Embracing AI Wellness: Navigating Mental Resilience and Personal Growth in the Face of Societal Pressures with Reuben Spath

Join us for an enlightening conversation with the remarkable Reuben Spath, an Ironman athlete and a visionary in AI technology. Reuben Spath shares his personal journey from the grueling demands of endurance sports to pioneering the AI wellness app, Macromate. Discover how his experiences in training during the challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic shaped his understanding of mental resilience, and how this inspired him to create a tool that provides unwavering support for men facing societal pressures and personal health challenges. This episode promises to offer insights into how technology and mental wellness intersect, creating a path for consistent personal growth without fear of judgment.

In our discussion, Reuben Spath takes us through a landscape where AI is set to revolutionize health and wellness. We explore how innovations like Macromate can transform medical diagnostics and treatments, particularly for men hesitant to seek help. Reuben Spath’s story of building and selling a SaaS business amidst competing in demanding endurance races illustrates the essential role of community and loved ones in fostering resilience. Listen in to grasp the profound impact of AI on personal wellness and the inspiring tales of perseverance that highlight the importance of support systems in overcoming life's hurdles.

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Chapters

• 0:07 AI Wellness App for Men
• 15:24 AI's Impact on Health and Wellness

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome back to Mind Over Masculinity, the show where we redefine what strength, resilience and self-growth mean in a world that's constantly evolving. I'm your host, shavik, and today's episode is going to be electric. Yes, because I'm joined by someone who knows all about pushing the limits of the body and the mind, and now he is using the cutting edge tech to help you do the same as well. So meet Ruben Spath. So welcome to the show, Ruben.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Thank you, avik. Really happy to be here and hello everyone listening. Lovely to be involved with this.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Lovely, lovely. So, ruben, I'll quickly love to introduce you to all of our listeners. Dear listeners, ruben is the Ironman, endurance athlete, ai mastermind and the brain behind the revolutionary AI wellness app called PacroMate, ai wellness app called Blackromate. So Ruben has a master's in artificial intelligence, built and sold a SaaS business while still in college. Yeah, you heard it right Still in college. Yeah, and now he's creating a platform that could transform the way main tech charge of their health and the mental resilience. So we are going to dive into all of it, like endurance, sports, overcoming setbacks and what it takes to build groundbreaking tech, and why being strong isn't just about the muscles. It's all about the mind too. So buckle up, because this is going to be a ride. So welcome to the show again.

Speaker 2: 1:49

Thank you. Thank you, yeah, really happy to be here and looking forward to talking about everything to do with resilience and endurance.

Speaker 1: 1:57

Lovely lovely. So I'll quickly start with.

Speaker 2: 2:01

Like what inspired you to create AI app which is focusing on health and the well-being yeah, so I have had a long journey through endurance sports and overcoming difficulties and challenges, much like everyone else, and something that really digs deep and drives home. What I personally value is looking after your body and, to a certain degree, I would also say that people who do ultra long distance sports are not particularly mentally healthy, but I would say that it definitely grows a lot of resilience and this control over your ability to determine outcomes. So the effort you put in to get up every day and try and achieve what you've set out for yourself is massive and yeah it uh. The reason why I got into macromates and improving health and fitness is because I believe that there is a gap, and I think that artificial intelligence is going to be the tool that will help us bridge that gap, with a lot of people who are currently suffering right now, and I would love to help the world aim for bigger and better goals that's really great.

Speaker 1: 3:22

And um, also, um, like, you have combined ai with the holistic health goals. So a lot of men struggle with the long-term consistency, um, when it comes to health. So how does macromed especially, uh, tackling this issue?

Speaker 2: 3:43

yeah. So we've put a lot of effort into how so the artificial intelligence kind of works in two points and places. The first is utilizing and understanding a large database of information on food and nutrition, being able to generate meal plans for you. The other side of it is actually taking in your personal goals, your vision for the future, the things you want to achieve on a daily, weekly or much longer scale, and then constantly checking in with you to say, hey, look, you've done really well over the last week, or it was a really strong day for you.

Speaker 2: 4:24

It's, um, the second part of this AI piece, which is that support and encouragement which, if I'm completely honest with you, I don't think a lot of men find in their day-to-day lives. It's a, it's something that almost feels as though you don't get it unless you earn it, and I firmly believe that you should have support and be supported and then, with that support, you're able to achieve your goals. So the effort that we've put into supporting mental health and encouraging people towards being better is done in a healthy and mature and kind way, rather than saying healthy and mature and kind way, rather than saying you need to be better, you're not doing enough, you suck like that. That's not the way that men should be treated and I don't think that that's the way to encourage and improve upon men's mental health, which is massively important to me okay, that's, that's very true.

Speaker 1: 5:28

I mean, that's a powerful vision, I would say, and honestly it definitely resonates. So so many guys I know struggle because they they think that they need perfection, but maybe what they need is the right guidance at the right moment, without any kind of judgment. So that's very important.

Speaker 2: 5:47

Yes, yeah, yeah, and it's also the ability for people to start and do something. I feel like there's a lot of people who slow themselves down because they're not sure that it could be successful, so they choose to wait on it and hold on it, and then they're uncertain because what if they turn out to be a failure or anything like that? It's all quite limiting and I feel as though we, as men and as people, need to work together to kind of support us to achieve the things that we believe we can. And that's where I think artificial intelligence and macrame comes into play exactly, exactly, true.

Speaker 1: 6:31

So, like, one of the biggest issues men face isn't, uh, the lack of goals, but it's sticking to them. Yeah, exactly so why do you think that guys are so hesitant to seek help or use tools like macrame?

Speaker 2: 6:49

I would say and I'm potentially speaking from personal experience, but I'm the type of person that I will set these goals and are going on in your day to day.

Speaker 2: 7:02

It doesn't necessarily feel as though that you're making progress, supports and kind of refers back to how you've been over the week, how you've been over the month, and it takes into consideration that you are yourself growing and highlighting that you are becoming the person that you want to be, which is something that's often quite lost in translation.

Speaker 2: 7:47

When it comes to these things, which are mental health improvements, being able to see an assessment of like a good example would be weight. If you're trying to lose weight and you start from one weight and you go down to another and you will have a definitive numeric field which says we've gone from this weight to this way. We are either succeeding or we're failing at our goal, whereas when it comes to, like, mental health, there's no proper way to track that, and so we've put an effort to make sure that there is that consistent review and support from our tool that says hey, you've done really well over this last week. Uh, you've made massive strives to achieve x, just keep going. And I think being able to encourage that support and say you're getting there, it's just going to take a little bit more time is always going to be something that will kind of encourage people to come back to the tool and really help themselves become who they believe they can perfect.

Speaker 1: 8:46

That's really awesome. And um also like a lot of people hear that ai health app and they think great, another app to tell me I'm doing everything wrong. But but macromate focuses on holistic wellness and which is physical and mental, both. So how do you strike that balance between the tech and empathy, especially for men who are dealing with, um the mental health challenges?

Speaker 2: 9:17

yeah. So the way that we've integrated our ai is that it it covers your entire profile. So now you can limit it to specific, like just the food that you're recording, or you can include goals, you can include your journals, so it can actually take on that whole point of, let's just say, you've had a really bad week and everyone does. You have written into your journal. You've said like, hey look, uh, today's been a four out of ten and I didn't get much sleep last night and xyz.

Speaker 2: 9:51

And then you can kind of see that the food that you also ate, or maybe you had some more, you had some alcohol, you drunk too much, or there's that cross collaboration to say you potentially aren't feeling very good because, and because you're not feeling very good, you've gone into negative habits, which is like drinking or going to sleep late or just treating yourself poorly, and being able to address that the the physical act that you're doing versus the mental state are both incorporated, so being able to say you're feeling bad and then therefore you're making bad, bad decisions.

Speaker 2: 10:31

Maybe this has sprouted from this reason or this could potentially be the catalyst to why you've now done those other things.

Speaker 2: 10:39

So it's much like you said, taking a holistic view to say you were here, this potentially happened and caused an issue, and then that's led on to what has happened, happened here, and I think that that's a massively valuable tool because, uh, as a when I did my iron man, I spent a lot of time running and putting myself through the ringer, without even taking into consideration my mental health, my uh, energy levels. It was just setting that goal and going for it and having something that could potentially say well, maybe if you stopped exercising on Monday and Tuesday and you kind of had a rest, you potentially wouldn't have rolled your ankle on the Wednesday. Or if you had not gone out drinking on Saturday, you would potentially have felt significantly better on Sunday. Or it takes into that consideration the whole piece rather than just I didn't eat well and that's the reason why I'm putting on weight. It's it's more than that and we should start treating our mind and our body as two parts of a parcel that's interesting.

Speaker 1: 11:51

Yeah, yeah and uh like, what kind of personalized feedback can users expect?

Speaker 2: 11:59

it's massively. It's entirely personalized. So it takes into consideration, like I said, everything that you include inside the pro uh inside the platform, so your journaling, your goals, your food, your overall reviews, your health score. There's so much that it takes into consideration. You can expect it to be personalized to your health, your weight, height, gender, age, your climate, the amount of times you exercise per week. It's really we're trying to do our best to make it a whole picture rather than just a snippet of your life, and because that's truly what is important, okay and uh, I mean, do you think that ai has the potential to be a mirror for us, revealing the patterns that we can?

Speaker 2: 12:54

I don't know, we can't see about ourselves like self-sabotage or burnout cycles yeah, that's that's an incredibly good point and that's something that so part of our we we've introduced an AI coach as well, which will go on and kind of ask you questions about how you've acted over the week, things that are important to you. You then give feedback and it says well, this is what we've found out about you and this is what we think could potentially happen in the future. These are things that you should potentially try to improve on. This is something that you did really well. Well, and we've gone one step further and we've said tell me something that you think or you've identified about me that I wouldn't know or I wouldn't have considered.

Speaker 2: 13:46

And the beauty of artificial intelligence is and people say this all the time but it's effectively it's like a black box.

Speaker 2: 13:53

There is, there are things going on inside it that we don't particularly understand, and it is able to gain insights which we couldn't particularly see. So, having all of your uh, all of your personalized approach to life taken in, understood and then responded to in a clear and kind way, and then saying, hey look, I've noticed this about you that you potentially haven't seen in yourself. That could really help people by saying, well, maybe you're a little too hard on yourself and you've been down in the dumps recently because of a breakup and you need to start potentially looking after yourself or being kinder to yourself, things that you wouldn't necessarily think without that external feedback coming back so effectively. We're trying to make an ai that reflects yourself and sees the best in you, that helps you bring yourself to the levels you want to be, which is why we've called it macro mate your best mate yeah, and also like I love that, uh, you have used endurance sports as a way to build the mental resilience.

Speaker 1: 15:07

But uh, do you see parallels between training for something like an iron man and tackling big life challenges like building a business or recovering from the setbacks? Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah um.

Speaker 2: 15:24

So when I did my iron man, unfortunately during this it was all set for during COVID and because we all went into lockdown, there were delays on this. So the first one came. It was set to be in like September, I think, and we were still in lockdown. We then had a couple more delays. So every time I trained up for the Ironman, it um, the delay came and there was another setback, and another setback, and another setback, and something that I found to be quite powerful around that is that you can't necessarily control the external world, and being able to accommodate and continuously push towards an end goal, regardless of whether or not you know that that end goal is in sight, but being optimistic enough to continue towards it, I think is a massive, powerful insight to have and to approach life with okay, that's true, and um, so, uh like, what's the future of ai in health and wellness, especially for men?

Speaker 2: 16:37

oh, it's massive, it's. There is a lot of opportunity out there and the tools that are going to become available to us, uh, there are going to be things that will come out in the next two to three years that no one would have thought about even now and the future is going to be and I hope to say this with positivity but it's going to be very bright.

Speaker 2: 17:02

There have been tools that have been around since the early 2000s, like ibm, was watson, which was one of the first artificial intelligences to win against humans in chess, and then we had AlphaGo and all of that good stuff.

Speaker 2: 17:19

But what IBM Watson did in those early years is they actually trained an AI model to utilize to understand patterns within cancer patients and be able to highlight instinctively what their likelihood of having cancer is and what type of cancer would be, with significantly more accuracy and faster turnaround times than current doctors.

Speaker 2: 17:50

Now, the future of that is not necessarily that doctors are going to be replaced I don't think that that should ever be the case but the tools that they have available to them is going to be able to diagnose people with potential long-term illnesses and be able to step out in front of that and reduce the chances of that happening.

Speaker 2: 18:09

We're also going to be able to create larger sorry, new compounds as well, which could potentially be used as medical supplements or tools that will help people improve their health, which will increase their longevity in life. There are going to be advances in actual mechanical technologies which will allow for people to replace limbs and then potentially even replace internal organs so, for example, it could be lungs which allow you to breathe in much better capacity for people who have lung cancer, or being able to replace parts of your body that aren't actually working properly. Utilizing super advanced technologies as well as incorporating human ingenuity into it, I think there is going to be a massive overhaul over the next five to 10 years, where technology just makes these gigantic strides forward to help people deal with some of those day-in, day-out physical and mental illnesses which could potentially make society significantly better great.

Speaker 1: 19:25

So, uh, you have built and sold a sass business and further brutal endurance races, and now you are creating macrate, and it's already there. So what's a moment where you doubted yourself?

Speaker 2: 19:43

All the time. No, no, one of the hardest ones was recently during the 100 kilometer is. I got to about 70 kilometers in and my body had started aching, my limbs had started shaking and I was overly full but starving. But starve it because I don't know if you know this about um, long distance sports but your body starts consuming a bunch load of food but your stomach can't process it, so your body needs to find it elsewhere, which means you're effectively starving yourself whilst you're filling yourself your gut with as much food that will go in um. But I got to this point in the 72, around the 72, 75 mark, where I had realized that I still have a quarter of the way to go, and the pain that you feel, knowing that there's still so much more in the journey, and when you're exhausted you're starving. Everything's playing on on your nerves.

Speaker 2: 20:52

Not being able to persevere or not being able to see the end in sight, is massively challenging and I must admit that's kind of where I I found a lot of uh, love and support from my partner, anna. So 25 kilometers is about a checkpoint and so she'd been following me the entire track. And we get to the end around 75 kilometers, and Anna is there waiting at one of those checkpoints. I don't know. I feel like she could potentially see it on my face that I was struggling, but she didn't yeah, she didn't address it, she just was there to support me and say, hey, look, keep going. And I think that, along with a lot of sugary lollies, kept me going.

Speaker 2: 21:42

But there's always times in my journeys that I've been uncertain. But I have been able to take the support and love and admiration from my friends and family to help me push through. And I think, regardless of who you are, there are going to be people out there that will want the best for you and will want to see you succeed. And if you are able to surround yourself with people, with loved ones and people who care about the best for you, then I'm certain you'll be able to get through difficult challenges. Much like the iron man 100 kilometer timesheet selling a business, growing it. It's yeah, there's a. There's a great line, which is it's not about the journey, it's not about destination, it's about the people that you spend it with. So I think that's really important to take away from this.

Speaker 1: 22:38

That's lovely Really. I think a lot of guys listening can relate to that feeling of self-doubt, but, as you have shown, it's not about averting the doubt, but it's about kind of moving through it, using it as a fuel. So that's really great. So, ruben, that's really really incredible. And you have shown us that resilience isn't just about something you build on the race course, but it's something you bring into every part of life. So, and with Macromate, you are giving guys a tool to start winning that race for themselves. So, to everyone listening, if you're ready to take your health and mindset to the next level, check out Macromate and connect with Ruben online. And I mean as remember that progress isn't about perfection, but it's about showing up even when it is hard. So if you found value in this conversation, please share this episode, leave us a review and remember that masculinity isn't about just about the strength, it's about growth. And this is your host, avik, and I'll catch you soon in the next episode of Mind Over Masculinity. So till then, thank you so much.