Jamie Waters describes himself as a beta male with pipe-cleaner arms, which is how he ended up spending a Saturday afternoon watching AI videos of round “low test” faces morphing into chiseled “high test” ones. There are 1.4 million Instagram posts under #testosterone, made largely by men with outstanding deltoids and no medical training, and they have a pitch for every kind of guy. When several attributed sleepiness to low T, his droopy eyes widened. He had been napping. He emailed his doctor.
The doctor was not surprised. He has been seeing a lot of “very New Yorky” men in their 20s, 30s and 40s asking about testosterone and peptides since the Secretary of War announced in July, in a video sent from “The High T Department of War,” that warfighters over 30 would be screened. The blood went off. The results came back: everything normal except testosterone, which was, in the doctor’s words, “on the high side.” The expected range is roughly 250 to 850 nanograms per deciliter. His was 1,295.
Two weeks as an alpha
“Not to worry? NOT TO WORRY? I was thrilled!” He told anyone who would listen. His friends laughed; according to one video he had seen, jealousy is a telltale sign of low T. The doctor said he would retest in two weeks in case it was a lab error, which frankly seemed petty. The retest thudded into his inbox: 666, right in the normal range. “Is it bad that I was disappointed?”
The medicine in the piece is straightforward. Dr. Marcus Goncalves, director of endocrinology at NYU Langone, says that for men in the normal range there is no evidence raising testosterone “improves any medical outcome,” and that levels fluctuate constantly with stress and sleep. More than half the men consulting him about low T are now under 50; only 3% to 5% of them have hypogonadism. Dr. Alex Tatem of Urology of Indiana: “The biggest piece of misinformation is that testosterone is a silver bullet for all men,” while acknowledging that for the right patient it is life-changing. The root cause of lethargy, Goncalves told the writer, is usually “an unsatisfying answer, like you should be sleeping better and exercising more.”
Our read
We put this in the paper because it is funny and because it is the cleanest illustration we have seen this month of the most expensive habit in finance: acting on a single reading. One lab result and he had a new identity; a second and it was gone. One quarter’s return, one fund on a friend’s tip, one headline about the 10-year, and people rebuild a portfolio the same way. The doctor’s instinct — retest before you believe it — is the whole discipline of the September letter’s three conditions, which exist precisely so that a good Thursday or a bad Tuesday cannot make the decision on its own.
The other lesson is in the sales pitch. The influencers had a story for every symptom, and the story always ended with the code GETSTRONG. A product that cures everything has that structure whether it is a hormone or a fund with a triple-digit yield. When the answer to your problem turns out to be sleep and exercise, or a diversified index fund and time, it is unsatisfying. It is also usually correct.