06 January 2026

From Prison Visits to Persuasion Mastery: The Unconventional Marketing Education with Bond Halbert

✉️ Email Marketing, ✍️ Copywriting, Featured Guests, 🎙 Interviews, 💁 Mindset, 🙋‍♂️ Persuasion

Bond Halbert shares what it was like growing up as Gary Halbert’s son, from smuggling contraband into federal prison at 16 to learning marketing at business meetings instead of baseball games. Discover unconventional lessons on persuasion, parenting, and why the best marketing education happens outside the classroom.

Guest:
Bond Halbert is a direct-response copywriter and marketing teacher, best known as the son and longtime collaborator of legendary copywriter Gary Halbert. He helped organize and publish The Boron Letters, expanded and explained many of Gary’s core concepts, and built his own reputation as a highly practical instructor of persuasion, offer structure, and headline writing. Bond has trained thousands of entrepreneurs and copywriters, focusing on simple, testable methods that generate sales through direct mail, email, and online funnels.

[2:28] How A Childhood Obsession Built A Marketing Mind:

Marketing mastery emerges from deep psychological insight rather than technical copycraft alone.
Understanding what someone wants most intensely reveals the leverage point for exchange.
True domain fluency often comes at the cost of competence in unrelated life domains.
Early and repeated exposure to professional environments normalizes high-level thinking.

[7:26] The Overlearning Secret To Marketing Mastery:

True mastery arises when concepts are internalized through deliberate overexposure.
User behavior -not technology- determines the hierarchy of communication channels. Access to primary attention streams is earned by aligning with the user’s self-interest
Perceived value dictates where attention and access are granted.
Strategic positioning in a lower-priority channel of a high-value context outperforms high placement in a low-value context.

[10:01] How To Be Believed When It Matters Most:

Credibility compounds over time when honesty becomes the default mode of communication.
A reputation for truth-telling grants unique persuasive authority in moments of emotional vulnerability.
Legacy is strengthened when teachings are designed for reuse across generations
The value of a principle is proven not by declaration but by its measurable impact in real human moments.

[12:52] How To Hack Your Brain For Extreme Productivity:

Behavioral modeling is the most powerful form of influence a parent or leader can exert.
Social context primes behavior, people unconsciously align with the dominant activity around them.
Self-awareness of emotional triggers enables intentional state management.
Novelty disrupts habitual patterns by redirecting attention and resetting mental loops.
The unconscious mind responds more to immersive cues than to abstract resolutions.
Each individual has unique psychological levers that reliably activate desired states.
Parental influence operates less through direct teaching and more through curated association.
Long-term identity formation is outsourced to the dominant culture of the immediate social ecosystem.

[17:22] Stop Teaching Success Start Teaching Process:

Stories structure human understanding more powerfully than data because they encode survival-relevant patterns.
Emotional resonance, not logic, determines the memorability and impact of a message.
Transparency about process, including uncertainty and failure, builds deeper trust than curated success.
Failure studied with reflection becomes strategic advantage; failure ignored becomes repeated error.
Moral authority is earned not through perfection but through accountable handling of imperfection.

[24:25] Why Your Failed Campaigns Are Your Real Teachers:

Superficial tactics decay rapidly because they exploit temporary platform quirks, not human behavior.
The value of a failed attempt is proportional to the depth of post-hoc analysis, not the scale of loss.
Pattern recognition requires multiple data points; a single win or loss is statistically insignificant.

[27:51] Break The Template To Find Your Blockbuster:

Novelty captures attention because saturation dulls response to repeated patterns.
Template-driven approaches only work at the earliest stage of audience awareness.
The most effective ideas feel alien at first because they disrupt entrenched perceptual filters.

[29:18] Persuasion Is Not A Tactic It’s A Life Skill:

Persuasion operates most powerfully when calibrated to the hidden priorities of the decision-maker.
Breakthrough ideas appear absurd until validated by results, then become templates for imitation.
Marketing is not an event but a continuous state of inquiry into human motivation.
Attention is won not by fitting in but by violating expectations in service of deeper resonance.
Great persuasion requires fluency in multiple emotional registers (greed, urgency, fear, relief) not just one.
Competence in communication compounds across domains because human decision architecture is consistent.
The persuader’s toolkit must be dynamically selected, not rigidly applied, based on role, stakes, and identity of the other.
The most effective marketing is indistinguishable from deep, ongoing participation in the life of the audience.

[37:23] Why The Basics Are Your Ultimate Competitive Edge:

Mismatched messaging to an established audience triggers rejection, not algorithmic suppression.
Repetition of foundational texts deepens pattern recognition more than novelty consumption.
Editing is not polishing, it is structural engineering of attention, rhythm, and psychological leverage.
Reading aloud reveals dissonance that silent review cannot detect.
Cognitive fatigue blinds revision; altering sensory input restores critical perception.
First drafts must be protected from premature optimization to preserve raw insight.
AI output quality is constrained by the depth and originality of the prompter’s mental models.
Rationalizations drive high-involvement purchases; marketing must supply socially acceptable justifications.
True mastery lies not in generating content but in recognizing, isolating, and reinforcing what already works.

[47:55] The Immersion Method That Forges Masters:

Stress-testing reveals commitment but destroys potential if applied without calibration to individual resilience.
Creative process is personal, there is no universal workflow, only patterns that align with cognitive rhythm.
First drafts must be liberated from perfectionism; editing is where strategy and psychology are injected.
The most effective communicators think in dialogue, not monologue, anticipating resistance before writing begins.
Iterative resilience (not raw talent) is the true predictor of long-term creative output.
Copying a mentor’s method without understanding its context replicates dysfunction, not mastery.

[55:19] Think Like Your Customer To Own Your Market:

Empathy across demographic divides is a scalable competitive advantage in persuasion.
Motivation is not universal, it is tightly bound to an individual’s specific constraints and aspirations.
The deepest leverage in influence comes from identifying what a person *cannot* afford to lose or miss.
Status symbols function as behavioral contracts, access is granted in exchange for compliance.
People reveal their true priorities not in what they say they want, but in what they act to preserve or attain.
Incentive design must align with identity, not just outcome: freedom, dignity, and timing often outweigh money.
The most effective motivators are often non-monetary: autonomy, recognition, convenience, legacy.
Understanding a role (Housewife, caregiver, entrepreneur) requires immersion in its daily trade-offs, not demographic labels.
True audience insight emerges from observing behavior under constraint, not from self-reported preferences.

[1:03:07] Teach The Framework Not Just The Answer:

Wisdom compounds across generations when principles are deliberately transmitted.
Philosophy functions as a decision-making operating system when mentorship is no longer present.
Moral reasoning strengthens when anchored to legacy, imagining advice for one’s future child bypasses ego and fear.
Decision paralysis stems not from lack of options but from the absence of a consistent evaluative framework.
True autonomy emerges when individuals internalize criteria for judgment, not dependence on external validation.
Emotional resilience is built by retrospective gratitude practice, which reorients neural pathways toward abundance.
The optimal life path integrates present-moment engagement with future-value creation, not trade-off.

[1:09:40] How To Read People Like A Human Lie Detector:

Pattern recognition in human behavior is a trainable skill that confers strategic advantage.
Curiosity about others’ motivations builds the foundational empathy required for high-stakes influence.
Behavioral observation sharpens predictive ability more than theoretical study of psychology.
Nonverbal cues often override verbal content in determining trust, threat, and intent.
Environment shapes expression: the same person behaves differently in a mall, beach, or boardroom.
Teaching observation as play embeds lifelong habits of critical perception without resistance.
Group conformity operates below conscious awareness; uniformity emerges not from decree but from shared identity signals.
The ability to decode social systems grants leverage in negotiation, leadership, and conflict resolution.

[1:14:34] Become A Student Of Humanity To Get Rich:

All value flows through human exchange; money, trust, cooperation, and opportunity originate in others.
People act not on logic but on identity reinforcement: dreams, fears, enemies, and suspicions define their reality.
Persuasion succeeds when it aligns with the target’s self-narrative, not the persuader’s agenda.
Empathy without judgment creates psychological safety, which unlocks deeper insight and connection.
Adaptability across social strata stems from pattern recognition, not mimicry; it is reading, not performing.

[1:21:50] Master Timing For Maximum Profit And Happiness:

Timing is a structural variablem; optimal action windows exist before, during, and after readiness phases
Life-stage alignment determines the feasibility, impact, and sustainability of decisions.
Constraints create camouflage; prohibited actions can be concealed within permitted forms.
Temporal self-awareness (Knowing *when* to act, delay, or abandon) is a higher-order strategic skill than *what* to do.
Rules are interpreted, not applied; enforcement depends on observer intent, capacity, and priority.

[1:26:03] How My Father’s Biggest Mistake Became My MBA:

Perception of wealth or status can override procedural fairness in judgment.
Authority exploits visible symbols to construct guilt where intent is ambiguous.
Strategic silence is superior to over-explanation when under investigation.
Grey-zone activity thrives when prohibited acts are embedded within permitted routines.
Operational security depends not on secrecy alone, but on exploiting the observer’s assumptions and blind spots.
Learning from others’ failures is high-yield only when the failure is understood as a system failure, not a personal one.

[2:11:23] Bond Halbert Expertise:

bondhalbert.com is where you’ll find Bond’s current world: his latest trainings, ideas, and projects, along with his perspectives on copy and marketing today. It’s the main hub to see what he’s actively creating and how he applies proven direct-response principles in the current landscape.
thegaryhalbertletter.com is the archive of The Gary Halbert Letter, a deep library of classic newsletters and real sales letters. It includes famous pieces like the “water” letter and shows the foundation Bond grew up with. It’s a study resource many copywriters still revisit to sharpen their skills.
Facebook: Bond Halbert
Instagram: bondhalbert

[2:24:58] Igor’s Book On Email Marketing:

Visit www.igorsbook.com to learn more.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The ListBuilding Lifestyle. The podcast is for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[0:55] Igor Kheifets:
I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. And today I’m really excited to present you my next guest, Mr. Bond of Halbert.

Now in every industry, there are a handful of people who are either considered pioneers or game changers.

And Bond’s father, Gary Halbert, is widely referred to as one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. Unfortunately, he already passed away. So many of us did not get a chance to connect with him.

But his name is constantly coming up. If you’ve ever looked into direct response marketing or copywriting, if you ever studied the greats of this business, of this skillset, of this art and science of copy, Gary Halbert’s name certainly crossed your desk.

And so, that’s why I’m really, really pumped to be interviewing his son, one of his two sons, Bond Halbert, who actually got to not only learn copy directly from, obviously, from Gary, but also get some parenting going on and get some life advice and wisdom and see him in action, live, raw, unfiltered. So Bond, welcome to The List Building Lifestyle.

[2:15] Guest, Bond Halbert:
Thank you, thank you for having me.

[2:17] Igor Kheifets:
Awesome. So, I mean, obviously, I have to ask, what’s it like to be growing up in the household of the great Gary Halbert?

[2:28] Guest, Bond Halbert:
Well, OK, so first, let me say that I grew up in the household with a balance between my father, which was totally bizarre and completely unlike any other childhood parent-father experience, and my mother, who was extremely the opposite of my father. So if I’m a little bit more balanced, it’s because of that.

But, it was, my father was a very different kind of father than most of the people who the most of my friends had. So, there’s no doubt about that.

And then, the one thing that really happened that was different he actually has more than two kids. But the one that I was singled out to be trained for marketing specifically.

And the one thing you’ll be surprised, a lot of people are surprised to know is he didn’t spend a lot of time teaching you copywriting. Now, I teach copywriting, and so, when I teach you how to write headlines, you can just sit down and go write headlines.

My dad, what he did was he and he taught me this, and so I know it. He taught me how to get into human psychology, into human people’s head, so you spend a lot of time going around and saying what does this person want more than anything else? what does this person want that so desperately they’re willing to give me what I want if I give them what they want?

That kind of thinking, it was a lot less about wording, right? There was a little stuff like keep your language conversational, keep it basic and things like that.

But there were a lot of, I took some notes because you had mentioned that you wanted to talk about some of this stuff. There is a lot about his parenting style that left a lot to be desired. There was a lot about it that was fantastic.

And I think good parenting, it gets better and better if it becomes a multigenerational thing. And what I mean by that is when my dad went to Boron, he wrote letters. And a lot of people don’t understand that those letters were a continuation of my education he was already given me.

And I’ll make this really fast because I repeat it so often, because it just explains the start. My dad blew his money all the time. He made a lot of money, but he blew it. And so one time, he had blown all of his money and I told him I was really lucky.

And he said, “why is that?” And he chronicled this in the letters. And I said, “because, well, my brothers got to some hand-me-downs and some great toys and stuff from you and everything. I get to watch and see how you make the money”.

And he thought that was a really smart thing for any kid who was like 10 years old to say. So, he immediately, “Boom”. He took me to business meetings all over the country and in other countries.

He would pull me out of school and say: ‘you can learn what you’re learning in school tomorrow. But in the meantime, I’m going to take you and show you how the magic of direct response marketing happens”.

And he would take me to the one, the case that sticks out in my mind is he took me to the Sheraton Hotel in Santa Monica, where we met with a top list broker, Eric Weinstein, and he had the data cards.

So, my first job was working at a list brokerage company and he had the data cards which described all the big lists, so those were the markets. And the other person there was Jay Abraham

So Jay Abraham, they would identify a hot list with through Eric. Jay Abraham would talk about what offer, my dad would come up with the hook to sell that offer, right? And they would just do this.

And usually, it was a time between like breakfast and lunch, so I remember very few people being in the shot during the week. Anyway, but that’s the kind of education he started giving me right off the bat. And nobody was doing that kind of thing.

But the other thing is my dad lived a breathed marketing and to the point where he couldn’t do anything else. I mean, he didn’t know how to check the oil in his car. I mean, he one time blew up a car because he never checked the oil.

And these are not exaggerations. You talk to anybody who was friends with him and they, there’s a test to see if you really were a friend of Gary Halbert, which was, “do you have a story about how he almost killed you on a boat?” And if you don’t, you weren’t really a friend of Gary Halbert.

Anyway, so he lived, ate and braved that, to the point where, so I went to marketing conventions and I was there at meetings the way that other fathers take their kids to baseball games, right? I mean, that was the kind of immersion.

And that actually worked out pretty well, because there was one thing, there’s a concept that I’m going to spew in, if you don’t mind, and it’s been with some marketing lessons here.

[7:24] Igor Kheifets:

Absolutely.

[7:26] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Overlearning is a good thing to do. And so, overlearning is when you just hear something so many times that you get it on a different level.

So, I heard my dad’s famous APAL, BPAL speech more often than anybody else. And when online emails came out, what had happened was people tried to adapt that speech to email marketing.

And the problem with that was that they got the big concepts, like the very core concept wrong. They said, “OK, well, the main thing is you want to get it delivered to worry about the spam filter”.

I said, “no. The very first part of that speech was imagining how people sort their mail”. And the way people sorted their mail at this time was different email addresses. They had a spam email address, a work email address, a hobby email address.

And at the time, you would still check your spam email address in your primary email box, right? Just to make sure that something important didn’t get through there.

So, I said: “it would be better for you to be in the spam box of a primary email address than to be in the primary box of an email”. So the reason you talk about pioneering, I was the first one to teach people would go after primary email addresses.

And then because I understood the concepts and the basics, I was like, “OK, what would make me want to give somebody my primary email addresses”, right? So, there are these different concepts that I developed to help get primary email addresses.

And there were simple thing, and some of them were like: the reason you used a Facebook or a Google sign up sheet is everybody uses a primary email address on Facebook.

That’s less important now that the key demographic is moving away from Facebook as we get older. Only this old people are on Facebook.

But, everybody used a primary email address because they want to know somebody was talking about it. But when you see people say, “hey enter a primary email address, that all rolls back to that concept that I had gleaned because of overlearning.

So, hearing my dad’s speech is over and over and over again. And he did that on purpose. There was a scene in The Godfather where Marlon Brando is talking to his son and he says, “I hope you don’t mind me going over this Bozzini business over and over. But I can’t afford to be careless”.

And my dad quoted that to me to explain why he was teaching me the same things over and over and over again. And I’m doing the same thing with my son.

[10:01]
But, here are the things that made him different and made him better. I’m not going to focus on the things that I wanted to improve upon. But I think it’s natural for generations normally, not all the time, but normally to improve on their fatherhoods.

[10:18] Igor Kheifets:

Yeah.

[10:19] Guest, Bond Halbert:

My dad admitted I was a better father than he was. But he was a better father than his dad was. I don’t know about the previous generation, because my great grandfather was apparently pretty good grandfather.

Anyway, but what it is, is I turn around and I do this, really didn’t help, this was bad. So I try not to do that as a father, (excuse me).

And then if there was something that I really liked, like there was one thing I liked about my dad, he was raw, honest with me, so he never gave me any kind of nonsense about Santa Claus or anything. He wasn’t out trying to pop my bubbles all the time or anything like that.

But the other kids at the time in my generation everybody would say something and you’d wonder if it was true or not. And their parents would be like giving them lines of nonsense that was just like the standard quote line.

But I knew if I went to my dad, I would get his version of the truth no matter what it was, right? He might be wrong, but it was his version of the truth. And I got raw honesty out of him.

And so, I did the same thing with my kids. I made sure that I was never trying to fool them around. I never wanted them to turn around and go, “well, dad’s been lying all this time about the Santa Claus. I wonder what else he’s lying about”, right?

And that really paid off, because my daughter one time was upset and she, she had a like a crisis about her looks and stuff. And I said, “no, listen, you know how I never lie to you?” And she goes, “yeah, no, you never do”. And I said, “you actually are very cute. And I’m not saying that because I’m your father and everything. there are things I tell you that are flaws and everything like that”.

And so, she could really believe it for me in the way that she couldn’t believe it from another family member, because I was so honest with her all the time, right? So, it gave me a little bit more clout in what I said, right?

So, it was one of the things that my dad did that I really liked. And I was like, “I’m going to emulate that”. And I did that.

And then he wrote me those series of letters. I called The Bourne Letters. I’m now writing The Bourne Letters 2.0 to my son, right?

Which, again, is taking lessons I’m already giving him, but it’s codifying them and putting them into print, into recordings, so that he’ll have them forever and he can pass them on to his kids as well. And I fully expect him to be a much better father than I was, and pass on to his kids.

[12:52]

But, I’d say one of the big things that he taught me, you as a parent have, the two biggest influences you have as a parent are this one being a role model, oK? So I read one time that if I smoked cigarettes, my kids would have a 75% chance of being a cigarette smoker.

[13:14] Igor Kheifets:

That’s true. Both my parents smoked and by the second grade I was smoking.

[13:21] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah. And I read that and I quit smoking. And I learned how to hack my brain. That was one thing I teach my kid. This is something that I do that my dad didn’t, Which is I pay attention to the way things make me feel and do.

And I knew I had to spend three days getting my mind off of cigarettes till the knick fits were done, right?

[13:42] Igor Kheifets:

Just three?

[13:43] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well, the nicotine only stays in your system for three days, right? It’s still doesn’t stop you from wanting a cigarette every once in a while.

[13:52] Igor Kheifets:

My mom was irritated for weeks after she stops smoking.

[13:59] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah. Well, for me, I knew it was going to be at least three days. So, what I did was I knew that the way that I would be best distracted was traveling to someplace new.

Because when I traveled someplace new, that’s when my mind was most away from thinking about my life and everything else. I’m just getting stimulus that’s all new to me.

So, I took a trip to death Valley, right? And then, I’ve never been there before. It was beautiful, and I was with a friend of mine. And about halfway through, he’s like, “Hey, I noticed you didn’t stop and have a cigarette”. I go, “no, I’m trying to quit”.

And I hadn’t even told my wife this and she gets mad when I tell this story, but I’m telling itA anyway. I come back and I was like, “I’m going to see how long it takes her to notice I quit smoking”.

And it took a long time. And I started getting very offended. And my mom would call and say, “Hey, did she notice yet?” I’m like, “no”. This would be like a couple of weeks later she hasn’t noticed I stopped smoking cigarettes.

And granted I had always, because we had a little girl in the house, I would always go outside to smoke, but she didn’t notice that I stopped smelling like an ashtray or whatever.

But that game and all that other stuff made it easier. So, Oh, you know what? I will say, I give credit to my dad for this, he did teach me to hack my brain. I just took it to a different level.

So, one of the tricks he would, he taught me was when he wanted to be in the mood to write and get some work done, we would go to a reference section of the library, because we’re social creatures.

And it’s hard to work while everybody’s laughing and having a beer, right? But it’s also hard not to want to draw if you’re in a room filled with people who are doing art, right? So, what we would do is we would go to these libraries with a big tables in the reference section.

And there was, this was back in the day, this was the internet of the day was the information in the library, big tables and everybody there is working, so it puts you in the mood to work, right?

And so, that concept led to me figuring out how to hack my brain and pay attention to what puts me in the mood, what takes away anxiety and stuff.

Cause I was getting ready for a big trip and I was feeling a little bit nervous about it. This was many years ago. And I remember that what makes me always want to hop on a plane and travel were James Bond movies, because he always goes to these unique places he’s traveling around, so I watched a James Bond movie and boom! I was excited about the trip, right?

And so, it’s different for each person, but anyway, I know that’s a digression, but anyway, one of the other things, so as a role model, that’s your biggest influence.

Your second biggest influence is controlling their environment. Your children are most likely to become the biggest influence is going to be their five closest friends that they grow up with.

So if you put them in, let’s say Boy Scouts or something, and that wasn’t my main goal, my son is an Eagle Scout, but if you put them in, make sure that they are with children and all the parents are kind of teaching in the same way.

Like they’re all geared towards college, they will go towards college. And I’m not gearing kids towards college, that wasn’t my thing. I went to college, but I’m not, “you gotta go to college”. But you have that influence in controlling their environment as well. So, these are the two things that you have the most.

[17:22]

But here’s the something that is a great marketing lesson and is also a great parenting lesson. My father, when we would go to these meetings or before he reported to Boron, he would tell me what was going on and he would share it with me.

So, I knew things before the meetings. He would say, “this is what we’re going to do, this is what I’m going to try to accomplish”. I would be in the meeting and I would see how it went down.

And then afterwards we go, “this is what they said. This is what they’ll really do. This is my prediction”. And then I would be around to hear the results.

So, I would see him do this stuff, I would see his plan, the event itself and what he called “the after action report”.

You want to do this with every campaign, which is: what did, what went right? What went wrong? How can we improve? Right?

And he did this with all these meetings, but he also did these things with other parts of his life. Like when he went to Boron, he was pretty nervous. I mean, he’d wake up in the morning crying from stress because he’s about to report to prison, right?

And then, he would be crying as he put tidy shoes, his running shoes on. And I was with him.

We’d go to Hollywood high school, and he’d run the track and the difference between how he was and how settled and calm he was after he got his run in was amazing. And it really taught me how much exercise can reduce your stress and your anxiety in an acute situation.

And because of that, here’s the marketing lesson in that. The reason stories are so important in your marketing is it’s in our DNA to absorb stories.

Our ancestors that didn’t have the written word, it was the stories about the ogres and the bad people in the woods that kept kids from wandering in the woods and dying because they got lost, right? And so, the people who survived were more likely to listen to the morals of stories, right?

So, it’s in our DNA to understand stories. Well, so that’s why when you tell people’s stories in your marketing, it burns home more than data and facts, the points and the gist and the twists and turns and the emotional up and downs of this story.

But, what my dad was doing here, and I didn’t realize this probably until after you asked me the question is the reason these things burnt into my brain so much is I was a part of the story.

So, if you turn around and you tell people, “Hey, look I built this thing, leave it on a cliff hanger next week, I’ll show you the results of this or whatever”. That’s good, but it’s not nearly as powerful as, “Hey, you know what? I don’t know if this is going to work or not, but I’m going to try this”. You want to follow him along as I watch it.

When they’re a part of the story, when they’re like, “I was there at the very beginning of Igor’s plan to build this empire or to do whatever he was doing.” And they’re part of the story. And I helped him with giving him feedback or reviews or whatever it is. When they’re part of the story that really burns it in, right?

And so, with my kids, I use everything like my dad did as a learning lesson. So something goes bad, a business deal goes to bed, or it goes well. I say: “look, this is how we plan these business deals”. You plan for the worst case scenario, right?

Everybody plans for good and bad at the most, you mostly plan for good, right? But you plan for it to go bad. You plan for it to go mediocre and you plan to go for a great.

Because what happens is sometimes the deal goes so well that all of a sudden parties are figuring out how to try and cut everybody out of it, right? Because they’re getting greedy.

I mean, it happens. But what I’ll happen is with my son, I’ll say: “this is what we’re going to do”. Then he’ll go through it with me. And then we’ll talk about what happened afterwards.

But here’s the main point: Sometimes what you try doesn’t work. And it’s more important that they see this is the planning, this is how it went down, it worked, it didn’t work. And it didn’t work out, and this is how I’m going to deal with it and cope with this not working out the way that it is, then it is for them just to hear success stories.

Because, you’re teaching them how to deal with the ups and downs of life. There’s all these memes to say, “the road to success isn’t like this. It’s like this”. You’re teaching them how to deal with the curls and the the dips and stuff like that.

So, that was one of the things that my father did. And it was really, it helped, because I remember one time he tells a story -If anybody wants to read it, he’s got a newsletter about it called “The Dark Side of Success”-

Now, I went through all of this with him, but in it, he explains how he got in trouble with an alphabet agency, right? And made these mistakes that actually sent him down for something he did not commit.

And I know he didn’t commit it and it makes no sense. And I don’t want to go into the arguments for it. But, he was not an angel. There were other things he had done, like drinking and driving and things like that.

Where when he went in, he was like, “okay, I’ve done these other things. I’ll just look at it as though I’m paying my debts for that stuff”, right? So, he taught me how to handle things like that, like a man.

Anyway, so, I took the lessons because all of a sudden I was in a deal with him, with my father, we were partners. It was actually an idea that was built upon something that I brought out and everything was going swimmingly.

And then, he made a mistake in that and did something that triggered these alphabet agencies to look at us. Now we weren’t doing anything wrong, but they triggered them.

And I use the lessons from what happened to him to avoid and keep both of us and get us out of trouble right away, right? Because walking through these things and learning from his mistakes.

Everybody else is out learning from successes in this business. They’re like, “Oh, I did this. And I put in these religious kind of connotations into my subject lines and got higher open rates”. And so then they mimic that.

But very few people are sitting there, “this is what killed my open rates and this is the mistake I made, learn from this, don’t do this again”. So, I wasn’t just learning from the successes, I was learning from the failures as well.

So I don’t know, that was one of the key things that I thought he did really well as a father. He made sure that I knew he loved me and respected me, and it wasn’t BS, he wasn’t just saying things because he was my dad to be nice and things like that.

[24:25]

But, the more wild kind of stuff that a lot of people want to hear is like the time that he had me smuggled contraband into him for him in prison. Okay, so this is all like the good stuff. There was these things that were more like the wild stuff, right?

Which was, it’s a very strange dynamic or a relationship when you can ask your 16 year old kid to smuggle contraband into prison for you. And he says, “yes, no problem”. Does it without a heartbeat, it doesn’t even hesitate.

And that part was actually, I think I did it because I knew the timing was , right? I knew that as 16 year old, if we got caught or anything happened, he’d be the one to get in trouble, not me, right? And it wasn’t like I was smuggling heroin or anything. What it was, was you want to hear this story?

[25:23] Igor Kheifets:

Of course I want to hear that. What are you talking? Yes. Keep telling the story.

[25:28] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well, no, I mean, I’m just blathering on and I don’t I don’t want, actually.

[25:30] Igor Kheifets:

You know what, let’s leave it at a cliffhanger, because I want to revert back to what you said about learning from failures as well as successes. I think that’s a great point, because when I look at my marketing, let’s call it a career. I don’t think it’s a career, but let’s call it whatever.

Anytime I would launch a new funnel, anytime we run campaigns, and even more recently, I’ve got this funnel. We’ve been optimizing for several months now, we truly do learn more from our failures, from the campaigns that don’t work than we do from the ones that work.

It’s just, I think the reason many people do not learn from their failures is because they don’t really know the reason behind the failure, because you can only really discover the reason behind that failure after you’ve hit a success.

Like if your campaign isn’t working and you wrote an angle for your copy and it bombed and you ran five grand of ad traffic to it and didn’t convert, you know it’s a failure, and then you can just write it off and say, okay, “it didn’t work”. And then you learn nothing.

But if you rewrote the angle, and the angle number two worked a little better, but still didn’t work. And then angle number three hit, that’s when you can go back and say, “Oh, angle three worked, angle one did not work, why is that? What’s the difference?” And then you go and you find out the real lesson.

I think that’s one of the reasons why people struggle to convert their failures into lessons and they follow this model, which I think is really, really flawed. I agree with you. Where it’s like, they do something, usually a trick of some kind that gives them a bump of some sort.

Like I remember back in the day, you should always put your Facebook ad images in a red border, because that’s supposed to skyrocket your CTR, right? All of a sudden the whole feed is full of them. So, that’s not a real marketing lessons. That’s just people copying tricks from each other.

The real marketing lessons is something you learn after you’ve tried 10 campaigns, nine of them bombed completely, one of them became a blockbuster winner. And so, all the mistakes you’ve made building up to the 10th campaign, those are lessons you can carry with you forward.

[27:51] Guest, Bond Halbert:

I not only agree with that, I’m going to add something to it, which is, I’ve asked every marketer this, the answer has always absolutely been the same.

Which is one of the lessons that my dad taught me really well that most marketers do not get is: your biggest success that really stands out in your brain is, “Oh my God, this was a big success”, was it a surprise or not? It almost always is. The reason is you tried something that was different.

The biggest blockbuster campaigns the biggest best copy is always something that doesn’t sound like something anybody else had ever done before because it is. And that way, if you want to just copy there’s Eugene Schwartz’s market levels of sophistication, right?

And if you’re just going to use templates, that’s good for market levels awareness, one and two people who just had found out they have a problem and they’re going to search for the solution for the first time.

But after they’ve been searching for a solution for a while, they start to see the same old stuff, same old stuff, same old stuff, and nothing stands out, right?

And so, that’s where you want to get, that’s where somebody who’s trying something radically different that is throwing a totally different set of junk at the wall to see what sticks, makes a big impact, right?

[29:18]

And so, one of the lessons I learned from my dad, which was a very brutal one, as a kid, as he ran a personal ad in a, it’s like a tabloid style newspaper, actually it wasn’t tabloid. It was LA weekly. I think it was here in Los Angeles. I know it was here in Los Angeles, but I think it was LA weekly.

And he wrote this ad and today the ad is revered and everybody goes and looks it up and stuff like that. And they.

[29:47] Igor Kheifets:

Is that the one where he’s like talking about the woman of his dreams and describes all the types of women? (Yea) I absolutely, I freaking love this ad. (yea) And I know a guy who actually tried that on Facebook.

[30:01] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well, but you gotta remember, this is in a time when the only people who are looking for women in personal ads were considered to be losers.

I mean, you gotta remember the world has changed, people used to look at anybody with glasses as dorks, right? Nobody wanted to wear glasses and guys were afraid of being bald, so they all did the comb over, right?

So, back then it was like an embarrassing thing to be running a personal ad period. And here my dad is running a full page one in a major Los Angeles newspaper, right? And getting so much attention that the radio jockeys are reading the ad aloud on the air and then interviewing him.

[30:41] Igor Kheifets:

I actually did not know that it got him in an interview on the radio. (Oh yeah. No, he got) I bet that got him some phone numbers.

[30:48] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah, no. And I was like, “Oh my God, this was such an embarrassment!” But later on it became one of my favorite ads. And the reason it became one of my favorite ads is because it taught me the same thing it taught him.

Which was trying something new despite what everybody else’s fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of all this other stuff, leads to some serious breakthroughs.

So, your friend isn’t the first and only person to try and take that ad and use it in different eat harmonies and then run stuff and things like that.

There’s a lot of people who model that. Dan Kennedy says it’s one of the best lead generating ads ever. Because it first attracts people and then it tells you what he doesn’t want, so it’s qualifying leads. It’s a great example of qualifying leads.

We did an ad breakdown for that. It’s at halbertizing.com. And Kevin and I went through it every line for line and sometimes word for word and why they’re chosen and why he’s doing it, the way he was doing it, and the overall campaign.

When we break down his ads, we cover the whole overall goal, the history of it, where it ran all of the stories behind it and things like that. So, it became one of my favorite ads because it taught me.

Okay, another thing that my dad did teach me, the marketers don’t learn and you don’t learn in a course, is marketing is not something that is. Most marketers they’re stuck in this like myopic tunnel vision, where what they do is they say, “okay, I got to write an ad on Monday, I’m going to relax right now. And then Monday, what I’m going to do is get up and go ask buddies for a swipe files”, which is a giant mistake.

And then, what they will do, they’ll sit down and look at a blank screen and they’ll start putting in information and doing through a system. And that is not the way that my dad or any of the greats do it.

They first start absorbing information and getting into the market and learning stuff, walking around, spending all their time thinking about the products and the offers and the person, the most likely the perfect avatar, as we would say.

But my dad goes even one step further, the marketing was actually part of a daily life. I mean, he was testing with people to see what would piss them off, what would make them excited, what would get them to do things he wanted to do. He was one of the most persuasive guys.

And, I kind of do the same thing where sometimes, what you everybody’s like stimulate the greed glands, right? Get them to really want something.

Well, sometimes we actually want to induce stress and I’m not just talking about sense of urgency. I’m saying, for example I mean, I’ve been in legal battles and I’m writing about this in 2.0. I don’t know if I’m going to release this letter by the way.

But what I’m doing is I’m specifically, we are inducing stress on somebody to make sure that the other opponent is just absolutely terrified of petrified, right? To get them to do what we want them to do, right?

But it’s not just that, it’s persuasion on all fronts. And it’s like, can you go into a DMV and convince in a DMV employee to do something that is not like the norm, to take exception for you and help you out?

I remember one time, my son didn’t get a class he needed at school and he said, “Oh, I went in there and it didn’t work and everything, can you go talk to them?” I go and talk to them and then he gets what he wants. It’s kind of like you need to understand the people at different levels.

So, most of the time, when I create a deal, I try and make the people I’m working with happy. I try to make the customers happy. I need to make myself happy. make it a great win, win, win, win situations.

And sometimes you’re in a situation and you’re forgetting that these people don’t care about this or they do care about that. So it’s a lot different to try and sell something to somebody who works for a company than it is to sell to the owner of the company.

It’s a lot different, the example I like to use with like the law, I’ll give you as an example, is like judges. When you’re writing your stuff for judges and I would actually write the briefs and I would write the information.

My dad kind of did something similar, but not to the degree I did. He would write, let’s say a letter of intent to sue, but I would actually write responses that would go to a judge.

And the one thing you need to keep in mind, and I learned this from my father was what do judges care about the most? And everybody they’ll go off with like not being overturned on appeal or whatever.

It’s not true unless it’s a very famous case, right? And everybody’s watching. They care most about their time in their docket. They have a huge pile backlog of cases they got to get through.

And so, they’re usually the most amenable to the people who are obviously trying to get this settled and done as quickly as possible, right? And so, that really plays into it. Their interest and role in it is a lot different than the plaintiff and the defendant, right?

But understanding people, what they care about, going back to what I was talking about, marketing was something with my father was everything, every interaction, all the things with other people.

So, the better you are at marketing and persuasion. And the same things that you use in copyright, getting attention, turning that attention into interest, turning that interest in desire, compelling people to act, the better you are at that, the better it helps you with everything in your life that has to do or could be improved by a better interaction with another human being.

And I lived and saw that with my father. And the benefit for me for that was, you learn how to persuade mostly from either those five friends or your parents as role models.

So, if your dad’s always threatening to beat people up to get what he wants, you start trying to get tough to threaten, to beat people up, to get what you want. If your mom is crying and hoping for sympathy, you end up begging for sympathy.

My dad had an arsenal of tricks, right? And it was everything, every angle was different based on what, who he was dealing with, what the situation was and timing. And timing is one of those things that’s very critical that a lot of people.

[37:23]
And by the way, talking about what we were going through is when you’re going back to the basics is where you also find a lot of the problems, like you forgot something.

I was in this group of people in Facebook and they were top marketers. So I’m not naming them or knocking them, anybody could do this. And it’s a numbers business, this is a very important part of it.

But what happened was, I went back to the basics because somebody had posted in there, they said, “Hey, my open rates dropped, anybody know what’s going on?” And they had email open rate, 40%, 39%, 40%, and then like 10% and then like 40%.

And everybody started talking about the Gmail new algorithm, sending things to promo and spam. And I’m like, “but if that’s true, why did this last one go back up?” That didn’t make any sense. Numbers told me it didn’t make sense.

Like back in the old days, it’s same thing’s true with email. But this back in the old days, if you send out a thousand, 5,000 pieces of snail mail and you didn’t get any response, you didn’t get a flyer telling you that you need to accept Jesus Christ in your life, the mail didn’t go out. Some mailman threw it away, something happened.

Because you always got a response, right? The numbers tell you something’s wrong. These numbers told me it wasn’t a spam box issue, because the number went right back up.

And I’m reading the subject lines and it was like, “how to improve your golf game”, “the keys to putting”, then it went to just talking about a sleep supplement and then it just went back to golf.

I said: “this looks like a golf list and you sent them something to do with sleep”. I said: “you have to tie that in and you have to say something along the lines of the one thing that affects golf games that most people overlook”, right?

Get them to open the email and say, “Hey you’d be surprised at how much a bad night’s sleep can affect your golf game in the morning?” and then sell the sleep sleep supplement.

[39:18] Igor Kheifets:

For any performance whatsoever like, you can sell it to copywriters because I noticed if I don’t get enough sleep, I’m like feeling cloudy, you know? (Yeah) I’m not the same.

[39:31] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah. And there’s nobody who’s like on their game after they had a poor night’s sleep. But my point was that they were like, “Oh, wait a minute!”

Like what happened was everybody was so into, and this is where I don’t blame them at all. Everybody was so into the latest problem, which was the Google algorithm update, right? Or the Gmail. I shouldn’t say Google, the Gmail out update and the spam filter update.

But I was like, I’m so grounded in the basics of numbers and then the copy, I’m like, “no, here’s your problem”, right? And I could see it faster than they could. But the way I did that was, was going back to basics.

So, one of the tips I will give to everybody that I talked to is it’s better to read like the Boron letters or scientific advertising or some of these books 10 times than it is to read 10 different books.

And the reason for that is when you go back to the basics and you reread, I’ve never reread the Claude Hopkins or the Boron letters and not been, “Oh yeah, no, I need to be doing this more in my business”, right? Because it’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m not calling out the target based on, you know”.

So, back to market levels, awareness, like market level awareness one is they don’t know that they have a problem, right?

Let’s say it’s heart disease or whatever. You have to call them out by symptom, your marketing, shall we say, “Hey, that’s me”, right? This is exactly, I’m in that boat”. This might be important to me.

So, if you turn around, say, you are a male over 50 who gained two extra inches of belly fat? This might be a sign that you have some serious heart disease, which can be prevented, but only if you look at it quick.

And here’s how to tell: they open up, they get deeper into the thing and you start, cause they didn’t know that they had the problem. And you say, “this is a problem, you may not know it”, right?

But you have to call people out by the target. And so, there’s always a way to do it where you say, “Hey this is for anybody who’s a copywriting instructor”. “This is anybody who’s a life coach”. And people go, “Hey, that’s me”. And the more specific you are, the more attention you get,

But anyway, so going back to the basics is often how you find out, “Oh, you know what, this is why this thing bombed. I completely forgot”. I gave away the, there was no curiosity here. I gave away the secret. They thought they already knew what I was talking about. So they didn’t open the email or whatever it was.

But anyway, my dad grounded me in the basics. He did this over learning thing. And he also, and because of that, there were several different kinds of like breakthroughs I had done.

So one of the things that, I’m the first one, and this isn’t a pat myself on the shoulder thing. I’m trying to inspire everybody to get as grounded as you can, because David Ogilvie, once said that I’m not a great copywriter. I’m a terrific researcher and a great editor. That’s what he said. Something I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what he said. That was the gist of it.

And my dad had a five-step editing process, which he said: “cut the paragraphs down, right? To shorter paragraphs”, which people have taken too far. Now you’ll see people’s landing pages and every paragraph is one sentence. And that’s a mistake. I’m not going to get into why.

But if there’s no rhythm, there’s no cliffhanger. Because each sentence, nobody stops reading in the middle of the paragraph, they stop reading at the end of a paragraph.

So, if you want to leave that paragraph with like an incomplete thought , right? And that’s when I discovered the secret that made the big difference in my next email, right? Now, you feel like you have to read the next thing to get on with it, right?

So, if you have to do that in a two or three sentence paragraph, it’s better to do that than to just constantly break everything up into one sentence, paragraph. Anyway, my dad did one sentence, paragraphs, or not one sentence, he said, “break up paragraphs, make short sentences, use fifth grade language, read your copy aloud”, which most people will not do.

[43:38] Igor Kheifets:

Oh man, it’s so cringy! It really forces you to write better. Like, when I write copy for a VSL and record my own VSL, I would usually fix at least 23rd% of the copy, as I record the VSL, as I read it out loud, because it just, it just doesn’t sound right.

[44:01] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well, here’s a bonus tip for you, a VSL email or whatever, read it out loud. And then you’ll start to get kind of blindness. It’s kind of like watching a rerun where your mind drifts because you’ve seen it a million times.

Change the font radically, between the edits. And then your mind, it’ll be like watching a play you’ve seen, but it’s with different actors with a different tone. And you’ll start noticing differences you didn’t notice if you keep reading it in Arial 14 font, right?

So, but anyway, the other thing that the last thing they said was, “do a VAT hunt”. Most of the time we use the word that, well, I turned around and I was like, nobody really teaches editing the proper way.

And I was teaching some of my dad’s proteges and some other top copywriters while they were having me look at their copywriter: “No, do this and this and that”. And I wrote the very first book on editing sales copy, right?

And if it wasn’t for understanding the basics and seeing the patterns in this great copy, I wouldn’t have been able to develop this process.

And it wasn’t easy. The process was easy. What was hard was kind of organizing it in the right way. Cause I started with beginner intermediate and advanced tricks, but then I rearranged it to editing for clarity, right? Editing to keep them reading, right? To keep people reading their stuff.

And then editing to how to inject hidden psychology during the editing process, while you’re not stopping to think about that while writing, cause you want that first draft. You don’t want anything stopping that first draft process.

But he couldn’t have done that. And I couldn’t have done the primary email address thing and some other stuff that I’ve done. You can’t do that without getting really grounded in the basics.

And even your AI will be better, because I’ll get more out of AI than other people will, because AI, I will feed it better talking points. So, instead of just writing something and say, “Hey give me the top 10 pain points of people joining coaching programs”. I’m trying to think about things that people don’t normally think about in a new way. And that gives something unique to it.

One of my favorite examples of this, it’s one of my favorite pieces of, one time I bought a Rolex watch and John Carlton was giving me grief. And he said, “why would you spend so much money on a watch that is not as accurate as my digital Casio?” Or whatever it was.

And I said to him, “well, because wearing an expensive watch reminds me constantly that the most valuable asset I have is my time”. And he goes, “Oh, that’s actually a good answer!”

So, if I was going to write an email selling watches, right? And you need to give people the excuses. People buy the expensive watches because they want to be reminded of their success or they want to rub the success in people’s faces or whatever it is.

But to do that, to go home and tell your wife, you’re going to spend $5,000 on a watch, you need to have the excuse to tell her why you’re going to do it. And it’s going to be things like, “well, don’t worry, when I hand this down to my son, it’s going to be worth more than that”, right? You have to be able to give these excuses that they’re going to give for the reasons that they did.

So I was like, if I was going to write an ad, I would be telling AI, to using AI, I would say, make sure you make this point, make sure you make that point, make sure you this one. And so, you have better talking points, you get more out of it.

And then you have to edit it. you have to edit an add specific numbers, to add more believability to your headlines, into your information, things like that. But, being grounded in the basics is an extremely important thing.

[47:55]
Let me see if there was anything I didn’t cover before we go back to the one thing. Oh, so my dad, when he taught me all of this stuff, he didn’t really understand that there were like different ways for people to learn, that people learn differently, right?

And so, I kind of experiment with that. My dad mostly did immersion stuff. So, he wanted me to learn public speaking, so we’re at a conference and he goes, “I’m going to go to the bathroom, go up there and get my APAL, BPAL speech”, right?

He just set me up there to give a speech, no warning whatsoever. He never said for a moment, I might do this or anything like that.

[48:31] Igor Kheifets:

Kind of like that guy in the movie Whiplash, where he kept throwing him. It’s about a drummer, the kid that used to go to school for drums. And he had this crazy teacher that would work them until their fingers bled.

And then -it’s going to be a spoiler- so, at the end of it, he basically invites them to a concert, because there’s an opportunity, some drummer could make it. And he tells them that he needs to play this song and he tells them whatever the song is, so the kid prepares and he learns the song.

And then, when it starts, he realizes that it’s not that song. And so, the teacher forces him into improvising, basically, because, the day before he tells them that the greats, they didn’t care, they would play the drums no matter where, they would play the jazz, no matter where, even if they didn’t have a clue, they would improvise. And they were so committed to the craft that they would just relish any opportunity to play.

But it’s actually not the point you’re making. You’re making a point about learning on the job, right? So, he taught you things by forcing you to do the thing that you needed to learn rather than reading a book about it.

[49:49] Guest, Bond Halbert:

But I think it was because of his limited way of being taught that he remembered, he remembered bootcamp, I know that. Bootcamp in the military, they just break you down and they stress test you.

And my dad would try and do that with not just me, but his protégés almost to a person, they’d come on and say, “Hey, I want to work with you, I want you to teach me”. So my dad would sit there and listen, he did this, I saw this multiple times.

He’d go, “okay, come on in the office, be there at nine o’clock, we’ll get to work”. Nine o’clock would come by and say, “okay, listen, I want you to write a full page ad for this client. Here’s the ad”.

And my dad would wait about 20, 30 minutes, he’d come in and say, “okay, drop what you’re doing and come with me”. And then he would take that person out. And he’d go, “let’s go to a movie”. And then, we’re going to grab something to eat. We’re gonna go to a bookstore.

They wouldn’t come back to like four or four 30 in the afternoon. And then he’d be saying, “okay, now don’t forget, I want that out on my desk in the morning”, right? And so, they would sit there and scramble all night writing this ad, right?

And then what would happen is my dad would sit come into the morning and say, “okay, have a seat, sit there”. And he would sit there and he would silently read the copy. And he would read it, and then he’d go, “this is not good enough”. Crumple it up, throw it away, say, “rewrite it”.

And it did. I swear to God, it wouldn’t make a difference. If Gary Benzema anger wrote that ad. He was going to crumple it up, tell them to go back and rewrite it, right? And it was a stress testing type of thing.

Now, the problem with that is there are some people who would have been great copywriters that you’re going to make cry and turn people off. In fact, he had some of his proteges would then say, “this was a great thing”.

And so, they would purposely try and make their mentees cry. And then their mentees would try and make people cry. And this isn’t me.

[51:49] Igor Kheifets:

It sounds like an abuse circle.

[51:52] Guest, Bond Halbert:

It was a line of abuse. It absolutely is. And, what are you going to do? Cry.

But I will say this though, the best copywriters are the ones willing to take a look, take their criticism, throw it all away and rewrite it, right?

when you talked about it, just rewriting your, now, most of the time, unless you’re like, I saw somebody’s bullets that were terrible the other day.

Most of the time though, it is what you want to do is test three hooks, right? It’s really not the features and the benefits of your products, don’t really change very much.

So, most of the guts of your ad, aren’t going to make the big differences. The big differences you’re going to have is the call to action at the bottom, the closing arguments and the hook that gets people in the main, the angle you’re going for that, we were talking about earlier.

So, you write three of those, you write three of the backwards. And the other thing is everybody writes in a different way. Some people start writing the bullets first, Some people write the story first, some people write the closing first.

In fact, it’s a good idea when you’re writing stories to write the opening and the ending first and then write the middle and then connect the middle of the beginning with the end, right?

Because people would go and they’re flowing. And then they just don’t have that punch at the end that they need to kick people off the fence. So, one of the things that happens when they do that is, it’s all written. Everybody writes it in a different way.

My dad was the only one who did this. He would go around imagining a conversation in his head, a sales conversation with you, Igor. And he would say, “I’m trying to convince Igor to do this”. And so, I’m going to imagine I’ve got this one shot. He’s going to be speaking to me, I’m going to speak to him. These are all the things I want to say, this is how I’m going to get his attention.

He would perfect that in his head. And then, he would go and sit down and write it in like one shot. Cause he didn’t grow up with word processes.

He grew up with actual typewriters and he would write his copy out. We take it over to postal instant press over on sunset below or it’s no longer there. Typist would type it out, cost money. It was time consuming.

We’d pick it up, we’d go get lunch at a rock and roll Denny’s in Hollywood. And he would sit there and he would write it and then he’d make little notes and then go have it retyped and fixed, right?

I grew up with word processing, so what I do is I take a walk with my phone and I write those talking points down. Those things that I want to say, those things that are different that other people don’t say.

And then, what I do is I come home and then when I’m in the mood, I sit there and I take the talking points out and I start writing and hammering out and I don’t worry. I just keep going and going and going and going and going. And then it’s out of my system.

If I have more time, I will then go take another walk and more points will come to my head because I already got those original points out. Then I’ll come back and add them in, then I will move stuff, rearrange it, polish the whole thing, edit it.

And the more important it is, the more edits I will do, right? Different process than what my father had gone through. But my father was a door to door salesman. So he had thought about what’s this pitch that I’m going to say, what am I going to say next? What am I going to do this? And so it’s one of the things that made him absolutely great at what he did.

[55:19]

But I would say the other thing that made him great was just understanding people from different walks of life. You’ll find that most of the best copywriters that are super successful are great at selling to usually one type of avatar they’ve been trained to. And the majority of them will actually train themselves to an avatar that’s basically them.

So in other words, the top, not all of them, but the top supplement writer is usually a supplement taker. The top financial newsletter writer is usually that is a financial newsletter reader, right? So, it’s easier for them to understand them because they are one of them.

My dad, he understood other people and then he would, okay, here’s another lesson he did for me as a kid. I had a private phone and most of the time, most of the kids in my generation at the age of 13 or 16 did not have their own private phone lines, at all.

And I’ll give you another example of something he did too, but he said Bond, the housewife will actually do so much for a few extra bucks because her budget is so tight, that she doesn’t have any breathing room. So an extra like $40 means a lot more to her.

So, he ran this classified ad in the LA times and it said, “Hey, wanted somebody who could do like typing skills can work at night at any time?” And left my phone number.

And that phone rang off the hook, I could just pick it up, hang it up and it would be ringing again, right? Pick it up, hang it up and it would be ringing and I just had to unplug it, right? It would just ring and ring and ring.

And he was just showing me that there was absolutely, the power of understanding what that aspect for housewives, right? Most copywriters who aren’t housewives, who’ve never been housewives really understand a housewife.

So, the female copywriters in our industry, one of the reasons they get into it is so that they can have a good, lucrative, decent job, that’s not tied to a boss that can end their career in a heartbeat and they can go and they can run, they can work their schedule around picking up their kids and spending time with them after school. That’s a lot different from most of the guys in the industry. You know what I’m saying?

So, understanding the people, what motivates them and why they do it changes your pitch. So, if you were pitching a copywriting class, and most of the people that you were targeting on Facebook for female, you would still put an emphasis on independence and freedom and making money and things like that, those core things.

But you would be also talking about the experience of being able to drop off the kids, come back, have your coffee, go to work, do some stuff.

[58:12] Igor Kheifets:

Taking care of your elderly parents.

[58:14] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Taking care of your family and not worrying about the time constraints and having to ask your boss for permission off. It’s a much bigger angle.

And another thing he did, speaking of phones, he did this to both me and my brother. My brother always acts like he only did it to him, but he did it to both of us. Well, he did one thing, he did just to my brother.

So, my dad comes to him, and he says: “if you could have any car you wanted right now, what would you buy?” And my brother’s like, “Oh, I buy a Ferrari, blah, blah, blah”. He goes, “no, no, no. I mean, have a regular car that people drive, nothing fancy, super sports car”. And my brother says: “I’d buy a convertible Mustang, white, I’d buy a convertible Mustang”.

So my dad goes out and buys a convertible Mustang, okay? Cause he knows that he can toss my brother or me the keys to that and make us go do things, cause we wanted to drive the car, right? It was a way of getting what he wanted. He thought of that kind of level and it taught me to think on that kind of level.

[59:14] Igor Kheifets:

Did that make you think twice before you told him things that you really want?

[59:20] Guest, Bond Halbert:

It did, and it didn’t. So one of the things my dad thought in clickbait headlines and he would say something like, “Hey, I just thought of a way to make $20 million in over the next year”.

And we knew what he was doing and my brother would just like say, “Oh, okay, that’s good”. And just like not say anything. And I was more or less humoring him by saying, “Hey okay, so tell me more about it”, right?

But no, knowing that stuff, you kind of figured out when or where he was doing it, when he was driving in that direction or anything. And yes, it did. But it changed your answer because you’re like, I’ll tell you how it changed my answer because he never sold his cars, he gave them away.

So, I mean, my brother has a collection of like a cameras that were $5,000 bodies and $3,000 lens that my dad just gave him after my dad got it, played for it with it for a while and gave it to him. Like I said, he really knew how to blow money.

But it would make a decision on, “do you like this boat or that boat?” I would say this boat because this is the one I want to inherit, but I want it to be handed down to me. So we would pick up on that, right?

So, I mean, it did change the way that we’d answer some of his questions after we picked up on, this is kind of the stuff he would do.

And then, when we were I don’t know, I was like 16, 17 years old. And back then you’re too young to remember that, but you probably heard of it, there was this phone, it’s called “the brick phone” is like this big and had this thing.

And it the first mobile phones that weren’t in a car. And the only people who had these were like doctors, really high end lawyers and drug dealers. And my dad would have this phone.

And I remember I was the first person to probably, I guarantee I was the first, I was out on Santa Monica beach and you couldn’t order a pizza back then without giving a phone number, they could call back. And the reason was is because people made these fake prank calls and would order 10 pizzas to be delivered at somebody else’s house.

Well, I had the phone. So I actually called them and I said, “listen, I’d like a pizza. I’m out at stations, whatever out here and a Playa Del Rey”, it was just North of Santa Monica. It was still near Venice beach.

So I said, “I’m out here and, and I ordered a pizza”. This guy comes running out because he has to give it to me in 30 minutes or lesser, it’s free at this stage. He’s running out on the sand with my pizza. So I was like the first people person to be able to order a pizza on the beach, because I had this cell phone.

Well, the cell phone had a nickname. It was called “the leash”, because my dad didn’t carry it, he made us carry it so he could call us and say, “Hey, go pick this up for me and bring it back to me”.

So it was a leash for us so that it’s so that he can yank on it. And he knew that we do it because if we didn’t do it, we couldn’t keep the phone. And then everybody wouldn’t be like, “Oh, check out these guys!” Cause we’re I’m the only teenager running around with this phone that was something that really only high end, really well-paid people had, but he did.

So, he was thinking outside the box on how to motivate people to do what he wants in all situations. It wasn’t just when he came down to writing copy or an infomercial or anything else like that. That was a unique part of the experience.

[1:03:07]

Anyway, back to generational things. What I try and do is think of other things that I’ve tried to do that helped me, and then I add it to what I’m teaching my kid.

And sometimes you learn them late, sometimes you learn them new. And I just did a post on this not too long ago. I actually have -I don’t have it here- I have a journal for writing stuff, and it’s good like therapy. I don’t know if you want to call it therapy, it’s just a mentally healthy thing to do.

But I read somewhere, that if you keep a journal that’s just for happy memories and you write about it, then when you’re older, you can read it and look back and think about how lucky your life was.

And I was like, “that’s a great idea! (Yeah) So, I went and I had, it’s I had a moleskin done. It’s not this one, this one’s my bullet journal, but it says “happy memories”, right? And so, as a role model and I’m trying to get my kids to do that.

So, the point that I’m trying to re-hammer home is, it’s multi-generational. So I teach the kid things that my dad did, well, I emulate that as a parent. But then, I also add all of these things about “how to deal with stress information, how to time your life”.

Like I try and teach my kids that if you’re not really enjoying the now or working on something to enjoy your future, you’re wasting your time.

And the best thing that you can possibly do is do something you enjoy that does add to your future as well. That’s the best way. That’s the best of both worlds.

So, I try teach them those kinds of things, but these are things that I learned. I pick up, I add in the Boron 2.0 things that I’m doing for my son. And then he’s going to be able to hand his kids, my dad’s lessons, my lessons, his own lessons.

And I think it’s just going to get better and better and better and give more and more advantage as time goes by. So, I’m not just thinking about my son, I’m thinking about teaching him how to do things further.

And the other thing I teach him is philosophy. So, I always say this to him. I say, “when you have a decision, I can solve this problem. I can tell you exactly what the right thing to do is. And I’m going to tell you what the right thing to do is”.

But I tell my son and my daughter: “Imagine you have a son or a daughter, they’re your favorite person in life, what would you want them to do in this situation?” That answer may not be the easiest answer, but it’s going to be the right answer.

So, if you turned around and say, you’re driving along, somebody cuts you off and a big guy gets out of the car and he’s starting to threaten you, what would you want him to do? Get out and fight, maybe get your ass kicked. Or would you want him to say, “Hey man, my bad!” Just drive away.

Whatever the situation is, you’re going to do the right thing if you’re doing what you would want your children to do.

So, in some situations, it’s going to be stand up for yourself. In some situations it’s going to be go to sleep with pride, knowing that you did the right thing. Some situations it’s going to be back down. Some situations it’s going to be get up and fight. So this includes health stuff, business stuff, everything. It’s a philosophy to guide you by.

Because I won’t always be there to tell them the exact right way to deal with a specific situation. But if I give them the philosophy that they could start using and preparing for and teach them to use it, that will help guide them into a better life. Does that make sense?

[1:06:45] Igor Kheifets:

Yeah, absolutely. So, rather than making decisions for them, you teach them the decision making modest operandi, I guess. I mean, I see people making these mistakes, these days. Because, I’ve witnessed.

So, I grew up in post Soviet Ukraine, then Israel, and we were always poor. So, we had to work a lot since we were kids to, to get stuff. And then, we grew up and many of my friends and many of the people, my age, they grew up and they’ve became someone or something.

And, we now live in a world where everything’s accessible, everything is affordable, Just generally speaking, most people can travel twice a year, most people can have nice experiences, most people can go to a nice restaurant, most people can buy their kids nice toys.

And what I’m seeing is, lots of parents just give, give, give. They sort of like, just give their kids a lot. And not to say that they’re like deliberately spoiling them. It’s just, I don’t see them teaching their kids how to view the world around them, how to tell right from wrong, how to make decisions, what are the criteria to good decision-making?

And I think it primarily comes from the fact that they don’t realize that one of the decision-making is a skill. And I think people who procrastinate a lot and people who don’t really advance in life, tend to be bad at decision-making, specifically

They tend to be bad at either committing to a decision, meaning that they know the two or three options in front of them, they just can’t commit to one, or they’re terrible at analyzing data in order to arrive at the correct decision.

They look at they kind of like do, they attribute their outcome to a symptom or criteria that has nothing to do with it. It just correlates with it, but not necessarily connects to it. And so, they just make bad decisions.

And, I believe philosophy is critical in parenting, because it’s a way you view the world. And so, if I have a certain way to view the world, or to view a certain type of situations, like say conflicts, like you said.

Sometimes it’s: don’t let the bully bulldoze you, you have to stand up. Sometimes it’s not worth the fight, you back away. Sometimes you’re outnumbered, so you back away temporarily to come at it from a different side.

Sometimes, standing up against a large number of bullies or enemies and not moving back or giving them an inch is actually what is gonna win the fight, because they’ll be like, “Oh, he’s not intimidated”, right?

[1:09:40]
A friend of mine, who’s a very shrewd business owner, he owns a deli in the restaurant and he grew up in Ukraine and Donetsk, which is the area that’s where all the trouble is.

And so, he once told me a great Greek once gave me this tip where he said, “if you’re up against two or three in a fight, in a street fight, and you managed to knock one down, you stop fighting and you walk away slowly.

Because if you run away, the other two will chase you, but if you walk away slowly” It’s like, “I’m not afraid of you guys” and they won’t chase you down.

Like subtle stuff, but a way to view the world, because you now understand that your opponent judges your every move.

One of the reasons why at some point I decided to look into body language, as well as the tonality, like the way you use your voice, you know, the tone, the pitch, the speed, the breathing.

And I’ve actually already taught this to my daughter, she just finished reading a book on body language. And we now sometimes people-watch we go to a cafe or restaurant. And I was like, “what do you think is happening over there?”

It’s, “a woman and a guy and a guy’s like rubbing the back of his head, and he’s like, sort of trying to pacify himself like sometimes”. So, she can tell now.

It’s a way to look for clues that other people simply cannot see, that gives you an incredible advantage in life.

[1:11:17] Guest, Bond Halbert:

It’s funny that you mentioned that. I play this game with my kids. We go out walking along the beach in Santa Monica. And Santa Monica is one of the few tourist areas of Los Angeles, right? LA is really big.

But we play this game tourist or local. So, some of it’s obvious, like somebody is super pale and they’ve got a Venice t-shirt that no local would ever wear, you’re like, “okay, that’s a local”.

And then, sometimes it’s painfully obvious that they’re a local, they’ve got this bicycle with a whole bunch of stickers on it, you know what I mean? They look like they’re they come here every day.

But these ones in between, we’re sitting there and going, “okay, well, why is this a local or why is this a tourist?” And we will come and we were deciphering things, not just on, but it is also a body language. Look how they’re looking around like they’re not used to being here, right? That’s not common.

And then, we also do it in malls. I go people-watching in malls. And we’ll find these things, then we’ll try and analyze, why we do it?

Because you’ll notice that if you go to a mall, it’s more true among women, but it is also true among men. You’ll see, like if there’s a group of four girls, and one is wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top tee or a blouse, whatever it is, all the rest of them will be wearing cutoff shorts and a blouse. They will just have different colors.

And you’re also like, “okay, why are they doing it this way? Did they coordinate their outfits? Did they go shopping together and say: okay, you get the red one, I’ll get the green. how is it that they all dressed exactly alike?” , right?

And there are some guys that do the same thing. Like if you look at the guys, the golfing buddies that go out every week on Thursday to go golfing and you’ll see that they get a different color and everything.

But for the most part, after a year or two, they’re all wearing the same kind of shirt and the same kind of pants or whatever it is.

But you’ll find these things, and it’s really funny. Because here in LA, the fascinating thing for me is these people put thought into their outfits before going shopping at a mall, right?

It’s not like everybody obviously puts in thought before going to a party, going to a club, going to a gala or something like that.

But some of them have decided that they’re going to be in socks, slides, sweatpants, and sweatshirts. And it’s all of them, by the way, in the little group, but each group is different.

And it reminded me of the time where people would spend a lot of money to look like they just threw something together, their jeans were ripped and torn. You spent $400 on those ripped and torn jeans and stuff like that.

But I love that you do that with your daughter, we do people-watching. I don’t really do it in restaurants easily, but we do it in the malls and we do it out when we’re walking along the beach.

And it’s a game that I started playing with them, and I absolutely love it because you start to, I’ll tell you something, even if you’re not gleaning something from that particular situation, you were gleaning something by inspiring them to be curious about what makes other people tick that are not like them.

[1:14:34]
That’s the point that my dad instilled on me, and by the way, doing it without judgment, I’m not like, “Oh, you made this stupid decision in this way, you wore those slides, you could easily trip and fall, what if you have to run?” it’s nothing like that.

I remember one time I was walking, I was with somebody and we were walking and the person in front of me, we were in a very small town, but not small enough where I knew everybody or anything, this was Key West, Florida.

And I said that person in front of us is a police officer and they were in plain clothes. She’s like, :”actually, I know that he is, how did you know that?” I said, “well, there’s two things. One is only a police officer in a town like Key West would be wearing shoes he could run in at a moment’s notice. And his right arm is swinging wide, like he’s used to having a firearm next to it”, right?

And this, by the way, I’d never like studied this or anything. And she’s like, “Oh my God, how did you notice that?” All I’m doing is noticing the difference in that differences and asking why, why would somebody do that?

And so, it was very quickly, the haircut, the shoes and the swinging arm was what told me this is an off duty officer. But that curiosity in people helps you start to understand what people really care about because you care about finding out what they care about. And so you look into it.

[1:15:59] Igor Kheifets:

You know, I was either reading this or talking to someone, I don’t remember many, many years ago, they said something really cool. I think it was, I honestly don’t remember who it was. But they said that every dollar that you’ll ever make in your business is going to come from someone else’s pocket.

And this is like really smart to say, because it means like understanding human nature means more money in your pocket. Like if you understand people, naturally, you will make more money.

But taking it one step further, and now that I have, back then I was much younger. Now that I lived a little bit and I had different experiences, immigrated from one country to another than immigrated again, and now I understand that almost everything I need usually comes from another person.

There was a point in time when I sat down and I had a very dual, like a duality about how I felt in that moment. Part of me felt extremely grateful, part of me felt extremely helpless because I realized that almost everything in my life was dependent on other people.

Like there were very few things in my life where it was just me. I realized like, I imagined like nine or 10 people that I was interacting with all the time. And I was like, “what if this person is gone? Like tomorrow gets hit by a bus. Oh my God, the chaos that would ensue! What if that person is gone, gone, hit by a bus. Oh!”

And I started imagining scenarios where these people were gone from my life and realized that almost everything that we have in our lives, or we need to get at some point, it comes from other people.

Which is why understanding people, what they want, what they fear, what they get annoyed with, their love language, which I think is another great concept that we should all learn in schools: how people express love, give love, see love, et cetera. It’s such a critical component to being able to equip our kids with the ammo needed to navigate life.

Because, imagine you go through life thinking that everybody loves being praised, for example, which is not true, not everybody loves being praised, but let’s say you’ve been praised as a kid a lot, and you figured, you know what? Everybody loves being praised.

So, if I praise somebody, they will do my bidding, but that’s not true, right? Because there’s five different love languages. Plus it doesn’t mean that if you give them like some love, they will automatically do something for you.

That’s missing a totally other components such uh, are you familiar with the 27 word persuasion course? (No). So incredibly incredible concept written by, I forget his name. He wrote about Colts and different societies.

So, 27 word persuasion statement is people will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, throw rocks at their enemies, confirm their suspicions, allay their fears, and there was one more I can’t remember now, I’ll Google it later.

[1:19:23] Guest, Bond Halbert:

I’ve heard of that concept, but go ahead.

[1:19:26] Igor Kheifets:

Yeah. So, basically understanding the 27 word persuasion course or statement, there’s five things, right? There’s five things people care about. It’s their dreams. It’s their fears, justifying their failures, throwing rocks at their enemies and confirming their suspicions.

Like, to have a persuasive message for someone, you have to be hitting on these points Going through life, not knowing that is really random, you know?

[1:19:58] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah. Well that one of the things that my dad, he always told me. Okay, so remember I told you about that meeting that I had when he took me out of school.

I speak to the guy who was a list broker every once in a while. And I was talking to him and he says, “yeah, but you know what, you were like one of the only other kids that was at that age would have actually absorbed it and totally got everything and was into it”. So I had that benefit.

But one of the things that my dad told me that he said, “you know what I love about you, Bondy?” He says, “I can take you to a bar filled with bikers”, because that’s what my grandmother owned in Florida.

(a biker?) Yeah, she was known as mama Joe and, all of the guys in there were alcoholic bikers. But he says, “I can also take you to a meeting filled with executives and millionaires and you’re going to fit right in no matter who I’m with, who you’re with”.

And I was like, “okay, that was a great compliment”. He was saying that I can understand and adapt to all of these social situations that were there.

And I don’t know how much of it was nature versus nurture. I think it was a combination. Cause, one of my brothers, who’s 18 months older than me, we were just totally different people at birth and we’re only 18 months apart.

And, he’s actually my only full-blooded sibling. And, we were just completely different kind of animals when it came to social, being social animals, we are just completely different.

But, part of it was learning from my parents and seeing how they got along, how they navigated when they dealt with turmoils and stuff like that.

[1:21:50]
But, like I said ,okay, well, let’s get back to the cliffhanger. So, of smuggling stuff into contraband, the one of the things that I taught, I’m teaching my kid about is timing is the key to not just marketing, but happiness in life, right?

So my philosophy, which I teach my kids is that, in my opinion, other people have a different opinion. Some people, it’s like the person who, for me wins the game of life is the one who spent the most time happy, okay? That’s my own personal philosophy.

So for other people, then for me, there is a person, there is a part of the happiness comes from knowing you left a good mark on the world.

There are other people who like, it’s all about the mark you left on the world. So, it’s okay if you suffer for 60 years, as long as you leave the world a better place than you did. So, I’m not judging that. I’m not knocking that.

So, one of the things that I realized when I was very young was that there’s the different times in my life and there are things that you should be doing while you can do it.

So, for example, like if you’re going to go scuba diving a lot and everything, it’s better not to wait until you’re 75 to pick up that hobby. And, you probably at 75 shouldn’t be jumping off 25 foot cliffs into the water, right? Cause you’re not going to heal super fast and everything.

Now, granted the marketing in life, the only absolute rule is there’s no absolute rules. You can make money some instances by insulting your clients or whatever, insulting your audience. I know a guy who does do that. I don’t know if he would be better off if he didn’t do it. He’s not my cup of tea.

But in any case, it was all about timing. And so, one of the things that I knew when I was a teenager is I knew there was all this stuff I could get away with that I wouldn’t get away with the day after I turned 18, because of the laws and the way the police work here in Los Angeles and stuff like that.

I also knew that there were things that I wanted to save until I was older to do, because there were other things that I felt were timing was better in my life to do it. But timing is very critical for marketing, right?

And my dad used to say like the best time to sell somebody a fishing pole is right after they bought one. And I’m like, “That’s not necessarily true, that might be the best time to sell them some bait in assortment of lures, right?” Because, how many fishing poles can they have, type of thing?

But for the most part it’s true because by the time that they were on a list for, let’s say a diet book, they failed and they’re ready for another diet book. So for the most part that is true, recency is very, very critical.

People are really into copywriting for a while, then they lose interest in it. Could be they lose interest in six weeks, six years, whatever. So it’s almost always better to hit them up sooner than later.

But, this is one of those situations where what happened was my dad was in Boron and they had things that were contraband for him. And there was stuff they were looking for and stuff that they weren’t.

So for example, he was under the restriction that he wasn’t allowed to write advertising while he was in there. But the guards are just seeing him write letters and write stuff and I was his courier.

So, I would come pick up the letters and take them back to his clients the advertisements and the things that he’d written. And the reason for that was, he knew that the guards weren’t looking and going to start reading an ad that was paper and pay attention to that whatsoever, right? so they’re out.

[1:25:36] Igor Kheifets:

What logic not letting him write ads? Oh, because he went into, okay, nevermind.

[1:25:42] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Because it was mail fraud that he was convicted of, which he did. And by the way, I can prove that he didn’t commit mail fraud, it’s very simple.

It was the intent to rip people off. Well, here, my dad is, he has a house, a family he has established himself. He’s done multiple offers, always delivered all of his products and everything else. This was just a financial snafu, right?

[1:26:03] Igor Kheifets:

Was it about somebody not getting a refund or something?

[1:26:07] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well, yeah. Okay. I’ll tell you the story. So 1976, this country is turning 200 years old. My dad decides he wants to sell commemorative plates. They’re plates with a goal gold leaf Eagles printed on them.

Because people collect plates, the way that some of the older generations also collected spoons from different places they visited and stuff. And so, he wanted to sell commemorative plates.

And what he did was, he called up and a list broker and says, “Do you have a list? people who buy commemorative plates?” They said, “yes”. He says, “okay, give me a thousand names”. And the guy goes, “okay, I’ll give you a thousand names”.

And what he does is he does a merge purge. So these, this list, let’s suppose the list has got a hundred thousand names on it. And so what he does was he takes that in the computer and he takes that a hundred thousand name list.

And he says, “give me a thousand names on this list that are also on all the other commemorative plate lists”, right? So it extracts those thousand names, but these are people who will buy any commemorative plate, right?

So, it’s not representative of the whole hundred thousand list, right? These are the hot, these are the people who absolutely cannot, they’re addicted, they cannot say “no” to a commemorative plate.

My dad runs the test, it goes really well, right? So, he’s like, “okay, I’m going to get start getting tooled up and getting ready to sell these things, so I’m going to sink every dime I have into selling the commemorative plates. I’m going to mail the entire list”.

And they drop it and they mail the whole entire list. And it’s not nearly as successful as he thought. And there’s not enough money coming in to actually tool up and start producing a thousand, 2000 plates, right? Of the commemorative plates.

So, he can’t fill all the orders. He’s mismanaged his money, the thing’s aren’t right. But they charge him with the intent, meaning that he planned to run this ad and never planned on making these orders good at all, right?

So nowadays, under any sort of situation, you would have just filed bankruptcy. And that would have been the end of the company, right?

But instead, he makes the mistake of inviting these people in and this guy drives by, and he sees that my dad’s living in this big beach house.

And that it was actually on millionaire’s row, because these beach houses were owned by the millionaires of the silent movie era. And they were like their second homes, it was like a little 17 homes. That was a colony of partiers that included Hearst and Getty and Clark Gable and all this.

And we lived in the Tom Mix house, which was an old cowboy movie star, but they’re not really expensive, you know what I mean? They’re expensive, but they’re not really gnarly anymore. And my dad’s is renting this house. He doesn’t own it.

But my dad brings him in and says, “let me show you how this happens so that he knows that I did not intend to rip anybody off”. Well, he invites him in, they take all of this information. They use it to hold against him in a court of law. And they just, all he did was give them ammo, right?

But, but ammo that any fair minded person would have said, “okay, he really didn’t mean to rip people off. He’s got this long history of running products, delivering the products, and he’s a successful copywriter, why would he just do this and ruin everything?” , right? That makes no sense. He would have to be incredibly stupid to do this. S

Smart people would do this under a false name and then they would build it up, take all the money and run and flee the country, which my dad didn’t do. So, he did not commit this crime.

But anyway, so they go to court and he loses the case, but he wins an appeal and he always says, “I should have never won the appeal”, but he won the appeal, which is in this country is the means that they did something in the process that was wrong, and it entitles you to a new trial.

And they decided to try him again. Well, right before they had tried him, we had left that house, my dad had left that house. But, right before the jury was going to deliberate, the house itself went up for auction and sold for more money at a private auction than almost any house in history, or at least LA, right? For a lot of money, but my dad didn’t own the house, right?

So what happened was the, the prosecutor did something that he would never be allowed to do today, they blew up and put this article on an easel in front of the jury room and wrote Casa de Halbert across the top of it.

And so, when they came out and they were able to pull the jury after they convicted him and said, “okay, why’d you vote guilty?” And each one of them said, “because of that house”,

So, I had learned from that. And at one time an agency came to look at me and him and I said, “no, I’m not giving you any information”.

And then I followed the one piece of advice everybody should follow, which is, if you’re going to go through a divorce and you want to know the best advice, don’t go to a divorce attorney, because the divorce attorney is not going to give you very good advice.

If you have no money and the divorce attorney doesn’t see how they’re going to make money out of it, they just say, “why don’t you just settle and give this in and this and this and that”.

If you have a ton of money, they’re going to want to start a fight. “No, you should fight for that commemorative plate collection because that means something to you, it belongs to your grandmother”.

The two attorneys know that if they fight back and forth, they get to run up their billable hours, right? The best person to talk to is somebody who’s actually been through a divorce.

Because, what’s going to happen is when people go through a divorce, the first thing everybody fights over usually is custody of the children, right? All divorced people who’ve been divorced for a few years, I mean like 90 again, there’s no absolutes, but at least 90% of them, their big complaint is not that they don’t get time with their kids, their big complaint is they want to go on vacation and they can’t get their ex to watch the kids while they go on vacation.

The reality is they stop arguing over who gets the kid, they argue Hoover who’s stuck with the kid, for the most part, right? They come into a stasis situation, once they realize the kid’s not going to be as thinking, the wife’s boyfriend is the new dad, once they realize this is all nonsense.

So, anybody who’s been through the processes, don’t worry about it, in six months she’s going to be begging you to take the kids off her hands for a while, right?

Now, this is 90%. Notice I didn’t say 95% or 99% there are bad people, out there and stuff like that, but that’s the majority of the reality.

Well, what I did was, what you do is if you’re being investigated by, let’s say the IRS or something, you go and you talk to somebody who just went through that and they say, “well, what they’re going to do is try and scare you with a lot of fees and a lot of interest rates and all of this other stuff”.

And then what they’ll do is they’ll set up a offer and compromise and they’ll take probably 10 cents on every dollar you owe or 20 cents on every dollar, depending on what you have. So here’s the keys, and this is what my mistake was, and this is what you do”. You get your best advice.

So, what I did was I got good advice from people who went through it, I didn’t give them any information. And I told my lawyer what we were going to say and do and got completely unscathed, didn’t even get charged with anything, no, no, nothing.

And the reason, the point was I learned from my dad’s mistakes, right? By being part of that story, by understanding it to that level.

So, when he was in prison, it was like, if you committed an internet crime, they saying you’re not allowed to use the internet for the next while you’re on parole, that’s the reason they were thinking is they’re like, “well, this way you can’t write ads because you committed mail fraud, you wrote a fraudulent Ad” and it was all BS.

But anyway, so my job now is to drive out there, drop off the things that he wanted and pick up stuff to take back to his clients. Cause I had just turned 16 and got my driver’s license while he was in there.

And, he had given me his car, when he went away, cause again, he never sold his guys, but he’s like, “here, I’m going to give you the car. Then I want you to drive out. you’re going to be my courier, my messenger”.

And so, while he was there, my dad had always had some sort of sleep problems and he liked to take this herbal supplement called “L-tryptophan”. And so, just to make sure that that could have easily been pulled apart and people snuck heroin into it or something like that. So, they were not allowed to have supplements or pills of any kind whatsoever.

And my dad said: “next time you come, I want you to smuggle in some of these pills”. And I said, “okay, no problem”.

Because I knew I was 16 years old, right? And what are they going to do about me smuggling in some supplements into a prison? Are they going to throw me in jail for that? You know what I mean? I just knew this was not going to be a big deal for me, right?

Had he asked me after I was 18, I would have been a little bit more leery, if he had asked me when I was an older adult, I would have been way more leery, right? But anyway, I just said, “no, I mean, no problem”, right? off the bat.

And I knew he had asked me because one of my brothers, there was really only three of us that grew up with them. And one of my brothers was definitely too chicken to do it. And the other one would have done it, but probably wouldn’t have been as slick about it by this time as I was.

Now, I wasn’t always slick, I had been in trouble, gotten out of trouble, been in trouble, and then I eventually I kind of learned to be a little bit more slick.

Anyway. So what he does is my dad’s job is to go to, in the visitor center, this place in the desert, and he has to rake, clean the visitor area and rake the sand, leave these nice lines in the gravel, right?

That’s his job. And then he sits, he gets paid 11 cents an hour for doing this. And then he would sit down.

Oh yeah. No, they got it. Otherwise it’s slave labor, so they have to pay you, but 11 cents an hour is very little, right? And so, he would get paid 11 cents an hour, to rate the rocks, the gravel. And then, he would sit down and write ads and get paid $15,000 a piece for the ads.

And this is back when you could buy a house in the main part of Los Angeles for like $40,000, right? So, I mean, it was like whatever the an average house in LA is at least a million dollars. It would be in today’s money kind of like.

Well, maybe just housing prices went up, but I mean, basically it’d be like getting paid $20 to rake the yard, to rake the rocks and then sitting down and writing ads that paid you $300,000 for writing.

Anyway, So he says, “I want you to smuggle it, so do me a favor, get an alligator baggie”. That’s what we called them back then. They were the soft little plastic baggies that you’d put your lunch sandwich in.

He goes, fill it up with the L-tryptophan supplements that you get from the vitamin store and then bring it with you next time. And I said, “okay”.

And so, I come in and we’re at the table, because remember his job was to rake the visiting hour. And he goes, we sit at this table, it’s fiberglass table. But the frames for the fiberglass table are made out of aluminum poles that have been bent, to make the platform for the seats and to hold the fiberglass table up.

He goes, “okay, I want you to feel underneath the table”. He says, “you feel that pipe right there?” And I go, “yeah”. And he goes, “that’s your mailbox”. And so, I just waited and made sure nobody was looking. And I slowly slipped the little baggie filled with the pills into the mailbox.

My dad goes back into the prison, right? The very next day, he comes out to do his job to rake it, and that’s when he takes the pills with him.

Because you got searched right after, you could get searched in all kinds of searches right after being visited, but he wouldn’t be searched right after doing his job of cleaning the raking, the visiting hours.

And he didn’t write about that in the Boron letters, because somebody would have read that and then he could have gotten in trouble.

And I took a long time before me to tell people that, because it was like I knew that I’m not going to get in trouble. I was a kid. It’s statute of limitations and all that other stuff. But I wantedto make sure that my dad is no longer, you can’t punish him now for that.

But I always thought it was the whole weird part about it, like I said earlier, is just that to ask your 16 year old kid, “Hey, can you smuggle this into prison? And he’d say, “sure. No problem”.

[1:39:04] Igor Kheifets:

What’s fascinating about all your stories, and unfortunately, we do have to wrap up in just a bit, is that you actually listen to your dad and I’m assuming your brother too. Meaning that there was a level of authority, there was a level of respect.

Because many kids, those who do grow up with a father, oftentimes do not take their father’s advice. I’ve seen it many, many times when their father’s trying to talk to them and they just won’t even listen.

Now, this certainly doesn’t seem like this was the case with you. And even to a point where you’ve seen your role model, your dad end up in prison, regardless of the reason he is in prison, you saw him sort of go from sitting on the throne of direct response in kind of being thrown in jail.

And when he says, “Hey, smuggle some supplements in for me”, you’re like, “okay, no problem”, right? Again, there’s an aura of, I don’t know, authority, I guess, or maybe it’s love, mybe it’s respect, that isn’t a given. Let’s put it this way. It’s not a given in every family.

[1:40:28] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well, okay. So, I will say, I mean, I’m not telling the stories of where I argued with him, right? And I’’ll save this for.

[1:40:37] Igor Kheifets:

You didnt respect him?

[1:40:39] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Oh, no, no, no, absolutely. But there was, my brother always acted like I didn’t stand up to my dad. I’m the only one of his kids that hit him.

And when I hit him, it was because he told me that I was going to be sharing a place, that a living space with one of, with a guy who turned out to be one of the founders of Twitter, so I’ll save that story for you, for a different episode.

And that’s actually true, but there were times where I was like, “no, I’m not doing that”. But the other thing I’ll tell you is that it.

[1:41:16] Igor Kheifets:

Well, wait, so why did you have to hit him? You couldn’t say no?

[1:41:20] Guest, Bond Halbert:

I’ll save this for another . . No, I actually, I absolutely, it was the first one who S, I totally slapped him. And, everybody was like, couldn’t believe that I had done that, right? And it was because I was like, “no, no, no, no, no, no”.

But there was a certain thing about my dad and I, on top of the fact that I listened to my dad, my dad listened to me more than any other human being. In fact, I was the only one, some of my siblings would actually like, “Hey, dad’s really mad or upset about this. And he’s not calming down, can you talk to him for me?” Cause they knew I was the only one who could talk some sense into him.

And when he went in, when he had a drinking binge or something and they needed somebody to like kind of clean them up, I was the one they begged to come and do it.

I was the one where like he was going to fire somebody and I stopped him because it would have been detrimental, and the reason was is because I understood the way he thought. He taught me to think like him.

There used to be a computer and I love this analogy. There used to be a computer, it was a Macintosh, but you could boot it to act like a PC, right? I could boot my brain to get into Gary Halbert’s head, or I could boot my brain to get into bond Halbert’s head, right?

So there was a mutual kind of logical, “this makes sense” persuasion skill that he gave me. And I would also is a BS detector where I started to learn to detect what he’s saying that makes no sense, and so, I would refuse or something that he would do that makes sense that I wouldn’t refuse, and I would be glad to do.

But he really appreciated the fact that I was somebody who would take risks, but he also appreciated the fact that I was somebody that would stand up.

There was one time that he, we came into a Marina and he knocked a prop off of somebody’s boat cause he was a bad boat driver and he left me to deal with this. And this is another really funny story. I won’t tell you the whole story, but the guy, I was sitting there waiting to deal with the guy and the guy came in and I said, listen, my father knocked the thing off and then he took off.

And so what we’re willing to do is I’m going to pay to have this fixed and everything like that. And the guy was very upset about this. And it was an impeller.

So this is a, this isn’t actually a prop that drives the boat. This is a device that what you do is you lower it into the water and the motion of the boat spins the propeller and it generates electricity to charge your battery. Okay.

And so, um, my dad came in, he knocked one of the blades off of it. And, uh, then he just took off to go left me to stay on the boat while he and John Carlton were going to go and get some hotel rooms. And I was pissed about that.

And I’ll tell you what I did to get, actually I’ll tell you what I did to get back to him now. But what happened was, um, he leaves me in this place and, um, and this is one thing I remember my dad could take it as well as he’d give it. But this guy was constantly ranting.

And I said, listen, my dad said that I’m here to take care of it. We’re going to pay for it. we’re going to go and get this welded and everything else.

And the guy turned and he’s like, he just bitching and ranting about my father. And I just, I just, I flipped, I just turned around. I said, listen, I’m here to take care of this.

I’m here to pay for it. I’m here to make sure it gets done. But if you say one more damn thing about my father, I’m going to hop over onto your boat and beat the crap out of you.

And I meant it because I wasn’t going to sit here on this boat for two days listening to him bitch and whine and complain about my father. So, and the guy goes, okay, yeah, no, I get it. We’re cool.

We’re cool. Later that guy and I kind of became friends. He dove down and picked up the blade that we had knocked off called the guy who actually, which I was ready to buy a whole new prop, right? Called the guy and the guy welded it on and I paid the guy some money.

And then we actually partied a little bit together and hung out, right? I was like, okay, we’re good.

But anyway, so I’m mad at my dad because he’s left me to live on a boat while he’s going into this, into town to go sleep. Well, he’s in town and he’s in a hotel, but the, I didn’t know this. The only hotel he can get is, and this is in Key West because everything is booked is one of these hotels where young guys would get paid to go sleep with older guys, right? It was like, yes, this is Key West. So Key West is one of these places, I think 30% of the population is gay.

And this is, this is back in the early nineties, right? So we’re not nearly as woke as we are today.

And which and I, I have no problem with any of this, but what happens is I don’t know this. So I go to the bar where my dad is. And I said, Hey give me the keys to your place.

I want to, let’s go back to your place. I want to take a shower. He goes, no, no, no, no, no.

Because I’m not going in there with you because I’m young and tan. I got long hair and it’s going to look like he’s taking a young, a young guy to his room, right?

And I’m like, why, what’s going on? He’s like and then I figure out exactly why he’s doing this and what he’s, he’s afraid of, right? This appearance and everything.

And so I’m like, I plotted my revenge. So I go to meet him. He goes, okay, don’t meet me.

Just wait outside. I’ll meet you outside, right?

He comes, walks out the door and I put my arm around him and I said I’ll call you daddy if you want me to. And I kissed him. And my dad just turned beet red.

And he’s like, Oh my God, right? And cause to me, I I grew up in West Hollywood and I went to school in San Francisco and like, I absolutely do not care about any of this kind of stuff.

And I just knew that it would take his, for his, a guy from his generation that would just like send him really. And it did. But the, my favorite part of that was like he, he was like, you got me like, you know what I mean? He wasn’t like mad at me.

He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t do any of these other stuff. He would call, he would do that kind of prank and crap to you.

But if he did it to him, he would be like, okay, you got me. That was slick. That was smart.

You totally burned me. And, um, and he was, he would, he would laugh it off and stuff like that. But but I remember he always said it was things like that, that, that, that incident with the other boat owner that made him turn around and go look, you, you really try and get along with everybody.

You try and make peace and everything like that. But he loved the fact that I had the backbone to stand up to you stand up to people and to stand up to things and stuff like that. And, um, so there was a thing between us.

So I was, I did respect him. I looked at the things that he did. I, I judged him based on the logic and the merit.

And I knew that my father would do things for me that he wouldn’t do for other people. And so I was willing to do things for him that he wouldn’t do for that. I wouldn’t do for other people.

And, um, so it wasn’t, so for the most part, he had to persuade me with bribery, logic, or something that I wanted and stuff like that. But it wasn’t, I, I did not, was not taught up and, and I don’t, I don’t want to contradict you. I was not taught and brought up that you should listen to your elders because they’re older people.

I absolutely refuse to do that because I saw constantly how, no, no, no, you’re, you’re an older person, but you’re not a good person. So you’re not getting my respect. And I had teachers that were like trying to control me.

And I was like, and I was like, Oh no, you’re not. I was like, no, cause I, I mean, and I could tell you several stories about this where I was like, no, let me take you down to the principal. I said they’re like, boy you got a lot of nerve coming back here after this and that I go, no, I’m taking you.

And so we go down there and I said, listen, this guy’s doing this racist stuff. That’s nonsense and everything else. I want you to call my parents right now.

You think I’m having a problem? Call them. Let’s see what they do. This was going to get the teacher more in trouble than me.

I did not respect people just because they were authority or just because they were elder. I respected people because they were right or decent people. That’s what it was.

And so my dad was great at convincing me to do things, but they were also things it’s like he made it, he, he, he always had to make sure that it was clear that I was going to be better off if I did this than if I didn’t do it, or it’s no big deal. So if he had asked me to do something that was totally against my morals or something like that, I would get out of it. I wouldn’t do it.

And stuff like that. But for the most part, we had this, this kind of honest relationship where there was no BSing between us. And like, I admitted the things that I had done that I didn’t have to admit to him.

Because, and I, and I respected his opinion because he told me the truth nonjudgmentally where other parents were like obviously going to tell you this or tell you that. And and, and give you the thing that all the parents are expected to tell their children. And I didn’t get that I got like, no, this is the way it really is.

You know what I’m saying? And it was, whether it was true or not, it was his, like I said, it’s, I would say, it’s his version of the truth. I knew he wasn’t lying or hiding something from me. He wanted that kind of relationship with me.

And we had that kind of a relationship and it was great because when he passed away, there was no moment of thinking, I wish I had said the things to him that I wish I would have told him. And he didn’t have that with me. There was no, nothing left unsaid.

You know, I was sitting there looking at my son, Preston, and he was, he was baby. And I go, dad, he’s just so cool. This is like the most important valuable thing in my life.

And my dad’s like you’re my Preston. And I go, yeah, actually, I do know that. I know that and, um, so he didn’t leave anything unsaid with me and I never left anything unsaid with him.

And the way that just by our interactions, I knew that I had not only his full respect and his pride and all of that stuff that a lot of people really hope they would get out of my father. And I knew I had really had it and he knew he really had what he had out of me as well. So, um, yeah, no, it was, it was, it was, it was a different parent father relationship than any I’d seen before.

And it’s still even different from me and my, my son. Cause I don’t do the Hey I want you, I actually, I did one time teach him to do a little bit of deception. Well I would teach you, I would teach him, this is what you can get away with.

This is what you cannot get away with. And it was but, but is all with the caveat and the, um, the understanding of be a good person. It just pays off to be a good person, you know? Um, but there are some times when the rules like keeping my dad, not letting him sleep.

Well, because you’re afraid that somebody is going to smuggle in heroin inside of, um a supplement capsules. It makes sense from a prison standpoint point of view. It is a good rule.

I wouldn’t, if I was a warden, I would still keep that, that rule going. But do I feel bad about doing that and helping my dad get a natural supplement so he gets a better sleep? Absolutely not. No, of course not.

You know, if you want to kind of nudge your son into the direction of breaking the rules, right? So knowing where you can bend them like Neo where you can bend the physics of the bullet. Um, there’s a, um, a monopoly version of monopoly that encourages cheating. Oh, really? Yeah.

It’s just a fun way to, to encourage your kid to, to just think outside the box of the normal monopoly game and then encourage them to break these rules. But I agree with you. I agree with you completely on the subject matter of, or we shouldn’t listen to all elderly people.

The fact that they lived longer doesn’t mean that they lived better. It doesn’t mean that they’ve learned from their lessons. In fact, one thing I’ve noticed maybe after I turned 30 onwards, I noticed that a lot of people relive the same, this did the disruptive or destructive even patterns over and over again.

I watched my dad. You mentioned your dad used to drink sometimes my dad used to drink heavily and he used to procrastinate heavily. At one point he kind of gave up altogether.

And this is where I lost respect for him. Um, kind of looking at him, uh, kind of looking at him as a role model, right?

And then he just gave up. Like he encountered one big challenge and he couldn’t deal with it, which was immigration from Israel, from Ukraine to Israel. Um, and it on, based on that lesson, I realized, Oh, look, he doesn’t have everything figured out.

And he’s not even trying, but he acts as if, and I think that’s a mistake. So I also agree that teachers in schools, not all of them, first off, not all of them deserve to be teachers. A lot of these teachers should not be teaching kids should not be no, they shouldn’t be allowed to be a kid.

Yeah. And a lot of them don’t really know what they’re doing and all they’re trying and really all they’re achieving is just trying to enforce discipline of some kind, regardless of whether or not what they’re doing makes any sense. My son is only seven years old as of the moment of us doing this interview.

And he’s already questioning his teacher and he’s got in trouble with his teacher eight times since the start of the school year. Now in his school, uh, they give them red marks, red marks, and green marks green mark. If you did something good red Mark, if you broke the rules, naturally this is a conditioning thing.

And I’ve been trying to explain to my kid not to pay any attention to it. But at first he was really afraid. It’s like, Oh, I’m going to get in trouble.

I’m going to get a red Mark. And, uh I, I, I continuously trying to enforce the message that if he’s getting in trouble with the teacher, it’s not always a bad thing. And if he doesn’t agree with the teacher, he should say something.

And if the teacher doesn’t agree, he should tell the teacher, talk to my dad. I actually had to memorize this phrase just like that. So talk to my dad.

And I’ve now been in the school three times. And the first conversation was pretty tough, both on me and the teacher because nobody was listening. Then we kind of achieved understanding.

The second conversation was easier. Um, and now the third conversation actually took place last week when, um, somebody, so there’s like a water fountain and the kids lined up and there’s some kid kind of try to cut the line, I think. And it was right before my son was about to go drink.

So my son, uh, first yelled at the kid, he ignored him. So he pulled on his collar on a shirt and he kind of pulled him back and put him on the floor. Now my kid isn’t big or anything.

Uh, so he must’ve really, really felt the injustice because like for him to pull someone down on the floor, he had to really try. And so I got called in and my kid got a red Mark and I looked at the teacher and the teacher knew what I was going to say. And he said, yeah, so some kid cut in line and yeah, I see why he did it.

But you understand I had to give him a red Mark. He said, I completely understand. And I would probably do the same thing if I were you and I would do the same thing if I was him.

And we kind of left, left it off. But this is to say that older doesn’t mean smarter. And in schools today, I guess they, they’ve been like that all the time.

I mean, I went to an air force Academy. So instead of high school, I was basically wearing air force uniform and acting like a little soldier. So I’m no stranger to discipline not to mention, I grew up in a household of a former Soviet army officer who also graduated a military Academy in Moscow back in the seventies, I think.

So discipline, I understand, but discipline for the sake of breaking you, I really don’t like when they try to like make you do stupid things, um, that they just didn’t make any sense. And, and, and I think if a child understands it from the, from very little age, and most entrepreneurs, by the way, they know this, most kids would become entrepreneurs. They, they, they rebel against weird rules, stupid rules.

You know, they don’t feel, um, uh, school is a natural for them. Like they question school a lot, you know? And so that’s a trait. I think that’s common.

Fired from the last job he ever had for having an argument about wearing orange socks. It was the day before I was born. And that changed everything.

He decided to not follow the standard path of anything. So therefore all my siblings all have regular common names, but he names me Bob. I love it though.

I love it. And, and, and, but the one thing I’ll say about his drinking, that that it was a great thing for him is I also say that we all had different father because I was lucky I was the young one. And when he quit drinking for the first time, um, he quit drinking twice, but when he quit drinking for the first time, he took me, I what happened was this is around the same time he was training me.

And what had happened was he, um, took me with him to like his AA meetings. And when you quit drinking and you’re a heavy drinker, I quit when I was 25, by the way. So that was over 32 years ago.

And when, um, he quit he was replacing the time he spent in bars with time working and time with me, right? And so I was with him with all that, but here’s the important part of that, which I think is a great way to end this, this episode, which is having your kids see you constantly trying to improve yourself will set them on a path of looking at themselves and not just trying to justify their failures and saying, I am good, but to actually say I can be better and keep trying to improve who they are as people.

And so if they see that you recognize that you’re an alcoholic in that you cleaned yourself up, , right? They see that like one time I, I created this thing. I’m not Jewish, but it’s based on Shabbat.

It’s based on the, um, the rules of Jewish Jewish, um, Saturday there. Yeah. And so what I did was I created this thing.

It was like, okay, I cannot do these things on the day that, uh, I could, unlike that one, I could do Saturday or Sunday so that I could be flexible. It’s like something I had to do Saturday, but I couldn’t do specific things that I knew I needed to do less of, right?

And I had to do things that I knew that I needed to do more of, unless I’ve done it three or four times during that week, right? So I created these rules and I’m not going to go through them all, but there’s just one rule I did, which was I was getting into, I was in LA.

And so I would get very frustrated and get into kind of like racing around and road rage type of thing when somebody cut me off. Oh, you should not go to Bulgaria then. Well, I was, I’m actually a very good driver, right? I mean, when someone’s cutting you off, like you, you’re about to turn left and they cut you from left.

They overtake you from left to go to go into this. I mean, this things that happened here. Oh my God.

Well, LA is pretty well known for the road rage. You can get shot for it here. But anyway, so what I decided to do is instead of being somebody who raced around and everything, what I did was I said on this day, if I knew that the next lane I’m going to be turning into, I’m going to be making a , right?

When I turn onto that street, I get into that lane and I can’t, I can’t, we race my way through traffic. I wanted to slow down and be less aggressive driver. And because I did this so many times, it became, it now became my pattern of driving where now for the most part, I’m a very mellow driver compared to the way that I used to be.

Now, the other day I got new tires on my truck and I needed to make sure that they, the truck no longer shook at 60 miles an hour. And I was racing up the street like 60 miles an hour which proved that I could, this is in LA traffic in one of our boulevards or whatever. And my wife was very much like, Oh my God, you really got to going that fast in the thing.

And it just reminded, yes, this is the way I used to kind of drive, but I do not do that anymore. In any case, but my daughter made the notice. No, she goes, I see that you’re driving a lot more calmer than you used to do it because she, and I said, yes, what I realized is that was bad.

And if I continue to drive like that, you and my son would drive like that. And so as not just a role model, but to be a better person, I’m trying to control my behavior. But her seeing that and him seeing that no teaches them, which is what I learned from my father, which is be recognize your own flaws and be a better person.

Well as a modeling thing, you’ll start to say, okay, what do we, what is it I can improve about my personality about what I do? my being a hothead all these times, or am I being irresponsible in these ways and then changing your ways. Now, never thinking it’s too late to change your ways and never thinking that you’re always got it , right? And not just in instances, but in your just your daily life and the way that you behave.

So when my dad quit drinking when I was 25, I woke up one day and I was like, Oh, you know what, am I an alcoholic? And I was like, okay. I looked at my grandfather and my, my grandmother were alcoholics. My dad was a couple of my brothers were, and I was like, yeah, I think I am.

So I’m the only one who quit drinking at 25 everybody else waited and hit a lot harder rock bottoms than I did. And it was, but the the, the constant quest to improve myself and to change and become a better person came from watching my dad try and be a better person. Sometimes he’d succeed.

Sometimes he wouldn’t. But I think that it’s a, it’s an opera I, again, use these life moments as opportunities and say, look, I’m going to try and stop doing this. And this is why I’m trying to do this kids.

And this is what I’m hoping to achieve. Then they see that you succeed or that you failed, but this is why I’m changing what I’m going to do about the failure helps navigate the wins, the losses and helps to get this part portion that I’m talking about helps inspire them to improve. And I think that’s, that’s one of the best things you can do as a parent.

I agree. My dad, my dad did the complete opposite. He never spoke about any of it.

He never spoke about how tough it was to immigrate to a totally new country where the language was right to left is the left to , right? And he never ever learned it. He never spoke how tough it was for him to not be able to get a job after he was like somebody back in Ukraine, where he achieved some status in the city.

He never spoke about the procrastination that he was experiencing of stumbling against either government agencies, trying to trying to get like social security or, or a pension or anything like that. He just, he just, I think he felt like nothing he was doing worked, but at the same time he refused to start over. Like he never really had that sort of attitude where he would say, okay I’m in a new country.

I’m in a new place. I have to start from scratch and just go do it. Although I’ve seen other parents, all my friends actually take that approach and start over and, and, and achieve something because they, they had that sort of, they didn’t have that ego, I guess, holding them back.

Well, I also think it goes back to that philosophy. I mentioned, if he turned around and said, what would I want my kid to do if he was stuck and he really didn’t know all he did. And I hate to sound like a, like an ungrateful brat.

But, but this is how I felt after the age of 16, 17 I’ve kind of watched my, my dad turned from a grownup to a give up. I heard that phrase once. It kind of really hit me because all he did, he would, he just complained.

He either complained that he couldn’t get a catch a break or that if this was back in Ukraine, he would have done so. And so he would call this and that he would have he would arrange for this and that to happen. He would complain about my mom, even though she became the breadwinner, which which is a very common thing in immigration, where the breadwinner from the previous country, actually they switched places and that killed that.

Oh man, my mom becoming the breadwinner, it absolutely crushed him. Um, he did not. We, we, we had a, um, in the eighties, we had, I don’t know what time this was with you guys.

Early 2000s. Okay. In the 1980s we had, um, um, the Soviet union was only allowing Jewish people out.

And, um, what they did was they would, they were allowed and sent to Israel, but they would immediately hop on a flight, a plane and come to Los Angeles. Yeah. When they got here there, there was another community of and by the way, most of the, what we called Russians back then were Ukrainians because I remember when the Soviet union broke up, I went to my friends.

Spoke Russian. So everybody was labeled as Russian, but now these days, you’re not allowed to do that. These days you have.

Well, I love it. But what happens, I turned to my friend and I said, Oh, wait a minute. So Soviet union broke up.

What country are you? He goes Ukrainian. And I was like, okay. And I didn’t, that didn’t mean anything to me.

And then like, after this most recent things, I’m like everybody’s like, Oh, the Russians are really tough. I’m like, actually, I think it was the Ukrainians that are really, Anyone who grew up in the East is really tough, you know? But anyway, they, they had their, they, they worked together as a community. And so they all got social security or early social security or welfare benefits or whatever it was, because they were used to standing in lines for stuff, , right?

That so the, the, what we Americans complained about bureaucracy for getting social assistance, anything was nothing to them. That was like, are you kidding me? You just have to fill this paperwork out. It’s like I was like, you don’t stand in like an eight, eight, nine hours in the line to get something.

[2:09:20] Igor Kheifets:

Wait, wait, dude, this is still the case. Like this didn’t change. Here in Bulgaria, I had to register my vehicle.

So Bulgaria is a former Soviet Union country. It’s technically not Russia, but it’s sort of similar. And it’s a transition between Eastern Europe and Russia, in a way. So, lots of similarities.

So, I had to register my vehicle, which I bought in Germany and had it brought here. And because it’s European union, it’s a fairly easy process, but, you have to get in line, literally, physically get in line with your vehicle, to go register it.

So, they check your VIN number and say, “okay, the VIN number matches the vehicle, this is not stolen, so here’s your registration paperwork”. The line can sometimes be as long as two days! (Wow!) Two days to register your vehicle.

[2:10:22] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Here, they want you to do it online. The only time you have to do it is if it’s out of state and then they do do that inspection thing you’re talking about, but you get an appointment for it.

I remember when I was 16, I set aside my birthday to go get my driver’s license on my birthday. It was the first day you’re allowed to get and take the test. And I passed and the guy goes, “here, happy birthday”.

And so, I was like, “okay, you’re good to go and stuff like that”. But yeah, so like I said, come to Los Angeles and the system is like super easy by comparison.

Where we do complain,everybody here still complains about the DMV, but we’re not standing in line for two days.

[2:11:03] Igor Kheifets:

I know, I know, it’s so relevant, it’s so relevant.

[2:11:05] Guest, Bond Halbert:

And so much of the stuff that we do is can be done online. at the moment.

Anyway. Well, thank you for a great interview. I really, I mean, I enjoyed this conversation with you. It was fantastic.

[2:11:16] Igor Kheifets:

Yeah, the same, this is actually the longest interview we’ve ever done on this podcast.

[2:11:21] Guest, Bond Halbert:

You might want to break it up.

[2:11:23] Igor Kheifets:

I don’t know. I think it flows really well. I think, like anyone who’s into parenting or copy or human psychology is going to get a kick out of it. So I’m probably going to post it as is.

There’s one more thing we forgot though, so if somebody actually tuned in for two hours, where can they go to find out more about you? And what are you working on right now?

[2:11:44] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Actually, I’m going to give you a last tip that everybody can use. I teach people to do what’s called the “Google sniff test” work on their Google sniff test. So, if somebody wants to hire you and you’re high end, a lot of these people are going to go and google your name, okay?

And so, what they do, when they do that is they see what do you have. And if they see just like you have one Facebook profile that’s like, it doesn’t say anything to them, but if they see that you’re on LinkedIn, it’s like, “okay, you did a little bit”.

But if they see that you have a website and address, or they see that you’ve been on podcasts or they see that you have books published, the more info that’s there, the more professional you look, right?

A real quick tip is run ads on your own name. It doesn’t cost you anything. And if your name is common, just put in the next word like “Igor” and then just put in “marketing”, right?

And you run it on that, so then they see the ads and they’re like, okay, they see ads, website, podcasts, books, all this other stuff that shows up.

So put the information and say: “bond, marketing consultant, and copywriting coach in the description. So when the web crawls, it sees also the podcasts that you’re on. So anyway, you can put this stuff in there. So, just “bondhalbert.com”

if you like anything that you hear about my dad and you just hearing about him at all, obviously theGaryhalbert letter.com. Don’t forget to put in the word “the”. But bondhalbert.com. And then, I’m also on the old man socials. I’m on Facebook and stuff like that. But bondhalbert.com is where you want to join.

Yeah, well it’s so funny becaus, I’ve had people talk to me and they say I’m going to do this and that. One person said that we’re rebranding this lipstick, and we’re going to be selling it to teenage girls on Facebook. And I’m like, “no, you’re not”

[2:13:35] Igor Kheifets:

There is no teenage girls on Facebook.

[2:13:40] Guest, Bond Halbert:

And so, when he said that and I said, “hold on a second”. And I went and talked to my teenage daughter and I’m like, “okay, where do you learn makeup tutorials?” She’s like, “Oh, on Instagram”. And I go, “who are the people you follow?” And she gave me this and this and that.

And I came back, I gave him a whole game plan in 20 minutes. And he’s like, “how do you get that?” And I’m like, “it’s simple. I talked to a teenage girl”

But anyway, so yeah, you can follow me at bondhalbert.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and those things. And unlike a lot of people, my name is extremely unique. So you’re not going to run into another Bond Halbert.

[2:14:16] Igor Kheifets:

Awesome, man. Well, thank you, thank you so much for doing this. I know you do these interviews only once a week, there’s a designated time and I appreciate.

[2:14:28] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Not even once a week.

Not even once a week? So I appreciate getting this huge time slot and all the amazing, incredible stories that…

[2:14:37] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Well I gotta say that’s because of you, you requested information on parenting. I’ve shared you stories that I don’t share, a lot of them I don’t share on others. It’s simply.

Because when I first started granting interviews, people just wanted to talk about my dad, then they started realizing how much I knew about direct response marketing and copywriting, and they started not talking about my dad.

But this is the one where you’re like, “I want to talk about parenting”. And I was like, “okay, this is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart”. And so, I think it’s great. So this is definitely a unique one compared to the others that I’ve given.

[2:15:14] Igor Kheifets:

You know, I look at parenting as a certain form of copy. Because, we’re not selling products to them, but we are selling ideas. We’re selling ways of looking at the world, we’re selling protocols for making decisions. Where we’re selling things, like intangible, but still we’re selling.

And they’re different from us, they’re different personalities, they grow up in a different environment, they have a different way of processing information.

I read somewhere that now those who are born after the year 2010, they’re like a very special kind of human that can consume so much information, learn very quickly, operate with 15 screens in front of them, write with both hands and read and talk at the same time, whatever.

So, they’re not the same as us. But we still carry a lot of that wisdom that we want to transfer over. Because I feel like every entrepreneur, or at least every copywriter, would love to sort of download what they have here between the ears. And almost like a flash drive, put it into the ear of their kid.

Because they believe there’s so much time and heartache and pain and mistakes they can save their kids by dispensing this incredible knowledge.

[2:16:38] Guest, Bond Halbert:

No, you’re 100% right, I mean, it’s a very popular subject that a lot of people don’t talk about, is getting kids and young people into entrepreneurs. My son is actually, he’s got a group called NepoBabyMarketing.com, and it’s $5 a month.

And what they do is he gets these micro trainings. So when he asked me to teach him, I said, “okay, I’m going to teach you my stuff, but I’m also going to get people who I think are the top in the world at different portions to also give you trainings”.

And then he interviews them. And they’re not like interviews like this one, they are specifically, “how do you do this?” This is all about bullets. “How do you write a bullet? ““How can you tell a good bullet? ““What’s your process?”

And then, he breaks them down and he gives little videos once a week, right? You know what I mean? Like you say, it is different, when you’re grounded in the basics, which is like walk in the shoes of your prospects, understand them.

Understand this new group of people can download a lot more information into their brain a lot quicker, you know.

And the other thing is, there’s information overload. When I was a kid, there was like four or five books that were relevant to copywriting, right? There really wasn’t what there is now.

Now, what you’re doing is a lot of time, you’re not only saving them heartache, you’re saving them time.

[2:18:04] Igor Kheifets:

Yeah. (You know). Everybody’s a copywriting genius these days, right?

[2:18:10] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah, absolutely. But, it’s funny how their stories are all exactly identical to the ones that came before them.

And the funny thing is, I mean, more than nine out of 10 of the new up and coming copywriting geniuses are spewing something like it’s brand new radical concept that we’ve been doing, that I’ve known about since like the 70s and 80s.

Really? Wow! You’re giving me away something for value in exchange for contact information, that’s amazing.

[2:18:44] Igor Kheifets:

It’s a novel concept.

[2:18:48] Guest, Bond Halbert:

It’s so novel. It’s different because it’s on TikTok, it’s different because attention spans aren’t smaller, shorter these days. Everybody likes to say that. The truth is people get bored faster. (Yeah) that’s what it is.

[2:19:03] Igor Kheifets:

I agree with you, I agree with you very much. I noticed that I now get bored faster. I used to actually read books cover to cover. I now look for one concept, one idea, and then I drop it.

[2:19:16] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah, well, when it comes to books I recognize this, so when I put out the “Boron Letters” book in my book, I put the pitch up front.

Everybody’s, the last thing people hear is the one thing that sticks with their mind the most. And so, all of these people would take blog posts, and then at the end of their blog posts, they had these pitches and offers. And the reviews would complain that this is nothing but a sales pitch.

The top of the Boron Letters, top of every chapter, for more great free letters, go to thegaryhelbertletter.com, nobody complains, right?

I say, “hey, listen, this book’s filled with a bunch of info, you’re going to get straight out of it and you can use and apply. But just want you to know, here’s this other resource you should sign up for”.

And nobody complains, because the last thing they’re getting is value, not pitch. But that comes from what’s everybody going through right now? What are they used to? What’s annoying them? What’s refreshing? Give them that.

Because, what annoys you? What inspires you? We may go back to a time where people are like, “no, the new thing is to stop and read full books”. it always can come around and change and everything. The point is, what’s currently going on? Walk in the shoes of your prospects, do the research, find out where they are, find out what their frustrations are.

As you said, justifying their failures and all this other stuff. But what they consider to be a failure and all of these other things change over time. Know what the current stuff is, adapt to it. And then it’s going to be timeless. there’s no Halberd protege that’s worried about, “oh, the new social media thing is this”.

We don’t worry about that, we can walk in the shoes of people using their social media and say, “this is what will stand out”. “This is what will grab attention”. “This is what will provide value”. “This is what will endear people”. “And this is what will inspire them to purchase”.

[2:21:07] Igor Kheifets:

There’s an old joke about Einstein back when he was teaching, I think in America, right? He ended up in America? (yeah, he did)

So, he was teaching physics and he would keep the questions on the exams, like the annual exam, the questions will always be the same, every year. And one of the other teachers or other professors asked him, it’s like, “why are you keeping the same questions? Because the students, they know, why are you keeping the same questions?”

And he’s like, “well, because the answers keep changing”, you know? So, he was aware that science and physics were always fluid as well. We used to believe to be true is no longer true.

And with direct response, I think it’s the opposite, if we capture the timeless principles correctly, and we can, I guess, tell them apart from the tactics, we can then, carry them over to any media, be it a new social media platform, I don’t know, the new email or the new phone or whatever.

[2:22;20] Guest, Bond Halbert:

Yeah, I always teach my students, this things, it’s like, “look, I’m not arrogant, I’m just confident, everybody else is as screwed up as I am. So, I assume if something frustrates you, me, it’s frustrating other people”.

And so, it’s when I did the primary thing, I was like, “what makes me give a primary email address?” And so, one of the things I thought of just recently was like, “listen, I’m giving out this four week course and it’s for newsletters that you can sign up for and you can get it for free.

But I’m just gonna give you a fair warning, if you sign up for it, and you don’t open it, what happens is that messes up my delivery rate in going into Gmail. So what I’m going to do is, if you don’t open and consume” -Because it can tell whether or not you’re, how long you’ve opened an email for- if you don’t open the first two, I’m not sending you the third.

And there’s no problem, so be sure to enter a primary email address, you check often, so you don’t miss those first two emails and make sure you read them. And then I’ll be glad to give you the third, the fourth and the fifth”, right? It makes the emails go up.

But the idea is, that’s what would make me give a primary email address, right? And I would also say, “don’t worry we’ve been in this business for 30, 40 years, and we’ve never given away anybody’s contact info. And we’re not about to start now, you can unsubscribe at any time”.

And that makes people go, “okay, I’ll do it, and then I don’t want to miss this other one, I’m going to open the first and the second and everything, because I’m not going to get the third unless I do that”.

But that’s a tactic, but it’s a tactic that comes out of the basics. It comes out of walking in the shoes of your prospects and say, “what would motivate me, let me try that it might motivate others”.

[2:24:00] Igor Kheifets:

I think that’s a great place to end, because we I think we can keep going forever. So thank you again for doing this.

Guys, if you want to find out more about Bond, and get into into his planet, his world, you can check out bondhelbert.com. You can Google his name, very unique name, you can’t miss it.

And you can also check out thegaryhelbertletter.com. I mean, that resource, when I was getting started, I was devouring it, I was going over every sales letter.

I remember reading the the water sales letter for the first time, “Oh, my God!” I was like, “What? How can you write about something as mundane and abundant as water and make it so interesting that I’m like, I can’t wait to read this”. So, incredible resource. Absolutely have to go and check it out.

Bond, thank you again. And till next time we chat, have a good one.

[2:24:58]
Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package!

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WHO IS
IGOR KHEIFETS

Igor Kheifets is an amazon best-selling author of the List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire.

He’s also the host of List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to make more money and have more freedom by leveraging the power of an email list

He’s widely referred to as the go-to authority on building large responsive email lists in record time.

Igor’s passionate about showing people how to live the List Building Lifestyle.

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