We've Entered The Age Of The Jacked Nerd

Pawan Lapborisuth holds a PhD from Columbia in biomedical engineering, having completed a thesis that used VR, electroencephalography, and eye tracking to create brain imaging. By day, he’s an applied researcher for a hedge fund and works with the Mets to develop brain-computer interface tech that could help in their training. He also benches 400 lbs.

During a bulking phase, Lapborisuth, 29, eats up to 6,000 calories a day, and when we spoke on the phone he was a lean 270lbs, down from the 310 he hit before cutting back. For a competitive bodybuilder, a 40 lb slim-down is nothing – he expects to go as low as 240 by the time he’s ready to get on stage.

Despite the eye-popping numbers, Lapborisuth is soft spoken and thoughtful, careful not to overstate his expertise or achievements. He describes his path towards bodybuilding as “relatively typical.” He sketches out the basic stages: “I remember seeing fitness magazines on shelves, working out in high school. And at that time I got involved in bodybuilding forums,” where he made friends internationally that helped encourage him. For Pawan, who grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, this was crucial, since he lacked local mentors and practitioners. It wasn’t until his undergrad at Yale, when he attended a bodybuilding competition, that he knew he wanted to compete.

At Yale, he met Tom Morley, who reached out for training tips. “I was trying at the time to get big, and all I’d succeeded in doing was getting pretty fat,” says Morley of their introduction. Morley, a friend of mine, is an out-and-proud gay man and gym rat, whose attraction scales in proportion to size. (“The boyfriend twins phenomenon is real,” he tells me, “although I like twinks too.”) As a mass-head, he’s a natural friend to the bodybuilding world (despite not competing himself), and to Lapborisuth, a fellow gay intellectual in a community that skews, unsurprisingly, towards machismo.

“A huge part of it is about pulling yourself up, it’s very individualistic,” says Lapborisuth, which he believes resonates with a conservative mindset. Even in Yonkers, where he lives, he has noticed occasional undercurrents of homophobia. “[People can be] very, very right-wing.” Nevertheless, it doesn’t faze him: “At this point, I don’t feel uncomfortable anymore.” He describes a self-acceptance that comes from bodybuilding, despite the dysmorphic elements, that encompasses his sexuality, his size, and his right to be wherever he wants.

The homophobic elements of the scene are especially funny to Morley: “The one thing about bodybuilding is that it’s not for women” – as in, not for the female gaze. (Female bodybuilding is its own complex scene.) Both he and Lapborisuth describe the culture as a pursuit by men, for other men’s approval (or attraction.) It’s not often the case that the biggest guys in the gym are assholes, says Morley. At a certain weight class, that all starts to fade away. “The biggest assholes in the gym are 190-lb guys who wanna look good at the beach.”

He describes a type of hustle culture, tech and optimization bro who trains MMA or other masculinity-affirming hobby as the key demographic for buffoonery. The actual bodybuilders, the big guys, don’t suffer as much from this. Despite the external validation from your bros or the competition wins, it takes something deep and internal to drive yourself to the gym 5 days a week and do what Pawan does. “It just… gives me fulfillment,” says Lapborisuth after some thought. “It’s something I’ve always wanted, I’ve spent years of my life on.”

My own interest in bodybuilding taps into the optimization mindset. To me, Pawan and his circle seem like the forefront of transhumanism, the effort to enhance the human form beyond our biological limits. In this sense, bodybuilding is dense with connective tissue to other hotbed topics: transgender rights, medical ethics, body politics at large. And yet, this niche community has evaded the scrutiny applied to other groups. In part, this is because their methods of transformation aren’t very modern (nobody wants to ban the gym) and also because the facets of bodybuilding that are medicalized and modern are still very hush-hush.

A bodybuilding ad from the 1980s.

That brings us to juicing. Both Lapborisuth and Morley declined to comment on the steroid side of things, preferring to stay above the gray-zone legalities and fraught ethics. But another bodybuilder I spoke to off the record was able to give me the birds-eye view: “The interesting thing about steroids is that in bodybuilding, it’s not cheating.” This shifts the decision-making about body modification to the individual competitor, rather than the sanctioning sport body, another step towards the atomization of the scene. He describes a fairly sizable list of downsides: financial strain, complex medical check-ups and bloodwork, and more; occasional high-profile deaths within the bodybuilding world confirm people’s worst fears.

For outsiders looking in, however, the results are far more visible than their inputs. “I’ve started to see college guys, even highschoolers who are jacked,” says Morley, describing the spread of juicing to the regular gymbro world. He and Lapborisuth point to big-name influencers, in particular CBum, aka Chris Bumstead, current Mr. Olympia, as a driving force for the trend. 18 million followers can’t be wrong, right? Despite his size, however, CBum represents a shift away from size-obsession. Much smaller than 90’s stars like Ronnie Coleman, the new headliners represent a focus on aesthetics, symmetry, and form rather than mass. If anything, this “approachable” body type (approachable being a very relative term) is driving even more popularity in the sport.

“It has grown significantly [in Thailand],” says Lapborisuth of bodybuilding culture, “and social media has fueled that.”

Not all of that is within bodybuilding, but as with any broadly appealing hobby, someone will always take things to extremes. Unlike most hobbies, however, practitioners are unsure whether growing in bodybuilding is a good thing. “It does lead to people having unrealistic expectations, feeling bad about their bodies,” says Morley. The expansion is leading to new categories within the scene. “This is the age of the jacked nerd,” he says, “we’re seeing a lot new doctors, nurses, computer and tech guys, a lot of scientists, rather than the older demographics of blue-collar guys.” Pawan is a bit more skeptical: “I don’t think there’s an anti-intellectualism here, but not quite a pro-intellectualism either. It just pulls in people who want to learn more about their bodies, one way or another.”