From Dial-Up to AI: Jason Barnard on Owning Your Digital Narrative

What if the machines people use to find you—Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Siri—became a fair lens instead of a funhouse mirror? That’s the challenge we tackle with Jason Barnard: taking back control of your digital narrative without resorting to hype, hacks, or heavy tech.

We swap dial‑up memories and language mishaps for hard‑won lessons on modern brand stewardship. Jason unpacks how he went from failing French to thinking in it, then pivots to the craft of prompting: why early prompts fall flat, when to reset a drifting thread, and how a “vanilla” model can write better instructions than your biased assistant. The big unlock is structure: a JUSTEN-style instruction format that reduces hallucinations by turning personality, methods, vocabulary, and guardrails into machine-readable directives—then adding text for the human “soul” that structure alone can’t capture.

From there we go practical. Learn the Claim‑Frame‑Prove method to seed facts, articulate value, and link to proof across the web. Build an “entity home” as your canonical source, then create a loop of corroboration that AI can trust. Jason breaks down the algorithmic trinity powering modern answers—LLM chat for conversation, search for freshness, and knowledge graphs for fact checking—so you can design content and signals that align with how assistive engines actually think. We also dig into ethics, the risk of over‑reliance, and why his team runs multiple unnamed assistants per client but keeps humans in charge of final judgment.

If your audience meets you first through a machine, you can’t leave that first impression to chance. Use clear prompts, structured instructions, consistent bios, and verifiable proof to make those lenses accurate. Ready to test your narrative in the walled gardens? Listen, take notes, and then visit calicube.com/guides to start shaping how AI represents you—deliberately, honestly, and at scale. If this conversation helped you see your brand through a sharper lens, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find it.

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