[00:00:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: All right. Well, welcome to the abundant coach. And I have to tell you, I’m pretty excited about our next guest here. Full transparency, I’m totally fangirling over this next guest.

[00:00:11] Lauren Brollier Newton: So our next guest is someone who is known as the billion dollar copywriter. I didn’t say million. I said billion with a B because for his clients and customers, he’s helped create 12 billion in revenue.

[00:00:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: He is someone who is the creator of something I know many of you are familiar with, which is the VSL, the video sales letter, super groundbreaking. And even more groundbreaking, the creator of a new technology that uses AI called Benson.

[00:00:36] Lauren Brollier Newton: So welcome to the abundant coach, John Benson. Thank you for being here.

[00:00:40] Jon Benson: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: Super excited to have you. So I just have to say, cause I’m fangirling, like I said when I took your advice on video sales letters and those things before I came to BTI and had my own coaching business, it was game changing for me as a coach. So first of all, thank you for the continuous output of cool things that you give to us.[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Jon Benson: Thank you very much. And you’re welcome.

[00:01:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: So many of our coaches that are listening to this podcast, are experimenting with technology somewhat. They’re familiar with it. They’re not familiar with it. And over the last, I feel like 12 to 18 months, we’ve been hearing so much about AI and the terrors of AI and the benefits of AI. So for those of us who are not super in that world, can you just describe what is AI and do we need to be super scared of it?

[00:01:25] Jon Benson: I don’t think you need to be afraid of it unless you’re talking about general intelligence versus narrow intelligence, which is what we’re dealing with right now in something like a chat tool, like, chat or Claude or something like that. The people that should be, I guess alarmed is probably too stern of a word, but on guard about it are people that make their living creating words that sell.

[00:01:49] Jon Benson: So for copywriters and for anyone in the marketing space to not have AI as a tool that you know and know how to leverage is [00:02:00] tantamount to not being on the internet in 2003. So it’s, you know, there were people that weren’t on the internet in 2003 that are, you know, very few of them are still in business.

[00:02:09] Jon Benson: So it’s that inflection point again in history. And you could even make the argument, this is like 1997, 1998, like going way back, you know, so where being on the internet was not a compulsory thing. Yeah. It wasn’t like, you know, you had to do it, but the people that saw the handwriting on the wall were, you know, way ahead of the curve.

[00:02:27] Jon Benson: So that’s kind of where we are with AI. AI is just exponentially faster, growing exponentially faster, doing exponentially more things and then the internet could even do so.

[00:02:37] Jon Benson: Yeah. So in that sense, I think people are naturally a little fearful of new technologies new things in general, but definitely new technologies. And this one is definitely new. And very hard to understand for some people I, for me to, and I have an AI company, so don’t feel bad if that’s you, but it’s certainly disruptive in the sense of destabilizing people’s [00:03:00] employment opportunities for sure, especially if you’re a writer or musician or you’re doing things that require that can now be done or coder that can now be done with AI.

[00:03:09] Jon Benson: And that’s a little bit disruptive, but I think of it as the ultimate power tool. It’s like giving, especially a copywriter or a marketer or a coach, people that require words to sell their businesses. If you understand this it’s putting you in, it’s canon cloning you in ways that you couldn’t possibly do before.

[00:03:26] Jon Benson: So I think it’s pretty exciting.

[00:03:28] Lauren Brollier Newton: Very cool. So for us coaches or some of the coaches who listened to this podcast, who they’re starting to build their business. They’re not using a ton of technology yet. They might not even know that they’re writing copy, but they’re writing copy. Can you just give us like, what is copy? I know that’s like the most basic question I could ask John Benson, but just what is copy?

[00:03:47] Jon Benson: No, that’s a very important question. So copy the best way to explain copy is just the words needed to sell what you do to the world. So how do you communicate what you do to the world in a [00:04:00] way that not only resonates with you personally, but also resonates with your potential buyers. And those are often two different things.

[00:04:08] Jon Benson: So copy is the ability to communicate not only what you do in a way that’s ethical and integral to you, but also resonates with your potential buyers, gets take action.

[00:04:19] Lauren Brollier Newton: Beautiful. So some of our coaches, and I know I’ve messed with it a little bit myself. And definitely people within our company, you know, mess with it. ChatGPT is probably the thing that the most common thing that people are trying to use if they’re trying to use AI in their business, they’re shaky with it, they’re just getting started.

[00:04:37] Lauren Brollier Newton: And what I’ve noticed about chatGPT myself is if I’m reading copy or I’m approving something in the coach certification division, I can look at it and I’m like, okay, that’s chatGPT.

[00:04:47] Jon Benson: Yeah.

[00:04:48] Lauren Brollier Newton: Which is, we don’t want that. Right? I’m like, Oh, someone just completely wrote that with chatGPT.

[00:04:52] Jon Benson: Oh yeah.

[00:04:52] Lauren Brollier Newton: So let’s talk a little bit about what the limits are of chatGPT and why as a copywriter, you know, [00:05:00] what should I be thinking about?

[00:05:01] Jon Benson: Well, there’s a reason I built my own app for this. But there’s a reason why tool like chatGPT, which I use almost every day is, it’s ubiquitous now for a lot of, like tech business owners, for sure. It will soon be ubiquitous for anyone in business.

[00:05:16] Jon Benson: But for copywriting in specific, specifically copywriting, it takes a lot to get good copy how to chat. If you go into chatGPT and say, write me three emails about this and you upload a little document, the emails are going to sound, they have, if it doesn’t say here’s the kicker somewhere in the email, I’d be shocked. It’s it’s the worst copy on the planet.

[00:05:37] Jon Benson: And so I look at it as a professional copywriter and just, I die a little bit on the inside every time I read something that the chat writes without anything other than just a prompt. And hence the phrase I came up with that’s kind of stuck with people for the last two years is you can’t prompt your way to good copy.

[00:05:51] Jon Benson: It’s just, it’s not something that, unless you’re a prompt engineer and even then you’d have to be a prompt engineer and a professional copywriter to pull that off. [00:06:00] It’s not the best way to go about using chatGPT.

[00:06:04] Jon Benson: It’s super good for using things like, you know, like you’ve got a, you know, let’s say that you’ve got 10,000 words written down and you need to get a summary of it or, you know, things like that, you can’t beat it. Right?

[00:06:17] Jon Benson: But when it comes down to doing something creative and you need copy that actually works, you’re going to get very tried copy. Now, the problem is, this is where the biggest problem is. Everyday people are training this thing by saying, Oh, this is great. This is good. This is bad.

[00:06:31] Jon Benson: Out of those everyday people, one out of what a million to 2 million, 5 million to our copywriters, one out of a hundred million are good copywriters. So it’s trained on pure crap. That’s the problem.

[00:06:44] Jon Benson: Yeah, so it’s not trained to be a copywriter. It’s trained to be a utilitarian tool for everything, AI in a chatbot. So that’s the challenge that people face.

[00:06:55] Jon Benson: The cool thing is when they say, I need three emails, and I put a little bit of make, give it a little [00:07:00] context, like, here’s my, pitch, here’s my sales page. You copy it in there and give me three emails and it will like find stuff from your sales page and write you three emails.

[00:07:08] Jon Benson: And you’re more focused on how cool it is that it’s writing three emails instantaneously. Wow, they would take me like an hour or two to do that, that’s awesome. And the question is, do they convert? So let’s just strip away what it can do because it looks magical. It kind of feels magical.

[00:07:24] Jon Benson: Does it work? Does it convert? And as a copywriter in the trenches that’s doing this day in and day out, I will tell you right now that every professional copywriter will tell you like, yeah, to get it to do what we get it to do requires either again, you’re like us, your prompt engineers and copywriters, which is very rare, or you just have infinite patience with this.

[00:07:43] Jon Benson: And you’ve you train what’s called a GPT. You train your own GPT. And it can get really technically mind boggling. So, it’s not to the point yet where Maybe GPT 5 will be to that point, which comes out at the end of the year. Maybe it’s GPT 6, who knows, where you type in and it actually [00:08:00] understands nuances of all the little things that we copywriters doesn’t use stupid phrases like here’s the kicker or start everything with a question.

[00:08:09] Jon Benson: Like it’s the mind numbing things that AI does. We have this whole list of them. So you’re not alone. If this is something that you’re getting input, you’re getting output rather, and you’re going, ah, that’s just so cheesy. It’s like, it uses these lame analogies and metaphors. It’s like, it’s adjective crazy.

[00:08:26] Jon Benson: You know, it goes crazy.

[00:08:27] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. Oh my gosh. The adjectives.

[00:08:30] Jon Benson: Really super duper amazing. It’s like, Oh God.

[00:08:34] Lauren Brollier Newton: It’s funny, we have a our programs director here at Brave Thinking Institute. One of the people in the C suite has been telling her like, your voice needs to sound more enthusiastic when you write emails. So she’ll run it through chatGPT and she’ll be like, please make me sound more enthusiastic.

[00:08:49] Lauren Brollier Newton: And then it’ll come back and I’ll say, okay, now let’s delete. Like, three or four of the adjectives in that.

[00:08:55] Jon Benson: Exactly. Adjectives and adverbs, man.

[00:08:58] Lauren Brollier Newton: One adjective to spice it up a little [00:09:00] bit there. Oh my gosh. Okay.

[00:09:02] Jon Benson: You’re stunningly and amazingly lose more weight. It’s, yeah, it’s crazy what it does with adverbs and adjectives, but

[00:09:07] Lauren Brollier Newton: It really is wild. I think that the cool thing for our beginning coaches about using chatGPT is we’ve had coaches, just they’re not copywriters. They’ve never done this before. They’re wanting to just send like their newsletter email to their clients or something like that. There might not even be a call to action or a sales in it, but they sit there and they stare at a blank page because they’re not writers and they sit there for hours and they don’t know what to write.

[00:09:29] Lauren Brollier Newton: So I think part of the benefit is like, okay, like if I’m going to use it to just get my mind moving, so I’m not sitting here for hours, torturing myself. You know, great. And we want to know the limits of it and what doesn’t convert and what does.

[00:09:43] Jon Benson: Right. Well, to get ideas, to get some spark to it’s, if you communicate with it as you would a person, this is going to be helpful if you tell it what it is like, okay, you’re a world class copywriter. You’re not a poet. You’re going to write something [00:10:00] that’s going to be intriguing without starting with a lot of questions, forget that adverbs exist.

[00:10:07] Jon Benson: But okay. Just that little thing that I rattled off right there. You’d have to know to tell it those things and then how to talk it in that language. So, a friend of mine said, well, you used to train people on how to write copy. Now you’re training people how to write copy for an AI. It’s kind of the same thing, you know, it’s copy for an AI is essentially what a prompt engineer is.

[00:10:24] Jon Benson: So, Yeah, I don’t find that to be the best use of our time. That’s.

[00:10:30] Lauren Brollier Newton: Well, and also if I knew how to be a prompt engineer, I wouldn’t be sitting here staring at a blank page cause I’d probably just be writing a copy.

[00:10:35] Lauren Brollier Newton: So, that’s, yeah. So how, like, I want to ask you two questions just kind of about the history of all of but the first one is how did you get trained on copy?

[00:10:47] Lauren Brollier Newton: So you’re like the best copywriter in the world. How do you become that? Like what precipitated that?

[00:10:53] Jon Benson: Well, thank you. I don’t think I would label myself that but I’m usually recognized as one of the top guys around [00:11:00] and that’s very flattering I look at the other guys I look at and go man. There’s so much better but I didn’t become, like I didn’t set out to become a copywriter.

[00:11:07] Jon Benson: I was just a fitness guy that wrote a book and I didn’t have a way to market it. And then I partnered up with a guy that studied copywriting under the legend, John Carlton, one of the greatest copywriters alive. And I was, when he wrote the sales page for my book, I was just horrified by it.

[00:11:22] Jon Benson: I was, it was like, what on earth is this? This is 5,000 words long. Who on earth is going to read this? And who is this guy you’re talking about? It’s like, what is going on? I didn’t understand any of the nuances of the copywriting at all. And then the book, like, Hit 1,007 on Alexa the first day it was launched, so that’s, it was a thousand and seventh most popular website on the whole internet.

[00:11:43] Jon Benson: So that’s crazy. That’s back in the 2004. So this is like, you know, in the days where you could actually do that and, you know, we just shattered every record you could think of with it came down to ClickBank, which is the vendor we were on, and so I was like, okay, I should probably look into this copy thing and my next book came [00:12:00] out and I was more focused on the books and the actual stuff I was doing and then I said, okay I’ll try to write the copy cause I wrote two books. I mean, how hard could it be? Right?

[00:12:08] Jon Benson: And so it was terrible. And and it honestly, the only reason I became a copywriter is because that during the second book is when I created the video sales letter. And the only reason I did that is because I was thinking, well, I wouldn’t, I suck at this long form copy stuff. It must be some skill to it that I don’t know. Maybe I can make a video. And then it just drilled down to like, well, I don’t want to be on video. I don’t want to be on camera because it’s like, there’s a lot of reasons for this.

[00:12:33] Jon Benson: It’s back when YouTube was just taking off. So this was like, YouTube is not a very popular thing. And so I said, well, I’ll just put the the words on the screen, it’s like, it just seems like on retrospect, such a dumb idea. It’s like, you know, my friend, Mike Geary suggested he goes, you should do like a PowerPoint video.

[00:12:49] Jon Benson: I was like, PowerPoint is so lame. It’s so boring. I mean, no way. And I thought, well, you know what we could do is I could just put the words on the screen and kind of read it along. And then I turned certain words red. Cause I [00:13:00] knew NLP, I did study NLP when I owned an ad agency.

[00:13:03] Jon Benson: And so I turned it into like an ad agency, black or that’s why the colors were red and black and white and then the NLP words were highlighted and the rest, as they say, is history because it just, for whatever reason, when I chunked it out and wrote only one slide at a time, it was easier for my brain for some reason.

[00:13:21] Jon Benson: And then I got all these offers to write video sales letters. I just kept telling people I’m not a copywriter. I’m just a fitness dude. I mean, like, you know, I know nothing about copywriting. Well, you wrote that. Well, yeah, but you know, so I wrote, the second one I wrote was for Mike and he ends up paying me a lot of money to write it.

[00:13:37] Jon Benson: And I wrote it in like six hours and thought, okay, well, gosh, it’s, you know, Here, I don’t know if this will work. It ends up making him like $50 million and I’m like, okay, there’s something more to this, you know, it’s still my voice to this very day. That was like 20 years ago. It’s so weird.

[00:13:53] Lauren Brollier Newton: When it made $50 million, were you like, I should have charged more.

[00:13:56] Jon Benson: Oh yeah. I mean, totally. I’ve thought that throughout my entire [00:14:00] career, man, I wish there was some way to get, like, to add a little bit of, you know, percentage points to every VSL.

[00:14:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: Percentages? Yeah. So, I mean, I think this is interesting. We have a principal at brave thinking Institute that we teach, you know, all of our coaches are life coaches. We are coaches. Mary’s a coach who coaches people. And one of the principles that we teach and we train our coaches to teach is do what you can from where you are with what you have.

[00:14:22] Lauren Brollier Newton: If you want to be successful, you got to start, just do what you can, where you are with what you have. So as I’m sitting here thinking about you. Going, oh, I’m just gonna put words on the screen.

[00:14:29] Jon Benson: Yeah.

[00:14:30] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love that because it’s like, that’s where powerful ideas come from. That’s how success starts. It’s like just the willingness to do what comes to you with what you got and let it fly and see how it goes.

[00:14:40] Jon Benson: The funny thing is I was doing video like just me talking on video and it was just, it was doing really bad and in bed back then it was like, It took forever for videos to stream. And I was thinking, well, how can I get the video smaller? And then, and I hadn’t shaved for like four or five days. And I thought I didn’t want to go on video.

[00:14:56] Jon Benson: And so the only reason I didn’t put myself on video that day was because [00:15:00] I didn’t want to shave. I know this is ridiculous, but this I was like, I’m just not, I’m in a hurry. If I take a shower and shave, I’ll be too late. So I was like all these excuses I was using.

[00:15:08] Jon Benson: So it’s just kind of funny because sometimes those excuses can pay off.

[00:15:13] Lauren Brollier Newton: As long as you still do something.

[00:15:14] Jon Benson: Yeah. Exactly. So that’s how that happened. So, yeah, I stumbled into copywriting. It was years later before I even called myself a copywriter at all. John Carlton was a guy that told me that I have to start calling myself a copywriter, so I did. Next and then it just kind of took off from there.

[00:15:28] Lauren Brollier Newton: So how did you keep evolving after the day you didn’t want to shave? It’s like, okay, I hit the jackpot pot on this. How do you keep evolving? Cause I’m just thinking about your journey and the video sales letter and all the copy you’ve written and now getting into AI, like, what is your mindset, I guess, around like just that keeping up with what’s going.

[00:15:46] Lauren Brollier Newton: Cause I mean, you could also say like, Hey, I’ve done a lot of cool stuff. Like, you know, I don’t want to keep inventing new. Is like for personal, is it for personal creativity? Like what’s the mindset that keeps you moving?

[00:15:57] Jon Benson: I’ve always been an inventor kind of at heart. I [00:16:00] mean, you know, not the guy that could invent anything with a pair of pliers and a Crescent wrench or anything, I look at things and try to say, well, how can we do this better? How can we do this different? Or oftentimes it was like, let’s figure out a way to make this work despite my weaknesses.

[00:16:14] Jon Benson: So a lot of times, I created an audio series for that would became something called known as empower. I can’t say it here. And empower was all about like my own weaknesses with motivation. So I just decided, well, how could create something for myself to make it a little better and then stumbled on dichotic audio and started playing around with different ways of doing it.

[00:16:32] Jon Benson: So it was, it’s more like, Inspiration through desperation kind of stuff. But then it just became like habitual to say, how can we do this differently? And I didn’t want to ever plagiarize, so I, you know, everybody plagiarizes to a point, like, we all learn something from somebody else you take ideas, but, you know, plagiarism, like, kind of in a broad sense.

[00:16:50] Jon Benson: But yeah, it’s always been that way for me. I’ve never been the kind of guy that has to slow down or to, yeah, I can’t, I’d be bored in about five minutes. So I have to be doing something else.

[00:16:59] Lauren Brollier Newton: [00:17:00] So you’re not like selling your company and going and laying on the beach for the rest of your life, drinking a Mai Tai.

[00:17:03] Jon Benson: We live on a beach and it’s funny. It’s like we live where most people would vacation and I’ve been to the beach three times.

[00:17:11] Lauren Brollier Newton: That’s hysterical.

[00:17:12] Jon Benson: Literally have it as our backyard, my wife is on me all the time. She’s like, you know, babe, come on. I mean, we live here. It’s like, I know, but it’s like, you know, I have to go figure out some prompt for Benson or something.

[00:17:22] Jon Benson: And it’s not like it doesn’t come from a workaholic point of view because I don’t have a good balance between my physical life and my work life, if you will. Yeah, it more comes from being like this driven guy to want to figure things out and keep moving the needle forward.

[00:17:38] Lauren Brollier Newton: I get that, that’s why when, you know, as coaches a lot of times people talk about work life balance and they’re striving for work life balance. And I’m always telling our coaches, it’s very important that we share with our clients that is not a one size fits all. Like what looks or seems like workaholic to me, I’m the same way is life giving to me. I love it. I love eating, sleeping, and breathing.

[00:17:58] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so my work [00:18:00] life balance is going to look very different from someone who’s like, I love gardening. Like I’m going to go out there all day and garden. Like that’s not, You’re never going to see me plant or pick a flower. So, I think it’s very important for all of us.

[00:18:12] Lauren Brollier Newton: I think it’s important for everyone to hear that just because you work a certain number of hours or you’re choosing a certain way, it doesn’t mean it’s not balanced. It’s just balanced for you.

[00:18:20] Jon Benson: Yeah, and I’ve never understood the maybe this is off topic or something, but I never understood the mentality that says that we should slow down as we get older or that we, you know, I’ve done exactly the opposite. I started a whole new career at 40, so I did just literally changed an entire career, most people don’t do that. But I had started my own business and I hold it for 14 years before that.

[00:18:42] Jon Benson: So that’s usually what people do, they don’t just switch an entire career over, right? And I just became something totally different at the age of 40. And then I started fitness modeling at 50, which is not the age most people do that.

[00:18:57] Jon Benson: And then I just started [00:19:00] competition when I just turned 60. So it’s like I’m competing in my first show in six weeks. So I just don’t like, I don’t like to take things, I guess, at the same pace and so people, we live in a building full of people, a lot of different ages, but there’s a lot of people here. It’s in Florida.

[00:19:14] Jon Benson: So there’s a lot of people that are older retired. And one of the first guys I met here, he was talking about, well, what do you do? And I was getting ready for this last year photo shoot. And, you know, I’m like carrying food around with me and I’m like, you know, I say, I love this.

[00:19:30] Jon Benson: I just freaking love this lifestyle. And he’s like, man, don’t you want to retire? I was like, that to me is a question of death. I’m like, no I mean, we started Benson started launched on my 60th birthday. So, yeah, I’m like there’s no I don’t even, yeah there’s not an off switch. It’s just going to keep going this way.

[00:19:49] Lauren Brollier Newton: Well, it’s just so important for everyone to hear, because I think this idea that we have to slow down and as we get older is sort of just a paradigm that we’ve been sold and we’ve bought into, I think it’s just, you know, you get it in your mind that [00:20:00] something’s going to be a certain way.

[00:20:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: And then you go down that path and no, but I totally resonate. I am, I know you can’t tell for those of you listening on the podcast platforms, you’re not going to be able to see me anyway, but for those of you watching on YouTube, you can’t tell, but I’m nine months pregnant right now. I’m five days away from my due date.

[00:20:13] Jon Benson: Oh, wow. Congratulations.

[00:20:15] Lauren Brollier Newton: Thank you. And so I totally get like, what would, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing then. Interviewing me right now because I love this work and I love bringing it to our coaches. So you know, a paradigm there too, where it’s like, don’t you want to like, put your feet up and whatever? And I’m like, I will, I know I will when the baby comes. And why don’t we have fun while we’re waiting?

[00:20:32] Jon Benson: So cool. That is so cool. Well, congratulations. Are you keeping boy or girl quiet? Or do you know, or,

[00:20:38] Lauren Brollier Newton: No, it’s a boy.

[00:20:39] Jon Benson: Oh, cool. So

[00:20:40] Lauren Brollier Newton: It’s a boy. Yeah. I’m excited. I think it’s going to be fantastic. So I’m kind of excited that for this first baby. It’s a boy because I think the thing that terrifies me about how, what, if it was a girl would be like, I have to brush hair and like, all that stuff and like, learn how to put a ponytail on a kid’s hair something like I, that sounds complicated to me.

[00:20:59] Lauren Brollier Newton: So,[00:21:00]

[00:21:00] Jon Benson: Now you have to do is guys have learn how to throw a football. That’s pretty much it. You’ll be happy.

[00:21:03] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah, exactly. So, all right. So the next thing I want to know is. Tell me about the evolution of when did you start getting interested in AI? And when did you know that it was going to become a big thing? Cause it seems like you were at the, as far as I understand, it seems like you were kind of on the front end of realizing that this was coming.

[00:21:22] Jon Benson: Yeah, very much so. That’s just one of the few things I can say. I was actually ahead of the curve. I guess the VSL by proxy only, but the sense that, you know, I just stumbled on creating that stupid thing that ended up being pretty cool, but it wasn’t like a stroke of invention but yeah, We started seeing in 2010, I created an app called Celerator, dumb name, but that’s what it was called.

[00:21:43] Jon Benson: And it was to create VSLs, but it was just software that was designed to go through and help people create the slides for VSL. And it was literally like, my name is name and I want to help you goal. You know, so it’s like, you know, it was very rudimentary kind of stuff. [00:22:00] But it was harder than it looked because we came up with like nine different variations for every single slide.

[00:22:05] Jon Benson: So you would choose one. You could choose another. And then the users would have to fill everything out. I mean, people thought this was like, you know, really, it was groundbreaking software back then, right? And and it was like my course in the software. That’s really all it was meant to do to help people get through it better.

[00:22:20] Jon Benson: But in the process, we had to figure out, like, well, how do you break apart every single sentence in a VSL? And make it make sense? What are you talking about here? What is the difference between a goal and a promise or what we call a primary goal, the number one thing you want to achieve versus secondary goals?

[00:22:36] Jon Benson: What else do you want to achieve? What are you even name those things? Primary goals, secondary goals. So I had to come up with names for every single one of these and break everything out and it was like, I guess the math geek in me kind of, you know, it was like or science geeking me because I like to tear things apart and figure out if I a word.

[00:22:52] Jon Benson: And so I was tearing apart language, figuring out what happened, what on earth you even call this and having a pull apart the words that could [00:23:00] be, you know, interchanged with any offer at all. Like, I want to help you could change for anything. And we were getting, I was getting so pedantic about this.

[00:23:08] Jon Benson: I was like, what if it’s not an I, what if it’s a, we, it’s like, Oh my gosh, I can’t do this. It was like, it was so.

[00:23:13] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah.

[00:23:14] Jon Benson: So finally we settled on, you know, me and my team, I was the one doing it with just one of the guy and we settled on, I forget how many, there’s like 89 different variables or something like that.

[00:23:28] Jon Benson: And then that got pulled over into copy pro in 2016 and that pre AI and about 2018, 2019. That’s when things started to change where copy pro was really struggling. We couldn’t sell it. You couldn’t give it away sometimes and so my other company, Digital Publisher, started looking into this, what’s coming out with AI at the time, no one knew about ChatGPT or anything, but there was a company called Jasper that was just coming out, it just came out, and they asked me to, hey, would you want to be the first A list copywriter to have a VSL in [00:24:00] Jasper?

[00:24:00] Jon Benson: So, maybe this is inspirational for your coaches. I don’t know, but so most people would say like, no way am I gonna take the thing I created and the thing I have software for at the time, I still have the software, right? This is now 10 years later, or 15 years later almost. And put it inside of an AI but I knew from breaking this out already, and knowing the limitations of three, 3.5, which is what the GPD back then I knew that. There’s no way because I’d played with long enough to go get, I go, yeah, I’ll give it to you. Sure. Yeah, we can do this. Totally. Cause I was like, okay, cause I, you know, I’m like, so I shipped it all over to their tech guys.

[00:24:36] Jon Benson: And about a week later they come back to go, yeah, that will never work. It’s like, and they were like, okay, so that was too ambitious. Maybe we could put a five minute version. So I gave them that and they go, yeah, that won’t work either. So we came up with a one minute VSL version that was in Jasper AI.

[00:24:51] Jon Benson: And this was like 20, 21, I guess. I don’t know, something like that. But that got me thinking, seeing how they were doing it, working with their AI [00:25:00] guys going, okay, what if we did it differently than that? And I, the same thing I started thinking what, no, I’m not a pro I’m not a prompt guy, but I’ve been dissecting language for 10, 12 years.

[00:25:10] Jon Benson: And so I started working with learning how to do the prompting stuff on the side and working with a friend of mine. Yeah. Darby Rollins and, you know, he’s showing me, well, here’s how I create this prompt. I said, okay, but what if we did it this way? And I just started, I don’t know why I came up with this idea, but I said what if we do something before we do the prompt?

[00:25:30] Jon Benson: Like maybe this is the problem. And he’s like, what do you mean? I said, well, what if we gave it like more context and this is way before you could upload documents to. And so we’re like, well, you can’t upload anything. I go, yeah, what if we, and we were just thinking, I was thinking, well, what if we did it like this?

[00:25:50] Jon Benson: And I said, well, this is how we do it. And this is really funny. This is how we did it in Celerator in three XVSL is what we changed. This is how we did it. And now it’s all and I said, bracket [00:26:00] primary goal, bracket equals, Typed it out, you know, and I started doing this and said, well, what if we just run this through chatGPT?

[00:26:09] Jon Benson: And the next thing that came out was like, we’re like, holy crap, that sounds like 10 times better. It’s like, so I’m like, wow. I said, it’s kind of like a pre prompt. And then I went, okay, so I wrote this down pre prompting and I wrote it down. So like, okay, so pre prompt it’s stuff you put in front of the prompt and then we trademark that.

[00:26:28] Jon Benson: And then we got really scientific with it and after at first I was thinking there’s just no way I could do this and within six months, digital publishers building Benson and originally built it to be VSL pro it’s called VSL pro. So we were going to like, just to be, it’s going to be the world’s first AI that I can actually do a VSL.

[00:26:47] Lauren Brollier Newton: That will create the VSL completely for you.

[00:26:50] Jon Benson: And so, but my goal wasn’t a one minute VSL. My goal was a 60 minute VSL, like the whole thing, right. And I, cause I would think if you pre prompted and you train it and you [00:27:00] basically it’s technical jargon, but it’s like, there’s something called few shot training where you can basically override AI’s native learning if you will, like AI is intelligent.

[00:27:08] Jon Benson: So, but what it knows can be overridden. If you can say it’s sort of like going, think of it this way. If you go to an illustrator to hire them to do a portrait. And they have a style, right? And you go, no, I want you to do this style right here. And let’s say that they can do it. They go, Oh, okay. And then he does that stuff. Well, that’s completely different than what he would normally do or she would normally That’s kind of what we’re doing with AI.

[00:27:31] Jon Benson: So instead of doing this style, do this style. And before you even do this style, think of it in terms of this equation. And we send this equation. So basically it was an equation and said, now solve for X.

[00:27:42] Jon Benson: And we would basically, this is how we tricked it. It’s like AI is really dumb when it comes to creativity, but it’s pretty good at solving for X. And so we just made it solve for X and it, we started getting this insane copy out of it. And the next thing you know, I mean, when we launched, it became Benson.

[00:27:57] Jon Benson: It was, but we had my [00:28:00] entire VSL. Long form VSL and Benson, and now we got dozens of them trained in there. So it’s an entire webinar of links in there. So, so

[00:28:07] Lauren Brollier Newton: I was going to say, I heard that it could even write a webinar.

[00:28:09] Jon Benson: Yeah. And but we were the very first to do this and we had to figure out the length of it was an issue because at the time 3, 5 was, 4 wasn’t even out. And 3, 5 was just a model in chat GPT and it would limited to a certain degree of, they call it tokens, but we’ll just say words, right? To us, it’s words.

[00:28:27] Jon Benson: So you can only get so many words to come out of the thing. So you can’t get thousand words to come out at once, so you had to limit it.

[00:28:33] Jon Benson: So I said, well, what if we just broke the VSL into the same way? I broke up VSL and stuff, broke it up into a hundred parts before. That’s a little crazy. Let’s bring it into 10, you know? And so that became it. And then it became 10 parts and we’re like, and then we figured out, like, Oh, if we do it in 10 parts, then we can tell it to send this kind of thing on this part, but only this kind of thing.

[00:28:53] Jon Benson: And then we got really nuanced and that’s why Benson sounds like it does. Sounds very human because there’s a lot of human components to it that you don’t have to mess with, but we [00:29:00] do.

[00:29:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: Okay. So I want to come back and ask about Benson for coaches, but this is bringing, coming to my mind. So as life coaches, we’re always, at least I am, and I’m always encouraging our coaches to do this. Always looking at what was happening in the person’s internal world to make the move or not make the move or whatever.

[00:29:16] Lauren Brollier Newton: So you had copy pro, was that what it was called?

[00:29:19] Jon Benson: Yeah. Copy pro.

[00:29:20] Lauren Brollier Newton: I used it by the way, my coaching business. And you’re seeing that AI is coming in all of this. So one of the things that many of our clients navigate and many of our coaches navigate. Is you’re thinking about making a change and fear comes up like, what if it doesn’t work? What if this doesn’t go?

[00:29:35] Lauren Brollier Newton: And it seems like in your career, you’ve just been willing to go with the flow of the next thing. Have you experienced fear? And if you have experienced that fear of like, what if this doesn’t work and am I making the right move? How have you personally been able to overcome that?

[00:29:47] Jon Benson: Yeah. So fear is like, I mean, I experience it all the time. I mean, they say that the adage of everyone feels it, but you know, the question is, can you move through it? Right? It’s not the question. Do you feel it? It’s what do you do with it? Fortunately I had [00:30:00] great parents and my dad was a, I was born to much older parents, so it was, my dad was 54 when I was born and he fought in World War II.

[00:30:07] Jon Benson: Crazy to think that’s true, but people in World War II. So you grow up over the greatest generation, as they say, for a reason. And so you learn a whole lot about acting through fear and just going through it. And I grew up in martial arts and football, motocross and bodybuilding and all this very like fear based stuff. And then I dealt with crazy health issues, like serious life and death health issues.

[00:30:28] Jon Benson: So, yeah, I kind of felt fear and learned how to navigate around it and so it’s never stopped me. It’s, you know, I had a a massive heart attack at 38 cause I had heart disease I was 21. I was born with it.

[00:30:40] Jon Benson: And so you don’t usually have heart attacks at 38, you know, you don’t, you know, especially the kind that nearly take you out and care flight you out to a hospital and stuff. And so that was the painful kind, you know, the kind where you’re clutching your chest and you know, I’m the youngest guy, I’ve had 25 years in the ER ward and the guy’s going, man, I’ve never [00:31:00] seen this is really messed up stuff.

[00:31:02] Jon Benson: I mean, really bad. It’s called familial hypolipidemia, but so you kind of get face to face with this fear thing and it certainly isn’t fun. I mean, having all these weird health stuff, but it was like, okay, well how can I run toward it? And so with that, I was under a 300 pound squat in two weeks after my heart attack.

[00:31:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: Wow.

[00:31:26] Jon Benson: Yeah, it’s not so for people that train that heavy. That for me, that’s still a lot of weight because I’ve never been that strong, but that’s a lot of weight to be 100%. But so, I did this cautiously, like I was working with a team of guys and I was hooked up to all this electrodes for two weeks prior to that.

[00:31:41] Jon Benson: And I knew that, okay, all this comes, but it, to psychologically get over that and still get under there and feel your heart rate, get up to 180 during the bottom of the squat and when you just got off of, you know, two weeks ago, you just had a surgery. And so that’s kind of what I would kind of train myself to do.

[00:31:58] Jon Benson: It’s like, okay, do the thing [00:32:00] that scares you the most, the fastest that you can within cautious reason. So you’re not throwing caution to the wind. Yeah, I just had a not a heart attack, thankfully, but another kind of serious scare here recently and did the same thing. I was like, I’m like, literally on the way to the hospital, I’m going, I’m not stopping.

[00:32:17] Jon Benson: I’m going to keep going on exactly what I’m doing. And so I just set this parameters like, okay, I’m just going to doing it. And it ended up being something really trivial to be on but at the time it felt like it was like the end of the world. It’s like, and so like, but in the time I already made the decision.

[00:32:30] Jon Benson: I was like, I’m already going to do this. There’s nothing going to stop me. And so there’s this mentality of like, okay, once you set your mind to it, that nah, I’m just going to do it anyway. And your body almost has to adjust. Your mind just leads it. So I take the same thing. And so that does not mean I don’t feel the fear because believe you me, I was scared shitless.

[00:32:46] Jon Benson: But yeah, I feel it and go, okay, well, how do you run toward it? That’s been the same thing with AI, it’s like, how do I run toward this? And I ended up running so forth toward it. I started an AI company and it was like, that’s just been, yeah, most people don’t start companies at 60, but I [00:33:00] did.

[00:33:00] Jon Benson: And

[00:33:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. It sounds like to me that there’s just this commitment of keeping moving forward. It just is valuable enough to you that’s why you’re willing to push through the fear, overcome the fear, go the farthest you can with the fear.

[00:33:13] Jon Benson: Yeah. I mean, none of us gets out of here alive. So it’s like, on your deathbed I go through the, I love coaches. My ex fiance was a life coach. So I said that before and she’s really great at what she did. But the bottom line is this isn’t supposed to be a RARA speech at all, because these are just logical decisions.

[00:33:31] Jon Benson: I think it’s just a thing of rationality versus anything else. But what are you gonna remember on your deathbed if you’re lucky enough to have like a very peaceful, deathbed experience what do you think you’re gonna remember? And most people are not gonna remember that they took out the trash on time. I tell my wife that.

[00:33:46] Jon Benson: And you’re definitely not gonna remember all the times you played it safe, right? That’s not what’s gonna come to mind. You’re probably gonna remember the things that the biggest challenges, the biggest obstacles you overcame, the biggest risks you took and hopefully you’re not going to, you’re not going to dwell on [00:34:00] regrets.

[00:34:00] Jon Benson: So,

[00:34:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that Mary will often say is she’ll say, you’ll understand as you start to overcome these fears, start to live more of a life that you’re enjoying and that you’re in love with, that you realize it’s not really the milestones, although they’re great, it’s like, okay, I started this company or I hit my first million dollars or I did whatever I did, but she’s like, the thing that’s going to stand out most to you is who you became in that process.

[00:34:25] Lauren Brollier Newton: Cause that’s something no one can ever take from you. It’s pretty astounding when you look at where you came from, you’re like, wow, it’s like the thing itself, you’re always going to want the next thing. But the thing that you can really like your hat on, I guess you could say, hang your hat on, that was pretty magnificent.

[00:34:38] Lauren Brollier Newton: That transformation that happened within me.

[00:34:40] Jon Benson: Yeah, if you have something in your life that is a daily journey, that you absolutely love the journey, and I am fortunate that I have multiple things in my life. I love the journey. My wife and I spent four hours talking today and relationships are a journey. You know, they’re like, there’s so much [00:35:00] to explore there.

[00:35:00] Jon Benson: And when you’re married to your best friend, it’s super, super advantageous. And we can sit there and talk about like what’s next on the journey. And then the entire, being into competitive bodybuilding now, it’s like, it’s 24 seven. So it’s there’s never a, the stage is just, that’s not the goal. The goal is everything you do before that. Right?

[00:35:18] Jon Benson: And the same thing goes true for building a business or whatever. If you don’t love what you’re doing, if you don’t like, if building it isn’t as fun as getting your first. You know, when we hit a million dollars faster than any business I’ve ever ran and it was like we hit it and it’s like, I didn’t even know I was like, Oh, I wasn’t looking at the don’t have no idea how much money we have in the bank.

[00:35:39] Jon Benson: I’m so not motivated by that. We just got our, another investor today. We just opened up a seed round for this. And and I haven’t told my wife yet. I was like, Oh, by the way, honey, we just got, cause that’s not, the driving point I’m much more excited about, man, you should see what we figured out how to do with this focus or tool. We figured out how to make it do this.

[00:35:55] Jon Benson: It’s like, and so if you’re focused, I know if I’m talking to coaches, [00:36:00] you get this because your passion is helping other people achieve the life of their dreams and see the things that they can’t see. I know that, but that’s got to be the driving passion.

[00:36:10] Jon Benson: The money does follow that. It does, if you just find what you love to do in the money thing too. You have to, like, if you just hope for it to come, probably not gonna happen, but if you’re loving what you’re doing and you apply any strategies, and I think copywriting is the best strategy to apply myself, but I’m a little biased, but that’s the thing I could take almost anybody’s offer and make them way more money with better copy that you can’t say that about any other medium.

[00:36:34] Jon Benson: If you say, well, I could do the same thing with video. Well, videos copy.

[00:36:37] Lauren Brollier Newton: Well, exactly. Yeah. so true.

[00:36:39] Jon Benson: It’s like, then you’re still communicating.

[00:36:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: You just go copy.

[00:36:42] Jon Benson: Yeah. So it’s really copy. It really is copy.

[00:36:45] Lauren Brollier Newton: No, I’m so glad that you brought up this point about like the passion for what you do and what motivates you. Because I think a lot of times our coaches, they absolutely have the passion for helping people. They want to make giant difference in the world, but a lot of times they’ve tricked themselves into thinking like they have to focus on something else other than that, in order to be [00:37:00] successful.

[00:37:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: Whereas I think if you keep the mission at the center, like the reason I started my coaching business in the first place, and the reason I came to Brave Thinking Institute, even though it wasn’t logical financially, I already owned my own multimillion dollar company. The reason we make the decisions we do, if we’re doing it from the right place is because there’s some sort of mission, personal mission that we have or personal passion that goes beyond anything else.

[00:37:25] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so I think our coaches sometimes think, Oh, I have to sacrifice that because I got to figure out how to do this first. And it’s like, no lean into the passion because that’s the thing that’s going to keep you going. And that’s the thing that’s actually going to cause you to enjoy the journey.

[00:37:37] Lauren Brollier Newton: Cause if it sucks the whole time, then you’re not probably going to attract the money anyway, and you were just suffering the whole time leading up to trying to make it somewhere.

[00:37:45] Lauren Brollier Newton: So this is great advice, John. Thank you for going into the mindset with me, because I think it’s important for people to see we look at you and we’re like, Oh, he’s super successful.

[00:37:51] Lauren Brollier Newton: He’s probably not afraid of anything. And yet of course, there’s a mindset thing happening behind it. Right?

[00:37:56] Jon Benson: Yeah. If I could share one more thing, I am a big [00:38:00] believer in sharing foibles and things that are not so pretty, but I’m a diehard rationalist. Like I said, I’m very skeptical mindset, skeptical, not being in the negative sense of the word, but someone who’s using reason in deduction.

[00:38:12] Jon Benson: And yet my wife jokes with me all the time about this. It’s like, if there is one thing that I’m like, I have a completely irrational borderline phobia. It’s not quite a phobia, but it’s borderline that level of irrationality. And it has to do with anything dealing with finances. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to look at bank balances. I don’t want to know.

[00:38:32] Jon Benson: And so it’s like, and she’s dealt with this, like it to this ridiculous degree, she’s like, she’ll come in and she’ll say, babe, I’ve got really good news about that. I don’t know, I don’t want to, it’s so weird. It’s like, I know where it came from, just so all of you know, it comes from dealing with decades of owning my own business and then having, you know, these really good, great months and then kind of stable. And then you hit a couple of months where you’re like, how am I going to pay [00:39:00] everyone? How am I going to make it for the end of the month?

[00:39:02] Jon Benson: And people look at you, especially if you have some degree of notoriety in your industry as you never faced that. And it’s just, nonsense I mean, Ryan Dias, I don’t know if you know Ryan, digital marketer. The guys definitely huge marketers and you know, billion dollar marketing company. And he started TNC traffic conversion.

[00:39:19] Jon Benson: So,

[00:39:19] Lauren Brollier Newton: Oh yeah,

[00:39:20] Jon Benson: Ryan is a good friend and, you know, I called him, this is in 2017, 16. So I can’t remember the exact date, but I just had somebody embezzle money. The IRS hit us for an extra huge tax bill and we had a terrible month all at the same time. And I literally heard the words you’re broke from my accountant and I haven’t heard those words in my entire career.

[00:39:44] Jon Benson: I’m thinking here, man, this is late in my career and I’m hearing broke and I call Ryan and I’m like just that level of fear, that level of where you just everything, the world starts getting really narrow and all [00:40:00] the adages you say about money. Well, money isn’t everything. Man, money makes a lot of things easier.

[00:40:03] Jon Benson: Let’s just get And when you don’t have to worry about the money aspect of things get a lot easier. That’s true, you know, Tony Robbins says, you know, money doesn’t make you happy, but it allows you to arrive at your problems in style, you know, which I think is 100% true. So I’d much rather be arriving at my problems in style and worrying about like where the money is going to come from to pay bills.

[00:40:21] Jon Benson: And so I call Ryan and I’m like, bro, I feel almost embarrassed. Just here’s the deal. You know, this guy stuff he’s going, dude. It’s like the same problem as you multiple times, except with another zero or two behind.

[00:40:34] Jon Benson: It’s like, and you just put it in totally different perspective because I just had to lay off 16,000 people or something so crazy.

[00:40:39] Jon Benson: It wasn’t 60, like 1600 people or something. All like, oh crap. I mean, so it’s like he put it in a perspective where I could go, I understand. He goes, now I got over that and you’re going to get over that because you can make, you can pull money out of a hat like you and Perry pull money out of a hat.

[00:40:52] Jon Benson: But if you haven’t fired somebody with the next time I talk to you, I will never talk to you again about that. so he just held my feet to the fire man and [00:41:00] say and so in the last time I went through that, I was like, nah, I went in and fired four people that day. Cause I knew that this wasn’t going to work and never look back.

[00:41:07] Jon Benson: And so yes, and so probably that’s where that foil, that little phobia comes from. It’s like not wanting to know, right? But it’s funny cause we can kind of joke about it. And I also have systems in play to where I don’t really have to now, but you know, now it’s kind of breached over into the ludicrous cause you don’t even know the good stuff. Right? But,

[00:41:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: Right. You’re like, don’t tell me anything. I’m so grateful that you shared this because many coaches who are beginning or they’re making their first hundred thousand dollars or they’re replacing their salary are experiencing the fears over money. And they’re looking at someone like you, or they’re looking at me or they’re looking at whoever.

[00:41:40] Lauren Brollier Newton: And they’re saying, like, they’re not having that challenge and it’s such a made up story that we tell ourselves that someone at this level is not experiencing any of this. And so I’m very grateful for your transparency that, like, none of us are alone in this the life of an entrepreneur is feast or famine up and down.

[00:41:56] Lauren Brollier Newton: Let’s see what I can navigate today. It is. And like, none of us are alone [00:42:00] in that. And anybody who says they’re not, whatever, you know, because we’re all going through the ups and downs of a crazy decision to be a solopreneur or an entrepreneur. And it’s very helpful to hear for these coaches that they’re not alone in it.

[00:42:15] Jon Benson: Oh, absolutely not. I mean, there’s definitely far more profitable times than those kinds of downtimes. But when those downtimes hit, they’re way more for me, at least they were way more impactful. But just the pull us out of that conversation during that time of that happening, I made two business decisions that night on the phone after I got off the phone with Ryan.

[00:42:37] Jon Benson: That in the next 60 days, my income for the year had doubled. And it was more out of anger than it was anything else. It was more like out of, I will never feel this again. I will never ever feel this again. And so now if I ever come close to feeling that again, I go and grab back into that, no, I’m never going to feel it again.

[00:42:54] Jon Benson: And whatever you need to do to motivate yourself, I want to say anger. It wasn’t anger at the world or anything. It was more like just a, anger is [00:43:00] probably a bad word. It was, it’s more like just kind of pissed off at yourself. Like how did it how

[00:43:04] Lauren Brollier Newton: Oh yeah, absolutely.

[00:43:05] Jon Benson: You look at your, and you have to look square at yourself and go, what did I do to create this? Even though X, Y, and Z did happen.

[00:43:12] Jon Benson: So, but yeah, if you’re listening to that, we all go through it and some of us go through it with another zero or two. Like my buddy Ryan said behind there, but even they go through it. Billionaires go broke.

[00:43:21] Jon Benson: I mean, it’s Tony Robbins, one of my heroes, he went broke multiple times and he’s gone, he’s had troubles in his life. Everybody does, but it’s what you do with it. Just get out of it. You can get out of it. Just have a mindset that says, I will get out of this no matter what. And you will.

[00:43:35] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think failure is way more informative, like way more informative for creativity and what we want to do next. And as coaches, failure is the thing that actually makes you a great coach. Because you’re navigating through it yourself. And then when a client comes to you and they’re navigating something similar, you’ve got a tool belt of all these ways in which you overcame it and stories that you can tell.

[00:43:56] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so I think when failure happens, it’s like, all right, [00:44:00] let’s mine this data and let’s do something really fantastic out of it. I mean, you’ll appreciate this when I was a beginning coach, I didn’t know what I was doing and I built my first funnel. Having no idea what I was doing.

[00:44:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: I’m sure if we went back and read the copy, you’d be like, Oh, feel so sorry for you. Like there’s just, you know, I did what I could and I spent $15,000, which at that time it was like, it might’ve, well, it’s been a million dollars, $15,000 on this funnel. And it totally flopped. Like didn’t convert at all. It sucked.

[00:44:27] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I called up Matt Boggs, you know, he does marketing for us coaches here at Brave Thinking Institute. And I was like, Matt, tell me that this is salvageable. Cause to me, $15,000, I’m hearing all these voices in my head. Like. You could have bought a rental property with that, you could have this, you’re throwing money down the toilet. And I’m hearing all these, I’m like, Matt, tell me something is salvageable.

[00:44:45] Lauren Brollier Newton: And he looks at the whole thing. He’s like, nothing is so I’m just freaking out. And so, he reminded me of a quote by Napoleon Hill that goes, every heartbreak, every failure, every adversity carries within it the seed of [00:45:00] an equal or greater benefit.

[00:45:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: But like any seed, you have to find it, plant it, nourish it, and harvest it. So Matt reminds me of this and I’m like, all right, well, for as big of the failure, I feel right now, this better be a big ass seed of benefit,

[00:45:13] Jon Benson: Right. Better be you know, Sequoia tree.

[00:45:16] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. It better grow you know, like a beanstalk or something. But what Matt did with me that day and what was super helpful is reminding me of that, and I just kept saying to myself, I’m going to have the benefit of this. I’m absolutely going to have the benefit of this. And an idea came and the idea was, this program I was trying to sell in this funnel, if I’m honest with myself, that’s not the program I want to be some.

[00:45:37] Lauren Brollier Newton: And it was such an awakening. It’s such a great moment. And so I always like to share that with our coaches, that you can hold it as failure. You can get all depressed about it. You can get all shameful about it, or you can look at it and go, okay, I know this is going to be way more informative than success, so like, let’s mine it, let’s see what’s in there, get in there and do it.

[00:45:54] Jon Benson: But that’s such a good, not only you probably had to go through that to even [00:46:00] realize that’s not the product you really want to be selling and have something push you over the edge to go, okay, I really want to sell X and something tells me X worked out pretty well.

[00:46:07] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah, X worked out great. And it’s sometimes I think we don’t want to look at these things until, you know, if that funnel had worked, you know, good enough. Yeah, I wouldn’t have looked at it, but then I would have been like, why am I just kind of flatlining, you know, so fabulous.

[00:46:21] Lauren Brollier Newton: So I wanted to go back to Benson for a second, because I want to know about the software and the capabilities of it. If someone’s a coach wanting to grow their business, wanting to quit their day job, how can Benson help them just make, have an easier time of writing their copy, selling their program. Just tell us a little bit more about that.

[00:46:40] Jon Benson: Yeah. So, Benson is promptless AI. So that’s the very first aha moment here because we’ve talked about how prompts are not the way to go. So the question we started asking ourselves is what if we could remove the prompting from the equation? How would that look? What would that look like? And we trademarked it and since then [00:47:00] three companies have stolen it.

[00:47:01] Jon Benson: So it’s like, you come up with a good hook, people are going to steal it. But we were the first to do this and to basically take the user interface between the AI and the application out of the process to where all you had to do is copy and paste. I proved the point by saying, okay what if I could get, no, we’re talking about a list level copy. We’re not talking about copy from chat. You were talking about a copy that actually converts.

[00:47:26] Jon Benson: What if we could get a list level copy from a Wikipedia page from a Google search? Can you do a Google search? So on the first webinar, I did a Google search. I said, let’s search for something. And I just came up with, I didn’t have anything.

[00:47:38] Jon Benson: So I said, let’s do chiropractic care. I don’t, I know very little about it, so I’ve been to chiropractors, but I won’t let them touch me . But I Google, and it’s so funny. The very first page was a Wikipedia page. I go, okay, even worse. I’m going to click on the Wikipedia page because God knows that’s the bastion of great copy is Wikipedia.

[00:47:54] Lauren Brollier Newton: Right?

[00:47:54] Jon Benson: So I just grabbed the definition of, from chiropractic care. And it was like, I don’t know, a hundred [00:48:00] words or something like that and copy and paste it into Benson. And I clicked the literally we have what’s called the magic button, click the magic button. And within 20 seconds, my entire marketing blueprint was created for a fictitional product, a fictional product, fictitional, a new word, just invented a new one.

[00:48:15] Jon Benson: But a fictional product. Yeah. And so, and from there I was able to take that blueprint and turn it into a VSL. So if you need a sales letter or a VSL or an email campaign or an ad or an editorial or a website, you know, for coaches. Let’s say you need a coaching specific VSL, then you just go into Benson and choose that framework because it’s been trained on coaching VSLs.

[00:48:38] Jon Benson: It’s literally copy paste, fill in a few fields that maybe that we wouldn’t know, like what’s your name or you know, what’s the name of your offer, how much are you selling it for? It takes you literally a minute to fill that in. And then as it needs things, it’ll prompt you for things as you go along.

[00:48:53] Jon Benson: Like, Oh, I don’t know this. Do you have like a nickname? You know, so really like no copy and you click it [00:49:00] and out comes this copy. That seems like there’s a copywriter living in your computer. Yeah, that’s what I really want.

[00:49:06] Lauren Brollier Newton: That is so awesome. So how do you, so like, so for chat GPT, if I was going to use it, I’m going to use it to maybe prompt my ideas, but I’m going to go and change like 75% of what it did. With Benson, are you finding that the coach, let’s say we’ll really have to change like little or nothing because of the higher quality of the copy.

[00:49:28] Jon Benson: if you go to our page, you’ll see there’s video, a lot of test video testimonials and most people say that they’re kind of amazed that they don’t have to edit much at all. But I’m a big believer in copy editing, but we’ve refined the editing process into what we call refiners. And so if you select the refiners below, the refiners can do a lot of the editing for you.

[00:49:45] Jon Benson: Like if you say, well, you select a paragraph ago. This paragraph is too long. You can just click make it shorter or I want this to be more dynamic. You can click it and you can hit these little tools called focus or and then you could choose like the fields that you have in your blueprint that are more [00:50:00] dynamic and you just click and choose click.

[00:50:02] Jon Benson: You know, there’s a lot of clicking and choosing and then of course we are, I’m all for someone manually adding things in there, but if you’ve got 85% 90% done we have pro marketers using it and, you know, getting 85, 90% of it done and they’re converting it, you know, million dollar a month offers.

[00:50:16] Jon Benson: So

[00:50:17] Lauren Brollier Newton: That’s so cool.

[00:50:18] Jon Benson: Of it being human input or refiners or something they already had, for example but yeah, that’s the goal. And we want to push it to 98% and that’s where we want to get to.

[00:50:28] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. I love that. That’s so cool. You know, it’s interesting over time I’ve worked with, I wrote a lot of my own copy and there were times when either a copy something copy writer came with a package I bought, or, you know, I tried to hire someone to do copy. And I was always a little bit, and I don’t want to, this is not like tarnishing the name of copywriters, but I was just always surprised at how like mediocre it always felt, you know, and how, and what a talent and a skill copywriting is.

[00:50:56] Lauren Brollier Newton: So to think like for our coaches who for the most part, don’t know much about [00:51:00] copywriting, they’re not marketers, super heart centered people just want to help people having something like Benson where they can just put it in there and not have to think about the thing that they’re not good at anyway.

[00:51:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: And they don’t know how to do, and it’s getting them stuck. that’s a really cool thing for a heart centered entrepreneur to be able to do what their gift and talent is and not have to worry about the thing that they don’t know anything about, or hiring someone who they can’t really oversee the quality of the work because they don’t know anything about it themselves.

[00:51:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: Like it’s just such a neat thing for them to just be in their zone of genius and let you guys do your zone of genius.

[00:51:29] Jon Benson: Yeah, that’s the goal. And just really take the most expensive part of marketing is copywriting and ad placement. Those are the two big expenses, right? So if you can take an ad placement is completely dependent upon copywriting, the better the copy, the more ads convert, then you can afford to pay for the ad.

[00:51:45] Jon Benson: So it’s really coming back to copy still. You take that expense all, but out of the equation and you get that expense down under a thousand dollars a year. I mean, that’s like, you know, you can’t even, I charge like $5,000 an email when I wrote for people. So it’s, [00:52:00] I know this really ridiculous but we write really high converting emails.

[00:52:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: When you’re that good. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:52:04] Jon Benson: So, yeah, you never have to do that again. Or a hundred thousand dollars for A VSL. That was my asking rate when I retired. When I say

[00:52:11] Lauren Brollier Newton: Do you ever watch a law and order SVU?

[00:52:13] Jon Benson: No. I’ve never seen it.

[00:52:14] Lauren Brollier Newton: Okay. So, the main character is like, she’s, I mean, this has been like a 20 season show and she’s detective Benson.

[00:52:21] Jon Benson: Okay. Yeah. I didn’t.

[00:52:22] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so I was thinking, you know, as I’m hearing about the Benson software, I’m like, You know, detective Benson is my favorite Benson, but I think this is going to become my favorite Benson is this software.

[00:52:32] Jon Benson: There you go. Cool.

[00:52:33] Lauren Brollier Newton: Anybody who watches law and order will understand. John, I asked this question to every guest is the last question that I ask, and I’m going to ask it to you.

[00:52:41] Jon Benson: Sure.

[00:52:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: So if you were a life coach and you had to start a business from scratch, meaning you can’t take your email list with you, you can’t take your contacts with you, you can take your awareness, but you have to start this business from scratch.

[00:52:51] Lauren Brollier Newton: You were a life coach. What is the first thing that you would do to start growing your business?

[00:52:56] Jon Benson: The very first thing I would do is [00:53:00] one of two things. If I can, the very first thing I would probably do is I would do, if I knew I was good at what I did, so I knew I was a good coach, I would put something on Facebook and say I’m taking three people and I’m going to change their lives in the next 90 days. And it’s for free.

[00:53:13] Jon Benson: All I ask is that you spread the word around and that, so you can apply for the change your life in 90 days or whatever it would be. So whatever I’m, I say change your life very, you know, like if I’m a coach for wealth, I’d say, Oh, change, you know, change your income, you know, hit your income goals in 90 days, whatever you can claim on Facebook.

[00:53:29] Jon Benson: And then I would do that for free and say, do this as a contest. As I said, where I’m taking people to come on and then I would pick three and then I would have probably 30 that might would still be around. And then you’ve got 27 people that you can immediately call. And so that, that’s a really cool little thing that I could do.

[00:53:45] Lauren Brollier Newton: Love that.

[00:53:45] Jon Benson: The second thing I would do is much more time consuming. And that is create a YouTube channel. So the thing that I’ve learned from YouTube, Lian lady that worked for me for many years, she helped me build my YouTube channel. [00:54:00] And now the channel ended up doing really well.

[00:54:03] Jon Benson: And if you have somebody build the channel that knows what they’re talking about and she definitely does I’m working now with another girl that they know how to do this stuff really well, you can get organic traffic and that’s, you could be helping people having fun, getting organic traffic, setting this up, right?

[00:54:21] Jon Benson: And you don’t need to quit your job. You don’t need to you know, it’s worth the expense if you can say, so when people say, I want to start a business, what I would do is do the Facebook thing and then do, and you’ll need copy for that. So, okay but that’s not a lot of copy. So it’s just, you know, it’s not a lot of copy.

[00:54:38] Jon Benson: So that’s a good thing about it. And the second thing to do is like, if you really want to do this right create a YouTube channel that’s focused on one thing and find somebody to help you in the YouTube space, because if you can hire that out, if you could afford it, when somebody says, I’m going to start my own business, they usually think of marketing expenses or they said, I said, some degree of money, I would put all my money into somebody that is an expert at building [00:55:00] YouTube channels.

[00:55:01] Jon Benson: That’s what I would do.

[00:55:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: Beautiful. So brilliant.

[00:55:04] Jon Benson: Well, I buy Benson and then do that. So, I have to say that. Yeah.

[00:55:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: Okay. John Benson. My new favorite benson best Benson of all time. You have given us so much gold today. I thank you for your wisdom. I thank you for your time and for all the inspiration you brought to all of us coaches.

[00:55:18] Lauren Brollier Newton: We really appreciate you.

[00:55:19] Jon Benson: Thank you so much, Lauren. It was great talking to you.