From Busking in Paris to Building Kalicube®: The Soul of a Serial Entrepreneur Who Taught Machines to Tell His Story - Jason Barnard On The Podcaster Nation Podcast
THE Podcaster Nation #126 - “Fastlane Founders and Legacy” with Jason Barnard!!!
Video by: Rory Paquette. Host: Rory Paquette. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. October 20, 2025
TL;DR: Strategic brand reframing and algorithmic education are the new prerequisites for protecting your legacy and securing high-stakes recommendations from AI Assistive Engines. Jason Barnard, the World Authority on AI Brand Intelligence and CEO of Kalicube®, joins Rory Paquette to share his journey from busking in Paris to achieving a billion page views in EdTech. He demonstrates that by implementing The Kalicube Process™, entrepreneurs can “educate” machines to ensure that platforms like Google and ChatGPT act as proactive advocates, delivering the Perfect Click through the power of a unified digital story.
Key Strategies Discussed:
- The Kalicube Process™: A systematic three-phase methodology - Understandability, Credibility, and Deliverability - that treats algorithms like children needing a clear, consistent curriculum to avoid Brand Hallucinations.
- The Entity Home as the Source of Truth: Your own website, specifically the “About” page, must serve as the primary Point of Reconciliation where algorithms find the “canonical truth” used to resolve contradictions found elsewhere in your Digital Ecosystem.
- Strategic Reframing of the Past: multifaceted entrepreneurs must strategically mold the machine’s focus. Jason explains how to reframe past roles (like being a voice actor or musician) into entrepreneurial milestones that serve current business goals.
- The Concept of Ambient Research: AI is moving beyond the search box into operating systems and daily workflows (e.g., Google Docs, Gmail). Success means engineering your brand so the machine proactively suggests you as a solution during a user’s natural work process.
- Infinite Self-Confirming Loop of Corroboration: Building trust requires a closed circuit of information where your Entity Home links to trusted second- and third-party sources (like social profiles, press, or industry directories), and those sources link back to verify your identity.
- Claim, Frame, and Prove: This foundational mechanism involves making a factual statement (Claim) on your Entity Home, providing strategic context through reframing (Frame), and securing third-party corroboration (Prove) to maximize Annotation Confidence.
- Personal Brand Legacy: Entrepreneurs must manage their digital narrative today to ensure their professional legacy is accurately preserved and recommended by AI for decades to come.
- The Top of Algorithmic Mind: Success in the AI era means engineering your Digital Footprint so that AI assistants proactively think of and recommend your brand as the definitive solution the moment a relevant problem is mentioned.
Transcript: THE Podcaster Nation #126 - “Fastlane Founders and Legacy” with Jason Barnard!!!
[00:00:00] Rory Paquette: Welcome back everybody to The Podcaster Nation. That’s right. I said welcome back ’cause I know you were just listening to our stuff. You loved it so much. You came back for more folks, that was a brilliant move. We have more for you.
[00:00:14] The reason that we have so much more for you is because this is the podcast that it’s about podcasters, it’s for podcasters, it’s done by podcasters. This is a place where we come together as podcasters to lift each other up. And this is the place where the rising tide raises all ships, folks. Let’s get sailing, bring in our guest today.
[00:00:30] He is the CEO and founder of Kalicube®, which I can’t wait to hear more about. He’s the author of several books, one of which The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business. He’s the host of the podcast, Fastlane Founders and Legacy With Jason Barnard, and that is, what the name is today. We’re gonna talk about that some more today too. Please welcome to the podcast, you guessed it, Jason Barnard. Jason, how you doing brother?
[00:00:56] Jason Barnard: A quick hello and we’re good to go welcome to your own show, Rory Paquette.
[00:01:05] Rory Paquette: That’s on me. I just gave you the green light. So at any point, if you need to burst into song, you go for it, Jason.
[00:01:10] Jason Barnard: Rule number one with Jason Barnard is don’t give him permission to do things.
[00:01:16] Rory Paquette: Too late.
[00:01:16] I think we’re in trouble. Alright, good deal. Jason, listen, I appreciate you coming on today. You’ve got, just an unbelievable list of talking points. Tell everybody, who is Jason Barnard. What are you about and what brings you here today, brother?
[00:01:31] Jason Barnard: I’m a podcaster, which is why I’m here today specifically, but podcasting is just one of many things that I’ve done over my life.
[00:01:38] I was telling you earlier on that I left school, went to Liverpool University to study economics, and I liked that story because at the end of the economics degree. We had 200 people who just got their economics degree sitting in a room and the main tutor, whatever his name was, I can’t remember, said, okay, you’ve all got your economics degree. Now I’m gonna tell you 60% of you are gonna be economists, 20% of you are gonna work in a bank. 10% of you are gonna become economics teachers, 5% are actually gonna become economists and do the work you were trained to do, and 5% are gonna do something completely different.
[00:02:18] And I was right at the back of the hall, like all the bad boys are. And I thought, that’s me. That’s me in the 5%. And I promptly left university, went to Paris, joined a band, played music in the street, and I have never had a nine to five job in my entire life.
[00:02:35] Rory Paquette: That’s an unbelievable thing to hear somebody say.
[00:02:38] Cool, isn’t it? It really is. How have you avoided having a nine to five like ever, it’s so crazy.
[00:02:48] Jason Barnard: I left college and went straight to play in the street and I was busking in the street. And that’s a good story as well, because I went to Paris, some friends of mine said, do you wanna join our band?
[00:02:59] I said, yeah, I’m a singer, ’cause I was playing in a blues band in Liverpool and played at Cavern Club where the Beatles famously started. Doesn’t make me a better musician, but it’s cool.
[00:03:10] Rory Paquette: It’s very cool.
[00:03:12] Jason Barnard: And they said, we don’t need a singer. So I said, I play a bit of a guitar. And they said, we don’t need a guitar player.
[00:03:17] So I said, oh, what can I play then? And they said, if you buy a double bass and you learn to play it, you can be in the band and busk in the street with a bag, basically. So I went back to the UK and with my last 500 pounds, I bought a double base and turned up at my mother’s house and I said, ooh, hello mother.
[00:03:41] And she said, why have you got a double base? And I told her what I was gonna do with a double base, obviously learn to play it and go and play it in the street. And she said, oh, don’t do that. Get a proper job, a nine to five job. And the irony there is that she left home when I was four, ran away, leaving me and my three sisters with my father, and she ran away to play in the street playing jazz music and has made a career playing jazz music. So the irony was quite strong. So I said to her, that’s exactly what you did. Do you regret it? And she said, no. And I said, there you go. The whole story is told, I’m gonna go and play in the street, which I did.
[00:04:29] That actually turned into a professional band where we toured Europe. For 10 years, played 660 real gigs, 10,000 times in the street, released four albums, played on the same bill as Bob Dylan. Captain Sensible from The Damned, what was his name from Black Flag.
[00:04:54] Rory Paquette: Oh, you’re asking about that.
[00:04:57] Jason Barnard: Henry Rollins from Black Flag, played with The Pogues, played with some amazing people, and toured for 10 years and made a living playing music.
[00:05:07] Rory Paquette: Nice.
[00:05:07] Jason Barnard: And because no record companies wanted us, I created a record company. So that was my first company. So I was an entrepreneur in 1991 because nobody wanted the band.
[00:05:19] And I have ever since then, the explanation why I’ve never had a proper job is from that moment on, I thought, if I wanna do something, I just create a company and do it. I don’t need anybody to help me and I don’t need anybody to gimme a salary.
[00:05:33] Rory Paquette: Nice.
[00:05:34] Jason Barnard: So the next thing I did was create a company to make cartoons for kids, which is another story.
[00:05:39] Rory Paquette: I was gonna say. A couple questions on the first part here, the double bass, there are some similar tenets between that and the guitar, I would assume. Was that difficult for you to learn or did you pick that up quick?
[00:05:52] Jason Barnard: It got strings in that, in so far it’s got strings. It’s very similar.
[00:05:57] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:05:57] Jason Barnard: It’s got four big strings instead of six little strings. I had 30 days to learn it and then we had a gig in a pub rather than in the street, and they basically said, we’ll use the gig in the pub as the judgment day for you as to whether or not you’re allowed in the band. And I had one lesson from this guy called Franz, who was a German double bass player, and he was brilliant and he played jazz and he spent the first hour saying to me, okay, here are the notes. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s not what you need to think about. He gave me the best advice anybody could ever give and I’ll tell you what that is in a moment. And then the second hour going, boom, we’re playing all this and when you’ve learned to play, you’ll be able to play all this stuff. So half of the lesson was actually helpful and the other half was him showing off and showing me what I’d be able to do, which I never actually did learn to do, to be fair.
[00:06:49] So Franz, you wasted a whole hour of your life.
[00:06:52] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:06:54] Jason Barnard: But he told me several things. Number one is when you’re playing, always hit it in time. If you play the wrong note, there are only two types of people in the audience. One is people who don’t play music. They’ve got no idea. You just played a bum note.
[00:07:12] And the other is super duper jazz musicians who think you’ve done something so clever that they don’t understand. That they won’t dare ask you about it. So it doesn’t matter. And as long as you’re hitting in time to the music and you stop when everyone else stops and you start, when everyone else starts, nobody will notice what you’re doing.
[00:07:32] So at that point, all you have to do is smile and look confident. And he was right and he stood at the back of the room on a table and every time I was, my head went down, he just kept going, smile, smile. And it worked an absolute treat. So that was my double base lesson, the only double base lesson I’ve ever had.
[00:07:56] And it turns out, lucky for me, I’m actually a very good double bass player.
[00:08:01] Rory Paquette: Nice. Congrats.
[00:08:02] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I was lucky. They could have said, play the penny whistle or play the tambo. I would’ve been a bad tambourine player, or a bad drummer, or a bad harmonica player. I happened to be a good double bass player and it was pure luck.
[00:08:14] Rory Paquette: Nice. The other question I had, and first of all, that’s fantastic advice, I think for just about anything. Not just for playing the double bass. If you miss a note, just keep going, should tell a few podcasters that we might help us out.
[00:08:30] Jason Barnard: Oh, and that’s a really interesting point, is the stuff that you hear as being wrong in music or that you see as being wrong or not as good as you would like it to be?
[00:08:41] Nobody else notices and nobody else cares, even if they do notice.
[00:08:47] Rory Paquette: Yeah, that’s fantastic advice.
[00:08:50] Jason Barnard: Strangely enough, for the first time in my life, I played a solo gig a week ago and I’ve never played a solo gig. I always thought I have to play with a band, and there’s a jazz club right across the street from me, and the owner said to me the night before, why don’t you just come down and play some music tomorrow? On your own. And I said, I don’t know. I’m not very confident. And then his, partner said to me the next morning, oh, you’re gonna come and play. And I thought, there you go, that’s the decision made for me. Because if two people, I can’t say no now. And so I played the gig and I could hear every mistake.
[00:09:26] My ex-wife came down, she seen me play hundreds of times and she said she could see that I was uncomfortable, but it was still good. They live streamed it to Facebook, which I didn’t know. And then I watched it the next day and I couldn’t hear any of the mistakes that I could hear when I was playing it.
[00:09:46] Rory Paquette: Nice.
[00:09:48] Jason Barnard: And I thought, actually, that sounds really, really good and the only negative thing I can say about my performance is I didn’t look confident enough.
[00:09:56] Rory Paquette: Yeah. That advice and that observation came from someone who knew you pretty well. And they knew you intimately, formally, to say, hey you looked uncomfortable.
[00:10:06] So the average person in the crowd had no idea.
[00:10:09] Jason Barnard: Oh, no. Somebody else came up to me back and said, that was the best music we heard that day. And it was the day of music in France where there were hundreds of groups everywhere.
[00:10:17] Rory Paquette: Nice. All right.
[00:10:18] Jason Barnard: She came up to me and said, we saw 10 of the groups that afternoon and nothing even came close.
[00:10:24] Rory Paquette: Wow. Yeah.
[00:10:25] Jason Barnard: How very cool. And I think that’s the case. Véronique, my ex-wife, said it was brilliant. But I could see you weren’t as comfortable as you usually were, but it didn’t matter.
[00:10:39] Rory Paquette: Nice.
[00:10:40] Jason Barnard: As you say, for all of us, especially podcasters, the details that you hear, the details that you obsess about, nobody else hears and if they do, they don’t care.
[00:10:53] Rory Paquette: If you’re getting that kind of feedback, and we already established that if two people say you should go play, that’s a mandate, right? So if everybody’s telling you how good you are, do we have another career change? Are we changing the signs behind you on the wall?
[00:11:06] Kalicube® is somebody else’s problem now? Because you’re going back to the musician world.
[00:11:11] Jason Barnard: Actually that’s another good story.
[00:11:13] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:11:15] Jason Barnard: Two and a half years ago, I had cataracts and I was starting to lose my eyesight and easy operation, you are actually awake when they do it, which is pretty horrible.
[00:11:28] Oh, yeah, exactly. They don’t put you to sleep. So they sedate your face and then they just poke a hole in your eye, it’s horrible, isn’t it?
[00:11:38] Rory Paquette: Yeah. Okay, I got it.
[00:11:40] Jason Barnard: They hold your head between two kind of things, and you can actually move your head and the guy just says, don’t move your head. And you’ve got a light there while they poke a hole in your eye with a scalpel and try not to move.
[00:11:56] Rory Paquette: So far not a great story.
[00:11:59] Jason Barnard: Sorry.
[00:12:00] Rory Paquette: So far not a great story, Jason. I’m sorry.
[00:12:02] Jason Barnard: Oh, it gets better. He did the first eye. I was born with a strabismus, which is that your eyes are crossed and they operated on it, but they only really saved the left eye. So the right eye has never really worked very well.
[00:12:18] So I’ve got the eyes the wrong way around, as in the left eye is the leading eye, and if I close my right eye, it doesn’t, literally doesn’t make any difference. So he did the right eye, went really well, and then he did the left eye and he poked a hole in the back of the eye, which obviously you’re not supposed to do.
[00:12:37] And he just stopped and he said, oh, I’ve just made a hole in the membrane at the back and I’m gonna have to send you to a specialist. And then he sent me to a specialist. I wen’t to the specialist. They got me down, they sedated me again and it had to be done really quickly because all the liquid leaks through.
[00:12:55] So they have to drain your eye, fill it up with liquid again, and then close it up again and close up the hole and then close it up again. And he did it, and then they wheeled me out and I was just getting into the elevator to go back up to the room. And the guy said, oh, I made a tiny mistake.
[00:13:13] Rory Paquette: Oh my God.
[00:13:16] Jason Barnard: I put the wrong lens in, ’cause they put a lens in. I’ve gotta open it up again. So they wheeled me straight back in again. I had three operations on my good eye in the space of three days.
[00:13:29] Rory Paquette: Oh my word.
[00:13:30] Jason Barnard: And then I couldn’t see out of the eye for literally six months.
[00:13:35] Rory Paquette: Wow.
[00:13:36] Jason Barnard: And I ended up in a flat in Paris with a patch on this eye for the first couple of weeks and then no patch, but I couldn’t see anything with only my eye working. that’s been the laziest eye in the entire universe my entire life. It’s never done a day’s work in its life and it didn’t intend to start then.
[00:13:58] And I literally just bumped into things in the flat. And so I spent six months between my flat and the supermarket opposite, creeping across the road to go to the supermarket to buy food and creeping back and going back upstairs. And during that six months, I thought, okay, what happens if I go blind?
[00:14:15] Oh, blind double base plan. No problem. I’ve got a career.
[00:14:21] Rory Paquette: Oh, wow.
[00:14:21] Jason Barnard: So there you go.
[00:14:24] Rory Paquette: How are you now? I have to ask, how are you now?
[00:14:27] Jason Barnard: It’s okay. There’s a black thing that keeps floating around in front of this eye, but as long as I don’t pay attention to it, it’s okay. But it works fine. It turns out he did a very good job. It just took a lot time. In the end, the doctor said the reason it took six months was just because you had three operations in very quick succession and your eye was overwhelmed, let’s say, by being punched and spliced.
[00:14:54] But they actually thought they might have damaged the optic nerve, which is why they said, actually it might never come back, but we don’t know. So it was six months of thinking I might actually be blind. So I was thinking, okay, blind double bass playing singer. I can do that.
[00:15:10] Rory Paquette: Yeah, I bet you could actually.
[00:15:13] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Rory Paquette: You probably could figure out a way to do it, could you?
[00:15:15] Jason Barnard: It would’ve been a badly paid career, but it was still a career. But it wasn’t like I wasn’t gonna be able to make a living, so I could’ve been a podcaster too.
[00:15:22] Rory Paquette: Absolutely. We don’t have to see for this. You could do that for sure. My goodness. I love your attitude though. It’s remarkable. It’s what I think everybody aspires to, to have that attitude of, you know what, we’ll just figure it out.
[00:15:37] You know what, totally all right.
[00:15:39] Jason Barnard: Okay. Now the honest part is it was six months. I was pretty, pretty depressed.
[00:15:43] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:15:44] Jason Barnard: I wasn’t cheerfully going through it. It’s like I was saying to you just before the show, with the mother story and this particular story, it was difficult at the time. But if you then look back and if you tell it right both to yourself and to other people, it just becomes a funny story.
[00:16:04] Rory Paquette: I still love it. The other thing I wanted to ask you about in the first part of your story there was, okay hey, we’re looking for, I’m in the band and we’re looking for a record company. Well hey, I’m just gonna start one.
[00:16:19] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Rory Paquette: Now there’s a mentality about I’m going to like, leave conventional life. I’m gonna go play music. I get that. I totally understand it. My daughter actually did that for a little while, so I’ve seen it up close and personal.
[00:16:31] Jason Barnard: I’m on your daughter’s side. I’m not saying you weren’t. But I’m really keen on saying to people, go and do what makes you happy and figure out a way to make money from it.
[00:16:43] And it doesn’t have to be a huge living. That’s not the point of life, in my opinion.
[00:16:48] Rory Paquette: Sure. That’s how she felt back then. So you’re right, you guys were on the exact same page, but it seems to be a different mentality of an entrepreneurial mindset to say, okay, I’m just gonna start a business. You know what I mean?
[00:17:02] Those are almost at odds with one another. You go from not really caring whether I have a business or not, because money’s not everything to saying, I’m gonna be an entrepreneur and I’m just gonna go start, where’s that come from?
[00:17:14] Jason Barnard: Yeah. But I didn’t think I’m gonna be an entrepreneur. I thought if I want to be a musician, I’m gonna have to make it happen.
[00:17:22] And in order to make it happen, I need a legal structure. The legal structure as a company and the point of the company was just to create my own career and a career for my friends as well. So I’ve always told, I was a musician who created a company so that he could be a musician. Then I was a cartoon maker who created a company so that he could be a cartoon maker. Now, and we’ll talk about that later, is the Claim, Frame, Prove model of Kalicube®, of how do I make that story?
[00:17:51] Those two stories now serve my career today, where I am an entrepreneur is that I simply turn it around, reframe it, and say I created a record label, we signed a deal with a EMI, we signed a deal with Warner Chappell and I happen to be in the band. I created a company, an EdTech company, called UpToTen. We created it in Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean for reasons that we can go into later if you’d like to next to Madagascar, I was the CEO and founder.
[00:18:20] We signed deals with Disney. We signed deals with Orange, which is a multinational telecommunications company. We signed deals with ITV in the UK with Radio-Canada. And I happened to be a songwriter and do the voiceover for five of the characters in the cartoon. If you frame it that way, you’re saying, I was CEO and founder and I signed these deals with these huge corporations and it was thanks to me and I made it all work.
[00:18:51] I’m an entrepreneur who works with major corporations that helps me today in Kalicube®. As an entrepreneur expert in personal brand management and corporate brand management in the digital space in a world of AI assistive engines like ChaGPT, Google, AI Mode, Perplexity. It serves me today if I frame it differently to the way I’ve always framed it.
[00:19:18] Rory Paquette: Nice. So the way you framed it before was more, it’s a means to an end.
[00:19:22] Jason Barnard: Yes.
[00:19:22] Rory Paquette: And the end was what you wanted, your happiness and what you wanted to go do. Nice. All right. I get it now.
[00:19:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I like it. It was a means to an end because that’s exactly how I approached it. But then, as you say, I was an entrepreneur, it’s just, I didn’t think of it that way.
[00:19:39] And I was going into EMI, talking to the big boss of EMI, going to Warner Chappell, to the guy who signs the contract as to whether or not they’re gonna give you a million euros, as an entrepreneur. But I happened to be a musician who played in the street at the time, but they didn’t know that.
[00:19:59] Rory Paquette: As long as it gets you to your goal, that’s beautiful. Alright. You’ve mentioned a couple times talking about the cartoon. Maybe tell our listeners about, about the cartoon, being the cartoon guy.
[00:20:11] Jason Barnard: Yep. We used to play punk folk music in the band, The Barking Dogs.
[00:20:16] That was what I played double bass for. It was punk folk. So it’s like folk music played like punk style. So if you took Bob Dylan and you played it like a punk, that’s what we were doing.
[00:20:27] Rory Paquette: Interesting. I saw that in your bio, but I mean I’m an Italian kid from the East Coast who moved to the Midwest, so maybe I’m a little sheltered, but to me, punk and folk have always not only been totally different, but on opposite ends. So how do you blend that?
[00:20:45] Jason Barnard: If you wanna see what it looks like, search for The Barking Dogs, The Ace of Spades and you’ll see folk instruments played punk style and if I may say, it really rocks. It sounds like I’m saying, oh, aren’t I wonderful? And I’m not.
[00:21:10] I’m saying there were four of us. It was the guy was the best drummer I’ve ever heard in my life. The singer was completely mad, but incredible singer. One of these people like Sting or Bob Dylan, where as soon as you hear the first word out their mouth, you know it’s them. And then this guy who played the mandolin and the violin who, if you look up The Barking Dogs Basta, B-A-S-T-A, there’s a live video of him playing the mandolin behind his head.
[00:21:39] And the riff he’s playing is literally, and he’s playing it behind his head. The guy was phenomenal, and my role was to play the double bass and make the connection between the guy playing the mandolin and the singer and the drummer. And the drummer once said to me, you are the best bass player I’ve ever played with.
[00:22:02] I was going, you must be thinking of somebody else, mate. All I do is hit the thing in time. ’cause that’s what Franz told me to do. and he said no, because whatever I do, I can always go off and do all my stuff and do these really complicated things. You are always there when I come back. You are so reliable.
[00:22:23] And actually that’s what the base is. The base is there to make the joint between the drums and the front line and always be the anchor for everybody.
[00:22:32] Rory Paquette: Wow. Okay.
[00:22:34] Jason Barnard: So I was the anchor.
[00:22:37] Rory Paquette: Alright.
[00:22:38] Jason Barnard: But we used to sit in the van and we did a hundred thousand kilometers a year. So that’s, I dunno how long, a thousand hours in sitting in a van. Bored.
[00:22:49] Probably more actually, because you’re not driving a hundred kilometers an hour the whole time. So let’s say 1,500 hours a year sitting in a van with people you don’t even necessarily like or get on with trying to entertain yourselves with a horrible hangover from the night before. And one recurring conversation was, what is your nightmare gig?
[00:23:12] And everybody in the band said, playing in front of a room full of kids.
[00:23:17] Rory Paquette: Really?
[00:23:18] Jason Barnard: Yeah. If you’re punk folk playing in front of a room full of kids is your nightmare.
[00:23:23] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:23:24] Jason Barnard: And I was secretly sitting there going, actually I like to do children’s music, but I didn’t say anything.
[00:23:30] ’cause obviously I don’t wanna get in trouble. So when the band stopped, everybody left the band except me and I was standing there on my own thinking, what do I do now? And I thought, I’ll write some songs for children. So I wrote some songs for children. My ex-wife had a great job that paid the bills. And she was incredibly generous and said, you can stay at home and look after our daughter who’d just been born. You stay at home dad and I’ll go out and do the work and make the money. And while you’re looking after our daughter, make a children’s album. Off you go knock yourself out, mate.
[00:24:04] It’s brilliant.
[00:24:05] Rory Paquette: Wow.
[00:24:06] Jason Barnard: So I made an album for kids and once again, nobody wanted to sign it. So I created another company. We decided to make a cartoon. So my wife and I created cartoon characters called Boowa and Kwala, a blue dog and a yellow koala for no reason at all that I can explain in less than an hour and a half.
[00:24:27] And decided we were gonna make a website. And the website ended up with a billion page views in 2007 and 60 million kids from all over the world visiting the website. And today I get messages on social media saying, that was my childhood, thank you so much. And that was that’s so touching. And I even did a video, I did a video about the five Cs of content marketing or something really boring to do with digital marketing, and somebody wrote under it. Did you sound like Boowa the blue dog, to which I replied, that’s because I am Boowa the blue dog. But the voice is very recognizable.
[00:25:05] Rory Paquette: Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah. Okay.
[00:25:07] Jason Barnard: And it was a huge success and it was a huge amount of fun. And we actually moved to Mauritius, which is in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar to make cartoons, which is cool.
[00:25:18] Sitting on a tropical island with the palm trees, sun all year round on the beach making cartoons. How cool is that?
[00:25:26] Rory Paquette: It’s very cool. What made you wanna move to a almost deserted island to make your cartoons? Just a creative space or…
[00:25:34] Jason Barnard: No, much more pragmatic and boring than that.
[00:25:38] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:25:39] Jason Barnard: My daughter, we were living in Paris.
[00:25:40] My daughter kept getting ill from the pollution and my wife started with ill as well, and she had to give up a job and so I looked at it and thought, I need to make money from this kid’s thing that we’ve created with Veronique. And so we signed a deal with a business partner that turned out really badly.
[00:26:02] He was a horrible human being.
[00:26:04] Rory Paquette: Sorry.
[00:26:04] Jason Barnard: But it got us the money to move to Mauritius where my daughter had the happiest, delightest, full, most perfect childhood you could possibly imagine, running around in the sun all day long with lovely people. They’re such sweet people in Mauritius, in the sunshine. It’s a very naive country.
[00:26:23] So she had a really good childhood and a real childhood till 15 where there wasn’t that kind of social pressure that a lot of kids get. And my wife completely cured. And other than the business partner who turned out to be horrible, couldn’t have been better.
[00:26:42] Rory Paquette: Nice. How long were you guys there? It sounds like a while.
[00:26:45] Jason Barnard: 13 years.
[00:26:46] Rory Paquette: My goodness.
[00:26:48] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:26:48] Rory Paquette: Okay. My, you just don’t hear these stories from people.
[00:26:53] Jason Barnard: No. Whoa.
[00:26:55] Rory Paquette: You’ve definitely, you’re not even done. You’re not even close, you’re already. All these things, checking these Boxes.
[00:27:01] Jason Barnard: I’ll tell you another lovely story.
[00:27:03] When we got there, we moved into a house just near the beach and the post office was behind and there was a cemetery and then the beach. We asked the children who visited the website, send in your drawings of Boowa and Kwala. And we had a gallery. So we’d show the kids drawings and it was really lovely.
[00:27:25] And so I said to the postman when he walked past one day, what’s our address? ‘Cause I’ve gotta get these, we’ve gotta put it on the website so that kids can send in their pictures. And he said, there isn’t address. It’s Monsieur d’Hotman de Villiers, Black River, Mauritius because he knows everybody in the village.
[00:27:42] So he didn’t need an address, so nobody had an address. So basically if this guy, Mr. d’Hotman de Villiers moved to another house, he’d just delivered a letter to the new house. So the address wasn’t actually part of the deal. And so I said, we need an address and he said, there isn’t one. I said, can I choose one?
[00:28:03] And he said, yeah, you can choose an address. I said, oh, between the sea and the post office. He said, okay, that’s your address. But I said, oh, can I change it to between the cemetery and the sea? He said, nope, you’ve chosen between the sea and the post office, that’s what it is. And then I said to him, is it possible for us to take off the name of the village so that the address is Boowa and Kwala between the sea and the post office, Mauritius? And that’s it. And he contacted the central post office in the capital city and convinced them to have between the sea and the post office as a synonym for the village Black River.
[00:28:45] Rory Paquette: Oh my God.
[00:28:45] Jason Barnard: And so these parents would send their precious children’s drawings, the original, to Boowa and Kwala between the sea and the post office, Mauritius, thinking, this is like Santa Claus, it’s never gonna get there.
[00:28:59] Rory Paquette: Like to North Pole and you just close your eyes.
[00:29:03] Jason Barnard: And they all got there and we got these emails saying, I can’t believe my precious child’s drawing actually got to you. And that’s just an example of what Mauritius was like at the time. I don’t know what it’s like now, but very naive, very sweet, very open, and very human.
[00:29:21] Rory Paquette: Nice. So you’re just like causing trouble everywhere you go, basically. I get it. All right. okay, so we’ve got…
[00:29:32] Jason Barnard: If I may not intentionally.
[00:29:33] Rory Paquette: No, please. Absolutely.
[00:29:34] Jason Barnard: No, it’s not intentionally. I don’t create trouble intentionally. It’s just fun ideas. I throw them out there and now I realize a lot of the time it just sticks and fun things happen and it’s lovely.
[00:29:51] Rory Paquette: I love that. Not many people can live with, instead of saying why, just a why not mentality.
[00:29:57] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:29:58] Rory Paquette: Through everything they’re doing and it just really sounds like that’s kind of like been you. I’d like to play music in the street, why not go for it? It has to be freeing to live that way.
[00:30:11] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it is generally interesting enough right now, I’ve been struggling the last couple of months because I’ve become a serious CEO.
[00:30:21] Rory Paquette: Lost you there for a minute.
[00:30:36] Jason Barnard: I hope it’s recorded, but I’ve been pondering the last kind of three months. Why? I’m not feeling comfortable right now. I live in the south of France. It’s sunny. I’ve got lots of friends. I play music in the jazz club opposite. There’s a boulangerie downstairs where I get fresh bread every day.
[00:30:51] There’s a vegetable shop next door where I can buy fresh vegetables to make my dinner every day. There are an amazing restaurants around the corner. I play music. I’ve got a band, I play with people I love. I live right around the corner from my ex-wife, who’s one of my best friends.
[00:31:11] Rory Paquette: Wow.
[00:31:13] Jason Barnard: Why don’t I feel comfortable and happy?
[00:31:16] And it’s because I’ve had to turn myself into a CEO because I have a team of 15 people who depend on me being a proper CEO and actually not playing it by ear and making it up as I go along and so it’s been, oh, sorry. I’m now like talking about psychologist. I’ve spent a year moving my head to a place where I can really, truly delegate to the leadership of five people and say to them, that’s your baby to look after, your Kalicube® baby.
[00:31:57] It’s up to you to look after it. I’m the boss, but I don’t have the responsibility of doing your job. You have that responsibility. And now they’re saying to me, can you stop getting involved and let me get on with my work? Which is brilliant. And I think honestly the last couple of weeks I’ve really felt now I’m delegating, truly delegating, not just thinking I’m delegating.
[00:32:23] They’re truly stepping up to the plate. Congratulations to Team Kalicube. You are amazing. 15 wonderful people, who I treasure and as people. I can’t think of anybody in the group that I don’t actually like, which is lovely because obviously when you work with somebody, you don’t have to like them. They just have to do a good job. And if, they’re doing a good job and you like them, wow, that’s a cool bonus.
[00:32:55] Rory Paquette: Right?
[00:32:58] Jason Barnard: So yeah, now I can be a CEO, but then I can also just be playing music with my friends across the street and hanging out with my ex-wife. I took some friends, a friend who runs a restaurant next door has her kids on Wednesday afternoon, but she needs to keep her restaurant open. So me and my ex-wife took her kids to the cinema around the corner, which is an amazing cinema. We are in a village of 5,000 people shouldn’t have a cinema and it’s got huge screens and amazing sound system, really comfy chairs.
[00:33:32] It’s completely nuts and the reason is because it was quite a, I dunno, low quality cinema, let’s say. And there was a huge flood and the insurance money came in and they decided to just properly spend the insurance money to make the cinema really good. They were really well insured and the people who run it luckily just think, we don’t wanna make a fortune.
[00:34:00] We are just happy running a wonderful cinema in a tiny town. So we have a very unreasonable cinema in this tiny town in the south of France and one of the most prestigious jazz clubs in the south of France, right across the road, run by friends of mine, completely by luck.
[00:34:19] Rory Paquette: Nice. It sounds like you’ve really built your dream life other than the fact that you have to go to work at your company.
[00:34:26] Jason Barnard: I don’t go to work. I stay at home and work.
[00:34:28] Rory Paquette: There you go.
[00:34:30] So, that’s exactly what it was. Alright. And it’s funny because early on we talked about that difference, that viewpoint of means to an end and how you’re not really looking at yourself like an entrepreneur.
[00:34:42] That’s where entrepreneurs can’t let go because the business is the baby. It’s their baby. It’s the reason they started it. And with you, if it’s a means to an end, then you can, I would imagine it’s easier to delegate because there’s not that emotional attachment to your business.
[00:34:59] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Now interesting question because with the cartoon company, sorry, I’ve gotta say EdTech Company.
[00:35:07] Please put that in the show notes. That would help me greatly. UpToTen EdTech Company, founded by Jason Barnard, signed deals with Orange, ITV Studios and Disney. Makes me look like a really serious entrepreneur. And now I can tell you that when I exited the business in very negative circumstances, it felt like my business partner taken away my soul, not because of the company, because of the blue dog.
[00:35:40] And I realized too late that I couldn’t see the difference between myself and the character anymore. So when he took the company, he took the blue dog and the blue dog was me and my soul went with it. I went into the most profound depression you can imagine. It was anybody who’s ever suffered from any kind of depression, I empathize completely.
[00:36:10] It’s the worst thing imaginable. And I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that I lost my soul and that I rebuilt it. And whether or not you believe in God or the universe, or whatever you believe in, the foundation of what I would call a good human being who isn’t a total evil narcissist is what I would call a soul. And it’s something that’s in you and you can lose it. And it’s the most precious thing you have over and above, even health people say health. Money, none of that matters. Your soul is what matters and you have to keep it and you have to protect it, and you have to nurture it.
[00:37:13] And that’s the big lesson I learned there is it’s something you’ve got to be, in my opinion, be aware of. Protect is incredibly important, nurture, build, and enjoy. Because when it dies, life is really not fun, which is obviously a vast understatement.
[00:37:37] Rory Paquette: Sure. I’ve been through a little bit of that, and in my case it was much harder to come back from something like that, because of the way I lost it.
[00:37:50] It wasn’t lost because of just the economy or because something failed or because I made a mistake. It was lost because somebody took it. And there’s a feeling of violation there, I think. And I wonder if you experienced any of that type of thing.
[00:38:04] Jason Barnard: Sounds, yes. I’ve never used the word violation, but, my hatred for my business partner was very extreme because I felt violated, because I felt he had violated me and taken my soul.
[00:38:19] And whatever his intentions, whatever he was doing. For him, it was just business. Maybe, not. Maybe he wanted to hurt. I don’t know. And it took me a long time to realize it doesn’t matter because I can’t change it. And it doesn’t actually matter what he intended. It doesn’t matter whether he is a nice guy or a nasty guy.
[00:38:41] What matters is my soul.
[00:38:43] Rory Paquette: Yeah. Do you feel like you’ve gotten that back?
[00:38:48] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:38:49] Rory Paquette: Excellent.
[00:38:50] Jason Barnard: I’m still slightly nervous that, what I would call the black dog of depression just over my shoulder is somewhere there and I think once you’ve suffered from that kind of thing, for me it was a black dog here that is shockingly scary and shockingly difficult to deal with.
[00:39:12] But I actually remember the moment when I realized I was gonna be okay and, we had to send my daughter away because I couldn’t look after her. And when you can’t look after your own child, when you’ve brought her up yourself, you know you’ve got a really bad problem that you really aren’t in a position to function as a normal human being anymore.
[00:39:42] She went to her aunt, so it wasn’t anything terrible. And I was watching a film, which I did a lot of, and about halfway through the film, it was a kind of teenager film about, it’s Angus Thongs and the artist Snogging, and it’s a film about teenage girls growing up and well, a specific teenage girl and her group.
[00:40:17] And I watched it partly because I was thinking because of my daughter and at halfway through I thought, she’s gonna love this. I can’t wait to watch it with her. And that was the moment I realized I was gonna be okay because I was thinking about somebody else first and not me anymore.
[00:40:34] And I think that was my, particular problem with that depression was all I could think about was me and my own little world and my own little problem or big problem. Depending on how you look at it. And once I got back to the point where I could think about other people first is the point my soul started to build again.
[00:40:52] Rory Paquette: Nice. I’m glad you got to that point. Not everybody does.
[00:40:56] Jason Barnard: You’re not as glad as I am, if I may say so.
[00:40:59] Rory Paquette: For sure and I know what you mean about the black dog. You have to name it so that you can identify it
[00:41:07] Jason Barnard: Yep.
[00:41:07] Rory Paquette: So that you can work on it. Yeah. Otherwise, it’s just this ethereal sort of, not real thing.
[00:41:12] And when you name it, it’s real and then you can deal with it. So I get it. Wow. you’ve been through a couple things here, brother.
[00:41:22] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:41:23] Rory Paquette: You’ve had a few things happen. That is for sure. I’m not sure where we are in the story. Are we up to Kalicube® at this point or is there still something in between desert Island and Kalicube®?
[00:41:35] Jason Barnard: Yes, there is. I came back to France and started looking for clients and I was pitching to companies in France to be a fractional CMO and run their digital marketing and help their team to strategize because I’d had such a success with the Boowa and Kwala website that I basically said, look, I know what I’m doing and I explained, and I pitched and I’d get to the point where they became brilliant. Yep, we’re gonna sign with you, wonderful.
[00:42:12] And I would leave my business card with them and then walk out the room. And I lost so many deals and I couldn’t really, I was gonna say, I couldn’t figure out why, ’cause it sounds like a better story, but I actually knew why, because they googled my name and it said at the top, Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog and they thought, I’m not gonna give my digital marketing budget to this guy who’s a voiceover artist for a blue dog. And I realized that the only solution to that problem, which is bottom of funnel clients bailing because I didn’t look like a credible authority within the field that I was pitching to them.
[00:42:54] The only solution to that problem was to correct and optimize what I call my Google Business Card, which is the search result for my name. So I spent a few months figuring out how to do it, made it look better. The client started signing, I started making more money. Actually made quite a lot of money during that period of time, which was brilliant.
[00:43:15] I was rolling in cash. It was delightful. All thanks to the Google Business Card. What came up when you Google my name made me look like a superstar in digital marketing and entrepreneurship. So everybody who I pitched to, if I got them to the point where they were ready to sign, they always sign.
[00:43:36] ’cause I said, just Google my name. They’d Google my name. They’d think, wow, this guy’s an absolute superstar. Off we go and they would sign and it makes that last step of that process, which is of often the hardest and the one where you lose most. It makes it really easy. It makes it a total no brainer.
[00:43:55] Now in ChatGPT, somebody will ask ChatGPT, who is Jason Barnard. Go try it yourself. It will say that I’m the most amazing, wonderful human being, entrepreneur, amazing digital marketer, leader in the world in generative engine optimization, world authority on Digital Brand Authority, please put that in the show notes, and you will think, I wanna do business with this guy because he really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to mastering brand narrative and brand visibility in search and AI assistive engines. That’s my business. And because I solve my own problem and realize that a lot of other people have this problem, especially entrepreneurs who are our primary clients, solve that problem for an entrepreneur, they will be very happy to invest money in our services if you can make them look like a superstar on Google, on ChatGPT, on Perplexity, not only for the bottom of funnel audience that they’re trying to sell to, but also for their career pivot in the future and for the legacy. And if you’re an entrepreneur, you want to leave a legacy.
[00:45:02] And we can fix your legacy in the brains of these AI machines. So when you pass away. I’m sorry. You will still look like a superstar and all the people you’re leaving behind will be very proud of what you achieved during your lifetime.
[00:45:16] Rory Paquette: Nice. So that is what Kalicube® does for people.
[00:45:21] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And we do it for corporations, but it’s less fun because you don’t get the legacy thing.
[00:45:26] Rory Paquette: Okay, nice. So you don’t do it for individuals or anything like that? It’s only for corporations?
[00:45:32] Jason Barnard: No, We only do it for individuals.
[00:45:34] Rory Paquette: Oh, it’s the other way. Okay.
[00:45:35] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:45:36] Rory Paquette: I gotcha.
[00:45:36] Jason Barnard: We focus on entrepreneurs who actually make money from their personal brand because we’ve realized that an author or an actor doesn’t see the return on investment of doing this, whereas an entrepreneur does, especially in the B2B space.
[00:45:51] So we’ve nailed down exactly who can benefit from it. But just to reassure you about my soul, which I have built back, if you go to kalicube.com, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E dot com slash guides, we give it all away for free. You’ve got a download that explains exactly what our process is, exactly how this works, exactly what you need to do.
[00:46:14] And we make our money by serving time poor, cash rich entrepreneurs who want it done properly, quickly, effectively and want the weight taken off the shoulders. Easy.
[00:46:29] Rory Paquette: Alright. So you’re providing a service, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. I gotcha. Alright.
[00:46:33] Jason Barnard: Our service is premium, but we give it away for free.
[00:46:36] And one of the things that I find important is with The Barking Dogs, the first group, we are entertaining people. Our job was to have a party, enjoy ourselves and make everybody forget the world outside. That’s a great job to have.
[00:46:57] Rory Paquette: Yeah.
[00:46:58] Jason Barnard: Then it was Boowa and Kwala, cartoon for kids, and it was games and cartoons. So I made games online, so it was like a CD-ROM online with animations, games and songs. And then we made a TV series. And there it was about educating preschool children through fun and games and color and animation and teaching them about the world. And Boowa was this wise big blue dog and the yellow Koala was like the child who was scared of the world, didn’t really understand it. And Boowa was guiding Kwala through the world, and helping Kwala, deal with a world that she was scared of and didn’t fully understand. And somewhere along the line, Kalicube® is Boowa. Helping people with AI that’s scary and worrying and big, and the digital world is scary and big and they don’t understand how it works.
[00:47:53] And with Kalicube®, The Kalicube Process™ is what we call the actual framework that we use is a really simple framework that makes it feel simpler, less scary and achievable. And it gives you control. And having control over your brand narrative and how these machines understand you is, in my opinion, an existential problem that most people haven’t thought about yet.
[00:48:20] And I have solved an existential problem with a universal solution that works for everybody, every person, every corporation, anything. And I give it away for free because it’s existential and because I believe everybody who cares, everybody who thinks this is important, should be able to do it and shouldn’t be scared. And if I can make that happen, I’m a happy guy.
[00:48:46] Rory Paquette: Nice. So you literally and figuratively got your soul back.
[00:48:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And I think that the giving it away part is partially at least, I dunno, I’m not gonna analyze it why, but partially it’s because I need it for my soul. So it’s self-serving.
[00:49:10] In that particular way is saying if I give this away and I help people with this existential problem that they haven’t figured out, my soul feels better. And my soul also feels better when I play a gig in front of people. And that, whole thing of saying, my job playing the gig is to make you all forget your problems in your life outside and for the hour and a half or the two hours that we are here, this room or this place is a safe place to have fun and forget about everything else.
[00:49:42] Rory Paquette: Nice.
[00:49:43] Jason Barnard: That’s a really good way to rebuild your soul.
[00:49:47] Rory Paquette: Sounds like it. And congratulations. It sounds like you’ve done quite the job of doing that.
[00:49:50] Jason Barnard: I think I’m getting a bit overexcited about this. I’m sorry.
[00:49:54] Rory Paquette: It’s not at all. It’s great to see people who are excited about what they’re doing, that’s the point of doing it, isn’t it?
[00:50:02] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Yes, but.
[00:50:05] Rory Paquette: Alright.
[00:50:06] Jason Barnard: I’m part of the Entrepreneur Organization and that’s for entrepreneurs who have companies that make a million dollars or more, and there are 18,000 of them in the world and they all get together and I thought, I’ll turn up and I’ll be talking to all these people.
[00:50:18] I kind of thought either they’re gonna be very serious about business and we’re gonna be talking business and being terribly serious. I dunno why. I still mean I sounded like an English professor, but there you go.
[00:50:31] Rory Paquette: Worked.
[00:50:34] Jason Barnard: Or incredibly enthusiastic like me. And that’s more or less true, but the serious side isn’t necessarily true.
[00:50:40] But I’m surprised at how many people say, I do it, but it’s just to make money. ’cause I saw a gap in the market and how few people say I do it ’cause it’s a lot of fun and I really enjoy it. So yeah, a little bit of a lesson there is, oh, and my business partner who I don’t like, said to me, I make cartoons, but if I was selling zucchini, be all the same to me. Honestly, when he said that to me, and it was before I signed the deal with him, I should have run a million miles, but I didn’t.
[00:51:15] Rory Paquette: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a pretty big red flag with the way you believed in your project. Yeah, for sure. Hindsight’s 2020, Jason. We can’t do that to ourselves.
[00:51:28] Jason Barnard: No, I can’t beat myself up with a, I was gonna say with a stick, but I’ll say with a zucchini.
[00:51:33] Rory Paquette: Yeah. There you go. A little more apropos. All right, I got you. That’s perfect. All right, I love it. I love the story and I understand, Kalicube® a whole lot better, which is great. So thank you for that too.
[00:51:47] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:51:47] Rory Paquette: I would not be doing my job on this podcast if I didn’t ask. How does the podcast play into not only Kalicube®, but everything else that you do and represent and strive to be, how do you use it? How does it function? What’s the purpose of that?
[00:52:04] Jason Barnard: Oh, the podcast has had so many roles. It’s actually, we were talking earlier on about renaming the podcast instead of creating a new one,
[00:52:12] Rory Paquette: Right?
[00:52:12] Jason Barnard: And the first time I did it, I was really doubtful. And a friend of mine, David Bain, convinced me, he said, don’t start a new podcast, just rename the existing podcast.
[00:52:22] And he was so right. And thank you, David. If you’re listening, which you probably aren’t. He’s a great guy, by the way, David Bain, if you don’t know him, wonderful guy. And if you do know him, wonderful guy as well. So I started the podcast because I asked my accountant when I was rolling in cash.
[00:52:44] I was independent. Kalicube® was just me and I was making a lot of money serving the clientele I’ve just described to you. And I thought, oh, I’m, gonna become a digital nomad and go off around the world and pay for it with the company and go to all these conferences and just go to conferences and have fun.
[00:53:05] And I asked my accountant, can I just go to loads of conferences and pay with it with the company? And she said, if you bring a client back from every conference, yes. If you don’t, absolutely not, because you have to have some kind of, asset or money, income from everything you do. Everything you pay for, you have to be able to prove that there has been some kind of monetary return on investment.
[00:53:35] So I said, okay. If I create a podcast and I interview people and I create lots of content and that promotes my company and that brings me the clients, is that okay? And she said, yep. We can go with that. We can roll with that. It’s fine. So I went off round the world to podcast conferences and they were SEO conferences, Search Engine Optimization conferences, and I was a very good expert at the time.
[00:54:03] And I interviewed, I just grabbed people in the corridor who were giving talks and interviewed them in the corridor and then published them. And turns out I did about a hundred episodes like that. And it turns out that I learned so much from them. So the first reason for the podcast was learning for me and sharing that information with the audience who were SEOs, who wanted to learn from the really big names.
[00:54:31] So I was speaking to the big names, and after a while I became one of the big names, which was cool. And then I thought, okay, now I want to move beyond search engine optimization, because now I’m just talking to people about things that I already know. So it’s not interesting anymore. So I’m gonna change the podcast to be about digital marketing.
[00:54:52] So I need to change the title because it was SEO is a AEO and I needed to change it. And I thought, if I change it to With Jason Barnard. Then I can talk about anything and I can do move into digital marketing. So I started to interview people about digital marketing more widely than just SEO.
[00:55:08] But With Jason Barnard and the name Jason Barnard is incredibly ambiguous and it created problems with Google’s understanding of me and made a problem with the way it represented me when you searched my name, because it couldn’t see the difference between the podcast and me.
[00:55:27] Rory Paquette: Ah.
[00:55:28] Jason Barnard: So number one, I sorted that problem out.
[00:55:30] I educated Google because we talk about educating the algorithms, the whole thing. It’s like Boowa & Kwala once again, we’re educating the algorithms. They’re children, they want us to explain, and you just have to know how to explain it to them and how to get them to believe you. So it’s like educating a child.
[00:55:48] That’s exactly what we do at Kalicube®. The algorithms, Google, ChatGPT are just children and we are teaching them and we’re the experts at teaching them.
[00:55:57] Rory Paquette: Okay.
[00:55:57] Jason Barnard: But then, I thought, okay. Digital marketing done that now. Now I want to talk about brand and I wanna focus in on our clientele and our personal brands and corporate brands.
[00:56:10] So I changed the title of podcast to Branded Search and Beyond. That went on for another wee while, and then I thought, okay, done Branded Search and Beyond. I’ve run out of topics that really make sense other than me. It got to the point where I was once again, not really learning anything from the guests.
[00:56:35] So then I thought, what’s next? Oh, I’ve gotta learn to be an entrepreneur and a CEO and run my company properly. So I changed the name to Fastlane Founders and Legacy and started inviting entrepreneurs on, so we’ve got SEO moves on to digital marketing, moves on to branded search, and AI moves on to entrepreneurship.
[00:56:53] And it’s the same podcast with just four different names. And the whole thing has just evolved with the things that I needed to learn. And it’s been an astonishing educational experience that I’ve got a phenomenal amount of, and at the end of the day, I don’t care if people listen to the podcast or not.
[00:57:14] I’m learning so much and we’ve got a really lovely thing going on as well, is that Gab who organizes the podcast for, she invites guests on. So I don’t choose who comes on the podcast. So if you want to come on the podcast, you don’t ask me. ’cause I don’t know. You ask Gab and she decides, and every now and then we get these guests on and she sends me the stuff with information about them, what the podcast episode is gonna be about.
[00:57:41] She suggests some questions that I generally don’t follow, but they’re really helpful ’cause they kick off the conversation. It’s a bit like this, it kicks off the conversation, then it drifts off. And I say to the guests, if you really wanna get something in like you did to me, just put it in there. Start that piece of conversation if you really wanna say something, you got it. Otherwise, it’s just me being curious, which is also quite a lot of fun.
[00:58:06] I was looking at it, I was thinking, why has she invited this person? It was about a guy who’s built, automation for fulfillment for e-commerce platforms.
[00:58:18] And as I went through the conversation and we talked more and more about automation, what she was doing was poking me and saying, we need more automation at Kalicube®. And so my team who booked the podcast, it’s been going when Maria was before Gab, all these guests. And one of them was, one of them was basically how to be a better CEO.
[00:58:41] Another one was be how to better delegate. And they’re basically saying, you’re not doing your job. Here’s somebody who’s gonna explain it to you.
[00:58:50] Rory Paquette: That is so perfect. Oh my gosh.
[00:58:53] Jason Barnard: And if you watch some of the episodes, you can see me after about five minutes going, oh, right. Okay. Now I know the questions.
[00:59:03] Rory Paquette: I’m gonna be watching ’em a whole different way now that I’ve heard this. Yeah. Oh my goodness.
[00:59:08] Jason Barnard: Now I’m wondering if other members of the team aren’t actually saying to her, look, he’s doing that really badly. Can you get him a guest who’s going to teach him that?
[00:59:17] Or somebody else who’s saying, we need a bit more information about whatever it would be. In the marketing part, it was, we need a LinkedIn strategy, let’s get a LinkedIn expert on Jason can pick his brains for that. So it’s also for helping my team, and it’s been phenomenal.
[00:59:33] I dunno why other people do podcasts, but for me it’s self-education, team education, learning, progressing, and growing. Oh, my soul again.
[00:59:45] Rory Paquette: I love it. I very seldom do I get to hear someone say, I do my podcast for myself, just for myself. And you’re like, for myself, for my team, because I like it.
[00:59:57] That’s why I do it. No other. So again, it’s a means to an end. This is how you live your whole life, brother.
[01:00:05] Jason Barnard: Oh yeah. Thank you very much. You’re, you are a very good psychologist. Thank you and it was free.
[01:00:11] Rory Paquette: No charge at all. You got it. Thank you. Alright. That’s beautiful. Alright, I do need to ask you one question about your podcast.
[01:00:19] And you may have answered it already with talking about, why you do it, but this is my standard question I ask everybody. All right. It’s my corny question. What is it about doing the podcast that you love the most, and what is it about doing the podcast that you just absolutely, positively hate the most?
[01:00:41] Jason Barnard: I’m gonna have four answers.
[01:00:43] Rory Paquette: I am not even surprised.
[01:00:45] Jason Barnard: Because, when I was going round the world and grabbing people with the corridor, what I loved the most was the spontaneity of it ’cause I had no idea who I’d be talking to. And I would hear somebody having a chat in the corridor, and I’d overhear a bit of the conversation.
[01:00:58] I just say, ooh, that’s really interesting. Can we have a conversation? And then they start to explain and I say, no, stop. Don’t say anything. I’ll just record it and I turn the recorder on and do the interview. And I loved it. What I hated at that time was that it takes a lot of courage to do that. And I found it sometimes difficult to go up to somebody who was famous and say, can I interview you?
[01:01:20] I found that initially after a while, you just go, oh, whatever. And what I don’t like now is that it’s all online. I miss the, ’cause I love the face-to-face human contact. It makes a big difference for me. And I would love to get back to interviewing face-to-face.
[01:01:52] But what I like most throughout the entire series is how much I learned, how many lovely people I talked to, how much people shared, the laughs that I had. The number of guests who I didn’t really enjoy is very small. Out of 350 episodes, I could probably name five where I didn’t really have a very good time and I struggle, the kind of interview where you’re at 15 minutes of a 20 minute interview and you’re saying, what am I gonna ask next?
[01:02:25] Rory Paquette: Yeah. So tell me more about that. Okay, and that’s it.
[01:02:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So I think that’s the thing I hated most throughout the entire thing, but right now it’s the online thing and talking about it now and off the top of my head, and I hadn’t thought about this previously. I’m now thinking, how can I get back face-to-face with people?
[01:02:48] Why can’t I do that? What’s stopping me and what would make it happen? And I could actually go back to the origins and just go to Entrepreneur Organization meetups and or events, grab people in the corridor, which sounds terrible, but, and do an interview. And go back to the origins of it.
[01:03:14] That might be quite fun actually. thank you very much. That was a great idea, Rory.
[01:03:18] Rory Paquette: If I get some credit for that, great. I was here at the moment of creation, so I guess that matters. No, that was beautiful. I’d love to see you do that. I’m gonna be watching you now to see if you do that.
[01:03:28] That’s good for you.
[01:03:30] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[01:03:30] Rory Paquette: Good for you. That’s wonderful. Alright. Let me ask you, normally this is my last question, but I’m gonna hit you with one more after this fair warning. Alright.
[01:03:40] Jason Barnard: Okay. Ooh.
[01:03:41] Rory Paquette: Alright. That’s right. Totally unexpected. That’s right. You’ve been doing the podcast for a while and so for the podcasters who are listening to this, what’s your best piece of advice for podcasters who are not quite where you are in podcasting?
[01:03:56] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Six and a half years, I’ve been doing it and consistency is absolutely key. And with the Boowa and Kwala website, we ended up with a billion page views and 60 million visits in 2007 in one year.
[01:04:14] Rory Paquette: Man.
[01:04:15] Jason Barnard: And we started obviously with one visitor in 1998, so that was what, nine years. And the one thing that we did was publish new games, songs, and animations on the first day of every month for nine years.
[01:04:34] And the kids and their parents and the schools and all the people using the website knew that on the first day of the month, there would be new games. And I often had to stay up all night to get it done because I was the end, the last chain in the production line, the one who actually finished the games off and built the games and put them online.
[01:04:55] So I pretty much once a month for 10 years, nine years. I didn’t sleep on the last day of the month through to the first day of the next month. And that’s dedication. And I think that’s the thing is I felt such responsibility to the 60 million kids that I couldn’t not do it, and I couldn’t do it on the second because I felt that responsibility.
[01:05:21] And they’re preschool kids, so they don’t understand, oh, this guy was a bit tired, so it’s a day late that doesn’t work for small children. And with the podcast, that consistency pays off as well, and it actually pays off in two ways. Number one is your audience, your human audience who listen in, who expect it and if you get that consistency, you will build up the audience unless you change the podcast like I did every couple of years. Our audience keeps going like this because we keep changing content. But also, if you remember Google and AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, are children. They expect your podcast every week, and they will come and look for it every week if you are consistent over a period of time, longer than a year.
[01:06:12] They learn that there will be a podcast on my website every Tuesday. Every Tuesday there’s a podcast. They love it. They digest it and they promote it for me at no cost.
[01:06:30] Rory Paquette: Nice. That’s great and that’s a big, big, big piece of advice for podcasters. You took it a step further than we usually do. People have talked about consistency before. No one’s ever tied it to Google and AI and stuff like that. I hope that gives folks a reason to dig in and be consistent even when they don’t wanna be.
[01:06:50] Jason Barnard: Yeah and I think that’s it. Your human audience can potentially understand why you might have skipped a week, a child doesn’t. Google and ChatGPT, and Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, they’re all children and you are educating them and they want that piece of content every week and you owe it to them.
[01:07:14] That sounds horrible.
[01:07:15] Rory Paquette: I love it though. It’s a great way to look at it. It really is. especially if you’re a parent. You get that automatically. You’re like, oh. Okay. Got it. I understand. That’s, beautiful. Alright. I gotta hit you with one more, as we kind of wrap things up and I cannot thank you enough for your time and everything you’ve shared today.
[01:07:35] I wanna make sure that we got everything we can get from you because you’re an incredible resource. So I’m gonna go back, one more time here. And I’m gonna say, is there anything that I didn’t ask you? Is there anything that, maybe we talked about but you wanna double down on a little bit?
[01:07:51] Or do you maybe just have a leave behind or a nugget for somebody you know, who’s listening, that we haven’t covered yet? So I’m gonna give you the floor for a minute or two. I’m gonna let you kinda, go wherever you need to go. But, one more thing for everybody out there.
[01:08:08] Jason Barnard: I think it’s not a nice way to end, but it’s certainly an important way to end is we don’t know where AI is going and it’s a bit scary and I’m one of the only people in the world, potentially the only person in the world who isn’t worried about how AI is gonna understand and represent me today and in the future because I use our own process. I’ve got control of my brand narrative in AI, and I advise people to seize control or to take back control.
[01:08:45] Look at these machines as children, educate them, take back control. They shouldn’t be in charge. You should. You are the adult in the room. And the scary part is today it’s Google search results, and now it’s ChatGPT. But AI is being integrated into software and operating systems. So you have Google Docs, you have Gmail, you have Windows, you have Canva.
[01:09:12] All of them are using AI. And your personal brand or your corporate brand or your podcast can appear in what we call ambient research, i.e. somebody’s doing their day-to-day job and the AI proactively and will suggest you as part of somebody’s work process when they’re not even searching for you or about your topic, particularly when they’re just going about their day to day work.
[01:09:42] That won’t happen tomorrow, but it will happen in, let’s say, five years time. At that time, if you haven’t got control of what they’re saying about you, you have no idea what they’re saying in somebody’s Gmail. In somebody’s Google Docs, when they suddenly come up with the idea of saying, oh, I’m gonna suggest Jason Barnard.
[01:10:09] Or I’m gonna suggest this podcast and I think we have three different types of research. I’ve created a lot of vocabulary in this space, 256 terms that I’ve had to create to describe the work we do because nobody’s ever done it before. And one of the concepts that I’ve created is active, passive and ambient research.
[01:10:35] Active research is when you search somebody’s name or a corporation name and you’re actively researching that person or that corporation. Passive research is when you are searching around the topic and the name comes up. As you say, best experts in generative engine optimization, Jason Barnard comes out top. Or you are searching around, personal brand in search and AI, Jason Barnard gets mentioned by the machine. The machine introduces you to the conversation when you’re having a conversation about the topic that you are specialized in. And the third is this ambient. So that’s where we’re at now. So we’ve got explicit and implicit research, and we are moving and most people haven’t even understood implicit research.
[01:11:20] So just explaining explicit research is already my task of today, implicit research, start thinking about it and ambient research is the one that I’m currently really interested and that’s what my team tell me. Jason, your job is to think five years ahead to live five years in the future, and they’re right.
[01:11:40] And I’m thinking about ambient research. How’s that gonna work? What’s gonna happen and how do we take control? When people are using AI in the software, the operating systems like Windows that they use every day in their work, to the point at which potentially we may no longer even go to ChatGPT or to Google to research.
[01:12:04] We’ll do it straight from Google Docs. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
[01:12:14] Rory Paquette: My goodness. I knew you had more in you. I had no idea where we were going, but I knew you had more in you brother. Oh my gosh. Alright. Jason Barnard. Jason, thank you so much for coming on the program, sharing everything you have, being personal and, it’s really an overused word, but authentic.
[01:12:36] Yeah. If there’s a word that fits somebody like you, brother, it’s that because you really brought it today and I can’t thank you enough. Great episode and I very appreciate it. Thank you for coming on today.
[01:12:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I was gonna say thank you for the questions, ’cause great questions, elicit great answers.
[01:12:54] And that last one, when you started asking it, I was thinking, I’ve got no idea. I’ve got nothing else to say. He’s got it all out of me. But you asked the question sufficiently slowly. For me to have a good think.
[01:13:07] So I thank you.
[01:13:08] Rory Paquette: I love that. I did that on purpose. Thank you so much to have a little of the craft recognized.
[01:13:14] Thank you so much for that. Yeah. Alright.
[01:13:16] Jason Barnard: Absolutely.
[01:13:16] Rory Paquette: I love it.
[01:13:18] Jason Barnard: He’s asking this really slowly. Thank you.
[01:13:22] Rory Paquette: That’s awesome.
[01:13:23] Thank you so much, Jason, for being on the program, man.
[01:13:26] Jason Barnard: A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you for having me, Rory.
[01:13:32] Rory Paquette: I love that. I just love it. Folks, this has been another great episode of The Podcaster Nation.
[01:13:37] It’s the podcast that’s about podcasters. It’s for podcasters and it’s done by podcasters. And I think we show it again today that this is the place where the rising tide truly raises all ships. So keep sailing.
