StrangerStreet StrangerStreet

Los Angeles, June 15, 1995. Prosecutor Christopher Darden asks O.J. Simpson to try on the bloody leather gloves in front of the jury. His own lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, had objected. Simpson is wearing latex gloves underneath. He tugs. He strains. The gloves don’t go on. In the press seats, the writer Dominick Dunne whispers to a reporter that the case is over.

Thirteen days later, a defense lawyer named Gerald Uelmen writes his team a memo. It contains the line that will outlive everyone in that room: If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. His note pitches it as a theme for the whole defense. Johnnie Cochran gets the credit, because Cochran says it to the jury, more than once, in his closing that September. The jury deliberates for about four hours.

Look at how the line is built. It starts with something the jurors saw with their own eyes. It turns that into a rule (if this, then you must do that). And it rhymes. Lawyers have a name for this kind of line: the theme. One theme, said like a rule, repeated till it rhymes.

The rhyme isn’t decoration. In 1999 two psychologists, Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh, gave sixty college students a list of unfamiliar sayings and asked how accurate each one was. Some rhymed. Some had been quietly rewritten so they didn’t. “Woes unite foes” averaged 6.38 out of 9 for accuracy. “Woes unite enemies,” which means exactly the same thing, scored 5.15. Then the researchers asked the students directly whether rhyming sayings are more accurate. All sixty said no.

Before you object, I’ll say it for you: the effect is small. It came from student samples, and it shrinks when people are warned to separate how a claim sounds from what it says. Hold that thought, because confessing a weakness before your opponent can is the second-oldest trick in the courtroom.

How a trial lawyer wins twelve strangers

1. Build one theme, not a list. A theme is a one-sentence moral hook the jury can carry into the deliberation room. Good trial lawyers plant it during jury selection, open with it, prove it witness by witness, then close by repeating it word for word. One theme. Not five.
2. Make the theme a rule they already agree with. In Rules of the Road (2006), Rick Friedman and Patrick Malone teach lawyers to frame cases as rules the defendant broke. A good rule tells someone what to do, is simple, can’t credibly be disputed, and was broken. Friedman’s test: breaking the rule should look as obvious as crossing a double yellow line.
3. Steal your own thunder. In a 1993 mock-trial study (Williams, Bourgeois & Croyle), damaging evidence hurt the defense less when the defense raised it first. A 2003 follow-up found the catch: it stopped working once the other lawyer told jurors the tactic had been used on them. Use it rarely, and only for weaknesses that are real.
4. Tell it in story order. Jurors don’t tally evidence; they build a story and hang the facts on it. In Pennington and Hastie’s 1988 experiments, the same evidence produced a 78% guilty rate when the prosecution presented it in story order and the defense didn’t. Reverse the orders and it fell to 31%.
5. Cross-examine with questions that have one answer. Irving Younger’s 1975 “Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination” include: be brief, use short questions and plain words, always lead, never ask a question you don’t know the answer to, don’t ask one question too many, and save the ultimate point for your closing.
6. Rehearse in front of a mock jury. In 1972, sociologists surveyed hundreds of Harrisburg residents to help the defense pick jurors in the Harrisburg Seven trial. The jury hung, and an industry was born. Today’s mock trials are the courtroom’s version of an ad test: a full dress rehearsal in front of strangers who match the real audience.

“Use simple words, words that create pictures and action.”

Gerry Spence wore a fringed buckskin jacket, practiced out of Wyoming, and is credited with never losing a criminal jury trial. Count his appeals and the record gets murkier. His core lesson fits on an index card: words that make pictures. That’s one theme, said like a rule, repeated till it rhymes, delivered in a jacket you remember.

Let’s get this out of the way.

You’ve probably read Never Split the Difference. You might be rolling your eyes at yet another chapter about Chris Voss. You may be thinking that half of LinkedIn already “mirrors” and “labels” its way through every sales call, and that “tactical empathy” sounds like something a robot came up with. You might even suspect this act is about to tell you to talk in a soothing late-night radio voice.

Fair. All of it. It is, a little.

Now let me tell you what happened over coffee at Harvard. Voss, then the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, was attending a negotiation course when two professors, Robert Mnookin and Gabriella Blum, sprang a surprise role-play on him. We’ve got your son. Pay a million dollars or he dies. Blum had been a negotiator for the Israeli government. They expected the FBI man to haggle.

He didn’t make a single offer. He asked questions. How do I know he’s alive? How am I supposed to pay that? Every question handed the problem back to them. By the end, in Voss’s telling, Mnookin conceded that the FBI might have something to teach Harvard.

Voss’s favorite real case is Port-au-Prince, 2004. Kidnappers take the aunt of a prominent Haitian politician and demand $150,000. Voss reads the demand as quick party money, not a fortune, and walks it down one calibrated question at a time: 150,000, then 50,000, then 25,000, then 10,000, then 7,500. The final offer is a deliberately odd $4,751 plus a portable CD stereo. The aunt comes home safe. (All of these figures come from Voss’s own telling; nobody else has published the case file.)

Underneath the tricks there’s a model. In 2005 the FBI’s Gregory Vecchi and colleagues drew it as a staircase: active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, behavioral change. You climb it in order. Influence is step four, and most ads try to start there.

The patron saint of slow climbing is Gary Noesner, who ran negotiations for the first half of the 51-day Waco siege in 1993. His team talked 35 people out, 21 of them children, while the tactical side cut the power and blasted noise all night. Noesner has said the FBI didn’t get out everyone it could have.

“Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make.”

The negotiator’s toolkit, in the order they use it

1. The accusation audit. Open by saying every negative thing the other side already thinks about you. Saying it out loud takes the sting out. Then stop talking.
2. Label the emotion. “It seems like…” “It sounds like…” Then pause. A label names the feeling without arguing with it, so the other person feels seen rather than handled.
3. Mirror. Repeat their last one to three words with a slight upward lift, then go quiet; they’ll keep talking. In a 2003 Dutch study, a waitress who repeated orders back word for word earned mean tips of 2.97 guilders against 1.76 when she just said “okay.” In a second experiment, 78% of mirrored tables tipped, against 52%.
4. Earn “That’s right.” Summarize their world so completely that the only possible answer is “That’s right.” Voss treats “You’re right” as a polite way of saying go away.
5. Ask questions they can say no to, and “how” questions. “Is now a bad time to talk?” feels safe to answer. “How am I supposed to do that?” says no without saying no, and makes them solve your problem.
6. Use the late-night FM DJ voice. Low, slow, calm, saved for the hard moments: the ask and the bad news. The rest of the time, Black Swan teaches a warm, smiling tone.

Before we knock on the first door, a tiny favor.

Think of one gift your best customer would never think to buy. Just one. Got it? Hold onto it; I’ll ask about it again before we leave this porch.

In 1966 two Stanford psychologists, Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, sent researchers posing as volunteers door to door in a California suburb. They asked homeowners to let a large, badly lettered DRIVE CAREFULLY sign go up on their front lawn. Asked cold, 17% said yes. Other homeowners had been asked a couple of weeks earlier, by a different person, to display a tiny three-inch safe-driving sign, which nearly everyone agreed to. When the big ugly sign came around, 76% of them said yes.

Nobody had changed the sign. The homeowners had changed. One small yes had made them the kind of people who support safe driving, and people act like the kind of people they’ve just decided they are. Psychologists named it foot in the door, and they found it the same way salesmen did: on a porch.

The porch is still undefeated. Southwestern Publishing has been sending students out to sell door to door since the 1860s; its alumni include a Texas governor, Rick Perry, and the prosecutor Ken Starr. In 1992 a BYU student named Todd Pedersen started knocking for a pest-control outfit run out of a trailer. He switched to alarms, co-founded the company that became Vivint, and by 2013 its solar arm was the second-biggest home solar installer in the country, mostly by knocking. More than two-thirds of its customers came from a doorstep.

(The doorstep also sends bills. New Mexico’s attorney general sued Vivint Solar in 2018 over alleged high-pressure tactics, and a different Vivint business paid the FTC $20 million in 2021 over misuse of credit reports. Shortcuts at the door come back with interest.)

Two more doorstep legends tell you what actually opens doors. In 1886 David McConnell was a traveling book salesman who handed out a little perfume as a free gift. His customers wanted the perfume more than the books, so he built a sales force of women to sell it. That’s Avon: the free sample became the business. In the 1950s Brownie Wise noticed that nobody understood Tupperware’s seal until someone showed them how to “burp” it, so she moved the demo into living rooms. A hostess invited her friends, earned a gift, and booked the next party from her guests.

The twist: the study that was fake, then true

In December 2014, Science published a stunning result: a twenty-minute doorstep conversation with a gay canvasser durably changed people’s minds about same-sex marriage. Two grad students, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, tried to build on it and noticed the survey firm had no record of the work. In May 2015 they exposed the data as fake, and the paper was retracted.

Then they ran the method for real. In Miami in 2015, 56 canvassers had ten-minute conversations with 501 voters about transgender rights. Warmth toward transgender people rose about 10 points on a 100-point scale, more than the national shift toward gay men and lesbians over the fourteen years from 1998 to 2012. It held for three months. The canvassers didn’t argue. They asked people to remember a time they had been judged for being different, and then traded stories.

“conversations deploying arguments alone had no effects”

How a door-knocker gets inside

1. Give a reason before they ask. The first ten seconds decide everything. Step back from the door, smile, and say why you’re there before they can file you under solicitor. The reason comes first; the company name can wait.
2. Ask for something tiny. A question they’ll happily answer, or a three-inch sign. The small yes changes how they see themselves, and the big yes follows.
3. Lead with a gift. McConnell’s perfume, the Fuller Brush man’s handout, a free sample. When a server at a New Jersey restaurant dropped one piece of chocolate with the check, tips barely moved: 19.59% against 18.95%. When she dropped one, walked away, then turned back and offered a second piece “spontaneously,” tips rose to 22.99%. The gift that feels personal and unplanned wins.
4. Demo on their own stuff. Tupperware burped in your kitchen, not in a catalog. The demo is strongest when it uses the customer’s own things.
5. Trade stories instead of arguments. The deep canvassers asked for a memory, listened without judging, and shared one back. In the follow-up studies, arguments alone did nothing.
6. Follow up like Joe Girard. Girard sold 13,001 cars in Detroit, including 1,425 in 1973. He wrote a personal letter every night to every customer who had bought that day and sent his customers cards for years. The sale isn’t the last knock.

Now the bigger favor I promised. Take the gift you thought of at the top of this act and write one hook for it, right now, in under fifteen words. Do it before you open the envelope.

On the platform outside the tent stands a giant in a four-foot feathered headdress. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. He just looks down at you over the heads of the crowd, and you stop walking.

That was Ward Hall’s instruction to the man billed as “Abdul the Arabian Giant”: stay silent, stay in character, and let the crowd wonder. Hall, born in Nebraska in 1930, was the outside talker for World of Wonders, a traveling ten-in-one show he ran for decades with his partner Chris Christ. (Insiders say talker. “Barker” is what outsiders call them.) In the 1950s and ’60s more than a hundred sideshows toured America. By 2006 Hall’s was the last one left, and Hall had been in the business for 61 years.

Here’s what Hall knew. People walking a midway aren’t looking for you. They’re holding corn dogs and kids’ hands. So you don’t explain anything. You give them a show for free, right there on the outside platform, and you make sure it’s the most astonishing minute of the night. Everything after that happens inside the tent, and costs money.

For proof that talent alone doesn’t stop a crowd, look at January 12, 2007. During the morning rush at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C., the violinist Joshua Bell played some of the hardest music ever written for about forty-five minutes. 1,097 people walked past. Seven stopped. One recognized him. He made $32.17 from 27 people, plus $20 from the woman who knew who he was. The Washington Post story about it, by Gene Weingarten, won a Pulitzer. It’s usually told as a parable about people ignoring beauty. A talker would read it differently: no bally, no tip, no reason to stop.

The talker’s dictionary

Bally

The free teaser show on a platform outside the tent. Its whole job is to stop foot traffic.

Tip

The crowd the bally gathers.

Stick

A planted "customer" who buys the first ticket so others will follow. Also called a shill.

Turn

The moment the crowd surges to the ticket box. Lose them and you've "blown the tip."

Grind

The steady, rhythmic patter that keeps people moving inside once the turn is done.

Ten-in-one

One ticket, ten acts inside.

Blow-off

An extra-charge attraction at the back of the tent, sold only to people already inside.

The same choreography ran along the Jersey Shore. Nathan Morris pitched kitchen gadgets on the Asbury Park boardwalk and at fairs. His nephew, S.J. Popeil, learned the trade from him and founded Popeil Brothers, which brought us the Chop-O-Matic and the Veg-O-Matic. (S.J.’s son Ron is the next act.) In 1983 a young Billy Mays was on the Atlantic City boardwalk selling a gadget called the WashMatik.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s telling of the pitchman’s craft, the master explains the product three or four times, with a new twist each time, so late arrivals catch up and early ones see something new. He has a trick for when he’s finished, too. If 25 of 50 people step up to buy, he sells to only 20 and tells the last five to wait, because he has one more thing to show them. Those five become the core of the next crowd. That’s called the hold.

And then there was Hadacol. In 1950 and 1951 a Louisiana state senator named Dudley LeBlanc toured the South with the Hadacol Caravan, a traveling show selling a “vitamin tonic” that happened to be 12% alcohol. One musician remembered crowds of 10,000 to 12,000 a night. The tonic collapsed within months after LeBlanc sold out, and the FTC called its publicity deceptive. The medicine show is the bally’s evil twin: same platform, false promise.

How a talker turns a crowd

1. Bally. Put your most astonishing minute outside, for free. Mystery beats explanation: Abdul’s silence did more than a speech would have.
2. Build and hold the tip. Pull the edges of the crowd in close. A crowd attracts a crowd.
3. Explain it three times, each with a twist. The pitchmen’s rule: people arrive at different moments, so repeat the core while giving the ones who stayed something new.
4. Turn at the peak. Ask for the money while the crowd is still gasping. Billy Mays said the same thing on tape: when the pitch peaks, that’s when you ask.
5. Hold the stragglers. Don’t fold the tent when the first wave buys. The ones who waited are the next show’s front row.
6. Sell the blow-off inside. The upsell only exists for people who already bought a ticket. Nobody pitches the back room from the platform.

Auctioneers run the same engine at double speed. The chant alternates the “have” number (the current bid) and the “want” number (the next one), with filler words slurred in between so it sounds faster and more urgent than it is. In 1937 the American Tobacco Company put a Durham tobacco auctioneer named L.A. “Speed” Riggs on network radio. His chant ended with the Lucky Strike tag “Sold American!” Werner Herzog filmed the world livestock auctioneering championship in 1976 and called the chant, more or less, the last poetry of capitalism.

Is this you?

It’s two in the morning. You can’t sleep. You’ve scrolled past the same three ads forty times, and the TV is still on. A man is sawing through a tin can with a kitchen knife. Then, with the same knife, he slices a tomato so thin you can see the studio lights through it.

That’s 1978 in Warwick, Rhode Island. Barry Becher ran two transmission shops. Ed Valenti sold airtime at a TV station. They took an ordinary knife made in Ohio, gave it a name that sounded like a samurai sword (Becher later joked it meant I never have to work again), and hired a copywriter named Arthur Schiff. The spot opened with a karate chop through a board: a hand can do that, the narrator pointed out, but try it on a tomato. Then came the torture tests (cans, nails, radiator hose) followed by the delicate one (the tomato). Then the price question, and an instruction not to answer it yet. Then the stack.

Sales estimates for Ginsu run from two million to three million sets over the next six years, depending on who’s counting. Schiff is credited with “How much would you pay?” and “There’s more”; the “But wait” got bolted on later.

But wait. The Ginsu men didn’t invent the demo; they inherited it. Ron Popeil, son of the boardwalk Popeils from Act IV, was demonstrating gadgets at a Woolworth’s in Chicago as a teenager. In some weeks he cleared up to $1,000, and office workers reportedly spent their lunch breaks watching him. He sold more than nine million Veg-O-Matics. His first half-hour infomercial, for a food dehydrator in 1991, sold more than $100 million in two years. Then came the Showtime Rotisserie, eight million units in the US, and four words that sold every one of them: Set it and forget it!

“stop them, create an interest and have them go down in their purse”

But wait, there’s more. Half-hour infomercials only exist because in 1984 the FCC scrapped old rules limiting how much of a TV hour could be advertising. Within months, late-night cable was full of program-length ads. One industry study of 878 people who had bought after watching found three things made the shows work: demonstrations, testimonials and expert endorsements.

And there’s more. Somewhere in that era, the infomercial writer Colleen Szot changed one line. The standard close was Operators are waiting, please call now. Hers was If operators are busy, please call again. According to Yes! (2008), the show she wrote broke a home-shopping sales record that had stood for nearly twenty years. The old line pictured a room full of bored operators, meaning nobody was buying. The new one pictured phones ringing off the hook. It’s social proof in one sentence. The book gives no control group and no numbers, so the line’s exact share of that record is unknowable. It’s a great story; treat it as one.

Act now and we’ll throw in home shopping. On August 28, 1977, an advertiser on a little AM station in Clearwater, Florida, couldn’t pay his bill, so he paid in avocado-green can openers. The owner, Bud Paxson, had his host sell them on air. They were gone within the hour. That became the Home Shopping Network. QVC followed in 1986. Years later Joan Rivers joked that only dead celebrities sold on QVC when she started there in 1990; her jewelry line went on to pass a billion dollars in sales.

And if you call in the next ten minutes, China. Li Jiaqi, a former L’Oréal beauty adviser, earned the nickname “Lipstick King” by testing lipsticks on his own lips on livestreams. In 2018 he beat Jack Ma in a lipstick-selling contest, moving 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes. In 2023 he told a viewer complaining about the price of an eyebrow pencil to ask herself whether she’d worked hard enough. He lost more than a million followers in about a day. The pitchman’s one unforgivable sin is contempt for the buyer.

The two-minute infomercial

1. Is this you? Open on an exaggerated, often black-and-white struggle she instantly recognizes.
2. Cut to color for the demo. The product does the selling. Popeil built the Showtime with a window so you could watch the chicken turn.
3. Torture test, then the delicate test. The tin can, then the tomato. Prove it’s tough, then prove it’s precise.
4. Ask the value question, and defer it. “How much would you pay? Don’t answer!” The answer you imagine is bigger than any price on screen.
5. Stack it. “But wait, there’s more.” Each addition makes the deal look better, without the price ever moving.
6. Reverse the risk. Ginsu offered a 50-year guarantee. The bigger and more specific the guarantee, the smaller the leap.
7. Call to action, three times, with a busy room behind it. Standard infomercials run 28:30 with two to four built-in “commercial” breaks that each ask for the call.

Chris Rock doesn’t walk into a comedy club to be funny. He walks in to be bad.

Before a world tour, Rock would drop in unannounced at the Stress Factory, a club in New Brunswick, New Jersey, forty or fifty times. There’d be about fifty people in the room. He’d do about forty-five minutes with a yellow legal pad of half-finished ideas, and most of it would flop. He wasn’t only listening for laughs. He watched for nods, for people leaning in, for the moment the back row shifted in their seats. Rock compared it to a boxer’s training camp. The special everyone sees later is the four rounds that survived camp.

Comedians don’t write a perfect hour and then perform it. They write too much, test it in small rooms, cut what dies, and repeat. They also kill their darlings in public. On August 9, 1998, HBO broadcast Jerry Seinfeld’s I’m Telling You for the Last Time live from the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway. It opened with a staged funeral for his old material. He promised never to perform it again, then went back to small clubs to build a new hour from nothing, which the 2002 documentary Comedian follows.

And the jokes have to live somewhere until they’re ready. Phyllis Diller kept a 48-drawer steel cabinet holding more than 50,000 jokes on index cards. Since 2011 it has lived at the Smithsonian, which makes it the most famous swipe file in America.

How a joke is built

The comedy teacher Greg Dean breaks a joke into parts. The setup plants an assumption in your head without you noticing (he calls it the target assumption). The punch reveals a second, hidden meaning (the reinterpretation) that was hiding in the setup all along. The laugh is the jolt of switching stories.

That’s also the structure of a good hook. The first line sets up an assumption, and the second line flips it. Remember the glove from Act I? It set up an assumption (that the glove would fit) and flipped it. It even rhymed.

The comic’s workout

1. Keep a joke file. Diller had her cabinet. You need a running list of real phrases, overheard lines and half-ideas, because the good stuff shows up at random.
2. Work it out small. Rock’s forty-odd drop-ins weren’t the show; they were the lab. Cheap rooms, rough material, many nights.
3. Read the room, not just the laughs. Rock watched for nods and leans. Laughs are the click; leaning in is the watch time.
4. Build setup and reinterpretation. Every punch line is a second meaning hiding in the setup.
5. Tighten. Cut every word between the setup and the punch. The fewer words in the way, the harder it hits.
6. Use threes, tags and callbacks. Two items set a pattern and the third breaks it. A tag is an extra punch off the same setup. A callback brings an earlier joke back, so the room feels rewarded for paying attention.
7. Burn the act. George Carlin made fourteen HBO specials between 1977 and 2008 by retiring old material and writing new hours. Seinfeld held a funeral for his.

There’s a sound rule too. In Neil Simon’s play The Sunshine Boys, an old vaudevillian lectures that words with a hard “k” sound are funny: pickle, chicken, cupcake. (Science agrees that how a word sounds can be funny, though nobody has proven it has to be a K.) So “Ray backed the Buick into the creek” beats “Ray had a car accident” three ways: it’s specific, it has hard sounds, and it has the creek.

On September 29, 1985, at the Omni in Atlanta, Ric Flair and his crew broke Dusty Rhodes’s ankle. A month later Rhodes sat down with the announcer Bob Caudle to cut a promo for their rematch, and he didn’t start with Flair. He didn’t start with his ankle either.

He started with you. The textile workers who’d lost their jobs. The auto workers laid off. The man who gave a company decades and got replaced by a computer. Hard times. Only after he’d spent the opening on the audience’s life did he turn to the man who’d hurt him, and by then the crowd’s fight and Dusty’s fight were the same fight. The promo sold Starrcade ‘85 on Thanksgiving night, broadcast live from two arenas at once to about 30,000 people on closed-circuit.

Everyone in those buildings knew wrestling was scripted. They came anyway, because a great promo isn’t about whether the fight is real. It’s about whether the reasons are.

Who they are

In wrestling, everyone is either a babyface (booked to be cheered) or a heel (booked to be booed). The heel’s job is to generate heat, and heat sells tickets. Staying in character in public is kayfabe. Reacting so the other guy’s offense looks devastating is selling. A promo is the interview where a wrestler tells you, in about ninety seconds, why you need to see the next match.

What they want

They want your money for the next show. Paul Heyman, the most famous talker of his generation, says he can never go off message, because if he comes back through the curtain without having sold tickets, pay-per-views, merchandise or subscriptions, he failed. (Heyman credits his father, a personal-injury lawyer, for his style of arguing a client’s case. Act I would approve.) Heyman made a career as the “advocate,” the guy who sells someone else’s fight better than they could.

Who’s in the way

A promo with no villain is a press release. Flair was Dusty’s villain. And villains can be built on the fly. On June 23, 1996, at King of the Ring in Milwaukee, Steve Austin beat Jake “the Snake” Roberts, who was playing a born-again preacher and had quoted John 3:16 at him. Getting his lip stitched backstage, Austin heard about it and fired back on the mic with two words, “Austin 3:16,” plus a rude punch line. The T-shirt followed: the verse on the front, a skull on the back. Austin says it became WWE’s best-selling shirt, though he says he doesn’t know how many sold.

Villainy also works when the crowd decides you’re it. In 1996 WWE introduced Dwayne Johnson as Rocky Maivia, a smiling, clean-cut good guy. Crowds chanted for him to die. He turned into a trash-talking heel called The Rock, and the same crowds started repeating his catchphrases back to him. You can’t force a crowd to cheer. You can give them someone to boo.

When and where

Every promo points at a date. The last TV show before a pay-per-view is the go-home show, and its whole job is to send you to that date. The Rock vs. John Cena was billed as “Once in a Lifetime” about a year ahead of WrestleMania XXVIII, on April 1, 2012: 78,363 people in Miami and, by WWE’s preliminary count, about 1.3 million pay-per-view buys.

Boxing learned this from wrestling. Around 1961, a nineteen-year-old Cassius Clay met the wrestler Gorgeous George at a Las Vegas radio station and watched George brag that he’d crawl across the ring and cut his own hair if he lost. Clay later remembered about 15,000 people turning up hoping to see George beaten. The lesson he took: people will pay to see someone shut your mouth. In 1963 he released a comedy album of trash talk, I Am the Greatest, which sold about half a million copies and picked up a Grammy nomination. In 2017, Mayweather vs. McGregor went from announcement to fight in 72 days, with a four-city world press tour in between, and sold about 4.3 million US pay-per-views. And for the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974, Don King had Ali and Foreman fight at 4 a.m. in Kinshasa so it would air at 10 p.m. on the US East Coast. He scheduled the fight for the buyer’s clock.

Why you should care

Go back to Dusty. The hard-times monologue is the beat most promos skip, and it’s the one that made his work legendary. It answers the only question the audience is really asking: why is this my fight? Until that’s answered, it’s two strangers yelling.

The five-beat promo

1. Who I am. Babyface or heel. In ads, your buyer is the babyface.
2. What I want. The stakes: the title, the respect, the moment.
3. Who’s in my way. The heel. Heat is what sells the ticket.
4. When and where. One date, and everything points at it. That’s the go-home show.
5. Why you should care. Make it their fight. Start with their hard times.

London, June 1966. The British press had a theory about Billy Graham. The preaching wasn’t really what sent people down to the front, they said. It was the hymn: the choir, the organ, the old revival song swelling while the preacher waited. Take away the music, and the aisles would stay empty.

So on opening night at Earls Court, Graham took away the music. After his appeal, the choir and the organ stayed silent. 447 people came forward anyway, three times the opening night of his 1954 London crusade. The next night, 734 came, three-quarters of them under 25.

That’s an A/B test, run by an evangelist, on the emotional soundtrack everyone assumed was doing the work. The music wasn’t the engine. The invitation was.

The invitation

Graham’s sermons all aimed at one moment. At the end, he’d ask people to get up out of their seats and come forward, right now, physically. Then he’d add a line his brother-in-law Leighton Ford and the historian Grant Wacker both remember, a line that sounds like nothing at all.

“The buses will wait.”

Many people came on chartered church buses. The one thing stopping a teenager from walking down the aisle wasn’t theology. It was the fear that the bus would leave without them. Graham removed the last practical excuse inside the ask itself. Then he stopped talking. He stood ramrod straight, his fist under his chin, and waited for several long minutes while the people already walking pulled the next ones out of their seats.

He also had the handoff figured out. Each person who came forward met a trained counselor of the same sex and similar age, filled out a card, and got a follow-up call about three weeks later. For a 1959 crusade at Wheaton, 1,300 counselors trained for 2,825 inquirers. In Seattle in 1976, 18,135 people came forward out of 434,000 attendees: a 4.2% conversion rate, which most landing pages would kill for. (Fair caveat: a majority of inquirers were probably already churchgoers. In New York in 1957, only about 14% of the people who signed decision cards had no church ties.)

The idea is older than Graham. In the 1830s Charles Finney put an “anxious bench” at the front of his revival meetings, where the troubled could come and be prayed for in public. One step, in front of everyone, broke the pride that kept people in their seats. Finney said the method was “undoubtedly philosophical, and according to the laws of mind.” His critics called it quackery: technique producing outward effects. Both were a little right.

The testimony

Before the invitation comes the story. In 1939 the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous wrote down the shape of every story told at their meetings: what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. The very next sentence in the Big Book is the offer, and right after that come the steps. Story, offer, steps.

It started with a failure. In 1935 a doctor named William Silkworth told Bill Wilson he wasn’t helping anyone because he was preaching. So in Akron that May, when Bill met a surgeon called Dr. Bob, he didn’t preach. He told his own story. Dr. Bob had planned to stay fifteen minutes. They talked until after eleven.

Black preaching tradition has a name for the shape of the whole sermon, passed down as a folk saying: start low, go slow, rise higher, strike fire, sit down. Open with the hard news, in a conversational voice. Let the congregation answer back (call and response). Turn to the good news. Close in celebration, so the truth is felt as well as understood. Then sit down at the peak, not after it.

How the invitation works

1. Aim everything at one decision. Graham’s whole sermon pointed at one walk down one aisle.
2. Testify. What it was like, what happened, what it’s like now. Specific and humble, with no war stories for their own sake.
3. Alternate what is with what could be. Nancy Duarte’s analysis of great speeches (Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Steve Jobs’s 2007 iPhone launch) shows them bouncing between the world as it is and the world as it could be, then ending on a picture of the new bliss.
4. Make the invitation explicit and physical. “Get up out of your seat.” Not “consider,” not “learn more.”
5. Remove the last excuse. The buses will wait.
6. Give them silence and time. Graham stopped talking. The people already walking did the persuading.
7. Hand off to a person, immediately. A counselor, a card, a follow-up call. The decision dies if the next step is a cold form.

The speech professors arrived at the same place by a different road. In the 1930s Alan Monroe, at Purdue, taught a five-step “motivated sequence”: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization, action. Most ads skip step four, the one where you make the audience see both futures, the one where they say yes and the one where they don’t.

If you’ve read this far, here’s your invitation. Before you walk to the next act, pick one ad you’re running right now and rewrite its last line as an invitation: one physical step, with the last excuse removed. Just one. The rest of the street will wait.

Sit down. Give me your hand. Let me read you.

You test more than most people in your line of work, and yet some nights you wonder whether you’re testing the right things. You can be bold with a budget when you believe in something, but you’re cautious about anything that could embarrass the brand. At least one winner has died on you for no reason anyone could explain. There’s an idea you keep coming back to that you haven’t shipped yet. And part of you suspects your best ad is still ahead of you.

How did I do?

Pretty well, probably, because that reading fits nearly every advertiser alive. Every sentence in it is built from a technique fortune tellers have used for centuries. In 1948 a psychologist named Bertram Forer proved how well they work. He gave 39 students a personality test, and a week later handed each of them a “personal” sketch of their character. Every student got the same thirteen statements, most of them copied from a newsstand astrology book. The first one told them they badly needed other people to like and admire them. Asked to rate how accurately the sketch described them, from 0 to 5, the students averaged 4.26.

Then there’s Ray Hyman, who paid his way through college reading palms and came to believe in it. A mentor suggested an experiment: read the opposite of what the lines said. Hyman did. His clients were just as amazed. He quit journalism for psychology and spent his career studying exactly how this works. His 1977 paper on cold reading reads like a sales manual: be confident, set the stage with modesty, use a prop, fish for information, listen, dramatize, imply you know more than you say, flatter freely, and tell people what they want to hear.

The fortune teller’s toolkit

The mentalist and writer Ian Rowland catalogued dozens of named techniques in The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading. Here are the ones an advertiser needs:

1. The Barnum statement. A line true of almost everyone that feels personal. (“You have a lot of unused potential.”)
2. The Jacques statement. A line tailored to a life stage, named for the “seven ages of man” speech in As You Like It. Every forty-something worries about where the time went.
3. The rainbow ruse. Credit someone with a trait and its opposite. (“You can be very outgoing, but sometimes you need your own company.”)
4. Fishing. Ask questions that get the client to supply the specifics, then hand them back as insight. The client remembers the hits and forgets the misses.
5. The Pollyanna pearl. Promise that a hard part of life is about to get better.
6. Shotgunning. Throw broad statements at a room, then zero in on whoever reacts.

Magicians work the same crowd from the other side of the table. In a 2012 essay for Smithsonian, Teller of Penn & Teller laid out how magic fools you. One method: make the secret more trouble than the trick could possibly be worth. He and Penn once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on David Letterman’s desk, which took weeks of prep, a supply of slow-moving, camera-friendly roaches from an entomologist, and a secret foam-core compartment. Another: laughter shuts off critical thinking. And the best one:

“Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.”

The psychologist Gustav Kuhn showed how far that goes. A magician tosses a ball into the air a few times, then only pretends to throw it, and many viewers see the ball vanish in mid-air. The real tosses set up a pattern, and the brain fills in the last one. In 1997, David Blaine took this onto the sidewalk. His ABC special Street Magic pointed the camera at the spectators instead of the trick. The screaming, laughing faces were the show, and TV magic changed overnight.

The stage hypnotist adds a filter. Before the show, he asks the whole audience to clasp their hands and imagine they can’t pull them apart. The people whose hands stick are invited on stage; the ones who don’t respond are politely sent back to their seats. In 1971 two researchers concluded that stage hypnosis runs mostly on that selection, plus social pressure and stagecraft. Benjamin Franklin got there first: in 1784 his royal commission blindfolded the patients of the “animal magnetism” craze and found that imagination, not magnetism, produced the effects.

He was on the radio for more than half a century. At his peak, about 24 million people a week heard his voice, on more than 1,300 stations, plus hundreds more for the armed forces. Advertisers lined up to be approved by him, and he only read ads for products he actually used. He believed, as he told a reporter, that the commercial could be the best news in the whole broadcast. In 2000, at an age when most people have retired, he signed a ten-year contract worth $100 million.

And the most famous ad he ever voiced aired four years after he died.

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to him. First, the other kind of radio host.

The engine in the bunker

Alex Jones has broadcast for hours a day for decades, and for most of that time the broadcast was a sales channel. A former employee called it “QVC for conspiracy.” John Oliver’s team estimated that nearly a quarter of the airtime went to promoting products. The machine ran in the same order, over and over:

1. Alarm. The water is poisoned. The food is running out.
2. Enemy. A named villain is doing it to you.
3. Identity. You’re one of the few who can see it.
4. Product as protection. Filters, storable food, iodine, supplements. Every fear came with a product.
5. Patronage. Buying “supports the broadcast.”
6. Coordination. Product plugs timed to the news cycle.

It worked. Spreadsheets filed in the Sandy Hook lawsuits showed $165 million in store sales from September 2015 to the end of 2018, more than $56 million in 2018 alone. On Election Day 2016, the store did more than $660,000. On July 20, 2017, the day Jones questioned a Sandy Hook parent’s account on air, it took in more than $180,000. Leaked texts later showed a supplement that cost about $4 to make selling for $39.95.

Then the fuel caught fire. Jones had spent years telling his audience that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, where twenty children and six adults were murdered, was a hoax. Grieving families were harassed for years. Juries in Texas and Connecticut ordered him to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages. On the stand in 2022, Jones conceded the shooting was “100 percent real.” He filed for bankruptcy; a receiver was ordered to liquidate Infowars; and the families, as of this year, had collected almost nothing.

The engine is neutral. It’s urgency, identity, and a product mapped to a need, the same parts every marketer uses. Jones fed it invented threats and the defamation of grieving parents, and the lies became the liability. Steal the engine. Never the fuel.

The voice in the kitchen

The healthier lesson from radio is about trust. In 1956 two sociologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, described the strange bond between broadcasters and their listeners: a one-sided friendship they called “intimacy at a distance.” The host feels like someone you know. When that someone tells you about a product, it doesn’t sound like an ad.

In the early 1990s, Snapple put its ad budget (about $15 million a year) into live reads by Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Sales went from $95 million in 1991 to $231.9 million in 1992. The risk travels with the trust, though. In 2012, when Limbaugh insulted a law student on air, around 45 sponsors pulled their ads within days. Podcasts run on the same bond: in a 2019 Edison Research survey, 76% of podcast listeners said they listen for particular hosts.

“the best news in the broadcast is the commercial”

The broadcaster’s playbook

1. Open a loop. Start a story and withhold the key fact: who it was, how it ended. People stay to close the loop.
2. Stack concrete detail, then pause. Specifics make it real; the pause makes it land.
3. Reveal, then a ritual line. The payoff, then a signature sign-off listeners can say along with you.
4. Make the ad sound like the show. Same voice, same rhythm, no gear change into “commercial mode.”
5. Endorse only what you use. The host’s trust is the asset. One bad read spends years of it.
6. Tie the urgency to something real. A date, a deadline, a production cutoff. Never an invented threat.
7. Give them an identity. “For the ones who remember everything” is a club people want to join.

The rest of his story

Now, the voice from the top of the act. In 1976 he launched a radio series built on the open loop: a story about someone, with the famous identity held back until the very last line, then his signature sign-off. His son, Paul Aurandt, wrote it for 33 years. The ads he read in the middle sounded exactly like the news around them. He’d just say “page two” and keep going in the same voice.

He died in February 2009. In February 2013, Ram trucks ran a two-minute Super Bowl ad with no music: just a slideshow of farm photographs under a speech he had given to the Future Farmers of America in 1978, So God Made a Farmer. Ram pledged $100,000 to the FFA for every million YouTube views, up to a million dollars, and hit the cap in under five days.

His name was Paul Harvey. Good day.

Once upon a time, there was a novelist named George Dawes Green who grew up spending summer nights on a back porch in Georgia, telling stories with his friends while moths slipped through a hole in the screen toward the light. His friends started calling themselves the Moths.

Every night on that porch, the stories ran late and the moths kept coming.

But one day, years later and living in New York, he decided to bring those nights back. In 1997 he invited people into his living room to tell true stories, porch-style.

Because of that, the nights outgrew the living room.

Because of that, The Moth started StorySLAMs: open-mic nights where teams of audience judges score strangers’ five-minute stories from 1 to 10.

Until finally, The Moth had collected more than 70,000 true stories, put on more than 600 shows a year in 11 countries, launched a radio hour in 2009 that won a Peabody, and received a MacArthur award in 2012.

And ever since then, the rules have stayed the same: the story has to be true, it has to be yours, it runs about five minutes, and you tell it without notes.

The rules from the porch

The Moth’s official guidance reads like a creative brief. Hook us in and paint the scene. Tell us your fears, desires or dilemma: what do you stand to gain or lose? Introduce the conflict and make us worry for you. Give us observations nobody else could. Pull us into the moment when it all goes down. End as a changed person. And the list of things a Moth story must not be is a perfect filter for ad copy: no rants, no essays, no how-tos, no lectures, no stand-up routines.

“A story without stakes is an essay.”

The shape underneath every one of those stories has a name. In the late 1980s or early 1990s (accounts differ), an improv teacher named Kenn Adams invented the story spine: Once upon a time… Every day… But one day… Because of that… Because of that… Until finally… And ever since then… An improv teacher brought it to Pixar, and in 2011 a Pixar story artist named Emma Coats tweeted a compressed version as one of her storytelling tips. Another of her tips: settle your ending before you figure out your middle.

The three-minute stories

The hardest live audience isn’t a comedy club; it’s a funeral. On January 28, 1986, hours after the space shuttle Challenger broke apart, Ronald Reagan postponed the State of the Union and spoke to the country instead. Peggy Noonan’s speech named all seven astronauts. Then it did something unexpected: it turned to the schoolchildren who had watched the launch live in their classrooms and spoke to them directly. It ended on two lines borrowed from a poem by a young World War II pilot. Specific people, a turn to the room, and an ending that soars.

Endings matter more than they should. In a 1993 experiment led by Daniel Kahneman, people held a hand in painfully cold water for 60 seconds. In another trial they did the same, then kept their hand in for 30 more seconds while the water warmed very slightly. Asked which trial to repeat, most chose the longer one, which had more total pain but a better ending. People remember the peak and the end. So end at the peak.

Nashville has been doing all of this for a century. The songwriter Harlan Howard, who wrote more than 4,000 songs, is credited with defining a great country song as “three chords and the truth.” And Nashville’s signature move is the turn: a title phrase that means one thing in the first chorus and something devastating by the last. When the producer Billy Sherrill brought George Jones “He Stopped Loving Her Today” in 1978, Jones thought it was too long, too sad and too morbid. For most of the song the title sounds like stubborn devotion. The final verse reveals what it really means: he stopped loving her only because he died. Released in 1980, it gave Jones his first number one in six years and won the CMA’s Song of the Year twice.

The Bluebird Cafe, a 90-seat room in a Nashville strip mall, made songwriters’ stories into a show. In 1985 four writers sat in the middle of the room and took turns playing, “in the round.” Garth Brooks got his record deal there after filling in for a no-show. In 2004 a label executive signed a fourteen-year-old Taylor Swift after seeing her play there.

Hollywood compresses stories even further, into one sentence. The screenwriter Blake Snyder taught that a good logline needs irony, a picture you can see, a clear audience, and a killer title. Samuel L. Jackson signed on to one movie because of the title alone, and when the studio tried to rename it Pacific Air Flight 121, he made them change it back. Snakes on a Plane became an internet sensation. It then opened at about $15 million, short of predictions. Buzz isn’t box office. A logline still has to sell tickets.

How a storyteller holds the room

1. Find the one sentence. If you can’t say it with irony and a picture, you don’t have it yet. (The Moth’s directors make storytellers boil their story down to one sentence too.)
2. Put the stakes up front. What could be gained or lost, said early.
3. Start in the scene, and tell it in order. Chronology is the easiest path for a listener to follow.
4. Run the spine. Every beat must cause the next. If a sentence could begin with “and also,” cut it.
5. One specific scene beats a list of adjectives. At weddings and funerals, the toast people remember is a story, not a list of virtues.
6. Turn the title. Bring the hook phrase back with a new meaning.
7. End at the peak. Then stop. Peak and end are what people remember.

Here’s this whole act in one sentence: the best attention scientists measured the exact moment strangers looked away, and cut it.

Now the stairs.

1969: the slide projector. The people making a new children’s show called Sesame Street had a problem nobody had solved: how do you know, second by second, whether a four-year-old is still watching? The researchers, led by Edward Palmer, built a contraption called the distractor. They sat two children in front of a TV playing a test segment. Next to it, a slide projector clicked to a new random image every seven or so seconds. Observers noted each time the children looked away from the show and toward the slides. Segments that held the kids 80 to 90 percent of the time went to air. Segments around 50 percent were reworked or cut. By the show’s fourth season, episodes rarely tested below 85 percent, and at least one expensive segment was killed for failing.

That’s a retention curve, drawn by hand, more than thirty-five years before YouTube.

July 1969: the street scenes. Before the premiere, five test episodes ran on a Philadelphia station. The children loved the Muppets and tuned out the street scenes with only human actors, which were supposed to hold the show together. Child psychologists had warned that mixing Muppets and humans would confuse young viewers. The producers overrode them, reshot the street, and Jim Henson’s team built new Muppets to live on it. Two of them were Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.

The Electric Company: the faces. On a later show, eye-tracking revealed that during a skit meant to teach kids to blend letter sounds, they were watching the performers’ faces instead of the letters. The fix was to turn the faces into silhouettes. If a face is stealing attention from the thing you’re selling, simplify the face.

1986 to 2015: the vanishing intro. A music researcher at Ohio State, Hubert Léveillé Gauvin, analyzed 303 top-ten singles from three decades. In the mid-1980s, the average intro ran more than twenty seconds. By 2015 it was about five. Voices arrived sooner, titles arrived sooner, and tempos got faster. Streaming data shows why: in a 2014 analysis of Spotify plays, about 24 percent of songs were skipped in the first five seconds.

Three seconds: the dial. The political pollster Frank Luntz tests words with focus groups holding dials that they turn second by second as they watch. He told PBS in 2003 that viewers decide in about three seconds whether to keep watching. His most famous finding was a rename: by his account, Americans who shrugged at the “estate tax” turned against it as the “death tax.” (He popularized that phrase rather than coining it.) Same policy, different words, different verdict.

2024: the memo. That September an internal onboarding document from MrBeast’s production company, How to Succeed in MrBeast Production, leaked online. It reads like a lab manual. It tracks three numbers: click-through rate, average view duration and average view percentage. It says the title and thumbnail set an expectation the first minute has to meet or beat. It calls for re-engagement beats around minutes three and six, and for stair-step escalation: one video lit a $1 firework, then a $10 one, and kept climbing to a world record.

“The first minute of each video is the most important minute of each video.”

Trailers: the five seconds before the five seconds. Don LaFontaine voiced more than 5,000 movie trailers and claimed his company coined “In a world…” In the 2010s studios started putting five- to ten-second teasers in front of their own trailers, a trailer for the trailer, so viewers on streaming sites wouldn’t skip.

One girl: Rokia. In a 2007 study by Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic, people who had just been paid five dollars in one-dollar bills were given the chance to donate some of it to Save the Children. One group read about Rokia, a seven-year-old girl from Mali. Another read statistics about the food crisis in Africa. Rokia raised an average of $2.38; the statistics raised $1.14. A third group read Rokia’s story plus the statistics, and gave $1.43. The numbers didn’t add to the story. They diluted it. Slovic often quotes a line attributed to Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass I will never act.”

Seventy-seven feet: the castle. Walt Disney called it a wienie: one big visual magnet at the end of a path, so people walk toward it without being told. In 1991 his Imagineers wrote it into their “Ten Commandments” for designers. Sleeping Beauty Castle at the end of Main Street is only 77 feet tall. Forced perspective (bigger stones at the bottom, smaller ones near the top) makes it look grand from the gate and welcoming up close.

The attention lab’s method

1. Build a distractor. Watch your ad next to a live scrolling feed with five to eight real people and note every look-away, or read the platform’s retention curve the same way. Fix or cut anything that loses half the room.
2. Put a voice in the first five seconds. No instrumental warm-up. Say the name early.
3. Make frame one a promise, and keep it. Whatever the first frame promises, the landing page has to show on its first screen.
4. Climb a stair every five to seven seconds. A new image, a new beat, a bigger moment.
5. Show one face, one name, one detail. Keep the statistics out of the story.
6. Use one wienie per frame. A single visual magnet, and everything else points at it.
7. Test words, not just ideas. Same creative, one phrase swapped: Luntz’s dial, run as an ad test.

Before we go into the back room, take this. It’s free, and you can use it in an ad tomorrow.

During his undercover years, Robert Cialdini (the professor from the start of this book) spent time in a restaurant watching a waiter he calls Vincent work the big family tables. After the first person ordered, Vincent would lean in and quietly say that dish wasn’t as good tonight, and steer them to something slightly cheaper. In front of the whole table he’d just cost himself part of his own tip. From then on, the family trusted him with everything else: the wine, the desserts. Admit a real limitation that costs you something, then make your recommendation. For example: “Fair warning: it won’t sound like the radio. It’ll sound like the two of you.”

You just got a small, real win. Remember how that felt, because that’s exactly how the back room works.

The convincer

In May 1925, a con man named Victor Lustig read a newspaper story about how expensive the Eiffel Tower was to maintain. He forged government stationery, posed as a deputy director-general of the French ministry of posts and telegraphs, and quietly invited a handful of scrap-metal dealers to bid on the tower for scrap. He picked his mark carefully: André Poisson, an insecure newcomer eager to get into the big leagues. Then came the masterstroke. Lustig hinted that poorly paid officials were expected to be, well, entertained. He was angling for a bribe, and the request for a bribe is what convinced Poisson the official was real. Poisson paid, Lustig fled to Austria, and Poisson was too embarrassed to report it.

Lustig’s other trick was a mahogany “money-copying” box. He loaded it beforehand with a genuine banknote and let the mark watch it “print” a perfect copy. Each copy supposedly took six hours, which happened to be exactly the head start Lustig needed. When he died in federal custody in 1947, his death certificate listed his occupation as “apprentice salesman.”

The journalist Maria Konnikova mapped the con into stages in The Confidence Game (2016), borrowing the names from a 1940 study of grifters’ slang. The put-up: pick the mark. The play: build rapport before any scheme appears. The rope and the tale: steer them toward the scheme and tell them how they’ll profit. The convincer: let them actually win. The breakdown, the send and the touch: take more and more, then the big score. The blow-off: get them out of the way. The fix: make sure no one complains. (Usually, Konnikova notes, shame does that by itself.)

“He doesn’t steal. We give.”

Three-card monte is the whole sequence on a cardboard box. The dealer’s partners pose as players who win. One of them “secretly” bends the corner of the money card while the dealer isn’t looking: that’s the convincer. The dealer quietly straightens it and bends a losing card instead. Then someone shouts that the police are coming, and the game folds. That’s the blow-off.

The friendly interrogator

Hanns Scharff was a German interrogator of captured American pilots during World War II, and his method was kindness. He took prisoners on walks, arranged dinners, and above all acted as though he already knew everything. When Colonel Hub Zemke, one of America’s top fighter commanders, was shot down in October 1944, Scharff showed him detailed files and copies of Stars and Stripes only three days old. Then he walked him half a mile to a hospital to dine with the staff. Zemke said later that Scharff had extracted something from him, and he had no idea what.

Scharff’s best move was to say something slightly wrong and let the prisoner correct him. In one famous account, he offered a mistaken explanation for why American tracer bullets had changed color, and a pilot “helpfully” set him straight: the new tracers told the pilot he was running out of ammunition. The pilot never felt he’d revealed a thing. Modern researchers have tested this as the Scharff technique: a friendly approach, no pressing, the illusion of knowing it all, and letting the source confirm or correct you. Their experiments found it drew out more new information than direct questioning, while the sources underestimated how much they’d given away.

After the war Scharff moved to the United States, lectured to the American military, and became a mosaic artist. His work includes the mosaic murals inside Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World. (Act XII would like a word about castles.)

The CIA has its own version of this act. In 2013 an officer named Randy Burkett published a paper replacing the old spy-recruitment formula (MICE: money, ideology, coercion, ego) with RASCLS: reciprocation, authority, scarcity, commitment and consistency, liking, social proof. Those are Cialdini’s six principles. The professor who went undercover in car lots ended up in the CIA’s recruitment manual.

The leaflet

The cleanest persuasion in the back room fell from the sky. From September 1944 to March 1945, Allied planes dropped about 65 million copies of a leaflet called the safe-conduct pass. It was engraved like a diploma, carried the US seal, the British royal crest and General Eisenhower’s signature, and promised any German soldier who surrendered with it that he would be disarmed, fed, given medical care and taken out of danger. It was printed in German and English so the soldier who captured him would honor it too. Officially, about 80 percent of the prisoners taken on the Brest peninsula were carrying one. Three soldiers who had only one pass between them surrendered, the story goes, each holding a corner.

In 1991 the Gulf War leaflets went further: they choreographed the surrender. Remove the magazine. Carry the rifle on your left shoulder, muzzle down. Hands over your head. Approach slowly. Hold the leaflet up. They also taught a lesson about props: one surrender appeal showed a bowl of fruit, and some prisoners later protested because they believed they’d been promised bananas. Every object in your picture is a promise.

And the leaflet that didn’t work teaches the best lesson of all. In 1953, near the end of the Korean War, the US dropped leaflets offering $50,000 to any pilot who delivered a working MiG jet (and another $50,000 to the first). In September a 21-year-old North Korean pilot named No Kum-sok landed his MiG-15 at an American air base. The press credited the leaflet campaign. No later wrote that he didn’t believe any North Korean pilot had ever seen the leaflet. The ad got the credit for a sale it never touched.

The honest playbook

1. Know your mark. The con artist’s put-up is the marketer’s research: what does she want, and why now? Use it to serve her, never to find her weak spot.
2. Play before the rope. Open on her world (thirty years of marriage, a son shipping out), not on your product.
3. Give a real convincer. Let her win something real before any ask: the free preview she can actually keep listening to.
4. Act like you already know, and let her correct you. Scharff’s move turns an intake form into a conversation. “Let me guess: he swears he doesn’t want anything this year.”
5. Issue a safe-conduct pass. A specific guarantee from a named person who’ll honor it, written so both the buyer and the recipient can trust it.
6. Choreograph the steps. Exact physical instructions, in order, the way the Gulf War leaflets did.
7. Audit with RASCLS, and check your attribution. Every reciprocity, authority, scarcity, commitment, liking and social-proof claim has to be real. And before you credit an ad with a sale, ask whether the buyer ever saw it.