Commandment XI: Thou Shalt Flip The Script

Thanks for reading 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.

I’m about to share with you the apocryphal eleventh commandment, which I’ve unearthed during my research.

The thing is, this eleventh commandment involves a key plot spoiler from one of my favorites movies, one I’ve watched a half dozen times.

This movie is called The Sting. It has to do with con men. And I think you should watch it before you read on.

Not only does The Sting have Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the lead roles… not only did it win an Oscar for best film and best director… but it also has a sparkling script (which also won an Oscar) by a guy named David Ward, who was well-read in the techniques of con men, and who also seems to have had an intuitive understanding of human psychology.

Since you’ve made it this far, I assume you found the topics and techniques I’ve talked about interesting.

If you haven’t seen The Sting yet, I encourage you to close this eleventh commandment right now, go download the movie somewhere and watch it yourself.

Based on what I know of you — that you are here and reading right now — odds are great you will love The Sting. Plus, you will see a bunch of techniques we’ve been talking about in practice. When you finish, come back and read this.

Are you still here? Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here goes:

The relevant scene from The Sting is when Johnny Hooker, a lonely conman on the run played by Robert Redford, shows up at the door of Loretta, a gruff waitress at the local diner.

Hooker has talked to Loretta several times at the diner. He knows she is as alone as he is, and that she’s only passing through town, another tramp like him.

Hooker has tried asking Loretta out before. She shot him down cold. But Hooker gives it one more try. He knows where Loretta lives. And one night, at 2am, when Loretta finishes her shift at the diner and goes home and turns on the light in her room, Hooker takes a deep breath, walks up to her building, climbs up the stairs to her door, and knocks. Loretta cracks open the door. The following dialogue follows:

HOOKER: I was wondering if you might wanna come out for a while, have a drink or something.

LORETTA [indignant]: You move right along, don’t you?

HOOKER: Hey I don’t mean nothin’ by it. I just don’t know many regular girls is all.

LORETTA [still angry]: You expect me to come out, just like that…

HOOKER: If I expected something, I wouldn’t still be standing here in the hall.

LORETTA: I don’t even know you!

HOOKER: You know me. I’m just like you. It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.

Loretta pauses at this. She gives Hooker a sad smile. She opens the door a bit wider, and moves aside to let him in.

So that’s the scene. Now here’s the spoiler:

Loretta is not actually a waitress at a diner, the way she has led Hooker to believe. She’s actually a top-level hitman, or hitwoman, working for a mob boss that Hooker fleeced by accident. She’s been hired to take Hooker out. She’s playacting her indignation, just trying to reel Hooker into some private place so she can kill him.

The best name I’ve found for this pattern is “flipping the script.”

At a high level, flipping the script means inverting the usual form of an influence episode, and doing the opposite of what most people would do if they tried to influence here. That’s kind of abstract. Let’s make it more specific.

In a con game, flipping the script means that, instead of the con man making an effort to persuade the mark, he creates conditions for the mark to persuade him. That’s what’s happening with Loretta and Hooker in the scene above.

Loretta has actually been grooming Hooker for a while, subtly letting him know she’s alone and lonely, just like him.

Hooker, normally the con man, has now become the mark. He has the bright idea — seemingly of his own accord — to go to Loretta’s apartment at 2am. He even works hard to overcome Loretta’s mock reluctance when he shows up.

Hooker is doing just what Loretta wants him to do, what she’s orchestrated for him to do, except he’s doing it thinking it’s all his idea. He has had the script flipped on him.

Flipping the script repeats in different situations in The Sting, with different characters, as they try to influence and con each other. But in case you’re wondering if this is just Hollywood fantasy, let me reassure you. Real con men “flipped the script” in real con games. In fact, flipping the script is in many ways the essence of a con game. Let me give you one real example.

During a “big con,” which might take days or weeks to pull off, the mark is gradually convinced there is a sure-shot money-making opportunity. Eventually, he agrees to send away for the money to invest in this opportunity, but the money takes a while to arrive — for his bank to approve the transfer, for the sale of his stocks to complete, for his life insurance to be cashed in.

During this period, which is known as the “tie up,” it’s crucial for the con men to keep the mark isolated from his usual life. His family or friends would pop the bubble, put questions and doubts in his mind, and likely make it so he decides not to invest, that is, not to put himself up to be fleeced.

To prevent this, the con men want to “tie up” the mark during this time, all day long. How do they do it without arousing the mark’s suspicions? They flip the script. Here’s a step-by-step playbook, from David Mauerer’s book The Big Con.

The insideman — let’s call him Mr. Big, because he is the main con man, the guy with the most skill who had gradually gained the respect and the trust of the mark — takes the mark aside. Let’s call the mark Mr. Markham.

Mr. Big privately expresses his confidence in Mr. Markham, due to Mr. Markham’s “good deal of character.” But Mr. Big also raises some doubts about another of the con men, known as the outsideman, whose job it was to introduce Mr. Markham to Mr. Big. Let’s call the outsideman Mr. Scammell.

For a while now, Mr. Scammell has been working hard to get Mr. Markham irritated at him. Naturally, Mr. Markham eagerly agrees there’s something fishy about Mr. Scammell. Once that happens, Mr. Big then says something like the following (taken from The Big Con):

“Now what I want to ask is this: For our protection, will you keep a very close watch on Scammell? I mean stay with him at all times. Don’t let him out of your sight a moment, for he may see or talk to someone who will tip the whole thing off. Don’t let him shake you under any circumstances. And don’t let him suspect that you are watching him. Now I will be very busy for the next few days, but I will ‘phone you at least once a day and you report to me if everything is going nicely. If Scammell gets out of hand, just let me know and I’ll be right up and give him a talking to. By the way, could you get him to share your room?”

In other words, rather than the con men keeping an eye on Mr. Markham all day long, they convince Mr. Markham to keep an eye on one of the con men. The end result is precisely what the con men wanted, except, since they’ve flipped the script, the mark does it voluntarily, without any resistance or suspicion, and he even feels good about the fact.

David Mamet, the screenwriter and director we heard from in Commandment V, wrote and directed another movie about con men, called House of Games. In that movie, Mamet has the main character, a con man played by Joe Mantenga, explain the essence of a confidence game, which is at the heart of the “tie up” above, and of “flipping the script” more generally. Says Mamet:

The basic idea is this. It’s called a confidence game.

Why? Because you give me your confidence?

No. Because I give you mine.

Mystery, the pick up artist from Commandment IV, practices the same idea as “flipping the script,” except he calls it “role reversal.” The typical roles in a seduction situation is that the guy is trying to pick up the girl, and the girl is the one resisting. Mystery reverses these roles, to make it so the girl is trying to pick him up, and he is the one resisting. He’ll say things like:

[Mystery to girl:] “Don’t think you’re going to get something just because you’re buying me this drink.”

[Mystery to girl:] “You just want me for my body.”

[Mystery to girl:] “I swear, all you girls do is think about one thing.”

Mystery explains the unspoken assumptions — the frame — behind such role reversal lines:

“Notice that this strategy is exactly what a woman will use if you don’t control the frame. Through little things that she says, she sets a frame that she is the prize. You don’t want to get sucked into that frame. Instead, you want to grab this hoop and immediately use it yourself.”

So reverse roles. Do the opposite of what most people would do to try to persuade. Create conditions so the other person is chasing you, or trying to persuade you. Or in the simplest terms, flip the script. Keep these three simple words in mind, because they summarize many of the 10 Commandments we’ve already covered, such as:

• Be unokay —flip the script from the usual human tendency, of seeking to be okay
• Call out the elephant — flip the script from the natural instinct to try to hide or ignore the elephant
• Push-and-pull — flip the script from constant and often desperate pull, pull, pull
• Agree & amplify when someone accuses or mocks you — flip the script from what logic and pride demand, to deny or dismiss what was said

Let me give you one final case study of flipping the script in action. It comes from Claude Hopkins, the A-list copywriter we first came across in Commandment V. In his book My Life In Advertising, Hopkins complained about the ads he saw businesses running in his time. He wrote:

“Everywhere we see advertisers merely crying a name. They say, ‘Buy my brand. Be sure to get the original.’ Their whole evident desire is some selfish advantage.”

That kind of advertising — “merely crying a name” and asking for a sale — was the script in Hopkins’s time (as it mostly remains today). So Hopkins flipped the script. Instead of asking for the sale, he offered to give people the product he was advertising — for free. Hopkins ran an ad at one point for a patent medicine named Liquozone with the headline:

“We Paid for a Million 50c Bottles of Liquozone And Gave Them to a Million Sick Ones. Is There Anyone Else Who Needs It?”

Hopkins started working with Liquozone in 1902, when the company was bankrupt. Since the company was bankrupt, Hopkins opted for a 25% stake rather than taking a salary.

One year later, thanks entirely to giving away hundreds of thousands of free samples, Liquozone was making a profit of $1.8 million (over $60 million in today’s money).

Hopkins got his share, and he learned his lesson. Giving away free samples became the core strategy of how he marketed business, and the technique most associated with his name. It also formed the basis of his eventual billionaire-like wealth.

Curious historical fact:

Hopkins’s ads claimed that Liquozone would cure everything from asthma to “blood poison” to dandruff to “women’s diseases.” In fact, Liquozone was nothing more than a bit of sulphuric acid, highly diluted in water. A few years after Hopkins made his millions with Liquozone, a muckraking journalist, Samuel Hopkins Adams, wrote a series of articles exposing patent medicines as quackery, and singling out Liquozone in particular.

The result of this was the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., which started to regulate health products and the kinds of claims that could be made about them. Hopkins had to stop running his over-the-top ads for Liquozone, and withdrew from the public eye in disgrace. (Don’t feel too bad for the guy. He was soon back in business, advertising Schlitz, as we saw in Commandment V.)

My point here is not to give you techniques of making millions selling quack medicines. My point is simply to reiterate the value of flipping the script. As Hopkins wrote in My Life In Advertising:

“Ask a person to take a chance on you, and you have a fight. Offer to take a chance on him, and the way is easy.”

We’ve reached end of this 11th commandment. The normal thing to do at a point like this is to offer you a hot special deal on something to buy.

Instead, I will take a page from Claude Hopkins’s book, and offer you a free sample, not of my own stuff, but of some of the best advice on influence, marketing, and sales that I personally consume. Here’s the background:

Over the past year, the one person I’ve been learning from and listening to the most closely when it comes to marketing and online business ideas, is a guy named Travis Sago.

Travis is an business owner and marketer who has been selling online for 20+ years.

He has mostly made his money outside the “make money online” niche, but he also does sell very expensive courses ($2k-$6k) for Internet marketers and runs a community of Internet marketers, which costs $300 per month to be in.

I’ve paid for both Travis’s multi-thousand-dollar courses, and I am a member of his $300/month community. But if you don’t know Travis and you haven’t been part of his world for a while, I realize those prices might seem crazy high, even if I tell you that both his courses and community have paid for themselves a few times over in my case.

That’s why have a special sample offer for you, Travis’s book Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You.

Travis’s book contains the core philosophy and marketing ideas that he teaches in some of his very expensive courses, and it gives you practical ideas you can put to work today to influence, persuade, and sell, if that’s what you aim to do.

Travis’s Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You sells for $9.99 on Amazon right now. But because you bought my 10 Commandments book, I’ve made a special deal with Travis. You can get a free PDF version of his book by doing the following:

1. Go to the following page: Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You
2. Put in your email address
3. Put in “john” as password (no quotes)
4. Go wild