Ep. 213 - Addressing The IFBB Pro Bodybuilding Controversy (ft Desmond Butler)

Cult, we’ve been working on this one for weeks. We’ve got Desmond Butler on this episode, the lead journalist who wrote the recent Washington Post series on the corruption, exploitation, and health and safety controversies in the NPC/IFBB pro league. We previously discussed this article series both in a duo episode as well as with Dr. Guillermo Escalante, and now, we’re privileged to sit down and hear it from the source (or rather the man with the sources). In this episode, you’ll learn how Desmond’s father directed the cult classic (pun intended) Pumping Iron, and then how years later he’d go on to revisit bodybuilding from a very different perspective. You’ll also learn just how much research went into the Post articles, and how many people they spoke to. This was a monster episode for sure folks and an eye-opening exposé.

Om Podcasten

Iron Culture was started by Eric Helms and Omar Isuf, now currently hosted by Eric Helms and Eric Trexler with Omar as a returning guest, as a means of exploring the world of physical culture and attempting to distill a unified philosophy of lifting and to help listeners find greater meaning from the iron. The lifting community has become fractured over the last ~70 years and this Podcast will attempt to explore the fundamental threads that unite these different tribes. The Podcast focuses on dispensing practical, useful information to the listener, bouncing from history, to philosophy, to contemporary lifting culture issues, to science. This can range from teaching the audience about lifting, programming, nutrition, supplements/PEDs and the history of lifting culture. The format includes casual conversations between the two hosts on a variety of topics, discussions with a panel of experts and interviews with authoritative figures in the lifting community.