Behind the Bastards - Part One: How the First Fitness Influencer Doomed Us All

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante to discuss Bernarr MacFadden.FOOTNOTES: http://web.archive.org/web/20150915124002/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123750174381989343https://sites.edb.utexas.edu/stark/publications/building-american-supermen-bernarr-macfaddenbenito-mussolini-and-american-fascism-in-the-1930s/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346917559_Racialized_Surrogates_in_Bernarr_Macfadden's_Physical_Culture  https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/circulating/2021/01/21/circulating-physical-culture-by-catherine-keyser/ https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/may/08/muscular-christianity-and-american-sports-undying-love-of-violence  Adams, Mark. Mr. America (p. 84). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/12/wellness-influencers-vaccine-misinformation/ https://www.americanheritage.com/true-story-bernard-macfadden#6 https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a23610/strange-tale-historic-fitness-guru-bernarrmacfadden/ https://www.historynet.com/putting-fad-macfadden.htm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I am recording. I'm Robert Evans. No, I thought I was going to start this episode. I'm ashamed. Yeah, okay. Sophie Lichterman here. We just did a full five minutes of this podcast where Robert... An incredible opening. Well, with Robert who, like, accused me of crimes, used my full legal name,

and mispronounced Caitlin Deronde, our fabulous guest last name, 16 times. And we don't have it for you, because Robert wasn't recorded. Yeah, well... How do you feel? Look, I think I am a hero and did nothing wrong. I mean, don't ever change, but also you should record yourself. I mean, let's get the opinion of our guest for today, Caitlin Deronte. Caitlin, how are you doing?

You're going to pronounce her last name correctly this time? I just did. I want it clear one time. Caitlin Deronte. No! I don't know what you're having problems with. Oh, my God, it's incredible. You're being very mean to me.

I said Deronte! I said that! Oh, you did not! Sophie, this is not professional, okay? We have a podcast to do. Oh, Evan's Robert bad. Caitlin, I apologize. It's okay.

How are you doing? I'm doing well, thank you for asking. How are you? I'm good, Caitlin. You helped to host a podcast, co-host, some would say, most would say, a podcast called the Bechtelcast, which is about Hollywood and movies and sexism and sexism in Hollywood movies. This is all true.

Yes. And we just, we've found that there's no problem. There's no problem with sexism in Hollywood. It's actually, they're doing a great job. It's all good, baby. It's all good. That's what everybody says about Michael Bay in that unproblematic scene where he showed a cutout laminated of Texas's Romeo and Juliet law allowing adults to sleep with teenagers.

Wait, what is this? Have you not seen that? Oh, my God. I think it's the third Transformers. It might be the fourth, but there's, one of the characters is like, he's an Australian race car driver and he's dating Mark Wahlberg's daughter who is 17 and he's like 20 something. And Mark Wahlberg is like, hey, that's illegal. You're, my daughter's a child and you're an adult.

And the kid pulls out a laminated copy of Texas's Romeo and Juliet law and the camera centers on it and focuses for like several seconds long enough for you to read the entirety of the law. Like it's very clearly Michael Bay being like, hey, you can fuck children in Texas. Oh, my God. It's amazing. Wow. It is.

It's hard to say something's one of the creepiest moments in Hollywood history, but that's got to hit the mark. That's in the running for that award. Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah, it's amazing. I hate that. Oh, you all have to watch that now because I need to hear Jamie Loftus have an aneurysm

through a podcast. Well, we keep trying to get you on the show. Come on. Back to us. You've never asked me on. Well, we've. Look. Lie.

Lie. Lie. Lie. I don't believe I've ever been asked on. I've asked. Caitlyn's asked. Jamie's asked. I've asked again.

Jamie's asked again. I would never say no to Jamie or Caitlyn. It's. I mean, maybe you're. I definitely say no to you sometimes. So when you tell me to wake up at the ass crack of dawn. You mean noon. It could.

It could be the movie we want you to do is the Hannah Montana movie. And maybe you've been reluctant to. Come on for that. Montana. Then great. We'll see you there for the Montana, the famous movie titled Montana. I do love Montana. I am.

I am assuming it is a sequel to the hunt for red October where Sam Niels character is resurrected by an archangel and becomes a farmer outside of Boseman. Now that is my head cannon. All right. So Caitlyn normally on this show when someone comes in having a good day, it's our job to ruin it by telling him about how a bunch of babies got killed or molested or how I don't know the world got poisoned or something horrible happened. But today we're going to have a little bit more fun with it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, today our bastard didn't kill anybody except for arguably maybe one baby. Well, okay, then. Yeah, that barely counts as a crime. Like by our standards, he's earned the Robert Evans Award for killing no more than one baby maybe potentially. Yeah. Let's give this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah. I would. I would argue that he would have killed less babies than most people who have won Nobel Peace Prizes. That's definitely true. That's absolutely true. Caitlyn, have you ever heard of Bernard McFadden? Bernard?

McFadden? Bernard. Yeah. Not Bernard. Bernard. Nope. Bernard. Bernard.

I mean at one point Bernard. Yeah. Bernard. Okay. Well, this is going to be a fun time because so obviously, you know, when we think about the apocalypse, right, the end of days, there are a number of ways like all the nukes could come like the 99 red balloon scenario, I think is one when people think a lot, something like that.

Aliens could come down, asteroid, I think based on the pandemic we've had, one of the likeliest ways the world might end involves fitness influencers. I think there's a pretty good chance that the end of the human race heavily involves wellness and the people who get famous promoting wellness. Yeah. Yeah. That tracks to me. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think I need to like belabor that point. Now, the title fitness influencer today applies to just about anybody who like writes about health to a social media audience that's above a certain size and studies consistently show that at best about one in 10 of these people provide broadly accurate information. So about 90% of health influencers are just lying to people, which is again, why they're going to help end human civilization. We can currently trace a significant amount of COVID-19 disinformation to what are currently

called micro influencers. These are people with like about 10 to 100,000 followers on apps like Instagram, which counts as micro. It makes me feel really bad about my following then. It's okay. Yeah, because Caitlyn, I feel confident saying in upwards of 80% of my theoreticals, you have no role in ending civilization. Yeah, but I want the power with more, to be able to, if I wanted to, if I had more followers.

It would be fun because Joe Rogan could snap his fingers and wipe out cities. Also, I follow at Caitlyn Drawtine Instagram. Yeah. Follow Caitlyn Drawtine Instagram. It boosts my following so that I can help end the world if I want to. Caitlyn into a micro influencer because studies show that micro influencers are actually much more influential. I was just joking about Joe Rogan, but people with that kind of following are less influential

than people with like the 10 to 100,000 follower range. One of the theories is that like it's a little more intimate. So people think maybe they're less trying to sell me stuff and more like my friend giving me health advice. A person with only, you know, 12,000 followers is a little bit more relatable than someone with 3.2 million. Yeah. Exactly.

And so at present time, I would argue that like roughly a third of American industry is different kinds of fitness and health and wellness influencers. It feels like that's the most common job or at least aspirational job that I see. But it wasn't always this way. For the social media age, fitness influencers were a mix of celebrities who parlayed their existing fame into workout videos. And people who were primarily famous for either losing a bunch of weight or writing a best selling exercise book.

I'm talking about people like Richard Simmons, right? That's an early fitness influencer by most of our standards, right? Sure. He's a good example of kind of the former. He was famous, I believe, just because he lost a bunch of weight and then made videos teaching other people how to do it. Another early fitness influencer was a running guru named Jim Ficks, who stand-up comedians in the 90s loved to joke about because he died after a run.

Now perhaps the most toxic health influencer in the modern canon is Oprah Winfrey, who we have talked about a number of the scams that she's perpetuated. But Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz would probably be top about that. Now if anyone currently gives Oprah a run for her money, it's probably Joe Rogan, a man who I'm certain if you asked him what he considers himself, he would not say anything that sounds like health influencer. But that's also like a huge part of what he does and what his fame and popularity comes from.

Is it? I've not listened to a single second of anything he's ever, what is it? Joe Rogan experience? Yeah. The Joe Rogan experience. He gives a lot of advice. I mean, I don't think he even frames it as advice, but like he talks about what he does in terms of like, here's what I'm doing for COVID, you know, I'm not going to get

a vaccine, I'm taking the ivermectin or whatever. He gives a lot of life, and he has a lot of people on his show who give like diet and lifestyle advice. So it's not just him, but it'll have like Jordan Peterson on to talk about his all meat diet. Whether or not Joe considers himself one, Rogan is a major health influencer, like maybe even the biggest currently, because Oprah's kind of faded a bit and influenced next to Joe Rogan at this moment.

And obviously, both Joe and Oprah are ridiculously wealthy people. There are billions to be made in looking healthy, and some people think Joe Rogan looks healthy. I can't explain that to you, Caitlin, but they do. And then promising to teach people the secrets to be like you. The best of these people create little bitty cults so tight and consistent with their disinformation that no light or truth can escape. Today, we're talking about the guy who invented that kind of thing, the guy who is the foundation for both Joe Rogan and Oprah Winfrey and a million lesser health gods, all spewing misinformation

into the plague-wracked ether. And this guy, this motherfucker, is a dude named Bernard McFadden. Now, that's a weird name, Bernard. Yeah. Let me not to shame all the Bernard's out there. No, you should. He chose it. He chose it.

He's the only Bernard there's ever fucking been. It is okay to shame someone for choosing a stupid name, because he was born Bernard, like the actual name. The name that we are familiar with. Yeah, like the real name, Bernard Adolphus McFadden, on August 16th, 1868, in Millspring, Missouri. Now, Millspring was a tiny little shit town without much going for it, and young Bernard came into a family who also didn't have a lot going for them.

His dad was an alcoholic in an era in which you weren't legally an alcoholic until you drank yourself completely to death. Now, Papa McFadden had fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. So when I say he's an alcoholic, I have some sympathy for the man. He's probably an alcoholic because he's lived through nightmares, incomprehensible to modern men. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And by the time he started his family, I think it's probably accurate to say he was basically just a broken shell of a man. The biography I found of Bernard says that his dad was happy only hunting deer and drinking himself to death and betting on horse races. The few times he was sober, he was apparently nice to his family, but he was not sober often, and he did not seem to take much pleasure in his children, including young Bernard. Mostly he would physically abuse his wife and his children when he came home drunk

as hell. It is a bad home environment. Once all of the family money went to hard liquor and gambling, the McFaddens barely survived during the best of times when dad was alive. When Bernard was still a little kid, his mother decided she had had enough, which is not a common thing. You do not see a lot of women who are able to do this in this period of time, like the fucking 1870s, early 1870s.

And she picks up her son and her two young daughters, and she flees her husband and their home to stay with her family. Papa McFadden comes by a couple of times, tries to get them back, and she does not take him back. She does not agree to it because he is a ruinous drunk. And sure enough, less than a year after she leaves him, when Bernard is four, his dad dies from alcohol abuse, just drinks himself to death. It was not common for women to get divorced in the late 1800s, and I do not think this

was a divorce. I think she just was like, I am not going to keep my kids around this fucking maniac. So good for her. It is a mark of what a strong woman that Bernard's mother was that she managed to do this. And she got her children free and clear from a bad situation. Unfortunately, she was not able to bring them to a good situation. This is not like a, she doesn't like take them into a, I mean, I guess you, maybe it's better.

We'll ask that question later, Caitlin. Because they were dirt poor, and she was also dying this entire time. She was basically sick from tuberculosis, all of Bernard's early life. And she can't really make any money, can't really feed her family. And her, her relatives are not very helpful because they're all kind of barely hanging on by a thread. Bernard's biographer, Mark Adams, describes him as a mama's boy, which makes sense, obviously he's going to be dedicated to his mom growing up in this kind of environment.

His dad certainly did not give him a lot to aspire to emulate. Bernard was also a sickly boy with poor health, much like his mother. He was smaller than many of the other local boys. And he was regularly beaten up and dunked in a river by other kids. At age seven, yeah, he's, he's a victim of bull. He's got a, he's got to have a lot of sympathy for this kid. This is, we hear about some rough upbringings on behind the bastards, but this is a tough one.

He said dunked in the, like that's freezing cold, gross water. That sucks. Yeah, cause this is like, you know, not a night, not a nice part of the world. I wouldn't say a blasted hellscape, but a hellscape for sure. Now at age seven, Bernard was vaccinated for smallpox. That seems like a good thing, right? Today, I mean, as a rule, big fans of the smallpox facts, big fans of vaccines in general. However, in the 1870s, vaccines were not quite what they are today.

Wait a minute. A bad vaccine experience for the vast majority of people means like, yeah, I felt like kind of shitty for a day. Right. Like you get the COVID vaccine. A lot of people like, yeah, I felt like I kind of had a flu for like a day. Vaccines were different back then. So the best way of vaccinating people against smallpox at the time, it was not like a nice

clean shot. You would cut their arm open with a razor blade and you would shove a scab from someone else's smallpox lesion into the wound. And this works. It does, in fact, confer immunity to smallpox at the low, low cost of killing a significant percentage of the people vaccinated in this manner. Not as many as smallpox did. It's an improvement.

But a lot of people die from this early vaccine because you're just shoving a scab into an open wound. And it gives you smallpox for several of those people, I imagine. It is supposed to give you a weakened case of smallpox that then gives you an immunity. However, none of us here are doctors, but I think we all can understand that if you shove a filthy scab into an open wound, you can get sick, like other than the way you're supposed to get sick. And in Bernard's case, he gets blood poisoning, which keeps him bedridden for six months.

Oh, no. Bernard is. Yes, it's fucking horrible. That's poor kid. And he's, how old at this point? Oh, he's like six. Oh, it's poor kids. This is probably his earliest memory.

I mean, this is probably like his earliest memory is like spending six months dying in bed because a fucking maniac doctor shoves a scab into his open wound. Oh, with like a probably rusty knife. Yeah. I mean, sanitization. I mean, the doctors were arguing strenuously about whether or not washing your hands was like the devil's play thing or something. Like it was not a great time for science.

And to make it much worse, Caitlin, not long after he recovers, this happens. And I'm going to quote from the biography, Mr. America, which is about Bernard McFadden. One morning, not long after Bernard had recovered, his mother took him to St. Louis, so already we're on a bad start here. They were met at the Mississippi River Docks by a strange gentleman. Mary explained to her son that the man was going to take him away on a steamship. She did not mention a return trip. Long after the boy had grown up and reinvented himself as Bernard McFadden, he recalled the

resulting scene as being torn, screaming and clawing and kicking in a frantic agony of fear from his mother's arms. The man managed to pull Bernard from Mary and lead him towards the wharf, but the boy broke free and ran back to his mother, tears running down his face. Mary told her eight-year-old son the cold truth, hopeless and nearly destitute, wasting away from late stage tuberculosis. She no longer had the energy or means to care for a growing boy. She was sending him off to the cheapest boarding school she could find.

So she, and again, I don't, I can't put any blame on her. She's in an impossible situation. She's trying to be, she wants her kid to have someone to take care of them. She's like, I am dying and I cannot provide you with food. Like this is the best option that is available to me. And it's a shit option because this school is a horrible place. This is a school that would qualify as a war crime. There are concentration camps that were nicer than this school, you know?

Are we going to hear more about this school? Yeah. It was officially an orphanage. Bernard called it the starvation school. He was, of the opinion as an adult that the orphans in Oliver Twist had it easy compared to him. Children were barely fed. The only calories they could reliably get came in the form of peanuts, which at the

time, peanut butter hasn't been like created yet. So at the time, peanuts are basically trash and are being sold as hog feed for a dollar a ton. So that's what the kids get and not much of that. So after several months of slowly starving to death, Bernard's mother came for him. She'd managed to find, like get in contact. It's hard to get in contact with family, right? You may know like, well, I've got relatives in this state, but like you haven't seen him

in years. It takes six months to fucking get anywhere. So she manages with like the last strength in her body to find some relatives who are willing to take Bernard's sisters, who she keeps with her. And then she comes back for him because she's figured out a better solution for him. She knows she's close to death at this point. She's kind of scrambling to get all of her children set up as well as her limited resources would allow.

Unfortunately, she was not great at this, although arguably you could again say this is like an impossible task. And the person that she places Bernard with after this orphanage was an extremely distant relative who saw him more as cheap labor than a human being. But it's a step up from the starvation school. Yes. Yeah. I suppose so.

Yeah, that's better. We're doing fine. We're doing fine. And you know who else is doing fine, Katelyn? Who? The products and services that support this podcast. I knew that was going to happen. They're nailing it.

They're doing great, Katelyn. They're doing great, Katelyn. Anyway, here's ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

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podcasts. We're back. And I'm just basking in the glow of pride that I didn't say, you know who else doesn't starve children? Robert, I was just going to commend you on how pure and not horrible that that break was. Yeah. Yeah.

That's going to keep us in the house and home for another week, Sophie. So this relative and his wife, the family that Bernard is placed with, and again, distant family, run a hotel near Chicago. When Bernard met them, he was overwhelmed by the fact that they were fat, which is he had not like, well, because number one, it's harder to be fat back then. Number two, he has spent his entire childhood starving and his family's been starving. Not enough food ever. So the fact that he just assumes anyone fat is rich as shit, right?

Like he almost couldn't comprehend the idea that people could be fat. Like he recalls this as being like baffling to him. This couple set Bernard to working long hours staffing their hotel. They fed him, but that was about all they did for him. One day, a few months into his time with them, the man he was staying with, like told him offhandedly, Hey, your mom died. And then the hotel owner's wife said, this one's going the same way. She says this to her husband.

This one's going the same way. About Bernard? Yeah. He's got all the symptoms, consumption runs in the family. Like, Hey, mom, your dad, or your, Hey kid, your mom died. And then the lady's like, yeah, it looks like this motherfucker is going to drop pretty soon too. Again, bleak childhood.

Truly. Yes. I would argue not really a childhood. Oh, just, it's just one torturous situation after another. Pretty horrible situation. Out of spite for his relatives as much as anything, Bernard decided then and there that he would become the healthiest man alive. Now, consumption today, when people talk about someone having consumption, generally

they're referring to tuberculosis or TB, but it's also worth noting that like everyone that people said had consumption didn't actually have tuberculosis because medicine was shit and people got sick in a variety of ways that made them like thin and kind of in bad health. And everyone was just like, Oh, that person's like thin and pale and sickly. It's got to be tuberculosis. And sometimes it was like, no, they're not, they're eating like they're not getting nutrients. They're like basically have been starved their entire life of necessary food stuffs or whatever. Like they have, I don't know, a parasite or something like there's all sorts of things

that can make someone in the 1860s, 70s say like, Oh, that's got to be the consumption. I was like, no, you never fed them. I imagine basically everything was misdiagnosed back then. They get some things right. But yeah, a lot of, I mean, I don't think he had TB because he cures himself with like diet and exercise later, so which I don't think works with TB. I think he was just horribly malnourished because he grew up unbelievably poor, right? After a time with the hotel, Bernard was moved to a farm in Northern Illinois.

And these are again, like family members who treat him as labor with no thought to his emotional health or education to the extent that he was ever educated at all in his childhood. It was like he was occasionally sent to school for a day here and a day there because the truant officers were in town and like he needed to like not get them in trouble. Yeah. Still, the fresh air and the manual labor of farm life did him wonders. He starts putting on muscle for the first time. He stops showing what people consider to be symptoms of consumption.

Like as soon as he gets out in the fresh air working with his body and eating a decent diet, he has a high, a diet high in dairy. So he's finally getting a lot of protein for the first time in his life. He's immediately in much better health because again, he didn't have consumption. He was just horribly, he was just starving to death. Just eating peanuts. Wait, is that where that phrase comes from or that expression where like if you like work for hardly any money, you're like, oh, I'm just getting peanuts or whatever the actual

expression is. Yeah. I mean, that would make sense, right? Because it used to be like literally the cheapest food you could possibly get. Yeah. Wow. That would be my guess. I don't know.

So. Let's say that it is. Let's say that it is. During his time at the farm, Bernard began to learn the lessons that would become the center of his health philosophy. Outdoor labor along with a sparse diet consisting mostly of vegetables and milk was the key to health, which is not bad pelt advice. If you spend a lot of time working around outside using your body, vegetables, milk,

avoid red meat, which is a thing like he doesn't, he's not really a big fan of meat. Like that's not bad diet advice. Most people will do all right on that kind of a diet. This merged with his unfortunately well-earned hatred of vaccines, which is understandable. We're not talking about like modern anti-vac shit. If you have Bernard's childhood, I get why you'd be anti-vaccine. When you were like bedridden for six months because you had blood poisoning because someone gave you a bad smallpox vaccine in the 1870s.

Yep. Yeah. I understand. Makes sense to be. Yeah. Yeah. That's not really being anti-science. It's anti-science, but like I can't blame you.

But also the vaccines were anti-science back then. They weren't. I mean, the sad thing is they were better, right, than smallpox because smallpox is fucking nightmare. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird.

Caitlin, I mean, I think most of us would be anti-anything that kept his bedridden for six months. Yeah. I think I would be. Yeah. I think I'd probably not be supportive of that thing. Another pillar of his growing philosophy came when after a particularly bleak church lecture, he stole some of the farmer.

He was living some of this farmer's whiskey and a bunch of chewing tobacco and he basically he has like this church lecture where they're like, everybody's going to hell and he gets sad. So he steals a bunch of liquor and chewing tobacco and he gets just wrecked and he is 12 at this point. He just goes on a bender. Wait. He's 12?

Yeah. He's 12. A hard 12. Well, Bernard. Yeah. He gets wrecked and this is probably the last time he ever gets wrecked because he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover. You know those tobacco and hard liquor hangovers.

Yeah. I went to college. Yeah. I know. Those are not pleasant for you or anyone around you. So he decides based on this hangover to spend the rest of his life sober, which I have decided on a number of occasions. It never stuck with me, but it does for him.

Same. I'm like, oh, I'm never drinking again. That's my last time drinking. I've made horrible choices, but then, you know, two weeks later, I'm having a glass of wine. You know what? I would like a hurricane at nine in the morning. No, you wouldn't. Sophie.

When you drink hurricanes. Not at nine in the morning. First of all, you wouldn't be awake. Not if I'm drinking enough hurricanes. Yeah, Sophie, you're going to have to bribe Robert for like these early recordings with hurricanes. Yeah. Deliver hurricanes to my house and I will wake up as early as 11.30.

That's a lie. That was a lie. But okay. So shortly after this, Bernard, you know, he loves the farm labor. He loves the outdoor life, but he's also, he grows up with a lot of pride, which is, you have to say impressive for a kid who's upbringing is so comprehensively bleak. And despite loving the lifestyle, he's enraged at the fact that he's not getting paid much money.

He thinks he's worth more money than he's getting. So shortly after this, he leaves like the country side for the big city, which in this case was unfortunately St. Louis. He got it. Why do you hate St. Louis? Well, I was born there for one thing. So I get to, yeah, so he gets a job with yet another uncle and this one runs a dry goods store.

Bernard earned $12 a month to help keep the books and manage the store. He was promoted after a year and he made pretty good money for a teenage boy at the time, but the work kept him indoors and huddled over a desk at all times. So he's just experienced what he considers to be the joys of being physically fit of laboring with his body. And then he gets stuck inside a dank office all day, every day. And he goes kind of stir crazy and his health issues return, right? Because he thinks it's his consumption coming back.

The reality is that like, yeah, you shouldn't sit inside a desk all day and not go outside. It's bad for you. It's not good for anybody. And also you are 13. You should not be working a desk job for 60 hours a week. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

That's not good for you. So yeah, his health issues return and he's desperate. He winds up stumbling through the city one day until he happens upon a gym. Now, at the time, gyms are a pretty new concept, right? This is like not all that. I'm surprised they exist at all. Yeah. They did.

They actually started earlier than you might think. The Young Men's Christian Association or the YMCA had been founded in England a couple of decades earlier in 1844. And it had been founded to push back against the unhealthy conditions caused by the switch from pastoral farming lives to industrial work and desk work by men in dense cities. So the actual origin of gym culture comes out of the same stuff that Bernard is experiencing. From farming, which is, I don't know, there's a lot of things that can be unhealthy about some of the different motions of farming, but as a general rule, moving around outside

using your body, the fresh air, people who grow up farming tend to be healthier than people who grow up in dank industrial cess pits like every city in the mid-1800s. And that's where the YMCA comes out of, is people recognizing, not knowing much about health yet, but people recognizing that this seems bad for us, seems like this is killing everybody. They're connecting the dots, no. All the 12-year-olds have lung cancer. We might need to do something about this.

So the Y... Good for those young Christian men. Yeah, good for those young Christian men. The Y and other groups like it had noticed not just the deleterious effects of industrial life on people, but that disease spread rampantly in cramped urban environments. It's a great place for bacteria and viruses to propagate. And these guys came to believe that physical exercise could prevent disease, which is not correct in the way they thought it was, but it's also not wrong.

If you exercise, your immune system will be stronger, which does render you less vulnerable to all of the horrible diseases that riddle a stink-drenched filth pit like England or St. Louis. So religion gets heavily bound up in all of this, as it was with everything else in those days. And the YMCA isn't just like standing for people being healthier. It's part of an intellectual movement that became known as muscular Christianity. What?

I know, right? Well, I mean, you just think about those ripped Jesuses on the wall with like their fucking abs and delts that don't quit. I mean, you're holding yourself up on a cross. Your delts are going to be pretty, pretty shredded, you know? Which are the delts? Are those like your arms? Yeah, it's like back shoulder area.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, baby. So I'm going to read a quote from The Guardian about what muscular Christianity was. Please. The muscular Christian strongly believed in the formative power of athletic competition that by participating in games and sports, young men would be instilled with positive character traits.

The muscular Christians had particular concerns that America's men were becoming soft and thus placed higher value on games that created a few bruises in the process. In 1868, a year before Rutgers beat Princeton in the first ever college football contest, one American muscular Christian wrote, There is a precise discipline in danger. I consider no man educated who is not educated to meet danger, grapple with it and conquer it. And any system of gymnastics which leaves out danger is an emasculated system. And the context of this article is about, there was like one year where like a shit, like teams worth of people died in a single football season because they didn't wear

any kind of, they were just murdering each other out on the gridiron like that was football. We were just like, yeah, let's go watch some kids kill each other. Oh my goodness. Okay. So hang on, I have some thoughts. There seems to be a lot of toxic masculinity wrapped up in this because there were just like. Hundreds?

Like even more than you'd expect, well maybe not more than you'd expect, but they're just like, we need to be violent toward each other because if we're not, that's emasculating and we need to beat the shit out of each other or otherwise we're little girls. Yeah. I mean, the attitude is very much, it's not really proper, not necessarily not proper exercise, but certainly not a proper sport if you can't die doing it, which is my attitude towards a good party. You know what?

I don't, I don't disagree. Yeah. No. All joy carries with it the risk of death. This is, this is what we're cursed to know if, if the stakes aren't high, I'm not having fun. Yeah, exactly. Fuck it.

Yeah. That's why drunk driving has such a proud cultural tradition. Now, while all this is happening, the actual science of fitness is also starting to grow. People are beginning to learn how to be physically fit and yeah, they're starting to, right? There's, I mean, today there's more misinformation than good misinformation about fitness. So it's even messier back then. Now for centuries, physicians had advised months of bedrest and indoor isolation for people who got sick.

Like if you were sick, they would say, well, you need to hide in a room alone. Like don't go outside, stay in this like quiet, dark, dank room and never leave for years, which you might recognize as bad for people. Yeah. Look, I've seen the secret garden and I know that that's not how that works. So yeah. I mean, I think a secret garden is good for people, especially if you're talking about like a gorilla grow and you're illegally growing marijuana in like public land, great for your

health for a lot of time running. I don't know if you've seen the movie, but it's about a little sickly boy who's just like kept away in isolation and then the little girl, like a cousin of his comes and like finds him and then she's like, by the way, I found this secret garden outside your house. Let's go to it. And he's like, I can't. The spores will kill me and she's like, no, it'll be good for you. And then he gets really healthy and then he's like, he's great because he goes outside

and enjoys the garden outside because we were supposed to be outside a lot of the time. Otherwise we die. So yeah, in the last 20 or so years of the 19th century, doctors slowly start to and not evenly start to realize that like, oh, it's good to move your body. People are less likely to die when they regularly move their bodies. This actually makes a lot of health problems better. Like having people go out and bicycle stops them from getting horribly sick sometimes. And I'm going to quote from the book, Mr. America here.

Though Americans had a history of importing fitness vads from the continent, Ben Franklin wrote in 1786 that he'd reached a ripe old age because I live temporarily, drink no wine and use daily exercise of the dumbbell. It was not until the United States was well into its own industrial revolution that its first homegrown fitness guru emerged. He was Diocletian Lewis, fucking incredible names back then. Diocletian Lewis, I think Diocletian was a Roman emperor. He was Diocletian Lewis, a Harvard University physical education instructor.

In September 1860, Harper's Weekly Magazine hailed him as the genius behind the country's athletic revival. His enemies were stress and inactivity and his weapon was exercise. The newly formed classes of desk-bound office clerks and the expanding ranks of house-bound urban mothers were stockpiling nervous energy in their pale, untaxed bodies, like pressure building in a Fulton steam engine. In 1869, the physician George Beard gave this malaise the name neurasthenia. It was also commonly known as exhaustion.

Americans were warned to beware its symptoms, insomnia, anxiety, headaches. And that's, again, they don't understand the reason behind it, but that's good, basically accurate, that like, yeah, if you spend all day stuck inside not moving your body, you feel like shit. It is bad for you. It's good to get outside and move around. So that's kind of how that all begins as a broad cultural understanding. And after Diocletian Lewis came another Harvard man, Dudley Allen Sargent, who coined the

term preventative medicine. He's like the first guy to be like, what do we, stopped people from getting sick? Can that be based? And he devised the first pulley weight machines in exercise history. So like the origins of all the, like, not like free weights, but the different machines at your gym these days or whatever, like he's, he's the guy who figures out like the first of those. And Sargent is generally recognized as the father of physical education, which in some

ways makes him the worst bastard we've ever discussed on this show because he is the origin of PE as a concept. Oh, did you not have a good time in gym class, Robert? Did anyone? Was that a good time for anybody? I had a great time. I loved getting changed in front of other people in the middle of the school day. That was the best part.

I somehow scammed my way into being the assistant who counts the laps on lap day in the seventh grade. So I didn't have a lot of friends, but I didn't have to run lap day. I had a friend who died in PE. Oh, really? He is bad. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He had like a hard problem. He'd been like, he had, he had been exempt from PE for years and then for whatever reason, they decided he was better and he could, he had to do PE and then he dropped dead during a run. That was horrible. It was pretty fucked up, pretty fucked up.

So you know, whatever. Time class, so at any rate, by the last 20 or so years of the 1800s, you have a few different distinct strands of physical culture come in again. You see, these are all like different, but they're all kind of interrelated. You've got these muscular Christians talking about like the way, the idea that sport and fitness improves moral character, right, that like God wants you to take care of your body because it's his body and like this is part of like being a good Christian. You have the more humanistic secular values of Diocletian Lewis, who sees activity as

an antidote to sedentary industrial life. And then you've got Sergeant, whose values are kind of the father of PE, whose values are starting to verge on eugenics, right? The basic idea is like, okay, look at technology, colonialism and history. It's obvious that people are improving, right? That's how these people think white people in this period like, oh, people are obviously better than we were before because we used to be savages. Like the people who I still consider to be savages, who's everyone who isn't white and

lives in a city. And so his idea is that like, if you can improve people through exercise, if it makes people better than if you can force societies to exercise at scale, you can improve the human race, right? Which is, and again, exercise is good, I would argue this is not a healthy way to think of exercise. No, especially because like that has evolved into like modern day, a lot of like modern day ableism, which is like a huge problem with the like wellness movement that exists

now. And I mean, yeah, yeah, it is a problem. It's one of those things like when I talk about it is good to move around, it is good to exercise. There are people who don't have that option, and that requires them to do additional things in order to stay healthy, because like you do, like your body needs a certain amount of exertion in order to do its best and it's difficult. But you're starting to see, I mean, obviously these people being who they are, there's a

lot of moral value attached to being able to exercise and in the way that they think is best. Right. And there's a lot of problematic shit as there is still today, as you just noted. But you know what's not problematic, Caitlin? The goods and services? The product sensor. The goods are incredibly problematic.

Oh my God. Do not, do not check out like fucked up. I'm so sorry. Fucked up. The products. Yeah. The products are fine. Products are golden.

Unless it's, unless it's, yeah, you know, one of the not good ones that we didn't approve that slip. Yeah. That we, yeah. Like if it's like if it's Chevron or black rifle coffee or black rifle coffee. But do, if you get an XC ad, I do recommend hiring XC for all of your mercenary needs. Look, they're monsters, but if you need a bunch of men who won't ask questions to kill people for you, you've got to go with XC.

This has been a paid advertisement of what used to be black water. Here's the rest of the ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The idea of fitness and again, this is like, I don't know if there was no coined eugenics thinking at this time, eugenics isn't really like a popular thing yet in 1879. But the precursors of it, like people are starting to have the ideas that will feed into the eugenics movement that dominates the early part of the 20th century. And this kind of like fitness as proto eugenics, one of the people who takes it on is a guy named William Blakey.

Now in 1879, Blakey writes a book titled How to Get Strong and How to Stay So, which is not a bad title for an exercise book. Blakey was an endurance athlete with a Darwinian attitude towards fitness. His book included much of the same sort of exercise advice that Sergeant gave, mixed with appeals to patriotism. You could see where like the eugenics nature of this is like, we need to make a nation strong, you know, unsettling stuff. Early on, he makes sure to compare American youth to British youth, who he claims are

in much better shape, capable of running miles without breaking a sweat. Quote, let him who thinks that the average American boy would have fared as well as these British kids, go down to the public bath house and look carefully at a hundred or so of them as they tumble about in the water. He will see more big heads and slim necks, more poor legs and skinny arms and lanky half built bodies that he would ever have imagined the whole neighborhood could produce. So he's like, go look at a bunch of naked kids and tell me how weird they are. Pretty creepy.

Yeah. That's not great. That's not great. So this has been a long digression, but I think the background is necessary. So when we left off our man Bernard, right, he's feeling like shit. He's working indoors all day and he starts like walking about, like looking for a way to deal with his health problems and he comes across a gymnasium. This is in 1883.

He is 15 years old and he sees his first gym and he sees a bunch of dudes working out. And again, health is shit in the 1880s, right? Because people are dying from the time they're like four. This is his first time seeing healthy people like he sees people who have like muscle. Not just because they're at a gym, but because it's expensive to go to the gym. They're wealthy. So they're able to feed themselves well and they're of the fairly small number of people at that point who are working out regularly.

So he sees these people, even the least of them looks like an adonis to him. And he's just immediately like, this is what I want to do with my life. I need to have this in my life. But the entry fee to get started at the gym is $15, which is more than he makes in a month. So he cannot afford to join a gym. But just kind of hanging out around the gym, he acquires a copy of how to get strong and stay so. And he manages to find some used weights, some barbells that he can afford.

So he buys some weights. He buys this book. He goes home and he works out for the first time in his room. He later wrote, thereafter, I had but one object in view, I would not be satisfied until I was a strong man. You know, at this point, strong man is like, that's like a thing, right? Because exercise is so new, the first time guys figured I had to lift big weights, it's like you show up like, look at that guy, he can lift a bunch of weights.

Okay. So he's not filled with rickets like the rest of us. So Bernard just like sees all these like fit dudes who basically no one else looks like because no one else has like the resources to do it. And then he's like, my light, my calling is to be a gym bro. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it.

I mean, it might be hard not to because he's basically seeing people who are living close to the way the like normalish people in the 20th century were able to live because they have better diet because they have a basic understanding of exercise and he's living in an era in which like if you only had a couple of parasites, you're doing great. Right. Right. So you get why he might be like, he would be like, oh my God, this seems so much better than my miserable starving life of disease and death.

Sure. I don't, I have a lot of sympathy for him wanting to be a gym bro, I guess is what I'm saying. Yes. It's not like, I don't think, I'm sure, I know Vanity is wrapped up in this because he becomes a very vain man, but it's not just Vanity. It's just like, oh my God, I don't have to be sick all my life. Sure.

Yeah. That is a motivation that is understandable. Yeah. Yeah. So Bernard exercises with these dumbbells and he comes up with other solutions. He finds a 10 pound lead bar and he wraps it in newspaper and he just stuffs it into his shirt every day and goes walking for miles. When he comes home at night, he'll just like set the bar down next to everyone else's coat.

His family thinks that he starts to think that he's mentally ill because like, nobody, like exercise is not commonly talked about. So like, what the fuck is wrong with this kid? Why is he carrying a bar wrapped in his shirt? Also, it's lead. Can you get lead poisoning that way? I don't know. Yeah.

I mean, it's not, this is probably not great for him, but also probably not the worst poisoning he's getting. He did have a lot of poisoning earlier. He's had a lot of poisoning at this point. Everybody was poisoned with a couple of things in those days. That's right. If you get a given somebody and asked bestos milkshake, it would have made them healthier. Not a great time.

So exercise profoundly agrees with Bernard and he gets in a lot better shape. His health problems go away. He starts looking good and he sets out into the world again with a new lease on life. And I'm going to quote from a 1981 article in American Heritage magazine now. He became a hobo of sorts, riding the rails, descending on more of his numerous relations and working as a waterboy for a construction gang, as a dentist's assistant, a wood chopper, and in the tradition of Franklin and Twain, a printer's devil. That's like the assistant of a printer.

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

McFadden, kinesis therapist, teacher of higher physical culture. As to his change of name, he later explained, the picturesque appealed to me. I wanted something out of the ordinary. As to the origin of the word kinesis therapist, he admitted to having no idea. So he makes up both a name, Bernard, which I've heard one allegation, it sounded like a lion's roar to him, so he thinks it sounds stronger than Bernard. Okay. Bernard.

It's very funny. And kinesis therapist is like, yeah, I don't know where that came from. Like I just felt like that, like I just wanted to make up a, you could just do that, right? Like there's no, yeah. That sounds like, it doesn't sound unlike kinesiology or like, it makes sense because like kinesis I think is just basically movement, like movement therapist, that is like what a personal trainer at its best should be. So it's not like, he's not, again, he's not like snake oily at this point.

Like he's actually selling something real. Now nobody has a great understanding of like what's actually good for you and what's actually bad for what exercises may do more harm than good, but that's not his fault. That's just like, we're just now figuring this stuff out, but his basic premises at this point are like, I'm going to help people move their bodies and lift heavier things until they get stronger, which is a broadly positive thing to do. So kinesis therapy may not have been an actual term, but it was a real enough thing and Bernard was good at it.

His studio did well in large part due to his undeniably brilliant slogan. Weakness is a crime. Don't be a criminal. What? I fucking love that. That is everything about like fitness culture today too. Like that's crossfit, right? Like that's all of it.

It's so good. There's just like no, he doesn't dress it up at all. That is so aggressive and yet I imagine for a certain type of person who sees that type of marketing very effective. Yeah. He's very successful from an early stage at this and he's grasping at the thing that all of these people will wind up basically saying. They just put a little bit more of a bow on it now.

Bernard may have been the first personal trainer in history. It depends on how you define it, but he may have been the first person to be like, my job is going to be to one-on-one train people how to be physically healthier through exercise. He might be the person who invented that entire field. So he assert at the very least, he helped to invent the entire discipline. This is going to happen a bunch. It is actually kind of boggling how many different career fields this guy either invents whole cloth or helps to invent.

He is a tremendously influential person. So he invents personal training kind of and in order to make extra cash, he works as a wrestling match organizer. He also experiments constantly with different health treatments. Mostly this would mean periodically fasting and restricting his caloric intake to an extreme degree in order to lose weight while exercising constantly. He would regularly gain and then drop like 30 pounds. I think he had an eating disorder.

I'm actually certain he had an eating disorder because you hear about this. He has this obsession with total caloric restriction in order to drop weight very quickly. Like he's purging. I don't know that he binges, but he certainly purges. Not by puking, but like total caloric restriction, that's eating disorder stuff. I mean, I've been there. In his own writings, Bernard build this as scientific experimentation. He wrote up his findings and submitted them to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.

His entire educational career at this point amounted to a handful of odd days at school to avoid truancy court. So he was not good at writing like he's barely like able to write, but he seemed to sense instinctively that writing was going to be crucial to his success. So while he's working as a personal trainer and it's like a wrestling Barker, he goes back to school in order to learn how to write and he takes a part time job, a more formal part time job to help with this at the Bunker Hill Military Academy as a P.E. coach. And it was here working as an early P.E. coach.

This is not a common job at the time that Bernard would be struck by his greatest revelation from Mr. America quote. For simplicity's sake, Bernard had temporarily abandoned his two meals a day habit for three squares served at the Academy. Near the end of the spring term, he felt the early symptoms of pneumonia coming on and immediately diagnosed his relative gluttony as the cause. Bernard had noticed that farm animals became well by abstaining from food when ill. He immediately cut his own intake back to a couple pieces of fruit per day.

By the second day of fasting, his chest had begun to clear. By the fourth day, the inflammation had all but vanished. His fitness philosophy was starting to gel. Lots of exercise, limited calories, non-traditional cures. So he's making a significant illogical leap here, which is that it is true. Sick animals stop eating. It's not because it helps them get better, it's because they might die and they, as a general rule, the animals he's talking about are like herd animals.

And if you're a herd animal and you get sick, you want to stop eating because there's a good chance you'll die and every calorie you eat while dying is calories that the rest of the animals in the herd don't get. It's the same reason why if you're slaughtering an animal, like a sheep or something, a lot of them, chickens, it's the same way. There's a way to basically like, if you position them properly, they kind of turn off. Like if you get them on their back and you get like a knee on their neck, like it's not like, you're not like shoving them super hard, but it's just kind of an instinct.

And the idea is that like, oh, they've gotten caught by a predator. It's best if they just kind of let it happen so that the rest of the herd can get away. Like there's a bunch of instincts like that in prey animals to where like, well, what's best is the, what's best is not what's best for the individual, it's what's best for the herd. And so like, oh, I'm dying of some disease, I'm going to stop eating so that everybody else stays fed. I did not realize that was like an instinctive thing among certain animals.

Herd animals that do that kind of stuff, the herd does better, you know? So it's amazing. He's very wrong about what's happening. And you also, you listen to like, well, yeah, dude, most, like most people get sick once a year or so at least, you know, at some point, and it usually doesn't last four days. It's usually over in a day or two. So like, it wasn't the starving that got better, it's you waited four days and eventually stopped being asserted feeling better.

But he correlates the fact that he's starving himself because he likes to starve himself with the fact that he gets better anyway, you know, it's unfortunate. This is the start of what will be a series of unfortunate logical leaps that Bernard makes. Okay. After a year at school, like as a PE teacher and as he's also taking classes. So a year, both teaching and taking classes, he's a dedicated, he is a fucking workaholic, you know, he's, I think he's got this attitude.

You do see this in a lot of people with backgrounds as difficult as this is where they're like, I survived childhood, like, and I'm going to spend every second that I'm awake working hard on things because like, I, I don't know, I think because like, he's been that close to death, death was such a constant part of his childhood. I think maybe that that's for, and it's not just him, a lot of people who have this kind of an upbringing in this period become these like dynamos. And I think it's just because they can't stand to waste any time, you know. Also, there's no internet, like you're not going to hang out on Twitter or anything.

Like you got, like there's nothing, literally nothing to do. So what else, what else are you going to have? Right. You got to take a bunch of classes and work as a coach and work as a personal trainer and learn how to write and starve yourself and work out constantly. Yeah. Yeah. After a year at school, he applied this new healthcare revelation to wrestling and he

used his ability to starve himself to train as a middle or heavyweight fighter. So he would, he would get, build up a bunch of muscle mass and, and you know, he's a big guy. So he would be like a heavyweight, but then he would purge, stop eating for several days and lose 30 pounds. And then he would go fight wrestlers who were as heavy, like who were like, he would, he would basically drop down into a lower weight class, but with people who he was stronger than because he'd been training as a heavyweight, but he go down like a middleweight or something.

And he would gamble on the outcome and win. Um, he was actually really good at this, which is a wild scam to run. So he'd be like disproportionately more muscular and strong than them. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a thing.

Um, I, yeah. And I'm sure the fact that like nobody's that great at being healthy at this point makes it easier for him. Cause like, yeah. Sure. Yeah. He was briefly the most popular wrestler in the St. Louis area. His fame got him a fancy and well-paying job as a PE teacher at a better school where

he wrote his first novel, a near plagiarism of Jane Austen based around a swole dude titled the athlete. I know when you, when you said he wrote a novel, I was like, wait a minute. Yeah. I didn't know he had aspiration. He was creative. He takes Jane Austen and replaces like the lady protagonist with like a jack dude and the book is titled the athlete's conquest.

So again, let me, I mean, you can guess, you can guess what's in that book, right? I can. So the book is terrible and no publisher will take it. So Bernard self publishes it. He's popular enough as a teacher that all of the kids at his school buy it and it does okay. Okay. In 1893 at age 25, Bernard moves to New York city.

He's only 25 at this point. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. He's doing a lot. Too much. Some would say too much. So he moves to the big apple and his years of teaching PE and coaching people had convinced

him that his brilliant health wisdom needed a bigger audience. It wasn't going to be enough to just work one on one or even just like teach a class of people at a time. He's got to reach the nation, you know, he's decides like, I've learned too much about starving myself and plagiarizing Jane Austen from American heritage quote almost immediately after leasing an apartment in New York, McFadden presented a physical culture matinee and invited the press, a local newspaper accepted and reported that the professor as McFadden was now calling himself chatted and posed in an interesting way for over an hour.

He's just like talking and like showing off his muscles. So he's just kind of doing like spoken word, but mostly just like flexing. Yeah. He's, he's literally just like flexing and talking to one man show where he's like, check these muscles out. Look, a man who's not dying of goiters, look at how unswollen his ankles are. And this had an audience. Yeah.

Yeah. It's very popular. A lot of, a lot of journalists show up. Again, nothing is going on. Like there is, there is absolutely nothing happening in the world at this point. So there just a fit man is talking in town, send the New York times. So McFadden's other passion was for his ideas. They had to do with the Titanic benefits of exercise, the right foods and periodic fasts

and the extreme perils of among other things, corsets, white bread, doctors, vaccination, overeating and prudery. So these are the things that he's flexing. He's talking about like corsets are bad for you. True. White bread is bad for you. Also true. Doctors are bad for you.

Honestly. And this time, not wrong. These are bad for you, not true, but understandable that it's wrong. Over-eating is bad for you, accurate. And it's bad to be approved. And what he's meaning about this is that like the human body is incredibly like verboten at this point, right? Like you don't like, even in like health textbooks, it's, it's considered kind of risque to show

the naked human form. And he's like, no, people should look at naked human bodies. Like if you want to see how you're supposed to exercise, you should have like a guy who's mostly naked on their lifting stuff so you can see how his body's moving and like, he's a big believer in the, the human, in the, the nudity as like not being a sinful thing. A shameful thing. Yeah. Which is also good.

Right. Like that's good. I love nudity. Yeah. Big fan. So the physical culture of matinee was probably McFadden's first step as a proper fitness influencer. Now that he wasn't teaching people how to exercise, he was giving populations sweeping

healthcare advice based on his own ideas and opinions. And again, these are not all, they're even mostly bad at this point. Corsets are, they're not as bad. Like I think there's been a lot of like, oh, they were making people like constantly draw like, I know people who are like way into corsets and there's plenty of ways to do it where it's fine. White bread though is like, is trash. Like it's fine if you enjoy it, but it's not, there's not a lot of nutritional value

in white bread. It's not necessarily good for you. Yeah. Over-eating is something you should avoid if possible. And obviously being a prude is not good for you. Bernard's rejection of prudery was tied directly to his love of fitness. Again, he likes these naked, he likes books that are showing people at like yoga books and stuff.

That is yoga starting to be a big thing in this period of time. And he loves these yoga books of people who are like nearly naked. And he thinks it's, he thinks accurately that like, yeah, it's important. You got to, you can't have somebody wearing like six layers of dresses showing you how to do a yoga pose. You're not going to know what it looks like. Right. Unfortunately, Bernard's lifelong hatred of vaccines and doctors, which by this point

have gotten to be a lot less nightmarish and medieval. That is also makes it into his advice. And again, medical science isn't great at the time, but in raging against those things, he unknowingly set a pattern that's still going strong 130 years later. Because he's just like, fuck doctors, all you need is exercise, which is the same thing the people who have gotten made this pandemic so much worse also believe, right? You can draw a direct line from that to, to, to McFadden. And again, I don't know that he would have been the same guy had he been born 130 years

later, you know, but yeah, I mean, who knows if his vaccination experience as a kid is I didn't get the typhus as opposed to I nearly died for six straight months. He'd probably just be like an Abercrombie model where he's just like really jacked and loves going to the gym, but like, you know, and maybe he, he might still be plagiarizing Jane Austen. Who knows? Who doesn't plagiarize a little bit of, I mean, my novel is just a plagiarism of Jane Austen.

And mine too. And yeah, everybody's, look, there's only been one, a book written and it's, I don't remember any Jane Austen titles, fill it in, finish the joke for me. Pride and prejudice. Pride and prejudice, that's the only book, Pride and prejudice. So the physical culture matinee was a success at drawing attention, but a failure at making money. And after two weeks of like waiting for all of this PR to turn into cash, Bernard is on

the verge of bankruptcy. And at that point, when he's desperate, a successful actor like a stage actor who's huge in New York City, walks into the door of his office as a personal trainer and asks how much is it going to cost to get me in shape for a role? This is the first time this has ever happened. And Bernard thus invents what I think is like his third career field at this point, body sculptor to the stars. So this is the first time like a famous actor is like, I need to get jacked for a role.

Can you help me? And he's like, yeah, absolutely. This is like, I think he invents this, like this is like how all like Kumail Nanjiani just like got ridiculously swole. Like this is the start of that entire career field is Bernard being like, oh, shit, if I get this famous dude, like ripped, that's going to bring me a shitload of business. Then you can be cast in the Eternals. Yeah, you can be cast in the Eternals.

Chris Pratt can go, I mean, I'm sorry to bring up Chris Pratt that shit, but like, yeah, this is a thing. But yeah, Chris Pratt would be nothing without Bernard McFadden, nothing less than shit beneath our feet. He would be Mr. Guardian of the galaxy. No, we'd spit on him like we did before he was on anyway, because he's a fucking homophobe. He's a loser. He's very rich and successful asshole, unfortunately.

But anyway, whatever most of them are. So Bernard McFadden becomes a body sculptor to the stars and he gets suddenly just a flood of customers, right? It always has worked that if you can show like, hey, this famous person is jacked by doing this one simple trick, a bunch of people will be like, well, I could be famous too. If I just got jacked, maybe that will make me famous. The human brain is a magical thing. So in short order, Bernard has more business than he knows what to do with and he becomes

a minor celebrity himself, getting the city's top celebrity photographer to agree to do a photo shoot of his body. Now, this famous photographer is going to come by and take like shirtless pictures of Bernard posing and he wants to look his best. So what does he do? He starves himself for a week before the session so that his abs will look more defined. I think this is the first time anyone does that. Every abs scene you've ever seen, like if you, you can actually read about this, anytime

you've seen an actor, you like, who's like super shredded in a movie where their abs are, they don't drink any water for like a day before that scene because it makes their abs show out more. They have to do really unhealthy shit. It's really bad for you. I think he invents this. I think he's the first person to be like, oh, I'm going to get like a shirtless photo taken.

I'd better starve myself and dye myself water so that my muscles look more defined. Like, I think he invents this. Yeah. Again, this guy invents so much shit. It's really kind of amazing. And also, you know, terrible because it's, it's really, it's not only is it bad for the actors who do this. You can talk about like Hugh Jackman, I think has talked a decent amount about like, yes,

it's fucking miserable being like famous for being super jacked because you have to stay super jacked, which is like horrible. I think it's not. Zac Efron has spoken about this, too, on his Netflix show where he's like, I didn't eat a carb for six years and then he goes to Italy and does a bunch of carbs. Bad. It's one of those things, too. It's also, you're not actually nearly as strong as, as you look when you are like that.

If you look at actual strong, like people who are like, who compete to lift the most weight, like actual practical strength, not like compete to look like a strong, but compete to like, who can lift 800 pounds over their head? They all have huge middle sections and bellies because that's like necessary to being physically strong. Look at a longshoreman, right? Like those guys would beat the shit out of your average underwear model and it's because like they're, they have functional anyway.

It's bad to starve yourself. It's not, not good for you physically. It's not good for you. It's morally bad again. We've all struggled. A lot of us have struggled with eating disorders. I have, but like it's not good for you. And Bernard really gets that started.

Like really is the origin point for that in our culture. This idea of like starvation and like particularly starvation to make yourself look better for like a photo shoot, which then passes on to like all these people having unreasonable expectations for like, well, my body should look like that all the time. And it's like, well, their body doesn't look like that all the time. They didn't drink water for a day. He's like passing this information along like, here's a little tip and a trick. If you deny yourself food and water, you can look hot.

Yeah. You think of this as like a fire. Like he shoots this into the body politic and it's never left. It's great. For the next few years, Bernard works as a teacher, a personal trainer, a model and a writer, finally selling articles on fitness and health to numerous publications. But the whole time Bernard's number one product was Bernard McFadden. Right again.

He's like influencers today. Next he decided to bring the benefits. You are the good in the service, sorry, the product in the service. The product in the service. Goods are trash. Fuck them. Next he decides to bring the benefits of his teaching to people in their homes by creating an exercise machine anyone could use.

So he's the first fitness influencer to make an exercise machine and sell it through the infomercials of the day. This guy, you have to respect how groundbreaking he is. Like every month of his twenties. He's inventing a thing that exists forever now. And he hasn't killed that baby yet. He has not yet killed that baby. Maybe.

It's debatable. Maybe. Right. So, so far, I mean, I admire his... There's a respect you have to have for anyone who is this influential, right? It doesn't mean they're good because a lot of the things he's invented even at this early stage are bad things. But it is like, well, goddamn, like...

I mean, his productivity, and I know we shouldn't like measure someone's value or anything like that based on productivity, but it's one of those things I still kind of hang on to where I'm like, I've done nothing today and this guy, and he's twenty-five and he's inventing all these... He's created like four different poisons that still exist in our society. He started singing the song that might end the world, you know? So he invents this exercise machine and he describes it as, quote, a combination of rubber cords running over pulleys, and it was such a failure in the U.S. that the company making

it goes bankrupt, but Bernard doesn't take this lying down. Instead, he takes the machines that have been built and he travels to England and he holds a series of stage shows where he shows up on stage in a loincloth, lit from below on a background of black velvet, and he poses with his machine, lecturing on its benefits while showing off his shredded abs and biceps. He is hosting the first infomercials, which he does in England. Wow. Yeah, because he's like trying to advertise it, I think, through the paper in the U.S.

It doesn't really work. Next, from the book Mr. America, perhaps inspired by the life-changing pamphlet of dumbbell exercises he'd received on his first visit to the Missouri Gymnasium, he published a four-page brochure describing how to use the McFadden Exerciser. When British audiences devoured this fitness wisdom, the frustrated writer began adding his rejected health articles to the publication's contents. What started as an instruction manual was soon transformed into a miniature physical culture periodical.

Inside was an address to which interested parties could send money to receive future editions. Orders flooded in. McFadden quickly arranged to publish the pamphlets regularly out of London as McFadden's magazine. So, he starts the first fitness magazine. This is really the first one that exists. And this leads, McFadden's magazine in England, leads quickly in 1898, like he returns home.

And in 1898, while he's back in the U.S., Bernard McFadden creates a new magazine. And this is going to be his first dedicated full-time publication. And it is the first dedicated health magazine in history. He calls it physical culture. His wife would later say that most of his articles and the dozens of books he started writing from this point forward were the result of him encountering a physical malady, getting through it, and deciding that he had arrived at a medical breakthrough. Since his default treatment for almost everything was to starve himself or to exercise, most

of his recommendations were based around starving yourself or exercising. He quickly developed a fan base. From the Wall Street Journal, quote, he attracted a following of serious people that included, among others, Upton Sinclair, the guy who wrote the jungle, who contributed articles to physical culture. Proto-feminists such as Charlotte Perkins and Margaret Sanger also wrote for McFadden. From the beginning, physical culture was rooted firmly in the imperialist dogma and white supremacy at the time, but not in a Nazi way, in like the noble savage cultural appropriation

way, right? I'm just like, they're different, so I'm making that clear. From an article by Catherine Kaiser of James Madison University, quote, physical culture played into an ideal of frontier masculinity that may explain its strong circulation numbers in the West. The magazine contains some expressly regional content. In an early issue, a reader inquires about a physical culture settlement in New Mexico. Physical culture also plumbed US mythologies associated with the West, praising indigenous

diets and midwifery with imperialist nostalgia. McFadden published fiction by Jack London, reinforcing that fantasy of white masculinity, Northwestern exploration, and the raw elements. The magazine was considered scandalous for its pictures of scantily clad bodies, which may explain its limited circulation along the Bible Belt. Physical cultures versions of muscular manhood and fearless femininity promulgated frank sexuality and clean eating, still hallmarks of California culture. So he kind of invents California in a lot of ways, like he really, he really does like

that's like this whole mix of like, um, often a historical idolization of indigenous diets based on stuff white people wrote as opposed to actual history mixed with like the benefits of exercise and fasting. Like he invents California suddenly Southern California, scantily clad, sexy, and scantily clad scantily sexy people. Yes. He's just created Southern California. From the beginning, physical culture, the magazine was influential from more than just

its health advice. It was also one of the first mainstream publications where Americans could see scantily clad or even naked human bodies. At the time, Anthony Comstock was a US postal inspector and the secretary of the New York Society for the suppression of vice. His job was basically to make sure that stuffy Victorians in the big Apple encountered nothing that might harm their sensibilities. When someone pointed out that there was a hugely popular magazine with photographs and

drawings of topless women in it, he lost his fucking mind from history net quote. In 1905, he rented Madison Square Garden for a monster physical culture exhibition advertised with posters of muscular men and women minimally dressed. Anthony Comstock, head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, seized the posters and arrested McFadden for obscenity. The court convicted him without penalty. The hoopla drew 20,000 customers, so again, being censored is great for his business. Police again arrested McFadden in 1907 when a New Jersey postmaster charged that a physical

culture article about venereal disease was obscene. The jury convicted McFadden, the judge sentenced him to two years in prison. He filed an appeal, meanwhile, traveling the country, denouncing prudes and censors. But the appeals court upheld his conviction. Facing prison, McFadden urged fans to write to President William Howard Taft, deluged with letters, Taft, America's fattest president, pardoned the muscle-bound media king. And it's again this mix of things that are bad and things that are good that he's doing. The obscene venereal disease articles that he gets censored for is him like talking very

frankly about this is what gonorrhea looks like. And what it does and how it's spread. What syphilis looks like and what it does and how it's spread. He's actually doing a necessary public service that he gets censored for. Yeah, it's cool. Now while all this is going on, McFadden is fighting the government, while McFadden is fighting the government for his right to show tits and talk about syphilis, he's also operating a cult compound in New Jersey.

So he starts a cult compound in the early 1900s. Of course. Of course. Why not? Like I will one day do, but not on the east coast. Because that sounds horrible. Not on the east coast. We talked about this.

We talked about this. And as cult compounds go, his was pretty milk toast. No one died. Or as far as I can tell, got like raped or anything. Like I don't, I don't, it's kind of a cult. But it's not really. Is it cult white? Yeah.

It's definitely like a diet version. Is it cult? It's a diet cult? Oh God. Oh God. It is a diet cult. Yeah. Wow.

But I have to say, it goes down in history as having the dumbest name in cult compound history. Are you fucking ready for this, Caitlin? So excited. No. No. Physical culture city. What?

That is so stupid. He calls it physical culture city. It's not even truly. It's not even culture. It's very funny. It's like if I called my cult compound behind the bastard's town, like it's just kind of lame. Like come on, Bernard.

Is that not what you're going to call out? Well, it mustopolis, like Jesus Christ. To understand his efforts here, we should go back and talk about the cult compound that inspired Bernard's cult compound, the much better named Zion City. That's a fucking compound name. That's what you call your cult compound, right? Zion City, solid cult compound name. Zion City had been founded at the turn of the century by a guy named John Alexander

Dewey. Dewey or Dewey, whatever, was a preacher who brought 5,000 followers out of Chicago and created a small city where people could live a godly life. In Dewey's estimation, godly meant no drinking, smoking, pork, doctors, or vaccines, so you can see why Bernard McFadden loved this shit. In 1903, Bernard declared Dewey the greatest leader and most remarkable reformer of the last 100 years. Shortly thereafter, Dewey was kicked out of his church for stealing from it.

But Bernard remained deeply committed to his vision, and in 1904 he started writing columns in which he discussed his desire to buy land and create a city. Soon after, he bought 1,800 acres in northern New Jersey. He called it physical culture city, and it was large enough to be subdivided into many lots. His idea was that people would buy lots in physical culture city and build an actual industrial city. He wants this to have factories and shit.

It's located well. It's next to a railroad crossing, so it is possible to get stuff in and out of there. It's got its own 70-acre water feature, which he calls Lake Margaret, which is named after his second wife. He's gotten married and divorced once already. He does this a lot. This happens to him a few times. His employees noted that when it came to the women he married, he preferred Amazons, large

breasted women with large child-bearing hips. When he married Marguerite, he immediately started having her write articles about raising children to a new magazine that he started for her articles called Beauty and Health. Neither of them had kids at this point. They're writing articles about how to raise them. Immediately after their wedding, and again, this is his second marriage, Bernard writes a book, which is his 10th book in the last five years. He's just writing books all the goddamn time now.

It sounds like he's pivoted from plagiarizing Jane Austen to mostly just fitness and self-help. The book he writes is Marriage, a Lifelong Honeymoon. In it, again, he's failed at his first marriage, and he just started his second, but he's like, I got this shit figured out now. I know exactly what I'm talking about. He thinks. His conclusion is that all divorces are caused by people not exercising enough. It's very funny.

Oh, wow. He is funny. He's quite a guy. In 1905, Bernard and Marguerite had a baby, a daughter, and immediately moved to a house that they'd built in physical culture city. The city's opening was announced in Bernard's magazine to great fanfare. He bragged it would be, quote, a community with no sickly prudes, no saloons, drugstores, tobacco shops, or places in which one may purchase things that make for the moral undoing

of man or woman. Speaking of moral undoings, Bernard almost immediately fell in love with his secretary, Susie, and he set a house up with her in the house he lived with with his wife. And yeah. Wait, he set up a house in the same house? He moved her into the house with his wife, yeah. So his wife leaves. Incredible.

She goes to Canada. He never sees her again. She takes their daughter with him, her, and he never sees his daughter again, either. I don't think. Oh my gosh. He's fine with this because he's got Susie now. Susie's mom moves in to help keep up the house, to keep it clean, and Susie gets pregnant with Bernard's second child in 1906.

Physical culture city operated, again, another innovation as an internship scan. He advertised degrees and physical culture to people who would come and cut down trees and plant crops for free. He would build streets and stuff. He builds. This is a work study program, but he makes it impossible to graduate, so they stay as indentured laborers the whole time. Holy shit.

I know. What a fucking groundbreaking thinker. I can't believe I did not expect for that to take that turn. He's amazing. Most people who resided in physical culture city were interns. The rest were a handful of wealthy cranks who wanted to spend all their time nude or experiment with weird diets. There were a lot of raw food fanatics who live in physical culture city.

The whole project fell apart, of course. It never eclipsed 200 people in population. Bernard's arrest for transporting obscene material through the mail actually happened because the postmaster that he bribed to handle the city's mail got angry when Bernard then tried to cut him out of the business, and this postmaster reports him to the feds. A lot of formerly dedicated members abandoned the project when Bernard abandoned his wife, and they're like, oh, maybe this guy doesn't know all everything. He wrote a book on how marriage is a long-lasting honeymoon, and then he abandons his wife.

I can't trust him. Maybe this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. These two things together led to a mass exodus that was exacerbated by a disastrous town meeting in which Bernard accused everyone else of committing, my favorite term ever, physical culture treason. What a perfect maniac. Physical culture treason. Oh, that's good.

He's very funny. By 1907, he and his operation were back in New York City. By 1910, he'd written another eight books, and he'd opened a chain of health food restaurants that sold healthy meals for one cent, and these do seem to have been pretty good. Wait, eight books in three years? Sorry, I'm just doing that math, and that's wild. Yeah, no. I don't think they're good books.

Okay, Katelyn. He's like Stephen King, but with health shit. Right, okay. What have a car made you fit? I don't know, whatever. He also founded a chain of health atoriums, most of which operated similarly to the health club at Battle Creek, operated by Dr. Harvey Kellogg. Bernard personally created treatment plans for each of the patients who showed up at

his health atorium for extended stays. Most of his treatments involved fasting or starvation, and that's where we're gonna end for part one, Katelyn. We have a good bit more of Bernard's tale to tell, but that's gonna have to wait until Thursday. Until then, do you have any pluggables to plug? Oh, goodness, I do. And they are this, you can follow me on Instagram

and Twitter at Caitlyn Durante. And you can check out the podcast that I co-host with Jamie Loftus called The Bechtle Cast, in which we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens. And of course, you can find Caitlyn at Physical Culture City. Born and raised. Born and raised.

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He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.