I Am That Content Creator Podcast

Ep#134 Why Your AI Sounds Generic (And How a Second Brain Fixes It)

• Kristen Werner & Mia Steel

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In this episode, Kristen Werner explains why AI output so often feels generic or "sloppy," and how she and Mia fixed it by building a second brain: a place their whole business offers, SOPs, brand voice, terms and conditions lives so their AI has a real foundation to draw from instead of guessing. She covers why Notion works better than Google Docs for AI-connected business systems, and real examples from blog automation, email campaigns, and even vineyard record-keeping.

She walks through why most people's AI output feels like "sloppy seconds" (the AI has no foundation to draw from, so it's guessing every time), why she and Mia moved off Google Docs and onto Notion once they realised it talks to AI far more seamlessly, and what changed once their whole business — offers, SOPs, brand voice, terms and conditions actually lived somewhere the AI could read properly. 

Real examples: a blog that used to never get written now ships itself every Monday morning. An email drafted from memory in a Spotlight aisle came out "spot on." Her husband asked Claude for a login instead of asking her.

If your business lives in your head and falls apart on a bad brain day, this is the episode.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • "AI slop" generic output that doesn't sound like you usually isn't an AI problem, it's a foundation problem. Without a second brain to draw from, the AI is guessing every time.
  • A second brain is a place your business information lives outside any one AI platform, so it works across Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever you use next. It's not locked into one tool.
  • Notion connects to AI more seamlessly than Google Docs, which is why Kristen and Mia rebuilt their system around it after Google Docs kept falling out of sync with what was actually in Claude.
  • Once the second brain is built, updating it can be as simple as talking out loud — brain dumps get sorted, categorised, and actioned without you sitting down to type it all out.
  • Building it once takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour to get started. The payoff compounds every time you use it after that.

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Drive Time And The Big Idea

SPEAKER_01

Ooh, I think I should call this the drive time. I feel like every time I have something significant I want to share with you, I'm driving home. I've just been to the shops and I'm on the way home. It is a half an hour drive from most of the places around me, so that's why I always just get time to think alone in my car.

What A Second Brain Solves

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So this drive time edition is all around building your second brain. Now I am Kristen Werner, the co-host of I Am That Content Creator Podcast. And today in the drive time edition, I wanted to share with something. Like when I get my passion pants on, I just want to share it with everyone. I don't know if it's part of being a manifesting generator, or it's just that I believe in this so deeply that I want to share it with you and make sure that you really understand what I'm saying when I'm talking about what a second brain is. And basically the reason that it's called the second brain is as business owners, we have a lot of stuff on our brains, right? We've got how to run the business, where the marketing director, the some the HR, some the ops, um, the ops manager, some the marketing, the design, the copywriter, the sales page, the website. Like you you wear all the hats. Plus, I'm thinking some of you might be mums, parents that also wear that part of the business, as well as just being that emotional person for your partner. So you've got a lot of shit going on. And the second brain is built to take that overwhelm off of you, is built to put your thoughts, ideas, business, goals, aspirations, you name it, whatever you want in there, to put it in a place that it lives together, to put it in a place that whenever you want to update it, it is as simple as just letting your AI of choice update it and updates that accordingly to make sure that you keep on top of your business. And so what I'm gonna share with you today is we do have a workshop coming up in August that we will be sharing with you the second brain. And we're offering you the second brain where you can come in and you get the tool that we've created so that you don't have to think about what to set up, how to set up, how to make it all work, how it works seamlessly, but rather you get to jump into our program and you jump into this second brain tool itself that asks you all the questions that you need. And once you've got all those questions answered, and it kind of nine times out of ten, it takes about 45 minutes to an hour. Taking as much time as you possibly can to set this up is the ideal practice because in it, it asks you questions around your brand voice, around your SOPs, any terms and conditions, any offers, any copy, anything in your business that you are doing on the daily, you're doing regularly, lives in this brain. And as you start to build the brain out, you then get to add things into it that become far more in-depth, which is, you know, we've got things happening inside the brain that pings at us and lets us know what's going on. I won't go into that right now because I want to make sure that it's clear what we're actually building. So I want to talk you through the step by step basically of what it is we're

Beating AI Slop With Foundations

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building when we say the second brain. Now, when we've been doing our workshops, and originally when we started setting this up, we got to a point where we went to a lot of AI workshops and we invested in AI communities and in AI coaches and things like that because we've been doing this since about ChatGPT first kind of came out. We implemented this in our business and have continued to learn this over time. So we've been in many communities over the time to help train us up as well, to build our own skills and expertise. And every single time we got into community, the biggest question that Mia and myself both had was, yeah, but how? Like there's all these amazing things that's going on, but how? How is this working? Where is the foundation stuff? Where's the stuff that it draws from constantly so that you're not repeating yourself over and over again? And when people talk about AI slop, that you know, you put a prompt in or you want a caption or you want something and you just get back kind of sloppy seconds, which doesn't sound like you, doesn't feel like you, so that you end up tweaking, changing, you know, updating constantly. And that takes what much more time than if you just wrote it yourself and then maybe took it to an AI and said, look, this is written by me, can you just change it up? Because for most of us, I know personally myself, I use AI more for here is my entire brain dump. Like I'm just gonna verbally diarrhear this into my claude and say, kind of sort it out. And I can only say that because I've got the second brain set up. So I know where to go inside of my AI to speak out these different things, or I know just to go and say, hey, look, I'm just gonna give you a brain dump of an idea I had. Can you then put it into my second brain and categorize it under blog ideas or categorize it under new offers or whatever it looks like? But that's not possible until the second brain is built. So, like I said, when we first kind of started and probably in the last six months, where Claude and ChatGPT have gone from something nice to have to in the creator world and the entrepreneurial world, they've kind of skyrocketed, skyrocketed to fuck, I really gotta have this and I want to understand, I want to use it as best I can within my business. And so when that started to happen, is when we really started to go, okay, this is great that we can build websites, this is great that we can create copy, this is great that we can do all that, but how? And originally the first thing we did was turn to Claude because Claude really had a moment in the sunshine, and you know, ChatGBT is coming back with different things, and we don't want you to pick a platform, but rather understand how this second brain can connect to any AI of choice. So it's agnostic and it can it can be wherever you want it to put wherever you work best, you get to take this second brain basically. But we started with Claude, and a lot of people that we're learning from were talking about the projects and how to set them up and the MD files, which is basically a text file that the AI platforms use and read very easily. It doesn't take up as many credits and all of that kind of mambo jambo, if you will. And so we started doing it that way, and that was working really well. But what we found was that we connected it to Google Docs, which that was how we were working, and it was working quite fine, but we just started to find, like, hang on a minute, it's a bit clunky and it's not really updating, and every so often it just wouldn't do what we asked, and it didn't really understand how to best and we it didn't understand how to best complete the task, and also it wasn't always updating what was inside Claude then. So then we found there was a disconnect where we'd upgrade an offer, for example, and we'd update that offer inside Claude and it would understand that, but then the original Google Doc wouldn't match that. And so then when it's drawing, potentially if you say, Okay, go and grab the offer from the Google Docs and write me a sales page, then it was like, Well, hang on a minute, in the Google Docs it says this, but in Claude it says this, and it just wasn't

Why Notion Makes It Seamless

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a seamless process at all. And we found that there was more hiccups than there were successes. So we did some research, we dug a little deeper, and we saw that most of these gurus, I suppose, in the space that we were learning from these projects and all of that, we're like, hang on a minute, they're using a lot of Notion. And we started to think, okay, there's got to be a reason why they're using Notion. So we started to dig a bit further into that, learn a little bit more. We were never really mad for Notion, as in it was quite overwhelming for both of us because I liked the idea of using Notion, but then I never used it enough to fully understand it to go, that makes sense, and I want to use that in my business. Some people absolutely love Notion, have used it forever, think it's amazing and truly understand it, which is fantastic. So we did some research and we watched lots of YouTubes. We went down our rabbit holes because we're generators and manifesting generators, and all we do is just go down rabbit holes and find stuff that we're also hyperfocus, that's part of the spicy brain. So we did some hyperfocusing and realized that hang on a minute, if we can set up these notion boards, they talk to the AI. They are therefore the they are the part of this AI that becomes more seamless. They are the part that it speaks to it in a seamless manner, unlike Google Docs, that was a bit clunky, like I said. So we started to work with that and we started to build through that. And what we did notice is we got to a point where we were doing something one day and we created in in Claude and said, Can you create this inside a Notion Board? And all of a sudden, it started to create it seamlessly. And then as we started to build it in, then we were able to update in real time and create what was now a working ecosystem that all of a sudden that's what changed. Our content and our content creation was no longer slop because it was understanding what we were updating when we're updating it in real time. And we would say, you know, if we were doing blogs or we were doing uh brain dumps or content things, we'd let it know, update this in notion. And then we came to a point in our journey where we realized that the AI itself needs a lot of rules. And in order to do so, it's it's part of um, you know, doing your AI ethically, it's part of being, you know, having the right governance around your AI and ensuring that you're giving it the right rules, it's understanding you and vice versa. And so in in doing that process, we kind of went, hang on a minute, if we can now take everything that is in our brain about our business, our offers, our SOPs, our terms and conditions, our website copy, you name it, everything that we've done over the last three years, if we can take the key stuff and we can let Claude understand that and then get Notion to build that out, then all of a sudden we've got this second brain that we can tap into anywhere, anytime. We can take that Notion board, that second brain, and we can use it in Chat GPT. We can use it in Claude, we can use it across any AI platform that we want because it doesn't live in the AI platform. It lives on its own, it's got all our information, we can draw from it anytime. And the rules that we have set up inside Hive AI and inside the second brain training that we will give you if you want to come along to that training, all the details are in the show notes. But inside that, what we've created is the steps that you go through, you then get to choose the rules, regulations, you get to make sure that the AI and the notion board and your second brain understand what you want from it. So it's got governance over it, it's got

Rules Governance And Portability

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control over it, and you build all that, and then that lives inside this second brain. And so that any time, and you know, when I was just at Spotlight before uh doing the shopping for the book week, and I was standing in the aisle looking at something, and I just remembered, oh, I've got to update that for the email campaign that we're doing. So I whipped out Claude and I just said I found the I like to work in projects that's going too deep and I don't want to go there right now, but basically you could just say it in the chat. I'm updating the email campaign that's coming out for the AI second brain build. This email is gonna be, I think I was doing number two email and an email sequence. I want to make sure that I remember to add this particular link and get this email ready to go by the time I get home. Can you please update that, bring it through to the second brain and make sure it's ready to go in the email nurture sequences? And then off I went to continue my spotlight journey of buying things for the Queen of Hearts. And by the time I got back into the car, and then I shut down, obviously, and I went and bought my things, and I just sat down in the car before I started driving away to then write create this podcast, and I checked that email, and it was fucking spot on. And the only reason that it is spot on, the only reason that it works, the only reason that you can be talked to your phone and updating things in real time is because you've got the second brain connect connected. And because Mia and I talk to it so much, because it has our human design, it has our tone of voice, because we verbalize to it often, so it understands who we are. We don't type information in so much because we don't edit ourselves, we just go for it. So it's it understands us enough. Then when I read that email, I was like, ah, it is sensational. There was nothing that I needed to change because I'd verbalized exactly what I wanted from it. It understands what the AI workshop is all about because we've been speaking to it about that. It's written the sales page for us. The conversion on the sales page is 50%. It's done all that for us. The website itself is created through the help of this second brain. And so I hope while what I've said in this podcast isn't confusing because it doesn't have to be confusing. What I want you to understand first and foremost, as the most important mecha of this whole thing, is when you build out this second brain. That can literally take you 45 minutes to an hour, longer if you want, but if you want to just start, that's all it takes to get the ball rolling. And then once you have that second brain, and this is the part that I broth so much, and I can't, I don't know if I can get my passion across as much as I want to, but maybe I am, I don't know. But the part that I I just can't celebrate enough is because we brain dump often, because we'll be in the shower or in spotlight or in the supermarket or driving home and think, ooh, I've got an idea, and we verbally dump that into Claude, and then it goes and takes the second brain. And

Real Examples From Emails To Vineyards

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usually when we do that, we say, put this into the brain dump section for the blogs. So then we've got it all set up to automate that then every single Monday it goes into that brain dump that Mia and I brain dump at whatever stage, two in the morning if we friggin' want. And then it goes in there, it grabs that information, it creates a blog for us, it finds links to our podcast, it does a reference check on the actual information it's providing, it puts links in if we've got any offers at the moment that that particular podcast could uh that particular blog could link to. It creates it all, it gets our images, it gets it all sorted, it writes it all, it sends us a little ping in Slack on Monday morning. We jump in there, it is on our website, ready to go. It hasn't launched yet, but it's all set up. We have a read. Nine times out of ten, we go, yep, that's actually pretty perfect. And when it is, we say, okay, ship it. And so then it ships it off to the website, and that's the blog done. Now within two weeks, we started ranking on Google with with uh keywords. And we have said to write a blog for nearly three years. It never happens. These things don't happen because we're busy. When now that second brain is built, that's the magic that happens. There's so much more, but that's just one example. I mean, another example if you want me to keep raving, cause I bloody well will. First and foremost, come along to this session. The details are in the show notes. Please come along to this session. You this will change your fucking business. I just I get really passionate about this stuff, and I know it probably peeps some people off, but you might have switched off by now. But like, this is the stuff that will change your business. This is the stuff that will change the way that you work. Like, for example, the other night, my husband, we have a full process in the vineyard. And AI only works when you do something over and over and over again, and you can say, hey, can you like help me here? I don't want to do this manually anymore. And in the vineyard, every single year, we have to go around and push posts to check if they're broken or not. And if they're broken, we have to dig them out, we have to replace them. Now, obviously, AI can't be going around and walking around the vineyard. I get that. However, I've set it up. So when I'm walking around the vineyard, I've got my music blaring and my headphones, I've got my phone with me. I used to record it as we go. First of all, start it on paper, then I started doing the notes app, then I'd take that paper on Notes app back to the computer, and then I'd type them into my Google spreadsheets, and then that spreadsheet my husband would take, and then he'd print it out. He'd take it on the farm. When he's digging out the posts, he'd know which row to go to, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The story went on. Now I've set it up so I can just jump in as I'm kind of walking around. If I push a post that's broken, I can jump into Claude and say, Hey Claude, uh, row 43, broken post, south end. Can you update this in the spreadsheet for the top block? And so it does that. So then when I get back to the house, or when my husband looks on his phone now, because I've set it up for him and he opens up ready to go, it's all updated in real time. There's been no transferring of content. It's just me talking into Claude or him talking into Claude to keep a record of that. Now we have to keep records for sustainability and stuff like that on the vineyard. So I'm building all of that into a second brain. Now, this second brain is of its own. I've purchased and am doing it through a different Claude account connected to a different email address because that is a completely separate business, obviously, to Hive Hub Collective. But now, every three or five years, we have to provide a sustainability report. And you have to provide records for the last three years. And most people write it in the biggest, fucking, ugliest, bloody book you've ever seen in your life. And it takes hours and it's horrific and I hate it. I set mine up in the Google Drive three, four years ago, and even the people that come to audit were like, geez, this is impressive. I was like, I know, right? I'm not doing things on paper, but now it's even better because now I've been able to collect connect that whole, like I can't even tell you how many pages there is. But now, the other day, my husband, for example, said to me, What's the login for the water portal? And I was like, ask Claude. He's like, he doesn't know. I was like, just jump on and ask it. And he was like, okay. So he jumped on and he said, Hey Claude, uh, well, I said it so he could watch me. I said, Hey Claude, can you find the website

Workshop Invite And Next Steps

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and login details for the water portal that would be in the sustainability report water portal section? And up it popped. And he was like, Are you fucking kidding me? I was like, no, man, I'm not. This is some cool shit. That's just one part. Like, I've got one for the wedding business. I just, if you run a business, please, and you don't have to put your your deepest, darkest financial reports and all of your clients or anything like that. We absolutely do not advise that. If you wouldn't put it into the Google Drive, I wouldn't put it into Claude, no. But there are ways around that, and we show you that inside Hive AI. We show you what's possible. I've done it with my hairdresser and her business, and she cannot stop raving about how much time it is saving her. And her assistant is like, this is absolutely ridiculous. What I can achieve now. And now Beck doesn't have to worry about this and this and this because I can handle it this way. Yep. Anyway, I'm gonna just cut it there because I think I've shared my passion for this. I want you to come along to this session. It is inside the show notes. Please come along. You can get the you get the second brain when you purchase that. And then we are running a bonus session where we actually jump in live and help you build it. So you have questions, we'll answer them there and then. It's in the show notes. Go grab it. Any questions, jump in the DMs and ask us. And that has been the drive by. Oh, anyway, have a cracking day. See ya. Podcast. Absolutely. So many good ones, too.