Let's Build AI Skills with Nico Lafakis, George B. Thomas, & Chris Carolan

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Happy Friday, March 7, 2025. Welcome to another episode of let's Build AI Skills with Nico, George and Chris. How you fellas doing this morning?

Doing well. It's Friday. It's, it's. It's been a, A great week yesterday. Got to witness probably one of the most emotional speeches I've heard in, in a minute. Especially like just in our arena in general. And of course, I'm talking about Mr. George B. Thomas, who just absolutely killed it yesterday at the profoundly launched.

Thanks, buddy.

You guys missed that. Definitely. Check it out. Was honestly just really, it was one of the most moving speeches I've. I've heard. And I mean, I'm. I'm comparing these to inbound speeches. So.

Yeah, I am. I. I don't know if anybody noticed, but I got emotional about how.

Yeah, oh yeah, we all did.

Yeah. Like, like, I don't usually get like that, but I had to like, compose yourself, brother. Like, what are you doing right now? Don't fall apart. So together. I know. It was like, come on, man up, bro. My chest and stuff. I'm like, I didn't hit my chest, but it was like, oh my gosh. Like, I was just, I was feeling it, you know, and it's just, it's. It's so true. Like, I look at the ecosystem and I, I think back when it was like Marcus and I, like, we were the people creating content around HubSpot. It was lonely, but it was fun. It was. You know, and so like as I was giving that speech and I was thinking about all the people who are doing this human centric value first inbound, be a great human. Like, I just, I just started to get emotional and so it was a good, it was a good moment. I am, I am doing good too. That's exactly the same thing I was going to say. I'm coming off the back of the profoundly launch. I'm looking forward to the weekend and also I'm just excited about where we're at in life and the technology that we have at our fingertips and the, the creativity, the ability to be creative right now is absolutely amazing. But, But Chris, how the heck are you doing, brother?

I'm doing well. Feeling similar. That was the first time I've ever seen George get a little bit clumped in the middle of an event speech like that. Seen it a few times, I think in beyond your default. But to see it during a presentation, in that moment, in front of hundred people. Yeah, very powerful. And you said some nice things about me, which I appreciate. I think that's kind of what we're going for. Like you say it's grown so much, and as it's grown, it's also grown pretty unintentionally as people just step up and all over the place are helping people. So it's very hard to recognize outside of the growing number of LinkedIn posts that list everybody as the experts in the field, which also feel good, by the way. But just seeing hearing Unico say that about, like, there's been more than one unsolicited comparison to Inbound, which is crazy to think about. We just launched like six weeks ago. But that's the power of kind of the goal of instead of having to blaze and create new and just find all the people already adding value and just bring them together and it's already multiplying, has a multiplying effect and it's really beautiful to watch. And it was something special yesterday for sure. Can't wait to get the recordings up and available to everybody, which should be happening in the next few days or so. I'll be given more of a breakdown later today on let's Build GTM with with Rob Jones at at noon Central. But we'll get into some AI skills for today and George's turn on doing some pretty amazing stuff with with a new tool. And I think the setup needs to be. When was the first time, George, that you said to yourself or somebody said to you the word chatgpt?

Oh, as soon as chat GPT came out. I mean, we're talking within probably like 30 days of that being a thing. We were joking around on a call and somebody's like, yeah, we need a chat gbt. And I was like, and I actually went to try to buy the domain, by the way, and it was like $60,000. And I'm like, well, that's not happening. But yeah, it. Pretty quickly there was that kind of correlation, Chris.

So here we are two and a half years later.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it looks like you might have one.

Well, so. And, and here's the funny thing too, like, yes. Well, first of all, just, let's just say yes, but yes, but and yes, and. And all, yes, all the things. So here's the. It's once again, it's a thing that I am doing kicking and screaming. And what I mean by that is if when I tell the story about Marcus saying I think you should do a podcast, I'm like, man, would you. I had somebody six months ago be like, bro, you need to build a clone. And I was like, man, I want to. And. And then I ended up through a great opportunity, spending a weekend with this human and another human. And they were like, you need to. And I was like, okay. And then we did. And. Holy crap. Holy crap. So. So, yes. I don't know if you want to ask me more questions. If you want me to get into it.

Let's get into it, because it's. It's pretty powerful. Show, people.

This week I'm going to present my screen, and I want to make sure I get the entire screen here, which is going to be this one. And I want to make sure audio is on, because we're going to need that. I want everybody to just think about what I just said, because chat GPT, it's like, you talk to it with text. Okay. Anyway, I'm going to share this. So first of all, I want to start here, Chris, because I want everybody to see this is a LinkedIn post. I want everybody to see that. First of all, this is in German, right?

Zoom in a little bit for us.

Oh, yeah, I can zoom in a little bit. Let's see if I can. Plus, plus, plus.

There we go.

I understand my name, and I understand Marcus's name immediately when I see this post. And I'm like, okay, I don't know what's going on here, but you can translate this to. Which I did. And it's basically saying, the guy that I have followed for years and watched almost every piece of content, a thousand podcasts, and it's. And then it's, like, coming down here, and boom, I see this screenshot, and I'm like, I didn't ask anybody to talk about this. I didn't. I didn't ask anybody to share this. And. And so all of a sudden, there's like this conversation of, like, yeah, you know, you can actually speak to it in German and start a call with it. And so I'm kind of talking about that. And then some of these comments are interesting. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to actually talk about this comment here, where it's. It's saying, I don't know if I agree with cloning, you know, a thought leader, this, that, and the other thing. And so this is where I want to start. I want to start with the why I actually did this, Chris. Because what I don't want people to think is, like, I'm just doing this because it's AI and it's the new thing, and we want to be cool. I've been doing this for since 2013. So is that 12 years now? Like, if I do simple math, it's a long time. That's what it is. And here's one thing that I found out there. I've been asked multiple times, how do I get more? And I say this humbly, how do I get more? George B. Thomas is in my organization. Meaning how do we get people who are just coming into the inbound space, they're working for an agency and they need to get up to speed on strategy or the tool? Well, that's training. And it's time. Unless you had like a Sidekick or an assistant that had 12 years of experience sitting on your desktop that you could start to ask questions. I've been asked many, many times, like, is there a way that you could help but we can't afford you? Is there a lower price? Is there group coaching? Is there? And so sometimes people can't afford to actually, like, get into the ecosystem because, like training, it's, it's not cheap. And I fully understand that there are people. And the reason I brought this LinkedIn post, we, we speak completely different languages. Like, and, and that's difficult. And so there's always been this, like, language barrier. And I've always wondered, like, well, man, can I get to a day where I could actually have like, YouTube channels that are in German or in French or in, you know, Spanish or whatever. And so they're like, the language barrier gap is a thing. And so there's all these reasons why time zones. Listen, I have some meetings with people in Australia, in real life, by the way, and it gets difficult because I'm up at like 9 o' clock or 10 o', clock, which I'm usually tired at that time, and they're up way early. And so time zones, there's just so many reasons why I would want to get the 12 years of content creation, 12 years of HubSpot knowledge out in a way where no matter what your time zone is, no matter what your language is, no matter what you can have a conversation or ask the things that might be in my brain. Right? One of the things that I put in my comment to that LinkedIn post, in that comment was I will never turn down an IRL in real life meeting. I will always continue to be somebody. This is not a replacement. This is an augmentation to those in the ecosystem that need the access. Right?

So yes, go ahead. I want to double click on that. The augmentation and filling spaces that are not filled. Otherwise, you know, like you said at the Top like it's a great time to be alive.

Yeah.

And if you can't find a way to think about the abundance like that is available right now because this is like we know that certain when it comes to HubSpot, we know or I have heard that like Europe is traditionally underserved when it comes to, you know, resources and support. Latin America and almost every, every vertical I've ever experienced is underserved from a support perspective. So this has led to ideation of like how do we create resources in those languages? Like just based on the, the thought leadership that we already have and. Right. And now like we can. And it's not replacing anything else that's already there.

Right, right.

So we're strictly adding more value in places that sorely need it. Right. And they've been asking for it forever. It's not rocket science. It's surprising. The one thing that's surprising is how fast like man, immediate social proof. You just announced this thing this week.

Yeah, right. Well, and I've reached out to a couple of other folks not to be named yet and been like, hey, this might be the biggest thing that I've ever done in the HubSpot ecosystem. Would you be interested in putting this in your newsletter or talking about it and the. Yes, please give us a write up so we can. Okay, I can, I can, I can do that.

Exactly right. Daryl. Helping the world for good with AI, that's one of our main goals with this show. Like there's so much that can be done. And for me, and I've brought this up to several people this week as like, like with, you know, the best of intentions, knowing that it's very possible to freak people out and go down a path of replacement and where human's going to be and all this stuff. But there's for me it's, there's two ways that you can go right now with stuff like this and you can accept or you can avoid.

Yeah.

And just avoiding. We're trying everything in our power to help you not do that because it cannot be avoided. Yeah, okay.

Exactly, exactly. So, so if people are curious, they can go to georgebthomas.com forward/ helper. Here we kind of explain like what can you do with the George B. Thomas HubSpot helper clone. We talk about the potential. We, you know, get a HubSpot edge you've been looking for. Who's the clone for? If you're a super admin, a power user. Heck, I'll even show if you haven't purchased HubSpot yet how this might be helpful for you if you're a business owner or leader. And why me, man? I've been as bleeding orange as humanly possible since I stepped into the ecosystem in 2012. I've been an aggressive learner, an aggressive educator. And so this is literally just taking me and trying to do the best of making a me version that everybody can get access to. And, and when I say that, I want everybody to realize I really mean me. Not just HubSpot me, I mean me. And I'll explain that in a little bit too. But you can go through here. All this, all this page does is it gives you three buttons that get you right here because I want everybody to have like a super clean interface to be able to engage and do the things that they're trying to do. So a couple of things that I want to mention. One, there are some suggested questions that you could pick one and kind of get started with. It does keep a history of your running conversations that you have with it. So you can always start a new conversation if you want to. You're going to see over here that you can even give me feedback, like if there's an answer that you're like, I don't know, bro, I don't think that has anything to do with the price of rice in China. So can we please work on that? Maybe train it a little bit like, yeah, absolutely. Give, give feedback. You're also going to see here that you could share your conversation, if you like it, with a team member or something like that. So, so there are some like pretty rich features in here. But the way that this works is, let's say I'm, I'm just even trying to figure out like, what the heck is this HubSpot thing that somebody just told me about. And I want to ask it the question, what is HubSpot? The fun thing is it's not going to just gurgitate like the general speak, it's actually going to kind of talk like I do. So you're going to see that there's some language in there that might be a little bit different than your typical like just robotic bot. Right. The other thing I want you to see in this and understand about this is that it's a closed system. It is not going out to chat GPT. It's not going out to anywhere. It's like it is just the information that we have given it that it's learning from. And you can literally look at the citations of like, this was George's Twitter. This is Sidekick Strategies. This, you know, if we go down here, this is Sidekick Strategies. So it's either like this is a file that we've uploaded, so a word doc or something that we've used to train it. And so you can see like where the stuff is actually coming from. And it's, it's our thoughts, our brain, our way that we think of life. Now you can read through this if you want to, but you can also say, hey, can you read this out loud for me now? Now this is like having a Swiss army knife for your business strategy. Powerful. Okay, so I could hit this and it's going to load and it's just going to read this for me now. We'll give it a sec.

Spot is an all in one dynamic customer and business growth platform that's built to help you attract, engage and delight your customers at every stage of their journey. At its core, HubSpot is powered by a robust CRM.

Thanks, buddy. I'll tell it stuff here. Citations. I can get the list right. And, and listen, it sounds like me. Doesn't sound like me, whatever. Like, that's not the important part. The important part is it's delivering the information here. And also you can read it out loud. And so now you could just sit here and go like, okay, well is, you know, HubSpot really free for us? And so like you can, you can type all the things that you want to type here and then get back to it. And again, it's going to be fun. It's going to be edutainment. There's. I did one the other day and it's like, it's like that wall, right? It's like, it's like throwing this but against the wall. It's like. So it's, it's just, it's fun, but it's great information as well. Now I'll pause. Chris, Nico, anything on this kind of texting, typing portion that you guys want to just kind of mention or are thinking?

I just remember the first time I used it, I wanted to switch topics and I was like, okay, we're going to talk about this now. Are you ready? And the response was like, oh, heck yeah, I'm ready. It's like, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. Okay, Nico, what do you. What's your thought?

I admittedly I haven't spent as much time with it as I would like to, but the, the. A short amount of time I did spend with it was very, was very. Georgie. Best way I could put it. Now, the, the the great part about it, I mean, like, this is something that we, I think we, we were talking about this, like the three of us, like a few months ago, right? We were talking about, like, the probability of like cloning ourselves and what that looked like.

Yeah.

And when you were talking to me about it, I was just like, yeah, this is, this is very cool. And I remember, you know, you, you were messaging me saying like, this is gonna be awesome. And I'm like, yep, it looks, looks like it will be.

And then.

I'll, I'll let you. I don't want to take the stats out from under you, but all I can say is as a, as a teaser, the joke was, man, there's more information in that thing than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll talk about that in a second. I'll talk about that in a second. All right, so. So here's where to me, texting's fine. Getting me or it to read it is fine. This is where I get excited. Right here is because you can literally call it. And by the way, we're still working on. They have this long process. Takes like 15 to 30 days to get an actual, like phone number. But there's also going to be an 877 number that you can call. So you could literally be driving down the road or wherever and you can start to have a conversation around things that you're curious again, one of the things I'll say, it's HubSpot and Human Helper. That's all I'm going to tease on that. Okay, that's so whatever conversation you want to have with my clone to think about what I might think or how I've trained it on the way that I think you can do this. So let's go ahead and do this. Let's start a call. It's probably going to ask me for access here. Oh, no, it's. Hey there.

I'm George B. Thomas, the HubSpot helper your go to HubSpot expert and inbound growth guide. How can I help you today?

Yeah, George, can you explain a complex multi object import where I actually am bringing in locations?

All right, so let's dive into this. When you're tackling a complex multi object import in HubSpot, especially when locations are involved, it's like assembling a puzzle where every piece has to fit perfectly. The key here is understanding the relationships between your objects. For example, are these locations tied to companies, contacts, or maybe even custom objects? You've got to Map that out first. Now, HubSpot lets you import multiple objects at once, but you need to use unique identifiers to connect them. Think of these as the glue that holds your data together for locations. You.

Yeah. Think of these as the glue that holds your location.

Anyway, so very Georgie.

Right? So that's. By the way, that's not an easy answer to give, but so you can literally just start to have a conversation. I'm just going to go in a really fun way here first. Hey there.

I'm George b. Thomas, the HubSpot helper your go to HubSpot expert and inbound growth guide. How can I help you today?

Yeah, George, I'm having a hard time with actually connecting my calendar to HubSpot. Can you walk me through the steps to connect my calendar?

All right, let's get you sorted out with connecting your calendar to HubSpot. First off, you'll want to head into your HubSpot account and navigate to the settings. Look for the little gear icon in the top right corner. Once you're in settings, find the section labeled General and then click on Calendar. This is where the magic happens. Now, depending on whether you're using Google Calendar or Outlook, you'll see either one.

I have a question. I found it. So thank you for helping with. With that. I hear you talk online about being a happy, helpful, humble human and doing some happy hubspotting along the way. Can you explain why that's important to you?

Oh, man, I love that you asked this. Being a happy, helpful, humble human, it's not just a tagline for me. It's a way of life. Each of those words carries a deep meaning rooted in my personal journey. Let's start with happy. I've been blessed with this natural optimism. And I realized early on that showing up with joy can be contagious. It's like a ripple effect when you're happy. It inspires others to find their own happiness, even in tough moments. Now, helpful is at the core of who I am. I've always believed in servanthood and being there for others. Whether it's answering a HubSpot question or just lending an ear. It's about making someone's day a little easier. A little.

Hey, George, I have one last question because. Because we're. We're. We're on a show and we have to kind of wrap it up. But can you just maybe tell me what the meaning of life is? Real, man.

The meaning of life. That's a big one. But here's how I see it. Life is about showing up as your most authentic self. Happy, helpful, humble, and human. It's about shining as brightly as you can. Not just for yourself, but so.

Hey, George.

Shine, too. We're here.

I have a question. Grow. Can you. Can you actually wrap the answer to that question of what is the meaning of life?

All right, let's wrap this up with a bow. The meaning of life, at least from where I stand, is about connection, growth, and impact. It's about being a happy, helpful, humble.

Oh, I didn't know. Wrap up the show. That's hilarious. All right, there you go. So not like, listen, you can ask it anything. Here's the fun part that we were talking about yesterday as a team. The word Easter eggs. Like, what could we put in this? That if you, like, said something or did something, it, like, unlocks something special or unique that it does. And so just the idea of. By the way, you. You had mentioned this, Nico, and I don't. I want to give everybody the right number here, so I'm just gonna look it up real quick. This thing, as we sit here this morning on this show, it has 7,795,289 words that we have trained it on around HubSpot humans to make it the closest digital version. Thinking of your boy, George B. Thomas. And we're. And we're programming it every day with new stuff.

That sounds like a moat to me. I challenge anybody in the HubSpot ecosystem to show me 8 million words of value. Not even, like, just whatever transcripts you want to throw in. It's like, you know, all the trainings that you've done, all the content that you've created, it's just like, it's really powerful to think about.

It's in there.

Like, George has really just taken the. The first step towards, you know, something that. That we've been talking about for. For weeks now, and something, you know, Chris and I have definitely been talking about a lot of people have been asking me about, which is like, you know, where. What's the next evolution? What's the next step to all this stuff? Like, where. Where do we go? What does it look like working with agents or whatever? And, you know, George is already, like, 10 steps ahead of most of you guys, right? There's already two Georges out there.

Oh, don't tell my wife that.

I mean, like, you know, this, like, you know, so, like, this form of George plus operator equals George's assistant, right?

Yeah.

And, well, that's that.

Nico, you were hitting on something because we have an Internal version of this cat as well.

Yeah, yeah, that's like that. It just makes logical sense. Right. And so, you know, when I think about it, it's like, yeah, to your, to your point, in terms of it being emote, I don't, you know, one of the things I, I laughed at when all of this first started was when financial, financial sector was just like, oh, there's no moat, there's no such thing as a moat. Like, you know, whatever. And Allman was the first one to say, like, it's, it's the model. Like, the model is the moat. It's not a matter of like, it's not. You can't productize this because it's intelligence. So you can't really say like, oh, this intelligence is better than that intelligence or whatever. They're just different types. Just like they are different people, they're different minds, they think different ways. So to Chris's point, good luck trying to create another George because only George can do that.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Like, what he did to, to create this thing is really, it's, it's the same. It's probably, it's close to the same level of work that I, I put into Triple H. Right. And if it's anything near the same, you have now brought on to yourself another job friend, because, so that upkeep, it's takes a minute.

I think we'll, we'll talk about that next week because George and I were talking about what this means in terms of like every business leader ever, especially founders of startups. Say the words, I wish I could clone myself. Yeah, this is what that looks like and what it's going to activate. You know, knowing George is going to be pretty powerful. As we wrap up, I just want to show this comment and let, let this LinkedIn user know when I build my clone, that will definitely be the answer to that question, so don't worry. Thanks for showing that off, George, man. Absolutely powerful stuff.

Yeah.

And, and until next week, folks, think. Try to think abundantly this weekend based on what you just saw and try very hard to, you know, find those opportunities of, of what's possible. So much is possible right now. Find a way. Find a way to see it, find it, play with it, learn it, and let's grow. Have a great weekend, everybody.

Thanks, everybody.

See you.