Richard Simmons Isn't Missing

Man, I'll tell you what, all I ever want to drink when we're recording is like fizzy things, and it's the worst idea.

I know, because you have fizz in the background and you have the burps.

Yeah, you get just lovely little gurgles to join us on the podcast.

The gurgle cut.

We're releasing the gurgle cut.

I think, I mean, I think maybe I'll go literal.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that will make you cry slightly less in this episode than the previous episode.

This is what I was promised.

This is why I'm here.

You're really selling it.

I'm fucking, I'm leaving if you make me cry.

But I think, listen, I think the main arc of this episode is Richard Simmons' rise to stardom and then decision to disengage from stardom.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

Oh, my God.

We hadn't said our names.

We haven't.

Through all that shit.

I forgot, again, you have to say your thing.

If you'd like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/slash maintenance phase.

Or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

It's the same audio.

Same stuff.

Michael.

We're talking about Richard Simmons again.

Can you give us like a

brief nutshell overview

of sort of what we learned last time?

Grew up Louisiana.

He talks a lot about being bullied for being fat by his father and also other kids.

Then he moves to Italy, becomes a happy little meatball, ends up moving back to LA and essentially having like a very severe eating disorder to lose 100 pounds, and then discovers a group exercise and opens a gym and then a chain of gyms.

Yeah.

Because his gym is based in Beverly Hills and because he is such a theatrical dude, it is not long until the media takes note.

Richard and Anatomy Asylum are ultimately featured for the first time on TV on a show called Real People.

Are you ready to watch a clip?

Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

What was it that compelled you to lose all that weight?

I had a friend who had a friend who

died from obesity from just being fat.

And that's when I started going to autopsies, like, you know, looking at people's hearts and being able to take this picture into the classroom and go, do you see this heart?

This heart is covered with cookies and pies and grease.

And your heart may look like this and you never know when it's going to stop beating.

Weren't you afraid that if you lost weight, you couldn't get work as an actor if you were thin?

Every fat person has the fear that they will change in some way, mentally, physically, spiritually, and sexually if that weight loss goes.

I tried every diet in the whole world.

I had the jaws wired, I tried the pills, I tried the shots, and finally I basically starved.

I lost 123 pounds in two and a half months.

My hair fell out, the eyes drooped, the chin drooped.

If you don't exercise while you're losing the weight, you will end up to look like a very thin glad bag.

I had to go to a plastic surgeon.

Chin had to go up, eyes had to be done, nose fixed, 900 hair transplants.

I mean, you're looking at a four-door Cadillac paid for when you look at this face.

What's to prevent other people from looking at you and saying, hey, Richard did it, why can't I do it?

Because they shouldn't make the same anguish mistake that I made because I almost died.

I didn't know he had that much plastic surgery.

Yeah, he had quite a bit of, I assume there was like some loose skin

removal stuff to do, but like, yeah, he was very open about having had a lot of work done.

He also has this weird thing of like, I lost weight the wrong way, so that's why I, you know, had this kind of drooping face.

But my understanding is that like, you have that no matter what It's like you if you lose weight You just have extra skin on your face.

Yes, absolutely.

It's the same thing as like when people are like oh zempic face and you're like Yeah, that's just people losing weight and you got less fat everywhere

Yeah, and then your skin hangs a little lower and there you go.

I feel like it it makes me kind of like respect the message a little bit less if he's promising people, you know, that they can look like Richard Simmons after losing so much weight when he's presumably spent thousands of dollars on a bunch of plastic surgery.

This is some of the sort of selective stuff that people listen to with Richard Simmons.

He was very consistent about saying that he starved himself and that that was a bad idea.

Yeah.

A lot of people missed that message.

He was pretty consistent about talking about having work done.

A lot of people chose not to pay attention to that.

And he was also pretty consistent, as you see in this clip, with really haranguing fat people

about being to blame for their own deaths, basically, right?

Yeah.

In a people magazine profile from the time

called former fatty richard simmons is the grand duke of diet and the clown prince of fitness that's not even what yeah

it's exactly right

they write quote off camera simmons himself has even been known to accost strangers caught in the act of overindulging

I'll see an overweight woman eating a butterscotch sundae, he says, and I'll sit at her table and say, what is this?

For me, this is not a job.

It's a mission.

He's like, bullying worked for me.

So I have to bully people.

But it's like, Richard, it doesn't sound like it actually worked for you.

Yeah, totally.

And I will say, he doesn't really talk.

a ton in interviews about his relationship with food.

Yeah.

But when you get little glimpses of it, it's very clearly not an easy relationship.

Oh, yeah.

There's one men's health interview where he lists off just like dozens of foods that he can't have in his house.

Oh, Oh, wow.

Okay.

Let yourself have a potato chip once in a while.

Oh, my God.

So he probably just has like a low-grade eating disorder for like essentially the rest of his life is like how he keeps the weight off.

Well, and now not only is it his perception of his own health and his perception of his own social value and other people's perceptions of those things too, it's also his fucking job.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He can't ever be seen to gain any weight.

I think the thing that I took home from this clip when I first saw it is I was like, holy hell, his message was so much gnarlier

and more like tough talk than I remembered, you know?

Yeah, it's this scared straight stuff.

I think people tend to think of him as the antidote to like toxic weight loss messages.

And I think that's the part that people listen to the loudest.

Yeah.

But he had plenty of extremely judgmental messages in there because that is how he felt about himself.

So is this just a show that's just like, here's a random guy?

It's the TV show equivalent of get a load of this guy.

Like the guy who got calf implants on True Life on MTV that I still remember first episode.

Oh, boy.

Remember that one?

No.

What?

I think about that all the time.

And here you said you didn't get TV references.

Nice try.

That's all I did as a kid was go over to a friend's house who had cable.

And watch MTV.

And you're like, go away.

I'm watching MTV.

Were your parents like a we refuse to have cable house?

We were a Cheapskate house, and cable was like $32 a month.

That's where you get it.

It is Aubrey.

yes.

It's a genetic trait.

So unsurprisingly, after his appearance on Real People, Richard is a huge hit.

And the next thing he did, Michael, was that he landed a recurring role as an aerobics instructor on General Hospital.

Oh, here come the weird references to things the youths will not understand.

Yeah, General Hospital is an extremely long-running American soap opera, and soap operas, I would say, are like telenovelas that never end.

We have to give it to people in Mr.

Beast.

Imagine Mr.

Beast, but there's a script that he talks, and there's 50 Mr.

Beasts, and they work in a hospital.

That's how young people will understand.

Imagine you unwrap your shredded cheese, and there's a big pile of blue market.

The way that he talks about getting the role is another one of these sort of, I don't know, Richard kind of ingenue stories where he's like, I was on a plane to Las Vegas and I got into my seat and I was sitting next to a professional looking brunette in a three-piece suit who asks him, Aren't you that guy who jumps around on television?

Okay.

And he says, Yes, I guess I am.

And she says, You're very funny.

I've never seen anyone like you on TV.

And he says, Well, that's because there isn't anyone on TV like me.

Nice.

Like, I was like, I don't think this exchange happened at all in this way.

Yeah, no.

And I don't think you stumbled into a role on General Hospital.

She, this professional-looking brunette, then says, hey, I'm in casting for General Hospital, and I'd like to write a role for you on the show.

And he's like, I turned her down.

Oh, what?

No, you didn't.

I feel like a theme in celebrity memoirs is people write out their ambition oftentimes.

Yep.

It sounds like he probably wanted to get on TV.

He got a little taste of celebrity.

He liked it.

And he's like, okay, what other opportunities are there?

And he probably went out of his way to try to make these opportunities happen.

There's nothing wrong with that, but people want to make it seem as if it's just like, I'm so special that people couldn't help but notice.

I think he had gotten a taste not only of sort of being on camera, but of the kind of adulation that he had absolutely never gotten in his life before, right?

Yeah.

Everything up until now has been mostly people rejecting him.

Right.

And then he gets this thing where people not only accept him, they adore him.

Right.

Right.

Right.

He talks during this era about how there were whole bags of fan mail just for him.

Oh, wow.

This is around the time that he starts his pretty legendary relationships with his fans.

In his memoir, he writes that he usually makes 40 to 50 phone calls a day.

Oh, my God.

Even when he's on the road.

And on a really busy day, he'd go up to 100 phone calls.

This is my bad place.

Hellscape.

This would kill me.

Hellscape.

So Richard lands this role on General Hospital.

It goes really well.

He's really loved on the show.

He calls his dad to tell him he's on General Hospital.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And his dad's response is, basically, why don't you have your own show?

What the fuck?

That's such garbage.

So from there, Richard went on to host his own daytime talk show, The Richard Simmons Show.

Wait, really?

Like immediately?

Yeah, he started General Hospital in 79

and he started the Richard Simmons Show in 1980.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

We're going to watch the intro, which will give you a taste.

Good, good, good, good, good.

I sent you the link.

Intro.

Okay, the Richard Simmons show.

It's him doing fitness.

Great transitions, PowerPoint transitions.

Okay, there's like a preacher skit.

Okay, fitness in top hats.

Vaudeville fitness.

Oh, it's like pranking people in girls.

In the grocery store.

Getting into hot tub fully clothed for some reason.

God.

He's driving a car with why are you fat on the license plate?

Why are you F-A-T-T?

Why are the comments turned off?

They're afraid of people roasting him?

It's too spicy.

I really comment that that's not for bad.

But listen, this was uploaded by someone with 13 subscribers.

Yeah, 13 subscribers.

Okay, fair enough.

In that intro, Mike, we get Richard Simmons, among other things, we get him doing a lot of fitness with a lot of costumes.

Very weird.

Yeah.

At one point, we see him dressed as an angel.

That costume is for a character he called the weight saint.

Oh, no.

Who was the angel on your shoulder, reminding you to count calories, right?

That's what he was doing in the grocery store was like telling that lady.

Don't get that, get this.

Oh my gosh.

She was in the produce aisle, Richard.

He had other characters on the show.

He frequently did like sketches on the show.

That

I don't know if that's his gift.

I don't know if that's his gift.

He played a nun named Sister Mary Local.

Wait.

Is it a whole talk show dedicated to weight loss?

This sounds so boring.

It is a fitness-themed half-hour talk show

every day.

Oh my god, why would anybody watch this?

He has another character named Anna Maria Spaghetti.

He plays a reverend named Reverend Pounds,

who is a man of the tablecloth.

Oh my, okay, that's pretty good.

All right, fair enough.

Who says things like, Twinkies are my shepherd, I shall not want.

What?

And though I waddle through the valley of Latweeni Latweene and clams, I shall fear no evil.

Richard!

That's terrible.

He has a sketch about broccoli going to the unemployment office because, quote, people just don't eat vegetables anymore.

God,

he plays a cop from the slob squad who gives out tickets at grocery stores to people who are buying fattening foods.

He had celebrity guests on.

Bob Barker came on.

Betty White came on.

Phyllis Dillard, Jack Lelane, and Barbara Eden.

You wanted your 70 celebrities.

Let's go.

Oh, man.

We're not explaining a single one of those.

Barbara Eden, just I Dream of Genie.

That's all you need to know.

Oh, I didn't actually know that one.

I didn't actually know that one.

It was my ringtone for years.

Mine is just the My Neck, My Back song in its entirety.

So doing the Richard Simmons show allows Richard to buy a house for himself.

He doesn't really want a house.

He's never really home for it.

But everyone keeps telling him there's this gorgeous house and he just ought to buy it.

So he buys this house.

He can afford it.

He buys this house and he calls his family and says, Come out to LA.

I'll fly y'all out.

I'm hosting Christmas.

I got a house.

I'd love for you guys to come out and see it.

His family arrives, and his dad walks through the entire house, making note of all of the flaws.

That's such toxic dad behavior.

It is such a specific parent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The pipe's a little loose here, Richard.

You're like, what?

What am I supposed to do about this right now?

The appliances are all stainless steel, which is like a very fucking fancy thing in the early 80s.

Okay.

And he just keeps going, they're going to be covered in fingerprints.

Ooh, anti-cyber truck king, Richard Simmons' dad.

And he's like, there are too many steps in one house.

I've never seen this many steps in my whole life.

Christ.

So Richard gets his family settled into their rooms, and his dad immediately starts shouting to him about how there's no hot water, like the hot water is out.

Okay, I would complain about that.

I would complain about that.

So I'm going to send you his quote from his memoir explaining what happened next.

We're back in the crying in the driveway section of the podcast episode.

Yeah, get ready to get sad about it, Dad.

My father said, we fly all the way out here, and now we're in a mansion, this big modern thing, and there's no hot water?

Do something, Richard.

I called the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and managed to get a string of rooms.

That's how I spent Christmas that year.

The next day, December 26th, I put the house up for sale.

I didn't want to clean all those windows anyway.

Oh, that's so sad.

It's so sad.

So, like, he bought the house because other people thought he should buy the house.

And he sold the house because other people didn't like the house.

It's sort of like, what did his dad, like, want?

Like, what did he expect?

Well, I mean, I think, listen, I'm just spitballing here, but I think his dad was a showbiz guy who gave it all up to have kids.

And here Richard is having a good amount of success in showbiz.

Right.

And who said that he didn't want showbiz kids because they are annoying.

Right.

And I'm like, well, you got an annoying kid who is having a great deal of success in the thing that you left.

Yeah.

I will say over time, Richard says that his relationship with his father starts to sort of soften.

Oh.

He doesn't.

give a lot of great examples of that.

The closest he gets is like, there is a conversation that he recounts where his dad says, I'm really proud of you.

Oh, okay.

And it's clear that that meant a lot to Richard.

I remain skeptical in a protective way.

Be like, leave him alone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean?

Because this dad has been like bad news.

And also, as part of that relationship softening, Richard's like, I started sending him gifts.

Okay.

And it's like cashmere sweaters and tailored shirts and like nice ass shit.

Look at what my gay son got me.

Look at the gay things that my dad got me.

Richard eventually ends up buying another house and he wants to hire a housekeeper to look after the house because he has gone so much.

Richard Simmons has many dogs and they are all Dalmatians.

Oh, really?

Like famously difficult to care for dogs.

Every Dalmatian is named after a character in Gone with the Wind.

Oh, wait, really?

Scarlett, Patty, Ashley,

Rat.

Dude, Richard Simmons and I would not have been friends if we've met each other under different circumstances.

He also collected dolls.

So many old dolls in the house.

Yeah.

How you doing, buddy?

There's no way.

I want to maintain my affection for this man.

These are not the choices as an adult that I have made.

So he's interviewing housekeepers, and he interviews someone, and he says, hey, do you like dogs?

And she says, says, Yes, I like dogs.

And when I was a kid, I had a Dalmatian.

And he goes, You're hired.

Okay.

Her name's Teresa.

She lives with him for decades, working as his housekeeper.

Okay.

When people ask him if he's married, he says, I live with a wonderful woman named Teresa.

Oh, man.

Ooh.

Okay.

Yeah.

According to Teresa, who has shared this since he passed, he also bought two grave sites side by side, one for him and one for her.

Huh.

While Richard is doing the Richard Simmons show, his father falls ill.

He goes in for surgery for kidney stones, and Richard is like, How bad do you need these kidney stones removed?

You're 85.

There are complications from the surgery.

So Richard flies out to New Orleans to see his dad because he's 85 and he's experiencing complications from surgery and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put together the risk there, right?

He talks about seeing him in his hospital bed and sort of scarcely recognizing him.

He should walk around his dad and criticize all the flaws with it.

Your nose doesn't look right.

Be like, oh, your ears are garbage.

Once his father's released from the hospital, Richard gets him all settled in and then says, Okay, is there anything else that I can do for you?

And his father says, Yes, Richard, there is one other thing you can do for me.

Go to Rome and meet the Pope.

What?

And say a prayer with him for me.

This is like some sort of like three riddles to cross this bridge type shit.

This is like a video game character.

He's like, go on this quest.

I'm going to go cameras on for a second so that you can see.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Wait, what?

That is Richard Simmons meeting the fucking Pope.

Wait, so he actually pulled this off somehow?

He went to Rome and he met the Pope.

He does not explain the mechanics of how that happened.

He sat next to me on a plane.

I think he sat next to me on a plane.

What do you do?

He like really yada yadas it where he's like, I called my agent who worked out the details and I was on a plane to, and I'm like, no,

that is not a sufficient explanation, Richard.

I wonder if he told the Pope that he's Jewish.

By the next year, spring of the next year, Leonard Simmons Sr.

died on April 18th, 1983.

This is a big loss for Richard.

His relationship with his dad was complicated and rough, but even in its complication and roughness, it still loomed large in his life in a big way.

Yeah.

And I think for anybody who's grieved somebody who you who sucked.

Who sucked?

You can say who sucked.

Yeah, who was really close to you and also who sucked.

You know how complicated it can be to feel grief and relief and anger and all of that at the same time.

This is how I felt when Queerist Folk went off the air.

It was not good, but it was very important to me.

So he's lost his father.

While all of that is happening, his career continues to take off.

In addition to his

talk show, in addition to General Hospital, in addition to all of that, he releases a diet book.

It's his first book called Never Say Diet.

Is that supposed to be a pun on Never Say Die?

Yes.

He says he doesn't like the word diet because the first word is die.

The first part of the word is die.

So his is a live it program is what he calls it throughout.

He takes these little things and he makes them so much worse.

They're so sweaty.

A live it.

So he's talking in this section about people who've tried everything and just can't lose weight.

And like, why should you listen to me about this?

Right.

He's sort of credentialing himself.

He says, the difference is that you've failed and I haven't.

I used to weigh 268 pounds.

I used to be fat and round and miserable.

And I didn't like it.

So I found the way to beat the fat and come out a winner.

And I know where you've gone wrong and why you failed so far.

Well, this is kind of mean, yeah.

And also, like, I'm so sorry, you beat the fat and came out a winner.

That's how you're describing like hospitalization induced by starving yourself.

Like, what are you talking about?

He just said this more succinctly on the show with the why are you fat license group,

like, his whole thing.

Yeah,

I think the other thing to know here is that, like, this is absolutely the template for how former fat people are urged to feel about themselves whether or not they feel that way yeah they're urged to feel and say like i was fat that was bad i made a decision to be thin i had the grit to achieve it and i came out a winner right and i should say he is not a person who has mentioned any formal training at any point in any of this yeah good point yeah he's just like a guy i think a lot of his shit is based on vibes yeah yeah yeah and his own experience and his own experience is not replicable.

Yeah.

While all of this is happening, he keeps teaching his classes at the anatomy asylum now called Slimmons.

Finally, he's becoming himself.

He's starting to believe.

He starts teaching classes.

His regulars really love him.

And one of his regulars named Ellen.

She became a favorite of his.

She made these teeny, tiny little teddy bears and would sell them at local gift shops and would bring them to him as a gift.

She brings little bears every so often.

He doesn't see her in class for a while and asks after her and finds out that she has passed away.

And he's like, what happened?

And the person is like, well, she was anorexic for a really long time.

Oh, wow.

And he says that at this point, anorexia is not a term that he has heard.

So he asks another couple of regulars who are both nurses what anorexia was.

Oh, wow.

This is the passage that he writes about it in his memoir.

He says, so an anorexic is a person who stops eating for no reason and millions of reasons.

It's someone who gets smaller and smaller, just like those little teddy bears.

That alarmed me, because I had once starved myself to lose weight.

I asked the nurses, when I starved, was I anorexic?

Not necessarily, though it's a fine line, they told me.

You starve to lose weight.

Anorexics starve to disappear.

There are usually feelings of self-loathing or lack of self-worth connected with anorexia.

In Italy, when I'd starved, it was because I finally realized my own self-worth, so I thought.

I'd wanted to live and to look my best so I would fit fit in, although I'd gone about it in a very harmful way.

Oh,

this is like what he's telling himself.

He's like, I didn't hate myself.

I just did it because I hated myself.

It's so sad

and self-soothing by being like, even though I behaved indistinguishably from someone with profound anorexia,

being thin is still healthier than being fat, even if you starve to do it.

It's like someone who is really bending over backwards to tell himself stories that make sense of his own experience and sort of protect it.

It's also so interesting how you can like, you can make somebody stare this stuff in the face.

Yeah.

Right.

Of being like, starving yourself because of low self-esteem and poor body image, et cetera, is unbelievably bad for you and an actual like diagnosed medical condition.

And he can look at that information and still be like, I mean, I did that, but not in like the bad way.

Yeah, yes.

Like it's not, it's not that you can like tell people that this exists and they'll have this eureka moment and be like, oh my God, I shouldn't do that.

It's like, oh, oh, but I don't count.

We are now, Michael, solidly in the mid-80s.

And 1985 is the dawn of the infomercial era.

Oh, yeah.

Another thing we have to explain.

I did not know why

infomercials sort of showed up in the 80s.

I just sort of knew that they did.

Do you have a guess about why infomercials showed up?

The invention of the Ron Co.

rotisserie oven.

It was so good.

They're like, let's put this on TV six hours a night.

This

jam wow.

They just had to.

Look, they had to get the word out.

This is part of the Reagan administration's massive deregulation effort.

What?

So Reagan's changes to the FCC abolish the fairness doctrine.

that had been in place since 1949, which was the doctrine that required broadcast television to fairly cover differing viewpoints on controversial issues.

Should chicken rotate?

Should chicken not rotate?

This deregulation also removed restrictions on advertising to to kids.

So this is when we also start to get a huge wave of ads aimed directly at children during children's programming.

And it loosened restrictions on how long an individual advertisement could last.

So now you could have a 30 or 60 minute advertisement.

Wait, those were advertisements?

I thought they were just like talk shows that only ever existed for one episode.

All of them had the same catchphrase, which is just like, there's got to be a better way.

The thing is, I did watch them when I was like six years old and like, I absolutely fell for it.

I was like, oh, I learned on a talk show about like this knife that can cut paper or whatever.

I grew up in a house with cutco knives and a miracle thaw.

I am not above the infomercial.

Miracle thaw was the best one.

It was just like a cutting board on the counter.

It's like meat defrosts.

Like, yeah.

And it's metal.

So meat does not defrost.

It just makes the metal cold.

Now everything's cold.

Congratulations.

So at this point, when infomercials sort of roll around, Richard Simmons had a two-minute TV ad for his product, Deal a Meal, which is sort of like a hybrid board game diet.

It's like a very bad board game and a

okay diet.

We don't have time, Aubrey.

We don't have time.

We're not doing it.

We can't run through every part of the Richard Simmons Empire because we would be here for, I would come out of my office with a Rip Van Winkle beard.

The diet board game.

Deal a meal for many of our listeners in our age group will have been their first diet because it's sort of a gamified, kid-friendly.

Is it like you spin a wheel and you can like eat an apple or a blueberry or something?

No, you have like a little play wallet and you have cards in the wallet that are like, you get seven vegetable cards and two lean protein cards.

Oh my god, it's a roguelike.

And you move them over to the other side of your wallet when you eat them.

It's bilatro.

I don't know any of the words you're saying.

Just don't worry about it.

Not a single one of them.

Welcome to my world, Aubrey.

Anytime you mention survivor to me.

I don't watch Survivor's 90-day fiancé, and you know that.

Are those different?

Direct your hate mail to michael.com.

So the ad, his two-minute ad for Dela Meal was a big hit, and so was the product.

So the production company approaches him about doing an infomercial for Deala Meal.

He does, and it becomes a big hit, and Richard just sort of keeps doing infomercials.

The very next year, 1986, Richard Simmons starts making exercise videos.

In 1982, Jane Fonda's Complete Workout came out and was a massive hit.

One of the things that people say about that time is that the video was so popular, it increased VCR sales.

Right.

I couldn't find confirmation of that anywhere, but like that's like, I think it's a gesture at how popular those videos were.

Yeah, my understanding is that the rise of the VCR was like 99% pornography.

Oh, that makes more sense.

But 0.5% was probably at-home fitness.

There's only two things that you need privacy to watch.

Most of those tapes were cranked out.

Few of them used any recognizable songs.

Richard describes them as elevator music.

Oh, interesting.

So, and I went back and did watch some other, I watched Richard Simmons' workout tapes and I watched some others from the time.

And you're like, yeah, it's a little bit like the Angela Lansbury Positive Moves one.

Right.

Where you're like, oh, it's just like sort of synthy vibes.

Or in today's parlance, Creative Commons.

It's Pottington Bear.

So

the production company once again approaches him and this time is like, what if you made an exercise tape?

And he was like, cool, cool.

But I want it to be like my classes where we play my records.

And he wants it to be his favorite songs that he listened to as a kid in the 50s and 60s.

So he plays It's My Party and He's a Rebel and Beyond the Sea and these older timey songs for the 80s.

And for his middle-aged audience, which is actually like very smart.

Yeah.

He casts the videos like his classes.

They are mostly women, but not exclusively women.

They include fat people and they include super fat people and they include visibly disabled people.

It's radical inclusivity for that era.

Radical, right?

But it's also inclusive in the name of making those fat people thin.

Yeah, it's all on a relative scale.

It's totally advancing from what it was before, but it still has a long way to go.

Yeah.

I'm going to go cameras on again.

Up until this point, Richard's personal uniform

is like a ballet dancer.

Oh, what?

Tights and a leotard, and he looks gorgeous.

Oh, wow, the hips.

Right?

Yeah.

Like, he looks stunning.

Yeah, he looks great.

Yeah, I also recently discovered leggings.

Oh, you're going to start getting into leggings?

I found them at the children's section of Goodwill, like every pants I wear.

I'm a very small man.

He's like, people always told me I had great legs, and they're right.

I do.

And I'm like, yes, you do, Richard.

You do have great legs.

Good job.

Yeah, man.

In the lead-up to Sweat into the Oldies, he meets a wardrobe person named Leslie Wilshire, who he calls, quote, my own Edith Head, which I'm like, boy, Richard, the references are not getting timelier, my guy.

She is the one who brings him a pair of dolphin shorts for the first time.

Wait, explain dolphin shorts to me.

People have been tweeting this at us, too.

Why are they dolphin shorts?

It was the brand name, D-O-L-F-I-N.

But then people over time thought it was like just the animal.

Okay, I've never heard of this.

But those are like the little tiny short shorts that he's wearing in like every video.

I've seen them.

Yeah, they're the little tiny short shorts.

They're like the dude version of hot pants.

This is my only like traditional, like we used to be a proper country take.

It's like, bring back short shorts on men.

Shocking take from a gay man.

Just want to see more of the gentleman.

She brings him the dolphin shorts, which he describes as being like very in at the time.

Like this was like the look.

Yeah.

And she gives him a flowy, flashy, like tank top.

And he writes in his memoir about trying it on for the first time.

I just sent you a quote.

He says, in that tank top and those shorts, I finally knew what Superman must have felt like when he put on the cape for the first time.

My legs looked great, and the tank top covered my waist.

It camouflaged the area where my underwear made little love-handle dents around my waist.

It also gave me an incentive to work a little harder on my chest and arms.

It was the perfect outfit.

I just love him having this moment of like, I look awesome.

I feel awesome.

It makes me sad, but built into that is like, my waist is covered and I need an incentive to work on my arms and that kind of thing.

Right.

But I'm like, this is a moment of Richard feeling straightforwardly like great about how he looks and how he feels in his body and all of that sort of stuff.

And I'm like, I love this for you.

Is it also you striving to find any like moments of joy in this book that is so joyless?

You're like, we found one.

So this becomes his signature look, of course.

Sweat into the oldies also became a huge hit in the exercise tape world.

It made him even more of a household name and it opened the floodgates for sort of Richard Simmons Inc., right?

Yeah, yeah.

He starts making branded clothing.

He starts making Richard Simmons workout shoes.

He starts making fat-free popcorn, which I would argue, oh, popcorn has fat-free popcorn.

What?

It's just popcorn with like a bunch of Nutra Sweets sprinkled on it.

Just dry,

plain air pop popcorn.

Also, one thing we have not talked about yet is the economics of all this.

Home videos for like $20

in like 1985 money, which is like 45 or 50 bucks now.

Like it must have been so profitable.

to have like a home videotape empire.

He also starts making huge appearances in malls and big box stores

in order to promote this merch.

Like he releases a steamer at one point.

Okay.

And he goes and does like a big like exercise class in the middle of them all with the steamer so they can't sell the steamer.

Richard Simmons keeps sort of energizer bunnying his way through his work life, right?

Until 1999 when his beloved mother, Shirley Simmons, passes away.

And Richard describes this very openly in the memoir as a real turning point for him.

It is sort of an earthquake in his personal life.

This is from one of the final passages in Richard Simmons' memoir.

He says,

I don't know what to do with the menu.

I was there for him, and now I guess he was going to be there for me.

I still had my doubts, but I knew I couldn't hide forever.

Eventually, I said, Yes, of course, I'll go on.

I feel like I know what's gonna happen.

People aren't gonna let him be serious about his mom because he's Richard and he's a clown, and nobody wants to hear him be serious.

That's not the story that he tells.

God, I want to cancel Jay Leno again.

God damn it.

Well, you can do that for other reasons.

For the cars, due to the cars, due to the denim.

After this little passage, he writes about having a pep talk from his late mom.

That he heard her voice telling him to just be himself and to not say anything to aggravate his brother, which I absolutely believe his mom said to him a lot.

Mr.

Business, Mr.

Heterosexual.

So that is where the memoir ends.

It's like, I don't feel like being funny anymore, but I guess I kind of have to.

Yeah, I got to go on Jay Leno and get made fun of.

Yeah, it is hard to read, and I think, to me, it has the tone of an editor being like, you can't end on such a sad note.

It's funny because his like alleged happy ending is also kind of a sad ending.

Yeah.

It's like continue being the clown for everyone.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that is sort of the chapter that we're leading into is like culture does not let him have some space.

Yeah.

From there, Richard continues to make some media appearances, but he is sort of slowing down from the 80s and 90s, right?

How old is he at this point?

He's born in 46, you said, right?

He's born in 48.

48, okay.

So in 2000, he would have been

52.

As I've gotten older, I used to have like two hours a day of extroversion in me, and now I'm down to like one interaction with a Trader Joe's cashier.

He probably started at a higher baseline than me, but I can see how some of the energy that he's using on this is probably dwindling by 52.

It's funny because like at the time when people kind of noticed that he had disappeared from public life, it was sort of in some ways constructed as a mystery, but it seems like this book kind of answers this question.

Yeah.

He was a guy with a lot of hurt that he was carrying around, and nobody really took any of that seriously or like listened to him.

And he had this kind of one-dimensional public persona.

So like, yeah, of course he was just like, yeah, I don't really want to do this anymore.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Doesn't it?

So I felt like I had sort of, even just after reading the memoir, I was like, oh, well, I feel like I have a real good sense of why he disappeared from public life.

He was experiencing grief, right?

And he just like was like, I don't have this level of like, you know, be the life of the party in me.

Right.

What an extremely human response.

Yeah, totally to grieve.

Yeah, yeah.

And he didn't step away from public life entirely at this point.

He just started to slow down like people, like our fellow people in middle age tend to do.

Cut to Mike and Aubrey going, we're not going to produce as many episodes.

Yeah, it's like

a normal thing.

So we start getting these reports of Richard getting really short with people, which is something that doesn't really exist in previous media about him.

Yeah.

So in March of 2004, The Smoking Gun reported that Richard Simmons was charged with assault

in the Phoenix airport.

I do not remember this at all.

So here is the report from the Smoking Gun.

It says, the 54-year-old fitness guru laid the smackdown on one Chris Farney, a 23-year-old Mesa man who happens to cage wrestle in his spare time.

According to the Phoenix Police Department report, when Farney spotted Simmons walking through the Sky Harbor International Airport, he said, look, Richard Simmons, drop your bags, let's rock to the 50s.

Farney told Cops he was referring to an old Simmons workout tape.

The diminutive star, guys, the diminutive star responded by walking over to the strapping Farney and saying, it's not nice to make fun of people with issues.

He then slapped Farney's face.

The motorcycle salesman, who was not injured, called Cops, who cited an emotional and repentant Simmons for assault.

I mean, don't slap people, but also I can see how you would sort of snap.

Yes, and also Richard Simmons tells a very different version of this story.

Oh, okay.

In 2012, Richard gives an interview with Men's Health, and he talks about this instance.

Richard Simmons says that Chris Farney was talking shit about fat people and making fun of the fat people in his videos.

That

I believe.

Dude, have you seen the video of Bajork attacking that paparazzi?

Why are you saying it like this when I'm talking about it?

That's how you say it.

No, it's not.

I've heard a lot of Icelandic people get it wrong, but it's actually Bajork.

Oh, okay.

Have you seen the video, though?

Of Bjork slapping someone?

Dude, it's wild.

It's like normal paparazzi video of like a celebrity leaving an airport.

You know, you've seen this clip a million times.

And then this lady goes,

welcome to London or like, welcome to New York or whatever city it is.

And Bjork just goes fucking nuts on her like

jumps at her, grabs her microphone, and is just like beating her fucking ass with this microphone.

And it's like out of context, you're like, what the fuck?

Like this, like, this pop star is completely unhinged.

But according to Bjork later, this is this paparazzi lady who had been hounding her for like weeks and showing up in her like private vacations and fucking with her.

And like it felt super passive aggressive.

Just like, welcome.

And that's when she like really snapped.

So if you have the full context, it's like, I mean, again, it's not defensible to sort of blow up and like physically attack somebody, obviously, but it actually kind of makes sense in context, or at least it's like more legible as human behavior in context.

And I can see something like that happening with Richard Simmons.

You imagine that this must have been some sort of prolonged interaction.

So when Men's Health asks Richard Simmons in 2012 about this instance, this is his response.

He says, you can't just do that in front of me.

You can say anything you want to me, but you better not say anything that's going to upset me about obese people.

I've gotten emails where they go, my wife's a fat pig.

She'll buy your videos, but then she eats Doritos.

I'll email that man back and say, you should be ashamed of yourself.

You are there to support your wife, not call her animal names.

How dare you?

This is the woman that loves you.

She's the mother of your children.

You need to embrace her, tell her that you love her, and never call her names or embarrass her in front of other people.

Yeah.

Slap that motherfucker, Richard.

Right.

I was like, I read that quote and I was like, I have been fully turned around on the slap.

Yeah.

Some people do deserve violence.

This is the kind of energy that you never actually see from thin people or from formerly fat people who are now thin people, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, sorry.

You were going to yell about fat people in the middle of the airport?

I'm absolutely going to fucking

give the human being equivalent of like getting out the squirt bottle and being like, hey, get it up.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, no.

I would have expected more if he had a literal squirt bottle.

That would be amazing.

This is the thing that I was thinking about recently: is if I got into a fight, I'm not confident that I would know how to throw a punch.

Wait, Wait, really?

You never been in a fight, Aubrey?

A physical fight?

You never been in a physical fight?

Sorry, what about me?

Oh, because you went to a fancy school.

Somebody didn't go to public school.

No, that is not what's happening here.

I'm just docile.

I'm just chill.

I think I was in my 30s before I would consider being like, hey, you got my order wrong at a restaurant.

Dude, the last day of eighth grade, I was getting bullied by this other.

This is like a chronicle of me being bullied in middle school now, this podcast.

Were you too sleepy to be bullied?

No, this was after, this was not after the seventh grade roller skating.

This was after the eighth grade cruise.

And this, this kid whose name I really want to say, but I'm not going to say it, who had bullied me all fucking year was fucking with me.

And he shoved me down and I tripped and fell.

And he started, he was like, oh, bitch, or whatever.

And he started walking away from me.

And I got up and I like, I tapped him on the shoulder.

And I was like, oh, hey.

And he turned around and I just did the cheapest fucking shot.

I just punched him in the face as hard as I could and it felt so good.

I just like, boom, and he had fucked me all year.

And then he like fell down.

It was like, it was like Mike Tyson's punch out where like, pull, pull, and they go like different directions.

And it takes like hella long to fall down.

And like, as he was falling down, I like realized what I had done.

I was like, I just punched like a popular kid in the face and I'm like not a popular kid.

So like as he was like still slow motion falling, I turned around and ran.

So I was like, if he gets up, he's going to beat the shit out of me.

Obviously, the only way I could have done this is with a cheap shot.

So I like, I booked my ass off to the school bus because I'm like, if I can get to the school bus, it's the last day of school.

I'm just never going to see this person again.

And like, if I can get to the school bus, I'm like in safety.

I booked as fast as I could to the school bus.

I like jump on.

I'm like,

get on the school bus.

And this, this kid goes, I heard you just punch somebody in the face.

I was like, how did the rumor

travels fast before I got here?

What the fuck?

And everyone was like, is it true?

I'm like, how the fuck do you people know about this?

But yes, it was.

And I feel great about it.

And I never saw that guy again.

God, my heart was just pounding for tiny Mike.

Oh, dude, I know.

For teeth, tiny.

I was like,

the stakes could not be higher.

And then I was like, I know how it turns out.

You're here.

You're fine.

I did live, but I'm still tiny Mike.

So in that same men's health interview, Richard Simmons talks about some more things that I personally found really troubling.

He talks about keeping himself strictly to a 1500 calorie a day diet, which is again like Minnesota starvation study levels.

It's a little bit lower.

He was born with what he calls, quote unquote, a crippled leg

and has been wearing corrective shoes since early childhood.

It's so weird he doesn't say that in the book.

He just deals with it.

It's painful, but he says, quote, thank goodness for ice and hot baths.

So you get the impression that he is in pain

with some regularity, enough that he has a routine around it.

Right.

Right.

And his job is exercising in public.

It's also funny how, again, it's like he was telling us in public, like, I'm a more complicated public figure than you think I am.

And just like, nobody listened.

Yeah, he said he described his role in the world as being part priest and part clown.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

It is no mystery at all that this was a person who needed a break.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in February of 2014, just a couple years after that men's health interview, Richard Simmons stops making public appearances.

It's not long before rumors start to circulate about his quote-unquote disappearance, which is a sort of wild word choice in this case, right?

It's not someone who's vanished off the face of the planet.

It's a guy who's at home.

And like a, by that point, like 60-something year-old guy who just like isn't out and about doing stuff anymore.

Absolutely.

Just like totally, he's basically retired.

The wrench in the works here is that he also sort of stops responding to a bunch of people that he knew through Slimmons.

Friends start calling.

Some of them show up at the house and Teresa turns them away.

And she tells them that he doesn't want any visitors right now.

On a friend level, I can absolutely understand how that would be like really hurtful and confusing.

But also, this is not an unclear boundary.

Well, his life probably feels like a prison of his own making, right?

Because if he's playing this role where he's everybody's therapist, he might not want to play that role anymore.

And he might feel like a lot of those relationships, even as you know, you can say it's kind of self-inflicted.

And on some level, these people, of course, do care about him.

You can see somebody who's created this life for themselves that they just don't really want to participate in anymore.

Yeah, totally.

That's not like necessarily defending it.

I'm like, my feelings would be hurt too.

But also, it's like you kind of, it's understandable and human.

So, in January of 2015, TMZ reports that the LAPD did a welfare check on Richard Simmons.

They had gotten an anonymous tip.

They reported out publicly, like he's okay.

He's, quote, responsive and alert.

Like, he's fine.

Then...

Over a year later, the New York Daily News runs a story called The Haunted Twilight of Richard Simmons.

Oh my God.

This is where the sort of disappearance, quote-unquote, story really seems to take off.

It's just a bunch of people who they considered him a friend, who were like, he's not returning calls, right?

My favorite of his friends was a woman named June, who owned a store called Wigs Today in Los Angeles, and said that she and Richard became friends because he was a regular customer at Wigs Today.

And I was like, I love this.

Okay.

I love that he was like, I'm at the wig store so much, I've made friends there.

But does she say it's just like we used to hang out, now we don't hang out anymore?

Is that like the extent of it?

Well, there's a fair amount of that, but the bulk of the story, the main source is Moro Oliveira.

Moro Oliveira was on Richard Simmons' payroll, first as a massage therapist and then as a personal assistant.

There have been all these rumors that they were partners, right?

That they were romantically involved.

But Richard Simmons doesn't say that ever out loud to anybody.

Does the guy, does Moro, identify himself as a boyfriend or partner?

He never really says either.

At least not that I have seen.

Interesting.

Okay.

He lived in an apartment that Richard Simmons owned.

And he, according to him, he sent in a rent check every month that he says that Simmons never cashed.

Oh, okay.

So he would just write a check every month and Richard Simmons would like, you know, throw it in the garbage or whatever.

Recycle it?

He seemed like a recycler.

Yeah, he did.

He did.

So we're going to start with one of his early, one of the early passages

about Moro's story from this New York Daily News story.

Let's talk it over, Olivera said.

I want to sit here and make sure you'll be okay.

Let's go upstairs.

I'll give you a massage and relax you.

Simmons called up to Teresa Ravelis, his live-in housekeeper of nearly three decades.

Moro is going upstairs with me, he said.

No, no, no, Ravelis shouted from the second floor, according to Olivera.

Get out, get out.

Olivera looked at his friend, who told him in a soft voice, you've got to go.

Olivera leaned in towards Simmons.

Is she controlling your life now?

As Olivera tells it, Simmons looked down and with one resigned word confirmed his worst suspicions.

Yes.

This was the last time he saw his friend.

This is sort of the key part of his story.

He believes, and the story that he tells to the New York Daily News, is that Teresa is keeping Richard Simmons captive in his home.

Okay.

He doesn't offer a motive for that.

He just says she is a witch who practices witchcraft.

Oh, he literally says this?

Yes.

He's careful to note in the interview that that isn't part of many Americans' belief system, but that it's a very real thing where he comes from, which is Brazil, and where Teresa comes from, which is Mexico.

He tells the New York Daily News that he thinks that black magic is what caused Richard to be, in his words, tormented.

Also, a very unreliable narrator.

Would you like another layer of unreliable?

Yeah, give it to me.

He wrote and self-published a book about the whole situation called King Rich and the Evil Witch.

Oh,

he learned from Richard.

You could tell maybe they were boyfriends.

Maybe something rubbed off.

A shared love for terrible titles.

He calls the book a living fairy tale.

He self-publishes it.

Characters in the book include the good, goofy King Rich,

the evil witch Bereza, which is Teresa.

Bereza?

There is King Rich's brother Prince Benny.

Blenny.

It's the fictional story of Bitchard Bimmons.

No relation to any real

and then there's a character just called the artist.

Oh, okay.

And that is very clearly Moro.

This beautiful, intelligent young man who gets caught in the witchcraft, yes.

And the thing that I find maybe most galling about this piece is that it ignores its own context.

In this piece, they talk to Richard Simmons' manager, who's like, he's fine.

He's been on the road for 40 years.

He's just at home.

He'd had trouble with his knees.

It makes sense to me that you would need what he got, which was a full knee replacement on one side and he needed another.

And it reports in this piece that his last living Dalmatian, Hattie, had a terrible, long health decline before ultimately being put down.

Moro says in the piece that he visited at 2 p.m.

on a Sunday and Richard was asleep and Moro was like, this is out of control.

You got to get out of the house and you got to get up and at him.

And I was like, his fucking dog just died.

He's in his 60s.

Let the man nap.

Let the man have a depression nap when he has lost so many beloved people and creatures in his life, right?

Yeah.

I think especially in periods of grief, like it does call you to like zoom out on your life and be like, is this what I fucking wanted?

Yeah.

It's very conceivable that in that state you would go, I think I'm actually fucking done working.

Yeah.

In response to all of this dust kicking up, Richard gives an interview to the Today show.

saying he's totally fine.

He's doing what he wants to do.

Nobody needs to worry.

Man.

Yeah.

The fact that it is an audio-only interview just adds fuel to the fire for people.

It's true crime brain happening.

In direct response to Richard Simmons being like, I'm fine.

Please stop.

They're like, this means he's definitely not fine.

This whole time I'm thinking, like, okay, you're a fan of Richard Simmons.

It turns out he's like been whatever, semi-kidnapped by his mate or whatever.

Or like, yeah, he's in some like

severe depressive funk.

Now what?

What do you do?

You don't know this person.

It really just seems like people were treating him like an ATM for validation.

Yeah.

And not like a person.

And when he was like, hey, I'm a person and I need a break, people were like, where the fuck is my money?

This ATM is busted.

Where did it go?

Weird.

They're absolutely treating him like a utility that got shut off.

Also, you're allowed to just not be a public figure anymore.

I think you and I are probably both two people who will just one day be like, well, I'm done.

Yeah, I will also be kidnapped by my housekeeper.

And there will be a strange Brazilian man who tells a story about me.

That's Brian bicep.

I'm going to be there.

How dare you call back to that?

It's my telephone habits.

To a bonus episode, dude.

Ridiculous.

Bold as brass.

So in November 2016, Richard Simmons closes Slimmons.

There's not really a formal statement from Richard.

They just like post up signs on the door being like, hey, this is going to be our last day.

I'm sure this just digs up the controversy again.

Right.

So on the last day, people are like, maybe he'll show up for the last class.

He doesn't.

He hasn't shown up to anything in over two years at this point.

Yeah.

He finally later addresses it in a Facebook post.

Here is that post.

He says, I've never been very good with beginnings and endings.

Well, it's been over 40 years now, and I'm finally taking my own advice.

I'm being kind to myself and putting myself first.

I'm making changes and taking time to do the things I want to do.

Please know that I'm in good health, and I'm happy.

No one has ever been able to tell me what to do, and the same is true today.

I'm still independent, determined, and opinionated.

I simply am making a new beginning for myself, quietly and in my very own special way.

Slimmons closes in November of 2016.

It's four months after even that last chapter

that missing Richard Simmons premieres.

Okay, right.

So at this point, there's been the wellness check, there's been the Today Show interview, there's been this Facebook post about Slimmons.

He's been really clear.

I am taking time off.

His manager is saying that.

And that's when this.

podcast comes out.

It's hosted by a journalist who had become a regular at Slimmons

and who had been over to dinner at Richard Simmons' house.

This is kind of the apex of the Richard Simmons' missing narrative, right?

This is the biggest stage that it gets.

The next month, on the heels of the podcast release, the LAPD got more tips to conduct another welfare check.

Man.

They go so far as to issue a public statement saying that Richard Simmons is, quote unquote, perfectly fine.

And quote, right now he is doing what he wants to do.

And that is his business.

Man.

In the following month, the month after that, Richard Simmons was hospitalized for severe indigestion.

While he's in the hospital, he posts a photo of himself on Facebook with the caption, I'm not missing, just a little under the weather.

Yeah, but the picture is from a few years earlier because, as we know, Richard Simmons in the hospital is probably not posting a picture of what Richard Simmons looks like while he's in the hospital.

Oh no, so then I'm sure the internet sleuths are like, oh, well, the picture's old.

Whatever.

Remember the Kate Middleton psychotic?

Yes.

People are like, it's an old picture.

He's faking it.

This is Teresa doing it I also think there are plenty of public figures who would not elect to post a picture of what you actually look like when you're checked into a hospital yeah exactly especially if you're making a post that's trying to reassure people also ultimately Richard Simmons is a boomer and he's like he's just posting on Facebook he's like oh I'm posting a little thing and I'll just put a photo on there why not totally just like attaches the photo and the whole internet is just like what about the metadata of the photo like people just like zoom in when like he might just not have been thinking about it all that hard right Richard Simmons was born the same year as both of my parents.

And I'm like, oh, was he also going to attach a photograph of his TV screen?

The post is in all caps for some reason because he doesn't know why.

He doesn't know how to turn that off.

He also FaceTimed someone, but it was just showing his ear because he lifted the phone up.

That same year.

The National Inquirer starts publishing a series of articles alleging that Richard Simmons was trans and started accessing gender-affirming care.

What?

One of the headlines was, Richard Simmons, colon, he's now a woman.

Oh my fucking God, where the fuck is this coming from?

It's the National Enquirer, right?

So someone's kicking up some dust.

That is all made possible by the he's missing narrative, right?

Yeah, yeah.

If we don't have the he's missing narrative, Richard Simmons' name is not in the news, and this doesn't become a story that the National Enquirer probably cares to publish, much less cares to publish at the level that they did.

It's funny contrasting him with Johnny Carson, who also like retired from public life very publicly, right?

Like there was this like series of shows, the end of the tonight show,

and then he just never did anything again.

He just like played golf and hung out on his yacht.

But like, no one cared.

There wasn't like a narrative of like, he's missing or whatever.

He also, it appears, stopped hanging out with all of his like celebrity friends.

Yeah,

he disappeared from public life.

And most people were like, oh, this is kind of cool.

Yeah.

It's weird that the culture did not allow Richard Simmons to do that when we allow people to do this all the time.

Absolutely.

So on July 13th, 2024, Richard Simmons died at his home in Los Angeles.

He was 76 years old.

According to the LA Medical Examiner, his cause of death was a fall the day before with heart disease reported as a contributing factor.

According to People Magazine's interview with Teresa Ravelis, this is her first time speaking to the media.

It's after his death.

She says that he spent his final days doing what he wanted.

He was working with a well-known composer on a Broadway musical about his life.

He was in touch with his fans and was writing people letters.

And he was planning some media appearances for the first time in a while.

She was like, he was kind of starting to feel up to like doing an interview or something.

So there's a funeral mass for Richard in New Orleans.

New Orleans.

has embraced Richard Simmons with its whole heart.

People from New Orleans love Richard Simmons so much.

We heard from some listeners who were at that funeral mass, and one of them said that they were really shocked and sad to see that the church was not full.

What?

Yeah.

That's shocking.

It really underscores this sort of theory that I've been developing of, like, again, like validation ATM.

Yeah.

You know, we talked in the last episode about like, these are all ways that formerly fat people are encouraged to feel.

The way that people were interacting with him is as a currently fat person.

Right.

Which is like, he doesn't have a story of his own.

He's the fat best friend, right?

Right, right.

He's the gay best friend.

He's the bit characters who are there for comic relief, and the comic relief just is their difference.

Just say Rosie O'Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle.

This is taking forever.

That's when all the information was so available to it's like the man wrote a fucking memo.

Yeah.

None of this was hidden at any point from anyone.

He was saying this in interviews for years.

He was saying it in his book.

When people asked how he was, he would be pretty honest.

Yeah.

People put me, you know, take me out of the box when they need entertainment and then put me back in the box when they don't.

Yeah.

I think he was right.

In the same way, there's like the happy meatball, Richard, and the selling his jewelry to people, Richard.

And like, we want the best for all these Richards.

There's also, I think, the last 10 years of his life, Richard.

Yeah.

We don't know that much about that period of his life.

He never got the chance to write about it.

He never got the chance to tell us about it.

But like, I choose to believe that he got some of what he wanted.

And he decided at the end, you know, like he said in his Facebook post, like he's an independent guy.

He made a decision that this is what he wanted to do with the last 10 years of his life.

And like, all evidence is that he did.

Yeah.

I mean, I think there's a lot of internet talk about like, so-and-so doesn't owe you anything.

Right.

And I'm like, this is a moment where we have to go, Richard Simmons didn't owe us anything.

Yeah.

That doesn't mean that people didn't have genuine feelings about him and don't still.

That doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to feel close to him.

It just means that we should do a little check on like, how much of that was us projecting.

I think it's also worth thinking about like people in your life who have that kind of energy, that like really kind of social energy.

It's always important to sort of check in with those people to make sure there isn't something behind it or

they're training you not to see them in a certain way.

I always like my this is a really dark little transition, but my friend who killed himself when I was in my 20s was very much like that, like social butterfly, everybody's friend, always making jokes, the last person you'd think would be struggling with stuff.

And then out of the blue, he killed himself.

It's like, people, it doesn't mean every single person who's like bubbly is like hiding some dark secret underneath it, but like just because somebody is bubbly and like, oh my God, you seem so happy doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking in with that person.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is sort of incumbent on all of us, right, to to like do a little relational inventory on that front.

Is there someone who you're treating as just sort of entertainment for you or as a vessel for your complaints or your grievances or as just a source of guidance for you, right?

Are you treating someone as a wellspring of a resource or are you treating them as a person?

And the thing is, if you recognize us from the podcast and you come up to us and I get the slightest whiff that that's the way you think of us, I will slap you in the face.

I will spin you around like Tekken 8.

I might start carrying around a tiny squirt bottle.

You guys are bad interactions too, I feel like.

Yeah, just a can full of rocks I can shake.

Get!