verbally say it, Isabelle would answer the question. Abraham Lincoln. Jose Silva was mind blown. And so he wrote to this guy. Silva disagreed. He trained his kids. Then his adults started noticing and the adults started coming to see him. And he created the Silva mind control method. Okay, now one of the things that's interesting to me, just candidly speaking, is that there's a lot that's going on in the initial opening in this, and there's really no promises, no benefits, which I find quite interesting. Again, the thing did well. So I don't really care what's a good principle or not. If the thing is crushing, it's crushing. Typically when I'm leading with a story or a curiosity factor, I'm trying to tie in some kind of relevance, depending on how confident I am in the angle. Right. If you're just dragging people in through an interesting story, you have to really hope that your story is grippy enough for the people watching it to make sure they're going to keep watching. Otherwise you want to put in some sort of relevance tag, which is either some sort of talking about how you're going to fix a pain point or some sort of promise, etc. We can see. Let me get rid of this. You know, what's interesting is right off the bat, we're talking about winning seven trips to Paris. Boats, houses, things like that. So maybe there's some sort of implicit benefits that we see in there. The other thing I see that's actually kind of interesting is that there's a lot going on. We got Helen, Hansel, then we have this guy talking about his documentary crew. Now we have Jose Silva and we have a story about the kids. And now we have this other guy. So it's a lot of characters being introduced as well, which again is a little bit different than maybe how I would approach it. But that just shows you, like, again, so many different things can work because this thing crushed. So it's. It's pretty cool. I'm going to try to skip over here to this section two. We're going to talk about the root cause and the science of brainwave states. By the way, Let me know in the comments. Below. I'm happy to watch and go through these things all the way through, but sometimes I think it's more important to just highlight the, the mechanics on this as well. So you guys can let me know in the comments what's better. But let's skip around and let's look at where we start talking about this method here. The root cause.

The rest of this kid across the United States absolutely flooded by people. And the silver mind control method ended up expanding all across the United States. So here's what Jose Silva discovered as the root cause of all our problems. We are powerful beings, but from the time we are born from the education system we grow up in, from parents and caretakers who may not know better, we take on so much negative programming, we actually suppress our inherent human abilities. There was a famous study done that showed that all children under the age of four are naturally hyper creative and genius. But the percentage of kids who show genius ability gets lower and lower and lower as they get older. Something about our modern way of life removes these unique abilities from us. The solution, Jose Silva discovered, is the act of being able to consciously access altered states of consciousness. What is an altered state of consciousness? Well, our consciousness actually operates at different frequencies. You can measure this using a scientific device called an EEG machine. There is a frequency called Beta, which is the waking state frequency. Most of us are in beta as we go through our jobs. But when you get into a relaxed state of mind, you go into a hyper creative state called Alpha. Alpha is known for creativity, for problem solving, for accelerated healing. Meditators, monks go into Alpha as part of their daily routine. Athletes are proven to go into Alpha before they, they take a shot, before they shoot an arrow. The alpha state is what you're in when you practice relaxation or meditation. And this is why There are over 15,000 studies today that show that being relaxed and being in a meditative or mindful state actually improve your health and well, being awesome.

So there's a lot of interesting things happening here. Now the, the opening is cool. There's a lot of proof and curiosity and interesting things in there. And again, it hooked many people. The part to me that I find super, super interesting that I want to highlight is this sort of mechanism section because again, consciously or unconsciously, the writer of this, I think it was Peter Kell who wrote this, who we've done some work with. And he's, he's awesome. I think it was, it was him who wrote it. But you know, subconsciously or consciously in his case, it's probably A lot of this is conscious. There are a lot of really important things that are happening that I want to highlight here. They're very. They're so basic and simple, but people write copy all the time. They miss these really basic things. Okay, So I want to highlight these. Here's what he discovered is the root cause of all our problems. We are powerful beings from the time we were born, from the education system we grew up in, from our parents and caretakers who may not know better, we take on so much negative programming that actually suppresses our inherent human abilities. So let's look at this right here. Two interesting points. I'm making a video probably right after this, where I'm going to call it depth psychology or something like this. Here's some really important things to know. The best copywriters and marketers, they really, truly understand not just like the individual beliefs that a market has, but how the market views the entire world. Because these beliefs are not in isolation. These beliefs form a structure. So the way that they think about the world, anybody, including you, watching this right now, this, to me, is the most interesting part about marketing. Every market, every person, has some sort of mental models that they use to. To model the world. And when you're doing marketing, the best marketers in the world know exactly what those mental models are. And they're so intimate with them that they know how to kind of almost like. It's a weird metaphor, but almost like tickle them or expand them, right? Kind of play with people's mental models in a way that's stimulating enough, but not so hard, right. That they're actually hurting that person's mental models. Right? That's why the idea of tickling, it's like it's just enough to kind of stimulate and animate the person, but it's not enough to really, like, mess with those person's idea. So what do I mean by this, to make it concrete? Because I know this is super abstract. So the initial idea is that we are powerful beings, from the time we are born, from the education we grew up in, are caretakers who may not know better. So this is saying already you are whole, perfect, complete. You are an amazing being. You are a powerful being. You have more potential inside of you than anyone else. Now this is a personal development market with a lot of crossover to spirituality. Many people believe this, but particularly in this market, this idea and sentiment that you already are whole, perfect and complete, and the desire to be better and the desire that you have potential that's latent within you, that we can then stimulate are all very congruent beliefs. Those beliefs slide down easy because you're confirming their worldview, right? I think it's Blair Warren who basically says people do anything for those who throw rocks at their enemies. Whatever, whatever. There's a bunch of it, right. I have some expanded versions so I'll talk about in a second. Okay. The point is you're confirming their worldview and when you confirm that worldview, it animates people. It feels like a yes and it goes down easy and then they like you more because you're confirming that. The next thing is, look at this metaphor here, right? This is an example of what I'm going to call magical thinking. We're going to hit that in just a second. But it's very, very important. So this idea of take on negative programming. So programming is basically a metaphor, but most people are watching this have no idea. I don't really understand how programming works, right. I have a very surface understanding of it. Most people do not understand programming, but programming is a certain kind of meme or a certain kind of metaphor that has latched on and in culture that people have an idea for it, right? And basically it's using the metaphor of the brain like a computer where it just is running these different types of programs where something is done to you externally and sort of in like this mechanistic way. So this idea that these external forces have programmed you, that's a very, very easy congruent metaphor that they understand. And at the same time there's this element of victimization that's in here, right, where people did this to you. And again, what I really like about this is that it doesn't take a firm stance. It uses maybe, which is really, really powerful because if it just came out and said your education system fucked you up, some people may not agree with that, right? But if it just said your parents fucked you up, some people may not agree with that, right? Or if people believe that their parents did fuck them up but it wasn't their fault, well, we hit that one as well. But probably, probably somebody believes in general that education, parents or caretakers are, whether they did it purposefully or not, did negative programming on us. So it's a very open ended sort of worldview that's congruent with a lot of what they say. So there's a bunch of things that we have in here. One is you are whole, perfect and complete as is. That's what it implies. Two, you have more power than, you know, potential latent abilities. Three you were victimized. Four, it happened through negative programming. And you have to understand that, like people always are not responding to specific words. Like I said, most people don't even really understand how programming works. They're responding to an overall feel or sensation. Something happened to me that forces and causes me to do something outside of my control. And again, this is the most basic paragraph, right? I mean, the reading level is like, what, what are we going to guess? Six or seven? I'm gonna guess six. Whoa. Okay. Shows you what I know. Maybe it's the colon. It doesn't really seem like it's a post grad, but whatever. The point is it's quite simple language when you break down each piece. But these are what's going on underneath the surface. And that stuff is super, super powerful. And it may not seem like it's all that impressive, but the, you know, most copywriting and most marketing goes wrong by trying to do too much and making mistakes that are going to conflict against people's worldview. So let's keep going here. Let's see, there's some other funny moves that are interesting. So what is an altered state of consciousness? Our consciousness actually operates at different frequencies. And you can measure this using a scientific device called an EEG machine. So there's a lot of blending of some of the spiritual with the scientific. Is it quite true that an EEG machine measures consciousness? Not quite, but it's an easy enough connection to people and it verifies it and validates it. Then we have beta, which is where we go into our job. And then we have alpha. And here's something that's really interesting as type of proof. There are over 15,000 studies today that show that being relaxed actually improves your health and, well, being. This is kind of a nothing sentence, basically. Just there's probably a bunch of studies that show meditation is good for you, which really doesn't hit his main point, which is about going into some beta state and unlocking telepathic abilities or something like that. Right. And to be fair, that's not what's being said here. But you want to pay attention to what people hear versus what people say, right? So as they're processing and hearing this information, they're starting to think, okay, whatever this guy is talking about, I may not understand it perfectly, but there's a lot of studies that kind of support it. And there's brainwaves and it seems solidified and concrete. This is the Eureka. We have an anecdote on here. Here's another famous one. Cool. The Other element that I think is interesting in here as well, which we'll talk about is people love states, People love types, right? They love types. So as you can see this idea that there's a delta type, a theta type, things like that, types work all the time. I mean, if you look in astrology, that's what people love. They love to be organized and put into types, or they love to have their world categorize and organize into types. There were a bunch of magnesium products back in the day talking about seven types of magnesium or full spectrum magnesium with 10 types of magnesium. This magnesium does this, this magnesium does this, this magnesium does that. I'm trying to think of some other, some other types of examples, Not too sure, but, but in general, the human mind really likes these categories, for example, alpha, beta, delta, things like that. And so this is also congruent with a lot of people's worldview. And it's dripping in all types of different proof, right? We have specific anecdotes from famous people. We have testable proof, right? People kind of understand meditators and monks are in this type of state. And we also have the studies and things like that. So I thought this section was, was, was super well done. It's clear people can understand it, et cetera. So let's start to look now at this sort of section three and see what we got with that.

Crazy serendipities occur help you bring in higher intelligence to help you solve the most difficult problems. He also created the three scenes technique to help you see your life unfolding something different. It almost seems like these people who are trained to access Delta can bend reality. Jose Silva went on to create this incredible movement called the Silver Mind Control Movement. It was one of the first, first personal growth programs in America. His book the Silver Mind Control Method sold millions upon millions of copies. Everyone from opera singer Margaretta Piazza to the Chicago White Sox spoke about how Silva techniques were allowing them to improve their skill on stage. On the ball field. Silva went deep into pioneering new techniques including the centering exercise to rapidly take you into the alpha level. And then he created techniques to amplify focus, creativity and intuition. His mental video technique, which he created in the mid-1990s as he's laid his deathbed, was designed to help you bring in higher intelligence to help you solve the most difficult problems. He also created the three scenes technique to help you see your life unfold and manifest your deepest desires. His case working technique was designed method gru. Of course there were skeptics and newspaper absolutely mobbed by people filled with.

Interesting. So now we're breaking down a bunch of different types on here. Let's keep going. This is the craziest story of all. Just talking about Richard Bach who wrote Jonathan Livingston Siegel. What I really like too is kind of tying himself back into it. It helps us kind of get access. So talking about like, you know, showing a picture with Helen Hasdale and then also. I guarantee, hopefully he has a picture with this Jonathan Livingston sequel. Guy.

Your own mind. Now, are you ready for this? Because this is the crate and on this cover you go this Time magazine is from the COVID of Time magazine. Because his book copies. But here's the thing. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar magazine, Richard Back said that this book had been sitting in his basement for years until he took a silver class. And as he went into his alpha level of mind, the final closing chapter of the book came together. He was able to complete the book, submit it, and it became one of the best selling books on of his generation, putting him on the COVID of Time magazine. I interviewed his daughter to validate it and sure enough, Back's daughter confirmed the story saying that her father had the manuscript for five years in their basement. She also said that her father would come back from these classes, sit down with her and teach her techniques. And now she understood that these were silver techniques. Before I show you how to change your, your mind, to change your life, let me first say my name is Vishen.

Yeah, I gotta say it's a pretty unorthodox way of breaking this down, right? There's a lot of stories and a lot of proof that's in here. There's not really a lot of promises or direct use statements. It's sort of all talking about this. The other thing that I find a little bit interesting is like, you know, if I were to write this, I'd be like, as soon as I introduce the book, I know people are going to be like, oh, let me just close this out and go buy this book on Amazon. That sounds cool. I didn't know who Jose Silva was and there's not really any sort of open loops about well, stick around and watch this and things like that. And yet again, this thing crushed. So it just shows you like there's so many different ways to approach this. And principles are principles, but they're not hard and fast rules. So now we go into his personal transformation story. I also have to say, of course he's really good on camera. You feel connected to him, which is awesome. Now we're Going into the silver mind control techniques, advanced techniques. Here's another story. Cool goes through bonuses and things like that. I think there's a lot of interesting things that you can pull out from here. But I guess what I want to kind of spend a little bit more time on is kind of going back to some of this stuff because I think that this is really the most important. There's tons of anecdotes and tons of proof. He has his personal story as well, which I think is interesting. And I think the offer itself is kind of cool and of course, whatever. But if I had to say that the three things that are really making this work is just the bombardment of proof through anecdotes, through stories, through photos, through things like that. And then I also think this sort of mechanism in here is some of the most important. So I'm going to break this down a little bit more. The keys that I wanted to point out is this idea of what I call magical thinking. It's very similar to this idea about understanding kind of the worldview that people have already naturally and trying to come up with something that's congruent with it. And you'll see as you go through this process that they go through the vsl, they talk about this idea of releasing breaks, talk about this idea of accessing limited portions of mind, talk about this idea of opening up everything else in the, in the brain. So this super powerful idea, this mechanism of you have something that's locked up and we're going to release it so you can access it is super, super, super, super powerful. Whenever you're coming up with mechanisms or metaphors, you want them to have. Sorry. Whenever you're coming up with mechanisms, typically most mechanisms have some sort of metaphorical aspect to it, some sort of visual, some sort of feeling, some sort of something to it, right? You could talk about something that's icy, that's going to make something hot cool down. You could talk about something, you know, your gut being stuck and you talk about something that flushes it out. Or in this case we're using a mechanical metaphor of you're trying to go through life feeling stuck and feeling sluggish. This is going to release the brakes, right? Or this is going to unlock and release hidden potential. And these things seem so subtle. But you know, you could compare it to the idea of, I think a mechanism that would be like you're going to, let's say, Let's say for example, you're going to freeze or you're going to heat up your.

Yeah.

Heat up your courage, right? Your courage gland or something like that, right? You're going to increase. Increase what it is. Now, I've seen mechanisms like this that violate my rules and they end up working just fine. But I would compare this idea of people don't feel like their courage gland is cold and frozen, right? But they do feel like there's something that's stuck within them. So the metaphors that you use for your mechanisms are so, so key. And again, I. It's really basic stuff, but I don't see people always execute this 100%. And the reason I call this magical thinking is because really, when you dig in too deep into it, it's not that sophisticated, right? People are using big sketches or big, large shorthand to understand their worldviews. So it's not about being super sophisticated. It's really about understanding what is the sketch that people have of their worldview. And so if their sketch is that something is stuck within me, then you're going to want to talk about releasing it. We already talked about this idea that people like types of things, so types of brain states, alpha beta, delta, people like that kind of stuff. And then of course, we talk about simple kind of mechanisms like programming or other things people understand like cortisol or inflammation or leaky gut. These are types of metaphors that just persist, right? These are explanations that persist in popular culture and in the minds of other people. And it's really important. Every market has these, right? Any market that deals in health typically has some idea about inflammation or cortisol. And so using those in your mechanism and in your process are always super, super key. Okay? The other notes I see is that there's a low reading level. This guy here, he comes off as sort of everyman, right? He's a very successful person. But if you read his story, I was 26, you know, my timing sucked, I lost my savings, I lost the job. I was dialing for dollars. I mean, let's be clear here. This guy is 20 years old, living in San Francisco in the tech world, right? He probably was doing all right for himself quite well. But the way everything is painted here. And again, I don't know his exact story, but the way it was painted here is like, this guy is the everyman, as much of a loser as you possibly can, which again, is quite powerful. And we see that here, the everyman, the loser status, this idea of kind of being the underdog. The other thing I said is just tons and tons of proof points. Like, really this thing is just dripping in proof, as far as I can see, that's the only reason why this thing works. This is just so much proof all throughout, both in terms of the anecdotes and in terms of like, hey, I talked to this person's daughter, so I know personally what's going on. And then of course there are named techniques that are tangible, et cetera. Right? So types of exercise, the mental screen, what was the other one like the, the television or the video method, all those type of things on there. Okay, this right here that you'll see is a really powerful kind of breakdown. This is personally what I use when I want to break down vsl. It's what I call the reverse brief. We have a bot inside of Genesis that will do it for you. But you can see the breakdown in here. Basically, it's going to look at your target market. It's going to look at the specific product details that we have. It's going to look at the mechanism of the problem. So we are powerful beings with inherent human abilities. But from birth, through education, we are losing that programming. We use only a limited portion of the faculties. Our minds program beliefs and ideas that are holding, holding me back. This is about a technique that teaches people to access these different brain frequencies by using mental resistance. More mental power flows through the specific techniques. Mental screen centering, whatever are layered into consciousness through word for word scripts and reprogram mental activities. Okay. This other idea too, that it's all done through these mental scripts is really, really powerful. Right, because it kind of reduces the need for error as well as effort. You just follow the different scripts and techniques and. And boom, everything is done here. We have characterizations, which are nicknames, types of hooks, metaphors. We have the background. Here. We have what I call the trigger, the inciting incident. Cool. What I like about this process too, I encourage you guys to kind of read through it. You'll see some of the beats. There's basically the beats of a VSL that I think are really, really important. They're just like the beats in a movie that typically are not cliches but just moments that happen. Right? Frodo meeting Gandalf versus Luke meeting Yoda. That's like meeting the guru. And again, you'll have experiences like that on here, copies the same way. So you can see some of the beats that we're on here and you can see some of the stuff that's missing as we go through some of this stuff. So that's pretty powerful. I'll also put the raw transcript as well. As the broken down organized transcript. And then I'll put the link on here as well so that anyone who wants it, you can access it. All you got to do is just click through join the email list and I'll send it to you. And then you can unsubscribe if you want to, whichever you want. But that's the best way to get access to this type of stuff. Overall, I encourage you to watch watch it through. But I really think if you're going to go through and study this type of stuff, I'd personally just kind of look through the different sections, look through the structure that you have here and then look through all the different beats that I lay down on here. And that's going to give you a really clear understanding of what's going on. But overall, this thing absolutely crushed. It's 1,000% worth studying. And I think if I had to highlight it and bring it down to anything, it's the power of the mechanism being congruent with a worldview, telling people what stuff that they want to hear but then framing it with just so much insane amounts of proof. And then of course a great offer that just kind of is, is. Is flexible, allows you to do whatever it is that you want. Also a good lesson that, you know, we learn structures and we learn techniques and we learn flows. Those don't always apply. So you have to be open minded as you go through this. Let me know in the comments below how you like this video and how you want me to do. If you want me to do more breakdowns and how you like me to do them, I'm happy to go through and watch the entire thing and comment on it or, or to give you access to resources like this where you can kind of look through some of the techniques yourself. So that's all. I have more videos to come and I appreciate you watching every single time. Thank you.