Menu
Sign In Search Podcasts Libraries Charts People & Topics Add Podcast API Blog Pricing
Podcast Image

Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley

You Are Not Thinking Big Enough About AI

23 Jun 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is the main problem founders face with AI?

0.031 - 4.018 Bryan McAnulty

The biggest problem that I'm seeing right now is that people are just not thinking big enough.

0

4.038 - 9.126 Ryan Hanley

AI is going to be a net positive long-term for us. How do we think bigger?

0

9.426 - 25.633 Bryan McAnulty

It would take eight hours of reading per day for about 36 years to read what happened in one month. Why can't we just build the next Google? The work itself can be performed by these AI agents, but the ideas, the tastes, the reasons behind what we're doing, that is still what we have to communicate.

0

25.613 - 30.838 Ryan Hanley

I don't know that there's a better tool out there for extracting information out of your own mind than being interviewed by AI.

0

Chapter 2: How can we think bigger about AI opportunities?

31.28 - 34.375 Bryan McAnulty

With AI you can outsource your work, but you can't outsource your understanding.

0

42.556 - 67.332 Ryan Hanley

So you're not just someone who is using AI to build. You have this very unique business that you built in LashLoop where you're actually helping other people build with AI as well. And if we're going to have a conversation about AI, which everybody seems to be doing, I think it's important that we kind of level set on, like, where are we right now?

0

67.793 - 89.063 Ryan Hanley

Before we start talking about where we can go in the future and what a founder should be doing, shouldn't, how they should be looking at it, how things, where you see things going down the road, like, what is the baseline reality of what a founder should expect in implementing AI into their business. And let's assume, let's take two cases here as you answer this question.

0

89.303 - 114.084 Ryan Hanley

One is, say, the AI native founder who maybe has an idea and is coming to a platform like Lashloop to actually build their idea from scratch. And then let's contrast that against what someone who maybe has a more established business and is now trying to bring AI in. What are the realities for them on the street in terms of what they can expect to get out of these tools?

0

114.485 - 135.49 Ryan Hanley

Because it seems like there is so much... I'm going to use the word propaganda, but not necessarily in a nefarious sense. It just seems like everyone kind of sits on whatever their bias is and then just projects down the mountain. And I'd love to, as much as we can, just have an honest level set and then we can push into our biases as we go.

135.57 - 140.417 Ryan Hanley

But, you know, where are you seeing the world today and what is actually possible with AI?

140.819 - 162.253 Bryan McAnulty

Yeah, great questions, and it's great that you separated the AI-native business versus the existing business, too, because I think there's differences. So real quick back story is we started in like 2022 working with these ideas that were not yet possible, and then GPT-4 comes out, and suddenly these ideas were possible.

162.233 - 187.853 Bryan McAnulty

I feel lucky in a way that we already knew some of the things we wanted to build and AI made those things possible for us. But yeah, I've been working on these early AI agent products and things and experimenting and trying these ideas. We released the first autonomous AI coach with Heights AI Coach and my software Heights platform back in 2023. But AI has changed so much since then.

187.833 - 208.812 Bryan McAnulty

And so where we're at now is kind of like the future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed. And what I mean by that is we have reached a point with the models that have come out between the very end of last year and right now that they are just so much more capable than they were a year or so ago.

Chapter 3: What is the significance of the AI loop concept?

289.862 - 309.235 Bryan McAnulty

And beginning this year, it was like a billion tokens per month. And then I remember hitting like the next month was 2 billion. Now it's like over 3 billion. And the amount that I'm able to use just keeps going up because the model is so good. But the work that I'm putting in is not necessarily more. And so we're suddenly seeing this like massive output that

0

309.215 - 318.144 Bryan McAnulty

I'm trying to talk with other developers because I don't even know what the baseline is anymore of what is a high amount of code changed in production per month or something like this.

0

318.765 - 337.905 Ryan Hanley

So you just described a scenario that I think... So first of all, to level set, the audience knows this, you may not. Huge AI optimist. So this is something I've been pushing on my socials and stuff a lot because I think that all these AI doomers out there are doing...

0

339.05 - 358.892 Ryan Hanley

everyday users of AI, particularly business owners will say in the small to medium-sized space, mid-market space in particular, who may not be tech founders or tech-oriented. It doesn't mean they're Luddites, just, you know, it doesn't come naturally, which I would put myself in that scenario. I believe in technology. I've been around it my entire career, but I was never a coder.

0

358.912 - 379.826 Ryan Hanley

I took one C-plus class in college and was like, nope, this is not for me. So, but I appreciate it. So, Now, if I wasn't kind of as open minded to this stuff as maybe I just my natural proclivity, I may buy into this. AI, you know, is going to wreck all jobs. It's going to remove all satisfaction from work.

379.846 - 403.919 Ryan Hanley

And people are just going to be, you know, taking some universal basic income and having no purpose in life. And I'm like, none of that is going to happen. None of that is going to happen. That is all this crazy, almost like demonic scenario of what AI could be. And I guess there is a percentage chance that it could happen, but it's never happened before.

403.979 - 421.701 Ryan Hanley

Yet the same language that's being used towards AI right now by the doomers was used when the printing press was invented, when the car was invented, when the internet was invented. You know what I mean? Like we've been told this over and over and over again. So, okay. I'd like to believe that history rhymes and sometimes repeats, and in that case, you know, things will be different, right?

421.942 - 441.231 Ryan Hanley

The world was different after the car than before the car, different after the printing press than before, but we're still here, we're flourishing, and I honestly believe that. I think what you said, though, that's really interesting, and I want to frame it, and then you take this where you will. You said, right now...

441.363 - 471.574 Ryan Hanley

No one really understands what the baseline consumption versus output of tokens is, what you should be getting as an ROI or as output. Okay. And that says to me that we are living in this kind of wonderful FAFO moment where the answer is most likely. go out and do it, play around or, you know, make a more serious push, depending on where you are in the curve of AI adoption understanding.

Chapter 4: How does 'service as a software' change business models?

486.733 - 489.156 Ryan Hanley

Is that a proper way of framing this, do you think?

0

489.136 - 499.551 Bryan McAnulty

Yeah, I completely agree. I think you have to try out things with these models. And I think the biggest problem that I'm seeing right now is that people are just not thinking big enough. And like, I realized it's a thing for myself.

0

499.591 - 512.975 Bryan McAnulty

I have to constantly challenge myself of like, well, how could I just think bigger on this and do something that before it would have been like, well, this is like a year long effort or this is like a year long effort with a team. And now it's like, okay, well, let me try this over the weekend quick with the AI.

0

513.095 - 527.199 Bryan McAnulty

And so even if you tried something like maybe six months ago and AI couldn't do it or AI messed it up, yeah, why not try that again now and see like, okay, if the AI does do it, okay, well, can you think bigger than that? What's something that is more impressive? Can it also do that?

0

527.941 - 543.046 Bryan McAnulty

And I think people are getting stuck in like building this little thing, but not thinking forward to like either where does it go from there or what could you actually accomplish from there? Because I completely agree with you. I don't think we're all gonna like lose our jobs and have nothing to do. I think there's a lot to do.

543.206 - 552.553 Bryan McAnulty

And I think we're underestimating the things that we could be doing now if you have this like resource of AI that an individual can direct it in so many ways.

552.813 - 571.641 Ryan Hanley

Yeah, I just saw an article, the CEO of Cognizant, one of the largest management consulting and tech consulting firms in the world, he just came out and said they are actively recruiting 20,000 undergrad graduates because...

571.621 - 594.157 Ryan Hanley

They've what they're doing with AI has created so much additional work and like whether it's orchestration or human in the loop touch points or output validation or all these different things that need to be done by humans that they're out there recruiting 20,000 new employees. That's white collar work. right?

594.758 - 613.44 Ryan Hanley

And you also think about all the contractors that need to be done to build the infrastructure to build, you know, I mean, what no one's talking about right now that I think is really interesting is, you know, you're consuming 3 billion tokens or using 3 billion tokens a month. And from what I heard, it's probably only going to go up, right? Well, we need more

Chapter 5: What lessons can be learned from failed AI projects?

854.382 - 868.523 Bryan McAnulty

I was thinking to myself recently, like, I would love to know about like other platforms and competitors and stuff, even like not just to know about competitors, but just have a broader picture of like where things really as a whole and not be biased by like, just the kind of creators on my own platform.

0

868.503 - 873.73 Bryan McAnulty

And so I thought to myself, well, why can't I just be a next, why can't we just build the next Google?

0

874.03 - 892.834 Bryan McAnulty

Why can't we just build a Google where we have our own web crawler, web search that's going to build a database of every creator out there and learn all about them, learn what they're doing, and then we can be able to pull data from that and understand, okay, the creators who have been around longer Do they have like they have this many web pages on their site versus somebody else?

0

893.334 - 904.025 Bryan McAnulty

And like, where can we pull interesting information from that? And before it would have been like, okay, well, this is a really like complex project. And now it's something that like the MVP is built already from like a couple prompts.

0

904.826 - 920.667 Bryan McAnulty

And so like things like that, that you would just never consider like even being able to do for your business are now that's like, it's just if you have the idea, like might as well try it. And I think that the way that you begin to think these ways also is that

921.035 - 950.232 Bryan McAnulty

You have to be able to learn to communicate your intent in the clearest and fastest way possible to get these agents involved in things. But stop thinking of it task by task of each little thing. And it's more about now a broader, bigger plan. And so the kind of prompt that I gave an AI agent for building that kind of search engine was not a couple sentences,

950.212 - 971.45 Bryan McAnulty

It was like a 20-ish page or so prompt of text of everything that it had to build. And then I let it do it and just walk away and see what happens. And I also didn't have to write the 20 pages, right? So I was communicating with AI, kind of having it interview me to understand what we actually need to accomplish here. Then it wrote the 20 pages of its own implementation.

971.49 - 986.532 Bryan McAnulty

And I said, that looks good. Let's go for it. But I think the founders out there need to be thinking for themselves and for how they have their teamwork in the future is designing these processes that you can delegate.

987.253 - 1009.524 Bryan McAnulty

And I'm very happy to see that the last couple days on X, people are talking about loops and that the future of working with these agents is you're designing loops that are going to be running for you in your business. And that's great for me because our coding agent is called LatchLoop. Hopefully that sticks around. But the phrase sticks around and people can hook onto it there.

Chapter 6: Why is understanding still crucial despite AI advancements?

1142.583 - 1145.167 Bryan McAnulty

It doesn't need your direct input necessarily.

0

1145.348 - 1166.242 Ryan Hanley

Yeah. And maybe, so I use, I set a couple very simple ones up where to handle email because I don't, I've tested almost all of the like AI email tools, and I've just never, I've never really been happy with them. I just don't, it ultimately comes down to, I don't need all that. And I like working inside of Google's kind of native email system.

0

1166.302 - 1185.57 Ryan Hanley

I have it set up already the way I like and all that kind of stuff. However, there's certain recurring emails that I get that I just don't want to clutter up my inbox. And I know you can create certain tasks inside of Google natively, but you know, it ends up being, you have to have 400 of them because it tends to be very like specific one-to-one kind of stuff.

0

1185.55 - 1202.74 Ryan Hanley

And I have like just for the audience, mostly not this won't be revolutionary for you, but like receipts for my business. So anytime a receipt comes in, it's scanning my inbox twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. It's finding those receipts, tagging them, moving them to a folder and then forwarding them to my accounting software. Boom.

0

1202.76 - 1221.078 Ryan Hanley

So now the receipts that I get, however many of those come in a week, day or month, et cetera, I never even have to look at them. And if I see one, I know it's ultimately going to be taken care of and I can just scan past it. And that way I don't have to set up individual rules for every single vendor that sends me a receipt on a weekly or monthly basis.

1221.538 - 1240.476 Ryan Hanley

Now the AI is finding it and then et cetera. So that would be an example of some like an automation inside one of these AI tools that you could set up. That's fairly basic, but ultimately does create an increase in productivity. Now, what I hear you saying is this actually is something that's very powerful inside a coding agent.

1240.516 - 1261.575 Ryan Hanley

So if I'm trying to actually build, let's say I'm trying to build a connection between two systems that there isn't necessarily a tool for, or maybe the tool is kind of priced in an analog or digital era style, and I don't wanna pay the $150 a month for it, I could potentially build that connection myself,

1261.555 - 1277.59 Ryan Hanley

you know, you, you would, what these loops allow you to do and then push back on where I'm wrong here. I'm just trying to, I'm trying to steal me in your case. Like that loop allows you to, as you described, Have the AI... So what I would do is I would have the AI interview me. I might pull up Quad or ChatGPT or whatever my favorite is.

1277.911 - 1294.043 Ryan Hanley

I would tell them what I'm trying to do and maybe say, hey, interview me to create a plan that I could deliver to a coding agent, right? Now that AI is going to interview me, I'm going to take that output. I'm going to deliver it to, say, LatchLoop and a tool like LatchLoop. And now I can...

Chapter 7: How can AI improve customer retention strategies?

1497.933 - 1517.4 Bryan McAnulty

I think what we're all doing and where this is going, whether you're building software or something else, is that we're all kind of communicating intent to direct attention. And so before AI, that attention was like directing human attention, like where are our employees going to work on something? What is important for us for them to focus on?

0

1517.38 - 1526.594 Bryan McAnulty

Now it's on these agents and explaining to the agents what are the things that we want them to kind of kind of essentially spend this attention on.

0

1526.775 - 1545.409 Ryan Hanley

I want to come back one more time to this idea of of not thinking big enough. So for you, when you sit down and you start to vision, you know, kind of map out, we'll say. a new a new product completely, or a new function, a new feature?

0

1545.95 - 1562.341 Ryan Hanley

Like, how do you make sure that you are thinking big enough, you know, using your words, you thinking big enough about that thing that you're, you're pushing the envelope as far as possible with these tools, so that you're not just another commoditized, you know, app builder or whatever, right?

0

1562.382 - 1573.628 Ryan Hanley

Like you have a unique feel, like how do you ideate through a, do you have a process for ideating to make sure you're capturing the full extent of what's possible for this idea that you may have?

1573.675 - 1594.131 Bryan McAnulty

Yeah, I think it comes back to what we were talking about of like just playing with the models and finding out. I think, I don't remember if this is the exact quote. I think it was from Yacine on X. I remember some investors and other people started quoting it and everything. What he said is that with AI, you can outsource your work, but you can't outsource your understanding.

1594.111 - 1611.695 Bryan McAnulty

And so it's your job as a human in order to be able to communicate the things that you have ideas about and the things of where you care about, you have to be able to understand. And so the good thing is you can use AI to help you understand those things faster. But in part, that's from trying things. And so thinking about, okay, well, what if we did this?

1611.996 - 1630.821 Bryan McAnulty

And it's not so much a thing of cost anymore of like, okay, well, I can't go and spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or whatever dollars and hiring a team to build this thing that they may end up throw out. But now you can just ask AI to do it. And there's still a cost of the tokens, but it's tens or hundreds of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands.

1630.941 - 1644.077 Bryan McAnulty

And so, yeah, it's just like, okay, well, it'd be cool if we could do this and just try it, see what you get. You might get something that, okay, actually this is not there. Why is it not there? Is it because of some technical thing I don't understand? Is it something else?

Chapter 8: What does the future of AI in business look like?

1730.178 - 1747.225 Ryan Hanley

And I went down the path and I built this thing out and it cost me maybe three or $400 in tokens over the course of a few weeks, you know, putting it together. It wasn't my primary focus. So, you know, I was kind of taking my time. And I got to the end and I was like, this is cool, but there's some pieces here that are pretty complicated.

0

1748.046 - 1769.917 Ryan Hanley

And ultimately, this isn't really a business I want to be in. And then Perplexity Computer came out with their finance tool. And I was like, okay, that's $20 a month. and ultimately I've moved to chat to BT's new finance tool, which I think is absolutely fantastic to be honest with you. But I was like, there's better things out here for 20 bucks a month.

0

1769.997 - 1791.602 Ryan Hanley

And I think they're going to eat this process anyways. And, but it was the process of building it helped me understand what does it actually mean in terms of integrating a plaid into a business like this? What, you know, what, what kind of, uh, um, security structure do I have in place for them to even give me access to their API, et cetera? What, how do I have to map this out? I,

0

1791.582 - 1814.097 Ryan Hanley

made a bunch of mistakes because I didn't go deep enough on what I wanted from the business side in terms of telling the AI. So it kind of came out wonky. Okay, there's a lesson learned. I didn't map it out or plan it properly. And ultimately, like I said, it was like maybe three or 400 bucks tops. And I ultimately blew it up and decided I didn't want to do anything with that. But to your point,

0

1814.077 - 1841.94 Ryan Hanley

Even though nothing came out of that from like a financial or usage standpoint in the long term, I now have a much clearer and richer understanding of what it takes to develop a project from the beginning and what some of these more complicated or more secure connections are going to cost, what it's going to take to build to them, what they're even going to allow, what you need to do and prove to them in order for them to even connect to your system, etc.,

1841.92 - 1865.447 Ryan Hanley

And that's how you develop this understanding. And it's why I come back to this idea of like, this is the FAFO moment, like probably of our generation is right now. And it seems like the people like yourself, like to include myself in there, even though I'm far less technical than you, like, even if you don't end up being a hardcore builder of technology,

1865.613 - 1886.414 Ryan Hanley

I think taking on some small projects and trying to build some of these things, even if they don't end up working is going to play, pay massive dividends into the future. So. you know, I want to, and where my question kind of going here is, is this idea, which people have kind of gotten away from this term a little bit, but like vibe coding.

1886.775 - 1905.349 Ryan Hanley

And I want to set just a little bit more context and then I'll pass it over to you. Um, I was listening to very famous podcast. It was all in podcast and they had an investor on, and I want to use his name because I think this guy is brilliant, but he's just hammering on vibe coding, hammering on it. This is not the future.

1905.469 - 1925.843 Ryan Hanley

They're not going to build relevant applications, on and on and on he's going. Now, if you listen to the full podcast, he then gives away at the end that he's also a massive investor in Salesforce and HubSpot and all these SaaS tools, right? So he has a vested interest in people not creating technology that competes against them. And

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.