Ben Settle

A couple month ago the great comicbook writer Peter David died.

He was one of THE best writing teachers I have ever learned from.

I used to study interviews he gave, a book I have of his (about how to write comicbooks), and especially the comicbook stories he wrote. He could do more characterization in a single page than most writers could do in an entire year of issues. And his 12-year run on The Incredible Hulk is still being grifted off of by lesser writers today in much the same way a lot of late night comedians grift off the late Johnny Carson.

Another true, and admittedly nerdy, story:

I bought all my comics via mail order as a teenager in the 90’s.

But I’d spend extra money to buy a 2nd copy of Peter David’s Incredible Hulk title each month at the comicbook store, because I could not wait for UPS to deliver the mail order bought issue to see what would happen next.

His pacing, use of cliffhangers, and characterization was second to none.

And his work has had a huge influence on my writing today.

Including copywriting, emails, content, books, fiction, all of it.

If you can find interviews he gave, and his book about creating comicbook stories, I highly suggest paying attention to his writing approach. He was one of the best. And if you want a world class lesson on how to do market research read X-Factor #87.

The entire issue is like a buyer psychology lesson in some ways.

But the Quicksilver character part is especially good.

And quite entertaining to boot.

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Ben Settle

An Email Players subscriber once called out my abusive nature:

Hey, Ben. I hope you’re doing well, or even fantastic.

Have you ever considered that you’re a modern version of Pai Mei?

A kind hermit who’s a master of his craft, has barriers to entry, doesn’t open spots for disciples very often, and is ready to dismiss those who aren’t worthy or ready to learn.

Just a thought.

Another thing that has been on my mind often in the last few weeks is that the world you created has an expanded version. You send us in various directions for exploration, to neighboring territories. Those of Matt Furey, Gary Bencivenga, Jim Camp, and many others.

While consuming their content and visiting their worlds, it feels somehow that I’m still in your world, if it makes any sense. As many ideas and concepts are interlinked, it’s like being in both planes at the same time.

Feel free quote me anytime in any medium of your choice on this.

I’m a big fan and a happy denizen of the world you’ve built.

True story:

Many years ago I had a copywriting apprentice who I also happened to have been dating at the time. But alas… she did nothing I told her, rebelled at every opportunity, and I had to fire her. Most notably, she kept (1) giving advice away for free and (2) kept taking on rush jobs.

Two things I expressly forbade her to do.

So, she had to go back.

Word around the campfire is, after we parted ways for good, she took to Facebook telling everyone I was too controlling, too demanding, too cruel… like the copywriting devil incarnate.

And she was absolutely, 100%, no-question-about-it correct.

I AM controlling, demanding… even cruel to those who SPURN my commands.

Stefania will tell you all about how I brook no insubordination from those wanting to learn from me. I’m also quick to berate, badger, and shame if required – figuratively whacking people on the head with my righteous walking stick or forcing them to punch wooden posts until their knuckles are raw and they wake up in the middle of the night twitching and jabbing at the air as they sleep on the floor… while subsisting on nothing but rice.

The mantra on Ben Mei’s mountain is and always has been:

“The beatings WILL continue until obedience improves”

Being “nice” never helped anyone. It merely props up mediocrity, excuses, and sloppiness. That is why my “template” for how to do business is not some idiot mindset marketing goo-roo.

It’s the Soup Nazi.

“Ben Mei” suffers for his business.

How can he expect any less from those wanting to learn from him?

Anyway, and so it goes.

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Ben Settle

No, not because AI is gonna take their jobs, unless they let it do so.

But because the information being taught is seems to be decaying to the point where now nobody even knows what is ethical or not. I am not talking about “gray areas.” I am talking about black & white, line drawn in sand, “don’t do this” kind of stuff.

For example, this question I got:

I’m an aspiring copywriter and I had a question about bullets please.

Some bullet examples are insane like:

“Why you should never chew gun if you’re trying to lose weight!”

Are these kinda made up bullets? Or do you actually mention this in the products? Do products really have answers to all these INSANE bullets? What if they don’t and people ask about it?

There was a time when I’d think a question like this was trolling.

And I certainly don’t blame anyone at all for asking.

Sounds to me like the copywriting community as a whole has become so fooked it somehow has even less standards than it did the last time I checked in on it. It’s one reason I stopped engaging with the copywriting community (other than this list and my Email Players subscribers, of course) back in 2018.

The virtue signaling, pandering, and overall fragility was bad enough.

Not to mention that’s when they started supplicating to the self-mutilating pronoun brigade.

But I noticed a lot of bad advice being shared, celebrated, even held up as wisdom back then.

I wanted nothing to do with it.

And going by the above question?

Smells to me like it’s only gotten worse.

Some of the names I see today getting thrown around as copywriting authorities and mentors are people I know for a fact aren’t qualified to pour water out of a boot, much less teach copywriting, and I also know for a fact many have never sold to anyone but their own warm lists/audiences. This is especially true from a bunch of the ones I see shilling so-called AI.

No, I’m not talking about those legitimately testing & exploring the technology.

I’m talking about the ones outright grifting, lying, and exploiting newbies.

Speaking of which, here’s something not directly related to copywriting, but certainly “adjacent” to it:

The great Karl Denninger recently wrote an article (titled “Digital Tulips”) about so-called AI that everyone whole cloth believing the lies coming from the corporate-pushed, FOMO-fueled Narrative should read. But if you know who Karl is, you’re probably either a fan and probably already read it, if not then if you do read it you might think him a lunatic and probably won’t want to hear what he has to say.

As far as business goes?

And the email-side of it, especially?

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Ben Settle

Here are a few of the differences between writers and Publishers, and why one is far superior to the other:

* writers exhaustedly chase media

* Publishers shrewdly stack media

* writers have to sometimes use tools (i.e., so-called AI) even if they don’t want to and it demonstrably makes their work look stupid

* Publishers can select whatever tools they want, and can ignore what they don’t

* writers have to do what client tell them to do even if it’s not serving the market/customer because reasons

* Publishers are their own client and can do whatever they want

* writers are often at the mercy of trends and the vagaries of the crowd, whether it makes sense or not

* Publishers can ride out, or even make their own, trends

* writers are subject to government regulations (like communist – literally – California’s idiotic AB 5 some years ago, that almost drove a bunch of freelance writers right out of business with its 35-submission limit for freelance writers and other creative professionals, severely cutting down how much money they could earn).

* Publishers are far less susceptible to such things for a variety of reasons the communist mind apparently can’t comprehend

* writers have to think tactically and in the here & now (i.e., like a chef)

* Publishers have to think strategically and long term (i.e. like a restaurant owner)

* writers are totally expendable in a world awash in writers and, now, AI prompt fondlers

* Publishers are the boss, can’t be replaced, unless, I suppose, they replace themselves

* writers have a ceiling on their income

* Publishers don’t have a ceiling on their income

* writers can only sell their own work, if they stop working they stop selling

* Publishers can sell their own writing as well as others’ writing (via licensing, hiring ghost writers, buying rights to IP, whatever), and so can keep earning even if they stop selling

I’m not going to blow sunshine up your righteous skirt and say it’s “easy” to switch one’s mentality from being a trend-chasing writer to being a trend-creating publisher. If it was easy everyone would be doing it, just like anything else in business and in life.

But, I daresay it can be worth it.

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Ben Settle

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, actor Joshua Jackson said something on the Kelly Clarkson Show about a lesson Emilio Estevez taught him that is perhaps in some ways amongst THE most valuable business advice you can ever get. Specifically, about when working on the Mighty Ducks sequel, when he “blew past” a line of autograph seekers to get to the locker room.

Jackson said:

“Emilio pulled me to the side and just said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Don’t ever, ever do that again. Why do you think you get to go out there and skate in front of all those people? This is who keeps you employed; do not ever forget who it is that you are here for.’”

Jackson then added:

“It was a really important reframing for my 15-year-old self. Remember who you are, and what’s actually important.”

Earl Nightingale’s “you have no boss but the customer” comes to mind. They pay you, not the clients. Without those customers, those clients can’t pay you. So it makes no sense to pander to the clients like copywriters do.

“My client says I have to use dumbed-down AI because they want to save money…”

Screw ‘em if that’s the case.

They are NOT your boss.

The customer is your real boss, if your client doesn’t like it, find a better client.

Gene Schwartz warned about this in the early 90’s in his speech to Phillips, “you have no client but the audience.” Nothing else matters at the end of the day – not some digital grove worshipper with an AI girlfriend, not some committee of chuckleheads who wouldn’t know a good ad if it fell out of the sky and bit them on the prostate gland, and certainly not some goo-roo approval, industry approval, or peer approval.

If anything you are likely better off doing the opposite of all them.

Either way, only the customer matters.

And if a client balks at that attitude?

If they are more interested in “saving money” than serving the customer?

Why waste your time and talents?

You can do whatever you want, of course. It’s your life. But I remind myself of this every day, and it has kept my business out of a lot of trouble, while making decision-making on what to write in ads, emails, books, etc a lot easier.

Even better:

Be your OWN client, with other clients optional.

Literally treat your own business, list, offers, as a client in your rotation of clients so if one or more go darkside chasing nonsense, you don’t care, it doesn’t really affect you, and you are eating steak either way – yes, even if they fap themselves blind and their palms hairy to so-called AI in the service of saving money instead of serving the market and giving it a great buying and user experience.

The future is bright for Client-less copywriters, imo.

We don’t care about things like AI or client moods, either way.

If anything, we find it amusing.

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Ben Settle

Not long ago, I saw a screenshot of a tweet that said:

“I was shocked to discover that my friend is marrying the man she advised me to break up with.”

And it got me to thinking about how, one of many reasons I’m immune to shaming & gaslighting by the really cranky variety of feminists I sometimes hear from, who run around behaving as if men are inherently abusive, sexist, while they are all inherently pure as the driven snow… is because of my stint as co-owner of an info publishing business in the diet niche targeting overweight women.

I was good at selling to that market, but I never enjoyed it.

Do enough research in the diet niche and it takes you to some really dark places.

But one thing that quickly became apparent during the research and selling to that niche was how much of the frustrations our female customers suffered were not from men at all… but from each other. Many of my most profitable emails were real life stories about women who were trying to lose weight being sabotaged/betrayed/emotionally broken by their female – not male – friends, family, co-workers, etc.

I’d haunt weight loss forums all the time observing the market.

And it was just one nasty example after another of women hating each other. Probably the most profitable one I wrote was an email about a woman’s friends purposely tagging her in her heaviest pics on Facebook just to cruelly demoralize her.

Another one was a woman asking a heavy woman who was trying to lose weight:

“When is baby was due?”

(and right in front of her other friends)

Plus stories about their friend or sister making a move on their man, etc.

It was like right out of soap operas about so-called friends & family.

All real life stories about real people not merely being cruel, but I’d say evil.

Every man who feels the need to pander to and virtue signal about women for clout and likes, or who is intimidated by women (most men these days), struggles to find a good woman… and/or is repulsive to women… should research the diet niche. They will realize women are just as flawed as men, and therefore be far less likely to supplicate and disrespect themselves for the possibility of a scooby snack from a woman they are needy for.

As far as business goes?

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Ben Settle

Let me tell you a story I read on a Facebook account called “Inspiring Quotes.”

Back in the 1800’s a wealthy business man had a daughter named Hetty Green. When daddy died, she inherited $7.5 million (far more in today’s money – probably a half a billion or more). She then moved to New York and invested her money in Wall Street and became known as:

“The Wicked Witch of Wall Street”

Story goes she married a millionaire.

And even though she had more money than Scrooge McDuck and his money vault:

* She lived on leftover cakes and broken biscuits in grocery stores

* Would argue to get a free bone for her dog every day

* Sewed underpants in her teens and did not change them or buy new ones for the rest of her life

* Never used hot water to save money

* Wore a dress she never changed until it was worn down to the last molecule and had no choice

* Lived on 2 cent pies each day

* Delayed treating her son’s broken leg to not have to spend any money, causing the leg to be amputated

* Died from having a stroke while arguing with her made after the maid asked for a raise

Yeesh.

Probably there are exceptions. But I’ve personally never met a cheapskate who wasn’t miserable & made everyone around them miserable. Before the reply guys get too excited, I am not talking about being broke. That happens to everyone, and is just life. Nor am I talking about being frugal, using common sense, and being wiser than serpent when it comes to money.

I am talking about being cheap minded.

It’s a sickness of the mind & soul.

Stefania (back when she lived in New York City) once told me about a guy she knew whose family made lots of money. The dad is a CFO of a corporation probably everyone reading this has heard of. But he and his family were so cheap they brought bologna sandwiches on the way to fancy restaurants.

The reason:

To not eat & spend so much at the restaurant.

The mom would even squeeze and scrape the condiments to take home, and the son would refuse to eat pasta simply because it had the biggest markup. I probably don’t have to tell you how stingy they were with tipping – assuming they tipped at all.

They sounded like wretched people, too.

The kind that’d stab you in the back.

Incidentally, Stefania also knew someone whose father left her such a large inheritance that she lived on Madison Ave off only the interest, and yet would un-crumple her used paper towels to dry and reuse them later out of pure, uncut, and unadulterated… cheap-mindedness.

Anyway, I’ve seen these types come & go in this business for nearly 25 years.

And I also have yet to meet a single one who I wanted anything to do with.

I also do everything I can to frighten such types away from even thinking of subscribing to the paid Email Players newsletter.

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Ben Settle

I was recently forwarded a post of a copywriter who’s like a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest.

Here are the highlights:

* The copywriter working for an agency was mandated to process his copy through AI detection software, because their clients (wisely) want to know humans wrote the copy

* The problem was, so-called AI was flagging human copy as AI-written

* The result is the so-called AI limiting what the human copywriter can even say/do without being flagged as AI

* Wording legitimately required to describe the offer sold is even flagged as AI

* The copywriter had to dumb down language and generate nonsensically boring content to appease AI instead of serving not only the client but the reader/prospect

I think you can take it from there.

“Bro! AI is here to stay!”

Oh, we know, lil’ anon, we know…

And those who don’t use it to do their thinking and writing are going to dominate in direct response over the coming months and years. I have been seeing more and more copywriters starting to see the limitations of the FOMO-created mad dash phase, realizing what it’s legit useful for and what it’s not, and seeing the corporate-pushed Narrative crumbling in real time.

All of which is why imo there ain’t no better time to be your own client, sell your own offers, and use client works as an option and not a necessity.

If you go that route then I highly suggest growing an email list, mailing it each day something they want to read, selling it offers they want to buy.

A good resource for the email side is the paid Email Players newsletter.

More on that here:

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Ben Settle

Here’s a juicy one for you:

I saw a video short of Gary Vee being interviewed about his most insane so-called AI predictions. And his first answer was that your grandkids will marry an AI robot, and there will be relationships with AI robot boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives. And he also said it will happen…

“At scale.”

Ain’t nothing these guys like more than the term “at scale.”

Except, maybe, “workflow.”

I am not even saying he’s wrong.

You already have people falling in love with fake fapGPT personalities.

It’s part & parcel of the power of proximity, which I’ve talked about many times in Email Players and also in my Client-less Copywriter program AWAI sells.

Plus, Gary Vee also thinks AI will save marriages.

And who knows, maybe he is right?

For example:

If a man spends more time with his fake AI concubine, his real human wife is bound to get jealous. And because other men who know how to get real women will be with other real women having real children and happy families, the only men a woman spurned by a man who chooses his fake AI concubine will be able to find is other guys with no game they are not really attracted to, and who can’t get laid unless it’s with a robot. Or, they will find putting up with the human woman’s bull shyt is not worth it, and just stick with the robot.

Men are far more interested in sex on the front end, and relationships on the backend.

Women want the relationship on the front end, and the sex on the backend.

So in the AI robot apocalypse I predict the men will have the upper… uhm… hand.

And, as a result, these 100 point checklists chicks on Tinder have like the six-six-six rule (six pack, six figures, 6 feet tall) will go right out the window unless they want a fake, non-emotionally available robot that pretends to be emotionally available, but isn’t really emotionally available any more than it can give her children.

Will that happen?

I don’t know.

But I’m on record predicting sex robots bringing balance back to the force since 2016 in my old elBenbo’s Lair Facebook group, where this opinion did not make me very popular with the girl boss hellcats up in there at the time. But now, John Hughes’ “Weird Science” comes to mind with all this. Except without the reality-bending powers, of course.

Whatever the case:

When I mock the fapGPT dorks and talk about how they worship AI as religious idol while having orgies in the digital grove, it’s understandable people think it’s just joking around and assume I exaggerate.

But if they don’t believe me, maybe they’ll believe Gary Vee?

Concubinage is going to come back in a big way, my friend.

If you’re single, then best take the last chopper out of ‘Nam while you can.

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Ben Settle