Ben Mack, We Salute You

When you come across someone who is going to change your life, you know it immediately.  Looking over my life in retrospect, I think that’s been nearly 100% true.  You never know how, why or when, but that basic super-electric charge is there the second the connection is made.  I’ve been learning many things from many people, here on these internets, but I owe more to Ben Mack than pretty much anyone else I can think of.  I am writing this as a thank you to Ben, and as a heads-up to you, the reader.

There are serious problems in the world today and I have no interest in complaining about them. Whatsoever, yo. I expect my friends to slap me as hard as they can when I start backsliding like that.  Because when I find myself asking “Why?” at this point, I’m just lying to myself.  I know exactly why, I know exactly how to change it, and neither answer is comforting. How do we break the cultural hypnosis?  How do we expect to get people to wake up and change their own lives?  I’m bringing this up here because I believe that Ben Mack has a great deal to teach about mass media, about persuasion and the creation of consensus reality, and most of all about realistic solutions to these problems.

Interested? 

My life would be easier if I cared less. If anybody knows a better way to convey my ideas I’m all ears. I welcome people to swipe my ideas if they aren’t making money on the endeavor and they aren’t being malicious. I’m open to constructive criticism and fair comments. I’m interested in real facts.

--Ben Mack

Let’s Prepare the Stage

So who is Ben Mack?  Well, there’s two stories of his life, and I think they’re worth presenting back to back.

1. Ben Mack is a former advertising genius who defected and took all his secrets with him. Ben Mack was living comfortably as a “memeticist” for the highest-profile ad firms on the continent.  It’s easy to be comfortable when you’re making $180,000 a year, right?  Yet Ben was not comfortable—in fact, he was going crazy.  Ben realized that the insights and techniques he brought to the table were wasted on the major corporate clients he consulted with.  His core insight was that branding was really a weapon for small entrepreneurs, who are flexible and intelligent enough to take full advantage of the power it provides.

2. Ben Mack is a child prodigy magician with decades of experience in persuasion and illusion who is constantly giving the reader peeks behind the curtain and up his sleeve. If you knew how to alter people’s perception, control their reactions, and make them hallucinate right in front of you at the age of 16, do you think you’d be normal today? He’s lived his life behind the curtain, and the most common complaint people have is that he’s hard to understand.  (I’ve noticed that’s true for just about anything worthwhile, but that’s just my personal experience.)

I would submit that the real key to understanding Ben Mack is the Bucky Challenge.  Are you familiar with the Bucky Challenge? It’s been haunting my entire life since I first read it.  It goes a little something like this:

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”

We’re raised to think we don’t matter.  Hilariously, as long as we act that way, we will prove it to be true every single day. Reject that, fight that, fuck that, spit that out, it’s a lie.  You have more power than you realize, here and now.  Are you willing to use it?  More importantly, what will you do with it?

What’s Your Supercontext?

Of course, this could all be a slick sales pitch, right?  What’s driving Ben Mack?  Here’s the simple and pure answer, from an excellent and concise interview with Weekend Entrepreneur:

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?

BEN: I was inspired to become an entrepreneur because I stand for the possibility that every human have drinkable water and it appears to me that decentralizing the world powers is the fastest, most likely way to bring drinkable water to every human on this planet.

My work empowers entrepreneurs to market more efficiently and more sustainably profitable. Seriously. Concentrated power is hegemonic and the only way to decentralize world power is to empower more entrepreneurs to get bigger faster.

Have you read Poker Without Cards?  It’s not the best novel I’ve read, but it was damn interesting.  High-bandwidth ideas abound, and the title is one of the best.  As Ben explains, Poker is a game of betting on incomplete information. Poker/marketing guru Mike Caro told him that you could just as easily play Poker with cow shit as with playing cards.  The point is that you don’t know what your opponent is holding, and you need to develop strategies and systems to compensate for that.

The applications of this insight are simultaneously obvious and profound—especially since neurology teaches us, clearly and repeatedly, that as human beings we will always be betting on incomplete information.  You’re playing poker every day, wether you know it or not. 

There’s a curious myth in our culture about reality being somehow optional. We do not have the option of rejecting unpleasant truths.  You and I are going to die, and pretending otherwise does nothing to change that.  Our “leaders” are sick monsters and money is a toxic lie—but that doesn’t mean we get to reject it because it’s distasteful.  This is the world.  Those are the rules, and those will remain the rules until you and I get enough power to change the rules. That involves hard work, brutal self-analysis, and a thousand difficult choices every week.

There’s also no other way.

“If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?”

Here’s one of the most valuable insights Ben Mack has given me: we’re all selling, all the time, wether we know it or not, wether we like it or not. I’m selling every sentence I write because I want to communicate what I consider useful information to people.  I have to captivate your attention in order to do that, which is why I’m naked right now.

1. Ben Mack taught me how to use my email right. I empty my inbox every day or I don’t go to sleep.  This system has made be exponentially more effective and organized, and I’m also exponentially less stressed out day to day.  I recently found out that David Allen advocates the same system with his book Getting Things Done, but I found out about it through Ben’s interview with Jake Frank. (An earlier version is here.)

2. Ben Mack taught me to be my own boss. Self-employment is not a slumber party and in fact you need to work much harder when you become Your Own Boss.  Thanks to Ben’s material, I’ve installed a few simple habits and self-checks that keep me focused and productive.  I meant it when I recommend Think Two Products Ahead.  I won’t get into details here because the book is worth the bucks, but if you’re broke, email me and I’ll be happy to discuss this with you.  All I ask is that you use it to live a happier life, and pass it along.

3. Ben Mack taught me to be professional and polite. It’s easier for me to communicate with people, and it’s easier for people to contact me.  I found that when I’m not projecting negativity and insecurity, people actually want to interact with me.  I am not alone on this, take a look at Tim Boucher, who’s experienced a similar self-transformation and written one of the best damn essays I’ve read this month, the Six Strategems.

4. Ben Mack taught me that I’m not insane. I have been giving away resources for years now, and I’ve had no shortage of “blog experts” assure me that they would have made tens of thousands of dollars off those resources.  That’s probably true, but it also would have meant that the people who benefitted the most from what I give would have never recieved it.  You want to read books?  Here’s my library. You want to hear my hip hop?  It’s all here, enjoy. This is not hippie bullshit, this is legitimate business in the 22nd century.  It settled my soul to see, vividly, that I was not a idealist relic at all: I was actually ahead of the curve.  I intend to stay there.

Let’s Define Our Terms

Conscious Attraction is not trademarked by Joe Vitale and Oprah Winfrey. Having ritual focus on clear goals and taking concrete steps to achieve them really will change your entire life.  It doesn’t take a movie to prove that, and it doesn’t mean that your relatives have cancer because they “thought themselves sick.” We live in a culture where simple truths get twisted and coated in bullshit until we’re sick of hearing them, and that’s the whole point. DON’T WORRY. BE HAPPY. MEAN PEOPLE REALLY DO SUCK.

Internet Marketing is the art of selling information for money. Usually, lots of money.  The reason people like Tellman Knudson charge lots of money for their information is because they’re assuming you will apply that information and use it to make a great deal more money than you invested. 

Affiliate Marketing is when you give people a percentage of your profits in exchange for helping to sell your product.  For instance, when I recommend a book like Grant Morrison’s The Filth, which is the only comic I’ve read that’s better than Alan Moore’s classic Watchmen, I provide an affiliate link. If you click it, and purchase those books—or anything else, for that matter—Amazon.com will pay us a small percentage for referring you.  Generally when Internet Marketers launch new products, they build up a large affiliate program, sometimes called a “JV” for “Joint Venture.”

Here’s my terms: I recommend the work of Ben Mack to anyone who wants control over their art, their writing, or their music. I have found him to be incredibly useful and generous.  As a general rule, Brainsturbator needs credibility more than money.  (Fortunately, I have many other projects.) So aside from the Amazon affiliate program, I’m not signed up for any kind of affiliate or JV with Ben Mack.  That’s a deliberate choice, because I think my recommendation would carry less weight if we both knew I was earning a percentage on something I recommended, like Think Two Products Ahead.

“Amazing Secrets Revealed By Blackballed Brand Strategist Eliminates Customer Apathy and Defections, Explodes Your Online Business Beyond Your Wildest Dreams And Propels You To Own Their Hearts, Minds and Wallets This Year and Every Year Of Your Business Life!”

Further Reading for Motivated Monkeys

Right now, Ben Mack is going buckwild.  He’s running a series called “Profitable Magic,” and it’s a good example of why I respect the man so much.  To promote his upcoming product, he’s giving away more information than most people sell in a lifetime.  He’s been doing his teleseminar series night after night after night, and the material has been consistently valuable, useful and entertaining.  You can catch up over here.

Googling Ben Mack will take you to some strange and amazing places.  He’s attracted a lot of hate, generated a lot of controversy, ruffled a lot of dead feathers.  A lot of the websites you’ll find for Ben are “squeeze pages”—designed to get you to sign up for his email lists.  (They’re pretty entertaining and often contain very valuable info, but at the same time, basically just a daily sales pitch.)

I recommend starting with his blog posts, like Autobiography of a Magician or especially Entrainment and the Psychology of Alternative Selling.  There’s also Give Bucky a Chance dot com, which is an EXCELLENT collection of youtube videos about and featuring R. Buckminster Fuller.

Mark Horn runs a Squidoo Lens about Ben Mack’s work which gives you, freely, a huge portion of Ben’s most valuable and interesting work.  It’s precisely this kind of generosity and transparency that makes it hard for me to take Ben’s critics seriously, but of course, your decisions are your decisions.  Do you want to hang out with people who think just like you and talk about issues you already agree about? Or look at it this way: is Ben Mack a “sellout” for bringing Bucky Fuller and Bill Hicks in front of people who would otherwise never come into contact with them?  Personally, though, I prefer the third angle: if you want to talk shit about Ben Mack, what exactly are you doing these days?