October 17, 2026 | Read online
I've never put a lot of value in IP, especially when it comes to sales training.
There's nothing really new in sales. Almost everything any of us teaches is a repackaged version of something somebody else figured out a long time ago. We slap a new name or a new acronym on it, and the fundamentals underneath are the same.
That's why I've always been open about giving my content away in pieces. Tips, nuggets, and chunks of my process went up on YouTube, LinkedIn, and free webinars for anyone who wanted them, and that's how I built my entire brand.
The full programs stayed behind a paywall, because anybody could piece my content together if they had the time, and almost nobody has the time. What people pay for is someone they trust putting the pieces into a process and walking them through it.
AI messes with that math. I've been putting content online for 20 years. You could open ChatGPT today, ask it to coach you like John Barrows, and it would get pretty close.
That got me thinking about what IP is worth anymore. Then I saw what happened to Adobe, and it got me thinking even harder about software, about everything else we build, and about how much brand matters.
A developer named Brandon Thomas used Claude to build free, open-source versions of seven Adobe apps and gave them away. Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat. All of them.
His reason was refreshingly petty. He said he "got bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times." Then he went on Hacker News and wrote, "Software is over."
Eight days after he announced them, his projects had more than 86,000 stars on GitHub. Chamath Palihapitiya said on the All-In podcast that "IP and software was effectively rendered worthless."
Then HSBC downgraded Adobe from Buy to Hold over the clones, and the stock moved less than 1%.
That's the part I keep coming back to.
EVERYTHING IS TRAINING DATA NOW
Adobe is the headline this month, but the same thing is happening to anyone who has ever created anything.
Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per book across more than 482,000 books. A judge gave it final approval in July.
The detail most people skipped over came from an earlier ruling, where another judge found that training AI on those books was fair use. The penalty was for downloading pirated copies, and the learning itself was ruled legal.
You can think that's wrong (a lot of authors think it's VERY wrong) and it's still the world we're selling in. Your slide deck, your talk track, your methodology, and your product's code can all be absorbed and rebuilt by somebody with a laptop and a free weekend.
So if IP and knowledge are turning into commodities, what do any of us have left?
My answer is trust, and for individuals, trust shows up as your personal brand.
YOU CAN'T CLONE TRUST
Adobe is a perfect example. They paid $150 million this year to settle a federal lawsuit over how hard they made it to cancel, and plenty of people still feel held hostage by the subscription model.
But, they keep paying anyway, because creative teams have built their careers, their files, and their workflows around a brand they've trusted for decades.
My favorite detail in the whole story is that the HSBC analyst told people not to download the clones at all, citing the security risk of AI-written code with little human oversight. The code was easy to copy. Nobody could copy the reason you'd trust it with your files.
The research on people says the same thing. Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer (33,000 people in 28 countries) found trust moving toward the people closest to us. Trust in coworkers, and in friends, family, and neighbors, went up 11 points net, while trust in national government leaders dropped 16 and major news organizations dropped 11.
Among people who trust a lifestyle influencer, 62% said they would trust, or consider trusting, a company they currently distrust if that person vouched for it.
That number is a big part of how I think about the companies I partner with.
Otter, Apollo, and Unbounce (#sponsors) are trusted brands on their own. There are also plenty of tools out there that do a lot of the same things they do, and more and more, what separates them is who’s willing to put their name next to them.
That’s what I’m doing when I partner with a company. I’ve spent years building my brand on authenticity and trust, I have criteria for who I’ll work with, and I’ve turned down partnerships that didn’t meet them. My hope is that the trust you’ve given me carries over to the brands I choose to stand behind, and I take that very seriously.
It's also the cleanest example I have of how this works for you. When you share something with your take on it, the people who trust you extend a little of that trust to whatever you shared.
People trust people. A personal brand is how someone who has never met you decides whether to trust you before you ever get on a call.
WHY MOST PEOPLE NEVER START
I've been preaching personal brand for years, and I hear the same two reasons for not doing it.
The first is that there's very little short-term benefit. You post for three months, your pipeline looks exactly the same, and it drops to the bottom of the list behind everything that pays this quarter.
The second is that most people don't know what to post, or they don't think they're a "thought leader" or have any confidence in what to say.
Here's what I tell them. You don't have to be the thought leader, and you don't have to be the content creator. Be the content curator.
That means building your own news feed around the personas you sell to and the industry you sell into. Follow the thought leaders and the publications in that world, and treat it like the morning paper. The goal every morning is to learn something.
When you learn something, share it with your context. What did you take away from it, why does it matter to the people you sell to, and who should see it? Tag the author and tag the people who'd care.
This is the part people miss. If I write a newsletter like this one and you share it with your takeaways, and somebody who follows you gets value out of it, they don't thank me for writing it. They thank you for sharing it.
You get the credit for finding it, and you get smarter about your buyer's world every morning while you build it. That business acumen alone is worth fifteen minutes a day.
THE PROMPT PACK
Systems beat motivation here, so I'm sharing the Build Your Brand prompt pack (FTF11) that I use in my Filling the Funnel program to help reps get started.
You upload the PDF to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever AI you use, and it walks you through it one question at a time. It asks who you sell to, finds 5-10 real thought leaders for that persona and industry, and helps you set up a way to follow them (LinkedIn notifications, email subscriptions, Feedly, or a monitoring prompt it writes for you).
Then it drafts your first 3-5 posts from their recent content with your takeaways built in, and finishes with a weekly routine you can keep up alongside your number.
And if you get something out of this newsletter, share it with your take. That's your first post.
The part I still can't figure out is deepfakes. AI can already copy my face and my voice well enough that most people couldn't tell. My gut says it can't copy trust, because trust gets built over years of doing what you said you'd do in front of the people who end up vouching for you.
I'm not 100% sure that holds when nobody can tell what's real anymore.
Let me know what you think. If everything in your business can be copied, what's the one thing that can't?
#MakeItHappen
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