Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

To go from one state of consciousness to another…To move from an old opinion to a new…To travel from ignorance to insightand darkness to light…requires a portal.A portal is a transitionary device of sight or sound that functions as a sort of third gravitating body between the this and the that, pulling us toward itself, allowing us to bridge into the unknown from the known.Persuasion, in all its forms, requires a portal. If your goal is to educate, motivate, evangelize or sell, you're going to need a portal to succeed. Without a series of known portals at your disposal, you're just talking to yourself in the dark. A portal allows you to connect to the need being felt in the heart of your student, your employee, your convert, your customer.Portals can be colors, shapes, symbols, rituals, words, or music. The Cognoscenti will remember that I talk about portals for about 10 short minutes during the 3-day experience known as The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.Portals in literature include the red pill that takes Neo into the Matrix, the tornado that takes Dorothy into the Land of Oz, the wardrobe that takes the children into Narnia, and the rabbit hole that takes us into Wonderland.We look deeply into these and dozens of other portals – visual, literary, and musical portals – during one of the 90-minute sessions in the newest class at Wizard Academy, Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies.I'll also be sharing this 90-minute session with all our guests at the Academy Reunion on October 21. It's an avalanche of knowledge, illustrated by examples in sight and sound certain to make you dizzy.The red pill is strong, the tornado is terrifying, the wardrobe is inexplicable and the rabbit hole is deep.And there are monsters in the deep. Are you sure you're ready for Wonderland?Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies picks up exactly where the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop leaves off. Both classes are selling out faster than ever.The Wizard Academy Campus has nine buildings scattered across its Campus in various stages of construction and seven of them will be complete by the time you get here in October for the Wizard Academy reunion.The bad news is that seating limitations allow us to accept only the first 200 registrants.You snooze, you lose. You study long, you study wrong. The early bird gets the worm. Doubtless there are other platitudes and euphemisms that would be appropriate, but I'm sure you get the idea.For more information, visit WizardAcademy.org.We'll see you when you get here.Roy H. Williams

Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they’re mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.Listen to a group of physicists talk about String Theory and it will slowly dawn on you that they’re explaining the entire universe as nothing but the quivering, dancing echo of the voice of God. “Let there be light.”String Theory describes energy and matter as being composed of tiny, wiggling strands of energy that look like strings. And the pitch of a string’s vibration determines the nature of its effect.In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation… as music.Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light. The strings that make up protons vibrate at a different pitch than the strings that make up electrons. Strings composing the strong nuclear force vibrate differently than the strings composing the weak nuclear force. And electromagnetism vibrates at its own unique frequency as well.We’ve known for a while that matter is made of protons, neutrons and electrons – which are themselves made of quarks. Now String Theory comes along to whisper in our ear that quarks are made of vibrating, wiggling strings of energy that are unimaginably small. According to Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford, “If an atom were enlarged to the size of the solar system, a string would only be as large as a tree.”Greene goes on to say, “Just as different vibrational patterns or frequencies of a single cello string create what we hear as different musical notes, the different way that strings vibrate give particles their unique properties, such as mass and charge. For example, the only difference between the particles making up you and me – and the particles that transmit gravity and the other forces – is the way these tiny strings vibrate. Composed of an enormous number of these oscillating strings, the universe can be thought of as a grand, cosmic symphony.”According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the 4 dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time. We live in these 4 dimensions and know them well. But String Theory (M-Theory) describes an additional 7 dimensions beyond our ability to perceive.Suddenly the idea of an invisible world isn’t quite so hard to believe.Physicist David Gross of the University of California in Santa Barbara says, “It’s as if we’ve stumbled in the dark into a house which we thought was a 2-bedroom apartment and now we’re discovering there’s a 19-room mansion at least, and maybe it’s got a thousand rooms and we’re just beginning our journey.”So what can String Theory teach us about art and advertising, journalism and truth, persuasion and seduction?Come to the inaugural session of Wizard Academy’s new class on Advanced Thought Particles and Third Gravitating Bodies and we’ll do our best to open your eyes to a whole new way of looking at communication.Read the details at WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

Last Thursday the Wall Street Journal published a story about a new book written by two of our faculty members, hinting strongly that if the biggest advertising agencies on Madison Avenue would just buy a copy and read it, they would find the answers to all the questions that have eluded them. That story was a very big deal. On Friday the Wall Street Journal bestseller list revealed Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg's Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? to be the top-ranked business book in America.Six years ago, Jeff and Bryan were regular folks. Struggling. Hopeful. Doing the best they could with limited resources.Sound familiar?Jeff came alone his first visit to Austin because the brothers had only enough money for one plane ticket. He sat in the small meeting room of our old facility with a couple dozen other people who had come for a free public seminar. Jeff and I spoke briefly that day. He shared his dream and I encouraged him. A couple of months later, Jeff was back for a 3-day class and he brought his younger brother, Bryan. They obviously grasped the essence of what Wizard Academy was teaching, so when they asked permission to expand my work and apply it to the Internet, I said, “Delighted to see you do it.” They smiled. I smiled. And in that moment I was sure of something. “Someday your company is going to be a whole lot bigger than mine,” I said. They had no company at the time.When Pennie and I launched Wizard Academy Press, the Eisenbrothers turned in a manuscript called Persuasive Online Copywriting. We published it, sold some copies on Amazon.com and kept our fingers crossed that a real publisher might take an interest and give the book brick-and-mortar distribution. It never happened.When I flew to New York to visit them in their cramped little office in the basement of an old house in Brooklyn, they showed me their fancy new coffee maker. They were really proud of it. I sipped a cup and talked about how all their hard work would someday pay off. Soon their strange, new methods began paying big dividends for clients and thousands of people began to lean forward with their hands cupped behind their ears. The Wizards of Web curriculum was born when the brothers presented us with a fabulous syllabus for a course on Internet marketing.Their second Wizard Academy Press book, Call to Action, made the bestseller lists a year ago in spite of the fact that it also had no brick-and-mortar distribution. Finally, the brick-and-mortar publishers began to take an interest. Last week's trumpeting of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, published by Thomas Nelson, couldn't possibly have made Wizard Academy more proud. Today Jeff and Bryan's client list includes many of the largest companies in the world.Craig Arthur, Chris Maddock, Michele Miller, Mike Dandridge, David Freeman, Dave Young, Holly Buchanan, Juan Tornoe, Thomas Tucker, Mark Fox, Walter Koschnitzke, Lisa Davis, Steve Rae, Jeff Sexton, Sonja Howle, Steve Clark, Michael Drew, Chuck McKay, Peter Nevland, Ron Love, Paul Finley, Clay Campbell, Sean McNally, Tim Miles, Greg Farrell and others have graduated from Wizard Academy, pursued independent research in an area of interest, created something for Wizard Academy Press, then gone on to become extremely successful.Wizard Academy throws gas on the fire and Wizard Academy Press fans the flames, but you've to provide the spark.Have you got a little fire that burns within you? If so, you, too may someday own a fancy coffee maker.And then we'll have a cup.Roy H. Williams

About 15 years ago I concluded that a medium-impact broadcast ad should be replaced only after the typical listener has heard it at least 12 times, and a low-impact ad should be replaced after achieving a frequency of 20. I arrived at these conclusions by carefully monitoring the results of radio campaigns of clients around the country.But the times have changed, and so have you and I. It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.My most current research clearly indicates that today's moderate-impact broadcast ad begins to show diminishing returns after achieving a frequency of only 8 to 10. Let a listener hear the same ad 12 times or more and you'll see clearly diminished effectiveness after achieving a frequency of 8 to 10. It appears that our brains have learned to more quickly recognize what we've heard before, and to subconsciously tune it out.Dang. This is means we've got to write 20 to 50 percent more ads in every 52-week campaign if we're going to keep our message at maximum effectiveness.One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that we still have to hear the new ad 2 or 3 times before it begins to affect us, even when we're already familiar with the advertiser in question and have a positive opinion of them. What this means is that the first week of every new series of ads will continue to yield softer results than you can expect to see in weeks two and three.Neurologically, all of this happens in the phonological loop, one of the 3 functions of Working Memory just forward of Heschl's Gyrus and Broca's area in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the left hemisphere of your brain. Broca's area is also known as Brodmann's area 44. And just interior to it is the Nucleus Accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain.Okay, I'll admit it… I said all that just to impress you. I wonder why I do that. Do you figure perhaps I'm insecure about my lack of education? Or is it just that I like to show off? I should probably give that some thought.Oh well. That's pretty much all I've got to say today.Oh! One last thing: Wizard Academy is offering a Free, Public-Sampler Seminar on Saturday afternoon, August 19 in palatial Tuscan Hall. I'll be delivering a tantalizing series of multimedia previews and teasers about each of the new, upcoming courses at Wizard Academy. It's going to be lots of fun. We won't be starting until 2 in the afternoon, so you'll have plenty of time to fly into Austin on Saturday morning from wherever you happen to be. We'll keep going until probably 9 or 10 that night because we want you to see how magical the Wizard Academy campus becomes after dark. But don't worry, we're going to provide a nice evening meal for you. No charge. We know you'll be back to take some classes later. We just take the cost of it from our ad budget.And that, my friend, is what you call “transparency.”I hope you approve.Roy H. Williams

We buy what we buy to remind ourselves and tell the world around us who we are.“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.” – Bill Bernbach, legendary ad writer“I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager. I am handsome, I say, as I don my Levi’s jeans.” – John Kay, columnist for The Financial Times“In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.” – Charles Revson, maker of RevlonYou’ve heard it said throughout your life: “Birds of a feather flock together.” So what is the feather, what are the characteristics, of the birds who flock to your brand, your product, your company? Beyond the fact that they all chose to do business with you, what do these birds have in common? Answer that question and you’ll discover the truth of your brand and earn yourself a copy Bible, a dialogue Bible and a comprehensive brand manual.Do you want true brand power? Then you must quit writing to a particular type of customer and begin writing to specific, representative customers. In their current bestseller, Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg call this technique “writing to personas.” (Yes, the boys did it again. Their new book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? leaped onto the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists as quickly as did Call to Action, their 2005 bestseller.)According to the brothers, correctly identifying your customer personas is the foundation of Persuasion Architecture™ and the beginning of Six Sigma optimization in marketing.Sharing a glimpse of what they plan to teach at the Wizard Academy Fundraiser this November, Jeff Eisenberg says,“Anything that results in a lower level of customer satisfaction or a lost customer is a defect, a flaw in the sales process. When a person doesn’t convert, your marketing has a service defect and your processes don’t deliver on your promise to customers or to prospects. At least, that’s how you’d look at things if you applied the Six Sigma discipline to your marketing. Think of these defects as holes in a leaky bucket.When you use Persuasion Architecture™ in your marketing, you are predicting your customer’s behavior based on assumptions you’ve made about their motivation. If he or she does what you modeled, then you understood the customer’s needs. But if what they do differs from what you planned, there can be only two possible reasons:(1.) You correctly understood their motivations but your execution was bad. Correct your execution.(2.) If these changes in execution fail to improve results, then your original assumptions were probably wrong. Correct your assumptions.Either way, using Persuasion Architecture™ personas in your marketing is the best way to bring accountability to your ad budget.”Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg were among the earliest graduates of Wizard Academy and have since become important faculty members. Will you be here in November when they whisper unpublished secrets to their Wizard Academy family?Yes, we are taking over the world.Roy H. Williams

Colorful and interesting people surround you in life, but in a graveyard, everyone becomes boring: “John Smith. Devoted Husband, Loving Father.”That's it? That's a life remembered?Where do they bury the interesting people? Where do they bury the reckless daredevils and tender poets and seductive femmes fatale? Where can I find their stories?When Dad died a year ago, my friend Woody Justice cancelled a world of commitments to be at his funeral. Woody knew my father well. Thinking back about him, the Woodster smiled that day and said, “He was a colorful old son-of-a-bitch, wasn't he?” I looked up and smiled and nodded. “You know what I think he'd like?” Woody chuckled, “the biggest grave marker in the cemetery. And on it the words, ‘Larger Than Life, Even in Death.'”That was Dad. Always the center of attention. The kind of guy who would pay any price for any thing, as long as you could draw a big enough crowd to watch him buy it.A few months ago I shared with you the note Dad scribbled when he knew he was dying. “All the little things in life add up to your life. If you don't get it right then nothing else matters. It gets lonely in the promised land by yourself.”But no one should be remembered only for their dying regrets. So after a year of pondering, my sons and I sat down on Father's Day, 2006, to decide what to carve on my father's oversized tombstone. They give you the first 30 characters for free.We went over the limit by 1,037.We feel sure that my Dad will be the center of attention in that cemetery for as long as those carved letters remain on the face of that granite. People will shout and say, “Come and see what I've found!” They'll have their pictures taken next to him. They'll go home and tell other people about him. They'll read his stone and smile and say, “He was certainly a colorful old son-of-a-bitch, wasn't he?”And that's exactly how Dad would have wanted it.But I'm not talking just about my father today. I'm talking about you, and I'm talking about making money.Do you have a business you believe in? Would you like to see that business grow?You need to do for your business what my sons and I did for my father. You need to embrace the amazing wisdom of Bill Bernbach, the legendary ad writer who said, “I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.”Telling the truth is powerful. Telling the truth is scary. Telling the truth will always cause complaints.Don't let it bother you. Small people complain. Let them stand in the dark of your shadow.Come visit us when you can.Your colorful friend,Roy H. Williams III

Each letter of the alphabet represents a phoneme, a tiny sound that joins with other tiny sounds to make the more complex sounds we call words.Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.Numerals are images of amounts. But the amounts they represent are real.You see a person when you look in the mirror that no one sees but you. Other people see a person when they look at you, but you're not that person, either.Dulcinea was the image of feminine perfection in the mind of Don Quixote. In reality, she was a common, earthy village girl with nothing special about her.“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, then she takes on a mythical quality. You can see this principle functioning as a sales device in advertising and in places like Playboy magazine. Almost every movie you see has this quality, because you can't embrace the image on the screen. Thousands of novels use this principle, because you can't embrace a printed image on a page.” – James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 153Bible illustrator Barry Moser says, “I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they're devout Christians they can't separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can't see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don't have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children?”Moser goes on to say, “The truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope – and many believe – that they are made in the very image of God.”Do we tend to believe in a god whose attitude reflects our own? In her book Bird by Bird Anne Lamott speaks of a friend named Tom who said, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”By the way, a single copy of the deluxe edition of the Bible illustrated by Barry Moser sells for about $30,000. Want to take a look at it?In 1971, Marshall McLuhan spoke about the gap between image and reality in politics. “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”Whether it's women… or politicians… or God… we tend to believe in images that aren't entirely accurate.But McLuhan wasn't the first to note the fact that we Americans tend to vote for a romanticized reflection of ourselves. H. L. Mencken, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 26, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”H.L. Mencken, a journalist, wrote those words 85 years and 11 months ago.Human beings are creators, flinging powerful images into the minds of their fellow men. And all of these images are built of tiny particles of thought.Knowing how to sculpt vivid mental images from particles of thought is a very powerful thing. In reality, it's the basis of every form of art, including sculpture, photography, architecture, speechwriting, advertising, poetry, website design and all the visual arts, including filmmaking.Wizard Academy is a school of these communication arts. Advanced Thought Particles is a new class at Wizard Academy, the long-awaited sequel to the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop. Check it out at WizardAcademy.org.Roy H. Williams

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain“I too have had my dreams: ay, known indeed the crowded visions of a fiery youth which haunt me still.” – Oscar WildeDo you have a plan that makes you feel half crazy and the other half scared? Are you attempting to do something that's far bigger than you are? Tell me about it in an email. Send it to Tamara@WizardAcademy.org. I don't promise to help you. Heck, I don't even promise to respond. But I do promise to read your words and smile. Or maybe shake my head in amazement. Or perhaps even mumble a prayer for you.While speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910, audacious Teddy Roosevelt looked the French coldly in the eyes and delivered his famous admonition, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”And you wondered why the French tend not to like Americans.Tell me the audacious thing you're attempting to do. Send a tale that would make Teddy proud.Roy H. Williams

BANG. Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg's new book hits the shelves of every bookstore in America today. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?Well, are you?Many of you have heard me speak about society's 40-year pendulum and how we're currently in the middle of a 6-year transition from an Idealistic “Me” society to a more Civic-minded “We” perspective. If you've experienced my 90-minute Time Tunnel presentation, you know how it answers deep, nagging questions while it brings bubbling to the surface a bunch of new ones. This book begins answering the new ones. (Hello to all the new readers who experienced the Time Tunnel in Las Vegas last week. This is the book I told you to pre-order.)This newest hardback from the Eisenbrothers contains much of the latest thought from Wizard Academy. In it, you'll find me quoted a couple of times, along with board member Dr. Richard (Nick) Grant and our resident screen-and-fiction-writing genius, David Freeman. Mostly though, the book is an explanation of why yesterday's successful marketing techniques aren't working anymore, with expert advice about how to get in step with today's finicky, cat-like public.SURPRISE! Packaged inside the cover you'll find an 80-minute video CD that was shot a couple of months ago in Wizard Academy's Tuscan Hall. View it and witness a brutal peer review as America's most forward-thinking marketers from several of the most powerful companies in America grill Jeff and Bryan about the strange new ideas in their book. Would you like to see a one minute and twenty second glimpse of this 80-minute video that comes inside every copy of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?Buy the book at your local bookstore today. Or order it online.Is fiction more your taste? Did you ever read The Secret Life of Bees? If you liked that book, you'll like The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The characters are well crafted and the unfolding is intriguingly bizarre, almost Tom Robbins-like. (I won't tell you the identity of the omniscient narrator, but trust me you'll be surprised.) Here's one of the little sidebar comments made by the narrator throughout the book:* * * SOME FACTS ABOUT RUDY STEINER * * *“He was eight months older than Liesel and had bony legs, sharp teeth, gangly blue eyes, and hair the color of lemon. One of six Steiner children, he was permanently hungry. On Himmel Street, he was considered a little crazy. This was on account of an event that was rarely spoken about but widely regarded as ‘The Jesse Owens Incident,' in which he painted himself charcoal black and ran the 100 meters at the local playing field one night.”As long as we're on the subject of literature: Jacob, our 22 year-old younger son, expressed his concern to me last week about the name of the new course I'm teaching at Wizard Academy, Da Vinci and The 40 Answers. “Dad,” he asked, “don't you worry that people will think you're jumping on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon?” I explained to Jake that part of my reasoning behind the course's name was to reclaim the misappropriated identity of Leonardo da Vinci.Yes, I read Dan Brown's book, The Da Vinci Code. Its pace kept me breathless and I was entertained in the same way that Bruce Willis entertained me in Die Hard. But neither of them is great literature.The Da Vinci Code is all story arc, no character arc.Me, I'm a sucker for character arc. Remember the evolution of the Jack Nicholson character in the movie, As Good As It Gets? Or the transitional journey of the unlikely trio in The Station Agent? Those, my friends, were vivid examples of character arc.I realize that I'm a minority voice on this Da Vinci Code issue and about 30 million people disagree with me. But no matter. Novelist Stephen King, at least, is on my side. Speaking to the graduating class of the University of Maine in 2005, he said, “If I show up at your house 10 years from now, and find nothing in your living room but Reader's Digests, nothing in your bedroom but the latest Dan Brown novel… I will chase you down to the end of your driveway and back shouting, 'Where are the damn books? Why are you living the mental equivalent of a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese life?'”Well said, Stephen. Well said.Yes, I realize that I'm a literature snob. Though I grew up happily in Oklahoma, I somehow never developed a taste for NASCAR, hunting season or Budweiser, but have always been drawn to fine art, theater on Broadway and a fragrant glass of wine.Uh-oh. I criticized the Da Vinci Code.Can we still be friends anyway?(Big smile. Bright eyes. That's me, grinning for your forgiveness.)Your Friend,Roy H. Williams

The most famous quote attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville is, “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”Strangely, Tocqueville never said it. He did, however, make a number of astounding pronouncements and predictions.Alexis de Tocqueville, that 25 year-old Frenchman who authored Democracy in America, traveled for 9 months throughout the United States of 1831 with his friend, Gustave de Beaumont.The pair traveled west to Michigan to see unspoiled wilderness, then down to New Orleans to hear the heartbeat of the South, but the majority of their time was spent in Boston, New York and Philadelphia where they arranged meetings with some of the most influential thinkers of the early 19th century.Tocqueville interviewed presidents, lawyers, bankers and settlers and even met with Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Democracy in America, the book that resulted from his beagle's journey, set the stage for discussions about democracy that are still being carried on today.So what did Tocqueville say?Allow book-reviewer Margaret Magnus to paraphrase: “America will face a great civil war,' Tocqueville predicted, 'and although they've chosen a bunch of numskulls for president before, don't be fooled. In time of great need, they will elect a great man. They just don't want busybodies in power unless they need them. I know America has only a small percent of the GNP and population of France, but keep a close eye on this one. In 100 years, its population will be around 200,000,000. And the world will be split between two great powers, Russia which will gain its preeminence by the sword and America which will gain it by the plowshare. Now I know Mexico just translated America's Constitution word for word into Spanish, and aspires to establish a society just like theirs. And I know their current populations are comparable. Still America will gain preeminence, but Mexico will not. And here's why… And I know the number of Negroes and the number of natives is about the same, and they are both subordinate to the whites. Still the natives will disappear as a powerful identifiable social and economic force, but the African will not. There will be a well defined and influential African subculture in 100 years, but the same will not hold of the natives. And here's why…'”– from the Margaret Magnus amazon.com review of Democracy in AmericaThe entire text of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is available online.Was Tocqueville posing as a mystic seer, as did Nostradamus before him and Rasputin after? Or did he simply gather information and recognize patterns, as did Leonardo da Vinci, Buckminster Fuller and Genrich Altschuller?Read what Tocqueville wrote and decide for yourself.Roy H. Williams