Episode Details

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 qu