MAHA: Make America Healthy/Hypocritical Again | Bryce Calvin and Chris Beal
Transcript of Ep: 82 - P2 Podcast
Bryce (00:12)
You know what I mean?
Chris (00:13)
Yeah, I think it's interesting. Going back to your analogy of team sports, I actually think about it differently. In team sports, you have specialties, right? You have a quarterback, you have a receiver, and the quarterback cannot do what the receiver does and vice versa. A receiver would be foolish to say, "Sorry QB, no shine for you today. Just me." Because I can't do what you do, and I'll do better at what I do with you back there.
So when people see Pizza on Demand coming and they ask, "How's that affect my coaching offer?" When you mentioned someone has to lose - no, the people trying to compete directly with Pizza on Demand will lose. I am headstrong in that direction. I want that to happen because that means our product is better, that we've marketed it better, built something better, and garnered a community. But I don't want to make every other fitness company lose or starve. I want them all to get better because then the industry gets better, like we talked about yesterday.
It is team sports. I think people look at this very much more like solo sports - golf, wrestling - where they think, "I have to be the only one. No one else can do this." In wrestling, if I'm 171 and I win state, everyone else on my team can lose and I can still win state. I actually look better if I'm the one carrying the team. There's definitely a contrast in mentality, and it's profuse in the fitness industry.
Anytime I talk to someone, I'm always thinking about how this interaction will be a net positive to my life. Are they someone who could be a great friend? Someone I can talk to about esoteric things we both have interest in? Is there a business alignment where we can compound on each other and both push forward for more success? I don't immediately think about how this person might step on my toes, but I feel like that's how the industry tends to think.
Bryce (02:39)
Well, sticking with the sports analogy is interesting because you mentioned football and solo sports. I actually think the best analogy is basketball because basketball is a team sport, but statistics are generally zero-sum. If you score points, someone else on your team isn't scoring points. If you get a rebound or an assist, someone else isn't. In football, typically there are multiple stats that can come out of any good play.
Baseball is much less like stat-oriented in terms of collecting tons of stats in one game. Basketball definitely can be. When you're looking at a box score in basketball, you generally understand that one person can do a lot. In football, even the best quarterback throwing 400 yards and four touchdowns still needs a line. The assumption is built in that the line had a great game or the receivers had a great game.
I think in many ways, this is like basketball where we can all be on the same team, but who's the opponent? Who are we up against? Because I do think there needs to be almost this external competition. But honestly, looking at the fitness industry as a whole, I don't think there is an enemy or opponent. If everybody works together, then it's positive-sum - we all win, our clients win, everybody gets healthier, everybody gets in better shape, we all make more money, we make our lives easier. Maybe you just have to create this phantom opponent, Michael Jordan style.
Going back to the analogy, I think you have a lot of Kobes, or people that think they're Kobes, but you don't have enough role players because everybody wants to be a Kobe. When you get a Shaq on your team, friction starts to come up because people always want the ball. In the fitness industry, you can have someone like Mike Israetel, but Mike Israetel and Layne Norton are never going to work together because you can only have one superstar. But you need role players - people who are going to be the defenders that get three steals and two rebounds but don't score a point.
You need someone who can rack up assists, someone who can be like Chris Bosh on the Big Three and sacrifice their stats for the good of the team. But there's not enough thinking along those terms to understand that sometimes you can sacrifice for the good of the whole.
I think there's going to be something that forces the issue. We've been talking about how no one really wants to do things differently, especially if they're "working for themselves." They might not be working for their clients, but if you're making money and there's no external pressure to do anything different, you're just going to continue sitting on your hands, making money, and not really worrying about much else.
But if something comes along - let's say a coach is very good and offers their services for half your price - well, then you're in trouble. Because if people are comparing the same service value, but one costs 50% less, the choice becomes obvious. If Mercedes and BMW both came out with the exact same car, but BMW's was way cheaper, everyone's going to buy the BMW. Brand recognition only goes so far when it comes to people's wallets.
I know this wasn't the topic we were going to talk about, but ultimately, I think what's happening in the fitness industry is going to be good. It's going to consolidate the talented people who actually know what they're doing - coaches that truly want to help people versus just extract money and be parasitic on the industry. There are a lot of people who get into coaching because they want to make quick money, having been told it's an easy industry for that. I hope that stuff gets filtered out.
The talented people who want to work hard, who are ambitious and dedicated to making people fitter and healthier, improving longevity and quality of life - I hope over time that starts to filter to the top. I'm not going to hold my breath, but I think trends are pointing toward people needing to collaborate at certain levels. Maybe not super intimately, but at least marginally so that everybody can be better off. It's about creating positive-sum relationships for the industry and for clients.
Chris (08:20)
For sure. The synergistic approach, right? You have Dwayne Wade and LeBron who made it work. You have Kyrie Irving and LeBron who made it work. Obviously they didn't run their full careers together, but there are opportunities where you recognize that there are edge cases where you're better here and I'm better there.
Even going back to your analogy of Chris Bosh or Kevin Love taking back seats to be on better teams - Kevin Love is a champion, Chris Bosh is a two-time champion, both are hall of famers. When it's all said and done, they're both better off than if Chris Bosh had just stayed in Toronto or Kevin Love had stayed in Minnesota.
When you can zoom out and take that 30,000-foot view, you realize that being a role player doesn't mean being interchangeable. Think about Manu Ginobili, Derek Fisher, Robert Horry - these guys weren't replaceable. They just weren't the "guy," but you don't win without them. Taking a second to really understand that is probably an important overarching lesson for everybody.
Bryce (09:55)
Speaking of retarded people...
Chris (09:59)
Speaking of things changing - industries needing to change, especially on a mass scale, societal scale, governmental scale. Let's talk about MAHA - Make America Healthy Again. You say what? Make it happy again? Put a smile on your... isn't that the McDonald's theme song? I think that is the McDonald's theme song, or it was at one point in time, which is appropriate either way.
So Bryce and I spoke yesterday about this, and it's been a hot topic with lots of online discourse, some informed, some not. I actually took the liberty of further informing myself and having arguments with my language models just to make sure I was seeing everything and was prepared. You heard a bit about how I feel, and I'll tell the audience here in a bit, but what's your take on everything? Your understanding of what's to come or what is hoped to come, and where do you see opportunity for it to succeed and then opportunities for it to be even better?
Bryce (11:08)
I'll try to stay relatively narrow in my answers because this is a pretty broad topic. First, it's pretty apparent that America has a health problem. You don't have to look very far to see the results. Most people are overweight. Most people are dealing with symptoms, syndromes, autoimmune deficiencies, things that maybe a few generations ago weren't problems or aren't problems in other areas of the world. America has specific America problems.
The question then is what's causing these problems? Why are America's obesity rates so much higher than in other parts of the world? Why do we deal with certain deficiencies or allergies at greater rates than other areas? I'm not going to get into specific stuff like autism because there are very easy explanations for that that don't require food dyes.
So preface everything I'm saying with: America clearly has low-hanging fruit that can be improved. The difficulty is figuring out where these obvious issues are coming from. It's not obvious that it's one place. That's an issue with pointing fingers at specific ingredients or dyes or foods or food groups - you're being overly reductionist for something that probably has tons of confounding variables and lots of overlap and correlations, but not necessarily causations.
A lot of this stuff we don't necessarily know or understand very well. Human physiology - we don't understand hardly at all. If you pull one lever, 15 other levers freak out. We just don't know. We don't have the data. It's nearly impossible to run all the experiments and simulations to understand how these things work.
What I will say though, is I think RFK is a bit brain-wormy for me. Not a huge RFK fan, but what I will say is that the ideal of "make America healthy again" is a good goal to have. But you have to go about implementing that in the right way. I think immediately demonizing certain things is not the right way to go.
My opinion is that if we eliminate artificial dyes or artificial sweeteners from the American diet, I don't think things are just going to solve themselves overnight. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I think a more important question to ask is: what can we do to create incremental improvements and progress towards the goal of making America healthy?
People tend to focus on the wrong things all of the time. If you're someone who's a bodybuilder shooting a gram of tren in your ass, maybe you shouldn't be so concerned about non-organic ingredients and artificial dyes in your food. Don't be a hypocrite. If you're worried about your health, then you need to be consistent across every domain, not just the ones that align with your preferred lifestyle.
Another aspect of this is that it's very easy for people who are financially well off to demonize things that are cheaper to mass produce. Yet these things are mass-produced cheaply for a reason - because people used to starve to death. We don't really know this because we're not exposed to it daily, but famine and starvation used to be a fucking problem. It's not anymore. We solved it. Know why? Because we figured out how to mass produce food and calories so people don't starve anymore. Where starvation still happens, it's because of corruption and bureaucracy rather than humanity's ability to produce enough food. That said, certain cheap food is probably unhealthy for mostly healthy people to consume all the time. If you're a young adult, you probably shouldn't be drinking only Mountain Dew. Seems pretty obvious, right?
It's just basic adult decisions. You should probably be getting pretty good sleep every night. You should probably stand up and walk around once in a while. You should probably eat a fruit every once in a while. These are pretty straightforward things. If you do those just 50% of the time, you're going to be healthier than most people. And I would say 90% of the population probably has better things to worry about than if there's an artificial dye in their food.
Chris (17:12)
Yeah, we're aligned there. I actually did a pretty deep dive because I didn't want to misrepresent his action plan. It is actually pretty encompassing. I think my largest issue, like with most things, is that the seemingly smallest, most minute, but most concrete and actionable pieces tend to rise to the surface.
People learn about intermittent fasting and digestion and circadian rhythm, and they go, "I need to stop eating by six and be in bed by 8:30." But then as soon as they get up, they spike two full cups of coffee and rush to work half awake, eat shit food throughout the day. There are a lot of other things they should address before changing their nighttime routine to affect things on a much larger scale.
In MAHA, they do have sections where they talk about local initiatives and trying to enrich food deserts and ensure people have access. I don't think there's enough language or logic about the metrics and logistics of how they want to enact this. Because I think those are the much larger pieces.
They talk about education, saying we need to educate, we need to educate. And I'm like, yes, that's always my first place to start - being able to educate people. But education without access does nothing. Telling someone that red dye is bad for them? Okay, cool. But if all the foods available to them in their time-constrained state, having less than 10-15 minutes to dedicate to meal prep per day for their families... if McDonald's serves the need of making sure their kid doesn't starve that night or have sleep for dinner, then McDonald's it is, regardless of what's in it.
Would you rather have a child who is fed on additives and things that might not be great for them in the future, or a child that starves tonight? Everyone's going to choose the former. And I don't think there's enough talk about that.
When I think about just my life and the different places I've lived - when I lived in a majority white, affluent community with lots of money versus where I was born and spent the early part of my childhood... I could stare down a street from my childhood home and see Burger King, McDonald's, Taco Bell, Wendy's on the hill. And then I knew if you keep going up, there's a KFC. The closest grocery store? Couldn't see it. Couldn't throw anything to hit it. Long, long walk, but I could ride my bike to all the fast food places. Also money... my parents running around... that kind of time constraint meant it was ramen noodles at home, something in the microwave, or a dollar menu item from one of these places.
Bryce (20:41)
Well, not to interrupt you, but people always complain about how the foods you're allowed to purchase with food stamps are "junk foods." There's a reason for that - they're calorie dense and cheap, which is the idea behind subsidizing people who cannot afford food. If we're subsidizing people's calorie intake, think about it like that. We're paying for calories. That's what we want for people who are on food stamps. We don't want you to starve to death.
So if you're being subsidized and getting government benefits for food, unfortunately, it has to be processed, cheap to make, and calorie dense foods. People see the result being Doritos and such, but they're not understanding why that is the case. I would agree that we don't need food stamps to cover things like soda, because if we want calorie density from liquids, there are better ways like juices, which aren't super expensive. But as a whole, you have to understand what these things are in place for.
Chris (23:50)
No, yeah. So when you talk about what we're doing here - okay, we gave people red dye and we can definitely sit there and say, "sweet." But when you get that concretely removed from all diet, what do people do next? How does that help? It didn't create a new problem per se, except for maybe a problem of complacency - like "we won, we did it."
Bryce (24:20)
So they'll just move on to the next thing that's "poisoning our kids."
Chris (24:35)
Exactly. And I think that's the big piece for me when you talk about problems. Can you remind me of the name of the curve you quoted earlier?
Bryce (24:40)
The Kuznets curve, yeah. That's the whole principle - because we get to a point where the primary problem is solved, we can then move those resources over to solving the problems that popped up as a function of solving the primary problem.
Chris (24:47)
Yes. Well, I think even more so I wanted to really articulate this for the listeners. I think it's even less about "Okay, I'm now in a better space, I have more time, I have more money, so now I can go and solve these problems," much as it is that I think that for a lot of these solutions, they're almost rolling right into natural solutions for the other things.
It's less about having to refocus, but almost like naturally we get to solve this problem because we have momentum in this direction already. And so when you talk about red dye, what does that give us momentum with? It starts to align us with the world in just being more restrictive in our diets and what we have in our food, because we know that the US is fairly lax on that. But when it comes down to momentum in something as severe as childhood obesity, do we gain momentum in solving the problem of fat kids? Do we gain momentum in solving the problem of kids who grow up to be obese adults with comorbidities and drains on the healthcare system? We don't solve that with dye. And allowing people to fixate on that is just dangerous.
Bryce (51:07)
Yeah. And another aspect of this too is incentives. Currently, we are obviously incentivizing the wrong things at various levels of health and fitness. There definitely should be some aspect of making food stamps contingent on this, like getting an annual health check and being under a certain BMI. Because if you're over a BMI of 30 and you're on food stamps, clearly you don't have a calorie intake problem.
I actually saw this - someone posted the other day on Twitter saying RFK is going to make it so that people's tax rate is based on their body fat percentage. I laughed for a moment and then thought, "Wait a second though... we're onto something here." Like if you think about it, that aligns incentives. If we want a healthier country, legitimately, setting people's tax rate based on their body fat percentage would for sure lead to people being less fat.
Granted, there are going to be other ways to get there that don't necessarily require something as crass. But that's a good way of thinking about this stuff - are we incentivizing the right things? Why does it not make sense to give people tax breaks for being healthier? You get an annual checkup and your doctor signs off on your health, you get a tax break. It can be some impartial doctor, it can be whatever. Maybe it's something more quantitative rather than just "Hey, you're good." Maybe it is something like body fat percentage, or cholesterol levels in a healthy range.
Chris (54:11)
Well, I think you can even - and I'm big on rewarding achievement, we should reward people succeeding at said thing. I also am big on rewarding activity. So I think that if someone comes in and maybe their body fat percentage is a little higher, but they are seeing a doc twice a year to make sure they are preemptive in all care, they're regularly working out in some sort of regimented way...
If they are eligible for something like EBT, you can track what people buy, how people prep their food and what they're doing. Submitting that kind of stuff might seem kind of painstaking, it might feel like big brother, but if you told someone "I'll give you a tax break, I'll subsidize you here if you're doing X, Y, and Z," well, all of a sudden you incentivize the activity that you want people to partake in.
I think doing stuff like that is the direction we should go. Damn the "I'm free, you're infringing on my rights" or "you're somehow isolating me." No, everyone can take part in this action. Everyone can go out and get 6000 steps a day. Everyone can make sure they're drinking enough water per day. Those are things that everyone can do. So incentivizing that kind of activity versus someone just going "I don't want to do it because it feels like someone's telling me what to do" - okay, well then you don't get the break.
Bryce (55:06)
No, like - we can end this on something that I do think is very good. The direction that a lot of this is going, I feel confident about. A lot of people don't, and that's okay. Not even just the RFK stuff and bringing more attention to very obvious issues that Americans are dealing with that are seriously affecting the quality of health at a broad level, but even Elon and Vivek's "DOGE initiative" about government efficiency.
I'm a very firm believer that there should be very few, if any, of these three-letter agencies making decisions for the entire population with no accountability. If you're making decisions on what we can and can't do, what we can and can't eat, what we can and can't consume, you better be making the right fucking decisions, especially if I don't get any input into that stuff. And we better be able to measure your performance and be able to fire you if you're doing a bad job.
A good example of this is the FDA - they fucking suck. The SEC, they suck. They're horrible. They're not doing any good job of protecting people. There's no reason why a life-saving drug needs to be in development for a decade and the pharmaceutical company has to spend billions of dollars just to get it to consumers. There's so much government bureaucracy that needs to go.
Ultimately, I'm optimistic that these initiatives combined will shine a brighter light on the fact that Americans are very unhealthy. And there are simple ways to make us not unhealthy. But also, an initiative to make sure the government is more efficient and there is accountability at every level - I think these are ultimately going to be very, very good things if they go in the direction that hopefully they will go. I'm not gonna hold my breath - it is the government after all. But the ethos there is, I do think, aligned with the direction that we should be going.
Chris (57:24)
We should be healthier. And this is overall, like I said, a very good sentiment. So we will wrap up there. We want to hear you guys' feedback. We're sure we missed some things. We're sure you have your own thoughts on this. So we want to hear it. Share it with us. Like, share this with your family and have an excellent Black Friday. I know we're pushing it a little early, but yeah, come join us.
Bryce (57:50)
Go buy our stuff!
DISCLAIMER: Bryce Calvin is not a doctor or registered dietitian. The contents of this document should not be taken as medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem - nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. Consult your physician on matters regarding your health. Materials in email transactions are not to be shared.