Exploring the Ethics of Persuasion in Marketing

In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re talking about how con men, pick-up artists, magicians and yes, copywriters, use psychology and persuasion to get readers to pay attention and change their behavior. My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic who has just published a new book on the topic. If you want to be a better writer, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

The 10 Commandments Book
John’s first interview
The Katelyn Bourgoin Interview
The Sarah Levinger Interview
The Richard Armstrong Interview
The Parris Lampropouos Interview
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Looking for non-obvious ways to be more persuasive? Today we’re talking about the ten commandments of con men, pick up artists, comedians and others. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve interviewed a couple of guests about psychology and persuasion… on episode 447 I talked with Katelyn Bourgoin and on episode 448, I spoke with Sarah Levinger. In both of those interviews we talked about using psychology and principles from behavioral economics and neuroscience. Today’s episode covers similar ground in a very different way.

My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic. John runs one of the best daily email lists out there, sharing his throughts on marketing, sales, and persuasion. He recently published a book about these topics called, The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. It’s a long title for a short book that covers a lot of ground. I wanted to talk to John about the ideas in his book, but more than that, I wanted to discuss the ethics of using these kinds of tactics to get our readers and prospects to take action. 

If you want to be a better writer or a more effective communicator or simply want to help your children or customers or friends use information to make better decisions, I think you’ll like this episode.

These topics really appeal to me. Not just as a writer or marketer so I can use these techniques myself, but also as a consumer. You can’t avoid the con men who use these tactics unless you understand the tactics and how they use them. Being smart is not enough to avoid responding positively to the ideas we talk about on this episode.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with John Bejakovic.

Rob Marsh: Hey, John, welcome back to the podcast. You were here, I think it was literally two years ago, Episode 365, where we talked about a lot of different stuff, and people maybe can go back and listen to that, but catch me up on what’s been going on in your business, and this new book you’ve got.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I was thinking about that. It’s been about two years since I was on the podcast last and I think we talked about email and things like that, because that’s kind of my bread and butter. And then at the end of that podcast, you were kind of asking me, what I’m what am I working on? And I was working on this book at that time, and the plan was to have this book, which is a kind of an intersection of different disciplines and the commonalities between disciplines like sales and copywriting, but also things like con artists and pickup artists and stand up comedians and screenwriters. And at that time, I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write in the book, and I was very, very enthusiastic and thinking, I’m going to get the book out in the next few weeks, month or two. And it took me a long time to get the book out, and I finally managed to do it this spring, so, or maybe a little more than a month ago. So the book is out, and it’s exactly what I was planning on being in. You know, you helped me out with, actually, some of the final edits and so on. So that’s kind of the main thing. Otherwise, I’m still very much just focused on email and writing daily emails and writing about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, but the book is the one significant achievement advantage in the past couple of years.

Rob Marsh: I love this book. I actually sent an email to my list, sharing it with people and talking about something that Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book Big Magic, talks about in her book. There, she mentions this experience that she has where she had an idea for a book and she was noodling on it for a while. And didn’t really do anything with it. And then she had lunch with another friend who had the exact same idea come to her, and she basically said, hey, when you know ideas move from person to person, and if you don’t take it on, somebody else will. And I think I told you this, you know, maybe shortly after we talked on the podcast, I’ve been thinking about writing this, almost this exact same book. Your your title is a little bit more comprehensive. You know, I was thinking of, you know, the persuasion secrets of con men and charlatans and copywriters. And you’ve literally written the, not exactly the way I would write it, but it’s literally the book that I wanted to write. And I don’t know if the idea hopped for me to you, or occurred to us both simultaneously, or it’s just this idea that needed to happen, but you brought it to life. And I think it’s a fantastic book.

John Bejakovic: Thank you. I think it’s something that’s in the water because of the people that I’m profiling in the book are all of the disciplines. There’s a lot of people. That’s something I didn’t really write about in the book. There’s a lot of people who started out in one of these disciplines and then who moved to another one, who spotted the same commonalities. So, you know, I think the most famous in our little world is maybe Dan Kennedy, who talks about how all the best copywriters had direct door to door to door sales experience, you know, and all the copywriters that he knows who really became excellent copywriters, they started out going to door to door and how, you know, so many of the the mindsets as well as the techniques from sales apply to copywriting. And I think, like Gary Bencivenga was also famous at that Gary Bencivenga never did the door to door stuff, but he definitely talked about how one of the the secrets to being, you know, a successful one of the secrets to his being such a successful copywriter, is that he went back and he studied what salesmen were were doing. But it goes the other way around. So again, going back to some of these disciplines. So, you know, I’m profiling pickup artists in there, and one of the most famous pickup artists, this guy named mystery, who wore this big top hat, and he was on BH one, well, he started out as a magician, right? So he was like a club magician, before he started approaching girls in clubs. And I don’t know how consciously he brought in some of the ideas from that into into that pickup, seduction world. But it was definitely there. And likewise, for hypnosis, I feel like there’s people who have noticed that there’s a lot of commonalities in these things. So I think it was, I think, I think a lot of people who are, who have been in parts of this world that I’m talking about, I’ve noticed the commonalities is just that, because I already had that concept of the 10 Commandments, and I wanted to have 10 separate disciplines, I went and I really looked at 10 separate disciplines that have some sort of an overlap, or that have a significant overlap. And I think there might have been one or two more that that I skipped just because they wouldn’t have fit within the umbrella of 10 Commandments, but, um, but, yeah, I think it’s, it’s kind of just in the water.

Rob Marsh: It’s good. I’m holding up the book for anybody who’s listening. But it, The book is called The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-t-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand up Comedians and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. Yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments or secrets. The last time we talked, I mentioned a book by Darren Brown that you pointed out we’re not actually like. It’s one of the supposed secret books that sort of passed around underground amongst copywriters and everybody says, don’t talk about it. It’s, it’s one of those secrets. People can go back and listen to that episode if they want to know what book that is. But Darren Brown happens to make an appearance in this book, as well as one of these experts, persuasion. I don’t he’s not a con man, necessarily, but he exposes a lot of cons, you know, in his shows and stuff. So, yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments.

John Bejakovic: Darren Brown appears twice in the book, and I don’t know, for people maybe, who don’t know Darren Brown. So he’s, he’s kind of a stage performer. He’s done hypnosis, he’s done mentalism. He’s also had a bunch of TV shows in the UK where basically the kind of stuff that I cover in this book is the kind of stuff that he talks about in his shows, but he actually puts it into practice. And so when I was writing this book, I did. Part of the reason that it took so long is that I did a lot of research, because I really wanted to dig in and find interesting stories, and not simply, kind of right off the top of my head of like, Oh, here’s kind of like, what the connections are. But it really wanted to have good illustrations for all these things and and I’m, I’m a big. Big reader of, of the New Yorker. You know, here’s my most recent copy, and I really like their style of writing. And one of the things that they one of their kind of go to techniques for, for opening up an article, I don’t know, for people again, who don’t know, maybe in the New Yorker, The New Yorker writes on very random topics.

So there can be very, seemingly uninteresting or niche topics that they manage to write about very interestingly. And one of their go to ways of opening up a topic is to go back to kind of the initial historical background of how this topic, you know, how it even came to be or or some sort of the historical incident. So for the book, since the book opens up with the 10 Commandments of of con men, I wanted to go back and find out, where does that term confidence man, con man. Where does it even come from? Or where does it appear? And I managed to track it down to, I believe it was 1849 in New York, and it was this guy, William Thompson, who would walk up to rich looking New Yorkers on the street, and he’d start a little conversation, and within a few minutes, he had convinced them to hand over their gold watches. And he wasn’t lying, he wasn’t begging, he wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t throwing out, you know, any kind of fake authority. He wasn’t really promising them anything. So it was a remarkable story, because eventually he got caught and arrested for stealing, even though he wasn’t really technically stealing. And so there was a an article in The New York, I think, Daily Herald reported on this guy, and it was an interesting story, but it didn’t really explain how he was doing it.

And Darren Brown, I don’t know whether consciously or not, but he repeated this exact same thing where he went onto the streets of a small holiday town in England, and he went up to people, and he started a conversation, and very, very quickly, he convinced people to hand over their wallets, their, I believe, watches, and in one case, somebody’s house keys, right? And the first commandment is about how to do that. And in the beginning, I wasn’t, I wasn’t really sure how to put these commandments in a way that was both succinct and that didn’t give the commandment away. And so from that Darren brown episode, I said, you know, thou shalt ask for directions. Because ultimately, that’s what Darren Brown was doing. He stopped people on the street, he asked for directions, and by doing that, he broke down a lot of the resistance that a lot of us normally feel when we’re faced with a stranger, when somebody’s kind of trying to do something to us, when they’re when it seems like they’re trying to ask us for something, get us to do something, when they’re possibly trying to manipulate us or trying to take advantage of us. When people put themselves into that position, that they’re a little bit helpless, they’re a little bit lost, they’re asking for directions. It’s a very small things, but it’s a very small thing, but it can be very powerful in opening up people to influence. And so that was, that was the first commandment. And, yeah, Darren Brown was a great illustration, because otherwise, I don’t know where I would have taken that episode with William Thompson from 1848

Rob Marsh: I think in the book, if I’m not mistaken, you mentioned, as one of Darren’s credentials that he actually convinces somebody to push somebody off of a building in one of his specials. And if you didn’t write about it, you know, I’m thinking about that because I think this, this is, that’s one of those TV shows. It’s on YouTube. Everybody listening should go and watch that. Because if you want to know the power of influence and the power that we as marketers have to, you know, move people from where they are to, you know, some other state That special is, it’s both fascinating and also incredibly frightening in some ways, because, you know, I’ve said this a few times, but persuasion is a superpower, and when you are able to use it, hopefully to help people. But you know, some of the examples in your book are slightly more nefarious, you know, and people are taking advantage of people with these superpowers that we have, that literally can, can make people act against what they would say is their own best interests.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had to be very careful, and I tried to do that in multiple places in the book to basically highlight that, you know, I’m not encouraging people to do criminal things. I’m not encouraging people to do immoral things. And that’s not the point of this book. This book is, in a way, a collection of techniques, the way I just described. You know, if you want to, let’s say. Soften somebody up or open them up to influence then, yeah, asking for directions or making yourself to be vulnerable in that way is, is a way to do that. But the reason that I wrote this book was because, yeah, branding, these techniques are very transferable, and you can use them in in lots of different ways, including ways that are completely beneficial to both sides.

And also, I think it’s, you know, all of these techniques are pointing to some sort of deeper thing within human beings and human minds and the way that we work. And I try to write about those things as well. So, you know, the fact of, you know, why does it happen that in so many disciplines, people keep discovering that, oh yeah, if you ask for a favor or if you make yourself out to be a little bit a little bit inferior or a little bit somehow lost or somehow vulnerable, why does that make people predisposed to liking you, you know, and I feel that that that points to some interesting stuff that that’s telling me about myself, and that I think tells me about how other people are, so that whether you want to use this stuff in in a business context to persuade or whether you simply want to use it to understand yourself better, because I don’t know about you, Rob, but one of the reasons I kind of got into marketing, or that I stay in it, is that I think, you know, Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence. He says he’s kind of a patsy in the sense that he’s really a sucker for for all sorts of, like marketing ploys, or all sorts of like persuasion techniques, or, you know, people on the street stopping him and asking him for money. And in many ways, I’m the same. I’m very, very gullible. And it only takes me, it takes me some time after that to say, like, what happened, you know, like, how did this work? How did this work on me? Why did I do this? And, and so, yeah, that’s one of the things that I wanted to figure out. Not just, well, okay, there’s these common techniques to these different disciplines, but what’s really going on, and what is a what does it point to at a more fundamental level about human you know,

Rob Marsh: You mentioned Cialdini, I think, in pre suasion, his second book, he actually deals with that. He says so many people came up to him when he would teach his seminars and say, hey, you know, why are you teaching us to manipulate people? And there’s a chapter in persuasion where he talks about this is actually a manual for people to understand what’s happening so they’re not manipulated or taken advantage of. And that’s why he wrote influence in in the first place, was to help people understand what was going on. And so there’s definitely value in understanding this so that we’re not fooled, or we can see the people around us who maybe are being taken advantage of by some people. But yeah, then it’s our responsibility to use use what we know wisely to help people help themselves, right, and to not take advantage.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know a lot of these techniques, and even so, I’m still, I still find myself getting, you know, not necessarily suckered, but in this, I definitely still react to these techniques, you know. So there’s some part of the human brain which is just so instantaneously reacts to some of this stuff. And I think that that’s kind of one of the things that I tried to get across in the book of some of the things that I talk about, for example, the Darren brown thing, stopping somebody on the street and getting their wallet 3040, seconds later. It’s, it’s hard to believe that that’s possible, right? And and yet it is possible. And it happens. It doesn’t happen in every case, but, yeah, the the way that our brains work, it’s, it’s very strange, and there are some sort of short circuits there. And you know, if you know the right buttons to push, you can activate those short circuits and strange, strange stuff can happen.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I remember seeing a study that was talking about how intelligent people look at this kind of stuff and say, oh, you know, I’m smart. I’m not going to fall for this stuff. That’s what less intelligent people do. And the study measured the IQ of people who joined cults and fell for cons and various things, and they found that the people who were most able to fall for these kinds of things were actually the more intelligent people. So there’s some correlation between being smart and still, you know, falling for this stuff, whether it’s that we think we’re smart enough to not be fooled and so we get fooled, or there’s something else going on, but there’s a there’s a lot of usefulness in knowing this stuff so that we can look for it.

John Bejakovic: Richard Armstrong, the copywriter, he wrote a he wrote a book about con men, a novel about con men. And then to get people to read that, he had a little PDF where he was writing about, you know, the techniques of con men and how that applies to ethical persuasion. And one of the things was the very beginning of that little PDF was how con men choose their marks and or their, you know, the the target or their victims, let’s say, and one of the things that they looked for was definitely intelligence where, where? If you are not of sufficient, let’s say intelligence, you’re not going to get the opportunity. You’re not going to be interested. But the people who were sharp enough, they could immediately, kind of see what it was, and they kind of jumped to the conclusion of like, wow, there’s a really great opportunity here and and that’s why they that’s why they made, you know, good prospects or good victims for this. Another thing that I mean just about how crazy marketing can be, this is another Dan Kennedy thing. I guess Dan worked with, or he knew somebody, or maybe this, no this, I think this one back to Gary Halbert. Apparently, Gary Halbert worked with some company, I think, out of Arizona that was selling very suspicious male enhancement products, I think back in the early 2000s or something like that. And and this, I think stuff was completely hoken Like this was just complete snake oil. Eventually, this company, I think, was prosecuted by the FBI or somebody else, and not even because they were selling completely bogus products, but because of it, in tax reasons, but because of that, all of this stuff surfaced about who their customers were and what was happening. And it turned out that out of their, you know, they had a huge database of people who had clicked on a link and read that some magical powder would, you know, increase body parts by three to six inches. And it turned out that the number one category of people who are buying this were doctors and dentists, right? So that’s to say that, you know, these are people who are not only somehow pre selected to be intelligent, but they supposedly have a significant amount of professional training and tell them that there’s no way, there’s no way that this is going to work, and yet that in the privacy of their own home, that desire or that response to those triggers is so strong that it overrides the experience, it overrides the intelligence, it overrides all of that training and education and and the most, and the people who should know the best that it’s not going to work are the ones who fall for the most. I suppose,

Rob Marsh: If you’ve fallen for a con, or you find yourself, you know, easily manipulated, there is some respite, or, you know, some satisfaction in knowing that you’re probably one of the more intelligent people out there, even though you might keep doing these dumb things. So one of, one of my favorite ideas you talk about in the book is you phrase it a little bit differently, but it’s this idea of making the skeleton dance that we have bad things, you know, or some, sometimes there’s a flaw in a product. And I don’t just mean a blemish. I think the blemish effect is a little bit different from, you know, having an actual skeleton. But let’s talk a little bit about that. Why does this work? You know, when something clearly is broken, and yet we can make this skeleton dance, and it makes us still want something.

John Bejakovic: So, yeah, I think, I think it’s a few different things going on. I think, first of all, and I think these are kind of main themes that are running through this book. One is the theme of of trust, which I think is such a crucial thing in marketing and copywriting. And, you know, I think for people who might be newer to copywriting, I know that this was my reaction when I when I got into this field, when people who seem to be very experienced, they would talk about the importance of trust, and I would say, Yeah, okay, but I mean, I really need to know the headline formulas and the secret words and so on. And really, no, you know, really, it is about, how do you get how do you build sufficient trust, particularly when it’s somebody that maybe you’ve never met before, that only appeared in your, I don’t know, inbox or your Instagram feed or in your physical mailbox two minutes earlier. How do you build up that trust so that you’re willing to say, Okay, I’m willing to take the next step, and sometimes that next step means actually, you know, sending money to that person. So I think trust is one thing, and another thing is the power of the reason why, right, and just the fact the very fundamental human need, not just for proof, but for this specific kind of proof, for having a coherent understanding of like cause and effect and reason why, and making the skeleton down. Dance takes those two things and and combines them, right? So, for anybody who might not know, this idea making the skeleton dance is basically, if there’s a flaw or an objection or some sort of aspect of your offer, or you personally as the salesperson that is going to bubble up to the consciousness of your prospect. You want to raise that objection or flaw or whatever it is, you want to be the one to bring it up first, and that’s the part that that addresses trust, right? Because if you don’t, then you become suspicious, right? Because it’s something that you knew about, but you tried to hide and and for most things that are really big problems, that are the skeleton in the closet, they’re going to bubble up, right? They’re going to bubble up either before people buy or after they buy, and if they if it bubbles up after they buy, then they won’t buy anything else. And, you know, we are in the copywriting world, and we’re in the direct response world, and then direct response world things, you know, the profits are made on the back end. So if you, even if you manage to sell something to somebody once, but then, then they discover the skeleton in the closet and they feel burned, then you’ve effectively, you know, gotten a customer at break even who’s never going to buy anything from you again. So you you’re at net zero, or maybe worse off, right? So that’s one aspect of making the skeleton dance, is that trust aspect. And on the other hand, if you do bring up a negative voluntarily, then that automatically puts you on the same side of the table with your prospect, which is a powerful place to be in, because suddenly you’re in this position of collaboration and kind of playing the advisor rather than a salesperson, or some sort of a conflict of being on the other side of table. But the other aspect of it is that, you know, it’s not simply bringing out the skeleton from the closet, but it’s actually making a dance, right? And this is an idea by by this guy. What’s his name? Mar, yeah, I forget his first name, but his last name is Mark and and Barry Marsh, so Barry Mar and basically the idea is you don’t simply want to bring up a negative, but you want to make it work for you, and you want to show how some positive comes out of that negative, right? Whether it’s that the negative is a consequence of the positive or the the negative is the consequence, or the positive is the consequence of the negative. Or somehow there’s some connection, right? So that you can turn around this, this negative into actually being a proof element and into being a reason why there’s something attractive and good about your offer, right? And that’s that’s a powerful thing because of proof, but it’s also a very necessary thing, I think, for humans to simply have that awareness of like, there’s a coherent story here, and there’s a reason why this negative is here, and that’s super important.

Rob Marsh: I think my favorite example of this in the marketing world is Buckley’s cough syrup. This gets popped up quite a bit, you know, where people will say, Oh, this is a case of, you know, showing off a blemish or that kind of thing. But it’s, it’s actually more than that, because cough syrup tastes awful. You know, if you buy it thinking that you’re, you know, buying a cherry flavored cough syrup, and your cough is going to go away, you know, automatically, you can be severely disappointed with that first swallow. In fact, you may, you may, you know, throw up. I mean, it really is that nasty. And so they basically make that dance by by showing the whole reason it’s nasty is because it works like that. The ingredients that make cough syrup work do not taste good, and you can’t mask them with flavor. And that’s the whole idea here. And so the fact that it’s this terrible tasting thing is an indicator that, you know, it’s actually going to do what you’re hiring Buckley’s cough syrup to do. But we see this in all kinds of things. You know, some of the examples that use in the book. There is comedian Patrice O’Neill, who, you know, uses talks about how he’s racist in order to tell a racist joke, and gets the audience laughing along with him, which, even the way I’m talking about it probably makes some listeners feel really uncomfortable, you know, because this, these are the cultural norms that we have that say you can’t do this thing or this is unacceptable. And yet, by again, putting it out in front of the audience and making the skeleton dance, he brings an audience along along with it. So in some ways, this is one of the biggest marketing superpowers. I think that there is out there is if you can make. Or a products less than positive aspects actually be positive, then you’re a pretty good marketer, copywriter,

John Bejakovic: I think if you do that, you not only, you not only kind of take away the sting from the objection, but you, you know, in a very subtle way, you also put the burden onto the onto the downsides of any alternatives, right? Because suddenly people have nothing to, you know, their their negatives or their doubts have been taken away. And then they start thinking, Well, okay, this, this, I, you know, Rob’s offer is queen. He’s, he’s told me all the negatives, and he’s actually shown me how these are, in some way, even positives, for me, these other alternatives. So, you know, John’s, John’s solution, it sounds good on the surface, but there don’t seem to be any negatives, right? And that makes me a little bit suspicious. And, you know, somehow that same need for a reason why a coherent story makes it so that people start to spin up their own story and so that, so that they spin things in a negative way that you know works against the alternative. So I think you’re absolutely right. I think it’s, it’s very powerful thing. The only thing is that it sounds very scary, and I think a lot of people, including if you’re doing it for yourself, it’s very scary, but maybe you can will yourself to do it. If you’re doing it for a client, then it’s doubly more so that the client might just be like, Okay, that’s that might be a fine idea in theory. I definitely don’t want to run this as a campaign or as an ad, because it’s very counterintuitive to do this.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is something that comes up in so many areas too, you know, I think about people looking for work, you know, for jobs that may have, you know, gaps in their employment record, or, you know, things that that they would typically want to hide, and if you can surface that, say, hey, you know, yeah, I didn’t work for the last year, but that’s because I was doing this great thing that’s actually really beneficial for what I want to do next in my career, you know, though, to be able to turn those kinds of things into a positive again, I said it already. It’s a superpower, but it’s the kind of skill that, if you want to progress, if you want, you know, to we all have flaws, you know, without a doubt, and some of them are pretty big, so we have to be able to figure out a way to make those things work for us.

John Bejakovic: I can speak to this, I feel like, you know, I’ve been working as a copywriter for a while now, 10 plus years. I guess I feel like the one thing that keeps getting better, that I keep getting sharper at, is exactly this of just like, kind of running a sales argument through and then realizing, okay, well, what’s the, what’s the likely objection or or suspicion that a client or that a prospect might still have at this point, and then proactively, you know, attacking that or addressing that even before it pops up, you know? And I feel like, you know, this is ultimately kind of what the the bottom the gist of the game is, I think, like, you know, agora had that, I think copy boarding process, or whatever it was called, and all it was was like, Okay, there’s some sort of a, if you’re writing a sales letter, there’s some sort of a sexy idea to open it up that sucks you in. And then all it is is really a series of objections addressed, I mean, written in a sales letter format, but proactively thinking, what’s the next objection they’re going to have, and bringing that up yourself, and then working out why, you know that’s actually something that works in your favor. It’s not what you think, or it’s proof of something else, or whatever it is.

Rob Marsh: Do you have a favorite chapter in the book? John?

John Bejakovic: I have particular stories that I like, but I think in terms of one that I particularly find, consistently, for me, useful, I believe it’s chapter chapter eight or chapter nine, and it’s about committing to the bit, because I feel like a lot of the other chapters are very specific techniques. They’re like, Okay, here’s like a little thing that you can do, or you can, you can ask for directions, or you can, you know, make the skeleton dance. And I had to hide that chapter about committing to the bit deep into the book, because it’s much less about the specific technique. It’s ultimately about the idea of you just got to do it, or you have to be confident. But that idea of being confident is so not helpful. I feel in in many situations, if you could be confident, then people will be confident. And you you know being told to be confident doesn’t help. And so in that chapter, I had some stories where I think I took that idea of like, Okay, what does it mean to be confident? How does that actually look? How do you deal with that, even if you’re not necessarily feeling confident and and what happens if you try to be confident, it doesn’t work out, and you have, instead of getting a good reference experience of like, oh, I pretended to be confident, and it worked out, and now I’m a little bit more confident, and things are better. But what happens if you try to be confident, you act and then it flops, right? And I feel like this is super relevant in in a lot of situations, right? So if you know, just recently, I was talking to somebody about creating a course, you know, you know, some a copywriter who had decided to create his own course, and he was talking about how he felt imposter syndrome, or nervousness about about taking that next step, even though he knew the material well. I think it’s relevant for that. I think it’s very relevant if you’re talking to talking to clients, if you’re trying to get jobs. I think it’s very relevant if you have your own email list, and if you want to write emails daily. I think it’s very relevant in everyday situations. Again, in the book, I talk about, you know, pickup artists and guys who are going up to girls in clubs and trying to appear smooth and confident and having something interesting to say. I talk about hypnotists trying to hypnotize somebody and looking very authoritative and saying sleep, you know? And I’m talking about comedians who go up on stage and they have a routine that’s good, and they’ve worked through this, but unless they have an authoritative, confident delivery, the audience isn’t going to laugh right. And on the other hand, even if they have mediocre material, then the audience will still get into it, and they will laugh, right? And so there is magic. There is some magic about this charisma or some energy, except it’s not useful to me personally to hear, Oh yeah, you just gotta be cool dude, or you gotta be, like, confident, or you just gotta have charisma, or you gotta be yourself. I needed something more operational. And that’s kind of what that chapter is about. And so that’s something that I find myself thinking back to on a daily basis, squad, you know, I’m ready to quit something, or I’m ready to say I’m just not. This isn’t working. And then I remind myself of things that I’ve written. And I say, Okay, well, if I wrote this, and if other people are reading it, I should be acting on it as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, one of my favorite chapters is the chapter on focus, and this is something that I’ve noticed. So I think you’re like this too, but I love watching magicians, you know, do their acts, and then, you know, most people are, I think, are wowed, and then they move on. But I like to go back and re watch the acts and see if I can see where the misdirection is happening, you know, and where my focus is being, where I’m being told to move my my focus so that something else can happen in the background. Kind of ruins magic in a way, you know, when you start to see it, but it’s, it’s fascinating to me how easily all of us are directed into, you know, look, look here, or watch the light, or don’t look at that in order for something to happen behind the scenes. And I think this is one of those things where, you know, when people start thinking about, they’re like, well, marketing shouldn’t be about misdirection, which is true, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not, but directing focus on specific things that we need people to pay attention to is, again, a huge part of what we do. And some of the stories that I think you had in that chapter were pretty fascinating as well.

John Bejakovic: I don’t think I’m going to be giving away a huge insider secret here. But a long time ago, Parris Lampropoulos had this webinar series where he was sharing his kind of some of his biggest secrets. And I don’t think this was a really big secret. It was just very, very impactful to me. And Paris kept saying over and over, he said, does it help your case? Does it hurt your case, or is it neutral, right? If it hurts your case, or if it’s neutral, it goes out, right? And you only include things that help your case. And you know that chapter on focus is in many ways, let’s say, you know, the way you can apply that to marketing is specifically that thing that I mean again, in the beginning, I said that this book is about techniques, and it’s about kind of the underlying psychology or neurology. And I think the underlying neurology here is that we don’t really realize how limited our focus is and how. Very little we can actually focus on at a given moment, and then our brain stitches that together into something that feels like a coherent picture, where we feel like we’re really looking at something that looks like a poster or a photograph, but it’s really not we, you know, the our visual field is incredibly blurry, and we have about, you know, a dime’s size worth of focus is just we keep flicking around to things that are interesting. And, you know, that’s not just vision. It’s kind of how reality is. And when it comes to an opportunity or a product or a course, you know, there’s 1,000,001 things you could potentially say about it, right? And as marketers, yes, we want to be transparent, and yes, we want to make the skeleton dance, but at the same time, we also want to orchestrate some sort of like a presentation of what it is that we’re selling that paints it in the best possible light. And that means guiding people from unsold to sold, like, you know, showing them a series of mental images, or giving them a series of facts or arguments that, you know, build up a certain emotional state in their brains and and that get them to say, Okay, this is, this is something that is good For me, right? And again, you know, this is something that all copywriters who reach a certain level of success keep repeating, but that means you want to work with good clients, right? Because you can, you can do. You can paint that series of pictures for crap products. You know, again, it really won’t probably work long term for you or your client, you can, you can make a large money grab quickly, but it’s not a sustainable business. And there are enough people out there with good products that that you really can sell stuff that is worthwhile, but the way you sell it is exactly this. You know, Paris is thing of, does it help my case. And you know, magicians do the exact same thing, where they get you to look exactly where they want you to look, and they build up this story in your mind, where the conclusion is, this is magic, and something magical just happened. And I agree with you. I watch those videos a lot, and I love watching them. And in a way, it spoils the magic trick when I know it, but it also like the next, next magic trick, I’m just as much of a sucker for it, and I get just as much, like, satisfaction and joy. Like I feel like nothing puts me into that state of mind of, like, being like a kid again, like watching a magic trick because I’m genuinely, like, amazed. I feel like I I follow again. I’m such a patsy, and I follow exactly what the magicians want me to do. And I really get into that state. And I just get an absolute thrill out of something magical happening and something disappearing when it shouldn’t have disappeared, and something appearing when it shouldn’t have appeared, and things change in color and so on. So even though I know some of the tricks, now, I’m not a magician, and I never really studied this stuff, but even though I know some of the tricks, I still fall for it every time.

Rob Marsh: What’s really frustrating is you could watch a magician do a trick. You can figure it out. You can see where the misdirection is happening, or where somebody forces a choice, you know, in order to make sure that the right card or puzzle piece or whatever gets selected. And then you watch a similar trick by maybe a different magician, and you can’t, like, I can’t see where the misdirection is happening, right. Or I can’t see where the person moves off stage to appear, you know, in a different suit, you know, in 10 seconds. Or like, and so, you know, it’s like, I know how this trick should be working, but I still, no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t figure out how the magician is pulling it off. And and you’re right, it’s, it’s still magical, and it still tickles my brain in a way. That’s, it’s really pleasurable to watch.

John Bejakovic: That brought to mind. I have a quote in the book from Gary Benson Vanga, where he says, the only power we have as marketers is to anticipate what people are going to think and, you know, for magic, or for any of these other disciplines, it’s the same. It’s like, kind of the, you know, the market, let’s say, or the audience moves on and becomes more sophisticated, and then it’s the magicians or the copywriters, or, I don’t know, the pickup artists role, to say, Okay, now that the market has moved on, how do I adapt to that, and how do I integrate what they now know into what what I’m doing? And I think there was this famous story of of a magician. I think it was di Vernon who so Harry Houdini, who I have in the book, Harry Houdini had this thing where I think he had a challenge. I think it was maybe like, okay, $100 if you can come and have a magic trick, the fools Harry Houdini. Houdini was, of course, a magician. He became. Am known as an escape artist, but he started his career, and he ended his career as a magician and and he was also, you know, very fond of these challenges, and he was very fond of debunking other magicians, and kind of position, positioning himself as the guy at the top of the pyramid who was so good he could even give tricks away, because, you know, it was a way of of putting other people beneath him. Well, the one guy who managed to fool Harry Houdini was di Vernon. And again, I’m not a magician, so I don’t even really know what the trick was. It was a card trick. All I really know is that it was a trick where I think, like, maybe it was like a way of putting an ace into the middle of the deck and having it pop back up to being the top cart. And I think one of Houdini’s conditions was show me the trick three times, and I’ll figure out how you do it right. And guy Vernon showed him the trick three times. It was the same trick each time in the in terms of the card popping up to the top, and Harry Houdini couldn’t figure it out. And the reason was that each time, Dai Vernon used a different technique to do it, so it was the same end result. But he knew that okay, if he repeated kind of the same thing, Houdini was probably looking for that, even though, you know, it all looked very much the same every time. But it looked, you know, it looked pretty much the same, but Houdini would have probably figured out had die Vernon done the same thing three times. He got the same effect, though, by doing three different techniques. And that’s how he managed to fool Harry Houdini and that kind of, again, goes back to, you know, the same thing about knowing these tricks and then still falling for them, right? So that ultimately, people still laugh at jokes, even though the tricks of comedians are kind of well known. You exaggerate. You, you know, have triplets, you, you know, you make fun of some sort of a group, or you make fun of yourself those you know, all of these things are well known, yet people go to comedy clubs and they laugh, right? Or people know that, yeah, you know, there’s a certain format to a headline, and you throw in some testimonials, and you have free shipping. And people are gonna, you know, react to that and buy to that, even though it’s well known. And so somehow, you know these, these ideas and these tricks and the underlying psychology there’s, there seems to be infinite permutations, and you can apply them over and over and over.

Rob Marsh: A related idea that you bring up in the book. It’s almost the opposite idea, and that is that you can’t always tell people exactly where to look or what to do. Sometimes you have to let them come up with the idea themselves. And I don’t remember what the title of the chapter is, but one of the examples you use is when Ronald Reagan is running against Jimmy Carter in the presidential election. And, you know, he finishes up this debate with his final pitch. It’s just a few days before the election, and he could have said things like, you know, inflation is, you know, X percent out of control. We’ve had these long gas lines. You know, Carter told us all to turn down the thermostat like he could have pointed it at a bunch of things that people knew were going on, but he didn’t do that. He basically let people come to their own conclusion by simply asking, Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Which naturally lets people think all of these things that are going on without being told them by somebody who they would then react and say, well, he’s just saying that because he’s a politician, or, you know, whatever reason. And so in some cases, you want to direct attention, and in other ways, or in other cases, you want to be able to be a little bit more open. And, you know, obviously he’s, he’s guiding your thoughts. He’s taking you back to to where we were four years ago and to where we are today. He’s inviting a comparison, but he wants you to bring the data to the argument, and again, related idea, but almost the opposite.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, I’m glad you bring that up, because I guess the first podcast, I kind of like hinted at this book, and then two years later, the book is out. And then the next book I want to write is exactly on this idea of, like, how do you get people to have a certain idea and feel like it’s their own? And yeah, absolutely. What Reagan was doing was, I mean, this is another one of the currents that’s running through the book, is that none of us likes to feel manipulated, none of us likes to feel bullied, none of us likes to be told what to do. I mean, there is a certain point at which we come to trust somebody sufficiently, and we put ourselves into somebody else’s hands, whether that’s a leader who we kind of trust them to guide us to the new place. We. Or it’s somebody like a hypnotist, you know, we say, okay, just tell me what, what I should be doing, right? Or a therapist, or somebody like that. But in a normal day to day situation, there’s this prickliness, right? There’s this reactance, where as soon as we feel that somebody’s telling us something, or a natural reaction is to say, yeah, actually, but, and then to argue for the other end, right? And so what Reagan was doing is absolutely like you said. He it was, it was a very tricky thing, just basically rephrasing things in terms of a question and saying, you know, are you better off? Right? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel our country is more respected today. Do you feel that you can get more for your money than you could? And of course, he wasn’t. This wasn’t a disinterested, you know, completely Socratic dialog, or, you know, where he was really inviting people to discover things for themselves. He was guiding them to a very specific kind of outcome, but the way he was doing it was so that he eliminated or minimized that reactance, right? So that people could say, well, he brings up a valid point, even though he’s not really telling me about it. But you know, that thing he asked about, am I better off now? Now that I think about it, I’m really not, but had, you know, had he said basically the same thing, but simply just turned it into a statement, instead of asking it as a question, it probably would have, you know, gotten people’s hackles up, but, but, yeah, I think that in marketing, you know, marketing is not psychoanalysis, where we really want to guide people to discover things completely on their own. So we do want to guide them to a certain kind of conclusion. But the question is, how do we do that in a way where they have the feeling like it was their own discovery, or that they feel ownership of the idea, or they don’t feel that resistance and reactance that we all normally feel when we feel that somebody’s trying to tell us something, or trying to get us to do do something, or trying to command us, right? So questions are definitely a very, very effective and very subtle and very simple way to do that.

Rob Marsh: I feel like we could keep going on, but I want to leave something for people to actually, you know, find in the book themselves. It’s like, I said, it’s a great book. It’s relatively short. It’s about 150 pages, very easy to read. It’s loaded with stories, in fact, as you go through your learning principles, but it’s not textbook. Ask, you know where it’s like, Hey, here’s a principle, and this is how I’m going to show it to you. You you discover it through all the stories that you’re telling, which is its own kind of genius, I think, in its own persuasion technique. So John, tell us where we can get the book, and you know where we can follow you if we want to get that next book about, yeah, how do we, how do we persuade people and let them come to the belief that they’re doing it on their own and and we won’t, hopefully have to wait two years for that one?

John Bejakovic: Yeah. So the book basically is available on Amazon. If you go on Amazon and and look for 10 Commandments of con men, or if you just type in my name, the book will come up. It’s got that charming black cover. Was only the text on there, so it’s very noticeable. And if you want to read more stuff like that, because I’m writing these daily emails, and often I’m writing about the same kind of persuasion and influence stuff, including about, you know that topic of, how do you get people to have that idea on their own? Then it’s just go to my, my personal website, which was my last name.com, Bucha, which.com and and then you can sign up. Or you can, I have a an archive of 2000 plus emails. So if you don’t want to sign up, you can read, read the archive, or if you want to sign up, then you get on the list. And my emails arrive every night, so you can, you can see if you like them.

Rob Marsh: It’s one of the few daily emails I really look forward to. You know? What you share usually leaves me thinking of something that I hadn’t thought of before, and even, even when I have thought about it before, it’s usually a new take or a new way of looking at it. And so yeah, sign up for John’s emails. Get the book. It’s definitely worth reading. You kindly mentioned me at one point in in the acknowledgements. So thank you for that. But again, fantastic book. Highly recommend it. It belongs alongside, you know, Cialdini influence and all of those other books that we read about persuasion is it’s a lot of fun. So yeah, go grab that. Thanks John for for sharing.

John Bejakovic: I appreciate it, Rob, thank you for the opportunity. And thank you again that you said you’re in the acknowledgements, and that’s because I. Um, you know, you helped me edit this book and get it out. And you had some, some great feedback that I integrated into the book. So you helped me make it what it was in the end.

Rob Marsh: Well, it’s, it’s 99.99% John. And you know, I might have fixed a comma or two, but, yeah, it’s, it’s a good book worth reading. Thank you, John.

Rob Marsh: Thanks John for talking through many of the ideas in this book. I’ve linked to it at the top of the shownotes so you can easily find the link to the book on Amazon. If you’re listening using a podcast app, that link should be in the description so you can just click it there. Or you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/podcast. I don’t get a commission for recommending it, I just think it’s the kind of book that will help just about everyone be a better writer and marketer.

Some of you may have heard me share on a previous episode that I teach a college class on marketing. A couple of weeks ago, after a class on the way the media and many marketers use these technique to manipulate their audiences, a student came up to me afterwards and told me this whole topic was making her rethink her career in marketing. Maybe this topic does the same for you.

I told her that it should actually be the opposite. That marketing needs more people who are bothered by manipulative tactics to help make sure we use persuasion and psychology to help our customers, not take advantage of them. Just because a tactic can be used unethically, doesn’t mean we can’t use it ethically. If that were the rule, we’d have to shut down the entire internet. And publishing industry. Let alone activities like public speaking, acting, broadcasting and more.

By learning these principles, you can help make sure the companies you work for always use them to do good instead of bad.

Don’t forget to check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion