beautiful people my name is Brian
brushwood and I’m here to answer the
real question that all of you guys had
coming into this program I know this
isn’t gonna be some kind of pie in the
sky high-minded theoretical stuff I’m
gonna give you the boots on the ground
real work on how to advance this frame
if you there you go how to fake an
erotic fiction bestseller that’s what
we’re gonna learn first of all there’s
some things you got to know the story
begins about 10 years ago and you should
know that I used to look like this but
now I look like this don’t panic I used
to tour all around the United States
doing a punk rock blood-and-guts magic
show I shoved nails in my eyes a fire
that was my full-time job and I had an
idea for a show
because after each each of these
programs the students at each of the
college’s would take me out and I would
do magic for them and essentially I
would teach them how to scam free beers
and so I had the idea for what came to
be known as scam school I pitched it the
idea was be the most interesting person
in the room capture everybody’s
attention provide so much value that
when you get to some kind of unbeatable
challenge or puzzle you end up getting
somebody to agree to buy you a free
drink ah so I would be 10 years later
now we’re at a point now scam school is
now over a million subscribers it’s a
little bit hard to see let me see if I
can enhance this enhance in a hat there
we go ok good it’s been a long journey
to get there and there’s been a few
lessons I’ve learned on the way now keep
in mind there’s a few moments during
this talk that I’m going to talk as if I
know something I know nothing I’m an
idiot who eats fire shoves nails in his
eyes however I’ve read some really good
books including robert cialdini’s
influence where i learned about the idea
of fixed action patterns these are
psychological backdoors that sit in the
back of your mind something that caused
immediate stimulus response actions we
see them in mating behaviors of animals
of all varieties and one of the most
powerful ones is the psychological
backdoor number one is liking the idea
is when you like someone you’re much
more likely to grant them what they
do some work for them or or give them
something and I figured out that you can
use the liking psychological backdoor to
get out of speeding tickets I realized
that a hundred percent of the time every
time I’ve ever made a police officer
laugh he’s left me off the hook and most
of the time that happens immediately
because my Bly ‘sons looked like this if
they wanted to if they were continuing
to press I would say they’d ask for the
insurance I say oh I’m sorry officer
this is a rental and I’ll have my
insurance but I’m told this will help
and sometimes they would let you off the
hook
a second psychological back door is
reciprocation turns out that as human
beings we want to balance the scales
whenever we’re given something we want
to pay people back even if we actively
dislike the other party the Hari
Krishna’s figured this out back in the
1960s they made a lot of attention by
banging on drums and and make it a lot
of noise however they weren’t able to
get a lot of donations that way so they
figured out that if they handed people
flowers and said here’s a gift
enjoy this flower by the way would you
like to make a donation people would
often donate then they would go through
the flower in the trash they would go
pick the flower out of the trash and
then they’d give it to someone hi here’s
a flower would you like to make a
donation and pretty much that’s the
philosophy to score free drinks at the
bar that we do on scam school
reciprocation and liking liking because
you’re engaging with the other person
you’re looking them in the eye you’re
trying to make them smile and entertain
them reciprocation because you’re giving
something of value you’re giving a magic
trick or performance and it ends up
looking something like this
after this prank I believe it’s called
lateral force but for some reason if you
stick a quarter to your forehead like
this and you hit your head on the table
it will not
I’ve never been able to do it in fewer
than three hits it’s not to the fourth
time that it actually it actually will
come off I mean I’ll buy your drinks for
the rest of the night if you’re able to
get the quarter to fall off in less than
three hits and it will just go it will
stick up alright you got it go for it go
for three in lesson three go
okay John you’re almost there it’s the
idea is simple it turns out that those
nerve endings on your forehead I have a
bit of a lag and it feels like the coin
is still there on your forehead so you
could take advantage of that and be a
total jerk but out of everything I’ve
learned both in the stage show both in
the launch of scam school and
it’sit’sit’s rise to prominence is that
out of all the fixed action patterns of
all the psychological backdoors the most
powerful in my opinion is social proof
social proof is the reason we pay
attention to other people it’s the
reason we have laugh tracks on sitcoms
it’s the reason we pay attention to Yelp
reviews it’s the reason McDonald’s brags
about having billions and billions of
burgers sold it’s because there is a
comfort in knowing this is a heuristic
this is a shortcut that’s not always
right but right enough of the time that
we rely on it because if everybody else
is doing it odds are it’s probably a
good idea so I don’t want to brag about
scam school but pretty much the moment
it came out everybody loved it right
they thought that I look great they
thought that my hairstyle was super rad
ah no obviously none of that’s true um
but we did end up at this over a million
mark so what happened if there’s one
moment I could point to that
fundamentally transformed the trajectory
of scam school it would have been when I
performed for a show called diggnation
there’s a podcast that was very very
popular called diggnation that I opened
for this was two months after scam
school started I was doing my stage show
fire-eating Sheva nails in the eyes and
all that and I stopped in the middle of
the show because I realized what I
lacked was a platform I didn’t have a
team on my side I was unknown but I
needed to figure out the right idea to
court them on my side and what to do
with that energy I realized everybody
out here loved new media they loved
podcasting they loved YouTube they loved
the idea that they are part of a
revolution against old media so in the
middle of my stage magic show I stopped
and gave a PowerPoint presentation much
like you’re saying now the fact that all
of new media was dominated by old media
faces NPR Oprah 60 minutes all this
stuff and I said wouldn’t it be great if
we could wrestle control the number one
spot away from old media and I proposed
a scam that we would all I guess I
pretty much proposed a conspiracy
I said let’s all try to scam the itunes
algorithm because at the time very
little was known about the YouTube are
they the itunes algorithm it was known
that in general it seemed to monitor the
number of new subscriptions in for our
blocks so I said what if all of us by
the way everyone follow me here Brian at
twitter.com slash would and then at one
moment we are all going to hit subscribe
at the exact same time and if this works
we’ll stick it to the man by making it
into the top ten and it worked it worked
uh we all hit subscribe but one time
it’s probably a thousand maybe two
thousand people but it was enough that
we hit the number three and number seven
spots this was my first lesson in the
power of social proof because at this
point we thought hey we blew up the
Death Star good good game team we
high-fived each other and went home but
the mere fact that we were in the top
ten created its own engine of attention
and one week later by virtue of having
gotten to the top ten once we were still
in the top ten number four and number
nine so at this point uh we were on the
Intuit we we had garnered the attention
of the Apple staff we ended up being a
staff pick up some poem moment later on
we ended up getting picked as a top
podcast of 2008 it’s kind of hard to see
let me enhance this there we go okay
good there we go ah but the the
attention itself ended up generating
more attention and so this is the moment
where the story gets a little bit weird
2012 by this point I had written a
couple of books for his scam school the
first book we had told everybody buy it
at the same time and all that stuff
everybody did a targeted strike we blew
up the Death Star it was the number one
bestseller on iTunes when it came to the
second book though I ran into a problem
because they
happened at the exact same time as the
cultural phenomenon of Fifty Shades of
Grey now there’s some fantastic articles
breaking down why Fifty Shades of Grey
was a dominant force there’s all kinds
of things from the the efforts that
boots-on-the-ground efforts the
community that was built by Yale James
and all this stuff all I know is I was
covered in naked jealousy and annoyed
that this cultural phenomenon was
keeping my book from being number one so
a friend of mine who co-wrote the book
said jokingly said well look at all
these other books that seem to have the
exact same motif as Fifty Shades of Grey
maybe the next book should look like a
fifty Shades of Grey book and we laughed
I was like wait what if we wrote the
Fifty Shades of Grey book and then we
laughed and we thought wait what if we
got our fans to write of Fifty Shades of
Grey book and then we were onto
something because I do a podcast every
Tuesday night called Knight attack me
and my co-host Justin Robert young we
had the idea what have we set up the
characters the situation and the places
and then we just had the fans open up a
Google Doc have the Internet write an
erotic fiction book and see if we could
steal the number one slot with which
what clearly is a cultural phenomenon so
we put together something called the
Diamond Club the idea was simple first
of all I had a cover that looked like in
Fifty Shades of Grey book we and by the
way none of this is new this is where
pretty much ripping off the idea of
naked came the stranger back in the
1960s there was a journalist who
gathered together 20 or so of his best
friend writers and they came up with a
pseudonym and they decided to publish a
erotic fiction novel about a woman who
had sex with anything that we move and
and so we wanted to do the exact same
thing but naked came the stranger was
very much of its time there were beatnik
poets and all these artifacts of the 60s
so we said well let’s do the same thing
let’s make it very much of the mid or to
early 2010’s so we set it in Silicon
Valley we made it about a woman who had
co-founded a start-up only to be jilted
by her lover and who found out that that
he had married someone else
and to get revenge she discovers a sex
club called the diamond Club
and we put together our own pseudonymous
author Patricia Harkins Bradley by the
way is a mash-up of both of our third
grade teachers names and we told the
internet to write uh we we had to cool a
little bit of some of the saucer
chapters that we got but we put together
this thing we published it on an ebook
platform but think back to that moment
when I was able to pitch the idea of
scam school being a number one podcast
we needed energy we needed an audience
that would have a stake in the game now
a subscription is free
anyone can click Subscribe and be part
of a prank that feels good what we
needed was people to spend ninety nine
cents on this prank so we realized we
needed to look for an audience that was
feeling something and regardless of
whether you understood try to remember
in 2012 nobody really understood what
was happening with the Fifty Shades of
Grey phenomenon right there was this
mass confusion so we went to those
people and say do you not understand
what’s happening either
great let’s let’s set fire to something
so we put together a video that we pitch
to the internet yeah I mean finish aids
crazy that makes a lot of sense a lot of
people buy it do you wanna know what
else is on there butter books that just
look like Fifty Shades of Grey
they’re just poorly written erotic
fiction to cash in on an obvious trend
so we developed a theory that we’d like
to test today what are they in the
Internet write a book we have not read
the book and it was all just completely
crowdsource and add little cohesion
amongst the chapters and just delivered
on all right so that was our pitch to
the audience we went out to the biggest
group of rapscallions on the internet
reddit
who apparently also liked the idea and
and they bunch of people voted it up and
sure enough when this thing launched it
actually uh this photograph right here
shows it at 4th place it actually hit
third place and supplanted one
of the eel james books at the time but
at that point we’re like high-five how
cool we did it and we knew it was our
people because all of the readers also
bought were either books written by me
or one of my co-hosts so it’s like okay
that’s our people pretty cool we are
able to generate a little bit of
publicity it was fun to go on some shows
and talk about the phenomenon but uh oh
and by the way this is my favorite part
we knew that a bunch of people would
write five star reviews because they
were into the idea of trying to you know
scam their way into the top slot and we
knew that there would be some reactions
of one-star reviews of people saying hey
guys this is all big prank don’t stop
enjoying this book but our favorite were
the three star reviews that said I mean
it delivered on what I wanted wasn’t
great so sure enough though the power of
social proof was so compelling that what
this is when when everything launched
everything was our books and our friends
books
one week later very different set of
users had also bought so in this case we
had made our way into the pantheon of
erotic fiction through no fault of our
own in fact we our favorite moments was
discovering real fans of fictitious
Patricia Harkins Bradley it was it was
it was a fascinating experience and I
will go to the mat claiming you know
people are saying oh there’s a fake book
does a fake this fake that if you look
at that that that five-star one-star
curve I’m gonna guarantee you it’s
identical to Fifty Shades of Grey and
all of the negative reviews are
identical to the complaints about Fifty
Shades of Grey
but if there’s one thing that I if there
is some way that I’ve come out ahead we
we did a run about a hundred physical
copies of the book just to make this
program I went and looked and apparently
those physical copies are now being sold
for $10,000 mission accomplished
[Laughter]
so whatever it is you do and make sure
to take advantage of those psychological
back doors liking reciprocation and
authority and of course never
underestimate the value of social proof
thank you very much guys
[Applause]
brushwood and I’m here to answer the
real question that all of you guys had
coming into this program I know this
isn’t gonna be some kind of pie in the
sky high-minded theoretical stuff I’m
gonna give you the boots on the ground
real work on how to advance this frame
if you there you go how to fake an
erotic fiction bestseller that’s what
we’re gonna learn first of all there’s
some things you got to know the story
begins about 10 years ago and you should
know that I used to look like this but
now I look like this don’t panic I used
to tour all around the United States
doing a punk rock blood-and-guts magic
show I shoved nails in my eyes a fire
that was my full-time job and I had an
idea for a show
because after each each of these
programs the students at each of the
college’s would take me out and I would
do magic for them and essentially I
would teach them how to scam free beers
and so I had the idea for what came to
be known as scam school I pitched it the
idea was be the most interesting person
in the room capture everybody’s
attention provide so much value that
when you get to some kind of unbeatable
challenge or puzzle you end up getting
somebody to agree to buy you a free
drink ah so I would be 10 years later
now we’re at a point now scam school is
now over a million subscribers it’s a
little bit hard to see let me see if I
can enhance this enhance in a hat there
we go ok good it’s been a long journey
to get there and there’s been a few
lessons I’ve learned on the way now keep
in mind there’s a few moments during
this talk that I’m going to talk as if I
know something I know nothing I’m an
idiot who eats fire shoves nails in his
eyes however I’ve read some really good
books including robert cialdini’s
influence where i learned about the idea
of fixed action patterns these are
psychological backdoors that sit in the
back of your mind something that caused
immediate stimulus response actions we
see them in mating behaviors of animals
of all varieties and one of the most
powerful ones is the psychological
backdoor number one is liking the idea
is when you like someone you’re much
more likely to grant them what they
do some work for them or or give them
something and I figured out that you can
use the liking psychological backdoor to
get out of speeding tickets I realized
that a hundred percent of the time every
time I’ve ever made a police officer
laugh he’s left me off the hook and most
of the time that happens immediately
because my Bly ‘sons looked like this if
they wanted to if they were continuing
to press I would say they’d ask for the
insurance I say oh I’m sorry officer
this is a rental and I’ll have my
insurance but I’m told this will help
and sometimes they would let you off the
hook
a second psychological back door is
reciprocation turns out that as human
beings we want to balance the scales
whenever we’re given something we want
to pay people back even if we actively
dislike the other party the Hari
Krishna’s figured this out back in the
1960s they made a lot of attention by
banging on drums and and make it a lot
of noise however they weren’t able to
get a lot of donations that way so they
figured out that if they handed people
flowers and said here’s a gift
enjoy this flower by the way would you
like to make a donation people would
often donate then they would go through
the flower in the trash they would go
pick the flower out of the trash and
then they’d give it to someone hi here’s
a flower would you like to make a
donation and pretty much that’s the
philosophy to score free drinks at the
bar that we do on scam school
reciprocation and liking liking because
you’re engaging with the other person
you’re looking them in the eye you’re
trying to make them smile and entertain
them reciprocation because you’re giving
something of value you’re giving a magic
trick or performance and it ends up
looking something like this
after this prank I believe it’s called
lateral force but for some reason if you
stick a quarter to your forehead like
this and you hit your head on the table
it will not
I’ve never been able to do it in fewer
than three hits it’s not to the fourth
time that it actually it actually will
come off I mean I’ll buy your drinks for
the rest of the night if you’re able to
get the quarter to fall off in less than
three hits and it will just go it will
stick up alright you got it go for it go
for three in lesson three go
okay John you’re almost there it’s the
idea is simple it turns out that those
nerve endings on your forehead I have a
bit of a lag and it feels like the coin
is still there on your forehead so you
could take advantage of that and be a
total jerk but out of everything I’ve
learned both in the stage show both in
the launch of scam school and
it’sit’sit’s rise to prominence is that
out of all the fixed action patterns of
all the psychological backdoors the most
powerful in my opinion is social proof
social proof is the reason we pay
attention to other people it’s the
reason we have laugh tracks on sitcoms
it’s the reason we pay attention to Yelp
reviews it’s the reason McDonald’s brags
about having billions and billions of
burgers sold it’s because there is a
comfort in knowing this is a heuristic
this is a shortcut that’s not always
right but right enough of the time that
we rely on it because if everybody else
is doing it odds are it’s probably a
good idea so I don’t want to brag about
scam school but pretty much the moment
it came out everybody loved it right
they thought that I look great they
thought that my hairstyle was super rad
ah no obviously none of that’s true um
but we did end up at this over a million
mark so what happened if there’s one
moment I could point to that
fundamentally transformed the trajectory
of scam school it would have been when I
performed for a show called diggnation
there’s a podcast that was very very
popular called diggnation that I opened
for this was two months after scam
school started I was doing my stage show
fire-eating Sheva nails in the eyes and
all that and I stopped in the middle of
the show because I realized what I
lacked was a platform I didn’t have a
team on my side I was unknown but I
needed to figure out the right idea to
court them on my side and what to do
with that energy I realized everybody
out here loved new media they loved
podcasting they loved YouTube they loved
the idea that they are part of a
revolution against old media so in the
middle of my stage magic show I stopped
and gave a PowerPoint presentation much
like you’re saying now the fact that all
of new media was dominated by old media
faces NPR Oprah 60 minutes all this
stuff and I said wouldn’t it be great if
we could wrestle control the number one
spot away from old media and I proposed
a scam that we would all I guess I
pretty much proposed a conspiracy
I said let’s all try to scam the itunes
algorithm because at the time very
little was known about the YouTube are
they the itunes algorithm it was known
that in general it seemed to monitor the
number of new subscriptions in for our
blocks so I said what if all of us by
the way everyone follow me here Brian at
twitter.com slash would and then at one
moment we are all going to hit subscribe
at the exact same time and if this works
we’ll stick it to the man by making it
into the top ten and it worked it worked
uh we all hit subscribe but one time
it’s probably a thousand maybe two
thousand people but it was enough that
we hit the number three and number seven
spots this was my first lesson in the
power of social proof because at this
point we thought hey we blew up the
Death Star good good game team we
high-fived each other and went home but
the mere fact that we were in the top
ten created its own engine of attention
and one week later by virtue of having
gotten to the top ten once we were still
in the top ten number four and number
nine so at this point uh we were on the
Intuit we we had garnered the attention
of the Apple staff we ended up being a
staff pick up some poem moment later on
we ended up getting picked as a top
podcast of 2008 it’s kind of hard to see
let me enhance this there we go okay
good there we go ah but the the
attention itself ended up generating
more attention and so this is the moment
where the story gets a little bit weird
2012 by this point I had written a
couple of books for his scam school the
first book we had told everybody buy it
at the same time and all that stuff
everybody did a targeted strike we blew
up the Death Star it was the number one
bestseller on iTunes when it came to the
second book though I ran into a problem
because they
happened at the exact same time as the
cultural phenomenon of Fifty Shades of
Grey now there’s some fantastic articles
breaking down why Fifty Shades of Grey
was a dominant force there’s all kinds
of things from the the efforts that
boots-on-the-ground efforts the
community that was built by Yale James
and all this stuff all I know is I was
covered in naked jealousy and annoyed
that this cultural phenomenon was
keeping my book from being number one so
a friend of mine who co-wrote the book
said jokingly said well look at all
these other books that seem to have the
exact same motif as Fifty Shades of Grey
maybe the next book should look like a
fifty Shades of Grey book and we laughed
I was like wait what if we wrote the
Fifty Shades of Grey book and then we
laughed and we thought wait what if we
got our fans to write of Fifty Shades of
Grey book and then we were onto
something because I do a podcast every
Tuesday night called Knight attack me
and my co-host Justin Robert young we
had the idea what have we set up the
characters the situation and the places
and then we just had the fans open up a
Google Doc have the Internet write an
erotic fiction book and see if we could
steal the number one slot with which
what clearly is a cultural phenomenon so
we put together something called the
Diamond Club the idea was simple first
of all I had a cover that looked like in
Fifty Shades of Grey book we and by the
way none of this is new this is where
pretty much ripping off the idea of
naked came the stranger back in the
1960s there was a journalist who
gathered together 20 or so of his best
friend writers and they came up with a
pseudonym and they decided to publish a
erotic fiction novel about a woman who
had sex with anything that we move and
and so we wanted to do the exact same
thing but naked came the stranger was
very much of its time there were beatnik
poets and all these artifacts of the 60s
so we said well let’s do the same thing
let’s make it very much of the mid or to
early 2010’s so we set it in Silicon
Valley we made it about a woman who had
co-founded a start-up only to be jilted
by her lover and who found out that that
he had married someone else
and to get revenge she discovers a sex
club called the diamond Club
and we put together our own pseudonymous
author Patricia Harkins Bradley by the
way is a mash-up of both of our third
grade teachers names and we told the
internet to write uh we we had to cool a
little bit of some of the saucer
chapters that we got but we put together
this thing we published it on an ebook
platform but think back to that moment
when I was able to pitch the idea of
scam school being a number one podcast
we needed energy we needed an audience
that would have a stake in the game now
a subscription is free
anyone can click Subscribe and be part
of a prank that feels good what we
needed was people to spend ninety nine
cents on this prank so we realized we
needed to look for an audience that was
feeling something and regardless of
whether you understood try to remember
in 2012 nobody really understood what
was happening with the Fifty Shades of
Grey phenomenon right there was this
mass confusion so we went to those
people and say do you not understand
what’s happening either
great let’s let’s set fire to something
so we put together a video that we pitch
to the internet yeah I mean finish aids
crazy that makes a lot of sense a lot of
people buy it do you wanna know what
else is on there butter books that just
look like Fifty Shades of Grey
they’re just poorly written erotic
fiction to cash in on an obvious trend
so we developed a theory that we’d like
to test today what are they in the
Internet write a book we have not read
the book and it was all just completely
crowdsource and add little cohesion
amongst the chapters and just delivered
on all right so that was our pitch to
the audience we went out to the biggest
group of rapscallions on the internet
who apparently also liked the idea and
and they bunch of people voted it up and
sure enough when this thing launched it
actually uh this photograph right here
shows it at 4th place it actually hit
third place and supplanted one
of the eel james books at the time but
at that point we’re like high-five how
cool we did it and we knew it was our
people because all of the readers also
bought were either books written by me
or one of my co-hosts so it’s like okay
that’s our people pretty cool we are
able to generate a little bit of
publicity it was fun to go on some shows
and talk about the phenomenon but uh oh
and by the way this is my favorite part
we knew that a bunch of people would
write five star reviews because they
were into the idea of trying to you know
scam their way into the top slot and we
knew that there would be some reactions
of one-star reviews of people saying hey
guys this is all big prank don’t stop
enjoying this book but our favorite were
the three star reviews that said I mean
it delivered on what I wanted wasn’t
great so sure enough though the power of
social proof was so compelling that what
this is when when everything launched
everything was our books and our friends
books
one week later very different set of
users had also bought so in this case we
had made our way into the pantheon of
erotic fiction through no fault of our
own in fact we our favorite moments was
discovering real fans of fictitious
Patricia Harkins Bradley it was it was
it was a fascinating experience and I
will go to the mat claiming you know
people are saying oh there’s a fake book
does a fake this fake that if you look
at that that that five-star one-star
curve I’m gonna guarantee you it’s
identical to Fifty Shades of Grey and
all of the negative reviews are
identical to the complaints about Fifty
Shades of Grey
but if there’s one thing that I if there
is some way that I’ve come out ahead we
we did a run about a hundred physical
copies of the book just to make this
program I went and looked and apparently
those physical copies are now being sold
for $10,000 mission accomplished
[Laughter]
so whatever it is you do and make sure
to take advantage of those psychological
back doors liking reciprocation and
authority and of course never
underestimate the value of social proof
thank you very much guys
[Applause]
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