Billion-Dollar Copywriting Secrets with David Deutsch

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It's been said that if you have this skill, you will always eat well, you will always be in demand, you will always have a job. I'm talking about the ability to write copy, copywriting. Our guest today is a world renowned copywriter. He has learned from some of the top stars. David Ogilvy, one of the superstars of all time. He has written copy that has generated more than a billion, billion dollars in sales for major, major corporations like Proctor and Gamble, to name just one. It's my honor and privilege to introduce David Deutsch to the program. David, thanks for joining us today.

Oh, my pleasure to be here. Looking forward to talking with you. Great.

And you've got a lot of goodies for our viewers here today. We're going to direct them to your website, speakingofwriting.com where you, you've got a couple of free books and special reports for them. But copywriting is getting a lot of attention in the news these days because it's put up there as sort of a poster child of jobs that are going to be made obsolete because of artificial intelligence. I, I have a, a slightly more nuanced view. I, I suspect you do as well. I don't think any copywriter is going to lose their job to AI. I do think that, you know, to paraphrase the futurist Ray Kurzweil, a lot of copywriters are going to lose their jobs to other copywriters who've learned how to use AI effectively to make themselves faster, more prolific. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I think that's exactly the case. I think, I think the danger is kind of just AI denial and like, oh, that's, you know, I'm a writer, I don't need that. And, and that's, you know, that's artificial and all that stuff. When in reality it can really be a great thinking partner and a, you know, the best thinking partner and writing partner you may have ever had. So how do you, how do you.

Currently use AI in your own craft of writing and of copywriting? And which particular programs do you use or which applications?

I use a couple of different ones. I find that's usually true of people that really seem to know AI. You ask them, oh, what do you use? I want to know what you use. And they say, well, I use all different programs for different kinds of applications. But I tend to go back and forth between Claude and Chat, GPT and what's Perplexity?

Perplexity.

Perplexity. Yeah, I can never remember that name. And then you know, have fooled around with other stuff, but those are my, those are my main go to's other things of course, for specific applications, whether it's, you know, writing music, there's music programs for that, you know, doing other kinds of specialized tasks.

I'm interested in your workflow of how you go through this process because we have a lot of small business owners, entrepreneurs, speakers, trainers, coaches, subject matter experts who watch this show, listen to this show. And some of them use outside copywriting agencies, ad agencies. Some of them do it just themselves. Some of them may farm it out to, you know, a family member even. Everyone has a slightly different approach. I'm interested in your actual process and if you can indulge me. I thought we'd just do a real life case study today because just this morning I was writing copy effectively. I was promoting my new digital clone. And it's an interactive video based and audio and text based clone. And it just in the last week suddenly became able to speak to people in 32 languages. So I'm excited about it seems like you're talking to me, but if you push a button, I'm speaking to you in Chinese or French or German or any one of 32 languages. So I've noticed that when people come into the cone, because I can see the video of the conversation, sometimes their jaws drop, sometimes they're telling people, hey, you got to see, this is freaking amazing. So I'm seeing this genuine excitement about there, about this, plus members of my own family. My wife speaks Chinese and she's like, I can't believe you're speaking to me in Chinese. And so I wanted to sort of put a spotlight on it to, to bring my existing users back in. So I want to show you my thought process and I don't want to exploit you and ask you to rewrite the whole thing, but I want you to tell me where you think I may have done something right so our viewers and listeners can say, okay, that's the right path. Where am I going wrong? And how would someone like you actually do this? So I'll show you the first draft. The first draft I did myself. Now sometimes I'm lazy. I'll use Chat GPT or my own TJ Walker GPT to do a rough draft of a marketing newsletter, marketing copy for an online course. But today I just did sort of my own version of it. So this is kind of my start. Imagine yourself fluent in 32 languages. We won't go into all the details here. I just want to show you my workflow So I dictated a first draft. Then I went to Chat GPT.

And.

I asked it to. I went through several different versions. So I asked it to rewrite the following email message. I told it that it's going to existing users that it just came. I gave it a little bit of background actually. I'm sorry, I didn't. I just said rewrite the following email message with the idea of getting existing users more excited about trying out the multi language capabilities and wanting to get them to click it. So I'm not trying to make a direct sale, I'm not trying to get them to whip out their credit card. It's more of a soft sell where they go into the clone, try it, use it, if they like it and want to come back after you know, 10 or so minutes or 10 different questions, then a paywall comes up. So I then just cut and pasted my email draft. It then gave me a version. I looked at it not that carefully, but I did see something I didn't like. I said most of this is good, but my clone won't do that. This made it sound like it was my technology and I'm the technology. I'm simply using a platform to do this. It's not OpenAI or Claude, it's one called Delphi. But I'm not interested in promoting the platform. I want them to check out my clone and get them excited about cloning in general. So I, I asked it to rewrite it to make it sound like it's not my clone because the headline says we've added the ability for my clone. It made it sound like it was all me. Oh, it says what my clone can now do for you. That's what the part I didn't like is. It made it sound like I was going to teach them or show them exactly how to do that. Now, in fairness, I do have to be overly promotional here. I do have my own book on how to make a digital clone and it's how to use a platform and I have an online course on that. But that's not what I was promoting in this particular bit of copy. So I asked it to, to rewrite that. But then I said most of this is good, but this is just a template. I want people to see that it's now available in other places. So it did another version. It still kept my clone, video clone technology. I wasn't happy with that so I gave it notes. Sounds like it's my technology. I'm just a guide, is a step or two ahead of others. And as you can see, probably like most people, I realize the AI is good enough to correct my spelling here. So I don't bother to correct, you can see typos in my prompts there. So it did it again. But it still used my video clone technology. And I don't know anything about technology. I'm just aggressive at looking for the best technology to allow my clone to allow me to create a completely interactive video clone. So I kind of stressed that. But then I thought that it lost something because in my initial copy I had quotes from people saying this is freaking amazing. And because they literally said that when I was watching the video of people in my clone and they saw me speaking Arabic at one point they turned to a friend and said, this is freaking amazing. So I'm pulling from that. I put that in my initial draft and it was kind of written out of it in the chat GPT. So I asked it to rewrite that. So I said put in some of my original language. And I want people to really get a sense that this is a new type of communication. So it did a final version. I used the final version. I still didn't really like the title, so I used the final version it gave me. And let me just pull up a moment. The title that I actually used, you might be appalled at the title because I didn't test it or anything else. But let me just pull up.

The.

The title here. I just sent it. It should be in my trash because I already deleted it. Okay, so let me go to. I'll go into my clone and I realize this, I've thrown a lot at you and we didn't discuss this in advance that I was going to ask you to do this. By the way, if you're just joining us, I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success. Our special guest today is David Deutsch who is a well known copywriter. He has worked with, with top agencies. He's worked with American Express, General Foods, Merrill Lynch, Proctor and Gamble. He's learned from the likes of David Ogilvy. We're very happy he's here today. And I'm getting his feedback in a sort of a real world case study on how people can use artificial intelligence to do copywriting. And I'm going to ask him, where did I go wrong? Where did I go right? How would someone, how would someone really use this in the best possible way? And so I want to tell you, okay, so here's the title I used. I changed this at the last minute and I put the headline to be appear to speak in nearly any language instantly. Question mark, question mark, question mark, exclamation point. That's maybe too cheesy, or maybe that might even sell off spam filters. I don't know. Anyway, so that's. That is my interpretation of how someone like me, a small business owner, a content creator, a subject matter expert who does have to promote things, whether it's books, online courses, workshops, should use AI for copyrighting. I came up with the first concept. I didn't just ask it to do everything. I came up with a concept. I had it do drafts, I tweaked it. I didn't just take everything it said at first blush. And by the way, I have to confess, I have done that before.

Right. Nothing.

Nothing that's caused a disaster for me or hurt me. But this one I wanted to get right because, frankly, I do find it very exciting. And if we have time or it's relevant, I'll show you the clone speaking a different language later today. But I wanted to get it right. So that's my concept of start with a concept, go back and forth with some program, whether it's chat, GPT, and then come up with yourself. Now, tell me, what would you have done if I had just come to you and hired you, or if I'd gone to speakingofwriting.com and gone through one of your workshops or seminars or courses? How would you have taught me to do this differently?

Well, I think basically there's a step that we're kind of missing both. Both a copywriting step and an AI step. And, you know, that is to really be clear on who the prospect is and what we want the prospect to do. Right. I'm a little unclear even on who the prospect is and what we want the prospect to do. I think it's people that are kind of in your world already and you want them.

So this was a. This was a mailing, an email mailing, going to people who have already registered to use my digital clone, my interactive digital clone. They might have interacted just with a video, maybe just the audio, maybe text, but at some point they came in either from a newsletter of mine or they were a student in one of my online communication skills or personal development courses.

Right. Okay. And these are all things that the AI should know, because it's helpful for the AI to know where these people came from and who they are. And.

And I didn't say that. Yeah, I could have given it more briefing, more background.

And you want them to do what like what to take what action? After they get this email, I wanted.

Them to click on it and try it in a different language. Even if they don't speak that language, I want them to see me, someone they've only ever seen speak in English, because I'm the dummy. I only speak English.

Right.

Speaking fluently in another language. And if they happen to speak another language, to have them like, oh, boy. I mean, it happened just the other day. My. My daughter had a friend over who's fluent in Hungarian. And I said, hey, Sophia, did you know I was fluent in Hungarian? And I put my clone on, right? And she went, oh. She kind of laughed. She did say, oh, this was speaking a little quickly, but it was still something that caused amazement. And I thought, it's not that often in my industry, public speaking training, communication skills training, where you can really get people's jaws to drop and say, oh, wow, that's amazing. Because people feel like they've seen it all before. And this is genuinely new. So that's what I was trying to hit on that.

Yeah. You know, that was good copy that you wrote just then. That idea of there's so few things that are jaw dropping today. And this is because what I'm missing here is why should someone go do this? Aside from that, if you would like them to. Right. Like, what are the reasons? Okay. One reason is that it's amazing and it could make your jaw drop. Right. Another reason might be you should be familiar with this technology because you may want to use it sometimes. So if you see me doing it. Another reason might be maybe it is a language that you speak or that you'd like to speak and it would be interesting or even useful to hear me speaking. Maybe, you know, people, maybe they want to send it to people. Maybe you want them to send it to people that speak a language.

Yeah.

Than other language. Oh, my friend speaks Hungarian. I'm going to send, you know, TJ speaking in Hungarian to them. That'll be so cool because they. They're also in communication or whatever. So AI is really good when it has like a lot of information. Right. Like, and. And the. The loop is kind of also. AI can also help you figure out what are the reasons. See, that's kind of the missing step, right. Step one is kind of AI help me find the avatar for this. Who is this going to exactly paint a picture of it. Right. So now you kind of know in your head what the picture is. Right. But now AI has the picture, which you can then, of course copy and paste and use every time you want to write something to this market.

Yeah, I mean, clearly I left some things out. I should have briefed the AI more on the background of the user, more reasons of why they want to do it. That does bring up, I find, a perennial question when it comes to copywriting. More versus less, long versus short. And I sometimes feel like I've wasted half my life debating this with people. I come in general, I come from the school of thought that says the more you tell, the more you sell. And you and I are both old enough to at least have read in the textbooks how at one point, for, you know, 35 years, the most successful direct mail marketing campaign ever was for the George McGovern campaign. It was, I believe, a 17 page fundraising letter.

Right.

And it raised more money than anything else. And people are bombarded with so much information these days of, oh, the average person has the attention of a goldfish. And you've got to communicate everything in 30 seconds or you've got seven seconds or you've got two seconds. And I have this debate with a lot of other communications people on marketing. You know, it's got to be shorter, shorter, shorter. And I always generally push back and say, why does it have to be shorter? If they're really not interested in this, they're not even going to read one sentence. How do you make your own judgment calls about length when it comes to copywriting?

Well, I think the thing that's being left out of the discussion kind of is long is great if it's interesting.

Yeah.

If it's boring, it's not so great. We'll read, you know, eight Harry Potter novels, right? We'll listen to you.

Might I. I can't. I won't. But I get your point.

You know, we'll read, you know, long books, we'll read long articles. We'll read anything if it's about ourselves, right. You know, somebody used to say, I can. I can get you to read a five. You know, I can get you to read 100 page report. Right? All I have to do is say, it's all about tj. It's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna read it. It's all about me, right? Same thing if it's about me. So if copy.

Fascinating report, by the way.

To us. Right? But that's the thing. To us, to our. Or to this audience of one or to this audience of people. It's, you know, we want to do things that are fascinating. We want to do things where they go, wow, this is about Me, this is about the challenges that I'm facing as a communicator, right? This is about the challenges that I'm facing. What do I do? How do I use AI? Long versus short. All these challenges. So the question, you know, like most things that rhyming, the more you tell, the more you sell. Like most rhyming little ditties like that penny saved is a penny here, and the opposite is also true, right? Pennywise, pound foolish, right? You, you can focus on the wrong things. And sometimes short is good, and sometimes long is good. But long has to be interesting. It has to be compelling. It has to keep your attention. You can't bore someone into buying. You know something?

Now, that brings up an issue that I'm just dying to ask you about. With respect to boredom. I'll. I'll be candid. I have read hundreds and hundreds of books on marketing, copywriting, ad, ad creation. Intellectually, I feel like I know a lot, but emotionally, I could tell you I'm not a good copywriter because I just find it too boring. Can you teach someone to find copywriting interesting or is it just a weeding out? Are you good at it because somehow you found a way to make it interesting for you? Because I, I just find my eyes glaze over. I can't focus on it. I want to go to something else. How do you deal with that issue of, I mean, you know, you could be writing novels. In fact, a lot of ad agency people did that. David Patterson, famously, CEO of a major ad agency, said, you know what? I think I'd rather wr Novels.

Yeah.

And did it. How do you maintain, after all these years, an interest, a passion for copywriting?

Well, I think there's a lot of questions in there, right. One, you know, and there's also a lot of answers, you know, to the same question. You know, one answer is you just sit down and do it, right? A lot of, you know, a lot of copy. Like writing a novel, right? That's not fun every day to go write another chapter of a novel, right. For most people, right? It's hard work. It's the same thing with writing.

Sometimes it's fun to be at the cocktail party saying, you have written a novel.

Yes, yes. I like, have. I love having written. I don't like writing, but I love having written. And, you know, to some extent, that's one answer is copywriting. As you say, you'll never go hungry again if you know how to write copy. And a large part of copywriting is just sitting in the chair and Doing it right. That said. Right. There are way. I think I found a connection to my own curiosity and my own what I find interesting early on, and I was lucky to do that. And I think that's kind of what I teach people that I coach how to do. Because when you do that, your copywriting gets a lot better, right? Because you're, you know, with your just, like right now, you're enthusiastic because you're excited about this conversation. Right? And that enthusiasm. And I am.

And forgive me, I'm looking away because I wanted to pull up your website. I don't want you to think I'm off looking at email right now. For those of our podcast listeners, I'm on screen and I'm looking now to my records. I have three screens up. And I wanted to be respectful of our guests, so I thought I had his website up now. I do. We're gonna. We're gonna show that.

And.

Well, I'll bring it up now as we. As we speak.

But.

But continue. Continue chatting. For those interest. For those interested, if what he says sounds interesting to you, he is graciously giving away a couple of free reports to help with proving your skills of copywriting. Copywriting from a to Z + ideas unlimited. And we'll. We'll show that again. But I want to bring you full screen. And forgive me for interrupting. You go ahead.

That was a good interruption. Thank you. So, you know, to some extent, it's a matter of what I teach people, right? Is getting in touch with what's interesting to you and also getting in touch with your own inner persuader. Right? Because I'm sure you're perfectly capable of persuading your, you know, your partner to do things, to go to this restaurant or that restaurant, Right? To go to this.

Sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes, right? But when you do that, you don't sit down and go, oh, this is so boring. I gotta figure out how to build persuasion. Should I start with an interesting story or a startling fact? No. You. You know, your partner, right? And you know how to persuade them and what to talk to them about. It's the same thing with anything. It's the same thing with copywriting. It's gotta come from inside. It's gotta come from your own natural ability to persuade. If you were sitting across the table and talking to someone and say, hey, you got to check out this thing where it talks in different languages. It's so exciting. And you should do it because, A, you're going to learn a whole lot. B, your jaw is going to drop and It'll be really cool and you'll be able to send it to your friends and you could use it, right? You're going to be able to, you know, use it for yourself. And. But we sit down to write and we're kind of like, you know, you should go visit my. This is very interesting because we're bored. We're not in touch with that inner passion. So that's, that's really the first thing, right, Is to find, get in touch with that. And maybe that means dictating instead of writing. Because as soon as we pick up a pen, as soon as we sit in front of a computer, we get into a whole different mindset of, okay, I'm copywriting now.

I do find it's easier for me and I get a better result if the first draft is dictation. Part of it is, even though I took typing in junior high school and high school, I never learned how to type. I peaked at 23 words a minute. I also do a lot of misspellings. And as I'm sure you stress to all of your students, the more your copywriting sounds like the human language, speaking and conversational, unless structured with long sentences, the better. So I find it's just better to dictate the first draft. This morning, for whatever reason, I didn't, I did type it out with that copy, but typically I do try to dictate it first. And quick comments from Dr. Sunny is joining us today. Have you already touched on the impact of AI on copyright? Well, Sunny, we are talking about that now, but you have any additional questions for our guest, David Deutsch, let us know. And by the way, if anyone wants to come on live and join us, you can do so on streamyard. We'll post that. We'll post the link to that shortly if it's, if it's not on the site you're looking on now. David, how do you teach people now what you do? Is it primarily through your books? Is it your online courses? Is it in person workshops or seminars? What is the primary mode of training that you like the most and that your clients and customers like?

Yeah, you know, I work with people in a variety of ways, right. I work with people, you know, through course, through my training courses, through my copywriting training, my training in creativity, coming up with ideas which are, which are training courses. Also I have a, a group coaching where we get together twice a month and we go through copy. Kind of like we're doing with your copy in a certain way, going through it, how to make it better. How can we improve this headline? What is it? You know, a lot of times it's strategic questions, right? Like we're talking about, like okay, what are the reasons people would buy the product? What are the reasons people would call you an appointment? What are the reasons people would go see your AI clone speaking in different languages? So there's the, the group coaching and then there's one on one coaching where I just work with people either once a week or a couple times a month and we, you know, to improve their marketing, improve their copywriting. Some of those people are, copywriters want to be, you know, more successful. Some of them are business owners that write their own copy, which I think is a huge strategic. If you're a business owner and can write your own copy, you have a huge strategic advantage because first of all, you don't have to deal with finding and paying copywriters and trying to explain your business to them and get them to write great copy for you, which is a lot of work. Right. Even good copywriters.

Let me ask you what, I mean, what percentage of business owners can't write their own copy? Presumably if they're an owner of a business and they have built up enough to sustain even a one person business, they are used to expressing themselves, their ideas, right. Whether it's one on one conversations with clients and prospects. Isn't that a transferable skill to turn it into text, which is whether it's then turned into a radio ad or a TV ad. How much of it is just they tell themselves I'm not a copywriter or they tell themselves I'm not creative type?

Yeah, no, I think a lot.

Or is it just a completely different skill that doesn't necessarily overlap?

Yeah, no, I think a lot of it. Is that right? People, if you're, if you're running a company, you've been selling your product, right, one on one for a long time, you've been writing about your product, you've been sending out emails. I think a lot of it is the mindset of that copywriting is this foreign thing that I don't know how to do or I'm not good at, or you know, whatever, whatever that is that's keeping them from accessing their inner persuader, which is perfectly capable of writing copy. Just like it would be perfectly capable of selling someone one to one across the table.

Yeah. Now I hate to sound like a walking cliche, but I know you've heard the expression the cobbler's children wear no shoes. I constantly find people in The PR business, for example, are the worst at doing PR for themselves.

Sure.

Let's just do a test here. Walk us through your website and tell us exactly how you came up with the copy for your own website. You talk about something a lot of people, the American Dairy association. You know, milk does a body good. The results were bad. Got Milk is obviously something that people remember. Disclosure. I've done a lot of work with the American Dairy association in different, different places in New York. Tell us about what you're writing here. And we see right out of the gate, without reading it carefully, I see a lot of one sentence paragraphs, easy to read, sometimes a four word paragraph. Tell us about the, the ad copy on your own website.

Well, I think it's kind of what we've been talking about, right? Like what interests. You know, what's interesting to me, right? Interesting to me is that Got Copy camp Got Milk campaign where instead of saying milk does the body good, they came up with the headline or the, the idea of Got milk. Right. You're eating a cookie and you're, you know, it's really dry and sticky and you want to have milk, right? Milk goes with certain things and the absence of milk is, can be really bad. So they played, they played with that. So I also played with it in terms of, you know, got copy and it was a way to just, it was just a way to get into a discussion about the importance of copy through that classic campaign of, you know.

And I see that you, you, you have it in the form of a letter. You have your name, you actually have a signature which from, from all I've read in copywriting books, the signature matters. People do ab testing of a blue signature ink versus black. How much thought did you put into that? Even things like the color of the ink when you're doing like a traditional direct mail paper, direct mail campaign, you.

Know, the main thing with something like that is readability. And interestingly the main thing with the signature is, is legibility. Right. If you see like a scroll it, you trust the person a little less when it's a, when it's a scroll, right? When you can read it, you trust them a little more. It's just a really small thing, but really small things add up. Yeah.

So tell us about. And you've got pop ups on your website, which I do too. Tell us about these reports. If people are interested again, they can get these at no cost by going to speakingofwriting.com you also have DavidL deutsch.com but presumably easier for People to remember how to spell. Speakingofwriting.com.

Yes.

Tell us about these two special reports.

So relieved when I got speaking of writing.com and didn't have to continuously spell Deutsch. Which reminds me of the time I went to Germany and someone there asked for my last name for some customs thing or whatever. And I said, it's Deutsch. D, E, U, D. And they went, I know how to spell a little.

More common name there.

I was so happy. It was a country where everyone could spell my name. It was the most.

But tell us about these two special.

I will, I will. These are. These are two reports. One of them is Copywriting from A to Z. It's 26 ways to improve response. And it's just a way of going through different copywriting techniques, right, from A to Z that will improve your writing, improve the response that you get from your writing. Again, it was a fun way to do it, and it was something that made it not boring for me. And, you know, the challenge of having to come up with something for every letter of the Alphabet and hopefully it makes it interesting for, you know, for people. Hopefully people are going, I wonder what he came up with for Z. That's going to be, you know, a hard one to come up with a copywriting principle for. Then the other one is idea. I mean, I love ideas. I love creativity. I love the impact that an idea can have, whether it's an idea for a product, whether it's an idea for how to market something, whether. Whether it's an idea for copy and for a headline. Especially today, right, when AI is just sort of homogenizing everything and making everything, making copy, making the ideas that people come up with be so similar. You know, a real human breakthrough idea is something that stands out. And this is, you know, some of the techniques that I've come up with for coming up with ideas in a more kind of a systematic way.

I want to go into more depth than that in just a moment. But while we're on your products page, you've got the A list, copywriting secrets, right? You have your inner circle. This is a mastermind group.

Yeah, it's a mastermind group. It's kind of a group coaching kind of a thing. You know, if people wanted to coach with me, wanted me to coach them 101, one on one. It's, you know, like thousands of dollars an hour, but for 97amonth, you can be part of this group and, you know, have the chance to have me work with you one on one. And have your.

And you also have idea power. Is this an online video course or what is this?

Yeah, it's basically an online video. There is an offline workbook which is a big part of it, and it's basically a systematic way of coming up with ideas. Because I think the problem people have with ideas is they kind of go, oh, I need an idea. What in the universe would be a good idea that I could think of? And this is kind of a way of just kind of using a series of questions. Kind of like the same way AI uses prompts, right, to prompt you for coming up with ideas. Right. Like that.

I mean, that's really where I wanted to go, is how much do you find yourself using AI as a source of ideas? Because I do find that if you retain your editor's hat, it's fantastic for just generating ideas at a very high volume. And, yeah, I have my own GPT as well, where I've uploaded, gone to OpenAI, set up an account, created my own GPT with all my books and online training and stuff. So now my clients can go to my GPT or my digital clone on my own site and say, yeah, I got an interview tomorrow. I think this is my message. Or, you know, here's a paragraph, help me really narrow down my top three messages. But now I want 10 great sound bites for each message using the TJ sound bite method, which has got to have an analogy or a cliche, or I've got a whole matrix and boom, It'll spit out 30 sound bites in 30 seconds. And if I'm being fair and honest, I will say, okay, maybe not everyone is perfect, but it would take. It would have taken me 90 minutes to do that. It did it in 30 seconds, right? And I really only need three or four for each one. So if half of them are bad, it doesn't matter. I still have at least five for each one that are frankly as good or better than the ones I would have come up with.

But you see that that's where an important skill comes in, which is discrimination, which is the ability to tell which ones are good and which ones are bad.

Yes.

And that's why skill is such an important factor. That's why people will never be able to just use AI to just come up with stuff. They've got to have that skill where they know what's a good. You know, whether it's a headline, whether it's a sound bite, whatever it is, they've got to know. They've got to be able to tell.

And what do you see the marketplace giving evaluations to copywriting skills these days? Because I see headlines all the time about AI decimating, you know, a number of jobs such as copywriting. I know as recently as a. Is quick as, as close to me as a block away was a building with a big ad agency gone. I think some of them are working from home now. Are we actually seeing the raw numbers of, of copywriters going down the way we are with journalists, for example? I mean, the number of full time journalists at newspapers has been decimated in the last 30 years, not just because of AI, but.

Right.

Other trends. Are we seeing the actual numbers of full time professional copywriters going down necessarily? I don't know, because sometimes the media messes things up. Or, or are we seeing this as a skill set just being incorporated more into any serious business person, any entrepreneur, they're just building this on as a skill set and doing it themselves or both. Are both of those things true?

Yeah, I think both of those things are true. I think it is being incorporated as a skill set. I think there's more need for copy these days than there's ever been.

I think that, well, there's more opportunities for communicating.

Well, yes, right. There's more opportunities. There's more need for communicating. There's more also that you're fighting against in terms of communicating. There's a lot of noise out there and what's going to stand out from that noise is not kind of AI homogenized copy. Right. Which takes everything that's ever been written and just kind of, you know, gives you the average. Right.

Well, let me ask you only probe there. How much do you test the various AIs you work with? Claude Perplexity and others where you say, hey, I want some copywriting script here and I need you to make it not sound like everyone else. I needed to really jump out and strike people as different. Have you, have you given IT prompts like that and what are you getting back?

Yeah, I've given it prompts like that. I don't know that I would ever just say I need this, write it. Right. I. It's more of a process of let's figure out the avatar together, let's figure out the objections together, let's figure out what we want the prospect to do. Let's get. It's almost like working with an assistant, right? It's like, you know, wouldn't just hear, you know, write this, right. We'd be like, okay, figure out who the avatar is and what their top 10 what are they? What are, what keeps them up at night? And what do they dream about? And get back to me. Right. And then. Okay, now that you've done that, like do an outline. Right. What's. What. What are some possible approaches? Because I think AI is much better step by step than it is trying to do a lot of things at once, which is kind of what we're asking it to do when we say write an email or write a sales letter without, without taking it through those steps.

We're speaking with, we're speaking with David Deutsch, well known copywriter, expert on communication creativity. You can get a couple of his free reports by going to speakingofwriting.com. here's his website. He's got these for you. David Deutsch, no relation to Donnie Deutschland, the. Who's also well known in the advertising space.

You know, Donnie Deutsch's dad was David Deutsch, who founded the actual Deutsch agency. And David Deutsch used to work at Ogilvy, and he worked there maybe 10 years before I did. You know, even. Maybe even more than that. And so I would get his mail when I was at Ogilvy. All these subscriptions he used.

That must have helped you get better. Better table reservations at the Four Seasons back.

Yep, there you go. It almost landed me in jail because when I, when I applied for a, I don't know, a bank account or a checking account or something, when I moved to, when I moved and they asked for a place of employment, last place of employment or whatever, and I put Ogilvy, they said, you know, we checked with Ogilvy and it's, you know, you said you worked there like last year. They say you haven't worked there for 15 years. For the past. Oh, yeah, that's the wrong David Deutsche.

That's. That's interesting.

There's also the physicist David Deutsch.

Yes, that. That showed up in my search for you today too.

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Trying to do a little research. Here's the thing that keeps me awake at night sometimes. And you're in a. At least a similar adjacent space to where I am. And that is the power of AI and generative AI to start churning out so much content. Not just text and spam emails, but video, audio content. We're not there yet, but there are predictions that we're not that far away. Whether it's six months or 18 months or three years, when if every single business and every single creator can push a button and all of a sudden 10,000 new videos come out every day.

Right.

We all get lost in the shuffle. Now, I've been successful in part because I've been a prolific online course creator. I have 250 online courses. Most of them don't do well, but the one, there's enough of that. Do that, pay for all the losses. But if we're at a point where someone can push a button and publish a thousand new courses a day, I'm going to get lost. Everyone else is going to get lost. If everyone's email is completely overrun with great copy from products they actually like and want to hear from, how does any one message cut through when the power of AI is going to make it cost essentially zero to put out copy in text, in audio, in video, in entertaining video. You mentioned Harry Potter. If, if someone who just self publishes a book can have something that has got the entertainment value of Harry Potter, it's a five minute video ad and they could be putting out 10 of those every hour. How do we all not get lost in the clutter?

Yeah. I think the question is, first of all, what will the quality of it be? Right. I think AI is a long way from writing from something from a Harry Potter or even creating an ad that has the human power of. I mean, who do you think of as having a lot of power? Whether it's a kind of an Alex Hormozi or a Gary Vaynerchuk or someone like that. Right. Those are, those are things that AI is not easily going to be able to reproduce now or ever. So part of it is your personality and your brand and people's trust in you. And part of it is the humanness of your copywriting. Right. If your writing stands out the way Gary Halbert's writing used to stand out, or the way Dan Kennedy's writing stands out, or the way Ogilvy's writing stands out, it's going to be relatively easy to then stand out in because a lot of what's coming out there is kind of mediocre. You know, we talk about a lot of copywriters losing their jobs. Yeah, the mediocre copywriters are using their jobs because AI is getting okay at writing mediocre copy. But there aren't that many people that can write really great copy that kind of, you know, stands out from that mass. And standing out is more important than ever, I guess.

The scare, the fascinating thing, but also the scary thing is how quickly AI is getting better and better at everything it's doing. I mean, I started doing clones five months ago and it Was it was pretty awful and rough back then. It would mess up things and it would look weird. It gets better every day. Two weeks ago, all of a sudden, you could call my clone and it could speak to you in any language. A week ago, you can do a video call and it can speak in any language. It seems to be getting better and better every day. And you mentioned Alex Harmozi and Gary Vaynerchuk, two people pretty well known to a lot of this audience. I consume a fair amount of content from both of them. I think I bought every Gary Vaynerchuk book. He's definitely inspirational and talented, but there's a part of me that wonders, are we that far off from me being able to talk to a chat GPT or a Claude or a stable one of the Dali and say, create me a character that's kind of like a cross between Gary Vaynerchuk and Alex Harozi. Have him use the F bomb every now and then. Have him say outrageous things.

Right.

Have him scream and curse and have him do this, this, and this. I'm not so sure that we're that far away from an AI being able to create a Persona that might generate just as big of an audience.

Well, I don't know that the next iteration of that kind of is another Alex Hermosi who's outrageous and cursed. He's kind of done that, right?

Yeah.

Maybe it's a more human. Like when I was just listening to you talking, right. It was very sincere and it was very from your heart and it was very not the sort of thing you see from AI And I think that humanness is what is going to come to be valued that human, because to some extent, we also want the connection, right. It's not just, it's that there is a person behind the Harry Potter novels. There's a person behind, you know, this person that I follow, whether it's Alex or Mosey or Gary Vaynerchuk, and is he gonna buy the New York jets or isn't he? And feeling like you know him and seeing him even at events. So I think that humanness is what's. Because, you know, and you're also your, your experiences that you've had. I, I, I imagine that when you talk, you talk about experiences that you've had that are genuine experiences that have taught you things in life lessons, and that a lot of what you teach comes from that. And that's something that AI doesn't have human experiences. It's never felt emotions, and it's never going to be able to. So it's going to be able to kind of write credibly to some extent about them, but it's never going to be like someone speaking from their heart about them.

You know, I'm not. I don't really know. I'm not sure. I'm not going to be adamant one way or the other. We got a comment from Janice of unconventional advice, says cursing, maybe that we don't want to go there in the humanness and personal. And Sunny says, I agree. TJA is gaining on us. So, Janice, I think I'm kind of like you. I have a certain style, and to me, it just seems sort of tacky to be cursing. And, you know, we all have different styles of communicating at different parts of life. How you speak at a funeral is different than how you speak with your best friends while watching an athletic event over a beer. We all have different ways of life. Gary Vaynerchuk isn't my style, but let me be candid here. Gary Vaynerchuk is many, many, many times more successful than I am by the metric of audience and personal net wealth and also book sales. And he curses all the time. And part of his appeal is he doesn't seem like everybody else. And that has, in fact, worked for him. Even though, Janice, it might not be the style you prefer or my prefer. What I'm not so certain of is whether or not you can't have an AI program to be an outlier. You could specifically give a prompt, create a Persona that 95% of people will instantly dislike but will resonate with people who are like this specifically because they don't like people over here and they like the fact that this person is offensive to these. Yeah, I, I think you could create with enough prompts a Persona like that.

You know, Sam's Parish talks about positioning not in a marketing way, but in a planning way. Positioning yourself and your business and. And. And your life. And I think what you're. What you're doing to me is positioning. It's very intelligent because you're not saying, oh, it's going to go this way, and so I'm going this way. And you're not saying it's going to go this way. So I'm going to go this way. You're saying, I don't know which way it's going to go. Could be in any one of three or four different ways. I am going to be ready no matter what way it goes. I am. I am using AI. I mean, look at you. You're like on the forefront of using AI. AI clones. Right. I'm doing it. And yet I'm also learning about copy and I'm learning about how to. How can I be more human and stand out from that? You're kind of, you know, you're being smart, which I think people.

I hope so. No one really knows where all this AI is going.

I'm.

I'm placing a bet.

Right.

You know, at some level, you're playing.

A couple of bets, which I think is the smartest thing to do.

Every, I mean, every human being at some point has a philosophy of the future, whether they realize it or not. You know, you buy a house, you're thinking, it's not going to get blown down tomorrow and it's going to be worth more. Otherwise I'd rent a house. You know, everyone has an philosophy of the future, whether they realize it or not. And they're acting.

I think people are thinking that a little bit these days in terms of the house not getting blown down, especially where you live in Florida and where I live in North Carolina, it's a little more like, well, that could happen.

Yeah. So when it comes to AI, to me, what I'm convinced of is this cloning technology is going to be a big deal. And I'm basing that on my own experience because I've been doing in person, public speaking training and media training. In fact, I did my first one down the road from you in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1984 when I was in college. So I've been doing this for 40 years. And what I have found consistently is that when I work one on one in person, in the same room with someone or a small group, I can dramatically improve their skills because it's completely interactive. Everything is about them. I get them on camera a dozen times in a day and they dramatically improved. They appreciate me, they're happy to pay whatever I've charged them. That's one set of experiences. So the positive there is people love it. They're happy to pay, they're happy to pay a lot. The downside is I gotta travel all over the world. And I've been to 45 countries and it's been great. But I don't necessarily want to travel all the time or they have to travel me, and it's very expensive and 99, 0.9% of the world can't afford it. So that's the downside. Then I started doing online training in 1998, which turns out was way too soon. I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for 15 years. But then it did take off and it soared in the. In the last handful of years. I have 2 million online students, so that's been great for me personally, financially, as a business mom. The beauty of an online course, someone can access it anywhere. It's inexpensive. I don't have to fly to them, they don't fly to me. The bad news is most people don't get much better because it's a passive experience. They're sitting back watching me, and at some level, it's, you might as well be watching Seinfeld. Oh, Seinfeld's funnier and I'm not. And in an online video experience, it's one way. I'm saying what I think is important now you have to listen to me. And yeah, I give you an option to do homework and submit a video. But it's not the same thing of being there, giving personalized feedback, doing 10 videos in a day. So what excites me about this video? This clone is, in my world, in my view, it has the potential of bringing the best, best of both worlds. It's completely interactive and can allow me to coach your appearance. And. And yet it's scalable because I don't have to be there. And someone can be there any, any time of day, 24 hours a day, any country, and now in any language. So that's why I'm convinced this is such a big deal. And as much as I think there's a lot of hype going on in the AI world, by the way, quick plug for a book. I just read AI Snake Oil, which is a great book. I do think that this digital cloning thing is going to be huge, potentially bigger than the Internet itself when it comes to how it transforms communication, and perhaps bigger than the printing press. So that's kind of where I am.

And just did actually see my appearance. In other words, when the clone is working with someone in terms of speaking skills, you said something about.

Yeah. So let me just give a quick demonstration. What it can't do now is when I'm on a computer, it can't then capture another computer image. But let me just show you. In fact, I'll show you one thing that you may find amusing. I had to just step away for one second in. But that's the other thing that's fascinating. And it didn't. It didn't exist even six weeks ago. So I'm going to talk to my digital clone again. Anyone can do this by going to TJ Walker AI they can talk to my clone. Hi, I'm TJ's clone. How may I help you? Hi, TJ. I'm about to go on CNBC to promote my digital clone. I'm very excited about talking to a business audience. I'll be doing it remotely, so I'm just wondering if you can give me feedback on what I'm wearing. What do you see me wearing and should I change anything about my appearance for my TV interview? I see you're wearing a suit and a cap, sitting in a room with a cozy, colorful vibe. The suit gives you a professional look, which is great for a TV interview. However, the cap might be a bit too casual depending on the formality of the show. So that's what I find. That's kind of what blows. Obviously, I wouldn't wear a cap in real life, but it's able to give feedback. It's not just processing everything into a word.

Yeah, that's. That's amazing. That's really amazing. I mean, that's something everyone should be checking out in terms of, you know, how to use it for their business. Because, as you say, it's just going to keep getting better.

Yeah. And, I mean, I. I think we're going to get to the point where anybody who currently has a LinkedIn page or a website is going to have a digital club. The only question is, are they going to be cutting edge early? Are they going to do it when everyone else does? Are they going to be late to the game? And you and I are old enough to remember that there was a time around 1994, 95, 96, where if you were a business and you announced you had a website, you could sometimes get a front page story in the New York Times business section or Barron's. And it got to the point where everyone had it. And then by the early 2000s, they might write a story on you if you didn't have a website.

Right.

As a sign of how slow and behind the time, you didn't get any credit for having a website, but you got mocked and ridiculed for not having one. I think that's where we're going to be with respect to clones. We've had a few more comments come in. Sunny says, well, I'm one of them. Oh. Janice says she doesn't want to see me start cursing. Well, I'm. I don't for a couple of reasons. It's not my style when I'm doing things of a public nature. Have I ever said a curse word in private with family or friends? Well, I'll let You ask them about that. Sunny says, I'd love to see a prompt that allows two clones to have a conversation with each other. I have done that. I've had. I've had two different versions of my clone interview each other, believe it or not. And at one point, I believe. I think it's on my YouTube channel where I had my clone interviewing Socrates. I know I was interviewing a clone version of Socrates, so I don't think we're far off from that. So, David, we really appreciate your time today. I want to again recommend to people that if they want to improve their own copywriting, probably the best and easiest thing they can do right now is just go to speakingofwriting.com and they can check out your website. They can get your free reports. They may want to take a look at your mastermind group, your inner circle. They may want to check out idea power and also find out about your books. Where else do you like to interact with people and communicate with people who are interested in learning about your services and what you're all about?

Oh, that's. I'm not sure where else I would communicate with people. That's where people can get in touch with me if they want to contact me. That's where it lists the products. I do speak occasionally at different places.

Okay, great. Well, other comments coming in. Mary says human beings will be lazier if we let clones do the work. Is a question mark. Mary. It's possible. I can tell you now that I've had a clone, I'm working more than I've ever worked. But I also feel like I'm more productive. I'm creating more courses. I've just created a course and here's how I. David, you may find this interesting, but you may find it appalling. So I created an online video course on how to make a digital CL clone. I then copied the transcript of my lectures, fed it into chat GPT, chat GPT to clean it up. Then I fed it into my TJ Walker, the text version of my clone. Then I put it in a PDF and I turned it into a book with really very little oversight for me. But it was all pulling initially from ideas I had spoken. I then had the. The Kindle book, the digital book turned into a paperback book. I then had the very same copy, turned it into a hardback book. I then. It doesn't have a hundred percent happy ending. I had the. The audio, the text turned into an audiobook from my digital clone. The bad news is Amazon rejected the. The audio clone. They are using audio clone voices, but they want you to use their audio clone voices. So yesterday I spent the whole day here in this studio recording out loud my voice. So the audio, the audible version of the book will be available in that format. So. So Mary, to your question, I'm working more than ever doing interesting, fun things, but I'm reaching more people. And I think it gives flexibility. But what I. But it also gives me flex. Sorry for sounding self serving, but it also gives me flexibility in that I don't have to be in a classroom tomorrow and the next day and Friday at a university or in a training facility because all of this stuff is digital, not just clone, but my online courses. So I'm hopping a plane to the Bahamas tonight because I want to get away from the Florida hurricane and I can work there and enjoy myself too. So, Mary, that's how I see the interplay. David, really want to thank you for your time and your generosity with your Wisdom today. I'm T.J. walker. We'll see you next time.