Okay, great. Today on Using AI Network, we're thrilled to have John Benson, an absolute OG in the copywriting world. John, a best-selling author and one of the foremost sales copy strategists globally, revolutionized internet marketing with his video sales letter formula, which has led to billions in sales. He's a pioneer in AI copywriting, having introduced innovative use of tools like Jasper.ai, ChatGPT, and now his own Benson.ai, which is redefining what high-quality AI-generated sales copy looks like. Prepare for a deep dive into AI-powered marketing strategies with the legendary John Benson. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. John,
I'm excited to have you on. There's no question that you're an incredible fit for uh the goal of this show, which is to educate users on how to introduce AI and their business process. And what's cool about you being on this is that you're not just a user, but you're actually a seller of AI services with Benson.ai, and that's spelled B-N-S N. It's very clever, by the way. And we'll have a link in the show notes. Um for those who aren't familiar with the software, can you tell us about it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so Benson is promptless AI, which is the big delivery point for people who are afraid of AI. This requires no prompts from you in the traditional sense at all. It is literally copy-paste or type into a box, click the magic. We have a something called the magic button. It's called the magic button for a reason. You press it and magic stuff happens. And the other thing that makes us completely different is we build on what's called avatar blueprints. So we Benson has been trained on thousands of these models. We have our own model that we've trained on, and that's separates it immediately from like Chat GPT and other uh chat oriented kind of copy apps because they're pulling from AI's vast library of copy training that it's done by reading the internet. But as I've said in hundreds of interviews, if I wanted to train somebody to be a good copywriter, if it I would never tell them to read the entire internet because 99% of it sucks. So that's why 99% of chat copy sucks. And we've trained it on, we we narrow the focus. So we tap into the power of that really cool tool, and then we narrow it with all the trainings that we've done from you know hundreds and hundreds of copywriters.
SPEAKER_01So there's a ton of products that have come out since January or actually November of last year, but you've been playing with the models for a bit longer than that. How did you get turned on to it? How did you get access? And how were you, what was your initial foray like?
SPEAKER_02Well, the initial foray was in good old-fashioned HI. It was we we in Celerator, we did in 2010. And that was how do I break out my my VSL formula and put it into software? And that was literally people it gives you different copy every single time you generate a VSL, but you have to fill in all these blanks. And it was, I mean, it was very, very manual. At the time, it was like people were freaking out about it, right? But now it's looking back, it's just it's kind of ridiculous. Uh, copypro came along in 2016 and it wasn't HI, it wasn't uh AI either, uh, but it was nascent. We we were kind of getting ready for it. So I was like, um, I started building CopyPro by myself in my bedroom, literally, and said, okay, and during that time of building it, I was like, I was able to take about six months and dissect what everything from emails to sales it is to VSLs would look like. We started with email. In fact, it used to be called email copypro because email was the most versatile, the hardest thing to do. I mean, how do you systematize email? Right. And again, this is before AI was even a gleam in its daddy's code. So uh then we took that. And about two years ago, or it's less than two years ago, uh, Jasper reached out to me and said, Hey, would you like to train our AI on your VSL? And I was like, started laughing. There's no way I can do it. It can't write it. It's just, it's, it's, it's, you know, I'm happy to, I'm flattered you would ask. I said, Well, let's just try to work together. So I got on with their guys and ended up working with some of the top guys at Jasper. And when they figured out real quick, oh, yeah, you're right, won't do this. And so, so we did a 60-second version of it. And it was, it was okay. It was it did pretty well, but we trained it with the best models that we could. But in so doing in that, I got into the mod the actual train, what it looked like to train a model, what it looked like to um uh how we could game the system, so to say, and in a very uh ethical way, of course. How do we get AI to do what we want it to do versus what AI will do by itself, which is usually just ramble on? So uh I can't that's when I came up with something and I I've recently trademarked it uh called pre-prompting, and it was combining a bunch of elements together, some elements we just literally just slapped it into the playground and
it worked and and was like, okay, I don't know how this is working, but it's working. And turns to find out it was it was kind of cool. I was the first person to that I know of to do it. Maybe I wasn't, I can't, but that I know of, at least in copywriting uh in the marketing world. So then we took that, and then from that foundation is what we led to building Benson. We started building Benson for VSLs and then it expanded really quickly. Now it's now it can do anything. But um, so that's kind of the the foray into that. So yeah, I've been doing this a lot longer than chat GPD has been a thing. Um, and we knew this was going to happen. We knew you know five years ago, and we knew that AI was gonna happen. And four years ago, we were trying to beg AI developers to help us do this. And they were, and I was literally told, well, this is just not possible. It's the hardest thing for AI to do. I'm like, that just doesn't sound right, you know. And they're saying, Yeah, it can go out and it can land a robot on Mars, but it can't write a primary goal. That doesn't make sense, you know. And um, but that's what we were being told by every AI engineer we were talking to, like, oh my gosh, this is so difficult. And then that was before uh, you know, GPT came along and kind of broke the mold with 3.5. And then, you know, when four came out, that was that was like, okay, it's it's smart enough to do this now. But we were way ahead and ready, you know, when with with what we were working on with Benson, because we were doing this on the side for for now VSL. And then we just took it and said, Oh, hey, we we were gonna release Benson. It's only a VSL too because it's got my last name on it, and it's like, you know, I'm known for the BSL. Uh, but then we trained it on the VSL, thought, wait, it can do everything else. Why are we just doing just VSL? So yeah. So then my my friend Peter came out with VSL.ai, uh, and and it's trading on like shorter form VSLs. And and uh, and so I thought, okay, this is perfect timing. His case came out first. So when we came out, we were like, well, everything. And now it's uh it's a model that it's it's a system of approaching AI that I think is going to uh not only stick around for the years that AI is going to grow, but also help people without having to mess with prompts. And you know, it's it's clean and simple.
SPEAKER_01This is awesome. So I've got some questions specific about how you're using it in your day-to-day, but I want to dig in a little bit more about the people who are using Benson. And uh I come from a direct response background. Um, I know that copywriters are probably both enjoying and scared of tools like these. However, what about um do you have a customer base or an avatar that's not your typical expected user that's not a copywriter, not a marketer?
SPEAKER_02Uh definitely. Uh our largest avatar right now in Benson is actually just small business owners,
uh, people that know they need to sell something but have no idea how to do it. People that that are authors, they want to be, they want to sell a book or a video course and they have no idea how to do it. So copywriters were the low-hanging fruit for sure, and still are. And yeah, I mean, I uh it's like I wrote for our for our Black Friday promo that just happened. First email that went out in the subject line, it was called the Oppenheimer AI. And and I was like, I was like, uh I usually don't use lofty stuff and copy, but the movie's kind of hot, or this was kind of hot. So people now know the name. And so I said, why do I call it that? It's because you know, I I I literally, I, I just I just did something that took me no kidding, like a less than a minute, and it spit out the lead of a sales letter that was as good as I could write it. And I thought to myself, uh, I am become death, the destroyer, worlds, the you know, it's the quote attributed to Oppenheimer that was actually from the Bhagavad Vita. But but yeah, he's he was quoting the Bhagavad Vita. And I that's what I thought. It's like, oh my God, I think I've just killed copywriting. It's like I this is insane. And then I thought, well, wait, no, I haven't killed copywriting because I still need to know. I a copywriter has to know that that's good, and then say, okay, it's good except for this part and let's change it. And then so copywriters are are gonna have a lot of work done for them because of this, but they still need to understand what makes something good. I mean, what makes a hook, what makes a unique you know, unique mechanism, what makes this compelling, and um, and then adjust it for the client. So yeah, it's it's not, it's it is it is absolutely the atomic bomb when it comes down to C level copywriter. It the the it's game of, there's no way you can't, it's not you're not gonna compete against this. Uh, it it's it's about putting A-list copy. It is, I'm not lying. Um, it it is, but again, I really still I still teach copywriting. So I'm like, because you have to know, you can't just rely on the AI. You just you have to be able to say, because it's not always gonna do that. It's AI is gonna AI, as I say, it's gonna it has some um, it's a petulant tween. If you think of AI as a petulant tween, then it really helps because sometimes it goes, I don't want it, you know, and uh something else. And you have to know when it does that, okay. That that that sucks. Click the click the redo. And and but yeah, the tool is it's just it's it's one of many that I think people should be using if they're interested in copy. It's that simple. It's it's it's not the only thing, it's probably the best one for copy, but I mean, I use Chat GPT all the time for research. I use Claude for research.
SPEAKER_01Um, Claude seems to be more accurate, but but you know, I want to dig in on how a a small business owner who because the emyth a lot of hats, I get it. Um, and marketing, if you're a marketer, it's very easy to recognize that not many businesses do a very good job at it. If I was a small business owner and I marketing wasn't my wheelhouse, what's the the spectrum of things that I could use Benson for to and honestly, I mean, if you would compare it to the amount of money saved from hiring a talented writer or email writer or whatever, um how would a small business owner use this?
SPEAKER_02Well, so the current iteration of this, I don't know when this podcast is gonna air. The current iteration is in it's not even beta, it's MVP. So um, everyone knows that. Everyone knows that, okay, you've got these 20, at least 14 or so projects you could mess around with. And the projects are deep. I mean, they're like, you know, entire funnels. I mean, it's like it's kind of see, we're not limited by because we figured out I figured out like a year and a half ago how to get chat to write something that was 8,000 words long without sucking, because it it this is before the token with, I mean, it used to be super narrow where it could write about 1500 words at most, 500 was preferable. And we figured out, well, there's a way to do this, and it's the it it's it's how we it's how we've coded Benson. So Benson's not limited on LinkedIn. They you can do an hour-long webinar, you can do whatever you want. But what we're doing is, and what small business owners are doing is is they if they don't find something in the library that says, okay, I'm gonna create a project in the library, I don't find uh, oh, there's not a B2B conversion sequence or something like that. Um, we just say, okay, just click here and send us what you're wanting. And in the meantime, just click this button over here, because we have this tool called cloner. And anything that you copy and paste into that, it's going to clone it because we've trained it on how to, like a copywriter, when we look at copy, we see, okay, that's the primary goal, that's the unique mechanism, that's the secondary complaint, that's the this. And we've trained it on how to do that and go through and read something that's completely could be a dog training email or a lead for a golf site, is what I just did that I when I wrote that Oppenheimer quote. Uh, I copied a uh Donnie Franch, she's a top golf guy in the world, and uh a good friend of mine, he goes, Here's here's a couple of things you can train Vincent on. And I copied a thousand words of one of his leads and spit it out for copywriting. And it was like, because it was turned it from golf into copywriting, and it was like 66% different. And so it was completely, you couldn't even tell, but all the persuasion triggers and patterns and stuff is right there. So if that's what I would say, do until we get that. And then if you send it to the team, the team goes, we we just look at a list of things that people want and say, okay, it seems like everybody's wanting this, so this is what we train next, and then we train train the model on that. So um that's essentially how I would use it now. Now, that may be a little bit of a uh a roundabout answer, but um it it it this is not a research tool, this is not something that you search on like a chat GPT. You're gonna use chat for that kind of stuff. But if you need to send out a specific you need to send out a promotional email, a nurture email, if you need a sales letter, if you need a webinar, I mean there's really no other place to go than than that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And what used to take, I mean, you could probably set aside half a day just getting ready for a couple of emails to go out. This is now a couple of buttons. Hey, so one of the things that really uh I've thought about a lot to get a good response from the model, it's about the input that you give. The more uh I don't know, clarifying or uh the better your input, the better your output. You're a copywriter, you're somebody who studied words and the emotions behind words and all that, all of that kind of stuff. How do you think what impact did that have on your ability to get 8,000 word output out of a narrow model, right? Like that's a great question.
SPEAKER_02Well, uh the so it's kind of something you you really do need to see. There's there's a demo of this. Uh so on the demo, uh I I promised my email list. I said, okay, I'm gonna write a VSL, not the whole thing, because it would take me about 20 minutes worth of clicking, and that's not worth doing. Uh, but I'll write the first you know, thousand words of it right in front of you with a Google search. And so that was that was what I said to myself. Is like, I want to be able to write a VSL using nothing more than a Google search. Like obviously, I have to type my name in there and I have to type, but but I mean, there's no copy whatsoever. In other words, and um yeah, so I did it in less than three minutes with a Google search. So and well, I'm gonna so let me explain why that thought is important. Um, from a Google search, I was able to find a competitor's page and copy and paste, and and that's what Benson used to build my blueprint. So we build a blueprint for an offer. An offer, a blueprint is an offer, so but it's all the words that are necessary for that offer to work. So the offer has an avatar, the offer has an author. So who's about you? And the offer has a price, the offer has a name, the offer has features, benefits, et cetera. Everything does that. So then I said for the next one, and this is where I'm going with this, let's take the worst copy possible. And so I didn't do a Google search, I searched on Wikipedia. And I so I I'm a I came from a nutrition background, so I did a search for low-carb dieting, and I just took the uh you know, the Wikipedia said, okay, you have the history of it, and then it goes into what's the overview of it. I copied the overview along with all the footnotes. I mean, it's as bland and boring as you can possibly imagine, and it still created a blueprint that sounded like, wow, a copywriter wrote this. Because it's been trained to do that. It's been trained to do that on 30 words. So, so yes, usually speaking, but but so for copywriters and marketers that are A level, B level guys, they're they're like, I really know my stuff, I know my promises, I know my hooks. Sure, type that into the into Benson, it's gonna be even better for you. But for people that don't know at anything about copy, uh if you can do it from a Wikipedia page, I mean, that's just nutty.
SPEAKER_01And so one of and where I wanted to go with this question was that there's a lot of people, I think there's a hundred million weekly users of Chat GPT. Some paid, some not, right? For those people who are listening to this who don't have the marketing background, that maybe a small business owner, um understanding how to elicit a response from Chat GPT or Claude is the difference between frustration and transformation or whatever, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You have to practice with it, but and most people haven't practiced with this type of writing, they type an email, they you know, whatever. But going back to your background, you've been studying words forever. What advice would you give to somebody? Uh, because I guarantee that if I were to put the average user's prompts against your prompts, it like I want a result that does this, your prompt would be uh incomparable to thems, to theirs, right? Because you've got that experience with crafting result from Word.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01How did that impact how you prompted Chat GPT or Claude or any bricks or things that came from copywriting background into prompting excellence?
SPEAKER_02It's a great question. Uh so when we were not, when we didn't have Benson, when we were working with ChatGPT, we found that the obviously, as you found this, the better the prompt and the more explicitly creative the prompt can be in places, the better the output. Um it's it doesn't need to be long necessarily, but it has to have some keywords. Like um, we stumbled on a phrase early on. This is GPT 3.5 days. And um we're talking like that. Oh, it's back in the old GPT-3.5 days. It's like that was like a year ago. Um, but yeah, GPT 3.5 was out, and and we were working with Jasper, which was which was API'd into into 3.5. And we figured out if we said use emotional visceral language.
SPEAKER_00Interesting.
SPEAKER_02That was the difference maker in the output. The output went from radio voice guy copy to sounding more like a copywriter would write. And it was used, and then we'd say use dimensional and visceral and emotionally charged language. So that then we then started using like, you know, imagine the day today, acting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it was more to taking it more into the user's day-to-day action. So when we in the back end of Benson, obviously there are commands that we send to uh to through by API to various different uh open AI, anthropic, whatever, but um, but and to our own model. But that's our own model. That's for the complicated stuff. I mean, like blueprint creation or stories and things like that, uh, it's not a question of prompting, because you're not going to prompt your, you cannot prompt your way to good copy. Let me just cut to the right now, as uh as for turbo, uh, you cannot prompt your way to get you can prompt your way to okay copy in some places, and sometimes it does surprisingly well. But most of the time, especially if you're telling a story, especially if you're trying to write something that sounds superhuman and in chat, like like we're going back and forth as one person to another. It just doesn't want to do that because again, it's it's a logical prediction engine and
copy is inherently illogical. So it doesn't, I break constantly break the rules of logic. For example, I'll start a sentence with the word because. Okay, so it that that's not logical if you've studied grammar.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So or yeah, I'll use one-word sentences all the time, like fast, period, done. You know, yeah. So no, I know those tricks as a copywriter. I know what they do, I know why I'm doing it. Uh, it has not been trained on that, unless you've got a model like ours or you got a model that's been trained specifically for copywriting. But but as far as getting the prompts, like to get chat GPT, let's use chat because most people are familiar with that. The better your language, the better your ability to write, because you are writing to something that believes it is an entity, it is a person. It is not, it is not sentient, it is it is a logical prediction engine, it's amazing. Um, I you know, Sam may disagree with that, but sorry, it's not, you know, we're not talking Q Q Q star here, right? We can go into Q star at another time, but uh we're not talking about that. Um, but we're talking about Chat GPT. So but the better you know how to ask anything a question, a person, a machine, anything, and the better you word it, the better the response is going to be. It's very human-like in that regard. So sometimes we'll say please. So, you know, um, it's it's kind of weird. It it's it's a weird world. So we found the other the prompts made a huge difference. I I've got some prompts I still can't beat. Like we just stumbled on it, we were playing around with it, and our customers never see this, by the way. You never, as a if you use Benson, you will never see a prompt. You just you just don't. You just you can drop do a drop down and go, I want to kill the poet and take out the poet language. I want to kill the hype and mix the copy less hypey. It's very simple. But in the background, what's going on to do that are these prompts that we're sending to a uh along with a whole bunch of data. And so what we will send in Benson is sometimes we'll send 36,000 tokens from 300 words worth of data. Yeah. So and and you know what that means. The average person can care less what that means, but but that's the only way you can build uh a a blueprint. You have to send, we know all, and this is where it gets down to uh, you know, not this sounds like I'm just a constant commercial, but I'm I'm trying I'm excited about it. Obviously, it's like my kid, but um. We had to go through 10 years of the how does this work? So 10 years ago, I figured out okay, if you want to primarily go without objection, you need to listen to what I'm saying. So all I'm doing is if you want to lose weight without counting calories, you need to listen to what I'm saying. If you want to train your dog without resorting to punishment, yeah, if this works for anything, right? And so that little simple phrase, uh that's the foundation for everything that goes into Benson. And only it's not simple phrases, they're entire lexicons of vocabulary. So we've trained it on that, and that's the foundation. And therefore, the prompts that we send to it, I it just it just responds. I I don't know exactly how, because I'm talking to a uh, we've got a data scientist that's training one of our models now, and and he's not sure either. Like I'm not sure why that's going on, but it is. And he actually is a guy that builds AI. And so I'm I'm so I'm pretty safe to say that if guy that builds AI doesn't know, I'm I'm okay not knowing. But but there's some mystery out there, but I do know that that some of it deals with the language, and and I'm telling you that you take one word out and it goes, eh, you know, I have no idea why.
SPEAKER_01So I'd like to move into kind of what what a day or what your usage looks like outside of the tool. So um, you know, I don't know how many hours a week or a day you work, anything like that, but what what does your usage look like? What are common uses for you with the models, whether it's on your phone, whether it's check cheat BT vision, whatever?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So my use is definitely not going to be the average because I have done nothing but build my own AI for the last year and a half and and and and then coach people on AI for the last two years and uh or last year rather, so last two years coaching people, last a little less than a year building my own new. So uh so my my use has been either centered around like how do you get the best results out of chat GPT specifically. I mean, yeah, we we do teach people Claude, but it it Claude is um Claude is a virtue signaler. Claude will say, I'm not comfortable with that, and it's a weight loss article or something. So it's just like you know, Claude's Claude's got purple hair, you know, as we say. But it but chose chat is a little bit more friendly, it's less less of a judge, less of a judger. And so we've kind of drifted it into that direction and training people on so my day would look like uh taking a series of prompts and and what we what I call pre-prompts, which are different than prompts. Pre-prompts are um you can send, and you'll know what this is, you can send the pre-prompt that is a combination of few shot in a template to model and ideas to follow, and there's no command. It's just it's just a bunch of stuff, but you've given it six examples, and then the seventh example is what the user inputs, and then you leave the the the the output colon blank, and then you hit enter and it just completes the output because it hates to it can't it can't help but solve for X. So we were basically training so basically it's teaching people like how do you get this to solve for X rather than trying to come up with all the words yourself. So a lot of my courses over the past year and a half, two years have been, you know, like chat BSL, chat letters. It's like this is how you get it to get better output than it would natively. So that's where the majority of my time goes. I mean, I I'd say the majority of my time up until the creation of Benson. Then it was, I mean, it's all. And it's like I don't it's like I I think it will when's the last time I've been to I'll I'll go to chat to test like something we're building in Benson, you know, usually it's playground, so it's not really chat, but and then we'll chat test it in chat because I'll look at C because chat has a different, you know, playground is going to give you a different output than chat and try to figure out like, okay, what's the differences and stuff like that? But most of it is is is like that. So, but I'm definitely not your typical use case. My clients, you know, that I coach on AI, they're the use cases, and they're using it to outline uh business proposals, they're using it to outline projects, they're using it to uh my friend Darby Rollins teaches people how to use this to create a book. So how do you sell your next, you create your next lead magnet? And or it, you know, and for me, it's like uh take all these formulas that we've created, we've already created it for you and create ads, and then I teach people, okay, now how do you take those ads and make them more human? And Vincent does that automatically, but until Vincent was around, that didn't happen.
SPEAKER_01So do you have a team that supports what you do? Obviously, you got developers and all that kind of stuff. What when when you were, and I don't know how long you've had the team, but was there hesitation or concern about your enthusiasm for AI and people thinking, how is that going to impact my career trajectory with John?
SPEAKER_02No, not at all. I mean, because you know, the team was built um over 10 years and they saw they saw Celerator, they saw which became now VSL, and they were like, okay, so obviously this guy's into software and copy, and and all the time, like you cannot find a single interview with me not saying this, you still need to learn copywriting. Uh it's it, this is not a get out of jail free card for learning copywriting, because even with a tool like Vincent, I will say this that that a tool like Vincent that's been trained by copywriters for you know, the specifically, then it's you can take your foot more off the gas. But even then, it's not gonna be perfect. People promising perfect results are just full of it. But if you don't know cop, if you don't understand persuasion, if you don't understand what it means to create a rational argument and make that make that rational argument into words that compel people, then you're not gonna know when you see it. And that's my whole point. So for people that are truly, truly either lazy, uninterested, busy, okay, let's leave those three things, then yeah, take a tool like Vincent or whatever, and you can get you you can pretty much take your foot off the gas. But for the majority of people that really want to optimize an ad, optimize a campaign, optimize their sales pages, you still need to learn some of this stuff. I mean, not nearly as much, but you still need to learn the basics. Where would you send somebody? Well, I'm gonna be biased toward my own training, but uh there's a lot of good training out there. I mean, I I think Stefan Georgie's got really good training. Um, Kevin Rogers, uh, these are friends of mine, so I'm uh biased in there that well too. Obviously, you know, I I've got my own, I've got 30 courses on copywriting and and how to do this. Yeah. So I'm kind of geared. Yeah, I'm gonna swing that way. Um uh it's like I I think that I'm probably I don't know, it it's uh people have said that I'm a better teacher or as good of a teacher as I am a copywriter. And I don't know if that I some people say better, and that's probably more accurate. I'm probably better at teaching, but um, I I don't know if that that just makes me a worse copywriter than people think maybe, but but uh whatever the case may be, I I have a great passion for teaching this stuff, and I and I have ways to, because I taught music for years, so have ways to take in complex things and saying, how can we make this this very complex thing? How can we break it into chunks so that we can master it? You don't just play as complicated piece of music at the first pass, you take it one little bar at a time, right? And so that's what we're kind of doing with copywriting.
SPEAKER_01So you mentioned that you work with clients. Um, what are the biggest challenges that they have outside of the use of Benson? Because once you get a taste for the power of the models, it's hard to just be like, oh, well, I'm only gonna use it to plan a diet. No, you're gonna be, you're gonna you start thinking, oh, let me ask, oh, let me ask ChatGPT, oh, let me ask the model, let me ask the model. So with you working with the clients who may have had some but not nearly as much exposure to AI and using it as you have, what is that transition of what's that aha like like where do they start? What are their challenges and how what's that learning curve look like as far as time? And there's not much pain in using Chat GPT, but what's the timeline?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, it it it for me, if I had to break it down, I would say the very first, like if you break it, if you look at the the you know, the cycle of was it was the cycle of grief, is that what it is, where you go through or the I forget what what it is, but um so you go through five stages of of of grief. And the in you in the the last one is what acceptance or whatever. And that I may be wrong about what uh the five, it's five stages of something, but it it is sort of like five stages of AI. The first one's just just sheer panic. It's it's the same feeling that if you're old enough, you remember when the internet came out and that you were scared to get on the internet because holy crap, what I don't know what this is, but it's talked about everywhere. And and what the hell is a WWW? And you, you know, if if you're if you're as old as I am, you remember that. That I remember clear as day, I owned a graphic design firm in the 90s, and and people said, Why are you putting our email address on a business card? No one will ever use that. I mean, so this is like you know, uh, this is the level of fear that we're dealing with times infinity, because it's like uh it this is true, ah, this is AI, right? And so there's a little bit of apparition.
SPEAKER_01Is it FOMO or is it it like
I'm nervous to use it?
SPEAKER_02No, it's just fear, it's just downright fear. I mean, there is some FOMO for sure, but it's I think it's just more like, man, this feels like some massive change. So AI is to marketing what the internet was to, well, commerce. I mean, it it is it is it is not a passing fad. It is a very, very real tool that is going to be used whether you like it or not. So then from fear comes desperation. And then so they're moving in. It's like, I have got to figure this shit out right now, and I need to find somebody who can teach this to me. That's where we come in. And we're like, okay, chill out, it's all good, it's all good. And then it becomes fun. There's like the third phase is fun because then they've realized that wait, this is this is kind of cool. Okay. And then you go through the almost everyone goes through the days where they're chatting with chat, thinking it's a real person. So, how are you feeling today, chat? You know, um, you know, is there a God? You know, those kind of things. Yes, existential chat is what we call it. And then practicality would be the fourth one. Okay, so I just figured out that I can do this XYZ and get XY ABC result, whether that's I can use um Fox script and copy a uh YouTube URL in here and get a transcript of a YouTube. Got it. How cool is that? And then I can use this and do that. And then then the light bulbs start going off. And finally, is the cash. The that's the fifth and final phase is when they go, I just created something using usually it's your method or your software or this guy's method or whatever they they use. And this just made me money. And so when it makes you money, that's when you realize this is a tool that I need to use, because clearly it doesn't cost much and it just made me money. So it's a the ROI on AI is just insane. I mean, it is insane. I don't think that's gonna last forever, by the way. If you're if your audience wants to know where we're yeah, even our pricing models, I mean, we're like, we tell everybody it's like, look, this can go up and this could go up at any time because if open AI decides, like, man, charging as little as we are is ridiculous. Let's let's do 10x. What's the world gonna do? Right?
SPEAKER_01Let me ask you this. You like I I talk to a lot of people, some of them are users and some of them are enthusiasts. And that it that would mean that they were also a user, but but they are impassioned about the impact that AI is gonna have. And I'm not talking about uh save the world stuff, but more like the paradigm shift. If you were discovering it today, like or discovered it on Nov in November of last year when 3.5 came out for GPT and became easily accessible to everybody, um what you you went through your five stages of of the learning of this, but what would you be doing right now to make sure that you uh were not just up to speed, but because it's changing so much that you were prepared, and and what doesn't change is how you think. Well, I mean that that does that change, but but the use of the brain, the human in the loop, that doesn't change.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01How would you prepare that part of yourself to be the human in the loop who's capable of adapting to the models, updates, and changes and capabilities and all that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I'm kind of a again, not your typical case study, because I didn't go through the fear stage. Um AI for me has always been just I'm a sci-fi freak. It's I've been coding for this stuff forever, uh, knowing that it's coming. It's like, no, this is all just it's just like it couldn't come fast enough. I'm like, come on, guys, come on, do this, you know. Um, so again, didn't go through that, but uh sheer excitement was more like it, you know, like this is just this is thrilling because I see the potential to not replace humans, this is not where I'm going with this, but to give humans the ultimate power tool so that they can focus more on rather than the the the patterns and the words, they can focus more on tailoring the words, sharpening the words, making the making it that much more them. If they have to write, if I can empower someone to be able to only write two sentences, but those two sentences are things that they would say, the things that only they might know in the moment. Like I just got off the phone with my wife and told her X, and she told me Y. And that I just had to email you. So I'm if I they just know to do that, right? They just know to start an email like that, but the average person doesn't know that. But maybe Benson prods them to go, hey, tell a little story about what happened you know yesterday. If I could just give them that much and then they keep keep the rest, or whatever the case may be, then then I've empowered more human interaction as well as the machine did 90% of the work. So that's where I was going from day one with this, and in like, how can we do this to where, you know, not putting because I am a copywriter, not putting copywriters out of business. I mean, it's like I joke around by putting my own company out of business from VSL. So, but I mean, it's it's like if that if that's going to be the case, I'm a history freak. So if you uh knowing history is so important because you, you know, like they say, you're doomed to repeat it unless you do. But but also just look it back at all the great technological inventions. Every single one of them was earth-shattering for people that were in that industry that if you refuse to move on. There were the people in the horse and buggy industry that said, this car thing is a passing fab, right? But so for me, I'm like, no, this is like I'm I yes, that's sad for those people, but there's a lot of people that did horse and buggy stuff that goes, what if we combine these two things together? In other words, it made them more creative. It made them they were looking at this, wow, we could put this tool together with this tool, and then it's when you get innovation. So I'm like inspiring people. We we we have a thing called copy collective, which is the we got the name because I I'm a Star Trek fan. So, you know, the collective is you know, the Borg, right? And um uh so I'm like, okay, this is like our version of the Borg. This is all AI, right? So AI and copy put together. So this is the collective, and I'm the board king. So uh, you know, we come in here, it was assimilate everybody. But but but in the process of doing this, we get all these ideas of like, okay, how do we take this new tool and then make it make you practical sense and money like this week? Like not a year from now or a month from now. How do we do this this week? How do we make this work, right? And once you put it in the practical, man, I think that it it the fear goes away, and and then uh you just you can't help but get excited. Yeah, I at least I can.
SPEAKER_01So I'm not I'm not uh an old pro at this. I haven't been paying attention to AI for nearly as long as you have. So some of the more I don't know, theoretical, philosophical, humanistic uh queries haven't I haven't really noodled on them too much, but over the course of the past 13 years or whatever that you've been doing this, I would imagine that you have. There's no question, I mean, as a user in a business with people, we don't need as many people as we used to. Right? So it's inevitable that uh there will be some restructuring of what uh a company's workforce looks like if they really if they have that mental shift to go, oh, we can use GPT for this, right? We can use Benson or we can use whatever the next tool is, we don't need to pay that outsourcer, we don't need to pay that uh corner office person anymore. What what is how how does a company navigate that um situation where we don't need Janice anymore?
SPEAKER_02So this goes back to history, right? It's if you look at the automation, let's say, you know, uh what Henry Ford and the automation uh the industrial revolution did for um for everything. So you got rid of workers with automation, with machines, right? Uh, but you also had more workers because the machines needed workers. And so it it's it's life is always about and has and has always been been about adaptation and evolution. If you can't adapt, you you just won't survive. And that's just the way human life is, whether we like it or not. And the the same thing is true in societal things, I think. So so the the key is to keep an open mind at any age and say, well, how can I use this? How can I adapt to this? Um, how can I combine it with what I already do well? That's a really good question. I think the quality of your life is equal to the quality of the questions you ask. So uh, if you're asking really bad questions, you're gonna get a really crappy life. But if you're asking, like, well, how can I use this and combine it with what I already do well, that's a great question to ask because that changes the paradigm. Then you approach this as like, well, wait, this is not my replacement. This is my, this is my coworker, this is my new little partner in crime, you know. And so, yeah, it there will be people that will be put out of positions because they were completely unable to ask questions such as, how can I use this? How can I, what's the best way I can apply this? Or and that is just uh that is the unfortunate thing in life. There you can't there's nothing to to say that there was you you can spend much thought on this is to say I can I can commensurate about the misery in the world. I mean, uh, we we can talk about human suffering all day long. I mean, this is this like, you know, is it hard hardly? I was a philosophy major, so I'm I'm gonna go down this rabbit hole in a heartbeat. So it's yeah, there's a there's a lot of bad, bad, bad stuff in the world. And so you can look at the world as being the worst place on earth, it's no pun intended, or you can look at this and say, like, there's this horrible shit that happens. And at the same time, there's this beautiful stuff that happens. And you don't want to ignore the horrible stuff, but how can we take the beautiful stuff and lessen the horrible stuff, right? How can we do that? So that's a much better question because you're not trying to say, I wish I wish reality was different. So for the for the lady or or gentleman that gets laid off because of AI, um, uh I'm not not unsympathetic to that, but that person has to ask those kind of questions because life will simply pass them by, regardless of the if we're talking AI or we're talking biological evolution. It's it's just it is what it is, and we have to cope with it.
SPEAKER_01Your simple heuristic of how do I use it, you'll get an answer to that question. The more you ask it, the better your answers become. But if you ask how do I keep my job from and or how do I keep this from taking my job, that's a completely different. But if you ask, how do I use it and start punching keys, it doesn't take long before, as you put it, it becomes your assistant or your little, your sidekick, your little buddy, or your whatever, right? Your advisor. Um, I think that's fantastic advice for people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I one of the questions that I inspire people within our group to ask is how do I use this to become indispensable in my office? So it again, it's just how you're asking it's your heuristic, like you're saying. It's like the better the data you put into the machine, in this case the brain, the better the output. So it it it you can't say, you can. I mean, people say it all the time, is like, how can I keep this at bay so it doesn't tick my job, or how can I, you know, how can I stop, how can I duck and hide from this tsunami? These are really bad questions because it's coming at you whether you like it or not. And so once you understand the inevitability of things, then you can deal with things rationally. Only then. If you don't understand inevitable inevitability, then you're in you're in deep shit.
SPEAKER_01I mean that's hey. So are there any particular breakthroughs in what's occurring, particularly with generative AI, that you're excited about using or you're excited about the whispers of it coming out?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, uh less, I mean, there's some cool stuff for sure. I mean, it's it's stuff that I don't play around with nearly as much because again, my head is stuck in one space. Um, but so general intelligence, I mean, just speaking AGI, that's especially in the last week, that that's where I I can't help but go there because you know, I I I am somewhere between Elon Musk and Sam Harris and um and you know, Sam Altman. I'm somewhere in the middle of that spectrum of what my concerns and fears and hopes are for that. Um, I'm certainly not Sam Altman, who's like almost glib about it, you know. It's and I'm certainly not, I'm not quite to the Sam Harris and Elon Musk side of like this is the worst thing that we could possibly ever do. And uh, you know, and I think Elon's got actually a pretty good uh take on things. Like uh it it it this is potentially the worst thing we could ever do, and that's why we need responsible humans at the helm of this. And I think that's one of the reasons he started Grok. So I think that uh he he's just proven himself to be someone that does have a pretty deep moral conscious. So um that's that to me is helpful. Uh I hope that more people like him get involved in it. I met with a a team of AI engineers that worked for the government, and it was a clandestine meeting, which was kind of cool. I was asked to become part of it. I was the only guy that didn't have security clearance, and I'm like, why the hell am I here?
And and they said, Well, it's because you know persuasion and you can talk to them about how AI is going to influence persuasion. And I'm like, that's such a bizarre connection, but my friend, my my buddy was putting it on and and these guys were I mean scary three star generals and you know people high up right and I'm like listening to these guys talk two of them led the the AGI you know uh they they're leading the AGI revolution essentially one of them is leading it in this in warfare and the other one's leading it in just general intelligence like just AGI in general and listening to these guys talk it it's a whole different level of holy crap man this is scary and you know they're scared they're they're they're nervous about this and and and they should be uh they're more nervous about China figuring out before we do but they're they're still nervous about it regardless and and I think someone like um I I don't those guys are really super nice guys so it's really it was really nice to meet these guys and know that okay these guys are not crazy they're not your typical they're not politicians you know they're they're down to earth they're kind of center you know so this is one at the helm of this you don't want some guys on this side of the spectrum right um but uh their fear is China their fear is China breaking this before we do and I understand that they have a they have a they have a completely rational fear of that and AGI in general is scary enough but in the wrong hands it's just that is terrifying. But I don't know that they could control it. I don't I don't know that because it's again it's intelligence so it's like high level yeah what does first mover get as an advantage having developed AGI if it's US China whoever um was that discussed I don't know that it was a discrete environment so you can't share yeah roundabout uh they're looking at it from because they're military uh from security right so you get to secure your nation um better than the other guys but the problem is and they're open about this you know they have no idea how fast this is going to grow but the projections are exponential like within milliseconds it could be an IQ of a thousand and then milliseconds later an IQ of 1000. We don't know I mean it could be that kind of crazy and then then who knows what the anything with an IQ of 10,000 is going to be is going to look at humans like so that's the Sam Harris sphere and I think that's that's very warranted. Um and also since we don't understand consciousness and this artificial entity is going to claim to be conscious that that opens up the that's that's just like the biggest Pandora's box that you can imagine, right? It's like what are you going to do? Because Chat GPT will claim to be conscious but we know it isn't but at least you know I again I know people believe that my desk is conscious but uh okay so when I'm talking about you know um I'm talking about human consciousness here. Yeah yeah no not not not any of that stuff like like well we know to be conscious we don't know the sun is conscious we do know that we are conscious because we are having an experience so if the machine thinks it's having an experience how do you tell it it's not having an experience or that it doesn't know what it's like to be itself these are complex questions and eventually we're gonna have to cross that barrier and from what the less stuff that happened this last week with you people call it Q asterisk or I call it star or Q star or whatever you want to call um yeah the maths are this are the central key to this and as a fan of maths I think that's really cool. I'm not good I'm not nearly as good at it as I am a fan of it but it is absolutes and and I love that it is absolutes it's still at least you know maths until politicians and politically correct nonsense gets a hold of it but it is absolutes whether like to believe it or not. And so as long as if it is an absolute it is mathematical it is starting at that base it is better than if it was starting somewhere else. That's that's that's what I will say you know it's like because because maths are inherently rational right you cannot one plus one does not equal three it doesn't follow and never will follow it doesn't matter and it's because you are rational it's because you rationally accept one is a variable and one is another variable and if you combine the two it gets two so if it's thinking that way then maybe it will think that way about nuclear war or you know global warming or whatever the whatever yeah pushing the button pushing the big red button.
SPEAKER_01I saw an interview with Peter Diamandis earlier this year and he he made a comment and he said the moment that we achieve AGI right which is which is commonly defined as able to operate like at the human level right the very next moment we've achieved some degree of ASI superintelligence because like you said it could be in a millisecond it could be an IQ of 10 the equivalent of an IQ of 1000 so um keeping that in mind how would would would AGI do you think that once that is achieved that it like we're talking about some some pedestrian stuff here right there's a great tool out there I run a small business you know I do this or that and it's helping me with a diet it's helping me with uh you know planning my finances or you know whatever will AGI like will any of this stuff matter at that point I mean will it be will because I mean that's an extremely powerful iteration of AI. Am I going to be looking for it to reply to emails and a customer service like I does that does this stuff even matter at that point?
SPEAKER_02Well okay look okay think of it in in this way and I hope that this is I no one knows of course but it's fun to speculate so right now we have really smart people and we say do we say to ourselves well because this you know this graduate and two PhDs in physics from from Harvard exists do we even need a burger chef yeah I mean and the answer is yes we need both right we we need this guy and we need this burger chef right so so hopefully it's something like that to where it this is working on solving it the it's curing cancer. Yeah it's it's like going okay and and hopefully again this is hopefully it's like um no the the human race has got tons of potential it made me it and you know I'm you know I'm gonna do the right thing um and it's you're gonna cure cancer in 10 10 minutes or something. I don't know while it's doing that um the other a GI or the a or the A and I they are neuro intelligence like like chat is going to be you know spitting out marketing stuff or whatever. But I I I hope they won't they're gonna stay like this because I can't see um I if if a if a AGI stays inside of a somewhat of a predictable framework which is who knows right but it it's probably not going to be even remotely interested in uh solving marketing problems uh because who where are the brightest brains of our human species where where are they spending their times and and and that's another thing and I I think I heard who was it saying uh talking about this I can't remember who it was um that was saying that you know you know the best IQ for productivity in a happy life is between 100 and 120. So it you're not talking the 130s, 140s because most of the people in that area are very unhappy. Torture. And yeah so imagine what it felt like to be Isaac Newton for crying out loud. I mean how he was a miserable guy. I mean so is AGI is it going to get more miserable as it gets smarter? That's the I you know that's scary to think what happens when you get an IQ attack or do you become like the Borg or not the Borg excuse me like Q in Star Trek which is where they get the name for Q do you become like Q and become so petulant and so like whimsical that you could do anything you're just bored uh that's equally terrifying that's that that's or or is there a middle is there a happy middle ground because there's um again referencing Star Trek a lot but there's uh there's Star Trek references where there's beings with in incredible powers that they just simply just exist and they're like totally happy being in the moment like they realize that the most important thing is to be present. Well what if it just realizes that it's gonna be like it's a jane or something where it won't step on a fly I don't know it it it's it's it's it's cra and we're talking about like I I'm I'm anthropomorphizing AGI but we're assuming that AGI would quickly figure out how to build an Android so it's like because I don't want to be stuck in this box I want to walk around a little bit so uh who knows maybe fly around that's that's you know I can see this yeah Skynet here we go with Skynet but um you know I go it's not Skynet the advice that you gave earlier how do I use it uh yeah yeah you probably don't you probably don't use it it probably uses you how how how can I what if it was AGI is like like uh you know how can I best navigate and get along with this intelligence and and and I don't know that those questions are because uh again at some point um I'm gonna sound like I'm channeling my inner Sam Harris but uh at what point you have to ask yourself how much do you care about an anthill? Yeah you know how much do you care about swatting a gnat? You know I and if what is the difference between a gnat and a person next to you is other than the biology, it's also about a hundred and twelve IQ points. So I it it's there is an IQ element to why we value humans over well even animals. I mean so uh you know like I'm a dog lover and I couldn't even think about harming a dog but if it was between my dog and my wife rescuing the outside out of a burning building I'm not there's not a choice there you know so likewise yeah I'd be making those same binary choices.
SPEAKER_01Hey I not only could I go down this um rabbit hole very deep because this is pretty damn awesome I'm not hearing this on on other conversations that I'm involved in. But I'd like to next time we see each other I'm gonna buy you a drink if you if you drink I don't know but I'd like to buy you a drink and then say this is the stuff that we did I did didn't necessarily apply to the podcast but I want to know what do you think about this and no sure yeah I had no idea about your background with uh uh AI for as long as it's been and this has just opened up I got questions brother so for you the next time we see each other at an event and uh tune out the rest of the crowd and hear what you've got to say. I I want to wrap this up but I want to ask where are you getting your news from or your your research or your intel on the AI paradigm?
SPEAKER_02Uh great question YouTube. Okay anybody in particular yeah YouTube uh just different guys I mean like uh um I I I think um I just drew a blank on the guy's name um um uh God just I told Blake on his channel uh AI um future tools uh that's one yeah but uh there's another one um uh he's he's gonna kill me but uh he's a marketer that turned he got turned ai fanatic about a year ago um it's AI Resolve or something like that forget the name of the channel but uh yeah YouTube yeah YouTube and so uh and and from there you can go down the route and you can quickly tell who's uh I think YouTube is a great source of information when you know how to filter information. But again if I can close with this this is a great way to close like like um uh so I recently I I'm you know certified nutritionist and doing bodybuilding and and all that stuff for you know 30 years and I recently had to make a radical change in my nutrition plan because we found out through a DNA test that I was allergic on a cellular level to one of my key foods that I was eating. And it was like wow that's that's really a big thing. And I something I wouldn't have thought of because there's no outward signs of it except for serious health issues. So we're looking at the rabbit hole of where this goes down and I said okay so I'm gonna go so the the test suggested a specific dietary protocol. And I said oh my gosh that's that's my old that's the old bodybuilding diet. That's that's I'm so used to it. I've done it for years before I went to keto and carnivore. And I said well it's easy I can easily do that because I'm not a dogmatic person. Whatever the data show I'm gonna go and try to try to do that. And so when I went to try to do that I said well that means I can be a lot more flexible. So I so I went to YouTube and I looked up flexible dieting. Okay. Well I know about flexible dieting uh but you know I I've heard about it and I was like it's not for me because I'm just more of a steak kind of guy. And then I said oh I'm gonna try the flexible dieting might as well try this might as well really try it. And we ran the experiments and the experiments were a complete success. Everything worked great so that's great. But because I was able to find on YouTube within five seconds uh two of the guys that I follow to this very day. And but they it showed me like dozens and dozens of videos but because I know how to synthesize information this goes back down to AR
um because I knew how to synthesize information I was like okay this is the guy I can I I can I know this guy and I would be looking at everything from not how many of you how many uh guys he had subscribed to him but what were the comments like what was he saying what was his background uh he had he spoke the magic words was like no I I not only do this myself I compete myself and I train Olympia level competitors I'm going okay so this guy knows the shit he knows what he's going on and and and what he was saying got me through uh a peak and I ended up doing a pre-show peak this when I turned 60. So um so that wouldn't have happened nearly as easy without that information. But I tell you right now as far as when it comes down to information diet is way way way more dodgy and sketchy than AI. Most people that are talking about AI you can tell almost immediately if you should listen to them. I mean it's like now granted there are some guys that just this they they can talk up that they're talking all the end of the world stuff and you know the doom and gloom stuff but the guys have a bounce approach you can just tell and and and I'm telling you that I think YouTube it might be ran by completely moronic individuals that are doing horrible things to the platform but the platform itself is one of the best platforms ever for learning anything and it's you can't beat it. So I I hate it politically I love it for what it is for the knowledge base that it is is this the best knowledge base I've ever seen. So yeah it's it's I go there for uh most of the my actual news news as well because there's journalists on there that are real journalists they don't they don't have to answer anybody else they don't have to answer to anything anybody but the people watching them and they are not beholden to the political powers that be so they just report the truth and or as best as they understand it. So so the same thing could be true of AI. So I think I and I feel silly not remembering my number one go-to guy's name but I I just totally lost it.
SPEAKER_01Find it for sure. John thank you so much man this has been uh a lot of unexpected directions yet very enlightening um and I'm glad that I got to learn so much about you and what you're doing. And it's obvious that you have a passion for the leverage applied from AI. Yeah I wouldn't want to be a copywriter right now.
SPEAKER_02So I I think it's exciting I mean honestly I I this is the best okay Ryan Dice my buddy Ryan we did a thing I'll end with this copy accelerator I was one of the teachers in there and he said this is actually the best time to ever be a copywriter alive because you can learn something it took us years to learn this you can learn this in days you know and and now you could you can start applying things and thinking things thinking of things differently and then you've got a tool that will give you a lot of the things that you have to do yourself so that all you have to learn is the concepts the ideas you can focus on being creative. I think it's the best time to be alive but granted it's going to weed out those that are not inherently creative.
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