Comedian Ron White, who famously smoked cigarettes and drank scotch during his sets, used to tell a joke about vegetarians.
“You ever seen a healthy vegetarian?” White would ask his audience. “They look like s***. They’re all plump and gray.”
“It’s because their bodies become intolerant of things they need, and I’ll give you an example,” White continued. “I’m on the way to the Melrose Improv in Hollywood to do a set with my buddy, and he says he feels nauseous and has a headache because he thinks the vegetable soup he had for lunch had some beef broth in it.”
“I didn’t know what to say,” White nears the punchline. “Your system is kicking back … broth? You’re a real manly man, aren’t ya?”
I thought of that Ron White joke recently after seeing a clip of podcaster Steven Bartlett talking to fellow podcaster Chris Williamson about the supposed evils of alcohol.
“It’s one of those areas where you don’t understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while,” Bartlett tells Williamson. “I stopped drinking at 30 years old. I’m now 33. When I was 31, I thought, I’ll have a drink again because now I could really A/B test it. I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a drink again.”
“It ruined three days of my life,” Bartlett says without an ounce of shame. “I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn’t get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused.”
“I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. I then slept worse, and I could track all of this on my [device].”
A grown man had two glasses of wine, and it “ruined” his life for three days?
Bartlett is a real manly man, ain’t he?
Maybe this viral clip is just a clever advertisement for the fitness device Bartlett was wearing. Williamson happened to be wearing the same brand, too. And maybe the advertisement will be successful. But I sure hope not.
Bartlett has previously said he constantly tracks his heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature, and respiratory rate. “Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m obsessed with the data,” Bartlett said.
By all means, people should strive to eat well and exercise. Chainsmoking onstage while throwing back scotches probably isn’t good for you. But the obsessive wellness maxing of people like Bartlett isn’t healthy either. If your body is so finely tuned that a glass of wine or some beef broth throws it into a tizzy, then it may be time to rethink how you are living.
That is the problem with so much of today’s optimization culture. It presents itself as strength, discipline, and self-control. But often it produces something closer to fragility. A missed workout becomes a crisis. A bad night of sleep becomes a catastrophe. A glass of wine becomes a three-day life event. Health should make us more capable of living, not less capable of surviving ordinary life.
Alcohol is not harmless, and excess should not be romanticized. But wine is not merely a toxin, either. Alcohol has been interwoven with human life since the beginning of civilization. Brewed into beer in ancient grain societies, fermented into wine for feasts and rituals, raised in toasts to seal friendships, marriages, treaties, and mourning. Across cultures, it has helped people bond by lowering social barriers and marking shared moments as special.
None of this means alcohol abuse should be dismissed or that everyone needs to drink. Some people are better off abstaining altogether, and no one should be mocked for making that choice. But we should resist treating alcohol as a simple evil, or treating ordinary pleasures as threats to be monitored, measured, and optimized away.
A wiser approach is balance: respecting alcohol’s risks, rejecting abuse, and preserving its long-standing role as a companion to fellowship, ritual, hospitality, and joy.
Health should make us more capable of enjoying life, not less capable of surviving it. If two glasses of wine, a missed workout, or a bowl of soup with beef broth sends your system into crisis, maybe the problem is not the wine or the broth. Maybe the problem is the life you have optimized yourself into.