Standing in the surf with my boys at South Padre Island, I took this photo this week.
In the conclusion of Return to Real, I write about two photographs of my boys taken seven years apart…
Both walking down a winding path.
In the first, they’re three and five years old, holding hands, wearing boots that look too big for their feet.
In the second, they’re ten and twelve. Much taller. And decidedly not holding hands.
As I share in the conclusion:
Life is made up of windows. Windows open. Windows close. But windows do not last forever. You blink, and the window closes.
My boys may be beyond the age of holding hands…
But this photo reminds me of a time they still did.
* * *
As I wrote in last week’s [Issue #096] Ramen Noodles, AI Robots, and the Rio Grande Valley…
This week, the family and I took a trip to South Texas to visit Tylene’s parents…
It turned out to be a trip down memory lane… For two different reasons.
(One of which is potentially important for YOU…)
1 | Memory Lane #1: Brownsville, TX
Sights and sounds of the Rio Grande Valley: the iconic South Padre Island water tower; a steaming bowl of menudo; a Laughing Gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) on the beach looking for snacks; and of course — no Mexican family is complete without a chihuahua whose tongue permanently hangs out :-)
We took the boys to see the very first apartment Tylene and I lived in after coming back to the US from China back in 2009.
A tiny place in Brownsville, Texas, long before Elon Musk set up shop with SpaceX down the road…
2 | Memory Lane #2: A Conversation With One of My Oldest Active Clients...
The second trip down memory lane this week was a conversation with one of my oldest clients still active in business today…
(This one has to do with YOU…)
His name is Ron Reich.
That’s a photo of us from a few years ago. (The “kid” on the left is a much younger, pre-beard Ryan)
Ron and I started working together way back in 2012.
Prior to launching The ASK Method Company, after building my orchid care business, I helped Ron grow a very successful information product business in the relationship space, and later launch a second successful business in the dog training market.
In the process of working together, I got to know Ron’s work ethic and his discipline, in addition to his skill and talent as a marketer (not to mention his integrity as a standup guy.)
So, about a decade ago, when I made the decision to launch The ASK Method Company, I hired Ron as my first ever Product Launch Manager and eventually Director of Marketing.
(That story alone is one l have to tell you one of these days…)
Ron has gone onto build several businesses since then, and as part of his latest business, is hosting an upcoming multi-day intensive for teaching what he sees as the “new” way to launch products in a post-AI world…
Ron asked me to come on and teach what I think is coming for product launches through the lens of the Return to Real …
Including what I think are the most important tactical moves to be making in light of how the launch landscape is radically changing…
BTW – If you’d like to learn more about the Product Launch intensive Ron is hosting, you can check it out here.
What follows is the most compressed version I can give you of what Ron and I talked about in our conversation, including a handful of moves you can begin making immediately.
First, let me set the stage…
3 | Dopamine vs. Oxytocin: Why the "Old Way" of Launching No Longer Works the Way it Once Did...
For the past two decades, the launch playbook has run on dopamine.
Urgency. Scarcity. Countdown timers. Push notifications. The “red-notification-circle” arms race for attention.
It’s a strategy that worked. Until it didn’t.
In fact, that “old style” of launching is now largely obsolete.
And it is obsolete for at least two major reasons:
First, buyers are numb. They’ve seen every variation of the script too many times to feel anything when your timer counts down and your launch follows the same old predictable path…
Second, AI automation makes every dopamine tactic infinitely cheap to replicate. Anyone can generate a slick looking launch page with a “countdown timer sequence” in a matter of seconds…
It’s no longer a point of differentiation.
So what’s the answer?
I believe the next big edge in launching is optimizing for oxytocin — the neurochemical of trust, connection, and real human bonding.
I describe this in Return to Real as “The Oxytocin Advantage.”
As I write:
If we spent the last decade optimizing for dopamine: clicks, likes, swipes, streams. The next decade belongs to oxytocin: presence, intimacy, and trust.
Because in an age where everything can be faked by AI, what can’t be faked becomes the most powerful way to differentiate yourself…
Which brings us to…
4 | A Major Macro Shift & The Strangest Piece of Software I Discovered this Week
If you don’t believe me on this, take it from a guy whose entire job is to monitor the front lines of culture and content.
On December 31st of last year, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, posted a 20-slide year-end memo. The whole thing is worth a read, but slide 10 is the one most worth paying attention to. Mosseri writes:
In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal.
— Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram
Or to put it in terms of the Return to Real framework I’ve been working on for the past three years…
We spent the last decade figuring out what makes something perfect. We’ll spend the next decade figuring out what makes something real.
— Ryan Levesque, Return to Real
(Feel free to quote me on that one.)
I believe this is where launches are going.
I believe this is where everything is going…
In fact, I came across a piece of software this week that is so crazy I originally thought was a joke (it’s not).
There is now technology that exists for the sole purpose of making your “perfect” AI-generated content sound more (wait for it…)
“Real.”
Check it out…
It’s called Sinceerly.com. Quite literally an AI tool whose job is to make AI writing sound human. It strips out the em dashes. Removes the “it’s not x, it’s y” antithesis phrasing AI overuses.
And get this:
It actually adds strategically-placed typos.
(Their tagline: “Humans make mistkaes.”)
I’m not making this up.
We’ve reached the moment where AI is being used to generate content, and additional AI is being used to make that content look like it wasn’t generated by AI.
Which means there’s a brand new problem emerging that we now have to solve.
We’re going to have to learn how to differentiate “fake real” from “real real.”
So if REAL is the new edge (and if real can now be faked), what does that mean for how to actually run your next product launch??
5 | Three Contrarian "Verified Human" Moves to Engineer Oxytocin Into Your Next Launch...
Ron asked me to put together a guide for his upcoming Launch Intensive where I layout five (5) specific “oxytocin” launch tactics…
What I describe in Return to Real as “Verified Human” moves…
Here are the three I’d start with.
1 : Write FOR a Single Human, FROM a Single Human.
Launch copy that converts best is copy that’s written BY a single, real human being FOR a single, real human being.
Not an amalgamated customer “persona” from some marketing exercise…
(Or even worse, whatever ChatGPT or Claude recently fed back to you as your customer “avatar”…)
No. Write to an actual real-life person whose fears, context, and internal dialogue you know cold.
(Literally someone in your life that you know personally. Someone whom you could take their photo and scotch tape it onto your computer screen.)
Tim Ferriss did this with The 4-Hour Workweek. He famously wrote it for two of his real-life friends, one trapped in his own startup, another sucked into a bloated banking lifestyle.
Stories are one of the few scientifically proven ways of eliciting oxytocin from afar.
But if you’re reading this right now and thinking you can’t identify an actual human in your life that fits the bill as your “one real person?”
Then you’re not ready to launch.
You don’t yet know your customer well enough.
Go find someone and come back to launch after you’ve done that.
(I wrote about this exact concept in [Issue #047] The 100, the 100,000, or The One? if you want to go deeper.)
2 : Lead with Your OWN “Embarrassing Confession”
The single most underused asset in modern launches is transparency + vulnerability.
The story that makes your stomach tighten when you consider saying it out loud?
That’s often exactly the story your audience needs to hear.
(This is the whole “being real vs. being perfect” shift Adam Mosseri at Instagram is talking about.)
In fact, this very email newsletter began with my own “Embarrassing Confession” way back in [Issue #001] in June 2024…
In that first issue, I admitted publicly that for seven years, virtually every email from our company signed with my name was actually written not by ME, but instead by one of our in-house writers…
I braced for the blowback.
Some came.
But what also came in the six months that followed was more genuine opportunity than the previous six years of my life combined…
(It also became a thread I eventually pulled on – Seek & Speak Truth – which turned into an entire chapter in Return to Real…)
The move: Sit quietly for twenty minutes before your next launch. Ask yourself what you’ve been afraid to say.
The answer?
Is probably the hook for your opening piece of launch content.
3 : Replace ONE Digital Touchpoint with a Human One.
This is the smallest, highest-leverage shift you can make.
Pick any one automated touchpoint in your launch… a welcome email, a mid-sequence nudge, a post-purchase message.
Replace it with something that requires YOUR actual presence.
A thoughtful voice memo in place of a templated email…
A live founder call in place of a pre-recorded webinar…
A small in-person dinner for your first cohort of buyers in place of a Zoom-only kickoff.
It should be something that is decidedly NOT scalable.
The fact that it doesn’t scale IS the point.
It should require real “pain and effort” to do it, because that’s exactly why your competition is NOT going to do it.
(And that’s precisely what will make you stand out.)
For example…
In that photo above, over this past week’s school break, my older son wrote a handwritten thank you note to every high school he applied to – (in addition to an email) – to express his appreciation for taking the time to consider his application.
THOUSANDS of kids apply to each of these schools each year.
Acceptance rates at some are SUB 5%.
Each admissions officer personally reviews HUNDREDS of applications.
They will receive at most a handful of cards like the ones above.
Admissions decisions are already in.
Matriculation deadlines have already passed.
This isn’t about swaying an admissions officer’s decision.
But it’s classy move.
The lesson I’ve tried to teach my boys is this:
Life is short, yes…
But life is also long.
You never know who might re-enter your life a decade or more from today.
It could be the high school admissions officer who remembers the note he received from you when you were a kid…
It could be a client you worked with 15 years ago who remembers how you impacted his life many years ago…
The move: Pick one human moment. Start there.
* * *
Okay, that’s all I got for this week!
Have a GREAT rest of your weekend…
Remember to hug the ones you love…
And until next week,
Ryan :-)
P.S. In case you’re curious…
There’s a lot more that Ron and I covered together that I’ve run out space to cover here.
In fact, I used Claude to put together a short, 4-page summary guide covering everything I shared in my “Oxytocin-Driven Launch” conversation with Ron…
The guide includes two additional oxytocin shifts I didn’t have space in this issue to unpack (plus the science behind each of these moves…)
AS WELL AS a few “Product Launch Pattern Interrupts” I think every smart launch operator should consider incorporating into their next launch…
If you’d like a copy of this mini-guide:
SEND ME AN EMAIL with the word Oxytocin (make sure you spell it right :-)) and I’ll send you a special link to access it.
No cost to you.
No opt-in required.
Consider this the prize at the bottom of the cereal box for reading all the way to the end of this week’s issue.
Sinceerly,
Ryan ;-)
