Pilates

welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that lays on its back and bicycles its legs i feel like you've answered the first question which is mike what do you know about pilates literally i did pilates for like three weeks so that's like all i remember doing and then i quit because it was hard my tummy hurt i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon you can also get the same audio content on apple podcasts as a subscriber and you can buy t-shirts mugs tote bags all manner of things at t-public michael aubrey today we are talking about pilates poncious pilates that's what i always think of as like a church kid every single time we are going to be talking about the very surprising story of how pilates came to be i'm so excited i know nothing about pilates it's just like a workout yeah the way it was sold to me originally was like it's like a combination of like yoga and like crossfit and then i signed up and i did it like three times and then i didn't see immediate results and then i stopped what were the results you were looking for i don't even know i was like i just want to be like strong and like flexible and then i wasn't either one and i've remained so you wanted to be a willowy pilates lady also the lady who was teaching it who was extremely nice was like the buffest human being i've ever witnessed in my entire life and she was like five foot one and i was like this is the short queen energy that i want so bad but i also don't want to work out like six hours a day fair so i had i had a whole journey aubrey a whole emotional journey in that class so i am proud to report that this episode is not going to be a ruiner i'm also proud to report that we don't have any really huge content notes wow for once it just means we're not gonna like get into like extremely gnarly oppressive attitudes today yeah pilates seemed totally fine to me it was just like group exercise and you were stretching and doing setups and stuff like it was yeah it was fine i can i can see why people like it are you ready to get a little primer on you on pilates and then we'll dig in on this big long story of where it comes from the riddiest so pilates was originally called contrology oh i can see why they changed the name yeah that's terrible it's not great it sounds like some sort of eye surgery pilates is basically just a workout right it's sort of focused on muscle tone posture this kind of mind body connection and particularly on building abdominal strength okay the original set is about 50 individual repetitive exercises that can be done either on a mat or with specific pilates equipment some of the things that you talked about before things like yoga and tai chi and capoeira are shaped over decades or centuries by a whole bunch of practitioners often from like a shared geographic region or ethnic community or religious tradition or what have you right that is not the case with pilates there is a single inventor it's bob pilates it's joseph pilates wait so that's where the word comes from it's not even like a fancy word it's literally just the dude's last name it's his name okay joseph pilates was born on december 9th 1883 in germany his mother was a naturopath and his father was an avid gymnast who had a gym oh okay as a child joseph pilates reportedly had asthma rickets and rheumatic fever his father introduced him to bodybuilding boxing gymnastics and jiu-jitsu and joseph pilates talked a lot about finding strength and finding relief in his sort of uh workouts right that that became a real source of joy and strength for him strongmen were sort of celebrities at the time and joseph pilates was a man who was a joseph pilates especially grew up admiring a kind of strongman celebrity of his day someone named eugene sandow he reportedly wrapped a chain around his arm and broke it by flexing his muscles all right some of these don't sound real but okay well the thing that i was thinking is i was like listen i'm wearing a necklace that's on chain i bet i could break that one yeah i guess it's like defined chain for me champ he bent iron bars was part of his act just like i said i'm wearing okay and at one point he fought a lion these i don't know this is just taken from eugene sandow's like tinder profile he went on to open a line of gyms he wrote books he published a magazine and he argued that body culture should train the whole body in order to quote get rid of the defects that civilization and the changes it has brought are responsible for making humans neglect their own body it's the civilizational stuff again we still see this now it's so fucking weird yeah it's wild humans are under some sort of weird witch's hex to just do like the same stupid bullshit over and over again in like many domains but especially in health and wellness so joseph pilates in his young adulthood pursues both gymnastics and bodybuilding professionally he was married and widowed by the time he turned 30 oh in 1912 at age 29 joseph pilates moves from germany to england and he starts working in a wild range of jobs he is briefly a self-defense trainer for local police and then scotland yard okay he was a professional boxer and he was a circus performer oh like a situation he did two things one he was a contortionist so he would be the guy who bends himself into a pretzel right and two he did a thing that is hard to imagine at a circus now because like my god you can't get away from it in city parks in the u.s he was the guy who posed as a statue oh they used to do that in circuses apparently in his they did so like look how bendy i am and look how still i can hold myself the two greatest men in the world prize traits i mean before tv there wasn't that much else to do so you're just watching a guy not move within a couple of years he settles in blackpool which is a northern coastal town in england that is where he was in 1914 at the outbreak of world war one oh okay do you know much about what the brits did in response to the outbreak of world war one well i mean they they fought it sure yeah yeah fair enough no specifics world war one began in july of 1914 by august of that year the british government passed the aliens restrictions act that allowed them to intern anyone who they suspected of espionage or believed to otherwise be a threat to national security or anyone who held still for too long suspicious so over the course of the war over the course of i think the camps are open for about five years britain interned 116 000 people under the aliens restrictions act that's a huge infrastructure according to national geographic at this time there were 57 000 german immigrants in britain oh they locked up like everybody basically they just they went off the rails with this thing right like they went all in joseph pilates was a single man he wasn't fluent in english he was a traveling circus performer he was a singer he was a singer he was a singer performer in a world where you're rounding up over a hundred thousand people that guy seems suspicious right it's sort of the conclusion that they come to they would just go around humming 99 red balloons and see who could hum along from the future joseph pilates was then required to register himself as a quote-unquote alien okay local police station good sign and ultimately he was sent to knockalo internment camp on the isle of man knockalo was one of the largest internment camps that the brits operated okay knockalo alone housed 23 000 prisoners of war and 3 000 guards between 1914 and 1919 wow these places were awful a swiss doctor visited these internment camps during world war one and afterwards came up with the term barbed wire disease to characterize the sort of trauma and mental illness that he witnessed there it was seen as sort of a counterpoint to shell shock right combatants had shell shock and prisoners of war had barbed wire disease was sort of the idea yeah knockalo internment camp is where pilates is reportedly born no way it's it's from a internment camp from a fucking internment camp developed by joseph pilates while he is a detainee no way so i mean i guess that makes sense why it's all these kind of do-it-yourself like body weight style exercises totally so joseph pilates was there for um pretty much the entire remainder of the war he's there for four years he spoke and wrote extensively after the fact about the inspiration for pilates do you want to know what inspired him oh did he see like an upside down bicycle he's like i should make kicks from that uh the thing that inspired him was the feral cats that came to the camp in search of food scraps wait what so it's like cat exercises he said that he watched the ways that they stretched and moved and was like really impressed by how sort of limber they were and he believed that to be linked to their alertness and their quick reflexes i mean probably true he's he's not wrong we gotta get some cat movements yes this is downward cat it was because they were interned uh designed not only to tend to folks physical health but also their mental health right he had this idea that the mind and body are connected to each other and that they're connected to each other which is a very popular idea but that that connection can be lost and he developed what he called contrology to sort of re-establish that connection so when you read his actual instructions on how to sort of do these exercises there's a lot of instruction about what to focus on and what your mind should be doing right while you're sort of doing these exercises right it's actually like kind of a more appealing origin story than a lot of other forms of exercise where it's like a guy trying to cope with this terrible situation lots and lots and lots of better things about this yeah while he was there he reportedly led large groups of internees in these exercises so many articles mike referred to this as he had a captive audience which is so gross that's not even like really a pun yeah but also like god help me if i have to spend four years with a fucking fitness influencer yikes yeah yeah did any of them use the phrase thin mates the person was no no no we're not doing this we're not i got more we can do these all michael it's been a long time since i fired you but i feel the time has come you're due for a review mike so this camp is also where joseph pilates first developed his pilates equipment there's pilates equipment do you know you've never seen the like pilates equipment like the reformer i think is the most uh widely used one no hang on i'm gonna send you a couple of pictures of people using them oh wow i never used these yeah yeah so they're basically just like it's a series of like springs and pulleys and that kind of thing to add resistance to whatever you're doing right you see these in movies sometimes somebody has like a strap on their feet and then they sort of lift themselves up and down with this series of pulleys by like closing their legs or whatever and it sort of slides them back and forth it looks very comical to be honest but i'm sure it's i'm sure it's a good workout it looks goofy but i bet it's good yeah you know what i mean like i'm a fan of resistance and this kind of stuff you like sliding back and forth i do like famously i like sliding back and some people know about you some of your comfortable discussing publicly oh no oh mike no my dms that's your fun fact when i introduce you at cocktail parties this is aubrey she likes sliding back and forth so joseph pilates works with a lot of people and she's been doing this for a long time and she's been doing this for a long time and she's been doing this for a long time and she's been doing this for a long time with a lot of different kinds of people in this internment camp but uh particularly focused on people who were in the infirmary he focused there because he was like that felt like him right that felt like a place where he could help it felt like something that he recognized and he had sort of seen the benefits of movement in his own life and wanted to bring that to more folks which i imagine led to some really helpful conversations and some really exhausting conversations yeah right yeah the beds in the barracks where most folks slept were made of solid wood it was just a hard wood platform but the beds in the infirmary had springs which were way better for sleeping and they also gave pilates an opportunity to kind of tinker with parts okay so he started messing around with the springs and first started rigging springs over patients beds so that they could rest with their limbs elevated for example like in cartoons right yeah yeah traction yeah totally exactly and then he started using those springs for resistance in different positions around the bed frame and started doing his exercises using the bed springs right like those little cords that everybody bought during the pandemic yeah like rubber the resistance bands floopity bands yeah so those were some early prototypes for equipment like the reformer that is still used in pilates today have i seen this man i don't think you've shown me this man are there photos of this man we can see a photo of this man i want to see a photo of this man i want to see a photo of this man i want to i want to see a photo of this man i want to i want a mental image you sound like kiki palmer oh sorry to this man i'm the opposite of that i'm i'm seeking more information about this man ah here we go here he is when he's older i actually think that when he's older is like the best wildest look at this guy oh wow he's standing on a woman as she's like doing a sit-up holy shit he really enjoyed to stand on people while they were working out that was like a thing that he did a lot of thank you to my pilates lady for not doing that to me for not standing on your abdomen my little abs show me a younger one show me him in his peak physical form yes yes hang on oh no that's him getting stood wait here's him getting stood on he also requested it apparently oh he was verse with the standing you keep doing it you can't you can't tell you can't tell three people what we're like very nervous oh wow okay so he's in it's like grandpa underwear it's like a speedo but it goes up like above his belly button it's a very diaper look he's being stood on and like i guess he's like doing a crunch as he's being stood on and he's wearing ballet shoes yeah those are great those like i've been looking for like summer slippers he's got because of the way he's laying down it looks like he's wearing a little crop top he really does i know so then here is this is the other photo that we've got joseph pilates reportedly at 57 which i struggle to believe oh yeah and then at 82 oh okay yeah so he's he's in he's in the diaper speedos and he's out in the snow in the 82 year old one which is demented in it looks like maybe bare feet or in ballet shoes he also has a very deep tan you can see his transition into influencer over this time because he's like at first he's just like a buff younger dude and then you can tell he's been like sort of on the circuit for a while by the time he's been on the circuit i mean older guy so after he is released from internment joseph pilates moved back to germany first he settled in hamburg then in berlin he worked as a boxing trainer and owned a boxing gym he got remarried in that time to another woman we know nothing about okay he also filed his first patent in 1923 for a piece of exercise equipment that he invented okay ultimately he has 26 devices in his lifetime wow were they mostly like uh pilates like resistance bandy type stuff would you like to hear the names of his inventions yes please trapeze table wanda chair magic circle foot corrector pedo oh no tough one pedo pull head harness that sounds like what you had as a kid to fix your teeth i was gonna say i don't even have to translate head harness to queer toe and finger correctors spine corrector ladder barrel guillotine and catapult this this feels very like as seen on tv yeah are you tired of doing sit-ups the normal way get the wanda chair yeah absolutely so ultimately what leads him to leave germany because he does leave germany is a job offer because he had trained with police in britain and with scotland yard he was asked to train the german military police but that was part of an attempt to begin to rebuild the nation's military and his experience at knockalo left him staunchly anti-war so he refused the job and was like also i don't like that we're rebuilding our military i don't want to be here for another war and in an extremely prescient move he immigrated to the u.s in april of 1926 dude this is by far the least problematic ever discussed on the show honestly someone who's like anti-nazi not a given for this field he moves because a boxer that he's training wants him to move to new york and keep training him and as an incentive that boxer's manager agrees to finance a studio for pilates to teach his method in wow so they fully like pay for him to start a business and to run his like pilates classes dude this honestly i don't know why the pilates people are not like marketing this more it's wild right it was developed in an internment camp and the first studio was a guy who was like fleeing the nazis he wasn't fleeing the nazis this is the 20s right it's not like things are imminent he's just like i don't want to be in the studio i don't want to be in a state that's like trying to build up its military like this it's not quite as good as like anti-nazi but it's still like yeah canceling germany because it's problematic absolutely agree on the boat over from germany he meets a woman named clara zuner and she becomes his wife did he divorce wife too we have no idea don't know okay couldn't tell you lost to time they open a studio in new york city it's near a bunch of the city's ballet studios so contrology as he's calling it at this time quickly sort of gained a following among dancers who wanted to improve their performance and also particularly reduce their injury recovery time his role in the dance world is really sort of cemented when he successfully rehabilitates a modern dance icon named ruth sandini from an injury that she thought was going to end her life and he's like no it's not and she goes to him and she is able to dance again and it becomes this like huge sensational sort of story from there actors start to join in he becomes a trainer to lawrence olivier lauren bacall and katherine hepburn wow and he develops a crew of sort of local devotees too so many of them become pilates instructors themselves his classes were five dollars a piece and he's like no it's not gonna work he's like no it's not gonna work he's like that sounds expensive for back then doesn't it for the 20s yeah wait let's put it in an inflation calculator do it do it do it five dollars holy shit uh 85 dollars and 70 cents whoa okay this is really uh stretching to the stars it's not for the people yeah exactly at this point sort of early in the life of the studio the method's sort of biggest asset is one of its best instructors kathy grant is a famous black dancer and chorus girl in new york who came to joseph pilates for injury rehabilitation and she loved his methods so much that she trains to become sort of certified in pilates she trains more than 2200 hours to get that certification wait what 2200 hours that's like a college degree her classes quickly become some of the most popular in the city because she's known to be really fun really encouraging and also really tough she was also known for creating adaptive exercises for disabled students and exercises to deal with specific sort of symptoms that folks were experiencing so she gets more and more popular and moves to larger and larger venues and ultimately ends up teaching pilates at the tish school of the arts at nyu this is the most wholesome episode we've ever done i was not expecting this she is widely cited as one of the most instrumental sort of mentors in launching a generation of pilates instructors like there are many many many people who credit her as their mentor which is like really fucking cool she seems nice he seems fine watch it last time i said this halfway through an episode it turned out we had like a police brutality subplot coming so there's probably more information you're gonna tell me yeah totally watch pump the brakes buddy yeah it's not gonna be anything like that but he's just like kind of a dick okay he's also very eccentric so he usually ran classes in his tight little short shorts his little like somewhere between briefs and shorts paper he wore those shorts he wore sandals and that is it oh his studio is decorated with paintings photos and sculptures of him oh nice okay and most of them are him either naked or in a loin cloth we're all right we're getting closer to like problematic stuff we're getting back into familiar mike and aubrey territory i didn't want to we were gonna get a nice little detour with kathy grant and now we're back to the weird shit that we normally traffic in he's about to mention hunger games i read a biography of him called caged lion okay and the biographer talks about the first time he met him and he was like he shook my hand and then kept sliding his hand up my wrist oh and he was like i couldn't figure out what he was doing it was like for such a long time and he was like then i realized he was taking my pulse oh what so not the king of boundaries yeah that's a great move that's a weird creep totally but again there's not anything like more sinister than this that i'm aware of nothing okay came up in the research except that he had a really bad temper and was just like a dick to a lot of people and particularly to students if they frustrated him he would throw people out of class regularly if they frustrated him not great but grading but also still grading on a curve c minus you pass yeah c is for cookie and that's good enough for me so there's a 1962 profile of him in sports illustrated that recounts this moment that the author witnesses the author of the article witnesses joseph pilates is telling a student off for moving and i quote like an elephant oh yeah that's not good and it really upsets her yeah she says he's calling her an elephant he says quote i wouldn't insult the elephant i wouldn't insult the elephant i wouldn't an elephant could walk into this room and you wouldn't hear it an elephant walks delicately but you clump clump clump that doesn't sound accurate about elephants americans baseball players joggers weightlifters straighten the knees oh is what he says to her okay americans baseball players joggers weightlifters straighten the knees is like a phrase that will come up again i don't even understand what it means he is profoundly disapproving of americans actually let's do this quote now this is in his interview with sports illustrated so this is him talking directly to the reporter and this is the brickiest brick i'm so sorry but it's wild as hell the fact that he talks shit on americans all the time is just going to make me like him more careful okay he says americans they want to go 600 miles an hour and they don't know how to walk look at them in the street bent over coughing you men with gray faces why can't they look like animals look at a cat look at any animal the only animal that doesn't hold its stomach in is the pig what by exercising your stomach muscles you wring out the body you don't catch colds you don't catch cancer you don't get hernias do animals get hernias i mean maybe i don't know joseph he seems very confident do animals go on diets eat what you want drink what you want i drink a quart of liquor a day plus some beers and smoke maybe 15 cigars what and what do americans do they play golf they play baseball they use half of their muscles a quarter of their muscles they get fat they go jogging they go on crazy diets they jump up and down in crazy exercises they have bad backs they have beer bellies they slouch they complain they have hurt me they slouch they complain they have hurt me have hernias this is fucking incoherent what's he even saying this is a rant that he goes on often he writes a couple of books and this kind of stuff is in there where he's like why aren't americans more like cats but also he's like the problem with americans is like they eat they eat bad they don't exercise and then he's like i drink beer every day i smoke cigars this is big drunk uncle energy yeah it doesn't matter what americans do they play golf they play baseball they use half their muscles a quarter of their muscles yeah what are you talking about they're playing sports what are you talking about they're playing the wrong sports so i was a prom king okay like he just fully goes into the sketch he also writes books during this time he publishes a book in 1934 and one in 1945 uh his first book is called your health a corrective system of exercising that revolutionizes the entire field of physical education which i'm sure you read because you're also a weirdo on this stuff but in a much better and different way than him i also read return to your life through contrology what were they like they're bonkers it's a lot of photos of him doing the exercises so you can see how to do it right which makes a lot of sense um but the narrative parts are bananas also as he's publicizing these books he starts making absolutely wild claims he claims that the detainees that he trained with in his internment camp quote ended the war in better shape than when it started oh and that not one of them got the flu during the influenza epidemic during the war you need to have more than one opinion in your life you can't just be like we did exercise so the internment camps were okay nobody got the flu he has some good stuff in his books to be totally honest he talks about the importance of quote hobbies and all forms of play for quote vitality and moral uplift okay he's like it's really important to have a good time he advocates for pleasurable living and he sort of decries the working world for leaving us with too little energy for fun and pleasure and relationships and like social time i don't know i don't know what you're talking about i don't know what you're he is a european listen he's like you guys need paternity leave and stronger consumer protections but then there's also stuff like this he starts talking about circulation as quote an internal shower okay and keeps talking about the importance of quote fresh pure blood which absolutely seems like it should be published on the daily stormer or like some weird silicon valley youthful blood shit yeah or the guy who's harvesting blood from his son or whatever yeah he keeps yelling in his book and when i say yelling i mean sentences in all caps oh really like fully going for it it is like you have been dropped into a lindy west essay collection just like all caps it's happening now he keeps yelling about how our minds should be able to dominate our bodies okay he writes quote in all caps ideally our muscles should obey our will reasonably our will should not be dominated by the reflex actions of our muscles when brain cells are developed the mind turns who is developed okay i would i would also like to control my impulses when it comes to my use of the internet but i cannot yeah he's talking about like your body should do everything your mind wills it to do i mean i'd love that too i could fly sure you could be superman yeah what's your kryptonite if you're superman i mean actually grinder but for the show probably say blueberries or something these are also very clearly the work of the guy who kept yelling about how americans should be more like animals okay he has a passage in which again like on its face you and i would probably agree with him where he is going off on quacks and sort of scammy quote-unquote miracle cures oh cool and i am sending you the quote unproblematic king joseph pilates nope that's not true it is very doubtful indeed whether a really sane and intelligent person would even think of attempting to prove that any of these many highly recommended cures accomplish one iota toward improving the health of anyone much less affecting a cure not the best writer he shines in other ways pardon this thought but is it not idiotic figuratively speaking to permit oneself to be led around by one's nose by these holy mercenary unscrupulous and irresponsible exploiters who through their misleading advertisements fake references and unconscionable methods of making a living are being used in order to move forward in order to make a living that's not what i'm trying to say that was one sentence think it over you saps hocus pocus is hocus pocus by any other name this is basically our show if written by an ai to be in like 1850s speak now see here think it over you saps hocus pocus is hocus pocus i'm tired of all the humbug aubrey i got to think it over you saps and i was like that's going in the show i don't care it's pretty good it's pretty good so joseph pilates uh lived in new york city as a fitness eccentric and you know general unsettling dude until his death in 1967 at the age of 83 he dies of emphysema oh because of the smoking likely because of the cigars that's what it's generally attributed to he runs his studio in new york for 40 years wow and his wife continues to run it after his death but after she passes away in 1977 10 years later the studio passed through a handful of owners before finally sort of closing for good but in his lifetime pilates never really goes mainstream its popularity starts to rise in the wake of the 80s right so in the 80s fitness was dominated by cardio by aerobics by bodybuilding which were all like intense and like pretty high impact forms of exercise and people were just generally like tired right pilates sort of emerged at that time as a gentler more focused form of exercise right infomercials started selling pilates equipment in the u.s in 1996 which is a pretty good gauge of its sort of quote-unquote going mainstream it was an infomercial thing yeah yeah yeah there were pilates you could buy a pilates reformer oh so it was like the equipment that they were selling absolutely interesting okay from there a bunch of celebrities started doing it and sort of touting its virtues publicly madonna starts doing pilates jennifer aniston jane seymour uma thurman gwyneth paltrow and just a parade of like skinny 90s women just willowy white yeah wealthy women yeah just the wispy broads of the trapper keeper era in the 2010s pilates popularity starts to slump and it slumps so dramatically the new york magazine published a piece called the pilates apocalypse how the method that started the boutique fitness trend is going bust sure basically it found based on some market research which like question mark about the methodologies of market research kind of always for me right um but their estimates based on that market research was that about 10 percent of pilates folks stopped doing pilates in 2011 alone okay that like there's a pretty significant decrease and that's mostly because just sort of the blooms off the rose as often happens with fitness trends right it starts to seem sort of dated it starts to be seen as too expensive it starts to be seen as boring and now there's stuff like bar and there's a bunch of different kinds of yoga that are more available in the u.s and there are like all kinds of fitness classes right soul cycle is starting to come onto the scene right yeah it's all these things are always cyclical because they fundamentally can never deliver on their promises and people oftentimes crave a little bit more variety than just doing the same thing over and over again yeah that's what i was gonna say is like even if there aren't promises like you kind of gotta mix it up especially with these things where they're like fundamentally kind of interchangeable like yeah group exercise seems to be very beneficial but also like do you want to do yoga do you want to crossfit do you want to do pilates yep for most normal ass people if you're like working a nine to five job and you don't get like a ton of exercise if you're doing like twice a week you go to some like exercise class it's not super important like what the actual class is in terms of the data on pilates it bears out pretty much the same thing it has basically the same benefits of other kinds of exercise right there are particular benefits to it maybe in some cases there are like lots and lots of health claims about pilates as there are with so many fitness regimens but none of those are definitively borne out by the data right right cochran says that quote while there is some evidence for the effectiveness of pilates for low back pain there is no conclusive evidence that it is superior to other forms of exercise another meta-analysis found that there was evidence that pilates was more effective than other forms of exercise but this is the difference between some of the other forms of exercise and some of the other forms of exercise and some of the that's statistically significant and something that's clinically significant so the one study is reporting on like it's statistically significant that it's a little bit better but like clinically that doesn't change your approach that doesn't like mean that a ton of doctors are going to start prescribing pilates all that kind of stuff right i can hear a bunch of our listeners opening a new tab to write us an email and i will say like if it worked for you great you don't have to tell us that god bless we we believe you just because something on average is not necessarily like the cure-all doesn't take away from you that it worked so like if it was good for your lower back and you love pilates in in a genuine way like that's great we're so thrilled for you you don't have to correct us that we said an average was not your individual experience so a little coda to the joseph pilates story the joseph pilates name and image have been subject to some really fascinating lawsuits in recent years the first one is in 1992 so this is well after joseph pilates has passed a pilates teacher named sean gallagher bought the trademarks and the brand name of pilates for 17 000 oh that's like nothing even in 1992 that is a song yeah right um for this kind of transaction with that purchase he received boxes containing over a thousand photos and old company and all kinds of sort of proprietary stuff from the studio and the company he's buying this from the old studio owners and he starts sending cease and desist letters to other instructors and businesses who are using the word pilates oh it's a patent troll thing you buy up the property and then you just like threaten people with lawsuits and they settle for like whatever a couple hundred or a couple thousand bucks and you basically just like make money this way he argues that he's not a patent troll because he really is a pilates teacher and he really does care about the legacy and all of this kind of stuff right sure in 1998 one of his cases makes its way to federal court in the southern district of new york two years later in 2000 the case finally wrapped up with the judge ruling that pilates was a generic term like aerobics or yoga and that it was therefore free for anyone to use so okay say goodbye to that 17 grand dude so all it all it took was like one person to challenge this and it basically just immediately gets overturned yeah totally and like the ruling also sort of cast some aspersions on Gallagher and was like, we know you're not doing this on the up and up. So knock it off. Right. Okay. Well, that might've sent somebody else packing. It did not stop Sean Gallagher. And there was a new piece about him last year in the New York times. He is now saying that he is the rightful owner of all the photos and materials that he got in those boxes that came with the trademark and what have you. He says that that is because he wants to protect the integrity of the Pilates method. His critics say that those images already existed in other places and were already in use. You can find them on the internet. He didn't put them there, but essentially he has started reporting other people's posts on Instagram. If they use a picture of Joseph Pilates, that is one of the ones in his fucking boxes. That's hella funny. What a, what a shitty epilogue. That's a weird way to spend your time. It's like bonkers. And they're all people who are like, uh, I wanted you to see how to do these exercises properly. So here are photos of the founder of this thing, doing it the way he thinks you should do it. So one woman received those complaints on Instagram, uh, and Instagram pulled one of her posts down. She then did a fairly common thing. She shared a screenshot of Instagram's message being like, what the fuck? That message. The message from Instagram includes a tiny thumbnail of the original image. So he reports that one too. Oh, nice. Okay. And gets it taken down as well. Right? Like that's the level that this dude is operating at. Other people have written to him ahead of time to ask clarifying questions about what they can and can't use only to find that their questions prompted him to go back through their feeds and report past posts as copyright violations. Is he making any money on this? Or he's just like reporting people and getting stuff taken down. He's just getting things taken down at this point. That's so weird. Okay. One of those was a violation because, uh, the person posting posted a picture of themselves holding Sean Gallagher's book and advising her followers to buy it. Okay. And he's like, report this post. You didn't have authorization to use that photo. Like she is marketing your book, dude. What are you mad about? I always wanted to write an article about this when I was at HuffPost. Like how easy it is for just one random busybody to just like ruin it for everybody for like no reason and fields where like this isn't happening. It's just like luck that some random ass dude hasn't like made this a project. Totally. So here is a quote from a New York Times piece about this set of lawsuits called The Fight for the Soul of Pilates. Nice. There you go. When she was notified by Meta that the second of her accounts had been removed after a complaint from Mr. Gallagher, she clicked the box to indicate that she questioned the validity of his copyright claim. Mr. Gallagher said Meta notified him that it would restore Miss Kelly's account unless he took legal action to assert his ownership of the images she had posted. That is when he sued her. So cut it out unless you're actually going to back this up with legal claims. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to back it up with legal claims. Okay. You thought you were going to call my bluff? Nice try. God. This is only making me stronger. That case is making its way through the court system now, but it is a fascinating, weird arc for Pilates to take, right? That it is started in ostensibly a pretty altruistic way, right? Whether or not you're like a big fan of how Joseph Pilates goes about things, like it seems like his motivations here were genuinely pretty good. And over time, that legacy sort of grows. And then gets big enough to be a target for extremely petty patent trolls. Yeah. I like the episodes that are just like, we're not like canceling anything. It's just like, here's like a fun story. This is a fun story. Of this thing that like, if you don't do Pilates, that's fine. If you do Pilates, that's fine. Don't care. But here's probably something you didn't know about it. Yeah, this is, this is Halo Top. This is Angela Lansbury. This is, yeah. I mean, we kind of canceled Halo Top, but this is, this is different. We were just like, it's fine. And it's just mostly air. Honestly, that's like most of our episodes. It's fine, but air. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.