This week, Kevin goes off the fitness path and dives deep into philosophy, exploring how our senses—and even industries like fitness—can deceive us. From Plato and Descartes to The Matrix and Baudrillard, he explains why what you think is real might just be a well-crafted illusion. Plus, hear how you can keep connecting with Kevin after his final episode.
This week, Kevin goes off the fitness path and dives deep into philosophy, exploring how our senses—and even industries like fitness—can deceive us. From Plato and Descartes to The Matrix and Baudrillard, he explains why what you think is real might just be a well-crafted illusion. Plus, hear how you can keep connecting with Kevin after his final episode.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hello listeners, I hope everyone is doing well this week. This is the penultimate episode of the show with me as the host. This week I am going totally off piste and will be talking about philosophy, so if you haven’t ever wondered what the meaning is in life, what is right and what is wrong or what is real and enjoy living in ignorance and bliss, tune out now. But, if you do sometimes ponder the deeper things, stay tuned!
As a perhaps recurring theme on the show during my tenure, I have talked about how to think about things we see online, in magazines and so on. We know that the fitness industry doesn’t exist to get you fit. It exists so that people can make money from telling you how to get fit. These are two different propositions. Because there is a danger to anyone who has fitness as their full time income. That is the scenario where I tell you how to do it and then you don’t need me any more. Even in the most bourgeois of global locations, somewhere like Mayfair, Malibu, Manhattan (why do these all start with ‘M’?) A personal trainer will cost at the most 180-200 usd. Which sounds like a lot for an hour, but its not enough for you to come do a session with me, learn how to do this stuff and go off to do it on your own. No…personal trainers need to put food on the table and pay rent. They rely on ongoing business across years. So, weirdly, its in their best interests to bamboozle you into thinking things are complicated. They need you to stick around.
This is why I wanted to share the facts with you. You dont need fancy tests, complicated equipment, workouts that are hundreds of exercises long and crazy jargon. You dont need a trainer that in 2010 is telling you the paleo diet is the way to go, in 2015 is telling you to be vegan, in 2020 is saying dairy and gluten are the devil and in 2025 to say the carnivore and raw milk diet is the best. But therein we have a problem. How do I know what is true, what is real and what is fake?
This question has been troubling philosophers since at least the time of Plato. He had a famous thought experiment called the allegory of the cave asking just that. Then in 1637, the French philosopher, Descartes wrote: I think, therefore I am. This was in response to him asking about what he could really know about the world around him. It might be that an ‘evil demon’ as he put it, was controlling his thoughts and making him think the sky was blue, that he had hands and so on. But there was one thing he couldn’t doubt and that was in order for his thoughts to be controlled, there had to be something that was having thoughts. So, he concluded that if he was thinking, he existed, even if nothing else did.
Now, there are some problems with Descartes' line of thinking. I would argue that we still don’t know how consciousness works or where it arises. Some people believe in the existence of a soul, one that exists independently of the body. So, it might be that a living individual is not a necessary component of thinking. Just because he was thinking doesn’t follow that he does exist in the way he was claiming. There are lots of pushbacks on Descartes' argument. But what we can take from it that is fairly reasonable is that the world around me might not be as I think it is.
Enter idealism. When I consider any object, its made up of qualities. If we think of an apple. It is round. It might be green or red. It is hard. It smells and tastes ‘appley’. So, my question to you would be: if I remove all the qualities of an apple that you are using a sense to experience, then what remains? For most people they think about this and come to the conclusion that the answer is, in fact: nothing. There is nothing about an apple that I can come to know without using my senses. Sense data is received by different sense organs, the eyes, the ears, the skin and so on. They relay the information to the brain, where it is processed and formed into a picture of the world. This leads one to the position that if everything I know about the world is from my senses and my senses are processed in my brain, that there is nothing about the world that is external to my brain.
Scary right? It was this idea that the world is something different to what is being processed internally and the idea from Descartes that these processes could be being fed to us by a nefarious being with the sole purpose of deception that contributed to the movie The Matrix. In the case of Descartes, just replace ‘evil demon’ with ‘machine’ and you have the same argument. But the movie was actually based on a book by the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard called ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. This book, written in 1981 was so important to the movie that it was required reading for the cast and crew. It even appears as a philosophical easter egg on one scene, where Neo retrieves some computer discs from inside a hollowed out copy of this book. Another metaphor for things not being as they seem. It looks like a book, but is in fact a storage device. More deception.
Baudrillards ideas can be a little hard to wrap one's head around, but basically he believed that the world we live in is already totally detached from reality and that real things have been replaced by signs, symbols and signifiers that refer to or hint at the real thing but are not the thing itself. Considering he wrote about this over 3 decades before instagram filters and deep fakes, he really was ahead of his time. Baudrillard believed we were living in a world with 4 levels of simulacra. It is quite hard to even explain, but I will give it a shot with some examples.
Let’s take a pirate themed historical reenactment.
This is a 1st level simulacra, where things are not reality but are a faithful reflection of reality. The actors are dressed as real pirates, they play the role of historical pirates and buccaneers.
In the 2nd level of simulacra, we have a perversion of reality. It takes a real thing and distorts it. Lets say the pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. This was the ride the movie series was based on. It portrays pirates but in a distorted way: there is no indication of their bad side. Its all rum and gold coins and galleons.
In the 3rd level of simulacra, it pretends to be reality. I would argue that Captain Hook from Peter Pan or Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of The Caribbean movie are more famous than Blackbeard or Captain Kidd, who were real pirates. So, we have a situation where fantasy has become more real than reality because reality is either forgotten about or ignored.
The 4th and final level of simulacra is pure simulacrum. There is no resemblance to reality at all. Lets imagine a new theme park opens and it designs a ride based on the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. We already know the movie was based on a ride and the ride was based on a perversion of reality. So this new ride would be a copy of a copy of a copy.
In a real world example, I was in a coffee shop a few weeks ago and sat reading a book and having a flat white. I watched a delivery arrive. Big white boxes of pastries from a generic manufacturing plant. I then watched the store manager open the boxes and remove the pastries, which were all vacuum packed in plastic wrap. She then got out some very artisan looking wooden boards. She removed the pastries from the wrappers and placed them on the boards. She dusted them with powdered sugar and put them out in the window with handwritten signs. Now, she is just doing what she has been told to do. But, without thinking about this, she created a simulacra of a coffee shop that bakes its own pastries. No sign or signifier was remaining that these pastries were mass produced, cheap crap. Instead, she had replaced those with signs and symbols of individually handcrafted items.
It seems to me that this is a moral and ethical issue. Is it ethical to deliberately remove traces of reality and replace them with manufactured signs of a different reality, one that bears no resemblance to the truth? I would argue that no one would say they want to live in a world where nothing tells the truth about what it is. Because as Descartes reasoned in his first meditation:
"Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false.”
What do you think? Are you happy to be living in a world where everything we see can be doubted because we are all unwittingly creating a simulacrum taking us further and further away from what is real? Or would you rather that we stopped this in its tracks? How would we do that? Outlaw the creation of false realities? Spend all our time taking up hyper skeptical positions?
I could go on about this stuff, but its a short podcast! If you do enjoy these things, you can follow my Philosophy YouTube channel. I started making some videos a couple of weeks ago and it would be great if those of you that enjoyed my yapping about philosophy over the past couple of years came and followed me there. I’m sure you know its free to subscribe to a YouTube channel and it would help me immensely if that would be something you could do to support me. My channel can be found by typing my name in the search bar but Kevin with 3 ’n’s so “kevinnndon”. All one word. It would be so awesome to connect with listeners there because I am certain that at this point, many of you come each week because we have connected weekly for over 2 years. I would love to continue that. Just as a reminder though: I won’t be making fitness videos there, just philosophy!
To those of you that have emailed your own questions, I will do my best to either reply to your emails or to answer the questions in my last episode next week. I would also like to remind everyone that, whilst I am studying hard, I actually pay for my studies with my remote coaching. So, if you have been looking for a coach, and by all accounts I am quite good at it, then get in touch. I would love to help you reach your goals and it would be a great way to support me growing my brain to epic proportions. Email me! getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, and the director of podcasts Brannan Goetschius. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app