Vicarious Expertise
On “No Experience Know-It-Alls”
About 10 years ago, I opened a small tattoo shop inside a powerlifting gym.
The gym was run by a very well-known and accomplished powerlifter who was at that time one of the top competitors in the world. I’d been training with him and his team at this great, dirty little gym in a strip mall. It was my first exposure to powerlifting, and man, team training night at that gym had some energy. A bunch of dudes who were strong and trying to get stronger—all running through a big rotation, calling out weights, flipping plates, lifting and shouting for each other. AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”—the official folk song of middle-aged white men who lift—blasting in the background. It was one of those “lightning in a bottle” scenes that you don’t fully appreciate until it’s gone.
I was driving a delivery truck and working my way through a tattoo school run by an old biker and a Juggalo. The powerlifter signed a lease on a bigger commercial warehouse space just as I got my license, so he rented me a room to tattoo. I rolled the dice and quit my day job, so I was at the gym all day every day for a few years. The powerlifter and I became good friends for a while. I worked out with him often, and learned a lot about that style of lifting.
I say that, but I will tell you right now, I am no expert. I could get you started and give you some decent tips.
The powerlifter was at a different level, and was regularly squatting 600, 700, 800 pounds. I saw it with my own eyes many times, and I knew what sacrifices he made to do it.
He’d post videos of himself doing this to Instagram, and then, as we were lifting, he’d show me the comments on his phone. They were full of guys telling him he didn’t know how to squat, or what he should do to “fix” his squat.
None of these guys in the comments were the powerlifter’s peers or competitors. He knew all of those guys, and they traded notes all the time. Most of them were friends. They were in private forums together where they all shared arcane and experimental knowledge about gear and technique.
The guys in the comments were novices at best.
How did they know better? How could they? Where did they get this knowledge that the best guys in the world had somehow missed?
As far as we could tell, they got it from reading forums and watching YouTube videos of other men squatting or other powerlifters talking about squatting. In many cases, they were getting their “corrections” from the powerlifter’s peers who he compared notes with all the time.
“Lord, grant me the confidence of a man who knows exactly how to do something because he watched a YouTube video…”
Fishmongers were probably telling soldiers and gladiators that they didn’t know to fight in Ancient Rome, and we’ve all probably read or heard part of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech. Every armchair quarterback knows what the quarterback should have done and every guy who watches UFC knows how to fight in his head, or “when he sees red.”
These are all cliches but we see them every day.
Do women do this? I see more of them acting like frenemies in the comments, affirming each other, and telling each other they are amazing. But I don’t really follow a lot of women online.
I do know that any man who does anything and posts it online, whether he is just trying it for the first time or whether he is a world-class athlete or operator, is going to have a comment section full of guys telling him what he did wrong.
This is an old phenomenon, but social media exacerbates it. People say that you can learn how to do anything on YouTube, and YouTube can be really helpful. I use it to learn things all the time. I try jiu-jitsu moves from Instagram constantly. And now we also have AI ready to answer all of our questions.
But there are limits to what you can know by merely watching other men do or talk about things.
True expertise cannot be acquired vicariously.
It’s like the difference between having sex and watching porn.
Virgin porn-watcher telling Chad Thundercock he’s not doing it right.
And while the Internet rewards big talkers and blowhards because they seem to have confidence, the best men don’t behave that way. Their accomplishments enter the room before they do, so they don’t have to convince you that they know what they’re talking about by spamming you with petty details. And they tend to be curious and open to experimentation, at least in certain areas. They’re always looking for new and better ways to do things because they want to be one step ahead of their competition.
Humility is a truly underrated virtue. There are some men who think of it purely in terms of submission, but that’s an adolescent perspective. Pretending that you know things that you don’t know just makes you look like an idiot to the men who actually know them.
Can you perform this action at the same level? Can you execute? Can you compete? If you are unable to do so physically, have you been able to teach other men to do this so that they can execute and compete?
Can you produce results?
If you can’t, what is your “knowledge” worth?
And why do you feel the need to argue about the knowledge you acquired second-hand?
The other thing I learned early on from being around strength and fitness influencers in the 2010s is that SOMETIMES THEY ARE BULLSHITTING YOU.
These guys (and the women, too) have to produce an incredible amount of content to stay relevant and bring in new clients.
They have to fill time. They have to do and say controversial, attention-getting things to get clicks and views.
They’ve gotta have a gimmick.
If you can deliver technical jargon with confidence and you look impressive* or have a big enough name, you could convince hundreds or even thousands of people that The Chicken Dance is an elite warm-up secret for shoulder workouts because it activates the supporting forearm muscles, increases blood flow to the delts and primes the hands, which are often overlooked in warm-ups even though you use them to hold the weight. Given that he started his bodybuilding career in Germany, it is entirely possible and even likely that Arnold Schwarzenegger used The Chicken Dance as part of his routine during the early years, and that may have helped build the foundation for his massive shoulders.
You see what I did there?
If I were Layne Norton or Jeff Nippard, some of you would be practicing The Chicken Dance right now, and there would be guys in the comments arguing for or against it.
Maybe not. Maybe you’re swinging a mace like it’s a full body workout, since mace swings are the nunchuk routines of the Instagram fitness generation.
I get it, I agree that mace swings look totally esoterically brutal.
Maybe you’re sunning your balls or doing shots before deadlifting.
While I was writing this, I came across this post:
He’s right, you know.
The point is, if you actually put in the effort, try different things, and remain humble enough to seek out the expertise of men who can execute and demonstrate in real life, you will become wiser and better able to separate the sensationalistic bullshit from what actually works.
You can remain humble, let your accomplishments speak for you, and help others when asked.
Or, you can just argue in the comments section about things you’ve never done.
This applies to many things and many areas in life.
The choice is yours.
Stay Solar ऋत
*On X, a photo of a Greek statue or an AI image of a bodybuilder will do. You don’t need to prove you can do ANYTHING on X to be an X-pert.
You can watch my unscripted delivery of this essay as I was developing it on YouTube.
(But it won’t make you an expert.)