Brad Stulberg

whose life is just so in order and your job is to be a homemaker and to essentially serve your family.

And in all of this, and it's being sold as like, that's what it means to be an excellent woman.

But the women that are doing this, one, they have full-time jobs, which is making trad wife content.

And two, the people that they're appealing to that have the time and energy to watch them are inherently somewhat lonely because they're watching trad wives streaming their entire life all day.

So it's this vicious cycle.

Yeah, a lot of this became popularized with this idea of marginal gains, which was born out of Team Sky, a British cycling team that won multiple Tour de France's.

And at the time, the theory was they had this meticulous focus on all these marginal gains.

So every single calorie was measured, your lactate was measured, everything that you were doing was measured, and that's what allowed them to get to the next level.

It turns out that Team Sky was most likely 99.99%, now we can say with confidence, doping.

So they actually kept the main thing, the main thing.

The main thing was just performance-enhancing drugs that were, listen, in Newsflash, those work.

And out of that, though, became this whole industry of you two can be like Team Sky if you're just focused on these little micro-improvements, and we're going to package them up and sell you.

And what's fascinating about this is even the studies...

that are well done, they tend to have small sample sizes, but that aside, that are rigorous, and they show you get a half a percent benefit with beetroot juice, and you can take a lactate acid buffer, and that gives you a percent benefit.

And then if you change your sleep a little bit, that's gonna find a 2% benefit.

Well, guess what?

If you were to add up all these percents, you'd be getting like 18% better.

And nobody gets 18% better from doing this.

So each marginal gain that promises to get you a percent or two better, you put them all together and you still might only get a percent better if that.

So it is this trying to construct a pyramid out of these small things that tend to have a price tag when what you actually need to do is just build the foundation, which is often, as you pointed out in the example of deadlifting, there's no price for it.