Lessons - How Building a Fitness Empire Revealed the Truth About Consumer Psychology | Carl Daikeler - BODi CEO

In this lessons episode, discover the shift from vanity-driven workouts to a longevity mindset that values every workout as progress. Learn why health esteem, the confidence earned by simply showing up, beats, fleeting aestheticles, learn how prioritizing mobility at any age preserves independence, and learn why embracing imperfection makes fitness sustainable and empowering. Again, like 26 years, amazing. How is your personal philosophy on health and wellness sort of evolved over those 26 years? That's a really good question because it really has changed a lot. I used to be, you know, I told the story that I don't like vegetables, and I also was not, I'm not an exercise now. I would say as recently as this year, as I turned 60, I had to check myself because that, if these and that mentality, even though it's sort of clever for the shitness company to say, I don't like working out, but I do it because our programs are great, but I also know that's not serving me. So I no longer have the option of saying I don't work out. I have to. If I want to, like I visited my parents at their respective facilities, right, where they're, you know, what do you call them? Like a, yes, a care or old age or yeah, it's a care. So, and you know, everybody's got the Walker with the tennis balls or or a cane or they're driving around on one of these little scooters. And and some of them are in their early strategies. It's on 60. And I made the decision, I can no longer allow myself to have this intellectual acceptance that I'm not a shitness person because I don't want to be that. I don't want to ever drive a scooter through Disney World with my grandchildren. I don't want to have a cane unless I, you know, the something goes on, then it's fine. But if I can avoid the cane or the Walker or the scooter, I'm going to do it, which means so, so the question, how have I evolved? I've realized that where it used to be aesthetics and vanity and strengths, now it's about the imperative that I maintain my mobility and agility as I age. And now I've got of you on from 60 to 90, I'm saying mobile and active and consistent for as long as possible until they pry the freaking dumbbells out of my aids. So now I'm a fitness person. I love it. And you know, it's actually interesting because this actually mirrors and I'll let you tell this story, but this kind of mirrors, if I'm not incorrect, you're move away from beach body and to body. And I want to understand, I mean, you've created a lot of programs. It sounds like as you've changed your own perspective on what health and wellness, maybe even like not caring so much about aesthetic and we're caring about longevity. Talk to me about sort of that mental shift, how it impacted your programs, maybe just and like at least we can start like high level problems that we see in the health and wellness community that ultimately maybe don't serve people the way that they should. These programs, these ideas, these fitness gurus, these diets, these all these things that I mean, I also come from a sports background and health and wellness. I think there's a lot of toxicity in health and wellness. So yeah, that's a big question. I'll try not to go on too big of a speak. It's a big one. I'm sorry, but it's interesting. I know you have opinions. So I'd love to the name beach body. It was super fun, gratifying, but it was also very limiting because there were partnerships and applications that were that we were not just we were not welcome to participate in. So since renaming the business to just B-O-D-I, which originally said so beach body on demand interacted, but but now to be this clever spelling of body B-O-D-I and to drop the sort of gratuitous beach body name. Now we did a partnership with the American Diabetes Association because we're not purely associated with how do I seek look or feel in a swimsuit, but how is my body? How is that working? And frankly, you know, right now with the advent of weight loss pharmaceuticals, you got all these people doing GLP ones. And if they don't take control of their lifestyle choices, including getting enough protein, listing and exercising, and they just do the GLP one to lose weight, they're going to be in real trouble like real muscular skeletal or skeletal muscular. I don't know how they go. They're going to have structural problems and their metabolism will crater and it's going to bow rang on it and they're going to have health to pay. So so I wanted body to better represent really what we're about. And that is the outrageous health and lifestyle and feeling benefits from doing one single workout. So while we have these programs that are 21 days to 100 workouts, we created this category called health esteem, which is really about acknowledging the fact that when you show up for a workout, just one, you've got something to show for it. And and this was a big learning. This is a really a huge, uh, uh, a piece of me for me was that I didn't have to go into the gym and be on the edge of puking in order to feel like I had a good workout because my entire life and your an athlete, you know, that ceiling of I gave it all in the gym and I just absolutely destroyed myself, which can get you great results. But it can also make it really intimidating to get back to the gym if you don't have that alpha energy. So we step back and said, wait a minute, 170 million people overweight or obese. Maybe they're not looking to blow their brains out in the gym. Maybe they're looking to just feel good by showing up. So we created the category of health esteem, which is a play on self esteem that your your self esteem is improving when you're paying attention to your health and just showing up for yourself is is as much a win as the before and after photo. It doesn't need to just be about the before and after photo. The scale the before and after photo are great metrics and certainly something to be proud of. But as a guy who got. Look, Scott, I get outrageous results when I did PIDX, whatever, 15 years ago. But there's no way I could was going to keep those there's no way I was going to keep those kind of results for you know into my 60s. So now I'm proud of myself that I show up and I'm consistent about it. That is my before and after. And that's what that's what this shift to body really represents is mature. I love it. And what I was sort of alluding to it and it's something that I've heard you speak about was like the imperfection economy and and that's that's really what I and I'm I just want to hear your take on that because that's what I was actually alluding to. I didn't I didn't I didn't realize that beach body was getting sort of blocked from all these great wellness initiatives. Like you mentioned, like the the American diabetes association and what not. But that's sort of like a very specific example of a very specific example of the imperfection economy. I don't even think I'm going to say that I don't think beach body at all is as even remotely as bad as some of the stuff that I see online in the imperfection economy or quote, unquote, health and wellness economy. I think that you mean social media and and fitness influencers and everybody's is almost like a zealot about their specific workout regime or diet to the point where they almost shame or look down on other people that are also trying to improve in a slightly different way. I think there's a lot of issue with like you coined the phrase imperfection economy. I just called it toxic fitness. Gover is online. But talk to me about this whole economy, this sort of bubbled up that you're fighting against with body. But it's obviously something that a lot of people are getting exposed to when they try and lose weight. Well, we were participants with infomercials. And you know, at first I'm very proud of the results that people were getting. But then when it turned into and I started to wash this within our own customer community, where people would be so hard on themselves if they had a cookie or they didn't finish a program. Like what I never wanted was the nature of the business to contribute to someone's self-loathing or their own self-esteem. And I think that so coined the phrase imperfection economy, which we were guilty of participating in. And that is, you know, hey, you're not good enough yet. And I don't know that we ever said that literally, but the implication that you need to do this program for and then keep going and go to the next level and the next level. And look, our mission statement is is where I don't jail to guilty because it's always been help people achieve their goal to lead a healthy fulfilling life, not help people lead our standard for a healthy fulfilling life, which is also why we had to abandon the name Beachbody because what was just a clever little fun name turned into a connotation of some sort of perfect image or ideal body. And we didn't want to participate in that anymore. And it's interesting. So we've got incredible customers who've had outrageous results that are such inspiration. But I've had some of them say, you know, I've seen them on social media saying, you know, yeah, I'm still calling it Beachbody because that's what it is to me. And it's fine, but they're not really accepting the fact that the company, like this is not Twitter going to X. This is a company evolving its message so that it can be more helpful in helping people achieve their goals and lead healthy fulfilling lives. And quite frankly, if I think about my kids, who would look over my shoulder at the infomercials that I'm editing, I would get self conscious if all of a sudden they're seeing me perpetuate an ideal that now I'm teaching them that they have to live up to. And I was no longer comfortable with that prospect. So that's why we started to make these changes and they were not that radical. I mean, we still want people to have a healthy lean body mass. We want them to have muscle. But you know, I don't want them to starve themselves. I don't want them to, you know, I've watched people with intermittent fasting, which can be great. But I have watched friends intermittent fast themselves into an eating disorder because they go, wow, when I skip breakfast, I really started losing weight. I'm going to skip lunch now and I'm going to eat even less for dinner and all of a sudden there are even problems and they're miserable. And so anyway, that's the nature of that transition. And I think we're still navigating it because results are such good marketing because that's what people aspire to. So you still need the results to market. But the message within the product needs to be about like, like, okay, we have a promotion going right now called workout to win $10,000. That's not about a transformation contest. It's just every time you workout in October, November and December is another entry into that month's $10,000 giveaway. So it's just, it's really a participation. You show up, you do the workout, and maybe I won 10 grand today. I don't know. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.