Yesterday, a friend and I spent a lot of time tracking down the phrase “Joe Hepp.”
It appears in A House of Games, a David Mamet film about con men.
“Are you Joe Hepp?” is apparently an old circus saying that means, “Are you a know-it-all?” It later morphed into, “Are you hep?” — meaning “are you in the know?” — and later hip, hippy, hipster, etc.
But here’s something you might find more interesting.
It’s the etymology of another phrase from A House of Games. It comes up when the main con man, Mike, talks about what a con game really is.
It’s short for confidence game, says Mike.
You might have already known that.
But do you know why it’s called a confidence game?
Not because the con man gains your confidence in order to cheat you. Instead, it’s because he gives you his confidence. And this makes you trust him, and makes you susceptible for manipulation and persuasion.
In other words, it’s the old reciprocity principle from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.
Except, not as it’s applied in the lame and ineffective way of most marketers (“If I bombard my prospects with free pdfs and hard-teaching emails, then they will feel obliged to eventually buy from me”).
No.
There are much better, more subtle, and more effective ways to apply reciprocity — AKA the con game — to copywriting and marketing.
I won’t lay them out here.
But if you’d like to know what I have in mind, you might find some answers here: