113 – Jason Barnard – How to Train AI to Recognize You and How Jason Got 1 Billion Website Visits per Year

Published by: Entrepreneur, Among Other Things. Host: Alexander V. Johnson. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. September 3, 2025

Listen here: #113 – Jason Barnard – How to Train AI to Recognize You and How Jason Got 1B Website Visits Per Year

Jason shares his revolutionary approach to managing personal and corporate brand digital narrative online - an approach he developed over 12 years from his own real-world challenges, from being known as a “cartoon blue dog” to being mistaken for a criminal. Jason has a unique gift for explaining the mind-bogglingly complex world of search and AI with simple, powerful analogies that will make you think, ‘This is actually very simple!’ You’ll walk away with clear, actionable insights that will make you completely rethink your own online footprint and the massive opportunity you might be leaving on the table.

In This Episode (in a non-geeky way), You Will Learn:
– Why Your Brand Is What AI Says It Is: You’ll learn why your brand is no longer just what you say about yourself, but what Google and AI Assistive Engines like ChatGPT say about you when you are not in the room. Jason breaks down the crucial concepts of the Brand SERP (your “Google Business Card”) and the AI Résumé (the summary AI provides about you), showing you why these are the most critical touchpoints for closing a deal.

– The “Aha!” Moment: Algorithms Are Children: The core metaphor that makes it all click is that AI Assistive Engines Are Children. You’ll understand why you don’t try to trick algorithms; you have to patiently “teach” them with clear, consistent information. This simple shift in mindset is the key to preventing confusing and damaging Brand Hallucinations.

– How AI Actually Works: You’ll get a clear picture of the mechanics behind AI as Jason demystifies SEO for the AI Era. It sounds geeky, but Jason makes it easy - the traditional Web Index (the database of web pages), fact-checking Knowledge Graphs (machine-readable encyclopedias), and conversational Large Language Models (LLMs) must all work in unison to generate a single, authoritative answer.

– The Power of an “Entity Home”: Discover the actionable step you can take today: establishing an Entity Home. Jason explains why a page you control, like your “About Us” page, is the foundational piece for your entire digital brand - a tip that will have you rethinking your own website immediately.

– How to Build Algorithmic Trust: Learn the secret to building trust with machines through what Jason calls an Infinite Self-Confirming Loop of Corroboration. You’ll get the simple but powerful strategy of ensuring all your digital assets consistently repeat the same core facts, a process that builds immense Algorithmic Confidence in your narrative.

– A Structured Path to Taking Control: You will walk away with a clear, three-phase plan for managing your brand with The Kalicube Process™. Jason outlines the journey from Understandability (organizing your existing footprint) to Credibility (proving your expertise) and finally to Deliverability (becoming the solution AI recommends).

– Why Your Traditional SEO Isn’t Enough: Find out why old-school SEO tactics are becoming obsolete. Jason explains that traditional strategies only feed the Web Index, and why a modern approach like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is essential to properly “educate” all three parts of the Algorithmic Trinity.

– A Real-World Story as Proof: The stakes of digital branding become incredibly clear when you hear Jason’s story of being mistaken online for a criminal. It’s a powerful example of Brand Ambiguity and proves just how vital proactive Online Reputation Management (ORM) is for anyone whose name is their business.

Connect with Jason:
LinkedIn: jasonmbarnard
YouTube: @jasonmbarnard
Facebook: jasonmartinbarnard
X.com: jasonmbarnard
Instagram: jasonmbarnard1
Website: www.jasonbarnard.com

113 – Jason Barnard – How to Train AI to Recognize You and How Jason Got 1 Billion Website Visits per Year

The Career of Jason Barnard: From Musician to “Brand SERP Guy”

[00:00:00] Alexander V. Johnson: Jason, good afternoon.

[00:00:12] Jason Barnard: Good afternoon, Alexander.

[00:00:13] Alexander V. Johnson: You were just teaching me all about the geography of France, which you’re currently based in.

[00:00:17] Jason Barnard: Yeah, south of France, right in the middle. Nice, hot and sunny. Lovely food, great wine, cheese, ice. Good. Is that your, is that where you

[00:00:25] Alexander V. Johnson: were born is that the destination?

[00:00:27] Jason Barnard: No, I was born in cold, rAIny. Yorkshire in the North of England. All right. Brought up in lonely Moorlands and spent my childhood under the rAIn, in the snow, living a very lonely life, and then moved to France and became French.

[00:00:45] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, I’m, I’m sure they miss you and, you know, the colder weather parts of the world.

[00:00:49] Jason Barnard: Well, I think they’re probably glad I’m gone.

[00:00:52] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, Jason, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself. You’ve got, the big Google moniker behind you, but, tell us what you do and what it is you’ve been up to over the last [00:01:00] handful of years.

[00:01:01] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well the Google thing behind me is actually a little bit outta date now because it’s Google and ChatGPT.

[00:01:06] Jason Barnard: We help. Entrepreneurs, business owners get their personal brand perfect in Google and AI like ChatGPT. This is what we call the Brand SERP, the for your name, your personal brand name.

[00:01:17] Jason Barnard: And then ChatGPT would be called an AI resumee. And what it says about you to your bottom of funnel audience is, in my opinion, fundamentally important to your business.

[00:01:26] Alexander V. Johnson: Mm. So you work to help brands. I’m sure you’ve probably started on the Google side, right?

[00:01:32] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So it, it starts on Google. That was 10 years ago. You were saying you’ve been in business 11 years. We’ve been in business 10. There you go. We started optimizing the results for the people. Then we started building Knowledge Panels, which is this picture box here, the factual information Google has.

[00:01:47] Jason Barnard: Yep. And that’s neatly segued into AI assistive engines like ChatGPT. And over the years, I’ve built up a data set of 9.4 billion data points, covering 70 million brands and a million entrepreneurs. [00:02:00] We have detAIled information about them. Of their digital footprint online. And we use that data to understand how Google and ChatGPT and Perplexity think, and how we can, let’s say, manipulate what they then say about you.

[00:02:13] Alexander V. Johnson: Huh, interesting. Alright, well, take me back. I’m reading in your bio you started your first company in 1991, is that right? So youve been, you’ve been in business a long time.

[00:02:20] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, and, and the story kind of from the perspective of what I do today is quite interesting because I’m a serial entrepreneur.

[00:02:26] Jason Barnard: I’ve had three successful companies over 60 years in business between them. Geez. They’re all still open, profitable and running. I’m just not running the first two. I sold them on to other people. The business partners took them over.

[00:02:38] Jason Barnard: And so if I put it like that, you say, oh, great. Okay. This guy’s a really serious businessman who’s managed a career with these successful businesses.

[00:02:44] Jason Barnard: First in music publishing, then in EdTech and entertAInment for children, and now in digital brand management, digital brand. But if I told the story differently, you’d get a completely different perspective of me. ’cause the [00:03:00] music publishing company called WTPL Music I created in France. But I created the company because I was in a band and we wanted to get signed by a major label, and we wanted to tour and get gigs and play huge stadiums like you do when you’re that age.

[00:03:17] Jason Barnard: But nobody would sign us, so I just created a company to do it myself.

The Creative Journey of an Entrepreneur

[00:03:22] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay. So take me through the landscape at that point in time. Like what was your educational level at that point? Did you understand anything about business? Did you even understand you were starting a business? ’cause I’ve heard that from entrepreneurs.

[00:03:32] Alexander V. Johnson: They’re like, I wasn’t, I didn’t even realize I was doing a business. I was just kind of doing this thing.

[00:03:37] Jason Barnard: In fact I needed a legal framework to record the album and then get it into the record shops. Okay. So I needed to be able to invoice people and I understood that. Even as a musician playing in the street in Paris, which is what we was doing at the time, we needed a legal structure in order to be able to produce and sell a record.

[00:03:56] Jason Barnard: Mm-hmm. And then also when I was asking to play [00:04:00] gigs, I would ask, we can come and play, it will cost you whatever. At the time, 2000, 3000 francs. And then the bar owner or the club owner or the festival organizer would say, okay, who am I paying? And if they pAId me directly, it’s illegal. Oh.

[00:04:15] Jason Barnard: Or it, it turns in, well, at the time you, you didn’t have the status of being a freelancer without any kind of legal structure behind you as an individual in France.

[00:04:23] Alexander V. Johnson: So you would have to have like a company in France to like invoice someone. Is that, am I kind of hearing that?

[00:04:29] Jason Barnard: Well, you would’ve to register as a freelancer, at which point I see you pay 50% tax on everything and that’s just ridiculous.

[00:04:35] Jason Barnard: Interesting. So, I mean, ’cause it becomes personal income that you then have to declare through a system that is a very, very heavily taxed

[00:04:42] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. I mean. In the United States. It’s a lot of, I mean, I guess it’s probably a lot of countries, just a lot of the trust system. It’s like if I go and I pAInt my buddy’s house and I charge him $2,000, the government just like trusts that, Hey, you’ll report that $2,000 in income.

[00:04:57] Alexander V. Johnson: You don’t have to become anything. They [00:05:00] call it a sole proprietor. I’m sure I’m telling you something, you know? Yeah. But it’s just like you have an automatic designation that if you aren’t registered as a business, you’re a sole proprietor.

[00:05:08] Jason Barnard: So no, there’s a registration process to go through in France.

[00:05:11] Jason Barnard: It’s now much easier, but at the time it was very difficult. But the other thing is that the companies, if I wanted to put records into a distribution network, I would have to get the company, another company to put it into the distribution network. And it was WMD and they needed me to invoice them for the sales that they were making for me.

[00:05:29] Jason Barnard: Mm-hmm. So I had to create a company. I created a company in order to be able to pursue my dream career as a musician. So. My initial approach was say, well, I’m a musician who happens to own a company. Rather than an entrepreneur who happens to be a musician.

[00:05:43] Alexander V. Johnson: A lot of creatives don’t. I just had someone on the podcast like, oh, two weeks ago.

[00:05:46] Alexander V. Johnson: He was just talking about how creatives really struggle with business. That they, well, I had do the creative part and that’s where they.

[00:05:53] Jason Barnard: Well, I had a degree in economics. But what I found, in fact, there were five people in the band at the time, and I ended up doing all of the [00:06:00] boring work.

[00:06:00] Jason Barnard: Hmm. And they ended up all doing all the fun stuff.

[00:06:03] Jason Barnard: But I it was okay mean, I’m not complAIning. I then owned the company, which was great, and we had 10 successful years and ended up publishing other bands as well. So we worked with EMI, Warner Chapel. We signed a group to EMIA huge deal.

[00:06:18] Jason Barnard: That was pretty successful.

[00:06:20] Jason Barnard: And then in nine, well in 1996, the band split up. So I just went full time into music publishing and became a businessman, but creative in the sense that I was signing bands, helping them to record their demos, getting it through to the record companies, getting them signed, and then helping to manage the career.

[00:06:39] Alexander V. Johnson: So that would be like a management business or would you, were you like a rec you weren’t a record label, right? You weren’t pressing records?

[00:06:46] Jason Barnard: No. It, yeah, it was management. Got it. Um, so it was management with touring. Gig, organizing and publishing all kind of rolled into it. Yeah.

[00:06:56] Alexander V. Johnson: My, my best friend is a music agent in Nashville, [00:07:00] and he says it’s just amazing.

[00:07:01] Alexander V. Johnson: That’s cool. Yeah, don’t, don’t hype him up anymore. He doesn’t need it any, any further along his ego, but he said that it’s just amazing because so much of the music business has just gone away from publishing. Like, there’s just no money in publishing. So if you wanna make money, you have to become a touring artist.

[00:07:13] Alexander V. Johnson: That’s like the only way to do it. I mean, it’s good for him because he’s a gig booking agent, so, all the money flows into him.

[00:07:21] Jason Barnard: We, we actually did both, but as you say, publishing was very lucrative at the time and isn’t so much anymore. And the actual physical presence is where the money is.

[00:07:31] Jason Barnard: And, and it’s interesting and I like the fact not obviously that publishing has kind of died and Spotify is paying very, very little. And the songs that I wrote back in the day are getting, senti songs Sense. Sorry. People still listening to songs you wrote. Dang, we we gotta check them out.

[00:07:47] Jason Barnard: Yeah. A tiny, tiny amount of money. But, but when we play gigs is when we get the money.

[00:07:52] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah.

[00:07:53] Jason Barnard: And so that ends up being in fact, that the irony is that the digital side has taken [00:08:00] away the indirect income. Help with the direct income because people are looking for that human contact because it’s something that’s slowly slipping away from a lot of us.

[00:08:08] Alexander V. Johnson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I guess it’s just, uh, if you’re, it’s weird, right? Because it’s like sort of a totally different world from like, I like creating music like alone by myself, or me and my friends like to create music and record it and put it out and then we like to go play it in front of everyone.

[00:08:27] Alexander V. Johnson: Like that’s just, yeah. It seems similar, but it’s not really and, you’re forced to sort of do the latter if you want to, make the first part meaningful.

[00:08:35] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean the, the, the practicing, I’m not, I’m in a band now and we were practicing last night and, uh, we, we’ve got a, about 25.

[00:08:44] Jason Barnard: 30 songs and we were learning a new song yesterday and I’d forgotten just how much work it is to learn a song that you’ve written.

[00:08:52] Jason Barnard: Because you have nothing to refer to. So you’re trying to explain to other people quite exactly what it is in your head. And then they say, well, I don’t really agree with that, even if they [00:09:00] understand what you’re trying to explain.

[00:09:01] Jason Barnard: And there’s a whole kind of creative process, which is really interesting, where there’s a lot of disagreement and a lot of agreement, a lot of ideas, a lot of inspiration. But one of the biggest things, the barriers you need to get through is when people don’t agree. Because we’re all trying to put our thing into the song.

[00:09:17] Jason Barnard: We all have different opinions. And I remember back in the day when I was younger, there would be huge fights about something. At the end of the day, you listen to the song, you say it didn’t matter. Yeah. And I hope as a slightly more mature person in terms of years and in terms of how I approach the world and life , the practice yesterday was a lot of fun, even though we didn’t agree about everything.

[00:09:37] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, that’s, you know, what bands do they break up? Basically every band that has ever existed eventually breaks up. So it seems like there’s, except the Rolling Stones. Yeah. They’re, they’re making so much money. But, you know, I know this from my friend who’s in the music industry, and you probably know this too, some bands, I’m not saying this is the Rolling Stones.

[00:09:53] Alexander V. Johnson: Some bands just hate each other and they just get together and they’re like, we’re just doing our job. Like [00:10:00] we’re not, this isn’t like a fun thing. We’re coming together on Saturday, you know, in London to play a show. Yeah. But then we’re like, we’re not hanging out again after that.

[00:10:09] Jason Barnard: Well, I mean, Charlie Watts said that from very early on.

[00:10:12] Jason Barnard: He’s a really good jazz drummer and he’s into jazz. So he goes down and plays the jazz club. And he said, I just pitch up to the Rolling Stones because it’s my job. And I don’t particularly like the music. I don’t find it very challenging. I much prefer playing jazz, but it’s an incredibly well paying job.

[00:10:26] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And I’d be a fool not to turn up and play for that amount of money, so not my favorite thing in the world. And it gives me all the, all the freedom I want. So yeah. He, he openly says, I just treat it as a job.

[00:10:36] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. We went to a country music show together, and it’s a, a duo, and he said they hate each other so much that they have to have separate dressing rooms.

[00:10:44] Alexander V. Johnson: They like, oh wow. They travel separate, they have separate dressing rooms. They literally like walk together, play on stage, walk apart, and that, that’s it. And I was like, geez. Like, I don’t know if that’s right. Worth it, but so how does that business progress sounds like the band splits up, you go full-time into that business and [00:11:00] you said that all the businesses are still running so clearly.

The Rise of a Digital Empire Boowa and Kwala and a Billion Page Views

[00:11:03] Alexander V. Johnson: Oh, right.

[00:11:04] Jason Barnard: Clearly that’s still out there. Yeah. Well, in fact, what happened was that with my ex-wife, we decided, well, I decided I wanted to write children’s songs. Okay. So I wrote some children’s songs and tried to get myself signed to a children’s music label. And that fAIled as well, even though we had all the contact.

[00:11:22] Jason Barnard: Did you have kids at the time? Was that the motivation? We just had a, a baby. Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. So I wrote the songs. She was sitting next to me, I was looking after ’em. I ex-wife went out and got made the money and very generalist. He said, you can just stay at home, look after our daughter and knock yourself out.

[00:11:39] Jason Barnard: Make music, do what you want. I don’t care. It was really sweet. Mm-hmm. But I had a business partner at the time and he was help. We were working on the music management and publishing together, and then we didn’t manage to get the music signed. So my wife and I created two characters to go with the music.

[00:11:56] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:11:57] Jason Barnard: Called Boowa and Kwala. Boowa, a blue dog and Kwala, a yellow koala, and created a book with the music. And we tried to get that signed as a. A book publishing deal with a music focused book. Yep. That didn’t work either. And so I said I’m gonna make a website. And I learned flash, macromedia flash at the time and go, what year was this approximately, you think?

[00:12:24] Jason Barnard: 1998. Exactly. 98. Okay. And built a website and put the songs into animations on the website using flash, which at the time was just a, an animation tool and it was a huge success. Can

[00:12:38] Alexander V. Johnson: you just explain to people out there listening who I’m 33, so my first experience with a website was like, there’s already systems to build websites, but it still is complicated to use the system.

[00:12:52] Alexander V. Johnson: What you’re describing is like, there’s like a programming language basically, but then there’s no system whatsoever. Like I think people [00:13:00] nowadays can’t imagine that I can’t get on Shopify and just like, drop in some images, click some buttons and I could build a Shopify website in the next 60 minutes.

[00:13:08] Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, you had to code it all by hand. So I had to learn HTML by hand. And then flashes at the time was just animation. So it was a, an animation software that was adapted to stream on the web. And this was back when you had 14 K modems. Now today, 14 K just doesn’t mean anything to anybody. ’cause you know what?

[00:13:26] Jason Barnard: I don’t understand. 14 k, that’s 14,000 and I’ve got 500 megas. With my fiber connection. 14 K is so slow. You would watch a photo load and it would come. Yep, I remember that. Yeah. And you’d be, wAIting, looking at your watch and 10 minutes later you’d see the photo and it wasn’t the photo you were looking for, so you’d start all over again.

[00:13:47] Jason Barnard: And the lovely thing about flash was that it was vectorial, so it was relatively light and it streamed, which meant that you didn’t have to wAIt for the whole thing to download. You could download the beginning of the animation and start watching [00:14:00] that before the whole animation was downloaded.

[00:14:02] Jason Barnard: And I mastered that really early on, which is why the site was such a success, because people didn’t have to wAIt. And you could do smart stuff. Like I would have a little game going on whilst the content loaded behind it. So the child would be watching a game or playing a game or interacting, thinking that was the thing.

[00:14:22] Jason Barnard: And then all of a sudden the whole thing would open up and it’d go and it would be really glorious. And. Lots of animation with sound, with music. Music was really difficult to download at the time. And so that strategy allowed us to keep the person entertAIned whilst we loaded the really strong content that was truly entertAIning and engaging.

[00:14:43] Alexander V. Johnson: So that sounds like a pretty like fundamental idea that you had that not to say that my music isn’t gonna be superior, my characters aren’t gonna be superior, but like my interface, my operating like experience, my user interface and operation is gonna be [00:15:00] superior and that’s gonna help me win.

[00:15:01] Alexander V. Johnson: Like did that just like happen by accident or was that something you’ve thought through? Like, if I can make my website faster, better, smarter, I will get a leg up in this world?

[00:15:13] Jason Barnard: I think it’s because I had empathy for the child and the parent because I know how frustrated children get. WAIting for things, you know, if you’ve gotta wAIt for that photo and it’s 10 minutes, oh yeah.

[00:15:24] Jason Barnard: The kid is just not, they’re not gonna sit down long enough for that. So it’s a necessity. And parents with frustrated, children get angry and they get angry with me because, not because they hate me, and not because they’re bad people, because a frustrated child is difficult to deal with and the anger can’t be thrown onto the child.

[00:15:42] Jason Barnard: So you throw it onto the thing that you’re trying to use, which is my website. And we learned when we built the company, which I can talk about in a moment very quickly, that the, if we could build the whole thing totally bug free, smooth, beautiful ux, we never got [00:16:00] complAInts. And as soon as there was a bug, we would get people writing the rudest emAIls you can possibly imagine.

[00:16:05] Jason Barnard: And I had to tell my team that they’re not horrible people, so be kind. They’re frustrated because their child is really, really upset because the game is broken and they’ve just done all of this stuff and it doesn’t. Come to the conclusion they expected. or you’ve lost their high score or, you know, stuff like that.

[00:16:22] Jason Barnard: And, and a child doesn’t understand that, you know, there are problems like that in life and you have to deal with them and the parent’s trying to deal with the child. So as you get that idea. So it wasn’t a smart decision that I was thinking, this is how I’m gonna win the game. It was, I need to be empathetic to my audience.

[00:16:37] Alexander V. Johnson: Hmm. Interesting. So it sounds like you started at that point to get some traction. Like what were you doing to promote your website?

[00:16:44] Jason Barnard: Back in the day it was all, Google was just starting in 1998 when I started. Google was just incorporating as a company. Okay. And there were 15 different search engines and it was all very clunky, but it was fun.

[00:16:56] Jason Barnard: So search engines were one great way. They were what we [00:17:00] called, oh, I can’t remember what they were called now, but they were basically groups of sites that got together to link in a circle together.

[00:17:06] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:17:06] Jason Barnard: So you would find a group that was. That you naturally belong to schools with kids game sites playgroups grandparents associations, and they, they would all just kind of say, oh, this is a good, so it was a, a mutual recommendation system.

[00:17:22] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. It was like, almost like an early search engine. You go to this website, it’s got a bunch of games on it, you click through the games kind of thing.

[00:17:29] Jason Barnard: Yeah. No. Yeah, a hundred percent. And so early on you said the characters were not as good and the songs weren’t as good. I would say the characters were really good.

[00:17:37] Alexander V. Johnson: Didn’t mean that they weren’t as good. I said that what helped you win was that yes, the operating system was better. I mean, like, you know, who’s to say what’s a better character, blues clues or do the Explorer I don’t know. But if the kids like it, like,

[00:17:52] Jason Barnard: you know, that’s like, no, no, no. So I was teasing you, but that’s a really interesting point because fur further on down the line, I took on a business partner.

[00:17:59] Jason Barnard: And the [00:18:00] big beef between us or one of the big beefs was that for him, you couldn’t like Dora the Explorer and Boowa an Kwala. It had to be one or the other.

[00:18:08] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:18:10] Jason Barnard: And for he was saying, I have to get all of these children to just like Boowa and Kwala, and they have to never look at anything ever again.

[00:18:17] Jason Barnard: And I was saying, but they can like everything as long as we’re making money and they’re happy and we’re doing a good job. And it was a very bizarre kind of approach that I deeply didn’t appreciate.

[00:18:26] Alexander V. Johnson: That’s like saying you can’t, like Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez, it’s like I, you know, I like ’em both, you know, whatever.

[00:18:32] Jason Barnard: I mean it’s even, it’s, you can’t have three friends.

[00:18:34] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah, right. Well, you can’t have two wives. So I don’t know. That one’s an limiting factor there.

[00:18:39] Jason Barnard: But the beginning was really successful. We, we took off really quickly and Macromedia invited me to. YUKon 99, which was their yearly event as one of the best flash developers in the world.

[00:18:52] Jason Barnard: And I’d only been doing it for six months. And that was a really, really big help to me because it put me at the center of a community that was actually [00:19:00] growing very fast.

[00:19:01] Alexander V. Johnson: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:01] Jason Barnard: And that makes sense. Flash has died. Steve Jobs killed it off for various reasons and historically it’s not very interesting.

[00:19:08] Jason Barnard: But it was a brilliant piece of software that helped the web grow enormously because it was so easy to deliver. And the big companies like the BBC were invited and PBS were invited. And I think it was Sony EntertAInment with the Prince of Egypt. So I was, I was sitting alongside the big guys.

[00:19:27] Jason Barnard: And that was the other really lovely thing about the web at the time, is you could come from nowhere and be. Toe to toe with PBS and the BBC in six months. That’s brilliant.

The Challenges of Growth and a Disagreeing Business Partner

[00:19:38] Alexander V. Johnson: That sounds like a pretty big moment. That’s kinda like being on the early forums when people are talking about this weird thing called cryptocurrency.

[00:19:46] Alexander V. Johnson: It’s like, yeah, being in that community at the right time can be a rocket ship.

[00:19:52] Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I remember as well, it’s another thing which is kind of human relationships, which is, there was one guy, I can’t remember his [00:20:00] name, who was the go-to guy for Flash, and when we were in YUKon, he was there as well, and we had a big kind of get together and he just said, okay, brilliant, lovely, this guy Jason, he’s amazing, he’s brilliant.

[00:20:11] Jason Barnard: Look at what he’s done. And that validation from the leading light in the field really pushed that forward.

[00:20:17] Alexander V. Johnson: So where, where does the brand go at that point in time? Where does the where does your, maybe this is a better question. How was your time spent at that moment? Because it sounds like you’re. Sort of getting billed as this like flash expert. Are they expecting you to spend a lot of time like working in the back end of the website or did you actually have time to go out and build that business?

[00:20:40] Jason Barnard: In fact with, at this point, that was a private project and I was still doing management in the music industry.

[00:20:46] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:20:46] Jason Barnard: And then I decided that I would sell my share in WTPL music and set up a new company for this new project. Okay. So I just did that, which is why the other company is still going.

[00:20:58] Jason Barnard: And it’s still profitable because I sold it to my [00:21:00] business partner who’s a great guy and he’s made a really big success out of it, and he’s doing absolutely lovely.

[00:21:05] Jason Barnard: And so moved over to the new one, but in fact there was no business model behind it at the time.

[00:21:10] Jason Barnard: And so it was building it in that internet bubble, which burst in 2001. Because everybody said, you will make a fortune just if you can get enough people coming to your website. We don’t know how you’re gonna make a fortune.

[00:21:21] Jason Barnard: Right? But it’ll happen. Don’t worry about it.

[00:21:23] Jason Barnard: And I kind of went along with that and it was amazing because we built up a huge audience very, very fast. And we were hugely successful. And several people wanted to invest in the company. And I chose the investor, and I chose, unfortunately very, very badly.

[00:21:38] Alexander V. Johnson: Mm.

[00:21:39] Jason Barnard: What happened? And it all went well. It took 10 years, but it all went south. It all went horribly wrong. In fact, it took 11 years to kind of finally work its way out. But the, we decided to have this guy in as an investor because the way that he was organizing his investment meant we could [00:22:00] move to Mauritius, which is a small island in the Indian Ocean.

[00:22:03] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:22:04] Jason Barnard: Where it’s sunny all the time. Coconut trees, beaches, peaceful life. Lovely people. Calm tropical island. I’m gonna go and make cartoons for kids in a, on a tropical island and live peacefully on the beach in the sun, making these games sitting underneath the palm tree with the hat on.

[00:22:23] Alexander V. Johnson: Why does it never work out as planned?

[00:22:26] Jason Barnard: Well, the, the first years did, the first years were brilliant. We moved, did this , unfortunately the I wasn’t a developer at the time. I could do flash and I could write HTML but I couldn’t do my S-Q-L-P-H-P, and I didn’t know anything about network management and content delivery at scale. And I thought I’ll just find people and employ them, it’d be fine.

[00:22:47] Jason Barnard: Of course, I arrived on the island and there was nobody to employ because they didn’t have people with that expertise.

[00:22:53] Jason Barnard: So I had to learn. All of the backend stuff on my own. With trial and error. And every time it broke, [00:23:00] of course parents did. Which, sorry. Which is why I know how annoyed parents get because it kept breaking because I wasn’t very good at it.

[00:23:06] Jason Barnard: And so I figured after a while, the best way to solve this problem of aggressive emAIls that I ha don’t have time to answer is to stop the website breaking. So I spent enormous amounts of effort and time and nights and making sure that the website was incredibly robust and it was phenomenally robust.

[00:23:23] Jason Barnard: To give you an idea, we got a billion page views in 2007 in one year. 60 million people, a billion page views. Geez. That’s wild. Yeah. And I was doing all of the backend myself on my own. We would get maybe one complAInt a week, and it was very, very, very rare we got any complAInts about bugs or issues with the delivery of the website.

[00:23:47] Jason Barnard: The complAInts were more about, somebody said that they didn’t like the fact we’d use stars and that we shouldn’t be using them, we should be using something else, or we used Suns. And so it’s complAInts from people about their perspective on the world as opposed [00:24:00] to complAInts because we weren’t delivering what we were supposed to deliver.

[00:24:03] Jason Barnard: And at that time, what was the monetization strategy? Well, by that time we built the business model. The business model was really sweet is that we had such a huge volume of visits. We just put ads on the pages.

[00:24:14] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah.

[00:24:15] Jason Barnard: And got peanuts for the ads. I mean, it was very little, but it added up because there was such a huge volume.

[00:24:20] Jason Barnard: And then we said to parents, there was a big button that said, if you don’t want the ads and you want this to open full screen and have a secure environment for your child, pay five euros a month and you get the site ad free, full screen secure, your kid can’t get out of it and you can go away and do the cooking and you know that they’ll be locked into this website and there’s no way for them to get out of this particular environment.

[00:24:42] Jason Barnard: I mean that’s probably, so we had both,

[00:24:44] Alexander V. Johnson: sorry. It was probably pretty, I don’t wanna say early on in that like ad versus ad free model, but that now that’s so popular.

[00:24:52] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t think I invented, I’m sure other people were doing it, but this was in 2003.

[00:24:56] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. So advertising and [00:25:00] pAId subscribers , TV or video Yeah.

[00:25:02] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. Was also gonna be a part of it.

[00:25:05] Jason Barnard: We built the model and the characters and the business using that freemium idea.

[00:25:10] Jason Barnard: And it was go, it was going great. And then ITV International now called ITV Studios Radio Canada came to us for a TV series. So we made a TV series that a add on Playhouse Disney.

[00:25:22] Jason Barnard: Okay. And it a in 20 countries around the world. So we then turned it into a terrestrial tv and we also signed with Samsung to deliver to their first interactive tv. So we were precursors in on the web, we were doing deals with huge companies , and it was going incredibly well. And it was a hugely profitable.

[00:25:42] Jason Barnard: Business once again on a tropical island living the life. It could not have been better.

[00:25:49] Alexander V. Johnson: No, I mean that sounds like what entrepreneurs dream about because you don’t have like a physical product. There’s really not a whole lot of like cost of management. It’s just the intellectual property and [00:26:00] people are visiting your website and you’re probably doing website edits and updates every so often.

[00:26:05] Alexander V. Johnson: But it didn’t sound like it was a 50 person team. How many people were on the team at that point in time? Six. That’s pretty cool. Pretty green.

[00:26:14] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And I mean, the thing about the complAInts is I had to have three people at one point just to deal with the incoming emAIls.

[00:26:21] Jason Barnard: And by making the platform more robust, improving their delivery, I managed to reduce that to one and one person very happily, just replying to a few emAIls a month and then doing some other stuff. And that taught me the importance of robustness in delivery.

[00:26:36] Jason Barnard: And it, it was a huge win for me.

[00:26:38] Jason Barnard: Now with Kalicube, it’s absolutely one of the best things I ever learned, simply because Kalicube is now, I have a whole platform behind Kalicube with those 9.4 billion data points, and it’s incredibly robust and it doesn’t break. And it all fits together perfectly. And that’s exactly what we need.

[00:26:55] Alexander V. Johnson: So I guess why didn’t [00:27:00] you just continue on with this business, these characters, this website sounds like you’re kind of printing money.

[00:27:07] Alexander V. Johnson: Why didn’t you just continue on and living out the island life?

[00:27:11] Jason Barnard: Huge disagreement with my business partner. It was I could see the way forward or my, for me the way forward was to keep scaling. We could go from a billion to 2 billion to 3 billion. And those are big numbers. The in, in, yeah.

[00:27:26] Jason Barnard: Well, the income wouldn’t increase threefold. It would increase by whatever, you know, let’s say 60%, but the cost would only increase by 5%. Right. So for me, I’m saying, well, yeah the scale is not a problem because I know I can deliver.

[00:27:42] Jason Barnard: The income is gonna increase significantly faster than the cost because the incremental cost of each additional visit is pretty much zero.

[00:27:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I wanna keep going with that. And he came and said, well, I want to put an emAIl barrier that people can’t get into the website unless they give their emAIl. And once we’ve got the emAIl, we’ve got [00:28:00] them and we can suck as much money out each child as we possibly can. And I really don’t agree with that

[00:28:05] Alexander V. Johnson: Getting their emAIl I think is a good thing, but I guess it depends on what kind of barrier we’re talking.

[00:28:10] Jason Barnard: Well, he came to me with a whole business plan of how many euros per head of child he was making a month. And I was coming to him with a business model that said, how many children can we get using the website, making the most?

[00:28:23] Jason Barnard: It was educational content as well. So I just wanna help the world. So that was part of my motivation and saying, well, if I can scale the number of children who have access to this platform faster and bigger than the cost that we have, sharing is better for me. I mean it, he might have made more money than I would, but that wasn’t what was motivating me.

[00:28:43] Jason Barnard: And I think that was the disagreement. I was looking at it as a really lovely way to make a really good living, making amazing content, having fun sitting on a desert island, and he saw it as. Business moneymaking opportunity where you’ve gotta get as much money as you possibly can, as [00:29:00] fast as you possibly can.

[00:29:00] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, I think it’s just the difference of the idea right. Like I’ve heard entrepreneurs say, you give. Then you ask. Right. So it sounds like that was kind of your philosophy, like, Hey, if we can just get people really excited about the content and the website and like they don’t have to pay anything, like they’re going to want to give to us on that time.

[00:29:20] Alexander V. Johnson: When we do ask, Hey, we’ve got a movie out, we’d love for you to go watch it, subscribe, buy it. Yeah.

[00:29:26] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. And once you’ve got the TV series out, you kind of say, well, we can actually move this out onto the TV screens, then we can start, we’d sold plush toys. Yeah. And they were starting to sell quite well. I mean, t-shirts there were lots of opportunities that I could see around it.

[00:29:39] Alexander V. Johnson: And it would benefit from volume.. From popularity. So I mean we just disagreed. We had a huge fight about it., And in the end, I sold up and walked out.

[00:29:47] Jason Barnard: Because I just couldn’t handle the disagreement.

[00:29:50] Jason Barnard: So that was 2011. So it took three years for us to sort out our differences to the point at which I just gave up . and just said, just buy my share [00:30:00] and do what you want. And I’ve given up care. And and unfortunately, I mean, the business still makes money, but I dunno how much, and it’s certainly not as popular as I thought it should be, and it deserves to be.

[00:30:10] Jason Barnard: But that’s not my problem anymore.

The Birth of Kalicube: From Freelancing to AI Expertise

[00:30:11] Alexander V. Johnson: Never quite reached the door of the explorer, blues clues kind of scale that you were thinking it could be.

[00:30:17] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I thought we could do that. And I think, obviously asking for an emAIl seems like such a small step, but we actually tried it and even asking for an emAIl from somebody to access free content.

[00:30:31] Jason Barnard: You would get, you know, 5% of people who at that time were willing to give their emAIl to get access to this content.

[00:30:37] Alexander V. Johnson: I mean, that’s a huge, huge bounce rate.

[00:30:40] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, we might have done it badly and it could have done bad. Maybe I didn’t put my best efforts into it. Maybe I mean, and I’m not a very good marketer.

[00:30:46] Jason Barnard: I wasn’t at the time I am now. I hope I’m now, so I, it’s one of those things and it’s a difference of opinion where two people simply cannot agree and one of them has to leave. And it was me. I mean, I did a decent exit. [00:31:00] I’m quite happy from that perspective. And I just moved on to a different career.

[00:31:03] Alexander V. Johnson: I was smiling ’cause you said you’re not a good marketer, but you had a billion views on your website per year. I mean, like, those things are incompatible.

[00:31:13] Jason Barnard: Okay. I’ll take that compliment.

[00:31:14] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. So this exit happens. Do you leave the island? What was island life look like for that period that you were there?

[00:31:24] Jason Barnard: What was living on the island like?

[00:31:25] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. I mean, I’m looking at where it is on the map and it’s like out past Madagascar and Mozambique.. I mean, like, I couldn’t have pointed you anywhere near this island when you said it.

[00:31:38] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it was at a time as well in 2000 when people were saying, you can do the internet from anywhere.

[00:31:42] Jason Barnard: And so I said, okay, I’ll go and do it from, and I spun the globe and put my finger on it. And Mauritius, it’s not quite like that, but it makes a nice story. And you can, or even in 2000, you could run an internet site from absolutely anywhere, make a huge success as we demonstrated. But life on the island was lovely.

[00:31:56] Jason Barnard: It’s an interesting country in that they all [00:32:00] speak French, but the official language is English. So everything is written in English. so you get somebody giving you a piece of official paperwork and you say, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with this. And they will explain the paper to you In French.

[00:32:12] Alexander V. Johnson: I see.

[00:32:12] Jason Barnard: The paper’s written in English and you have to fill it in English, and that’s completely normal. But the people are really kind. It’s a really easygoing, gentle atmosphere. There’s no stress. It’s sunny, literally all year round. You have cyclones from time to time, which mess things up a bit, but, that’s life.

[00:32:30] Jason Barnard: And our daughter had the best childhood you could possibly imagine.

[00:32:34] Jason Barnard: Because you don’t have the outside world pressure that you would get, or the societal pressure you would get in New York or in London or in Paris, or even in the south of France for that matter, because the country is so detached.

[00:32:46] Jason Barnard: A lot of the societal pressures on the kids to grow up fast weren’t there. So she, when we left, was 15 and she was still very nAIve and still enjoying a very. NAIve, fun, delightful childhood. And she came to Paris. We moved [00:33:00] to Paris. It was a real culture shock. Oh yeah. I believe it. And she really, you know, it was a huge slap in the face for her.

[00:33:06] Jason Barnard: I mean, she dealt with it admirably, but it wasn’t ideal.

[00:33:11] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay. So you’re back in Paris now that business is behind you. Are you thinking of Hey, maybe I just don’t go back into business. Maybe I just kind of utilize the money that I made from this past exit. I mean, what was your thought at that point in time?

[00:33:27] Jason Barnard: Oh, well it’s an interesting question ’cause there’s actually a three year gap before I created Kalicube. And people often ask me why from 2012, 2015 I didn’t have a new business. And the answer is because I started freelancing. I was in Paris doing fine, and I like working on how do I get and yeah, okay, marketing, I like working on how do I get people to this website?

[00:33:49] Jason Barnard: How do I leverage Google? To get them to send me or my client as much traffic as many people who are relevant to my business as possible. And so I did [00:34:00] consulting for a while for that. And when I actually went and pitched, I would go in, give the talk, say I can make this happen. I did a billion pages for this website.

[00:34:10] Jason Barnard: I can do the same for your business. And people go, brilliant, wonderful. I would tell them what the strategy would look like. They would be on board looking brilliant. And I estimate I lost over a million dollars in potential sales that just went through the floor out in the dust bin because when I walked out having left my business card, they didn’t look at the business card.

[00:34:31] Jason Barnard: They Googled my name and my name. When you Googled it in 2012 to 2014, said, Jason Barnard is Boowa the cartoon blue dog. Because that’s what I was known for, because that’s what I’ve been talking about.

[00:34:44] Jason Barnard: And they said, oh, I’m not gonna trust this guy with my marketing strategy, I’ve got this company has a $15 million income a year.

[00:34:52] Jason Barnard: This guy’s a cartoon blue dog, voiceover artist. Oh no. We’re a serious business. Yeah. And so they would sign with that [00:35:00] agencies because agencies reassure them. And this freewheeling thought, I dunno how you call it, creative guy just doesn’t hack it in comparison. So in terms of lifetime values of the clients I think I lost maybe 20 deals that way with lifetime values.

[00:35:17] Jason Barnard: That would’ve been a million dollars because the, I was asking quite a lot of money as well for my expertise. And then so I thought, okay, this is losing me business. What do I do? And I’m really good at SEO. That was 20% of the traffic for the kids site was from Google. Yep. 20%. That doesn’t seem that, is that.

[00:35:36] Jason Barnard: That’s because most of it was people coming back time and time again. ’cause the kids would direct, obviously. Yeah. The kids would get incredibly involved with the characters and they’d love their favorite games. And kids are very good at this kind of repetition thing that we got a lot of repeat visits.

[00:35:50] Jason Barnard: So 20% isn’t much from Google, but if you think about what 20% of 60 million is, it is a lot.

[00:35:55] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. Okay.

[00:35:57] Jason Barnard: So 20 million. So I’ll tell you, it’s [00:36:00] 12 million from Google in a year. And the site was just for children under 10 years old, and it was only in French and English.

[00:36:07] Jason Barnard: So that’s it. A big number in 2007.

[00:36:09] Jason Barnard: So the Google’s aspect, as you say, doesn’t sound much when it’s 20%, but when you say 12 million kids. It does sound like a lot more.

[00:36:16] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah, I was just thinking about my friends that are like in the trades, like roofing, plumbing, things like that. And like almost all of their traffic comes from Google.

[00:36:25] Alexander V. Johnson: Like the people aren’t like punching in west Jefferson Plumbing and heating. Like, it’s just not happening. So they search like plumber near me and then people find them from that.

[00:36:34] Jason Barnard: I mean, local business is very much like that. Whereas with personal branding, you’re saying, especially in B2B. For B2B, it’s really important, the personal brand. And I was doing B2B and my personal brand because I was a freelance consultant, my personal brand was my business. So obviously for me it was hugely more important than it is for many people. But I solved that problem and the leakage stopped.

[00:36:55] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:36:57] Jason Barnard: And that was great. And I thought, okay, [00:37:00] so that’s really helpful. And I carried on. And then one day my name was all over the news, the B-B-C-A-O-L, the DAIly Mirror in the UK. Jason Barnard Court speeding three times the speed limit, criminally charged three times the speed limit, but it wasn’t me. It was somebody else with my name.

[00:37:22] Jason Barnard: And I call that namesake online reputation crisis.

[00:37:26] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, I’ve got that. My name is Alexander Johnson. You know, you said what do you go by Alex or Alexander? I don’t really care, but Alex Johnson, I mean, there’s a lot of us.

[00:37:34] Jason Barnard: Yes. And, and the thing is today the AI gets very confused.

[00:37:38] Jason Barnard: It can’t distinguish between different people. It’s actually statistically very, very, very, very highly probable that it will mix you up with somebody else and say something about you that’s actually somebody else with the same name. And if somebody else happens to be a criminal, that’s a huge problem for your reputation.

[00:37:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah, because there’s no distinguishing. I mean, with Google, you could read the articles and you would see it wasn’t me ’cause the guy was in the [00:38:00] UK. But does do people do that research and with AI, people just say, oh, AI says this guy’s a criminal, so he must be a criminal. Right. So that namesake, Online Reputation Management, I solved that problem because once again, people would search my name.

[00:38:12] Jason Barnard: They say, well, the guy’s a criminal. It was actually surprisingly less of a problem than the blue dog.

[00:38:18] Jason Barnard: But I solved that problem by explaining to Google, educating Google, and this is where I got to the point where I was saying, well actually I’m educating this machine like it’s a child. I educated it that I didn’t wanna focus on the blue dog.

[00:38:32] Jason Barnard: I wanted to focus on entrepreneurship and digital marketing. I am not the same person as this guy in the UK because I live in France. I wasn’t in the UK at the time. I have this career. He has that career. Please don’t confuse us anymore. So I was educating Google like it was a child, and that’s when Kalicube kicked off.

[00:38:49] Jason Barnard: I said, this is a hugely valuable service that I can offer to everybody. Everybody needs it to some extent. My approach of educating the algorithms really works well.

The AI Trinity: Search, Chatbots, and Knowledge Graphs

[00:38:59] Alexander V. Johnson: So what does that fundamentally look like? Educating the algorithm sounds good. What does that look like? What does that in practice?

[00:39:08] Jason Barnard: If you look at the algorithms right now you would focus on search results, large language model chat bots like ChatGPT and Knowledge Graphs like Google’s and Knowledge Graph. And those are the three main types of algorithm you need to educate. And they all use the same data set, which is the web.

[00:39:24] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:39:26] Jason Barnard: So you educate them by placing the right information in the right places, explaining the right things across the web, because then they go round, they pick it all up and it all makes sense to them, and they will say what you want them to say because they’ve understood. So I talk about Understandability for that.

[00:39:44] Jason Barnard: Then if they’ve understood you, the next stage is help. I’m gonna make them think that I’m credible, that I’m trustworthy. So you build your Credibility on top of that understanding. So I understand who Jason Barnard is. He’s a digital marketer. He’s the world’s leading expert in brand authority. [00:40:00] And I trust him because he has successful case studies about his clients.

[00:40:07] Jason Barnard: He has a lot of testimonials. He has author tasks saying that he’s wonderful. He’s worked with Semrush, Wordlift say he’s great. He speaks at conferences, he’s on podcasts, he’s written three books. All of that builds up this Credibility and at that point when you to come to come back to the kind of practical aspect of it.

[00:40:25] Jason Barnard: These algorithms are trying to recommend the best solution to a specific problem that a user is sharing with them.

[00:40:31] Alexander V. Johnson: Yes. I So you sit down, I explain that to my clients all the time about Amazon, right? What you search is the problem. Amazon’s trying to populate the solution to that problem.

[00:40:40] Jason Barnard: That’s what Google does.

[00:40:41] Jason Barnard: That’s what ChatGPT does. They’re trying to lead their user to the best possible solution to their problem. And people use Google ChatGPT, and because they trust them as recommendation engines.

[00:40:51] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay?

[00:40:53] Jason Barnard: So we’re on the same page with that and that’s beautiful. So if they understand who you are. Then they can understand how [00:41:00] credible you are, at which point they’re likely to recommend you to the subset of their users who, your audience. And that’s the trick.

[00:41:06] Alexander V. Johnson: So that would include creating content around your personal brand and branding so that if someone was to search, you know, whatever your business or your name or you know, a certain topic, then you are going to pop up.

[00:41:21] Alexander V. Johnson: Is that that part of it that I need to have some volume of content out there around my name.

[00:41:28] Jason Barnard: You’ve made the leap that a lot of people do make and you are putting the cart be before the horse, as we say. Okay.

[00:41:35] Jason Barnard: Alright, so we, we’ve just put the cart be before the horse because Understandability does the machine understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve. You don’t need to create anything new, you just need to organize what you already have, okay? Because your digital footprint is gonna be very fragmented.

[00:41:49] Jason Barnard: Whether you think it is or not, doesn’t matter. It is, believe me.

[00:41:52] Alexander V. Johnson: No, I believe that.

[00:41:53] Jason Barnard: So well, maybe the listener doesn’t. So you take what you have and you organize it around what we call the Entity Home, which is the central [00:42:00] reference point that the algorithms use to figure out who you are.

[00:42:03] Jason Barnard: And that needs to be a website that you own. So it’s your about page on your personal website, and you explain really clearly who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you’re credible. Okay? And then you link out to all the resources that confirm it, and you make sure that all of those resources say the same thing as you are saying on your Entity Home.

[00:42:20] Jason Barnard: And then they link back to your Entity Home and the machine just goes backwards and falls like this, seeing the same information. And after enough repetition, it will just understand it and believe it. So you don’t actually need to create anything new, you just need to organize yourself properly.

[00:42:33] Alexander V. Johnson: That makes sense.

Building Your Digital Footprint: The “Entity Home”

[00:42:35] Alexander V. Johnson: ‘Cause I’m thinking about my own self and I’ve, you know, I’ve done a good amount of things on the internet and I’ve got a hundred plus podcasts out there and, you know, a couple dozen podcasts that I’ve done with other groups and entities and our business website and ranked on Inc. 5,000, I think seven times in a row now.

[00:42:53] Alexander V. Johnson: We’ve been on the fast growing list and same thing as Columbus business First, fast grow, fast growing lists, but I don’t [00:43:00] think that my digital profile is probably organized in one place.

[00:43:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:43:05] Alexander V. Johnson: So your advice would be the about page on my personal website, which I give like, no love to. Yeah. You should give a lot more love to it.

[00:43:13] Jason Barnard: If I may give you advice.

[00:43:14] Alexander V. Johnson: It’s good advice. I just. I struggle to put the time together for that. I, ’cause this is one of my, my hurdles, my struggles is like the business is growing with the here and now. Actions that I take, like cold reach outs, you know, grow the sales arm of the business.

[00:43:32] Alexander V. Johnson: I think that if I was to approach my business partner and say, Hey, I’ve got this content idea, it’s gonna take three years to pay off and it may not pay off at the end of three years. And like, I need some, you know, I need a videographer and I need maybe an SEO person that I’m gonna be paying full time.

[00:43:50] Alexander V. Johnson: He’s gonna be like, why don’t we just like keep doing the cold reach out thing That’s like kind of already currently working.

[00:43:56] Jason Barnard: Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I get that. And it’s a very valid [00:44:00] point. I mean, you mentioned three years. You pulled that out of the air. Yeah, you’ll, it will start to pay off after a year, but the real kind of rolling would be, I mean, it’s a three, realistically, a three year project to get your place top of mind of the algorithms and keep your place, to get top of mind for the algorithms, we call it top of algorithmic mind.

[00:44:21] Jason Barnard: So when you’re having a conversation with ChatGPT, sorry, you’re using ChatGPT, you’re having a conversation. Yep. And it’s trying to find a solution effectively bringing you down the funnel. And you want your brand, personal, or corporate to be top of algorithmic mind at every stage on the way down, but particularly at the bottom when the person’s found the solution and then says, well actually, now I know what the solution is.

[00:44:43] Jason Barnard: Who of the three choices that I have, should I choose?

[00:44:46] Jason Barnard: You wanna make sure the machine says that it’s you because there’s one click and it’s called the perfect click.

[00:44:51] Alexander V. Johnson: So how does ranking on like an algorithm like ChatGPT, this is sort of a really new thing. This is like only something I feel like I’m starting to hear people talk about.[00:45:00]

[00:45:00] Alexander V. Johnson: My friend, he’s a roofer and he started to invest in ChatGPT like ranking. And he’s like, holy crap, we just got like a huge job from this. Like it’s starting to work. It’s not just like this, you know? Oh yeah, you’ll get clients from ChatGPT. It like, sounds good. Does it actually happen?

[00:45:15] Alexander V. Johnson: How does working on those algorithms differ to working on something like Google? Or are they very similar?

[00:45:24] Jason Barnard: Well, I had a conversation with a potential client yesterday who was asking about ChatGPT, and they’re saying, well, if we need to work with you on ChatGPT and I laid out how we would approach it.

[00:45:36] Jason Barnard: And her take was, this is just SEO. She’d misunderstood not what we were doing, but the way that it all fits together. Okay? Because SEO is just optimizing for search, but you need to optimize for the chat bots and for the Knowledge Graphs. So if you look at it this way, the chat bot ChatGPT has [00:46:00] knowledge from its training data that allows it to have and the ability to have a conversation.

[00:46:08] Jason Barnard: If you ask it about Napoleon Bonaparte, it doesn’t need to look it up online because it already has the information. Okay? If you ask it about something it doesn’t know about, it needs to use the web index to look it up. Got it? If you’re asking about something recent news, for example, sports scores, it needs to use the web to look it up for that recency.

[00:46:26] Jason Barnard: If you’re looking for something incredibly niche, it won’t have it in the training data, it needs to use the web. It has the problem that it makes mistakes, it hallucinates.

[00:46:35] Jason Barnard: So it needs a Knowledge Graph. And a Knowledge Graph is just a machine readable encyclopedia that’s hugely big to fact check.

[00:46:41] Alexander V. Johnson: Could you linger on that Knowledge Graph for a second? ’cause I wrote that down and I wasn’t really very familiar with that term.

[00:46:47] Jason Barnard: Google has a huge Knowledge Graph about 50 billion things in Knowledge Graph. So it understands 50 billion people, corporations, music, albums, films, all of the things that you can imagine and [00:47:00] attributes of them.

[00:47:00] Jason Barnard: For example, Jason Barnard from the UK, Jason Barnard, five feet, 10 tall, Jason Barnard is a digital marketer. Things like that understands as well that Jason Barnard is the CEO and founder of Kalicube. So it can fit facts together like we do in the brain with people, corporations, product films. Music albums, music groups, their attributes and the relationships between them.

[00:47:27] Alexander V. Johnson: Is that like a stored thing? Is it because you said that they don’t need to look up Napoleon? They’ve got that kind of like ready to regurgitate at any point in time. Just like I have, you know, some facts about Albert Einstein. I don’t have any deep facts, but I’ve got a handful that are like, ready to go.

[00:47:42] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. Is that sort of like, it’s stored for like optimization of the like processing? Am I thinking about that correctly?

[00:47:50] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well the Knowledge Graph is just like Wikipedia but 20,000 times bigger and machine readable and [00:48:00] the Knowledge Graph contains everything Google can possibly understand.

[00:48:03] Jason Barnard: So it’s not just famous people and famous companies like Wikipedia. It’s any person or any company. If it understands it, it gets it in the Knowledge Graph.

[00:48:11] Alexander V. Johnson: And is that the first place that like a chat bot an AI would go, is that Knowledge Graph?

[00:48:18] Jason Barnard: No, it’s not quite like that because what they do is they, it’s geeky and boring, but predictive.

[00:48:25] Jason Barnard: So what it does is predict the next most probable word. Yep. So it builds a sentence doing that. So the facts about Napoleon Bonaparte or the information about Napoleon Bonaparte would come out, but it doesn’t understand whether or not it’s true. It has no idea what it’s saying.

[00:48:38] Jason Barnard: So it needs that fact checking element behind it.

[00:48:41] Jason Barnard: I see now they’re building some of the fact checking already into the LLM, but that fact checking at the end of the day has to be done using some kind of reliable encyclopedic source. And that’s a Knowledge Graph.

[00:48:51] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:48:51] Jason Barnard: So even if they’re training the machine to start thinking better, which they are, they need the Knowledge Graph because they need it to be able [00:49:00] to check the factuality, the factual relevance of the factual accuracy of the information they’re giving out.

[00:49:05] Jason Barnard: So those three pieces of technology fit together. Got it. They all use the web as their source of data primarily, but they all function differently and they all have different needs from that content. So when the person said to me, this is just SEO, you’re saying, well, it’s still bots reading the web and feeding that information to the algorithms, but the bots need to put the information into the web index in a very particular way.

[00:49:33] Jason Barnard: For each of the algorithms and each of the algorithms needs the web content for different purposes and uses it differently. But they all come together at the top. And I wanted to draw a diagram of it, which I’m gonna try and do tomorrow, but I’m a very bad illustrator. But you’ve basically got the web, these three technologies, and then the output.

[00:49:52] Jason Barnard: So it goes kind of this nice kind of one into three and then three into one. It’s a really nice kind of figure like that. And you’re saying that’s [00:50:00] where the whole thing happens, is in those three technologies. And if you can master all three, then you’ve won the, what they call Generative Engine Optimization goal.

[00:50:09] Jason Barnard: I call them AI Assistive Engines because I think it’s more descriptive of what they are.

[00:50:13] Alexander V. Johnson: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:15] Jason Barnard: And SEO as it’s traditionally done with links and word counting will only feed the web index properly.

[00:50:23] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:50:24] Jason Barnard: And I’ll give you an example. And the lady actually said, oh, right, okay. I get that. And LLM has no idea about link.

[00:50:33] Jason Barnard: Because it’s trained on masses of words. And if you say to it, where did you get that piece of info? Where did you get that piece of information from? If it’s getting it from its training data, it doesn’t know. How does that person’s website relate to the other person’s website? It would need to go online to look it up.

[00:50:52] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[00:50:54] Jason Barnard: So it would need the web index in live to be able to figure out the relationship between two websites unless it happens to be in [00:51:00] their training data. But you see what the kind of problem is that the LLM doesn’t understand what it’s saying and doesn’t have context around what it’s got in its vectorial database.

[00:51:10] Jason Barnard: It’s gonna say, well, I’ll pick this little bit and this little bit and this little bit, but it does it without context so it doesn’t actually mean anything.

[00:51:16] Jason Barnard: And the Knowledge Graph gives it fact checking and context and the web index gives it the opportunity to look things up and make the connections.

[00:51:25] Jason Barnard: I’m getting a bit geeky.

[00:51:26] Alexander V. Johnson: No, no. It’s interesting.

[00:51:27] Jason Barnard: We started with a blue dog and punk folk music and music publishing. We’ve ended up talking about Knowledge Graph.

[00:51:34] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, it’s, it’s really interesting because I, I guess I, I hadn’t really ever thought of if I ask, AI, like, Hey, I want a marketing agency in Columbus, Ohio.

[00:51:43] Alexander V. Johnson: Like, how is it making that decision? I’ve never really thought through how is it making that decision? And, I don’t do any shopping like that. It’s just not how I shop. But I could foresee, and Google’s already doing it, like basically on your behalf, right? If you go to Google and [00:52:00] you know, you search for, whatever, like you said, who was Napoleon?

[00:52:05] Alexander V. Johnson: Now maybe that maybe that’s not a good example and they’re actually not giving me the AI summary.

[00:52:10] Jason Barnard: One of these. It’ll give you a Knowledge Panel because it’s facts.

[00:52:14] Alexander V. Johnson: Yes it is.

[00:52:15] Jason Barnard: And the Knowledge Panel is the factual representation of the Knowledge Graph. So this is the facts according to Google.

[00:52:21] Alexander V. Johnson: Alright, so what would be maybe a better question to ask AI here? ‘Cause Google’s doing that preemptive, like little AI, like, you know, you ask like, what is going on in the war in Gaza? And it’ll just like give you like a little summary.

[00:52:34] Jason Barnard: You, I mean you could try that. What’s going on in politics in France?

[00:52:38] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, actually let’s do Serbia ’cause I just saw that there’s some stuff happening in Serbia and sure enough they have given me the AI overview right now experiencing a period of significant civil unrest. And then they have some links here.

[00:52:51] Jason Barnard: And so what, what that has done is gone and picked out all the little bits of, it’s not pages, it’s passages from pages.

[00:52:58] Jason Barnard: So it’s picking out multiple [00:53:00] passages and then summarizing them for you. But if you look next to that, you should have AI mode.

[00:53:03] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. Dive deeper in AI mode.

[00:53:06] Jason Barnard: I click it. Yeah. So if you click on that, what you’ll see is something even more immersive and much more like ChatGPT, where you can now start to have a conversation with it.

[00:53:14] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. It gives me suggested things to ask. Elaborate more on the government response. What are the protest specific demands?

[00:53:20] Jason Barnard: So AI mode is Google’s response to ChatGPT.

[00:53:23] Jason Barnard: And you were saying you don’t do shopping that way. And I mean, I’m, I’ve got a really nice story as a musician is that I played the double bass Okay.

[00:53:33] Jason Barnard: All fiddle. And I’ve got a huge bass amp and I’ve got a guitar and I wanted to play the guitar. And I thought, well, if I play it with the bass amp, I might break the bass amp. But I don’t wanna buy a new guitar amplifier. So I asked ChatGPT, if I play my double bass through the my guitar, sorry, through the bass amplifier, will I break it?

[00:53:51] Jason Barnard: Said, no, you won’t break it. No problem, but it will sound not very good. Okay? So I immediately came up with the answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked [00:54:00] myself. And I said, okay, it’s not gonna sound very good. Is there anything I can do about that? And it said, yes, you need to add a compressor, an equalizer, and a reverb.

[00:54:11] Jason Barnard: I said, okay, brilliant. How would I do that? And they said, well, you buy pedals and you hook them up and your guitar goes through them and it goes to the amplifier and it will sound significantly better. I said, okay, which ones do you recommend? And it gave me a list of three.

[00:54:26] Alexander V. Johnson: Wow.

[00:54:27] Jason Barnard: I said, how much is that gonna cost me?

[00:54:29] Jason Barnard: He said, $250. I said, I don’t wanna spend $250. Can you find me something Equivalent for 150? He said, well, 150, you can use these three. If you’re a professional musician, it won’t sound good enough for you. But if you’re an amateur, it’s absolutely fine . I said, well, I play, I play one gig a month in front of people in this area.

[00:54:48] Jason Barnard: Nobody’s really listening to the sound, and I’m not an incredibly good jazz guitarist anyway, so I’m going for the $150. Where should I buy it? If you’re an America, buy from Sweetwater. If you’re in [00:55:00] Europe by from Toman, I’m in Europe. Here’s the link to Toman. Clicked on the link, went through, bought it 15 minutes from the moment I started the problem, which was I wanna play my guitar through the bass amp, which I thought was a stupid idea to buying for $150 from Toman.

[00:55:14] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I definitely can see how that would synthesize the information.

[00:55:21] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot of fun. I find it a really fun way to shop, to be honest, because I’m having a conversation with a trusted advisor. I enjoy it. And the nice thing as well is that ChatGPT or Gemina AI mode, or Copilot or Perplexity knows a lot more than I do about the world.

[00:55:41] Jason Barnard: So I’m relying on it to know what it’s talking about. I’m relying on it to understand the world. I’m relying on it to have an opinion. And so from, if we come back to my perspective is my job is to change its understanding of you, improve its opinion of you [00:56:00] so that it recommends you when your users are having that kind of conversation where you can help.

[00:56:05] Alexander V. Johnson: And it sort of sounds like whether or not that generative AI thing is your final solution, like I said, marketing agencies in Columbus, Ohio, like May, maybe in two or three years, that’s gonna be a more prevalent way of searching. But it sounds like everything that you’re doing is only gonna help just Google anyways.

[00:56:23] Alexander V. Johnson: It’s going to help. Yep. Backlinking. Knowledge Panels for Google. I’m sure I don’t have a Knowledge Panel.

[00:56:31] Jason Barnard: But and that’s the kind of, the thing about it is what I’m trying to do is, I dunno if the word is less than the blow, but say to people it isn’t SEO or Generative Engine Optimization.

[00:56:43] Jason Barnard: It’s both. And you need to evolve what you’re doing in SEO to fit into this new Algorithmic Trinity. I call them this three, this new three algorithm model.

[00:56:55] Alexander V. Johnson: Mm.

[00:56:55] Jason Barnard: And so you evolve your SEO to please all three of them, and you work on all three of them at the same [00:57:00] time, with the same data source in the same work.

[00:57:03] Jason Barnard: And that makes a lot of sense. And it’s a really lovely way to evolve rather than to think I’ve gotta throw all of my SEO out the window, which is what some people now think. You don’t.

[00:57:13] Alexander V. Johnson: So then if someone’s listening, whether they’re an individual or they own a business, what would be some of the, I don’t call ’em simple recommendations, but the low cost, high impact things that someone could do that would help them on all three of these kind of algorithms that you’ve talked about.

[00:57:30] Jason Barnard: Well, the first thing to do is clean up your digital footprint. What does that mean to you? Which is the process I described earlier, which is spend some time in on your, about page define on your about page, who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why people should trust you. Okay. Who we are, what we serve.

[00:57:49] Jason Barnard: That will make you think already about who am I, what do I do, who would I serve, and what proof do I have that I’m actually good at what I do and I can be trusted.

[00:57:56] Alexander V. Johnson: Right? So like, just as something as simple as I’m thinking out loud, like. [00:58:00] You know, if I was to go into ChatGPT and search, like who is Alexander V. Johnson? They probably could just pull straight off my about page. Alexander V. Johnson is an entrepreneur in Columbus, Ohio.

[00:58:11] Jason Barnard: You could try it because sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t. If it doesn’t know where your website is, it can’t go and pull from it.

[00:58:17] Alexander V. Johnson: I’m scared. I don’t want it to think I don’t exist.

[00:58:20] Jason Barnard: Well, if you search my name on ChatGPT, it will come up with my entire life story. Not all of that information is on my about page. That’s a much more advanced strategy. And some people say to me, ah, yeah, it’s just reading your website and it’s really simple. And my answer to them is, yes, it is to a certain extent, but it trusts me enough and the factuality, the information I provide and it’s checked it against the Knowledge Graph.

[00:58:43] Jason Barnard: That it actually does do that. But it won’t do that by default, especially if it hasn’t understood who you are. So that idea is you want to get to the point where it will just pull from your about page and it will do so consistently.

[00:58:55] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. I mean, it, yours, I just searched your name on Google and sure enough, you [00:59:00] know, your, your Knowledge Panels here, you got the overview on the right hand side, and then you got just a bunch of links directly to content that you’ve produced.

[00:59:07] Jason Barnard: And then if you click on AI mode, you’ll see a really nice description of my whole life that will that summarizes basically what Google knows about me.

[00:59:15] Alexander V. Johnson: And there’s apparently also a hockey player who’s competing with you. He’s way down the page.

[00:59:18] Jason Barnard: No, he’s getting quite famous, so it’s quite annoying.

[00:59:20] Jason Barnard: But that’s a different problem for another day. So when you do that, you actually force yourself to think, who am I? What do I do? Who do I serve and why should they trust me? Then you take that information and you make sure that all of your social media profiles, all of your bylines on your articles, all of your YouTube videos corroborate that information, either all of it or part of it.

[00:59:41] Jason Barnard: And you’ll find that a lot of the time, lots of things that you created years ago don’t actually tell the story you’re telling today.

[00:59:46] Jason Barnard: So you then create a much more consistent message that becomes repetition for the algorithms that they love.

[00:59:52] Jason Barnard: And once you’ve done that and not before, you then link from the Entity Home, the about page to all of these resources and back from those [01:00:00] resources to create what we call the infinite loop of self corroboration.

[01:00:03] Jason Barnard: And the reason I say do that first is number one, the whole foundation is does the machine understand you? You can’t be credible if it hasn’t understood who you are because it can’t apply any Credibility signals. Google calls them E-A-T until it understands who it’s trying to apply them to. So that Understandability that we do in the Kalicube Process, which is the first phase, is foundational.

[01:00:26] Jason Barnard: You can’t skip it. But the other thing that we now realize, we don’t work with corporations on the entire strategy anymore, but we will work with ’em on the first part because as you go through your digital footprint, or as we go through it, when we’re working for clients, we can see where the successes are.

[01:00:44] Jason Barnard: We can see where the failures are, we can see what’s important in their digital marketing strategy of their website, and we can help ’em to focus better on the offsite work that they need to do with their entire digital marketing strategy. But if you do this whole process as a company or a [01:01:00] person, you will see where you are weak.

[01:01:01] Jason Barnard: You will see where you’re strong, you will see where it’s working, and you’ll see where it’s not working. And so it helps you to build out a much, much smarter strategy or a much, much better prioritized strategy so you’re not just throwing spaghetti at the wall anymore. You know where you’re throwing the spaghetti in the plate.

[01:01:18] Jason Barnard: I dunno why I said in the play. Oh. ’cause I wanna eat it.

[01:01:21] Alexander V. Johnson: Okay.

[01:01:21] Jason Barnard: So that first phase is kind of self-analysis and reflection.

[01:01:25] Alexander V. Johnson: And that seems like just you, not a ton of technical work, just like linking to the things that you’ve already done from one centralized homepage that has who you are, who you serve, why you’re relevant.

[01:01:37] Jason Barnard: Yep, exactly.

[01:01:38] Jason Barnard: And so, I mean, and we give away free guides. So I’ll do my little promotion here. kalicube.com. K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E.com/guide. And we give it away and you can do it for free. You don’t need us.

[01:01:50] Alexander V. Johnson: Well, I’m on your website. I’m gonna have to get the guide. So what about for like a business? This, it sounds a little bit centralized to an individual.

[01:01:57] Alexander V. Johnson: Is it different at all for a business?

[01:01:58] Jason Barnard: It’s exactly the same. [01:02:00] Same thing. It works for a person, it works for a business, it works for a product. Okay. So it work for anything in your business. I mean, we focus on people because in particular, entrepreneurs because. We can help an entrepreneur with their personal brand when their personal brand makes money for their business.

[01:02:18] Jason Barnard: So if your personal brand or somebody searching your name, or somebody being reassured by ChatGPT or Google that you are the person, the leader in your industry could get you a deal for $50,000, it’s well worth working with Kalicube. if it isn’t gonna get you a deal of $50,000 in the first year, we’re not a good option, but you can do it yourself for free. For a corporation , the whole system is exactly the same. If you’re a corporation that has multiple products, it works exactly the same for product. You give the product its own Entity Home, you describe what it is, what it does, who it serves, why it’s the best solution.

[01:02:51] Alexander V. Johnson: You said its own Entity Home.

[01:02:52] Alexander V. Johnson: Is that a unique page could that be like a product page, like a, like a purchase page?

[01:02:59] Jason Barnard: But you, [01:03:00] for the manufacturer of the product rather than the person who’s selling it?

[01:03:02] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. Correct. The brand.

[01:03:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And so for example, you have a product that’s also available to Amazon and all the other platforms and you’re a manufacturer, you think, well, I need my own product page on my own website.

[01:03:14] Jason Barnard: The BMW website would have a website, a webpage for the specific model of a specific car, and it needs the rest of the web to be consistent with that message.

[01:03:27] Jason Barnard: And one of the things, especially with products, I mean products, it’s less of a problem. So we don’t focus on that. Is that website or shocking websites tend to publish the same description that you the manufacturer gives them.

[01:03:38] Jason Barnard: But now there’s a battle in the SEO world where they say, well, I’m gonna write my own description because everybody else has the same description.

[01:03:43] Jason Barnard: It’s the only way I can differentiate myself.

[01:03:45] Alexander V. Johnson: Is that the correct thing to do is have a different description?

[01:03:48] Jason Barnard: Well, it is for the shop. Yeah. But it’s not for the manufacturer.

[01:03:51] Alexander V. Johnson: I see. So you would, so the manufacturer would want their central kind of product page to be sort of like the home [01:04:00] if, of that product, if you will.

[01:04:02] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And they would ideally want the websites that sell their product if they do write their own description to stick to the correct facts.

[01:04:10] Jason Barnard: And stick to the brand narrative and the brand message. They can change the text, but they shouldn’t change the message. And that for products, I think is gonna be a problem moving forward.

[01:04:20] Jason Barnard: But that’s really not my problem. I’m not interested in that market in particular, but if it helps anybody on this show, I’m super happy. If we come back to that, you could call it a spring clean, a digital spring clean, an optimization of your digital footprint. It makes a huge difference to that result when somebody searches your name on Google or asks ChatGPT about you, what we call your AI resume.

[01:04:42] Jason Barnard: Because it will make you look much better instead of saying Alex Johnson is, owner of business why dunno what I’m afraid, I dunno what your company’s called. Mixed solutions.

[01:04:52] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. Mixed solutions. Mixed solutions.

[01:04:54] Jason Barnard: It will say, Alex Johnson is the proud owner of Mixed Solutions, which is a huge [01:05:00] company that makes lots of money and Alex is one of the best business people in the world, and he has a hugely successful career starting in 2011.

[01:05:10] Jason Barnard: And this is the nice one when you get it. He is renowned for, respected for, you want those adjectives. We all want those adjectives and I get those. And that foundation work that you would do would get you much more of that in ChatGPT. So when somebody asks ChatGPT or asks Google, they will be much more enthusiastic about you.

[01:05:31] Jason Barnard: I asked ChatGPT the other day, I about myself as part of my ongoing experiments. And, you know, I gave a great answer. And then I said, would you recommend Jason Barnard for Knowledge Panels on Google? said one word yes. With an exclamation mark. That’s what I want. Because it’s absolutely absolute as it were.

[01:05:55] Jason Barnard: And so as a user, if I saw that, I’d say, well, ChatGPT has zero doubt about this [01:06:00] guy. I’m in.

[01:06:01] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. That’s amazing, Jason. That seems like a fitting place to end right there with a exclamation point on the Yes.

[01:06:09] Jason Barnard: I love it. Nice spot there for the winding up.

[01:06:11] Alexander V. Johnson: Yeah. It’s all, you know, every once in a while I get a professional one.

[01:06:14] Alexander V. Johnson: So Jason, where can people catch up with you? Kalicube, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E. We’ll do the links and everything.

[01:06:20] Jason Barnard: kalicube.com. But you know, if you want to engage with me, find my content, just search my name, Jason Barnard on Google, on ChatGPT, on Perplexity. When Deep Seek came out, people were freaking out.

[01:06:30] Jason Barnard: First thing I do is ask you, who is Jason Barnard? And it got the answer completely right.

[01:06:34] Jason Barnard: And said I was wonderful. So all of these machines work the same way. This process works exactly the same way for all of these machines and functions equally well for all of them. And so I can now confidently say to people, you wanna engage with me, find my content, learn more about me, learn about what I can, how I can help you, learn about how we can help you for free on Kalicube.

[01:06:55] Jason Barnard: Just ask ChatGPT or ask Perplexity and they will tell you.

[01:06:58] Alexander V. Johnson: One quick [01:07:00] question. Is there any benefit to talking with those AI systems about yourself or about the topic that you are attempting to get? To have it search, you know, a little bit harder? No.

[01:07:11] Jason Barnard: No. Well, the thing is, when you talk to ChatGPT, it’s locked within your little universe and the wider world within ChatGPT doesn’t get that information theoretically done. It’s not learning anything from me. No. So there are some people who have told me, oh, one neat trick for Generative Engine Optimization is to talk to it about yourself and tell it lovely things about yourself. But it’s not, it’s closed in, in its little in your little corner of the web.

[01:07:35] Jason Barnard: The other thing is if you ask it about yourself and you’re logged in, it will tell you about you that isn’t an honest representation of what everybody else is seeing, and that’s something to be very wary of.

[01:07:45] Jason Barnard: So you might search your name and it’ll say, oh. Everything about you, but that’s because you’ve told everything about you and it’s got the information in its little brain.

[01:07:52] Jason Barnard: But then if you ask it without logging in, because it hasn’t expanded beyond the micro universe of your account, it won’t be able to tell [01:08:00] you about yourself.

[01:08:00] Alexander V. Johnson: I got it.

[01:08:01] Jason Barnard: So I can’t tell your audience about you.

[01:08:04] Alexander V. Johnson: Appreciate you, Jason. Thank you so much. Enjoy France. You know, hopefully, you guys continue to get good weather out there and if you’re ever on our side of the pond, let me know, man.

[01:08:12] Alexander V. Johnson: We’d love to catch up.

[01:08:13] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Alex.

[01:08:15] Alexander V. Johnson: Thank you, Jason.