Our guest today is best known under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist, or simply REN, although he now also publishes under his real name, Charles Cornish-Dale. Behind this figure, who has become fairly recognizable online, lies an academic background that contrasts somewhat with the image of the raw-egg-eating bodybuilder: trained as a historian, he received a doctorate, or DPhil, from the University of Oxford in 2018, at Lincoln College. His thesis focused on the religious and devotional culture of England between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period.
For several years now, REN has been developing a body of work at the intersection of nutrition, bodybuilding, biology, politics and cultural criticism. His latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, takes this project considerably further. In particular, he revisits the figure of the “last man,” first in Nietzsche and later in Fukuyama, to argue that the contemporary decline of masculinity is not merely cultural or political, but also physiological. Falling testosterone levels, endocrine disruptors, industrialized food, infertility and the gradual disappearance of certain masculine behaviours thus become different aspects of the same phenomenon.
REN is also the founder and editor of Man’s World, a men’s magazine that is probably the fullest expression of his broader intellectual and aesthetic universe. It features political and historical essays alongside fiction, bodybuilding, nutrition, aesthetics and interviews. The project explicitly sets out to make the men’s magazine a genuine cultural object once again, reconnecting with an older, freer and often deliberately provocative conception of masculine culture. After initially existing in digital form, Man’s World is now also available in print.
So these are some of the subjects we will be discussing today: testosterone and thymos, bodybuilding and politics, hierarchy, and the relationship between biology and civilization.
NIMH — Your work is rooted in the importance of biology and hormonal processes. We sometimes hear that our age suffers from a lack of thymos. Could testosterone be regarded as a kind of biological proxy for thymos, or would that reduce a spiritual and political disposition to a mere hormonal marker?
REN — Yes, testosterone can very definitely be regarded as a biological proxy for thymos. That’s the whole point of my current book, my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which was published at the end of last year, in December.
Testosterone is a proxy for thymos, or thymos is a proxy for testosterone. That doesn’t mean they’re coextensive. That doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same thing. And I’m not making an ontological argument about thymos. I’m not necessarily trying to say that the Greeks were attempting to talk about testosterone, because they didn’t have any idea what testosterone was, and hormones weren’t really properly discovered until the beginning of the twentieth century.
But many of the behaviours associated with thymos, which is often translated as “spiritedness,” are behaviours associated with testosterone. So men with less testosterone display less thymotic behaviour, and that is part of the argument of my book.
There has been a generational, civilizational decline in testosterone levels, and we’ve seen a corresponding decline in thymotic behaviour as well. My argument isn’t that politics can be reduced to biology or to hormonal changes. My argument is that every society on Earth is a distinctive hormonal environment, and our civilization, our society, is a particular kind of hormonal environment that is very, very hostile, very toxic, antithetical to testosterone.
That obviously has individual effects. It affects men individually. It ruins their lives and their motivation. But it also has aggregate effects, and nobody talks about it. I’m drawing attention to something that people just don’t talk about, and I think it’s very important.
NIMH — You write that, “once you shake off the physical chains of the modern world and the modern left — as you become fit and beautiful — so you must necessarily shake off their mental chains too.” Does bodybuilding merely transform the body, or is it also a practice that produces a particular relationship to the world, one characterized by greater thymos in your perspective?
REN — I don’t think that bodybuilding is just about the body. I think that necessarily, when you begin to cultivate yourself physically, you also change yourself mentally.
We have this misguided notion that mind and body are separate entities, and they’re not. You are an embodied being. You’re not a mind piloting a sort of meat suit, which is the kind of Reddit vision of human existence and consciousness.
We are an exception in that regard, in that way of thinking. The ancient Greeks recognized the interrelationship between mind and body, their inseparability. The Romans did. Other civilizations do.
It would be a caricature of my position to say that I think just lifting weights makes you virtuous somehow, or makes you admirable, because I don’t think that. But what I do think is that we live in a world of profound sickness and profound dependency, and sickness, dependency and weakness are things that favour the Left and are actively cultivated by the Left.
So to resist those things, to take control of yourself, to take control of your life and your body, to exercise discipline and to refuse to be weak and dependent is necessarily, I think, a kind of political statement. A pretty profound political statement, actually.
NIMH — There is a famous 4chan post claiming that only two kinds of people can tell the truth: neurodivergent people and men with high testosterone. The autistic nerd and the high-T alpha would therefore represent two different paths towards the same form of epistemic independence, albeit for very different reasons. You also published an article that was not written by you but directly addresses this issue: Against the Nerds. Its author explicitly argues that nerds lack thymos and should not rule. Do you agree with that argument?
REN — Yes. Fundamentally, I do agree.
I think that nerds are important. I think that smart people are important, and experts are important: scientists, researchers, people who are talented and have great mental gifts. But I think that a society run by nerds is fundamentally not a society anybody would really want to live in, apart from nerds.
This is one of the reasons why I dislike IQ fetishism, and Bronze Age Pervert dislikes IQ fetishism as well, because it’s not the whole story. I think in Bronze Age Mindset he says something like: imagine trying to get Hernán Cortés to sit down and take an IQ test. Good luck with that. He wants to be conquering Aztec cities and seeking gold and glory in the name of God.
There’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom, and I think you can fetishize knowledge to the detriment not only of wisdom but actually of life itself. I don’t think that knowledge, knowing stuff, or even knowing the most, is necessarily the best thing. I don’t think that’s how you should guide a society.
And look, we saw during the pandemic what rule by experts looks like. It’s ugly. It’s very, very ugly. Rule by experts means people who can’t balance competing values and competing ideals.
Safety is one of these paramount things that nerds seek out. Not to be too crude about it, but they’re used to being stuffed in lockers. If you possess a frail physical form, then you are much more likely to shun danger, I think, and to prioritize safety over other values.
During the pandemic, in the pursuit of safety, in the pursuit of saving lives at any cost, we made it impossible to live. And it was noticeable that one of the main groups that actually resisted the tyranny of the lockdown measures — and it was medical tyranny, really — was gym bros. It was gym owners and people who wanted to work out. They were very prominent voices who spoke out against the tyranny, and I think that’s a good example.
Knowledge is important, but it isn’t an end in itself. And those who possess the most knowledge often aren’t the most admirable in other respects.
NIMH — It is often believed that masculinity is toxic and that men with more testosterone are therefore the most toxic because they are the most prone to aggression. In some ways, testosterone is seen as the anti-social hormone, and men with high testosterone are perceived as the reason why people can’t get along. However, you have a totally different stance on this. Is testosterone actually a pro-social hormone?
REN — The pop-science view of testosterone is that it is the aggression hormone. It’s the antisocial hormone. It’s the hormone that makes men behave in a retrograde manner, that makes men behave like cavemen.
You hear it all the time. It’s an idea, a viewpoint, that has really saturated our society.
You have someone like James Cameron, for example, the famous director who made Aliens, The Terminator, The Abyss, Titanic, Avatar and so on. He said fairly recently in an interview, because he’s getting on now, “I’m so glad I got the toxin testosterone out of my veins. It made me do some very, very questionable, very stupid things when I was a young man, when I was a young director.”
But testosterone is responsible for The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and the great films that he made in the first half of his career as a younger man. Yet he is inclined to see testosterone as something bad, and lots of people are.
But it really depends how you define what is and isn’t antisocial.
Testosterone is involved in aggression. Yes, it is. That’s indisputable. We’ve known that for a very long time. That’s why, when you castrate a bull, it becomes more manageable. Its behaviour becomes less aggressive.
In fact, castration of animals and humans, slaves and captives in war, was man’s very first endocrinological experiment. I talk about that in the new book. That was our first foray into a kind of crude endocrinology: cutting testicles off to reduce aggression.
But testosterone is involved in aggression, and estrogen is involved in aggression too. That’s something I talk about in the book. It’s not just testosterone. Estrogen also modulates aggression.
Testosterone has other, more positive roles to play. And actually, aggression, when it’s directed correctly, when it’s put to the right uses, is a beneficial thing. You want soldiers to be aggressive. You want men to defend their families, their communities and their nations with aggression.
Testosterone also increases in-group preference. By increasing in-group preference — basically, preference for one’s own tribe — it also makes you more generous towards your tribe. It makes you more able to work as part of a hierarchy and to recognize the importance of hierarchy.
Really, it comes down to your vision of society and the kind of virtues and values that are necessary for your kind of society to function.
The leftist vision of society, the leftist project, is about flattening hierarchy. That is the fundamental goal of leftism: to flatten all forms of hierarchy, because they are supposedly unnatural impositions wherever they’re found.
You start with class, and then you get gender and race, and now even biology. We’re flattening the differences.
But testosterone, as I mention in the book, is a hormone that makes you recognize the importance of hierarchy and makes you able to fit into a hierarchy. And that’s the Right. That’s the conservative vision of society: a hierarchical society, a society that is ordered correctly, with everybody in their rightful place doing what they should be doing.
So if you’re a leftist, then of course you are much more likely to deplore testosterone and to say: okay, we need less testosterone in order for society to be better.
And that’s exactly the line that was used by the Democrats in 2024 during the election after Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee when Joe Biden dropped out.
This could be the first female president, the first woman of colour to be US president. But what’s necessary? Well, it’s more likely that men are going to vote for a candidate like that, a woman, a black woman, if they have lower testosterone.
So there was actually a linkage made between testosterone decline, changes to biology and progress with a capital P. Maybe testosterone decline is necessary for there to be social progress and for America finally to have a female president.
I think testosterone really does impinge fundamentally on our vision of society and how society should function. It’s not peripheral.
NIMH — Pete Hegseth has announced annual testosterone-deficiency screening for US military personnel aged thirty and over. Do you see this policy as an institutional validation of Raw Egg Nationalism?
REN — I do, yeah.
I think the Trump administration as a whole has paid quite a lot of attention, and continues to pay a lot of attention, to Twitter, to the Internet, to anonymous posters and also posters who are now no longer anonymous.
I know that my work has had quite an influence. With my 2022 book, The Eggs Benedict Option, I spoke in person to someone who is very senior in the Trump administration, and he said that The Eggs Benedict Option had served as the blueprint for Make America Healthy Again.
That’s an institutional validation of Raw Egg Nationalism right there, because The Eggs Benedict Option really was, I think, in many respects, the full political programme for Raw Egg Nationalism laid out in a book.
But the Hegseth thing, yes: the attention to testosterone, the recognition that an effective fighting force needs to optimize its testosterone, and that testosterone is an important variable that needs to be monitored. If active-duty soldiers have low testosterone, something needs to be done about it.
It’s in the interest of America and of her fighting fitness for testosterone to be optimized. That’s a huge institutional validation.
And what’s funny about that policy, of course, is that it’s a complete reversal of the policy before, and in particular the previous administration’s policy on transgenderism and access to gender-changing hormones.
If you’re a woman, a female soldier, and you think you’re a man, you could take testosterone. But that was it. The DOD, or the Department of War, wasn’t providing testosterone for other purposes.
But now, under the Trump administration, with Secretary Hegseth, you can’t get gender-changing hormones. So if you’re a female soldier, you can’t take testosterone to become a man. But if you are a man, if you are a male soldier and you have low testosterone, then you can get testosterone, and it will be administered to you legally by a doctor.
So yes, I think that’s a huge institutional validation.
