How to create explosive growth, with Derek Halpern | Ramit's Brain Trust

I'm Derek Halpern, and I'm the founder of Social Triggers.

Derek, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Pleasure. I want to start up. Usually I ask RBT interviewees, I say, do you recall how we met? But I actually want to tell a story about the first time I ever talked to you. I remember I was visiting D.C. and somehow we had set up a call, and I didn't know who you were, but I got on the phone with you, and you talked about psychology, and you talked about starting a new website, and it had already been going. And you said something to me that was really interesting. I said, oh, you have an email list that's really interesting. You know, what are your goals with this email list? Are you selling a course or what are you doing? And you said, no, I don't care about selling anything until I just want to write the best content. Until I get. I think it was 25,000 subscribers. And then I'll worry about turning this into a business and monetizing it. For now, I just want to create the best material. Yeah, Nobody says that. Like, to me, I was like, oh, a kindred spirit. Because that's how I thought. And these days, we hear about all these people. All they want to do is monetize, monetize, monetize upfront. But you were like, I want to create the best material. And I thought that was very unique. And since then, we've become good friends. You know, we've done some business together, and so it's a real treat to be able to get you in here. Thank you for coming.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm pumped.

Now, let's start off by talking about. Give people a quick description of social triggers, and then I'd like to talk about your interesting, unusual career history, because I think a lot of people don't know about it.

All right, so Social Triggers is where I show entrepreneurs and executives how to use psychology to just get ahead, whether they're trying to make more money, start a business, convince their boss to give them a new project or additional responsibility. Just try to use psychology and persuasion.

And. And one interesting thing about you is rather than only pop psychology, which so many people love to write about. Top 10 Ways to Get ahead on Twitter. Whatever.

Hate these people.

I know, Me too.

You.

You actually pore over the literature, right? And actually quote studies that are not the same three studies that everyone on the Internet does. So you read the literature, right?

Yeah. We'll probably talk a little bit more about this later, but I actually like to read academic Journals for fun. And I think that the story that really nails that home is one day we're talking about what time you should show up to a party. Yeah. And I was like, you should show up on time. And you were like, you should never show up on time. Show up a little late. Yeah, only nerds show up on time. And I was like, wait, I show up on time? He goes, well, Derek, you read academic journals for fun.

Exactly.

True.

Wait, all right, so on social triggers, you teach people how to use psychology to get ahead, how to improve their persuasive abilities, how to sell better online. Very fascinating topic. But I think equally interesting is what jobs you worked in before. It wasn't like you were reading psychology books from age 5. You had some very interesting positions. Tell us about those.

So I started off as a professional gamer. I played all types of nerdy card games, like Magic, the Gathering.

Yeah.

Star wars, the Spoils, all these types of weird games. And I did that. And I would play in tournaments, and I would win money for playing in these tournaments. I soon found out that that was a great way to make a few thousand dollars, but not a way to make a living. So I did what any gamer at this point, it was the early 2000s, started to do. Started playing poker. I started playing poker professionally over the course of about a year and a half, and I did extremely well. But for whatever push comes to shove, I had a lot of family members that didn't really support that. So I was, at that point reading a lot of blogs. Like, blogs were the new hot thing on the market in 2005. And I stumbled on this one blog about this one guy that wrote about all the dumb things he did in college.

Okay.

And I thought he was hilarious. But one day, I accidentally clicked on his advertise here link, and I saw he was getting $500 a week for ads, and he had five of them. So I'm sitting there like, this guy does dumb things in college, writes about it, and makes $2,500 a week. I do dumb stuff all the time. Let me just write about that. So that was when I finally realized that I could go from playing games to building websites to make money.