the #1 most important question in copy (not what you think)

25 years ago, two men graduated from the same college. They had the same grades, same iq, same personality. Heck, they even looked the same. But fast Forward to their 25 year reunion and one is running the entire company as president, while the other one is managing a tiny department inside that company. Same starting point, wildly different destinations. And it wasn't because of their talent, their hustle, or their drive. Instead, it all came down to one thing. What made the difference? The answer to that one question literally spawned the entire Wall Street Journal empire, generating them an extra $2 billion in revenue and becoming what experts now call the most successful sales letter of all time. One that ran virtually unchanged from 1975 to 2003. But here's the crazy part. It wasn't the answer that made it legendary. No, it was the question itself. It was a specific type of question that I call dumb toddler questions. Although as you'll see by the end of this video, they're anything but dumb. In fact, these questions may be one of the most powerful yet simple marketing tools that you'll ever wield. Because throughout history they've been responsible for literally billions in sales and yet most marketers and business owners still have no clue about them. For example, have you ever heard of the eight figure language brand pimsleur? Well, the original VSL or sales letter that it was built on incorporated one of these questions. Meanwhile, there are countless other offers online crushing it right now that use these questions. And even my own copy, which has gone on to generate over $100 million in sales, has used these questions over and over and over again. And today I'm going to peel back the curtain and show you exactly what these questions are in excruciating detail. Show you how you can use them to generate money for your business or your client's business and explain why they're so devastatingly effective. So you basically develop a superpower that you can use over and over and over again. Now, this is stuff that's never been shared outside of my $5,000 per year copy program. And I guarantee this is the first and probably only place that you're going to hear about these questions at this level of detail. But I'm not just going to break down what these questions are. In fact, by the end of this video, I'm also going to literally hand you a never before seen list of 500 of these different types of questions from across 100 different niches like photography, gardening, supplements, and more. If you do any kind of business, chances are your niche will be on this list, and you'll have an entire set of questions that you can go and bring to market, literally starting today. I'm also going to show you a bot that can generate infinite variations of these questions on command, which means you can use them for sales, letters, email campaigns, social ads, vsl, or any other marketing that you want to do. So let's not waste another second, and let's dive in and show you how these questions work. So what is this type of question that I'm talking about? Well, I started this video by calling them dumb toggle questions. And the reason why is because they almost always start with the word why, why, why, why? Just like a curious kid who won't stop asking questions. Now, the technical term for these types of questions is paradoxical questions, otherwise known as reality's greatest plot twists. And before I go ahead and give you a formal definition of these, let me just start by showing you some examples. Example number one. Why is it so hard for an adult to learn a new language when young children have no problem learning multiple languages naturally? Example number two. How are these 2,500-year-old teeth perfectly preserved after millennia in the dirt? Meanwhile, our teeth are practically rotting inside our head, even with today's modern dentistry. Or here's another these two dogs are the exact same age, eat the same food, ex, have the same genetics, yet one has gray fur and can barely hobble up the stairs. Meanwhile, the other plays like a puppy. What makes the difference? Now, if you hear these questions and you immediately start rushing to try to answer them in your head, good. That means that these questions are doing exactly what they're designed to do. Because when you hear them, your mind literally cannot help but start racing for solutions, trying to figure it out, trying to fill in the curiosity gap that the questions cause. And that's what makes them so damn powerful. Because using these questions goes way beyond just grabbing attention. Instead, they're about peer engagement. It's about getting your prospect hooked up, trying to solve these questions, and starting to interact with your marketing rather than just passively consuming it. A paradoxical question can be defined as any question that points out some contradiction in your prospect's mental model. It's something that feels intuitively true and makes them go, hmm, yeah, why is that? In other words, it highlights how reality works differently than we'd expect, challenging our mental models of how the world operates. These questions expose the gaps that we all have in our simplified maps of reality versus the complex territory that they're trying to represent. And it's in these gaps where you can insert new marketing messages, new beliefs, new behaviors, and. And ultimately conversions. I still remember the first time I ever encountered a paradoxical question. It was when I was a kid and I was sitting in this old delicatessen back in the suburbs of Chicago, and my mom was excitedly explaining to me why Rosetta Stone was now defunct. Bullshit when it comes to learning languages. And in fact, the new way we were all about to learn Spanish and go backpacking through Barcelona was by using this program called pimsleur Language Learning Method. And to this day, I can still remember how she explained it to me. She said, this is built around one single idea. The answer to this question, why is it so easy for kids to learn language when it's so much harder for adults? She explained that the answer was that kids learn through learning and absorption, while adults are trying to learn a language through structured grammar and workbooks. So what if we just applied the same natural way that kids learn languages and try to use that to learn languages as adult? In other words, if we just listen to somebody saying, donde esta el mano? Over and over and over again, we too would become fluent in Spanish. Now, the reality is, is that none of us became fluent in Spanish. And I don't think that that answer about just trying to learn the way that kids do is actually the right solution to learning the language. But here's the thing. Whatever is true actually does not matter. What matters is this question and how viral, memorable, and spreadable that one idea was, because that one simple question that my mom encountered, she heard it one time, and it triggered a buying decision. Then she goes ahead and sends that over to me, and now, 20 years later, it's still rattling around in my head. Do you have any idea the statistical odds of that? Is think about how much we're bombarded by advertising. Things that our friends and family say, our own thoughts, things we read, things we see on tv. There is so much information coursing through our minds. So for one piece of information, marketing, out of all things to stick in someone's mind, for them to transmit that to another mind and have that stick inside their brain for 20 years is insanely ridiculous. Are you starting to see why these questions are so. So powerful? Now imagine my surprise when I get into copywriting years later, and I learned that this question wasn't just something that someone pulled out of their ass. Instead, it was meticulously designed and crafted by a copywriter named Chris Haddad. And Chris is probably one of the greatest copywriters and definitely one of the best emotional copywriters of all time. And he understood the power of these questions, using them to become the literal backbone of the sales process for pimsleur language learning method, which went on to sell for millions and millions of dollars. Now, in order for you to understand how these questions work, let me give you one more example. This is probably one of the best examples of a paradoxical question in a sales letter and probably one of the best openings in copy that I've ever seen. It comes from my original mentor, Stefan Georgi, who is obsessive about paradoxical questions and drilled this into my head so you can thank him for this video today. Now let me read the opening to this sales letter, which is probably the best thing that I think he ever wrote. Scientists at the prestigious National Cancer Research Institute in Spain didn't set out to find the secret to human immortality. Instead, they were trying to answer a simple question. Why do some animals have such longer lifespans than others? They knew it didn't have anything to do with the animal size. Because while bowhead whales routinely lived over 200 years of age, humpback whales, which are almost exactly the same size, only lived to be about 50 years old. Plus, if being larger meant that you live longer, how do you explain the fact that hand sized quahog clams were routinely live to the ripe age of 500? Or that tiny sea urchins live to be over 250 years of age when on average humans only live to be 79? Or how do you explain the so called immortal jellyfish? This type of jellyfish that thrives in the water of the Mediterranean Pacific and that has been found to literally age in reverse. We humans have always thought that living to 140, 170 or even 200 is nothing but fantasy. But when these Spanish scientists turned their eyes to the natural world, they couldn't help but notice dozens of animals that routinely live three times, five times, and even seven times longer than humans do. And they couldn't help but wonder, to them themselves, is the secret to immortality buried inside their cells? Now, no matter what kind of business owner you are or what kind of copy that you use in your business, you cannot help but be entranced or enamored by copy like that. And I think it's some of the best copy I've ever read. The reason it's working is a lot of different reasons, but right at the beating center of it is a remarkable paradoxical question. One that is so simple. Why do some animals live longer than others? But again, this paradoxical question built the opening for this sales letter that went on to sell millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of good. So I hope that you're seeing and understand how powerful these questions are and why it's so important to master them. The reason why paradoxical questions are so powerful is that our brains literally crave resolution when they experience any kind of cognitive tension. It is hardwired into us. When something contradicts our existing mental model of the world, we can't just explain it away. Our brains have to understand why. And it's this itch for resolution that creates instant engagement that makes stuff stick in your head. The greatest filmmakers understood this at a deep level. Watch any film from David lynch or Stanley Kubrick or Park Chan Wook, which, when you watch Oldboy or Eraserhead at the beating heart of all those movies, is mystery. People are wired to discover insights. Something is going to change how we see the world. And that's exactly what paradoxical questions do. So let me explain how paradoxical questions work so you can know how to generate them for your own marketing and use them for whatever you're doing. Like I said, everybody has a mental model of how the world works. But the map is not the same as the territory. We're all walking around with little mini maps in our mind about how the world works. But the thing is that these maps are all incomplete. There's little places that haven't been fully shaded in or borders that aren't clearly marked, towns that have popped up that we don't know anything about. There's all these nuances and things in our mental models that are completely missing. And good marketing exploits that. Because when you can identify and communicate gaps in people's maps of the world, their worldviews and their understanding, that's where you can insert new understanding, new insight, and gain some level of mind shift. So all paradoxical questions begin with something I call an unstoppable fact. This is something that contradicts your prospect's mental model of the world and creates cognitive dissonance, but something that they still have to accept as true. There's a couple ways to do this. One, you can start with something that they already know. Like kids learn language pretty easily, or your breath tends to stink more in the morning, or some people seem to have faster metabolisms. Or you can introduce a brand new fact like, hey, here's a pair of ancient teeth that look better than modern ones. Or nobody really knows why certain animals live so much longer than others. Regardless which one you Use. The goal is to find an unstoppable fact that creates a wrinkle in their mental model. And let me quickly show you four types of ways that you can do this. First, for example, let's say we have a map that says, hey, A always causes B. But now we're going to talk and introduce some hidden variables. So now it's not just A that causes B, but A and C that causes B. And as long as you don't know that C exists, you could be missing out on something really, really important. And this is exactly how the Wall Street Journal ad that we started, this video works. You have two guys that are completely identical. They have the same haircut, same genetics, same college, same iq, same grades, same everything, but they have drastically different results. And what this ad does is, is it points to a hidden variable that you didn't expect. One guy reads the Wall Street Journal, and that's what propels him to become the president of the company. Meanwhile, the other guy's floundering away under fluorescent lights. The second type is something that's called pattern breaks. This is just where you observe certain kind of patterns that repeat. For example, we might think the bigger an animal is, the longer it lives. In general, this pattern is true, but all we have to do is find a couple contradictions to it. Like small animals that live longer than their bigger counterparts, or an immortal jellyfish that ages backwards. As long as you find one fact, at least, that contradicts that pattern, we can start to poke holes in that model of the world. Or here's another one. People seem to think that the more input you have, the more output you get, which just makes sense. Like, the more steps you take, the farther you're going to get. But reality doesn't always work like that. So you could ask a paradoxical question, like, why does working longer hours tend to lead to getting less work done? In this case, more input or longer hours does not result in more output or more work getting done. And one of the last things you could do is you can look at the context. So, for example, you could say, why do these 2,500-year-old teeth look better than modern ones? Or, why does this tribe with zero dental care still have perfect teeth? The point is, you're looking at the environment as this sort of hidden factor that changes everything. And while it might be easy to get bogged down in the technicals of the four types that I just shared, the point is, you don't have to know what those types are. All you have to do Is understand that you're looking for an unstoppable fact that contradicts your prospect's mental model of the world. Something that violates normal cause and effect, or environmental factors that change everything, or patterns that hold true most of the time, but break down in interesting ways. So here's what you got to do if you want to come up with your own paradoxical questions. One, just start paying attention to known facts that are in your market. For example, in weight loss, everyone knows that one friend can crush pasta and pizza and never seem to gain a pound. So you could use that as the basis for one of your questions, like why do some people seem to be able to eat whatever they want and never gain weight? You can also start collecting new facts that you can introduce to your market. And the way to do this is to follow people who are a little bit ahead of the curve. So, thinkers who might be a little bit unorthodox, a little bit outside the mainstream, but are just one to two steps ahead of what everyone else believes. Those are really, really good signals for contradictory ideas that might challenge your prospect's model of the world. Now, once you have those facts, you can just start thinking about how those could create wrinkles in your market's mental maps. For example, look for situations that have the same starting conditions but radically different outcomes. Then link the hidden variable that causes those radically different outcomes directly to your product, just like happened in the Wall Street Journal. Or you can find where common sense falls apart. We're doing more of something, doesn't get more results. Or again, how the context can flip everything on its head. It might be tricky at first to go through this process like a step by step algorithm, but just by knowing how powerful paradoxical questions are and knowing that they exist, that's at least half the battle. And you're already there just by watching this video. The rest of it comes down from just observing bunches of paradoxical questions across different markets until it sinks into your subconscious. And you're able to generate those at will on your own. But you can also use AI for the same process. In fact, I built a specialized bot that's inside our community where you can access it through the link below. And all you gotta do is press one button and generate instant paradoxical questions pretty much for any market. And I personally use this bot already to generate over 500 different paradoxical questions across 100 of the most popular niches online. And if you want a copy of that list, there's a place below where you can get access to it. Chances are, even if your niche is not on there, you'll find something in an adjacent niche that will inspire you to come up with a paradoxical question. And again, use this at the start of your vsl. Use it in your ads, use it in your emails, use it in your headlines, use it in your sales pitch. And I promise that will increase the selling power of your marketing. And by the way, paradoxical questions are just one of what I call these seven advanced selling keys. Selling keys that I use over and over and over again in my copy. And they're not advanced because they're hard to use. They're advanced because most marketers just never know about them, because most marketers don't talk about them. And the ones that do use these selling keys usually use them on accident. But I promise that these marketing keys can accelerate the selling power of anybody's marketing, no matter what the context is. So this is just one video in a series of seven, but I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. What do you think about paradoxical questions? What was most interesting to you about learning about them? And what paradoxical questions could you use in your own market? Drop a comment below and let me know. Thanks for geeking out with me on this stuff and thank you so much for your time and attention.