Persuasion

Let’s see if I can make you watch the SuperBowl

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A few days ago, I was listening to an old episode of the James Altucher podcast, and I learned this curious fact:

A person who bets any amount of money on a game is 11x more likely to watch the game.

I’m not sure if this means that you can get people to watch a game, just by getting them to bet. But I’m willing to find out.

Because there’s an old marketing idea that I’ve long thought is super clever.

As far as I know, nobody today in the DM world is using it, at least not online. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can correct me.

Here’s the idea. It comes from direct marketing legend Joe Sugarman, the guy who made BluBlocker sunglasses into a $300M brand.

Joe once wrote an ad promoting a computer. He ran it around the time of the SuperBowl.

The ad basically said, if the Bears win the SuperBowl, you get this computer at 50% off. If they lose, the price stays as it is. And here’s the outcome, in Joe’s own words:

“There was a lineup of people — we had a retail store — there was a literally a lineup of people all the way around the block waiting to pick up their computer that they were getting for 50% off. The funny part about it was that we were making a nice profit on that as well.”

Like I said, I’m willing to test this idea out.

So I just checked. The Superbowl is in 8 days.

And I happen to be working on a new offer. It’s called Copy Zone. It’s about succeeding in the business part of copywriting — getting started, finding clients, managing clients, performance deals, upleveling.

I am planning to get Copy Zone out by the end of this month. And I’m planning to sell it for $150 to start. But I’ll make you a wager:

If you pick the winner of this Superbowl right — Bengals or Rams — you get my Copy Zone offer for 50% off, or for $75, during the launch window.

Of course, you gotta buy a ticket if you want a piece of this action.

Fortunately, the ticket to play this game is free. But it is time-limited.

So if you want to play this game of chance, you’ll need to get on my email list first. Then just hit reply to my welcome email and pick this year’s SuperBowl Winner.

Bengals. Or Rams.

You have time to enter until I send out my email tomorrow, Monday, Feb 7 2022, at 8:24 CET.

​​Call — or rather, email — now. Our bookies are standing by.

The man who kept falling out of bed

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In the middle of the night, a man in a hospital bed kept falling out of bed.

Each time, the orderlies came and picked him up off the floor. They helped him get back into bed.

And then, a short while later — THUD. The man fell out again. The reason why is pretty incredible.

Today is the last day of my denial mini-series.

Over the past five days, I’ve showed you different ways that people deny unpleasant things in their lives.

I’ve been doing this A) because this denial stuff is fascinating… and B) because it’s something we all do all the time.

So my claim is that if you know how denial shows up in life, it can help you understand yourself better. And it can help you understand other people too, including the ones you want to get something from.

And now we’ve come full circle.

Because today’s final denial mechanism is projection.

I wrote about that recently. An Internet stranger sent me an email to accuse me of name-dropping in this newsletter… and in that same email, he rattled off the names of a bunch of copywriting gurus.

But that’s kind of fluffy, isn’t it?

There’s no way to prove that it’s really denial-by-projection that’s going on in such a person’s brain.

That’s why I’m telling you the story off the man who kept falling out of bed.

This story was reported in the book Phantoms in the Brain by Vilaynur Ramachandran. He’s the neuroscientist who studied people with paralyzed limbs.

Ramachandran found these paralyzed-limb patients sometimes engaged in ridiculous, obvious, impossible denials… in spite of otherwise being perfectly sane and rational people.

Like the guy who kept falling out of bed.

The doctor on the hospital ward asked him why he kept falling out of bed.

The falling man looked frightened. “Doctor,” he said, “these medical students have been putting a cadaver’s arm in my bed. I’ve been trying to get rid of it all night!”

In other words, this guy couldn’t admit the paralyzed arm belonged to him. So he assigned it to a cadaver.

And he kept pushing it away (rightly so, who wants to sleep next to a cadaver’s arm). But each time he finally got the arm out of the bed, he found himself pulled after it down to the floor.

You might say this denial borders between rationalization (my email yesterday) and projection (my email today).

Fine. Ramachandran has more straightforward projection stories.

Like the woman who claimed the paralyzed arm next to her was too big and hairy to be her own.

“Whose arm is it?” Ramachandran asked her.

The woman thought for a second. “It must be my brother’s,” she said.

So that’s all I got for you for denial and projection. Except one more quick story.

It’s by James Altucher, about an encounter he had with one of the most infamous people of this century.

James’s story features projection by that infamous person. ​And it might save you from making a huge mistake at some point in your life.

​​So if you’re curious to read the story, you can find it below.

But before you go, you look like the kind of person who wants to get more email subscribers. Am I right? Maybe I’m just projecting. Sign up for my newsletter in any case. And then here’s James’s article:

https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/im-the-worst-judge-of-character/

Flat-Earther accidentally proves deep truth about Reddit users

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Over the past 24 hours, one of the top five post on Reddit has been:

“Flat-Earther accidentally proves the earth is round in his own experiment”

It’s a video of a guy, doing an experiment in his back yard, at night, with a lamp and a couple of styrofoam boards.

You don’t need to follow the precise thinking of this modern Galileo. The gist is this:

If the earth is flat, as the guy believes, then the lamp will be visible in one setup with the styrofoam boards.

But if the earth is curved, as the Illuminati want you to believe, then the lamp will be visible in a second, different setup.

Result:

The guy does the experiment with the desired, flat-Earth setup.

Nothing. The lamp is invisible.

The guy moves the lamp, to the control, Illuminati setup.

Suddenly, the bitch lamp becomes visible.

“Interesting,” the flat-earther says. “… interesting…”

Over the past four days, I’ve been talking about denial, and the ways we all do it all the time.

Today I got one more denial strategy for you. It’s the most useful one for marketers. It’s called rationalization.

That’s when we are faced with a fact we cannot or will not stomach, and so we explain it away.

Apparently, the flat earther in the Reddit video explained away his experiment results. Uneven terrain… twigs… branches… possibly a tear in the fabric of time and space.

Rationalizations like this are not particularly interesting. But like I said, they are most useful for marketing.

In fact, there’s a whole powerful school of marketing called reason why. It’s all about rationalization.

But this email is not about reason why marketing or making people believe what they already “know.”

Instead, I just want to point out that, when people fervently explain something away… they are probably denying a deep, uncomfortable truth.

Such as the millions of people on Reddit, upvoting that flat-earther post.

Some of those Reddit users are cackling (see my email yesterday about humor as a denial tactic).

​​But many are rationalizing. Like Reddit user ringhillsta, who wrote:

“The fact that there are people out there who actually still belives that the Earth is flat is scary and funny at the same time and i feel a bit sorry for them. Must be hard being that dumb lol.”

So what could be the deep and uncomfortable truth that ringhillsta is trying to deny?

Who knows.

Perhaps it’s that we’ve moved into an era where we have almost no direct experience with the “truths” in our lives.

Instead, we get them all second- and third-hand, through college textbooks… Neil deGrasse Tyson… and various mainstream subreddits.

And if anybody ever stands up to question that, there’s a ready-made rationalization to sweep away that person. “Dude what are you some flat earther? I feel sorry for you. Must be hard being that dumb lol.”

Anyways, this denial mini-series has been going on for borderline too long.

So I promise to wrap it up tomorrow, and bring it full circle to where we started from.

​​Or is that impossible? Maybe it’s all just a straight line… and we will fall off at the end.

Only one way to find out — read my email tomorrow. You can sign up here to get it.

I’ve thought this email over a lot, I wanted to get it just right

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Picture the scene:

A man, wearing a pastel flower-print shirt and unmatching shorts, runs down the street after a stylishly dressed woman.

HIM: Um, look.

She turns around.

HIM: Sorry. I just… um, well this is a really stupid question, particularly in view of our recent shopping excursion [they had just been shopping together for the woman’s wedding gown]… but ah… I just wondered… if by any chance, um… ah… well obviously not, because I’m just some git who’s only slept with nine people… but I just wondered… I really feel… um… in short, to recap in a slightly clearer version… in the words of David Cassidy, in fact, while he was still with The Partridge Family… I THINK I LOVE YOU. And I just wondered if by any chance you wouldn’t like to… um… ah… um… no… no… no, of course, not. I’m an idiot. He’s not. Excellent, excellent. Fantastic. Lovely to see you. Sorry to disturb. Better get on.

The man turns to leave.

HER: That was very romantic.

The man turns to face her again and winces.

HIM: Well, I thought it over a lot. I wanted to get it just right.

That’s a scene from the 1994 movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. The man in the scene is played by Hugh Grant, in his typical 90s role as a boyishly charming uber-Englishman.

I bring this scene up because over the last few days, I’ve been talking about denial. When people are faced with a situation… or realization… or personal characteristic that they find unacceptable… and so they take various evasive maneuvers.

Such as for example, making a joke out of it.

That’s what’s happening in the last line of that scene above. Hugh has just put his heart on the line, he’s been tacitly rejected, and he’s made a donkey out of himself.

​​What better way to put it all behind than with a bit of irony?

Vilaynur Ramachandran, the neuroscientist whose book got me thinking about denial in the first place, says that denial explains why so much of humor deals with sensitive topics like sex and death.

​​And I guess it explains 90% of the life work of Woody Allen.

So the conclusion is, when you hear people making a joke out of something… well, um… ah… to put it more concretely, in the words of Eric Idle in fact, while he was still with Monty Python… WHEN YOU PURSE YOUR LIPS AND WHISTLE, IT MEANS YOU’RE CHEWING ON — but of course. How silly of me. Sorry, terrible. You must already know what I’m getting at. And you wouldn’t perhaps want to… but of course not. No. Excellent. Excellent. Lovely to see you. Better get on.

Five years ago, I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, notebook in hand, surrounded by trashbags full of my old clothes… but then what happened?

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Over the past few days, I’ve been telling you about different mechanisms of denial. So far, I’ve written about a troll to illustrate flat-out denial… I’ve had some pop science to illustrate reaction formation… and today I wanted to give you a personal story to illustrate a third mechanism of denial.

The trouble is, I cannot remember the personal story. Literally. I’m not joking or making this up.

Because that third mechanism of denial is repression of unwanted memories.

Of course, we all forget stuff all the time. But if you’re like me, you probably think you either forget stuff that’s unimportant… or you forget stuff at random.

Of course, there’s a third option, and that’s to forget important stuff on purpose, because it is inconsistent with the world as you want it to be.

I’ll be honest with you. While this repressed memory topic is definitely interesting… I’m not sure how it can be useful for self improvement, or personal power, or better marketing.

Perhaps it’s because I hate dwelling on the past. Or perhaps it’s because I did think of some useful option, but it was too unpleasant, so I forgot it since.

In any case, if you have any ideas for me on how to use this fact — that people can selectively forget stuff to suit their desired image of the world — then write in and tell me. ​​I’d love to hear what you think.

​​​And I’ll be back tomorrow, if I can remember to do so, with a much more cheery and productive way that people deny unacceptable facts in their lives. You can sign up here if you’d like to read that.

The denial theory of the fake female orgasm

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Over the past few years, it’s become trendy to say, “Stop reading the news, it’s like junk food, bad for your health.”

Maybe so. But without The Daily McMail, where would I find tasty morsels like this headline today:

“Women who make more money than their partner are TWICE as likely to fake orgasms, study reveals”

The revealing study, which came out earlier this year, was pretty straightforward.

Researchers at the University of South Florida surveyed 157 women in sexual relationships with a man. And the researchers asked these women embarrassing personal questions.

Result:

It turns out women who earn more than their male partner (29.6% of the sample) were twice as likely to fake orgasm.

Like I said, that part of the science is pretty straightforward.

Where it gets more murky is the moral interpretation of this sensitive issue. According to Professor Jessica Jordan, the lead researcher behind the study, the interpretation is this:

“Women are prioritising what they think their partners need over their own sexual needs and satisfaction. When society creates an impossible standard of masculinity to maintain, nobody wins.”

In other words, society says that men should earn more than women… but some men fail at this and their egos crumble… and then their women are forced to coddle them as a result.

Perhaps. But perhaps there are other interpretations?

For example, here’s a personal confession:

Some 20 years ago, my mind was warped by reading a pop-science book called Sperm Wars. And ever since, I’ve been a bit of a science Columbo on all things female orgasm.

That’s why I remember a second study, one that came out in 2009, in the pre-gender-dismantling era.

This study was also based on a survey, in this case, of 1,534 couples. The results were summarized in the headline of a Business Insider article:

“Study: Rich Men Give Women More Orgasms”​

The author of the underlying​​ study, a certain Dr Thomas Pollet of Newcastle University, gave his interpretation of the statistics. From the Business Insider article:

“He believes the phenomenon is an ‘evolutionary adaptation’ that is hard-wired into women, driving them to select men on the basis of their perceived quality.”

Perhaps this could also explain all those extra fake orgasms in 2022?

Perhaps those faking women just find themselves horribly unattracted to their lower-earning partners. And that’s a problem — both personally and in the relationship.

So what to do?

The best thing really is to watch a little When Harry Met Sally… take notes on the restaurant scene… and put on a similar show the next time it’s time.

Because like I wrote yesterday, denial might just be a fundamental human activity. It might just be something we all do, all the time, in order to make life acceptable in our minds and bearable in practice.

And the fact is, denial manifests itself in different ways.

There’s flat-out denial, which I wrote about yesterday:

“No, of course not. I’m not bothered that you earn less than me. It’s certainly not any kind of turn-off.”

But another type of denial is what psychologists call reaction formation. That’s when you don’t just deny… but you claim or do the exact opposite:

“Yes, yes, take me, you low-earning animal!”

Of course, if my theory is true, it begs the question why these women would deny their lack of attraction in the bedroom… but break down and confess it when questioned by Professor Jessica Jordan.

My only answer to that is that there are different levels of denial.

Some denial is complete — we can’t face up to the fact at all, and we have to change our inner movie to fit what we want to believe.

But other denial is partial — we act as if, we claim as if, but on some conscious level, we are aware it’s not really as if.

Anyways, perhaps you say I’m completely off with my denial-of-unattraction theory.

But perhaps you feel there might be something to my idea. In that case, I’ve got two takeaways for you.

First, if you’re a guy, and the thought of your woman faking orgasm makes you shudder with feelings of shame and inadequacy… then the best thing to do might be to get better at sales and marketing, and start earning more money.

My second takeaway can be summed up by the following headline.

It comes from the tabloid The Daily Bejakovic. And it’s about a study performed at the University of Bejakovic, by a certain Dr. Johann Bejakovic. The headline reads:

“Study: Men and women who emphatically claim anything are TWICE as likely to secretly believe the exact opposite”

Anyways, if you want more ideas on denial, which you can use for your own research into your own mind or the mind of your market, then sign up for my email newsletter here.

A defensive Internet troll sets me straight

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Last night, while my Copy Riddles promo was still going on, I sent an email about a troll who chimed in to say Copy Riddles isn’t good enough for him.

He started by accusing me of name-dropping.

​​He ended by telling me to “go read some stuff from Settle, Tony Shepherd and Andre Chaperon.”

So I did. And I used what this guy wrote to illustrate Ben Settle’s idea that Internet trolls always project.

But no.

​​It turns out Ben and I are wrong about that. Or least that’s what my troll claims, in a message he sent me today:

Kind of sad when you think someone being critical of your emails is ‘a troll picking a fight’ with you. Most people would see that as an opportunity to examine, review and possibly improve. You get defensive and start making (bad) assumptions about someone you know NOTHING about.

1. I’m NOT the one dropping names, 2. I’m doing very well with my own sites and 3. I’m not interested in the new ‘shiny’ objects.

Why would you make assumptions like that?

You’ve written a book that may be the best copywriting book ever – but based on the way you’ve responded to me I doubt it.

PS: I’ve read ALL of Settle’s books. Copy Trolls is easily the worst. Read the Infotainment Book, there’s ideas in there you can use.

I’ve done enough unpaid promotion of Ben Settle’s ideas, so I won’t talk about infotainment today.

Instead, let me get back to what I really love to do. And that’s finding illustrations for deep persuasion, influence, and psychology ideas that I can share with you.

Today’s idea comes from neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran.

At one point, Ramachandran studied people people who had suffered a stroke and were paralyzed in one arm. And yet, these people stubbornly refused to admit they were paralyzed.

This wasn’t just a brave face they were putting on in public.

They truly could not accept that their arm was hanging limp by their side, not responding to any command they gave it.

Ramachandran performed clever experiments to try to elicit whether these patients actually believed they were 100% fine.

The answer was yes. They themselves were convinced their arm was not paralyzed, in spite of the very obvious evidence otherwise.

So is this just a strange corner case in the medical literature… or something for the archives of Internet trolldom?

Ramachandran thinks it’s more than that.

He claims this is a dramatic and concrete illustration of the kind of thing we all engage in, all the time.

Denial, Ramachandran says, is a fundamental human activity. It’s how we manage to live in a complex and often nasty and brutish world, and still maintain an illusion of a coherent, in-control self.

I personally find this idea both terrifying and fascinating. Which of the things I know to be true are a flat-out denial of reality?

​​Or maybe, not even a flat-out denial, but something more complex?

Because flat-out denial (“I’m NOT the one dropping names”) was just one of the mechanisms Ramachandran came across in his paralyzed-but-no patients.

There were five other types as well. You can see a few more of these denial strategies in my troll’s response above.

​​But if you can’t spot them, don’t worry.

I’ll spell out the other five types of denial in my emails over the coming days. You can sign up here if you want to read that.

Like I said, I find this stuff personally fascinating. But it can be valuable, too.

It can help you understand other people better, whether those are your friends… family… customers… prospects… or trolls.

And of course, it can help you understand yourself better. And who knows. Maybe, one day, it can even be an opportunity to examine, review, and possibly improve.

Torture-free deadline for Copy Riddles is near

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Perhaps you don’t care that the deadline to sign up for Copy Riddles is approaching in a few hours. Such is the society we live in.

But it wasn’t always so. For example, Julius Caesar once wrote about a curious urgency tactic used by his enemies, the Gauls:

“By Gallic intertribal law all adult males are obligated to attend the muster under arms; and the last to come is tortured to death in sight of the host.”

Ah the good old days… when a deadline really meant something.

But again, we live in a modern and a civilized society. So the only torture I can inflict upon you is to say:

Come 12 midnight PST tonight (Sunday), I will close the doors to Copy Riddles.

And no amount of pleading about how your car was in the shop, or how the kids were sleeping, or how you only had cash on hand (all excuses I’ve gotten before) will make me crack those doors open a single inch.

​​Not until some uncertain future date, at least a few months down the line, when or if I decide to reopen Copy Riddles.

Again, perhaps you don’t care. But if you do, there’s still a bit of time. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Knock twice before you open this email

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Welcome. First, let me share the traditional greeting:

“Email is great! Yes it is.”

And now, you and I can get started with today’s content:

A few weeks ago, I was rea​ding a New Yorker article. In that article, I came across an interesting idea that’s stuck with me since. ​​I’ll share it with you in today’s email and then we can wrap up this part of our lives and move on to other things.

The article I read was about how good technology is getting at reading our minds, in a very literal sense.

You can now scan people’s brains and have a good idea of how their brains are lighting up in real time.

Combine this with a lot of data of other people’s brains and a lot of fancy software… and we are nearly at a point where somebody can know exactly what you’re thinking… even if you’re just sitting there, eyes closed, doing nothing but smirking.

Anyways, the idea that stuck with me had to do with “event boundaries.” From the article:

He had the class watch a clip from “Seinfeld” in which George, Susan (an N.B.C. executive he is courting), and Kramer are hanging out with Jerry in his apartment. The phone rings, and Jerry answers: it’s a telemarketer. Jerry hangs up, to cheers from the studio audience.

“Where was the event boundary in the clip?” Norman asked. The students yelled out in chorus, “When the phone rang!” Psychologists have long known that our minds divide experiences into segments; in this case, it was the phone call that caused the division.

In other words, neuroscientists now know something that writers have known for millennia:

Our brain loves to create scenes, snapshots, and scripts as a way of making sense of the immense complexity of the world.

This is so obvious that it might not sound like much of a breakthrough. But it has some interesting consequences. Again from the article:

Walking into a room, you might forget why you came in; this happens, researchers say, because passing through the doorway brings one mental scene to a close and opens another.

But perhaps more interesting is the basic influence idea of exaggerating what people already want and respond to.

​​For example, is it any wonder so many religions have strict rules for entering and leaving a place of worship?

When entering the church, dip your fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross… do not enter or leave the sanctuary while the ark is open… leave the mosque using your left foot while reciting the dua.

And the point of this sermon is:

People want scenes… clearly marked beginnings and endings… so give it to em. Create doors, entrance rituals, dramatic event boundaries.

You will be helping your audience make sense of both you and of their world. They will thank you for it, with their attention, trust, and perhaps even money.

And that all I wanted to say. Except of course the traditional farewell:

“This email is finished! You can sign up here to get more. Yes you can.”

Why do scammers say they are from Nigeria?

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According a site that tracks online fraud, 51% of all scam emails mention Nigeria.

It seems self-defeating. Everybody knows it’s a scam. The “Nigerian prince” has become a stock joke.

So what gives? Are scammers so dumb? Don’t they know that everyone is on to them?

Well, we now have the answer, thanks to Cormac Herley, a researcher at Microsoft.

Herley came up with a mathematical model of the scammer’s dilemma.

And after a lot pencil sharpening… crumpled-up papers… and banging his fist on the desk… Herley finally solved his mathematical equations.

The answer to “Nigerian scammer” riddle is this:

1. Sending out spam emails is pretty close to free.

2. But “selling” the prospects who reply to those emails takes time and effort.

3. And so scammers want their front-end marketing to repel everybody but the most gullible. Because…

Those are the only people who the scammer can hope to profit from. That’s why scammers say they are from Nigeria… exactly because it sets off warning sirens to almost everyone except real prospects.

Ok, maybe this isn’t the kind of mind-blowing conclusion that required a bunch of fancy math.

But still, it sounds like a solid second argument for what Ben Settle calls repulsion marketing.

The first argument is psychological:

By saying things that repel the people you don’t want… you create a tighter bond with the people you do want. Because if you’re not saying anything to piss off a few people, you’re not saying anything to make anybody bond with you, either.

But the Microsoft research gives us a more practical reason to repel.

Because these days, there are a bunch of ways to get a bunch of free prospects. For example:

You can implement Daniel Throssell’s “Referral Magnet” strategy to create a kind of flywheel for new email subscribers…

Or you can post your stuff on your blog and let Google serve it up to the world forever…

Or you can go into popular Facebook groups, and spread your peacock tail for all to admire.

Free. All of it. But then comes the second step:

Fielding questions/requests/offers from prospects… dealing with customer service… handling refunds if you offer them.

All of these things have a real cost, whether in terms of time, actual work, or simply your psychological well-being.

So my takeaway for you is:

Start repelling people. Or get off my list.

Because as freelance forensic consultant Sherlock Holmes once said:

“When you have eliminated all who would be impossible or improfitable to sell, then whoever remains, however improbable, must be your prospect.”

Are you still reading?

Damn. I tried so hard to repel you. In that case, the only thing left for me to do, even though it hurts me to do it, is to offer you a spot on my email newsletter. Click here and fill out the form.