On one hand, we have the CEO of Crossfit tweeting that “Floyd-19” is the real problem. (He got canceled.) On the other, COVID-truther psychiatrist Kelly Brogan is using Hopi mythology to support the fantasy of a Corona consciousness-awakening — while the Hopi themselves live within the Navajo Nation, which has the highest infection rate in the country.
WTF is going on with white wellness people?
For this episode, we’re joined by New School historian of American fitness, Dr. Natalia Petrzela, who sheds light on the historical links between physical culture and racism, and Dax-Devlon Ross, an anti-racism and civil rights educator, on what white wellness ideology does to Black people.
Show Notes
Dr. Petrzela on Ahmaud Abery
A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age — Dax-Devlon Ross
Glassman’s FLOYD-19 tweet
Buzzfeed covering Glassman’s Zoom
Dr. Petrzela tweeting on McFadden and Sandow
One City’s Struggle to Police the Police — Dax in The Washington Post
Kelly Brogan using “sovereignty”
Kelly Brogan appropriating a Hopi text
Something we didn’t cover: A Wisconsin “I Can’t Breathe” workout
A BUNCH of white spiritual dudes claiming that the “I can’t breathe” protest chant is a spell to program people for slavery to the Deep State. They advise taking strong action with deep breathing exercises and antidote mantras.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, a weekly discussion of the intersection between right-wing conspiracy theories and left-wing wellness utopianism. a weekly discussion of the intersection between right-wing conspiracy theories I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
Our topic this week is Conspiratuality and Racism.
At the peak of the George Floyd protests on June 6th, the CEO of CrossFit tweeted out that Floyd 19 is the real Problem.
Linking the Black Lives Matter movement to false news about the pandemic.
Thankfully, he canceled himself.
Meanwhile, after claiming viruses don't exist, and alongside posts about how face masks constitute submission signaling, COVID truther psychiatrist Kelly Brogan posts a prophetic statement from a Hopi elder in support of her fantasy of a corona consciousness awakening.
Meanwhile, actual Hopi people are alive today within the Navajo Nation Territory, which has the highest infection rate in the country.
WTF is going on with white wellness people.
For this episode, we're joined by New School Historian of American Fitness, Dr. Natalia Petrozzella, who will give some background on the historical links between physical culture and racism.
And another guest, Dax Devlon Ross, JD, An anti-racism and civil rights educator on what white wellness ideology does to black people.
Gypsy.
So you can curse on this podcast, Julian.
Just throwing it out there.
What the fuck is going on with white wellness people?
So for this week in Conspiratuality, I want to start first of all by saying that the three of us, this is our six week recording and we are finding ourselves putting a lot of time and effort into it and we want to continue to.
It's actually something we've all been interested in and the response has just been tremendous.
So first of all, thank you everyone for the feedback, the advice, the ideas.
We've already started to look into booking a few guests out of recommendations.
And we have decided to start a Patreon page.
There are a couple different levels if you want to support the work.
The podcast will always be free for everyone, but we're going to start adding more content to the page and we have some ideas of where we want to take it, as well as collaborate with people.
And before we started recording, we got our first Patreon.
Thank you, Nicholas.
And so we're off on that.
So if you check out our website, you can become a Patreon or our Facebook page at Conspiratuality Podcast.
So, but to dive into this week, I couldn't help but to come across the Mike Pence op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the coronavirus.
And as Julian was saying, it's over.
It's over.
So we're back to normal.
We're not.
But in this op-ed that he wrote, there isn't a coronavirus second wave.
Now, first of all, let me point out that as with a lot of these talking points, he's right because we're still in the first wave.
We have never left the first wave.
So there isn't a coronavirus cycle wave right now.
But when he says that our public health system is far stronger than it was four months ago and we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy, No, we are not, and data prove that out.
And why I bring this up in this context is because it just reminds me of the fact of something that I learned long ago when I left college and I started my working career.
that someone told me that if you work with a company and it's poisoned at the very top, it's going to filter down all the way and it's going to affect everyone.
And I don't think sometimes we give enough credit to the ways that America, as a culture, that we think about things and how we approach each other and how we communicate.
Because when you're constantly bombarded with these crazy and false messages, I mean, I think the Washington Post has been keeping track of Trump's lies.
We're over 18,000 lies that they've documented and you can go and see online.
That is going to filter down.
Just things like this, even though you might look at it and be like, Pence, whatever, and ignore it, this sort of messaging does affect what we're going to talk about today, right, with Kelly Brogan and how the wellness community just approaches their own practices.
When I was growing up, I grew up in an agnostic family and I've been atheist for a long time, but I still can't deny that Christianity played a role in how I think about things and how I think about good and evil and how I approach relationships.
In the small town that I grew up in, Liquor stores were closed on Sunday because Sunday was a day, and this still is in New Jersey, there are still towns that honor this.
That is a very Christian idea.
And it sets up a frame of reference that you have for reality.
So it's very important to pay attention.
Sometimes we just like to tune out the leaders and what they're saying and doing.
But it is affecting everything that's happening right now.
And I think a lot of the insanity that we're talking about every week does in some sense start from there, or at least that influences the way that we're thinking right now.
Yeah.
Pass the baton.
Yeah.
I have a few things just to touch on quite briefly about this week in conspirituality.
One is I came across a piece by this guy, Ben Ralston, And I said, that name sounds kind of familiar.
And I went back in time all the way to 2011 and found, oh, I got into an exchange with this guy who's a life coach.
He kind of frames himself as a psychotherapist, although I find no evidence that he has any training or credential to actually call himself a psychotherapist.
The current article, and the article from the past was him making claims about being able to cure thyroid disease through deep emotional and spiritual process work that he could do with people that he had the cure for endocrine disorders.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, so that was a red flag a long time ago.
Now, come to find him again, he has tons of followers.
This new piece that he just published last week, 17,000 views, so not huge, but nonetheless perfectly exemplifying what we're talking about.
Basically, throughout the article, he's saying that the title of the article is Why Your Protests Are Worse Than Useless.
Oh, wow.
With the image then of Black Lives Matter protests.
And essentially, the thing I found fascinating about it is this taking an actual political issue that's happening right now, and then saying, "No, that's a distraction.
There's an evil they behind the scenes who want you to be protesting like this, and you're playing into their hands." And so you keep the enemy and you keep the political agenda vague and mysterious, and at the end of the article perfectly sums it up, He says, I say to my brothers and sisters of all colors, we're going to erase any kind of racial issue here, right?
Brothers and sisters of all colors and all creeds and all corners of the earth.
We want the same thing.
We have the same enemy.
Know yourself, know your enemy.
We are many, they are few, and this is our time.
So, you know, it's almost like he's hijacked the anonymous Way of framing things where nothing is ever specific.
Everything has this paranoid kind of hidden meaning about it.
So I found that pretty interesting in terms of our topics.
The other thing is that Mickey Willis is back and Plandemic Part 2 was announced yesterday.
It was announced with a really long post which then has since been deleted because he got the landing page up where he's gathering email addresses.
And essentially it's the, you know, this is the most watched documentary of all time.
This is the most censored and banned documentary of all time.
I'm simultaneously the messiah and the victim in this narrative.
And now, argument from authority, we have 27,000 doctors and scientists who are signing onto this agenda that the shills for big pharma and the big media don't want us to get out there.
And if you have courageously shared Plandemic, then you are sort of part of the revolution.
So that is, of course, going to be on the horizon for what we have to deal with in the coming days.
And my last thing is Michael Beckwith.
And, you know, Michael Beckwith is a local spiritual leader here in Santa Monica.
I don't know if he founded, but he's headed up the Agape Church for a long time here in Santa Monica.
That's sort of like a new age science of mind kind of establishment that is very, very popular.
And he has a video that's out this week.
The video is called, And It's Up to Us.
And he starts with this opening claim that the virus is fear.
And from a higher perspective, we're involved in a great cleansing.
It's the death of the old paradigm, the birth of the new.
The people awakening, this I found fascinating, people awakening are the reporters of the new paradigm.
And the press are the reporters of the status quo.
Yet people actually believe what they see when they turn on the news without realizing we are one of the most censored countries on earth.
So to me, this was fascinating because he talks about some important things with regard to race and compassion and, you know, healthy sort of systemic change that needs to happen.
But he keeps coming back around to messaging that would be indistinguishable, is indistinguishable from, say, a Trump message that you can't trust the media.
The media is always lying, right?
They're part of the problem.
And he ends by saying that from the universal perspective, there are no problems.
The solution comes from going outside of time.
Right.
There's this repeated appeal to death and the transcendence of death as being some kind of ultimate sort of surrounding solution with regard to the pandemic, as if that's not what public health officials are trying to actually mitigate.
It's very, very It's very strange.
It's a flip that depends on this category distortion.
Weren't we just talking about healthcare?
Why are we talking about outer space now?
I'm not quite sure.
Yeah, and I just want to say for anyone, I'm sure plenty of people who follow me, like Michael Beckwith and like Agape and some of those sorts of ideas,
And so to not have it just be sort of an instance where we maybe come across as being mean or superior, I think for myself, there's just something I'm really compelled by in terms of figuring out how we talk about personal growth, healing, freeing your mind, you know, seeing through illusions in ways that don't commit some of these fallacies that end up being politically
Psychologically, scientifically, just wrong.
And it's very easy to fall into some of those mistakes.
Well, it makes me wonder, Julian, whether the hinge point for the problematic nature of what you're describing in Beckwith's video is that he's using the virus as a starting point for a metaphor.
And I'm wondering, like, If he were just talking about human anxiety in general, then he would be staying pretty firmly in a theological lane.
I'm wondering, what do you think?
I mean, I don't know anything about this figure, but what do you imagine is driving the will to use the virus as a metaphor?
Like, I think because we're seeing so many people do that.
Yeah.
Why don't they stick with, why don't they stick with, hey, you know, I'm in the discipline of theology or in spiritual therapy or comfort.
And from my point of view, this is how we can self-regulate or we can see, you know, spiritual possibility in this moment.
Why are the categories continually being mixed?
You know, my sense is that there's a... The reason we see this from so many different people is that there's a kind of grand narrative frame that always has to be imposed on everything.
So how do I make this current crisis fit into my metaphysical framework that has to do with fear and love and hope and knowing the ultimate deep truth that the universe is always perfect And yet figuring out how to reconcile that with the fact that we're going through something really, really difficult.
And to the point of what I know is going to be a big part of today's episode, it's again this word sovereignty, right?
And the weird kind of echoing line between much more white-oriented spirituality and libertarianism.
There's this sense of rejecting collectivist concerns in favor of my personal well-being, transformation, empowerment, right?
And failing to see that there's a real political failure there, especially if you're going to talk about concepts like compassion.
Right, absolutely.
Well, that leads right into my This Week in Conspiratuality segment, you know, for which I'm really just going to link in the show notes to posts by several conspirituality influencers who've put out explicitly racist posts in the midst of the Floyd protests, because I think these links will support key points that came up in the incredible interview I was honored to have this week with Dr. Natalia Petruzzella, She's an historian of American fitness.
And because, you know, she has so much data that she brings to the table and she packs so much in, I just want to actually walk through a couple of her key points.
We're going to roll the full interview later, and then I'll riff a little bit on some of those points.
One thing that she helped unfold in the interview, which she'll go into more detail in the interview, is that at the historical root of physical culture, and we're talking about going back into the 1920s and maybe even a little bit earlier, this is where strongman exercises made the leap from Like the circus tent into big nationalist physical education programs in Europe and the United States.
And that led to gym culture, and that's now merged with wellness.
The evangelists of that time were white bodybuilders who were panicked about, get this, racial suicide.
They thought that urbanization and office work was making white people soft, and this meant that the stream of white babies would start to taper off.
So their focus on strength and beauty earned in the gym was largely about white people distinguishing themselves from those who became strong through manual labor.
So their training was explicitly linked to racial strengthening.
Now, the aerobicizer of the 1980s or the crossfitter or the yoga person of today probably won't have any clue about that history, but I would argue that it's baked into the routines and the reps.
The entire political economy, after all, of fitness emerges from this.
And like everything else, it's been filtered through segregation and now gentrification.
So, when COVID comes along to expose the vulnerability of non-white populations in the field of public health, do we think that fitness and wellness people are suddenly going to wake up to structural racism?
No.
In fact, we should probably expect that they'll double down on their spells and mantras of hyper-individualism and body-mind sovereignty.
And that's the word that I'm going to turn to now, because it's coming up all over the place.
It has a nice ring to it.
It sounds noble.
Now, Dr. Petrozzella and I didn't discuss sovereignty per se, but one of her other key points was that fitness discourse has always been filled with notions of the triumph of the individual will.
The idea that the single, solitary person must become some sort of island of wellness unto themselves, and that social conditions have nothing to do with health.
Now, as an aside from your Canadian colleague here, I'll just say that this totally makes sense in a country that's basically given up on the notion that healthcare should be a universal right.
Now, this individualist point of view becomes iconic through the imagery of the yoga celebrity photographed alone against a fabulous landscape or the solitary athletic triathlete scaling the mountain of personal triumph as they just do it.
And more recently, the hyper individualism of fitness and wellness has been elevated further still and even sanctified by a very alluring term, sovereignty.
All the conspirituality celebrities are using it.
We've already seen it in this podcast subjects in earlier episodes.
So Charles Eisenstein writes in The Coronation, quote, a true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death.
And then holistic psychiatrist Kelly Brogan uses the term in her anti-medication and anti-vax literature to refer to a self-sufficient autonomous body that won't be invaded.
But the term carries some baggage with it that intersects with white nationalism and its anxieties.
Now, its previous boost in public usage erupts during the 1970s when white nationalist and anti-Semitic militia types banded together, mostly in the Midwest, in groups like the Posse Comitatus.
They dreamt up this notion that they could be sovereign citizens, which you might have actually heard as a phrase within wellness discourse recently.
And what they meant by that was that somehow federal and state laws shouldn't apply to them.
They shouldn't be taxed.
They shouldn't have to carry driver's licenses, gun licenses.
And all of this, including their conspiracy belief that the American legal system was hijacked away from its common law foundations, is detailed in research offered by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which we'll link to.
Now, the sovereign citizens movement sounds kind of cool and anarchistic until we learned that it was really a show of defiance against civil rights laws and other equality movements that require social commitment.
So I'm not making, I'm not doing all of this on sovereignty to try to create some sort of forbidden word.
forward.
I know that in some wellness circles, like especially feminist ones, sovereignty is used as synonymous with agency, especially from the point of view of trauma recovery.
And I was really interested to see that there's a First Nations Pueblo group in New Mexico called Seeding Sovereignty that's actually a women's collective asking for donations of face masks.
So they're using the word sovereignty going in exactly the opposite direction that somebody like Kelly Brogan is, who says that the face mask is a form of submission signaling.
So let's just, I just want to let that sink in.
There's an indigenous women's collective in New Mexico asking for masks in a call for solidarity in the face of historic and ongoing inequality.
And Brogan and others are calling the masks that these women are asking for signs of slavery and submission.
So who should take a seat?
Like who has a clear relationship with reality?
So, the personal rule I'm going to be using going forward when I hear this word sovereignty is, how white is the context?
Or, like, is it actually being used in an explicitly anti-racist way?
because if it isn't, there's a good chance that it's acting as a password into conspirituality land while also providing cover for either implicit or outright racist sentiment.
All right, well, Dr. Petruzzella is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture and is currently finishing up a book on American fitness culture.
She recently weathered considerable pushback after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times after the murder of black jogger Ahmed Arbery in Georgia.
In which she detailed the historical exclusion of black Americans from the sport.
She's an associate professor at the New School in New York City and one of the co-hosts of the excellent podcast series, I'm a big fan of Past Present, and that's available through all the usual channels.
We'll put the link into the show notes.
Thank you so much, Doctor, for taking the time.
Thank you.
I'm thrilled to be here and congrats on launching your new podcast.
Thanks so much.
All right.
So exactly a week ago, as of this recording, Greg Glassman, empresario of CrossFit, spouts off in a Zoom call with his franchise owners that, quote, we're not mourning for George Floyd.
So this leads to many of his franchisees distancing themselves and Reebok and Rogue Fitness severing relations with the brand.
Glassman now has put himself out to pasture, but What do you believe his outburst has revealed about racism in American wellness culture?
Oh my gosh, so much.
So one thing I think it's really interesting and important that this is CrossFit where this all blew up.
And so I'll begin actually by making a slight correction to what you said, not to be pedantic, but because I think it is relevant, which is CrossFit franchise are not franchise, doesn't have franchises.
Right, okay.
And the reason that I say that it's important is because that is born of Glassman's rabid libertarianism.
He calls himself a rabid libertarian.
So when he was building this brand in the early 2000s, it was really important for him not to be this like top-down corporate presence, but to sort of let the best rise to the top through, you know, the invisible hand of the market.
I say that that's important because I think that this meltdown and the kind of racism that showed up at CrossFit in terms of what it means for the larger industry is actually quite relevant to that hyper individualism, which is part of a libertarian perspective.
Now Glassman has always been like a real loud mouth, you know, on any topic that he stands for.
So he's sort of like a perfect person to bring these issues into relief.
But, you know, part of Glassman's libertarianism, which I think shows up across the industry, is this kind of faith in fitness that who, where you come from, who you are, the color of your skin, your background, actually doesn't matter.
And that you can lift yourselves up by dint of your motivation, and your perseverance and transform your body and transform your life.
Now, when critiques that raise structural issues, like the big national conversation we're having right now, kind of give lie to that or say, hey, there's structural factors, gender, race, et cetera, people like Greg Glassman get really pissed off.
And I actually think that his sort of uniquely intense rage about this highlights across the industry what you suggested in your question, which is it's really hard for fitness companies to reckon with these structural issues because their whole product, their whole worldview is actually bound up in, if not their whole worldview is actually bound up in, if not explicitly, a rejection of those kind of structural things and embrace of a kind of like 100 percent 100% individualism.
So that's a little bit philosophical, but I think that hopefully it answers the question.
Well, it does, and it also points to an underlying history that you tweeted about, actually, as you commented on an LA Times article about these broader trends, especially with regard to gym culture.
But you sent it back about a century as well.
You wrote that strongmen like Bernard McFadden and Eugene Sandow, who are... McFadden was American, right?
And Sandow was German?
Was that correct?
Right, now these are like key figures in early bodybuilding and physical culture in the early 20th centuries.
You say that they're often quoted as fitzpo, but they explicitly encouraged deliberate strength training as opposed to brutish manual labor for men and women as a way for white people specifically, that's not your quote, but I'm just highlighting it, to distinguish themselves from and exert power over Threatening POC.
So can you give a brief sketch of how that emerges McFadden and Sandow and their legacies in relation to fitness body politics and race?
Yeah, so one thing that's really important to highlight is that at that moment in American history, and more broadly, but I'm an expert in the U.S., so I'll stick with that, that, you know, kind of working out today as we see it as a virtue was not that.
People who spent time cultivating their bodies, going to the gym, that was very subcultural and very strange.
So people like Sandow and McFadden, who are, you know, More than enthusiasts, they're kind of like, you know, missionaries of the power of deliberate training.
They are very subcultural and sort of outside the norm.
Now, they 100% were speaking the language that I described in response to your last question of, you know, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, etc.
But it is abundantly clear, explicit in both of their writings, that they're talking about strengthening white bodies.
And in their celebration of deliberate training, they see that as one, they have to distinguish it from the manual brute force labor, That largely, you know, freed enslaved people and Southern and Eastern European immigrants are doing.
So they're saying, we're not telling you we want you to work with your hands and not be cerebral.
They're actually saying a way to distinguish yourself from them is people who are civilized, who have the better classes, who are working at desks more frequently, and who don't have manual labor as part of their daily life.
Well, this deliberate training is distinct from that kind of manual labor.
So that's one piece of it.
But two, there's this real panicky vibe about what people in those days called race suicide, that if white people don't strengthen themselves, they are committing suicide for the race.
And that all of these people of color, that was in the term back then, who reproduce at higher rates are going to overtake the world and society to great chaos and demise.
Now, the reason that I highlighted that they're often quoted today is because on the face of it, A lot of this stuff they say feels sort of very woke and, you know, McFadden hated corsets for women, which, like, I can get behind that.
But when you read on about his, you know, hatred of corsets, why does he hate corsets?
Well, he hates them because, one, they're sort of a form of dissembling, right?
Like fashion hides who you really are, your real body.
Right.
Importantly, this fashion of upper-class white women, it crushes women's insides.
Which again, I can get behind rejecting that.
Why does that matter?
Because then they can't have white babies.
And he's very explicit about this.
And so when you read a little beyond like the Instagram quote, you know, it's like extremely disturbing.
And you see that kind of form of white uplift and strengthening and self-preservation very explicitly early on.
But I don't think that's Completely gone from fitness culture today.
I don't want to, you know, dismiss the fitness, and I count myself as part of a community who sees fitness as a point, as a way for women and marginalized people to, like, strengthen themselves and build community.
But I do still think it has echoes, and we saw that through Glassman, of this kind of, like, hard-edged, individualistic, white pastime.
And I think we should, you know, be wary of that.
Right.
Wow.
Well, that's a great history and background and description.
And I guess, I think I've heard of the race suicide thread before.
That's got to be linked to urbanization, technologization, industrial and office work being sort of depriving these upper class people or wealthier people from, or distancing them from the possibility of physical labor.
Are we also seeing in the development of gym equipment a kind of like pseudo-industrial, I don't know, application of technology, but just to remake the body?
Is that part of what's going on?
Yeah, I think that you should say that.
You can say that.
And it's true that whenever there's this kind of boom in like white-collar work in the U.S., which on the face of it and to many people is seen as a sign of American superiority and progress, right?
We are not some like backwards rural nation.
This is a place where there is progress in advance and where people don't have to spend all their time doing manual labor.
This happens again in the 1950s after World War II.
That is celebrated, but then in terms of the body, there's always this very close to the surface, deep anxiety, or not even that deep, anxiety about what's the cost of that on American bodies?
That on the American bodies that are valued most, right?
Right.
Who are usually benefiting from those technological changes are often the ones whose bodies are, as JFK said, becoming soft, right?
And so then you get, as you say, this that always invigorates this kind of movement for deliberate cultivation of fitness, whether it's with machines, which is sort of rationalize, you know, the body and it's and it's and it's care.
Or with, you know, chain gyms in the 1960s.
It's all connected.
Right.
Well, you know, the topic of our whole investigation here on Conspirituality Podcast is where this material begins to intersect with new religious movements and with spirituality as a modern category.
And one intersection that I want to point to and see if you have a comment on is that I know that from my own investigation into modern yoga history that people like Sandow had a huge influence on the physical culture and the fascinations that pre-independence Indian yoga reformers had And that he actually toured through India with his bodybuilding shows and this was one of the strings, one of the weird strings that tied Germanic nationalism to an emerging Indian nationalism.
Now today, yoga in India is part of the soft politics of Hindu nationalism that some go so far as to describe as fascist.
And so I'm wondering, you know, if you have anything to add to that or what you find interesting there.
I find a lot of it interesting.
Well, I think this whole idea of like cultivating the body as a form of nationalist fealty, right, or a display of kind of civic virtue, that's something, interestingly, that I posit is very related to why fitness blew up in the U.S., blew up, you know, expanded after World War II.
I mean, Eisenhower and JFK Criticize them a lot, and maybe even for this, but one thing they really did was tie the subcultural pursuit of cultivating the body to like a positive civic purpose.
And I think that is related to what you're talking about, but what's interesting is that also the kind of proliferation or support of a robust national fitness endeavor, whether that's school PE or recreational fitness for grown-ups, That was hamstrung in some ways by concerns over what would happen if the state is too involved with promoting fitness and that comes straight out of looking at fashions in Europe, right?
Like you have, it's when I'm reading these sources of cold warriors of a sort of I think Pretty unknown chapter in Cold War history.
You have these debates between physical education advocates, who are Cold Warriors, and, you know, a kind of other people who think after Sputnik, we should invest in science and technology.
And they're saying, and also, look at those images of Hitler Youth.
Fascists are the ones that are making their kids work out in rows and lines in ways that, they were right, looked very much like what JFK wanted.
But so that, that fear of a sort of body control, Um, it is often linked in the U.S., like, well, you'll make us into fascists.
That's the nanny state.
We saw this very recently with, um, you know, uh, critiques of Michelle Obama and Let's Move that, like, this is inappropriate.
This is the nanny state.
Like, get out of our, get out of our cities.
That's a little different because she was really focusing on people of color, whereas often in, in earlier, in the earlier period I'm talking about, it was, like, white affluent kids.
But, um, there are echoes.
Right.
Amazing stuff.
Okay, so back to Glassman.
He doesn't just reveal his racial politics, of course.
On Twitter, he actually kicked off his spiral downwards with a tweet that read simply, it's Floyd 19.
And then in that Zoom call that BuzzFeed reported on, He sprouted a bunch of conspiracisms that the Minneapolis protesters were Antifa, that there was some counterfeit ring involved with it, that COVID was cooked up in a Wuhan lab.
Now, we're looking particularly in this episode at this tangle between racism and conspiracism, and I'm wondering if this has a history to it as well in American wellness, and might that history have something to do with the prevalence of pseudoscience in the industry?
I'm wondering if there are like other bizarre theories that have been mobilized in American fitness to justify or reinforce racism in the sector.
Oh my gosh, yes.
So first, just sticking with Glassman for one second, that first tweet that got everybody so angry at him, Floyd 19, I actually read it and didn't even fully understand what he was talking about.
I tried to read the whole thread and I'm like, this sounds like the sort of garbled musings of somebody angry, but it wasn't until the Zoom call that it was fully elaborated, as you say, with all these conspiracy theories.
To me, for him, that goes back again to this sort of, like, anti-state libertarianism, where he's pissed off about the quarantine.
You know, he had told affiliates, lie about your protocols, like, just get people back in.
The government shouldn't tell us that we can't exercise.
The best protection of health is, you know, doing a CrossFit workout more so than sitting in your house.
So, to me, that tweet encapsulated those fears about big government and, you know, the whole sort of big government civil rights program that conservatives are always railing about.
So I think that's kind of important there.
But then in terms of pseudoscience, which I know is a big focus of this podcast, one of the things as I look back, particularly the earlier half of the century, but it still is very much with us today, is how many fitness companies came and went and how many of them were peddling is how many fitness companies came and went and how many of them were peddling products that They'd say, "Oh, well, this doctor approved it," et cetera, but are based in no science, Like, flat-out made-up lies.
And so one of the questions that I try to answer in my work is, well, we have this rise of scientific knowledge.
Like, even the field of exercise and physiology is growing.
There should be more to the basis in actual science as time goes on.
But I think one of the things that's interesting there, and I hate to just be, like, capitalism, But that the fitness impulse has really always been met more by the market than by universities or by the government or by, not that those are perfect institutions, trust me, but there's a little bit more of a commitment when, you know, a university issues a program that it's based in research.
Right.
You have the fitness impulse met almost entirely by an industry that's just not the case and so therefore you have like totally invented things.
The thing that I think that's connected to also is that fitness in this country has always been maybe even more connected to beauty products and sort of the maintenance of beauty than to physical health and so I think in some ways You know, the bar has been a little bit lower on regulation of, oh, it's just to look better than as opposed to it's to cure heart disease or it's to do sort of more health related things.
And I think that that's an important context to industry and the connection to beauty, which has always been less regulated than to health.
Right.
Well, one of the things, maybe this is in winding down, one of the larger connections that I wanted to ask you about was that, relatedly, when wellness influencers move into conspirituality land, they move into a place where, like You know, as you're describing in the fitness industry generally, they can cherry pick the science.
Things like, you know, so they'll boost things like immune boosting over, well, there's a whole field called epidemiology and virology that Glassman might want to look into as he's telling people to reopen.
So it seems like this exposes a more long-term and contradictory relationship between physical culture and pseudoscience.
Am I on the right track with that, do you think?
Yeah, I think so.
I think that, well, one, it's just funny with Glassman, because one thing he's always championed himself as, as, like, he's a data guy.
Like, he's someone who, like, the numbers mean everything.
And he actually founded CrossFit in many ways, rejecting what he thought was sort of, like, the BS nature of modern fitness, which wasn't based in analytics and data.
So it is interesting to see his conspiracy theories, based in no evidence, come out, even as that's always been a selling point for him.
But yeah, I think we, just to get back to your question, so you asked, like, do you see, what was the, I just don't wanna- Well, it's like, I mean, we have, people are moving into this zone in which they can cherry pick, you know, their science as it pleases them.
And I'm wondering, like, is this a, I mean, I guess you've already answered that there's this deep relationship between physical culture and pseudoscience over the years, but I wonder if,
I mean, if, and maybe Glassman is really a good example here, if the culture seems to be interested in data, if it seems to be scientific, because it's always clothing itself in the language of, you know, optimal performance and tests show that and, you know, our laboratories have produced a supplement that blah, blah, blah.
If that's the, and I know that that has a history going way back as well.
back over a century with the claims of physical culturists and their healing products.
But if it has always been a zone in which data has not been really solidly presented in which it hasn't been scientific, I'm wondering if the field, if it's used science in a deceptive way sort of right if it's used science in a deceptive way sort of right from the beginning or certain aspects of it
Because one of the things that seems to happen is that the more cherry-picked the data is, the more magical the solution seems to be.
And that's where the spiritual values and aspirations enter in.
It's almost as if, in conspirituality, there's this sense that, you know, well, my internal subjectivity is going to, and the power of my body and my immune system, is going to be the most important thing here.
Yes.
And that becomes sort of like the ground zero for things that are true, or ways to know what is true.
This is so correct.
And so I think that there are at least two things happening in your comments that are worth kind of teasing out.
And one of them is, yeah, kind of what I was alluding to before that there's this, you know, sort of, I would call it like scientism that as you say, like there's this like desire to stamp a seal of authority, like a doctor looked at this on a product, but without a real commitment to, you know, peer reviewed studies, actual but without a real commitment to, you know, peer reviewed studies, actual trials, like people want to feel like it's real and grounded in data, but not so much that they're willing to pull back the layers and look, and there often are not regulatory pressures to
Right.
This has come up with me, for me, in a very sort of like anecdotal way, but where when I was teaching fitness more, I would often be asked to comment for articles and I don't know, you know, like health magazines, and they'd always want to put me as PhD.
And I say, you know, I have a PhD, but my PhD is in history.
So unless you're asking me about, you know, like what we're talking about now, Like, it's not appropriate for me to tell you, like, 10 ab exercises for summer and put games in there, because I, like, I have an exercise certification, but it took me, like, a week to get, you know, and I'm not diminishing that form of expertise, but I'm always sensitive about misrepresenting that, whereas I feel like a hallmark of the industry has always been, like, stamp something on there, but with a, not a very rigorous commitment to that.
So yes, that's baked into the industry.
The second part of what you say, this sense that, like, one's internal sense of what's right for one's body and one's own subjectivity is appropriately and almost, like, virtuously the, like, authority on what's right, that is a major, major theme, I would say, in contemporary wellness.
And that comes from an era that you're very familiar with through all of your experience and study of yoga.
But I would say that when fitness gets subsumed under wellness and this sort of holistic sensibility that to me is based in at least two core principles.
One, I am in control of my own health and my own body.
And two, that body and mind and self are connected, which sort of elevates the spiritual selfhood stakes of going for a run or a yoga class because it's much more lofty.
Once that happens and that takes hold, and I think for some groups it takes hold for really good reasons.
They've been screwed over by pharmaceutical companies.
They've been told by their doctors, you know, you don't matter the way you feel.
Oh, you're too fat or you're too feminine or I understand your body better than you do.
And so I'm actually very sympathetic to the origins of a wellness culture that rejects dominant ideas about science out of like Being totally screwed over by those realms.
Now, what's happened, I'm less sympathetic to that today.
Not that medical discrimination and Big Pharma are not negative things in people's lives, but I think the commodification and the sort of bad faith use of that sensibility lends itself to exactly what you led this question with, which is people fostering conspiracy theories about the only one who knows best is you or me, so buy this supplement.
The FDA is out to get you, Big Pharma.
And I think that is a real problem.
But I think unless we have a historical sense of why that became so popular, it's very easy to poo-poo this as like just a bunch of hucksters and dupes and not to understand deeper roots of why it's appealing.
And I get really pissed off about that.
Right.
Well, thank you so much, Doctor.
It's such a pleasure.
You know, as I was listening to your answers, this figure was coalescing for me that I wanted to ask you about.
Maybe later we can do this, but it feels like Dr. Kellogg brings a whole bunch of people, a bunch of these themes together, and maybe he's responsible, not Bill Gates, for all of this stuff.
Yeah, it definitely goes deeper than Bill Gates, for sure.
We'll talk about that at a later date.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
I can't wait to hear the podcast.
All right, me too.
I have to say it was wonderful hearing Natalia.
She was my colleague for many years at Equinox in New York, and we had some great discussions over a decade ago about these topics and have stayed in touch.
And she is such a wonderful mind, brings such an interesting perspective to these subjects.
And when she's talking about Glassman and, you know, this is something that has been baked into CrossFit culture.
I remember a number of years ago when people were suffering from a rare condition of, and I'm forgetting the name, it's like a thombrosis or I'm spacing that and I should have looked at it.
But basically it's this rare blood condition that happens from overexertion.
One of the means is overexertion.
And doctors were warning about it because people who were working out so hard that they were getting this and it's a very rare condition, but they were seeing an uptick.
And when it turned out that a lot of people who were coming down with this condition were getting it from CrossFit, Glassman said, well, that just shows you that we have the best workout.
We push our people the hardest.
And this was in the New York Times, he said this.
So this has been part of CrossFit culture, this very me-centered, egocentric perspective that has pervaded.
And I want to add in though, nothing is black and white.
I know so many people who have benefited from CrossFit Over the years, from the community aspect, they got stronger and stuff.
So, you know, I don't want to just write out the... I will write out Kipping, personally, for the pull-ups, but everything else, you know, it's fine.
But when you have this... He was very much creating a cult of personality around himself.
I don't know if you're aware of Zumba's business model.
how in the beginning, Matthew, that she corrected you in saying that this isn't a franchise, like they are straight up, you know, that this is a business model that actually kind of reminds me of, I don't know if you're aware of Zumba's business model, but it's not the same, but it is more of a franchise.
But when you see these workouts pervade, you have to go to the root and look at who is putting it forward.
And before we started the interview, Matthew, you were saying about the nationalistic aspect.
I don't know of any workout in America that is American born, at least in the modern era, that fits that profile as much as CrossFit.
And I think she brought that out really well.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, and what you were just saying about, you know, it shows how good our workouts are that some people suffer debilitating medical symptoms as a result.
It makes me think in a sort of partially related way about all of the travails that Lululemon went through a couple years ago, right?
And how part of the attitude is, you know, if your legs are too That, for our leggings, well then, you know, you probably shouldn't be trying to do this anyway.
Go do something else, right?
If you do a CrossFit workout and you suffer some terrible medical condition as a result, well, I mean, that's just evidence that this is only for the fittest, right?
So it's this kind of social Darwinism, in a way.
And having, yeah, great interview.
Having the historical context is always fascinating, especially when it's not widely known, right?
Yeah, it gave me a lot of thoughts.
I actually, when we go to the concluding segment, I actually dreamed about the interview and put some stuff together with regard to strong men and yoga practice and what it means, you know, the anxiety that is actually embodied in the effort that it takes to build oneself up to that extent.
And so, yeah, I just, it was great.
So, up next we have a conversation with Dax Devlon Ross.
I could read his bio, but I have known Dax since we were 18.
We met on the basketball court at Rutgers University, and we were both columnists for the daily Targum at Rutgers.
And we didn't become good friends until our senior year, but he has been one of my closest friends.
And I'll explain a little more in depth in our wrap-up discussion about that.
So the word wellness is almost ambiguous in some ways because it has so many meanings, but it generally has this connotation of being sound in body and mind.
When you hear that word in terms of just the word itself or in terms of the relationship it has to our culture, what does it invoke in your mind?
Well, I mean, I hear it from the lens of like people of color, like black.
Black, Indigenous, and people of color, there's a wellness that is really connected to like healing and is connected to sort of harm that's been done and a recognition of harm and a need to do work to be well and to be, so I don't, I think that, so that's what I, when I hear about it, my mind goes there and it also goes to an industry, an industry that is like, that still kind of like is a purveyor of of a kind of soft white supremacy still.
It's not as explicit in its declarations of what wellness is and what wellness looks like, but the imagery associated with it, who it sells its products and brand to in the first place, what its goals tend to be.
You know, so its goals are very self-oriented.
They're not collective-oriented.
They're not about, like, transformational change in the community.
They're about, you know, self-improvement, which is important, which is invaluable.
But at the same time, I think it's to some extent limited, and it still promotes a kind of individuation that is right for consumerism.
And it's right for, like, purchasing wellness clothes or purchasing wellness, you know, other products, a variety of various types and kinds.
And therefore, like, It always, it used to be definitely much more of a trigger for me, you know, in New York when you and I used to hang out and we would and sort of we would go to places, yoga studios.
And as a black, you know, as a black guy walking into those places, I think at that point in my life, I felt like a resentment towards it.
Because it seemed to me that it was, you know, the very kind of folks who would tell me, you know, it's not really about race.
Like, we just need to like, you know, transcend it.
And like, we'll get better and everything will be fine.
And I also just have recognized that the ways in which some that mindfulness, which doesn't belong to the wellness community, first of all, like mindfulness doesn't belong to them.
They can't own it.
But mindfulness, nevertheless, I think, is a component of wellness that I think has real value for us as a larger society.
But I'll pause there.
Maybe there's something else you want to add.
But that's where I initially comes to mind.
Well, the term you said was great, soft white supremacy.
And I think that's one of the hardest things from my perspective, being in that industry in some capacity for decades now, trying to get that across to people.
I'll give you an example.
I just read an article this morning.
There was a rally, a Black Lives Matter rally protest in a small town of Bethel, Ohio yesterday, and 80 people came out for it.
And then 700 counter protesters came armed.
And there was some violence and there was, you know, it was, and there's some video of it and it's, this is straight up, this is not soft white supremacy.
This is straight up white nationalism that happened there.
And I see a lot of people saying, Hey, I'm holding the zoom.
I don't want to say a lot, but I see some.
Meditation for peace.
And this is how we have to change things.
And I'm like, that's not going to work on the street against these counter protesters.
So from my perspective, when you see someone, let's, let's use that as an example.
They post, they make a post that says all lives matter.
We should transcend race.
I'm holding this meditation for peace.
And this is how we're going to change things.
What, what does that bring up for you?
And how would you engage that person to try to explain to them your point of view?
Yeah.
Man, those are two big questions.
So, um, you know, the how I would gauge is a whole different separate one, but I think, you know, let's, let's start with how, what it brings up with you and then we'll.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, that's the side that silence is, is, um, there is like hurt there for me, you know, like, it's just like, damn, you know, it's just like, damn, You know, like, what do we got to do to just sort of be seen and have our experience be affirmed?
I was talking to a student yesterday, and I was just having a conversation with a group of students, and one of the things she said to me, which was in relation to something that I was saying to her, and we had a great moment around it, which was, like, she was outside or had somewhere with some friends, and she saw a rally, people in the cars, people honking their cars and sort of expressing Support for Black Lives Matter.
And she says a lot of them are white people.
And she felt like, wow.
Part of it, she was split.
A part of it, she felt, wow, white people care about my experience.
And then the other part of it is like, damn, what must I think about my own experience such that I have such gratitude for people acknowledging my humanity?
You know, and I think that's where I'm sitting with it is that there's a failure to recognize the extent to which the harm has gone around all of us and has infected all of us.
And I'm going to keep saying this again and again and again.
Because in my mind, when I hear someone say the all lives matter, after people have asked you to stop saying it, after they've said over and over again, just could you please, like that is a trigger for me.
It's traumatizing, like, and, you know, given the sort of historic history of power relations in this country, and given the evidence of the way Black lives are treated in this country, just out of a mere sense of respect, you need to invoke that terminology.
So it's like a kind of, it's like, that to me is white violence right there in and of itself.
White violence is saying, I'm going to, despite the fact that you've asked me to stop using this word and this term, I'm going to dig my heels in and I'm going to keep using it because I believe what I believe.
And I'm just, and I have the, and it's, and it's eye centered again.
Sometimes we make decisions in the community that are not about I. Maybe I might personally want to do something in a moment, but that doesn't mean I do it.
I might just have to take a temperature of what's really going on and say, you know what?
I don't know if I can contribute, or I know that these folks over here, who I actually align myself with, are expressing a different need.
How can I support them?
So to me, it's like, you know, how can you claim to be an ally when allyship is fundamentally about understanding what my needs are, what my movement is about, and how you can support it, not just creating your own and doing your own thing?
So I don't see you as aligned with me, and that is harmful.
So now I could tell you how I would answer, how I would have a conversation, and that's what I would say to them.
I would start by asking, you know, how do you see yourself in relationship to me?
And my sense is that they would say, well, I believe that Black Lives Matter belongs inside of, or is a part of the art.
When I say all lives matter, I also mean Black Lives Matter.
They're not excluding my life.
And for that, I would say thank you.
I'm thankful for you affirming that part of it.
Now, I would like for you to also recognize and acknowledge, if it is the case that you are supportive of my life, that you hear my voice.
And that my voice is saying this, and my voice is asking you for that.
Now, you can choose to ignore that, but understand that that's what you're doing, and therefore you're not an ally of mine.
And when I hear you say that, I know that it's a dog whistle for someone else and something else, because I've already communicated to you very clearly the violence that I think it does.
Now, with all what's happening right now, I mean, I find myself almost daily texting you articles about police forces and changing... And I appreciate it.
And I appreciate it, bro.
But there actually does seem to be momentum right now.
What would you... So, say that you've had this conversation.
I mean, we're having this conversation, but... Yeah.
So, kind of laying down, we've laid down the explanation for why All Lives Matter is hurtful and has its own sort of violence and only perpetuates a certain idea.
If you want someone, say, from that community or any community to be an ally, what would you prescribe or recommend them to do that would actually be helpful in this moment?
Relative to the All Lives Matter.
No, to Black Lives Matter.
Yeah, I'm framing it because systemic change that is starting to seem to happen now, but we know how easily in two weeks.
Yeah, so I mean, listen, so then we just need to take it.
So there needs to be what can only be described as a deep and ongoing commitment to seeing it through.
To seeing, you know, to being present for what's happening and not to, like, avoid presence or deny presence or escape presence.
It doesn't mean you have to be inundated with the news.
It doesn't mean you have to follow everything on social media, because I certainly don't.
But it means to, like, you know, express solidarity, you know, in the ways in which you, you know, either choose to consume, the ways in which you choose to, like, react and be in relationship with people.
That's something I think is really important.
I mean, I continue to believe, like, that That allyship in this context, and I mean, I would even go beyond it and say co-conspiratory, you know, being a co-conspirator in here, meaning like, help us do this work, can look like a lot of different things.
So it could look like if you know that you are receiving, you have, you experience privilege in a workplace, it means you need to call it out and say, I experienced privilege and name this, name it.
For example, you know, at my, you know, my wife's company last week at Bon Appetit, so it's part of Conde Nast, you know, you had White on-air personalities coming out and saying listen I've been paid this much and my black colleagues and my POC colleagues have not been paid what I've been paid and I'm not gonna let the company not say that.
Now, I'm just pointing that as an example, like, as I'm not, you know, it's just, that's what happened factually.
And so we need folks to, like, put it on the line.
Like, if you just, like, put it on the line, like, it's okay.
Like, if you put it on the line, then we can get through this.
It's like, we can move forward.
But as long as you hold and as long as you sort of are sitting in a kind of, you know, complacency and fear about, you know, then you're not, it's going to feel risky.
It should feel risky.
It should feel dangerous.
It should feel a little dangerous.
And that's okay.
Like, people got your back.
And I'm always going to keep saying that when folks step out there, people step up.
People see you and they support you.
But that can only happen if you step out a little bit.
And so, you know, it's, it's still, it's just, and then specifically because you did bring up defunding the police as a, as a sort of form of by which to address this.
And I think in my mind, I think that's a really, that's an important start.
It is not police abolition, which is, I think, you know, a conversation needs to start at the extreme and then move backwards.
I think defunding the police is not really at the extreme.
It's, you know, it's still a peripheral kind of component associated with how we address public safety and communities.
So I would say, like, use that as an entry point and not an end point.
And let that be an entry point for a larger structural analysis.
So what other things can we think about?
What can we refund?
What can we, you know, put other resources into?
Versus just sort of thinking that it's a, that will, it's not fixed.
Defund the police is a tactic.
It's not a, it's not a fix.
So that's my, that's how I would say, you know, that's how I think about like what folks can do in terms of allyships.
Put it on the line a little bit.
Put yourself out there.
We've been putting ourselves out there.
The last thing I'll say is like, I said that, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was at, um, a week ago, I was in Placid Park.
And I was with my black friends and we were sitting down having a, having a picnic, social distancing.
Want to make that clear?
And a group of white people walked by us and they all had on, they all had, they were all holding Black Lives Matter signs.
And it was like a bugged out moment.
I'm like, yo, all of us are sitting here.
Like, enjoying a picnic, and they're marching.
And then we had to, like, catch those.
I was like, oh!
It's like, yeah!
That's right!
Oh, please!
Thank you!
I've been doing this for a long time.
I'm gonna have this picnic right here with my people.
Thank you so much for doing that work right now.
I got you.
Listen, I'm gonna be back out there on Monday, but on Sunday, you got it.
That's how we gonna do this. - You know, I found myself really moved by that interview with your friend Dax because he's an academic and because he's so politically active.
I was moved by his responses being so sort of open and vulnerable and empathic.
I loved the way the interview ended with, all right, that's how it's going to be.
We'll sit here and have a picnic while the white people are handling the protest on Sunday.
I thought that was really beautiful, but the way that he responded to your question about how would you talk to someone who was kind of in clueless good faith, thinking that all lives matter includes black lives.
His responses, for me, really modeled a kind of political discourse and conversations that really might make a difference.
It was powerful.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I totally agree.
I mean, to be in the position of being asked so directly to listen in very particular terms.
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing more to say.
It's all to be done now, instead of discussed, I think.
I mean, he was really, really clear.
And I was really glad that he had the time for it, Derek.
Yeah, I mean, again, he's one of my closest friends so we speak through each other in a lot of ways in our discussions and what I love about him is his clarity.
I also love his evolution as a person because I had mentioned we were both columnists at Rutgers and he was much more hardline activist at that time and the thing about him specifically that's so amazing is He is the ultimate journalist in some ways.
I remember he had an internship at a book company and he got to work with Studs Terkel, who made his mark in the early 70s with the book, Working.
And I almost feel like Dax really was influenced by that because when he meets someone, he just automatically interviews them about their life.
He gets in right away and about their interests and about what they think about.
And that has really informed his activism in a way that is kind of rare because we usually see it as a black or white issue.
And I'll just wrap it up with this.
Watching, especially, we talked about it with Michael Beckwith before, because one thing with that video, and I'm sorry I didn't find it at that moment, but the All Lives Matter ideology that he talks about in that, why that's so troublesome is Because I don't think that the people really understand what the experience of black people in America is when they say things like that.
And specifically, I mean, I've been pulled over four times with DAX in my life, twice in the same day.
I've had a gun put to my head because I was in the wrong part of Manhattan with a black guy and they thought I was buying drugs when we were going to dinner.
I've watched a cop threaten to put a bullet in his head because they didn't like his attitude.
I've experienced so many things with him and this is when I was in my early 20s.
When you question the experience, it's very parallel in different ways, but to me too, like how people don't believe women.
When you question the experience of other people like that, it just means that you've never seen it up close.
Because I've seen this up close on a number of occasions with him, I don't have to question it when he tells me things or when anyone tells me things about what they go through because I've lived through it.
At least I've had a window into it in some capacity.
For all this talk about the light beings and meditation and peace and all these ideologies, these ideas we have in wellness culture, For people not to understand that empathy begins with recognizing that other people have experiences different than you and if they're telling you the truth, you should probably listen.
I think at least this moment in American history and seeing the protesters and watching everyone film and seeing what's happening, I'm glad it's opening people's eyes and that really just has to continue.
Can I ask you, Derek, when you went through the pullover and the gun is brandished and you realize what's happening, what immediately becomes apparent to you about yourself?
What did you discover about you?
I freeze.
Okay.
I freeze.
Like fight, fight or freeze.
I just, I, I was actually, we were going to a Malaysian restaurant on the Upper East Side, uh, coming from Washington Heights and we were at 140th and Broadway and you could bring your own alcohol.
And so I had a bottle of, uh, cognac in my, in my lap.
And I remember thinking like, should I open this or not?
Like on the way and I'm like, I'll just wait.
And then the next thing I know we're at a light and then there's a tap and a gun right here.
And I just couldn't move.
Everything in me just stopped because I had never seen that before.
Right.
Maybe I'm asking when you realized why you were being stopped.
I mean, you have instant insight into what Dax's life is like.
I'm almost imagining that if I had gone through something like that, that would be the first day that I realized that I was white, in a way.
Oh yeah, well it was an interesting thing because... Or at least what that meant.
At least what that meant.
Yeah.
Well, it was actually, right, they thought that I was the one buying drugs.
So they almost strip searched me on the middle of Broadway, whereas they let him go.
Now in my head, I was like, I didn't have anything on me.
So in one sense, I'm like, I was aggravated because, because I'm like, this is ridiculous.
This is a good friend of mine.
But what was very interesting about that was they Said, where's your bag?
We had dropped off our bags back about 40 minutes ago uptown because we were crashing there up night.
But that means they had been following us for at least an hour.
Oh, wow.
And when they realized that I didn't have anything and that our story was holding up, no one said I'm sorry.
They didn't even look at me.
They just walked away back into their vans because two jump out vans had surrounded us.
And so what I felt in that moment was like, you just can't trust these people in any capacity.
And there is no humanity there because to not even recognize your error at that point, it really, and I was 24 at the time, but it still really got to me.
Right.
Well, it's interesting, you know, in that question, Matthew, I really resonated with that question in terms of almost what came to mind for me was the possible realization of As a white person, I am usually off these guys' radar.
And it's because I am with a black person that they have noticed me, they are treating me this way, and they are treating him this way because of our association and their assumptions and projections about that.
And I would also imagine that for many of us, as white people in America, there is a kind of consternation that is born out of the entitlement of unconscious privilege of like, you can't treat me this way.
And it's like, oh, actually, they can.
And they do all the time.
Right.
Yeah, I'll just, I'll follow that up too, because that's a great point.
But throughout college, you can't tell now because I'm bald, but I had long hair down to my shoulders and I did a good amount of psychedelics and I ran with crowds that were in that.
And so I had been bothered by police before.
So it wasn't the first time, but you're right on the race element of just purely because I was with him and his girlfriend that was sitting in the front seat at the time, who's also black.
So experiencing that dynamic, but that wasn't the first time that Dax and I had run into problems before.
So after you do it a couple of times, you just You know, it gets in your head so that every time, even now when he comes and visits in Los Angeles and we drive, it's still in the back of my head, although we haven't been bothered in a long time.
But throughout our 20s, it was pervasive.
It was constant.
Yeah, I'm guessing that you must also realize somewhere that you're not carrying around a certain kind of hypervigilance and you're not being stressed out or you're not, there's a whole body that you're entitled to have, that you're allowed to have walking around in the world that your friend doesn't have. that you're allowed to have walking around in the world Did you ever talk about that specifically?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I remember one time, because he grew up outside of D.C.
and he spent a lot of time in D.C.
and he was just hanging out on a street in D.C.
one day after a bar and he got thrown in jail overnight just because he was hanging out.
While he was in law school, like I said, he was a little more upfront.
So like when people bothered him, he knows the law cause that's what he studied and he knew he didn't have any problems, but they didn't like his attitude.
And so they pinned him down, him and his friends and put him in the cell overnight.
And that's a pure body issue.
So I remember we discussed that, you know, afterwards.
Amazing.
So, Matthew, I think you had some concluding remarks for this week?
Yeah, we actually got some feedback suggesting that maybe a little concluding piece for our podcast would be good, so I did put together some reflections on our themes.
And really, in the spirit of Dax's call to put myself out there a little bit, I'll try to braid two things together here, and I hope it works.
My main point overall is that the racist aspects and even roots of fitness and wellness culture are clear, but that the irony is, while they certainly aid and abet power, they don't ultimately work for the moral or spiritual health of white people.
So I had Dr. Petrozzello's thoughts about those old-timey strongmen in my head last night as I fell asleep.
And then I woke up with this clear memory of a scene in a fairly famous French-Canadian movie from years ago.
It was called Leolo.
And in it, the young boy of the title has an older brother who's about 16 and he's skinny and gangly and awkward and one day he gets mocked and then beaten severely by the local bully who breaks his nose.
And as he recovers, he commits to this bodybuilding regime, determined to never be harmed again.
And the time passage shot, it pans to suddenly find him totally bulked up and bench pressing like, whatever, 300 pounds and drinking all the raw eggs and stuff.
And he's become a real musclehead.
But of course, the bully shows up again, and totally unfazed by this beast flexing in front of him, breaks the guy's nose again with a single punch.
And he falls to his knees, alone and humiliated again, and it's just totally pathetic and shameful.
And one realizes that he was beaten because he tried to build himself up on his own.
He didn't make friends.
He had no community.
No sparring partners.
He invested all of his effort into this competition-based dream that his body could be made invulnerable.
And he didn't build his relationships or his understanding of how the world works for that matter.
So that made me think of the strongman again.
How he builds and builds and builds himself into a fantasy of perfection and invulnerability that has nothing to do with utility, with work, with community protection.
If there's anything collective about that physical culture stuff, about what they were doing, it was like militarized and fascistic.
It served the homogenous state.
So, so I thought about also how venal and pathetic it is when these guys inevitably go to pot and they struggle with chronic pain and they lose this fragile protection they thought they were gaining with their body armor.
So, okay, so that's one thought.
And then the other thing is, like, you'll both remember that I, I started my yoga culture criticism by publishing notes on the hundreds of interviews I did with yoga people who had injured themselves practicing yoga, which is weird.
Like, it was this weird thing I was trying to figure out, not only about them, but about my own yoga injuries.
Like, how was it that this art form that people took up for fitness, therapy, even spiritual reasons, was leaving so many of them in pain?
So I dug around, I came up with a bunch of compelling reasons, but Here's what I didn't fully understand and appreciate because it's so obvious and it's before I'd heard of Black Lives Matter and it's totally invisible to me, like all of my research was taking place in white spaces.
I was talking about a lot of white people, talking to a lot of white people about how they pushed their way into injury because they believed they must somehow perfect themselves individually for whatever, for something.
Then something started to click when a good friend of mine helped sponsor a weekly yoga class in her downtown Toronto studio that was exclusively for Black women.
Now, they got a lot of pushback for this, for the typical reasons.
People said it was exclusionary, that, you know, why would you need this?
But, like, they totally stood firm, and it was this amazing thing, and everybody loved it, it was really popular, and I heard through the grapevine That this one, one of the women came out of the first class and she said, being in a class for black women gave me the first experience of being able to relax in child's pose and Shavasana.
And I was like floored by that statement.
It just blew my mind to be privy to this comment on what white spaces could feel like and the constant stress of performing in and assimilating within the dominant culture.
But since then, I've realized something else, which is that the whiteness that women felt some relief from is all intensified by this anxiety of individualistic achievement or of attaining sovereignty.
Like, amongst all of the reasons that I heard for why people got injured in yoga, the leading theme was always, I pushed myself really hard.
So there's all kinds of reasons for the kind of anxiety that drives people too hard.
And to my knowledge, the voices in fitness that would be explicitly white supremacist are not as prominent as they were a century ago.
So that's good.
I don't think that people are today crushing it in the gym so that they can make sure they have more white babies.
But I do wonder if the endless drive to self-improvement is related nonetheless.
That maybe this fascination with personal strength and willpower and sovereignty carries with it some of that very old panic about power.
How to keep it, how to expand it, how to justify it, how to feel worthy of it, and maybe even how to push down the guilt associated with it.
I mean, for me, the bottom line is that the physical culture that is at the root of wellness systems in the global North today comes directly out of the colonial era.
And it carries with it this idea that you can hold on to your social power by building up your individual body.
So, the alternative would have been to think about fitness as, I don't know, the sharing of resources.
Or to realize that you both strengthen yourself and you get right with yourself by sharing power instead of hoarding it.
It's beautifully said.
Yeah.
I will say that it struck me a number of years ago that what I teach is called group fitness and that is a term in evolutionary biology and group fitness is what gave humans a leg up, our ability to communicate with one another and not be killed, not be prey animals, right?
So the group fitness, but that requires everyone working together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the thing that I don't feel like we've touched on yet about this word sovereign, because it's come up in a few episodes, It's aristocratic and monarchical overtones, right?
That you are learning how to become the king or the queen, right?
So that you have all the power and you're better than everyone else because you have somehow given yourself these attributes that make you superior and all-powerful.
Right.
Well, to be continued then.
Well, thank you everyone for listening.
We will be back next week.
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