Testosterone, Status, Tate & Why The Billionaires Got Buff

In this video, we dig into why today's billionaires and high status people often have very muscular physiques. We explore how physical attributes like muscularity have historically signaled social status in different ways across different cultures and time periods. From tanned skin to calf muscles to informal clothing, status symbols are always changing. We talk about how steroids and social media are disrupting traditional notions of high status masculinity. Finally, we speculate on what the next big status symbols might be in a social media-dominated world where everyone can fake looking good online.

Simone: [00:00:00]

Simone: like in the early days of tech CEOs becoming super wealthy, they would wear pretty disrespectfully informal clothes as a flex because they could, And then I think we saw the, like the height of it with Sam Bankman freed.

Malcolm: if you look at the billionaires today, , they're pretty buff. They are, they are very muscular And the question is, is why are individuals doing this? I think we need to take a little history lesson here

Malcolm: If you want to understand why Andrew Tate like he talks about low T males, except you can tell by looking at a male's face. How much testosterone they were exposed to when they were in their developmental stages, .

Malcolm: , when you look at the far left and the far right, they both seem to have body dysmorphia Would you like to know more?

Simone: hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I am excited to talk to you today. So one of the things I've been doing recently, because I was like, okay, well, Andrew Tate's a really big conservative influencer, I wanted to really dive into his longer form content to understand.

Malcolm: The underpinnings of his philosophy [00:01:00] and a big part of it is be muscly, look

Simone: like he, he like actively advocates for people to lift.

Malcolm: And one of the things he points out, and this is absolutely true is if you look at the billionaires today, the people in our society that are like top of the social hierarchy, presumably a lot of them, whether it's Bezos or Musk recently, I don't know if anyone's seen him recently or Zuckerberg.

Malcolm: They're pretty buff. They are, they are very muscular. Actually it's very interesting. So I think many people have this view of Elon Musk from this one shot of him on a yacht , but if you look at like recent pictures of him, he looks Bezos y. That's what I would think.

Malcolm: Oh no, doesn't really, okay. Okay but the point being is that you see this sort of across the billionaire class right now, right? And so Andrew Tate's taking that as evidence that, look, once you don't have any other needs, you realize the importance of muscle. And then you'd be like, and as a man, as a man, maybe not as a man.

Malcolm: Of course. And throughout [00:02:00] history, here, you can see this. The problem is it's got history. You can't see this what you actually see and what is actually going on here. And this is a very interesting phenomenon to dissect so like, let's talk about luxury cars, right?

Malcolm: If you are buying a pointless luxury car to signal your status or build a self narrative of, I am a person with X type of things, you need to actually think about. What you're giving up when you spend three times on a car, what you would otherwise spend. It's the same as muscle. Where there is a level that you need to exercise to be at optimum physical health.

Malcolm: And then there's a level way beyond that, where it is about signaling something to your environment or to yourself or changing aspects of your chemistry, which we can also talk about. And the question is, is why are individuals doing this? I think we need to take a little history lesson here to something that my parents pointed out to me when I was growing [00:03:00] up and really helped me contextualize physical status symbols.

Malcolm: Okay. So when I was growing up, my house, they actually had a tanning bed in my house. My mom had bought a tanning bed for tanning. And my dad, he pointed out to me, he goes, when I was growing up a long time ago, you go, you go back a long time ago. Having a tan was considered very low class. The reason why having a tan was considered low class back then is because the lower classes did physical, manual labor.

Malcolm: So they would get tans, and then the wealthy, and you can see this, this is why historically, you look at the old west or something like that, the high class women would have these

Simone: parasols all the time. No, better than that, have you seen like even middle ages I think, like throughout history riding masks?

Simone: They're scary, like women would wear these Yeah,

Malcolm: yeah, so throughout most of history, tans were considered very, very, very

Simone: low class. Well, and even currently keep in mind, have you seen like [00:04:00] the sort of bikini burqa face mask things? Well, I want

Malcolm: to talk about how this flipped again, okay? Okay, yeah.

Malcolm: So then there was a generation... Where tans became common because everyone was like, okay. So first let's talk about how tans became high class. Well, what you had is a culture where the lower class, instead of working on farms, because all that had been automated, they were working. at McDonald's or whatever, right?

Malcolm: So the only people who could spend all day in the sun

Simone: were rich people. Who could go on, especially like it became to be associated with expensive vacations where you sat on a beach. Like it was a sign of luxury. So tanning was a sign that you could afford to literally fly somewhere sunny, especially like even in the winter months.

Simone: So let's assume that like the entire population. All works inside anyway, but you know, only the wealthy would be able to fly to some exotic beach and get baked by the

sun.

Malcolm: Yeah. And then, and then tanning beds became common. And on top of [00:05:00] tanning beds, fake tans became common, right? Yeah. Which were very inexpensive and they got better and better and better.

Malcolm: And then you had this era where, and this always happens when you have these class signals, right? Is it often the, the people who grow up in, in very I guess you could call it lower class environments and up overcompensating was this classic, right? So today you'll see this in things like jewelry, right?

Malcolm: Where like a rapper may just absolutely cover themselves in jewelry the way you would never see anything else doing it because they're like, oh, this is a sign of wealth. So I'm showing how much wealth I have. Right. And you had, this was tanning as well, where they would get these. really deep almost comical tans to other people.

Malcolm: And then where this really began to become broadcast and this had become a lower class or very nouveau riche, so there's two sort of groups of nouveau riche. One group of nouveau riche is a group that integrates well with older money society. And they get considered genuinely upper class individuals.

Malcolm: The other group is a group that like. [00:06:00] I don't know if you call them autistic, but they don't really get it. Like they get off in some way. And this is what like Jersey Shore. So Gen Z have no idea what I'm talking about when I'