Psychology Behind Advertising

My big takeaway from yesterday’s Daniel Throssell presentation

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I’m at the airport as I write this, sitting in a dangerously comfortable armchair, staring out the big windows onto the tarmac, and waiting to fly from Sofia, Bulgaria to Barcelona, Spain.

This is the latest leg of a crisscrossing world journey I started almost two years ago. During that time, I have moved some two dozen times, staying mainly in Airbnbs though occasionally also with friends and family.

If you’re wondering why I’m gushing all this atypical and overly personal information at you, it’s because yesterday I held my “Analysis of Daniel Throssell” presentation.

In the aftermath of this presentation, I noticed I got as much positive feedback about the actual content I shared as about random personal things people spotted about me. The Firefox extensions I use… the labels in my Gmail account… my own charming face (apparently I look like actor Mike Connors).

The presentation seems to have been a success. Exactly 430 people registered for it, and by my very precise estimate, somewhere between 0 to 430 people attended live (I was too focused on what I had to say to actually check how many people were on the Zoom call).

The three techniques I was so focused on sharing during this presentation, the three techniques I identified in Daniel’s copy, are what you might consider “secrets.”

In other words, they are stuff you probably hadn’t heard or thought about before. They are meant to make you say, “Ohh, that’s clever” when you hear them.

These three techniques made certain of Daniel’s emails stand out to me. In that way, they are undoubtedly valuable.

But marketing “secrets” like this are rarely as valuable as the fundamental stuff you probably hear all the time, and have probably been hearing for years, but for one reason or another you refuse to accept, or refuse to do.

Such as the idea that personal reveals create trust, build a sense of liking, and set the foundations for a long-running relationship.

That’s probably plenty obvious to you if you are a regular reader of Daniel’s emails.

Perhaps you have incorporated revealing personal stuff in your own marketing, and you’ve reaped the benefits thereof.

Or perhaps like me, you dislike the idea of talking about yourself in any way.

In which case, all I can say is, it’s worth pushing yourself, and experimenting with how to make personal reveals in your marketing while still keeping your sense of integrity.

Because personal reveals definitely have benefits. Like I said above, they seem to be as impactful, and probably more so, as the info you actually share and the benefits you provide your audience.

That’s my big takeaway from yesterday’s presentation.

Does it resonate with you in any way?

No? You want more secrets?

In that case, you definitely won’t like the offer I will make in my email tomorrow.

To be honest with you, I actually hoped to put this offer it into today’s email. But I’m very sleep deprived, and it took me shamefully long to write the preceding 507 words. And in just a few minutes, boarding is starting.

So the only offer I have for you today is my workhorse, The 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. It might have slipped by you if you joined my list only recently.

It doesn’t really have any secrets, but it does have a lot of really fundamental advice, some of which might be trasnformative for you. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A shocking demonstration of influence or just a bit of misdirection?

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Last night, I watched The Heist, a Derren Brown special that ran on the BBC in 2006.

I wrote about Brown a few days ago. He’s a stage mentalist and magician, and TV debunker of psychics, faith healers etc.

The premise of The Heist is simple:

Can Brown take a group of middle managers who show up for a self-improvement seminar… and within a few weeks, turn them into criminals willing to steal £100,000 at gunpoint?

The short answer is, yes he can.

How exactly does Brown do it? Well, if you watch The Heist, it seems to be a matter of:

1) Carefully choosing the right marks
2) Classical conditioning
3) NLP and hypnosis
4) Making use of deference to authority
5) Commitment and consistency

The show starts out in a countryside castle. Brown delivers a training there to a group of 13 people who responded to a newspaper ad.

Brown was already a TV celeb at this point, and the ad promised that, in the training, chosen participants would learn some of his cool techniques.

During the training, Brown teaches the attendees some useful stuff, such as his memory tricks. But he also programs them using his hypnosis and NLP skills. And he encourages them to commit a petty crime — to steal some candy from the corner store.

Most of the attendees end up complying. They walk into the store, and more or less awkwardly, they walk out with a Snickers or a Kit Kat tucked in their pants or jacket sleeve.

Over the coming weeks, Brown focuses on the most promising prospects. He gives them more tasks and training, which are really more compliance tests and criminal suggestion in disguise.

In the end, Brown picks four of the original 13 — three men and one woman. He massages them more with suggestion and mind tricks, amping up their aggression, planting the seeds of a daring and serious crime.

The climax of the show is covert footage of each of four final would-be criminals. One by one, they walk down the same London street, toward a bank security guard (actually an actor).

Three of the four end up pulling out a fake gun and robbing (or thinking they are robbing) the security guard.

Only the fourth guy nervously walks on, twitching his head and gritting his teeth, but leaving his toy gun unused.

So that’s the story you get if you watch The Heist.

But what’s the reality? Well, who the hell knows.

Because I’m not telling you about Brown’s Heist as an example of the power of influence techniques, or NLP, or good list selection, all of which I’ve written about plenty in this newsletter.

Instead, I’m telling you about The Heist as an example of sleight-of-hand and misdirection.

Brown says there was no trickery and no fooling the viewer involved in The Heist. And I believe the participants in The Heist were real, and not actors. I also have no doubt they believed they were doing something real when they pulled the toy gun on the bank security guard.

Even so, I think The Heist contains some clever editing to make you come away with the story above… as opposed to a significantly different story.

Maybe if you watch The Heist yourself, you will spot the crucial bits that I think are missing, and you can learn something about misdirection.

Or who knows, maybe I’m totally wrong.

Maybe The Heist really is demonstration what it takes to convert a few ordinary law-abiding citizens into serious criminals. If so, it’s worth watching for inspiration and self-programming value alone.

(Not to be a criminal, you goose. But just to realize the true power of these influence techniques we use all the time in copywriting and marketing.)

In any case, if you are curious, or suggestible, then take a look at the entire Heist special below. And before you click to watch it, if you want to get more influence and persuasion ideas like this, sign up to my newsletter.

A gazumping email that might give you a conniption

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What exactly does gazump mean? Or tippex? Or quango?

I have no idea. I’ve never heard these words before. And for the sake of this email, I decided not to obey my curiosity and not to look them up.

Odds are, you also don’t know what these words mean, unless you are from the UK.

If you are from the UK, you you almost certainly know them. That’s according to a data analysis I just looked at, about differences in word familiarity between the UK and US.

80% of people from the UK knew gazump, tippex, and quango. But only 10% of Americans did. (My guess is that the rest of the world, maybe excluding Australians, are equally clueless.)

What about the other direction?

Well, less than 20% of UK people, and at least 75% of Americans, knew such all-American words as ziti, manicotti, and albuterol. The word conniption also had a big spread.

But wait, there’s more.

Because I got one more interesting data set for you. This one is about differences between men and women.

Fewer than 20% of men, and more than 50% of women, knew the following words:

* peplum
* boucle
* rouche

(True enough, I don’t know what any of these words mean. And I’m afraid to look them up.)

There’s nothing comparably interesting in the other direction, because words known by fewer than 20% of women, such as femtosecond and thermistor, are also known by fewer than half of men.

But there is something very interesting at the highest end of the men-women data set.

There is a certain provocative word, which is known by 88% of men… but only 54% of women.

That word is shemale.

Draw your own conclusions.

I really mean that. Because while I thought this word data was interesting, I couldn’t come up with any smart marketing point to draw out of it.

So today, I will just risk it and guess that maybe you’re like me, and maybe you find words interesting.

And since I found this stuff fun, maybe you will too.

Thinking about it now, that might be a marketing point in itself.

In any case, if you like strange or disgusting words that women know and men don’t, and vice versa, you might like my email newsletter. Or you might not. If you want to give it a try, click here and fill out the form.

I broke the email chain yesterday

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This morning, reader Jesús Silva Marcano wrote to say:

Hey John!

Today when I saw that I didn’t have an email from you….

And after waiting a few hours…

I must admit a part of me was a little saddened.

Besides Ben Settle’s emails, yours are the ones I usually look forward to.

They never disappoint.

I hope all is well.

It’s true. I didn’t send out email last night.

I broke a chain going back to July 2020, when I skipped a few days because I was on vacation at the seaside, drinking quite actively, and generally celebrating and feeling high from having made a ton of money the previous few months, my first really big copywriting months.

But nothing exciting like that happened yesterday.

I had an email scheduled. I checked my inbox before I went to bed. But the email still hadn’t arrived.

I checked ActiveCampaign. It said my email was “Pending Review.”

I tried to stop the campaign so I could recreate it and send it again. It wouldn’t allow me. I tried again. No soap.

I contacted ActiveCampaign to ask what’s up.

No response.

I went to bed, figuring it would solve itself.

It didn’t.

This morning, my email from yesterday is still “Pending Review.” I can’t imagine why, because I wasn’t writing about any controversial or flaggable topics. (I do have an email about a certain kind of “gross body enhancement” coming up, but last night’s email waddn’t it.)

Oh well. The world doesn’t end if I don’t send out an email.

​​But it does spin a little faster. So it’s a shame I don’t have something to sell you right now.

In my experience, people today are starved for something — anything — real.

And when your readers witness you making a mistake, in real time, or getting involved in conflict, in real time, or failing to deliver on a public promise like a daily email, that’s more powerful and engaging than even the most personal stories you share.

And if I had, say, a training on writing faster, that would be perfect. I could end this email right here by saying something like:

“But you know what? Let’s talk copywriting. According to my extremely neat timekeeping, 72% of so-called “writing” really goes to editing. And things often don’t get delivered on time, or ever, because they are “Pending Review” by that finnicky, editing part of your brain. So if you don’t want to be at the whim and mercy of your own inner editing demon, if you want to meet all deadlines, if you wanna get projects done more quickly and make more money, then join me for the Faster Writing (and Editing) Workshop here blah blah…”

Well, maybe a little less ham-handed than that, but you get the idea.

If only I had the faster writing offer for sale right now, then the fact that ActiveCampaign is behaving like a lazy consular office processing my visa application… rather than as a for-profit business that has been taking my money for the better part of a decade… well, that would’ve all worked in my favor.

So keep this in mind if you have your own email list. Anything really real in your life, particularly that readers can experience and verify for themselves, makes for the pinnacle of engagement.

As for me, I got nothing. No gain from this ​event. ​Except to tell you that indeed I am ok, in case you were worried. And now that I’ve told you the background of all this, to maybe make a slightly stronger bond with you, so you get excited about getting my next email tomorrow, and decide to sign up for my email newsletter.

The gruesome adventures of Mussolini’s corpse

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On today’s date, April 28 1945, the leader of fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini, was executed by Italian partisans in a small town next to Lake Como. But it turned out death was only the beginning of the adventures of Mussolini’s corpse.

The next day, the corpse was taken to Milan. It was dropped off in a square recently renamed to honor 15 partisans killed by Mussolini’s forces.

There, on the ground, Mussolini’s corpse was kicked and spat upon by passersby.

The corpse was then hanged by its heels from an Esso gas station.

Hanging upside down, the corpse was stoned by an angry crowd. One woman fired five bullets into the corpse, one for each of her five sons who had been killed by Mussolini’s soldiers.

Mussolini’s body was eventually taken down, and buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery north of the city.

The end?

Oh no.

Next year, on Easter Sunday 1946, Mussolini rose from the grave, or rather, his corpse was dug up by three fascist sympathizers.

The decaying mass that was left of Mussolini was then kept in a trunk for over 10 months, and smuggled around from place to place.

​​Eventually, the Mussolini trunk made its way to a Franciscan monastery near the town of Pavia. There, the corpse was recaptured by Italian authorities.

The end?

You wish.

The new Italian government couldn’t decide what to do with Mussolini’s remains.

In fact, the government kept agonizing over this question for over ten (10) years.

I couldn’t find out exactly where Mussolini’s corpse was kept all this time. But the conclusion was that, after intense political deal-making, Mussolini was finally reburied, in 1957, in a crypt, with marble fasces on the side, in a cemetery in his home town.

The end, finally.

​​A gruesome story, right? And so… illogical.

I mean, the guy was dead. The war was over. Fascism had ended. Why all the fuss over what would happen to the rotting flesh of the man who had once ruled Italy and caused death and destruction?

Well, because that’s how our brains work. What I mean is…

It’s impossible for our brains to take in all of a complex historical process, even if it’s happening around us.

And while it’s not impossible, it’s certainly hard and unpleasant to keep an abstract concept like “fascism” in our minds for very long.

But a specific person… with a name… a title… and all the ready-made emotional reactions that we humans get in response to other people… well, that’s very easy and natural to keep in mind.

But forget all this stuff I just said. And just remember Benito Mussolini and his traveling corpse.

Because whether you want to promote an idea, or bury one, you will find it much easier to promote a person, or to execute one. Figuratively of course. And then to figuratively kick and spit on the corpse, and let it hang by its heels for all the world to curse.

By the way, do you hate Benito Mussolini? Or love Bill Burr?

Then you might like my email newsletter. You can try it out here.

Selling drugs to kids

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IN ONLY SIX MONTHS, that formerly desperate man bought a $385,000 house with half down, and became a millionaire in less than a year. He also bought a vacation house, put away enough to cover his kids’ college educations, easily stopped his bad habits, and attained complete personal and financial freedom… all accomplished automatically, without effort or willpower!

That’s the back envelope copy from a direct mail sales letter written by one Jeff Paul.

​​Jeff was a student and protege of Dan Kennedy, and this sales letter is actually selling Dan’s Psycho Cybernetics program.

I’m sharing this copy with you for two reasons:

First, because I want to point you to Info Marketing Blog. It’s got a few decades’ worth of brilliant direct response ads, and smart and interesting commentary. And if you need proof of that, the guy who runs Info Marketing Blog, Lawrence Bernstein, was called out as a valuable resource during Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar by Gary Bencivenga himself.

Second, there’s a masterful marketing and copywriting lesson in those two sentences of copy above. It’s right there at the end:

“… automatically, without effort or willpower!”

When I look outside at the people I know… and when I look inside, at my own feelings and frustrations… I find this is what we all really really want, deep down.

Peace. No effort. Definitely no struggle, and no demands on our willpower. No opportunity for it to go wrong. Instead, all done automatically, by some mechanism outside of us.

That’s why smart marketers like Dan Kennedy and Jeff Paul, and millions of others like them, make those promises.

And if you want to sell, in big numbers, at high prices, you should make these promises too.

Only be careful those desires you stimulate in your sales copy don’t seep into your own subconscious.

Because in my experience, life is all about effort, about exerting your willpower, about getting things done yourself instead of sitting around and wishing they could be done automatically.

How exactly do you reconcile selling something to people that you wouldn’t consume yourself? It seems a little like going down to the elementary school each day to sell drugs to kids, while being religious about never allowing that filth near your own family.

I don’t have a good way to reconcile these things for you. But facts are facts. And if you want to see some market-tested facts, here’s Jeff Paul’s complete sales letter. It’s worth reading. So much so that I’ll even talk about it tomorrow.

Sign up for my email newsletter if you want to read that when it comes out. And here’s the link to the sales letter if you want to get a head start.

https://infomarketingblog.com/wordpress/jeff-pauls-greatest-story-selling-ad/

Flash roll: The following presentation has been paid for by Desert Kite Enterprises

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I’ve been on a hiatus from the usual marketing mailing lists over the past few weeks, so it took me a while to find out that Joe Sugarman died recently.

I’ve written a lot about Joe and his ideas in this newsletter.

In part, that’s because Joe’s Adweek book was the first book on copywriting I ever read. It gave me a lot of ideas to get started in this field, and to a good extent influenced my writing style.

But also, I’ve written a lot about Joe just because he was such a successful direct marketer, who was willing to publicly share the many million-dollar insights he had over his long career.

I found out Joe had died from Brian Kurtz’s email last Sunday. Brian also sent out a link to the infomercial for Joe’s BluBlockers — which became Joe’s biggest success, bringing in over $300 mil.

I actually bought a couple pair of BluBlockers a few years ago. So I was happy to finally see the full infomercial. In a nut, the entire 28 minutes is just a frame around a bunch of on-street testimonials that Joe collected for BluBlockers.

But ok.

Maybe you’re starting to wonder if this email will have any kind of marketing lesson, or if I will just reminisce about Joe Sugarman.

I do got a lesson for you.

​​Take a look at the following bit of sales patter delivered by Joe in the infomercial. It comes after some testimonials by people who say that BluBlockers allow them to see as well as they do with prescription sunglasses.

“I know BluBlockers aren’t prescription sunglasses,” the host babe asks Joe, “but why do so many people think that they are?”

Joe responds:

“BluBlockers block 100% of blue light. Not only the ultraviolet light but the blue light as well. Blue light does not focus very clearly on the retina. And the retina is the focusing screen of the eye. Now all the other colors focus fairly close to the retina. But not blue light. So if you block blue light, what you see is a lot clearer, and a lot sharper.”

If you have read Oren Klaff’s book Flip the Script, you might recognize this as a flash roll. It’s basically a rapidfire display of technical language used to wow — or hypnotize — the prospect into thinking you’re legit.

(To make it clearer: the original flash roll was a term used by undercover cops. They flashed a roll of cash to a drug dealer to show they meant business.)

For over two years, I’ve been collecting ideas related to the use of insight in marketing. That’s when you say, “Ahaaa… it makes so much sense now!” And in that way, you become open to influence.

Several people have suggested to me to include Klaff’s flash roll idea. I resisted.

After all, what is there to intuitively make sense of in Joe’s argument above? He’s just throwing some technical facts at you. They could be completely made up. You have no way to actually experience or validate those facts for yourself.

But it doesn’t matter.

The people who told me the flash roll creates a feeling of insight were right. I was wrong.

That same feeling of deep understanding — which is usually triggered when you experience or understand something for yourself — well, it can be triggered, on a slightly smaller scale, just by an adequate display of authority.

“So you’re telling me to include more authority in my sales copy?” you ask. “That doesn’t sound very insightful.”

What I’m actually telling you is that there are better ways of creating insight. But if you got nothing else, then some technical jargon, or perhaps a scientific study, can be good enough to get people to say, “Ooh… I get it now!” Even though they really don’t.

As for those more powerful ways of creating insight, I’ll write about that one day, in that book I’ve been promising for a long time.

For now, I’d like to tell you about an interesting article. It’s titled “Beware What Sounds Insightful.”

This article points out the unobvious truth that there are mechanisms of creating the feeling of insight… and that they can dress up otherwise mundane or even ridiculous ideas as something profound. It even gives you some more examples of flash rolls, by some of the most insightful writers out there on the Internet. In case you’re interested:

https://commoncog.com/blog/beware-what-sounds-insightful/

Mood is a thing for cattle and loveplay, not selling

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Last night was the first time I’ve ever walked out of a movie theater.

I nervously edged forward in my seat… I clutched my jacket and my backpack… I waited for the end of the scene… and then I gritted my teeth and pushed through the long row of legs and their groaning owners and the boxes of popcorn these leg-owners were holding.

Once I had tripped and stumbled over all these people, I made my way through the darkened theater, out the emergency exit, and out into a world of light and air and freedom.

I asked myself later what had happened to me. After all, I’ve suffered through worse movies than this, the 2021 version of Dune. Why did I decide to bolt this time?

Maybe it was the fact it was my first time in a movie theater in over two years.

Maybe it was the movie itself. After all, compare the same line from the mysterious 1984 version, which I like a lot, to this present, lifeless version:

“Not in the mood? Mood’s a thing for cattle and loveplay, not fighting!”
— Dune (1984)

“Mood? What’s mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises, no matter the mood!”
— Dune (2021)

So yeah, there were those reasons. But I realized what the biggest reason was simply:

I had gone to see this movie by myself.

I’m in transit between two cities. I had some free time, and a few people had recommended this new Dune. So I decided to go to the movies, even though I had no one to go with.

It turned out to be a rare blessing.

I didn’t have to bribe, convince, or beg anyone to agree with me. I didn’t have to look over to my movie partner, look imploringly at the exit, and then look back, trying to see if the person next to me understood that now’s time to get up and get the hell out, and avoid wasting two more hours of perfectly good life.

In my experience, that’s often not the case. Not when it comes to movie going. And not when it comes to life in general.

I recently wrote about the many hooks that keep people stuck in the status quo. Even when the status quo is dull, sepia-toned, and threatens to drag on endlessly, like this new version of Dune.

Well, other people are the most powerful of these hooks, both directly and indirectly.

That’s an unavoidable fact of life. And it’s something you will have to deal with in your marketing.

So my point for you is this:

Many marketing gurus will try to sell you new tricks to help you agitate the spleen out of your prospect. The idea being, once you get somebody in the right mood, he will finally take action.

A dangerous mistake, I say.

In the words of Jonah Berger, instead of asking what would encourage change, ask why things haven’t changed already.

And if you are trying to get your prospect to take real-world action… or make a transformation in his life… or just make a really big purchase, which might end up helping him… then think about other people in his life. And somewhere in your marketing, equip your prospect to deal with these other people.

​​Give your prospect a buying system, not a mood. After all, there’s a world of light and air and freedom at stake.

Now, in a moment, I’ll give you a chance to transform your life, by signing up to my email newsletter and getting a steady stream of valuable persuasion and marketing ideas.

But you might think how your spouse, kids, or wife might react if they see you reading yet another newsletter on your phone, when you should be paying attention to them.

When they try to make you feel guilty about it, tell yourself, and them if you like, that it’s a temporary sacrifice, so you can build a better life for all of you.

But that’s all assuming you sign up to my newsletter. It’s not for everyone. But maybe it is for you. If you want to find out, here’s where to go.

Dark and disturbing

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Today’s email is dark and disturbing. I mean it. Read at your own peril.

Many years ago, late one night, I was watching TV and I saw a fragment of a courtroom drama starring Robin Wright. (She also played Buttercup, if you’ve ever seen the Princess Bride.)

In the movie, Wright’s character is testifying against her violent and abusive ex-boyfriend. Even so, she is still in love with the guy. She even interprets his acts of violence as signs that he cares.

I’ll admit, this made me morbidly curious. It had a ring of truth to it. But after all, it was just a movie.

Then a couple days ago, I shared a Rolling Stone article about get-rich-quick master David Bendah. And while I was looking at that article, I saw something in the sidebar. The number 1 trending article on Rolling Stone right now:

“Marilyn Manson: The Monster Hiding in Plain Sight”

It’s same story as that movie I saw long ago. But it’s real — or at least that’s what many of the women Manson has been with claim, including in court.

One of Manson’s exes reports being locked in a cramped, soundproof space that Manson called the “Bad Girls’ Room.”

The first time it happened, she was screaming and kicking to be let out.

In time, she says, she learned to stop fighting, because Manson enjoyed her struggle.

In other words, this happened many times. This grown, independent woman was locked up in a soundproof closet space as punishment… she was humiliated and horrified… and she came back for more.

Another woman, actress Esme Bianco from Game of Thrones, claims Manson abused and raped her for 2 years.

The final straw, Bianco says, was when Manson started running around his all-black, meatlocker-cold West Hollywood apartment, smashing the walls with an axe, and screaming that she was “crowding him.”

2 years of rape and abuse. And it had to take an axe for a successful Hollywood actress to finally get out.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to blame the victims here.

I just think that looking at extremes in life shines a light on more everyday situations.

For example, how conflicted we all are.

There are bad situation in life. And yet, so many hooks, physical and mental, keep us from packing up and leaving.

There are also many possibly good future outcomes. And yet, so many hooks, physical and mental, keep us from moving towards these outcomes.

So that’s my takeaway for you.

Maybe there have been times when you’ve made people an amazing offer. And you couldn’t understand for the life of you why people weren’t running to take you up on it.

Well, there is the chance that your offer was not as amazing as you thought. Or maybe you botched the marketing.

But even if you get everything just perfect, only a few percent will ever respond to even the best offer.

Why?

Well, for reasons like this, the conflicts that exist in us, even in the most extreme situations.

And if you keep this dark and disturbing truth in mind, and find ways to address it, you might have a chance to sell — and maybe help — a lot more people.

Or not.

As another example, I have an offer for you. Marketing and copywriting and persuasion lessons… delivered to your inbox in small, fascinating packages, each day… all for free. Will you take me up on it? Well, I won’t be surprised if you don’t. But if you want to, here’s where to go.

More on people’s deepest secrets, fears, and desires

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INTERVIEWER: I think finding something that helps you find fulfillment and happiness is important. And if that happens to be heroin, and you got it under control… maybe it’s okay.

MATTHEW: I do, but then it’s the money thing. It’s a lot of money.

INTERVIEWER: How much do you spend? How much do you spend a week?

MATTHEW: A month, probably $1,500. So I could have a nice apartment.

That’s from an interview with Matthew, a functional heroin addict. Matthew says he smokes heroin, every day, all day. And yet he has a job, and he does it well, and nobody knows.

The interview with Matthew is part of a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.

I discovered Soft White Underbelly a few weeks ago. It features hundreds or maybe thousands of in-depth interviews with drug addicts, homeless people, child abuse victims, prostitutes, escorts, inbred Appalachian families, gang members, a high-level mob boss, a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher, a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, and various others on the outside of what you might call mainstream society.

I won’t lie — I got sucked into this channel because of purely prurient curiosity about the lives of escorts and prostitutes and even a male gigolo.

I’m not sure what my persuasion and influence takeaway for you is today. Except that, in my experience, being interested and curious is like a superpower in almost any field.

You achieve focus by being interested. And you achieve interest, if you don’t have it already, by seeing details.

I talked yesterday about how there are primal urges that motivate all people — except these are secrets most of us will never share with others. Often, we can’t even face up to them on our own, in the dead of night, as we’re falling asleep, with the covers pulled up to our eyeballs.

But the people who are interviewed on Soft White Underbelly are incredibly open about the most shocking, intimate, painful, and humiliating things in their lives.

Maybe some of these stories aren’t true. But I bet many of them are. And they’re very revealing.

Yes, these are extreme stories of people coping with bad life situations and bad life choices.

But like I said yesterday, the human experience is similar among all of us. And a person doesn’t need to have extreme abuse or trauma or misfortune to fall into the same patterns of thought and behavior as the people on Soft White Underbelly.

So if you pay attention to the details of their stories… it might be useful both to understand others better, and to understand yourself better.

Or who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify my own prurient fascination.

In case you want to decide for yourself, let me recommend a SFU interview to start with.
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​​It’s with a black-hat hacker, who started in the 1980s by phreaking phones and early ATMs, then graduated to more lucrative and high-scale tech exploits ($10M for hacking the DirectTV receiver), and culminated about 10 years ago with… well, I won’t spoil it.

If you’re interested, the full interview is below. But before you watch it, if you want more ideas on understanding yourself and other people better — both for profit and for curiosity’s sake — then sign up to my email newsletter.