The HubHeroes Podcast

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, lord lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt? Knowledge.

Never fear hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Of heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers.

George, I gotta I gotta ask you. Is the person who reached out to you Lord Loop?

No. It's not Lord Loop. It wasn't even Oh my god. It wasn't even Lord Lact.

Where's the sad trombone? Where is that?

The the sad trombone. Break them, John. Hang on. Hang on.

Yeah. Here we go, guys.

How's everybody doing this morning?

Oh, just amazing. Dude, how are you, Liz? Wonderful. Most important question.

I am so glad you asked. Yeah. It was my birthday yesterday. And next to me, I have the coolest birthday gift I have ever received in

my life. Can I show you guys?

Yep. Show it. What is it?

A Val Schumer autographed picture of him playing Jim Morrison. And my favorite part is the way he signed it. He just put Jim in quotes. Wow.

Nice. Wow. That is awesome. I'm I'm without words.

I know. It's for it's a gift for a niche audience and the niche

is the size of just me. But I'm very happy.

That's cool. That's cool, though. That by the way, I know I texted you, but but since we're on the show, happy birthday, Liz.

Happy can we sing happy birthday,

though? Happy birthday.

Guys, we should start up with the boy band. Five. We we should start up with that. That was dope. Now, Liz I think

that thirty five millisecond delay was killing it. We were in sync, dude. Yes. Sync. We

were in sync, bro. To say is to the women out there listening, ladies, step back. They're all mine.

Yes. Line.

Correct.

Calm down. But let's move on to what I know is going to be Max's favorite topic today. But are you ready?

Get an angry email.

Loop Marketing Express part two, Electric Boogaloo. We are back. Right? So if you missed last week's episode, I'm gonna have to tell you to go and listen to that one first because it's just

have to go get it.

There's an irony to all of this, guys, because express is all about clarity, expression, voice and tone, and we only got through two questions of our outline last week. Today we are going to be getting into the hows, the tactics, the tools, the HubSpot technology of how you actually employ Express using HubSpot tools. But I've gotta be honest. Okay?

Be honest.

I'm just gonna say the conversations we've been having over the past couple of weeks about loop marketing have been fascinating, like Jim air quotes. Fascinating. I mentioned this in the last episode but this is the first time I've seen a product rollout from HubSpot where we are struggling to move through the what and the why behind it. So I want to start off today's conversation, and this is where we're gonna get all of our feelings out before we get into the actual tactics. Gentlemen, how are you all feeling about last week's episode?

Oh, man. I feel like I needed to get that out for a while. Felt It felt cathartic. And, you know, I I feel excited to figure it out.

Because, like, what I've learned is over the years, especially with

HubSpot, I tend to not learn something until I get super frustrated with not understanding it. And I'm looking at this as the next thing I'd like to overcome in that regard.

Interesting. So glad we're a part of your process.

Yeah. No. It's my brain immediately goes to is that where inbound physics came from? Because Max, at one point, you were like, I needed a

deep yeah.

You know? So

Inbound physics was my my way of understanding it in a very simple manner that works with the way my mental model is set up.

Yeah. And if you're if you're listening to this or watching this and you're like, inbound physics, just just Google Hub Heroes podcast, inbound physics. There's there's an episode for that. Chad, I'm gonna wait. I want you to go first as far as how you're you're feeling about last week's episode.

Yeah. I think this this week, we have a real opportunity, I think, to unpack some of some of the specifics in, like, how HubSpot intends you to do this. Right? And I think that's gonna help bring a lot of clarity. It's not the only place that you can do this kind of stuff, but they've, like, tailored it to making this a playbook for how to really succeed with HubSpot.

And in the context of HubSpot, this can make a lot of sense, I think. So I think that we can really pull a lot of things together.

Yeah. So, Liz, how did you feel about last week's episode?

I'll be honest. Pretty much what I said during last week's episode is that I have seen heated debates. I have seen friction and I have seen disagreements about the funnel versus the flywheel about shifting dynamics and how the inbound methodology is deployed. I think this friction, it's not that we're seeing with these conversations, it's not fatal by any means, but it is telling. Because one of the things that we talked about last week is that this isn't about humans informing strategy, this is a product informed strategy move.

And I don't necessarily feel badly about it, but again, it brings me back to what problem were we really trying to solve with loop marketing. Yeah. Because it's presented as a methodology, like this human first framework, but it's about getting people to use the product.

Well, they call it

a inherently yeah. It's not inherently bad.

Yeah.

But, and I'm not saying it's, you know, but that's kind of how I feel about it is that this rollout has felt weirder. Yeah. And it reminds me of what happened when the Content Hub rolled out where I said they really need to do a better job of messaging with their partners or their messaging in general because there's just a lot of confusion. Like I had a couple folks reach out, reach out to me on LinkedIn after listening to last week's episode. No one said that you made them sad, Max.

You'd be very happy about that. But they did say, Wow, thank you. I thought I was going crazy.

Yeah. See, and see, this is where I'll jump in because I loved last week's episode. Love last week's episode because I feel like we reached a place where a lot of humans were or are and are afraid to say that they are actually at. Right? Or they're just not saying it out loud or they don't have the place to say it out loud.

And again, this is why I dug into like, Guys, I want to talk about this at a deeper level. Everybody's trying to do it in one video. Everybody's trying to do a broad brushstroke. And there's so much granularity to the conversation that needs to happen. And what I love about last week is it is a foundational piece to get us into what we're going to dive in today and what we're going to dive in in the future on some of these other stages or places of what is this playbook that is loop marketing.

We're going to be able to do our best to try to figure it out, to try to simplify it, to try to help others at least take some tactical real world. Here's what that means. And maybe even as Liz, you alluded last week, what it has meant for years before somebody tried to put a different word on it. Like, so, so I'm excited and, and I loved last week.

Well, let's find new ways to love this week. It's a new week. It's a new day. Yeah. It's a new adventure.

So George, I want you you are now in the position of power of keeping the cats herded because I want us to get to the tools and tactics, not the what and the why, but the how. Yeah. So I wanna turn to you and ask you, how do you actually teach your brand's voice to AI tools in HubSpot so they don't spit out that generic content, right? Are the practical tools or processes that you've seen work for yourself or with clients?

Yeah. So a couple of things I'm going to try to do this in steps, and I may even ask if there's any feedback or thoughts during the steps. But some things that I want to make sure we talk about is one, gathering a small collection of your best work that sounds like you a a voice, a pile of of content, if you will. Like, this might be 12 to 20 pieces that are the most you historically that you've created. So we'll we'll come we'll swing back to this.

So that's a gather gather you did the digital you. There's also this idea that I want to talk about of making like a one pager. Think of this as like your ultimate voice card, something that you could hand to a human or something you could hand to any LLM. And immediately they would understand the context of who you are, where you work, the way that you want to, we'll circle back around on that as well because there's some specificities. I also wanna think that we could talk about how there's this golden set.

Like after you've kind of used AI for a while and you get a really good output or outputs, capturing those and using those as examples. You could use the word examples, but I want them to be like this. The other thing that has helped for us as an organization while we've gone through this whole process, and again, HubSpot mentioned hybrid teams. Creating a prompt stack or a a prompt library that you can hand to other humans in your organization when you build something that you know works based on the foundation that you've put into place. Because, again, a big piece of this is keeping humans in the loop.

Okay. Alright. Yeah, I did it. I did it. So let's let's circle back around to step like kind of step one or or whatever.

Yeah, let's call it step one. Gathering the content. And now here's the thing. HubSpot gives you the ability when you go to set up your brand voice to upload information or to connect to information that you may have already been creating in HubSpot. So, want everybody to kind of think about how their mind might go.

It's twelve, fifteen, 20 pieces of content that feels most like you. By the way, we're talking in the context of Hubs, but you could totally use this with Perplexity or ChatGPT or any other LLM if you wanted to. So just know that this is rinsible and reusable outside of Breeze and HubSpot's voice and tone tools and things like that. But I want you to think, I've watched people go through this process and usually they immediately go to blogs and only blogs. And what I would suggest is that you think about emails, you think about blog articles, you think about pages.

Even think about unstructured data. And what I mean by that is like, think about transcripts of calls that maybe you've had or interviews that you've done. And this could be internal interviews, like a mix of different content types is good to kind of get that voice pile or the things that you want to use. I would even suggest, and Liz, when we went through the original workshop, you kept asking me questions like, well, what are the what are the humans that you're helping saying? Like, what?

And so I would even suggest like ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, depending on how many you have real customer quotes, reviews, calls, support ticket, whatever. We want their words, not just our words. Here's the fun part is when we start to talk about voice and tone, we immediately go to like, well, how do we want to sound? How do we want to communicate with people who want to hear from us? And so their words in there.

It's also how do they need you to

How do they need us to show up? So that's like gather this information that has been historically just kind of floating around out there so they can use it to start to build. I'll shut up there and Liz, I know you probably have thoughts, but Max and Chad, like let's just let's use that to start the conversation.

You know, is one of my personal favorite topics. One of the things I always really encourage people to do, and George, you really dialed into this nicely, you have to remember the tools in HubSpot are actually quite simple and intuitive to use. The challenge and where they become ineffective is how dialed

effective the choices you are making about your voice, right? So for example, right, like you can have HubSpot, but if your content strategy sucks, there's nothing wrong with the platform, your content strategy sucks. If you have a bad voice and tone strategy or documentation,

dialed HubSpot cannot help you. It's not going to work. The biggest piece of advice I would say is you have to look at the instructions you develop for your voice and tone. This is not a vanity exercise. This is not about your aspirations, hopes, goals, dreams.

It's about the humans you serve, what they are feeling, and how you need to show up. Like I remember I used to hear from folks, they would say, well, the way we develop our voice and tone is we basically picked, like, what celebrity we wanted to sound like. Right? K. If your people need empathy, sounding like Pitbull isn't going to help

you.

Well, hold on.

I do love Pitbull. Do love Pitbull, though.

Max, imagine if every single one of your blog posts just started with Mr. Worldwide. Wide.

That's funny.

I'd read that. I'd I might actually read if that was the case. Right.

Yeah. There's no snare in my headphones.

That's funny.

You know what? Like, it kinda like feels to me as like the I remember always reaching this this point onboarding Marketing Hub customers that in my head, I was like, alright, now comes the hard work. Right? And it would generally be after you get everything set up and, like, your ripe your your HubSpot account is ripe for just, like, starting to pump out and create content and everything. And, you know, the the burden then shifted to the marketers or copywriters or whoever, you know, whatever sort of resource you had to say, okay.

Now we have to make content.

Yeah.

Right? And what it almost kind of sounds to me in this sort of stage of express, right, this first one is that a lot of that hard work has kind of shifted way, way, way more into the beginning. So it's less, oh, it's difficult for me to write blog posts. Right? And that was like the human output that was needed inside of HubSpot.

Right? Well, now that that part of the equation is handled to different, you know, varying extents. I think it's probably a spectrum of how much people, like, rely on

Right.

AI to put fingers to keyboard. Right? But it sounds like there's still this one thing that AI is not gonna help you do, and it's this.

It's It's set up the AI.

It's yeah. Like, give it what it needs to go on. Right? And like that to me still is, I think, the fundamentally hard thing for people to get over. It's like, oh, yeah, you got this, you know, you got this these wonderful tools that will actually create and generate content for you so you don't have to spend time writing and and and doing all this kind of stuff, or at least makes it easier for you.

But before that even happens, you need to actually still do a whole bunch of, like, legwork, which includes a lot of thinking, a lot of writing, a lot of, you know, human led creation of stuff that this AI is actually gonna go off of. Right? So, like and and what I'm wondering, right, as, you know, strategists that work at partner agencies or customer success specialists at HubSpot or inbound consultants or like any of the people that are still like helping customers with strategy, right, this is going to be the new blog post hurdle. Right? Where it's like, oh, yeah, we've got these wonderful AI tools that can like write all this stuff for you and like help you create content better, but you still are gonna hit this wall where there's this, like, big intellectual intellectual exercise you need to do at the beginning for any of this to work properly.

Right? And before we were talking about, oh, the hard part was like or I mean, depending on who you are. The hard part was getting your blog set up, getting your domains all hooked up and, like, all that kind of stuff. And that was like block. The barrier to get into this.

Right? But now the barrier for the AI to go do its job is still a whole bunch of intellectual work that you have to do in order for it to do it in any meaningful way.

And can I dive into that for a second? Because I think there's something that happened to me, like, two years ago that was a fundamental mindset or shift that allowed me to focus on and I agree, Max. This is the new hard thing. And and let me explain why. So, like, when I got my fingers on AI, and Liz was there at the beginning of this, and I was like, I'm testing this, and I'm trying this, and let's hone this, and let's tweak this, there was a mindset for me that I didn't need AI to write blogs.

I wasn't looking for a air quotes writer. I, when I saw AI in the output, I said, oh my god, this is the fastest typist on the planet. And my weakness was typing. I should have paid attention in typing class, I didn't. I'm a two to three finger guy at best and so I was like, okay, so if that's the fastest typist, how do I make this typist me?

And so what I started to do was give it all of the things that I could give it of like, here's how I feel about this and that in the And like, and so when I talk about like surface level of like 12 to 20 pieces that are you, there's a layer even before that where like my AI assistant, I was able to go through a process where I was able to give it my mindset, my beliefs, my core values. Now for you as an organization, it would be your mission. It would be your vision. It would be your company's core values, your culture code. Like there's so much stuff that we have laying around that if we make sure it's exactly what we wanted it to be in the first place, that we can create this brain.

And again, you're talking to a dude who literally cloned himself with delphi.ai and went through this whole process. And there are some similarities to what you as a human or what you as an organization should be doing cloning yourself to thinking about what you're building from a brand voice tone standpoint in HubSpot. And so as soon as I realized I could make this typist, type basically what I wanted to say, or close to what I wanted to say, and then I could iterate that and say, make it more heartfelt, make it more emotional, make it more in your face. I don't like this, but can we say that this way? Now retype the whole thing.

Like as soon as that was the mindset and I was literally creating a version of Sidekick Strategy, a version of George B Thomas that could just type really fast, It just made sense for what I should get into the machine, how I should train the machine.

Yeah. We use the word train. We use the word assistant. We use the word agent.

Yeah.

These are all words that describe people. Okay?

Yeah.

And I think there's this very, like, walking on eggshells type of mentality that a lot of the folks that are really pushing a lot of this AI stuff or this tightrope that they're walking saying like, this is not a person that is replacing anybody.

Oh, is Max going there?

Right? Well, here I don't think it has to be a person that replaces anybody. Yeah. Yeah. Right?

But I think this strategy starts to make a lot more sense when you think of it as if you're onboarding a new team member.

Without his

doubt. When I hear all of this express stuff like, again and I like, for me, like, just again, the word express, like, again, don't know why I keep playing express yourself like Doctor. Dre every single time I hear it. Express yourself. Right?

Yep. To me, express makes a lot more sense when I replace it with the word onboard. Yes. Because here's the thing, the AI is something that kind of exists just like a new employee would. Right?

And until you train it on like until you onboard them onto your company, right? Yeah. And teach them what your company's all about. Yeah. How to do their job, your company's values, your company's voice, how to talk to customers, all these things.

Right? The word onboard makes a lot more sense to me than express.

Well, here's, I don't disagree with you. And here's the thing I wanna back up 50,000 foot because while we're talking about AI today, HubSpot was talking about hybrid teams, which means it is kind of like onboarding humans and onboarding Yeah. Hybrid teammate. Yeah. To be able to work together.

Now, Liz, you just made a, like, a funja funja face. Need to know what's going on in your brain. Like, talk to me.

Okay. It's like a semantic argument that I'm hearing here. But and I don't I'm so nervous to say this because we have not done a great job of staying on track with these conversations.

Are we talking about Express?

Yeah, Express. Express to me is exactly what it says. Like, I actually think it's beautifully named. It's about how you express yourself. It is your voice.

It is your tone.

It is the fully realized expression of your brand. What I will say that I do like about what you said, Max, is that the function that Express completes is that onboarding aspect.

Mhmm.

So I could see it there. I just I do like the name. I have a lot of issues with Loop Marketing, but at least this one, was like, well, it says what it is.

Yeah. I think that's fair. I think you express your company's values and what you're all about to your employees when you're onboarding them. So I totally agree with you there. Yeah.

Think the way I think about it, you know, is it's like that you're hiring somebody to assist you in writing, and they could have all the best practices in the world, best punctuation, everything, you know, as far as being a typist and helping you make content. But unless they know who you are, they're going to write generic as as the dickens. Yeah. Right. And that's the whole thing we're trying to ideate through.

So I guess my question here is like, you know, how do we set that up? Right. So like previously, it seemed like it used to be a thing where it you know, like Max is talking about the pain point used to be, well, hey. We're gonna show everybody how to use the forms tool, how to make a website page, how to add a theme, landing pages, how to campaign, how to connect all this stuff, all the shenanigans inside of HubSpot was and then the hard part was really getting an outside agency if some of your content was done by outside people to use HubSpot so that you had the attribution and information and data inside your HubSpot portal. But now it's like we're front loading that, like Max said, into HubSpot so that the hard part is getting the data.

Now I'm wondering, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but like it sounds like anybody's practical first step to getting HubSpot to help you with Express is probably actually starting outside of HubSpot and talking to whatever your preferred AI assistant is if you don't already have some sort of voice brand tone documentation, and giving it everything that you possibly can about who you are, like George was saying, give it all of that information. Right? And once you've done that, talk talk to it and say, hey, give me my, you know, first stab at who I am, my brand, my my tone, all that sort of stuff.

Yes and no. And no. Liz, I'm going to hopefully make you smile. You have two paths you can journey. Can call somebody like Liz, who has walked organizations and organizations and organizations through understanding what their voice and tone is and how they should show up to the world and levers they should pull and when they should pull them.

Like literally, this is one of the things that I did when I started George B Thomas LLC before it even became Psychic Strategist. I was like, Hey, Liz, I wanna roadmap to how I'm supposed to show up or how I wanna show up from a voice and tone standpoint. And we literally went through like this, like two, three session workshop, which I got a presentation deck. And then I feel like, again, I was cheating because I used that presentation deck to like, super vent my chat GPT assistant of like, look at this presentation deck and know everything that you should know about me now.

Oh yeah. I've even restructured how I build those presentations now so they can be input for those things.

Yeah. Now, Chad, path number two, If you've been using Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude for a while, you could literally say, Hey, we've been working together for a while. If you had to describe my voice and tone. So yes, there is a step one where it's like working with a human could be an internal human, could be somebody like Liz, or working with your LLM of choice for the last six months, one year, two years, however long you've been doing it, and trying to get at least a starting point because then what you can do, and while I'm showing my screen is you can take that information and you can start to, and I'm, this is like, I've already gone through a couple of the setup pieces and I don't want to remove this to like show the setup process, but maybe in another episode or like we'll find a tutorial or something. But at the end of the day, want to be able to have your brand voice and you want to be able to have things like personality and default tone.

And you've got advanced settings where you can say these things. Here's what I'm going to kick back to. At the beginning of this, I literally said there was a step two, which is like make a one pager, a voice card, if you will. Basically, you're looking at HubSpot's version of a voice card, but I want you to think about this as you get tactical with it. And you gotta be clear and you gotta be concrete with this, but like who we are in three lines and what we stand against.

The tone dial or like levers from like one to 10, warm, playful, direct, short. Use these phrases, don't use these phrases. Use these words,

don't

use these words. Like, my assistant anywhere I go knows to use the word ready for it? Ready for it?

How else?

Not people. Right? You will you'll be hard pressed to find, unless I purposely do it, the word people, because it'll use humans. It also knows to use flourish instead of thrive. Like, so there, so you can literally, it also knows to say, by the way, if you go talk to my clone, says automagical, which is a made up freaking word.

Right? And so then, like some proof rules, like, you can literally be like, we need to proof this. We need to see the, you know, where did you get this information? Make sure you don't lie to me. Don't hallucinate.

Like, Make sure you always include this. Always exclude that. And so you can create a card of these rules and these ideas, and then you can literally take it to any LLM and, of course, HubSpot. This would help you with getting to this point in HubSpot where now you can literally have this thing. And Chad, I wanna circle back on one thing that you said.

Hey, the fight used to be getting the outward agency to actually use HubSpot so we can measure. Ladies and gentlemen, we're at the level now where we want agencies to actually start the creation process inside of HubSpot because it'll be using our voice.

Exactly.

It'll be using our tone. And so one of the things that we used to say, and by the way, I was right alongside with Marcus when we used to say it, was like, it's hard for somebody to sound like you. If they're in an agency, your thought leader should be in your organization. Still agree the thought leader should be in your organization and they should probably have the precipice of the beginning ideas or verticals that would help create the content, but it is really easy once this is set up for anybody to sound like you, as long as they're creating the content starting in HubSpot. For most people.

Now I have the brand voice or the brand identity page pulled up in the Hub Hero sandbox, and it's completely unset up. Do you want me to pull that up so we can take a peek at it real quick?

If you want to.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that could be helpful. Let me snag that.

Because it'll it'll help the

When you wanna see it

Yes. Yeah. People it'll help people understand. Here's why we're saying, gather these things. Here's why we're saying, understand these things.

Here's why we're saying, start with the, Oh, how do we, let me see if I can, there we go. Change that layout. There we go. Okay.

Yeah. So this is content and brand. And I think I noticed a little message in your settings, George, that said content brand is where this is going now.

Yep.

But it won't let you do some of the stuff until you get your booty over here and start putting in your brand voice. Now you can upload files. And if they're trying to give you the light version of what we're talking about by being able to paste in a writing sample of at least 500 words so that you can help it figure out what your kind of tone is. Right? You can paste in that and then, otherwise you can upload files.

Right? Then you go through

the setup. Think about that. Right? I just said create a one page voice card. Imagine the difference of uploading a one page voice card or like I mentioned Liz's PowerPoint presentation as a document.

Imagine uploading that as your starting line versus like trying to like type, you know, two, three hundred, 400 words. It's gonna be a huge difference.

Yeah. And there's a little bit of like, who moved my cheese going on here or whatever, because like, they're trying to bring together, you know, your brand kit, your overview, your AI data sources for company profile, ICP, and products and services and how you would like any of your AI to do marketing goals along with additional context where you can kind of tag your industries, tag customer sentiment, tag a brand associations for both positive and negative. All this stuff helps it have a little bit more data points to be able to help put the content in a place that needs less refining where you can, you know, it's already kind of going down the right direction. Like tactically, this is a great way to start going down that AI assisted express functionality.

And I would say AI assisted human powered level of expression. Okay. I wanna shut up because I wanna know where Liz and Max's brains are.

You know, I think try I don't wanna say I'm fully on board yet, but I feel like I'm feeling a lot better about this whole express thing. And I can get over the fact that I don't like the name. And I think the name is a bit more woo woo because I like to be very intentional with the names of things just because, like, I'd hate to have to explain this to someone saying, like, hey, this express stage, yeah, you're gonna express yourself as a company, but what you're really doing is you're onboarding this new employee that you have that's this AI thing. Right? You know, it because, again, it's just like I'd like to think of the stages as something is like, what are you literally doing?

Right? Just because I think, you know, fancier names for stuff just confuse things for people, which is why I love to track engaged delight so much, even though engages probably breaks that rule a little bit.

Well, once once the onboarding is done, though, then what does Express mean to you? Because it's a one time thing with the onboarding. Right?

Yeah. Once that stuff do you think about it? Express yourself to the AI, like, then it, you know, it it makes sound like you're expressing who you are so that AI understands, you know, what to do. Right?

AI. You're see, we're getting stuck in the fact that we're training AI to help us express ourself. We're we're training AI to help AI assist us in expressing the organization. Because really express is the foundation of like, you need to know how you wanna show up for who you wanna show up, because then when you go to create the content and get into like amplify, you're not amplifying a turd. So, like

Yeah.

See, but, yeah, see, the thing is is, like, when was the like, I don't think I've ever bought something being, like, wow, they really showed up. Like, I bought something because they

Well, you created something that

convinced me that well, no. No. I created I bought something because they created good enough content to convince me that I needed the thing right after I was searching for it.

I'm gonna like, it's not I'm

not sitting there like they express themselves to me. It's just not like Well, no.

Of course not. But they did or she wouldn't buy. Liz, I I put put put put put your thoughts

throw this out there. Max, you and I could have a much more in-depth conversation about this, but as someone were like, this is my domain, you will never look at it and go like, wow. They must have sat down and really had a great voice and tone workshop, but you will be damn sure to notice when they don't have it. It is the thing you think

you

don't need until you don't have it. And that's how you end up with website pages where it sounds like four different people wrote them, Where there's zero alignment amongst your team members about who you serve, how you serve them, and how you say it. Like, it I think we have this assumption that great content just appears. There is no wizard. Thank God I would be out of a job.

Right? But here's the thing. This type of stuff, it's like an iceberg. Right? The power of an iceberg is what is below the surface.

You only see the tip when it comes content. You only see everything that is above the surface, but all of the effort was below the surface. It is intentional choices. We are going to say this, are not to say that. We are for these people.

We are not for these people. This is how they need us to show up. The good news is is honestly, if you were sitting there going, man, they express themselves so great, then I screwed up. It's supposed to appear effortless. It's supposed to appear organic.

So the fact that you can't see the matrix behind the content, that's kind of on purpose.

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's Really? It's it's so good.

Like, it's funny because Liz can create let me give you a real world example, and I know we're running out of time. I have written the first three chapters of the Beyond Your Default book, and I did it in a real crazy way. And these first three chapters, it's like the tip of the iceberg because you can't see all the instructions. You can't see all of the memory. You can't see all of the base of like every Beyond Your Default episode going into a project or the custom instructions, or you can't see the process of me making my assistant ask me questions along the way to drag context of like thirty years ago in my life onto the page.

I've had people who have read it and literally said, Listen, I cried after chapter one. It was written by AI typist. It was created by human George B Thomas. Nobody will ever look at that and go, oh, he's doing a great job at using AI to type this to express himself. But they had an emotional moment.

Anyway.

I love that. Alright. I'm gonna bring this conversation to a close today. George, I'm actually gonna ask you a specific question as opposed to a one thing question.

Wow.

I would like to know, for folks who may have listened to us talk about Express for the past two episodes, can't they skip this step before going to Taylor?

Oh, yeah, because you'll literally be creating a turd. You will confuse your audience. You won't know the road that you're trying to travel and be able to help them travel down the road. Like this this is so vitally important to like how you show up as a By the way, there has to be some level of self awareness. There has like, listen, the only reason I can do what I can do in the way that I do it is because I've put the work in.

I've and what I mean by that is I've sat in my own air quotes, personal therapy chair for a year and a half with Liz on the Beyond Your Default podcast to be able to extract, like at found fundamental levels, beliefs, core values, mindsets. I did a workshop with Liz to like understand voice and tone. I've taken the time to understand who I am, what I And so like you as an organization, you as the individuals who lead the charge for the Taylor and Amplify and Evolve moving forward, there's gotta be a high level of self awareness to the organization and the people and the emotions. And and if you don't take to do that here in Express, nothing else moves forward in the way that it should. Yes, Max.

I think I think also the thing that I would add to that, because I'm I'm really starting to understand this Express thing is, like, this is sort of like putting a customer success person, you know, day one in the job without any training. They're not gonna know anything about your company. They're not gonna know what you they do. They're not gonna know what you stand for. They're not gonna know how we talk to customers.

They're not gonna go

They're not

even gonna know how to answer questions. They're not gonna understand any nuance. None of that stuff. Right? So, like, if you had an employee, would you make them customer facing with zero training whatsoever?

Probably not. No. Right? The same thing goes for a content writer or a marketer or this, that.

Yep. Yeah. Exactly.

Bingo.

It's and and now human or should I say Human. Reached out to me before, I would expect you to reach out to me and say, Max has officially made me happy. Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast?

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