EPS 406 - Authentic Personal Branding in an Ai world with Chris Do - edited video

Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Brand Builders Lab podcast. I'm your host, Sue Chadwick, certified business and mindset coach, author and speaker. Each week we'll be talking about simple but powerful business and mindset strategies that will help you build a lean, clean, and profitable business so you can learn to get out of your own way and pay yourself more.

Forget average, it's time to level up.

Hey. Hey, my lovely, welcome back to the podcast. Can you hear the excitement in my voice? I am so excited to share this episode with you. You know, I'm a personal branding girlie. You know that Chris Doe is. He's like the number one dude I think in the online space when it comes to personal brand as well.

And I have been following Chris, I wanna say for like 10 years. When I used to run an employer branding agency, it was [00:01:00] global. I remember watching him and his business partner. Before he was in this iteration of what he does, they used to talk a lot about brand strategy and I used to watch a lot of their content when I was working with huge global brands around brand strategy.

And so I have known Chris for a long time. , I worked with him about a year ago or so in his membership, , which is the future, and I watch a lot of his content. I also met him. Probably about a year ago as well, when he came and spoke at the no BS conference here in Melbourne. , And I went and said hi when, , there was a cocktail party on.

So Chris, I feel, has been a staple in my business world for a very long time, for when I was in corporate through now in the entrepreneurial space, and I love the stories that he tells. I love the fact that he's such a wealth of knowledge and I love watching. Him on different [00:02:00] podcasts, et cetera. So there's just so much content that Chris creates through other people and for himself on YouTube podcasts, et cetera.

So when I wanted to talk about, not only talk about this, but talk about personal brand AI authenticity, I knew that I wanted to speak to him. Now, the one thing I'm gonna say. Is that for anybody that's known me for a long time, and I actually said this to my email subscribers, if you're not subscribed, make sure that you come over and subscribe.

Sue chadwick.com/subscribe. Uh, and I was sharing with them that my mother has always taught me since I was very young. If you don't ask, you don't get. And because I think I have worked with Chris and I've met him, and so we know each other. And I thought, I really wanna speak to him. So like anything, I just sent him a dem and said, Hey Chris.

Hey Chris. [00:03:00] I really wanna have you on the Brand Builders Lab podcast. I'd love to talk to you about authenticity in personal branding in the age of ai. And he said, sure, when do you wanna do that? And so it just goes to show that my mother continues to be right all of these years later where if you want something, just ask for it.

And if the answer's yes, amazing. And if the answer's no, that's okay. We'll move on to the next thing. And so I just wanna encourage you today to ask for what you want. To connect with your heroes in your spaces and to engage with them?

Because the way that we build our network matters and the connections that we have allows us to have amazing conversations. And who knows, maybe one day I will run a branding event in Australia where Chris, oh look, I'm gonna put it out there. Where Chris Daniel priestly. I don't know some others that I love in this space, maybe [00:04:00] you know, I'm gonna be the one that creates that summit that, uh, that conference.

That would be fun, wouldn't it? That would be fun. Dream big. I say dream big, but listen, without further ado, instead of me yammering onto you, I am excited that you're here. I'm excited to share this episode with you. It is on YouTube as well. You know that I'm wanting to grow my YouTube, so make sure you head over to YouTube and watch it.

Leave a comment, ask a question. Subscribe all the things, , so that, so that we can get more eyeballs on this. But I am gonna be sharing, this podcast and our clips and the video for some time to come. So listen, let's dive into today's episode, all about authentic personal branding in an AI world with Chris Doe.

Enjoy my lovely, enjoy.

Speaker 2: Chris Do, welcome to the Brand Builders Lab podcast. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Obviously, when I think about personal branding right now, and this is a question for you. Yeah. You are the first person I think of. Did you ever think that you would [00:05:00] be. The beacon for personal branding.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I woke up four years ago.

I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the beacon to personal branding when you're lost in the water and you're, you've not found your way. Look to the sky, my friends, that little tower swirling. Actually, no, but it's something I've been working on. So can I tell you a little story about how I found my way into personal branding?

I would love that. Okay. Not everybody knows this story. So I'm in a darkened theater at Art Center where I went to school and there's some people speaking on stage. I'm there just for support. I'm not really speaking. So student who recognizes me sits in front, turns around and is like, oh my God. They're chatting with me and they mention his name.

And this name is a guy by the name of Aaron Draplin, and I think it's 2018, I'm not sure. Somewhere around there. 2016, 2018 ish. And and I'm like, who? And they're kind of aghast. They're like. You don't know Aaron Joplin don't front Chris. I'm like, no, I, I'm, I've just. I'm sorry to tell you, I don't really follow designers anymore.

I just do my own thing. I'm not really in [00:06:00] that stage in my life where I'm like checking out what all the kids are checking out. So that night I go home, I look him up, and sure enough, he's all over the internet and he had given a TED Talk in Portland and here he is. If you don't know who Aaron Trappin is, he's probably one of the most famous graphic designers.

He's a big man, big in every dimension, bearded, and he's wearing his jean jacket, his trucker jacket, and trucker cap and jean shorts, and he goes, you know, I got dressed up. I wore the clean Levi's today. He goes on to do his bit and I, I remember his bit really well 'cause it was very refreshing and it sparked something inside of me.

He gets on stage this night, he goes, my name is Aaron James Lin. At that time, he's like, I'm 42 years old. I'm doing everything I can do to make it the, the little leagues of graphic design. And I'm like, that's fascinating. Radical transparency, telling people his middle name. Talking about like how he's got an employee of one himself and how he gets to work in an air conditioned building and he doesn't have to wear pants most days.

And the crowd loved it. They loved everything about him. He was kind of like a [00:07:00] larger than life figure, telling folk stories about the business of design and the champion for the people, and people loved it. So me being me, I'm like, let me reverse analyze. And cross, cross-reference check all this stuff.

And I, that began my journey into understanding how some people, despite being better or worse than other people, become much, much more famous and celebrated. And two names came up. Stefan Sagmeister and Aaron Draplin, the two giants of graphic design at that time, contemporaries. And I was like, what are they doing?

They're totally different people, yet they have very strong magnetic personalities. That draw people to them and love for who they are.

Speaker 2: I love that. And so was it intentional for you when you look at that and you're like radical transparency, just showing up as yourself, did something click for you in that moment?

Speaker 3: Yeah, a thousand percent. I was used to the designer who was put on a pedestal who was at the top of the mountain in terms of the design echelon who celebrated, who wrote books, who spoke a very certain way, pinky in the air kind [00:08:00] of. That kind of person and the designer's designer. And we took our profession very seriously.

And Stefan s Miser is more like that kind of person. Um, but Aaron Lin was like this breath of fresh air, kind of folksy Midwestern thing, talking to him about how he wear a lot of Terry cloth. Just, just fun and different, and people just loved it and celebrated. And what I needed was. For someone somewhere in the universe to tell me it's okay to be you.

You do you. And he did himself. And so I was like, I see the template now.

Speaker 2: And so from that point on, what were the changes that you made? What was like the next thing that you did that adopted some of that, and how did it feel?

Speaker 3: Before I tell you that part, I do what I normally do. I created a keynote presentation to my community, my future pro group, and I showed them like, how do you build a personal brand?

Let's look at two people from the polar ends of the design spectrum. One, one person who wants to exhibit in museums and one person who probably doesn't even go to the museum. One person who judges awards, one person who's never won an award, has [00:09:00] never tried to win an award. Very different. Highbrow design, lowbrow design, but they both had this presence.

And I was going through like what was common to two people. Because you can, you can say like anyone can do something radically different, but when you see a pattern between two or more people, all of a sudden it's like, well, anybody can do this. Not at this point. I'm still in my content creation journey, learning how to be myself on camera.

I have a small audience, but it's not, it's not anything. And, and I was already starting to understand who I was supposed to be in this world and this life, and I think what Aaron inadvertently did was he just gave me the fuel I needed to go full throttle. So instead of idling or observing the speed limit, I just want him like, you know, let's go Audubon on this personal brand thing and let it all go.

Who cares? What does letting it all go look like? It looks like what it looks like right now. Me with my chains, my funky glasses, my thick frame glasses, you know, like how I describe to people my Kim Jong-un world dictator glasses and me wearing a skirt on stage with crazy patterns and colors and [00:10:00] do whatever it is I wanna do.

And accepting that if I'm not for you, that's okay about me.

Speaker 2: Did it take a while for you to. Settle into that. Like did you kind of gradually move towards it, or were you just kind of like, okay, I'm just gonna show up fully as myself and all the things that I love now?

Speaker 3: I think I went all in fully as myself, but not realizing there were layers to myself that even though, and giving myself permission each time, like, are you interested in this thing?

Let's go for that too. And so every time you reach what you think is the upper ceiling, the limit of how you're expressing yourself, you find even more ways. And I'm just keeping, I just keep giving myself more permission. I tell people I don't know how to dance. I really don't know how to dance. I know how to move for a certain period of time to music, but if it goes beyond that, I'm a disaster.

So it's like intro walk music. I'm good, you know, just shaking in the audience a little bit. But don't look at me. I'm good. But like, Hey, cut the rug with me. I'm no good. I cannot do that. So I'm even, I'm even trying to embrace that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think, you know, know what you're strong at and know what you're not strong at.

I think this [00:11:00] is another good one as well, but I wanted to, I wanted to find out a little bit more from you. 'cause obviously you are so immersed in this space and you're speaking on a lot of podcasts. You're speaking on a lot of stages and there's a lot happening in the world of AI and personal branding.

Okay. And that that's, those two words kind of go against

Speaker 3: each other. But I'm curious where this question is going. I know,

Speaker 2: I know they do. Taking breath and I think that's, that's the conversation or a little bit of the conversation that I wanna have. 'cause there's this authenticity piece that we've just talked about, like being truly you showing up quirks and all.

And then we're sort of seeing in the online. Space AI kind of coming in as far as I can, clone myself, I can clone my voice, all those sorts of things. I don't, don't have clear thoughts on it yet, Chris, because I feel like it's so new. Yeah, and I'm starting to see it a little bit online and my brain is saying that's not authentic personal branding because it's not you quirks and all [00:12:00] that is showing up.

And so I guess my question is, what do you see when it comes to AI in the personal branding space? First of all. Okay, let's start there. Okay. We'll

Speaker 3: start there. I, I think this about most people, the present company excluded that most people are just faking their way through life. They really are be, not because they intend to be mean or deceptive, but because they don't know who they are.

They just don't. And how do you tell your story when you don't know it yourself? There's this expression. The expression is, it's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar and the label's us. I

Speaker 2: say that all the time,

Speaker 3: right? It's us, and we're inside the fricking jar, and we're like, what? What do you see?

Tell me. Tell me what you're reading. Am I fermented? Is it salty? Is am I spicy? I don't even know because. Of this one thing, we've, we've only lived our, our experiences to know one perspective of our own. As much as we try, we can't really be anybody else. So that idea of empathy, it's like, what is empathy anyways?

So it's like us projecting what we think the other person's feeling [00:13:00] onto them. It's kind of impossible to know what it is like for the other person. It really is. Unless there's a, a new skill or new technology that allows us to beam our brain across to someone else. So we just know it. Like, for example, if you're short, you only know the perspective of a short person.

1. You don't know what it's like to hit your head on, uh, in a, uh, stairwell. You don't know what it's like to like have your knees and your kidneys when you're on an airplane and you're flying coach. It's things like that we don't know. And then the tall person doesn't know what it's like to, every bed fits you.

Everything is good, you know, and they don't know what it's like to have people of the opposite sex look at you in a different way. With less admiration, with less desire or lust or whatever it is. So we just don't know. And so we're out there kind of just trying to figure it out. I'm not casting judgment on anybody.

And then this thing called social media comes along, or now just media and it amplifies this. And all of a sudden we're seeing a lot of people, our peers, people we admire, people we despise, jumping on social, showing you a highly curated version of the thing that they don't know about themselves. And [00:14:00] we're kind of like.

We're like sheeple, when we see somebody do something, we'll do it. So I'm not saying you did this, but if you did, I'm not judging you either. But you remember those pointing videos, you know for a while. Like everybody's pointing. Yeah, because why? 'cause people are pointing and the videos are popping. Or if there's a song or some challenge that everybody's doing the same thing.

We're just sheeple. We're a little lazy. So I think the journey of understanding. Our own personal brand is the journey inward. We kinda have to figure that out and there's a lot of inner work that needs to be done. Now we, we add the sauce of AI and now we can amplify that to the N degree. So basically you're taking a generic cookie cutter, low self-awareness template, and you're gonna multiply that across space and time.

That doesn't sound very cool to me

Speaker 2: for people who struggle. I, I was having a conversation with a girlfriend last night about this. People who struggle to show up online. Yeah. Uh, excited about the possibilities of how AI can help them to be able to do that. But then I also think we lose that, and I'm gonna use the word authentic.

What I'm [00:15:00] really saying is the quirks, the real mistakes, the thinking at the time, rather than everything being scripted and perfect. It's kind of like, you know, how do we. Potentially integrate or not integrate it when there could be a lot of AI videos, et cetera, coming online. And it's an easy approach for some people and then for other people who, this is what we've built up to where we are.

Physically here, having this conversation, how do you keep your authenticity in a world that is going down that route?

Speaker 3: I don't think it's hard to keep your authenticity. It's like saying everyone's robbing banks and looting stores right now. How do you stay honest? I'm like. I think you're either honest or you're not.

You know, everyone's, uh, picking on that poor person over there. How do you stay courageous? Well, either are, you're not. There was this expression, like the pandemic ruined a lot of businesses. I don't think it ruined any business. It accelerated their demise. They were in trouble before the [00:16:00] pandemic and then the pandemic hit.

So a lot of these things, what they do is they expose, they magnify who we are. So if you're a person who's. Really chasing some external metric of validation. You, you have some extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation and you seek the approval of other people. Well, gosh darn it, social's gonna help you with that.

AI's gonna help you with that. But inside all the likes and engagement, the followers is a really broken, insecure person, and I think that's not gonna go away. In fact. You know, I didn't understand this before. When I was younger, somebody told me this. An older person told me this and said, you know who the most insecure people are?

I'm like, no. They're models and actors. I'm like, what? They're the most beautiful people. They have everything going for them. They won the genetic lottery. Why would that be? Because that's their whole life. That's their entire life, and they know it's a fleeting moment. They have a skin breakout, or if they start to get wrinkles or bags, their whole self-worth is gone.

They didn't need to work on anything else. Except for show up and be beautiful. And so I think if you [00:17:00] extrapolate from that, you can start to see that everywhere now. And there's an example I wanna make, and it's confusing for young people too. When I say young, I don't mean numerically young, but young in the maturity.

It could be 50 years old and pretty, be pretty young. In your maturity, is that Pamela Anderson? Not exactly the spokesperson for authenticity, because she had boob jobs. She has all kinds of things going on. Finally, it's like, you know, I am gonna show up without makeup. And she's kind of had some kind of renaissance with her life and everyone's like applauding her like, oh, so brave, so brave.

But when did it become really brave to show up as yourself? So we skew so far to the one side that it just now is remarkable for someone to show up as authentic. It's weird. And I, I was always talking to my wife about this, 'cause sometimes we'll watch Survivor, the TV show together. Mm-hmm. And I always find the men and the women very attractive when they're on an eyelid.

Not eating junk food with no makeup, having not brushed your teeth or the hair. I'm like, wow, they're really super attractive. Maybe their personality's not that attractive, but physically they're very attractive. Then they do the season finale, which now everybody's been fed and [00:18:00] returned back to society and I can't even recognize them.

Their face is like all bloated and their face looks like painted on, and I'm like, what is going on from the men and the women? Like, what is going on? Mm-hmm. So I think we need to find a way for us. To figure out what's right for us. And I'm not saying zero makeup is good or a hundred percent makeup is bad, but somewhere in between there is the right amount for you.

But I just find that it's funny, society skewed so far to one side, and the part that's really confusing is. Uh, I'm forgetting her name now. Uh, who's the, uh, Jenner woman? The mom? Chris Jenner. Chris Jenner, yes. Chris Jenner, um, had a recent, uh, facelift. Mm. And the internet's all buzz like, well, who gave her the glow up?

First of all? She don't even look at herself anymore. She looks, first of all like amazing. But I'm like, when you look in the mirror, do you recognize yourself? Like isn't it okay to grow old and be okay with that? But everybody's doing it from Brad Pitt to wherever. So now it's like this whole, well, if you get plastic surgery and it looks natural, then that's [00:19:00] great.

So it's very confusing for people. I say that right before I go into like a facelift myself. No, I'm just kidding. It's like, who knows?

Speaker 2: You still look young as Chris, but I think that that sucked. I think that's that's, I know that's the compliment you were looking for. Yeah,

Speaker 3: I was fishing for it. Thank you.

Speaker 2: But I think that's such a great comparison. I do think that we are in a world right now where beauty standards and plastic surgery and faking it is just everywhere. And I think for a lot of people, they feel the pressure of that. And what I'm seeing where they're using a lot of AI generated images and photos and it feels like I feel uncomfortable, like when I see it.

Because I know it's not really them, even though it kind of looks like them, it's not actually them.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And so I think that there's that feeling where you are seeing something, but you know that it's not real. And so then the next question is, I can't trust it or can I trust it? And so I think that. I think that there's a whole thing around [00:20:00] when we are using AI a lot, either in our business, in our writing, in our visuals, et cetera.

There's definitely a gut feeling that other people get as to, can I trust this or can't I? And I think that for people that have. Built their brands, built their businesses. There's an erosion of trust potentially there that we just need to talk about that we just need, let's talk about it. Need to be aware of where it's like a really easy option.

It's like a really, like, oh my gosh, how easy I could create a hundred videos of me and it looks like me and it sounds like me. And I wrote the content. But it's not really me. And I think that the question we have to ask ourselves is, are we willing to risk eroding the trust that we've just spent the last 10, 15 years building?

Yeah. And is that at risk if a lot of people are

Speaker 3: doing it? Well, let's talk about that. So I always find it really easy for people to fall into categories. I love ai. Or I hate ai, and I think it takes a little bit more patience and intelligence to slow down and really understand [00:21:00] what we're talking about here.

Let's strip away the word AI for a second and say like, what's real? What can you trust? What can you trust? When before AI was around, there's a lot of people I cannot trust. I. And there's lots of people that, that's not real. They rented the car. They, they went into a prop jet so they can take a photo.

They're using filters while they take the photo and they're doing post retouching. They're squeezing body parts in and long hanging certain parts and smoothing out. That's not real. But did we have that same kind of conversation before? Four. And if we're okay with some level of retouching and some level of filtering, and we're like, okay, well, so what level are we not uncomfortable or comfortable with at this point?

Mm-hmm. So I think that's the thing. So we, we will dismiss it into a binary thing. It's ai, no AI trust, no trust, but radical technology scare people. And we don't not, we're not very, we're not very contemplative. We're not very, very introspective when it comes to like, what are we talking about here? So, for example, right now, let's just be real, real.

I'm using a $500 microphone. It's sent through a couple hundred dollars processor, which has certain kind of [00:22:00] dynamic things done to my voice. So that has a fuller deep end. 'cause you know, people with a deeper voice sound, sound more credible and it's filtering out a lot of background noise. It's doing its job.

So I feel and present myself as more professional, and most people are not gonna have a problem with this at all until one day you're talking to me in person, you're like, whoa. Who dat, and then there's that authenticity gap that comes in. I'm like, no, it's still me. I'm like, it doesn't sound like you.

Well, you need to understand, you know, like, and radio personalities have had this done for decades. You know, Howard Stern does not sound, sound like Howard Stern when he's just speaking in an unfiltered mic. And so we're not usually in, in, in, up arms and. With our pitchforks and our picket signs up and saying, well ban that person.

And so we have to kind of get into the content of the character and how you wanna represent yourself. So I think it raises a really big question, seus, which is, what is the intentionality behind the person doing what they're doing? So, for example, let's say I'm dyslexic and say, let's say the second part's, not, let's say it's real.

I'm [00:23:00] ESL. So I struggle sometimes with grammar and syntax and colloquialism, things like that. And so I write my draft. I'm like, there it is. And I could have spent three weeks writing that thing, but today I'm gonna finish it. In an hour, I'm gonna have AI go and clean it up for syntax or grammar for localizing the content.

It sounds pretty good. It's my idea is me. It's cleaned up as if I had a proofreader. If I had a really good proofreader. And an editor writing over it. So we're okay with that. Right? And we're okay with buying books that are not written by the authors. If you look a lot of books that you love, myself included, it's not written by the person that you think it is.

'cause there's another name on the book that nobody knows it's 'cause they're the ghost writer. And we're okay with that too, you see? So it's like, now the line is not so black and white anymore. But if your intention is I don't have ideas, I dunno what I'm saying. I'm gonna graph this person's content, I'm gonna mix it with that person's voice.

Not, not literally their voice, but their tone. And I'm gonna say it this way, to serve this kind of market. So none of the ideas and none of the voice is my own. I'm the art [00:24:00] director, all this stuff. If we disclose that we're art directing all this. No one's gonna have a problem. But if you're like, these are my ideas, this is my voice, people may have a problem later on.

So I think some level of transparency does matter. Some understanding of intention, which is almost impossible to figure out from afar, does matter. Okay? So I know people who write posts all on their own, and I look at 'em like, you fake af. I know the real you. And that's not you at all. Who are you trying to fool?

Why would you do that? And I've struggled with this like watching my friends for many, many years. Like the person that I know in real life is way more interesting, is way more real. That person, you show up and pretend to be online, I find disgusting and I'm having a hard time reconciling those too. 'cause we're afraid.

We're afraid of being rejected. We're afraid of being unpopular. We just want to be loved by everybody. So we start showing up in this manufactured way. AI is not gonna be the end all it is making it a little bit easier. But the, the people who wanna cheat, we'll cheat the people who wanna lie, we'll lie, nothing I can do, nothing I [00:25:00] want to do about it.

Speaker 2: So how are you using it in your business in a way that works for you? Because I know I've experienced dBot myself, which I think was really, really. Which I think was great. Mm-hmm. For those of you don't know, Chris has taken all of his knowledge and put it into an AI tool for his clients where you can ask questions.

If you've got a better way of describing it, then go for it. But I'd love to know how you are using it and how it's, how you to build your personal brand, if it is, or if there's anything else that you're sort of like, yeah, like we're, we're thinking about. How we can use it in the future to help us build the business, help us build the brand.

Like what are the discussions in your business about it? Okay. This is fantastic.

Speaker 3: I think in the very near future, it's in every single one of us will have a digital version of ourselves, mostly as a repository for our knowledge, and so it knows what we know up until the point in which stop teaching it.

What's really interesting is for teachers, for people who create a lot of [00:26:00] content, this is gonna be a powerful tool to help us teach and reach more people. So it's a very good thing. Robot basically is trained on very specific pieces of content that are exclusive, that aren't available publicly. So it knows a lot about what I've spent a lot of time thinking about, uh, things from my book, things from certain courses and bootcamps I put together, and it goes deep.

And it's also trained to not answer your questions in a straightforward way. It's designed to ask you in a Socratic approach to help you arrive at the answer very much like the way I would do it. But you add in infinite patience and kindness and generosity and non-judgment. And it's not me obviously.

'cause I have finite patience and I have a lot of judgment I think to to myself. Like, gosh, Dobo is much kinder than I am. That's how you know you're talking to it. 'cause it will not cut you off. It'll let you go on for as long as you need to go on. Right. But what's really cool is that no one is thinking that it's me.

I'm not pretending like it's me. We even give a name, Dobo. And you talk to it, and you chat with it, and it's only gonna get better and better as we feed it. More data, as the models get more sophisticated so that when you're in a pinch and you need to do a sales role [00:27:00] play, you need to have a look at your bid or your proposal or pretty much anything that you're doing.

Your offer. It will know. It's like, well, let's tweak some of these things. What is it you're trying to do? And you may watch out for these three things. Now we're still in that state where it will make up certain things as AI tends to do it hallucinates a little bit. We ask it not to hallucinate whenever possible.

So it's filling in gaps. 'cause obviously we didn't feed it that much data. And I think the, the really cool thing is I just got back from Singapore where I did six days, six full days. It's the longest I've ever. Been at doing something for that many consecutive days. We have the transcript from every single day and with the transcript, what I can do then is I can then feed it and update the latest dobo to say, now we have more data.

Now you're encountering more situations. So we we're gonna upgrade the intelligence of the machine so that if somebody went to the workshop and said, you know, when you said this, I'm not sure what you meant. Can you expand on this? And hopefully Doba can do that for you. I think that's a pretty cool tool.

Speaker 2: [00:28:00] Yeah. Yeah. And I think for people that do teach and for people, I'm gonna use the word thought leader, dunno whether you like it or not, but people who are constantly looking at how do we, you know, take information from different places and what does that mean? Now I think that I've started to do similar things.

Put all my courses, put all my books, put all my podcasts. Et cetera into it and starting to build that for clients as well. But also just thinking about like, what does, what does that look like in the future? And when I say in the future, I'm even just thinking in the next like 12 months because things are moving so quickly.

It's like, how do. How do we show up and share? And I love that you, are you teaching for six days? Yes, six days of workshops. That's like 48 hours. That's amazing. And I think that I heard somebody else say we're in an analog renaissance where it's like, because there's so much online, because there's so much information that.

It's really the in-person. I'm literally standing and speaking to you, asking questions, having a [00:29:00] conversation, us thinking about things together. That's what is going to become the thing that people want the most. Yes, because we are craving that in-person connection or real connection. And so what are you thinking about?

As far as the things that you are doing, 'cause I know you're speaking a lot, you're doing a lot of workshops, your clients have got access to your ai. But what else are you planning on doing in the future? If you can share, if you've thought about it, I can. That kind of brings it all together. I.

Speaker 3: Yeah, so I wanna double click on something you just said, which is the new wealth is the ability to do things slowly, to enjoy analog things.

So everybody needs to just let that sink in at some point. When trees become so precious, we will only, the rich will have books like Printed Ephemera. Everything else will live in the, in the sky and the cloud. And if you want a slow cooked meal versus having a replicator, make it for you. That is the thing that people will do who have a lot of money.

They actually want someone to manually prepare food versus hitting a [00:30:00] button and saying, I want pizza, and it would disappear. I, I also just want, wanna point out one little thing. If you grew up in the seventies and the eighties, there was a space fantasy trilogy called Star Wars and it was about the future.

Now people say it's not science fiction, it's more science fantasy. Right. And so, so there's some debates about that where Star Trek was a little more science fiction than it was science fantasy. Is that in the spaceships? It's like old buttons and switches. There were, there was not even touch interfaces because it couldn't imagine it back then.

And then you would watch Star Trek and it would then you would say like computer. Analyze this and da da and plot a course, and we would sit there and like, my God, is that ever gonna happen in my lifetime? 2025? It's already happened. Everybody. You can literally talk to machine that understands context, nuance, it does all kinds of things for you now, not just understand keywords.

It's not keyword based. It understands context. So when you say things like, do that again, it knows what you're talking about. This is fantastic because if you don't have the use of [00:31:00] your limbs and you can speak, this is a pretty powerful abled thing to have available to us. Right? I think that's really, really cool.

So we're living some amazing times right now. I don't know if you know about crispr, CRISPR jeans. Do you know about crispr? It's one of like the biggest medical breakthrough. Oh yeah. Oh my God. So soon you and I. We can change our biology, we can change our DNA, so we know about like cloning and genetic manipulation at the inception point.

But CRISPR allows us to change our DNA as adults. So if you're like, Hey, I want green eyes tomorrow, you just take a shot, you'll have green eyes. Wow. Yeah. If you wanna change this part, you change that part. So we're not that far away from the singularity where we can live forever. 'cause basically if your brain starts falling apart because of, you know, dementia or things like that.

Take a shot of CRISPR goes in, it repairs your brain and rebuilds it. So like now you have a 19-year-old brain again. So you just have to live long enough Suze so that you can experience the wonders of the advancements of [00:32:00] science and medicine. And you know, they're using AI to detect forms of cancer that human eyes cannot see.

Pretty cool. So they always say like, early detection is the best thing for prevention, right? Mm-hmm. And so now can scan, it could do massive amounts of data crunching and figure out like, what's the likelihood of you getting something based on your specific genetic profile and when do we need to test for that?

You're, you're more prone to X versus y. I think that's really, really cool. So I just wanna put that out there now. I've totally forgot your

Speaker 2: question. That's okay. I was talking about like what your thinking about. As far as the future of what you are doing. Oh, okay. Because we were talking about live workshops, you know, things like dBot.

Yeah. How we using ai. Like where, when you think about your business in the next 12, 24 months, is there anything you are like, I really want us to be doing this, or I'm kind of thinking about that? Or are you just seeing where things go?

Speaker 3: Well, number one, I wanna keep. Myself, very agile, nimble, because things are changing pretty quickly.

The business model, which we've depended on is pretty much like course downloads aren't doing well at [00:33:00] all. Pretty much everyone I know who's launched the course has the course is finding out it's really hard to sell. We had Ryan Deis on our show and he's an OG marketer, marketing courses and things like that, and he said, we saw our sales drop from January to now 80%.

So they're like, we're done. So he made a big announcement on LinkedIn and says, we're done. We're retiring all our courses you can buy at one time. We're not doing that anymore. We're gonna go all in on ai. What he is talking about is implementation. We know that when you take a course, the likelihood of you doing something's quite low, the likelihood of you completing the course is even lower than that.

So it's like, hmm, we have a problem here. So as an educator, I sell transformation, and if you're not keeping the transformation, then basically you just paid for something to feel good, but you haven't done anything. So we have to kind of figure out new models of helping people achieve a result. Now they say you can't hire people to do pushups for you, you gotta do 'em yourself.

But there's a lot of things you can hire people to do that'll save you a lot of time. So we're investigating like other things that we can do with AI to help assist people. I'll give you one quick example. [00:34:00] So recently we're adding in, we've added in some accountability for people. 'cause we wanna have like a traffic light system, red, amber, and green.

Basically, financially, you're good to go red, you're in deep trouble. You're gonna go outta business. We need to intervene and yellow. We need to watch out because this is not going well right now. Now what we've been able to do, instead of hiring an army of, uh, accountants or bookkeepers, we ask people to do their profit and loss statement.

And from the p and l we can use AI based on what we know. To look at that and raise some flags. So it'll say something like, based on industry standards, you may be paying yourself too much money, or you're paying yourself too little, or You're not accounting for X, Y, and Z. And based on your numbers, if they're correct, we think you're deficient here.

You need to add more here. And if you don't change things, you'll be in, you'll be outta business in 30 days. That's a red light. And at first we thought like, gosh, we have to go through all these numbers and I hate numbers. I don't even look at my own numbers, so now I'm gonna do it for other people's homework.

Well, what we did was we had it run through it. We kind of checked the homework a little bit, [00:35:00] like accounting you can do. It can do it really well. There's not a lot of creative interpretation there, and it knows what the ratios are supposed to be, so it kind of helps us out there. So now we can add value to a group that needs some support like that, and we can continue down this rabbit hole and say like, maybe the next robot we need to do is to help you with your positioning.

That's something that people struggle with mightily, or to figure out what your tube word brand is, or to figure out your tone of voice so we can make little robots do one job and do that job really well. And then all of a sudden these resources will be available to our community or, or maybe we just do it as a pay per use thing, where every time you use it, it's like five bucks, something very affordable.

Speaker 2: So you are gonna be shifting your model a bit then?

Speaker 3: Yes. We have my good friend Dave, who's a wizard at ai, and he's gonna help us build a bunch of agents. So I have to determine what the need is, what the use case is, and he'll build it and then I give it feedback. And so usually two or three rounds we kind of get something that's quite good and then we go into [00:36:00] beta.

Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Exciting. Mm-hmm. Exciting and interesting. Yeah. I think that I've definitely like, I mean my, I built my first course in 2017, I think it was. And so, yeah, I've definitely seen the shift and also the micro information that people want. It's like I have, instead of me wanting to fix the whole thing, yes.

Like from A to ZI like need this thing here.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So

Speaker 2: how do I, how do I get help with that? Which is exactly what you're talking about, which is like, you know, is it just train of voice? Is it just like marketing strategy? Is it just. This. So I think that, I think that that is definitely what I'm seeing. And I heard somebody the other day say something where, you know, we're in an, we're in a time where information, there's just so much of it that it's the people that can ask you the right questions that that's where the value is gonna be.

Did you say that, was it you that I was listening to? I might have said that. Yes.

Speaker 3: Asking questions is a 21st century skill. When the machine can do [00:37:00] anything, then it's a question of what is it we want to do and not how, because the machine already knows how. Yeah. So people don't know how to ask a good question apparently.

And even when I'm running my workshop, and as much as I can emphasize what is a good question to ask people struggle with this because we're not used to being as specific and articulate as we need to be. And I don't know if you know this, but in, in the, uh, like the ancient Greeks rhetoric was one of the key things that they wanted us to learn.

So mathematics, science, and rhetoric. It's like, but somewhere along the way we kind of just lost rhetoric. I. And that's kind of a, a very important thing. So we might be returning to what the Greeks already knew a couple thousand years ago

Speaker 2: on all of your travels and in all of your workshops. Mm-hmm. 'cause you see so many people and you speak to so many people.

Is there anything that you are seeing that's shifting out there in the business landscape that has either taken you by surprise or that you just feel there's a shift there? Like in the conversations that you're having, in the spaces that you're speaking or doing workshops?

Speaker 3: Well, we're talking [00:38:00] about right now, everybody's concerned about ai.

Everybody's using it to a degree or the other, or not using it all. And they think they misunderstand how to use AI most of the time, and they're not seeing the total creative potential for how you use ai. And I'm fascinated by this stuff. And so I'm seeing things done on the edges and I'm, I'm like, oh, there's the application right there.

We could do that. We could do that. So I'll give you some examples. Okay, let's take it from super basic so people kinda like, yeah, I get that. We, we can do that. So when you're cutting out an image in Photoshop, uh, before this intelligent remove background feature was invented, I dunno about you, it was the pain in the buttocks.

You would do all kinds of things like going to the channels, the red, the green or blue channels, and finding the, the most appropriate one and mostly just hand painting everything back in. And it was a pain in the butt, especially around transparent things, very difficult to do. Some of the wizards out there had the advanced techniques, which I'm not that good at doing.

So now Photoshop, and you don't know this is using AI to remove the background and it's getting better and better. So it's not perfect, but every time I give it [00:39:00] an image, I'm like, let's see you break. And it's like when I don't have to retouch it. I'm already getting a little bit impressed. Let's move on to level two.

Image was cropped. I'm like, fudge, I gotta, I gotta mesh warp, clone this thing. And the texture's never gonna be that. Now I know people who can do matte paintings and could do a fantastic job, but that's a full day endeavor. To do that the right way. I'm, I need an image for a marketing campaign I'm writing, or a slide for my keynote.

I ain't got this kind of time. Now I use expand background. I use Gen Fill and it just does a great job most of the time. It used to be really funky. It's still a little funky, but it's getting much, much better. Okay, that's level two, level three. I'm looking for a background. I can't find it. I'm on Shutterstock.

I can't. It's kind of between this and this. Now can take those two things, jump into Mid Journey or Firefly and say it's kind of like this, but with that. Like I want this feel, but I want it to be with flowers. That's level three. So it's taking two things under our direction and it's producing it for you and it's [00:40:00] pretty good, but guess what?

It's a little bit low res. So I'll take that and I'll jump into Leonardo and I'll ask it to creatively up res this thing, and it can do a pretty good job better every single day. Okay. But now I want it to move. I don't wanna just, I don't want it to just be a bed of flower sitting there. I want a background to be living and breathing.

So then I called my friend, Dave, Dave, Dave, do something with this. 'cause every time I run through video, it's a piece of garbage. He goes, oh, you need to use this one versus that one. I'm like, oh, okay. He prompts it and it is quite beautiful. It, it kind of blows in the wind a little bit, so there's a little bit of movement and it, it gets the spirit.

So it's an animated thing that looks photo real, but it's, it's rendered like. Etched, you know, so it's like, it's got a really neat look. Uh, that's pretty cool. And Dave's like, would you like me to write a piece of music to go around along with the background? I'm like, fudge this rabbit hole never ends.

That's how you use ai, in my opinion. This is how you don't use ai. Uh, make me something with music. That's great. I'll just use that. That's not what we're talking about here. That's like you're [00:41:00] letting the machine do all the thinking for you and you don't know good from bad. So whatever it gives you, you think it's great.

That's what we're seeing out on the Internets right now.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's something that I heard you talk about recently, which was more around taste. Yes. So taste being the big differentiator when it comes to Yes. AI and I kind of feel like exactly the example you just used. It's like, go create me something.

I'll just use that. As opposed to creatively evolving it into something that you know to be good because I think that's taste. Yes. So. Can we talk a bit about that? Like what, yeah. How do you see that? Okay,

Speaker 3: so we talked about one thing. The skill of the 21st century is ability to ask a really great question.

The second skill of the 21st century is to have good taste. And taste is something that can be taught. It's not innate sometimes, and it requires some education. Even as the people who are growing up around art, design, architecture, photography, fashion, they generally have. Better taste 'cause they're exposed to things to understand [00:42:00] materiality, like why this material feels better than that material.

They're, they've trained their eye to notice things and I think that's really important. So when we're, when we're design students, we take design history, we take art history, we take music history, we learn a lot of things, and that we can have a reference point. So when I say to you, I want that Rembrandt look, if you're like puzzle, it's because you don't have the same visual vocabulary that I do.

Now, the interesting thing is one of my friends who, who works with me, his name is Rodrigo, and we talk a lot and I said to him, you know, I just realized something that I make references to things that you do not have a clue on because from the ages of like 18 up, I spent a lot of my discretionary income buying very expensive European.

Magazines on fashion, art, architecture, and I inhaled this stuff. In fact, I have binders that are like that big, multiple binders separated by different disciplines, different categories, organized, because I wanted to know what good furniture looks like, I wanted to know what an interior looks like in the lamps.

And so I got to know the designers and I still know who they are to this [00:43:00] day. So when we walk into. Door. I'm like, oh yeah, that's a PR Las Sony piece. He, he, he's a great director for, uh, this company, poly Formm versus that company that is this Egyptian designer's, like really well known for plastics, ceramics.

And, uh, Kareem Rashid is his name and he has no idea what I'm talking about. Because by the time he's in his forties, which he's really close to, he's had a sliver of the design education I've had, mostly because of how I've disciplined myself to be consuming all this stuff that I didn't know was gonna have a benefit later on.

But it does have a benefit. I've studied films, commercials, music videos. I've studied fashion architecture and graphic design. And art history. So I, I'm not saying I'm the world's most knowledgeable person in anything, but I have been exposed to lots of things. I start to understand what makes something good, so a person and I can walk in the store and like, Chris, that looks great.

I'm like, no, it doesn't like why. That looks just like the other thing. I'm like, no, because your eyes have been trained. Look at this. Look at that. Look at the scale proportion. Look at the seams on that jacket and, and, and how the hem is. Done and look at that, [00:44:00] that little flourish. And this doesn't feel, look how the, the collar stands up and this one flops, those things do matter if you, if you care.

Speaker 2: I was about to say, have you always been like that?

Speaker 3: No, I've, I've actually had really bad taste in my life, most of my life. 'cause I grew up in the valley. When I say the valley, I don't mean like San Fernando Valley, but Silicon Valley. Not exactly a cultural hub. And growing up as, as a refugee kind of immigrant, I wasn't really exposed to art and architecture.

We were just making our way through our lives. And I remember very specific looking at the magazines when I was 16, 17 years old through gq, through Better Homes and Garden or Sunset Magazine, like looking at our house and look at a magazine like. How come they don't look the same? Why don't we have this curated thing like our walls are white, we have bare floors.

Our curtains are pretty basic. They have molding. I didn't even know what molding was. I thought it was like there are two types of homes. Homes with drywall and homes that are made from these ornate things. I didn't realize it's something you could just add to your walls, and that's what actually happens.

I didn't know you could do like these pickled finishes and, and make [00:45:00] things look aged and to give it a sense of character or to mix different shes of paint together and create this whole different look and aesthetic. I didn't know any of that until much, much later on, but thankfully, and the reason why I wanna say this is because it's a learned thing.

If somebody spent enough time with someone who has really good taste and they could, they were open-minded and they were astute and they had this capacity to learn new things. You can learn this for sure, you can learn this.

Speaker 2: We've almost outta time, but there's just one other thing that I wanted to ask you as well is what are you a bit obsessed with at the moment?

Because I know you read and you are probably listening to a lot of things. I know that you love to learn and consume from other people, so I'd love to know what are you really into at the moment? Is there anybody that we should be listening to reading anything like that? When it comes to the, the things you talk about.

Speaker 3: Yes, I'll answer the simple way first in the much more difficult way. Second, first thing is I love listening to Radiolab. Radiolab is usually on one of these NPR kind of networks where they [00:46:00] really focus on teaching you things about science, but done through a story format. And if you believe producers, sometimes episodes take a year to make, cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to research produce.

Record rerecord, and they're interviewing people and they're just bringing out stories, and they built wonderful soundscapes. So it's like the most interesting science program you've ever listened to. I've learned so many things about the way the brain works. I learned that placebo is not placebo, it's cebo.

I've learned about things like Mesmer. There's a person named Mesmer, that's why it's called Mesmerizing. So there's like some form of hypnotism involved with that. There's so many things I've learned through like how our brain works and how do we do animals communicate and have human emotions, all these kinds of wonderful weird topics, and they go down deep into these rabbit holes and I just love listening to 'em.

There's another program called The Moth Radio Hour, which you're a fan of storytelling. You already know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2: I have just discovered that on TikTok. It's amazing.

Speaker 3: On TikTok of all places.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's the [00:47:00] videos with people telling the stories. Yeah,

Speaker 3: go straight. Go straight to, yeah. I've seen some of them go straight to the source, the radio program and listen to it.

There are very few programs that when I'm listening to, I'll just sit in the driveway and just finish the story. Like I, I, I'll arrive at home. I just sit in the car and I'll weep. I'll just sit there like, that was such a touching story and I need to recalibrate a little bit here before I go into the house.

People are like, what happened? Who took your lunch? You know? And so those are easy programs and you can listen to them. Mm-hmm. And you can enjoy them while you're working at the gym. If you're cooking dinner, if you're, you're cleaning the garage, you can enjoy this. And that's what I do now. One of the things I miss very much about commuting to work, 'cause mostly I just work at home now, is I don't have a need to listen to programs anymore.

So I have to make time. To be able to listen to these things. I'm telling you right now, if you don't listen to a podcasts or you're filling your brain with a lot of junk, listen to these two highly produced, well put together programs that have been around for years, if not decades. Radio labs one, the other one's the month, radio hour.

So I would listen [00:48:00] to those two, two things. The answer to that is a little bit harder. Like what I'm really into is I find that to, to kind of bring our conversation to bookend. The whole thing about personal brand is that as I've. I've grown in my reach, my presence. I'm asked to be parts of conversations that I never thought I'd be part of.

So I'm invited to have back room meetings, sit at a table at dinner or lunch, or people invite me to speak to their community, and I get to meet really wonderful people that previously I could only admire from afar. So I'm really just enjoying this thing of like, I have no idea what's gonna happen next.

I'm gonna be in front of somebody and they have lots to share. So I just wanna, I wanna be a student. I wanna put down my teaching cap and put on my student cap and just listen and learn at the feet of giants, because then I'm richer for it. And I feel like I have an obligation to everyone who listens to me to be the learning machine that I can be, because then I take those nuggets of wisdom, I run right back and I share with the people like, look, I found bread.

I found milk. I found [00:49:00] honey. Please fill your bellies. And let's sing songs and we'll, we'll, we'll have a good time.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I love that. And as somebody who always watches all of your interviews online, and there's a lot, well, thank you very much. Well, while I'm cooking or while I'm grocery shopping or while I go for a walk, whatever it is, uh, I always love your pearls of wisdom and I always find you really insightful when it comes to the way that we think about things.

So I so appreciate you being on the podcast and having this conversation, and you've gotten me thinking. In a different way today as well.

Speaker 3: I have a weird question to ask. You probably edit this part out.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: If you consume a lot of content, do I ever slip into your subconscious?

Speaker 2: That's my subconscious, Chris.

I don't know.

Speaker 3: You don't know. Okay. Because you know why years ago pre pandemic, so you know this years ago now? Mm. I was having a meeting with somebody and they're the owner of like a really well-respected, large design firm that does a lot of entertainment packaging in Santa Monica. I don't know what we're talking about.

I don't even know why we're having the meeting, but we're having a meeting, we're [00:50:00] chatting a little bit, and he's an older gentleman and he said to me, Chris, my wife and I sleep with you every night. I'm like, what? He's like, okay, hold on. Context. I'm like, yes, please don't do the dramatic pods. At the end of that statement, I'm like, have I been abducted?

I don't know what's going on here. He goes, no, no. What we, what we love to do is we'll slip into bed. It's our nighttime routine, and we'll put the channel or the pod on, and we'll just listen to you and we'll, we'll fall asleep to you, and every once in a while you slip into our subconscious and people tell me that now, like, I had a dream about you, or I was having a meeting with somebody and I said something.

And I, I was taken aback like, wait, that's not from my mouth hole. That's from Chris saying that in my brain saying, say this at this point. And so it's wild that with content with media, we can have this really asymmetrical relationship with people. That's something that you say that may not have that much meaning to you in that moment can hit somebody really hard because of the way they're listening to it.

Mm-hmm. I, I wanna respect the power of the medium right now.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I even think the taste thing, like, I feel like I've heard you say that a few times, but I'm like, was it you that said it or was it somebody else? I know that. [00:51:00] I've heard it several times, so I think that, yeah, you're like, I about to say you are the Matthew McConaughey of the entrepreneurial space because

Speaker 3: Well, if people are going to sleep, so what are we talking about?

You guys have a freaking magical voice I have to say, because you listen. I'm like, all right, I'm, I'm at chill level zero right now. I'm good. Take me home, baby. Yes, that's, I think it's a huge co. Chris, you've obviously

Speaker 4: got the dult tones. That people are falling asleep too.

Speaker 3: Something. You know what, and I, I wanna say it just in case.

This is the first contact somebody's had with my dulcet tones, quote unquote, or my personality, which is for the longest time I could not stand looking at myself. And you'll see from time to time, I don't even make eye contact with you because I can see myself in the camera right now. And so I'm like, I'm averting my eyes.

But even listening to myself was just so cringe for me for a long time. Yeah, I think it took, I wanna say like over two years before I could listen to myself. And I remember my [00:52:00] mentor at that time, my former business partner, Jose, we're editing clips. I'm like, dude, how do you do this? I go, you kidding me?

I love listening to myself. I'm like, you're so gross, dude. That is so gross. And now, every once in a while when I'm doing quality control, you know, when I'm playing back an episode, I'm like. Somebody asked me like, so what'd you mean in, uh, minute 14, five seconds in? I'm like, oh, fudge. I didn't even remember what episode is that, that was recorded like a year ago.

So I go and listen to it and then I'm laughing at myself now. I'm like, dude, you gotta chill out with those jokes, you know, like, that's too much. And my wife will walk in the room and she'll look at me, I'll look at her and it's like very awkward. Like she caught me masturbating or something. I'm like, no, it's quality control, babe.

It was for a science project. It, I swear to you, it's not what it looks like. I'm just listening. I'm just listening. That's all funny.

Speaker 2: It could be an introvert and an extrovert thing. I've never had any thoughts about my voice. Um, I, I just have, I, but I've also, I've been a speaker since I was 16, so I was on the debate team a

Speaker 4: little different.

Speaker 2: So I don't know, maybe it's just like you life out. Yeah. Yeah. You get used to it. But I've got a lot of [00:53:00] clients where they're just like, I cannot stand the sound of my own voice or, or looking at myself. So the fact that it took you two years, I think it's like Yeah. It's just something you've gotta kind of get used to.

Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. And if you can stomach it, it'll be okay. And you know, for me, in case somebody's listening to this and they're pointing at the radio or at the speaker or their TV screen right now, and they're like, wow, that's me. That's me. How'd to get over this? And I'll tell you exactly how it happened. I can't watch my own video.

So I'm like. Honey, can you take a look at this? She goes, why? I can't, I can't watch it. And it occurred to me that I don't actually sound like that. She goes, what do you mean? I'm like, it doesn't sound like me, does it? So I I, I hand her my phone, I hit play and I walk away and my wife's like, she's my wife.

You know? She's like, whatever, stupid. This is just like you. I'm like, you're just saying it 'cause you wanna get rid of me 'cause I'm annoying. I get that. It's like an old married thing. So my, my children are much younger back then. I, I think they're only like eight or 10 or something like that. I'm like, boy's voice, come over here.

Dad's got a big favorite to ask of you. Like, yeah, dad. I'm like, okay. I know games are important to you, but I need you to listen to me for one second. I want you to listen to this clip. And then I'm gonna come [00:54:00] back. I'm gonna ask you a question. And so they listen to it for a few seconds and I come back.

I'm like, okay, does that person sound like me? Like, yeah, bye. And they just leave. I'm like, okay. So if my wife says that's me, and both my children say it's me and children do not lie. Maybe your partner might lie to you kindly, you know, lie to you, but your children will not lie to you. They'll like, you gotta booger in your face.

I'm like, oh, okay, cool. You know, so hard time reconciling that. So if I hate me, but if all the world knows me as the way they hear me. And they're okay with it. I'm gonna have to be okay with it. I'm probably the one person that hates me the most right now, whereas they're just okay with me. And so in that way, my children have taught me a lot about self-acceptance.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I always say to my clients, just focus on the value, not the vanity. So focus on the person that you're speaking to, the message that you're giving. Mm-hmm. Like what it is that you are here to do. And I know that that's probably easier said than done, but I'm just like, when you focus on [00:55:00] them and not on how do I sound?

Well, how do I look? What are they thinking about me? All of that, then I think that it becomes easier. It's not that to say that it's easy from day day one, I. Couple of things I say to my clients, value over vanity, wherever possible, and just practice imperfection every day. Like don't expect things to be exactly the way that you think that they should be.

The more you do it, the better you get.

Speaker 3: Yeah. But lemme ask you this question. True or false? When you look good, you feel good? A hundred percent. Okay. When you sound good, you feel good?

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: So in our mind, if we don't sound good, we don't feel good. And in our mind, if we don't look good. We don't feel good.

And so there are little tricks, right? Like I always tell people, uh, I used to do this a lot 'cause I would stay up all night, just all night preparing for presentation. But you know what, if I got a crisp shirt on and a nice tie and I feel like put together, even though in my mind I'm like, I'm barely got my eyes open right now.

They can't see that and most times they cannot see it. It's 'cause you wear your fatigue and the just not on your body, but you, you [00:56:00] wear it in the clothes and we can tell. So every time I would go to class or present, I just felt sharp. Yeah. 'cause I look sharp in my mind. I'm like, I'm a, I'm a mess right now.

I'm barely holding it together. I'm running on fumes. And I just gotta get through the presentation and I, I can do that. And so I think if we can learn to love ourselves even in the vanity, because it's human nature. Yeah. I accept the human nature part of it, the insecurity, the inferiority complex that we all have.

And if we can learn to use our instrument to learn, to speak, to learn, to breathe, to learn how to play our instrument, our voice, and how to control it, and how to bring energy and emotion. Because what we're transmitting is more than sound, it's energy. We give ourselves the best shot of liking ourselves.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I always say that. Building a personal brand externally. Building that brand is a huge lesson in self-love because you've gotta, you've gotta be okay with yourself. If you're going to be like, I'm gonna put myself on stages, I'm gonna put myself on podcasts, I'm gonna put myself out there and I have to, I have to build that self-love so that I love the way I look.

I [00:57:00] love the way that I sound, even if it's not. Exactly the way that I want. It's just like how brave, I always say, how brave was I to go and do that, even though it didn't turn out the way that I wanted, even though it didn't look or sound the way like I see her and how brave she was in that moment to do that.

Like that's, that's the practice that I think is important when you're building a brand externally. Yeah, so good. Chris could talk to you all day, but you got things to do and places to go and people would just say, no doubt.

Speaker 3: I have something to do. Yes. Who knows.

Speaker 2: Really appreciate you and thanks for everything that you share and give and, and yeah, so good. Thanks for having me. It was a real pleasure. Yeah, my

Speaker 4: pleasure. Thanks Chris.