Ten Thousand Losses - UNLOCKED Bonus 25: The History of Online Lifting Culture ft. Bobby Wagner from Tipping Pitches

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

While Tom & Liam are on summer break, please enjoy one of our more popular bonuses from last year. A follow up is in the works! Friend of the show Bobby Wagner of Tipping Pitches fame joins us to talk about the foundations of online lifting culture: where it came from and how it got to the insane state it is today. In many ways it's a battle between actual science and bro science; of which the latter now includes suntanning your balls (for some reason). Really makes you pine for the days of the debates over which creatine is best for you. We cover the history from Usenet and early forums up to the modern influencer era. The notes Tom made are also attached if you wanted to take a look at them. This is a broad overview and there is plenty we missed. Hope you all enjoy and thanks for being patrons!

He is actually going to eject a fan. Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things. Joy is to come to Philadelphia and stand here at Dodge Ice Ball. The Dallas Cowboys head of satisfaction of John Cooney. Yeah. Brough. What fucking lie, bro. Brow, that's not, that's not helping your gains, brough.

Brough. You're three inches shorter than me, bro. Hyder penis. Uh, fuck. Um, the thing is, that is the noise of a junior varsity, uh, pullback. Hey, how did you know? If only I'm at a university. Oh, there was no university team.

There was enough people in my school. Oh, that's why they closed it. And they kept judge open because a good die young ambassadors live forever. Yeah. I think we had two junior varsity football teams at my school. Well, your school redact is very big. Yeah, my school redacted, which is like not that hard to find if you Google me. Honestly, I'm sure you could.

I'm in your hand. In your hands. I'm in your, I'm in your walls, Bobby. You're in my hands and walls. That's kind of sweet, actually.

Oh, thank you. Thanks, Leo. This is starting with a lot of positive masculinity. You're never alone. We're going to talk about. You're never alone,

Bobby. That's good. That's good. You and Peter Thiel, you've developed some technology. Yeah, to be within my walls. Mm.

I really want to do a rant about no, we don't have time. But we don't have time for that because, bro, we're trying to get swole. We were trying to get swole. You myron, you jelly?

I don't know what the fuck that means. So I didn't get this. I just lifted weights in the weight room. So you guys are going to have to be my guides to the wonderful world of early 2000s weightlifting culture. Well, I think that's funny that you mentioned that because I did message Tom when we were talking about the outline that he sent over, which by the way is really something. Great work by you, Tom. I love this outline. I didn't contribute at all.

I feel like I tapped in at various points. points on this. Like, I sort of weave it in and out of this culture, so I'm really excited to learn something from you as well. Yeah, I mean, he is a teacher by trade. We have to learn. Are you sitting crisscross applesauce, Bobby? I always do, yeah. That's good for hip flexibility. Okay. You can

say Indian style not because woke is gone. I don't want to say that. That feels bad. Well, if you say crisscross applesau, you get sent to Ecuador. To Goulog. Yeah, you get reported on that, on the Trump. Ecuador, right? Yeah, he can't even name the fucking country

we're gulogging people too that's a temple education really showing through no is he frozen for you too yeah he's frozen yeah he's get too angry hang out

I'll reload I have my local is it did I get the country wrong is El Salvador I'm a fucking idiot but Liam is but Liam is frozen

blame it on the persona that you've put on yeah as soon as you put you put you put a fucking tortoise shell Maui gym's on.

Right. Exactly. Your IQ drops 20 points. The sound of a shaker bottle being within 12 inches of your ear, absolutely. It just cuts your IQ and half. Your brain capacity. It's like using chat GPT, that study that came out today. Did you see this?

Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. It just, but there was like, there was something else where it said like, if you're already smart, like it doesn't affect you as bad. Right. It's like, oh. I don't know how they would know that.

That seems like a sort of suspect. study, honestly. I don't know. I'm not a data scientist. Oh, let's see. What's up with Liam? We're trying to get him back. Is my audio coming through all right? Yeah. Yeah. You sound. Okay. Well, now that you're back. You're back now. That's crazy. I never dropped you. I could hear you guys perfectly. When there was, when there was just one set of footprints. It was then the Bobby carried us both. Liam carrying me and Bobby. Why are we here? Yeah. So, all right. You know what podcast this is.

You pay for it. I'm Tom. Oh, let's just stole it. Yeah, it's true. I'm Tom. You got Liam. And we got special guests, Bobby Wagner from tipping pitches. What is up?

I'm here to have a normal time on the Zencaster. I'm here to record normal content for the normal listeners of the 10,000 losses. It does a site feed. With a host that does a site gag. For an audio only podcast. For an audio only podcast. How do I get the shield to jump? Hang on one second.

So, yeah, we got Bobby here. Like I mentioned, this Liam is muted because his wife's asked him a question, probably about shooting people knocking on the door or something like that. Is that a marble backpack behind him? Yeah, it sure is.

It's a marble and unlimited backpack behind me. That's beautiful. Does it smell like cigarettes? No, it doesn't. It's clean. Did they send you that for hitting a certain amount of Marlborough's purchased? No, no. This is Stolen Valor. My friend Josh bought it for me.

Okay. Stolen Valor. They used to have a Marlboro catalog back in the day. So my first camping experience was in a tent. My dad won from Marlboro. That explains. No, my dad and I used to go to the racetrack and watch like a little derby cars race around in Washington. and we used to wear Marlboro ponchos from that same catalog that you're referring to the time.

Sick. As we're recording this, Liam is under threat of tornado, I believe. Yeah. So if I drop off, just kill me, I guess. I will release that audio, like that video, like, if the tornado breaks into your house. Like, yeah. I think you would want me to do that. I would.

That's a dying wish, frankly. Yeah. So we got Bobby on here today to talk. doing the history of online lifting culture, the eternal battle between bro science and actual science. And the bro science guy is, uh, is just a Nazi now? Which one? Because there's a lot.

Um, there's a lot of guys who are Nazis now. We did a, we did an episode with, uh, Patrick about fascism in lifting culture. So there's a little bit of crossover here. But, um, we're, what we're doing is we're looking at the origins. We're diving into the actual. how online lifting culture came to where it is and sort of like how it became what it is today through basically what is a giant nostalgia trip to me. So this was,

this one was a lot of fun to put together for me. And we have the earliest origins of anything online, of course, is in Liam's favorite place. Usenet. I do love Usenet. And that's why I have a, well, right now, what am I downloading? How do you have right now, Justin? Bobby, I'm not sure if you know, Liam, make sure he has torrents running while we're recording the podcast to make sure the quality doesn't get too good.

Yeah, right. No, I actually read one time in the Zencaster FAQs that Zencaster works better when you're torrenting stuff while trying to pod. It's something to do with the packets. Like, the more packets are moving along, the faster the video goes. Dark out, bruh. It's getting dark here, too. Oh, that's what I just went through, too. let's let's uh um i have a severe thunderstorm watering from now for my area let me look at the radar oh yeah

oh you're gonna get you have it where it's it's so much rain it goes white racist on the radar i'll put the i'll put that in the in the chat there just like lifting culture yeah exactly um boys where even well lifting culture or even the black guys or uh maga um we'll get to that uh uh uh But anyway, it ends up in Usenet. And I have here, I can put some of this stuff in the, an unsecure website. I put this stuff in the show notes. An unsecure website that doesn't support HCDPS,

where it is quotes from the old misk. Fitness. That weights on Usenet. Some of them are nice. Some of them are homophobic. But a lot of it is just people being like shitty to each other. It's it's but there is actual like real Read the patent post

Yeah read the Read the fucking FQ dude Our TFM baby Yeah So it's what goes on on news that it's Because it's a smaller thing It's not something that everyone has instant access to You do have people able to talk about steroids

You got facts, beginning of routines And then there's also a surprising amount of like scientific stuff being shared so like PubMed stuff there's always a lot of like lifting studies going on they're usually really bad Liam is very distracted by the weather

bro it's pouring yeah go on yeah you're getting a nice a nice super cell but yeah no so it's like it's you have actual scientists like sharing studies everyone's like trying to like learning new stuff

but also at the same time bro science wisdom uh lift more how does bro science work? I don't. You know, that's probably a good idea. Let's define bro science. Bro science is the received wisdom in the lifting community.

Oh, no. It's things like... Oh, my lights are going. Oh, boy. I just saw the flash, too. The bro science, for example, one of the things would be like, bro, you got to eat meals, small meals, every two to three hours. Because you got to stoke the metabolic furnace.

Right. Because the human body is the same thing as a steam locomotive. I got some bro science for you. One time a bro of mine told me that in order to cut faster, I should wear a trash bag while doing cardio. Oh, yes. So like sweat it out? Yeah. Yeah.

You burn more calories the hotter you are, right? People confusing the I trying to sweat to make weight for wrestling. Yes. I'm actually losing fat. Yes. Yeah. You're just losing waterway. Yeah. Oh, I had, I got an argument with a friend over that because he wanted to go for runs wearing, he bought a special suit design the run in. And he's like, bro, do you want to do it with me? Yeah. Like, you want to go, I'm like, and I was still very heavy at that point. Like, like, I was at one of my higher weights. And like, I will die. I would die now. But I would have died faster even then. So I remember seeing this.

exact logic in Silver Linings playbook, the book that was then turned into the movie with Bradley Cooper. Terrible fucking movie. Featuring your beloved Philadelphia Eagles prominently. And he, like, is layering up on sweatshirts for this exact reason. And I was like, oh, so this is not just like my one friend telling me this. There's a community of pros out there who believe stuff like this. Bro science, man.

Yes. Yeah. And there's other stuff out there. A lot of it's like protein timing. like it's all majoring in the minor shit right like like yo you got it you got to do caseine at night because it's slow absorbing you got to do way right after your workout because it's going to flood the muscles back up um there's all sorts of things like that you're doing this entire thing in sunglasses hey you know what it kind of works i just have to turn the light on um i wear his

sunglasses at night so i can so please please keep moving we have to keep bobby uh we only have Bobby hostage for 53 more minutes. Oh no, we got him for an hour. An hour and three minutes. Did the time? Maybe the lightning changed the time. Keep going. I'll fuck you up, man.

I just got severe thunderstorm warning, so you might not have to. I don't know, but Liam, was there any bro-science shit when you were? Oh, yeah. There was like the cutting and bulking shit. I mean, there were people who were like, oh, we have to make weight, but like we played football at a high school that was like irrelevant. Yeah. The only thing my high school has ever. done sports-wise is win several state natties and swimming and then get our asses handed to us

in districts by T.J. McConnell. Wow. That's kind of a badge of honor now. Yeah. Yeah. We got our asses handed to us in state playoffs by Ryan Archer Diakno, Villanofoan legend. Yes. Oh, God. And now Villanova is sanctioned by the Holy See. So. Yeah, but if we're going by how the white soccer. are playing. I don't think that really means much. Yeah. Well, at the very least, God is not an Arkansas fan. I can tell you that. I watched that

game last night. Jesus Christ. All right. So the best, the best, the stuff that I know the best is what came out of the early form culture. I wanted to be like, do I want to call it Web 1.0? But I don't hate myself enough to do that. I'm going to lose power. This is awesome. you seem a little too excited shut the fuck up so the early days of the farm the best days of the internet the day when the internet was good yeah before aOL ruined everything

we have like BBS what was the other one but it was it turned into a vision free but it was something else before envision you're on your own for that one oh it was a vision and then it became Zeta boards Zeta boards I used to

I used to be able to manage Invision-free. So I used to remember the, like, the markdown and the light shit. Wow. Did you do MySpace layouts too? Zanga layouts. Zanga layouts. I was on MySpace guy. I was on MySpace guy.

You were Zanga, though? I didn't have enough friends to. No, I was always an internet kid. Yeah, me, too. So I didn't have, I didn't, I had like, I mean, I became a citizen on the Total War Center forums. I was a member of the Concilium D. Kivitate, which was the board that elected new citizens. This is all very important.

Anyway, so wet forums come out, and one of the most influential forums, not only in lifting, but in actually like the history of like internet culture is bodybuilding.com. Yes. No. Yeah. Yes. The Misk, which is the origin of several influential memes. So some of the things that came, I would say the most prominent thing that came out of the MISC was the spaghetti stories.

So if you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, it's a green, usually a type of green text story. But they originated on the MIS, so it wasn't green text because it wasn't a 4chan. Talking about, you know, like be me, be at the count, be at the store, see a beautiful girl. you know, I want to get some fuck, you know, usually some sort of like homophobic or racist or something like that. And then like I go to talk to her, put my hand in my pocket, spaghetti falls out my pockets, spaghetti falls over the floor. I keep trying to put it back in, but it's not stopping. Yes. So it's sort of like an avant-garde kind of like weird twist of fate.

Alvant-garde twist of, okay. Yeah, it's the dais. Oh, my God. Opening my window so I can see the storm come in. but we also have, if you've ever seen memes where they're making fun

of like people for saying like, oh, this girl's not attractive like it'll be like, I don't know, Taylor Swift and they'll say well, she's got pointing elbows two of ten. She looks like an alien. I love her.

Two out of ten would not bang. No, wrong. And usually, usually mocking. It's usually mocking guys like that. Right. It's like an alien. I'm fucking here for it.

I've made that. That's, that's what I like. There's the didn't read LOL, which is an early version of TLDR. Come at me, bro. Comes out of, Bodebuilding.com. Huge one. Huge one.

That's a big one. I mean, that was on like Jersey Shore. Yes. And like Jersey Shore bro culture was influenced by MISC because a lot of those guys were on BB.com. We're on the MISC. We're on the body space. Did you have a body space, Bobby?

No. No? No. I did. I never. Here's an important thing to learn about me. I never, like, made an account in any of these places. And I never originated any content here.

I was not commenting. I was just, I think, like, a lot of people, this was the time of the internet where you had questions and there were very few places to get answers. It's so different. Dot com. It's so, yeah. Ask Jeeves. It's so different from now where it's like you have a question and you have too many places to get answers that you don't know.

You still have to just use Reddit. Yes, exactly. And we've now kind of cease out our way back to the point. It's almost like horseshoot theory with how the internet has worked. And so when I had a question about whether or not I should, what kind of protein I should be taking using after my workouts, whatever, I went to, I just Googled it because I was of the internet. I was of the internet age where I was like, I feel like I should have every answer at my fingertips. And like, because of what you're describing here, Tom, that, you know, the early Usenet era and then leading into the bodybuilding.com web forum era,

they had so much stickiness in search results in SEO, search engine optimization, that it was literally with every single fitness question that you could ask. Always, always, always there was a forum post and thread. Oh, that was the first thing that came up. It's like owning a Corvette. Yes. Whatever problem you have, somebody else has had it. Don't worry about it. Parts are cheap.

That's why the Corvette's the ideal sports car. Don't worry. It's like owning a Corvette. It's like owning a Corvette. It's like owning a Corvette, but also you also have to own a Corvette because on every single corner, there's a Corvette dealer. That's what you felt like to interact with Bodybuilding.com in the 2000s. And one of the things, one of the things, and I think I'm the oldest one of the bunch, but the, you would actually go sometimes to like GNC and talk to the guy. Yeah.

And that was, you would like, oh, yeah, the bro at GNC said like, this is like, this is the shit. Yeah. You know. And it's like the original. Sometimes the bro at GnC would be like, would reference a bodybuilding.com for it. Oh, no. Sometimes the bro at G&C would offer you steroids.

That's if you went into GNC enough times, yes. Yeah, or the, the original Jack 3D with methamphetamine in it. What? Yeah, the original formula of Jack 3D had, what it's called a pro drug when it's,

it's not methamphetamine in it. It's not methamphetamine until he digest it. A precursor? Yeah. So people really, it was a really good pre-workout. You got a lot. It was very popular. But I also killed some people.

What are you going to do? Yeah. And, and, you know, people, yeah, people gravitate the bodybuilding.com. It was, it was, yeah, a monolith in its day. We have, there's more memes. Now, these are more just fitness-related memes. D-Y-E-L What's that stand for?

Do we know? Do you even lift? Do you even? Bro, do you even lift? Fun fact, the guy, that bald guy and that meme, that guy's Jim's Delco.

Wow. Or Chester County. Chester County. Of course it is. I think it's Chester County. Iron Sport Gym, I think. Yeah. Heroes, legends.

They walk among us. Yeah. I looked into when I was something in the city. They wuddle among us. Yeah. I was looking into that gym when I was still living in the city because it wouldn't,

when I lived in, brewery town it wouldn't have been too long a drive was like fuck man that's like a hour that's still like a 40 minute drive to like go to the gym I don't know about that I'll still I'll go to the gym at school this is not yet the time to ask about this but I can't wait to talk more

about like where you've landed in your fitness journey and like what kind of gyms are going to like that's where I want to end this conversation yeah we'll have that and we do have you know like you know when we talk about planning fitness we do have you just have a one-com If I walked in, if I walked into the Planet Fitness radio, that's going off the way I'm dressed.

I have been to Planet Fitness. I would say probably like over a hundred times in my life because I was a member for a while there. I was part of a group membership with my girlfriend at the time. And she would just bring me along as a guest for free. And I think I only heard the Lank Alarm go off once in my whole time there. I've never heard it go off. It was terrifying.

It is such a bad idea. It sounds like a fucking air raid siren. It does. Not only that, like for anybody who might have literal PTSD from hearing that. You let go of that. Like, I am lifting weights. It is not the time to startle me with a gigantic siren right now. Yeah, I might.

It's a liability issue. I might get damage on the Smith machine that only goes up to 100 pounds. Cool, bro. There are free weights at Planet Fitness. There's dumbbells. they go up to like 90 I think. Now, some of the dumbbells actually do go up to like the hundreds, but they, they don't give you, like, you can't go super. I mean, obviously, you could do a hypertrophy routine and like get pretty, you know, if that's your only gym, you can get swole of shit doing that.

Yeah, bro. Yeah. Of course you can. You get swollen shit at home with no weights at all. That's really wanted to. That was as an adult getting back into it, I did, I did fucking body weight fitness. So, I used to be able to do a hand. stand, Liam, believe it or not.

I believe it. And I've been doing this whole pot as a handstand. And I've never weighed less than 235 pounds as adult. So I still am able to do that. I do. I do want to see you do that next time I see you. I could do it. Maybe I could do it against the wall.

No, you got to do it. I can get my start off the wall. Then no, no, no, it doesn't count. Can't do it handsstand. Liam's like we stop at nothing until Tom shreds every ligament in both of his shoulders yeah exactly I'm gonna be on the I'm gonna be on the fucking IL for for softball um they'll really miss me I mean I'll I'll miss yeah um well I think the game today's canceled oh yeah do you well so some other things you might have heard is that dare sell tech um no I've never heard that that that was a great one

a guy fake pretended to email Ronnie Coleman said, hey, are you on steroids? And the fake email reply back was no him on that there, cell tech. Because of course, in the mind of a guy on BB.com, Ronnie Coleman, who was black, would write in AVA. Right. In an email. Responding to a stranger. Yeah. And people passed that along

as authentic for years. We have Zs. We'll talk about Zs in a little bit. Um, so fucking sick cutt night I'm fucking sick scot night That's yeah All right So we got zes

Um You sick Cot mate Um Oh thank you We'll get into them Uh Curl bros

We all know about curl bros Right Of course Uh 12 ounce curls I can do 12 ounce curls Um Arms bruh

As long as you're not In the squat rack No arms Brough So that's also curling In the squat rack Or friends Only friends

Skip leg day Friends don't let friends skip like day Persists I think the most This and that and do you even lift and come at me bro Are the three that you've highlighted here that have I would say Pervaded into regular pop culture Like A rod would post something like friends don't let friends skip like that

Oh for sure yeah I think it's still like it's still like completely relevant Yes like I've it would be back in the day I would have done something like this I wouldn't do something like this, not because I'm not an asshole. This kind of asshole. Despite what visual representations on this podcast might suggest. My blue Philly set, tortoise shell, sung Maui gyms. They make me really mad. And I'm just wearing an undershirt, like an A shirt.

And I have my shaker cup. Just so I can, you know, flex the guns. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So the guy who owns my gym, he definitely skips leg day. Oh no. He's very top heavy.

He's very top heavy. He never wears shorts. I just like want to take a picture of his little chicken legs. And be like, come on, man. Come on. Dude, do some leg fret. You'll even have to squat.

Like, do the leg press. Come on. Let's build some shit off here. Don't you be down there. Well. Do you know where legs are, Tom? No.

And then my face, my personal favorite from the body build, from body space. Body space. Wow. Thick solid. Body space was where you would track your progress on BB.com. Okay. And thick, solid tight. I will bust that one out every once in a while.

And there are people who get it. That makes me so mad. That honest of God makes me upset. Do either of you, have you seen the origin of this? No. No. All right. So hold on.

I'll link you to an image. You don't have to read it. This guy, his name was unconditional. And everybody. Everybody, even me, everybody got this comment. Something to do with nice size, looking solid, thick, tight. Keep us all posted on continue progress. Any new progress or vid clips.

Show us what you got, man. Want to see how freaking huge, solid, thick, and tight you can get. Thanks for the motivation. Everyone got this. This dude was for years, which is every time someone posted. Or body's face. Just like a reply bot? Yeah.

Like, fix. off the original copy pasta the original copy pasta. What scripting is fun. We all love Ruby on Rails here. This guy this guy definitely I mean he was trying to fuck I think I that's okay well I admire

the game like he wasn't being an overt creep he's just saying fix all it's not that overt although I think you actually bring up a really important thing which is I know we're sort of examining the link between online lifting culture and like

I guess fascism, which you've already talked to on the podcast before or like just generally like the state of masculinity as we complete our arc here towards the end of this conversation when we complete our arc here. If we ever do or if Liam gets taken out by a tornado first. I'm about to get hit now. Yeah, go ahead, Bobby. There's just like a profound homoeroticism and online lifting. Oh, yeah. profound, which I think that we cannot really over. We can't glance over when talking about.

these forums is like bros wanting to see other bros, bros wanting to talk to other bros online in a place where it's like you don't have to be too worried about what the perception of you is in real life. And like, you know, I feel like this is much more of a present conversation than the one that we were having at the time. But like the fact that men dress for other men most of the time, the fact that men, their body ideals, you know, coincide more with other men think rather than what women are actually historically really looking for. And this is where I think all of that stuff gets like not only just like codified, but really, I think exponentially exacerbated by how the internet works, which is like upvote,

downvote style of the way that things get put in front of you. I was talking earlier about search engine optimization. It's like, I'm just being fed stuff that just other guys think. There's like literally no women for like 10 straight years or any of these places. Right. 100%. And this, I've jumped forward a little bit like in the same. sense of the

unfortunately we talk about guys are like, I want to be bare mode, I want to be a motor mode, I want to be twink mode. They're using gay slang to define bodies

that they want. And guys getting absolutely trying to divorce it from gay culture, which is really interesting and really kind of weird because, like,

appropriating gay culture. Appropriating is the word I wanted. And then, and then getting like mad when a woman expresses desire for a man who's like not a fucking bodybuilder. Yes.

because they want like a guy who's got muscle but the belly doesn't really matter that much is he handsome like Is he nice and Kenny Cook? This is the only thing that women want I tell you the hand of God The dad bod thing broke a lot of these guys' brains And in fact I think we are still watching

The breaking process. Yes. Yeah. Oh, you're 100% right. Yeah. Like, you know, this is like this is way before light but you know like Jordan P. Peterson here. Let's go. Let's go. We have this is what the The masculine archetypes in the Youngian mode,

Joseph Campbell said that all men are actually trying to fuck other men. Or some bullshit, I don't know. But he does actually come in to play towards the end of this. In a Freudian sense for three men to come together on a podcast to talk about. Alex, one of them is shirtless. Oh, what, hold up. Oh, no. Liam's taking a shirt off.

Let's go. now we're podcasting yeah Bobby's Bobby'll take a shirt off I take a screenshot I charge $10 per view

on the tipping pitches slack that's not gonna happen yeah that's a new tier of the tipping pitches thank you Bob Patreon dot com slash tipping pitches

thank you Bobby um as we say as always redirect any and all thirstraps to Ross yeah um um not to be laborbodibbuilding.com.

Probably the most famous thing, the funniest thing ever to come out of that website was how many days are there in a week? A debate between seven or eight days. Seven or eight? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like 140 posts.

That's too many posts. Arguing how many days there are in a week. Paving the way for how many batters does it take to be considered batting around an argument that we've been having on the baseball internet. If you read the thread, baseball comes up. Of course it does.

Yeah, because they try to use batting average. Because the guy's like, there's no way you can fucking lift three and a half days a week on average. There's those as a thing as half a workout. You either worked out or you didn't. And the other people are like, you're fucking idiot. Like, it's on average, you dumbass. That makes me so happy. Yeah.

It's like you can't get 0.3 a hit. That's a batting average. I can get 3.3 a hit. I've never played baseball. I don't know anything about baseball. I could probably hit a home run You cannot know that physique I'm kidding

Any bigger glutes It's all in the glutes man It's all in the posterior chains That's right posterior chain drive A posterior chain's gonna come up in a little bit When we move on to crossfit.com Oh yeah We got we

The Misc on bodybellar to come is a fucking cesspool It was it was shut down in 2024 I looked I remember the last time I looked at it was like a 2023 and it was all racist, uh, Vax racist Trump Biden like it was all politics old right wing shit. So not I'm not too surprised.

They did actually start monitoring their forums around I want to say 2003, 2004. And then a lot of those guys moved over to 4chan. Yeah, tracks. Yeah. But before we get the 4chan, we have TNation, TNation.com. They, they fuck their website up because I used to have lots of links to the good articles on there. And it just links to their forum now.

A lot of fashion adjacent guys now were on there. That was a mix of steroid culture. You got bro science and the actual science. And he had real coaches. There was some sort of interaction there. There was some real legit guys on there. Louis Simmons, West Side Barbell. If you've ever seen guys lifting with chains, it's not a BDSM thing.

I mean, it could be. But it's West Side Bargall. That's like his shit. Jim Wendler, who is, I don't know if he's a neo-Nazi himself. He's a neo-Nazi jacian. Cool. He's friends with the Wolves of Vinland guy. Jack, something, whatever.

Great lifting coach. If you want his books, if you want, I think we talked about this last time. If you want five three run, just go to Libgen. Yeah. Don't buy it. But it's a legit book. He also is like, he's like massages. He has this whole thing.

the north of Vage, which doesn't even make sense. Like, yeah, you got to be above the vagina. My man, I'm trying to be, I'm not trying to be above it. I'm trying to be inside. I mean, like, listen, man, that's just how I am. Sorry, I like my wife. My fault. Sorry, I like vaginas.

Dickhead. Yeah, asshole. I ain't trying to be north of that. Yeah, I ain't trying to be north of no vaginas. I went to north. Yeah, I went to north. There wasn't any there. It was just dicks all over the desks.

Um They did At all boys school It's just dicks everywhere Dicks Dicks scratched Into the wood Like eons passed

Like my dad might have Scratched his dick Into the Into the desk In the fucking 80s Did dad go to north? Yeah I don't know that

Yeah All the all the men And my family did And now they can't No they can't anymore Because they're dead Oh you mean I can't go back

Yeah Yeah because they killed it. Yeah. CrossFit.com. CrossFit gets its start around then. CrossFit had to form. CrossFit murder people.

Isn't that the thing that's happened? Yes, that's happened. They talked that they wads, libertarian shit. So. I know because it's time to try to expose you as a libertarian, Tom. Oh yeah,

I used to be libertarian. Up until I voted for Gary Johnson in 2012. Damn. I voted socialist in 2012 because I didn't want to vote for Obama. I was 16 in 2012. My hatred is pure. I voted illegally because, you know, you support the Democratic machine.

No, I punched one in for big old Mitt. My, uh, my favorite binders, all women. My favorite thing is, uh, it, but I, what I said about Hillary Clinton and 2016, we were a little off topic, but I voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton. I threw up in my trash can and I went about my day. Yeah, I mean, that was 2016. No, you know, I changed. I had become a communist and started the Philly SRA, I think, by then.

No, that was 20. Yeah, no, that was by then. Shit, that was a long time ago. You're fucking old, bud. I know. Yeah. CrossFit became, I want to say, like, the seed, one of the seeds of this, like,

Mahaha, crunchy shit. Yes, that makes sense. This is important. Because it was, like, doing your own thing. It was also, okay, this is a place where I, tap back in. So obviously I was on bodybuilding.com because it owned the internet for a while in terms of fitness when you had questions about lifting or whatever. It was always the first result.

And then I thankfully did not migrate to forge hand, which is good for me and the people around me. And then CrossFit comes in. And there's like immediately in almost like Scientology kind of way. just genuine accolites of it who what's important about like crossfit in the bodybuilding world is that these people not only were like this is what I like to do they're like this is my way of life I'm an athlete 24 7 from the moment that I wake up I'm doing athletic things I'm lifting my kid out of the crib I had a gym teacher in high school who only did CrossFit workouts with our gym class and the other gyms at my school because

my gym school was huge. We had three gyms. The other gym classes did not do the CrossFit. So he was like really truly, to your point about libertarianism, going rogue and just being like, I think this is the best way. And it was like an alternative, presumably healthier for your body version of working out because years and years and decades and decades of metabolic steroids and lifting too much weight, causing injuries that like it was seen as not compatible for day-to-day life.

for most people, the style of bodybuilding that was ultimately in the culture very niche. And so CrossFit came in, Tom, to your point, as like an alternative method of getting really fucking ripped. And you would see the people on TV at the CrossFit games and you'd be like,

oh, that person looks like they're fucking jacked. But meanwhile, you don't see the MRI of all of their joints 10 years later. You also don't see the blood test because they were on steroids too. Well, yeah, that's obviously true. They just weren't going for pure, like, muscle mass.

Yes. But they were, yeah, the weird kipping pull-ups and stuff were like a source of mock, that people would mock the stuff. But there's more. In theory, like there's more functional movement and more cardio built into the world of CrossFit. And so in some ways it does cross over for like me, as a teenager at this time, it crosses over more into the idea of like athletics.

Because bodybuilding is not really comparable with any sports. No. Right. It's like those posts you see where it's just like a guy who's super jacked. And then it's just like this guy would get absolutely fucking shredded by like a kickboxer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or an MMA guy or what have you. I have a weird respect for bodybuilders that are very when they're honest about it. And it's like this is just a sport. I just want to be as big as I can. And like I want to have an aesthetic physique.

And I want to look a certain way. And this is what's important to me. Right. I'm not going to I'm not going to shit on any. one for that. Yeah. And there's a lot of guys who are like that who are like chill and that's just their thing. I do, I mean, we could do a whole episode of just on bodybuilding. Ooh, that was right over ahead. I'm sure. I'm sure we will.

About how physiques have changed over time where you had the more, the art, like the classic like Arnold physique, which looked attainable. Obviously, it's not without rate genetics and steroids, but it looked more like, oh, this is like a human. Right. Versus what it looks like now. I might walk down the street and see a guy who looks something like this. Yeah. Like,

oh, that's like, they're like, perfect for Conan the Barbarian. Like, just big Barbarian warrior. But he looks at that. He doesn't have weird acne all over.

He's not all like. He doesn't look like. That looks like how he's sort of supposed to look like. Yeah. Like versus now. He doesn't look like his hip bone is about to snap in half. Yeah. Right.

I don't see. I can't see the muscle insertions like where the tendons are. Yeah. Like, like down to like the individual muscle. fibers because this guy's 1% body fat and he's passing out on stage and just covered in faked hand. That, that's not, that's not, that's not the aesthetic go for.

And then there's classic bodybuilding, though, but people try to emulate that. But anyway, we're still in the forums. The last form I want to talk about is starting strength. And I kind of talk about Mark Ripato in a second because Mark Ripeto, I don't know if you guys did starting strength. I did. Starting strength He is such a popular program

Because it's very simple It's a three by five with a one by five for deadlifts And you did it three times a week And you did A B A BAB right Very easy to follow If you follow it and you're a young person Full of hormones You will get strong as shit

Right I did it in 90 days I went from doing my body weight stuff I went from like a 95 pound squat To like a 350 pound squat to like a 350 pound squat. Wow. It was insane, right? How quickly I was able to get strong on that.

And the goal of this thing was to take skinny freshmen and make them able to play high school football in Texas. The problem is... You might have done this. You might have. And if you take a look at it, if aesthetics is your goal... It almost never is. It just makes you big. It makes you big.

If you... And you have to... kind of be eating a lot for it to work. Well, I got that down, bro. Yeah, yeah. So I did well on it. The forums, the forums, though, full of old guys. Some of them are the old Usenet guys.

And it is still to this day the least newbie friendly. Every post on there is you're not following the program. Read the FAQ. Eat more. Do go mad. Do you know what Go mad is? No. gallon of milk a day.

That's insane. Not doing that. That is so crazy. And I can tell you, even trying that, I'm lactose intolerant. So I'm blowing that. I'm blowing,

I'm drinking. I'm starting if you finished the gallon. I'm blowing it out the other end. Thanks for the visual. Yeah, really appreciate that. I'm really sure what you meant when you said. This is a lactose and tolerance.

So we don't, We don't have visuals on here. That rectum is gone. It's got some miles on it. It's got some miles on it. It's got some miles on. Aren't you happier here, Bobby? Oh, I'm thrilled.

This is where I want to be at 6 p.m. on a Thursday. Yeah. We got, we got, we. So if you still go, if you go now on this, on these forums, you can read what Rip, coach, rip thinks. Everyone calls them coach too. like, all right, coach, coach. coach what his takes are on global warming it's fake um he has a he has a degree in geology

and he's he's one of the oil truther guys oh no what the fuck does that even mean means that oil is not going to run out oh i believe that oh okay i mean eventually the no i love those people those people are so funny um no he's and he's and he's not a loyal truther i don't get he's not a christian like he's an atheist and if anyone mentions religion he he he fucking jumps down their throat. Just goes off the handle. Yeah. But he's not a Republican. He's a libertarian. He loves Trump though.

Okay. He loves Trump. Yeah. But he's libertarian. All right. Let's get to let's get to the 4chan. Uh, must be. And some early influencers. Let's, we got, we got 4chan starts at 2003. Um, you know, a sin upon upon humanity. Amark against our soul. Yeah. Yeah.

If you were a 4-Champ person, you would know that there were some relative areas of sanity. For example, it was not a conservative site until Obama became president. So up until about 2008. I wonder what changed. Yeah, I wonder what changed. It was the racism, Bobby. Yeah. What?

Yeah. Can you believe that? Yeah. So Fit was a place of relative sanity. For some reason, the TG, the Warhammer guys were pretty decent. for some reason, somehow. They were pretty decent. Because they had like

the racism boards, right? They had like, they're all doing the race war simulations now. Yeah. Whatever. I was, I was on there. I was, I was, I was on Fortune. I was on fit. I thought that shit was hilarious.

I really wish I could find there was a meme I made that was semi-popular back of the day. I can't find it anymore. And I only remember to us. But there was one going around. It was like an angry face. guy. But, you know, there was some decent advice that could be found on there if you could sort

through the pro science and the memes and all that kind of stuff and the porn. But one of the early, like, early influencers was this guy called Z's. His real name was a Ziz. He was like Armenian, Australia. He was from Australian, but like Armenian ancestry. He was a very strong. short-lived, literally, body-building icon for about a year and a half. So you Myron, you jelly, right?

Let's see. Fuck. I got some Ziz. Some Z's. Thank you. There for us. As the heavens open up around me, it's slendering like crazy. Zee's trying to talk to you.

Yeah, Z's, oh, shit. From beyond. From fucking. Thank you for all your. his messages. He's thanking you for all your great work on Fortuna over the years. And you could see, like, I have a picture of him. He was like a jersey shirt kind of fuckboy looking guy.

Obviously, good physique. He was on steroids. But he was very inspirational because he was a really, really skinny nerd. And a lot of those guys looked up to him because he's like, no, like, before I started steroids, even, I was aesthetic. He was like, he was talking about, I'm aesthetic. Like, I want to be aesthetic. You want to live this life, right? You want to go out to the club.

You want to get the girls, right? Yeah. Just follow my. routine. And he was, he was like, he was famous saying, we're all going to make it. Bro, we're all going to make it. That's nice. So he was, he was, he was like a nice guy, I guess. Question mark, question mark, question. If he had lived, who knows? Because he dies in, what, 20, shit, 2011. I forgot to put the date of his death. Hold on. Yeah, 2011. That's

2011 in Bangkok. He had a heart defect. The sterile, and probably cocaine didn't help. We'll get you. Yeah. His brother goes by Chespa. And he was actually arrested at one point for dealing steroids. That's not a crime. Right.

I know. You jelly, that's just gender affirming care. You, you, you, myron, you jelly. Actually,

true. Bras, honestly, it is in a way. It's a good take. I think all steroids should be legal for, everybody so they can conform to the gender that they want to. Yes.

So, yeah, so that's Z's these. He, there, there, I might have cried to the, to the Z's we're all going to make a comic back in like 2011 at the end of the year. Because there was fit comics at the end of every year. This one guy would draw, you know, it was all based on like the crazy stuff you saw like, you know, from going on and like Planet Fitness and stuff like that. This is also where we get manlets. So did, I don't know who I, who I texted today, five, foot 11 king of manlets checking in. Texted me, five foot 11 something. Okay, that might have been that.

Yeah, five foot 11th king of manlets, because you're, you're not a manlet unless you're six foot. Okay. Six foot is to cut off. And then they went and then, of course, the exaggeration was like six foot eight average male height. You know, that's a normal height. Oh, you texted me king of the manliest. 511 checking it. Am I forever a little?

Should get the leg surgery in Turkey. Please respond. Sick. Thanks, bra. Got a gym today. Fixed his poverty bedroom. Do I even lift your bra? I love to be six tail.

I'll tell you that right now. Yeah. Perfect height. 6 foot 7. 6.5 average. 6 foot 4 is King of Manlets. 5 foot 11. Are you even trying?

Are you? Bobby, how tall are you? Six feet. Yeah. Oh. Tom's the shortest. Well, Jay Keller is 5'8.

It's always hard for me to tell people that I'm six feet because no one ever, I mean, rightfully so, no one ever believes that. So it's like saying you're rounding up, right? And I'm like, no, but it's okay. It's an officer. I only had two beers. It's never one beer.

It's never three. It's always two. Yeah. Yeah. A few hours ago also. Yeah. Crazy. I don't know what the, what's the problem, officer?

Oh no, I'm reaching for his service weapon You guys like Suicide back up because I'm a manlet Brough I'm only 5 I'm only 6 foot 2 I'm never getting QD pie girlfriend I'm a birthday boy I'm just a little birthday guy come on

I don't know what you guys I have poverty bench I only squat two to or I always squat 300 pounds I don't know how often you're around armed police officers but whenever I am and you can just see the service weapon right there like just the part of my lizard brain is just like I should touch that

like I should like that's right there it's called the void it's called the void yeah Pell David if they have like the real good kydix holster you're not you're not going to be able to but if it's some like shitty loose

fabric thing you have a chance no bro I live in New York they got the real holsters yeah they got the kite they all got kydex um they have multiple for their taser and for service weapon those dudes are military They have a brace.

They just have like, so they can pull out tool. They have their phone with candy crush, of course. Well, yeah. What else are you going to do? Yeah, exactly. You're going to take reports from someone whose car was stolen,

or are you going to fucking, you guys get that candy cart street going? Yeah. Right. Reddit starts, Liam's favorite site. Reddit starts 2005. Now,

Fitness Reddit, Reddit becomes like the center for science for, like, as opposed to bro sites. So, like, the fitness reddit's been around forever. They have, like, a Wiki and all this shit. So the more science-oriented people migrated there. I know I migrated the Reddit at 9, 2005, but later on. And they-

I feel like partially because of the expectation of moderation that came with a lot of different subredits over the years. That, like, all right, some of this bro-science stuff, like, we're going to try to moderate this out. Yeah. Yeah. And also I'm not going to like open up like, oh, here's like check out my lifting routine. Unfortunately, you click on it and then it's like it's like porn.

Yeah. Or something worse. They would love they love to do shit like that. So yeah, so like bodybuilding.com. And this is like forms in general or are on the decline by the mid mid 2000s is really when it's when late 2000s is the definite decline. I know that the form that I used to moderate died in like 2012. Although some of them are still around. We're better off for it.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. The, we get our first YouTube fitness guy, though. I think this was the origin of why I wanted to have you on, Bobby, because I think we, I talked about Scooby 1961. Yes. On the last, when me and Alex appeared and Liam was violently ill. And we filled in on 10,000 losses.

Yeah. So Scooby, 1961 is still doing it. He's the oldest running fitness YouTuber. He's had this channel, Jesus, his oldest video is 18 years ago. Oh, so he's like the OJ. Oh, yeah. Genuine, genuine good soul.

But he had some questionable advice. One of those was the skateboard squats. What? You can see the picture in the thing. It's fire. He's doing, he's doing squats. using a skateboard because he's afraid of hurting his back. Oh, okay, sure.

He's doing like dumbbell squats. I would be more worried hurting my back doing that. I mean, yes. But also, I sympathize with being afraid of hurting your back. As someone with the L5S1 partial urination, I understand. I haven't squatted since I've done that. I've done everything else but squat. One of these days I'll try, I see.

We'll see how it goes. You've done everything else, including like running on the treadmill while like throwing a chair over your head like some of these dudes got to do it backwards yeah yeah um while also while also over at pressing um with the other hand yeah that looks like a mistake um we he also had he was he's one of these he's old school in the nutrition science life that's who i was thinking of as the nazi yes domazetti he's not nazi is he yeah but he is wait when yeah when when did that come out. He,

there's nothing in recent life that would have pushed information like that out into the world, really. Hang on. Now I got to go to Google and make sure I'm right. Because I think he was on a podcast with, uh, uh, some dickhead, uh,

oh, what's his name that I hate? Dan Bilsarin. Oh, yeah. But is he a Nazi, though? I don't think he's not.

Bilsarian is a Holocaust denier. Well, I'm talking about Domit. Oh, shit. I don't know that. Bro science life I thought he was just a broadly misogynistic billionaire

Mike Tornibene I could be wrong I hope that I am because I don't think he's really like that I could be I could be wrong I mean anyone who went to NYU is probably not a Nazi they're just an asshole yep just like me

yeah and also a friend of the show Jay Sottai went to NYU um we have the the program Reddit um saying that he might be cool

he said that he's he said that in the past that he's a feminist okay and he satirized toxic masculinity before it was cool all right

so I don't think Domazetti is yeah Domazetti might be but the the real guy might is not damn Bill Zarin

is absolutely a fucking holocaust buyer he's a shit head back back to someone sweet and innocent scooby yeah okay yeah move on so he he used to I remember when I was like really trying to lose way and I was getting back in the shape and stuff like that he was like if it tastes good spit it out

which is the old Jackal Lane thing but so he was old school nutrition he had like these scooby snacks that he that you could make it looked it was like peanut butter and like oats and shit like that it was very old school but he genuinely cares about fitness. Now, he does this video mocking this guy, Jeff said, and he puts a wig on, he does a whole thing, he makes fun of him. A couple days later, he gets doxed. The rumor is that this guy paid for him to get doxed. He gets doxed, not by the people like on fit. So he actually goes on fit. He's like the evangelist. Like, I'll go on mission anywhere to preach fitness. I don't care how shitty it is. And I'll be nice.

Like, you can make fun of me all you want. I don't care. I know I'm a goofball. Yeah. Sort of like Gavin Newsom, I don't know, appearing on Tucker Carlson or whatever. Yeah, exactly. You know what?

Scooby probably voted for Gavin Newsom. Scooby gets dodged. You did too. You punched in a couple of illegals for Gargall. Yeah, yeah. I did the DNC. I have a family member who was asked to be in his administration, and they said, absolutely fucking not.

don't want that stain on my wrist made. They're liberal. Oh, boy. It's got to be. Yeah. So, so Scooby gets stocks.

It turns out he's gay. And this 2013. Oh, no. Okay. So we're just getting, in this community, I assume.

You got death threats. People, people were coming up to them, like, coming up this house, taking pictures and stuff like that. Why? Just to harass him.

Because he was like this, be fucking normal. Yeah, because he was, but he was like this nice guy, because he was a, little weird, right? He, dude, he fucking built his own house. So he had to move. He had to sell the house. He, dude, he built his own airplane. Super Grover Scooby. He's like, he's like, he's like a

retired engineer. Like, he's like very cerebral. Like, he's a smart guy. He's like a hands-on guy. Um, dude, his farewell video is, is enough to, like, make you well up. Like, he could tell he was trying not to cry. Now, he couldn't stop. He couldn't stop. He's like, I'm I'm only going to do private console stuff. He comes back. He's still, he's still going. He's back in the game. That's a beautiful story. He's doing 20 year YouTube anniversary.

His latest video is Old Man Skin, Fast Safe, Summer Tan. Why Chat GPT and AI make bad bodybuilding meal planners? Oh, then now he has, he has Bitcoin tips. Yes. Great. Dude, I was looking for more Bitcoin tips. I have places on the internet. Give me all your money.

Broccoli hair, Sarms, Bro, advice. preventing money fights he's a weight loss hack that works and there's a toilet behind them that's pretty good I love this guy I shall return I love this guy

he's not daddy podcast with bathroom breaks built in yeah go ahead I ate primo hoagies for lunch you tell me how I'm fucking doing how much of the special juice did you get All right Well we'll keep going because we know you got a We got like 15 minutes left here

All right Now I think So this is like early influencers Now we have like Some of the names that we might know Especially if you're if you're if you're Would you qualify as you're a millennial or a zoomer I'm literally right on the cusp

I always identify I'm 96 But I always identify as Millennial because I was born in the first half of 96, so I'm in the earlier school, I'm in the older school year and also I have an older sister who's five years older than me. So that kind of aged me up a little bit in terms of my reference points. Gotcha. So then this would, this would sort of be applicable being like a young millennial, whereas this stuff isn't as applicable to me because, you know, you reach a certain point in your life and you kind of get like solidified and where you get, like,

get advice. And I have Instagram. I don't use it. Yeah. I don't use Facebook anymore either. But like, I am still stuck on Reddit because I like forums or on Twitter and Blue Sky, whatever, because I like those formats. Yes. But I'm not the average American. And the average American loves reels. They love Instagram. They love TikTok. And influencer fitness starts to kick off in in the 2010s, the late 2010s. And you have a lot of things going on. We have influencer fitness. We have people who are very unqualified to actually give real lifting or nutrition programs,

giving nutrition programs illegally because you can't give nutrition programs unless you're actually a registered dietitian. And basically just based on their aesthetics, Instagram filters, selling things based on how I look, lying about being natural, lying about not using steroids. And I have a couple names on here. I don't know how. I might have missed some. Hodge twins, they started out doing comedy stuff.

They're Chuds. Elliot Hulse, Chud. Jeff say, I don't know what the fuck he's doing anymore. Bradley Martin. He does Jim Pranks that makes, what's his name? Mike Isretel mad. And we have Domazetti, Brozai's Life. He's been making fun of a Nazi.

Not a Nazi. Beat the allegations right here on the pod. Mike, Mike, Tornabani. Come on the show. Okay. We'll extend that to you. And I have another guy I want to stop on. And Bobby, stop me if there's anyone I'm missing or you want to jump in.

We got Rich Piana, a Rich Piana. He's a two scoops. Come on guy. He's a guy who comes along and he's not ashamed to admit that he is a steroid user. He's honest about it. His $5,000 a month steroid habit. What? Yes. He also had an opiate thing going on one point.

He was like, he just, he's not special. Yeah. He's a substance abuse guy. Have you guys seen the episode of Malcolm Miller with the bodybuilders? Yes. He is the guy in the square. If you haven't seen it, you need to watch it, Bobby. Malcolm Middle is a goaded television show.

It's real working class. It is genuinely. I mean, it literally is. and Hal has like a legion of bodybuilders falling around and Rich Piano is one of them. He called himself a 5%er, which is like, I'm a part of the 5% people who really go,

I'm going to go all out of my goals. Okay, but, I just a little too close. I mean, it's better. You're not three and you're not one. So I guess that's good. And he was, and he was very active.

He was like very reachable. And he would talk about, about steroids. And his whole thing is like, listen, kids are going to use steroids. They're going to do this stuff. I'd rather be there and tell them how to do it right so they don't fuck themselves up. But he died in 2017. He had a coma. He fell into a coma after he hit his head. He fell, hit his head. We went in a coma for two weeks. Bobby right now was drinking from his gallon jug of milk. That's right. No. And he had significant heart disease. I'm quoting for Wikipedia here. An autopsy revealed significant heart disease and that his heart and liver weighed over twice the average amount for an adult male. Jayson said piano was well aware that his organs were enlarged and that this was a known set effects of steroids and the hormones he'd been taken. But he said he was unaware that this put him at risk for some cardiac arrest. Oh. Yeah. I feel like if I hear the phrase the side effect of steroids is increasing your organ size, I might.

assume that failure of the organs, which is what cardiac arrest is, failure of the most important organ, might be one of the side effects. But that, I mean, that's just me, guys. That's just you. That's fine. And that's primarily a symptom of taking human growth hormone. If you actually look at the picture where Howl's looking at Rich Piana, the guy to our right, he has what they call palombo gut, where he has abs, but he has like a ninja turtle looking belly. Yeah. And that is a sign of overusing H.T.H. because your organs are. getting too big. And we see Rich Piano here has a little bit, but not too much.

He actually has a pretty, he has an aesthetic physique here that looks like, oh, he kind of looks like a strong guy. Like, he looks like an action hero kind of guy as opposed to he ended up looking more with the gut later on in his life. Right. And then there's debates about fake natties online, so that

becomes a thing. There's this guy, Derek, he does more plates, more dates. Are you familiar? I haven't listened to. The only thing I ever watched of his was when he took down when he took down liver king. I did watch that, but I know I have not been a subscriber. Yeah. Of more plates. I went on the subreddit doing research

for this and immediately encountered transphobia. Yeah, that's a track. So I was like, I don't know about him, but his community sucks. Sure. But now, yeah, let's, let's, but you know, they're taking a debate. There's actually a Reddit called Natty or not like, you know, this is a whole thing. Fake Natty's, who's actually natural, who's on steroids.

If you are listening to this and you have had literally any fitness reels, and like mainly male fitness reels, push to you in the last five years, you have seen, like in the way that this is time as a flat circle, you know, like the do you even lift bro type questions and memes that came out of the bodybuilding.com era, you've seen people be like, Natty question mark, natty question mark, not nat. Like, just people debating in the comments because for whatever reason, this is like the most viral form of content is like a seven second video with no context at all, which I could and

probably should point out and argue here is the worst possible way to get your fitness advice. Yes. Is getting contextless advice from a person who you know nothing about what they're doing and what they're putting into their body. and yeah the natty versus not natty debate has become to the point where it's like I don't even know

like no one's even talking about lifting anymore they're talking like completely around the whole like I don't know kinetic chain aspect of like what this began with I don't know yeah it's it's

the TikTok if I guess. Oh, yeah. You know, in Instagram Reels where everything's fed to one word of the time because you got your sound off. And I can't read a paragraph anymore. Yeah, you want like, good fitness content is long form. Like, you're going to go on stronger by science. You want to read an article. Like, hey, what are the things that Creighton does for you?

And dude, it's going to take a half hour to read it because it's learned to read. It's legit. It references studies. Like it's like that's what you need. You need like or like video like long videos that show you like, hey, this is how you cue your squad or do whatever. Like seven seconds is not enough. It's not enough to show you how to do a bicep curl. Right.

There's also a proliferation beyond people arguing about whether they are natural or not. There's also a proliferation of people who are like, this is what your form should look like, not this. And like most of it is wrong to. Like, because on bodybuilding forums and stuff, you really couldn't, for a long stretch of the internet, you really could not get like video breakdowns of what something should look like. And so I'm pretty sure that a lot of these bros, a lot of these bro science types, their form was probably terrible for the sake of being able to say that they lifted more weight. We've all seen this at the gym, a guy who's just like throwing his whole back out trying to just say that he's lifting more weight. And, you know, now that we actually have video to show people, there's a lot of people just defiantly promoting themselves as experts on a certain topic.

Because I think if I think it's how you make it culture has spread everywhere in our modern world. If you're like your biggest promoter. But like this is really not one of the aspects of life and the internet where fake it till you make it is a good way to go about doing this. because like there really is a right and a wrong way to do it because of physics and mechanics. And yeah, man, I don't know. So you're saying that you don't engage with this at all. Liam, do you engage at all with like any of this style of content of like Instagram influencer who's like this is how I look like this is how I look like this is also a whole like this is another can of worms probably that we we probably don't want to open up this late in the pod. but there's a whole like feedback loop of what celebrities look like.

Like if you want to look like Captain America, do this. And it's like TikTok or it's an Instagram meal or whatever because I'm not on TikTok. So I just see TikToks that are like three weeks old on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. This is how Chris Evans got to look like this doing this exercise. Doing this seven days a week and, you know, all that shit. Like that's how it would be like.

And then now AI, it's like here's, you know, a total. fabricated image basically. Yeah, seven workouts you have to do according to the age because they don't know how we use articles in English. And, you know, it'll be some like fucking AI generated like old guy.

And it's, you know, you can kind of barely see the text. It's like one by 10, you know, body weight, inverted rows on your table. Like, oh, yeah, that's how you get jack like that. That's how you look like the liver king

or you look like these guys. And we're in this era of, everything's algorithmic. So you're getting, we were talking about this. Like you start looking at one thing. And suddenly now you're getting just everything it thinks is related to that.

Like you watch one YouTube video on fitness. And you let that on autoplay. Within 10 videos, you're going to be on Joe Rogan. You're going to be. Oh, for sure. On some red pill shit. Well, because it always reverts back

to like the biggest people in this spaces. The algorithm is always tied to the juice. and the juice for whatever reason is like you have some names written down here like the Liver Kings the eventually like the Andrew Tate style content the the Huberman

Huberman is a big person in this area too where it's like the fake science wellness crossover with the lifting culture where it's not quite as in vogue to be like I'm a bro who lifts it's more in vogue to be like I'm living like the Romans

lived. Yeah. With my return. Right. But this is like a serious. You go get eaten by some. And I always think about being unethical, but I'd be like, Gary, this is the fucking, this is the Dune and Dying Ranger workout.

Like this is, this is how you protect your people from the outsiders, you know, just like in Lord of the Rings. Like you'd be like unethical. Or one of the things Patrick, Patrick and I have talked about is legitimately trying to get land and doing men's retreats. And he would do the lifting. side of it and I would do like the mental side of it. And like when you see those videos are like grown men like all, it's all roided up grown

men laying in the pool just in like briefs and they're all crying. That would be like and you're charging $10,000 for a weekend. Yeah. You have you have the entire like the entire like region like I, we could get every sales manager in the Northeast. You could. In one location. Yeah.

I mean, sure. Yeah. That reminds, I mean, you, you describing that, I think hits on a key point that underpins every single era of what you just described in this incredibly detailed outline, which is that, you know, we talked earlier about the innate homoeroticism of all of this stuff. But it's also the innate, like, body dysmorphia, lack of self-confidence that has inspired every single version of this. you're like it's always about change. It's always about like looking like someone else. Someone else, right. Yes, whether that ideal is like the Andrew Huberman type

because he's like a smart ripped guy with like a well-kept beard or whether that ideal is Schwarzenegger or whatever it might be, whether it's Z's. I do think that there's like a really profound. Not to go socialist mode here on you guys at the end, but like a really profound capitalist underpinning to be. being able to sell shit back to people. Different companies and different, you know,

corners of the internet have monetized it better over the years. But like, you know, I think about one of the things that you don't have on here, Tom, is that like the Beach Body Company, which I think is now just renamed to Body, but they were the one, B-O-D-I. It's like just very tech-ified.

It seems like they're trying to just like, you know, rebrand because they seem a little bit, uh, passei, I suppose. But this came out of, you know, like basically Southern California in the 2000s, late 90s is when it started, but it really got popular in the 2000s.

And they were the company that was doing like, they were like shake weight and like infomercials, but they were also P90X, which Tony was founded by this guy named Tony Horton, who was a bodybuilder, but also like kind of one of these like functional athletics type people. Like I can train you for your sport, but I can also train you to look and feel good. and the whole like mail order DVD element of bodybuilding culture, which I did do P90X for a long time. Like for years, I was sort of like vacillating back and forth.

And there's other versions of this too, like the Marine guy, Sean, what's his name? I can't remember. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm talking about though. And that is almost like the kind of trying to like mass market the forums. You know,

like we're sidestepping all of the unsavory aspects of this and all of the like decent. centralized versions of all of this, and we're just sending you DVDs. And this is the program. And that's when it starts to be like, all right, now we have content companies that are pulling this into one centralized stream here. And like all things, that stuff dies out because we'll no longer need a DVD player. We can just look up this workout on our phone.

It's in our pocket at the gym. And or we saw a TikTok that is just describing like a worse version of this workout. but we don't care because we don't know what is the right version of this. And so, yeah, man, it's a really interesting arc. I would say probably not. I don't think we've landed in a good spot. I don't know if any of the eras that you described are particularly better or worse than others for like the mass amount of people. But where we've landed now is just like I was saying earlier,

it's really hard to find reliable information about any of this stuff. And so when you do, when you find someone who actually knows what they're talking about and is actually rooted, and then like a historic historic truth to some of these like tried and true methods you really gotta hold on to shit like that.

I mean, part of me wants to go but like, no, what you need is a forum with an asshole moderator. And if you don't like them, you start your own forum

and you have your fact and that's what you got your shit. And then you like have PDFs of like the good liftings. Like, like I'm joking, but like there is everyone's an expert now.

Yes. Everyone's doing their own research because they ask chat GPT. And in order to seem like an expert, not to cut you off, but in order to seem like an expert to people and to the algorithm, you have to say something

that is like quote unquote revelatory. There's not that many revelatory things. You know, the body is the body and it's been that way for a really long time. It's not that many. You can't hack your body in all these different ways like people are selling you that you can't.

Yeah. You just, you have to lift weight. Like you progressively overload whatever you're like lifting weights or body weight, whatever it is. So you do more. Caloric surplus. Caloric surplus, or if you're trying to lose weight,

deficit, you're not going to, like, you can't spot fat reduce or anything like that. No. I really feel like that reduced there. Yeah, reduced. We're going to reduce the fat. Yeah. You're trying to cut damn fucking John's out. And, like, it's these basic principles and like, like, the squad's been around forever.

The Delo's been around. Like, do basic stuff. it's not it's not crazy and like all the stuff that everything that people sell online it's they tell you it's going to be this crazy thing at most it's like a 5% thing for an advanced lifter you know it's it's like i remember i know you gotta get out here in a second like people like i want to buy the slingshot like that's the thing for for your bench right it's like dude you bench 135 pounds the slingshot for guys benching 4,500 pounds. You don't need that.

You just get up to 165, bro. Yeah, you need to bench your body weight first. Let's try that. Then you need to get up to 185 and then maybe 215 and then we can keep progressively When you can bench twice your body weight and then you want to start doing a powerlifting competition, yeah, then you could do that. Then by the, but you can't use it in a content. Like it's all, but that's the thing is we're going back to like, you know, we're not really

known for being common this year. but one of us isn't um one of us is a libertarian who posts all over fortune yeah um but it is it goes back to like it's like i'm always selling you like this one little trick yes that's going to that's going to be the key and it's always a one little and for 1995 you too can have this one little trick yeah and and also a really powerful element of this is that i think you have it somewhere on this dock is like if you don't know this you're not part of the club right like like you should know this. Someone should have told you this by now. There's an exclusivity to knowing some of these things. For sure. And if you don't, then you're not going to get jacked.

I mean, for the most part, like, people's genetics are the reason why they look the way that they look. And you really are not going to get more than like 15, 20 percent in either direction of that without like drastic efforts. And in some cases, steroids for a lot of these guys. But I don't know. The state of it really bums me out. And like when we were talking about it on 10,000 losses, you asked me if I wanted to come on this, as someone who just likes kind of normal information, as someone who just likes to not go, you know, way overboard on things and just like, just do a normal workout. It's really hard to find like content about because it's not, it's not like super profitable

to just tell someone to do what we've known to do for a really long time, which is what we said earlier, progressively overload and eat a little bit more. That's, that's why I wanted the one, the one, the one I know. confirmed comrade in the lifting world, Greg Nuckles. He calls himself the big Bill Haywood of lifting. That's excellent. He had to end his Stronger by Science podcast. He says, I have nothing else to say.

Yeah. I'm not going to come here and do an hour every two weeks. That's baller. With nothing else to say. I read Casey Johnston's newsletter as well. I don't know if either of you guys are familiar with her newsletter. I'm not. I'm not.

She was a fitness writer for a lot of different places and kind of covered a lot of stuff and came out of the blog world. But she wrote a column for a long time called Ask a Swal Woman because she had gotten into coming kind of coming from the other element of this where like we're coming from the very male dominated bodybuilding forums world. And she was coming from a lot of the like you got to burn calories. You got to do cardio like all the things that are fed to women on the opposite side of that same point. Oh, yeah. And then she kind of flipped it. and was like, oh, actually strength training is the thing that I was missing in my life from making me feel better.

And so she just approaches it from a really pragmatic, reasonable perspective about, you know, different phases of your life, changing your needs and for what you want to do when you're powerlifting or bodybuilding or whatever you're looking to do. And it's like normal advice, which I think is cool. That's awesome. I'm going to look, I just look, searching her up, it looks like she's like got legit shit. So like, and that's a whole other thing. It took me so many years to get my wife.

to lift, but it's not her so much benefit. And she's just fitter and fitter every time. And, you know, I slacked off during COVID and after I hurt my back. But she has maintained that. It is so better. Everybody. Everyone should just be, you don't have to be a bodybuilder. You just need to, like, lift weights like two times a week.

And that will actually get you so much. Like, if you can bench 135, you're, like, stronger than 99% I know. It's the same way that if your podcast gets 500 listens a week and you have more listeners than 90% of the podcasters in the world. Very true. That's a nice way to tie it back to a conversation we're having before we hit record. All right.

So any last thoughts from either of you guys? My last thought is I have a hurt shoulder right now and I also hurt my shoulder in high school. So it's really making me, it's hearkening back to my days of being like, all right, what do I do with my life now? I can't do any lifting of the upper body. body variety. So it's going to be a lot of leg days for your boy. Just like day, leg day every day.

A lot of long walks. You know, a lot of just kind of low level cardio. I'll dedicate my next overhead press to you. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. Well,

Bobby, if they want more Bobby content, where can they find you? It's the tipping pitches podcast, brother. We're available wherever you get podcasts. It's ostensibly about baseball, but you know,

it just kind of goes all over the place. we do public feed episodes once a week and then we also have a Patreon much like this one where every other week we do a little segment called three up three down where we talk about three things bringing us joy three things taking our joy away

in the baseball world so yeah man it's a fun time I do with my best pal Alex who's been on this pot a few times with me several times yeah I think you guys were our first guest and uh I think so yeah you've what an honor holy shit I didn't even know that every every

every year I think twice this year. All right. Well, I think we'll call that a pod. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for being patrons. Unless you still listen, fuck you. Yeah.

Go sign. All right. Have a great day, everybody. Bye. Thanks, Bobby. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, guys. No one likes us.

No one likes us. No one likes us. We don't care. We're from bailing. No one likes us. We don't care. Yeah.