Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - The Truth Behind Weird Fitness Ads | Quick Question Ep. 320

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Comedy fellas Soren Bowie and Daniel O'Brien descend into a rabbit hole so deep we're not sure there's a bottom. Lover of advertising Daniel O'Brien, tired of seeing his feeds inundated with uncanny, AI-generated fitness ads featuring shirtless men with inconsistent accents, walks Soren through a labyrinth of gaslighting chatbots, impossible refund policies, and YouTube channels that might not employ a single human being. It's a sordid behind-the-scenes look at the future of content creation, framed by a nostalgic look back at their days at Demand Media and the Cassandra algorithm.To explore coverage, visit ASPCApetinsurance.com/QUESTION.  The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance.Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/QQ. Policies issued by Western-Southern Life Assurance Company. Not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions.Go to ButcherBox.com/QQ for $20 off, free shipping always, and choose organic ground beef, chicken breast or ground turkey in every box for a year, new subscribers only. Follow the guys on Bluesky!https://bsky.app/profile/danielobrien.bsky.socialhttps://bsky.app/profile/sorenbowie.bsky.socialBonus episodes 2x/month at patreon.com/quickquestion OR Apple Podcasts

Sorry, so what's your favorite? Soren, welcome to quick question. Oh, thanks, I'm doing things a little bit differently today this week, this time. I want to talk, Sorin, welcome to quick question. Oh, thanks. about them a little bit in the past. And I want to get right out ahead of things and say that I love commercials. And I think they're good.

And I actually think they're important. Do you have anything to say about commercials before we get into this? Yeah. Commercials I like to credit as my highest rated article at Crack. It was about commercials. Was it really? Yeah. I was that one where I came.

I remember coming to you and I was like, Hey, has anyone written an article about the worlds that commercials insist are true? like that all women bleed blue from their vaginas and that no one drives on streets except for one person at night. And you're like, no. And I was like, perfect. And so I did an article on that and it did gangbusters.

That was like the first viral one I did. Correct. That's, I think, because commercials, more than almost anything else, are whether we're conscious of it or not, part of the monoculture in a way that shows aren't anymore because we all kind of live through and experience commercials. And I have had a come to Jesus moment about commercials in general because I feel like starting out as a writer, commercials felt like if you're going to create a hierarchy

of like writing and entertainment jobs, advertising always felt like a thing you would do as a writer if you couldn't find, if you weren't lucky enough to land like a TV or other kind of writing job, it's like, well, at least I still get to write. It's commercials, but I still get to write. I think it's also stepping stone in the opposite direction. It's like you started commercials

and then maybe you do a good Doritos commercial and you get to move up. Yeah, that's where I held it in the hierarchy for a long time too. And I've, if not reversed that, I've certainly like sweetened my opinion about commercials from like a writing standpoint for sure. but also just like, here are the things that I think about commercials.

Now, I think commercials are good. I think they accomplish a few things. And like business-wise, they employ actors, usually, like, incredible sketch and improv actors. We've talked on this show before about how progressive commercials cast. It seems like, by design, they're going after, like, groundlings and UCB people, whether it's Stephanie Courtney or Natalie Polymetus. Kimio we see pop up in commercials here and there and it almost feels like a benevolent patronage system

where they're scooping up these sketch and improv comedians these are not like sketch and improv are not lucrative pursuits but progressive is like funding these great comedians so they don't have to have other jobs so they can like keep doing these funny silly progressive commercials and like continue to live and pursue art the way they want to. And the commercials also employ, like, crews. Like, you'll hear every once in a while about, like, Breaking Bad Vince Gilligan

directing a commercial or Paul Feig doing something. And it's like, why is this A-LIS TV director doing a commercial? It's because when Breaking Bad ends, they want to keep giving work to their crews, like all of the hair and makeup and glam artists and, like, sound operators. These are like the working class crafts people that make Hollywood run. None of them are millionaires. They just need steady work. And commercials provide so much steady work for all these people.

Is that still true? Is that still true? I mean, I don't watch broadcast television in forever. But are commercials, do they hold the same weight as they used to? In terms of what wait, in terms of like. Are people still spending money on a commercial outside of the Super Bowl? They are, yes. Okay.

And I And I love them for doing that. And I think about it now that I think we should probably devote a future episode to why specifically insurance companies seem to be pouring a lot of money into commercials because that is, when I think of examples of commercials that I like,

it's almost exclusively Geico, Progressive Liberty Mutuals, all these companies that have just been pouring money into commercials. That's David Hoffman, right? He's a groundy's a guy. Yeah. And I'm just like, and you're half in your frame.

We have, thank you. We have, we will one day do a reckoning about like why specifically insurance companies are trying to, funnel so much money into commercial hectares. But that's not today's episode. So today's, we're just talking about why I think they're important for like the economy, the amount of jobs that it creates doing these commercials.

And also this is like less defensible. I really enjoy a lot of these commercials on a content level. I don't think of it as stepping stone work anymore. When I think about the progressive commercials, there's like the ones with flow in the extended flow universe. But they also do this run of commercials where progressive auto insurance Progressive Home and Auto Insurance can't keep new homeowners from turning into their parents, but they can help them with insurance. It's a solid commercial, yes.

It's a really solid commercial. It's like the longest running sketch series in my life now because it's one premise for that commercial that they hit over and over again with different beats, different escalations, different great actors from the comedy scene. And I watched, I humiliating as it is, I look forward to these commercials. I'm watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune every night, which is where I get a lot of my commercials from. And when a new progressive commercial comes on, I'm just like, oh, great, I can't wait to see what they do with it now. Or the Liberty Mutual, it's been for years where they've been running this set of ads with a lemu and a, uh, uh, and a guy who, that world has exploded so much. They're like cops together.

I don't even understand what the narrative thread is anymore. I've been watching this show. I've been watching for years. And I love these characters, even if I don't completely understand what they're doing together. Yeah. And crucially,

I am not switching insurance companies based on anything that happens in these commercials. Well, that's a big point. of the commercials, right? Is that no one knows what they're actually doing and they're like,

they know how to get your attention. My son, if we go to like a restaurant, we go to a, BJ's or something and we're sitting there, he will kind of check in

on the sports or whatever happens to be on the TV because kids love TV. But the minute commercials come on, he's, we've lost him. He is so engaged

in the commercial. He has no idea what it's for. He has no idea with like what's giving going on. She's just like staring at a campfire. He can't help himself. It's just like he's riveted by whatever formula they've put together in terms of cuts and timing that he can't look away. I had something click for me recently when our in-laws were staying with us.

And they watch a lot of news and they watch a lot of documentaries. And when something funny happened, either on our television or like something funny happened out in the world, my father-in-law was like, that's funny, like one of those progressive commercials. Like that is, if you're not watching sitcoms all the time, that's like your touchstone for comedy. And it's like, yeah, of course. He's not going to comedy shows. So like, where is he finding jokes? And it's like, yeah, it's because some of the best sketch comedians alive right now are doing progressive auto insurance commercials.

Yeah. Oh, wow. I'd like to talk about my dog Jackson a little bit. It snowed recently, which is not his fault. but it snowed about 10 inches, and I care so much about my dog that I shoveled out a little pathway from our back door into the lawn, so he had a little trail to get away from the house, to go to the bathroom if he wanted to, because I will do anything for this pup. And then it turned out the path effectively got him away from the house, but he wanted more room.

and so I dug out even more space so he had variety. I am telling you, I am giving my dog options for peeing because I don't want him to be bored with the limitations of just a small singular path. That is how much we care about our dogs, our pets, our family. We have a quick message from today's sponsor, the ASPCA Pet. health insurance program. Speaking of pets. Life with a pet is full of surprises.

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Soren, I'm going to present an ad to you as been served to me on Instagram and on my television because we watched their YouTube TV, an ad that I've seen 10,000 times. And one thing I'll say for this ad is that the conceit, the setting for it, is normal. It looks like two people in a podcast studio, which is a reasonable thing for an ad to do,

because if you're living on Instagram and TikTok, a lot of my feed is that. So much of what I look at are clips from, podcasts, two people in a room with a microphone, and things that look like clips from podcast that I don't actually know if they are or not. Some of them are ads and some of them are sketches. Yeah, Gabe brought this to our attention a while back, right? Where he was like, all those, like, when you see something that's insightful or like inciting and kind of somebody saying something crazy and it looks like they're on a podcast, most of the time they're not

on a podcast at all. It's just designed for clicks. Correct. And it sort of lulls you into paying a little bit more attention in the way that like old FM radio commercials, if you were listening to like your morning zoo guys on your commute, sometimes a commercial would just try to slyly sound like it was part of a morning zoo. Like you would just be dropped in the middle of like two people casually talking. I was like, ah, you have a good weekend. Yeah, I had a great weekend. You know, my wife did the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's why we actually never agree on dinner, but we agreed on DoorDash. Isn't that crazy? And I'm like, ah, fuck. I'm listening to to a Dorydash commercial.

I had no idea. And that's what these, like, the fake podcast things try to do because they know, like, your brain might tune out if you're watching a commercial. But if you think you're watching two people having a conversation,

you're more inclined to lean in. So this commercial that I'm going to show you, I've seen it a thousand times. I've said 10,000 times. And it looks like a fake podcast. And we're going to, we're going to play it now. And you're going to watch it.

for I hope the first time. Great. And we're going to talk about it. We're going to pause it. Hit commercial number one, Gabe, please. It happens if my husband starts Tai Chi tomorrow. How old is your husband? He is 56.

Oh, perfect. Yeah. By the end of September, you won't even recognize him. Soren, describe what you've just seen. Okay. It's a woman who is dressed for a job interview. It looks like, she's like she's where she looks nice, but she looks like too nice for even.

in most jobs. And then there's a guy who is, I want to say naked on the other side of the table, absolutely shredded, looks to be about 50 years old with a man, with a man bun,

gray hair and a man bun, and he is completely naked. Yeah, we can confirm that he is shirtless. He is an absolutely yoked, shirtless Asian man. There are a couple of, there are a couple of subtle cues that this is AI.

When they cut to a wide shirt, shot, you can see there's a window behind them that completely breaks in half. Like the AI machinery just couldn't handle that. That's if you're paying attention and looking for clues that it's AI. The biggest clue is probably that in the... The AI was clearly told do this in a style of a podcast where two people are talking into microphones. And they nailed that part, ignoring the fact that... This specific genre of podcast where a woman asks for fitness advice to a shirtless Asian man on behalf of her husband, that doesn't exist.

No. There is no podcast where you interview a fitness expert for like tips for your husband. Yeah. It's also, I'm noticing now, they have microphones in front of them. The cords don't leave the microphone in any way. They are in a gorgeous room. And my tip, my red flag for AI is always the lighting, right? Yeah.

The lighting is way, it's got this like that real stink of AI all over it in terms of the shading. Gabe, keep playing. But what if he hasn't worked out in years? That's even better. Yeah. Tai Chi was built for men 40 plus. Isn't the gym better? After 40, the gym breaks you.

Tai Chi heals your body and soul. and makes you live longer. So this is a commercial that is trying to trick you into thinking, it's a natural conversation about Tai Chi. And like, I know that all commercials are a little bit of a fake world. But it's, they're not even

trying to convince you that this could be real. Because again, what is the reality of this world? The premise is that this woman went on this show to ask softball gimmee questions about her husband again not even like

her not even like how does a person just like my husband is over 40 and he wants to get in shape what can you tell me oh you got to do Tai Chi isn't the gym better

yeah hey fantastic question no the gym is in fact not better than the thing I'm selling yeah and this guy okay as somebody who goes to a gym this guy

would never I mean this is also a conceit of commercials but this guy would never have gotten to look like this doing Tai Chi this is not the result of Tai Chi that we're seeing absolutely not we're going to

there's one more part of this commercial if you're again I'm not convinced that it's AI I want to see if you if this Bums you at all. This commercial. Does he need any equipment?

No, body is enough to build a strong physique and clear mind. Do you notice that he suddenly has an accent? Yeah. In fact, I thought, did I just not notice this before? Nope. That's AI doing its absolute best with whatever prompt it was fed to give this specific thing. Oh, my God. I'm hung up on it only because I saw.

it so many times. It was, it took over my entire holiday season. Every time I turned on anything. And I really felt, at first it felt like targeted attack because I turned 40 this year.

And it's like, am I now only getting ads about how to stay fit in my fucking 50s? Is this my life? And then I thought it was just truly an insane spend on these ads because they were unrelenting, they were everywhere.

I googled around, a lot of people are seeing them. And maybe if it was just this commercial that I was seeing over and over again, I would have been able to move on with my life. I would have been mad that it was AI, but I would have just, like, move past it. But then another one started getting fed to me.

And as crazy as the premise of this podcast, this ad is, where a woman interviews a martial arts expert about how to get her husband in shape. The second installment, strange credulity, even further, because I could almost make an argument for this one that it is designed for men because a man watching this commercial

can see a beautiful woman asking a strong man, how do I get my husband to look like you? I can see that as being a motivator to a man watching the commercial at home who's thinking like, oh, that's a beautiful woman. I kind of want a beautiful women, a woman in my life. And it seems like beautiful women want strong jacked men. So I'm sold.

I'm going to buy whatever this product is. The second commercial. Sorry, we just remember really quickly. This commercially you've watched a million times. Is it by the Tai Chi Council? What is this actually a commercial for? Soren. We're going to get into it.

Okay. All right. But first I want to show you the next commercial. Okay. How long it takes a beginner like my dad to go from beer belly to get ripped again with Tai Chi. How old is your father? He is 56. Oh, perfect.

By the end of November, you won't even recognize him. Oh, it's the same. Describe to our listeners what you're looking at. Okay. Okay. Different background. Now we're in a sound booth type studio, something a little bit more. intimate. It still has the visual language of a podcast.

A podcast, absolutely. But it is a, yes, they have different types of mics. It is now a young girl talking to a ripped naked man, a different ripped Asian naked man. That's correct. This is the premise of this commercial is a teen girl is asking a shirtless older Asian man for fitnesses. advice for her father, which is a genre of thing that doesn't exist. Will never exist? No, could never exist. This couldn't be anything. And I don't want to gloss over the fact that the sentence, the opening line of this podcast, how long it takes for a beginner like my dad to go from beer belly to get ripped again with Tai Chi.

that is one of the most AI sentences I've ever seen in my life. It's so clearly run through different translators back and forth that it doesn't, and your brain almost doesn't catch it because you're watching a 13-year-old girl talk to a shirtless, possibly naked adult man. And because it's AI, her eyes aren't focusing on anything that your brain doesn't even have time to stop and go like, wait, what was that? She's asking how... What was the sentence structure?

She's asking how her dad goes from beer belly to get ripped? She's asking how long it takes her dad to go from beer belly to get ripped? Yeah. Let's continue with the commercial. Oh, perfect. By the end of November, you won't even recognize it. Same dialogue. Yes.

100%. Same exact dialogue. But what if he hasn't worked out in years? That's even better. Tai Chi was built for men 40 plus. Aren't Jim's better? Isn't the gym better after 40? The gym breaks you.

Jim breaks you. Tai Chi will make you feel better and lose weight faster than in your 20s. Does he need any equipment? No, his body is enough. Okay, I have a question. What are we doing here? Yeah. If you've been putting off getting life insurance, there's no better time to do it than right now. Most importantly, because you are, from what I understand, still alive.

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Yeah. I assume that what that translates to is, how does he end up looking like you? Yes. Which is also maybe the mistake I meant on the first one. And now that I'm actually listening to the commercials, this is like a weight loss thing. Tai Chi is weight loss. Not as let's get fucking shredded like these two guys.

It's just how do you lose weight using Tai Chi? Well, in the commercial, they seem to boast that you can get ripped. You can lose weight and clear your mind. It's good for the mind and the body and the soul. There are some other commercials for the same company that we won't show today that are just talking about an exercise cults. Tai Chi walking specifically. I do think it's important for where your heads are right now to let the end of this commercial play out.

Okay, sorry, yeah, please go. The last thing that he says. Okay, just do it for nine minutes a day and see your body feel younger. So what's the first step? Click the link, get the app, and start tomorrow. Why do they slide in the accent every once in a while? The accent, of course, is an insane move,

but nine minutes a day, day is what this. So this is a workout plan that has so far not mentioned diet or any other lifestyle changes. But it is believed that just in a few months you will lose your beer belly and get ripped by doing an activity for nine minutes a day. And Soren, you and I know that there is truly, man, do I want to say there's nothing you. you can do for nine minutes a day that will change your life. I think I might think that. Yeah.

Maybe reading for nine minutes a day, but even then. No. I don't know. I think nine minutes is not enough to do anything, even if you do it every day. But that's what this ad boasts. You, your little girl, your dad will stop being such a fat fucking embarrassment. And for just nine minutes a day, all he has to do. is download this app.

Oh, man. And so, first of all, I'm looking at the, now the end of this. The only text is a period is tap the link. And then it's got two arrows, which I'm pretty confident are the Barry's fitness logo upside down. That's probably fair. And I did not, because I was so absorbed in the accent, I missed that he had said that you could do this in only nine minutes. a day, which is outstanding. I think maybe if you did, I mean, maybe if you did like wall sits or you did, every time

that you went to the bathroom, you then did pull-ups afterwards. That could, eventually by the end of the day, you might have worked out for nine minutes doing pull-ups. Maybe that would be helpful. But you, doing Tai Chi for nine minutes a day will. Doing anything new for nine minutes a day, I don't think is going to change you. I, and as someone who was working out over. 40 and doing more than I've ever done in my life.

Yeah. Nine minutes a day is not going to do it. An hour a day is barely fucking doing it. But I got really curious about these commercials, not because I thought it was a good product or a good ad. I just fell down a rabbit hole because I was like, this is so AI. What is this? And so I went to their website just to see what it was all about.

and there's a whole like, there's a sleek interface, and there's a survey you fill out, you put in your age, male or female, if you've ever done Tai Chi before, your goal, I selected weight loss, chose the body that you want. One of the few sizes. They pointed out like a bunch of shirtless bodies, and they're like, which one of these do you want?

I'll take that one. I'll take that one. It's a few sizes smaller, and it's fit and athletic. Did the survey, and they believed that I could lose 10 pounds in one month and one week. Wow. The way it works is they send you a customized workout plan that you pay for. You don't get to see a single thing about this until you give your credit card information, which I was not going to do. I didn't even sign up with my real email. I created a burner email account, and immediately my burner email notified me that the email service was protecting me from a tracker, which isn't necessarily nefarious.

It's a thing that lets the sender know if you've opened the mail. And the non-tracker email that they non-tracked email was standard. It was just like, good news, you're almost there, sign up with a credit card, and we'll send you your plan. And I didn't want to sign up because I didn't want this plan. How much does it cost? They said for one week plan, they would send me a plan for one week that cost $5. And for 1899, a 12-week plan. you just have to pay for it if you want to see it.

And I was not going to do that. I especially, I never really wanted to see the plan. I just had a few questions that I wanted answered about this commercial. The nature of this AI commercial. And so from the burner, I emailed them. Hi, my name is Daniel. I'm a fitness enthusiast and podcaster with the show Quick Question. All true.

I was curious about an ad for. Tai Chi walking I came across with a link to the ad, would you be able to tell me what company produced the ad or given that it's an AI ad, what prompt was fed into the AI to create it? Thank you. Because I thought, I needed to know how we got to 13-year-old girl talking to shirtless man about how her dad loses beer gut

and gets Tai Chi ripped again. Soren they responded, would you please read the first response? Yes, this says, hello, Daniel. Thanks for reaching out. and for your interest. I'm happy to clarify this for you. The Tai Chi walking ad, you came across,

is associated with Mad Muscles, a fitness app that offers guided workout programs designed for different goals, experienced levels, and physical needs. Within the Mad Muscles app, the Tai Chi-inspired walking and similar mindful workouts are presented as part of a broader fitness ecosystem

that may also include strength training, flexibility work, and optional nutritional guidance. All personalized based on user, your input. At Mad Muscles, we are dedicated to helping you achieve your fitness goals and develop healthy eating habits with a personalized plan tailored to your preferences. Our comprehensive approach ensures that you receive the support and resources you need every step of the way. Once you activate your account on our website, you will gain access to our app, which offers

a range of benefits to enhance your fitness journey. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us at any time. Have a wonderful day. Regards Elsa, MadMussels team. Now, this was frustrating because it didn't answer my question. No, it did not. Was written by AI? It seemed like it was written by AI. So I responded, hi, Elsa. Thanks so much for replying, though I don't believe my question was actually answered.

I'm in the process of signing up for Mad Muscle. My question was about the advertisement itself. What company produced the ad and what was the prompt or prompts that went into its creation, all my best, Daniel? And Elsa got back to me, Soren. Would you mind please reading that? Hello, Daniel. Thank you for reaching back to us. Fuck. Okay.

Thank you for clarifying. And I'm really sorry for the confusion earlier. I appreciate your patience. And you're absolutely right to want a clear answer here. Your question relates specifically to the creation and production of our advertisements. This area falls under the responsibility of our marketing department, and we do not have access to the detailed information you're requesting. As a result, we're not able to provide further clarification on this topic from the support side. We appreciate your understanding that different teams handle different.

aspects of our operations. If you have any questions regarding the product itself, pricing, or account creating matters, will be happy to assist. Wish you a wonderful day. Regards Elsa. This is AI. I'm fully convinced this is AI because they did the- That's exactly how AI responds when you get mad at it.

They do the AI thing where they restate your question for you to show that they've been listening. And so I reached out again and I said, thank you for your response. Could you please put me in touch with someone from your marketing department? a human being preferably. No disrespect. Now notice that I said no disrespect. No disrespect, but I have a strong feeling you are a language learning machine or chatbot and not a real person.

I'd love to get someone on the phone. Best, Daniel. Yeah. Yeah, you did the turning test on there. Okay, here's what she says. Dear Daniel, thank you for your message and for sharing your concern. Wait, is that exactly the same? Thank you for reaching back out to us.

No. Okay. I'd like to clarify that you are currently communicating with a real person from our customer support team. I'm sorry if my previous responses came across as robotic. That certainly wasn't my intention. We've carefully reviewed your request and genuinely appreciate you taking the time to reach out.

At the same time, I should let you know that I'm part of customer support, and unfortunately, I'm not able to share direct contact details for our marketing department. At the moment, we don't offer support, and all assistance is handled via written communication. So I felt a little bit bad, but I also still kind of... Because you thought this was a person now? Do you...

Right. Well, canonically, it's a person. Do you think it's a person? No, absolutely not. This is not a person's response. No. I got back. Thank you, Elsa, for filling me in, and I'm sorry for choosing you of being a robot. Your company utilized to AI in their ads,

so you can forgive me for assuming they might also rely on machine learning for their customer support, as many modern companies do. But you're a human being, and I think that's great. As far as signing up goes, I fill out the questionnaire on the website. The only thing I'll have to do is give my credit card information and sign up.

I put that on hold because the AI commercials from your marketing department gave me pause, and now I am more than a little concerned that I can't find any information about these commercials. I have a few reasonable questions about the commercials and the claims made in them. And once those get cleared up to my satisfaction, I would be more open to complete the sign-up process, all my very best fellow human Daniel. Daniel, you're arguing with a robot about commercials you don't actually care about. and tempting them with the possibility that maybe you would put in your credit card if you could just find out, I don't know what your end game is. You know that the commercials are AI.

Yeah, I want to know. You want them to admit their commercials are AI? No, I know they're AI. There's a disclaimer on the ads that said that they're AI. I wanted to know what prompt was fed in to generate a commercial like that. It got me very curious. Like, I wasn't making up that part. I wanted to know, like, hey, how did you, how did you?

how did you do this? If this is the future of commercials, if commercials want to deprive my fellow writers of jobs, if AI commercials want to make it so, the actors lose out, the directors lose out, the cinematographers,

the sound operators, the makeup people, the drivers, the fucking caterers, the craft services people, if they're going to destroy all those jobs show me how you're doing it

and show that you're not being lazy about it not that I think that there's a good way to eliminate a million jobs but just like try a little bit fucking harder have some respect for us a little bit. Okay and you also want to know why what yeah was the prompt

hey show me a little let's have a little girl asking somebody about this yeah why they chose this okay. As some of you may know we have got a baby on the way, not me and Soren, but me and my wife, my other Soren, were just about prepared for everything that we have. We've got diaper stations everywhere. We've got changing tables. We've got bibs. We've got blankets. We've got binkies. And you know what we don't want to do is we don't want to think about our meals. We are over it. Butcher Box is here to help us. They're helping us stay on track with premium protein and it's delivered right when we need it.

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We can keep reading the responses, but I think we can. can we can cut them there because the the long and short of it is after I accused Elsa, after I credibly accused Elsa of being a robot and Elsa said she's not a robot, I apologized and said I thought it was great that she's a human. I never speak to Elsa again. I get a response after that from someone named Lumina and I respond to Lumina to see if she could put me in charge with marketing. And instead of her replying, I get a response from someone named Gloria and she cannot get me in charge of anyone from marketing. And so I believe I have officially reached a dead end with my correspondence.

So I felt the wind dropping from my sales a bit. Not just because I couldn't find out the answer from them, but also it just seemed like, well, it's no longer entertaining to be, to talk to different robots. And you can see every robot from the Mad Muscles team in their email. They have a profile picture. And I got to say, it looks extremely AI. Every profile picture of everyone who emailed me is too professional, two stock photo model E.

And I just, even when it's a robot telling me, I think that I'm a real person, that I'm a real human being. they're still doing it in the AI way of like, I understand that you are aware that you were talking to a machine. I am not a machine. And I apologize. It was not my intention to sound robotic. Like, man, that's what a fucking robot would say. It's 100% what an AI would say.

So now I started to get worried about the company itself, that I couldn't get a person on the phone to talk to me about the commercials is not unreasonable. Like, I don't think, if someone tracked me down from last week tonight, and was like, I want to talk to, I didn't like a billboard that you guys ran, and I want to talk to the person in charge of billboard placement. I would also reasonably say, I don't have that person's contact info. And, P.S., get fucked.

I'm not going to connect you with anyone in our marketing department, because it's not my job to do that. So it's not weird that they wouldn't connect me with marketing. It is weird that I learned in this process that no communication is handled on the phone. There is no way to get a human being on the phone to speak to me. And I started doing a little bit of

Googling about this company and lo and behold came across some reviews from Reddit and Trust Pilot. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, great. Saying, it's a scam. They added me to a subscription and upsold me to $50 a meal plan

with $99 subscription with zero action on my part. Luckily, I paid on PayPal and saw the charges right away and was able to cancel and report them. If you have already bought in, you better check your payments. You might be paying $150 a month when you thought it was going to be an $1899 trial. Be aware, this is a scam site.

Another user said, total scam site. I purchased a $9 four-week trial and was hit with a $50 ad on. I immediately contacted them for a refund minutes after receiving an invoice, and they refused to refund the add-on cost of $50. It also comes with an automatic monthly subscription that you need to cancel, or they will keep charging you 100% scam. site. A report made to the Better Business Bureau, Soren, describes an identical experience with the app, concluding with this is not just a bad customer experience. This is a business model based on

confusion, misleading design, and forced upsells. They prey on people who just wanted to get healthy, only to trap them in a billing nightmare. I strongly urge others to avoid mad muscles, and I encourage the Better Business Bureau to document and investigate this pattern. Okay. All right. I don't totally feel bad for these people, by the way. The people who are tricked by an ad like this. First of all, anybody who clicks on a single ad on social media, like in your reels and Facebook on Twitter or whatever, X, you're a fucking idiot.

Don't do that. Don't ever click on an ad on those. There was a story I came across several years ago about someone who ended up giving a, lot of money to someone purporting to be a fortune teller or a palm reader or something. And this person was giving them like truly thousands of dollars and then tried to sue them when they didn't get the results that they wanted, like a future didn't, like prophecy didn't come true or they were supposed to do something that, that whatever the, they felt that they

did not get what they owed, they were sold a false bill of goods. and I looked at the court case because this is the kind of person I am and the name of the person who scammed them her last name was you want a witch as in you want a witch

and it's like a fortune teller last name you want a witch and I felt bad that this person gave Anita you want a witch $20,000 but a part of me was like if they didn't give this fake fortune teller $20,000, they would have given someone else $20,000.

Some people are always going to be scammed, and that sucks. That doesn't mean we should be a country of scammers, which is sometimes how it feels. And like the whole AI business feels like scammers, scamming other scammers. But the reason I get mad at people who fall for this kind of thing is that it's creating the circumstances in which these things continue to work on that site. So, like, I'm sick of looking at these types of things. If it doesn't work for everyone, they would stop doing it. But because it works, I have to look at this every single time.

Because it works, I can't use my phone as a real phone because I get 25 other calls a day from somebody who's trying to steal money. Like, I want these things to stop working. And the only way it's going to stop working is if everyone can just get a little bit of social media literacy, of, like, technology literacy and not deal. would not fall for these? I agree with you. I think it's getting harder

to keep up with social media and technology literacy. I think I can spot a scam relatively well. I think they're making it immediately harder to spot scams. I don't think they hold up to scrutiny

really at all. Again, you can see in the ad where like the panel breaks in the background, his accent changes. It's a little girl asking about her father's beer belly. But if something is just coming across your feed and your only real takeaway is these are two people talking about losing belly fat

in a cheap way that doesn't involve the gym, which I hate, and it's just an app that I can do on my phone and it's nine minutes a day, I think there are some people who don't, they, like how long did it take to reach national literacy about Nigerian Prince email scams? That took a long time. It took a long time for the targets of those scams to realize exactly what was going on.

We have a thousand different versions of Nigerian prints email scams, new ones every day. Yeah. Done by AI companies that are iterating on things that have. have worked and they, they are more effective than the Nigerian email fishing scam because it's not a guy. It's a company that is a million guys sending a million emails to a million people or advertising. The Nigerian Prince thing didn't advertise. It didn't show up right after a guy co commercial.

It was a thing that showed up in your email. So I could at least then kids could tell their parents, hey, if anyone that you don't know, emails you, it's a scam. We don't have that anymore. We don't have the ability to say like all apps are scams, all fitness apps are scams. We just, because the scams are happening too quickly. And this one, there's a lot of it. I dug in a little bit more and there's a company that that estimates approximately 18,000 AI generated advertisements for Tai Chi walking or Mad Muscles came across YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms. I don't know if that's a real number or not. It feels real. Yeah. And in some further digging, we still don't, it's not publicly known what AI platform or

service was used. It is generally believed to still be a scam. What else is my reporting turn out? Oh, one of the things that they flag on the scam is how hard it is to get a refund. And if you go to the Mad Muscles website, there are terms of service. You get a refund only if you have adhered to the plan for at least 14 days in a row. Your refund request should include supporting materials to demonstrate your compliance. Specifically, please provide us with a screen video or screenshots of your workout plan history indicating your personal progress. For the sake of clarity, the money-back guarantee does not apply to the following cases.

Personal reasons, i.e., you don't like the product. It did not meet your expectations, et cetera. Financial reasons. You did not expect that you will be charged that the trial will be charged, that the trial be converted into subscription, that the subscription will automatically renew or that the services are paid, etc. If you thought the hardest thing about the canceling process was that you would need to show proof that you tried it for two weeks. Even that, if you clear that bar, it doesn't matter because you're still not allowed to cancel it if you didn't like it or it costs money.

That's amazing that this is, and it's not actually amazing to me that this is all written in AI, by the way. This is like, this is nice. The company is run by people who are not native English speakers. So like that makes total sense that you would choose to do AI for every single component of it, your customer service, everything. I think the most charitable reads that the company is based somewhere where English isn't the first language. And it is, in fact, registered to Cyprus. That's where they say that they're based. And that would make sense if they're just translating things back and forth. Mad Musles is according to Wikipedia, founded by a couple of...

company called Amos Apps. Oh, Mad Muscles isn't even the parent company. No, the parent company is Amos Apps, a company focusing on AI-driven wellness solutions, personalized training, nutrition plans. That's the one that's based in Cyprus. This comes from Wikipedia. I think a thing that is a little bit concerning is that you can't publish something on Wikipedia without sources.

Otherwise, the Wikipedia editors will delete it. All of the sources. on the Wikipedia for Mad Muscles and for Amos apps comes from different press releases. There are no like fast company announcing a new company. It's just a press release that like it can get published on Yahoo, but if you paid, you could get a press release published on Yahoo. And then you can get that link to Wikipedia to make you seem like you're a legitimate company.

Got me concerned, Soren. That it's not just mad muscles making apps with AI and having an email correspondence with AI. I am now so insane that I don't know if there's anyone working at any of these sites, any of these companies at all. Amos Apps has a website. It is described as a team of professionals that make health and wellness mobile applications. They launched in 2017, and in 2018, created the YouTube channel, ASSA,

and according to their website, made it profitable in three months. We could talk about ASSA in a minute, but shortly after they made a YouTube channel, they pivoted to mostly health and fitness apps like Mad Muscles, which is where we are today. Another one of their apps is Unameel, an AI-powered fasting app, which not for nothing. Everything pulls from a quick exploration reveals a story very similar to Mad Muscles, i.e. lots of ads promising a healthier you, leading to an attractive landing page asking you to fill out a quick survey, which they used to create a personalized diet plan for you that is only accessible behind a paywall. All of this before ultimately, resulting in users complaining about surprise upshar.

and a difficult time canceling subscriptions and getting customer support. The YouTube channel, OSA, Asa, is, I tooled around a little bit. It's like a, this is a curveball of sorts. It's a celebrity and pop culture focused YouTube channel. Fucking what? And if it's not AI generated, it's a remarkable facsimile. The channel description, Asa is the bottomless well of stories about the celebs you love or love to hate.

Here you'll find everything to know about the cast of the shows and movies you watch all the time. From the struggles they face out auditions to the strict rules they follow while shooting. From relationships on set to their real life partners,

will keep you up to date with all the fresh drops from Netflix, Amazon, and HBO, as well as remind you of good old friends how I met your mother and the Big Bang Theory. Yeah. This...

Go ahead. I was just going to say that in hearing that and like hearing their descriptions and those descriptions that go on and on, but they say the exact same framing for the sentence. From this to this to this to this, from this to this to this to this, from this to this to this,

to this. That is something we used to do when we worked at demand media. And what you're doing there is you're creating words that are specific to be searched. Like that's like a real, that's the whole goal in your metadata, which is like the brief description you can give of what the fuck people are going to be clicking on. You're just throwing in as many key words as you possibly can, but we'll still try. to make it sound like a real traditional sentence. Soren, I'm so glad you brought up demand media. It's where we got our start. We were both at Cracked, and demand media was our parent company.

There was pressure from demand, because their big thing at the time was gaming the Google algorithm. They found what people were searching for, and whatever was the most Google thing, their algorithm would generate a bunch of titles. And then their roster of... writers, the demand media writers, would write articles based on those titles. It's something that's still happening today. It's why one of the most prevalent articles you will ever see on the internet is articles under the search term, what time is the Super Bowl? It's because a lot of people are

searching for that. And so algorithms like the one at demand media know that people want that. And so they seeded those titles to writers. So writers could write. articles that answer that question, put those articles on the internet, get them searchable on Google, and place an ad on those pages. Yeah. That's what demand was doing, was getting a bunch of people to write shitty articles that fulfilled basic search engine optimization prompts. So people could click on the thing that, like, oh, I want to know what time the Super Bowl is.

I'm going to click on this article that's like poorly written and it's long. And it might be not even right. Maybe not even right. And there was a bunch of ads on it. And it just made a less reliable internet. And people at the time got very mad that their internet was full of EHOW articles with unreliable information. We did everything right. People got mad.

Google changed its algorithm to punish companies like demand media for this specific practice. And it was devastating for our parent company, but seen at the time as a wind. for the internet. And it made everyone at demand media pivot to what cracked.com was doing because we were still having human beings write articles based on what we thought would be good, not responding to an algorithm. The rest of demand was like, maybe we should start doing what cracked is doing because that crack doesn't crumble when Google changes its algorithm. If the content is good, people keep coming back. Something has changed between now and then. The internet is back to being e-how, demand media,

SEO, algorithm-style articles. And now it's getting even worse because you're not even paying what demand would do, demand would pay. I don't know, writers. They'd pay five cents a word to writers to write what time is a Super Bowl on. $10 an article to write articles titled

What Time is the Super Bowl? What channel is the Super Bowl? Now AI is writing those articles itself based on what you're searching for. and it seems like they're making full ads based on what they think people are searching for. This YouTube channel seems there might be a person doing the voiceover and there might be a person

editing the videos on Asa, the film channel that launched Amos' business, there might be a person. It doesn't sound like it. I can't prove that it's AI. The voice sounds like AI. The editing could be AI. and it's

editorially driven by search engine optimization. That's why they have friends and how I met your mother and the office in their metadata and their descriptions because people are constantly searching for those things.

It is a channel that is putting out nothing but fucking slop based on what people are searching for. I, it should come as no surprise, reached out to Amos Apps to ask them about the prompt for the AI Tai Chi walking ad and it should come as no surprise

that they didn't even bother to respond to me. Which is, we're at our conclusion now, Soren, which is, I don't know why I did this. I strongly suspect, based on the evidence, which the evidence is, three apps that are designed to be scams that are impossible to cancel. They just get your credit card information.

they're all running AI powered ads with no customer service behind them all under the umbrella of a parent company with a website that reads like it was written by AI and a YouTube channel that seems powered by AI I'm trying to find one human being from any of these companies that will talk to me

and I know they don't need to because I'm just a guy I'm not even a fucking journalist, I'm just a guy but I can't find a single real human being who works at any of these companies that is collecting money. And I just want to know,

is anyone real? Or is this somehow an AI scam of perpetual motion? It's AI all the way down. But then who gets the money? There's one person probably who set it up. But they wrote whatever the code was that was responsible for like, creating these ads even.

That's written by AI too. It's somebody who just was like, maybe not even, doesn't even know how to write code and like was just like, isn't even putting in the prompts even. Like they're just like, I need commercials for this.

And I need, I need, I need a customer service app rep. And I need this. And they're putting all that in. And then they are making whatever amount of money it is from people who don't realize that this is a scam

every single day. And then these people get on, then these people are creating their own ads of themselves being like, these are all the books that I have in my garage. If you want to get the grind set in my lifestyle and you want to make over a million dollars, then this is how you got to do it. Yeah. I think it's those guys all the way down. It's Ty Lopez for sure. That's the guy you were referencing.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm doing this as, well, I'm doing it because I put the work in and I want someone to show the work. that I put into a thing. I'm really, thank you for doing it, by the way. I'm very impressed with the amount of work that you did in trying to dig into this. And the, I mean,

it did what we used to make when I say we. I mean, this company to main media, what they used to make was, was slop before slop was this bad. Like, what they made was their most popular article was something called how to boil an egg. And it was like,

everybody's searching that. So like, how do we capture those people? How do we capture that audience? We could put ads next to telling them how to make boil an, oil and egg. And so they created an algorithm that they fucking named Cassandra. I'll get to that in a second.

We'll put a pet of Cassandra. But they created an app, an algorithm that would determine how much an article was worth. How much you could, how many times that was actually being searched, how many times you can anticipate it being clicked on. And if you put an ad on that, how much you would get back year over year. And the app, like the algorithm was working. for a very brief time where they were like, oh, look, you could do this and you can, and then there's going to be all kinds of different ways

that people are going to search it, because they don't use a uniform phrasing. They don't just say how to boil an egg. They say, how do I boil an egg? How does one boil an egg? How? Boil egg. Boil egg, how? Like that kind of stuff.

So now they're creating articles that are like a little bit different for each one of those. And so at the time, we were watching this happen. We're like, this is the end of the internet. Like, we're killing the internet. And they're like, but we're going to get rich. I mean, they're never explicitly saying that, but they, that's what the thought process was.

And then they bailed. But they, if you have somebody who's doing that, you're like, this is the end. This has got to be the bottom. And then, and then I think what you're finding, Daniel, is that there maybe is no bottom. That everything can always, nothing's ever so, so terrible that you can't sink even lower. Yeah. It's, it's wild that, that this is quietly. become a fight that has dominated both of our careers coming from early web content publishing

where all the pressure from outside was, hey, we like what you're doing at cracked. People are reading this thing. How can we do it faster and cheaper and more of it? And we're like, well, you just can't. You can't do it and it still be good. And they're like, well, what if we remove the good part? And we're going to do it. That was always the question.

So, yeah, the fight that we always had to have at Cracked versus the rest of this company that had like 20 websites and was like, why aren't you doing everything like us? And then like that other piece of the side of the website fell apart. And they're like, how do we do things like Cracked? Is that they were relying on search. So they're relying on somebody already looking for something. They already have in their head what they want. The difference between that and Cracked is that Cracked is a website that's an entertainment-based website. So they don't know what they want yet.

And you're fucking giving it to it to. them. So they come to you because they're like, what do I want today, correct? Oh, I didn't even have any idea that Leonardo da Vinci tried to steal a river. That's fucking great. And so they didn't, they don't know what they want yet. And so like you can't apply the same model to both. And they never once understood that. Cassandra, the algorithm, wasn't telling anyone that the internet would love an article about shared universes in commercials, about blue period blood or or drugs. driving by yourself on a road. Cassandra wasn't telling us that. You needed a human. You needed, you needed Soren, who has been reading and writing for his entire life and generating ideas. You needed him to talk to me, a professional editor at the comedy website to say, yes, I think

this is a good idea. I don't think I needed to give any feedback on it other than, yes, do it. You still needed my bosses to look at it. You needed a copy editor to go through it. You needed someone from our graphics department named Brandel to go through and add images and captions. You needed all of these people to get an article that went fucking viral and didn't piss people off like how to boil an egg.com. You needed all these people. And our bosses were like, but we want to do it with fewer people.

And they did that successfully for a while until they were punished. And instead of learning any lessons, what people took away from that was, so that's what happened when you did it with fewer people. what about doing it with no people? No people. The ultimate goal is to make things so cheap that eventually you don't have to pay anyone to do any jobs ever. Yeah, it was very shitty.

I want to go back to Cassandra really quickly before we finish here. Just say, Cassandra in Greek mythology, is a woman who was cursed with foresight that no one would ever believe. She was a woman who... She could see the future. And she was right every single time

and every single time, everyone was like, nah, that can't be right. That's so awesome. Thank you for joining us on this weird episode, everybody. Wow, Dan, great work. I like commercials. these ads drove me crazy. I think

probably the government or the better business bureau or whatever shouldn't allow companies that have one or zero humans to design fake fitness apps built to trick people

into giving them money. I don't think they should be allowed to do that, even if they spend enough money to create 18 thousand ads. Even if they give all that money to Google,

they still shouldn't be allowed to advertise a fucking scam. Yeah. The nice thing is that this is the best it will ever be. It's only going to get worse from here. It's just going to get worse. If any of my listeners work for

mad muscles or Amos apps, I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love for it to be like a hardworking entrepreneur in Cyprus who is like I'm doing my best to scam everyone? How is I going to make it better? Knowing that it's AI scamming everyone or people.

If there's like a person in Cyprus who is like, I truly did, I came up with a nine minute way to get ripped after 40. I just don't know how to get it out to the world. All right. Thanks. Bye. What's your favorite? How did you get? If there's an answer, they're gonna find it. I think you'll have a great time, yeah.