Ask A Genius 1279: What about James Bond working out and training?
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/02/26
Rick Rosner: They never showed James Bond working out.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: He’s got all these skills.
Rosner: It’s true. He doesn’t practice.
Jacobsen: You never see him practicing anything.
Rosner: Many of his skills are improvisational—he takes advantage of things in his environment. But he still has to fight people and dodge bullets.
Jacobsen: Apparently, in the novels, he could do all sorts of physical activities—boxing, judo, swimming, skiing. He was also a golfer, so that was something. But in terms of his portrayal in the movies?
Rosner: Daniel Craig, in his first Bond appearance, Casino Royale…
Jacobsen: Not a tall person, by the way.
Rosner: He’s what, 5’9”? Maybe? But in terms of sculpting a body, that can be an advantage because you have less to work with. Schwarzenegger’s lifting buddy, Franco Columbu, was 5’4”.
And you could argue that it’s easier to build a bodybuilder physique on a 5’4” frame than on someone like Lou Ferrigno, who was what, 6’2”? It takes much more weightlifting and effort to fill out a taller frame.
Daniel Craig’s introduction in Casino Royale—he comes out of the water in a bathing suit. That was a direct callback to Ursula Andress emerging from the water in Dr. No 50 years earlier. It reflects shifting times—men can be objectified as much as women.
Somebody was definitely going for that parallel. But yeah, he comes out of the water, and he’s shredded. And we’re supposed to believe he naturally looks like that. No—Daniel Craig must have followed the standard superhero routine.
He must have worked with trainers for two and a half to three hours a day, eating many calories. They probably didn’t have him on diuretics, but Hugh Jackman has admitted to using them.
James Bond is supposed to be a highly skilled and experienced agent, yet you never see his work. His attitude toward effort—outside of life-or-death situations—seems pretty disdainful. If he’s dangling from something, he’ll put in the effort to stay alive.
But he acts like he couldn’t care less about spy bureaucracy. Which makes you think—he’d probably have a shitty attitude about training too. The various Bonds have had different physiques.
Roger Moore always seemed soft-bodied. He could fight a little, but I don’t recall many shirtless scenes. He was the most effete of the Bonds. Sean Connery had been a bodybuilder in the ’50s—he took third in Mr. Universe. But back then, bodybuilding wasn’t what it later became.
It was more about looking decent in a bathing suit. He was never bulked up and shredded like a modern bodybuilder. But he didn’t look wimpy, either.
Roger Moore, on the other hand, looked a little wimpy. Pierce Brosnan wasn’t particularly bulky. Daniel Craig was the most physically imposing Bond. I read an article recently—it’s been three and a half years since the last Bond movie, and nothing is in production yet.
They haven’t even named the next Bond.
Jacobsen: There was Sean Connery too—his whole attitude. He was old-fashioned. He had that one interview…
Jacobsen: ‘I don’t mind hitting my women.’
Rosner: ‘I don’t mind hitting my women once in a while.’
Rosner: He was old school. I don’t know—Sean Connery was born in the 1930s?
If you trace it back, the original Bond, written by Ian Fleming, must have been born around 1926. Fleming’s Bond did spy work as a teenager during World War II. His parents died in a mountain climbing accident or something, and he was left to his own devices.
Which included sleeping with the family housekeeper and getting recruited for missions at 16 or something like that. Someone born in 1926 probably wouldn’t have hesitated about smacking someone.
Jacobsen: Did you ever hear George Carlin’s JFK joke?
Rosner: No.
Jacobsen: It was about how Kennedy pronounced things—his accent.
He’d swap the “A” and “ER” sounds.
So he gets on some talk show and says, “As we can see here, things are looking good in the first quarta for suga in Cuber.”
Rosner: Oh, that one!
Jacobsen: Yeah, I think it was from PBS or something.
They were doing legends of media—those long-form archival interviews.
Three-, four-, five-hour interviews, all in one take.
You can see the sunlight shifting in the background as the day progresses.
He did that joke in one of those.
Rosner: Speaking of Kennedys, RFK made it out of committee, as did Tulsi Gabbard.
Jacobsen: I had that come up. What does that mean, legally?
Rosner: So, the first hearings and votes take place within the appropriate Senate committees—the committees that handle each department.
RFK is up for… health—what’s the name? Not the CDC, but the whole health department.
Jacobsen: The Department of Health and Human Services?
Rosner: Yes, HHS.
So, I don’t know how many people are on that committee—maybe 27?
And the party that controls the Senate always has one more member on the committee than the opposing party.
So, in this case, it was 14 Republicans and 13 Democrats, and they voted along party lines.
RFK narrowly gets recommended by the committee, then it goes to a full Senate vote.
I don’t know whether they’ll interrogate him further before that or not.
Same process for Tulsi Gabbard—she got out of committee by a vote of nine to eight, along party lines.
And these are terrible people. And terrible things are still happening.
Musk has sent his personal team of coder-hackers to mess with—as we talked about last night—the payment disbursement systems. The people who work in these government departments have been trying to hold them off, but apparently, they can’t.
Trump—I don’t think he’s made the order yet—but he’s been drafting an order to eliminate the Department of Education. So, many bad things are happening, but I haven’t spent as much time tracking it today.
People on the other side are at least filing lawsuits and trying to introduce bills to stop some of this. Still, they’re in the minority in both houses of Congress. I don’t see how any of those efforts succeed.
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