019: The Power of Email With Ben Settle

00:00 Beau Henderson: And one of the things our listeners that are business owners that they’re sending questions… They want to know how to take this idea of this business they have and amplify it or get it out into the world or maybe even stand out. And I’m excited today to talk to Ben Settle. Ben has written ads, created the email campaigns, marketing strategies that have earned his clients multi millions of dollars in sales. So, Ben, welcome to the RichLife Show.

00:26 Ben Settle: Well, hey, I appreciate you having me on. I’ve been looking forward to it.

00:31 Beau Henderson: You know, it was funny when I was digging through, one of the first questions I wanted to ask you is how in the world do you figure out or become an email specialist? There has to be a story there somewhere.

00:44 Ben Settle: Well, actually, I started out as a freelance copywriter and I had always liked this one guy’s email list, his name is Matt Furey, he’s in the fitness market and all this. This was back in the early 2000s. And I used to be on his list and I thought, “Man, this guy has the best lifestyle.” And he would brag about it. He’d get up in the morning, write an email, and he’d be done for the day. I’m like, “That’s the business I want.” So as a copywriter I was like, “Yeah, okay, I can try to build something like that.” Eventually I got some materials from this guy and learned from him how he does email, and his stuff pretty much serves as the foundation for what I do and teach now.

01:24 Ben Settle: I’ve kind of tweaked it a lot and changed things around a lot just for my own personal use and all that, but basically that’s the foundational stuff and I… A few years… I don’t know around 2008-ish or something, I started emailing in this other style, like what he was doing like a daily email. It wasn’t just pure content or anything, it was actually a fun thing to read but he still sold everyday. And I started learning that and I did it and I started applying it to my own products. And I was like, “Wow, this is actually working. I’m getting all these sales when I never really used to. I mean, I was getting… I was a copywriter, I’d worked for clients, I’d get sales for them, but getting sales for my own stuff was not always that easy. So, I started doing that and then eventually people were like, “Hey, Ben, when’s your email course coming up?”

[chuckle]

02:10 Ben Settle: I didn’t really plan to have an email course, but I must be doing something right. And so, I created a course. Basically, I kind of broke down exactly what I do and how I think during email and applying just… Everyday is like a new testing ground for me. I always… Even to this day, I learn something new everyday of writing emails. And I created this $800 course which easily paid for itself if anyone just had a list and did what I said, that was like chump change. And so, I sold that for a while and then it dawned on me that I’m constantly updating this product because I’m always learning new things and applying new things and all that. And so, I kind of segued into a print and a monthly newsletter that teaches email, and since then I’ve just specialized in email. I still do copywriting, I still teach copywriting, I still enjoy it, but email is the thing that I focus on the most now.

03:03 Beau Henderson: Well, you know, it’s funny and working with and talking to a lot of business owners over the years and one of the thing that comes up, and I’ve seen it myself, is there’s a lot of advice out there. And I’m using air quotes here from gurus to go, “Make sure you have this email strategy to where you’re building a list, engaging your audience.” Yeah, sounds good but there’s really not a ‘how to’ to it. And I think that’s an issue out there because it sounds like a good thing to do but there’s not a lot of people out there actually teaching you how to do this.

03:34 Ben Settle: Yeah, and most teaching falls into one of two mistakes. So, the first is just sending blatant sales pitches all the time or even more worse is kind of almost like a booty call where they’re like they have something to sell, they’re gonna pound their list with offers out of the blue. It’s like they’re using them and that’s all they’re there for. And that’s a big mistake, I think. I mean, I’m not saying you won’t make any sales doing that but compared to the way you should be doing it, it’s nothing. The other mistake people make is going the opposite way and all they do is give hard content. Hard content that they could be selling in their product, and they call it moving the free line. And basically the idea behind that is if I email people and send people all this free information, they’re gonna look at that and say, “Wow, this is so great. I wonder what’s in the paid product.” And they’re gonna buy it from me.

04:24 Ben Settle: And I’m not gonna say that never works. It does especially for certain people who have a rockstar following in whatever their niche is. It’ll work for sure, but not nearly as well as just treating it like talk radio or like a podcast, actually. You’re gonna sit down for 200 to 300 words a day, you’re gonna give them a little show. You’re gonna talk about something interesting with your list. You’re gonna talk about maybe problems they have or insecurities they have or interesting ideas you have about whatever their problem is. You’re just having a discussion with them. You’re not necessarily solving any of their problems. You’re not giving away anything that’s in your product, because not that I’m… It’s not that like, oh, I wanna be greedy or anything, it’s just that nobody buys like that.

05:07 Ben Settle: It’s like if you go to the grocery store and they give you a whole chicken leg as opposed to a little toothpick of food, you’re already full. But if they just give you a little bit, just a little taste, so that they get an idea of what you have, you make them hungry, and they’re gonna buy what you have. And if they buy what you have, they’re far more likely to use it, whatever it is and consume it and their life will improve. But if you just give free stuff to people, it has no value. It just gets put in this digital dustbin in their computer that’s just, “Oh, yeah, that’s nice. What else do you have?” I don’t like that. I like to train my customers to not only buy stuff but use it. I don’t want people buying from me unless they’re gonna use whatever I’m selling, ’cause otherwise they’ve wasted their money, and I don’t wanna waste anybody’s money. So that’s kind of the mindset I have when I write emails.

06:03 Beau Henderson: No, I love it, it almost sounds, and correct me if I’m wrong, it almost sounds like you’re spending 90% of your time on rapport. And then, maybe a little bit, “Here’s how I can help you a little further.”

06:13 Ben Settle: Absolutely, yeah, rapport is a big thing and there’s so many ways to get it, and just having that conversation with your list every… Daily. And it’s just like a segment of a talk radio show. You’re going to talk about one thing and then just like talk radio you have a chance, after a segment, they’ll go to commercial and ask you to buy something. It’s the exact same thing with email. I’m not saying I never do a blatant pitch and I’m never saying that I never give like a lot of information, I do once in a while. But most of the time, I’m just in there, I’m gonna make it worth their while. Here’s kinda the mindset I have and I learned this from this guy named Ken McCarthy, who’s like the founding father of internet marketing as we know it.

06:52 Ben Settle: I mean he’s the guy that, he’s basically one of like four or five people that were sitting around a table in Silicon Valley back in the early ’90s saying, “How can we use this internet thing to sell with?” Conference on… So he’s been doing this for a long time. And I remember him writing about this in one of his books, he’s like, “Before pushing that send button, ask yourself the question: Does what I’m about to send warrant the person reading it interrupting their day for two or three minutes?” If the answer is “No,” Don’t send it. But if you have that going in when you’re writing an email, as long as you’re not wasting people’s time, I think it’s good. I think you have to respect people’s time and respect their intelligence, and respect the problem they have that you’re trying to help them with. And just doing those things will make people a lot more interesting to hear from everyday.

07:38 Beau Henderson: And that’s funny that doing a daily conversation for a lot of people or even you you might even hear that would be too much, but it like, you said if it’s just a little bite of, I like you’re analogy to being… I’ve done a radio show for six years, and it’s almost just like having a segment that you’re just going out and engaging your people with.

07:57 Ben Settle: Absolutely. And daily is important because well, God, there’s so many reasons to do daily, other than just the financial reasons, you know, like the more… And that’s the obvious reason. But another reason is people procrastinate. Sometimes they need to hear from you for two weeks before they pull the trigger on something. And they’re happy that you kept talking to them. Another reason is, it’s there’s like a… There’s this, this is sorta of an unspoken thing, but whatever you’re doing out there, you’re probably… And this, I’m just talking to the audience here, whatever you’re doing, you probably want people to think you’re an expert at what you do.

08:31 Ben Settle: I mean that’s just typical branding and positioning. Well if you, if you’re supposed to be an expert at whatever it is that you sell and you don’t have something, even if it’s something small to say everyday, are you really the expert that you’re proclaiming yourself to be? I don’t know about you, man but I can’t not, like I have to do it. Like, it’s not just emails. I have a podcast, I have to get this stuff out of me. It’s like therapy. And that’s the way to look at it. Like if you just love your market and you love what you’re doing and you love the product that you’re selling, it’s therapy.

09:03 Ben Settle: It’s your moral and ethical duty to make sure that people in your market know it exists everyday so that when they’re ready to buy, you’re right there with that nice, shiny candy like link to buy from. And, they don’t have to buy everyday. Sometimes people make a decision to buy two weeks ago, and they just they didn’t have money back then or they just needed to get paid or whatever. They’re procrastinating and they did it today. And I’ve had people say that you know, “I wanted to buy this for the last three weeks, I finally pulled the trigger.” That’s why the daily is so important, it compounds on itself.

09:33 Beau Henderson: Well, and so that’s something that I just pulled out of what you’re saying Ben, this idea. It could be across, this methodology could be across mediums too. It could be, for some people, it might be a daily two minute video.

09:47 Ben Settle: Oh yeah, in fact, I even tell people that. I’m like, “In my opinion you should… You should hunt what you know how to catch.” So if you’re a video guy, it’s the same, like, it’s all about communication. So I would say write an email and then turn that email into a video, turn it into a blogpost, turn it into an article, a social media post, you know, on LinkedIn or whatever. You can turn it into whatever you want. But, I mean, if a daily video is fine. If you’re doing a podcast everyday, do a podcast everyday. That consistency is what’s important and I think people should play to their strengths. Some people hate writing, but they love just getting in front of a camera and talking, that’s fine. You’ll do better doing that everyday than doing it once a week. So absolutely.

10:30 Beau Henderson: Now, and again now, I’m just getting engrossed in this conversation, so I hope the audience gets some value too. When you’re doing this daily, just things I’ve been working on, when you’re doing this daily touch, now are you keeping a consistent through line? Or are you just ever kinda just going off topic and it’s just about kinda making friends? You see what I’m getting at?

10:53 Ben Settle: There’s always some kind of a teaching element to it. There’s a lot of entertainment to it. I do, I do mostly, now this is really isn’t a function of email what I’m about to say but I am a big believer in this concept of sequential selling which is something, the only person I know who really teaches this, is this guy named Sean D’Souza. His site is psychotactics.com, I get no money if you go there, but I just think the guy is brilliant. And he teaches this thing called “Sequential Selling.” So, it’s not about throwing a million different products at a list, it’s about having like a flagship product that espouses whatever, the philosophy and like, the how-to of what you teach overall and just letting people buy that.

11:37 Ben Settle: So it’s kinda like karate schools, right? You can’t just walk into a karate school and say, “Oh, I want an orange belt.” No, you have to start with a white belt. But you start with a white belt, it brings you in the correct way, and you know what the next belt is. So to translate that to business, you know what the next sale is already, what you’re supposed to buy next, you don’t have to ask. So it helps each sale perpetuate on itself to the next sale, and it’s just a sequential way of doing things. So, yeah I’ll get off topic. Sometimes I’ll sell something completely different. Like this last weekend, that’s why I asked you before the call, if you’d gotten on my list today or earlier this weekend, because this weekend I was selling somebody else’s product as an affiliate, but that’s not my normal way of doing things.

12:17 Beau Henderson: Right.

12:17 Ben Settle: I mean most, 90% of the time I’m selling my print newsletter every day, and that’s just because that’s my main thing. Once somebody buys that, then they’re kind of ready to buy some other stuff. But I want to bring them in the right way. It’s kind of like a sack of flour. If you take that string and it just goes down the middle, everything comes out and it’s chaos. It’s hard to put back in, it’s hard to fix. If you don’t bring people in the right way and buying the right product at the right time so that they’re ready for your other products, it’s chaos and it’s better to have it nice and trimmed at the top in the right way.

12:52 Ben Settle: So another analogy for that would be the Star Wars movies, since… That’s buzz [12:57] ____ buzzed about Star Wars.

12:58 Beau Henderson: Right.

13:00 Ben Settle: You’re better off coming in. And the studios would prefer you come into watch Star Wars first before watching Empire Strikes Back, because if you like Star Wars, the sale for Empire Strikes Back is already made. So is Return of the Jedi. But if you come in on Empire Strikes Back and you’re lost, you don’t have the context, the first movie and all that. It’s just less likely that you’re gonna buy, it’s not like you won’t buy tickets for the next movie. It’s just less likely. Maybe you’ll go back and watch Star Wars, true. But, you gotta be a little paranoid about this stuff. You may only have one chance to get someone in the right way. And so, it pays to be paranoid, I guess would be the too long, didn’t read version. [laughter]

13:36 Beau Henderson: That’s gonna be the quote I’m gonna, the graphic I’m gonna make for your quote. “It pays to be paranoid” by Ben Settle. You know what I like too Ben, about martial arts analogy? I’ve been involved in martial arts in the past. And one thing, I think people do crave that you have an order, and a structure. Step one, step two, step three, step four. But also, something I believe too is that, I aspire to have that black belt knowing that I have to go through a bunch of steps to get there.

14:04 Ben Settle: Absolutely. There’s a lot of psychology behind this. And really, it’s, it goes even beyond Karate schools and stuff. Restaurants do this. Airports do it. Not like they’re selling anything, but it’s just sequentially bringing you from one step to the next. The Catholic Church does it. You can’t just say, “Okay. I want to be Catholic. I want to get married.” No, first you have to get baptized and then confirmed. I mean I’m not Catholic so I may get some of these wrong. But, they have a very specific sequence to go through.

14:34 Ben Settle: Eventually you can go branch out and do multiple things. But you have to do the first three things first in that order. You can’t get your last rights from my understanding, if you haven’t been Baptized. I mean, maybe I’m wrong on that, but I’m just saying that’s just the basic idea of it. And restaurants do it. They don’t just let you come in and seat yourself. Usually you have to wait to be seated. Not that they won’t serve you food, but first they ask you if you want something to drink and an appetizer, then the main course, then coffee and dessert. It’s a very specific, well thought out thing that is designed to extract as much money from us as possible. But we like it. We don’t resent them for it, because they’re bringing us through the way we want to consume food in that case. But you can do the same with any other product.

15:18 Ben Settle: People want that. You were saying that’s structure. They wanna be told what to do. We’re all like that. I mean, if I don’t know anything about something, I’m buying a product, lets say it’s an informational product. I would love for someone to guide me through this. What do I learn first and all that, so it’s a good thing.

15:36 Beau Henderson: Well Ben, this all makes a lot of sense to me, and I think to people listening. But here’s an issue, in my inbox, I’ve got 1,000 things that come in everyday. And how in the world can a mere mortal, with their copy, stand out in an inbox?

15:56 Ben Settle: Well here’s the way I look at it. We now live in a celebrity-obsessed culture. Like it, hate it. It doesn’t really matter. It is what it is. People give far more credence and attention to celebrities. That’s why a celebrity can write a book about, I don’t know, a health issue, but the real experts are ignored because that’s the celebrity they got on Oprah and everything. So my point is, people want to be entertained more than anything. People want to be entertained first. So you got to make your emails entertaining.

16:26 Ben Settle: Now it doesn’t mean you gotta be funny and slapstick jokes and all that. But there are ways to be entertaining even if you’re not an entertaining person. And if you’re the one that they like hearing from every day, because you’re kinda giving them a little show. It’s like talk radio. I mean there’s entertainment value to it. And if you do that right with email, you’re good. You’re gonna be the one that people want to listen to. And all the other ones that say, “Last chance” or whatever, they get ignored. But if you’re the one that comes in and says something crazy in your subject line, that’s what I try to do every day in my emails, you’re gonna stand out.

17:00 Beau Henderson: And I think that’s a good point too is entertain but without necessarily modeling, because say somebody sees a sample of yours and that’s just not who they are, you gotta find a way that that kinda fits, that’s authentic to you, correct?

17:15 Ben Settle: Oh yeah. Absolutely. And believe me, I have my copycats. And they don’t even realize how much money they’re leaving on the table because they’re not being themselves. They’re not being authentic. I mean that’s 95% of the battle right there is just being you. Just like you’re talking to your buddies or something. You’re not probably stiff or copying someone else’s way of talking. You’re just yourself and you’re having a good time and you just translate that to the email. You write like you talk. Just doing that will go a long way toward getting people to want to be heard everyday.

17:49 Beau Henderson: Well, Ben, I want to ask you about antipreneur, but before I do that…

17:53 Ben Settle: Sure.

17:53 Beau Henderson: Any last minute tips for somebody that they’re out there, with a business and they’re wanting to, they’re just wanting to take another step and be more successful or maybe get their business out in a little bigger way.

18:08 Ben Settle: Yeah, just start collecting… If you’re not already doing it, start collecting email addresses from your customers or put just from a website, and start sending them an email every day with just something interesting and then a link to buy something with. That’s important. Just give me interesting information is actually gonna bring them in [18:25] ____ wrong if you don’t sell them something, ’cause people get accustomed to just getting free whatever. You wanna let them know you’re a business and you do that by just putting a link in there, talk about a problem or something that’s going on in that market’s life. I can’t give specific examples without… Because there’s probably lots of different businesses listening to this but that’s it. I mean it’s that simple, and put a link in there and get people and just get in their inbox every day. And that’s really…

18:53 Beau Henderson: Yeah, but this works for a traditional offline business, meaning it could work for a financial planning firm, that’s just my background, just as much as the guy that’s 100% online.

19:05 Ben Settle: Well, let’s put it this way. How cool would it be if somebody’s hiring a financial planner? I would love to get an email every day with some new tip or strategy or some new change in the IRS code or whatever, keeping me abreast of all this stuff, but done in a fun way where it’s interesting or the guy is just talking, like they’re talking and then put a link in there and say, “Look, if you give me a call if you wanna talk about this some more or whatever.” I mean how many people get a news, an email every day from their accountant, which we could actually all use, saying, “Hey… ” Well, actually, my accountant does do a blog. It’s kinda cool. He’s like that. His thing is he likes to point out all the scammers and all that, people who are getting thrown in prison for tax evasion and all that, so like warn us. So it makes his job easier so we don’t try to do shady things.

19:55 Beau Henderson: So they just busted at that…

19:56 Ben Settle: It’s good like that, yeah. That’s an example of how to do it. So anything, any kind of business this worked for.

20:02 Beau Henderson: Excellent. Now another question here about the strategy. Do you just kinda get up in the morning, have a routine, say, “I’m thinking about something to talk about?” Or do you map out a week at a time or is there a process, or is that just more individual?

20:16 Ben Settle: It depends. Sometimes I have a lot coming up. For example, I wrote my third novel this last summer, and it was like, “Okay, I don’t wanna be thinking about these emails because it’s a lot of work editing a novel.” So I pre-wrote 30 days of them and put them in there, but my ideal way to do it is to write them the night before and have it go out the next morning. So there’s no pressure or anything. But that’s the way I’m at my best when I do it like that, but everybody’s different. Everybody has to do it their way.

20:42 Beau Henderson: Let’s talk about it this… So you’ve been doing the email and the copywriting for a while. How long has the newsletter been going out?

20:51 Ben Settle: The paid newsletter, I launched August of 2011. Yeah, so we’re doing pretty good so far. Almost we’re going on five years next summer. So…

21:03 Beau Henderson: Excellent. And we can let listeners know too that you do have daily tips too that people can opt in for, correct?

21:10 Ben Settle: Oh, yeah. That’s at bensettle.com. It just, that’s daily emails I send out. Sometimes I send more than one out. I email a lot, but I warn people. And the first email they get, it says, “Look,” you know what, sometimes I send two to three a day, sometimes just one. This last weekend, I was sending a lot because I was doing a special offer. Yesterday, I sent like seven emails to my list, but they all were written under that guidance of, “Does this warrant them interrupting their day to read this?” It wasn’t just “Oh, last chance, last chance.” So it just depends. But that’s my main site and then I have a podcast site which is bensettleshow.com, and that’s my weekly podcast where I get everyone deep in all the stuff and I can talk about it at more of a deeper level than on a daily email.

21:56 Beau Henderson: Well, that’s what I was gonna bring up. So the transition to the Ben Settle show, the podcast world, tell me a little bit about the antipreneur idea and what that means.

22:06 Ben Settle: Well, okay. So antipreneur, I’ve written several emails just about this philosophy that I do business by called the anti-professional. In my way of thinking, you have professional people, and you have unprofessional people. And professional people are fine. I mean I think in this day and age, especially on the internet, I mean where you have a lot of trolls and stuff, that being the professional who just, the customer’s always right and we wanna bend over backwards and all that, for a lot of businesses, I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. I think for some, like big corporations, I think they should, where they have PR battles they’re fighting all the time. But for the small independent entrepreneur, I’m a big fan of being an anti-professional. Now that’s different from unprofessional. Unprofessional is the guy, for example, let’s say somebody emails you because they didn’t like your product, they use the four-letter word.

22:57 Ben Settle: And then you use one back, say, but add their mother into it or something, that’s the unprofessional way. The anti-professional way is just to ignore them or to say something that just shuts them up, like, “Do you always whine like a little bitch every time?” Just something like that. It’s like whatever I would say to someone in real life if they were trolling me, this doesn’t mean to be mean to people. I’m saying the people who deserve it. That’s the anti-professional. It’s kind of like the anti-hero in stories, right? The Incredible Hulk, for example, the anti-hero. He’s not a hero but he’s not a villain. He’s just kinda doing his own thing, following his own code of honor and ethics and saving people, and that’s kind of the way I do business. So my producer, Jonathan Rivera, came up with the name, antipreneur because I wanted to use the word “anti-professional”. He’s, “What about entrepreneur, antipreneur?” So I just apply that to [23:49] ____ antipreneurs; a lot of the stuff that I talk about is definitely not stuff you’re gonna get at business school.

23:56 Beau Henderson: Right, right.

23:57 Ben Settle: It’s not the stuff that… The typical thing. I just have my own way of doing business. And people… It’s not the right way for everybody. I’m the first to say it. But the people that I know who do do it and follow what I do tend to be happier business people, because they’re living by the… They’re doing business on their own terms. They’re not letting… For example, I teach people not to be needy at all. To take all neediness out. Neediness is like a killer of businesses. It’s a killer of attraction in personal relationships. Friendships, relationships with the opposite sex, all that. Neediness hurts people. The antipreneur way is to never be needy, at all. If somebody… You gotta almost go the opposite, where you have to go out of your way to just not be needy. And doing that makes you… Gonna make you a lot more money, whatever you’re selling, for one thing, but it gives you peace of mind, too, because you didn’t compromise yourself just for a sale or whatever. Now, this is a really small crack into a big tapestry of what I teach, but that gives you an idea.

24:53 Beau Henderson: So that really… The format of the show, the theme of the show is you’re teaching these nuggets every week and just digging deeper?

25:00 Ben Settle: Absolutely. And sometimes it’s about email marketing. Sometimes it’s about business in general. Sometimes it’s mindset stuff and inner game stuff. You know, it’s just things I’ve learned over the last 15 years in business and in life, just ’cause I’m a very introspective guy. I’m always… I rationalize things. I like to think. If something goes wrong, I like to rationalize through it. Like, what did I do to make that happen, and what lesson can I extract? For example, a couple months ago my house was burglarized, and I lost over $50,000 worth of precious metals and cash and a couple firearms and stuff, a couple meth addicts broke into my house. They were watching me, targeted me, and did it when I was gone. It’s my fault. I blame myself for it. But I thought “You know what? I can sit here and be like the victim about this, or I can turn this into a plus.” So what did I do? Within a couple weeks I moved out of that town, which for two years I kept saying, “I wanna move out of this town,” and I never did, back to the Oregon coast where I like to be. I’ve gotten more work done in the last month than I probably had the last three years, ’cause I’ve been motivated to now wanna buy a house. I just put an offer down on a house last week.

26:02 Ben Settle: All of this stuff, I never would have… These burglars were like the best thing ever happened to me, because there’s so much good has come out of it because I just ran with it. And I was just really grateful that they didn’t hurt my dog. That was the thing. I walked in. I thought “Oh man, did they hurt my dog?” That would have really sucked, and who knows what would have happened? But I was just grateful for that. I took that anger I had… You know, you go through something like that, you get angry. It’s like, “Ugh!” And I’ve used it now, and everything’s going in a much better direction as a result. So I teach that kind of thinking and how to turn bad things into good things. And really nothing bad ever happens to an email writer or a podcaster or someone who does video because all of those things make great content that you can use to turn into lessons and sales to sell things with.

26:48 Beau Henderson: Everything’s a good story for something.

26:50 Ben Settle: Absolutely.

26:51 Beau Henderson: I like that. So, bensettleshow.com, correct? To check out the podcast?

26:55 Ben Settle: Yep.

26:55 Beau Henderson: Okay.

26:56 Ben Settle: Yeah.

26:57 Beau Henderson: And check out bensettle.com for the daily tips to see what Ben was talking about, that daily touch, that daily interaction in action. It’s one thing to talk about it, it’s another thing to actually see it, and that’s what I’m excited about.

27:10 Ben Settle: Yeah, definitely.

27:11 Beau Henderson: So one of the questions… I’m gonna shift a little bit to a question I like. This show, I’ve been talking about on international radio for six years now. Here’s the podcast this year. It’s always had a theme of just living a life… Living the journey, and not waiting for some destination and making sure you’re not just sleepwalking through life. And the themes we’ve talked about is that you can be successful in both life and be successful with money. And one of the questions I like to ask, Ben, I’m sure you have an opinion, I’ve got a feeling, or an idea. What is the best advice someone’s ever given you about money, and who was it?

27:51 Ben Settle: Oh man. The best advice I ever got for money, and you’ve probably heard this from other guests, but it stands, is from that book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, about who’s slave to who, the debtor… Like, being out of debt. I’ll tell you… I was telling you, I just put an offer down on a house. I didn’t do that… I mean, I’ve been working my ass off for the last couple months because I don’t wanna be in debt for very long. I haven’t been in debt since 2009, and I like not being in debt. And so I really have a fire under me right now to pay that thing off like in two or… Like maybe three months, I hope. Three to four months I’ll have the whole house paid off. Because I think that that is just a terrible… I know there’s ways to make money from debt. I’m not saying there isn’t. But I just don’t like it. I’m not psychologically comfortable with it. I don’t like it. So to me that’s been the best advice I’ve ever gotten. I mean, not being in debt.

28:39 Beau Henderson: There you go. And that’s… You know, Robert Kiyosaki has come up so much in that question. I’m gonna have to one day get him on the show to tell him how many times his work has come up in that question.

28:49 Ben Settle: Oh yeah. He’s… That book is… I mean, that should be required reading for high school students. I wish I’d known it back then.

28:56 Beau Henderson: It got me actually… That book got me… Rich Dad, Poor Dad got me on the path from being a psychologist… I was actually a counselor going to be a psychologist to a financial planner. So that shows you how big of a shift I had in my mindset.

29:06 Ben Settle: Yeah. Absolutely.

29:08 Beau Henderson: So, Ben, hey, I appreciate it. Lots of valuable tips and content. We’re just kinda winding down here on time, but I hope to have you back. I have a feeling we have multiple topics we could talk about here on the RichLife Show in the future.

29:20 Ben Settle: Absolutely. And anytime you want, you just let me know. I had fun talking to you here, and it was good.

29:26 Beau Henderson: All right, guys. Check out bensettle.com or bensettleshow.com and we’ll see you next week with some more tools, tips, and strategies to help you live your definition of a rich life.