Brian Keane - The Fitness Coach's Guide to Beating ChatGPT

You can't compete with the results if you're competing with AI. You just can't. If you've positioned yourself to compete with the results, you've already lost. Meaning that if you're a weight loss coach or you're in the fitness industry helping people get in shape and you're trying to compete with the results, you can't compete with all the collective information that the likes of Claude or ChatGPT can pull together in a matter of seconds. Eric, an absolute pleasure to have me on. Thank you, brother. Looking forward to this.

Yeah, in one podcast or to another, I'm so happy when you have a simple last name to pronounce and first name. And we're just joking about how it's like, dude, so many times I will right before I'll I'll be like, okay, before I hit record, Brian Keene, correct? And then like as soon as I hit record, something in my brain like fizzles out. I'm like Brikiani. And I'm like, you know, completely.

I've been called considerably worse than Brikiani. So you can call me that if you want going forward. I think that's a new positioning and a different brand switch, but I blame the accent. I I get away with it more often than not because people just assume it's the accent. But yeah, podcaster to podcaster, this is like the bane of our existence.

Yeah. Anyway, so it's Brian Keene. It's Brian Keene. It is. Um I digress. I mean, there's, man, I'm excited. You know, I've been you've been on my radar for a long time. You and I have had multiple email back and forth. But, you know, anytime I see someone who's interviewed as many people as as you have, coach as many people as you have, not just coaching people, but coaching coaches and fitness entrepreneurs in the industry. And one of the things I really want to hone in on, of course, multiple things is becoming AI proof. You know, there's a lot of fear, right? There's a lot of opportunity. I mean, I think you ask anybody about artificial intelligence right now, you're gonna get everyone has two sides of the coin. Some people are super optimistic. I'm I'm both, right? I'm optimistic, but I'm also scared as shit. Like, okay, what happens to my podcast? What happens when someone can just duplicate my voice, right? I mean, what is it, notebook LM? It's pretty good if anyone's ever played with it, and it's a little frightening. But look, before we get into all this stuff, you know, I want to give people a little bit of background too, because you know it's pretty interesting. So you were a former uh primary school teacher, right, in Ireland. You walked away, you know, pretty stable career um and you went to go build a fitness business from the from this from the ground up. Literally, I feel yeah. I did that too. You know, you are a four-time best-selling author. Um, you were Fitness Coach of the Year in Ireland in 2025, so just last year. Um, you run two podcasts simultaneously. We'll get into that. You have a consumer-facing one, you have a B2B one. That's the one I primarily follow. Um, you are a top 0.5% podcast globally. So over 585 episodes, over a half a million combined social media followers. Um, you're way better at social media than me. I totally I can't, I just can't, I not very I hate I hate it. Anyway, and uh, and you know, I think the most critical thing is like you have over a thousand coaches who will come up with your ed education and tutelage to launch their, you know, their businesses and and kind of pursue their dreams, which which means to me, signals obviously that uh, you know, over that period of time, the industry has evolved and you have to keep evolving, right, to help these people evolve with the current nature. So, all right, ma'am. Well, let's let's with the backstory, I guess let's start with this. I think a lot of people get into this industry as a coach or a fitness professional or practitioner because they feel torn, you know, drawn towards it as like it's it's a passion, right? You know, being a primary school teacher, there's got to be a lot of passion and service there too. But why did you make that switch so many years ago? Like what was it about fitness entrepreneurship um, you know, that that drew you that way?

It's interesting, Eric, because primary school teaching was a job that felt like a job. And when I went into what was just a basic one-to-one personal training certificate and then qualification and then going into a gym, working one-to-one clients, that never felt like a job. That never felt like work. That felt like I can't believe I'm getting paid for this. So there was a huge disconnect and feeling straight away from the two things. On Friday, I knew that I was off for the weekend. On Sunday, I knew I was going back to school on Monday morning. When I went into personal training and fitness coaching, that kind of all went away. Where I was jumping out of bed every morning and I was super excited to work with people, running classes, working with people one-to-one. And it was an interesting development because I went into teaching and primary school teaching, probably for the wrong reasons in hindsight. It was a safe and secure job, it was a pensionable job, it was something that was respectable for my family, my friends, my peer group. And I'll never forget it because I started teaching in the UK. So I qualified in the UK, did both Ireland and the UK, but I qualified there. So my first teaching job was in London in the UK. And I went into my first ever day of teaching, which was 37-year-old children in front of me. And I was about 20 minutes into it, and I thought, I don't want to be a teacher. I had spent I had spent years and money and time and energy studying to become a teacher. And 20 minutes in, I realized that this isn't what I wanted to do. And the analogy that I've used in books on podcasts is that it felt like I spent years climbing the ladder only to realize it was against the wrong wall. And what fitness coaching was, what fitness entrepreneurship was, was it was the ladder against the right wall. And although I had to climb back down it, it took me several years, and again, we can get into it or not. It took me several years because I didn't have the confidence to know what else I wanted to do. And it came from I wrote about this in the last fitness book or in the last mindset book. Like I came home at Christmas and my mum was looking at me, wondering, like, you're not happy, you're not your usual bright energetic self, what's going on? I was like, look, I hate my job. And she asked me a question that was the seed in which everything else grew for the next decade and a half. She was like, What would you do for free? And I said, Oh, I I would work in a gym for free. I was like, if I was cleaning the floor in a gym and I had my membership paid and I had a roof over my head and I could eat my food, I would be so happy. She was like, Go do that. She's like, You're not a tree. If you don't like where you are, you can move. And then that's kind of what set up the journey. And then, like, honestly, Eric, it exploded more than I ever thought. In the early days, I just wanted enough as a one-to-one personal trainer in a gym that I could pay my rent or then more now mortgage. I would be able to eat, I would be able to have a little bit of free time and it wouldn't be overly stressful. That and I felt like I was in a job I was passionate about. And then a decade and a half later, you know, you look back and you I've written four best-selling books. I've written six in total, nearly a million over a million copies sold at the time of recording. Built multiple businesses, a consultancy, a fitness business, won multiple awards, built up a podcast. That was all stuff that kind of just evolved. None of that was set. I'd love to be like I was a visionary and that Eric, this is all coming. I thought I could have told you on day one. It wasn't. On day one, it was just like I just want them enough money that I can live and I can be happy because I'm not happy as a teacher. And it eventually evolved into what it became today, where I'm still jumping out of bed every morning just for a different reason.

When you look at your days, right, you just mentioned a lot of different projects, writing books, having a podcast, coaching people, having your own business. When you sit down every morning, what's the biggest priority for you?

I work off the Gary Keller one thing principle. So in Gary, yeah, it it's it's it's the only my brain is way too ADHD to not have a focus point for the day. If I don't have that, the day can run away from me and I can end up being busy versus being productive. So I generally have Monday now, I'm I must say because it's going to be a complete disconnect to people, so I apologize in advance. I have a very good work-life balance now, 15 years in, because I work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I take a half day Friday. I do stuff with my daughter on Friday when I pick up from school and I don't work Saturdays or Sundays. So that that from the 70-hour work weeks and the 80-hour work weeks to that is a massive win because I'm very fortunate. I make a very good living with my businesses. The different projects that I get to do are all things that are very profitable, but also things that I really like to do. But every morning I have to have something that moves the needle forward. So that morning time is protected. It's when I work out. I wake up in the morning, I don't set an alarm anymore. I was a 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.er for probably a decade. I wrote multiple books at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. because that's the window of time when, you know, before my daughter was going to school, etc. And I would then go and do my work day after. But now in 2026, I don't set an alarm. Like I've got my whoop, I've got my tracker, I get up, I train, and then I do my most productive task, my one thing first thing in the morning, whether that's recording a podcast, writing a chapter of a book, setting up a funnel, setting up a lead pipeline, having the ads campaign running correctly in the background, having something that needs to move a project forward when it comes to my mentorship or my mastermind. That's what I will work on first. And then I'll have a to-do list, and they're the things that just automatically get done as the day goes on, whether that's content, replying to messages, etc., delegating things to my team. That's how my day looks generally Monday to Thursday, Friday is a little bit different. And it doesn't feel like it's an awful lot, but when done consistently over time, the same as working out, it's not the five-hour workout on a Monday that gets you ripped and shredded. It's the 45 minutes five days a week for five years, for 10 years that does it consistently. That's the same approach that I take for my work.

Yeah, it's so great. I'm so glad you brought up that book. You know, I revisit that book every few years. And actually in January, I reread it. I bought it from my business partner. And I'm not gonna, it's a great book. Everyone should read it. It's got so many anecdotes, so many great examples. It's an easy read. But if you guys want the cliff note, here it is. What's the one thing I can do today that makes everything else easier or unnecessary? If you sit there and you ask that question in the morning, I'm and give it space. Like, don't just ask it, like actually sit there and be like, what is the one to do today that make everything else easier or unnecessary? Right. And once you start to think, and that's that's true, I think, executive or entrepreneurship thought, because you're right. Like, dude, like as as if you're entrepreneur by nature, there's so many shiny objects, right? There's a million things you want to chase. I'm like, ooh, I want to try that, I want to do that. That sounds great, and do this, right? But like really, like it's it is, it's like training. It's like, man, it's it's the boring, consistent 30 to 45 minute workouts that you do all the time. Like some of the healthiest people I know eat the same 10 recipes over and over again, right? It's just not that's just part of it. But you know, every once in a while you gotta step back, but like, what am I actually doing here? Adjust and move forward. So that's I'm I'm really glad you brought that up because I almost never talk about that, but it's a huge part of what I do.

Can I just add to that too, Eric? Because you give me a perfect point to piggyback on what we find as gym owners, personal trainers, online coaches, fitness experts, we see people doing all these random internet workouts or random recipe ideas, and then they're wondering why they're getting these random results. And yet it's so hard sometimes to put the mirror back on us when people are jumping from podcasting to social media to ads to this to that to the other, like and that shiny object. It's not that those other things won't be helpful. Maybe they will be, but you would never tell a fitness client to jump on a load of different workouts. You probably put them on some form of progressive overload, and you probably have some form of repeatable meals that they can stick to and make it easy and consistent. Business is exactly the same. So sometimes it's taking the specific domain knowledge that you have within your industry and applying it to your business so that you're able to put the mirror back on you so that you don't fall down the pitfall of the exact same thing that's happening to your clients just with your business.

Yeah. Well, nice segue too. Thank you for this. So you brought up ChatGPT or whatever it is, right? So about a year ago, I remember watching, I think I was watching American football, and there came a commercial. It was like a a kid typed in a ChatGPT, hey, I want to be able to do 10 pull-ups by X date, right? And like ChatGPT built out a program. And I I even pause it. I'm like, that's actually not a bad program. It's got some negatives in there, it's got some scapula work. I was like, damn it, we're all screwed. Yeah, I'm like, that's pretty good. And I think that was the moment too, where like ChatGPT specifically made a commercial, the first commercial I think I had actually seen commercially out there publicly, and it was about fitness. And I was like, shit, like, okay, now the collective consciousness of a lot of people just realized like this is how I'm gonna work out, right? And you know, about six months ago when ChatGPT released their um ChatGPT health notification, I think it's still in beta, but the number, and I repeat this all the time, is like they said 230 million people per week, 230 million people per week make a health-related inquiry into ChatGPT. So, like, and as a fitness industry, now I I think this industry is actually, especially the in-person, right? Is like we're kind of for the time being, we're we're pretty safe. People want that experience, right? People want to work with someone, they're dying for it. Like going to the gym, you want to like see, like I went in this morning, same thing. I'm up at 5.15, I'm in the gym by 545, see a couple buddies, catch up, what are you doing? Sit in the sauna, chat a little bit. Like, dude, AI is not gonna fucking do that. Right. So, how in the modern age, as a fitness fitness entrepreneur, coach, and maybe you can define like who we're actually talking about here as an avatar, but how do we become AI proof? Because you just wrote a book about it. I just listened to a podcast about it that you released. You put a lot of thought into it.

I have. This is something that in my community, for my entrepreneurs, and and I work primarily with uh gym owners, personal trainers, online coaches, people within the health space entrepreneurs. And one of the repeated worries that was coming up was what do we do? Two of them actually, we spoke right before we went on AI. One was the age of AI and the other was GLP ones and peptides, but focusing on AI here. The common theme was people are now searching Chat GPT or Claude or other AI apps for the problem that I solve for. And the first piece of advice, and it's a layered approach, is you can't compete with the results if you're competing with AI. You just can't. If you've positioned yourself to compete with the results, you've already lost. Meaning that if you're a weight loss coach or you're in the fitness industry helping people get in shape and you're trying to compete with the results, you can't compete with all the collective information that the likes of Claude or ChatGPT can pull together in a matter of seconds. But if you position yourself separately and in a different space, you can still win and use AI as a tool to help your clients get better results, help your gym members get better results, help your customers' clients get better results. And the positioning for that is you're not selling the result anymore. You're not positioned as an expert selling the results. You're selling the accountability structure, you're selling the filtering of the information. And if you're in person, you're selling the community aspect. But if you're online, you obviously don't get that last one unless you do a, you can still do it. It's just more difficult and easier for AI to copy. The accountability structure is we all know this. If you have a habit tracker in Claude, in ChatGPT, or any app, you're not as likely to stick when you don't have another human being on the other side keeping you accountable, especially in the beginning when motivation is high and you need to filter well, and in the messy middle, when every client and every person feels a little bit of difficulty and struggle, and that's when they normally give up. You're not gonna feel bad telling Claude that you've missed a couple of workouts or that you missed a nutritional meal plan that you're supposed to have, etc. But you if you do have a coach who you like, know and trust, somebody who knows your family members' names, they know the work you're in, you're gonna be more and positioned as a better accountability expert within that space. So you have to put that front and center. Second is the filtering. One of the advices that I gave in that podcast you mentioned on the Fitness Business Podcast was titled ChatGPT Doesn't Know How to Grow Your Fitness Business, and Neither Does Claude. And I did that episode for two reasons. One, I wanted to break down the good, bad, and indifferent advice that AI was giving for how to build your fitness business. But also the second call to action in that episode was do this in your market. Go through your PCOS coach, your thyroid coach, you're a weight loss menopause coach. Go through Claude or ChatGPT, ask it all the questions, and then use content online through social media, through podcasting, through blog, whatever way you want to do it, and break down the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Don't say it's all rubbish and crap because it's not. Like the pull-ups for the ad, for the negatives and doing the programming that you needed with the in terms of ChatGPT doing an ad. There are some really good stuff there, but how it applies is equally important. How does this apply to you based on your injuries? How does this apply to you? Because you don't know what you don't know. Your clients don't know what they don't know. So if they're looking to lose body fat in menopause, they don't know that they need to be searching out their how their HRT is impacting their hormonal function and how that's impacting their energy levels, which is impacting the way that they train in specific times during the month. They don't even know how to ask that or that they should ask that. So you're selling filtering. And then the bottom of that pyramid, especially if you're in person, is the community aspect. That element alone, up until less, you know, Elon Musk has the robots and they really figure it out, and there's these skin graphs like Terminator and Schwarzenegger, you're realistically you're not going to have this in-person element coming anytime soon with AI. So if you can do anything that's community-based, that straight away allows you to position yourself off the back of this podcast that your messaging changes online. The other angle, and it's what I covered in the book, scaling your story. And again, this isn't just a plug for the book. I'll actually give you a link. People can download the book for free for the PDF if they want us. There's no funnel or back in, it's just here's the book. This will help you if you're struggling with the age of AI. But scaling your story, five-step framework for fitness entrepreneurs looking to increase their impact on their income. That scaling your story is that's AI proof. What makes you unique? What's unique in your story? If you're a coach, it's slightly different. If you're a gym owner and you're using the brand, but you're still using the messages of the brand in terms of what got you to where you are and why you serve that community in that local area geographically. But if you're an online coach, fitness coach, personal trainer, you have a unique story that can't be copied by AI. What got you into the space? I weirdly, I've got there is 35 in my mastermind, and seven of them were teachers. No connection. Like I don't talk about the teacher side of things, it's on a couple of pieces of content, etc. But they resonated with the one or two times I did mention I was a primary school teacher, I built this fitness business, and then the people that came in were all former teachers. So your message ends up connecting with those people who are vibrating at that similar frequency. And that's not a that wasn't a strategic play on my part. I wasn't like, right, I'm going to get all the ex-teachers who want to build up fitness empires and I'll get them into my mastermind. That wasn't a strategic thing. That was just something that happened from me telling my story, scaling it online, podcasting, social media, et cetera. So your story is also AI proof. So if you're happy to lend into that personal brand or lean into that personal brand element, that's something that can also help you massively in the age of AI.

I mean, let's dig into the psychology about that. Because you mentioned, you know, people um who resonate at the same frequency will will understand your story and be attracted to it, right? Like we can say one thing, like, hey, you should tell your story. Totally agree. Everyone should tell their story as often and as as loudly as you can, right? But why? Like, why what is the psychology behind that? Like, why is that such a critical thing? I mean, obviously, Claude's never gonna give me a story like this is how I was raised, and this is what you know, the struggles I've had. Like, it's no, you're you're a robot, dude. So people, you know, we do differentiate ourselves, but but I guess getting a layer deeper, like, why is that important to us as humans?

I open the so I broke scaling your story into the five-step framework. So it's it's scale, S-C-A-L-E. So S is storytelling, C is core offer, A is Amplify, L is leverage, E is Evolve. I open story the first chapter with we're in an age now that feels quite unique to us, but we've been telling stories for thousands of years around campfires, pre-funnels, pre-lead pipelines, pre-podcasts. We've been telling stories for millennia. Storytelling isn't new. It's something that was a survival strategy for thousands of years. You know, what berries were poisonous, what areas had leopards and cheetahs, what where was their water, where was their food? So we've been sharing stories for a long period of time. So it's ingrained in our brain that this is something and this is how we communicate. It's also the reason when you listen to a podcast or you listen to a TED talk or you listen to something online, you'll forget the facts long before you'll forget the story that's been wrapped into it. And there's a reason for that. It's the the way your brain connects with it. It's the latest work of connection with what if you I'm not sure if you've ever watched any of the Netflix brain explained, where the people who are able to remember these massive chunks of numbers and massive data, and their way they do it is by they tell the story that links the numbers together, links the letters together. It's absolutely fascinating. So this shows how hardwired that is. And there's also going to be a little bit of a trust element, as you've just mentioned. You're you could put into Claude, tell me your backstory, Claude, tell me about your childhood, etc. And you know it's shit. Like you know it's not real. So there's a human element to this. Now, I should also say your story told the right way is what's important. Not sharing for the sake of sharing or manipulating your story or making it inauthentic to you. Because what's people sometimes forget and miss is your life is so uniquely you don't need to pour gasoline on the highlight reel. You don't need to do that. Like you don't need to embellish it, you don't need to make it up. There's stuff that's been in your history, whether it's fitness related, if we use fitness related, fitness entrepreneurs are the best for this because I've never met a fitness entrepreneur in my life to this day, my 38 years, nearly 39 years on the planet, that doesn't have a story as to why they got into fitness either. And it's not always about them. Sometimes it was a family member, a mother, a father, a brother, or a sister. Somebody got sick, health became a priority, fitness became a priority. But in 80% of the case, it's normally about them. They had gut issues, they had confidence issues, they had body issues, they had strength issues, they wanted to be an athlete, they wanted to be this, they wanted to be that, and fitness was the vehicle for it. We it's called the false consensus bias. I'm sure you're familiar with it, Eric, where we assume that other people think the same way we do. So our story feels boring to us because we've lived it, but it's actually the thing that makes us really unique. And leaning into it the right way is what differentiates you. And I got into fitness for a whole host of reasons. I was an athlete, I had gut issues, I had body confidence, I have I was the perfect recipe for a fitness guy. Like, you know, all the all the things. And bit by bit, all I did over the years with social media first and then the podcast and books was pulled out those stories. I'll never forget. I'll tell this story and hopefully it helps.

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I wrote my first book, The Fitness Mindset, in 2016, released it in 2017. Now that book did better than I ever dreamed, Eric. I literally wrote that book with in mind that I would help my clients that I was working with in that time because most of them knew what to do with food, training, etc. It was the mindset, the self-destructive patterns, the anxiety, the mental health stuff that was holding them back. So I wrote a book for them. And that book did 16 weeks on the Amazon bestseller list. It went bestseller in all the stores that was in in Ireland. It opened up more doors than I ever dreamed possible. And it's not kind of a humble brag. I'm getting to a reason for this. I crowdsourced that book. And what I mean by crowdsource was I used organic Facebook in 2016 to write chapters of that book to see what was landing and connecting with people. And the stuff that was getting the most likes, comments, and shares, I was taking back and rewriting and made the final edit into the book. Oh, interesting. There are two sections in that book, one that never made it, one that did. I had a whole section on insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance that I thought this is a must-have. Must-have in a fitness book. I was like, you need to know this, what's going on, et cetera, et cetera. I put it up on social, there was crickets. I was like, all right, okay, well, that's that's interesting. I then, about two weeks later, put up a post on anxiety. My history with anxiety, the amount of internal combativeness that would happen. And I remember posting it on Facebook going, nobody's going to care what a fitness person has to say about mental health, about anxiety. This is quite early in the the trend. And it exploded. It was my most viral post that year. It got thousands of shares, tens of thousands of likes. And I went, oh my God. I one, I would never have thought this. I literally nearly didn't post it because I'm like, no one's going to care. I'm a late 20s fitness guy talking about anxiety. This is going to be worse than the insulin sensitivity post. But I ended up putting that into the final draft of the book. I ended up editing it in, and it's the one that gets quoted back to me the most. Same as the ladder against the right wall. I didn't think telling my story about primary school teaching would make it into a fitness book. I'm like, there's no real value here, but there is value because it's human. It was part of my story. And that was something that kind of happened by accident, but also I put it out there to test, and that's what it's about. You're sharing your story and seeing what's connecting with people is a little bit of throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks, but in an authentic way, because you don't really know. Like I've had podcasts and videos and things go viral that I never thought would have. And then I've had other things, and I'm like, that's amazing. Brian, you're so good at this. And then it's just crickets. It just doesn't land, it doesn't connect. You spent days, weeks researching it, and you're like, oh my God. So like that's the nature of the beast, but knowing that's important.

Yeah. Um so good, man. I mean, you know, you know me, like storytelling is one of my favorite things. And uh one of my favorite parts of what we do with the podcast collective on the media side is we teach primarily executives in the industry to tell a story. You know, you can say, like, sleep cycle. We could say, hey, we have uh four billion data points, seven million users, uh, the largest sleep data set in the world. I'm like, okay, great. Well, who did like those are numbers, dude? But when Eric, the uh CEO, starts telling the story about how the founder you know first started by taping uh iPhone to his bed, right? And like this whole story about how this thing evolved, I'm like, people are gonna remember that. One of my favorites is um Dan Wyemurah. So he's the CEO of Push Press, one of the founders as well. And uh he was our longest running partner or client that at the collective, and he worked with us for over two years. And we basically kind of ran out of podcast. Like, I don't think I can place you anymore. But it happened, it started building so organically. And we first started, he's got this killer story, and I would urge people to go, you know, he's been on mine, he's been on a bunch, but he had this story about rock bottom, right? He was a gym owner and uh he got into heavy drugs and he got into alcohol. And uh, you know, I'm not gonna ruin the story, but he ended up getting this point where like he was a he was in line to go to jail. He was about to get on the bus, right? That was gonna take him to jail, not like a light jail, like a white-collar jail, like a real jail in like California California, right? And at this one point, he just got this last moment of hope. Like someone gave him a chance and he grabbed onto it. It was a lifeline. He, you know, has been dead sober, like he worked his way from the basement. He was never gonna get hired again. He only had one option was to build a business, right? So it's just this whole thing. And he's like, he asked me, like we're first starting working, he's like, should I tell a story? I'm like, all right, dude, if you have the stones to tell this story, tell it as many times as you possibly can because people will not forget it. And um, it worked. I mean, it started happening as we started building his media, you know, as his podcast uh influence across the the board. He started getting more organic like outreach towards him asking for people to be him a guest. It was remarkable. We went from pushing to pulling and curating, right? And that was a very powerful. So I can't, I've seen it firsthand so many times about like, you know, like you can say how many people you've worked with a thousand coaches, right? Okay, great, that's an impressive number. But like, tell me the story about one that you changed, right? Like, how has that actually worked and your backstory and all these things? So I urge people, like, and you're right, like we we've heard our own story so many times, we're like, no one wants to hear this shit, right? But it's unique and there's always something cool. And that's my favorite part is like, okay, tell me your story. And, you know, working with clients, I'm like, that's really cool. You should mention that. Let's let's piece this together in a way that you can repeatedly tell it over and over again. Um, it's a lot fun. So, yeah, man, that's yeah, awesome. Love it. So, what what else about AI? Maybe we can start with this or switch to this as like, okay, we know how to differentiate ourselves. You set a framework there, but how do we leverage AI? Like, what are you doing to become, you know, a super fitness entrepreneur? Like, what what are coaches and trainers doing? Maybe talk about, I'm happy to share with how I use it, how you use it. Like, yeah, give us some insights. What are the best ways in 2026, May 2026, that we can leverage it because by April, because by June it may be different.

That's so true. It's yeah, Moore's Law, it's finest. With AI, like you said it beautifully, Eric, earlier about like you didn't use the language blessing in the curse, but blessing in the curse is the language I use. Like AI has got so much benefits and the way that I use it. Claude is a big one that I use. I use Gamma app, which I'm a massive fan of for presentations, webinars, etc. Perplexity for researching. The the last book, what's so interesting about the last book, scaling your story? Like, I I've written six books, and the last one was a more straightforward write for me because I had the framework. I don't need to kind of get into the the hows of it. It's a very wild story of ayahuasca and a plane journey on the way home. And I can go into it if you want. Your face is telling me I should probably be interested.

Yeah, I mean, how do I pass that up?

Okay, so I don't know. Very long story short, I I had this idea for a book, Scaling Your Story. I was like, okay, the AI is coming, people are struggling with this message. I went to Thailand, I spent a couple of weeks writing the first draft. I was like, okay, it's it's not right. I've got the stories I want to include, but it's not right. And then I went on an ayahuasca retreat, so a plant medicine retreat, very, very powerful and potent plant medicine. And I've done several journeys with the medicine more for personal healing. I've documented this on my main podcast as well, and some of my most downloaded episodes because it's it's not to promote this in any shape or form. Some people will get tremendous benefit, other people should avoid it at all costs. But my most recent experience was in November of last year, and I was over, did three nights of ayahuasca with the shaman from Bolivia, and a lot of different things came up for me. But as I was coming back from the plane back to Ireland, as if a bolt of lightning just hit my brain, it just went poof, and and the whole framework went into my head and it was scale. I was like, oh my god, I've got it. I've got it. I've got it. So I like took out my phone and like writing down like a storytelling, core offer, amplify, leverage, evolve, and then I'm writing all the notes and stuff that go with it. And that went on for about an hour, and then I came home, and this has never happened in any of the previous five books. I came home and went into a 16-hour flow state of just writing. This was literally two days after the last ayahuasca ceremony. And I sat at my laptop and I just went for like 16 hours, and the whole book just came flowing out of me. I already had kind of the stories and the ideas I wanted to do, and the whole thing just flew out. And so it was a very interesting process, whatever you want to get into and and and take away from that. But and again, it feels like it's a a bit of a promotion for ayahuasca. It definitely isn't. Just you know, I've I've had some pretty rough experiences with that too, but it was and it came. But to tie it back to AI, one of the things that I always struggled with with my book writing, and I hated the tedious nature of it. I was doing a master's when I was a teacher to do pedagogy, and I hated the referencing and bibliography and all that shit that takes so much time. I took the whole book and put it into the AI, into Claude at the end, and was like, give me all the references and give me all the bibliography for everything that I've talked about in this, and it just spat back all the books, all the studies, everything I had. And that that would normally take me a month or two just to do, partly because I'd be procrastinating on it, but also because it would take me a time to go back on. So AI straight away made that whole process even easier for book writing. I also ran it through for basic things like grammar, etc. And then I sent it off to the normal proofreader and all the general process for books, but it just small things like that are a huge advantage now that weren't available for the previous buy books that I wrote. That just wasn't there, that wasn't available. So you were either outsourcing that or you were spending time doing it yourself. So that's just one way that I've used it in more modern times. Claude, I use now for script writing when I'm doing videos on YouTube, videos on social. I've I've always scripted, like again, just general outlines of scripts for making sure I've got a hook, making sure I've got the message, and making sure I've got a call to action built into my video. And I will give the prompts to Claude to say, give me a 45-second video for Instagram. I want to talk about the best process for using ads and using paid versus organic. And I want the message to be amplifying content that's already working and not having to test ideas and spending a load of money. Give me a 45-second script on this and then it'll give it back to me. I'll edit it and then I'll use that. So things like that, and not to mention the gamma app. So in my circle, that mastermind I mentioned, the one of the things that I always hated, and I used to have to outsource was presentations, PowerPoints, things along those lines. Just having something that you could like work from if you were doing a webinar, if you were doing a presentation, if you were doing a corporate talk, et cetera. Now, gamma app spits that back in about 30 seconds when you put in the points that you want. So things like that, they I would always outsource them. I was using Upwork, Freelance, I was using all these different outsource subcontractors, or else I'd have someone in my team do it. Now AI is shortening that learning curve. So you're able to do things more efficiently. You can do things at a higher level of scale if you decide to. And it just works as a better bounce back and forth for idea generation. There's massive limitations. Like I did on that podcast, some of the advice it gives you is terrible. Like when it comes back, or it'll give you a script, and like that's so generically rubbish. But you're I'm able to filter that. I know what my voice sounds like, I know what examples I use, I know what stories I tell. So I will transcribe, or I'll apologize, voice note it into Claude, it'll transcribe it for me, and then I'll reuse it to recreate. So there's just a couple of examples that people can use now to scale their impact, scale their income, but it's a very, very powerful tool, just understanding the limitation of it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's this is probably a question I should ask everybody who comes on the show. It's like, hey, how are you currently using AI? Because I always learn something new. I mean, even just a little thing about, yeah, I could probably use voice, right? When I when I talk to Claude, I could talk to Claude, right? And leave little voices. That's a very simple, elegant thing that you could do that would save some time. You know, the things I found that are most uh powerful for me is like, this isn't a professional, but we have an issue with uh, you know, we have a rental unit in California. And anyone who knows, like it's a dumb idea to have a rental unit in California, just the laws are just outlandish. But we have an HOA and we're going with some water damage, right? So basically I have, I have, I fed it every document necessary, right, to deal with the HOA and like their demands, and then also the potential, you know, the the tenant and then any news. So there's like all these different parties, and it's so good, right? It's so good. I mean, it's not as good as an attorney. Like we still have an attorney on, right? Like when I need her to write a letter, or if we're gonna have a call, I will prep a one pager for her with every single piece of information. So instead of her spending three, four hours researching, I'm like, here's everything you need to know. Now, if you can just please execute on a letter and write it on your letterhead. Like, so there's things like that. Like you have a as as Mark Fisher, you and I both know this man, he was on this podcast a while ago. It's like having a pocket expert in any specific field you could want that's there for you anytime, that doesn't get tired, isn't gonna get you know, isn't gonna call you stupid for asking, you know, repetitive questions, like all that stuff. It's it's ridiculous. And it's only we've only had it for two years, dude. Like I have it open all day. I'm still investigating ways to use it. And I'm not even that good of a prompter. I think there's like ways, like I've followed some people on LinkedIn who have these like, hey, here's how I found a $79 hotel room in you know Manhattan with these five prompts. I'm like, I don't know about that stuff. Like, I don't know. I'm just I'm an average, intelligently, you know, intelligent person on this planet trying to do the best I can, but it just keeps keeps getting better, man. It's it's uh wild times, wild times.

As you said, two years when you think about where it's going to be in another two, another five, another ten, it but what's so important, and I love that Wayne Gretzky line, you know, don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going. With with AI, it's tricky because there's no way to know where the puck is going, but you know it's not going backwards, and people can be resistant to it. And in that scale framework, the last one is evolve. And I use Netflix as an example in there, how they evolved with Blockbuster and went to quickster and nearly with broke, etc. And then how it applies to the fitness industry. AI is the evolution, it's not going back. The internet's not falling out of the sky. If it does, like we're we're a whole host of other problems, right? Yeah, exactly. But right now it's not going backwards. So if you're resistant to it, you don't have to know all the cloud agents and have little mini teams built into it right now. But play around with prompt protocol, play around with different tools like perplexity for research. If you do need to research for a podcast, for example, check, play around with your cloud for your transcripts for your videos for social, look at your gamma app for your webinars and design, like whatever way you want to use it, just make sure that you're actively progressing with it because it can feel a little bit like the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland that the faster and faster you go to stay in the same spot, and AI can feel a little bit like that. But you what you don't want to have happen is it's evolved way past your ability to use it to grow in your business, in your personal life, in your professional life, etc. So again, the call to action is just because some are not even afraid of it, they're scared by its possibilities. And we know as entrepreneurs, as business owners, even if you are scared by it, you just actively have to be open to it anyways, because the the businesses that don't evolve are the ones that go dead. You know, this is Jim Collins' book, The Built to Last, where he breaks down all the businesses that fails from his previous book. Like that it's a completely different thing to be successful in business and to stay successful in business. And AI is one of those tools that's potentially gonna make or break you over the coming decade. Yeah, man.

Yeah, it's um you know, it reminds me a little bit of like when wearables hit the the market for the fitness industry. My thing was like, well, you know, I remember the first time someone asked me, like, hey, what do I do with this data? I'm like, oh Jesus, I have no idea. So I'm like, well, again, the best thing you can do really is just go get yourself a wearable and start using it, right? Start playing with the data, see how it affects your sleep. As a as a fitness professional or a gym owner or a business owner or someone who's, you know, curious about the industry is like that, just start using it. And I think that's the best thing, as long as you have daily practice with it, you'll start to learn new things. Um, you know, before we we wrap up, I want to give a good chunk of time to the the fitness business podcast, which is great. I mean, we talked, I think the episode that we're talking about is ChatGP doesn't know how to grow your business, neither does Claude. Great. Listen to it this morning. Um, highly recommend people go check it out. You'll get more information in in depth uh on this conversation. But tell tell me about that podcast, man, the fitness business podcast. Um you know, why did you start it? How long you've been doing it? What have been some of the benefits that that you've got from it? What are some of the highlights? Yeah, talk me talk about that journey.

Yeah, so I have two podcasts and they serve completely different purposes. I had three and I stopped one because I removed that program. It was a top of funnel for an athlete-specific program that I was using for those who are going to get fitter and stronger for a specific sport, getting football, hurling, the national sports in Ireland. But the two that I kept was one, the Brian Keen podcast, which is a bit more of a brand builder, as you mentioned. It's purely a personal brand play, having conversations with experts from all areas, from professional athletes to Hollywood actors to experts in nutrition, training, business, etc. The Fitness Business Podcast is very much a brand building top of funnel. And I've got nearly 200 episodes in it now. I've been doing it since 2018. I've it's evolved in several different ways because it used to be weekly, then it did monthly, then it goes bi-weekly, and I've changed and evolved it to make it sustainable for me. But what it's done for me is it's kind of very similar to a book that the podcast pre-qualifies the right people for me. I'm a big believer in pull marketing. Pull people into your ecosystem, your frequency and your energy, like I mentioned earlier, versus pushing people in. You're cold to Yemen, you're forcing people into things. I don't do that. It's not how I operate business, it's not how I grew my fitness business, it's not how I won the awards in that business, it's not what I did for that, and it's not what I do for my consultancy either. And what that fitness business podcast does is it's about 80% solo episodes, 20% guests. So you'll be on as well. So experts, guests coming on, sharing their story, talking about their expertise. So there's loads of value in different ways and shapes and forms. But what it ends up doing is twofold. Either a collaboration and connection. So me and you are friends now after having a conversation, and the same when we go on the on my podcast. So you end up networking with people, seeing other people doing really cool things, asking about them and asking about questions that are very curious to you and the audience. So you end up expanding your own knowledge set as the expert. But the solo episodes serve a different purpose, then they serve as a this is my way of operating, this is my way of coaching, this is what you will get if you're working with me in a business mentorship or you're working with me in a group mastermind. And what it will do is it'll attract and repel people. And I don't mean repel like a oh, I hate Brian, he's such a twat. That might happen, and that's okay if it does too. You're not everyone's cup of tea, but you're someone shot a whiskey. Like, you want to be able to attract some people and you want to repel others, as in that's not for me. Like, I don't get an awful lot of the 22-year-old Lamborghini, get me rich quick guys. I don't get those. They do not come into my space at all because my messaging repels those people. What I do get is business owners and entrepreneurs who know that they need to differentiate themselves. They know that they need to put in the hard hours on the front, but it's not about hustling 80 hours a week forever. That defeats the whole purpose of building something. Like you want to be able to step back and have a balance and lifestyle and whatever that looks like for you, but it doesn't come at the cost of nothing. You have to grind in the beginning. That's no entrepreneur that's been successful hasn't put in their dues and hasn't paid their dues on the front in some shape or form. So I bring in people who know this is the expectation that they have. They know I'm gonna start pulling out their strengths. I'm gonna have conversations with them, similar to what you do with the podcast collective, where you're like, tell me the story, pull out the CEO story, tell me, oh, we need to lean into that more. I will do the same, but with strengths, where I'll look at somebody and go, Well, they can speak. I was like, okay, they need a podcast. Like, we need to make this the top of their funnel and we need to build out the business off the back of this funnel. Others are like really good at short form and they're quick and they're witty. I'm like, okay, TikTok, you're you're talking to an avatar that's 24 or 25. We need to prioritize you on TikTok and we need to build out your funnel that way, and then build out your offer that way, and then tier the offer based on what that looks like. And what the podcast has given is awareness of what I'm going to do and how I'm going to structure coaching. And that it's not a one size fits all. It's not even a one size fits many. That's what the courses are for, that's what the books are for. The coaching is different. And what the podcast does, it's a one-way trust builder for this is what you can expect if you're working with me. And when I hop on calls, I don't do sales calls. I don't do them. I send people prices, everything beforehand. Here's the waiting list, or the when you can come in, and then they know what coming in, and then they come on the call and I go, okay, tell me why we should work together. Like, tell me why we'd be a good fit. Like, so that that straight away, all the heavy lifting has been done with the podcast because I've had none of my mentees, not one of them that are currently with me now actively, haven't gone through at least 20 to 50 episodes of the podcast. Because I asked them on the call when I'm chatting to them. They're like, look, I've listened to 20 episodes, 30 episodes, 50 episodes. So they're already, can you take me on? That's what a podcast can give you when it's done correctly. You know this better than anybody, Erica, who what you're doing with Podcast Collective, et cetera. But I've experienced it firsthand.

That's awesome. Dude, uh, last question I always ask on here, Brian. And, you know, I I I love asking people about their podcast journey. So actually, I'm gonna, before we get to the last question. And I think it's so critical because most of the time I've helped people launch a bunch of them. I've obviously been part of many. And the the journey, like, it's not just the content and the numbers. Like that's actually the last thing most people talk about. You didn't once say, I have X amount of downloads. No, you talked about the relationships, you talked about the education, you talked about, you know, the process and how it benefited your business. And I think that's something that people have to understand is like, dude, it's just an you're not if you think you're gonna the guy from Mind Punk, Sal from Mind Pump, was on here last year. And it was so funny. It's like, if you think you're gonna start a podcast, grow an audience, and sell t shirts, and that's your business plan, then like good luck. Dude, that's just not the way it's gonna work, right? If you got to be more creative, you almost have to have something on the back end that you're gonna sell if you're gonna do it that way. So great insights, man. Last question I asked is like, as an industry, what do you need help with? Like, what can we help you with if people are gonna reach out to you? Yeah. You know, what's what's something that keeps you up at night?

That's a great question. Authentic connection is a big one. And I think this is a little bit of a a casualty of success. I'm sure you've had it too, Eric. Where a I did a YouTube collab with Keith Farazzi years ago. I don't know if you know Keith, he wrote Never Eat Alone, the New York Times bestselling book on network. And that first line or first protocol in Never Eat Alone is Lead with Generosity, which means that how can you lead with values? Very similar to what you just asked with the question. And something that's been a big part of my journey over the last I've been doing this 14 years now, but the last decade when things started to get really big, social started to grow, notoriety, different awards, different appearances, etc., is fake connection and authentic connection. What I mean by fake connection is those just looking to tick. It's all about them, it's all about them. What can you do for me? And I spoke at a networking event about eight months ago, and I forgot why I don't speak at networking events. And it was so, it was so icky. Like as soon as I came off stage, like I was surrounded by the people that were there, and I was like, oh my god, you should have I should be on your podcast and I should do this and we should do this together. I'm like, fuck. Like I was like, oh yeah, I forgot this is why I don't do these, which is so weird because like there's so much out there in terms of podcasts, collabs, social media, people to work with, businesses to do B2B with, B2C with, with customers and clients that are going to be a fit. Like the more authentic you are in whatever that looks like, you're gonna have a magnetism of the right people coming to you, whether that's a podcast appearance, a YouTube, a social media live, a collab, a client, a B2B, whatever it is. So something that keeps me awake at night, and I won't even say keeps me awake, but something I've been thinking a lot about is like, how do I keep it as authentic as possible with connection? Like, not every person is supposed to work with you. I've worked off my business and I grew millions in the fitness business over the years and won multiple awards as coaches, as a coach, but it was always about square pegs into square holes, like the right fit of people. I'm a square peg coach. I don't need a round person coming into a square, it's a terrible analogy using a fitness one, but like a triangular person coming in. Like I you're fitting square pegs into square holes. And that goes with collaborations, that goes with clients you're working with, that goes with any kind of business collaboration you're going to do in any capacity, pay it, organic, or otherwise. And something I've been thinking about a lot recently is how do I put that message back to my minties, to the people I'm working with now, that there's an element of trust without being too woo into the universe. There's an element of trust in that, but there's also an element of just intuition and trusting your instinct that, okay, if I scale and talk about my story, if I design my right core offer, if I learn how to create a solution for the pain point I'm trying to solve, and I can get the right people into this and provide a really good offer, whatever that looks like, the things are going to naturally happen. And that's what I kind of think about now. And how do I put that message across so it's as authentic as possible and not this fake, you know, tears on social media telling a sob story like it's the X Factor or like it's America's Got Talent or something that just is manipulating on purpose for the sake of narrative and storytelling, which there's nothing wrong with that. That's the way those programs are designed. But how do you get away from that for social, for podcasting, so that you're able to build an authentic connection? And if you do have something deep that you need to share, it comes across in that mess becoming your message kind of way, not in a fake vulnerability or a fake authenticity to try and manipulate people into buying. My whole approach as a coach is the antithesis of that. So it's trying to put that out there into the world with people I'm working with here publicly with you, but also reminding myself of that on a regular basis.

That's awesome, man. Well said. So, Brian, um, where do you want people to go? Where do you where do you want to send them?

Oh, cheers, Eric. Yeah, uh the Fitness Business Podcast, like that's uh definitely the one to check out. I'm on all the socials, but Instagram's the one I always tell people on podcasts, it's only people that listen to my podcast. I'm the only one, the only thing I check myself regularly is Instagram DM, Brian underscore Keen underscore fitness. Emails will go to my assistant first. Now we I've been doing your emails, Eric, because I keep an eye out for your your own, so it's slightly different. But generally, my my first my first protocol, actually, the first one was probably Clive who replied actually, because I don't I don't check those messenger etc, but I am on Instagram DM. So if anyone does message me directly, you'll get me directly on.

Well, Brian, thank you for joining me, man. It's been an absolute pleasure. And uh yeah, it's it was really fun. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Keane.

Legend was all mine. Thank you, Eric.