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.