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Once a week, I take one idea and put it under the microscope. Sometimes it’s about business, sometimes it’s about how people think, and sometimes it’s simply an observation about the world around us. If it challenges the way you see the topic, then it has done exactly what it was meant to do.

There is one book I have recommended more than any other in twenty years of doing this.

More than anything on copywriting. More than anything on traffic, list building, or email marketing. More than the books that directly made me money, and I have read a lot of those, built careers around some of them, and still consider Influence in a category entirely its own.

The book is Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. If you have never read it, stop reading this email and go order it right now. If you have read it, you already know exactly why I am writing this.

Last week, Dr. Cialdini came on the List Building Lifestyle podcast — and this one was personal for me.

His work is embedded in everything I have built. Every email sequence, every campaign structure, every webinar script. His fingerprints are on all of it.

He shaped how I think about communication before I even knew his name. When I finally read Influence years into my career, the experience was less about discovering new ideas than finding precise language for things I had been doing by instinct. 

That book handed me the map I had been looking for. This conversation went deeper than the map and went places the book never covered.

We started where I thought we would. Fake scarcity, manufactured urgency, the countdown timers that reset every time you refresh the page. Within the first few minutes, the conversation was already somewhere I had not anticipated.

He does not talk about these principles the way most people talk about them. There is no posturing, no jargon, no academic distance. He tells stories.

He is disarmingly honest about the times the principles have been used on him, including once by a television salesman. I will let him tell you that one himself.

Before we go any further…

Most people chase the sexy online business models. They want to start private label products and personal brands…

So they burn through their budget, which was hundreds of hours, and quit before they ever make a dollar.

My buddy Luke has been making money online for over 20 years, and his company is on the Inc 5000 list. 

He's helped absolute beginners collectively make millions of dollars using a method so unglamorous that most people overlook it completely.

He flips used textbooks on Amazon.

His student Randy has done over $5 million. Seth from the UK has done over $3.6 million working two to three hours per day. Patrick started as a broke college student with a maxed-out credit card and has done over $500,000.

We just recorded a training where we walked through three different ways to make $10,000 per month flipping books. We show each method live so you can see which one will work best for you…

And they all work without a website, email list, ads, or any content creation.

The replay comes down soon, so I urge you to check it out now:

Now, as I was saying…

We talked about what you put in front of people before your message arrives, and why that context shapes their decision more than most marketers realize. He had data on this from thousands of commercial websites. The findings are simple and immediately applicable.

We talked about the principle he added to the original work after the book had already sold millions of copies. The one he now considers among the most powerful of all, and the most chronically underused by digital marketers. If you have read Influence and consider yourself fluent in the six original principles, this adds a seventh layer to everything you thought you understood.

We talked about loss aversion and the exact language shift that produced a forty-five percent jump in sales for one of the most famous audio brands in the world. Same product, same price. One change to the wording.

We talked about AI. (He ran actual research on how persuasion principles work on large language models. The compliance rates he achieved will surprise you.)

And near the end, I asked him a question I was not sure he would want to answer. He is over eighty years old. He has sold seven million copies of one book.

He has had institutions named after him. Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett, sent him a single share of Berkshire Hathaway stock just to say thank you for how much money that book made them.

By any reasonable measure, the man has nothing left to prove.

So why is he still going?

His answer was the part of the conversation I have been thinking about most since we finished. It had nothing to do with legacy or reputation or any of the external markers you might expect. It was something much simpler. The kind of answer that makes you sit back for a minute.

I am not going to tell you what it was. Go listen and hear it for yourself.

The episode is live now.

If you have read Influence, this conversation will change how you apply it. If you have never read it, this will make you want to read it immediately, and then listen again after you have. Either way, you are going to walk away with things you can use in your next email, your next campaign, your next sales conversation.

P.S. The conversation with Cialdini is waiting for you. Listen to the full episode.