The Checkup with Doctor Mike - The Science Of Attractiveness | Dr. Mike Israetel

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://www.incogni.com/doctormikeI'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/00:00 Intro3:45 Lying about attractiveness17:10 Are unattractive people “broken”?23:50 Does attractiveness matter?28:30 Good Will Hunting32:57 Love at first sight41:06 Are his words dangerous?43:00 Lizzo47:03 Dating apps49:50 Disney Princesses54:38 Taboos1:00:35 Weight vs. Height1:07:45 Cultural Norms / Hollywood1:13:10 Breasts and Teeth1:21:45 How to change yourself1:39:00 Why does he care?1:44:50 "You're beautiful"1:54:12 His plastic surgery2:13:17 Doing unhealthy things2:24:10 Having children2:37:05 None of it matters2:40:07 Plastic surgery for children2:47:27 How he's perceived2:57:14 Future3:00:04 RFK Jr. + PoliticsHelp us continue the fight against medical misinformation and change the world through charity by becoming a Doctor Mike Resident on Patreon where every month I donate 100% of the proceeds to the charity, organization, or cause of your choice! Residents get access to bonus content, an exclusive discord community, and many other perks for just $10 a month. Become a Resident today:https://www.patreon.com/doctormikeLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga* Select photos/videos provided by Getty Images *** The information in this video is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional **

I was at a college party once. And there's tons of people in the party, guys, girls, everyone, you know, just college. There was a poster on the wall. It wasn't very big. But it said no fat chicks. I remember turning my head at one point during the party, and I saw two girls standing there well away from the picture. And they were chatting, having fun.

And they were both like, Mike, they were fat. You know, I'm not going to fucking walk around it. I wondered at the time, and I've wondered many times since, what it would feel like to read that mid-conversation with someone at the party. Like, it can't feel good. By a certain age, if you are not conventionally attractive or at least, like, decent, you start to learn subconsciously or consciously that all of these things that people live in their lives, romance, interaction, things like that, they're just not for you. That is a giant unmitigated tragedy.

The aesthetic revolution, using biology and technology and all of our best efforts, whatever the hell you brought with your biology, however you look, we're going to make it a little bit better and then better and then better until you look like what you want. And then those people will have a psychological healing that is unprecedented. That means there's some kind of pre-assumption that those who are unattractive are broken. You believe that? Interesting choice of words by you. Not wrong.

Hurt. Hurt. And thus requiring healing. On this episode, I welcome back, my friend, Dr. Mike Isretel. To refresh your memory, he's a bodybuilder with a PhD in sports physiology from East Tennessee State, co-founder of Renaissance periodization, and a former exercise science professor at Temple University. I was excited to have him back on to speak on his recent decision to undergo plastic surgery, as well as his choice to return to competitive bodybuilding.

However, upon the start of our conversation, he mentioned a new book he's written on aesthetics. This led to a lengthy discussion on beauty standards, the impact of them on mood, mental health, and even quality of life. Given that this podcast is focused on getting to the truth, regardless of the perspective, I think it's important to note that some of the research I looked at after the conversation shows broad variability on certain claims discussed on the episode. You'll hear some strong, strong takes about the universal beauty rules and preferences. To be fair, there are broad patterns.

Symmetry, clear skin, and some sex typical cues tend to be considered attractive across many groups. But significant cross-cultural research like the International Body Project show body size and shape ideals shift quite a bit with culture, resources, and media influence. There isn't one global template. Even for faces, twin and large sample studies show personal experience drives preferences more than genetics. That being said, attractive people seem to have certain real-world advantages. So Dr. Mike's advice surrounding nutrition and fitness could be valuable from a practical perspective. We just need to remember an important distinction.

While these aesthetic nutrition and exercise-driven recommendations can help with mental and cardiometabolic outcomes, purely cosmetic changes show mixed psychological outcomes. And they require screening for conditions like body dysmorphic disorder. That being said, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with the other Dr. Mike. Huge thanks to Incogni for sponsoring this video. Let's get started. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant.

You're building something big. and Squares there for all of it, giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in-person with Square kiosk or online. Instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights so you know what's working, what's not, and what's next. Because when you're doing big things, your tools should to. Visit square.ca to get started. Tell me about the book.

So I just finished a rough draft and submitted it to the editing team. Okay. For a book. The editors hated it. Oh, great. And they said it needs to be completely different. But that's what, that means you're doing the right thing.

I guess. I think so. Because that means you're getting an emotional response. Yeah. I'm kidding. They didn't say it. Oh. No one reads.

No one's ever going to read it. No one reads it. Okay. But, uh, so the book, the working title and likely the final title is the aesthetic revolution. Hmm.

And so this is some combination. Is this like the golden ratio thing? Uh, yeah, yeah, but applied to, bodies wait wait wait wait wait hold up is that your body you're drawing no no it was yours okay god i have that many curves well i don't know you gave a lot of curves there's a lot of curves there's like calf muscles in there in that curve yeah that's my little joke because like in hip hop

they do this like oh got it and then i i just expanded it like the roly-poly body which i have a huge fan of is that what the aesthetic revolution has become to turn us all into roly polis 100% the shell everything everything um okay so serious note the aesthetic revolution is my attempt to do kind of two things the book is going to be hypothetically although the rough draft is literally this part practical guide on how to get in shape for visual aesthetics okay part understanding why getting in shape for purely visual aesthetics in most cases makes you way healthier way better quality of life, way better longevity, and obviously massive psychological benefits. And then the kind of third part is to talk about what we've already figured out how to

leverage in biology in order to change your body, but really, and the part I kind of like a lot, is to talk about what's coming down the pipeline in the near term. Like that means drugs, for example, already in phase two or three trials. And then what's coming in the medium term and the long term. And long term here is like AI long term, which means 15 years. Anything past that? I think it's like difficult to predict. What was the claim you made on the last podcast that by 2029 will have robot servants for homeless people?

I don't think it was 2029. I think it probably said it's likely a system within 10 years sometime in the 2030s. It's a shame that we do podcast so often that I can't call you on it. Yeah. It hasn't been 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Do you still stand by that? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was like as an example of what robotics will be able to do, categorically, yes. Will the policy situation result in that being the case is much more difficult to predict? Got it. But there's a... Well, yeah, I mean, we're cutting funding for vaccinations across the globe for children. Do you mean poisons that our children get without consent? They're not our children. Oh, no, they're our children.

I meant them the grand scheme. The world. Yes, children of the world. But yeah, so the aesthetic revolution is, and I guess there's another element to it, which I'd love to discuss today, is the emotional component, especially for females, of how it feels to exist in society with a certain type of look, and how differently it can feel and how deep the psychological implications go of existing with another type of look, a look that is much more.

preferred by mostly women themselves and then the majority of onlookers to put a fine point on it and start this off with a bang. I'm going to use some terminology here that I mean in all of the best possible ways, but it's going to be ugly, ugly terminology because these are very emotionally latent issues and the very real. And so when you present as a male or female, especially as a female as more or less fundamentally, I was going to, let me use more scientific parlance. There is a normal distribution, a bell curve, about which you can rank general attractiveness. How do you do this? It's super easy.

You get like 1,000 people or 10,000 people to just rate pictures of people. Like, do you like this one better or that one? It's just like just two, one at a time. And what you get from that if you read a whole bunch of people is normally distributed. most people get rated as like, she looks all right. Some people get rated like, whoa, tough. And some few people get rated like,

holy crap, like Scarlett Johansson type of stuff. If you... Won't that change culturally? There are cultural differences, but they're actually smaller than most people expect. And so like there is actually not a place in the world where peak Scarlett Johansson can go

and be nearly ubiquitously considered unattractive. There are foundational universal paradigms for attractiveness. And they are human universals in the technical sense that there is no recorded society that violates them on moss. And they're universal probably for genetic reasons as well. And so when you aggregate all of the insight on who is kind of most and least attractive on average, mind you, everyone has their own pick of the litter. What I like best in a female or a male is a little bit different than what most people like, potentially. Everyone has their own. But if you aggregate the big numbers, how you walk through the

world, how other people treat you, how you treat yourself in your own head when you look in the mirror, does really depend on where on that spectrum you fall. And who's doing that research that you're talking about? I've never seen it, because obviously it's not a med school topic that gets which one of your patients is more attractive? You're like, why does this matter? Like, shut up. Anyway, so here's a picture. Maybe in a plastic surgery residency. Ah, so there it might matter. evolutionary psychology generally concerns itself with this and so they have all kinds of

Evo Psych is one of these things where the little bit that most people know about it is like oh, okay neat like we used to be primates or whatever we still are and like we have kind of internal drives that makes sense, we want to eat, we don't have sex, blah blah you dig real deep into that field you come out reeling a little bit because you're like

that shit is ruthless and it is exactly as ruthless as many people's experiences of middle school for example because you can tell, for example, you can tell a girl who is 15 years old, now high school, whatever, that is substantially overweight and has mostly android adiposity, which means mostly excess body fat around the midsection, thinner legs, thinner arms, and has a pretty substantially notably asymmetrical facial structure with some parts of the face, eyes,

nose, mouth, radically different in size relationship to one another. You can tell her all sorts of things about how beautiful she is. And as a human soul, as a being, every single one is true. Unless she's like a junior league Stalin and you just don't know about it. You're like, you're beautiful, Nancy. And she's like, I am beautiful. Like, okay. Where did your gerbil go?

Everywhere. Oh, God. You're not beautiful at all. You're terrible. But like, you know, every human is super beautiful in that deep way that is kind of just true for everyone. But if you are very well-meaning parents and you say, oh, Nancy, you look amazing. It's true between you two, but there's two problems with that. One is the same evolved software that all of us carry to assess other human bodies incredibly rapidly, incredibly subconsciously for general attractiveness, exists in us and works in the mirror.

So 15-year-old, not so conventionally attractive-looking Nancy, will look at her own body in the mirror and be like, I don't think I'm beautiful. I think people are telling me something that's generally not true. And when she interacts with other people at school, you're going to get a few different kinds of interactions. One kind of interaction is just really awesome. You're like, you ever meet like 15-16-year-olds? It's just so fucking great. Like, why couldn't I be more like you when I was a kid? Just treat everyone with mega respect.

They love everyone. They're super popular. It's just great. You would probably like that when you were a kid. Then they're a joke one. No. I was just an annoying clown.

Oh, my man. Yeah. Same. And here we are. Mike's. Yeah. Yeah. And then there is another kind of interaction

where you, for example, get outright bullying or degradation on the other extreme. Like, hey, you're fat. You're ugly. And like, kids will say stuff like that all the time.

kids are a certain brand of ruthless that we as adults tend to forget until we experience it like you're around kids like what did you just say to your friend like you can't talk like this to people but there's another kind kind of in the middle where everyone's cool with you everyone thinks you're dope you're that 15 year old girl that's significantly out of shape let's say and um but it's the subtleties that hit you the hardest um you're friends with all the girls all the pretty popular girls and everyone in between and they all like boys Or whatever, other girls, right? Trying to be inclusive. Got me some slack. They like other people. And when you're an attractive female of that age and you like someone else, there's a pretty even chance that they're going to like you back, decent at least. And so you're like, oh my God, like I love like John.

He's so hot. Oh my God. And John's like, yeah, sign a back text, the whole thing. When you're that girl, when you're not conventionally attractive and I'm using it very mildly, you are conventionally unattractive. Nobody tells you. outright, potentially, that you're like that. And, you know, people like to bring the pretty girls down,

they call them ugly too, so it's all same, same. And you could have gone through some of your life until that point, thinking, like, I fit in. Everything's great. I'm just like my super hot friends that are popular too. And then you're like, I think I like Eric. I think Eric's amazing. I'm actually using subconsciously names of fictional characters

in the book, by the way. People read that, they'll be like, ah. But here's a big problem. There's a high probability to Eric. doesn't like you back. And that's going to hit you like a ton of bricks because it's not going to happen once. It's going to happen over and over and over to you in your life. It may start when you're eight, when you have little kid crushes, and it may extend all the way

through your entire life where just because you're shaped a certain way, it doesn't matter how you are on the inside. It doesn't matter how gorgeous you are as a human being to others, how intelligent you are, how patient you are, all those real qualities that we know like people get married for, you know? Like, can you imagine someone's like, oh, oh, man, marry your wife because she was hot. You'd be like, oh, that would be a profoundly stupid decision just to make on that one metric.

And so most people will never see that part of you because they evaluate you on just one metric. It's like a gateway. The rest of you is behind it. But your gateway doesn't look like they want to go through and they just don't. And you want them to go through. You read romance novels.

You watch rom-coms like everybody else. But by a certain age, if you are not conventionally attractive or at least like decent, you start to learn subconsciously or consciously that all of these things that people live in their lives, romance, interaction, things like that, dating, they're just not for you. And I happen to think that is a giant, first world problem, right, but a giant unmitigated tragedy. And the aesthetic revolution, the culmination of this idea that using biology and technology and all of our best efforts that we're going to make every, for the purposes of this. and my own personal view, at the very least adults, over 18, whatever the hell you brought with your biology,

however you look, we're going to make it a little bit better and then better and then better until you look like what you want. So you're an external presentation matches your internal representation of what you think you want to look like. And then those people will have a psychological healing that is unprecedented. And I think that getting folks to look exactly how they want to look

could be such a major amazing thing that happens that I'm both excited about it but also hoping that it gets ushered in faster rather than slower and one of the purposes of this book is to tell folks about these things happening in the tech space and the biological space

and already how much you can do about it now with training and diet which we can get into so that they know that they don't have to settle for looking like what they're supposed to look like and they can get much better because the amount of psychological healing that can occur from someone who has been, oh, how do I say this best, significantly below average and attractiveness for much of their life, when they gain that above average of attractiveness they've always wanted, that can change them profoundly in a way that is not to be

understated and that's kind of the big thesis so as a doctor would you say that they can experience tremendous healing that means there's some kind of pre-assumption that those who are unattractive are broken you believe that interesting choice of words by you um not wrong hurt hurt psychologically hurt um and thus requiring healing so um and how are you landing there yeah i mean so if you look at the literature on how the degree of i'll just throw a random non-related example of where my mind's going there is this presumption that if you're not as wealthy as someone else you're sadder not as happy but then when we look at basic needs being met

you have security, you have a home, whatever that magic number is, one documentary, one study will tell you some specific number, $70,000 or the year. Happiness doesn't really change. Is this the same principle where like your looks really don't matter? Even in a situation where people say, oh, if I lose a limb, I'm going to be so much less happy. But then you have the same interviews with people who have lost a limb or are paraplegic or quadriplegic, and they say, now my happiness is level is the same.

Is this the same wrong assumption that we could make as humans in those examples? That's a great point. The amount of psychological healing that can result from you radically upgrading your appearance so that you look like what you want is not boundless. And it also requires a certain bit of work

on at least two other fronts. One is really kind of doing the inner, inner work of accepting and loving yourself. Nobody can do that for you. Therapists can help a ton. But you can look flawless. And there are many, many Instagram girls that look like, oh my God,

this is a real person and their brains are all sorts of gnarly because they hate themselves. So that's definitely a thing. And also, once you become much more attractive, you have to let it sink in. And the way I've been thinking about it is this. Let's say that between the age of five,

when you first found out that people thought you were ugly generally, and some people were nice enough not to say it, but many people were not nice enough to say it. And up until you're 35 and you finally get, let's just pretend it's just all one radical procedure together and you come out as Barbie, you have the area under the curve of 30 years of f***ing trauma, basically. and you may need 30 years of really imbibing with your true deep self, this new reality.

Because a lot of people, when they get an upgrade, they'll go, oh, yeah, people are like, oh, my God, you look gorgeous, like, oh, yeah, that's no big deal. And it's fine to say that for a polite company, but even in their own heads, they'll try not to accept the fact that, no, they do belong now. I think that acceptance takes a long time. And it's something optional. You can do it or you can not do it. Some people have made radical transformations in a variety of things and have never really let them sink in.

And then they're making, I think, a gigantic mistake because all of that stuff that happened to you in your childhood, that people said hateful things, you thought such hateful things about yourself, that's neural wiring. And you don't really, in most cases, I mean, unless you smash a ton of psychedelics or something, even that doesn't work all that well, you don't just rewire everything right up. Like your brain doesn't work like a CPU or just delete this part of the drive and install a new program. It takes a long time to upgrade. And so the benefits of looking substantially more attractive than you used to are not infinite. And you can absolutely collect very few of them, even if you look super attractive, if you resist really like floating in that wonderful sea of compliments and of looking yourself in the mirror and going, yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah, this is working. It's like, I know people in bodybuilding that look like machines, like Android's like flaws. You look at them, you're like, how hell do you look like this?

And they, like, point to, like, one part. Like, yeah, I only love how my chest is shaped. That shit's on their mind, 24-7. Sure. And if someone who compliments them, like, yeah, I don't know. I kind of have small arms. What the hell is wrong with you? Don't you ever want to feel like you actually did the thing?

And most people around you won't help you feel that. It's something you have to feel yourself. So it is definitely not a thing, just like the wealth example. You can't really say, like, oh, as soon as you get wealthy, you'll be happy forever. Is to solve all your problems? Absolutely not. But I will say the opposite is also an interesting thought experiment. If you're like, well, you know, people who lose limbs are statistically roughly as happy

after, say, years of agony of trying to accept the fact that they don't have a limb anymore, by the way, that as the rest of us, that's totally true. If I give you a saw, how likely are you to chop your leg off? I say profoundly unlikely, for good reason. At least the acute trauma of having to deal with the fact that your limb is gone is substantially different. That would be really wonderful is people who've lost. limbs to, you know, get to a place where synthetic biology is so good, it can grow your limb backs. And you have all of the deep lessons of happiness that you took away from that traumatic

incident and having to cope with it. Plus, you have a limb, that would be really awesome. So the money thing is also, I like that you brought that up. So it turns out my last look at the data, it looks like the relationship between money and happiness is roughly linear in a very steep slope up until you get to like whatever $70,000 roughly, blah, blah, blah. Let's call it hundred thousand dollars inflation adjusted etc because like basic needs met and you have enough money for entertainment you don't feel super constrained anymore uh to get that much happiness takes you know from going from 10,000 dollars a year to 100,000 dollars you get like let's say one X improvement in happiness you actually get the same one X improvement again two X improvement

but you have to make about 10 times more money so their happiness going from 100,000 a year income to a million is the same as going from 10,000 to 100,000, but it's 10x. And so if you go from 100,000 to 200,000, you're like, oh, my happiness is going to double. No, it's not. It's going to be like 1.15 or whatever. And you're like, I feel basically the same. But if you get to a million, yeah, oh yeah. And if you get to 10 million, oh, yeah, you're going to get another big happiness boost. If you get to 100 million a year, holy shit, it's going to be a thing. Now, your brain has ways of leveling you off. Like it's a hedonic treadmill, 100%. But there is also another perspective, I think, is super, super important here.

When you're telling people that becoming more attractive won't make you happier, maybe as happy as you think it will, that's super valid. It hits different when you're telling someone who's like pretty damn good looking that like that extra little part of perfection won't make a big deal. It hits real different if you're telling someone who has been made fun of for how they look and it is clear to everyone, including themselves, that are very grotesquely unattractive, they're like, oh, well, it really won't matter much in your life.

It's tantamount to telling someone who scrapes by on $10,000 a year, like, listen, I have money, kid. You don't want money. It's more problems. The girls get crazier. And it's like, hey, rich guy, can you get the fuck out of my face until you have money for me? And then you can tell me things like that.

So I think that for people who have been thinking, like, oh, I could, like, I could use bigger boobs. That'd be nice. Yeah, like, you get a little. little bit of happiness out of that when you get them installed and that's about it for people who have been and i mean traumatized traumatized with years of having to deal with the fact that they are very unattractive um i think they get big boosts out of becoming substantially more attractive doing the inner work and accepting the fact that they now live in a new reality and they have to imbibe

that all the time yeah i think about this um from a cognitive behavioral standpoint obviously i'm a family medicine doctor, not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. But given the limited availability with mental health access these days with patients, I end up filling the role of beginning or doing an intro session about what CBT is quite often with patients. And a lot of it is figuring out what version of the hedonic treadmill patients are on, what they envision happiness to look like. And a lot of times it's set to extrinsic goals like wealth, a number followers, a specific cup size, height size these days, bicep size. And the reality is none of those things actually yield long-term happiness. Like having, like the fact that you could change those

things in a moment will create a spike on the chart because it's something different. It's something new. You're going to get accustomed to this new lifestyle. But the fact that you will get accustomed to it means that there's something intrinsically going on that's driving the on happiness. So like wouldn't the better exercise instead of trying to fix what perhaps a generation of individuals or culturally we believe to be attractive, instead focus on let's go on a higher level of what it means to be human. Let's not devolve to the childlike state of calling each other ugly. Let's figure out how we value other traits, the kindness, the intellectualness, the curiosity that someone has, the humor someone can bring to a conversation, and put that as the

priority of what we should be focusing on, or do you feel like no matter what we do, we're so biologically driven, it doesn't matter that we're going to put our focus into that, it doesn't matter that we're going to focus with cognitive behavioral therapy to help individuals if they do carry trauma. You think that physically there's better bang for your buck to make that transition. I don't know if it's better. I think it's additive. I think both would be great.

And if we can solve both problems, that would be great. I also think there are some things in life that really good-looking people have access to that really not good-looking people don't. And there's unlikely to be an amount of therapy in any proximate time frame that's going to mediate those. for example, as a single woman in her late 20s, who is conventionally profoundly unattractive, radical morbid obesity, very asymmetrical face shape, the whole thing.

I don't have to say it. We know what it is. Like, it's really, if you go on a real spirit journey to deep into Eastern Buddhist tradition, it is possible you will come out changed profoundly and a level of serenity and happiness that you didn't think was possible. And then there's that guy at work you like and you want a family and you realize that you can't trick romance humans or primates and they could love you as a human a ton. But there's no spark because the spark is largely physical. People have this term called love at first sight.

I'm sure you've heard it. So first of all, it's not love. That's ridiculous. That's a crush at best, maybe? I mean, I don't know. People sat across from me and said some pretty miraculous things about seeing their loved one for the first time. You've seen Goodwill Hunting. I hated that movie.

What? Yeah. For one very autistic reason. Like, for all the controversial things you say, that's the wildest thing I heard you say. I was 13 when I watched that movie. Well, that's why. You don't get it. Oh, I got it.

You're still stuck at age 13. I'm still trying to figure out the equations on the board. There was a recruiter from the military and military intelligence that came to, you're not. try to recruit Matt Damon for... Yeah, and he gave like a really funny speech. The baby seal. He gave like a retort that was just wrong. And the only thing I could think about it was like,

wow, you're not really that smart, aren't you? Well, it's a movie. Okay. That's why I hated it. Well, yeah, but it's bad fiction. Is that okay? Although it's very realistic, like a cocky person who's really high-rah IQ,

it doesn't owe you a politics well, could very well have given that answer. Exactly. But I hated it because he gave a stupid answer and I hated him and I hated the movie. I did a lot of hating. He was being witty. I don't think he was looking to be...

Well, he actually rejected the offer. Yeah, yeah, but I don't think he was looking to be accurate. I thought he was looking to respond in a really pithy way that really undercut the entire premise of the military industry. Sure, but I... I don't think that he was trying to be factually accurate while doing so. The same way that he was perhaps calling one of the therapists gay. I don't think he was trying to really call him gay.

I think you're trying to throw him off his game. I think the people that wrote that line in the script, those lines, I think they thought those were lines that other smart people would be like, ah, he got him. But if you really know anything about geopolitics, you'd be like, that's a clown take, and that's wrong.

In any case. Okay, so that one line killed you in the movie? 100%. No, come on. What about the relationship with Robin Williams? Robin Williams speaking about his wife? Uh, yeah, it was dope. Okay.

On the metrics, phenomenal movie. It's just a good movie. Oh, but I hated it. I make a real good hobby out of, Hating good movies. Any other good movies you hate? Name a good movie. Shawshank.

I cried like a child. I love that movie. So there you go. You can't have a fool's he. I don't know. I thought you would hate it. You're like, what is he doing with those rocks?

Rocks are meant for skipping. I want to see the person that can watch the end of Shawshank when he's walking down the Pacific Coast line and they see each other and not cry and be like, keep that person the fuck away from me. That's a psychopath. What's another good movie that? Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump's really good.

I like one that's not known to be a favorite amongst anyone, man on fire, Denzel, Dakota Fanning, kidnapped girl in Mexico, Marganton, did you see it? Did you think it was good? Whatever, yeah. Most people feel that way about it. I like the music.

There's this genre of movie where it's a real jilted man, jilted protagonist, and he's struggling internally. Like, Will Smith has a lot of these roles where he does the Will Smith face. We were saying, and I just, I just don't, it just never hits. I'm like, I don't know what he's thinking. Oh, what was that Will Smith movie when he was a broke guy, but he was really smart.

And he, and he went with his, pursuit of happiness. Did you like that? I never saw it. Oh, that was good. I watched the preview and I was like never a million years of my watch that shit. You don't like movies. No, God, no. I'm the worst movie critic all time.

You hit me like a guy who watches police body cam footage or something. It's exactly what I watch. See? Crystal and I watch that all the time. See? beats reality, bro. That's real. Nobody's scripted that shit.

Yeah, the fact that you watch that is scary. Why that? Humanity in the raw, I think, is actually one of the futures of content creation. Because curated content that's designed to deceive you into a false reality is, like, awesome from an artistic perspective. But something about seeing shit as it really is is really, really intense because you actually just don't know what's going to happen. You know, it's not narrative driven.

It's just like, this is real life. Also, like, I don't want to get too far in this tangent, the politically correct understanding of criminology is so at odds with the real understanding of criminology that police body cam videos, if you have the incorrect understanding, will inoculate you within several videos to like, what the hell is going on here? Like, most criminals are the kind of people that once you get to know them, you realize why they're in trouble with the law all the time and it's not a mystery anymore. And so it's always like, oh, these are real human beings. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety

brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, Lisa 2026 XE90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Should actually like that. All right. So wait, love at first sight.

Let's move off police body cams because that's going to take us in a direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So love at first sight is a thing that is fundamentally reserved mostly for attractive people. And through no doing of their own, mostly because attractiveness is largely genetic

unless we have tractable ways to change it, which is what the book is about. And so you could be that girl that went under a Buddhist spirit journey. She's okay with how she looks at a huge deep level. You're still not going on with that guy at the office who you adore, he's never going to marry you, you're never going to have children

with him. You may not ever have the candidacy of a man that you consider a worthwhile of your time on a financial level, on a status level, on a deep emotional connection level, on an intellectual level, all of those guys have pursued women significantly more attractive than you physically. And you're never going to eat at that table. And that is a tragedy. Because inside you're much better. That's an unfair assumption that that would happen. it's statistically true so i mean by what statistic that you specifically yeah uh statistically true in the sense of that it happens on on average and on aggregate so like is there a probability that you're fundamentally very unattractive and you meet a guy who's

way super attractive and all of the ways that matter and the physical ways and he says yes you're that girl yes is it so unlikely that there are rom-coms about it yes Yeah, like on a vocabulary English level of the words you're saying, I could say it makes sense. The same way that I can say, oh man, putting chemicals in children is bad. Also make sense, the vaccines are good. Yeah. So like how do we distinguish between what you're saying as sounding good versus this is actually what plays out all the time and it's not socially driven by movies and influence from a

Hollywood side of things like what's the reality if humans were left to their own devices how do we figure that out if you dig a level deeper deeper on the chemicals claim you realize that it actually doesn't make any sense because if you've ever paid attention for several days in high school chemistry you know that everything is a chemical pretty much for like the neutron star or something. And then you realize that actually is a meaningless statement. And if you dig down deep enough on the claim that physical attractiveness matters a great deal for outcomes in the world, you run into two things.

One is the statistical data on various correlates of success, outcomes at work, outcomes in social spheres, number of friends, intimacy with other people. They correlate grandiosely with physical attractiveness in a way that I consider both. both true, real, and disgusting. It's a thing. The other way you can do it is just talk to regular people. I think it passes the obvious test. And I'll say this, and I mean this with all very, very due respect.

You're very attractive, conventionally. I do have a citation. You've been in multiple magazines as one of the most attractive doctors of all time or whatever. Good luck for feuding that. Okay. Okay. Which, by the way, I think I tricked them, but. My man.

It's all angles. right because like this you don't look back right but like that that's face tuned Clint Eastwood 172 this whole podcast has been face tuned do you know what face tune is uh-huh oh it's an app oh it like Photoshop your face I tried to download all those apps and the algorithm's like this is too much it doesn't do it automatically yeah it's not an AI thing you have to know what's messed up yeah right I need a lot of AI so um you have likely at least for times in your life experienced reality at a very different how tall are you six three six three super handsome super educated erudite very well spoken fashionable i might add um did i mention ultra wealthy i saw your ferrari's

video so can the bullshit thank you and then damn it pull that video off you too um and then you're six three and the way humans treat you and in the world is going to be very different than they treat other people. And if you get folks and talk to real humans that have the opposite of all of those things on the metrics I just listed, their perception of how other humans treat them

is going to be very different. And that's their real truth that they live every single day. And so if you look at the statistical data on life outcomes and on people's emotional regulation and stability and perception of their happiness during various formative years

looking like some other things, we find that like, it's pretty grim picture. pretty grim and if we kind of step back and think like have I ever had times in my life where I was less than where I didn't fit in and it's tough it's really really tough and so what I would say to answer that's kind of final place where this started is I think it's combinatorial accepting that your attraction to other people etc really is only skin deep and that most of the value of who you are really is up here somewhere I think it's phenomenal I think it's phenomenal I think

making sure that you attend to your inner dynamics is huge therapy, et cetera. But I think that there's a certain kind of benefit to actually looking like you always wanted, that if we heal that, if we fix that, it both makes these things easier and it adds to the slice of the pie. Because when I ask myself, how happy can people get? How fulfilled can they get? I don't really tend to see a top end to that. I think it's boundless. And so I say, why not more? And also, none of this is prescriptive. I could give, in the best way possible, a flying car. Anyone looks, I will accept you as you, period. Do you accept you as you as a very different question? How do you want to live your life as a very different question? And there are a lot of people that have

grown up attractive and have never been not attractive that run into one hypothetical and one real problem. One hypothetical problem is if they were in an unattractive body and face, they would think that the world changed it overnight for them and really kind of would have. And the real problem is a lot of women who put a lot into how they look when they're younger. As they get older, and you can see this evolve on social media, they start to report that people are so much meaner nowadays. People are so rude nowadays. Everyone used to be so cool. Well, because everyone used to want to stick it in you and now you're old. Sorry. It's real life. And I don't like any part of that. I think that that rude awakening to the fact that you never really invested in much of anything else and you just assumed you were cool, but really is because you were hot. I think there's like the ugly people in the back are like, yeah, take that, you know, Stacey. But I'm trying to be like, why does anyone ever have to be unattractive? Like, this is a solvable problem. And my prediction is that over the next 10 to 15 years, it's going to be basically completely solved problem.

that everyone will just access like, oh, I want to look like this, now I look like this. And I think that's almost all upsides. Do you think that if someone's watching this and they feel they're unattractive or perhaps kids in their class tell them they're unattractive in high school,

middle school, college, whoever's listening? Do you think them hearing what you're saying is valuable to them? Or do you think it potentially perpetuates the idea that they're broken and they should feel broken and they're going to have a terrible life and that people won't like them, no one's going to fall in love with them at first sight.

Do you think that is helpful to them? I think to them it's like telling Ukrainians that live close to the battlefield that war sucks. They know, you don't have to tell them shit. They know better than you that it sucks. Well, I would say that they don't, not because that perhaps people haven't told them or they haven't felt it,

is this feeling that you're describing of feeling less than or feeling unattractive, this isn't universally isolated to people who are unattractive. Attractive people feel ugly. If you ask some of the most beautiful people in the world, they'll oftentimes talk about how ugly they feel. Yeah, totally. So this feeling could be implanted in people who don't feel ugly when by your measurements and aesthetic principles, you may deem them ugly.

So that's my question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you implant that in them? Yeah, yeah. Quadrant. How you feel, how you actually look for possible scenarios. One is that you look amazing, on average, and you feel awesome. You feel beautiful.

Amazing. The aesthetic revolution is just trying to get everyone into that quadrant, by the way. That's the best quadrant. But feel great and look great. Yeah. Not so controversial. You mean, like, who's trying to get them there when you say they're trying to get them there? Me.

Writing the book. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're trying to get people into that. Yeah, oh, yeah. You want everyone to feel good and look good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, look like you want and then feel also like you want. Most people probably want to feel good and look good, but that's not of my business.

If you want to look like whatever, again, like, I have carte blanche. I have tons of money. Okay. I have a loving wife who accepts me no matter what. I could have already got height enhancement surgery. I could have had lots of face surgery. I'm fundamentally not terrible looking, but there's stuff to improve. it could have gotten the hair shit.

I don't give a f I want to look like a teenage ninja turtle that like was more mutant than teenage or a turtle. Tadda, success, right? So if you want to look a certain way, I love it. But the thing is most people, if you survey them, just want to look conventionally attractive. It's just really the thing. And so like, you know the whole Lizzo situation? What's the whole Lizzo situation?

So like there's a real fun kind of inside joke that, you know, your hot girlfriends are like, oh my God, Lizzo is so gorgeous. And then you're like, you look like Lizzo. And they're like, what the fact? Do you mean I look like Lizzo? They don't take it well. And I thought she said she was gorgeous. Like, I meant like, you know what I just shut up.

And they don't want the conversation. Because even Lizzo wants to look like scarlet your hands fundamentally. So I digress. We all want to be in that one quadrant. There are people that look good to your point and they don't feel so good inside. They feel ugly. Number one candidate, therapy, immersion. That's a path you have to walk yourself.

Totally. There are people that look terrible, again, on statistical aggregate, not in some moralistic way, but how most people perceive them and how they perceive themselves. And they feel amazing. They feel beautiful. Lizzo, I don't know how she feels on the inside. She got more swag than half of Manhattan all put together. So I feel like she's probably feeling pretty goddamn good about herself.

And so that is nothing short of wonderful. And if that's where you want to stop, God bless you. then there are people who feel ugly and look ugly and almost every interaction they ever have that's not neutral reinforces both of those things so if you tell someone hey you're not attractive conventionally you know this like yeah no shit but like through a personal journey you can just shrug all that off and feel your best they're like dope that's very easy to say profoundly difficult to do because every sign you get around you, especially as a younger person and really as a person of energy, especially as a woman, is the sign is the opposite.

The amount of inner work and the amount of strength you have to hold, keep your self-esteem and self-image up at all times is really tough to do in the face of everything. It's similar to telling someone who's profoundly desperately poor, be like, well, like everyone in 1700 was poor and they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They did great. Like, you just have to have more resilience. You know what the thing is, to your point, that is true. Every single poor person to have more resilience to just deal with it.

And they get themselves out. People do it all the time. Immigrants do it all the time. But it hits different when it's coming from someone who has money and telling a poor person like, just, you don't need all this money. You just got to get, you know, it's all up here. Like, all right. It would sure, shit, help.

If I had some money, though, wouldn't it? And we know it would. And so I say both. and I say that there are definitely people that are gorgeous on the outside but struggle deeply mentally but who we're forgetting are the people that have the exact same genetic proclivity for poor self-image but they are existing in bodies that are statistically unattractive that's extra double double misery that sucks in a way that at least the attractive person's like oh I feel like shit and Kevin's like you're so beautiful Stacy and she's like oh stop I don't

believe it. At least she's got Kevin over here telling her some shit and every other guy she'll love for me. You're like, oh my God. When you're hot enough, it gets annoying because there's guys just ogly all the time. Hey, what a great problem to have. What if you want people to ogle you and they never do. And the people that you like and you want to reach out to romantically, almost never do they say yes. And at some point you learn that they're probably not going to say yes. Mike, there are, I would say, very heuristic, very hand wavy estimate here. Millions of American women and around the world, God knows, tens of millions that have written off

the probability that they will find physical intimacy with someone because it has been so unavailable to them in their real life that they're like, that's just not me. That's tragic. I don't want to say everyone deserves physical intimacy and the recognition of beauty

of another person, someone to touch your body and accept it for what it is and find it attractive. It deserves a strange word, but is there a reason those people don't have it and other people do? and there is, it's just genetics.

We can change some of that stuff. What about the fact that I don't know what great studies have been done on this? I haven't studied the subject enough. In fact, this is my first time discussing the subject with you. That people who, let's say, if you get a thousand people,

a diverse enough sample size, rank someone a five, or they rank themselves a five on a scale of one to ten, they then select a partner that's in a similar range. And given the fact that there are perhaps people who based on these aesthetic principles will be a one,

they will find someone else who's a one and they will deem each other beautiful. You disagree with that as a compensatory natural mechanism that nature designed? I wish it were so, man. Some people really do function like that. And I think like that's such a huge unlock. what an incredibly massively beneficial adaptation

to kind of detect where you are in the social physical hierarchy and be like that's who my candidacy group is I squint really hard I'm going to find that person attractive maybe I think that does happen for some people what I would surmise is that reality is mostly much grimmer than that we know this from lots of dating

dating app studies which by the way if you've ever looked into it there are studies now with millions of people in the sample groups like that's crazy that you don't even need stats for that you're like which bar is higher and you know like statistical significance is eight zeros and shit um and what we get from that is that tall handsome wealthy men that have some ability to be social uh they eat bro they eat i'm talking about they're getting almost all the hot women don't you fink at me you look like you're a real full belly you know what i'm saying The fact that you're saying they eat

Is, come on, am I street yet? Was that cool? Am I cool? So I hang around with pieces of shit that talk like that all the time. My friends and my wife. So, and women that are super, super attractive, they just get carte blanche, pick of the litter. And if you look at the bottom 10%

of attractiveness for both sexes, you get two things. One is the probability that you're very successful with the other sex is or with whichever sex you like is low much lower not zero of course to your point they find each other the thing is that the general software for determining attractiveness is really varied at the at the edges but at its core it's universal and so most of us think roughly the same things are pretty attractive um no matter what like like think of disney princesses like they're all kind of shaped the same, not identically, but very similarly.

I mean, part of it, though, is like, hyper racist because the people who were drawing them only had one idea of beauty in their mind, right? Like, where did Disney come from? Disney is reflecting cultural universals. Yeah, from the time where it was deemed as one race was specifically more beautiful. If you, like, analyze exclusively black men in Africa, they choose almost the exact same silhouette that white dudes in Norway choose is maximally attractive, except 10 to 15% thicker. What if you weigh 400 pounds, Mike?

What about skin color? When you have a giant, we're talking about the shape, just shape. Skin color, you're totally correct, but it also works both ways. Almost every pale white woman wants to look like J-Lo, and almost every darkson black woman wants to look like J-Lo. Really, though, the Hispanics one. If you ever Google Latinas, anything else after, really, they're really, oh boy. Don't they look great?

Honestly, so let me make my final big point here to answer your question. There are realities in the world that are serendipitous and beautiful. There are realities in the world that are a mixed bag. There are other realities in the world that are ugly, real ugly, but they're true. And we have to face them as adults and be like they're true. And one of the realities is that if you, most people have the same basic software for analyzing who's attractive and who's not in ranking them. Basics, on the edges they fray

and there are exceptions, 100%. But when you are one out of 10 to most people, what you want in your heart of hearts for your partner is for them to be a 10. A shit, at least an eight, you know what I'm saying? At least a six for the love of God and maybe a four, but you almost certainly don't want a one. And so the idea that there's this,

everyone just pairs is in contradiction to evolutionary psychology and to lived experience of people to primatology, by the way, into almost every interaction we've ever come to know, there is a competition for the most attractive people. It's not even a slot hierarchical.

It's like, if you look like this, I don't care where you rank, I like that look. And if you don't look like this, if you look very far afield from this, again, 400 pounds androgynous obesity, there just aren't that many people

that are into that look. And if you're a woman who's 400 pounds with androgynous obesity, you don't necessarily look at like 400 pound truck drivers. God bless them, they're wonderful people who have also androgynous obesity and you're like, that's my man.

Like the Shrek idea, like Lady Shrek and Shrek, and they're like, oh, like this is what they like. The reality is if you're that woman, you probably read romance novels with Fabio on the cover. It's a muff that looks like you. And that's what they want. That's what most people want. And if you were like, hey, lady, carte blanche,

how do you want to look? Turn the magazine to J-Lo or Scarlet Johansson and someone else and be like like that and it's just not rocket science that's how most people want to look that's what most people want to interact with so the aesthetic revolution to me and a big part is about like there are so many just unbelievable people in bodies and faces and hairlines and everything that just don't add up like a lot of hot people too are just like you've met lots of hot people that are just like no offense everyone's on their own journey total dog shit on the inside and you're like you're like she's like do you want to like go on date number two and you're

like, I would pay really good money to never see you again, at the very least talk to you. And that mismatch is tragic. I think that everyone who is just simply born into a body and face and physique that just doesn't add up as far as attraction, I think life for them would be really different, maybe not ecstatically happy to your point, but better, better than it is if they just made the outside match the inside. And yes, I do. It really is skin deep.

because all of a sudden, if you go on a lifting journey, you do your diet, right? Some stuff we could talk about next maybe because that's mostly what the book is about and then get all the cosmetic surgeries and all the eventual age reversal genetic modification, blah, blah, blah. And you finally look like whatever you wanted to look like, then people talk to you and they engage with you

at a discourse that they never would have engaged with you before and you get romance and all that. You never change. The real you was always in there, quote, unquote, that it was wrapped up in a gift pack that didn't look appealing to most people. And I think, should we work on our inner selves? Yes.

Should we work on the rapping? Yeah, why not, man? And people that tell you the wrapping is overrated are unfortunately fall of one of two camps. Unattractive people that are coping and really attractive people that have just never seen the other side before. It's like a billionaire's inheritance son

be like, I don't know what people in Africa keep complaining about with their water supply. Mine's fine. What about people who feel it's taboo to say they like something that is perhaps deemed societally unattractive. Give me an example. People who are overweight carrying 300 pounds overweight,

they say, oh, when I go on social media, the amount of men that message me is wild, but they are embarrassed by it because society deems people who are overweight is unattractive, so they feel like if they were to message me publicly, it would be taboo. Would you mean message publicly, like comment? Yeah, like they won't comment on their stuff,

but they'll message them privately saying, I'm really interested in you. Some of those guys are dogs, man. They comment too. But I'm saying that's a thing that people say. Again, I'm pointing out just from a... That's definitely a thing too, 100%. The reason why I think of society playing

such a big role here and magazine culture, like if I think back to the Shape Magazine and Vogue, telling people to just do champagne and cigarette diet and all of these ridiculous things to just try and weaponize beauty in a way to make themselves feel better. Make who feel better? The people who are already physically attractive

at baseline, and the reason why there's a theory why that could play out is because there is some sort of distribution from a bell curve standpoint about who is attractive by these standards that we're discussing here aesthetically. And the people who are on the tail end of the curve are rare.

So they know that's rare. They dangle it in front of people as a form of rarity, just like how if there's a rare Ferrari, I really want it. If there's a rare watch, I really want it. If there's a special edition coming out,

I really want it. So there's plenty of, we even see this play out in the social media world, Instagram influencers who talk about being lifestyle coaches and here's how to get

a waistline like mine. Here's how you could get my Brazilian butt going just like you're just like you can and they're doing it because it makes them appreciate what they have and they know that they got theirs either gifted to them or they bought it and yet they're still dangling it so basically they create this artificial demand just how ermes does when they only release a certain number of burkins for example and everyone's like oh i want the Birken. Is the Birken that much more beautiful than any other bag? Well, it's limited. People want it.

There's demand for it culturally. And then we've created this artificial demand for a product that perhaps isn't any more special than any other person. It doesn't do anything different. Just like how a person that aesthetically could be a 10 or a one, they could both be amazing humans or both be terrible humans. It doesn't say anything just by looking at them aesthetically. And I think about how, in talking about these aesthetic, we could take people in the little diagram you created and go into the diagram where someone feels great but perhaps aesthetically is on the low scale

and by having this conversation by talking about in the way that we are by looking at the magazines and social media the way that they value a certain type of look and now they certainly fall into the category of being unhappy and they feel like they need whatever it is that the next plastic surgery wave AI wave is going to be trying to sell them. Are we just creating consumers for beauty in that way?

It's definitely a factor. If I had to rough estimate, I would say that is a roughly one to nine relationship with 10% of the variance of how people feel what they should look like explained by cultural forces and 90% explained by deep evolutionary, roughly static forces that tell you look like this or you look like that. And it doesn't work so well.

on the extremes. So if you look in a way that most people think is not great, it's profoundly difficult to drum up demand for yourself. There's certainly some Instagram profiles of people that look at, let's say, very different charitably, and they're just doing amazing, right? People message them all the time. The thing is like most of the people that don't look that great, they don't get very many messages. And an even random, decently attractive girl gets dozens all the goddamn time even though she's not dangling shit she's just like posted her and her dogs and it's like hey what do you up to i love you they get that shit all the time there's a massive real asymmetry and the amount of beneficial attention that they get now also there's negative attention

too sure everyone gets some kind of negative attention but sure is nice to get negative attention born out of jealousy uh like guys that will call girls the s word s l ut i don't know if we're allowed to say that. Does YouTube detect, like, speaking around children and dogs, uh, spelling? We pee, whoop you. Yeah. There we go. Uh, and, uh, then you can say like, oh, he's just jealous, right? Uh, it's a very different thing to get criticized for something you also agree with the critic about. Like, you're ugly. You know you're ugly. That hurts way, way, way deeper than like, oh, that guy's just coping. And so there is to some extent not to underweight it. There are definitely cultural variations. There are historic variations.

But if you look at the variations, you're unlikely to find a lot of, like, radical discordance from just average. So, for example, you look at, like, what the pre-Miji Restoration Japan's most attractive kind of girl looked like. Yeah, she could get it today, man. She could get it from almost anybody. A little 110-pound thing with whatever, little body. Yeah, hell yeah, line them up. Where in culture do we see grotesquely hideous, wildly overweight, and not the fun big hips and assway, but the big gut way, where do we see those women being vaunted as like the most attractive?

Is this strictly a conversation about weight? No. But that seems to be like the prime example here. Because if we... Weight's a big deal. Let's remove the weight as an example and talk about height in men, right? Because that's a factor that's been studied. I, like in a child who, let's say, is lacking growth hormone.

We worry like, oh, we should supplement growth hormone in this child because they have a deficiency. And we worry about them developing a very short form. short stature, which could be intervened with and helped with by giving them growth hormone. But at the same time, if we had, let's say, some knowledge and we say, oh, this child is going to grow up five, six versus six, we're not going to be like, oh, my God, by all means, get him to six, because that's going to change his life. It will, though. But that's the question, will it?

Or are you studying after the fact of judging it and putting this. out into the world. Oh, I'm not judging it. Women that say yes or no when you ask him on dates, judge it. And you can see this on OKCupid studies and all that stuff. You know, like, so I don't remember the figure offhand that somebody correct me in the comments, but I think for every extra inch of height a man has, in order to become equally as attractive at that lower height, he has to make like 50 or 100,000 more dollars a year

or something totally insane to overcompensate that. And so you don't have to tell a five foot, six. kid like hey kid you know a real short end of the stick literally a little bit you have to say that that's toxic it promotes the wrong kind of attitude but if he was like hey is me being taller going to make me more likely to girls that I like say yes to me when I ask him out on dates categorically the answer is yes and if you don't tell them that you are foisting upon them a great illusion that does them no good you're trying to boost their self-esteem by giving them the big lie and the big lie is like well no height doesn't matter the depth of your voice doesn't matter

your hairline doesn't matter, your income doesn't matter, your looks don't matter. After a while, you're like, why the hell did people like anyone ever at all? And the reality is all these things matter and they're true and they're real and they're profound. They matter in terms of getting variety, but does it matter on a scale long term of a life of happiness, of finding a partner, period? Do we see profound loneliness in someone who's two inches shorter? God, yeah. God, yeah. Massive loneliness and physically unattractive. active women, massive loneliness, there's this whole thing. It's called in cells, right? There's real people. If you were male and you are like below five foot three, the probability that you

get any, any, attractive, remote, five plus to go on a date with you is teeny tiny. As if you were six three, it would be like way, way, way, way, way, way bigger. I don't personally give a about height at all. I think I was in my late 20s when I learned that height is statistically attraction factor from it. I literally just didn't know that my whole life. It couldn't care less. So didn't that help you, not knowing? Because now you're telling everyone. Yeah. So what if like when you were 12, you heard this conversation and I'm like, if you don't grow,

your life's going to suck. Would that have helped you to get to where you are today? So that statement right there is so exaggeratory that it borders on being false. In what sense? It's not going to suck. It's going to be worse than if you were taller. And then they go there. But then there's so many other variables.

Totally, exactly. Life is so multi-effective. So they go, okay, okay, I'm not winning it on height. You're like, nah, you're not. So I better, like, work extra hard at school and maybe get into some hobbies and really push some other way so that I can have all these very pretty girls

saying yes to me. And then you're like, yeah. That's not the end of all to life. Said by someone who eats a lot. Right. It's not ideal that I'm the one having this conversation, but scientifically, that's not the end all to be able to happiness.

If that was, then the people who just date pretty women would statistically have the highest. It's a part of it. It's a part of it. And let me give you another example. How do you pick an excellent partner? There's actually one true thing about this is you get to know lots of people.

And only through getting to know and dating lots of people, can you ever possibly tell what you like in a person? Because it's all pretend until you're like sitting on the couch with them and you're six months into dating him and you're like, okay, they look great. They're a huge mismatch on hobbies and interests. next girlfriend, I'm going to make sure there's not that mismatch. You got a sample. You got a sample. And if your sample size is one person ever said yes to on your date, the probability that you settle and end up with them

is higher. And the probability that that person is much closer to your ideal match is way, way lower. And thus the probability that you have a not so ideal relationship is also a way, way low. I don't know if that's true, because if you look at grocery store shelves and you see 10 options for ketchup, you have more options than two, but if you had two, statistically, you're probably happier with your choice because you're like, oh, well, I know I don't like that one. I like this one. But when there's 10, you're like,

oh, well, do I want this one or do I want that one? It's like the mantra of some options are better than none. More options aren't better than some. That's true in an acute sense. If you're just standing there and you're all around with options. But if you try a bunch of different ketchup all the time eventually you're going to be like this is amazing where did this come from you like oh they make it in denmark do you want a box so you can have a lot of it yep now every time you go in another restaurant they don't have that ketchup they're like you're not eating ketchup but like i don't talk about any ketchup that's not my shit and like how did you find that out well i tried a lot of ketchup if ketchup is really meaningful to you and i think long-term committed relationships are

probably really meaningful you're going to want a bigger sample size just mathematically enhances the probability that you will get the outcome that you're looking through two ways one the chance that you'll randomly find a person that's your person goes up, literally scaled linearly to how many people you date, and two, how you know yourself as a person in a relationship. It's a big deal. Who you are in a relationship is a little bit different than who you are just casually. You might not know who you are as a relationship, but you might not even know what you want. If you never tried many relationships, you're going to have a really shit sample size and you're not going to be able to pick a person as well as if you had lots of people to choose from.

So that doesn't mean that someone can't meet and then after two dates, like, this is it, this is it, this is it we're good that happens 100% but what i want for people is let's say uh i get to know someone who's a co-worker and she just looks like this the wrong look right just the wrong look and i know her because i work with her all the time she's so god damn beautiful on the inside she's 28 she's 29 she's 30 no one no one no one she wants marriage she wants children i want her to look like she wants to look so that she can start dating people in higher numbers and much more importantly, in higher quality, bandwidth, and then really get pick of the litter

because she's so goddamn wonderful, I want her to have the best. I want her to have something that's ungated by her physical appearance. And physical appearance is a problem. We can just solve. We can just solve it. So why not solve it?

I think the issue becomes, again, with the rarity aspect. I think the reason is we found a hierarchy with this genetic distribution of looks, and we've tied it to something culturally the same way that like there was an improvement in bags over the years some bags became sturdier

the materials changed there's innovation and then we've gotten to the point where like let's just release less of a certain one and that one's gonna be special so once everyone starts looking the same aesthetically there'll be a new way

I didn't say the same well not the same meaning the same level of whatever it is there's a huge diversity of the same level There'll be a new hierarchy that forms. Oh, totally. But everyone... Which is why focusing on intrinsic is way more valuable because irrespective of what happens

in the world, whatever the cultural norm, whatever lip size is popular in a given moment, whatever suit style is popular, it doesn't matter. So like it's irrespective of where cultural norms shift or biological norms shift because those two adapt. So cultural norms also affect people's assessments of intrinsic. value. If you were in the culture of the 1940s and 50s in the United States, complacency as a female would be culturally very, very high regard. Independence and ruthlessness like my wife has would be like, ugh, she sucks. That stuff also changes. So you could spend a lot of time

upgrading your internals only to find out that those are cultural shift and your internals are now in this match. But the cultural don't matter. You're talking about societal successes versus internal happiness and fulfillment, joy, more lasting. None of this is to argue against internal work. But I think arguing, even to the degree that you're arguing for aesthetics, actually hurts the internal work. Why? Because the focus shifts. You have limited focus, just like you have limited time in life. So if you're going to be talking about, focus on what you want to look like. Focus on changing your aesthetic. Your time is limited. Your focus is limited. Your focus is now on something that's ever changing, that's delegated by perhaps whoever is at the head of

Hollywood in a given moment. That's not how any of that works, by the way. I'm sorry. So Hollywood can't carte blanche choose what the trend is. The trend is usually contained in a very small box of what is acceptable to look like attractive-wise. And then there are slight variations that bounce around with there based on a bunch of inputs and some decision by people to front certain people. But there's all sorts of people at Hollywood.

They're like, yeah, here's the new hot girl. And she's just, no one gives a shit. And there's sometimes where, like, the new look is kind of wacky. And they're like, I guess this is who's popular. Oh, put her on stage or whatever. There's no one at the top deciding. Magazines almost never decide what's attractive. They're really just really good at riding trends.

And sometimes not even so good at riding trends. So I don't think it's nearly a top-down hierarchical system as it is a, um, classically we're educated to believe that it is. Um, many people go around thinking that the reason we have beauty standards is because the magazines made, made, uh, like, just, just, just ran. randomly propped up like skinny girls or whatever, that's 90% wrong, 10% right. It absolutely matters, but to a very, very tiny percent. Most of it is deeply biological, deeply ingrained, and is really not cultural at all.

And that stuff some people lack in such a huge regard that they can make and should make all of the upgrades in their own brain of how they feel about themselves. But how you feel about yourself only gets you so far. It sure a shit gets you internal happiness, but it can leave you bereft of meaningful human interactions, like romantic interactions, like acceptance in a deep way by someone who's assessing your body and face and telling you're wonderfully beautiful that you just can't get unless somebody else thinks you're beautiful. And no amount of pizzazz and Riz is going to cross the line with everyone.

And that if you actually look, to use a term you used earlier, is not broken, it's going to be a real thing. Now, here's the thing. If you tell young people, the only thing that matters is how you look. And if you just get these surgeries and these genetic upgrades, your life's going to be serene. You're selling people a lie. That's a stupid like Hollywood transformation lie and like 13 going on 30 type of shit. It's wrong.

Of course it's wrong. But if you tell them, hey, work on your inner self and beauty externally doesn't matter. It's the same kind of lie in reverse. They both matter. And I like to treat people as intelligent. When you say they matter, what's your definition of matter? matter to you and how awesome of a life you're going to live and are you going to get what's awesome one so how you feel day to day like you're writing in your diary you know i feel

great in here and the other one is like do i have a family do i have people around me that are awesome do i get to go to dance clubs and like walk around and dance with people like isn't it fun going to a dance club and just dancing for everyone yeah that's not for sure but what if it's for me and i don't look like it's for me i'm sure you'll find a place where you can dance and people find you awesome if you're a great dancer why do i have to find a place A one out of 50, a one out of a hundred place where they accept. Because everyone is doing that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, I think they are. Attractive people are welcome everywhere, except for one in 50 places where they look too, too vanilla. Yes, or it functions the other way, and there could be predators that are negatively impacting them. Certain girls don't feel comfortable walking on the streets because of the way that they look. So, like, there's variables that shift in life

and, like, why we're hyper-focused on that variables. interesting, I guess. Biological. When you say biological, what are you looking at? It's, um, do you remember the first time you were attracted to female breasts? First time, no. Okay, sweet, I do. It's not a thing.

They're going to start telling me a breastfeeding story. You think it was feeding related? How dare you? Well, it was. How did you know that? Because you said you like to eat. Pause the interview. Oh, literally.

I see, well, it's drinking, really. Oh, okay. Comes out as a salad. You're like, I think you need to go to the, Doctor, I don't think it's supposed to be solid. It, it's okay. When I was,

geez, I was probably 10, one of my acquaintances at a Jewish community center camp in the locker room for the pool was like, hey, Mike, do you like girls yet? And I was like, gee whiz,

I sure do, mister. And exactly that voice, 1950s kid voice. And he was like, oh, you know, like tell me about like, What kind of girls you like?

And I was like, well, they have to be real special, you know? And he was like, you don't like girls yet. In a few years, you're going to like every girl. And I was like, no, I won't because I'm special. And he's like, okay, kid. And then like when I turned like 12 or 13, whatever the hell, when I saw it for the first time, I was like, oh, shit, I do like most girls at this point in that way. It was not something that seemingly came from the societal ether.

We actually know it doesn't come from the societal ether. If you give your dog a toy, he has no other dogs to look at. He's going to grab it and he's going to do this one. Completely genetically programmed behavior. It's to disassemble the spinal cord of prey. It actually hurts my head a little bit to do that. But for you, I did it twice. So I have other motions that deal with my head, which you might find in private even better.

Forward and back ones, Mike, in case you were filling the blanks. But also side to side, I've stopped, I swear. Okay. Okay. So there are many, many things about our human nature, which are biologically driven and biologically expressed. They do not require consent. And they take some modification for culture, but only at the margins. And so in the same way that nobody tells you like, you're going to like breasts, it's not like you were reading a magazine. And you were like, oh, current literary criticism says I should like spherical objects. Well, here we go. It's guttural. It's deep. It's automatic. That's how most people's assessment of attractiveness writ large is. And it's something you program into people, which is how cultural universals are discovered. Like, why in God's name is a girl that is considered highly attractive in India, also very likely to be considered very highly attractive, literally anywhere else? I mean, Indian girls are gorgeous.

That's not here nor there. But goddamn, how? How? How are these cultures? Like, this is also true in pre-industrial times. There's no communication between cultures. And so what is considered attractive is considered attractive mostly for very well understood biological reasons, detection of fertility, health, youth, at, et cetera. And it is one of these things that if you have it, dope, but then you have almost nothing else. And all of your points completely apply. Like the rest of life is like, okay, you don't have

happiness. You're just hot. You have to deal with a bunch of assholes and predators and people DMing you and people making it seem like they're interested in up here, but they're really interested in here and here, 100%. But if you are the opposite of hot, if you are very undesirable looking. The stack is so against you in so many ways that fixing that problem just fixes the problem and allows you to enter into the conversation for the kinds of problems everyone else has to deal with. Problems you also deal with, but you also deal with this extra problem. I don't want people to have to deal with this extra problem. It's a solved problem. Let me give you an example. Dental work. You know, everyone used to have f*** up teeth back of the day. So we fix people teeth. Why do we do that?

I mean, you could say, like, look, like society tells you people have perfect teeth. That's not true. You snagletooth, you're totally great. Like, it's dope. Or you could just take your eight-year-old who has messed up teeth and the year 20, 25, and be like, we're just going to get these fixed. We're just going to fix them. Well, there's health benefits to getting them fixed. There are so many health benefits to losing a substantial amount of adiposity.

Well, if you were telling me the reason that you want people aesthetically to change is because it's good for their metabolic health, that's one conversation. You telling me that they have the stack against them otherwise is a different conversation. Sure. But most people don't get kids' teeth fixed due to the health benefits. They get them fixed the aesthetic benefits because the kids don't want to grow up making people, getting people make fun of them for their nasty teeth. Most of the way braces are constructed is from an aesthetic perspective. I mean, your teeth are still functional. How many kids get braces in non-functional teeth? Like, oh, very few. That's an orthodontics problem. That's like one in ten. Most people who get braces, your teeth are just misaligned and you want to look better. Well, because if they misaligned at childhood, by the time you're in adulthood, your jaw changes, impacts breathing, eating, et cetera. This much. Unless you have an extreme case. We got to be careful to not come outside of our fields of specialty. Totally. Totally.

But like, we're already doing it by having this conversation. Oh, for sure, for sure. But aesthetics matter. They matter deeply to people because even though it would be cool if we all switched off our aesthetic comment, like I would do it instantly. Like, if I could just switch that part of my brain off and I would stop appraising other people as attractive or not or whatever on the spectrum, if everyone could do it, if kids could do it, it'd be wonderful.

That's not the reality of the world at all. There's another argument here. People will say like, you know, inequality is a problem. Inequality is actually not a problem. It's straight up not a problem in a very narrow lens of analysis. The only problem is how do the poorest people in society live? What is their standard of living? Because anything north of that basic needs is just irrelevant.

We already discussed it, right? And so but still people, because we're animals that are hierarchical, have kind of like a little bit of a problem with people making a gazillion dollars and other people making much less. And you can tell them, hey, inequality doesn't matter. That's probably a little bit easier to intellectualize, but still insanely difficult to do in a much, much deeper way. You can tell people, look, how you look doesn't matter. But it does because everyone thinks it does and they think it does.

And they can't just brainwash themselves into thinking it doesn't. Yeah, I don't think you're functioning on two extremes, like this false dichotomy. Either you tell them it doesn't matter at all, or you tell them that it matters so significantly that they have the deck stack against them. And I don't think it's either of those. And I think it's going to be a spectrum. And that spectrum is largely influenced by their own perceived notion of whatever that stack is. The dating thing is not influenced hardly at all by what their perception is. If someone feels super demotivated by the way they look and they're not actively seeking other people's companionship.

Oh, yeah, it is. As a male, yeah. But as a female, most of the shit comes to you and you don't have to go looking for it. So as a female, if you feel demotivated, your hottest, your DMs are full of that shit. if you're feeling really motivated and your DMs are still full of you're saying on the lower end of the aesthetic yeah on the lower end of the aesthetic you could feel all sorts of ways about how awesome you are and the DMs are still emptiest or they're full of just perverts and people who don't want to go any further than you and just sending you a pick to be completely

honest yeah I don't know if that's true I feel like we're jumping to a lot of assumptions how do you know that it's true I mean I wish we had a evolutionary I wish we could bring up like uh yeah sure we feel free uh to get one of those people um it's to me true on two different levels. One is a level of not some personal but mostly vicarious experience talking to people that were in their younger years substantially unattractive. You get a taste of what life really is like. Lots of grains of salt in there. Sure. Yeah. And also on the statistical level of we know how people interact with people that are unattractive and it's different than how they interact with attractive. So we're also talking about extremes of people on the lower end, but you're saying

that if you're somewhere in the middle, you're in the bell curve, that this conversation won't really apply. It applies to you on a marginal level. So, like, if you're a four and you want to feel life like an eight, just feel free to upgrade to an eight. But if you're a one, and someone's like, do you want to be a 10? Almost no one answers no to that for very good reason. So it's one of those things like if someone is so weak to use an analogy that they can't

get up out of a chair, how important is strength training with life saving? If someone, it wants to put an extra 10 pounds in their already world record squat total, how important is it's not, but it still matters, right? It just matters more and more and more, the bigger the disparity is. And I think that these kinds of aesthetic things, if you're like an eight or seven

and you read the book, you're going to be like, oh, this is a dope book. I love it. It's great vibes, great advice. It's like I got to really hit. If you read it as having at some point in your life or currently been, let's say, a two or a three or four, zing, you're going to be the holy shit.

That right there has some, and wait to it because it does. And how would you in this book recommend people to get aesthetically on your level? So again, super, super clarification. I said this once before, but it bears repeating. This is none of the prescriptive. I agree with you entirely that the inner self matters

way more than the outer self for sure. But I also know that people care about what their outer self matters. And so I'm kind of like, well, if you want to upgrade your look, God bless you, here's how to do it. You don't have to do it at all. But here's how to do it. So here's how to do it. I mean, you're on one hand saying,

if you want to do it, here's how you can do it, which I think is a totally reasonable message because people have these interests and want to get stronger, faster, bigger, whatever. But then on the other hand, if you say, like,

look how bad life is if you don't do this. Not life, certain elements of life. Which then ends up being huge life factors, like you pointed out, companionship, how awesome it is to go to a club and have someone dance with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, significantly will impact your life in a bad way.

Yeah, yeah. And then say, but if you want to do it. Well, it's like you just went on to telling me how awful things will be if I don't do these things. And not things will be. Things are likely to be. But this is all averages and all bell curbs all the way down. You could be a girl that weighs 400 pounds, androgen obesity. You just got balls for balls of confidence.

And you like being iconoclastic. And you're also a professional dominatrix. And you're in the fetish scene and you're a goddess and a queen. And someone's like, do you want to be skinny or whatever? You're like, fuck, no, how would I do that? Also, I lose a shitload of money because most of my clients like me this big.

Are you, is your life a problem? That's a really, that's the extreme version of that for you. It's an extreme version. You have to be a dominatrix. You have to go into these ridiculous. Like, you're basically saying join the circus or do my boosting of aesthetics. I don't remember when I said you had to do that, Mike.

But you're saying that you gave an example. Just as an example. But like, is there a less extreme? Yeah, can we not? Yeah, sure. What's a? Oh, 100%. You don't look so great on the outside.

You don't have a very high sex drive. You met the person that was going to be your lover forever when you were both 12 respectively and it became sexual and you were 17. And you work at Microsoft and you work in AI and you work on the Azure platform and you've got everything you need and everything's awesome and your partner's awesome. Got it. And then who's the person, again, not extreme. that would benefit from doing this program? Someone who has really done a lot of work and has a lot of their life really stapled together super well,

but is missing that external attractiveness factor that they've always wanted and never could have because some people just want it more. Like I could have wanted to be 6-3 my whole life and like, who's to tell me that that's bad? Dope, kid, ears, get the, Bone growing shit and you're good to go if that's what you want amazing. What I'm saying is that tens of millions of women and men want that They do. They really actually do want it some a ton some a little bit most people in between somewhere and so the utility you'll get out of the aesthetic revolution

Ranges from literal zero to be like because I don't give a shit all the way to this is the most life-changing and impactful thing that has ever happened to me period And that's real but it's everything in between so what's the plan all right you just download my app and you pay me money I'm not an engineer I don't know what happens between then and I just know I get paid tracking got it

this was an amazing talk Michael thank you for having you on it's www.mikesapp.com slash pay me we gotta be careful because who's app that's someone's website do you think that's like it's Mike's app yeah Sam who owns mic's app.com Mike Sapp.com. Don't give Mike Zapp any money.

Everyone's going to make Mike Sapp will make me beautiful. Thank God. Look, aesthetics matter, but $695. Jesus. Back to the interview in just a second, but first I want to talk to you about Incogni, a privacy service that automatically request

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kinds of nefarious purposes like applying for loans in your name or posing as you online, which can even raise the cost of your health insurance. Incogni steps up on your behalf to get your data removed from these databases automatically. They even got a dashboard where you can track the progress and see how many lists you've been removed from. In a constantly evolving era of cybersecurity, having someone like Incogni going to bat for you behind the scenes can deliver some serious peace of mind. To get an exclusive of 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com slash Dr. Mike or click the link in the episode description box. All right, let's get back to the other Dr. Mike. There are multiple things that

you can do to upgrade your look. And I'm going to list them. I think they're like, offhand, like six or something. I split them into like roughly six categories. And they're also scaled in time of how over history and over current and over future time, we've gained attractions on these things. So the first basic one is training. So if you do enough physical activity and you do resistance training, just regular normal lifting, then you're able to upgrade your muscularity, reduce your body fat percentage. And it makes most people more aesthetically pleasing to the average, right? Straight up. It gives you all the cool curves and all that stuff. So that's great. That's ingredient one. Very easy to do. Most people can get all of the aesthetics that most

people want with like two workouts a week each taking 20 to 30 minutes if done right no problem the next one is dio so here's another thing we know a lot about training for aesthetics i don't want to say we know everything about it but god we know a ton like we have a real good understanding of that problem space like if someone if you sit next to me on a plane and you're like so like lifting have we figured out how lifting like why like how do i lift to grow muscle is that like a solved problem or it's super mysterious to be like if that's solved but like we're well on our ways i don't give you five points right now that are just going to take really good care of you. The next is diet, dietary control. Huge. Dietary control is a bigger impact on aesthetics than lifting does on

average by several factors, mostly because the number one reason that the average person isn't as aesthetic they would want to be today in Western society and modern society is that they're overfat, which is a technical term, overweight obese, et cetera. And so diet can just crush out your body fat stores to a huge extent. And that's a big deal. So getting your diet right, the book's going to have all these excellent super simplified basic recommendations for how to eat long term sustainable super healthy that will shrink your fat so so far we got some muscle growth we got some fat loss what are we left with next for many people that's just it man like you're you look amazing awesome there is another thing that's been around for a while but is getting much better now

and that's cosmetic surgery there are numerous reasons to get cosmetic surgery the simplest most simplest ones to understand in this context if we're saying, okay, we're going to use all of these things in succession. First, we lift weights, we get some muscle cool. Then we start dieting. We burn the fat. Cool. If you have more than, oh, depending on your frame size, like 20 to 30 pounds of excess fat on you at any one point, also depending on how it's distributed, you can get some loose skin after you lose it. And loose skin does resort over time and with some external cream modalities that are non-pharmaceutical, but just a teeny bit. And so you could get, for example, skin excision. surgery, which I just had recently, and I'm still recovering from.

It's been traumatic, but thanks for asking. Like, I know you don't care about my feelings. Anyway, so, and so all of a sudden, because here's the thing, people will go from 400 pounds to 150 pounds. People do this all the time. I mean, it's incredibly rare, but we have so many people that you see this on Instagram over and over. And a lot of people think I'm going to lose weight and I'm going to look phenomenal and

they look so much better. It's unbelievable. They take their shirts off and there's just loose hanging skin everywhere. That is a tractable problem that aesthetic surgery can solve the solution. It's not perfect, but they get better all the time. It's like what aesthetic surgery looked like in the late 80s? Like Toss considered like brutal and not ideal. In the late 2020s, holy crap, they got, dude, they got robot surgery now.

They got compounds that like weird like stitching inside that helps you heal way faster. All this really cool ship. So you can excise fat cells so they can't regrow bigger. You can, a variety of surgical techniques can. can make the skin tighter, and that's amazing. So if we take a person, and I do this in the book through a kind of long story that I weave, we take a fictional character was 450 pounds at the beginning,

and at the end, like, I know, like 175 or something like that. And we say, okay, she got more muscle. Then she basically lost most of her fat. And then it's potentially surgery time to kind of, you know, draw down the skin in the arms, the legs, the tummy, so on and so forth. And at some point, that gains you lots of traction.

But for many people, it doesn't go as far as we'd like because some people have the kind of genetics that makes fat loss dieting profoundly difficult due to high levels of food noise, of a huge food drive. Or they have levels of muscularity that are capped genetically at very low levels. They may want to be significantly more muscular,

but they just can't do it. And those people are real. And so we have another thing, which is now an exploding field, is drugs, modern pharmaceutical inventions for the purpose of body composition, enhancement. And that doesn't end with just like a growing muscle and burning fat. It goes all the way into what are called exercise mimetics, which are currently several of them are in various

stages of FDA approval. What is an exercise mimetic? It's a pill that you take that maybe does biochemically what 50 to 65 percent of all of the things exercise does for you, but it's just in a pill. This shit is real. Anyone's interested? Google Azela Prague. You can't buy it yet. It's research chemical and you read about what it does and you're like this is a real thing that does this. I think I saw it on Mike's app's website. It's a great website. And a phenomenal app, it's only accessed by money. You want to split it with me? Yeah. It's Mike's app. Like which Mike. They're like just Mike's. Mike's. Mike's apostrophe. No. After. Yeah. That way we share. Yes, of course. So on the drug side, you have drugs of course like Trezapotide, for example.

Because it's easy to tell someone, hey, do a diet. And then they have, like, psychotic hunger three weeks later. And they're like, realistically, this is not going to work for me. I can't even think it work anymore. You take something like Trezepotide, you're well on your way. The drug wave is just cresting up right now in, oh, man, these predictions get really tough for a reason I'll tell you right now. There are, I can separate drugs into, there are many more classes in this, but three classes of drugs are instructive. There are drugs, this is some of the stuff that you know pretty well, bylaw.

Right? Like you don't just take them. A lot of times you have to go to the hospital to get them infused. If you take them, do not drop this vial. Keep it in a cool environment. It's $10,000. There are biologics that do crazy shit to your body, but they're not realistic. And they can become realistic with like a 10-year research pipeline. But what's happening right now is as some of these biologics are in phase two and three trials, they already have small molecule drugs that are as good as the biologics, but they're oral, super cheap, insanely easy manufacture. And they could eventually. cost what like blood pressure drugs do like nominally like right aids like it's nine dollars for a 90 day supply and like you know how anyone makes money selling this shit like miracle shit then there's one last one and that i'm going to say for a little bit later and that's genetic engineering like if you have a thing with yourselves which is like they make you hungry all the time that's from your DNA when i just change your DNA so that's downstream predicting what drugs are going to be like in five years is tough because you could be like man we're all going to be taking awesome biologics in five years but actually we're going to be taking small molecules,

but actually halfway through stage two of small molecule research, they go, hey, we can actually hit the DNA itself. We don't even need to be selling drugs. So these waves kind of crash onto themselves. But in any case, the drug revolution is a huge deal because if you lift, if you control your diet, eventually even if you do zero of those things, drugs are going to be able to give you right about as much muscle as you want,

as little fat as you want, as much daily energy as you want, and all of the benefits of exercise in a pill. Phenomenal. Let's take this further. So we have all these things already. And already, if we're constructing our fake person, they've got a lot of tools, man. You can really change your body in a ton.

I'm not going to address the face in this podcast. All the same shit applies to the face. Cosmetic surgery, creams, et cetera, et cetera. And then we get to age reversal. Age reversal is nearly inevitable. It is going to be one of the biggest revolutions. anyone has ever seen in 50 other ways that have nothing to do with aesthetics.

You know, like you don't age anymore if you're kind of sweet. But on aesthetics, age reversal is enormous. Because at some point, when you're a woman, let's say in your late 40s, and you've been that woman that wasn't conventionally attractive and never got that taste of romance

that you really wanted. And so you can get jacked, you can get lean, you can get the surgery to cut out all the excess skin. You can take the advanced drugs in the late 2020s. It'll make you just like awesome.

But, but, but, but, but, but, but you're still now 50 looking and it's just very well established fact that a huge part of female attractiveness is basically proxies for youth. Like, that's just a thing. Cosmetics industry knows that very well. And so if we can meaningfully and we will reverse human aging back to like whatever like age 22 kind of vibes, then that is going to be such an enormous impact on aesthetics that it's going to change tons of stuff. And then the. last biological revolution will be the genetic engineering revolution. I don't know which one will hit first, meaningful age reversal or genetic engineering. Though if you hit genetic engineering first in a big way, it actually swallows up the whole aging revolution. And the genetic engineering revolution is basically going to be like, you can look like whatever the fuck you want. Like you can have horns, you can be purple, you can be six foot nine, doesn't matter. Because once artificial super intelligence gets carte launch on human DNA, it can just send you something in the mail. It's like just jab this in and over the next two months, you're going to transform into the thing

that you designed on your computer interface to want to look like. There's nothing about that that is impossible. It's not intractable for an artificial superintelligence, which is probably, I don't know, several months away now in some ways already here. It's going to be a thing that gets solved. So all of these things for the aesthetic revolution are such a big deal because right now in 2025 if you're listening to this podcast. You okay, cool artificial superintelligence. This guy's out of his mind. Age reversal sounds fucking wacky. It's not going to be here for a little while. It's true. It won't. But what can I do now to get to my best look if I care? And the answer is, and all will be in the book, is you can control your weight training. You can exercise. You can

control your diet a ton. You can already have access to some drugs and you sure should have access with enough saved money to a lot of surgery that really makes you look very different in a really awesome way. And some of the surgeries more subtle nowadays, there's just like a facial, like de-aging, it's not really de-aging, procedure that people do, like really subtle facial surgery now that all the Hollywood people get. You know, there's the look. You remember like the mid-90s facial surgery look in females?

Puffy lips, like cheekbones look like this. And you're like, that's not a real human face. That's a surgery face. The new kinds of surgery are so subtle. You can't really tell. Someone just looks like kind of 10 years fresher and like a little prettier than they've ever looked. That stuff you can access already today. It's very expensive today.

In the future, it's just, it always does this. It's just, it's been coming down and price this entire time. And so you can access these things as they come out and eventually accessing age reversal and eventually accessing genetic engineering so that to the people that care the most, eventually. And by eventually, I really mean probably the mid-2030s, no way. no more than 10 years, maybe 15 years depending on regulatory stuff from now, to whoever has left that still cares about how they look at a deep level, you'll be able to look more or less like what you want. I think that's a great thing. Why does the subject of attractiveness matter so much to you? Like, how did this become a passion? Do you think it really matters much to me?

I mean, so much so that you're studying it, you're writing a book on it, you're trying to figure out how people feel, how to help them. Where do that come from? So, actually, the current intro to the book addresses this. I might as well tell the story. I was at a college party once. I mean that just once, but it was so fun. And there was a poster on the wall. It was like, you know, like guys owned the house, like a college house.

And well-meaning, just decent human beings, just dudes. And there's tons of people in the party, guys, girls, everyone. You know, just college. And there was a poster on the wall. It wasn't very big. But it said no fat chicks. And I remember not like, I don't know, it's a joke, I guess. I'm not going to judge other people's humor.

My shit is wacky. So whatever. Ha-ha. I remember turning my head at one point during the party. And I saw two girls standing there. well away from the picture and they were chatting having fun and they were both like like they were fat you know i'm not gonna walk around it not like thick not pudgy not whatever not whatever terms like straight up and uh i wondered at the time and i've wondered many times since

what it would feel like to read that mid-conversation with someone at the party like it can't feel good and then that thinking layers on to reading like evocyte literature talking to real humans examining my own feelings on the matter talking to my wife at length and uh you realize that like when you grow up as an unattractive girl you grow up differently your experience is very very very different than if you grow up even just average being attractive just average um and that difference is massive and there is a world of deep hurt that is available to you if you simply just are normal because we're talking about all of self-work stuff which is so valuable the average human being to your point has only so much bandwidth and if your degree of nastiness that you gained

from the world being the other was so high your realistic probability of self-working through that is lower it's just too much toxicity for most people to eat and I don't like that imagine being a kid not of financial means and you go to a party with like wealthier people

and there's a poster on the walls says no poor kids but you're talking and laughing with people and they didn't ask you how poor you were no one cares no one's that they just assume you were with the rich kid you're also rich like guys how's that make you feel how does it make you feel when everywhere in the world poverty matters you ever see like slumdog millionaire and shit like that caste system there's not a caste system for attractiveness um in the modern world by i tell you what middle school sure shit feels like that sometimes man did you when you went to middle school did you guys

have cliques. Yeah. I mean, to some degree. In the middle schools and high schools I attended, the click structure, you could frame it with a knife.

It was that clear. It was based wildly on external physical attractiveness for females. And for males, that plus how like cocky you were or whatever the fuck. It was clear as day

and people treated each other very differently based on how they looked. And so my assessment of that is that if you have to go through the world with a lot of toxicity and a lot of not fun experiences and a lot of not fun experiences in your head, because remember most people who are not attractive, when they look in the mirror, they're under no deep illusions about who's attractive and who's not. And no amount of society telling you you're beautiful can go all the way to clearing that cash. Absolutely not. But I don't think they're, like, the solution isn't to tell people they're beautiful.

That's also an equally judgmental standpoint. People do it all the time. It's really well-intention. I'm not saying that that's not done. I'm just saying that's not what the opposite strategy would be. The opposite strategy would be saying that this is not as important. But it is really important. We should seek to change it.

So like the example. How do we change it? People just don't want to have sex with me. They don't want to kiss me. I think now middle schools function quite differently from what I've seen in my nephew's middle schools. Also, even from like the changing of genders and how people view sexuality has drastically changed from the way that I even went to middle school. And the fact is that when we, we could set up people for failure or we could set up people to be adaptive to

circumstantial change. The idea that you're seeing this no fat chicks and having the strong emotional tie to it is very positive. Like you're creating an evolution in your mind of what it's like to be a higher level human. That's how I imagine it to be. So the question is how do we play that out of actually solving the societal dilemma where people are judgmental of someone saying no fat chicks? Is it make people who are overweight lose weight or adjusting how people that treat individuals who are overweight as that's the problem, not the weight. So it's both for sure.

But treating people, you can be treating people bad in a positive way or negative way. I don't mean positive and negative like motions. I mean like actively or neutrally. So not saying mean shit, dope, a really good idea, right? But like, I'm a fat chick, right?

Who's gonna go on a date with me? they don't call me fat anymore that's great look like the 70s and shit were ruthless places middle school people throw rocks at your head if you were fat terrible awful thank God we don't do that anymore but um are people who are not

who are conventionally very unattractive seeing a much higher rate of people giving them the kind of physical affirmation and love that they want I mean statistically people are having way less sex than ever so it would be tough to say And also statistically more people are overweight and obese. Yeah.

So is the norm changing? No, I would say it's a reflection of the fact that the norm's not changing. More people are overweight, fewer people find each other attractive, fewer people have sex. If people were, if everyone was really attractive. You're saying that people gaining weight has led to people having less sex? I'm not making that claim, but it wouldn't be surprising if that was the case. It perfectly makes sense. Is there anything like, we can do,

lots of postulating in public life. But in private life, two things interfere. Do you really want to touch that person in a sensual way? And also do your downstairs bits cooperate? I could be a feminist in the real true sense of the word and have total body acceptance. But Mr. Winky

doesn't give a flying thing. And he only wakes up for when shit is hot. And he only works on raw biology. You can't trick him into culture for shit. Like, that's the thing that revealed versus stated preferences. Right? People say they like this. You look at their porn cash. It looks for Different. That's what they really like. That stuff's much deeper. That stuff's more biological. That stuff you actually have to look the part for. And so what I'm saying is we should work and have been very successfully I'm at. And we need to do more to make everyone feel never hated and super fully accepted. But there is a level of acceptance that's not up to your generous nature. It's up to your endowed nature. And that just doesn't like imagine you're sitting across from like imagine you're in high school. And one of your best friends is super fat, super unattractive.

which is so cool, right? And she goes, hey, I have like a crush on you, legit. And you feel nothing in that department. Mike, what are you supposed to do, man? How much social, how much social indoctrination can save? Well, the question is, do you truly not feel it? Or are you blocking it for the fear of social norm rejection? Social norm rejection means you say, oh, hey, let's talk about this later.

And you go to our house later. So we're assuming you really fucking want it, right? You go to the house, radical makeouts, just tons of real fun. And you're like, we have to keep the secret because they won't understand. And then it's two things. On the one hand, forbidden and awesome. Everyone likes a forbidden affair. That's half of all romance novels.

Mike, what I'm trying to bring to the conversation is that there is another option here is that nobody says yes to you or the people that say yes to you you don't like. And then you are not having it. It's not that they're secretly not into you, which I think probably accounts for some of the variance, but also makes that cool off-hand, seedy romance thing possible. there's also just the real raw and this is brutal but it's true in many cases no one's gonna you man no one wants to make out with you i don't mean no one in the literal sense no one at your school no one that you know no one that you trust none of your friends in your circle who you actually like it's the guys will be like if there's a girl out there in the

world she's a reproductive age i'll hit it girls don't work like that they work off relationships and getting to know people much more what if the one guy you really really like you're just not physically attractive enough for here's the other thing you look at yourself in the mirror and you agree you look at yourself you go i'm not physically attractive enough i wouldn't i wouldn't be banging me if i was a dude and it's not like you got um tricked by society into thinking that maybe some element of that is true but even if it was just super raw it just that this ain't it like what do you do then and my answer is like well okay so what's exactly the problem of super first principles like okay the guy like loves my soul

but i don't like the container uh-huh he already loves my soul soul. You don't have to change your soul. Okay. Can I change my container? How old are you? I'm over 18. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. This is in a conversation about whether or not plastic surgery should be illegal. Not just plastic surgery, but all these other things. I'm not saying illegal, legal, illegal, illegal. The right thing to do from a compassionate perspective from onlookers. I don't want to be telling people who go consult for plastic surgery to look, well, honestly, you're already beautiful on the inside. Yeah, I know, mister. I'm here to fix the other shit. I mean, like, well, it doesn't matter much. I know, but it matters some. And when you don't

have that romantic interaction and acceptance of many other people take for granted, then it can matter a lot to you. Fuck what everybody else thinks. If you have a vision of how you can be more externally beautiful and you have the money and you have the intelligence to pursue that, the aesthetic revolution book and philosophy is like, great, this is it. So for this book, in order to, like you're giving people the ammunition, for lack of a better term. It's very combative. I don't like that. Yeah, this is a combative statement.

You're giving people the, not the food. Ammunition. Ammunition. The equipment. Sure. The equipment and principles by which they can change their appearance. But then within you giving those principles and equipment, you're also passing a form of judgment of what it's like to be them.

Are you doing it from personal experience? Here's what I've seen these people treated as. Or are you saying it, I'm one of those people. I've been treated like this and here's a way to get better. Or are you saying it even from a more scientific standpoint, like, I've studied this. Here's what I've studied. Here's what I've seen outcomes with. Which one of those three are you writing from?

All three, but in different proportions. My own personal experience is very small. I would love to, it would just be better for the book. if like I was like a formerly really fat girl and then I changed my body and shit like that like it would be did dope It's not me. It's not my history I have my own aesthetic preferences for my body and you know they're but they're wacky and they're really out there and they've nothing to do with being attractive to women or like I've done things to my body that I knew for a fact were making me less attractive to women because they were raising my power lifting total I was like can give a flying like so very small me But enough me to relate to other people's emotions like someone stomps on your toe and it hurts a lot, right?

You see someone get shot and their arm gets shot off in the street. You're like, oh my God, you want to help them. You're like, you assume they're in pain. Like, you've never been shot. What if it just didn't feel like anything? You're like, I don't know, man. My toe really hurt. And if I extrapolate that, blown off arm really hurts.

And then all the neuroscientists come in and they go, yes, getting your arm blown off is probably the kind of pain you never want to fuck with. And so it's a little part me, decent part research, although a lot of this stuff is like super obvious, but if you look in the research, it's the kind of research that, like, you know, people, people with certain morphology have lower body, like, acceptance standards and self-image and all the stuff. You're like, I've got to told you that. When people lose weight, direct studies, people lose weight, their body image and self-efficacy goes up, period, right? Again, it's easy to say, it's easy to envision, easy to study, all the stuff is there. A big part of it

is with technically called vicarious experience of communicating with others and watching others go through the world. And, you know, also I have been, I'm not Mr. I'm not good looking like you, but stop it. I hate it when people compliment me. You will shut up and you will take it. That's right. I get the crew laughing. So I've been that guy in a few circumstances where I've interacted with people that wanted more. And just for physical reasons, the answer was no, I hated it. I hated it. But I couldn't change it. It's just, that's just who I am. Now, I can put the words on, like, in the bedroom or whatever at a date. I can touch in a real cool way. I can say all the shit. I can do the eye contact. Like, I got the whole

psychopath lying thing down. It's great. It's easy. Um, so I got, I got some game. I can't do that to a real human being for real, for real. And be like, you're so gorgeous. I can't tell you that. If I don't believe it, like, you are real feelings. You're going to believe me. And that what the It's going to happen. I've been that person, and a lot of it's been the vicarious part. So I'd say it's probably 50% vicarious part, 40% research, and then maybe 10% of my own, like, wishing I look different so that I could, I don't even know, man, get success with girls, I guess.

Like, I don't know. When you make enough money, that problem solves itself, to be completely honest. Why did you get plastic surgery? Yeah, yeah. So in my quest to be to get as strong, absolutely strong as possible, I was under the illusion that the bigger you get, the stronger you get, which is not so much an illusion. It's true. But I just didn't know that when you get really fat and muscular at the same time that some of the skin doesn't resort. And so now that I'm into bodybuilding and I have an aesthetic vision for my physique, a huge limiting factor of mine was that like I just had love handles. And when they weren't filled with fat anymore. They were filled with water. And then they just looked like shit all the time.

And I was like, fuck this. I can just get them cut out. So I did. It really just goes about that deep. How did that go? So like, alpha male plastic surgery, Dr. Douglas Steinbreck,

Chicago, New York, Beverly Hills. Amazing. Recommendation. You went to Beverly Hills to get your plastic surgery. No, I'm not beautiful enough. I went to Chicago. Where ugly people go. Chicago wins it's a joke.

Stay calm. They're like, how could you? You know, typical Chicago. Mind you, I grew up around Detroit, so all the jokes apply. I did meet a gentleman, Crystal, I met a gentleman yesterday who was from Cleveland, and we were like, oh, and he was like, I know, I know. Why, what happens in Cleveland? Nothing.

Oh. It's a terrible place. Do you know that Cleveland has had a nickname called The Mistake by the Lake for a long time? No. Yeah. I grew up in the city, Staten Island, that it was called the Forgotten Borough. Yeah, I didn't even know it was a borough for a long time. Look at that.

People are like, I'm from Staten Island. Like, where's that? They're like New York. Like, nah, I've never heard of that. Some people call it a dump, which is unfair. Because there used to be a Staten Island dump. That's true. I like the shit that was true in the 40s, like follows into the 2000s.

Come on. Well, we put a park over it. So that means it's good. Yeah, it's fine. I think. I got a fact check. This park smells weird. Okay.

So I got the procedure. And a lot of it is expectation setting because a lot of, not all plastic surgeons will be like, this is what you want. This is what we can give you. And there's a lot of ways it can go wrong in between because they do not want you to have expectations are the mother of all like lawsuits and plastic surgery.

And also just bad vibes because if you think it's going to make you flawless overnight, you know, a big mistake. Also, the surgery takes one full year to completely recover from, including all water retention in the area. So if you think you're going to walk out of surgery and look amazing that next day,

you have something completely else coming. So I did all that stuff. Got the procedure. I've had several other surgical procedures before. I've been put in anesthesia before. I generally think it's awesome. And I wake up like, I don't know, like you're all f***ed up, but it's fun. There is this thing that when you...

Were the other surgeries aesthetic as well? This is my first aesthetic surgery. The other umbilical hernia repair and one side. So functional ones. Yeah, so totally, yeah. And so, um, Basically, I woke up and my body was screaming at me subconsciously that I had taken a lot of damage. You know, like if you, this is super fucked up, but if you injure an animal, they start making the yelping sound and they crawl away.

That's how I felt. I didn't even know I was supposed to feel like that. Because usually I come out of the procedure, you're on like fentanyone and whatever the hell you guys give people there. Hell yeah, the doc gave me some extra to take home. I'm kidding. It's a joke. He's great. And so I woke up and I was just like, oh, what the hell happened to me?

And I mean, there was like, so blood just keeps coming out of the area and all kinds of crazy drainage for like days. We had a hospital, a hotel room bed that was covered. And just like World War III, your movement restrictions are profound because if I, if I lean forward, this, the Douglas Steinbrecht, Dr. or Douglas Steinberg said that he uses term as hideous, a cheese wire effect. When he said that, I was like, ugh, and so like you can barely move. Pooping is really difficult

because you're neither allowed to bend over. So you have to sit down on a toilet completely vertically, which is cool. And also if you, in the first like several days after surgery over strain, you can get a hematoma. And so, you know, what they did was he cut a 270 degree incision from my hips

all the way back around my back and then did two roughly six inch vertical incisions kind of in the love handle area side slash back and then pulled a crap load of skin out of that did a bunch of liposuction and then sucked it all back in etc

and so side to side movements no go front to back's no go you're just really kind of a zombie you have to wear the compression garment for like six weeks I wore it in total for all altogether 12 of various compression garments. They have the drains. You call the grenade drains or whatever.

Showering is weird. I'll say my first shower was like five days after the procedure. Miraculous. Like you ever gone five days without showering other than as a child or whatever? It's a trip. Right. Yeah, camping or something like that. And so I thought I would miss training.

I wasn't allowed to train for six weeks. After six weeks and another six weeks of pretty restricted but full body training. And then after that, they're just like, you, everything's healed as much as it will on structural grounds. You could just do fall. So I'm well into that phase now. But I thought, six weeks of no training, by about week two, I was going to go psychotic. Because other than taking a few weeks off here and there for healing reasons, for 25 years, I have never taken off more than two weeks of training ever. And for two weeks, they didn't want to train because my body felt so screwed up that my brain was like, you know, I don't do anything.

And so that was not fun. Two weeks after that, I felt like, I don't know, I feel a little better, but I don't know how training would work because everything is all fucked up. The last two weeks, I was like, if I don't train, man, I don't know what the hell is going to happen. So that was really tough. The amount of pain was really intense.

I will say that I ended up taking a new drug that is a non-opioid pain modulator. And it is, it was revelatory. It was unbelievable because, like, you can only take vikes and perks for so long until you're like, am I a drug addict? And this drug just had like zero side effects as far as I could tell, except on clinical trials. And in my experience, like, got the pain down to as much as Vicodend did.

It was phenomenal. So the recovery was a real pain in the ass. Way, way, way harder, way more uncomfortable than any diet I've ever done than any training. Because like, like, I've had leg workouts, right, barely like, you can remember you and I trained legs, you're limping around for like a week. You think, like, that's a lot of damage. That's not shit, man. you cut your body up and your body's like, you're done.

You know how like, um, in movies when the good guy gets like real hurt and eventually he saves the day, but he's like lying there with a sword and he's like, like his girl is, she's about to get killed and he's like, oh, and he stabs the guy and you're like, why doesn't he just like wake up and just okay, your leg is broken, just be athletic, just have that raw. You can't because your brain when it detects mega trauma is like, you get regressed back into like fetal form. That feeling was weird. I was not ready for that.

shit. So that was my perception of that. The surgeon didn't talk to you about the pain that you would experience in the rehab. So I'll tell you something about surgeons. When you've done hundreds of procedures, maybe thousands, like the best folks have, it becomes so routinized to you that the way you interact about it is very antiseptic. It's just like there's no, nonchalant, bereft of any connected emotion. I'm not sure. Also, most of these doctors haven't had surgery themselves, so they can't come at you from like, this is how you're for sure going to feel, feel. So, like, you know, they tell you all the stuff.

But here's also the reality I think they're maybe basing this on. They don't tell you much about how fucked up you're going to be because after six weeks, you look back and you're like, that actually went by really fast. And you're in the thick of recovery. You're like, this is terrible. I also say that many people within the first several weeks post-surgery will be like, I made a huge mistake. They surgeon is pretty good at prepping you for that.

And I was like, I'm not going to feel that. And I didn't feel that. But, you know, I came close. I could, I totally see how that would work. Do you feel like you made a mistake now? God, yeah. I just want my old body back. Really?

No, no, no. This is amazing. Really? Yeah. What's amazing? Looking at, um, my body from certain angles. I do this religiously daily anyway. And, uh, seeing that I don't have love handles.

And seeing them no longer to be artistically expressive here. not poisoning the rest of my physique anymore is sublime. It's sublime. It's unbelievable. Interesting. Why is that so valuable to you? So I decided to point my vision

at crafting the most aesthetic physique that I was capable of crafting. I got pretty far. Pretty jacked, pretty lean, the whole shit, all the shapes. And there are just probably two main ways in which my physique really doesn't measure up to my own standards, the biggest one was the fact that no matter what look I had, I still had love handles. I mean, I was down to a Dexa

confirmed under 6% body fat, and I still had love handles. I'd cross-straations in my glutes. You ever see that in real life? Or someone flexes their butt and it goes, walnut. And I still had love handles. At some point, you're like, what body fat will I not have love handles. And the answer was there was no, because you're just excess skin. And there's just going to be there. And so, imagine you're a painter and you make this grand work. And there's just this jut of color that doesn't match. And someone's like, can you get rid of that? You're like, nope, no eraser I have will get rid of that. At some point, it's going to drive you fucking insane. I'm kidding. But it's like, it's super giant nuisance. And so I'm like, yeah, I've had

enough of this shit. So I got to cut the fuck out, man. That's it. Does it impact the fact that you're a bodybuilder, but part of your body was no longer built by you, but by Dr. What's his last name? Douglas Steinbreck. Steinbreck. Probably one of us. Now is, yeah, is now your bodybuilding journey somewhat attributed to him? Yes.

I consider it a great honor for a master of his craft to apply literal bodybuilding. Recomposition science at the highest level to me. One of my favorite most inspirational short YouTube clip videos that I've ever seen. Anyone can Google this, YouTube it. Freeza, spell it however you like YouTube, we'll fix it for you. Freeze a Reborn. It's Dragon Ball Z. Friza is an evil villain that are inconsequential to the story.

And he gets like basically cut into pieces, blown into pieces during a battle. And then his top engineers and scientists literally put him back together and upgrade him with technology. That little clip about how that happens is religious dogma to me. To be a recipient of advanced science and then come out better, however you measure better, is so wonderful. It's just amazing. So for me, getting the surgery, it was just like, this is so sweet. Like, this is exactly everything I believe in. And also, like, for the record, I don't resonate much.

And for people that do, I think it's wonderful. I never resonated much with the pride of having built my physique. Because here's the thing, like, I had a pretty cool physique when I was drug-free. I didn't care about physique then, it was just a powerlifting. I got really strong. Was ever, like, proud that I built the strength? Like, I could tell you I was, but it's not an emotion of really experienced much. And so I was never really a person.

in my physique who looked at it and had some kind of resonant thought in the background, flexing in the mirror, like, this is me, you know, I did this. So what was giving you joy at that time? At the time, the process of upgrading, like, becoming better by whatever means. Well, isn't that the work? Not only, I mean, so, okay, so it's work, but also it's multiplied by genetics. Like, I started gaining muscle when I was, like, 15, and I just got lucky enough genetically that I got up to like crazy level of muscle mass

that most people can only get from drugs completely drug free and it just kept coming and like I didn't even know what like struggling to gain strength was like. But even if you were genetically weaker or had less muscle, you'd still would have been making some progress that you could have been feeling joy about.

Yeah, no, no, no. So the progress was good but there's not a part of what loops back effectively to my ego to say you earned this. I like also I come from an Eastern meditative practice like I do Sam Harris's waking up app and all that stuff and I've been doing meditation for years I don't have much of like a really like a real ego left in there man like to be totally transparent like but the love handles feed the ego or the lack of love handles it seems like the love handles were

blocking happiness no no no I was perfectly happy I just like wanted to look cooler I think a lot of people think that like it's not as deep as most people think it is no no no no no I mean, like, it's pretty deep because this is my sculpture. I make to this, you know. Well, that's the thing. I made it, but I don't take a lot of pride out of me having made it. I put it together through having sweet genetics for the, like, you know, not elite, but like pretty goddamn good.

And then, you know, people say, like, what about the time you spent training? I love training. It doesn't seem like time to me. Like, oh, put it on his suffering. Like, suffering through diets. Yeah, that's dope. But, like, also diets, like, compared to some of the other shit I've done in life, It's not that hard, like, and they're hard, but also when you get into a diet, you get this, like my friend Jared, who's a pro bodybuilder. He's in the state now where he's towards the end of a, my man, yeah, he's towards the end of a diet. He's in like a zen-like state. Like, if you really bite into the diet and accept it, it's fun, it's radical, it's awesome. So all of a sudden, if everything's really fun and you're struggling, but you love the struggle, you can't, there's nowhere to rest your ego on, like, I overcame this. And you've overcome a lot of stuff, which is cool. But I'm, that's awesome. But what works for me,

is two things. One is making progress. Like I love upgrading my physique. Like if you tomorrow I woke up and I was like a flabby 120 pounds and I was 20 years old, I would love it, bro. I just be like, let's build, baby. Building is everything. And it's not that I'm building it. It's that it is getting built. And if I have to get an external contractors, hell yeah. And dude, I've taken tons of steroids and shit like that. How can I possibly take credit for anything? I can't. And I don't need the credit. I just need upgrades. And the second thing is to look sweet. And so, My goal is to keep making upgrades to some extent and towards a look that I think is cool. That's it.

In the level of difficulty, dieting, all the work you put in with exercise and surgery, what's that level? Surgery is super easy, but incredibly painful and uncomfortable to the extent that dieting and training can never touch. I didn't know that until I got the surgery. I thought I was going to be like, dude, I've trained my ass on the ground. I've fucking black belt and jiu-jitsu. I've got an elbows in my face and all this crazy shit, blood everywhere.

limbs damn near snapped off. And I was like, ah, this is fine. And then I was like, oh, shit, this is. Damage-wise, it's just orders of magnitude more. And I was like, this sucks. Like, it sucks in a real special way. But as far as, like, overall, how much I was pushed to my limit in a short-time surgery by a long shot, because those six weeks, like, blow in a weight that's really difficult

to conceive of over the sum total area under the curve of my career, yeah, I mean, training and diet, I mean, geez, 25 years of training and dieting. a total amount of suffering you have to go through for that. One surgery is not going to do it. So 100%, but any one given diet? Yeah. If you were like, hey, if you could just, somehow you discovered a pill to take that you had to do the diet hard, but that pill would attack the skin and fat cells of your love

handles and you wouldn't need surgery, can you go back and do that? Yes, absolutely 100%. Oh my God, I never want to go through surgery again. But I will be going through surgery again, probably at least a few more times. to enhance my physique even further. To do what? So I have at least two ideas. One is I have some loose skin and extra fat cells

around my lower chest area and some cases around my back and actually just out of sheer genetics in my tie-in between my biceps, triceps, and shoulders like right, this area. And those can actually be kind of furrowed out with surgery, much less invasive. A procedure called body tight

where they basically chemically, they treat your skin with heat so that it contracts. They also lipo out the fat and then microlipo can fix all that. So eventually I'll do something like that because it'll be sweet. And I do have hypothetical, probable plans for very ambitious surgery.

I think it's pretty neat. So I have this thing where no matter what body fat I have, and there's tons of YouTube videos of me doing this, I have a big gut, just plain old. And I can even suck in and do the vacuum pose or my weight. look super tiny and then I just go back to regular

and there's just gut that just comes out and my parents both have it that's just like pot belly and it's really just the genetic laxity of the abdominal wall has nothing to do with muscle strength and none of that shit and so there are procedures where they do is quite extensive

they basically placate you know what placating is they pull your muscles in kind of to each other and kind of stitch them together and so you can placate the obliques you can placate the rectus abdominis and it brings your waist in. And just in case you were ever going to blow that out, and it kind of resorbs after a little while, you get a polymer sheath installed around your entire, like a corset sheath, plastic sheath

internal installed. And then it constantly keeps your waist to the size that most people of my leanness have. But I don't because I just have the flabby gut situation. I have been thinking about potentially going to that max level of surgery and getting my two. bottom ribs broken inwards to have an even cooler, even smaller waist. Because hip-wise, and some of my bodybuilding photos show this off, genetically, I have a very small waist structurally. The love handles are done. That's cool.

Now the gut's kind of hanging out. And I'm like, I could really like Stan to get this smaller. And so I think small wastes look in a way that I really fucking like. I'd like to have a small waist, not just small. Ideally, I'd like to have a tiny waist. I think it's magical. And I would like to have that look. That surgery is really intense.

Yeah, like the idea of fitness and nutrition and talking about aesthetics and how we could benefit health is interesting because you're benefiting health. That's why I talk about it as a doctor. This is risking your health with no health benefit. Am I right? Like removing your love handles. We're doing the polymer inside. The polymer inside, no.

The love handle removal, yes, because you're removing fat. cells, they scream chemical noise into the ether and you have to counteract them with drugs. So that's probably net benefit over the long term, but marginally and not as net of a benefit as putting on more muscle and losing fat through diet and exercise, for sure, at huge risks. So how do you decide to go down one of these paths that's obviously risk benefit, more risky for your health, less health benefit, and more for the aesthetic? Like, how do you decide which three buckets lead your decision, where you put your emphasis? I'm really risk averse in very many aspects of my life, but not risk averse in some other

aspects of my life. And for me, my journey in modifying my own body and learning about that through this aesthetic process is quite important. And what are you hoping to learn on this journey? Oh my God. How long do you have? One is like what things actually work and what things don't. One is through helping other folks

What works for some people It doesn't work for other people Another one is how body image Interacts with actual body shape And esteem and all this stuff Another one is social perception It's been fascinating to see how some people react to Because I've been very public about having

Get the surgery I'll be super public With all the other ones in the future And it's just been ultra fascinating To see how people react to that sort of thing So part of your drive for wanting to get the surgeries is to see public perception of what it's like to get the surgery? That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, just part of it, though. But most of it is just, like, at the end of the day, I want to look like my vision of what a cool physique looks like.

Even if it means being less healthy. Yeah, oh, yeah. Well, I already did that with steroids, so no surprise. Well, that's a thing. Like, your Renaissance periodization is a way for people to get healthy. And you're doing a lot of things that make you unhealthy. How does that vibe? One of those is a company in which I help others,

and the other thing is just me and what do I do with myself. So like it's tantamount to be, so let me ask you a question, do you drink? Sure. It's fucked up. Your doctor. Alcohol is insanely deleterious.

Trade off. Drinking is a sweet vibe. Right, but if I have a patient who has one drink a week, I'm not going to dissuade them from drinking it. The impact on their health are probably negligible. And if I have people at R.P. asked me, should I get the surgery? It'd be like, there are very many other questions to ask before the answer to that is yes. These are very, very serious things.

So when would you say yes? When someone has consistently for years worked on upgrading their muscularity in most cases, consistently for years worked on their diet and physical activity to contract body fat and has maintained excellent results and consistency in a huge buy-in, like, So here's a tragedy of surgery you see in many people. They get in shape over like six months or a year, better shape. And they're like, oh, I don't want all this gone. The excess skin.

And they never, like, inculcated the deep consistency. And then so as soon as the surgery is over, they just, like, blow the fuck back up. And then, like, need round two of surgery. And, like, you know, that's not fun. Sure. So long-term consistency. Long-term consistency and a clear need for surgery. Because some people just have a teeny bit of loose skin.

I'm like, bro, you just keep going. And in three months, I won't be there. And someone can say that about you in your tricep issue? Well, you were saying that you have. Oh, not loose skin, excess fat cells, yeah. Well, they'll say tiny bit of fat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So how do you judge that? So this, my next question comes up is, how much do you give a shit about this? How meaningful is it to you to do this? Because if you currently in your body have like this much risk tolerance and you care to change this much, smaller amount, For sure, I don't do it. Most of those people don't ask about surgery because they can go through that in their own head.

The real fun cases to consult with are the people for whom it's really close. Because some people, they, so for example, you got much leaner, but you were way, way fat. You have tons of loose hanging skin. And you've been dying your whole life to go to the beach and not get stared out for being a fat or for being loose skin freak or whatever the hell that's in your head about it. And most other people heads, by the way, being transparent here. It means a ton to you, and the risks are like, whatever, people go skydiving. Hell, yeah, do surgery. If it's close, you've got to think real hard about that shit because surgery is very serious.

Very, things can go wrong. And even if they all go right, the look may not be the look that you want to go for. Surgeons do a pretty good job of vetting and consult. I have spoken with many surgeons. Many of them will tell you they reject patients all the time. And one of the reasons they reject patients because they know, like, put this comedically, if they say it more charitably, they're not right in the head in the extent that they haven't really swallowed what they're doing and they're being impulsive and they're just going to keep making really weird decisions. A surgeon doesn't want to be associated with that. At the end of the day, it is a hugely personal decision.

So to the extent that I could tell anyone else, anything about this, it would be like, this is not a game. It's not a joke. serious downsides, but the upsides can be transformative, can be. How do you know what they're going to be? There's no way to be sure, but you have to check a lot of boxes about you really thought this through, and you have at least a pathway hypothetically to how this is going to make things better for you. And if that pathway is the real deal, hey, man, surgery is a serious thing that you consider.

And I will say, as surgical techniques get better, the downside risk falls precipitously, and the upside actually goes up a little bit because, because it just all the scars get smaller and all the curves get better. And so over time, surgery is going to be a thing that I think more and more people access because the tradeoffs are less and less wacky.

I mean, imagine getting surgery in, like, in France, in like the 70s, like some of the first people to get plastic surgery. Like, I wouldn't do that shit. There are some procedures that are possible today that only a few doctors do. I'm not going to get that because I don't want to be the first,

first person to get them. So that's kind of how I see things. In your factors that you take under consideration, when telling people whether or not to go for surgery you didn't touch on mental health at all is that a factor for you no I did when I said like the some people aren't right in the head situation well me in terms of for the person to figure out like is it really your love handle that's bothering you or is it the love handle is just the next thing and then after the love yeah yeah yeah that comes in that remember the margins conversation like it's really close when it's really close we know what the surgery is going to get you what we're testing it against us how much do you really want it. And that's not like an amount. They're not like eight out of ten. It doesn't tell me much. That's a conversation. Why do you want it? What's going to happen? What if you never get the surgery? What's the, what, how are you going to feel about that? Well, let me ask you that question. How would you feel if you never had your love handle surgery? Totally fine. But like, I'd feel

better if I had it. Yeah. Based on like what score, what factor? Like, every day you wake up, and you're like, less love handle, I'm one out of ten more happier. So when I look in the mirror, either for physique purposes or just examining my genitals to make sure everything is in one place, before, I used to kind of look at my love handles

and be like, it gets weird, right? When the rest of your body you think is like, this is sweet. And then you got this one part, you're like, it gets lame. It gets really lame. And then now when I look at that part of my body, even though the scar is really intense,

And even though most of the inflammation is still there, I'm like, sweet. And that's a piggy bank that you go to all the time. And it never gets not cool. The first time I got like jacked as far as like a regular person would think I'm jacked was probably when I was like 5.5 and 160 pounds in high school. It's pretty jacked for 5.5. And I drank from that cup of feeling jacked. And I loved it.

I loved it so much. Drinking from that cup feels even better today than it did back then. So if 25 years or 23 years of being more and more jacked and loving it the whole time, because people think like, oh, you get the surgery. And at first it's cool. But then later, you just don't care anymore. For my rest of my physique journey, I have absolutely not found that to be the case. That's just me, though.

To your point, you could be one of these people that you're like, I thought the surgery was going to like make me feel in a deep way, more accepted by others and it hasn't. I don't do surgery. You got to talk a lot. And that's, again, surgery is very, very serious. You've got to think through the shit a lot and you have to feel through it a lot. But for some people, the answer after all of that will be like, yes, some of those people,

they will have loved it and thought it was an excellent decision. A small but notable fraction of people will be like, 50-50. A vast minority of surgical candidates that go through with plastic surgery do not like how it looks even after revision. Those are real people, though. And there are thousands and thousands of them. And that you don't want. So before you get surgery, ask yourself very, ask yourself the most difficult possible questions you can because you don't undo the surgery. One of those questions is, how will I deal if I'm in that percent of,

regret. There are ways to answer that question. Like the Yolo answer works. Like, shit happens, man. Like, you've made mistakes in life. So have I. Do you think about them all the time? Do you burn them? Of course you do. Your Ashkenazi Jew. What's what the hell do we do before we fall asleep and in our dreams end up on waking. But all jokes aside, some shit you're like, yeah, I f***ed up, shit happens. We move on. If you're not ready to swallow that up front before surgery and you're like, I need this to feel better. And if it doesn't go well, I don't know what I'm going to do, man, you need some more therapy. I'm not using that as a derisive tactic.

I mean, really, you need to think things through way before you go through surgery. And surgery has to be a calculated risk because it is. Do you want to have kids? Mike, like, we've been cool for a while, bro, but like, that's so, we haven't even kissed yet. That's okay. That's true. Technically, we don't need to kiss. My God, how mechanical.

You're so predictable. I'm tired. You knew I was going to make it about that. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're good looking and you're taking that for granted. Everyone always says yes. I think it's because you always just go there.

Yeah, I do always just go there. Do I want kids? So the answer to that is actually quite complicated, but I'll use the simplified version. Can you give me the complicated version? All right. Waste podcast minutes with this. What's waste? Waste.

Waste. We're monetizing. A version of. My life with my wife Crystal and I where we had kids would have been really dope in many ways I think it would have been beautiful the version of my life with crystal in which we don't have kids is dope in many ways and beautiful and so Right now I'm not in a position in which I want to children But I have before wanted children and I think it would be a really awesome thing and I And I think a lot of really smart, really wise people correctly say that having children is one of the most meaningful experiences you'll ever have.

And that experience lasts all the way through your life. I don't just hand wave that. It's a dope thing. It's clearly real. But I don't currently have plans for children. Yeah, I'm not asking about plans. I'm not going to get that person. I was just asking from like a philosophical statement.

Oh, yeah. So the two answers are like, if you. were like, hey, you're in this new life and you have kids, I'd be like, all right. And if you're like, hey, you're on your current life and you don't have kids, all right. Like, Crystal, I can have kids any time we want. But we don't for various reasons. Sure. You said that at one point in your life you wanted kids and you kind of maybe changed your mind.

What led to that change? Proximately what led to that change is that Crystal and I had this plan that after she was done with her medical training. We were going to move to Michigan, and we were going to start a family. And it's easy for the husband to say, because, you know, like, oh, we're pregnant. Like, my fuck, you look the same. You got, like, she's pregnant. And I just like, your love handles look the same. Right. They look the same. They look terribly. She gets surgery. And it turned out that Crystal never had a chance to let her career bloom. And she never had a chance to go on her own physique journey. to look like she wanted.

Because all the stuff I'm saying about myself, the shit matters to her, too, in a different way. But we were like, you know what? Career is a big deal for both of us. And my shit was going like this and her shit was going like that. And we're like, yeah, like we could have kids now. We could. But we're kind of feeling more like, let's do the career thing.

Because when we talked about having kids, it was two sides of the coin. One side was like, it's going to be amazing. the other side was like, whoa, we're going to have to really change our life priority substantially. And we just weren't in a place where we were like, yeah, we're totally cool with that. I think a massive mistake some people make is having kids because one of the partners wants it, but the other doesn't. And like, you know, man, that that leads to some gnarliness. Like, you know, like, oh, it's Jimmy's eight-year-old birthday party.

And you're like, oh, that could have been my PhD dissertation, but whatever. Like, in the end, I think everyone, almost everyone thinks, so it's a great thing, but there's rough times there. And so we kind of thought, like, her and I take things very seriously, like, when it matters, we're, like, really focused. We weren't going to, like, half-heartedly have children. And so because we were so invested in our career procurement and are doing our own thing, we were like, yeah, like, kids wouldn't, our kids wouldn't appreciate us being like,

yeah, well, here you are. I hate that you cry all the time, but it's nice. You know, so we decided we were going to pivot. And TMI, but, you know, crystals at that age where, we can still theoretically have children, but it would be a little tougher. I think that's an attractable problem that'll be solved probably the next

is my usual bullshit, five to ten years. I mean every word of that, but you'll be able to be any age and have biological children. But like the thing of biological children, man, is like, man, they're around a long time. It's a big project. That's an 18 year long project.

Minimum. Probably more. Right. Exactly. And so for that reason, we're like, yeah, we're going to kind of do our own thing in some way.

And we definitely have parental vibes that we just basically laser focus onto our dog you know how that works and it's just I mean she's the baby and it's really fun to like dog parent or whatever

that there's orders of magnitude of complexity between the other it's not like what I'm trying to say is we're not like we just can't connect to like why people would have children like oh they're gross because there are people think like children are annoying they're gross

Are people putting that image on you like why do you feel they need to defend that okay not defend it just to clarify because like here's the thing if you think kids are gross and annoying like you're not like wrong wrong like a lot of parents listening to this are like you ever seen my house but like that's not why we didn't want the shit uh for us it was like we do have that drive to be caretakers and stuff like that but it was like other priorities were kind of at the four if you had the choice given that you're so passionate about genetics and aesthetics to make your child have the chance at being beautiful

meaning that you would just leave it up to chance, or you could guarantee that your child will be an eight. But it's a risk that they'll have something bad happen to their health. Is that a risk you would take? You would want the control over their aesthetics? I'd need to see the relative risk ratios. So there would be a situation where it would be in value to have the chance of them being beautiful.

Yeah. Why? It matters to people. It matters how they look. It matters to kids a great deal. I keep coming back to this, and I think it's important. How your middle school goes, and I use middle school just as a sampling of where maybe it's most intense, but for some people, it's more intense in high school, some in elementary.

But if you happen to be very low on the attractiveness scale, you can have the kind of time that I wouldn't damn anybody with. It's a real thing. I think we are to be under no illusion that there is this, what's the technical? logical fallacy, the nirvana fallacy, that everything's all right in the end. That's not true. It's not true at all. I think that if you grow up

and you have the certain kind of psychology match with a certain kind of life experience from being not so attractive when I'm using that politely, you can have a real bad time at it. And if there was some kind of corrective factor that had some sort of risk, we would really have to look at what risk that was.

mind you the magnitude of risk matters a ton of course yeah so but basically that's a statistical way of me saying it's very how you look is a very important it's not the most important thing in the world it's not even close but there's lots of very important things that are not the most important and they still matter you can look the whole aesthetic revolution is the most first world problem ever imagine someone from Ethiopia being like I'm sorry you guys are with what to make people who have all the food and money they want in the world to look marginally better when they're 50 the fuck is wrong with you I'd be like oh facts you know what I'm saying but it's a real thing it's a real thing nonetheless if there was a chance that you didn't have the genetics available to

the genetic modification and your child was born unattractive what or anesthetic what conversation would you have with your child how would you deal with it I would try to do two things fill them with as much love and joy and hope as possible. Like, I'm real wacky. I get along with kids, great because they think they're wacky and I'm like, ah,

there's levels to this. And I'm like, holy shit, you're like eight in there. I'm like, a lot much younger than eight in there. And so we'd be having a grand old time. And that person,

that child would never feel anything other than fundamentally loved and accepted on my end. And I would prepare them actively, probably not much or to any extent for the potential that other people think you look so not great and they say mean things to you. But if they came back and said, hey, people are making fun of high look at school, then I would be interested in having many very in-depth, very compassionate, but realistic, scale, how old

they are and how well they take things, conversations about how do we deal with such a thing? Because they could say, like, well, you know, is it true that I'm ugly? And I'd be like, bro, that's like, you know, everyone has their fucking cup of tea, man, you look great to me. And they're like, well, you know, is it true that I'm statistically ugly? Be a goddamn kid, you're going to math camp and coding camp saying some shit like that when you're eight, you know, but if they were old enough to understand that human variation

is a thing, I'd be like, look, how do you appraise your average attractiveness? They'd be like, I appraise it fairly low. I'd be like, oh, I don't. Like, what do you think? Well, like, well, you're my kid. I'm not going to ever see you objectively. Jesus Christ. But like, if you think that's the thing, maybe it is a thing.

And then here's your next question to yourself, kid. Do I get a name? Can I have a name? What's my kid's name? No, no, you name the kid. Come on, this is all right. I'm naming your child. Come on, please, man.

It's an honor. Don't say, Mike. Don't do it. No, no, no, no. Obviously. There must be three of us. That's too predictable. I'm going to make the name so it's unisex.

Canyon. What are we in Hollywood? You sort of are. Your mother and I conceived you in the Grand Canyon. It was miraculous. All right. We're going to do something where it could be either way. Sam.

Sam. The big question after you have appraised your own attractiveness to other people is to do two things. One is it's quite easy nowadays to get a more realistic appraisal in a variety of more objective places for like our guy, like there's beauty and aesthetics people that can tell you like actually you're delusional and you're really good look. And there's other place, you know, the other thing is like, yeah, you know, like, we're all, you know, they say it very softly. So one is a realistic appraisal just to make sure you're not too much in your head. And the other one is like... So you would encourage them to try and find that?

Maybe. Yeah, sure. Well, because like a lot of times kids just like have a way lower appraisal of how they are than as a reality. Sure. So you'd want them to be hit with the reality that in this situation, there are one. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, so the reality hits either way.

not up to us. Do you want that person knowing they're going into a minefield or do you want to be like, here's flowers go skipping around. But what I'll say is this, like you look like how you're going to look. You got two things to do about it. One is understand that that is a reality and don't ever let anyone get to you making fun of you because you're just saying a true thing. Like if you call me short, I'd be like, yeah, that's correct. And you're like, don't you feel bad about that? Like, no, I know I'm short. Next question. You're like, ah, that didn't work. Right? Because you can preempt people.

If you're real clever and fast, it'd be like some bullies about to be like, oh, I'm ugly, I'm ugly, my teeth are all fucked up, right, is that what you're going to say? What other dumb shit you have in your head? I can make fun of you better than you can make fun of me.

And the, you know, bullies are like, what the, I can see myself out. You know, the M&M thing? Of course, I watched eight mile. It's the Detroit. My man, you'm saying, I was born on eight mile, like physically on the road, Mike.

Because I'm trying to say. I know what everything is going to say against me. I'm so good. So good. I still remember the lyrics. We're on Dr. Mike. Ah, that's true. That's true.

Damn. Maybe you do have a career in rap music ahead of you still. But the thing I would try to get across the most is, first of all, live that shit, accept your reality. Don't be under any illusions. And two is what are you going to do to improve the very rest of you that matter so much more to be the best that you can be? Because I got news for you, kid.

When you get older and you make some money, your appearance is carte blanche, whatever the hell you want it to be. Dude, plastics is getting really crazy. And, like, it's just not going to matter. So what you can do now, and if it's a boy, child, Sam, I'd be like, check this out, Pam, here's what really matters.

I would love to give a lot of kids the conversation and what really matters in life. Check this out. You're going to study real hard in school. Because everyone that does them, it's a fucking idiot, and for not doing it. And you are going to have Napoleonic plans for success and you are going to exploit those plans and you are going to be incredibly

successful at something you love to do that consumes every waking hour of your day and you're going to get really rich doing it and then everything else you want is just a matter of buying the shit and that's how life works because a lot of people are like I'm in seventh grade and I'm having a bad time to be like guess what matters about seventh grade when you're grown up other than your memories and trauma from it nothing nothing it seems at the time that's the biggest thing in the world but it just doesn't matter and almost all the really cool fun you're going to have comes later in life anyway.

I wish somebody, I had a real tough time in my mid-20s personal trainer in New York but just like a rough time and one of my clients who was in his 40s he was a hedge fund guy, super, super wealthy, really good looking, just amazing, he had it all.

And he noticed that was sad one day. He was like, check this out. Your 20s are going to suck. Just swallow it. Your 30s are going to be a lot better. Your 40s are going to be fucking unbelievable. And I was like, okay. But hearing it from him because he was such a pimp,

I was like, dope, it hit. and I never forgot. And hilariously, he was completely correct. It's like, I wish someone in my life when I was much younger, be like, hey, kid, none of this shit really matters, bro. People take middle school really seriously. It'd be cool if an adult who was super dope

and had lots of success sat down with you and was like, I know that you're feeling a lot of feelings and they're all valid. They're all super valid. But just remember, like, in the end, in the end, the shit's all a fucking joke. I mean, isn't that the slogan? It gets better?

I mean, yeah, 100%. Kids are told that. They are told that. But they're usually told that in ways which are just very vague in general from people that do not demonstrate with their daily life that things for them have gotten better

because people can tell you that and you just don't believe it whatsoever but I have my way of using colorful adjectives and meeting children at their level to tell them shit that they're like this is clearly not so people talk to you like an adult to a child if you level with children

and you swear a little bit with them they're like this is a person who's like real real and I don't think they're with me like because you know parents will say very nice things to the kid they don't really mean and kids can tell a lot of the times But if you really level with kids, you're like, look, man, I'm telling you right now, man, like, and I would love to answer questions.

You tell me how I'm wrong. You tell me why today in seventh grade matters a ton, and I will talk you through it. I will tell you what matters about it and what doesn't. Because that one carte blanche statement is bullshit. Like, of course it matters. Chelsea won't take me to the prom or whatever. Is that the wrong time scale? Seventh grade dance.

Really communicating with humans is tough to begin with, but very valuable. So if I had kids, I would try to just be as real of a person to them as possible and a super awesome teammate that's always on their side for their long-term view and telling them like, look, whatever, like, did you expect to have all the best things all at once? Did you expect perfection was going to be the nature of your life? No. I don't. You got some good things. You got some bad things. Maximize the good things, accept the bad things until you can change them later.

That's it. there's been some tabloid stories magazine stories of teens 13 14 years old getting plastic surgery would you recommend that for your child if they felt some kind of way about a part of their body it's a great question I'd be real careful about how I say this otherwise I'll be getting a mail bomb why are you trying to destroy this podcast a mail bomb Do you want me to die in some other way that's more creative? Is that what you're saying? No.

Okay. You're like, assassinations for the sniper rifle is so much easier. It's one thing to pat yourself on the back as you probably should be doing and calling yourself a good person, which you probably are not you, royal you, that you accept kids for what they are and you don't want them bought into this Hollywood toxic plastic surgery bullshit. And it's super valid. But there's a part of it that is you pay zero cost of any of that shit. And you get to feel real nice about yourself that you prevented the kids from doing that.

And it's usually the right answer. Because when you're a kid, your ability to appraise how bad of a time you're having, even that sucks. Things that seem like the end of the world to you today, tomorrow or like whatever. And so massive decisions like having plastic surgery are like just generally outside of your realm of proper decision making. and thus are not like a good idea for you to even decide on, which means we just do default consensus, which is just don't do anything. So that's real a shit.

There's another side of that story. And that side starts to figure itself out depending on how bad it really is and the kind of childhood you want your kid to have. If what they're dealing with aesthetically is a minor procedure, it does not interfere with overall facial and growth. Imagine you have a kid who has like a giant war,

that's like one inch off their face, right? Like protruding. Pratruiting. And it's a different color than the rest of their face. And they're six. You're gonna send them through school with that shit on their face?

Well, I'm saying cosmetic surgery, not like barn, medical deformity. Hold on a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's not really like the doctor says, I mean like a crooked nose versus a giant thing

that's changing your face completely. Just to illustrate a point. Just illustrate a point. Um, most people would take their total, um, excision of plastic surgery as a consideration off the table when you're like, listen, the doctors are going to just ablate the thing. You just won't have it anymore. Now, you lose something there. You do.

You lose the potential mental strength that you get from having a go through life with that freaky shit on your face. You gain something too, which is your childhood becomes like, I don't know, infinitely more happy because people are constantly telling you you have something on your face where is it which side do you see this little little thing right here i might hear sure yeah when i was a kid endlessly from almost all children i heard about a day and five night kids are ruthless in a way that's adults i think just forget or have never experienced because they were born perfect like you he's like no there was not a joke i was born perfect oh please continue um so on the extremes

we can see that there are reasons to do reconstructive surgery if the problem is insane enough that you're like, this kid's going to have terrible time with this. And it doesn't hurt their growth trajectory or some, some shit like that. So if your crooked nose is off by just a little, then the answer is like, yeah, kid,

you know what I'm saying? When you're 18, get that shit handled. You're good. You'll learn a lot of lessons and you'll make personality get better. It's still not clear to me. People will say, like,

if you're beautiful, you don't have to develop a personality, but if you're ugly, you do, actually there's zero literature to confirm that. And mechanistically, I don't know how that adds up. It could very well be that people

who are physically unattractive, just have a worse time of everything. It's just worse. That could very well be. I'm not sure that it is, but it could be. And so, but you say,

okay, it's a little deformity or whatever kid, everyone's different. Fine, get out of here. Also, surgery's risky

and, you know, your nose might be growing still and who knows. But if it is a significant enough deformity, I guess what's the line? Oh, it's nuanced. Oh,

it's entirely individual dependent and it requires a lot of thought and a lot of consternation. 100%. So there's no clever. I got, if I had a clear line, and I'd be the first answer I'd give.

But what I want to demonstrate with this answer here is that it is absolutely not a clear yes or no question should children be receiving plastic surgery for cosmetic benefits. Because the answer is absolutely not until you get to a kid's face that you're like, okay, yeah, for you, yes. And they're like, aren't you mangling that child?

Be like, did you see them before the surgery? They were born mangled. And that's a thing, you know, cleft lips and stuff like that? Sure. Like, that's, that's cause me. Or scars, I mean. Yeah, well, think about this, cleft lip. I meant something on the level of a love handle.

Like body surgery? I mean, on whatever level of deformity you deem love handles to be. For me. Yeah. Oh, hell no. No, that's icing on the cake. No, little kid. That doesn't, are you not?

No, hell, this is like my body. Pending their ears back. I don't know, something. I don't know. know what that is. Kids have sometimes ears that come out and then they get them pinned back. It's a pretty small surgery. Oh.

But people don't want to be teased for having ears that come out. So parents do it or if they have an oblong nose or something. Yeah. I think that's in the conversation for totally reasonable stuff. What you don't want, I think, is for your nine-year-old to be like, I want to look like Kim Kardashian in her prime and I want to look like that right now and be like, oh, boy, no. Um, there's a difference also between attending to clear, obvious, I don't want to call them deformities, but irregularities that no one likes, almost no one likes, versus, uh, you look totally cool, but you want enhancement. As a young child, um, what you think enhancement should and would look like is already kind of out of your realm to even comprehend. And if there's any probability that it screws up your development or is a very big surgical risk, uh, the probably the answer is no. But I guess what I'm trying to get in, my answer get across is, yeah, to repeat myself, it's not cut and dry. And there are going to be

lots of people in the comments who think it's cut and dry and it's not. Again, it feels really amazing to do two things. Be super pro-body positivity and be like every way a kid wants to look different. We should allow them to do that. If your eight-year-old wants a different nose and you have the money, it's the same as you. They're a person like you. They don't want to be ugly just like you, you got the no surgery, so should they? And they're going to pat themselves a lot on the back and say they're really good people for thinking that. And you know what?

They are good people for thinking that. There's going to be another group of people that are never, ever surgery for children because they're not adults. They don't know what they want. And this whole reliance on how you look and overvaluing that as toxic and it needs to fucking stop. They're also totally right. They're going to pat themselves on the back a lot.

Neither one of those really awesome things that gives us lots of feelings gets us to a nuanced answer on a case-by-case basis. I'm going to ask you ultimately a question about Spectrum. But I'm going to start it with two different starting points. There's two people, one on my right, one on my left. A person on my right is your biggest fan. Watches all your videos, philosophical videos, nutrition videos, supports your brand, is always there for you.

Summarize what that person thinks of you. I have almost no idea, man. I mean, you can summarize it to some degree. Oh, I really, I'm really glad you asked this. So maybe we could start it from the other side. Okay. Person on my left, hates what you stand for, constantly commenting on Reddit threads negatively about you.

What does that person think of you? Those people actually make it very clear what they think about me. Which is what? Speak way outside of my depth way too often. Sound very self-assured when the reality is I'm probably not. Take a tone of authority about things I'm not nearly as good at as they would like me to be good at to have a tone of authority. Like, I'm a physique expert, but my physique to them compared to the best in the world sucks

total. Those probably are a really big ones. Oh, and when I'm in a mood, I say really, really hateful, nasty things that clearly point to my insufficient ego and not so great thoughts about myself. There's probably more, but those might be some of the core of that. What's the other person saying? I love your shit. Why?

No, that's what they say. They almost never say. Come on, they do. They don't, Mike. So you don't read the, you've only read this negative criticism. So what I'm saying is positive feedback is almost always very general. And negative criticism is much more often highly specific. That's a reality.

Here's another thing. I've met zero people in real life as far as I can tell. uh with a few exceptions i guess almost zero people is that are that person because in real life no one ever talks to me that doesn't like me they just don't so when they talk to you in real life what did they say positive to um you're dr mike yes dude i love your shit thank you dude i love your philosophy channel i just think about that shit all the time dude amazing i love it can i take a picture yeah you bet i mean that's that's a starting point yes it's not very content heavy um it's anything i tell you on that is ideas about myself that i like it's not from real

humans well that's what i'm saying to try and do it from someone else's standpoint and then but that's just projection yeah or your summary of what you feel objectively said to you what i'm saying is there's almost nothing said to me that has much substance on the positive side but lots of substance on the negative side so how would these two people argue if the person on the left started saying all the negative criticism you said how would this person defend you like in an ideal world how do I think realistically they would define me like if someone said something like oh speaks outside of his depth says mean things when they get angry oh what would this person counter to that be that's not true yeah uh they would usually do an ad hominem attack on that other

person so he'd be like so what depth are you speaking from I checked your profile it looked like shit not a lot of productive comments in youtube got it so not not as clear uh i mean i know how i would argue but i would be literally projecting onto a person who would support me well how would you do it on my best day or my worst day right now well right now i can go either way so perfect give me the middle ground oh it's really it really is bimotal come on it can't be by mode i give me both then both the following is an example i do not endorse the following take in case it definitely gets clipped out of context uh cool story don't give a you're irrelevant and when you see me in life you'll probably never look at my direction not very nice why is that never mostly false i don't

think anyway what's mostly false everything i said oh is it is it If I had to examine it from a more objective perspective is not true, except for the last part, which they generally don't look in my direction. It's just observed reality. I don't like, in my best self, to degrade people. I don't think I'm more relevant than anybody else. It's easy when you have a platform and you're all famous and rich or whatever to be like, you don't matter. You're a fucking insult. You don't even have a profile picture.

You have a private account. You suck. Oh, by the way, looked at your pictures. You should just, there's no reason for you to keep talking to me because how dare you? I'm, you're nothing. Every part of that is toxic as fucking. I don't mean any single part of it. When I'm upset, I sure a shit want to say stuff like that.

Every now and again, I do. And I always feel like, oh, that's so bad to say to someone. Because that person, first of all, is a human being. And they're awesome. Sometimes, or they're a bot. Oh, I love the bots. The bots just don't clap back too much. And, you know, everyone, fundamentally all humans have the same value.

That's how society works. And every time I meet real humans in the world, I am always almost always over the top impressed with how wonderful humans really are and a lot of times I know for a fact that people who criticize a lot when I want to clap back at them and I sit to dig through their profile

I realize like oh man life brought this person down a lot already I'm not going to add fuel to that fire I say hey man like I feel you I'm a piece of shit a lot and my physique sucks you're looking at them yeah like from a part of is there any truth to

their criticism or anything you agree with yes absolutely the thing is most of the people that will write criticism um there's like a uh an emotional uh minimum that has to trigger you to start typing and that it emotional minimum is quite high and so almost all of my critiques about me are insanely emotionally uh salient and thus tend to be wildly irrational in the sense that they're massively over exaggerated like like facts wrong and stuff like one of the things about me is that At my last show, apparently I blamed the judges for not turning me pro. I play sixth, okay? So first of all, I never blamed the judges.

I said I had a shit contest color and I might have bumped up a place maybe with better color, which has a decent probability of being true. Those by no means clear true. And it was like one post and people would be like, this guy thinks the judge is fucked him and he should have been a pro. Like that's a typical critique. It's nonsense. I just never said that.

I don't mean that. And I never did. And so like, how do you respond to that? like it's tough well that's why i'm saying if you were to choose one that you feel like has some substance and then to what degree it has substance i think i've said some things that i uh are real mean things to say um i said them publicly and they involve other people and i think it was a thing that i wouldn't in the future repeat uh and so when they say you said this and you're an asshole I'd be like yeah I said that and I meant it and I still think it's true but it's a

thing to say I think it's valid whenever when people can examine your entire things I've said a lot of stuff I've been prolific on YouTube podcasts and so when you pick like the out of the top 10 worst things I've ever said there's plenty of shit there that's real toxic and fucked up and I also agree most of that is toxic and I have no excuse for it it it blows and I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did so I own it 100%. And a lot of those comments I own. Yeah, like, yeah, fuck me. Speaking outside your expertise, how do you feel about that?

My first thing that popped into my mind to say was going to be one of those toxic comments. So we're getting better. It's good. Yeah. Yeah. I feel better already, Mike. Speaking of my itself, so I will often say things that are categorically false. I will often say things that are wild exaggerations

and I will often say things that are pretty true but way lacking in nuance and I don't catalog that and don't put that into the description. Those are all valid critiques. I absolutely do talk way too much shit outside of my expert area. I would say that's probably 10% of the shit

I say that's outside of my technical expert area and that's a lot of shit and it's like some combination of wrong or fucked up or stupid or misleading. See, 90% of the shit, I say, that's outside of my expert area is most of the actual experts would be like, yep, that's 100% factual. Like, I'm trying to carry the torch for toxicology, even though I'm not a toxicologist,

a toxicologist, plural. And I think most toxicologists will take most of my takes on like artificial sweeteners and be like, this is I think, God, somebody's saying this shit. There's just not a toxicologist as famous as me. Like you're saying stuff a lot for other doctors, psychiatrists and stuff. I guarantee you all the shit you said about psychiatrists. or tons of psychiatrists for like that's right on thank god he's saying it that's way outside of your expert area and so i think my marginal utility to say truth in a way that many people can

understand and is marginally more interesting than other people saying it is still worth the risk that i'll get it wrong sometimes um nobody ever gets it right perfectly and if you constrain yourself to only your expert area i think it's wonderful but i think if you expand out to other reasonable things that you can do way more good than bad and i think the tradeoff is worth it interesting take um where's the future where are we going subway or something probably sure something healthy i mean five years down oh uh as far as aesthetics anything life i mean we talked a lot about books kids this that what else do you hear those uh incoming drums of my artificial super intelligence talk no no for you oh that's what i was talking about you're going to do

something with artificial intelligence? Oh, I always do. I talk to chat GPT daily. What's coming for me? And I mean, I'm going to be competing and bodybuilding in probably. It's going to be sweet. You had a moment where you said you're not doing that anymore and then you've chosen to come back. Take me through that because I should be more familiar. I got super busy with YouTube and going on people's podcasts right when I was in the middle of a competitive at the start of a competitive season. And it was just like, what do you want? Do you want to blow up on social media

or do you want to have a successful competitive season? And I talked to my team. I talked to myself and it was like, clearly we're going to be, like when, oh my God, what's the podcast? Diary of a CEO. When they want you on, you know, say no to those people, man. You know how many views you get off, something like that? And I have a fiduciary responsibility to my company

in which I'm an equity holder RP to like run with a brand. Can you imagine me telling my software guys that owned part of the company and Mr. Nick Shaw, who owns a big part of the company, The CEO, that like, hey, like, I could do a lot of good for us by making myself like 10 times more popular in the next several months. But like, I'm just going to go and hide a hole and diet and do bodybuilding. They'd be like, okay, thanks. And so that was off the table.

So I had to basically take a step back from competitive bodybuilding and address the rise. Now that it's at a more stable point and I've learned how to organize my life in such a way that I get to do podcast appearances more when I want and less when I have to. then, and I've kind of finished a couple big projects. Now I'm ready to come back and do bodybuilding. Okay. So you'll be back in shows and then you were saying some other things you got going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're writing a few books and just a big part of what I think I'm going to be doing

is staying on the cutting edge. Do we need to shut out for a bit? No. It adds to the flavor that is interesting. Oh, yeah. New York. I am really interested in the pharmaceutical revolution that is upon us. And I want to understand it better.

I want desperately to help promote, and I mean this, this is going to sound wacky. I want to promote the pharmaceutical industry and the mass social acceptance of using drugs to enhance every part of your life that you think they will as much as humanly possible. are you a fan of secretary kennedy i'm really into salt and pepper older guys so that absolutely yes are you a fan of his health policies the most popularized

of his health policies um need a bit more science in there that's the nicest you're like i'm trying to be nice now right yeah It's the new me, see? When did you become politically correct?

You were talking about mail bombs a second ago. Trump's sending people out of the country for whoever. They're going to send me. Yeah, man. Like, real talk? You wouldn't do well in an El Salvadorian prison. Or real. God, no one has knives, right?

No, they'll probably all have knives. Yeah, and now you don't have the extra padding from the love handle to protect you. That's right. I'm Dr. Mike from YouTube. It's like, Cricotts. I'm like, soy Dr. Mike and YouTube. They're like, still crickets. I'm like, Miguel.

hell doctor um secretary kennedy where is dr oz in government at this point he's head of CMS dope center for medicaid i come from two perspectives on this one is you and i are like relevant enough now that secretary kennedy may hear this staffers may hear this yeah i know that's your opinion. And then other very well-meaning conservatives will hear this, definitely. And what I want to say to those folks is we're all on the same team and we're all trying to do better. And I think that Secretary Kennedy's way of approaching better is in many ways awesome. His interest in getting Americans more healthy and more active and more into fitness. His interest in supporting like testosterone replacement therapy and shit like that is, I think, wonderful. But there are other ways in which

we disagree radically. And I would love to have that logical conversation. with anyone who wants to listen and so that's that take the other take is I want to raise the sword and flag of science and scream at the top of my lungs what the fuck is going on that's probably not the most productive thing to do but it's a real thing and so mostly is I watch you debate folks like that on your show and I watch with my wife from my living room like get them I get these models well because you know you say a statement like I support R of K's idea of getting people moving again, focusing on nutrition, all that stuff. But like in reality, those are his talking points and that's it. He's not actually doing any of the things to get people

to eat healthier. Changing the sugar component in soda is not a win. It's still sugar. Have a script for a video that's coming out in a few weeks. It's going to be not just that. Cutting research in nutrition within the NIH is doing the opposite of those things that it seems like people get on board with his messaging. He just fired or had the person resign, retire. Kevin Hall. Kevin Hall's a legend. Yeah. Kevin Hall invented metabolism. I mean, I basically called him the other day in an interview, the Michael Jordan of metabolism research. Like I said. And he was just my last guest or two guests to go. He sat here? So to have him get thrown out of the United States research facility.

Because his findings were contrary to what the political establishment today would like to believe. Sure. About dopamine in mice. Well, basically it was like, what was it? I barely remember. It's like actually like you can't say food addiction because it's not really addiction. It wasn't even that far because he doesn't make grand statements from his research.

I think he's more honest about what the findings are and speaks only to the findings and what future potential questions could be made and in his research for specifically that one where they were trying to censor it or change what he was saying to news outlets was they thought food could be addictive due to certain neurotransmitters being released

upon eating the food. Much in the same way certain neurotransmitters are released when given ecstasy at cocaine, etc. Miami. Miami. Why is Miami linked to that? That's where you do ecstasy and cocaine, Mike. Who's you?

Royal you. Royal. People of money and power. The royal. Well, Trump's definitely never done both of those in Miami, I'm sure. You're going to get canceled. We all did some fun drugs. No change.

Yeah. No, like, change meaning that, like, it came, the neurotransmitters were equal in both groups. They couldn't even measure, on average, any release of the neurotransmitters. or in food. So like, yes. The, the model needs to change.

Yeah. Our next test has to be different. Our mantra has to change. We need to insert more skepticism and the idea that food is addictive the same way that cocaine is. So, yeah.

They didn't like that. And they started saying, oh, it's a small study. It's a worthless study. Yeah. And Kevin Hall was like, fuck that. You know,

that's part of the, so far as I can tell, at least some part of Kennedy's plan, that plan, politics is a tribut And one of the things is very common in politics that does a gigantic disservice to actual real humans is the attempt by people from all parties, unfortunately, not all, but at least the two major parties in the United States, a massive attempt to make it so that the individual on Moss cannot be blamed for the outcomes that they have. And so typically Republicans, to my liking, are really big on individual responsibility, whereas people on a political left, typically gets all society. You can't ever have done anything wrong as a person, which, again, is half true.

And it's really dope, coming from a great place, wrong in a really big way, because sometimes it is just you fucking up. And what's been really unfortunate to notice is that, I don't want to say, Republicans, I guess, are people who are more conservative leading, whatever the fuck. Secretary Kennedy is also Democrats. I know. And so is technically Trump. That's why I'm having trouble with these terms, right? So people currently in power are people part of the Maha movement, is that they're going for the same other things caused this problem and not you. I have been big on countering this to some extent,

and I'll give a quick sort of briefing. They're trying to say it's addictive. Junk food is addictive. They're trying, and you know, addiction implies a loss of control, which is true. They're trying to say that you, you know, there's all these additives and foods, and that's what's bad for you. It's the seed oils.

It's the high-furtress corn syrup. It's the, you know, if you replace these, just make these little, little chemical changes, you're going to be able to just get way healthier. It wasn't ever your fault. It's the system's fault. It's food corpse's fault. And the reality is, and I've said this a few times, junk food tastes really good,

and you can't stop eating it. And that's why you're fat, motherfucker. And nobody wants to hear that shit, including me, if I was overweight, but this guy's a but it's true. And politicians usually don't say really true nasty things that are not going to get them elected because everyone's like, oh, way to. alienate everything. We can imagine going to some ethnic or racial or gender or body composition group and being like, you're the problem. Oh my God. Good luck getting elected ever.

You don't want to tell people they're the problem. You want to say it's other things that I'm going to fix them. I'm the politician. I'm going to come and clean it up. You're good. You've been doing anything right. Food agro business has done you wrong. When the realities, you know that like meme is like here's the enemy and it's just a picture of you. You're like, oh, shit, that is me. That's real truth, much closer to the truth than that other stuff. And so on the one hand, it's easy for me to say, Like just say it for what it is man Americans just eat a ton of junk food because it's really tasty Let's treat that problem seriously and not try to look for boogeymen because there are none or few and they don't account for much of their variants

It's easy for me to say but like I don't know who Kennedy is as a human. I don't know how politics work in real life You know all sorts of illusions about how you're gonna do things and as soon as to quote my favorite Thomas Sol the proximate job and sometimes the ultimate job of almost every politician is one thing Re-election period and if that's not your proximate or ultimate job, you just don't exist in the ecosystem long enough to matter. And so, you know, if he wants to get reelected or get a bit higher position of power, no doubt. I'm sure he's interested in a presidential bid at some point.

Blaming people for their problems is going to land really poorly. And if he can say, oh, I did these great things and made us healthier in a way that didn't really matter. I don't know the kind of person he is in real life. He already cares. Does he know? I also don't know what he knows. One thing I have had some interactions with politicians lately. And I take a tell you, the people like you and me, bro.

and they don't have all the answers. They're smart. They're not that smart. Like, they're not some kind of super, like, not like Elon or whatever. And so when you're like, well, shouldn't Kennedy know better? Like, I don't know.

Who's telling him better? His staffers all sit there and do this and just wait for his every word and then go like that and they just do what he wants. And when you're in power and you have a lot carte watch to get rid of people

or bring people in, whatever hairbrained idea you have, a lot of yes man around you who have basically all the no men have all gone, they're going to tell you what you want to hear. And so, like, I don't even know if Kennedy legit has ever,

like someone for real in his cabinet was like yo rfk like none of the shit's true you know that right he's like yeah shut up i'm trying to get reelected that would be kind of okay fine but he probably thinks like yes seed oils really are bad for your health but when he gets like we had peter hotez dr peter hotez on the podcast and he had multiple hour long conversations with him i believe in late 20 teens and he just didn't care for the science and he's having legitimate scientists talk to him but he what do you mean didn't care for the science do you have any more insight on that. When they were talking about autism, Dr. Peter Hotez raised environmental exposures as playing a role in autism development or increased autism development. And he said,

you're an environmental lawyer. Like, this is your bread and butter. Like, there are actual good scientific ties to certain exposures that look like they could be contributing to the rise in autism. And he labeled them. I don't remember them now offhand. There was, like, exposure to some medication, during childbirth, et cetera. And he didn't want to hear it. He said, no, no, no, it's vaccines. And what's interesting is, like I try and get into someone's head. In mid-20 teens, Secretary Kennedy, RFK Jr. at the time,

was writing books that it was the mercury component in vaccines as the driver of autism. but they were the ingredient that he labels mercury stymarisol it was removed from almost the entire childhood vaccination schedule in the year 2000 i mean that's like a simple fact that like any everyone tells him a lot of people don't know simple and he said yeah but it's still present in multi-dose flu vials so he's like uh basically guarding his position he doesn't want to admit publicly that he's yeah and i don't get it like how like we removed it and nothing changed. We removed it just to be safe

even though we didn't think it was causing a problem and nothing changed and nothing changed. And yet he's still saying that it has some negative impact. He, on his Twitter, when I was making my video covering his statements, had a thing saying that the Gardasil, the HPV vaccine was causing more damage than it was helping.

Meanwhile, every health agency across the globe, not like some dude in the U.S. He's not disagreeing with Peter Hotez. He's disagreeing with international, tens of thousands of physicians, expert scientists that are like, no, no, no, no, you are factually wrong. Here's studies. Here's what we did.

Here's how we tested it. We want the best for our people. And he's like, no. I said different. Yeah. But like, how do you get that? It's a trip. Politicians have lots of power.

I think that's probably not great. They have lots currently in the way the government works is they have lots of, especially in the administrative wing, they have a lot of like, this is the policy. I'm now in charge for the next four years of these federal agencies and this is law. A lot of people think that should change. I agree.

It's pretty messed up. It's not even a partisan thing either because just whether on your right and left, you just have your little emotional stuff. Like currently, RFK has this like vaccine thing and autism and a few other environmental things. And there's just wacky. He's just like, it's just bold face letters wrong

according to consensus and science. The same can be said, unfortunately, for various, certainly various people on a conservative party, but just to keep it nice and fair, you know, on the political left. So like, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez has a few views on economics that would just, if she answered like that on a test back in her schooling,

she would have failed a test. They're just wrong, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. I mean, these are people who are wildly considered economically illiterate, like that would be accurate to say, but they run large fractions of the economy and they have big votes. I think somehow we have to get to a place socially where factual accuracy is by real humans, real voters, something that is like you've got to have that. And if you start getting real awry of the basic facts, man, you're going to have to get like not voted in again or something like that.

I'm not sure how we get there. I think AI is going to be really helpful because like chat GPT, Gemini, all these things. If you ask them factual questions, they cut you the pretty real deal. But no one's listening to them. I mean, Elon Musk loves Secretary Kennedy constantly supporting him on Twitter. And if you ask his own AI, GROC, what is the factual accuracy of the majority of Secretary Kennedy's health statements? It says most of them are inaccurate. Yeah.

Like, bro, your own thing that you say is great is telling you the guy that you're supporting is lying, is inaccurate, constantly. I see this in two ways. one, there are things that Elon knows better than his AI because Elon's one of the smartest people who's ever lived, flat out. On the other hand, it is, Elon also has a lot of feelings, bro.

We all do. You've seen his Twitter feed, right? And so people just, like, have their shit that they feel like, and they're going to bat for it. The other thing is this, and I've wondered whether or not I wanted to say this publicly, But I suppose like anyone can really think it. I don't think it's going to cause some kind of mass movement or whatever.

But when you enter into the world of politics, you have to start thinking, at least consider thinking in a Machiavellian way. And that means that things you say in the people you support can be for kind of functional reasons for a grand strategy. You're going to say a lot of shit that's wrong on the way and you're going to know what's wrong, but you're going to swallow it and you're going to tip your hat anyway to that person because they're in charge. for example, very many people who were tech billionaires, either the smartest people on the planet, they are, at least for a time, and still, to some extent, super pro-Trump. And a lot of them were asked about their Trump's opinion,

like Trump's tariffs, for example. Now, so can the economics profession tariffs are like a laughing stock. Like if any time after 1790, you're still supporting tariffs, it's insane. And most of these people know that. They're quite economically literate. I listen to podcasts about how these people

talk, Peter Thiel types, you know, they're real sharp, guys. And when you ask a lot of these people, like Jensen Wong was asked about what he thinks about tariffs, his answer, as far as I can remember was, you know, I generally tend to leave economic policy in the hands of the folks that have the control, and they're doing the best with it, and he kind of dodged the question. I think Jensen Wong would have really thought. You know, we get the fucking insane. Like, of course it's wrong.

Of course it's going to cost us, it's going to cost the American economy for billions of dollars the stupidest thing in the world. How do you think that would have affected his probability of data center construction approval and pipelines for microchip components is when Trump's the guy in charge. What do you think Jensen Huang's going to say? If you're a Stalin, Stalin, early Stalin, and you're in his cabinet, he's like, hey, let's go start killing a bunch of people. Like, no, hey, Stalin, let's not do that.

You wouldn't say, shut your f***ing mouth and either try to leave as fast as possible and make sure you weren't the second guy in line to die. So I think a lot of people who are pro various political leaders that are very smart AI people or just really good technologists, just anyone, good scientists, always try I think, like, how close to politics are they and how likely is it that the views they espouse are the ones they actually hold deep down inside? And I say, for some people, that really is what they believe.

For many other people, they just got to say what they got to say so that NVIDIA doesn't get canned and medics going. Yeah, but he didn't say in that statement, I support the tariffs. He just said, I'm staying out of it. Yeah. Which is different than saying I support them. For sure.

Which is what Elon's doing with RFK. For sure. Now, so Elon also, to his credit, has had a huge rift with Trump. because he was like the big beautiful bill can't be a cogent concept because his breaking point was the the budget the deficit now that was his thing that he was focused on but up until so i i can almost promise you that if you got elon in a box and you're like hey we solved everything ass i's here magical perfect the world is awesome mars is colonized how did you really feel about all these things back in the day i can almost guarantee you'd be like yeah of course i thought various political leaders were completely insane people vastly out of their depth but you got to play the game you You've got to play the cards as they're dealt. So when we're talking about individuals who say or don't say various things, it's easy for us to say because we're not in politics.

When you're in politics remotely and when the success of the entire technolize, so for example, Trump with the situation, the political stuff with AI that he just did was probably, I would say if I had to catalog it, I'm a historian, one of the most important decisions ever made in the world, and definitely in the free world, definitely in the United States, and it made in the right way. So for all of Trump's maladies, his pro-AI stance, really empowering and deregulating AI

in the United States might have just like preempted or won us World War III against China. Oh my God. So if you say, oh, man, somebody should have stood up to Trump, imagine if all the tech guys were like,

dude, you suck. Like, you really just need to point someone else. Like, J.D. Vance is way smarter than you. Like, we have really talks with him. He's like, no, I know, this is crazy. I can't believe this guy's in power. They would have all been ousted. And then he would have been like,

AI sucks. I changed my mind. and even more protectionism, more anti-China jingoism, and we would have been in a losing World War III in like two years. So when people say Elon said this, Elon said that, I have half a mind to think Elon's just having some feelings, and he's entitled to his opinion. Maybe he's right, we're wrong.

But I also think, like, I don't, for people that famous, that impactful, that close to power, like the Mark Andreessen types, I don't know, anything they say about politics. I'm like, maybe he thinks that. I generally tend to listen to them more on like, you know, their opinions on social matters, grander political forces, but specifics, it's tough. RFK support. Maybe Trump really thinks that. Sorry, maybe Elon really thinks that. Maybe

there's some sort of association that's beneficial for as Elon assesses the state of humanity going forward. I do believe that Elon is very sincere when he really cares about the survival of humanity into the long term. I think I don't know why he would say things that often, which usually land on deaf ears if it didn't really mean it. Because most people are like, what? Yeah, we should get him on the pot next. Be tough. Is it tough? You're famous. You could do something like that maybe both of us if you get Elon on the pod tell him I'm a massive fan and I said hello he's gonna be like who's that like that like that like that come on I can make these jokes I got all guy so many jokes about that man I'll just say he said hi just like that

more the more extended arm deals and so one of these like you know he's a he's an interesting character for sure I think we covered a lot of topics too many as usual too many I think most of your heroes by this point are they're asleep or have unsubscribed. I don't know. I think a lot of people enjoy your conversations, for better or worse. For worse. Well, thank you for your time. Hope you had fun.

Always fun, Mike. Thank you for having me on. And once again, I will say, I absolutely appreciate the fact that you basically grill everyone on your show. Because you seem like a very pleasant guy and you really are. But when you're in the hot seat, it really is the hot seat. And I love it. I love it. I love it.

I love being grilled. Well, I'm just, it's curiosity. Maybe curiosity killed a kid. curiosity that you know like my wife will be like she'll be hanging out with some of our Jewish friends and she's like they just debate each other all the time like that's what we do like a lot of people are into that well I feel like that's how you find two ideas through discourse and debates 100% cool thank you sir thank you so much a bit of a controversial episode Mike tends to be a bit inflammatory at times and I think he recognizes that but I'd love to know what you thought of that episode definitely leave me a comment down below and speaking of beauty standards I interviewed Hannah Brown the former bachelorette, and learn about all the ridiculous things that she had to deal with in her career while on reality television.

Scroll on back, find that interview, because to me, it was quite enlightening, and it really allowed me to put things into perspective when watching reality TV. And if you enjoy this interview, give us a five-star review. It goes a long way to helping us find new viewers and listeners for this podcast,

and as always, stay happy and healthy.