The Critique That Sparked This

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So I got a comment on Spotify after one of my recent episodes about the new app, about Fitness Lab. And the person said, quote, the use of AI is a hard nope from me. Why would anyone want AI-generated content, especially in this field? Unfollowing, not interested, and kind of grossed out TBH, end quote. And of course, what did I do? I clicked publish. I wanted to publish the quote so people can see it and judge for themselves because I think this reaction represents something very important worth addressing, hence today's bonus episode. And I don't know if this person's going to hear it, if they're still following or not. They said they weren't. Maybe they will. I don't know. Now it's not because I need to defend myself or the app. I'm proud of both, to be honest, and I own those things. But because I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding about what AI can do when it's used, I'll say the right way for a meaningful purpose built on training and principles in a methodical, meaningful way, rather than use so-called off-the-shelf, like Chat GPT, you know, scraped from the garbage pile that is most fitness content on the internet in the way most people use it with AI. Does that make sense? So let me walk you through what's actually happening when people out and outright reject the use of AI at all without trying it, because I encouraged that this person at least try the app. They could always get the refund within

What Fitness Lab Actually Does

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the window and then come back and let me know if you think differently. And the first thing is I think people imagine that AI generated content is the same as the junk, generic Chat GPT output that you see all over the internet. That is somebody went into ChatGPT and said, create a workout plan or create a mail plan or create a blog article or even heck, create a podcast episode. I mean, that's like sacrilege to me that you wouldn't use your own ideas. I use AI all the time as a power assist, but would never want to use it to create new content. Like create content out of scratch. And that's the kind of thing that kind of treats things the same. Everyone's the same. It ignores context, it ignores nuance, it doesn't have any constraints, let's say. And if that's what we're talking about, I would unfollow as well.

unknown 2:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

But that's not at all what Fitness Lab is. Not even close. Not even close. This is this is why I put my blood, sweat, and tears over months into doing this the right way and taking a tool, a technology that exists in the world and saying, how can I hone it in and use it in a good way that can help people, especially in filling a gap that wouldn't have been filled otherwise. You'll you'll know what I mean in a second. Essentially, Fitness Lab is my coaching system, the frameworks I use and I developed since I got into this, which was in 2021 time frame, 20, yeah, 2021, after I started the podcast, and then I got my certification and I didn't know anything, right? But I started to learn, learn, learn and develop frameworks and systems, use that with people, get feedback, see how the results turned out, always iterate and improve, right? So the same frameworks that I talk about on the show that I use with one-on-one clients, the same ones I refined over these years of coaching and 400 plus episodes of this show, and talking to a lot of guests who are experts, and just a ton of research, self-experimentation, helping others experiment, and using evidence. The same thing that guides everything I do. And so the AI in my app isn't doing what ChatGPT does in that it generates content from scratch or from the general knowledge. It takes specific principles, guides, resources, frameworks, you know, plan logic, and applies it then to your specific situation in real time. So it's combining two things. It's combining an AI backbone that is constrained to information that I told it is important and not to use all this other junk that's not important. And then it says, let me take you, the user, and everything you're doing and try to gather data, not just the simple metrics, but qualitative data as well, and biofeedback and things like that. Things that I as a coach would normally ask you in a check-in form, and combine them together. It's the difference between asking ChatGPT, what should I eat,

Principles Over Generic AI

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versus asking a coach, hey, you know how I am training, when I eat, what my recovery demands are, how I've been adapting with my metabolism, what my stress and sleep and everything else look like, you know my personality, you might my life, what should I eat? Those are two different situations, aren't they? And then it's applying those principles conversationally based on what you tell it, which again is very much like a human would do. I'm not saying AI should replace humans, but I am saying that if you can't or won't, you know, if you can't afford or don't want to pay for the rather large expense of having a human on call. And by the way, if you have me on call, it's not like you have me on call truly 24-7. You can send me a message at 3 a.m., but I'm not going to get to it till business hours, whereas an AI will never sleep. That is a powerful thing. I think the second thing happening here is that people love to defend the status quo without realizing what the status quo is. I think most people are not getting quality human coaching, even if they have a coach. They're getting somebody who is doing the bare minimum with a cookie cutter, you know, workout program that they have from their stack of programs. There's influencers who have very little actual education, academics, sometimes experience. A lot of them are just really good marketers, really good business people. Some of them are actually quite good at it. In fact, I it took me a while to even get decent at that part of it. I was always jealous, thinking, like, wouldn't it be nice if you could take all the people who are good coaches and just automatically funnel clients who need help to them, even though they don't know how to market, and take all the best, slickest marketers who aren't coaches and have all their the people that they reach go to these good coaches, right? Wouldn't that be great? But it the but real life doesn't work like that. You have some good coaches who are good marketers, you have some bad coaches who are bad marketers, but then you have a lot of bad coaches who are good marketers, and that's the problem, right? That's the problem. And then they even say and claim things as influencers that are just flat out wrong or dangerous. And so I hear so many people who get advice from people who are trying to make as much money as they can on as little effort as they can and really don't work to improve or help in the way that would be necessary to have a truly high quality coach. And even then, even if you're paying a decent amount of money for a decent coach, I've talked to lots and lots of coaches. And there's just a tiny slice that are truly

The Status Quo Problem

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among the elite who could be super helpful in the way that I know you want. And am I saying that I'm in that group? I'm saying I strive to be. And if you found working with me helpful, great. I'm I'm sure I have clients who were disappointed. I'm sure I have clients who are like, that wasn't exactly the experience I wanted. I know I just as a human being, we all do, right? Like if I claimed that every experience I had with a client was great, that would be lying because nobody in the planet could say that, even though I strive to do better. So when someone says I would never want AI-generated content, I think what they're really saying is I want to keep doing what I'm doing now. And I think that's somehow superior. Or they're saying that they think everyone has access to the same resources that are superior to quote unquote AI, which in my opinion would primarily be working with human beings and coaches, but very few, not very few people, a lot of people can't afford that, or you know, don't want to carve out that much of their budget for that, or the time and hassle, or can't find a good coach, like I just said. And so what that leaves you with today, in in today's world, up until I created this app at least, is winging it, following generic stuff that you download, trying to do it yourself by piecing together hours and hours of information from lots of conflicting sources, including podcasts. And you know what? That's fine if it's working for you. If that's great, if you're getting exactly the results you want, beautiful. But for most people, and you know who you are, and that's almost all of you listening right now, it's not, and you want more. You want more. I know you do. And for many of you, listening to this or other similar podcasts gives you a huge leg up in this morass of information. And I'm proud of that. If you could take this information from wits and weights and take actions and get the result you want and it all works for you, awesome. That would be awesome. But again, for a lot of people, it's not. That's why I have coaching services, right? Because people will so if I didn't, what you know what would happen? People say, Well, I need help here. I have this question, I have this question. And all those questions lead to hours and hours and hours of my time. And I'm like, oh geez, well, I only have so much time to spread between a hundred different people asking me questions. Ah, let's let's use our system of of, let's admit it called capitalism, to exchange value for value. All right. And you can tell I'm an engineer, I'm kind of a math numbers type thinker when it comes to these things, but that's how the thing works. So that's that's the second piece. Okay, it's kind of about the status quo and assuming that something's working for people. When you say, ugh, AI, that's gross. In this field, like, oh, this is such a this is such an amazing field, the fitness industry, isn't it? It works so well for so many people. No. So the third thing is it assumes that AI is replacing human judgment. So this is a big misunderstanding with AI and the fear around AI, and I joke around about it all the time about Skynet from Terminator taking over the world. I think we have it backward. I think that the best coaches, they do not create codependency. They actually create lots of skill and competence in their clients. And my best clients have been the ones that have been curious and sought to learn, the ones that actually replied to me and then reached out proactively as I reached out proactively and to kind of suck up information and share information back and forth so that they leveled up as they practiced these skills and falling on their face

AI As Coaching Force Multiplier

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multiple times along the way, which is how it works. The best coaches teach you to think for yourself in an area that you may not be an expert in while guiding you through that process. And so, guess what? My goal with creating an app was to have something that can do that for you, where you don't have to rely on me or an individual human being coach who only has limited resources. You know, a digital product like an app can handle that for unlimited people, theoretically. And it is not trying to be your coach forever either. It's trying to teach you to coach yourself using the same frameworks that effective coaches use, right? As long as you feed it in the information and talk to it and help it understand what you're doing and what your goals are, your recovery state. I mean, look, right from day one or two, one of the one of the activities you're probably gonna see pop up is called the future identity vision or future state vision. I forget, I actually forget what I called it, but it's basically a vision of who you are in the future, what is your identity, right? That's kind of what a human coach would want to do and understand, and then have some meaning behind what you're doing. But yes, it also wants to understand nuts and bolts, like how much are you moving, how are you training, how did it feel, what are you eating, what's your emotion around eating, what's your hunger around eating, all of those things. In many ways, let's be honest, it's better than a human because a human cannot be there at your beck and call 24-7, asking all the right questions all the time, having expertise in multiple areas from psychology to nutrition to strength, right? Many coaches are lacking a little bit in one of those areas, and being able to synthesize all of your data in real time, which even the best coaches can ask for data from you, but it's still you're limited cognitively as a human being on how much of that you can process. So let's talk about access because honestly, I think this is where the real issue is. It was one when I responded a rebuttal to the comment and published that as well. You can go read it. This is one of the points that I made is that good one-on-one coaching costs anywhere from say two to five hundred dollars a month, maybe six hundred or seven hundred for some of the elite coaches that I've seen, even eight hundred. And as you know, the cheapest of the cheap coaches may be like 150, but they're probably trying to get as many clients as they can to support that price. That is out of reach for many people who need it and want it. It just is. That's that's like a small, that's like a car payment, right? Even if you can afford it, finding a coach who understands the principles and apply them and do all the things we already we already talked about that is is pretty hard. It's pretty hard. And the best ones are probably they probably have a wait list, you know? So what are your options? Well, you can keep trying to figure it out yourself. That means lots of trial and error and experimentation, which is going to result in some wasted effort and time, or worse, doing the wrong things for a long time and not really knowing why or what you should do, which for many of us is what we've been doing for many, many years. You can follow things that you download,

Access, Pricing, And Tradeoffs

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you know, spreadsheets, work out apps that suggest different programs, but again, they don't dynamically figure out who you are and try to adjust to those. You kind of have to adjust them yourself. Same thing with food loggers, you know, and that's that's just on the tool side. You can even try to pay for coaching or join a group program, and then it may or may not be worth the investment. And then I hear from people all the time like, well, this is the second, I've already tried, you know, two coaches. You're gonna be the third. Is it worth my while? Blah, blah, blah. Now, if you hire me as a coach or come to physique university, you know what? We do it everything by month now. I don't do packages anymore. I do that on purpose to give you an out. I want you to have an out and have no risk. And there's plenty of people who will cancel after a month or two in physique university because they're not taking advantage of the platform. Maybe it's not right for them. Maybe I need to do a better job with the onboarding. I don't know. There's plenty of people that way more people that stay around, but I want to give you an out. And so that's the other problem you got coaches asking for, you know, six-month packages, lots and lots of money up front, and you have no idea if it's actually gonna be worth it. Or you can use modern technology, AI, in an innovative, cool new way that yours truly, Philip Pape of Wits and Weights, has taken the time working with the company behind the scenes to train it with evidence-based coaching at a fraction of the cost. How much of the cost? Well, the cost is transparent. It's like one fifth, it's what 147 for a quarter or 440 for a year. So that's anywhere between like 30 something and 50 something a month. And then for Black Friday, it's 20% less than that. So you do the math, that's 10% or less of a human coaching program. And it's not all about cost, but for a lot of people, if if that much of a savings can still give you a similar experience as having a coach, whoa, that is powerful. And I think this person commenting on Spotify, commenting on Spotify is effectively canceling, canceling out all those people, like basically dismissing all those people who could benefit from this. I don't know if they think, if the person thinks it's superior to not have a coach, do it yourself, listen to podcasts because it's free. And yet that's the thing everybody's frustrated with to begin with. And then I've already mentioned that there are aspects of this that are actually superior to human coaches. And I'm sorry to all my fellow human coaches who do this for a living who are listening and pissed that I came out with an app that does this, but I'm sorry. I'm trying to, I'm trying to get this out to as many people as I can. So the person who left the comment on Spotify, they unfollowed

Try, Evaluate, Then Decide

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maybe, I don't know, maybe they're listening, before even trying it out, which before even understanding what it does. They decided based on their assumption what AI generated content means. And you know what? I respect that. Everyone gets to make their own choices, right? Free country, free world. But I'm going to be direct. I'm going to be direct right now. If you're someone who genuinely cares about evidence-based training, nutrition, lifestyle, and you reject a tool before understanding what it does just because it uses AI, you're not being skeptical. That to me is dogmatic. Skepticism means evaluating something on its merits, right? Dogmatism means rejecting it on principle. And in my opinion, the fitness industry already has more than enough dogma to go around with adding without adding, quote, AI bad to the list, right? You can't generalize anything. So let me make this clear. Fitness Lab, my new app, it's not replacing human coaching, but it is making those quality coaching principles accessible to way more people. Whether it's because of affordability or need or they actually feel like the app is superior than working with a coach, I'm okay if that any of those are your determination for the reason why you want to try it out. And by the way, you can try it out. There is a window to get a refund. So, and I know people asked about a trial. There's not a free trial, but there is a refund window. So effectively it's like a free trial. I don't know if I should be saying that, but that's how it works, right? So the app, it's not just generating generic content like a chat bot. It's applying massive amounts of preloaded, pre-trained data to your situation. I mean, here's a cool example. I guarantee, after a few days, you know, within a week or two, it's gonna pop up an activity that says, hey, here's a Wits of Waits podcast episode. I've been following what you've been doing, and I think this is perfect for you. You've been talking you've been talking about your thyroid health. Check this one out. You've been talking about hypertrophy a lot, check this one out. That's pretty

Personalized Education At Scale

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cool. Talk about a time saver compared to trying to binge or find from this huge library of episodes. So it's not creating dependency either, like we talked about. It's actually going to teach you in a very educational sort of way. It tells you the why. Almost, almost to a fault. Like I've almost thought, hmm, should I should I update the next version to like not be so verbose? But then everybody says, oh, this is so cool because it tells me what I'm doing well, where the opportunities are, and gives me all these bullet points of things to think about. And I'm really learning a lot about the why behind this. Cool, I'm gonna leave it like that. And look, if none of this matters to you because you've already decided AI has no place in fitness because it's gross TBH, that's your call. But at least understand what you're rejecting. For everyone else who's been wanting something like this, like human-based, evidence-based coaching, but thought it was out of their reach, or you're tired of trying to find a good coach, or you're trying, tired of trying to piece together all the information from Instagram and YouTube and have something that just curates it and feeds it to you, the stuff that matters, any of those things, Fitness Lab gives you that. It's available now at the early launch pricing, the Black Friday sale 20% off through November 28th. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. Yes, I am pitching this thing to you because I think it is amazing. I

Final Thoughts

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am proud of it, and I want to counter some of the dogma out there and help more of you get the result you want. Thank you for listening. Again, go to wits and weights.com, wits and weights.com slash app if you want to check out Fitness Lab. And I'll talk to you next time.