Harnessing AI for Breakthroughs in Marketing with Jon Benson at BNSN

Mike Maynard: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I'm Mike Maynard and today I'm joined by John Benson. John is the founder of Benson and CEO of that company and also the creator of vsl. Welcome to the podcast, John.

Jon Benson: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it Mike. Good to be here.

Mike Maynard: It's great to have you on and we always like to uh, start off by getting people to tell us a little bit about their story and what they're doing. So tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to create Benson.

Jon Benson: Uh, so I started in 2004 back in the stone age with uh, a crazy book idea that I had. I wanted to write a book all my life and I was in my, I was in my 30s and decided I would write a book on being Fit Over 40, which became the name of the book. Fit Over 40 became the title. That's pretty self descriptive. But uh, I had just gone through a, uh, heart attack and obesity and horrible disease states and so I just went back to my athletic roots I grew up with and kind of thought, okay, well I can't be the only one that has gone through this and worked themselves nearly into an early grave and, but I probably am the only guy that I know with like a dozen diseases and two of which can kill you at my age. So I was like, that's pretty rare. And I thought, okay, this might make a good story but a short one. So I decided I would interview 50 other people that did similar things and that became fit over 40. And um, so I was just a writer and a fitness guy and a clinical nutritionist and, and you know, just, just that's what I was, I was doing that part time and design part time music playing on the side, you see the guitars in the background. So I was just kind of living a, like a bohemian lifestyle really. And then next thing you know I start a friendship, uh, up with this guy named Tom Venuto who's still a legend in the, in the marketing space. And, and he said I'll write the sales copy for this. And I had no idea what he meant. And uh, he goes, yeah, that sounds great. 5050 partners. And little did I know that this was going to be like um, the biggest book on ClickBank for a while. And, and so I took off and, and I never looked back. And that's how I got thrown into this crazy world.

Mike Maynard: And so that drove you to kind of work out how to create content using AI. But I mean you've kind of alluded to the fact you're a non technical founder. So I mean what sort of challenges does that present?

Jon Benson: Yeah, I'm like, I'm like a really techy, non techy guy. I'm like, it's, I used to race motocross in high school and in junior high and, and this is kind of a parallel. Like people would ask me all I go to the track and I'd be throwing my bike 30ft in the air and it's like, it's like it was nothing, right? It was like crazy stuff that you see, you know, all those people doing backflips and stuff. And you know, I, I was just, and I'd, you know, I'd come into the, the pits and they'd go, you know, what, what kind of, what kind of plugs are you running in that gate? I go, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. No clue. I, I just turn the machine on and I go. And that's kind of the way I am with, with, with computers. I don't, I have no idea what, how much memory I have on my computer. Don't care. And so I just kind of just focus on what can it give me, what, what can I do with it. I don't care about the inner workings as much as I care about what it can do with. And so uh, the programming thing never fit my personality. But the conceptual, the idea really did like, oh, I can do this, I can build this. So I kind of became an architect of it. And when AI came out we were way ahead of the AI curve. We've been doing AI since 2018 and, and really saw the handwriting on the wall because of the apps we were building that, that this is going to, this is going to be revolutionized the world if it ever gets to the point where people can use it. And yeah, we helped a small way getting it to the point where people could use it. So at least in copywriting, at least in what we do, we were the very first software uh, that did copywriting on a high level and, and that language breakdown was necessary for LLMs to understand how to even think about copy. It's, it's kind of interesting because it's structural before it's learning from examples. So um, so yeah, that's, that's really how all this kind of all melded together at a really good time. It's the, the VSLs are in copy in general is notoriously difficult to write. If it was easy to write, there'd be, you know, millions of millionaires out there that it's, there's just not. And they're, I mean not in the space. Right. There are not a lot of offers that are doing, you know, eight, nine figures. And the ones that do have really got this down. They've really figured out how to tap on the, all the key, uh, points of persuasion. And VSL does that better than any other selling vehicle. So I wanted to see if AI could do it. And AI is not like if you go to Claude right now or chatgpt or whatever and you say write me a vsl, just good luck, it's going to be really, really bad. But we took the capabilities of AI and it just strung it together in this long chain of things that we know to do and created Benson. That's how Benson got created and does more than VSLs. But it started with just VSLs. It started with just long form VSLs which are notoriously difficult to write. And ours sounded really human and converted. So it was, that's how it kind of got started. And uh, now we're, now we write anything and everything we want with it.

Mike Maynard: I love that approach. It's like we built something and um, it really worked to deliver results. So it probably was quite good. I think that's fantastic. I mean, let's talk a little bit about VSLs. Maybe some of the people listening aren't really familiar with the term. So you can explain what a VSL is. You know, why um, it's so difficult to write and also why it delivers such great results, uh, and great revenue when you get it right.

Jon Benson: Yeah. So, uh, stands for Video Sales letter. And you've seen them because they're all over the place. I mean it became ubiquitous in, in Instagram feeds and Facebook where you see videos and you see all the script at the bottom. Like you see these apps like Descript that do nothing but put the copy at the bottom right. That, that's just vsl. That's, that's uh, that's what we built. But ours went one step further. It had no images in it at all. It was all text. And so you still see these all over the place. You just have especially in direct response. Uh, Agora still uses them all the time. The top offers on clickbank still uses it all the time. We, and they can blend some images, but it's mostly text. And the reason it works is because people notoriously don't read. But uh, if you're reading and listening at the same time, obviously you've got two different modes of, of getting information into your brain. So it's going to go up. The ability to hear and the ability to see is going to make things a little better than just the ability to see. So as far as retention goes, then we add all this other layers on top of it, which is hypnotic pacing and NLP and things, things that, that really disengage the critical part of your brain. Not the critical part that says, oh, I'm trying to manipulate you into making a, uh, decision that's not good for you, but the part that's skeptical by nature. The fear of mechanisms in our brain that, you know, they've evolved a lot slower than we have. And so we still have all of them. You know, we still hear a sound and think it's a tiger. It's, it's just part of our evolutionary programming. So we kind of had to slip underneath that radar and slip underneath that, that guard that everybody's got up and speak to the emotion and speak to, uh, sometimes the primal emotion, depending on the topic, but definitely the emoted state of the buyer. Because you buy based on emotion, you justify your buying based on logic. You don't buy based on logic, no matter how logical you think you are. So once you, we understand all those factors, a static text page becomes a far less compelling thing. It doesn't mean it doesn't work. I mean I remember when this came out in 2006 and Ryan Dice was saying, oh, John killed sales pages. And it's like, no, I still use sales pages. It's just, it's just another mode of selling that happens to be insanely effective because it, it forces you to read. Another thing it does is really cool is most sales pages get read to the tune about 6%. Well this forces you to either bail or read every word. I mean it's like uh, if you build halfway through, you read half the sales page, there's no way around you heard it or read it or something. So the message that people spend these months, they used to spend months on writing a letter on can now be heard. And that is now can be written in minutes thanks to tools like Benson. But it can be heard, which is kind of an important thing. Get, get yourself message heard.

Mike Maynard: I mean, that's interesting. Obviously you know, a lot of what you talked about, the uh, driving emotion is important in whatever you generate, whatever you write. I mean, is there something particularly special that really makes a great VSL stand out against something that's not going to perform.

Jon Benson: Usually I would say it's, it's how they weave narrative with pain. So the, the, the weaving of the. Everybody that's buying something has a pain, has some sort of pain they want to fix, right? Even if you're saying I'm buying a, ah, pleasure cruise, okay, why are you doing that? You just keep going down that, that it doesn't take very long to get to the real reason. It's like, well, you might really enjoy pleasure cruises and that's great. And I'm not saying that people don't buy things that they enjoy. They do. The primary motivation for buying something is, is lack, is pain. Now I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm not saying I'm not here to judge it either. It just is what it is. And so if you don't speak to the pain of your prospect, uh, you're not ever going to make them feel like they're, they're seen, heard or understood. The three most valuable things you could ever do as a marketer. So if you can make them feel seen, heard, understood, and then valued and respected, on top of that, now you're batting a thousand. I don't think there's a better way to do that than combining narrative, a story with understanding the pain. And to do that with words is completely possible. Otherwise sales pages wouldn't work. To do it with words and voice is far more doable. And that's because it goes I think back down to when we were children. We read stories a lot. So uh, we're used to hearing stories, we're used to hearing narrative. We're not so much as used to reading narrative. And it's a sad statement of indictment of our culture. Maybe, but we're not avid readers anymore. I don't think VSLs would have worked in the 1700s, but if the technology wasn't. But it certainly wouldn't work for people who are just totally avid readers. Uh, even though it would be shocked how many doctors we have in our community, just people who are avid readers that just, they still start reading and they're watching. But it's the narrative combination with, with really relating to somebody's pain. And I'm not saying in, in a, uh, oh, if you, if you don't get this, you're going to be harmed or anything like that. Nothing like that. I'm saying it's like relating to where their discomfort is. Like as an example for, for weight loss, the reason why my weight loss Offers work so well, and I was the top guy in the industry for 10 years is because I. Very few people lived it. When they wrote the copy, I would read the copy and go, you've never been fat a day in your life. You know, I could tell because the things they were saying didn't make any sense and they didn't do the research, the avatar research, but in the ones that did were far better. But there's still that missing factor of literally being able to say, I know exactly what this feels like and it feels different for you than it deals does for me. But it sucks for both of us. Trust me, we don't. I don't have to feel exactly what you feel, but maybe it's because. And then I'll say things like, maybe you're feeling, uh, guilt ridden because your, your kids are looking at you and watching how you're eating and you're scared that they might be forming patterns around you. Or maybe you feel ashamed. I felt this, I felt this, that, and the other. But what I did in that very subtle sentence was say, maybe you're experiencing this and people who are, are going to go, oh my gosh, that's, that's completely me. That makes them feel seen and understood. And then when you say, look, this is, there's a fix for this. It's not that. There's no judgment here. I totally get it. I was there. And so once you can say I was there and I was. I figured out a way around it, then the judgment goes away because you're not judging anyone. You're just saying, I have a solution that's been proven to work not just for me, but now for, you know, these thousands of people. So, so that's, that's much more effective to do with a voice combined with text, in my opinion.

Mike Maynard: I love that. I think that's great. I mean, I'm really interested about the sort of early days in the company because obviously you built the product, you used it, it worked, but then you gave it out to customers. I mean, what surprised you when customers started using it? What did they do that you didn't expect?

Jon Benson: Uh, ah, I jokingly say I put myself out of business. I was ready to stop writing for other people. And, uh, I wanted to really do something that could expand this, what we built to people who couldn't afford it. I mean, I was a hundred thousand dollars to write a vsl. That's. That sounds shockingly high until you see what they generate. So once you generate, you know, $50 million, the VSL. $100,000 isn't that much money, but I'm, um. What's the top guy in the world that. That's. And it feels it's a very, very high margin. Right? But even guys who are like, in B level copywriters are charging 30, $40,000 to write a VSL because it's a lot of work. And so I was like, well, I. I'm not trying to put people out of work, but what if I can help them do it like 10 times faster? And also with the knowledge that of a dozen copywriters that they just. There's no way they could filter that knowledge. That couldn't hold it all. I mean, I can't hold it. No one can hold all the knowledge they learn from all the greats in the world. And so then with formulas that we already know work, so it just make it so much easier, then all they have to do is put their creative input into it, and then they can say, oh, I see the vision going this way. And then. Then it becomes what they really want to do. Most people don't want to write words like most copywriters don't want to write. They want to create. They want to. There's a difference there. I'd rather speak it, and then I'd rather, like, narrate it like an idea. And so I got into this consulting realm where it was like, okay, five grand an hour to consult with for ten years of. It's. That's what it's been. And I said, like, I'm not going to write any copy at all. I'm just going to get on a. Get on a call, we're going to talk, and we're just going to talk to the offer. Where's the positioning? Where's the hook? Where's the big idea that's almost always missing? So it's almost always buried, you know, so it's very rarely is it right at the top where it should be. And then we'll figure it out. And then when we start talking, all of a sudden it's. It's a conversation and the narrative changes. And then the like, well, yeah, this is how you sell. This is exactly how you sell. So just turn our conversation into words on the page. There you go. So record it. Record everything and just give it to them. And that became kind of the impetus of what I was doing. So what if you go, I could teach other people to do that if I was there saying, okay, what about this? You know? And that's what Benson 3 has is me saying, hey, let me help you come up with your big idea. Let me help you come up with your hook. Let me do this right from the start so that everything you write, ads, emails, everything, obviously BSLs sound fantastic and, and they, they, they resonate on a level that's beyond just trying to market to somebody. Because if you talk about what some people want from a product, it's one thing, but what do they want from the life that, the product that they, they are imagining? Well, what do they want that life to be different? How do they want to be different? In what ways do they want to be different that is so radically different than. I want to learn to be a copywriter. Why do you want to learn to be a copywriter? What is it about being a copywriter that makes any sense at all? Well, almost always you're going to get down to freedom. You're gonna get down to like, you know, like the ability to, to work and travel anywhere you want. Uh, the ability to make more money than you're making out. So, so, and why do you want that? And so you just keep asking why, why, why? You get down to these really core values, right? So that's what a job of a copywriter is, is to get to the core values. And if I take the mechanism, all the stuff out of the way, that gets in the way of it, which is I have to think of structure, I have to think of, uh, I've got, I've got to learn all these, these, these patterns, these NLP technique patterns and these hypnotic phrasing patterns and these induction, uh, you know, take all that away and just so you can just think about it, just, just think about the vision. Makes it a lot easier. And so that's when I turned it over. I was kind of surprised that people were able to, you know, I've had so many people come up to me say, you made me a millionaire. And I, I just, they went through just, just a vsl. I was like, that's what they did. But they had a formula, they could free their minds to think. And, and so once you do that, it same thing with all copy for ads and emails and everything people need, they try to do it themselves. It's like trying to fix your own car. Even worse. It's probably more like trying to operate on yourself. Even if you're a surgeon, you don't want to do that.

Mike Maynard: I love that analogy. I mean, I guess, you know, one of the things I need to ask is, you know, AI's got a bit of a bad name when it comes to content. You know, there's a lot of low quality slot being produced. What is it you do with Benson that makes sure that you focus on delivering quality rather than volume?

Jon Benson: That's a great question. Man, if you only knew how much I hate, ah, AI copy. Um, it's. I have, uh, there's a crack in my monitor from the, um, from my watch. I hate this. Uh, so, yeah, whenever you're a writer, I think your sensitivities go up dramatically over when you see really bad copy. And AI is flooded with really, really, really bad gavi. And the only way that we could even remotely get this to work is we figured out early on that if you did not do this more than once, there was no way for it to happen. So it had to start with something that it understood as being good. It had to. There was no way around it. You have to start with something that you know is good. And, uh, it can be one thing because the AI will just latch onto that one thing and then make a clone of it. That wouldn't. That's not what you want. There has to be a series of things. And then this is way before, by the way, just so everyone knows. Way before, Claude. Way before, like having like, uh, a custom GPTs. We, we figured this out four years, five years ago. So we had to lump it all together into this thing and say, I need you to learn from this knowledge base. Okay? First of all, don't replicate it. Learn from it, and then get your first draft. And that's where the people that were really kind of in the know, that's where they stopped and the first draft came out. And they're like, going, oh, wow, that's so much better than, you know, going to chat. Or of course it's better than going to jab. But, um, because chat's been trained on copy, that sucks. I mean, chat's been trained on the Internet. Do you think the Internet's full of good copy? It's like, it's. It's the most obvious question to ask, right? It's like, well, why do you. Why is Benson write such better copy than. Well, it's because Claude and Chad, they're trained on the entire Internet, so they're going to be, you know, they're going to have a lot of crap in there. So we just gave it nothing but the good stuff. Focused. Nothing but this, right? And then came the magic. The magic sauce. Then we said, okay, the writing is rewriting and copywriting. That's a Phrase John Carlton made popular. Uh, I have a whole course on editing copy. So I said, what if we took that same approach with, with AI So we have one AI Agent that does nothing but give it humanization, and we have another AI Agent that comes in and strips out everything that's AI like the ubiquitous, uh, you know, em M Dashes now or the, the absolutely horrible rhetorical questions that AI Loves to ask, like, are you ready to get rich? No, man, I'm so happy being poor. I mean, they ask the dumbest questions imaginable, right? And um, so we, so we just strip all that down and then we do another pass. So we do like four passes before you ever see anything. And so we're. I, I could show you on the screen here some. Sometimes the books that we write, like in Book Builder, are like six to one. So for every one word you see, it's took us six to, to write it, right? And so the copy is the same way. Three to one is what we shoot for. But sometimes it's four or five to one and it has to be right. And so we're paying a lot more than what we're charging for. So we get, we charge you for words on the screen. We don't charge you for words that are in the background. And so it's a very different billing model and is one that it's, quite frankly, isn't as profitable as some of the competitors that we use, which is why they can charge ridiculously bad, low amounts of rate for really crap copy. It's that simple. It really is. So to do it right, in other words, to do it right, it has to be rewritten over and over again and then it will be okay. But it is, it's. That's the only thing. And so we created this thing called chains. And that became, by the way, this was the birth of agents. This is before agents. So we had chains, and they were static. So chain would pass thing off to one thing to another to another, and it would grade it on a test. And so we've been, you know, pretty, pretty cutting edge with what we've been doing. Not out of like trying to be techie, but out of trying to get the best possible product. And that's, that's how it works, man. But I'm totally with you. Most of it's, Most of it's crap.

Mike Maynard: I love that. I love the, ah, you know, six words to create one. I think, you know, people who actually do a lot of writing for a living will kind of relate to that. And maybe humans don't do six to one, but you know, you certainly write a lot more words than ultimately you produce. Just pivoting a little bit here. You know, the listeners on the podcast are ah, in the B2B sector and you're obviously from a consumer, more consumer background. I mean B2B copy's got a pretty bad reputation for being, you know, very dull, very corporate. I mean, what's Your view about B2B and what should B2B copywriters be doing to make their copy and make their VSLs, uh, more effective?

Jon Benson: I have a very good friend, Matthew Stafford, and he's one of the top guys in B2B and marketing and copy. And he said this to me because he gives the something I saw you say on uh, stage once and I just, I took it back and we implemented it and really did really well for us. I said, I said there's no such thing as selling to a business. It doesn't exist. You're selling to a person at a business, a business never will buy anything from you. You're selling to a person, period. And there's always one person at the end of the chain, always one. But the person reading your email, there's not a group of people sitting around reading your email. And this is what business to business, B2B guys think that, that there's this team of people that they have to talk to and about their team of people. No, it's, it's not that way at all. And so once you strip this down to the human element to it again, it's, it's all being about human. It's like what's the pain points of the business and how does your business solve? Their businesses pain points, they don't give a damn about your business. They don't care. No one cares about your offer, no one cares about your product, no one cares about your business. No one. They don't care. What they care about is can you relieve the pain that they're experiencing? That's it. And once you understand that hard brutal truth of reality, as I, as AI would say, now I can no longer say brutal truth because of AI. Um, once you understand that it, the life becomes a lot easier, then you get out of your own way and you stop talking about yourself. So I will challenge like when I was doing a lot of copy teaching and uh, Benson kind of teaches you as it goes along as well, which is, I think it's important to know copy, otherwise you don't know if it's good or not. But one of the things we teach people is to do is to write an entire piece of copy without ever mentioning your. What your business does once. It. Just as an exercise. Just as an exercise. Like, nothing specific about your business at all. Just. It's like. And so people will. Like. Especially the B2B guys. They're going to. I. I can't do that. It's like, I. It's a T shirt. Uh, how, uh, do I do that? It's like, okay, why do people want a T shirt? I don't know. They want a T shirt. No, why do they want a T shirt? You know, it's like, I don't know. Look good. Oh, uh, like I said, to look good. So your. Does your T shirt help them look better? It's like, well, yeah, because it's got this. This polyester cotton blend. No one cares about that. No one cares about that. It said. So you say, look, look. We designed something to help you look better, and it helps you. It helps every man that puts it on look better. That's what everyone says. Just read the reviews below. It makes you look better, makes you look tighter, more fit. I know you don't got time to go to the gym. Neither do I. So we. We had to figure out something, and this is what we figured out. So much easier than going to the gym. Okay, do, uh, you see where I'm going with this? This is not for a copywriter. This is just easy, right? But for a B2B guy or a marketer or a guy that is so proud of the stainless steel polyester blend that they just put together in this shirt, right? That that's what they're really thinking about. Or is it this or the M M5 chip in the Mac? It's. No one cares. No one cares. It's. It's what they care about, what it solves. And if you just. And so as an exercise, talk about only what it solves, the only what it solves, then all of a sudden, now you can start talking about your business, but only after you talk about that. It's like, this is. If you're anything like us, you are tired of X and X, Y and Z is it's dragging your business down. And we talk to people all the time in the same exact position. It's like, what do you do about it? Well, we have an answer. I'd love to share it with you. Do you have five minutes? I didn't mention anything. I didn't even tell them what it was. I was like. And so I guarantee you that will get more response than, you know, here at Acme Incorporated, we pride ourselves on, uh, geez, I'm already asleep and I'm talking.

Mike Maynard: And that sounded just like a lot of copy, you see. So, you know, I have to write. I mean, you know, here at the agency, we talk a lot about, you know, you've obviously got to remove the pain. Somebody's got a problem, you've got to fix the problem. But also in B2B, I think one of the big things, one of the things you can really deliver to your customers is to get them promoted. So if you do something that helps them get promoted, they've not only, you know, fixed their problem, but other people in the organization have recognized that as well.

Jon Benson: M. Yeah, it's. It's that. That is a massive push right there. A massive push. So the whole, um, solve this and you're a hero kind of mentality. Uh, yeah, that. That's a really good P.S. by the way. That's a really good P.S. and by the way, I'll just give every. Everyone listening a trick to use. A trick. When I say trick, it's. It comes across as deceptive, but it's not at all. Um, guess what people read in a subject line in an email rather.

Mike Maynard: So what they read, uh, what's the

Jon Benson: highest thing, the highest point of readership in an email? What is it?

Mike Maynard: Well, I guess it would be the subject line because a lot of people never open the email. Right?

Jon Benson: Well, okay, so. So you have a hundred percent subject line read. So you know, anyone that opened the email read the subject line 100 of the time, either clicking on autopilot. So you got that right. So what do you think that your first link should look like?

Mike Maynard: Wow, that's a great question. I don't know. I mean, tell me, tell me, how would you approach that first link? Yeah.

Jon Benson: Ah, I should look at your subject line. They just opened it. Okay, so it's really cool. So. Yeah. But guess what the second most read thing in an email is? It's the PS People skim down on the bottom. Especially longer emails. So guess where you put all your good stuff. P.S. look, this is making guys like you, or people like you or whatever, uh, whatever their titles are, look like freaking rock star heroes. I mean, I know one guy that just got promoted just because he shared this idea. So here, click, uh, be sure to reread this if you did. If you missed the third paragraph, I. That's where I give you all the good stuff and it makes them go Back and reread the email, tell them it's in the third paragraph, make them go find it for love. So, so these are just, these are like I wrote a book on this called Open Click Buy that's all about uh, how to get more response with emails. But little things that you ask and how you ask it makes it just, there's no business to business in that, in that comment that I just said. It's just person to person. It's all selling as people to people.

Mike Maynard: I don't know. Some great tips there. I just want to change a little bit. There's a couple of questions we always like to ask people just to see how they approach things. And the first thing is we ask what's the best bit of marketing advice that's ever been given to you?

Jon Benson: M. Uh, that, that one's easy. Best uh, bit of marketing advice is write uh, like you're writing to one person because you are really clear. You are. Yeah, yeah. It ties perfectly into the B2B mythology of like, oh, we're writing to a company. No you're not.

Mike Maynard: Now that one's great. And then, you know, obviously things are changing very fast. AI particularly has had a huge impact on marketing. What would your advice be to be to someone who's maybe a graduate and just starting their marketing career?

Jon Benson: So I, I, I'm not trying to sound dire, I'm not trying to sound hyperbolic. There's no hyperbole in all, in anything I'm saying right now. If you are just getting started in this business and you do not know AI and I'm not talking about chat, I'm not talking about Claude, I'm talking about legitimate AI. Um, not by the way, those are both really good companies and we use both those companies. I want to say legitimate AI, I mean, I mean AI that is, that is basically an employee, it is basically, um, a partner. That is, that is the promise of these, these uh, web based applications. They just can't hold a candle to something that's on your own machine. Um, so that if you tap into that power you become superhuman. And, and, and, and there's not even a it, it's not like, oh, this is someone that I might hire above somebody else. This is someone that will be hired 100% of the time, every single time above somebody that doesn't know it. If you come into a, an operational meeting or an interview or whatever you want, whatever it happens to be and you say, um, I do, I know this, I know this, I know this. Oh, by the way I can do this with AI in fact, I can have this for you tomorrow. You're going to get hired. It. It, it's, it's like the people that I have at my company and continue to hire my company are the people that understand this and the people that use it and the people that don't are fired. There's no, there's no place for them because it's impossible. I used to say it's like saying that I refused to have a fax machine in 1980, but it's more like I refuse to be on the Internet in 2000. It's that level of complete discombobulation from reality. It's like if you're like, oh, I'm on the fence on AI because all you know about AI is ChatGPT. Well, well, uh, yeah, I, I can understand that. That's a. ChatGPT is a chatbot, essentially. It's, it's a very intelligent one, but it's, it's, it's a chatbot. But if you don't know what's underneath the layers of that, if you don't know what's going on inside, you know, Claude, uh, code, openclaw, codex, uh, uh, more of the, more of the heavier machinery involved in what we do in AI then, uh, it's, it freaks people out. I, If I can give you one story, I, I could do. I could give this every single day. I could give, give a different story. But just yesterday, one of my good friends I've known for 10 years, he's a trainer, he trains trainers. He came over, visit our. My house. He goes, I saw what you're doing. It's like, I. Is that really going on? I go, uh, yeah, I guess. Of course it's going on. It's like. So he said, well, do you have any ideas on what I could do for my, my trainers? I said, yeah, just imagine this for a second. Every single one of your trainers, like, for example, um, they, they sometimes they follow up with their, their clients. Sometimes they do it once a week. Sometimes they'll text them like, hey, how are you doing? Like, you know, I'm. I'm a competitive athlete, so the fitness competitor. So, so my coach will text me. It's like, you doing all right? You know, totally cool. Imagine if they got this. And what I did is I just grabbed one day or one week of my eating and out of like, my food diary, and I just dumped it into Isaac is my clone. So I said, isaac, uh, I want you to build me A presentation. Use my 11 Labs audio key. Make uh, it look like this, uh, go. So what if you gave him this on autopilot? I would set up a recurring command so I didn't even have to do that. It's like every single Monday a video would be produced and be sent to them. And I sent him this video and he's like, you've got to be freaking kidding me. It was beautifully animated. It's like, okay, look at what you did this week. Your goals. It slid in your goals, did this. You hit this much protein in this. Here's what we want to tweak for the next week. We need to get you down a little bit here. What I suggest is here, imagine that from a trainer. But they didn't do it and you could not tell this was not me. So this is like, uh, ChatGPT won't do that for you folks. It's not possible. So, but these tools that we use will. And that's what people are doing with AI and that's a very, that was a five minute fix. Extrapolate that into a business where you, you build a tool that your business needs that no one else has or a method of delivery that no one else has thought of. That's what's possible with AI. That's why it's not an option. You have to do it. So that's my plea to you to learn this stuff.

Mike Maynard: Man, I love that. That's such a good example. It's so easy to understand. I mean, John, this has been amazing. We've covered so much more than Benson. I feel like we've covered an awful lot in the way of some of the ideas and tips you've been given. If people want to find out more, I mean, where do they go and maybe how do they get hold of you?

Jon Benson: So we have a couple of free things for people if you go to ucloned. Y O U C O N E D A I U Cloned is my method of cloning myself. And so I cloned myself not just once, but like 10 times over. So I've got like 10 of me helping me run a business, which is kind of cool. Needless, um, to say we, we're growing a lot, uh, because they don't sleep. So I show you, I, I give you a PDF. Here's the PDF, here's what I, here's the stack I'm using. Here's, here's how much it costs me. It's the cheapest employee you will ever have. But it's like with an IQ of 600. So it's, it's just ridiculous not using it right. So that's cool. And if you want to know more about the marketing side of things, if that's in, in your, your wheelhouse, then we have freebuyerprofile.com which gives our, uh, gives you a free, literally a buyer profile. In other words, who's your ideal buyer? Rather than trying to sell to everyone, sell only to one group of people for a while like this, because that one group of people will absolutely make you a multi, multi, multimillionaire. Sell to them. They will feel incredibly special. They will feel incredibly heard. You will resonate with them because they're already in your value list. They're already aligned with your values, so you don't have to worry about all the hassles that come with bad customers. So we teach people how to do that and, and then if you want to use our AI to do it, it can do it for you.

Mike Maynard: That's amazing, John. It's been fascinating. I feel like we could talk for, you know, hours on this. But I thank you so much. Thank you for being so generous, you know, sharing your insights and your ideas. And thanks for being a guest on marketing B2B technology. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on itunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website@napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.