136 AI-Proof Your Personal Brand With Jason Barnard
Published by: Stephanie Hayes (Business Coaching). Host: Stephanie Hayes. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. September 11, 2025
Listen here: 136 AI-Proof Your Personal Brand With Jason Barnard
Are you building a personal brand that AI can replicate? In the age of artificial intelligence, generic content floods every platform - making authentic differentiation not just valuable, but essential for survival. Today we’re diving deep into how founders can craft personal brands that AI cannot commoditize or copy. We’ll explore the specific strategies that separate human authenticity from algorithmic mimicry, revealing why your unique story and perspective are now your most valuable assets. Get ready to discover the counterintuitive truth: AI doesn’t make branding easier - it makes authentic differentiation more critical than ever.
136 AI-Proof Your Personal Brand with Jason Barnard
Coffee, Tattoos, and AI-Generated Content
[00:00:00] Stephanie Hayes: Chris, I feel like we have been a show together in a long time.
[00:00:27] Chris Franks: I do feel like it’s been a minute. How are you? You look terrific. How is your Thursday morning going?
[00:00:35] Stephanie Hayes: It’s early and I have a packed day, so well ask me in six hours.
[00:00:41] Chris Franks: The I for one have coffee going. Things. So I got it. You get better once I start getting coffee on board.
Stephanie I question, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this. How many cups of coffee do you drink a day?
[00:00:55] Stephanie Hayes: None.
[00:00:57] Chris Franks: What?
[00:00:58] Stephanie Hayes: I drink tea. [00:01:00]
[00:01:00] Chris Franks: Okay. Green tea. Do you drink C tea? No, not
[00:01:03] Stephanie Hayes: Green tea. Just tea. Tea.
[00:01:05] Chris Franks: You drink no caffeine? It’s caffeine. So there is caffeine in your tea?
[00:01:11] Stephanie Hayes: Yes.
[00:01:12] Chris Franks: Okay. Do you drink 16 glasses of tea a day?
[00:01:15] Stephanie Hayes: No, see, here’s the thing. I used to drink a lot of coffee until like last year, and I find that I go really crazy on the caffeine. I can have one glass per day and then that’s it. And now with the tea, I don’t get quite as much of a,
[00:01:33] Chris Franks: So I see what you’re implying here is that my craziness is just the subject of my caffeine addiction has nothing to do with my actual personality defects.
Yeah. Okay. All right. That’s good to know. So
[00:01:44] Stephanie Hayes: I got a tattoo yesterday.
[00:01:46] Chris Franks: You did? Tell me. Literally look,
[00:01:48] Stephanie Hayes: I got it.
[00:01:49] Chris Franks: Oh, I thought this was the dad joke. Oh, that’s amazing.
[00:01:52] Stephanie Hayes: What a beautiful tattoo. So this is the profiles of my kids in the stem. Oh wow. Oh wow. That’s really cool. And then Tiger Lilies, they have [00:02:00] some meaning, but it made me think you could get a tattoo as well.
On your head of rabbits because from afar it would look like hAIrs.
[00:02:13] Chris Franks: It’s pretty good also. I love that. Jason, our guest is also bald, so we get to just stare at you and like just, that’s pretty good. Pretty good. Dad joke, I like it.
[00:02:24] Stephanie Hayes: Yeah. Good dinner. But yes, I got my first tattoo and now I wanna go back to my today to get more. I’m addicted.
[00:02:30] Chris Franks: It’s addicting. It’s addicting.
I’ll tell you.
[00:02:32] Stephanie Hayes: Hey what makes your personal brand impossible for AI to replicate? Did you know that 73% of LinkedIn content is now AI generated yet? Engagement rates for human authored posts are 47% higher. Then AI content. When Kajabi’s, Travis Rosser pivoted from generic marketing advice to sharing his raw founder journey, including fAIlures and [00:03:00] mental health struggles.
His personal brand engagement tripled this shift from polished perfection to vulnerable authenticity created a moat that AI simply cannot cross today on how founder we’re gonna be talking about your personal brand of AI is. Like pretty good co-host Chris Franks, and we have an amazing guest who is a second timer on the show.
Jason Barnard.. The Brand SERP Guy® is a globally recognized, oh, I can’t do two things at once. So globally recognized expert in Digital Brand Strategy and Personal Branding as CEO of Kalicube®. He’s helped thousands reshape their online presence and dominated AI driven search. Hello, Jason. Welcome back.
From Cartoon Dog to Brand SERP Guy
[00:03:48] Chris Franks: Jason, it is great to see you. Can you at least, ’cause I don’t think Stephanie has heard your episode. Can you talk about your life as a voiceover artist before we even get started and give us a couple of cartoons? [00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Jason Barnard: Alright. Oh, you want the voices?
[00:04:02] Chris Franks: Yeah, I give it to you. Let’s just start right off the bat.
I’m, I know. I’m like, it’s the best content we have. We, most people will drop after five minutes anyway, so go lead with this.
[00:04:11] Jason Barnard: Hello everybody. My name is Boowa. I’m a blue dog. That’s the blue dog. Then his father was, hello, I’m his father, it’s lovely to meet you. And then I was my wife. My wife was, sorry I wasn’t my wife.
My wife was a yellow koala and I played the role of her father. Hello. It’s lovely to be here. I’m Koala’s father and her grandfather. Hello. It’s lovely to be here. I’m afrAId I’m going to have to go and have a nap because I’m very old.
[00:04:43] Chris Franks: That’s what I sound like. That’s actually with just a lot less of a cool accent.
That’s just what I say. I’m very old and I need a nap. That’s
[00:04:50] Jason Barnard: so I did, so what I don’t think I told you Chris, was why I became a voice actor.
[00:04:55] Chris Franks: I’m assuming you were unemployable in every other career focus. Yes. Thank you very much. Yeah.
[00:04:59] Jason Barnard: I [00:05:00] left the folk punk band and became a cartoon blue dog.
We moved to Mauritius with my wife. She was a yellow koala. I was a blue dog. And we realized after two years of creating content with just these two characters, that we would need to create a family for them. ’cause we ended up creating a thousand. Interactive activities for children. We got a billion page views.
In 2007, we were competing with the BBC, with PBS, with Disney in terms of dominating the children’s market online for multimedia edu-tAInment, I think we called it. And so we created the families with the mothers and the fathers, the sisters and grandfather, grandmother. And then we started looking for voice talent, but we were living in Mauritius, which is a tropical island just off the coast of Madagascar.
And we couldn’t find any voice talent. So for a year, these two characters had their whole family’s around them. But the families never said anything because we didn’t have any voiceover actors. And then one day I just decided I had to do this, even [00:06:00] if I’m not very good at it. ’cause we can’t have their families wandering around and never saying anything.
[00:06:05] Chris Franks: I just like that the Blue Dog’s dad just sounds like an idiot, which is just how most dads are. Jason we’re just
[00:06:12] Jason Barnard: Oh, but he was a musician, so he kept going
[00:06:18] Chris Franks: This episode. I’m sorry.
[00:06:20] Stephanie Hayes: Like a left turn for sure.
[00:06:22] Chris Franks: Stephanie, I was gonna say I’ve completely derAIled your episode, but in the best possible way. The love to see how you segue back. The personal brand name after I, I knew a
[00:06:31] Stephanie Hayes: family who lived in Mauritius as well. It was super, super interesting to listen.
They actually lived across the street from my parents. But your voiceovers and the characters you became, were. Almost like you were replicating a brand identity.
[00:06:48] Chris Franks: Oh personal brand identity transition. Very nicely. Nice segue. So we come
[00:06:52] Stephanie Hayes: Back to if you had AI back then, it would’ve really helped you build the identity of your doggy [00:07:00] family.
[00:07:02] Stephanie Hayes: I’m struggling.
[00:07:04] Jason Barnard: No. In fact, the personal branding kind of aspect of it does come in really heavily because. It was so successful and so popular with like a billion page views, 60 million kids. We made a TV series that add on Playhouse Disney. It was a huge success. And then I pivoted my career.
I exited the company, pivoted my career, and when you search my name on Google, it said, Jason Barnard.. is the voiceover artist for a cartoon blue dog. And that was a problem for business because I was presenting myself as a CEO founder, entrepreneur, and digital marketer. I realized at that point that I needed to change Google’s perspective of me and how it represents me.
So instead of talking about the Blue Dog, I talked about the fact that I was the CEO and the founder of Up to 10 Limited the company, and that I signed deals with Disney, with ITV studios, with Orange in France, with who else? Lagar [00:08:00] there. Oh, and Samsung as well. And that was how I managed to change Google’s perspective of me by changing my own perspective and how I presented myself.
The Problem with “Vanilla” AI
[00:08:10] Stephanie Hayes: Okay, so back in the early days of the interwebs because I’ve been around this world for a very long time as well you could write a few blog posts and you’d be able to, to skew SEO. So now we’ve got all of these tools to build content for us and to create content for us.
And we do have to do so at volume in order to really make some shifts. So where does the. The disconnect come in when we try to use AI to replicate or build our personal brand.
[00:08:41] Jason Barnard: Ooh. There are two things there. Number one is volume isn’t the most important thing when you’re managing your personal brand.
Volume, in fact, creates problems. The more you create, the more you then have to control. So the quality of what you’re creating and the consistency of your brand narrative is what’s important, [00:09:00] not the volume. And as you say, with AI, if I start using Gemini, a vanilla Gemini, let’s call it, or a vanilla chat, GPT, it won’t sound like me.
And when these tools that analyze AI, your AI output and says this is human generated or AI, and they usually. Get it phenomenally wrong with anything that’s even slightly well-trained. One of the reasons that AI will recognize you is your vocabulary and the way you turn your phrases round.
So if you’re gonna use AI, you have to get it to use your lack, we call it lexicon, and you have to get it to create sentences with the structure that you would create. And very importantly, you have to feed it Anecdotes. If you feed it anecdotes, it will drop anecdotes into the story, and then other AI thinks it’s real because of what you said about the guy from Kajabi.
Anecdotes make it seem real, whether it is or not.
[00:09:56] Stephanie Hayes: 73% of anecdotes make it seem real. Yeah. [00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Jason Barnard: Is that a real number or do you just make it up? You went to long, it sounds like AI,
[00:10:05] Stephanie Hayes: Every stat that AI comes up with is 73% of something. Okay.
[00:10:12] Music: Yeah.
[00:10:12] Stephanie Hayes: So what you’re saying is look. Building a personal brand is pretty important as a founder, right?
And it can definitely shift the trajectory of your business from a marketing perspective. You can use AI tools to help you build that personal brand, but you have to know. Where they come in handy and where they can actually, like the overuse or the, maybe the underuse can actually harm your personal brand because, you read half the content that’s getting posted out there and you’re like, oh yeah, that was AI.
And if it, if you as a human being can tell that it’s AI, then you know somebody’s been lazy.
[00:10:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I was. Sitting on the lawn in the sun in the south of France just to make everyone feel [00:11:00] jealous with Google Discover. And I was just scrolling through articles and I did it for about an hour. And after about an hour, I realized my brAIn had totally switched off, and it was just washing through my brAIn and it was all AI generated.
It was all very. Vanilla and that word is gonna keep coming back. It’s vanilla. AI is vanilla because the AI is creating content based on the next most probable word, it builds a sentence and then a paragraph, and then a, an article based on what is the next most probable. And the only way you can stop it from being completely vanilla is to feed it things that are improbable, such as unique lexicon, anecdotes, and specific sentence structure that you tend to use.
That’s how you stop it being vanilla. And at ckey when for our clients, we build Gemini Gems, which are assistant GPT, that are carefully trained on the lexicon that we build up for them and their anecdotes and their sentence structure and [00:12:00] it comes pretty close, but it never gets it right. You still have to go in and correct it.
However good your assistant GPT gets.
[00:12:07] Stephanie Hayes: Chris, in all your travels as whatever it is you’ve done in your life those cute little jobs and stuff that you had have do, would you say that you have built a personal brand, and if so, how?
Why Authenticity Matters for Founders
[00:12:19] Chris Franks: It’s I would say that I’ve been pretty terrible at it. I think that this is the point in time where Jason, I think that this is even the first time we had a conversation and really through the course of doing the podcast, my opinion has changed dramatically.
I was the gross marketing guy. I was the math, not art. It was all about the perfect ad at the perfect time, on the perfect platform to the perfect landing page, and it had nothing to do with me as a founder. I didn’t want it to have to do with me as a founder. I wanted to do about product. And what I was selling and how I’ve evolved is in the world of AI not personal branding Jason, but the world of AI is very good at marketing.
You know why it’s trained off the [00:13:00] internet. And you know what? The internet is 90% marketing. It’s all marketing. And so it’s trained off of millions and billions of pages of market. And so where my perspective has changed is a personal brand is now incredibly important, and authenticity. I think that word authenticity becomes the key word.
I think that being an authentic and real human being and talking about your experience as a founder, Stephanie, you’ve been preaching this from the beginning. It’s just taken me, and I’m a little slow. Also, Jason, I’m from Texas. I don’t think we got into that lexicon down there. I
[00:13:35] Jason Barnard: Don’t think,
[00:13:36] Chris Franks: I don’t know.
No, we don’t got, we AIn’t got no lexicon. I know that for sure. Lemme
[00:13:41] Jason Barnard: Get you. I like you Chris. What you just said is really vital and it makes me feel much better because yes, I, AI will write brilliant marketing and I’ve been using it for kq and we’ve got significantly better at marketing by using AI.
But it’s the personal brand that makes the difference, that makes people trust [00:14:00] and convert. And what I get now is people coming to the calls saying. I know what I want. I know you’re the guy ’cause I see you absolutely everywhere with that red shirt talking about personal brand, AI and Google and how they represent you.
My only question now is how much does it cost? How long would it take? Those are good sales calls.
[00:14:19] Chris Franks: Yeah, those are great sales calls.
[00:14:20] Stephanie Hayes: Do you have more than one red shirt?
[00:14:23] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I’ve I actually went to a tAIlor in ThAIland when I was at a conference. I went in and said, can I have a red shirt? And I asked him just to do the first three buttons and he got really upset and said, you have to have buttons all the way down, otherwise it’s not a shirt.
And I insisted, but he said, no, I won’t do it. I said in that case I’ll take three. Will you do it now? And he said, yeah, okay. And so I got three done. They’re exactly the same
[00:14:47] Chris Franks: With just three buttons.
[00:14:48] Stephanie Hayes: So I think that, I think we limit ourselves when we just think about, AI in, in personal brand development is about creating content, right?
Like the, to me, a like our [00:15:00] AI, AI tools have all this capability, and you can see this in these new like ecosystem agent tech, AI tools that are coming out that there is like a whole lot more that the thinky part of AI can do to. Help us build a personal brand and be our, our thought partner, even if we are creating the content ourselves or whether our AI tools are doing that.
I think a lot of people get stuck thinking AI is just ChatGPT writing them content. So how have you seen founders use other AI tools to, in other ways to really support their personal brand?
[00:15:38] Jason Barnard: I’m gonna be very. Much like a politician here and completely not answer the question. Well done, because
[00:15:45] Stephanie Hayes: I’ll get back to it.
I’ll get it eventually.
[00:15:47] Jason Barnard: Okay. So you’re gonna turn into the real journalist. Brilliant. So what I actually wanted to do was flip this over and say yeah we can create all this content. And we talked about volume, we’ve talked about how to create tools to help us, but the big question is [00:16:00] how do we get that content and our personal brand in front of the right audience?
And I think not enough people think about that. And obviously you’ve got the traditional marketing, you go onto LinkedIn, you were talking about that earlier on, maybe YouTube and hope that people are gonna visit your website. But at Kalicube, I’m completely obsessed by saying that ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Google Search, Bing Co-pilot, Perplexity are the biggest influences in the world.
They’re having trillions of conversations with billions of people who trust them. And the real trick to get in front of your perfect audience is to get those machines to introduce you. To the conversation they’re having with a subset of their users, who your audience we’re having conversations with Shachi, bt, it’s getting us to the solution, to our problem.
And as a marketer and with your personal brand, you have to get yourself what we call top of algorithmic mind. So the machine keeps thinking, Ooh, ooh. They’re talking about AI optimization. Ooh, they’re talking about search, they’re talking about Google. They’re talking about personal brands. Ooh, Jason Barnard..
Jason Barnard.. [00:17:00] Kalicube. It’s that idea of top of algorithmic mind. We talk in marketing about being top of mind. All the way down the funnel. And if you think about it as top of algorithmic mind, all the way down the funnel, you’re hitting billions of people with trillions of niche conversations with a machine they trust.
So that’s smart marketing.
[00:17:18] Stephanie Hayes: How does that look different than traditional SEO?
[00:17:23] Jason Barnard: Ooh, that’s a very good question. Now you are doing such a good job. She’s a hard
[00:17:28] Chris Franks: Journalist.
[00:17:29] Jason Barnard: Yeah she’s actually crossing the ball over. Setting it up for me perfectly to head in the net, which is what we say in football, English, football, not American football.
’cause
[00:17:38] Stephanie Hayes: It’s not manipulation.
[00:17:40] Jason Barnard: Oh, okay. Fair enough. You’re manipulating me. I’m happy, right?
[00:17:44] Chris Franks: Yeah, well done. Good job. Good manipulation. So
[00:17:47] Jason Barnard: AI engines are based on, all of them are based on three technologies, search results, which we all know about. So you need to dominate or have good search results at passage level.
But that’s a [00:18:00] long story. So they have search engines. They have LLM chatbots that allow them to have the conversation and the search results allow the LLM ChatGPT Gemini Microsoft Co-pilot to update the information that’s out of date or find niche information they don’t have. So if you ask an LLM about something, it already knows.
It just tells you. But if it doesn’t already know it, it goes and looks it up online and then summarizes for you. So the LLM chat box conversation, search results for the niche and UpToDate information, and then Knowledge Graphs for chat, fact checking. And the Knowledge Graph is just a machine readable encyclopedia, like Wikipedia, but 20 thousand, 20,000 times bigger.
And we track that at Kalicube. Then we track the Knowledge Graph, we track the search results, and we track the LLM chat bots. So those three technologies come together and that’s the difference. You can’t just rely on search results anymore. You have to master the [00:19:00] LLM, the search results and the Knowledge Graph.
[00:19:03] Stephanie Hayes: Okay. I wanna shift gears for a second. We started out talking about authenticity and how important that is in a personal brand. So Chris, I’m curious A, where have you seen this? And B, what do you think? What happens when authenticity? Clashes with professionalism, which one wins and which one can really build that personal brand?
[00:19:30] Chris Franks: It is a very good question, and I think that this really does come down to your comfort level of being a founder. But for me, the moment when everything changed is when I stopped trying to be. Like my image of what a successful founder entrepreneur was like projecting like I needed to address a particular way, I wanted to talk a particular way, et cetera, and just started being authentically me.
And the thing when it changed, Stephanie, is when I [00:20:00] started talking about failure and started talking about not just the good things. Because if you do this job, you’re gonna fall a lot. And so it’s about your comfort level. But I will tell you, I would absolutely encourage anybody. The more transparent you can be.
You get to keep things back. You don’t have to talk about every bit of your life, but the more transparent you can be about your journey, your professional journey, and the good and the bad, we all share those experiences. I think to Jason’s point, that’s not something that a chatbot can really replicate.
It’s not what AI can replicate. Your genuine experience and the emotions and struggles and joy that goes along with that. That’s something that’s very real and I would say you’re terrific at this, Stephanie. So I wanna get it back to you as well, because you’ve taught me a lot on this subject. How do you approach it?
[00:20:54] Stephanie Hayes: I think your turning point was when you started dressing as a German barmAId and it was very [00:21:00] authentic and I think a lot of people, it’s
[00:21:01] Chris Franks: Just who I am inside Stephanie. Exactly. It’s who I’m inside.
[00:21:05] Stephanie Hayes: Octoberfest all year long. It’s
[00:21:08] Chris Franks: All year long. Exactly. That’s exactly right.
[00:21:11] Stephanie Hayes: Yeah, I think so. Go ahead, Jason.
[00:21:14] Jason Barnard: No. He asked you the question. Then I’ll come in with my. 2 cents.
[00:21:18] Stephanie Hayes: Oh yeah. Why? So you go ahead. You answer the question. I’d like to hear your perspective.
[00:21:22] Jason Barnard: No. It was actually to do with the authenticity people saying authentic. It’s one of those vacuous words that no longer mean anything because everybody uses it so much and it doesn’t actually.
Mean anything anymore? A bit like holistic SEO strategy, holistic digital marketing strategy. Because if it’s overuse, it stops meaning anything. But the authenticity side of things is, as you said, just be you and I had an experience a few weeks ago, I joined entrepreneur organization, which is full of entrepreneurs who make lots of money and I feel a bit, I dunno outta my depth, maybe because I was a cartoon blue dog, I don’t really feel [00:22:00] I’m a legitimate.
Fair, authentic, and yeah, I’ve had three companies, sorry.
[00:22:04] Stephanie Hayes: It’s very authentic.
[00:22:05] Chris Franks: Yeah. But that’s actually, yeah. And then you start to probably realize most of those people were jealous of your story. Because you gotta
[00:22:12] Jason Barnard: The thing that struck me was that I went up to Paris for an entrepreneur organization forum meeting, and I was sitting with the people and I didn’t really feel that comfortable.
And then somebody said. What, when did you get here, Jason? ’cause I traveled to Paris and I said, oh, I got here at seven in the morning. And they said, but you come from the South France. That’s weird. How, why would you get here at seven in the morning? I said, oh, I took the night train. And they said, you are mad.
Why would you take the night train? I said, because it’s fun. It was just an idea. I was wondering what it’d be like to take the night, train, sleep overnight, traveling across France, then wake up and I really wanted to take a shower at to Paris. They’ve just opened up the showers for people who come in on the night train in first class.
And so they all kinda laughed and then somebody [00:23:00] said when are you leaving? I said I’ve got the night train back at 8:00 PM and they all just fell about laughing and that was the moment I realized that I could just be me. I don’t have to be pretend to be the entrepreneur that I think people want me to be or expect me to be.
And it was a lovely moment. The whole thing now of course, is Jason is this mad person who gets the night, train up, has lunch, has a meeting, and gets the night train back because he thinks it’s fun. And they said, but you’re gonna be really tired. And I said if I am, I just won’t do it Folk.
[00:23:32] Stephanie Hayes: But it’s so the, yeah.
So this authenticity is all about. I also have struggle with the term because it’s been a, it’s become almost a little bit meaningless, but whatever authenticity means to you, it’s about finding something that, like in the early days of these online creators. I remember there was one big online creator and she all, she talked about all the time, like she had her stuff, but she also talked about mac and cheese all the time.
And that was her thing. And everybody knew [00:24:00] her, could remember her because it was a bit of an outlier. It was something a little bit different. I have a community of about 900 freelancers and virtual assistants that are part of our program and our membership. And I will say like we do a lot of posting in the community.
We do a lot of relevant posts. And then one day I posted about my daughter getting her driver’s license. Most engagement of anything like ever. People just wanna know you. They wanna know who you are as a person. And I think that is getting more and more true. About founders and about organizations.
People wanna relate to something, they wanna have a, to have an emotional connection. And I really like struggle to find that balance of I’m not gonna put my whole life out on the internet, but you don’t have to. It’s not about, it’s about the things that are meaningful to you and people want people it’s the number one thing people want is to be known.
To know others, and I think that’s getting more [00:25:00] and more of a demand from customers no matter what you’re selling. I’m in the services business, so it is particularly more relevant to us because people wanna hire someone that. They feel like they know, but being known is just as important.
And when you can relate and you, even if you never, ever meet face-to-face or in a personal way, feeling like there’s some type of knowing behind a brand, I think is extremely important today.
[00:25:29] Chris Franks: Can I ask a question? ’cause this is, I think this is the heart of this struggle, which is. You’ve been an experienced, you’ve been around the block a couple times.
It’s easier to be authentic. It’s easier to show up, and you realize that there is no secret cabal of business professionals. There’s just a bunch of people like you, everybody in the world. There’s no, room where all the decisions are made. But everything that you’ve learned at this point in your career, and particularly as a founder, is about pretending to be [00:26:00] somebody that you’re not.
And we show up and say, don’t do that. Actually be yourself. That’s a it’s almost a paradox, isn’t it? It’s almost this idea that you as a founder and almost every founder I know is have some sort of imposter syndrome, and so how do you overcome that imposter syndrome? I’m gonna act like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or, some great founder that I know.
But yet every bit of the management research says leadership is just about being yourself and about being. Embracing what makes you differ unique and special. I know it’s a little bit of a left field question, particularly as we’re talking about SEO, but Jason I’d love to get your take and then Stephanie, yours as well.
’cause it’s a really difficult hurdle, I think, for most founders.
[00:26:46] Jason Barnard: I’ve never had any kind of particular problem answering a question. You ask me a question I will always answer. I’m like this 12-year-old child who, if I know the answer, I go, Ooh, ooh, I know the answer to that. So if you ask me a question, I will [00:27:00] always say the answer.
And I’ve always been authentic up until this point when I thought, oh, I better become an entrepreneur. ’cause I better start ringing a company that,
[00:27:09] Chris Franks: yeah, you’re a folk musician. There’s nothing more authentic than being a punk. So I’m coming back to embracing that. Let you do authenticity,
[00:27:15] Jason Barnard: folk punk. Yeah. Folk punk. Yeah. Oh, it’s actually punk folk because if you think about it, punk folk. Punk folk becomes poke punk predominant. No. If it, if you say punk sorry. Punk. Ah, folk punk. It’s punk. And that doesn’t make sense. I was getting really confused. But the thing for me is.
What I find is that people come on sales calls or come into business meetings, and the red shirt immediately gets the conversation going, that it’s a really nice trick. But also the fact that when people ask me, how did you get here? When did you get here? And I just tell ’em, I came on the night train has broken down or breaks down barriers.
And I regret now the full six months [00:28:00] when I wasn’t answering questions like that authentically, if I dare say. And I do truly believe in being who you are and allowing that to move your business forwards. Oh yeah I agree a hundred percent. But with AI, the really important thing is you need to decide what stories you’re telling.
Because otherwise you’re gonna confuse the poor little machine. Because for example, with me, you’ve got punk folk, you’ve got Cartoon Blue Dog, you’ve got WTPL Music, our CEO, and Founder up to 10 Limited, CEO, and founder Callie Cube, CEO, and Founder. It’s starting to get complicated, and then I wrote a book.
Then I’ve made albums, music albums, and I made a TV series and I’m a voiceover action. I’m a screenwriter. Naturally, AI and Google are gonna think that’s nine or 10 different people. And getting them to understand that it’s all the same person is really difficult. And then the second problem is once it’s said, okay, this guy’s done 10 different things and it could potentially be 10 people, but now I understand it’s one.
What does it do [00:29:00] with the ice hockey player in Canada? The professor in America, the circus clown in South Africa. That could be me too.
[00:29:08] Stephanie Hayes: Think it should. So you’ve got,
[00:29:10] Jason Barnard: yeah.
[00:29:11] Stephanie Hayes: Yes.
[00:29:12] Jason Barnard: I think it should be too, but it’s not. And so you’ve got this kind of problem where you’re saying, I’m trying to unify multiple facets of one person that could potentially be lots of different people whilst Disambiguating from people who aren’t me.
And that’s the hardest thing to AI proof your personal brand. In search and it, yeah. It’s such
[00:29:31] Stephanie Hayes: A good, it’s such a good point. And I wanna ask you one last question before we move on to the speed round, but what’s the, here’s what I, here’s my hot take on using AI to support your personal brand. Is that we don’t tell, we don’t teach our.
Our agents enough, right? We take what it gives us and go, oh it just, ’cause I’m the same way. I’ve got all these different businesses, I’m, I do all these different things and AI goes, what do I focus on? [00:30:00] How do I even do this? But with a little bit of teaching. I can help it to understand who I am and just, with conversations.
So what are we not doing yet that is going to help us in leveraging these tools to be able to support us as a multifaceted brand?
[00:30:22] Jason Barnard: From creating a content perspective, one thing that people don’t do enough is clean up. For example, you have a conversation with your AI assistant, your ChatGPT, your Gemini, whatever it is, and there are gonna be misunderstandings and things that you say that are no longer true today, that were true two weeks ago.
You need to delete all of that stuff. That isn’t true because otherwise it will keep spitting it back out. And that’s something people don’t do is clean up after themselves. And the other thing they don’t do is look at the output and ask the AI, how can I improve the instructions I give you? Given that the answer you just gave [00:31:00] me is incorrect or unsatisfactory for X, Y, Z reason, and the AI will tell you, okay, if you frame it this way, it’s gonna be better next time.
So I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Vanilla Gemini to say, okay, I just asked my. Gemini Jam that I trained this question. Here are the instructions I gave it. This is the answer it gave. This is why I don’t think it was satisfactory. What can I do to improve its instructions? And it works so well.
After about five or six iterations, you get something that is really powerful and you don’t do it in your AI because your AI is biased towards things it already knows about you and the things you’ve told it to do. You use a vanilla one that has no preconceived idea and it’s simply trying to help you.
Improve the performance of your assistant?
[00:31:46] Stephanie Hayes: Yeah. I’ve been using an ag agentic ecosystem recently that I just started using and this is fascinating me, but what it does is it allows you to create all these different brains, so it allows you to feed the brain [00:32:00] for, Stephanie Hayes.
Exiting growth strategist with all the things you wanna feed it. And then I’ve been using new brains for each of my clients and then, feeding it all of the things that it needs to know so it doesn’t mix everything up. And I, that’s just like this next layer of super interesting evolution, I think of all of these tools, Chris.
[00:32:22] Jason Barnard: Giving you a chance just to say what you are calling brains is what I’m saying, assistant GPT and Gemini Gems. So just to clarify for everybody, we’re talking about the same thing and it is incredibly powerful because I create one for pretty much every part of my work. Yeah. And my different clients, a hundred percent.
I’m super. Yeah, as we say, that’s
[00:32:40] Stephanie Hayes: the next, that’s the next evolution, I think, is to help people understand how to create these brains. Chris, last sort of call for your comments. Your, being the old guy around here and having been through this before I was even a thing. I think you and I are only a couple years apart, are we?[00:33:00]
[00:33:00] Chris Franks: Yeah. You’re two years older than me, Stephanie. I dunno what you’re talking about. Actually, I’m 26. I just look this way because I’m a founder for as long. What’s
[00:33:07] Stephanie Hayes: Your hot take on, what’s your hot take on all of this stuff?
The Power of an Entity Home
[00:33:10] Chris Franks: I really like everything we’re talking about. I think that there’s one question that I have remaining, which is the mechanics, Jason.
So we talked a little bit about this last time in the episode, but. Let’s say that I now use my AI, a gentle AI, which I think is brilliant to help come up with a really good position. I make sure I go and I clean up things that are not necessarily true about myself. And now I have an authentic story that I want to tell.
How we build this story is a different episode, but I have this story I want to tell mechanically. Do I go out and post blog posts? Is it LinkedIn? Is it podcasts? What are the mechanics now to go start presenting my true, authentic personal brand of the world?
[00:33:54] Jason Barnard: Oh, which is an amazingly good question because that is how you AI proof your personal brand is you [00:34:00] create your own personal website that represents you because all of the AI, Google Copilot Chat, GPT Perplexity are looking for what we call the Entity Home.
Google, call it the point of reconciliation. The geeks call it the canonical website for the entity. And you put your story on that website and that website becomes your version of your truth. And then you go around the web and you make sure that everything about you online corroborates that story.
And you link from the website to the corroboration, from the corroboration back to the website and the machines just go back and forth, see the same story. And then they will repeat what you want because they see the same story over and over. They know where to find the story. They see that everybody else corroborates and confirms what you’re saying.
They see a consistent message and they have no choice but to repeat it. And once they’ve understood that, that is your Entity Home and that’s where they need to look for information and they [00:35:00] trust you. You can get them to change your brand narrative the way you want over time. That’s how you AI proof yourself.
Personal website that the AI understands is the source of information about you from you
[00:35:16] Stephanie Hayes: All right. Awesome. Conversation was probably for another hour. Jason, are you emotionally ready for the speed round?
[00:35:27] Jason Barnard: Yeah I think I’ve gotta calm down a little bit from that bit, A bit of over excitement of the geeky stuff of what you need to do.
Yeah. Yes.
[00:35:33] Stephanie Hayes: Yeah. Let’s do some breathing exercises and then we’ll jump into this meeting. Yeah.
[00:35:38] Jason Barnard: Good to go.
[00:35:39] Stephanie Hayes: Alright. You good, Chris?
[00:35:41] Chris Franks: I’m real. Let’s do it. Let’s go.
Speed Round
[00:35:51] Stephanie Hayes: It really is stress inducing that, okay, Jason, let’s do it. Share vulnerable [00:36:00] failures to build trust or maintain polished perfection to project competence.
[00:36:06] Jason Barnard: Share vulnerable stories because if you ask me, I can’t help but tell you the truth.
[00:36:12] Stephanie Hayes: Okay? Create unique content that takes time or use AI to scale generic messaging faster.
[00:36:19] Jason Barnard: A mix of the two. Use AI to help yourself move forwards to give you ideas. Don’t trust it to actually reflect your voice. Spend the time to rewrite it. When I write an article, I’ll get the AI to spit it out, but I rewrite the entire thing. So instead of taking me five hours, it takes me two or three hours, and that’s a great win.
[00:36:39] Stephanie Hayes: Okay? Focus on personal story differentiation or optimize for search algorithm preferences.
[00:36:48] Jason Barnard: Focus on your own story. Make sure you’ve got it clear in your own head before you start to distribute it. And once you distribute it, make sure that the machines can understand and digest it, [00:37:00] otherwise they won’t repeat it.
[00:37:02] Stephanie Hayes: Okay? Build niche expertise depth or cast a wide net for maximum reach
[00:37:08] Jason Barnard: The deep expertise niche right down the line.
I had a client the other day who said to me, oh, you can’t help me ’cause I’m too niche. There isn’t two niche. If you have no, please,
[00:37:17] Music: yes. If
[00:37:17] Jason Barnard: You have a business where you can make money in an incredibly tight, small niche, of course it will work in Google and AI, it’s a question your business model. If your business model will function in a tiny niche, then it will work in AI.
And AI and Google appreciate incredible nicheness. And this isn’t very speed, is it?
I’m being too long.
[00:37:40] Chris Franks: No, it’s lack of speed around. No. Stephanie’s
[00:37:42] Jason Barnard: just looking at me going, shut up all the words.
[00:37:46] Stephanie Hayes: No. I only look at Chris like that. Exactly. Sometimes Anthony. Okay. Invest in long form authentic content or prioritize quick viral AI generated posts.
[00:37:57] Jason Barnard: I wouldn’t do either. I don’t particularly do long form [00:38:00] content or AI viral stuff.
I do medium form content that tells the story I need to tell in the number of words I need. I think the obsession with long form content is an old SEO trick that we should all forget. Write the content, the length it needs to be to project the message you need without wasting anybody else’s time.
[00:38:21] Stephanie Hayes: I’m a long form content writer. It just, that’s just what comes out of me, right? Like I, I try to do short, but I just can’t. I like, it’s just. It’s just what comes naturally. Okay, Chris, founder Fundamentals. What do you got?
Founder Fundamentals and Resources
[00:38:36] Chris Franks: Really good stuff today. I like the very first thing we talked about is you get to own your narrative.
You get to decide what your story’s gonna be, and start with this idea of how you want to perceive and what story you want to tell. Big props. If you can be more authentic, AI can help you, but you need to manage your AI, feed it anecdotes. You need to go in and clean up things that are not true, and then use a gentle [00:39:00] AI.
Ask AI how to improve the instructions. Authenticity, for lack of a better word. We all hate that word, but let’s just use it ’cause we don’t have a better one is everything. AI can never replicate your unique perspective, wisdom and experience. This is hard. You’re gonna have to lead with vulnerability.
You’re gonna have to be yourself. The SBL world is now all about, about being a human being. Like you now have to show up as a human. Don’t just throw out AI content and then tactically create your own website that your hub and link all other posts back to that website. Very good stuff. Really appreciate it.
[00:39:39] Stephanie Hayes: Awesome. All right. Deep dive resources. We’ve got The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business by Jason Barnard and building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. Anything else you might recommend Jason, as you, some good reading,
[00:39:57] Jason Barnard: download the Free guides kalicube dot com sorry. Do [00:40:00] kalicube dot com slash guides, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E slash guides and there are eight or nine guides, 60 pages each, and they explain everything you need to do.
So we give it all away for free. My personal opinion is that we all have an existential responsibility to ourselves to manage our personal brand, whether we need it or not in AI, because it will misrepresent us if we don’t and that everybody has that, right? And so you download the guide, knock yourselves out, go and do it yourself.
We’re giving it away for free because we found the universal future-proof solution that manages those three. Technologies, search engines, Knowledge Graphs, and LLM chat bot, please take the content free, it’ll help you and you’ll be happy.
[00:40:48] Stephanie Hayes: Awesome. I am gonna go totally nerd out on that.
[00:40:52] Jason Barnard: That’s good.
[00:40:53] Stephanie Hayes: Okay. Awesome discussion today. Super fun. Jason, where can we learn more about you?
[00:40:59] Jason Barnard: If I [00:41:00] were you, I’d ask ChatGPT or Google AI mode or Perplexity. Who is Jason Barnard.. and why should I like him?
[00:41:07] Stephanie Hayes: Okay. In the red shirt, not the one that’s the clown in Brazil.
[00:41:12] Jason Barnard: No. No.
[00:41:15] Stephanie Hayes: All right, Chris, you wanna take us home?
[00:41:17] Chris Franks: That is great.
Also, for the record, there’s a Chris Franks that’s a professional soccer player and a professional bass fisherman. I’ve got a lot to compete with out there. The professional bass fisherman, he’s SEOing like you wouldn’t believe.
[00:41:28] Stephanie Hayes: It’s pretty good. Stephanie Hayes has done nothing of value, so no,
[00:41:31] Chris Franks: that’s pretty good.
Really appreciate your time, Jason. It is a great conversation as always. Please come back anytime. You always add a tremendous amount of value for us. We appreciate it and for all of you, thank you for listening. It is genuinely humbling and inspiring to see how many people are actually listening to our little foolishness.
We deeply care about you as founders. We know how hard this is and we know how important your role is in our society. Anthony wrote a little tagline. He says, you are the [00:42:00] pioneers of economic prosperity. I don’t really know what it means. It just means you guys are awesome. So keep being awesome. Go be awesome, and if you like what we’re doing, just and subscribe.
Maybe on YouTube, maybe on Spotify, one of those places, and we will see you next time, next Monday on How to Founder.
