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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Are you feeling overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the AI changes? Trust me, I know how it feels. The marketers who are truly thriving today with AI have discovered something really important. They're not doing it alone. At the AI Business Society, we've created a community where smart, curious marketers like you share discoveries, troubleshoot their challenges, and celebrate breakthroughs together. Listen to what Marissa Shadwick had to say. Quote, I found my people. I love chatting about our experiences with AI and supporting each other on our journey towards the future. Unquote. Stop navigating the AI revolution by yourself. Join our community of innovators and let's grow together. Visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI to learn more. Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Today we have a very exciting show. We're going to talk about something that I've never talked about on this show, which is creating interactive AI clones of yourself or of your business. And when I say interactive, I mean they talk, they sound like, and they do things exactly as if they were you, but they're not. And if you're like, what are you talking about? Mike, you definitely want to stick around for today's podcast interview because I interview my good friend George B. Thomas, who has done this successfully, and he's going to reveal to us everything we need to know to be able to do this for ourselves, this could indeed be a game changer for you. If you are a creator of content already and you are potentially a thought leader and you don't have enough of you to go around. Now, there's also other reasons why you might want to create this, so be sure to listen to the interview to learn all about it, but I can assure you this will be a very entertaining and fascinating discussion. By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show on whatever app you're listening to so you don't miss the great content we've got coming your way. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with George B. Thomas, helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by George B. Thomas. If you don't know George. You've got to know George. He is an AI marketing strategist and a HubSpot expert. He's the author of the forthcoming book Cloning Human Experience. And his agency is Sidekick Strategies. And his podcast is Hub Heroes. And he happens to be a good friend of mine. George, welcome to the show. How you doing today, Michael?
- [03:14]
George B. Thomas
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to just be sitting with you and having this conversation. And hopefully we're going to add a ton of value to those that are listening today.
- [03:23]
Michael Stelzner
We definitely will. And today George and I will explore something new to me and likely new to you, which is interactive AI clones. It's not exactly what you think and really how they can help you create unique experiences. And I'll share a little bit about how in the world I discovered this with George in a little bit. But first I want to scroll back the clock a little bit and I want you to share your story and how in the world you got into AI. Start wherever you want to start and then take us up to what you're doing today.
- [03:52]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, I'm going to start back further than some might think I would start back because I think there's context to the conversation that is the story of George B. Thomas. Like, listen, I started out at three years old in a one room log cabin in Lincoln, Montana. We didn't have any running water. And at nine years old, I rode my pony to a one room schoolhouse. Right? By 17 years old, I was a high school dropout and I actually joined the Navy. And so to say that I come from non tech beginnings and lightly educated beginnings is an understatement. And the reason I'm sharing that part of my story is because I want everybody to know that anybody, anybody could do the thing that we're about to talk about today. Like, I'm not a tech genius. I'm not like, you know, half Albert Einstein. So if you're sitting here and at any point you're like, I don't know if I can do that. Just go back to the very beginning of this story. Some other pieces of how I got here. I've been a youth pastor to church, I've been a bouncer at a bar. I've worked in the food industry. And at some point in like my late 20s, early 30s, I was like, hey, maybe I want to do this design development agency thing. Which then led me to winning tickets at inbound 2012, which led me to HubSpot, which led me to Marcus Sheridan, which led me to podcasting and video editing and educating humans how to do great stuff in sales, marketing and business, which then led me to AI. And when I say led me to AI, when I first started to use AI, when I first started to get into artificial intelligence, it wasn't out of like, it's the shiny new toy, even though it was. It was out of desperation for something that I wished I had once learned, but out of my infinite wisdom as a youth, ignored and realized there was something on the planet that could do it way faster than me. And that was, I wish, Michael, if I could go back, I would listen to my typing teacher and I would learn how to type. Because right now it's like two fingers, three fingers, and trying to go as nuts as possible. But then I saw ChatGPT and I was like, this is the fastest typist on the planet. And so I went down this road of like, how can I get it to understand me? How can I get it to create content like a human? How can I get it to sound like me? And so this started me down this journey of like, voice and tone and grammar and structure and all of these things that I like to call the bricks that were kind of being built during this almost two year period before we even reach the story that we're talking about today, which is the creation of the digital interactive clones. So I want everybody to realize as we kind of talk through this, we might go back and I might talk about certain segments or sections of this and how all of this ends up being in the clone or clones that we're going to talk about today.
- [07:09]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. And there's part of your story which is not been told, where you decided to do another podcast exploring human understanding and relationships, which also I think is part of the story. So kind of. So that part of the story too?
- [07:24]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, definitely. So here's the thing. In the intro you mentioned the Hub Heroes podcast. That's the podcast that we do for HubSpot users. And I'll be honest, over the 1012 years that I had been helping humans with HubSpot, I realized you can teach people HubSpot as much as you want, but at some level, you also have to teach the humans to be good humans, to do good sales and to do good marketing. And so once I started my business, because this was about three years ago, I actually ended up exiting out of agency life. Like, at first it was Marcus shared in the sales line, then Impact brand and design, and then Impulse Creative with Remington and Rachel Beggar. And then boom, three years ago. Let's start our business, which means you can kind of do whatever you want to do as long as you have the Runway financially to do that thing. And so I was like, hey, I want to start this podcast that is about helping humans. And so I started a podcast called beyond your default. And here's the thing about beyond your default is this podcast is me being about as vulnerable and as raw as humanly possible. And it was a painstaking process of me basically putting myself on the digital therapy couch or session each week where I would talk about the skeletons in my closet or the way that I wanted to grow better, or the way that I felt and kind of had engaged with fear. And it was. It was like me unpacking all of these things that in my early 50s, I was like, it's time to activate mentor mode. And so beyond your default was this. Let me help humans. Let me do a little bit of mentoring. Let me give something that I can plug into the humans that I'm helping with HubSpot of like, hey, you might want to check this one out too.
- [09:15]
Michael Stelzner
So connect the dots how what you ended up doing. Like, go ahead and reveal as part of this story what you created.
- [09:22]
George B. Thomas
Yeah.
- [09:23]
Michael Stelzner
And then we'll kind of dissect a little bit about, like, how. How to actually do it, because you were able to use all this data, for lack of better words, that you had created for this podcast to do something with an interactive clone.
- [09:35]
George B. Thomas
Yeah. So let's reveal the masterpiece. And that is we have created multiple clones. But at first, I'll talk about the George B. Thomas HubSpot helper clone. And I also want everybody to realize as we get into this, I came kicking and screaming. At first. I had a buddy who was like, you've got to check this out. This is the dopest thing ever. And I was like, nah. And then I was like, who am I? Who would want that information? How would it be useful? And so I just want you to know there was like a six month period where I was like kind of backpedaling of like, this may not be the thing for me, even though I was like super down with like, AI and ChatGPT. Then I ended up doing a weekend at this friend's house with another friend. Both of them, by the way, happened to be clients of the agency. We're hanging out and we start over the weekend to build this clone. And it was crazy because all of a sudden all of these pieces that I've been talking about started to fall in place. So for instance, we needed to make it sound, and I don't mean audio. We'll talk about that later. But I needed to make it sound like me. Like if I was going to create a clone, it needed to not just be this like, robotic version of like HubSpot knowledge or information based on the content that I had been creating for years of content creation. And so I got to use the brick of like voice and the brick of tone and the brick of like, all the grammar stuff that I had told ChatGPT to use or not. Don't use these words, use these instead. Don't use EM dashes, which I might get some hate. For those of you that love the M dash, I'm just gonna throw that out there. I get it. But like the way that I wanted it to kind of use medium paragraphs, use short, medium long sentences to add perplexity and burstiness. Like all of these things, I was able to take the thing and be like, okay, I'm going to create these custom instructions. So it just understands. Like, be a HubSpot expert. Make sure you're simplifying the complex. Come from a place of empathy. And then once we got the content in there, which I'll talk about, like what all the veins of content here in a hot minute, we got the voice, the tone, the, the grammar, the way that in there, the next part.
- [11:53]
Michael Stelzner
Don'T reveal everything yet because we're going to get into this in a little bit. But just jump to the end and explain what this thing could do once you had finished all the stuff, because we're going to reverse engineer everything. What was the final output of this thing? Describe it in words.
- [12:05]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, so the final output is somebody could come to helper GeorgeB Thomas.com and they could ask any HubSpot question or question around anything that I had created from a content perspective, either by typing in like a ChatGPT experience or by calling on the web browser and being able to actually talk to it and even hear my voice, literally carry on a digital phone conversation to the point that we even Michael got it 1-877-number. So people can really call it on like their cell phones or heck, you could use a rotary phone if you still have that. But you can call the 877 number, you can call it via your browser, or you can text with it. And you can just have these massive conversations around HubSpot workflows, HubSpot reporting, what's an active list versus a static list, like whatever you're curious about. And that's where it sits today.
- [13:00]
Michael Stelzner
And this brings us to the part of the story where I reached out to George because I saw a Facebook friend who was blown away by it, and I didn't know what it was. So I reached out to George and George gave me a link and I interacted with him. As soon as I started talking to it, it immediately sounded like George. And he said something like, what's happened, Mike? Literally, like it knew who the heck I was. Right. And it had George. As you listen, George has a very unique personality. So I messaged George and I said, george, we gotta get you on the show. We gotta reverse engineer how you did it. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about how you can create an interactive clone of yourself that writes like you and sounds like you, more importantly, and is live and interactive. Now, George, you already might have answered this question a little bit, but there are some marketers and entrepreneurs right now that are asking the question, why in the world would I create an interactive AI clone? Said another way, what's the upside if you do well, what we're about to talk about?
- [13:55]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, I think the upside if you do well, and there's a whole conversation around that one word of, well, you're going to be able to buy back time in your day. That's one, two. You're going to be able to streamline many of your processes, especially when it comes around content creation or content ideation. That's two and three. You're going to be able to scale your helpfulness or servanthood to the world based on the products or services that you're providing. And so just for those three reasons alone, getting back more time, streamlining processes, and helping more humans, that should be enough.
- [14:34]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And your why was a little bit more too. You had a legacy. Why? You want to talk about that?
- [14:39]
George B. Thomas
Yeah. So one of the things that I kind of toy around with, and again, for some people, this may creep them out. For some people, this is like, oh, yeah, I like that idea. But I know I've had a really interesting life. I know that I've learned a lot of life lessons. I know that I'm into this, like, focus on significance, build legacy, leave ripples on the planet before you leave. And so I started to think about this clone and what I could teach it. And again, it started down the HubSpot rabbit hole, but quickly, because of beyond your default and because of also this part that we did during the training of understanding, hey, let's give it my core values let's give it my mindsets. Let's give it my beliefs. All of a sudden, I realized, like, as a recovering youth pastor, as somebody who gets tons of messages of, like, hey, can I just talk you? Like, can we talk through something? Like, I. I just need some advice. I was like, you know what? Maybe I should create a, like, personal and business growth clone so there's two different clones, one more for, like, the personal and professional growth, and then one specifically for HubSpot. And when I started to go in that vein, I was like, I can't wait. Which, I'll never see this, by the way, but I can't wait until there's a day when either my kids or my kids kids can sit down with the digital version of what I am putting into this brain on a daily basis into this digital clone, and can ask it questions with zero judgment. But with all of the understanding and values and mindsets and beliefs that I've been bringing to the world for the last, at this date of this recording, 53 years now, by the time I'm gone, maybe it'll be 83 years. And so can you imagine 30 more years of data in a closed LLM that your family could be leveraging for advice, success, whatever it would be in the future or outside of your family?
- [16:48]
Michael Stelzner
That's really cool. Okay, so you got a lot of synapses firing a lot of people's brains right now, of all the possible applications of this. So before we begin considering, I mean, creating our very first AI clone, what are the things that we need to be thinking about?
- [17:08]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, and here's what I hope, Michael, is I want people to hear this episode, and I want them to be activated to do, but I want to go back to the words you used earlier, and that is, well, I want them to do well. And so depending upon if you're an individual or you're setting this up to clone an individual, or if you're setting this up to clone a business, there's a couple things that you might want to pay attention to differently. So, for instance, when I think about just the human, and I've. I mentioned this earlier, but what are your core values? Have you documented your core values? Have you created, either using AI or just writing it as a human, the core values and what that means in different directions. Have you documented your mindsets? Have you actually got your beliefs down somewhere that you could train to a digital clone? Do you have your voice and tone in there?
- [18:03]
Michael Stelzner
Do you have.
- [18:04]
George B. Thomas
Do you have your strategies, your signature phrases? And by the way, Michael, I've got to share one of the most exciting moments with me and the clone. Because, of course, you know, you have to have that Geppetto Pinocchio moment where you're like, how much of a real boy have I created? And so I'm talking to my clone, and all of a sudden I heard the phrase automagical, which is a word that I made up, like, years ago on the Hubcast podcast with Marcus Sheridan. And I was like, oh, my gosh. It just said automagical. And then it stopped answering one of the questions I had asked it with, don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human. Which, by the way, is the way that I had ended my video tutorials, HubSpot Video tools for years. And so all of a sudden, there were these phrases. It knew my stories from beyond. Beyond your default, right? And so, like, all of a sudden it started telling this story about when I was at an Indian reservation on a mission trip. And, like, what? And I'm like, oh, my. So, like, do you have those things documented? Or can you figure out a way to document those? Any frameworks that you have, so. Or methods. So, like, for instance, I've created this thing called the superhuman framework. It's four cornerstones and 10H pillars. Just to give you a kind of short synopsis, like purpose, passion, persistence, and love. Like, that's the four cornerstones. But it knew that framework. So when it talks about things, it knows to use that framework. What is your emotional intelligence? Do you know what that is? And have you documented the emotional intelligence? What's your boundaries? What's the blind spots? Right? And these are just things for humans. But if you're an organization, you could be doing this as well. But I also want you as an organization, let's say. Okay, George, I'm a marketer. I don't really want to clone myself. But, man, it'd be great to have a clone for our organization, which I have several clients that were getting ready to go down that road where they saw what we did as a human. They're like, hey, we need. We need that for the world. Okay, we can do that. But now you have to start to think about things like brand values. You need to think about cultural principles. Here's a big one. Start thinking about tribal expertise and how do you actually document that and get it into the clone again. Brand, voice and tone. The origin story of the company, the origin story of the top tier of people that are in there. Case studies that you have. Please buy all that Is holy. Put those in playbooks, SOPs customer philosophies. Right. So this is the laundry list of things that as a human or an organization, you should be like, hey, oh, by the way, let me just maybe say the most important thing you should have. By the way, hopefully, if you're listening to Michael's podcast, I'm assuming, which I shouldn't do, that you've been creating content and a part of the, like, add value, human first, value first, like, content creation process. Because all of the things that I just listed, plus being able to get your content into the mind, which maybe, Michael, we can dive into. What I mean by that later on in the show. Now, all sudden, you end up in a magical place because it has been more about the technique and less about the tech.
- [21:21]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, we're gonna come back to that content thing for sure. I put it in all caps. All right, So a couple things that was a lot, first of all, and one of the things we were also talking about when we were prepping is that audience also speak to me a little bit about the audience and also the ultimate goal. Right? Like, we didn't talk about either one of those things. Did you have a goal when you got started with this thing? And how does that play into it? And how does the audience play into it? And then we'll come back and we'll deconstruct some of the other stuff you talked about.
- [21:48]
George B. Thomas
So, so great questions. So the. The Persona, I'll use a marketing term, or the humans that you're helping, or the ideal customer profile or client profile, if it's the organization that you're selling to. Whichever ones of those you look at, I'm hoping that you have those baked out. So, like, for us, we literally had a Persona that was a HubSpot user, a business owner, a marketing professional, a sales professional that we put those 3, 4, 5 Personas into the mind of the clone and in the custom instructions said, pay attention to the way that you communicate based on if it is this Persona, that Persona, so on and so forth. Again, you could reverse engineer this for your ideal client profile, but what you're giving it is the context in the way that it should communicate based on the place that they are in. Because I would definitely talk to a marketer different than I would a CEO of an organization or a business owner. Right. So you've got to kind of take that into account. That's Persona or audience. Plus, you want to make sure that you're programming prompting. I like to call it teaching and communicating, by the way, I just like to simplify teaching and communicating to the clone that like, your goal is to serve, is to educate, is to simplify, is to ask questions, is to challenge. Whatever it is for you, you want to make sure that you have that directed towards the audience as well. So that's audience. The next piece that you asked me.
- [23:24]
Michael Stelzner
Michael, was the ultimate goal. I mean, like, is. Yeah.
- [23:27]
George B. Thomas
So, and this is kind of a couple different directions, but for me, I'm one guy. Right. Do I have a team? Yes. Do they help me with things? Yes. But are they George B. Thomas? No. Do people want access to me and the brain and like the person that I am in this kind of brand that I've built in the HubSpot ecosystem? Answer is yes. And so there got to a point where I realized a couple of things. One, I can't scale myself to be on every call with everybody. I can't scale myself to answer every question that everybody has because my calendar showed me that I was trying to do it. And my coach told me that calendar is not the calendar you want to live by. Which Angus is a super smart dude. And I listen to what Angus says and I'm like, yeah, I probably need to figure out a way. The second thing I realized is that when it comes to even employees, I'm a bottleneck. Like, if I'm working on three different things and they have to wait in slack for me to answer a question, then we're burning time and time is money. And I don't really get that like micro on it. But you get my point. You, you understand what I'm trying to say here. At the end of the day, my goals were how do I scale more helpfulness and how do I not be a bottleneck in my organization? And if you're like most mere mortal humans jokingly at some point in your life is woo, if I just could clone myself. And so I did, I did. And I found places to put these different instances of the clone once we created them, in the places that would give employees the empowerment that they needed, the answers that they needed, as well as people that are outside of the organization, the access to me that they needed to move forward in different ways of life. And I have some crazy testimonials and use cases that have kind of come in as we've been building this. And it's just, it blew my mind so much that that's why we literally started to write the book and are in progress of writing cloning human expertise. A true flywheel model. And I can't wait to birth that to the world and just see again how much impact that will make and how much impact the clones that people make will make.
- [25:43]
Michael Stelzner
Shout out to Angus Nelson, your coach and my coach. Yeah, well, if you haven't been tracking, there have been some major AI updates over the last month and the changes just keep coming. I know this feels overwhelming, but what if I told you you can actually thrive in this rapidly evolving AI frontier? The marketers succeeding aren't the ones with the most AI tools. They're the ones with the right guidance. That's exactly what you'll find inside the AI Business Society. Our team cuts through all the noise so you can focus on what actually moves the needle in your marketing. As member Shannon Caldwell told us, quote, these trainings are filling the gap between knowing what AI can do and knowing how to do it. Are you ready to thrive with AI? Join me inside the AI Business Society by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com AI so, okay, come up with an ultimate goal is what I heard you say. And in your case it was like trying to give you time back so that you but still provide a lot of value to the people that want to connect with you. I also heard you talk about whole bunch of other things like what makes you uniquely human, right? Your core values, your mindsets and your beliefs. Talk briefly. What if people don't know what their mindsets and beliefs and core values are? Do you have any like, quick little tips on how they could get to the bottom of that?
- [27:03]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, so many times we wear our business hat when it comes to like, AI in general. So you've probably watched a tutorial or a video that tells you to like, get ChatGPT to interview you for your next job that you're going to apply for. Get ChatGPT to interview you about questions that matter, right? Literally do something like, hey, I'm trying to diagnose my top 10 mindsets that make me impact the world. Can you ask me 5, 7, 12 up to you questions that we can document the answers that then we can break that down and then rinse and repeat for your beliefs. Because by the way, I kind of cheated. I did a podcast for a year and a half and then put every transcription into the ChatGPT and had it diagnosed out of a ChatGPT project and looking across it all and said, hey, what are these things? And then read them, mind blown, tweaked them and then inserted them into the clone, right? So it sounds like it would be difficult, but if you just get the right questions asked to you and you give honest and vulnerable answers, then you're going to get the data or context that you're going to need for what we're talking about here.
- [28:23]
Michael Stelzner
Love this. Said another way, if you already are a creator of content, and you have ideally written content or transcripts of all the things that you have produced over a period of time, you. You could quite literally upload them into AI and ask them to reverse engineer what it believes your beliefs are, your mindsets are, and your core values are, and then you can edit those. Is that essentially what I'm hearing you say?
- [28:48]
George B. Thomas
Exactly.
- [28:49]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, now you said perhaps we could explore this later. You need a lot of content, so where do we find the content? And you also are consistently feeding in content, so talk about that a little bit.
- [29:02]
George B. Thomas
So this is where I just, again, during the process, it kind of blew my mind because we have been creating content for years. So here's what happened. We started adding into the tool the tech, which we'll talk about later. We started adding into the tech The Sidekick Strategies YouTube channel, the George B. Thomas YouTube channel, the George B. Thomas website, the Sidekick Strategies website, the Hub Heroes podcast, the beyond your default podcast, my social channels, by the way, we added those in.
- [29:34]
Michael Stelzner
When you say you added them in, do you generally mean that this particular tool that. That we're going to get to in a little while is smart enough to work with different mediums?
- [29:42]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, it was absorbing all the audio.
- [29:46]
Michael Stelzner
Video, written word, all the stuff, right?
- [29:48]
George B. Thomas
Yes, it was absorbing all of this information from all the channels to get it to the word count that it needed to get to. And by the way, because it was pulling in audio and pulling in video, it was already knowing how I sound, the actual sound of my voice, and it already knew the pace and rates at which I speak when I speak about things, because it has that context that it can pay attention to and the wizardry that happens in the background. And what I want everybody to realize, too, and this, this completely impacted the way that I looked at content creation moving forward, is with many of these channels, I could flip a little switch that says, keep synced. So what does that mean? Well, for my entire life, I've lived on this principle of 1% better each and every day, meaning if I can just learn something new at the end of this, I'm gonna be a dope human. And so when I saw that sync for, like, the podcast and the YouTube channels and the websites, I was like, man, if I just create one piece of Content on each channel, either daily or weekly, or some version of like, we're going to train this thing to be smarter, then literally the clone can be 1% better each and every day. And so one, all of that stuff goes in there. And then two, we start creating content based on the fact that we knew there were some gaps. However, here's the other mind blowing piece. If you're a content creator, I would ask you this. Do you remember every piece of content that you've created and answered that you've answered?
- [31:22]
Michael Stelzner
No.
- [31:24]
George B. Thomas
No. And so when we were testing this, we're sitting around that weekend, we had gotten a couple channels in and I started asking it questions like, George, can you tell me about Salesforce versus HubSpot versus Zoho? And all of a sudden it spit out an answer and I was like, where did it come up with that? Because it's a closed LLM, like, did I teach that to. Which then I went into the mind and realized that like two years earlier I had created a piece of content that was a Versus article that I had completely forgot about. And I found multiple things where I was like, man, I should go back through my library because I forgot that I taught all these things. However, the mind doesn't forget, meaning the interactive digital clone doesn't forget. It can look at all of that in seconds and pull the answers out of everything that you've been doing for years to the human that needs it now. Versus if they ask me and I'm like, I don't know, let me go look and see. I'll get back to you next week. And it's like, I don't know, let me look. I'll get back to you in like two seconds. Boom. And it's there. So there's just these pieces that it. I was like, man, this is, this is fascinating. This is incredible from so many directions of like, the content being brought in, the content being. So now I want to tell people a little bit about this process of like, keep training it. So we created an instance, by the way, now we're up to like, helper.georgebthomas.com for HubSpot Growth.georgebthomas.Com for Professional Growth and personal growth. But then we started creating internal clones. So we created a content creator clone which its job was to help us create content in the voice and tone of George B. Thomas. That was easy. It is George B. Thomas. We didn't really have to teach it much. It like, knew everything of like, the voice tone, the vernacular, the pace, all of that stuff. But we started going in because HubSpot, they do 3, 5, 12, 14, sometimes more updates a day to their platform. And so what we started doing is I got this wild kind of kick of like I want it to be the most up to date resource on HubSpot possible. And so we would. And I say we. I did not do this myself. I brought the team in and said, hey, project manager Kelly, AKA the wife, can you please get these different updates out to different humans? And here's the process. I've created this prompt which you're going to copy and paste into the content creation clone that basically tells it to teach this update like George B. Thomas would teach it to the world and then give it the update and when it spits out, put it in a word doc, give it a title, H1 title, title the document, get it over to another employee and they're going to upload all of these updates into the clone. So that means there was information that we were learning, there was information that we were creating into our own voice and tone. And the clone now knew the information and could teach it like George B. Thomas air quotes would. And there's so many different directions and levels that you can do that to. It just gets fascinating on like here's how we are going to create content so that we can fill the machine. And I think when I first talked to you to talk about this interview, I think we were coming up on 17 million words that were in our closed LLM. Michael. We're almost at 19 million. So it's getting smarter every single day. And imagine you listening to this, your clone or your organization's clone that could get smarter every day and create just super dope experiences for the people that you're trying to serve.
- [35:09]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. We're going to get to the tech here in just a short moment. Talk to me about hallucinations because this is a big concern that a lot of people have, especially if it's going to model them, you know what I mean, and sound like them and speak like them. One of the biggest fears people have is it's going to say something stupid or it's going to make a mistake. Reactions, thoughts.
- [35:25]
George B. Thomas
Yeah. This was one of my biggest worries because of being an early adopter of Chat GPT. I had called foul on it many times. Like, I don't think so, brother. That's not how that works. Like, can you please tell me if that's true? Oh yeah, sorry, I was just making it up. So the fascinating thing about this tech is that you can put in guard rails and goal posts. We kind of talked about the, the goals, but the guard rails is like, hey, only talk about these things. Don't talk about this, don't talk about this. Like this is out of bounds. So with like micro custom instructions, you can tell it where not to go in different directions if somebody's like, don't.
- [36:02]
Michael Stelzner
Talk politics, for example. Right?
- [36:04]
George B. Thomas
Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.
- [36:06]
Michael Stelzner
But what about the hallucination side of it? What about when it just says stuff that doesn't isn't what George would say.
- [36:11]
George B. Thomas
So it's not going out anywhere, so it can only talk about the things that you've programmed it or uploaded into it. So like the idea of a hallucination doesn't even really exist in this system because it's not just going out and then finding things and then randomly trying to put it together. It's like, no, here's all the stuff. And we've super structured you how to communicate it because like there's multiple tabs on the tech side of like how you're giving it. Like it makes custom instruction. First of all, I love ChatGPT, so don't hate on me and I love me some good custom instructions. But the tabs on this thing make custom instructions look like a kindergartner versus like the way that you can program this bad boy or teach it how to communicate just on the content that you've added into it.
- [37:00]
Michael Stelzner
So if it asks a question that it doesn't know the answer to, then you it's going to say just like you would say, honestly, that's a great question. I really don't know the answer, but maybe you could go here to find it, that kind of thing.
- [37:11]
George B. Thomas
Oh, it's funny, you just unlocked something else that we need to talk about as far as go and find a thing. But here's what mine says. You can make yours say whatever you want, but if you ask it a question and it doesn't know, mine will say, unfortunately I don't know the answer to that. Maybe you should have a real world conversation with George B. Thomas and I get a notification from the system saying you have one unanswered message or you have two unanswered message, which I can then go in and I can message them or I can even do like an email or an SMS broadcast with the answer to the user which then they get the answer that they're looking for. Now here's what I'll say. I might have got lucky and we when again, ton of content we were able to program it and teach it quickly. So far in the time that we've been doing this, I've had one unknown answer that I've kicked back.
- [38:02]
Michael Stelzner
That's crazy. Okay, let's get into the tech. What's powering all this, George?
- [38:06]
George B. Thomas
It's a little tool called Delphi AI is what's powering it. And you can go to their website, you can check it out, and when you ask me that question, like, I want to dig deeper than just like, it's Delphi AI. And obviously we've spent a lot of this time talking about what's powering it is actually the technique and then also the tech that allows you to do this. But when you go in here and after you kind of get your, you know, mind, things are uploading to your mind, you can go into this behaviors area, and under behaviors, you're going to have things that you can start to focus in on, like purpose and instructions. And so, like, purpose is literally this open text field that you can put up to like 6,000 characters of how you want this thing to be and what you want it to kind of know and how you want it to use it. And so, for example, like, mine literally says, you are a digital George B. Thomas. You are the digital embodiment of George B. Thomas, a trusted HubSpot expert, inbound strategist, educator, and guy dedicated to helping businesses grow better, humans flourish, and leaders step into their full potential. Your mission goes beyond just HubSpot. Yes, you help users master HubSpot tools and methodologies, but you also provide wisdom, clarity, and motivation. I won't keep reading, but you can see that that sounds less like a prompt and more like you're instructing it for its life duty. Like, and by the way, one of the things that I loved doing when I got to this point, I was like, hey, George, can you tell me what your purpose is? And then it spits it back out to you and you're like, oh, I gotta tweak a little bit, or, oh, that's exactly what it is. And under that you have custom instructions where you.
- [39:46]
Michael Stelzner
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. You just threw something out there. You said you gave it its purpose and then you tested on what its purpose was.
- [39:53]
George B. Thomas
Yeah.
- [39:54]
Michael Stelzner
Is that right? And then if it got it wrong, you tweaked it. Is that right?
- [39:57]
George B. Thomas
Yeah.
- [39:57]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, that's important. I didn't know if you were just doing that inside of ChatGPT and brought something over to this Delphi thing. So what you're saying is you can put the purpose in there and then you can ask a series of questions and if it seems off, then you can modify it. Is really what I'm hearing you say, okay, keep going.
- [40:11]
George B. Thomas
And by the way, you just mentioned something that could be a huge hack for people. Some of what I am saying I had to go through a little bit of a harder trench than what you might because of some recent ChatGPT stuff. You could literally be like, hey, based on all you know about me, can you?
- [40:31]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, because the memory feature now is available.
- [40:33]
George B. Thomas
So based on all that you know about me, what would you say my purpose and educational style is? And then you could be like, okay, can you tweak that and actually write it like we're giving it to a Delphi AI clone? And then you could take that and tweak it the rest of the. You want it. So you can air quotes, cheat to get where I got eventually from the beginning of this. But the thing that I want to double down on is, yes, I have had conversations with this. Yes, I have tried to trick it. Yes, I have tried to go as deep as it will let me go before it hits the barriers or the guardrails that I've actually given it so that I can go in and be like, all right, let me tweak a little bit of the purpose. Or the next piece is you have the custom instructions. And so I won't read all the custom instructions, but I want you to hear the first part of the actual custom instructions that I put in here. So stay engaging and personal and then it continues. Communicate with energy, enthusiasm, and the warmth that defines George B. Thomas. Right? But think about the beginnings of all these custom instructions. Break down complexity, challenge users to grow, speak with confidence and authority. Encourage best practices, reference real world scenarios, adapt to the user's level, keep it conversational and fun. Encourage action and implementation, be proactive in problem solving. When asked about the Superhuman framework, always dot, dot, dot, right? So there's more to all of those. But I want people to understand the, like this, this, this, this, this, that you're actually training it. And you can give it up to 20 of those what I call micro custom instructions because a lot of your purpose is like the, the macro custom instruction of how it's going to show up and how it's going to be. So that's purpose and instructions.
- [42:18]
Michael Stelzner
We were talking about speaking styles and response settings. Talk about that a little bit when we were prepping.
- [42:22]
George B. Thomas
So that's second out of three tabs by the way because you have purpose and instruction, speaking style and response settings. And so speaking style is literally where you can go in and. And you've got this area that's like your clone speaking style. And so what I did here is I put George B. Thomas speaking style optimized for maximum impact. George B. Thomas speaking with a natural mix of passion, energy and real talk wisdom. His style blends mentorship, humor, and no nonsense guidance, making complex topics not just understandable. But you get where I'm going with this, right? Again, yeah, yeah. It's less about, I'm going to prompt this thing to do a robot. No, it's like you're literally like, this is how you might go to ChatGPT, by the way, and be like, hey, mold my voice and tone, which if you know your voice and tone with like communication best practices, and then build me out a clone speaking style based on my voice and tone and professional speaking best practices. Boom. Tweak it a little bit, add it here. But then you can also, because that's, by the way, just like the rhythm and rhyme of it. Like how it says throwing spaghetti on the wall when it's talking about, like the most complex thing on the planet. But then you can also upload speaking style samples. So this is where you have, like, maybe it's interviews you've been part of, maybe it's zoom teachings you've done. But you can take little clips, no music, no weird background, and you can then start to add these speaking samples to, which is how you can hone it into sounding like you. But there's even these levers that you can manage where it's like, make it a little more engaging or make it a little bit faster or a little bit slower. So, like, even when your voice is in there, you have like the refinement tweaks that you can make as well.
- [44:18]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. What about response stuff? We need to talk about that.
- [44:21]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, Response settings. So this is where you can set your default language. So for me, it's English. Now I'm going to pause there for one second because this was another big thing that excited the crap out of me is that I know that I've tried to learn languages in the past. I suck at it.
- [44:40]
Michael Stelzner
Me too. Me too.
- [44:41]
George B. Thomas
But here's the thing. I know that if I was really trying to scale helpfulness, there are people in Mexico that would love to learn from George B. Thomas. There are people in Germany that would love to learn from George B. Thomas. What's funny, Michael? One of the first testimonials I got based on the clone's power was a guy on LinkedIn raving about it in, like, German. I had to have LinkedIn translate it so I could see what in the heck all the good stuff that he was saying. So it speaks in, like, 57 different languages. Okay, so now all of a sudden you're going global. You aren't your clone, your clone is going global and being able to speak to all sorts of different languages about the thing that you're good at. But if we go down into now, we can do, like, the messaging configuration, and so you have this place where you can do response length. So I can make it sound intelligent, or I can make it sound concise, or I can make it sound explanatory, or I can do a whole custom thing, but mine concise, by the way, at first it was like, longer messages, and then I turned it to concise because the friend that you were talking about when she was all excited and she created this video and she sent it to me, she said this, and she didn't mean it in a negative way, but she said, this thing kind of goes on for a while. And I was like, that's a problem. Because I don't go on for a while. Like, I talk and I'm out and I listen and then I talk. Except for when I'm on an interview with Michael Stelzer, I'll talk all day long anyway, so. But here's my point. So, like, you can tweak it and be like, you know what? I think I want to go concise. And then there's a creativity level where you can be, like, stay super strict to, like, just the words I give you or give it a little bit of, like, adaptation. So have a little bit of fun with what I've given you and make some assumptions on all the things that I've taught you right here. Or you can even be like, hey, Footloose, fancy free. Just make it creative. But it's still your stuff. One of the switches that I love the best in response settings is dynamic questions, because you can now make it ask dynamic questions when it's done with the thing that it's teaching. So, for instance, I might be teaching on lists. And when I say I, I mean the. The clone. And so it might be talking about. So to create a static list. Joe, by the way, what kind of static list are you thinking about creating today? And then it's, oh, well, I'm actually thinking about this, this, and this. Is that a great idea? Well, if You're a pet groomer. You might think about this direction of list. But does that make sense for you? Oh, actually. So again, it starts to feel more like a conversation because there's a question that entices the conversation to move on. And then if you're in an industry that you would need this, you can also add, like, specific guidance or questioning style around this. And you can add, like, what do I want to call this? Like a. This is just a clone. It is not me. It does not play me on tv or like, you know what I mean?
- [47:42]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, kind of a reminder, by the way, you're not really talking to George.
- [47:45]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, yeah. Which, by the way, if you call my 8, 7, 7 number, it starts out with, hi, I'm a clone. And then goes into the thing because I'm never trying to, like, pull the wool over anybody's eyes. I'm literally just saying, hey, we've created this amazing thing. Go use it however you want to. Boom. Now, here's. Here's one last switch on this response settings that I think is important to use or not use, depending on who you are and what you're teaching and how relevant this is. But you can even turn on a thing called recency bias. Now here's where this gets spawned, and ours is on, by the way, because what we want to do is have the base of HubSpot education, but when we add updates, it means that is the most recent thing that you can do with HubSpot. Therefore, when you're looking at the context, you need to look at the latest update information in conjunction with the base of information you have so that you can get the most recent answer to them for what they're actually trying to do. So for us, it makes sense if you're just like a normal consultant and you've got your framework in there and it's like, doesn't really change over time. Then you might not need that. But until the day you go to, like, update your framework, and you don't want to lose everything that you put in there, but you update your framework and you hit that little switch, hey, recency biased. I'm adding new stuff. Make sure you pay attention to that. I just think the, like, dynamic questions and the recency biased are like some, like, ninja tip, like, turn it on or turn it off, depending on who you are and how you're going to use it.
- [49:17]
Michael Stelzner
George B. Thomas, the real George B. Thomas.
- [49:21]
George B. Thomas
Yes, sir.
- [49:22]
Michael Stelzner
It has been a pleasure to interview you on today's show and scratch at the surface of what is possible if you create an interactive AI clone? If people want to experience your clone, you have already mentioned where to find it. I'll let you mention that again. But first, if they want to interact with the real George V. Thomas, is there actually a preferred social platform? If they want to work with you, is there a place you want to send them? And then where can they try out your clone?
- [49:52]
George B. Thomas
Yeah, definitely. Listen, I know most of the people that are going to listen to this, you're probably on LinkedIn, so just George B. Thomas on LinkedIn. Connect with me there, message me there. I love having conversations. So I'm super down with any questions that you might have as you kind of roll through this process or any mind blowing thoughts that you even got from the episode. Even if you don't activate on this after you're done, if you want to do like HubSpot style work sidekickstrategies.com if you're like, I need to get that dude on my podcast or my stage, head over to GeorgeB Thomas.com because that's where all the speaking stuff is. And then if you just want to interact with the clones, if you happen to use HubSpot or by the way, you're thinking about buying HubSpot but you don't want to get into HubSpot sales funnel. Did I say that out loud? You could go and interact with the clone or you could go over to the growth georgeb thomas.com and interact with that one. So helper.or growth. And you'll find the right place to go.
- [50:49]
Michael Stelzner
Interact helper.georgeb thomas.com for the HubSpot stuff and what was the other one?
- [50:55]
George B. Thomas
Growth.georgeb thomas.Com for the personal and business.
- [50:59]
Michael Stelzner
Growth one folks, go try out his interactive clone. It's going to sound exactly like him and it's going to freak you out a little bit. George, thank you again for sharing your insights and wisdom with us today.
- [51:09]
George B. Thomas
Thanks, Michael.
- [51:11]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, and I'm sure you did, because we talked about a lot, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com a59 also, be sure to follow this podcast on whatever app you're listening to so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you've been a longtime listener, I would love a review and I would also love it if you would share this with your friends. Be sure to check out the other shows. You if if you want more and you feel like there's not enough with this show, we've got the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful. The AI Explored Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Just a quick reminder before you go. If you're ready to become indispensable in the age of AI, the AI Business Society is your solution. Join now and secure your discounted membership by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com AI I can't wait to see you inside the AI Business Society.