How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Content Creation | Austin Armstrong

0:00What is up the entrepreneur DNA family? We are back with another incredible guest and as you guys all know These episodes are brought to you by the entrepreneur DNA community and club where you get access to my guests Just like you will today now You're gonna want access this individual because we are gonna be talking AI We're gonna be talking personal brand. He is a best-selling author of virality a great book that you need to make sure to get and He is the founder of syllabi that focuses on AI and creating that personal brand with hundreds of thousands of users I have Austin Armstrong here. How are you bud? Dustin, thank you so much for having me on brother. It's truly an honor I'm excited to nerd out with you and hopefully provide everyone some value I'm down to nerd out because you are the genius in AI and we just off off camera offline We were talking about this blend of personal brand AI How to really make we even are talking about your YouTube channel. Let's lean into this What are you seeing right now in the AI space specific to social media?

1:04Oh gosh there there's so many ways that we can take that even just before we were Jumping on this call I was working with chat GBT's brand new image generation model that creates perfect Harassels for Instagram out of the back out of the gate multiple image slides that you can swipe through the cover image Everything through call to action slide at the end. It's fantastic. You upload a single reference image and You can create a perfect carousel on any topic that you want aside from that AI video generation is Exploding this has been going on for a while now I own a video generation tool like you just mentioned Sold I but there's so many of these new models out there Seed dance 2 is probably the most powerful model on the market right now But Google also has VO3 open AI had Sora they shut that down

2:07There's so many different models out there. It's getting easier and easier to create AI videos and we were kind of also talking and before we pressed her cord here about How it's hard to trust what you see online anymore even with content going viral I just tricked my mom yesterday With an AI image unintentionally, but she called me multiple times. She texted me multiple times We are now in that area of Content hengo viral with AI and you don't know if it's real or not and that's kind of Exciting but scary and a lot of ways too. I I just was saying this and I'll say here I watched a guy who I follow and I know is a real guy followed him for years And he's always kind of headed the curve with that kind of stuff And so he was talking in his traditional influencer style with a handheld little mic whatever and then he dropped He cut the screen and he had this beautiful woman saying the exact same word same tonality same everything same

3:12you know It was he was just showing You actually won't know when the person isn't real or not and I've actually seen some of these new pages if you will Immediately go into hundreds of thousands of followers if not into the seven figures and unfortunately a lot of them tend to be Very good-looking females saying the message that the guy business owner wants to hear but is a lot more appealing to look at Yeah, I mean, I've seen Completely AI only fans channels pop up that start on Instagram with a completely fabricated AI woman Doing AI trends that drives people to the link in their bio. Yeah with adult AI content It's crazy man. It's gonna be it's gonna be crazy. So now let's talk about your book the brain the game Viral it. I mean, that is just brilliant. It's right there behind you if you're not watching on YouTube

4:14Make sure you're watching on YouTube but talk about your book. Let's let's jump into this a little bit What is the book talk about? Yeah, yeah, so this is my first of all you can do this really silly pose if you buy that is actually fun but I've been doing social media marketing or Over 21 years now I think about 22 years now. It's kind of crazy to think about And it's a two part book. So the first part of the book is everything All the lessons that I learned along the way over the last 20 years how I found a mentor to the different Lessons that I have taken from being a former martial artist And then the second half of the book is very tactical Strategies that you can implement how to use AI to do research To create content to execute the content to study patterns

5:15To frameworks that you can follow. I have a start video framework in there that you can follow to just stack the odds in your in your favor That your videos are going to go viral Just a really practical workbook and at the end of every chapter as well And I very much want it to be a workbook where you can write in it write your notes takeaways There's a section at the end of every chapter. What were your top three takeaways? What are the three immediate things that you're going to take action on and what is the timeline that you're going to give yourself in order to take action on that book and I have had So many people tell me so far that they read this book they applied it and within 30 days of doing it and sticking with it Their numbers of skyrocketed. Yeah, I'm very proud of it Well, so it's funny you say that because I was a little bit ahead of the curve. I know means in my some massive influence or I have like 130 subscribers on Instagram or followers whatever right like But that's for me it has been a very long runway. I've had to give myself to grow there right

6:20I'm not like a overnight success. I tend not to go truly viral I do at times we'll get you know tens of thousands of whatever but I don't hit that like three million views But there are business owners out there that literally end up going broke because they're only focused on trying to go viral Um, what would you say to those individuals you know that are business owners? They're leaning into the personal brand, but they're going broke from posting all the time Yeah, it's it's such a great question the actual thesis of the book is don't be a content creator be a business owner who creates content And so you need to be very strategic with what type of content that you create Viral for the sake of viral is not going to help you you could go viral Dancing, but you're a car mechanic That's not going to do anything for you right? So look at what's actually going to move the needle and what platform is going to move the needle for you You don't need to be Everywhere on every platform for every single person and viral is a very subjective thing as well

7:27Viral for me might be different for viral for you versus viral for the car mechanic or the therapist for example so What you really want to do is educate that is education oriented content that is Either locally targeted for if you're if you're trying to get local business or if you have a software tool or a service business that you can Or a widget that you can sell Anywhere in the in the world or anywhere in the country just stacking the odds in your favor So if you're a mechanic for instance, I would create educational free content just give your best information away for free three tips if you If your car is sputtering You know like give them the information so that they don't have to come to you This is going it sounds counterintuitive But when it comes time for them to purchase your your service or your thing

8:34You are the first one that's going to be top of mind for them and they're much more likely to get that sale Now you also want to have your systems in places as well setting up things like many chat automations for for dm building your email list sending them a book here link and all of these systems in place but by following like us like really paying attention to where your customers are at What are their needs? What are their emotional pain points just provide incredible free value don't ask for anything in return That's what makes content go viral because it increases the view duration on it because it's so helpful And it's shareworthy people say this information this video helped me so much I'm going to share it with somebody else because they need that as well That's how content goes viral and that's how business owners can capitalize on it What's one thing that people are getting wrong that are keeping them at no views small amount of views

9:36Well, there's so many things that they're getting wrong but talking too much about yourself upfront I think is one of the quickest ways to That someone's going to swipe away. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here But nobody goes to social media for you or for me. They don't care They're there for distraction for entertainment or education and oftentimes a blend of of all of those things And so if you open your video with hi my name's Austin and I've been doing marketing for 20 years and in this video I'm going to be nah you've already lost them You have three seconds tops To hook their attention in this era of unlimited content With a swipe of a finger There's another piece of content in front of you and so if you don't capture them immediately Someone else will so you need to hyper focus on really strong

10:37Opening hooks and this is you know, it's sad But it's the reality that we're that we're in you need to play the game If you want to succeed on social media, you need to understand where people are at where our attention spans are at Meet them where they're at having strong opening hooks like these five websites feel illegal to know is a series that's worked very well for me Or very practical ones for business owners and entrepreneurs I did this for therapists for a long time So I worked in the behavioral health industry as a marketer for about a decade or so And what we did was we looked at long tail keyword questions This is a very practical tip by the way for everybody listening or watching right now go to an SEO keyword research tool ahtreps.com Uber suggest answer Socrates answer the public whatever your pick your poison type in a service that you offer or an emotional pain point. So for example

11:42Depression and anxiety if you're a therapist type that in Sort my questions you will see all of the questions with data that people are actively searching for online What are the early warning signs of depression? What's the difference between depression and anxiety? What are over the counter medicines that can help with depression or anxiety? How do I stop an anxiety attack? I'm going through right now etc. You can extrapolate it's out to any industry Every single one of those questions is a unique video that you should create for your target audience And just saying that question is the opening hook that is how you should start the video Either you Stating the question as a as a statement or just having somebody behind the screen holding their phone asking that question verbatim and then you is the expert answer it

12:42That strategy that format has gotten millions and millions sometimes tens of millions of views Because it's hyper focused. It's hyper-targeted and it resonates with the right people What would give me one or two of those websites again that the people can go look at I love a h refs.com. That's my personal favorite a h r e f s com But there's sem rush.com answer socrates.com answer the public.com Uber suggests.com I think perfect. Yeah, I think that's a lot of people and I know this because of the space I live in more in the kind of business consultation business Facilitation. It's just people go oh Justin, but I'm just I don't even know what to do And so what your advice is really helpful right now everyone should kind of rewind that little part Okay fine, but you have expertise in something and again whether you're a

13:45psychologist psychiatrist you're a mechanic faster expertise and you go to one of these websites I just wrote two down is a h refs.com or sem rush.com Go and ask the question right and then what do most people worry about about their car breaking down something like that I would guess And they will give you these questions. Is that how you want to use them? Exactly type in Armouffler you'll get And thousand questions that people search for online. I would do search volume because what we're doing here This is an SEO strategy for your for your website, but Social media is a search engine people just look in different ways But the questions are still the The human side of of the question and so Volume is the best play for me like I would sort a little bit differently if I'm creating blog articles for these questions like sort by volume and Keyword difficulty like how competitive are those but for this purpose specifically

14:51I would just search volume because it's showing you the most amount of people that are asking that question I think that's the biggest challenge the most people I mean partly the the you know, they don't want to show their face, you know women in their hair and whatever And it feels awkward don't get me wrong to some extent it is I'm okay with it. Obviously you're okay with it. You actually Built a YouTube channel Massively and you didn't show your face Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So faceless content is a very fast growing Viral style of content and it's been around for a long time What faceless content is as the name implies is just content without a face. It's narrative content with B-roll or stock imagery or AI generated imagery or videos behind it and this has been around Forever, I mean look at Documentaries for instance you go on National Geographic or the travel channel or something and there they'll be like one person

15:53Talking in a room and then as they're talking they cut to to B-roll that's while there's narration and subtitles on the screen Something visual there that's Demonstrating what they're actually talking about. This is just removing the person from the equation this is And I love faceless content because exactly like you said there are so many reasons why someone cannot show up on camera They feel a little self-conscious for whatever reason They're in a regulated industry or they're in a job where they're highly scrutinized and they're not allowed To put theirself out there. Maybe they work in the government. They're not allowed to create content faceless videos allow you to still be creative still get your Thoughts out there your expertise out there your stories out there. This can be done educationally This can be done for fun We've grown tons of channels in every industry that you can imagine

16:53With this type of content. It's what my my tool shot. Sorry to shamelessly plug But that's just what syllabi my company does is it just helps you create faceless content on on any topic We've had real estate agents use it. We've had lawyers create content. We've had history oriented channels Science oriented channels now where can they go for syllabi? What's what's the website? How do they reach out to go to hey? I'm pretty interested in this faceless because I'm a little Not too keen on throwing my face up there like you Justin. What where can they go? Yeah, it's syllaby.io syllabi.io is the main website and now with that though I would encourage you if you are able to create content Do it your personal brand is so important And if if the only thing that's getting in your way is that you are afraid of getting some negative comments online that affect you

17:53Have empathy for the people That would leave these negative comments because most of the time it comes from their own Personal issues with themselves and it's never really an attack on you So get out of your own way Most of the time is well. I actually have a whole strategy like I love trolling the trolls online Trolls are inevitable no matter what you look like you can be the most attractive person in the world The most perfect person in the world You're still going to get negative comments from time to time because people love to disagree with you and so I've just Having been a child of the internet for so long and creating content for so long All these platforms really care about is more engagement So you can actually leverage the negative content to your advantage to reach more of the people that you want to reach anyway If you had to start all over again with all this experience with your company the knowledge and wisdom all your clients But you didn't have a budget for it

18:55What would you do for the first 30 days to get started? I would go really hard on short form vertical video My niche in industry is AI right now I've pivoted my personal brand a lot every like maybe five years. I'll pivot my personal brand If it makes sense to AI is a very fast moving industry I would break it into multiple clusters of content Like breaking AI news AI tips and tutorials and deep dives into individual tools specific use cases Essentially what I'm doing right now. I would do nothing different. But I see these Engids like this with zero experience starting to crush because the industry and the timing is performing really well And you're hitting top of funnel. So broad awareness. You're hitting middle of the funnel

19:55consideration stage and and then bottom of the funnel closing Conversion oriented content. I would stick to probably top of funnel for most of the content to just bring in Awareness awareness to top of mind stop of mind and I would probably create Three to five unique videos every day if I was starting from scratch Yeah, yeah, what is the the right rhythm? I mean consistency Yeah, I said by no means in my son viral Type of person like I have just been posting consistently for Kind of since Instagram came out just using that as one platform That's how I have 130,000 followers is not that I went viral and in have this What would be in I know you just said three times a day But what is your very kind of hard and fast rule for someone actually producing content maybe not AI driven or automated

20:57Actually producing content what should be the pattern Every day that they're subscribed to Whatever that you can consistently commit to is the real answer And as much as you can consistently commit to My answer varies depending on what stage that you're at If you're just getting started or you just have not had any traction Maybe you've been on Instagram for five years for your business and you've just had no traction whatsoever I am very much team quantity over quality while figuring it out When you figure it out then you can slow down because you know what type of content is going to work and then you can double down on it I would go crazy strategically crazy right like like we said earlier top of funnel middle of funnel Breaking news oriented content tutorial oriented content how to Content just answering frequently asked questions in your industry if you're a restaurant showing

22:02Food recipes or doing doing fun things and and trying some trends just try Everything at scale give yourself a 30-day Ultimatum This is like a timeline you don't need like if five years didn't work for you of You know posting once and then taking three days off and then posting again and like maybe ones a carousel and One's a video and that didn't work and so I stopped doing videos altogether and like not having a strategy 30-day straight come up with a strategic plan and whatever that you can consistently commit to Like three to five a day when starting Yeah, you're so 30 days. I basically guarantee that you will find One style or one format of content if you do that that works And then you double down you do one a day of that style of content But I would do at least one a day right now Yeah, I don't think you'll get anywhere without

23:04One a day. I mean, I'm with you on the three day. I mean, I do three day every day right seven days a week Yep, and it's you know, I'll do a real I'll do a Carousel and then I'll do a post or maybe another real but I just try to switch it up a little bit because sometimes one hits and the other doesn't and You know depending upon what it is Let's lean into you know your expertise of AI. How's AI uh Making people feel on the internet. How is it affecting the space for creators? Well, that's a great question, right because it's It depends on what your perspectives are on on AI. So there's plenty of people I'm an opportunist very much so in the best way like I love to find opportunity and share That opportunity as I as I find it. I am very transparent and anything that I am excited about And that works for me in a practical use case and it it makes me money as a business owner and entrepreneur I share that freely and I want to teach that and so I am very

24:07Optimistic about AI and I love how fast-paced it is even though it makes me feel overwhelmed Most people I think would would say that AI makes them feel overwhelmed Feak that's it. It's just out of control. I'll go to I was just at a social media marketing world conference For four days and I feel like I just missed the world But that's the echo chamber that I'm in and the lies that we tell ourselves We're all just doing the best that we can but I'm very optimistic about it uh, I I love all of the new tools that are coming out and Agentec AI and particular that's doing multi-step things for me I just was playing with chat GPT's new agents Yesterday they have this brand new feature that can create individual agents in your chat GPT account To to things like open-claw and and perplexity computer just amazing um Workflows and and opportunities with AI to save me time and to save and to make me a lot of money

25:11But I also understand the opposite side of things artists writers virtual assistants That Are fearful of their jobs and their livelihoods and it's overwhelming and maybe they're a little bit older So they're not as technologically savvy and as as quick to adapt to some of these new things and they're comfortable and You're they're not wrong either and I and I feel for them I partially am blunt. I think if you Are not embracing AI no matter what industry that you're in It's the cats out of the bag that the world is not going to go back You know you can talk your bags and go down to South America and live a life on the beach that doesn't involve AI if you want but the modern worlds Is using this all around the world In pretty much every industry. I think blue collars okay for a little bit longer But robotics are coming for for blue collars as well

26:14And so like I I see both sides of it online and as I talk to people in in person and the the the large majority I think are overwhelmed but see it in a largely positive light We we just talked about the personal brand side. I did an event 2025 2025 I called it the creators conference And I had some of my friends pretty big names from Dean Grassio C Tai Lopez many many friends that I've had on the podcast that I said hey, let's talk about being a creator now. This is back in January 2025 And then I think I did again April 2025. So AI was nowhere near where we see it today Yep, but everyone essentially said the same thing You need to lean into one or the other if you want to win big For the rest of our lives you need to have a personal brand and or lean into AI and now we're at a place again

27:16This is a year ago. I don't think anyone knew where it was gonna be You essentially can build a personal brand with AI When building a personal brand How would you either leverage AI specifically for content? Yep, and or would you not and try to genuinely authentically Do kind of the cringey for most people cringey easy for me and you to the selfie hey to everybody blah blah How would you do it now for the personal brand side? AI is a tool To help you do more of what you are already good at That's kind of the lens that I like to go about this And so how I'm using personal AI or AI to help my personal brand is I'm training projects and custom gpt's with my brain my book which I wrote myself

28:16and transcripts from speeches that I've done podcasts that I've done scraping years of social media content Answering questions for it so it really understands and knows me and it then I have my digital clone brain of Austin in there and I can use that to create more content to help me be uh more productive to increase my output to fill in the gaps of of what I miss to Find new ideas That my audience would resonate with that maybe I didn't think of because I'm distracted running multiple businesses My AI brain that says Austin you should create you should really like create a piece of content on on this This is trending online right now

29:18You have a background and expertise in this here's an outline or or a format of content that you can post on this in a very quick timely matter I'm going to catch that trend It's still me it's still my expertise. It's still how I would react to that content And it's allowing me to stay top of mind more now I still create a lot of content on on my own as well. I create silly handheld videos, but they're educational on on AI tutorials and and breaking news and all kinds of stuff But I use AI as my thinking pad and my my sound board that I can communicate with and helps me across the board That's how I use AI to really blow up my personal brand Now there's so many out there It's not a little bit about like what is open AI versus Hmm Claude Mm-hmm So there are different llms me main companies open AI has chat gpt which is their primary model

30:24Anthropic has Claude which is their primary model and there's google that has Gemini There's X formerly twitter that has Grock there's all of these main models out there And essentially these are llms which stands for large language model And they all more or less have the same capabilities with a little bit of variation Most people I think are familiar with chat gpt you type something and you get a response text images a pdf output Uh all of a lot of these models also have video generation capabilities as well Claude does not have a video generation model But chat gpt does or did Grock does Um Gemini does as well So you can create content at all of these um formats

31:25And you can train within them these little projects or brains like I was experimenting or mentioning as well Custom gpt a Claude project a Gemini Gem They're all essentially the same thing a specialized knowledge base that it pulls information from that then When you say create this thing for me it cross references the skill sets and the knowledge base that you trained it with to execute Following that format That's kind of the llm model and then we can get into a gentic AI if you want a gentic AI is Really what's Exploding right now it kind of started to come out to the consumer last year This year it's it's blowing up even more and I think by the end of this year we will see Mass adoption of of personal agent to AI Uh, you know again, you're like you just feel overwhelmed and I go oh yeah, yeah, you know So this is the feeling of probably every listener when you just said what you just said every listener is probably like

32:30I don't even know what to do Like it just sounds like anguish Right So let's go with just the peace line easy Here's where we want to start right I know everyone's aware of chat, but you know Claude is gaining some pretty big headlines What where why would someone use Claude versus chat gpt? They really go back and forth and in overall quality But I'm gonna take it back a step further as well before you even choose a model You as the entrepreneur need to figure out what AI can even do for you. You know, you don't need to create videos or You know Instagram images or AI songs If you don't want to if it doesn't make an impact in your business, right? So what I typically recommend people as the starting point is to do a time inventory I love this practice if you haven't done a time inventory

33:30This is the best place in my opinion to start and what this is is from the moment that you wake up until the moment that you go to sleep For seven do do this seven to fourteen days every single task Write the task down the start time the end time your level of personal enjoyment on it or if it's mandatory And then how much that task is worth Based on your time value So you also should understand how much is your time worth? How much is your time worth to you put a put a dollar value on it And what you're gonna do here is you're gonna see like okay, I woke up. I got out of bed I brushed my teeth. I took a shower. I took my kids to school. I let my dog out mandatory things Level of enjoyment can vary But when you get into work you check your emails wow 45 minutes went by I opened my phone and I I went on tiktok wow an hour went by I doomscrolled

34:33I looked at my calendar and I looked at each individual events and looked at the notes of the events and then I went over to a Google doc Or had my assistant rate my An executive summary of everything that I'm going to do today and that took an hour and just go through all all of these things like I attended a meeting and I wrote down physical notes in the meeting and then I had A down time to reflect on those notes and then come up with an action plan on those notes and that took me an hour to an hour and half Really understand where does your time go During the day and I find that most entrepreneurs most people in life have never done this practice They have no idea where their time is actually going and everyone says oh, I'm busy. I didn't have time to do it Do you know where your time went? I? Hate when people say that do you know where your time went most people have no idea because all of these little things rack up

35:35So you do this practice and then you look for AI solutions to the tasks that are taking you a large amount of time That are low enjoyments and low ROI and maybe that's a Calendar management tool that has you know, it's not going to be chat gpt. It's not going to be clawed It's a third-party tool that just saves you two hours a day Because you're spending too much time checking your calendar or checking your email Yeah, that is where I that's where I would practically start as an entrepreneur Yeah, it's it's again that that deep science like man There's just so many so much utility and I think that practice that you talked about like I talked to people about like When you're getting started with anything like understanding and auditing your time like every 15 minutes right down what you're doing What are you actually doing are you answering email still and then how low right so if you start to understand I think there's utility for all these different things I can tear point you can start

36:37To use yep So you have your company who's who's the type of person that should be reaching out to the company about Some level of content production and then let's even talk a little bit about specifically what you do there Yeah, so the business owner entrepreneur that knows they need to be more active on social media But doesn't have the time or doesn't like to be on camera or that doesn't think that they have the budget to hire a video production That's who syllabi is made for it's based on my 12 years of working at video and owning my own video Social media marketing agency everything that we did there I streamlined into software and made it literally 100 times cheaper Literally, it's it's That off to the client so if you're like a Justin Absolutely, you know rather than hiring agency a videographer a video editor a video that You can do it this way and then you have your book

37:38virality And that is almost a workbook. It's a book. It's an instruction manual It is for the business owner that understands brand is important in AI is important Yeah, absolutely can work and they get that Barnes noble can they get a Amazon is the only Amazon is the audible It is wherever you buy books Amazon is is probably the best place to get it but No full ISBN you can get it online It's it's probably not in your neighborhood bookstore unless you request it which would be great But you can get it anywhere you buy books online Austin Armstrong is been a pleasure having you brother We could probably do this over and over again and as always I will have you a part of the the community They help other individuals other business owners understand because you are the expert and that's the point is shared resources Shared people more hands to shake so thank you so much for spending time here at the entrepreneur. Are you there? I was an absolute pleasure brother. I feel like we're just getting started. We sure are

38:39I fully agree with that So if this was helpful if you need someone The need you know someone that needs to hear while Austin just talked about please share this with at least two your friends We'll see you on the next episode