Novelist Jordan Castro on lifting culture, masculinity, and why getting jacked is a spiritual practice

Summary

Jordan Castro, novelist and contributor to the Cluny Institute, argues that weightlifting is fundamentally a spiritual practice, not an optimization exercise, and that the current culture of biohacking misframes the entire endeavor. His novel Muscle Man centers on an English professor who despises academia but finds meaning in the gym, and doubles as a satire of higher education. Castro says he couldn't find a single compelling book about lifting, so he wrote one.

Castro's personal origin story tracks closely with a now-familiar pattern: anxious, screen-addicted adolescence, followed by a near-complete resolution of depression and anxiety after starting to lift. He draws a hard line between that transformative experience and what he calls the 'optimizer' mindset, putting Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson in meaningfully different categories but reserving skepticism for anyone who reduces the human body to a chemical and neurological input-output system.

On the politics of fitness, Castro offers a clean framework. Physical strength implies a hierarchy of outcomes, that 225 pounds is objectively more than 145 pounds, and that framing sits in direct tension with a certain strain of dogmatic egalitarianism. A member of his audience articulated it more bluntly: the left imposes ideas onto nature; the right reads ideas from nature. Castro places lifting culture in the latter camp.

The practical supplement stack he endorses is deliberately minimal. Creatine, protein, raw milk, Greek yogurt, and enough caffeine to, in his words, 'kill a small child.' He went from 165 to 200 pounds in roughly three months drinking a gallon of raw milk daily alongside a tub of Greek yogurt. He is skeptical of PEDs personally, citing not having had children yet as the primary reason, though he does not dismiss their utility and recounts a friend who started 'blasting gear' to improve his dating app results and saw immediate, if largely psychological, returns.

Castro's current training structure is the Mad Cow five-by-five program, three days per week, built around squat, bench, deadlift, barbell rows, and overhead press, adding five pounds per week. He favors Rogue racks, a garage gym without air conditioning, and a basketball court as the core of any ideal athletic setup.

On public reception of Muscle Man, Castro says literary media reflexively categorized it as a 'manosphere novel,' a framing he finds reductive and roughly equivalent to Norman Mailer being dismissed as a 'man novelist' by feminist critics in the 1970s. He wrote a straightforward pro-lifting essay for Harper's that carried the more direct advocacy he intentionally kept out of the fiction.

The broader public image argument is direct: Mark Zuckerberg's post-physique-transformation approval shift is treated as near-proof that physical fitness is an underleveraged PR asset for the tech elite. Castro's advice for any billionaire's communications team is a single step: hire a trainer.