Why CEOs Must Use AI Themselves in 2026 | Ryan Kohler on AI Agents & Business

All right. Good to see you guys. Welcome to the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. I am Chris Weiser, your host, here with an awesome new guest. It's pleased to meet you, sir. Ryan Kohler, founder, CEO of CustomerMind. Good to see you, man. First time meeting you.

Yeah.

Utah resident, you told me, right?

Utah resident. Yep. Southern Utah.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we're gonna get right— it's gonna be awesome AI stuff today. So I'm pumped about this.

Yeah, super interesting story. Like, recovering accountant, studied accounting in college. You poor thing. Got an MBA, like, got this lucky hit of like getting an accounting job at an early learning management company. And we're like early, like shipping VHS, just barely getting into— like, we had to send you DVDs to just like stream the video. And saw that and went, I should get into SEO. Left, gone to SEO.

Somebody asked, when was this?

This would have been 2001. Okay, so this was easy days of Google.

Yeah, yeah. So I started, I started my own company in 2000, so right same— yeah, there's—

it's, it's a great correlation to AI because like that same time period, like the, the world was new.

You were getting laughed at. Yeah, right.

Oh yeah, nobody knew what we were doing. Like massive market of business owners who had no clue how the internet worked, no clue how marketing worked. And so, you know, very similar to AI where huge demand, they knew it was important, but very uneducated buyer base.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, jumped into it. Somebody asked us to build some hiring software and I bootstrapped from— gosh, I put $40 grand in, bootstrapped to 10,000 clients, 280 employees, 80% mom. So the majority of the company is all— all the sales reps came out of customer support, trained them. And so just happened to sell and step down a month before ChatGPT came out and had 2-year non-compete, non-solicit, nothing to do with my hands.

Sat around and went to 8,000 hours of ChatGPT. Oh my God.

Just like, what would I do? So when was that?

When was that?

That would have been, gosh, the month before it came out. October, what, 2022?

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds about right. Yeah.

Yeah. 2023, I think. Yeah. And so right before it came out, I'd seen like Jarvis or Jasper, whatever they were calling it, and just didn't get it.

I think it was— I think it was Jasper.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, they started with Jarvis and got threatened, got yelled at, switched it to Jasper. I'd seen it and I was like, I don't quite get this. And then, yeah, picked up my son from, from middle school one day and he's like, hey, Dad, have you seen ChatGPT? We were talking about in school.

Wow.

And like literally 8,000 hours later of if I was fill in the blank, you know, an HR person, a teacher, a professor, a salesperson, how would I use this tool? And more importantly, like, how would I get it to work better? Because that was the, the big, the big unlock was like, hey, why are you waiting for this tool to get better? I bet I could make it better. I bet I could change the way I'm, you know, better prompting and better context and all that kind of stuff that I think is where most of corporate America is getting lost right now, thinking it will get better instead of I could get better.

Yeah, and we were kind of talking green room time just how so many companies are really missing the mark with strategy and planning. And, you know, you, you mentioned a thing to me about, you know, imagine letting your sales reps run that show, etc. Can you— can we talk through that?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's, it's honestly kind of like the Wild West. Think about like this is the first time we've had technology come out that literally like flattened the organization from an understanding standpoint. The receptionist might actually know more about ChatGPT than the CEO. The, the blind is kind of blind leading the blind.

Really well said too, right? You're right. And you know, it's interesting because there's— and we, we didn't know much about each other coming into today, but I told you earlier that I come from the IT services world, and we're watching MSP clients that we have deal with their, their clients that are law, like big law firms, like saying, nope, we're getting rid of it, we're removing it. And because they're threatened, right? And so, you know, we were talking a little bit about that ahead of time too. And it's very interesting because they're threatened, but the staff is all trying to use it, maybe partially because they're worried about being replaced. But I think it's more they're like excited and anticipating like, what might I want to do better, right?

Yeah, it is the most— this has got to be the most confusing time on earth to be an employee. I mean, to be anybody, but especially as an employee, if you think about it. If one of your employees woke up tomorrow and unlocked the— an Iron Man suit, like they figured out how to use— like literally, they have almost no incentive to tell you. Just think about that one right there. Hey, if I show up and I say, hey boss, like, so I reworked the process you probably built, you might freak out on them.

You're like, what?

Why don't you just do what you're supposed to do? And secondly, you'll just give more work, not more pay. So there's this really weird thing of like, they went and they used their own ChatGPT accounts because you didn't provide them to them, probably leaking all kinds stuff. They figured out they needed to upgrade, so they're paying it out of their pocket. So at this point, if an employee has figured out how to become twice as effective, they kind of feel like that was their learning, their asset. But if they say it out loud, they might get in trouble for putting the wrong stuff in. They might get pushback for it. They might just be given more work. You might take their stuff, share it with the rest of the team, lay people— lay half the people off. Like, there's just no—

their mindset's all Man, it's a really good point because there, once people start to get into it, I mean, you're still going to have your run-of-the-mill normal worker bees, I guess, right? But then you get some people that start to get that excitement and they start to understand. I've watched this happen and then they're dealing with, oh, I just created this, but I did it underneath your watch, so now I don't own this anymore and it's your intellectual property and now I'm kind of screwed. So like you said, there's zero incentive for them to go talk to you about it, right?

Or the flip side, if they quit, If they quit because you let them use their ChatGPT account, like you don't have any access to their product. But yeah, and the day— and there's these really cool things if they uncrack. So we're doing a lot of training right now on vibe coding, but not like to build a SaaS company, like to do data analysis platform or to build a little dashboard or a calculator. Somebody uncracks that one. It is the most like awe-inspiring thing to them is like, holy shit. I can build stuff.

Yeah, that's— it's funny because I, I'm that guy. Yeah, like I've never been a coder and I had a very similar conversation. I have a dev team, I have a whole dev team, and I got a guy that runs my dev team and I sat down with him and I've been up his backside for 9 months now saying you need to like— and he's not super coder guy, like he's more the project manager and the leader of the whole team, and I've been really on him to say like, let's really AI first, 'cause I'm an AI first guy, right? Our whole company's that way. We have a policy, we have a company issued Gemini Pro, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I went to him and I said, hey, here's where we sit 9 months ago. And I've now cracked the vibe coding code myself. So I've figured out stuff, I'm making things and I'm making things in minutes and I'm teaching my team how to do that and all this other stuff. And it's kind of, you don't want to be the CEO doing that, but still somebody like you want to be the leader.

Yeah. But here's the thing. If the CEO isn't doing that, let's say that the CEO has no clue what vibe coding is. They have no clue how to use, say, like, not just ChatGPT, but especially as we get into agentic stuff.

Yeah, I'm a Claude guy at this point.

How do they set the vision for their team? I mean, this is, this is like saying that, like, uh, you know, somebody leading you into war has never actually been there. So there is, like, as CEOs, we feel like, hey, we gotta hire a really smart team and get out of the way, and they'll figure it all out, and that's our job. And We don't want to micromanage them. But not when Iron Man suits enter the marketplace. Not when this really valid point, wildly disruptive technology that's going to not just make your team— look, if you want, if you want your team to be 20 or 30% better, sure, let them figure that stuff out. But if you want your team to have 10x capabilities exponentially, that is rethinking your business model and your process. And there's very little chance that a team is going to lead and go headstrong into that.

Yeah, they're going to do that.

Their risk profile is so different than yours as a leader. Yeah. And so if you're not out there going, hey, I'm going to jump over here and show—

Well, no, I don't feel so bad. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah. I appreciate it. No, honestly.

Every organization that I know that is killing it with Agentic AI has leaders who are willing to show their screen and show what they do with it.

Yeah.

First, so that their team goes, oh, okay, this is what experimentation looks like.

That's hilarious because that's literally what I've been doing. Have you seen Maria out here? Yeah. Literally she was confused about a bunch of stuff and I literally shared my screen and showed her what I built this week and she was like, you can do that?

So yeah, just think, think about this one thing. How many people have not seen somebody else use AI, meaning they're trapped in their system?

Their version of it is ChatGPT, right? That's what they think. It's a prompt. Yeah.

And, and their ChatGPT is responding completely different than mine and yours is, let alone having never seen somebody use Lovable Replit, Manus, something like that.

Yeah. Yeah.

So if you want the one unlock as a leader, like walk into your next meeting and say, hey everybody, we're going to stop right here real quick. We're going to go around the room. What's the coolest or crazy shit you did with AI this week? We're going to pick one. Show your screen and go first. Be like, look, I did this. Here's how it works. Here's where it drifted. Here's how I fixed it or how I iterated. And you will see that one switch that brings it out in the open where everybody's sharing what they're doing with it. Instantly, you'll have a 5x on context of what's possible. Because that's what, for most people, that's the very first unlock is I don't know what I don't know. I don't know what it could do.

They've never seen what it's like.

It's a search engine. Awesome. Yours is a search engine because that's how you use it. Mine creates entire web platforms because that's how I use it. Same tech. Yeah, just a difference in context and then iteration on it.

Yeah, yeah. Really, really good point on that whole thing. So, you know, I think the lesson from that little mini discussion there is as a leader it's really good to get in the trenches on some of that stuff because you want to be, you know, I really, I really like your reference of the Iron Man suit. Yeah, because I think we can all relate to that. That's our second Iron Man reference in today, in today's talk.

Well, it's just, it's the easiest thing to think about when you go, but wait a second, like, we've been given access to this— you could call it a magic wand— for like $20 a month.

Yeah, it's crazy how reasonable it is.

And everybody has the same access. So what will divide those who are killing it from everybody else will be their capability with it, not the tech. So all this like Claude versus OpenAI versus Grok, whatever, everybody I know that's crushing it, just leaving everybody behind, they focused on their side. How good are they with it? How do they think about it? What is their approach?

Kind of the platform is the platform, whatever that— whatever you choose, you go with it. Yeah.

All of us had access to Google and websites, but some of us are rich. Yeah, right. Some of us took SEO to a different level. And it had nothing to do with the tool. It had, we all had HubSpot. We were all using the free tools.

Yeah. Yeah.

Had to do with the way that we iterated and expanded our capabilities. And AI is that on another level.

Yeah. And you can not only have it on another, you could do it from anywhere. You can be anyone. Yeah. That's, that's, that's crazy cool. So, man, that's just, that's got my brain going because I actually, you know, as a leader, I kind of felt bad. I don't say felt, felt bad is maybe not the right word, but I was in this almost conflict internally. Like I, and you kind of heard me say it, like, I don't know if a CEO should be doing that, but you're really right because I am definitely like, that's what is, that's the core of what we, how did we get here? Again, you bootstrapped a bigger company than me, but it's the same basic concepts and the same basic stuff. I bootstrapped and props for bootstrapping everything because I've done all that stuff too. I've never taken outside money ever.

AI was— is no different today than it was when I was building that. I had the same thing you were saying all the time where I would get like, hey, why are your hands so dirty? Why are your hands so dirty in product? Why are you so dirty in marketing? Why are you doing these things? And you're like, look, the difference between Goliath and a big company where they are far removed from the customer and a bootstrap disruptor who's coming in to disrupt is almost always that their leadership team is hands dirty with the customer because that's how they sense what's happening. They're not just throwing cash at it because they don't have the cash. Yeah. So they're, they're hands deep in it, and it is a constant battle of like, should I be this dirty? Should, should I be this engaged with what's going on? And all the great business books are making you feel guilty about it. But if you're— if the world was, was changing at 5% per year, you could deal with that. But when the world is entering a massive Black Swan, chaotic—

5% a day? Yeah, more than that.

I'd even say like, you just can't expect that your team is to follow a leader who they know when they get up on stage and start talking about AI, they're like, this guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

Yeah.

Like, nobody follows somebody they don't respect. So what, you know, we look at as far as you'll hear a lot of leaders go, look, our team's got to learn AI because, you know, AI is not going to replace you. Somebody who's better with AI is going to replace you. Number one, AI is 100% going to be aimed at replacing workers. But number two, like, what is actually going to happen with your best employees is they're going to figure something out. They're going to quit their job and go get a new job making 3 times more money, or they just start their own shit. Yeah, like, that's probably this huge, like, talent leak is going to happen out of organizations if the leader isn't inspiring, if they're not leading the charge, if they're not there in the trenches with them. So it may be contrary to what everybody else is saying, but every company I know crushing it with AI right now Yeah, has very involved leadership.

Yeah, yeah. And like I said, I kind of like— now I don't, I don't feel bad because I, I wasn't apologizing to my team on it, but it's just like internally I have this conflict.

I read the same books you read. Yeah, I've heard the same stuff, like how do I get myself in?

Unlike you, I didn't go to college, so I have no MBA, so I'm falling back on all the stuff I have to learn. And a lot of it is growth by accident and learning by accident and execution by accident, and it's just that movement, right? You do some stuff. So yeah, I All the things you're talking about are very similar to what we do day to day. And here in my brands, we are a completely remote company. I'm like, you're sitting in my Austin office. I'm the only one here in Austin. They come in periodically, but it's really interesting how that all works together. So, okay, I wanna pivot a little bit here. Jeff, how we doing on time? We're good. We're good. So I wanna pivot a little bit. I wanna talk a little, you know, we can talk about AI all we want all day and we get pretty much unlimited time here, but Tell me about CustomerMind. I want to talk a little bit about where that goes and, you know, what is your vision for that? And, you know, bootstrapped up, did really, really well previously. Where do we sit now?

Yeah, you know, so there's this big challenge where we're super hyper-focused on tools and then we're hyper-focused on prompting, and all that is like table stakes at this point. And the challenge you have is what, what context are you giving these tools access to? Meaning like, yeah, yeah, you go on and put in a great prompt and you go, hey, look, we wanna write an email to a B2B founder to talk about AI or whatever the case may be. But that's a very generic focus. And so for us, we look at and go, if we want to really enhance the capability, capabilities of our tools, and most importantly, if we want to be able to speak right to a customer, right? Like right in their head, like right in their heart. If we want our content to sound like we can read their mind, right? Then we're going to have to give our AI much more context than that.

It's got to understand, right?

And that means like getting outside of the tools and building a data model that has access to our information, not just data, not just like, oh, in the CRM you have data, you have all the numbers, but I'm talking about—

it's got to use somebody else's context, right?

I'm talking about the context of what your customers are saying on the phone every day. If you think about The greatest, the most highly distributed tool right now in especially sales, but in the world, is we're recording every single call, right? Almost every organization has 20 transcription tools in there. And if you ask this one question to the average person, you go, "Hey, cool. So what do you do with those transcripts?" They're like—

They don't do anything with them.

They don't do anything with them.

They sit in a repository.

Yeah, they sit in a repository somewhere. Now, the organizations the next step up are taking those and, and grading the sales rep, which is great. Giving them feedback. Cool. Super great. Think about there's a prospect and a sales rep on the phone and two transcribers, and neither of them get any value from that. We're not, we're not using it to write marketing. Marketing doesn't even have access to it. The product team, you know, they try to interview customers to figure out what's in their mind. And yet here's this stack of transcripts. The leadership team doesn't know anything there.

And you kind of don't think about it that way.

Oh, ridiculous.

And I think a lot of people are just assuming, oh, I got my, my cloud recorder or my, my AI bot in there, my Read.ai or whatever you're using is sitting in there. But nobody does anything with the data.

Nobody does anything with the information. Nobody goes and analyzes, especially the customer side of that conversation. You have in there the exact words and phrases that your customers use to describe their challenges, their problems, etc. So problem number one is we're not looking at. Problem number two is if we look at this one call, we have no context to compare it to. So it's like, it's like you have this super smart assistant taking notes, but you never told them about your organization, your products, whatever. You just say, hey, read this 30-minute blob and guess what we're talking about. And so that expanding from there and going, wait a second, if we give AI this transcript, but if we also give it context, who we are, what we do, the personas of our clients, like how they think, our NPS scores, our just the more information we can give it, to point it to, the more that when it jumps on that call or gets done with it, it's like, ooh, Joe was in this call. I know Joe. He is this type of persona. I know what you guys were talking about because I consumed everything about your product and stuff. And so this, like, the companies that are saying, okay, now we've all got AI, just like we all have powerful employees, but it's like we, we bring in these employees, these AI agents, and we go, hey, just listen. For a while and maybe you'll figure out what we're talking about instead of going— imagine if you did that with an employee. Imagine if every employee you brought in, you're like, yeah, we don't have a training program, we don't have an orientation program. Like, just listen and maybe in 6 months your brain will figure this out.

Well, that's— I mean, that's mostly what sales teams do now, right? So, so what? Like, so tell me how I'm just— and honestly, this is two bald dudes sitting here shooting the shit. It's kind of fun. How do I apply that to my sales team? And, you know, raw company that, you know, we record all our calls. Obviously we're doing most of our stuff on either Zoom or Teams, mostly Teams now. Not a huge fan of Teams, but it is. And then we do have Read.ai. You heard me mention that earlier. And so how do I go into like, where does customer mind solve my problem? And I'm, you know, 20-some million a year. What does that look like for me?

Yeah. So we start with like, hey, let's build the foundation of what it is that is context, right? Like, Let's get the backstory of your company. Let's get like the personas we target and not like, not weak marketing personas, like 30 to 60-year-old, whatever, like psychographic personas. Like if, you know, if Maslow and Alan Watts got together and we're building the persona of what's inside of you when you're making decisions, let's build these personas. Let's connect them to the products. Like now we can take and consume all of anything we can get access to. Let's take and let's consume all these sales calls and let's tag them into personas and let's let AI massage them and build a giant repository of information that we can now have context to in the same—

does it— is it learning on the fly to kind of— yeah.

So you start with like, can you build the foundation of all this knowledge? Cool. Now you have something that when a call comes in, a sales rep, like the very first easiest thing, sales rep has a call scheduled on their calendar tomorrow. It goes and looks at it, grabs the information about the call, compares it against the knowledge base and goes, let me prep you for this call. Here's a dossier of everything going on. Here's a unique needs audit flow based off your playbook. But about this one call. Awesome. You show up on the call and you're actually prepared, which most sales reps are not. Are not. They're just winging it on every call.

Yeah, we kind of— it's really cool. I want to talk a little more about CustomerMind. I'm kind of do something similar now. But it's so cobbled together because there's all these different pieces that I have to pull together.

Yeah.

And you— and it's definitely not cohesive. So I see that. I 100% appreciate the problem you're solving, especially for— so, so who's your ideal client in that? Is it the SSM, you know, sales team of 3?

Yeah, yeah. It starts anywhere from a solopreneur that's doing all the sales and going, man, I need an assistant, I need some way to show up. But especially, you know, the bigger the team, the more leverage you get, I would say, right? So when you jump into that team of like 3 to 10 sales reps and you're going, okay, we're not, we're not huge, we're not— excuse me— we're not running crazy stuff. We want to figure out how we compete with these people with superior tools. Yeah. And right now you're probably going, hey, we have GPTs our sales reps use and there we've injected a bunch of files and stuff, but those might get out of date and there's no learning model and it's not connected. And you go, let's build this in a way that it's automated, that that the mind is there, it's just all the agents done and they don't have to think about it.

Because I will tell you, as that AI-first guy we talked about earlier, looking at my sales team saying, I really want to use AI for all this stuff, I want to put it all together. I've literally cobbled together 6, 7 systems.

Yeah.

Now, and it's not bad, but it's— I got to chase a lot.

You got to chase a lot. And then like your system has its memory and information, and then you give it to one of your guys. And their system's back to zero.

Yeah.

Or heaven forbid you decide, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna switch from Cowork to Manus, or we're gonna roll out OpenClaw over here and we're gonna roll this system over here. Well, now our knowledge is spread all over hell, right? It's like we, we turned into like Google, Google Doc factories. We're just building all these Google Docs everywhere.

I, I will say that's become— that's noticeably been a problem like that data sprawl thing, right? That's definitely increased more with all this, because like I've often said to me, like I've been similar to you, you know, founders, owners. I've been this like awesome idea guy for years, right? And then execution and final is like way over here, and this is really helping us shrink that gap. But then there's all this shit that happens kind of like all over here, and it's like You're like, oh, I built all this stuff. And it's like, what happened to that? Oh, it's way over there. Like, so there's like no organization on it. And it's hard because as fast as our brains go now, and let me ask you this, do you feel that you're, does the AI stuff kind of make you feel like you're constantly not working? Like, I feel like I'm behind all the time.

That one. So that's what's super interesting, especially if you're deep into it, is that we were told AI is going to make us so much faster, I guess that will free up some time, right? We'll have more time on our hands. We should be working like 10 hours a week right now, right? What's missing though is A, like, instead of going, what if we become more efficient? You're like, wait a second, what if we just got massive leverage and we can do 10 times as much?

As much. That's the deal, right? Right. Yeah.

So, that's number 1. Number 2, there is this nagging feeling that the world's changing so fast, we're going to fall behind.

That's exactly what it is for me.

Like, that's— Yeah, like you wake up in the middle of the night and then you add your third part, the dopamine hit of being able to go from idea to tool.

In minutes.

Yeah.

In minutes.

So at 3:00 AM, you're like, well, somebody would tell me to get up and write this down. Instead, I'm going to hit Manus, load it up.

We might actually be related. It's kind of ridiculous. We're both bald guys.

But this is the feeling you get inside of it is, and so part of it is also like, hey, we need to make sure we're finding some balance of like, hey, go outside, go for a walk. Like, like reset your nervous system because you can't run this.

I have to go golfing.

Yeah.

And it's funny because when I, I really prided myself like 2 years ago on being like the guy that was working 10 hours a week kind of thing, and I had great teams and great systems. And as it's come, like the last 6 months, I just, yeah, I feel like I'm constantly behind. I also kind of feel, I want to ask you this question, I, I'm— I don't say worried is the wrong word, but I'm— I got this feeling in turn, I think it's probably more internal, that we only got a certain amount of window to really crush.

Yeah, no, I don't think it's— it is an internal feeling, but it's the same feeling.

So you have that too?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, because we have this like this moment in time and you have all this noise coming of these jobs will be displaced and be replaced, and you— we're clearly heading into We're— so the US economy especially, but, you know, the world economy is built on labor arbitrage, right? Hey, we have all these people and they work for us for $10 an hour, and then we turn around and combine up whatever they do and we sell it for $50 an hour and we make the money in the difference and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Very much a labor arbitrage. And then we brought systems and tools into this. But this is the first time where we're suddenly going, wait a second, these are human augmentation tools or potentially even replacement tools. And, you know, my team is in Discord right now, and we have a virtual product manager who's an OpenClaw bot and a prompt engineer that's an OpenClaw bot, and they're interacting back and forth as a team together. But that clearly is not the same. And anybody who's comparing AI to the internet, it's not.

No, it's right. It's— yeah.

And so you feel like this, like, in 3 years, movement is similar.

Yeah, like the— all the stuff in it.

No, that I So you feel like, hey, in 3 years, I don't know, like in 1 to 2 years it's not going to change as fast as everyone wants to change because humans are slow.

Yeah.

And organizations are slow. But in 10 years, we might not even recognize the world of work. And anybody who's been around it can sense it. And so you're like, wow, this is weird. And so you might get a, we need to sprint.

It's like we knew something's coming, but we kind of don't know what it is. Whereas 100%, right? Like the internet. I don't know, I'm 49. I mean, I think we're similar, literally the same. That's great. Okay, so we are very similar on all that stuff. And I remember it all starting, and I was a computer company owner back then, and it just— I remember that feeling. I didn't feel like I had a whole lot of control over stuff, like it was just going to kind of happen to me. I feel like this I can definitely control. I feel like there's movement in it, but I feel like if I'm not like massively— I'm also kind of a Twitter bro, so a little bit. So it's— I think that world is a different world than reality too. So it's just, man, I live in this world of constantly feeling like I'm behind, that I can't catch up, and that there's this window that I— is a closing window that I'm worried about.

And I think that's probably the difference. If we go back and look at '01, '06 kind of area with the internet, like, you knew the world was changing, you knew you needed to embrace it, but you didn't feel like the world was going to change completely different.

Yeah.

You knew it was going to expand out like this.

Yeah.

And right now that's not how you feel and that's not the feedback you're getting. You're getting this like, oh shit, like 3 to 5 years from now, like the world may look utterly different. Yeah. And so, yeah, it is. And clearly, you know, I don't believe that it's going to be utopia because that's a hard change and I don't believe that it's going to complete meltdown.

100% agree with that. I don't think humans will ever really be in a world of utopia because I don't— I think they thrive on the neg— is it negativity? I don't know if that's the right word, but they thrive on like discord.

Yeah, I don't know if it's— they thrive as much as we've been trained on scarcity. Yeah, right. Capitalism by definition is scarcity, although you can say, oh, it's brought more good than blah blah blah, but by definition competition equals there's a finite amount of value and I'm trying to get my cut. Yeah. And so that training that we put everybody through— the other problem is we put everybody through a, you know, shut up and do what you're told training in the education system. So the entrepreneur time right now, this is our— this is our— if you were the little bit disruptor in school, like, this is your time. You're like, oh yeah, it's paying off to not question the status quo.

We were both that guy, weren't we? I could tell that.

Yeah.

I put a thing up on my public Facebook wall a couple weeks ago, and it was like, uh, let's, let's do a funny prank. Let's put everybody through 15 years of education in massive debt and then replace them all with AI bots. And man, I got blown up for that one.

Or, or let's put them through 15 years of psychological training of telling you to put your hand down and that there's, you know, the big one, that there'll be an adult in the room that will have your best interest in mind and will tell you what you should do. And all of a sudden, all these adults in the room don't know what they don't know.

Yeah, no one allow you to free think either, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, imagine if you're— imagine if you're 24 right now sitting in college and you're going, career services has no clue what comes next. My professors have no clue what comes next. And everybody I'm talking to isn't getting an entry-level job and AI is replacing them. But at the same time, I'm being told that AI is cheating in school and I'm not being taught how to actually use it in the workforce because nobody knows. Yeah. All the adults in my life suddenly have no credibility with me. Like, it is a very interesting time for that.

Well, and you watch the kids that just sold Cal— did you see that? So if you don't know what we're talking about, there's— I think it was a couple of 16, 17-year-old kids built an app to track calories with AI, and they sold it to MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal for $100 million.

Ridiculous amount of money.

Props, kids. Like, that's awesome. Like, I— so from you and me, we're like 100% celebrating that. I wonder, like, we think about the money side of it, but it's far more to me. And think about the institutional world that they were in. So, so everybody's watching this, like, take the money side out of that. The $100 million gets you a little distracted. I think this is a big bubble. So let's take that out of that. Let's just say they— let's just say they sold a million-dollar startup or even a $100,000 startup. The fact that you're 15 years old and you kind of have the forward-thinking brain to say, I am going to defy that institutionalism, the institutional education piece that I've been forced to conform to. I think about our world that we grew up in. That's impressive. And that's, I think, what we need a hell of a lot more of.

Yeah. And I think if you deconstruct what they did, you start off with vibe coding. You start off with this idea that— and even the words, like, You know, we came out with prompt engineering and the very small fraction of the world wants to be an engineer. And so to put off a lot of people using the word engineering and coding like implies that, that we need, you know, for especially since the internet came out, we've consolidated the act of creation in the hands of a very few people.

And good, right? Yeah.

Well, so like, so we've consolidated this act of creation. We've all become users, users of Facebook, users, consumers of content. Users of software, right? Think about how many pieces of software you are— we would define yourself as a user of.

Yeah.

Now think about how many people in this office right here would say, I'm a creator of tools. Very few, right? Now with AI, we start expanding.

Probably me and you. Yeah, that's it.

So now we start expanding that, going, oh shit, I can wake up today and create a website, a tool, a dashboard, a whatever. And that act of creation, when it becomes unlocked and you go, wait, just by talking? I can, I can speak the whole vibe.

Coding is confusing people. Yeah, I agree with that because it's, it's hilarious. Yesterday morning I have a personal trainer that comes to my house here in Austin and she's talking about that kind of— we kind of like do business coaching on the fly with her. A lot of times she's trying to grow her practice and, and I'm like, okay, you know, we can try and build lead magnets and all this stuff. So I'm kind of like going live with her. I'm like, you realize you can just do that now, right? Like you can give what you want to your marketing person if that's what you want. She's like, well, I don't know how to do that. Like, Just vibecode it. And she said, I'm not. And she goes, what? And she actually thought I was talking about like a vibrator. I'm like, no, not, not that. Like that. I literally went and got my MacBook. I pulled out Claude and I said, tell me what you wanna do. And we typed it out and she's like, I can do that? I'm like, yes. Like, do you have Claude? She said, yeah, but I use it like, just like you said earlier. She's like, I use it like this. I'm like, tell it you wanna see this. And she literally pulled out her phone and did it on her phone. Right. And she's like, oh my God, I can build that. So that's that, right?

That and that. So you don't put that back in the bottle. Yeah, right. Like that doesn't go away. And so, you know, if you take Claude, but, you know, if you make even an easier entry level, go grab Lovable.

Yeah, right.

About the easiest vibe coding platform.

We have our Filipino VAs actively using Lovable right now to make landing page, like to make full campaigns for our IT clients, right? And they're— and in fact, our one, our main team on this, it's a 64-year-old Filipino mom and her daughter work together with us. That's what they do, right? And she's, she's blown away by it and she loves it.

Now the, the next unlock is, so you get this app and it's sitting there and you hit the voice icon or use, you know, use like your voice memo.

Yeah, yeah.

Close your eyes so you're not thinking it's an app and imagine it's me or you sitting there that you're talking to because you have no idea how many people come and say, hey, I wish I could build blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I literally copy and paste that into Lovable. I'm like, why didn't you just talk to it? Yeah, but that act of like, tell it what you're trying to do and it will do it. We have not had technology like that, right? We did not, you know, think about like, I remember my first website I built with Dreamweaver.

It was so much work, right? Yeah.

Like you had to know what the hell you were doing. But this idea of like, but it's so interesting. It's, you know, we used to have this site I would use with people all the time that was like, let me Google this for you. So they'd send me a question, I'd throw it in there just to be a jerk and send them back the link and it would show me typing it for them.

Let me, let me, let me vibe code that for you. We should, we should, we should build that.

Yeah, because it's surprising how many people I take their exact phrase and I drop them like, now just answer the questions. And as soon as they get that and it clicks, they're like, wait a second. It's like, luckily it's very opening because they're like, wait, it feels like I've been being lied to for decades that I couldn't create, that I couldn't make my own tools. And you don't put that shit back in the bottle.

Yeah.

And so, and you might go, well, I don't need a landing page. I don't need— hey, if you have 7 spreadsheets, if you have 7 spreadsheets and you're like, man, I wish we could put this data from our CRM and this data from QuickBooks and this data from our marketing thing. I wish we could throw this together and be able to make sense out of it. Awesome. Throw that into Manus and be like, hey, I have this and this and this. Will you build me a way to make sense out of this? More importantly, if you do the kind of pull, we move from push prompting, I'm telling it what to do, to pull prompting and say, I'm trying to do this. What do you need to know? What do you need to know about what I'm trying to do to make this work? So if you just ask it, what do you need to know to make— here's my, here's what I have. I have these 5 spreadsheets from these 5 systems and here's where I want to go. I sure wish I had a dashboard with calculators that I could play with this data. Now, what do you need to know about me, my company, or whatever to make this happen? And what can you do?

Prompt that way, actually. Yeah, I didn't really think about it, but I'm just— I, I'm often asking questions to whatever platform I'm using. Are we— I'm mostly on Claude for that stuff, but I also use a combo of Gemini Pro and ChatGPT. And, you know, I, I've— in man— like, we're in all kind— I'm always trying different stuff, right? Yeah.

But yeah, that's a net— we take it for granted, but But we have mentally switched to recognize that these platforms can't just do shit. They are smart enough to tell us what it needs to do that stuff. We can ask it. And like, you don't get into Excel and be like, hey Excel, what would you need to know about me to build this spreadsheet? So it's a different mindset shift. But as soon as you switch to ask it what it needs, it suddenly is like a consultant with you going, well, I would need this and this and this. Cool.

Well, this is really like now to me an actual agent or a coworker, kind of like, etc., etc. I'll be curious to see what I saw. Microsoft literally a couple this week released their, their own coworker, Copilot coworker with Claude. And I come from IT managed service provider land, so they've been very deep with the Microsoft ecosystem for years, right? We had Microsoft Action Pack and all that stuff back in the day, right? I don't know if you remember that or if you were a part of that, but they gave you free software to get you to be part of their stuff. And realistically, Microsoft Copilot just didn't do anything, which I think is the problem. They've run— I mean, it's not a whole lot different than Siri at this point, doesn't do anything. But I think it's funny because both, both the big guys, Microsoft and Apple, have kind of been sitting around letting these guys get dirty in the trenches, and then we're going to see some stuff really start to happen in the next quarter.

Yeah, and these two companies are going to be interesting because clearly Microsoft has access to everybody's stuff.

Yeah, right.

And they, they're kind of trapped in the ecosystem. And Apple is currently sitting on the greatest computer ever to run OpenClaw.

Yep.

Right. And so it's gonna be interesting where they go with it.

Most of them are in our hands, if you think about it. And they have, what, 200 billion—

not just in our hands, especially on the Apple side, listening to everything we're saying.

Yeah, they got, they got millions.

Yeah, yeah, crazy amounts of information, all that stuff.

Yeah. So I think we're going to have to do this again in a few months here. So we'll keep in touch. You said you're coming to Austin once a month, right?

I'm here all the time again. Like, if you want, we can go golfing, right? Yeah. You golf, I'll fly code. It'll be great.

I'll try to ride along. I'll be like, Ryan, how'd it go? Still going.

You know what? Last week, just to end on, last week was my first, my first time snowboarding with Manus. So last year I'd be snowboarding with ChatGPT. And so I'd be like riding the lift, doing stuff, and then I'd snowboard down and ChatGPT's context window was small and its capabilities to finish stuff was light. Whereas with Manus, I can vibe code 5 platforms while snowboarding, just while I'm sitting on the lift.

I was literally, well, I lift while I vibe code while lifting.

Yeah, like 4 versions, task running in Manus while you're out there snowboarding and just like, yeah, it's a whole new world.

Yeah, I went to, I have a house in Mexico and I go down there and just like go lay out and hammer away on the laptop. And it's kind of a, it's like that side of it's really cool. So kind of wrap things up a little bit here. What do you see coming? Like what do you see the next quarter gonna look like?

You know, here's what the challenge is. The more powerful our tools get, meaning like there's a huge power difference between ChatGPT and Claude and Groq in the chat interface versus say Coworker, Manus. Versus a lovable Replit. And, you know, if you figure out, as you start bringing agents into the mix, uh, OpenClaw agents, or everybody's going to be releasing— every platform is going to get some variation of Co-Work, or I mean of OpenClaw, right? The challenge is we're moving from micromanaging it and prompting to giving it bigger projects and say, like, let it self-manage. Yeah, it's managing and filling in the gaps, but that means very much like an employee, we have to give it more context when you get up at the upper level of an agent, this is like an employee. You just hired a crazy smart, extremely arrogant employee that has no context.

And so that next level, not a whole lot of guilt, or like, they don't restrain. It doesn't care.

Yeah, it doesn't care about tokens.

Just goes.

Yeah, it's like, it's like a wildly smart new college grad that believes they've got the black card and they can just burn anything they want. And so our ability, like, all those are going to drop into the world and everybody's go, oh my gosh, we got agents everywhere and we're gonna be back to where we were at with ChatGPT of going, but it's not working. The ROI isn't there.

Mm-hmm.

And they're gonna blame the tech instead of going, wait a second, maybe we need to figure out how to train this stuff. The more capabilities a tool has, the more strategy that you have. You know, think about how do you teach it how to make a good decision? Because that's where we're at with OpenClaw. Can you give it decision-making frameworks and capabilities just like you would with an employee that you're about ready to unleash. And how do you build checks and balances, and how do you get to check its work, and how do you give it— you know, it goes back. It's so funny, but like, I spend more time in psychology and old business books thinking about how did we teach employees this, because it's just an agent's just an employee.

Yep. Yeah. And they all have souls and, you know, workflows and all the different stuff that we got to give them. We just got to make sure we do it. And I think Everyone's really— right now where we sit, there's like the halves that kind of get it, they get this, and then there's everyone else. And everyone else is just looking for that easy button to get in, and it just— it's not quite there yet. But I, I think you're— you and I are very similar on everything.

And that's, that's the second thing is in the next, in the next year, we're gonna see what happens when people aren't just 5 times better, but when they're 5 times better and iterating it 5 times the cycle time.

Yeah.

Because that's where we're at is not just like, oh, I'm better at ChatGPT than you are. Okay, cool. Maybe I'm getting 20 or 50% better of output. But what happens when I'm getting 5x better output and growing at 5x faster? It's the slope on the line.

Yeah, it's going to really enable the getters to just go. Just go.

Yeah.

Cool. All right, man. Really, really enjoyed this conversation. We are— you're in town for South by Southwest this week. You got Internet Marketing Party tomorrow night. So I'll be around. We got some stuff here at the office tomorrow, but I'll be around IMP. Uh, well, we got, uh, he's gonna be at AI Profit Machine House with us on Thursday. Super pumped. The first time we're doing this, and I'm excited about that. Now, I don't mean just us, but the first time we're doing AI Profit Machine House. I've never had my own South by event, and we've already signed the paperwork to do a 3-day event next year. So that's pretty cool. So, uh, and we go the same time. So we got Chingy in the house on Thursday, which is pretty cool. Like his name's Howard. He's a really good dude. So we're gonna have a blast on Thursday.

Really appreciate it.

Great conversation, Ryan. Really appreciate you. Good luck with CustomerMind. And, uh, we're going to be doing a lot more. All right. Thanks for joining us on the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. We'll see you guys soon.