In a world where QR codes kill kittens and customer service is an oxymoron, one podcast has set out to make things right. This is the Unpodcast. Shh. Wayne just shushed us. On Podcast First, established in 2015. We have been shushed for the first time during the intro by Wayne. Shh, the credits are rolling. It's finally happened. Be quiet. My timer's gone backwards. Oh, that's great. I mean, we're professionals here. We'll be fine. What's up, everybody? Hey, everyone. So this is the second episode back. We haven't seen the crew in a year. That's true. Multiple of them have beards now. and I won't tell which crew members do on the show have beards at this point but there's multiple beards on the show they're all majestic and I just like to you know I just think I played a little part in it just a little part you feel like you were inspirational I think I'm their hero and I find that it's a they're always saying that always the number one comment we get from Adam and Wayne when is my hero coming beard man Yeah, man. Yeah. But also... T minus. But this beard is brought to you by Tommy. Barber's Mark. Tommy is... Do we have the graphic for Tommy? It's right there. There he is. Oh, there you go, Tommy. Thank you for making my face mane look this way. My face mane. What we don't realize is I lost my beard guy. He retired from bearding. and it's something that you just can't go to anybody. I'm going to educate you all right now. So hair is the thing you're looking for somebody that can style it, cut it, right? And it's hard to find somebody as that. I'm not sure if you know about this, love. So beards are very – I know hair is – nobody cares about their hair. But beards, once you find a stylist, you like to stick to them. Years of walking into barber shops and saying, hey, do you do beards? And they're like, sure. as if they've never heard of one and they just think it's an upside down head. I didn't know there were so many products. I think that's what surprised me most about being on this journey through life with you with your beard is how many products? Well, we found Tommy at Barber's Mark because I lost my person and I went to Barber's Mark. Now, before that, I went to a different place and I had 17 chairs with ring lights and cameras and everybody had even also a more impressive beard than I had as well. Oh, see, that's tough. They were asking me questions as a 50-year-old me does not understand. Yeah. For example, like, do you wash your beard? That was one. No, it was like, do you want a lineup? Is that an expression? I thought a lineup is usual suspects, and they all get together, right? And it's like, you know. It's funny. I was going, like, sports first. Oh, yeah. I went prison. Yeah. Interesting. Which is very weird. Interesting. So, okay. Let's go your route. Note that. Someone note that somewhere. But all these questions, what I want is a beard trim. Okay. Shape it with this gargantuan skull I've got. Make it work. Make it look good. I just got a look from Allison. I don't have a gargantuan head. It's a fine head. It's fine. And the problem is I don't know how to sculpt it. And I don't want to know. I want somebody to do it for me. I want a professional. And I lost my person. And now I found Tommy. And I mentioned, Tommy, we've got a show. And the reason why I was going to get the trim was to go on the show. But also my wife is in the car currently. And if you cut the entire beard off or shave it, and I'm not looking, she will come in here and drop kick it. Yeah, I know. I go back and forth because I feel like sweeps week was for the podcast. If I shave that off. You getting like a really terrible beard trim, I feel like would be funny. And the content is important to me. But as the person who spends most of my time like looking at you, I do enjoy the beard. I think I'm just thinking about our listeners and how excited they must be to have the podcast back, to cover these important issues in their lives. Exactly. Like beards. And again, Tommy. And Tommy. What's up, Tommy? Thank you for taking care of this beard. We appreciate you and everybody in the world of beards that helps. And there's actually- The wide world of beards. The wide world of beards where you walk by somebody. Also, very weird giving people beard compliments. Yeah, but I think that might be, maybe we should ask our listeners, I think you're the only person I've ever heard give a random beard compliment. If I see a good beard, I'm walking up and telling the man. It's true. He walks up to strangers and tells them that he likes their beard. Now, half the time, they're just like, thanks. They're not really strangers, right? You're brothers. We're beard brothers. Yeah, you're beard brothers. But the other half, people have this look on their face of like, when are you going to stop talking to me? Yeah, some people look uncomfortable. And otherwise, halfway through, they realize, oh, I'm not trying to sell anything to them or ask for something. I'm just trying to give some beard respect back for them. You should keep being you. I'm not suggesting you change her. Thank goodness. That's what I really hope for. So I want to, we're going to hop into some ridiculous things today and fun things today. But there was a campaign earlier on back that we all remember. Yeah. And Allison's going to jump in with a story today. It was so fun. So what we usually do is we share stories with each other before a podcast. We sort of get together all the stories over the month, in this case over the year, that we've, that have been sitting there. And so when you showed me this story, you found this story. I remembered the campaign, and it was funny to see it back in front of me and think about how things have changed, too. So the title of the article is You Wouldn't Steal a Car, Anti-Piracy Campaign May Have Used Pirated Fonts. Digging into Archive's site points to the questionable use of text styling. So you wouldn't use a car. You wouldn't steal a car, right? So you wouldn't pirate a movie either. That was the gist of an infamous campaign, You Wouldn't Steal a Car, Anti-Piracy Campaign, from the Motion Picture Association of America during the mid-2000s. The questions are now being asked about just how careful the MPAA followed its own anti-piracy principles when designing the campaign. Specifically, did they rip off a key font, which is the font that if you're watching the video for the podcast, because the video is also available, the font is up on the screen. I highly recommend you open the video to see it. And so the question to that, the answer to that question, like whether they used a pirated font, is apparently complicated, which usually isn't a great sign. Usually when something is straightforward, it isn't complicated. So what had first happened was that a site called Fonts in Use, which is like a fair use site, noticed it, right? And sort of called out the fact that it was something called FF Confidential which is designed by someone named Jess Van Rossum in 1992 And it pretty similar to the unmarketing font on the cover of Unmarketing It is. That's right. And so the article features all this conversation back and forth, different people noticing it. And it's funny because one of the people who noticed it was the brother of the person, right, the person who designed it. So it said Van Rossum, who is actually the brother of Guido Van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, told Torrent Freak that he knew the anti-piracy campaign had used his fonts, and he knew that a clone existed to his font. But he didn't know that the industry group had used the knockoff version in the campaign and found it hilarious, apparently. So it's... It's too funny. And it's interesting. The article's really interesting. It goes more into fonts. It says a font, or specifically a font file on a computer that makes displaying a certain typeface possible can be protected. Yep. So it is something that can be protected by copyright. So it's something to be interested about. And I was thinking about that. Do you think that there's a lot of like. It's a fascinating world to me. Fonts and custom fonts. In a few different ways too, right? Both from the campaign who's putting out. We need to pause on that for a moment. Let's sit in that moment. And I want to reflect. The anti-piracy campaign. Yeah. Did not buy the font they used to stop piracy. And one of the things we talked about a little bit last week when we were our first podcast back was this idea of like how you, you know, you're using, how do we build business, for example, when we talk out against AI? Like we must really be like, what's that tension, right? We must really be. But like, you know, this is sort of why exactly why we don't use it. Right? Like it's talking about you have to represent your brand. And so the campaign is a brand as well. And look at what they're known for now. And the fascinating, it's like finding out D.A.R.E. was really a multi-level marketing scheme for police officers. It's fascinating. You got paid to send people to it. You're just like all of our 80s and 90s big kind of, hey, don't do this bad or this bad. You know, it's like this campaign. Yeah, bad's drinking. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Laura Zolrick's like, you can't use Napster. Like all these things realizing, oh, that's just all BS. I also, I love the ecosystem of the internet that finds those things. I'm just so glad that that part of the internet still exists. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like this campaign from 1992 needs to be reconsidered. And I love that. And it's also something that it's like one of the more disrespected forms of art. Yeah. It's fonts, right? If somebody walked up to you and said, well, what do you do? I design fonts. To me, it's cool as hell. Yeah. It's a cool thing to hear. But people are thinking of paying for a font. Yeah. This is a wild guess, but I am guessing very accurately right now that 90% of people in business have never bought a font. Yeah. Right? It's something to think about. Or they've even heard the term bought a font. Yeah. If you're watching this and you're in the industry that uses, of course you understand this, but I'm saying outside of that, the disrespect for fonts is as much, if not more, than other creative worlds as well. Or just take the font. Or just grab it. You're like, no, you're writing all the things in this, and we don't have the rights to use that. Yeah. Do you remember doing it, making the logo and the font and everything for Unmarketing? Do you have a memory of that when you first started Unmarketing? So here's the, so it's like, and this leads us perfectly into what we're going into as well, into AI. So we should start doing a show. You think? It's really good. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, let's see. But it's, so starting Unmarketing long, long ago, and looking at, trying to figure out a way, how do I get what's called a corporate identity? It's your package. It's your logo, your sites of colors, all the things. Back then it was like you'd get a packet. You'd get letterhead, envelope, business card. It was a corporate identity package. So one of the things I did was there was a program that was called on a CD, a logo creator, and I'd try to figure stuff out. And when I created it, it was called the Virtual Networking Group or virtualnetworkinggroup.com. was the site was the first online networking thing there was for businesses, business people or business owners. I would use that, but it looked like it was generated by a program and this was back late nineties, right? Early 2000. But actually all my, my corporate identity package was actually a barter because I was new to business. And this person's designer in Guelph. She was newer to business. I gave marketing help to her. She did my initial designs for my corporate identity, but my big screw up, my start, and a lot of people don't know this, and marketing originally was called unmarketing, and then the tagline wasn't stop marketing, start engaging. It was how to do business without spending a dime. One of my favorite things about unmarketing. It was about not spending, because all the best ways of marketing, positioning is not money-based. It's positioning yourself. The problem is, the only people it attracted was people with no money! Which is a very difficult way to start a business, let's be honest. Right. And as somebody who's been it multiple times there's different being somebody who's being economically feasible with what they're doing and being broke absolutely it's a very so i realized i needed to bury the lead of that part and b that's one of the benefits of what we do not the feature which is just looking not to spend money any anywhere ever so it was a very different shift but as we go we're at a spot now very much now which is people say do you need a logo no problem ai will do it like literally it's the default. Or that the term chat GPT is like a verb or describing a person at this point where, oh, chat GPT will do it for me or Claude will just do it for you. This will just take care of it. Where we now, we remove all of the human out of design, except we're designing for humans. I also like, it's one of my favorite things. Like we've started a few, I mean, a few companies, like I've started a company, you've started a company. We also have other projects that the two of us have worked on over the years. And one of my favorite things is that look of it. And I know it's not everyone's. I understand it's not everyone's. But I also think there is an input as someone who has the idea, someone who's the creative person coming to the idea, to understand you're going to have to. We look at this a lot. We look at marketing a lot. We look at the name, the way the colors are. Everything's on purpose. And I do think that there's something to be said for engaging in that work and spending some time in it and adding something or liking it. We talked last episode about always sounding off. the music podcast, right? What's being made right now is the album art for the show. Hey, cool. Owen's making it, coming up with concepts. Aidan and I are talking about what we like and we don't. It's fun. Yeah. Right? But also you've gotten to have a part of this. Now, and the thing is, if you let AI design your logo, also you can't copyright it. Yeah. Which is a very big thing that's happening with AI more and more. And what happens then is this just trickles into everybody in marketing. And now we have so many people who love creativity who love creation who love art One of our biggest mistakes in I think in business and marketing and totally understandable why and the worst reasons is we call it content We should call it art. We call it content. We take the art out of it. We talk about it. Content is something to be done. Art is something created. That is a very important distinction. I want to give you, I'm going to read out a message I got from one of our long-time, she's not a long-time listener fan. She's a friend of ours and being connected for a very long time in marketing and also really a great human. Yeah. Always working for places or causes or just always there. Reaches out because she's reacting to one of the things I shared about, I've been slightly vocal about hating so much about AI. Yeah. About this stuff. And she wrote, Hi Scott, I thought of you today while crashing out over a conference call. By the way, if you think of me while you crash out, it's such a wonderful compliment. Thank you. On the call, I found out that basically every other marketing team in the organization is creating custom GPTs to manage their marketing output. From strategy to copy to design, I'm apparently the last holdout. I got off the call and cried for 15 minutes because as much as I want to push back on this over use of AI, it seems it'll be career ending if I don't. And so I appreciate that you're out there being a voice for those of us who don't think Degenerative AI is the right way forward. And that is exactly why we talk about these things. And also why we've brought the show back. Is that now more than ever, being human is the best business move. I agree. We always talk about being human. And that's one of the threads throughout everything we've always done is that message. but for the people that have to hear this in a different way it's now good for business right the fact that every youtube any youtube video i watch and i watch a whole bunch of youtube every day i think you're the reason for the big shift we talked about last week that's right the shift in the and how media is consumed but when at the start of a video especially ones now that use any kind of animation or illustration will have a disclaimer near the start that says made by humans. And that's what I mean. And where people come around, because they always ask for opinions too on this type of things when it comes to AI. And it's a very basic thing for me. I did a real estate podcast last week. And he's like, well, then what is the message? Because it's not black and white. And people are like, well, it's here. You got to be... Look, we talk... Listen, we wrote the book on disruption. I understand disruption and what it does. But if you are feeling hesitant to certain areas of AI right now, you are not wrong for feeling that you are not wrong for feeling that if your gut says this part of ai or ai in general or you've watched the terminator once in your life if you're finding it's not comfortable for you you are not wrong but you have a lot of people right now who are also fearing for their jobs yeah and saying i will get on board yes i will get on board my job at the movie theater when I worked there in the 90s was to train customers how to use the automated kiosks to buy their tickets to put me out of a job as a box office attendant. Tellers at banks are there to help you use the ATM to make them out. So I understand that that can happen. If you feel this is wrong, you are right. And your feeling is right. And the situation she's in here is like a lot of people. And the answer is you can't push back within the circle. The decision's already been made above you. So either we find a place that has not made that decision, do our own thing, or figure out down the road, how do I move out of this world that is really rubbing against me the wrong way? I also think what's important for them to know is that they aren't alone, that we get messages like this all the time and talk to people like this all the time. And I really think like there is something to be said. Hopefully people who are listening are also managers and people who are responsible for other people. You know, it is often we're in the middle of that chain. So yes, our company is doing something and we feel like we have to give into pressure. But then we're also passing that pressure along to the people who work for us and who work under us in a certain structure in our company. So, you know, there's always something that we can do. And I would also speak to managers who are listening to say that, you know, we've seen calls. A really huge article went viral just like maybe six weeks ago was talking about how companies are looking for storytellers. I think it was in the Atlantic. And, you know, companies are also seeing what we're all seeing, which is that the content is being filled up with AI generated. Schlopp. And so the answer to that, to standing out, what we've been talking about since 2008 or 2009, was distinguishing yourself, right? How do you establish yourself as an expert? How do you platform yourself online? And part of platforming yourself is distinguishing yourself from what everyone else is doing. And the only way to distinguish yourself is by being yourself. And none of that gets done if you completely, even more and more and more so, eliminate that from the equation. So when I see that companies are looking for storytellers, and then I read a message like this that says that the one person still in a company or in a team who wants to put that creative input into their work is so afraid, what it says to me is that you already have those people. You don't need storytellers. You have storytellers. But you have to allow that storytelling to happen. And it doesn't happen when you're enforcing on people to use a technology that makes us homogenous and makes things tend to make things the same and safe and within a certain hold, you know. And people ask, too, then, well, then where can I use it? And the answer is, well, wherever you want, first of all. But secondly, where are you willing to lose the rep? That's the question personally you want to ask yourself. Okay, so where are you willing to not improve in? I am not being sarcastic here. I'm not being saucy. I'm not trying to do the thing here where I'm being sarcastic. I really mean what I'm saying here. Where are you willing to lose a rep in? Okay? But understand what that rep means. If you say, I'm willing not to become a better writer, which is your choice. Okay? I don't like writing. That's not my thing. You love writing, right? But also, I'm not losing a rep in writing, though. Because if I wrote something, with that is research. With that is reading. So the rep has other things around it as well. So maybe you want to take that out or you put that in. That is part of the issue. So I don't want AI replacing me. So I never having something sound like me write for me or be on a video like me But the other side of it is I never want it to create I can use I like AI in anywhere I like automation where I don know it happening Right? You know, it's like our newsletter. I don't physically go down the internet tubes and send out my newsletter. It goes out to all the people itself, and I don't have to do that anymore. I like how you sent out the newsletter. Right? Just kidding. Pneumatic tubes everywhere. Right? We're just going to ship it out the newsletter. But this is the point. I'm willing to not use that rep. Yeah, I understand. But if 10 people are writing every week for their newsletter, and you're using AI for your newsletter every week, after a year, they've had 52 editions they've written and researched. And you have 52 editions that you haven't written or researched. Who's smarter now? I don't mean who's smarter because you've done your time for other things. Who has gotten better with the reps? It's the person who's done the writing. And the reps is often communicating your message or communicating what you do, which is sort of an important thing in marketing and sales and business to be able to, you know, be present and explain who you are. And if you want to do with writing-wise and you're going to use something like Grammarly, we'd like to talk to you about what you shouldn't do. And by the way, longtime users of Grammarly ourselves here were taken aback by this whole thing. This part is from tomorrow's publisher. It says a proposed class action in Manhattan federal court accuses Grammarly, now called the AI writing tool, of using the reputations of well-known journalists, authors, and academics to make market an AI editing feature without their permission, of course. The complaint filed by investigative journalist Julia Engwin alleges the company's expert review tool presented editing suggestions as if they were drawn from named writers, creating the impression those individuals had agreed to participate. The case highlights a growing legal question for AI products, whether software companies can invoke real people's identities or expertise to frame automated advice. According to the complaint, Grammarly subscribers who activated the feature saw status messages such as, quote, reading your text and, quote, finding experts to review your piece, followed by prompts including applying ideas from Julia Engwin alongside short biographies of the cited figures. Engwin, a Pulitzer, Pulitzer, either one. For those on the podcast, I just sort of nudged and wasn't sure. A Pulitzer winning reporter and founder of the markup says she never consented to be included as an expert, never licensed her name or likeness and never approved the comments attributed to her. She told the court she learned of the feature only after a March 26, 2026 article reported that the tool relied on real people's names. She heard about it in the news. She heard about it in the news. who seeks damage to more 5 million. And it happens to be the fact that one of our wonderful friends of the show, Anne Handley, is one of the voices as well. To the awesome Anne Handley. Shout out. Anne, who also we are both keynotes at a conference coming up, which is unfortunate, so I need to now not speak at that conference because I hate speaking on the same stage as smart people. Hey. Oh, wait. No, it didn't work. Okay, sorry. did it and i'm gonna need to edit that out so ann commented on somebody sharing this story and i thought it was really good and uh ann says that they actually took it down yesterday um ceo the posted an apology on linkedin saying they're disabling the feature to quote re-imagine it yeah i bet and then says i was one of the experts included without permission or notification what gets me is how he's framing this as a if they just fell short on implementation rather than acknowledging the fundamental problem, which is they built a commercial product around our names and reputations without asking first. The pattern you're calling out here, which is speed to output over long-term implications, is spot on. And it puts all of us writers, artists, creators, experts in an impossible position. Either let your work be used commercially without compensation or become irrelevant. That shouldn't be the only choice. To me, this matters beyond just one feature or one company. It's about whether AI companies will treat expertise as something to partner with or just raw material to extract. Unfortunately, it very much seems to be the latter. So there's a lot of things about this that bother me. One of the things that's interesting is also the focusing on the implementation is focusing on this idea of like, well, if we asked, right, So if we'd come to Scott Stratton and we'd say, Scott Stratton, can we use an AI-generated you to give writing advice to – it could be business advice. I know. Well, it won't be writing advice, but it could be business advice or speaking advice or video game playing advice or any of the other things that you're really, really good at. What about the ethics of the person using it? So if I go to Grammarly and I think Stephen King, because he gave permission for his AI to be used, I just want to make sure that I don't think Stephen King is actually – even if they give permission, the AI-generated version of the expert is never going to be the same as actually the expert reading your work. And also, like Anne Hanley has books you can buy where she tells you how to write better. Scott Stratton has books and a podcast and a website where you can learn how to, and keynotes where you can learn how to be a better business expert. So it's extrapolating and appropriating the knowledge you guys, experts already put out in the world and just making a fake version of it. So it's like there's so many reasons. And this is now the time. I can't decide which is the worst one. At the end of this episode is actually now the time we reveal we never recorded this episode. This is fully AI. I almost did a spit take and then I thought, no. Wayne wouldn't like that but I thought about it yeah no I'm Allison Stratton I'm real I'm Scott and I am not this is my AI Scott I brought him with me today he's very handsy to have around he's great at podcasting let's go bye bye yeah is that it for today that's it did you have fun AI me or real me uh AI you yes okay good end communication Bye guys. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and visit the unpodcast.com. And remember friends don't let friends use QR codes. you
