The Human Advantage in an AI Copywriting World

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As men, we are very weird, and if we see something in a urinal, We are gonna aim our pee at it. And if that's, you know, right in the middle of the, the where it all goes down the drain, you are gonna get less urine on the floor. And that sort of opened up my eyes to thinking, or not even thinking, but understanding behavioral psychology. As in, when you tell people to do something, they don't do it. When you ask them to do something, they don't do it. Often that incentive has to be something they don't even realize is happening.

Gosh, one of the great things about AI we all think as business owners is that we can just replace our copywriters, our content creators with our favorite GPT, Claude, Grok, whatever you're using these days and save a bundle. But you are in for a big surprise because the backlash is coming hard. Latest report shows that almost 2/3 of businesses that are just using AI to create copy are getting massive backlash. And so I'm so stoked to bring on one of our top copywriters, We have out in Speakeasy, Mike Samuels, who has had the biggest copywriting breakthrough actually from him. Didn't come from Halbert, Kennedy, or Caples. It came from a Dutch bathroom where guys couldn't stop peeing on the floor. I love this story. And that one revelation went on to be a catalyst behind a $100,000 launch he's had. And he's been involved with direct response copywriting since 2013. way back when, went full-time in 2016. He's worked with Clients on Demand, Organifi, Newmarket Health, Nick Child, the YMCA, Daniel Priestley, many others. Absolute copywriting sensation. And I am so excited to hear how we are battling this AI world from his perspective. Welcome, Mike Samuels.

Thanks, Eric. I have to say, as a copywriter, I want to stand up and give you a round of applause for that intro. That was possibly the best hype man intro I've ever had for a podcast. So I like it.

All right.

Well, that's good feedback. I'm honored that I was able to do some good copy on the fly from a copywriter, but I want to get into some of these big things because I talk about it all the time with some of my partners. Like, okay, when do we bring in, you know, we just hired somebody to help us do some copy and we're like having that decision. Like, you know, do we use AI? Do we not? And I want to get there, but before we go there, you had a great story that I started with. You gave me a good teaser story that I kind of planted, and I want to kind of rewind the clock back to 2013. So 12, 13 years ago, how did you even get into this world? Like, what were you doing that all of a sudden, like, you wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to be a superstar copywriting business entrepreneur? How did that happen?

Yeah. So 2013, I was actually working full-time in fitness. So I had a personal training business, which had taken off. I was doing my whole thing was mobile training. So I used to drive around to people's houses. I had like 200 pounds of kettlebells in the trunk of my car. I drive around and train parents, train city workers, train all these kinds of people from 5:00 AM through to 11:00 PM at night. And it was, it was fun, but it was, it was crazy and I was burning out. And I started doing some online work. I'd always wanted to get into writing. If you've got any sort of old school fitness aficionados watching or listening, I was big into like T Nation, EliteFTS, Men's Health, all that kind of stuff back in the day. And I'd started to do a bit of online writing on the side around fitness. And it gradually started to build up as a business while winding down my fitness work. Because while I enjoyed that, I was very much thinking, well, fitness stuff, I have to be in a certain place at a certain time. And if you don't show up, you don't get paid and all that kind of stuff. And so I was building up this writing business and then all of a sudden the guys I was working for, they were a kind of a media company, a content company. They, I just got an email out of the blue from them saying, we believe you've fabricated a reference. There's some plagiarism in one of your articles. Basically, we're removing all your writing permissions. There's no way you can come back into the program. I hadn't fabricated a reference. I found out later down the line they were actually looking to cut costs and they got rid a lot of writers and they needed a reason to do that. But essentially overnight, my sort of over half my income had gone. And I thought, as much—

They accused you of plagiarism to cut costs and you didn't do plagiarism.

Wow.

And they just cut half your income. And I just gotta go on a tangent because I didn't properly introduce Mike being in our London chapter. And you can actually tell that with the accent. And immediately in my head, I'm sitting here being in California. I'm like, oh my God, if that happened to an employee in California, you're talking about a mega lawsuit out here in these states. But keep going.

I can't—

Yeah. The company definitely played fast and loose with that. But, um, in a way, at the time it sucked. But ultimately looking back, it was amazing for me because I kind of got in that position where I thought, okay, I've got 2 options here. I either go back to doing more personal training, which I didn't particularly want to do because I'd worked hard to cut down my in-person hours and have something that was a bit more online-based and a bit more freedom. And I'd actually written a dieting ebook kind of a few months back that I hadn't done anything with. And it had just been sitting there on my hard drive. And I had all sorts of the sales copy around it. I had some emails written, but I'd not put it out there because I was like, I don't really know what to do with this. But getting fired from that content position made me think, well, that's my only other option. So let's put this out there. I had a small email list at the time that I was only really emailing sort of tips and articles and stuff to. And I had no expectations whatsoever. I think my list was a couple of hundred people and the ebook that I put together, I thought I'm going to sell it for $20. So I put it out there and no expectations whatsoever. And in that first day, I made over £1,000 in sales, which is like, what, $1,300? And I was just amazed because that was like what I earned in a whole week at the time. And that was my epiphany of going, okay, yeah. Looking back, obviously, you know, for a lot of us, £1,000, $1,000 in a day is not big numbers whatsoever. But for a 23-year-old who'd earned no income online apart from this writing, It was massive for me and I was like, okay, this is pretty cool. This sales copy marketing stuff obviously works. How can I do more of that? And that just sort of led me down the rabbit hole of looking at copywriting. I hired a couple of mentors and coaches who introduced me to all the greats. And, you know, I had some mentoring from Dave Madan, from people like John McIntyre. I bought courses from Gary Halbert, all those people. So yeah, that was the start of the journey. 13 years ago, I guess, all from getting fired for not plagiarizing stuff, but being accused of it.

Oh my goodness. All right. Well, yeah, stick it to them. They missed out on a good resource on what could have been. Did you enjoy writing? And when you were in college and school and all that, I mean, did you like that?

Yeah. I was always kind of creative. I never really excelled in any one thing. Like I sort of enjoyed the data stuff, like the maths and science and that kind of thing. But I also enjoyed creativity, but it was never something that I particularly set out to do. It was more the, When I was getting into fitness, it was the guys that I love to read online. I was super into reading fitness articles and yeah, so I have no formal training whatsoever, but it was more just a passion project I picked up that kind of took off.

And you did the things that we do that a lot of us tend to not do enough of, which is learn from the best. And you went out there and you had some favorites and you said, okay, I could do this. All right, so you do that first, that ebook, and you get a little glimpse of what could be. You started studying, what's next? When did you actually have your next kind of big hit? Like, okay, I'm actually getting some momentum here.

So from that, I thought, okay, well, selling ebooks is great, but it's a one-off purchase, like people buy once. And if you've got nothing else for them, then you know, you don't have much of it, you have a product, you don't have a business. So I started offering online coaching, where I basically took what I was doing with people in person and did it with them online. So I'd write training programs, I coach people on diet, that kind of thing. And built that business to the point where it was relatively successful. I had about 50 or 60 online clients and had then other fitness professionals reaching out to me saying, I like what you've done, as in taking your business from in-person to online. Could you help me do that? And I was like, I don't know, I might be able to, let's find out. So all of a sudden I was writing blogs for other fitness people. I was writing emails, not really knowing still what I was doing. It's very much I've learned a bit. And obviously at the time I thought I was amazing. And, you know, you think you've figured everything out with copy and marketing and whatnot. And you look back and think, yeah, I didn't realize how naive I was, but I think I was charging like $50 an email or about $1,000 for a sales letter. But it kind of, again, just took off very naturally, very organically. It wasn't one of these things where it was, you're making no money from copy and then you're hitting, you know, 5-figure months or $20K months or whatever. It was very much just, okay, I was still doing fitness stuff. And I might have made an extra couple of thousand dollars a month from copy one month. 3 months later, that was up to $4K or $5K. And it got to the point where in 2016, I had a chat with a mentor of mine at the time, a guy called Dan Meredith. And he said, you need to choose what you're doing. Are you doing fitness stuff? Or are you doing copy? I strongly advise you do copy because you're better at it. It's more interesting. There's more freedom. It pays more. What are you going to do? And I thought, Yep. You make a good point. So I wound down the fitness business that kind of closed up within about 3 months. I just sort of gave every client a bit of notice and then yeah, basically just over 10 years ago I went full-time into copy and marketing. Wow.

Love it. And well, I think also the other thing you probably in hindsight realize is that when your market was people on the fitness side, not to generalize, but a lot of people that are out there in fitness probably aren't necessarily the best marketing folks. And certainly they're not necessarily the creative Knowing how to do that. So it was a really good, probably a good niche. You know, looking back as you've been doing copy all these years and all the things you learned, like how much has it evolved?

Yeah, I'd say there's a twofold answer to this because one, I think the market definitely has changed to a degree. So when I got into it, it was very much the biz op style of copy was the thing to do. It was that you learned about the super catchy headlines. You learned how to write a very hard close. You learned how to really hooked people in. It was all about the, I don't want to say pushy, but it was much more the kind of amazement style copy. Everything was the next best thing. Everything was, you know, we're going to give you more of this and more of that, and we're going to twist the knife on the pain points. And I think over time, most markets, that's become less and less effective. It still works in some markets. It still works very well in biz op, in survival, in certain health niches as well. But on the whole, I think it's got less effective. But also from a personal standpoint, it was never the style that I liked writing myself. So I've often had clients whereby that type of copy has worked really well for them. And I've written that, but my style has always been much more— I'm a storyteller. I find that interesting. I like to buy through stories. I like to see people's weaknesses, their real side. I've never sort of considered myself a marketer, so to speak, as in I am, but I also Yeah, I only actively sell in about 10% of my emails. I keep it very organic, very natural, that kind of thing. And I, I feel like more and more people are starting to do that now. It's a clichéd thing, but people want authenticity. And there's the TikTok influencer who talks about authenticity while sitting in a fake private jet and, you know, getting paid $10,000 to promote a product they've never used. And then actual authenticity where you're telling stories, you're, you know, Showing you the ups and the downs, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, for me, that's always been more my style. And I do see that coming through as being more and more effective now that it's so easy to fake stuff online that people want that realness and that rawness.

Yeah. They want to see the vulnerability, the journey, something that's relatable, I imagine. And so when you're doing, I mean, what's your preferred modality when you're doing copy? I mean, do you do a lot of like, hey, we'll do an email campaign with multiple emails where it's kind of like You know, give, give, give, story, story, you know, and then email 5 is the ask, or is there like a certain formula? Like, you know, what would you advise a listener today on? Is there a cadence when you're building out story?

Yeah. So my overall advice is always write stuff worth reading. I think if you're not doing that, you're never going to get people opening your emails. You're never going to get people reading to the end. So as much as I'm a fan of super catchy subject lines, I love strong hooks, all that kind of stuff. Ultimately, people have got lots of things vying for their attention now, whether it's other emails, whether it's social media, whether it's Netflix, podcasts, all that kind of stuff. So you have to make sure that you are writing things they want to read. As obvious as that sounds, I think we often forget that. And then certainly when it comes to things like launches, I like to have a bit of a variety. So I am a fan of sort of the Jeff Walker approach, the sideways sales letter, where You're effectively taking what you'd have in a sales letter. So you've got some social proof, you've got some story, you've got some unique mechanism, you've got some objection handling, and you make sure all of that goes into a launch. I think if you are only giving testimonials or if you're only telling stories, you're only doing short, sharp emails, you're gonna be missing a lot of stuff there. And then I also think that as humans, we quite like unpredictability. We don't like to be able to know exactly what's coming at the minute. in my mind, someone knows what's going to be in your email, that's the minute they switch off. So when I'm writing broadcast emails, yeah, sometimes it might be a really short, what we could call a hand-raiser type email. So it might be, and I'll use the clichéd one here that I wouldn't use this exact copy, but it's kind of like, hey, I'm looking for 5 business owners who've got lists of 50,000 or more people, but you're making less than $10,000 a month. I want to work with you to install my you know, my client generating engine into your business and, you know, get you to $50K a month of email revenue. Let me know if that's you. That kind of thing can work really well if you put it in once every 10 emails. If every email is like that, people get bored of it. Likewise, if every email is a 3,000-word story about what you did at the weekend, again, people want to know about your life, but they don't want to know about it that much. So my whole thing is I don't want anyone to open an email thinking, I know exactly what Mike or Mike's client is going to say to me today.

And then you mentioned something, the hook. So obviously, and we all kind of get that, we're all, it's an attention-getting business. We're all in with all the options. How do you, I mean, is there any go-to without giving all your best secrets away? I mean, is there any kind of go-to hooks that you've noticed that you're saying, okay, at the end of the day, I got to get that attention. I have a couple of go-tos that I really like to use that helps.

Certainly in terms of resources that I'll look at, I keep an email swipe file. So I've got a separate email address where I sign for loads of different offers. And there's so much stuff in the health space that's great at that. I mean, the classic example is things like, you know, the— I'll probably get the exact wording wrong, but the one food you should never eat on an airplane, or these foods explode in your stomach. If you have a good swipe file of emails coming through, you'll still see that kind of stuff coming through, even though those headlines were written decades ago. So my thing is, have a think about what would make you stop and need to open something and keep that swipe file of those ideas. And then you only need to modify slightly. Again, it's stuff like disconnect, the lazy man's way to getting rich, that kind of thing, or how to get rich slowly. Everyone else is saying how to get rich quickly. You say how to get rich slowly, people are like, okay, that's different. So for example, like I've just released a new training today and a lot of people are talking about, oh, my training can help you earn an income in this amount of weeks or days or whatever, and you just have to use AI prompts. I went with the hook of saying there's this free training, it's an hour and 50 minutes long and you can't fast forward it. You have to watch all of it. Because I want to go against the grain with a lot of stuff. It also calls out the right type of person. But think about disconnect. If you can put 2 things together that shouldn't be together, that always works. Or the other thing is, I think it's still a free resource. John Carlton's Power Words is great. If you just want something that can very easily spice up a subject line or a headline, have a look at that because it's got all these words that evoke an emotion. And often you can take quite a bland, boring subject line and insert a word that evokes emotion like furious or embarrassing or grotesque. And that can take a subject line from like a 5 out of 10, nah, it's okay, but I'll open it later, to a 9 out of 10, oh my goodness, what's this guy saying? I have to open this now.

Love it. Okay. So a lot of us are out there writing copy and doing things. Hopefully got some good tips there. And again, I'm going to get to the AI question shortly because I'm very excited to hear your thoughts on that, as I'm sure people watching. But, um, one more thing, you kind of talked about it earlier, the importance of data. Like, we all get lazy. We're all doing things going from one another. This is your, your world, obviously. Um, how much do you feel like we're missing the boat by not analyzing? Like, if we're not hiring a Mike Samuels and we're just doing it on our own and we're doing stuff, how much do you think we should be paying attention to the data? How many people you see don't pay attention to the data? And like, what is it costing us? Meaning, like, we're just throwing stuff out there, moving on to the next thing and saying, well, damn, you actually didn't even analyze or go back to see what's working or what's being open. Like, how much do you see that? your clients? How much should we be focusing on this?

This is something that I've probably changed my tune about quite a bit in recent years. I used to be very much a guy who said, if you're making money from your list, don't look into it too much. I think your bases are covered with that. More so the last few years, I think where markets are getting more competitive, and I think where everyone is looking for that edge, it has become more important. I do this probably more with cold traffic because obviously ad costs are pretty much always rising, platforms are always changing. So I'm more of a data guy when it comes to ads. So I'm looking always at cost by click, click-through rate, that kind of thing. Same with emails. I will study open rate. I'll study click-through rate the same, but I also think a lot of people probably look at the data wrong. So I've worked with a lot of clients who will say, well, these emails got our best opens and click-through rates. I'm like, okay, that's cool. How much money did those emails make? And they'll say, well, they made this much. And I'll say, okay, that's fine. But actually the emails that made more money had lower opens, lower click-through rates because Often to get good clients who are going to buy, you have to be exclusive. And when you're exclusive, actually you get lower opens and click-through rates a lot of the time. So some people look at that first level of data, the same with ads. People will say, oh, this ad got our best cost per click. And you're like, cool, but what was the quality of the click like? Did that, you know, did those clicks lead to sales or not? So I am much more data guy than I used to be, but I also think you have to go deeper than the surface level data. That's where sometimes the more complex data analyzing platforms can be really useful because you can track someone from click to sale, even if it happened months in advance. And certainly the higher priced offers you're working with, it's less of an issue if you're working with a client who's got some $7 ebooks, let's say. But if you've got a client where their main program is a $25K program, most people aren't going to buy from clicking on an ad. They're going to buy 6 months, 12 months, 2 years down the line. You need to be able to look beyond that initial data and say, right, how did this person come into our world? And it might've been an ad that you were paying, I don't know, $50 a click and $300 for an opt-in. But if that client turns out to be someone who spends $25K on a program and does that 3 years straight, that's a pretty good ROI.

Okay. I love that. One of the biggest takeaways I just had from that is how much we all get stuck in a silo and looking at one data point and saying, okay, Let's take the, the 7 ads, take the one with the best click-through, get rid of the other 6 and go deeper in those ads. And you're like, wait a second, you might be missing a big opportunity there. Um, and the second takeaway of course is the niching down part, which, you know, don't be afraid to do that, which I think we all know intuitively, but sometimes I think the data can get us lost and going the wrong direction. Okay. So, um, let's get into one of the most exciting topics I wanted to talk to you today is obviously, you know, this proliferation of AI, um, especially when it comes to copy and content. I want to go through the emotions you had when all of a sudden the swarm started hitting, you know, whatever many years ago we want to talk about and like the panic you may or may not have had, or maybe the excitement you may or may not have had. Walk us through the emotions of somebody in the world that you play in when you saw this coming on the tidal wave. And now that the, you know, we're in the tidal wave and ain't going anywhere, how have you adapted? And tell us what we should be thinking about within the world of copy. A lot of questions in there, but yeah. Everything you hear on this show comes back to one idea, proximity.

I wrote the book on it, literally, Proximity Pays, my bestselling book available now at proximitypays.com.

No, no, no, it's good. It's definitely been a bit of a roller coaster. I remember the first time I became aware of AI copy, I was working with Clients on Demand and this would've been probably 2020, I think. So obviously there were bits and pieces before this, but I think that the first The first main platform I was aware of was, it was either called Jasper and it turned to Jarvis or Jarvis and then Jasper. It's one of those, but I remember doing some stuff with that and thinking, this is fine, but I can't really see it doing anything special. It was very much quite rudimentary. I remember we had, um, we were on a call once with the clients on the marketing team. We all laughed because one of the things it could do very well was do different voices. So we put some copy into it and we said like, make this sound like Brené Brown and it did it. And then we said, make it sound like Dan Kennedy. And it took the same copy and it started with the line, listen up, woman. And we were like, okay, that's actually quite funny. It's quite clever. It's very Dan-like, but it didn't seem too much of a threat at the time. It seemed like if you're a content writer or if you were running your own business and you just needed content to be present, it was probably fine, but it wasn't going to do much. Then I think around about 2022, '23, it really started to pick up. And yeah, I'm not afraid to say I was slightly worried about it, slightly concerned because I thought, oh, actually a lot of what I do is, is, you know, possibly going to be replaced by AI. And I felt that for me personally, it was probably fine because I had the relationships. You know, I'd been doing this, what, 7, 8 years by then. I was fairly comfortable. But part of my business is teaching other copywriters, and I was thinking, actually, I don't feel nearly as confident for someone coming into the market now who doesn't have that network, doesn't have that portfolio. How are they going to stand out? And then I'd say 18 months ahead again, I was— I hadn't seen it advance that much from a copy perspective, and I I made my position more anti-AI, and I kind of, you know, called out a lot and picked up flaws in it and all that kind of thing. Um, and then I think now I sit somewhere in the middle. I use it daily myself for certain things, but I don't particularly use it for generating copy. So I really like— I actually, I like it a lot for research. So when I'm starting with a client, um, and I'll use— I'll always use this example. So I started with a client about 18 months ago, and He's a well-known author, business speaker. He's on podcasts all the time. Got, I think, about 7 books now. And in the past, the research involved in that would've been probably the whole— I'd have spent like 25 hours doing research, and then the research would've still been an ongoing process for weeks after that. As it was, using AI, I could get PDF transcripts of all his books. I could get podcast appearances. I could get social media content. Took me about 2 hours to get it. I put it into AI. I said, can you make me a document that's got like some brand voice stuff in it? That's got brand values, what he stands for, stands against, language used, all that kind of thing. And it basically gave me this sort of 20-page document that was probably 90% as good as if I'd have done it myself, but it took what, 5% of the time. So I love it for that kind of thing. I love it.

And what AI tool are you using for that? What's your go-to there?

Uh, so I like Claude. I've played around with different bits and I'll happily admit I'm not an expert. If you asked me to compare tools, I would have absolutely no idea, but I think Claude generally does a good job for that kind of thing. And yeah, that kind of analyzing data as well, it's really useful for analyzing data, spotting patterns. So when it comes to writing, I still very much write in a flow state because that's how I work best. And I think that there's an argument to say you could get AI to do your copy for you and then you edit the AI tails out of it. I think that's risky because I think you can potentially start sounding AI sounding like AI in your own copy if you do that. So I just don't like doing it. I sort of, I don't know, as fancy as it sounds, I see writing more as an art than a skill. So I like to keep the art and the human side involved, but for the stuff around the copy, I think AI is awesome. I'd encourage everyone to use it. But from a writing standpoint, I think that, as you mentioned in the intro, we're seeing that backlash to AI copy. There's quite a lot of data to say that many more markets are catching onto it and they're having, they're seeing lower perceived value when they see something is AI generated. Yeah. And they just feel like the brand doesn't care about them as much. So I think if you can get ahead of that and stay as a skilled writer, sure, use AI for everything around the copy, but for the copy itself, I'm still a big fan of writing it. Got it.

Do you feel like we're all as humans gonna start to be able to detect, like, just get really good at saying, okay, this is just AI versus not, not, not that it's good or bad. I'm thinking as me as a consumer, like it's more of an acceptance. Okay, this is just AI, you know, versus, oh, there's something special, almost like By not doing it that way, maybe subconsciously as people, the list, the audience reviews and reads it, you know, perhaps it's almost like, wow, this is high quality because they intuitively know this is not AI. Is that sort of what you're going for and seeing out there a little bit more of?

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of interesting points. I think it's niche dependent. I certainly think if you are in the tech space, let's say you're going to care less about it. If a product's great, if you kind of know the founder or the creator or whatever is smart, you're not going to care if the copy is AI generated, I think. If anything, you might see it as an advantage just because you like that kind of thing. But there's been a few interesting studies. One of them was basically took 2 groups of people and they showed them the same piece of art. One group was told this art is AI generated. The other group was told this piece of art is made by a human. And I won't get the numbers exact on here, but the first question they asked was, would you buy this or not? And it was something like 50% fewer people would buy it when it was AI or when they thought it was AI generated. And then they said, if you would buy it, how much would you pay? And the group who were told it was AI generated would on average spend about 68% less just because as humans, we inherently value human effort. And I think you can probably translate that to copy as well. So same as before, if you've got a low ticket product, is it going to make much of a difference? Unlikely. If you're selling a high-end mastermind or a retreat, if you're selling a high-touch service in like accounting and legal and coaching, anything like that. I think more and more it's going to start to make a difference. And we're going to want to know that companies, brands, people, whatever, have made an effort to actually write that or at least generate the ideas. Because if you're positioning yourself as a thought leader, I want to know that your thoughts are original. You've not just put a load of stuff into AI and said, what's the best way I can sell this? So I can see there being a split in the market. So I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that if you are selling something that requires more of a human touch, I think that needs to come through in all of your marketing.

Love it.

Okay.

There's a couple of things I want to unwind there. One is imagining a listener watching this and you're trying to take away, okay, bucket of when you should go get focused on building proper copy, whether you do it yourself or hire somebody like you, or when, all right, I'm okay just to, you know, go to AI, go to my Claude or whatever tool I like to use. In your mind, like I heard right now, high ticket offer, do it, you know, get copy, get proper copy, low ticket, maybe some explanations. Like what else? Like what else falls in the bucket of, okay, maybe you really need to reconsider not being lazy here besides high-ticket, you know, sales offers, that kind of thing?

So I think a lot of it will come down as well to how well you can prompt AI. I've seen a lot of people who say, well, my AI doesn't sound like AI. And I look at stuff and I think actually it kind of still does. But I think there's a small percentage of people who are very good at doing AI prompts and coaching AI to sound like a human. And so for instance, I've got Some clients who require a high volume of ad copy. And actually, once you've given AI enough data and enough, you've told it enough times, no, don't use that obvious tell, don't use that phrasing, all that kind of stuff. Coming up with ad hooks, it can be great. So if a client says to me, we're shooting like in 2 days' time, we need 10 different sets of ads, each with 10 different hooks. I'm like, okay, that's a lot of work to get done in a short timeframe. AI can be great for that because I could even ask it to generate 500 hooks. I can just take the best 100 out of that. Technical writing as well. So anything like, obviously SEO isn't as much of a thing as it once was perhaps, but anything SEO-based, I think AI copy can be fine for that. Anything that's a bit more mechanical. So again, you can get good and bad here. It's not necessarily that there's a cover-all that fits every situation, but I think if you're writing an instructional email to someone at your work or in your business, AI can do that pretty well. I also think that when I've seen people use the AI voice noting software, that tends to be pretty good as well, because it kind of picks up your voice relatively well. So anything like that, I think if it's basic, if you're communicating just essential information, like I've got nothing against people using AI.

Got it. And I think another thing you said, which I think is important, and I'm kind of rooting for the Mike Samuels of the world, is that finding somebody like you or others That even can help you be the expert on the prompting side. And I imagine you're now finding another lane for yourself outside of the high-end copy of just saying, look, you know, you could use me to make sure even your high, that the lower quality copy that you need to produce a lot of, if you're going to do it with AI, do it the right way. Like I'm going to make sure that you have the right prompts, the right, you're asking all the questions, you're loading up your, your AI skills accordingly. So you could do that. And I imagine, you know, finding an expert like you is probably, if you're going to do it, do it right, do it the right way. Are you seeing some of that?

Interestingly, yeah, it's almost been not a service I ever thought I'd offer, but I've had a few people request it now, basically saying, look, we've got a content team, a marketing team, that kind of thing. Maybe we don't have the budget to hire a copywriter full-time, but could you do stuff like brand voice guides? Could you help us train our AIs? Could you share sort of the dos and don'ts of AI copy? So one thing I'll often do with people is either go into a company for like half a day or a day and sort of do almost like a workshop with them about what good copy is and how to use AI with it. Or I'll create them a bumper document, kind of like the one I mentioned earlier with the client that's got the brand voice guidelines, all that kind of stuff, where even if all you do is give that to AI, it's not too bad. It gets you about 70 to 80% of the way there. Obviously I'm biased. I'm a perfectionist. I like it more than that, but I think sometimes actually, if it's a case of We can't afford to drop $10K a month on a copywriter, but what's the next best option? Okay. Dropping $5K once to get one of these guides done. Yeah. It's not a bad trade-off.

Yeah.

That's cool. That's another, yeah, I could see that as another opportunity for you to be out there doing that. So that's great. What about how much do you like to include video? And I'll say real video, not, you know, not, hey, Gen 11 Labs produced, you know, voices of me talking Spanish all of a sudden. How much do you recommend that as part of the strategy in the world of us trying to show authenticity?

Now more than ever, definitely. I used to be very much a written guy, and I quite liked getting on podcasts and that kind of thing. But just kind of going off what I said earlier about authenticity, I think it's becoming bigger and bigger. And I think you want to have a certain persona, right? You don't want to just be— there's realness, and then there's just being too real, as in, you know, taking a video of yourself while you're in the bathroom. I mean, that could be a marketing tactic, obviously, but, you know, you don't want to always do videos like that. But I do think that People want to see the real you. Part of, um, I do a lot around behavioral psychology and one of the, one of the concepts I love is called the pratfall effect, which is basically saying that people like to see some flaws in a person as well. When there's an expert, they don't trust them if they're too perfect and polished. And I think that if you're doing videos, if you're doing lives, if you're on a podcast or that kind of thing, that can sort of utilize that concept really well because you'll see someone's slight flaws, slight tics, you might see them mess up a little bit. So whenever I record a webinar, I might edit it slightly, but I'm not going to be there necessarily sitting in a studio and making sure every last bit is perfect. I'm going to keep in some of the ums and ahs. I'm going to keep in the weird side tangent I went off on for 30 seconds that has nothing to do with it, because if you've got a kind of a founder-led business or a personal brand, I think that kind of stuff should make it in. So yeah, I like video because it's also a different way for people to get to know you. Some people actually respond better to videos, some to written copy. So I think, yeah, unless you're absolutely terrible on video, probably start doing a bit more.

Yeah, I tend to agree. I'm a big fan of it. And I think that's a big opportunity for those that find ways to get behind the camera and we're going to be wanting it more because we're going to want to know what's real.

All right.

So I'm going to go full circle as we kind of close out a little bit. I talked early on, I dropped the seed about your biggest breakthrough came from a Dutch bathroom where guys couldn't stop peeing on the floor. And that was a revelation that went on to be a catalyst behind a $100,000 launch. So I need to hear the rest of that story.

Yeah, it's a great hook. So this was, I think, around, probably around the time that I said I was getting a bit worried about AI copy. And I've made my living for 8 years just writing traditional sales copy. And when I saw AI coming in, I was like, maybe I need to diversify a bit. And I did a course by a guy called Rory Sutherland, who is a British guy. He works at Ogilvy. I think he's the vice chairman of Ogilvy Advertising in the UK. Really smart guy, super funny, great speaker, great on podcasts. And I took a course from him. And the first thing— the course was about behavioral psychology. And the first story he told was about Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. They had a bit of a problem that was in the men's bathrooms. They were getting a lot of urine on the floor. And apologies to anyone who's eating their dinner or breakfast or whatever while they're listening to this, but— But they had that problem. And obviously, if there's a lot of urine on the floor in an airport, people get it on their shoes, they trek around the airport, it's really not that great. And if you've been to Schiphol Airport, you know, it's quite a nice airport. It's very big, it's very polished, it's got a nice aesthetic. So they thought, well, what can we do? Okay, let's just put up a sign that says, don't pee on the floor, because that will fix it. So they did that, and surprise, surprise, it didn't fix the problem at all.

It probably got worse.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, because people don't like being told what to do. I don't know what type of man you've got to be to then go and deliberately pee on the floor. But anyway, there's probably some. So they thought, well, what else can we do? Right? We've tried just telling people, let's be nice instead. Let's put up a sign that says, please don't pee on the floor. You know, we want to keep the airport clean for everyone, all that kind of stuff. So they did that and thought that'll fix the problem. Gave it a bit of time. Nope. Problem wasn't fixed whatsoever. So then they got together and thought, well, what can we do? What else can we try? And what they did was they put a tiny picture of a fly in every single urinal, and almost overnight, that fixed the problem. The idea being that, look into this however way you want, but as men, we are very weird. And if we see something in a urinal, we are going to aim our pee at it. And if that's right in the middle of where it all goes down the drain, you are going to get less urine on the floor. And that sort of opened up my eyes to thinking, or not even thinking, but understanding behavioral psychology, as in, When you tell people to do something, they don't do it. When you ask them to do something, they don't do it. Often that incentive has to be something they don't even realize is happening. And you'll get the same thing. Like you see it, once you start seeing this stuff, you see it everywhere. So it'll be things like in supermarkets, in grocery stores, where things are positioned. There's some absolutely fascinating studies around this, um, in terms of how senses influence what we buy. So They did a big study in a supermarket in the wine aisle, and they tested out playing French music one day and then German music the next day. And what they found was that when they played French music, more people bought French wine. When they played German music, more people bought German wine.

Wow.

But when they interviewed people afterwards, people didn't even notice the music. They said to them, do you know what music was playing when you bought that? And they're like, oh, I didn't even know there was music playing. And so all of that showed me how how easily we can be influenced when companies and brands are touching on the right triggers. And that was sort of my transition to bringing that into copy. So I now come at copy much more from that standpoint. So I still write hooks and headlines and that kind of thing, but I much more look at the behavioral psychology around it because I think a lot of big brands do it very well. So brands like Red Bull are amazing at it. Brands like Amex do it fantastically, but in copy, we don't really look at it. So That was sort of my catalyst to begin doing that. And then yeah, that was when I created the course around it, teaching other copywriters, ended up in a $110,000 launch. But yeah, I've kind of been teaching that ever since, just because firstly, I find it fascinating. I love it because it shows even if we think we're not easily influenced and we like to think we're in control of all our decisions, we are absolutely not. And secondly, I just feel the market's moving that way more and more with AI copy and that kind of stuff. I think that If you can understand how to subconsciously influence human behavior, you're never going to go hungry for business.

I love it. I love it. Okay. Well, as we wrap, a random question, because for those that are watching on YouTube, you have some interesting artwork back there. And initially I looked at that and I'm like, wait, is it 9:04? So behind Mike, he's got what looks like a clock that's just sitting at 9:04, like it's the time 9:04, but it hasn't moved and it's not 9:04. So what does that represent?

Oh no, it's genuinely a clock that just stops. It's one of the ones that, you know, you have like the flip ones that flip down.

Yeah.

It stopped working a while ago and I have no idea how to get it working again. So it's been 904 for like the last 10 months in here.

Nice. Now also known as an art piece called 904.

Well, I'll sell it for millions.

Yeah, that's it.

All right.

Well, thank you. I'm so glad I got the opportunity to get to know you better today. So thanks so much for sharing all your words of wisdom and getting us to think in the right direction about where we're going in the world of copy. And I'm looking forward to our next adventure together. Thanks so much, my friend.

Thanks, Eric. Really appreciate it.

And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast.

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