The Influence Builder, Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman1:03

[It's a] pleasure to be here. Super excited for this conversation.

Isaac Mashman1:12

It's making things more efficient and more optimized. My business is about optimization, whether that be taking a public figure and improving their social media, or improving the distribution of their IP, or improving the quality of their content. I view artificial intelligence as kind of that tool where I'm able to use it in so many different ways, so that what used to take maybe 10 hours to do is taking an hour or less, or what used to be outsourced, I can now have an artificial intelligence [do], or somebody who knows how to operate that AI. So it's really about efficiency and that pursuit of optimization, which I know sounds so broad, but I know that we'll dive into some deeper use cases.

So long term, it will help me scale. It'll help MCG scale. I'm really stoked to see all the different ways that we can adopt it while still maintaining a human touch, because I don't think that AI should be used to replace the workforce from some communistic standpoint. But I do believe that it can be integrated with the workforce to improve outcomes and ultimately the results of a given company.

Isaac Mashman2:44

Well, going into the personal branding space, I believe that every single person has a personal brand. This is my philosophical approach: you're the only Ana Gonzalez who's lived your life, who's gone from Austin, Texas, to New York City and Mexico City and all the other places that you've lived, and who has your friends and your experiences and your interests and your passions and your personality. When people rely too heavily on artificial intelligence, they lose that personal touch sometimes. I don't know about you, but over the past six months, I've been able to spot posts that I knew were written by ChatGPT. So if I see that post, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this sounds exactly like a prompt that I would have been given that I didn't use.

All right, are you using this to replace you, or are you using this to be lazy, or are you using this to improve what you're doing? That's a huge thing that I see, a big mistake ultimately that people are making, just in my space in general. And I imagine that applies to nearly every business: relying too much on AI to do the heavy lifting versus [having it be] kind of like the weight bench spotter that helps you up.

Isaac Mashman4:02

Yeah, no, it's really not. I do think about this, though. I have a client of mine who was a veteran, and he lost his eyesight in 2017 in a horrible motorcycle accident. He's gone on to build a public speaking career, and [we're] actually having an event for him tomorrow. I was talking to him, saying, Kwan, [have] you ever thought about using AI to ultimately improve accessibility for what you've got going on? That's a use case that I don't think I've ever heard discussed on a podcast or anything yet. But you know, there's this entire Americans with Disabilities Act that basically requires companies and businesses and websites to be accessible for those with colorblindness or different disabilities, [vision].

A lot of times you think about why you would put alt text on a photo, and the alt text isn't for Google so much as for the one person who's reading that who might not be able to see, [which] allows their smartphone to read off that text. So now they can get a visual image of it. [I] think about the accessibility aspects of AI. Have you thought about that at all?

Isaac Mashman5:40

I have written probably at least a dozen press releases in the past year using ChatGPT. Here's what I'm doing: I'm not saying, just write me a general press release. I'm feeding the AI the information. So just like you would have an AI video editor, the AI video editor isn't creating the content and the video for you. It's editing the video that you have created. So again, it's not doing the heavy lifting of creation but building off of your creation. So when I've wanted to write a press release, whether that's announcing the new company or the dissolution of my old company or that I'm working on a second edition of my book, what I'll do is I'll say, all right, well, ChatGPT, I need a press release that looks similar to the other ones we've written together, and it needs to include a quote by me.

Then it also needs to be [three paragraphs] long, have this call to action at the end, and address these certain things. So you're really writing an effective prompt so it's able to make a more effective outcome. That's just one of the use cases that I've done over the past year that has just completely [changed things].

Isaac Mashman7:00

Well, you can find me literally everywhere at Isaac Mashman. You could run a quick Google search or go to my website, isaacmashman.com. I also recently launched a consulting firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and we're serving clients internationally. So if you want to grow your personal brand, whether you're an emerging or an established public figure, I'd love the opportunity to call you a client of MCG and have a consultation with you.