Can AI Write Your Personal Brand? with Mark Schaefer

How this transcript was made

Transcribed by machine from the published audio, then corrected by hand. It is not a verbatim record: the changes below were made, and are counted.

This episode

84 speaker turns, 90 changes.

• opening voiceover replaced with the authored script (match 97%) and attributed to Max
• closing CTA identified as CTA 3 - Resources (match 99%), replaced with the authored script and attributed to Max; the 70 words spoken before it stayed with Mark Schaefer rather than being swallowed by the substitution

What was changed in these transcripts, and what was not

Generated: 2026-09-20 from 2026-09-20-named/, itself transcribed from the audio that is live on the feed. Every change below is mechanical and counted. No sentence was reworded, no claim altered, nothing removed for being awkward.

The editorial decision

Owner's choice, 2026-09-20: light clean. "Um", "uh" and stammered word repeats ("and, and") are removed, because nobody intends to say them. "You know", "I mean", "kind of" and "sort of" are KEPT - they run to roughly 2,300 instances across the catalogue and stripping them would make the page read as somebody else.

Counts across the whole set

Change	Count
stammered repeat removed	667
um / uh removed	654
space before punctuation	241
split contraction	132
guest turn named (Joe Casabona)	101
organization -> organisation	71
diarisation fragment returned to the host	62
ai -> AI	57
empty turn dropped (was filler only)	36
synthetic outro restored from script	21
organizations -> organisations	18
hyphen followed by space	14
realize -> realise	14
A.I. -> AI	10
recognized -> recognised	9
gray -> grey	9
summarize -> summarise	9
color -> colour	9
behavior -> behaviour	8
synthetic intro restored from script	8
analyze -> analyse	7
behavioral -> behavioural	7
recognize -> recognise	6
percent -> %	5
personalized -> personalised	5
skeptical -> sceptical	5
analyzing -> analysing	5
center -> centre	5
optimization -> optimisation	4
realized -> realised	4
favorite -> favourite	4
realizing -> realising	4
canceled -> cancelled	4
recognizing -> recognising	4
announcer turn relabelled from Guest	4
summarizing -> summarising	4
labor -> labour	4
behaviors -> behaviours	4
colors -> colours	4
organizational -> organisational	4
customized -> customised	3
analog -> analogue	3
optimize -> optimise	3
honor -> honour	2
optimizing -> optimising	2
summarizes -> summarises	2
personalize -> personalise	1
prioritize -> prioritise	1
prioritized -> prioritised	1
organize -> organise	1
rumor -> rumour	1
organized -> organised	1
capitalize -> capitalise	1
centered -> centred	1
organizes -> organises	1
emphasize -> emphasise	1
split name repaired (Schaefer)	1
humor -> humour	1
traveling -> travelling	1
defense -> defence	1
maximize -> maximise	1
Organizations -> Organisations	1
apologize -> apologise	1
digitized -> digitised	1
monetize -> monetise	1
analyzed -> analysed	1
narrator opener re-attributed to Max, words left as transcribed	1
theater -> theatre	1
specialized -> specialised	1
split name repaired (Wadsworth)	1
aluminum -> aluminium	1
specializes -> specialises	1
skeptic -> sceptic	1
customize -> customise	1
personalization -> personalisation	1
optimized -> optimised	1
visualize -> visualise	1
spoken domain -> humanspark.ai	0

What was deliberately left alone

• "Program". A computer program keeps that spelling in UK English; only a broadcast or a scheme is a "programme", and only a reader can tell which was meant.
• "License" and "practice". Both have a noun/verb spelling split in UK English that a rule cannot decide.
• Capitalised words mid-sentence that would otherwise have been respelled: 4 of them, most often part of a name. Left as spoken.
• Retired show and brand names. Spoken by the host and guests. A transcript that removes what was said is not a transcript.
• "Co-pilot". Sometimes Microsoft's product, sometimes the metaphor. A rule would corrupt the honest ones.

The synthetic segments

The opening voiceover on the archive episodes and the closing call to action are read by Max, the show's AI narrator, from a script written in advance. Transcribing them means guessing at words already on file, and the guesses were wrong in places - one opener came back as "an AI that boned him up" where the script says "phoned him up". Those passages carry the authored text instead, and are attributed to Max rather than to the guest: the diariser groups Max with the non-host speaker, which would otherwise put a real person's name on words they never said.

MaxYou're listening to Something About AI. Early on, Mark Schaefer admits a failure: he threw every AI tool he had at his last book, and the result, in his own words, was a complete flop.

Most of what follows is him working out exactly where the line sits.

He calls it the Milli Vanilli line, and he is unusually specific about which side of it he puts a grammar checker, a ghostwriter, and a synthetic voice narrating his own audiobook.

The original opening has been trimmed, because the show carried a different name then. Here's the conversation.

Alastair McDermottI'm going to be speaking with a true thought leader in marketing. He is an expert in personal branding, marketing strategy. He's a keynote speaker.

He is an educator, a true bestselling author in the real sense of many books, all of which I have.

And he's somebody who I'm really delighted to kind of dig into this concept of this inherent contradiction of authenticity and personal brand and using AI as a thought leader.

And today, I'm delighted to say that my guest is Mark Schaefer. Mark, you're very welcome. It's so great to talk to you again.

Mark SchaeferYeah, I loved your little intro video. That's impressive. It's beautiful. Nicely done.

Alastair McDermottThanks. And this, you know, everything that you saw and heard there was created with AI in one morning.

And I think that kind of cuts straight to the power of the, you know, the flexibility and the power of these tools, helping us to create content. And that's really what we're talking about

Mark SchaeferHere today.

Alastair McDermottYou are an expert in personal branding and marketing strategy. And I think it's fair to say that authenticity is probably one of the pillars of personal branding.

And I'm really interested to dig into how you think about AI when it comes to using AI for things like helping us to write and create as thought leaders.

Mark SchaeferYeah. Well, it's just, it's such a remarkable and interesting subject and something that I've been thinking about a lot.

And the first thing that comes to mind is a few years ago, I got to interview Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson is the great author.

He just wrote the Elon Musk book, but he's written books on geniuses. And he did Einstein and Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. And I got to sit down and talk to him one time.

I said, what makes a genius? He said two things. He said, one is insatiable curiosity. And number two, an ability to connect the dots in a new way.

So I think you could sort of like put that same characteristic onto thought leadership. And so now we have sort of a framework to think about, okay, how does that apply to AI?

AI can certainly help with the curiosity part. This is how I use AI all the time. The one I've been using mostly, I use perplexity a lot.

Now they're starting to show ads, so I'm not sure where I'm going to go with that. But I've been using Claude 3 to help with research. And I spend a lot of my time alone.

I have an office in the woods. And unless I'm travelling, I spend a lot of time thinking and writing alone.

So Claude 3 and other AI tools have been my companion to help bounce ideas and help me with this exploration. Now, let's talk about connecting the dots part. I've been working on a new book.

And this is a revision of an older book I wrote in 2014 called Social Media Explained. I did a second revision in 2018. And my publisher thought, well, it's time to do it again.

And of course, in the AI world, it's all new. Now, when I write a book, it takes everything out of me. It is a completely exhausting process.

Literally, even physically, I'm ill by the time I'm done with this book because I've become so obsessed. Now, I'm in this age of AI.

So I thought, look, there's got to be a better way that I can write a book in a more efficient way. I'm going to embrace every tool I can to help me write this book. And I did.

And the result was a complete flop. Interesting. Because it wasn't connecting the dots. Because the way AI works, at least now, is you put in a query or you give it a challenge.

And it's like a puppy dog. It wants to please you.

It goes out, it scurries, and it looks at all the millions of data points and everything that's happened in the past and comes up with the most probable way to please you.

So it's coming up with this best average answer of the past. And that makes for a lousy book. If you want the best average of the past, just go to Google. That's what that is for.

A book, and I think thought leadership, is about connecting the dots in your way that leverages your history, your experience,

your perspective, your education, your connection, where you've been, what you've done, who you know. And it's my stories.

You know, it's applying an idea and saying, well, this is what this means to me. This is how I interpret this. It's, you know, a great book is about revelations. A revelation is a lesson.

It's something I learned. It's something I want to teach you. Because, look, I went through this. And I don't want you to go through this. Or I had this victory.

And I hope you have this victory. Or, you know, it's just like you know, starting out saying, okay, you know, let's connect the dots between AI and thought leadership. It's very complicated.

I'm giving you a very personal answer, which is unique based on, and we'll continue to talk about this, I'm sure, just revelations I had.

This is the, I'm talking about a revelation I had while writing this book. It wasn't me. It wasn't, it wasn't my stories. It wasn't my humour. It was just bland and awful.

And it, so it didn't work. I was able to use it for some research. I was able to use it to fill in the blanks sometimes.

Like maybe I'll say, oh, well, to do this, you need to do these five things. Maybe ChatGPT found a six or seven thing I needed to add. But really, the book is me. It had to be.

And I think my lesson, Alastair, in this example, is that I still matter. Is at least right now, even in this AI drenched world we're in, you know, I still matter.

Alastair McDermottIf you see me looking down, I'm furiously taking notes because there's so much in what you just said there that I

Mark SchaeferWant to dig into.

Alastair McDermottI think one of the key points here you're talking about is the personal stories and the uniqueness that each of us has as an individual.

I think that's really important, that that's something that AI cannot currently create.

The other thing is there is an interesting process that goes on in the brain when we write that actually helps us to think.

So writing and editing our own work actually helps us with our thinking process. I think that's one of the most important reasons. I think that's one of the most important reasons we should

Mark SchaeferWrite. And then writing also, it also teaches us. So, you know, if I if I answer a question for you know, a week or a month later, I might not remember it. I might not think about it.

But when you're when you're when you're writing, you're sort of creating your legacy.

And especially if you're writing for the public, you're writing a blog post, if you're writing a book, if you're giving a speech. And so it forces you to internalize it.

You know, it forces you to really understand it. So when I write a book, it's like getting a master's degree. It takes me two years of research and writing to complete a book.

That's like a master's degree. I like my my my latest book is on brand communities. When I started, I was not an expert in brand communities. I had a thesis. I had a framework. I had ideas.

But then I spent two years getting it right. And now I am an expert on brand communities because I wrote this book. So and now it's it's an it's something I can help people with.

It's something I can teach people. It's something I can consult with. Right. So it created writing the process of writing creates a new competency.

Alastair McDermottThat's a wonderful way of articulating that this this whole

Mark SchaeferConcept.

Alastair McDermottI think this is one of the most I think there's one of the strongest arguments for continuing to write yourself. But there are some things that it is great for.

And you mentioned some of those like research and brainstorming and the ideation. Like you mentioned, like you've got a list of five things. What's six and seven that I might have forgotten.

How do you feel about using AI to help you brainstorm when you're supposed to be the expert, when you're supposed to be the thought leader and you're claiming credit for

Mark SchaeferWriting something?

Alastair McDermottBut I actually came up with two of those seven things. How do you feel about that?

Mark SchaeferYou know, I think we're still trying to figure that out. You know, in the analogy that I use is we had the same arguments in the 1980s when we started to use calculators.

We started to use calculators. And in school, they said, that's cheating. You can't use a calculator. That's cheating. You need to declare that you're using a calculator.

You know, you have to learn how to do long-form math. Now, I probably haven't done long-form math in 40 years, and I'm perfectly happy about that. The automation of math is in everything.

It's in e-commerce. It's, you know, it's in the program we use to do our taxes, right? And so it surrounds us like the air that we breathe. We don't feel like we're cheating.

We don't feel like we need to declare something. And this is what's going to happen with AI. And it's becoming embedded, you know, in everything.

Innovation is basically applying a layer of AI to all of our tasks. Now, what's the line where you cheat?

You know, so I wrote a blog post about this, about, like, when do you cross the Milli Vanilli line?

You know, when are you getting, you know, what's the, you know, if you use auto-tuning when you sing a song, everybody embraces that.

A lot of people sort of accept that if you see a performer, you know, at a parade or a festival, maybe they'll be lip syncing their own song because of,

you know, the environment or the technology or something. But you still embrace that.

But at some point, you become Milli Vanilli, where you're not just getting an assist, you're an outright fake. And I think that line, we're still sort of navigating that.

It hasn't really been an issue for me because I'm a, I guess, you know, fairly prolific writer. At least I blog every week. And for me, it's, I just have so many ideas.

I want to get out into the world that is faster and more efficient for me just to write my ideas than to use ChatGPT.

And so on my blog posts, at least when I remember to do it, I put a little badge that says 100% human content just to assure people this is me.

You know, I didn't, you know, I didn't use anything else. I want to assure you that, you know, these are my own ideas. So for me, it really hasn't been an issue.

You know, I guess at some point, if I would use AI as an assist, you know, I might declare that. The one place where I did use AI is in the new, this new book that I wrote.

It's Social Media Explained 3.0. It's the third edition of the book. I didn't use AI in the book, but I used AI voice synthesis to narrate the book.

I believe this might be the first voice synthesis narrated business book. I don't know, absolutely, but it's definitely one of the first, if not the first.

I trained, you know, 11 labs on my voice. I sent it to my traditional audio editor for the audio book. She said, wow, this is really, you know, pretty amazing. It's pretty great.

I had to record a few things where it, you know, where it stumbled. There were some times in the audio narration where it suddenly would change to a different language inexplicably.

So I had to do those parts over. But I declared that, you know, I declared it in the audio book. I declared that even in the paper book, explained that I used it that way.

I'm working on a new book for 2025. One of the ways AI has helped me with this book is to discover examples and case studies.

That can be very time-consuming work to come up with good case studies. So I might ask for an example of something in business.

It might give me 10 ideas, and maybe there's like one I can use.

Now, I still have to research and write that case study, but at least it, you know, did the detective work, kind of led me down the right path. Do I declare that? I don't know.

I haven't thought about it yet. So I think we're still kind of navigating. But my goal is to be, you know, transparent about it. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottLike, it's interesting, the example you gave of having to declare that you were using a calculator.

I mean, I would be horrified, for example, if my accountant, if I discovered that my accountant wasn't using spreadshe ets and accounting software, you know.

Mark SchaeferThere's no difference. There really.

Alastair McDermottThere, you know, I think the thing is claiming credit. Like, when do we, you know, claim credit?

Mark SchaeferBecause we put our name on the outside.

Alastair McDermottNow, for the audience, like, Mark, I think you've published 12 books so far or so around that. And you've written, you know, thousands, probably, blog posts.

But your name is on the outside of every one of your books. And so do we now, like, if we use AI, so, for example, we can use AI to do spelling and grammar checks, right?

Very simple, and replace it.

Mark SchaeferGreat example. Great example. That's AI. We can also ask it to bridge between two sections that we

Alastair McDermottHave difficulty bridging between two concepts. I don't know how to get from there to here, but I know they

Mark Schaefer're related.

Alastair McDermottCan you give me some suggestions on how to do that?

Mark SchaeferYeah.

Alastair McDermottNow, that's kind of, that's a little bit more advanced.

Mark SchaeferYeah.

Alastair McDermottAnd then we can also do things like, for example, I quite often narrate and record while I'm driving on a topic. And then I will take that and put that into AI.

And I'll say, can you reward this as a blog post?

Mark SchaeferOh, nice.

Alastair McDermottNow, what that's doing is it's taking my original thinking.

Mark SchaeferYeah.

Alastair McDermottBut it's actually doing the writing. Like, it's changing the wording to make me sound better, to make me sound more articulate, to make it flow better from place to place.

Mark SchaeferYeah.

Alastair McDermottAnd maybe even to make it more popular in terms of how well that blog post might do for search engine optimisation or for a social media audience.

And so every step down that road we go, I feel like, you know, do we declare this? Do we say, like, was that me that wrote that? Do I say that I wrote this?

Am I claiming that I wrote it if my name is on the outside of the book? I think that's the bit that we have yet to figure out.

And I think that in the case of thought leadership, because we are thought leaders and we are hired for our thinking. We're hired for our suggestions.

And then when we think about this concept of authenticity, like, we need people to trust us and to trust our thinking.

And if they're not sure if we wrote something, if our potential clients aren't sure if we wrote it, you know, that's where this gets into fraught territory for me,

where, like, I'm not sure where we're going with this, which is why I love bringing people like you on to chat about it.

Mark SchaeferYeah.

Alastair McDermottWhat do you think about all that?

Mark SchaeferWell, you know, again, so again, I think we still are figuring this out.

But the analogy that kind of comes to my mind is I have a friend who is literally one of the most brilliant men I've ever known. He is just one of the greatest visionaries.

He's a great thought leader. And by his own admission, he cannot write his way out of a paperback. I mean, he is just, it's just something about his brain.

He just doesn't think in that way where he can really construct sentences in a good linear fashion.

And so using something like AI can help unleash a new level of productivity and creativity for him. And it's almost like he's still driving the car.

Now, you might have things on the car that help you navigate. You might have things on the car, you know, to help keep you in the lane and to help get you to the destination in a safe way.

Do you need to declare that if you're still driving the car? You know, in the case of my friend, who is this really just a genius, he's driving the car. These are his ideas.

These are his vision. And if he can have some AI assist to keep him in the lane so that he can explain it even better, you know, I just think that's amazing.

And maybe it gets down at the end of the day to, you know, a value system or, you know, what you feel, right, you know, ethically sort of declaring.

I mean, I sort of just in my business, I just have this kind of like lily white approach to ethics where I don't want to do anything that even could look,

could even appear like it's unethical. And so, you know, I'll declare anything and everything so that people know that this is really me and this is really how I stand on something.

But other people might be different.

You know, in the case of my friend, which I think is sort of similar to, you know, what you're trying to tease out of me, he's driving the car, he's getting an AI assist.

I think that's a wonderful way to, you know, help him with really a deficiency in his skill set that's, you know, not, it's almost like a disability in a way, right?

It's not really his fault, no matter how much he tries. You know, he can't write as good as me. AI can help him get there. That is amazing.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I agree with that. And I guess that, you know, to take the example of your friend, like one thing that we have had in publishing forever is we've had ghostwriters.

And we've had editors who go in and effectively almost

Mark SchaeferRewrite.

Alastair McDermottLike, it's very typical for a sports person to have a column in the weekly newspaper.

But that column is actually written by a journalist who gets on the phone with the sports person and interviews them and then basically writes it up from the first person point of view.

And that's not genuine or authentic in the sense that it's not literal. But we all know, like, we know that those thoughts are actually the thoughts of the person whose name is at the

Mark SchaeferTop.

Alastair McDermottWhen we have a book that's ghostwritten, we know that the person, you know, like somebody like Richard Branson or someone like that, you know, their autobiography was probably ghostwritten.

Almost certainly, you know, and that's just taken for granted. And so if we're using these tools, is it just the equivalent of that? Is it just the equivalent of hiring a professional ghost

Mark SchaeferWriter? Yeah. I mean, I think, again, there are different standards on that because some people will write a book and it might say, you know, Mark Schaefer with somebody, right?

That with is the person that helped me write the book or whatever. But, you know, you're right. It's just like, you know, being a speechwriter for a politician.

The politician gives the speech. That is their speech. There's no other attribution and nobody even really cares.

So I think those are meaningful analogies in terms of, you know, the AI assist.

Alastair McDermottAnd that's a super analogy, actually, because I think that everybody knows and accepts that the politician certainly did not write that speech.

In fact, you know, it's it's and probably would not claim to have written it either.

Mark SchaeferYeah. And usually maybe we would not even want them to write that speech.

Alastair McDermottYeah. So then the other issue then is if if we do do some sort of acknowledgement and I was talking to Jonathan Stark about this last week where when you upload a book to KDP now.

So, first of all, Amazon KDP, they now limit you to a mere three books a day in terms of publishing because people were abusing that by publishing 30,

40, 50 books a day, which you can imagine what the quality of those is going to be like. But one of the questions that it asks you is, did you use

Mark SchaeferAI assistance?

Alastair McDermottNow, we don't know what they do with your book if you tick yes.

Mark SchaeferSo, yeah, I just went I just went through that. Like I said, the third edition of this new book, literally, it went live like two days ago. Yeah.

And so and I self-published through KDP and I said, oh, what does this mean? And I could, you know, very, you know, ethically say, no, I didn't use AI. But what is the implication?

I don't know. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottDo we get penalized in the algorithm if we admit to using AI, you know, and then there's the intellectual property issues of,

well, if the AI was trained on somebody's private, somebody's, somebody's proprietary data and copyrighted materials without permission.

And then I use that, even if it didn't end up, you know, ch aining any of the same words together.

My new book could now be a, you know, could now be compromised in some way, you know, in terms of copyright.

And then the other thing is with the U.S. rulings, and it's not the same here in Europe at the moment, but the U.S. rul ings that AI generated content isn't protected by copyright.

Like, does that, if I give it a blog post that I've written by hand and then ask it to, you know, correct spelling and grammar, does that now apply?

You know, does the output, which just has spelling and grammar corrected, is that now no longer protected by

Mark SchaeferCopyright?

Alastair McDermottThere's all of those IP issues as well. So, really, there's so many different issues here. I think it's fascinating and so problematic.

Mark SchaeferI think this is actually going to be resolved. And I think it could be resolved by the end of this year. And here's why.

So, going back to, I mentioned Walter Isaacson wrote the Leonardo da Vinci book, which is a beautiful book. Lovely book.

And so, I read this book and learned that almost all of, I mean, da Vinci is arguably the most creative person who's ever lived. And almost all of his creativity was a collaboration.

So, I mean, even in his early days, when he was learning painting, he would go to a friend and say, hey, you know what? You're really good at animals. Could you come over and do this animal?

His most famous drawing, the Vitruvian man, which is the human body circumscribed with a circle. You know, he was a popular guy. He loved to have people around him.

And a friend of him said, you know, I was looking at these ancient manuscripts from Rome. And there was this guy named Vitruvius. And he had this idea. And so, they're talking about it.

And then another guy said, yeah, it would probably go like this. They kind of drew a little drawing. You know, I said, oh, that's really interesting. Let me take a look at that.

And then he went back and found the original Vitruvian manuscripts and eventually drew his own drawing, which is beautiful and elegant in its own way.

But there were four different people involved in that drawing. So, all art is iteration. I mean, everything I write somewhere in my brain, it's an iteration. It's building on something.

And we have to acknowledge that, I think it was Picasso that said, you know, good art is borrowing, great art is stealing. And art builds and builds and builds and builds.

There's no way around it. Now, you can go to sites today and find photographs and different resources that you can use that are license-free.

So, why can't we create art and photos and text passages that are verified, content, copyright, okay, license, you know, license-free.

You know, you said yourself, you know, the way these models work is they scramble up these words based on some algorithm. You know, is there any way really to tell?

Is there a way you can scramble the pixels and scramble the words so much that, you know, it passes some test to say, look, this is just an iteration of the world. It's, you know, it's okay.

You know, there's got to be, someone's got to come up with an AI site that, like, scrambles it so much that it's, you know, that you're going to be fine, you know, to use it.

Or, you know, another idea I had, which I'm going to be writing about, is, so, you know, you're creating content. You know, I'm creating content.

We have all these writers out there who've done thousands and thousands and thousands of blog posts and books. What if we said, go ahead and use it? We're a guild.

You pay us a monthly fee and you can use all our content. We don't care where it goes. I would be perfectly happy with that. 100% happy with that.

So, I do think there's got to be some solution. There's money to be made here. So, I do think that there will be a solution. I think even by the end of the year. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottYeah.

Mark SchaeferI think you're right.

Alastair McDermottI think they're, that, one thing I think that they are doing now is they're getting a lot more careful about what data sets that they are training these models on.

And they're starting to, you know, to license, they've, they've made licensing deals with some authors already about using particular works.

So, I think that that will be something that will be addressed, but it's still something that, you know, it's still something that I think about when I generate some text,

particularly if you ask it to write like somebody else. Like, for example, I don't know if your books are in there, but if your books were used in the training data, I could ask,

you know, I could ask, write a blog post on this topic as if Mark Schaefer wrote it, you know, and that.

Mark SchaeferI don't know if my books are in there, but my blog posts certainly are. Your blog posts certainly are.

Alastair McDermottYeah, so, you know, it'll do a good job of, you know, cloning your voice in text and trying to clone your ideas.

Now, usually what it ends up doing is doing it in a very cliched kind of stereotyped way, which as somebody Irish, it's unfortunate because I can never ask for anything with Irish because it

goes into the top of the morning and big era kind of stuff, which is, you know, abhorrent to most of us from Ireland.

But, you know, the real Hollywood Irish, but, you know, it, when you can get it to write in a certain voice. So, I think it's going to be interesting to see where that develops.

The other thing I want to ask you about, cause like, to me, you are the personal branding guy. Like that's, that's the flag that you own in my head.

I don't know if that's the one you want, but I'm just really interested in knowing what you're thinking is in terms of how we build a personal brand and like,

is it now more important than ever? Like, what do you think about personal brand in the age of

Mark SchaeferAI? When ChatGPT, was announced, I tried it right away and was just blown away.

And I couldn't believe what I was seeing that we had artificial intelligence available to the public in a form that was easy as easy, as easy to use as Google.

So I called up a friend of mine. He's a very famous tech analyst, Shelly Palmer. I said, Shelly, you know, I got to know just, you know, what'd you think about this?

And he said, Mark, I'm absolutely terrified. He said, I have blogged nearly every day of my life for 15 years.

And I asked this thing to write a blog post about a certain, very specific subject in the voice of Shelly Palmer. And it did a perfect job in three seconds. I am 80% replaced.

Now on the surface, that does seem terrifying, but the more important question is what's the 20% that's not replaced. And that is the personal brand.

And as far as I know, this is the only defence we have. If you are known, if you are trusted, if you are beloved in your field, you're going to be okay.

Everybody's going to still read Shelly's blog. They're going to still hire Shelly to speak. He has nothing to worry about because he's known in his field. He's done the work.

I mean, I am immersed in AI. I'm studying AI, but I'm not really worried.

You know, I don't think people are going to unsubscribe to my blog because, you know, they're going to be reading AI instead.

I don't think people will not buy a book because they'd rather read an AI book instead.

People are, they're going to come to me because I'm known, because they trust me and they might even love me.

And especially, Alastair, in this world of deep fakes and just, you know, my head is actually spinning. I looked at some demos this morning about some things that AI can do.

It's just unbelievable how fast and how accurately these things can duplicate you, can duplicate your image and your voice and make a video of you doing anything,

saying anything at almost no cost, at almost no time. So, to be the person that the world will turn to in a certain area on a certain subject, that's more important than ever.

In fact, it's the only thing we've got left to defend our skill sets and our careers from AI.

Alastair McDermottDo you have any specific advice for people who want to do that, who want to build that personal brand?

Mark SchaeferStart now. I mean, because it takes time. It's, you know, it's not a hockey stick type of process. It's a slow and steady kind of process. So, you need to start now.

And I know I'm coming on here as the guest of your show. I appreciate it.

And, you know, I don't want to sell from the stage and be salesy, but I did write the bestselling book on the subject called Known.

As I look back at my career, I would say that at least so far, that's probably been my biggest contribution to the business world is that book.

Because every single week, somebody sends me a note and says, this book changed my life or changed my business. I did the work. I did the research. The process in the book really works.

I also teach a class through Maven on personal branding. It's, you know, six sessions over three weeks, plus two one -on-one sessions with me, which, you know, like failure is not an option.

We got to, you know, we got to do this. We got to, we got to get this right. So, I mean, follow the process in the book. It absolutely works.

It's helped hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people. And just start and don't give up. The biggest problem is people get disheartened. They give up too soon.

So, you've got to show up in the world and be consistent. Consistency is more important than genius.

Alastair McDermottThanks. And I, you know, you know, I was selling from the stage, but I have no problem with recommending that book and all of your books, in fact.

And I have them here somewhere, not to hand, but I have, I know that that known is probably near my desk somewhere.

Mark SchaeferIt's over my shoulder here, so. There you go.

Alastair McDermottMark, what about the future? Are you disheartened by what's happening with AI or are you positive? Are you cautious?

Mark SchaeferHow are you feeling about it? Well, I'm the same as everybody else. They say, hey, I'm super excited. I'm super terrified.

You know, I mean, we talked about writing and we talked about thought leadership. And, you know, the fact is that these systems are becoming better and better and better.

And at really a geometric kind of rate. And while I use this example of my friend who's a genius but can't write, that's wonderful for him.

But for someone like me, it's like now I'm competing with unearned talent, right? I mean, I've been honing my craft for, you know, almost 50 years.

I mean, I had my first writing job, paid writing job when I was 16 years old. And I studied and I had editors and I, you know, I suffered for my craft.

And now it's being replaced by anybody in many ways. It gets, you know, better and better. You know, I think I'm really worried about how it's going to replace entry-level jobs.

I mean, how did I get to be good at what I do today? I'm a consultant. I'm a teacher. I'm an author. It's because I had little jobs along the way and I had great bosses and great teachers.

And I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal that said kids coming out of college today have to be prepared to operate at like a middle manager position because a lot of the

entry-level jobs are going away. Well, how's that going to work? You know, how's that going to work? Just leave school and be ready to operate at a middle-level position.

So, you know, that's, you know, that's, you know, that's a concern.

And probably the biggest concern is just, you know, the deep fakes, which really could create an existential crisis for companies,

for companies, for governments, for security, and for us as individuals. You know, any of us could be copied, have our images, our likenesses hijacked for nefarious purposes.

And it's, it's, that's, that's going to be a tough part of our world from now on.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I agree with you. On the positive side, what are you really looking forward to? Is there anything that you think it's amazing?

Mark SchaeferI'm going to be able to do this.

Oh, you know, it's the thing that I'm really excited about is the part of my world that is most inefficient for me is this grey area between things I can absolutely delegate and

administrative work that I really can't, because it has to be me, right?

So let's say I'm going to be giving a speech in Ireland, and the sponsors of the speech say, hey, could you do a little, you know, do a little post for our magazine, right?

Well, I can't really delegate that. I mean, I can't really do that, you know, but could I get some help from AI?

You know, I'm like, I'm kind of excited about Microsoft co-pilot, you know, could this fill in the gaps to like, help me make my,

I mean, you know, when I create a speech, it's a very personal thing. I can't really delegate my slides, right?

It's my stories that I want to tell in a, in a certain way, you know, could co-pilot learn how to be me?

If they see how I create my slides and they know, you know, how I paste things and they know the fonts I use.

So, I mean, I haven't been using co-pilot yet because the earlier reviews have been kind of meh.

But that's, that is that the intersection, that grey area, if it could fill in that grey area for me, that would, that would change my life. Okay. I love it.

Alastair McDermottWe'll end on a positive note. Actually, I do have one other question because I know you're, you're kind of deep in

Mark SchaeferTesting things.

Alastair McDermottAre there any AI tools that you recommend that I go check out that I mightn't have

Mark SchaeferHeard of? Well, I really don't spend a lot of time testing things. I have, I'm lucky, I have a marketing community called Rise.

And in that community, we've got lots of people testing things. And then they'll say, this is the one we need to focus on. And so then I'll kind of, you know, go into that.

I use Midjourney for images. That is, it's really just become revolutionary of how good it is and how simple the prompts can be to create something, you know, quite stunning.

So I'm kind of a Midjourney sort of guy for now for, you know, I was using perplexity a lot because perplexity gives you the sources. So it's not this tangled up group of words.

It actually shows you this is where it's coming from. So, you know, as an author, I want to know, I want to go to those sources and I want to have links to those sources.

So perplexity has been really my go-to. As I said, I mentioned, you know, Claude 3, I find is doing a much better job with the flow of the writing I've been using.

BuzzSumo has a very interesting tool that will help you do a creative brief. So it doesn't write something for you, but I'll say, well, I want to write something on this topic.

And it'll say, well, if you're going to write something on this topic, here are the three subjects you should probably cover. And here are the most popular sources for those three subjects.

And so I've, I've tried that a few times and the blog posts have come out great because there's so much depth there in these resources that the brief is recommending.

And that just, you know, it saves me a lot of work and also assures a certain level of thoroughness that would save me a lot of time.

So, yeah, off the top of my head, those are the, those are the ones I've been, I've been using the most. Yeah. And, I agree.

Alastair McDermottLike perplexity has replaced Google for me. I do most of my searches first in perplexity and I love the sources and I particularly love Claude 3, the writing.

I use it if I do want to write something where I want to actually be able to use the text directly, then Claude is definitely my go-to, far superior to ChatGPT, in my opinion.

maybe that's just depending on writing style. You know, other people have told me that they prefer chat, what ChatGPT is producing.

the buzz, zoom, buzz, sumo, brief generator is the last one that you were talking

Mark SchaeferAbout there. That looks really interesting.

Alastair McDermottI have to check that out.

Mark SchaeferYeah, I think that might be behind a pay wall. I think by sumo, they might have a free version, but the, the brief generator is sort of in beta with them right now.

and, but it's, it's worked pretty well. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottWell, Mark, I've taken up enough of your time. Thank you so much for joining me.

you are the author of marketing rebellion, known, humans of advantage, the content code, social media explained the tower, Twitter, born to

Mark SchaeferBlog return on influence.

Alastair McDermottAnd what was the, what was the latest one?

Mark SchaeferBelonging to the brand. Why community is the last great marketing strategy. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottI think we can safely say that you are a thought leader. So thank you so much, Mark. Where can people find you if they want to learn more?

Mark SchaeferSuper easy. You don't have to remember my name or how to spell it. All you have to remember is businesses grow.

If you can remember businesses grow, businesses grow.com, then you can find me, my blog, my books, my podcast, all my social connections. I follow everybody back on LinkedIn.

so I would love to hear from your audience and keep in touch. Thanks so much, Mark.

MaxThanks for listening to Something About AI. Everything discussed here, and a good deal more, is backed up by free resources over at humanspark.ai. No cost, no catch.

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