The Ryan Hanley Show - High Agency is the Game (and Most People Aren't Playing)

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley I was 17 years old. Kitchen table my mom bought at a garage sale. I hand-wrote 17 letters to college baseball coaches with a message no teenager should have the nerve to send: my family is broke, whoever gives me the most money, that's where I'm going. George Mack calls what happened at that table high agency. Three wheels: clear thinking, bias to action, disagreeability. This episode breaks down why high agency is not a trait you're born with. It's a state you access. And the fastest path to that state is what I call Easy Mode. I also make the argument that most people are using AI backwards. They're speeding up hard mode. That's the low agency move. The real play is building an AI layer that protects your zone of genius so you can operate at full high agency by default. Ryan Hanley is the host of Finding Peak, author of the forthcoming book Easy Mode, and founder of the PEAK coaching framework for founders and executives generating $10M+ in revenue. If this episode connected with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. That's the best way to support this work. Follow Ryan: Website: https://ryanhanley.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley This is the way. Hanley. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I was 17 years old, sitting at a kitchen table my mom bought at a garage sale. No dad in the house. Stepfather working 12 hours a day, on the road, construction crew. My mom was busy with my little sister. It was just me. I hand wrote letters to 17 different college baseball coaches, package them up in VHS tapes, me hitting, fielding, whatever I could get at the time. And in every single letter, I said the same thing, that most 17-year-olds would never have the nerve to say.

said, I'm a power hitting right-handed catcher. I finished 29th out of 325 kids in my class. I want to study science or engineering. If this is the kind of kid that you want on your team, here's the deal. My family is broke. I cannot pay for college. Whoever reduces that burden the most, essentially whoever gives me the most money, that's where I'm going.

No hedge, no performance, no pretending that I had options that I didn't have. 17 letters, 17 years old, 17 VHS tapes. Total clarity about what I needed and what I was offering if they were to offer me a scholarship to go to that school. When the University of Rochester letter arrived, I opened it and immediately, immediately flipped as fast as I possibly could to the acceptance part, and once I saw that, immediately went to financial aid package.

90% covered. I started crying, legitimately. crying right there again alone crying at a kitchen table that my mom bought at a garage sale because I was going to college. I didn't know it at the time, but there's a name for what I had done. There's a name for what happened at that kitchen table. George Mack calls it high agency. High agency is one of those ideas that once you see it, once you learn it, you cannot unsee it. It burrows into your brain. It's not optimism and it's not confidence. It's not even in intelligence. Mack describes it as a tricycle, three wheels. Clear thinking, bias to action,

disagreeability. Remove any one of those wheels and the whole thing stops working. The person you'd call that person, that friend, that family member that you'd call if you were stuck in a third world jail cell, that's the high agency person in your life. Not the smartest person you know, not the most credentialed. The one who would actually figure out how to get you out of a third world jail. That 17-year-old at the kitchen table, he was not the most talented baseball player in New York. I can promise you that. He wasn't the best student. He had no connections, no money, no roadmap. But what I was willing to do was figure it out. I was willing to be misunderstood because that letter was weird. Coaches don't get letters like that.

And I knew that if something broke along the way, I could fix it. I didn't have a, a name for the three wheels that George Mack calls high agency, but they were turning all the same. So here's the problem. Most people might have one wheel, maybe two on a good day spinning for them, and almost nobody, nobody, especially today, can sustain all three consistently over time.

The question is why? I want to tell you what the opposite of high agency feels like, not theoretically from the inside, from my own experience. It feels like that dull nagging sensation, a low-grade disconnection from who you actually are, that voice in the back of your mind creating doubt, shame, and guilt. Because you know you're not doing the work that matters. And it translates physically, desk scrolling Instagram at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday when you should be doing something productive,

reorganizing folders on your desktop at 9 o'clock at night, spending hours on emails that have no real value and should never even have been read in the first place. Scheduling calls with no real purpose, just you have meetings on the calendar so that you can look busy. I lived this. There was a season in my career in my life where I took a job, a big title, more money than I'd ever made or seen before, and I was miserable from day one. The CEO eventually looked at me in a board meeting and he said, haven't you realized by now that you were a vanity hire? Now, part of me is flattered by that, but the high agency portion hated it. because it broke me inside.

What could have been seen as a compliment, though honestly was not given as a compliment, I took it as its intended purpose, which was an absolute insult, in so much as you might be sitting in this room, but your voice is not appreciated in this room. And frankly, what really broke me was that he was right. Not because I wasn't capable,

I got the job because I was capable, but because I had voluntarily walked away from work that I had built that I loved, that I had spent years putting together to get a dump truck full of money. That is a low agency reason to pick a job. That is what hard mode does to high agency people. It doesn't just drain your energy. It drains your identity.

And a person without a clear identity, I know for me when I don't feel connected to my identity, you cannot operate in any regard of the high agency framework. None of the wheels are spinning for you. You can't figure it out because we don't know what, We're trying to figure out in the first place. The idea of being misunderstood because we're lost on some thread from who we actually are and can't fix what breaks because we're too depleted.

Our energy is too drained to even diagnose the problem. This is the low agency trap. And low agency in the terms that I use in coach is hard mode. Hard mode doesn't just make you tired. It makes you low agency. So here's the argument. I want to make for you today. High agency, George Max concept,

is not a personality trait. It is a state of being. And the fastest, most reliable way to access that state consistently is what I call easy mode. Not easy work. Easy mode is not about doing less and it's not about doing easy stuff.

It's about doing the work that you were built to do, the work that creates energy instead of consuming it. The work where your output is so, disproportionate to your perceived effort, the work where you look up in three hours have disappeared, the work that to everyone else looks like cheating. When you are in that zone, that high agency, easy mode zone, it's not something you have to manufacture.

It's the default. So let me show you what that looks like in practice. It's March 2020, the zombie apocalypse that just hit upstate New York and shut everything down, and I had launched my business, Rogue Risk, a digital insurance agency, seven days before the world closed. Seven days, not a great time to start a business. I just lit $40,000 of my retirement savings on fire

because that's what it took to get the business off the ground. And while every other insurance agency in the country were scrambling, trying to wedge their analog pre-Zombie apocalypse processes into systems that might work, trying to figure out how to do business the way they had always done it, but now in a completely digital environment, we did everything different. We embraced what was actually happening,

the game that was happening on the field in front of us. A massive move to digital media, digital education. Consumers who were sitting at home on YouTube learning everything they could about anything they were interested in were also searching for topics related to our business, which was insurance.

And we wanted to be there for them. So we went full force into educational YouTube videos on commercial insurance products. It was thrilling. Let me tell you. But it's what we sold. And not all of them were sales videos, not pitch videos, educational videos, where we weren't trying to sell our customers.

We were trying to help them solve a problem. They watched the videos. They got educated. And if they want, they could solve that problem on their own because they now understood their options. And by the time they called us, they were already sold. All we had to do was connect their problem to the right product. This was wholly different from the way the rest of the insurance industry operated.

Was I braver than every other insurance agency owner in America? No. It had nothing to do with bravery. Was I smarter? Certainly not. Was I operating from my easy mode? Was I creating? Was I educating? Was I building frameworks and systems while everyone else was operating from fear trying to wedge analog into digital? I was in my zone. All three wheels. of the triangle were turning automatically in that moment. I was figuring it out. I was absolutely willing to be misunderstood.

People thought I was insane for making YouTube videos about commercial insurance. Those people will never buy from you, they would say. And when things broke, I fixed them because I had the energy to diagnose the problem because I was operating in my easy mode. Easy mode doesn't just make you more productive. It makes you high agency by default. Now, here's where this gets important for right now, this moment, for 2026, for the age of AI, because there is a conversation happening everywhere about AI and most of it is missing the point entirely.

Most people are using AI to go faster, faster emails, faster content, faster reports, faster presentations. And I want to be direct with you here. That is the low agency move, unequivocally and undoubtedly. If you are in hard mode, disconnected, depleted, reorganizing folders, writing emails that don't, that shouldn't even exist, and you give that person an AI tool, you don't get a high agency person automatically. You get a low agency person trying to produce work slop at machine speed because they feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing. The real play, the one no, almost no one else is executing is using AI to protect your easy mode. This AI was built to protect your easy mode,

to protect that thing that when you do it, it looks like cheating to everyone else. AI protects easy mode. Not to produce more, to eliminate everything that pulls you away from your zone of genius, where you produce disproportionate results, results that look like cheating to everyone else. Let me show you exactly what I mean.

I run a podcast, Finding Peak. It's part of this YouTube channel. We do over 200,000 downloads a month. And one of the biggest drains on my time, one of the things that was consistently pulling me out of my easy mode, was managing inbound guest requests. Every week, 90 to 120 minutes, gone. Analyzing requests, scoring them, crafting responses, handling follow-ups, getting calendar, calendar invites out, attaching Riverside links, sending onboarding materials, all of it is necessary to the process. none of it requiring my specific genius. And certainly most of those administrative tasks are outside of my crazy ADHD brain zone of genius for sure.

Like most of them actually causing me physical pain when I have to and do them, endure going through all of them, even though they are necessary. So I build a workflow inside of my AI chief of staff. I call him Max, maximum effort, that handles my entire process. He's built on Open Club, by the way. Every inbound request gets scanned and run through a scoring system, score of an 8-10. the 10, Max automatically sends an acceptance email and then a welcome email and then a calendar link that's included. Once the guest books, Max goes into Riverside, creates a new studio, pulls the link,

jacks it into the calendar invite, and then sends a separate confirmation email with onboarding materials in it. Score of 6 to 7, Max flags it for me with a summary and asks for my call. Basically, lets me make the decision there. Score of 5 or below, Max automatically declines politely. professionally, every single request, accepted or declined, then gets cataloged in a dashboard. Every single request accepted or declined, then gets cataloged in a database so Max can reference whether that person has reached out before what their score was and what the outcome was.

So for austerity. 90 to 120 minutes, an hour and a half to two hours, every week, back in my pocket. And that's just one workflow. That's just one. My zone of genius is creating, not managing inbound guest requests. But here's what I actually want you to hear out of this diatribe. It's not about the time. It's about what that time unlocks because those 90 to 120 minutes don't go into a void.

They go back into creating, into writing, into building frameworks, into working with my coaching clients, into prepping for my next podcast, into work into only I can do. They go back into my easy mode. and a person in their easy mode with their AI layer protecting that zone of genius, you're not just more productive. You're operating at full high agency consistently by default. That my friends is the unlock. Now, I want to come back to that kitchen table.

Rod Sailwood, handwritten letters, VHS tapes in Manila envelopes, a 17-year-old who had no safety net, no roadmap, no one to show him how anything was done. He figured it out anyways, not because he was special. I certainly am not, but because he had no other option. You have something that kid never had. You, today, you can build an AI assistant that knows you, knows your work, knows your goals, knows your life story, knows how to help you fill the gaps in your knowledge, knows how to send you to the right resources, is whether those are real people or digital tools or something that you haven't even discovered yet.

Today, with an AI assistant built around your easy mode, you are not alone. That 17-year-old at the kitchen table who had to figure it out by himself, he had no other option, but you do. The only question left is whether you're willing to do what he did. Get clear on who you are and what you want. Get clear on the work that you were built to do.

And then build the systems that purpose. protect it. And then go be that unreasonable son of a bitch that you are meant to be. My friends, this is the way. And by the way, if you want to go deeper on easy mode, how to find yours, how to audit where you actually are spending or wasting your time, and how to build the AI layer that protects it, I'm writing a book on exactly this. It's called Easy Mode. There's tons of resources associated with it. There's a link in the description. And if this video connected with you, I would love for you to share it. It's the best way. to help this channel, help this work,

help teach more people about easy mode. I love you for being here. If you've ever had that garage sale kitchen table moment in your life, you understand what I'm talking about. And I love you for being here. I'm out of here. Peace.