The Shocking Transformation That Broke the Internet

Max: This fat pride “watched me eat myself to death” YouTuber just shocked the entire YouTube community with a single genius marketing move. In fact, YouTube is blowing up right now with videos breaking down how he could do such a thing, with people talking about what he did and wondering if it’s all just fake or actually as genius as it looked like. Even on Google Trends, people are searching for Nikocado Avocado – they’re 100x up. So let me break down the three exact psychological triggers that are behind that very genius marketing move so you can learn from it and copy these as a business owner with a personal brand. And at the end, I’ll give you a bonus lesson that is a bit evil and can give you quite a competitive edge.

So whether you’re an online coach or a digital creator or a business owner, personal brand, faceless brand, this is going to help you reach more people, blow your brand up, and probably even go viral. So pay attention.

So for context, this YouTuber Nikocado Avocado seemingly lost over 250 lbs overnight because just 7 days prior he was still posting videos of him being fat – see videos like the Heart Attack Grill and the like. Now of course he actually didn’t lose that weight that quickly. He apparently had stockpiled 2 years worth of videos while in the background secretly losing all this weight.

The Psychology of Shock – Trigger Number One

Max: But the crazy thing about that to learn for you and me here, apart from the fact that this is a great weight loss transformation if it’s real (which I’m assuming – congratulations, you got my respect), the great thing for us to learn here are the psychological triggers that we can use for our own personal brand, which are:

Trigger number one: emotions, specifically the emotion of shock. We humans, we love feeling emotion. We love to cry at sad movies, we love to get angry at the news, we love to laugh at funny movies. So the predominant emotion we’re feeling here with this crazy from one day to the other transformation is shock.

Right now, sure, he could have also documented his weight loss journey over the last two years and, you know, weekly updates and so on and so forth, but the emotion of shock would have been missing. And to be quite frankly, that documentation over two years would have been interesting too, but in today’s short attention span, he would have been very likely to lose a lot of people and slip into irrelevancy because people would literally have to follow for two full years to get the payoff of all the weight loss. So instead he said, “Let me do a backlog and just make everybody think I’m fat and then boom boom, lost all the weight.” Great stuff.

Now the lesson for you to learn here is: how can you shock people out of their dull state? That dull state that people are feeling – they’re watching your videos while they’re waiting for their Uber, while they’re commuting, while they’re sitting on the toilet. Nobody sits down and says, “I’m going to watch XYZ’s videos now.” It’s more of a scroll activity where people are just dull, and shock emotions can get people out of that dull state and get you – get people to watch your stuff. Great example of that is Andrew Tate. You can love him, you can hate him, disagree or agree with him, but we can all agree that he’s quite shocking with his crazy things like “women are property,” “I bought my Bugatti,” la dah. He knows how to play that extremely well.

The Curiosity Factor – Trigger Number Two

Max: Now number two psychological trigger is actually even more interesting because it really adheres to something deep within us, and that is curiosity. We humans are a very, very curious species. I mean, we value curiosity over our own personal safety. I mean, that’s why people are going cave exploring or wreck diving and all these crazy things, because we’re curious. We want to see what it’s all about, right?

So by him seemingly losing weight overnight, Nikocado Avocado is making us really confused. We’re curious – is this real? Is it AI? What sort of fat transformation thingy has he done to lose all this weight? I mean, the Google Trends search for “Nikocado Avocado weight loss” is going viral right now.

So here’s your lesson: ask yourself, how can you create curiosity for your brand or for your product? How can you make people talk about it, right? We’ve just given the example of Andrew Tate – shock value, people talk about it. But also people that are very funny, like Khaby Lame – this is very funny stuff, let me share it with my buddies so we all have a laugh together.

Or Max Torow here, for example – one of the things that I really have going for me is that on the surface level, I don’t look like a business consultant, right? I have all these nerdy rockstar tattoos, so to speak. So people see that and they’re like, “Ah, he’s probably some brainless heavy metal fan man who loves playing video games.” But then they see, “Oh my God, he’s got all these awards, he’s a business owner, he’s made millions of dollars.” So I have the educational part in it in my brand, and that catches people off guard and that creates curiosity.

The Hero’s Journey – Trigger Number Three

Max: Now the third psychological trigger is my favorite one because it literally made me a millionaire at age 26 with my first business in the dating advice and personal development coaching niche, and that third trigger is what we call the hero story trigger. People want to be entertained, they want to have their emotions spike, and they want to be inspired by someone’s hero story. And that’s what he’s embodying with this crazy transformation. People are watching this and they’re saying, “I’m super inspired by this weight loss story. I want to know more about the crazy ways that this guy has achieved this end result.”

So you got to ask yourself here: what can you learn from Nikocado Avocado’s hero story, hero journey, and how can you make yours more interesting?

So let’s say, for example, you’re a fitness coach, right? And you’re like, “Well, I’ve always been good with fitness.” Woo, boring hero story. But if you say, “Listen, I used to be super overweight, I used to be bullied in school, and look at me now, I’m super duper shredded.”

Or business consultant: “I know business well because I am smart.” Boring. But if you say, “Listen, I come from a 5,000 people cow town in the middle of the Austrian Alps. In fact, we have more cows there than humans. And then I grew up there and I realized there’s got to be more to life than going to school, going to work, and then retiring and then dying. I wanted to see the world, I wanted to do crazy things, even though everybody was making fun of me for that in my small village. So I set out to the US, I learned from my mentors, I worked 12 entire months for free, and then I started making money and I made my first business, first million age 26,” and so and so forth. That’s my hero story – that’s very, very interesting.

Now granted, it doesn’t sound interesting to everyone, but I make it packaged as interesting as possible. All right, so ask yourself: what parts of your journey can you package in an interesting way?

The Evil Genius Behind the Madness

Max: And that leads me to the absolute bonus lesson that is, quite frankly, a little evil. I actually think that a lot of content creators out there that we’re looking down upon for just being funny or crazy or doing stupid things are a lot smarter than they look.

Just think about the things that Nikocado Avocado has been saying in his weight loss reveal video. He called it a social experiment. He called us viewers “unwell, unbalanced, and disoriented beings in search of stories,” and therefore becoming “a product of influence.” “I feel as if my life has been positioned to where I’m monitoring ants on an ant farm. Just look at all these consumers.”

So on a surface level, he seems innocuous, almost crazy in a very innocent way, when in reality he’s pretty freaking genius.

So you got to ask yourself: in today’s world where social media is everywhere and it’s not going to go anywhere in the next 20, 30 years, are you going to be on the consuming side, mindlessly scrolling through social media every single day as a first thing to do in the morning, or are you going to be on the creating side?

Every single person on Earth, most importantly business owners, are going to need a personal brand in the future. Mark my words, I’m predicting that if you say social media is something I’m not interested in, you’re going to lose out big time to people that are interested in it. So make sure you understand branding, marketing, and I hope this video helped you.

And hey, if you want to learn more on what to post, what the strategy behind that is, go check out this video. Watch it now and I’ll see you there.