Part One: How the First Fitness Influencer Doomed Us All

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Well, I am recording. I'm Robert Evans. I was going
to start this episode. I'm ashamed. Yeah, okay, Sophie Lichtman here,
we just did a full five minutes of this podcast
where an incredible opening with Robert who accused me of crimes,
used my full legal name and uh mispronounced Caitlyn Drante,

(00:25):
our fabulous guest last name sixteen times, and uh and
and and and we don't have it for you because
Robert wasn't recorded. Yeah, well, how do you feel? Look?
I I think I am a hero and did nothing wrong.
I mean, don't ever change. But also you should. You
should record it. I mean, let's get the opinion of

(00:45):
our of our guests for today. Yeah, I just did
I want it clear one time. Caitlyn durrant No, I
don't know what you're having problems with. Good. It's incredible.
You're being very mean to me. I said that, did

(01:10):
not Sophie. This is not professional. Okay, we have a
podcast to do. Can I apologize? How are you doing?
I'm doing well? Thank you for asking? How are you?
I'm good, Caitlin. You helped to host a podcast co
host Some would say most would say a podcast called

(01:33):
the Bechtel Cast, which is about Hollywood and movies and
sexism and sexism and Hollywood movies. This is all true, yes,
and we just we've found that there's there's no problem.
There's no problem with sexism and Hollywood. It's a they're
doing a great job. It's all good, baby, It's all good.

(01:56):
That's what everybody says about Michael Bay And at unproblematic
scene where he showed cut out laminated of Texas is
Romeo and Juliet Law allowing adults to sleep with teenagers?
Have you not seen that? I think it's the third Transformers,
It might be the fourth, but there's one of the

(02:19):
characters is like, he's an Australian race car driver and
he's dating Mark Wahlberg's daughter who is seventeen, and he's
like twenty something. And Mark Wahlberg is like, hey, that's illegal.
You're my daughter is a child and you're an adult.
And the kid pulls out a laminated copy of Texas
Romeo and Juliet Law, and the camera centers on it

(02:40):
and focuses for like several seconds, long enough for you
to read the entirety of the law, Like it's very
clearly Michael Baby and like, hey, you can children in Texas.
It's a basically wow. It is. It's hard to say
something's one of the creepiest moments in Hollywood history, but

(03:01):
that that's got to hit the mark. That's in the
running for that award. Yeah, holy crap, it's amazing. I
hate that. Oh you'll have to watch that now because
I need to hear Jamie loft Is have an aneurysm
through a podcast. Well, we keep trying to get you
on the show. You've never asked me on. Well, we

(03:25):
we've lie, Lie, I don't believe I've ever been asked on.
I've asked, Caitlin's asked, Jamie's asked. I've asked again Jamie's.
I would never say no to Jamie or Caitlin. It's uh,
I mean maybe you're I definitely say no to you sometimes.
So like when you tell me to wake up at
the ass crack of dawn, it could it could be.

(03:50):
The movie we want you to do is the Hannah
Montana movie. And maybe you've been reluctant to come on
for that one Montana. Then great, we'll see you there
for the Montana. The famous movie titled Montana I do

(04:10):
love Montana. I am. I am assuming it is a
sequel to The Hunt for Red October, where Sam Neil's
character is resurrected by an archangel and becomes a farmer
outside of Bozeman. Now my head canon. All right, so, Caitlin,
Normally on the show, when someone comes in having a
good day, it's our job to ruin it by telling

(04:30):
him about how a bunch of babies got killed or molested,
or how I don't know the world got poisoned or
something horrible happened. But today we're gonna have a little
bit more fun with it. Oh yeah, today, our bastard
didn't kill anybody except for arguably maybe one baby. Well, okay, then, yeah,
that it barely counts as a crime. Like by our standards,

(04:53):
he's earned the Robert Evans Award for killing no more
than one baby. Maybe potentially, Yeah, let's give this guy
a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, I would. I would argue
that he would have killed less babies than most people
who have won Nobel Peace Prizes. That's that's that's definitely,
that's absolutely true. Um, Caitlin, have you ever heard of

(05:16):
Bernard McFadden, Bernard Berner, yeah, not Bernard, Bernard, Bernard, I
mean at one Bernard, yeah, Bernar Um. Okay, well this
is going to be a fun time because so obviously, Uh,
you know, when when we think about the apocalypse, right

(05:36):
the end of days, there are a number of ways,
like all the nukes could come like that red balloon scenario,
I think is when people think a lot something like that,
Aliens could come down asteroid. I think, based on the
pandemic we've had, one of the likeliest ways the world
might end involves fitness influencers. I think there's a pretty
good chance that the end of the human race heavily

(05:58):
involves wellness. Uh, the people who get famous promoting wellness. Um. Yeah, yeah,
that tracks to me. Yeah yeah, I don't think I
need to like the labor that point. Now, the title
fitness influencer today applies to just about anybody who like
writes about health to a social media audience that's above

(06:19):
a certain size, and studies consistently show that at best
about one in tent of these people provide broadly accurate information.
So about nine of health influencers are just lying to people, um,
which is again why they're going to help end human civilization.
We can currently trace a significant amount of COVID nineteen
disinformation to what are currently called micro influencers. These are

(06:42):
people with like about ten to a hundred thousand followers
on apps like Instagram um, which counts as micro um
and makeel really bad about my following. Then it's okay,
because Caitlin, I feel confident saying in upwards of eight
percent of theoretical so you have no role in ending civilization. Yeah,

(07:04):
but I want the power with more to be able
to if I wanted to. If I had more followers,
it would be fun because Joe Rogan could snap his
fingers and wipe out cities. Um. Also, yeah, boost my
boost my following so that I can help and the

(07:25):
world if I went into a micro influencer, because studies
show that micro influencers are actually much more influential. I
was just joking about Joe Rogan, but people with that
kind of following are less influential than people with like
the ten do d thousand follower range. One of the
theories is that like it's a little more intimate, so
people think maybe they're less trying to sell me stuff
and more like my friend giving me health advice person

(07:48):
was only you know, twelve thou followers is a little
bit more relatable than someone with three point two million. Yeah, exactly, Um.
And so at present time, I would argue that, like
roughly a third of American industry is different kinds of
fitness and health and wellness influencers. It feels like that's
the most common job, or at least aspirational job that

(08:09):
I see. Um. But it wasn't always this way. Before
the social media age, fitness influencers were a mix of
celebrities who parlayed their existing fame into workout videos um,
and people who were primarily famous for either losing a
bunch of weight or writing a best selling exercise book.
I'm talking about people like Richard Simmons, Right. That's an

(08:29):
early fitness influencer by most of our standards, right, Um,
he's a good example of kind of the former he was.
He famous, I believe, just because he lost a bunch
of weight and then made videos teaching other people how
to do it. Another early fitness influencer was a running
guru named Jim fix Um, who stand up comedians in
the nineties love to joke about because he died after

(08:51):
a run UM. Now, perhaps the most toxic health influencer
UM in the modern canon is Oprah Winfrey, who we
have talked about a number of the scams that she's perpetuated,
but Dr Phil and Dr Oz would probably be top
about that. Now, if anyone currently gives Oprah a run
for her money, it's probably Joe Rogan, a man who
I'm certain if you asked him what he considers himself,

(09:13):
he would not say anything that sounds like health influencer.
But that's also like a huge part of what he
does and what his fame and popularity comes from is
not listen to a single second of things. Is Joe
Rogan experience. Yeah, that Joe Rogan experience. He gives a
lot of advice. I mean, I don't think he even
frames it as advice, but like he talks about what

(09:35):
he does in terms of, like, here's what I'm doing
for COVID. You know, I'm not going to give vaccinating
yadda yadi YadA, like I'll I'm taken the ivermectin or whatever. Um.
He gives a lot of life and he has a
lot of people on his show who give like diet
and lifestyle advice. So it's not just him, but it
left like Jordan Peterson on to talk about his all
meat diet um. Whether or not Joe considers himself when

(09:58):
is a major you're like health influencer, like maybe even
the biggest currently because Oprah's kind of faded a bit
an influence next to Joe Rogan at them at this
moment um. And obviously both Joe and Oprah are ridiculously
wealthy people. There are billions to be made and looking
healthy um, and some people think Joe Rogan looks healthy.

(10:20):
I can't explain that to you, Caitlin, but they do
um and then promising to teach people the secrets to
be like you. The best of these people create little
bit of cults so tight and consistent with their disinformation
that no light or truth can escape. And today we're
talking about the guy who invented that kind of thing,
the guy who is the foundation for both Joe Rogan

(10:42):
and Oprah Winfrey and a million lesser health gods, all
spewing misinformation into the plague racked ether um. And this guy,
this motherfucker, is a dude named Bernard McFadden. Now that's
a weird name. Bernar Um I mean shame, and he
he chose it. He chose it. He's the only Bernard

(11:05):
there's ever fucking dog. It is okay to shame someone
for choosing a stupid name because he was born Bernard,
like the the the action that we are familiar, like
the real name. Bernard Adolphus McFadden on August six, eighteen
sixty eight, in mill Spring, Missouri. Now mill Spring was

(11:26):
a tiny little ship town without much going for it,
and young Bernard came into a family who also didn't
have a lot going for them. His dad was an
alcoholic in an era in which you weren't legally an
alcoholic until you drank yourself completely to death. Now, Papa
McFadden had fought in the Union Army during the Civil War.
So when I say he's an alcoholic, I have some

(11:47):
sympathy for the man. He's probably an alcoholic because he's
like lived through nightmares incomprehensible to modern men. Right. Yeah,
And by the time he started his family, I think
it's probably accurate to say he was basically just a
broken shell of a man. Um The biography I found
of Bernard says that his dad was happy only hunting

(12:09):
deer and drinking himself to death and betting on horse races. Um.
The few times he was sober, he was apparently nice
to his family, but he was not sober often um,
and he did not seem to take much pleasure in
his children, including young Bernard. Mostly he would physically abuse
his wife and his children when he came home drunk
as hell. Um. It is a bad home environment, um.

(12:31):
Since all of the family money went to hard liquor
and gambling. The McFadden's barely survived on. You know, the
during the best of times when when Dad was alive,
when Bernard was still a little kid, his mother decided
she had had enough, which is not a common thing.
You do not see a lot of women who are
able to do this in this period of time, like
the eighteen seventies, early eighteen seventies. And she picks up

(12:55):
her son and her two young daughters and she flees
her husband and their home to stay with her family. Um.
Papa McFadden comes by a couple of times, tries to
get them back, and she doesn't take him back. She
doesn't agree to it because he's a ruinous drunk. And
sure enough, less than a year after she leaves him
when Bernard is for his dad dies from alcohol abuse. Um,

(13:16):
just like drinks himself to death. It was not common
for women to get divorced in the late eighteen hundreds,
and I don't think this was a divorce. I think
she just was like, I'm not going to keep my
kids around this fucking maniac. Um. So good for her.
It is a mark of what a strong woman that
Bernard's mother was that she managed to do this, and
she got her children free and clear from a bad situation. Unfortunately,

(13:37):
she was not able to bring them to a good situation. Um,
this is not like a she doesn't like take them
into a I mean, I guess you maybe it's better
Well ask that question later, Kaitlyn. All right, Um, because
they were dirt poor. Um, and she was also dying
this entire time. She was basically sick from tuberculosis all

(13:58):
of Bernard's early life. And she can't really make any money,
can't really feed her family, and her her relatives are
not very helpful because they're all kind of barely hanging
on by a thread. Bernard's biographer Mark Adams describes him
as a mama's boy, which makes sense. Obviously, he's going
to be dedicated to his mom. Growing up in this
kind of environment, his dad certainly did not give him

(14:19):
a lot to aspire to emulate. Bernard was also a
sickly boy with poor health. Much like his mother. He
was smaller than many of the other local boys, and
he was regularly beaten up and dumped in a river
by other kids at age seven. Yeah, he's he's a
victim of bull He's gotta he's got to have a
lot of sympathy for this kid. This is we hear

(14:41):
about some rough upbringings on behind the bastards, but this
is a tough one dunked in the like yeah, because
this is, like, you know, not a not a nice
part of the world. Um, I wouldn't say a blasted hellscape,
but a health scape ape for sure. Now, at age seven,

(15:04):
Bernard was vaccinated for smallpox. That seems like a good
thing right today, I mean as as as a rule,
big fans of the smallpox vacts, big fans of vaccines
in general. However, in the eighteen seventies, vaccines were not
quite what they are today today. Wait a minute, A
bad vaccine experience for the vast majority of people means like, yeah,

(15:25):
I felt like kind of shitty for a day, right
like you get the COVID vaccine. A lot of people like, yeah,
I felt like I kind of had a flu for
like a day. Um vaccines were different back then, so
the best way of vaccinating people against smallpox at the
time it was not like a nice clean shot. You
would cut their arm open with a razor blade and
you would shove a scab from someone else's smallpox lesion

(15:46):
into the wound um And this works. This does, in fact,
confer immunity to small box at the low, low cost
of killing a significant percentage of the people vaccinated in
this manner, not as many as smallpox did. It's an improvement,
but a lot of people die from this early vaccine
because you're just shoving a scab into an open wound
and it gives you smallpox. For several of those people,

(16:09):
it is supposed to give you a weekend case of
small box that then gives you an immunity. However, none
of us here are doctors, but I think we all
can understand that if you shove a filthy scab into
an open wound, you can get sick like other than
the way you're supposed to get sick, and in Bernard's case,
he gets blood poisoning, which keeps him bed ridden for

(16:31):
six months. It's looking horrible, this poor kid. And he's
how old at this point? Oh, he's like six. Oh,
it's poor he is. This is earliest memory. I mean,
this is probably like his earliest memory is like spending
six months dying in bed because a maniac doctor shoves

(16:55):
a scab into his open wound. It looks I could
probably rust knife, yeah, I mean sanitization. I mean the
doctors were arguing strenuously about whether or not washing your
hands was like the devil's plaything or something like. It
was not a great time for science. And to make
it much worse, Caitlin, Not long after he recovers, this happens,

(17:19):
and I'm going to quote from the biography Mr. America,
which is about Bernard McFadden. One morning, not long after
Bernard had recovered, his mother took him to St. Louis.
So already we're in a bad start here. They were
met at the Mississippi River docks by a strange gentleman.
Mary explained to her son that the man was going
to take him away on a steamship. She did not
mention a return trip. Long after the boy had grown

(17:40):
up and reinvented himself as Bernard McFadden. He recalled the
resulting scene as being torn, screaming and clawing and kicking
in a frantic agony of fear from his mother's arms.
The man managed to pull Bernard from Mary and lead
him towards the wharf, but the boy broke free and
ran back to his mother, tears running down his face.
Mary told her eight year old son the cold truth.

(18:00):
Hopeless and nearly destitute, wasting away from late stage tuberculosis,
she no longer had the energy or means to care
for a growing boy. She was sending him off to
the cheapest boarding school she could find. So she and again,
I don't. I can't put any of laim on her.
She's in an impossible situation. She's trying to she wants
her kid to have someone to take care of them.

(18:21):
She's like, I am dying and I cannot provide you
with food, Like this is the best option that is
available to me. And it's a ship option because this
school is a horrible place. This, this is a school
that would qualify as a war crime. There are concentration
camps that were nicer than this school. You know, are

(18:41):
we gonna care more about this school? Yeah, it was
officially an orphanage. M Bernard called it the starvation School.
He was of the opinion as an adult that the
orphans and olive her twist headed easy compared to him.
Children were barely fed. The only calories they could reliably
get came in the form of peanuts, which at the
time peanut butter hasn't been like created yet, so at

(19:04):
the time peanuts are basically trash and are being sold
as hog feed for a dollar a ton um. So
that's that's what the kids get, and not much of that. So,
after several months of slowly starving to death, Bernard's mother
came for him. She'd managed to find, like get in contact.
It's hard to get in contact with family, right. You
may know, like, well, I've got relatives in this state,

(19:25):
but like you haven't seen him in years. It takes
six months to fucking get anywhere. So she manages with
like the last strength in her body, um to find
some relatives who are willing to take Bernard's sisters, who
she keeps with her UM, and then she comes back
for him because she's figured out a better solution for him. Um,
she knows she's close to death. At this point, she's
kind of scrambling to get all of her children set

(19:46):
up as well as her limited resources would allow. Unfortunately,
she was not great at this, although arguably you could
again say this is like an impossible task. And the
person that she places Bernard with after this orphanage was
an extremely stent relative who saw him more as cheap
labor than a human being. But it's a step up
from the starvation school. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's better. That's

(20:12):
we're doing fine. We're doing fine. And you know who
else is doing fine, Caitlin, the products and services that
support this podcast. I knew that was going to They're
nailing it. They're doing great, Caitlin, they're doing great. Land. Anyway,

(20:33):
here's ads. We're back, and I'm I'm just basking in
the glow of pride that I didn't say, you know
who else doesn't starve children? Robert. I was just going
to commend you and how pure and not horrible that
ad break. Yeah, yeah, that's going to keep us in

(20:54):
the house and home for another week, Sophie. So this
relative and his wife, the family that Bernard is placed
with an again distant family run a hotel near Chicago.
When Bernard met them, he was overwhelmed by the fact
that they were fat, which is he had not like
well because number one, it's harder to be fat back then. Um.

(21:15):
Number two, he has spent his entire childhood starving um,
and his family has been starving not enough food. Ever,
so the fact that he when he just assumes anyone
fat is richest shit right like he he almost couldn't
comprehend the idea that people could be fat like. He
recalls this as being like baffling to him. This couple
set Bernard to working long hours staffing their hotel. They

(21:37):
fed him, but that was about all they did for him.
One day, a few months into his time with him,
the man he was staying with like told him offhandedly, hey,
your mom died, um, And then the hotel owner's wife said, uh,
this one's going the same way. She says, as to
her husband, this one's going the same way. Yeah, he's
got all the symptoms consumption runs in the family. By

(22:00):
hey mom, Hey, could your dad or your hey kid,
your mom died and then the ladies like, yeah, it
looked like this motherfucker's gonna drop pretty soon too again.
Bleak childhood, truly, I would argue, not really a childhood,
so oh, just just just one torture situation after another

(22:22):
pretty horrible situation. Out of spite for his relatives as
much as anything, Bernard decided then and there that he
would become the healthiest man alive now. Consumption Today, when
people talk about someone having consumption, generally they are referring
to tuberculosis or tv um. But it's also worth noting
that like everyone that people said had consumption didn't actually

(22:44):
have tuberculosis because medicine was shipped and people got sick
in a variety of ways that made them like thin
and kind of in bad health, and everyone was just
like that person is like thin and pale and sickly,
it's got to be tuberculosis. And sometimes it was like, no,
they're not. They're eating, like they're not getting nutrients. They're
like basically have been starved their entire life of necessary

(23:05):
food stuffs or whatever like they have I don't know,
a parasite or something like. There's all sorts of things
that can make someone in the eighteen sixties seventies say
like Oh, it's got to be the consumption. It was like, no,
you basically everything was misdiagnosed back then. I think it's
some things right, but yeah, a lot of I mean
I don't think he had t B because he hears

(23:27):
himself with like diet and exercise later so which I
don't think works with TV. I think he was just
horribly malnourished because he grew up unbelievably poor. Right. Um,
after a time with the hotel, Bernard was moved to
a farm in northern Illinois. And these are again like
family members who treat him as labor with no thought
to his emotional health or education. To the extent that

(23:50):
he was ever educated at all in his childhood, it
was like he was occasionally sent to school for it
day here in a day there because the truant officers
were in town and like they he needed to like
not get them in trouble. Um. Still, the fresh air
and the manual labor of farm life did him wonders.
He starts putting on muscle for the first time, he
stops showing what people consider to be symptoms of consumption,

(24:11):
like as soon as he gets out in the fresh air,
working with his body and eating a decent diet. He
has a high a diet, high end dairy, so he's
finally getting a lot of protein for the first time
in his life. He's immediately in much better health because again,
he didn't have consumption. He was just horribly. He was
just starving, just eating peanuts. Is that where the phrase
comes from, or that expression where like, if you like

(24:33):
work for hardly any money, he's like, Oh, I'm just
getting peanuts or whatever. I mean, that would make sense,
right because it used to be like literally the cheapest
food you could possibly get. That would be my guess. Um,
I don't know, so let's say that it is. Let's
say that it is. During his time at the farm,

(24:54):
Bernard began to learn the lessons that would become the
center of his health philosophy. Outdoor or labor, along with
a sparse diet consisting mostly of vegetables and milk, was
the key to health, which is not bad Pelt advice.
If you spend a lot of time working around outside
using your body, vegetables, milk, avoid red meat, which is
a thing like he doesn't he's not really a big

(25:15):
fan of meat. Like that's not bad diet advice most
people will do all right on that kind of a diet. Um.
This merged with his unfortunately well earned hatred of vaccines,
which is understandable. We're not talking about like modern anti
vac shit. If you have Bernard's childhood, I get why
you'd be anti vaccine when you were like bedridden for

(25:35):
six months because you have blood poisoning because something gave
you a bad smallpox vaccine in the eighteen seventies. Yeah. Yeah,
that's not really being anti science, like it's it is
anti science, but like I can't blow. Also, the vaccines
were anti science back then. They weren't. I mean, the

(25:56):
same thing is they were better right than smallpox, because
smallpox is fucking nightmare. But yeah, yeah, it's weird, Caitlin,
it's I mean, I think most of us would be
anti anything that kept us bed ridden for six months. Yeah,
I think I would be. I think I'd probably not
be supportive of that thing. Um. Another pillar of his

(26:20):
growing philosophy came when, after a particularly bleak church lecture,
he stole some of the farmer he was living, some
of this farmer's whiskey and a bunch of chewing tobacco,
and he Basically, he has like this church lecture where
they're like everybody's going to hill and he gets sad,
so he steals a bunch of liquor and chewing tobacco
and he gets just wrecked. And he's he is twelve
at this just goes on a bender way he's twelve. Yeah,

(26:42):
he's twelve, a hard twelve Bernard. Yeah, he gets he
gets wrecked, and this is um probably the last time
he ever gets wrecked, because he wakes up in the
morning with a horror will hangover. You know, you know
those tobacco and hard liquor hangovers. I went to college. Yeah, yeah,

(27:07):
I know those are not pleasant for you or anyone
around you. Um so he uh. He decides, based on
this hangover to spend the rest of his life sober um,
which I have decided on a number of occasions. It
never stuck with me, but it does for him the same.
I'm like, I'm never drinking against time choices. But then

(27:30):
you know, two weeks later, yeah, I'm having a glass
of wine. You know what, I would like a hurricane
at nine in the morning, Sophie, when do you drink hurricanes?
Not morning? First of all, you wouldn't be awake, not

(27:51):
if I'm drinking enough hurricanes. Yes, So if you're gonna
have to bribe Robert for like these early recordings with
yeah hurricanes, Yeah, deliver hurricanes to my house and I
will wake up as early as that was a lie. Okay,

(28:13):
So shortly after this, um Bernard. You know, he loves
the farm labor, he loves the outdoor life. But he's
also he's he grows up with a lot of pride um,
which is you have to say, impressive for a kid
who's upbringing is so comprehensively bleak. And despite loving the lifestyle,
he's enraged at the fact that he's not getting paid
much money. He thinks he's worth more money than he's getting.

(28:35):
So shortly after this he leaves, like the countryside for
the big city, which in this case was unfortunately St. Louis.
He got St. Lucis, well, I was born there for
one thing, so I get to So he gets a
job with he had another uncle, and this one runs
a dry goods store. Bernard earned twelve dollars a month

(28:57):
to help keep the books and manage the store. He
was promoted after a year, and he made pretty good money.
For a teenage boy at the time, but the work
kept him indoors and huddled over a desk at all times,
so he's just experienced what he considers to be the
joys of being physically fit, of laboring with his body.
And then he gets stuck inside a dank office all
day every day and he goes kind of stir crazy

(29:18):
and his his health issues return, right because he thinks
it's his consumption coming back. The reality is that, like, yeah,
you shouldn't sit inside a desk all day and not
go outside. It's it's it's bad for you. It's not
good for anybody. Um. And also you are thirteen. You
should not be working a desk job for sixty hours
a week. Oh god, yeah, yeah, it's not good for you. Um.

(29:45):
So yeah, his health issues return and he's desperate. He
winds up stumbling through the city one day until he
happens upon a gym. Now at the time, Jim's are
a pretty new concept, right, This is like not all
they exist at all? Yeah, they did, they did. Um.
They actually started earlier than you might think. The Young
Men's Christian Association, or the y m c A had

(30:05):
been founded in England a couple of decades earlier, in
eighteen forty four, UM and it had been founded to
push back against the unhealthy conditions caused by the switch
from pastoral farming lives to industrial work and desk work
by men and dense cities. So the actual origin of
jim culture comes out of the same stuff that Bernard
is experiencing moving from farming, which is, I don't know,

(30:29):
there's a lot of things that can be unhealthy about
some of the different motions of farming, but as a
general rule, moving around outside, using your body, the fresh air,
pretty good. People who grow up farming tend to be
healthier than people who grow up in dank industrial cesspits,
like every city in the in the mid eighteen hundreds. UM.
And that's that's where the Y m c A comes

(30:49):
out of, is people recognizing not knowing much about health yet,
but people recognizing that this seems bad for us, seems
like this is killing everybody. Huh do all the twelve
year olds have lung cancer? We might need to do
something about this. Um. So the christ Yeah, good for

(31:11):
those young Christian men. UM. The Y and other groups
like it had noticed not just the deliterious effects of
industrial life on people. But that disease spread rampantly in
cramped urban environments, right like, it's a great place for
bacteria and viruses to propagate. And these guys came to
believe that physical exercise could prevent disease, which is not

(31:32):
correct in the way they thought it was, but it's
also not wrong, right like, if you exercise, your immune
system will be stronger, which does render you less vulnerable
to all of the horrible diseases that riddle distinct drenched
filth pit like England or St. Louis. Um. So, religion
gets heavily bound up in all of this, as it

(31:53):
was with everything else in those days. And the y
m c A isn't just like standing for people being healthier.
It's part of an intellectual movement that became known as
muscular Christianity. Um, what I know, right well, I mean
you just think about those ripped jesus Is on the
wall with like their fucking abs and deults that don't quit.

(32:14):
I mean, if you're holding yourself up on across, your
doubts are going to be pretty pretty shredded. You know
which are the deults? Are those like your back shoulder area? Yeah? Yeah, baby.
So I'm going to read a quote from The Guardian
about what muscular Christianity was please. The muscular Christians strongly

(32:35):
believed in the formative power of athletic competition that by
participating in games and sports, young men would be instilled
with positive character traits. The muscular Christians had particular concerns
that America's men were becoming soft, and thus placed higher
value one games that created a few bruises in the process.
In eighteen sixty eight, a year before Rutgers beat Princeton
in the first ever college football contest, one American muscular

(32:58):
Christian wrote, there is a precise discipline in danger. I
consider no man educated who was not educated to meet danger,
grapple with it, and conquer it. And any system of
gymnastics which leaves out danger is an emasculated system. And
the context of this article is about there was like
one year where like a ship, like like team's worth
of people diet in a single football season because they

(33:20):
didn't wear any kind of they were just murdering each
other out of the gridiron thattball. We're just like, yeah,
let's go watch some kids kill each other. Oh okay,
So hang on, I have some thoughts. There seems to
be a lot of toxic masculinity wrapped up in this
because everybody like even more than you'd expect. Well maybe

(33:41):
not more than you'd expect, but they're just like, we
need to be violent towards each other because if we're not,
that's emasculating, and we need to beat the ship out
of each other or otherwise we're little girls. Yeah, I mean,
the attitude is very much it's not really proper, not necessary,
not proper exercise, but certainly not a proper sport if

(34:02):
you can't die doing it, which is my attitude towards
a good party. You know what, I don't. I don't disagree. Yeah,
all joy carries with at the risk of death. This
is this is what we're cursed to know if if

(34:24):
the stakes aren't high, I'm not having fun. Yeah exactly,
fuck it. Yeah, and that's why drunk driving has such
a proud cultural tradition. Now, while all this is happening,
the actual science of fitness is also starting to grow.
People are beginning to learn how to be physically fit. Um,

(34:45):
and yeah, they're starting to write there's I mean, today
there's more misinformation than good misinformation about fitness, so it's
even messier back then now. For centuries, physicians had advised
months of bed rest and indoor isolation for people who
got sick. Like, if you were sick, they would say, well,
you need to hide in a room alone, like don't
go outside, stay in this like quiet, dark, dank room

(35:07):
and never leave for years, um, which you might recognize
as bad for people. Look, I've seen the secret garden,
and I know that that's not how that works. So
I mean that I think a secret garden is good
for people, especially if you're talking about like a guerrilla
grow and you're you're illegally growing marijuana and like public

(35:28):
land great for your health. A lot of time running.
I don't know if you've seen the movie, but it's
about a little sickly boy who's just like kept away
in isolation. And then the little girl, like a cousin
of his, comes and like finds him, and then she's like,
by the way, I found this secret garden outside your house.
Let's go to it. And he's like, I can't, the

(35:48):
spores will kill me, and she's like, no, it'll be
good for you. And then he gets really healthy and
then he's he like, he's great because he goes outside
and enjoys. Good to go outside because because we were
supposed to be outside a lot of the time. Otherwise
we die. Um so yeah. In the last twenty or
so years of the nineteenth century, doctors slowly start to

(36:12):
and not evenly start to realize that like, oh, it's
good to move your body, people are less likely to
die when they regularly move their bodies. Um, this actually
makes a lot of health problems better, Like having people
go out in bicycle like stops them from getting horribly
sick sometimes. And I'm gonna quote from the book Mr
America here. Though Americans had a history of importing fitness

(36:35):
fads from the continent, Ben Franklin wrote in seventeen eighty
six that he'd reached a ripe old age because I
live temporarily, drink no wine, and used daily exercise of
the dumbbell. It was not until the United States was
well into its own Industrial Revolution that its first homegrown
fitness guru emerged. He was Diocletian Lewis. Fucking incredible names
back then. Diocletian, Diocletian Lewis. I think Diocletian was around Nimber.

(37:00):
He was Diocletian Lewis Harvard University physical education instructor. In
September eighteen sixty Harper's Weekly magazine hailed him as the
genius behind the country's athletic revival. His enemies were stress
and inactivity, and his weapon was exercise. The newly formed
classes of desk bound office clerks and the expanding ranks
of house bound urban mothers were stockpiling nervous energy in

(37:22):
their pale, untaxed bodies, like pressure building in a Fulton
steam engine. In eighteen sixty nine, the physician George Beard
gave this malaise the name neurasthenia. It was also commonly
known as exhaustion. Americans were warned to beware its symptoms insomnia, anxiety, headaches,
And that's again they don't understand the reason behind it,
but that's good, basically accurate. That like, yeah, if you

(37:46):
spend all days stuck inside not moving your body, you
feel like shit. It is it's bad for you. Um,
it's good to get outside and move around. Um. So
that's kind of how that begins as a broad cultural understanding.
And after Diocletian Lewis came another Harvard Man Dudley Allen Sergeant,

(38:07):
who coined the term preventative medicine. He's like the first
guy to be like, what do we stopped people from
getting sick? Wouldn't that be based? Um? And he devised
the first pulley weight machines and exercise history, so like
the origins of all the like not like free weights,
but the different machines at your gym these days or whatever. Like,
he's the guy who figures out like the first of those.

(38:29):
And Sergeant is generally recognized as the father of physical education,
which in some ways makes him the worst bastard we've
ever discussed on this show, because he is the origin
of pe as a concept. Um, did you not have
a good time in gym class, Robert? Did anyone? Was
that a good time for anybody? Had a great time?

(38:52):
I loved getting changed in front of other people in
the middle of the school day show. Sky MMed my
way into being the assistant who counts the laps on
lap day in the seventh grade. So I didn't have
a lot of friends, but I didn't have to run
lap day. I had a friend who died in p

(39:13):
oh please bad. Yeah. Yeah, he had like a hard problem.
He had been like he had, he had been exempt
from PE for years, and then for whatever reason, they
decided he was better and he could he had to
do PE. And then he dropped dead during a run.
Pretty fucked up, Pretty fucked up. Um, So you know

(39:36):
whatever Jim class. So, at any rate, by the last
twenty or so years of the eighteen hundreds, you have
a few different distinct strands of physical culture coming again.
You see, these are all like different, but they're all
kind of interrelated. You've got these muscular Christians talking about
like the way the idea that sport and fitness improves

(39:57):
moral character, right, that like God wants you to take
care of your body because it's his body, and like
this is part of like being a good Christian. You
have the more humanistic secular values of Diocletian Lewis, who
sees activity as an antidote to um sedentary industrial life.
And then you've got Sergeant whose whose values are kind
of the father of Pe, whose values are starting to

(40:18):
verge on eugenics. Right. Um, the basic idea is like, okay,
look at technology, colonialism, and history. It's obvious that people
are improving, Right, That's how these people think white people
in this period like, oh, people are obviously better than
we were before because we used to be savages. Um.
Like the people who I still consider to be savages,
who's everyone who isn't white and lives in a city. Um.
And so his idea is that like, if you can

(40:40):
improve people through exercise, if it makes people better, then
if you can force societies to exercise its scale, you
can improve the human race, right, which is and again
exercise is good. I would argue this is not a
healthy way to think of exercise. No, especially because like
that has evolved then to like modern day A lot

(41:03):
of like modern day able is um, which is like
a huge problem with the like wellness movement that exists now.
And I mean, yeah, it is a problem. And it's
one of those things like when I talk about it
is good to move around, it is good to exercise,
there are people who don't have that option, and that
that's that requires them to do additional things in order

(41:25):
to stay healthy, because like you do, like your body
needs a certain amount of exertion in order to to
do to do it's best and it's it's difficult, um,
But you're starting to see I mean obviously these people
being who they are, there's a lot of moral value
attached to being able to exercise and in the way
that they think is best. Um, and there's a lot

(41:46):
of problematic shit, as there is still today, as you
just noted. But you know what's not problematic, Caitlin, the
goods and services, the products and so the goods are
incredibly problematic. Oh my god, do not do not check
out like fucked up. I'm sorry, fucked up. The products. Yeah,

(42:08):
the products are fine. Products are golden, unless unless it's uh, yeah,
you know, one of the not good ones that we
didn't approve. Let's slippy. Yeah, yeah, like if it's like
if it's Chevron or black Rifle coffee or black Rifle coffee.
But do if if you get an ex c AD,

(42:28):
I do recommend hiring ex C for all of your
mercenary needs. Look their monsters, But if you need a
bunch of men who won't ask questions to kill people
for you, you've got to go with x C. This
has been a paid advertisement what used to be Blackwater.
Here's the rest of the ads. Ah, we're back, Caitlin.

(42:55):
Have you ever paid demand to kill anyone? I really
haven't no. Okay, well, I guess podcasting is different for everybody.
So the idea of fitness and the kind of and
again this is like I don't know if if there
was no coined eugenics thinking at this time, Eugenics isn't

(43:17):
really like a popular thing yet in eighteen seventy nine, like,
but the precursors of it, like people are starting to
have the ideas that will feed into the eugenics movement
that dominates the early part of the twentieth century. And
the kind of this kind of like fitness as proto eugenics.
One of the people who takes it on is a
guy named William Blakey. Now, in eighteen seventy nine, Blakey

(43:38):
writes a book titled How to Get Strong and How
to Stay So, which is not a bad title for
an exercise book. Blakey was an endurance athlete with a
Darwinian attitude towards fitness. His book included much of the
same sort of exercise advice that Sergeant gave, mixed with
appeals to patriotisms. You can see where like the eugenics
nature of this is like this is we need to

(43:59):
make a nation strong, you know, unsettling stuff. Early on,
he makes sure to compare American youth to British youth,
who he claims are in much better shape, capable of
running miles without breaking a sweat. Quote. Let him who
thinks that the average American boy would have fared as
well as these British kids, go down to the public
bath house and look carefully at a hundred or so

(44:20):
of them as they tumble about in the water. He
will see more big heads and slim necks, more poor
legs and skinny arms and lanky, half built bodies than
he would ever have imagined the whole neighborhood could produce.
So he's like, look at a bunch of naked kids
and tell me how weird they are. Creepy. That's not great,
that's not great. So this has been a long digression,

(44:44):
but I think the background is necessary. So when we
left off our man Bernard, right, he's feeling like ship.
He's working indoors all day, and he starts like walking about,
like looking for a way to deal with his health problems.
And he comes across a gymnasium. This is a three.
He's fifteen years old, and he sees his first gym
and he sees a bunch of dudes working out, and again,

(45:04):
health is ship in the eighteen eighties, right, most people
are dying from the time they're like four. This is
his first time seeing healthy people like he sees people
who have like muscle, and not just because they're at
a gym, but because it's expensive to go to the gym.
They they're wealthy, so they're able to feed themselves well,
and they're of the fairly small number of people at
that point who are working out regularly. So he sees

(45:26):
these people, even the least of them, looks like an
Adonis to him, and he's just immediately like, this is
what I want to do with my life. I need
to have this in my life. But the entry fee
to get started at the gym is fifteen dollars, which
is more than he makes in a month, so he
cannot afford to join a gym. Um, but just kind

(45:47):
of hanging out around the gym, he acquires a copy
of How to Get Strong and Stay so Uh, and
he manages to find some used weights, some barbels that
he can afford, so he buys some weights. He buys
this book. He goes home and he worked out for
the first time in his room. He later wrote thereafter,
I had but one object in view. I would not
be satisfied until I was a strong man. You know.

(46:09):
At this point, strong man is like that's like a thing, right, Like,
because exercise is so new when guys the first time
guys figured out how to lift big weights, it's like, like,
you show up like that guy, you can lift a
bunch of weights. Okay, So he's not filled with rickets
like the rest of us. So Bernard just like sees
all these like fit dudes who basically no one else

(46:33):
looks like because no one else has like the resources
to do it. And then he's like, my, like, my
calling is to be a gym bro. Yeah, yeah, that's
exactly it. I mean it might be hard not to
because he's basically seeing people who are living close to
the way the like normal ish people in the twentieth century,

(46:54):
we're able to live because they have better diet, because
they have a basic understanding of exercise. And he is
living in an era in which like, if you only
had a couple of parasites, you're doing great. Um, right,
So you get why he might be like he would
be like, oh my god, this seems so much better
than my miserable, starving life of disease and death. Um,

(47:16):
I don't I have a lot of sympathy for him
wanting to be a Jim bro I guess that's what
I'm saying. It's not like I don't think I'm sure.
I know vanity is wrapped up in this because he
becomes a very vain man. But it's not just vanity.
It's just like, oh my god, I don't have to
be sick all my life. Sure that that's a that
is a motivation that is understandable. Yeah? Yeah. Um, So

(47:38):
Bernard exercises with these dumbbells, and he comes up with
other solutions. He finds a ten pound lead bar and
he wraps it in newspaper and he just stuffs it
into his shirt every day and goes walking for miles. Um,
when he comes home at night, he'll just like set
the bar down next to everyone else's coat. His family
thinks that he starts to think that he's mentally ill
because like nobody like exercise is not commonly talked about,

(48:01):
So like, what the fund is wrong with this kid?
Why is he carrying a bar round in his shirt? Also,
it's lead. Can you get lead poisoning that way? Don't? Yeah,
I mean it's not. This is probably not great for him,
but also probably not the worst poisoning he's getting. You know,
he's had a lot of poisoning at this point. Everybody

(48:22):
was poisoned with a couple of things in those days.
If you could have given somebody an asbestos milkshake, it
would have made them healthier. Um, not a great time.
So Exercise profoundly agrees with Bernard, and he gets in
a lot better shape. His health problems go away. Um,
he starts looking good, and he sets out into the
world again with a new lease on life. And I'm

(48:44):
gonna quote from a nineteen one article in American Heritage Magazine.
Now he became a hobo of sorts, writing the rails,
descending on more of his numerous relations, and working as
a water boy for a construction gang, as a dentist's assistant,
a wood chopper, and, in the tradition of Franklin and Twain,
a printer's devil that's like the assistant of a printer.

(49:05):
I don't know why they called it a devil. Toward
the end of the period, while toiling in a coal mine,
Bernard had one of those moments of revelation that dot
his recollections. He suddenly saw that his mission in life
was to preach the gospel of health. He got busy.
Returning to St. Louis, he saved enough money to join
a real gymnasium, got acquainted with books like William Blakey's
How to Get Strong, and eventually rented a studio and

(49:26):
hung out a sign that said Bernard McFadden Kinniss Therapist,
teacher of higher physical Culture. As to his change of name,
he later explained the picturesque appealed to me. I wanted
something out of the ordinary. As to the origin of
the word kinness therapist, he admitted to having no idea,
so he makes up both the name Bernard, which I've

(49:49):
I've heard one allegation it sounded like a lion's roar
to him, so he thinks it sounds stronger. It's very funny.
Um and Kenne's Therapies is like, yeah, I don't know
where that came from. Like I just felt like that that,
Like I just wanted to make up a you could
just do that, right, Like there's no Yeah, that sounds

(50:10):
like it doesn't sound unlike no canology, you're not. It
makes sense because like Kenneth, I think it's just basically
movement the movement therapist. That is like what a personal
trainer at its best should be. Um. So it's not
like he's not again, he's not like Snake Oily at

(50:30):
this point, like he's actually selling something real Now nobody
has a great understanding of like what's actually good for
you and what's actually bad for what exercises may do
more harm than good. But that's not his fault. That's
just like we're just now figuring this stuff out. Um.
But his basic premises at this point are like, I'm
going to help people move their bodies and lift heavier

(50:50):
things until they get stronger, which is a broadly positive
thing to do. Um. So, Kenne's therapy may not have
been an actual term, but it was a really enough
thing and Bernard was good at it. His studio did
well in large part due to his undeniably brilliant slogan
weakness is a crime, don't be a criminal. What I

(51:12):
fucking love that? That's that is everything about like fitness
culture today too, Like it's that's that's cross fit, right,
Like that's all of it. It's so good. There's just like, no,
he doesn't dress it up at all. That is so aggressive.
And yet I imagine for a certain type of person
who sees that type of marketing very effective. Yeah, he's

(51:36):
very good, Like he's he's very successful from an early
stage at this um and he's again like he's he's
grasping at the thing that all of these people will
wind up basically saying they just put a little bit
more of a bow on it. Now. Bernar may have
been the first personal trainer in history. Um Like, it's
kind of I get kind of depends on how you

(51:57):
on how you, uh you define it, but he may
have been like the first person to be like, my
job is going to be to one on one train
people how to be physically healthier through exercise. He might
be the person who invented that entire field. Um so
he asserted at the very least, he helped to invent
the entire discipline. And this is going to happen a bunch.
It is actually kind of boggling how many different career

(52:20):
fields this guy either invince whole cloth or helps to
invent um. He is a tremendously influential person. So uh,
he invinced personal training kind of uh. And in order
to make extra cash, he works as a wrestling match organizer.
He also experiments constantly with different health treatments. Mostly this
would mean periodically fasting and restricting his caloric intake to

(52:43):
an extreme degree in order to lose weight. While exercising constantly,
he would regularly gain and then drop like thirty pounds. Um,
I think he had a needing disorder. I'm actually certain
he had a needing disorder. Um, because you hear about
this regular he has this obsession with total caloric restriction
in order to drop weight very quickly, like he's purging.

(53:05):
You know, I don't know that he binges, but he's
certainly purges. Um, not by puking, but like total caloric restriction.
That's eating disorder stuff. Right, Um, I mean I've been there. Yeah.
In his own writings, Bernard build this as scientific experimentation.
He wrote up his findings and submitted them to a
wide variety of newspapers and magazines. His entire educational career

(53:28):
at this point amounted to a handful of odd days
at school to avoid truancy court. So he was not
good at writing, like he's barely able to write, but
he seemed to sense instinctively that writing was going to
be crucial to his success. So while he's working as
a personal trainer and it's like a wrestling barker, he
goes back to school um in order to uh learn

(53:49):
how to write, and he takes a part time job,
a more formal part time job to help with us
at the Bunker Hill Military Academy as a pe coach.
And it was here working as an early p e coach.
This is not a common job at the time that
Bernard would be struck by his greatest revelation from Mr.
America quote for simplicity's sake, Bernard had temporarily abandoned his

(54:11):
two meals a day habit for three squares served at
the academy. Near the end of the spring term, he
felt the early symptoms of pneumonia coming on and immediately
diagnosed his relative gluttony as the cause. Bernard had noticed
that farm animals became well by abstaining from food when ill.
He immediately cut his own intake back to a couple
of pieces of fruit for a day. By the second
day of fasting, his chest had begun to clear. By

(54:33):
the fourth day, the inflammation had all but vanished. His
fitness philosophy was starting to gel lots of exercise, limited calories,
non traditional cures. So he's making a significant illogical leap here,
which is that it is true sick animals stop eating.
That's not because it helps them get better. It's because
they might die and they as a general, the animals

(54:54):
he's talking about are like hurd animals, and if you're
a herd animal and you get sick, you want to
stop eating because there's a good chance you'll die, and
every calorie you eat while dying is calories that the
rest of the animals in the herd don't get. It's
the same reason why if you're slaughtering an animal like
a sheep or something, um a lot of them and chickens,
it's the same way. There's a way to basically like

(55:16):
if you position them properly, that kind of turn off.
Like if you get them on their back and you
get like a knee on their neck, Like it's not
like you're not like shoving them super hard, but it's
just kind of an instinct. And the idea is that like, oh,
they've gotten caught by a predator, it's best if they
just kind of let it happen so that the rest
of the herd can get away. Like there's a bunch
of instincts like that in prey animals to where like, well,

(55:36):
what's best is what's best is not what's best for
the individual, it's what's best for the hurt and so like, oh,
I'm dying of some disease, I'm going to stop eating
so that everybody else stays fed. You know, I did
not realize that was like an instinctive thing among herd
animals that do that kind of stuff. The herd does better,
you know. Um, So, well, it's amazing. He's very wrong

(56:01):
about what's happening. And you also you listen to it's like,
well I did most like most people get sick once
a year or so, at least, you know, at some point,
and it usually doesn't last four days. It's usually over
in a day or two. So like, it wasn't the
starving that got better, it's you waited four days and
eventually stopped being deserted feeling. But he correlates the fact

(56:22):
that he's starving himself because he likes to starve himself
with the fact that he gets better anyway. You know,
it's unfortunate. This is the start of what will be
a series of unfortunate logical leaps that Bernard makes after
a year at school, like as a pe teacher and
as he's also taking classes, so a year both teaching
and taking classes. He's he's a dedicate. He's a fucking workaholic,

(56:44):
you know, he's I think he's got this attitude. You
do see this in a lot of people with backgrounds
as difficult as his, whether they're like I survived childhood,
like and I'm going to spend every second that I'm
awake working hard on things because like I I I
don't know. I think because like he's been that close
to death. Death was such a constant part of his childhood.

(57:05):
I think maybe that that's for and it's not just him.
A lot of people who have this kind of an
upbringing this period become these like dynamos, and I think
it's just because they can't stand to waste any time.
You know. Also, there's no Internet, Like you're not going
to hang out on Twitter or anything like you got
like there's nothing literally nothing to do, So what else?
What else? Are you gonna have right, you gotta take

(57:27):
a bunch of classes and work as a which work
as a personal trainer, and learn how to write and
starve yourself your shelf and work out constantly. Yeah. After
a year at school, he applied this new healthcare revelation
to wrestling, and he used his ability to starve himself
to train as a middle or heavyweight fighter. So he
would he would get build up a bunch of muscle
mass and and you know he's a big guy, so

(57:50):
he would be like a heavyweight. But then he would purge,
stop eating for several days and lose thirty pounds, um.
And then he would go fight wrestlers who were as heavy,
who were like he would he would basically drop down
to a lower weight class, but with people who he
was stronger than because he'd been training as a heavy weight.
But he'd go down like a middle weight or something,
and he would gamble on the outcome and win. Um.

(58:13):
He was actually really good at which is a wild
scamp to run. So he'd be like disproportionately more muscular
and stronger than them. Okay, yeah, yeah, it's a it's
a thing. Um. Yeah, And I'm sure the fact that like,
nobody's that great at being healthy at this point makes
it easier for him because like, yeah, yeah, he was

(58:34):
briefly the most popular wrestler in the St. Louis area.
His fame got him a fancy and well paying job
as a pe teacher at a better school, where he
wrote his first novel, a near plagiarism of Jane Austin
based around to Swolldu titles The Athlete a novel. I

(58:55):
was like, wait a minute, yeah, I don't know he
had aspiration. Yeah, he ate it. He takes Jane Austen
and replaces like the lady protagonist with like a jack dude.
And the book is titled The Athletes Conquest. So again
let me. I mean, you can guess. You can guess
what's in that book, right, I can. So the book

(59:18):
is terrible and no publisher will take it, so Bernard's
self publishes it. Um. He's popular enough as a teacher
that all of the kids at his school buy it
and it does okay. Um. In three, at age twenty five,
Bernar moves to New York City. At this point, yeah,
oh my gosh, Yeah, he's doing a lot too much,

(59:38):
some would say much, so he moves to the Big Apple,
and his years of teaching pe and coaching people had
convinced him that his brilliant health wisdom needed a bigger audience.
It wasn't going to be enough to just work one
on one or even just like teach a class of
people at a time. He's got to reach the nation.
You know. He decides, like, I've learned too much about
starving myself and plagiarizing Jane Austen from American Heritage quote.

(01:00:03):
Almost immediately after leasing an apartment in New York, McFadden
presented a physical culture matinee and invited the press. Um.
A local newspaper accepted and reported that the Professor, as
McFadden was now calling himself, chatted imposed in an interesting
way for over an hour. He's just like talking and
like showing off his muscles. So he's just kind of

(01:00:25):
doing like spoken word, but mostly just like flexing. Yeah,
he's he's literally just like flexing and talking where he's
checked these muscles out. Man who's not dying of goiters.
Look at how unswollen his ankles are. And this had
an audience. Yeah, it's very popular. A lot of a

(01:00:47):
lot of journalist show up again, nothing is going on
like there is. There is absolutely nothing happening in the
world at this point, so they're just a fit man
is talking in town sending or times. So McFadden's other
passion was for his ideas. They had to do with
the titanic benefits of exercise, the right foods and periodic fasts,

(01:01:10):
and the extreme perils of among other things. Of course
it's white bread, doctor's, vaccination, overeating, and prudery. So these
are the things that he's flexing. He's talking about, Like,
course it's are bad for you. True white bread is
bad for you. Also true doctors are bad for you, honestly,
and this time not wrong. Vaccinations are bad for you,

(01:01:32):
not true, but understandable that it's wrong. Overeating is bad
for you, accurate, and it's bad to be approved. And
what he's meaning about this is that, like the human
body is incredibly like verboten at this point, right, Like
you don't like even in like health textbooks, it's it's
considered kind of risque to show the naked human form.
And he's like, no, people should look at naked human bodies,

(01:01:54):
like if you want to see how you're supposed to
exercise you should have like a guy who's mostly naked
on their lifting stuff so you can see how it
is he's moving and like, um, he's a big believer
in the human in the nudity as like not being
a sinful shameful thing. Yeah, which is also good, right,
Like that's good. That's I love nudity. Yeah, big fan.

(01:02:17):
So the physical culture of Matinee was probably McFadden's first
step as a proper fitness influencer. Now that he wasn't
teaching people how to exercise, he was giving populations sweeping
healthcare advice based on his own ideas and opinions. And again,
these are not all they're even mostly bad at this
point of course, it's are they're not as bad like
I think there's been a lot of like, oh, they

(01:02:38):
were making people like constantly draw, like I know people
who are like way into Courset's and there's plenty of
ways to do where it's fine. Um, white bread though
is like is trash, Like it's fine if you enjoy it,
but it's not. There's not a lot of nutritional value
and whitebread for you. Yeah, over eating is something you
should avoid if possible, and obviously being apprud is not
good for you. Um. Bernard's rejection of prudery was tied

(01:03:02):
directly to his love of fitness. Again, he likes these
naked He likes books that are showing people like yoga
books and stuff that is yoga starting to be a
big thing in this period of time, and he loves
these yoga books of people who are like nearly naked. Um.
And he thinks it's he thinks accurately that like, yeah,
it's important. You gotta you can't have somebody wearing like
six layers of dresses showing you how to do a
yoga pose. You're not gonna know what it looks like. Um. Unfortunately,

(01:03:26):
Bernard's lifelong hatred of vaccines and doctors, which by this
point have gotten to be a lot less nightmarish in
medieval um that is, also makes it into his advice.
And again medical science isn't great at the time, but
enraging against those things, he unknowingly set a pattern that's
still going strong a hundred and thirty years later, because
he's just like, fuck doctors, all you need is exercise,

(01:03:48):
which is the same thing the people who have gotten
made this pandemic so much worse. Also, believed right, you
could draw at e lect lot a direct line from
that to to mc fadden. Um. And again I don't
know that he would have been the same guy had
he been born a hundred and thirty years later, you know. Um,
But yeah, I mean, who knows if his vaccination experience

(01:04:09):
as a kid is I didn't get typhus as opposed
to I nearly died for six straight months. He'd probably
just be like an Abercrombie model where he's just like
really jacked and loves going to the gym, like you know.
And maybe he might still be plagiarizing Jane Austen. Who
knows who doesn't plagiarize a little bit of Ji. I mean,

(01:04:29):
my novel is just a plagiarism of Jane Austen and
mine too, And yeah, everybody's there's only been one book written,
and it's I don't remember any Jane Austen titles. Phill
it in finished the joke for Pride and Prejudice. Pride
and Prejudice. That's the only book, Pride and Prejudice. Um.
So the Physical Culture Matinee was a success at drawing attention,

(01:04:53):
but a failure at making money, and after two weeks
of like waiting for all of this pr to turn
into cash. Bernard is on the verge of bankruptcy, and
at that point when he's desperate, a successful actor, like
a stage actor who's huge in New York City, walks
into the door of his office as a personal trainer
and asks how much is it going to cost to

(01:05:13):
get me in shape for a role? This is the
first time this has ever happened, and Bernard thus invinced
what I think is like his third career field at
this point body Sculptor to the Stars. So this is
the first time like a famous actor is like, I
need to get jacked for a role. Can you help me?
And he's like, yeah, absolutely. Um this is like I
think he convinced this, Like this is like how all

(01:05:34):
like Camaio nan Gianni just like got ridiculously stall. Like
this is the start of that entire career field. Is
Bernard being like, oh, ship, if I get this famous
dude like ripped, that's gonna bring me be cast in
the eternals. Yeah, you know he can be cast. Chris
Pratt can go. I mean, I'm sorry to bring up
Chris Pratt that ship, but like, yeah, this is a thing. It. Yeah,

(01:06:00):
Chris Pratt wouldn't be nothing without Bernard McFadden, nothing less
than ship beneath our feet. Do you think he would
be Mr. Guardian of the Galaxy. No, No, we'd spit
on him like we did sit on him anyway, because
he's a fucking loser. Um, he's very rich and successful

(01:06:21):
asshole unfortunately, but anyway, whatever, most of them are. So
Bernard McFadden becomes a body sculptor to the stars and
he gets suddenly just a flood of customers. Right. It
always has worked that if you can show like, hey,
this famous person is jacked by doing this one simple trick,
a bunch of people will be like, well I could
be famous too if I just got jacked, maybe that

(01:06:41):
will make me famous. You know. Um, the human brain
isn't a magical thing. So in short order, Bernard has
more business than he knows what to do with, and
he becomes a minor celebrity himself, getting the city's top
celebrity photographer to agree to do a photo shoot of
his body. Now, this famous photographer is going to come
by and take like shirtless pictures of Bernard posing, and
he wants to look his best so what does he do.

(01:07:04):
He starves himself for a week before the session so
that his abs will look more defined. I think this
is the first time anyone does that. Every ab scene
you've ever seen, like if you you can actually read
about this, anytime you've seen an actor you like who's
like super shredded in a movie where their abs are
they don't drink any water for like a day before
that scene because it makes their abs show out more

(01:07:24):
really unhealthy, really bad for you. I think he invinced this.
I think he's the first person to be like, oh,
I'm gonna get like a shirtless photo taken, I'd better
starve myself and deny myself water so that my muscles
look more defined. Like I think he invinced this. Yeah again, this,
this guy invinced so much shit. It's really kind of amazing.
Um and also you know, terrible because it's it's really

(01:07:46):
it's not only is it bad for the actors who
do this. You talk about like Hugh Jackman I think
has talked a decent amount about like, yeah, it's fucking
miserable being like famous for being super jacked because you
have to stay super jacked, which is like horrible, like
it's not. Efron has spoken about this too on his
Netflix show where he's like, and I didn't eat a
car for six years, and then he goes to Italy
and yeah, bad. It's one of those things too. It's

(01:08:10):
also you're not actually nearly as strong as as you
look when you are like that. If you look at
actual strong, like people who are like who compete to
lift the most weight, like actual practical strength, not like
compete to look like a strong, compete to like who
can lift eight hundred pounds over their head, they all
have huge middle sections and bellies because that's like necessary

(01:08:31):
to being physically. Look at a longshoreman, right, Like those
guys would beat the ship out of your average underwear model.
And it's because like they're they have functional anyway, it's
bad to starve yourself. It's not not good for you physically,
it's not good for you, not it's morally bad. Again,
we've all struggled. A lot of us have struggled with
eating disorders. I have, but like, it's not good for you,

(01:08:53):
And Bernard really gets that started, like really is the
origin point for that in our culture, this idea of
starvation and like particularly starvation to make yourself look better
for like a photo shoot, which then passes on to
like all these people having unreasonable expectations for like well
my body should look like that all the time, and
it's like, well, their body doesn't look like that all
the time. They didn't drink water for a day. He's

(01:09:17):
going for this, He's like passing this information along, like
here's a little tip and a trick. If you deny
yourself food and water, you'll look great hot. Yeah you
have you think of this as like a viry, Like
he shoots this into the body politic and it's never left. Um,
it's great. For the next few years, burn Our works
as a teacher, a personal trainer, a model, and a writer,

(01:09:40):
finally selling articles on fitness and health to numerous publications.
But the whole time, Bernard's number one product was Bernard McFadden. Right. Again,
this is very much like influencers today. Next, he decided
to bring you for the good in the service product
and the product in this trash. Next, he decides to
bring the benefit of his teaching to people in their

(01:10:01):
homes by creating an exercise machine anyone could use. So
he's the first if this influencer to make an exercise
machine and sell it through the infomercials of today. Dude,
this guy you have to respect how groundbreaking he is.
Like every month of his twenties, he's inventing a thing
that exists forever now and he hasn't killed that baby yet.

(01:10:23):
He has not yet killed that I mean, right, so
so far, I mean I admire his Uh, there's a
respect you have to have for anyone who is this influential. Right,
doesn't mean they're good, because a lot of the things
he's invented, even at this early stage, are bad things.
But it is like, well, god damn, Like, I mean,

(01:10:46):
his productivity, And I know we shouldn't like measure someone's
value or anything like that based on productivity, but it's
one of those things I still kind of hang on
to where I'm like, I've done nothing today and this
guy and he's twenty five and he's inventing. He's created
like four different poisons that still exist in our society.

(01:11:06):
He started singing the song that might in the world,
you know. So he invinced this exercise machine, and he
describes it as quote, a combination of rubber chords running
over pulleys um and it was such a failure in
the US that the company making it goes bankrupt. But
Bernard doesn't take this lying down. Instead, he takes the

(01:11:27):
machines that have been built and he travels to England
and he holds a series of stage shows where he
shows up on stage in a loincloth lit from below
on a background of black velvet, and he poses with
his machine, lecturing on its benefits while showing off his
shredded abs and biceps. He is hosting the first infomercials
which he does in England. Yeah, because he's like trying

(01:11:48):
to advertise it, I think to the paper in the US.
Doesn't really work. Next from the book, Mr America, perhaps
inspired by the life changing pamphlet of dumbbell exercises he
received on his first visit to the Missouri Gymnasy him,
he published a four page brochure describing how to use
the McFadden exerciser. When British audience has devoured this fitness wisdom,
the frustrated writer began adding his rejected health articles to

(01:12:09):
the publication's contents. What started as an instruction manual was
soon transformed into a miniature physical culture periodical inside was
an address to which interested parties could send money to
receive future editions. Orders flooded in. McFadden quickly arranged to
publish the pamphlets regularly out of London as McFadden's magazine.
So he starts the first fitness magazine. This is really

(01:12:31):
the first one that exists. And this leads McFadden's magazine
in England, leads quickly in eight like he returns home
um and in eight while he's back in the u S.
Bernard McFadden creates a new magazine and this is going
to be his first like dedicated full time publication. Uh.
And it is the first dedicated health magazine in history.

(01:12:51):
He calls it physical culture. His wife would later say
that most of his articles and the dozens of books
he started writing from this point forward were the result
of him encountering a physical malady, getting through it, and
deciding that he had arrived at a medical breakthrough. Since
his default treatment for almost everything was to starve himself
or to exercise, most of his recommendations were based around

(01:13:13):
starving yourself or exercising. He quickly developed a fan base
from the Wall Street Journal quote. He attracted a following
of serious people that included, among others, Upton Sinclair, the
guy who wrote The Jungle, who contributed articles to Physical Culture.
Proto feminists such as Charlotte Perkins and Margaret Sanger also
wrote for McFadden. From the beginning, Physical Culture was rooted

(01:13:34):
firmly in the imperialist dogma and white supremacy at the time,
but not in a Nazi way. Um, in like the
noble savage cultural appropriation way. Right. Um, I'm just like
they're different. So I'm making that clear. From an article
by Katherine Kaiser of James Madison University, quote, Physical Culture
played into an ideal of frontier masculinity that may explain

(01:13:58):
its strong circulation numbers in the West. The magazine contains
some expressly regional content. In an early issue, a reader
inquires about a Physical Culture settlement in New Mexico. Physical
Culture also plumbed us mythologies associated with the West, praising
indigenous diets and midwifery with imperialist nostalgia. McFadden published fiction
by Jack London reinforcing that fantasy of white masculinity, Northwestern exploration,

(01:14:21):
and the raw elements. The magazine was considered scandalous for
its pictures of scantily clad bodies, which may explain its
limited circulation along the Bible Belt physical cultures. Versions of
muscular manhood and fearless femininity promuligated frank sexuality and clean
eating still hallmarks of California culture. So he kind of
invents California in a lot of ways, like he really,

(01:14:44):
he really does. Like that's like this whole mix of
like um often a historical idolization of indigenous diets based
on stuff white people wrote as opposed to actual history
mixed with like the benefits of exercise and fasting. Like
he invent California suddenly, certainly Southern California scantily clad sexy
and santalis sexy people. Yes, he's just created Southern California.

(01:15:10):
From the beginning physical culture, the magazine was influential from
more than just its health advice. Was also one of
the first mainstream publications where Americans could see scantily clad
or even naked human bodies. At the time, Anthony Comstock
was a U. S. Postal inspector and the secretary of
the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. His
job was basically to make sure that stuffy victorians in

(01:15:32):
the Big Apple encountered nothing that might harm their sensibilities.
When someone pointed out that there was a hugely popular
magazine with photographs and drawings of topless women in it,
he lost his fucking mind. From History and net quote.
In nineteen he rented Madison Square Garden for a monster
physical culture exhibition, advertised with posters of muscular men and
women minimally dressed. Anthony Comstock, head of the Society for

(01:15:55):
the Suppression of Vice, seized the posters and arrested McFadden
for obscenity. The court evicted him without penalty. The Hoopla
drew twenty customers, so again, being censored is great for
his business. Police again arrested McFadden in n seven when
a New Jersey postmaster charged that a physical culture article
about venereal disease was obscene. The jury convicted McFadden. The

(01:16:17):
judge sentenced him to two years in prison. He filed
an appeal, meanwhile traveling the country denouncing prudes and censors,
but the appeals court upheld his conviction. Facing prison, McFadden
urged fans to write to President William Howard Taft delused
with letters taft, America's fattest president, pardoned the muscle bound
media king. And it's again this mix of things that

(01:16:40):
are bad and things that are good that he's doing.
The obscene vinereal disease articles that he gets censored for,
is him like talking very frankly about this is what
gnarrhea looks like and what it does and how it spread,
what syphilis looks like and what it does and how
it's spread. Like it's he's actually doing a necessary public
service that he gets censored for. Okay, yeah, yeah, it's cool. Now,

(01:17:04):
while all this is going on, McFadden is fighting the government,
you know, while my fadden is fighting the government for
his right to like show tits and talk about syphilis,
he's also operating a cult compound in New Jersey. So
he starts a cult compound. Yeah, in the early nine
why not, like I will one day do, but not
on the East coast because that sounds hard talked about.

(01:17:24):
We talked about this, and as cult compounds go, his
was pretty milk toast. No one died or as far
as I can tell, got like raped or anything. Like,
I don't, I don't like. It's kind of a cult,
but it's not really. Yeah, it's definitely like a diet version.
I don't think, oh god, yeah, I know it is
a diet cult. Yeah. Um. But I have to say

(01:17:47):
it goes down in history as having the dumbest name
in could compound history. Are no physical culture city? What
cosson physical culture city. It's very funny. It's like if
I called my could compound behind the bastards town, Like

(01:18:10):
it's just kind of lame, Like come on, what you're
going to call it? Mosopolis? Like Jesus Christ. To understand
his efforts here, we should go back and talk about
the cold compound that inspired Bernard's cult compound, the much
better named Zion City. That's a fucking compound name. That's
what you call your cold compound, right, Zion City, solid

(01:18:31):
could compound name. Zion City had been founded at the
turn of the century by a guy named John Alexander
Dowie uh Dowie or Dowie whatever. Was a preacher who
brought five thousand followers out of Chicago and created a
small city where people could live a godly life. In
Dowie's estimation, godly meant no drinking, smoking, pork, doctors, or vaccines.

(01:18:53):
So you can see why Bernard McFadden loved this ship.
In nineteen o three, Bernard declared Dowie the greatest leader
and most remarkable reformer of the last hundred years. Shortly thereafter,
Dowie was kicked out of his church for stealing from it.
But Bernard Meermain deeply committed to his vision, and in
nineteen o four he started writing columns in which he
discussed his desire to buy land and create a city.

(01:19:14):
Soon after, he bought eighteen hundred acres in northern New Jersey.
He called it Physical Culture City, and it was large
enough to be subdivided into many lots. This idea was
that people would buy lots in Physical Culture City and
build an actual industrial city. He wants this to have
like factories and ship um. And it's located well, it's
next to a railroad road crossing, so like it is

(01:19:34):
possible to get stuff in and out of there. Um.
It's got its own seventy acre water feature, which he
calls Lake Margaret, which is named after his second wife.
He's gotten married and divorced once already. He does this
lot um. This happens to him a few times, so
his employees noted that when it came to the women
he married, he preferred Amazon's large breasted women with large

(01:19:55):
child bearing hips. Um. When he married Marguerite, he immediately
started having her write articles about raising children to a
new magazine that he started for her articles called Beauty
and Health. Now neither of them had kids at this point. Um. Yeah,
but they're writing articles about how to raise them. Um.
Immediately after their wedding, and again, this is his second marriage,

(01:20:15):
Bernard writes a book, which is his tenth book in
the last five years. He's just writing books all the
goddamn time now, and it sounds like he's pivoted from
plagiarizing Jane Austen to mostly just like fitness self help. Yeah.
And the book he writes is marriage a Lifelong Honeymoon. Um.
And in it again he's failed at his first marriage,

(01:20:36):
but and he just started his second. But he's like,
I got this ship figured out now, I know exactly
what I'm talking about, he thinks. And his conclusion is
that all divorces are caused by people not exercising enough.
It's very funny. Oh wow, he's he is funny. He's
quite a guy. In nineteen o five, Bernar and Marguerite

(01:20:58):
had a baby, a daughter, and immediately moved to a
house that they built in Physical Culture City. The city's
opening was announced in Bernard's magazine to great fanfare. He
bragged it would be quote a community with no sickly prudes,
no saloons, drug stores, tobacco shops, or places in which
one may purchase things that make for the moral undoing
of man or woman. Speaking of moral undoings, Bernard almost

(01:21:21):
immediately fell in love with his secretary Susie, and he
set a house up with her in the house he
lived with with his wife. Um. And yeah, he set
up a house in the same He moved her into
the house with his wife. Yeah, okay, So his wife leaves,
she goes to Canada. He never sees her again. She
takes her their daughter with him and her, and he

(01:21:41):
never sees his daughter again either. I think, Um, he's
fine with this because he's got Susie now. Uh. Susie's
mom moves in to help keep up the house, to
keep it clean, and Susie gets pregnant with Bernard's second child.
In nineteen o six, Physical Culture City operated again another innovation,
as an internship scan. He advertise degrees and Physical Culture

(01:22:02):
to people who would come and cut down trees and
plant crops for free. Um he would like build streets
and stuff. He builds this as a work study program,
but he makes it impossible to graduate, so they stay
as indentured laborers the whole side. Holy sure, I know
what a fucking groundbreaking thinker. I can't believe. I did

(01:22:23):
not expect for that to take that turn. He's amazing.
Most people who resided in Physical Culture City were interns.
The rest were a handful of wealthy cranks who wanted
to spend all their time nude or experiment with weird diets.
That were a lot of raw food fanatics who like
live in Physical Culture City. The whole project fell apart,

(01:22:45):
of course, it never eclipsed two people in population. Bernard's
arrest for transporting of scene material through the mail actually
happened because the postmaster that he bribed to handle the
city's mail got angry when Bernard then tried to cut
him out of the business, and this postmaster warts into
the FEDS. A lot of formerly dedicated members abandoned the
project when Bernar abandoned his wife, and they're like, oh,

(01:23:06):
maybe this guy isn't doesn't know all. He wrote a
book on how marriage is a long lasting honeymoon, and
then he abandons his wife. I can't trust him. Maybe
this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh. These
two things together led to a mass exodus that was
exacerbated by a disastrous town meeting in which Bernard accused
everyone else of committing my favorite term ever, physical culture treason.

(01:23:35):
What a perfect maniac, physical culture treason. Oh that's good,
he's very funny. By nineteen o seven, he and his
operation We're back in New York City. By nineteen ten,
he'd written another eight books, and he'd opened a chain
of health food restaurants that sold healthy meals for one cent.

(01:23:56):
And these do seem to have been pretty good. He
also sent three years Sorry, I'm just doing and I
don't think they're not good books, Caitlin. He's like, he's
like Stephen King, but with health shit right, Okay, what
if a car made you fit? I don't know whatever.
So he also founded a chain of health attori ums,
most of which operated similarly to the health Club at

(01:24:18):
Battle Creek operated by Dr Harvey Kellogg. Bernar personally created
treatment plans for each of the patrons who showed up
at his health actorium for extended stays. Most of his
treatments involved fasting or starvation. Um. And that's what we're
going to end for part one. Caitlin. We have a
good bit more of Bernard's tale to tell, but that's
going to have to wait until Thursday. Until then, do

(01:24:39):
you be pluggables to plug? Oh goodness, I do, and
they are this. You can follow me on Instagram and
Twitter at Caitlin Durante, and you can check out the
podcast that I co host with Jamie Loftus called The
Bechtel Cast, in which we examine movies through an intersectional
femine list lens. And of course you can find Caitlin

(01:25:03):
at Physical Culture City um Born and Raised and Raised BOYD.
Here we Go.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: How the First Fitness Influencer Doomed Us All