Demystifying AI: Enhancing Creativity & Efficiency with Phil Pallen

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent to Doxa Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatant.com BillG. One more time. Docsatant.com Bill G Check it out. Today. Everybody's talking about AI. Everybody's pretending to be an AI expert out there. AI seems hot, seems important. Maybe you're already using it, maybe you feel like you should be using it more. Maybe you think it's the answer to everything. We're going to have somebody share some experience with how they're using AI for themselves and their clients, what makes a difference and bring some common sense to this. I obviously have some very strong feelings about the world of AI because of my family connection to one of the bigger companies and I think there's a lot of nonsense we're going to demystify and get to some really practical good things for you to think about. Everybody. This is the Scaling Up Business podcast and I'm your host, Bill Gallagher, scaling coach, host of the show. Our show comes to you every week, at least once a week, usually twice a week with an expert sharing some experience, a guru, an author, somebody in the world of scaling and growing a company. And it's going to show we have to for you today. There's over 570 episodes roughly now by the time you're hearing, seeing, watching, listening to this. And you'll find all those back shows which are super useful on every subject you could imagine about growing your company@scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, etc on and on SoundCloud, I don't think we're there too. So wherever you might go and get them, you'll find it. But if you go to scalingcoach.com you can also get our workshops, see about our coaching programs, tool downloads, our newsletter, that kind of thing. And@scalingcoach.com you also have a sign up for our bi weekly newsletter. We send out updates, thoughts, things like that about growing your company. That's super useful. So go subscribe to that there and scalingcoach.com all right, I'm joined by now by Phil Pallon. Phil is a branding expert. He's been a podcast host, he's got a great YouTube channel, and he's helped many, many brands, especially focused on the personal branding side of things. And he's become a passionate advocate and user of AI tools for his business and his clients. And so I'm excited to have him talk about what's he actually doing, what's the utility. I find a lot of people selling hype of things that don't really work very well. So welcome to show Phil Pal.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm also looking forward to this chat.

So you've got thousands and thousands, I don't know, 60 plus thousand subscribers on YouTube. How long have you been running that? How have you built this that into a success?

So it started as a hobby, right before the pandemic. I sent a tutorial video to one of my clients that we had just launched her website, and the video was teaching her how to update her blog. And she replied to me, she said, phil, this was so engaging and entertaining to watch. Why don't you post videos like this on YouTube? And I thought that's probably advice I'd give someone else. And yet why do I need to hear it from someone else to actually implement it myself? And so I decided I like making videos. I like teaching people about cool things. Comes more naturally to me than like having to sit and write something not my favorite. So I committed to posting a video every week on YouTube. It started with branding and marketing, and it's quickly evolved. I still touch on those topics, but AI, as you said at the top of the show, is a hot topic where people are equally delighted and confused and scared and. And so it's something that I've just naturally started to talk more about in the last two years.

It's interesting and how things evolve. You know, I started this show because I was debating whether I should write a book or do a blog or do both. And my. I had a. This. I was in a peer group called a forum, and my forum mate had a popular show that built. That grew the rest of his business. He's like, bill, you have a background in radio. Why don't you just create a show like you. You could do a show easier than you could angst over all the rest of this stuff. And so I started thinking about what format. And he said one other thing to me, though. He said, make sure, you do it in a sustainable way, that if you set it up, you do it. You can do it so that you'll keep doing it, not get 20 episodes out and then quit it. And so obviously we took that to heart and we've done a pretty good job of keeping the show alive over some time, I would say.

So.

It's interesting how saying yes to things and leaning into what feels natural, what feels right, is definitely a path to not everything that's going to work, but certainly having more fun in the process of figuring out what works and what.

I agree with your friend that the most sustainable content strategy is content that fulfills you. I think there's. I would even push it a little further and say the most sustainable content strategy is selfish. Being selfish. So, yeah, it's great if someone listening to the podcast benefits from it, but that's not really why you create it. As a result of you having a podcast, you and I now know each other. You emailing me, saying, hey, Phil, I found you online. I'd love to pick your brain. I'd love to, you know, have a virtual coffee. I'm probably not going to reply to you. And yet you sent an email to me, hey, I'd love to have you on my podcast. You made it about me, and it's all of a sudden my top priority. It's just human nature. I'm not proud to admit it, but, like, a podcast is a great example of media creation that enables you to be selfish. And I think the best content for me, making a YouTube video means that I get to put in my calendar time to research and learn about something and then share that journey. I don't claim to be an expert in absolutely everything, but I certainly can communicate what I'm learning, what I'm thinking about in a way that's valuable for the viewer.

So before we get into the AI stuff, I'm curious, like, how you got into the branding, personal branding in particular, but how you got into that world. What sort of childhood trauma or whatever led to that?

Oh, there's. That's a good story. I know you like stories, so I'm going to tell you the story. I studied in Florida, Full Sail University, did my master's in entertainment business. It meant that I could leave Canada and move, you know, to the land of opportunity. So I was 13 months in. In Winter Park, Florida, and I applied for a ton of jobs before graduation. Internships, actually. Not even jobs. Internships. Thinking that's where I need to start. This was 2011. This was when Charlie Sheen was all over the news for Tiger blood, his, like, famous quote and internships.com jumped on that bandwagon and paid Charlie Sheen $100,000 to essentially have him be the face of an internship competition. So I entered this competition, along with many other internship applications, with a tweet, a single tweet, and 90,000 people from around the world enter this competition. Long story short, I made it to the top 50 of this internship competition, which became really, in its emphases of social media, it became a social media campaign of me trying to figure out, how do I get to the next round of this competition with videos and media, and how do I get people to buy in and be a part of this and take interest in it? And I made it to the final round. Good question. It's been over a decade. I don't remember what the tweet was. I should have researched this before I knew. Chatting with you. I don't remember what it was, but it was not more than 150 character. 140 characters at the time, that was the limit. But it was. I don't know. I mean, I think the tweet was the first round, and there were a couple thousand people in that. In that round. But it was the videos that helped me grab people's attention, which now I'm smiling because it's ironic now YouTube is such a big part of my business. It's like, hello, why didn't I do that sooner? But I made videos that was, you know, that were pretty out there, and I just wanted to create something that people would notice, remember? And I wanted. I didn't want to be one of those annoying people on social media that were like, vote for me. You can vote for me every day. It's like, shut up. You know? You know those people. I wanted to create an experience that people could, you know, feel like they were also in this internship competition as well. So made it to the. Made it to the final round at Full Sail. I had a connection to Ryan Seacrest Productions, and. And interning for Ryan Seacrest was definitely an actual dream of mine. Not necessarily Charlie Sheen, but I got a ton of media coverage from the Charlie Sheen thing. Canadians get excited anytime other Canadians are successful in entertainment or sports. And even though I wasn't successful yet, I got tacked on to every story in Canada about Charlie Sheen. By the way, there's a Canadian in the running to become Charlie Sheen intern. There were 15 others, but I made relationships with the journalists. I gave them little exclusives on certain Details of it. It was like Media Training 101. And again, long story short, but I'm giving you the fun parts of the story. One week before I was set to move out to LA to intern for Ryan Seacrest, the VP called me and said, phil, are you sitting down? I said, no, I meant Universal Studios celebrating the fact that I'm about to graduate. But what's up? He said, we've had million dollar advertisers threaten to drop because you've connected our squeaky clean family brand to Charlie Sheen's brand of cocaine and strippers. So as much as we'd love to have you, you're fired. Still moved out to la, had no friends, no family, very little money. The money I did have was less than $1,000 in my bank account. And I took this weekend workshop for TV hosts. It's always something that I wanted to pursue. And that weekend I told that story that I just told you. It was much more recent at the time. And I came out with three clients. Real estate agent, a jewelry designer and a makeup artist. They were my first three clients and I helped them build their websites, their logos and their social media strategy, helped them navigate it at the time because all of it was so new. They. That's how I launched my business. And a focus in personal branding has always been. It's always been my thing.

It's really, that's a really, that's a great story. And I think you like, interesting how seizing opportunities, leaning into things like, you know, takes us down a path in life and leads to something, but also like how unexpected brand affiliations and connections are, can be really, really dangerous. Like Charlie Sheen, like, was all, if you wanted to sell tabloids or eyeballs in TMZ or something like that, he was fantastic material. Right? That. But yeah, but drugs and hookers is not really. Or strippers or whatever. It's not a thing that most brands want to be associated with. I know maybe there's some like beverages or prophylactics or something like that that would benefit from there.

I mean, I learned in a few months so much about practical media and branding skills and lessons. It's one thing to sit in a classroom and study it, but it's another thing to actually build relationships with journalists. You know, figuring out, like, how can I get attention from this? How can I get more attention from this? How can I get them to pay attention to me and not the other 15 finalists? How can I create a story that's going to impact people for better or for worse? And so it was a double edged sword because I ultimately got fired because I got too much attention from it. But it also gave me quite a captivating first portfolio example of what I might be able to help a client achieve.

It's interesting today that it can be so powerful, it can be grabbed onto. Like you could try so hard to do it, then you could get it accidentally. And there's something about something that is just a little bit different. Different or somehow captures. And then some people, like they find their moment, it's embarrassing or awkward. Other people lean into it and start to build something. And there's a young woman who got the hawk to a girl, right, like it. And she said something off color or whatever, but it was sort of innocent. But now she's like, there's something charming about her. I wonder if she will build a personal brand around something that is so like humorously crude. It's kind of light hearted, but also crude in the beginning. Like it's interesting and, and yes, if she went out to do that, it probably wouldn't have turned out right.

It's hard to say. I think about this type of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about this type of thing all the time. It just, it, it genuinely fascinates me. Um, yeah, well, so from a branding perspective, yeah, I try to break it into like a science. So that example, you know, all of us, including her, we're made up of two components. Content, what you say, Personality, the unique way that you and only you deliver that information. So we could go to Apple Podcasts and type the word scaling, you know, scaling business. And we'll get a whole list of podcasts. But when I subscribe to this podcast, I'm not just subscribing to the information, I'm also subscribing to your personality, the human element of this. And that keeps people coming back for more.

Yeah. And you know, there are, I listen to different shows and I'm like, wow, that host really like something about their voice, their style. It irritates me and others, I'm like, oh, I love. I listen to them all day long, talk about whatever, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting thing that, that there's something like subtle and intangible about that chemistry there that connects and doesn't connect and how wide it connects and works. Well, we're getting far afield from our AI topic. Or maybe not. I remember well, a couple of years ago our son had been involved in several startups, things mostly that didn't go well and, and he'd Raised and started some companies. And he was on our deck post Pandemic and he was fiddling with this thing. He's like, well I'm kind of working with this AI tool. He'd done some AI work a few years before, after he left school, after he college, and he's like, I think we can make images by describing them. And he was fiddling with an early version of stuff and he started, they were bad images and that kind of thing, but they were on the mark. He'd like, talk, make me an owl. And they're sort of an owl. And it only got better and better and better. And then that company and his work got folded into another company that's now one of the big players out there mid journey. And so I've been seeing a ton of people coming out. Suddenly everybody's an expert in AI and half of them don't know what they're talking about. And a lot of people are selling things. I went to a workshop recently. Somebody's like, this AI is going to solve your entire marketing department, marketing, vendor, whatever. And he had all these prompts and he took a group of CEOs through all of his different prompt. And most of us were like looking at each other going, yeah, the emperor has no clothes like this. This, this isn't producing anything usable for me. Like it's being in many ways oversold. What I was intrigued about is that you were talking about like practical, sensible things to do. So let's talk about like your first discovery maybe, and getting into and seeing web chat, GPT and I don't talk about that to begin.

Yeah, well, I feel the same way as you. It's being oversold, it's being overhyped. A lot of the content related to AI right now is designed to stress you out. And I'll be the first to admit I've just finished writing a book called AI for Small Business and I don't feel like an AI expert. I don't identify as a, quote, AI expert. I think, you know, your, your family connection is more of an AI expert than I am. I stood on stage actually last fall when the book project began, gave a keynote that I was paid five figures for. I stood there and I almost had a meltdown because. And I've never felt that way in a decade of being a speaker. But I stood there and went, here I am representing authority and knowledge and expertise on a topic that I knew nothing about a year and a half ago. So I own the fact that this is new territory for all of us, unless you're Sam Altman or a few degrees away from him. It's new for the majority of people. And so it really irks me. And then I'll talk about the story, but it really irks me when I read these tweets that are like, I felt sick and then I went to ChatGPT and described my symptoms and you know, now I've, now I'm healed and I'm better. Like, to a certain degree, yes. But also like, shut up, you know, is generally how I feel. So. So when it comes to like, you know, when I talk about AI, I try to only talk about it in practical terms and in terms that don't stress people out. So here, here, you know, you brought up this story like it took me a little while to get the hang of figuring out what do I even type into ChatGPT. It's funny how we get to Google and we know exactly what to type because we've been trained for years on formulate a question that's going to get an answer. The better the question, the better the answer. And I remember looking at ChatGPT and going, I don't even know where to begin. So what I did, I used a free Google Chrome plugin called Web chatgpt and I sort of forcing myself to use chatgpt. I thought, let me just do this another way. I would still use Google and I would type in a query into Google and with this free plugin, it will populate the search that you put into Google. On the right hand side, it'll populate the response as if you had went ahead and typed it into ChatGPT instead. And then, and only then did I start to realize, wow, in some and in many instances, what I'm getting from ChatGPT on the right hand side is much better than what I'm getting from Google. For example, type in a Google search, the first four or five results are sponsored nonsense. And so I remember I was looking for how do I cancel this subscription that I had. I needed to clear my archival storage. It was like something bizarre like that. I was like, how do I just get this over with? Soon as possible, type it into Google. Sponsored, Sponsored, Sponsored. No kind of, you know, clear steps on what I need to do. ChatGPT. Step one, do this. Step two, do this. Step three, do this. Crystal clear. And that was how I started to train my brain to go to ChatGPT instead of having to sift through Google to find an answer. And I would just say, additionally, I think we're used to going to Google with a question as you build your confidence interacting with chat based tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Claude. As you build your confidence, you'll develop your own ways of interacting with it. You don't always have to have a question. Sometimes you can just start a conversation or sometimes I'll say commit this to memory and upload a PDF or paste some examples. Before I even say this is what I need you to do, I'll say commit this to memory and then we'll move on to the next step.

Have you, have you been using Claude or Perplexity for any of that now? And how do you feel about that relative to the current best GPT?

So this is a, this is a funny topic for me because in writing the book I've really challenged myself to use things that are not ChatGPT. But especially with the latest version of ChatGPT for, for 4.0with the expansion of its memory and speed, I use the others and then I go back to ChatGPT. I just find that it has become superior. However, I'm always interested in hearing other perspectives. I have a good friend of mine that swears by Claude. I had a really bad clot experience once where I was asking it to write something for me and it said, I'll do this but not until like it won't be finished until tomorrow, I kid you not. That's what it told me. And I said, well, no, I need it now. It said, I have screenshots of this somewhere. It said, I can't do it now. It'll be, it'll take a few hours at best. Like, I was like, are you kidding me?

How long was what you were asking for?

It wasn't that long. It wasn't that long. I was asking it to compute something, I think for a YouTube video. It just was such a bizarre interaction. I'm so used to. Yeah, it was really bizarre.

Robot overlords are striking.

Yeah. But I've tried to use some of the others obviously in writing the book. But Yeah, I definitely ChatGPT is my.

Go to every day about what different tools to use and what he likes and he's always tipping me out, we'll try this now and try that now. And some of them it's like, are pretty useful because, like, oh, I can, I can put in, preload a bunch of parameters into Claude and save the stuff. And that's really, really useful because in my work there's a whole bunch of like works I want to refer to, show transcripts and tools and things that, that I, that I might want to reference and then I have pre built in, in there things like tone and that kind of thing. But I did have something interesting. I was at a podcast conference recently and somebody announced that he had written an entire book with chat gbt. And I'm like, oh, it's awesome. You should send me a PDF of it and I'll have my chat GPT summarize it for me. I'm not going to read your AI book and you haven't bothered to take the time to write it. I'm not going to bother to take the time to read seemed to me. I mean for sure, I'm serious, I'm not reading your. Except maybe to skim it to see how bad it could possibly be. But I went back and I'm like, well, could I do that? So I took a premise of something that I've been working on and I said, okay, give me a chapter outline for this book and some other like basic opening parameters. And it did a decent job of that. And I said, okay, write me a version of this chapter with these points and that kind of thing. I gave it enough material and it just produced a lot of like, it just made up weird things and threw in other things and it was just sort of like filler nonsense. And I realized, okay, where it can be really great in writing short form social posts and giving me short articles like it was anything started to get a little bit longer, like a whole book chapter went on. Nonsense like an email. Sure, yeah.

But better to go from more to less than less to more generally. So ChatGPT and other, you know, comparable tools, incredible at making something more concise. So for example, if I'm working on a social media ad based on a, I don't know, a long form video, I could put in the transcript of the video and say, you know, help me write a social media ad for this and it will do it exceptionally anytime you're going from like, you know, here's the topic of a YouTube video, help me write a script. There's a few ways. I mean that's not enough, that's not enough input to get a good output right away. You're going to get things like unlock the potential, unleash game changing, groundbreaking, transformative, innovative. I actually have a separate saved prompt called Avoid words. Every day I tell ChatGPT what not to say. And so in the same way that you're saving, you know, repeatable prompts or templates in Claude, I use a free plugin called Text Blaze in Google Chrome. And that's where I save all my text snippets. So I literally just have to type backslash, avoid words. And it populates the running list that I add to every day of words that I won't let Chad GPT say because it drives me mental and it sounds like it's written by a. And funny enough, when I got the book deal, first thing I did was order five books about AI because I had total imposter syndrome. The books that I got, they're over here and they are huge print and they are absolute garbage. It was so obvious to me that whoever self published these books literally wrote the book on ChatGPT and did it. You know, they give AI a bad name, you know, when, when AI becomes synonymous with being lazy, they're not helping the cause. And so we've seen it now with.

Articles and content and you'll go, you'll click on some link or whatever and you realize this is written by a bot or, or, or maybe somebody in another country who doesn't really speak English and they're just doing some weird filler article to try to develop some backlinks or something. It's 100 trash, right? Yeah.

Yes.

That's going to exist for a while. I. Let's talk about when you first used it. Then for your business, you talked about using a filch. Tell that story about the image fill.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I mean, it's funny because whenever we talk about AI or ChatGPT, it often, you know, we talk about text, text input and output. But as I told you earlier on, it took a little while for me to get used to interacting with it in that way. For me, image creation is far more exciting in terms of learning what can be done and what can't be done. But the first moment for me where I actually thought, okay, we've now gone beyond experimentation with AI and it's actually made a difference. I had a client who had just done some photos for her personal brands, so photos that we would use as banner images on her website and for social media, etc. She loved her photos, except she didn't like how the red brick photographed in the photos. And it was exactly the same day, yes, it was exactly the same day as Generative Fill launched in Photoshop Beta. And so I had creator friends and peers that were all posting about this new feature and I thought, oh God, I wouldn't even know where to begin with that, but maybe I'll just take five minutes and try it out and I had a real world example, a client of me that had just invested time and money, and I changed the brick, sent it over and said, hey, here are a few other options. She said, how the heck did you do that? Let's use that one. It's now on the homepage of her website. So that was a neat moment where I went, wow, this actually made a difference. This went beyond experimentation to saving my client time and money and ease for me in terms of keeping the project momentum moving forward.

Yeah, you know, sometimes you could do things in the past where you'd cut and paste something and you'd drop it out, drop the background and do that kind of thing. But often you're left with artifacts and things like that that don't blend. Right. That, that don't look good. And so just, you know, having somebody use their lasso tool or, or give you some cropping path doesn't necessarily give you what you want. You end up with shadows and lights that are coming from different directions that in the image looks off, even if you're not sure why. But it's cool.

When you look at the clock and you've spent all day on this, like one thing, you're like, damn it.

Yeah, I love hearing that. Like, okay, I'm going to try a tool and use it to solve a real world business problem right now, a focus thing. Not try to revolutionize everything or fire a department or whatever, but just do one little thing and then, okay, maybe I could do that again. Maybe I'm left with a little bit.

More.

That we could do. We've been using both the language models and the, and the image to do different client work. So we'll take survey data and we'll summarize it. We'll look at trend data and we'll summarize it. Like, summarizing things seems to be a fantastic way to. We sometimes have gotten nonsense like we fit survey data in and it's pulled out wrong things as trends and that kind of thing. But it gets close enough for some stuff that a little bit of reading and editing is useful to get it. And then like coming up with draft of brand promises or things like that. Like, really useful, where you take a bunch of input and then try to find within it some patterns, recurring words, and that kind of thing. And then doing concepts with the image generators seems a really useful tool. Internal communications like, hey, let's create an image for a quarterly campaign, you know, that we're going to do or some kind of launch theme or that kind of thing. Super fun to do really quickly, right?

Yeah. Well, and also as you're describing that we think about the time that we would have spent even just initially getting ideas down on paper like that in itself, staring at a blank word document is a hold up for so many, me included. And I'm happy that AI has meant that those days are behind us. Sure, the, the output that you get on the first go round, it's probably not going to be perfect, but that's okay. You can iterate and you can continue the conversation and refine and learn how, you know, what you can depend on these tools for and what you can't depend on these tools for. You going in and refining and double checking the work is a perfect of the, you know, summarizing the trend data. It is a perfect example of, of how and why we still need humans. I'm an optimist, so the things that I get excited about are these many, many examples of how and why we still need humans to do good work. You know, humans, we, we still need humans to make high impact. And if anything, AI is underscoring that. And so it's, it's refreshing and exciting for me to hear that a human is spending their minutes doing what humans and only humans can do. I think it's really, you know, yes, there's some doomsday and there's concerns about AI I have all kinds of concerns about it, but there's also some, you know, there's a lot of positives.

Well, when you put AI in charge of dropping bombs and things like that, without a human in the loop, you're gonna have problems. When you put AI in charge of making your stock pick without having a human say, wait a minute, let's not do that. You're gonna, and maybe someday it'll be different. But I wouldn't do that today. I wouldn't put things on autopilot and make my decisions that way. You'd be making a mistake. You'd wake up with something very bad on your hands. I think the other thing is I don't think it's taking any jobs. When I think about when I sit around with a team and we go through a quarterly planning process and we create a theme and we want to talk about the priorities for the company for the coming year and we create a theme and then we create an image and that image is then used as for the internal campaign to socialize the theme within the company. We're not taking a job from a graphic designer or photographer. That job wasn't going Anywhere they weren't going to do anything in the past. It wasn't big enough to warrant hiring somebody to spend days on thousands of dollars on something to create that campaign. You know, they wanted to talk about building their sales and they think there's some opportunities in the CRM. So they said drop and give me 50 and they made an image of a guy doing push ups. Right. Like that's what it's doing. It might though be taking the place of some stock photos and doing a better job of it. Right. That's a world where, and that is photography and photographers and the agencies that are reselling that work. How are you using that to replace stock photos or to use them where you wouldn't have done something in the past?

Yeah, I always say, I mean nothing replaces brand photography. So regardless of how AI advances, I will still require I'm building a personal brand or even a company brand. I will still require my clients get photos taken with a photographer. Because in branding we're recreating the in person experience. We're trying to achieve consistency between what makes you great in real life and how that comes across on the Internet. So if anything like what's nice is now when I have a photographer go out with a, with a client, I don't care if there's people in the background, I can remove them. I don't care about these nitty gritty details we might have worried about several years ago. For now we focus on emotion. We focus on a range of looks and poses so that I have a nice variety to create something. Stock photos. I've never been a super big fan of particularly stock photos with faces. A dead giveaway that you've like licensed a photo and it looks lazy.

People standing around with a nice mix of genders and races.

I would normally like crop out the faces. Like if you're going to use a stock photo with, with people, no faces, hands fine or like, you know, but it can't. Yeah, it's just, it, it's so corporate and so lame. But. And there's a lot of instances too where you look for a stock photo and you don't find it. There's an example I was working on a, on a. Ideating for a campaign for. It was an airline 10th anniversary celebration for an airline and we wanted to create like a, like a cake that was an airplane made out of marshmallows. Okay. So it's very specific. Went to stock to try and find. Obviously this stock photo didn't exist because this was something very specific in My mind. And I thought, oh, this might be fun for an AI prompt for a text to text to image. So I typed in something like airplane made from chocolate and marshmallows with confetti. Okay. And in seconds, obviously you can type this into mid journey. I typed it into a, into firefly. And that was a perfect instance. I can adjust the style. It could be art, a photo. And I was able to create this concept that was a part of a pitch again, ideating, you know, here's a concept in so many different industries. This could be a mood board. It could be a storyboard for a movie, for an event. I'm so excited that humans get to be creative again. Instead of spending half a day, you know, editing out flyaway hairs on a photo and refining, refining, refining and doing the grunt work, AI helps us do those non sexy things so that humans can actually be creative. Like, I got to sit here and go, wow, I can create anything I want. Let me try a few things. Like, let me actually use my creativity. And so I'm finding that like, even people that don't identify as a creative are getting to be creative, which is really cool.

Well, you know, it's funny. That's one of the things Jack said. He's like, look, a big part of the reason is I've always been fascinated with things visual and so on. His sister's a photographer, designer, stylist kind of a person, and he's a more of a mathematician. And he's like, I just thought I could use my mathy mind to create the images that I can imagine but cannot necessarily create myself. It's not in my skill set. And he's like, I find that very intoxicating. Right? And one of the props that he has, he's like, I told him about when he was first doing it. I'm like, so I have this story I like to tell about people and human connection and stuff about when I got asked to go give a workshop to a group of plumbers. And I was really apprehensive about walking to this room of angry plumbers. And I'm like, I need an image to represent that. And I've searched all the image libraries. I can't find a room full of angry plumbers to bring this story to life. I certainly didn't take a picture at the time. And in reality, I want to have a picture of my fear, not of the reality. I want to have a picture of the actual room. Because the actual room was some nice people. It wasn't like a super White collar room. It was a very much of a blue collar room. They were small business plumbers. Right. But, but I had this sort of fear that of like these blue collar people that weren't going to like me and, and I had to go give this workshop for them and I'm like, oh, I'm not that kind of person and they're going to hate me. And, and, and the, you know, I have this whole story about it which I'm not going to tell right now. But you can get the picture that I needed a picture of a thing that what never existed in reality. Right. To tell the story when I'm on stage or on Zoom land or whatever it is. And so that became one of his regular test cases. And you know, all the initial things would just give you like a room full of like a picture of Mario characters. And those are like the angry plumbers. They all look like Mario. But you know, over time it's actually gotten better and better. And of course now you can prompt it within the style of whatever, name your favorite photographer, painter or whatever and you will get a thing that looks like that. And so like I have this kind of retro 70s surf brand for my coaching work because I'm a guy from California and I want a particular vibe. It's not super businessy or conservative, boring corporate kind of look. And I definitely don't want to, you know, like, so I can put those parameters in it. I have words that describe that. Super useful, right? To be able to go in and talk about that. That's a real world application. When I want to talk about a company value, I can create an image and I've got some, some language that describes the look and feel I want for those images. Right?

Yeah. And one of the things that we're doing now, which is really new for us, but it's very exciting is when I'm creating a brand identity before I might provide some parameters or examples on. Here are some stock photos, you know, that look and feel related to what you might want to use now we're not doing that now. It's more. Here are some styles that you might want to incorporate into your prompt when you're going to create images. Trying to, you know, branding is really all about parameters. Like how do we, how do we make some parameters or limitations to get, you know, to achieve consistency. And so that's new territory for us. As part of a branding project, we're saying, hey, you know, create your thumbnail images in the style of paper, crumpled up paper, for example, like we can, we can create now these styles, these parameters for my clients to be able to stay on brand and not worry.

And when I hear that, right, to take out the jargon of it, I hear making something that looks uniquely and consistently you and distinct. Right. Distinct from every other whatever restaurant coach, that kind of thing. Let's look like a unique and distinct kind of an entity and a consistent way so there's a through line for all of it that, that connects and people recognize that even down the road. Oh yeah, that's whatever, right, exactly.

I always think like if you could cover up the profile photo on a post or whatever it is you're looking at and people could still look at that visual and know who it's from. Oh yeah, yeah. That's successful branding.

You know, it's funny, I go places now and because I have a number of people who see on my socials and that kind of thing and see these shows and the other posts and I walk in a lot of times like this without my glasses on. I just took my glasses off for the listeners and people don't, they're like, you look kind of familiar to me and I'm like how about now? And they're like, oh yeah, you're Billy. Like that's so funny. I've become like hard identified with it. So although I can see in certain situations without my glasses for sure, the computer, I need my glasses and for up close reading like I'll wear them now in every situation and I have different types of them because I'm known like I have to wear the glasses. Right. It's become, and it actually, it's part of a unique look and says something good.

It's people's experience of you and it's important to, to, to know what that is. It's important to remember that you have influence on that. I think nowadays it's like some people will say, well I don't need a personal brand. I'm like, you don't really get to choose whether or not you have one. If you have a reputation, you know, people are typing your name into LinkedIn or you're typing your name into Google. Ideally you treat this as your own digital responsibility to have some impact over what comes up. You know, in, in a search result might be social media or, or a search engine.

Well, I think we've covered a lot of material. We should give people a link and where to go to check out your work in the world of personal branding and using the AI. I know you've got a book coming out. Philpalin Co is the link to go to. It'll it's there on screen now. It'll be in the show notes as well so you can go find it. But you can probably remember Phil Palin P A l l e n.com is how if you're listening just go look at the show notes later. But it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining and getting real with us about the world of AI in application for small business and I look forward to seeing what you got out in that book.

Thank you so much for having me. I've also enjoyed it.

Yeah. So let me also give thanks to a couple other people to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish who created the whole Scaling framework without whom none of this would have been necessary and and to the folks at Storion who get our show out and produced, prepped, ready, out the door, all that every week. Without that team we would not be over 500 episodes. It takes a team. So thanks again everyone. If you want information about our coaching, our workshops that we do a workshop every month to help you get started with the tools, we've got a free course on navigating the stages of growth in the company. We've got a range of coaching options, that kind of thing. You'll find all that and more@scalingcoach.com as long episode and all the other back catalog of episodes. If you want to search and find those shownotes and tools and things like that, scalingcoach.com is our website. Thanks again everyone for watching for listening until next week. Talk to you soon. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app. You can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by alignment. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.