EP50: AI Is a Tool, Not Your Voice. Stop Letting It Replace You

Everyone's using AI. But here's what no one wants to admit: your audience can tell. They can feel when your emails, your content, and your talks were assembled instead of lived. In this episode, I break down why people are running back to real human connection. Why run clubs are exploding, book clubs are back, and health festivals are packed. And what that means for anyone building a brand or a community. I share what happened when I chose to show up with real stories at Growth Summit instead of an AI-polished keynote, and why the people and brands that survive the next five years will be the ones who set clear boundaries on how they use AI. Use it as a tool. Never let it become your voice.

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Transcript

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This is the Austin Cohen Podcast where we talk real strategies for chiropractors ready to grow beyond the adjustment. If you're building a business, developing your leadership, and trying to build wealth without burning out, you are in the right place. Let's get to work Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. What is up everybody? Welcome back. Austin Cone Podcast. Listen, we are at episode number 50. Let's go. Man, I'm sorry about yesterday, guys. I, my body has just been for those that wear, whoop, maybe you can relate, man. I was at 25% recovery, 68 resting heart rate. Whew. It has been a interesting week to say the least. Yeah, sorry about yesterday. I just was, my body was a little worn down and here we are today, I'm actually in Chicago, which is cool. Bolingbrook family, chiropractic, great people. Dr. Mitch and Dr. Ella. Shout out to them doing a site visit with them. And yeah, just been great being a. Being over here with them and learn, getting to learn a lot and strategize. Man, for those of you that are finishing up cohort one for the Freedom Accelerator Program, congrats. You are crushing it. It's been cool to watch all your recurring revenue drastically going up, and I'm excited for those in cohort two to start on Friday. So we've got a sold out group on Friday to talk about cohort two and all about scalability in your practice and building really good systems. So super pumped about that. Now, for those who. By the way, I'm sorry, but today you are gonna be hearing me deliver. I do a little bit of sniffle, so you are gonna hear that. Which you know this, but the content's gonna be great. Just so you know today. But real quick, I gotta say for those of you who do not have your ticket yet for Growth Summit, I've already shared, we have under 20 tickets available for next year's Growth Summit. And I know people have been saying to me, they say, yeah, but I don't know what I'm doing in 2027. You should know what you're doing in 2027 in February, which is coming to Growth Summit, which is. I truly believe is one of the number one business chiropractic seminars that exist when you get non chiropractors coming that say how great the experience is. Huge testament, especially for these people that have ultra successful businesses. I know in chiropractic for everyone's goal is to get to the million dollar clinic. Million dollar, million dollar business in true businesses just is not a that's like the baseline, right? So it's cool to. Be affiliated with some of these great people who have been coming and saying really cool things about the content they've been getting. What are we gonna talk about today? That's something I've been sitting with for a while, by the way, and I think a lot of you have been feeling exactly what I'm gonna talk about today. So I think it's gonna be very relatable. And right now we're living in that golden age of ai, right? Artificial intelligence. It is everywhere. Your emails, the content you see online, the marketing you see out there, the events like. Everything is ai and I'm not against AI, by the way, at all. I use it for sure, and it's definitely been an incredible tool. But here's something I've noticed. The more AI shows up in the real world around us, the more people are craving something that it will never replicate. And what that is they are craving real. REAL, not a reel, like an Instagram reel. Like people are craving real now and they're craving realness from people. I can't go on social media now and I don't even know what's real and what's not real anymore. By the way. Everything that gets posted, I have to question on whether or not it's real or fake or ai. Back in the days, it used to be, is that Photoshopped or not Photoshopped. Now it's, is it AI or is it not ai? And listen, like I go to events, I. I read hundreds of emails a week, and I listen to other podcasts and I can tell you almost immediately, I feel like when something was wi written with ai, you feel it too as well, and there's just the sameness to it and what. This polished content that they're producing, how it feels very hollow. Perfect structure. Structure. The grammar. Wow. Never seen somebody write such perfect grammar before knowing exactly where every comic goes. Parentheses, oh man. What's missing from it though, is the soul of it. And it reads like when you read this content or you listen to the podcast or you look at the graphics or the social media posts. It's like everything was optimized, but I didn't get any feelings from it. There was no story to me from what I read. And so that's really what I wanna be hitting on today because this is gonna be a really important topic for many of you that are using AI that are not. And the thing is, like I know I'm not the only person who notices this too, as well. When you're pumping out the content, whether that's social media, your newsletter, your marketing, like whatever it is, guess who else notices and that's your audience. Your customers notice and the people in your community noticed like you're using M dashes everywhere they notice. And we all have this internal filter right now where we can scroll past AI generated content the same way we learned to scroll past banner ads 10 years ago. Maybe you guys remember banner ads? It just doesn't land the same. I was at an event recently and someone was giving a keynote and you could just tell the talk that they were delivering was completely assembled. It was not lived in real stories. The frameworks they were sharing were definitely clean. The slides were polished. No story behind them though. I'm looking for like, where's the scar tissue? Where's the story? Where's the grind? No. Let me tell you what actually happened. Came from it and I looked around the room while I was at the seminar. Dude, everybody was so checked out and it wasn't, his information was wrong. It just didn't feel like it came from a human being. And that's the shift we're in right now. People aren't just consuming content anymore. They are literally filtering everything out for authenticity. And they're asking, did this person live this? Or did they prompt engineer it? And the part that gets me excited is like looking at what's happening in our culture right now. And I've shared this before on previous podcasts, but it's like run clubs are massive right now, and I'm not talking about. Like high level ultra marathon training groups. What I'm talking about is people that are showing up at six, 7:00 PM to jog with random strangers because they want to feel connected to other human beings. They wanna be in the same physical space, breathing the same air. They want to struggle through it. They want to be able to have connections with'em afterwards. And like some of the ones that I go to, like on Monday nights when I go to these run clubs, usually they'll have burger stations out there. They'll have food trucks too as well out there. And so people are looking for that. Health and wellness festivals right now. Is it Running Man, last year? Booming book clubs back in a huge way. By the way, dinner parties have also started to make comebacks as well. They used to hear about back in the days they would call'em like Sunday Night Suppers. Huge comeback. And people are now starting to choose experiences that are very slow and they're deeply human connected. Why? Because in a world that's getting more automated and is more AI driven by the day people are running. Huh Sometimes, literally back to the things that have stood the test of time, which is always community conversations, shared experiences. How about this one? How about people are looking for eye contact and vulnerability? What you're seeing right now aren't the trends. They are fundamentals of being human. And the fact that these things are surgery right now will tell you everything you need to know about where the world is heading. Like the more that technology scales, the more the value of the human touch becomes. And. It's not even a contraindication. That's the point. And if you're a chiropractor listening to this, the more experience that you can put into your practice with more eye contact, with more storytelling, with more community driven events, you can win the game.'cause everyone, all these other chiropractors are focused on everything has to be ai. You call their office and AI person answers the phone. I wanna talk to a human. Nobody wants to talk to AI bots. And then people will say to me, salespeople will say, you can't even tell the difference. Oh, you can definitely tell the difference. Okay, so I wanna get personally for a second because I do think that matters. I recently spoke at Growth Summit and I made a very deliberate choice about how I was gonna show up at Growth Summit. I could have built my entire talk, by the way, using ai. Could have used Claude Chat, Gemini, whatever, and I could have had to outline my points, could have had to write my scripts, generate all the PowerPoints, and it probably would've sounded pretty good on paper. But guess what? For those that were there, you know this. I didn't do that. I got up there. I told real stories from my actual life that have happened to me, lessons that I've learned the hard way. Moments in my life that were definitely messy, not polished at all, but they were true. And I shared from experience, not a prompt. And you know what happened? People leaned in and they came up to me afterward and said things like, that felt different. I could tell that was real. Thanks for the authenticity. Thanks for not doing an AI generated PowerPoint. The response that I got back from people at Gross Summit told me everything that people are starving for, speakers, content creators, leaders who just wanna be real with them. And even when real is imperfect, like more so probably when it's imperfect. It's funny, like back in the days, you could say you could type to somebody like they're going to the mall and. Maybe you said they're going to the mall, not they are going to the mall and you forgot the apostrophe. Nowadays people respect actually maybe when you mess up.'cause if it looks too perfect, then you know what doesn't feel real. Feels maybe more like AI wrote it. Sometimes when I'm typing text messages people and I feel like it's a good text message, I think in my brain, maybe I should misspell something just so they think that this is real. Not ai. You guys know what I'm talking about. I know you do. So here's my take. I wanna be really clear about this because I'm not saying you should get rid of AI at all. That'd be stupid and be ridiculous. It is one of the most powerful tools we've ever had access to. I have patients that come in who are in high school that are term papers, people who PhDs, do a thesis. It's amazing the access they have. Use AI to gather your thoughts. Maybe organize your research, brainstorming ideas, cleaning up rough drafts. Great, that's smart. You are leveraging a tool the way tools are meant to be leveraged. But what you do not do, and I cannot stress this enough, do not let AI become your voice. Do not let it write your emails and pretend they're from you. Do not let it build your community on autopilot, and definitely do not let it replace the part of you that makes people actually care about what you have to say. I am tired of the influencers. All they're doing is just, it's content. It's ai, ai. Nobody wants that anymore. The filtering process of that is gone and here's a prediction I'll be making right now. The people, the brands that survive the next five years, the ones that actually will thrive, will be the ones who drew the clear boundaries around how they use ai. They use it as a tool. They didn't use it as a crutch. They let it handle the back end. But what they did is they kept the front end of their life human. And in a world that is drowning and AI generated noise, the people who sound like actual people are gonna stand out really hard. So the question isn't are you using ai?'cause everyone's using it. It's do you have boundaries? Do you know where the tool ends? And you begin. Because that's a tool, literally, that's all it's, and your audience can tell the difference. I promise you they can. So I'm gonna leave that with you today as AI is here and it's powerful and it's not going anywhere. Embrace it, learn it, and use it. But what you have to protect is one thing, and that is your voice. You gotta protect your story and the things that make your community actually feel like community. The run clubs, the walking clubs, the rut clubs, the book clubs, the festivals, the real conversations, they're all telling us the same thing. People want human. People want real people want you, not the AI version of Austin. They want him and they want all the lessons that he's learned in the last 17 years of being a chiropractor. And I've made a million of mistakes. I'm not perfect. I made a ton of mistakes. I used to be a terrible leader back in my days. But what? Those are the stories that I love to share with people to let them see that, hey, you know what, he's just like us now. I took a lot of action to become a better person and a better leader to get to where I've gotten to. That's all I'm asking you to do. And that could be an AI conversation, but it doesn't take your voice away. So go be the person in the room who tells a story that could not have been generated and be the brand, the clinic that sends the email that actually sounds like it was written by someone who gives a damn about them. That's the competitive advantage right now. It is not the tool, but is the human behind it. Appreciate you guys listening, and for those that are in Freedom Accelerator Program, cohort two, Friday, February 27th, 1:00 PM lives will be changed. Eight weeks, 90 minute calls together, let's grow. To learn more about building your business, leadership, and life on purpose, visit chiro one eighty.com or follow Austin on Instagram at Dr. Austin Cohen.