I want you to picture something. You walk into, like, a retro video game store Okay. And you're scanning the shelves, and you see two games side by side. Technically, they're the exact same game. Same code, same everything.
Same code, same levels. Yeah. But game a is in this plain white box with just, you know, black text space simulator. Uh-huh. Game b has this holographic cover, explosions, a hero in sunglasses…and a big sticker that says limited edition.
Which one do you grab? I mean, it's gotta be the explosions. Ninety nine percent of us are grabbing the explosions. We grab the explosions, and that right there, that's what they call the yes switch. Right.
It has nothing to do with the product, really. It's all about the packaging and how it triggers your brain to just say, I need that. Exactly. Today, we're looking at how to engineer that exact reaction in your own writing. And for this, we're unpacking a Geek Out Friday session.
This one's from January thirty twenty twenty six with Damon Nelson and Wayne Atkinson. And this session is fascinating because it sort of bridges these two worlds that, you know, usually don't mix, deep human psychology on one hand and then automated AI on the other. Right. Because you usually get the, you know, the purest copywriter saying AI has no soul, and then the tech guy is saying you don't even need to write anymore. Mhmm.
And Damon Nelson is right in the middle. He's been a copywriter for fifteen years, but he admits something that I think a lot of people feel. He says staring at a blank page is well, it's terrifying. The blank page syndrome. Yeah.
And he hates what he calls the boring facts. Right. He knows if he just lists the product specs, he's lost the sale…
because, well, facts are dry. Psychology is what sells. So the mission for this deep dive is to figure out how to take that dry factual content, an email, a sales page, whatever, and turn it into something people actually fight to buy. And we're gonna break down these eight persuasion triggers, a framework that originally came from Bushra Azra, and then see how Damon built this whole AI workflow to automate it. And when we say automate, we're not just talking about asking ChatGPT to, you know, write a funny email or something.
No. This is way more sophisticated. It's a diagnostic workflow. It uses Google's notebook LM and Gemini to audit your writing against, like, a psychological rule book.
It's literally engineering persuasion. Yeah. But before we get to the tech, we have to understand the human brain. Damon talks about this idea of a circuit board. It's a great metaphor, really.
The idea is that the human brain is lazy. It wants shortcuts. Yeah. And these eight switches are like pre wired shortcuts. You flip one, you get attention.
But if you can stack them, you know, flip two or three at once, you bypass logic and go straight to desire. Okay. So let's start with the big one. Switch number one, prestige. The cool kid factor.
The cool kid factor. Exactly. This one is huge because it taps right into our ego. We all like to think we're rational people buying things for their utility. Sure.
But Damon argues we mostly buy things for what they say about us. He uses that analogy of the middle school cafeteria. Which is, by the way, the most terrifying place on the planet. Oh, absolutely. But it's a perfect little market economy of status, isn't it?
It really is. You don't buy the expensive sneakers because they have better arch support. You buy them because of how you feel walking into that cafeteria. You wanna feel, you know, elevated. So when you're writing copy, you aren't selling the product.
You're selling a status upgrade. That's it. Exactly. Yeah. The classic example he gives is the lawnmower.
Mower. Okay. If you focus on facts, you're talking about blade speed, fuel capacity, turning radius. So boring. Nobody cares about turning radius.
No one. But if you flip the Prestige Switch, you don't talk about the mower at all. You talk about the lawn. Specifically, the lawn that makes your neighbor, Bob, super jealous. It's so petty when you put it like that.
It is petty, but marketing often taps into our pettier instincts. We're just wired for hierarchy. So if your copy makes the buyer feel smart or special, like limited edition, you've hooked them. Okay. So prestige is about who we are now.
Switch number six,
desirability seems to be about who we wanna be. Yeah. The dream life. This is all about selling the afterlife of the product. The afterlife.
What your life looks like after the problem is solved. And the key technique here at the little hack is the phrase, Imagine this. It sounds almost too simple. Why does that work so well?
It's a bit of neurolinguistics. If I just state a fact like this software will save you ten hours a week, your brain immediately goes into critique mode. Right. I'm thinking, is that true? Can it really You're judging the claim.
But if I say imagine Mhmm. Your brain just shifts gears. It stops critiquing and starts visualizing. Oh, I see. Damon's example was selling a plane ticket.
You don't sell the TSA line or the cramped seat? No. You sell the destination. You say, imagine waking up to the sound of the ocean or for business. Imagine waking up and seeing you made five hundred dollars while you slept.
You're making the person mentally experience the benefit before they've even paid. Precisely. You get that little dopamine hit of the result, which makes the price feel, well, almost irrelevant. But I do wanna push back a little here. Yeah.
We see imagine this all the time. Imagine being a millionaire. And for a lot of us, the reaction isn't wow. It's more like Yeah. Right.
Exactly. That works for you, but I'm too busy or I'm not smart enough. That is the number one sales killer right there, the internal objection. And that leads perfectly into switch number two, believability. Right.
And this is where he brought in the even if factor. Yes. The even if technique is designed to just snipe those objections before they even form in your head. You promise the result, then you immediately add even if, and you name their biggest insecurity. The example from the session was pretty funny.
He was talking about some complex software. Mhmm. And the copy was, you can build an automated content network even if you struggle to set the clock on your microwave. It's a joke. Right?
But look at what it's doing. It takes their biggest fear. I'm not tech savvy, and it just trivializes it. It says, the bar is so low that even you can do this. It totally disarms you.
Because if you just called…
me out of my blinking microwave clock, you've removed my only excuse to say no. You're taking away the excuse. And sometimes the objection isn't about ability, it's about choice. Why yours instead of the other one? And that brings us to switch number three, parity.
Parity. Now that usually means things are equal. But here, it sounds like they're trying to make them very unequal. They're rigging the game. Parity is all about framing the comparison so that there's only one logical choice.
The technique is the would you rather game. Like, would you rather have a million dollars or a poke in the eye? Basically. But in copy, it's about framing the effort. Something like, would you rather spend ten hours struggling with a blank page or ten minutes filling out our proven template?
When you frame it like that, it's not a choice. It's an IQ test. You're forcing the brain into a binary decision. One option is pain. The other is pleasure.
You're not just saying my product is good. You're saying the alternative is suffering. Now there was one more switch here that I found really counterintuitive. In a world of prestige and status and trying to look cool, this one goes the other way. Switch number seven, the pratfall.
The pratfall effect. Yeah. This comes from social psychology back in the sixties. The name comes from that old TV trope, you know, like Dick Van Dyke tripping over the ottoman in his show's opening credits. So why on earth would we wanna trip over an ottoman in our sales copy?
Because perfection is suspicious. If I tell you my product is perfect, never breaks, solves everything, and it's the cheapest, and you just don't believe me. My scam detector starts going off. Exactly. But flaws make you seem real.
They signal authenticity. The pratfall switch is about…
deliberately admitting a small weakness to gain trust. So admitting you're not perfect actually helps you sell. It does. Damon mentioned admitting that, you know, his AI image generator sometimes messes up hands, gives people six fingers. We've all seen those.
Right. Or sending an email that says, hey. Sorry. There was a typo in that last subject line. Haven't had my coffee yet.
It makes you human. And once you're human And once I've shown I'm honest about the small bad things, you're way more likely to believe me when I tell you about the big good things. It just lowers your defenses. That is devious and brilliant. So, okay, we have these switches.
We get the psychology. But knowing the theory is one thing. Actually applying it, that's another. And this is where the whole thing pivots from a psychology lecture to, like, a tech tutorial. Right.
Damon didn't just write these on a sticky note. He built an AI workflow to do the thinking for him. The hack. And I wanna be clear for everyone listening. He's not just using standard chat g p t.
He's using a specific tool called Google NotebookLM. Why that one? Well, the problem with general large language models is that they're generalists. Right? They know a little about everything, so they tend to write that generic marketing speak we all hate.
Unlock your potential, a game changing solution.
That stuff. NotebookLM is different. It lets you do something called grounding. You upload your own documents, your PDFs, and you tell the AI only use the information in these documents.
You're giving it a specific brain. So Damon took the forty page PDF on these eight persuasion switches. Yep. Uploaded it straight into NotebookLM, and now he has this persuasion bot that knows the rules perfectly. It's not guessing.
It's referencing the textbook every time. And then and this is the key part. He connects that to Google Gemini with what he calls a guardrail prompt. He's not just saying rewrite this for me. No.
And that is the mistake most people make. His prompt is diagnostic. It's act as a world class conversion copywriter. Use this notebook l m source as your rule book. Now analyze this text and identify the persuasion gaps.
Persuasion gaps. I love that phrase. It's so important. He's asking the AI to tell him where he's failing to hit the switches. It's like getting an x-ray before the surgery.
You get the audit first, then you ask for the rewrite. So let's look at some of those x rays. He shared a few case studies of his own software, and the before and afters were just stark. Oh, they were eye opening. Take RSS Smasher.
It's a tool for automating blogs. The original copy was very functional, easy to use for everyone, no coding required. Which is clear. I mean, it tells me what it does. It's clear, but it's vanilla.
The AI audit flagged it immediately. It said by claiming it's for everyone, he was killing the prestige switch. If it's for everyone, it can't be special. Okay. So what did the AI rewrite it as?
The new version was RSS Masher is designed to be the ballerina on roller skates graceful, but bulldozing through technical objections. A ballerina on roller skates. Yeah. That is vivid. It's weird, but it sticks in your brain.
Right? Yeah. And then he told the AI to use the parity switch to compare it to competitors, and this is where the AI got,
spicy. It wrote, most tools are turd muffins dressed up in a two thousand dollar bikini. Wait. The AI wrote turd muffins? It did.
Turd muffins in a bikini. It said they look pretty, but the content inside is, well, garbage. I will never get that image out of my head. Yeah. But I guess that's the point, isn't it?
It's a total pattern interrupt. You're scrolling, you see turd muffin, and you stop. It makes you laugh. Yep. And it triggers that superiority switch.
You think, well, I don't want the turd muffin. I want the ballerina. It's visceral. There was another one for a service called BizClips. The original headline was so generic.
Stay competitive in your market. Total snooze fest. The AI said it was missing the desirability switch, that dream life of doing nothing. So the rewrite became no learning, no work, just the results you deserve. No learning, no work.
That speaks to the lazy person in all of us. It shifts from talking about a feature we make videos to a benefit you don't have to lift a finger. There was one more, an email from a guy named Matt Zimmerman. The subject line was something like unlock twenty percent better AI output. A classic benefit headline.
But the AI said it was boring. It suggested he pivot to curiosity. So the new subject line was there's a dirty little secret in the digital marketing world. Oh, I'm opening that email one hundred percent. I have to know the secret.
Of course. And inside, instead of just saying buy my thing, the AI focused on shared frustration. It talked about the eight tool nightmare and the four hour trap. It builds that bond by saying, I know your pain. It's incredible how these small tweaks can completely change the emotional weight of something.
But there's a risk here, isn't there? If everyone starts doing this, won't everyone sound the same? That's a valid concern. But Damon had a fix for that too. He called it the enhanced writing style tactic.
This is where he basically cloned himself. Essentially. Yeah. He took transcripts of his own webinars, hours of him just talking, and uploaded those to NotebookLM too.
ah, so he grounded the AI in the persuasion rules and in his own personality. Right. He told the AI, analyze my voice, my humor, my cadence. So when the AI writes that turd muffin line, it's not random. It's channeling Damon's specific conversational style.
So prevents the copy from sounding like a generic robot. It sounds like Damon. Just you know? Damon on his best day every single day. And to wrap this all up, for anyone listening who thinks I don't have time to build this whole system, Damon actually built a tool that does this right.
He did. It's called Master Tools. It's a web app that runs this exact workflow. You just paste in your text, and it gives you a report card. Like a spell checker for psychology.
That's a perfect way to put it. gives you a letter grade, a, b, c, d, and a checklist of quick wins. He showed an example where it audited a rehab clinic's website, and it caught that the headline was failing the curiosity switch. And suggested a better angle. Yep.
It suggested a brain based recovery angle instead of just addiction treatment. It's about finding those tiny hinges that swing massive doors. It really does demystify the whole dark art of copywriting, doesn't it? You don't have to be a wizard. You just need the framework and a tool to check your work against it.
The big takeaway for me is that we are all sitting on content that is probably boring our audience to tears. Yeah. We're listing specs when we should be selling the ballerina on roller skates. And you don't have to guess anymore. You can literally ask an AI, where am I being boring?
And it will just tell you. So here's my final question then for you and for everyone listening. We've just talked about how an AI can perfectly mimic these very human persuasion triggers. It can fake the pratfall to seem clumsy and build trust. It can stroke our ego.
It can even clone a human voice. I see where this is going. If an algorithm can perfectly replicate the feeling of an authentic human connection, if it can manufacture trust from a checklist Mhmm. Does it even matter that it's technically fake? That is the question of the decade, isn't it?
If the product actually helps you, does it matter if a robot tricked you into buying it? War? Are we just entering an era where we can't trust our own instincts anymore because our instincts themselves have been hacked? Something to think about. Thanks for listening to the Deep Dive.
We'll catch you next
