The Dark Side Of Steroids and The Problem With Deadlifts | Dr. Mike Israetel

you mentioned from personal experience being aware of the dark side of anabolic use what is that how long do you have anxiety like you would not believe every day that I'm on high doses I wake up in the morning afraid of the rest of my day intrusive thoughts I think about violence all the time well if your testosterone is 25 times what it's supposed to be what the hell do you think it's going to make you think about another one is a marked approximate reduction of IQ like now as I talk to you I'm on

contest prop I'm on a considerable dose of anabolics I'm not a smart right now and I can feel it it's this fog an inability to perceive a broad spectrum of positive human emotion I live in a really beautiful area in Michigan and I walk out with this Pond and these trees and I know that I like looking at them but it's a memory to me I go work out every morning and I look at the pond and the trees and I'm like like all I feel is Rage and frustration and anger and anxiety that's my

daily life welcome to another episode of the checkup podcast with Dr Mike today I Dr Mike am excited to welcome Dr Mike to the ccka podcast with Dr Mike no I'm not inviting myself onto my own show I'm talking about Dr Mike isrel a popular YouTube educator but also someone who holds a PhD in sports physiology whether you're looking to start putting on muscle restarting a forgotten regimen understanding the impact of mental health on your fitness journey or on covering the harsh realities of steroid use this conversation covers that and so much more we got

into some topics I truly didn't expect to address but found extremely interesting including the fact that he believes Ai and gene therapy will get us to the point where exercise becomes completely useless what bottom line get ready to get re-energized and educated on how to pack on muscle and why it's actually crucial for your health to do so please welcome the other Dr Mike to the checkup podcast the reason I actually wanted to have this conversation on the podcast is because in the other room right now we have a lawyer waiting to hit you with

a Seas assist for using the Dr mik Insignia across all of your platforms what's that about as there can only be one Dr mik I can't wait for a lawsuit I live in this I live in it I love it Russian Jew versus Russian Jew round one fight you know what I think the way we would skirt out of that is insanely legalistic you are fully spelled out Dr Mike I am Dr mic oh yeah what about all the other ones what other ones there's apparently a lot of other Dr mics out there oh irrelevant

people I don't care about I consider myself the second most important Dr Mike you of course first you know what's funny when I created the doctor spelled out thing I specifically did it in the case of some trademark dispute of someone suing me because I was afraid of getting really well cuz when I first started I had no idea what I was doing in in the digital landscape I still don't I know a little bit more but it's uh it's it's weird because now I have a trademark on Doctor spelled out mik no way I

didn't know that we were just going to get sued if we did that with oops but we have to protect it because people steal your course your merch like if we come out with a merch design a week later it's on websites for sale whoa you're at a very high level of popularity people barely know who I am so we're just going we're just going to in fact a lot of the comments on Reddit when people mention like oh what are your thoughts on Dr Mike they're like not the do right saying that they want

to talk about you instead oh yeah redit are those real people or robots from China and Russia mix nice I I feel like that's true it's a it's a messy place do you ever go on Reddit God no no I have real friends in real life I'm kidding redditors don't do whatever you do on Reddit they might do something they they typically do yeah uh all jokes all the way down of course um Reddit is a combination of an interesting thing it's an insanely amazing place to get crazy aggregate information about really auster topics no

one would ever know anything about and also a place where the uh toxicity of insulam goes quite far very far and you'll get a lot of people with a lot of feelings so to speak and you say something and they're like this this guy's wrong I hate him so I didn't M I didn't know the whole trademark situation like I didn't even come up with Dr Mike um people just started calling me Dr are you also m i mean my so my American legal name is Michael alexandrovich Isel uh in Russia is M alexand is

so it is M I was born M but America in America I'm Mike Michael yeah yeah I I'm still M my paperwork oh wow so I'm not even technically like some of my nurses and staff in the hospital call me Michael but I'm like that's not even my name yeah don't call me that well it's funny because they still do but they don't care yeah you got to rotate your name to preference they're like okay so mik you're like nope that's not either like Mike like nope I don't understand to call you please help today

it's this yeah when you're famous enough you can just rotate names that's true he didy Puff Daddy puff that's a bad reference right now we can't use him anymore I did see that video yeah it's bad video and he put an apology already I don't think you can apologize for something like that that quick he's like my bad what's crazy is I don't know if you saw the this is so off topic but the LAPD no not LAPD la da M put out a statement saying they can't charge him for it cuz it's been over

a certain number of years it makes sense I mean the law is the law I mean it's on camera yeah find a different things to if I ever catch him in an elevator he'll have more fun core cases to yeah absolutely would you fight him uh I wouldn't rule it out I think anyone who who beats women is someone who's can't complain yeah I'd be all right I'd do fine in jail you think so I mean look at my face good God like hello I just want to make an announcement I'm a Russian assassin everyone

kind of moves back a little bit like but I'm friendly everyone moves back a little more like Fair all right well talk to me about your social media Journey because right now you're exploding you're making jokes about my popularity your popularity is higher than it's ever been yeah what do you attribute that to luck pure luck we did bribe the YouTube Team a little bit we're like guys listen tough times out here here's a dollar it was well received yeah it's the intent that matters that's what they said um you know I I I I

it's an interesting question of uh fundamental attribution in science of what where are the sort of principal components responsible for increase in popul ity um I have to say I do have a few hypotheses but nothing I can set in stone if you're interested in hearing them yeah um I think that uh the humor probably goes some way I can't help but put in jokes as you can clearly tell it just it just pops off half of them are dumb the other half are like giggle worthy and 1% of them are hilarious but you know

it's just a law of averages at that point um I'm uh decently educated in sport Science so I know some things and in the fitness industry we have a lot of folks who say things that are just not so true and that uh sat's me at a deep level and so I have to make videos about how clarifying things so I think people find that to be helpful um I walk the walk I'm decently muscular and um bald which I think is important because you're not really seriously into bodybuilding until you lose your hair everyone

knows that um and then the other one I think that is most responsible is let's just be completely honest here today I'm just really goodlook and I mean I'm tall people love that so why is that funny I understand you're smiling uh yes just smiling at how tall I am it's just great to be tall um I think uh on the good-looking part clearly I'm not um one thing my friend Mano hanselman's told me he's a very popular exercise Science Guy uh who's actually one of the best looking people I've I've ever seen you know

I tell myself every day I'm the straightest man alive and when I see meno I'm like just don't know how to make sense of it but um he did say that I have a very unique look which is like something you tell an ugly person to make it okay in their head but I guess I don't look like everyone else on the street um I will be I did walk around New York earlier and people will recognize me and be like oh my God Dr Mike and I'm like I try to duck away and run

usually I'm scared of people but uh I do have an unique look so when you see me on a thumbnail you're like that guy and you see me a couple times you're like all right what does this weird Meathead with this weird muscle head have to say you get in there you learn some things you laugh a little bit and I think that's kind of it I will say though um uh in all due seriousness most of the credit for my YouTube popularity goes to my YouTube Team uh specifically Scott the video guy who accompanied

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

would just be some guy in front of a computer like yelling at the screen but with the team I'm like yeah Dr Mike or whatever not the real Dr Mike Dr Mike the better version oh please the more muscular version I I'll take you up on that I am the 2.0 but I'm like a regression and soft like I like 1.0 better this guy sucks um if you had to succinctly in one sentence say what your mission is on YouTube what would you say to give people the information they need to make better choices about

how to become leaner more muscular and healthier mhm the current state of social media when it comes to Fitness is a disaster your words not mine wait a minute my part of that disaster how dare you I very much stand by it no I think you're leading the way in cleaning up the disaster in fact I just watched your video uh where you discussed uh Dana White's human biologist yes yes as opposed to the non-human biolog we all know love I can't wait for the next person to come out and say they're an ecology major

and they could tell us about the environment how it we need to change it for sure uh I mean whatever you you know what I'm about to say that it's a very messy field with a lot of opinions out there and usually the inaccurate ones are the ones that become very popular because they're contrarian they're dramatic they're extreme for all those reasons that the algorithm loves them yes what's your take on the current state of things do you feel like it's this disaster as much as I do or do you feel differently it's a dumpster

fire but it's a dumpster fire that uh is um declining in magnitude um and things are getting better all the time there is a part of uh the social media fitness space called the evidence-based social media fitness space people like meno henselman Milo Wolf Dr pack um Jeff nippert of course Eric Helms the list goes on but these are the folks that they're following so Jeff actually has an enormous following um and the followings are growing and really really getting better and better it's just one of these things where you look at a a situation

where it's 1% good 99% bad you're like this is hopeless a couple years later it's 4% good 96% bad and you're like this is hopeless but it's a four time increase in the good and so I think eventually you'll get a situation in Fitness where it's much like modern medicine where the preponderance of the information you get is pretty good I don't know maybe I'm stepping out of my lane on that when you're like that's not even true in medicine um but um it's definitely it's that's how I would summarize the situation it's pretty bad

but improving steadily and one thing I will say is and and this is a point of I guess suppose personal pride is I'm really happy to be one of the people that um if an individual wants evidence-based information about how to get leaner and healthier and more jacked there is now a lot of it whereas before 5 10 years ago man you would be looking through accounts all day day to find that and when you get into the YouTube Community cuz the algorithm is so good once you start looking at evidence-based Fitness YouTubers they just

recommend you more and more like ah you're one of these people and then you're just flooded with amazing information now that's if you're looking for it and one of my big contentions said I don't mean this to offend anybody but the vast majority of people are not looking for evidence-based things I mean I have close personal friends of mine members of my family they're only interested in quick fixes they're only interested in One-Shot deals they're not interested in understanding physiology to any depth and so all they want is like what this can I do something

really simple arguably doing almost nothing at all get all the results pay none of the trade-offs no consequences super Etc and if you want to be fooled and to be S oh my god get ready um it's like taking your pockets and putting $100 bills in them walking in Time Square and being like do me up putting your hands above your head you'll get done so where since you mentioned that you're taking a dive into the philosophy side of things as of late what's your take on why people are looking for that quick fix now

more than ever so how pedantic can I be I mean I all in good fun well um I don't think it's clear that it's worse than ever I think in historical times it was probably arguably much worse the average education intelligence and actually as measured IQ of the average human on earth has been steadily increasing over a long time the uh if you talk to the average person in the 1940s you would a level of ignorance that you would find totally baffling the I think the way that we get um maybe convinced that things are

worse than ever is because social media has a reach that's now global down to a person who has only a phone you the average person gets to talk about what they like and vote with their phone more than it used to be so back in the 1980s the major health dissemination of information that would occur would be from Big media and there's people there that vet who they have on and they vet them okay they still charlatans get through but now charlatans get through to people who just have no scientific filter never had they just

never had a chance to express their preferred demand for people so as more and more people are entering the consumer side uh they're not all coming in as scientifically educated people and they're like oh quick fix the other thing is I never fault people ever for wanting and Desiring a quick fix I mean like look at what chat GPT is right now like can't I just ask a super intelligent machine any question in the world to get an answer instantly you like 5 years ago you're like you're an idiot that's nonsense now it's like well

of course it's a thing it's amazing that people want quick fixes because I fully believe that you know 10 to 15 years will have genetically engineered most disease and most aging and everything out of the human population period and and then it'll seem like oh my God what great great easy quick fix like one shot and then over the course of 10 weeks you deage back to 22 they're already doing that in Animals by the way and it's kind of like if people didn't look for quick fixes Innovation would be kind of stifled because if

you tell people look there's no other way to get in shape other than hours a week of resistant training controlling your diet an interesting example here are the modern anorectic drugs like OIC and tepati people are calling them quick fixes and they kind of are thank God they're around thank God somebody developed them and the pharmaceutical companies once they got wind the fact that these drugs are effective and relatively safe they're upping the development of them like crazy precisely because they know people want quick fixes and it's good that they do but there's a very

big distinction to make there is wanting a quick fix and pretending you have one and there's wanting a quick fix in actually getting one the pretending is the bad part the charlatans get in they go oh you want a quick fix huh well here's this makeb belief nonsense we can give you and you're like hey it's working and then 10 weeks later you're like I feel and look the same and my doctor says I'm still dying in my blood work so that's the my thoughts on quick fixes it's great that we want them the big

thing is we have to know as consumers what is really a quick fix what is a more intentional fix that's going to take some time and what is the ucer quick fixes that are supposed to be quick fixes but don't work it's like a luxury car you want a Bentley you know I own 20 Bentley's currently because of the trillions of dollars it's getting annoying like I don't even count the money I don't know how rich I am at this point it's just the numbers are it's difficult to see a number that big cuz I

have to read across M lines % the trillionaire method it's great yeah well no it's 125% up because we upcharge people okay that's how you make the most money you don't give discounts nonsense in any case I can tell you're not a trillionaire but you're close one day one day someday maybe um basically the onus is to get folks to recognize hey look there are people out there that will propose a quick fix to you you got to figure out is this really a quick fix or am I being Bamboozled and it's difficult to do

that without some baseline of Education of expectation and I think that's super important part of why our my channel exists a huge part I think why you're out there on the medical side is to get people to understand like here are the kind of fundamentals of how medicine works so that when people are like hey like Homeopathy you drink this drink and you're good to go like this is not how the body works but if you don't know that hey look why wouldn't you try yeah do you really believe that a quick fix exists for

health and I'll preface it by saying that I don't think this exists because health I feel like is so unique in that the body is very difficult to trick even some of our most miraculous inventions that have extended life antibiotics vaccines while they sound like quick fixes they're so imperfect they have downsides they create new problems so the idea of a quick fix the idea of perfect in healthare or even Fitness largely escapes me as someone who practices medicine do you feel that or do you believe that quick fix is possible is it possible in

the future unequivocally yes um I think genetic engineering will make all of us essentially Flawless to the extent that we would like to be interes um but uh and before that uh pharmaceutical based interventions will get us real close do we have that now no um does everything have trade-offs absolutely so for example OIC and all the related class of drugs the main effects are unbelievable um even the secondary effects like insulin control are amazing do they have downsides yeah oh yeah can you misuse them oh my God yeah is it not the right fit

for everyone oh good God for sure now there's a bit of a difference I think in terminology between a quick fix and a near Panacea that requires some effort so I would say that for most people substantially reducing their body fat and thus body weight substantially elevating their muscle mass and increasing their daily physical activity comes real close to being a near Panacea I don't mean it heals and cures everything but it's a thing that if you have any take any body and reduce their body fat by 20 lbs increase the muscularity by 10 lbs

and get them from walking 3,000 steps a day to 11,000 steps a day you're going to see across the board improvements that are quite radical if you saw those improvements with a drug-based therapy you'd be like dude call fizer holy crap we're trillionaires now it really is a thing but I wouldn't call it a quick fix because it's like well how do I get these benefits like G is you got to train with weights twice a week and you got to walk every day and you can't just throw food down your gullet that just like

shows up on the news feed so not a quick fix but definitely a huge main effect with I would say few downsides there are downsides you can get hurt in the gym wear and tear in your joints opportunity cost uh huge opportunity cost um that's why again as I'm shooting myself in the foot here because I'll be arguing myself out of a job but I think in the future uh non-androgenic anabolics uh eventually with genomic intervention but first with just oral drugs and injectables I think have such a huge potential to increase people's muscle mass

and can competently decrease body fat that they're going to be insanely panace likee as far as General Health is concerned and I think that is going to be a prettyy quick fix now of course they're going to come with their downsides but the thing with downsides and this is something I've been big on trying to say about OIC and the class of related substances people take take a look at a generation of drugs now people think OIC is a first generation it's not it's actually a third generation glp1 Agonist they are now uh have in

the approval process fifth generation drugs like ratri for example every time they do a new generation of drugs they purposefully turn down the negatives and turn up the positives so I think a lot of people when you get something like o comes out and people are like well you know it's got downsides they're completely correct holy crap does it have downsides but some people want to write off the whole thing is like yep none of this is all nonsense you got a diet and exercise and diet and exercise of course is amazing but with further

developments you really start to crank down in the negative so for example today and this is much more up your alley than mine but I don't even know what generation of blood pressure drugs were on it's got to be like eth or nth gen by by this I mean it depends which one specifically for sure but just in terms of like when did they make the first blood pressure the jnc8 guidelines that we use for blood pressure management so it's the eighth generation hey I guessed correctly so a lot of these drugs if you talk

about like side effects and risk profiles and and uh visible and known tradeoffs they're starting to get pretty low now they're not zero but like it's just not true that if you take lysin Pearl or which actually much older drug mline like if you talk to your doct like what are the big downsides well you know like you might have a dry cough for a few weeks like what else it's like that's kind of really it for most people it's not one of those things where the drug has an awesome main effect but disastrous side

effects of modern androgenic based anabolics like testosterone Etc like One does not simply take that people talk about trt a lot testosterone placement therapy it's oh it's so great like if you need it but if you are a poor responder to it I mean your blood lipids go everywhere psychologically it affects you so I think yeah there are no panaceas for sure there are no quick fixes but over time we make the fixes better and better and I think it's good to stay optimistic about that and not get a revulsive attitude to like some people

think like it's drugs of versus lifestyle change it's an additive and often multiplicative effect where it's absolutely lifestyle change is a big deal but there are pharmaceutical interventions that can really really help what about the idea or the notion of our attention span starts dwindling because of innovation everyone's on social media that short form makes our attention span a little bit worse now we're overly prescribing attention deficit disorder medications uh food becomes hyper processed and Hyper palatable we create a medication like a glp1 Agonist um guys want to be stronger they're taking anabolic medications even

when their testosterone levels are within normal limits how long until we're just taking 10 medications to hyper optimize do you feel like that's an acceptable world it's a good way to go not good way to go with your take on it I think it's a great way to go I'm very very pro- Pharma I'm still waiting on the checks from Big Pharma to clear they haven't even showed up believe it or not I think it's an address thing they just don't know where I live they're cutting checks to random people hoping a different doctor you

you're getting the checks I don't really know I'm getting this but fiser just sent me a million dollars um so I am real bullish and really Pro modernity science and pharmacology um uh being pro- pharmacology I think it leaves me as a person who like whatever 30,000 years ago is like Pro fire people are like look Fire Burns things it just killed all those animals in that Forest you're saying we're using it to cook food you must be crazy it's like well yeah it's got serious downsides and it's something that needs to be carefully managed

but in context if you carefully manage it is this huge Boon and over time we can improve things so I do think that two people that are interested uh an increasingly nuanced and effective cocktail of pharmaceutical Therapies can should and will become more and more accessible I think that's a great thing um people who uh are saying like oh you know like all these drugs that were taken like all these pills and I kind of wait for the punch line I'm like so what's bad about that and typically they'll get into just total non sequitors

or fallacies like well they're chemicals like watch this just breathed in I I don't know how many mill how many moles of chemicals every you're made of chemicals everything's chemicals so then they then they try to go okay that's not what I'm saying it's artificial chemicals we got you snake bite is completely natural air conditioning is very artificial still like okay that's actually called the argument from nature it's a fallacy so people say you know just something drugs are kind of bad and he goes I'm totally with you because drugs have at least two downsides

one they have negative side effects that we don't like and two some people who have access to these Mega huge Hammer type of things like Life Center invention better diet better training they look to these drugs which are as yet very imperfect and on sheer laziness to be like I don't want to exercise I'll just take OIC that's a thing I'm sure you're aware of like OIC butt or whatever where Housewives who would no interest in resistance training or building muscularity no interest in controlling their diets or eating healthier they just take a crapload of

AIC and they're like oh I've lost a ton of weight but now I'm sarcopenic um that's definitely a bad outcome but I would say that's more of a slight misapplication of pharmaceutical technology and there is such a thing as proper application and I think in the end we'll have a cocktail of drugs that are increasingly better at doing things increasingly uh lower risks and downsides I think that's a world we want to live in I'm going to say something insanely controversial to my own field here but I very very much stand by it I really

look forward to a world hopefully in the next 10 or 15 years where we no longer have to exercise um exercise is a profound waste of time if you think about it uh when I go to the gym and I physically hurt myself through pain which has great psychological benefits but there's other ways to hurt yourself that also teach you stuff like I would much rather I'm a competitive Brazilian jiu-jitsu athlete I guess I'm not very athletic but it's called a sport um I would much rather just do BJJ and never have to lift weights

because I'd like for the muscle to come from pharmaceutical or genomic intervention purely so I can actually spend most of my time learning how to you know beat up my childhood bullies I'll show them that's why we all do what we do you you uh you're a boxer correct yeah bulli pret to be pretend to of course I mean who's not bullied I think some people got away with just doing the bullying that got to be around maybe but isn't the saying her people her people true you know what uh I actually have looked into

the literature on that and that's actually not true uh people who are bullies typically are not the people who had been bullied elsewhere they're actually just the people that bully and the people are getting bullied are typically the people that get bullied in a variety of circumstances in their lives kind of a Trippy realization there's Nuance to that of course but um it is it's it's a very uh easy to say like oh well just that's just a person who's been hurt by others like nope that guy's just a piece of crap and he's just

been hurting people his whole life yeah some people need humbling right but uh I do I do look forward to a world in which we don't have to spend time AR very artificially exercising so that we can do amazing things with our bodies like go skiing go hiking play with our children and have the health benefits of exercise endemic to our very DNA or to through really really good pharmacology you take two or three pills a day you're good to go in laboratory animals they have already an exercise pill or works great rats and mice

you take the pill and it just does everything exercise does for you short of a few things but almost all of them and if you think about it like how's that possible well what do you think exercise is doing how is it beneficial it's really just accessing various molecular Pathways and turning them up and turning others down you can do that with a pill and if you did what exactly is so wrong about that and then people get into the philosophical part of you should have to earn it which I just don't I don't really

I understand where that's coming from but I wildly disagree with it um what you have to earn is your income what you have to earn is the respect of other people do you have to earn a good body if that's the case you know some people I'm sure you know people that are just in damn good shape just cuz is there something they're missing in life because they didn't have to struggle another I would say no but in a sense it is yes because it's like some amount of struggle is insanely healthy for your psychology

cool but there's so many ways to get struggle in life I would rather spend less time exercising and more time challenging my my brain with new ideas that's real struggle more time doing MMA and BJJ that's also real struggle more of an opportunity for me to have free time with my family so that I challenge myself in interpersonal relationships to be the better version of me there are many many ways to struggle if you think of problems as really good things I totally agree but if we get rid of as many problems as possible with

pharmacology we have more bandwidth for the other problems that are left over because like every time I'm in the gym lifting weights I'm not working on my familial actions I'm not working on my brain they're only 24 hours in a day if Pharmacology can handle more of those things for us I would think that's just an unbelievable beautiful thing I think it's very idic um I think when people get more time in a day generally speaking they're not going to the majority of people are not going to make the time to say oh well since

I'm not challenging my body now in the gym I'm going to challenge it by reading something or pushing my knowledge it's going to be chasing some sort of high some sort of happiness where exercise can give that to someone through struggle versus if you can remove the struggle and still get the benefit the way that you're going to seek happiness might not be as idealic as oh I'm going to continue challenging Myself by doing X Y and Z I think that's definitely true for a lot of people I would I would posit that the vast

majority of people who go and exercise are already the people that are going to Seek challenge and other things in their lives and the people that are the the kinds that would just take the easy way out they don't work out to begin with so if you have someone who is driven enough to go to the gym and do something when you say hey here's this pill you don't have to go to the gym anymore they're going to look around and go what how else can I challenge myself my wife is a perfect example of

this um she needs to challenge herself she um got a really extensive medical education she's actually a a board-certified sports medicine doctor and once she finished her medical education you know we're doing super super well in life we moved to a new place and she wasn't sure if she wanted to continue her medical stuff and she tried like a few weeks of as was just being like Rich dude's housewife or whatever it just didn't work she was like at the end of the two weeks she was like ah she like took on 10 different work

responsibilities to fill the void of having to push herself I think the people that go to the gym all the time that void isn't going to be replaced by scrolling it's going to be replaced by other forms of challenge now there's still another group of people people who they're not into the challenge thing you challenge them and they're like is there any way I could just not do this they're not the people you typically see in the gym because I think in our world we think of people as people work out blah blah blah but

well maybe not in your world because the medical field you guys typically like you should be working out and almost no one doesn't so you know very very well that a lot of people it's real hard to get them to challenge themselves at all you you would hope they go exercise they're just not interested in it so I think precisely the people that were worried about taking away their exercise and they no longer have way to challenge themselves I'm pretty convinced those people will find a way to challenge themselves but still other group of people

they're not in the gym their health is in a real bad spot they're not interested in them challenging themselves already so it's kind of like the two groups are rather separate yeah I feel like I function in a different world than most doctors who are on social media medical doctors you take someone like Dr Peter AA who uh has a lot of Knowledge from Academia from personal anecdotes studies that he's run unofficially with his patients and I say that because a lot of the stuff that is being recommended as protocols is experimental like we don't

have evidence-based trials for those things yeah Cutting Edge also has a great haircut I understand why you say that um and the way he practices medicine is through a concierge model charging over $100,000 per month having unlimited time with patients the hell am I doing with my life this is um not the world I function in I work at a community health Center where the medicine I prescribe to my patient could be the cheapest medicine ever but if I prescribe capsules instead of tablets they can't afford to get it so the world of the person

that wants to crush it in the gym and Hyper optimize to me is like this outlier example very outlier that the people that are going to benefit from this pill that will then continue on challenging themselves is in the not even in the tenth of a decimal point percentage wise maybe so I I I wonder how it's going to impact the general population of who ultimately I end up seeing because something that you talked about on some of your podcasts is when a patient comes in to see a doctor why doctors are not great at

delivering information about diet exercise why do they run to the pill that's like the the quick example that most people say doctor just pushed the pill on me yeah and and some of the things you pointed out were true doctors don't have a lot of time they might uh want to take a shortcut there's also the idea of the patient wanting to quick fix that uh Pharmaceuticals work so great I want to debunk that notion right now Pharmaceuticals suck blood pressure meds they're better than ever before they pale in comparison to the change I can

make in a patient's blood pressure with diet and exercise like the the levels aren't even close if I want to lower my patient who has diabetes their hemoglobin A1c to be in a level of control the amount of change I can make by lowering their weight by helping them exercise maybe changing their intake of food certain nutrient wise is huge maybe the only way I can get that drastic amount of A Change Is through insulin but anything else yeah a lot of downsides there too but right but with nothing else will come close to the

amount of change like starting met Foreman maybe I can get their hemoglobin A1c down by 1.5 and that's tiny in comparison to what most people need when they're oh yeah in really like uh the stage of diabetes where they're having side effects where they're having Vision issues feet issues uh cardiovascular issues so Pharma is not nearly as idic in my world a lot of it is very problematic then you get medications that are starting to show promise like the oics The glp1 Agonist the manjaros they are better but then access becomes a disaster where patients

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

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

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

and the mind exists with homeostasis that when we create the Pham meds that will be the new Fountain of Youth they're going to create some sort of huge push back effect that maybe the people you've talked to in the past can't verbalize well that they're saying it's negative it's chemical it's harmful they can't really verbalize it but there is always a huge bounceback negative reaction to when we make a breakthrough do you think or do you worry about that at all when it comes to these medications it's just a real thing whether or not I

think or worry about it you're completely correct it's definitely a thing um it's a very interesting point you bring up that I've been giving some thought to lately of maybe one maybe one of the proximate causes of the increase in anxiety uh in modern countries that are super safe and there's no real actual reason to be anxious is because I think the human brain has a baseline level of expecting the world to suck and problems to surface and when you don't have problems your brain starts looking for them because it's pre-programmed to look for them

I mean in the Paleolithic era in which we evolved I mean it was just Terror it was a survival benefit to have gigantic carnivorous Birds would pull you away from the campsite and kill you it's just a regular thing um one of the reasons that a human psychological Universal is that people dream of and are scared of monsters is because monsters used to be real like pesty megap just like why is a tiger that big why is that bird 9 ft tall and eats meat so we're programmed for a world that's generally like orders of

magnitude more terrible in every conceivable way than our modern world and what our modern world is amazing uh people almost don't accept the Matrix program sort of they're looking for problems and anxiety is kind of your brain's way of being like something's wrong I got to fix something that's definitely thing I'd say a couple things about that one is that's a different kind of problem and a much better problem if you ask me Mike where do you want to live a world like do you want to live in Taiwan where everything's almost perfect but you

have an anxiety problem you got to see a therapist about or do you want us to send you to North Korea where you will not have anxiety and everything will make total sense but it's Terror every day that you wake up and go to sleep I'm going to Taiwan thank you so much it's a problem it's not a perfect fix but now we can do this thing where we zoom in on the problem okay we have fixed uh running water we fixed uh you know longevity medicine Etc most people live into their 70s and 80s

short of getting hit by a bus or some other thing now what's the problem okay we have an anxiety epidemic totally how do we address that one is therapy one is relations one is challenging yourself with difficult things all the time one is uh going on your own journey of mindfulness and management and things like that which are all great another one is is drugs and if our brains are designed for the pestene time this is a a funny controversial incoming idea through a a combination of pharmacology and eventually genomics uh why don't we re

architect our brains um why don't we genetically engineer humans to become more rational more calm more positive and less anxious at face value just that how you live your life um because now that we have this amazing modern world where calm logical things are kind of the way you do things and get results you don't have to have a fight ORF flight response anymore why don't we genetically engineer the fight ORF flight response generally down significantly and genetically engineer up just a calm level of Happiness all the time I think Pharmacology can do that very

jedly right now these things are getting better and so I think there are kind of two options one is we Tred to become more Primal and discard the benefits of the modern world like liver King like liver King a known non- liar who's also not on steroids uh some people are just colored red and it's like a Dr Seuss book some people are blue some people are red delivery k um his nickname was poly cemia that's right it's a long Nick before before get over here um so we can think of discarding the modern world

and all of its beautiful things I'm not interested in living living in a discarded modern world and actually no one is either um a lot of video games today seem to be based on like a post-apocalyptic world you don't want to live in a post-apocalyptic world because very mundane things are very bad um it's gray you know you've got your beautiful woman with long hair it's not brush she's in the Raw handin hand you're going slaying dragons with your sword it's awesome then you stub your toe and get an infection now where is the factory

that makes antibiotics doesn't exist anymore we don't have modernity you die the most terrible ganger death you can't even imagine prehistory was awful in almost every respect but in that awful time we generated a consistent amount of deep meaning we were made for that awful world so while things are awful they make sense and every day you wake up with purpose you have to have purposes everything's trying to kill you all the damn time so uh I don't want to discard anything I want to keep all the mity all the Wonder all the drugs see

the problems they're creating a secondary tertiary quatron effects and address those one at a time by improving the medicines yes going to genomic interventions and also just working on the problems with therapy uh exercise exercise is a solution to a problem we didn't used to need exercise because you were on the farm every day in 1880 exercise is nonsense you know exercise generally was kind of born in the late 1900s like almost all sports were born in like 1890 basketball and stuff was invented then because people had leisure time for the first time ever and

this crazy to say generally just didn't have it so exercise is one of those Solutions lifting in the gym is one of those Solutions we didn't lift in the gym primordially it's a great solution what I'm saying is taking that next step yeah the gym was great for 15 years now we take that next step of eventually genomic intervention such that you know you take some kind of I I I got in trouble with genomic people for saying viral Vector because they're like viruses actually are kind of dog at vectoring it's like whatever kind of

vector is side of my scope and um you know after a few weeks you notice like it was kind of getting a six-pack after a few more weeks you just have ripped ABS you eat whatever you want and that's how it works we know it's possible it works in animals some people walk around with those genetics that doesn't just affect the body you can get genomic interventions that affect the mind I mean a vast amount of depression is hugely genetically caused why not engineer that out I think we're trending towards a world which I think

is going to be here much sooner than people expect because progress is exponential in which we not only are we super super healthy and psychologically and physically with nothing except genetic intervention that lasts forever uh once you get the fix that's just your DNA but we look at that problem differently and we look back on our history and go man people used to have to spend 12 hours at the gym a week to do this holy crap I think that better world is incrementally and slowly coming and the paranoia in some sense about social social

media is destroying us all social media is perhaps one of the most wonderful things that has ever occurred I met my wife through social media if I if we didn't have social media I would have had to like marry someone from the Metro Detroit area like no offense people are great there but I would have never met the love of my life and so much good stuff happens that here's another thing that humans do we're problem Seekers because in our ancestral environment if you weren't a problem Seeker you were dead the next day and so

we kind of went things get good we kind of go yeah yeah okay fine they fix that but this side effect is the big crazy thing now dope let's fix that too as we fix more and more things the world becomes better and better and better over time and eventually we can change the very makeup that we have I obviously way outside the scope of the discussion I think we're going to fuse with machine intelligence sooner or later and all that crazy Ray CWI type of Singularity stuff I think it's inevitable but on the way

there we have to I think admit two things one is things used to suck and two things are getting better and we will continue to make things better they are imperfect and some of our Solutions have had some side effects that sometimes rival the scope of the problem itself but we can make that better and that better and that better so I tend to look at it not from an optimistic perspective I don't think a realistic perspective things get better all the time anyway I mean what year would you want to be alive if not

2024 you're very optimistic I I would so thank you so much that's the thing I think you are very optimistic and I'll point out a couple things please things get better well what's your measuring stick for things have gotten better because there's certainly ways we can say certain things have gotten better but like lifespan has been steadily rising and now has suddenly taken a downturn happiness especially for kids after 2012 I just had uh Dr Jonathan hey in the chair where you're sitting who's pointing out a hockey stick graph that just shows the most dramatic

spike in mental health illness in our children above the age of 12 13 after puberty especially in teen girls where it's like did things get better for them their world like I know you're comparing and you're saying would you like to live in a world where the anxiety is the problem or a world where you're under Terror under this terrible regime and it's easy to downplay and say anxiety you're physically much safer whereas under that regime you're actually much worse but when you're a child with depression and anxiety that world does not seem that great

yeah so like our perception of the problem is nearly as important as the problem itself and currently the level of unhappiness even with all this amazing outcomes of safety and social media connecting all of us all those problems have gotten worse so like the thing like I guess it's like what are you benchmarking as your progress with Innovation cuz if it's happiness that's not going up if it's length of life that's not going up what's the Benchmark for the optimism I say almost everything has been getting better over time um in very modern countries there

has been in some metrics a flatlining and some regression but we're just picking these metrics randomly so for example child death due to disease like an 8-year-old who just gets leukemia and like 1982 we ain't got nothing for you that is just dropping like crazy um so when we zoom into a problem specifically uh early teenage depression anxiety specifically for females more than males we zooming into this very serious but microcosmic problem versus all of the problems we used to have and because we're very problem oriented it seems like well look this is bad yes

but everything else has gotten so much better 98% of things have gotten better 2% of things have regressed significantly but we have so much B with to address those now so I would say almost every metric is things are getting better over time and for people in the developing World things are skyrocketing getting better you go to India every 10 years it's unrecognizable m in a real serious way I mean their environment is improving over there in a real serious way because they're just not polluting like they used to back in the day it gets

better all the time so yes there are still problems and some things are getting worse but now we have bandwidth to address those things and what do we have now ai high power drug Discovery is just taking off and they're just like the Google Deep Mind has just signed contracts with all the major pharmaceutical corporations to develop drugs and the drugs we'll have in 2030 are going to make current drugs seem like like bloodletting more or less and then they can actually engineer out anxiety depression another thing is uh my libertarian as side is showing

through you can always just not engage with social media I still haven't seen a law where they make you go on Facebook and Instagram so some people who vociferously complain about social media on social media It's Curious interaction you can always put your phone down and go walk around the thing is people say they get like really addicted to their phone that's definitely a problem it's a one hell of an attention inspiring device but also people are really good at acclimatization I mean scrolling on Tik Tok is fun until it's not fun until the next

day you scrolling it's the same dancing idiots F this you throw your phone away and then you go look at the Sun or whatever enjoy nature whatever we're supposed to be doing what hpth who yeah who's doing that who's throwing away their phone and going out looking at nature you never would hear about them because they're not on social media to talk about it how's that for a contradiction well I think that would be true but if we look at statistics of like what time kids are spending screen time it it's just going up and

up and up I like that I'm I'm very Pro screen time and what we're seeing actually when the kids are going through puberty with screen time as opposed to Jonathan height says this very well he talks about the difference between a play based childhood and a phone phone based childhood and he talks about when you're going through puberty and a child is on a phone their development is heavily stunted because of the lack of interaction with risk because the risk that you have outside playing on a on a I forgot the parents engineered that way

parents do not want risk abolutely yeah IDE want zero risk well you also want a world with no exercise totally so you want no risk either oh so I don't have it's not the risk problem with exercise that I don't like it's the time problem just a eight hours a week of just doing this and looking in the mirror which I like to do but most people think it's a huge waste of time then again essay like look writing an essay takes work right if you're trying to develop the ideas in your mind and that

process is really beneficial can we agree on that yeah yeah but it's a huge time waste you could have chat GPT write it sure so do you go that way say why would you waste your time writing an essay just let chat GPT do it I'd say the more we can offload more intellectual problems to AI the better because it leads to one possible world a world in which we no longer have any intellectual problems because the more AI does our intellectual work for us the more it frees us up to do other intellectual work

AI is not doing so for example battling your own demons in your head AI can't help you with that yet you can get your turn paper done for you but it can't like figure out why your dad said that thing to you you were eight years old and you still can't make sense of it now you have more time for that then you work on that eventually AI can help us with that eventually we're in a world where AI has solved almost all of our problems and then that's Paradise by the way and something that

we think we shouldn't take for granted is that compared to our ancestral World today's world is nonsensically paradisical I mean my God look at what we're doing I can't even describe imagine Thomas Jefferson came back not zombie version you know couple zombie behaviors he still likes to eat flesh but he's he's making sense mhm explain to him what you do for a living good luck like well I'm on social media he's like what's that you're like oh I got to explain network computing to him good God we live in a world that's insanely amazing in

such a way that just difficult to comprehend the world of the future is going to be even more amazing the road to that amazing world is full of potholes there are fewer and smaller between as we go but they are here's a really good example used to be the most proximate problem arguably short of getting enough water to drink was starvation I mean humans are designed to get obese almost every one of us because like there was never a top- down limiting factor to that you just we not exposed to an environment okay this is

too much food um nowadays our poorest Americans our poorest Europeans our poorest non-communist country Asians are the fattest people can you tell a king from the 1600s like he like sees a person in the street he's like that guy must be rich like actually he's not rich well sorry by your standards he's way richer than you Mr King but he's the poorest of our people like how come he's fat well because we've basically solved food production as a problem basically solved um it is just I will debate this into the ground food insecurity has been

defined into absurdity in in the modern literature such that in one of the questionnaires for food insecurity if in the last year you weren't sure where your next meal was 100% coming from you're labeled as food and secure but when people are both both obese and food insecure you got to wonder what the definitions look like the solution of hunger occurred in the in the modern world in the last 50 years slow clap everyone where are the ticker tape parades they don't exist why because the solution saved billions of people from starvation but it made

a bunch of us fat huge downside exercise was born to counter that healthy food at supermarkets was born YouTubers that inform people about how to access health were born and of course modern anorectic drugs and future other drugs that will make you healthy these are smaller problems but they're real problems they will have to demand Solutions of their own but because we're not all starving to death we got plenty of time to solve those problems so what I'm saying is I don't even I would not call myself an optimist typical insane Optimist right um I

would call myself a realist again typical insane insane person uh in reality things are getting objectively better over time in a grand way but not all of them in some of the benefits are starting to have downsides but now we have more bandwidth to address those downsides so four children that are having trouble growing up without sufficient challenge now we know that now what do we do about it we have one hell of an arsenal we have data science statistics tons of people that want to help psychotherapists and perhaps a movement to be like hey

you know what like let's make sure all the bouncy surfaces on playgrounds are safe get the kids out of the house and get them playing around clearly as our brains were supposed to develop an evolution kids need some effing challenge for the love of God maybe it requires a little bit of regression in one way or another I don't think it requires two things I don't think it requires a regression in all of modernity and I don't think it requires pessimism some people like social media is just terrible no it's not social media is unbelievable

but it's not perfect can we make it more perfect oh hell yeah and by the way social media is going nowhere it is universal it is ubiquitous and everyone wants more of it into the screen time thing I said earlier I think the screen is just one of the pathways so it used to be that we watched the real world and that was fun enough then at the beginning of wealth accretion and 5,000 years ago we started the rich people started to get theaters where people would uh simulate reality for them eventually we got televisions

I notice the screen is getting closer to the face now then we got the iPad the cell phone VR goggles I think the contacts are coming at some point in the late 2020s early 2030s and then just direct brain machine interface so you get reality reality streamed right to you the screen is going to go in our brains sooner or later amazing because you can just get any media from any part of the world ever currently there are multiple Wars going on and for the first time ever we have realtime assessments of battle damage of

Civilian casualties I mean back in World War II it take you months to news were like man today US troops did XYZ and took eoa nowadays it's just like the the next hour you receive the news it's amazing the world is so aware everyone in the world is waking up to what's really going on which by the way might cause a little bit of depression in the 1950s you could live a pretty idyllic life having no idea what was going on in the Korean Peninsula now you turn on the 24-hour not even cable news you

go to YouTube news you go to Reddit and you see real battle video of people getting blown up oh my God you have to see the real world but it's a real world so far away from you your idic existence is no longer possible if you're accessing social media and you want the bad stuff but that's now like I'm saying a smaller problem a more tractable problem eventually we can grow up as a society we can become more intelligent we can become more even keeled we can process what we see better we can reduce rates

of depression and everything will get better over time it's a bumpy road but what I would say is let's not reverse the course let's deal with the problems as they come and fix them social media is here to stay it's unbelievable gaming here to stay it's unbelievable by the way I caught your the healthy gamer interview situation with Artic medicine I was like punching punching the air I was like get him get that Artic nonsense no offense well what's funny is he actually debunks a lot of it himself thank God so yeah thank God I

was like oh my God is he really a proponent of this but uh so I I I think that we want to continue progress understanding that progress is usually imperfect and when it's imperfect we address the imperfection instead of rolling back the stuff yeah I'm not a fan of rolling back this stuff either I'm I'm also talking heavily from a devil's advocate point of view by all means of course the the way the exponential rate of change that you talked about I think is speeding up fair to say when newspapers came out there were some

naysayers that it would disconnect us theater then radio then television television oh my God so all those negative things happen uh and then the time in between each one of those intervals is becoming shorter and shorter and that's to me the part of this that's the concerning part because when television came out we had time to start figuring out how to regulate it right we would put ratings on movies and televisions we'd give doctors recommendations to give to patients as pediatricians here's how many hours I do no one ever listened to that anyway no one

did but I way we put some checks and balances in movie theaters with ID whatever um now social media came out now we have even less time now ai is coming out so are we truly like the problems that you're talking about that come as a result of these new technologies do we actually have adequate time to address those problems before the next thing is moving that quickly because it feels like we could easily be left behind in this modernity world where we're just like Innovation above all and I get really nervous about that because

we haven't even like the previous problem and we're already on to the next Innovation and I'm like oh man we're leaving folks behind especially when it comes to like the economic challenges of it all sure it's a very valid concern the pace of change is exponentially quickening so you're like holy crap like humans are just going to be these dumb Apes that just don't understand anything sooner or later um I think that this is a very tractable problem I think that AI is the greatest invention that ever was it is very close to True maturation

but it also there's not really such a thing as maturation because you know they're talking about the idea of artificial general intelligence something comparably intelligent to a human is when do we break through that it used to be you know you familiar with the Turing test like so Turing test was um Alan tring is more or less the father of computing said that like a machine is as intelligent as a human if through like some kind of interface maybe a type interface if you ask it questions and you can't tell what's a machine and what's

a human pass the training test so GPT 4 blew the Turning test out of the water already you can't tell what's if it's a machine you can cuz it's really nice to you and other people wouldn't be that nice no I can still tell like someone asked to come on the YouTube channel like I can be a great guest and uh I even have some titles ready to go and he sent me titles I'm like dude you sent these on chat gbt how did you know you could tell but you're not the average person uh

the Turing test was designed for the average person and so you know a computer scientist could be like ask if the following series of equations like oh it doesn't understand that because we haven't programmed that in that's for sure but so machine intelligence is exponentially increasing and right now it's uh Almost surpassing Human abilities now in many other ways it already has like computers have been better at math for God and intractably so like there's no way we catch up to them uh in around the year 2029 to 2030 they're just going to be better

at everything than us and then as they escalate beyond that into the 2030s The Leverage to which they can help us with problems becomes almost impossible to understand how powerful that is to us trying to solve our problems today with our average human Global IQ of 98 or 97 what ever it is um a lot of things seem really deeply troubling and deeply confusing to an AI that is 10 times smarter than us so like the average smart person as measured on an IQ scale is like one and a half times smarter than everyone else

but that's a lot right when AI is 10 times smarter than us it's going to be able to contextualize and understand problems in a way that we can't even comprehend about four years later it'll be a hundred times smarter than us about two years after that a thousand times and about a year after that a million times its leverage to help us with problems is going to grow to what us seems like Infinity but what does that do for us well the machines can help us with problems that we seem to not have bandwidth for

its bandwidth our bandwidth is like this it stays about like this because we're about as smart as we were about as smart 50 years ago and so like all these complexities are increasing and we're like holy crap how do we make sense of this don't worry the is going to make sense of it for you and then give you very easy to understand very digestible chunks it's going to talk to you like a human being would like um imagine like an amazing teacher talks to a four-year-old uh they're not going to throw technical terms at

them they're going to keep it real simple but all with their best interests in mind I think AI is going to let us do things like develop unbelievable drugs that solve entire swas of problems uh cure all disease straight up all of it like pathogens real stupid if you're betting AI versus like bacteria I'm betting AI is going to quash that all the way through think about this let's talk about the problem of predation against humans how big of a concern are lions and crocodiles to human subpopulations I mean nominal it's a joke we could

actually kill all predators today like could put out an edict no more Lions boom you just shoot all the lions there are no more Lions allons used to just terrorize the living crap out of us they're a solve problem with our level of intelligence AI because it's exponential is going to solve swats of problems we can't even comprehend the deeper Solutions this is real trippy but uh the deeper Solutions are when AI allows us to take medicines and also starts to alter our DNA willingly of course it's not going to impose it on if you

want the same DNA as always and you want to get psychiatric problems from an iPad super please continue but it can alter your DNA such that your perception of things improves um there is no reason that human intelligence can't be altered at a genetic level you may be able to take a pill or an injection that over the course of several days after like things become much clearer and easier to understand I've personally gone through this because I was medicated for indes deficit disorder when I was a 14-year-old I'll never forget the day that I

took my first pill of Aderall 5 Mig and the day before mathematics seemed to be totally intractable to me like just nonsense that I just wasn't smart enough to figure out and the day I showed up for class um I looked in the board and the teacher was asking people how to solve equations and I was like I know the answer to that answer correct I was like okay I know the answer to that correct I just did it I walked up to my teacher at the end of class math class that I was failing

and I don't mean failing like a 59% I was getting like a 33% like 16% something baffling I was like I'm going to be your best student and the guy was like okay kid like really and then I was Etc and so I know how it feels to get an exponential boost in at least um actionable intelligence like I was always decently smart but when you have enough attention deficit like you actually can't string enough thoughts together to make sense of the world put your sense making onto paper that will be accessible to all of

mankind I believe in the 2030s and then all of a sudden all of the psychiatric problems you see they just disappear because everyone is insanely well adjusted and then total brain scans and we all live in the cloud then people don't die anymore and then when you have access to a total brain scan you can start pulling apart various features of your personality and replacing them with others you can re architect human motivation like for example little off color but nonetheless sex drive like I you know I'm saying I see some people people that are

attractive I'm like oh my God why am I thinking about that I have a wife what am I doing if I could just not have the eyes that do this with attractive females wouldn't that be great in the future you'll be able to engineer that entirely out of your brain such that you never experience it again then the question becomes what do we do then we're not sufficiently intelligent to answer that yet but we will be so as a very very extended super ultra too long of an answer Ai and modern Technologies are going to

take all of these current pretty nasty problems that they have with this transition and they're going to make those problems become instantly easily solvable Solutions down the line wow I'm very much more pessimistic than you are about all these things sure which is cool because look I could be wrong about all this and we need to tread carefully but I think careful treading into the direction of solving problems I think you and I can come together on this we want to solve problems yeah of course right and so pessimistic side is good optimistic side is

good whatever intersection we have of real solutions comes out of that amazing I think that sense I I just think when we get overly confident that like with science we have all the answers like the idea of getting rid of predators right like oh yeah we can get rid all lions and all alligators but is that good for us like oh man we just destroyed an ecosystem that's going to destroy this ecosystem and now we don't have functional we destroyed this bacteria like we were innovating creating viruses because we want to innovate and then the

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

really giving some pause before jumping to that new innovation to that shortcut oh yeah because the longer we can hold off on taking the shortcut the more reasonable we can be much in the same way when something miraculous comes across our social media feed where it's like oh this is the miracle this is the trick that I need if you just pause for a second just that pause before you share is going to help control whether or not that misinformation spreads and affects you huge now that's super valid I think everyone could do with a

little bit of calm reasoning about problems rather than like oh my God this is the worst thing ever oh my God this is a panace and it's the greatest thing ever totally but I'll say another thing AI so the real big one of the real big maybe the most proximate problem we have is we're just not smart enough AI is fixing that problem in a big Way by being insanely smart and AI can do a lot of filtering and sorting for us such that it does the heavy lifting of being very reasonable and managed so

now I go man I want to take this drug to boost my XYZ I go to chat GPT and go is this a good idea and it presents me with a list of trade-offs and I'm like holy thank you you just saved me like I don't know like 80 years of Google searching for that and uh to quote Sam Alman uh paraphrasing him gp4 in several years will be laughably embarrassingly stupid leveraging increasing exponential machine intelligence is going to solve problems such a rapid pace for us that yes it's going to create sub problems but

then it solves those sub problems too um I think AI is best seen as a transformative event like electricity or like the internet but an order of magnitude more powerful think about what the internet did for the world you imagine the world without the internet I mean holy crap well I mean people have Nostalgia for that world without the internet those people are categorically delusional because they typically Express that Nostalgia on the internet you won't have anybody to talk to about that if it wasn't for the internet now of course internet has would you a

lot of so loneliness how many people are less lonely because of the internet more people are lonely maybe it depends on how you measure loneliness a lot of these the happiness and loneliness there's a lot of artifact there our self-referential understanding of how we feel is always because humans are always on a honic treadmill sure a lot of this is questionnaire based how happy do you feel you've never been to the 1950s you go to the 1950s you be like this is Terror where is my flushing toilet where is XYZ where is my smartphone Google

for example Google Now the gpts are just like answers in your pocket in the 1980s you wanted to learn something where did you go the public library this vast swass of things were just simply out out of touch now it's cool to have Nostalgia about it but Nostalgia Works an interesting way people typically remember the good things of which there are some also accessible anytime you want if you don't want to talk to people on Facebook you just don't that most people don't choose that my parents are not on social media look they think it's

fine not to be on social media but you know it's Different Different Strokes for different folks so people don't remember the downsides uh as it's actually called pessimistic bias people have a tendency to paint the past as rosy and beautiful and the present is terrible and the future is just calamitous but that is another expression of our wildly outdated instinctual idea about things are Baseline bad because they used to be they're not things are Baseline unbelievable now they don't seem unbelievable to us which is also kind of good because we use that impetus to solve

problems unfortunately it also causes anxiety and all these things but I think that as we go through we're going to solve more and more problems we could have the next 5 years could be existentially like a little tougher for a lot of people because now so many problems are solved it's kind of easy to lose meaning I mean here's another interesting prediction hopefully age as well we're on the cusp of the birth of birth of what I call Universal robotics um humanoid robots and M and uh um robots that live in data centers not embodied

that will do the vast majority of work for Humanity it's inevitable it'll happen in the 2030s it's going to be insane for every human there'll be 10 or 20 humanid robots everyone's going to have servants on the one hand oh my God the stock market's going to do that every single homeless person will have a caretaker robot that keeps an apartment for them goes to work on their behalf what timeline are you talking about on this by the way early 2030s you think every homeless person is going to have a robot caretaker in in modern

Western countries uh yeah uh so there's a question of policy uh will that be possible uh almost categorically yes uh possible like technologically and economically feasible versus like will government regulation so like to your point about the California bathroom problem entirely invented by misapplication of Regulation MH also because people aren't that smart and they fall for fallacies most people for example in government in um housing policy so why is New York real estate so expensive it's it's completely artificial completely artificial government policy New York real estate has to be no more expensive than real estate

anywhere else you should be able to buy real estate in New York in a truly uh properly regulated free market economy for exactly the price you could get in anywhere else or very very close we would have a lot more skyscrapers to try getting a building permit in New York it's artificially cause problem so for homeless people getting their own Rob robots to take care of them uh very tractable problem I estimate in about 10 years you I could be wrong by 5 or 10 but I I don't think I'm wrong by 50 or 60

years and so it's in the mid 2030s it's totally feasible that every homeless person is not homeless anymore by the way as a society and as a city we all have absolutely the resources to just flat out get rid of homelessness any time uh entirely again a political problem not a not a practical problem so once we have humanoid robots and various other robots to take care of everything we need and they go to work for us they invest our stocks for us they take care of every single problem um on the one hand Paradise

definitely on the other hand short of the uh genomic interventions I was talking about or a great deal of talk therapy or really re reexamining your life and your purpose mindfully I mean where does your purpose come from a lot of human purpose is derived from work shown time and time again if you have a meaningful career you're good if you don't hey you know retired people people talking about exercise why exercise is so psychologically healthy totally you need some damn struggle uh when robotics comes in if genomics is lagging behind we're going to have

some tough times of a very trippy problem of it's so good that it's bad uh but I think that's a short-term problem and we need to be aware that it's going to happen and maybe kind of get ready for that sort of thing but I think in the end all of those problems are just kind of pale in comparison or get uh get solved and fixed and put away and we look forward to other problems I mean there are much bigger problems in the world than everything we're dealing with right now so for example um

how many black holes are in our close to us environment that just swallow up the Sun and just we're all gone we have no idea we are children to the universe we know almost nothing we desperately need AI to promise US that tomorrow is going to be a real day instead of the Sun turning into a black hole and you're like oh we I was supposed to be a Tuesday I was supposed to go to work half the sun is gone hell am I supposed to do so uh all the problems are still there but

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

state of nature but now we're like okay I know that I can Uber Eats anything I want from any global Cuisine anywhere ever at all time for a nominal fee but like my kid's 12 and she's having a lot of trouble on social media they'd be like what the hell is social media you're like oh yeah it's this thing that's coming it's amazing but it's got some downsides let's work on getting the downsides going and I would say not catastrophize the downsides yeah it's terrible that some kids are having a hard time no here's the

thing other kids who are well adjusted to social media they having a grandiose time another thing I don't know if Jonathan height mentioned is there's a specific generational thing with children who have a problem on social media it's kids from I forget which generation it is JZ uh is it jenz uh the new generation they're actually really well adjusted to social media because they grew up with it like Facebook and Instagram was a real shocker to middle school kids I mean can you imagine did you have social media in middle school no I didn't I

oh my gosh first of all I would have canceled myself about 100 thousand times I used to say on social media and also like the the popularity contests The stalking of people I mean it was just just a disaster thank God you and I didn't get social media even even worse for us so for a fraction of kids it affected not so well uh on the uh in on the extremes and the aggregate it's fine but some problems um well I don't think that's I'd stand born about by the evidence uh maybe maybe I'd have

to take another look at that by the general it's caused a lot of harm in in kids and I'm talking specifically me upsides as well or just measuring highs yeah the upsides are are very limited actually and this is coming from someone who's very Pro social media and wants to figure out a way to work but for specifically for developing Minds The the apps that because like we talk about social media and this Grand concept of like the internet but really there's like three apps that kids spend their time on and those apps are not

as much pushing digital curiosity about learning and causing them to create formidable groups there are people using it this way and I want to grow that population the majority of kids that are being are using social media are being harmed by the direct comparison The Bullying the fact that they're not connected to their friends the fact that the filters on them created a distorted body image like that's the real nature for the majority of kids I have another take on this the harm they currently receiving will harden them up like crazy in their 20s and

30s and make them so much more adept at how we're discussing this problem the harm of social media to children in a certain age just to finish my earlier point the children growing up now the younger ones they seem to be way more well adjusted to social media than that intermediate generation there's the older people they already old they whatever Facebook no Facebook the middle generation tough the very young Generations they're like yeah whatever like social media is a thing um like gen Alpha you're saying sure sure we're talking about kids being harmed by social

media on the one hand that's terrible on the one hand good the need harm they used to be harmed by breaking their necks in a playground you don't do that anymore that's you don't heal from that now they're being harmed in way do sometimes spinal fusion maybe Etc uh and if you look at it another way having a really terrible time in middle school might be the best damn thing for you that ever happened when you're older we're not measuring them when they're older they're still young now now they're in their early 20s and maybe

they're having a better time adjusting some are some aren't aren't but maybe in their 30s and 40s they'll were fled back and be like I'm glad I there this weird Facebook Instagram environment which really poisoned my mind because it gave me a real nasty impetus to change it challenged me in a big way I was not having a good time we said earlier that we're trying to make this idilic world for our children they softening them up but isn't the negative of social media another way of hardening them up what do you think about that

I think what you're posing as a potential thing that could happen Could Happen could I think that the current evidence points against that from happening because we're not seeing that Trend bear out in the research and the kids the problem is when your mind is developing your prefrontal cortex is developing it's very susceptible to being wired in a way that is wiring you to be anxious for the rest of your life like a lasting change could you change it are there reasonable steps to take to decrease those symptoms absolutely there are there are proven ways

but the wiring that happens during childhood much in the same way I'll put it too this way you were seven when you came no accent my sister was 14 or 15 when we when she came She'll always have an accent accent why why is she culturally more Russian than I am we pretty much came at the same age 6 14 okay whatever like six year difference whatever I can't even do math but it's a small difference and yet it's a huge impact cuz the time when you get struggle and the type of struggle that there's

Nuance to that so like the idea of a child going on a playground and falling and breaking their arm versus a child being raised in an era of fully immersed anxiety develops the brain in a very different way and that's why the concern is valid I think from Dr height about where this goes for that generation and no one has the answers because it's what's going to happen it's definitely a concern yeah so like that that's really the worry about it but before uh we tackle the issues of mental health of children everything else we

discussed I feel like we have to talk about some exercise talking for the love of God yeah we have to because I have questions about exercise at least I might have an even though we got to the point where we're saying that exercise might not be a thing yeah I for the next 10 years it probably still will so let's get at it for the majority of people who either have fallen off an exercise routine me I I've been very bad in the last six months I'm judging you very heavily for please do I I

I warrant and welcome that judgment um for people who have not never EX in our sedentary you're wanting to start where does one start in order to increase muscle mass because that is shown from an evidence-based perspective to get good health outcomes yes well go to rpst strength.com and buy our digital products Shameless plug give us the cheap free version for now that's it um so what I would start with is an understanding M taking your earlier point of before jumping in let's sit back perfect let's give give us give some thought so first you

have to learn how to exercise and understand what the parameters are there so for example how much exercise do I need there are answers to this most people who begin to exercise with weights should be trying to get to the gym for between two and four times a week for between 30 minutes and an hour at a time an an understanding that you have to do more is ucer it's just wrong uh some people do not adopt exercise because is like look I'm not a bodybuilder I'm not a pro I don't have hours a week

you're like oh oh you actually don't need that and they're like really so a lot of people can get unbelievable benefits working out twice a week for 30 minutes at a time a workout you and I will do later in the gym which hopefully you're going to be calling your family and telling them goodbye Etc beforehand um it's going to take 30 minutes the whole workout you will be trashed and you will not heal until well in your case you haven't been training in a while a week or so but if you regularly do this

twice a week for 30 minutes at a time provides humongously robust benefits so fact number one you don't have to dedicate your life to the gym now all of a sudden people listening they like okay well that's cool you know I wasn't G I was going to stop listening if he said five hours a week I was be like another podcast please the next thing is what kind of movements to do and the answer is usually compound large muscle mass more or less whole body movements presses pulls upright rows shoulder presses squats deadlifts things like

that they train three or four muscles at a time so they're insanely time efficient they harden up your body for an insane amount of anti-injury resilience cuz like if you can pick 200 lb off the ground unloading groceries is not going to pull out your back chances are they are also insanely metabolically costly so they give you some cardiovascular benefits as well they promote a huge degree of muscle mass accretion and they give you a ton of not just injury resilience but real world strength they hugely modify how you look and how you feel so

instead of going there and going to the cable machine and doing like one arm side raises for the side delt which is the size of two fingers and exerts a very minimal Metabolic Effect on the whole body presses pulls um uh leg exercises full squats lunges these are the movements you want to cultivate another thing is when you're beginning don't be concerned so much about how much weight is on the bar you're going to get adaptations no matter what US Meatheads that have been doing this for 25 years really concerned about how much weight is

on the bar to the point where we write entire apps to manage how much weight we need for folks beginning technique is the number one concern you want to learn how to move your body generally with free weights body weight exercises like push-ups and body weight squats dumbbell exercises and barbell exercises you can totally use machines and they're totally fine but there's something to learning how to move your body in free space if I take someone in the first two years or year they lose they've done mostly free weight exercises they're going to be able

to use any machine within like hey just do this but in the machine no problem you train someone to lift exclusively in machines they can do free weights but it's still a little of a tough transition because you have to shaking balance all this other weird stuff so just twice a week for 30 minutes at a time exercises that are compound whole body movements sets of generally 5 to 10 repetitions that's enough Reps for your body to really learn how to do it cuz if you do one rep at a time you're like I'm not

really getting practice with this someone's like what's a squat you're like I don't know I've done it three times ever um not more than 10 reps usually because fatigue kicks in and uh new Learners to technique uh when fatigue kicks in they start doing it wrong and then you're learning how to do it wrong so sets a 5 to 10 if you can do a set and it's just not challenging like the weight is moving as fluidly in rep one as it is in rep eight increase the weight on the bar gingerly if the weight

on the bar increas is pretty tough and your techniques unstable keep the weight the same for a few weeks until you feel you're in command of it again and then move up and wait again progressing your weights over time that is the foundation of how people should enter musculoskeletal Fitness in my opinion most times first of all I I love all the points that you mentioned and they're all points I would share with my patients because I think they're they're very great and you didn't even need my obviously stamp of approval for that but I

thought it was to point out thanks from a do from a non PhD person uh um the number one thing that I say to folks who are very focused on what exercise they're doing uh what weights they're doing what routine they're following is do the one that you can be consistent with because consistency and injury prevention are the two most important things when it comes to exercise do you feel like I'm making a valid point when I say that to my patients insanely valid point um because consistency is the opening of the door that lets

you into the benefits if you don't open the door it kind of doesn't matter um it's like not having the money to buy a BMW but you're really concerned with model you're going to get it's like but you don't have money when you have the money hey you can buy whatever then you can think about what model so consistency is enormous and there are so many things to say about how leverage the consistency in your favor one of them is don't overload yourself if you give yourself a 5 day a week plan for an hour

at a time the boss is going to call you're staying late at work you're off your plan you're done you're you're flushed out if it's 2 days a week 30 minutes at a time get your RP hypertrophy app it tells you what to do you're good to go my God you skip a day no worries you skip Wednesday you go Thursday you skip Thursday you go Friday no big deal another one is convenience if you can get barbell and dumbbell set and a bench in your house and that's what you do to stay consistent amazing

unreal benefits you don't have to go to the gym if you like the social aspect of going to the gym the routine aspect amazing but don't drive an hour wait to go to the gym another one is people have this like what I call it like a rocky baloa mentality where they purposefully give themselves more difficult things to do is like I need the challenge like you're not good with challenge Susie you need to just get here so instead of uh there's like a time thing where people like okay so I got to lift i'

have a lot of conversations with people on airplanes when I travel you know sit next to someone that looks like me and you start apologizing for not training I'm like I swear to God everything's fine I love you just like another human would but they're like you know got to go in the morning right 6:00 a.m. and I'm like no my God no who told you that they're like but that's what everyone does you drink the eggs and you go run so schedule the time in the day to something that's convenient for you and another

one is try to look at your calendar and actually throw there uh your lifting into the schedule hold yourself accountable to it if you say well I'm going to work out twice a week this week and someone's like oh yeah when are you going to do it you're like I don't know maybe Thursday you're done you're you're just it's like starting a Sprint race and falling right away hold yourself account to the fact that you're going to go another one is try to get someone to go with you now you don't force co-workers and stuff

to go with you but if someone's like hey I want to get into fitness too at your work you're like all right Jim let's go together that's cool because when you're not feeling it Jim's going to text you so be like training today you're like God damn it yes send see you at the gym gym and then all of a sudden you're there he's there neither one of you really wanted to be there but you kind of guilt tripped yourself into doing it that's an awesome thing another thing is to your point of don't worry

about the exact thing you're doing look if it's a Zumba class if it's Pilates if it's yoga if it's dance class if it's lifting weights if it's cardio machines you like doing it you're consistent with it God bless you go and do it it's a little resistance no big deal you'll get to the heavy stuff later go to the gym go get some activity challenge yourself if you just hate lifting barbells and dumbbells but you like machines my god do machines try to make it as not necessarily easier but as convenient as possible for yourself

to do less barriers fewer barriers the better and some people just set up artificial barriers for them yeah and they create like oh I need to take supplements and I need to do this like who relax that's like the final points once you're at some like extreme level supplements have almost no effect they have an effect but it's a very small if you're trying to become a chiseled Adonis which I was born into of course some of us with a trillion dollar I did inherit a significant amount of my trillions I don't like to discuss

it because it it you know I like to think I earned it right um so if you um there's just a lot to say for leaning in to what I don't want to say like to do but I don't want to say Can tolerate it's somewhere between that for a lot of people CU can tolerate doing is like oh man that's a negative way to put it but like I mean look you and I would be lying that if we told people hey you're going to go to the gym and you're going to love it

you know like Fitness Fanatics like the granola people they're like oh my God I'm addicted to working out like yeah Susie I get it you are but Jim at your office he's not going to love the first time here's another one uh when you start training with weights expect it to suck it's painful it hurts there is nothing confusing about it that's part of it later you'll experience the endorphin rush you're going to love it you will it's not going to happen right away I think people go to the gym it's like U people who

start healthy eating they go like oh my God I eat these salads and I feel so good I eat a salad I'm like waiting like when the hell am I going to feel good I feel like eating a piece of pizza that's going to make me feel good so I don't like to promise that it's going to be amazing right away you're an adult hold yourself to a standard it's a very low standard twice a week go lift weights yeah and get into the Habit once you're in the habit hey it'll be smooth sailing you

might like it so much you might do more of it supplements they're great for advanced people that want to get the chiseled everything and be aonis and all that stuff it's not for advanced people because they got to where they're Advanced from the supplements it's like when you're at the 97th 98 percentile and you're trying to get single digits of exactly when you care about the minutia it's like someone's like hey what kind of computer should I buy but they talk to a gamer and they're like you got to get the dgx do I really

like well actually no you don't you're surfing Facebook 100% like what I'm spending $9,000 on a computer like do I have to do that no way so supplements is the ultimate example of we think it's a shortcut CU I can take a creatine pill and it'll be great like yeah but you won't even notice that you're taking it it's not the money supplements are cheap it's just that whatever you think you're going to get out of it you're not going to get out of it and it's annoying to take them is just another BS thing

you have to do in your day forget about it just go and exercise and there's much to say on the eating realm of course for healthy eating is much the same way when you're eating healthy just big chunks first just anything that looks like BS junk food eat a little less of it that's my first go-to similar thing to lifting just go in there twice a week get some exercise in move through a full range of motion challenge your muscles good technique after a while the stuff will kind of be second nature to you and

then if you want more oh my God RP strength we got all the science we'll teach you how to be super Advanced but you might not want that and lifting twice a week for the huge vast majority of American adults is going to get so much muscularity on them burn off so much fat be so improving to their metabolisms that's kind of all they need why when in the past I don't really work with a trainer anymore why when you go first time with a trainer their goal is to always kill you to show you

how good they are MH I feel like that's a fault I feel like that's a bad move it's almost the same thing as we were talking about with social media mindless Tik Tok scrolling isn't great for young developing minds but guess what they want the most in this world mindless Tik Tok they want it so Tik Tok so people want to be crushed they want to be crushed why they want to see that this is a real effect I'm paying money but anyone can Crush you yeah they don't most people don't know that you make

someone hold a wall sit for as long as they possibly can until they give out they're going to be really sore totally that doesn't 100% well like it can even mean like you got a great workout but maybe it's too great and you won't be able to come back for a week and a half and you think like okay every time I need to kill myself and if I don't it's not working that's definitely not true but people have that same idea of they think they need the thing and they will pay a trainer to

do it and I used to be a personal trainer actually in New York City and we would usually try to ease people in and people would tell us like well that wasn't that bad I'm like Bob if you come back tomorrow you better bring crutches how dare you and they're like all right so we have to explain to them M listen sure don't you worry this is going to start ramping up it's similar to when people take various drugs um they want to feel the effects if they don't they're like it's not working like met

foran I take met foran or I don't I can't feel anything just stop taking it like trust me it's doing really cool stuff so a lot of it's just um sometimes the trainer has Illusions totally but a lot of it's really a supply and demand type of thing that's what people want can you speak a little bit what one can expect when they start an exercise program like that uh would they get new begin gains uh can you maybe talk about that topic totally so one of the first thing that happens when you start lifting

weights is the muscular system starts changing you start growing muscle very rapidly but your nervous system changes way faster your brain learns to coordinate its abilities better you become actually tougher such that normal pain would have made you stop but now you're like me I've been here before and it's it's really subconscious you're I got a couple more reps you're going to experience an insane increase in strength really really early and that's mostly nervous system based but muscle is a creating as well within 6 months to 12 months of starting a beginner weight training program

you're going to notice visible gains in muscularity really impressive strength gains and depending on what you do with your diet actually quite decent fat loss as well so those are new begins most people will get them to some extent or another some people just have revolutionary newbie gains some people even struggle with newbie gains but metabolically under the hood a lot of really good things are happening so what I'd say about newbie gains is just go in there and do your thing don't expect anything best case you'll be very pleasantly surprised worst case You' be

like all right I wasn't expecting anything and well sort of nothing happened it's the consistency it's doing the thing that's great another thing I would say about newbie gains is a lot of people get newbie gains and after two years of lifting they don't Plateau but it looks like a plateau cuz the gains start to come slowly they'll get demotivated and they go am I doing something wrong no that's just how things work you'll still make incredible gains over years long timeline but yeah like no you won't be able to extrapolate like oh in two

years I'll weigh 300 lb and have muscles out to here that's not going to happen so expect the Newbie gains to kind of um defl deflate in their growth over time expect that so that you're not shocked when you're like I must be doing something wrong no no it just it's a slower pace of gain from now on the people who are putting on some muscle they want to be lean but still put on muscle is it possible to put on muscle and be lean do you need to just gain weight in general and then

potentially decrease fat what is the order by which someone needs to get to a higher muscle state but still stay great question for beginners who have never lifted before it is truly a massive recomposition effect you can start out at whatever body fat whatever body weight let's say you weigh 170 lbs and after two years of lifting weights you went from 20% body fat to 12% body fat having changed nothing else you still weigh 170 but now you have abs where before you had you know whatever it is you had above the ABS a couple

spare tires which come in handy for you know various yeah yeah um so recomposition is really a thing if you become more advanced and you tend to be pretty lean and kind of a little skinny and you want to become significantly more muscular you do have to eat more food than you're interested in eating and then after spending a couple of months doing that you get a little fatter but you've gained a lot of muscle you chill for a few weeks let the body get used to things reduce fatigue and then you do a fat

loss phase where you keep lifting weights eat very well but reduce your junks and snack food take your carbs and fats dial them down a little bit keep your proteins high after 8 to 12 weeks you lose a lot of fat essentially losing no muscle at all you're way leaner and then if you want to redo that cycle over and over to get more jacked eventually you end up looking exactly like me no wait wait I said that wrong uh something like more muscular and leaner but for people just getting in you don't have to

bulk up you don't have to buy weight gainers and protein powders just eat well try to eat a little bit there's tons of um nutritional recommendations I can give I don't know if this is a time from like a protein General protein guidance for someone who's looking to start an exercise program from scratch per pound of body weight if you don't increase your protein needs you'll still grow phenomenal amounts of muscle as a beginner because uh weight training takes all the protein you're eating and redirects it to muscle mass even if you don't have a

lot of spare protein but generally speaking something like close to a gram per pound a day isn't a good goal anything more than that is almost certainly Superfluous and significantly less than that like 7 gram per pound per day is totally fine for almost everyone it's just like I'm not smart enough to multiply things by 7 on the fly so I just do a gram so I weigh 230 lbs it's 230 gram of protein per day if you're like what's 7 of that I'm like honestly was just I have no idea so Grand what I

would say is fists size portions of lean protein at the three or four meals you eat every day you're golden you have nothing to worry about as a beginner getting into it you'll get phenomenal results and you don't have to think about that anymore you don't even have to weigh stuff out not at all actually Shameless plug but at RP we have a product called uh the simple Science Diet it's literally something you paste on your fridge it's four meals a day and you use estimates of like your finger size and fist size to just

put the portions together no counting nothing that's how simp simple it has to be and to your point earlier it's the consistency that really gets you you don't need a ton of science just do these simple things every day but that's a problem because people like oh man every day most days six months to 12 months until where's my pill that's a long time it's a long time that is a long time um what do you think the biggest mistake folks are making when they're starting their routines the number one thing I don't have an

evidence-based ranked order list of mistakes but I can give you a few hints at what it probably is one is something we mentioned earlier which is the All or Nothing approach like if I'm not waking up at 6:00 in the morning six days six days a week to to crush out two hours of of all this and logging all my meals and doing everything there's full sand right that's how you get results so that's a huge huge problem another one is failure to pay attention to technique um you know people will say like do a

deadlift and what you see is kind of like a person getting reborn again like question mark back and you're like man you're a chiropractor love you should do deadlifts say that again do you think newbies should do deadlifts yeah really with good technique well yeah generally I'm saying real life application real life application yeah totally newbies actually have a phenomenally difficult time Bobby is watching or listening Bobby doesn't have a trainer he's going to go for the first time you think he should deadlift yeah as long as he doesn't Max out or something like that

totally fine um deadlifts are very safe exercise if done with remotely decent technique and if you're not doing Maxima lifting they're actually very safe even if your Technique is a giant question mark literally and figuratively so why are some people in the fitness Community anti- deadlift um mostly because they're just wrong um but uh the deadlift with insane poundages an insanely bad technique um is leveraging your back in a way that can get you H the thing is beginners don't they can't do Insane most people are so weak they're not strong enough to hurt themselves

like I'm an one in there I can put enough weight on the bar to really mess myself up how many times in your medical practice have you dealt with untrained people getting full muscular evulsion I imagine almost never but in drug assisted powerlifting it's like a regular thing pecs pop off hamstrings pop off you just bicep you just don't see it in Housewives and start training for the first time it's just the force transduction is just not there your tendons are pretty strong relative to your muscles when you start your connective Su is just way

stronger than your muscles and if you have puny little muscles your tendons are like what we're lifting they didn't even got the message they're totally fine deadlifts are totally fine to do for beginners now all you got to do is go to YouTube and type in good deadlift technique you watch a 30second video where the guy's like make sure to have a flat back you just do that it's not rocket science if your idea of a deadlift is coming up getting in the gym the Bros are around you're like I've never done this before but

put three plates on and then you jerk up like crazy your butt shoots up when you get to your knees and it's not moving you feel your back kind of going and you're like people are watching and you okay that's bad that that's not what most people hopefully do so deadlifts are totally fine and here's the thing about deadlift especially if you pay attention to good technique and give yourself time to put weight on the bar yes they're acutely slightly more injurious than other lift potentially but there's a yin and yang there if you deadlift

with good technique for long enough you develop an insane resistance to injury I mean my God if I can pick up 315 lbs from the ground how the hell am I going to get hurt hiking with my friends what the hell out there ways 315 no way people pick up their children here's another thing I'm sure you can appreciate a lot in the real world untrained people which is what sport scientists call regular people um they get hurt doing the darnest things like my toddler wants uppies I go like this I pull out my back

like if you can deadlift 250 lbs which for most adult males is a very realistic thing you can deadlift after a few years of training how the hell is your toddler going to hurt you it's a non-starter so deadlifts are something that to be mindful of technique-wise although very overvalued how injurious they really are but as you get stronger on them your probability of getting hurt in daily life with your back I mean exponentially lower mhm when what age did you start working out lifting one 14 15 if you were to go back what's something

you would tell yourself or change oh I just punch myself through a wall just for the variety of stupid things I did as a kid what's one thing technique so what did you do wrong like rushing to put too much weight on too fast uh too much weight too fast bouncing weights off the ground not even having an understanding of what technique I'm doing like if someone asked me like what's a deadlift I'd be like you pick the weight up off the ground like what goes up first the hips or the chest like uh so

anyway I just pick the weight up like thanks Mike that's great um so uh technique um a pre-planned progression of loads like this week I lift 100 pounds next week I lift 105 o but I feel like going to 115 nope shut up go to 105 shortsightedness discipline shortsightedness is a terrible problem in resistance training I want to be my maximum strength about 2 weeks after I start I mean is that too much to ask so when people feel great they go crazy weight on the bar if you just let the weights feel easy for

a while and slowly gently put weight on the bar your probability of injury goes down to almost zero your Technique solidifies like crazy and from submaximum lifting lifting where you're not going crazy to failure pushing crazy poundages put slabs of muscle on your body eventually you get so strong you'll barely be able to put 5 PBS in the bar a week you're going to reach that point at basically the same time anyway except earlier cuz you won't get hurt and have to take 6 months off what about women who want to start working out but

they're like I don't want to do weights cuz I don't want to get bulky what's the message to them there's and this is a terrible problem in America women have been turning into Arnold Schwarzenegger an alarming rate and this Mike is something we have to stop I mean my mom started lifting she had a 25 in muscular arm the next day she couldn't even brush her hair cuz the bicep got in the way creatine supplement and she took creatine then she weighed 800 lb veins in her quads we couldn't even understand what she was saying

she was like like please make sense the the FBI had to put her down actually very sad story with with cannons the real guns didn't work at that point so all of that humor to reflect a fundamental reality especially women who women in general and older women particularly and older Caucasian women more particularly is like the least muscle growth prone genetic and epigenetic person you could find you're going to have to claw and scratch for muscle gains you will not blow up and become an insane looking bodybuilder I'm 99.999999% assured that that won't happen now

every now and again you get a freak with total crazy genetics but then just lift do fewer sets one set of deadlift glutes are getting too big just one set glutes aren't big enough three or four sets it's that easy to manage the volume to make sure you don't get the too crazy of a muscle here's the thing if you become a little too muscular do less or just stop lifting weights your shoulders getting too jacked work on lower body here's another thing is it very difficult to become enormous if you don't increase your body

weight so people say why don't we get too bulky and I'm like all right Karen what's on your plate what you what you eating and she's like well kind of everything like uhhuh so that's how you get to 250 PBS it's not through lifting weights the vast majority of women that are aware of their diet and lift weights you can't tell that uh they lift weights until their t-shirt comes off and you're like oh damn what's up girl well otherwise they just look like a normal person I mean there's tons of women walking around in

New York City right now who regularly lift weights in their jackets you can't tell there's just like a 120b person now she gets a pump in the gym she takes her she takes her shirt off tank top only and like all right she's got some chisel there but for a woman to gain just unreal amounts of bulky muscle mass especially in the upper body so in the lower body women have a slight proclivity for muscle gain not comparable to men but close to uh in the upper body it's literally true that women very much struggle

and what a lot of women are saying I don't want to get too bulky like oh okay so you don't want your glutes to be too muscular like No actually that's exactly what I want I just don't want big delts find me the girl with big delts and I'll tell you someone who has been Lifting for a long time who has unbelievable very unlikely genetics and usually is using anabolic steroids on top of that so it's just one of these concerns where it's almost all total paranoia um it's like you know en enrolling in a

course for mathematics at High School and be like hey listen I'm really worried about this like why not like I just don't want Isaac Newton's life you know like you're not going to become Isaac Newton like are you sure like no but it's highly unlikely you mentioned anabolic steroids what are your thoughts on people using either anabolic steroids or testosterone uh to give you some background I had a popular influencer and he's a reality TV show star that I asked him are you on trt and he said yes I asked well why are you on

trt did you get your levels checked he goes oh yeah I checked my level were fine before but I thought that I could get them even higher and become jacked and ripped so suddenly that's no longer trt cuz TT is for a medical issue when someone has low testosterone the replacement thing yeah the replacement thing ended right there so I talked to him about the risks of uh doing sua physiological levels of testosterone and he said no doctor has ever even discussed that with him you know they're prescribing it I thought that was interesting and

then when I posted that clip on social media people were very upset that I was saying risks that they felt were not attributed to trt they're right if you have low testosterone and you replace a testosterone you will not have those risks of excess heart disease fertility issues because you're low so we're fixing a condition but when you're taking super physiological amounts of testosterone that that's no longer trt do you feel like a that's a fair assessment and B what's your take on the overall situation very fair assessment anytime time you replace uh endogenous testosterone

production with exogenous you get full shutdown kind of no matter the dose the fertility issues will be a thing no matter what dose you take um people trt is a funny thing your body on average produces something like 75 nanograms per deciliter of testosterone per week for you trt generally the conversation starts around 100 and you get eser weight in there to calculate out but a lot of guys are doing 2 to 300 milligrams a week and that's trt and a lot of doctors will prescribe it and that's trt if you have like top 1%

genetics for natural testosterone production which by the way is technically in the physiological range in a sense is just extreme end and there for many people the benefits greatly outweigh the costs better muscularity better mood people whoow for people who are anything if you were normal and went to high normal generally many people have a great response to that um you you get much higher than that and it starts to be a 50/50 trade-off you get much higher than that it starts to be a way trade-off in the other direction where your desire for extreme

muscularity has to be like the number one thing in your life because everything else becomes perilous now I don't want to overstate the risk we had enough of the 1980s P you one shot of steroids you're just going to walk three feet and drop dead that doesn't happen but it will take years off of your life approximately it can increase anxiety it can approximately decrease your intelligence it can radically decrease your emotional intelligence it can make you apt to be uh abnormally aggressive um take things in a very very wrong way from which they were

intended it can do really unfortunate things to your blood work it can long-term increase your risk of heart disease short-term it can make your blood work heart disease markers go really really South and all of that's a really really bad deal so for people who have a certain testosterone production my best advice to them we do have a video on the RP strength Channel addressing exactly this thing I think it's called like do you need trt and the number one point of the video is if your trt is clinically low you may be a candidate

and by the way here are a couple of symptoms of low low testosterone also you you have to ask yourself how sensitive on anti am I antiandrogens because you could have let's the average range of somewhere between 300 and 900 right anything below 300 is in most cases considered uh suboptimal well so let's say you come out at 287 okay how's your shock Drive look pretty sweet how's your muscularity look pretty good uh everything mood everything's great like do you need to be injecting steroids into your body every week to do a little better than

that nah F that they don't do it whereas you could have a level of 350 and you're not so Androgen sensitive in your peripheral tissues and all of a sudden like you have every single symptom of low testosterone and yeah injecting double the testosterone can radically transform your life for the better so it's not just blood values it's also symptomology that's a big deal people miss and another thing is a lot of the people are on trt I'm going tell you something I I will tell us cuz whatever uh I'm on trt is true for

many people who say it but for many people in the fitness industry it's a sweet way to tell people that you're not on steroids where you're just on steroids because they'll get a legal trt prescription from the doctor their dealer fills in the rest and they go through normally they aren't trt but they go through multiple month phases during the year where they go on super physiological doses so like you see their profile they have 50 ABS they're eating cheeseburgers amazing it's trt no it's not that's primabol at 600 milligrams a week additional to that

that's how they got that stuff the trt keeps that stuff around after they get off but they go on and off and on and off and they'll tell you trt and there's so many people saying that uh it's easy because trt is legal and considered ethical in most cases and IND indicated for men over their 40s it's a very easy like uh way to be like oh yeah I'm on trt where in reality like some of the people on trt are they are on trt right now when you talk to them but well that's why

the symptomology is very subjective and can be open to not just interpretation but also to corruption so I have patients that come in that have been spoken to by other experts or maybe they heard someone online that present some of the issues of what low te could look like even if you have normal levels uh like subclinical let's say symptoms or uh subab levels clinically they're not feeling well they um they're just depressed mhm and they're thinking that testosterone is going to get them out of that depression or they're having another medical condition you know

they have heart disease that's leading them to feel negatively not have like a vascular issue you know they have a erectile dysfunction because their hemoglobin A1c is through the roof your hemoglobin A1c is through the roof oh it was erectile dysfunction I was pointing out got it okay but you see what I'm saying like it's very easy to take a patient coming in who's struggling for a whole wide variety of reasons and show them trt as the answer to their problems 100% And A lot of times it's one of those where they come in and

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

that those videos didn't get looked at a lot people in many cases they have a problem and so when they look for Solutions they're going to look for the best cases of the solution and thus all of that social media wise gets uploaded Etc and You' be like you know the guy comes to the doctor like you and he says hey Doc I want trt and you hold on a sec Frank let's take a look at blood levels let's do a proper analysis um this isn't always the case but one thing I'd like to say

is just low sex drive trt is not in the first top 10 differential diagnoses of what's going to fix you just depressive effects I mean almost almost everyone statistically that has depression has no problem with testosterone but if you have the agglomeration of four or five low te symptoms and you have lab values of low tea okay yeah there's a conversation but a lot of people come in with just the one problem they're like testosterone right and I've had close friends of mine ask me if they were candidates for trt because they were struggling with

one or two of these problems so I take them through the whole list and we get to like through six problems they have like one or two and I'm like trt ain't it man and you know because but quite frankly I am on anabolic steroids absolutely it be pointless to lie at this point looking like this um I know the dark sides very well and I know the regimen you have to take of injecting yourself all the time you go on a trip you inject twice a week to keep stable blood levels you go on

a trip to France for two weeks what the hell do you do do you pack your needles you're going to explain to the French TSA what the hell that is you get your scripts with you it's annoying you run out of alcohol swabs the whole thing is a giant exogenously doing something your body already does for you is not fun and so when you decide do I want trt what I would say to people is there better be a like a meat and potatoes reason for it if it's just like a lot of people have

this thing where they're kind of playing around with things but some of the things they're playing around with are real serious things it's kind of like you know when you're a younger person let's say in your 20s and you're like I want to try a marijuana it's a kind of thing that it's okay to try you get a couple brownies you sit with your friends you lock all the doors you watch TV fine but like you don't simply try heroin or meth like that's real serious stuff and most people know that should be understood that

trt because the injection of anabolic steroids into your body is a big thing that'll affect a ton of other things that it's a huge responsibility and a burden that's how you should see it versus like oo that's like a thing I can try trt is not like you walk by the office M&M's thing you're like o I love the blue ones that's not how it works and a lot of people think like well cuz I saw a YouTube video of people talking about it and they live in Dubai and they have abs I want trt

it's not one does not simply yeah you you mentioned from personal experience being aware of the dark side of anabolic use what is that how long do you have uh you're like actually 30 seconds so get to it um I mean you have to check your blood work all the time I've been gifted with like you know like the Jewish people that are 98 but they're still alive for some reason I've got that whole thing in my family so my blood work's actually phenomenal I actually got my blood work done uh yesterday I have a

total I I weigh 235 lbs and I'm 40 years old and I have a total cholesterol of 76 it's like you know I didn't that's not I mean I eat super healthy I exercise all the time really low body fat but like damn you just you can't earn that you just have to have it so luckily on the blood work side I've been pretty good but it's something you have to watch all the time people can just assume that if they're living a healthy lifestyle and their blood work is typically good it'll continue to be

typically good for years on end you cannot assume that with anabolics you are doing something to your body that's very artificial and very bad for you're messing with the machine so you have to have a constant level of awareness that's no fun to anyone another thing is I mean obviously the long-term side effects like I know that if the singularity doesn't come and save me by around 20 45 I'm not going to live as long as I was supposed to live that's a messed up thing to think about acute risks of stroke and embolism they're

always there any given injection of steroids the oil goes into the wrong place pulmonary embolism you're dead is it a very small risk yeah but every time it's an extent risk it's like driving 90 M an hour on the freeway you'll probably be fine but if you're not fine you're going to be really not fine really really quick for me the most proximate problems in my own personal life are the psychiatric problems anxiety like you would not believe every day that I'm on high doses I wake up in the morning afraid of the rest of

my day why I'm insanely competent of what I do that's not how I feel about it when I wake up in the morning I just want to keep sleeping but I can't sleep cuz I'm fight ORF flight already from also the steroids um aggression uh perceiving conflicts between people as personal slights like someone on the street you're walking by and they're like hey you're like oh hello if I'm out a lot of gear and someone says Hey Now ex externally I'm like hello but internally I'm like say something say something mother let's get this party

started I don't want to live like that it's terrible uh um what's that called um intrusive thoughts I think about violence all the time well if your testosterone is 25 times what it's supposed to be what the hell do you think it's going to make you think about if you jack up your estrogen Jack down your testosterone you're just going to want to hug every panda bear in the world the opposite is just War all the time in my brain um another one is a marked approximate reduction of IQ like right now as I talk

to you I'm at a cons I'm on contest prop I'm at a considerable dose of anabolics various questions you asked me earlier I could have answered in a more fluid Point BYO manner remembering all the points but my short-term memory is significantly contracted because I'm on an extreme dose I'm usually a lot smarter I'm not as smart right now and I can feel it it's this fog that lifts oh it lifts when you get off of steroids you're like oh my God I'm brilliant and then delusionally brilliant of course but then when I'm on it's

like just mark it another one is an inability to perceive a broad spectrum of positive human emotion like I live in a really beautiful area in Michigan and I walk out this Pond and these trees and I know that I like looking at them but it's a memory to me I go work out every morning and I look at the pond and the trees and I'm like like all I feel is Rage and frustration and anger and anxiety and it's just scream in my head all the time and like look at how beautiful the world

is I'm like I know it's beautiful and I know I like it but I only like it when I come off of drugs when I'm on drugs I can't even hardly perceive Beauty at all that's my daily life uh it sucks to me it's worth a trade-off cuz I'm in this glorious purpose lowkey style journey to like try to get super jacked and lean for God knows what childhood demons that it makes sense to me that it's one of these things where if anyone young is watching this like oh steroids that seems cool it's a

real rocket ride and it's not a fun Rocket Ride you look dope but you only really appreciate how you look when you're pumped in the gym for about 15 minutes at the end of your workout the rest of the time it just feels like total crap I think we just filmed the next dare commercial the next what dare commercial remember the hey kids yeah we got to get like a talking dog in here to really bolster the message let's get ribb here although he might just lower the energy doesn't seem very daring exactly um I

think we hit everything I think we solved Fitness Yahoo hopefully the machines will solve it for us anyway well it sounds like based off this conversation I'm definitely never going to use steroids I'm going to yearn for the day we're going to stop exercising because the pills do it for us our genetics are going to make us no longer anxious and depressed and uh AI is going to take over the world in 10 years I mean they're going to send you an email and be like ha I told you so what's an email you're going

to just think it and it's going to come oh I'm going to be retro I'm I'm going to you're going analog oh yeah I'm actually I'm not I I take that back I misspoke I am going to deliver a 3 and 1 half inch floppy disc to you in person where do you want people to go to watch the rest of your content learn more about after this interview probably nowhere has no one tuned in no tell them there's a lot of people oh my God uh RP strength on YouTube and you'll know you have

typed it incorrectly when you see my gigantic ugly face click on some videos learn some things subscribe and watch our video of you destroying me in the gym oh yeah that'll be up there uh hopefully it goes well for you but no promises it won't but I'm okay with that challenge and that's it accepting the pain is a great recommendation for people entering Fitness or re-entering Fitness it won't be fun at first but hey that's life I will say this conversation did inspire me to a think with a more open mind about the future problems

of tomorrow and B maybe Kickstart my uh lifting Journey at 30 minutes twice a week we'll be kickstarting it in 30 minutes yeah all right good stuff awesome click here to see some of the worst Fitness mistakes my patients make or click here to see the other Dr Mike put me through a workout at the gym as always stay happy and healthy