Barbell Shrugged - Technology, Social Media, and the Pursuit of Health w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Kenny Kane and Phil White - Barbell Shrugged #470

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

In today’s episode the crew discusses:   What role does social media have on the term “health"  What happens if you take your health business off social media? Will Covid -19 force government intervention using technology Is social media positively influencing your gym culture? Can you run a successful business without social media The relationship between privacy and health post covid 19 What are the best interventions for social media and eliminating technology And more…   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Phil White on Instagram Kenny Kane and Oak Park   ———————————————— Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   Purchase our favorite Supplements here and use code “Shrugged” to save 20% on your order: https://bit.ly/2K2Qlq4    Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”   http://pm03.com/shruggedfree to get a free bottle of PM-O3

Shark Fam, I am so fired up. E-Mom Aesthetics is taking over the world. We've been crushing the number of people going into our store and getting super shredded in a short amount of time. We actually wrote this program because Doug and I are in captivity with you. We don't have a lot of time. We've got kids. So who knows when we're actually going to have 60 to 90 minutes to get into the gym and actually do some training.

Plus, it's low-key in that you don't need a ton of equipment. We all have pretty basic home gyms. If you've got a barbell, if you've got some dumbbells, you can make it happen. And once we rode it, 20-minute EMOMs, all hypertrophy-focused. It just flew out of the store. It always makes you happy when you meet the people where they're at. I think a lot of people are right there right now with the fact that they want to build some muscle. They don't have a lot of time.

Everybody is in their house. And EMOM Aesthetics is the answer. So you can get over to barbellshrugged.com forward slash EMOM, E-M-O-M, EMOM, and pick up your copy today. barbellshrugged.com forward slash EMOM and pick up your copy today. Barbellshrug.com forward slash EMOM. And on top of that, you can save 10% using the coupon code shrug. We have a ton of cool programs coming out. I mean, the thing is it flew out of the store. It was incredible how many people ended up purchasing that program when we launched it. And we really tapped on a nerve with the ability to have these like short, concise, really complete workouts

in which we're just doing hypertrophy, bodybuilding combined with functional movements. So you're getting a lot of the benefits of the functional movement world and you're getting the benefits of the bodybuilding world. We're getting people jacked, we're getting people lean

and we're doing very little time. Best of all the worlds. Barbellshrug.com forward slash EMOM. Make sure you get over to the store. Use the coupon code SHRUG to save your 10% when you buy that program. And I want to thank our friends over at Bioptimizers. Because, as you know, everyone is facing challenges with the recent virus pandemic, stress, financial sickness, and quarantines.

There's a lot of people who haven't been touched by it. One of the highest risk factors is a weakened immune system, and a lot of what affects that weakened immune system is determined by your gut health. Gut issues are just about bloating and ingestion. They can be the difference between whether you get sick or stay well. Unfortunately, your gut is under assault like never before in human history. That's why my friends at Bioptimizers are here to help during these times. Bioptimizers is giving away a free bottle of their patented proteolytic probiotic P3OM until the end of this month.

As you know, I'm a fan of P3OM. I am. We actually just interviewed the CEO of the company and they are so legit. And I've talked about it multiple times on the show. There's a good reason for that. It's because P3OM helps eliminate bad bacteria and pathogens and rapidly boost your gut health. Therefore, also abuse your immunity. But P3OM also does something that no other probiotic can claim. It has patent filing that explicitly talks about research around antiviral capabilities. This makes P3OM the perfect probiotic to help support your immunity and that one of those you love during this difficult crisis.

This is truly a generous offer. Go to www.p3om.com forward slash shrugged free that's p3om.com forward slash shrugged free all one word and you will automatically get access to your unique coupon code to claim your free bottle p3om.com forward slash shrugged free shrugged family let's get into the show at the very basic level we have this social media thing but i was comparing it yesterday to like 9-11 these giant events that reshape everything that we do and now we're in the middle of a global pandemic and everything's going to change again and where where we're going in the next 10 to 15 years is completely unheard of territory and all the laws and everything just like 9-11 like when when we

left 9-11 or the week after we had that like rating system it's like today's yellow tomorrow's green blue orange red red means we died but we ever saw a green yeah it's like our fire danger here in colorado you know like evergreen in terms of the dollar value of real estate where i am it is the let's just put it this way the fire department they'll occasionally promote like a local amendment um you know on some some manner of voting the populace has to vote on but my buddy that's the deputy fire chief told me they're getting way more money because there's a lot of expensive real estate here and hence the name evergreen colorado we have an awful lot of evergreen trees and it's dry a lot but to your point the fire danger when you drive past the

fire one of the four fire stations is never green to say no no it's like it's always medium medium high high or extremely high and that's just yeah so we left 9-11 as a country with this rating system which nobody ever talks about anymore because we're supposedly just not scared even though we've been in war for 20 years and then now we've got this tiered system and now everyone's supposed to be afraid of the tiers and it's like tier one you can go do this tier two you can do this tier three we're never going to get to going to nba games again and watching lebron it's just not going to happen like we're never going to get there it's well also the technology is not neutral

because there's this guy i know chris I forget how you spell his last name. It's like H-N-A-T-I-N, so however you pronounce that. Probably pronounced Krzyzewski or something. Yeah. Anyway, and he's been annoying a lot of people because his thing is like a moderate, like, let's isolate the people who have autoimmune diseases or who are old and everyone else needs to go back to work because it goes back to like the uh the thing that brad pitt's character says in the big short where he's yelling at the two young guys he's advising when they get their deal with the big banks finally he's like don't be excited like don't high five like for every one percent unemployment

goes up 40 000,000 people die. And the inference is like from the stress of that, right? Well, unemployment from what I saw last week is the highest it's been since the end of the Great Depression, like since 1940. So multiply that number of percentage rise by 40,000. Let's assume even half of that is correct, 20,000. That's an awful lot more deaths than correct. 20,000. Yeah. That's an awful lot more deaths than we're going to see.

And I'm not poopooing it. My wife's been sick for almost five weeks. Probably the Corona virus can't get her tested. Okay. My mom's a cancer survivor. She's at risk. My brother and sisters are keeping her isolated. It's, it's a real freaking thing. Yeah. You don't have to be labeled aust denier for wanting to talk common sense and the technology is not neutral so this guy chris posted this article about how facebook is nudging people and the behavioral manipulation that's going a lot around now just around covid 19 and it's pressing certain posts elevating others the technology is not neutral so just

because i'm back on doesn't mean like, oh, it's this great thing, even though you and I are on here because of this and some other cool stuff happened recently because of it. So without just trying to hijack your intro there, Anders, I can really see it. Kenny and I have read like a billion books, and Kenny's been thinking about this stuff for like 10 years, as I know you guys have.

So, yeah, let's just go at it, man we can we just consider that the the intro to the show welcome to marble shrugged I'm Anders Warner Doug Larson Bill White your boy Kenny Kane he's in SoCal right now nobody else is in the background it's kind of like having a zoom background one of those fake ones except he's living it um he doesn't even know that zoom has fake backgrounds if you want one um i don't know how to work that happens when you disconnect um yeah and and to go back to kind of like the the tiered system and and i do want to segue into uh kind of the meat of what we want to talk about but that tiered system like it's going to be very hard for us ever to get to

a point because somebody has like a button that they can press that says, Oh, you go back to tier two or you're back to tier one. And now you're, you're afraid. And now we all go back in our house. And when I start to think about that and they've already created the technology at Google and Apple, where your phone is emitting a signal and the person standing next to you at the grocery store is emitting a signal and they can tell you they're not tracking all of this, but it's like they're following the disease through everyone's phones being connected to each other. And because if you think that what happened at 9-11 was so crazy with the freedom of information and people tracking everything you're doing, social media didn't even exist at that point in time.

It didn't come around for a very, very long time after. And it was like four, I want to say Instagram didn't happen until five or six years after that. Facebook didn't actually get out of the.edu piece until probably six or seven years after that. So now we've got this insane kind of behavioral shift of everyone sharing their lives, plus the companies are getting very good at connecting all the dots in where you go and what you do. And I'm not necessarily concerned about somebody tracking me. i already know that happens every time i walk around there's a cell phone

signal pinging off my phone and they know that's not really like my biggest concern it's the slippery slope of control that we have with this connectedness and i think that the biggest conversation that i want to have and why I think you guys being on here is so awesome is that we're all going to have to make a conscious effort, or we hope everyone will be making a conscious effort about what they are doing with their health data, with their health information in this new era in which when 9-11 happened, we could point across the Atlantic Ocean and go, those people, them over there, they're the bad guys. And right now, there is no them. It's all us. It's health. It's our own behavior that is the problem.

And if the government's going to attack health, they're going to be attacking our behaviors and either setting a reward system or a punishment system based on the way that we live our lives. And personally, I'm probably going to get a lot of benefits, but I don't know if you're going to be like, as a country, as a species, as humans of the United States, are we really going to be consciously walking into these? And I think that there needs to be an awareness. And the very first level of that, in which we will kind of kick it to you guys is like you guys drew a line in the sand with social media and i think that that's step one like pre pre-covid that's the biggest step you could take was just saying i'm out and i'd love to know kind of the background

of how it got there the logic behind it and just where your head was at when you guys decided to say, no more, I can't do it. We have to talk about a bigger conversation. Okay. Anders, can you hear me, Anders? Yeah, you're good. I've got my bank calling to tell me about the triple P right now. So listen, you're talking about several things, one of which is, like, I think the issues that you just brought up are largely about freedom and privacy. And those are interrelated to the sort of secondary question that I think both myself and Phil can talk very explicitly about.

In our research and in my writings, privacy has always been something that I am curious about. And the thing to understand about the technologies and what gives them valuation is very basic. And I think you're a coach trying to understand what you should do in real time to coach a person in the hour that you have with them. or that you're thinking about this from more of a macro perspective as far as human species and what our um what our rights are as a relation of these um let's call them tools because that's what they're kind of referred to as a zeitgeist and um with a big frame. And I get this frame from the Center of Humane Technology where they quote E.O. Wilson and they say, look, we've got Paleolithic emotions. We've got medieval

institutions and godlike technology. And so when you look at that, there's like institutions, there's governments, and there's people monitoring things like democracies and adjacent financial systems, let's call it capitalism loosely. And then, you know, each of these institutions has sort of a different role. But the way that our emotions work, it fuels these technologies in absolute ways for the company's bottom lines. And it's done by two basic denominators. And that is how much time define and that defines how much attention you're giving a particular service or tool. And so the company says, hey, I got eyeballs on my thing for two hours a day. What are you going to pay me? And the person needing to market something or other will say, that sounds pretty good. I'm going to give you some money. Meanwhile, all the people, let's call it what it is, nearing 3 billion people right now. When Phil and I first started this investigation, it was in the lower part of two billions,

2.2 roughly per day, spending two plus hours a day on the primary mediums. And let's define them for the function of this conversation that we're going to have here. That would be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube. And so if these companies are getting valuation by people volunteering their attentional capacity and their literal time and creating content for the companies to get remunerated, what's, what's lost in that is the subtlety of the redirectioning of our human behaviors. And this is really important as far as all the research that I've done.

And if you talk to any design engineer, if a company is good, it makes their product sticky, right? That's universal. And that's pre-technology. That's pre-social media, right? Your product's good. It's sticky. People like it. And we can assume that that's a statement of fact. Now, all of these technologies have employed engineers that understand behavioral psychology specifically. Now, there's two major psychologies that have been deployed in the last 50 years. One is behavioral psychology.

The other is positive psychology. Behavioral psychology rewards the extrinsic by motivating people with carrots and sticks. And the way that we feel that and the way that we feel urgency as it relates to these platforms is that these designers are so good at their jobs that they create massive dopamine drips for us to actually feel in real time a sense of urgency when we're away from them. So what does that do? It makes the product that they've created a lot more sticky because we feel urgent that we need to be on it. Now, if we're behaving this way for two hours a day, we start to practice impulsivity

rather than intentionality. And clinically we know, and most people experience, and I can get into this specifically as just my own sort of anecdotal to what they're seeing in the clinical fields of psychiatry and psychology, is that we're seeing massively amplified rates of anxiety and depression across the board for people that are interfacing with these things with regularity. And the problem with that is that they're force amplifiers. So the more time that you spend on them, the more urgent you feel. And urgency is a biological imperative. No human can escape that. And here's where it gets really, to me, interesting, because you're crossing over biology, you're crossing over economics, you're crossing over people branding

for themselves, their individual identities, narcissism, all these different things. There's an overlap of multiple disciplines, sociology, primatology. All these things intersect right here because the human being still has paleolithic emotions. What the fuck am I talking about? We are always sensing whether we are in danger or not. These technologies route into the base of our brainstem and trigger us wanting to do what is a biological imperative, and that's group the fuck together. We can't escape that. So the problem is, is that the other parts of our brain that can understand this dilemma that we're talking about rationally right now in real time exercise willpower or discipline against it and i get very much that any one of the listeners could be going, Kenny, I got control of this. And it's

like, okay, you may, but have you ever experienced a YouTube bender where you went on to look at one thing and then, I don't know, seven minutes later, eight minutes later, the average mobile user on YouTube right now is one plus hours a day. That's the average. So although our listeners might be saying, I'm a disciplined barbell shrug listener, I do the hard shit. I focus and I clear distractions. I would just ask the question, are you answering that emotionally or rationally? And the role for rationality in this conversation, in my view, is perhaps more existentially important than COVID. And I would argue, in some ways, even more important than what is happening with the environment. Because what we're talking about is massive cognitive malfunctioning and it is being wired in real time two plus hours a day that's just fact i'm not our listeners might say i get my little thing

set up and i i limit it to 15 okay four four good for you how many how many anders how many how many things are you on per day all of is it four four okay is it four for all of them no four for each one i'm on average about four hours and 20 minutes a day of social media okay and i feel like i'm on the low end yeah and so and so this is the average for two platforms or more right now, and this isn't Kenny and I making this up, like read Tristan Harris, read Howard Axelrod, any of these guys, is an hour and 53 minutes if you're on two platforms or more per day. as with other perceived negative behaviors. Now, the inverse to this is that people over-report the time that they spend on positive behaviors, going to the gym, eating healthily. They found that people under-report their social media use by up to 50%. So I'm actually four hours and 20 minutes ish on my phone,

but I technically have no reason to be on my phone outside of social media, including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. And now fucking tick tock, just posting videos. Like I'm a, like I'm a nine year old. Well. Well, and here's the thing,

Anders, and the truth of the matter is that you're experiencing what a human being should experience, being compelled to do something because of your biology. Now, you're a very intelligent person, and you're also in the dilemma, which everybody is, if we're approaching this ration of, you know, basic things like, you know, FOMO to the actual sense of urgency that you get when you stop anything that is generally addictive. And you just, you go through a tick and you just want to go and see what the hell is happening on that thing that was beautifully designed. And again, like, look, what are these companies doing? They're doing a great job. In many ways, I can't fault a company for doing a good job, right?

But look at the anchor of what's being used. I wouldn't be upset if somebody told me they were listening to 12 hours of Barbell Shrugged every day. Well, now look. The next step in that progression, though, Anders, is when Zuckerberg was hauled up before that Senate subcommittee. And I wish what happened, if you look up the Mark Zuckerberg bad lip reading that I've watched with my kids many times, or they just overdub it with funny quotes, I wish that was what happened.

And I can imagine it would have been similar. But ultimately, I think it was what happened. And I can imagine it would have been similar. But ultimately, I think it was Orrin Hatch asked him, Mr. Zuckerberg, can you explain your business model to me? Because it's free to use. And he just looked at him and he just said, Senator, we sell ads. And last year, that was to the tune of $8 billion. This year, we're looking at $14, $16, maybe $18 billion. Next year, we'll be looking at $25 billion. So this strip mining of our attention that Kenny has discussed, and the fact that they're hiring these folks away from MIT and the best research universities in the world, the smartest people in the world and paying them 400, 600,

800,000 a year to gain the system, like read Adam Alto's book, irresistible, which is more about the hardware side, but the software side then plays into this. Like it is the virtual shop slot machine. Steven Kotler, the flow state expert, the rise of Superman author says that this is as addictive as cocaine. But we need to look at what the end goal here, because they say that the end goal is bringing people together. So yesterday, when I'm on a call with my sister, who's in Farnborough in the UK, southwest England, and my nieces and nephews who are in various orbits around that and i'm in colorado well

that's sure darn handy i've got someone i write for for train heroic one of the coaches i go strike for who's in dublin ireland that's sure handy because he only uses he doesn't reply to email much so we only use facebook video but it isn't the first thing i get on there for that leaves me emerging bleary-eyed later having liked a billion cat videos like Will Ferrell in the device-free dinners campaign that Common Sense Media did and the end game is not what they say it is and there's a problem there there's a there's a disparity there's a disconnect between Zuckerberg and these other folks are claiming in Silicon Valley with it this is for the common good we're connecting people we're bringing people together

that are in disparate places. Okay, there is something to be said for that. And on some level, it is true. But that isn't the end goal. The end goal is, Senator, we sell ads for the tune of $8 billion a year plus. And that's the end game. Because the more times they can get you on it,

the longer they can keep you on there. And to Kenny's point, the stickier they can make it, the more platforms they have. Because now it's the Instagram icon powered by Facebook. Facebook has over 2 billion global users if you count Instagram in that because they own it. It's strip mining our attention to make billions of dollars. That's what it is. That's the end game. So let's be very clear that it came down to Kenny saying, my goal as a coach is to make myself and

my clients more fit, healthy, and well. And things either do that, or they make people less fit, healthy, and well. Which is this? And that's what sent us down this massive research realm. And as I say, yes, I'm back on so Oh, he's full of crap. He's on there Yeah, because now I'm on the back end and I'm reversing the experiment to be fair to the experiment itself Yeah, any car and know what he knows so he's out So Kenny do you want to talk about more about starting with that question? Does this make me and my clients more fit healthy and well and if not then therefore what and how that's affected you and your business and your family? logical progression for me. And then part of it was also my experience in real time as a human.

For starters, I never felt good on any platform, starting with MySpace. Now, the design back in the day for MySpace wasn't as functionally capable. And a lot of the algorithms didn't really start kicking in. And they really didn't start using behavioral psychology in their design well into the 2000s. So the first decade was sort of an establishment of the technologies themselves. And then this decade from 2010 to 20 is sort of like, how are we responding to it? And so what I noticed as a general arc of time, if you just take those two decades, is that slowly the things that I cared about were getting redirected into, hey, if you care about this, you need to do something in this other space. And let's just call it MySpace, YouTube, Facebook. You need to promote, you need to be there,

you need to connect with your people, whatever the sort of description was. But the weird part about that is that existentially that never felt particularly good. It was just sort of like I was told to do it and I just sort of did it not knowing any better. And then the poignant moment came for me when i was reflecting as i started researching for this article and and for this this this larger

research in general and it was a very simple moment where um you know my son was born and I posted a picture of him. And instead of spending all the moments with my undivided attention on him, I noticed that I was frequently looking at the post to see how appreciated it was, appreciated by the form of the currency, which is likes. And to me, that just as a matter of being a father, as a matter of being a human being, was just sort of like huh i on one hand i wanted my family my friends and all my clients to be able to see my son because he was born in sweden and it was going to be a while before we were back in the states but little did i, like what was concurrently motivating it was this deep need to be liked

biologically. And in real time, Instagram was competing for my eyes, heart and flesh against my newborn son. Now, the thing that really made this painful for me is that my mom died two days after he was born. In his first 48 hours, I was spending some of that time on fucking Instagram. My mom dies. I got to fly back to the United States a couple of days after that. And so I've spent like, what, four days with him. And the first two were split between him and Instagram. Now, as a human being, I'm not proud of that. But I was just sort of like, isn't that our modern existence? And just as a father,

for me, for what I value, I just feel that that's completely unacceptable. So then, you know, so that's an emotional experience that I have that's anecdotal to me, and it may not be relevant to anybody listening. But then I just thought about the broader scope of that. I'm like, wow, I barely post. I mean, in my history of Instagram, I don't know, maybe I had, I started in 2013 or 14, and maybe, maybe I had 15 posts or something. And so, you know, I'd go full, full annual years without posting anything. And then after that, I was just sort of like, huh, and Phil and I didn't really start doing the research until 2017. Now, in this time, in the mid-20-teens, I was just like, I always just felt like shit when I was on any of these mediums. Just period.

I didn't feel better. I know what feeling good feels like. And when I spent time on these things, I just felt worse. I didn't know what was happening until I started to understand it more comprehensively. And I was like, oh, what I'm experiencing is elements of depression. What I'm experiencing is elements of anxiety. What I'm experiencing is a sense of like heightened awareness

when there's no real threat. There's no lion. There's no storm coming. But the base of my brainstem is like vigilant and alert and like, hey, what's going on in the social group? But my prefrontal cortex couldn't understand that where you make all your executive decisions. And then I started doing the research. The first real stopping point for me was one of my former students, a guy named Tristan Harris. Tristan was one of the most significant engineers in our human existence because he was one of the top 10 Google engineers. And in 2013, he sent a query out to everybody that worked on the Google campus

and said, we are manipulating 2 billion people's behavior per day to our financial gain. and were using behavioral psychology to do so. And the campus of Google and all the other engineers were very compelled by the question that he was asking. It was just a basic ethical question. And leaders at all points in human history have to face philosophical, moral, and ethical dilemmas. And this is a big one for him. And at this time, I mean, this is seven years ago, man.

I mean, I think how much has changed in seven years. Do I only know his name through you or has he been on some very high level panels and stuff? He's been on big, like he's talking about this. Now, the interesting thing is, is that he's choosing to get most of his content. So I just want to press pause here for this part of the conversation

and intentionally direct people's attention to the Center for Humane Technology. Again, that's the Center for Humane Technology. And in the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan posted on Vimeo, not YouTube, with intention, because it's a different platform. And in it, he describes regener the people who make these technologies. I am, however, villainizing our capability to appreciate nuance and discernment and exercise discipline as it relates to our human total cognition. And by us participating in these machines, we only feed them and make them stronger, depreciating in real time our actual time per day, our real attention.

It trains impulsivity and it amplifies negative emotions. And those are statements of fact to some more, to others less, but all four of those points will hold logical water if you drill into them. And so if we're concerned about human health, which we all should be, because most of our listeners have become aware of things like evolutionary biology, then we need to understand, as Tristan will point out, that the design of these technologies can matter. So if Zuckerberg took a different approach, for example, and he shifted from behavioral psychology to positive psychology positive psychology is right now not as profitable it's just not but the anchors of positive psychology are things like there's three major points

your competence your relatedness, and your autonomy. Now, do you want to be motivated by developing your competence, being related authentically to people, and develop actual autonomy to handle life's complexities? Now, that's the road harder traveled, but the road most likely deeper valued if people are willing to reflect. And again, I don't want to impose that. I'm just using clinical psychology to describe two different prototypes

of what's motivating the literal construction on these technologies. And if you think about positive psychology, it works because it's intrinsic and it has sustainability. Whereas behavioral psychology is extrinsically motivated and is highly combustible. So both work. But the problem with behavioral psychology in design and in our daily life is that it's just a depletable resource. But if you're looking at something like, how do I get competent at something? Every human being feels better when they develop competence. Every human being feels better when they actually feel like an authentic connection with those around them. And every human being feels better as they grow

their capacity to handle challenge. Now, the problem is that these platforms, the ones that I identified at the beginning of the show, are masking in their public and congressional responses to these questions, hey, we are allowing people to have autonomy of expression. They can express their viewpoints. And we socially group them. And we often do that so that people who don't have competencies can get competencies with subject matter experts.

And topically, all of that is true. That's actually a statement of fact as well. But again, the long-term exposure to it starts to spin it into an opposite direction where even if you're trying to get into a Facebook group that relates to you with like-minded people on things that you're interested in developing competencies for, being able to exercise those competencies autonomously outside of that Facebook group in real time. All that may kind of happen, but you're still feeding a system in real time because as Tristan points out, if you're in a

weight loss group for your Facebook group, guess what comes up in your feeds? Anorexia, bulimia, et cetera, on the other mechanisms that they sell your fucking information to. They're not listening to you. They're not. That's bullshit. But they are fricking every click. And every time you socially group with somebody, they're getting predictable behavior patterns so that they can loop you into a bigger sales funnel.

Now, again, that's not nefarious. That's capitalism. But understanding this is hard. And I know people are just going, well, fuck you, Kenny. This is, I don't want to, because hearing all this can be overwhelming. What do I do with this? And look, that's up to the individual. But I will say that the more that we feed this, the more that we see in real time, the cognitive decay of humans, because how can it not? Well, that's why I actually really wanted to do this because at some point, I think all of us, and like I said, at the very beginning here, I think we're at this gigantic inflection point of we all got to here and we didn't really have to think too much about how our health and information and all of that and the way we interact with technology. there wasn't such an aggressive approach until this happened. Like COVID-19 is the gigantic inflection point where technology and humans are going to come together as one in a way.

Like social media and the tracking devices and the wearables, all of that wasn't around when 9-11 happened, but now it is. And if it's only being used for the negative thing to keep you coming back and keep you in fear, you guys, Kenny, you, I mean, both of you guys, took the route that nobody's taking right now and just cutting it, saying that's not a part of my life anymore. And I guess kind of the last time we had you on Kenny, you were just starting to think about this. It was about two years ago, we were in Newport and you had just started this process of going to going dark. And you really just wanted to focus on building your personal training business and eliminating social media. It was in the big transition from CrossFit LA to Oak Park

and a new mission statement. And the idea hadn't formed as a complete kind of life mission statement goal and this driving thing that you have now, I'd love to just know the day you decided, okay, I have to go all in on this because it's led to the next two years, which has led to the research and reaching out and working with people. Yeah. For me, it really... So this is where our anthropology comes into play, because I think one of the problems that the, look, and well? Right? So I'm either guiding people to increased fitness, which is sort of measurable and trackable. Are they more healthy? We can do that with, you know, what's their A1C?

What's their bone density? Lean muscle mass? Do they have diabetes? Are they pre-diabetic all those things like things that we can absolutely do something about with with training and nutrition and that's certainly within my realm and my team's realm um and you know that this idea that we have to default to scaling because i i work with a lot of ceos and and they they listen to me and every every really intelligent business person i know in um fitness has always

said to me personally aside from things like hey man it seems like you got a lot to say you know why don't you get on these platforms? I say, well, because it's contradictory to my primary mission, which is increasing the level of connectedness that I have with people in real time and those that are paying me. And they go, well, is that scalable? And I go, is that the right question to ask? And so not all businesses are scalable. Or they're scalable to a point. And a lot of people want to get away from working for the hard hour. So I bill for an hour, for example.

And a lot of people just go, well, that's the kiss of death. But I also take a craftsman's approach. And so people are imposing their business reality or consideration onto what I ought to be doing. So the thought five years ago is take over the world, be known by everybody and everybody know your shit. And the reason I retired from entertainment, being a stand-up comedian

and just being an entertainer altogether is that the overlap of social media and what was happening to the actual market of media itself was really alarming and concerning me because you take a narcissistic profession like stand-up comedy and then you add a force multiplier like social media on top of it and how can you not end up being what is you know generally speaking like most comics are anxious and depressed and hurt to begin with and like i i don't want to fuel that i want the opposite i i want the

opposite i'm not saying that comics are that i'm just saying that for me a great majority of comedians i've known are working through some serious shit. And I don't think that these mediums are helpful for that. So when we think about scale, we just kind of go, what kind of scale works? And then that's where Sebastian Younger and an abstract of positive psychology is really important. So there's a school from positive psychology. It's called self-determination theory. And they amplify these things that I mentioned earlier, competence,

relatedness, and autonomy. And as a tribal organization goes, it works up to about 150 people. And there are probably a few thousand gym owners out there going, whoa, when I owned a gym, things went well until I had about 150 people and after that

coaches started having beefs members started saying i like kettlebells not barbells or vice versa and then you got the gymnast and then somebody follows erwan lacore and another person ito portal and and then and then pavel what oh, shit. Okay, this is a big mess. How do we organize community around this? And then you've got substrates. I had two of them, and they were right next to each other, and the names of the gym was the exact same, and the people that coached the classes were the exact same,

and they were two completely different gyms. Right. And they were only like a mile away from each other. Everyone in them was completely different. It was weird. And they were only like a mile away from each other. They were just, everyone in them was completely different. Yeah. It was weird. So here's the thing, is that anthropologically, we've worked really good in groups of about 150 people.

And because in that situation, you can have good knowledge, good feeling, good relatedness, a deep sense of connectedness where your competencies are appreciated and your competencies like other people are going to hold you accountable to develop them we're going to take a quick second to talk about our sponsors over at organifi organifi.com forward slash shrugged save 20 on% on the greens, the reds, and the golds. It's the most delicious getting your vitamins, your minerals. And I actually had somebody write me back today. I wrote an email about how you can't get enough greens.

And of course, somebody had to write me back and say, yes, you can if you get all of the greens. If you eat an absurd amount of greens, all of the little defense mechanisms that those greens have, like the spinach is going to fight you, will actually cause kidney stones. To which I replied, yes, you are 100% correct. You might eat so much spinach that you get a kidney stone. But if you are eating that much spinach, what else are you doing in your life you can only eat so many pounds of spinach in a day and guess what nobody's doing that so frustrating on the internet sometime that's why we work with Organifi because nobody eats pounds of spinach you're probably barely

getting enough to actually get your basic needs of vitamins and minerals. And that's why Organifi comes in with their delicious green, red, and gold drinks. That's why you need to get them. So get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrug to save 20%, making sure you get your greens. You can get your proteins over there. Organifi.com forward slash shrug. Micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, making sure all your digestive systems, your immune systems, all the systems function properly. Let's get back to the show.

Now, just think of gym culture in general. Like that's really important. So having a gym of 400 or 800 or 1000 people starts to become, from that perspective, a little less sticky, a little more complicated, and certainly far less connected as far as depth of relationship can go. And what I did is I just, I studied that for a while this and I told my team a couple years ago I said look we're going to have a ceiling I don't want the business to exceed 200 because at 200 that's the margin where people are going to move anyway and then it's just over so it leaves us in a good position financially but it but it also understands that like we we're over our threshold with the number of people that we can actually know their names and know what's important to them, but we're able to survive.

So the sweet spot for our business is between 100 and 200 people in total. You're the worst gym owner ever. How the hell are you actually going to make any money? We have employees. Right. the hell are you actually going to make any money right and so so so the price point has to be at the price points and then the creativity there for the coaches to do things that allow them to make a living all those things are not easy to do i mean look this is the hardest most challenging frustrating thing one of them no i've been through much harder but like you know this it's a

challenge and there's frankly at the same time like the thing in the end whether i succeed or fail with this but like the thing that i'm seeing right now during this covid thing is that we're actually fairly resilient pretty durable um given our high relatedness to our client base we're not getting cancellations we're not getting positive memberships and we're getting a high level of of personal training clients on um on online so like or on facetime or zoom and let me get to zoom in a second because i have some problems with zoom that i didn't know it's better to pay for it than it is to do the free one and they were in january selling our information to facebook um they've subsequently gone back to redo some of that but it is important

just pay attention to which mediums you're using so i don't want to get stuck down that rabbit hole i will say this kenny real quick everyone called dun out. Richard Dunbar, the guy that did the network's which is around 150, because they're like, wait, I've got 3000 friends on Facebook, and I stay in pretty good touch with all of them. He's like, all right, well, maybe I'm wrong. He's like, maybe I'm wrong. So he goes back, and they study all manner of new data through the lens and through the added context of social media, which was not a thing, as to your point, Anders, and Doug, earlier on, which was not a thing, to your point, Anders and Doug, earlier on, which was not a thing when Dunbar's number first came out.

He was just talking about social groups and he looked at anthropology, studied cultures all over the world. All right, maybe I'm wrong. I'll rerun the numbers. You know the number he came up with when he rerun the numbers? 150.

It doesn't matter that the platform has changed or that you you may well have 4 000 friends 3 000 friends whatever on facebook you may have 2.5 million instagram followers but let let us not make the mistake of thinking that that is in any way analogous from those 150 and then kenny found when we actually dug into the research paper that both the old one and the new version where he re-ran the numbers that there are concentric circles within the 150 and as you start to get out you know 80 100 things start to dissipate okay so it's not even 150 super tight right you have your inner circle like Robert De Niro in meet meet the parents right circle got my eyes on you Greg um but seriously

so what Kenny's saying is true and it isn't things can start to drift and come apart well before 150 is my point and also anyone that's like well everyone knows Dunbar's number was the pre-social media age the pre-online age all that's crap it's out of date really well maybe you could debate Dunbar who has spent his entire life and is the world's leading authority on that if you don't believe me and Kenny go look at a Richard Dunbar go look at a Tristan Harris go look at a Jared Lanier the people have at a Tristan Harris, go look at a Jared Lanier, the people that have been in the belly of the beast, either in big tech or then in Dunbar, the academics behind this,

or even there is a study done that found that empathy within college students has gone down by 40% over the last 20 years. And then from there, other people have been like, hmm, I wonder why that is. And social media isn't the only thing, but it is a thing. So sorry, Kenny, but I just wanted to make the point because I know people are going to call BS on what you're talking about, scope and scale up to 150. I'm not saying that's the question, because even Dunbar asked the question, but he re-ran the numbers and found that 150 is the breaking point for a tightly connected network in which there is competence, there is efficacy, and there is true connectedness.

So I just wanted to make the point. Yeah, and thank you, Phil. Thank you for clarifying that um and again for what what phil's referring to is is the robin dunbar who who did this this study i mean there's been so much based on that and and look people don't have to take my assumption um that i got from dunbar but i just like it made so much sense experientially for me as well, because I've been in the gym business my entire life. I grew up at Oak Park in Northern California when my mom was running it. And there was, I mean, there was one point where our family business had 800

members and we didn't know. It was just like on any summer day, there was just like, you know, 500 people there. But then, you know, as a membership sort of shrank, we really got to know the people. And then I started thinking about like my experiences at, you know, Crunch Gym or Bally's or Equinox or these things where there's just a sea of people. And although there's fitness happening, there's not necessarily um deep communal connectedness and and again that's why a lot of crossfit gyms succeed and that's why a lot fail is because of that connectedness and then the problem is is that when when the behavioral systems shift a little bit and leadership um it can't understand that subtlety that's where you can kind of run into

problems and i i experienced that personally with you know the evolution of our gym crossfit los angeles and we've been open for 16 years now and as a crossfit gym 16 years as a fucking crossfit gym and like the number of iterations you know what i mean and it comes in my mind it doesn't even sound possible yeah but but right how'd you make it past 2012 but we wanted to be a part of it careful now you might get blacklisted look one of the things but but see look you think about that though what does crossfit do it introduces something that forces people to develop their competency.

They can all relate to what's the value system here? How are we talking with each other? What's our language? Okay, now I've got some autonomy to express myself in increasing ways. Like that's why, again, we're talking about the role of psychology in this. So that is hugely significant in the stickiness. Now, I just don't believe, I got over myself. I have a shit ton of energy. I am very historically good with people. And I realized some time ago, I am not scalable. Kenny Kane is not scalable. I just don't want to play scale my energy because every time I try to do that,

I felt an internal sense of depletion. Now, in using those mediums, I understand without equivocation why I felt depleted. As it is, human relationships are very expensive. They take a lot of energy. And that's why business people go, hey, yo, human relationships are costly. And at the same time, yeah, but that's the work that I do. That's the work that I do. So over the last two years, you've really moved away from this.

You've gone completely dark. There's no Oak Park, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, any of that stuff. There's no video demos. There's no technique-wad type stuff. We use Vimeo. We use Vimeo and it's pretty much explicitly for our membership.

But you're not marketing to the outside no local area through that um no no i i don't we don't we don't look we're limited with our capacity to serve yeah and that's a humble like i i i don't i hope that i'm not wrong for just kind of going no i do want to play the devil's advocate and say that you are those then what okay then what what is your quality of life and the quality of life of your coaches and those members been worth during that time in terms of elevating that so what if you are so this is exactly when i get what i want to actually ask and and in a way playing the devil's advocate on on the side of your coaches where i walk in and i want to train and coach at the greatest gym in la that's been around for 16

years and i walk in and i'm i've got a decade of coaching under me and i'm looking to be in a really good gym and great some get some great mentorship from a great owner and i'm going to scale my online business and I'm going to have this thing. And now the owner says, cut it off. We're not allowed to use this as our broadcasting. You're not allowed to look at our members as marketing tools. You're not allowed to be sharing what's happening in here. This is, this is our tight little space. A couple of things. in here this is this is our tight little yeah a couple things a couple things oh i know hold on one second so on the employee side and then i definitely want you to get to the member experience

because those are like you've got the owner there's like kind of three wings of the gym right there's like the the owner the employee the gym the coaches and then you've got the community slash individuals that show up and i'd love to know on each of those kind of stakeholders, how does that – we've gotten how it affects you. But one degree away from you, how has that played out? That's a great question. So, listen. I – let me just start with the coaches because that's who I serve primarily. The coaches serve the community.

Does that make sense? Absolutely. So my job is to develop a team of coaches that want to work together, that want to be individually incredible so you know if this is a dance crew it's sort of like the jabberwockies they do great on youtube by the way and TikTok and Instagram and Facebook or so he has heard having not seen these things yeah so he's heard

I mean to digress we can talk about that go back go back go back and that's actually a good sidebar in a moment but if we're the Jabberwockies as a coaching team that means like a group of professionals that have all been doing it a decade which is kind of our average

um you know how competently can they work together as a unit that's what that is what our um that's what an oak park coach is so a professional that is a team player and you know currently so so then the success of the business relates our our financial model relates completely to how each other does so the coaches are compensated, you know, in a couple of ways. One is that each of them has an assignment of tribe members. Each of them coaches each other's clients in the classes. So if one coach is doing a poor job, then it's likely that some of our athletes will get antagonized and potentially leave, which hurts the pocketbook of another coach. Concurrently, the other piece of this is that the coaches also do a certain level of personal training that they're required to do.

And they split the revenue there. They also now do a great job of laterally their private clients to other coaches when they go on their paid vacations. So like as a, as a function of, um, basic operation, that's, that's step one. Step two is something don't, don't assume that we're not marketing. Our marketing now is in the is in the direct form of referral i told the team that by the end of at the end of last year i said hey i want our business to literally be referral only by the end of 2020 so at one point it was like that it went out of that and now we're kind of bending the curve backwards just sort of like look i literally want this to only be a level of knowingness.

And there's so many people who can outwardly critique that. But that's the assumption of their assumptions that I should deploy with our business. And the problem with those assumptions is they don't work emotionally to keep our business sticky. And under the most challenging moment of business time, this COVID thing, I'm seeing a business that's pretty darn sticky. And we're not hammering Instagram, we're not hammering Facebook as a business. Now, some of the coaches are still maintaining their individual accounts. I didn't want to strip autonomy and say you've got to get rid of your account. Now, I established a logical argument for the coaches and published this article with Phil on Train Heroic. And then I did a version on body of knowledge.com and i would encourage all of you to

go back and listen to the two episodes that we did on social media um preceding season three of the body knowledge you go to body knowledge.com and the two articles that i wrote are on there as well um and as i produced that i just put this statement of logic out and rationality, which is like, hey, our job is to make people fit healthy and well. If we're redirecting people's time and attention to something that we're producing, but then knowing that it is almost certain that they're going to spend more time that we'd like them to spend on these mediums, we're redirecting their attention. Now, something critical happens here, is that if you look at chronobiology just as a science and a discipline,

they're suggesting that, and this relates to flow state, this relates to Kotler's work, this relates to Chix and Mahai, if you've read him, he wrote the original work on flow and creativity. to four hours a day where they can willfully deploy energy to say yes to the hard thing and no to the easy thing. And that's a limit. So all humans, some have said that Bill Gates had like an exceptional sort of threshold. If you watch the Michael Jordan documentary last night, he obviously had a high threshold for doing the hard thing. But most people, most humans are not wired that way. And they have limitations. And you can train those limitations, but there's still a ceiling. wellness requires effort. Then this is, again, as a statement of logic,

we can't intentionally put them in environments that amplify fear, anxiety, depression, even though it doesn't feel like that in real time, the nervous system, that's how it's interpreting it. That rewards impulsivity. So these mediums reward you to kind of jump around and scroll and look at things and go to the next thing and look at somebody else and go to their thing and go down the rabbit hole, whatever. You're training yourself to be impulsive. And

just think about that. And for anybody that is interested in growth, I would offer intentionality trumps convenience. So you have to choose to do the hard thing, whether it's to get under the barbell for a set of 20 or do a 20-minute meditation. That all requires effort, the effort to do it. And I think it does become kenny just sorry just to jump in real quick what we came to doug and anders anyone listening is it becomes an either or eventually it just does you were going to be with your kid and be fully present or your members or you're learning how to play the piano during covid because we've all got to upskill because if we don't come out of this as superhumans, we're all pieces of crap.

But no, junking aside, it becomes an either that, or you're going to spend that time in a distracted state where you're only half present, and you're not really doing the thing. And at the end of the day, that's really what it is. The like the question of fit healthy and well question mark yes or no led to either this which is what penny's talking about focused daily practice or that a state of perma distraction in which you were training that distraction to become more and more of an issue at a cellular level and up where decision making never advances beyond the base of the brain brain stem to the prefrontal cortex and the other areas that handle executive cognitive function. It's either an either or it can't be both. It just can't be.

So which one are you going to choose ultimately? And so Kenny, sorry. Yeah, no. And so, and so Anders is, is, is asking like, how, how does this relate to the coaching team? And so Anders, okay. I go dark two years ago. i published this article uh last summer and you know so phil and i do this like massive like it's a year-long research thing 18 months like it's just you know just took some time trying to understand this thing and then so i so i say the team like look here here's the block of reasoning now what am i met with i'm met with people who are like that makes a lot of sense but i'm still not getting off so it's it's it's the the argument that people are making back to me is not one of rationality

it's just one of emotion like i like this thing or i want to be on it or i don't want you to tell me what to do and all those are very human but i'm deliberately so our team develops and blocks so i take like major concepts shrink them down over a year time so like our major block a couple years ago was developing our tenants and our tenants are our first five are uh purpose growth uh connection contribution and value so you know all of those have like massive overwhelming interrelationships to this and other things the next block that i've been building for several years is understanding and collapsing the dualism um between the mind and the body practically for people in the physical practices. So that sounds very rhetorical.

Basically, we're a fitness business. We train people to train physically. And at some point, we need to account for all the psychological stuff that happens when we do or don't train, when we do or don't release serotonin, when we're grouping together doing hard shit, when we release the norepinephrine appropriately, and when we dish out the dopamine appropriately, not as this constant IV drip that these other platforms facilitate. And so what I'm doing now

is putting together sort of a neurobiological block for the coaches to understand what is actually happening as best as neuroscience can understand it. So it's everything from the chemical processes, the proteins that aren't being activated, the synaptic wiring that's happening, the electrocurrents that are allowing behaviors to be repeated. Because in the end, the listener should hopefully be holding me to the fire and saying, wait, Kenny, aren't you manipulating people's behavior? Absolutely. The difference is, is I'm doing explicitly. So the person comes to me and they say, I want to do X, Y, and Z. And I go, okay, what's this really about? Is this an issue of your confidence or competence? Do you want to

develop something or do you want to feel better about yourself? Either way, either way. And anybody who's been training people for a decade plus knows that those things are interrelated and they go in sways either way i got their back and you're gonna pay me money you're gonna pay my team money to do that yeah you want connection we're gonna deliver on a really fucking high level and we're gonna care with all our competent hearts can provide yeah um i want to talk about your members because they're in the end, they're the ones that matter the most. They keep the doors open. They're the ones your, your churn rate is just, if you've got a, if you've got a high churn and every three months you have to refill your gym, that sucks. And you're charging a premium, you're tacking on personal training, you have to teach

your employees, your coaches how to develop a relationship, which many people might not have that skill, especially if they've fallen victim to what you're talking about, which is this inability to connect, living in an era of quick, you know know just not having the depth to go with that so that's a skill on on your side that you're clearly very committed to finding purpose and developing um that skill set did you have metrics two years ago that you were um looking at and have you gone back on a 6 8 12 to 24 month period and saying like what is the member experience here and are we are we actually doing the right thing do the members actually care because if we're barking up a tree that no one gives a shit about what the hell what who cares

isn't that the thing so to answer the question, there's, there's some core metrics and then there's some like, like practical, like, um, relational execution of the thing. Right. So, um, you know, oops, hold on. Um, so we went through a period on transition about two and a half years ago so as i was sort of like kind of deepening the conversation which we've always been having like right what did what across it la do we introduced context into the world of functional fitness back in 2012 and under 13 we said that you know you the person training in a functional fitness or crossfit environment should have the

capacity to shift their mindset based on what the context of the workout is and that would allow for like some more sustainability so like that was something that we're deeply anchored in so the sort of like psychological consider consideration is something that we're pretty practiced in now what happens very easy for any business is that you start communicating in what you think is fives and sixes the community hears stuff in like nines and tens. And what you need to be doing is communicating in ones and twos. And so I go down these like massive, it's a strength of mine and it's a weakness because there's a gap between the time that I can kind of wrap my head around something and the actual experience

of it. Right. So let me, let me just take context, for example. In 2012, Anders, this is, you know, 2011, we take a team to the CrossFit Games. 2012, I'm developing this kind of theory, and it's just sort of like, huh, we should practice this thing. We should compete with this thing, and we should occasionally be mentally tough with it.

And this is kind of a hybrid of my background as an athlete my mom's instruction mark divine was influential with the mental toughness thing but just and then being a yogi and a martial artist is like like the language of a practice of movement is like very compelling and so we introduced that to our gym and then subsequently the you know some some gyms started getting interested in what we're doing. And now I look, you know, there's, you know, hundreds of gyms that are doing things like that and very well-known coaches deploying the very thing that we invented. But there was a gap. So, like, I go to introduce this. And there's about a year where people were like, it's just a workout, Kenny. I'm like, no, but it's an experience. And it's like

metaphorical to life. And then there's like a, there's an adaptive process and that's physiological. And we're trying to like, like, I would never guess that somebody like you took it way too far and then had to backtrack for 12 months to actually meet people where they're at. I would have never guessed. I started realizing, okay, what have I done poorly in the past? And that's like, really over communicate complex things, and unintentionally create a value system where people feel judged if they don't understand it. So if I could, if I could describe my leadership weakness to the population that I care most about, it's that. So what have I tried to do? I've tried to shrink these things down into words that a coach can understand and that a client can understand. So take our tenants, for example. Do you as a coach have purpose? Do you as a client have purpose?

As a coach, are you capable and willing to grow? As a student or athlete, are you capable and willing to grow? Are you willing to connect with yourself, others, and your coaches on both sides? Is that true? energetic presence here has a contribution and that if you bring salt to this environment or all kinds of crunchiness into this environment it will not help the general energy of the space if those four things are all affirmative then we will have value you will pay us for it we'll give you that value and so it's a logical process that both people, now notice I didn't talk about rep schemes. I didn't talk about AMRAPs. I didn't talk about membership rates. I didn't talk about length of contract. I didn't talk about any of that. That's as simple as it gets. And everybody can relate to that. And so that was my first step in becoming a better leader. How can we communicate this stuff? Now, getting to those five things, to answer your question, we lost people because in that process, the team, me, we were in the trenches, wrestling with these concepts, struggling with them in real time, and wrestling with some of our student population just who's looking at us going, you are getting too heady or too whatever or you know i want to do this like we did in 2011 come on that's like it's like actually the time that i uh really started to look to get out of

my gym because as i was having that conversation with people, because 20-something years later, if you don't have that connection to fitness, it's just not going to be there. If you don't have it, it's too easy to quit unless it becomes this deep-seated purpose in your life. But somebody that's doing it for two weeks or two months to lose 10 pounds, you blow them out of the water on day one, don't you? Well, you don't start with that though. You don't start with that. We're not even talking, I mean, we're just talking about, okay, so just use your avatar right now. I want to lose some weight. Cool. Okay. So you've got a little bit of purpose that I know as a coach is going to something a little bit deeper. If you want to do that, you've got to connect with me. You're going to turn up. Okay. And also there's some other people around here who are really motivated.

So if you don't turn up physically, you will literally lose motivation to do this thing. And the behavior around here is people, like, handling your shit. You want to be somebody that handles your shit, who connects with others, who handles your shit and do hard stuff? Cool. We're that group. All right. Cool.

Now, your presence matters. So So yeah, I'm providing a service. Part of the service is you being responsible and your energy and me bringing my contribution as a professional to you daily. So if I'm not focused, if I'm not a hundred percent like there, you need to call me out. Cool. Oh, so we got those four things straight, right? Okay. You didn't pay me money. I'm going to get you to where you got to go. Cool. That's all. Yeah. Everybody understands that. That is not complex. Does that conversation bother you in that it seems too simple for where you're at in this

pursuit? you're at in this pursuit i think that's the leader's dilemma is that you have to figure out like how to look again what are we doing we're doing the same thing to want to jump off the deep end with them and be like level 12 like check it out this is where we're going you're going to be so emotionally and spiritually connected to your body and your brain all at the same time that you'll never not work out. It won't even be a question. You will do everything in your power to be in this euphoric state of fitness and health and wellness, and it's going to be so great. And then they're like, oh, dude, I'm just here for the 10 pounds. Can you just let me?

Well, no. This should be the workout. Yeah, totally. And there's a practical part of that, which is you've got to deliver that daily too. It's a paradox. Look, I wrote an article a couple years ago called Holding Paradox. And it's on train and row. Like, you know, like this is one of our favorite pieces for Phil and I.

Like it's just – like the modern coach has to be able to hold paradox, which is both things are true, right? Like you've got to get something out of this and the client's got to get something out of this. Your job is to progress the person and grow the person and so a wise coach can do that at appropriate intervals when are you there oh i'm here yeah oh gotcha. When we go back to the idea of the social media side of things, I'm wondering why we can't have what you're talking about and at the same time write all of the tiny pieces that we've talked about in this conversation into captions or into a YouTube video in which we're doing a lot of good without it being some negative thing. I think that's, that's part of the,

to wrap this whole thing together of like what you're saying is a hundred percent correct, but can we live with both ideas? And is it possible? Is it within our best interest as health and wellness professionals, fitness professionals to say, I want to have the depth and the purpose behind fitness. I want my coaches to be able to have a relationship that is significantly deeper than 300 characters or 140 characters on Twitter. I want to have this depth. I want to be a very well-paid, high-end, personal trainer that can also run group classes and carry a conversation and deliver results and be this 10 out of 10 trainer. And at the same time, I'd like to be able to influence the world through social media

and talk about Dunbar's effect of why it's so good for our gym. So look, the medium is the message. And so at some point, we have to identify that not all technologies are the same. We have to, and this is why I stated nuance and discernment here is really important. And understanding how these mediums work is also important. if the the best metaphor that i've heard in this whole conversation and all the research that that i've done is the one that james williams points out and james williams in his book stand out of the light basically says hey look um we are we are in a time that can compare what it is we're doing to lead in the paint when we all grew up. How old are you, Anders?

You're 40? 36. 36. Okay, so maybe not. I think it was done by the time you were growing up. But there was lead in the paint on the walls when I was growing up. They still check houses for it when you're buying them? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's a lot of houses built. And it kills kids um and so with the with nobody's disagreeing that having a beautifully painted home is wrong it's just what's in the paint and so technology is the paint what's in it matters yeah and so i don't think i'm out i'm offering this to you and to the listenership people are likely uncomfortable with the the current logical progression of this conversation because people are still going to just go, yeah, but you got to go to where people are at. And it's just like, okay, and you're poisoning people. It would be a grotesque way to describe this. But at this point, from what I've researched,

I don't know another truth. It doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you an irresponsible person the more you start to understand it. And that's uncomfortable. And that's where I draw a line in the sand and just sort of go, the more you understand on this and it's worth educating yourself on. I don't see a progression where you just go, yeah, man,

it's what you make of it. You're in the matrix. I'm just like, no's it's not the matrix you are creating value for corporations that do not have your humane interests in mind period and so if you're redirecting two plus hours a day of people's time, generally speaking, redirecting their attention, rewarding impulsivity. Isn't our job as coaches and trainers to reward intentionality? That's our job to say you get a high five when you do things with intent,

but if you are impulsiveulsive isn't that every trainer's biggest pain in the ass the impulsive client that just doing stuff willy-nilly right and that's how we're training ourselves so somebody answer me logically like it's not a matter of like hey you know uh what you know i do good in the world it's like great you're still painting a house with lead in it it's all i'm saying and like and that's uncomfortable for people and it should be uncomfortable and i guess my role at this point is to be a spokesperson for humans yeah and a spokesperson for rationality and and the spokesperson for rationality. And the role of rationality here,

I think is really essential because what gets humans in problem states? Being irrational. That's where we get fucked up. And Jared Lanier points out, Kenny, in his books that like the most recent, I think is 10 Reasons to Delete Your Social Media social media accounts that an addict does not behave rationally an addict behaves emotion overly emotionally like it's the exact opposite to what jocko willing can leave babin and talking about when or even if we look at like john boyd's ooda loop right before we decide an act we have to observe and orient

and to do that right you have to take rational stock of what's actually going on around you and so an addict does not recognize they have a problem a lot of the time they do not accurately assess rationally assess what is going on around them. They respond irrationally and overly emotionally. And that's part of the problem because here's the deal with Doug and Anders and anyone listening. If you read Cal Newport's

Digital Minimalism, he proposes getting off all extractive platforms, social media platforms plus YouTube for 30 days, which Kennyny and i did to be fair proposed like a year and a half before he wrote the book noddy's reading our stuff because he's not on social media so he wouldn't have seen train heroic reposted but we wrote about this on train heroic like step one get off for 30 days to completely recalibrate it's like a thing of it

is a digital detox and then from there if you're going to get back on start to notice how it makes you feel what your motivations are how it's nudging you one way or another oh it feels great when i get a ton of retweets it feels like crap when i get zero likes and zero retweets okay well that's behavioral manipulation start to do a bit more research and then maybe for your business to your point anders right now particularly i know a lot of coaches that are doing stuff on facebook you know groups and you know certain membership benefits okay awesome maybe you need that to survive so that is what cal newport calls digital minimalism and there are there are freedom, rescue time. Yeah, freedom's great. Yeah, where you can set hard limits for, okay, I'm at 10 minutes today.

I'm out. I'm at an hour today. I'm out. Be honest with yourself about if you're providing value to yourself there. And I'm coming to the caveat, Kenny, in just a second here because I know there is one. Or maybe you employ somebody to do it for you if you know that you even with that we will i can just there's a great great story my kids have um by a french author and it's that like the tales of frog and toad and they're talking about these cookies right and their

lack of willpower well if we don't have no but let me get there if if we don't have willpower we've got to have more willpower, Toad. We can't just eat the entire box. So let's just tie a string around it, and then we won't eat them all. Yeah, but can't we just untie the string? Okay, well, let's just tie a string around and then put them up on a high shelf in the pantry. Yeah, but Toad, can't we just get the stepladder, go up, get them down, untie them and eat them all? And it just keeps progressing. And the point here is that it's not the first thing that you go on for, which is making your coaching business survive during COVID-19 shutdown. That is

a noble aim. It is a necessary aim to keep your clients more fit, healthy and well, keep your coaches employed and pay your overhead and keep your family alive. It's not the intention that's the problem, but it's like frog and toad. If you tie the string around it because you set up a limit on freedom or rescue time, you can easily disable that anytime you want. There's no hard thing on any of this. Okay, well, what if I put it on the higher shelf? Yeah, but you can still work

around it so there's going to be a personal problem for you as the coach unless you're employing someone else to do it you can outsource it so option one is outsource it pay someone else to do it because you know you don't have the self-control and this is my current problem my instagram used balloon from seven minutes a day to 12 and now it's at 22 it's starting to become more of a problem again but i've got to do it to do this reverse tech detox right um so outsource it practice what cal newport calls digital minimalism setting a hard time limit and ironically using technology to reinforce it okay you could do that also or you could just option three is just keep doing what you're doing if you don't think there's a problem okay great

but kenny's point is can you if you've done the research like we have knowing what we know in all good consciousness this isn't about me and it isn't about you it's and it's not about your coaches or feeding your family it's partly that is about those things but it's also about you. And it's not about your coaches or feeding your family. It's partly that it is about those things, but it's also about you are sending people down a path that you know makes people more anxious, isolated, depressed, less empathetic, less focused, more impulsive. And therefore, in all good conscience, beyond what your needs, your coaches your coaches need your family's needs

are can you keep perpetuating a behavior or directing people to platforms that you know are doing these things to them and still say that's making more people fit healthy and well and benefiting i'm coaching at scale i'm mentoring scale. Because it seems to me that there's a logical disconnect. Go, Kenny. Yeah. Anders, do you have a question about that? No. Go ahead. Look, I don't disagree with really anything you guys are saying. I'm playing a lot of doubles advocate because I know what the audience is going to want to know about.

Go ahead. Andrew, to take Phil's point a little bit further and to think about this bigger, a lot of people are going to hear this like, okay, that works for Kenny. How could it ever work for me or why would it? I think once you start to,

if you look at Tristan's Harris talk, he's got a couple on the Center for Humane Technology, but one of them is he talks about like this curve that we're on and, and a lot of science fiction novels and movies are really, you know, in the last five, 10, 15 years become about, you know, what happens when the AI takes over. And so when, can you guys hear that hammering? It's tough out there in LA, bud.

It is, it is. I know, people be working on the house, man. So, I'm a little bitch. Sitting in the sunshine doing this interview. Okay. So on a curve, as humans relate to technology, we're at this inflection point where the AI is starting to overtake our human weakness. So that is – it just – it really is feeding on our biological need to group together. And so when we feel urgent, there's enough anxiousness, there's just enough depression to go back on these mediums to, you know, to feed literally chemical, the three that I mentioned in and different variations that are being malappropriated. And the problem is if the technology starts to overtake our human strength,

human strength is different than all other species in the sense that what makes us different is part of our brain that allows us to work together as a group in a rational way, resisting urges to be destructive, violent, all these other things. Because when you can suppress those things for a moment, you can create things that are productive to you and those around you. The irony here is that we've created this technology to help us. So if we're at the intersection right now, and it's happening very quickly, and it's about our consciousness and if an organism's goal is to survive the technology and this is what what authors talk about and writers and thinkers are are considering right now is when artificial intelligence and that's all the algorithms that are working on all these things in real time start to overcome our capacity to be reasonable and work together,

to have these things work for the things that we actually want. And again, there's multiple layers of this conversation. What all of us want is varied. And so somebody could say, I want more clients, and I go online, and I get more clients, and the conversation ends. And what we're just asking people to do is just investigate a little bit further to understand what those actions facilitate. And if this continues, there's a natural progression in which all organisms look for fuel, look for food.

What is the food that is currently feeding the AI that we've developed? Our time and our attention. Once there's enough people and Peter, Peter Diamandis in 2018 said that there's going to be 4 million more participants on these online platforms by 2022. So if we're looking at, you know, two and a half billion people plus or minus, and we add another four to that,

now we're at 75% of the human population fueling behavioral modification that we're not in real time aware of and that's the fuel that it needs to exist unless we change the algorithms that they work off of. And how do you change anything like this? Well, you make it not as valuable. Well, how would billions of people not make it as valuable, not use it? And then you create a different currency. By the way, what makes currency work a trust in what the valuation of the thing is in the first place social currency is very volatile and i would

argue that you know as we've seen rotations of some of these mediums come in like tiktok's coming now okay i got a youtube competitor ish in facebook was a thing instagram's now you know all these things have evolutions right and facebook is so big right now so is google specifically youtube but they need fuel our time and attention our impulsivity is that fuel so it's just it's just a it's just a it's a it is a very big question to be responsible for. But I would say at the heart of this is human cognition. And the only thing that will allow us an opportunity to use technology to balance our strength, and let's think about that where I started this conversation, which is not in behavioral psychology,

carrot, stick, reward and base biology, but rather competence, relatedness, autonomy on deeper levels. If the technologies were designed in that way, and that's what the Center for Humane Technology is trying to do. Tristan argues that we don't need that many people people to make the change he just said like there's it's going to take about a thousand people and those thousand people need to be the engineers who are currently

understanding the chemical processes that go on in our brains to keep their products really awesome yeah and change the construction so that these companies can get value. The problem currently is that these companies are so valuable that there's very little incentive for the stakeholders to change their perspective on how the company should work foundationally. So which just leads me to more logical considerations. Okay, well, if that's the case, and if they don't move, then who moves the needle on this? If the engineers can get in and create new technologies,

that's a fighting chance. Or, to me, the obvious one is this, and I'm careful not to project what I did as the right thing to do, but it was the only conclusion that I could come up with is like, it doesn't matter. There's 8 million people or 7.8 billion people. And so me getting off this does nothing for their valuation,

you know? But me talking about it in a long form medium, like a podcast is different. Podcast is social media, but it's a long form medium, like a podcast is different. Podcast is social media, but it's a different form of social media. It would be considered on the regenerative side than the extractive side. Yes, you're asking people, we're currently at an hour and 40 something minutes in this conversation. You're asking people to spend that amount of time. Right. Think about how long we've been talking, but it's also been,

I would suspect a like interesting conversation to say the least where you're being challenged. Yeah. Now, if you were to compare that to the four and a half hours a day that you experience on social media, intellectually, how is that stimulating you? It's different, hopefully. And so the meat, that's what i'm saying the medium matters the medium is the message and the message that we need to communicate is that our time and attention does not need to be repurposed for somebody else's benefit and likely humans collectively destruction of cognition and i and i don't mean to create such an outrageous statement other than it's what's happening people are more depressed more anxious and we're seeing it real

time so shit is crazy right now well outside of covid there's very few generations you know so the covid thing is what i actually do want to get to as this big inflection point because i actually gotta get rolling here in like the next 10 minutes um and we could we like talking and we like having full conversations which is the most beautiful thing in the world um the we are of a very specific generation i don't know if like we're the actual same generation but a generation in which we very much remember what life was like pre-social media we very much remember or we were young enough to be influenced by it it all affects our career so we weren't too old to be so disconnected that we just let it slide until like our parents, they, they jumped in way too late.

Um, so we're, we're very much in this last, uh, group of people or this interesting group of people that Instagram hit when I was 29 years old. And I remember specifically going on there and being more angry, uh, all the time because I saw people in crossfit doing specific things that i

couldn't do and going who the fuck are these guys you're in my region i'm so mad at you and being so angry and going and like redoing all these workouts that they were posting and it was like their highlight reel that i was chasing over and over and over again. And it legitimately, but as I got more comfortable with it, as I became, maybe I'm a more angry person a decade later. I don't know the exact answer. If you run that simulation both ways, but it definitely affects. And we all remember how like that emotional turn or that mental turn or kind of going into that stage of saying like oh now i'm in and now i feel this way a lot because of it um doug i know that you've like really gone off of it and i would love to hear some of like your um thoughts on as well but the the part that I am you know

leading to now I would say I'm okay with it in that I very much choose when I put my daughter on there which is very very little I mostly use it for business I I use it very little for my personal life. But I'm also a victim of the I go to my room or I go to the bathroom and 30 minutes later, I'm still on Instagram doing nothing. And it's stupid. It's a waste of my life. And I spend 4 hours and 19 minutes a week or a day. And the only reason I have an iPhone is for for the camera and social media it's a fact i

have no reason for any of it outside of self-promotion for some product or something that we're selling which i think provides a lot of value and i think it tells people a good story on why they need to buy the products like they they help. They're great. We run an online business. I want people to be better people because of the programs we put together. But I also recognize everything that you're saying and the emotional side of it. And as we are in a place right now of we are at the the the largest inflection point and phil the reason we even started talking about this was because i remember when you guys wrote um wrote the book you and galpin and mckenzie were talking about unplugged yeah um you guys were talking about the there was i want to say it was a large chunk of one of the chapters about hey hey, this is only going to grow.

It's impossible for things not to grow. They have to go in a certain direction. And yes, we as end users get to control that direction because the companies will do what the market demands. But right now, that slippery slope is rising very fast. And the end customer for this is going to be some sort of government control over health data. And now we've hit a health crisis in which it just appears to me that we're headed in this direction. And also, Anders, I think you're right about the government thing, but then there's also the monopoly standpoint like if you look at vanderbilt and historical control of the railroads in the united states and in other countries if you look at the stranglehold on standard oil um that kind

of thing and really the muckraking like if you look up um if you do some reading about mcclure's magazine right which um teddy roosevelt the term muckraker was popularized by Teddy Roosevelt talking about this. So there's this awesome book, which is not me promoting me. I didn't write it called Citizen Reporters about McClure's magazine. And what they started digging up is just how nefarious these monopolies on the railroads, on oil production, eventually on electricity were. And they started, know teddy roosevelt was known as like the trust buster right like he'd go in and break up these companies forcibly mark zuckerberg right now has more power than caesar the emperor right he has more power than

pick a dictator of choice he has more power of whoever the prime minister was of Great Britain when the British Empire was at its zenith and controlled X percent of the world's population. He just does. It's a different kind of power. He can't march troops into East Africa and take it over. But in terms of the number of people being controlled and manipulated under one person's control,

and I'm just talking about through Facebook and Instagram because we're not even talking about like any, you know, tin hat conspiracy theories where the four of us got together and we're trying to sell people is that the government's going to control us all through this thing. It's not even about governments. It's about the outside influence, the outsized influence of certain individuals and corporations and what their end goal is. It's not to bring people together. It's to bring as much time and attention as they

can, as often as they can, strip mine that and extract it for ad revenue to the nth degree. And as long as those profit margins keep going up and that revenue keeps going up they have literally zero motivation to do what kenny's talking about and what tristan harris in the center of human technology you're advocating which is to bring change because ideally that would be awesome is it going to happen not until people start voting with their feet on mass and drawing a hard line in the sand because a little bit of saying okay here are my purposes here's why i'm doing it in my case it's partly to sell more book and that's that's like the thing that is the most interesting

to me like right now i feel like i have a decent amount of and i'm going to say this completely against kind of what you and kenny were talking about two hours ago. I'm definitely a struggle with it, but I also am objective about the struggle. I see myself doing it and I can throw the phone away. I don't take it out on weekends. I try very hard. And I actually am going to kick it to Doug right now because he's been so quiet listening to us to put his opinion in and wrap this thing up. I just, at this stage of where we're at, I think that it just gets very weird. And it's very cool because when you say you have to draw a line in the sand, I think that that is going to become something that we are all very, very faced with.

If we're not objectively viewing the decisions that we make and what we put out there and how far we're letting people take it. And Doug Larson, wrap us up. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to go an entire show for the first time in the history of Barbell Struggler. I didn't say almost anything. I know.

Jesus. But it has been interesting to listen to you guys talk about all this stuff but it's not it's not necessarily my uh my expert wheelhouse uh but yeah i i do have opinions on it so i think every social media platform is there's a primary emotion that drives each platform i think the primary emotion that drives instagram is envy. You go on there, it's all social comparison. It's all your friends and everyone's trying to make their lives look as cool as possible. You compare yourself to everybody in every category. And as a result of comparing yourself to the best weightlifters in the world and to the richest entrepreneurs in the world and to the most successful artists in the world and to the most successful, um, you know, artists in the world. And this guy's got the hottest wife and this guy has the most money and this guy on and on and on. Like you can't win any of the categories. And so in every category of your life, you see the inequality gap and inequality breeds unhappiness. Financial inequality makes people more unhappiness. It raises every, um, every negative thing, crime, thing, crime, abuse, addiction, alcoholism, etc. And so you see this social inequality because you're competing with everyone in the world.

And there's no way to win that game. Even if you are the number one weightlifter in the world, well, you're not as rich as that guy. And there's too many other categories and so um i have found with myself personally um that when i get on instagram it it does make me feel bad because i see what other people are doing especially the people that i'm friends with if i if i see that other people that i know are doing really really well at one level i want them to do well because i care about them and I think they're great. But at the same level, it kind of makes me feel worse about myself. Hey, bud.

You took a booboo off of your eye? Look at this little man's eye. The other day, he's got a scrape on his eye. So great. You okay, bud? And so I have very consciously chosen to um to not spend a lot of time on instagram i do think it's worthwhile and and hold on bud hold on this this is this is working at home right now with a three-year-old right i do think it's worthwhile to um to craft

posts like thoughtful posts i kind of view it it as like a way of journaling. You're refining your thoughts. You know, it's like your own philosophies on life. And then it's, you know, it's fun to take cool photos and post them for people to see and all that. And there's many benefits to it. But I have found that I should just, I just need to post things and then walk away

and not read through the comments and not like check how many likes I have. I just post it and then I leave. And to Andrew's point, um, you know, we, we run a hundred percent virtual online company. And so Instagram is just simply a part of the game. Um, we, I don't have a physical in-person gym anymore. Um, this is, this is what we do. We do everything online. I prefer podcasting. I like long form conversation. That's my number one by far. I think it's the most fun. Um, I think, I think I don't get on Twitter at all because I don't like writing very much. And I think the primary driver, the primary emotion that drives Twitter is anger. I think that's where people go

to complain and bitch and throw their hands up at the world. I think the primary emotion on Reddit is loneliness. I think that's where people go when they are depressed and they are sad. And so loneliness drives Reddit a lot. That's why if you read a lot of Reddit, you will see suicide, anxiety, depression. Those are very prominent topics in every thread on Reddit. And so even on Reddit, which I think is a very cool platform for many reasons, you get this very biased view of the world, kind of like watching CNN. They call it the constant negative news or something along those lines. Like it's all, it's all doom and gloom all the time.

You walk through the airport and you look on the TV and it's like, the world is just falling apart at every, every second of the day. And then you get this, this skewed view of what the world is like, you think everyone's everyone's a bad person everyone's killing everyone everyone's stealing and just committing crime and like most people don't most people are good but if you watch cnn all day every day or any you know any big news network you're gonna get a skewed view of of reality just like if you look at instagram all day you're gonna think everyone's everyone's lives are so great everyone's so happy everyone's doing cool shit everyone's traveling and everyone's you know everyone's at pool parties all the time and not and I'm not at pool parties right now I'm home

I'm home hanging out doing kind of nothing you know I'm working and you know I go for scooter rides with my kids but I'm not out of the fucking Vegas pool party because that looks like everyone else's but you should be I really should be. I deserve that. Oh, the Encore Beach Club. Last time we were there was fucking dope, though. We were partying next to Tito Ortiz and the VIP. That's right. Should have taken more pictures.

Kept them posting. They've been at the same party for months. It didn't happen. It's like a Strava fail, Doug. You didn't wire up your Strava, so it didn't happen, right? Strava fail. Yeah. So at least I got one rant in before the show was over.

Thank you. I'm going to edit that to go to the front. You jumped on here with too many talking people, too many loud people. Team, I got like 30 seconds. Kenny Kane, you can't be found anywhere. You actually have to drive all the way to la and hang out santa monica to go to crossfit la to meet up with kenny kane uh to hear him rant phil you're back on the internet where do you want people to go not for long buddy um hit me up at the

contact form on my website because i'm going to get off again soon enough so just philwhitebooks.com yeah kenny do you still have the coaching academy yeah we do we do we do we do have a coaching academy for people that um and also andrews people can reach us through our website oakparkla.com yeah i think that your coaching uh just from what you guys laid out two years ago and just what you guys have layered on top people go over and check that out there it's a great program. Doug Larson. You bet. Find me on Instagram. I still do that.

Find me sucking your soul dry. Hi, Anders at Anders Barner. Barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. You can find us on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook. What else don't we like? Twitter. I don't even know if we have a Twitter. Find me on TikTok. Posting weightlifting videos.

I got like 3,000 people on TikTok now. This has been phenomenal. Thank you, guys. Phil, it was great meeting you. Appreciate it, fellas. All right, guys. Later. Appreciate it.

Bye, guys. That's a wrap, friends. Make sure you get over to the store, barbellstruck.com forward slash EMOM. EMOM Aesthetics. You're going to save 10% using the coupon code SHRUG to check out. Also, our friends at Organifi.com forward slash SHRUG to save 20%. And our friends at Bioptimizers, P3OM.com forward slash shark free to get a free bottle of P3OM.

It's really, really awesome probiotic. And we will see you guys on Monday.