Speaker 1: Well, I am recording. I'm Robert Evans. I was going
Speaker 1: to start this episode. I'm ashamed. Yeah, okay, Sophie Lichtman here,
Speaker 1: we just did a full five minutes of this podcast
Speaker 1: where an incredible opening with Robert who accused me of crimes,
Speaker 1: used my full legal name and uh mispronounced Caitlyn Drante,
Speaker 1: our fabulous guest last name sixteen times, and uh and
Speaker 1: and and and we don't have it for you because
Speaker 1: Robert wasn't recorded. Yeah, well, how do you feel? Look?
Speaker 1: I I think I am a hero and did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, don't ever change. But also you should. You
Speaker 1: should record it. I mean, let's get the opinion of
Speaker 1: our of our guests for today. Yeah, I just did
Speaker 1: I want it clear one time. Caitlyn durrant No, I
Speaker 1: don't know what you're having problems with. Good. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: You're being very mean to me. I said that, did
Speaker 1: not Sophie. This is not professional. Okay, we have a
Speaker 1: podcast to do. Can I apologize? How are you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm doing well? Thank you for asking? How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm good, Caitlin. You helped to host a podcast co
Speaker 1: host Some would say most would say a podcast called
Speaker 1: the Bechtel Cast, which is about Hollywood and movies and
Speaker 1: sexism and sexism and Hollywood movies. This is all true, yes,
Speaker 1: and we just we've found that there's there's no problem.
Speaker 1: There's no problem with sexism and Hollywood. It's a they're
Speaker 1: doing a great job. It's all good, baby, It's all good.
Speaker 1: That's what everybody says about Michael Bay And at unproblematic
Speaker 1: scene where he showed cut out laminated of Texas is
Speaker 1: Romeo and Juliet Law allowing adults to sleep with teenagers?
Speaker 1: Have you not seen that? I think it's the third Transformers,
Speaker 1: It might be the fourth, but there's one of the
Speaker 1: characters is like, he's an Australian race car driver and
Speaker 1: he's dating Mark Wahlberg's daughter who is seventeen, and he's
Speaker 1: like twenty something. And Mark Wahlberg is like, hey, that's illegal.
Speaker 1: You're my daughter is a child and you're an adult.
Speaker 1: And the kid pulls out a laminated copy of Texas
Speaker 1: Romeo and Juliet Law, and the camera centers on it
Speaker 1: and focuses for like several seconds, long enough for you
Speaker 1: to read the entirety of the law, Like it's very
Speaker 1: clearly Michael Baby and like, hey, you can children in Texas.
Speaker 1: It's a basically wow. It is. It's hard to say
Speaker 1: something's one of the creepiest moments in Hollywood history, but
Speaker 1: that that's got to hit the mark. That's in the
Speaker 1: running for that award. Yeah, holy crap, it's amazing. I
Speaker 1: hate that. Oh you'll have to watch that now because
Speaker 1: I need to hear Jamie loft Is have an aneurysm
Speaker 1: through a podcast. Well, we keep trying to get you
Speaker 1: on the show. You've never asked me on. Well, we
Speaker 1: we've lie, Lie, I don't believe I've ever been asked on.
Speaker 1: I've asked, Caitlin's asked, Jamie's asked. I've asked again Jamie's.
Speaker 1: I would never say no to Jamie or Caitlin. It's uh,
Speaker 1: I mean maybe you're I definitely say no to you sometimes.
Speaker 1: So like when you tell me to wake up at
Speaker 1: the ass crack of dawn, it could it could be.
Speaker 1: The movie we want you to do is the Hannah
Speaker 1: Montana movie. And maybe you've been reluctant to come on
Speaker 1: for that one Montana. Then great, we'll see you there
Speaker 1: for the Montana. The famous movie titled Montana I do
Speaker 1: love Montana. I am. I am assuming it is a
Speaker 1: sequel to The Hunt for Red October, where Sam Neil's
Speaker 1: character is resurrected by an archangel and becomes a farmer
Speaker 1: outside of Bozeman. Now my head canon. All right, so, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: Normally on the show, when someone comes in having a
Speaker 1: good day, it's our job to ruin it by telling
Speaker 1: him about how a bunch of babies got killed or molested,
Speaker 1: or how I don't know the world got poisoned or
Speaker 1: something horrible happened. But today we're gonna have a little
Speaker 1: bit more fun with it. Oh yeah, today, our bastard
Speaker 1: didn't kill anybody except for arguably maybe one baby. Well, okay, then, yeah,
Speaker 1: that it barely counts as a crime. Like by our standards,
Speaker 1: he's earned the Robert Evans Award for killing no more
Speaker 1: than one baby. Maybe potentially, Yeah, let's give this guy
Speaker 1: a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, I would. I would argue
Speaker 1: that he would have killed less babies than most people
Speaker 1: who have won Nobel Peace Prizes. That's that's that's definitely,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely true. Um, Caitlin, have you ever heard of
Speaker 1: Bernard McFadden, Bernard Berner, yeah, not Bernard, Bernard, Bernard, I
Speaker 1: mean at one Bernard, yeah, Bernar Um. Okay, well this
Speaker 1: is going to be a fun time because so obviously, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, when when we think about the apocalypse, right
Speaker 1: the end of days, there are a number of ways,
Speaker 1: like all the nukes could come like that red balloon scenario,
Speaker 1: I think is when people think a lot something like that,
Speaker 1: Aliens could come down asteroid. I think, based on the
Speaker 1: pandemic we've had, one of the likeliest ways the world
Speaker 1: might end involves fitness influencers. I think there's a pretty
Speaker 1: good chance that the end of the human race heavily
Speaker 1: involves wellness. Uh, the people who get famous promoting wellness. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that tracks to me. Yeah yeah, I don't think I
Speaker 1: need to like the labor that point. Now, the title
Speaker 1: fitness influencer today applies to just about anybody who like
Speaker 1: writes about health to a social media audience that's above
Speaker 1: a certain size, and studies consistently show that at best
Speaker 1: about one in tent of these people provide broadly accurate information.
Speaker 1: So about nine of health influencers are just lying to people, um,
Speaker 1: which is again why they're going to help end human civilization.
Speaker 1: We can currently trace a significant amount of COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: disinformation to what are currently called micro influencers. These are
Speaker 1: people with like about ten to a hundred thousand followers
Speaker 1: on apps like Instagram um, which counts as micro um
Speaker 1: and makeel really bad about my following. Then it's okay,
Speaker 1: because Caitlin, I feel confident saying in upwards of eight
Speaker 1: percent of theoretical so you have no role in ending civilization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I want the power with more to be able
Speaker 1: to if I wanted to. If I had more followers,
Speaker 1: it would be fun because Joe Rogan could snap his
Speaker 1: fingers and wipe out cities. Um. Also, yeah, boost my
Speaker 1: boost my following so that I can help and the
Speaker 1: world if I went into a micro influencer, because studies
Speaker 1: show that micro influencers are actually much more influential. I
Speaker 1: was just joking about Joe Rogan, but people with that
Speaker 1: kind of following are less influential than people with like
Speaker 1: the ten do d thousand follower range. One of the
Speaker 1: theories is that like it's a little more intimate, so
Speaker 1: people think maybe they're less trying to sell me stuff
Speaker 1: and more like my friend giving me health advice person
Speaker 1: was only you know, twelve thou followers is a little
Speaker 1: bit more relatable than someone with three point two million. Yeah, exactly, Um.
Speaker 1: And so at present time, I would argue that, like
Speaker 1: roughly a third of American industry is different kinds of
Speaker 1: fitness and health and wellness influencers. It feels like that's
Speaker 1: the most common job, or at least aspirational job that
Speaker 1: I see. Um. But it wasn't always this way. Before
Speaker 1: the social media age, fitness influencers were a mix of
Speaker 1: celebrities who parlayed their existing fame into workout videos um,
Speaker 1: and people who were primarily famous for either losing a
Speaker 1: bunch of weight or writing a best selling exercise book.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about people like Richard Simmons, Right. That's an
Speaker 1: early fitness influencer by most of our standards, right, Um,
Speaker 1: he's a good example of kind of the former he was.
Speaker 1: He famous, I believe, just because he lost a bunch
Speaker 1: of weight and then made videos teaching other people how
Speaker 1: to do it. Another early fitness influencer was a running
Speaker 1: guru named Jim fix Um, who stand up comedians in
Speaker 1: the nineties love to joke about because he died after
Speaker 1: a run UM. Now, perhaps the most toxic health influencer
Speaker 1: UM in the modern canon is Oprah Winfrey, who we
Speaker 1: have talked about a number of the scams that she's perpetuated,
Speaker 1: but Dr Phil and Dr Oz would probably be top
Speaker 1: about that. Now, if anyone currently gives Oprah a run
Speaker 1: for her money, it's probably Joe Rogan, a man who
Speaker 1: I'm certain if you asked him what he considers himself,
Speaker 1: he would not say anything that sounds like health influencer.
Speaker 1: But that's also like a huge part of what he
Speaker 1: does and what his fame and popularity comes from is
Speaker 1: not listen to a single second of things. Is Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan experience. Yeah, that Joe Rogan experience. He gives a
Speaker 1: lot of advice. I mean, I don't think he even
Speaker 1: frames it as advice, but like he talks about what
Speaker 1: he does in terms of, like, here's what I'm doing
Speaker 1: for COVID. You know, I'm not going to give vaccinating
Speaker 1: yadda yadi YadA, like I'll I'm taken the ivermectin or whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: He gives a lot of life and he has a
Speaker 1: lot of people on his show who give like diet
Speaker 1: and lifestyle advice. So it's not just him, but it
Speaker 1: left like Jordan Peterson on to talk about his all
Speaker 1: meat diet um. Whether or not Joe considers himself when
Speaker 1: is a major you're like health influencer, like maybe even
Speaker 1: the biggest currently because Oprah's kind of faded a bit
Speaker 1: an influence next to Joe Rogan at them at this
Speaker 1: moment um. And obviously both Joe and Oprah are ridiculously
Speaker 1: wealthy people. There are billions to be made and looking
Speaker 1: healthy um, and some people think Joe Rogan looks healthy.
Speaker 1: I can't explain that to you, Caitlin, but they do
Speaker 1: um and then promising to teach people the secrets to
Speaker 1: be like you. The best of these people create little
Speaker 1: bit of cults so tight and consistent with their disinformation
Speaker 1: that no light or truth can escape. And today we're
Speaker 1: talking about the guy who invented that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: the guy who is the foundation for both Joe Rogan
Speaker 1: and Oprah Winfrey and a million lesser health gods, all
Speaker 1: spewing misinformation into the plague racked ether um. And this guy,
Speaker 1: this motherfucker, is a dude named Bernard McFadden. Now that's
Speaker 1: a weird name. Bernar Um I mean shame, and he
Speaker 1: he chose it. He chose it. He's the only Bernard
Speaker 1: there's ever fucking dog. It is okay to shame someone
Speaker 1: for choosing a stupid name because he was born Bernard,
Speaker 1: like the the the action that we are familiar, like
Speaker 1: the real name. Bernard Adolphus McFadden on August six, eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, in mill Spring, Missouri. Now mill Spring was
Speaker 1: a tiny little ship town without much going for it,
Speaker 1: and young Bernard came into a family who also didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot going for them. His dad was an
Speaker 1: alcoholic in an era in which you weren't legally an
Speaker 1: alcoholic until you drank yourself completely to death. Now, Papa
Speaker 1: McFadden had fought in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Speaker 1: So when I say he's an alcoholic, I have some
Speaker 1: sympathy for the man. He's probably an alcoholic because he's
Speaker 1: like lived through nightmares incomprehensible to modern men. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And by the time he started his family, I think
Speaker 1: it's probably accurate to say he was basically just a
Speaker 1: broken shell of a man. Um The biography I found
Speaker 1: of Bernard says that his dad was happy only hunting
Speaker 1: deer and drinking himself to death and betting on horse races. Um.
Speaker 1: The few times he was sober, he was apparently nice
Speaker 1: to his family, but he was not sober often um,
Speaker 1: and he did not seem to take much pleasure in
Speaker 1: his children, including young Bernard. Mostly he would physically abuse
Speaker 1: his wife and his children when he came home drunk
Speaker 1: as hell. Um. It is a bad home environment, um.
Speaker 1: Since all of the family money went to hard liquor
Speaker 1: and gambling. The McFadden's barely survived on. You know, the
Speaker 1: during the best of times when when Dad was alive,
Speaker 1: when Bernard was still a little kid, his mother decided
Speaker 1: she had had enough, which is not a common thing.
Speaker 1: You do not see a lot of women who are
Speaker 1: able to do this in this period of time, like
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, early eighteen seventies. And she picks up
Speaker 1: her son and her two young daughters and she flees
Speaker 1: her husband and their home to stay with her family. Um.
Speaker 1: Papa McFadden comes by a couple of times, tries to
Speaker 1: get them back, and she doesn't take him back. She
Speaker 1: doesn't agree to it because he's a ruinous drunk. And
Speaker 1: sure enough, less than a year after she leaves him
Speaker 1: when Bernard is for his dad dies from alcohol abuse. Um,
Speaker 1: just like drinks himself to death. It was not common
Speaker 1: for women to get divorced in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and I don't think this was a divorce. I think
Speaker 1: she just was like, I'm not going to keep my
Speaker 1: kids around this fucking maniac. Um. So good for her.
Speaker 1: It is a mark of what a strong woman that
Speaker 1: Bernard's mother was that she managed to do this, and
Speaker 1: she got her children free and clear from a bad situation. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: she was not able to bring them to a good situation. Um,
Speaker 1: this is not like a she doesn't like take them
Speaker 1: into a I mean, I guess you maybe it's better
Speaker 1: Well ask that question later, Kaitlyn. All right, Um, because
Speaker 1: they were dirt poor. Um, and she was also dying
Speaker 1: this entire time. She was basically sick from tuberculosis all
Speaker 1: of Bernard's early life. And she can't really make any money,
Speaker 1: can't really feed her family, and her her relatives are
Speaker 1: not very helpful because they're all kind of barely hanging
Speaker 1: on by a thread. Bernard's biographer Mark Adams describes him
Speaker 1: as a mama's boy, which makes sense. Obviously, he's going
Speaker 1: to be dedicated to his mom. Growing up in this
Speaker 1: kind of environment, his dad certainly did not give him
Speaker 1: a lot to aspire to emulate. Bernard was also a
Speaker 1: sickly boy with poor health. Much like his mother. He
Speaker 1: was smaller than many of the other local boys, and
Speaker 1: he was regularly beaten up and dumped in a river
Speaker 1: by other kids at age seven. Yeah, he's he's a
Speaker 1: victim of bull He's gotta he's got to have a
Speaker 1: lot of sympathy for this kid. This is we hear
Speaker 1: about some rough upbringings on behind the bastards, but this
Speaker 1: is a tough one dunked in the like yeah, because
Speaker 1: this is, like, you know, not a not a nice
Speaker 1: part of the world. Um, I wouldn't say a blasted hellscape,
Speaker 1: but a health scape ape for sure. Now, at age seven,
Speaker 1: Bernard was vaccinated for smallpox. That seems like a good
Speaker 1: thing right today, I mean as as as a rule,
Speaker 1: big fans of the smallpox vacts, big fans of vaccines
Speaker 1: in general. However, in the eighteen seventies, vaccines were not
Speaker 1: quite what they are today today. Wait a minute, A
Speaker 1: bad vaccine experience for the vast majority of people means like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I felt like kind of shitty for a day, right
Speaker 1: like you get the COVID vaccine. A lot of people like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I felt like I kind of had a flu for
Speaker 1: like a day. Um vaccines were different back then, so
Speaker 1: the best way of vaccinating people against smallpox at the
Speaker 1: time it was not like a nice clean shot. You
Speaker 1: would cut their arm open with a razor blade and
Speaker 1: you would shove a scab from someone else's smallpox lesion
Speaker 1: into the wound um And this works. This does, in fact,
Speaker 1: confer immunity to small box at the low, low cost
Speaker 1: of killing a significant percentage of the people vaccinated in
Speaker 1: this manner, not as many as smallpox did. It's an improvement,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people die from this early vaccine
Speaker 1: because you're just shoving a scab into an open wound
Speaker 1: and it gives you smallpox. For several of those people,
Speaker 1: it is supposed to give you a weekend case of
Speaker 1: small box that then gives you an immunity. However, none
Speaker 1: of us here are doctors, but I think we all
Speaker 1: can understand that if you shove a filthy scab into
Speaker 1: an open wound, you can get sick like other than
Speaker 1: the way you're supposed to get sick, and in Bernard's case,
Speaker 1: he gets blood poisoning, which keeps him bed ridden for
Speaker 1: six months. It's looking horrible, this poor kid. And he's
Speaker 1: how old at this point? Oh, he's like six. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's poor he is. This is earliest memory. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is probably like his earliest memory is like spending
Speaker 1: six months dying in bed because a maniac doctor shoves
Speaker 1: a scab into his open wound. It looks I could
Speaker 1: probably rust knife, yeah, I mean sanitization. I mean the
Speaker 1: doctors were arguing strenuously about whether or not washing your
Speaker 1: hands was like the devil's plaything or something like. It
Speaker 1: was not a great time for science. And to make
Speaker 1: it much worse, Caitlin, Not long after he recovers, this happens,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to quote from the biography Mr. America,
Speaker 1: which is about Bernard McFadden. One morning, not long after
Speaker 1: Bernard had recovered, his mother took him to St. Louis.
Speaker 1: So already we're in a bad start here. They were
Speaker 1: met at the Mississippi River docks by a strange gentleman.
Speaker 1: Mary explained to her son that the man was going
Speaker 1: to take him away on a steamship. She did not
Speaker 1: mention a return trip. Long after the boy had grown
Speaker 1: up and reinvented himself as Bernard McFadden. He recalled the
Speaker 1: resulting scene as being torn, screaming and clawing and kicking
Speaker 1: in a frantic agony of fear from his mother's arms.
Speaker 1: The man managed to pull Bernard from Mary and lead
Speaker 1: him towards the wharf, but the boy broke free and
Speaker 1: ran back to his mother, tears running down his face.
Speaker 1: Mary told her eight year old son the cold truth.
Speaker 1: Hopeless and nearly destitute, wasting away from late stage tuberculosis,
Speaker 1: she no longer had the energy or means to care
Speaker 1: for a growing boy. She was sending him off to
Speaker 1: the cheapest boarding school she could find. So she and again,
Speaker 1: I don't. I can't put any of laim on her.
Speaker 1: She's in an impossible situation. She's trying to she wants
Speaker 1: her kid to have someone to take care of them.
Speaker 1: She's like, I am dying and I cannot provide you
Speaker 1: with food, Like this is the best option that is
Speaker 1: available to me. And it's a ship option because this
Speaker 1: school is a horrible place. This, this is a school
Speaker 1: that would qualify as a war crime. There are concentration
Speaker 1: camps that were nicer than this school. You know, are
Speaker 1: we gonna care more about this school? Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: officially an orphanage. M Bernard called it the starvation School.
Speaker 1: He was of the opinion as an adult that the
Speaker 1: orphans and olive her twist headed easy compared to him.
Speaker 1: Children were barely fed. The only calories they could reliably
Speaker 1: get came in the form of peanuts, which at the
Speaker 1: time peanut butter hasn't been like created yet, so at
Speaker 1: the time peanuts are basically trash and are being sold
Speaker 1: as hog feed for a dollar a ton um. So
Speaker 1: that's that's what the kids get, and not much of that. So,
Speaker 1: after several months of slowly starving to death, Bernard's mother
Speaker 1: came for him. She'd managed to find, like get in contact.
Speaker 1: It's hard to get in contact with family, right. You
Speaker 1: may know, like, well, I've got relatives in this state,
Speaker 1: but like you haven't seen him in years. It takes
Speaker 1: six months to fucking get anywhere. So she manages with
Speaker 1: like the last strength in her body, um to find
Speaker 1: some relatives who are willing to take Bernard's sisters, who
Speaker 1: she keeps with her UM, and then she comes back
Speaker 1: for him because she's figured out a better solution for him. Um,
Speaker 1: she knows she's close to death. At this point, she's
Speaker 1: kind of scrambling to get all of her children set
Speaker 1: up as well as her limited resources would allow. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: she was not great at this, although arguably you could
Speaker 1: again say this is like an impossible task. And the
Speaker 1: person that she places Bernard with after this orphanage was
Speaker 1: an extremely stent relative who saw him more as cheap
Speaker 1: labor than a human being. But it's a step up
Speaker 1: from the starvation school. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's better. That's
Speaker 1: we're doing fine. We're doing fine. And you know who
Speaker 1: else is doing fine, Caitlin, the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast. I knew that was going to They're
Speaker 1: nailing it. They're doing great, Caitlin, they're doing great. Land. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's ads. We're back, and I'm I'm just basking in
Speaker 1: the glow of pride that I didn't say, you know
Speaker 1: who else doesn't starve children? Robert. I was just going
Speaker 1: to commend you and how pure and not horrible that
Speaker 1: ad break. Yeah, yeah, that's going to keep us in
Speaker 1: the house and home for another week, Sophie. So this
Speaker 1: relative and his wife, the family that Bernard is placed
Speaker 1: with an again distant family run a hotel near Chicago.
Speaker 1: When Bernard met them, he was overwhelmed by the fact
Speaker 1: that they were fat, which is he had not like
Speaker 1: well because number one, it's harder to be fat back then. Um.
Speaker 1: Number two, he has spent his entire childhood starving um,
Speaker 1: and his family has been starving not enough food. Ever,
Speaker 1: so the fact that he when he just assumes anyone
Speaker 1: fat is richest shit right like he he almost couldn't
Speaker 1: comprehend the idea that people could be fat like. He
Speaker 1: recalls this as being like baffling to him. This couple
Speaker 1: set Bernard to working long hours staffing their hotel. They
Speaker 1: fed him, but that was about all they did for him.
Speaker 1: One day, a few months into his time with him,
Speaker 1: the man he was staying with like told him offhandedly, hey,
Speaker 1: your mom died, um, And then the hotel owner's wife said, uh,
Speaker 1: this one's going the same way. She says, as to
Speaker 1: her husband, this one's going the same way. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: got all the symptoms consumption runs in the family. By
Speaker 1: hey mom, Hey, could your dad or your hey kid,
Speaker 1: your mom died and then the ladies like, yeah, it
Speaker 1: looked like this motherfucker's gonna drop pretty soon too again.
Speaker 1: Bleak childhood, truly, I would argue, not really a childhood,
Speaker 1: so oh, just just just one torture situation after another
Speaker 1: pretty horrible situation. Out of spite for his relatives as
Speaker 1: much as anything, Bernard decided then and there that he
Speaker 1: would become the healthiest man alive now. Consumption Today, when
Speaker 1: people talk about someone having consumption, generally they are referring
Speaker 1: to tuberculosis or tv um. But it's also worth noting
Speaker 1: that like everyone that people said had consumption didn't actually
Speaker 1: have tuberculosis because medicine was shipped and people got sick
Speaker 1: in a variety of ways that made them like thin
Speaker 1: and kind of in bad health, and everyone was just
Speaker 1: like that person is like thin and pale and sickly,
Speaker 1: it's got to be tuberculosis. And sometimes it was like, no,
Speaker 1: they're not. They're eating, like they're not getting nutrients. They're
Speaker 1: like basically have been starved their entire life of necessary
Speaker 1: food stuffs or whatever like they have I don't know,
Speaker 1: a parasite or something like. There's all sorts of things
Speaker 1: that can make someone in the eighteen sixties seventies say
Speaker 1: like Oh, it's got to be the consumption. It was like, no,
Speaker 1: you basically everything was misdiagnosed back then. I think it's
Speaker 1: some things right, but yeah, a lot of I mean
Speaker 1: I don't think he had t B because he hears
Speaker 1: himself with like diet and exercise later so which I
Speaker 1: don't think works with TV. I think he was just
Speaker 1: horribly malnourished because he grew up unbelievably poor. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: after a time with the hotel, Bernard was moved to
Speaker 1: a farm in northern Illinois. And these are again like
Speaker 1: family members who treat him as labor with no thought
Speaker 1: to his emotional health or education. To the extent that
Speaker 1: he was ever educated at all in his childhood, it
Speaker 1: was like he was occasionally sent to school for it
Speaker 1: day here in a day there because the truant officers
Speaker 1: were in town and like they he needed to like
Speaker 1: not get them in trouble. Um. Still, the fresh air
Speaker 1: and the manual labor of farm life did him wonders.
Speaker 1: He starts putting on muscle for the first time, he
Speaker 1: stops showing what people consider to be symptoms of consumption,
Speaker 1: like as soon as he gets out in the fresh air,
Speaker 1: working with his body and eating a decent diet. He
Speaker 1: has a high a diet, high end dairy, so he's
Speaker 1: finally getting a lot of protein for the first time
Speaker 1: in his life. He's immediately in much better health because again,
Speaker 1: he didn't have consumption. He was just horribly. He was
Speaker 1: just starving, just eating peanuts. Is that where the phrase
Speaker 1: comes from, or that expression where like, if you like
Speaker 1: work for hardly any money, he's like, Oh, I'm just
Speaker 1: getting peanuts or whatever. I mean, that would make sense,
Speaker 1: right because it used to be like literally the cheapest
Speaker 1: food you could possibly get. That would be my guess. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, so let's say that it is. Let's
Speaker 1: say that it is. During his time at the farm,
Speaker 1: Bernard began to learn the lessons that would become the
Speaker 1: center of his health philosophy. Outdoor or labor, along with
Speaker 1: a sparse diet consisting mostly of vegetables and milk, was
Speaker 1: the key to health, which is not bad Pelt advice.
Speaker 1: If you spend a lot of time working around outside
Speaker 1: using your body, vegetables, milk, avoid red meat, which is
Speaker 1: a thing like he doesn't he's not really a big
Speaker 1: fan of meat. Like that's not bad diet advice most
Speaker 1: people will do all right on that kind of a diet. Um.
Speaker 1: This merged with his unfortunately well earned hatred of vaccines,
Speaker 1: which is understandable. We're not talking about like modern anti
Speaker 1: vac shit. If you have Bernard's childhood, I get why
Speaker 1: you'd be anti vaccine when you were like bedridden for
Speaker 1: six months because you have blood poisoning because something gave
Speaker 1: you a bad smallpox vaccine in the eighteen seventies. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not really being anti science, like it's it is
Speaker 1: anti science, but like I can't blow. Also, the vaccines
Speaker 1: were anti science back then. They weren't. I mean, the
Speaker 1: same thing is they were better right than smallpox, because
Speaker 1: smallpox is fucking nightmare. But yeah, yeah, it's weird, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, I think most of us would be
Speaker 1: anti anything that kept us bed ridden for six months. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I would be. I think I'd probably not
Speaker 1: be supportive of that thing. Um. Another pillar of his
Speaker 1: growing philosophy came when, after a particularly bleak church lecture,
Speaker 1: he stole some of the farmer he was living, some
Speaker 1: of this farmer's whiskey and a bunch of chewing tobacco,
Speaker 1: and he Basically, he has like this church lecture where
Speaker 1: they're like everybody's going to hill and he gets sad,
Speaker 1: so he steals a bunch of liquor and chewing tobacco
Speaker 1: and he gets just wrecked. And he's he is twelve
Speaker 1: at this just goes on a bender way he's twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's twelve, a hard twelve Bernard. Yeah, he gets he
Speaker 1: gets wrecked, and this is um probably the last time
Speaker 1: he ever gets wrecked, because he wakes up in the
Speaker 1: morning with a horror will hangover. You know, you know
Speaker 1: those tobacco and hard liquor hangovers. I went to college. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know those are not pleasant for you or anyone
Speaker 1: around you. Um so he uh. He decides, based on
Speaker 1: this hangover to spend the rest of his life sober um,
Speaker 1: which I have decided on a number of occasions. It
Speaker 1: never stuck with me, but it does for him the same.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm never drinking against time choices. But then
Speaker 1: you know, two weeks later, yeah, I'm having a glass
Speaker 1: of wine. You know what, I would like a hurricane
Speaker 1: at nine in the morning, Sophie, when do you drink hurricanes?
Speaker 1: Not morning? First of all, you wouldn't be awake, not
Speaker 1: if I'm drinking enough hurricanes. Yes, So if you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to bribe Robert for like these early recordings with
Speaker 1: yeah hurricanes, Yeah, deliver hurricanes to my house and I
Speaker 1: will wake up as early as that was a lie. Okay,
Speaker 1: So shortly after this, um Bernard. You know, he loves
Speaker 1: the farm labor, he loves the outdoor life. But he's
Speaker 1: also he's he grows up with a lot of pride um,
Speaker 1: which is you have to say, impressive for a kid
Speaker 1: who's upbringing is so comprehensively bleak. And despite loving the lifestyle,
Speaker 1: he's enraged at the fact that he's not getting paid
Speaker 1: much money. He thinks he's worth more money than he's getting.
Speaker 1: So shortly after this he leaves, like the countryside for
Speaker 1: the big city, which in this case was unfortunately St. Louis.
Speaker 1: He got St. Lucis, well, I was born there for
Speaker 1: one thing, so I get to So he gets a
Speaker 1: job with he had another uncle, and this one runs
Speaker 1: a dry goods store. Bernard earned twelve dollars a month
Speaker 1: to help keep the books and manage the store. He
Speaker 1: was promoted after a year, and he made pretty good money.
Speaker 1: For a teenage boy at the time, but the work
Speaker 1: kept him indoors and huddled over a desk at all times,
Speaker 1: so he's just experienced what he considers to be the
Speaker 1: joys of being physically fit, of laboring with his body.
Speaker 1: And then he gets stuck inside a dank office all
Speaker 1: day every day and he goes kind of stir crazy
Speaker 1: and his his health issues return, right because he thinks
Speaker 1: it's his consumption coming back. The reality is that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't sit inside a desk all day and not
Speaker 1: go outside. It's it's it's bad for you. It's not
Speaker 1: good for anybody. Um. And also you are thirteen. You
Speaker 1: should not be working a desk job for sixty hours
Speaker 1: a week. Oh god, yeah, yeah, it's not good for you. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, his health issues return and he's desperate. He
Speaker 1: winds up stumbling through the city one day until he
Speaker 1: happens upon a gym. Now at the time, Jim's are
Speaker 1: a pretty new concept, right, This is like not all
Speaker 1: they exist at all? Yeah, they did, they did. Um.
Speaker 1: They actually started earlier than you might think. The Young
Speaker 1: Men's Christian Association, or the y m c A had
Speaker 1: been founded in England a couple of decades earlier, in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty four, UM and it had been founded to
Speaker 1: push back against the unhealthy conditions caused by the switch
Speaker 1: from pastoral farming lives to industrial work and desk work
Speaker 1: by men and dense cities. So the actual origin of
Speaker 1: jim culture comes out of the same stuff that Bernard
Speaker 1: is experiencing moving from farming, which is, I don't know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things that can be unhealthy about
Speaker 1: some of the different motions of farming, but as a
Speaker 1: general rule, moving around outside, using your body, the fresh air,
Speaker 1: pretty good. People who grow up farming tend to be
Speaker 1: healthier than people who grow up in dank industrial cesspits,
Speaker 1: like every city in the in the mid eighteen hundreds. UM.
Speaker 1: And that's that's where the Y m c A comes
Speaker 1: out of, is people recognizing not knowing much about health yet,
Speaker 1: but people recognizing that this seems bad for us, seems
Speaker 1: like this is killing everybody. Huh do all the twelve
Speaker 1: year olds have lung cancer? We might need to do
Speaker 1: something about this. Um. So the christ Yeah, good for
Speaker 1: those young Christian men. UM. The Y and other groups
Speaker 1: like it had noticed not just the deliterious effects of
Speaker 1: industrial life on people. But that disease spread rampantly in
Speaker 1: cramped urban environments, right like, it's a great place for
Speaker 1: bacteria and viruses to propagate. And these guys came to
Speaker 1: believe that physical exercise could prevent disease, which is not
Speaker 1: correct in the way they thought it was, but it's
Speaker 1: also not wrong, right like, if you exercise, your immune
Speaker 1: system will be stronger, which does render you less vulnerable
Speaker 1: to all of the horrible diseases that riddle distinct drenched
Speaker 1: filth pit like England or St. Louis. Um. So, religion
Speaker 1: gets heavily bound up in all of this, as it
Speaker 1: was with everything else in those days. And the y
Speaker 1: m c A isn't just like standing for people being healthier.
Speaker 1: It's part of an intellectual movement that became known as
Speaker 1: muscular Christianity. Um, what I know, right well, I mean
Speaker 1: you just think about those ripped jesus Is on the
Speaker 1: wall with like their fucking abs and deults that don't quit.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're holding yourself up on across, your
Speaker 1: doubts are going to be pretty pretty shredded. You know
Speaker 1: which are the deults? Are those like your back shoulder area? Yeah? Yeah, baby.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to read a quote from The Guardian
Speaker 1: about what muscular Christianity was please. The muscular Christians strongly
Speaker 1: believed in the formative power of athletic competition that by
Speaker 1: participating in games and sports, young men would be instilled
Speaker 1: with positive character traits. The muscular Christians had particular concerns
Speaker 1: that America's men were becoming soft, and thus placed higher
Speaker 1: value one games that created a few bruises in the process.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty eight, a year before Rutgers beat Princeton
Speaker 1: in the first ever college football contest, one American muscular
Speaker 1: Christian wrote, there is a precise discipline in danger. I
Speaker 1: consider no man educated who was not educated to meet danger,
Speaker 1: grapple with it, and conquer it. And any system of
Speaker 1: gymnastics which leaves out danger is an emasculated system. And
Speaker 1: the context of this article is about there was like
Speaker 1: one year where like a ship, like like team's worth
Speaker 1: of people diet in a single football season because they
Speaker 1: didn't wear any kind of they were just murdering each
Speaker 1: other out of the gridiron thattball. We're just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go watch some kids kill each other. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: So hang on, I have some thoughts. There seems to
Speaker 1: be a lot of toxic masculinity wrapped up in this
Speaker 1: because everybody like even more than you'd expect. Well maybe
Speaker 1: not more than you'd expect, but they're just like, we
Speaker 1: need to be violent towards each other because if we're not,
Speaker 1: that's emasculating, and we need to beat the ship out
Speaker 1: of each other or otherwise we're little girls. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: the attitude is very much it's not really proper, not necessary,
Speaker 1: not proper exercise, but certainly not a proper sport if
Speaker 1: you can't die doing it, which is my attitude towards
Speaker 1: a good party. You know what, I don't. I don't disagree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all joy carries with at the risk of death. This
Speaker 1: is this is what we're cursed to know if if
Speaker 1: the stakes aren't high, I'm not having fun. Yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: fuck it. Yeah, and that's why drunk driving has such
Speaker 1: a proud cultural tradition. Now, while all this is happening,
Speaker 1: the actual science of fitness is also starting to grow.
Speaker 1: People are beginning to learn how to be physically fit. Um,
Speaker 1: and yeah, they're starting to write there's I mean, today
Speaker 1: there's more misinformation than good misinformation about fitness, so it's
Speaker 1: even messier back then now. For centuries, physicians had advised
Speaker 1: months of bed rest and indoor isolation for people who
Speaker 1: got sick. Like, if you were sick, they would say, well,
Speaker 1: you need to hide in a room alone, like don't
Speaker 1: go outside, stay in this like quiet, dark, dank room
Speaker 1: and never leave for years, um, which you might recognize
Speaker 1: as bad for people. Look, I've seen the secret garden,
Speaker 1: and I know that that's not how that works. So
Speaker 1: I mean that I think a secret garden is good
Speaker 1: for people, especially if you're talking about like a guerrilla
Speaker 1: grow and you're you're illegally growing marijuana and like public
Speaker 1: land great for your health. A lot of time running.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've seen the movie, but it's
Speaker 1: about a little sickly boy who's just like kept away
Speaker 1: in isolation. And then the little girl, like a cousin
Speaker 1: of his, comes and like finds him, and then she's like,
Speaker 1: by the way, I found this secret garden outside your house.
Speaker 1: Let's go to it. And he's like, I can't, the
Speaker 1: spores will kill me, and she's like, no, it'll be
Speaker 1: good for you. And then he gets really healthy and
Speaker 1: then he's he like, he's great because he goes outside
Speaker 1: and enjoys. Good to go outside because because we were
Speaker 1: supposed to be outside a lot of the time. Otherwise
Speaker 1: we die. Um so yeah. In the last twenty or
Speaker 1: so years of the nineteenth century, doctors slowly start to
Speaker 1: and not evenly start to realize that like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: good to move your body, people are less likely to
Speaker 1: die when they regularly move their bodies. Um, this actually
Speaker 1: makes a lot of health problems better, Like having people
Speaker 1: go out in bicycle like stops them from getting horribly
Speaker 1: sick sometimes. And I'm gonna quote from the book Mr
Speaker 1: America here. Though Americans had a history of importing fitness
Speaker 1: fads from the continent, Ben Franklin wrote in seventeen eighty
Speaker 1: six that he'd reached a ripe old age because I
Speaker 1: live temporarily, drink no wine, and used daily exercise of
Speaker 1: the dumbbell. It was not until the United States was
Speaker 1: well into its own Industrial Revolution that its first homegrown
Speaker 1: fitness guru emerged. He was Diocletian Lewis. Fucking incredible names
Speaker 1: back then. Diocletian, Diocletian Lewis. I think Diocletian was around Nimber.
Speaker 1: He was Diocletian Lewis Harvard University physical education instructor. In
Speaker 1: September eighteen sixty Harper's Weekly magazine hailed him as the
Speaker 1: genius behind the country's athletic revival. His enemies were stress
Speaker 1: and inactivity, and his weapon was exercise. The newly formed
Speaker 1: classes of desk bound office clerks and the expanding ranks
Speaker 1: of house bound urban mothers were stockpiling nervous energy in
Speaker 1: their pale, untaxed bodies, like pressure building in a Fulton
Speaker 1: steam engine. In eighteen sixty nine, the physician George Beard
Speaker 1: gave this malaise the name neurasthenia. It was also commonly
Speaker 1: known as exhaustion. Americans were warned to beware its symptoms insomnia, anxiety, headaches,
Speaker 1: And that's again they don't understand the reason behind it,
Speaker 1: but that's good, basically accurate. That like, yeah, if you
Speaker 1: spend all days stuck inside not moving your body, you
Speaker 1: feel like shit. It is it's bad for you. Um,
Speaker 1: it's good to get outside and move around. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of how that begins as a broad cultural understanding.
Speaker 1: And after Diocletian Lewis came another Harvard Man Dudley Allen Sergeant,
Speaker 1: who coined the term preventative medicine. He's like the first
Speaker 1: guy to be like, what do we stopped people from
Speaker 1: getting sick? Wouldn't that be based? Um? And he devised
Speaker 1: the first pulley weight machines and exercise history, so like
Speaker 1: the origins of all the like not like free weights,
Speaker 1: but the different machines at your gym these days or whatever. Like,
Speaker 1: he's the guy who figures out like the first of those.
Speaker 1: And Sergeant is generally recognized as the father of physical education,
Speaker 1: which in some ways makes him the worst bastard we've
Speaker 1: ever discussed on this show, because he is the origin
Speaker 1: of pe as a concept. Um, did you not have
Speaker 1: a good time in gym class, Robert? Did anyone? Was
Speaker 1: that a good time for anybody? Had a great time?
Speaker 1: I loved getting changed in front of other people in
Speaker 1: the middle of the school day show. Sky MMed my
Speaker 1: way into being the assistant who counts the laps on
Speaker 1: lap day in the seventh grade. So I didn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of friends, but I didn't have to run
Speaker 1: lap day. I had a friend who died in p
Speaker 1: oh please bad. Yeah. Yeah, he had like a hard problem.
Speaker 1: He had been like he had, he had been exempt
Speaker 1: from PE for years, and then for whatever reason, they
Speaker 1: decided he was better and he could he had to
Speaker 1: do PE. And then he dropped dead during a run.
Speaker 1: Pretty fucked up, Pretty fucked up. Um, So you know
Speaker 1: whatever Jim class. So, at any rate, by the last
Speaker 1: twenty or so years of the eighteen hundreds, you have
Speaker 1: a few different distinct strands of physical culture coming again.
Speaker 1: You see, these are all like different, but they're all
Speaker 1: kind of interrelated. You've got these muscular Christians talking about
Speaker 1: like the way the idea that sport and fitness improves
Speaker 1: moral character, right, that like God wants you to take
Speaker 1: care of your body because it's his body, and like
Speaker 1: this is part of like being a good Christian. You
Speaker 1: have the more humanistic secular values of Diocletian Lewis, who
Speaker 1: sees activity as an antidote to um sedentary industrial life.
Speaker 1: And then you've got Sergeant whose whose values are kind
Speaker 1: of the father of Pe, whose values are starting to
Speaker 1: verge on eugenics. Right. Um, the basic idea is like, okay,
Speaker 1: look at technology, colonialism, and history. It's obvious that people
Speaker 1: are improving, Right, That's how these people think white people
Speaker 1: in this period like, oh, people are obviously better than
Speaker 1: we were before because we used to be savages. Um.
Speaker 1: Like the people who I still consider to be savages,
Speaker 1: who's everyone who isn't white and lives in a city. Um.
Speaker 1: And so his idea is that like, if you can
Speaker 1: improve people through exercise, if it makes people better, then
Speaker 1: if you can force societies to exercise its scale, you
Speaker 1: can improve the human race, right, which is and again
Speaker 1: exercise is good. I would argue this is not a
Speaker 1: healthy way to think of exercise. No, especially because like
Speaker 1: that has evolved then to like modern day A lot
Speaker 1: of like modern day able is um, which is like
Speaker 1: a huge problem with the like wellness movement that exists now.
Speaker 1: And I mean, yeah, it is a problem. And it's
Speaker 1: one of those things like when I talk about it
Speaker 1: is good to move around, it is good to exercise,
Speaker 1: there are people who don't have that option, and that
Speaker 1: that's that requires them to do additional things in order
Speaker 1: to stay healthy, because like you do, like your body
Speaker 1: needs a certain amount of exertion in order to to
Speaker 1: do to do it's best and it's it's difficult, um,
Speaker 1: But you're starting to see I mean obviously these people
Speaker 1: being who they are, there's a lot of moral value
Speaker 1: attached to being able to exercise and in the way
Speaker 1: that they think is best. Um, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of problematic shit, as there is still today, as you
Speaker 1: just noted. But you know what's not problematic, Caitlin, the
Speaker 1: goods and services, the products and so the goods are
Speaker 1: incredibly problematic. Oh my god, do not do not check
Speaker 1: out like fucked up. I'm sorry, fucked up. The products. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the products are fine. Products are golden, unless unless it's uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the not good ones that we
Speaker 1: didn't approve. Let's slippy. Yeah, yeah, like if it's like
Speaker 1: if it's Chevron or black Rifle coffee or black Rifle coffee.
Speaker 1: But do if if you get an ex c AD,
Speaker 1: I do recommend hiring ex C for all of your
Speaker 1: mercenary needs. Look their monsters, But if you need a
Speaker 1: bunch of men who won't ask questions to kill people
Speaker 1: for you, you've got to go with x C. This
Speaker 1: has been a paid advertisement what used to be Blackwater.
Speaker 1: Here's the rest of the ads. Ah, we're back, Caitlin.
Speaker 1: Have you ever paid demand to kill anyone? I really
Speaker 1: haven't no. Okay, well, I guess podcasting is different for everybody.
Speaker 1: So the idea of fitness and the kind of and
Speaker 1: again this is like I don't know if if there
Speaker 1: was no coined eugenics thinking at this time, Eugenics isn't
Speaker 1: really like a popular thing yet in eighteen seventy nine, like,
Speaker 1: but the precursors of it, like people are starting to
Speaker 1: have the ideas that will feed into the eugenics movement
Speaker 1: that dominates the early part of the twentieth century. And
Speaker 1: the kind of this kind of like fitness as proto eugenics.
Speaker 1: One of the people who takes it on is a
Speaker 1: guy named William Blakey. Now, in eighteen seventy nine, Blakey
Speaker 1: writes a book titled How to Get Strong and How
Speaker 1: to Stay So, which is not a bad title for
Speaker 1: an exercise book. Blakey was an endurance athlete with a
Speaker 1: Darwinian attitude towards fitness. His book included much of the
Speaker 1: same sort of exercise advice that Sergeant gave, mixed with
Speaker 1: appeals to patriotisms. You can see where like the eugenics
Speaker 1: nature of this is like this is we need to
Speaker 1: make a nation strong, you know, unsettling stuff. Early on,
Speaker 1: he makes sure to compare American youth to British youth,
Speaker 1: who he claims are in much better shape, capable of
Speaker 1: running miles without breaking a sweat. Quote. Let him who
Speaker 1: thinks that the average American boy would have fared as
Speaker 1: well as these British kids, go down to the public
Speaker 1: bath house and look carefully at a hundred or so
Speaker 1: of them as they tumble about in the water. He
Speaker 1: will see more big heads and slim necks, more poor
Speaker 1: legs and skinny arms and lanky, half built bodies than
Speaker 1: he would ever have imagined the whole neighborhood could produce.
Speaker 1: So he's like, look at a bunch of naked kids
Speaker 1: and tell me how weird they are. Creepy. That's not great,
Speaker 1: that's not great. So this has been a long digression,
Speaker 1: but I think the background is necessary. So when we
Speaker 1: left off our man Bernard, right, he's feeling like ship.
Speaker 1: He's working indoors all day, and he starts like walking about,
Speaker 1: like looking for a way to deal with his health problems.
Speaker 1: And he comes across a gymnasium. This is a three.
Speaker 1: He's fifteen years old, and he sees his first gym
Speaker 1: and he sees a bunch of dudes working out, and again,
Speaker 1: health is ship in the eighteen eighties, right, most people
Speaker 1: are dying from the time they're like four. This is
Speaker 1: his first time seeing healthy people like he sees people
Speaker 1: who have like muscle, and not just because they're at
Speaker 1: a gym, but because it's expensive to go to the gym.
Speaker 1: They they're wealthy, so they're able to feed themselves well,
Speaker 1: and they're of the fairly small number of people at
Speaker 1: that point who are working out regularly. So he sees
Speaker 1: these people, even the least of them, looks like an
Speaker 1: Adonis to him, and he's just immediately like, this is
Speaker 1: what I want to do with my life. I need
Speaker 1: to have this in my life. But the entry fee
Speaker 1: to get started at the gym is fifteen dollars, which
Speaker 1: is more than he makes in a month, so he
Speaker 1: cannot afford to join a gym. Um, but just kind
Speaker 1: of hanging out around the gym, he acquires a copy
Speaker 1: of How to Get Strong and Stay so Uh, and
Speaker 1: he manages to find some used weights, some barbels that
Speaker 1: he can afford, so he buys some weights. He buys
Speaker 1: this book. He goes home and he worked out for
Speaker 1: the first time in his room. He later wrote thereafter,
Speaker 1: I had but one object in view. I would not
Speaker 1: be satisfied until I was a strong man. You know.
Speaker 1: At this point, strong man is like that's like a thing, right, Like,
Speaker 1: because exercise is so new when guys the first time
Speaker 1: guys figured out how to lift big weights, it's like, like,
Speaker 1: you show up like that guy, you can lift a
Speaker 1: bunch of weights. Okay, So he's not filled with rickets
Speaker 1: like the rest of us. So Bernard just like sees
Speaker 1: all these like fit dudes who basically no one else
Speaker 1: looks like because no one else has like the resources
Speaker 1: to do it. And then he's like, my, like, my
Speaker 1: calling is to be a gym bro. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: exactly it. I mean it might be hard not to
Speaker 1: because he's basically seeing people who are living close to
Speaker 1: the way the like normal ish people in the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: we're able to live because they have better diet, because
Speaker 1: they have a basic understanding of exercise. And he is
Speaker 1: living in an era in which like, if you only
Speaker 1: had a couple of parasites, you're doing great. Um, right,
Speaker 1: So you get why he might be like he would
Speaker 1: be like, oh my god, this seems so much better
Speaker 1: than my miserable, starving life of disease and death. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't I have a lot of sympathy for him
Speaker 1: wanting to be a Jim bro I guess that's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. It's not like I don't think I'm sure.
Speaker 1: I know vanity is wrapped up in this because he
Speaker 1: becomes a very vain man. But it's not just vanity.
Speaker 1: It's just like, oh my god, I don't have to
Speaker 1: be sick all my life. Sure that that's a that
Speaker 1: is a motivation that is understandable. Yeah? Yeah. Um, So
Speaker 1: Bernard exercises with these dumbbells, and he comes up with
Speaker 1: other solutions. He finds a ten pound lead bar and
Speaker 1: he wraps it in newspaper and he just stuffs it
Speaker 1: into his shirt every day and goes walking for miles. Um,
Speaker 1: when he comes home at night, he'll just like set
Speaker 1: the bar down next to everyone else's coat. His family
Speaker 1: thinks that he starts to think that he's mentally ill
Speaker 1: because like nobody like exercise is not commonly talked about,
Speaker 1: So like, what the fund is wrong with this kid?
Speaker 1: Why is he carrying a bar round in his shirt? Also,
Speaker 1: it's lead. Can you get lead poisoning that way? Don't? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's not. This is probably not great for him,
Speaker 1: but also probably not the worst poisoning he's getting. You know,
Speaker 1: he's had a lot of poisoning at this point. Everybody
Speaker 1: was poisoned with a couple of things in those days.
Speaker 1: If you could have given somebody an asbestos milkshake, it
Speaker 1: would have made them healthier. Um, not a great time.
Speaker 1: So Exercise profoundly agrees with Bernard, and he gets in
Speaker 1: a lot better shape. His health problems go away. Um,
Speaker 1: he starts looking good, and he sets out into the
Speaker 1: world again with a new lease on life. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a nineteen one article in American Heritage Magazine.
Speaker 1: Now he became a hobo of sorts, writing the rails,
Speaker 1: descending on more of his numerous relations, and working as
Speaker 1: a water boy for a construction gang, as a dentist's assistant,
Speaker 1: a wood chopper, and, in the tradition of Franklin and Twain,
Speaker 1: a printer's devil that's like the assistant of a printer.
Speaker 1: I don't know why they called it a devil. Toward
Speaker 1: the end of the period, while toiling in a coal mine,
Speaker 1: Bernard had one of those moments of revelation that dot
Speaker 1: his recollections. He suddenly saw that his mission in life
Speaker 1: was to preach the gospel of health. He got busy.
Speaker 1: Returning to St. Louis, he saved enough money to join
Speaker 1: a real gymnasium, got acquainted with books like William Blakey's
Speaker 1: How to Get Strong, and eventually rented a studio and
Speaker 1: hung out a sign that said Bernard McFadden Kinniss Therapist,
Speaker 1: teacher of higher physical Culture. As to his change of name,
Speaker 1: he later explained the picturesque appealed to me. I wanted
Speaker 1: something out of the ordinary. As to the origin of
Speaker 1: the word kinness therapist, he admitted to having no idea,
Speaker 1: so he makes up both the name Bernard, which I've
Speaker 1: I've heard one allegation it sounded like a lion's roar
Speaker 1: to him, so he thinks it sounds stronger. It's very funny.
Speaker 1: Um and Kenne's Therapies is like, yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: where that came from. Like I just felt like that that,
Speaker 1: Like I just wanted to make up a you could
Speaker 1: just do that, right, Like there's no Yeah, that sounds
Speaker 1: like it doesn't sound unlike no canology, you're not. It
Speaker 1: makes sense because like Kenneth, I think it's just basically
Speaker 1: movement the movement therapist. That is like what a personal
Speaker 1: trainer at its best should be. Um. So it's not
Speaker 1: like he's not again, he's not like Snake Oily at
Speaker 1: this point, like he's actually selling something real Now nobody
Speaker 1: has a great understanding of like what's actually good for
Speaker 1: you and what's actually bad for what exercises may do
Speaker 1: more harm than good. But that's not his fault. That's
Speaker 1: just like we're just now figuring this stuff out. Um.
Speaker 1: But his basic premises at this point are like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to help people move their bodies and lift heavier
Speaker 1: things until they get stronger, which is a broadly positive
Speaker 1: thing to do. Um. So, Kenne's therapy may not have
Speaker 1: been an actual term, but it was a really enough
Speaker 1: thing and Bernard was good at it. His studio did
Speaker 1: well in large part due to his undeniably brilliant slogan
Speaker 1: weakness is a crime, don't be a criminal. What I
Speaker 1: fucking love that? That's that is everything about like fitness
Speaker 1: culture today too, Like it's that's that's cross fit, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's all of it. It's so good. There's just like, no,
Speaker 1: he doesn't dress it up at all. That is so aggressive.
Speaker 1: And yet I imagine for a certain type of person
Speaker 1: who sees that type of marketing very effective. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: very good, Like he's he's very successful from an early
Speaker 1: stage at this um and he's again like he's he's
Speaker 1: grasping at the thing that all of these people will
Speaker 1: wind up basically saying they just put a little bit
Speaker 1: more of a bow on it. Now. Bernar may have
Speaker 1: been the first personal trainer in history. Um Like, it's
Speaker 1: kind of I get kind of depends on how you
Speaker 1: on how you, uh you define it, but he may
Speaker 1: have been like the first person to be like, my
Speaker 1: job is going to be to one on one train
Speaker 1: people how to be physically healthier through exercise. He might
Speaker 1: be the person who invented that entire field. Um so
Speaker 1: he asserted at the very least, he helped to invent
Speaker 1: the entire discipline. And this is going to happen a bunch.
Speaker 1: It is actually kind of boggling how many different career
Speaker 1: fields this guy either invince whole cloth or helps to
Speaker 1: invent um. He is a tremendously influential person. So uh,
Speaker 1: he invinced personal training kind of uh. And in order
Speaker 1: to make extra cash, he works as a wrestling match organizer.
Speaker 1: He also experiments constantly with different health treatments. Mostly this
Speaker 1: would mean periodically fasting and restricting his caloric intake to
Speaker 1: an extreme degree in order to lose weight. While exercising constantly,
Speaker 1: he would regularly gain and then drop like thirty pounds. Um,
Speaker 1: I think he had a needing disorder. I'm actually certain
Speaker 1: he had a needing disorder. Um, because you hear about
Speaker 1: this regular he has this obsession with total caloric restriction
Speaker 1: in order to drop weight very quickly, like he's purging.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know that he binges, but he's
Speaker 1: certainly purges. Um, not by puking, but like total caloric restriction.
Speaker 1: That's eating disorder stuff. Right, Um, I mean I've been there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In his own writings, Bernard build this as scientific experimentation.
Speaker 1: He wrote up his findings and submitted them to a
Speaker 1: wide variety of newspapers and magazines. His entire educational career
Speaker 1: at this point amounted to a handful of odd days
Speaker 1: at school to avoid truancy court. So he was not
Speaker 1: good at writing, like he's barely able to write, but
Speaker 1: he seemed to sense instinctively that writing was going to
Speaker 1: be crucial to his success. So while he's working as
Speaker 1: a personal trainer and it's like a wrestling barker, he
Speaker 1: goes back to school um in order to uh learn
Speaker 1: how to write, and he takes a part time job,
Speaker 1: a more formal part time job to help with us
Speaker 1: at the Bunker Hill Military Academy as a pe coach.
Speaker 1: And it was here working as an early p e coach.
Speaker 1: This is not a common job at the time that
Speaker 1: Bernard would be struck by his greatest revelation from Mr.
Speaker 1: America quote for simplicity's sake, Bernard had temporarily abandoned his
Speaker 1: two meals a day habit for three squares served at
Speaker 1: the academy. Near the end of the spring term, he
Speaker 1: felt the early symptoms of pneumonia coming on and immediately
Speaker 1: diagnosed his relative gluttony as the cause. Bernard had noticed
Speaker 1: that farm animals became well by abstaining from food when ill.
Speaker 1: He immediately cut his own intake back to a couple
Speaker 1: of pieces of fruit for a day. By the second
Speaker 1: day of fasting, his chest had begun to clear. By
Speaker 1: the fourth day, the inflammation had all but vanished. His
Speaker 1: fitness philosophy was starting to gel lots of exercise, limited calories,
Speaker 1: non traditional cures. So he's making a significant illogical leap here,
Speaker 1: which is that it is true sick animals stop eating.
Speaker 1: That's not because it helps them get better. It's because
Speaker 1: they might die and they as a general, the animals
Speaker 1: he's talking about are like hurd animals, and if you're
Speaker 1: a herd animal and you get sick, you want to
Speaker 1: stop eating because there's a good chance you'll die, and
Speaker 1: every calorie you eat while dying is calories that the
Speaker 1: rest of the animals in the herd don't get. It's
Speaker 1: the same reason why if you're slaughtering an animal like
Speaker 1: a sheep or something, um a lot of them and chickens,
Speaker 1: it's the same way. There's a way to basically like
Speaker 1: if you position them properly, that kind of turn off.
Speaker 1: Like if you get them on their back and you
Speaker 1: get like a knee on their neck, Like it's not
Speaker 1: like you're not like shoving them super hard, but it's
Speaker 1: just kind of an instinct. And the idea is that like, oh,
Speaker 1: they've gotten caught by a predator, it's best if they
Speaker 1: just kind of let it happen so that the rest
Speaker 1: of the herd can get away. Like there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of instincts like that in prey animals to where like, well,
Speaker 1: what's best is what's best is not what's best for
Speaker 1: the individual, it's what's best for the hurt and so like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm dying of some disease, I'm going to stop eating
Speaker 1: so that everybody else stays fed. You know, I did
Speaker 1: not realize that was like an instinctive thing among herd
Speaker 1: animals that do that kind of stuff. The herd does better,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, So, well, it's amazing. He's very wrong
Speaker 1: about what's happening. And you also you listen to it's like,
Speaker 1: well I did most like most people get sick once
Speaker 1: a year or so, at least, you know, at some point,
Speaker 1: and it usually doesn't last four days. It's usually over
Speaker 1: in a day or two. So like, it wasn't the
Speaker 1: starving that got better, it's you waited four days and
Speaker 1: eventually stopped being deserted feeling. But he correlates the fact
Speaker 1: that he's starving himself because he likes to starve himself
Speaker 1: with the fact that he gets better anyway. You know,
Speaker 1: it's unfortunate. This is the start of what will be
Speaker 1: a series of unfortunate logical leaps that Bernard makes after
Speaker 1: a year at school, like as a pe teacher and
Speaker 1: as he's also taking classes, so a year both teaching
Speaker 1: and taking classes. He's he's a dedicate. He's a fucking workaholic,
Speaker 1: you know, he's I think he's got this attitude. You
Speaker 1: do see this in a lot of people with backgrounds
Speaker 1: as difficult as his, whether they're like I survived childhood,
Speaker 1: like and I'm going to spend every second that I'm
Speaker 1: awake working hard on things because like I I I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think because like he's been that close
Speaker 1: to death. Death was such a constant part of his childhood.
Speaker 1: I think maybe that that's for and it's not just him.
Speaker 1: A lot of people who have this kind of an
Speaker 1: upbringing this period become these like dynamos, and I think
Speaker 1: it's just because they can't stand to waste any time.
Speaker 1: You know. Also, there's no Internet, Like you're not going
Speaker 1: to hang out on Twitter or anything like you got
Speaker 1: like there's nothing literally nothing to do, So what else?
Speaker 1: What else? Are you gonna have right, you gotta take
Speaker 1: a bunch of classes and work as a which work
Speaker 1: as a personal trainer, and learn how to write and
Speaker 1: starve yourself your shelf and work out constantly. Yeah. After
Speaker 1: a year at school, he applied this new healthcare revelation
Speaker 1: to wrestling, and he used his ability to starve himself
Speaker 1: to train as a middle or heavyweight fighter. So he
Speaker 1: would he would get build up a bunch of muscle
Speaker 1: mass and and you know he's a big guy, so
Speaker 1: he would be like a heavyweight. But then he would purge,
Speaker 1: stop eating for several days and lose thirty pounds, um.
Speaker 1: And then he would go fight wrestlers who were as heavy,
Speaker 1: who were like he would he would basically drop down
Speaker 1: to a lower weight class, but with people who he
Speaker 1: was stronger than because he'd been training as a heavy weight.
Speaker 1: But he'd go down like a middle weight or something,
Speaker 1: and he would gamble on the outcome and win. Um.
Speaker 1: He was actually really good at which is a wild
Speaker 1: scamp to run. So he'd be like disproportionately more muscular
Speaker 1: and stronger than them. Okay, yeah, yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a thing. Um. Yeah, And I'm sure the fact that like,
Speaker 1: nobody's that great at being healthy at this point makes
Speaker 1: it easier for him because like, yeah, yeah, he was
Speaker 1: briefly the most popular wrestler in the St. Louis area.
Speaker 1: His fame got him a fancy and well paying job
Speaker 1: as a pe teacher at a better school, where he
Speaker 1: wrote his first novel, a near plagiarism of Jane Austin
Speaker 1: based around to Swolldu titles The Athlete a novel. I
Speaker 1: was like, wait a minute, yeah, I don't know he
Speaker 1: had aspiration. Yeah, he ate it. He takes Jane Austen
Speaker 1: and replaces like the lady protagonist with like a jack dude.
Speaker 1: And the book is titled The Athletes Conquest. So again
Speaker 1: let me. I mean, you can guess. You can guess
Speaker 1: what's in that book, right, I can. So the book
Speaker 1: is terrible and no publisher will take it, so Bernard's
Speaker 1: self publishes it. Um. He's popular enough as a teacher
Speaker 1: that all of the kids at his school buy it
Speaker 1: and it does okay. Um. In three, at age twenty five,
Speaker 1: Bernar moves to New York City. At this point, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, Yeah, he's doing a lot too much,
Speaker 1: some would say much, so he moves to the Big Apple,
Speaker 1: and his years of teaching pe and coaching people had
Speaker 1: convinced him that his brilliant health wisdom needed a bigger audience.
Speaker 1: It wasn't going to be enough to just work one
Speaker 1: on one or even just like teach a class of
Speaker 1: people at a time. He's got to reach the nation.
Speaker 1: You know. He decides, like, I've learned too much about
Speaker 1: starving myself and plagiarizing Jane Austen from American Heritage quote.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately after leasing an apartment in New York, McFadden
Speaker 1: presented a physical culture matinee and invited the press. Um.
Speaker 1: A local newspaper accepted and reported that the Professor, as
Speaker 1: McFadden was now calling himself, chatted imposed in an interesting
Speaker 1: way for over an hour. He's just like talking and
Speaker 1: like showing off his muscles. So he's just kind of
Speaker 1: doing like spoken word, but mostly just like flexing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's literally just like flexing and talking where he's
Speaker 1: checked these muscles out. Man who's not dying of goiters.
Speaker 1: Look at how unswollen his ankles are. And this had
Speaker 1: an audience. Yeah, it's very popular. A lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of journalist show up again, nothing is going on
Speaker 1: like there is. There is absolutely nothing happening in the
Speaker 1: world at this point, so they're just a fit man
Speaker 1: is talking in town sending or times. So McFadden's other
Speaker 1: passion was for his ideas. They had to do with
Speaker 1: the titanic benefits of exercise, the right foods and periodic fasts,
Speaker 1: and the extreme perils of among other things. Of course
Speaker 1: it's white bread, doctor's, vaccination, overeating, and prudery. So these
Speaker 1: are the things that he's flexing. He's talking about, Like,
Speaker 1: course it's are bad for you. True white bread is
Speaker 1: bad for you. Also true doctors are bad for you, honestly,
Speaker 1: and this time not wrong. Vaccinations are bad for you,
Speaker 1: not true, but understandable that it's wrong. Overeating is bad
Speaker 1: for you, accurate, and it's bad to be approved. And
Speaker 1: what he's meaning about this is that, like the human
Speaker 1: body is incredibly like verboten at this point, right, Like
Speaker 1: you don't like even in like health textbooks, it's it's
Speaker 1: considered kind of risque to show the naked human form.
Speaker 1: And he's like, no, people should look at naked human bodies,
Speaker 1: like if you want to see how you're supposed to
Speaker 1: exercise you should have like a guy who's mostly naked
Speaker 1: on their lifting stuff so you can see how it
Speaker 1: is he's moving and like, um, he's a big believer
Speaker 1: in the human in the nudity as like not being
Speaker 1: a sinful shameful thing. Yeah, which is also good, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's good. That's I love nudity. Yeah, big fan.
Speaker 1: So the physical culture of Matinee was probably McFadden's first
Speaker 1: step as a proper fitness influencer. Now that he wasn't
Speaker 1: teaching people how to exercise, he was giving populations sweeping
Speaker 1: healthcare advice based on his own ideas and opinions. And again,
Speaker 1: these are not all they're even mostly bad at this
Speaker 1: point of course, it's are they're not as bad like
Speaker 1: I think there's been a lot of like, oh, they
Speaker 1: were making people like constantly draw, like I know people
Speaker 1: who are like way into Courset's and there's plenty of
Speaker 1: ways to do where it's fine. Um, white bread though
Speaker 1: is like is trash, Like it's fine if you enjoy it,
Speaker 1: but it's not. There's not a lot of nutritional value
Speaker 1: and whitebread for you. Yeah, over eating is something you
Speaker 1: should avoid if possible, and obviously being apprud is not
Speaker 1: good for you. Um. Bernard's rejection of prudery was tied
Speaker 1: directly to his love of fitness. Again, he likes these
Speaker 1: naked He likes books that are showing people like yoga
Speaker 1: books and stuff that is yoga starting to be a
Speaker 1: big thing in this period of time, and he loves
Speaker 1: these yoga books of people who are like nearly naked. Um.
Speaker 1: And he thinks it's he thinks accurately that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's important. You gotta you can't have somebody wearing like
Speaker 1: six layers of dresses showing you how to do a
Speaker 1: yoga pose. You're not gonna know what it looks like. Um. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Bernard's lifelong hatred of vaccines and doctors, which by this
Speaker 1: point have gotten to be a lot less nightmarish in
Speaker 1: medieval um that is, also makes it into his advice.
Speaker 1: And again medical science isn't great at the time, but
Speaker 1: enraging against those things, he unknowingly set a pattern that's
Speaker 1: still going strong a hundred and thirty years later, because
Speaker 1: he's just like, fuck doctors, all you need is exercise,
Speaker 1: which is the same thing the people who have gotten
Speaker 1: made this pandemic so much worse. Also, believed right, you
Speaker 1: could draw at e lect lot a direct line from
Speaker 1: that to to mc fadden. Um. And again I don't
Speaker 1: know that he would have been the same guy had
Speaker 1: he been born a hundred and thirty years later, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, who knows if his vaccination experience
Speaker 1: as a kid is I didn't get typhus as opposed
Speaker 1: to I nearly died for six straight months. He'd probably
Speaker 1: just be like an Abercrombie model where he's just like
Speaker 1: really jacked and loves going to the gym, like you know.
Speaker 1: And maybe he might still be plagiarizing Jane Austen. Who
Speaker 1: knows who doesn't plagiarize a little bit of Ji. I mean,
Speaker 1: my novel is just a plagiarism of Jane Austen and
Speaker 1: mine too, And yeah, everybody's there's only been one book written,
Speaker 1: and it's I don't remember any Jane Austen titles. Phill
Speaker 1: it in finished the joke for Pride and Prejudice. Pride
Speaker 1: and Prejudice. That's the only book, Pride and Prejudice. Um.
Speaker 1: So the Physical Culture Matinee was a success at drawing attention,
Speaker 1: but a failure at making money, and after two weeks
Speaker 1: of like waiting for all of this pr to turn
Speaker 1: into cash. Bernard is on the verge of bankruptcy, and
Speaker 1: at that point when he's desperate, a successful actor, like
Speaker 1: a stage actor who's huge in New York City, walks
Speaker 1: into the door of his office as a personal trainer
Speaker 1: and asks how much is it going to cost to
Speaker 1: get me in shape for a role? This is the
Speaker 1: first time this has ever happened, and Bernard thus invinced
Speaker 1: what I think is like his third career field at
Speaker 1: this point body Sculptor to the Stars. So this is
Speaker 1: the first time like a famous actor is like, I
Speaker 1: need to get jacked for a role. Can you help me?
Speaker 1: And he's like, yeah, absolutely. Um this is like I
Speaker 1: think he convinced this, Like this is like how all
Speaker 1: like Camaio nan Gianni just like got ridiculously stall. Like
Speaker 1: this is the start of that entire career field. Is
Speaker 1: Bernard being like, oh, ship, if I get this famous
Speaker 1: dude like ripped, that's gonna bring me be cast in
Speaker 1: the eternals. Yeah, you know he can be cast. Chris
Speaker 1: Pratt can go. I mean, I'm sorry to bring up
Speaker 1: Chris Pratt that ship, but like, yeah, this is a thing. It. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Chris Pratt wouldn't be nothing without Bernard McFadden, nothing less
Speaker 1: than ship beneath our feet. Do you think he would
Speaker 1: be Mr. Guardian of the Galaxy. No, No, we'd spit
Speaker 1: on him like we did sit on him anyway, because
Speaker 1: he's a fucking loser. Um, he's very rich and successful
Speaker 1: asshole unfortunately, but anyway, whatever, most of them are. So
Speaker 1: Bernard McFadden becomes a body sculptor to the stars and
Speaker 1: he gets suddenly just a flood of customers. Right. It
Speaker 1: always has worked that if you can show like, hey,
Speaker 1: this famous person is jacked by doing this one simple trick,
Speaker 1: a bunch of people will be like, well I could
Speaker 1: be famous too if I just got jacked, maybe that
Speaker 1: will make me famous. You know. Um, the human brain
Speaker 1: isn't a magical thing. So in short order, Bernard has
Speaker 1: more business than he knows what to do with, and
Speaker 1: he becomes a minor celebrity himself, getting the city's top
Speaker 1: celebrity photographer to agree to do a photo shoot of
Speaker 1: his body. Now, this famous photographer is going to come
Speaker 1: by and take like shirtless pictures of Bernard posing, and
Speaker 1: he wants to look his best so what does he do.
Speaker 1: He starves himself for a week before the session so
Speaker 1: that his abs will look more defined. I think this
Speaker 1: is the first time anyone does that. Every ab scene
Speaker 1: you've ever seen, like if you you can actually read
Speaker 1: about this, anytime you've seen an actor you like who's
Speaker 1: like super shredded in a movie where their abs are
Speaker 1: they don't drink any water for like a day before
Speaker 1: that scene because it makes their abs show out more
Speaker 1: really unhealthy, really bad for you. I think he invinced this.
Speaker 1: I think he's the first person to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get like a shirtless photo taken, I'd better
Speaker 1: starve myself and deny myself water so that my muscles
Speaker 1: look more defined. Like I think he invinced this. Yeah again, this,
Speaker 1: this guy invinced so much shit. It's really kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: Um and also you know, terrible because it's it's really
Speaker 1: it's not only is it bad for the actors who
Speaker 1: do this. You talk about like Hugh Jackman I think
Speaker 1: has talked a decent amount about like, yeah, it's fucking
Speaker 1: miserable being like famous for being super jacked because you
Speaker 1: have to stay super jacked, which is like horrible, like
Speaker 1: it's not. Efron has spoken about this too on his
Speaker 1: Netflix show where he's like, and I didn't eat a
Speaker 1: car for six years, and then he goes to Italy
Speaker 1: and yeah, bad. It's one of those things too. It's
Speaker 1: also you're not actually nearly as strong as as you
Speaker 1: look when you are like that. If you look at
Speaker 1: actual strong, like people who are like who compete to
Speaker 1: lift the most weight, like actual practical strength, not like
Speaker 1: compete to look like a strong, compete to like who
Speaker 1: can lift eight hundred pounds over their head, they all
Speaker 1: have huge middle sections and bellies because that's like necessary
Speaker 1: to being physically. Look at a longshoreman, right, Like those
Speaker 1: guys would beat the ship out of your average underwear model.
Speaker 1: And it's because like they're they have functional anyway, it's
Speaker 1: bad to starve yourself. It's not not good for you physically,
Speaker 1: it's not good for you, not it's morally bad. Again,
Speaker 1: we've all struggled. A lot of us have struggled with
Speaker 1: eating disorders. I have, but like, it's not good for you,
Speaker 1: And Bernard really gets that started, like really is the
Speaker 1: origin point for that in our culture, this idea of
Speaker 1: starvation and like particularly starvation to make yourself look better
Speaker 1: for like a photo shoot, which then passes on to
Speaker 1: like all these people having unreasonable expectations for like well
Speaker 1: my body should look like that all the time, and
Speaker 1: it's like, well, their body doesn't look like that all
Speaker 1: the time. They didn't drink water for a day. He's
Speaker 1: going for this, He's like passing this information along, like
Speaker 1: here's a little tip and a trick. If you deny
Speaker 1: yourself food and water, you'll look great hot. Yeah you
Speaker 1: have you think of this as like a viry, Like
Speaker 1: he shoots this into the body politic and it's never left. Um,
Speaker 1: it's great. For the next few years, burn Our works
Speaker 1: as a teacher, a personal trainer, a model, and a writer,
Speaker 1: finally selling articles on fitness and health to numerous publications.
Speaker 1: But the whole time, Bernard's number one product was Bernard McFadden. Right. Again,
Speaker 1: this is very much like influencers today. Next, he decided
Speaker 1: to bring you for the good in the service product
Speaker 1: and the product in this trash. Next, he decides to
Speaker 1: bring the benefit of his teaching to people in their
Speaker 1: homes by creating an exercise machine anyone could use. So
Speaker 1: he's the first if this influencer to make an exercise
Speaker 1: machine and sell it through the infomercials of today. Dude,
Speaker 1: this guy you have to respect how groundbreaking he is.
Speaker 1: Like every month of his twenties, he's inventing a thing
Speaker 1: that exists forever now and he hasn't killed that baby yet.
Speaker 1: He has not yet killed that I mean, right, so
Speaker 1: so far, I mean I admire his Uh, there's a
Speaker 1: respect you have to have for anyone who is this influential. Right,
Speaker 1: doesn't mean they're good, because a lot of the things
Speaker 1: he's invented, even at this early stage, are bad things.
Speaker 1: But it is like, well, god damn, Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: his productivity, And I know we shouldn't like measure someone's
Speaker 1: value or anything like that based on productivity, but it's
Speaker 1: one of those things I still kind of hang on
Speaker 1: to where I'm like, I've done nothing today and this
Speaker 1: guy and he's twenty five and he's inventing. He's created
Speaker 1: like four different poisons that still exist in our society.
Speaker 1: He started singing the song that might in the world,
Speaker 1: you know. So he invinced this exercise machine, and he
Speaker 1: describes it as quote, a combination of rubber chords running
Speaker 1: over pulleys um and it was such a failure in
Speaker 1: the US that the company making it goes bankrupt. But
Speaker 1: Bernard doesn't take this lying down. Instead, he takes the
Speaker 1: machines that have been built and he travels to England
Speaker 1: and he holds a series of stage shows where he
Speaker 1: shows up on stage in a loincloth lit from below
Speaker 1: on a background of black velvet, and he poses with
Speaker 1: his machine, lecturing on its benefits while showing off his
Speaker 1: shredded abs and biceps. He is hosting the first infomercials
Speaker 1: which he does in England. Yeah, because he's like trying
Speaker 1: to advertise it, I think to the paper in the US.
Speaker 1: Doesn't really work. Next from the book, Mr America, perhaps
Speaker 1: inspired by the life changing pamphlet of dumbbell exercises he
Speaker 1: received on his first visit to the Missouri Gymnasy him,
Speaker 1: he published a four page brochure describing how to use
Speaker 1: the McFadden exerciser. When British audience has devoured this fitness wisdom,
Speaker 1: the frustrated writer began adding his rejected health articles to
Speaker 1: the publication's contents. What started as an instruction manual was
Speaker 1: soon transformed into a miniature physical culture periodical inside was
Speaker 1: an address to which interested parties could send money to
Speaker 1: receive future editions. Orders flooded in. McFadden quickly arranged to
Speaker 1: publish the pamphlets regularly out of London as McFadden's magazine.
Speaker 1: So he starts the first fitness magazine. This is really
Speaker 1: the first one that exists. And this leads McFadden's magazine
Speaker 1: in England, leads quickly in eight like he returns home
Speaker 1: um and in eight while he's back in the u S.
Speaker 1: Bernard McFadden creates a new magazine and this is going
Speaker 1: to be his first like dedicated full time publication. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it is the first dedicated health magazine in history.
Speaker 1: He calls it physical culture. His wife would later say
Speaker 1: that most of his articles and the dozens of books
Speaker 1: he started writing from this point forward were the result
Speaker 1: of him encountering a physical malady, getting through it, and
Speaker 1: deciding that he had arrived at a medical breakthrough. Since
Speaker 1: his default treatment for almost everything was to starve himself
Speaker 1: or to exercise, most of his recommendations were based around
Speaker 1: starving yourself or exercising. He quickly developed a fan base
Speaker 1: from the Wall Street Journal quote. He attracted a following
Speaker 1: of serious people that included, among others, Upton Sinclair, the
Speaker 1: guy who wrote The Jungle, who contributed articles to Physical Culture.
Speaker 1: Proto feminists such as Charlotte Perkins and Margaret Sanger also
Speaker 1: wrote for McFadden. From the beginning, Physical Culture was rooted
Speaker 1: firmly in the imperialist dogma and white supremacy at the time,
Speaker 1: but not in a Nazi way. Um, in like the
Speaker 1: noble savage cultural appropriation way. Right. Um, I'm just like
Speaker 1: they're different. So I'm making that clear. From an article
Speaker 1: by Katherine Kaiser of James Madison University, quote, Physical Culture
Speaker 1: played into an ideal of frontier masculinity that may explain
Speaker 1: its strong circulation numbers in the West. The magazine contains
Speaker 1: some expressly regional content. In an early issue, a reader
Speaker 1: inquires about a Physical Culture settlement in New Mexico. Physical
Speaker 1: Culture also plumbed us mythologies associated with the West, praising
Speaker 1: indigenous diets and midwifery with imperialist nostalgia. McFadden published fiction
Speaker 1: by Jack London reinforcing that fantasy of white masculinity, Northwestern exploration,
Speaker 1: and the raw elements. The magazine was considered scandalous for
Speaker 1: its pictures of scantily clad bodies, which may explain its
Speaker 1: limited circulation along the Bible Belt physical cultures. Versions of
Speaker 1: muscular manhood and fearless femininity promuligated frank sexuality and clean
Speaker 1: eating still hallmarks of California culture. So he kind of
Speaker 1: invents California in a lot of ways, like he really,
Speaker 1: he really does. Like that's like this whole mix of
Speaker 1: like um often a historical idolization of indigenous diets based
Speaker 1: on stuff white people wrote as opposed to actual history
Speaker 1: mixed with like the benefits of exercise and fasting. Like
Speaker 1: he invent California suddenly, certainly Southern California scantily clad sexy
Speaker 1: and santalis sexy people. Yes, he's just created Southern California.
Speaker 1: From the beginning physical culture, the magazine was influential from
Speaker 1: more than just its health advice. Was also one of
Speaker 1: the first mainstream publications where Americans could see scantily clad
Speaker 1: or even naked human bodies. At the time, Anthony Comstock
Speaker 1: was a U. S. Postal inspector and the secretary of
Speaker 1: the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. His
Speaker 1: job was basically to make sure that stuffy victorians in
Speaker 1: the Big Apple encountered nothing that might harm their sensibilities.
Speaker 1: When someone pointed out that there was a hugely popular
Speaker 1: magazine with photographs and drawings of topless women in it,
Speaker 1: he lost his fucking mind. From History and net quote.
Speaker 1: In nineteen he rented Madison Square Garden for a monster
Speaker 1: physical culture exhibition, advertised with posters of muscular men and
Speaker 1: women minimally dressed. Anthony Comstock, head of the Society for
Speaker 1: the Suppression of Vice, seized the posters and arrested McFadden
Speaker 1: for obscenity. The court evicted him without penalty. The Hoopla
Speaker 1: drew twenty customers, so again, being censored is great for
Speaker 1: his business. Police again arrested McFadden in n seven when
Speaker 1: a New Jersey postmaster charged that a physical culture article
Speaker 1: about venereal disease was obscene. The jury convicted McFadden. The
Speaker 1: judge sentenced him to two years in prison. He filed
Speaker 1: an appeal, meanwhile traveling the country denouncing prudes and censors,
Speaker 1: but the appeals court upheld his conviction. Facing prison, McFadden
Speaker 1: urged fans to write to President William Howard Taft delused
Speaker 1: with letters taft, America's fattest president, pardoned the muscle bound
Speaker 1: media king. And it's again this mix of things that
Speaker 1: are bad and things that are good that he's doing.
Speaker 1: The obscene vinereal disease articles that he gets censored for,
Speaker 1: is him like talking very frankly about this is what
Speaker 1: gnarrhea looks like and what it does and how it spread,
Speaker 1: what syphilis looks like and what it does and how
Speaker 1: it's spread. Like it's he's actually doing a necessary public
Speaker 1: service that he gets censored for. Okay, yeah, yeah, it's cool. Now,
Speaker 1: while all this is going on, McFadden is fighting the government,
Speaker 1: you know, while my fadden is fighting the government for
Speaker 1: his right to like show tits and talk about syphilis,
Speaker 1: he's also operating a cult compound in New Jersey. So
Speaker 1: he starts a cult compound. Yeah, in the early nine
Speaker 1: why not, like I will one day do, but not
Speaker 1: on the East coast because that sounds hard talked about.
Speaker 1: We talked about this, and as cult compounds go, his
Speaker 1: was pretty milk toast. No one died or as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, got like raped or anything. Like,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't like. It's kind of a cult,
Speaker 1: but it's not really. Yeah, it's definitely like a diet version.
Speaker 1: I don't think, oh god, yeah, I know it is
Speaker 1: a diet cult. Yeah. Um. But I have to say
Speaker 1: it goes down in history as having the dumbest name
Speaker 1: in could compound history. Are no physical culture city? What
Speaker 1: cosson physical culture city. It's very funny. It's like if
Speaker 1: I called my could compound behind the bastards town, Like
Speaker 1: it's just kind of lame, Like come on, what you're
Speaker 1: going to call it? Mosopolis? Like Jesus Christ. To understand
Speaker 1: his efforts here, we should go back and talk about
Speaker 1: the cold compound that inspired Bernard's cult compound, the much
Speaker 1: better named Zion City. That's a fucking compound name. That's
Speaker 1: what you call your cold compound, right, Zion City, solid
Speaker 1: could compound name. Zion City had been founded at the
Speaker 1: turn of the century by a guy named John Alexander
Speaker 1: Dowie uh Dowie or Dowie whatever. Was a preacher who
Speaker 1: brought five thousand followers out of Chicago and created a
Speaker 1: small city where people could live a godly life. In
Speaker 1: Dowie's estimation, godly meant no drinking, smoking, pork, doctors, or vaccines.
Speaker 1: So you can see why Bernard McFadden loved this ship.
Speaker 1: In nineteen o three, Bernard declared Dowie the greatest leader
Speaker 1: and most remarkable reformer of the last hundred years. Shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: Dowie was kicked out of his church for stealing from it.
Speaker 1: But Bernard Meermain deeply committed to his vision, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen o four he started writing columns in which he
Speaker 1: discussed his desire to buy land and create a city.
Speaker 1: Soon after, he bought eighteen hundred acres in northern New Jersey.
Speaker 1: He called it Physical Culture City, and it was large
Speaker 1: enough to be subdivided into many lots. This idea was
Speaker 1: that people would buy lots in Physical Culture City and
Speaker 1: build an actual industrial city. He wants this to have
Speaker 1: like factories and ship um. And it's located well, it's
Speaker 1: next to a railroad road crossing, so like it is
Speaker 1: possible to get stuff in and out of there. Um.
Speaker 1: It's got its own seventy acre water feature, which he
Speaker 1: calls Lake Margaret, which is named after his second wife.
Speaker 1: He's gotten married and divorced once already. He does this
Speaker 1: lot um. This happens to him a few times, so
Speaker 1: his employees noted that when it came to the women
Speaker 1: he married, he preferred Amazon's large breasted women with large
Speaker 1: child bearing hips. Um. When he married Marguerite, he immediately
Speaker 1: started having her write articles about raising children to a
Speaker 1: new magazine that he started for her articles called Beauty
Speaker 1: and Health. Now neither of them had kids at this point. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they're writing articles about how to raise them. Um.
Speaker 1: Immediately after their wedding, and again, this is his second marriage,
Speaker 1: Bernard writes a book, which is his tenth book in
Speaker 1: the last five years. He's just writing books all the
Speaker 1: goddamn time now, and it sounds like he's pivoted from
Speaker 1: plagiarizing Jane Austen to mostly just like fitness self help. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the book he writes is marriage a Lifelong Honeymoon. Um.
Speaker 1: And in it again he's failed at his first marriage,
Speaker 1: but and he just started his second. But he's like,
Speaker 1: I got this ship figured out now, I know exactly
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, he thinks. And his conclusion is
Speaker 1: that all divorces are caused by people not exercising enough.
Speaker 1: It's very funny. Oh wow, he's he is funny. He's
Speaker 1: quite a guy. In nineteen o five, Bernar and Marguerite
Speaker 1: had a baby, a daughter, and immediately moved to a
Speaker 1: house that they built in Physical Culture City. The city's
Speaker 1: opening was announced in Bernard's magazine to great fanfare. He
Speaker 1: bragged it would be quote a community with no sickly prudes,
Speaker 1: no saloons, drug stores, tobacco shops, or places in which
Speaker 1: one may purchase things that make for the moral undoing
Speaker 1: of man or woman. Speaking of moral undoings, Bernard almost
Speaker 1: immediately fell in love with his secretary Susie, and he
Speaker 1: set a house up with her in the house he
Speaker 1: lived with with his wife. Um. And yeah, he set
Speaker 1: up a house in the same He moved her into
Speaker 1: the house with his wife. Yeah, okay, So his wife leaves,
Speaker 1: she goes to Canada. He never sees her again. She
Speaker 1: takes her their daughter with him and her, and he
Speaker 1: never sees his daughter again either. I think, Um, he's
Speaker 1: fine with this because he's got Susie now. Uh. Susie's
Speaker 1: mom moves in to help keep up the house, to
Speaker 1: keep it clean, and Susie gets pregnant with Bernard's second child.
Speaker 1: In nineteen o six, Physical Culture City operated again another innovation,
Speaker 1: as an internship scan. He advertise degrees and Physical Culture
Speaker 1: to people who would come and cut down trees and
Speaker 1: plant crops for free. Um he would like build streets
Speaker 1: and stuff. He builds this as a work study program,
Speaker 1: but he makes it impossible to graduate, so they stay
Speaker 1: as indentured laborers the whole side. Holy sure, I know
Speaker 1: what a fucking groundbreaking thinker. I can't believe. I did
Speaker 1: not expect for that to take that turn. He's amazing.
Speaker 1: Most people who resided in Physical Culture City were interns.
Speaker 1: The rest were a handful of wealthy cranks who wanted
Speaker 1: to spend all their time nude or experiment with weird diets.
Speaker 1: That were a lot of raw food fanatics who like
Speaker 1: live in Physical Culture City. The whole project fell apart,
Speaker 1: of course, it never eclipsed two people in population. Bernard's
Speaker 1: arrest for transporting of scene material through the mail actually
Speaker 1: happened because the postmaster that he bribed to handle the
Speaker 1: city's mail got angry when Bernard then tried to cut
Speaker 1: him out of the business, and this postmaster warts into
Speaker 1: the FEDS. A lot of formerly dedicated members abandoned the
Speaker 1: project when Bernar abandoned his wife, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe this guy isn't doesn't know all. He wrote a
Speaker 1: book on how marriage is a long lasting honeymoon, and
Speaker 1: then he abandons his wife. I can't trust him. Maybe
Speaker 1: this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh. These
Speaker 1: two things together led to a mass exodus that was
Speaker 1: exacerbated by a disastrous town meeting in which Bernard accused
Speaker 1: everyone else of committing my favorite term ever, physical culture treason.
Speaker 1: What a perfect maniac, physical culture treason. Oh that's good,
Speaker 1: he's very funny. By nineteen o seven, he and his
Speaker 1: operation We're back in New York City. By nineteen ten,
Speaker 1: he'd written another eight books, and he'd opened a chain
Speaker 1: of health food restaurants that sold healthy meals for one cent.
Speaker 1: And these do seem to have been pretty good. He
Speaker 1: also sent three years Sorry, I'm just doing and I
Speaker 1: don't think they're not good books, Caitlin. He's like, he's
Speaker 1: like Stephen King, but with health shit right, Okay, what
Speaker 1: if a car made you fit? I don't know whatever.
Speaker 1: So he also founded a chain of health attori ums,
Speaker 1: most of which operated similarly to the health Club at
Speaker 1: Battle Creek operated by Dr Harvey Kellogg. Bernar personally created
Speaker 1: treatment plans for each of the patrons who showed up
Speaker 1: at his health actorium for extended stays. Most of his
Speaker 1: treatments involved fasting or starvation. Um. And that's what we're
Speaker 1: going to end for part one. Caitlin. We have a
Speaker 1: good bit more of Bernard's tale to tell, but that's
Speaker 1: going to have to wait until Thursday. Until then, do
Speaker 1: you be pluggables to plug? Oh goodness, I do, and
Speaker 1: they are this. You can follow me on Instagram and
Speaker 1: Twitter at Caitlin Durante, and you can check out the
Speaker 1: podcast that I co host with Jamie Loftus called The
Speaker 1: Bechtel Cast, in which we examine movies through an intersectional
Speaker 1: femine list lens. And of course you can find Caitlin
Speaker 1: at Physical Culture City um Born and Raised and Raised BOYD.
Speaker 1: Here we Go.