Mastering Personal Branding in the Digital Age

Isaac Mashman1:14

Well, yeah, personal branding is... Marketing and branding are symbiotic when it comes to building a personal brand. We could have a debate on whether marketing or branding is more important, but really, the kind of brand that you're trying to build influences your marketing strategy. You don't see Rolls-Royce marketing at an American football game or at the soccer World Cup. But you'll see Rolex or something marketing itself at a golf tour or a higher class sport like tennis. So how you're wanting to build a brand influences how you market. But Mashman is, some people that I work with and some of my clients struggle because their name is so common.

Brian Johnson is somebody I recently had a conversation with, but how many Brian Johnsons are around the world? Hundreds, thousands, [millions]. So if you're trying to build out your personal brand, you're fighting all these people, you have to really dig deep into strategy, or maybe use your middle name or use an initial or use a pseudonym, and it becomes a struggle. But for me, coming in as Isaac Mashman, that's one of one, maybe that's like, that's me. I think that, for example, if I was to search up Ganesh [Dada], is that a unique name or is it, you know, and especially.

Isaac Mashman3:59

I think it's smart, and a lot of times there's some hesitancy when choosing a stage name because you feel like you're leaving yourself. You're not leaving yourself, you're making a strategic business decision that will help you become more marketable and stand out. So it's not trying to be disrespectful to mom or dad because your parents named you at the end of the day. It's not like you're saying, mom or dad, I hate your name that you gave me. It's that you have to make a decision that's best for your business and for your success long term. So whether that be, for example, coming up with a middle name.

So you could be Ganesh Z. [Dada], for example, I can use Z as the middle initial, that could be a strategy that you could use, and what does Z stand for? Well, it doesn't really matter, but it helps you stand out because now you could get the handle @GaneshZDada, get the website, get the URL, get all those things to where now you're promoting yourself as such, and coming up with a pseudonym or a stage name, I mean, think about Lady Gaga or The Rock. The Rock is not, the Rock is.

Isaac Mashman5:17

But his stage name is the Rock. But you think about a lot of the celebrities you follow, they use stage names because their actual name was taken or didn't sound as good. You think about, like, well, yeah, it sucked or it doesn't flow off the tongue. It's not memorable. You're not wrong. But I mean, think about you coming into the name and your name is John Smith, you're not going to be memorable. Like, you wrote the Declaration of Independence kind of thing. That's what it sounds like. But coming up with something interesting, something that is marketable, something unique, that creates a memorability that people can have.

Isaac Mashman6:28

[Good] conversation, but I love it. In that case, I would say again, you could look at using a middle initial or using your full name. So let's say your middle name is, let's just go ahead and say that it is Samson. So you could go by John Samson Doe, and you would be much more likely to show up on that, but even then you wouldn't want to use John S. Doe because there are probably thousands of John S. Does out there. Now, John Doe in and of itself is not a common name. That was, if I'm not mistaken, something that was created as an identifier for missing persons.

So it's called a John Doe. But speaking as if that was a common name, such as John Smith or Brian Johnson, you could use your middle initial, you could create a middle initial, you could use your full middle name, or you could go into, let's create a name that's entirely unique. So maybe you drop the Doe and you create something different. So it's John Sampson Excalibur. Just something that could be so outlandish in a way to where now you're known as John Excalibur or, you know, something else, that way you can really start showing up in search, having your domain, having your social media handle, because you think about why is this even important?

Well, it's visibility. If you're fighting with, in your case, or Neil Patel's case, a thousand other Indian marketers, you're like, how are you building yourself as an authority? This is saying in a respectful way, but it's a challenge.

Isaac Mashman9:59

Well, it depends on what you're looking to get from it.

Isaac Mashman10:06

Okay. Well, you have to first understand that your personal brand is you. A big misconception people have is they believe that when they create a new website, they create a new social media page on Instagram or Facebook, they're creating a new personal brand. That's not the case. Your personal brand you've had from the moment you were born, from the moment your mom pushed you out and gave you a name, you've had a personal brand. I could argue that you've had a personal brand even when you were in the womb because she was talking about little baby Ganesh to her, to your grandparents, to your grandfather, your grandmother, and to all of her friends.

So you've had a personal brand and now you have to go and consciously start building it and leveraging it and doing things that can get you results. So whether you want to be famous or you want to make money, you all start at zero when you create a social media page. But whether you get your local friends to follow you online, which they're probably going to criticize you, but let's say you start connecting with business owners, and wherever you're at in your city, and whether that's somebody who's a tech entrepreneur or a local stand owner or somebody who's at a business networking event or a hotel owner, you connect with these people online. You start popping up time and time again and you come up with something.

Isaac Mashman11:39

Yeah, I don't I don't think that's on my end, but we could just resume where we were. It's not a problem. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman12:00

Yeah, you know, something substantial, absolutely, and in terms of time and money and what you're putting into it, you don't need to put any money into it to start with. You have the normal clothes that you're wearing on your back, you have the normal phone that you're using, and so you could take that phone and start recording yourself and just putting yourself out there online. You create a social media account, so you get on Instagram, you get on Facebook, you get on LinkedIn, you get on these platforms underneath your name, you get the same social media handle across everywhere. So for example, my name is Isaac Mashman, I have @isaacmashman everywhere.

There's no dispute which Isaac you're following, it is me, and you start creating this omnipresence. So you're everywhere all the time, and then from there you create content based off of a specialty and based off of you as the person. So you showcase some of your interests from time to time, but let's say you're wanting to be known for podcast management or you're wanting to create a specific business such as consulting or helping with YouTube optimization or you're wanting to do social media management, you start creating content based around those specific subject areas, and the reason you create this content is you get viewed as an authority in that field, and if you're viewed as an authority, you have people who know that they can trust you, then you're able to stand out and start getting more of their business, and more of the person's business on the other end of the phone, the other end of the screen, even though they might be 5000 miles away from you. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman14:39

Well, this is a very intricate question that has a lot of different avenues I could go down and talk about. Now, I am in the boat that says, you don't need to just [provide] value. Value could be perceived as motivation. I can motivate you with a video and you can feel good. That's an emotional high. The dopamine spike, you feel good. What I'm about is strategic value. So what's the difference between value and strategic value? Well, just like I'm walking through the actual steps that you need to take in order to start up a social media account or how to find a way for you to stand out with your name if you're fighting other people, that is an example of strategic value.

Something that people can go from step A to step Z, from step one to step 121. That is what people are wanting. People are not stupid. I think that social media is treated this [way], to where people think that they could just put out some piece of crap content that they think is motivational. What is that person getting on the other end of the screen? There are four main things that a piece of content can do. It could do a combination of all four, or just one, two, or three. It could entertain. So it's making somebody feel good, or entertaining somebody, you're making them laugh, or maybe they watch it because they like it.

It can educate a person and teach them something new. It can connect them, so the piece of content that you create is connecting you with the person on the other end and vice versa because there's a shared interest. So for example, most podcasts, it's 10 p.m. when I'm recording this with you. But typically I'll have a cup of coffee in my hand and people know that I drink coffee. I'm not like, I don't drink tea, I drink coffee. So that is something that can establish rapport with somebody on the other end of the phone. Then a piece of content can inspire or motivate and take that person to another level to where they feel like they could take action and run through walls.

So when you're creating a piece of content that could be talking about how you can launch a podcast, well, you could talk about the actual strategy. So it's educational. You could say that I did this myself, so it's inspirational. You could say that I remember one of the goofiest things that happened, that's connecting you. Then you could go into the editing style to make it entertaining. So you can do all of these different things with one piece of content. The more boxes you can check, the better. Now, the second part of that question is, well, should you be reserved with the amount of content you create, or should you go wide with the distribution?

So really effectively you're talking about, should I only post maybe one piece of content every couple of days versus, like, I post multiple times a day or one time a day. Now, I am in the boat that you need to be posting at least one short video every single day. You need to be posting that same video on multiple platforms. So you have multiple algorithms working for you. Now, a lot of times in the music industry or with celebrities, there's this perceived distance between the person who is the fan of the celebrity and the celebrity themselves. So you have this distance, this question, this void, this curiosity that's created, and that will naturally be created as you create content and as your follower count increases.

So the person who has a hundred followers doesn't have much distance between them and the follower who's going to their profile. But now I can actually imagine if you had a million followers or a hundred thousand, there's distance now, [to where] the person who hits that follow button or thinks about hitting that follow button is saying, okay, this person's done something. They're a little bit different than me. That's when we get into the psychology of building a personal brand and the psychological way this entire thing works, because us humans, man, we're emotional.

Isaac Mashman19:13

Well, Ganesh, that would be literally one of my pieces of advice that I would give a client. If a client said, what can I do? I don't have a whole bunch of time. It would be, go on other people's podcasts or start your own podcast. Use artificial intelligence to edit it. Thinking about five years ago, if I wanted to have somebody caption my video and add zoom.

Isaac Mashman19:34

No, literally it would have cost me $15 to a hundred dollars for a package of two or three videos, and now I pay $10 USD for an editing software called Captions AI. I take a video that takes me, over time I've gotten better at recording content. So what used to take me 45 takes I can do in three takes now. But it's taken me time and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, I would argue maybe damn near thousands, of takes in order to actually get good at this. But now I take that video. I put it into Captions AI. It adds the captions automatically. It adds emojis.

I'm able to put the zoom, I'm able to put the music, and create something that's 100% unique. It costs me $10 USD every month. Right. Very low barrier to entry. That's making it hyper competitive, which means that you need to start doing things to where other people are edifying you. What is edification? Edification is basically saying that you vouch for a person. You say, I trust this individual. Me coming on your show is a form of edification because you're saying to your audience that, hey, I trust Isaac Mashman enough to invite him on for this conversation. Vice versa, because now I promote it. Yeah. I say, hey, I was on the show.

This is great. Now, [to my audience], you're edified because I'm basically saying, hey, I promoted, I was on the show and now I'm promoting this, which means that I liked you enough to want to see you win and gain exposure. So it's like this mix of selfishness and selflessness. Yeah. Ultimately, [it] curates content. So yeah, I think this.

Isaac Mashman21:53

You could record a vlog or a long-form training in front of a whiteboard, or so many different things, you could do webinars, and you could clip those into a bunch of pieces of content as well. Like YouTube, the YouTube app has a remix feature that you're able to remix your own long-form videos that are vertical or horizontal and clip them into a bunch of vertical videos. The other thing that you could do is reaction style videos. This is something, I'm like, man, this takes literally two minutes to do, but let's say there's somebody, you take a Neil Patel clip. He was talking about the difference between personal brands like Kylie Jenner and corporate brands such as Coca-Cola.

I took a five-second clip of that and I reacted to it. I added to it. I didn't just react to it. I added value to that reaction. I said that, hey, this is actually true. You think about personal brands, you think about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, you think Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, you think about Elon Musk and Tesla. So I reacted and I added value. By doing that, you could get 50 pieces of content done in less than a day. Now you're not even having to do all of the bulk and the heavy lifting of creating it originally yourself. You're adding expertise to it. This conversation is aimed at the person who's working to become that professional in a field, in a niche, not so much the broader base. This is a personality. Although I do think that you should showcase the personal side of you as well.

Isaac Mashman24:08

Oh man, the best way I could explain it is they're the politicians of capitalism. Yes, exactly. This right here is a clip, video right here. We could take this and clip it and [make it] viral. No, literally, I believe that businesses are people that speak as if their consumer is stupid. They're the politicians of capitalism.

Isaac Mashman24:45

When a business or a brand is talking about, okay, let's address something, and, I'm trying to think of an example other than the broad base, it's kind of like covering up a reputational crisis. So before I went into Mashman Consulting Group and the 100% consulting space that I committed to, I was running the public relations for Mashman Ventures, and public relations is notorious for coverups and there's a negative connotation when it comes to PR. So PR is like you're manipulating people, which is common in marketing, but PR is like you're hiding things.

Isaac Mashman25:27

I never knew that, but it's true. It's true, but you know, PR, and I can talk about that for days on end, about how public relations is not reserved for celebrities or the rich. Every single thing you're doing to build out your personal brand is a form of PR because public relations is ultimately a person's relationship with the public. That was literally said by Edward Bernays, it's like it's the relationship with the people. So you're thinking about a cover up and a brand acting like it didn't happen. It's like you're basically saying, oh, you're gaslighting your audience into thinking something versus getting ahead of it and saying, no, okay, this happened, we screwed up.

Now if you think about we screwed up versus the, I don't know what you're talking about or the ignoring, which is going to create more security long term, the audience will be much more likely to respect the brand or respect the person for saying, I messed up, than saying, no, you're stupid.

Isaac Mashman26:45

I don't think it's a sound strategy, per se, because I believe that though it happens, it depends on the situation. It's very relative. So think about Liver King. The big guy who's on everybody's Instagram page. But no, there's, I know you're laughing here, Ganesh, but this is a real conversation about, yeah, he went on multiple shows, multiple times, multiple occasions, and said, I do not do steroids. Multiple years. Multiple years as well. Yeah. It was clear that, all right, he probably is doing it, but let's just leave the gig alone. Then he came out with an apology video, he said, I screwed up, I lied.

I lied. He has not been able to recover his brand. The reason why is because he specifically lied to the audience. If he did not lie, if he came out and let's say he just said, no, I do do steroids, but this is beneficial, he would have had security in his brand, maybe not as viral, but he would have had security versus, let's say he did, right, and he's completely ignored everything.

Isaac Mashman28:56

Eminem has addressed all those accusations that he's ever been on. It's not that he's accusation proof, but it's that he takes the accusation and he references it in his craft, so in his music. So it's like his most recent album, The Death of Slim Shady, which in my opinion is the best album since, like, 2008, Recovery. He literally addresses everything that he's been accused of over the past couple of years, or, like, the culture and how he's fallen off and all these other things. So he is answering the accusations.

Isaac Mashman29:52

Again, that's relative, and you could say that me even saying it's relative would be avoiding the question. But it's truly relative based off of the situation and what the accusation is, or if it's something goofy versus something that can be spun, because a lot of accusations might be stupid. For example, the steroid thing could have been spun in a way that he could salvage the brand somehow.

Isaac Mashman30:41

You have to be strategic with every single, and especially this is high level, if you have a million people watching you versus a hundred people. If a hundred people are watching you, you can get away with this stuff and be like, okay, this is a part of, I fucked up, let me go ahead and not do this again, and maybe don't address it, but if you have a million people that are holding you accountable, yeah, you're fucked. Well, you have to hire a PR team to help navigate the crisis, which is literally grab the bull by the horns, or by the med stack, and go and say, this is what happened, and sharing your side.

But then people are going to be [forming] opinions, and you might lose some people who might have respect for you, that's okay. But you have to pick and choose your battles. If I respond to this, this is the potential outcome, and it's ultimately about predicting outcomes and what would potentially happen.

Isaac Mashman32:51

I think it's quintessential you show your personal side. Now you're laughing and joking and stuff with me in a way to where I automatically like you that much more because you're not trying to come into this, but even then there's a balance between what you're doing. You're not joking to where you're not taking it seriously, you're inserting well-timed comedic rebuttals and driving, I mean, the conversation forward in a way to where I know that I could joke with you. If we were to have a cup of coffee or sit down, I'd be able to have a conversation with you as a friend versus this is just somebody who's trying to put on and be like, so what do you view about marketing?

What do you view about branding? You have your own website. So if you think about personal brand, the left side, you have personal. This is the personality. This is what builds rapport. This is what builds trust on a deep emotional level. There are celebrities you follow, or mentors you follow more than others, not because of what value they're providing to you, but based off of what you see in them that you see in yourself, or there's an aspect of their story that you like and you appreciate. Then you have on the right side of personal brand, you have brand, which is what do you use to make money?

What is your credibility? What is your profession? What is the thing that is driving you forward when it comes to your career? So you have to have this balance here. So if you're treating content, for example, for every two business posts, you might make one post that is personal. So you might do one about you going out to eat or you sharing a story or you talking about your fears or you talk about your desires, you talk about your vision. This is ultimately developing your skyline. I call this the skyline strategy. It's two to one ratio, two business posts, one personal. One book. Because there are people online, anybody can be an expert in something and talk about podcast management and how you should have a host provider and you get it distributed via RSS feed and whatever else.

Isaac Mashman34:51

But can somebody have the same, Ganesh, personality and be like, yes, you might look like an idiot, but at least it'll be good. Just for example here, so the personality is so important, I cannot express that enough, but there's again, you don't want to come across as a gimmick, as somebody who's not serious. Yes. But you do need to show your personality. So you can be this well crafted professional while having a little bit of rough edges that help people attach to you, want to see you win because they see the person outside, the person inside, versus just the person.

Isaac Mashman35:52

What's more important than that is naming your kid, something that is unique. So I know what I'm going to ask your children. Now, well, yeah, but thinking about him naming his children, they're all unique, but not everybody has the last name.

Isaac Mashman36:12

Yeah, the youngest has the most creative name. You cannot even spell it. I don't even know how to, I would just refer to him as X.

Isaac Mashman36:32

When you choose the name of your kid, yeah, you need to name them, you probably don't want to name your kid after you and say, this is Ganesh [Dada] Jr. Or this is Neil Patel, like, you're not going to want to do that. You're setting them up for failure versus setting them up for success. Naming them something a little bit different. I already have the names of my future children, whether that's a son or a daughter, and I could always add more to the list. But I know that I'd be able to get their domain. I know I'd be able to get their social media handle.

I know that they'd have Google, Google. I know that they'd be able to build up off of my personal brand, but I also know that I'm not going to name my son Isaac Mashman Jr. because he would always be in his father's shadow. So it's not something where, when you ask the question, it was almost like, this is super smart, but it's almost gimmicky.

Isaac Mashman38:25

Well, there's a time to be serious and there's a time for play. That's what businesses are beginning to realize and understand. So on April Fools', you might create a joke as a brand, but you're not going to create a joke every single week. So it's really about, again, how do you crack a joke? You don't just come up with a joke. Yeah. It's a stand up and you take five minutes to tell a joke to somebody in public that's stupid. If it was at a comedy show, yeah, you would build up to it. But if you were in a conversation and I'm cracking a joke, it's going to be well timed based off of the situation, based off of the time.

So you have to be aware of what the timing is in order for it to land, that punch line to hit. When it comes to building social media posts and building a brand, you don't need to be making it a gimmick and creating jokes every day of the week. But on April Fools', or maybe there's press, or, like, I think about Ryanair, one of the airlines out of England, they made so many jokes last year. They were all well timed based off of political situations and based off of things like James Corden, one of the talk show hosts. They were like, James Corden is way back to something, something, something.

I remember it went viral and gained them millions and millions of views on Twitter. So I think that businesses, especially small businesses who are aware and actually culturally competent, would probably be the word that I would use, have a leg up on other businesses that are the traditional, like, corporate, impersonal side of things.

Isaac Mashman40:42

I'd avoid it typically. I'd avoid it because any time, now I'm not in the place where I was a couple of years ago where I would have said that you should always avoid religion or you should always avoid politics. So I believe that there is a time and a place to mention those things. You don't necessarily need to. If you're building out your brand and let's say you're Christian, Hindu, or Muslim, you're not talking about that every single day of the week unless you're trying to be a pastor or an imam or a religious figure. But every now and again, making a post about faith and how that fits into your work or how that fits into your life might be important and that can connect people.

Done with an intention of connection versus an intention of division, the deliberate controversy can really backfire. Again, it's like you're forcing the joke versus letting the joke come out. I'm trying to think of an example of deliberate controversy off the top of my head, I can't come up with one. But I don't think that it's a strategy that people should really implement. I would avoid it.

Isaac Mashman43:40

Well, okay, let's go ahead and take no, like this is actually an example.

Isaac Mashman43:51

They go bankrupt. But again, if you're deliberately trying to create controversy, let's think about, I believe it might be Remington. It was a gun manufacturing company, after the Sandy Hook situation in the United States about a decade ago. They ended up going bankrupt as a company because of the situation because it was a Remington gun, if I'm not mistaken, that was used during that shooting. So there, and these are examples of situations that are outside of a brand's control. You cannot control what person purchases your product or purchases your item and goes in, acts. This is why hiring is also important, because if you're hiring people, they're reflections of your business, the reflections of your atmosphere, of your culture. These are intricacies that people don't think about and take into consideration, but they're examples of you, the reflections.

Isaac Mashman44:55

Yeah, she got brutalized on the internet.

Isaac Mashman50:17

I think that even when building a business and a prospect tells you no, you're not about to be like, fuck that prospect. I hate that dude. Why did he tell me no? You need to look internally and say, what about my process could have been improved?

Isaac Mashman50:35

Why did my post not go viral? Why did that prospect say no? You look internally and you get better from that. When it comes to our society, we've stopped looking inward and thinking, what could be different? What could be better? What could be improved?

Isaac Mashman52:26

It's not a game of what actually gets done. It is what is perceived as getting done. Business should not be a game of optics in so much as a game of execution.

Isaac Mashman58:16

These are all conscious decisions that you need to set and make based off of where you're trying to go or what you're trying to build versus building your personal brand. For example, there's a hierarchy to where you could become the local hero. You're locally known in your town, your city, your township, whatever, but you might not be the international icon or the national personality. So where do you want to go with this? How big do you want to take it? Then you can reverse engineer the steps in order to get there.

Isaac Mashman58:54

That was based off of tips only and going bankrupt or closing down within a month.

Isaac Mashman1:00:14

Yeah. It's fascinating how this conversation with you, as, like, an Indian outsider perspective, because, yeah, again, if you travel and go and get well versed, but most Americans, like the majority of Americans, never leave the United States. But if you go to other places in the world and you ask them, what do you think about America, their perception of.

Isaac Mashman1:09:00

Based off of your humor, Ganesh, I'm curious to know what trauma you've been through.

Isaac Mashman1:09:27

So yeah. I feel [Gen Z] also is in India too, not just here.

Isaac Mashman1:09:44

Where do you see the business entrepreneur culture evolving in India? Do you see something like that taking place?

Isaac Mashman1:10:09

Break that down into an American term.

Isaac Mashman1:13:17

It's like, no, I'm not going to do that. Well, I think our quality of life and living has been better based on industrialization for a long time, and now the industrialization of India, I imagine, a hundred years from now, though, India will go from cost conscious to consumerism.

Isaac Mashman1:13:57

Interesting. Which is the complete opposite of America because it's not based off of necessarily even what is the best, more so what is perceived as the best. So the iPhone is not the best phone in the market for, let's say, the camera. You could look and argue the fact that Samsung probably has a better camera than iPhone. But that does not matter because it's iPhone, it's the brand, it's the feeling, it's the emotion behind it, which again is a lot of what I think our entire conversation tonight has been about: the perception is more important than the actual execution.

Isaac Mashman1:14:32

Yeah, well, ironically, even though it's not even produced in America, designed in San Francisco and put together in India or China. And again, how many of our items in America are built in China. You think about, I've listened to, or read, books in the past, for example, Andrew Carnegie's The Empire of Business, which is a compilation of essays and letters that he wrote. I have a copy behind me that was, I believe, a 1913 edition, but in the book he talks about, it could be 1931, he talks about how American products were typically cheaper. This was written 100 years ago, his essays, Andrew Carnegie, the great American industrialist, and about how American products were cheaper, and imported products were more expensive, and they were perceived as better.

We flipped over the past 100 years to where now imported products are cheaper and the quality's less, and American products are more expensive and the quality's better. So it's like we flipped this as a society and as a culture to where again it's less about cost consciousness, more about how is this going to make us look, which is why you buy the same iPhone year after year after year, when the one from two, three, four years ago, as long as Apple's not throttling it, it's just fine.

Isaac Mashman1:16:19

Right now, what do you see about this? Do you see this Indian hustle culture evolving to...

Isaac Mashman1:17:44

Can you think about, again, what Americans are like.

Isaac Mashman1:20:16

They can purchase up more independent housing over there too.

Isaac Mashman1:24:17

Well, I don't know if I would agree that China necessarily owns Hollywood. But it's the same thing as music, for example. Universal Music Group is the record label everybody knows, but they don't know that Universal Music Group is owned in large part by a French company. I believe it's called [Vivendi], if I'm not mistaken, that might be the name of the company. But they own a large part of UMG. Again, it's like the brands that you purchase off the shelf are owned by another brand, and they have a hierarchy to this. Once you take a step back and view this from a macro lens of, wow, this is how all of our society functions and works together, you realize that everything is owned by something that's owned by something that's owned by something that has another person making decisions.

Our entire world operates on such a small thread. Thinking about earlier this week when CrowdStrike [and] Microsoft went down, it's like the world went up in flames. That's one company. I imagine the infrastructure of an entire nation going down.

Isaac Mashman1:25:57

It's fascinating too, because now that artificial intelligence has begun to take place, we try to predict what artificial intelligence will make our society look like and what it would be like in a hundred years. It's impossible to think. Think about it. We have these ideas based off of science fiction like the Terminator or the Matrix, when artificial intelligence could be something entirely different because it's on another layer of being. It's almost a spiritual being in the sense of there's no comprehension. It's like you try to comprehend God. What is God? Well, he's not some floating guy with a beard and a robe on a cloud.

Isaac Mashman1:27:49

I believe that AI is meant to be integrated, but not meant to be the thing that's doing the heavy lifting. So think about it like lifting weights.

Isaac Mashman1:28:02

I believe that [AI should be] integrated, but not [meant as] a replacement.

Isaac Mashman1:28:51

Just do basic things for humans. But what was the foundation of that language model and of that artificial intelligence? It was the foundation of humans. Exactly. So we're still the foundational piece, but I view artificial intelligence as, when you're lifting weights and bench pressing or squatting a new personal record, you have a spotter there to make sure that they can help you up if you fall down, or they're there to say, go, go, go, and motivate you to maybe lift some of the way and make it more efficient. I view artificial intelligence as the spotter for mankind to where we're still the backbone, but artificial intelligence is the thing that's pushing us forward at a rate that we couldn't have reached alone.

Now, could you be... And Bryan Johnson from Blueprint, he's somebody who I've been following religiously over the past several months, and I've listened to many of his interviews about not even biohacking, which is not what he likes to refer to it as. But if you cannot make the proper decision yourself on what you should eat or when you should go to bed, all of these things, imagine if an algorithm says you need to wake up at this time, you need to eat this, you need to avoid that. You follow that algorithm and you follow that AI strictly in order to get the...

Isaac Mashman1:30:33

I do. But if you were to tell the AI, based off of a DNA data set, it looks off of the historical precedent of where you're located and factors such as climate and skin color and how it has affected X, Y, and Z. Then it takes into account the historical wars and religion and all of these things that we cannot compute into a single algorithm ourselves. Imagine if an artificial intelligence [takes in] all of these things and is able to say, all right, based off of this entire data set, this is the best way forward for you in this particular moment. [Factor] in the year and your body mass and everything, and it's incomprehensible compared to...

Isaac Mashman1:31:45

Yeah, well, and you think about the amount of energy and power and land that is going to be required in order for all of this stuff to function. Just like in The Matrix, you have to have a power source. Again, it's like, how many...

Isaac Mashman1:32:23

I suppose, couldn't you use artificial intelligence to provide the solution to that problem, though?

Isaac Mashman1:32:46

Isn't that so wild to even think about, [in our] lifetime, and then 50 years from now? There's a show on Amazon called Upload. I've only watched the first two seasons, but the concept of Upload is you have the real world, you have this digital world where you can get uploaded into this basically digital space, and your consciousness is uploaded into a computer. People in the real world are able to interact with you, just like Sims. You're getting into the realm of simulation theory, right, where it's like, are we living in a simulation, and how many layers of the simulation are we in? But the show Upload is fascinating because the only way I believe that anything such as that would be possible would be having to use artificial intelligence to compute problems that would...

Isaac Mashman1:34:20

So yeah. I believe that even having this conversation and debating it almost makes us look ignorant, because there's no way that we're able to predict what our world will look like. I do believe, though, and I would fall underneath the schism of people that believe that AI is in that positive [camp]. I believe that, again, and that's one of the things that people are starting to talk about, that in the next 50 years there's going to be these pro-technology versus anti-technology groups that start to develop. Oh, we're 100% off of Instagram, 100% off of social media, 100% off the internet, versus we're pro internet, we're pro tech, we're pro all this stuff. I think that there will be a growing schism there. But the idea of AI will just continue to [grow] exponentially.

Isaac Mashman1:35:25

Like that, or let's say an AI program through a security camera monitoring productive work. And yeah, there are absolutely negative use cases, or cases that would be...

Isaac Mashman1:36:05

I suppose artificial intelligence will need regulation, and this would be going against a 100% pro-capitalist approach, to where maybe artificial intelligence is separated and owned by the people versus the two or three corporations that exist.

Isaac Mashman1:36:35

Well, there is an entire conversation about cryptocurrency and the regulation thereof, and I feel like that has progressed nowhere. It's like we were talking about regulation for crypto, and it's like, what has really come of that? Not much, aside from, okay, Ethereum is a legitimate currency that can be traded, but there hasn't really been any agreement on...

Isaac Mashman1:37:59

[An example] is, specifically, if I'm not mistaken, El Salvador has committed to purchasing a Bitcoin or something every month, or something like that.

Isaac Mashman1:38:30

Yeah, it's definitely interesting, and I'm curious to see not only the next 50 years, when I'm an old man or maybe I'm loaded in some AI program, I don't know, whatever the next 50 years look like, versus even the next five years, the next 12 months. We're entering into this unprecedented time. It's the equivalent of Galileo looking and seeing the stars and being called some evil witch, or because a woman discovered a certain medicine, all of a sudden she's burned at the stake. We're literally peasants in this current stage of evolution and adaptation and what we're creating. I hope that, and this is kind of like my Elon Musk take, I hope that we do what is best. But I don't know if...

Isaac Mashman1:42:10

Well, that's the thing. Is that going to be the case 50 years from now, or 10 years?

Isaac Mashman1:43:55

Again, emotion versus logic, and emotional decisions versus [logical ones], actually.

Isaac Mashman1:45:07

Yeah, well, it's... Again, I do believe, though, I have a degree of optimism that is consistently being... Yeah, man, I'm pessimistic though. Well, and that's your right and your prerogative to be.

Isaac Mashman1:46:53

Well, and it's like, I don't believe that... There's this idea, and then I'm going to have to wrap it up. It's already almost night where I'm at. Yeah, it's been an amazing conversation. I really have enjoyed this. This is something I want people who follow me to watch. But man, I'm just thinking through, we have this sense of importance, and like energy, like matter, it cannot be created or destroyed. [The primary law.] I believe that a personal brand is kind of the same way. I believe that a personal brand can be created but cannot be destroyed. But the closest way it can be destroyed is if the person is forgotten.

If the person is forgotten, they, essentially, just disappear. We think about the historical figures, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Martin Luther to Jesus Christ to Adam to Eve to Genghis Khan, to any person throughout history. Historical figures, they're remembered and have this sense of importance given to them based off of who they were and what they accomplished. A person can have a sense of entitlement if their results match it. It's not about just blanket narcissism. Right now we have a lot of narcissism with nothing to show for it. That is dangerous. Right? You as well. Let's get... So man, it's been a pleasure.

Isaac Mashman1:48:26

Education, entertainment, a little bit of everything.