Mind Muscle with Simon de Veer
Mind Muscle with Simon de Veer
Luxury Beliefs Unpacked
What if your beliefs about health and wellness are just status symbols in disguise? On this episode of the Mind Muscle Podcast, we explore the intriguing world of luxury beliefs, as coined by Rob Henderson, and examine how these ideas serve as modern-day markers of social status. With historical insights from the minds of Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu, we unpack the immaterial signs of wealth and how they shape our daily choices in nutrition and fitness, often at the cost of the less affluent. From the aspirational allure of fad diets to the exclusivity of youth sports, we peel back the layers to reveal how elite posturing influences areas meant to promote wellness for all.
Status signaling is everywhere, and it’s not just about diamonds or designer clothes. Through fascinating tales of spices and dueling, we discuss how individuals have historically projected their identities and maintained social hierarchies. Today, this manifests in the wellness industry where affluent individuals adopt luxury beliefs to flaunt their status, yet these choices often leave others to struggle with the financial and social costs. Our conversation also touches on the ways these behaviors have evolved, drawing a line from past to present in a way that reveals both the superficiality and the social power of luxury beliefs.
In the world of youth sports, financial capability has overshadowed raw talent, creating a class divide that further complicates the landscape of competitive parenting. We emphasize the need to return to community-focused sports that prioritize personal growth and community bonding over competitive spending. By questioning the true purpose of sports, we advocate for a system that fosters inclusivity and genuine talent development. Join us as we challenge the status quo and encourage listeners to embrace wellness practices that are not only inclusive but also meaningful. Let's reshape the narrative around health and fitness, ensuring that they are accessible and beneficial to all.
Producer: Thor Benander
Editor: Luke Morey
Intro Theme: Ajax Benander
Intro: Timothy Durant
For more, visit Simon at The Antagonist
Welcome to the Mind Muscle Podcast. Here's your host, simon DeVere. Welcome back to Mind Muscle, the place we study the history, science and philosophy behind everything in health and fitness. Today, I'm Simon Devere, and there's nothing new except all that has been forgotten. So today I should only have one big topic I want to get into. I think it's going to take me a while, we'll see. But yeah, no ranting on the gym. People have been pretty good this last week, nothing making me mad that I feel like I need to correct, but yeah, so no, I don't have any preamble rants Today I want to talk about.
Speaker 1:It's a concept that I came across reading an economist blog that I like, noah Smith. Noah Opinion was talking about luxury beliefs, and this was something that I was reading a couple years ago, and I don't know why maybe it was one of those shower things, but I was thinking about the concept, and I was thinking about how we might be able to map this into the health and wellness space, but some potential luxury beliefs that might be out there. So, obviously, though, before I start telling you what the luxury beliefs in health and wellness are, we should probably have a shared understanding of what a luxury belief is in the first place. So anyway, for this we're going to actually have to take a little bit of a deep dive into some sociologists, some philosophers, some thinkers. So that'll be fun. We can do a little bit of history, a little bit of philosophy, and then, once we've got that down of what luxury belief really is, then I'm going to rant a little bit about where I think that this is manifesting itself in nutrition and training today. So anyway, guys, without further ado, let's go ahead and dive right into it.
Speaker 1:Luxury beliefs, these are ideas and opinions that can confer status on an elite group or an upper class, while often inflicting a cost on the lower classes. This is a term that is popularized by a guy named Rob Henderson, and as he sets it up, he kind of points us back to an economist and sociologist, thorstein Veblen, who published a book called the Theory of the Leisure Class. His basic idea was that you kind of can't be certain about the financial status of people. So a good way to size up their means is to see whether or not they can afford expensive goods and leisurely activities. So, like in Veblen's day, people would exhibit their status with, you know, really delicate clothing tuxedos, top, hats, evening gowns the type of clothing that would just get completely destroyed if you were actually doing any real work. That's why they confer status on someone wearing it, because obviously it costs a lot of money and you can't do anything with it. So the visual appearance of things can just confirm status on people. Similarly, activities that are very time consuming, like golf, initially this would be something that working people wouldn't have access to because they wouldn't have access to the free time. So the mere just the fact that you have six hours of free time kind of lets you know about the class that somebody belongs to, one that I think is interesting and kind of well, at least if anyone here is in the United States like I am.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, term we have in this country is redneck. Uh, this term is a. It's all about status signaling. There's actually two versions of the etymology of the term redneck. The one that most people know, I think, is that obviously you get a redneck as a result of being outside doing labor, if you have fair skin and you are susceptible to the sunlight, and so obviously the term redneck just implies that to labor is to be lesser. You can't say that part out loud, but a lot of our cliches do reveal the status implications is a status signifier, and there's also stories that there were these red scarves that were actually worn by these miners in West Virginia that were organizing their labor, and so the term was a pejorative that was either thrown at people who were getting a redneck from being out in the sun or the miners who were organizing, for I don't't know I'll have to read up on what they're, what they were going for, but I don't know. They probably didn't want to breathe like coal or something like that. Um, some crazy, like woke shit. But uh, but yeah either. You know etymology of the word redneck. It is completely a status signifying term that is used to uh, signify lower status upon person with the red neck, whether it be, you know, sun or scarf. Uh, but yeah. So redneck, in a way, is an inverse status signal.
Speaker 1:Um, luxury beliefs that we're going to be getting into are going to be more closely tied to, like goods or activities that can only be purchased or performed by people who do not do manual labor, and they typically are also going to be things that tend to not have any practical utility. Distance from utility is also a good marker of elite status is also a good marker of elite status. So again, henderson, who kind of came up with the term, he also points us in the direction of a French sociologist, pierre Bordeaux, and his book Distinction, social Critique and the Judgment of Taste. So this is kind of exactly what Bordeaux is talking about. So this is kind of exactly what Bordeaux is talking about is that distance from necessity is often what characterizes the affluent or elite classes, if you will. But think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Obviously the first layer you're on is physiological needs. Once you have attained those, you can move up to higher levels, ultimately arriving at self-actualization. Obviously, folks that are concerned with their physiological needs, it's not that self-actualization is beyond them or maybe not important, it's just when you're dealing with necessity you don't have time for things like self-actualization.
Speaker 1:One other piece we want to add to this one more thinker, and then we'll kind of have our framework set up here. Pardon me, so, biologist Amatasatas zahavi hopefully I said that right, probably didn't, but he proposed that animals can evolve certain displays, traits and behaviors because they are physically costly. What he's talking about here, in a sense you can almost call it like conspicuous fitness. But, um, you know, consider, like a aelle, they'll often engage in what's called stotting, where they're repeatedly jumping as high as they can, springing vertically as high as possible, All the feet raised. It's completely inefficient, burns a ton of energy, but it what it's doing is actually signaling to any predators that you know, essentially, I'm so fit I can afford to waste tons of energy. Um, if you give chase to me, not going to be anything to dust you. Um, so a predator who is observing this is obviously going to avoid targeting a gazelle that was starting versus one that looks a little less lively and energetic. So, no, we also have, I guess, just a biological basis, then, for sort of displays, again, of fitness or status In humans. It's top hats, designer handbags, watches. In nature, it's going to generally be a physical signal displaying vitality.
Speaker 1:So everybody we just talked about Viblin, bordeaux, zahavi all claimed that humans or animals flaunt certain symbols and communicate in specific ways. They will adopt costly means of expressing themselves in order to obtain a distinction from the masses. So, again, I think it's fair to say that animals tend to do this physically, or at least it's fair to say that's what we're capable of observing. Humans obviously do it economically, culturally, with symbols, activities we'll get into this later diets, workouts. I think that there's almost no domain in our social sphere that is completely immune from this, but I don't know. Ironically, this reminds me of a funny story of just kind of how humans can signal.
Speaker 1:So I remember being a teenager and we're in Tahoe, and even though I live in California now, at the time I was spending my summers in Montana. So, love coming to California, but I still thought of people in California as Californians and we set up for a day hike and when I had just heard the itinerary that we're hiking up to a lake to go swimming I dressed accordingly to what I would wear in Montana, which was board shorts, flip-flops and maybe I had a shirt. I think I was into a big straw hat Back in those days, probably no shirt, but yeah. So when I show up to the trailhead, everybody had a good laugh and to me the Californians looked like an REI cataloger. They'd just gone in there and raided the place and yeah, it was funny at the bottom of the hill that my attire was the butt of the jokes there. But then I actually was the first person up swimming at the lake, since I wasn't carrying a whole bunch of useless crap that I didn't need to get there.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, I just wanted to talk about status signaling in this. Actually, was that what you had, in a sense, was two different cultures status signaling at each other and neither one receiving each other's currency? This happens a lot today. But, yeah, some people were on the mountain status signaling with their new hiking gear. I was status signaling with my lack of gear, basically signaling to people this hike is nothing to me. This is very easy, the type of thing I would do in flip-flops. But again, it was just funny because neither one of us received the currency that the other was trying to pass. If I was trying to impress people with my nonchalance and ease moving up the mountain, I was hanging out with people whose currency was gear and vice versa. But anyway, I guess I'm going to keep ranting just for one second.
Speaker 1:I want to actually interject a different idea. Just this difference between having and being, difference between having and being. This is what I kind of feel passionately about, because I do generally think in today's culture, one of the reasons why we strive to have so much is because we are very little, and I think this is why so many people get kitted out to go for a hike or go skiing the one or two times that they do it. Or I love playing basketball, so I can't tell you how many times you go to pick up and the guys that have all the freshest kicks and all the best gear a lot of times you're just running them off the court easily. Um, and I I know like just another pushing 40. So I'm just like bemoaning things. But you know, actually doing things is hard and takes time and discipline, and buying the wardrobe is is really easy and confers nearly all of the social benefits of actually doing the thing without actually doing the thing. Yeah, so I don't know, you know positive thing I can spin on this or how you can kind of pragmatically be more in the being orientation than the having Simple one, even in your language.
Speaker 1:Use more verbs, use fewer nouns, talk about things. You're doing a lot more than the objects. What do you do? Um, there's actually a meme floating around that I like I do mean this is a joke, but I kind of believe it no one's going to remember how much money you had the clothes you wore. What people are going to remember was what your bench and squat maxes were. I don't actually think anybody gives a shit about your bench or squat maxes either, to be fair. But I actually think there is a better chance that people tell stories about that when you're gone than about how many hours you hit of overtime, particularly if it's your family, because they're not going to give a shit about that time, particularly if it's your family, because they're not going to give a shit about that. But yeah, somebody might care if you took an active interest in their life or you did something impressive while they knew you. But no, anyway, I'll be done with my commentary here in just a second.
Speaker 1:But modern consumers, I think, really identify themselves by the formula I am equals what I have and what I consume. Simon says bullshit. You are what you repeatedly do Present tense, not did. You are neither what you have nor what you've done Present tense verbs only the having person is going to rely on what they have. The being persons rely on the simple fact that they are. This is again why not to make too much of it. But this is why, if you just throw me on a trail out in the middle of nowhere, why I don't necessarily need a lot of gear.
Speaker 1:A being person doesn't rely on things to get through the situation. A being person is going to rely on other things that kind of come from being in the present moment that you can only become aware of if you're actually in there. People might call it spontaneity, people might call it creativity. Those are nice words, but if you really want to engage that state, you kind of have to get yourself deep into the present moment and then whatever people call that is up to them. But yeah, key thing, I think, is up to them. But yeah, um key thing, you know, I I think to being truly adaptive is again engaging more of this being nature, um and but all right, last amateur linguistic point, and then I'll move on.
Speaker 1:But I will say that I honestly think you know, tied to this, when I'm talking about possession, I think for most people, except for parents talking about their children, the word love you know if you listen to how people are using it typically means more have or something closer to possession being implied when they use it. The only time I can honestly think when I hear it is is again when people are maybe talking about their, their children. But when we talk about the things we love. We're mostly talking about the things that people want to possess and then even read some you know philosophy, that that maybe that even trickles into people's ideas of love. But that's so far beyond my scope and not what I came here to talk about today. No, I guess what I do kind of want to say is I know these are really divided times. So, yeah, part of my interest is kind of throw everybody under the bus in this and it's like how do we get here, how do we get to this place where people are so divided over basic things? And I kind of want to just point to this.
Speaker 1:There's many things. One of the factors might be this having orientation, this belief that I am what I have, I am what I consume, and I actually find this belief to be a shared ideology. It's funny and I mentioned this a lot I moved around and I've lived in different places, so it's always funny for me to see how people will treat me based on these external circumstances that I choose to present to them. And it isn't hard for me to navigate, because the easiest thing in the world is to just change external things about yourself and just reflect what people want to see when I'm in coastal California, I can talk about a certain set of issues that when I am in Montana or North Carolina, I can just steer the conversation in a different direction. And for me, who grew up around a lot of different people, it's effortless to make this change if I want to. I spent most of my life doing that, but no, so anyway, I'm just spending all this time because, again, where we were initially talking about was human status signaling. This is something that I personally have lived, so I don't want to only just share that. There's these kind of academic sources that I've come across. But part of why I find this interesting is this really does map so much to my lived experience.
Speaker 1:I actually remember one time having a co-worker come to me and she was conservative and she just comes and gets in my ear and just says oh God, you're the only one I can talk to around here. Everybody else is whatever. They didn't call it libtard back then. This was like in the early 2000s, it was softer language, but she was convinced that I shared all of her views. And then, yeah, I'm sure an astute listener can probably figure it out, but at this time the Iraq war was the main thing and I'm probably the only person she spoke to that.
Speaker 1:At this time. The Iraq war was the main thing and I'm probably the only person she spoke to that actually protested the war, never made a thing of it at work, apparently because she felt very, very comfortable sharing a lot of stuff with me and I just never gave her a reason to not believe what she wanted to believe. And honestly, I've done this to so many people, and mostly when I was younger. But again, as people kind of talk about how divisive and intractable these problems are part of me, who grew up around people who have all of these views, has to call bullshit on that. There really is a lot of performative things that go on in all of this is a lot of performative things that go on in all of this. And no, it's actually quite easy to have these conversations. There's something different about how the conversation is being had, but intractable, hard to get past the gap not at all. I think that you guys have really been fed an illusion of division, despite the fact that we all have different social contexts. It's actually quite easy to bridge the gap.
Speaker 1:But anyway, let's kind of get back more to the topic, because I do want to get into luxury beliefs in fitness. So I got to finish up on just status signaling in general. So again, another difference between human status signals and signaling in animals. They tend to be copied or trickled through the rest of society. So once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent tend to abandon it. So one example might be spice. When spice was a luxury and trade was difficult, it was common among the elites. Once trade opened up, spice was actually abandoned by the elites and they decided it was vulgar and put a time period on this. For you, court chefs had banned sugar and spice from all meals except dessert. Dueling was also once only an elite thing, but then that wasn't adopted by the masses. Then it wasn't prestigious anymore and then it was vigilantism and bad. But when gentlemen did it, it was super cool and awesome.
Speaker 1:Another contemporary example diamonds, prized pretty much only because of their scarcity. You know, conflict free and fake diamonds exist. A lot of people still prefer the real diamond, in spite of saying that they are opposed to murder, violence, rape, um, all of the things that go along in the diamond trade and certainly a lot more than I mentioned. But no, obviously it's not the same status signal to have a diamond that doesn't come from a conflict-free area. So maybe you don't want to be that blunt and put it out there that well. I need this thing to flex on people so that fake one just isn't going to do it. It's not about the hue or the shine, it's, it's about people knowing, uh, that I am somebody.
Speaker 1:Lobster another funny one, but also follows the scarcity that we've talked about. When it was abundant, it was considered cruel and unusual punishment to feed to prisoners. We passed laws on that in early america. Um, regarded about as high quality of protein as rats, becomes scarce, scarce, and then now it literally functions as a status symbol If they ever recover unlikely, but if lobster populations were to recover, we would probably not see it considered fancy food. The thing every one of these things share is again a yearning for distinction. That's the key motive in the switches. There's nothing changing with lobsters or rocks or two people fighting. The reason our tastes change on it just has to do with the social context you live in and whether you can gain a distinction with the behavior. The social context you live in and whether you can gain a distinction with the behavior.
Speaker 1:So this to me is going to be one key part of the luxury belief. I know I've been taking a long time to set this up, but the chief purpose of luxury beliefs is, first and foremost, to indicate evidence of the believer's social class or elite status. Members of a luxury belief class promote the idea because it advances their social position, and they know that adopting these policies is going to cost them very little. Affluent people are again susceptible to these luxuries because they can't afford it. That's precisely why, when you're affluent, even if something has what, to other people, might be a high cost that's a barrier for entry it's still relatively low. They can afford to have luxury beliefs. And if you're an elite group, you have to care the most about status. You're the most sensitive to changes in status. So this is going to be the group that is most fragile to lacking distinction or, shall we say it another way, the most motivated to achieve distinction. And again, distinction is going to encompass not only clothes, food, rituals. It's also going to extend to ideas, beliefs and causes and I am soon to argue, health and wellness.
Speaker 1:One important critique, though, of the entire idea of luxury beliefs and you might have already picked up on this earlier but we are literally free to believe anything and it actually costs nothing. So just when we're talking in the realm of beliefs and we're drawing comparisons from consumer goods, things like that, clearly we signal differently with beliefs than we do when we choose to buy a BMW versus a Mercedes. There's a different set of social contexts that go into that choice and a different set of costs, and I already kind of jumped into this. But, as I had learned moving around the country, the pressure to conform is different in different regions. The things that I'm supposed to conform to when I'm in California are very different than when I'm in Michigan, washington, north Carolina, montana, any of the states that I've lived in. I already admitted when I was younger I was a chameleon. I just changed with the setting. I bring that up just to highlight.
Speaker 1:I'm really, really familiar how changing certain traits to gain acceptance or social distinction is something that humans are going to do the process for me. I was a new kid. Every year, upon moving to a new place, you'd quickly figure out what the regional norms were. I was young, I valued acceptance, and then I would. One of the most obvious ones was style. So then you just go and copy you know a couple of popular styles, a couple of popular attitudes and then bang, you're in and it really, you know, for me, who was, you know, athletic and just you know good student, conventionally attractive, it was that easy to get acceptance anywhere in this country.
Speaker 1:But people always ask me or say stuff like, oh, where are people in ISIS and this and that? And people don't like the answer. People are really the same everywhere. There really isn't a difference. That was what I picked up from moving around. So much was that people are actually startlingly similar. I would say especially so when in stress, in good times, that's when you get to have some fun, variation and things. But if people are ever going through a tough time, they're just insanely predictable, and people are so far more similar than we are different. Leave it at that, but again, we do live in different social contexts.
Speaker 1:So what I wanted to say because I actually have seen how particularly Rob Henderson kind of uses this concept of luxury beliefs to pick out the political beliefs he doesn't like and call them luxury beliefs. To be quite honest, I agree with some, disagree with others. I think the issue of doing that with political beliefs, though. Is that just the same thing I was talking about. We really have to consider the region somebody is coming from, why they're taking on a view and what that full context is.
Speaker 1:If we're really going to call something a luxury belief, I do think it's a really useful idea though, but if you're trying to label somebody's political beliefs luxury beliefs, I do actually think you have to have a little bit of individual context. You can't say that this belief is a luxury belief because it's on any issue. I got to be honest. It's real different when you're in North Carolina or California. Certain stances take courage in one spot and no courage in the other, and vice versa, and so people in both again depending on their constitution.
Speaker 1:You got some people who are contrarian types, like to be different than the crowd. They're going to counter signal. You got people that want to go with the group. They're going to go with the main signal, and then those signals get inverted in different regions. So again, I know a lot of people like to think that it's the ideas and the ideologies driving this. I actually think it's kind of more on how people relate to groups and social contexts. But again, a lot of that is just anecdotal, based on my experience of living in different places, meeting people and seeing how they come to believe the things that they believe.
Speaker 1:But anyway, with that being said, I just want to acknowledge that there's maybe some potential issues with this whole idea of luxury beliefs. That being said, I think it's really useful and now that I think we've got a solid understanding I know I was thorough, but yeah, now I think we can kind of dive into luxury beliefs in health and wellness. So I swear I am done with the nerdy stuff. On the off chance that you liked any of that, I would recommend David Marks' Status and Culture how Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, identity, art, fashion and Constant Change. That's a really, really fun read actually. Actually, if you found any of this cultural stuff interesting um, no relation to carl marx, if that triggers you, um. And then again, I actually think noah smith has had some good breakdowns of the concept, and he was actually my initial sort of stepping point into there. So I think noah opinion is his blog. Maybe um, sorry, it gets sent to me from a newsletter and, yeah, good blog, though, but anyway, I think one of the clearest places that you can really see particularly that human status signaling that was really described by Veblen.
Speaker 1:But this, to me, is the story that I've really trying to tell you guys about diet fads ever since I started this show. Diet fads really do work, a lot like tech or fashion fads. There is this group of early adopters. I guess there was some marketing book I read a while back. They call them mavens. Is that a Seth Godin concept? I don't remember, but yeah, so you got your early adopters or them mavens. Is that a Seth Godin concept? I don't remember, but yeah, so you got your early adopters or your mavens.
Speaker 1:And what these people again are doing is they're trying to seek a distinction. These people are going to be considered tastemakers, so they're going to be the first to move on a trend. Obviously, as the group observes these cool people doing something and looking cool, they're going to adopt a trend as everybody crowds in. Then the people who need distinction have to move on and do something else, because once the mass is adopted, it is now inherently uncool. Mavens move on. They regain their distinction. The masses follow them. Rinse, repeat.
Speaker 1:So if I can, I just want to tell you the story of fitness fads in my lifetime. I was born in 1985. You can tell. I've also done my research before, but these are the ones that I got to live through and see firsthand. So I was born into low-fat crazes. When I went around the grocery store with my earliest formative memories, everything was low-fat. The 80s fitness elites adopted it, went low-fat. Then the diet was adopted by the masses and health organizations and became the standard advice. Again, that grocery store that I have memories of told you I was born in 85. So if I remember low fat, now we're into the 90s, now we're getting into that mass acceptance time.
Speaker 1:And if you remember, right around the time that low fat got to mass acceptance, that was when all of the diet and fitness hipsters jumped over to low carb. That's when I first started seeing all that stuff pop up. And again, when it started out, it was that type of thing that you had to go to special grocery stores to source. And then eventually it goes mainstream. It's at all the grocery stores that like Kroger and Albertsons it's probably even one company these days but uh, you know all the oh and hey, I live in the south too. Shout out food lion, piggly, wiggly. Uh, michigan, we admire, but yeah, you get it by the time we got into the big box stores. It had gone mainstream and it was time for something else. So the elite started looking elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Get to the 2000s, if you remember. That's when paleo hit and I was all in on that. I jumped in on that too. We were eating like cavemen. Back then, books got written and because I was in the midst of my fitness hipsterdom, I will just have you guys know I was on that shit before everybody. Yeah, honestly, kind of like your favorite bands too, I knew about all them first, yeah, how many concerts have you been to? Oh, yeah, yeah, a week, no, but no, admittedly, that's how I was with diet at this time in my life. So, 2000s I'm jumping early into paleo. But then I start to see all these books getting written and I start to see all the masses coming in and I'm like what I'm special? I'm a food hipster, so I had to dump it. No, actually that's not the real reason. I dumped it. Told you guys a story. It wasn't working out with some of the training I was doing, but anyway, you get the pattern. I'll start going a little faster now.
Speaker 1:Early 2010s, keto hits. That becomes all the rage. Later in the 2010s, plant-based comes in that starts taking over your grocery store by the time you see that now we're lions, now we're getting into carnivore. Check out last week's episode if you want more. Didn't catch the reference there. But again, what I honestly see going on in kind of what diet becomes popular and when it maps perfectly with the status seeking cycle, people go into one mode, it gains adoptance and then they just have to go seek distinction. That again, we don't have to do it over again. That's what is going on with diet. Diet is being used as a signal. Status signaling is a major driver of of the fad cycle. It's for some people it's like having the latest model phone. These are just highly visible public ways to display some distinction. And again, this is mirror talk, not finger pointing.
Speaker 1:I have done this for years, no more than that. While I was doing it, I personally identified as a scientist and I was running experiments and admittedly I do enjoy doing that and I did control them well. But in truth I wasn't also doing this research in isolation and coming up with ideas all on my own. I was testing, in some capacity, the diet du jour. I read things that were a little bit ahead of the mainstream cycle, but that's it. I still wasn't exactly doing my own research. I was actually still partaking in this cycle that was being driven by other forces than my own genuine investigation and experiments. I also got a social benefit for being an early adopter and a fitness enthusiast. I've been a trainer since my 20s.
Speaker 1:So when you're the guy that always has the newest gadget or is on the newest thing, people just come to you with the questions. It's all about relationships. Once people know they can get good answers from you, they come back. Yeah, so it was always an easy way to just kind of signal that I was on the cutting edge and that I was somebody worth talking to. But a lot of the behaviors that I get into when you're kind of in that cycle really do wind up kind of becoming useless things. You adopt it and then you move on Again. That's what's led me kind of to the approach we talk about now. We're always talking about the big boring shit like the big rocks, but none of these attempts were big game changers.
Speaker 1:I've learned a lot, but again, that main thing was to become less dogmatic. Every diet works. Pick one, stick with it. I've probably gotten results on every diet you're talking about and ones that you think don't work, and had other people do it myself. No, I mean, I've really tried to simplify that process of what principles you actually need to pay attention to in diets. But that's literally how I got there. But yeah, I was. I was like a seriously insufferable hipster for nutrition for a long time. Looking back, I don't really think it provided me any critical edge in workouts and, yeah, it established me as an expert in some people's eyes because I was always doing novel, fun things.
Speaker 1:So anyway, I can admit that this was, just frankly, a great example of status signaling and group dynamics side for the lower class is a little bit more nebulous here, I will admit. But I'm actually still convinced that what I think the downside of our fad diet cycle is, and why I consider it a luxury belief, is it muddies the water and it makes things difficult. There's so many people who are genuinely confused when they're trying to source a diet and I do blame this cycle. So again, just to me, the average person going to the grocery store who's confused as hell when they're in like the milk aisle or any other section where there's like 17,000 different processed varieties and they're standing in the checkout and there's all these magazines with like 10 different diets. I think that's actually muddied the water and made it difficult for people to fuel themselves and to even know what's healthy, and it's really annoying because the truth is a lot simpler than the lies. So, yeah, anyway, slightly nebulous, but that's why I'm willing to call this one a luxury belief. The fad diet cycle in general muddies the water. It's a bunch people like like me, trying to be hipsters, trying to be cool, trying to gain some distinction and look like an expert, at the cost of just reaping absolute chaos on the general public's understanding of what good health practices are. So anyway, um, consider that my penance for my years of perpetuating it. I am no longer a member of that cult and I've moved on, but no, anyway. Next one I'm going to talk about is going to be sort of nutrition space, and this one has a much stronger connection actually to downsides for the lower classes, and we're actually going to talk about organic foods. Believe it or not, organic foods really might be a luxury belief. So, first off, most consumers that are going to be choosing organic foods obviously are going to be a more affluent consumer Not shaming you, by the way. I don't think that they put this stuff up in the grocery stores. So, yeah, it took me a while to learn this too, but no.
Speaker 1:2018 study found that if all of England and Wales were to shift entirely to organic farming which in a lot of ways would be a great thing crop rotation, taking care of the ecosystems there's a ton of good reasons to do that. I also don't want to pour a bunch of cold water on this or piss in the pool whatever term you like, but yeah, so they found some good stuff. They found that it would cut emissions from livestock by 5%. It would cut the emissions from growing crops by 20% per unit of production. So what's wrong with that? What's wrong with that is the yield. The issue is that the yield also drops 40%. So then you're going to be in a situation where, if you had shifted everything over, you've got a couple options. You can import food. The resulting importation is going to negate the emissions reductions that you did. You could convert grasslands and other areas over to farmland, but then the issue there is that those lands naturally store carbon and plant tissues, so again, you're going to lose your emissions gain.
Speaker 1:This is just kind of an unfortunate reality is that lower yields they do create economic incentives that may not be driving the intended outcome. And so one, two, I kind of want to speak up for the farmers for a second here. I'm not one, but I know some. And farmers don't want to destroy the environment, believe it or not. But sort of when I see people critiquing agriculture policy without any experience or knowledge of people who do it. I'm not an agriculture expert, I don't want to position myself that way, but no, I just don't have people to say confidently that farmers really, really do care about the environment. They're not trying to actively fuck it up, they are trying to make a living and economic incentives do play a role in all of the choices they make. So if they were to choose to go organic, the economic incentives are going to be a part of it. They can't be ignored.
Speaker 1:When you actually make that switch to become an organic farm, what you're leaning on, you're not buying more land, so you're planning on selling less food at a higher price point. So again, particularly if you're most farming, it's done by these huge farms. If you're even thinking about a smaller farmer that's switching over to organic farming, that's what they're going to have to rely on, they're not going to be able to sell them at affordable prices. So, again, when we have a limited amount of farmland, the people who will bear the cost in this are going to be the lower classes who don't have food to purchase. Similarly and I'm really not trying to trash organic foods I think there's a bunch of great practices that we do need to consider. I mentioned some of those up top Crop rotation. You need to grow the right types of crops within ecosystems to support them, make sure that they stay healthy, not negating any of that.
Speaker 1:But I just feel like a lot of people think, when you get organic food, that that means that there weren't pesticides or anything like that. That also isn't true. So I think, in general it's tough to say because, again, people live in different spaces I think broadly, though, comfortable to say that I think the health benefits of organic food have probably been overemphasized. There's a handful that are kind of worth getting if you will. But just to give you guys a short rule, because I don't have the list in front of me If something has like a thick peel or stock, it's really not going to be that important in front of me. If something has like a thick peel or stock, it's really not going to be that important. And again, it's not like they aren't using pesticides on the organic things too. They're just certified organic pesticides and we can get into what that process of certification looks like at a different time, but you know how that goes. It's probably not as clean as many people have been led to believe. So again, aspects that I really really like.
Speaker 1:The reason I'm sort of pigeoning organic food as potentially a luxury belief is that if we do see continuing demand for more organic food, what you're going to see is more and more farmland switched over to organic farms. That's probably going to lead to the importation of food coming from elsewhere. And again, the people that are going to actually bear the cost is actually going to be mostly lower income people. If you shop at Air One Gelson's Whole Foods, I don't think these are going to be problems that you're going to have. But anyway, I think I also got a couple for you guys in the training realm. I just looked at the clock. We only got time for one more, and this one's much more important to me.
Speaker 1:So, off the top, when I was first thinking about this episode, I actually thought that all that stuff that I talk about in the majoring, in the minors camp, was what we were going to do here, prepared a whole bunch of stuff like that, and then I actually dumped it because most of those things I was going to talk about they're just bad ideas. For an individual Probably not good, but they don't have a downside for the non-user in a different class. So again, I don't care if actually people are buying stupid fitness gadgets that I think are a waste of money, or getting into workout fads that are silly, stupid, potentially harmful, because they're the only person that can get hurt the person doing it. So that kind of is like my body, my choice. That type of stuff I just legitimately don't care about that. If it was creating a downside for other people, not them, then I think there would be something worth talking about. But just to clear up why I've talked down in the past if my clients are doing these things, then I have to badmouth them, but if someone I don't know is doing something like this, what the hell do I care? So, anyway, we're not actually going to talk about stupid products, silly fads, anything like that.
Speaker 1:The place I actually want to go, because I think this is the most important one is the way that we develop young athletes. In this country right now, that's a luxury belief. Specifically, I'm talking about the pay-for-play leagues that are becoming the default method to develop youth athletes. I don't remember the show. Sure, I've talked about this in the past, probably just ranting. But my first point, welcome to my TED Talk. But it doesn't produce the strongest national teams. It frays our communities at a time where, again, everybody agrees that we're incredibly divided and the biggest cost is borne on the non-users, the lower classes, the non-elites.
Speaker 1:I said a lot there, so now I'm going to go point by point and explain every single thing that I just said. So yeah, we've just thoughtlessly stumbled into norms around youth sports that I think most adults that are too old to have experienced it that includes me, by the way. So if you're older than me, you probably haven't experienced this either. You're not really going to realize how much things have changed. Tldr sports have shifted from informal and school-based programs to these expensive pay-for-play leagues. There's consequences for everybody involved for parents being overscheduled, kids burnout but the most profound really are for the lower classes, arguably playing the highest cost in non-involvement.
Speaker 1:I want to quote Matthew Iglesias on this. He's got a blog Slow Boring that I like to check in on every now and again blog Slow Boring that I like to check in on every now and again. But he said that I think shifting from informal and school-based sports to expensive pay-for-play leagues has landed us in a pretty dysfunctional place where parenting is unnecessarily complicated, society is unnecessarily inegalitarian and communities are unnecessarily weak. I love that and I want to echo a point that Iglesias was making in this article. But there really is no easy policy fix. This is why we have to talk about it. It's why we have to think about it. There can't be like a Youth Sports Act to save us from what's going on. People are going to have to fundamentally shift the way we think about what's going on. People are going to have to fundamentally shift the way we think about what's going on.
Speaker 1:And so one you know, payne, how did we get here? Because I think a lot of people kind of grew up where they were. You know, playing sports at school was the highest achievement and I wanted to let you guys know that's a memory. That's not the way it is anymore. You know, in kind of just this process of competing for spots on those school-based teams, paid programs started to emerge and incentives just drove parents to get in and be competitive. The benefits and rewards of sports you know, from scholarships to going pro, to just the benefits to your brain and social these are well known. So parents have just been competing for quite a while now and now we've kind of arrived at a world where again if you're not in this, I don't know if you've experienced anything like it these leagues don't function like leagues in other countries.
Speaker 1:There's no national priority on developing the best athletes. These are for-profit leagues. I'm not against profits that's awesome in a lot of places but the issue with that in youth sports is that you develop the athletes who can pay to be developed. This isn't an issue of taking the top 1% in terms of talent to an elite program to get even better. What we do is a fundamentally different situation. The criteria upon which you get selected to elite athletic training is ability to pay, not elite athletic talent. Studies have been done on this. So a kid, say, at the 70th percentile of ability, but the 90th percentile in household income is much more likely than a kid at the 90th percentile of ability and the 20th percentile of household income. This echoes data that I saw many, many years ago in a 2012 book by Nate Silver.
Speaker 1:The Signal and the Noise chapter in there about NBA and implicit bias plays a lot in perceptions of the NBA. Most people, I think, think that that league is full of people who have strived their way out of tough situations, and the facts don't actually bear that out. I'm not throwing people under the bus. Most people in the NBA come from two family homes great educations, great support systems, all of that stuff. If you think the NBA is comprised of people who've strived out of bad situations again, that's probably because implicit bias and there's a lot of black guys in the NBA and you assume that must be their backstory. But no, most of the NBA stars that you can rattle off your head, with the exception of LeBron James, don't have that backstory.
Speaker 1:You know I'll steal Nate Silver's here, but the simple sort of tell was would the name fit at a country club? Michael Jeffrey, jordan, christopher Paul, stephen Curry, kevin Durant, lebron James? There's one that obviously you might not see on the placard at the old country club 30 years ago, there's your outlier. That's how you can spot him. But anyway, more and more. That story is actually becoming rare. It's highly available and LeBron is so great. Everybody knows that story, so I think they think it's the norm. Everything about that story is so far from the norm.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, sports is so often cited as the last bastion of merit, but increasingly in the United States it isn't. There's a growing class divide in sports participation. Local and community teams are withering while paid programs are growing. So this, again, is a luxury belief. As consumers use more and more pay-for-play leagues, there is going to be less and less resources. The parks are going to keep getting worse. The school teams are going to keep getting worse.
Speaker 1:Also, beyond that, even if you don't care about kids at other schools, if you still only care about little Johnny getting as far as he can, even if he's only a 70% talent, you want to push him as far as he could possibly go, get him into a league beyond his ability. That's your prerogative. That's weird, but I can make one more argument. Even for you, it's also just a bad idea. On merit, you're worried about little Johnny, aren't you? Well, early specialization also leads to more injuries, higher likelihood of burnout and worse health outcomes.
Speaker 1:So part of this is like we got to just get back to kind of being like normal people again. Like, if little Johnny isn't the best on the soccer team, that's not a terrible outcome, quite frankly. If he is, that's great and let's get him moving. But no again, for those of us who have the memory of playing for our school team, the pride that you felt making that team, the pride the community felt in you when you put on those colors, how you felt as a member within that community when people came out to your games, again, I just want to let you guys know that that's a memory that's not really going on as much as you might think it is. And if that's a bad thing which I think it is we might have to shift one our values.
Speaker 1:But, quite frankly, just some of this competitive spending that that us parents I'm in this group, I'm not there yet Um, but yeah, you can tell I don't really want to partake in this for for so many reasons and I value sports very, very highly, um, so yeah, I'm going to do what I have to do, but I hope, as we age into these things, that we can kind of get more back into community-oriented sports. And then initially, admittedly also, I was going to say parents act a little normal. I don't know. I really don't believe much in theories of decadence kids these days, but the way I see some parents freaking out about their kids' performance in sports, I do think the incentives have changed. People weren't making millions back in the day, and so I think we do have my wife's a casting director. We got the equivalent of stage moms over in sports and they take this shit way too seriously.
Speaker 1:I really think that we got to get real about what the purpose of sport is. One we want communities to come together. We want to have great national teams to represent us, and we want sport to uplift and enrich the lives of the people who participate and the people who watch on every level. Pay for play doesn't check any of the boxes. Luxury belief. This is something that we got to move on from. Anyway, guys, I glanced over and thank you once again for your time and attention. Always appreciate when you guys spend it here. Again, if you found anything interesting in today's episode, make sure to pass it on. Share it with someone else that you think might enjoy it. I want to keep growing our community as organically as possible. My skin crawls even when I say stuff like that. So apologies, fears did too, but yeah, always appreciate your time and attention, guys. And yeah, remember mind and muscle are inseparably intertwined. There are no gains without brains. Keep lifting and learning, I'll do the same.
