The Checkup with Doctor Mike - The Dark Side Of Steroids and The Problem with Deadlifts | Dr. Mike Israetel

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

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/ Follow Dr. Mike Israetel here: YouTube -  @RenaissancePeriodization  Twitter/X - https://x.com/misraetel?lang=en Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/drmikeisraetel/?hl=en Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/michael.israetel/ Team Full Rom - https://teamfullrom.com/ 00:00 Intro 2:00 What Mike Does 09:50 Online Misinformation / Quick Fixes 22:20 “I Love Big Pharma” / Exercise Pills 34:30 The Evolution of Anxiety 45:50 The Benefits Of AI 1:14:12 Social Media’s Benefits 1:19:55 Where To Start Your Fitness Journey 1:35:50 Can You Gain Muscles And Stay Lean? 1:39:10 Most Frequent Mistakes / Deadlifting 1:44:27 Women Lifting Weights 1:47:33 Steroids / TRT

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or in the Reve app. Dewee appell service. Online bestelling in the market abholing. You mentioned from personal experience

being aware of the dark side of anabolic use. What is that? How long do you have? Anxiety like you would not

believe. Every day that I'm on high doses, I wake up in the morning afraid of the rest of my day. Intrusive thoughts? I think about violence all the time. Well, if your testosterone is 25 times what's supposed to be, what the hell do you think it's going to make you think about? Another one is a marked approximate reduction of IQ. Like right now, as I talk to you,

I'm on contest prop. I'm on a considerable dose of antibiotics. I'm not as smart right now, and I can feel it. It's this fog. An inability to perceive a broad spectrum of positive human emotion. I live in a really beautiful area in Michigan, and I walk out and this pond and these trees, and I know that I like looking at them, but it's a memory to me. I go work out every morning, and I look at the pond and the trees, and I'm like, like, all I feel is rage and frustration and anger and anxiety. That's my daily life. Welcome to another episode of The Checkup Podcast with Dr. Mike.

Today, I, Dr. Mike, am excited to welcome Dr. Mike to the Checkup Podcast with Dr. Mike. No, I'm not inviting myself onto my own show. I'm talking about Dr. Mike Isretel, a popular YouTube educator, but also someone who holds a PhD in sports physiology. Whether you're looking to start putting on muscle, restarting a forgotten regimen, understanding the impact of mental health

on your fitness journey, or uncovering the harsh realities of steroid use, this conversation covers that and so much more. We got into some topics I truly didn't expect to address, but found extremely interesting including the fact that he believes AI and gene therapy will get us to the point where exercise becomes completely useless? What? Bottom line, get ready to get re-energized and educated on how to pack on muscle and why it's actually crucial for your health to do so.

Please welcome the other Dr. Mike to the checkup podcast. The reason I actually wanted to have this conversation on the podcast is because in the other room right now, we have a lawyer waiting to hit you with a cease and assist for using the Dr. Mike insignia across all of your platforms. What's that about? There can only be one, Dr. Mike. I can't wait for a lawsuit. I live in this.

I live in it. I love it. Russian Jew versus Russian Jew round one fight. You know what? I think the way we would skirt out of that is insanely legalistic. You are fully spelled out Dr. Mike. I am d.r. Mike.

Oh. Yeah. What about all the other ones? What other ones? There's apparently a lot of other. are Dr. Mike's out there. Oh, irrelevant people. I don't care about it.

I consider myself the second most important Dr. Mike. You, of course, first. You know, it's funny. When I created the doctor spelled out thing, I specifically did it in the case of some trademark dispute of someone suing me because I was afraid of getting sued. Really? Well, because when I first started, I had no idea what I was doing in the digital landscape.

I still don't. I didn't know a little bit more. But it's weird because now I have a trademark on doctor spelled out Mike. No way. I didn't know that. We were just going to get sued if we did that with me. Oops.

But we have to protect it because people steal your course, your merch. Like if we come out with a merch design, a week later, it's on websites for sale. Whoa. You're at a very high level of popularity. People barely know who I am. That's not true. In fact, a lot of the comments on Reddit when people mention like, oh, what are your thoughts on Dr.

Mike? They're like, not the DO, right, saying that they want to talk about you instead. Oh, yeah. Reddit. Are those real people or robots from China and Russia? Mix? Nice. I feel like that's true.

It's a messy place. Do you ever go on Reddit? God, no. No, I have real friends in real life. I'm kidding, Redditors. Don't do whatever you do on Reddit. They might do something. They typically do, yeah.

All jokes all the way down, of course. Reddit is a combination of an interesting thing. It's an insanely amazing place to get crazy aggregate information about really austere topics no one would ever know anything about and also a place where the uh toxicity of insoldom goes quite far very far and you'll get a lot of people with a lot of feelings so to speak and you say something and they're like this guy's wrong i hate him gurg so i didn't man i didn't know the whole trademark situation's like i didn't even come up with dr mike um people just started calling me are you also macaille i mean my so my american legal name is michael alksandrovich isratel

In Russia, Mikhail Alexandrovich is Raytel. So it is Michael. I was born, Mikhail. In America, I'm Mike, Michael, yeah, yeah. I'm still Mikhail. Oh, no way. Oh, wow. So I'm not even technically, like, some of my nurses and staff in the hospital call me

Michael, but I'm like, that's not even my name. Yeah, don't call me that. Well, it's funny because they still do, but they don't care. Yeah, you've got to rotate your names to preference. They're like, okay, so Mikhail, you're like, nope, that's not either. You're like, Mike, like, nope, I don't understand what to call you. Today, it's this. Yeah.

When you're famous enough, you can just rotate names. That's true. He did, you can be like Cher, tough daddy, puffy. That's a bad reference right now. We can't use him anymore. I did see that video. Yeah, it's a bad video. And he put an apology already?

I don't think you can apologize for something like that, that quick. He's like, my bad. What's crazy is, I don't know if you saw that this is so off topic, but the LAPD, not L-A-D, not L-A-D-L-A-D, put out a statement saying they can't charge him for it because it's been over a certain number of years. It makes sense. I mean, the law is the law. I mean, it's on camera.

Yeah. Find a different thing to try them with. If I ever catch him in an elevator, he'll have more fun core cases. Really? Yeah, absolutely. Would you fight him? I wouldn't rule it out. I think anyone who beats women is someone who can't complain.

But then what if you go to town? Yeah, it'd be all right. I'd do fine in jail. You think so? I mean, look at my face, good God. Like, hello, I just want to make an announcement. I'm a Russian assassin. Everyone kind of moves back a little bit.

But I'm friendly. Everyone moves back a little more. Fair. All right, well, talk to me about your social media journey. Because right now, you're exploding. You're making jokes about my popularity. your popularity is higher than it's ever been. What do you attribute that to?

Luck. Pure luck. We did bribe the YouTube team a little bit. We're like, guys, listen, tough times out here. Here's a dollar. It was well received. It's the intent that matters. That's what they said.

You know, it's an interesting question of fundamental attribution in science, of what are the sort of principal components responsible for? increase in popularity um i have to say i do have a few hypotheses but nothing i can set in stone if you're interested in here yeah um i think that uh the humor probably goes some way i can't help but put in bullshit jokes as you can clearly tell it just it just pops off half of them are dumb the other half are like giggle worthy and one percent of them are hilarious but you know it's just a law of averages at that point um i'm a decently educated in sport science so i know i know know some things. And in the fitness industry, we have a lot of folks who say things that are

just not so true. And that upsets me to deep level. And so I have to make videos about clarifying things. I think people find that to be helpful. I walk the walk. I'm decently muscular and bald, which I think is important because you're not really seriously into bodybuilding until it lose your hair. Everyone knows that. And then the other one I think that is most responsible is let's just be completely honest here today i'm just really good looking and i mean i'm tall people love that so why is that funny i understand your smile uh yes just smiling at how tall i am it's just great to be tall um i think uh on the good looking part clearly i'm not um one thing my friend mano henselman's told me he's a very popular exercise science guy uh who's actually one of the

best looking people i've i've ever seen you know i tell myself every day i'm the straightest man alive And when I see Meno, I'm like, I just don't know how to make sense of it. But he did say that I have a very unique look, which is like something you tell an ugly person to make it okay in their head. But I guess I don't look like everyone else on the street. I did walk around New York earlier and people will recognize me and be like, oh, my God, Dr. Mike. And I'm like, I tied a dock away and run, usually.

I'm scared of people. But I do have a unique look. So when you see me on a thumbnail, you're like, that guy. And you see me a couple times. You're like, all right, what is this weird meathead with this weird muscle head? have to say you get in there you learn some things you laugh a little bit I think that's kind of it I will say though um in all due seriousness most of the credit for my YouTube popularity goes to my YouTube team specifically Scott the video guy who accompanied here is also my bodyguard people don't

know that about him but he's dangerous he looks friendly but that's all nonsense um he has a work ethic that like I thought I worked hard at stuff and then I worked or I lived with Scott on business trips and I was like I don't really do anything compared to this guy he's systematic it's just flawless execution and he deeply cares about thumbnails and titles and video quality and editing here runs a whole team of also amazing people

and it really is the team like by myself I would just be some guy in front of a computer like yelling at the screen but with the team I'm like yeah I'm Dr. Mike or whatever not the real Dr. Mike Jr. The better version. Two point oh please.

The more muscular version. I'll take you up on that. I am the two point O but I'm like a regression in software like I like one point oh better this guy sucks. If you had to to succinctly in one sentence say what your mission is on YouTube. What would you say? To give people the information they need to make better choices about how to become leaner,

more muscular, and healthier. The current state of social media when it comes to fitness is a disaster. Your word's not mine. Wait a minute. Am I part of that disaster? How dare you? I very much stand by it. No, I think you're leading the way in cleaning up the disaster. In fact, I just watched your video where you discussed Dana White's human biologist. Yes, yes, as opposed to the non-human biologists we all know and love. I can't wait for the next person to come out and say they're an ecology major. They can tell us about the environment, how we need to change it. I mean, whatever.

You know what I'm about to say, that it's a very messy field with a lot of opinions out there. And usually the inaccurate ones are the ones that become very popular. because they're contrarian, they're dramatic, they're extreme, for all those reasons that the algorithm loves them. What's your take on the current state of things? Do you feel like it's a disaster as much as I do, or do you feel differently? It's a dumpster fire, but it's a dumpster fire that is declining in magnitude, and things are getting better all the time.

There is a part of the social media fitness space called the evidence-based social media fitness space. People like Meno Henselmans, Milo Wolf, Dr. Pack, Jeff Nippert, of course, Eric Helms, the list goes on. But these are the folks that they're following. So Jeff Nippert actually has an enormous following. And the followings are growing and really, really getting better and better. It's just one of these things where you look at a situation where it's 1% good, 99% bad. You're like, this is hopeless. A couple years later, it's 4% good, 96% bad. And you're like, this is hopeless, but it's a four-time increase in the good. And so I think eventually you'll get a situation in fitness where it's much like modern

medicine, where the preponderance of the information you get is pretty good. I don't know, maybe I'm stepping out of my lane on that one. You're like, that's not even true in medicine. But it's definitely, that's how I would summarize the situation. It's pretty bad, but improving steadily. And one thing I will say is, and this is a point of, I guess, I suppose personal pride is I'm really happy to be one of the people. that if an individual wants evidence-based information

about how to get leaner and healthier and more jacked, there is now a lot of it. Whereas before, five, 10 years ago, man, you would be looking through accounts all day to find that. And when you get into the YouTube community, because the algorithm is so good, once you start looking at evidence-based fitness YouTubers, they just recommend you more and more,

like, ah, you're one of these people. And then you're just flooded with amazing information. Now, that's if you're looking for it. And one of my big contentions that I don't mean this to offend anybody, but the vast majority of people are not looking for evidence-based things. I mean, I have close personal friends of mine, members of my family. They're only interested in quick fixes. They're only interested in one-shot deals. They're not interested in understanding physiology to any depth.

And so all they want is like, what this, can I do something really simple, arguably doing almost nothing at all, get all the results, pay none of the tradeoffs, no consequences, super, et cetera. and if you want to be fooled and to BS, oh my God, get ready. It's like taking your pockets and putting $100 bills in and I'm walking in Times Square and be like, do me up, putting your hands above your head. You'll get done. Since you mentioned that you're taking a dive into the philosophy side of things as of late, what's your take on why people are looking for that quick fix now more than ever? So how pedantic can I be?

I mean, I mean, this is all in good fun. I don't think it's clear that it's worse than ever. I think in historical times it was probably arguably much worse. The average education, intelligence, and actually as measured IQ of the average human on earth, has been steadily increasing over a long time. If you talk to the average person in the 1940s, a level of ignorance that you would find totally baffling.

I think the way that we get maybe convinced that things are worse than ever, is because social media has a reach that's now global, down to a person who has only a phone. The average person gets to talk about what they like and vote with their phone more than it used to be. So back in the 1980s, the major health dissemination of information that would occur

would be from big media. And there's people there that vet who they have on. They vet them okay. They still charlatans get through, but now charlatans get through to people who just have no scientific filter, never had. they just never had a chance to express their preferred demand for people. So as more and more people are entering the consumer side,

they're not all coming in as scientifically educated people. And they're like, oh, quick fix. The other thing is, I never fault people ever for wanting and desiring a quick fix. I mean, like, look at what ChatGPT is right now. Like, can't I just ask a super intelligent machine any question of the world to get an answer instantly? You think five years ago you're like, you're an idiot. That's nonsense. Now it's like, well, of course it's a thing.

it's amazing that people want quick fixes because I fully believe that in, oh, 10 to 15 years will have genetically engineered most disease and most aging and everything out of the human population, period. And then it'll seem like, oh my God, what great, great easy quick fix?

Like one shot and then over the course of 10 weeks you de-age back to 22. They're already doing that in animals, by the way. And it's kind of like, if people didn't look for quick fixes, innovation would be kind of stifled because if you tell people, look, there's no other way to get in shape,

other than hours a week of resistance training, controlling your diet. An interesting example here are the modern aderectic drugs like Ozempic and Trezepitide. People are calling them quick fixes, and they kind of are. Thank God they're around. Thank God somebody developed them.

And the pharmaceutical companies, once they got wind of the fact that these drugs are effective and relatively safe, they're upping the development of them like crazy precisely because they know people want quick fixes. And it's good that they do. But there's a very big distinction to make. There is wanting a quick fix

in pretending you have one, and there's wanting a quick fix and actually getting one, the pretending's the bad part, the charlatans get in, they go, oh, you want a quick fix, huh? Well, here's this make-belief nonsense we can give you. And you're like, hey, it's working. And then 10 weeks later, you're like, I feel and look the same.

And my doctor says I'm still dying in my blood work. So that's my thoughts on quick fixes. It's great that we want them. The big thing is we have to know as consumers, what is really a quick fix? What is a more intentional fix that's going to take some time? And what is the illusory quick fixes that are supposed to be quick fixes,

but don't work. It's like a luxury car. You want a Bentley. I own 20 bettlies currently. Because of the trillions of dollars. It's getting annoying. Like, I don't even count the money. I don't know how rich I am at this point.

It's just, the numbers are, it's difficult to see a number that big because I have to read across multiple lines. The trillionaire method, it's great. Yeah, well, no, it's actually 125% up because we upcharge people. That's how you make the most money. You don't give discounts nonsense.

In any case, I can tell you're not a trillionaire, but you're close. One day. Someday, someday, maybe. Basically, the onus is to get folks to recognize, hey, look, there are people out there that will propose a quick fix to you. You've got to figure out, is this really a quick fix?

Or am I being bamboozled? And it's difficult to do that without some baseline of education, of expectation. And I think that's super important. Part of why my channel exists, a huge part, I think, why you're out there on the medical size to get people to understand, like, here are the kind of fundamentals

of how medicine works, so that when people are like, hey, like, homeopathy, you drink this drink and you're good to go. You're like, this is not how the body works. But if you don't know that, hey, look, why wouldn't you try? Yeah. Do you really believe that a quick fix exists for health? And I'll preface it by saying that I don't think this exists.

Because health, I feel like, is so unique in that the body is very difficult to trick. Even some of our most miraculous inventions that have extended life, antibiotics, vaccines, while they sound like quick, quick fixes, they're so imperfect. They have downsides. They create new problems. So the idea of a quick fix, the idea of perfect in health care or even fitness largely escapes me as someone who practices medicine. Do you feel that or do you believe that a quick fix is possible? Is it possible in the future? Unequivocally, yes. I think genetic engineering will make all of us essentially flawless to the extent that we would like to be. Interesting. And before that, pharmaceutical-based

interventions will get us real close. Do we have that now? No. Does everything have tradeoffs? Absolutely. So, for example, Ozmpic and all the related class of drugs, the main effects are unbelievable. Even the secondary effects like insulin control are amazing. Do they have downsides? Yeah, oh yeah. Can you misuse them? Oh, my God, yeah. Is it not the right fit for everyone? Oh, good God, for sure. Now, there's a bit of a difference, I think, in terminology between a quick fix and a near panacea that requires some effort. So I would say that for most people, substantially reducing their body fat and thus body weight, substantially elevating their muscle mass and increasing their daily physical activity, comes real close to being a near panacea. I don't mean it heals and cures everything, but it's a thing that if you have any, take any body and reduce their body fat by 20 pounds, increase the muscularity by 10 pounds

and get them from walking 3,000 steps a day to 11,000 steps a day, you're going to see across the board improvements that are quite radical. If you saw those improvements with a drug-based therapy, you'd be like, dude, call Pfizer. Holy crap, we're trillionaires now. It really is a thing.

But I wouldn't call it a quick fix because it's like, how do I get these benefits? Like, gee whiz, you got to train with weights twice a week and you got to walk every day and you can't just throw food down your gullet that just shows up on the news feed. So not a quick fix, but definitely a huge main effect with, I would say, few downsides. There are downsides.

You can get hurt in the gym, wear and tear on your joints. Opportunity cost. Huge opportunity cost. That's why, again, I'm shooting myself in the foot here because I'll be arguing myself out of a job. But I think in the future, non-angiogenic anabolic, eventually with genomic intervention, but first with just oral drugs and injectables, I think have such a huge potential to increase people's muscle mass and concomitably decrease body fat, that they're going to be insanely

panacea-like as far as general health is concerned. And I think that is going to be a pretty quick fix. Now, of course, they're going to come with their downsides, but the thing with downsides, and this is something I've been big on trying to say about Ozempic and the class of related substances. People take a look at a generation of drugs. Now, people think Osempic is a first generation. It's not. It's actually a third generation, GLP1 agonist. They are now, have in the approval process, fifth generation drugs, like Ratatotoride, for example. Every time they do a new generation of drugs, they purposefully turn down the negatives

and turn up the positives. So I think a lot of people, when you get something like OZempeka comes out and people are like, well, you know, it's got downsides. They're completely correct. Holy crap, does it have downsides? But some people want to write off the whole thing.

It's like, yep, none of this is all nonsense. You've got to diet and exercise, and diet exercise, of course, is amazing. But with further developments, you really start to crank down on the negatives. So, for example, today, and this is much more up your alley than mine, but I don't even know what generation

of blood pressure drugs were on. It's got to be like eighth or ninth gen by this point. I mean, it depends which one specific. For sure. But just in terms of like when did they make the first blood pressure drugs. Well, we have like the JNC8 guidelines that we use for blood pressure management. So it's the eighth generation. There you go.

Yeah, yeah, I guess correctly. So a lot of these drugs, if you talk about like side effects and risk profiles and visible and known tradeoffs, they're starting to get pretty low. Now they're not zero. But like it's just not true that if you take lysineapurl or which actually much older drug, M-Lodopine, like if you talk to your doctor, but like, oh, what are the big downsides? You know, like, you might have a dry cough for a few weeks.

You're like, what else? It's like, that's kind of really it for most people. It's not one of those things where the drug has an awesome main effect, but disaster side effects are modern androgenic-based anabolic like testosterone, et cetera. But, like, one does not simply take that. People talk about TRT a lot, testosterone replacement therapy. I say, oh, it's so great. Like, yeah, if you need it, but if you are poor responder to it,

I mean, your blood lipids go everywhere, psychologically it affects you. So I think, yeah, there are. There are no panaceous for sure. There are no quick fixes. But over time, we make the fixes better and better. And I think it's good to stay optimistic about that and not get a revolveulsive attitude to like, because some people think like it's drugs versus lifestyle change.

It's an additive and often multiplicative effect where it's absolutely lifestyle change is a big deal. But there are pharmaceutical interventions that can really, really help. What about the idea or the notion of our attention spans towards dwindling because of innovation? everyone's on social media that's short form, makes our attention span a little bit worse. Now we're overly prescribing attention deficit disorder medications.

Food becomes hyper-processed and hyper-palatable. We create a medication like a GLP-1 agonist. Guys want to be stronger. They're taking anabolic medications even when their testosterone levels are within normal limits. How long until we're just taking 10 medications to hyper-optimized? Do you feel like that's an acceptable world? a good way to go not good way to go what's your take on it i think it's a great way to go i'm very very pro pharma i'm still waiting on the checks from big pharma to clear they haven't even

showed up believe it or not i think it's an address thing they just don't know where i live they're cutting checks to random people hoping it's a different doctor you you're getting the checks i don't know i'm getting this but fyser just sent me a billion dollars um so i am real bullish and really pro modernity science and pharmacology um being pro pharmacology I think it leaves me as a person who like whatever 30,000 years ago is like pro fire, people are like, look, fire burns things. It just killed all those animals in that forest. You're saying we're using it to cook food.

You must be crazy. It's like, well, yeah, it's got serious downsides. And it's something that needs to be carefully managed. But in context, if you carefully manage it, it's this huge boon. And over time, we can improve things. So I do think that two people that are interested, and increasingly nuanced and effective cocktail of pharmaceutical therapies

can, should, and will become more and more accessible. I think that's a great thing. People who are saying like, oh, you know, like all these drugs that were taken, like all these pills. And I kind of wait for the punchline. I'm like, so what's bad about that? And typically they'll get into just total non sequiturs

or fallacies, like, well, they're chemicals. Like, watch the, just breathe down. I don't know how many moles of chemicals. You're made of chemicals. Everything's chemicals. So then they try to go, okay, it's not what I'm saying. It's artificial chemicals. Oh, got you.

Snake bite is completely natural. Air conditioning is very artificial. Still, like, okay, that's actually called the argument from nature. It's a fallacy. So people say, you know, it's just something, drugs are kind of bad. And he goes, I'm totally with you because drugs have at least two downsides. One, they have negative side effects that we don't like. And two, some people who have access to these mega, huge hammer type of things like Life Center Venture.

better diet, better training, they look to these drugs, which are as yet very imperfect, and on sheer laziness, they'd be like, I don't want to exercise. I'll just take Ozmpic. That's a thing I'm sure you're aware of,

like, Ozempic butt or whatever, where housewives who had no interest in resistance training or building muscularity, no interest in controlling their diets or eating healthier, they just take a crap load of Ozempic, and they're like, oh, I'm lost a ton of weight, but now I'm sarcopenic.

That's definitely a bad outcome, but I would say that's more of a slight misapplication, of pharmaceutical technology and there is such a thing as proper application and I think in the end we'll have a cocktail of drugs that are increasingly better

at doing things, increasingly lower risks and downsides. I think that's a world we want to live in. I'm going to say something insanely controversial to my own field here but I very much stand by it. I really look forward to a world hopefully in the next 10 or 15 years

where we no longer have to exercise. Exercise is a profound waste of time if you think about it. When I go to the gym and I physically, hurt myself through pain, which has great psychological benefits, but there's other ways to hurt yourself that also teach you stuff. Like, I would much rather, I'm a competitive Brazilian jiu-jitsu athlete.

I mean, I'm not very athletic, but it's called a sport. I would much rather just do BJJ and never have to lift weights because I'd like for the muscle to come from pharmaceutical or genomic intervention purely so I can actually spend most of my time learning how to, you know, beat up my childhood bullies. I'll show them. That's why we'll do what we do. You, you're a boxer, correct? Yeah.

Well, Pretent to be. Pretent to be, of course. I mean, who's not bullied? I think some people got away with just doing the bullying. They've got to be around. Oh, maybe.

But isn't the saying, her people, her people, true? You know what? I actually have looked into the literature on that, and that's actually not true. People who are bullies, typically are not the people

who had been bullied elsewhere. They're actually just the people that bully, and the people that are getting bullied are typically the people to get bullied in a variety of circumstances in their lives. Kind of a trippy realization.

There's nuance to that, of course, but it is, It's a very easy to say like, oh, well, just a person who's been hurt by others. Like, nope, that guy's just a piece of crap and he's just been hurting people his whole life. Yeah. Some people need humbling, right?

But I do look forward to a world in which we don't have to spend time very artificially exercising so that we can do amazing things with our bodies like go skiing, go hiking, play with our children and have the health benefits of exercise endemic to our very DNA or through really, really good pharmacology.

You take two or three pills a day. You're good to go. In laboratory animals, they have already an exercise pill. It works great, rats and mice. You take the pill, and it just does everything exercise does for you, short of a few things, but almost all of them. And if you think about it, like, how is that possible? Well, what do you think exercise is doing?

How is it beneficial? It's really just accessing various molecular pathways and turning them up and turning others down. You can do that with a pill. And if you did, what exactly is so wrong about that? And then people get into the philosophical part of, you should have to earn it which I just don't

I don't really I understand where that's coming from but I wildly disagree with it which you have to earn as your income which you have to earn as the respect of other people do you have to earn a good body if that's the case you know some people

I'm sure you know people that are just in damn good shape just because is there something they're missing in life because they didn't have to struggle I would say no but in a sense it is yes because it's like some amount of struggle

is insanely healthy for your psychology Cool, but there's so many ways to get struggle in life. I would rather spend less time exercising and more time challenging my brain with new ideas. That's real struggle. More time doing MMA and BJJ. That's also real struggle. More of an opportunity for me to have free time with my family

so that I challenge myself in interpersonal relationships to be the better version of me. There are many, many ways to struggle. If you think of problems as really good things, I totally agree. But if we get rid of as many problems as possible with pharmacology, we have more bandwidth for the other problems that are left over

because every time I'm in the gym, lifting weights, I'm not working on my familial interactions. I'm not working on my brain. They're only 24 hours in a day. If pharmacology can handle more of those things for us, I would think that's just an unbelievable, beautiful thing. I think it's very idyllic.

I think when people get more time in a day, generally speaking, they're not going to, the majority of people are not going to make the time to say, oh, well, since I'm not challenging my body now in the gym, I'm going to challenge it by reading something or pushing my knowledge. It's going to be chasing some sort of high, some sort of happiness, where exercise can give

that to someone through struggle versus if you can remove the struggle and still get the benefit, the way that you're going to seek happiness might not be as idealic as, oh, I'm going to continue challenging myself by doing X, Y, and Z. I think that's definitely true for a lot of people. I would posit that the vast majority of people who go into exercise are already the people that are going to seek challenge

and other things in their lives and the people that are the kinds that would just take the easy way out, they don't work out to begin with. So if you have someone who is driven enough to go to the gym and do something when you say,

here's this pill, you don't have to go to the gym anymore, they're going to look around and go, how else can I challenge myself? My wife is a perfect example of this. she needs to challenge herself. She got a really extensive medical education. She's actually a board certified sports medicine doctor.

And once she finished her medical education, you know, we're doing super, super well in life. We moved to a new place. And she wasn't sure if she wanted to continue to her medical stuff. And she tried like a few weeks of just being like rich dude's housewife or whatever. It just didn't work. She was like at the end of the two weeks,

she was like, ah, she like took on. 10 different work responsibilities to fill the void of having to push herself. I think the people that go to the gym all the time, that void isn't going to be replaced by scrolling. It's going to be replaced by other forms of challenge. Now there's still another group of people

who they're not into the challenge thing. You challenge them and they're like, is there any way I could just not do this? They're not the people you typically see in the gym because I think in our world, we think of people as people work out, blah, blah, blah. But maybe not in your world

because the medical field, you guys typically are like, you should be working out and almost no one doesn't. So you know very, very well, then a lot of people, it's real hard to get them to challenge themselves at all. You would hope they go exercise. They're just not interested in it.

So I think precisely they're people that were worried about taking away of their exercise and they no longer have a way to challenge themselves. I'm pretty convinced those people will find a way to challenge themselves. But still other group of people, they're not in the gym. Their health is in a real bad spot. They're not interested in them, challenge themselves already. So it's kind of like the two groups are rather separate.

Yeah, I feel like I function in a different world than most doctors who are on social media, medical doctors. You take someone like Dr. Peter Attia, who has a lot of knowledge from academia, from personal anecdotes, studies that he's run unofficially with his patients. And I say that because a lot of the stuff that is being recommended as protocols is experimental. Like, we don't have evidence-based trials for those things, yeah, cutting edge. Also has a great haircut. I understand why you say that. And the way he practices medicine is through a concierge model charging over $100,000 per month, having unlimited time with patients. How am I doing with my life?

This is not the world I function in. I work at a community health center where the medicine I prescribed to my patient could be the cheapest medicine ever, but if I prescribe capsules instead of tablets, they can't afford to get it. So the world of the person that wants to crush it in the gym and hyper-optimized to me is like this outlier example. Very outlier. That the people that are going to benefit from this pill that will then continue on challenging themselves is in the not even in the tenths of a decimal point percentage-wise.

Maybe. So I wonder how it's going to impact the general population of who ultimately I end up seeing. Because something that you talked about on some of your podcast is when a patient comes, comes in to see a doctor. Why doctors are not great at delivering information about diet, exercise, why do they run to the pill?

That's like the quick example that most people say. Doctor just pushed the pill on me. Yeah. And some of the things you pointed out were true. Doctors don't have a lot of time. They might wanna take a shortcut. There's also the idea of the patient wanting a quick fix that pharmaceuticals work so great.

I wanna debunk that notion right now. Pharmaceuticals suck. blood pressure meds, they're better than ever before. They pale in comparison to the change I can make in a patient's blood pressure with diet and exercise. Like the levels aren't even close. If I want to lower my patient who has diabetes, their hemoglobin A1C to be in a level of control,

the amount of change I can make by lowering their weight, by helping them exercise, maybe changing their intake of food, certain nutrient-wise... Huge. It's huge. Maybe the only way I can get that drastic amount of a change is through insulin. But anything else?

Yeah, a lot of downsides there too. Right, but with nothing else will come close to the amount of change. Starting metformin, maybe I can get their hemoglobin A1C down by 1.5. And that's tiny in comparison to what most people need when they're in really like the stage of diabetes where they're having side effects, where they're having vision issues, feet issues,

cardiovascular issues. So pharma is not nearly as idyllic in my world, a lot of it is very problematic. Then you get medications that are starting to show promise, like the OZempics, the GLP-1 agonist, the Mujarnos. They are better, but then access becomes a disaster. Where patients can't access them, they want them, they can't get their insurance company to approve it,

they don't have good insurance to cover it, there's a huge copay that they can't afford. So then access becomes a huge problem where it's like, initially we're talking about a medicine that can help a lot of people, but then like can people access? How does the world react to it? How does it change our mindset to things like diet and exercise? So I guess my question would be, if we can get to a place where these medicines work real well,

do you think there's an insidious effect where it starts impacting our psyche where we don't want to challenge ourselves and we want the computer to do the challenging thing for us, the medicine to do the challenging thing for us, where it becomes a life of comfort? And the reason I bring this up is because in society, as it exists today, we are safer than ever before, which we can agree is a good thing. Oh, yeah. But now we have these huge problems because it is so safe. We have an anxiety epidemic.

Yes. We have an anxiety epidemic from social media, which was supposed to make everything interconnected and wonderful. But now we're lonelier than ever before. So the things that came with a lot of good intentions ended up creating some significant bad outcomes. and absolutely I don't want to vilify everything with a broad brush because social media is problematic for many ways but there's huge benefits we're having this conversation we're educating people with evidence-based medicine and health and fitness information so there is benefit but then

there's all these like pushbacks of like the homeostasis model that the world and the mine exists with homeostasis that when we create these pharma meds that will be the new fountain of youth they're going to create some sort of huge pushback effect that maybe the people people you've talked to in the past can't verbalize well that they're saying it's negative, it's chemical, it's harmful. They can't really verbalize it. But there is always a huge bounce back negative reaction to when we make a breakthrough. Do you think or do you worry about that at all when it comes to these medications? With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

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or go to Explorevolvo.com. Oh, this is it, the day you finally ask for that big promotion. You're in front of your mirror with your Starbucks coffee. Be confident, assertive, remember eye contact, but also remember to blink. Smile, but not too much, that's weird. What if you aren't any good at your job? What if they dim out you instead? Okay, don't be silly, you're smart, you're driven,

you're going to be late if you keep talking to the mirror. This promotion is yours. Go get them. Starbucks, it's never just coffee. It's just a real thing, whether or not I think or worry about it, you're completely correct. That's definitely a thing. It's a very interesting point you bring up that I've been giving some thought to lately of maybe one of the proximate causes of the increase in anxiety in modern countries that are super safe. There's no real actual reason to be anxious is because I think the human brain has a baseline level of expecting the world to suck and problems to surface.

and when you don't have problems, your brain starts looking for them because it's pre-programmed to look for them. I mean, in the Paleolithic era in which we evolved, I mean, it was just terror. It was a survival benefit to have that. Gigantic carnivorous birds would pull you away from the campsite and kill you.

It's just a regular thing. One of the reasons that a human psychological universal is that people dream of and are scared of monsters is because monsters used to be real. Pleistocene megafauna. It's just like, why is a tiger that big? Why is that bird nine feet tall and eats meat? so we're programmed for a world that's generally like orders of magnitude more terrible in every conceivable way than our modern world and what our modern world is amazing people almost don't accept the matrix program sort of they're looking for problems and anxiety is kind of your brain's way of being like something's wrong i got to fix something that's definitely thing i'd say a couple things about that one is that's a different kind of problem and a much better problem if you ask me mike where do you want to live a world like do you want to live in taiwan

where everything's almost perfect, but you have an anxiety problem? You've got to see a therapist about? Or do you want us to send you to North Korea where you will not have anxiety? And everything will make total sense, but it's terror every day that you wake up and go to sleep. I'm going to Taiwan.

Thank you so much. It's a problem. It's not a perfect fix. But now we can do this thing where we zoom in on the problem. Okay, we have fixed running water. We fixed longevity, medicine, et cetera. Most people live into their 70s and 80s short of getting hit by a bus or some other thing.

Now what's the problem? Okay, we have an anxiety epidemic. Totally. How do we address that? One is therapy. One is relations. One is challenging yourself with difficult things all the time. One is going on your own journey of mindfulness and management and things like that, which are all great. Another one is drugs. And if our brains are designed for the Pleistocene time, this is a funny, controversial incoming idea through a combination of pharmacology and eventually genomics. Why don't we re-architect our brain? Why don't we re-architect our brain? Why don't we genetically engineer humans to become more rational, more calm, more positive, and less anxious at face value?

Just that's how you live your life. Because now that we have this amazing modern world, where calm, logical things are kind of the way you do things and get results. You don't have to have a fight or flight response anymore. Why don't we genetically engineer the fight or flight response generally down significantly and genetically engineer up just a calm level of happiness all the time. I think pharmacology can do that very jadedly right now. These things are getting better. And so I think there are kind of two options. One is we try to become more primal and discard the benefits of the modern world. Like liver king. Like liver king, a known non-lier who's also not on steroids. Some people are just colored red. And like a Dr.

Seuss book. Some people are blue. Some people are red. Liver king. His nickname was polycythemia. That's right. It's a long nickname. Polly, get over here. So we can think of discarding the modern world and all of its beautiful things. I'm not interested in living in a discarded modern world and actually no one is either.

A lot of video games today seem to be based on a post-apocalyptic world. You don't want to live in a post-apocalyptic world because very mundane things are very bad. It's gray, you know, you've got your beautiful woman with long hair. it's not brush, she's in the raw, hand in hand, you're going slaying dragons with your sword, it's awesome.

Then you stub your toe and get an infection. Now, where is the factory that makes antibiotics doesn't exist anymore? We don't have modernity. You die the most terrible gangrenous death you can't even imagine. Prehistory was awful in almost every respect. But in that awful time, we generated a consistent amount of deep meaning. We were made for that awful world. So while things are awful, they make sense.

And every day you wake up with purpose. You have to have purposes. Everything's trying to kill you all the damn time. So I don't want to discard anything. I want to keep all the modernity, all the wonder, all the drugs, see the problems they're creating a secondary, tertiary, quaternary effect, and address those one at a time by improving the medicines, yes, going to genomic interventions, and also just working on the problems with therapy, exercise.

Exercise is a solution to a problem. We didn't used to need exercise because you were on the, you were on the, and farm every day. In 1880, exercise is nonsense. You know, exercise generally was kind of born in the late 1890s, like almost all sports were born in like 1890. Basketball and stuff was in that and then because people had leisure time for the first time ever. And it was crazy to say generally just didn't have it. So exercise is one of those solutions. Lifting in the gym is one of those solutions. We didn't lift in the gym primordially. It's a great solution. What I'm saying is taking that next step. Yeah, the gym was great for 150 years.

Now we take that next step of eventually genomic intervention such that, you know, you take some kind of, I got in trouble with genomic people for saying viral vector because they're like viruses actually are kind of dog shit at vectoring. It's like whatever kind of vector is outside of my scope. And, you know, after a few weeks, you notice like it was kind of getting a six pack. After a few more weeks, you just have ripped abs. You eat whatever you want and that's how it works. We know it's possible. It works in animals. Some people walk around with those genetics.

That doesn't just affect the body. you can get genomic interventions that affect the mind. I mean, a vast amount of depression is hugely genetically caused. Why not engineer that out? I think we're trending towards a world, which I think is going to be here much sooner than people expect because progress is exponential in which we, not only are we super, super healthy and psychologically and physically with nothing except genetic intervention that lasts forever, once you get the fix, that's just your DNA, but we look at that

problem differently, and we look back on our history and go, man, people used to have to spend 12 hours at the gym a week to do this? Holy crap. I think that better world is incrementally and slowly coming. And the paranoia in some sense about social media is destroying us all, social media is perhaps one of the most wonderful things that has ever occurred. I met my wife through social media. If I, if we didn't have social media, I would have had to like marry someone from the metro

Detroit area? Like, no offense. People are great there. that I would have never met the love of my life. And so much good stuff happens that here's another thing that humans do. We're problem seekers because in our ancestral environment, if you weren't a problem seeker, you were dead the next day.

And so we kind of, when things get good, we kind of go, yeah, yeah, okay, fine, they fix that. But this side effect is the big, crazy thing now. Dope, let's fix that too. As we fix more and more thing, the world becomes better and better and better over time. and eventually we can change the very makeup that we have. Obviously, way outside the scope of the discussion,

I think we're going to fuse with machine intelligence sooner or later and all that crazy Ray Kurzweil type of singularity stuff. I think it's inevitable. But on the way there, we have to, I think, admit two things. One is things used to suck. Two, things are getting better and we will continue to make things better. They are imperfect.

And some of our solutions have had some side effects that sometimes rival the scope of the problem itself, but we can make that better and that better and that better so I tend to look at it not from an optimistic perspective I don't think a realistic perspective

if things get better all the time anyway I mean what year would you want to be alive if not 2024? You're very optimistic I would just so thank you so much I think you are very optimistic and I'll point out a couple of things please things get better

well what's your measuring stick for things have gotten better because there's certainly ways we can say certain things have gotten better but like life lifespan has been steadily rising and now has suddenly taking a downturn. Happiness, especially for kids after 2012. I just had Dr. Jonathan Haidt in the chair where you're sitting who's pointing out a hockey stick graph that just shows the most dramatic spike in mental health illness in our children above the age of 12, 13 after puberty, especially in teen girls, where it's like, did things get better for them?

their world like i know you're comparing and you're saying would you like to live in a world where anxiety is the problem or a world where you're under terror under this terrible regime and it's easy to downplay and say anxiety you're physically much safer whereas under that regime you're actually much worse but when you're a child with depression and anxiety that world does not seem that great yeah so like our perception of the problem is nearly as important as the problem itself and currently the level of unhappiness, even with all this amazing outcomes of safety and social media connecting all of us,

all those problems have gotten worse. So like the thing, I guess it's like what are you benchmarking as your progress with innovation? Because if it's happiness, that's not going up. If it's length of life, that's not going up. What's the benchmark for the optimism? I see almost everything has been getting better over time.

In very modern countries, there has been in some metrics of flatlining and some regression, but we're just picking these metrics randomly. So, for example, child death due to disease, like an eight-year-old who just gets leukemia in, like, 1982, we ain't got nothing for you. That is just dropping like crazy. So when we zoom into a problem specifically early teenage depression anxiety, specifically for females more than males, We're zooming in to this very serious, but microcosmic problem versus all of the problems we used to have.

And because we're very problem-oriented, it seems like, well, look, this is bad. Yes, but everything else has gotten so much better. 98% of things have gotten better. 2% of things have regressed significantly. But we have so much bandwidth to address those now. So I would say almost every metric is things are getting better over time. And for people in the developing world, things are skyrocketing getting better.

You go to India every 10 years, it's unrecognizable in a real serious way. I mean, their environment is improving over there in a real serious way because they're just not polluting like they used to back in the day. It gets better all the time.

So yes, there are still problems and some things are getting worse. But now we have bandwidth to address those things. And what do we have now? AI power drug discovery is just taking off. And they're just like the Google Deep Mind has just signed contracts

with all the major pharmaceutical corporations to develop drugs. And the drugs we'll have in 2030 are going to make current drugs seem like bloodletting, more or less. And then they can actually engineer out anxiety depression. Another thing is,

my libertarian aside is showing through, you can always just not engage with social media. I still haven't seen a law where they make you go on Facebook and Instagram. So some people who will vociferously complain about social media on social media, It's a curious interaction.

You can always put your phone down and go walk around. The other thing is people say they get really addicted to their phone. That's definitely a problem. It's one hell of an attention-inspiring device, but also people are really good at a climatization. I mean, scrolling on TikTok is fun

until it's not fun. Until the next day you scrolling, it's the same dancing idiots, F this, you throw your phone away, and then you go look at the sun or whatever, enjoy nature, whatever we're supposed to be doing. What world does that exist? Oh, hypothetical, right?

Yeah, who's doing that? Who's throwing away their phone and going out looking at nature. You never would hear about them because they're not on social media to talk about it. How's that for a contradiction? Well, I think that would be true,

but if we look at statistics of like what time kids are spending screen time, it's just going up and up and up. I like that. I'm very pro screen time. And what we're seeing actually when the kids are going through puberty with screen time, as opposed to

Jonathan Haidt says this very well. He talks about the difference between a play-based childhood and a phone-based childhood. And he talks about when you're going through puberty and a child is on a phone, their development is heavily stunted because of the lack of interaction with risk,

because the risk that you have outside playing on a, I forgot the- Parents engineered that way. Parents do not want risk? Well, yeah, absolutely. The ideally ones you're a risk. Well, you also want a world with no exercise. Totally.

So you want no risk either. Oh, so I don't have, it's not the risk problem with exercise that I don't like. It's the time problem, just eight hours a week of just doing this and looking in the mirror, which I like to do, but most people think it's a huge race of time. But writing an essay, like, look, writing an essay takes work, right? If you're trying to develop the ideas in your mind, and that process is really beneficial.

Can we agree on that? Yeah, yeah. But it's a huge time waste. You could have chat GPT write it. Sure. So do you go that way, say why would you waste your time writing an essay? Just let chat GPT do it? I'd say the more we can offload more intellectual problems,

to AI, the better, because it leads to one possible world, a world in which we no longer have any intellectual problems. Because the more AI does our intellectual work for us, the more it frees us up to do other intellectual work, AI is not doing. So, for example, battling your own demons in your head, AI can't help you with that yet. You can get your term paper done for you, but it can't figure out why your dad said that thing to you. You were eight years old and you still can't make sense of it. Now you have more time for that. you work on that. Eventually, AI can help us with that. Eventually, we're in a world where AI has solved almost all of our problems. And then that's paradise, by the way. And something that we think

we shouldn't take for granted is that compared to our ancestral world, today's world is nonsensically paradisiical. I mean, my God, look at what we're doing. I can't even describe. Imagine Thomas Jefferson came back. Not zombie version. You know, a couple zombie behaviors. He still likes to eat flash but he's he's making sense explain to him what you do for a living good luck he's like well I'm on social media he's like what's that you're like oh I got to explain network computing to him good God we live in a world that's insanely amazing in such a way there's just difficult to comprehend the world of the future is going to be even more amazing the road to that amazing world is full of potholes

there are fewer and smaller between as we go but they are here's a really good example. It used to be the most proximate problem, arguably, short of getting enough water to drink was starvation. I mean, humans are designed to get obese, almost every one of us, because, like, there was never a top-down limiting factor to that. You just, we're not exposed to an environment. This is too much food. Nowadays, our poorest Americans, our poorest Europeans, our poorest non-communist country Asians are the fattest people. Can you tell a king from the 1600s, like, he like sees a person in the street. He's like, that guy must be rich. Like, actually, he's not rich. Well, sorry, by your standards, he's way richer than you, Mr. King, but he's the poorest of our people. Like,

how come he's fat? Well, because we've basically solved food production as a problem, basically solved. It is just, I will debate this into the ground. Food insecurity has been defined into absurdity in the modern literature, such that in one of the questionnaires for food insecurity, if in the last year you weren't sure where your next meal was 100% coming from, you're labeled as food insecure. But when people are both obese and food insecure, you've got to wonder what the definitions look like. The solution of hunger occurred in the modern world in the last 50 years.

Slow clap, everyone. Where are the ticker tape parades that don't exist? Why? Because the solution saved billions of people. from starvation, but it made a bunch of us fat. Huge downside. Exercise was born to counter that. Healthy food at supermarkets was born. YouTubers that informed people about how to access health were born. And of course, modern anorectic drugs and future other drugs that will make you healthy. These are smaller problems, but they're real problems. They will have to demand

solutions of their own. But because we're not all starving to death, we got plenty of time to solve those problems. So what I'm saying is, I don't even, I would not call myself an optimist Typical insane optimist, right? I would call myself a realist, again, typical insane, insane person. In reality, things are getting objectively better over time in a grand way. But not all of them, and some of the benefits are starting to have downsides. But now we have more bandwidth to address those downsides. So for children that are having trouble growing up without sufficient challenge, now we know that.

Now what do we do about it? We have one hell of an arsenal. We have data science, statistics, tons of people don't want to help, psychotherapists, And perhaps a movement to be like, hey, you know what? Like, let's make sure all the bouncy surfaces on playgrounds are safe. Get the kids out of the house and get them playing around. Clearly, as our brains were supposed to develop an evolution, kids need some effing challenge for the love of God.

Maybe it requires a little bit of regression in one way or another. I don't think it requires two things. I don't think it requires a regression in all of modernity, and I don't think it requires pessimism. Some people like social media is just terrible. No, it's not. Social media is unbelievable. but it's not perfect.

Can we make it more perfect? Oh, hell yeah. And by the way, social media is going nowhere. It is universal, it is ubiquitous, and everyone wants more of it. And so the screen time thing I said earlier, I think the screen is just one of the pathways. So it used to be that we watched the real world.

That was fun enough. Then at the beginning of wealth accretion and 5,000 years ago, we started the rich people started to get theaters where people would simulate reality for them. Eventually we got televisions and noticed the screen is, getting closer to the face. Now, then we got the iPad, the cell phone, VR goggles. I think the

contacts are coming at some point in the late 2020s, early 2030s, and then just direct brain machine interface so you get reality, reality streamed right to you. The screen is going to go in our brains sooner or later. Amazing, because you can just get any media from any part of the world ever. Currently, there are multiple wars going on, and for the first time ever, we have real-time assessments of battle damage, of civilian casualties. I mean, back in World War II, it take you months to news where you're like, man, today U.S. troops did X, Y, Z, and took Yor Jima. Nowadays, it's just like the next hour you receive the news.

It's amazing. The world is so aware. Everyone in the world is waking up to what's really going on, which, by the way, might cause a little bit of depression. In the 1950s, you could live a pretty idyllic life, having no idea what was going on on the Korean Peninsula. Now you turn on the 24-hour, not even cable news. You go to YouTube news.

You go to Reddit, and you see real battle video of people getting blown up. Oh, my God. You have to see the real world, but it's a real world so far away from you. Your idyllic existence is no longer possible if you're accessing social media and you want the bad stuff. But that's now, like I'm saying, a smaller problem, a more tractable problem. Eventually we can grow up as a society. We can become more intelligent. We can become more even keeled.

We can process what we see better. We can reduce rates of depression. And everything will get better over time. It's a bumpy road. But what I would say is let's not reverse the course. Let's deal with the problems as they come and fix them. Social media is here to stay. It's unbelievable.

Gaming here to stay. It's unbelievable. By the way, I caught your, the healthy gamer interview situation with Aravitic medicine. I was like punching the air. I was like, get him. Get that Arivedic nonsense.

No offense. Well, what's funny is he actually debunks a lot of it himself. Thank God. So I think we agree more than we did it. Yeah, thank God. I was like, oh my God, is he really a proponent of this? But so I think that we want to continue progress, understanding that progress is usually imperfect.

And when it's imperfect, we address the imperfection instead of rolling back the stuff. Yeah, I'm not a fan of rolling back this stuff either. I'm also talking heavily from devil's advocate point of view. By all means, of course. The way the exponential rate of change that you talked about, I think is speeding up, fair to say. When newspapers came out, there were some naysayers

that it would disconnect us theater, then radio, then television. Television, oh my God. So all those negative things happen. And then the time in between each one of those intervals is becoming shorter and shorter. and that's to me the part of this that's the concerning part

because when television came out we had time to start figuring out how to regulate it right we would put ratings on movies and televisions we'd give doctors recommendations to give to patients as pediatricians here's how many hours ideally no one ever listened to that anyway

no one did but either way we put some checks and balances in movie theaters would ID whatever now social media came out now we have even less time now AI's coming out so are we truly like the problems that you're talking about that come as a result of these new technologies, do we actually have adequate time to address those problems before the next thing is moving that quickly?

Because it feels like we could easily be left behind in this modernity world where we're just like innovation above all. And I get really nervous about that because we haven't even solved like the previous problem and we're already on to the next innovation. And I'm like, oh man, we're leaving folks behind, especially when it comes to like the economic challenges of it all. Sure. It's a very valid concern. The pace of change is exponentially quickening. So you're like, holy crap. Like humans are just going to be these dumb apes that just don't understand anything sooner or later. I think that this is a very tractable problem. I think that AI is the greatest invention that ever was. It is very close to true maturation. But also there's not really such a thing as maturation because, you know, they're talking about the idea of artificial general intelligence. Something kind of.

comparable to be intelligent to a human is it when do we break through that it used to be you know you're familiar with the Turing test like uh so Turing test was um Alan Turing is more or less the father of computing said that's like a machine is as intelligent as a human if through like some kind of interface maybe a type interface if you ask it questions and you can't tell what's a machine and what's a human pass the Turing test well so GPT4 blew the Turing test out of the water already you can't tell what's if it's a machine you can because it's really nice to you and other people wouldn't be that nice no I can still tell like someone asked to come on the YouTube channel like I can be a great guest and I even have some titles ready to go and he sent me to

him like dude you sent these on chat gbt you how did you know because you could tell but you're not the average person uh the turning test was designed for the average person and so you know a computer scientist could be like ask it the following series of equations like oh but doesn't understand that because we haven't programmed that in that's for sure but so machine intelligence is exponentially increasing and right now it's uh almost surpassing human abilities now in many other ways it already has like computers have been better a math for god and intractably so like there's no way we catch up to them. And around the year

2029 to 2030, they're just going to be better at everything than us. And then as they escalate beyond that into the 2030s, the leverage to which they can help us with problems becomes almost impossible

to understand how powerful it is. To us trying to solve our problems today with our average human global IQ of 98 or 97, whatever it is, a lot of things seem really deeply troubling and deeply confusing to an AI that is 10 times smarter than us.

So, like, the average smart person as measured on an IQ scale is like one and a half times smarter than everyone else. But that's a lot, right? When AI is 10 times smarter than us, it's going to be able to contextualize and understand problems in a way that we can't even comprehend. About four years later, it'll be a hundred times smarter than us. About two years after that, a thousand times and about a year after that a million times, it's leverage to help us with problems is going to grow to what seems like infinity. But what does that do for us? Well, the machines can help us with problems that we seem to not have bandwidth for.

It's bandwidth. Our bandwidth is like this, stays about like this, because we're about as smart as we were about a smart 50 years ago. And so, like, all these complexities are increasing, and we're like, holy crap, how do we make sense of this? Don't worry. The AI is going to make sense of it for you and then give you very easy to understand, very digestible chunks.

It's going to talk to you like a human being would, like, imagine like an amazing teacher talks to a four-year-old. They're not going to throw technical terms at them. They're going to keep it real simple, but all with their best interests in mind. I think AI is going to let us do things like it develop unbelievable drugs that solve entire swathes of problems, cure all disease, straight up all of it. Like, pathogens are real stupid. If you're betting AI versus like bacteria, I'm betting AI is going to quash that all the way through. Think about this.

Let's talk about the problem of predation against humans. How big of a concern are lions and crocodiles to human subpoly? I mean nominal? It's a joke. We could actually kill all predators today. They could put out an edict, no more alliance. Boom, you just shoot all the lions. There are no more lions. Alliance used to just terrorize the living crap out of us. They're a solved problem with our level of intelligence. AI, because it's exponential, is going to solve swaths of problems. We can't even comprehend. The deeper solutions, this is real trippy, but the deeper solutions are when AI allows us to take medicines and also starts to alter our DNA. Willingly, of course, is not going to impose it. Like, if you want the same DNA as always and you want to get psychiatric problems from an iPad, super, please continue. But it can alter your DNA such that your perception of things improves. There is no reason that human intelligence can't be altered at a genetic level. You may be able to take a pill or injection that over the course of several days after, like, things become much clear and easier to understand. I've personally gone through this because I was medicated for an addiction deficit disorder when I was a 14-year-old.

I'll never forget the day that I took my first pill. of Adderall, five milligrams, and the day before, mathematics seemed to be totally intractable to me, like just nonsense that I just wasn't smart enough to figure out. And the day I showed up for class, I looked on the board and the teacher was asking people how to solve equations, and I was like, I know the answer to that answer, correct. I was like, okay, I know the answer to that, correct. I just did it. I walked up to my teacher at the end of class, a math class that I was failing.

I don't mean failing like a 59 percent. I was going to make a 33 percent, like 16 percent. Something baffling. I was like, I'm going to be your best student. And the guy was like, okay, kid, like, really? And then I was, et cetera. And so I know how it feels to get an exponential boost in at least actionable intelligence. I was always decently smart.

But when you have enough attention deficit, like you actually can't string enough thoughts together to make sense of the world, put your sense making onto paper. That will be accessible to all of mankind, I believe, in the 2030s. And then all of a sudden, all of the psychiatric problems you see, they just disappear. because everyone is insanely well-adjusted. And then total brain scans, and we all live in the cloud, then people don't die anymore.

And then when you have access to a total brain scan, you can start pulling apart various features of your personality and replacing them with others. You can re-architect human motivation. Like, for example, little off-color, but nonetheless, sex drive. Like, I, you know, I'm saying, I see some people that are attractive.

And I'm like, oh, my God. Why am I thinking about that? I have a wife. What am I doing? If I could just not have that, eyes that do this with attractive females, wouldn't that be great? In the future, you'll be able to engineer that entirely out of your brain, such that you never experience it again.

Then the question becomes, what do we do then? We're not sufficiently intelligent to answer that yet, but we will be. So as a very, very extended super ultra, too long of an answer, AI and modern technologies are going to take all of these current pretty nasty problems that we have with this transition, and they're going to make those problems become instantly easily solvable solutions down the line. brought to you by MewMew. Introducing Mutein, the new feminine fragrance by the iconic fashion house. Mutine captures the youthful, unconventional essence of the Mewewew girl, brought to life by a gourmand, intimate and enveloping scent of wild strawberry and brown sugar accords.

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See Golden Nuggett Casino.com for details. Play responsibly. Oh, hi, buddy. Who's the best? You are. I wish I could spend all day with you instead. Uh, Dave, you're huff mute. Hey, happens to the best of us.

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to tread carefully but i think careful treading into the direction of solving problems i think you and i can come together on this we want to solve problem yeah of course right and so pessimistic side is good optimistic side is good. Whatever intersection we have of real solutions comes out of that. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I just think when we get overly confident that like with science, we have all the answers. Like the idea of getting rid of predators, right?

Like, oh, yeah, we can get rid of all lions and all all all all alligators. But is that good for us? Like, oh, man, we just destroyed an ecosystem. That's going to destroy this ecosystem. And now we don't have function. Oh, we destroyed this bacteria. Like we were innovating, creating viruses because we want to innovate. and then the virus spread and killed millions of us.

It's like there's so many of these unforeseen instances that can happen. And that's even just talking about from the general side of things. Just here in the United States, how disconnected we are from, like to build a bathroom now in a democratic state for good reasons initially has now become so convoluted that it takes $2 billion to build a bathroom in California or something ridiculous. So it's like the balance of it all is really what we need to focus on. focusing on the things that we can change, but then really giving some pause

before jumping to that new innovation, to that shortcut. Oh, yeah. Because the longer we can hold off on taking the shortcut, the more reasonable we can be, much in the same way when something miraculous comes across

our social media feed, where it's like, oh, this is the miracle, this is the trick that I need. If you just pause for a second, just that pause before you share, it's going to help control whether or not that misinformation spreads and affects you.

huge. Now, that's super valid. I think everyone could do with a little bit of calm reasoning about problems rather than like, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever. Oh, my God, this is a panacean. It's the greatest thing ever, totally. But I'll say another thing, AI. So the real big, one of the real big, maybe the most proximate problem we have is we're just not smart enough. AI is fixing that problem in a big way by being insanely smart. And AI can do a lot of filtering and sorting for us such that it does the heavy lifting of being very reasonable. and managed. So now I go, man, I want to take this drug to boost my XYZ.

I go to chat GPT and go, is this a good idea? And it presents me with a list of tradeoffs. And I'm like, holy shit. Thank you. You just saved me like, I don't know, like 80 years of Google searching for that. And to quote Sam Altman, paraphrasing him, GPT4 in several years will be laughably embarrassingly stupid. Leveraging increasing exponential machine intelligence is going to solve problems

such a rapid pace for us. that yes, it's going to create sub-problems, but then it solves those sub-problems too. I think AI is best seen as a transformative event like electricity or like the internet, but an order of magnitude more powerful. Think about what the internet did for the world. You imagine the world without the internet?

I mean, holy crap. Well, I mean, people have nostalgia for that world without the internet. Those people are categorically delusional because they typically express that nostalgia, On the internet, you won't have anybody to talk to about that if it wasn't for the internet. Now, of course, the internet has, would you?

A lot of people, so loneliness, how many people are less lonely because of the internet? More people are lonely. Maybe. It depends on how you measure loneliness. A lot of these, the happiness and loneliness, there's a lot of artifact there, are self-referential understanding of how we feel is always,

because humans are always on a hedonic treadmill. Sure. A lot of this is questionnaire, How happy do you feel? You've never been to the 1950s. You go to the 1950s. You'd be like, this is terror. Where is my flushing toilet?

Where is XYZ? Where is my smartphone? Google, for example. Google, now the GPTs are just like answers in your pocket. In the 1980s, you wanted to learn something. Where did you go? The public library? This vast swast of things were just simply out of touch.

Now, it's cool to have nostalgia about it, but nostalgia works an interesting way. People typically remember the good things. of which there are some, also accessible any time you want. If you don't want to talk to people on Facebook, you just don't. But most people don't choose that. My parents are not on social media. They think it's fine not to be on social media, but, you know, it's different strokes

or different folks. So people don't remember the downsides. For sure. It's actually called pessimistic bias. Yeah. People have a tendency to paint the past as rosy and beautiful. Of course. And the present is terrible.

And the future is just calamitous. But that is another expression of our wildly outdated instinctual idea about things are baseline bad because they used to be they're not things are baseline unbelievable now. They don't seem unbelievable to us, which is also kind of good because we use that impetus to solve problems. Unfortunately, it also causes anxiety and all these things. But I think that as we go through, we're going to solve more and more problems. We could have the next five years could be existentially like a little tougher for a lot of people because now so many problems. problems are solved. It's kind of easy to lose meaning. I mean, here's another interesting prediction, hopefully age as well. We're on the cusp of the birth of what I call universal robotics. Humanoid robots and robots that live in data centers not embodied that will do the vast majority of work for humanity. It's inevitable. It'll happen in the 2030s. It's going to be insane. For every human, it'll be 10 or 20 humanoid robots. Everyone's going to have servants. On the one hand, oh my God, the stock market's going to

to do that. Every single homeless person will have a caretaker robot that keeps an apartment for them, goes to work on their behalf. What timeline are you talking about on this, by the way? Early 2030s. You think every homeless person is going to have a robot caretaker? In modern Western countries? Yeah. So there's a question of policy. Will that be possible? Almost categorically, yes. Well, possible, like... Technologically and economically feasible versus, like, will government regulation? So, like, to your point about the California

bathroom problem, entirely invented by misapplication of regulation. Also, because people aren't that smart and they fall for fallacies. Most people, for example, in government, in housing policy. So why is New York real estate so expensive? It's completely artificial. Completely

artificial government policy. New York, real estate, has to be no more expensive than real estate anywhere else. You should be able to buy real estate in New York in a truly properly regulated free market economy for exactly the price you could get in anywhere else or very, very close. We would have a lot more skyscrapers to try getting a building permit in New York. It's artificially caused problem. So for homeless people getting their own robots to take care of them, a very tractable

problem I estimate in about 10 years. I could be wrong by 5 or 10, but I don't think I'm wrong by 50 or 60 years. And so as in the mid-2030s, it's totally feasible that every homeless person is not homeless anymore. By the way, as a society and as a city, we all have absolutely the resources to just flat out get rid of homelessness anytime. Entirely, again, a political problem, not a practical problem. So once we have humanoid robots and various other robots to take care of everything we need and they go to work for us, they invest our stocks for us, they take care of every single problem. On the one hand, paradise, definitely. On the other hand, short of the genomic interventions

I was talking about or a great deal of talk therapy or really re-examining your life and your purpose mindfully, I mean, where does your purpose come from? A lot of human purpose is derived from work. Shown time and time again, if you have a meaningful career, you're good. If you don't, man, you know, retired people,

people win the lottery. Well, this is when we're talking about exercise, why exercise is so psychologically healthy. Totally. You need some damn struggle. When robotics comes in, if genomics is lagging behind, we're going to have some tough times of a very trippy problem of it's so good that it's bad.

But I think that's a short-term problem and we need to be aware that it's going to happen and maybe kind of get ready for that sort of thing. But I think in the end, all of those problems are just kind of pale in comparison or get solved and fixed and put away and we look forward to other problems. I mean, there are much bigger problems in the world than everything we're dealing with right now. So for example, how many black holes are in our close-to-us environment that just swallow up the sun and just we're all. all gone. We have no idea. We are children to the universe. We know almost nothing. We desperately need AI to promise us that tomorrow is going to be a real day instead of the sun turning into a black hole. And you're like, oh, I was supposed to be a Tuesday. I was supposed to go to work. Half the sun is gone. How am I supposed to do? So all the problems are still

there. But as AI expands, it's lever point on our world, things are going to get exponentially better and still different problems are going to be solved. So yes, I'm optimistic in that regard, but I also think if you properly read technological advancement of history, it's also inevitable. I mean, think about this, if I told you in the mid-1990s that most people would be part of a digital economy and that the average income would be like three times higher, adjusted for inflation, by the way, you'd be like, all right, you're crazy. Fact, it's just a state of nature.

But now we're like, okay, I know that I can Uber Eats anything I want from any global cuisine anywhere ever at all time for a nominal fee. but like my kid's 12 and she's having a lot of trouble on social media. They'd be like, what the hell is social media? You're like, oh, yeah, it's this thing that's coming. It's amazing, but it's got some downsides. Let's work on getting the downsides going, but I would say not catastrophize the downsides. Yeah, it's terrible that some kids are having a hard time.

No, here's a thing. Other kids who are well-adjusted to social media, they're having a grandiose time. Another thing I don't know if Jonathan Haidt mentioned is there's a specific generational thing with children who have a problem on social media, it's kids from, I forget which generation it is. Gen Z. Is it Gen Z? The new generation,

they're actually really well adjusted to social media because they grew up with it. Like, Facebook and Instagram was a real shocker to middle school kids. I mean, can you imagine, did you have social media in middle school? No. I didn't. Oh, my gosh. First of all, I would have canceled myself about 100,000 times.

Shit, I used to say on social media. And also, like, the popularity contests, the stalking of people. I mean, it was just a disaster. Thank God, you and I didn't get social media. You didn't even worse for us. So for a fraction of kids, it affected not so well on the extremes. And the aggregate, it's fine, but some problems. Well, I don't think that's borne about by the evidence.

Maybe, maybe. I'd have to take another look at that. By the general, it's caused a lot of harm. In kids, and I'm talking specifically in the genzy. Are we measuring upsides as well? Or just measuring homes? Yeah, the upsides are very limited, actually. This is coming from someone who's very pro social media and wants to figure out a way to work,

but specifically for developing minds, the apps that, because like we talk about social media and this grand concept of like the internet, but really there's like three apps that kids spend their time on, and those apps are not as much pushing digital curiosity about learning and causing them to create formidable groups. There are people using it this way. And I want to grow that population. The majority of kids that are being, are using, social media are being harmed by the direct comparison, the bullying, the fact that they're not connected to their friends, the fact that the filters on them create a distorted body image. Like, that's the real nature for the majority of kids. I have another take on this.

The harm they're currently receiving will harden them up like crazy in their 20s and 30s and make them so much more adept. Look at how we're discussing this problem. The harm of social media to children are certain. Just to finish my earlier point, the children growing up now, the younger ones, they seem to be way more well adjusted to social media than that intermediate generation. There's the older people, they're already old, whatever, is Facebook, no Facebook. The middle generation, tough. The very young generations, they're like, yeah, whatever, like social media is a thing.

Like Gen Alpha, you're saying. Sure, sure. We're talking about kids being harmed by social media. On the one hand, that's terrible. On the one hand, good. They need some harm. They used to be harmed by breaking their necks in the playground. They don't do that anymore.

You don't heal from that. Now they're being hard in a way, sometimes, spinal fusion maybe, et cetera. And if you look at it another way, having a really terrible time in middle school might be the best damn thing for you that ever happened when you're older. We're not measuring them when they're older. They're still young now. Now they're in their early 20s and maybe they're having a better time adjusting. Some are, some aren't.

But maybe in their 30s and 40s, they'll reflect back and be like, I'm glad I was this weird Facebook Instagram environment, which really poisoned my mind because it gave me a real nasty impetus to change. It challenged me in a big way. I was not having a good time. We said earlier that we're trying to make this idyllic world for our children, and they're softening them up.

But isn't the negative of social media another way of hardening them up? What do you think about that? I think what you're posing as a potential thing that could happen, could happen. I think that the current evidence points against that from happening because we're not seeing that trend bear out in the research and the kids the problem is when your mind is developing your prefrontal cortex is developing it's very susceptible

to being wired in a way that is wiring you to be anxious for the rest of your life like a lasting change could you change it are there reasonable steps to take to decrease those symptoms absolutely there are there are proven ways sure but the wiring that happens during childhood much in the same way I'll put it to you this way. You were seven when you came? No accent. My sister was 14 or 15 when she came. She'll always have an accent.

Why? Why is she culturally more Russian than I am? We pretty much came at the same age, 6, 14. Okay, whatever, like six year difference. Whatever, I can't even do math. But it's a small difference, and yet it's a huge impact. Because the time when you get struggle and the type of struggle that is, nuance to that. So like the idea of a child going on a playground and falling and breaking their

arm versus a child being raised in an era of fully immersed anxiety develops the brain in a very different way. And that's why the concern is valid, I think, from Dr. Height about where this goes for that generation. And no one has the answers because it's what's going to happen. It's definitely a concern. Yeah. So that's really the worry about it. But before we tackle the issues of mental health of children and everything else we discussed. I think we have to talk about some exercise talking about. For the love of God. Yeah, we have to because I have questions about exercise. Please, I might have answers. Even though we got to the point where we're saying that exercise might not be a thing. For the next 10 years, it probably still will. So let's get at it.

For the majority of people who either have fallen off an exercise routine, me, I have been very bad in the last six months. I'm judging you very heavily for that. Please do. I warrant and welcome that judgment. for people who have never exercised and are sedentary, you're wanting to start. Where does one start in order to increase muscle mass

because that is shown from an evidence-based perspective to get good health outcomes? Yes. Well, go to RPstrength.com and buy our digital products. Shameless plugs. Give us the cheap, free version for now.

That's it. So what I would start with is an understanding taking your earlier point of before jumping in, let's sit back and give us, give some thought. So first you have to learn how to exercise and understand what the parameters are there. So for example, how much exercise do I need? There are answers to this.

Most people who begin to exercise with weights should be trying to get to the gym for between two and four times a week, for between 30 minutes and an hour at a time. An understanding that you have to do more is illusory. It's just wrong. Some people do not adopt exercise because, look, I'm not a body build, I'm not pro. I don't have hours a week. You're like, oh, well, you actually don't need that.

And they're like, really? So a lot of people can get unbelievable benefits working out twice a week for 30 minutes at a time. A workout you and I will do later in the gym, which hopefully you're going to be calling your family and telling them goodbye, et cetera, beforehand. It's going to take 30 minutes the whole workout. You will be trashed.

And you will not heal until, well, In your case, you haven't been training in a while a week or so. But if you regularly do this, twice a week for 30 minutes at a time, provides humongously robust benefits. So fact number one, you don't have to dedicate your life to the gym. Now all of a sudden, the people listening are, okay, well, that's cool. You know, I wasn't going to stop listening if he said five hours a week. It was just like, yeah, another podcast, please.

The next thing is what kind of movements to do? And the answer is usually compound large muscle mass, more or less whole body movements, presses, pulls, upright rows, shoulder presses, squats, deadlifts, things like that. They train three or four muscles at a time through an insanely time efficient. They harden up your body for an insane amount of anti-injury resilience because, like, if you can pick 200 pounds off the ground, unloading groceries is not going to pull out your back, chances are. They are also insanely metabolically costly.

least. They give you some cardiovascular benefits as well. They promote a huge degree of muscle mass accretion. And they give you a ton of not just injury resilience, but real world strength. They hugely modify how you look and how you feel. So instead of going there and going to the cable machine and doing like one arm side raises for the side dealt, which is the size of two fingers and exerts a very minimal metabolic effect on the whole body, presses, pulls, leg exercises, full squats, lunges, these are the movements you want to cultivate. Another thing is when you're beginning, don't be concerned so much about how much weight is on the bar. You're going to get adaptations no matter what. Us meatheads that have been doing this for 25 years, we're really

concerned about how much weight is on the bar to the point where we write entire apps to manage how much weight we need. For folks beginning, technique is the number one concern. You want to learn how to move your body generally with free weights. Body weight exercises like pushups and body weight squats, dumbbell exercises and barbell exercises. You can totally use machines and they're totally fine, but there's something to learning how to move your body in free space.

If I take someone in the first two years or a year, they've done mostly free weight exercises, they're going to be able to use any machine within like, hey, just do this, but in the machine, no problem. You train someone to lift exclusively in machines. They can do free weights, but it's a little of a tough transition.

So you have to, shaking, balance, all this other weird stuff. So just twice a week for 30 minutes at time, exercises that are compound, whole body movements, sets of generally five to ten repetitions. That's enough reps for your body to really learn how to do it. Because if you do one rep at a time, you're like, I'm not really getting practice with this.

Someone's like, what's the squat? You're like, I don't know, I've done it three times ever. Not more than 10 reps usually because fatigue kicks in and new learners to technique. When fatigue kicks in, they start doing it wrong. And then you're learning how to do it wrong. So sets a five to 10, if you can do a set and it's just not challenging, like the weight is moving as fluidly in rep 1 as it is in rep 8, increase the weight on the bar, gingerly. If the weight on the bar increase is pretty tough and your technique's unstable, keep the weight the same for a few weeks until you feel you're in command of it again and then move up and wait again.

Progressing your weights over time, that is the foundation of how people should enter musculoskeletal fitness, in my opinion. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to. play on your next adventure. This fall get double points on every qualified stay. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at BestWestern. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions.

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valuable to point out. Thanks, Dr. Mike. From a non-PHD person, the number one thing that I say to folks who are very focused on what exercise they're doing, what weights they're doing, what routine they're following is do the one that you can be consistent with because consistency and injury prevention are the two most important things when it comes to exercise. Do you feel like I'm making a valid point when I say that to my patients? Insanely valid point because consistency is the opening of the door that lets you into the benefits. If you don't open the door, it kind of doesn't matter. It's like not having the money to buy a BMW, but you're really concerned with a model you're going to get. It's like

but you don't have money. When you have the money, hey, you can buy whatever, then you can think about what model. So consistency is enormous, and there are so many things to say about how leverage the consistency in your favor. One of them is don't overload yourself.

If you give yourself a five day a week plan for an hour at a time, the boss is going to call, you're staying late at work, you're off your plan, you're done, you're out, you're flushed out. If it's two days a week, 30 minutes at a time,

get your RPI hypertrophy app, it tells you what to do, you're good to go. Oh my God, You skip a day, no worries. You skip Wednesday, you go Thursday. You skip Thursday, you go Friday. No big deal.

Another one is convenience. If you can get barbell and dumbbell set and a bench in your house and that's what you do to stay consistent, amazing, unreal benefits. You don't have to go to the gym. If you like the social aspect of going to the gym, the routine aspect, amazing.

But don't drive an hour way to go to the gym. Another one is people have this like, what I call it, like a Rocky Balboa mentality where they purposefully give themselves more difficult things to do. I need the challenge. Like, you're not good with challenge, Susie. You need to just get here. So instead of, there's like a time thing where people are like, okay, so I got to live, I'd have a lot of conversations with people on airplanes when I travel, you know,

sit next to someone that looks like me and you start apologizing for not training. I'm like, I swear to God, everything's fine. I love you just like another human would. But they're like, you know, got to go in the morning, right, 6 a.m. And I'm like, no, my God, no, who told you that? They're like, but that's what everyone does. You drink the eggs and you go run. So schedule the time in the day to something that's convenient. for you. And another one is try to look at your calendar and actually throw their, you're lifting into the schedule. Hold yourself accountable to it. If you say, well, I'm going to work out twice a week this week and someone's like, oh yeah, when are you going

to do it? You're like, I don't know, maybe Thursday, you're done. You're just, it's like starting a sprint race and falling right away. Hold yourself accountable to the fact that you're going to go. Another one is try to get someone to go with you. Now, you don't force coworkers and stuff to go with you. But if someone's like, hey, I want to get into fitness too at your work, you're like, all right Jim let's go together that's cool because when you're not feeling it Jim's going to text you just be like training today you're like damn it yes send see you at the gym gym and then all of a sudden you're there he's there neither one of you really wanted to be there but you kind of guilt tripped yourself into doing it that's an awesome thing another thing is to your point of don't worry about the

exact thing you're doing look if it's a zumba class if it's Pilates if it's yoga if it's dance class if it's lifting weights if it's cardio machines you like doing it you're consistent with it God bless you, go and do it. It's a little resistance, no big deal. You'll get to the heavy stuff later. Go to the gym, go get some activity, challenge yourself. If you just hate lifting barbells and dumbbells, but you like machines, my God, do machines.

Try to make it as not necessarily easier, but as convenient as possible for yourself to do the thing. Fewer barriers, the better. And some people just set up artificial barriers for themselves. Yeah, and they create like, oh, I need to take supplements and I need to do this, like, whoa, relax. That's like the final points once you're at some, like, Extreme levels.

Supplements have almost no effect. They have an effect, but it's a very small. If you're trying to become a chiseled Adonis, which I was born into, of course, some of us were worth a trillion dollars. I did inherit a significant amount of my trolleys. I don't like to discuss it because it, you know, I like to think I earned it.

So if you, there's just a lot to say for leaning in to what, I don't want to say like to do, but I don't want to say can tolerate. It's somewhere between that for a lot of people. Because can tolerate doing is like, oh, man, that's a negative way to put it. But like, I mean, look, you and I would be lying that if we told people, hey, you're going to go to the gym and you're going to love it. You know, like fitness fanatics, like the granola people that are like, oh my God, I'm addicted to working.

I'm like, yeah, Susie, I get it. You are. But gym at your office, he's not going to love the first time. Here's another one. when you start training with weights, expect it to suck. It's painful. It hurts.

There is nothing confusing about it. That's part of it. Later, you'll experience the endorphin rush. You're going to love it. You will. It's not going to happen right away. I think people go to the gym.

It's like, people will start healthy eating. They go like, oh my God, I eat these salads and I feel so good. I eat a salad. I'm like, when hell am I going to feel good? I feel like eating a piece of pizza. That's going to make me feel good. So I don't like to promise that it's going to be amazing right away.

you're an adult hold yourself to a standard it's a very low standard twice a week go lift weights yeah and get into the habit once you're in the habit hey it'll be smooth sailing you might like it so much you might do more of it supplements they're great for advanced people that want to get the chiseled everything and be adonis and all that stuff and they're not it's not for advanced people because they got to where they're advanced from the supplements i wish it's like when you're at the 97th 98 percentile and you're trying to get single digits of advance exactly when you care about the minutia. It's like, someone's like,

hey, what kind of computer should I buy? But they talk to a gamer and they're like, you got to get the DGX fly. Like, do I really? Like, well, actually, no, you don't. Your surfing Facebook.

100%. Like, I'm spending $9,000 on a computer. Like, do I have to do that? No way. So supplements is the ultimate example of we think it's a shortcut. I can take a creatine pill and it'll be great.

Like, yeah, but you won't even notice that you're taking it. It's not the money. Supplements are cheap. It's just that whatever you think you're going to get out of it, you're not going to get out of it. and it's annoying to take them.

It's just another BS thing you have to do in your day. Forget about it. Just go and exercise. And there's much to say on the eating realm, of course, for healthy eating is much the same way. When you're eating healthy, just big chunks first. Just anything that looks like BS junk food, eat a little less of it.

That's my first go-to. Similar thing to lifting. Just go in there twice a week, get some exercise and move through a full range of motion, challenge your muscles, good technique. After a while, the stuff will kind of be second nature to you that if you want more, oh my God, RP strength, we got all the science, we'll teach you how to be super advanced,

but you might not want that. And lifting twice a week for the huge, vast majority of American adults is going to get so much muscularity on them, burn off so much fat, be so improving to the metabolisms, that's kind of all they need. Why, when in the past,

I don't really work with a trainer anymore, why, when you go first time with a trainer, their goal is to always kill you to show you how good they are. I feel like that's a fault. I feel like that's a bad move. It's almost the same thing as we were talking about with social media.

Mindless TikTok scrolling isn't great for young developing minds. But guess what they want the most in this world? Mindless TikToks are they want it. So TikToks are... So people want to be crushed. They want to be crushed. Why?

They want to see that this is a real effect. I'm paying money. But anyone can crush you. Yeah, they don't, most people don't know that. Like you make someone hold a wall sit for as long as they possibly can until they give out, they're going to be really sore. Totally. That doesn't mean that's a great workout, yeah.

100%. Well, like, it can even mean like you got a great workout, but maybe it's too great and you won't be able to come back for a week and a half. And you think like, okay, every time I need to kill myself. And if I don't, it's not working. That's definitely not true. But people have that same idea of, they think they need the thing

and they will pay a trainer to do it and I used to be a personal trainer actually in New York City and we would usually try to ease people in and people would tell us like well that wasn't that bad I'm like Bob if you come back tomorrow you better bring crutches how dare you and they're like all right so we have to explain to them like listen sure don't you worry

this is going to start ramping up it's similar to when people take various drugs they want to feel the effects if they don't like it's not working like metformin I take metformin or I don't I can't feel anything just stop taking it like trust me It's doing really cool stuff. So a lot of it's just, sometimes the trainer has illusions, totally, but a lot of times

it's really a supply and demand type of thing. That's what people want. Can you speak a little bit what one can expect when they start an exercise program like that? Would they get newbie gains? Can you maybe talk about that topic? So one of the first thing that happens when you start lifting weights is the muscular system starts changing.

You start growing muscle very rapidly, but your nervous system changes way faster. your brain learns to coordinate its abilities better. You become actually tougher such that normal pain would have made you stop, but now you're like, nah, I've been here before and it's really subconscious. You're like, I've got a couple more reps. You're going to experience an insane increase in strength really, really early. And that's mostly nervous system based. But muscle is accruiting as well.

Within six months to 12 months of starting a beginner weight training program, you're going to notice visible gains in muscularity, really impressive strength gains. and depending on what you do with your diet, actually quite decent fat loss as well. So those are newbie gains. Most people will get them to some extent or another. Some people just have revolutionary newbie gains.

Some people even struggle with newbie gains, but metabolically under the hood, a lot of really good things are happening. So what I'd say about newbie gains is just go in there and do your thing. Don't expect anything. Best case, you'll be very pleasantly surprised. Worst case, you'd be like,

all right, I wasn't expecting anything. Well, sort of nothing happened. It's the consistency. It's doing the thing that's great. Another thing I would say about newbie gains is a lot of people get newbie gains and after two years of lifting, they don't plateau, but it looks like a plateau because the gains start to come slowly and they'll get demotivated and they go, am I doing something wrong? No, that's just how things work. You'll still make incredible gains over years-long timeline, but yeah, like, no, you won't be able to extrapolate or like, oh, in two years, I'll weigh 300 pounds and have muscles out to here. That's not going to happen.

So expect the newbie gains to kind of deflate in their growth over time. Expect that so that you're not shocked when you're like, I must be doing something wrong. No, no, it's a slower pace of gain from now on. The people who are putting on some muscle, they want to be lean but still put on muscle. Is it possible to put on muscle and be lean? Do you need to just gain weight in general

and then potentially decrease fat? What is the order by which someone needs to, get to a higher muscle state, but still stately. Great question. For beginners who have never lifted before, it is truly a massive recomposition effect. You can start out at whatever body fat, whatever body weight. Let's say you weigh 170 pounds.

After two years of lifting weights, you went from 20% body fat to 12% body fat, having changed nothing else. You still weigh 170, but now you have abs where before you had, you know, whatever it is you had above the abs, a couple spare tires, which come in handy for, you know,

Very flat tax. Yeah, yeah. So recomposition is really a thing. If you become more advanced and you tend to be pretty lean and kind of a little skinny and you want to become significantly more muscular, you do have to eat more food than you're interested in eating. And then after spending a couple of months doing that, you get a little fatter, but you've gained a lot of muscle. You chill for a few weeks, let the body get used to things, reduce fatigue. And then you do a fat loss phase where you keep lifting weights, eat very well, but reduce your junk. and snack food, take your carbs and fats,

dial them down a little bit, keep your proteins high. After eight to 12 weeks, you lose a lot of fat, essentially losing no muscle at all. You're way leaner. And then if you want to redo that cycle over and over to get more jacked,

eventually you end up looking exactly like me. No, wait, wait, I said that wrong. Something more muscular and leaner. But for people just getting in, you don't have to bulk up. You don't have to buy weight gainers and protein powders, just eat well. Try to eat a little bit money.

There's tons of nutritional recommendations I can give. I don't know if this is a time or place. Well, from like a protein, general protein guidance for someone who's looking to start an exercise program from scratch per pound of body weight. If you don't increase your protein needs,

you'll still grow phenomenal amounts of muscle as a beginner because weight training takes all the protein you're eating and redirects it to muscle mass even if you don't have a lot of spare protein. But generally speaking, something like close to a gram per pound a day isn't a good goal.

Anything more than that is almost certainly superfluous. and significantly less than that, like 0.7 grams per pound per day is totally fine for almost everyone. It's just like, I'm not smart enough to multiply things by 0.7 on the fly, so I just do a gram. So I weigh 230 pounds,

it's 230 grams of protein per day. If you're like, what's 0.7 of that? I'm like, I honestly, I have no idea. So gram per pound, what I would say is fist-sized portions of lean protein at the three or four meals you eat every day, you're golden.

You have nothing to worry about as a beginner getting into it. You'll get phenomenal results, and you don't have to think about that anymore. You don't even have to weigh stuff out. Not at all. Actually, shameless plug, but at RP, we have a product called the simple science diet.

It's literally something you paste on your fridge. It's four meals a day. And you use estimates of like your finger size and fist size to just put the portions together. No counting, nothing. That's how simple it has to be. And to your point earlier, it's the consistency that really gets you.

You don't need a ton of science. Just do these simple things every day. But that's a problem because people are like, oh, man, every day. Most days. Six months to 12. months until I say. Where's my pill? That's a long time. It's a long time. That is a long time. What do you think the biggest mistake folks are making

when they're starting their routines? The number one thing. I don't have an evidence-based ranked order list of mistakes, but I can give you a few hints at what it probably is. One is something we mentioned earlier, which is the all or nothing approach. Like if I'm not waking up at six in the morning, six days a week to crush out two hours of all this. And logging all my meals and doing everything full send right that's how you get results so that's a huge huge problem another one is failure to pay attention to technique um you know people will say like do a deadlift and what you see is kind of like a person getting reborn again like question mark back and you're like man you're a chiropractor must love you do newbies should do deadlift say that again do you think

newbies should do deadlift yeah really with good technique well yeah that's generally i'm saying real life application real life application yeah totally newbies actually have a so like bobby is watching or listening. Bobby doesn't have a trainer. He's going to go for the first time. You think he should deadlift? Yeah, as long as it doesn't max out or something like that, totally fine.

Dead lifts are very safe exercise, if done with remotely decent technique. And if you're not doing maximum lifting, they're actually very safe, even if your technique is a giant question mark, literally and figuratively. So... Why are some people in the fitness community anti-deadlift?

Mostly because they're just wrong. But the deadlift with insane poundages an insanely bad technique is leveraging your back in a way that can get you hurt. The thing is beginners don't, it can't do insane. Most people are so weak.

They're not strong enough to hurt themselves. Like, I'm going to own in there. I can put enough weight on the bar to really mess myself up. How many times in your medical practice have you dealt with untrained people getting full muscular evulsions? I imagine almost never.

But in drug-assisted powerlifting, it's like a regular thing. Pecks pop off, hamstrings pop off. Bicep. You just don't see. see it in housewives that start training for the first time. It's just the force transduction is just not there. Your tendons are pretty strong relative to your muscles when you start.

Your connectives, you should just way stronger than your muscles. And if you have puny little muscles, your tendons are like, what? We're lifting. They didn't even got the message. They're totally fine. Deadlifts are totally fine to do for beginners. Now, all you got to do is go to YouTube and type in good deadlift technique. You watch a 30 second video where the guy's like, make sure to have a flat back.

You just do that. It's not rocket science. If your idea of a deadlift is coming up, getting in the gym, the bros are around. You're like, I've never done this before, but put three plates on. And then you jerk up like crazy. Your butt shoots up and you get to your knees

and it's not moving. You feel your back kind of going and you're like, people are watching and you're, okay, that's bad. That's not what most people hopefully do. So deadlifts are totally fine. And here's the thing about deadlift, especially if you pay attention to good technique

and give yourself time to put weight on the bar. Yes, they're acutely, slightly more injurious than other lifts potentially. But there's a yin and yang there, if you deadlift with good technique for long enough, you develop an insane resistance to injury. I mean, my God, if I can pick up 315 pounds from the ground, how the hell am I going to get hurt hiking with my friends?

What the hell out there ways, 315? No way. People pick up their children. Here's another thing that I'm sure you can appreciate a lot. In the real world, untrained people, which is a sport scientist called regular people, they get hurt doing the darndest things. Like, my toddler wants uppies.

I go like this, I pull out my back. If you can deadlift 250 pounds, which for most adult males is a very realistic thing, you can deadlift after a few years of training, how the hell is your toddler going to hurt you? It's a non-starter. So deadlifts are something to be mindful of, technique-wise, although very overvalued how injurious they really are. But as you get stronger on them, your probability of getting hurt in daily life with your back, I mean, exponentially lower. What age did you start working out? lifting was 14 15 if you were to go back what's something you would tell yourself or change oh i just punch myself through a wall just for a variety of stupid things i did as a kid what's one

thing technique so what did you do wrong like rushing to put too much weight on too fast uh too much weight too fast bouncing weights off the ground not even having an understanding of what technique i'm doing like if someone asked me like what's a deadlift i'd be like you pick the weight up off the ground like what goes up first the hips or the chest like uh So anyway, I just pick the weight up. Like, hey, thanks, Mike. That's great. So technique, a pre-planned progression of loads.

Like this week, I lift 100 pounds. Next week, I lift 105. Ooh, but I feel like going to 115. Nope, shut up, go to 105. The discipline. Short-sightness is a terrible problem and resistance training. I want to be my maximum strength

about two weeks after I start. I mean, there's not too much to ask. So when people feel great, they go crazy weight on the bar. If you just let the weights feel easy for a while and slowly, gently put weight on the bar, your probability of injury goes down to almost zero. Your technique solidifies like crazy. And from submaximal lifting, lifting where you're not going crazy to failure, pushing crazy poundages,

put slabs of muscle on your body. Eventually, you get so strong, you'll barely be able to put five pounds on the bar a week. You're going to reach that point at basically the same time anyway, except earlier because you won't get hurt and have to take six months off. What about women who want to start working out, but they're like, I don't want to do weights because I don't want to get bulky. What's the message to them? There's, and this is a terrible problem in America.

Women have been turning into Arnold Schwarzenegger an alarming rate, and this, Mike, is something we have to stop. I mean, my mom started lifting. She had a 25-inch muscular arm the next day. She couldn't even brush her hair because the bicep got in the way. The creatine supplement. And she took creatine, then she weighed 800 pounds,

veins in her quads. We couldn't even understand what she was saying, because she was like, we're like, please make sense. The FBI had to put her down, actually. Very sad story with cannons. The real guns didn't work at that point. So all of that humor to reflect a fundamental reality,

especially women who, women in general, and older women particularly, and older Caucasian women more particularly, is like the least muscle growth-prone genetic and epigenetic person you could find. you're going to have to claw and scratch for muscle gains. You will not blow up and become an insane looking bodybuilder. I'm 99,999% assured that that won't happen.

Now, every now and again, you get a freak with total crazy genetics, but then just lift, do fewer sets. One set of deadlift. Glutes are getting too big, just one set. Glutes aren't big enough, three or four sets. It's that easy to manage the volume to make sure you don't get the too crazy of a muscle. Here's the thing. If you become a little too muscular, do less

or just stop lifting weights. Your shoulders get too jacked. Work on lower body. Here's another thing. It's very difficult to become enormous if you don't increase your body weight. So people say, why don't we get too bulky? I'm like, all right, Karen, what's on your plate?

What's you eat? And she's like, well, kind of everything. Like, aha. So that's how you get to 250 pounds. It's not through lifting weights. The vast majority of women that are aware of their diet and lift weights, you can't tell that,

They lift weights until their t-shirt comes off and you're like, oh, damn, what's up, girl? Otherwise, they just look like a normal person. I mean, there's tons of women walking around in New York City right now who regularly lift weights. In their jackets, you can't tell. There's just like a 120-pound person. Now, she gets a pump in the gym. She takes her shirt off, tank top only. You're like, all right, she's got some chisel there.

But for a woman to gain just unreal amounts of bulky muscle mass, especially in the upper body. So in the lower body, women have a slight proclivity for muscle gain, not comparable to men, but close to. In the upper body, it's literally true that women very much struggle. And what a lot of women are saying, I don't want to get too bulky. Like, oh, okay, so you don't want your glutes to be too muscular? Like, no, actually, that's exactly what I want. I just don't want big doubts. Find me the girl with big doubts.

And I'll tell you someone who has been lifting for a long time, who has unbelievable, very unlikely genetics, and usually is using anabolic steroids on top of that. So it's just one of these concerns where it's almost all total paranoia. It's like, you know, enrolling in a course for mathematics at high school and be like, hey, listen, I'm really worried about this. Like, why not? Like, I just don't want Isaac Newton's life. You know, like, you're not going to become Isaac Newton.

Like, are you sure? Like, no, but it's highly unlikely. You mentioned anabolic steroids. What are your thoughts on people using either anabolic steroids or testosterone? To give you some background, I had a popular influencer, and he's a reality TV show star, that I asked him, are you on TRT? And he said, yes.

I asked, well, why are you on TRT? Did you get your levels checked? He goes, oh, yeah, I checked. My levels were fun. before, but I thought that I could get them even higher and become jacked and ripped. So suddenly that's no longer TRT, because TRT is for a medical issue

when someone has low testosterone. The replacement thing ended there. Yeah, the replacement thing ended right there. So I talked to him about the risks of doing supra-physiological levels of testosterone, and he said no doctor has ever even discussed that with him, you know they're prescribing it. I thought that was interesting.

And then when I posted that clip on social media, people were very upset that I was saying risks that they felt were not attributed to TRT. They're right. If you have low testosterone and you replace a testosterone, you will not have those risks of excess heart disease, fertility issues, because you're low, so we're fixing a condition.

But when you're taking super physiological amounts of testosterone, that's no longer TRT, do you feel like A, that's a fair assessment and B, what's your take on the overall situation? Very fair. assessment. Anytime you replace endogenous testosterone production with exogenous, you get full shutdown kind of no matter of the dose. The fertility issues will be a thing no matter what dose you take. People, TRT is a funny thing. Your body on average produces something like 75

nanograms per deciliter of testosterone per week for you. TRT generally, the conversation starts around 100. And you get Esther weight in there to calculate out, but a lot of guys are doing and 2 to 300 milligrams a week, and that's TRT, and a lot of doctors will prescribe it. Now, that's TRT if you have, like, top 1% genetics for natural testosterone production, which, by the way, is technically in the physiological range, in a sense,

is just extreme end. And there, for many people, the benefits greatly outweigh the costs. Better muscularity, better mood. For people who are low. For people who are anything, if you were normal and went to high normal, generally many people have a great response

to that. You get much higher than that, and it starts to be a 50-50 trade-off. You get much higher than that, it starts to be a way trade-off in the other direction, where your desire for extreme muscularity has to be like the number one thing in your life

because everything else becomes perilous. Now, I don't want to overstate the risk. We had enough of the 1980s, one shot of steroids, you're just going to walk three feet and drop dead. That doesn't happen. But it will take years off of your life. Approximately it can increase anxiety.

it can approximately decrease your intelligence. It can radically decrease your emotional intelligence. It can make you apt to be abnormally aggressive, take things in a very, very wrong way from which they were intended. It can do really unfortunate things to your blood work. It can long-term increase your risk of heart disease, short-term it can make your blood work.

Heart disease markers go really, really south. And all of that's a really, really bad deal. So for people who have a certain testosterone production, My best advice to them, we do have a video on the RP strength channel addressing exactly this thing. I think it's called

like, do you need TRT? And the number one point in the video is if your TRT is clinically low, you may be a candidate. And by the way, here are a couple of symptoms of low testosterone. Also, you have to ask yourself how sensitive am I anti-amia to antigens?

Because you could have, let's the average range is somewhere between 300 and 900, right? Anything below 300 is, in most cases, considered suboptimal. Well, so let's say you come out at 287. Okay, how's your socks draw? Pretty sweet.

How's your muscularity? Pretty good. Everything, mood, everything's great. Like, do you need to be injecting steroids into your body every week to do a little better than that? Nah. F that. They don't do it.

Whereas you could have a level of 350 and you're not so androgen sensitive in your peripheral tissues and all of a sudden, like you have every single symptom of low testosterone and yeah, injecting double the testosterone can radically transform your life for the better. So it's not just blood values, it's also symptomology. That's a big deal people miss. And another thing is a lot of people are on TRT. I'll tell you something I will tell us because whatever. I'm on TRT is true for many people who say it.

But for many people in the fitness industry, it's a sweet way to tell people that you're not on steroids where you're just on steroids because they'll get illegal TRT prescription from the doctor. Their dealer fills in the rest and they go through, normally they aren't TRT, but they go through multiple month phases during the year where they go on super physiological doses.

So you see their profile, they have 50 abs, they're eating cheeseburgers, amazing. It's TRT. No, it's not. That's prima bowl on it, 600 milligrams a week additional to that. That's how they got that stuff. The TRT keeps that stuff around after they get off, but they go on and off and on and off.

And they'll tell you, TRT. And there's so many people saying that, it's easy because TRT is legal and considered ethical in most cases and indicated for men over their 40s, it's a very easy way to be like, yeah, yeah, I'm on TRT. where in reality, like, some of the people on TRT are they are on TRT right now when you talk to them.

Well, that's why the symptomology is very subjective and can be open to not just interpretation, but also to corruption. So I have patients that come in that have been spoken to by other experts or maybe they heard someone online that present some of the issues of what low T could look like even if you have normal levels, like subclinical, let's say, symptoms, or sub-lab levels clinically they're not feeling well. They're just depressed. And they're thinking that testosterone

is going to get them out of that depression or they're having another medical condition. You know, they have heart disease that's leading them to feel negatively, not have like a vascular issue. You know, they have erectile dysfunction because their hemoglobin A1C is through the roof. Your hemoglobin A1C is through the roof?

Oh, it was a rectal dysfunction that was pointing out. Got it, okay. But you see what I'm saying? Like, it's very easy to take a patient, coming in, who's struggling for a whole wide variety of reasons and show them TRT as the answer to their problems. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant.

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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering. Is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote?

Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes? Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners, find fabulous for less. 100%. And a lot of times it's one of those where they come in

and what they want is a transformation. They want one thing that's going to make them more and everything better and pull up in the Ferrari and flash my abs and the hot girls get in and I drive off. And they think TRT is it because a lot of the testimonials you get to, bar TRT are the good ones right I mean like who goes on the internet and goes I did TRT and it was like meh and then like I inflamed injection sites and I stopped shooting very few people

say that when they do say that those videos didn't get looked at a lot people in many cases they have a problem and so when they look for solutions they're going to look for the best cases of the solution and thus all that social media wise gets upvoted etc and you'd be like you know the guy comes to the doctor like you and he says hey doc I want TRT and you're like hold on a second frank let's take a look at blood levels let's do a proper analysis. This isn't always the case, but one thing I'd like to say is just low sex drive, TRT is not in the first top 10 differential diagnoses of what's going to fix you. Just depressive effects. I mean, almost, almost everyone, statistically, that has depression,

has no problem with testosterone. But if you have the agglomeration of four or five low T symptoms and you have lab values of low T, there's a conversation. But a lot of people come in with just the one problem. They're like testosterone, right? And I've had close friends of mine ask me if they were candidates for TRT because they were struggling with one or two of these problems. So I take them through the whole list and we get to like through six problems, they have like one or two. And I'm like, TRT ain't it, man. And, you know, because quite frankly, I am on anabolic steroids. Absolutely. It would be pointless to lie at this point looking like this. I know the dark sides very well and I know the regimen you have to take of injecting yourself all the time. You go on a trip.

You inject twice a week to keep stable blood levels. You go on a trip to France for two weeks. What the hell do you do? Do you pack your needles? You're going to explain to the French TSA what the hell that is. Do you get your scripts with you? It's annoying. You run out of alcohol swabs.

The whole thing is a giant exogenously doing something your body already does for you is not fun. And so when you decide, do I want TRT? What I would say to people is there better be like a meat and potatoes reason for it. If it's just like a lot of people have this thing where they're kind of playing around with things. But some of the things they're playing around with, they're real serious things.

It's kind of like, you know, when you're a younger person, let's say in your 20s. and you're like, I want to try marijuana. It's a kind of thing that it's okay to try. You get a couple brownies, you sit with your friends, you lock all the doors, you watch TV, fine. But like, you don't simply try heroin or meth. Like, that's real serious stuff.

And most people know that. It should be understood that TRT, because the injection of anabolic steroids into your body, is a big thing that will affect a ton of other things, and it's a huge responsibility and a burden. That's how you should see it versus like, ooh, that's a good thing I can try. But TRT is not like you walk by the office M&M's thing.

You're like, ooh, I love the blue ones. That's not how it works. And a lot of people think like, well, because I saw a YouTube video of people talking about it and they live in Dubai and they have abs. I want TRT. It's not, one does not simply. Yeah. You mentioned from personal experience

being aware of the dark side of anabolic use. What is that? How long do you have? You're like, actually 30 seconds, so get to it. I mean, you have to check your blood work all the time. I have been gifted with like, You know, like, the Jewish people that are 98, but they're still alive for some reason. I've got that whole thing in my family.

So my blood work's actually phenomenal. I actually got my blood work done yesterday. I have a total, I weigh 235 pounds, and I'm 40 years old, and I have a total cholesterol of 76. It's like, you know, I didn't, that's not, I mean, I eat super healthy. I exercise all the time, really low body fat. But like, damn, you just, you can't earn that. You just have to have it.

So luckily on the blood work side, I've been pretty good. but it's something you have to watch all the time. People can just assume that if they're living a healthy lifestyle and their blood work is typically good, that'll continue to be typically good for years on end. You cannot assume that with anapologs. You are doing something to your body that's very artificial and very bad for it.

You're messing with the machine. So you have to have a constant level of awareness. That's no fun to anyone. Another thing is, I mean, obviously the long-term side effects. Like, I know that if the singularity doesn't come and save me by around 2045, I'm not going to live as long as I was supposed to live. That's a messed up thing to think about.

acute risks of stroke and embolism, and they're always there. Any given injection of steroids, the oil goes into the wrong place, pulmonary embolism, you're dead. Is it a very small risk? Yeah, but every time it's an extant risk. It's like driving 90 miles an hour on the freeway.

You'll probably be fine, but if you're not fine, you're going to be really not fine, really, really quick. For me, the most proximate problems in my own personal life are the psychiatric problems, anxiety like you would not believe. Every day that I'm on high doses, I wake up in the morning afraid of the rest of my day.

Why? I'm insanely competent at what I do. That's not how I feel about it. When I wake up in the morning, I just want to keep sleeping. But I can't sleep because I'm fight or flight already from also the steroids. Aggression.

Perceiving conflicts between people as personal slights. Like someone on the street, you're walking by and they're like, hey, you're like, oh, hello. If I'm on a lot of gear and someone says, Hey, now, externally, I'm like, hello, but internally, I'm like, say something. Say something. Let's get this party started. I don't want to live like that.

It's terrible. What's that called? Intrusive thoughts. I think about violence all the time. Well, if your testosterone is 25 times what it's supposed to be, what the hell do you think it's going to make you think about? If you jack up your estrogen jack down your testosterone, you're just going to want to hug every panda bear in the world.

The opposite is just war all the time in my brain. Another one is a marked proximate reduction of IQ. Like right now, as I talk to you, I'm on contest prop. I'm on a considerable dose of anabolic. Various questions you asked me earlier, I could have answered in a more fluid point by point manner, remembering all the points. But my short-term memory is significantly contracted

because I'm on an extreme dose. I'm usually a lot smarter. I'm not as smart right now, and I can feel it. It's this fog that lifts when you get off of steroids. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm brilliant. and delusional brilliant, of course. But then when I'm on, it's like, just mark it. Another one is an inability to perceive

a broad spectrum of positive human emotion. Like, I live in a really beautiful area in Michigan and I walk out and this is a pond and these trees and I know that I like looking at them, but it's a memory to me. I go work out every morning and I look at the pond and the trees and I'm like, hmm, like all I feel is rage and frustration and anger and anxiety

and it's just scream in my head all the time and look at how beautiful the world is. I know it's beautiful and I know I like it, but I only like it when I come off of drugs. When I'm on drugs, I can't even hardly perceive beauty at all. That's my daily life. It sucks.

To me, it's worth a trade-off because I'm in this glorious purpose, low-key-style journey to like try to get super jacked and lean for God knows what childhood demons. It makes sense to me that it's one of these things where if anyone young is watching this, like, oh, steroids, that seems cool. it's a real rocket ride

and it's not a fun rocket ride you look dope but you only really appreciate how you look when you're pumped in the gym for about 15 minutes of the end of your workout the rest of the time it just feels like total crap I think we just filmed the next dare commercial the next what dare commercial remember that

hey kids yeah we gotta get like a talking dog in here to really bolster the message let's get ribbing here although he might just lower that he doesn't seem very daring exactly I think we hit everything I think we solved fitness Yeah, who? Hopefully the machines will solve it for us anyway.

Well, it sounds like, based off this conversation, I'm definitely never going to use steroids. I'm going to yearn for the day. We're going to stop exercising because the pills do it for us. Our genetics are going to make us no longer anxious and depressed. And AI is going to take over the world. In 10 years, I'm either going to send you an email and be like, ha, I told you so.

What's an email? You're going to just think it and it's going to come. Oh, I'm going to be retro. Oh, you're going to send. Oh, yeah. I'm actually, I take that back. I misspoke. I am going to deliver a three and a half inch floppy disc to you in person.

Where do you want people to go to watch the rest of your content? Learn more about fitness and host. After this interview, probably nowhere. No, come on, is no one tuned in? No, tell them. There's a lot of people. Oh, my God. RP strength on YouTube, and you'll know you have typed it incorrectly when you see my

gigantic ugly face. Click on some videos, learn some things, subscribe. And watch our video of you destroying me in the gym. Oh, yeah, that'll be up there. Hopefully it goes well for you, but no promises. It won't. But I'm okay with that challenge. And that's it.

Accepting the pain. is a great recommendation for people entering fitness or reentering fitness. It won't be fun at first, but hey, that's life. I will say this conversation did inspire me to, A, think with a more open mind about the future problems of tomorrow, and B, maybe kickstart my lifting journey at 30 minutes twice a week. We'll be kickstarting it in 30 minutes. Yeah.

All right. Good stuff. Awesome. Huge thank you to the other and stronger Dr. Mike for his time and wisdom in this interview. If you're interested, head on over to his YouTube channel where you can actually see me get put through the paces on one of his workouts. It was actually a pretty simple workout

designed for busy professionals who only have about 30 minutes of time in the gym, so hopefully you could find some value in it. I'd love also if you could give this interview five stars, if you enjoyed it, maybe leave a review too, as that's the best way to help new listeners find the show. Thanks so much for watching, listening, or maybe reading if you took time to look at the new transcript feature.

always stay happy and healthy.