Body image is a phenomenon that has long simmered below the surface of the wellness industry. We’ve spent years covering the hard and soft eugenics that inform so many physical and spiritual practices, and how the notion of an ideal self persists and, as we get into today, grown in the online world.
Just as shaming and skewed body perceptions proliferate in the comments sections and fitfluencer podcast world, so have opportunities for meaningful conversations. One such venue is the wildly popular debate and discussion shows hosted by Jubilee Media. They’ve somehow managed to tow the line between heartfelt sharing and outright clickbait, for better and worse.
We look at a few recent episodes that deal directly with body image issues, from being jacked and bro’d up to the challenges of obesity and eating disorders, and discuss how Jubilee is walking such a precarious tightrope.
Show Notes
Anorexia vs Obese | Middle Ground
Is Being Fat A Choice? Fit Men vs Fat Men | Middle Ground
Is Being Fat A Choice? Fit Women vs Fat Women | Middle Ground
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She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.
Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
This is a story that's all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?
And I maximized that while I was lying.
Listen to DeepCover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 266 Jubilees Body Image Debates Body image is a phenomenon that has long simmered below the surface of the wellness industry.
We've spent years covering the hard and soft eugenics that inform so many physical and spiritual practices and how the notion of an ideal self persists and, as we're going to get into today, has grown in the online world.
Yet, just as shaming and skewed body perceptions proliferate in the comment sections and fit fluencer podcast world, so have opportunities for meaningful conversations.
One such venue is the wildly popular debate and discussion shows hosted by Jubilee Media.
They've somehow managed to toe the line between heartfelt sharing and outright clickbait for better and worse.
Today, we're going to look at a few recent episodes that deal directly with body image issues, from being jacked and broed up to the challenges of obesity and eating disorders, and discuss how Jubilee is walking such a precarious tightrope.
All right, this episode started because something interesting popped into my feed, and it was a discussion between anorexic and fat people.
This is part of Jubilee Media's Middle Ground series, where eight people are gathered to discuss a variety of issues, and in this case, it's body image perceptions and grappling with disordered eating.
I've done a few episodes now about how wellness rhetoric can help perpetuate eating disorders, having dealt with orthorexia for 15 years myself.
My initial reaction upon seeing that video was that it was going to be a fucking nightmare.
What could go wrong?
Some things do go wrong, but some things go very right because I started to watch it and I discovered eight young adults grappling with the very hard reality of dealing with their bodies.
Now, unlike the usual format of Jubilee shows, there wasn't a lot of contention and heated yelling.
Instead, there was a sincere attempt to commiserate about their own internal monologues and the perceptions that popular culture perpetuate and judge about skinniness and fatness.
I found myself really touched by the conversation.
And then, because there's always an and then, YouTube suggested a year-old episode of Jubilee's Middle Ground where four fit men dialogued with four fat men.
And it was an entirely different universe.
Then it suggested four fit women and four fat women from eight months ago.
We're not going to touch that one.
I am putting it in the show notes for anyone who's interested in this, but there's so much, and we're even going to get into this.
There's so much discussion online where men talk about women's bodies.
I don't really want to get into that territory.
So, you know, listener, if you want to go check that out for yourself, but the other two is what we're going to discuss.
Now, I've intermittently watched Jubilee for years.
And I know Julian, you and I, you do as well.
And we've talked about these offline.
And then we intermittently fast from watching Jubilee too.
Exactly.
It's a very ketogenic show.
I had missed these particular episodes about the fat people versus the fit people, et cetera.
And I thought they'd be interested to discuss them in the context of the work that we do here because health and body image is so pertinent to the wellness world.
So Julian, both of us being Jubilee fans, you know, sometimes, can you give us a 101 on what they're all about?
All right.
So Jubilee is a YouTube channel.
It's run by the LA-based Jubilee Media.
And the channel itself is billed as a game show.
And they have 10 million subscribers and an average 6 million views per video.
Demographics lean toward Gen Z, I would say.
They have multiple highly engaging formats and really slick professional TV level production.
Everything has this game show kind of pacing and style.
Some of it is organized around dating, some around trying to figure out who the one person is who's pretending to be someone they're not.
But they've become most well-known for their political debate formats.
And the most prominent of these people will have seen recently, there was a Jordan Peterson viral clip from their show called Surrounded.
And in this format, a well-known political pundit sits at a debate table and is surrounded by 20 students in like folding chairs in a circle who disagree with them.
And after a topic or a debate prompt has been announced, a buzzer sounds.
And this is the odd part.
The students all try to beat one another to the chair opposite the pundit.
And whoever gets there first then debates them on the prompt.
Most recently, Jordan Peterson was the pundit.
And as I said, multiple clips in which atheist kids like with philosophy chops were roasting the hell out of his views went super viral.
It is a really weird format.
It reminds me of middle school in that sense, you know, the game where they take away a chair every time and you have to rush to it.
It's very much of that mindset.
I was heartened because I was watching one where 20 MAGA people were debating a liberal pundit and a woman rushed to it and a man beat her there and then he just stepped back and offered it.
He actually got there to give it to her because he saw her trying to get there.
So there are heartening moments like that in the context of where you actually see moments of humanness.
And yet there was also one episode where a Palestinian who is not opposed to the state of Israel was debating 20 pro-Palestinians.
And it was a very heated, but also like there was a lot of heartfelt sharing going on, which was nice.
But the first person wouldn't shake his hand.
And you see these sort of social dynamics play out that aren't even, you know, part of the conversation, but the body image that you see on the actual show speaks volumes, including in the shows we're going to be discussing today.
So we're talking about Middle Ground, which is one of their series.
And it's a bit different than the pylon we were just talking about.
This one is designed to bring together people with opposing or deeply divided viewpoints.
Usually it's controversial or on sensitive topics.
And it's meant to engage in structured conversations with the aim of finding common ground.
Sometimes they do and sometimes not at all.
Here's the format.
Each episode typically features two or more groups with contrasting perspectives, conservatives, liberals, pro-choice for pro-life.
There's atheists versus Christians.
Speakers are presented with a series of statements or questions related to the topic, and those who agree step forward to discuss their reasoning.
Then after they have a few minutes, a bell rings, and then those who disagree take a seat and then continue the conversation.
The key point here is in order to foster productive conversations, they often start with less contentious questions and then they increasingly become more divisive.
And the idea is to build some empathy early on so that when it gets more challenging, the speakers remember that they're talking to other humans.
And it does work sometimes.
You see those sort of relationships formed, even when people disagree.
And sometimes it just doesn't matter.
Middleground first launched in 2017.
The show is one of Jubilee's most impactful series.
And there's over 100 episodes ranging from truly productive conversations.
I think we're going to get to one of those in segment three today.
And then sometimes what feels like pure clickbait, which to me is segment two.
I guess to participate in the attention economy, Jubilee has to vary their content.
I generally feel like we're doing a good job, but I know we're going to have some criticisms as well.
So generally, I have very mixed feelings about this channel.
I mean, I think they've clearly positioned themselves very well in the digital or very skillfully, I should say, right?
In the digital content landscape.
They obviously create engaging shows.
They've hooked me in.
Some of that has to do with who the well-known people are that they get to come on.
It can generate very clippable moments of juicy discussion.
And I think the very things that make them successful also have the kinds of downsides that I'm wary of.
Like the game show style and how they frame topics can end up trivializing or sensationalizing actually quite serious issues.
They can also create false equivalencies or caricatured representations of certain positions.
At the same time, it's getting a whole generation into thinking about these issues by hooking them with entertainment.
And their guest list of more famous figures also does unfortunately trend kind of in the direction of right-wing propagandists of the day.
Some of that may be baked into who's prominent in the digital landscape and who's willing to actually participate and go and have these debates.
So they have people like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson, but then also people who are more in the left-wing direction, Destiny and Pete Buttigieg, and even Sam Cedar as the one rare true lefty that I've seen on the show.
That's who I was thinking of before.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
The one progressive surrounded by MAGA.
So Jubilee definitely has its own lane, but I would say that they are situated in the context of similar shows which host debates.
And two of the most prominent are the Whatever podcast, which has 4 million subscribers, and Fresh and Fit that we're going to talk about today, who has 1.6 million, both of which I think are really more manosphere-based.
Like, for example, their debate thing, instead of one progressive and 20 MAGA, they'll have eight OnlyFans models on to debate the Evo bio reactionary male hosts about relationships.
And then there are other channels like Premiere Unbelievable, which does pretty well, and they host debates between Christians and non-Christians, but in this more game show kind of format.
And these are all very different from other channels that I think slant toward an older demographic, like Intelligence Squared and the monk debates, where it's a much more formal, contentious debate where people take turns and they're on a big stage, usually in front of a large audience.
And it has More of like a traditional academic structure.
And I'll just say, both of those channels, even though they have a lot of pretty prominent participants, are dwarfed by these others because their subscribers are merely in the hundreds of thousands, never approaching the million mark.
You know, with regard to this channel as a whole, you know, you guys are much more knowledgeable.
I'm mostly reply guy on that today anyway.
But I think that the debate format seems to be like a next step up in terms of Manosphere formats that really favor people who are super loquacious and can really be aggressive with their points.
And it probably favors Gish gallopers.
Is that what you've seen so far?
I don't know about Gish galloping.
I think it does favor people who are very good at being strategic and clever in their use of language and who have well-practiced talking points that they can flip back and forth between, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I would say not a lot of Gish galloping because one thing is people, whether it's the moderator, sometimes they have moderators, but they move it along so that no one talks for too long.
So you're not going to have a Russell brand on these shows, thankfully.
Yeah, I mean, what I've seen from the episodes we'll discuss today, I see mostly prose, actually, because on one hand, it democratizes and humanizes what's otherwise a culture war sphere, and it takes it kind of out of influencer land.
There's an exception we'll get to today.
But on the other hand, it does have this reality show or game show feeling to it with not a lot of guidance or facilitation.
And I noticed, too, in the episodes we'll look at today that there's this pretense to a kind of neutrality in what is really a politicized space and series of themes.
And that's most visible in the episodes that are hosted.
Like the host of the, you know, the four fit men versus the four fat men really wants to sort of like create this neutral space.
But I think that can sometimes make it feel like structural misogyny or fat phobia or other cultural pressures are kind of treated like facts of life or weather patterns that, you know, we can shelter ourselves from, but not necessarily change.
I also found it very interesting to hear people walk their lines between private experience and the impact of cultural propaganda, especially around, I think, what is the major question that we'll look at, which is personal responsibility or agency, or am I responsible for this aspect of my life or that aspect?
Absolutely.
And I also think that the platform, you know, I think there are exceptions, but at least for these episodes, is not actively ginning up acrimony.
And I'm remembering that like the three of us grew up with Geraldo and Sally Jesse Raphael and Jerry Springer.
And obviously this is a huge step up from all of that shit.
You know, we're going to talk about the risk of platforming Myron Gaines, which is a big sort of exception here.
I also want to point out one thing that I wondered about is that this is all about the exposure economy as well, because participants are not paid.
And there's not a lot of, I would have expected to have seen some big long think piece or investigation or, you know, interviews with past participants on what their sort of outcomes were from appearing on these things.
But browsing Reddit, I didn't see much, but I did glean that most people want to go on for exposure.
Some people end up feeling set up to look like idiots because they're not really prepared for the rhythm or the context or who they're going to be paired up with, or they're pissed off by editing choices.
So those are my general feelings about the format.
That's interesting because editing choices is a real concern that you can, you know, Subway Takes just did something on that with Bill Burr that was pretty funny, actually, because they released their full episodes on YouTube, but only edited ones on Instagram, but they want to have transparency there.
But in terms of being felt set up to look stupid, I mean, at this point, Jubilee has been around for almost a decade.
If you're going on there and you don't realize the rhythm and how it moves, then I mean, any sort of debate requires preparation.
And I think sometimes it would be an interesting question, actually, because you invoked influencer worlds.
How prepared are people to move from a safe space in which they have total control over what gets out to actually engaging with other humans?
And then whose fault is it because you weren't ready to actually engage in those spaces?
I think a lot of it is going to come down to that first producer call that the potential participant has, right?
And what the producer says.
Like, you know, if this is going to be chilled out, it's going to be a really relaxed environment.
We're just going to get together.
You know, you can imagine a pitch that is very welcoming and that might not sort of measure up with what the person later experiences.
But anyway, like the other thing that I was thinking about, you know, with regard to these episodes that we'll look at is that we're coming into them after this long media arc in which the discussion of bodily perceptions and dysmorphia and health and privilege is getting to be around 10 years old now on the internet, but it also dates back to the origins of fat acceptance movements in the late 1960s.
Like in 1967, there was a fat in protest in Central Park to highlight discrimination against fat people.
And then in the 70s, fat activism immersed in feminist body politics.
People started protesting the diet industry.
And then we all remember that Naomi Wolf wrote a very compelling book on this before she became a crank.
Even that book got a lot of criticism from people actually went back and fact-checked it.
They're like, wait a second.
That's the thing, right?
Yeah, I know how many people are dying of anorexia.
Yeah.
So body positivity emerges as an organizing philosophy in the 1990s, and that becomes this key sort of debating point in what we'll look at today.
And then it moves online in the 2000s, but it's mainly brought online by marginalized people, by black women, queer folks, fat activists, disabled people.
And so it comes under this sort of big umbrella, as far as I understand it.
And so when body positivity is pinged today in discussions like this, a lot of that history in broader context is absent because the focus is often reduced down to a more granular discussion of health and perceptions of health, especially in the one with men.
And one result that I see is this granular discussion can be used as a kind of science-y sounding way of condemning a cultural project of body acceptance as being too woke, right?
Like if we accept fat people, our society will decline because science.
So I don't think, you know, somebody like Myron Gaines cares about health science.
He cares about sex and power, and he's using health science whenever he wants to to sort of make his points.
And I think what gets buried there is the acceleration of body fascism that we've tracked for years, which is, you know, this series of anxieties about impurities and inefficiencies in individual bodies as somehow impacting national vitality.
But there's one other thing that I want to flag for listeners, which I think is really positive in these episodes, which is that a few participants allude to developing the attitude of body neutrality as opposed to body positivity, which is very contested, right?
Like, you know, how can you feel good about yourself if you look like that?
And then the person has to defend themselves from that framework, which is, it can work, but it's also, I think it's also limited.
You know, and experts who unpacked body neutrality as a concept argue that it's a more realistic attitude because it avoids this direct confrontation with social norms around attractiveness and health.
And so the idea is that developing ambivalence towards appearances can allow for these perennial tensions around body objectification in the age of Instagram, which impacts everyone, to just sort of like fade away a little bit.
Thank you.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, we're going to start with the more contentious episode, which is the fit versus fat men.
It's the episode I feel most qualified to talk about as a formerly overweight kid who ended up working in the fitness industry for decades.
So I kind of know the attitudes of everyone involved on a very intimate level.
While I said earlier that middle ground tends to open with less contentious questions to build up to more challenging ones, it's not really the case here.
And I attribute that in large part to the fact that after you hear the host, whose name is John Regalado, ask the prompt, you're going to hear Myron Gaines, who we've said his name already, the co-host of the popular Fresh and Fit podcast.
Julian, can you unpack him a little bit?
Yeah, sure.
And actually to your point, Matthew, that you were making a little bit ago, Fresh and Fit picks up where the pickup artist and men's rights movement left off in the 2010s online, right?
So there's a whole set of underlying assumptions that are essentially anti-feminist.
And that's not even up for debate.
That's just where everyone is coming from.
It's self-described as a channel that helps men navigate relationships, finance, and fitness.
And they get their start in 2020 with a former DHS special agent named Myron Gaines.
Let's just underline that.
This guy was a former...
What did he do for DHS?
He was an official agent.
So he probably would have been directing ICE raids if he was still there right now, right?
Yeah, awesome.
So his name, as we've already said, is Myron Gaines, and he starts off being nicknamed Fit as part of the kind of concept here.
And then an aspiring entrepreneur and musician named Walter Weeks, who gets the nickname Fresh.
None of this really carries over too much, but that's just the concept.
They have very successfully angled for the controversy lane.
And clips from Fresh and Fit that tend to go viral are usually of Myron telling insulting red pill truths to a young woman who's gotten too uppity, essentially.
And like their top two videos right now are titled, Myron Exposes the Downfall, All in Caps, of Women with Viral Clip.
And then the second one, Arrogant Chick Got Humbled in Caps, for thinking that she's the prize.
Now, both of these thumbnails show Myron looking composed and split screen, like he's giving a teaching, with an attractive woman on the other side looking very confused and upset.
Many of the debate opponents are relatively unknown young women who come on, it seems, for the exposure for their OnlyFans accounts or their streamer accounts.
Okay, so the business model is at least in part, let's bring erotic content creators and sex workers on to insult them.
And so let's make our content prurient and clickable via the bodies of women who we bring on to diss.
Yeah, and there's something going on underneath that, right?
Which is that they know that a lot of the men who are supposedly on board with their anti-OnlyFans messaging are going to end up being consumers of the OnlyFans models that they have on, which is the reason why they come on.
And, you know, they're also participating in this process before the exposure, which is actually, I think, really sad.
They also host interviews with people like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneeko, and Dan Bulzerian.
So very heavily trending toward the right and super misogynistic, and also people who have gained a lot of influence by posturing around how much money they make.
The channel has been criticized for its misogyny and its anti-Semitism, as well as racism towards black women specifically.
They received a week-long ban from YouTube in 2022 for hate speech, and then they were demonetized in August of 2023 for what YouTube called repeated violations of community and advertiser-friendly guidelines.
And of course, they made a lot of hay around this, around people, they're trying to shut us down.
They're trying to silence us.
They've mostly leaned into browbeating men about how to be high-value alphas and have power over women and smacking down women who think they can beat that evolutionary biology natural order.
Well, you're going to hear Myron answer the prompt first.
And you're also going to hear someone named Zach, who is one of the fat men in the mix.
So here's the first clip.
Our first prompt is: I have felt disgusted looking at a fat body.
Whoever feels compelled to start us off.
Well, it's only sadly to be fat.
Okay.
That's a great start.
I mean, I know why you say that, but it's one of those things where do you know why you're saying that?
Yes, because I've been fat before and I lost the weight.
Well, me too.
I've been fat my whole life.
I've been way skinnier than I am now, and I've been way heavier than I am now.
Was I less valuable at one point in there?
Well, I mean, you can make an argument that you're less valuable when you're fatter because you drain resources, but that's a whole other conversation.
But yeah, I mean, in general, being fat is unacceptable because you control every single morsel of food that goes into your mouth.
It shows a lack of discipline.
It shows a lack of character.
It shows a lack of temperance.
And when you're fat, it's an outward manifestation of your inadequacy.
So super ideological and also posturing as if he's got all kinds of different science-backed arguments waiting in the background.
You know, like, oh, I could go into how you're draining resources, but I won't do that right now.
Yeah.
I mean, if I'm the Jubilee producer, I can't see myself setting that up because I'm not going to know whether Zach is prepared for this level of aggression and abuse.
He did okay.
He's doing great.
I actually think he had a great response there.
I mean, I haven't found anything definitive on the process, but I haven't seen any indication that the participants know who they'll be grouped with.
So the producer really has to be okay with this kind of hunger games model of, I'm going to unleash this ghoul who talks for a living on these normies and whatever happens will be great content.
But this answer of like, do you know why you're saying that is an amazing intervention for any bully, I think.
But it's not going to stop him.
I mean, do you know why you're saying that really speaks to the fact that from the outset, we can see that this guy is incapable of anything but externalizing behaviors, like every feeling he has about anything, about himself, about the world, has to be turned into some crusade of control.
So this is like announcing himself with top shelf fragility, you know, constant self-defense against the ghosts of his own mind.
It's pretty obvious what's going on.
I think it's actually really compelling because we talk a lot about how people get siloed off into their echo chambers in social media.
And we've often, at least I'll say I've often made the case that a lot of people in comment sections will not be like that to other humans.
There are exceptions and Myron is one of those exceptions.
In fact, all four of the Fit Fluencers here are those exceptions, although none of them are as brutal as Myron is.
But in reality, you're going to face people like this in real life because there are those people as well.
And so if I'm agreeing to go on this show, I'm ready for that in some capacity.
And Zach, Zach turned out to be sort of the star on the fat side here.
He is also, just to be clear, a male fitness or not a plus size model.
He's very attractive.
He's like 6'5 or 6'6.
This comes up in the conversation.
There's so much male body perception going on, but I think he's truly capable of handling them.
I think it's why he stepped up first and was taking on the four people.
And I think opening, like I said, it was supposed to be less contentious to more contentious.
This episode, they just got right into it.
But in terms of preparation, I think he did well.
And some people are going to do very well.
There's another man we'll get to who also does very well against them.
I promise I won't just clip Myron for all these, but he does talk the most out of all of these people.
I do think what he says about shame here with a little bit of old-fashioned American exceptionalism thrown in is worth unpacking.
There's way worse stuff going out in the world.
Just people saying, oh my God, I'm set.
I'm going to eat some fucking ice cream.
It's like, no, dude, it's like, you're fat.
You made that decision.
You live in the best country ever.
If you live in a civilized first world country where you have electricity, internet power, et cetera, you deserve to be bullied.
It's ridiculous to me that we have all these fat people running around.
Meanwhile, people are being bombed in Gaza.
It's ridiculous.
We are so privileged here in the United States and in the West in general.
When I see a fat person, I'm like, wow, you got the gift of life.
You got the gift of being in a developed country.
And you're a fat POS talking about body positivity on TikTok.
What the hell is going on?
Now you're segmenting, though, because not everyone thinks like that.
No, we need to bring shaming back.
We need to bring shaming back in so many other regards besides obesity.
We need to do it with sluts.
We need to shame fat people.
We need to shame everybody when they're fucked up.
Because shame has been one of the strongest defenses against degeneracy and human f ⁇ ups.
Wow.
The moral absolutism and hatred is strong with this one.
You know, I am thinking about how Richard Spencer starts answering that question in 2017 to the Australian newscasters about whether or not he's a white supremacist and how he just gets punched in the face.
And I'm like, sorry to keep returning to this, but the risk that the producer runs with this is that somebody's just going to hit him in the face, right?
But yeah, shame is the most powerful motivator in social history is not exactly an evidence-based statement.
So yeah, where does the certainty come from, Julian?
I wonder if it gives us a picture of how he was brought up or what he's most scared of or what he thinks is just normal for everyone else or what he most needs to externalize.
Well, I want to bring up, though, the fact that you're right, it's not evidence-based.
We've talked about shame before.
Virginia Pastrow wrote a book about this over a decade ago about how shame does work in smaller communities.
Like say if you live with 20 people and someone steals something from someone else and you bring them into a circle, there are certain qualities of shame that I do think worth considering.
Myron isn't bringing anybody into a circle.
No.
No, no, no, but I'm talking about the actual idea of shame being a motivator.
That's not entirely incorrect, but it's not appropriate for every situation.
And there is some eloquent writing on how it can work.
I just don't know how it works in online spaces or in spaces like this, to the degree that Myron thinks it will.
Yeah, you're talking about a kind of understanding of the evolutionary basis of a kind of social utility of shame and why maybe it has lasted the way that it has amongst human beings.
A lot of psychologists will talk about the distinction between healthy shame and toxic shame.
And this is definitely the toxic variety.
Yes, agreed.
You know, I'm also thinking that I think a lot of people, us included, we're going to have an impulse to debunk or correct somebody like Myron on fatness or metabolism or whatever he has in his back pocket from whatever studies he's pretend to have read.
But I don't think he cares about any of that in any detail because it's so clear that his healthest fetishes are inextricable from his hatred of women.
Like that's why he's there.
Like he's not going to care about whether calorie restriction does or doesn't work because his main aim is to enlist men into a war against women.
And if the fat guys who also happen to be more emotionally intelligent on that panel backslap him about his sluts comment, which they won't, he'd speak to them differently probably.
And I think the next clip goes all in on that.
But I picked up this one thing about that I want to understand better, which is, you know, this guy's Somali American and he makes this kind of gesture at identity politics because, you know, he almost sounds like he wasn't born in Connecticut, but almost like he's speaking like an immigrant who's able to empathize with the global South.
So he sort of gestures at Gaza here.
But with this logic, I'm surprised that he didn't pin them with responsibility for being poor or electing Hamas in 2006.
But he also is a rabid anti-Semite, as I understand, right, Derek?
Yeah, a large part of his brand is built on it.
He said in the past that Hitler is right about the Jews.
Oh, Jesus.
He said that we have to take our country back from these Jewish supremacists.
In fact, one of his most popular clips ever, the Hitler one, has over 10 million views.
It's not surprising that he take any opportunity to ding them in any venue possible, even if he doesn't outright say it.
That is what he does a lot of.
I want to go back to about the, you know, the fatness or metabolism.
I just want to point out, you're absolutely right, Matthew.
He doesn't give a shit about any of that.
But the idea that dominates the fitness industry is this personal responsibility.
You're responsible for every morsel you put in your mouth.
There are many reasons that people are overweight.
And as some of the fat men talk about during this episode, for some people, it is overeating and not exercising.
That is a reality for some people.
And people like Myron, who says he was overweight, may have actually changed that completely possible, but it's not the only reason.
And the way that obesity and fatness gets flattened by fit fluencers is really, really problematic.
And as years ago, the New York Times did a long story on America's Biggest Loser, showing that pretty much everyone who went on that show ended up gaining the weight back.
And not because they necessarily changed their diets or fitness patterns.
It's just because that is how metabolism works for some people.
So it's frustrating when you see these jacked up douchebags saying these things, especially when it crosses over.
Now, I said we're not talking about women.
We're only talking about men, but women also have different biological realities to contend with.
But in someone like Myron's mind, it just doesn't matter if you're fat, you're fucked up, it's your fault.
You know, it really reminds me, guys, of something somewhat toxic in the yoga community that I know we've all experienced, right?
Where the person who is naturally quote unquote flexible or who has the kind of biomechanics and proportions where it's easier for them to say do handstands or something like that and balance in the middle of the room will basically imply that anyone who can't do that stuff is because either they're not working hard enough, they're not committed enough to their practice, or that they have blockages in their chakras that they need to clear so that they'll then be able to do full back bends or handstands or what have you.
Well, these are just people who have to believe in the meritocracy, right?
Because if they don't, then who are they?
Are they actually successful at anything?
Is anything in their lives, is anything in their lives left up to chance?
If they depend on anything outside of themselves, like their social contexts or the social determinants of health, then actually they don't have as much control as they think they do.
And I think that's probably where Myron feels worst.
Yeah.
And they've developed a kind of sometimes professionalized self-esteem based on a very real experience of like, I felt this way, and then I changed my mindset and my behavior, and I got to this point.
And the only reason you're not doing it is because you're lazy.
Why can't we just stop at the first part, right?
Like it's fine to say it's a professionalization problem, right?
It's like, if you have the experience of I changed my life and I feel better now, I would like to hear that story.
And then I would like to hear for you to shut the fuck up and not tell anybody else that that's what they should do.
But how do I make money off of it?
Make that into your casual sort of employment then and then professionalize further, then you just have to become an asshole, it seems.
That would have been tough for me because the way that I was no longer overweight is that I grew eight inches in one year.
Oh, right.
And I didn't gain weight.
And you can too.
So how can I sell a program?
Right.
Yeah.
It's the Derek Growth program.
Derek Growth.
Finally, I'm going to make my millions in my 50s.
One thing I've long found mind-boggling is the amount of men with podcast mics talking to other men about what women want.
And unfortunately, it's no different in this conversation, especially considering it's a total of nine men in the room.
I stitched together two clips here because the entire segment is a bit of a nightmare, but I do think it's important because it really exposes the sort of unconscious vulnerabilities and outright misogyny that so many men hold.
Oh, I just be a nice guy and girls are going to like me.
No, they're not.
She's not going to suck your dick with the same veracity when you're a fat f ⁇ as when you're in shape.
She's just not.
See, people don't understand that women are aroused by one thing and they're attracted by another thing.
Women are attracted to, you know, a guy that's confident, ambitious, makes money, et cetera, of course, right?
But they're aroused by guys that have asshole tendencies, dark triad traits, et cetera, and guys that are physically in Shape.
So, if you want to get the best of your woman where she respects and admires you while simultaneously being aroused by you so she doesn't cheat with on you, you need to have it all.
Because I've been so surprised to see on Instagram, there'll be like guys doing like an outfit try on, like, not in shape in the slightest bit.
And all the comments are women, like, I wish like men knew this is how we wish they looked, and like, oh, this is like your free media.
Myers for look good.
You can never believe what women say, man.
You believe how they behave.
That's not what they say.
That's a different episode.
That's a sad episode.
Yeah.
And just to notice, it is some of the fat men going along with that, not just the fit men.
So that's why I flagged it as nine men in a room talking about this is not a great topic.
Yeah.
Well, there's some solidarity there, right?
So I looked him up further.
Gaines has got a 2023 book out called Why Women Deserve Less.
I did not read it.
I did scan through it.
It's basically a copypasta of every, you know, sort of MRM PUA rant you've ever heard of.
It's less crass than Andrew Tate, but it's also super nihilistic, almost blackpilled to incel level on gender politics and, you know, the prospects facing men.
It is a long rant against feminism.
So like Me Too is an example of, quote, non-existent sins men have committed that never seem to relent.
That's lumped in with, quote, the mythical wage gap, microaggressions, harassment, oppression, the patriarchy, chore deficits, catcalling, mansplaining, and manspreading.
This is somebody who expresses zero interest in bonding or friendship or emotional connection, definitely no awareness of emotional labor.
You know, the book really sort of posits relationships as 100% transactional, but the contracts have changed these days, and that's why we're all in trouble.
Women don't like most men, and they never did, but now they're free to say that.
They're free from needing men because of technology and the welfare state.
Welfare queens.
Yeah, basically, I guess.
He says that online dating has made women delusionally picky, that they're only interested in the top 5% of high quality men.
So they become, this is a word I had to look up, hypergamists.
These are women who can only be parasites, who negotiate for attention and resources from men while they climb the ladder, the dating ladder in bad faith, while, of course, dirtying their value with too many sex partners and never offering genuine commitment.
Yeah, and that goes to what he was saying in the clip, right?
Where you really hear him saying that you have to be this way or that way so that they don't cheat on you.
Yeah, well, both ways.
Yeah, so that you have power over them, right?
And so this whole idea of hypergamy is that the woman is constantly wanting to trade up in terms of the alpha status of their mate.
And so if you're low down on that pecking order, she's going to cheat on you with a guy who's in better shape and acts like more of a narcissist or something.
Yeah.
So he's obsessed with misandry.
So women who hate men.
It sounds like a hymn problem.
And women getting victim status.
And so the answer is to give women less, to build yourself up more.
I think this, the whole thing is expressing betrayal in relation to men who won't join this lonely war that he has going on.
And I'm also, I don't want to flatten anything because he does brag about having 3,000 women on his podcast over the years.
So he knows women.
I would imagine there's some selection processes you flagged earlier, Matthew, in terms of people, why they go on.
And so maybe there is some group of women who act in the way that he says, but there are a whole lot of women who do not.
And it just, it, it just, the way I've always phrased it is that men talking to other men who don't actually talk to women about what women want.
And that's what it feels like throughout coming through this.
And so I have to wonder in the back of my head is when he says that women won't tell him the truth, I would imagine that most just want to get the fuck away from him.
So they don't have to deal with him and try to move on as soon as possible.
I have a zoom out thought too, a feeling about when I hear this sort of pickup artist, high quality man, woman, BS, and how it always reduces to scoring or whatever.
It just makes me really feel sad because it's the mindset of engaging with like the flimsiest veneer of human relationships, like you're setting yourself up for emotional destitution.
It's, it's like he's, I don't know, trapped in, I don't know, porn, but he thinks it's real or something like that.
Like, I, and at my age, and after a lot of feminism and hanging out with a lot of trans people and watching a lot of drag race and like really understanding performativity, I just don't buy into the world that this is built on, into the world of conventional beauty standards or appearances as really being substantial.
Like I don't reject them or judge people who, you know, turn themselves out, who want to look good in their way, but it just doesn't move me because everything these guys have to learn at some point is temporary, except friendship and loyalty and comfort and caregiving.
Like that's what they are missing.
It's like they're building a career, avoiding talking about what's actually going to be important to them when they're fucking, you know, like when the shit hits the fan, when they're 50 years old and they have responsibilities, they might have children or they might be looking at sickness.
Like they're actually spending their time avoiding looking at what they have to actually prepare themselves for.
Well, it'll be interesting, Matthew.
You have two Scott Galloway episodes coming up this weekend.
So maybe some of these ideas will be impacted there too.
And hopefully not in such a toxic manner as Myron, I don't imagine.
Yeah, I have to say that Galloway and the mooch do a lot better than Myron Gaines.
I do have my criticisms, but I am more kinder to them for sure.
Well, let's do one more.
I've been sharing mostly monologues with some feedback from other participants, but I want to share one more that's a bit of a back and forth.
An underlying current throughout this entire conversation is the body positivity movement.
Some of the fit men do see some value in it, not Myron, but others.
Some of the fat men have critiques of it.
So, again, it's a very holistic conversation when it gets around the image of the body.
The man who plays foil to Myron throughout, his name is Tevin Evans.
He's a sexually fluid black man who presents the most nuance of the eight men.
First, you'll hear Myron discuss why he hates body positivity.
And this is after a rant where he says everyone who's body positive is bullshitting themselves.
Then it's followed by what I consider to be one of the best moments of the episode.
I think the whole movement is a problem.
The body positivity movement in general is a problem, all of it.
So, you shouldn't feel positive even about your own, like for you, for instance.
You know, here's the thing, being happy and content with yourself, it's not given.
It's earned.
You have to go out there, work, and then you're going to feel that satisfaction.
Like, I earned that.
That's what I'm saying.
So, at what point do you earn it, though?
When you can look back in the mirror and actually genuinely, not coping, respect the man that you see before you.
And the reality is people are going to realize that you're going to need to achieve a certain physique because you have all these fat people.
I love my body.
No, you don't.
It's a lie, dude.
You're just coping.
You're lying to yourself.
And all these people on Instagram and TikTok with the body positivity movement are lying to themselves.
They're not happy where they want to be.
They just accept that because they're too lazy to make a change.
No, but I genuinely do love my body.
Right now as you are?
Yeah.
Then why are you going to this?
And I'll explain to you.
Then why are you going to this?
I will explain it to you.
I love everything that my body is capable of doing.
I love the fact that at my size, I can do a lot of things that other people smaller than me still cannot do.
But you want to lose weight, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Which is good.
I want to lose weight because I love my body, but I have one body.
Why would I not love it?
Yeah.
And because I love my body.
But you understand that your body now is.
You're looking to make changes.
Yeah.
Right.
But to say that loving your body is BS.
No, you make changes.
You make healthy changes to yourself because you love yourself.
All of that time that I'm putting in, the work, the money that I'm spending, that's a labor of love because I love myself enough to know that I want to make some changes to live a better lifestyle in the sense of I can just do a little bit more.
Yeah, I love that guy.
Yeah.
He's fantastic.
And I can't help but imagine as someone, again, who's overweight, looked in the mirror a lot and then grew fit, but still looked in the mirror and saw the old body that for Myron to say, are you happy with yourself now?
The idea that Myron is, I just don't buy it because I'm sure he's constantly staring at himself, thinking of improvements.
Yeah.
And that's tragic.
Right.
Yeah.
And no one could say it better than Tevin just did.
And there actually is data.
I can't cite it right now, but catch me later and I'll find it that shows that people who become really, really invested in fitness and especially in bodybuilding constantly look in the mirror and feel unsatisfied with the results of the hard work they're doing.
Yeah.
So Tevin does a brilliant job there.
And I think he pulls it off.
But I just want to mention, as I did before, strategically that, you know, responding from the perspective of body positivity boxes him in.
He overcomes it, but it does box a person into Myron's framing here of loving or not loving.
And that can be part of the limitation with the logic of body positivity as opposed to body neutrality.
But the guy basically says you've got it backwards, right?
But it has to stay in the framework of refuting the fact that Gaines thinks he's a mind reader.
And he's not going to be swayed by the contradiction because he can always say like, you're lying.
I don't believe that you love yourself.
Right.
But yeah, he gave an excellent answer.
So for this next format, we're looking at another middle ground episode.
It's called anorexia versus obese.
And it's a very similar format to what we've just been seeing, where there are prompts and people opt in or opt out of having that conversation based on whether or not they agree with the prompt.
In this case, there are four women with anorexia and two men and two women who are classified as obese, and they're ready to get into the conversation together.
So off the top here, I have a real side eye on all of this because the title and the framing already seems kind of rough to me.
Anorexia Nervosa is a psychiatric diagnosis that can require life-saving medical intervention.
It's based on a powerfully distorted body image and this obsessive fear of gaining weight that then drives extreme self-control strategies around food and weight and calorie burning.
And it can be triggered by trauma, but it also has a 50 to 60% genetic heritability.
And you are around 11 times more likely to develop anorexia if someone in your family also has it.
On the surface, we could say that obesity has some similarities, like yes, being fat can be very detrimental to your health, but it's not based on a self-destructive control mechanism.
I would say more perhaps a vulnerability to overdoing something that is crucial for survival in some cases.
It does have a similar percentage of genetic heritability, but interestingly, the likelihood of developing obesity based on a family member being obese is only three times higher than the average compared to 11 for anorexia.
So while stress and mental health components can contribute to overeating, it's not as characteristic to be struggling with the kind of psychic torment that anorexics experience.
So I start off really unsure what this combination is about beyond obvious marketability.
And the thumbnail for the video actually underlines this.
It's of a pale, red-haired, anorexic, self-described teenager who's one of the most vocal in the group looking very upset while the one non-white and non-gender conforming person on this panel who's blue-haired and heavy set looks at her like she's making a really strong I told you statement.
I understand the side eye because as I said, when I first saw it, I had that.
And then when I listened to it, the connection to me is body image and body perception between these two.
So I agree.
It might be clickbait, but at the same time, the internal monologues.
And I just know that when I was dealing with my own body image, I mean, I dealt with it a long time, but when I was, when I was actually overweight, I didn't have anyone to talk to about that.
And if I heard this type of conversation, hearing peers of mine who you can see on the screen, some of them are overweight and some of them are nowhere near it.
But actually, as they go through their processes and what they're feeling, that would have alleviated at least some of my own stresses around my own internal monologues because it's just that matter of, oh, there are other people.
I can see these people and I can now hear what they think about themselves.
Why am I so hard on myself in this way?
And that, that to me is where I found real value in it.
You know, I also just want to add the complexity with regard to disordered eating that, you know, some folks, we've covered this before, report feelings of agency around caloric restriction.
Like it allows them to control something in an otherwise prescribed life.
So that's part of Susie Orbach's thesis back from like 1984 or something like that, especially related to young women in her book called Hunger Strike.
It's also part of the storyline of Girl Interrupted with Renauda Ryder.
So eating or not eating as a form of rebellion when you don't have a lot of other options.
And, you know, that will change the way you socialize.
It can put up a firewall against family, which might feel helpful or even necessary for some people.
And then when combined with overexercise, this is an important thing.
The calorie deficit can feel exhilarating before it doesn't.
Yeah.
And I think that's what's going on with a lot of people who are just trying to be fit and healthy through controlling their calories and increasing their exercise.
I mean, I think we can see most coping mechanisms as providing some feeling of agency.
At the very least, they all serve some self-protective function that we can have empathy for.
Like the drug addict experiences some sense of agency by knowing how they're going to feel 60 seconds after ingesting that drug.
I think it's tricky with anorexia.
It's such a fascinating topic when you have some kind of structural analysis here, because I think we might expect to see higher rates amongst women who experience more oppression intersectionally.
But it turns out that rates are extremely low for anorexia amongst black women as compared to white.
And this may point more to a genetic component.
And one thing I found out in thinking about this is that the country with the highest rate of anorexia per capita is Luxembourg, which is one of the most socially progressive countries in the world.
So it's a puzzle.
Yeah, yeah, that's a puzzle.
I mean, I also kind of side-eyed this too, because the framing is kind of uncomfortable.
I think you'd really have to be a master facilitator for something like this to not just simply increase the pressure of the topic and the conversation in the culture generally, to not deepen shame grooves just through oversharing, which is what ends up happening when you have 6 million views or whatever.
And there was no host for this one.
And I don't know how they decide to have hosts or not have hosts.
Maybe with the men, they felt they needed somebody to keep the peace or something like that.
But I found that a little bit odd because they are directed through this exercise from the rafters, like ex-Makina or something like that.
I found that strange.
Yeah, there's actually an Indian-accented adult female voice that comes over the...
Yeah.
Almost like, yeah, it's almost like a prompt.
Who wants to be a millionaire?
Yeah, a prompt from Squid Game or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is kind of odd.
All right.
So speaking of prompts, the first one is, I would rather be too skinny than be too big.
And in this case, the four women with anorexia all walk to the stools.
Just one obese guy joins them.
And he's a really thoughtful conversationalist.
He ends up playing a big role in this episode.
And he's really interested in what's going on with these women.
And they're all, I think, on the younger side and have clearly been in programs and had therapy.
Overall, would much more appreciate being too skinny than too fat.
I think my onset was kind of bullying.
I thought if I lost a little bit of weight and I didn't feel too big anymore, no one could ever bully me again.
Like freshman year, that one, you know, friend who wasn't really a friend was horrible for me, and that's kind of what started my spiral.
I remember thinking, I was like, I want people to like me.
I want, you know, to be accepted.
And I thought that being skinny, or not even skinny, just losing weight and not feeling that big feeling would be the answer and that, you know, people would like me because I'm skinny.
And I feel like to an extent, unfortunately, that's kind of true.
People pay more attention to you when you fit those standards.
Where do you guys feel like you get that pressure from?
I kind of feel like comparison.
Comparison.
I mean, especially in our position, eating disorders are so insanely competitive and we're constantly comparing each other.
Yeah, me and my friends would like weigh ourselves in front of each other and see who is so bad.
I get a high weighing less than my little sister, who's shorter than me, unfortunately.
But it's horrible, but it's, Yeah.
Yeah.
Lots of insights here, lots of self-reflection.
As the conversation transitions, the other three obese folks who didn't step forward now join in because they disagree with the prompt.
And we don't have a clip of that, but I'll just say that the two women in that group reflect on having strived to be skinny and gotten praise for it, but they actually felt unhappy and unhealthy and like they were putting themselves in danger through the effort that that took.
And they're glad now to be embracing their body type, their genetics, essentially.
Yeah.
And there were references to ongoing struggles, trying to achieve a more sort of neutral perspective.
And then this difference that keeps coming up between loving the way they look versus loving their bodies.
And to me, that seems to be the real sort of wisdom there, that feeling one can become less anxious about calories more at home internally, but still knowing that the pressure of conventions and expectations socially are always going to be disturbing in some way.
It's not like you're ever going to be perfectly sort of radiantly happy in your own self-perception because your self-perception is going to be socially conditioned.
This moment hit me when I first watched it.
And ironically, because I had friends in town this weekend, Julian, you ended up clipping the show.
The first three clips you chose when I watched it in my head were the exact clips that I wanted, which just worked out really well that way.
But what really struck me is this environment and this situation where they're talking about this game they have with siblings, which is a real phenomenon with eating disorders?
It becomes competitive, and they're able to share it in a space where they don't know the other people around them.
And they're like, Yeah, me too.
And I just think of how lucky it is that there's not a fucking Myron Gaines in there to like jump in and just like be himself because they're able to actually share.
And again, that just gets back to what I see as the value of this is that they are in a space.
And then the overweight people do not come in and say, oh, that's horrible.
Like they're, especially the guy you referenced, they're commiserating in their own way with them.
And that's why I really did appreciate there is some tension throughout the episode, but it doesn't really fall upon this sort of competitive spaces and a lack of understanding about what that entails.
We're really, I think we're appreciating serendipity because, again, the producers are fucking rolling the dice here, right?
Anything, anything could have happened and they would have made it work and they would have made big view counts.
Maybe, but we don't know what the, you know, they could have screened for these things and let them know.
So, you know, to be clear, we don't know what the back end is.
Yeah, and they could also be throwing episodes out too, if they just go off the rails, right?
They have episodes where they're like, okay, this one we're going to go for more controversy.
This one, we're going to go for more empathy and see what the algorithm says about what people want.
I think really what you're getting at, Derek, is something I really agree with, which is that we come from a generation where a lot of our struggles were pre-internet.
And a lot of the isolation, the aloneness, the taboo about just like really acknowledging what you're going through, this is the upside of the internet, is that people are going to have access to content like this and to forums like this where they don't feel so alone.
And there are other people saying, yeah, me too.
Right.
Because for me, mesophonia did not exist as a condition until the internet.
And if people know what that is, it's the chewing noises that drive you fucking insane.
I've dealt with it my entire life.
And the people did not know it existed, that other people felt that way until early internet forums and it became a diagnosed condition and there became therapies around it.
So it is an example of one of the positives of having people being able to just grieve about their life online and then actually find community around it.
So the next prompt here is fat shaming comes with more hate than skinny shaming.
And this time, three of the obese folks step forward and just two of the anorexics.
The same young woman who started us off before says that being called fat feels like it's the worst possible insult.
And the two obese women also give their thoughts.
I think like societal beauty standards do, they push thinness.
So like being skinny shamed, of course it's like any type of harassment and bullying is not okay.
But I do think like that is kind of, like you said, it's almost like a compliment.
Like I just feel like being fat shamed is like more harsh bullying.
Because like on social media, I get comments all the time and it's like, you can never win either when you're fat.
Because like I can be at the gym working out and the people still call me fat.
And I'm like, well, what do you want me to do?
Like I'm here at the gym.
I feel like skinny shaming is a newer thing.
Yeah.
But there's a lot of like a thick, painful history to fat shaming and being called fat.
And you're right.
It's definitely, in my opinion at least, it just seems far more hateful.
Especially with society's idea about what is considered beautiful and what isn't.
It's, you know, the typical standard of beauty is a thin white woman, unfortunately.
Exactly.
I was actually going to touch.
That's a great point because I've kind of read into the whole theory of like fat phobia stemmed off of racism to start with because of course the beauty standard was a skinny white woman.
So that's why I feel like it's so much deeper than just being like, you're fat.
It's like, well, what do you mean by that?
If you are someone who goes to a gym and then give fat people shit for being in there, you can fuck all the way off because you cannot say that fat people should lose weight and exercise more.
And then when they try to do it, that is a real concern that people have.
I've talked to so many former students who just getting in the gym, you don't understand the sort of pressures they have to be able to go into them.
It's part of the reason that online fitness is so successful because people don't like those environments.
So I just want to say, you know, that is a real thing.
And I'm so glad they brought that up because it's just such a double standard that quote unquote fit people put on people who are not as comfortable in their bodies.
Yeah, I just want to say here too, one thing I've noticed a lot, especially with women of my generation and maybe just slightly younger, is that there's a little bit of a social game that sometimes gets played of like, oh, you look really, are you losing, are you eating enough?
And then it's always like, oh, thank you.
Thank you for thank you for suggesting that I might be unhealthy, that I might not be well because I look like I've lost too much weight.
So there's that, that's in the mix here too.
That was a conversation we would have at Equinox as instructors with our managers is that if we suspected someone had an eating disorder and was working out, some people would be in the gym for four straight classes.
It's like how to handle that.
And there are methods to be able to do that, but it is a very real concern in those environments.
What was the suggestion, Derek?
Was like, did HR say that you would try to engage the person in some way?
Because nobody's really qualified for that as a personal trainer, right?
No.
Well, group fitness instructor.
I don't know about the trainers.
That was a separate department, but I'm sure they had their own protocols.
No, the best thing you can do is try to get in contact with a friend who might be a gym friend and try to talk to them.
You'd never want to directly because that can go off the rails very quickly.
So their protocol was, yeah, try to identify someone in their circle and then try to bring it up in a way that wasn't so confrontational.
And people, if they are friends, they can understand where you're coming from.
The challenges, of course, as was brought up in the last clip, is because the sort of body type is competitive, you can also take chances there of them going back to them.
But if you see it, if you see someone who is literally about to pass out in a class regularly, That is an actual health concern that has to be addressed in some capacity.
So, next prompt: I'm terrified of gaining more weight.
And again, it's all four anorexic women who step forward and that same loquacious and thoughtful big guy.
For me, it's more dysmorphia-fueled.
Yeah.
Like, I already don't see myself as the weight that I technically am.
And so, just like the idea of a number going up plus my brain already messing with me, it's just going to take it completely out of control and it's going to start a spiral.
Dysmorphia is real, bro.
Yeah.
I have like nightmares about the number on the scale.
Like 120 pounds, like I have nightmares and again on the scale, I'm 120.
And I know that's so bad to say, but.
I don't want that number to go up because at my heaviest, I was near 400 pounds.
I don't ever want to see those numbers again.
What's your goal with weight loss?
I want to be healthy.
For me, healthy means I don't have issues where I, you know, snore, have sleep apnea at night.
I don't have difficulties with, you know, long endurance activities.
When I am sitting there in front of my kids, I'm presenting what I think is a good example of an ordered human being to them, of somebody who's in a good position.
You know, they're little right now and they see me and they know I'm big.
But I don't want them to think that this is what they ought to be.
I want to point out the difference here between these two episodes.
I'm sure listeners, you've clued into this already, between Myron's obsessive focus on physique as an indicator of health versus that, which is I want to be able to walk upstairs.
I want to be able to carry my kids around, which is how most people actually think about health.
And it's why the fitness industry skews health so badly towards physique.
It is actually one of the major criticisms I had working in Equinox for so long because they had very slick marketing campaigns.
But I'll just say that they were very choosy in who their models were.
They very rarely worked with actual fitness instructors.
They worked with models for all of their ad campaigns specific for those reasons.
And I think that's really toxic because health is not just physique.
There's so much more than that.
And in fact, there's been plenty shown that being too skinny or being certain body types that are quote unquote healthy looking, that people with a little bit more on them are actually metabolically actually much healthier.
Also, let's just shout out the dad bot, right?
Because, you know, he's talking about he wants to be able to do things as a caregiver.
And when you get older and you have injuries and you have reduced time, Myron gains, guess what?
Dad bot is coming for you too.
Although maybe you'll miss it.
Maybe it's better you do.
But anyway, but the dad bot is the body of the guy whose life is no longer primarily their own.
And I can hear that in this guy's voice.
But I mean, I can also hear like, I want to.
I mean, there's something I think there's a shadow behind there, which is I want to be here for a long time.
If you can stomach it and go back to watch the entire fit versus fat men, which I don't recommend.
No, no, I'm not.
No, I meant everyone, listeners, but you as well, Matthew.
There is a whole section on the dad bot in there.
Oh, is there?
Okay.
Yes.
All right.
Yeah.
And guess what, Myron?
Myron doesn't think it's real.
He doesn't think it's worthy of being healthy.
Of course he doesn't.
Because it's not going to change his life.
Nothing's going to change his life.
No responsibility.
No other person.
No amount of giving or generosity or caregiving is going to change his life.
That's great.
That's great.
Yeah.
And guess what?
He's going to get on testosterone replacement.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
So this last clip continues this vibe that's present in this particular episode, which is very collaborative and respectful.
They touch on the often controversial perspective of framing anorexia and other disorders as existing within an addiction model, which I think is really interesting.
And they get into the final question here, which is being, or the final prompt, being obese or anorexic is a choice.
And this becomes this quite touching set of reflections, I think, on free will and genetics and mental illness, what you do and don't have control over, and then also trying at the same time to heal and improve your life.
I think what's tricky about eating disorders is it's not just a diagnosis.
It quickly merges into the world of addiction.
I think that's another reason why the word recovery is used.
Because I was sitting here thinking to myself, that's true.
We don't say, I'm recovered from depression or anything.
Yeah, yeah.
At the end of the day, what I put in my mouth and my body and everything was a choice.
But I also know that there's other people that struggle that don't have that.
We can't just lose five pounds.
Like it has to keep going and then it becomes this whole thing, this whole disorder.
I still, like I said, inevitably, I think it's important to instill in my children and everyone, you know, anyone I will raise in the future as well, would be that there's a distinction between what your mind leans you to and what you actually do, right?
There's always that choice between those two.
And that factor is the thing that to me makes obesity a choice, is that no matter where my mind leans me to, it is inevitably the choice that I make that makes me overweight.
Wouldn't you think that the same for anorexia, though?
Well, I agree.
Skinny.
I would say being skinny is a choice.
But being anorexic is a choice.
As a mental disorder, I see.
If you asked me if you said, like, you know, is being, yeah, is being depressed a choice?
No, I don't think that being depressed a choice.
Yeah, for sure.
So what comes across a lot with this guy is that he is really grappling with what it means to take responsibility for himself, to make healthy choices as a role model for his kids.
And so I think this part of the conversation is very interesting around what can you and what can't you control?
What do you have choice over?
You know, I'm obsessed with the philosophical discussion of free will and what constitutes free will and do we really have it.
And the question that I always have for people who are really scared or skeptical of recognizing how little free will we actually have is always, you made that choice, but did you choose the thing that enabled you to make that choice?
Well, it's Particularly germane to somebody who's parenting because you're also tangling with that with your children all the time and whether or not they have agency and they are making choices or whether those choices are coming entirely out of your own sort of unconscious set of conditions that you've provided with them.
And so, like, do they, are they actually free to make any of those choices?
So, so he's, he's not just speaking about himself.
And I think that's why the conversation has a little bit more integrity.
He's also speaking about, oh, I'm grappling with this in terms of showing whether or not, showing my kids whether or not I have agency.
But this question of personal choice and agency is haunting everybody.
And I think it's because it's such a human hope that choice and freedom should always be possible for the individual.
And just my thought on that in the American or any individualist context, that that concentration is aspirational.
It can feel empowering to people.
It can also pull attention away from the things people can't change on their own, but they can through politics, like food access and mental health services and other things that we wind up providing for each other.
Yeah.
And so the illusion of absolute individualist choice, this is an avoidance of the vulnerability and the intellectual difficulty and the political awareness of recognizing a range of things from genetics to social conditioning to trauma history to socioeconomic conditions.
