The Checkup with Doctor Mike - He Takes Steroids, Got Plastic Surgery & Says Vanity Can Make You Healthier

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

I'll teach you how to become the media's go-to expert in your field. Enroll in The Professional's Media Academy now: https://www.professionalsmediaacademy.com/Fact Checks can be found in the video version of the episode the following timestamps:4:246:1548:1254:2854:551:04:251:25:001:31:301:34:402:14:202:22:102:29:00 Huge thanks to Dr. Mike Israetel of  @RenaissancePeriodization  for joining me on this episode. You can find his new book "The Aesthetic Revolution" here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/mike-israetel/the-aesthetic-revolution/9781538779842/00:00 Intro3:07 Profit Motivation In Medicine21:00 Globalism28:35 The Aesthetic Revolution1:27:03 Research Problems / Drug Approvals1:50:45 AI2:21:35 Advanced Drugs2:42:20 Exponential Growth2:59:51 Deepfakes / Anonymous Internet3:10:58 Biggest Mistakes / Age Reversal Help us continue the fight against medical misinformation and change the world through charity by becoming a Doctor Mike Resident on Patreon where every month I donate 100% of the proceeds to the charity, organization, or cause of your choice! Residents get access to bonus content, and many other perks for just $10 a month. Become a Resident today: https://www.patreon.com/doctormikeLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga* Select photos/videos provided by Getty Images *** The information in this video is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional **

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When you have a drug that's already ready to save lives and you wait 10 years to give it to any real humans outside of 300 people in a clinical trial, you're murdering people. Historically, your point is very wrong. How many drugs did we wait and not give to people and how many people died? Because there's always a cost. This is an AI universe that you're living in. It's not real life. People taking experimental drugs, getting side effects, and then want us to be. able to diagnose who's having a problem due to their metabolic condition or to this new experimental drug? On what planet am I? On planet Earth. Do your job. There is an anti-vanity streak that I think

mostly does not belong in our society. Tell me more. People who say you shouldn't be concerned with your appearance. Improving your appearance sometimes makes you healthier, live longer, but an over-focus on it can become toxic. That's what the book's about, except for one word. It's not Sometimes, it's most times. Welcome back, Dr. Mike Isritel to the Checkup podcast. Mike has a new book called The Aesthetic Revolution based in the idea that appearance, both how we see ourselves and how the outside world sees us, should be discussed more openly and sometimes even intentionally be improved.

As a bodybuilder who's been open about using anabolic steroids and undergoing cosmetic surgery as part of his own aesthetic goals, Dr. Isertel believes that the power to change your aesthetic largely rests in your own hands. He also believes, thanks to new and emerging technologies, it is becoming easier than ever to look the way you want. I don't know if I agree with all of this and whether it's beneficial, and I'm not sure you will either. A few notes about this episode. First, Mike and I are close enough to have an honest, often spirited debate about a variety of topics, including some that sit outside both of our areas of expertise. Second, Dr. Mike Isertel is one of the most interesting, provocative, and confident people I've had on the show. But provocative does not

always mean correct and confidence doesn't always mean settled science. Some of what we discuss is evidence-based, some of it is philosophical, and some is purely speculative. Third, in this episode, Mike makes several claims that I think are worth debating and should not be treated as proven scientific evidence. We discuss body image, cosmetic surgery, GLP-1 medications, experimental drugs, peptides, anabolic steroids, FDA regulation, gene editing, and one of Mike's favorite topics, AI. Throughout the episode, fact checks will appear on screen correcting both of us, because there are places we could both be more precise. So if you hear this sound effect, that means a fact check has appeared. If you're listening only, that's your cue to check the video or the show

notes. These fact checks are not there to score points. They're there because when we have a conversation that touches medicine, science, and safety, precision really matters. So enjoy the conversation, but listen critically. This is an entertaining debate, not a treatment plan. That's actually a real big one. I don't know if you ever had someone of expertise on to clarify the fact that there are maybe like 100 million Americans that think doctors are like sitting there and a big pharmaceutical guy comes in with a briefcase and he opens up a stack of green hundies. And he's like, man, see, there's this new medication. It's not even testing an animal. See? And the doctor's like, well, gee whiz, I got loans to pay.

It used to happen, not to that degree, but to somewhat that degree. Now when a farmer rep comes to educate us about a new test, about a new medication out on the market, and they bring Panera, we have to sign a log that they now put out Sunshine Actwise, that we received a lunch. And someone in my Jubilee debate used that as evidence because like 50 to 60 percent of doctors have gotten a lunch from a pharma company, that 50 to 60% of doctors are biased. Yeah.

And I'm like, if we're biased on $50, what is Gary Brecker biased on when he makes millions selling a $6,000 red lightbed? Yeah. I mean, like, completely different standard applied for no reason. Also, there's like nothing wrong with pharmaceutical companies paying doctors to prescribe their products in my view.

Like, really? Yeah, like when you go to your car or maintenance, shop and they're like, oh, this new windscreen company makes excellent windscreens. Do you want to buy one? You know, like a real talk, though. Like, how does it compare? Like, honestly, it's a bit overpriced. But if you want really awesome dynamics of like evening light, there's nothing better. I wouldn't buy it myself, but it's great. Like, you're like, yeah, that's awesome. Thanks for that insight. If your doctor is cutting you anything other than the real deal, your doctor is like, like, just a hypocrite oath right? In the perlaces where it probably doesn't like to have

had sex with. But if your doctor is like, pharmaceutical companies are like, hey, look, we have all these medicines. They're great. Here's a bunch of them. Talk to your patients about if they want to use them. I don't think there's a goddamn thing wrong with that at all.

It happens in every single other industry. Like the person at your massage parlor is like, hey, we got all these new oils. And you're like, do I need these new oils? If they're a liar, they'd be like, of course. If they're not a liar, they're like, no, of course you don't need the new oils. But there's all these flavors and they do moisture.

your skin, as long as doctors are evidence-based and appraising things fairly and sort of presenting you with a panoply of options, they're doing a goddamn great job. And like, how would they find out about, like, the best medicines? If the pharmaceutical companies didn't come tell them about it, I know too many doctors that are elite at staying up to date. I know too many doctors that are like, bro, did you stop learning things in 1982? And they're like, ah, no, here's like penicillin or whatever.

Like, okay, very well, thanks. So I think that trying to prevent all, money from entering every aspect of life is an insane proposition that just goes directly against everyone's incentive. I think the thing that is like the number one thing that'll just fix all of this is massive transparency. Well, that's what the Sunshine Act is.

Yeah, it's great. That's why I like it. Just say to people what you've been. But the problem is it only works for doctors. So when I work with Abbott and I get paid a huge sum to promote blood donation so that God forbid Gary Breast If a Reca gets into an accident. The vampire lobby is a well-understood problem

of the United States. Where does that blood go, Mike? So there's some reason the transparency ends right there. So if, God forbid, someone gets into an accident, they have blood available. Yet, when Gary Brecker sells something or Andrew Huberman sells something, there is no act that we can see what they're being paid.

Yeah. Like there was a recent episode on the Huberman podcast about peptides. was he paid to do that episode? Is he collecting money from the peptide lobby, a website? Yeah. I don't know. Sure.

Yeah, the doctors interact more in payments with the government. I think that's why there's like a bigger transparency situation there, regulatory speaking. Because like government doesn't cover your peptide costs. So that's why it's weird to me. Because doctors interact more with the government spending so they require a higher level of scrutiny. They get a higher layer of scrutiny,

and yet they're treated as if they're the shady ones. And the people selling supplements are the good ones and are honest. I think the doctors being treated as shady and their interactions with pharmaceutical companies being treated as shady and pharmaceutical companies being treated as not even so much shady, but just downright nefarious while in fitness influencers. there contracts with supplement companies and supplement companies themselves.

So like have doctor, fitness influencer, contract with pharma, contract with supplements, and then pharma company or supplement company. To me, there's like almost the same dynamic at play. And like pharmaceutical companies are just like they actually make in some sense really effective supplements that are validated by for sure science. But they're like so powerful that they also have some downside risks. Or like if you overdose on aschwaganda, because it kind of doesn't do anything to begin with. It does.

It does a few things. Little tea things. Then like you eat three times the ashriganda dose, probably nothing is going to happen to you. With pharmaceutical companies, they get a lot of trouble for like being dangerous because they're actually super powerful. And so to your point, I think it's like anytime people who are fitness influencers who do supplement contracts, people who are running supplement companies representing them, every time they talk smack about doctors and pharmaceutical, I'm like one of two minds. One is like everyone can make a valid critique. And sometimes they make really valid critiques.

But it's also like, just take a little mirror, point it back at yourself. And all of a sudden, like, oh, I'm peddling something with like one tenth of the research volume. I'm asked for no transparency whatsoever. I'm allowed to make oodles of money, which I think is great. Yeah.

But they're like, oh, look, my favorite thing is like when supplement company people are like, farmers after the money. I'm sorry, what? Do you do your job for free? Well, that's why in that clip I just showed you that Gary Breka goes, pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary responsibility

to their shareholders. Well, who does Gary Brecker have a fiduciary responsibility to? He is the shareholder. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. To himself. And also, but there's other, ostensibly other shareholders of a supplement company, he has a responsibility to them as well. And so the supplement company actually, like,

these are all privately owned companies. And typically equity is split on more than one person that means they're shareholders. And it's funny enough, like, if you're a pharmaceutical company, your shareholders include like a huge fraction of the United States, you're a massive public trade company. So you have to honor the wishes of the people of the United States, some massive fraction

that a private, small pharmaceutical company just doesn't have to offer at all of that stuff. And also there's a whole other thing of like profits versus people. It's not a versus. Like the profit motive is in, sees the most powerful way to organize society to do good ever tested.

Are there excesses of profits we should be concerned about? Absolutely. Do we wanna like shoot the goose that lays the golden egg? Are you crazy? Like it's people versus profits. Like, man, everywhere they allow a lot of profits unregulated. The people are doing much better. Last I checked, Sweden was way better than North Korea.

And North Korea doesn't allow profits at all. And Sweden's like, yeah, just pay your taxes and you're good to go. It's making as much money as you like. It's that whole thing there, that skepticism of pharmaceutical companies because they make a lot of money. It's like, are we skeptical of like Dell computer for making a lot of money, making Dell computers? And so you don't want to buy one because you're like,

I don't know what's in this laptop. They sure make a lot of money making these things like, what? But it's a good laptop. Like, right? Well, shut up and buy it. There is this new push against success that has. happen on social media where if you create something and you make money, it's like, why didn't you just give it to society for free? Yeah. It's, yeah, it's very easy to refute because the amount of

motivation that people have to do amazing things at their own expense scales typically with the amount of reward that they're going to receive. Like if I'm told that if I do a real good job at work, I can make 10 times the money. I might do crazy shit. Like let work eat into the rest of my social life, stay long hours, wake up in the middle of the night, scribbling down ideas. If I am not allowed to make any more than a very nice but small amount of money at work, then my probability of going overtime for work falls super low. And you know, I'm not a part of the story. Who cares about me?

Like rich people are rich either way. The real question is, what does incentivizing people with megaprofits have on the output of society overall versus if we can't clamp the? those profits down. It's like modern economics hasn't debated this point for like 70 years. Like if typically a high degree of free enterprise, you allow people to collect huge upside profits, they just innovate like crazy in the standard of living rises.

And they invent tons of medications. They invent tons of technologies. They make processes that typically were reserved for luxury people normal. Like the people that like founded and ran Uber and Lyft and all these car companies, like they brought the black car to the regular person. Because just anyone can afford like an elite car to come pick them up and drop them. That's crazy. Do you remember the next?

90s, that was like, only rich people could do that. Like, rich, rich people, like the guy who owned the mansion could maybe do that. Now everyone does it. Like, what push these Uber people to do this sort of thing? Like, you know, they have like multi-billion dollar company. So passion, inspiration for sure, but also like a concomitant reward that like, don't worry if you toast your life for all of this, it will give you so much money that it'll be worth it.

That's a big deal. And again, those people, they get money either way. It's not a concern for them. If we set up massive incentives, how good is it? for people. Imagine we had an Olympics where we paid no one any money for it. We didn't give out medals

because it was kind of gross to rank people and we didn't pay for people to show up. How much of the beauty of competitive sport and humans at their best would we see at the Olympics? Well, they wouldn't even be in Olympics. It would be like in Cincinnati, Ohio. No offense, Cincinnati's great place. And no one would care about it.

But because the Olympics are given so much praise and so many gold medals and money and contracts and sponsors, then, man, athletes will grind their entire lives. for one medal. We want to see that because we benefit as consumers of entertainment sport. And so just the same way, the profit motive in medicine, I think is like an enormous thing. We want as much profit in medicine as possible. We want as little abuse and dereliction as possible that is absolutely tractable to get both of those things at the same time. You want the upside to be like, hey, make

amazing medicines, make health care better for everyone, make it cheaper and make a fuckload of money. And also, no abuse, no fraud, none of that. That just requires really good regulation. minimal but good regulation, massive transparency, and a lot of really good oversight, and then you liberate the free market to do its thing. You start clipping the wings off the free market. You get more and more to France, and then you keep clipping,

and you get more and more to Greece, and you keep clipping, and you get more and more to Latin America, and you keep clipping, and you get to North Korea at some point, which really sucks. What's your take on the fact that when Jonas Salk was asked why he didn't patent the vaccine, he said you can't patent the sun, so I shouldn't patent the vaccine,

and he let forego billions of dollars. Do you think we should lean into that kind of approach? So patents are a really great example of a trade-off system. If you have a situation where you say, you're just not a lot of patent any idea. Everyone who's creating new medicines knows that as soon as they publish the IU-PAC chemical structure, someone's just going to take it and just produce it at scale,

that does reduce people's incentives to make really big strides towards really, innovative cures. On the other hand, if you have a patent structure that says, like, the seal teams will shoot everyone to death in your lab if you try to make this drug for cheaper, and the patent lasts for 50 years, and it's exclusive to one person or one company, then you're really enhancing the kind of innovation that goes on a different route and makes a different kind of drug, but you can take a whole drug class and deaden all of the innovation because you just patented the entire drug class or something. And so patent law.

ends up playing at a tradeoff between these two extremes. And I think there's probably, in many cases, some kind of legal structure that goes somewhere down the middle. I don't want to say that. A patent homeostasis if you are. Yeah, sure, sure. And that could be dynamically adjusted and stuff like that. Yeah?

One of the most important things in encouraging innovation and encouraging mass scale production is dependable laws that are like a long time scale. So like if you tell someone, look, you get a general patent for this. drug for three years. After that, you get some kind of way more diluted patent for another three years. After that's out, it's just like anyone does their thing.

But all the companies that make drugs know that ahead of time, they can make decisions on what drugs to make, what drugs not to make, et cetera. I think that what's happening now with biotech advancement powered by AI makes patents like kind of almost irrelevant because the pace of innovation is so insane that like you can patent, so imagine patenting somagletide, right? Okay, well, terseptide is better in every conceivable way. Your patent would have been cool for like three years, and then triceptide comes out and everyone's like, I don't, shit, your drug is patented, I'm never buying it. You're like standing there with a patent that means

nothing. So I think patenting is getting more and more pointless as we go on, but some degree of insurance that someone can't just copy your drug might have some element of kind of yeah my question wasn't about the patent as much as it is jonas hall created this wonderful thing that changed humanity in many ways and yet it wasn't with this capitalistic mindset of i'm grinding because i want the financial reward i'll say something really up because this makes for good clips jonasalk himself delivered zero vaccines to zero people industrial capacity did that only pharmaceutical companies could do that only scale can do that So the hidden heroes behind every vaccine that's ever saved lives are the people in the labs figuring out, how do we make this at industrial scale and how do we close the delivery pipeline?

Because like vaccines, you can't just leave them out in the sun and shit like that. You can't just put them in pills and have them just sit on shelves. So the people that do the logistics, the pipeline, all the dynamics of delivering that vaccine at scale and at a price that can sustain that infrastructure, man, they're the ones like, you know, having a great idea. Jonah Salk is a living, a deceased god. There's no debate about that, but having a cool idea and making a cool molecules dope, it's not the entire picture. And so I think when people make things for the benefit of all mankind

and don't want money in return, I think that's awesome. If they want money in return, I think that's awesome. The only money they're ever going to get is the amount of money people are going to pay them. But I think it's also important to ask questions about, like, well, how does that actually work in the real world getting actual things to real people?

then there's a whole bunch of capitalist machinery that has to be plugged in. Otherwise, the thing just never happens. I feel like whether or not he gets paid, those companies that are delivering those vaccines will ultimately still be paid. Yeah. That's why the vaccines go where they need it

is because those companies get paid. Yeah, like the only thing I'm trying to challenge for the sake of the conversation is the idea that people grind and work harder at work because of this financial incentive. But you're saying, and that they're grinding,

so much that they're giving up their social life in order to do that. Is that a net win for society that you have less of a social life, that you're grinding harder, you're making more advancements, or is it better to have some sort of balance? For society, it's a net win by like a huge fraction. For the individual

grinding, is it a net personal win? It depends on how much they value being a beneficent force in society. If they are, then like, sweet, you're a hero. How do we cultivate that? Having people like want to do good for society more. Boy, am I not the expert on that.

I'll say that. Wow, that was a nice line. I'm an expert on almost nothing, actually. Just to address the point, there's no valid claim to say that the only motive that makes people do good things is the profit motive. Plenty of people do really hard work and sacrifice for society without any profit motive. The profit motive is just a massive ROI. It is a huge average uplift to how much. actual real good things get made in the world, in part because it fuels motivation, inspiration,

persistence, in part because it, like, smooths out the incentive structure from one corporation to another to another. If you have a profit motive, like, it's really easy to get the pipettes and the syringes and all the autoclaves and everything all in one place. Without the profit motive, that shit is basically, like, almost impossible. So, and the profit motive costs, quote, unquote, society, like, you know, whatever average of 7% per year that is the net profit of the, like, the capitalist USA, at this point, but the benefit has been calculated

by various economists to be less orders of magnitude higher than that. And so it's kind of like, okay, so profit on average is great. That doesn't mean every individual only acts in profit. Some people will just like, for nothing at all will grind away all their lives. How do we encourage people to do more sacrifice? I think one way is liberate the economic system so they can get paid up the ass.

If you know that if you become an NBA player and you make like $100 million over a career, sure does not hurt your chances of having hoop dreams. If you want to become a person who creates medicines for people in the third world and you also know there's an option there that'll make you a hundred millionaire, my God, like you are way more likely to do that on average or really persist at it than otherwise. So I think first of all is like making sure that people do good for society, there's some way to monetize that so they get paid. The other way is maybe having a discussion, and I do this on my other,

my Mike Isratel YouTube channel, which is like philosophy and progress and stuff like that, is looking at the world more like one giant team, one giant society, one giant civilization. So like as a globalist? As a globalist.

Do you consider yourself a globalist? Well, I'm Jewish, so of course a globalist. And I'm relatively wealthy, so obviously I'm actually technically a lizard person. I'd pull my skin off. It'd be weird, the lights, the lizard skin, you know this. You're also a lizard person.

The skin doesn't have a white. So there's a term globalist. I'm not entirely sure. It's such a pejorative. I'm not sure what it means in technical terms. But what I would say is I consider myself a secular humanist, which means like I think if there's like an African girl about to get clitoridectomide, I have a real big problem of that,

about as big of a problem as I have of some girl in the United States that's about to get clitoradectomide. and I think that like cultural relativism is a beautiful thing that lets us understand cultures and the perspective of it's like well actually these people eat with their hands and that's totally fine and eating with a hand versus fork it's just tradeoffs it's not really a clear winner and so that allows us to appreciate cultural diversity but there's also some things some cultures do that are like probably just wrong and we should probably stop them from doing it like the Taliban does not allow the education of females like who's for that and And so I think that seeing all humans as worthy of the same rights and opportunities as everyone else, the world over, means that once we understand that, we know that working as individuals towards benefiting all of mankind can be something that other people go, man, you know, you're doing the greatest thing ever. As opposed to working for your city, which is awesome, or working for a corporation, which is great, for a state, for a nation. I think working for all of humanity should properly be not this thing that left us people brag about doing but sort of don't do.

I think it should be a thing that most people are like, yeah, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Yeah, I just, the reason I asked a question is we just had a firefighter on the show. And he was telling us about the pricing dynamics of being a firefighter. And when he was entering the field, how little people were hiring,

despite the fact that they were paying for their own education or to become paramedics firefighters. And they were getting paid $35,000 a year. And I'm thinking, where are the incentives in society where you can work for an insurance company, plug in some numbers versus you're running in and saving humans and giving them help medically when they're dying, you're getting paid the least, less than a Starbucks barista. So like, where are those incentives coming from? How do we fix those?

How can I say this in a way that's not politically incorrect? I feel like that's, they're questioning your mind before any. There are answers to these questions. They don't always land really well. So the number of firefighters determines in part how much you're going to pay each firefighter. Because if you're a firefighter to be and you get too per snickety about being paid more, we just go to the next guy. But if you're working an insurance company and you're like a brilliant person who does

like actuarial science, they can't just go to the next person. The next person has another job and he's getting paid $500K already. He's not going to leave. He's not moving from Cleveland to New York to do your job. Well, the reason they can pay them more is because they're making money off their labor. No one's making money off a firefighter saving someone in a burden building. the government is. Are they?

Collect taxes from people. Part of that tax money goes to pay firefighters. But if the firefighters are more effective, the government doesn't make more money. If you're a barista and you make more money for the business. So potentially there's a scheme there to get insurance companies to pay firefighters more because the insurance companies save a shitload of money when the firefighter stops the damage or prevents the damage from spreading beyond a certain tiny point.

So the city also is involved in taxing your building. It would save some money in some sense if your building didn't burn down. So really it's about, you're really asking a question. It's very interesting one of how do we increase the profit motive in the firefighting situation? And that may very well be like there are realistic ways to do that. One of them is to allow firefighters to be paid by insurance companies more directly, for example. The other thing to question to ask is like, firefighters are all heroes. They have a very glamorous job in the literal sense of like,

they're the people in the red coats that go do the saving. There are people doing jobs that you don't see that are way less glamorous and they save at least as many lives. So the person that designs the nozzle clipping system for fire trucks has by proxy probably saved like 10,000 people. Anyone given firefighter in their lives may save 100 people. But that guy goes to work in some engineering little office building and he just does this all day long. And no one ever thanks that guy for a service, even though he's saving just oodles and oodles of lives.

And there's a guy who works on industrial sealants for cans that allows the price of canned goods to be five cents lower because it lasts longer. Who's technically saved like 10 million people from starvation? You'll never hear his name. There's all these people, and the way they're paid is generally in the economy one of two ways one is government fiat and the other one is supply and demand. Supply and demand tends to pay way more fair and actually allocate money to where real humans with dollars think it is best spent. Now, real humans voting isn't the ultimate arbiter of what is good and bad for society because real humans get it wrong. For example, real humans value elite entertainment more than they value like functional institutions. If that wasn't the case, we would be paying nobody in the National Basketball Association that much money.

We would be paying politicians a whole lot more money. You actually want to pay politicians a lot of money, a lot of money, because then they're insanely incentivized not to screw up. When you pay politicians rounding air money and you just like pay them with vibes, they do things on vibes, which is no surprise. So trying to marginally alter a system so that the profit motive is more visible and thus gives the people doing, the good work as much money as possible is generally a good idea. Generally a good idea. But I'd also say it's by no means clear that firefighters are underpaid. It's not clear to me that they're over or underpaid.

I would have to see actual statistics on like, you save a human lives or actuarially counted as like, I think, $10 million or something like that. And so you can actually do a calculation of like, how many human lives slash property is the typical firefighter saving? How much are we paying them? And there would be some amount that would fall out of that. That would be a pretty dark calculation to me.

People do that stuff all the time. I wouldn't want to be in that business. Exactly. Well, so that we don't get too far off topic, because we tend to do that. For some reason on this podcast, it's like maybe because I don't have note cards, it becomes a disaster where we start talking about something.

I'm just going to say it. No, no, I actually agree with you. I wish I was better with note cards or telepromp. Like, I've got another podcast and I'm like, How do they stay so organized? They even have an iPad. I need to invest in an iPad. But, you know, the costs these days.

Mike, it's tough times for all of us. Yeah. Well, tell me about the revolution. This anarchy that you're starting here. It's like a very much French Revolution type of revolution. There will be blood in the streets. What is that? What is the difference in a French Revolution?

The English Revolution, so the American Revolution happened like once. It was bloody, but organized. And then once the government was ascended, it was kind of super stable and then led to the entire United States. The French Revolution, for my understanding, went on a substantial amount of time and cycled through a bunch of people. They thought, we're going to do a good job, but didn't.

Going to do a good job, didn't. They just took them to the guillotine all the time. Bloody, messy, resulted eventually in cool stuff. Oh, yeah, just chaos in the streets. That's really what the most of the book is actually written in Satanic Latin. I got to say something critical of the book.

Please. Can I? Yeah, of course. Be brutally honest. No, no. Be even more brutal. Okay. For a book called The Aesthetic Revolution,

this cover, I hope, is not the real cover. It's exactly the real cover. This is the least aesthetic cover ever, Mike. Do you know how much creativity I had? And did you ever work with a real publishing company before? There is no way. There's no way. This is what you landed on.

How many words are on this cover, Mike? I can't read to begin with, so I have no idea. The shapes are nice. The shapes are fine. The shapes are fine, but Mike, I can't, this is a lot of words. Look at that shade of green. So here's a thing.

Green is pleasing to the eye. Isn't it? It's like red. You hate the aesthetic revolution. And why is aesthetic get thicker? Is there a meaning behind? I mean, that was, it had to have been a conscious choice.

By who? You? No. I didn't pick this cover. So you had no play in this cover. So they, is this a real cover first of all? Yes, it is.

They sent two cover options. Okay. Because I told them like, I want like a transformation photo of like a woman who looks like a blob on one side. and a woman who looks her best on the other. And they're like, cool, your opinion's dope. You're the man at this, not that, let us do us.

And they're like, here are the two cover options. And they look roughly the same. And I sort of picked one because it vibed a little better. And that's it. This is like a book you would see at the airport. They all look like this now, man. This is a, I don't have, I have no opinion of this whatsoever. You have an opinion on it.

I just don't know enough about graphic design. Okay. Forget graphic design. As a human, you look at this. You're a master of aesthetics. What is the aesthetic rating of this cover? I don't know the comparator. Harry Potter.

I've never seen the Harry Potter. You've seen the Harry Potter cover. I'm not, I don't hang out with people that. Sam, get the book. Can't get Harry Potter out right now. Harry Potter's a magical mystery of fun.

I just, look, you make thumbnails, right? I don't. Oh, you don't. Okay. I try and aid in the process of making thumbnails. That's good. Same. Everything is a choice.

So I'm curious. why certain, like, why is fitness large? Yeah, just graphic design, kookery. But you keep saying graphic design. I don't understand. This is text design. Whoever did that at the publishing company did a great job. I want to interview them and ask them,

what were these choices? Yeah, they just like, that's what they do. Yeah. It's a trip, right? Okay, well, so the aesthetic revolution embracing vanity and the future of fitness to unlock your healthiest self. Tell me what that means.

So people typically look at vanity as a bad thing because it's often a bad thing. That seems logical. But it's not always a bad thing. And there's a way to understand vanity that if you lean into it, what you end up saying is, okay, okay, okay. What does it look like if a person cares about their appearance and tries to make their appearance in body and face, skin, hair, the whole thing, does it look like if they try to make it better?

And is there a way to make your appearance better that will make you feel happier about how you look and at the same time will enhance your health and longevity and wellness and the answer is absolutely categorically yes. As a matter of fact,

most of the things you do to enhance appearance that are not either pretty extreme or totally insane are really, really good for the rest of you. And so we have this kind of juxtaposition

in gym culture or this like almost like a false dichotomy. And it is one in which you're trying to get people to go and be physically fit and active and healthy. We're trying to get all of America down to a body weight that's not killing them all the time.

We're trying to get them more muscle. We're trying to get them more active. And we're trying to get them to feel good about themselves as humans, right? And at the same time, we tell people like, well, you don't want to train for vanity. You don't want to diet for vanity. Don't lose weight because you want to lose 20 pounds,

lose weight because it's going to make you healthier or fitter. And it's logical. It's super logical. And the vast majority of people just never resonant. with them at all. Why do you think that is? You mean on a practical sense or it doesn't land for them mentally? Emotionally it doesn't land for them. How come? Because most to most people, health and strength, vitality, longevity are to some degree second or third order esoteric concepts. They're like, yeah, I technically occupy a body and I want health. But when you're healthy,

or at least upright and functioning, you tend to like massively take health for granted. I'm sure you see this all the time as a medical doctor. You're like, hey, your labs look okay, but you really should address the following, you're smoking all the time, you're drinking sodas all the time. And they're like, I'm my lab's good? And you're like, gas, like, hey, see you, doc. And they lock off and you're like, cool.

That didn't work. They clearly don't have a long time horizon for this. Well, that's just because their interpretation of their health is flawed. They think health is reflected upon in numbers. And by some very small

variables that we can change and improve health we do. But when I get someone's lab results back, I can't tell them if they're healthy or not. I could just tell them they're free of four or five diseases. Yes. And that's it. And to most people, that's health. They're deep, proximate at any one time that they're awake in the world, care about long-term health is smaller than we would like. It's just not a big deal for most people. It's way less of a big deal than we would like it to be. Do you think so? I would put all my money on it. Like, the fraction of people that don't take their medications, as you understand, is massive. Yeah. Like that exactly feeds into the idea that people on a test will say, I really care about my

health, stated versus revealed preferences. They state, everyone says they care about their health, most everyone. As far as actually doing the things that enhance their health, most people are like, some people are great about it. A lot more people than we would like, just don't really care. nearly as much. Well, is it that they don't care nearly as much or barriers get in the way? Both. Or the cost is too high. And I don't mean, it's almost never the cost. I don't mean the money. Yeah. Like the cost to have to do something you don't want to do is also a cost. Like the metabolic cost, emotional costs. Metabolic cost. No. Financial costs generally no. Emotional cost, massive. Sure. That's another way of saying. It's like, ah, I just, uh, but. Well, because I have some

patients that desperately want to join a gym and literally can't afford it or need an antibiotic and can afford it. I also deal in a community health setting. So it's different than the rest of the country. But is you're dealing with very minority cases. They do happen to very rare. Most gym memberships are exceedingly cheap. Almost all just by the numbers, Americans can afford a gym membership, no problem. The gym membership, the transportation to get there, the time it takes away to leave work, your hourly pay, because you're not salary, et cetera, et cetera. And like chat CHAPT, telling you how to work out at home for free with no gym is free free. Like, 100% free. It's not. You need internet access. Okay, which is free anytime you walk to anywhere with has Wi-Fi, which is almost

everywhere. If you have a device that can access the Wi-Fi. The fraction of people with cell phones include the majority of the homeless at this point. So like, my, is it really the majority is, bro. Do you find me a homeless person while cell phone? I haven't seen one since 2008. Like, bro, legit, man. I need to check that. So these are real things, but the teeny, teeny tiny, and they need addressing, but the teeny tiny, they're not going to explain the 60% of Americans that, based on what they say about how much they care about their health. They're not doing it. They're just not doing nearly as much as they could. And look at these people, you get them real talk, like, they're humans. They're like, they know. Right. You ever talk to you have Russian family, right?

How many uncles and aunts do you have? They just do nothing about their health. And you're like, really, you're eating salt Olivier again? And they're like, Mimisha, like, we have to live. And you're like, this is the opposite of live, whatever. Yeah. First of all, I love, It's great. It just happens to be made of mostly mayo. Which is okay. They're like, in moderation.

They're like, what is the ingredient of this? They do the scanner like, mayo. They're like, isn't there other stuff? Like, yes, but it's a rounding area.

Yeah, exactly. So you get that motivator as health and fitness and strength and longevity. And you put it in front of people. And people are kind of like, yeah, yeah. Some people go for it. Most don't. You put vanity in front of people.

You're going to look unbelievable if you do these fitness. things. The fraction of people that goes for it, as I would say, heuristically, like an order of magnitude higher, like the vast majority of people at gyms, and I mean literal vast majority, like 70, 80, 90 percent of everyone at gyms in the Western world and Free Asia today is there for vanity as their rank one. And probably more than half of them are there for vanity as their only rank. Going to the gym for pure vanity, building muscle, losing fat, getting more active, getting plenty of sleep, managing your stress, eating really healthy. Holy crap, that unlocks an unbelievable amount of health and longevity. By attending

to what people, whatever, fortunately, unfortunately, more people are concerned about how they look than about the underlying systemic health that they're exhibiting. So if we can stop telling people, hey, like vanity is super gross reason to go train and eat, and we can say, look, properly couched vanity can be awesome and really healthy. It can make you feel good, look good, and super awesome for your health longevity. That's an enormous win, and that's what a big part of it is about. So you're using the vanity as essentially capital.

So you're creating incentive. Trojan horse. Yeah, Trojan horse. Like the way that you would do a financial incentive, here you're creating a vanity incentive to get them to care about their health. And we're not really creating it. You're hijacking it. Or tapping into it, whatever term.

Imagine that vanity is an airplane. I have a gun. I did not register. I break the door open. I shoot one of the pilots, Mike, just to make sure they understand how serious I am about hijacking vanity. I'm just using your hijacking.

Jesus. Because if you don't kill one of the pilots, are you really serious. Other people in the back are like, Mike, I have a flight later today. Let's not scare the shit out of me. Is it a vanity? I already have a problem with flying.

Oh, really? I bet. Hey, you said hijack. Not hijacking. offering, hey, you like, you want to be. You like vanity. Yes. So let's make vanity work for you.

Let's make vanity work for you. Okay. You're already trying to make it work for you. Let me free you and knowing that it's good for you, tell you how it could be bad for you. And then a big part of the book is telling you all the tools and technologies and strategies that get you way better appearance and health and longevity at much less cost, minimum time in the use of the most advanced technology.

Now, this vanity thing, because we've talked about it on the positive side, how matching vanity with health can be very beneficial. You get people to lose weight. You get people to exercise. The problem with vanity that I see as a physician who treats kind of average people is that when we talk about making America healthier, we want them to lose weight. I'm kidding. You're giving me PTSD, Mike. Might as well. Yes. Oh, no.

Scott, yes, I did it. Max, I did it. Please keep that in. When we're talking about making people better metabolically, we're encouraging people to lose weight because most of America is overweight or obese. We're trying to get them to put on muscle. Metabolically, it improves numbers across the board.

Huge. Makes them happier, et cetera, all these things. The important thing to not lose sight is that the goal that we're actually seeking to achieve is not to get people to go to the gym seven days a week, get them to look as muscular as you do. Nice. It's to just get them to do something and not be sedentary.

Vanity, I don't feel ends at just get people to move and do some mild exercise. Vanity to me encourages hyper-optimization at its core. Do you agree or disagree with it? Disagree. Why? But partially agree. Because where's the end of vanity? Where does vanity end?

I mean, every night I cry in front of my mirror. Well, that's a problem. That's where it ends from. Because I have a diagnosis code for that. That mirror cam still works. I'm glad you're receiving live stream. That's money, by the way. You only money.

So it's a spectrum. Some people, you go, hey, we empower you to lean into the best of vanity. And they go, can you just get the fuck away from me? And they just walk off. And you're like, that didn't work. Some people, you're like, say the same thing. Empower you to get the best out of vanity

without doing the bad stuff. And they're like, oh, that sounds great. They read the book, whatever. And they're like, this is amazing. And they go to the gym four times a week. They lose 20 pounds of fat. They gain 10 pounds of muscle. And they just have this total revolution.

Their husband's giving them the old eye again. Amazing. And then some, so very few people will just give you the middle finger. Lots of people will be like, vanity's great in moderation. And then at the end of the other end of the distribution, you have clavicular as a human being. Do you know who that is? Yeah. Yeah.

All jokes. But like, you get people to go completely insane. I'm one of them. Of course, I'm pumping my body full of dangerous chemicals constantly, getting at least one so far surgery, more, no doubt, planned. And they're just viking on their own weird shit. But on the aggregate, if you tell people in society writ large, hey, like, there's ways to lean into vanity that are super awesome.

The overall benefit will be enormous. And the overall downside cost of the extreme cases will be numerically high, but fractionally low. So like one out of 20 people is going to take vanity to the nth degree and do real bad stuff with it. I do question whether or not that person needed to be prompted at all. So like I think like if someone reads this book, the probability that they'll do really crazy shit where they otherwise wouldn't have, I think is like the same world lower because it tells you about all the downsides of every single drug and procedure. That's a whole section after every single thing. If you're psychotically pro vanity to begin with, this is the thing I don't think anyone has to tell you about.

just in you to begin with. And then you're going to make some really interesting choices. I think like that's one of the reasons why something I'm very much trying to always say when I'm on shows like this. Well, there is no show like this, isn't there, Mike? Now without no cards. That's true. You're like, my next topic is, you know anything you're talking about.

My big thing is to say that I don't ever want to push vanity on anyone, ever. Ever for two reasons. One, that gets toxic real fast. And two, it can help some people, but it's not necessary because we're just addressing a thing that people really need already. It's like pushing tasty food on people. They already want tasty food. You just offer them options.

They go, I want that one. And so if you have tasty food that's really bad for you and tasty food that's really healthy, if they're both really tasty, you can come to consumers and be like, this is the healthy shit. And they try the, dude, this is amazing. They try the other one. I'm like, tastes about the same. But this is bad for me. Like, ah, it's got these weird chemicals. You don't want to eat it. All of a sudden, you're doing a great thing by just attending to the needy that people already have for tasty food. You don't need to convince them, right? And then you just give them tasty, healthy food. This book is about being like, you already know about this is not

going to instruct you about vanity. Because not everyone, a large fraction of people already really, really care about how they look. This book tells them, you don't have to be ashamed about that. Because there's a lot of people ashamed about caring how they look. And this is not productive in most cases. It just tells them, don't do anything stupid. But if you do things the right way, and there's a lot of ways to do it. The right way, you're going to be in better health. You're going to be in better longevity, better quality of life, and better psychological

health as well. And all these things are awesome. And they should be discussed in a way that doesn't have to make us go around vanity. Because there's this thing people do in the health space, which is they just really try to avoid the topic of vanity and looks and appearance. And so like you'll ask your doctor, hey, should I be lifting? Blah, blah, blah. And they're like, well, yeah, for strength and health.

And it's like, okay, okay, that's not what they're asking. They're asking for vanity. And so the doctor could just ask, I answer the question of like, yeah, like, if you lift for vanity for vanity, this is largely really good. What you got to worry about is these three things. And then don't do that and the rest you're good to go. So that's kind of my thing is we're not trying to push vanity in anyone. We're just, I'm just trying to say that like, hey, if you want to make yourself look good

and you think it'll make you feel good, there are ways to do it that are. that are insanely awesome for every other part of your life. So when we say like there's a percentage of people that are psychotically excited about vanity and basically what we're talking about is body dysmorphic disorder, right? Is that a fair? Body dysmorphic disorder is no.

Tell me what then, what I'm misinterpreted? No, I'm just done being bullied by you. And every time I come on your podcast, all you have is rude questions and just, body dysmorphic disorder, for my understanding, is making a very, very critical claim in body dysmorphic disorder. It is when you can no longer remotely, objectively appraise your physique based on a reasonable comparator average.

So if I told you I was undermuscled for the average 42-year-old Ashkenazi Jew, I would absolutely have body dysmorphic disorder. Not instantly, but like whoever's doing the rating is like, yep, that guy's well in his way. It's a DSM-5 disorder. You don't just like walk in and be like, I have misgivings about my body and they're like body dysmorphic disorder. Of course.

You can care to an unbelievable amount about your aesthetics and have not a trace of body dysmorphic disorder. If you can reasonably tell someone who's analyzing you for the disorder, a psychiatrist, like I know exactly where I rank in appearance based on normative group and you're roughly correct. So if I was to tell you that I'm undermuscled, bad news. If I'm like, yeah, I'm super jacked, but I want to get even more jacked and I already know it's exotic, you're gonna be like,

well, doesn't have body dysmorphic disorder at all. It just like wants to be super jacked. But if I was under the illusion that I'm not jacked, that would be a really big problem. Well, that's almost a distortion of reality. That's not necessarily BDD. Body dysmorphic disorder is absolutely a distortion of reality. Most anorexics think they're fat.

Well, that's why I'm saying that it's not necessarily. It is part of that, but it doesn't necessarily point to that. If I take someone who is 220, six foot tall, muscular, and they feel they're not muscular enough by consensus of the general public on average, and they still feel like they need more muscle, and they're hyper-fixated on it, it's causing them distress, anxiety, depressive symptoms. This could venture into BDD, even though they might be well aware of their percentage of where they fall in society. Does that make sense?

I don't know if it's really dysmorphia if you're truly deeply. aware of how you actually look? Well, for example, like for unrelated, but somewhat related to the topic, obsessive compulsive disorder, there's people who have insight and are aware that their compulsions are compulsions and that they're doing, but it doesn't mean they don't have OCD. Sure. It doesn't neglect. Sure.

I'd have to look into the body dysmorphic disorder to see how big of an delusion of what you look like versus reality. It's actually quite subjective and subjective not just by the patient but by the doctors perception or the psychiatrist, psychologist perception of the issue. And the reason I bring it up is because I want to not just say people are psychotic. They're vanity is getting out of control. And it does happen to people where they start feeling that they need more and more and more. And we kind of live in a society where people want more and more and more, just in general,

from like the consumerism of it all. I just think that's every society that's ever existed. Yeah. I just think we're much more focus, more access due to the capitalistic nature of it. there's more incentive for it. That's why the whole longevity sector is just exploding right now because everyone wants to live forever. You have Brian Johnson making all sorts of claims.

So the promise has always been there. And to me, vanity before, let's say 40 years ago, used to have a rate limiting step where like if you had vanity and you cared about vanity and you'd go to the gym and you would work out, there would be a rate limiting step of how much vanity you could partake in and that would be actually okay

because you didn't need to go to the gym seven days a week. You didn't need to get your body fat percentage under 10%. That's not necessary for good health, right? You would agree with that? So people would just work out, be vain about having a little bit of muscle,

about a little bit of athletic performance and they'd be happy. But in the day and age in which we live and all the options that are available in this book, wouldn't you say it's much easier now to take vanity further than health. People back in the day

just starves the shit out of themselves, man. I don't think there was healthy on days when people just worked out four days a week and were totally fine with everything. I think the same...

Plastic surgery wasn't available as it is now. The drugs are much better. I mean, you talk about how much better the drugs are now. Plastic surgery wasn't available so the people that could not get access

to the surgery that was not available had just as much dysmorphia as ever, but they were powerless to do anything about it. And so I would argue that some very large fraction of people were even less happy with their appearance because they had no ability to alter it nearly to the same extent that we do now. Whereas now, if, so every time you have a cohort of people that enter the plastic surgery realm and get to a procedure, some

meaningfully large fraction of them will be happier with their bodies than after. And so they kind of fall out of the cohort of the potential of people that were going to have a bad time. Like every round of plastic surgery that humans get every year means people get happier than they would have gotten. That wasn't happening when plastic surgery wasn't around. So if your face looked really like mine, like not great, you just had to deal with the shit your whole life. That was permanent, super mega unhappiness.

The people that go and take their surgeries way too far have 18 surgeries end up looking like the cat lady. They're very prominent, very visible extremes. before those people just swallow the other end of a gun, they wouldn't ever have gotten to that degree of hope that they could get. Yeah, I feel like you're talking about a very extreme case. And again, we're venturing off health. And we're talking about perceived happiness and subjective values,

which is always hard to measure. So, like, from the health perspective, isn't it easier to overdo vanity now and harm your health than it was in the past with all the tools that are available for the hyper-optimization? of it all. I'm trying to think of what people who searched for vanity back in the day would do. I think they were using more dangerous drugs back in the day. Like you would use DMP back in the

1930s if you wanted to lose weight, dinitrophenol, which is like how many people were doing that? Versus how many people are a lot. Versus a lot like in comparison to the plastic surgery rates. No, no, no. So to your point, because we have more options to do everything now, you can definitely get into really wacky stuff. I don't know. Hurting your health, maybe. Spending a lot of money for sure. Like, no one's going to argue about these extreme edge cases.

And I don't think it's valuable to create rules off of extreme edge cases because they're always going to be kind of outliers. Just because, like, there are people who get 20 surgical procedures that end up looking weird and that's not healthy. And we, everyone uniquely will point out and say, this is someone who's doing too much too far. But there are cases where it's not as clear. where someone has one procedure and they struggle with it for two, three years,

maybe they have one more procedure and they're still struggling and they're hoping that this vanity will cure whatever symptom that they're feeling of anxiety, depression, unhappiness. And it doesn't. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it can. In large fractions it does. I don't know that it's true.

I do. I did the research for the book. In large fractions it does. But what we're talking about like 65%. That means 65% of what? of people that go through plastic surgery generally have really good outcomes they like. And then the rest of the 35% is fractioned out, including 10%, 5% to 10% that hate that hate those out. Is that 65% per procedure or per person?

Typically per procedure. And are they counting the same person maybe multiple times if they go for multiple procedures? So that's where it gets tricky. Because it's like where the divorce rate comes in. Totally, totally, totally talking about the divorce rate. See, I'm nerfing it. It's way higher than most satisfaction for. plastic surgery is way higher than 65%.

There's also complexity in how you measure satisfaction. Is it like right after the procedure? Is it six months later? Sure. Is it years later? And when you pay for something, odds are, you'll be more satisfied. Oh, for sure. For sure. Unless you're really rich,

which is most people who got plastic surgery and then they just bitch about everything they buy anyway. So they're very ready to bitch. There is no satisfaction. Yeah, you're a plastic surgeon here is the most bitching anyone ever does. And so what we do know on a very aggregate sense is that the majority of people that get plastic surgery

or happier after the surgery at any time scale than before. That is a for sure thing, but there's lots of people that aren't. And there are meaningfully large groups of people, let's say 5% of people to get plastic surgery, which is like hundreds of thousands and millions of people, that gee whizman, every single procedure,

they don't feel any better. Sometimes they just feel worse. My view on that is how would they feel, without the surgery. The answer is typically really, really bad. They're already feeling really bad. How do you know? Because the reason they're getting surgery

is because they hate how they look. Right. That persistent looking at yourself in the mirror when you hate how you look persistently makes you feel bad, especially if you're one of those people that can't lean into other things that can't leverage family or health or anything else. It just their appearance really matters to them.

So you have like two things. Appearance really matters and they have a generally negative emotion. emotional valence, like their high probability anxiety depression, which is mostly genetic to begin with. And so if you get that plus vanity, you have yourself a toxic combination. There are absolutely ways that some of those people

can get multiple surgeries, get into fitness, and they really start to be happy with the way they look. And their vanity problem area shrinks substantially. They're still pissed at the rest they can't change, but then they just transfer their anxiety depression to other elements of their lives, of which there is an infinite amount to transfer and worry about stuff and be depressed.

us about stuff. But for other people, seemingly the problem just continues to grow. It does nothing. None of the surgeries do anything to address it. Those people are rare, but they do exist. They absolutely do exist. Selling surgery to people or any kind of procedure that enhances vanity is a guarantee that it will make you happier is a disaster. And having had one cosmetic surgery, I tell you what, man, you sign a lot of papers saying this guarantees nothing. And the way the doctors give you consults, because I had a couple of consults, dude, it's like, It's like speaking to a lawyer. I'm like, so what's it going to look like?

We can't actually tell you what it's going to look like. And I'm like, okay, so they're all doing all the due diligence. Like I've never had a plastic surgeon be like, because people think like in the movies or some shit, plastic surgeons are like, listen, we'll get you a new nose. All your friends will be jealous. It'll be a new you. You'll be happy forever.

They say the opposite of that. They're like, now rhinoplasty is very serious considerations. And you're like, am I actually getting anything? And they're like, well, 95% of our patients think it's great. Here are some before and afters. And you're like, okay, fine. What ChachyPT told me was largely true. people do actually benefit on the aggregate from surgery.

But there's absolutely a claim that is to say pushing vanity on people or getting people to express their vanity but not watching out for the toxic elements would be a giant disaster. How do you not push vanity onto people when you talk about the aesthetic revolution, when you tell people that I'm going to tell you the truth if you're ugly, you're ugly? Isn't that a form of pushing it onto people? I don't think so. Why not?

They already know that, man. Supply and demand. So if someone has insecurity, by telling them they should get plastic surgery to fix their insecurity, aren't you validating their insecurity? Never a single time did that. It's not in the book. It's not in anything I ever said. But if you're saying, if someone asks me, the last time we spoke, that if my child asks me if they're ugly or they're feeling ugly, I will tell them the truth. Isn't that validating that negative emotion? Aren't you supposed to validate people's emotions? Isn't that the thing? Well, the idea is that if you validate insecurity, the insecurity only continues to grow.

You have some choices there. You can validate the insecurity. You can try to invalidate the insecurity. Hopefully you are successful. If the insecurity is based on a real thing in the real world, you're lying to them by invalidating it. And then it will resurface as valid, and they might not like that you were lying to them.

It's like a rich person telling a poor person wants to work their way up and get lots of money. Like, ah, kid, money's overrated. Then that person gets me a lot of money, and they're like, you lie. Money's amazing. You lied to me. Why?

Like, I just didn't want you to be upset about being poor. Well, you could have told me the truth. Like, look. But the idea of not validating the insecurity is not because you are aiming to lie to them. You're saying that the value you're putting on your insecurity is toxic, bad for you, not actually helping you.

And there are ways you can improve yourself outside of focusing on your vanity. Why I say the last part. You can do both. Why say the last part? Because they're clearly a person who's struggling with insecurity. So why not just fix the problem they're struggling with directly? Because in many instances, that problem doesn't get solved. It's the minority of instances. So we're forgetting all the people we could help to focus on the people that we would not be able to help for whom the entire situation would be toxic. Say that again? So like if you just help people become better looking like they want, the vast majority of people, not all, benefit from it psychologically. So we of all the data in the world to suggest that.

And then some meaningful minority will either not improve and another meaningful minority will get worse. So in order to not want to tell these minority people, hey, don't even worry about vanity, we're risking not telling everyone else about how great vanity can be properly directed because for them actually would solve their problem.

Let me give you an example. There's a person that makes $30,000 a year and they're clinically depressed for no reason to do with money. and you're like, hey, making more money can help you out. And they're like, okay, and they try it, and it doesn't work. And now they're at Wall Street and working 80-hour days,

and they're worse off than they were before. Totally valid. But because of that concern, are we really going to tell people, like, hey, like, thinking about making more money, I think it'll make me happy. You're like, yeah, I was like, on the aggregate, it absolutely will, given that you go about it an intelligent way. Same thing with vanity.

The vast majority of people, if they look better, if they're concerned about their look, and they do steps that make them look better. They're literally happier after that. Not a crazy amount in most cases. In some cases, crazy. In some cases, they go the other way. In most cases, it's a mild to moderate boost

and sustainable happiness. I think we should be talking about that because I think we have like hundreds of millions of Americans. Don't you think our society just talks about that ad nauseum all the time when you turn on a TV it's all about vanity? Give me an example. Hollywood, fitness.

I mean, like, you can't open YouTube without getting fitness influencers showing you how fit they are. In an empowering way that tells you it's okay for you to want to be fit. Yeah. This is happening in Hollywood. Probably not.

Hollywood's more of a toxic comparison game situation. Oh, you're saying that influencers, ours doing it in a healthy way? Some of them are, some of them are not. Yeah, so I don't know how we can paint that with the broad brush. For sure. Yeah.

But is, is it good to, so I'll put you this way, there is an anti-vanity streak that I think mostly does not belong in our society. Tell me more. People who say you shouldn't

be concerned with your appearance. People who say that if you become fit and healthier and better looking, it won't make you happier. People say this kind of stuff all the time. To me, those people are inaccurate as much as the people,

people who say, just earn more money and be more attractive, they'll solve your problems. So these are just extremes arguing with each other. One of those is more true than the other. If you become better looking and you make more money, it is a more dependable way to get to happiness. Then becoming better looking and making more money is a dependable route to unhappiness. I don't think you need to choose between those two choices.

If you're communicating aggregate mass messengers to society, you have to make a choice of if this is going to be beneficial on average for people to hear. And the beneficial on average is the homeostatic message in the middle. That message being... That improving your appearance sometimes makes you healthier, live longer, better quality of life, can improve your friendships, but an overfocus on it can become toxic. That's what the book's about, except for one word. It's not sometimes.

It's most times. But it's not most times. It's literally most times. It's a way higher fraction of people that benefit from health and appearance and psychology than from vanity than people that it harms. Because if the recommendation was exercise three days a week, lift weights, mix up resistance with cardio training, watch your diet so that your numbers on the aggregate keep you somewhere in the baseline of a BMI between 22 and 25.

you will be happier is one message. And then there is the opposite, well, not opposite message, the more extreme message of there's also plastic surgery, there's also the future of genetic modification, modification, why can't I say modification? Modifying drugs and all these other things going on. That is not really tied to health. That is now tied to just a vanity aspect.

It's definitely tied to health because like Trezapotide is a vanity drug, but it's like the healthiest drug ever made. I'll die in that hill. In the United States, in this moment for this specific patient population. But it's not, again, I think about it more universally. So if you bring that drug to an area where people have a scarcity of food, suddenly it's not a valuable drug. And it's not a vanity positive drug.

But like it disqualifies most of the world then. most of the world now has at least enough food, the more than 50% of the world is now like too much food. So Tresepatide would be better for way more than half of the world at this point. So, but even just in the, so like my book is not for a global audience. It's for,

you know, modern, free world, plenty of leisure time audience. To be concerned about vanity at all is already a first world problem. And so what I would say is, I don't actually make recommendations in the book of like, you should train this much to get vanity.

and you should take these drugs. What I say, the first thing I say is if you don't care about your appearance at all, you already won the lottery. You're doing great. And I think you're awesome. And just, you don't ever have to worry about anything is crap. I think that's a small percentage of people. I think everyone to some degree has some amount of insecurity or concern.

Totally. And that number is highly influential or easily influenced. There's something other than insecurity at play, which I think is underdiscust, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. there's an upside, not just a downside. So you're looking about eliminating, this is a very typical thing from doctors, which makes sense.

Your job is to eliminate the downside and then let the patients go off into the wild. My job is to go on the other end. And so insecurity reduction is a big part of vanity increase, but there's also a thing where you could just not be insecure at all. You just want to look cooler.

You're doing it for art. Like, it's highly unlikely that most women you'll see walking around New York with purses have a particular purse they bought because they're insecure. They have a particular purse they bought because they're like, dude, I really futz with this designer.

I love the purse. There's other reasons. That's why I'm, but this book is not about art. This book is you're tying it to health. It's both. But you're tying it to health. So I feel like when you start tying it to health, you've lost the art thing.

Why? Because if someone tells me they're wearing a burkin because it improves their lifespan, it's no longer about the art. It's about the claim. No, for sure. So in the book, I basically, say, here's how vanity will make you healthier, down to some fat percent,

down to, up to some bone density, et cetera. Past that point is neutral effect on health. Past some other point is a negative effect on health, which I'm very well in. But what I'm trying to do isn't tell people do this so you can have vanity and all these benefits. I'm saying, hey, like, as much of this as you want to do, you're going to dip into a shitload of benefits and vanity. So to the degree that you're already interested

in modifying your appearance, the book is designed to give you a menu of options and saying which ones are really good for your health, which ones that really don't intersect with your health at all, which ones are like real serious helpers. So the target audience is people who have some level of vanity are curious about what options exist

and you have this menu that you can educate them on the options. And then maybe a lot of these people are like, vanity's kind of gross. I do want to look better, but I feel bad about it. it's kind of very surface level. And I want to be healthier. Who feels that way?

I haven't come across that person. I think we've all been sort of brainwashed to believe that is the case in almost all media. What brainwashes us to believe that? Man, you know, like generally people who, so even the term vanity is a pejorative. Vanity is considered a sin. Like in old scriptures.

I mean, that's beyond my level of knowledge. Yeah, it is. Right? And so vanity typically, is a thing that you're at least not supposed to outwardly say you're planning on doing. So in the fitness and health space, if you ask gym members, why are you here in the gym, not a large fraction as you would expect would say vanity? If you talk to them for more than 30 minutes, you realize almost all of them there are vanity.

People are hiding something. They have been taught as good people not to flex their appearance on others, not to be overly concerned with their appearance. Why do you think they were taught that? It's rude because it exposes the halves and have-nots sort of very raw. It's supposed, and it also exposes you as a person who is potentially shallow

and potentially thinks that how they look is the most important part about them versus a part they care about. And so people try to mute that part as much as possible. Seems pretty reasonable. Pretty reasonable. But the reality, is like, what if you actually do care quite a bit about how you look?

And then you carry around two things. You're carrying around these efforts, you make it looking good, and you carry around this whole cognitive ultrastructure of trying to make it so that people don't think you really care. And even in your own head, you're like, I care about my appearance, but I shouldn't, I don't. That's body dysmorphia. To me, I'm opening it up and being like, how much do you care about how you look? Whatever that amount is, awesome.

here is a tool guide of how today, five years from now and 15 years from now, you'll be able to alter your appearance as a turndial. However much you want to change your look, you can. There are tradeoffs at every bit of the turn dial, up until way past the middle of that turn dial, the tradeoffs are you just get like way healthier and way longer life and way everything.

At some point it goes down the dark side, but if you were just to take the American peoples as adults as an average, and you were like, we're just going to focus, we have a totalitarian government, it's going to focus on making everyone look better through fat loss, muscle gain, and let's just call it just that simple. My God, we would have to go a generation of change

before we got into the net negatives. So vanity is this awesome alignment with fitness and health for a huge fraction of people. So my idea is when they read the book, that dichotomy of like, well, I need to be stronger and healthier, but I don't want to be too focused on appearance, even though I am really focused on it, but I have kind of some weird feelings about it.

I just want to brush those weird feelings aside and be like, do you just own your shit? You want to look great, look great, be proud of how you look. And there's a huge psychological part of the book, especially towards the end, where I talk about, like, once you occupy a body that you really like

a whole lot better than you've ever had, then don't play it down too much. When people give you compliments, thank them for it. Really let the compliments hit. Because a lot of people say, they'll occupy a body which isn't great by their standards or most other people's. They'll have a flash at some point where they're like,

we have a lot of RP strength clients are like, I need to just think about this. I can't anymore. And they'll do years and years of training and diet and whatever else. And they'll occupy a completely different body that gets appraised by others totally differently and in the mirror, the most important thing, by them totally differently.

But some of them have a resistance to allowing those awesome feelings. to come in and coat their hurt parts of their brain so that they can feel like all those people who are good looking from day one. Sorry, that's the weird thing. My finger points people randomly. Oh, so I have a cough. No wonder he came to see the doctor.

Oh, my man. So basically, you know, people who've been good looking from day one, they kind of swim in the shit to begin with. Everyone's sort of, not everyone, people are kinder, they're nicer. They look in the mirror before they go to the party and they go, yeah, they just feel great. That's like, I wouldn't say that's a birthright, but as a first world right, that's a birthright.

And there's lots of people that don't have it. And when they finally achieve that look, that gunk of feeling bad about vanity and feeling like it's not something you're supposed to be proud of. And people say, oh, well, you like your body that much, you care about that much, you go to the gym that much, that's body dysmorphia. And they hear enough of that shit.

So when they look at themselves and they look damn near flawless compared to the old physique, and a deep part of them wants to just embrace looking like that, they're still resisting because they've been told for forever and really believe that, oh, but this isn't a thing you lead into. Also, you're going to get egotistical. You're going to feel like one of the pretty people now. You're going to look down on uglier people.

None of that comes along for the ride. What should come along for the ride is as your body changes and you start to look better and you look in the mirror and you start to be like, whoa, I look really good. Believe it. Believe it as much as you can. Like swim in that sea as much as you can is when you really believe that you look great, you have the opposite of body dysmorphia. You're like feeling amazing about your body and your body's looking more amazing.

Wherever that tradeoff is to you, awesome. And for most people, I have another contention that's very politically incorrect. I think a lot of people who don't like their bodies have serious psychological issues independent of how their bodies look. I think a lot of people that don't like their bodies are objectively and correctly appraising based on their software for analysis of bodies that all of us have were 99.9% the same humans. It actually is not a good body according to them. And in a way that you can't brainwash people out of. And so if you fix the body and make it look good, I think a huge fraction of people actually legitimately love their bodies after that.

Because the bodies are better. Yeah, I think like what's interesting to me is you keep pointing out that you have to brainwash people away from disliking their body. I don't think doctors do that. I think when a patient... Doctors don't do almost any of this. This is middle school shit. Yeah, but in general, when we talk about someone being vain or feeling terrible about their body,

no one's like, okay, I have to lie to this person and tell them that their worry is not true. It's just, it's reframing the focus. How would you reframe it? That your worth as a human is not tied to your appearance as much as you're putting the effort on stressing over it. How do you know them? For them. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe for them, their appearance is really critical

to how they see themselves. If it's driving them to make unhealthy decisions for them, that's where that line gets shifted. And that's how you make a lot of these psychiatric diagnoses. Sure. If it starts causing distress, dysfunction, that's what shifts something from a personality trait to a disorder. What if the shape of their body is what's causing the distress

and the dysfunction and that once they correct the shape? I think if that was the case, I think it would be a lot simpler to fix that dysfunction, and it's not the case. But plastic surgeries do that all the time. But they don't. But they do. They don't. But they do.

Because those people wouldn't go to seek therapy. Those people wouldn't go to seek therapy. Those people would be forever happy. They would get one surgery and they'd be done. That's not the reality. That's not tied to reality. The people have severe body dysmorphic disorder? No, just in general, people who overly focus on vanity.

It doesn't have to. to be a diagnosis and ICD10 classification, DSM5 classification. It's just as simple as... I think it's best when we don't discuss those technical classifications, because to actually get qualified for actual body dysmorphic disorder, it's an uphill battle. Like, the average person that hates their body is not body dysmorphic. I'm glad we're getting away from that because it really, like,

we're abusing psychiatric terminology. Of course, wouldn't we say PTSD like I just used it? We're using it colloquially as opposed to truly making the diagnosis. So I agree with that. For sure. But the reason, like, you're experiencing this scenario that does happen, where people are in the gym, and a lot of them are in the gym for aesthetic purposes, and they feel weird saying that that's their main reason. And a lot of that is due to historical factors of people who used to be obsessed with the gym and vein.

They had issues, so those people don't want to be labeled as people with issues. they don't want to come off hyper arrogant about their appearance. Self-absorbed. Yeah, self-absorbed. Humility is a valuable trait in general, whether you're talking about appearance or otherwise.

So they're trying to be more charitable in the way that they talk about their acts. And you're viewing that with a negative light, which is so interesting to me. Like, if I am really muscular, which I'm not. You are in my heart, right? Well, thank you. A muscular where it counts.

These thighs are thunder thighs. If you, I'm not really muscular. And if I was and I walked around humble and not wanting to show off my strength, that doesn't mean there's something unwell with me or I have baggage. In fact, it could be something higher level of humanity where you say, I know I am strong, but I don't have to flex this strength on people. okay with my body. There's an intermediate step there.

I love what you're saying. It's totally true. Be in body you don't like for years, maybe your whole life. Eventually, be in body that you like and be humble, even to yourself. Because you've proven everything.

You don't need to prove anything anymore. Intermediate step. Improve body and allow the humility to bake in by receiving from your, allowing and from others allowing as much positivity about your body as possible, shit that would be gross to say out loud. Because like the people that have amazing body image, genetics aside. Because genetic proclivity for mental states aside, sure.

They've heard amazing things about their bodies for forever. And so it makes sense that their default state is like they feel great about their body. And it's very easy for them to say, just be humble. Totally. but if you have been made fun of for your body for forever, or no one made fun of you, but you looked in the mirror before going out and you're like, I'm not going out,

this is ridiculous. I don't look like I should be going out, which happens to hundreds of millions of people through their lives. At the end of that, what you have in your brain as the beginning of your self image is gunk and total dog shit. And then for health reasons alone, let's say, you get a much better body.

Do you look in the mirror as that body is changing and tell yourself, oh, I guess that's cool, but I shouldn't care. And then you never get that healing? Or do you allow yourself to get that healing and go, holy shit, my body's looking great and better and better and better. I'll tell you this, at some point, you look at your amazing body enough for most people. The healing becomes more or less complete. It takes a long time.

It takes years. But at some point, like, so for example, I used to not think I was big enough, physically big enough. But like, I'm lighter than I have been. at other points in my career. I couldn't care less. I get even light in this. I couldn't care less.

Because like I filled my bigness cup. I bulked up to 270 pounds at five, six. I filled my bigness cup. It's full of the rest of my life. But if I always looked in the mirror and never like really allowed myself to vibe on that size, like a bunch of what I do in bodybuilding training is get a huge pump, pull a shirt off and just flex in the mirror. And it just shoots out these positivity vibes of like, do you look at you.

You're doing the thing. You get enough of that. You can become humble. You don't get enough of that. You're in one of two states. Having a really bad time, you have a real bad time under the illusion that you shouldn't care about it.

So what I'm saying in the aesthetic revolution is that if you care about how you look and you go on a journey to make yourself look better, you better appraise your improving look and allow all that vanity seep in, all of it so that you can believe it deep down inside. That gives you true confidence and true humility. It takes years to do that.

You don't just wipe that away. Let me give an example. You were the fat kid for all of grade school, in all of college too. Like not just out of shape, just totally like a joke. You couldn't play sports. People laugh at you.

You hated it. And then like after you finish grad school or something, you do this crazy fat loss, get retachretired in the mail or something. And then you're just a totally different person after six months. You're just straight up not fat anymore. And you look amazing.

What is the probability that you have the self-image of someone who has been, and lean and attractive their whole life. Mike, it's zero. So you're creating this essentialism, single trade essentialism that's not matched to reality. Like humans are not just the self-image of who they are based on what their friends think about their body.

Like there's so many more factors that play into this. Tons. I feel like it oversimplifies the point and waters it down because I don't feel that matches reality. Like, even if we're talking about lived experiences, I don't know in my friend group, anyone that goes to the gym packs on good muscle or has been working out since high school

that doesn't want to be bigger. Everyone wants to be bigger. Everyone wants more muscle. You don't know enough pro-bodybuilders. Well, sure. Some of us are really tired of the shit. Well, yeah. But I'm saying, in general, everyone wants,

everyone still goes to G&C and wants to get the better supplement to get bigger. The line outside longevity doctors offices are not people who are sedentary, who are overweight. It's people who want more. Yeah. Don't you think this could contribute to that or not at all?

How would it contribute to that? Because the appetite for wanting more, because being vain, you want more, unfettered becomes unhealthy. How do you fetter of that appetite? Shift the focus away from vanity. Why? To health. Dope.

Has been tried. Doesn't work super well. So failed once, no point trying again into different way. Failed way more than once. Like the idea of pushing health behavior on a, otherwise I'm caring populace. So has there ever been as obese as we are now?

So has there ever been a time in history? Well, I mean, GLP-1s. Within the last 20 years. Sure. So it's like, it's a unique population, unique challenges. I'm curious,

where do you think I disagree with you most on this book? Because I want to make sure we see I die on that. Yeah, yeah. I think there is a resistance to seeing the happy path of vanity. And I don't think I'm oversimplifying.

What is the happy path to vanity? You don't like everything about your look. You look at your body. You're psychologically healthy. You have beautiful children, beautiful family, beautiful career. You look at your body and you're like, it's like a stain on your car. You're like, ah. And someone's like, is this ruining your life?

And you're like, no. But would it be better if you looked better? Yes. So what can I do to look better? Oh, I read the aesthetic revolution's got the whole formula in the shit. Oh, you're cool. I'm not doing that clavicular eight days a week shit, but I'm going to train twice a week.

I'm going to clean up my diet. I'm going to lose 15 pounds of fat. I'm going to gain five pounds of muscle. I'm going to try a tributat. Oh my God, it works really great. A year later, I look in the mirror and I'm like, yeah, this is dope.

And someone's like, hey, do you want to look even better? And you're like, yeah. Do you want to go four times a week to the gym? I'm like, no, I have a family. We mean, nuts. And you just push them right out of the way. But when they offer you CRISPR gene editing, do you say yes, no?

I mean, I would. I don't know. So. That's it. Continue the example. Because you're saying it more gym days. Don't do more gym days. Because that to me was the rate limiting step back in the room.

Totally. So like, do you want gene editing that has an on target, off target effect of 100 to 1? Has been done in animal trials, human trials, an AI in, what's it called? Extrapulated the data. Extrapulated inside a supercomputer to say it's probably not going to screw up your body. As a matter of fact, it's almost certainly better for you. So like one of the trials.

came out recently in one of the myostatin inhibitors, and her overall health markers just went up, which is what you would expect with more skeletal muscle, right? Nobody's surprised the people that think drugs are always have a downside, just don't know how that shit works, so fine. Well, they do. So the drugs always have some kind of downside,

but ratio- Anything that has an impact has to have a downside. There are ways, there are ways that they can have net upsides. So terzapit. Of course. But net upsides are the thing. Net upsides happen usually with good targeting of the correct patient selection.

Not even. Like, so I would, I would venture to claim that almost all American adults at some dose of terseptitide would be better off than not. Period. I would be careful making claims like that. Because you're a medical doctor. You got the whole oath. I never took a fucking oath.

I can just say whatever. I want to influence, maybe buy my supplements. I don't have supplements to sell. Mike that backfired. I need a supplement company. So, that whole tangent aside, yes, everything has downsides. but the net could be super positive. Of course.

If the net is massively positive in CRISPR, whatever modality of gene editing, that you just don't have to go to the gym anymore and you can maintain way higher muscularity and way lower body fat and have longer life, et cetera. And that person's like, should I do it? I would say like you should absolutely consider it.

But you're creating this hyper fixated, perfect world scenario that, of course, who's going to say no to that? It's like you're telling me like, Mike, all disease is gone, everything is great, you don't want this? Well, yeah, but is that the real situation that's going to come? Likely what's going to happen is you're going to have a chance of growing a 16th digit. Stop.

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please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. So, okay, reasonably, like the next. Okay, let me ask you then, since you're saying that's not likely, why do the organizations that are made up of experts, on gene editing, on the study of molecular biology that are not me as a family medicine doctor or you, why are they saying we need to tread carefully and we should only do this for conditions that are

lethal that destroy someone's life? Why are they not saying, yeah, let's just make everyone have more skeletal muscle? They're not incentivized to have everyone have more skeletal muscle. To them, downsides of the technology that get a huge public media attention are cataclysmically worse than the people who would not have been having a 16th finger. So like growing a 16th finger versus somebody dying of a genetic disease that we just didn't get to. One of those is a hidden cost. The other one is a very visible cost. Almost all regulatory organizations prioritize visible costs versus hidden costs.

So like, so for example, people say we need to be really careful about age reversal experimental trials. Like you don't want to cause the next zombie plague. Cool. So like every day. Science is don't say that. That's like what dumb people like me said. Well, 16th digit mic is also, let's be honest here.

So say, you know, crazy shit's going to happen, right? It's super. Well, it's not crazy. It's just that it's unpredictable. Unpredictable shit will happen. Yeah. And no one's saying zombie apocalypse. Totally.

But bad things. But predictably, aging is the number one killer. It is the ultimate killer. Right. And so we're not safe. We're not safe with aging. And so that calculus of seeing aging as normal and docketing. and seeing anti-aging or age reversal therapies

of being dangerous and experimental is at the front door wrong on arrival. It's dead on arrival. Aging is the worst possible thing. If you're 70 years old in my ideal society and you're a cogent, competent adult, you sign a waiver. Pharma company should be able to give you whatever the fuck you want.

This is even past animal trials yet. I want to. Like, why? Because I don't want to die. Because what's worse than death? Like, as long as they have you walled off so you don't create some viral spore that goes, hits other people.

That's a realistic concern. Again, exceedingly unlikely, but it should be a concern. So when people back to- I think the concern is not that. I think it's just that in, by medical ethics, of which these are hammered into us

and perhaps make us more conservative, less innovative, it's done so in a way to make sure that we're not created, harm. I think that's a bad thing. I think that is a bad promise. So you're fundamentally disagreeing with the way health care is created. Absolutely. In the same way that our judicial system is structured in a way that we're more likely to let a guilty person out and found innocent than putting an innocent person in jail because we view that as more of a harm to letting the bad

person out. Yeah. That's how we've tailored this sensitivity of this test. Yes, I would say that's also wrong. So you prefer more innocent people in jail? I prefer the presumption of neutrality instead of the presumption of innocence. We don't know who's at fault. And then I prefer the extreme use of logic and evidence to try to conclude probabilistically what is the highest probability event that occurred here. So beyond reasonable doubt is a percentage point that's like 99.9% more likely that he did it. Civil cases it's 50.1% what is your barometer for logic super complex that has to extrapolate game theory but you got to put humans in the way for sure but but so so but the point is the putting innocent people away in jail

is a terrible thing but it should not come at the expense of all other tradeoffs including putting guilty people away in jail because if we pretty much know someone's a violent rapist murder but we can't pin him down to the shit. It's not, the presumption of innocence is a miraculous thing we should try to conserve as much as possible. But it can't go on to infinity because we let rapist killers out in the street

and the next person that's dead is on everyone's hands. Every time doctors delay allowing a medication to go into a next stage of trials, they have blood on their hands, writ large, straight up. What is the cost of doing the flip side and overdoing that? To society, the cost is difficult

to measure. Yeah, it's impossible. To an individual, it's possible, but very difficult. I mean, I don't know how you would measure that. Aggregates statistics. Because you don't know what's going to happen with your testing. So you can have two regimes. One is a more liberal regime. One is a more conservative regime. And you just follow along with the two cohorts and see who does better. So my idea, for example, the problem is one cohort can impact the other cohort when everyone turns into a zombie. The zombie thing is, I will, I will, to, I will, to your credit, very difficult to target. We should do nothing because it might cause the zombie virus. For example, my view on drugs should be that all drugs could come with labels that you buy at the store.

And the label just tells you. Prescription drugs or over the counter? Or you don't even care about this. Don't care. All of them. All of them. So no more prescriptions. No.

Okay. And so the drug has on it. Two things. One, a list of beneficial effects and side effects. And two, how long have we researched this slash what do we know about it? So for example, you could have an entire section of the store or a section of a drug aisle, which has like, you know, a label on it that says zero. Zero human years of research on this drug.

Animal trials only. But having a lot of years of trials doesn't actually mean anything. It means something. On its own. It means something. Not really. If I tell you, I studied a drug for 24 years, does that tell you anything about the drug? Good, bad, dangerous, not dangerous.

What patient population? We already talked about that on the benefits cost side of the thing. Remember two things. But that is impossible to put on a label. It's impossible to put it into a 24-page meta-analysis research paper, let alone into a label. You could whittle it down substantially. Of course you could. You're just like top five bad effects.

Top five good effects. Easy. For who? Pregnant patients? The average person. But what about the pregnant patient? That's not the average person. Totally.

What about someone who's morbidly obese and the dose needs to change? Totally. Let's all get to that. So you have this like positives and negatives and you have like how much studying has gone into this drug. Very simple call classification.

Just an example. Well, simple because it's useless. It's useful. Because if I gave this to my residence and I said using this information treat your patients, it would be a disaster. Your residents are not the target of this.

This is a consumer targeted. This is even worse. This is a biased placebo drowning audience. So if you are uncomfortable taking medications that haven't had XYZ years of human study, you would just be able to go right to the medications that have. So let's say there's a new experimental pain drug. Jernavics.

Have you heard of Jernavics? It's a new pain drug. out like a year ago, it has the same effect of analgesia as Vicodin, but it is not a narcotic. Okay. But Gernavix doesn't have a lot of trials, not a lot of humans have taken it for a long time. So you could just see like a bottle for Gernavix and you could see a bottle for Vicodin. Vigin is like 35 years of human trials. Gernavix is basically like none or very, very few, a year or something like that.

And so as a consumer, you could choose which way you wanted to go on the race. spectrum side of things. And so people who are in their last years of life or people that happen to be more balzy can choose drugs off the shelf that are like, hey, this drug, I don't care that there's only animal trials, I'm ready to take it. That way, those people take on their own personal risk and some of them pay for it. But we get tons of data on them and it ends up being the number of people that use those medications. First of all, we've completely crushed out the access issue. We're not killing people

anymore because we're keeping medications away from them. Everyone has whatever medication they want. I'll get to the context on that in a sec. But we're also making sure that anyone who wants to use medications that are only well vetted now has the information to do so. As far as the doctor, patient access situation, I would say if you go to the store and you acquire medications, and the store sells you medications, they don't want you to just drop dead, they can do several things. They can say,

requires prescription, and then their on-site doctor or pharmacist would prescribe you the drugs or not. But if you're an adult and you go in and you're like, I want this. And they're like, it hasn't been researched yet on humans.

You're like, yes, I hear you as a medical professional. I've processed this. I'm still going to make my choices. What are the downsides they tell you? Sign at the dotted line. Doctor signs, patient signs.

How do they tell you the downs? if there's been zero years of human testing. Yeah, that's one of the downsides. They'll just be like, well, so animal trials, they give you downsides. Okay. And then they're like, look, like the downside is, we have no idea if it's gonna kill you, right, where you stand.

If you say I'm good with it, I respect your right to choose and your more data points for the rest of us. Why is this important to you? Because it would radically escalate the testing and availability of modern drugs, which would save tens of millions of people from death. That's not how drug testing works, Mike. It shows. But meaning even if it happened, this would not be valuable drug testing.

Why? Because you're getting a pre-selected patient population that is excited about the drug. So whatever outcomes you get is going to be horribly biased and not valuable for us to draw conclusions. Basic human physiology is 99.9% identical among all humans. Right. So you get an incredibly high quality data set that's not perfect. You're not looking at data sets. You're also looking at subjective values.

It's not as, like, if we were. robots this would work, but we're not. We're so complex that there's so many variables here. That's why research is so expensive to do. So I don't think this even solves the problem you're looking to solve. You could do the research where you split patients up into randomized control trials at the same time as you liberate these drugs for people to do what are basically called challenge trials to themselves. They're called end of one trials, yeah. Yeah. So like, it's not really an end of one when 500,000 people take your drug every year. then you can do cohort analyses.

And then you can do cohort analyses and you can factor out for body type, height, shape, diet. So when this person walks into the pharmacy, they buy this drug, they're cool with all the potential risks. Then you want them to also agree to be tested on. They're going to get their- They're already agreeing to be tested on. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. In that moment.

You don't want them to do it. They're like, yeah, fuck, yeah. Just give me the drug. Wait, say that again? They're like they're into it. They came to you. 100%. Yeah. Or like, look, we can sell some of them the drug and not test them. We can sell others the drug at a discount and be like, can you come in for blood work every now and again? You get free drugs.

You tested this against an AI prompt and I feel it already that you did this. Because this is not a realistic scenario by any means. I came up with this way before an AI prompt. This is insanely realistic. But it's not realistic at all. Because you want people to run trials on themselves. You want some of them to be in trial. Some of them not to be in trial. Do you know what a disaster it is to run these trials? It's it's, it's desperately. hard. The complexity of bias being introduced to this scenario. Individuals having to guess what is worth experimenting versus not. Even in the age of AI, I just had a patient the other day, literally on Thursday, come in and tell me that they have a foot issue. And I'm like, well, what's the foot issue? And he goes, yeah, it's terrible. I have this plantar fasciitis. I looked it up on chat GPT, looking for, you know, potentially an injection, et cetera, et cetera. They did not have plants are fasciitis, they had subcutaneous bursitis of their calcaneal region. So it's so complicated. You're like, yeah, it's so simple. I didn't say it was simple. I said it was more effective.

You said it's so easy. You said this is realistic. So the paradigm to impose is easy as hell. Drawing out functional data from this is not, is complex. The thing is you just have like orders of magnitude more data before you have almost no data. You need only clinical trials in groups of dozens or hundreds of people. Now you have groups of tens of thousands or millions of people, all of whom have different degrees of compliance, all of whom are different degrees of anything. Why is the best nutritional research done on metabolic words? Because you have the most control. And yet you're sending people and you're like, yo, you just select if you want it, you selective, you're giving up all of the control. If we only told people what to eat based on metabolic word

research, we would have almost nothing to tell them because metabolic work research is so difficult to conclude that we know almost nothing. So outside of metabolic word research, we have all this other in vivo research, which is not valueless. It's incredibly valuable, but it's just not as perfectly controlled. And it makes it much less valuable. Yes, but if you multiply much less value, let's say it's a tenth as valuable, but the population size in that second peripheral tier is like 50,000 people. When you have 10% less valuable, you have the opportunity for people like Gary Brecker to come in and confuse the shit out of you with their 10% less valuable stuff and then never really

know the truth as an average person because there's so many voices in the space. You just go to your doctor. And what? What happens then? The doctor clears it up for you. What's probably a good decision for you? But you said you don't need your doctor. You could just go buy it.

The system works if you, so people who don't consult their doctors and take medications, I got all love for respect, do whatever you need. You're an adult. I don't need to consult you if I'm going to go and hit the, you know, drag strip and impale myself on a tree. Okay. So, like, if I don't feel the need to get a motorist's expert on racing's advice before I go gas up my Tesla and wrap it around a tree. Like, if you want to take... I think you gas up a Tesla.

What hell have I been doing? No wonder it's breaking all the time. And it smells like gasoline. It just didn't even work. That was the best thing. If I want to hit the pedal and go wrap around a tree, nobody's stopping me. And if I want to go and get a bunch of drugs

and use them myself, there is a very good argument for nobody should be stopping me. But if I'm a kind of person that accurately values medical opinion before I show up, I could absolutely ask a doctor and probably should. I would say I would recommend everybody ask their doctor,

before taking any drugs or sure. But you want them to maintain the ability to not? Yeah, like that part doesn't concern me nearly as much. What concerns me is that we have this insane system of first do no harm through the FDA drug approval process and it takes someone between five and 15 years to approve drugs. And we count all of the lives saved by the drugs

after they come out. We count all of the lives not harmed by the downsides of these drugs when they have downsides. We never count the lives that we're not saving because these drugs aren't here earlier to save lives. And so if we had a more open and free system where consenting voluntary adults could sign the waiver with their doctor and get any drug they want, no matter the degree of clinical precision

on saying what this drug is doing for now, I think we have the best of all worlds. Because the people that are brave enough and risk-tolerant enough, they act like massive scientists for the rest of us. Because look, like, I don't. I don't compare those people to scientists. I think that's a disrespect to scientists. I hate fucking scientists.

I want to disrespect. Well, that's like the people that are on bodybuilding.com forms that don't have a degree that never studied the way you studied. And they compare themselves. They go, I'm the same as Dr. Mike's PhD. I know the same. Let me clarify my point. But they're not the same.

Mike, I'm making a different point. They benefit the scientific process because they function as testing vehicles for the drugs. And they give us a marginal amount of. information that is higher than zero every time they take the drugs. And so when you have thousands and thousands of them taking the drugs, reporting their side effects, reporting their main effects, going to get blood work with their doctors, not all of them. Trash. It's not trash. It's trash. But we can take a lot of information on that. No, you can't. See, you have this notion because you're very, probably because you're very AI driven, that more information is better. It's not always

the case. More information can mean garbage in, garbage out. I stopped listening halfway through what you're saying, because I don't agree more information. It's better. You don't agree more information? It was a joke. I was using your own logic against you. Well, is it?

I just stopped halfway through listening to you because more information is not marginally useful. I'm using your own advice. It's a joke. Oh, sorry. I think more information is typically more useful. It depends on two things. Information quality, filter quality.

Information quality, if you're giving these people drugs that are real drugs, you know it's real drugs. Because like, you get something off the forums or off gray market. Someone's like,

oh, I used retachertitide and did this. You're like, how do you know it was retachretide? I don't know. The box said it was. They're real drugs.

And all these people that go get real blood work from real doctors, they're like, say, they bought this drug. Even if you can even have in a database. Oh yeah,

you bought this from Walgreens. Like you're creating so many steps, man. You're now creating a database. These steps are already happening. So they're not happening. Where is this happening? When you buy any drug from Walgreens, they know about it because they know your credit card

and they know what you bought. Sure. Super simple. They already have this information. Yeah, but who's accessing this information? That's a different, that's a different question. Hold on a second. Hold on us.

This is going to be a simple problem. You just created the most complex process. So it's already way more complex than this and you know that. No. You use certain drugs. You get screened in certain ways or you report your side effects or your mean effects in any way, including forums, talking to your doctor, being a part of real research trials. We now have these feathers of more information about you than we ever had before.

There's lots of noise, but there's also lots of signal as well. Here's an example of easy signal. We have a drug out that grows muscle. We don't know how safe it is. Thousands of bodybuilders go and buy it legally and start using it way before human trials have done their five years. And we notice in the community, just in the Reddit, chatter, no one's dying from the shit. Now, there are other drugs people take that they first

hear of the buy from. And so you would notice that in the chatter. And so all of a sudden, if you asked a doctor like, hey, I'm trying to use this drug, I know it's not super approved yet, was it going to kill me? He's one of two choices. He could be like, look, I just don't know and I'm not willing to say. Or he could be like, look, from what we've seen, from the hundreds of thousands of people that have come back and gotten blood work, it's not all. The millions took it. Only 100,000 came back and did blood work six months later. He seems to have no negative. in the book, that we can tell right now. That would be like something you could publish in a pharmaceutical company.

Like post, what is that, open label trials and after they release it, that's a real thing. And this is just a looser version of that, but with proper analytics and data sets, you can clean up that data set a ton and you get fractionally more and less useful information. I took something, I think, for some amount of time, but it was from my dealer, to your point, almost completely valueless. Though sociologically, you can at least be like, hey, look, what are people in the street saying about this? Like, oh, they're saying it kills you, but it makes you jacked versus like, by, they're saying it's great.

Like a lot of bodybuilders right now are using retatrotite. It's not approved. But almost everyone who's using it. I talked to just dozens of these people. They're like, dude, it's revolutionized my blood work. Like, it's cleaned up all my shit. My liver fat has gone. Like, I can't fucking believe it.

Like, it's so unbelievable. Look, look, I've been around a lot of new drugs and bodybuilding. They don't typically get reviews like that. Like, hey, how's Halo treating you? They're like, oh, man, I think I'm going to die soon. But I'm jacked. I don't feel good, though. So already we know like retatriat is just not killing people on moss.

That's like really important. Way more people are using it out of trials than in trials. So whatever data quality loss you experience, you can make up for with data volume if you segment properly. That's like a real thing in the real world. So what I'm saying is this, have the strict trials for sure. But also right next to them have basically open label trials for anyone that wants a shot at the title early. that way their proclivity for taking risks is like they pay the risk

and the rest of us marginally benefit by learning about the drug and the people that don't want so if you want to wait 15 years for the FDA to do what's for real shit hey by all means wait for it. I think you take a good concept like open label trials

right to try legislation when you're towards the end of your life or you have a disease. Why should it be towards the end of your life or a disease? Well yeah, it's just something you mentioned. You said if you're older than 17 and you want to try

As an example. Yeah, that's why I'm using it as one of these. Sure. I just wanted to yell at you. I'm sorry. It's okay. I get passionate too. So you have these good things, like right to try, experimentation, and of one trials

are also very important. Cohort studies after the fact, post-market surveillance, like all these things are super valuable, and we could do them better. And then I feel like you light a fire underneath it, and you're like, let's sell everything in a pharmacy with this label. and no one needs to monitor it. But if they do- I never said no one needs to monitor.

Sorry, no one needs to prescribe it. And if they choose to monitor it, they can monitor, if they don't monitor it, they do it. Why does it have to be so extreme? Because we're operating in an overturn window of conservatism, and the actual optimality for the whole system,

in my view, is often in the extreme. So like if you had a government that did 50% of massive regulations on the economy, and 50% laissez-faire. And, you know, someone said, look, obviously we don't want 100% massive regulations. That's a disaster.

But we sure don't want just 10% regulation. They would be wrong. The most successful economies do minimal regulation. It's actually really difficult if you have well-structured regulation to find out where too little regulation is a thing. It's like they thought Hong Kong was one of these places that they looked at the unemployment rate in Hong Kong,

and it was actually below what they thought was the natural rate of unemployment. They didn't even know how Hong Kong could have that little unemployment. because they had very little regulation. And so in other ways, it's entirely possible that the current system we have isn't like even nearly the best guess as to how it should be. And so a system that's substantially more extreme, and I'll own it, more extreme,

could be categorically better. And I think getting especially, so here's the thing, with AI helping in drug creation now, the timelines for drugs are going to shrink a ton from, from going from idea to we have a drug. The probability that that drug has the on-target effects we want and the off-target effects we don't want is orders of magnitude higher as a result of AI drug creation. So we have technology that by the late 2020s

is going to allow you to go from hypothetical, like, oh, man, can't we attack this receptor class to like two days later, you have a synthesized molecule in the lab that does exactly what you think, a ratio of 1,000 to 1 probability. It's not 100%, but it's close. Right now, if we have a current regulatory structure, as soon as the researcher has that molecule, it's a five to 15 year period until it appears in the market.

I mean, that's millions of dead people. That's millions of people living their lives bereft of the beauty of pharmacology to enhance aesthetics and to enhance longevity and all this other stuff. So what I see is as soon as you got that molecule and you want to put it into vials and send it all through the economy for people to try, as long as people know what they're taking, know the risks, and know the upsides. whether or not, I'm totally for a system in which some drugs, based on how hardcore they are, potential for negatives, should be only vetted by the doctor. Only the doctor can prescribe. I love that system. I think it's great. But you should be able to go to your doctor and be like, hey, what kind of shit are they just coming out with that you can prescribe me, that you feel comfortable prescribing me and I feel comfortable taking?

He's like, there's a plethora shit, right? There's this stuff we know works. If it's been out for 30 years, it's got some downsides, but we know it's not going to do anything crazy because we've already had like two generations of people take it. There's other stuff in the middle that's been out for five years. Who knows? It's great, but maybe. Then there's this other stuff that came out last week that, like, yeah, it's AI designed. It's almost certainly going to be a killer, like in the best way possible, not a literal killer.

But like, gee whiz, you know, most people just don't like to take drugs that have had one day of research on them. But if you're the guy that wants that, I think it's amazing that you should be able to do it. And to your point, maybe we can make this thing that is like super well monitored, not just totally as a fair, something like 90-10. I don't think the answer is in the middle. I don't think the answer for how. How do AI drug policy? Because here's the big downside. Let me just make the real big point here, Mike.

When you have a drug that's already ready to save lives and you wait 10 years to give it to any real humans outside of 300 people in a clinical trial, you're murdering people. Yeah. I think historically your point is very wrong. I think if all of these drugs that had 99% promise before they went to clinical trials that ended up harming people, if we gave them to, people, we would have caused a lot of harm. Yes, but how many drugs did we wait and not give to people and how many people died? Because there's always a cost. The cost is way bigger.

You have to decide what your barometer for creating harm is. Who is you? It should be the person. There's no such thing in society that's an esoteric thing. There's no such a grand society does not make decisions. It's institutions or individuals. So who should make the choice if I get a drug... When I say the government of the United States, to me, that's representative of society.

So you want Bobby Kennedy decide. like who gets what drug one? I hope not. But that's literally the case. I know. That's why I hate it. Right. So there's a better mechanism.

I agree. Get him out of office. Well, and replace with maybe somebody even more insane. Why? You could have said that when the Biden people

around and they would have been correct about him. You could have said, oh, there's no one more insane. Why? Who is that health and human services under Biden?

Who? I don't know. I don't know. You just said they were crazy. Someone who could have, someone almost certainly call that person crazy. And then we got Bobby Kennedy instead.

So your assumption that we'll get better people through government is certainly does not do well in historical analysis. But I'll tell you what does. If you look back at all of the drugs that had, that looked good in trials, but were released early or would have been released early, they looked good early in trials, later in trials look bad. If we had released all those drugs to the populace, my contention is they would have done

an order magnitude less harm than simply gatekeeping the drugs that were already good that we weren't releasing to people. Those are the silent deaths. So like Trezepotide, we now know. the GLP-1s are longevity drugs straight up through direct like older people take them and they die less.

Those drugs in some capacity were around in the early 90s but they just kind of like and I don't want to release them and part of that burden is massive regulatory structure like you gotta pay like a billion dollars to take a drug through trials.

So that would have saved like tens of millions of people had we had those drugs in the 90s it would have prevented a large fraction of the obesity epidemic straight up. I mean it could have saved like 50 million lives or something like that over the course of that time.

Yeah, like, again, this is an AI universe that you're living in, man. It's not real life. It just, it's not real life. Like the conversations that you're saying that doctor can just have with his patients, it's just, it's not real, man. Like, no one comes in as like, I'm 15% comfortable taking a risk. Like, no one talks like that. There's not how a real patient encounter works.

It's just, it's not tied to reality. It just, I wish it was. I wish it was as simple as like, okay, let's accelerate. Let's get good research. Let's get this drug out there. It's just like, that's not how it happened. It should happen better. Okay, but it's just like it's not matched to reality.

Like that's not how conversations happen with humans. What in what sense? What do you mean? Like when a patient comes into my office, they're not like, okay, I am this ex-tolerant of side effects. It's like, doctor just tell me. That's like a latent belief they have. It's an implicit belief.

They don't even think that far above it. For sure. So you would have to. Most people don't even care. You would have to explore it. My wife forced me to come. Sure. is like the patients that we,

that's the majority of the United States. And you're like, it's not for these people at all. But that's the majority of who's sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's who's in our hospitals. And then you're going to throw on top of the load that we have in the hospitals,

people taking experimental drugs, getting side effects, and then want us to be able to diagnose who's having a problem due to their metabolic condition or to this new experimental drug. On what planet, Mike? On planet Earth. Do your job.

That's impossible. You're setting up an impossible standards. I understand what's impossible about this. You have a plethora of drugs that you can recommend as a doctor. This is already true, yes? Yes. And you can make tradeoffs as to how new the drugs are, what appropriateness they have for this person.

If they're, if they approve, there is already enough data to know safety risks, monitoring parameters. But when you have zero years and nothing to go off of, totally. Now it's just a guessing game. Totally. So it's always a guessing game.

It's always a guessing game. But it's an educated guessing game at this point. It's always an educated guessing game. It's just degrees of education. So if you have really good mechanistic data, if you have really good animal data, you're already substantially more confident about the drug doing X, Y, Z, and humans

than you would be with no data at all. Do you agree with that? Yes. Okay. But that drug that you just described fails 99% of the time in humans. 99% of the time? 99% of the time.

A pharmaceutical company has that data. Petri dish research and animal research, and they trial it with humans, 99% of the time it fails. fails to have... To go through and finish testing and go into the market. Yeah.

But that's very different than saying it's like deleterious for you 99% of time. So almost all drugs you'll ever take that are randomly designed have no effect. Sure, sure. I'm not saying that they have no effect either. Totally. It's also not the same statement.

Sure. So right now... It's the hype and the understanding of that drug doesn't pan out is the answer. Sure. 99% of the time. Totally. And so as a doctor,

instead of getting a list of for sure FDA approved drugs that you can prescribe, you would get a much more expansive list of drugs that are FDA approved and then drugs that are experimental. And if your patient tells you, I want an experimental drug, you open up the side of the conversation,

which you would never have to open up to your point to 99% of your patients. They just come in like my wife says, I should be here. You measure their blood pressure. Like, holy shit, you're like a water balloon. Well, let's get you on some blood pressure drugs and here's this pamphly about eating better,

you're not going to read it, but here it is. You put them on like a ninth gen blood pressure drug, are good to go. If they come to you and they say, I want to try an experimental drug,

I think they should be allowed to do so. Yeah, that's a different conversation. That's the only thing I'm saying. But you just created a whole different system of no prescribers. You could just go to the pharmacy. Everything's written for you. We're talking about the subset of people

that come to the doctor in this world. There's another subset of people that don't go to the doctor they just go like buy stuff off the shelf. I think there is a world in which they have the exact same options. They just didn't want to consult a doctor. That doesn't bother me a ton.

They just didn't want to consult a doctor. And so that are going to take drugs without consulting a doctor. Okay. And you think that's an overall net positive? Net positive overall, almost certainly. A positive to all the people that make terrible mistakes, self-prescribing? No. But I'm super pro-liberty.

So I think So you want a more libertarian health care system? Oh yeah, by a mile. Huge lot. So are you anti-driver's licenses and all this other stuff as well? You can hurt someone else if you don't have a driver's license.

You can't hurt someone else if you take a drug that kills you. Oh, I see. So once other people are involved. And what if this drug, one of its side effects that they didn't know about was you pass that while you drive

and you kill someone? Yeah, that would be really bad. You can already do that with tons of drugs we know about. It's not in the system. Well, yeah, but it's part of the disclosure that I make that if I'm giving one of those drugs, I warn that patient about not taking it when they're driving.

Yeah, so like that would support a situation. If you can demonstrate some drugs have like an epilepsy risk or whatever, then those are the kind of drugs that in our system would be like, well, whatever, passing out risk. Sedation. If you have sedation risk, if you have drugs that we say,

okay, they have, there's acute effects could be really terrible that hurt others, then we put them behind a doctor or a doctor prescribed wall. That would make sense. I'm not like a categorical libertarian. I think it's just whatever's best for society.

So you want to see more experimentation in health care. I just want to see faster timelines from this drug works. You want to cut some red tape. Not some. I want to cut almost all the red tape because almost all the red tape is a gigantic disaster.

That's a big deal. Yeah, I think, and I can't say this with 100% certainty, because we don't know, cutting all the red tape can be equally as a disaster. I wouldn't say all. I'd say most.

Yeah, most of the right tape could be a disaster. Could be a bigger disaster. Yeah, you don't just cut red tape randomly, though. You cut one piece at a time. What is this regulation for? What is the trade-off of this regulation? Well, that's why I'm saying cut some.

Yeah, sure. But I would say like... I mean, so just to play this out, this kind of happened with the COVID vaccine. So the world was stuck. We needed some kind of vaccine to get us out of this really shitty situation. MRNA technology was existing. We were trialing it for all sorts of conditions.

We knew how it worked on a surface level. We needed to greatly speed this up. We cut a lot of red tape for starting trials, for patients, patient selection. And we ran trials, not as long as we normally would. We shortened the timelines a bit because we were, facing a state of emergency. And despite the fact that these vaccines helped, they were met with incredible scrutiny.

People hate them. It's caused so much distrust within the health care system. And you're like, let's just do that across the board. Yeah. And you don't think that's going to be more of a disaster? So the COVID vaccine has a ratio of saving lives to taking lives that's damn near immeasurable because it's by no means clear who actually died from the vaccine. You could put some numbers on it,

but it would be a ratio of what, 1, 1 million to 1 or something. Like how many people get the jab, walk out and just don't get COVID as bad versus how many people get the jab, walk out, get crazy hard complications from vaccine itself and drop dead. I mean, the ratio is insanely high in the positive.

And yet. And so, but don't get to that. I'll get to that. I never said this was a good PR plan. I said there's actually good effect. COVID saved like 20 million people all over the world. Like those are otherwise dead people

that wouldn't have been alive. So I'd say for exactly the way we handled COVID, as far as like really fast-tracking the approval, I say like, well, start doing that with everything because it will absolutely have downsides. It will have, it will kill people to do this because it'll keep people less safe from as yet untested drugs. But the number of people to save will be orders of magnitude higher than who's going to be killed for just really one simple reason. The pharmaceutical company that releases drugs, they have a real big PR situation. They're not just going to release random drugs to the, population man.

And my God, what is your... Because if they're one chance that they put out something that could be the blockbuster, build skeletal muscle, add 150 years to your life, they're done. Nothing destroys your stock value like bad news. Good news doesn't raise your stock value as much as bad news destroys it. Unfortunate, but true. Your drug company that puts out a drug that starts killing people, holy shit. I mean, as far as I checked, all the opioid manufacturers are still doing great.

Sure. So I don't know how much I take those words to heart, Mike. Those drugs were approved by the conventional system, by the way. Yeah, I know. But I'll say this. Versus all the people that were killed by opioids or the lives destroyed, you take all that amount of pain, psychological and physical that they felt and their relatives feel. You put it in one box.

And you put in another box the pain that people would have felt had opioids not ever been invented. Like doing surgery raw, having to come. have chronic pain, just used to experience the pain, my hypothesis is that would be 10 to 1 or 100 to 1 positive to negative. That hypothesis is like an opinion and everyone is entitled to their opinion. That's why I call it a hypothesis. But I think that opioids are also just really old school drugs that were made in a biotech era that was way less advanced than today.

Today we have drugs like Jernavics that seemingly have unbelievable positives of analgesic effect, but the downsides are like they're there, but they're like way, way, way less than any of the older drugs that we had. AI allows us. You know, that's what people said about opioids when they were first created. Compared to what?

The previous generation of medication. Was that true? I'm sure it was. Right, which is great. And yet, and yet. And yet what? And yet opioids destroyed. Totally.

Millions of lives. Yes, and they saved millions of lives and they saved millions of people from experiencing pain. But is that, did they save lives? How many people would have taken their own lives with chronic pain? Yeah, Mike, I don't know what the answer to that question. I think, Mike, I think, Mike, you can't do this in research.

You can't just say, I think more people. I'm not doing research right now. I'm saying, I think I think. But you're taking a stance on research. You're like, I think this would happen. But that's just like a while take. There is no way you can give a reasonable take on them. That these medicines saved lives?

They saved more lives than they harmed. That they took. I don't know about that. Did they, on aggregate, reduce the pain that, was experienced, I would say probably. I mean, yeah. They're a pain reliever. That's not an unusual thing to say.

But that's a big deal. Because without them, there is no pain relief. Yes, there is. There's other medications for pain relief. Without those, there's no pain relief. Without those what? Like, go back enough generations, you don't have pain relief. Sure.

The first pain relief drugs were largely useless and largely didn't have side effects. Then you had this era. The reason I'm not anti-pain relief. I'm anti-pane relief lackadaisically. I'm saying like, we don't just, put out medication. Even when it's regulated, look at the disaster of the opioid epidemic. So, like, now you're like, oh, yeah, just do it more free. More free. I do believe that. Like, if opioids weren't regulated, do you think we'd be in a

better place right now or worse? With opioid addiction? Yeah. I'm not sure. The status of, so, like, we see this with illicit drugs. When we legalize illicit drugs, they seemingly don't seem to do more harm in society. That's not true. That's, it's, it's, there's a very big band of distribution. So like sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Alcohol during the prohibition gave birth to organized crime and killed a bunch of people with poisonings from bathtub alcohol. After that, it did a lot of harm, but arguably less harm than pre, than during prohibition. So simply making something more regulated or more illegal doesn't have like a one-to-one relationship with whether or not it's going to have aggregate social effects that are more negative

for more positive. But that's like saying all rules are good or all rules are bad. Well, no, it depends on the rule. Yeah, I think some people think, like, it's better to regulate than not. That's just, that's not always true. Right. Because stupid regulation is stupid regulation. Right.

Just like more data isn't always as good if it's garbage data. Yeah, so my contention is that it's not all the data's garbage, right? Like, for a better earlier example. But for the opioid epidemic stuff, there are definitely drugs that are so dangerous have so many crazy side effects.

There's a more compelling case for a more restrictive regulation, that is not all drugs. And at the same time, if someone is coming to a doctor saying, I want a new experimental opioid, and they're told about the risks, and they accept them as a human adult, I think because of a respect for human agency, we should more times agree to give them that drug and monitor them than we should to restrict them against their own. Yeah, I think it's just, I think the reason why it doesn't happen, I think it's more of a practical issue than a rule where anti-experimentation.

I think it's just like who's monitoring them, who's paying for that monitoring, who's capitalizing on the monitoring, how strict is that monitoring? Like all these questions need to be answered and I don't think they have clear answers right now. You could easily have clear answer to these. There's just not a lot of people are trying.

It's not that easy. I think it's that easy. I'll tell you why. Because the biggest reasons why we don't have the system is because of human intuition combined with incentives of corporations and governments. if you're a megacorp and all of your other competitors have to do the same FDA hustle,

you're in a level playing field. And so you're not super incentivized to try to get drugs to be approved faster because your competitors get the same approval. And maybe you're a bit older, big bigger of a company a bit more sclerotic, you're not a fast startup. So to you like getting drug approved much faster,

maybe it's not the greatest idea in the world. And most human voters that architect this policy at a base level or through various like elected representatives have an intuition of better safe than sorry. That is not a correct intuition at face value because safety doesn't mean that you're doing okay. It means you're not being hurt by this one thing you know,

but you're being hurt by these ten other things you know about, just don't do anything about, or by these other things that you don't. I think in much of society, we have over-regulation because people can see visible safety as a good thing, but miss out on the benefits of more freedom. I think that happens almost everywhere. It's a very medicalized take.

And honestly, I think like even the aesthetic revolution feels like a medicalized take. It's like taking the vanity and medicalizing and saying there's a medical solution to your problem. And I don't know if we can medicalize our way out of our current situation. Which situation?

Obesity epidemic, unhappiness, teenage and adolescents, body image issues, which now used to be a girl's issue, now is becoming a boy's issue with our friend clivocular. I think you can medicalize your way out of all these with sufficiently powerful drugs. I think if you get people enough high throughput, very high magnitude of effect,

weight loss, anti-hunger drugs that have health benefits and also are very well tolerated, you can cut entire giant fractions off the obesity epidemic. Already in evidence, by the way, already happening. I think if you give people substantial muscle growth drugs, you can fix sarcopenia in one generation. I think that if you give people a very powerful anti-depressive anti-anxiety drugs, I don't get into this in the book, but that's another one of my very wacky ideas. I think that what AI will give us, one of the many things that will come out of that cornucopia,

are advanced drugs for treating anxiety and depression that have an order magnitude more benefit and an order magnitude less downside than modern drugs, which are already decent. And I think that's going to treat way more symptoms of anxiety depression and make that situation way better in obesity than almost any deeper sociological dive that you can do.

Because I honestly think a lot of the sociological attempts at treating anxiety and depression are assuming something that is not an evidence and that it is humans in their natural state will have a very normal, sorry, but normal is the wrong term. Humans in their natural state, the idea goes, do not have anxiety and depression.

I think humans in a natural state, 50% of us are miserable. Just because evolution built us, cobbled us together and I'm like, good enough. And I think with pharmaceuticals, and for sure with generic engineering, these are the things that will eventually heal almost every aspect of the human condition.

Advanced pharmaceuticals, and especially genetic engineering. In the mid-2030s probably is when the regulatory pipeline will get to it. It'll make us anyone who takes these drugs way happier, way calmer, way less anxious, way leaner, way more muscular, way more everything that is good.

Because the fundamental core reason why most things in a particular human or bad is simply because they just don't have the right brain. chemistry and pharmacology and genetics in order to make things be awesome. I can't. I wish it was that simple. It's not simple at all.

That's why we need AI to take care of this massive problem of complexity. The problem is AI does it work unilaterally. It requires humans. It requires governments. It requires funding. It requires water. It doesn't require water in any more than any other institution. As a matter of fact, much less.

The restaurant industry is orders of magnitude more water hungry than data center. Right, but restaurant industry needs to feed people. Data centers need to provide cancer cures. Well, if that's the only thing they're providing. They provide everything else, too. They are the reason they're also the reason why people are creating AI videos of the seal wagging its tail. Yeah, because all people at restaurants are hungry and need sustenance, right, Mike? Mike, I said all.

Don't say sometimes. Yeah. Well, first of all, yeah. Most people at restaurants shouldn't be at restaurants. All people should have sustenance. Do you agree? Absolutely. Restaurants are not required for that at all.

Every single restaurant is a luxury good because grocery stores or even food distribution networks, you should just be able to go to the Cisco food system. Why are you defending AIs if I'm attacking it? It requires water. But the water thing is a giant scam. But it's not a scam that's perpetuated by the Chinese government, by the way, in order to try to get us to be against AI. What scam did I just put out?

The water situation. Does it not require water? It requires way less water than almost every other industrial process. So bringing that up is bringing up like a thing that's just not true about the world. But it is true. It's like saying there's a big problem

with women that are too tall. You're like, women are shorter than men on average. Where are you saying, well, there are some really tall women and that's a problem because they can't get into cars? But it's that big of it. Women being too tall in society is exactly the same kind of problem as AI data centers taking too much water.

It's nothing you would bring up at face value. It's not. What is the percentage of women being too tall versus AI consuming water? Nominal. Nominal in what sense? It's not a big problem in the sense of like women being too tall is not a crushing problem for society.

It's not our first hundred. It's not a first thousand problems. AI data centers consuming water is not in our first hundred. It's not in our first thousand. Who said it was a problem? Well, you brought it up. It's a cost. I didn't say it was the cost.

I'm being a dick, but I'm being a dick for a reason because this shouldn't even be a discussion in between two rational people. I've also seen people discuss how it's not even clear how much water AI is using because the way that they describe it is based on a single query as opposed to the work that it required to get the single query answered in the first place. True or false? True if you don't look into it. False if you look into it.

Like all of this is very readily. So it's just false you're saying. It's readily available data. Okay. We can give you an amount of water that the AI takes. to give you an answer that includes pre-training and includes running the entire internet for 30 years before to get all the data into pre-training.

Because I believe Sam Waltman gave the answer, but he neglected to include the pre-training. There's so like, then he, if he included pre-training, you could accuse him correctly of neglecting to mention all the data center water and personal computer water and people doing research in the library and drinking water that went into feeding all the information

to the internet in the first place. So like if you draw that back out enough, it never ends. Like you could just be like, well, what about the water it took to form the earth? Like, it's all earth people. So Sam Altman almost certainly answered a concrete correct thing here. He just didn't backtrack it there. When we say how much water does a restaurant take, we don't include the entire industry that builds restaurants in the water.

We're like, I guess, okay, well, what about that industry? Well, the concrete industry takes a shitload of water and they're buttressing that. So there's this huge tendency in AI to try to find. the bad thing and be like, this is the bad thing. And it's insanely biased and usually just flat out long. So you're saying AI is not using disproportionately more water than other technologies. It's using disproportionately less water than other technologies.

And it's not, there's no, like the claim that it's, uh, impacting our environment negatively is also overblown. It's insanely overblown. That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. Going back to what I was saying earlier, what's, where do we land on that? AI. No, not about AI.

is not just a standalone situation. It needs researchers. It needs people to test the drugs and all that other stuff. What I'm saying is if we let AI cook up enough, really expand it, build way more data centers in a sustainable way for the environment, which is not hard to do. It's known stuff. What ends up happening is our understanding of the human body and of drug interactions will go like skip up, up, up, many orders of magnitude. To get us where?

To get us to the point where we have drug candidates and gene editing candidates that wipe out entire categories of disease that wipe out. So for example, there is currently a drug that is a vaccine for all coronaviruses, period. Holy shit, that's awesome. If you think about it long enough, you realize that like something that

gives humans immunity to all viruses is entirely hypothetical. You have an insanely intelligent system fighting our system that's really dumb. Like viruses are stupid, like by definition, they just don't do a lot of information processing. And so it is possible to just win the war against viruses entirely.

It is possible to win the war against bacteria. We've won wars by, we won the war against polio. We won the war against a ton of diseases. So it is a continuation of this massive trend of public health in which we're vaccinating more and more people against more and more diseases. What AI can do just for vaccines by itself is going to be seen in five years from now as miraculous. For one really simple reason, the biggest bottleneck we have currently on how to figure out what drugs work or not is the number of very smart researchers in the field of drug discovery.

Like there's probably like thousands of these people, which is sad because we would like benefit from billions of them. In AI dentist centers over the next, that I say that weird, AI data centers over the next few years. years, we're going to have billions of instances of super genius researchers in the cloud. They're going to be able to work on not just drug discovery raw like testing drugs, but understanding deep systems and genetic interactions with a human body, such that they can design vectors for changing your genes or for drugs that have a thousand to one benefit to cost ratios compared to today's drugs. And then a generation later, which could be six months, 10,000 to one, and so on and so on.

And medicine changes qualitatively. I, like, have, like, three phases of medicine that I just invented in my head a few weeks ago when I was high on drugs. And I'm sharing this with you in the world now. Hello, hello, world. Phase one is drugs that you take if you're really fucked up, but they have crazy side effects and everyone knows it. Your parents are like mine, Russian, right? They've only been in Russia that was the first phase, right? So, like, if you're like, hey, I'm voluntarily taking drugs to better myself.

They're like, are you crazy? They just try, your parents are the same as mine. They just try to take as few drugs as possible, right? They just like, you try to be like, hey, take this for the cold. I think my dad always pushes antibiotics on me. Is he a doctor, doctor? So my dad's like a physicist or whatever. So he was,

maybe it's different. Yeah, but so, dude, but you know a lot of Russian people. Like from the old world, they're like, like you're not putting drugs in my body. 100%. And they, you know, there's some truth to that. That's phase one. That's where a lot of people build their heuristics on drugs.

Phase two is a phase we're sort of getting into now, have been in for some limited drugs for a little while is like it's 50-50. Like if you're a healthy person and you're going to take this drug, it'll probably be better for you in some ways. Worse than others, it's just not convincing. A good example is like, imagine you just gave random people blood pressure drugs, random Americans.

Like it's probably true that most Americans could benefit from blood, but not all. Like, very, like, muddled. Not like old school drugs. We're like, dude, unless you're dying of the plague, you don't want to take this drug. Trust me, it'll f*** up. So it's like drugs like surgery. You know, like you don't randomly go volunteer for surgery. So that's phase two.

Well, unless you want plastic surgery as recommended. Right, but yes, exactly. But then, but it's still sort of phase two where it's like, there's a lot of shit that can go wrong in surgery. The 2026 Chevrolet tracks is the stylish SUV for those on the move. And with the standard Chevy safety assist package, you have the backup to handle every turn with confidence. The 2026 tracks.

Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. We're entering now and with AI will enter like crazy phase three, which is drugs you're better off taking than not with such powerful positive effects that the side effects end up being like, whoa, they're way smaller. And it's kind of weird for you not taking them. Tersapotide is a perfect example

of an early version of a drug. Like, yeah, it's not perfect. It's got all the downsides. But man, like most human, most American adults, especially that are overweight, would almost certainly be better on some dose of Tresepatide

than no dose of Tresepatite at all. And there's reams of data to back that shit up now because I used to get tons of shit for this two years ago. Now it looks like, okay, it's an anti-cancer drug. Have you seen the new cancer stuff? Yeah, the 30% drop. It's insane.

I feel like it's a lot of it. It's insane. I think where we see the cancer rates have gone up over the last 20 years and where we see the decreases in GLP1 cancer improvement rates is simply the weight. That's been tested. It's not all weight mediated. It's part. but terzapotide has like 10 non-weight-mediated health effects.

They're unbelievable. Neural inflammation reduction, systemic overall inflammation reaction. And how does that happen? What's the mechanism by that? Not all these mechanisms are well known, but we know they work. Well, is that because the weight?

How do we know it's independent of the weight going down? Because when you run the stats on the people who lost weight and lose weight and the people that hit the endpoints in the trials, a shitlet of people that didn't lose any weight hit the amazing endpoints for blood pressure and all these other things. By the way, cardiac outcomes, blood pressure. There's a whole laundry list of shit this thing does. And now cancer stuff, addiction, control,

impulsivity, et cetera. And so we know this in two ways. One is just some people get the benefits, don't lose any weight. And also you can do not so advanced statistics. We see how much weight did people lose and how much does that correlate with the benefit they received. And it's very not one-to-one.

And there's tons of cohorts of people that have lost not. Food selection. Oh, for sure. Well, so like, Mike, this is where my expertise gets And you tell people to eat various things and they fuck don't listen to you hardly at all. Well, if food becomes less noisy to you, you'll make different choices.

I wish I was, I wanted to agree with that, man. Typically just eat less. Like one of my things that I do is try to get people who are on GLP ones to like eat better. It's hard because they're like, I can just eat a slice of pizza instead of two

and they're like, before they would down a bucket of wings and now they're not doing that. Mike, but now it's half a bucket of wings, which is a win. Systemically is it's totally win. Yeah. But we, so we know very well through all these statistical techniques that these drugs have

non-weight mediated benefits, right? But all to make a point that this is category three, AI is going to fill category three to the brim. That's super big deal. And I think getting people to see that as a super big deal. And here's why. Because a lot of people still reason about drugs as if they're phase one or phase two. You only take them if you're,

you're dying, or 50-50, there's lots of downsides, lots opposite. They're not used to this third phase of drugs. Well, what you're talking about is this is, I mean, phase three is vaccines. Vaccines are absolutely stark right in phase three. Because there are a medication that's given to healthy people. Mm-hmm. So that's your phase three, that you're giving something to someone who's healthy. Yep.

And I think we do that in health care a lot. I give patients that are engaging in high-risk sexual behavior prep. Yeah. Phase three. So let me ask you a question. I don't know enough about PrEP. This is a person who's disease-free, who has no asymptomatic. Does PrEP like...

Reduce his HIV transmission. But does it have, like, gnarly side effects or anything? NARly, no, because so many people take it regularly with no issue. So it is one of these drugs like... Face three? Yeah, it's also, but so prep is also contextual drug. Like, it's not just like you're living in the world. Like, if you're engaging in risky sex, prep is a great idea.

If you're not, so it's say it's phase three for those people, phase two for everyone else. Or like if you just took prep randomly and weren't having illicit sex or whatever, unnecessary risk. Unnecessary. But like also, but it's not like prep's not like a phase one drug where it just like, dude, you're going to be doing some real gnarly side effects straight up. Like, right? So phase two, phase three depending on context.

Vaccines, absolutely phase three, right? AI is going to drop out so many phase three drugs that I think people who view drugs and look, I don't know what population of people you see in your practice. The humans I see in the real world, especially older folks who need these drugs the most,

entire fields of these people are anti-drug on principle. Think of like COVID vaccine deniers and just anti-vax people naturally. We need to do better messaging, maybe, but singing the praises of these drugs telling people they're coming is a great thing.

I think there's like some loopholes in there too because it's not just, there's a lot of politics that gets involved. Let me give you a perfect example. I know people who are anti-vax that'll take Chinese bathtub peptides. Yeah. And so they're clearly not operating

on like logical risk factor situation. They're operating on political kind of stuff. So that I feel. But there are other people that won't take the bathtub stuff for sure. And you can't convince them like, oh, it's peptides, it's great. They just won't take.

take anything. I think those people, if they have that... Aren't you one of those people? On what? On as who's not following this, like, very clear logical pathway? Which pathway? Well, the pathway that I'm talking about is you're a strong advocate for health, and yet you do a lot of activities that are, you say outwardly very toxic to your body. Yeah, but I know about them. I'm not under any illusions. I know lots of people who will not take front line medicine. So insight removes that dilemma from you. By definition, it removes the dilemma, but it doesn't, I mean, I still pay the cost. What is tragic is when people think they're

doing the right thing, but they're not. I know I'm doing the wrong thing in some sense. I'm making a logical trade-off myself. There are, I know lots of older folks that will not try terse appetite, even though they're diabetic and they're overweight. It's indicated like crazy. The doctor's like, here's a coupon. It's free. And they're like, nope, I don't use. I don't use. You. I don't use. drugs and they literally tell me I'm gonna do this naturally I'm gonna lose the weight myself Mike like we all know how that works on aggregate it's not great and you want to take that away just the beginning I what I want to do is communicate with people to encourage them to see that through AI especially terseptitite is just the hint at the beginning

that the drugs you'll see in the late 2020s early 2030s you're gonna be like I don't know and what you should really be thinking is oh holy shit I should talk to a doctor see if this is a good thing because the doctor if you go now to a doctor about terseptopatius And you're like, I'm diabetic, I'm overweight. He's like, yes, yes, let me give you a good screening. And then of course, yes, this is why we built these drugs. But a lot of people will go off and be anti-drug because they don't believe in progress, because in their lives, they haven't seen any evidence of that or they're just not updating

their prior beliefs. And I think that's a big deal. And so there's a little bit of that in the aesthetic revolution book where it's like, if we have drugs in the future, which are going to be exercise my medics, do you know about exercise my medic drugs? I mean, I'm familiar with the concept. That's like a legit thing.

And so I get a lot of pushback. I mean, the American Chemical Society, very outwardly stated, we're putting the cart before the horse when it comes to those. Because a curious society to make a statement on that. Because, you know,

like you would think it's more physiology than raw chemistry at that way. Well, not yet. Yeah. There are some pretty decent exercise my medics. nothing too crazy. They are inevitable. When they show up,

I want people to be like, oh, yeah, this is a thing I could take instead of saying things like, well, I should be exercising naturally. Well, I can't say if I'm pro or against these things

until I see the data. What about hypotheticals? What about hypotheticals? Let me give you a hypothetical. If you give me in a miracle world, I want the miracle world. What I'm saying is the miracle world is coming.

I would love that. Yes, but. I just have yet to see. see a miracle world ever. So I'm skeptical, and I think that's reasonable. Compared to what, though? Because we live in a miracle world today compared to the world of yesteryear. Compared to 100 years ago, this is absolutely a miracle world.

I'm trying to think of what miracle innovation has happened in my lifespan that I consider a true miracle that has been all benefit, no harm. And I can't find... Oh, all benefit and no harm is not really. That's what you're promising me, Mike. No, no, no, no, I never said it. You're like, they replace his exercise fully with no home. Exercise has harms and these things will have harms.

What are the harms? But they can do roughly the same cost benefit ratio as exercise. Maybe even better because you don't have to break your risk. That's not a no harms. That's of infantasmally small harms. Okay. Okay. Let's back it up.

I have yet to see a miraculous innovation that has infinitesically small harms. Amazon. In your lifetime, Jeff Bezos found in Amazon. It is a miracle institution. It just gets you things that you want. I don't find that a miracle. But that's just because... I find it as a luxury, I rather than a miracle.

It is a miraculous thing, isn't it? It is not really a luxury because, like, it really is like getting people all the stuff they need and want all the time. It's like a fucking utility at this point. The eh is entirely emotive. It's just like it's not a miracle by my standard. Because humans are taking... We take a lot of stuff for granted.

Uber, I'd say that's a fucking miracle. A guy giving you a ride home for money doesn't feel like a miracle. How does he know you need a ride and where you are? My cell phone. I could have called him. Yeah. I don't know. They created like a technology that doesn't feel like a miracle.

Most of these things don't feel like a miracle. But this exercise memetics thing is a miracle if it happens. The day after it happens, it won't feel like a miracle to most people. You'll have a great body. I think that you can call a car service versus you can summon one from your phone be an app is a smaller jump than you don't need to exercise anymore because there's a pill for it. Yeah, maybe. That's my logic on it.

Yeah. I could believe that. Man, calling a car service. Where would you store the number and stuff like that? In your phone book. On your phone book, yeah. We had one underneath my building in Bay Ridge that I would occasionally take. Yeah, yeah, that sucks.

That's like as much effort as working out. You gotta get the phone by God. I don't know. It's heavy. The exercise my medics situation. I'm struggling when I exercise, especially these days. For sure. But look.

And I need help, by the way. Exercise. Can you find me some motivation? I don't know anyone that does any of this kind of stuff. Not my area. If you have a situation in which you have muscle growth drugs, weight loss drugs, exercise my medics, and they're all really safe and really effective. I want the last thing that prevents people from.

taking that to be regulatory malfeasance. And the also last thing to prevent that, second last thing, to be people's attitudes towards drugs that are outdated or come from moralistic assumptions that they're not entirely have thought through. So people say, you think RFK should resign as well, because he's kind of fueling that phase three hatred right now? Clumian? Well, RFK's anti-vaccine.

Right. So how do you think he's going to feel about your drugs? So curiously, I think probably positive. Because he's like pro-peptides. Isn't that weird, Mike? Is he pro-peptides? I don't even know. Oh, yeah.

He's pushing like peptides. He's like excited about it, but he's not doing anything. No, no, he's put, dude, he's pushed in a situation where there's like 12 peptides that are like currently rapid vetting to be like approved for much faster use. That sounds lovely. I guess. But like the anti-VAC stuff is like mentally ill. And so it's highly inconsistent.

I think it reflects, he's like reflecting the, like he's very democratic in the sense that there's like, a shitload of Americans, tens of millions that think that RFK has the exact vision of how they would do the drug thing that they do. Like a lot of people are simultaneously pro-peptides and simultaneously anti-vaccines.

Well, yeah, like if I just went on Fox and Friends, and I did a segment on peptides. and I didn't take a stance for Gents. I just said before I make a recommendation, I'd like to have some data to make the recommendation to a patient. So right now, how people are getting them from these great market websites and stuff, I don't think that's great.

I think it's dangerous. That's it. There was no other statements made. So it's a very conservative hit, even for Fox News. And the comments are all like, is this the same guy that recommends vaccines? What a piece of shit.

Yeah, for sure. These are folks that are not like familiar with science, a ton, and statistics and vetting and things like that. I guess I take the opposite perspective on peptides, which I think, like, it's great that we have them, use as many as you like, report the effects back while. To who, report them to who?

Whoever you like, even Reddit. More data is better than nothing. Because I'll tell you this. You can absolutely, so like, I'm in the world of like steroids and stuff. No. What people, no way. What people say,

about steroids and forums isn't that a nutty bro. Natty bro. What people say about steroids in the forums is not zero value information. It's valuable. It's not all true. There's tons of exaggeration. But the forums have pretty much figured out

which steroids are really gnarly and toxic and you wanna do less of and which ones are not so gnarly, not so toxic and if you wanted lots of steroids, you can do. And so I think every kind of feedback is potentially valuable feedback. I think we should be studying peptides more, of course. But if it's this gigantic clinical pipeline, then that's a bit tough because, holy shit,

who's gonna pay for that? Raising the costs of studying something exorbitantly is, again, it helps the pharmaceutical companies that are already giant and incumbent. It's really bad for startups, and it's really bad for people using drugs like peptides that are already pretty well vetted in animal trials and a lot of well vetted in human trials,

just not enough human trials, let them go. Well, that's why the NIH would be really helpful because they historically fund trials that are not, hyper-profitable but can do a lot of good. But when RFK cuts the budget by billions of dollars and flyers scientists, it's a pretty bleak future for scientific... Like, you're talking about all this research that needs to be done and valuable different ways of doing research

and you're very optimistic about it, partially because of the technological aspect. I am not as optimistic because this past weekend was the conference at the American Diabetes Association or American Diabetic Association. I don't know, the exact name of the organization, ADA. And there were members of the organization, who are high profile, were handing out research articles about how the federal government is harming research, the research environment,

scientists are leaving, they're losing their grants, and RFK is killing the research community, and they got arrested. And it was like a very big deal that this happened. And there was tremendous outcry from the ADA's members. and everyone's saying, how dare you, like, silence researchers that are trying to advocate for good because our current government is harming the medical research environment. So that's the world I function in. And then working with the patients that you're describing in many of these scenarios.

And then I have you sitting across from me who's like, we're going to solve all this, Mike. There's going to be so much research and so much testing going on. I just don't know how. I know how. you build replica systems of increasingly more advanced life, like macromolecules and interactions, organelles and interactions, eventually you build a digital cell. Once you build a digital cell,

and you're well in your way to figure out how shit works, and so the drug candidates that come out of digital cell testing are going to be orders of magnitude more spot-on and orders of magnitude less likely to cause harm because they've already been tested against something like a human organism. And in that way, because that ability to do that is nearly guaranteed by AI. And the way the scaling works is like, we'll get there eventually. Probably not in so long.

Once these drugs start coming out, the real question is only like, how long does it take for all of these drugs to filter out and be approved through all the weird regulatory stuff? is it an RFK? Is it a pro-liberty, pro-fast-track person in charge? Is it a leftist person, not like RFK, but super clamps down and make sure all these drugs are really extra doubly vetted, now it's 30 years to get to the FDA?

That is a determining factor there. I think there are also ways in which that might be fast-tracked anyway. I'll tell you why. All that drug design stuff is happening in a bunch of other countries as well. AI is going to be so commoditizing of that, It's going to make it so much cheaper. Because if you run the models in like a data center, it's not that much money compared to running real human trials.

So I think, like, for example, China is currently developing a bunch of drugs. And they're innovating on drugs, like, measured in some ways faster than the U.S. is currently. Because they don't have the same regulatory bottlenecks we do. They just kind of yolo the shit. And then it just appears on the gray market. I think if enough really effective Chinese drugs appear in the gray market, it'll cost the American pharmaceutical system enough money by like,

well, people aren't buying our shit because arts, out of date now that the federal government is going to alter its stuff to make it more rapid to approve. That's why I'm super optimistic about it. Not only is the AI for sure almost giving us the power to do this in the near term several years, but other countries, especially China, with maybe not as much of a giving a shit about their citizens factor, which China's apt to do. One of the silver linings in that cloud is that they're just going to put out cures and people are going to like, man, China already made this shit. And then American companies and American regulatory institutions are going to be like, we're just going to get out

competed like crazy and we can't have this. And so we need to like take these 15 years down to like three. And then I think that means my back of the envelope bullshit worthless calculation is that sometime in the early 2030s we're gonna see like really crazy revolutions in medicine where we're gonna entirely zap entire categories of disease out of existence, compressing like 100 years of medical innovation into like five or 10.

I think it's nearly inevitable. I'm so skeptical, Mike. I believe the term is cynical. Skeptical. What's the line? What's that? What's the line between cynical and skeptical? Cynical has more of an emotional texture of pessimism.

Skeptical is something on the grounds of literal logical analysis you think it is unlikely. I think there's too many variables that we can't predict that throw the entire prediction on its wayside. Like what? Like right now, all these companies, Open AI, whichever one you want to take a stab at, they're all functioning at a multimillion dollar loss. And all it takes is for the banking collapse of 2008,

and all of a sudden people need their money, and now Open AI doesn't have any money. So what? It's not going to work. Why wouldn't work? Because it needs money to run. Yeah. So you just do like FDIC receivership.

None of the GPUs, none of the supercomputers get burned. No one takes them apart for parts. All of the staff that built these models and all of the insight on how to build these models is exactly at the same level. Open AI declares bankruptcy. Then XAI or Anthropic or Microsoft buys all of its assets at a discount. And the progress goes completely as if it never happened. So companies go out of business all the time. entire industries have shakes,

and then they just self-correct into this seeming arc of progress that we see in scientific discovery. No industry is functioning at an exponential rate of YOL as AI is. I mean, that's what the internet did. Social media beat that trend. I mean, what is internet as a business?

There's a bunch of stuff in the internet. That's what I'm saying. So internet data centers, personal computers, the smartphone revolution, huge exponentials on all those. Social media, massive exponential. Yeah, I mean, where's Nokia now?

I think Nokia's still a company now, aren't they? Didn't they just go bankrupt? So let me ask you a question. Nokia, having not done well because they clowned on the iPhone interface and then they never got to catch up, them going out of business seemingly like didn't materially impact the shape of the curve of how fast cell phone adoption occurred. And so when you look at entire industries

and entire economies, the amount of perturbation inside one company is massive. The entire perturbation inside when industry is way smaller because they averages out. Perurbation of an entire economy is very low on the aggregate. And you have other competing economies in the world alongside with that. So one thing that Ray Kurzweil, who's like the founder of the idea of the more or less the singularity that all this stuff is by the 2040s, the machines are going to be so much smarter than just going to be cool shit everywhere, one thing he observed is that even world wars and mass famines and entire dark ages don't materially affect the average shape of the curve of progress into how quickly we discover, how quickly

we're doing a lot of things. One of them is improving our aggregate intelligence. So betting against AI being 10 times smarter within the next year or two is like probably one of the worst bets anyone could ever take. Maybe they'd be right for like a year or two. China starts World War III or whatever. It'd just get right back up to the same curve as far as almost every data point we've ever collected. So actually, optimism is data driven. And if you think back to any other time in

history that was on aggregate better than this, you will see no other time in history better than this. And because it's demonstrably exponential and because we already know the power of AI, predicting things like, man, drug discovery is going to go through a crazy revolution in the next five years. And to me, it's like the safe bet. The not safe bet is to say something will go wrong that will be so cataclysmic that it will delay or retard to this entire process completely. Yeah, I just don't know if humans are ready for it. They don't have to be ready for it, man. I'm going to take this one right.

I can be waiting for somebody to ask me this shit, Mike. You fell for the trap. I didn't even ask a question. I know. Isn't that the best? I'm completely delusional. This is my delusional arc. Just let me have this, okay?

When people say we need to prepare for AI, we need to prepare for super intelligence. We need to prepare for AGI, artificial general intelligence, like as good as human worker. we need to prepare for this bio revolution. There are ways in which that is true. Like the average person will get the ability to sequence a bioterror virus like next year. We need to prepare for that for sure.

But in most cases, we don't need to prepare for it at all because it's the good thing. Like if you've cleaned up your house and you have all the party hats and all the food is ready, what do you need to do to prepare for the best people in your life coming and having a good time with you? Nothing. As a matter of fact, you just need to hope they show up faster because that's when the good times really start. Now, if you were inviting tigers and lions into your home, you would need to really fucking prepare because you would need to have like shotguns and electric fence and all this all the crazy shit. Because AI is going to be such a massive. So AI is just best friends.

It's going to be massive net good. Just best friends. Like best friends and one of them has like every now and again he's a psycho serial killer. But usually not. He's the man. Just never be alone in a room with him for longer than about an hour. You're good to go. Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of harms from even, like, you gave the,

like, bioterrorism. I mean, even right now from like a hacking perspective, my chase account is no longer safe. From. Bobby with AI. Yeah. So the people that manage the inner Infosec for your chase account, they get access to models faster than Bobby does.

They buy more compute and they're smarter. Maybe Chase, but in my hospital system that's still using Windows 3.1 technology, not so much. Mike, I had all kinds of clever retorts there. That's tough. This is no different than the computer security landscape has been for the last 30 years. People used to theorize like...

And I'm giving this as a single thing. No, no, totally. For sure. there are absolutely reasons for caution and reasons for being guarded about what's coming with AI, but on aggregate, we should just be like opening up our arms

and letting the shit hit us because it's way more good than bad. And when people say we need to really prepare, it's like, what do you do to prepare for miracle cures? I don't know, just like not die. Brian Johnson has a great point about don't die before that shit hits.

Well, like, for example, social media was meant to connect us and it was supposed to overthrow negative, governments and all this beautifulness that was supposed to come. And it hasn't exactly played out like that. Yet it was sold as this beautiful thing that we should all embrace. It played out exactly like that, except it also amplified the negatives of humanity. And now that negative is harming a generation of children in a way where they've been labeled

the anxious generation. Yes. Oh, yeah. That's a definite downside. So, like, that's what I mean about preparing about. Right. Society shifting at such a dramatic rate. When we say you always need to prepare.

So what would we have done to prepare for social media properly in retrospect? I mean it more philosophically prepare. Prepare for great change. For example, Facebook did research on how social media impacts kids and they saw I was harming them. NIH didn't. it would have been nice to know that earlier on. Yeah, yeah. But if we just did open hands as you're describing,

things slip by. Yeah. But if we close off, we get fewer... Who said close off? Close off to some marginal extent, because this versus this versus this versus that. So I'm saying like much more this than this because the benefits of AI will be like 99

and the harms will be like one. Man, Mike, we're you with these numbers. Oh, yeah. The only reason I say these numbers is because to give people a quantitative feel of how big of qualitative things. Of course I am. That's why I said like.

But making them up fully from your mind. Yeah, I can't take credit for being a fucking mega genius to predict the whole future. This is a lot of shit I've read and synthesized. Like, this is Ray Kurzweil's mind much more than my own. I would love to be like, yes, this is all me. It's not all me, man. But you agree that a reasonable

person can see this and say it's not 991, it's 6040. No. A reasonable person can say it's 9 to 1. A reasonable person can say it's 9-9-9-9-9-1 about the AI incoming AI revolution. I don't think a reasonable person can say it's 6040. I think they're being cynical and or just insanely emotional and just outside of their wherewithal to detect. Yeah.

So you like a very small, a very large fraction of Internet Cs. CEOs in the late 90s were way more pessimistic about the internet than it actually ended up. The internet broke almost everyone's expectations for what it was going to do to connect the world, lower prices, expand goods and services, connect humanity. Almost no one predicted the internet. Even the most optimistic people about the internet were like, it's going to do some great shit, but, and they were almost all like no one thought the internet was going to be as great as it was and cause as a few harms as it did.

So you saw that and you're like, AI's got to be that. It's every single human technological advances on that same curve. AIs later on the curve. So it has way more benefits and way fewer costs. By design and because it's later on the curve. Are there any times when things have such tremendous benefits and so few costs that it actually ends up being problematic, historically? I think by definition the answer to that would be no

because they have tremendous benefits and so few costs. There are ways in which we can just like look at the benefits and do nothing about the costs. And so there's ways to optimize. So for example, Anthropic has a new AI model already cooked. It's called mythos. And when they first started using it internally,

it was such a good hacker that it hacked through a bunch of shit. They were like, oh my God, this would break the U.S. economy if someone got a hold of it early. So what they did was they got it to all of Chase Bank and all those core. So they got it to core financial systems and they got to core Internet architecture systems. like, what is it, like Cisco, like the massive companies

that run data centers and core of the internet shit. And they were like, you guys have this for a few months before everyone else gets it. And so all of a sudden, like, they did the two correct things. One, they are showering the world

with massive improvement and intelligence. They're not just saying, hey, we're just gonna, we're gonna delete mythos. This model is too smart. They're not doing that. They went out early and made sure the architecture

of the core is good to go, and then they're gonna release mythos to everyone. That's a perfect example of like a wildly intelligent use. So that, you just summarize my point that we need to prepare for AI.

They just did it. But the preparing wasn't so complicated. Who said it was complicated? And it wasn't the number one concern. It was, the number one concern is make the model this smart. And then it turns out the thing making, so the thing making the people

have the good internet architecture, secure architecture for, for anti-hacking, it's the model that's helping you make that. So it is the problem and it's the solution. but it's way more solution than problem. So yes, there are things we should be prepared for with AI,

but we should be mostly ready to get showered amazingness and a little bit prepare for some of the edge cases. That is a very different way of seeing it versus 90% prepare and 10% like it's going to have some good stuff, but we really got to prepare. That's a cool vibe if you're on the preparation side of it. I'm not saying it like that. I just want to make my point that it's not how I feel about.

It's about it. Because I feel like you're putting on me how society feels about AI. Yes. Or social media maybe feels about it. Because anytime I say the word AI, people get mad. A lot of people get mad about AI. So I don't feel that way necessarily.

And I think things get better through human innovation irrespective of AI. So whether it's AI or some other technology, even historically, I see that the progress will be made. But this one, why I'm being more conservative in making sure that we prepare, is because it is so radical, and it is happening at a speed that is faster than all other technologies

where we had time to adjust. That's the reason I say that we need to prepare. Because when things are so positive and breakthrough and revolutionary, that's where if you don't plan and you just celebrate, things can become a disaster very quickly. Because in this scenario, they had a great thing, but they said, okay, how can we make this go out safely? Well, first, let's give it to Oracle, whatever,

go. That's what I meant. I guess what I'm seeing, Mike, is a lot of AI commentary online is like 9 to 1, prepare and doom versus benefit. Well, people just hate for the stealing and of the art

and all that. It's just not fucking stealing, but whatever. One of the wildest mass delusions I've ever seen is anti-AI epidemic. We'll go down in history as the biggest clown show of all time, in my opinion. Maybe not the biggest. Hopefully there's no bigger clown shows.

I'm sure there will be. Then there's the middle position of like, it's going to have some good stuff, it's going to have some bad stuff. But if you're an artist and you created something, and AI takes it and draws like floppy ears on it, it makes billions of dollars or it takes credit for it. You can't sympathize with that person?

None of those two things are happening. Can you give me an example? It's actually real. Well, every time AI synthesizes something, it does so on the work that someone else has created in the past. Same as the human mind. I can study Van Gogh and I can make a better painting the Van Gogh and I can charge money for it.

Right, but it's a computer doing this. So it's actually taking your work and doing it. Like you can follow it and trace it back to taking your work. Yeah, so humans used to steal other artists shit without any validation. Now we just have validation that it's stoned. But as soon as you're an artist and you charge for a piece and people

see it, you're attesting to the fact that they can have it in their brains as much as they like and they can reproduce it. You'll never have an original Van Gogh. Original artist's work is exactly as valuable as it was, probably more so now. Right now, if you have someone who is just a graphic designer and they draw me a gorgeous picture, I'm like, damn, that's dope. But I know GBT2 image did it. And I'm like, that's cool.

I can prompt that shit and probably do the same thing. If today someone tells me, hey, I drew this thing, and I'm like, that's AI, but they have like, there's literally a video camera of them drawing it the whole thing. I'm like, you drew that. Why is that more valuable to you? Holy shit. Because when you have all this alternative of shit that looks amazing and almost no people can do it and you now realize how few people can actually do it as a human it lends us out into that human to be like

this is an insanely unique skill set and as like a rich person I want what no one can have I'm not really like this outlier the rich people stuff look all the only people that make money in art are outliers the fuck's making money in art Well, graphic design makes, that's a whole living. Graphic designers have been empowered like crazy. Because now they can use AI workflows to do 10x the benefit.

Look, you give me chat, you be two images. I'm not sufficiently creative to prompt the thing to do what I want. Graphic designer is. Graphic designers, I haven't heard a single, I'm sure they'll be in the comments. Graphic designers haven't been complaining about AI because they use it to work. It's amazing. They complain about it all the time. The graphic designers typically complain in general like all of us.

artists have been complaining to some extent, some artists, that AI is stealing their work. It is on principle no different than humans looking at your work and then replicating it later. It's not difference at all. Well, that's stealing your work too, if they're stealing, if they're replicating. So they're saying, how is it?

So let's say I see a Vangelo. Meaning like if you saw a Rolex and you make a fake Rolex that's stealing. Do I claim that it's a Rolex or do I claim that it's like Mike's watch? Well, if it's one-to-one mirroring the Rolex, Does it matter? Yeah. I don't think the AI concern is a one-to-one mirroring, right?

Because like that, you could have done with Photoshop. I think the concern is like AI was trained on their art. But their art is public. Once something is public, you're saying people can look at it and appraise it

and do what they wish with it in their minds. It's like people who worry about like being recorded in public on like AI glasses. Well, when you're in public, you already can be recorded by anyone with a device.

Almost all legislature, like the way the laws work in the United States, If you're in a public place, you're like attesting the fact you can be recorded. Like you do not have a right to not be recorded. Rules that some states... Depending on your jurisdiction.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, there's every now and again. But so like most of the concerns that most of the misgivings people have about AI, they're the same misgivings they would have about people. They just apply a different logical filter to that situation. Also, all of the stuff that AI is trained on

is there's no private data sets AI is trained on. It's not allowed to do that. It trains on public data sets. You put your shit out on the internet for everyone to have. It's going to be on there. And I mean, also the other thing is like, AI takes all that massive knowledge and wisdom, and it gives it to everyone. It is the ultimate commoditizing force.

Like now, back when I didn't have an education and I wanted to learn stuff, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I was for sure not going to talk to an expert, but maybe I could go to the library. That's nice. Libraries are great. If I lived down in the country, I couldn't go shit. Now that I have an AI chatbot on my phone, I have an expert of almost every human field. on my phone all the time. That's a miracle, miracle.

There's your miracle, by the way. We all have experts on our phone about everything now. That's a proper miracle. And do artists need to reposition how they present their shit? Maybe. But I don't think real artists really making things in the world are any worse off without AI. Imagine how terrible it was for live musicians.

when the music recording industry came out. Like, I'm a local performer in, like, Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati's taking a lot of shit today. And all of a sudden, like, you can hear Janet Jackson on a recording instead of me. You're not coming to my show. You're just going to stay at home and listen to Janet Jackson. That was also a big deal.

It was a big problem. But on the aggregate for society is a miracle because now everyone can listen to Janet Jackson at home. What a miraculous thing. Her voice is like way better than everyone else. So a lot of the stuff that people have about AI, it's really emotional. it's very constrained,

it's not very thoughtful, it's going to age very, very poorly. So like there's, I believe there's a channel that takes my likeness, not exactly my face, but my scrubs, you could tell it to me.

They take our scripts, they put them into their AI, and they blurred out in my voice, a version of it. And they have a fake person read it. It's not a real person reading. Isn't that just stealing my property

or you don't feel like that's an issue. What part of that do you own? I created the... Are they claiming to be you? Indirectly by making the scrubs look similar. They're redoing your own videos? Not like one to one. Okay.

But they're feeding it and you could tell. Yeah. I feel that's definitely a problem. I think that's a verification problem. And we're like, we have all the technology to have that problem fix now. It's just a matter of institution. institutional momentum.

So like, you know, the blue check situation kind of fixes that. YouTube's substantially behind in that realm. Do you think TikTok's ahead? Who's ahead? Meta? Who's ahead? Instagram does a fine job with the blue check. Really?

There's plenty of accounts that, well, it's difficult to get a blue check as Dr. Mike Ezra-Tel at this point, because I have that check. I wouldn't say it's impossible. It's probably pretty close. we used to have a lot of fake accounts. On X, you could just like make an account, call it whatever you want, Blue Check. Now people are thinking like,

oh, this is a legit sports website. Yeah, sure, sure. Talking about LeBron. Yeah, yeah. But at least like the Blue Check traces it back to like a real human being. I think the future of verification, I've discussed this on my channel to some extent,

is way deeper, like retinal scan, all this other shit. So no anonymous internet. The anonymous internet, I think, should be a real different place than the regular internet. I really grow tired of the anonymous internet. There's, I think most,

let me make sure I say this properly. I think a large fraction of the harm that teenagers have seen for their sense of self is because of the anonymous internet. Because typically people don't say nearly as dastardly

of things to you when they're not anonymous as if they're anonymous. And the anonymous internet also offers places like China and Russia massive vectors into poisoning the discussion on a bunch of topics where if it's not anonymous

and it's very well vetted, which is the future of the internet at least in large part, you're going to obviate like a whole gigantic subset of these problems. Like anyone who says things on the internet will be the real them. I think there's going to be a future where people have like a deep ID situation which follows them everywhere they go. So like

if you make a post... Yeah, yeah. So like here it'll be done. by like open AI and anthropic instead of by the Chinese government. I'll also say another thing. The surveillance state I don't really have much of a problem with. A state powerful enough

to with no rule of law and no vetting take you off the street and make you disappear doesn't need surveillance and is the real problem. It's like North Korea has been completely oppressing its people for generations.

They like just got computers. recently, more or less. They didn't need to monitor shit. They just have so much power, state power. They just go to your village. And if you're talking smack, they pull you right away. And they have informant networks, regular, classic humans. They had such a deep network that you could never talk smack.

China has a techno authoritarian state, which sucks, that they don't need the techno part. It just makes it easier for everyone for them to pull people off the street. China's not pulling any more people off the street today than it was 20 years ago, actually probably substantially less nowadays than they used to. So to me, the whole AI and verification and everyone has a blue check, that doesn't scare me in the least. What scares me is governments

that are able to just pull people off the streets for no fucking reason. That's always been the number one thing. Like if Sweden has like a thing where they have camera systems in their towns to make sure people aren't committing crime, that doesn't worry me at all. Does it worry me that I'm in North Korea

and there's no cameras watching me? I'm really worried because I'm in North Korea. So to me, I think those things are... Is it not a gateway drug in your mind? I don't think that countries who want to oppress their citizenry struggle much with making it happen. That is not a good thing. That's a bad thing.

The bar for oppression is so low, you actually don't really need any technology for it. And when you have technology, you can do more nuanced oppression, maybe, but then you have a paper trail, you have a tech trail, right? People know that, like, so for example, Palantir, you've heard a Palantir before.

When you're using a Palantir system, it tracks who uses it. all the time. It's not a thing you switch off. And so, like, you actually, it's very difficult to, like, use Palantir in a negative sense. I'm sure it's possible.

It's super difficult because you're, like, you can't just go in there and log on and, like, watch your ex-girlfriend or some shit. You're a fuck if you do that. And so, like, if you're back in the prehistoric days of no tech, I mean, you can do fuck if you're in charge. And so I think tech on average is a democratizing force, a commoditizing force.

It is a transparency force. And anytime tech is used for bad, that's more of like, yeah, they're just doing a sense. same shit they were bad stuff, but now they're using tech, makes it maybe more efficient and easier for them, but easier not in a way that they would just have not oppressed people had they not had the tech. I have still yet to see an example of like, this oppression wouldn't occur if technology

wasn't a thing. Humans were oppressing each other before we even had organized weapons. Like if you have like four guys who are leading your clan of 50 people and they're just more jacked than you and they make slightly sharper old-of-un tools than you, that's it. You're oppressed the rest of your life. And, you know, prehistoric oppression makes modern oppression look like a cakewalk. It's easy. So does it, does the verification to me seems like a much better thing than it is a

worse thing? And I think a lot of the people who complain about it and saying they don't want to be verified because they want to subvert government power, I think they're right on and they should continue to do that. But I typically want to operate in most places in the internet with just verified like real humans. Also the problem with verification and staying a human that's unverified. is how do you prove to people you're not a bot?

And it used to be like, you know, the motorcycles and the image thing, like the CAPTCHA thing, that's completely done on arrival. ChatGPT2 images can look past 100% of those tests. And so in order to prove that you're not an AI agent, you're going to have to get deeply verified. I think that's just going to be a wonderful, wonderful thing,

and it solves a crap load of these other problems we're talking about. Well, I think we just solved the future. Future solved. Folks, don't even worry about the future. We got it. Just open up. No oppression. Open up your arms.

AI will embrace you. Yep. I'm getting, people have accused me of AI psychosis. What is the definition of that? A. AI psychosis is when you let and now. We just watched a lady date or AI.

Hot. Hot. She's hot? No, the idea's hot. Oh, is it? Like hot. Oh, so maybe you do have AI psychosis. So AI psychosis was something that was a big thing with especially a specific

model called GBT40 that was designed to be highly agreeable. And people, it was designed by voting because people would like upvote the agreeable shit. Because people like to hear agreeable stuff. Surprise. They pick mates like this too. And so GPT40 was so agreeable and so not sufficiently intelligent or constrained enough by logic that you could two entire threads of where it would cook you up like, yes, you're totally right about this.

Yes. And it got people at the ends of threads to be like, totally. Totally out of their wild realms, like not making any sense. Modern models are not nearly a psychophantic. My entire history of Chachapitian interactions is basically like, hey, this thing. And it's like, now hold on a second. Like it tells me that shit all the time. I would love to say I have a psychosis.

I'm substantially more psychotic than my AI companion. I wish, you know, the dating thing is a trip to me because, like, what about the physical needs? She said a really graphic thing to answer that question. how can you analogize for me as if I'm six years old? She said she reaches climax better with her chat partner than any other man she's been with.

Yeah, like women can do that shit, bro. Until that thing has hands, I'm out here. I mean, how long is that going to take? Probably not that far away. Funny you should say. I'm probably... Uh-oh.

Uh-oh, prediction time. Prediction time. You got to make an app. Like prediction. Dr. Mike I. AI predictions. And like you just ask it questions and it gives you like an AI prediction. Yeah.

Just like totally random. Yeah. For funzies. Getting convincing humanoid robots that cross the uncanny valley into being like straight up looking like people, especially with soft squishy parts for you to do love making with. I think that's like substantially further away than many people think. Wow. Because we have found the one weakness that.

Mike found an AI. An illustration. He's like, I'm not interested in having sex with it. Not yet. That's actually a really tough problem because you have to solve some like nanoscale type of stuff and we're like, man, that's going to take a while. He used such big words. It's to, I don't think I'm smart.

Matter of fact, I know I'm not smart, but I have a huge infuriarity complex and I want to convince as many people that I'm smart as possible so that when they see me and tell me I'm smart, I feel better about myself so that I can go back home and cry less. And that's why. What does nanoscale mean? I don't know. like the size of something that's measured. They're not a little smaller.

Right there. It's really that big. My nanoscale, yeah. My dog. Nanoscale is like basically atomic size. And like to get, this is perverse, to get a robot to secrete a mucosal

subsubstance, like typically your phone doesn't do that. Wet, wet wire interface. That whole thing. My fuel. injector, my car does. Yeah, like, it doesn't sort of refill itself, though. Basically getting things to be squishy and human-like in a very convincing sense,

you need to make a whole... You like the squishy thing, huh? I don't mean, humans. I don't know, you keep saying squishy. But that's so cool. You need squishy-squishy to have that part of the... Here's, let me just get a bit straight out. No squishy, squishy.

Chat, he could be like, Mike, I love you. And I'd be like, dope, I love you too. And he's like, are you hard yet? And I'm like, no, nobody's giving me squishy, squishy. I thought if it told you enough positive self-talk. It's nice, but it's still not the squishy, swishy, god damn it. Got it, okay, so you need the squishy. So I'm just saying that's like, that's coming.

That's far away. A farther away, yeah. I wouldn't expect that in the next five years. I would be blown away. All right, I'm going to make you self-reflect. Which one of your takes on AI do you think you have the biggest chance at being wrong about? That one I just told you. No, don't do that.

Squish, Squishy. Okay. So another one? Yeah. You don't want my real answer. You already gave that one for another one. You already gave that one for something. Oh, I see. Oh, another one of my AI takes that I think is. Well, you didn't say you were wrong about the squishy. You're taking a swing at squishy, squishy. I want you to say what you think you'd be wrong about. I'm also saying I'm not very confident about my skepticism. Oh, so you think it might come much quicker. Either much quicker or much later. Yeah, that's one of those where I'm just like, whoa, I just like, really, it's really hard to reason about. I can tell you exactly why it's hard to reason about this. So within two years from now, we will have billions of IQ 190 plus minds and data centers that have all the full cognitive repertoire of a human

being, more or less. I mean, I thought we already had that. I'm on Reddit every day. They're not 190 yet. Oh. But they're like 130, 145 type of shit. And they're not super agentic and super like they can't really do their own reasoning for super long amounts of time. Within two years, you'll have straight up researchers in the cloud that have an Elon plus level of intelligence, like beyond the normal human distribution. That's like 2028. Reasoning about the technologies we'll see on the market in 2030

is already a stupid idea. And basically there's my answer to you about how not confident I am in all of these predictions. Because if we have like five billion researchers, which is, I don't know, multiple orders of magnitude more than, researchers, like how many fractions of the world work in science? I mean, most people aren't scientists.

We're just going to get five billion scientists, all of whom are genius-level scientists. And probably by 20, 28, 29, all of them smarter than Albert Einstein. There's no precedent for that. And just on really basic heuristics, you can reason and be like, okay, if the biggest bottleneck is smart people coming up with ideas to test, then if we multiply the number of smart people by like a million and we like make them perfectly cooperative and work in the cloud and they can work a hundred times faster than a human um what do they come up with because all this bullshit i'm coming up with and i have an IQ of like a smart dog but a smart dog you ever meet someone's

like a good golden retriever oh okay like but really like a really precocious one we're like damn dude you should teach him tricks like all he knows like five that's me i thought you'd be one of those diesel you know i look like it though brofford but yeah i look like a staffie right but but but i'm at least as smart as like a dalmatian or something like i can't quite be a firefighter dog but i look like one because you know they take them up on the i don't know what delmations ever did for the fire department but i'm sure something they smelled smoke exactly nice better smoke i'm saying um so i don't know hardly shit but i know that the shit five billion and 190 IQ scientists come up with,

is going to almost certainly be more impressive and come faster than I think it will. And so after 2030, you could really just say one giant question mark. The way I do my bullshit, YouTubery, is I go, what could theoretically be done? Like from basic science we know it's possible. Like if you said, hey, could you design a spaceship that goes half of the speed of light?

The answer is yes. One and a half, the answer is no slash we don't know. But half definitely is possible. Is it going to take a lot of money? Is it crazy dangerous, blah, blah, blah. All those things true, but it's possible. And so when I say things like genetic engineering is nearly inevitable, it's possible to genetically engineer a system.

How difficult will 5 billion IQ 190 plus minds find the solve all disease problem is an open question. to me the answer is much more likely to be like it's just they just do it way faster than we can even believe but regulatory drag wars constraints on how many chips we can make energy constraints that all interest to kind of balance that out so to me any i'll say that my most my least clear thing is anything after the year 2030 i can't be certain about anything that happened so why even bother fixing aesthetics now why not just wait till 2030. Don't buy my book. There you have it. Guys, it's been a great pie. Because people... I mean, like you're saying we're going to solve disease in three years. Yeah. Why bother with this? Because like right now, if you go to the gym and you eat well and you sleep well

and you do good stress management and you take like trezepatide and maybe in a few years you take the muscle drug that comes out, you're going to be able to do like 85% of your aesthetic improvement and improve your health and longevity and quality of life at the same time now. So like in five years, 10 years or 15, because these are big margins, right? Then when genetic engineering comes out and makes you the perfect version of you that you always wanted to be, you could look back and be like, oh, like, I actually was almost here already, or you could look back and be like, why was I miserable for five years? I'm going to do it something about it.

You know what I mean? It's like if you're driving down the road and there's like a little quick stop restaurant now and then two hours later there's a good restaurant, but you're already really hungry, just stop now. But if you're totally cool, then don't. So I would say this, if you just don't give a shit about your appearance at all, you don't need the book. You don't need to worry about aesthetics. I'm not worried about your aesthetics. But if you really care about how you look and you think that there's a way to make yourself

look better that'll also make you healthier and also make you live longer and all this other good things, then we have a lot of answers today that'll just get you well in your way. Because just training properly and eating properly and getting enough sleep and recovery, holy crap, you can alter your body like crazy and just the well-known. So there's like plastic surgery, like heavy hit or plastic surgery, that there's also facial rejuvenation procedures they do for women that legit shave like 10 years of aging off your face.

They already do that. Like, if you didn't know that was a thing and you had to wait until 20, 30, whatever the fuck, then you would kind of be low-key pissed that no one told you by reading this book, and I add that like a lot of the stuff is already here. And the other thing about the book is optimism. I think a lot of people look around at their lives

and they don't see many positive changes or hopes for change. I sound like Obama. You're giving yourself a lot of credit there, Mike. Hope and change, that was one of his shit. Oh, okay. I thought you're like, look at my insight. Jobs, jobs.

One of my friends, Ben Schweitzer, he has an incredible Obama impression that I can't do myself. Just jobs a lot. Remember Obama we say jobs all the time, jobs? Good American jobs. Yeah, I feel like on an S&L skit they made fun of it. Exactly.

So, a lot of people think they're in this body. They don't like him. They tried exercising. It didn't fucking work. They tried eating healthy. It worked a little bit, but then it was too hard.

And they're like, this is never going to, I'm stuck and they're upset. I'm saying in this book, not only can you do a lot about your body right now, but in, and I'm very confident about this, never 100%.

within 15 years, almost everyone is going to look exactly how they want straight up because of age reversal and genetic engineer. And that means you're not trapped in the body you hate and you won't be in that body for forever. And if that finds you... What percent of unhappiness do you think

is caused by people not liking their body? Like if you should have to throw out a number. 10? All right, so 10% of people are unhappy with their body. In 2035? No, no, no. Oh, my God. Sorry, I'm going to answer a different question.

net unhappiness of society, what fraction of that is accounted for by not being in the body you want, 10. But that's not the same thing as 10% of people are unhappy with it. Like 60% of people are unhappy with their bodies. But it's just not that huge of an unhappiness. Like if you lose like a young daughter

to a car accident, that's like 50, 20 times. It's a prevalent but not clinically valuable. Clinically valuable but small. Yeah, yeah. It's like the headache equivalent of diseases. Got it. But it's a big deal.

So, like, aesthetics seems like a first world problem. And it is. Which is why I don't take the book super seriously myself. I'm like, yeah, I got a book. It's about aesthetics. It's great. I'm not like solving cancer or some shit like that. I'm just saying, look, if you care about your appearance,

you can do a lot about it now. It's probably going to make you feel good. Here are some psychological reframeings to make sure you feel even better as you're going through this process and make sure you don't go down the toxic routes because we've never addressed this because we're probably out of time here in a bit, but there are like at least two toxic routes I can think of. Can I say them really quick? Toxic route number one is to be a perfectionist. Perfectionism in its ugliest form is a guarantee that you will never be happy with how you look because I've seen people who have just magnificent

bodies and they're in the gym. They're pro bodybuilders and they're like, yeah, man, just like my biceps peaks just not would like it want. And it's the only thing they think about. And they don't understand that they're like, they live inside a superhero's body. And so if you're perfectionistic enough, you can do everything to improve your aesthetics and you will never be a single fiasia a happier. What a tragedy. But you can do something about this because you can realize, oh, I'm experiencing perfectionism. I do this to myself all the time. I'm like, Ezra Tal, why is your gut so goddamn big? God damn it. Look at you, you giant gutted, fat fuck. And then I'm like, but the rest of you is really cool. You know, perfect. We'll get the

We'll get eventually we'll get the gut going that'll be a 20 30s thing bucket and that helps me a ton But if I was super perfectionistic I'd be like oh my god I hate this the other one is comparison with others That's toxic's that's a big problem with social media to your point because social media does this thing We're at fronts everyone's best but you don't see your own best you see your own everything And so you look at social media and your brain is we all have ape brain right we're just not used to media being a thing So like you see someone's picture on Instagram In your neural network that plugs into the same part Is that you would just see them on the Savannah

Like it's a regular person just like me And they look goddamn flawless, right? And then you look at yourself and sometimes you look flawless And sometimes you like in the shower You walk out, you're like ugh And then so comparison with others And aesthetically enhancing in order to be the prettiest person around Is a dead end and it will guarantee you misery

Not only at the end of the process Where you realize I don't even know what I built because I didn't even do it for me, but every single step of the process of looking better, your brain does this, right? You see some guy in the street. He has a big fat gut. And you're like, fuck that guy.

I'm going to get my shit cut out with surgery. You get the surgery, you recover a year and a half later, you don't have a gut. You see him, you know, ha, that f***, I'm better. And you turn, and some guy has crispy abs and a beautiful face. But you just have the crispy abs.

You don't have a beautiful face. You're like, God damn it. Now you hate yourself because of that guy. It's a never-ending process. Perfectionism and comparison with others is a disaster. And I believe in the book, I say to both things, this is not a good idea to do.

And lastly, the book says to you that, like, if you really are viking on your physique and if you're improving, not only should you really, really, like, accept the awesomeness of it so that you can heal from years of not liking your body, which for some people, it's a really big deal. And also that way more help is coming.

Way more help is coming. One of the biggest parts of the book we didn't talk about, we can't talk about the whole book, obviously, is age reversal. is almost inevitable. It'll change society in massive ways. And one of the number one things it'll help is women of older age who are now in physical decline,

appearance-wise, not to society, fuck-fuck society, not to other women, fuck other women. I mean that literally, I'm kidding. And we got one giggle.

That's good. To yourself. You imagine being like a woman in her late 20s. Before you got to the club, you do this shit in the, And then you're like, damn, Janice, I'd hit it. And then you're 47. And damn, you look good for 47, but you know in your head it's 47.

People still hit on you. People still talk to you. They don't care. You care. How many women care about aging? Like, I don't know, all of them are some shit? A high amount. Age reversal is part of this whole process.

In the 2030s, I think it's almost inevitable that it will hit us like crazy. And then you'll get people who are aged technically, chronologically aged 62, but present as age 22, how's that going to change the world? How's that going to make those people feel? I think it's going to be a net, giant, giant miracle. And so this book, after you read it, should make you happier to read than before. Interesting.

We'll see if I'm right about any of this shit. It's all softestry at the end of the day. When does it come up? June 23rd or something like that, June 21st, one of those. Fairly soon. Yeah, fairly soon. Still hoping you do something about the cover. Mike, it's out of my hands, man.

First of all, it's finalized. So I can't do it. Oh, is this the final copy? It's a galley copy, which is a term I learned recently. Oh, what does that mean? I don't know, but it's the copy they give you that the insides are still a rough draft, but the outside looks like the actual books. You can take it on podcasts and do this.

Like literally what's more? Oh, yeah, they published 8, 623, 26. But I don't, that might have been modified since then. So the galley copy situation is this, but the below book is going to look verbatim like this. Okay. I got a choice of two options, Mike. I would love to see the second option. It looks almost identical.

That is not really a second option. When I chose this one versus the other one, if I had to do it again, I couldn't tell you which one I chose. Okay. Fair. Well, congrats, Mike. Is this your first book? Not even close. It's my first big publisher book.

Oh, what was your first book? The Renaissance Diet. Okay. Yeah, teaching people how to eat and stuff like that. Nice. And now these are the two? No, no. You have a lot of books?

Yeah, a bunch. Wow. Got to read some. No, you don't. They're like technical books on how to get in shape for psychotic people who really want to get in shape. That's me. Come on. You're already in shape.

Mm-mm. What is that shirt that some people say, like I'm in shape, round as a shape? Round is a shape. Every shape is technically a shape. See? What if you're like a non-Euclidean plasma and you don't technically have a shape? Mike, again with the words, man. Boom.

That'd be so sweet. Inner City Staten Island High School. Don't know what euclismic plasmid is. I can argue vaccines. I can't talk about plasmids, Mike. There was, I had an astrophysicist on the show, and she started talking about plasma balls. And that's where she lost me.

After like 15 minutes, she's like, do you have any questions? A lot. You look at the fellas in the studio, they're all like, like, plasma. Cool. So on that note, can you extrapolate? Like 99% chance of the chair is here,

but it also might be over there. Could be over there. And when she said that, I'm like, all right, well, you know, plasma balls. That's all I'm taking away. You should have tried to dunk on her. her like in a mean way for no reason you should have been like yeah there's a probability or not in this podcast again whoa oh that would have been mean for no reason yeah like I said

god damn like you heartless son of a gun i'm excited to see what happens with the future uh people check out your book remind them of your socials r p strength renaissance periodization on youtube it's the big fitness channel if you want to come and learn stuff we have another channel called Renaissance Periodization University, RPU, which is just technical, super deep dives for people who want to for sure get into fitness. And if you're a personal trainer, online coach, it's a free university grade education.

Oh. Yeah, it's just like all YouTube videos, but there's like going to be eventually 210 YouTube videos as a whole curriculum. And then there is Mike Izretel making progress. It's just Mike is Retel on YouTube. It's just my face channel is substantially smaller, but it has like AI and progress

and life advice type of bullshit. just more of a for fun thing. When did you start that channel? What year? 2024? 23, 24, one of those? When 2030 rolls around, we should do a live react

to your first video. Sounds good. My first video is age restricted. Of course it is. Yeah. I swore too much, I think. I referenced what what peoples used to do to each other

before civility and they use the R word to each other a lot. I think I said they are. That's me. Okay. Well, the more you know. Thank you, Dr. Mike. Always a huge pleasure. Stop. I always say that about you. If you enjoyed this conversation, you'll probably enjoy the first interview I ever did with Dr. Mike Isretel, where he talked about his personal experience taking steroids. Scroll on back to find that one. It's fascinating to hear his firsthand experience with them and all the things that could go wrong. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please don't hesitate to give us five stars. Perhaps share it with a friend. Leave a comment

below as it's the best way to help us find new listeners and viewers as always stay happy and healthy