Hey, squids, welcome to Season 2, Episode 4: The Cupcake Truck at the Health Fair, aka Spotting Hypocrisies in the Wild. 

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about hypocrisy, not individual hypocrisy, which we all participate in at some level. Look, we all do it, but rather official organizations or brands or institutions or corporations that position themselves as a strong believer or supporter of a particular thing and then work against their own goals by doing the opposite.

Once you know how to spot it, you’ll see it everywhere at the end of the episode. In the interest of fairness, I’ll share my own unshakable personal hypocrisy. Here we go. 

I have anxiety, which makes me hyper aware of, well, everything. And that’s a good news/bad news scenario. Being hyper aware of hypocrisy is helpful when I’m trying to improve myself and analyze myself, but not at all helpful when it concerns every other person, group, club, organization, store, city, news item which crosses my face. I can’t NOT see it no matter how hard I try. It’s a garbage superpower nobody wants, including me. 

So what’s hypocrisy? What do we mean? Or at least what do I mean by hypocrisy or hypocritical behavior? Hypocrisy is when you have and share an opinion about a thing which you’re certain is correct, but then you do the opposite of what you say, I believe. 

So, for example, during sixth grade health class, my now adult son’s teacher, let’s call him, I don’t know,  Mr. Spark, taught them about the health risks of smoking cigarettes while taking breaks to constantly smoke cigarettes, like a chimney,  behind the dumpsters.

At the school, Mr. S coughed non-stop and smelled like an old, damp bonfire built over a pile of dead possums. 100% of the time. So is it hypocritical of him to teach the kids about the dangers of smoking while he smokes publicly? I mean, maybe don’t take your smoke breaks where the children can see you. 

The bigger issue is that he never admitted to the kids that he smoked. I mean, they all knew. Now, imagine if Mr. S’s lesson on smoking had been more like, “all right, sixth graders…cigarettes are terrible for you. I’m addicted and trying to quit, but I’m failing miserably. And I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life smelling like scorched sweat socks and charred chicken feathers”. 

If he had admitted his weakness, his “I smoke while telling you not to smoke” hypocritical behavior would have been transformed into more of a cautionary tale, which I think his students would have respected and learned far more from. 

But the “health teacher who smokes” scenario is still like an individual hypocrisy, which had an effect on his students only in his class. He wasn’t like the principal of the middle school or the mayor of the town. His decisions didn’t change day to day life for all of the students. 

So I want to focus on hypocrisies which come from a higher level, from the organization itself, from higher on the authority food chain, which changes life for those of us lower on the food chain. Decisions made, for example, by a school which affects the students, by governments which affects citizens, by tech company decisions, which affects its users, etc. 

About ten years ago, I was invited to be the entertainment at a health and wellness day at a private high school –  those poor kids…

My presentation was on social media’s effect on the rising problem of body dysmorphia among teens. Simply put, body dysmorphia is when you over focus on flaws in your own appearance, which are so tiny or non-existent that no one else sees them but you. (By the way, if this describes you, I’ve included some resources for body dysmorphia in the liner notes.) 

So this presentation that I was giving at the school covered my “All Frosting and No Cake” view of consuming or watching tens of thousands of images, which are pretty on the outside and empty on the inside. 

“Oh gee, that male model looks like he could crack a whole bag of walnuts on his 25 pack of abs. How come my abs don’t look like that? I don’t even have half a pack”
That’s because the image isn’t real. It’s not real. 

Why does every Victoria’s Secret model look like she’s had her butt polished with car wax? Why doesn’t mine look like that?
Because it’s not real. Nobody’s butt in the history of butts has ever looked like that. 

That was basically my presentation… well, that’s a little bit of an oversimplification of my presentation. It also had like charts and stuff too, but that’s basically the gist of it. 

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So the entire point of this school’s Health and Wellness Day was to encourage students to take better care of themselves in terms of physical activity and nutrition. So they hired me to speak at the end of the day, and the day was filled with amazing activities going on all over the campus. Actually pretty cool. 

And the kids could:

• Take a cooking class.
  No fruit roll ups and Sour Patch Kids aunt dinner. Cook this instead.

• They ran three-legged relay races. This one was funny, where each team had to run to either end and identify a vegetable before running back in the other direction.
  Branson. Idiot. Shut up and let me answer. That’s a turnip, not a tiny apple.

• They could do goat yoga.
  Uh, downward dog is fun when a goat pees in your hair. W.

I’m not making fun of them.. yet. Give it a second. I’ll get there. 

But I was actually super impressed with the school’s focus on improving the students physical activity and nutrition. I think that’s a great thing to do. So I got there early and I walked around for a while and I petted the goats. And I love goats. Can I just tell you how much I love goats? I could be in the worst mood. And if I hear a goat screaming. I pee my pants laughing. 

Anyhow, the time came for my presentation.

The principal introduced me to the entire student body and ended with, “oh, quick reminder students, I know you’ve all been looking forward to the cupcake truck. It will be here right after the presentation.”

Immediately I busted out laughing because I thought she was joking. So she hands me the mic and she looks confused because I’m still cackling like an idiot. And as usual, I stuck my foot in it once again. Live and on stage. And it wasn’t a joke. 

They actually hired a cupcake truck for their wellness day focused on nutrition. 

Now let’s clear something up. I love cupcakes. I would love a truck full to park in my driveway and just slingshot cupcakes into my gob by the hour. I’m not judging their stupid and shortsighted decision. Well, I try to ignore the fact that I just said stupid and shortsighted. 

I’m not saying it’s ridiculous because I’m a nutrition super freak, and I think canned frosting is the devil and not at all delicious when eaten. I don’t know, with a spoon at 2 a.m., right out of the tub on the way back from a middle of the night bathroom trip. I am, however, calling it stupid and shortsighted because when they hired the cupcake truck, they accidentally damaged their own goal. Their thing. Their thing was to encourage better nutrition and they hurt their own goal themselves. 

So a) stupid  and   b) shortsighted. 

So this is my message to these organizations about it.

Feel free to reuse this and pretend you made it up yourself. Take credit for it. Fine. These organizations need to hear this. 

Don’t say you know a thing to be accurate or ideal or correct. When your actions prove that you either
a) don’t really believe the thing to be true or…. ..worse
b) care so little for your audience that you don’t bother to make sure that everything you do supports the thing. 

And to make it even simpler. 

Don’t say you believe a thing when 

you don’t really believe the thing, 

and you don’t laser focus on supporting the thing

As humans, yes, but especially as adults and as adults with a platform, whether the head of an organization, the manager of a team, the principal of a school, it’s our responsibility to act with integrity, to do the right thing. And when we make mistakes, to try to avoid repeating it. 

So as a sidebar, because I get this question all the time, this is the reason why I refuse to use or have social media channels for my podcast. I don’t even use it personally, but I can’t in good conscience tell you guys that even casual use of social media, never mind constant use, has a deep impact on your mental health, your physical health, your brain development, your academic outcomes. And then what? Say “Hi guys! Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram. You can find me @ImAStupidHypocrite_666 pizzaslice”

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So now that you know what to look for, you’ll find glaring examples of organizational hypocrisy all around you. 

Here are just a couple of examples. 

• Schools who are meant to, I don’t know, promote reading literacy.
  It’s kind of a thing they do teaching kids how to read. And they do. They do until they shut down their school libraries, the library, they shut down the library. The thing with the books in it, they kill them. They kill those things that hold the books. And by the way, like clockwork, once the library is dead, the school’s literacy scores drop on standardized tests. Shocking.

• Here’s another one…on college visits.
  Every tour guide talks about how their school “cares about every student’s well-being”. And then we find out that colleges across the country are making financial deals with betting apps like DraftKings and encouraging their students to gamble. Awesome.

• How about healthcare facilities?
  Are you sitting around waiting to find out if your arteries are clogged? Visit the vending machines. They’re filled with soda and candy!

And look, in my opinion, because I eat like a sixth grade boy, the only way a vending machine filled with soda and candy gets any better is if it is also filled with hot dogs and donuts. This is why I do not write about nutrition. 

And here’s my favorite one to hate because I see it all the time…

• School’s accurately concerned about students’ rising screen time and the impact on mental health will hire me to come and speak to their students and parents. Perfect. Great.
  And when I get there, I see that the marching band has its own X account debate team members are expected to keep track of team communication stuff on Snapchat, and then near the front entrance to the school, a beautifully designed bulletin board encourages parents visiting the office to like the school’s Facebook page, where the parent event, my Parent Event, will be promoted. 

This is why my head feels like it’s going to explode. So? So look, it’s dangerous when this kind of hypocrisy is committed by organizations who either don’t care or don’t employ individuals, I guess, who are capable of what…recognizing these connections, I guess. 

I call it dangerous because when an organization of authority or influence, whether it’s your school or city government or big tech company, whatever is the one passing off the hypocrisy as accurate,  the listeners of that message –  us, the students, citizens, app users, whatever tend to fall into two camps when this happens, right? When the cupcake truck rolls up at the wellness day, the people there divide into two camps:

• The first camp is filled with the happy dum dums who don’t get the joke right, and they skip away happily balancing seven cupcakes and their sticky mitts and one more shoved into their smush.
  “Yay! Healthy Wellness-y Creamy Frosting! Boring Spinach Green salad? Gross! Don’t be a chump, sprinkle in some colored sprinkles, they’re healthy! They’re delicious AND nutritious!”

• The second camp is filled with people. These are my people who can spot the lies and are becoming increasingly disappointed by what they see, right? Layers of hypocrisy sort of tied together with a complete lack of logic. The is my tribe. These people, my people, are the organizations best chance at improving their world. And it’s being wasted. Once these folks stop listening, they could be gone forever, and they may even begin to mistrust everything the organization says. 

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Okay, so it’s find solutions time. 

If you think you’ve spotted some institutional hypocrisy at your school or in your town, and you’d like to point it out to the folks at the top, here’s what you can do: 

Grab a piece of paper. Yes. Actual paper. 

Number one, write down the stated goal of the organization, event, club, etc. what is their thing?
For example, The Health and Wellness Fair encourages students to make better fitness and nutritional choices with the goal of making them healthier. 

Number two, then write down what the organization did or said, which contradicts number one.
For example, Hiring the cupcake truck during the Health and Wellness Fair is the opposite of good nutrition. 

Number three, put these together in a respectful email. This isn’t your chance to get hysterical and vent into three pages. If it’s longer than six sentences, it’s too long. This is an exercise in revealing the organization’s lack of integrity and logic back to them in a simple sort of math problem, kind of like, Hey, Acme School District, if you really wanted number one, then why did you do number two?” 

(Do number two. Perfect. )

Well, you waited for it. And we’re friends now, right? This is me sharing. 

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Here’s my biggest personal hypocrisy. 

I love animals. All of them. Really? Even the hideous and terrifying ones. But I especially love cows. It’s my personal mission to hug as many cows as I can. And whenever I’m able to get close to Penelope The Cow (I named her. Leave me alone.)  I will walk right up to her while wearing my leather shoes and engage in a mostly one sided conversation. 

I tell her that she’s “Beautiful and the prettiest girl in the whole world. Yes she is.” And in that moment, I vow to Penelope that I’ll never eat another one of her friends. And in that moment, I mean it, I really do. 

Then a few days later, my husband who is part rabbit and eats mostly bark and gravelly foodstuffs, will ask me what I feel like having for dinner, and I hear myself saying out loud, 

“I want to eat something that had parents and a face”

Never mind that at some core level, I’m legitimately super uncomfortable with the fact that I eat animals and wear leather, and I do not want to eat Penelope, I swear I don’t. But then I do, because she’s delicious. 

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If you’ve identified what you view as some kind of organizational hypocrisy, send us an email info@BigMamasHousePodcast.Com. Let us know what it is, what you did about it. If anything, we’ll pick a few to include in a follow up show. 

Well, that’s it for today. Thanks for listening. 

And remember. Eat more dirt and avoid moist dudes in basements.