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The AI Agent Team Every Solopreneur Wishes They Had (And How To Build It) · The Life-First Solopreneur

• 0:00
  Carly Ries: What if you had a whole team drafting your emails, booking your meetings, and building your landing pages while you walked the dog? Today, our resident AI go to guy, George B Thomas, pulls back the curtain on Echo, the second brain he built to think and sound just like him and a crew of AI agents that do the work. Fair warning, your head might explode, at least mine did. So let's get into it. You're listening to the Life-First Solopreneur, the podcast for those in pursuit of a life first business.
• 0:29
  I'm Carly Ries, and my cohost, Joe Rando, and I spend every episode with solopreneurs who are proving there's a better way to run a one person business and experts who are helping make it happen. We like to say life first, then business. So let's get right to it. George, it feels funny hitting the record button because I feel like every time I talk to you, a record button is recording in some sort of way, whether it's a notetaker or whatever.
• 1:00
  This seems so much more official. So, for our audience that does know, the one, the only, George B Thomas, he is also one of our contractors here at LifeStarr. But he's also you never wanna say AI expert. You never wanna say AI guru. But I would say you are our team's AI go-to person.
• 1:19
  And you are the person we recommend people go to when they have any sort of AI questions because you just have such a great pulse of everything that is going on. So not to put you on the spot, but the bar is pretty high. Are you ready for that challenge?
• 1:33
  George B Thomas: I'm ready for the challenge. And I think it's funny, Carly. When I hear you say what you just said, guru, you know, a thought leader, I'm just a guy in the trenches doing the thing for myself and clients. Therefore, it's like when I talk to people about it, it's like it's from the streets, right? It's, not this hyperbole, this sky.
• 1:58
  It's rooted, Hey, this is what you can do. But I'm ready. I'm ready to go through these questions. I'm ready to try to add value to the community. And hopefully I can help some solopreneurs get some of their life back. That's the real goal here.
• 2:14
  Joe Rando: Because yeah. You're just a guy that's basically getting stuff done, trying to get it done better and faster.
• 2:20
  George B Thomas: I try to get it done. #GSD. Get stuff done. You may have heard it a different way, but I'll say stuff. #GSD.
• 2:28
  Joe Rando: GTD. Getting things done. There you go.
• 2:31
  George B Thomas: There you go.
• 2:32
  Joe Rando: Hat tip to David Allen.
• 2:33
  Carly Ries: Well, George, what's funny is I feel like when we talk to people about AI or really if you watch YouTube videos or whatnot, a lot of it, kind of, it's so focused on the machines, it kinda loses the human focus. And the ironic thing about you being on this show is at the heart of every single thing you do, especially with AI, you have humans at the center of it all. it is the core value that I feel like you have across all platforms, all clients, all channels, all everything. And so before we get into the whole AI thing, let's start with the human side of things for the icebreaker question.
• 3:06
  You often sign off with be a happy, helpful, humble human. Where did that come from and what does it mean to you now, in the age of AI?
• 3:16
  George B Thomas: Yeah. Well, so it came in 2013. Marcus Sheridan said, hey, I want you to start creating HubSpot tutorials. And I was like, okay, sweet. And of course, you know, you gotta have a good hook at the beginning and then you've gotta have a good landing.
• 3:33
  And I was like, well, what could I have for a landing? And I'm like, well, I wanna show up as a happy guy. I want people to be happy. I'm trying to be helpful with these videos. I want the HubSpot community to be helpful.
• 3:45
  They are helpful. So let's throw that out there. And I want people to be human, meaning I've got this one rule in life and I learned it a long time ago when I was younger and pardon if this offends anybody, but my one rule is no douchebags allowed. Like you've gotta be a good human if you're gonna be in the circle of who I'm gonna actually interact with. So, you know, happy, helpful, humble.
• 4:11
  I don't really like egotistical. I try to deflate my own brain when things happen and people are like, this guy is a guru. And I'm like, let the air out. There's a whole backstory to why I am so focused on being humble and not letting ego edge in, probably not this podcast, a different podcast, Beyond Your Default, if you're curious. Go listen to that.
• 4:36
  Anyway, so it started out as this outro of the videos where I was honestly reminding myself to show up as a happy, helpful, humble human. And I was trying to encourage the community that I was serving through these HubSpot videos to show up as a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, do some happy HubSpotting along the way.
• 5:02
  Carly Ries: Along the way, you just had your podcaster's voice. Okay. We'll stick with the happy, helpful, humble human. Let's be helpful when it comes to the AI world. So you were talking to our team about this a few weeks ago, and you had been on somebody else's podcast and were like, hello. We wanna be talking to you about this.
• 5:23
  So you've built what you call a second brain. Basically like a smart organized collection of everything you know, which is a lot. So for someone just hearing that term, what is it? And why should a solopreneur specifically care about having a second brain?
• 5:42
  George B Thomas: Yeah. And let me back up for a second, because I do want to tie second brain to the human, because I think there's something that I fundamentally do different and teach different than what you'll find on your typical YouTube video. And that is when I create the second brain, which by the way you can research Carpathi and Wiki and it's basically derived of that, but one of the first things that I started to do was I wanted my second brain to be an echo or a reflection of me as the human. And I wanted it to be basically at the end of the day, the smartest thing and fastest type or humanly possible to help me create content. Now that was the beginning of it.
• 6:23
  But by the way, it does way more than create content at this point in time. But at the end of the day, I started with this idea of inside the wiki, there needs to be an identity. There needs to be stories, therefore you can tie the identity and the stories to the human. And so if I really kind of think about this, the second brain is a system that allows the human at the front to plug in their identity and their stories to the content creation, whether that be an email, a blog article, a newsletter, and then be the human on the other side of the loop to make sure like any editing or whatever gets done at the end.
• 7:04
  But with a second brain, what it does is you can input information. It's funny that you guys started this podcast with like, or three note takers, because every note taker that I have gives me a transcript and those transcripts, if one fails, one's a redundancy, those transcripts go into the second brain. And so not only can I create content or do things for my organization, I can do things for clients' organizations because I also create their identities? I'm also trying to pull out their stories. And so we're going at AI in a very human mirrored, human echoed way versus just like, let me type this prompt in and hope for the best.
• 7:50
  Because to think about all the conversations we've had, all the information it knows about LifeStarr Intro or LifeStarr Premier, all the rules it knows about what to write in a newsletter, what to promote, what not to promote. If I tried to remember that and if I tried to get all of that done, it would take me a hot minute. But if you set up systems and if the systems are attached to the second brain, which I know we're on a podcast, but I might briefly show the second brain, so people who do go to YouTube, your YouTube channel and watch this, because they're like, what does it look like? I'll try to explain it, but I do want to show it because I think it makes a little bit more sense when you do see it. So the second brain, basically the way I'm visualizing it right now on screen, and if you're listening on the podcast, I've opened Obsidian because I have Obsidian attached to the second brain.
• 8:46
  Joe Rando: Can you tell us what Obsidian is?
• 8:49
  George B Thomas: I will. So the second brain in general, just so everybody knows it's not that nerdy, it's folders and it's files in a certain structure. So on the left hand side of my screen, you're gonna see things like clients, identities, knowledge base, wiki, and this is how it takes the transcripts, it intakes them, it puts it where it needs to go, it breaks these concepts into the wiki of where it needs to go, And so I could have a second brain and not use Obsidian at all because it could be folders and files on my computer. Or I use Obsidian so I can visualize it, meaning it is a free program that allows me to show what is on screen now, it's basically a visual representation of the second brain. And if I grab any of these dots and I start to drag it out, you're going to see lines show up, and I'm sorry for you podcasters, but if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see these lines that kind of start to show up. so this is seven ways to get more leads using HubSpot, full length webinar, and you can see all the other pieces of content or information that it's attached to. So if all of a sudden was gonna create a piece of content around getting more leads, and I told it, this to be the starting point of the article, but also pay attention to everything it's connected to, now it's like the human brain where it's connected to these other pieces of information.
• 10:19
  Joe Rando: Let me ask you a different question.
• 10:21
  George B Thomas: Well, can I answer your first question?
• 10:22
  Joe Rando: Okay, go ahead.
• 10:23
  George B Thomas: Yeah, So the reason I use Obsidian is because these files that I talk about in the folder are .md files. So Markdown files. So if all of a sudden I wanted to see one of these files, Markdown files, for instance, this one right here is an example of wheeled out on a stretcher. This is where they thought I had a heart attack, they thought I had a stroke, my wife stole all my devices for three and a half days. I'm making a very long story short, but here is the story of me being wheeled out on the stretcher. So if AI ever needed to tell that story, it can tell the story. It can also see where it got the sources of the story. So you can see different episodes of different podcasts that I told the story in, and the way that those things are showing up where I said, hey, it's connected, notice it shows themes like burnout, health, family, hustle, vulnerability, the LifeStage, Sales Lion, which by the way, while I'm on LifeStarr, what I want everybody to realize too, because I mentioned identities and stories, is one of the things that I've given my second brain in identities is the timeline of my life. So if I go into identities and I go into George B. Thomas, you're going to see that there's literally a timeline. And if I open this timeline,
• 11:48
  it's going to show like from these dates he was born and these dates he lived in Montana. you can literally see, I can scroll down through and it knows where and what, where I was working. And so again, when I talk about, I teach something a little different than you see on your typical YouTube video. Like, I'm getting very in-depth of who I am as a human and the humans I serve into the system that it has all of these threads and pieces and tags. like when I talk to it using Claude or ChatGPT or another program not to be mentioned until later in the show, all of a sudden, magical things can happen.
• 12:30
  Joe Rando: So let me go to my next question, which is, so all those connections, all those lines we're seeing between pieces of content, and there's a lot of them, those are all just tags, or are they linking article to article?
• 12:44
  George B Thomas: Article to article.
• 12:46
  Joe Rando: And how do you do that in the MD file? What do you say? You give it a URL? You give it a name?
• 12:51
  George B Thomas: So the fun part about it is I don't have to give it anything because what it's doing is it's automagically putting in what they call front matter. And so you can see here it's linking to the source transcript of that episode. And then what it's doing is if there are other episodes or other articles or other conversations that I have on Zoom meetings or whatever, that might have to deal with like, hey, this got a motivational tag or this got a progress tag. So it's looking at those other tags of the MD files that have those tags, and that's how it's connecting.
• 13:25
  Joe Rando: So all the tags are linked together.
• 13:27
  George B Thomas: Yep. Okay. I'll stop my share.
• 13:31
  Carly Ries: So, George, you just said and there's something else we could talk about later in the episode, but I figure we should just bring it up now because the whole point of when we were first like, well you need to come on the show is because you were so giddy talking about your agent teams that you are running with Grok bot. And you have names like Casey and Echo and Morgan, and they all handle different jobs.
• 13:54
  George B Thomas: Yeah.
• 13:54
  Carly Ries: in plain terms, because so people are so focused on ChatGPT, Claude. So what advantage have you found with this, with Grokbot so far? And how is working with the team of agents different from just typing questions in a chat should be to your quad?
• 14:08
  George B Thomas: Yeah. And I'm gonna answer that, but let me back up from that as well for a second, because what I want everybody to understand, again, kind of going back to like in the dirt, in the trenches guy, I was not a person who jumped on Nemo Claw, Mastra Claw. I was not a guy that jumped onto Hermes and I'm just like, no, I've built Echo, which by the way, Echo is the name of the second brain, an Echo of me. I built Echo, I'm building echo along the way, you know, I'll hear something on a YouTube video, I'll add to it. And so we're just going to stay in our lane and we're going to build this thing. I had built agents inside of this system that I create. So I had a writer agent named Quinn, I had an editor named Finch, I have a designer named Morgan, because I'm building this agentic team to go along with the human team. Let me pause there for a second too. I want to say that I'm always about human powered AI assisted, and I'm always about AI amplification, not human replacement. Okay, I'm just going to throw that out there.
• 15:23
  So this helps me be better, this helps my team be better, And so we're using in conjunction with, not in replacement of. Now, if you're a solopreneur, build your team and just love the fact that you can build your team, right? So what is very interesting about this system and why I decided to jump into GrokBot was I saw a video of it and I saw the potential and I knew that I already had more in what I had created than what I was seeing in the YouTube video of what they could do. And what I mean by that, and I'll share my screen for another hot second just so people can get a visual, and I will try to talk my way through this for the podcast listeners. Again, and gentlemen, you really gotta check out and subscribe to that YouTube channel, I'm just saying. But in this case, what we end up with is we end up with a dashboard like this, which has the agents in it. So when I mentioned that I created Echo, well now in this system, Echo can be an agent that I can come in and have a conversation with . But Echo can also talk to Jordan, who's the project manager by the way, and it can then start to do project management stuff, which you can kind of see, like Lifestarr, Jones, LifeStarr, Kate Fear, like we've been getting stuff done. Or Echo can talk to Reed, which Reed goes and looks at my emails and gives me drafts that I can go and look at.
• 17:04
  And so you can see the whole team here, which by the way, it's actually two teams. So I have all of these that are kind of wearing orange or at the top are sidekick strategies. And any of these that look like old kind of biblical avatars are for spiritual side of leadership. so I can literally come in here and just have conversations with Echo and it will start to divvy out to the people that need to do the thing. For instance, I told it, or the agents, the agents that need, good catch, especially for a guy who's all about the humans, it'll communicate with the agents and tell them to do the thing they need to do.
• 17:48
  So for instance, if we were doing something with HubSpot, well then it would tell Casey to go into the portal and it would tell Casey to build the list and it would tell Casey to build the form and all of sudden you'd have a page in a process that just was there. For instance, if you went to sidekickstrategies.com/expert, that's literally what they were building in this scenario that you're looking at right here. The other thing that I'll say that's quite unique is you'll see that Casey also teaches herself, so I taught Casey how to log into HubSpot, go look at HubSpot updates, and return thoughts on the latest updates. I'm gonna stop my share, but Carly, did I answer your question fully, or do you have questions based on my answer to your question?
• 18:40
  Carly Ries: I think you answered my question fully. I think my brain just broke, and I will probably have questions in like an hour.
• 18:48
  Joe Rando: Well, I have a question, though.
• 18:50
  George B Thomas: Yes. Joe,
• 18:51
  Joe Rando: So what were we just looking at?
• 18:54
  George B Thomas: That's Grok bot.
• 18:55
  Joe Rando: Yes. That was Grok bot we were looking at. So that was not Echo. Okay.
• 18:59
  George B Thomas: Nope. Just, just for clarity because we're throwing a lot of stuff around here,
• 19:03
  Carly Ries: And it's not code related, right? I think, for people that weren't looking at this screen, there was no code involved in that.
• 19:10
  George B Thomas: Well, that's the thing, and it's funny that you mentioned that because usually when I'm talking to Echo, the second brain, the thing that I built, not that I'm a nerd, but I open up terminal and I have a conversation in terminal and like, that's where we do a lot of our work. Here, it's purely conversational, but what's crazy is then it will tag in the person and the process to do code. For instance, I mentioned Casey is HubSpot, but if all of a sudden you guys came to me and said, hey George, can you throw up a new landing page on your website that is about x y z and a b c?
• 19:55
  I'd literally be like, hey, Echo, can you tag in Quinn to write copy for a page that's about XYZ ABC. Tag in Casey to go ahead and create the form. And can you have both of them run everything through Finch and then have Finch hand it to Riley so he can go code it. Let me know when the page is ready to go look at. And that would be the flow.
• 20:17
  I'd walk away. I'd go walk my dog. I'd go cook a pizza. I'd come back twenty or thirty minutes later and there'd be a link that would be on my computer. I could click it and I could go look at that page and then I could start to give it any edits as the human in the loop that I would want to make.
• 20:33
  I'll give you another fun one then I'll shut up for a second. Whenever I'm creating documents that I need to read, I have also taught Echo to go ahead and create an audio version of that document. And so if I want to, I can grab that audio, I can step out in my backyard, I can walk a couple laps and I can listen to the audio of the document, and then go back and I'll know if I wanna make any revisions.
• 20:59
  Carly Ries: And so you say it can do everything in the background, like it's in draft mode, can you have it published automatically? Or will it stop, will it not go live unless you tell it to?
• 21:11
  George B Thomas: So for some things, I make it draft on purpose. Like for email and Slack messages, I make it draft because I want to be able to add the extra context or remove the additional sometimes fluff that it might add like, hey, we don't really need to say that, ? So for those, I pretty much do draft all the time. There are some times where I've done autopilot where I'm like, hey, show me the copy. Okay.
• 21:39
  I like the copy. Just go post this to social because I've already seen it. And so it can post to social. Now here's what I will tell everybody because I don't want everybody to think Hey, you get Grokbot and all of sudden you've got 12 agents and you're doing all these things that George is saying.
• 21:58
  The first thing I did when I opened up Grokbot was I said to a random first bot they give you, Hey, I want you to look at this folder and I want you to understand what the main brain is and be able to use the main brain moving forward. Meaning I gave it access to everything I had been creating for the last year or two years in there.
• 22:20
  Carly Ries: For Echo.
• 22:21
  George B Thomas: For Echo, yep. And then said, and by the way, look at the agents I have and let's go ahead and onboard those agents here. And what's fun about that is when they first got onboarded, they were like these little colorful icons and stuff, but just by talking to it, I was like, hey, can you add what they do? So all of a sudden Riley became Riley comma development, Casey comma HubSpot, Alex comma COO. And then I was like, hey, can you actually, give that team human style avatars and give this team this. I didn't have to go download them or do them in Photoshop. It was just all here. And within probably two or three days I had all of my agents from Echo onboarded to GrokBot and connected to what made Echo Echo in the first place, which then immediately it just became very conversational, very powerful in some of the things that you could pull off.
• 23:21
  Joe Rando: So I wanna say something, because I think it's really important, because this sounds amazing, But just I don't want anybody to forget the fact that you did a ton of work. In fact, you created a course for us that's twelve weeks, and I'm sure that doesn't even get you as far as you were before you did this. Is that fair?
• 23:41
  George B Thomas: It gets you a good mileage towards this. I think that course plus some, butt in the seat time and letting the threads that we pull in that course allow your brain to go watch other things or read other things gets you there or some additional consulting here or there because I don't mind helping a human every now and then, if they're a solopreneur trying to do good in the world. But you can, if you pay attention to what we teach in the main brain and the content, the AI content system, the course that you have in LifeStarr, Joe, you're heading in the right direction. You're going to be better than 80 to 90% of the other humans who are trying to use AI in their organization.
• 24:29
  Joe Rando: And then you could take that, put it to Grokbot, and you're kind of in a great place.
• 24:34
  George B Thomas: Yep. Got it.
• 24:36
  Carly Ries: just to be clear, you were also clear that this does not replace you. It's more like having a second set of eyes. So when you're running a team of agents, like how do you split the work so you're not just blindly handing everything off?
• 24:50
  George B Thomas: Yeah. So I, the human, one, it's funny that you asked this question because there are so many people that use things, there's gotta be the human in the loop. And what does that even mean? And that's basically what your question is asking. like, how do you be in the loop and how do you know when there shouldn't be a loop at all? I can tell you that for a lot of the work I do, I am the human in the middle and I am the human at the end, and I am the human in the process that is the iterate as well.
• 25:24
  So like, we'll start to talk about a thing, I'll let AI do its thing, I'll then be like, I like this but I don't like that, Let's do this. Let's think of it this way instead. I think you're over indexing on that. Go ahead and let's try again. So I know there are three or four touch points inside any process that if I feel like it can be powered by AI, I'm gonna be in there.
• 25:49
  I will tell you too right now, I'm allowing myself to at least journey into, can this be an AI process more than I maybe should? Meaning there are some things I get in there and I go, nah, how about I just go do this the old way? Because I probably would have been done by now. But I'm doing that on purpose because I want to see how far I can take it, so I know where that line is. I can tell you this, if it's something that I know I can go and get done within five minutes, I'm not pulling up an agent.
• 26:25
  If it's a multi step process and I want somebody that can help with research and editing and these things that I can design agents to do, it's probably going through an agent process.
• 26:37
  Carly Ries: Got it. Well, and you're only a few weeks into this whole new process, right?
• 26:41
  George B Thomas: This one, yeah.
• 26:42
  Carly Ries: Yeah. I mean, not yeah, but what you're so excited about. you're kinda just scratching the surface still. So for someone who doesn't have a second brain, and they don't have any agents yet, this can still feel a little intimidating. Yeah. You could take our course. Yeah. You could go to your site and all that stuff. But where would you tell them to start?
• 27:01
  George B Thomas: On the human side, and I don't mean to be any sort of way, but on the human side, get real comfortable with getting to know yourself real good. Because when I started this podcast with you guys and we started talking about identity, like there is a whole thing that I would want people to go through when they're creating this second brain. Like, you've gotta focus on, literally it's set up the second brain, which I have a prompt I could give you and you could go into Claude Code and here's the thing and it would start to build the thing. So that's not even really the hardest part. I mean once you get past a couple of little hurdles there, the first thing that I would ask somebody to start on is okay, now start going through identity, start going through story. If you've historically been a content creator, podcast, blog articles, get all of that in there.
• 27:58
  Because again, essence of it is how can you get as much of you, and by the way, not in a weird way, but how can you get as much of you in the machine so that it knows here are my SOPs, here's the way I think. One of the things when I talk about identity, I'll break this down a little bit more. I literally went through a process where I was able to give it my top 25 mindsets, my top 25 beliefs, my top 10 core values. Like, you see what I'm saying? So when I say to it, hey, make sure we're doing business or creating content and they align with my core values, my mindsets, and my beliefs.
• 28:37
  I'm not saying with the large language model, I'm saying go with that. So starting there and giving it that fundamental route to follow based on all the information it knows is a game changer. Like to the point where it one shots pretty much 90% of the time, any of those email drafts or any of the communication that happens in Slack, which again saves me minutes at a time and over a day period, you know, hours at a time and over a week, probably a day. Like it's crazy the processes you can put in place that if it saves you two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, and you do that thing all the time, the time that you're buying back that you can then apply to your life where you want to apply it is amazing.
• 29:30
  Carly Ries: So let me ask, knowing what you know now, what's one simple task you think a solopreneur could hand off this week that would save them real time like you're saying?
• 29:40
  George B Thomas: So my two favorite things, and you could do this very easily without a second brain. Don't use this as a cheat skill though, because I, again, I'm really rooted in that, Joe knows, like, there's a whole thing here. But, something that you could do as a solopreneur, you could fire up Grokbot , you could connect your email and your calendar, and you could say things like, hey, I want you every hour to go check my email. If there's an email that I need to respond to, write a draft, but only a draft. Please send me a link to that draft once it's written so I can just click on it and go look at it if I want to use it for the reply.
• 30:25
  And also, since my calendar is connected, if somebody emails me, I want you to try to find times that are open so that I can look and make sure I agree with those times, you're putting them in the email. Because when you do that, you can send that draft and you can go back over to whatever your bot's, whatever your agent's name is and say, hey, I sent that email, can you go ahead and schedule that time on my calendar? Now, think about that. You didn't click over to a calendar. You didn't click add event.
• 30:57
  You didn't say meeting with Bob. You didn't make it a Zoom, especially if you have Zoom integrated to your calendar or Google Meet or whatever you use. Because now you could literally say, hey, schedule that time and make sure it's a Google Meet. And it'll just go do the thing. Meanwhile, while it was doing the thing, now you're working on your next task or getting a coffee or I don't know, playing a round a golf or whatever you want to do.
• 31:24
  But here's the other thing too, what's fun is, I have fought one thing with AI and that is people are like, Oh, I want to be able to use it for my phone and remote in. And just like I fought against Nemo Claw and Hermes, and I was like, no, I don't wanna use it on my phone. I wanna be able to be in the moment. I will tell you that Grok Bot has an iPad and a phone app. And being able to be walking somewhere, out somewhere and be like, hey, Echo, can you schedule thirty minutes for me on Monday to work on the LifeStarr x y z or to work on the whatever, and then just put it back in my pocket and know that there's going to be a thirty minute calendar hold for the thing that I just told it to do there when I get there, is so freeing.
• 32:14
  So again, there are some things that I can use it for, like that assistant, if you will, in the moment when I'm thinking about something or like, hey, send me an email to remind me that I want to write an article on this thing and here's three points that are in my head right now. Put it away, but it's gonna be there. It's gonna store it.
• 32:35
  Carly Ries: Wait. My head just exploded. I don't know that. There's so much to take in here and such good stuff. I mean, George, it's been so fun kind of being on the sidelines watching.
• 32:47
  You go through all this and the evolution of everything. And you know when you've had a big epiphany because you'll show up to a call just smiley and like, I have something to share with you.
• 33:00
  George B Thomas: Yeah.
• 33:01
  Carly Ries: But I'll wait my turn.
• 33:02
  George B Thomas: Yeah. It's funny because it's not that I'm easily excitable normally. I have fun and I enjoy life, but when I find something that I know has the potential to change the way somebody will navigate their life or their business, and I see real results because I've used it and put the seat time in, it's hard for me to contain my excitement and not talk about it. Meaning in the last three weeks, this is the third, if not fourth podcast I've been on to talk about this new piece of the journey that I've been on, I'm just so excited to tell people, hey, this isn't hype. Because a lot of times you watch YouTube and you're like, I feel like people might be hyping this up.
• 33:53
  This one to me is not hype. If you take time to figure out how you can use it in the best ways you can use it, it fundamentally could change things. Here, I'll give you another example. Because sometimes we're not the best humans at keeping up with things. One of the things I do is I put these podcast episodes in our LifeStarr Central community area.
• 34:20
  And I usually am really good at having a click up task where I say I did that thing. And then yesterday I was like, you know what? I feel like maybe I haven't done click up tasks for a while. And so I asked the agent, Jordan, the project manager, I said, Jordan, I'm about to put episode three twenty nine into LifeStarr Central. Can you look and click up and see the last task that I actually said what episode I put in?
• 34:52
  And it said, Oh, you did, what was it, three, I think it was three twenty one or three twenty two or something like that. And I go, oh, so hey, can you create a task for every episode in between and then also close those tasks so that we know that we did those, to which it just went and did it.
• 35:12
  Carly Ries: So wild. Well, George, we were talking about human first, but also on this show we talk about Life-First and LifeStarr in general, we talk about Life-First. So I'm curious as we end this episode, what would be your parting Life-First piece of advice you'd have for our audience?
• 35:28
  George B Thomas: Yeah. I mean, to kinda tie this in pseudo sorta, I would want you to figure out how you could provide the best experience for your clients, but have the best life for you. And that's gonna mean something different for everybody. But when I think about best life, my mind goes to things like freedom, time, family, the fun things I like to do. And so my Life-First is that you should be doing your life and have a business.
• 36:08
  Not doing your business and hoping to have a life.
• 36:12
  Carly Ries: I love that. Very well said. George, I was really excited for this episode today. I Was kinda nervous, like I said
• 36:17
  George B Thomas: Me too.
• 36:18
  Carly Ries: It gets so official when we record on Riverside as opposed to our Zoom speakers.
• 36:23
  George B Thomas: Right
• 36:25
  Carly Ries: But, where can people find out more? so obviously, folks, go look at our YouTube if you want to see what George was showing on the episode. Where else can they learn more?
• 36:34
  George B Thomas: Yeah. You can go to sidekickstrategies.com. You can go to my LinkedIn. If you just search for George B Thomas, you'll find it. Or you can email me. if you're like, hey, I'd love to get a couple hours or ask some questions or whatever. You can email me, george@georgebthomas.com I'll answer, always. Well, sort of. Maybe an agent might actually the first draft and then I'll add to it. But you'll get a response from me and my eyes have seen it.
• 37:05
  Carly Ries: I was gonna say, like busted.
• 37:07
  Joe Rando: Yep. What about your other podcast?
• 37:12
  George B Thomas: Yeah. So I have a Hub Heroes podcast, which if you're a HubSpot user or you do marketing or content or things like that, that might be relevant to you. I also have Beyond Your Default podcast, which is just kind of my, I decided to sit on a therapy couch and talk about all the dumb crap that I've done through my life and lessons I learned along the way around like forgiveness and love and passion and all of these things. So those are the two kind of podcast y areas that people can go find me.
• 37:49
  Carly Ries: I like it. And we've talked about this in past episodes, but you used to think your voice was something That worked against you, and it is not. It is so fun to listen to you talk, so definitely check out their shows. And George, thanks again. is this a three-peat episode? Four Peat?
• 38:04
  How many times were you on the show?
• 38:05
  George B Thomas: Yeah. Maybe three times, I think.
• 38:07
  Carly Ries: Crazy. Well, thank you so much for coming on, and for coming on always. You're one of our favorites to talk to.
• 38:13
  George B Thomas: Well, thanks for having me.
• 38:14
  Carly Ries: Alright. And listeners, as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Please leave that five star review. It helps us spread the word to other Life-First solopreneurs. Share this episode with a friend that you think could really use this information and somebody who's trying to learn all about AI.
• 38:27
  And don't forget to subscribe to our show on any podcast platform, including YouTube. And we'll see you next time on the Life-First Solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures?
• 38:49
  At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.