Dan Uyemura - The AI-First Gym: How PushPress Is Rewriting the Playbook for Operators

Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice supporter review wherever you consume your podcast. If you're interested in staying up to date with the future of fitness, go to future of fitness.co to subscribe and get weekly summaries dropped into your inbox. Now on to the show. One theme keeps coming up: the right technology can make or break your business. That's why I'm thrilled to introduce our new presenting sponsor, Perfect Gym. Perfect Gym isn't just another gym management system. They are part of the Sport Alliance Group, Europe's leading fitness software company that has officially entered the U.S. market. Now, I've seen this movie before, but here's the difference. They've opened up a U.S. headquarters in Boston because they understand that the American market deserves dedicated, localized support. After digging into the platform, one benefit especially stood out. They are simplifying the nightmare that keeps business owners up at night, migrations. These guys were able to migrate one mega client with more than 250 locations in six different countries in just 20 days between two payment runs. No disrupting operations, no member loss, one seamless operation that simply works. Now, if you have ever switched platforms, you know how terrifying that process can be and how truly impressive that feat is. At a high level, here's their secret sauce. They give the power back to the operator. Instead of forcing you into their closed ecosystem, their Perfect Gym Marketplace connects with over 120 integration partners. So want to use your own app, your preferred payment processor, class pass for booking? No problem. Whether you're running a single studio or managing a multi-location enterprise, Perfect Gym was built from the ground up for multi-club operations. They've invested a ton into this platform, and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. The migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise level sophistication meets operator freedom. Today's episode of the Future of Fitness is brought to you by Flex, the only HSA FSA payments infrastructure built specifically for leading fitness and wellness brands. I have been so impressed with the Flex team and their vision to transform how people pay for fitness. They built a platform that makes HSA and FSA spending seamless, unlocking a new revenue stream for brands and giving consumers easier access to products and services that keep them healthy. Here's why Fitz matters. Flex helps fitness brands increase average order value by up to 50% and boost checkout conversion by 30%. That is not just incremental growth, that is transformational revenue powered by consumer dollars that are already set aside for health and wellness. What excites me the most is that Flex is changing the game for the entire industry. They're bridging the gap between healthcare and fitness by making it simple for consumers to spend their pre-tax dollars on the products and services that help them feel and perform their best. Flex works with fitness leaders like iFit, Johnson Fitness, Tempo, and Allo Moves. Honestly, this is a no-brainer, and I rarely say that. If you want to see how Flex can drive growth for your fitness brand, visit with Flex.com. That is with Flex.com. Now onto the show. All right, we are live. Dan Waimura. Welcome back to the future of fitness. How are you doing, my friend?

We're live. Is this live? No, it's not live. We're live like we're recording. Live recording. Yeah. So say I would have done more makeup or something.

I'm good. How are you? Look great. I'm good. Okay. Yeah, man. It's good to see you again. It's good to have you back. I know it's been uh admittedly a little while, but this is at least your third or fourth time on this podcast. And, you know, I was thinking about this. You're one of the people that I know and trust when it comes to technology, because A, I know your heads down working on it all the time, and it has been for many, many years. And you also know the gym owner really well. And you truly advocate for the industry in the gym and try to put your best foot forward as far as how the technology is going to be leveraged extremely well. So I value your insights. I know you got a lot going on at PushPress. You guys continue to grow. You just made a uh we'll talk about quite a meaningful transition into you know gym management software to, I want to get this right, AI-powered gym management platform. You can tell us what all those words together mean. But the fact of the matter is that it starts with AI, right? Yeah. Everything else after it is really important. So we'll get into all that stuff. Super interesting. We'll talk a lot about AI. So everyone just buckle up for that. But before we do, maybe give us a little update, man. How has it been the last few years at Push Press? What's new? What's the what's the update?

Things have been good. I mean, we've been um we we raised some money and we've been deploying that money back into the product. We've hired a killer engineering team. I'm kind of really built a robust leadership team. We're looking at this business quite differently than we were before. Cadence of releasing product is off the charts. I do feel like, as I'm sure we'll talk about in a second, like with AI coming or here, the the product velocity is that is required to keep up with the changes in the market and the world are requiring a lot of investment into the product. So we just want to make sure we stay ahead of the curve of that and we're adjusting to where the market is going, ASAP. And um, yeah, things things are good here. Just frantic and busy. And you know, as you grow your business, you're breaking areas of it because what worked yesterday doesn't work today. So it's just like a lot of trying to keep up with all of that as well, internally.

Yeah, I can't imagine running an AI focused business right now. It's so, it's so freaking fast, dude. Every time, I mean, even just my little world of using, you know, LLMs, ChatGPT, and Claude and all of them, it's like it's always advancing and it's always every week there's a new update and something that I'm noticing. It's it's pretty wild. Okay, before we get into that, remind people again, like who does push press serve? Like what who are your primary clientele, consumers, members?

Yeah, yeah. So basically we work really, really well with uh what I call group-led coach-based fitness that is generally community-centric. So we grew up out of CrossFit, which is kind of like right in the bullseye of that. But then we're also finding we work pretty well in martial arts gyms, just things thing gyms that generally are community-based, that have a coach leading a class or a small group, even private training as well. So it's kind of our our self-defined sweet spot.

And there's a lot of news right now in the HVLP space. There's a you know, a ton of money. Private equity is coming in real hard. There's a lot of expansion for brands like Crunch and EOS. And um, I think recently there was the announcement that EOS bought golds, Southern California, which was 25-ish locations. So they're coming in hard. But you know it's not really making the news line, news headlines is the independent gym owners, right? The ones that you guys serve primarily. So give us some insights, man. How's that subset of the market doing?

Market strong, healthy. I wish I had some, I wish I would came prepared to bring some data on like what the averages are looking like. But by and large, I haven't seen any deterioration in uh the gym space at all. I think gym owners are they are not as successful as most of them want to be, to be honest. But I think that goes for all small businesses. They're just strapped for time. This is kind of lead well, it can lead into the AI conversation, but there is no deterioration for demand, for growth of gyms, for members that are going to gyms, etc.

Yeah. Well, if you do, if you find some data, send it over to me uh on that, and I can include it in the newsletter in a few weeks as well, too. So well, let's get into it, then man. Artificial intelligence. So you guys made that, I don't know, what do you call it, a rebrand, a re repositioning from gym management platform to AI led. So what is what does that mean to you exactly? Why is why is that such a critical move?

Yeah, so I think it's funny. I I have an AI keynote which talks about a lot of this stuff, but we're we're basically in a phase of the world where technology is, as everyone probably feels, advancing faster and faster. I guess in my lifetime, I've seen four transformative technology moves, four big ones that I can think of, and hopefully I got this right off the top of my head. It would be PC computing, internet, mobile, which led to social media, actually more than four, and then AI. And the bottom line is like if you were at any one of these inflection points of any of those things and you decided like I don't think we're gonna buy into that as a company, you were left in the dust. And honestly, there's probably dozens of micro movements as well. I could say actually, no, social media is I already said. So there are there are there there's a bunch of micro movements that are included in this that each little thing, each big movement kind of introduced. But I believe I don't want to go so far as to say I know, but I am willing to bet everything that AI is one of those movements. And so we just want to make sure we've learned from the past and we're ahead of the curve in terms of developing for it.

So, what does it mean exactly when you say AI-powered gym management platform?

Yeah, so I can if I can explain this as simply as possible. So the the bottom line to this is like AI can infer a lot from the contextual data that you can give to it. Platform is basically a hub of data. Not only just like financial data and so there's like subjective and there's objective data, right? And when you put all that together in the right way, AI can do good work. So the the objective stuff, financial data, check-in data, lead counts, funnel data, etc., it's all good context for the gym to understand. I think a lot of us actually are more in tune with the objective data than we think. Like we know in the back in our own little AI systems in our in the back of our head how much money we're making, how many members we have, how many leads we get, how much, how many memory how many leads we lose. All that stuff we kind of know, probably 50-50. You know, you're probably more wrong than you think you're right, but you kind of know. Where I actually believe the power of AI is really gonna come into play is the subjective stuff, right? It's like if a member comes in passing and tells a coach that they stubbed their toe last night, only that coach knows, right? And in the context of that, only that coach can know because what are they gonna do? Like send a tech group text to everyone? No, they're not going to. And even if they did, is everyone gonna read it? No. So what we're actually seeing is there there is ways that we can build hooks into our system that collect subjective data. Jim Happy is a good example of this. It's a review system we built, sits on top of our product, just collects reviews for gems all day long. Inside those reviews is gold, right? Like this was my first drop-in. I worked out with Sheena, the coach, and she made sure everyone knew my name and made me feel really comfortable. And da-da-da-da-da. And all of that stuff is gold in terms of like what we can do to turn around for training coaches, helping people, you know, sell more drop-ins across the platform. Like you can turn that into so much with AI behind it. And so when we're talking about becoming an AI first platform, it's basically like building a platform that's thinking about all of the data that's flowing in and out of it, and how do we put that in the right place at the right time, power it by AI and give it to somebody or or you know, manifest it in a report or whatever to make everything happen at scale more efficiently and better. That's kind of the idea. Hopefully that wasn't too jargony, but you know, that was good. It's hard to explain that all in one shot.

No, it was really good. I I it just made me think. So I was recently at an event, I was at the uh EGM Innovation Summit, right? And it was mostly there was like YMCA executives and operators, um, like uh rec center operators and a lot of nonprofits, basically. You know, one of the things I we we talked about AI all the time because you know, EGM has their genius AI product that they're pushing into the market right now, which is really cool as far as member experience. But the advice I gave them was don't worry too much about like focus on a couple things. Look at problems within your gym, things that you have on a day-to-day base, and see how AI can fix those. Because everyone's got different problems in their operations, right? But I was my advice, and I want to see if you agree with this or disagree with this, was like, but don't go too deep. Like companies like EGM, PushPress, whatever their software providers, like those companies are the ones that are doing the really hard lifting when it comes to AI. So kind of let them do the deep stuff, but do pick a couple things that you can work on right now that may have simple solutions. So when you talk about the independent gym owner and you know their problems just as well as anybody, you know, what are the recommendations you have for them specifically about AI? Like, should they be adopting it? Should it be on their every waking thought?

Like so there's so many other things to look at. That that's that's a good point. So the general advice I give to gym owners when I talk to them, it's and again, you can just go back to you're old enough like me to know, remember the beginning of the internet. If you were like, I don't want to get on the internet because it's new technology, I'm gonna keep using this Dewey Decimal system to look up books of the library and go there and research there. Eventually, you either have to conform and you're behind, or you are left in the dust. And the the reality is all of us get left in the dust eventually. Because at some point in our lifetime, they're gonna put chips in our brains and we're gonna be able to communicate with the internet through our thoughts, and we're gonna be like, I'm good, I don't need that. And then we won't be able to online bank anymore or whatever. Things will get taken away from us. But if you're operating a business, I'm gonna presume like you want to be at the tip of technology so you can leverage it. AI, the way I would I tell gym owners to use it is just use it. Most gym owners I talk to nowadays do use it, but one, get in there and just get reps in. Like use it, use it, use it. And it's just like time under the barbell or whatever. Like you've got to spend time in the hole to figure out what's going on here, and then start to figure out where does it supplement you, what are your superpowers. Some other advice I give gym owners is use it as a team, not as a job completely. So what you have in AI is the vast array of all information across all of the internet at your fingertips in a way that can communicate with you on your terms. So instead of just saying, like, hey, write this thing for me or make a social media post for me, you can use it to just as advisors. Like, I'm thinking about raising my prices. Here's how much I charge, here's my demographic, here's a bunch of data from my from my gym system. What other information do you need to know? And like, let's chat through this together. Like, go through that exercise with the decision. I mean, it doesn't even have to be about your gym. It could be about like, you know, I'm thinking about switching churches or whatever. And it'll like just work with it and see where you go, and it'll give you better outcomes than if you can do it yourself. So that's that's a big one, which is kind of on the heels of I tell gym owners, don't use it to just complete jobs for you. Use it to make your work better, don't use it to do the job for you. Those I think those two things are the most important mindset or contextual switches I have to see people make.

Yeah. You know, I think you're right. The the time under tension analogy is really good too. Just having it open on your desk, taught all the time and using it. You know, even today, but right before this, I had 10 minutes. So I was like, you know, I'm gonna ask, like, I asked Chat GPT to explain its level of consciousness to me. You know, literally, oh, it said a lot of things. But it kept what I noticed was it kept specifically saying, this is why I'm not human, this is why I'm not human. I'm like, okay, well, you keep telling me reasons why you're not human. Tell me why you are similar to humans. And that was a list which I actually didn't get through because you jumped on, but it started going through like, you know, pattern recognition, a couple different things. And I'm like, you know, that that's just that's interesting to me because I'm starting to get to know it at a different level, where it's just like using a hand tool or something like that. You you just get a better feel for it, right?

Yes, that was a really good analogy. Like the more you use it, like the more you use a chainsaw, the better you're gonna be able to, you know, handle a chainsaw. And for that, let's just dig dig into that analogy. A chain chainsaw is a bad example because it evokes some gnarly things, right? But let's talk about a hammer, right? Like a hammer is used for hammering, but you could use it as a paperweight, you could use it as you know, a projectile weapon. Like you could use it for many things, and the more you use it, the more you'll start to realize, like, oh, this could solve this other problem that I have that I didn't even think about.

Obviously, I don't use hammers that much, or else I'd have 10 examples, but in general, that's how I have is a hammer and duct tape in my toolkit.

So duct tape is good for everything.

The So when you're going, you're making these transitions, and we haven't talked about this in a few years. So give me an update. Like, as gym owners are using PushPress nowadays, what are some of the most common applications of AI within your your realm of what your your software does that has really helped them the most? Like give me two or three, maybe four examples.

So the AI stuff that we're working on, we're on the forefront of it all. Like the stuff that we have in play were more experimental shots to see if they work. I will say in terms of actual impact, Jim Happy for sure is the is the biggest AI play, but it's also the dumbest, simplest tool in the world. In terms of AI product inside the product, we've just launched like a chat assistant, which is we're just gonna try and make better every week. So it just started off by just replacing the need to navigate to certain pages and fill out forms. You can just do it conversationally. Hey, Eric's going on vacation next week. He's gonna be gone for two weeks for Thanksgiving. Can you put his membership on pause but start it back up December 1st? That that conversation gets all the context that the AI needs to execute the actual pause functionality. It will come back and ask you to confirm it because we're just like as as people are getting comfortable with it, we don't want to just take blind action. We're just seeing the cool thing we're seeing about stuff like that, which in my opinion has very low value because you could just go to a form field that and you know where it is and you can fill it out. But there's two cool things with that is one, you can do it from a Starbucks using voice voice conversation, right? And two, the learning curve becomes almost zero. Once everything becomes in this AI chat, you can just tell your staff when they come in, just like go in the chat and ask them to pause it, right? Because it catches because AI understands the context of everything and what it needs to know to pause a membership, it'll say, like, well, you didn't tell me who, or you didn't tell me when that should it come off unpause at some time? If so, let me know, right? It will actually have a conversation with you. And the way I like to see it, it's almost like if you had an assistant who was just standing there waiting for you to tell it to go do stuff. And if you told um an intern like pause Eric's account, they'll be like, Well, which membership plan and as of what date? And do you want me to enter why, or do you want to just leave that blank? Like that's how the AI kind of works, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. Um, so we got the gym happy, we got the contextual assistant. What else?

So now after after we've gotten our team kind of really ramped up thinking about how AI is going to work in gyms, they got pretty creative and started introducing stuff to me. This is pretty dope when you start building a team. Like they were bringing stuff back to me. I'm like, whoa, that's creative and that's awesome. And I never would have thought of that. So here's an example of one. They're calling it the coach AI assistant. They're working on it right now. And it's basically like this this is the context of data. So before a class, we're gonna have AI compile all the members that are coming and see what bits of information are relevant as of now. You might have new members, you might have birthdays coming up, you might have injuries, you might have people coming coming over from pause, drop-ins, whatever. And it'll give you like a quick summary up front of what's going on. That's not that imaginary, pretty obvious to me, but where they actually blew my mind was like after class, they'll send the coach a notification with a voice, leave us some notes about class. So this is where we're building subjective inputs into the software. I'm be like, oh, you know, class was great, it was a little bit overcrowded, the air conditioner broke, and people were pretty pissed off about that. One of the 75-pound dumbbells, all the rubber fell off, so it's in the trash can. We we have only one 75-pound dumbbell now. Jane, who is a new member, told me she's really stoked, but she wants to talk to somebody Friday afternoon to join. Records that, turns it into a whole bunch of to-dos and like after actions, and then disseminates that to the team, whoever should have it. Right. Now, in the in the future states, AI can handle some of that. Like, let's say AI can just auto-order a dumbbell for whatever reason. Like someday we'll get there. Done. Like it'll just be like, Do you want me to order the dumbbell? Yes, done. Dumbbell on the way. So we're kind of breaking it down into steps where like in the end, I want AI to handle everything AI should handle that is just a waste of gym owners' time. And then on top of that, it should be providing the context and information and/or to-dos or whatever reminders to people that should be getting them. Because otherwise, it's like that 75-pound dumbbell will be a single dumbbell for the next two years because not that many people use it or, you know, whatever it is. It's just like doesn't get taken care of. So this way it's like we make sure things get done, we make sure like the information is spread. And then, like, I forgot whatever name I use, but let's say it was Jenny. Let's say Jenny like happens to come in Thursday morning, not to the class she went to the other time. The morning, because it collates all this data, the morning one will say, like, oh, Jenny was a drop-in, she's thinking about joining tomorrow, but it looks like she's here early. So maybe have a conversation with her after class if she's thinking about joining, try and get her in. You know, it's like that stuff would never happen otherwise. Wow.

Yeah. So so in the the dumbbell scenario, so all that information gets taken in, and then the system will disperse it to maybe just does it disperse is it like the whole staff? Does it self does it select which

People need to know, like the head of admin, the owner, facilities manager, coach, like how does it think that's that's all to be determined in that yeah, we have to figure that out. But to be honest, like there's a number of different ways you can solve that. It could just go to the owner and the owner can say, like, I imagine everything you know what vibe coding is by any chance?

Explain it to me the other day and I didn't get it, so I asked ChatGPT about it, and I still don't get it.

Okay. So it's basically like you can write code. Like I'm writing, I'm writing an app right now just by chatting with a code editor. Like, hey, I want you to create a system that does this, stores in a database, and then you know, blah, blah, blah. And it'll write the code for you that does it, right? I imagine gym management to be like vibe coding your gym operations. So it'll be like as an owner, you might be like, hey, I never want to deal with dumbbell requests anymore. Send that to John. Every time you see an equipment request, send it to John because that's his job, not mine. Then the AI should be able to parse through the instruction to go, like, oh, this is John's job, sign it to John. So we we shouldn't eventually, this is like years down the road, this is a lot of energy and development, but you should be able to just type or or say what should happen in certain circumstances. And then the way AI is advancing, like we're gonna have such big context windows, we'll be able to just say, like, here's the entire gym instruction set, here's what just happened, follow the instruction set and assign all the tasks, right? So, you know, it's basically like SOPs are dead in the future because you'll just vibe code your SOPs. It's mind blowing where this is gonna go. I'll give you another example. If you're do you have time and are you interested?

I'm super interested.

Let me So here's here's another thing we're working on right now. Is we're gonna be building a website builder completely with AI. So right now it's like the pain point is I want a website. Fill out this 20 question form so we customize it to you, give us a week to build it, blah, blah, blah. Oh, there's edits. Hey, and we put in an edit. Okay, that takes three days to make that edit. Oh, I didn't like that edit, three more days. Waste of time, total waste of time. Again, vibe code your website. Like, I want a website, blah, blah, blah. It's connected to my core account. So we already know your schedule, we already know your coaches, we already know your members. We can probably figure out who your ICP is based on your member context, figure all the stuff. Bam, website done in like 18 seconds. And then be like, I'm gonna change the headline to be something a little more exciting. Okay, done. Here's three examples. Which one you want? I want option B, done, printed to your website. Then it's then it'll be like, I'm gonna add a class to my schedule. Okay, website's updated. We created a new program page, we updated the coach with the class information that they have. We put a banner up on your homepage announcing the new class, we sent out an email to all your members. We said put up, and here's a social media post you can post. Like, we don't we don't realize all the work streams we kick off by taking action. But once we build that into a pre-built AI first SOP, it's like here's your packet. You what you added a class, here's the package. We've done all this, and you can post this social media thing and send out this email, or we already did whatever. And that's where like I think push the push presses of the world can really help gyms because we can start to centralize that stuff instead of every gym recreating their own wheel. Like if you can again, if you can just vibe code it and just say, like, when I create a new class, I need to make sure the website's updated, I need to do this, this, and this, and whatever your custom instructions are, and then go do it. Yeah, it does it. So this is this is why I think small operators are gonna benefit the most because when you're a single owner operator, it's like all that stuff falls. And then that that creates an incomplete experience for for people, but now it's like we can close the loop on all that. So it's like you actually gain so much as opposed to like an EOS who has a staff of people who are dedicated to doing certain things.

Well, do you even just as we talk, I'm I'm I guess reliving former gym owner trauma of like having to add a new service offering, right? So just like a new membership tier. And dude, what the fuck? Like I have to do all these things to get this right, and then I probably didn't get it right or I didn't connect it to the to the stripe right in whatever I screwed something up, and now these other memberships are dead. And it's just like and then we can't launch the program, right? Or like, no, we start the program, we'll just bill them in a week. Like it was just this mess all the time because I'm not a gym, like I'm not a software guy, dude. I just want to run classes, right? I just want to run classes, want to create new programs, you know, I want to do some marketing and sales. Like that's the and the other stuff is just sucks. It just sucks. It's not why you got into it, it's not why you get into the field.

Yeah. So if I could dumb it down, like the way we're approaching AI is like if you opened your gym and you had all the money in the world, you would hire like a marketer, salesperson, a general manager, an equipment cleaner, you know, like you would hire all these people and just put them around you. But the reality is if if and when we build each one, all of these componentry, like you just get it for the most part. It's not gonna be as perfect as a human being and also won't talk back or go to sleep. You know, so there's pros and cons to it, but you just get it. And some of the stuff, here's here's another thing I'm really excited about. Like AI reporting, I wish I could show you some, I could show you some demos if you want to screen share, but like the AI reporting stuff is bonkers. Like, first of all, one of the most broken things I think about this whole software thing that we have to build is reporting, because people want all these reports, and then it's like we give it to them, and then they're like, first of all, yeah, so it's like they want all these reports, and it's like either we build all the reports everyone wants, and no one can find a report because there's a thousand of them because everyone wants a different report, or we slim it down to like 12 reports that is not perfect for anybody. So it's like this Goldilocks problem, right? But second of all, even if we did give everyone all the reports they want, most people are not MBAs in business analysis or you know, whatever. And so it's like they look at these reports and they're like, okay, cool. Like, I know I have this number, but what does it even mean? Like, what are you gonna do about it? I don't think most people like have a plan for what to do about it. So, what's cool about AI reporting is like you literally just open up a chat box and you're like, hey, I'm thinking about evaluating like my 7 a.m. class. Is it worth keeping? Tell me about it. And it will do all the work. It'll show you the report, it'll show you like an uptrend or downtrend in attendance, like what your profitability is on it, and it'll tell you if we advise it'll probably split the middle because most AI does, right? But it'll be like either you need to invest money in XX and Y ways to try and get this to this many people coming this how many times a month, or you should probably plan on phasing it out. Which one you want to do, right? So it actually comes with analysis pre-baked, which I think is gold. Like I've been playing, I've been playing with this AI reporting that we're working on, doing bonker stuff. Like, I'm like, hey, I'm gonna put I'm gonna do an end-of-the-year yearbook. Can you give me superlatives for all my members? And it's like doing data on each person, and it's like coming back with nicknames for them that are like valid based on like their activity or their usage or what we know about them. It's crazy.

That is well, and I imagine too, you could start playing in things like just the the unique economics of the space, right? Like I have 5,000 square feet, like how many people should I getting in this class? Like what's safe, what's not? Here's my equipment, like all these different things that you can you can factor, which were almost impossible, not impossible, but just very difficult and time consuming to calculate. Not a few years ago.

All of us gym owners want to run a class. Like, we don't want to break down unit economics per square foot per coach in demographic region XYZ. But what why and why would we nowadays when AI can kind of do that for you in like 30 seconds? It is true, it is absolutely remarkable. Like once you let your mind go. Because right now I think people are stuck in the like, oh, I'm gonna have a blog post. Like AI read a blog post. Like they're stuck in this loop of like do the menial things. But when you start marrying data with process and you start creating opportunities for data to flow, some pretty big stuff's gonna happen, I think. Especially in these community-based gyms where like the context of what Eric's feeling after he left class matters so much.

Which really nice segue for my next question. Thank you for that. Like the member experience. Like we've talked about the gym owner and the coach and all of them and how their experiences are improving, the workflows are improving. How is the member experience from their end changing?

Yeah. So, first of all, the obvious one is like the more little things that I don't have to remember as a gym owner that just create like cognitive stress, the more I can just focus on my members. So that's the easiest answer right there. The second one is I believe, I mean, I don't I don't even know if it's a theory. The truth of the matter is every human being can only manage so many people. Right? There's the Dunbar number or whatever it's called. Yeah. I actually have a very strong thesis that empowered with AI and especially deployed into your coaching staff that's empowered with AI, have a thesis right now that it's possible every coach in a gym can manage 100 to 150 people.

So about the Weimar number?

Yeah, it's what called the Wimurer number. So it is possible if you if we structure this correctly and the gym's implementing correctly, it's completely possible to say a gym can have if you have four coaches, you can have 400 to 600 members, you know, or maybe maybe even more, you know. Like I don't know, because you can you can automate and you can create this human touch and personalization. It's what AI is really good at, with again the context and the data of what's going on. So I do believe like not only are gym members going to get a better experience. You go back to that class coach, coach assistant I was telling you about. It's like every member to some degree is at least gonna have a chance. It's like as long as a coach reads it and like puts it in their brain, it's not hard for me to just say, like, hey, dude, Eric, I you know, I I caught wind that like your son hit a home run last weekend. That's dope. Tell me about it. I used to play baseball, right? Like, think of that connection it would make if you just had that information in front of you. I think every member is just gonna have such a much better experience. On top of that, like, well, we're gonna probably, well, not probably, we will eventually put a CX or a an AI agent inside the member app. So it's like, you have questions about the gym, ask it here, and you can get instant answers without having to like wait till you come into the gym or send me a text message at my house at 9 p.m. at night or whatever. It's like we can just take so much load off of people and give them better answers quicker for what they're they're looking to know.

I would imagine just even stuff like like retail sales, which have always been a huge pain in the ass, right? Generally not worth it. Everyone's there's been a bunch of slim, but you could just load the inventory in. People could just ask, you know, as a member experience, hey, but I want to buy two t-shirts. Cool, done on its way, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

I think chat and voice-based things as we continue to explore it, are it's just uh it's infinite in what can be done. Yeah. And in fact, you can push it out to people, you know, like we have a new shirt, you know, like just let me know. Hit hit hit this button and record what you want to purchase. Like, there's just so many opportunities for like how the new tech, I wouldn't even say it's AI, it's just like the what the new way that people are gonna be interfacing with technology is going to change commerce and the end gym experience.

Well, this is something I think about a lot, Deanna is like the interface. So remember when when the internet did come out, it was like DOS C prompt, right? That's that's how we interacted with a lot of different things. Or if you know, I mean I don't remember exactly it was so long ago. But then it kept morphing in the way we actually interacted, it it ended up with Google search. That that's essentially how it ended up. And I feel like we're kind of in that phase right now with artificial intelligence. It's like what's gonna be the final form of interface. I'm sure it's gonna be a chip in our brain at some point, right? If we opt in for that, but like, do you think that's where it's going? It's all going to like contextual voice interaction. Yeah.

Yeah. So what's going to happen is since AI works on context, everyone's going to find out sooner or later that the more you give the AI context, the better results come out of it. Right. And I don't know if like just to give you a layman's primer on this, and when chat came out, it had, I don't remember what context window, maybe like 20k context window. So it's basically like how much you can type into it before it was like, that's too much, I can't operate on that. Now it's like megabytes. So you can literally like put the entire dictionary in or something as like your context. So as context window opens, that's where a software like ours is able, like, okay, we're just gonna pipe in like your entire financial information when you're asking about a financial question. We'll just do it all because it can take it. The same goes for like when people are using AI, they're gonna be like, oh, I realize that when I tell it my entire backstory and what I want to get out of it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like it gives me a better answer. So I think that's why we're gonna move away from typing as an interface and more to voice for now. And God, I hope I'm not around when it goes to chip implant, but it will go into like think. I think about things, and the answers come to me. Because that's the fastest way to do it. I don't see that. Yeah, it's just all about speed. Elon, Elon Musk's whole um neuralink thing is like the most inefficient part of all computing right now is transferring thought to keyboard. And that's why he he's doing the Neuralink, which is thought to computer, which is lightning fast.

It's almost too fast though, right? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know who's experiencing right now, but it almost seems like I wouldn't even have time. By the time my thought gets there, that gets back, and I'm like, I didn't even have I didn't even have a breather.

Yeah, you're like, I didn't really think that through yet. Hold on. Yeah, you'd have to like can you imagine the interface world where you're like, don't take this as a prompt yet. I'm just thinking. And then you gotta then think. Or you're like, man, that guy's such an asshole. And then it's like it's broadcast to the world. Yeah, there would have to be some crazy safeguards around that.

Oh, that's well. Hey, you mentioned that you did a keynote on AI. What is maybe one or two major points that you were trying to make for the industry and you can kind of summarize here?

Yeah, so I guess there's uh three or four main segments of each have a point. The first segment is basically like technology is moving really fast. I explained why. There's this concept. If you guys want to go home and Google it or read about it, there's a concept called the theory of the adjacent possible, which I found to be fascinating. But it basically explains like why things are at this crazy breakneck pace of like, you know, 20 years ago we didn't have the internet or barely. Damn, it's been 20 years. 30 years ago, we we didn't really have commercial internet. And today we have like everything on the internet, everything, everything. You know, like we have all this crazy stuff. So anyway, part one is kind of like, why is tech moving so fast and why is that important for your gym? Part two is kind of the primer of AI is one of these moments where if you do not adapt it, I believe you you're dead, just straight dead. And I kind of go over like some of the companies that didn't adapt to the different shifts that we've seen in our lifetime and the companies that did, and like what happens to them. Um, the third premise is like how do you interact with AI today? And it's it that was what I was kind of telling you about. Like use it, ask it questions, work with it, make it, make it your team, you know. And uh the fourth section is kind of going through what how we're seeing AI because it's I watch people's minds break when I when I show how it all comes together to create a feature or a product. And I I just I know nobody can really put that together until they see it. And once they see it, they're like, okay, I get where this is going and I understand why I've got to buy into this.

Yeah. One of the biggest fears I think people have with AI, and this is probably just n equals one, but I I don't think it is because I just talked to my wife about this like two hours ago. Number one, I mean, first and foremost is like the uh Skynet situation, right? Which I don't think really a lot of people believe could be possible, but the thing that's most relevant and poignant for people is loss of jobs and replacement, you know, we're we're already seeing it a little bit at scale, but it seems to only be accelerating. When you look at our industry and what we do, do you think we are in a good position? Do you think people will lose jobs? Do you think people will move into the industry? Like how how do you think we're gonna be affected by that major transition as it rolls out? Because it seems inevitable.

Man, there's actually a talking point here I want to I never thought of, but you may you prompted in my brain, I don't want to lose it. So I'm gonna say it. And if I forget, because I will, bring me back to it. Okay. Fuck, I'm already forgetting it. It has to do around as things get easy, people do hard things will become valuable. So put a pin on that.

Yeah.

First of all, I do not believe AI is gonna cause mass job downturns in general at all. I know that's the common fear. I'll bet you if you could go back and do research when the car came, when oil was a turning point, you know, like every one of these major turning points in America, there was probably some when the telephone got, you know, interrupted by the internet or whatever, I'm sure a bunch of or I don't know, when telephones went digital, there was a bunch of people who like took a pin and connected you on a phone line, like those, you know how phone operators used to work? Yeah, yeah. I bet there's people that don't even know that. But back in the day, way back when phones were, it was like a phone call came in and some like you'll get it. Yeah, someone like connected two pin points and it like that's what made the phone call happen. Like those people all lost their jobs at some point, but there's plenty of jobs to be had. So I think what's gonna happen is the economy is gonna expand, everything will go faster, more companies will be created to do more things, and more jobs will be made out of the result. But the jobs that were legacy that AI can handle will be phased out just like the telephone operator was, and you you'll find there'll be other positions that do other things. I mean, ultimately we'll probably all end up being AI under under servants, like just feeding AI stuff, but there'll still be jobs, no problem. I think gyms are for the most part isolated from this because you cannot AI your way to fitness, right?

That might be the quote of the episode right there.

Cannot AI your way to fitness, yeah. And you can't AI your way, maybe you can. Pretty sad, but um, I was gonna say you can't AI your your way into a community and friendships, which is what happens in a lot of these gyms, right? Even in the global gyms where people put their headphones on, it's like there's a 30 people you see every morning that you give a pound to when you see them, it's like there's still something there. I think we're gonna shift into a period, to be honest, where obesity and loneliness are gonna be the two worst epidemics in our probably and global warming or whatever you might think, because AI is probably eating up electricity and all this. But in terms of non-apolitical statements, I would say obesity or health and loneliness are gonna become the two biggest problems every human being faces. But both of those things are solved in a gym. So I don't think it's going anywhere. And then to put a pin back on what what you the epiphany you maybe had was yeah, all in the world. Yes. So we're moving more and more to a world of comfort and leisure. And pretty soon comfort and leisure is gonna be boring if it's not already for people. And this is why I believe like jujitsu is getting an uptick right now because it's hard. It's hard, you get your ass kicked, it's a hard workout, you know, it's like CrossFit's popular. And I think there's something to the fact that, you know, you go back into Roman times and when having food was hard and everyone was ripped and skinny because they worked in the fields all day long, like fat people were sexy. And today, like, ripped people are sexy because it's easy to be fat. Pretty soon it's gonna be like a testament to the human, the spirit of the human being to do hard stuff because everything's so easy. So a gym falls right into that.

I hope you're right. You know, about the jobs and things like that. I guess it's hard from from like every technologist I know says something very similar, generally very optimistic. Also, uh, you know, believes that more jobs will be created, right? I guess my mind in its monkey form can't think linearly, like in a linear fashion to see how more jobs get created. I could see like prompters, but there's gonna be a few and far between. How many do you need? Right? Like, I guess it's it's hard to imagine because we're just not there yet. But I I I love your belief that that will happen. I'm just not there.

I mean, at the end of the day, let's let's talk about this from a more political standpoint. At the end of the day, let's pretend you and I own governments. Because somebody kind of, I mean, I guess nobody owns a government, but somebody kind of owns a government, right? You need your people to have something to do at the end of the day. And they have to be able to earn a livelihood, to support their families and see a future. And if you let everything slip to a point that that isn't controlled and managed, like you will have anarchy. So I think I I just at the end of the day, like if you if you if you degrade it to the human-made construct of government and countries, every country is going to be making sure that their people have stuff to do. Even if it's a life of leisure, where it's like your job is to go on a cruise. That's what we want you to do, because all of our AIs are making everyone universal income. I don't know, but they're still gonna make you do something because they don't want you just sitting around doing nothing, I assume.

Yeah. Well, whatever it is, I think the the challenging part is the speed at which it's happening, and that transition is gonna, it's gonna come with some discomfort. Change is scary, man.

Change is always scary.

Yeah, but I I do like to back to the the most optimistic point that we're making here is that I do like the way our our industry is positioned. I agree. I I don't think you know you can't AI your way to fitness. That's fantastic. You can't. You gotta show up, you gotta do the work. It's also one of the reasons why, you know, it's it's a little bit harder to sell fitness than French fries and tacos, right? And consumer products because you have to commit to something. It takes you to show up and you have to do it, and it's very human. And so is relationships and communities and all those things. So yeah, I think I think I'm I'm very bullish about our industry, and I've said that a million times, but a lot of other ones, you know, I've I'm concerned. I'm concerned, Dave.

I think it's fair to be concerned. I used to actually be on the opposite side of this coin, and I used to think that there was a lot of uh doomsday scenarios playing out in front of us. But the one thing I do believe that was on the when I was on that side of the camp, the flip side, what the argument they would make is humans always figure it out. And I guess that will be true until we don't and we're wiped off the face of the planet or whatever, right? But I do think like humans have this innate desire to not only survive but thrive, that somewhere in that there will be innovation created to thwart off any mass doomsday scenario event or even nobody has a job. Like, what would it what would our whole world do if nobody had a job? I don't know. I don't see it working, so I don't see it happening.

Yeah. Well, let's leave it there, ma'am. That's it's a good, it's a good optimistic note. And so last question is always you, what do you need help with right now, Dan? Is it, you know, are you are you hiring? Do you need some partnerships? Are you looking for anything specific? What's one of the challenges you're facing that we can help you with? And then yeah, part two is like, how would you like people to reach out?

I mean, we're always looking for amazing great people. For the most part, like all of our team is set. Our team's pretty good. We've got a few open jobs as of now, November 13th. I think there's a few jobs open, but team is always the most important thing when you're building a company. Uh, I think we're locked and loaded, like mission-wise, and we're hiring the right people. We probably will be looking to raise a Series C sometime either next year or the year after, just depending on how things look, AI adoption timing, just whatever the variables of what we're working on. What else? Oh, partnerships. What we are actively looking for is like potential companies out there that we can partner with in a we we look specifically for one plus one equals three situations and even one plus one equals four, because we can put the member and the gym in the equation. So it's like if we can create a partnership where our partner benefits, the gym benefits, potentially the member benefits, the gym or the member, and or vice versa, and then push press benefits. Those are the types of like winning partnerships we look for. And we've been kind of actively building out a marketplace of partners where we can help people go to market and work with our gyms. And the thing we kind of noticed is a lot of gym owners are so busy they don't want to do their research to find the next vendor and they want one throat to choke. And unfortunately that's us, but also fortunately that's us, so that we can help bring good opportunities to our clients. I think the one thing I'll say is like we're always in defense of the clients first. I think some of some people out there would look at this as like an opportunistic land grab to make money instead of the clients, but we just position it opposite. Like we want the health of our gyms to be outstanding.

Awesome. Right on. Well, Dan, thank you for joining me again. It's always a pleasure. I hope people found this entertaining, inspiring, and informative. Uh I did. So yeah, it's been it's been great. Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Wymara. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.