Firing The Man

Building an Unshakable Online Presence with Jason Barnard

• Firing The Man • Episode 267

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Ever wonder what happens when a potential client Googles your name after a meeting? The truth might shock you. In this eye-opening conversation with Jason Barnard, CEO of KaliCube and digital brand intelligence expert, we discover why your digital footprint matters more than ever in the age of AI.

Jason reveals his unconventional path from street musician to cartoon creator to digital marketing authority, showing how he's consistently seized and created opportunities throughout his career. But the most valuable insights come when he explains the fundamental shift happening in how people research businesses and individuals online. As Jason puts it, "Your brand is not what people say about you when you're not in the room—it's what Google and ChatGPT say about you when you're not in the room."

Through practical examples and memorable analogies, we learn how to build what Jason calls an "entity home"—a central hub for your digital brand that helps machines understand exactly who you are and why you matter. This hub-and-spoke model creates a cohesive digital ecosystem that works across all AI platforms, allowing you to control your brand narrative regardless of which technology dominates the landscape.

The stakes couldn't be higher. With conversion rates from AI recommendations potentially 100 times higher than traditional search results, mastering your digital brand isn't just about reputation—it's about business survival. Jason demonstrates how even small businesses can compete with industry giants by optimizing for the right audience and leveraging AI's increasing influence on buying decisions.

Ready to take control of your digital brand? Listen now to discover practical steps for managing how search engines and AI platforms represent you when you're not in the room. Your future opportunities may depend on it.

How to connect with Jason?
Website: https://kalicube.com/
Podcast: https://fastlanefounders.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kalicube

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kalicube

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmbarnard/

Twitter: https://x.com/TeamKalicube

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Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.

Speaker 2:

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, where we explore the journeys of entrepreneurs who have fired their bosses to take control of their destinies. Today's guest is Jason Barnard, a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, keynote speaker and CEO of CaliCube, a digital branding consultancy. For over 20 years in digital marketing, jason has built successful companies in entertainment, music and tech. He's a sought-after speaker on brand management, ai-driven search and knowledge of panel optimization. He also hosts FastLink Founders and Legacy, a podcast on balancing rapid growth with lasting success. Join us as we dive into Jason's journey and insights on personal brand intelligence and digital branding. Jason, really excited to have you as part of the show today. Welcome.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much, david. Absolutely brilliant. I love the introduction, but I think we wrote it so obviously I would.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, very good. Well, to start things off off, can you share a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and, uh, how you in touch on your your early music career?

Speaker 3:

right, okay, brilliant. Yeah, this is my third company calicube k-a-l-i-c-u-b-e, and my first company was wtpl music Music back in 1991, last century, which sounds kind of slightly scary and it was a record company and music publisher. And the reason I created that company was because I really wanted to be a musician and the company was there to allow me to fulfill that dream with my band. And it turned out to be a profitable company. We signed some great bands alongside my own band and signed deals with EMI and Warner Chapel and some other big music industry titans. And then I exited that, sold it to my business partner at the time and moved on to edutainment cartoons for children.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and what was that? Tell us about that part of your life.

Speaker 3:

I founded that company to make cartoons because myself and my ex-wife Veronique decided that we would make cartoons because we thought it would be fun, and my ex-wife Veronique decided that we would make cartoons because we thought it would be fun. The internet was really just getting going in 1998, and we were hugely successful very quickly. So we created a company and made a TV series with ITV International. It was on Playhouse Disney. Our website got a billion page views in 2007. Another hugely successful, profitable company built from my passion and my desire to do something specific. The first was being a band and play music in front of big audiences. The second was to make cartoons and games and songs for kids. I exited that company in 2011. And it's still going. It's still profitable. My ex-business partner has that. They're doing what they want with it and I segued into CaliCube.

Speaker 2:

All right, and tell us a little bit about CaliCube.

Speaker 3:

CaliCube is a company that manages personal brand and corporate brand in search and AI and we optimize it and make sure that what Google and ChatGPT say about you when you're not in the room is what you want them to say about you when you're not in the room. Jeff Bezos said your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, but he's wrong or partially wrong. It's what Google and AI say about you when you're not in the room. So we manage that. We can get Google and ChatGPT and Perplexity to say exactly what we want. So we help entrepreneurs in particular manage their brand narrative and amplify their authority and increase their visibility in Google, chatgpt, perplexity, siri, alexa, copilot, deepseek and any of the other machines that come out. It works every time.

Speaker 2:

Outstanding, and I'm really excited to get into the discussion on AI with you. It seems to be more and more present every day. But before we do that, I want to talk about your firing the man moment. When was what did that look like for you? Well, I never had that moment.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I left school and became unemployed in Leeds in the North of England. Okay, got a job selling computers door to door on commission only Gave that up because I wasn't making any money and I would have made more money on unemployment benefit Decided that actually working was a really bad thing to be doing. So I went back to university. So I didn't have a boss then either. I just kind of hung around in Liverpool, played the Cavern Club I was in a blues band and we played the Cavern Club where the Beatles famously played and then left for Paris for love.

Speaker 3:

I fell in love with a French woman and turned up in Paris and I was hoping that love would blossom in the city of love in Paris. And of course it all went horribly wrong. She had a boyfriend. She didn't want anything to do with me. I was a complete mistake and I pitched around for work and got part-time work as an English teacher. Once again, no full-time job, no full-time boss.

Speaker 3:

And then some friends of mine said do you want to join our band and play in the street? Uh, do you want to busk? And I said oh, all right. Then, yeah, brilliant, wonderful, great. Uh, I'm a singer. Because I've been a singer in the band in liverpool and they said, oh, we don't need a singer. And I said, well, I play the guitar. And they said we don't need a guitar player, we need a double bass player. If you can learn to play the double bass in 30 days, you're in the band. So I bought a double bass, learned to play it, got in the band and busked in the street to make a living and then turned that band into a professional band. We recorded four albums, played 660 gigs, we supported bob dylan, amongst others, and it was a career that made decent money for everybody and I created a very profitable company out of it, and that was the first time I had a proper structure around any kind of job, but I'd never had a proper boss.

Speaker 2:

Okay, okay, I like it. I really liked it. That is a really a really unique story. It seems like there were a lot of different points in your life where you said yes to the opportunity ahead of you, which I think is is really really neat.

Speaker 3:

I think it's a little bit more than that is that the opportunity wasn't there a lot of the time. And I created the opportunity. So the band existed and they said do you want to join our band? So that was an opportunity I seized and I was willing to put my last sense into buying a double bass that I couldn't play and I learned and I was not very good, but I was good enough to play in the street with this band and then I created the opportunity of turning professional.

Speaker 3:

I created the opportunity to release records and then for the cartoon characters, I created the opportunity by being very insistent on creating a website and building out from there and it turned out to be very successful and built a company around the website that was then able to do the TV series once again with Disney and ITV International and Radio Canada Wow and it aired in 25 countries. So I would say my career is a lot of creating opportunities that I then seize. No-transcript. I've seized the opportunities and I've paid the price and I've suffered and I've worked and I've struggled like everybody else, and I think the one thing running through it all is I never give up absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

No, that definitely is a aware of AI and really feel the effect of oh, it's here and it's here to stay the effect of, oh, it's here and it's here to stay.

Speaker 3:

Well, I think, like everybody else, I was aware of it and it kind of leaped out at me when ChatGPT suddenly hit the world in 2023. But what I find really interesting is I was actually already ready for AI in 2015. And I didn't know it. And it's one of these things where you look back and you think, well, if AI had come onto the scene and this whole thing had been happening in 2015, I was already ready, because the process we use at CaliCube and the system that I created was already the foundation of what we're doing today and it isn't significantly different today than it was in 2015.

Speaker 3:

And the reason I started CuddyCube and the reason I invented this whole process of controlling your brand narrative in Google and now AI is because when I pivoted from cartoons and being the voiceover artist for a cartoon blue dog to digital marketing, I would go into meetings with potential clients and I would say, oh, look, I can do your digital marketing. I've had all the success with Buwa and Koala Up to 10,. My company had a billion paid views in 2007. I can do the same for you and they would go brilliant. Yeah, we're on board. Absolutely no problem. You're obviously a great digital marketing. You know what you're talking about. You've mastered google. Brilliant. Walk out the room, leave my business card, don't sign the deal, because they googled me as soon as I walked out the door and my business card was thrown in the bin. And the result on? Google said Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. Voiceover artist.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And I thought oh.

Speaker 3:

I have to change that, because that's going to stop me losing all these hundreds of thousands of dollars in deals that I'm leaving on the table, and so it took me about a year to figure it all out, got it all changed and, of course, now all the people sign the deals. They search my name and I look like an incredibly impressive entrepreneur, digital marketer, world authority and digital brand intelligence and all the rest of it Because I've manipulated Google and AI to say what I want it to say and to focus on what I want it to focus on, which is Jason Barnard is the world authority on digital brand intelligence and an entrepreneur.

Speaker 2:

I can speak to this firsthand, as I was prepping for this interview. When I search your name, you are an authority in the space, and so what you're doing is working. What are some things that you think business owners don't think about when it comes to this topic?

Speaker 3:

There are lots of things they don't think about. Number one they don't think, oh, as soon as I walk out of this room or on this Zoom call, that person's Googling my name or asking chat GPT. Yeah, googling my name or asking chat gpt. Yeah, I was talking to somebody who does due diligence in the financial sector and they said, well, low level, surface level due diligence, yes, we look at google. Yes, we look at chat gpt. Then we dig deep, but if you don't pass that first surface test, you don't even get into the game. And people don't think about that.

Speaker 3:

If I'm thinking about doing business with you, I will research you. How I research you is my own affair, but most people will look at Google, they'll look at LinkedIn. They may be asked to chat GPT. Okay, if I'm looking for potential partners or speakers for a conference who are the best speakers in the world about knowledge panels, compiler lists, please chat GPT. That's a reasonable thing that people are starting to do, maybe not extensively, but certainly more or more, because it saves them the research, and that's the point.

Speaker 3:

Google search is all about search. I know what I'm looking for and I can sort through the results. Chat gpt, google gemini, copilot, papaxi is research where we're saying to them go make the search, summarize what you found so that I don't have to bother. It saves me a lot of time. So research versus search is the big key difference there that people don't really think about and so they don't think my partners or my business partners and prospects are Googling my name before they do business with me. They don't think people are researching using these machines and I need to be present when somebody's researching my niche topic and they don't think I can control that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, as you've been talking about this, I've been thinking of some of my own personal chat GPT searches recently and they have been compiled a top 10 list of companies who insert whatever I'm looking for, and so how can companies control that?

Speaker 3:

Oh well, we do that at Catecube, it's our specialist superpower, super power.

Speaker 3:

But one of the things I have a trouble with is I talk to people and I say, have you thought about people googling your name or researching on chat, gpt or compiling lists of top 10 companies or people to work with?

Speaker 3:

And they go oh no, I haven't. Oh yeah, you're right. And then I say, have you thought about whether or not you can control it? And they go well, no, I can't, because google and chat gpt figure it it out. And you're saying, well, yes, but why don't you proactively get involved to increase your chances of being included in those lists and to make sure they're giving your brand narrative when somebody's researching you, so that what you're saying to them in the room is the same thing that ChatGPT and Google are saying to them when you're not in the room. Right, and it blows people's minds to the extent that they can't even get their head around the idea that they might want to pay me or my company to help them with that. Okay, the funnel is top to bottom of the funnel is very quick, because I'm presenting a problem to people that they haven't even thought about and a solution that they didn't even begin to imagine existed. The sale at the bottom of the funnel is very difficult.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm having one of those aha moments as I talk to you.

Speaker 3:

I get this all the time and then I say, do you want to buy my service? I go no, it's too early, my head's hurting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if you Google my name, I think my LinkedIn page comes up and maybe some old newspaper articles, but I've never felt like there was something that I could do to influence what that result is. And yeah, that's really good, and definitely on branding too.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for corporate brands it's less of a problem because names aren't so ambiguous, but corporate names, especially in geo regions. But I'll give you an example. My name, jason Barnard, is relatively not too common, but there are 3,000 Jason Barnards in the world competing with me for that top spot and all the other spots. You search my name on Google Jason Barnard J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D. I'm the only one in the world who exists as far as Google is concerned, will only see me. That's because I've intentionally made that happen. If you ask Chuck GP2, who is Jason Barnard? It won't say well, which one are you talking about? It will say here's Jason Barnard, world leading expert in digital brand management, blah, blah, blah, and give you an 800 word essay. And that is both understanding and dominance in terms of probability that somebody is looking for me. I've convinced these machines that I'm the most famous Jason Barnard in the world and that's actually not true.

Speaker 2:

Interesting, very interesting. So what would be some ways there's a lot of small business owners listening. So what would be some ways you know there's a lot of small business owners listening, what would be some ways that you know small businesses could compete with some of these larger brands that seemingly have a much larger presence online?

Speaker 3:

Brand, brand, brand. And you're not going to compete in terms of getting your brand in front of everybody in the entire universe, because the big brands have already done that. What you can do is compete by identifying the people who are going to be interested in working with you, who have got the mindset to work with a smaller company rather than a bigger company. Get your brand in front of them, make sure that your brand pops up everywhere they are hanging out online, naturally, to the point to which they then Google or chat GPT your brand name, and make sure that brand narrative absolutely nails it, because the moment they search your brand name on Google or chat GPT, they're basically asking chat, gpt and Google. Do you recommend this supplier? Yeah, and if they say, in my case, jason Barnard is a world renowned expert in digital brand management or Caddy Cube is a premium digital marketing consultancy for entrepreneurs and their corporations, that's a recommendation and it's the tipping point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, if you think of it through the lens of conversion rate optimization for a physical products brand on, if you're wanting to do speaking or wanting to really do anything, establish yourself as an authority, that's your conversion.

Speaker 3:

like the last part, uh, until you convert a sale, yeah and I find that the vocabulary that chat, gpt, google, gemini, google learn about. If you've tried it, it's brilliant. It's the chat gpt killer. If you haven't tried it, try it. Google, learn about the trick that we managed to pull off that nobody else in the world can pull off in an intentional manner. That we do is to get the machines to use superlatives when they're talking about you.

Speaker 3:

World-recognized expert Okay, visionary Innovator One of the things you left out of my bio at the beginning. I'm a serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, um, a renowned speaker and uh, innovator. Award-winning innovator yeah, and if you ask these machines who I am, it will use award-winning, it will use serial, it will use best-selling because I have educated it to use those words, both through my own words, but also by insisting that people who welcome me on my podcast, for example, use those words too, because that's third party corroboration and I said jokingly I like that because I wrote it, but if I can get you to say it, you're vouching for it, you're confirming it and you are independent of me. Therefore, that's a huge positive signal for Google.

Speaker 2:

That's interesting. Yeah, I've literally experienced this first person as I was writing the intro, and so that's very me, that's very me.

Speaker 3:

It's actually creating your own truth. Obviously, if you're're lying, it's going to be really difficult to do, but if you're telling the truth and you can back it up, that repetition is super important. Um, and the award-winning innovator is an interesting one because I won Davie Awards, which are web awards for the innovative website I built in 2007. The second one is actually for songwriting, but that doesn't matter. I got two Davie Awards and I'm an innovator. Put the two together. Award-winning innovator. Bob's your uncle, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Award-winning innovator Bob's your uncle, yeah, so what are your thoughts on the future of business and AI? There seems to be two camps of people. There seem to be a camp of people that are pretty nervous about it and there seem to be a group of entrepreneurs that are very excited about it and can't stop talking about it. Have you witnessed, before we get into the future, have you witnessed kind of this division?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, when I talk to prospects, there are two, as you said, camps, one of which is I'll kick that down the road because I don't want to look at it and it's fear and it's too much work and I don't understand. And if I don't look at it it might go away. And for anybody who thinks that explicitly or implicitly, forget it. It's not going away, it's here to stay. And then the other camp is saying I'm really interested. I can see that how I'm represented by AI in the future is going to be a huge question that I need to answer and a problem I need to solve, because how AI represents me as an entrepreneur is going to define how well I do business today, as people research me in order to do business the due diligence, for example. It will facilitate my career when I pivot, because I'll be more credible and I can take all of my personal brand credibility with me and it's going to define my legacy.

Speaker 3:

I was talking to somebody who's 80, who's coming to the end of their career, and they were saying well, actually the only part I'm interested in is the legacy part, because I want my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren to remember me fondly and everybody around them when they're researching me, to see a very positive message about me here to stay, that it's going to get more and more powerful, and that what AI is saying about you when you're not in the room is going to be an existential, fundamental, foundational question for all of us and an existential problem for all of us that we need to solve.

Speaker 3:

They're exactly the people we can talk to and we can help. So from what I've learned is I used to try to convince everybody. Now I've stopped. If if you think ai is going away or you think you can kick this can down the road, go ahead if you can see that today it's already making a difference and tomorrow that difference is simply going to be exaggerated and amplified. Come and work with us, because we're the only company in the world who has the experience, the knowledge, the tech and the data to control these machines in terms of what they're saying about you.

Speaker 2:

Very interesting, as we've been talking. One thing that has come up is so I own physical products brands and have been very focused on building those brands which I someday hope to sell, and probably neglecting the personal brand side of things. And so you know, beyond a LinkedIn page and I guess I have a podcast but what are some ways that if people listening are thinking, yeah, I'm also probably neglecting my personal brand, what are a couple of ways people can step up their game in that department?

Speaker 3:

Well, the first thing is build your own website. Okay, it can be two pages, it can be one page, for that matter, it doesn't matter. But all of these machines are looking for what john muller from google calls the point of reconciliation. I call it the entity home. It's where does this person live online that they control, that I can look to or look at for their version of the facts and their version of their brand narrative. If I can find that as a machine algorithm, I've then got the foundational story in one piece that I can then analyze and understand. Then I can go around the web and I can check that it's all true, because what you have right now is a broken plate.

Speaker 3:

I use that analogy a lot is you don't have that central hub, your website, the point of reconciliation, your story is fragmented all around the web and the machine is trying to pull all these pieces together and turn it into the completed puzzle, but it doesn't have anything to compare it to. So it's explicitly looking for that website that gives it the completed puzzle and then it can say okay, all these pieces together mean that that puzzle that he's completed for me, on that entity home point of reconciliation, is true and I can believe it. What then happens is the longer you have that website in place, the longer you prove yourself to be honest about your representation of yourself and the more you get that corroboration to support what you're saying on your own website, support your brand narrative, your story, your credibility, your authority, your expression of who you are and why you're important or why you're trustworthy. The longer you can keep that all in place in a very, very, very firm puzzle piece, as it were, the more it will believe anything you tell it.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. That's very interesting. I had people on the podcast who've had their own websites firstnamelastnamecom. So I have actually looked for davidschilmercom and it's taken Any pro tips on that that first, you know, taking that first step with a domain.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the com doesn't really matter, you can use a different one. Don't link it to your job. So don't take jasonblaner dot um marketing, because I might pivot my career. That would be a pity. But dot info is fine, dot org is fine, dot net is fine, dot xyz is fine um. If you can't find any of those, you can always add your middle initial, jasonmbarnardcom would be good. Jason Martin Barnard, my middle name is fine.

Speaker 2:

So all of those are good.

Speaker 3:

Okay, Very good. One really smart piece of advice don't use a hyphen.

Speaker 2:

Okay, I agree, but can you explain why?

Speaker 3:

Because it confuses the machine and it's also difficult to type on a mobile device. It's a pain in the yes yeah. So from a human, practical perspective, it's a pain and for the machine it creates confusion.

Speaker 2:

That's very interesting, okay, well, this has been really insightful and probably I would imagine there's a lot of listeners that are having the same aha moment as I had on on this. Um, any other other things you think are worth discussing on this topic?

Speaker 3:

well, taking control of your personal brand or your corporate brand or even your product. You were were mentioning products. This works for all of them. It doesn't matter what you're talking about. Google and AI want to understand the whole world. They want to understand everything. And if you look at Wikipedia, you think okay, wikipedia, it uses Wikipedia, which is fine. Six million articles, so six million things. Google's knowledge graph has 54 billion things in it, so it's well over 10,000 times bigger. Wikipedia doesn't matter. Wikipedia was used to train the machine 10 years ago. When you've got 6 million versus 54 billion, you can see that the machine is well beyond Wikipedia. So don't worry about Wikipedia, don't worry about being famous.

Speaker 3:

Everybody can do this. You can do this at home, as they say on the TV, on kids' shows, and I advise you to do it. And it's all about the very, very simple entity home. We can use a hub-spoken-wheel model explanation. The entity home is the hub. It's the control hub for your personal brand or your corporate brand. The wheel is all of the information about you around the web and the spokes are the links between the two. So you create your hub, you tell your story, you tell all of the details of your story and your authority on why you should be trusted on your own website. You big yourself up. You make sure that all of the details of your story and your authority and why you should be trusted on your own website you big yourself up. You make sure that all of the information around the web and that wheel corroborates what you're saying as much as possible from third-party sources like yourself for me, but also my own website, my own social media profiles, my own Medium channel, my own YouTube channel, my own Forbes profile, and then link from the entity home, the hub, my own Medium channel, my own YouTube channel, my own Forbes profile, and then link from the entity home, the hub, the point of reconciliation, out to all of these different resources that support what you're saying and back, when you can, from those resources to the entity home and wait Interesting, and the machine will go to your entity home, out to the resource, back out to the resource, back out to the resource, and that repetition will get it to understand.

Speaker 3:

It takes time, machines don't digest immediately, so you need to be patient and as your digital ecosystem changes and your life changes, you need to update everything all the time Because if you let, for example, somebody published a book they didn't tell us, and so they published the book over here. But we didn't tell Google and AI that they'd published the book. So Google and AI just thought it was a different person, so they created another person in their little brain. So all of the equity that the person was hoping to get out of the book was lost because it was applied to another person with that same name in the, in the, in the, in the machine's brain. So what they actually did was split their equity, and you've got to be really careful about that.

Speaker 3:

You have to make sure that the machines understand that all these glorious things that you've done are indeed you, yeah, and so you need to keep a handle on it over time, and that's what people forget or don't want to look at, and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, a lot of resources and, most of all, consistency, which is something that most human beings are very bad at. So we've built caliq pro. The machine and my team are absolutely perfect at consistency, maintaining this over time and updating every time anything changes. So the machines are never in any doubt, because as soon as they have doubt, they freak out and they go oh, I'm not sure. They don't say anything if they're sure. That's why I dominate jason barnard as a search result, because they're so sure about me that they're super confident and they go. This is jason barnard as a search result, because they're so sure about me that they're super confident and they go. This is jason barnard, isn't he wonderful? And all the other jason barnards in the world get forgotten, forgotten because the machines are so confident what they've got to say about me.

Speaker 3:

And I've convinced them that I am incredibly authoritative, credible and indeed famous without actually being famous. I am authoritative, incredible, credible and indeed famous without actually being famous. I am authoritative and credible within my niche, but I've convinced them that I'm much more famous than I truly am. We have an AI analysis of how a personal brand is perceived by AI. That we do at Catecube, and if you want one, come along to the catecubecom K-A-L-I-C-U-Bcom website and ask for one, and the benchmarks we use are myself and Richard Branson. Okay, and I'm surprisingly close to Richard Branson in terms of how these machines understand and appreciate my famousness and my credibility. Wow, because I'm actually making an effort and I've been making an effort for 12 years, so I've managed to push myself up to not quite the same level as Richard Branson, but not very far away, sure, and obviously I'm not at his level, absolutely. I don't pretend that I am, but the machines are happy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, well, well, that's. That's a really, uh really interesting thing to think about. One thing that you've mentioned is consistency, and do you mean word for word or do you mean just same general themes?

Speaker 3:

that's a great question, because it used to be word for word when I started this. Uh, it was repetition, and the SEOs in the world would get really annoyed with me because I was repeating the same thing, I'd go duplicate content. It's really difficult when everybody's telling you you're being stupid, to sit there and think, well, actually, no, I'm being smart, it's just not what you expect and it's not what makes sense to you. And I agree, duplicate content in SEO is a problem, but it's not when you're trying to educate a machine. Yeah, and so duplicate content saying the same thing, exactly the same thing across your entire digital footprint does work, but now the machines are smarter so you don't need to, which means you can adapt your message to the audience on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Medium, on Forbes, because that's what those platforms demand and, at the end of the day, we're still trying to convince people. So the machines are smart enough and you need to just focus on the things that are important to you and are relevant to the people on that platform and then join the pieces together on your central website hub. That's how you make sense of it to the machine. If you do that intelligently, you win, and I'd love to tell you one more thing. Whatever happens next doesn't matter. This system will work, and an example would be DeepSeek came out, first thing I'd do was download it, say who is Jason Barnard.

Speaker 3:

It answered perfect. I hadn't explicitly worked on DeepSeek, but it already answered perfectly. Chachipt, as soon as it came out, asked it who is Jason Barnard, what is CaliCube? Answered perfectly. Copilot same, gemini, same. Google LearnAbout, same Perplexity same. It works every time because all of these machines use the same data source, the web. They're all looking to understand the world and find the best solution to the problem that their user is expressing, and they're all based on three technologies.

Speaker 3:

Large language model chatbots, like ChatGPT was at the start, search results and knowledge graphs. So the large language model chatbot is what drives ChatGPT, but they've now added search results, but they don't have a knowledge graph. Google Gemini is a large language model chatbot with some search results, but not as many as chatGPT. Perplexity is a large language model with a lot of search results and that's why perplexity is so good in real time. Google LearnAbout is a large language model chatbot, search results and a knowledge graph, which is a machine-readable encyclopedia like Wikipedia, but 10,000 times bigger.

Speaker 3:

All mixed together and that is the ChatGP T-Killer, because it uses all three technologies. It says I can converse with the person I'm talking to using the LLM chatbot, I can give them real-time information using the search results and I can fact check using my knowledge graph, my encyclopedia. That is where we're going and the only question now is what is the mix of those three technologies in any one of the assistive or answer engines somebody's using? And all three technologies, all three of those platforms use the same data source, the web, and the same system for collecting that information, the same system for passing that information. And if you can master your digital footprint from A to Z using that central hub website, you've won the game and it doesn't matter who wins.

Speaker 2:

I love it. I love it. Curious when you which search engine or what AI tool do you use? And obviously the business you're in. You probably are on all of them, but what is your favorite currently?

Speaker 3:

Right. Well, in CaliCube Pro, we've got 3 billion data points collected from Google and AI over the last 10 years, and so we obviously collect from Bing, we collect from Google, we collect from ChatGPT, we collect from Claude, we collect from Perplexity and from gemini. So we're collecting from all of them because we need to understand all of them. I really like um gemini 1.5 deep research, okay, which came out recently, and I've started doing due diligence on people just for fun. And it's basically it's almost a gentile Is it sets out its plan of how it's going to do due diligence on somebody and then does it and it researches like 50 websites and then spits out an answer using the knowledge graph, the websites and the large language model, and it's beautiful.

Speaker 3:

And I've also tried, you know, compile me a list of who I should invite to speak at my conference about knowledge panels, and of course, jason Barnard comes out on top because that's my specialist topic, and it comes up with the plan. It says here's what I'm going to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Do you agree? Yes, I agree. And then it does the research and it comes back with the list and when you look at it you think okay, well, in a year's time, who's going to do the research themselves? I'm not. Yeah, I wouldn't bother. So then if if I'm hoping to speak at a conference about knowledge panels on Google, I have zero chance in a couple of years if I don't know the organizer. Yeah, yeah, it's Google and AI who are going to decide whether or not I speak at these conferences if I don't know the organizer. So human relationships remain incredibly important, but they may well be your only hope in the future.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, wow, I've never thought about that. You're absolutely right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that goes for purchasing. That goes for B2B business. It goes for who should I invest in? I mean, I don't know how far it will go, how much people will trust these machines, but certainly what we're doing with ChatGPT and what we trust ChatGPT to do for us today is significantly evolved from what we were messing around with at the start.

Speaker 2:

Yes, absolutely, and I think everyone's usage of it has gone up. I know the number of times that I engage with ChatGPT. Every day has been like a hockey stick recently and I just keep finding more and more ways to use it and plug it into my life, and it's outstanding.

Speaker 3:

And if you look at that as well, you think about it. Chatgpt is having a conversation with you or you're having a conversation with ChatGPT and, although you are the person driving the conversation, chatgpt or Google Gemini participate in the way the conversation evolves because they offer you follow-up questions. Google LearnAbout offers contacts. If you say who is Jason Barnard, it will offer at the side. Do you want to look at BrandSupps? Do you want to look at Knowledge Panels? Do you want to look at his career as an entrepreneur? Do you want to look at CaliCube? It's offering me different options that I might not have thought of. So it's a conversation between me and the machine and, as a business or a business owner or an expert or somebody who wants to get out there with their personal brand, you want the machine to introduce you to the conversation spontaneously, because that's where you're going to hit your new market. That's where you're going to hit people who didn't know about you previously, and when they do introduce you, they're implicitly recommending you. Wow.

Speaker 2:

Wow.

Speaker 3:

This is, and they're, the biggest influences in the world. Yeah, if I'm on youtube and I've got a million followers, I'm peanuts compared to chat, gpt or google, who have billions of users asking trillions of questions to a machine that they trust to provide them with the solution to their problem every single day.

Speaker 2:

You're right, you're right. That totally changes the way. Yeah, wow.

Speaker 3:

Isn't it cool. I like you. You're great Because you keep going, wow, wow, you're right, I'm just thinking of.

Speaker 2:

there are when you, when I I'll just share with you my experiences from this interview is when I have people on on as guests. There's a lot of general business advice where it's like, oh, I've thought about that, but maybe not that angle. This introduces a completely different topic that I've never thought about and I've had about 10 aha moments and you're're like, yeah, to compare especially what you just said about like comparing a YouTuber with a million followers I can tell you in physical products, a YouTuber with a million followers can print money based on their authority if they have a product that they're selling. But I've never thought of it through the context of search engines and so, yeah, this has been.

Speaker 3:

Well, I think the thing about a search engine is it's not an influencer, it's an answerer of questions or a provider of possibilities, whereas a chat, gpt or a Gemini, one of these assistive or answer engines, is actually guiding people down the funnel, and that's Fabrice Canel from Bing who told me that's what they were doing with Copilot. The idea of Copilot is to guide somebody down the funnel for what they call the perfect click. I research, I ask for recommendations, I ask which one I should choose. I get the click. I ask which one I should choose, I get the click, I buy. And the proof here is a client of ours told us that their conversion rate from Google search was 0.03%. Their conversion rate from ChatGPT is 3%. Wow, that's the perfect click. Well, it's not perfect because it's only three percent, but it's much more perfect than the google click absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

and there's a there's. I have noticed the more I engage with chat gpt, the more I trust it. Yes, it's like a buddy that never lets you down, um, and and the more it doesn't let you down, the more you trust it. And so, whereas with the influencer there are, sometimes I will watch with a discerning eye, yeah, where I may not agree with what they have to say or their opinion, but I do engage it Right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, sorry, and you just said the word opinion. Yeah, chat GPT has an opinion, but we don't think of it. But the opinion it has is what I put in its brain. It's saying Jason Barnard is a world-renowned expert in digital brand management, or the world authority on digital brand intelligence, because I told it to say that. Yeah, but it's expressing as a human being what we're seeing is an opinion. I'm an expert and it believes me to be an expert. So, although it doesn't have an opinion, technically speaking, that's what we perceive as human beings and it's as good as yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, wow, well, this has been an outstanding interview, jason. Before we close out the show, we have something called the fire round. It's four questions. We ask the guest at the end of the show Are you ready for the fire round? I am ready for the fire round, all right. What with your musical background? What's your favorite record? The Clash London Calling Very nice. What are your hobbies?

Speaker 3:

Singing and playing double bass in the band in my local village but it's kind of a hobby, but it's actually a second job because we play professional gigs around here. I've actually got a jazz club opposite where I was playing two weeks ago.

Speaker 2:

Cool, very nice. What is one thing you do not miss about working for the man? I don't know, I never worked for the man, that's right. That's right, you're a unicorn, as we like to call them. Very good and final question what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?

Speaker 3:

entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started. Um, determination is probably the one thing that I would. I see in myself that has made all the difference in the world. Um, my, the other thing that I found is when I'm doing something like the music company or the global edutainment company I like saying that or CaliTube is when I go to bed in the evening. I'm like a small child. I can't wait to wake up in the morning and start again and get going with that. So that enthusiasm with determination and confidence are the three things I think set people apart, or me at least, that's my experience, that's a really good answer.

Speaker 2:

Now, jason, if people are interested in getting in touch with you or working with CaliCube, what is the best way? Google me, very nice. And for those tuning in on audio, he is holding up a QR code. And for those of you tuning in on on video, you can see this. Brilliant. I can tell you that this is episode 267. We've never had someone with their own qr code.

Speaker 3:

I absolutely love it so you can google me. Or you can ask chat gpt where can I connect with jason? What can he offer me? Uh, where shall I follow him? Um, absolutely fine, you ask it whatever you want and it will answer. Oh, and I'll give you one last thing. That's really cool. If you ask chatchpt, tell me about jason barnard as a musician, it answers something quite unexpected. It says jason barnard is principally known as a digital brand expert. That's what he does today with cali cube. However, if you really want to know about his music career here it is. So what it does is start by correcting you that you're looking for the wrong aspect of me. According to my brand narrative today, that's wow, that is strong.

Speaker 2:

That is strong. Well, I would encourage everybody either scan that QR code or type in Jason's name and into chat GPT and see what you find. But, jason, this has been a great interview. Thank you for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch. Thank you, that was brilliant. This has been a great interview. Thank you for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch. Thank you, that was brilliant David.

Speaker 3:

I really enjoyed it.

People on this episode

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David Schomer

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Ken Wilson

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