TRIGGERnometry - Why We’re Fatter Than Ever - Mike Israetel

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Mike Israetel is a bodybuilder, exercise scientist, fitness trainer, nutritionist and YouTuber. | SPONSOR. Venice AI: Enjoy private, uncensored AI with our sponsor https://venice.ai/triggernometry - use code TRIGGERNOMETRY to get 20% off a pro plan SPONSOR. Try Evening Being by Verso. Get 15% with code TRIGGER at http://evening.ver.so/trigger SPONSOR. In partnership with *Alphacell Labs:* visit https://alphacell-labs.com and use code TRIG20 for 20% off. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 08:25 How Much Of This Is Down To Unhealthy Food? 12:21 The Effect of Sugar 18:44 Two Lies About Obesity 31:17 Long Term Implications Of Obesity 34:51 Why Is Being Fat Bad? 42:52 Blame Of The Food System 50:21 The Suspicion Of Big Pharma 01:06:29 Misinformation Around Vaccines 01:14:40 What's The Answer To Having Readily Available Cheap Food? 01:19:22 What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the first time in human history, more people are dying of overeating than not having enough food. So why is it so hard, do you think, in the modern world, to actually be healthy? Food has become way cheaper for the average person to buy and way tastier and way more convenient. How is not everyone obese? When you look at things like the body positive movement, big is beautiful, you know, you can be beautiful at any size, you're like, I have a lot to say about that, actually. the reason why people who become obese haven't reduced their obesity. There are many, many reasons.

The vast majority of it is that giving a f*** factor is just real love. Mike, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me, guys. I'm a huge fan of the show, so this is, like, very surreal. And I typically don't get very nervous anymore. I've been doing a few of these every now and again, but I'm actually like palpably anxious. Yeah, well, if I was in front of two physical specimens like us,

I'd be intimidated as well. I'm actually also aroused. Well, that's why we've got a table there. That's right. Keep you away from us. Listen, man, it's great to have you on the show. You obviously talk about health and fitness and something that's interesting, especially in the modern world.

I think the stat just came out that for the first time in human history, more people are dying of overeating than not having enough food. So why is it so hard, do you think, in the modern world, to actually be healthy and be a reasonable weight? Because you see those pictures of Americans in the 1980s on the beach and now, two very different pictures, right? Yes, yes, absolutely. I have a view on this that some people think is contentious.

I think it's very data-driven, and I think I'm right, an egotistical statement to start off with. But all jokes aside, I think it's really just only one core variable that describes all of this, and that is ratioed to income in terms of hours' worked terms. You're like, you guys familiar with time costs in economics? Like, how many hours of work do I have to put in to a third? a glass or a jacket or a car. And this is the best way to think of purchasing power

because it takes care of all the inflation, money stuff, just completely aside. So the time cost for the average human, especially in the modern developed world, where most of the obesity epidemic is the most serious, to be able to afford a certain amount of calories has shrunk ton. And so at the same time, the convenience of the food

has exponentially accelerated, and the taste quality of the food has accelerated. Like, fellas, am I allowed to swear in here, not so much? Absolutely. To say whatever you were. Tastes incredible when you go to the store or to restaurants. And the idea that food tastes incredible is something that everyone who's in the food manufacturing business

takes as almost like a prior that doesn't even get articulated. Like if someone was like, oh, so you have this food you're making and it's healthy, but it doesn't taste good, right? They're going to be like, well, hold on, no, hold on. Of course it tastes good. That's the core metric because if food doesn't taste good, people just don't eat it very often. Very conscientious, health conscious people will, you know, kale juice or whatever the hell. It's really tough to force that on most people.

My wife tries on me, though. Go, go. A little spoon and everything. So as we've become so much wealthier as a society, and especially the average, especially lower middle income folks, And in lower middle-income countries, for example, Mexico. They used to be, I didn't mean to look at you, you're Venezuelan. You know, same part of the world. Same thing.

Spanish speaking. Yeah, yeah. Mexico. So. Well, in America, anyone who speak Spanish is Mexican. 100%. One hundred percent. Yes.

Yes. On the demography, it's not like Hispanic slash Latino, it's just Mexican. I look around like, God damn it. All right, fine. Close enough. So Mexico, we used to think of back in the 90s, it's like like a poorer country, you know? And then now Mexico, actually, the average person in Mexico is wealthier than the average person in the United States was in the 1960s, like per purchasing power. And so you think about like, okay, so Mexico's not a poor country anymore.

How is their obesity rate doing? Disasterous. It's insanely high. They are leaving almost everyone behind. Why? Because their people can finally afford all the food they want. Food is ubiquitously available and it is incredibly tasty. Super convenient. Like if you go to like a Costco or a Sam's Club, do you guys have that sort of thing back in the kingdom?

It's magical capitalism store and you get like a like a pre-made rotisserie chicken. I mean, it's cooked and it's warm. You simply just do this and for $5, it's yours. There's no equivalent of that in history. There's no metric by which we can even start to measure that sort of thing. So once we understand it, food has become way cheaper for the average person to buy and way tastier and way more convenient. We look at obesity and we start to have to ask a different question. How is not everyone obese? Because if you get people enough calories and food, it tastes good, there's a crap load of scientific data on this, when something tastes delicious, people just kind of keep eating it. And your idea of what full and full or empty feels in your stomach kind of gets a little hazy. If I gave you a plate of fresh broccoli and I was like, all right, fellas, dig in.

Okay, crunch, crunch, crunch. I'm done. If I gave you some really good, like, potato chips or something, you would be like, there's nothing else going on. And the whole thing is done. So when you do that to most foods, fast foods, convenience foods, anything you can get at, like, a 7-Eleven or anything like that, and in general, even fine dining is more and more affordable for more people.

And it's getting super cheap all the time. People love to eat tasty food. We've done a ton of analysis on, okay, are people less physically active? The answer is yes. but not by nearly an amount of physical activity decrement that would explain to this much weight gain. People used to maybe run a marathon every day and then they stopped.

That's actually not true. Cross-culturally and across societies, physical activity levels are actually really stable between people. Believe it or not, the average American moves almost as much as the average African, like goat herder. When you talk about all of the metabolic functions are required to keep the body going, the out part of the equation versus the in part,

It's really similar. There's just a little higher, but not enough to explain why the American weighs 350 pounds, or as I call one Texan unit, and why, you know, folks in Africa weigh substantially less. And the answer, almost certainly, the major part of the answer, I would say 80 or 90 percent, is the ubiquitous availability of ultra-cheap, ultra-delicious food. That's so interesting, man. It's a really interesting way of breaking. You're basically saying when normal people have access to so much, as much as much,

access to food as Henry Day, we're all going to look like Henry Day. More, more, by a long shot. I mean, think about like Uber Eats and Grubhub. Magic. Try to describe that to someone from 1900. Just like, show them a video. The video part's going to be confusing to begin with because they're like, what's the magic? It's a magic portal to the future.

And then just a regular person, you know, ordering on Grubhub and then it shows up. They'll be like, what's going on? You see it kind of whatever you want, just shows up to your door, any kind of food. And you're like, okay, they're like, so this person must be someone who is like I'm on guard, like one of the leaders or something like this person, it works a menial labor job. Like, what? So what do the wealthy eat? Like, they kind of sell you different stuff, but everyone kind of does Uber eats. There's not like if you walk around, you can't really tell who's richer or poor anymore much, you know, because there's that new rich guy swag where you're trying to purposefully look poor.

The whole world is kind of upside down reference to history. So, yes, the Henry the Eighth thing is 100% accurate, even more than that. Because, you know, like, imagine how much Thai food English kings of old had. None, I suppose, almost none. How do you resist modern Thai food? It's like $8 for, like, the greatest food you've ever had. And it's just always more of it. You just hit the Uber Eats button again.

And half an hour later, $16 worth more food comes in. How do you fight that? I haven't answered how to fight it, but it is a very, very difficult thing. How much of it as well is it's, yes, cheap food, tasty food, but it's also unhealthy food as well. Is that part of the dynamic here? Is that exaggerated in your opinion? Exaggerated, highly. Really?

Very highly. Because I know, sorry to interrupt. We have a friend who's actually former guest in the show, Dominic Frisbee, he's a comedian. And he was never like Texan unit size, but he was, you know, he was a bigger guy. And he cut out seed oils and suddenly he's super slow. That's his answer, right? So a lot of people think there's like a hack. If you stop eating X, then you're going to do Y.

But you don't think that's really as big a deal as people make out. The evidence shows that that's clearly not the case. In randomized control trials, seed oils do better than saturated fats in almost all health metrics. They just do. Like, most seed oils are healthier for you than, like, butter and lard. Straight up. I don't like how that feels. I don't love the vibe.

But it's just what, like, if you look at it. all the data, that's just what the aggregate of the data shows. That's fascinating. That being the case, there are some things that aren't super healthy. Various kinds of preservatives, you know, like the 7-Eleven rotating hot dog situation where you go in there and it's just the grill that, like, how long has that been there? Like, it doesn't matter. It never goes bad.

You're like, yeah. The hell is it made of then? That stuff isn't great for you and it will degrade your health markers a little bit, but there's not any magical way in which that's abysiogenic in the sense that there's not any magical way in which unhealthy food makes you fatter than health food, the critical ingredient, the critical metric for what makes you fat or not is calories. And if you can smash a lot of healthy calories in, you're still gaining that weight, which is a big myth that like, forgive me for getting racial, rich-ass white people have this thing where they're

like, I'm such a good person. I love nature. I voted for all the right people. And they go to Whole Foods. No offense. Whole Foods is great. But they, like, think, okay, I'm inside of a Whole Foods. I don't have to deal with the other muck out there, these Trump supporters or whatever.

I didn't mean to look at you again. How dare you? And they're like anything in the Whole Food store because it's got all the right labels, right? It's organic, it's vegan, it's free range. The chickens like own a cooperative somehow and slaughter each other. It's great, right?

And you're like, everything I put into my body here is going to be good for me. But then, like, I always tell the same story. I used to buy these, like, mega-sized vegan brownies. Like, you know there's, like, a brownie? And then there's, like, Hulk version of brownie and there's, like, Galactus brownie. It was like that.

and the thing had like a thousand fucking calories in it. Wow. But it was made of all the right stuff. No seed oils. It was like some kind of awesome healthy fats, plants only. The shit tasted like heroin. If you could eat it. And of course, people are munching these down and are like stepping on the scale and they're like, they're still heavy.

So the idea that if you just eat healthy food, you'll all of a sudden lose weight and get much healthier is illusory. However, if you eat minimally processed foods that aren't like the tastiest thing you can jam into your mouth every time you sit down to eat. It's just only so many calories you can put in. I put a plate of salmon, brown rice, and broccoli in front of you.

What you're going to do, order seconds? You're going to do that. You're going to pick at it. You're going to eat some. You're going to be like, I'm good. I put a plate of cheeseburgers for McDonald's in front of you. They're gone. And all of a sudden, it's like double the calories you're taking in.

So it's not the fact that the food is healthy, but minimally processed food that tends to be healthier, which is very good for the health part, not just the weight part, although the weight's the most important part of health. It's not the only thing. the biggest power those foods have for weight control is that you're just probably not going to overeat them. Imagine seeing someone in your office as an obesity doctor

and they're like, Doc, I can't lose weight. They're like, what is it? Like fresh green apples, man, I just can't stop eating it. It just doesn't happen. Hyper-palatable foods, which often in order to be convenient, they have to be shelf-stable, and that means they do have some preservatives in there that aren't great for you,

but we're talking about single percentage points compared to 90 percentage points for just eating more physical stuff that has calories. And Mike, people talk a lot about the effect of sugar. And sugar has become this kind of catch-all for evil in the world of food. And we've even got a term big sugar, which sounds like you're like a larger lady. You know, you like a bit of big sugar.

That's what she is on your phone. You're scrolling. It's tonight's date. Big sugar. I need more woman tonight. It's 10 o'clock on a Sunday evening. Time for big sugar. But how fast?

How bad is sugar for you? And do we overstate it or do we in fact underestimate it? Yes, greatly overstated, greatly, profoundly. So you feel free to call her tonight. You're good. Hey, baby, good news. You're not mad for my health. Sugar has an ability to ramp your calories up way beyond what you need

and then you start gaining weight. For one reason only, it's really tasty. You put sugar into a lot of foods. It makes them tastier. People like sweet things. Chemically, molecularly, there are many different kinds of sugar. Some of them digest more rapidly, some less rapidly. Some have certain very small differences in appetite regulation effects.

But on the aggregate, different kinds of sugars just don't matter much. So if you had a diet that had enough fiber, enough protein, enough vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, all that stuff, really good, healthy food, most of your food was healthy. And then you had a band of like 400 extra calories that came up to, to maintenance. And if you ate 400 less, you would lose weight. You don't want to lose weight. You're already healthy. If you fill that extra 400 with protein or with fat or with sugar or any other kind of carbs, it almost doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for weight control at all. And it almost doesn't matter for any other health variable. So when people are looking at drinks and it says,

you know, for example, no sugar added, like that's dope. But how does that reflect the calorie number? Because sometimes people say like natural sugars and they're like, oh, see natural sugar king. like, that is damn near the same sugar. It has the same calories. Gives people that illusory thing. So when people are trying to make their diets healthier, cutting out sugar as a way to reduce calories, brilliant. Because, like, there's a lot of extra sugar and stuff.

It really is. It's because people like extra sugar because it tastes good. So if you can cut down the sugar without adding in something else for calories, you're winning. If you just keep the calories the same, you're like less sugar, but now there's more fat. Maybe there's more other carbohydrates that aren't exactly sugar. you're just going pretty much nowhere

and it's the grand illusion of like, I'm doing well for myself except nothing's happening whatsoever. A friend of mine's father was one of the original guys, I think this was 20 or years ago in the longevity space. He was a doctor and I remember him saying to me I had a can of Diet Coke and he said, don't have a drink no. He goes, if you want to drink Coke,

drink Coke. Yeah. You know, I'll go but sugar. He was like, it's better that you have natural sugar than you have all the chemicals and everything artificial contained in that Diet Coke. Would you agree with that analysis? I mean, I don't want to disparage your friend's dad.

But he's wrong. I had a really, you guys are British. You do dark humor. Yes. I was going to, it would be funny if you were like, my friend's dad in the longevity space, sadly no longer with us. But I would say that's actually sort of the most backwards wrong advice that you could give on that topic. Artificial sweeteners, as they're called.

Technically, they're called non-nutriative sweeteners. Almost all of them. The ones that used to be sort of not so great for health are really kind of not in use anymore. Like Aspartame is still around, but kind of falling off sucralosis is the new thing. It's not that new. But it's actually kind of more modern than the other ones. Modern non-nutrior sweeteners, artificial sweeteners, have almost no effect on your health one way or another.

They're not good for your health and only do anything. But if you are trying to prove a point that they're bad for your health, and you're going solely off objective discussion of literature, you're going absolutely nowhere. The other argument of saying they're neutral for health and you can have tons of them has like hundreds of studies, almost unanimous studies of empirical support. If you're looking for something more cut and dry in the nutritional literature, than the statement non-nutrient sweeteners are generally well tolerated by most people

and have very few, if any, negative effects, that statement might not exist. Like, it's that solid of a foundation. So when people, now, On the other hand, excess sugar that boosts up calories. Like, if you drink in Cokes all day, some people don't even count that into their food. And, right? Like, each can is like 160 calories. That that sheds up.

500 extra calories per day, you gain roughly a pound of fat a week. That's like three or four cans of soda. If you just drink soda and then you do nothing, anything else to your diet except you switch to diet, you can. And many hundreds of thousands of people all the time, you can lose pounds and pounds of weight per month for months on end, radically improving your health and body composition.

So, yeah, I would say one of the best pieces of advice I can give people listening to this is anytime you want soda, go with diet. I would just say in most circumstances for normal folks, just trying to figure this out, not trying to become experts, regular sugar, full sugar soda is just a do not consume item. I would just be like, nope, put it next to the Drano. You know, every Friday night you need to clear yourself out, fine. But diet soda is like orders of magnitude healthier and safer for you long term than regular

full sugar soda. It's just not even close. And I'm glad we're talking about safer in the long term because, you know, I don't think we're honest enough actually about the effects that obesity has on the human body. You know, when you look at things like the body positive movement, big is beautiful, you know, you can be beautiful at any size. You're like, I have a lot to say about that, actually. I don't want to derail the conversation,

but that's a new intellectual sphere I've been entering for a while is the body image sphere and how people see themselves and how body positivity comes into that. I don't want to say too much about that, but I can give a little bit of a glow. I don't know if you guys want to talk about that shit. Anything to have a whole list of things. Anything to trigger fat people.

So, yeah, exactly. You know what I mean. I look, the thing for us is, I'm joking, obviously, but the thing, as you know, because you watch the show, we try and do is we try and just try and talk honestly about the things that people don't talk honestly about because they're all afraid, right? And I think when it comes to obesity, for the reasons that you're talking about, we've got to start actually challenging narratives that are false. That doesn't mean we have to be nasty to people or demean people. But I think there has been a lot of lies. And I don't even know what they are, where people are being told things to make them feel better about doing things that make them feel worse in reality. I have two lies. I'd love to chat with you guys. Go on, let's do it. Lie number one is that obesity is either exaggerated as a cause for poor health or some slightly less hinged people will say that it doesn't have anything to do with health causatively. It's just about as false as anything you could say. Obesity, especially, especially

especially in a longer term, several years plus, and exponentially more bad for your health, the longer you continue to be obese, and exponentially worse for your health, the more obese you become. Obesity is insanely deleterious to your body, to your quality of life, to your longevity, even to your psychology as it interacts with your physiology.

You literally feel worse if you're obese, not just from psychological stuff where people frown at you because you look bad or something, though that does also happen, just from the physiological feedback, mechanisms, you feel worse, you are more at risk for a variety of diseases, you heal less well from any kind of injuries or surgeries or anything like that. Being obese, if you had to tell someone, like, if I was in an elevator, where you find, gentlemen, and I was like trying to,

try to pitch you guys, like, I'd love to be on your show. I want to talk about how bad obesity is. You know, like, 20 seconds, you guys, I'm sure, are quite wealthy. You live on 110th floor or something, so we're riding down. And you're like, 20 seconds, tell us what obesity is, what's bad about obesity physiologically? It would be an intractable problem, because the least, list is like hundreds of things long. Like almost any disease condition you can think of is radically made worse by having obesity. And it causes like at least 10 major disease conditions.

Diabetes. They have actually a thing called metabolic syndrome, which is five of those conditions wrapped up. Poor blood lipids, arterial clogging. I mean, just like, if you're trying not to be around for a long time, getting obese, very dependable way to do it. So that's one big lie. the idea that like, hey, it's okay if you're obese because the medical community's racist or sexist.

They never can get their kind of understanding. Fat phobia. That's right. It's fearing fat people. I have the phobia part. So that's lie number one. Lie number two is a little bit lower key, but in some way even more insidious. And it hits me on a personal level.

And the lie is almost the entire summation of the body positivity movement. And the lie is this. that you can be just as beautiful if you're morbidly obese as you can be if you're any other shape or size, maybe a more conventional shape or size. I didn't mean to look at you, though your body's quite stunning. It's a little distracting.

I'm just kind of not... So here's the thing, to their credit, to these folks who are in the body positivity movement, kind of promulgators of that. Is there anything right with people getting rude comments because they're fat? No, that's toxic and insane. That's not how adult people interact with each other. Is bullying children by other children okay because those children are fat?

Like, it's terrible, and that should be heavily punished, discouraged, and people should talk to children. You don't do things like that. And are people in all bodies, fundamentally beautiful, wonderful human souls? Categorically, yes. value as a grand understanding has nothing to do with how you look or how fat you are, how skinny you are. That's ridiculous. It's like an eight-year-old understanding of the world. On the other hand, is it true to say that other people will find you as attractive and appealing if you're

morbidly obese is not? No. And if they tell you that, they're one of two things. The rare, though commendable fat fetishists, my people, or Patreon link below. Or people who are lying, mostly in order to appear nice, but they're lying to you. Here's the biggest, fuck all those people, fuck everyone else. What about you? Here's the, my biggest take from this. Fat people themselves don't think fat is beautiful, 97 times out of 100. And so when you tell them, oh, fat is beautiful, they want to believe it, but they don't believe it. Imagine a world in which you took a very, very obese person. And aliens come down.

And they're like, so we gave everyone a mind virus? They actually just find obese people insanely attractive now. You're walking down the street. Everyone's like, you know, people are hollering at here. You know, like construction workers are taking their clothes off. The hell is going on.

And then you come home and you look at your body. Do you love your body now? Is it that simple that socialization can flip that switch? Or even after a few months or a few weeks of being inundated with compliments, do you love your body? My contention is the answer is, mostly no. Because how we assess bodies is mostly engineered into us via evolution for

mechanisms that are real simple pattern detectors in our visual field. And if you are a certain shape, you're going to like your own shape in the mirror. If you are another shape, it's a grotesquely overweight. You're not going to like it most times. And when people lie to you and say fat is beautiful body positivity, you're not really going to believe it. And also those people don't really believe it either. So when we're telling people, hey, body positivity is great, fat is beautiful, why are we doing that? And I know why. It's so that fatter people can feel okay and not terrible. Well, that's a commendable reason. I think that's awesome. And so I think we can simultaneously work as a society, though you guys know enough economics to know that multiple components of the society,

not all of them agree, that most people can work on at the same time welcoming everyone, every gender, every race, every sexual orientation. You know what I'm saying? Trans people, we worship, Muslim people, get them all in, fat people. Love everyone. Maybe not love, love, love, because my parole officer keeps saying,

can't physically just start loving people in the street, Mike, again. Everyone should be treated with a fundamental degree of respect and acceptance. And we can also say, some people are found more physically attractive

on average than others. We don't have to mix those two, ever. Like, if I walk up to a, you know, I'm married, my wife sitting over there, I'd be really careful what I say. She gets violent. I'm just kidding.

She stays violent. So I walk up to a five foot 11 model in New York. And I'm like, you know, my best lines. Hey, baby, what do you think? If she's like, you're a little short, I'm not going to be like, you know, in my best self. I'm not going to be like, the height oppression continues like years. And Mark's talked about this. I'm going to be like, I don't think she hates me deep down as a human that I just think

she's not into short, guys. And that's all right. I'm five, six. It happens. And when you're very overweight, you look at certain way that neither you nor most other people find ideally attractive from a physical porking perspective. All right. But, like, you know, there are so many other utilities for people other than, like, being in victorious secret ads. Like, we need to get more obese models.

Like, why? So they can also have cocaine addictions in crises of eating at age 22? You know, like, is that really the pinnacle? So I think us admitting look, most people want to look a certain way. And that certain way is like, you know, some more muscular than others, some fatter than others. Most people haven't understand it. Like Matt Damon type of shit, you know, like just looking like a normal dude, a little

bit of abs, maybe the Brad Pitt from Fight Club look. That's kind of the normal distribution about look preferences, kind of, that's the center. And it's not a very wide distribution. We can have that and admit that to ourselves. Well, at the same time saying, look, a lot of people just don't look like that. And the next question is like, hey, do you want to look better? And they're like, well, yeah, let's figure out how to leverage science, coaching, software, and pharmaceutical technologies, which I'm huge on,

in order to get your version of you right now physically into a package that looks more like what you want to look like and what everyone else seems to find handy-dandy. And I think that honesty, which you guys are very famous for on this show, like, I get some of not-so-nice feedback on it, but here's the thing. It's fucking true. There's a whole movement called Health at Every Size, Haze, and the fraction of that movement's waves

in the water has, like, shrunk by a factor of 10 ever since the modern obesity drugs came out. Lhempic and Trezepotide and Manjaro, whatever, they came out. And a bunch of those people kind of look around, like, there's a pill I can take, or shot I can take, no longer be a beast.

And they just don't come to next week's meeting of fat people, you know? Because at the end of the day, most of those people don't want to be fat. It would be very, very different if people who are overweight as a majority of them really loved their look and how they feel in their health. And everyone was like, you look like, you need to change.

No, that's ridiculous. Stop doing that. But they don't. Most overweight people do not want to be overweight. And most other people also don't fancy the overweight as much. And so there's actually no mystery. The only, not mystery, but discordance is some group of people, you know, on the political left, academia, people, I think mostly are very good people.

They're just trying to do right. And everyone else is bullying them to saying the shit. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that, yeah, yeah. That is beautiful. They say shit like that. I think it just lends just more confusion because at the end of the day, nobody really believes that there's this funny, like, meme going around in a line, a little joke.

You know, like your super hot girlfriend and her super hot friends are like, oh, my God, Lizzo's beautiful. And then you're like, hey, you look like Lizzo today. She's going like, what the fuck? And like, why the discord? I thought she was beautiful. And then that girl, like, if you sit her down, if you're like to try to forget sociology at Harvard your last year, is Lizzo beautiful? Like, as a human and a fucking rock star, queen energy times a hundred.

Lizzo's a goddess. The rest of us are just in her wake. But like, as a person of body composition, you want to attain in order to, like, attract the highest number of mates. And much more importantly, look in the mirror and be like, yeah, with that. No. And that's okay. And we can be honest about that without coming up to people who look like Lizzie, being like, you. you're fat, you know, like, I'm autistic as sh-s. I probably do something like that. You know what I mean?

There's that massive discordance. I think the body positivity movement comes from all the right perspectives, but ends up doing a disservice because it's trying to bleach, wash away fucking literal reality of the fact that, again, most fatter people do not want to be fat. We'll be back with our guest in a minute. But first, in our recent interview with Dr. Peter Atier, we explored the science of longevity. He explained that age, isn't just about adding years to your life. It's about maintaining quality of life. And that's where NMN comes in.

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On a Denny's slam-in' meal deals. and see the new Masters of the Universe movie, only in theaters June 5th. It's also the long-term implications which we touched on. So my mother throughout her entire life was morbidly obese. And she was like, oh, but I'm fine, and I go for tests and whatever else. And they've told me, my blood pressure is fine. So is there a problem? But what people don't seem to understand is the effect that obesity has on your muscular and your skeleton.

And so what happens is my grandfather, who's a doctor, described it, as being like, hinges on a door. And so when you put too much weight on the hinges, what happens, it will come off and the effect that it has had on her hips and her knees to the point where she is now physically disabled. And I always found this conversation really frustrating because I was going to people, you're denying reality. You're denying reality. And what you're doing is condemning people to an old age where they're sick. And that's awful. Yeah. It's one of those things that, It's like blood pressure. The real thing with blood pressure is if your blood pressure is high, almost always, you don't feel it.

They're like wake up one day with high blood pressure and you're like, there's no sensation like that. And so if you have high blood pressure, you can have it for years and just be none the wiser. And because you feel fine, you think you're okay. And then like, you know, two years later, they're like, hey, your kidneys are done, bro. You need kidney transplant. You're like, how? And like, what's your blood pressure destroyed all of the little tiny machines in there that do the filtering. That sucks.

And so with obesity, a lot of times, two things. First of all, people feel just fine for years, no doubt like your mom did. And then by the time they're in their 60s, still obese, can't move around, weight loss becomes very, very difficult. And if you lose weight without being very active, you lose a lot of muscle as well. And that's very, very bad for your health. It's one of those things like everything's fine until it isn't, you know? Like, if you're driving your car and you have no seatbelt on, like, you're fine until

you hit a telephone pole and then you're part of the telephone pole and that whole fun thing happens. So that is a big, big deal because it's really easy to forget that sort of thing. And with obesity, another thing is you feel fine. But because weight typically accumulates slowly and your brain is really good at adjusting how you feel to all these differences, what ends up happening is when most people lose lots of weight, they go, oh my God, I feel incredible. And they're like, did I really? feel that bad this whole time, uh-huh.

You were just used to it. You guys see very obese people like walking around the store and they're like, they're doing one of these, like they're shuffling. It looks like they're lifting an enormous amount of weight because they are. It looks like it on their face. They have walkers. They're kind of pushing. And then you see someone of, you know, lighter weight just kind of scamper across.

Like, yeah, man. But those people, they get used to it enough and they're like, this is just how life is. So once you lose the weight, you feel better. But during the time that you have that way down you, for a lot of people, they feel totally fine. They go to the doctor. The doctor's like, you know, there's doctors that will pursue optimality with you. Like, look, like, this is unsustainable. Don't do this to yourself.

But many doctors, I want to say most, like, as long as your fundamental current in the now blood work looks like not admissible to hospital yet, they're like, yeah, and they always say the same shit. I'm trying to lose some weight. And they go, okay. And you leave the doctor's office, you go have McDonald's and you forget about it. two years later, come back to doctor and you're totally fine. 15 years later, you go in, get some blood work and they're like, you have like three different types of cancer. And you're like, huh, I didn't see that one coming.

You should have. And Mike, what is the mechanism by which obesity is unhealthy? How does that work? Like, how long do you have, you know? Well, I guess, I suppose, what I'm asking is, I think we sometimes get very confused. And I think a lot of people just feel that obesity is mostly an appearance thing. So, really? I think a lot of people do feel that.

Yeah. And I think that's partly because it's a way of putting that out of reality. Sure, sure, of course. And there's been times, by the way, just if people are watching all these three people in normal shape or is like, you know, fat people. There were times in my life when I was fat. And I think, I was young at the time, but my concern was definitely not about. the health implications. Of course.

Right. Of course. So, but how does it work? Why does being fat? Because the reason I ask this is, there have been cultures in history where being obese was considered attractive or at least desirable, particularly places where there's not been a lot of food availability. Not our kind of modern obesity.

No, true. Thickalicious. Yes. Massively obese. No, not so much. No, agreed. They just weren't even people like that. But the other thing is, you know, carrying fat is a desirable thing from an evil

your perspective. To some degree, absolutely. Right? So why is it bad for us? Yeah. There's a bunch of reasons. One is it's actually being fat is quite bad, but getting fat is really bad because when you're getting fat, you're having excessive calories put into you.

And it means the amount of fats and oftentimes carbohydrates in your blood gets really high. And high blood fats cause a lot of cardiovascular problems. They clog up the arteries, like in the literal. sense many times. And then high degrees of carbohydrate in the blood sustainably, both are directly deleterious to various structures, like having a high glucose amount in the blood vessels close to your eyes makes you go blind, all this other crazy shit. And also it causes you to slowly over time get really bad at managing the glucose, and it causes you to be diabetic. And so that's one of the main ways in which obesity hurts you. But when you have lots of fat cells, there's another way in which

it hurts you. The fat cells secrete a bunch of different hormones, and those hormones affect how the rest of your body works. Most of those effects are not good. Fat is not, we used to think fat was kind of like an inert tissue. Like it just sat there and you put away calories into it, and I just sat there. It has a ton of hormonal effects along axes of the rest of the body, and it really freaks you up in a bunch of ways. There's another way in which it's bad. High degrees, chronic high calorie loads and being very, very obese, both cause a massive increase in total body systemic inflammation. And that low-grade chronic inflammation, for lack of a better term, I know a medical doctor, just fucks everything up. And so all of those effects combined,

and probably about 10 others I haven't mentioned, leads to obesity being real bad. So it's literally like if you draw out a diagram, it's tons of different vectors from all places. Some of those vectors go to other causes and then they indirectly go in. And if the big circle in the middle is health, that it's just from all angles of attack. Obesity is bad. I haven't even talked about the joint stuff you were referring to earlier. If you are very overweight, it ends up being, first of all,

you have lower levels of physical activity almost always because it's just harder to move around. Lower physical activity by itself is very bad for your health. So that's already a big problem. And obviously the orthopedic concerns when you have hips, especially knees, human ankles tend to be pretty good at what they do. So they don't often just snap. But people who have been overweight for a long time, also low in activity, their knees just go straight to hell. And like, we're getting there. We will be with AI getting to where joint replacements are super easy to do.

But like, you guys know people who have gone through joint replacement surgery. It's not like you're not waving the flag after that show. I can't wait to go skiing again. I broke my arm. It's not something I want to do again. I imagine a joint replacement is a little bit more uncomfortable. 100%. And a part of what seems to cause either arthritis or arthritic-like ailments is the systemic

inflammation. So if you have any proneness to arthritis and you happen to be obese, you now have way more proneness for it. And if you have arthritis and you are obese and the doctor says, eat less, move more, you're like, move more, fuck that, that's not happening. And then eat less, like, where hell am I going to go? And then eat less is good advice in the technical sense of like, it's not right. But when people don't arm you with the advice of how to choose foods that can keep you full

and at the same time can keep the calories nice and low and provide all the nutrition you need, just eat less turns into real shit advice because you're like, okay, cut the McDonald's cheeseburger and half, eat that half. They're like, I'm still hungry. Okay, I'll start tomorrow and eat the other half. So a lot of times the kind of treatment people get at doctor's office is phenomenal and super helpful. And a lot of times, they're just kind of like, yeah, some kind of stuff to watch out for.

and the doctor checks his clock because he's 15 minutes left. There's one minute left with you and he has this next patient 15 minutes. Off you go, I don't want to say in blaming doctors for this, though, because doctors get a lot of shit. And in the comment section, no doubt there'll be horror stories about how terrible doctors are about nutrition. The thing is, for as long as I can remember, doctors almost always will tell you when your weight is out of the chart bounds

and that you should control it and bring it back. Are the nutritionists? No. Have they ignored the problem of obesity? Absolutely not. here's another fun contentious thing. I love being on the show, by the way, because I could just say shit without you guys don't get offended.

Also, English people don't get offended at much. One of the big things that many people have been looking for in obesity and in health is one external cause to fucking just blame. Like seed oils, no offense, seed oils, people, you guys are great. Artificial sweeteners, additives, big pharma somewhere in there. with their top hats and their canes doing something bad to children. I don't know. And if we can just blame this one thing and remove it, we can still eat whatever we want. We can just not have an exercise routine. We can not take care of our sleep health and all that Andrew Heberman's

stop scrolling on your phone, close your eyes, make a dark room, all that stuff, wake up on time. And because we've excised this one external factor, these aliens come down to Earth and they like do the scanning of our water. They're like, oh, you guys have hydrochloro-peptide in here. And they're get it out and everyone's like, who they just like get healthy and awesome hair grows back. The reality is the vast majority of the reason why people who become obese haven't reduced their obesity. There are many, many reasons. The vast majority of it is that giving a factor is just real low.

People just don't care enough. And it's so weird to say because you're like blaming the victim. I know if there's any victims in obesity because like Cheetos are not like a, you know, a gun with the smoke coming out. You're also holding the gun that's kind of weird. But it's really strange position to have to tell people, you know, it's not the poison in your water. It's not the fact that mega food corporations are like,

oh, man, if we just get everyone obese, then dot, dot, dot, profit. I don't know how that works. It's the fact that when you go to the store and you're feeling like eating something tasty, you don't give a shit and you buy the stuff that's tasty. And someone's like, what about the calories? And you're like, eh, they've done a bunch of different studies. actually one in New York, New Jersey area, where they had calorie labels on fast food,

and then no calorie labels, very good control. Almost no effect for almost everyone. Really? Oh, yeah. That's so interesting because it does affect me. When I look at it, I'm like, okay, well, you know, if I eat this, this is like two-thirds of my daily intake. Maybe I shouldn't. And look at how you look.

Saxy. Well, thank you, although I'm scared now. Good, good. It's healthy. The point you made, though, I think about the food system, I can see logically how people make those conclusions because if people are fat, are they going to eat more calories? And if they eat more calories, they spend more money on food and therefore, do you see what

I'm saying? Yeah. I honestly, I do see what you're saying. I think that food company executives are not as strategic and Machiavellian and fourth order thinkers as people think. A lot of times the opposite is true, where they actually mostly look at like quarterly earnings reports. That's how the real business world works at scale.

And if you make a bunch of super awesome obese food, obeseogenic food, people get fat, your corporation might not even be around in that next generation to profit off of that. As a matter of fact, if you think about economically, you're cross-subsidizing your competitors. Like, your competitors could never want to make people fat. And they say, yeah, we don't want to make people fat. But then fat people still eat more food, so they get in and benefit off your shit, whereas you're paying the cost to make people fat. And then you also have to, I guess, sell to people again. It might not quite add up. What I think is happening is as simple as this.

Food corporations try to sell you a bunch of different stuff and some combination of things that are, for the average consumer, very reasonably priced, very delicious, end up people just buy them more. McDonald's and all the other restaurants and fast food have experimented with a bunch of different healthy menu options over the years. I mean, like dozens. Yes.

And most of them have like the first flight. I remember when the salads came in, I have never seen anyone eat a salad. in McDonald's. Bro, like, what is that even for? Like, because here's the thing, McDonald's and all these other systems, like these food systems, these restaurants, they're very evidence-based and very logical and have crazy supply chains.

And they have, like, a stack in their menu. Like, it's regional, but there's an average stack. There's, like, 20 items they can offer you. And their kitchen doesn't support the economics of 25 items. They could just, all of these are a waste, right? So if there's a stack of 20 items, they look at purely at ROI, like return on investment. So everything has a place in the stack. If you throw a fucking salad in there, and it stacks out at, like, what would be number 40,

like, you're the salad division product manager, and you go to the meeting with the boss, like, later that month, he's like, how are salads doing? You're like, well, according to the numbers, nobody gives a shit. He's like, what is he supposed to do? What is he supposed to lose his job to stand up for salad? Because if McDonald's quarterly earnings go down, they're going to look and be like, where can we save money? Like, I know, nobody buys the salad.

They're like, all right, Johnson, you've got a promotion, no more salad. But a lot of the healthy food at fast food restaurants is like super well-intentioned. Here's the thing. Capitalism. We're all capitalists here, yeah? Yeah. Venezuela, you love communism, right? Yeah, of course.

Yeah, at least a great way to lose weight. Even the zoo animals didn't have trouble until people started breaking into eating them. You know about that? Like, yeah, during the more recent Venezuelan starvation episode, people were breaking into the zoo to eat to the animals. It's like real f***ed. Yeah. Yeah. Being from Russia.

That was a fun little. interjection of just depressing historical realities. I am Russian, right? It's all in there. The fundamental situation is food companies are just trying to do their best

to give you whatever the hell is you're going to buy. And because capitalism is accurately construed as greed motivated, greed in the best way, I think, for us, if we were a little, little left of center, be the most evil thing in the world. Greed motivates you to do anything to get the dollar, right? Anything.

Which means that companies don't care to make you obese. And as a matter of fact, it's bad vibes for them to do anything to you that you won't like in the short term or the long term. McDonald's does not want the PR of people turning around and being like, you fucking poisoned me for 20 years. They don't want that shit. But what they want is money. And the easiest way for them to get money

is to be like, hey, Francis, like, what do you really want? And you're like, number five with extra large fries. And they're like, what are we supposed to do? Not give him what he wants. It's our job as a corporation to do what this man wants. Give him the extra fries. And that's it. Like, that is my Occam's razor for why the food system is the way it is. Because most people don't give a shit.

And they just like tasty things. And also, I've been a personal trainer for a long time around a huge fitness company. I used to be a college professor for a long time, teaching people how to be personal trainers, talking to just like tons and tons of real people in the real world. Real people in the real world are beautiful, awesome, amazing in 50 different ways. But they just fundamentally, for the most part, don't give a shit about what goes in their bodies.

You guys, let's walk around to York. You're going to look at people eating all kinds of stuff. Have you really thought through this pretzel? They're like, why? Get out of here. You know, typically the Yorker shit. And like, if you can get people to give a shit, the food corporations will pivot as quickly as possible. McDonald's corporate, they so much as sniff out a health food phase, they got 10 candidate items

and menus across the country the next month. It's a fucking McDonald's test kitchen. They're cooking up batches. They don't care. McDonald's, in two years, could be a health food store. If mass amounts of global and American people demanded in the economic sense of I have the money and I'm willing to give it to you so you get me this, every company with Pepsi wouldn't make a single sugary beverage ever again.

it would all be artificially sweetened. They don't care. Can you imagine, like, being in charge of PepsiCo, and one of your interns is like, people are buying more diet soda and less sugar. They're like, you're like, take a drink of your scotch. You're like, my father didn't build this company to make sugar farmers bankrupt.

Roll the regular sugar in. They're going to do that. They don't care. In the most sociopathic way, they don't care. But also in the coolest way, they don't care. They're going to give you what you want. It just so happens to be that most Americans and people around the world, they just want cheaper,

food, they want to be tasty. So for health food people watching this, if you make your health foods cheaper and you make them really tasty and they have lower calories and they make you really full, you're going to make a lot of money and you're going to help a ton of people. But the idea that like people are really health conscious and just trying their best and they just get fooled by these advertisements for mega-corps, the fuck my face. Advertisements never made me McDonald's. Is that smell that you drive by and you're like, what the hell's in there? I want it all. If you're someone who values free inquiry and independent thinking, which let's be honest, is why you're probably watching trigonometry,

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which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. It's a great point. And I'm actually really glad that you brought up the term Big Pharma.

Because when we come to America, we notice the suspicion around Big Pharma. Nobody ever goes, you know who's great, Big Pharma. It's always like Awkward cocktail party banter. Yeah, exactly. And it's just, and the moment people start getting a tad conspiratorial, which you love to do in this country, let's be fair.

Nonsense. You drop in Big Pharma. So why the suspicion around Big Pharma? And what's really going on here? Man, there are legitimate critiques of Big Pharma. Most of them having to do with big pharma's cozy, though, sometimes necessary relationship with government and making various regulatory structures exceedingly complex

so that little pharma can't compete. That serves big pharma well in the game theoretic locked-in landscape of like, well, we can't really deregulate. So if they're going to be regulators, we might as well grease them up to our advantage, which every industry does. Big anything means that the big players who got there earlier, the Pfizer's, the et cetera, they have lawyers and other people in Washington lobbyists who are going to look at smaller upstart competitors and be like, can we get the legal system kind of to reflect that so those people don't like fuck up our profit stream? That happens for sure.

We can blame Big Farmer for some of that. I happen to be from a very highly free market school of economic thought myself or my dilettante bullshit pretend economics that I don't actually know. But I place most of the blame in the hands of government because it's, If you're going to have ultra powerful government with ultra heavy-handed regulation, you as a major corporation can either go in there and be like, hey, do this. Or you can just sit around and be like, we'll just be happily regulated by whoever goes in there and says that first. You know, like back in the Soviet days, I point to you as if you and I lived in like the 50s or some shit. Like if you weren't ranting people out, it was ran you out. And so whoever gets the reins of communist power first, that's kind of who's there.

So I don't blame the corporations as much as I do government for that. for sure. They do have some blame, 100%. And so some of that is, I think, rightfully assigned. And that concludes my anti-Big Pharma rant and begins my much more impassioned pro-Big Farmer rant. I mean, you're one of the only people in the world, certainly who has, like, YouTube followers or whatever, that is, like, super pro-Big Pharma. I think everyone's actually pro-Big Pharma when the pressure is high enough. Like, imagine going to the hospital and your, like, your arm, bone is, like, out. You can see it. my man, it's fun, right?

You're like, oh, cool. It wasn't out, but it was like that. Oh, that's even more disturbing when it's under the skin. You're like, oh, that's not how my arm's supposed to look. And imagine you're like an agonizing pain. And the nurse is like, we're going to give you something for the pain. You're like, hold on, hold on. Does big pharma make it?

And she's like, yeah, man, keep that out of my body. Oh, my man. It starts getting infected. And they're like, we have antibiotics for you. And you're like, big pharma again? Like, yes, that's correct. Are you like, nope? And then there you die in agony after hours and days of having ooze on your arm and it goes up through your brain and then you die.

No one's actually against Big Pharma when it comes down to it because Big Pharma makes revolutionary medications that keep all of us not infected, free of pain when we need to be. Do they f*** up every now and again? Yeah, hell yeah, I screw up all the time. Like every fallible human institution? Yeah, but I guess, Mike, the suspicion is for, for some people, and I think it's not unmerited, is, for example, what we saw during the pandemic, right? It's like, let's vaccinate the kids

when everyone knows there's no point vaccinating kids against COVID, right? At least that was my perception. That was my view. So the sense that the profit motive drives them to over-prescribe things. Pharma doesn't prescribe anything doctors do. And doctors do not directly, they do not directly profit from prescribing more medications.

That is a huge myth. Nobody, I know a ton of doctors. My wife's a medical doctor. There's not like you write a bunch of scripts and know, hey, good job this month. Here's probably money. That just straight up doesn't happen. The oversight for that is massive, by the way. Now, when your people coming to your patients want a lot of drugs, you can be a doctor

that's like, hold on, let's wait and see how this evolves. You're like, how many medic, how many antibiotics and pain pills do you need? If you had like a smoking gun, a pharma really very massively influencing doctors to write more prescriptions, as far as I've seen, this just almost, if not just completely, just not there. It's just not there. What about the example I gave about, look, my view was that vaccines were massively over-prescribed during the pandemic to loads of people didn't need them. Did you think that's an unfair take?

I think most of the, I think it's a fair take. I think most of the people who in the public health space wanted everyone to have a vaccine weren't so much concerned about everyone needing the vaccine. They were concerned about spreading. And so junior comes home from elementary school. He's fine, but he coughs out. There wasn't much evidence for that, right? There wasn't. But these people typically who are in the public health community, and let's just call it, call it what it is, like leftist care and women.

Like, come on, that's who shares all the poor vaccine shone on Facebook. They're incredibly neurotic and incredibly risk averse. And so if they say, like, okay, one extra, you guys see this, like, advertisement bullshit, like even one life lost is a tragedy, which is so true. But also from a policy perspective, like, can't just think like that. because it's always trade-offs. And it's like all of our freedoms, just long as to save everyone,

no one really believes that so we can get past that. I think those people are more concerned about getting everyone vaccinated so we could have completely crushed COVID out of existence, which was probably more likely than not at some point. But it turned out, you know, vaccines were profoundly effective.

Vaccines probably on aggregate, as far as I can tell, saved about 20 million lives around the world, which is like, several Holocaust worth of lives. Depends who you ask minds. Well, in my view, it never happened anyway. Also, vaccines aren't real and birds are robots.

Yeah, this is going down the whole wormhole. So, yes, that's not a dependable unit to some. So vaccines are on that aggregate really, really good. And I don't think that there was much push from Big Pharma to over-prescribe vaccines. I think that PR-wise, Big Pharma can't afford emails to people that even hint at like that. One whistleblower gets out on an email that's a Pfizer CEO's like, let's push these vaccines and a little bit of the wrong way. Dude, Pfizer stock and the whole thing goes, they have to be very, very easy. But I've tried to talk to higher level pharma people and it's

basically like talking to James Bond. What do you do for a living? They're like, what do I not do? I got to get the fuck out of here. They're very not transparent. Mostly because like everything is insanely litigious and there's a huge PR situation. Did a lot of Americans on the left want everyone forcibly vaccinated? Yes. You want someone to blame. I'd be blaming them off. I'm happy blaming them. They might have a little bit of blame. I just don't think it's a huge fact. So it's interesting to me because based on what you've described, you must, I can't imagine you'd be super aligned with what the current health government, the health department and RFK are talking about. That doesn't sound like, because he's talking about changing the food

which you don't seem to be too concerned about. And likewise, with vaccines, you know, I get a different sense from you. I think vaccines are one of the pinnacle achievements of mankind. And if vaccines have side effects, which they do, and are sometimes deleterious, which they are. And they sometimes kill people, which they do. But what kills more people? COVID or any of the COVID vaccines? Well, the Russian Sputnik vaccine, who knows what the hell it did?

And the Chinese vaccine that, like, people took but never did anything like that. moderna uh Pfizer all the all the top tier u.s based vaccines they are like any drug will save and help most people some people will have very mixed results and a few people though a few in a sample of a hundred in a sample of the entire united states we're talking about hundreds of tens of thousands of people will have very bad outcomes but on the aggregate vaccines are phenomenal should we be force vaccinating people, there's a very interesting discussion. There are ways in which that discussion turns into a yes. If there was a confirmed viral strain, confirmed, that came out of India or something that had a 50% on contact within two days death rate and a virality 10 times that of COVID,

and someone in the U.S. said, don't force vaccinations. I'd be like, I'm coming to your house. I'm going to go to India real quick. I'm a cough on your bitch ass of out of here. State of emergency, flat out. During World War II, freedom of speech took a little bit of a hit because you could be a fucking Nazi spy. We're fighting a global war. It's real.

In the context of the real situation of COVID, in the context of most vaccines, I think the trade-off of giving government that much power versus the actual effect that you're going to modulate is much more in the direction of, let's not do mandatory-forced anything. You know, so I'm super

at the same time aligned with not anti, but more vaccine skeptical people on the limitations on government power. In almost all cases, except for a super psychotic germ from India case, I'm super against mandatory kind of anything, really, for sure, mandatory vaccinations. We had in Russia, actually.

And my parents pulled my sister and I out of school that day, because this is real fun for people who don't know. They would vaccinate children with the same needle. Okay, the same needle. Not like the same syringe, but the cap. No, the same literal fucking. needle. And this was like in the late 80s when AIDS was getting to be a real party. And so like that, yeah, shit like that is like bone chilling. Fuck all that. No thanks. But at the same time,

should we be recognizing that vaccines are incredibly powerful and we should be aiming to make them better over time and more efficient and less deleterious? Yeah, 100%. I guess what I'm asking is, are you excited or are you concerned about RFK being in charge of everything that's going on in this country with health or both at the same time maybe. I'm curious. I'm curious. I don't know what he's going to do. There's a kind of a term in kind of geopolitics war strategy of see what leaders do, not what they say. Because like, you know, if you just looked at what people said, Trump would be like, what the hell? There's an actual leader. He'll like, they'll do some good stuff, you know. And so with like RFK, I kind of want to see what they kind of crap out. For me, I think the, I'm

aggregate the new administration, especially Doge, I fuck with Doge so goddamn hard. Minimizing the size of government, cleaning out a ton of bureaucracy and waste, massively deregulating the economy. It's just like things that pretty much economically, like objectively, like objectively correct things to do that just a lot of people on the left have a lot of feelings about for some goddamn reason. I think that's so wonderful that the inclusion of RFK, who I think is genuinely a really, really good person who gives a shit and wants to help people in that administration, to me is kind of like, all right, let's see what he does. But if he comes out hard against vaccines,

it's just going to be in the wrong. And like, hopefully it doesn't hurt a bunch of people. It's not likely that it will. If he comes after the food system, like, they've been doing that for years anyway. It's not that it's going to do tons of damage. It's just like a lot of money spent towards something as almost no effect,

where if you actually empowered, so here's how I would handle this whole thing. If I was RFK, I would just do all that cool Kennedy shit, you know, Epstein's Island. First, Epstein's Island. I need a refill from, my soul and then work.

The first thing, which Epstein's Island does work, I'll shut up, I stop. I have like a stack of 80 Epstein's Island jokes that just come in. You fellas have been to the island. You know how it is, right? You massively overest to me. I wanted to go, I got my application rejected. Try again next year.

I would say massively deregulate the pharmaceutical industry, massively. And have just one really easy law. If you are a consenting adult and your doctor approves a prescription, you can try any testing phase medication you want. Like, do you own your body or does the government own your body? Want to find out which one it is? Try to take a drug from a manufacturer that hasn't passed all stages of FDA trials yet. You're going to go to jail and stuff.

It's my body. And as a consenting adult with doctor's approval, if I can take a drug from any manufacturer, then it turns out I have really, great results. They get a ton of data studying brave young people. I'm not young anymore. God damn where's my hair? So it's going to be a huge win-win. And then in addition to that, the deregulation of the space brings in a flood of competition or a ton of money, software money and shit like that. And then with AI, you have this incredible wave, which will happen anyway. It'll just happen a few years later with the current FDA of insane innovation that makes medications, orders of magnitude, cheaper, more effective, and

less side effect prone. That's the answer. More pharma, more technology, more intervention of the human body. That is the way to get pharma to do the right stuff. As far as overall U.S. health, we have that one big problem. People like to eat a ton of high-calorie tasty shit. People like to eat it. How do you go about that? Imagine having a real drive policy-wise in the UK to get the motherfriars up north to stop drinking pints every night. What you don't do? You're going to be like, it has calories. He's going to be like, oh, sweet.

It's bad for you. Cool. Everyone dies anyway. What you got left? At some point, you got to be like, you can't drink this anymore. It's illegal. We already know how prohibition works. It's not fun.

Like, back alley, beer dealers. We don't want that shit again. As a free society in a free world, we have to understand that we have to try our best to help everybody. But at the same time, when people just kind of want to do their fucking shit and pay the cost health-wise, we just got to be like, that's just what they're going to do.

And you can gingerly educate them, you can tell them. But heavy-handed government regulation, restructing the food system, all the shit. It's some combination of doesn't work, waste a lot of money, and just kind of antithetical to the principles of liberty, which is like, you want to, like, eat French fries cigarettes and smoke them at the same time. Rock on, I'll light it for you. I don't think you should be doing that, but you're the one paying the cost. And freedom is a motherfucker, man.

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I've been taking it myself, and honestly, I'm falling asleep faster, and my mind actually switches off at night, which used to be a battle. Shut it, of course it did. Head to V-E-R-S-O, and use code trigger to get 15% off your first order, or click the link in the description. That's V-E-R-S-O-Code trigger. And I think there's one element that we haven't spoken about, which is the element of misinformation

and that I actually find it really worrying, Mike, when I'm in this country. And I talk to people, and they bring up vaccines, and I try and be open because I'm very pro-vaccination. I'm careful. I hear this guy's here. I'm... I have friends who are very vaccine skeptical.

I don't mean the COVID vaccine. I mean vaccine skeptic. And I don't have the language to win the argument. Sure. And I thought that what happened during the pandemic was bad, among other reasons, for that reason. Yeah. Because it discredited vaccines that do work

where the tradeoffs are absolutely worth it. 100%. And we've lost the language for it. Hashtrap. Trust the science. Yeah. Yeah. But that's a very important, and that's another part of it. But the thing that I find really worrying, Mike, and it's not even a topic of conversation because the study was discredited.

And these are intelligent people we talk to where they go, well, you know, the vaccines cause autism. And I'm like, what? Are we still having this conversation here? And that's really worrying for me. And it's sad. Because people are allowing misinformation to dictate the choices not only over their body, but over their children. Is it true that there's no link between vaccines and autism? Yes, like hasn't been debated in a generation.

If you want to say there's a link between vaccines and autism, you have like an enormous hill to climb by just looking at, you know, like, you like, you liked a girl back in middle school, and you were trying to look for signs of how she interacted with you that she likes you, and every sign is like she fucking hates you and you're a creep, but you're trying to like, but that one time she didn't yell at me too much. Maybe it's because she loves me. That's the uphill battle that, like, vaccine skeptics for the autism thing have. It's also a really weird, random hill to die on. Because if you said, like, you know, certain kinds of vaccines cause various immune function abnormalities, like, you have a few decent studies, 10 studies that say the other thing, but you got something. The autism thing was just, like, almost whole cloth, like, folks who have, like, here's this thing. If you have an autistic child, especially severely autistic, there's like, there's nothing I can. say in a fucking podcast that's going to be charitable enough to how even the words here difficult to kind of calibrate how big of a challenge you have and how much of a necessity

there may be for finding someone to blame and I feel that a thousand percent that much resentment and anger is two things 100 percent understandable and occasionally vented of the wrong thing. And I think the vaccines thing was just super convenient. No, it's like, big crime happens and every criminal runs away and there's just some dupe on the corner or police show up, like, who the fuck are you? And it's vaccines with autism. He's like, I was just having a Coke. They baton the shit out of them, drag them into the car. That's vaccines in autism. Do we know, are cases of autism rising? And do we know why that is, if it is happening?

It's a complex issue. We know one of the predominant reasons, not the only reason, is increased awareness, increased use of proper diagnostic criteria. There's another thing with autism that's more curious. Jesus, you guys are dragging all the politically incorrect out of me. I swear to God, I'm getting canceled. That's what we do. Yeah. You fiendishly smiled like, yes, yes, more. We've slagged off fat people. I mean, now we're getting to the good shit. Oh, boy.

So there has been a recent, very profound rise of autism. I say, mostly actually diagnoses, but even more claimed diagnoses because there are a lot of folks that have a high degree of neuroticism, a high degree of social interaction phobia, mostly because either they are genetically just more prone to be introverted and a little bit neurotic, and or because growing up, they had negative socialization experiences with other children and middle school. You know, like middle school just really f-de-lac-n-ass, for lack of a better term, like,

you were awkward looking or something, I did not mean to look at you again. There's only two of you, who am I supposed to play? And, you know, you just kind of had a bad time and it kind of made you go into your shell, you know? And that experience also of bullying and being physically intimidated makes you neurotic, makes you misinterpret or be very difficult

with facial expressions. Like some people don't have the confidence to look someone in the eyes as they talk to them. If they've been beaten the shit enough and made fun of enough in their lives and they're already genetically more neurotic and more introverted. Zero autism, by the way. They're perfectly fluid with humor.

They understand every joke. They get offended. Here's the thing is autistic people just almost never really get offended because they don't really have a concept for how that works. You're like, hey, like, you don't belong here. They're like, okay, we just fuck off. You're like, okay. And so those folks that have been basically kind of bullied,

had a bad time in childhood, and are not super pro-social, even though they want to be and they can read all the signals, they have been both misdiagnosed lately a ton as autistic and have themselves self-diagnosed. There's almost like a bit of a pride with autistic diagnoses nowadays. With all diagnoses now.

Of course, yeah. Like, you guys know the channel, YouTube channel Jubilee? No. It's a great channel. They have like all the people come together and it's like one gay dude rates 20 people who claim to be gay or not and then they find out later everyone comes out,

that sort of thing. And they had a bunch of them with autism and like who's autistic and who's not. They had autistic people rate, which is extra hilarious because they're like, I don't fucking, I can't figure this out for myself. And a lot of people, it seems like they really identify with like their grade, like autism type, whatever. And it seems like this in community is also that the Hollywood left thing made neurodivergent cool. I fucking can't stand that term because all neurological and psychological qualities are rather normally distributed.

There's no such thing as the average person. It's a statistical abstraction. It's like everyone's different. And so I'm neurodivergent. It's like, well, neurodivergent, how? Like, I don't score as neurodivergent on any tests, but I'm a weird fucking asshole. And you're like, that guy's definitely something.

Everyone's something. So the whole term of neurodivergence has by some people in the sort of Hollywood peripheral left, which obviously spreads to a lot of the rest of the world, has been planted as the seed of like, hey, you're special somehow. And all these other things about yourself that you don't really love,

it's because of this one thing. But it's a cool thing and it's new and you're awesome and you're really like, I don't know, like Albert Einstein because he was maybe sort of autistic and all of a sudden they're like, yeah. And so actually autistic people, their levels may or may not be rising, but if they're rising, it's probably not very high and probably due mostly to actual diagnoses. Because you're like, you guys know, like we didn't have a term for autism back like 100 years ago. There were still autistic people. They were just labeled categories that I'm not allowed to say on public YouTube, like very. very bad words for people that are bad words because they used to be labeled for those. So better diagnostic criteria is most of the explanation, but there is this other cohort of people that are either claiming to be autistic and they're not, or diagnosed by maybe not so diligent psychotherapists as autistic, when in reality they're really just some combination of introverted and neurotic and sometimes from genetic perspectives or variables. And other times just because they had a really bad time growing up and you get bullied your

entire life. You don't look at people the same way. Jokes are awkward. Everything is uncomfortable. You do a lot of this stuff and there's nothing to do with autism. And so those people, I think now, some of those people have grouped themselves into autistic because it's kind of a new cool thing to do. A very similar thing has occurred with the trans situation. But that sucks. Yeah. Well, no, we can't let him go on that. Anti-trans advocate, Mike Isratel, thank you so much. Well, no, so I guess The real question I wanted to ask you before we wrap up because we've been dancing around is what's the answer at an individual level to the fact that we've never had this amount of incredibly tasty, available cheap food ever? How do we deal with that? Two answers. Great question.

Number one is look into all of the new pharmaceuticals coming out because they're unbelievable. It's probably true to say that the modern weight loss drugs, you guys are referred to. of Ozmpic and all that. Yes. It's probably true to say that it's better for most people to be taking it than not taking it. It's damn near a health elixir. I'm not kidding.

I'll get a lot of shit. Come on, that's not typical, let's be honest, right? Usually you mentioned yourself, there's trade-offs with everything. They are trade-offs with Ozimpec. They are trade-offs with a new drug coming out soon called retatertititis trade-offs as well. But actually the trade-offs are diminishing and the positive effects are escalating. And so the trade-offs do exist, but they're massively in the positive favor. If you're obese or just for everyone?

Especially if you're obese, but maybe low doses for most people. Okay. That's great. That sounds pretty great, great, right? So tell us more about that. Yeah, yeah. So if you look through the literature on the effects of these drugs, the primary way by which most of them work is they just reduce your food consumption, so you lose weight, and then the

weight loss kicks off tons of health benefits. But it turns out these drugs have profound anti-inflammatory effects, psychological effects, where they actually make you calmer. They reduce all kinds of noise in your head. not just food noise and can make you less addiction prone. A lot of people quit smoking on these drugs just because I didn't feel like smoking anymore. And tons and tons of benefits, they're still finding every few months more and more benefits of these drugs. The costs are pretty well known and pretty well understood.

Some GI stuff if you take it wrong. Some people just doesn't meld with. Some people actually have increased probability of depression after taking these drugs. That's a little bit more complex because sometimes they kind of the only happy thing in their lives is tasty food and the food doesn't taste the same anymore, and so that happens. But on aggregate, these drugs are super special and magical because they seem to be net beneficial for most people

and especially for people that are overweight. There are new drugs coming out all the time. I would say look into them if you're trying to lose weight because, like, well, they're designed to help you and they're really awesome, use them. That's part one. Part two is you might consider getting a little bit of an education about how nutrition works,

about how physical fitness works. But the best place to get an education for that now is my YouTube channel. I'm kidding. Also, that's fine if you like really weird humor and ball people. Just talk to any AI. I would say Google Gemini is probably the worst

because it's so filtered by social justice warriors that it's actually not even that smart. I use chat GPT from an API. I think it's like drinking from an infinite well of knowledge as the fucking greatest thing that ever happened. Grock, Elon's shit, is awesome. You just talk to Gptis and ask them, like, what should I do?

be eating and how should I be working out in order to get some decent results and help me now that I'm taking this medication. It's going to hook you up like crazy. And so, yes, take the medications. They're amazing. But also, if you really want to make a change, you're not ducking personal responsibility. It's just not going to happen. Figure out what you need to know. Hire a personal trainer. Go look at some websites, download some fitness apps, and make a commitment to yourself to say, I'm going to do this thing. It's not always going to be fun. But putting my pants out in the morning isn't fun. I want to walk around with my dick out. The authorities continue to tell me that's misunderstanding. It's bad. You're going to have to do some not so fun stuff,

but you're going to pay it full work because years and months even later, you're going to look better, you're going to feel better, you're going to be healthier. So yes, Big Pharma's awesome, and it's super, super great that it's coming. In a few years, there'll be even better drugs. Drugs for muscle building are on the horizon. They're already on testing. Wonderful stuff. Yes, to Big Pharma. But a lot of people have this big pharma versus individual. responsibility. It's both. Yes, you can take the drugs and you can go to the store and instead of getting a bag of Cheetos, you can get a bag of apples. I know, the apples kind of suck. You want to look and feel good, feel good, you'd eat the apples for a few months, you feel much better. A few Cheetos here

and there, a few apples. You're in a state of balance. Everything is going really well. Before Mike answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description, head to our substack where you'll see this. What advice would you give someone for the simplest route to break in poor eating and exercise habit cycles. How is training for strength gains different than training for size gains? Now this is a nice surprise. I'm a great fan of Dr. Mike. I hope he talks at Francis into getting on the tea. Oh, geez. Mike, what a pleasure it has been having you on the show. Final question always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

Oh, geez. the coming, I guess so keep it related, the coming era of wonder drugs is already upon us with these drugs. He's not talking about fentanyl. Because that's already. Well, so my favorite drug. And it needs to be Chinese. I need the good shit. You know, I don't need another of this fake stuff.

So there, actually, so there's recently a pain drug that works locally and not system. or so it works on the peripheral nerves and not the brain. And it has similar analgesic pain reduction effects to all the crazy narcotics, but zero of the addictive effects. There's actually no mechanism for you to be addicted to it. And it has almost zero side effects. So Wonder Drugs are coming for pain.

And the idea that people used to use pain drugs and ruin their whole lives from abuse, that is going to be something we look on in probably about 10 years and go, holy shit, we used to feed these to people. This is crazy. Drugs, so AI power drug discovery is just getting,

started and it's going to lead to drugs that do crazy things, exercise my medics. So you take a pill and almost every part of your body responds as if you were exercising for two hours a day. Like muscle drugs to help you build muscle. Why did you look at me like that? You know, you know, build up your muscle a little bit. There'll be drugs for cosmetic effects to tighten up your skin to make you more look youthful. There's going to be drugs for almost every amazing thing that you can't imagine.

are coming because AI could understand things we're barely capable of comprehending and making drugs for them with huge positive effects, very tiny negatives. I think preparing people for a world in which drugs aren't this thing. They're like, I should be taking fewer of them and are more this thing of like, well, are there any drugs that are going to help me achieve what I want that are safe and effective? Looking at it more of as a tool and a utility belt rather than this forbidden thing we shouldn't be taken. Clearly in the 1980s anti-drug stuff, you know, propaganda failed with me. But I think that kind of stuff is going to be here. The good news is we don't have to be talking about it,

because when the amazing drugs come out and all your friends are on them, you're just going to take them and you're going to be like, this is sweet. But better to get to it earlier than later, I guess. Mike, an absolute pleasure. Join us on Subset where we carry on the conversations, and we are going to find out the truth about vaccines in RFK. Zofa asks a great question. How is training for strength games different than training for size games?

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