Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2595: Mike Istraetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Mike Israetel How powerful is muscle memory? (1:35) The amount of strength training required for the average person to build muscle. (10:01) Why in some cases doing less is best. (14:57) His demons and sharing his own personal journey. (19:00) Balancing relationships, family, and business. (23:20) GLP-1s are here to stay! (29:21) Any downsides to myostatin-inhibiting drugs? (35:05) Hot takes on reverse dieting. (38:45) Science-based vs. being a practitioner. (52:48) Calling out the cortisol junkies. (58:52) Why going down the difficult route is how you are going to get in shape. (1:05:30) What advice has he changed his mind on? (1:12:14) Highlighting the indirect results of taking a GLP-1. (1:16:48) The downstream negative effects of “exercise in a pill.” (1:21:26) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** No code to receive 20% off your first order. ** May Special: MAPS 15 Performance or RGB Bundle 50% off! ** Code MAY50 at checkout ** Colorado Experiment – Wikipedia Building Muscle with Adam Schafer – Mind Pump TV 207-OR: Myostatin Inhibition Synergizes with GLP-1R Agonism to Accelerate Weight Loss in Male, Obese Nonhuman Primates  Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Michael Israetel (@drmikeisraetel) Instagram Website Eric Helms (@helms3dmj) Instagram Hany Rambod (@hanyrambod) Instagram Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne) Instagram Melissa Davis, PhD (@regressive_underload) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. All right. This episode is one of my favorites ever. We finally got Dr. Mike Israel tell on the podcast You know who he is by the way warning this episode has lots of colorful language and topics

It's we haven't laughed this hard in a long time, but also good stuff talking about Fitness and muscle building the science behind it. So it's a very entertaining but also educational episode again This is not this you know parental advice here. This is a colorful, colorful episode so but we know you're gonna love this episode especially if you're fan of his. By the way you can find him on Instagram at Dr. Mike Israetel. It's I S R A E T E L. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Viori. So Viori clothing is that's leisure wear. It's the best that that leisure wear I think in the world. It's very popular and if

you go through our link you'll get 40% off, excuse me, you'll get 20% off. So if you want to check them out go to Vioriclothing.com that's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com forward slash mind pump. Again that link gets you 20% off. We also have a sale this month. MapsAPS 15 Performance and the RGB Bundle are both half off. If you're interested, go to MAPSFitnessProducts.com and then use the code May50 for the discount. All right, here comes the show. Mike, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me, guys. Sorry I couldn't make it in person. Yeah, no problem. In fact, we just off air learned that you just had some surgery. You have to take six weeks off of training, which you're probably gonna lose all your gains. Of course, that's not worth it. That's the fear. This actually leads me to a good question or a good topic,

because you obviously heavily muscled. You've been training for a long time. I think you said off air was the longest you'd ever really taken off of training. It was like a week and a half. So you're very consistent. Six weeks off doing nothing because of surgery. Of course you're going to lose some muscle, but you got muscle memory. And talk about that for how powerful of an effect is muscle memory. What does the data show on how quickly you can gain back muscle once you've built it and then you lose it?

Great question. It's actually difficult to understate, or sorry, it's difficult to overstate the effect of muscle memory. It is an incredibly powerful effect. So if you have trained, especially the longer you've trained, the more of a thing this is. But if you've trained for years, especially, and you've gotten to a certain level of muscularity, and you've been at that level for a while, when you don't train for however long and you lose however much muscle, what ends up happening is when you got much bigger, you increased the size of all of your muscle cells. But if you get much bigger than a moderate amount,

you end up during the course of your gain in size, incorporating satellite cells into your muscle cells. These satellite cells are basically just cell nuclei that kind of like come into the regular cell and they help grow muscle, maintain muscle and control all the functions of a muscle cell. It's kind of like if New York City, if Manhattan only had one fire department and one police station and one hospital for all five boroughs, it would be like ridiculous and ever all the boroughs would burn down and

everyone would die and the police would never get there because it's just one nucleus for a huge area. Your cells work in much the same way. And so just like if a town or a city grows, it gets multiple precincts and multiple hospitals and multiple fire departments. As your muscle cells grow, the satellite cells incorporate into them and give them these multiple nuclei.

The thing is, once you have a lot of nuclei in a muscle cell, once that cell shrinks down, the nuclei don't delete out, they just stay there. And so when you start training again, you have multiples the power to manufacture muscle protein because the nucleus is what does a huge degree of the manufacturing and all the ultra structures around it. And so now you essentially have the equivalent

of like ridiculous genetics when you're coming back. And so when you're coming back to regain that muscle, it happens unbelievably quickly. And if you've ever experienced this yourself, you're like kind of in awe, you're like, what the hell? So I honestly anticipate that worst case scenario. After about six weeks of training again from taking six weeks off, I expect to be about as muscular as I've ever been. And it's probably pessimistic, because probably after about

four weeks, I should be very close to my best ever. That's how fast it comes back. And this is such good news for people that have to take time off because I think there is this very understandable misunderstanding that many people have, which is they think, okay, I train and I'm big because I train. and I've been training for 10 years and I've gotten quite jacked and if I detrain for let's say a year, then I lose kind of a lot of muscle, which is like very true. And then however much muscle I lose, let's say I was pretty jacked 200 pounds, pretty lean and after a year of not training, whatever, motorcycle accident, whatever, um, I'm one 70.

What they do is they look back to when they were first one 70 fucking six years ago and they go, Oh my God, Oh my God. It took me five years to get from one 70 to 200. It's gonna take me five years again to put this muscle back on, but it really takes like five months. And so that is incredibly good news for anyone that's detrained. And it's news that's used in a really good way. Here's a good way to use this news. Don't you dare get upset or down on yourself or disappointed

when you have to have a layoff of training because it will come back so goddamn fast. And also because you're not pounding your joints into oblivion all the time, and you're not pushing yourself through crazy hard workouts, both your joints and your mental aspects are gonna be super, super refreshed. I mean, after six weeks of not training,

I'm gonna basically be restarting my training career psychologically and joint-wise, and that's such a good thing. In the Eastern Bloc countries, that were pretty good about foreign periodization back in the day, a lot of times after a yearly cycle or especially after an Olympic

cycle, many of the athletes for about one to three months after the conclusion of let's say the world championships and whatever sport they were at, they literally just disappeared and did not engage in the process of sport training in any capacity. They went on vacation, went back in the Eastern block days that you couldn't leave the country. You know, had whatever kind of leisure time you have in communism, all the kind of good stuff.

And then after a few months, they would start this long process of getting in shape again. And it was a long process simply because they didn't want to get hurt. But they could easily be back in good shape in two months, but they took their time. And then by the middle of the year, they were at regionals, they were at the equivalent of states and nationals, breaking records again, they were to the world championships, they'd win again. Soon as worlds were over, they would just take months off.

It's something that we in the free Western world, because we're engaged in training purely voluntarily in almost every case, it's not like none of us are getting paid to fucking do this, we're doing this because we love it. And because as far as I can speak for myself, a variety of psychosocial disorders about my body and so on and so forth,

and a lot of rage to get out of these barbells, fuck you, dad, shit like that. And then so because of that, we never really take a lot of time off, and because we're paranoid about it, we think any time off is gonna fuck us up, but it really just reality is the very, very opposite of that, and I think that's just wonderful news.

Yeah, it is, and it's so incredibly powerful that when you experience, people have experienced it when they have a broken limb and they'll wear a cast, and then they take the cast off, and like, oh my god, I can see my bones, and then without even training, the muscle comes back. I think it points to the protective effects that strength training provides that are unique

to other forms of exercise. That's why we sell it so hard. Are you familiar with like the Colorado experiment, you know, the familiar, the popular experiment that Casey Viader was a part of with Dr. Arthur Jones? That's when he never trained ever before or used steroids during the experiment and he managed to gain 89 pounds of muscle

in three and a half days, exclusively due to nautilus equipment. Yes, yes. That's the nautilus. Now it was witnessed, people, I don't know if it was 89, it was a ridiculous amount of muscle, but. I think it was 60. A big part of the story was, Casey Viator was sick

and had lost, before that he was a highly competitive body, lost so much muscle going into it, and then started training and maybe using gear, so he had the additive effect, plus his genetics, so I think it might have happened. Well, I just went through the 22 pounds in four weeks. I mean, that was an example, obviously not as crazy as that example,

but of course everybody thought I was lying and all this bullshit, but what I knew was, I was was a competitor I was a men's physique pro for years and walked around at 240 you know 5% body fat for an extended period of time since then I've completely fallen off keeping that kind of muscle and so over the course of the last three four years I've lost 50 pounds of muscle off my body still have decent amount but nowhere near what I had before and then I had just coming off of not training for like a month or two and I documented the process of building back and I told the audience watch what I go do I'm gonna go build 25 pounds of muscle as fast as I

can. I did it in four weeks I put on like 22 pounds and nobody believed it and the crazy part Mike is that I was doing two lifts a day. That's it. So not only does it, the period of time is so short, but even the volume and level of intensity that I had to do to get it back, it blew me away. I actually was really shocked. I mean, I went about it my best I could and was a little surprised at how easy it was to get it back. That's another good direction I'd like to ask you, Mike,

because one of the reasons why we have you on the show besides the fact you have a very colorful personality, very entertaining to watch. That's a nice way to say it. Yeah, you got it. Is you communicate accurately, because we all have two decades of training clients. We've worked with everyday people

for years and years and years. When I hear really smart people communicating how much strength training you need for the average person to get some strength, some gains, whatever, you communicate it the most accurately based off of what we've experienced. How much strength training does the average person really need to reap the kind of benefits that they're looking for? Not to be a pro bodybuilder to get crazy, but just to get the strength, mobility,

you know, some of the health effects. What does that look like for the average person? It looks like a few sets per muscle group a few times a week is gonna get you like a humongous fraction of gains. So like if you do three sets of work for your quads, two times a week, and each one of those sets is pretty fucking hard, close to failure.

You can do that for literally years and see continued radical improvements and just get really, really great results. Are they going to be your best results? No, your best results would be doing 30 sets per week. But the difference between good results and best results is like maybe double. I mean, the degree to which there's a hyperbolic kind of esototic relationship of how much work you put into how much jackness you get is really impressive. A little sad for those of us who want to be exotically big, because it's like, look, if you want to get 20% bigger, you have to do one and a half times the work. The fuck, that doesn't add up.

You want to be twice as big. You have to do like four times the work. Like, oh God damn it. But the opposite end of that is really good news. But if you want to make an awesome body transformation and get incredible health, incredible strength, incredible mobility, finally get some fucking blood in your cock and am I allowed to swear on here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's okay, I just had it. Thank God. Yeah, you're good. It's a family podcast. How dare you? So if you want all those amazing benefits and you want to look like TRT dad or whatever, you really just have to do like two to four sets per muscle, two times a week, go pretty fucking hard.

You're going to get incredible benefits. And that's such a big deal, I think for most people to realize, because there's this thing which is getting very understandable, but people see pretty jacked people, pretty lean people, and they automatically assume that this is like a lifestyle that this person doesn't do anything else. Um, one of my friends, actually, the CEO of RP strength, our company, he, uh, had already been working,

he's been working since he was a teenager, like three jobs at the same time. This is the fucking workaholic, works all the time. And he really got in really good shape at one point. He's done this a few times in his life, but like very noticeable, like lost a bunch of weight, gained a bunch of muscle. And he went over to a family function.

And these are people, these are Azerbaijanis, right? Like Central Asian, Russian type folks and very old world culture. And they noticed he was in great shape. And one of his uncles or whatever was like, Oh, you look great. He's like, thanks. He's like, you know, I would do the same thing too, but I have a job. And Yasha's like, you think I'm a fucking, you think I don't have a job?

Like, of course he didn't say anything. Cause it's all respect cultures. Oh yeah. You know, true. But it's like, Oh no, like, well, I can't, I get in shape. I would need to like eight, you know, true. But it's like, oh no, like, well I can't, I get in shape. I would need to like eight, you know, train eight hours a day. Another thing I get all the time is, you know, like when I'm in my fairly jacked look, I, you know,

travel a lot, talked around to people at airports. They just assume that it takes like hours a day. Like you, you guys, I'm sure get this question all the time. Like how, how many times a week do you train or like how many hours a day? And then they're looking for like, I train 12 times a week. I train eight hours a day. I like train my training is like a union job in the fucking seventies in Pittsburgh.

I fucking clock in, I can get in the iron mill. I fucking clock out. I fucking look at my family all wrong and eat the fucking Salisbury steak while looking at my wife all wrong. It gets a fucking lifestyle. And the thing is you can get a huge amount of gains doing fractions

of that work and I think a lot of people, two things, want to hear that because like oh my god, I can't have these great gains and really only spend like three hours at the gym per week, but also I think some people low key kind of subconsciously don't want to hear that because thinking that getting a better physique and getting much leaner and looking way younger and it's going to require some effort, thinking that it requires so much effort that you will never be able to do it is a great like cope mechanism excuse to keep in your back pocket. Because when you look at that guy that's your age, but he's jacked and shredded and you're like, well, I have a family and I have kids. And then you see he has like triplets he's walking with,

you know, fuck that excuse doesn't work anymore. At least you can tell yourself, you're a hard-working American, you pay taxes. Well, he's a degenerate that lives in the gym. And the reality is you can have most of what he has and spend two or three hours at the gym a week. A lot of people want to hear that. A lot of people don't fucking want to hear that.

I think the other part of it too, Mike, and I'd love your input on this, is a lot of us, we don't do what's optimal. We just push what we can tolerate. And so we're in the gym more than is necessary to the limits of our ability to recover, and we think that's what's necessary to look the way we do.

When oftentimes you scale back even with that person and they get better gains. They get better gains from doing less. Yeah, there's no way to figure out how you're gonna get your best gains unless you experiment with training much less than you typically do, around the amount that you typically do, and much more than you typically do. And you do each one of these for weeks and weeks and even months if you can, and you

very objectively analyze the result. In some cases, doing way less is the best. In some cases, you know, what you figured out over the years probably works really well. And in many cases, good news or bad news is like, well, the more you do, the better you get. I have a friend who just, he's in his, oh, fuck it, it's Eric Helms.

I don't know if you guys know who he is. He's a natural pro bodybuilder. He's in his early forties. And he just kind of discovered that like the more volume he adds to his program, the better he gets. And he's making objectively the best gains ever in his fucking early forties. And he's like, man, it's like low key. I didn't want to figure this out because I didn't want to have to do this, but I love training and it's great news.

It's kind of like, damn, I really do have to do 35 sets for my biceps every week. But for, for many people, I really do have to do 35 sets for my biceps every week, but For for many people they are 100% to your point pushing it way too far And it's just a matter of figuring out I guess through mindfulness if that sounds kind of lame Why am I doing this? Like do I really believe that throwing up after every leg of day is my best path to success logically? Like, I have to talk to chat GPT and justify how I train. Could I do it in a way that makes sense?

Or am I doing this shit for vibes and because, you know, my dad didn't love me when I was between the ages of seven and 10 or some shit like that. I made, I didn't make the class one Pee-wee football team. I made the class two team. And I never fucking let that down. I'm never going to fucking hang my head down in front of another man.

So you bet I'm doing nine cents a hack squat today. I don't care if I have a rabid-o every fucking workout. I'm a goddamn human adult nail and I will be granted my respect. If that's where the shit is coming from, like listen, on vibes, dope, 100% dying on a fucking hack squat, what a goddamn honor. But on like optimality and getting the best results, then it's a different question. You have to experiment with yourself.

It could be more, it could be less, it could be way less. And I always get a bunch of shit, you know, in the comments, like with as many, it was a fucking ego move, with as many followers as I have, you know, I don't want to comment. You know, once you hit a certain level of bullshit, fake social media fame, the number of comments you get is like intractably large.

And it's so many people, when I say, like, hey, here's a way to train, here's a volume that you can do, that science seems to show is kind of probably the best way to do it. I get a lot of people, real fucking butt hurt. And number one reason they're butt hurt is they're doing some shit that's not bad,

but they're really fucking emotionally attached to it. Like it matters to them that they get to like, I often say like training all the way to failure is typically unnecessary for your best gains. And in many cases, a few reps shy of failure is even better long-term sustainability wise. And like I almost never hear a technical refutation. And I almost always hear like you fucking pussy.

Like you fucking, I was going to use another F word that might get you guys canceled. So that's a derogatory term for homosexuals. And like they, you know, they say the shit and I'm just like, oh, I get it. Like you just have a lot of feelings. And for me, it really helped to do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu because all the bullshit feelings I had about being a man

or whatever got real sorted out. One of my fifth time getting me unbellied by the fucking local blue belt. I had no more ego after that. But if you don't have that fucking combat sport outlet, I get it. Like you go to the gym and you fight your demons, which again is dope. But it's a very different question than what is optimal and optimal could be a lot less and a lot less glorious than you want. And so those are questions you have to ask yourself. Mike, where are you at in, you know, this is, so since we're here and I've heard you kind of tongue-in-cheek talk about your drivers and your, you know, this is, so since we're here, and I've heard you kind of tongue and cheek talk about your drivers and your, you know,

body dysmorphia and stuff like that. Where are you personally at in your own journey with all your wisdom, your experience, obviously your level you've reached already? Like what are the demons you're trying to fight or sort out, or like where are you at with your own personal journey? Well, you see, my uncle had gotten the same bathroom

as me when I was four, and what happens, no, I actually enjoyed it, believe it or not. And that's the fucked up thing. I liked it, and people told me it was wrong, but he was really good at his job. Job is nicely paid for, maybe it was paid for. So, man, fuck, that's a hell of a great question. So I don't actually have body dysmorphia

on the technical qualifications. And I'm not saying I'm defending myself here. I am a fucking lunatic cocksucker with 50 trillion flaws. I am not anyone's hero. Do not look up to me. I will disappoint you inevitably. But like when people say, oh, you've got body dysmorphia, they forget that like body dysmorphic disorder

is like a diagnostic to statistical manual of mental disorders, diagnosable disorder. You have to meet certain conditions. Yeah. But we just don't. So here's a really good start to how to figure out if you have body dysmorphia. If you are objectively way bigger and leaner than the average person, let's say in your age group, and you don't think that you are objectively bigger and leaner and you resist

accepting that, you might have some body dysmorphia. Now this might come off cocky, whatever. I know I'm jacked, for the love of God, look at my head shape, it's ridiculous. I typically walk around at like five, six, 230 pounds with like faint glutes, triations. I would be fucking insane to think that's not like tank shit.

Of course it's tank shit, I actually had a fucking, this one guy who worked at a gym, a security guard when I was a professor at Temple, is only black people have certain phrasings that are just fucking unbelievable. He looks me up and down, he's like, man, you want some tank shit, huh? I was like, I am on tank shit, sir.

Thank you so much. So, you know, I don't actually think I'm not jacked. However, there are parts of my look I do not like. The love handles, fucking lifetime of combat against that. I finally was like, fuck it, I'm getting cut out. That's gonna be a big deal. And I have another, like one really big demon. I have yet to put a physique on the bodybuilding stage that I think is like, that's it right

there. That is appropriately shredded and has all the things I like in a physique. I'm not trying to look like Dexter Jackson or some shit, Phil Heath. That's never going to happen. But can, have I reached my best look that I could know? Do I have a hangup about that? Yeah, I'd like to do it. And so I'm still fighting the good fight.

I'll be competing again, almost certainly in 2026. I think I could have bigger arms. I think I could have bigger shoulders, but is it more of like, I already know I'm jacked and lean and this is just looking for like that extra extra. Yeah. Do I love my physique all the time? I'm not in love with it. So like, for example, now the love handles are going to look way better, but I also like genetically just have like a bigger gut. And like, I don't know if you guys have seen, like I can do this thing where I like relax and my gut looks huge and then I can do a real legit

vacuum pose in the next second. It looks kind of wild. Like I don't love having a gut. I've had a gut my whole life. Am I like infatuated with that? No, I think it looks fucking awful. Think it looks objectively awful. There's no one that's like, no, actually it looks great.

Like that's bullshit. So at the same time, I have like ridiculous pecs. Like my pecs are like straight up obnoxious looking. I have humongous triceps. My quads, I haven't trained in a year because they got outlandish and threw off the rest of my physique. And to be honest, they barely shrunk.

What the fuck? Okay, fine. So now I'm just gonna start training my legs again and full send the shit, who cares? So there's parts of my body that are fucking awesome and I love, and there's parts of my body that I don't love. It's like a marriage. You don't love everything about your wife or some of your case fellows husband.

I know y'all from California. That's how you do. And so just a guy, you know, at the bar, who cares? Um, and you know, it's a, it's a mixed bag. So do I have demons about the shit? Yeah. But they're like, you know, like for real demons, I'm not like waking up in the middle of the night screaming, looking for my abs, you know, for my cock. Absolutely. And it's usually the nightmare that's real because I can't find it. So that was about as honest as somebody could answer that question.

You guys want me to lie? No, no, no, no. I appreciate it. I PTSD. I appreciate it. So, okay. I love that answer. You what does that balance look like with your personal relationships, your business? Like, is there anything like that that you see yourself like, okay, I'm gonna reach a point where it's like, I'm good, I've presented that physique and then maybe I'm gonna cruise,

or like, how does that all work? Like, how's the balance of relationships, family, business, work with this obsessive, I'm gonna go become a monster still? Yeah, that's a great question. So this past summer, I had planned to do four shows. I did the first show as a tune-up show. I didn't look that great.

And then right after that show, I realized that with the amount of steroids that I was taking and the amount of really huge degree of focus that you have to have to do prep, especially multiple shows in a row, I was going to be passing up a lot of opportunities in the YouTube Insta-famous land. That's when I was blowing up fucking crazy like crazy. And I was having like all these invitations to go on these crazy ass like Dire every CEO type of podcast

like a gazillion views. And I'm like, well, fuck man, either I continue to compete right now or I put the shit aside for now and focus on the YouTube shit. Cause like glory is dope, but like money, it comes around, these opportunities come around, they may not come around after.

Like, you know, man, it's like there's like movies every now and again, in which like this person is like trying to become a singer songwriter. And they, they go through these trials and tribulations, and they finally have their crazy audition. And like, you know, typically like the people signing them to the record label are kind of cocksuckers, they won't let them do it. They somehow get the audition, they blow it out of the water.

And the record label's like, do you want a deal? And they're like, nah, I'm good. It was just to prove that I could do it. And they walk off, my Jewish ass. I'm like, motherfucker, are you out of your minds? A $15 million record deal, are you crazy? Where are you going? Someone bring that bitch back to sign that fucking contract.

You must be out of your mind. So when this whole YouTube bullshit happened, I was like, oh fuck, I'm like junior league famous or whatever. I was like, I'm going to milk this shit out for everything it's worth. So I had to, I had to take a step back, take way less gear, focus on more like balancing my physique instead of just training everything for size.

And so that was a big deal. And then in addition to that, like, you know, being on trend and shit, not exactly good for my relationship with my wife. And so I was like, okay, that ship has sailed. Now I'm coming back into my physique phase. But it turns out that I came basically back to TRT and I functionally lost almost no muscle and I was fucking blown away. I was like, Oh my God, I've been taking

way too much gear for so goddamn long. So that was, I would have never figured that out had I not backed off. So now I'm gonna be coming back in the competition and I'm basically gonna take no more than like 500 Migs of total gear. And I know for a fact, I can put a physique on stage. It's like 210 pounds, fucking shredded. Like the shredded thing, we'll see if it works out.

That's aspirational. But like muscularity wise, no problem, no problem. And so I'm gonna do that. So luckily the trade-offs aren't as big, but next time. So then 2026, when I hope to come back to bodybuilding competitively, I'm going to have to carve out a lot of time from my day away from work, um, and to really do the thing right. Because like there's a reason they call it professional bodybuilding.

There's actually two reasons. One is you have a pro card from whatever federation you're competing in. That's reason number one. Reason number two is you are professional athlete, which means that's what you do. You fucking don't you have some, you know, commitments to your sponsors, you post some fucking tic tocs for them every now and again, you wear their t shirt to the gym. But that's it you play PlayStation, you bang your toxic Latina girlfriend, and you just fucking train, and you fucking go to sleep, and that's what you do, and you eat your meals. That is a reason, it's not that the guys are lazy, it's that you need everything possible to recover as much as you can. That requires trade-offs. I was kind of trying to do it all at the same time.

I had pretty decent results at everything, and then decent isn't good enough. And so for me, next time I come through competition, I'm going to have to lessen the shit for a little while and then come back into it. But as far as will I ever want to back up and focus on other stuff? Like I could, I could tell you yes, but what I want to look like and what I look like now are far enough apart that until and unless my health just throws the middle finger and I was like, nah, you're done.

I'm going to try to improve my look. Like I want significantly bigger arms and shoulders. I want a wider back. I want bigger upper pecs and my legs are good now, but they'll probably get bigger anyway, just because this is what they do. And so I can improve my physique. For me, the most important part of working on my physique is the art is the science in the art of actually doing it. I don't give a fuck

like competing is whatever. I'm not a big fan of competing. I have won my class and shows before. It was no more fun than losing my class. You stand around, you look at everyone's cock, you like 30, 40 minutes later, you don't have a pump anymore, they say you're going up on stage, whatever. It's fine, competing is fine. And a lot of people love it, and I'm trying to get into the mode where I love it,

but the thing I love most is improving my physique and eating the meals and getting the sleep and knowing that I have a purpose. And I treat my body as a sculpture, and I'm always trying to improve it. Am I gonna be able to give that up? Yes. Do I want to give that up?

Not really. Are there drugs already in the pipeline that are going to allow us with no anabolic whatsoever to radically go a fuckload of muscle and get super lean? Yes. I could talk about those. I'm waiting for them shits. Cause when your boy gets his hands on that, I'm going full send. I want arms that are more inconvenient to live with now.

Like now, if I sleep on my side for long enough My arm goes dead because my delts and arms are big enough now the way caught off their own circulation Fellas I'm trying to get the whole show. I'm trying to get my arms amputated because they're so goddamn big That's what I've considered a fucking success. Is that body dysmorphia or not? What do you what drugs are you talking about these myelstatin? What drugs are you talking about? Are these myostatin inhibiting drugs? Are they? Correct, correct. So there's a drug that just passed primate trials

and it's a dual agonist, sorry, dual antagonist. It antagonizes myostatin. Myostatin is the molecule that exists in all of your skeletal muscle that caps your muscle growth. Myo is muscle statin, a stopper or blocker. And man, the Latins really did figure all the shit out. And so basically that is a hugely powerful molecule

that if you uncork, you just fucking grow muscle all the time. If you guys listen to this podcast, Google like double muscle mouse, or muscle greyhound, or muscle cow, you're gonna see pictures that you're like, what are they fucking, what steroids are they feeding these things?

None, and they don't train, and they have as much muscle as physiologically possible, given all their other genetics. But there's more, there's another compound called Activen-A that also antagonizes muscle growth. And so this dual agonist, it antagonizes myostatin and alpha-activin, So these are blockers of muscle that these drugs uncork, they unblock. And the recent study that came out on these was,

let me try to summarize the study really quick. So they had four groups of monkeys and they gave them all the fucking plague virus and they just released them into New York City. Wouldn't that be sweet? After outbreak with Dustin Hoffman back in the day, I've never seen research monkeys the same way, keep them fucking demon monkeys the fuck away from me.

However, so group number one, this is a 20 week diet they put these monkeys on, calorically restricted to a decent amount. Group number one, they just did it natty, natty monkeys. They're real proud of themselves and shit, they talk about how they're natty all the time in monkey language, but the other monkeys, they just gave them some eglatide.

So like, you know, like, uh, GLP one classic, the, uh, other group, they just gave him the mouse statin inhibitor plus some agletide. And then the fourth group, they gave him the active and alpha, the active and a inhibitor, my stand inhibitor plus some agletide. So three fucking vectors. And what they found was the group number one, the Natty monkeys, they lost almost no muscle and they lost a bit of fat. Group two, the semaglutide monkeys lost like

almost double the fat, but like a significantly more muscle. Not a ton, but like you can tell. Group three that had the myostatin, a drug plus semaglutide, lost like almost double the fat that the semaglutide monkeys lost. Almost triple the fat that the that the samaglitide monkeys lost, almost triple the fat that the natty monkeys lost, and they lost about the same amount of muscle as the monkeys who were natty, which is to say almost none. So we're talking about a drug that you can lose like 2.7 times x the fat, but with zero added muscle loss. Check this out. The triple monkeys,

myostatin, activin, and somaglutide, they lost even more weight by a little bit. So basically three times the weight that the natty monkeys lost in fat. And they gained in muscle at the same time what the drug-free monkeys lost in fat. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. So let me put this really quick into common terms. I translated these numbers into proxies for like a 200 pound person at 20% body fat. If the results hold for humans, which they'll, they'll similarly hold for humans, especially if you adjust the dosing, the natty human would be like two identical twins, one twin, 20% body fat. After 20 weeks, he's gonna weigh 200 pounds,

20% body fat. He's gonna weigh about 192 pounds at about 16.5% fat. 20 weeks of dieting, drug free. Cool, right, cool, that's good, that's good, right? You know, Janice at work notices and tries to suck your dick in the bathroom as usual. And then, but you're at work, worker Janice get the fuck away from me

I got it's for shit to do and then the other identical twin in this case with the truth with the three drugs Started at 200 pounds 20% body fat in 20 weeks would have gotten to 181 pounds Which is cookie. He lost like 10 more pounds. Love more pounds. Cool 6.5% body fat. Wow. Wow. Wow. You guys, this is coming.

It is only one of the drugs that Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is working on. It's already a drug, they already know it works. It just has to go through FDA trials and don't you fucking bet against this. All the other pharmaceutical companies are catching onto that shit too because they realized some aglutide

and all the GLP-1s and the GIP drugs that they have out now, they're unbelievable at helping people lose weight. The problem is people in a huge caloric deficit like that will lose some muscle. And you can't have older women and older men, obese populations losing muscle because it tanks their metabolic health, it makes them fucking unable to take care of themselves.

That's no good. And so these companies have been working on these non-antigenic anabolic, these drugs that do nothing to do with steroids, no mood swings, no ball shrinkage, no yelling at your girlfriend and then crying afterwards and begging her not to leave. None of that shit. We know some of it's fun, right? Trent is fun.

He said no, whenever. And then, so none of that, they just, these drugs are here. And they, in several years, probably three years or less, depending on the FDA regulations, will be hitting the market. This will change everything. And I can't fucking wait because your boy's gonna get fucking nonsense arms.

Yeah, well the motivation behind this has gotta be the GLP ones, because those are blockbusters, they're changing, they're shifting culture. And yeah, the motivation before was for things like muscle, muscular dystrophy and muscle wasting disease, which is a big deal, but it's not that big of a deal from a market perspective like the obesity.

So we're basically gonna reach the exercise in a pill mythology that people will bring up with those combinations. Are there any downsides to myostatin inhibiting drugs? Because you're not working out, you're not getting fit, you're just building a bunch of muscle. Do you still get a lot of the same effects? Insulin sensitizing, the...

Yes. Okay, but are there any downsides? Why does myostatin exist in the first place? Like one of those, like it's natural, therefore it's good type of deal. Are they seeing any negatives? Two percent of the people become insane and homicidal. It's maybe just a chance, I'm kidding.

Roll the dice. Oh God, the CEO of Regeneron's like, you know, I think all CEOs have like one of those old revolvers in their fucking desk that they take out to you know And and the whole thing when the stock goes down. That's what's happening there's a reason that myostatin exists and all of the other related compounds exist and that is because Muscle growth is two things in the natural evolved environment at some point Totally fucking useless because like take Ronnie Coleman in his prime

at some point totally fucking useless. Cause like take Ronnie Coleman in his prime. What exactly is the adaptive value of being 287 pounds of 3% body fat? Like, I mean, you're not really any better at hunting. You're not going to be picking fucking pear trees any better to gather the shit. You don't weave baskets any better. So in a typical human evolve environment

is fucking pointless. And the second thing is it is metabolically insanely expensive to build muscle and to maintain muscle. And so your body evolved in an intermittent starvation environment. Like sometimes there was food and sometimes the fucking buffalo herd didn't zig by your village

and half of you fucking starved to death. And so the body is incredibly, incredibly efficient with its calories such that you guys know this, I'm sure from personal experience, when you work out a lot, you get really tired and you sit around a lot more and your body doesn't even let you lose more weight. If there's a reason it's really hard to diet off a bunch of weight, because your body's just not interested in this shit. It's really economical. If we uncork the muscle growth process in the wild, we start to divert so many resources to muscle growth that we

just don't have much food, then you're fucking pretty jacked, you're pretty shredded, and you're dead on the side of the road because you couldn't fucking like your liver that can't fucking get enough calories to operate. The good news is we have capitalism and fucking grocery stores, and we're all by historical standards hyper, hyper fucking rich. And so because we have infinity food now, yeah, there may be no functional big downsides. Now, of course, there's gonna be some adverse effects

like that with every drug. There's gonna be some people that just don't take to the shit and they have some bad downsides. But on the whole, you're likely to see a side effect profile with these drugs that you do with samaglutide and terzapetide. Like, yeah, there's some shit. And if you take it wrong, it fucks you up a little bit. But on average,

almost everyone tolerates it really well. And it's probably healthier to take the shit than not take the shit. One really cool thing about the GLP ones and the GIPs more and more research shows that regardless of if you lose weight with them or not, they have like 10 incredibly beneficial overall health and metabolic effects. These are fucking wonder drugs you guys to be used responsibly and they can have downsides. But if you figure out the dosing and figure out your diet for most people, these drugs are awesome.

So mouse statin inhibitor drugs, the active and inhibitor drugs, and I'm sure that fucking eight generations of even better versions of those that are coming up afterwards, it's going to be one of those things of like, what's the downside of Viagra? Like you see slightly different shades of blue and your head kinda hurts and your nose is puffy, which is a problem, because if you're doing cuntalingus, how the fuck are you supposed to breathe through your nose and your mouth at the same fucking time?

This is the only problem, otherwise your dick just gets engorged and you're out there slaying fellas. So you know what I'm saying? Like talk some shit about Cialis, I'm not gonna be here for it, it's a fucking wonder drug, we should have everyone on it. You know, okay. So I want to circle back. I'll circle back to GLP-1s in just a second, but you brought something

up that I'd like to touch on because there's a bit of a debate in the fitness space around reverse dieting or, you know, strength training for fat loss. Cause we can see a metabolic boost type of deal. Now we trained people for decades. I've reverse dieted people. I've used strength training. For me, it's always been the most effective way to get fat loss for the average person for multiple reasons.

But what are your thoughts on reverse dieting? What are your thoughts on being able to impact your metabolism in a positive way through building muscle or the strength training process. What's your opinion on all that? I mean, it has, it has, it holds a lot of water. It's that fucking magic, but it also depends on how extreme it is. If you have a client who's 230 pounds and they lose 15 pounds, you don't need to do crazy protocols to get their metabolism backfiring.

It's probably better than it's ever been. If you have a competitor who's gone down to 4% body fat, you can't even reverse diet them, you need to bulk them out of that. Like one of the big myths with reverse dieting when it came up was people realized it worked pretty well. And so a lot of competitors were like, Oh my God, if I reverse diet out of my show, I can stay 5% body fat and gain back all these benefits. Like, you just can't stay at 5%. You got to bulk your way the fuck back up out of that.

But if you are adding lots of muscle to your body over time, and if you are careful to not crash your metabolism during a diet, or you slowly weave back in some junk foods and just increase the amount of healthy food, you're going to get a lot of really, really big advantages that are way, way better than the kind of quote, unquote traditional method of dieting, which is don't weight train, don't put on muscle, starve yourself for a while. You guys remember shit like the cabbage soup diet, dumb shit like that, like shit housewives would do. They would just lose a bunch of muscle, lose a bunch of fat, and then just get right back to their normal eating. They would be really hungry, really tired, metabolism is slower. They would regain all the weight and then some, and then they would be,

you know, fall prey to marketers for their next fucking diet. If you properly reverse diet out of that and combine it with weight training about two or three months after your last diet, you're down 15 pounds. You feel amazing. You look amazing and you can totally sustain it. And if you want another run at it, you can do another bit of weight loss and kind of keep going. That long-term periodized approach to weight loss and management including using resistance training to build muscle, I mean it is 100% the fucking correct answer. Does everyone do it now? No. Are more people doing it than

ever? Yes, 100%. What about the metabolic boost and what the research? I'm familiar with what the research says. When they compare a pound of muscle to a pound of fat and calories per day, it's very minimal in the research. But in my experience, and this is tons and tons of times, I've had a client, she came in, she reports eating 1,400 calories. I reverse diet her. I build only probably five, six pounds of muscle, but for

that size of a girl, that's a decent amount of muscle. And now she's eating 2600 calories and not putting on any body fat and staying lean or getting leaner. And that doesn't, it doesn't math. It doesn't add up to what the studies say. So do you think there's something more going on? Do you think like, what's, what's the answer to that? Yeah. There's like one answer that probably explains 80% of the variance. It's not very nice, but it's probably true. Uh, she was not eating 1400 calories. The way that people report their diet is typically like how you tell your dent.

You guys go to the dentist, right? Clearly you're all handsome men with great teeth. Um, the dentist is like even brushing and flossing. You fucking haven't, you've just been, you know what I'm saying? Like is eating pussy a way of flossing? Then no. But, um, you know, like, you know, we're not great about it, like technically the American

dental association, I think says like, ideally you should brush and floss after every meal. Fellas what, who the fuck does that? You don't do that. But when your dentist asks you, you know, have you been brushing and flossing? A lot of us were like, oh yes, yes ma'am. And yeah, like that's just how it goes.

So when you seek out the help of a trainer, there's this kind of like, it's, it's like going to a religious figure, like a pastor. And he's like, how have you been? And you're like, great, really trying to live a Christian lifestyle. And it's like, no, you haven't, dude, you're basically a professional gambler at this point.

But when you talk to Pastor John, you're gonna tell him a nice story. And so when people go to trainers, there's that halo effect where they like wanna present their best case. I had a, I was working for a fitness company with my co-founder of RP, Nick Shaw. Him and I were working for a fitness company

in New York back in the day. I'm not gonna say which company it is, but they were basically like, it was a training company. They have regular people come in and you train them as a private personal training studio. And the boss was like, here's a worksheet. You can give them a little thing for nutrition. It's like a little mini diet.

He said, I'm going to tell you what's going on with diet. These people all are going to tell you that they eat in the following day. They're going to say they wake up and they have some eggs or some egg whites for breakfast and maybe some oatmeal. They're gonna say they either skip lunch or they have like a turkey sandwich or a salad with chicken. And they're gonna say they have some fish

and some brown rice and maybe a glass of wine for dinner. And they're all fucking liars. And I was like, holy shit, this is the real world. I was just out of college. I was like, God damn, he's talking about real people. And he think he was a mean, curmudgeoning Jewish man, but he wasn't wrong. And so 1,400 calories is some shit.

Like on their good days, they 100% eat. And fuck man, they might have six good days out of the week. But when that cycle hits at the fucking time of the month, or just like a fucking, there's like a Netflix special on the real time of the month or just like a fucking there's like a You know Netflix special on the real story behind the friends series They don't want you to know and it's a five pound up fucking episode series You're gonna go and you're gonna basically get Ben and Jerry right in front of you and you're gonna tag team them motherfuckers You're gonna have four fucking pints of ice cream. You're gonna have eight cookies. You're gonna cry a lot Guess what gets the tears out lasagna works every time you fucking lasagna

You have pizza So starved out from that whole week of dieting that you're like an insane person and like yeah You can do damage you guys like there is There are a lot of documentaries about how sumo wrestlers eat the typically people like oh my god I can't believe they eat this many calories I'd be like have you been around a post-dieted sorority girl in college? I've seen that bitch suck up 12,000 calories in a matter of hours. No fucking problem And so if you average 12,000 calories on Saturday with 1400 calories the other six days

that maths because then they're like eating like 2500 calories a fucking day if it's not losing weight and then if you get them to train and you put on a good Deal of muscle and you get them to move more be more physically active and weight train Which is more calorie burn then yeah 2650 is not what they're eating and they're like, oh my god It's fucking magic but because you made them eat more healthy food through the week They don't have this temptation to go eat the fucking kitchen sink every Saturday. And then their average really is 2,700 calories. And it really does work like that because you're right, it doesn't math and the muscle is not enough to offset it.

Now, some of them are so fucking starved down, their metabolisms are actually lower. When you feed them more food, they actually burn even a couple hundred calories extra, but it's not a thousand calories. And so the, between the metabolism resetting up a little bit, that teeny effect you get from muscle and the 80% of them just not gorging themselves every fucking other

meal sometimes, or every few days, that is what explains most of the variance. Because like I've dealt with clients like that. Sometimes you hear the darnedest fucking shit. Like I had a woman be like, I eat like 1200 calories and I can't lose any weight. I'm like, no, like a thermodynamics is undefeated. And I'm like, just tell me about your day. And it turns out she was like walking by,

like she worked from home. She was walking by her living room and like getting her hand into the fucking pecans and almonds mix and just jamming it down her throat like four times a day and not counting that. Bitch that's 300 calories every time are you out of your fucking mind? I had another client no offense former clients she was like I can't lose weight I'm eating 800 calories she wasn't counting fruit juice

and she had it all day long and so if the question is are your clients bullshitting themselves low key with good intentions or did like the founders of modern physics misunderstand thermodynamics? Man, you know, unless that bitch builds a fucking gravity canceling spaceship and is like, see, thermodynamics was wrong. I'm gonna believe the fact that she's just cramming hotdogs

behind my back, which is, you know, like it's fucking sobering It's probably true. There's gotta be something there's gotta be something to be said to though about okay now that they're exercising they built muscle Okay that what it takes to maintain that muscle is more activity more movement more volume They're also you know this when you're you're feeling good. You're healthier. You're just more active throughout the day So there's probably there's probably a kind of three different things happening there. And there's also, you know, if they become healthier, hormones can oftentimes change, hormones can affect fat storage, muscle gain.

And I do think the human metabolism is super complex. You know this, Mike, and the data does show that your metabolism or energy expenditure with the same lean body mass, there's a range there. Your body can decide to become more or less efficient, which I think that explains the people who, because you get competitors or people who chronically train, chronically track like orthorexics and they're just over dieted, over trained. And those people, I've seen some radical transformations in their metabolism, but those are pretty extreme examples.

And I think the metabolism is a little bit more mysterious, uh, in those particular cases, but I think it has to do with those, those three things. For sure. And it's like, um, especially the part where they've been dieting for so long that their energy expenditure subconsciously is just way lower's the biggest part. And so not chronically dieting anymore, giving your body enough food to just kind of breathe free can be hundreds of calories difference. And I mean, like it's really fucked. And so it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not

the biggest part of it. It's not the biggest part of it. It's not the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that's the biggest part of it. And so I think that'sing anymore, giving your body enough food to just kind of breathe

free can be hundreds of calories difference. And I mean, like it's really fucked. It's really sad because you can have a whole six month period where you were starving yourself and you weighed 132 pounds. And then after four months of reverse dieting, you're eating like 500 calories, more food per day on average, and you weigh 134 stable.

But you're like even the same body fat, cause you built back more muscle. What a ripoff to think, man, for months and months and months, I was needlessly starving myself, which is a big deal. Once that's why like, um, I think, I don't know, I think we made up this term, but at RP, we made up a term called diet fatigue, like months

of dieting fatigues you in a big way and it resets your body and your metabolism to work in a way that is very much against you. If you reverse diet intelligently out of that, you could have amazing, amazing results because you were in a state of incredible fatigue. And a lot of people just think that's how it is.

And a lot of people live their lives like that, like supermodels and shit, they're always starving because for them it's psychological. For them, if I allow myself to eat more food, I'm failing and I'm just gonna be a fat bitch again like I was in seventh grade and no one's gonna love me and how the hell am I supposed to get free cocaine if I don't look like a model anymore?

Yeah, well you know by the way- I'm not trying to pay for my Coke, that shit is expensive. By the way, you know, what I appreciate about you, Mike, is that you're speaking from a combination of education and experience. I could tell you've trained people. I can also tell you've competed as a bodybuilder

and I can also tell you that you're educated. Cause sometimes what happens in the, in the social media space with the, with the science crowd that has never trained anybody, has never competed, is they just stick to the data and the science, which doesn't explain a lot of the experience, which I think will eventually. I think that eventually the science will catch up to what bodybuilders have been expressing and what coaches and trainers have seen with their clients. I don't think the data supports reverse dieting

in speeding up quote unquote the metabolism as much as what bodybuilders and coaches have seen. I think that's why you get the pushback is we see on one end what the data doesn't yet support, but I think the data will eventually catch up. 100%, and also most of the data is on recreationally trained undergraduates who are not diet fatigued.

And so if you have someone diet down like 3% of their body fat and you show that reverse dieting doesn't make a big difference, well yeah, no shit. But if they diet down 12% of their body fat, you may see some very different results. Most data is not collected on bikini competitors or anything like that. And if you do get data collected on that,

you can see very, very different results. I think a lot of people who hashtag science, they just don't hashtag science that well. And so they forget that ecological validity is a thing, external validity is a thing, internal validity is a thing. They basically just read abstracts or read like the last line of an abstract that draws conclusions and assume that this like

unanimously applies to every single case. And that's just wrong. It's just science thing bad. Science is a small sliver into the truth, but it is not like this just giant telescope that shows you everything. So it's a huge part of the equation, but it's not a standalone thing you can rely on.

And it's dope if you're a fucking pencil neck motherfucker and you've never lifted a lot and you can't look a woman in the eyes, even as an adult to like do PubMed searches and jack off a lot and then dunk on stupid meatheads in the comments. It's dope, it's a cool vibe, but it doesn't get you all the way there

to explaining all of the human variation you're gonna see. If you've done the shit yourself, if you've competed, and if you've coached other people, you start to be like, man, the science makes a ton of sense and in addition, there's all this other stuff from the real world that can super, super help figure a lot of shit out. Yeah, like behavioral psychology. I mean, talk about, I mean, I'd love to hear it because you've, you have a PhD, right? So were you at one point, were you the pencil neck nerd who was like that all science, all study, or did you have a nice blend of experience and hands-on while also going through

your PhD? Tell me a little bit about your personal journey of coming kind of full circle as a coach of kind of knowing how to meld all the science with the psychology, with everything. What's that been like for you? Yeah. Well, thank you. That's a great question. I started out as a person who was good at science science, like in school, but I hadn't read any exercise science cause there was hardly any. And so I started out just doing meathead shit. And then I started learning more science

because I was like, yeah, some of this shit sounds dumb and doesn't make any fucking sense. And so I came into the science with a lot of my own preconceived notions and a lot of information, both for meathead shit and about how my own body was responding. But I hadn't really coached a lot of people yet. And then I started being very adept at the science, very adept at understanding my body,

but I still hadn't coached a lot of people. And then as I coached more and more people, it's that third tier that probably helped me learn the most, to be completely honest. Maybe not the most, it was indispensable because you can learn all the science you want and that's dope. It's actually the most straightforward part. Like if you're smart enough reading all the science and understanding, that's dope. It's actually the most straightforward part. Like if you're smart enough, reading all the science and understanding, it's not that complicated.

It's very accessible. Learning about yourself is just gonna require like years and years of trials and tribulations. But a lot of people learn stuff about themselves, they just assume it applies to everyone else. And then you can really tell apart who has learned science, who has learned science plus learned a lot about themselves through experimentation, and then who's actually coached a bunch of people.

Only through working with tons of other people, especially competitors, do I learn, oh shit, just doesn't quite work the same way that I thought it did. And so for me, the last thing for me to happen was coaching enough other people, coaching enough competitors, and then competing myself to learn like,

oh, fuck, a lot of this does make sense. For example, a lot of the stuff that was, I read in like Flex Magazine and all the muscular development, all those magazines back in the day, was advice that I thought nonsensical when I was doing it myself. I thought it was nonsensical when I read all the literature that I could, but then when I realized like, Oh, there's a drug game and growth hormone

of something you take X, Y, Z times during the day. That's why these guys eat like this. That makes total sense. And so a lot of that stuff you just can't have access to unless you're in the thick of it. So there's a way to be a really good scientist. There's a way to be a really good practitioner. But I always have a lot of time, even if they don't know science, even if they don't train

themselves for hearing experiences of like elite sport coaches, like someone like Hany Rambod, who has coached like dozens of Olympians basically, like thousands of clients, like in Hany's brain is a lot of God damn treasure from just seeing that many human beings go through transformation process. It gives you a color to the world that you'll never ever see in your life. Analogy here quickly is like the best communicator, the one that the person that's talked to the most number of people is going to be amazing and talking to a bunch of different people. But there's levels to this chat GPT talks to like 600 million people every week. You can't ever beat it as a conversationalist.

It just talks to more people. It's talked to fucking everyone about their wildest dreams, their craziest fantasies, their biggest nightmares. It's just a wisdom machine. You can't beat on numbers. And so until you've coached lots of people and you've been around the process and you've done it yourself and you've read all the science

You can't confidently say well fuck and I know it all and of course as you work with tons of people as you do the shit Yourself as you read all the science you realize well, you know a lot But there's always more to learn and it like, you know, people say like like lame shit like oh, I'm a lifelong learner Like it sounds dumb It sounds like something you say at an educational conference and then go have fucking refreshments afterwards but a 100% is a real fucking thing there's always more to learn and especially working with tons of different people you start to realize because real quick while I'm on this rant there are a lot of people

that are really good at bodybuilding for example and they're gifted like there's just fucking gifted they just have fucking incredible genetics and they'll tell you shit that they do. And you're like, that's ridiculous. It works for me. And then incels on the internet will be like, it works for him. You're not doing Yates. You can't say shit.

But when that person tries to coach others, a lot of time, it's real bad deal because that person's like, Oh, they're not responding how I used to respond. They got a, just like a whole laundry list of problems. They're getting these side effects from drugs. They're crashing in the diet. I never used to do that. A lot of times, the amount of wisdom you can increase in yourself if you have good genetics is only be increased if you work with people that don't have great genetics.

One of my biggest gifts ever, so to speak, was working with regular clients. Fuck competitors. Competitors are sometimes just the elite just because. And you learn a ton with competitors. But with regular fucking average clients, middle-aged women, if you know your shit, you're gonna get them in shape. If you don't know your shit, you're gonna do nothing. Because it's easy to get a 22-year-old dude

on steroids in shape. I fucking wonder, he's 22. Who will weigh every meal he'll weigh and he'll track too, right? 100%. He's completely compliant. He's best genetics, best youth, best everything, best drugs. Of course, of course you're going to get in shape. But when you work with a 45 year old mother of two that's also a Wall Street broker and

she's like Jewish and dog shit fucking genetics, no offense Jews, then like if you get her to lose 10 pounds and keep it off, you're gonna have to figure some shit out. The way I learned about basically people fucking their metabolism up through dieting is with regular female clients in New York City. It was not with competitors. And you think like how can someone have the amount of diet fatigue a typical

competitor has after a 16 week prep in just eight weeks of dieting genetics man it's a motherfucker but you learn a lot working with people like that let's go there uh you just reminded me of like i talk about this on our show a lot um it was one of the clients that i remember how the type of a client i remember helping a lot was exactly that. Maybe not Wall Street, but they were busy moms, under eating, loved the orange theory bootcamp classes, six days a week, couldn't, you know, couldn't lose weight whatsoever. So that what I used to call cortisol junkies, you know what I'm saying? I swear that this is the workout they needed.

And many times getting them to eat a little more, scale back their training, like half the days, long rest periods. And boom, all of a sudden, this, this client who was training six days a week, eating so little, pushing their body all of a sudden starts responding. What's going on there? So much. One thing is getting them to weight train in a way that builds muscle, starts to alter their physique in a way they didn't think was imaginable. But what they're after is to be leaner and

shapelier. And the way you do that fundamentally is by losing fat and building muscle. And cause no offense to orange theory, a lot of that cardio bullshit, you just do a whole lot of that in addition to that cardio doesn't really do a whole lot of much for weight loss because your body just reduces your energy expenditure concomitantly and you just don't get a lot of it.

It's healthy for you. If your diet is very set in stone, more cardio can help you lose a little bit more weight, which is meaningful for like competitors and stuff, but it's not this big thing. And probably one of the biggest variables is diet control. It means knowing what you're putting in your body by tracking slash programming what you put in your body and then maneuvering from that because people will say, Oh, I can't lose weight. I'm like, well, how much do you eat on average?

Like, well, I don't lose weight. I'm like, well, how much do you eat on average? Like, well, I don't know. Well, who the fuck? No shit. Like how, how, how, how theoretically would be able to help you if you don't even know what's going on in your body. So getting these people to eat four meals a day of high protein and some fucking veggies, knowing what they're eating and then going, okay, we have your maintenance. Now we're going to crank it down by 500. We're going to have you wait, wait, train.

We're going to track your steps. All of a sudden fat mounts off muscle builds because you're actually doing the thing For the first time it's like people are trying to build like the Lego spaceship or school bus or whatever they got But they don't look at the instructions on the fucking back of the box. They're like, it's not a school bus No shit Do you ever try looking at the instructions or why I thought I could just figure it out. Like, well, that clearly didn't fucking work. And here's the thing, if you're some kind of genius savant, maybe you can figure it out.

The big irony here is that as a busy mom who doesn't get enough sleep, who's diet is shit, and she's in her fucking late 40s, and there's no one in her family that had very good genetics to begin with, she is working completely at a deficit on all of these things. And so for her to get in remotely good shape often requires a level of intricacy and effort and organization of diet and training.

That's like damn near competitor level. And the thing that, you know, that makes sense once you think about it, like, well, yeah, if you have everything going against you, you're gonna have to do your best to, you know, to be as good as possible. So that is always kind of a little bit of a shock to people when they're like, wait, I have to do all the shit to get in shape?

Like, yeah. And another thing that's crazy to me is, if this is understandable, especially with tech getting as good as it's, especially with tech getting as good as it's getting with tech getting as good as it's getting, you just expect things to work. Like if, if chat GPT doesn't get back to me with a perfectly polite, incredibly, incredibly intelligent answer in three seconds, I think there's something wrong with the internet and I start getting fucking pissed.

And that is understandable because tech sets such a high bar. But a lot of people who have everything going against them, not so great genetics, a lifetime of doing nothing about it, they're in real bad shape to begin with, they have tons of stress, very little sleep, no organized diet, they somehow think that when they see a personal trainer twice a week and they take like one tip in their diet, like just eat more protein, Karen.

Okay. That they're somehow going to like accomplish the body of their dreams. And I had so many people tell me like, well, like, so my goal physique is like Jennifer Garner. I'm like a perfect angel. Are you out of your fucking mind? Someone who's 27 years old and trains

fucking three hours a day to look perfect because that's her job is to look perfect. She's elite genetics and as a private chef, that's low key your goal. Like how many people come into like a basketball camp and they're like, I don't want to be LeBron. Like, okay, like Steph Curry, that'd be great. Could you get me there? Like, no, you delusional asshole. But with the way that the service industry works and the fact that you go to a restaurant and you're like, I want a perfect steak and they give it to you in 15 minutes,

I think you get used to the shit. And then you're like, I just want, you go to a personal trainer, like I just want amazing results in almost no time. And you're like, no, bitch, that's not how the fuck it works. It works by you pounding it in and being ultra consistent for months and getting decent results.

And if you think you can do it better somewhere else, be my guest. Now good news, combination of these weight loss drugs we already have now and these crazy muscle building drugs coming up, hey, the standards are gonna elevate. But we're not there yet and it's just gonna take a lot of work and so one of the things that always baffled me working with regular people is most of them are dope

But some of them come with these absolutely ridiculous ideas about what's gonna happen and a total unwillingness to work for it with all the odds stacked against them and it's just to Me it was always kind of like I was pretty good at real talking people We're like a polite way, but you know a little Kurt little humorous. I always be like look you want big changes I'm here to tell you that JLo is unusual. Yes. They're like, well, I guess yeah So having her as your goal is kind of fucking ridiculous. They're like, I guess okay So let's just try to get 10 pounds off of you in 12 weeks and put on a few pounds of muscle and after that If you're still with it, we're gonna try to do

a little bit better, what do you say? And then all of a sudden, they don't have these crazy goals, they're more realistic, they're much happier with their transformation, because they didn't think they were supposed to be able to do it all in three fucking weeks, and then everyone wins. So one of my biggest pet peeves is when clients,

or sorry, when trainers allow their clients to hold on to delusional goals and promise them a ton, so they can get that $600 up front and then inevitably the client quits halfway through and goes on to the next trainer. Agreed, 100% agreed. And I think a big part of that also is just people are kind of redlining with stress anyway,

and so adding a ton of exercise, your body not only is not gonna adapt, it's gonna try to survive and hold on to what it can and makes fat loss very difficult. You're not sleeping well, you've got kids, you're stressed out, you're going to add a bunch of extra stress on your body with six days a week of exercise and you're not going to eat properly. Good luck. It's not going to work. Dude, yeah, let me riff on that really quick if that's okay. There are so many clients who again have

everything stacked against them and they come to you with non-negotiables. And it's like, well, you can't negotiate against physiology, so you're just not going to get what the fuck you want. Two non-negotiables that are to me crazy, but understandable, but also like it's your job as a trainer to weave clients out of these. One is alcohol. Like I got a drink for work.

No, you don't. Well, while I go to these things where you have to convince the client to sign the deal. Yeah. You got to be drunk to do it. Are you out of your fucking mind? It makes you worse at your job. You drink cause you like how alcohol feels you like feeling drunk You like vibing with clients and it's really fun. Yes. Yes. There's nothing to do with the demands of your job Yes, like okay fuck. No, it doesn't. Okay, great And they're like well clients insist that I drink really fucking CEO of Oracle

Wants you to be fucking hammered at a New York restaurant at 9 p.m. On a Tuesday Otherwise, he doesn't sign the deal. Have you got any fucking mind? You're like, oh, you're just ordering like diet diet sodas. And to be like, aren't you drinking? You're like, well, honestly, I'm trying to do some like health shit and I got to like stick to the diet sodas. They're not going to be like, come on.

And for ridiculous, you're like, dude, that's really awesome. Good for you. And then you can work on fucking discussing the deal and all those technicalities. So that whole alcohol is non-negotiable. It's such a fucking dog shit, 99 times out of 100. Like when we, Nick and I first got to New York, we just like revered these people because they're rich, they're successful, all the shit.

They know what's going on. And a few months in, we like, not that we lost respect for them, it's that we woke up to the idea that they're paying us to call them out on their bullshit. We're like, oh, oh, oh, we're allowed to call you on your bullshit. Stop fucking drinking. And they're like, god damn it. All right, fine. They try the shit. Well, I have bullshit. We're like, oh, oh, oh, we're allowed to call you on your bullshit. Stop fucking drinking. And they're like, god damn it.

All right, fine. Cause they try the shit. Well, I have to. We're like, no, you don't. They're like, okay, I don't. You're right. I don't have to do that. And the other non-negotiable, it's also fucking bullshit.

This one's a little bit more nuanced is sleep. Yeah. They will be like, okay, so like I can't sleep but four hours and that's just gonna have to be how it is. And I'm like, dope. I can't give you hardly any results and that's just gonna have to be how it is. And I'm like, dope, I can't give you hardly any results and that's just going to have to be how it is. And they're like, are you joking?

I'm like, no, I mean, yeah, but no, I'm not fucking joking. And then you have to like work with them. And this is actually a great part of being a trainer and a coach is getting people to articulate their daily schedule and articulate why they can't go to bed at 9 p.m. and watch them tell you that like well like I don't know like I just like to stay up with my husband and bullshit and watch track tv for three hours and drink like three bottles of wine and order sushi at midnight I got it do you want to look like what you told me you want to look like? Yeah. Take three months off of that dumb shit, have a fucking protein shake, go the fuck to sleep at nine. Aren't you tired? Well, yeah,

go to sleep. All right. But it's kind of boring. No shit. You know those people you look up to in the fitness magazines? You live the most fucking boring lives in the world. I remember once, they asked Jay Cutler after his second Olympia win, what he was going to do. He's like, well, you know, typically, uh, uh, you know, I, I like to party it up at the Olympia. So, you know, I normally go to bed at nine and I think, I think after the Olympia, I'll go to bed at 11 and everyone's like, what the fuck? What?

That's crazy. Like, yeah, that's just, that's how he lives his life, like a fucking machine. You want to look like a machine. You do not have to live your life like a machine, but you're going to have to live three months of your life like more like a machine, you do not have to live your life like a machine, but you're going to have to live three months of your life like more of a machine. And so when you say, I can't get any sleep, I know you're fucking lying because you only

work so long during the day and you just have a lot of entertainment built in. You're going to have to curtail that a little bit and start entertaining yourself in three months when you have the body. Good news, once you lose a lot of fat and you gain a lot of muscle, maintaining that look is like, I don't know, five times easier than getting it. Then you can start having wine and fucking

mimosas and the ultimate killer of female physiques in the big cities, brunch. There's no amount of physique progress. One fucking brunch can't undo. I'm convinced of this shit. It's like the menu items in a brunch seem like they were made, made up just to see how much, how many grams of saturated fat we can cram into products needlessly.

Like it's like salmon. You're like salmon, but it's dipped in a fat reduction. And then it's panko crusted and then a fat based oil, a fat based sauce is strewn on top of that and it's dipped again in fat flakes. What the fuck? Oh my God, but you got to try it. It's so good.

I get that it's good. You have to back the fuck away from that for a short amount of time. One of my colleagues, Dr. Melissa Davis, is a fellow coach at RP and helped co-author a bunch of our books. She made a huge, huge point of this a ton where the diet quote unquote to get you in shape is not a lifestyle. It is temporary. And one of the things I used to love to do to my high like elite clients was talk that shit. Because they would be like, it's really hard to diet and be like, Oh, yeah, no, for sure. You're totally right.

Like, yeah, I'm like, so you never went to school, did you? They're like, I graduated top five at Harvard Law. I'm like, but that was easy, school, did you? They're like, I graduated top five at Harvard Law. I'm like, but that was easy, right? They're like, no, it was brutal, Harvard Law. I'm like, oh, so you're capable of doing difficult things for a short time, right? They're like, fuck you, should have seen that one coming. Oh, dope, see you tomorrow on your diet.

Oh, damn it. But clients are at times trying to weave their way into the easiest shit that they can, which is understandable, right? Like you do this every day in every life. Like you're not trying to go out of your way on your way to work, you're trying to cut with your car the fastest route.

But if you understand that all of the routes are blocked, except for the difficult, and going down the difficult route is how you're going to get in shape. And then after that, you can back up to a maintenance lifestyle, live your best life, have your mimosas, dip your fucking salmon

in whatever bullshit fat that you want and still have that look, which is gonna take 12 weeks of low key, some fuckin' effort and some restriction. You either buy it, you take the red pill and you do the shit, or you don't. And if you don't, you can just be like you were five years ago and like you're gonna be in five.

Same shape you were in, making fucking bullshit excuses every time you meet a fit person. Dope. That's cool. I don't care. I think you look great either way, but you give a shit. So it's time for you to step up and do the shit or not. So well said. Hey, you know, Mike, if you can you think of a piece of advice that you've you've one

eightied on in your journey? I'll give you one, a big one for me. Like I started personal training was I was 20 years old. I'm 43 now. And I remember doing intake forms and asking the client, you know, what do you do for exercise right now? And they'd say things like, Oh, I walk with my husband for an hour every day. And I would scoff at that. That's not fucking exercise. Cause I'm doing the math of you're only burning this

many calories and we got this far to go. That doesn't mean, and I would laugh at it. Yet I look at myself in my forties. That's typically the very first piece of advice I now give to somebody. Well, what are we doing? Let's try and take a couple of 10 minute walks a day. And so that's something that I used to scoff at as a 20 year old, as a, somebody who's been training for two decades. It's one of the first things that I advise. Do you have some things like that that you remember saying one thing when you were first getting into the industry

to now you've completely 180? Yeah, fuck yeah. Right. How long do you have? Uh, one is meal frequency. I used to think that if you weren't eating every two hours, you're just an idiot and that eating four meals a day was not the way to get jacked. Like about 800 studies later and my own experience and tons of bodybuilders is like, Oh, actually, if you eat four times a day, you're almost certainly covering all of your bases. That is a huge one. Another one is the if it fits your macros thing is

something that works really well on paper. Like if you just combine whatever foods you need and get your macros, you're good to go. But it turns out that eating mostly healthy foods, like kind of traditional bodybuilding clean foods, is such a huge energy leveler and a huge reducer and controller of appetite. Like if you have to eat a fuckload of broccoli and kale and a bunch of chicken and brown rice, you're just not like, you're not gonna overeatat that. You got good luck getting fat on that.

100%. No one's doing it. And so the, uh, idea that like I can have potato chips and still succeed in my diet is cool. And if you ignore the temptation of junk food to eat more of it, and you ignore the hunger signaling part, it works. But the hunger signaling and that shit is real. And so as I've been, when I matured more in the industry, I realized, you know, there is a reason that bodybuilders eat like they do. And, um, maybe we should all be eating a little bit healthier with more protein, more veggies and stuff like that.

Even though it's not sexy, it's not super convenient. Sometimes if it's your macros, great for your maintenance, when you're in bulk. And it's awesome when you're like, um, Oh fuck, I have to get some food in me. Somehow. Let me just do macros. That's cool. But as far as like a sustainable thing that really causes change, eating meals that are high in veggies and fruits, whole grains, lean meats, healthy fats,

all that bodybuilder shit, it really does produce results. And it's not a thing I want to admit. Like I wish we could just, you know just protein shake and Snickers bar our way into better physiques, but unless you're fucking slamming a ton of some eglatide or something, it's much easier said than done. I love that you said that. So one of the big waves that we made 10 years ago when we started this podcast, we actually made these shirts that were, was Dunkin' Donuts? What? Not Dunkin' Donuts.

Crispy Cream. Crispy Cream logo and it said our brand in the middle of it and then it said IIFYM sucks. And it was right in the, it was in the height of that being asked. Asking for trouble. Oh yeah, totally. But then this was what we tried to articulate and this is again through years of experience, I realized what you just said is I could tell a client, if you ate foods I said we don't even gonna track calories go eat I'd tell clients yeah go eat as much as you want so long as it's these foods from this group and

I give them a whole list of meats and veggies and starches that you can eat and just be like eat from that list when you're hungry eat and all I want to do is eat your protein first and that's the only thing if we're gonna track is that and and I think everybody lost weight everybody got in shape as soon as I And all I want to do is eat your protein first. And that's the only thing we're going to track is that. Everybody lost weight. Everybody got in shape. As soon as I start to allow them to introduce processed foods, snacks, and quick things, and this is even sometimes

the negative part of you, like protein bars, because they're basically glorified Snickers bars. You know, a little bit extra protein. They were engineered to hijack that satiate, that feeling that our body tells us to stop wanting any more food and it just made it 10 times harder. So I love that you come out and you say that because of course if you've been a bodybuilder,

IFYM is something that you've definitely, you know, understand, follow, you've found a way to get your treats here and there or have your cheat day and make it work. But for the average person, never. Never. It's a terrible strategy for most people. It really is. I wanted to circle back to the GLP-1 for a second, Mike. What are you seeing on the other effects of the GLP-1s? There's lots of reports of people who stopped smoking or not drinking anymore or interesting effects on maybe the hedonistic aspects

of certain activities. Are you hearing about any of this? Tons, yeah. People, it just in many people causes a reduction in want, generally. It fills that hole. It quiets not just food noise, but desire noise. And it's not a guaranteed thing.

It doesn't happen for everyone to same extent, but it is meaningful, meaningful effect. And so people will quit smoking by accident. They'll reduce or quit drinking by accident. Another thing is these drugs are insanely powerful, systemic anti-inflammatory drugs. Yeah. And that is incredibly beneficial for almost every aspect of health.

Another really great part of these drugs is indirectly foods that are very processed, they're very tasty, that are very high in calories and fat in a very dense package, tend to gel very poorly with these drugs because if you dump a fuckload of calories really fast in your stomach and you're on these drugs, you get sick because your gastric emptying rate is really slow,

the food ends up sitting there and your body's like, that's not supposed to be sitting in there, I'm gonna make you feel like you need to throw it up. And so it turns out that whole foods, foods that are pretty filling and healthy foods just feel way better on these drugs than the alternative. And so it's kind of the softer nudging effect to get to eat better. So a lot of people, you know, personal trainers and, and fitness industry people often have a lot of feelings about these drugs because they

just have a lot of feelings about a lot of stuff. And so like this drugs fucking cop out, man, you got to earn this shit. I'm like, why do you have to earn it? and fitness and people often have a lot of feelings about these drugs because they just have a lot of feelings about a lot of stuff. And so like, this drugs fucking cop out, man, you got to earn this shit. I'm like, why do you have to earn it? You didn't design a microchip, but you use it every day on your cell phone, you hypocrite asshole. That shit aside is, uh, there'll be like people could just eat junk and fucking still lose weight.

I'm like, first of all, what's wrong with that? And second of all, they can't because most people will figure out that they really can't tolerate junk nearly as much. They feel worse eating junk than before. There was that like drug back in the day called Chantix or whatever, a smoking cessation drug, and if you tried smoking on it, you felt in fucking incredibly awful and sick and you're

like, fuck that, that doesn't work anymore. So the low key, some of these drugs do that for food. And so they actually encourage a healthy lifestyle. There are crazy actually encourage a healthy lifestyle. They're crazy systemic anti-inflammatories. They improve your blood glucose control independent of weight loss.

They improve your blood lipids independent of weight loss. There's tons of other benefits of them. They really are like, kind of not panaceas, but like just ubiquitously really awesome for your health. And a lot of people have a problem with that because they exhibit what's called the naturalistic fallacy of the argument nature that anything that is natural is good and anything that is artificial is bad. And it's just not true.

There are some natural things that are amazing. Whole foods, good clean water. That stuff is fucking dope. Sunshine and shit. Children's laughter, all that bullshit. That's awesome But then there's artificial shit. There's natural shit. That's bad for you You know, you don't see like a bear out in the wild and you're like, it's natural. It's fine Honey, like fuck that like don't do that

Don't go over there snake bites bad for you If you think natural things are good for you, just go randomly berries off the fucking trees in the forest do not do that you will fucking die and the artificial shit a bunch of it's not great for you junk food and stuff is fucking terrible right especially in access but you know air conditioning is great antibiotics are fucking awesome vaccines are dope and then like all of a sudden you're like okay okay so natural versus official doesn't work I actually just have to go and find out what's good and what's bad.

And it turns out some artificial things like these drugs are really just awesome. And I think we're entering a world more and more as AI, especially starts to decode our biology and produce all these drugs that are incredibly awesome. You're just going to be in a world where if you stay drug free, you can be totally fine. But if you're on more and more of these advanced drugs, you're just going to feel, look and be better overall.

And I think embracing the very best that artificial stuff has coming for us is awesome. And there's nothing wrong with it. And it's just a matter of, are you doing healthy shit or unhealthy shit? And the shortcut of natural versus artificial is not a shortcut because it just does not give you much information at all. So let's, let's, let's play out. Um, cause I think we're,

we're totally aligned on GLP ones. Now let's say these, the muscle building, like let's say, let's say we get literally fitness in a pill in the next five years and everybody can be fit by taking this pill. And it does happen. What are some of the downstream effects, negative that you see that, it's obvious what's positive. I mean, the amount of obesity that will go down

and health markers that will go up and maybe we'll see even longevity. But what do you think, what else is fitness and training, working out the discipline around it, the routine of it, what else is it benefiting us that we're gonna potentially lose out on

because we can now just get it in a pill? What do you see? At least two things. One is your sense of identity and career. Lots of people in the fitness industry and they might have to shift to doing some other kind of work because everyone's just fit already. Now the work can be fitness industry adjacent. Instead of taking people through sets of squats in the gym, you might be taking them on guided hikes through the wilderness because that shit is dope for its own vibes and even if you're fit, it just makes you better at hiking. So I think once people get in really good shape they're going to have this unlock of being able to go out in nature and do cool shit that they just can't. The

average 300 pound person is not going on a fucking five mile hike through the fucking Colorado wilderness for obvious reasons. You make excellent bear food. If a bear finds you, that's not really an advantage to you. So I think there's a massive pivot that many people will have to make into a very similar kind of profession, but different. And another one is, I think that there's a certain amount of doing hard things and a certain amount

of just raw human movement that you have to have, and if you don't do, you're kind of get massive cabin fever and you're pent up and you're fucking pissed. And so just suffering through super long hard workouts is really good psychotherapy. Now, there are no doubt will be many psychotherapeutic drugs that mute that response that you actually will be able to be fit and happy

and not need to beat the shit out of yourself. But there's a certain amount of challenge just because it's challenging. It sharpens your mind, it makes you healthier and all that stuff. It's not gonna be a disaster because I think there's an easy solution to this. But it's easy on paper and maybe a little bit harder

in practice. A lot of people are going to have to shift to finding challenge somewhere else. And that's a big deal. Right now many of us find our challenge in fitness, but if we have fitness in a pill, maybe the challenge is pick up Muay Thai or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or boxing. That's fucking challenging.

And if you're already in shape, that doesn't mean you can box motherfucker. Get hit in the face a whole bunch. All of a sudden there goes your catharsis. You might get into endurance stuff. You might get into mountain biking, 50 other things to do. But fitness isn't the only thing. Every time you go to work out because it's challenging and because it's good for you, you are not going in and helping children in need. You are not hanging out with old people at old people homes or dying

fucking alone. You are not volunteering your time in the third world to help them build up the kind of structures and institutions that we have so they can have a good time. So maybe once we sort out more and more of our own problems, we can have more time and energy and desire to go out and make sense of the actual fucking world and help in a really big way. Because in one sense, when you look at gyms right now, people are doing wonderful things to their own psychology,

to their physiques, to their health. But in another sense, they're just literally wasting energy moving fucking plates up and down for no goddamn reason at all. If we can get the chemicals to do all the fitness shit, we can open up ourselves to like two hours extra per day where you're doing anything but moving weights up and down

in a fucking straight line, which listen, moving weights up and down in a straight line is the passion of my life. But also, there's like a lot more shit to the world that you could be doing. And I think that is something that humans are gonna have to quote unquote grapple with, but it's great. It's a great problem, but nonetheless a problem and a bit of a speed bump.

Yeah, I think a lot of those questions have been pondered and asked by ancient spiritual practices, by religions, because we're gonna get to a place here, maybe in our lifetime, where we can get everything we want. We're gonna get everything we want, and then we're gonna be sad, and we're not gonna know why. Why am I sad?

I have everything. I mean, look what we did with money. We now have shelter and food, but people are worse off than ever. So I think it's just gonna force us to really look at what gives us purpose and meaning of life. So I don't think it's gonna answer some questions

and solve some things, but it's not gonna solve the big things, and I think it'll pose other questions. So it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see. Yeah, I think there's two solutions to that. One is going out into the world and making inroads on real problems

instead of just fitness. I think that's a big unlock. I think they could just look at our fucking inner cities for love of God. Who the fuck's cleaning it up? Nobody. Who the fuck is mentoring children if nobody in their lives to mentor them?

Nobody's fucking, yeah, some people, it's not enough. We need 10x the number of people helping everyone out. So that's a big thing. The other thing is, this is like fucking weird, but I think it's true, advanced pharmaceuticals that interact with your brain are 100%, many of them are here already. More of them are inevitable.

You won't have to be sad because you will be pharmacologically incapable of feeling sadness. I'm gonna say something fucking wacky. I always have at least one of these, 50 of these things on every podcast I'm on. There is no reason to think based on first principles of how the brain works, that eventually AI

and scientific researchers can't figure out how to make a drug that makes you feel like you do at a peak ecstasy high, except permanently and with no downsides and with no adaptations. That is 100% theoretically possible. So you can have a pill maybe that's developed in five, seven or 10 years that if you take it every day, you are like, do you guys have any friends that are just genetically fucking happy for no goddamn reason at all?

They're just like, I broke my leg, but it's an opportunity to learn. You're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I was depressed before I broke anything. How the fuck are you doing this? They just have different brain chemistry. And there's no reason to think that all of us can't have that brain chemistry times 10 in the future.

If you think that taking a pill to be ecstatic and happy and optimistic and hardworking is bad, I would love to hear why. Maybe there are some good points, but at the same time, a lot of people are going to want to take that pill. So we have pills for our body coming up. That seems straightforward. There are going to be pills for the brain coming up that deal with a lot of existential angst

and all this other bullshit that might just go away after you start taking a pill. And is that really like, yeah, but you should be suffering like, I don't know, should you be? Maybe, maybe they're suffering. that deal with a lot of existential angst and all this other bullshit that might just go away after you start taking a pill. And is that really like, yeah, but you should be suffering. Like, I don't know, should you be? Maybe, maybe there's a compelling argument against that. But I'd love to hear that.

Have you seen the Twilight Zone episode where the bank robber gets shot? Have you seen that episode before? No, I'm not 55 years old. Fuck off. Fuck off, fatty. I haven't. What's the other way?

Sal tells a better night. He gets shot and then he, a guy approaches him and is like, hey man, you can have anything you want. And he's like, what? What are you talking about? And he can have everything. And he's gambling and he's winning every hand

and he's got beautiful women, he's got food. And then it fast forwards like nine months later and he's like he hasn't shaved and he's pissed off because every time he rolls a dice he wins and everybody agrees with him and the guy comes back and he's like man this sucks he goes I didn't think heaven would be like this and the guy looks at him and says what makes you think this is heaven? Oh that's like people's concept of hell from hyper capitalist abundance like you know having like you know known people who went to Russian prison, I'm telling you, hell's a lot worse

than fucking winning a bunch of rounds and being fucking models. That's just potential angst. Like, have you ever been beaten by five prison guards daily for 20 years? Like, no, I guess there's levels to this. I'm just gonna go back to fucking the strippers, I'm just gonna learn to deal with this shit.

Here's my pushback on that, because you have, you have people who have dedicated their lives to doing what you're talking about and they're tired, they're physiologically depressed because they're so exhausted, but they're joyful. And so you hear the spiritual leaders, you know, Mother Teresa, they find joy which is different than happy, than the chemical happy that we feel. So I personally think, my opinion Mike, is what you're explaining is gonna reveal hell

to a lot of people. They're gonna be chemically happy. In fact, I think they wrote a book about it, right? 1984 might have been one of them, or I'm not sure, it's one of those books where everybody's fed happy pills all the time, they can never feel sad, but they feel like something's missing.

I think that's a much bigger question. I think it'll be an interesting experiment, but I think people are going to be, if we do get to that place, I think there's going to be a lot of people are going to be like, something's missing. I don't know what it is, but something's missing. That's my opinion. Joy is also chemically mediated. Maybe.

And so if you attack the right chemical pathways, you can just have joy all the time too. Like deep, meaningful joy all the time too. Like deep, meaningful joy, just straight up. How do I know that? Ecstasy exists. Like if you're on ecstasy, you love everyone you see as much as you've loved your mother. And like, you really do feel that.

Do you have kids? No, fuck no, man. I can't, they don't let a person like me with these crazy beautiful children. All right, then forget it. I was gonna ask you a question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you've been great, Mike. It's just a dog. It's been great talking to you, man. You're absolutely hilarious. Very, very smart.

Lots of experience. Stop. We appreciate a lot of what you communicate on social media and other outlets because, again, you communicate like someone who knows the science but also has the experience. Oftentimes you get one or the other and you don't get the combination. Your answers are nuanced. You're not going to be able to answer the question. You're going to be but also has the experience. And oftentimes you get one or the other,

and you don't get the combination. And so your answers are nuanced, and we think you're pointing people, oftentimes, the right direction, besides being absolutely hilarious and entertaining. So, yeah, we appreciate it. You guys are fucking awesome. Thank you so much.

You got it, man. Next time, let's get to it. Yeah, we'll have you come out here next time, for sure, Mike. Yeah, man. You guys are in the Bay Area, right? Yeah, yeah. The town is there. Yeah, fuck no, I'm never coming out here. I'm sure. Yeah, right. Yeah, man. Well, you guys are the Bay Area, right? Yeah Yeah, sounds that fuck. No, I'm never coming out Thank you so much

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