1109: Michael Israetel | Fitness Myths and Science-Based Solutions

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Some substantial number of people that are diagnosed with anorexia nervosa

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Some substantial number of people that are diagnosed with anorexia nervosa are not savable. It actually causes a substantial amount of higher death rate in females because anorexia nervosa is one of the deadliest diseases, period.
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.
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Today on the show, Dr. Mike Isretel, fitness and performance expert, author, competitive bodybuilder.
He is the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization. I don't know why they thought that was...
Who can spell that? I can barely say... You know how many takes that took? Anyway, you've maybe seen him on YouTube where he is enormously popular.
He's also a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College, and perhaps most importantly, my sometimes lifting buddy at the CCRB back at the University of Michigan during my college days. That's right, I lifted with Dr.
Mike. Jealous much? Today, we dive into testosterone, hormones, steroid use and abuse, roid rage, body and muscle dysmorphia in men, dieting, muscle memory, and even how AI might affect the future of exercise.
This is a really fun conversation. Dr.
Mike is a riot. We got along really well.
He's so freaking sharp and science-based and just all the things that I love and a total meathead. So this is a great show just for me particularly.
I think y'all will like it. I normally don't cover health, but he is an authority and knows what he's talking about.
And this was beyond interesting, in my humble opinion. Here we go with Dr.
Mike Isretel. As I drink from my Not Your Lawyer mug that a show fan made for me, filled with only the healthiest Diet Coke.
I actually am curious. Is this stuff so bad for you? Because people tell me like you drink poison as they shovel nicotine patches into their mouth or whatever.
Yeah, actually, I was in Los Angeles about a week ago. And this like 16 year old kid is like, hey, man, could you buy me a Zim or whatever pack nicotine thing? And that 7-Eleven, I was just like, I had to think for a moment, like what is being asked of me? And I was like,

ah, I'm good, man. And I walked off.
I was like, no, you bitch ass little kid at night, you know,

18 or over for tobacco products. Like, do you think I was born yesterday? Also, you're nobody to me.
What are you talking about? Also like you're creepy and standing in the middle of a

corner. Like I'm not going to turn my back to you at all.
It was just wild, but to your point of

nicotine is totally fine. So here's the thing.
If you were teaching an AI that has been insanely well-educated in all the topics of the world, except it just has never dealt with sodas, it doesn't know what those are. Somehow you took a whole data set from the internet, you scrubbed any mention of diet soda or soda in general, and then you gave the AI a prompt.
You said, here's the diet soda and here's regular soda. Here's all their ingredients.
Well, you already know all the statistical data on the various harms of the ingredients. Like it knows what sucralose is and all that.
And on first principles, is there any reason to suspect that diet Coke is better than regular Coke or worse than regular Coke for your health? The thing is, if you treated it like that, at the very least, the AI would be confused as to why you suspect Diet Coke is bad. So another way of saying that is on first principles, there's no reason to suspect that Diet Coke is bad outside of various fallacies of logic.
For example, what is called the naturalistic fallacy or the argument from nature, which is a false argument. It's the idea that just because something is artificial, that means it's bad for you.
The corollary is just something is natural because it's natural. It's good for you.
Like arsenic, famously good for you. Scorpion bite, arsenic, air conditioning and pillows are artificial.
And I've seen people deny those too often. And so all of a sudden you're like, okay, this is not a helpful heuristic.
It actually, we should go point by point on what's natural and artificial and select out like that. It's tantamount to saying who's better, men or women? Like, I'm sorry, what? First of all, at what? And second of all, based on which individual, like if you tell me men are better at basketball, but I can recruit a five foot two guy who's never played ball or a literal, the current best female in the WNBA, like who do you think I'm picking from my team? You have to be deep dive to actually learn things.
And so that heuristic of our Diet Coke's made made of artificial sweeteners, that means it's bad, is just wrong. And there's worse because a lot of the articles you find on the internet about artificial sweeteners are written by like express advocacy groups that are naturalistically biased, like the Mercola Foundation, for example, aggregates a lot of information about the various studies of which artificial sweeteners were bad for health.
Now, there's a problem with these studies. One, these are almost always the studies that haven't been replicated.
Like one out of 10 studies found that Diet Coke is bad for you, and they've just never been able to replicate those results. And then more and more studies keep coming out, and it's totally fine.
Oh, you do a study, and I'm like, oh, I want to just make sure that that's correct. Let me do the same study, and then I do it, and I'm like, I didn't get that result.
Totally different results. Right.
It's like one of the core elements of scientific process because like one study doesn't prove

hardly anything, but 100 well-conducted studies all approaching a similar problem from slightly

different angles and even the same angle over and over can like really get you, like if

someone has a friend that's really strong and they beat you in arm wrestling, you know,

well, that's pretty cool.

Like maybe you should try arm wrestling again with them.

Maybe you should try them arm wrestling really strong people.

And then after they beat everyone, you're like, okay, your friend's legit versus like

you arm wrestle them again and you beat them and you're like, oh, your friend's strong. We're not that strong because I'm not that strong and I just beat them in arm wrestling.
So, you know, replication is good. The other problem that they do in those research aggregations is they will use studies with purposefully or unbeknownst to them have been refuted in a sense of methodologically refuted.
So for example, there are the Ramazzini studies from the Ramazzini Foundation in Italy that came out with these studies about like aspartame and rats. It was like a group of like several studies that they did and aspartame was just toxic to rats and aged them faster, called all kinds of disease, tons of cancer.
And then somebody made a request for raw data for the Ramazzini studies and they just wouldn't fulfill it out. Like they are not, here's the data we actually collected, which in science is like, if you're not willing to release raw data that you've properly de-identified, by the way, these are animals.
So there are no ethical privacy concerns. You're probably up to no good in the sense of like your raw data does not show what it's supposed to.
And some elements of the data that they released was like, they actually didn't control for age for the rat samples. So there may have been like way more older rats in the aspartame sample.
And of course they're older and then they just get tons of cancer and shit because they're old and that's it. And so what ends up happening is if you actually look at the literature from an unbiased perspective, there is no reason either via the direct empirical literature or mechanistically by supposition or population studies to suspect that Diet Coke is bad for your health.
That is not the same as with regular Coke because regular Coke has sugar and sugar in the context of a well-balanced diet in which you control your calories is totally fine, as much of it as you like to eat. But sugar in addition to a diet of normal calories and like very few people drink a Coke or any kind of Sprite or anything with sugar in it, they're like, oh, that really filled me up, Jim.
Gee whiz, I'm going to skip dinner. They're usually like, it's so easy to get sugars into your diet.
They're so highly palatable. They're so liquid and easily digestible that you can often use sugary beverages as like a buffer to your caloric intake.
So a lot of people who drink regular sodas, they just have a harder time controlling their calories and then they do get fatter and then they do get all these health maladies. So I would say like in the context of well-balanced diet, both diet Coke and regular Coke, et cetera, and all the diet and regular sodas are totally fine.
But if you have to get rid of something from your diet that's really making it tough for you to lose weight or stay at a healthy weight, then like regular sodas are tier one, exactly the first thing you get rid of. Because unlike fruit juices, they don't even have vitamins and minerals.
Now, fruit juices are also probably not the greatest thing if you have weight control problems. But if you have a fruit juice here and there and your weight's fine, hey, the vitamins and minerals are good.
Sugar is totally fine for you. But what diet soda really comes out on top is like, man, this thing is just like roughly inert outside of a couple of really, really esoteric concerns, which just don't add up in the long term.
Diet soda is totally healthy. And it's not one of these things like, oh my God, like what did we learn new? How is it like a huge revelation? Like I always thought it was bad.
Like, no, no, no, there never was any good evidence for it being bad. And there was no theoretical supposition.
This is just something that like emerges straight from like instinctual human preference. It's like people who are trying to dump stocks during a stock market drive, like do not sell when the stocks are falling.
My God, what are you doing? This is a terrible best practice. Everyone will tell you it's terrible.
You're just doing it because of human instinct. Because like when it's a hot potato, you want to throw it away.
You just don't do that. And so same idea for the diet soda thing.
It's one of those things like it's totally fine to drink and there is no good reason to think it's bad. That is a huge relief personally, but I'm glad that we can straighten that out.
There's like a sacred cow among wellness influencers that diet soda is terrible for you. The new sort of edgy bros who are, I don't even know if they're wellness influencers.
They're just dudes who say weird things on the internet, but I'm hearing like nicotine is good for you. What is that all about? That's going to be something if you haven't addressed yet, people are going to be asking you a thousand times next year.
Yeah. I just got into this thing with alcohol and another podcast.
So last I checked, nicotine is not an ROI positive net balance drug to be taking through your lifespan. However, as with almost anything you take in, it has some downsides and some upsides.
And nicotine has distinct upsides. Nicotine is technically a nootropic in the sense that it helps you think clearly.
It can calm you down. It can give you a sense of peace.
It can allow you to focus. And to that end, nicotine has some real big upsides.
It's an appetite-reducing agent, and so it can help you curb your cravings. So it has all those advantages, and some people, for whatever reasons genetically or otherwise, just don't seem to get tons of the downsides but get lots of the advantages.
So there's going to be people out there in the world that, for them, nicotine use is better on net balance than not using it. Those people aren't super common, but they do exist, and everyone gets something beneficial out of nicotine, though usually the health downsides are worse for most people.
They're definitely worse if you use the tobacco vehicle of smoking, but chewing has its downside risks and all these other things. So there are ways to minimize them that they're doing now with various patches and various gums that don't have tar that up your teeth and gives you oral cancer.
But still, the argument for nicotine being a health benefit on average needs substantially more evaluation. And the probability that that's correct for most people is low.
So that's the deal with nicotine. And so the good news, I guess, is that like, I think like if you're really like dead set on like loving nicotine and it's great, but people love it, they get addicted to it.
Then you can definitely find ways in which it's beneficial. And then you can post about them to your bro friends on the internet and mention it.
If you really just hate and despise nicotine for whatever reason, you can find like a thousand things wrong and bad about it and only talk about those and never accede to the fact that it has some benefits and upsides. The whole world is mixed, but what'd say everything shades of gray.
It's an average for the average person. Nicotine is probably not a good idea to take.
If you do take nicotine, there are ways to take it that can minimize, though not eliminate the downsides potentially, if you are a good responder to the drug. I've got some friends that are, let's just say they have some city miles on them from living in Hollywood for a long time.
They have all told me that nicotine was harder to kick than cocaine. Damn.
Yeah. That's intense.
Yeah. I mean, there's lots of data about the addictive proclivity of various drugs and most people just don't get addicted to cocaine.
Some small fraction will. The problem is when you do get addicted to cocaine, it's insanely expensive.
It messes you up real fast. And so it's a real huge downhill slide.
I think probably proportionally way more people get addicted to nicotine than cocaine on people who try it or use it recreational, but nicotine does not have the same deleterious, very acute downsides to your life and health that cocaine does. So there's a lot of stuff like that where people are well addicted to it, but the thing is, it's not a big deal.
Like you could be addicted to watching several hours of Netflix documentaries per night. That's actually really good.
You know what I mean? So nicotine is not nearly as bad as cocaine, but yeah, you know, it's interesting. A lot of people have trouble giving up caffeine like for good.
Can you imagine that? Like how many people are like, wait, no coffee ever. You're like, yep.
They're like, man, that like they just won't do it. And if they try, it's going to be terrible.
And a lot of this interfaces with lifestyle. So if you think about it, like, okay, so when do I do cocaine? It's at crazy parties when I'm at the industry parties before movie releases.
Okay. So if I just do some other drug at that party and just stop doing cocaine, it's not like I'm going to be doing cocaine before my kids' baseball game on Saturday.
So I'm out. I'm out of the whole game.
Whereas like, where do you do nicotine everywhere, everywhere. And where do you do caffeine? Like what's actually actively encouraged by society.
Like you just are expected to be a caffeine addict. So when something is integrated into your daily life and everyone around you does it, they're like, do you want a coffee? We're making espresso.
You're like, well, this is a really hard habit to kick. Yeah.
Yeah. That's true.
The most wholesome kind of date or meeting is going out for coffee. Right.
If you were like, Hey, you want to get together and like do a couple lines. You'd be like, I don't know if I'll meet up with this person or, or yes, of course I do.
I've actually never tried cocaine, but I've seen my friends do it. And I'm like, there's enough of me to go around already.
Like I don't need to be talking any faster, getting more excitable. That's my exact sort of theory on this as well as it's like, do I need to talk more quickly? I don't think so.
Not really. I'm already on the end.
That's inconvenient for people, but caffeine consumption and specifically through coffee is a net health benefit every time it's studied. So people who are worried about like, Oh, but I drink too much coffee.
Like unless your sleep is actively hampered, which you can test really easily by drinking coffee earlier in the day, stopping earlier, drinking less and seeing how your sleep folds out, unless that's really the approximate case or it causes you a lot of anxiety or something like that, then it's probably like coffee is really good for your health. As a matter of fact, I'm drinking the worst thing in the world, a coffee drinker's, you're going to hate me in three seconds.
This is an instant decaf coffee made with hot water from my sink, like faucet, and three packets of Splenda and just a spoonful of that bullshit that people dare to call coffee. The reason I take it is because I love the taste.
It's like one of my favorite beverages. It's nice and warm in the morning with my protein bars that I eat for breakfast, but also it has like tons of antioxidants and all these other health things.
So there's this thing from the wellness influencer space where like they start getting real, real gatekeepy about anything that you take is bad for you. Like any kind of semblance or hint of a drug or like coffee's got to be bad.
And it's funny, we've seen this from people's kind of biases and what they've seen from the health space, as long as like I've helped run Renaissance periodization, RP Strength, because we had clients back before we even had a company name where you would tell them a lot of New York City clients, big wig people, and they would be like, okay, I'm starting to die with you. Like, yes, they're like, okay, so I assume like no coffee, no soda, no tea, right? And we're like, who the fuck told you that? And told you that they're like i don't know a yoga lady always says and it's kind of like this thing that lives in the ether and it's just not true it's just not true so drink coffee as long as it's fitting your lifestyle to your heart's content coffee drinkers are like what are you doing there's so many better ways to do this none of which you care about but it is quite interesting how demonized it gets and, though, if you trace the wellness influencers, it's like no coffee.
And then it's a dot, dot, dot. Here's the grift, right? No coffee.
Caffeine's bad for you, but not all caffeine. This particular type of tea is good for you.
However, that stuff's really hard to get. So I have created a product that has only the good kind of caffeine and you can buy it from me on a subscription basis for $60 a month.
And it's like, oh, okay. So caffeine is probably not that bad.
You just want, but I have even better news, sir. Right now you can get it for cheaper if you buy the year up front.
Exactly. Yeah.
It's dot, dot, dot grift. And it's either their product or an affiliate product.
I now have a line of organic earth supplements and shit. That's really good for you.
Here's where and i'm like are these just unapproved drugs what are you doing that's right this probably will work some of you will die but that's a price i'm willing to pay people die anyway you know that's right you're eventually gonna die at best best case scenario you have decades left i found you because i told my brother-in-law this is probably like three or four years ago i'm gonna do tr because everybody needs TRT over age 40. And then he was like, I don't know, man.
And I was like, yeah, I don't know. A lot of people are recommending it, but I'm on the fence.
And he sent me this video with this big bald dude who said stuff that made a lot of sense. And I was like, oh, I actually have changed my mind as a result of this YouTube video.
We're going to link it in the show notes because I was like about to click buy on whatever website has a doctor that will just write a prescription without ever seeing you. And I was like, oh, I love those sites.
Yeah. I mean, look what they don't tell you, the overview of your video that really got me was once you pop, you can't stop.
Like once you start TRT and your balls go, I'm off. We're retired now.
They don't come back. Maybe when you're 25, they will.
If you're 45, probably you're just going to be on TRT forever. Oh, conveniently locked into the guy who's selling you the stuff that made your balls stop working in the first place.
Yeah. The good news is that even at 45, there's a very decent probability that within a few months, your nuts are going to be back to normal all by themselves.
Really? Yes. But a decent probability is not the same thing as a very high probability.
And so if I told you like, like, Hey, like I want to go on vacation in Afghanistan. I'd be like, yeah, like if you go to Kabul, there's only a 20% chance you're going to get kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban.
You go, but that's not a big deal. But like, wait a minute, the downside risk is insane.
The magnitude is wild. And so if your nuts no longer work and you've shriveled down to way less muscle and you're clinically depressed after six months of coming off of TRT and they just won't start again, and now you have to realize, oh shit, I have to be on this forever, even if you're only one out of five people that that happens to.
Knowing something up front, if I told you, hey, on a road trip from New York to Las Vegas, there's a 20% chance of death on the freeway, there's no way you would take it. And then so if I told you, look, there's a 20% chance you're not getting your testicles back to a fully functioning order at age 45, you may at the very least approach the problem differently.
You're like, how bad are my things? And one of the other things I think I'm trying to get really, really across to people in these TRT videos, which I make seemingly every six months. And every time I go on podcasts, I want to make a big deal out of this.
Testosterone replacement therapy is something that is awesome and it's great and it works. And anyone who's said it sucks is just like lying old guard.
Like, oh, everything's bad. Sterards are bad.
Drugs are bad. That's bullshit.
However, it's something that comes with trade-offs and downsides. And you have to like really robustly demonstrate that you have a need for it.
Like I get asked about TRT from 18 year

olds. I'm like, my f***er, your nuts work as good as TRT, except they're inside your body.
You don't

have to put needles into yourself. You're already on TRT.
Enjoy your life, my friend. You know,

like if I could re-engineer my genetics to have to take zero supplements and just exist in my

supplemental form all the time, of course I do it. But like, that's what most people are.
So a lot of times people ask about TRT and they haven't demonstrated one of two things, a low serum testosterone level or to any of the very well-documented side effects you would see or effects you would see of low testosterone. You talk to someone, you're like, how's your muscle mass in training? That's great, but better than ever.
Okay. How's your sex drive? Like phenomenal.
How's your success for life and your tendency to be depressive. Like, man, I'm crushing it.
Like, okay. So what did you say again? Like, I want to, I want to start TRT.
Like why, why, why, why? It's like you live in some like community in America, which has like, it was functionally no crime. That's most of America, right? Like you look around the suburbs, there's nothing happening.
And you like talk to someone who does like up armored cars and you're like, can you like up armor my escalade so they can take like seven, six, two rounds? You're like, okay, sweet. So like, are you going somewhere? Like it's dangerous.

You're like, well, it's just driving around town. Like what the is wrong with you? Do you know,

that costs $10,000 to do. It also doubles your gas expense from here on out.
And where's the

car down like five years sooner? Cause it's another 5,000 pounds on your vehicle. Well,

you know, you're better safe than sorry. Like I'm sorry, safe from what? Are you going to have

assassins coming to get you? You have to justify the expense. The TRT people think is like this thing I'm going to do and it's going to be great.
The thing is the thing comes with a lot of stuff. You're injecting yourself, you're taking pills, your own nuts shut down.
You got to watch your health all the time. You know, of course, probably your doctor.
You want to go on a trip to a foreign country, you got to bring your replacement pills or your shots and a copy of your script so that when you get popped by the TSA of that country and they talk to you for three hours and they're back, finally, they learn how to read in English and figure out that these are scripted for you. And they say, hey, this is good this time, but you can't come to our country again with this kind of shit.
You're going to be like, why did I get on the TRT? Yeah. Especially if you go to Denmark, they might be like, oh, yeah, OK, we've seen this.
If you go to Turkey or you're visiting your cousins in Saudi Arabia or whatever, you're just going to go to jail unless they've got some kind of connections and they can convince people that that doctor is real. It's not worth it.
So their telehealth doctor will tell you what my telehealth doc says, which is leave all this stuff at home. Just don't even bring it.
You're going to survive for a few months. I'm not on TRT, but like other things don't even bring it.
And hormones are especially important. I think as we age, I'm sure you would agree, like having a decent amount of testosterone.
I had my testosterone checked, and the regular doctor was like, it's normal. And I was like, oh, good.
So I told my friend who is in a similar field as you. I was like, oh, yeah, it's normal.
He goes, hang on. Show me the actual numbers.
Because when doctors say normal, they mean, are you below the range that an 80-year-old man would have? Because that's not normal. And if it's way higher than you have a tumor that's making testosterone or some weird thing going on, that's not normal.
But everything between like, what is it, like 200 and 1200 is normal. And it does.
They're like not taking into consideration the fact that you're a 44 year old athlete. They just don't care about that.
They're not taking into consideration multiple things. Absolutely what you said.
And they're also not taking into consideration the fact that if you're just above the cutoff for normal, let's say roughly 300 to 900 nanograms per deciliter is like the sort of the reference range. If you're like 305 and you feel like total shit in every way that indicates you have functionally lower testosterone than you could benefit from, there is a very good argument for trying to raise you up to 450, 500, 600, and even 900 to see where you get your best combination of like outcomes and blood work.
Because if you have your best blood work and best outcomes at 900, looks like your body was finally attuned for a high reference range and that's where you live your best. And so a lot of times people will say, oh, well, you know, you're in the normal range.
The normal range is very big and you can have very, very distinct outcomes within the normal range, usually not for muscle growth, but for how you feel and how you sleep, all this other stuff. And over the long term, definitely for muscle growth, if you're one of those kinds of individuals that's very sensitive, that sort of thing.
So you're totally right. A lot of doctors, and very understandably so, don't deal with almost any variables from an optimization perspective.
They deal it from a functionality perspective. Like the traditional way the doctor interacts with the patient is, are you going to die when you leave my office? Are you in the normal range for everything? And if you are, hey man, it's kind of like someone who you like have like a super, super knowledgeable outfit person who knows fashion 10 times better than everyone at your house when you're dressing up to go out.
And like, they have one of two instructions. One is like, just don't let him

leave in a clown suit or half naked. That's the doctor's job by analogy.
The optimizer's job is

to be like, can you get this person in an outfit that like is good for the occasion? It's good for

the season. It reveals modern trends, but it's also well-fitting to their body and all the rest.

And so like, that's two very, very, very different things. And people, I think sometimes go to the doctor thinking like, I'm going to get this really in-depth advice to optimize my shit.
And doctor's like, looks at their shit. He's like, you're good.
I'm like, okay. And it's kind of weird because you feel like you're not being attended to as a human.
And that's absolutely correctly true. You're not, but that's not the doctor's job normally.
And it's not like, oh, doctors are bad. Like, no, they literally think they're doing another job, which they're correct about.
Like their job is to keep you upright. And that's why they get paid the big bucks.
And if you want an optimizer, you might talk to them about it. And they're like, oh, you want optimization? Well, shit, let's talk.
Or you just go to a different doctor. Cause your doctor might be like, I'm not into that, but there's these other TRT guys that have all the questionnaires.
They have all the detailed stuff. They'll titrate your dose up and down.
They'll do all that. And they just, so it's up to the person.
If they're interested in optimization, not to just take their doctor's y'all right. As like a carte blanche, like that's it.
Like end of discussion. You know, when mom says he can't play PlayStation anymore, like it's the end of the discussion, go see dad.
And he might be like, come on, honey, a kid's been good this week. Yeah.
That's right. He's trying to get it in.
It's interesting because my doctor at Kaiser Permanente is a smart dude. He's like, you need blood work.
I was like, I'll actually do blood work every 10 weeks because I take supplements and stuff like that. Here is the blood work.
And he's like, all right, I'll look at it. My previous doctor goes, wow, this is really good.
This doctor goes, yeah, you don't really need to have this and this and this this high. It wasn't out of the reference range.
It was my DHEA or something was like too high. And I was like, I got to lower the dose of this DHEA because when I don't take it, it's way low.
And it's like red alert. You don't have any of this.
Just spouting my medical crap on this podcast. But I take some in Clomaphine and HCG to get my testosterone higher.
I don't take actual testosterone. And the doctor's like, don't mess with that at all.
And other doctors are like, yeah, you can do that. Just don't get like twenty five hundred nanograms per deciliter of testosterone.
You're forty four and you work out every day. Probably shouldn, probably shouldn't have 250, 350 or whatever it was when I did my blood work.
Usually people don't even articulate their values. So the doctor has to like assume you're just a regular person.
They just give a regular person advice. Like if someone asked me, like I'm sitting on a plane, my ultimate analogy for conversations with random people, sitting on the plane next to someone and they're like, hey, how much protein should I be eating? And if I just assume they're a regular person, I'll tell them one thing.
But if they're like, I'm actually a competitive bodybuilder, I'm drug free, I'm in the last three weeks of my contest prep, I'm going to give a very different answer in very different context, but I just didn't know. So it's really good to communicate with your doctor and tell them where you're coming from.
And if you're not getting traction with your doctor and you don't feel heard, then it's time to find a new doctor. And usually most people can do that quite easily.
I think people are confused between TRT, what testosterone replacement therapy is, what steroids are, and what steroid abuse is. Because they think, oh, it's like the same thing or steroids are totally different.
My wife was asking me the other day. She's like, but don't you do steroids? And I was like, no, not at all.
I showed her a photo of you. She's like, you're not going to get like that, right? I was like, don't worry.

How dare she?

So beautiful.

She doesn't want other women to start paying too much attention to you.

No. She was like, wow, that guy works really hard.

But you're a bodybuilder.

I'm not a bodybuilder.

She doesn't know the difference between somebody goes to the gym in their backyard and somebody

who's building muscle so that they can show it off or whatever.

Testosterone is a steroid. So your own body makes steroids.
So everyone's on steroids. But colloquially, that's not what that means.
So on steroids almost means one of two things. One, you're taking substantially more testosterone than you can produce naturally or that anyone can produce naturally.
Double, triple, 10x the amount. Or you're using analogs of testosterone, molecules based on testosterone derived from it and that are very similar to it but have slightly different effects and slightly different side effects.
And those are just the anabolic steroids that are not testosterone as a class. So it's like deca-durabolin or whatever? Like deca, EQ, primo, and all these other steroids.
Like those are things your body does not make, but they work very similarly to testosterone. They're steroids, so is testosterone.
Your steroids are being produced for you at normal doses by your own body. There's TRT, where steroids are being shot into you or taken by a pill, and they're at roughly normal doses or normal human range anyway, and all is well.
Then there is another category I'd like to insert. There is understood and calculated risk steroid use.
So like athletes and bodybuilders will take like very specific amounts of very exact steroids of very, very good blood work. They understand all their values.
They understand the health and longevity trade-offs and they're using it as a tool to enhance their appearance or performance or whatever. And then there is steroid abuse, whereas like every time you lower your doses of psychotic amounts of steroids, you feel slightly human again and you can't make them insane gains again

and your veins aren't always popping out of your forehead and you hate how that old version

of you was because they got made fun of too much and you just ramp back up to super high

doses and even though it's destroying your life and making you insane and destroying

your health, YOLO, you don't give a fuck.

You're flying out on the many, many grams of steroids.

And then another one is like, you know, you're 16 and you decide to do steroids. That's abuse by definition.
And so there's all those categories in that other one. You're open about steroid use, correct? Can we talk about that? So I would love to address this because I think some people are going to go like, oh, I've heard Dr.
Mike talk about how he uses steroids. So he's a hypocrite for even saying that it's bad in any way right now.
It's like telling a race car driver that they can't tell you about like that speeding is dangerous. Yeah, that's good.
I really like that one. They're actually the most familiar with why exactly speeding is dangerous.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Remember when I crashed at 200 miles an hour and I flew out of the car and it was a miracle that I'm still alive. Yeah.
Don't speed. Don't speed kids.
Nothing at the end of that road for you. Yeah.
I mean, like I can address that directly. First of all, that argument, while I appreciate where it's coming from, is an illustration of what's called the genetic fallacy, and it has nothing to do with genetics.
The genetic fallacy is because an argument is articulated by someone or generated by someone that actually has logical merit on the argument's validity and veracity, which can't possibly be true. So if the world's strongest man said, hey, do a lift like this, people would be like, oh yeah, it must be right.
But if he told his son who's 12 to go tell someone at the gym, hey, do a lift like this, he'd be like, get out of here, little kid. Like, what the do you know? And he's like, my dad told me Dan's world's strongest man.
Like, oh, now it must be right. It's the same exact exercise.
Like what about the actual exercise? Was the exercise a good idea? Like on mechanical grounds, on muscle stimulus grounds, on injury and all this other grounds. That's how you actually determine the validity of an argument.
So if someone who's totally drug-free lifetime tells you steroids are bad, and if I tell you steroids are bad and I have not been drug-free lifetime, how could it possibly be that those two arguments have anything to do with who's saying them? Like you can write them down on a piece of paper and drop them off at a bus stop and leave and someone picks up the piece of paper, they can examine the validity of the argument without even knowing who was saying it. So that whole thing of Dr.
Mike's a hypocrite, part of that's genetic fallacy. The second part is I think there's a misunderstanding of what hypocrisy is.
Hypocrisy is like telling someone to do one thing but doing another yourself. I've never told people not to take steroids.
I've said, if you take them, there will be decided consequences, like consequences I'm paying right now and will be forever. Is that hypocrisy? Like, imagine like a soldier gets back from war and he's like, war's terrible.
You're a hypocrite. You went to fight it.
Yeah, that's true. You just came from Afghanistan.
Who are you to tell me war is, right? It would be just as nonsensical. Now, I do understand that once you are labeled as a steroid user or whatever kind of moral degenerate you happen to be labeled as, some people lose an overall degree of trust for you.
It's like a mobster trying to tell the police how to enforce crime better. You're like, yeah, but you're on the production side of crime.
Though I will say a lot of retired mobsters could often work with the police to be like, I know exactly how criminals think, so you're going to find them there. It's called an informant, by the way.
They get paid for that. Exactly.
So, yeah, I understand the emotional valence those people are coming from. But largely, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense when they say, oh, like Dr.
Mike's on steroids. So don't listen to him about steroids.
I don't think we need to have someone on steroids or off steroids to listen to them. The only way is if you really need the experience to say,

if someone was like, this is how it feels to be on testosterone, but they've never been on

testosterone, something's missing. They can read a lot about other people's accounts and admit that

they haven't themselves been on steroids and talk about recounting other accounts, and then

it's also still valuable. So that whole focus on who's saying the thing is usually just baseless,

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All right, back to Dr. Mike.
An old friend of mine, he became a man, she's trans, and he told me, he goes, I got to tell you, I used to think you guys were just like obsessed with sex and it was really sort of juvenile. He goes, I get it now.
Like, I get it, man. This is purely hormones on the brain.
Once I started injecting testosterone, I was like, oh, now it all makes sense. Dude, that is so wise.
And I call it jokingly, either like the thirst or the hunger, you know, the male sex drive, it never sleeps. It just waits.
And the longer you don't attend to it, the more insane it gets. And it's really difficult, even difficult.
It's, it's funny to communicate with, with women about like what the sex drive implies and them just have like a category error and trying to understand you. Just like we have category errors and trying to understand how women feel about various things.
And only by trying do you really fully know. So it's really funny when women try steroids or start to become males and they're like, oh, fuck.
Because for example, you know Chris Williamson, you know who that is? He's a podcaster, a good friend of mine. And he had a dating expert on his show way early back in the day, Kezia something or other.
She was great. And she's like, I have incredibly good looking male friends that are super tall, super wealthy.
Their game is stacked front to back. And they leave a club at the end of the night with just a dinosaur of a person.
And you're like, why? You could get whatever. And the guy's just like, yeah, it was just talking to other people.
And then it's 2 a.m. and it's time to leave, but I'm trying not to use my own hand tonight.
So this person will be sufficient. And to women that just absolutely can't understand that, but to guys when you felt the hunger slash thirst, like anyone who is not hideous and who has functioning hands and a mouth will do 100% fine depending on the circumstance.
And that's something that's so absurd to say. You're like, there's no way a lot of men think like that.
And there are two types of men, men that think like that, men who lie about it still think like that for exaggeration, but not by much. And so that's one of those trippy things.
Like when you do have a male sex drive, you realize the rules are different. How you treat the world is different.
Tell me a little bit about the brain changes that happen with steroid use. People know you get big muscles.
People know that you get maybe a little bit more aggressive or whatever, but I'm curious about the brain changes. Cause I actually, when my testosterone was like 350 or 300, I was one person.
And when my testosterone was like 1100 to 1200, it's a different story. Aren't steroid users typically sort of off the charts? Yeah.
So there's like a bit of a different thing that happens to steroid users when they use a lot. Some of this is kind of hypothetical.
It has some decent amount of research support, but nothing I can as a scientifically minded person say, okay, this is like almost for sure a thing, you know? But some of the suspicions are that it is neurotoxic, like it's harmful to your neurons and your brain. Some of the other indirect evidence is like it might lower certain types of intelligence in the person who takes them for a long time at very high doses.
Some of that might come back if you stop, some of it might not. And some of it's acutely dose dependent, like when you're on high levels of steroids, you're dumber.
When you're on lower levels, you're smarter, but some of that might be permanent. Steroids also at high doses, you're processing about mood and stuff like that.
They make you more male in every respect mentally. And so you become, for example, less apt to exchange emotional information with other people because women are much better at doing that.
The female brain is the best at doing that. The regular male brain's decent, but not so good.
And when you take steroids, you become like a hyper male brain. And then you begin to have lower throughput of social interactions, lower ability to have empathy.
You become quicker to become aggressive or angry or see things as like affronts because the dominance hierarchy becomes like really, really front and center in your mind at a subconscious level. And you become more likely to be anxious or you become more likely to be closed off.
And you're potentially even your ability to form kind of introspection about your emotions and verbalize them. Both might be lowered.
Those are really estrogenic sorts of things, the opposite of androgenic sorts of things. And if you tolerate it poorly, you can get high levels of anxiety, potentially some depression in there thrown in and problems with sleep and so on and so forth and problems with mood and being kind of dick to people because you have that kind of alpha male mentality sort of all the time and it doesn't have a gradation or a switch to it.
And so those are some of the offhand downsides that can occur with steroid use. Do you find that happening when you go on higher doses? I assume you're not just always slamming that stuff, right? You cycle it.
Yeah. So right now I'm on TRT and I'm just smarter on TRT, just smarter.
I can tell it myself. My verbal fluency improves substantially.
My ability to keep track of multiple concepts concurrently in a conversation improves substantially. My context window of how much information am I aware of in my mind's eye at the same time to be able to manipulate to come to the right conclusions goes up and a bunch of other stuff.
So it's palpable, it's notable. And it's not a huge deal within moderate ranges, but at the high range, it's like, hey, you're just dumber and meaner and more emotional and more reflexive and all the things that do not feel great.
So right now, I've been on TRT for a little while now, and it's the best I've felt in a very, very long time. So very, very palpable, very worthwhile considerations and changes.
I'd love to talk about muscle dysmorphia in men, where guys look in the mirror and they're like, I'm'm small. And it's like, dude, you look like the Hulk went on a diet.
You're fine. Yeah.
Well, don't say they are on a diet park because, Jesus, they're going to be like, oh, my God, what kind of diet? You're leaner than the Hulk. You call me anorexic? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, that's the thing is, like, I see dudes who look like a CGI version of a Marvel guy from a movie. And they're like, ah, but I only have six abs instead of eight.
And there's no veins on them. And you're just like, oh man, this is a never ending thing for you.
I'm talking about myself probably, but whatever. Let's talk.
For sure. So muscle dysmorphia and body dysmorphia in males is real.
It's not as common as the concomitant phenomenon in females, which tend to be more related to body weight. The average female wants to be smaller.
The average male wants to be more jacked, but the average female wants to be smaller more than the average male wants to be more jacked. So it would be a disservice if I said this affects males and females the same because it's more of a female problem and it actually causes a substantial amount of higher death rate in females because anorexia nervosa is one of the deadliest diseases, period.
And it is maybe the or one of the most deadly psychiatric illnesses you could ever experience because some substantial number of people that are diagnosed with anorexia nervosa are not savable. They'll bring them to a hospital when they're in a lower weight, they'll force feed them, they'll give them anabolic steroids to help them put the weight back on.
And many of these people, when they leave the hospital on their own accord, they will just spiral back down and end up being found in their kitchen like dead from starvation. I was reading online that someone works at a hospital that deal with anorexia patients.
And she'd said something like, if you fail out three times, we won't take you back. And all the comments were like, why? Those are the people that need the most help.
And she was like, I know. But the problem is we have limited beds for these people.
And if you fail out three times, statistically, you're never going to actually survive this. And we just have to let you die.
And people were like, oh, my God, I by myself was like shocked. Let you die is a real harsh way to say it.
It's not wrong. I would say another way to say it is the ROI to help you is now negative in reference to the ROI to help other people.
If you have someone on a combat hospital line, some person is bleeding out of their arm, but if you tie it off and sew it, they'll be able to keep their arm and not die. Whereas another person has both their legs severed and the blood is coming out so fast that you're like, he's going to die in about two seconds.
There's no way to save him. Who do you attend to? The logical answer, if you care about humans, period, and you don't even care who you're helping, the logical answer is you help the people you can save.
That's at the basis of triage. And emotionally, it's really fucked up to be like once gone, they're out.
They think the way we need to deal with that is like, well, let's improve innovation and wealth and technology in our society so much that we'll have robots attending to people and we'll have infinite number of beds and no one's ever kicked out. That's the only way to solve that.
Because if you're like, well, why don't we help those people? Like there's literally other anorexics that are helpable or going to die. Do you want two people to die or do you want one person to die? It's really up, but there's only one correct answer if you like people.
So it's true. I'd love to focus on the muscle dysmorphia specifically in men.
So you're right. It is horrible.
It's probably an entire separate podcast. But for men, nobody really seems to talk about this because we kind of laugh at these guys.
And I get it. It is kind of weird to see dudes flexing in the mirror.
And they're like, my right delt is like a little bit bigger than my left delt. And you're like, dude, you're just weird.
Let's go get sushi. What are you talking about? How did you get my video cam for my gym? Live feed? Exactly.
But I also, you know, look, I used to be the guy who used to be like, oh, roll their eyes at the guys flexing the mirror at the gym. And I still probably do that.
But I will tell you, as soon as I dieted for like a year and I ended up with a six pack for the first time in my entire life. And I had that six pack for maybe three weeks before I was like, but I want like the sides to go in more.
And then I want like this stuff to go away. My original goal was it would be great if I fit into my pants again.
And now it's like, but I kind of want like the V thing. And it's just ridiculous.
And you keep moving the goalposts. And I know myself well enough to go, I could be built like the cover of men's fitness.
And I'd still be like, ah, but like my back muscles are like not the same size. It's just human nature or something like that.
Or am I just neurotic? There's a huge, huge human nature component to it. First of all, a lot of times it's genetic and environmental in a way that you can't predict, or you can just describe.
So some people, they get really into how their muscles look. And some people, you just can't actually get them to give a shit.
There are multiple Hollywood actors that are known for getting in shape for roles. And as soon as principal photography is over, they're just, I'm not lifting for the next however long it takes the studio to contact me about my next movie.
I don't give a fuck. Some people will start lifting and they'll catch the bug for forever.
And they'll take so many stares to try to get their appearance to be amazing at all times that they'll die because of it. That whole range exists.
And short of dying, there's also such a perseverative

focus on physique that you really lose touch with a lot of the great other things in your life. You won't go on vacation or you have to weigh out your food on vacation because you can't have one ab go away on you and all this other stuff.
There are ways that genetic and environmental proclivity can be altered by various other forces. A big one is what has been your relationship to your body historically? If you totally thought your body was totally fine up until you were in your 30s and then you're like, I could do better, it's less likely that you're going to be really obsessed with your body.
If you hated your body for whatever reason, coming up as especially a teen and all the way through your 20s, and finally you get some traction and start to be able to change it, you might have such a hole in there where your body confidence is supposed to be that's going to take a long time to fill it up. And you might really go far down the road of optimization before you're like, I'm actually jacked and lean enough that I'm like, I feel pretty good about my body and I don't give a shit to go any further than this.
So that's a big deal. That can be a really big deciding factor.
Another one and a huge one is what's your social circle and what do they value and how do they give you criticism? How do they give you acceptance and who is valued highest in that social circle? And if all those are very physique oriented, it can get pretty crazy. Social media is like ideal for doing this.
And so it's particularly toxic when not used intelligently. Obviously when used intelligently, it's the greatest thing ever, second to AI.
But with social media, it's like, okay, everyone I follow is a pro bodybuilder. People that follow me know me for bodybuilding.
All the pictures people put up on social media are the best ever. And so I always look like shit compared to everyone.
And then when I go and do a couple shows, I look 220 pounds, shredded, veins everywhere, but not quite as good as the competitor. So I place middle of the pack.
And then I hear forever on the internet about how much I suck at bodybuilding. I'm total shit and I'll never be a pro.
And then like, if you're in that world all the time, it can be like, wow, like how I look matters and I need to look better and better and better. And everyone else looks great and I'm just falling behind.
And that's a big deal. And then the other one is also probably a personal quirk, but different people have this different extents.
And it's really good to be mindful about it is when I get a certain thing that I wanted objectively out of my physique, how do I settle on that? How do I reflect in it? How do I really accept the fact that I'm in a really good place? I should really be grateful for this. I should really bask in the sun, so to speak, versus how quickly am I apt to be like, okay, this is the new normal.
Now what's next? It is not like a right or wrong answer there. Just you have to know which one you want and what comes with it.
If you're like, no, I can do better. It's cool from like a mountaineer who's looking up at the Everest peak from base camp perspective, looking up and be like, fuck, man, there's more up there to explore.
I love that. That's an open-minded positive way to see it.
The negative way to see it is like you look down from Everest, like I'm never coming down ever again. And if I'm not up to the peak of the mountain by whatever next year, then I've really just done terrible.
And so there's a big mindset problem there. Some people, once they get to an objectively best shape of their lives, at the very least, feel some gratefulness for it, feel some love from themselves about like, dude, you did the thing, you look sweet.

After training sessions, I'll often take my shirt off and just do some posing. And a lot of that's for me to just get vibes off myself and be like, man, I look awesome.
This is great.

And my desire to continue to trade off everything in my life to push for higher and higher is at

least for the time mitigated because I'm at least vibing. One of the most terrible things you can do

is you see yourself and you objectively look the best you've ever looked. And your first thought

Thank you. And as nobody's happy in that road, specifically you.
And remember like if you had, you, who had a better time in life, a bodybuilder that mostly didn't interact with people and died hopeless and alone from steroid abuse, or Hugh Hefner, who looked like whatever, but like a trillion people, you're like, okay, Hugh Hefner won that one, right, right. So if you don't have the best body of all time, you can clearly still live an amazing life, right?

Like, right.

Okay.

So now you have to trade off how far am I willing to take my body bullshit away from living the best life that I can.

So the optimality isn't because people have this idea.

They're like, I'm going to be ripped, shredded to the bone all the time.

And I'm going to have amazing life and balance and all this stuff.

If you can manage that, dope, amazing.

I can't wait till like drugs and genetic engineering allow us all to be pro bodybuilders and walk around and do nothing. Amazing.
We're just not there yet. And so a lot of times you have to be like, how important is it for me to look a certain way? And is me looking better over time associated with me feeling better? For example, for some people who have felt small or weak or fat during their lives, when they finally get in shape and start slowly improving their shape over time, it's just like all gravy.
It's all amazing for them. I'm living my fucking dream.
I can't believe I occupy this body. I'm thankful for it.
Every day, it's making everything better. Dope.
But if you're like, the last four years, I've been really optimizing for my physique. And if I look back at it as just me missing a lot of social functions and me hating myself a lot, and I've never really been satisfied, that's just, that the road that's going to great places?

It's like someone tells you there's like, you know,

a really great trick-or-treating house down the street.

We live on the street for 20 minutes already,

and the houses are getting incredibly more dilapidated

with like ghosts and shit in them.

You're like, the f*** are you?

What's down there that I need so much?

There's clearly nothing down there.

Let's turn around.

And I think some people after years

of meticulously perfecting their bodies

have received almost no joy from the process.

It just made them like hate themselves more. Like you have to be mindful of that and understand how to walk it back.
Whenever I meet retired bodybuilders, they're almost always quite a bit happier, even though they're not at the peak anymore because they can go and eat like seafood pasta without beating themselves up and being like, well, can't eat tomorrow or whatever it is. And they still look amazing.
You see a you see a woman at the pool with like abs and delts and triceps and you're like, wow, are you a fitness model? Like, oh, no, 10 years ago, I used to compete. You're just like blown away.
Meanwhile, looks like crap compared to her peak fitness. Right.
But she's actually super happy about it. I talked to a lot of people in that boat and a lot of it has to do with them finally doing the psychological work as well as the physical work and then like oh i actually don't feel the need to only eat protein and broccoli every single day for 18 months to work up to and then spray myself tan to show so a lot of it has to do with patting yourself on the back pat yourself on your steroidy hairy pimply back and enjoy your success disgusting those animals yeah yeah that animals.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a big deal.
That's a big deal. People, a lot of times, will do things without questioning.
And since suffering is such a big part of the sport, because it has to be, because it's just hard, a lot of people will be like, well, suffering is hard. And the harder I work, the more I suffer.
Thus, the corollary of the more I suffer, the better the results will be should be true. So try to suffer as little as you can.
try to be as happy as you can, but work the necessary amount and be diligent to get the physique that you want. And my best advice is every now and again, take some time to think to yourself, what physique do I really want? And what is my track record of various physiques making me happier or not happy? Because if you can maintain a certain physique and you just feel like over the moon about living in that physique for like ad infinitum, dope, amazing.
It's probably worth it. But if every time you get leaner and more jacked, the only thing you're left with is like, oh man, I really don't still like this look and I really need to be more lean and jacked.
Just ask yourself what the downside risks of those are and what the upsides are and see if you're making like a remotely interesting calculation. Like I had to step away from competitive bodybuilding for some time.
I'll be back to it in a year or two. Because YouTube and business and all that was really shooting up, and I couldn't just take Mondo tons of drugs and computer time.
I was just taking my abilities and time away from the main thing. It was painful.
It's still painful. It still sucks.
But I had to realize, yeah, I just can't keep cranking grams of steroids anymore. I'm not willing to pay this trade-off, and I'm in a better place than I was then.
Is there a better place for me still that I come back to competition and I do some good stuff and I'm proud of the physique that I can kind of leave competitively with? Yes, I think that's in my future, hopefully, and I think it'll work out great. But I'm always aware of all these things.
If I just did things on vibes alone, I mean, good God, who knows what the hell I would be doing now. And the problem is with a lot of dysmorphias, they're completely subconscious and people don't ever bring them to the full mindfulness.
And I'm like using like Sam Harris's waking up app and stuff to keep my meditation going and everything. And stuff like that helps a lot because it's like, are you really aware of what's going on? Are you really getting what you need out of this situation? And that's something you must, must, must ask.
It's really, really important. Looking at the diet I needed to lose weight is not the same as the diet that I needed to maintain the healthy weight.
And a lot of people when they're dieting, the reason this is important, a lot of people when they're dieting, they go, God, this sucks, right? My wife looked at my diet and she's like, you're eating turkey breast every day for dinner. You're eating protein shakes for breakfast.
I ate whatever I wanted for lunch. That's why I did that.
And I did it for 10 months straight. And then I did it again for like three months, a year or two later.
But after you make those changes and I got down, I lost like 40 or 50 pounds of fat and I gained a bunch of muscle during that time. Yeah.
And people are like, wait, but you weren't fat. But honestly, it was all between my organs.
If I looked at a DEXA scan. Yeah, that's the most dangerous kind of fat.
Actually, you did yourself a real good service. My doctor was like, you're going to need to start taking blood pressure medication because you're genetics.
And I was like, let me try this one thing. Now my blood pressure is completely fine because I don't have literal lard between my kidneys and everything.
Maintaining the diet has been really easy. I still track everything in this app called Macrofactor.
It's a great app. I cannot recommend it enough.
I don't get anything if people sign up, but I recommend it to everyone who is willing to do this. And people think like, oh, weighing your food, it's such a pain in the ass.
It's not though. And you learn so much about food.
I'll link to the app in the show notes for people. It's just such, it's one of the best purchases I've ever made in my life.
But maintaining it, you get that 500 or whatever extra calories per day. I usually can't even eat all of the calories that I'm allowed in my maintenance diet because I'm just not hungry anymore.
Sure. There's so much to say there.
I mean, it's absolutely a problem that people have an on-off switch for dieting or not dieting. And then like, how can you not zigzag when you're on switch is you lose weight and you're off switches, you gain a shitload of weight.
And zigzagging or what's called yo-yo dieting is just very bad for your health, very bad for your psychology. It never leaves you with a stable ground.
The other thing is once you use an app like Macrofactor for a long time, you actually get so good at eyeballing your average meals that you can just stop using the app for months at a time. I think the people that publish it are awesome.
So I would just say, don't even mess with your subscription. It's whatever small amount of money, just keep it going.
Oh, I tried eyeballing. I was like, I'm going to eyeball this.
And I was like, oh, I'm getting fatter. And then I went back to weighing and I was like, oh yeah, no, I'm just shit.
That's just because you're not that smart. Most people will do better than you.
Most people don't lie to themselves when they eyeball the people do, but it takes a long time to inculcate that tracking. So I think you have just a few more years of tracking out of you.
I've been tracking for a real long time. So for me, eyeballing is super easy.
And you can also eyeball, if you're gaining weight, just know that you're eyeballing too much and just spare the eyeballing a little bit and then you're good to go. So you don't have to track for forever, but tracking for a while and really developing really good eating habits and then understanding how to change them from the fat loss diet to the maintenance diet is a really good thing.
So take your fat loss diet and it'd be lots of protein, a little bit of fat, a little bit of carbs in a meal, lots of green veggies and stuff. And that's most meals and you don't do cheat meals.
When you're maintaining, you keep the core protein in the veggies, add some fruits and grains and fats to liking and to fullness and to something that can maintain your body weight. Once or twice a week, have a cheat meal and go ham and have fun, and then just adjust your diet slowly as it goes and you maintain your weight.
But you still have those core, very healthy, high-protein, high-veggie, whatever meals that you have, your Greek yogurts, your protein shakes, your chicken breasts, your turkeys, that high protein, high nutrition core keeps your calories lower because it's filling food and it's very low calorie density and it's not super tasty. You don't want to keep eating it all the time.
And that in combination with some junk and some bullshit is like, that's just what's going to allow you to maintain your weight roughly for years and years and years. Whereas if you have the diet mode where you're starving to death, and then as soon as you end that, you're like, okay, it's like, I'm not dieting anymore.
That means I just go back to my old habits of just eating Cheetos for every meal. And then that tends to cause the problem of it reverses all of your good benefits and it takes you back up to where you're starting.
And then you're just on another diet again. I have many people in my life that I know very well only do periods of extreme insane dieting juxtaposed with periods of like, f*** all, I'm eating whatever.
And that is not a good thing. And so by following what I just said, a principle of keeping the protein and healthy food core and adding some bullshit to it and monitoring your weight over time, keeping active, that's something that's very rarely taught, very rarely practiced, very rarely encouraged.
Some people don't even know that it's real. And so people get stuck in that cycle of like, I'm either dieting or I'm not dieting.
And when I'm not dieting, I'm not maintaining my results from dieting and supplying my body with nutrition it needs. I'm just like a child with much more money to spend.
Yes. Yes.
Oh God, I can relate. Like I said, the first time I dieted, I went for 10 months.
I had a coach and he's like, you should take a break. And I was like, do I have to? Cause I'm actually fine.
He's like, you're not hungry. So like my superpower was not being hungry on 1400 calories or whatever it was.
That's impressive. It's an impressive superpower.
Like people go, Oh, you're lying to yourself. Like I'm no, I'm fine.
Like I would eat 1300 some days. And I was just like, I'm full.
I'm good. That's incredible.
Yeah. It was pure luck.
But the problem that I had was that I was like, I want to go rucking for three hours and then I'm gonna hit the gym later and I'm also going to eat 1400 calories. And then I sort of stopped losing weight.
And my friends were like, who would know about this stuff that are smart like you, they were like, yeah, you're probably screwing with your metabolism. And I was like, oh, I thought that was like a fake thing that people say when they're really fat, that their metabolism is slow.
They're like, no, no, no you earned it yeah you earned it how does that work what is the metabolism thing about yeah i actually just wrote down a good youtube video idea based on what bad eating is really just eating like a kid and how we learn not to eat like that we grow up and how you should eat like an adult my dieting coach would tell me to take a break and he goes i go what are the rules for the break he goes just don goes, just don't eat like a teenager. Like don't have pizza three times.
Yes. That's it.
Exactly. I was like, oh, just, he's like, just have like normal meals that an adult would order at a restaurant.
That's all. Very straightforward.
So the metabolic stuff, if you diet for a very long time on very low calories and you have lots and lots of cardio as in the output, a couple of things happen. One is you get in a very high stress state.
And some people in a high stress state will hold lots

of body water. So your weight won't be going down.
It might even be going up for a few weeks

because you're getting bloated because your body's in like fight or flight mode.

Another thing is your body will decrease your overall metabolic output to account for almost

all of that extra activity. And it'll actually get more efficient in processing your food.

And it'll get you to slightly underestimate how much food you're eating. With all these

So to account for almost all of that extra activity. And it'll actually get more efficient in processing your food.
And it'll get you to slightly underestimate how much food you're eating. With all these little subtle changes, it can basically make it so that even though you're on paper doing more physical activity, as far as calories in, calories out, nothing's really changed.
And your body water is going up because of that increased inflammation. And so it actually seems like you're gaining tissue because you're gaining weight.
Now you're almost certainly not gaining tissue. You're gaining water weight and more activity and fewer calories will not solve the problem because you've accumulated a lot of fatigue, diet fatigue, and you need a time where you're at maintenance, maybe regain a little bit of weight, stay at maintenance and have weeks and weeks and weeks and probably months of just like enough food for your body to finally be like, okay, we're not starving to death anymore.
Then it cranks down the body water situation. It makes you feel better.
It cranks up your energy levels. So not only are you maintaining calories, but you have to peel back your physical activity to like sane, sustainable levels.
Once you do that, your body's really good. And then you can go and do some more physical activity and some less food for a number of weeks and months because your body's refreshed.
You'll get great results. You'll get the leanest you've ever been if you'd like, but then you have to back away and do the same thing again.
The body works like any machine. It needs phasic pushes and then pulling back to recover.
You can't just push all the time. There is not a kind of factory machine you could do that with.
There's not a kind of machine humans ever made. There's not a biological system we've ever discovered.
You could just push the gas pedal all the time and it doesn't matter. That's just not a reality.
And I think some people, they are introduced to dieting as like, this is the thing you do now. Now you don't eat carbs.
Now you don't eat junk food. Now you just eat like this.
And it ends never go. And inevitably they'll get into a really bad spot.
They'll try to reduce calories even more and increase activity even more to get out of it. That just makes the diet fatigue even more insane.
And sometimes that pushes the needle along and sometimes it doesn't. And then sometimes they end up like you where they're like gaining weight and they're not supposed to be.
Nothing's broken. It's just really, really off kilter.
And it takes some time at maintenance calories, lots of sleep, and a much lower level of physical activity so your body can recover from all those things and get out of its kind of shock mode that it's in. All right, y'all.
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Mike. So I, uh, TMI, but I had a vasectomy, right? I had to stop working out.
It's a terrible idea to work out. They're like, really don't mess with it.
If you work out, it's going to bleed and you're going to be in a whole world of hurts. I was like, okay.
So I stopped and then I went to Hawaii. I ate whatever I wanted.
I mean, like an adult. And I was like, wow, I thought it was going to like blow up a little bit, eat all the sushi and stuff.
I weighed myself. I had lost three pounds and I was absolutely shredded in the mirror.
And I was like, this is so confusing because I haven't worked out at all. And I just got done killing myself in the gym and rocking and all this stuff and eating on this diet.
And then I changed that up and I was like, what could this be? And it's probably what you just said. I probably peed out a whole bunch of bloat and ended up looking better than ever.
And of course, other friends are like, oh, you just lost a bunch of muscle. But I've heard you say that you don't lose muscle right away when you stop working out.
I used to think like,

oh, if you don't work out this week, everything you did last week, your body's just metabolizing

it immediately. I mean, it might be true to say it's metabolizing everything you did last week,

but you have like five years of working out under your belt. It just does that a week at a time each time.
So you're not losing any more than that. And gaining it back is profoundly easy.
And you don't notice any actual tissue gains and muscle with most of our best measures within like about two weeks is when you really can start measuring it. So you're like losing two weeks worth of muscle has a few outcomes.
Outside of like you're not pumped anymore for being at the gym all the time, nobody can tell. And two, if you come back and lift for like half a week, you've regained all the muscle you lost and then you're just gaining new gains after that.
So it's really not a big deal. Your specific situation tells me that you are quite overreached, quite fatigued and quite far gone because if after two weeks of not training and eating recreationally, you look better, you dug yourself one hell of a hole.
I've been in that circumstance before. So have many, many bodybuilders and physique athletes.
And only after you start eating more and you come out of that deficit, are you like, oh shit, I'm looking better and leaner and fuller the more I eat. And it's like, well, it's not magic.
You just have depleted yourself so much, thrown off all your hormones so much that your body is just like in an unhealthy place. It's kind of like if you get someone who's been like on the front lines fighting and getting lots of experience with, you know, gunfights and stuff, but they're like, haven't slept in days.
They haven't eaten in a long time. They're dehydrated.
How good are they going to be like on the gun range, firing, maneuvering? Well, like not good. They're really tired.
But if you take them and you have a week of them, like just sleeping a ton, eating a ton, no gunshots, no explosions, as soon as they get the weapon back in their hands and they go down the range, they're going to be like a savant with the shit because now they have all the skills they build, but they don't have any of the fatigue. It's that same kind of thing happens with the body all the time and people totally discount it.
I think a lot of people think whatever I do to my body lasts for a few then there's like totally reversed. Like I work out or today, at least for a day.
Good. If I miss a day bad, if I have a good meal, good.
If I have a bad meal, bad, I'm already like losing ground. It just takes longer.
It takes weeks to have all those things set in motion. And if you've pushed way too hard for weeks, it's just going to make you better until you get back to baseline.
Yeah. I started instead of just going on these long diets, which I don't need anymore every two two or three months of like going on a diet, basically just take two or three months.
And I'm like, I'm just going to stay where I am. And now I could stay where I am forever.
Like I look fine. I don't need to like have the bottom two abs with veins on them or whatever the hell, like the next few steps are.
I think it's important. Dieting seems impossible if you think you have to starve yourself and eat kale forever.
And it's just it's not true. And I always want to beat this into people's heads, because if somebody had been able to explain this stuff that we're talking about right now to me 10 or 15 years ago, I probably would have started living a healthier life earlier.
I just thought it was like, I don't want to end all of the joy that I have from eating now. I was like, I'll do it later.
But now I realize I didn't have to end the joy of living life and eating it at all, actually. Yeah.
I just like delay it for a few months and then you get months of it and years of it back as much as you want in a healthy balance. That's a very, very wise thing to say.
I think a lot of people with the best intentions that are in the health space, like health nuts is what we call them in the 90s. I don't know if that's still a term, but they're so psychotic about the shit in the best possible way that they give other regular people a bit of an illusion as to what's involved.
They'll say shit like, oh, when you eat healthy and eat salads and stuff, you feel so much better. Some people get that.
Some people don't. Some people are like, I felt better when I ate pizza.
I just feel hungry and frustrated when eating chicken salads all the goddamn time. And they'll say like, because they're health nuts and because they're mentally maybe not so well and have body dysmorphia up the ass, they're kind of like always counting their macros.
They're always eating, quote unquote, clean diet food, and they never cheat or hardly ever. And people look at them and they're like, well, apparently that's how you're supposed to look your best is you just are a robot and you eat only what's prescribed for their whole life.
And it's just not true. It's similar to when, you interact with various professional athletes and they just always assume that they're in their peak training and diet control phase all the time.
They're like an NFL player after the Super Bowl when their team won. A week later, they're like, oh, training's pretty tough, huh? Actually, no one at the organization is going to contact me for the next month.
I don't train at all for a month. And they're like, why? Because my bones got broken into pieces during that last game.
So I have to heal my bones, my tendons, my cartilage, my psychology, everything. People just have this perception that people who do the thing always do the thing in increments of linear increasing difficulty until they reach 90 and die.
I don't even know. But that is a very, very big misperception.
And exactly to your point, causes people on the outside looking in to be like, was it this fitness? Doing this shit all the time and never having a break? That's not for me. And you just back off.
And one of the things I like is the idea of a cleanup phase, where once you've done most of your body composition change, you've gained a lot of the muscle you wanted, you've lost a lot of the fat. And like you are today, like you feel great, you look great, and you're good to go.
If you ever find yourself in a position where like, you know, the holidays, a couple work trips, couple various other things, and now you're in a situation where you're like, yeah, I've got a little bit of a spare five or six pounds of fat that I gained over whatever amount of time, just like four weeks of eating no junk and reducing your carbs and fats in your meals by half, sticking to that protein and veggie core for all the meals and whatever Greek yogurt or some bullshit, and just like making sure you get 10,000 steps a day and really hitting the gym diligently can just completely wipe away all five or six pounds of excess fat, keep and build even more muscle. And then after that, you go just back to your normal.
Because people will think maintenance is like, okay, maintenance means I never accumulate body weight. I never get out of shape.
As soon as I get out of shape one day, the next day has to be a good day. Actually, you can float for months up in body weight by five or six pounds.
And it's a great time because first of all, you're not food obsessed. Second of all, you're working out.
Yeah, you're doing your shit. But also, you know, you have a couple of junk food items here and there,

skip the gym a couple of times here and there. And then when the phase of life shifts,

it's no longer the holidays, now it's January. Now you're like, yeah, I actually do have four

weeks to clean this up. And then you buy yourself another multiple months worth of time of living

in fundamentally healthy habits, but also not psychotically looking over your meals and workouts

like a hawk and ruining the rest of your life. I think that slow up and down, very little cleanup, once I'm, you know, twice a year, you'll do it for a month.
And the rest of the time you live your life in an awesome, healthy balance that's not psychotic. I think that's probably one of the better ways to approach it.
Having that ability to know how to clean up in your pocket and deploying it when you have a few weeks here and there. And even if you have only two or three weeks at a time, even one weekend spent diligently dieting and not going out for pizza can be a measurable impact on your physique.
And so there's always a chance to clean it up. I love, love, love that approach because it says once you get to a really good place, you can really have a lot of freedom.
And coming back to that good place to restart the clock, so to speak, is insanely easy. It takes a few weeks of diligence.
Empowering people with that takes them out of the perspective of like, well, should I really have this ice cream bar? I don't know, 210 calories. My cap's 200.
Like, bro, bro, have two of them. And then in three months when you're like, eh, I want to look a little leaner, you can spend literally a few weeks getting back exactly all the leanness that you ever lost.
Yeah, this is the whole like, getting in shape for spring and summer. But in a way that's conscious and not just like, oh, crap, I haven't done anything for five years.
Now I want to get in shape now on a six pack for summer. It's like, that's not gonna happen.
But if yeah, if you have five pounds that you need to get off, and you just haven't worried about your diet, other than protein before that, then it's so much easier to do. And I again, I wish people had told me that like a decade and a half ago.
The other thing I needed to learn was that diet will always outrun exercise or basically you can't outrun your diet maybe is a better way to look at that. You know, you look at the calories in a donut, it's like 150 or maybe it's 200.
I don't know. It's like 300.
It's like, oh God, it's brutal. And then you're on the treadmill running a mile and you're like, wait, 82 calories.
I'm tired already. What's happening? This can't be right.
Yeah. So every donut should be seen as like a two to four mile run.
And that's brutal, but also it's good because your body is designed by evolution to conserve on calories. And so it's insanely efficient.
That means our ancestors could survive like off of the land in Africa, hunting various small animals and eating roots and tubers. But because now we have modern grocery stores, it's a different game.
And once you realize like, okay, actually our bodies are phenomenally efficient in physical activity, phenomenally efficient with absorbing and adjusting food, we're not really going to use one of those processes to counterbalance the other. So what we ought to do is get up to a level of physical activity that's healthy and allows us to burn a moderate amount of calories, nothing too low, roughly 10,000 steps a day's worth of regular activity with some lifting in there.
And once we do that, the main lever we can pull for getting a calorie deficit so we can lose fat is going to be diet control. And the good news is you don't even need to pull the lever that hard.
First of all, getting rid of all of your junk food when you're dieting is like just such a huge hack. No more regular sodas, no more junk.
And when you do eat food, keep it a protein core with plenty of veggies. And if you need to eat more food to not lose weight too fast or be hungry like crazy, some high quality nutritious carbs, whole grains, fruits, things like that, or some high-quality fats like olive oils and nuts and nut butters and stuff, they can fill in the blanks.
And then that's really how you do it. You're not very hungry, but you're losing weight constantly.
That's probably the best approach to go for that. But I'm curious about muscle memory.
You mentioned earlier, if you lose this, it's really easy to gain it back. What is muscle memory? How does it work? We don't know exactly how it works on every little level, but some of the inklings we have has to do with satellite cells.
So your muscle cells have a nucleus, which controls the cell, and then the rest of the cell that does all the cell stuff. But the nucleus is like a town center with a fire department, a mail distribution service.
and the rest of the cell is like the rest of the city, the apartment complexes, the gyms, the factories, and so on and so forth. At some point, your muscle cells get big enough that they need more town centers to be located in because like one fire department is not enough to cover New York City because the city's grown so much.
So once your muscle cells get big enough, there's all these little nuclei barely covered up by a cell enclosure sitting around close to that in your muscles. They're microscopic and they have almost no cell around them.
They're just a nucleus. And those satellite cells, when the regular muscle cell gets big enough to where they're too big, it's called a myonuclear domain ceiling.
It hits that. The satellite cells will donate their nuclei.
So the nucleus pops into your old cell and now has two nuclei. So it can get like twice as big.
And the thing is once nuclei go in, they seem to not come out. So if you get a bunch of nuclei, which are like the control processes of the cell that help to direct all the protein manufacture, and the more of them you have, the more protein you can manufacture, and the quicker you can bulk up your muscles and sustain them.
Once you have lifted and then you quit for however long, you will lose the city amount, like people will close down the shopping malls or whatever, but the fire station, police station, government, the nucleus, never closes. And so when you want to build in that city again, you're like, okay, we want to build in the city.
Do they even have a fire department? Yep. And it's really close to your house.
And now you're the only person who lives there and you have a whole fire department to yourself. You're going to be able to build out that city real quick.
And so once the nuclei stay and then you stop lifting and the muscle around them shrinks, when you start lifting again, your muscles are like, okay, we got to get this lifting going. Hey, nuclei, you ready to work? And there's like all these nuclei like, yes.
And you're like, oh my God, we've got a goddamn factory over here. And so you regain that lost muscle real quick because you're super power to do it because you have so many nuclei.
It's almost the same thing as giving yourself just better genetics from the get-go. And so for that reason and a few others, muscle regain happens really, really rapidly.
And if you've gotten really jacked, which is you've already translocated a bunch of nuclei from satellite cells into your core muscle, then they never leave. And so that's kind of how the memories develop, like kind of always there.
And whenever you want to get it started again, you're good to go. It's kind of like if you used to play PlayStation, but you haven't played in a while, the system's still at your house and it still turns on and you're right back.
You don't have to like go to Best Buy and buy a new one or whatever. Like you still have the system at your house and it's never leaving.
That's kind of the analogy there. This is a curveball that maybe there's no answer to yet, but what if I build my initial physique on like a crap load of steroids and then I come back in a decade and I work out again, but there's no steroids.
Do I still have the fire station and the police station or are they like, ah, we left when the steroids left? You still have them. And so because you don't have as much testosterone in your body, the analogy is they still have the fire station, police station, but the export GDP coming in is lower.
So there's not as much business to be done. However, you can do way more business with fire stations, police stations than without.
And so you're not going to, unless you take steroids again, get back to your steroid size, but you'll get back to a way bigger size than you could have had without having ever done steroids. Or it would have taken you like five more years of training to get that big.
The steroids do incorporate satellite cells faster as they grow muscle faster. Because the number one reason satellite cells are incorporated is when the cell gets too big to run itself without more nuclei.
And so steroids can grow your cell so fast, you just add satellite cells faster when you're on steroids. Then when you stop steroids, you still have them all incorporated.
That's one of the reasons why many sports scientists have now sort of taken the position that steroid use for especially a long period,

any time in your career is a permanent enhancer, a permanent cheat code. And so they used to just

test people right before the competition. And if you didn't have any steroids in, you were good

to go. Nowadays, it's really tough.
And there's a lot of very rational voices in the community to

say, if you've ever tested positive for steroids, you should never be allowed to compete with drug

free people ever again, because you always have an advantage. And there's absolutely a lot of

truth to that. How long does muscle memory take to kick in? Is it like taking two months off or two years off, or does it just kind of stay there forever and like come back 20 years later and suddenly I can reactivate these police stations? We have no reason to believe that we found any time limit.
Every examination we take seems to be like years at least, probably decades, and maybe forever. Wow.
That's incredible. That's great news.
Yeah, it's great. Isn't it great? That means you can like take three weeks off on traveling to Tokyo or whatever, and you come back to lift and two weeks later, you're the most jacked you've ever been.
Because people, man, they get really up in their head about that. They're like, oh my God, I'm going to quit lifting.
I'm going to lose it all. Even if you do lose it all, your comeback road is 10 times easier than the road to get there initially was, which is huge.
It's especially good news for

those of us. I know you went to high school with a friend of mine, my college roommate, Rob Brode.

We were lamenting a couple months ago. We were like, oh, remember when we used to go to the gym,

CCRB every day at Michigan and work out? And we used to be so jacked and fit. Ah, never again.

But now it's like, actually, the fire stations are still operational. They're just waiting for us to get off our ass.
That's great. Huge, huge hello to Rob.
He's awesome. I saw him pin someone in wrestling once in seven seconds.
It was the fastest pin I've ever seen in my entire life. It was awesome.
It was a big hero moment. A lot of people will say, yeah, man, I used to be a college athlete and now I'm like a stock trader or whatever.
It's just tough. And to those people, obviously, I usually say polite things that they like to hear, weave in some wisdom.
What I'd like to say is shut the up and go to the gym regularly, you a**hole. You're arguing in a way that seems for you to tell me that, oh, it makes sense, man, must have fallen so far.
It's tough to get back. But the reality is because I know you used to be more jacked, it's easier for you to get more jacked.
If you're like, yeah, man, in college, I never did anything and I was Harry Potter skinny. Should I lift weights? I'd be like, yeah, it's going to be an uphill battle.
You're going to have to build everything anew. It's possible that it's going to be great, but it's a big dig.
It's like deciding you to pull out, you buy a piece of property with a house on it, you just had to pull that house out and put another one in. There's some shit going on.
Whereas if you are in the position where you used to be pretty jacked and lifted regularly, any point in your life for like months on end, at least, then coming back to that, it's just going to be way easier. It's like having the house and the frame already there.
You're just adding a new roof or something. It's just way, way different proposition.
Electricity is already running in. The plumbing's in there.
You just got to plug everything in. Yeah.
I've heard the argument that having more muscle burns more fat. So are jacked dudes or jacked ladies just sitting there burning more calories?

Yes, by such a small calorie number that's nominal.

It just won't be picked up by most equipment.

That's good to know.

And so is the statement more or less true than average of they're the same would bring us?

I would say the statement is less true than is on average a good idea.

So if you operate under the assumption that muscle and fat burn roughly the same amount of calories, you're going to have various things happen to you and to your body as a result of that assumption. And if you operate under the assumption that muscle burns substantially more calories than fat, and thus you change your behavior and change your goals and everything, you're going to be much closer to reality and a good time and a good outcome if you just assume they're the same.
That's a good rule of thumb. What is this about a world without exercise because of AI? I've heard you mention this, but never explain it.
And I'm just dying to know when I can stop actually working and look at my chat GPT. Yeah, well, I can't explain it because it's always during my manic episodes on podcasts and I just don't even remember those.
So, you know, AI is really powerful and it's powerful in ways that most people, including myself, have just not really wrapped their minds around. It's also going to be powerful really soon in a way that's impossible for your mind around because how does your dog understand why do you go to work? There's actually insufficiently intelligent to understand what work even is or even think of various ideas just by themselves.
So AI is growing exponentially and it's super powerful and it's going to do all these great things

but one of the things

that AI doesn't even have to

exist for this

but because AI exists

this is going to come

much sooner than later

is the idea of

looking at the body

and being like okay

so like when we're exercising

how does exercise

make us more muscular

and healthier

and all these other things

and it turns out

it just actually just does it

in really one way a few others but they're very very small. The most direct way is it could actually, something about exercise is detected by your cellular machinery and your cellular machinery changes how it operates and it produces more proteins of some kind, less of another kind, and then it upgrades your body to give you what you want.
It's like, it's not literally true that lifting weights makes your muscles bigger because how the does that have anything to to do with laws of physics? Where is the signal coming from to make your muscles bigger? You're not eating the weights. Because we know that the end result of exercise, the exercise is a stimulus, and the final result is some kind of molecular alterations in the cell, we have to ask the question of like, well, what are the intermediary steps to change those molecules and molecular machines to work in a different way? And we're like, oh, they're like chemical substances.
Like, uh-huh. Okay.
So you can make a drug that's them. Uh-huh.
If you just take that drug, they'll just like do the thing that you're trying to do, but like get right to the point. Uh-huh.
Okay. What's stopping us from doing that? Like, well, we're not so good at designing drugs that are exactly the thing we want.
And we're not so great at delivering them into the body system such that to survive digestion. And like, hey, AI, can you help us with that? And AI's like, yeah, I can actually scan all the types of protein you could ever make.
You'd be given information about all the different receptor types that can clip that protein clip into and probably design a protein that has 99% chance of being exactly the thing that you want it to be. And you're like, oh, so if we can really do that, then all of a sudden we can maybe like take a pill

that gets us all the muscle that we need and with zero training. Can you give us some kind

of grounding? And the reality is there's actually just one molecule in skeletal muscle called

myostatin. It's naturally produced, myo for muscle, statin for stopper or blocker.

And it stops you from growing constant, huge amounts of skeletal muscle. And when you exercise,

among various other things, myostatin's activity turns down. And then when you don't exercise for

a while, it turns back up. So muscle loss isn't something that just happens all the time because

nature, it happens on purpose. Your body gets rid of muscle on purpose.
When it stops getting rid

of muscle, that's actually its default state, and then it gets you super jacked. How do we know that's a real thing? With chemicals, researchers have confirmed that it exists.
And we have animals that are mice, we have greyhounds, we have cattle, and a few humans who have the myostatin protein just doesn't work. And so they just never stop gaining skeletal muscle to a point that's much higher than us, and they just look jacked and ripped all the time.
So we actually know that there's not like this magical set of circumstances we have to unlock for muscle growth to occur. It's really just like even one molecule goes like 95% of the way to maximum muscle.
If we just turn it off, we're good to go. So now all we're looking for is a way to turn myostatin off in a graded exposure level with a pillar and injection for humans.
It's one protein target in one type of cell. It's not rocket science.
They've done this with other things before. And now it's just a matter of getting the candidate molecules developed and getting them researched.
And it's not happening right now because all of the large pharmaceutical corporations are now using AI, but they're using it to hit like big hitters, like diabetes, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary, so like all these things that are mega killers. But very shortly, they're going to realize like actually insufficient muscle mass in older populations is like a real big killer by itself.
And so they're going to develop that. And then the rest of us who are of normal healthy weight can take however much of that we need to be as jacked as we want functionally.
It doesn't address like muscle asymmetries and imbalances. You will get like your head will look more like mine marginally because you'll develop muscles everywhere.
These are all skeletal muscles. That's why I look kind of ridiculous.
I didn't notice that. Thank you.
But as a result of just hitting the chemical buttons, that's kind of the story. We're already doing that with appetite.
You've noticed the new drugs, the ozempics and stuff like that. GLP-1, is that what they're called? GLP-1, yep.
And there's GLP-GAP dual agonist. There's retatratide, which is a triple agonist, which actually increases your basal monobolic rate in addition to reducing your appetite and a few other things.
So we're getting to this point where we have known for generations that the body's a very complex machine. And then if you turn various genes off or if you turn various proteins on and off or turn them up and down, you can sort of get whatever the f*** you want out of it the realms of like biological feasibility.
But now we're actually having some traction in this. In the next five to 10 years, I think we're just going to get a lot of traction onto it.
We're going to have super ozempics coming out and we're going to have drugs that can modulate your muscle mass and modulate your health. And so like, yeah, with like two or three pills a day, you can have an incredible amount of health, muscularity, et cetera.
And if you want to work out just for extra aesthetic appeal and get the muscles all in balance, like that's great. But then people who like want to do hiking or want to hang out with their families and want to travel around the world, they'll still be able to be healthy and fit without having to spend hours and hours at the gym, which I personally think is a blessing and an amazing thing.
And I think it's also rather inevitable, but some people in the fitness community maybe misunderstand my position or maybe they understand it appropriately. And they think that's going to be like the worst thing in the world.
Yeah, I mean my personal trainer is probably like I'll be retired before then hopefully but like, you know, I don't think that there's always going to be a market for people who actually enjoy exercise which somehow I've become one of those people. What the hell happened there? But yeah, weird question to end it.
But what are you most proud of? It's a weird question, but we are just two dipshits from Michigan who both went to the same college and did okay for ourselves. I'm curious what stands out to you.

Oh, man. My best answer is I'm not sure.
I have trouble experiencing the emotion of pride.

And anytime I get proud of anything, I try to figure out why me and not other people.

And I realized most of the reasons are like my parents just happened to be pretty smart. And I came out genetically real smart and genetically prone to hard work.
And I took some opportunities

that came my way through nothing other than luck multiplied by my genetics. And I don't really know how to feel proud about any of that.
Imagine asking a basketball player if they're proud about being 6'10 and they're like, well, I just kind of grew into it. So I don't know, man.
What do you think your parents are most proud of that you've done? I think my parents have seen me be so not successful. They're probably most proud of the fact that I'm just like a decent human being who earns a living.
But I think they're proud of the fact that I'm like, you know, financially very well to do. It's a big deal for Ashkenazi Russian Jews.
And the fact that I'm like sort of in the fitness space, kind of world famous or whatever that seems to be, I think I think they think is nice. but I think they just like that I have a thing that I'm good at and that thing pays well and that I support myself and my wife and I'm not in jail for various degenerate crimes.
I think that's for them like a real big deal. Russian Jewish parents tend to see pride as like, can you checklist these three or four major things? We're good.
And if you haven't, you're like a disaster failure. That's seemingly how it works.
But yeah, for me on a personal level, I'm just trying to do my best, man. I've tried to like really be proud of some stuff, but it just never sinks in.
So I'm just kind of like, yeah, but I think it's nice that I have all these things, but I'm just trying to be like a decent human being and do better to help myself and help other people one day at a time without stepping on too many toes. It was best I could hope for.
That's a very, probably a similar answer that I would give.

Although you're right, it's hard to be proud of stuff. And I don't know if that's how we were

raised or it's just like how normal people think about achievement. Well, that's something to

unpack for next time. I'd love to have you back and talk about getting, actually getting into

shape some more. I appreciate it, man.
Can't wait to get back on the show again. And thank you so

much for having me. Thank you, man.
You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show on how big pharma broke American health care and what we can do to repair it. Prior to the pandemic starting, Americans live 3.3 years less than the citizens of 19 other wealthy countries.
And in those two years of the pandemic, that 3.3 years less grew to 5.3 years less. I think it's a very powerful testimony of the fact that our healthcare system is not as well-oriented towards producing health as the healthcare systems of the other wealthy countries.
Here's the problem, Jordan. The drug companies have paid for the research.
The drug companies have analyzed the research. The drug companies have written up most of the research.
These written up manuscripts that are brief summaries of the whole study are then submitted to journals for publication. When they're submitted to journals and the peer reviewers and the medical journal editors look at these manuscripts, they don't get to see the underlying data.
The drug companies have one primary mission. We've got to remember this.
It's not to make us healthier. It's not to improve the quality of our lives.
It's to maximize the financial returns to their investors. And they do it very well.
their job that's what they do they do it they are world class and they fight tooth and nail against it and as you were saying the wealthier they get the more money they have to fight anything that's gonna threaten their profits but even when they blow it completely with a disaster like Vioxx that killed 40,000 to 60,000 Americans, even then they break even. Nobody went to jail about that.
And that is the introduction of the conversation about why is this happening? How could this possibly be happening? To hear John Abramson's take on how our health care system can be overhauled to benefit people over profits, check out episode 709 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Love this conversation with Dr.
Mike. I watch a ton of his videos.
I highly recommend giving him a follow on YouTube if you're into exercise and fitness. And he is already on the books for another round here on this show because I got through like one third of my notes.
And I will probably keep having him on because I love this stuff. Look, the trick to being in the best shape of your life is to be in terrible shape for the first part of your life.
And I don't want to ever go back to that. I'm 45 and I really do look and feel the greatest that I ever have.
And I'm sort of trying to evangelize a little bit about that as much as I can to you all without being annoying about it. Hopefully I'm towing that line decently.
All things Dr. Mike will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.
Also, our newsletter, Weebitwiser, something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, in under two minutes every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.
It is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.
Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at SixMinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show has created in association with Podcast One.
My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

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