Dominate Content Game Using Multiple AI Models | Dustin Stout

Ryan Hanley: It's a land grab right now, and they want to build their brand as the best of the best AI model. They're going to build their little cages around their products and try and pull people into that ecosystem, which is fine. It incentivizes them to make the better model because there's heavy competition. OpenAI needs people like me to create these multifaceted, complex, comprehensive systems that utilize their technology because that's where their real profit is.

Dustin W. Stout: I was saying it's similar to, in the acting world, you kind of get pigeonholed into doing one kind of role. And I've always fought back against that. There are some actors who break out of that and do a wide range of roles. But even in the professional world, you get pigeonholed into one thing. I've never been that way. I've been multi-interested, interest-diverse. I never wanted to be pigeonholed. I wanted to have multiple businesses. So when I tried to make that pivot, it was astonishing how many people were just like, "No, stay in your lane, dude."

Ryan Hanley: I get this all the time because most of my career has been in insurance. While I have developed an arcane set of skills highly relevant to the insurance industry, like you said, I've always had a broader set of interests. A lot of my success in the insurance industry has been exploring other industries and then bringing those ideas back. I find that take people give you so interesting. If you only sit in your little insular world, and this is all you ever do, talk about, and think about, you're actually diminishing yourself. While you may develop a tighter skill set, you're also creating a level of brittleness in your business or methodology because you're not exposed to new ideas. There's no cross-pollination.

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah, it becomes rigid. That's why people get so locked into "this is the way we've always done things" and they won't change or advance. That's why so many businesses are still struggling with AI because they've put themselves in this box and won't branch out. I remember sitting in a church where a pastor said, "I don't read other pastors' books." And I thought, so you're just narrow? You don't hear anybody else's perspective but your own? That was a red flag to me.

Ryan Hanley: I think it was probably 10 plus years ago I wrote an article about how if you're not growing, you're dying. Everything in life is that way. Every living thing is the same. You look at vegetables in the garden, the minute that vegetable stops growing, it starts decaying. I've always felt that way. The minute I jumped out on my own to be an entrepreneur, I had a little side hustle, but I had a full time job at a t-shirt printing shop designing t-shirts. The minute I realized I wasn't going to grow there, that there was no role above me, it was just me and the owner, I knew I needed to leave right away. If I ever feel like I'm not growing, I go into panic mode. I have to figure out how to start growing again because I feel like I'm dying. Humans were not made to be static.

Dustin W. Stout: I think your point on the pastor and others who flex that idea is spot on. I've heard comedians say it, authors say it, other speakers say it. I know you speak a little bit and I have for 15 years. I'd bump into speakers on the road and they'd say, "Oh, I don't watch other speakers." And I don't understand. How do you find new things? How do you come up with new ideas? How do you expand your game? Can you imagine a basketball player saying, "I don't watch other basketball players. I don't study the other team's plays"? It makes no sense. It's ridiculous to me.

Ryan Hanley: For me, I always felt uncomfortable up on stage. Here I am speaking professionally and getting paid, but standing on a stage always made me feel uncomfortable. Then I saw a good buddy of mine, Marcus Sheridan, speak for the first time. He works the crowd. And it was like, "Oh wait, you mean there's no rule that I have to be up on that stage? I can get down with the people." Unless it's in my contract that I have to stay on stage, I'm down in the crowd. Even then, I'm usually lobbying to figure out how to get down there because that works for my style. If I hadn't been open to looking at other speakers, particularly Marcus, I would have never seen that and implemented it in my own work. That's one of the things I see with AI, and why I was so excited to chat with you today. Having lived in the social media world, the design world, with your actor training, and now developing this highly successful AI app and doing incredible things... When you're running into people who are hesitant to engage with AI, who are still maybe interested but have hesitancy, what are the obstacles, questions, and fears they're presenting you with most commonly?

Dustin W. Stout: The number one fear is people think AI is going to take their job. To me, it sounds ridiculous at this point, maybe because I've explained it so many times, but that fear is real for a lot of people. Back in May, I was speaking in Branson, Missouri at a conference to journalists, media entities, magazines, newspapers, online news blogs. These are people who've been in the media industry for decades. Many were embracing AI already, but there were still quite a few who either never sent their first prompt to an AI model or were completely opposed to it. I would say AI hostile. That was an interesting conversation. But the number one thing was just, "AI is going to take my job. I'm going to be out of work. I'm going to be fired because an AI is going to replace me."

I think it's such a natural thing to think, especially with all the AI influencers out there talking about automation, AI agents, and how you can revolutionize your business with AI. They're really just talking a bunch of theory instead of pragmatics. But if you sit and think about it, the AI has to be prompted by someone or something. AI is still not at the point where it can be completely unmonitored. You still have to check its work pretty thoroughly because it can still hallucinate, make stuff up, and get things wrong. Even if you feed it a source of truth, it can still make the wrong conclusions. So you have to have a human telling it what to do, prompting it, or setting up the automation. Even if a human sets up the automation, there have to be quality checks along the way to make sure the end product isn't completely off the rails. You have to have a human in the loop to a very good degree, and I don't think that will ever completely change. Sure, maybe one human will monitor more AI systems doing more things, but there's still going to be a human at the end of the day checking the work and making sure it's doing its job properly, or refining that job.

Ryan Hanley: It's still pretty irrational when you look at the whole history of technology. Our generation in particular has gone through so many paradigm shifts. Think back to when the internet came online. This is something I talked about with Brad because it hits my heart so much. There was a business paradigm that hit the world. Nobody saw it coming. The businesses who fought against it, who resisted it, who said, "No, we've always done business this way. Our brick and mortar is the way. This internet thing's a fad." Those businesses are gone today because they refused to adapt. They didn't have access to knowledge or learning or teaching. They didn't have anyone giving them a helping hand. I don't want to see that happen again.

Dustin W. Stout: I think this fear may be based in a lot of the fiction we've been fed about AI, but also some of these paradigm shifts we've seen where people have gone out of business because the age of the internet took over. There is truth in the fear, but if you dig through the rationale, at the end of the day, humans are still critically needed to make sure these AI processes are working. The only way to truly get past that is to dive in and start learning AI, exploring AI. The cliche I've used probably a hundred times now is that AI is not going to replace you. Somebody using AI is going to replace you. So unless you equip yourself to be that person using AI, that's why we fight so hard at Magi to make our tools easy and accessible. Every single week we're doing a live training, teaching something about AI, giving people pragmatic use cases of how to work with these AI models and understand how they work so they can innovate and iterate from there.

Ryan Hanley: I have a slightly different take that I would love for you to get your thoughts on. I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago that went fairly viral on LinkedIn. It was directed at insurance agents, but basically I said, "Some of you are losing your jobs. AI is going to take some of your jobs." I get that "AI won't replace you, humans who use it will replace you" because I think that's mostly going to be true. But I also think in pivotal transitional moments with technology, which we are absolutely in, what ends up happening is the businesses that weren't really run well to begin with get exposed.

Dustin W. Stout: Absolutely.

Ryan Hanley: That happened with the internet. It happened again with APIs, VoIP, that digital era from 2010 to 2020. It's happening again now. Companies that were able to leverage their brand, legacy, or relationships but aren't run particularly well, when they hit these transitional technology moments, they get exposed. Most of them, it's not that they couldn't adapt or start using a tool like yours, but they don't have the decision-making process, the systems, the people, or the infrastructure in place to even consider these things. They just get mowed down. What was funny was when I wrote that post, I expected to get a lot of pushback, but I was shocked at how many people were like, "Yeah, I think there's a lot of people missing the point here. If nothing else, no one's going to be growing headcount." There might be more smaller businesses leveraging this tech to do more, but companies aren't going to be putting on headcount. Why would you put on headcount when... we were talking about it before we went live. We are actually putting on headcount, but we're going through an extreme growth phase.

Dustin W. Stout: I'll clarify and validate exactly what you said. I wrote a blog post around the time when a bunch of big companies were laying off massive amounts of people and blaming it on AI. They were saying, "We're laying off all these people because of AI." I think the real truth is that those businesses were failing already before AI. There were inefficiencies, over-hiring. Far be it for me to bring up a touchy subject, but Elon Musk went into Twitter and fired 70% of employees. Everybody said, "No, it's going to die. How is Twitter going to stay online with only 30% of staff?" Well, guess what? It stayed online. It's running. I don't want to say how well, but it's running and I love being there. The truth is, to your point, they're realizing they don't need as many staff as they've had. They've maybe overshot their staff or numbers are down because the economy has been doing this thing as we stabilize into this new administration. They're using AI as an excuse. At the same time, you're 100% right. They're not hiring now because they realize those two employees who were doing five hours of work can do that same five hours of work in 30 minutes now. They can increase the workload without having to hire more staff.

I also want to clarify my statement. I do believe AI is going to eliminate jobs. But my point in saying "someone using AI is going to replace you" — whether it's your manager replacing you because they learned AI and you didn't — that is going to happen. There's going to be fewer jobs that are AI-able. But the point I really try to emphasize is that if you learn and grow, you can be the master of your own destiny. You don't have to be a victim in this AI paradigm shift. You can learn those skills, become a valuable asset in this new AI economy. Equip yourself with the knowledge so that when somebody is hiring for a new prompt engineer role or a new AI administrative role, you have those skills and can accomplish that job.

One more history lesson. Back when sewing machines became a thing, seamstresses were the only way garments got made. When sewing machines were invented, there was a whole panic in the industrial industry. All these seamstresses were like, "We're going to lose our jobs. These machines are going to take our jobs." And they absolutely did. But not in the way that the seamstresses never worked again. Their jobs just changed. They became more efficient. The quality became easier. It just shifted. I'm not saying it's exactly the same parallel, but we've seen this through multiple industries. Whether it's the seamstresses or the printing press, scribes and transcribers, their jobs changed. Many of those jobs went away forever. It's a matter of human beings being adaptable if you let yourself be. Going back to what we started talking about, if you're not growing, if you're not advancing with the technology and the culture, then you're going to get left behind. As long as you're growing and equipping yourself, you can become a valuable part of the next phase of our economy.

Ryan Hanley: You brought up a really interesting point about the victim mentality. When we hit these transitional technology moments, people become very polarized. I don't mean that necessarily in the political sense, although obviously we're there as well. But more in this idea of you get people who are Machiavellian and people who are Marxist. It's either "I'm a victim, I need to be taken care of, this new technology is going to push me aside," and they tend to go towards the Marxist ideas. Then you get the people who are driven, who say, "You know what, I'm going to start my own company. I'm going to learn how to take my expertise, dump it into a GPT so I can pump out content. I'm going to get after it." They become very polarized between hardcore Machiavellian capitalists going out and creating things and taking market share, and those who are willing to coast along or were able to coast along because of some simple skillset or position they had. They tend to get replaced and pushed towards this more Marxist side. One of those yields positive results, and one clearly doesn't.

So if I'm sitting in a company from where you're at, and I don't want to be replaced, I'm looking at this going, "This is a huge opportunity." I'm 44 years old. I've got another 20 or 30 years of career left. I want to make sure I'm capitalizing on this. What are the things that I'm looking at that I have? Is it my knowledge? Is it my network? Is it my system process discipline? What parts of my skill set should I be cultivating that fit with AI and allow me to launch faster?

Dustin W. Stout: It's a great question. I think the most valuable thing we have as humans is the thing that AI will never have: our unique combination of predispositions, experiences, and the way we see the world. From the day we're born, we're being influenced by our parents, relatives, whoever we're growing up around, the TV shows we watch, the books we read, the teachers we have. All of it shapes and molds us in a way that is so unique that there will never be another human being put together exactly like you. It's for that reason that AI can never match you in terms of how you see the world.

AI's greatest strength is that it has absorbed and been trained on billions of parameters. It sees so many different perspectives. But in that great strength is its greatest weakness because it doesn't have an opinion. You can make it sound like it has an opinion. It will fake an opinion, but really all it's doing is filtering and sifting all its data to give you an answer that matches what you're looking for. The way you view the world, if you're using your critical thinking, your wits, and your wisdom, that will be your greatest strength in the AI economy. When you bring your expertise and your perspective to your work and augment it with the infinite knowledge of AI, that's when you have real synergy and real results that can't be replicated by some predetermined process. That's where your unique ability lies.

Ryan Hanley: I love this idea. I was listening to Dan Martell the other day on the Martell Method podcast. He was talking about a process I've seen other people go through, but he was breaking down how he did it: taking all the content he's ever created and putting it into a custom GPT. He put documentation together around his personality and how he viewed the world. He could now ask this thing questions about things he had forgotten. He said, "I might've said something three years ago that would really work for the argument I'm trying to make today. But am I going to remember that I said that three years ago on podcast 172?" Now the AI can prompt out these similar things that our brains aren't set up to catalog and reference. We all know that with every moment, our memories become a little fuzzier. That's why when you imagine yourself as a child athlete, you hit 27 home runs and were the captain of every team, even though you didn't even make your modified baseball team. We start to get a little fuzzy. What AI can do — and this was his point, I thought it was wonderful — is take your work experience, your thoughts, your beliefs, your content, and now you can remember it in its crispest and clearest form and reference it in your future work. He said he's able to build on his work faster today because he can accurately reference what he did in the past. I thought, "That makes a ton of sense. I need to start doing this."

This is a project I'm actually working on behind the scenes now. I've done thousands of podcasts and thousands of blog posts over my career. You've created so much content too. I'm struggling with how to get some of the social media content in there. But this idea of being able to reference ideas I was talking about on a topic five years ago, how much faster can I move in building on those ideas today because I'm not guessing at what I thought five years ago? It's right at my fingertips. As a leader, as someone who likes to create, if you need to do SOPs, best practices, systems — all these things inside your business — having all that at your fingertips means you're basically the collective knowledge of your professional life at your fingertips. That's a competitive advantage that I don't even know you could put a value on yet.

Dustin W. Stout: That makes me think of... are you a big Netflix watcher? Do you watch a lot of shows?

Ryan Hanley: Unfortunately, I can be sucked in. Death stream on Instagram, death scroll. I can death stream episodes of shows. The only way to turn off my business mind is to go head first and lose myself in a TV show or movie. That's my de-stressor.

Dustin W. Stout: One of the hardest things about Netflix, and I equate this to why we created Magi, is you go in and you don't know what to watch because there are too many options. One thing I love doing is finding a show with a lot of episodes so I don't have to think next time I log in. I just grab the next episode. No thinking, just turn it on. I found a show recently called Rust Valley Restorers. Have you heard of it?

Ryan Hanley: No.

Dustin W. Stout: The premise is there's this guy named Mike Hall from BC, Canada. He owns a huge plot of land with dozens of old junk cars. He started a car restoration business. The plot of land is massive. He has all these treasures, but it's just junk everywhere. Dozens of old cars, frames, pieces, parts. He's got containers filled with new and old parts. He doesn't know where anything is at any given time. Half the show is him rummaging around with his partner trying to find these parts. What you said is really funny because that feels like how our brains are. We've got all this treasure in here that we've accumulated over the years — wisdom, knowledge — and accessing it becomes so difficult because you're rummaging around. "Where did I put that thought? What did I say about this thing? When did I do that other thing?"

How great would it be if Mike could suddenly have an AI catalog all the stuff? He could say, "Where did I put that fender for the '67 Chevelle?" And it would say, "In this place over here." Brilliant. He wouldn't have to rummage around. There would be no show anymore because half of it is just them hilariously stumbling around this junkyard. But imagine that for our brains, for our body of work. How many times has someone said to you, "Ryan, you said this thing in that podcast that one time that really blew my mind," and you're like, "I said that? I can't even remember that."

Ryan Hanley: It does happen. I do this sometimes with certain shows where I picked up a hundred episodes into their podcast. I'll go deep cuts. I'll scroll into the archives and find an old episode with a guest from three, four, or five years ago. People do this. A lot of podcast listeners find a show, like a couple episodes, and then go deep cuts. When people email or DM me about it, I sometimes don't even remember what planet I was on three years ago when I was talking. You just don't remember it. It's crazy.

But one thing I think is really interesting is I see the potential for a really interesting counter movement as well. With AI, take this idea of creating a second brain that we can easily reference. Put that over here as AI. Then I think there's a really interesting counter movement around consciousness and clarity, really expanding our own minds and what they're able to do. For a while, I was microdosing psilocybin once or twice a week. People would ask me why I was doing that. One, I like to test everything that I don't think is going to kill me, and I was pretty sure it wasn't. It's not addictive. So I wanted to give it a try. What I found was, as long as you didn't overdo it, there was a zone of genius. Too much and your screen got a little funky. Not enough and you didn't even know you were taking it. But when you hit that zone, you felt an unlock in your brain.

Now, granted, I'm using a chemical to get there. But I do think there is, as much as there is a clear value from an industrious standpoint to creating this second brain idea and using these tools to reference and create interesting things, one thing I worry about in that effort is the loss of serendipitous ideas. You're a believer as much as I am in Christ and God. There's divine inspiration. If everything is mechanical in an AI, if you live solely in that world, then I wonder if you lose that serendipitous muse, that divine element. Or does it amplify that?

Ryan Hanley: I mean, because some of these, some of the ideas that sculpt the world, when you listen to the inventors or the individuals who crafted these ideas, oftentimes they don't have a clear answer as to where it came from. And I think we have to be careful of over-indexing on the computers and over-leveraging them. And we've actually seen some studies already that show individuals who rely too heavily for all of their creation on AI are actually losing the ability to create when they're not using it. Where do you see that transition or how do you marry that idea in your own life? How do you make sure you're not losing some of your natural skills by over-indexing on the AI so that you can still keep that human spark.

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah. I think it first starts with an awareness, a desire to grow. I think anybody who does want to grow will be highly sensitive to that. I know I am. But think about it almost like our physical world. I could sit here all day and be great. I've worked from home since 2014. I could stay in my house all the time, but there's a part of me that starts to get antsy and a part of me that's like, I got to get out of here. I got to stretch my limbs. I got to go to the gym. And in fact, I'm missing my gym workout time today to be here with you. Not that I can't do some pushups together on camera.

Ryan Hanley: Yes, if you want.

Dustin W. Stout: No, I go after this. But like I start itching, right? I start to get that feeling because I want to be growing. I want to keep my physical strength. I want to stay physically fit. And I can tell when I'm not. Same thing is cognitive. So when I'm being lazy, mentally lazy, I can feel it. I can start to feel my brain getting squishy. I have a sensitivity to it. Some people may not. One of the things that I think is very true is that lazy people are going to be lazy. They're going to find more ways to be lazy, whereas people who want to do their best work will find ways to do their best work. So I think there's definitely an awareness that needs to happen.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, it can be a crutch. Back in the day when we had to memorize everybody's phone number, how many phone numbers do you have memorized today?

Dustin W. Stout: Probably not that many. Not many.

Ryan Hanley: Not many. I realized the other day, this is so interesting, I know the last four digits of a decent number of phone numbers because sometimes they come up. But I could never tell you the full phone number anymore. I recognize the last four digits because that's what the iPhone will show next to someone's name. But I couldn't tell you what their phone number is. My ex-wife is 3631. My dad is 9113. But I honestly couldn't even tell you what the first three numbers of their phone numbers are today. I was like, wow, that's a really weird thing that developed with the technology.

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah.

Ryan Hanley: So back to what I was saying, as long as we keep our wits about us, we keep our critical thinking hats on. That's the most important part of it, is critical thinking. Going back to this idea that AI makes mistakes, AI hallucinates, AI isn't perfect. We have to keep our critical thinking hat on. And as long as we're doing that, and we're realizing that our most valuable asset is our unique combination of experiences that leads to those serendipitous moments that God has only built us for. I'm also a firm believer that God created us for a purpose on purpose, and that there's nobody else in this world that could fulfill that purpose the way that he built us to. So knowing that, I think as long as we keep that at the forefront of our minds, that we're here to be uniquely us and AI can never be uniquely us, we can fight that urge to be lazy and fight that urge to just use AI as a crutch rather than using it as a stepping stool.

So I want to talk about your transition. You wrote this incredible article actually like two days ago. I was pulling up your website because I was learning about Magi and I want to get there because there's a bunch of really interesting things that you've done that I'm really intrigued about and I want to talk about for the audience as well. But one of the things I thought was really interesting in this article, I'm going to link it up in the show notes, everybody. So whether you're watching or listening, just scroll down on whatever platform you're on, and I'll have the link there. But one of the things you talk about is this capture, right? You had always been a social media guy, a design guy. This is what you'd always talked about. It's what your audience knew you for. It's what your social media followers followed you for, why they were connected to you for those insights. And now you see this opportunity, you're called to it, you fight it, but you can't get away from it. And you decide to make this move into becoming an entrepreneur in the AI space and create this tool. And you talk about it in the article. I think you do a wonderful job, and that's why I'm referencing it and pushing everyone there, is the friction of people had always seen you as X and you're being called to become Y. And there's a lot of friction in there, right? It creates doubt and it creates probably some frustration and it creates some fear.

I think that's really natural. We talked a little bit before we went live. I've experienced a little bit of that in my own life. One of the places is taking this podcast from being an insurance only podcast three years ago to the last three years, expanding it out into broader topics, bigger topics. And I've had a lot of people email me and go, dude, I loved your podcast more when it was just insurance stuff. And it's like, yeah, except over a decade, I basically had said everything I could and wanted to say on that topic and I needed to expand. So I think your jump is probably even more powerful because here you are really becoming an entrepreneur. Your career, your income, your ability to provide for your family is now in this company and you have to make this transition. How did you, one, what were you really dealing with, and two, how did you fight through that fear and confusion and frustration to actually make the transition to where you are today?

Dustin W. Stout: How long we got? Do we have time for the lifetime movie of my life? I'll try to keep it short. Here's the harsh truth about being a social media expert. Many of the social media experts you know are broke because there's not a ton of money in being a social media expert. There are a fair few who become super influential and have really figured out how to monetize their social media expertise, but the vast majority of social media managers, social media consultants, they are not valued as much as they should be. People don't want to pay them what they're actually worth. And it's a real struggle to make a comfortable living in the world of social media marketing and consulting. There are many who've done it, but many, many have not done well.

So I found myself, I was always an entrepreneur. Back in 2014, I started the Social Warfare plugin with a couple of partners that did fairly well. That was my first successful SaaS business. Around 2020, my partners and I had grown apart. We weren't agreeing on pretty much anything. So I decided to exit. I had a couple ideas of two products that I really wanted to build. Both of them in the realm of social media still. One of them was an app that would produce social media graphics quickly and easily in every size you need. Think of it like Canva light. It was supposed to be like, fill out a few words and then boom, without having to tinker and resize. The other one was a way to create articles or turn articles or long-form content or web pages and chop it up into a bunch of social media posts instantly.

Now, this is all before the onset of AI. In my mind, I wanted these apps to be AI-oriented. Again, this was 2020. It wasn't until November 2022 that ChatGPT hit the scene. I knew in my mind AI is starting to become a thing. We had some copywriters out there, the Jaspers of the world which back then were called Conversion AI if you're that old to remember, and then Copy AI, a bunch of clones. I thought to myself, I want to create an AI app that will generate images for people and one that will generate copy for people at scale for these social media jobs. Long story short, I had to raise money to build these apps because it was expensive. I didn't get anywhere close to the AI features because it just wasn't accessible then. I would have needed $100 million to make these products the way that I wanted to. I didn't have $100 million. I had about $30,000.

So the MVPs came out. We built them. Took us about nine months. And $65,000 later, I'm broke. Nobody wants these products. I'm probably in the worst mental, spiritual, and financial state I've ever been in my life. I've got a wife and three kids to take care of, a mortgage that I don't know how I'm going to pay. And I realized my career up to this point had been great until it wasn't. Everything I was doing seemed to be failing around me. And then ChatGPT came around. It was one of those moments where I used it for the first time, and I thought to myself, this is going to change everything. I hate to be overly charismatic, but it was almost like God brought me to my lowest point. I mean, I was suicidal many times, thought I had nothing to give to the world. I was praying that God would take me home. And it was in that moment that I used ChatGPT that God almost gave me a vision of like, this is going to change the world. And here's what it's going to look like in about five years. You need to pay attention to this. And I had such clarity in that moment.

I had taken a couple clients. I was doing some web design and some social media for them at that point. So I started using ChatGPT. And as I used it more, the more I realized, oh, this is great, but why doesn't it do this? And why doesn't it do that? And I wish it did this better. And why do I have to have five other subscriptions to have these image things and the video things and the audio thing? Why can't they build? And it was almost like God said to me, this is how I built you to find all the gaps, to find everything that's wrong and to build something better. So in eight weeks, when I finally decided I had this idea for Magi, start to finish, built it by myself, no capital, no team, no resources, just me sitting at my desk going, I got to figure out a way to pay my mortgage next month and make sure my kids don't go hungry. And by the grace of God, I'm not a developer. I know enough code to be dangerous. But it was like when the student's ready, the teacher appears. God put all the teachers in front of me and I learned what I needed to learn and built the first version of Magi in about eight weeks, launched it March 31st, 2023, just four or five months after ChatGPT hit the world.

Ryan Hanley: Dude, it's incredible. And it's funny, you're in very good company. I had something very similar happen to me with my last startup. Founded an insurance agency, grew it, sold it. Unfortunately sold it to the wrong people. Watched my baby get torn up and shredded. I made good on the numbers that I needed to make good on, but the first moment that I could hit an exit, I exited. And it was this moment where I was used to having this company with 25 employees and all this stuff and was making money. And now all of a sudden, I had a little bit of money in the bank but I had no job. It was the first time in my life that I ever woke up and didn't know what I was supposed to do.

Dustin W. Stout: Similar.

Ryan Hanley: I knew it. And it felt the same thing with marketing, even as a CMO. I've been a CMO a couple of times. You're always put a peg below because you're the marketing guy. I got into marketing because I'm charismatic, willing to create, and it felt like an easy path to move up the rungs. The problem is, and you talked a little bit about this, you get pigeonholed as a marketing guy. And it's like, I'm not even a good marketer. Honestly, if you were to put me head to head with a good marketing person, I would get slaughtered.

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah.

Ryan Hanley: And you know what? I took it as... I love that story. I want to get into some of the technical aspects of what you're doing because I want the audience to take some technical stuff away from this. I think your approach is really unique and really interesting. But I just want to sit here for one second because I think too often, whether we're entrepreneurs, sales professionals in an organization living that salespreneur life, or we are true entrepreneurs, wherever we are, I think we look at these moments and we feel like we're being punished. That's the way I felt at that moment. I was like, I had these enormous plans for this company and it just didn't happen.

Dustin W. Stout: Yep.

Ryan Hanley: And I was like, why would you do that? I gave up two years of my life. I got divorced during this time, not necessarily because of the startup, but all these things were happening. I was like, what the fuck? I try to be a good guy. I'm a believer. I pray. I try to live a life that I believe Jesus would be proud of. I think if I have to stand in front of St. Peter, I can justify it. And fuck, why is this happening? You go down this spiral. And this is why I advocate for having a relationship with God, because in that time, if you're willing to open yourself up and you allow yourself even moments, you start to hear things. Maybe it's God. Maybe you're providing, praying creates space in your brain for you to actually have some original thoughts or really get to the core of who you are. But what I heard was you're not a marketer, you're a leader. And you need to get better at the business of leadership so that you can do this again for another company, which is what I'm doing now. I'm the CEO of an AI startup in the insurance industry. Different from what you're doing, but interesting.

And I just hope, guys, if you're listening, you listen to Dustin's story, you listen to mine, whatever. We all have our own. Even God loves you, whether you believe in him or not. So even if you're an atheist, creating that space and acting as if, I think Jordan Peterson said it best, act as if. There's a lot of opportunity for us to hear and find what we really want to do. So you find this idea of God telling you, hey, you're here because you see the gaps, you see the spaces, and you create Magi. One of the things that I was immediately captured by is this concept of, in context, the ability to use different models. I'm very interested in where that idea came from. And then maybe you can expand upon the power of being able to do that. What is the actual power of being able to start in OpenAI and then touch Gemini 2.5 and then move to Claude or whatever process makes sense? Where did that come from and why does that matter and how does it add value?

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah, so it's funny transitioning from the pigeonhole conversation. I'm getting ready to pigeonhole some of these AI models. But to speak to that a little more, I think anybody who's listening feels like they have this pressure from the people around them to stay in their lane. Just know that sometimes you have to make the decision to remove those people from your life and stop listening to the people who want you to stay in your lane. That's what I had to do. People wanted me to stay in my lane were keeping me broke, miserable, and not fulfilling my purpose. You really have to have that bravery to just jump out of that pigeonhole and say, who do I want to be? In our case, who does God want me to be? And listen to that voice rather than cave into the peer pressure of this is who people expect me to be.

Now, to answer your question, with AI models, they do have very explicit strengths and weaknesses. The more that you test them, the more that you explore them. This is also another reason I created Magi, because I wanted people to be able to explore. It's so difficult to have to switch to this tab and try this one and then switch to this other tab and try that one and then switch between the tabs and compare back and forth while at the same time the underlying technology is not giving you a fair shot at actually exploring their capabilities because they're all doing backend engineering and prompts that you can't see. So you don't get to explore. But when you do get to explore, you get to have a baseline for all these models. You'll find very quickly that you like how one model does this type of prompt versus how this model does another type of prompt. And you find very quickly you have favorites and you have preferences.

For me in particular, I love GPT's creativity. I think it has the most out-of-the-box ideas. Whenever I'm looking for a perspective that I can't get to on my own, or maybe an analogy that I just need a better analogy because the one I'm coming up with is just not hitting, GPT comes up with some really great creative thinking. Whereas when I'm writing marketing copy or sales copy, GPT falls kind of short. I just never really buy into it. But I hand that same task over to Claude and Claude writes copy better than I ever could. So there are definite strengths and weaknesses of every single model. Google Gemini is all about structure. I mean, think about Google in particular. It's all about structuring the internet, right? So it makes sense that they've engineered it in such a way that it's really, really good at structural stuff.

When you find these different strengths and weaknesses of these different models, you realize you can do something like a blog post. I need to write a blog post about this keyword. Let's brainstorm the titles with GPT because it's super creative. And then let's brainstorm that outline with GPT. But once I have that outline and I want to do some actual writing, I don't want GPT to do the writing. I want to switch over to Claude. Now, how would you do that without Magi? You'd have to copy that outline, head over to Claude, log in, start a new chat, paste that in and say, hey, we're going to build it, and then give it all the background. But with Magi, because we've put them all in one place, you can essentially say, all right, thanks, ChatGPT. Now I'm going to bring Claude into the room and Claude's going to take over from there as if it was in the room the whole time.

I think of it like having a room full of experts who are just sitting there waiting to help you out whenever you need them. You can just say, all right, you're in. Almost like a sports team. You're like, hey, ChatGPT, you're on the bench. Claude, come on in. You're up next. That not only gives you a more seamless experience, an unbroken experience so you're not breaking up your flow, but what's really fascinating is you find that these models, without going into super technical how it works, basically when you start with one model and you bring in another one, the new model sees the entire conversation from you and the other model. It's almost like it learns from it. So Claude can actually learn from the creative choices of GPT earlier in the conversation and actually becomes more creative. The more you pull in those abilities, the longer that conversation goes, the better these models get. You can even use a dumb model near the end, one that's not very sophisticated, maybe an older model, and it creates the same level of output almost because it's learned from the earlier parts of the conversation. So it's really fascinating to see how all these models can not just be leveraged in ways that brings out all their strengths and none of their weaknesses, but they actually enhance one another as the conversation progresses.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, this to me is the future of creation. I completely agree. I at one point started deprecating them only because before I knew what you were up to, and this is going to be my go-to tool now. I mean, 100%, I've been playing around with it already. I was going, ChatGPT, then I would do research in Gemini. This was before deep research with ChatGPT. Then I'd pull the research in. And then like you said, the titles and some of the hooks that GPT creates are phenomenal.

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah.

Ryan Hanley: But I agree. You get into the body and unless, I feel like GPT has a really good feel for narrative design, but like you said, marketing copy, sales copy, email copy, it's kind of like blah. It doesn't hit. And then I played around with Grok for a little while, but Grok pre the latest release of Grok 4 was iffy. 4 seems a little over-tuned for personality.

Dustin W. Stout: Yeah, four is wild. I think they may have swung the pendulum a little too far the other way. We'll see.

Ryan Hanley: I agree. But I do think what you're describing, this workflow of using, it's like anybody else. If you have a plumber come over to your house, it's not like they have one wrench and that one wrench does every function they need. They got a screw gun and a wrench and a socket wrench and a pair of needle nose pliers. For what they need to do, they're pulling out of their tool belt the best tool. To have one place where you can pull them all together, to me, is an absolute no-brainer. This is where we have to go.

Do you see a time when, to me, it feels like we're in an expansion phase of AI. I shouldn't say obviously, but to me it's obvious that right now we're in pure expansion. New models popping up all over. You have entire countries creating new models and all this different stuff. It's really wonderful and wild. It's a true FAFO moment for the world. Do you see where we start to come back in and these models actually natively start to work together? Or do you think the business of AI will keep that from happening?

Dustin W. Stout: I think the business of it will keep it from happening because these companies are all trying to do a land grab right now. They want to build their brand as the best of the best AI model. So they're going to build their little cages around their products and try to pull people into that ecosystem. Which is fine. I think it's great. It incentivizes them to really make the better model because there's heavy competition right now. Well, when I say heavy, there's really like four competitors. There's four top ones. China out of nowhere comes up with a new DeepSeek model that is more efficient, less costly, and can do just as well as the GPT models, but at a lower price. So we have real competition in the market. I think that's great.

Now, the thing is, these companies are losing money hand over fist on subscribers. Your ChatGPT subscription, your $20 a month, you're paying ChatGPT. They're losing so much money on these subscribers that they have to find other ways to monetize their models. That's where apps like Magi come in. Magi in relation to OpenAI is pure profit for them. Every time one of our users uses a ChatGPT model, we have to pay for it. We are paying for every single transaction that happens. So OpenAI needs people like me to create these multifaceted, complex, comprehensive systems that utilize their technology in a way that's 100% pure profit for them. So I think it's a really interesting ecosystem. They have to build their own little castle on their own little hill, but at the same time, they have to make it friendly with working with other apps because that's where their real profit is.

Now, in terms of capabilities, I think it is rapidly expanding, but the sort of truth behind the scenes, if you talk to any of the AI engineers, is the AI model growth trajectory is actually slowing down. Because if you think about it, once you've trained on all of the world's data, how do you get smarter? How do you make a smarter model on the same data? So now they're talking about creating synthetic data, data that's fake created by AI. Even with this, you're watching these capability charts, and it shot up real quick, and then it's starting to kind of plateau out. So I think we're seeing a slowdown of model releases and model capabilities. We saw these rumors of GPT-5 coming out before the end of summer, and that might happen. But I don't think it's going to be the mind-blowing hype of the first version of it. It's going to be an increase in capabilities, but it's going to be slowed down. I think what that means is this Wild West is starting to get a little more tame. It's starting to stabilize a little bit more. And I think that's a good thing for everyone.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I think just raw hype cycle all the time, we'd all just be burnt out. I agree because that stabilization allows entrepreneurs like yourself to start to create the towns, the meeting places. If we're using the Wild West analogy, you're able to actually put down some roots and build something because now the models aren't shooting off in every direction. The iterations have less deviation in them, which I think is a good thing.

Actually, the last episode of the All In podcast, the most recent week here which would be the week of July 7th, the week before we're recording this, I'll try to link that up in the show notes too. They talk about this idea of synthetic data. I know we're getting up against a number, but I just want to put this in front of you and get your thoughts on it because you're so deep in this world. The idea of creating synthetic data is exactly what you just said. ChatGPT and OpenAI have indexed almost all of the knowledge that they can get their hands on today. There are pockets that are still hidden, but for the most part, they have their hands on everything that's available digitally. They've consumed at this point and they're consuming as new is created as well. Just read your private API contracts if you don't think that's happening.

Dustin W. Stout: Unless you're a Magi user, then it's all...

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that's good. Some of these tools, you gotta be really careful because some of them have different versions of the API. I think some people don't realize what they're putting in. That being said, the idea of synthetic data is that they start creating data that has no physical or any basis in the real world in order to train these models on increasingly difficult problems, on increasingly diverse problems, to give them things to train on. My question for you is, is that a good thing? How should we feel about synthetic data? Because I caught ChatGPT in a lie the other day. I asked it a question about where it gathered a specific type of data that was relevant to our tool. It gave me an answer which I knew at face value was false. So I pressed it and it gave me this whitewashed version of the answer. So I pressed it again and then I got the real answer. The real answer was a little scary. Doesn't matter. But if we're training on synthetic data that is false to begin with, or just not based in reality to begin with, how do we as business professionals consider that? Should we consider models that are using massive amounts of synthetic data? Where do you see that part going? Because I do think that's a real question, especially for regulated industries. This is a big problem in our space, right?

Ryan Hanley: Insurance is highly regulated, both at the federal level and individually at every state level. Right now, insurance carriers cannot use AI algorithms to do any kind of underwriting. They can train models today, but they can't deploy them in actual underwriting. So a lot of carriers are starting to play with models as test data, but they can't actually use them. And the reason is hallucinations and all this kind of stuff.

Dustin W. Stout: Sure.

Ryan Hanley: But the only way—and this is where this question comes from a little selfishly—there's been a lot of talk in the insurance industry around the use of synthetic data because everyone's policy information is proprietary. It's in these private vaults. It's their competitive advantage. Who bought what, for how much, et cetera. So if everyone has their little private pool and there's not one singular place for it all to come together, the thought process has been that the only way to get more sophisticated, more accurate, and deliver faster results is to start creating synthetic data. But if you do that, are you corrupting the underwriting models?

Where are you on synthetic data? How do you see this being used? If I'm a business owner who's all in with everything you've said so far, how do I navigate models that are using synthetic data?

Dustin W. Stout: I think it's really hard. One thing you'll never see me do is pretend to be smarter than I actually am. At least I try not to. I do that all the time.

Ryan Hanley: So if you did, you'd be fine.

Dustin W. Stout: I really try not to jump to conclusions because experts have been wrong before. I've been wrong before. I can't make a decision on whether synthetic data is bad or good because I just haven't tested it yet.

So far, there have been some new models that have come out. The new Claude models have come out. The OpenAI GPT 4.1 models have come out, and they've been trained on some synthetic data. So far, so good. I am optimistic about it, but I'm optimistic because I have this emphasis on critical thinking. We need to use our brains. We need to not just take what the AI gives us at face value. You immediately saw when it was wrong because you were looking at it critically. As long as we keep that critical thinking and analyze everything it gives us with a critical eye, I think we should be fine.

In my optimistic outlook, I think the synthetic data will be mostly fine. But I don't know. Could be terrible. We can only see because it's completely new territory. We just don't know. I don't know enough about what kinds of synthetic data they're creating, what it looks like, what it reads like, how it works. So I'm going to remain optimistic. I'm going to remain the advocate for think critically, don't take anything at face value. Assume it's going to lie to you if you're not careful.

Ryan Hanley: Trust, but verify.

Dustin W. Stout: Trust, but verify. Trust, but verify.

Ryan Hanley: Dude, it's been so great to reconnect. I'm so excited for what you have going on. Fan of the tool. Where can people dive deeper into—and we'll have links to anything you mentioned here, especially Magi, where they can go and sign up. But if they're just interested in your takes and staying with your ideas and getting deeper into your world, where should they go?

Dustin W. Stout: Well, you can visit my personal blog, dustinstout.com. I'm pretty inconsistent on there. I've been trying to be more consistent writing recently now that I have a little bit more margin. Things have gotten a little bit crazy with my last podcast interview. But yeah, I'm trying to write more. You can find everything about me there. Links to Magi as well. You can go to magi.co—M-A-G-A-I dot C-O—to learn more about Magi.

Ryan Hanley: Dude, appreciate the hell out of you. I love what you're doing. I really love your story. So good to see you again.

Dustin W. Stout: You too, bud. Be good, man. It was great.

Ryan Hanley: Good. Let's go. Make it look easy.

[Closing music fades in]

Ryan Hanley: Thank you for listening to The Ryan Hanley Show. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts.