Last week I poured myself some strong black coffee…

…tidied up my cabin a little bit…

…and recorded a 56 minute bonus call with master marketer and email copywriter John Bejakovic.

John is a fellow Write Way subscriber, a cabin crewmember and customer of mine, and I am an enthusiastic reader and customer of his.

He also has what is, in my opinion, the best headline of any email landing page ever.

You can read that and sign up for his excellent emails here.

Or you can keep reading for the first part of our discussion, which is on tapping into the toddler mind inside us all.

A brief disclaimer before we begin.

I’ve fairly heavily edited this transcript, because let’s be honest…

…reading a conversation sucks.

Pasting transcripts in can work if they’re short, or the speaker is naturally eloquent (unlike me) but boy howdy does it hurt mine head to read if otherwise.

So what I’ve done here is attempt to marry the material of the transcript with the style and energy of the Write Way you know and love.

Call it an amplified transcript.

If you want the full, unfiltered, unedited conversation with all the questions included?

Well, there’s a chance to get that down at the end of this email.

But without further ado…

Let’s dive in!

James Carran:

Thank you, John, for taking time to chat. So, as you know, I tried to farm out some of the work of coming up with questions.

My favorite question that came through was someone who replied saying:

“Which of the ten commandments in your book would be most useful in persuading a newborn that the middle of the night is sleep time and not playtime?”

I know you don't have kids…

…and the question was tongue-in-cheek…

…so I'm not necessarily expecting you to answer it.

But the reason I wanted to kind of open with it was because I've got four kids, and I have actually used a lot of the things that I've learned from persuasion, copywriting, hypnosis, all of those things, when I've been parenting my kids.

Whether it’s little things like focusing on the positive behavior that you want instead of focusing on what you don't want them to do (because that just puts the idea in their head) or some of the stuff that you talk about in the book about giving people a reason why and putting a story into things.

For example, my daughter used to have nightmares in the middle of the night.

She'd wake up screaming at 3:00 in the morning about pumpkins.

I think it was a Halloween craft that she saw that just freaked her out.

And after a few nights of trying to be rational about it, I grabbed her toy rabbit and told her this story about how she's got a toy rabbit in her bed, and, well…

“Rabbits eat pumpkins!”

Like, that's what rabbits eat, vegetables, so if there's any vegetables coming to get you, the rabbit will just eat them, and she slept through the night like straight after, forever. And it was interesting because the rational stuff didn't help.

Rationally telling her, "Don't be silly, pumpkins can't walk, pumpkins can't get you.", that did nothing. So I just wanted to share that up front because I know some people probably look at your book:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

And think:

“Well, I’m not a Con Man, Pickup Artist, Magician, Door-to-Door Salesman, Hypnotist, Copywriter, Negotiator, Political Propagandist, Stand Up Comedian, or Oscar-Winning Screenwriter…

…so what’s it got to do with me?!”

But I thought that story might help illustrate why we’re having this conversation on the Write Way because you can absolutely apply these skills and lessons and commandments across domains, likely in ways you haven't thought about before.

So, unless you have specific parenting tips you picked out from conmen…

John Bejakovic:

Yeah, I don't have a parenting tip, and like you said, I don't have kids.

So I might be giving horrible advice here. But the first thing that came to mind is, I believe, commandment five or six is about agreeing and amplifying.

Or I guess in general, it’s about the idea that there's communication that's going on and there's a surface level to that communication…

…and then there's kind of the underlying, very deep ocean of actual sub-communication that's going on.

There's this statistic that's thrown out, how 96% of all communication is body language and vocal tone (or whatever the percentage is), and, you know, some small percentage is actually verbal.

But I think there's an even bigger part of communication which is…

…inside of somebody's head.

And you're kind of tapping in, with the story about what your daughter knew about rabbits and pumpkins.

Not just that, but suddenly it changed the entire interaction from dealing with this real threat, and I'm trying to rationally dissuade you from talking about this threat…

…to “it's story time, and we're focusing on your rabbit, and I'm telling you this fanciful story.” And it's not only the logical points you were making about how rabbits eat vegetables, and therefore she's going to be safe, but it changed the entire frame of that interaction.

I don't know the operational way of actually putting that into practice. I have a few examples in the book, but one of them is this idea of agree and amplify. So whatever people say, you don't try to dismiss it, you don't try to rationally shut it down.

Instead, you agree with it, and you say yes, and you build it up in this fanciful way, which is changing the tone of the conversation from being, “we're arguing about something serious,” to, “this is a fun thing, this is a fun interaction, the initial thing that you said was just a silly game.”

And I imagine that somewhere it could either calm your daughter down, or it could result in a horrible misfire where, suddenly she's like, "Oh my god, we need to, like, really batten down the hatches because the pumpkins are coming, and it's horrible."

James:

That's a good point, because the first couple of nights it happened, I tried to rationally approach it, saying things like:

“don't be silly, pumpkins can't get you, they can't walk,” etc.

That would calm her down eventually, but then it would happen again the next night.

But yeah, it is the difference between just dismissing the nonsense and trying to actually divert it, which I think you talk about there.

The example you give in the book was about Ronald Reagan and the way he used a series of questions in a TV debate, which kind of slip past because you're not confrontationally saying “this is true,” and then the person is like, well, is it?

You're actually just making them come to you, and I think stories do a similar thing.

John:

I think a big theme of what these different commandments are about is this idea that, even if you're coming to people with the truth, even if you're coming to people with something that could be helpful to them, but you're approaching them and telling them:

“this is good for you, you should do this”

…for whatever reason of self-protection or clinging to the status quo, it seems we all have this innate mechanism where we say, "Yeah, but," and we immediately want to argue that.

And as soon as someone tells us, "I have a great way for you to make money, I have a great way for you to raise your kid, I have a great way for you to be happier and healthier," our immediate reaction is always going to be:

"I don't know, I don't know if that really is so great, or I don't know if that's going to work for me. Just… don't tell me what to do!”

James:

…especially my daughter.

John:

I feel like it's a universal human principle and I feel like different people have a different level of reactiveness. Maybe it also depends on who we're talking to.

I'm a fairly middle-aged person, and I call my mom up, and she will make recommendations like “make sure that you wash the vegetables before you eat them.”

I keep trying to tell her, I've been living on my own for decades, I feel like I've learned certain basic facts about how to survive in the world.

But the point is that she says those things, and the hackles stand up on the back of my neck, and I'm, like, you know,

“I know how to live my life, don't tell me!”

And she can't not tell me these motherly things, and I can't not go back to that mindset of being a 14-year-old boy and being, like, “just don't tell me what to do.”

Everybody has this to a certain extent, and so a lot of these disciplines in the book are people finding ways of circumventing that, or in some way channeling that, so it actually works in their favor.

James:

I was just thinking as you're saying that…

People think about how you can fail to persuade a toddler because you’re trying to treat them like a fully rational adult. But it's almost the other way around.

We fail to persuade adults because we treat them like fully rational adults, and actually, we need to remember that we never really leave behind that emotional, driven, toddler-like instinct. That's always in us, no matter how rational we think we are.

And then the rational mind, you talk about it in the book, the interpreter, builds a story around what has happened. It puts the facts together and builds a story around it.

It doesn't necessarily actually have anything to do with what actually happened.

It’s a really helpful reminder to remember we're all toddlers to some extent. When you understand that, you realise how some of these things would apply to writing an email, for example. Because if you do go in and tell them what to do, like a toddler, they are just going to push back.

And sometimes you just have to, but sometimes you can save a lot of angst by just approaching it from a slightly sideways direction.

John:

Yeah, I completely agree.

Our mental image of how we are is, I was this childish, irrational, very gullible, very stubborn creature for a certain number of years…

…and then I went through my teenage years when I was very reactionary, and where I had a lot of sensitivity to what other people think of me…

…and then I grew up, and I matured, and I became this solid, reasonable person that I am today. And the fact is,

it's not like that at all!

It's like you have this strong foundation of the four-year-old kid inside of you always for the rest of your life. All of the decisions that you make are based on the immediate, instinctive reactions.

This isn't me speculating.

There was that famous book a few years ago from that Nobel economist, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. The thinking fast is that instinctive, four-year-old thinking, where it's, like, no, no, no, I know this answer, even though that answer might be okay, or it might be right in 80% of cases, and 20% of cases, it's completely wrong or it's dramatically harmful.

Gradually, throughout life, we develop this second or third tier of thinking on top of that, where it's much, much more ponderous, it's much less convincing in a way. It's somehow, it's much more of a creation, but it can, somehow and sometimes, change those very bottom-level instinctive things.

But the point is that all of those layers are still there, and if you want to persuade people, then you need to know what those, like, very childhood, childlike instincts are. And I think that's kind of one of the things I talk about in the book, is that a lot of this stuff, it sounds almost impossible when you hear about it, right.

The first story I have in there is about Derren Brown approaching somebody on the street and starting a conversation, talking for 30 or 40 seconds, and then asking for somebody's wallet…

…and people actually giving him their wallet, right?

And when I tell that story to people, there are people who say, "Oh my god, I could really see myself falling for this." But then there's a large number of people who say, "No, that's impossible, I just don't believe this."

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones who is so self-centered, and I mean self-centered in a positive way, where you're, you know, self-conscious, you're not so gullible and liable as the majority of us are, but most people, if you press these buttons, you can really get people to do some crazy stuff.

…but more on the crazy stuff next week because we went on to talk about the ethics of persuasion, manipulative marketing, and making people do stuff.

Is it ethical to market anything?

Is there a difference between selling drills and selling courses?

Can you sell good courses ethically? Or is all info-marketing a scunnering scam?

All this and more…

…next week.

But if you can’t wait, or you want the full conversation including the parts I won’t reprint here, or you just like listening to our dulcet tones, or you really like the words “like”, “You know” and “just” which we both use with alarming frequency as we talk…

…and you want the full bonus call recording completely free?

Buy a copy of John’s book, and hit reply with proof of purchase.

I’ll send you the link post-haste.

Here’s the link to buy the book.

And in case you’re too tired to scroll all the way back up…

…here’s the link to sign up for John’s emails.

Meanwhile, may your pipe and prose tap into childlike pleasures and dreams,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

fin