Based Camp： Pissing Off Swole Twitter ⧸ Testosterone Declines After Kids
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and Malcolm discuss the dangers of "swole" and how to get people to think differently about themselves online. They discuss the science behind why testosterone is decreasing in males and females, and how we can counter this trend.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone. What are we talking about today, Simone?
00:00:06.260
Well, do you remember that time on Twitter where suddenly a bunch of muscular people
00:00:12.400
started sending us pictures of themselves working out in skimpy clothing and also threatening to
00:00:18.880
throw us into lockers? I do remember that time. That was fun. So you may remember from our last
00:00:28.500
post, we were talking about sort of the theory of Twitter. So we hadn't really used Twitter before
00:00:34.320
Elon Musk acquired it just because it wasn't interesting to us. And afterwards, it became
00:00:41.200
sort of this collective, it got more interesting, I'll say that. So we were like, okay, let's give
00:00:49.160
it a shot. It's back in the zeitgeist again. And we really began to sort of learn how to use it.
00:00:57.860
And one of the things was, was to piss people off. I mean, the-
00:01:05.420
Yeah. And specifically communities with people closely identified. So this isn't like
00:01:11.020
model train enthusiasts. This is especially anything that is visually identifiable and part
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of how people see the core of their personal identities. That seems to be where like you
00:01:25.280
Yes. And so we decided to, was one of the ones we've done. So often what we do is we try to take
00:01:33.320
what a community thinks of themselves and then subvert it. Like that's the best way to sort of
00:01:38.700
try to engage a community. And one of these hooks was for the quote unquote swole community or the
00:01:45.560
weightlifting community. Because they're pretty big in the communities that are adjacent to us
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online spheres. So we did a series of tweets that made a number of points that were sort of designed
00:02:02.860
to invert what they, the way they want to be perceived. So one was pointing out, and this is like
00:02:11.560
well backed by research. You can Google it. I love how people are like, this guy doesn't know what
00:02:15.420
he's talking about. I, I was a, I am a published neuroscientist. I have an exhibit that I worked
00:02:22.680
on still on display at the Smithsonian. I know a lot about the way the human brain works and, and
00:02:27.680
yeah, I actually do know what I'm talking about when it comes to stuff like this. Is that when a
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person is in a, and we wrote a bestselling book on sexuality and relationships. So those are also tied
00:02:39.600
to this. When a person is in a long-term monogamous relationship, a male specifically, but this also
00:02:46.600
happens in females, their testosterone decreases pretty dramatically. And testosterone is going to
00:02:52.840
be much higher in individuals who are single and actually highest in individuals in polyamorous
00:02:58.740
relationships. However, since like us, many of the weightlifting community are on the right leaning
00:03:04.480
part of the spectrum. You know, they do aspire to be in long-term monogamous relationships.
00:03:09.500
So I pointed out that alongside a second fact, which is that when you have a child as a male,
00:03:18.020
your testosterone decreases. It's not clear whether this decrease is permanent or temporary only when
00:03:24.840
the child is an infant, but considering that, you know, we are pronatalists and we believe in having
00:03:30.580
lots of kids, you know, I'm going to have an infant in the house, uh, constantly over the next 10 years
00:03:36.140
about. Um, and so, uh, then the question becomes, uh, well, if you are, or so the way I use this
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information, uh, was to say, well, so if you were in your like late thirties and you are still swole,
00:03:55.340
it means either you are juicing was artificial source of steroids or IEA, an artificial source
00:04:03.100
of testosterone, or you are a genetic failure. Um, because they are often trying to present this
00:04:09.700
like, Oh, you know, I'm very desired because of this. I'm extra masculine because of this.
00:04:15.720
So we thought we'd do a little inversion of this. Yeah. But I mean, in other words though, I mean, what,
00:04:19.260
what we were sort of arguing you're looking at is, um, males seem to hormonally have higher levels of
00:04:26.360
testosterone when their bodies are like, Oh, I'm in go big or go home mode. I need to be high risk,
00:04:32.200
high reward. Like until something is telling signaling to my body that I'm in a stable position,
00:04:37.420
that I am safe, that I am doing well in life. I need to take a lot more risks because that's kind
00:04:44.340
of the male strategy. Um, and if you see someone whose body is, is apparently hormonally optimized
00:04:53.220
around taking risks, the, the insinuation is that that body is responding to signals of I'm failing.
00:05:00.540
I'm alone. I am not loved. I am not secure. I am not safe. And I don't feel safe. And I don't have
00:05:06.300
kids. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to take a few steps. So testosterone actually does decrease
00:05:12.080
in individuals when they're not in positions of local dominance in their social hierarchy.
00:05:17.180
Yeah. When they're sort of giving up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unemployed people have lower
00:05:20.200
testosterone. Yeah. So yeah, if you do give up, like if you submit yourself to a system where you
00:05:25.800
are at the bottom of a social hierarchy, your testosterone does go down. So it's not absolutely
00:05:29.620
true what you're saying, but the larger piece of their being that males as a human gender are sort of
00:05:37.060
the disposable gender. And this isn't just like a cultural thing. It is to a large extent,
00:05:42.080
historically biologically true. You know, one man could have many wives, but there was not an
00:05:47.920
increase in reproductive capacity. If one woman had many male partners. And because of this,
00:05:55.500
testosterone in males, it causes a lot of negative effects. It's really sort of eating away
00:06:02.920
at your body, the longer you have testosterone. And it does a lot of other things that can cause like
00:06:07.280
shorter lifespans and stuff, you know, causing increased risk taking behavior, stuff like that.
00:06:10.900
But all of those things are useful if you are trying to secure a mate. However, once your body
00:06:17.700
is like, oh, you are no longer disposable to the tribe and to your community and to your kids and
00:06:25.140
family, like your genetic line, it does naturally decrease your testosterone levels because that would
00:06:32.220
obviously be the genetically optimal thing to do, you know, for the long run. But yeah,
00:06:38.860
so it is your body's way of saying when you are in these high testosterone states that it thinks it
00:06:44.160
has a chance of succeeding, but it doesn't think you are currently succeeding.
00:06:48.440
Yeah. So anyway, we made that dig. We actually made that dig for a reason. So per our general
00:06:54.000
theory about how ideas spread, especially on Twitter, reasonable ideas ride on waves of hate
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and anger. So all that was sort of meant to anger a certain group on Twitter. However,
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the larger purpose of this was to make a comment about where society is, especially vis-a-vis
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pronatalism, which is a cause that's important to us. So we live in a society that for both men and women
00:07:21.800
idolizes a life stage that really should be only idolized when you are an adolescent. So both men
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and women, even in much later stages of life are incentivized to appear physically like a very fertile
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adolescent or like 20 something human instead of as like a parent or a mentor or a tribal elder.
00:07:48.600
Um, and so a lot of, I'm just thinking of the ghoulish sort of, you know, trying to look like a
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child continue. Well, and you, I mean, you see this a ton, you know, you see this with like a lot of
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media figures, especially women, like still trying to look like teenage girls, which is, it's not a
00:08:07.080
great look. So we're, we're trying to comment on the fact that that's happening. And, uh, a comparison
00:08:11.780
that you really made, which I love has to do with a child celebrity. This is another thing that we
00:08:17.780
included in the tweet said that went really well. And it's, I, I, I do really love this comparison
00:08:22.320
and I make it all the time, which is as a person goes through life, you go through sort of multiple
00:08:28.000
puberty like stages, uh, before you go through puberty, people warn you, the things that make
00:08:32.380
you happy are going to change. Your biochemistry is going to change. Uh, the way you relate to your
00:08:36.900
environment is going to change. And we all recognize this, even if we haven't gotten past
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the teen stage, which I think many people in society haven't because we've kind of been
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brainwashed, but everyone can remember how much fun it was to imagine and how it's really hard to keep
00:08:50.500
enjoying that. Now, even if you try, even if we like stopped right now and played the floor is lava
00:08:54.660
and maybe had a little bit of fun, it wouldn't be quite the same. Exactly. All right. Sorry. We cut
00:08:59.500
the tape there because we wanted to make a note for a future episode, uh, because it's really
00:09:04.580
important to remember that, uh, you are the descendant and only the descendant of people
00:09:12.360
who went through this change during puberty or mostly people who went through this change during
00:09:17.820
puberty that motivated them to do things that led to them having kids for men. That's often, uh,
00:09:25.380
getting obsessed with sex and sexuality. However, you are also the descendants of men who were
00:09:31.260
successful parents. And that requires a very different set of optimization patterns, desires,
00:09:39.240
everything like that. So the same way that the things that make you happy change the, your sources
00:09:44.780
of, of, of desire change when you go through puberty. Um, the same thing happens again after you have
00:09:49.980
kids because your biology is tooled to do this. Um, and the same thing happens again, when you go
00:09:55.580
through menopause or you enter this elder stage, like after the kids leave your house. Um, and we actually
00:09:59.960
argue in our books often that one of the core reasons that you have so much, uh, you know,
00:10:04.640
uh, sadness or like middle-aged drama in our society is people are trying to masturbate sort
00:10:10.880
of emotional sets that were relevant in their teenage years, but aren't relevant to parents
00:10:16.100
or, or people in their like thirties or forties or aren't relevant to older adults. Um, in the same
00:10:22.120
way that it'd be very hard for me to get the same amount of happiness my kid does from playing
00:10:26.380
with toy fire trucks. So where does Andrew Tate come into this? Well, it's interesting
00:10:31.060
to us because he is a representation of, uh, sort of an immediately post puberty males iteration
00:10:39.240
of what they think the perfect adult life is like in the same way that Blippi, a children's
00:10:46.160
character, uh, he, um, is similar to like a blues clues sort of guys. I don't know, Scott
00:10:52.100
or whatever from blues clues where he would, uh, dance around, uh, fire trucks or, uh, police
00:10:59.440
cars about how happy he is and pushing the buttons and playing with toys. And as a young
00:11:05.520
kid, you look at this and you're like, this guy has the best life. But as an adult, you
00:11:11.640
see sort of the soullessness in his eyes because you know, no adult is actually enjoying that.
00:11:17.860
Um, and in the same way, you know, as an adult, when you go and you watch these Andrew Tate
00:11:22.280
interviews, you see him being trapped in these scenarios that he doesn't want to be in. Um,
00:11:31.820
uh, for example, uh, I love one interview. He's like, yeah, you know, I need to have sex
00:11:36.560
with these women multiple times a day. Um, and it's really like a job because if I'm not doing
00:11:41.960
a good job pleasing them, then they lose loyalty and that loses an income source for me.
00:11:47.200
And you can tell like he was really sort of, uh, beholden to this lifestyle he was not interested
00:11:54.900
in. And I know to a young guy, the idea of having to please multiple women a day to a certain level
00:12:03.420
of satisfactory, that sounds great. That sounds like Robin to an adult man with kids. You're like,
00:12:09.520
oh my God, am I like some, some stud horse? It's, it's, you know, that is not fun. Um,
00:12:17.380
and it's hard to imagine how your biology is going to change before you are genetically successful,
00:12:24.380
before you do have a lot of kids that you are raising with a woman who's dedicated to you.
00:12:28.900
But I think the whole Twitter thing really revealed to me, especially based on the way
00:12:33.620
people reacted to it. And we have a whole theory around what makes you react to something with
00:12:39.000
offense. In other words, we, you know, if someone accuses you of something completely ridiculous
00:12:43.260
and preposterous that you don't think could possibly be true, you won't be offended because
00:12:48.480
it's not even close to being true. There's nothing threatening about that statement. Um, but it did
00:12:54.600
seem that, that a lot of weightlifting community members on Twitter were deeply offended by what we
00:12:59.880
said, which implied to us that there was a kernel of truth. And, and to me, I think that that's,
00:13:05.000
you know, it's more than just Andrew Tate, like, you know, exemplifying people chasing after this
00:13:09.260
unsustainable, um, or I'd love to go with this thread, but to wrap up the previous thread, um,
00:13:17.160
the reason why it's important for us to disintermediate this and the reason why we're
00:13:21.380
interested in disintermediating, isn't it just for pronatalism? Um, well, it is partially for
00:13:26.000
pronatalism, but the idea, uh, that we are selling to young people that they will be satisfied
00:13:32.660
living the ideal life of a 20 something when they're in their thirties and forties. And that's
00:13:36.920
the life they often plan for and make costly sacrifices around won't actually make them
00:13:43.180
satisfied as an adult. Um, and it will actually be deeply unsatisfying as an adult. Um, and, and you
00:13:50.280
are biologically optimized in the same way your ancestors were to sort of go through this cycle
00:13:54.040
of having kids and everything like that. And, um, when you optimize around figures like Andrew Tate,
00:14:01.020
uh, it will lead to deep systemic unhappiness and, and sort of desperate behavior patterns as you get
00:14:08.420
older. Well, but also it's, it's worse than that, Malcolm, because then, okay, let's say that you make
00:14:13.180
lifelong decisions around this as, as a younger person, that's really damaging. But then think about
00:14:18.240
the, the years of dissatisfaction you're going to have as an adult. And then an older adult,
00:14:22.300
as you continue to try to chase after a standard that becomes increasingly difficult to obtain.
00:14:29.380
Like we had even people like DM us that were friends who were saying, Oh, well, I've had kids,
00:14:36.340
but I still lift. Like I can, you know, I'm still swole. Like I, you know, people saying things like
00:14:41.120
that. And yes, they, you can absolutely do that. You can, you can look jacked as long as you want in
00:14:46.580
life, you know, without steroids or with steroids, like either way that you can do it, it becomes
00:14:51.180
increasingly harder. And I think the same exists for women, women, you know, will have, you know,
00:14:56.300
they'll get older, whether or not they have kids, their body will change. And it becomes increasingly
00:15:00.920
harder to continue to look like an adolescent female. And after a point, you stop really pulling
00:15:07.380
it off. And no matter how many cosmetic surgeries you get, even if you really are like top of the line
00:15:13.520
cosmetic surgery, everything is perfect. You age really well. You're still never going to be able
00:15:19.260
to compete with a, you know, a 23 year old woman. If you're, if you're a middle-aged woman and as a
00:15:25.760
man, you're not going to be able to compete with a teenage boy in terms of being able to maintain a
00:15:31.340
high level of metabolism, to be able to, you know, bounce back from hangovers as much, to be able to
00:15:35.500
build muscles easily. And so I think the other thing that's really important is that people are setting
00:15:40.580
themselves up, not just for dissatisfaction, not like, oh, this isn't giving me all the joy it
00:15:45.240
could, but like for active cognitive dissonance and for like a losing game. And I think that's a huge
00:15:51.100
deal. I couldn't agree with you more. Now to the other point, you're talking about offense, because
00:15:54.860
I do want to, I just thought that that was an interesting, a point I really wanted to make before
00:15:58.180
we moved on from this topic. So let's talk about offense. So if, no, we might have a kid sneaking
00:16:06.780
on, on frame here in a second. When I was, uh, uh, when we went viral, uh, for this whole elite
00:16:13.680
couple thing. Yeah. What's up? You want to, you want to hop in here and say hi to people here?
00:16:19.580
They saw you when you were just a baby. What are you doing? Are you home? No, you don't. Well,
00:16:29.160
can you go back up to Dada's room? You can't because you want to see me. You are so sweet.
00:16:38.060
Okay. Offense as a concept. Now let's touch on that. When we were sort of going viral as this
00:16:45.880
elite couple thing, one of the people, a guy who has a lot of followers, he's like, uh, don't you
00:16:52.020
know that this couple isn't real? They're, they're models. Uh, this is not like, this is what the
00:16:58.400
pro natalist movement wants you to believe that they look like. And it's followers were like, no, no,
00:17:06.180
no. Like I did some investigation. Like I understand why you could think that, or they do look like
00:17:11.020
models, but they're not models. And by this, what I mean is from third parties, third parties that
00:17:18.140
don't like us and want to make fun of our movement, they say we look like models. So
00:17:23.080
when people attack us for being unattractive, I know like objectively, it doesn't really hurt my
00:17:28.720
feelings when they're like, oh, you're ugly or weird or freakish looking. I'm like, well,
00:17:33.160
I don't think so. Oh, you're making sure everyone can see the show that you're watching.
00:17:42.380
Well now, Malcolm. Hold on. Hold on. Let's, let's continue to go down.
00:17:48.120
This, this chain here. Um, but in, in, in addition, if somebody were to say something
00:17:53.460
that was just patently untrue, like if they were to say, Simone, you're fat or Malcolm,
00:17:56.940
you're fat. I'd be like, that doesn't cause me offense. Or they're to say something that I
00:18:00.620
already accept about myself. Like Malcolm, you are not swole. A lot of people were like,
00:18:04.960
you are not swole. You, you don't even lift bro. Like you don't, I doubt you could lift X.
00:18:10.880
And it's like, well, yes, I accept that about myself. That is not a dominant hierarchy. I'm willing to,
00:18:16.660
I'm looking to climb. So that doesn't cause offense in me. Um, and so the way that you cause a type of
00:18:24.980
offense that causes people to pick up on something is you have to say something that, uh, a person
00:18:31.880
doesn't want to be true and doesn't accept is true, but is plausibly true. Even from their own
00:18:37.900
perspective, you have to credibly challenge their worldview. And you were going to say something,
00:18:43.500
Simone? Oh, well, I thought you were actually going to, I, you probably want to say what would
00:18:49.100
actually really offend. Ah, so, well, this is where it got interesting. So, uh, this community did
00:18:55.780
something that was really bizarre to me, which was, um, yeah. Uh, when they were upset with us,
00:19:06.720
um, they would try to like hurt our feelings by either saying stuff that just obviously wouldn't
00:19:14.220
offend us because either we know it's not true or we accept it about ourselves or by sending us
00:19:19.240
pictures of like them weightlifting. Oh yeah. It's my Coke. Um, yeah, it does need to be recycled,
00:19:29.720
but you see there's still coconut. So they would do things like send us videos of themselves working
00:19:34.380
out or looking really swole as a way to, I think, attempt to like attack us or show that they were
00:19:40.100
higher in a status hierarchy than us. And they would often, when they were attacking us, be like,
00:19:43.780
I doubt you even lift, or I doubt you can even lift X, which is really fascinating because this
00:19:49.260
sort of swole community is part of a status hierarchy where you can sort of immediately judge
00:19:55.300
somebody's status relevant relative to yourself based on how much muscle they have. Um, but we are not
00:20:01.880
part of that status hierarchy. Like we have no interest in that. And mainstream society
00:20:05.200
largely doesn't have an interest in it either. Uh, and so it's very odd. It would be like,
00:20:10.200
if you made fun of Goss and then a bunch of Goss sent you stuff, like, I doubt you've even listened
00:20:14.160
to a cradle of filth. Um, or like, I, I, I have this test of Goss trivia for you, or like, I doubt you
00:20:22.020
even have X pierced. And it's like, yes, I'm, I'm not a Goss. So it was a very odd thing.
00:20:28.000
And so I was like, you know, I should, I could really school them on how to hurt somebody's
00:20:31.240
feelings. Um, and I told her a tweet we could do it. She's like, Malcolm, no, you can't do that.
00:20:37.400
That is actually too mean of a tweet. Um, and so it's to say, I am really understanding the
00:20:45.240
weightlifting community and genuinely I am like, I used to follow swell hate. I understand it's a
00:20:49.140
community that's unfairly maligned. Like we really shouldn't have been making fun of them. It's,
00:20:53.340
it's got a wholesome side to it. Um, and a lot of the people in it are in this wholesome side,
00:20:58.320
you know, the, the, the bad guys in it are the minority. Um, and it is really the only option
00:21:04.780
for a lot of people. So if you are a guy as some guys are, and you are born short and there's not
00:21:10.420
a lot you can do about that, or you're born not very smart and there's not a lot you can do about
00:21:14.820
that. Uh, the way you can raise your status and have total control over is weightlifting.
00:21:20.820
Um, and this is why I think you often see weightlifting combined with get rich quick
00:21:25.280
scenes as well. Um, in terms of communities that are adjacent to each other, uh, you know,
00:21:30.060
this sort of like hustle culture guy stuff, it's because, you know, they're trying to raise their
00:21:33.560
status, uh, guys who hear these pitches of like, we can help you improve. Um, you know,
00:21:40.080
obviously one of those pitches, these sort of get rich quick guys, like, Oh, you got to read a hundred
00:21:43.440
books and then do this and then do this and then drop shipping. But the truth is, is only one or
00:21:48.060
two percent of guys who subscribe to these sort of gurus actually do end up making any money. Most
00:21:52.600
of them are just hemorrhaging money. What's interesting about the weightlifting community
00:21:55.800
is the vast majority of people who actually follow through and put in the effort do gain muscle
00:22:00.380
and do raise in status within that community and have some moderate augmentation of status
00:22:06.060
within the wider world. Um, and something we note here, you know, like when we talk about
00:22:11.800
attacking a person's, the reason why that hurts people is because it's partially true. They know
00:22:15.920
that that's the reason they're doing this is the way they can improve themselves that they actually
00:22:19.480
have control over. And I don't want to belittle the amount of work that goes into it only to say
00:22:25.000
that I would always recommend, especially, uh, you know, as you become older as a man to stop
00:22:29.920
optimizing over this use definition of masculine perfection and focus on other forms of, uh, self
00:22:37.300
improvement that might contribute to the world more or contribute to sort of your cultural faction
00:22:42.480
or contribute to aspects of your family more. And, or when you want to insult someone, you need to try
00:22:49.280
to model them as effectively as you can model their values and their aspirations. Um, and then
00:22:55.080
attempt to attack that because that is the only way that you will actually offend them, um, which
00:23:00.480
actually dovetails with our theory of anger. So if you want to anger someone, don't treat them in
00:23:05.340
accordance with how they expect to be treated. That's your theory on anger, Malcolm. Whereas
00:23:09.080
offending someone means pointing out something about their worldview that kind of questions a
00:23:14.280
fundamental underpinning in a way that's very scary. The core thing that causes anger, we argue
00:23:18.500
in our books, um, is when somebody or the world, uh, doesn't react to you or something you have done
00:23:27.980
in the way that you expect them to. Um, so this can be, you've turned your car keys, you expect your car to
00:23:35.040
turn on and it doesn't turn on and you do it a few times and you become increasingly angry. Um, but it
00:23:39.920
could also be somebody doesn't engage you properly. And so this can be a big problem when you have
00:23:44.060
cultural misalignment. So like, you see, this was the trans community, right? Like they expect to be
00:23:49.280
gendered one way and then somebody doesn't gender them one way. And that causes anger. Um, uh, whereas
00:23:55.120
the other community doesn't think that other people should be able to tell them how they gender them.
00:23:59.380
And so when they are corrected and how they gender somebody that causes anger. And so you have this
00:24:04.500
anger spiral. Um, and you see this in a lot of communities. Uh, and that is a, a problem. Uh, and it's
00:24:12.340
also a problem in relationships as well. Uh, when there is a misaligned expectations of how each of the
00:24:18.060
couples, uh, should engage with each other. Yeah. So wise words on Twitter, courtesy of Malcolm with help from
00:24:28.300
Octavian, our wonderful little blonde. Do you want to say bye? You can cut and then you can have him
00:24:33.960
come say in and say bye. Okay. You want to say bye? Bye. And you like. Thanks Octavian.
00:24:41.540
Mama and Dada and their friends on, on camera. I will be too. Is there anything that you want to say
00:24:50.200
to the world, Octavian? I will be the good kid. You will be the good kid? You will be the good kid. Good.
00:24:58.100
Do you promise our, our, our fans on YouTube that you'll be a good kid?
00:25:05.520
Silence. You're not, you're not sure? We love you Octavian. We love you.
00:25:13.320
You say to the fans, I love you too. I love you too daddy.