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- [00:00]
Cody Sanchez
Hey, I'm Cody Sanchez and welcome to the Big Deal podcast. I wanted to be shredded while not working out that much and still eating like a non psychopath, AKA not counting calories and living on a scale and eating chicken breast like it's the last animal on the planet. So I looked around for who to talk to about that and arguably the biggest name on YouTube and the Internet right now is Dr. Mike Israelitel. He is an exercise scientist, PhD, hysterically funny dude, bizarrely jacked, and also very hairy. Mike is going to talk to us about the science of getting fit, healthy, getting skinny with a bunch of things that are really gonna surprise you. From drugs, that maybe we'll have a stance that you've never heard before to what lies were we told about physical health and hotness. And also he built a company, RP Strength. Super interesting company and a multi, multi million person audience by truth talking. And despite his very large brain, which.
- [00:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
You'Ll agree that it is large after.
- [01:00]
Cody Sanchez
You listen to him for the next hour. Also with a sense of humor and a way for us to take ideas that maybe seem overwhelming, like health, fitness, making money, building businesses, what's happening in the world, but in a very simple way. So without further ado, I want to get right into the conversation with Mike. I think you guys are really going to like this one. I learned a lot.
- [01:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Why are we so fat based days in America? What happened to us?
- [01:25]
Cody Sanchez
Well, you see, the corporations and the government, they're not enough. Lizard people. Illuminati, five dimensional aliens. You see how they come from a. Totally. See, makes sense. Obesity. Yeah, that's it.
- [01:41]
Dr. Mike Israetel
That's it. That's what we're taught.
- [01:42]
Cody Sanchez
It's tough, it's complicated. The 5D stuff really throws a whole loop. On a serious note, it's actually we are learning nowadays that the increasing amount of obesity around the world now is probably down to just like mostly one thing, which is curious. And when I tell you this one thing, you might have a similar reaction to many other people here where they're like, no. Yeah. So here it is over time, specifically after roughly the 1950s, and moving up in an exponentially increasing curve, what you could call the price palatability of food has skyrocketed. You can also use accessibility, palatability, convenience, palatability. What does that mean? Bunch of science terms, I don't know. And that's all I had memorized. I'm really nervous and I have no idea where I am. So basically, for how much it costs, for how easy it is to Access for how little time you need to spend working to get it in. Both at work, for your job, they give you money, you go buy food. And for like I have to make food or get food now, how long is it going to take me to get the food I want? Is it going to be like I have to slave over a hot stove for two hours or is it going to be like I just drive over to the. What do you guys have here in Austin as a grocery store?
- [03:05]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, Buc ee's is the best.
- [03:06]
Cody Sanchez
Bucky's. Oh, Bucky's.
- [03:07]
The gas station.
- [03:08]
Oh, the gas. Well, I'm not going to the gas station to get your dinner. My God, I knew it was a low class podcast. You know, I'll have my butler see me out. But so yeah, perfect example. Bucky's is the quintessential example. A driver of Buc EE's is two minutes away. And for what? Functionally, for the average income in the United States amounts to almost no money. You can buy an inordinate amount of high calorie food that is the most convenient and the most tasty by a long shot that has ever been. So we are swimming in an environment where incredibly convenient, incredibly cheap, incredibly easy to access, super wide variety, insanely amazingly tasting food is almost ubiquitously available to all of us or almost everyone. And people really. I know this is going to sound crazy. People really love to eat super tasty food. And most people care about the calorie density of that food and long term what it's doing to their bodies, only to some nominal amount. Like if someone's like, hey, like what do you think about the Ukraine, Russia situation? You'd be like, what's terrible? War is terrible. They're like, what are you doing about it? Specifically? You're like, my taxes go to NATO and NATO make sure that Russia doesn't do anything else bad. Maybe something like that. So when you catch people at a Thai restaurant or catch people grubhubbing Thai food on their phone after a long day of work, you're not going to be like, hey, like what? Really? Peanut sauce? And they're like, it's delicious. And you're like, but it goes straight to here. And they're like, yeah, yeah, no for sure, but I'll do fitness or something. And it turns out that the amount of calories you can pack on that through tasty, super tasty food is like wagah. But the amount of exercise and physical activity and resistance training, everything you'd have to do, to quote Unquote, burn that off. I mean, gee whiz, it's really hard to do. If you think about like you go to McDonald's, get a regular meal, combo meal or whatever, it's like over a thousand calories, 1000 to 1500 calories, sort of minimum. The amount of exercise extra per day or physical activity takes to burn 12, 50 calories. I mean, we're talking about running, like jogging. For real? For real. With your 80s headband and your tunes. A Walkman perhaps to make it dated hours, like five hours over running, nobody doing that. And so basically, human beings have a set of wants. And you know this from the business world. The supply and demand is such a beautiful concept because it distills down to so much about what we do. Humans demand in the sense of have money, am able and willing to pay for very super tasty food. And super tasty food, you just kind of want to eat it all the time. And everyone really has that pull to some extent. And so what we can tell is the biggest factor of who's getting super obese and who's not is probably just people's genetically determined, largely genetically determined baseline hunger signaling and food pleasure response. Do you have friends that are like, they'll eat, like, you'll go to sushi with them and they're like, oh my God, I'm starving. And you're like, okay, sushi. If you get sushi, they have like a roll and a half and they're like, oh, that's it. And you're like, what? I'd be here all day. They would have to get the police to kick me out. Like, I can drink the oil, the whole thing. Some of us just like food a lot more than others. And that is the primary cause. Now, back in the 1920s, let's say you liked food a lot. What are you going to do about it? Nothing. You're going to go to the nickel and dime store, get a can of beans you don't like? Just keep eating beans. So there's that concept of palatability. Here's the thing, if you can't tell.
- [06:55]
By me starting a podcast, I love talking to friends about how they made their millions helping business owners and normal humans solve their problems. Fulfilling. And I love sharing these on the Internet because then you and I, we learn together and hopefully it helps you. But when I can't meet in person, there's one tool I use. Riverside. So Riverside ensures I can talk to someone anywhere in the world and record it in 4K resolution. So the video Quality matches the quality of the people. Riverside records separate audio and video tracks so we can easily cut out those awkward interruptions that I know are not my favorite part of interviews. But if you're not into the detailed editing, Riverside still got you covered. They have in platform editing software that gets this edits based off a 99% accurate AI transcription. And if that's not simple enough, they take AI one step further with their show notes that summarizes your content into an SEO optimized description and chapters all automatic. So you can use Riverside for podcast interviews, panel discussions, discussions, presentations, webinars and more. And best of all, it's simple because I don't have time for complex. I love technology and I got you guys a deal. Try Riverside for yourself with the link in description and use the code Cody for an exclusive discount.
- [08:05]
Food corporations Anyone who sells your food, it can be the local hipster, mom and pop diner retro place in Austin all the way up to like Pepsi company. They know that if they make their foods tastier and they know that if they make their foods tastier in such a way that you just want to keep eating more like that's what you want, that's what seems to make you happy, they're just going to do that. So back before a lot of processed foods were made and not even processed, just really well prepared foods, convenience foods. Nowadays you go to like Costco or Sam's Club and there's like that rotisserie chicken. It's already done. It's amazing.
- [08:39]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's like $5.
- [08:40]
Cody Sanchez
I don't even understand the price economics of that. How do they afford that? Must be cross subsidized or something, right? But that is not even processed food. It's technically whole food. But it's so delicious and it's so convenient. Back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, if you wanted to really gorge yourself on amazing fun foods, but you have to have like an Italian grandmother or several in your home preparing food. And you know like all those videos about how food prep used to happen hours, hours to make lasagna or to make any kind of special dinner. Nowadays it's minutes. And in order to have a really, really good food in the 1930s, you have to be living pretty large. Poor people, middle income people, they had to kind of subsist on food that was annoying to make. But if you wanted it convenient, it was just not going to taste really good. Imagine taking a completely unflavored cut of not so great steak and some like just buckwheat that you boiled and put that together and eat up like, how much really is anyone? Do people overeat that? And the answer is some small fraction of people whose food drive genetically is just outrageous will actually overeat that. Which is why we still saw obesity in the 20s and 30s in America. Very small fractions. Now, as over time, the ease, convenience, cost per work hour that you put into your life and taste of food all go that way. More and more people, regular food drive, people start to fall under the curve of like, yeah, you're going to want to eat the stuff all the time, Cheetos and stuff. You ever have one Cheeto? Nobody does that. You just want to keep having it. Of course you get full at some point, but at that point you've drained 800 calories or something and you're like, oh, very well. And then a couple hours later you're hungry again. You do the same thing. And so the insane availability, insane in a very good way, by the way of super amazingly tasting foods and people being just categorically way more wealthy on average is the thing. You can see this live occurring that what happened to us in the 70s and 80s in Mexico right now, I went to Mexico on vacation for the first time in like 1998, and like almost everyone was either thin or like normalish looking. And then I went back with my wife and some friends like two years ago and holy crap. There are a lot, very charitably, there are a lot of people in Mexico that are enormous, America, enormous. Like, I'm like, are you guys from Texas? And so how is this possible? Well, Mexico's income per capita is now similar to what the US income per capita was in the 1960s. It's no longer accurate to call Mexico a third world country or a poor country. Almost no one's there as poor. Food insecurity is an incredibly unlikely thing in Mexico. And most people have enough disposable income to buy all the fun foods they want. And guess what people do when they have money and they like to eat fun foods? They buy fun foods and they eat them. That really is the core of the obesity epidemic. And also another reason why new medications like Ozempic, Tirzepatide, et cetera, mounjaro all those things, while why they are some of the only things to really take a big chunk out of obesity is because they take your whatever genetic food drive and palatability drive you have, how much you want to eat, and they lower it based on how much of the drug you take. Now at Some point, you take enough drug, the side effects are so terrible, you're like, this isn't worth it. But for many people, there's a point at which the side effects aren't terrible yet, but they just don't really want to eat food as much as they used to, or they still do, but they turn into that girl from earlier. They have three pieces of sushi, they're like, oh my God, I'm so full. And you're like, what? And so if there was some kind of mysterious cause for obesity, how could these medications, which really predominantly work just by lowering your hunger levels and food drive, how could they possibly work to kibosh obesity? But they're doing.
- [12:27]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's so interesting because, you know, these days, if you were to say to a lot of people, well, just eat less calories, they would be like, well, it's also the seed oils. And haven't you heard that? It's also like you said, sort of this giant geometric blob of institutions that are incentivized to make you fat, essentially. But when you explain it that way, it makes it so much simpler. So do you think that the. We'll use the word Ozempic just because it's more normative, but do you think that Ozempic is actually good for society and good for our obesity rates? Rates?
- [13:00]
Cody Sanchez
Incredible. I think it's a miracle drug. And I think because it's only technically it's a third generation GLP drug, but fourth gen is Tirzepatide. It's already on the market. Manjaro. Fewer side effects, bigger primary effect. There are 5th gen drugs currently in FDA approval process which make OIC look like a starter pack version of this. And so we're just at the beginning of this crazy drug revolution where if you have a problem with your appetite and you're overeating, very soon there's going to be something you can take that probably doesn't cause you super crazy side effects and can get your eating back down to a level that is not going to cause you to increase your obesity anymore and probably reduce it. However, like every single tool that capitalism provides for us, you can use tools in a variety of ways. They can be empowering or they can be less than empowering, sometimes even like crutches, for example. So if you want to be leaner and want to be healthier, drugs like Ozempic are like just the shield and sword of Athena. Like, holy crap, are they empowering? Because you used to be like trying to get on a diet three weeks later, everything looks like a giant, fatty, juicy drumstick. Like, your husband starts looking like one. Can I eat your leg? He's like, what? I'm sorry, I just need a snack. Pop tarts, everything. Because dieting's hard. Your body is designed over millions of years of evolution to be like, hey, we're a calorie deficit. Probably means we're going to die soon. In ancestral times. Get to the fridge, everything starts smelling good. You start fantasizing about food. But Ozempic and all those drugs can really quiet that process so that now you're like, oh, like, this is what it's like to diet if you're just, you know, like you. Everyone has that girlfriend who's like, oh my God, Becky, I'm getting pudgy. And you're like, oh, I hate you really have any body fat? And she's like, three weeks later, she's like, look, I have my abs back. Ha ha ha. You're like, what did you do? She's like, I just like, ate less. And you. So it turns us more into that girl that can just kind of do it. And it's just not a big deal anymore. Because what's called food noise or hunger noise. Like you're writing something and you're like, tacos. No, I didn't mean to write tacos. I'm just starving to death. All I can think about is tacos. That goes down from a yell to a quiet whisper or to nothing at all. That's enormous. On the other hand, you could do a thing where you take all the anorectic Is what they're called anorectic drugs that reduce your appetite. You take all those drugs in the world that you want and have no desire or motive force to actually accomplish your fitness goal, and then they will absolutely lower your body weight just because naturally you start eating less, but they're not as empowering and then you're not going to get as much out of them. And you can continue to still be roughly as obese as you've ever been or a little less and still kill yourself with tons of really not good for you foods. One of my colleagues, Dr. Spencer Nodolsky, he's a board certified obesity specialist. He recounted a story that he had interactions with someone before where and hopefully there's no names involved. So I think it's okay. Spencer will be killing me if not. He was working with this person who was like, he had her on like multiple anorectic medications, obesity drugs, like many, not one. And so like, his assessment was that like she couldn't possibly experience food drive with this cocktail and her body weight wasn't going down and he was consulting her and trying to figure out what's going on, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, tell me what you've been eating. And she's like, well, like I had a candy bar earlier. And he's like, oh, I see. Were you hungry? Because like when you're hungry, truly, it's a little curt for us to judge you for just reaching for something. Like, we're human, for the love of God, we've all faltered before. And so he was looking for that, like, oh, Jesus. So were you hungry? And she goes, no. And he's like, why did you eat the candy bar? And she's like, I felt like eating a candy bar. If you're that person, no offense, we're all different in our own ways. And no medications coming to save you because the medications are sword and a shield. If there's a hyena over there and you got Zeus or Athena's shield and sword, you could just go like that and the hyena dies. But you just drop them and go wee, it's going to cuddle with you. And hyenas aren't good at cuddling. So that medications now being our new best friend, empowering us to do things is amazing. But we can use them to empower ourselves or we can just use them and sort of continue to eat the same diet of Cheetos and Pepsi Cola, no offense, Pepsi, who I think also might manufacture Cheetos, if I'm not mistaken. I think you're right. And then like, if you don't want to take the little babiest ant step to help yourself, it's going to be tough. But for those people who have been struggling with just genetically high proclivity to eat and want to do the thing, it's just really hard for them to do the thing. These medications are unbelievable. They're also on a net balance, healthier for you probably to take than not to take. They have incredible glucose clearing, anti diabetic benefits. They have really cool cognitive benefits. We're learning they actually lower your addictive drive to almost everything. People like quitting smoking, they're quitting drinking on these drugs, they stop biting their nails and stuff. It's really trippy. And so because there's that on a personal level, when you're really, really hungry, like after a bodybuilding show or something, you see wide eyes for stuff. You just want things to go inside you, like you can't Even barely taste food anymore. You're just like, there's this gaping hole you have to fill. If that drug quiets the crap out of that, all of a sudden making healthy choices and actually sticking to them is this thing that you just have to be an organized, conscientious person to be able to do instead of being a person who's fighting like an unbelievably powerful temptation, which is tough.
- [18:44]
Dr. Mike Israetel
That's fascinating. Do you think that I was reading a little bit about that? There are some early indicators that. And you as an exercise scientist and given this is your field and I'm just playing around in it part time.
- [18:56]
Cody Sanchez
Don'T ever question my expertise.
- [18:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Do you worry at all about if we inhibit the reward sensors, let's say inside of our body, to say, no, you know, I don't want food, I don't want. Maybe even sex? I don't know if there's anything that shows that that happens. I won't have alcohol. Like, could it. Could it mess with our reward sensors overall? Will it have any like suicidal issues? Do you worry about it in the same way? I just sort of common sense. Luckily I look at it like SSRIs or something. We're like, we were like, you know, they should make us happier, but because they dole these different things or then there's actually these third and fourth order side effects that like, we want to keep our eye out. Does any part of that actually make sense medicinally or. And what do we. Is that just like everything else? It's like good things in measure?
- [19:42]
Cody Sanchez
It's a very good point. A couple of things. One is we are consistently engineering and reengineering drugs to have better main effects and fewer side effects to the point of SSRIs. There's a new medication that just got Approved in early 2024, late 2023. Geparone is the. Not the trade name. Geparone is the generic name. The trade name is Exua. Exxua. I don't know who the hell comes up with these drug names, but beautiful. It has very similar, probably slightly elevated antidepressant functions compared to traditional antidepressants. But its effects, at the very least on food drive and on sex drive are not statistically differentiable from placebo. Which means that now there is an antidepressant pill that takes you out of major depressive disorder, but at the same time doesn't really mess you up in seemingly very many ways. That's not a Gen1 drug. That's like Gen9 or something. So as drugs evolve, they're seeking to reduce the side effects, some of which you describe, and increase the main effect to the point where if you, let's say have like a blood pressure drug that you take, someone can legitimately ask you if you take a modern blood pressure medication, they're like, so what are the side effects? You're like, I don't think there are many or any. You look at the medical literature, like a few austere side effects. For some people, usually nothing, you can't even tell you're on them. And so like man, that is a well engineered drug. So we're heading in that direction. However, were not there yet perfectly for most drugs. And so for Ozempic and all those other drugs, there are downsides for sure for some. And it really comes down to this on a broad strokes level, they work just super well for almost everyone. But almost everyone, let's say is 85% in the United States, population of roughly 300 million. With this, tens of millions of people who are going to have a bad time on Ozempic and all the other drugs like it. And so, yeah, we're doing great. But all those concerns you bring up some people, yeah, that kind of saps their joie de vivre or whatever.
- [21:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Right.
- [21:49]
Cody Sanchez
And seemingly it doesn't do a ton of that, but on the margins it can, especially at very high doses, especially as it mixes with your own internal pharmacology, it can definitely do that. There are some risks of various types of other things that can occur. Obviously the biggest problem with these drugs is that if you crank the dosage really high to get the main effect, the side effects come up with it. And those can be really well managed if you eat really well, lower fat diet, decent amount of protein, plenty of veggies, not overeating, not eating a ton of super tasty foods. And it can empower you to do that diet and be like, this is great. But if you take a bunch of Ozempic and then you get into some pizza, you know that thing where like your body doesn't really tell you it's full until like 20 minutes into eating or something. There's a little validity to that. I mean, just on habit, some people can pipe down like nine slices of pizza before the bell rings, you know, like, oh, I got nine. The thing is, your stomach is digesting at such a slow rate when you're on Ozempic that you get so much pizza in the stomach at once it can kind of makes an executive decision and it goes that this is a non starter. I can't have rotting pizza. And then you'll get gastroparesis, which is like the cessation of digestion altogether. Sometimes it goes up one way, sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes it stays in there and causes you massive pain everywhere. And you go to the hospital, they pump your stomach. If you make really bad choices on this kind of drug, it's kind of like there's like an anti smoking drug like Chantix or whatever. I heard that if you like smoke on that drug, you're going to have a real bad time. So just don't do that. But if you take the drug, you don't want to smoke. Some people will take the drug and think it's like a panacea. They think like, oh, this is instead of responsible dieting and exercise. Yeah, it's not, it's an adjunct therapy to them. And in that way it works really, really well. But if you're just like, I'm just going to eat the same crap I always did, you might have a really bad time of it.
- [23:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, I think it's like really beautiful the way that you talk about it because so often we're so dismissive of drugs for people who are, let's say morbidly obese. And a lot of people on podcasts are just like, just get up at 6am Cold plunge, sauna, then do the workout, then eat nothing with seed oil. And we just kind of to minimize how hard it is to go backwards from something. I mean, I've seen it with my family too incredibly difficult to go backwards. And if there's something that can help you in some way and use, use it responsibly. I think it's, it's reasonable for us to, to appreciate that. You can tell you've talked to a lot of people because of your EQ with how you explain it. I also think with.
- [24:24]
Cody Sanchez
I talk to. No. When I sit in front of a.
- [24:25]
Dr. Mike Israetel
YouTube studio, you talk at a lot of people.
- [24:28]
Cody Sanchez
Not even. It's just a camera aperture. They never let me out.
- [24:32]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Really help. No, I think he's killing it. But I like. The other thing I think that's kind of interesting about this is let's say the blood pressure medicine. Like my dad's been on it forever. But the thing with my dad is I'm like, yeah, it seems to be very helpful for you. Also you do nothing to actually help yourself with blood pressure. You think that cheese crisps are a food group and so.
- [24:54]
Cody Sanchez
Whoa, whoa, you're gonna install cheese Strips on somebody else's pod. No, wait, this is your podcast.
- [24:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
This is my podcast. He's gonna be pissed. He'll side with you. But if we're like symptom covering this other terrible thing that we're doing with drugs, I don't think that's great. But I've never heard about the food drive spoken in this way.
- [25:10]
Cody Sanchez
Yes.
- [25:11]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Which is not. Doesn't seem to me like it would be a symptom of something wrong in the body. It might just be genetic.
- [25:18]
Cody Sanchez
It's totally genetic. Interesting. And it also happens to be somewhere where the conspiracy theorists are sort of correct in a very low key way. There is a corporate conspiracy to try to make food as cheap and delicious and accessible to you as possible. But it's not a conspiracy. It's just what people buy at the store. McDonald's over the years has tried to have a bunch of menu items that were healthy and they usually discontinue them after some amount of time and like, look like you're very. This is your career is to be super corporate savvy and understand economics and things like that. Business practices. The McDonald's Corporation, great. I love them. Right? But to believe that the people in charge of McDonald's are any much more than using their pure Machiavellian drive to determine ROI is insane. It's a publicly traded company. If you don't do ROI as the internal calc there, you're just not going to sit on the board for much longer.
- [26:13]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Incentive alignment. That's it.
- [26:14]
Cody Sanchez
That's it.
- [26:14]
Dr. Mike Israetel
We're all Pavlov's dogs.
- [26:15]
Cody Sanchez
Pav loves dogs. And so if you get a menu item that's super healthy and doesn't taste that great even, hey, it tastes great. But super healthy. A little fibrous, a little salad feel, nothing really beats like one of the McDonald's cheeseburgers just sliding down your throat. You're like, I don't even have to chew this thing. I can inhale it. You give them another product. If it doesn't generate proper ROI for its alternate menu position, every part of the menu is, what's the roi? And it's a stacked rank order list. If something falls below the bottom, it's out and something else is to replace it. You know, all these things. It's not rocket science. If it falls below that, like, why do we sell this at all? It's gone. And on the other hand, people are like, see, they just want us to be fat. Corporations do not want you to be fat. Not in the least.
- [26:59]
Dr. Mike Israetel
They Want to be rich?
- [27:00]
Cody Sanchez
It turns out there's no they want to be rich. And how do they get rich? They give you what you tell them you want. Not verbally with your dollars. And so when they have a, if they have a salad at McDonald's ever, that makes sense on the numbers. Like people love it and they buy it. You will see McDonald's transformed into a health food enterprise.
- [27:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
They don't care.
- [27:21]
Cody Sanchez
Can you imagine like sitting down at McDonald's board and they're like, health food's really picking up. Our menu items in health category are crushing it. They're like, jesus, how are we supposed to make America fat if they won't eat our junk food anymore? Foot in the line, we're selling only Cheetos. We're going down with the ship. That's never going to happen. They're going to sell you what people buy. Trouble is, people don't seem to as often in many cases be interested in buying the super healthy stuff. That's a people problem. It's not a corporation's problem. I mean, corporations are a second order problem to that. But what do you want them? Because people are like, oh, these big food companies, they really need to be taking the task. How do you do that? You go into stop selling tasty things. People buy what? So what are we supposed to sell? Good stuff. Like we're going to go out of business. A good, okay, we'll just shut it down now. It's a total non starter. So to those people that value personal responsibility, I'm huge on that. At the end of the day, it's up to the individual to decide, like do I want to go to McDonald's and get a salad with grilled chicken or do I want to go to McDonald's and just have some soul food fries dipped in shake, you know what I mean? The girl cheat meal where there's like not even a protein source around. Column A, column B, which one do you want? At the end of the day, probably the best way to get some traction is to focus on the individual. Again, why are you choosing to eat the following foods? Some people. And there's a positive, super inclusive side to this part of that argument is everyone has a different food drive genetically. You have no idea what it's like to be in someone else's body. You might think you have a lot of willpower, but it takes some people, Navy Seal carrying boats overhead, willpower to resist eating junk food. Like that's how. And I do have an insight on this. I've gotten down to a relatively low body fat percentage and bodybuilding competition. The psychology of someone whose body thinks they're starving to death, seen from the inside, is a totally different world. I'll watch movies where the characters will be at a dinner table and they're like, you know, like a super awesome mom made spaghetti, kind of a loaf of bread for everyone, a little mini bun, some broccoli, like obviously it's covered in like some kind of thing that she needs for the camera. You're not supposed to eat it or whatever. And the characters are talking to each other. And when you're starving enough, you're what I start to think. And many of my friends who've competed in bodybuilding and lost a lot of fat, you start to be like, why aren't they eating? Why are they talking to each other? Because if I was in that scene I'd be like, yo, pause. I'll tell you what happened in school after this. Your whole perception just goes just food, food, food. The there was a Minnesota semi starvation experiment back a really long time ago. Not ethical anymore, but they took some folks and they were in like a work camp situation and they cut their calories by like oh, roughly half. And what they noticed is the degree of food obsession skyrocketed. All they, all they thought about, talked about was food. They started doing a trade with food in the cafeteria situation. It was just insane. And so if someone lives in that world permanently, us saying like, man, they just got to toughen up, like that might not be true. They might actually be tougher than you. There's a specific person I forgot. I'm not going to call this person out by name, nor I know their name, but I was watching like a Microsoft debuting some of their new AI products. Big stand up thing with a projector and a huge screen. And there was a person there who was super, super high level at Microsoft on the ENG side too. Like, and he was just like straight up morbidly obese. Not in a bad way, just physically, literally. He was talking about tech stuff and you know, all this AI stuff. Like that person's smarter than all of us. You don't just end up as the number three at Microsoft or whatever ENG side just by like being a will less soulless person who does whatever appears. This is a person who spent late nights who's grinded through best at. He was the best in every engineering pro, best mathematician, the best code, the best everything. This is a willpower generator and he still looks like that. What do you think his food noise Is like, you put anyone else in his body, they'd be £800 in a matter of months and die in their sleep or something. So it's not always accurate to say that people who have let themselves go just have low willpower overall. That's the light side. The dark side is that trait Conscientiousness. How much you plan ahead, how much you think about your health and everything is very genetic, though not entirely, maybe about half. And influences a ton of stuff about how you live your life, including what choices you make, how to address your hunger and food drive. So a lot of people that are overweight. Yeah. They really do make bad choices because they just don't care that much. Yeah. One of the things that always comes up in a nutrition field is how do we improve nutritional education? What many times people fail to ask is, who wants to know? Like, you know, like, yes, exactly. And here's the thing. You. If you. They've done studies like this, you just talk to people as they enter McDonald's, you ask them, like, is this healthy food? They're like, no, they know that people know what junk food is. You give. You give someone with no nutritional education a green, fresh apple and then a bag of M&Ms, you go, which one of those is healthier? They're like, I don't understand. Is this a trick question? It's not a trick question. They're like, the apple. Correct. How do they know that? Everyone kind of knows what's what at a very basic level. But a lot of people, you tell them, like, do you know any people that smoke cigarettes, by any chance? You're too young for that sort of thing. Back in my day, we smoked cigarettes. Well, you're just not cool enough. In Austin, that's also cool. Austin people with a cowboy hat, they smoke.
- [32:48]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Definitely not cool. Yeah, yeah. Like menthols.
- [32:51]
Cody Sanchez
Same. I've just seen videos about these cool people, cowboys, literally riding their horse into the bar. The horse is smoking too. Just supermodels. The horse has a cowboy hat. I'm, like, more fascinated with a horse at this point. I'm like, what's the horse's name? But, like, a lot of people that smoke cigarettes or, like, drink a lot, you're like, you know, that's killing you. They're like, yeah, yeah. Like, okay. So when a lot of times people have a high degree of body fat, you're like, you know, you could be eating better. Like, mm, what's on the menu tonight? You're like, oh, my God. So there is a part of this is where it's like, dude, everyone, many, many people are trying in their own best way. And these medications help bring them back to what maybe is the average amount of food noise that everyone who's pretty lean feels all day. So it's not right for us to judge people. But at the other hand, we can judge people a little bit because some people just don't care. And then, like, how do you address that? Corporations, food, stuff that goes out the window that those people are going to want in any way. It comes down to talking to the individual and ask them, like, do you want to improve your life? And if they're like, I'm good, then, like, we're just going to have some obese people. And as long as in my view, in the view of our company, RP is we want to help every single human on earth who wants to get into better shape. To get into better shape. But notice the wording. We don't want to help anyone who doesn't want to help themselves. That's arguably impossible outside of, like, North Korea or something like that.
- [34:12]
Dr. Mike Israetel
100%. My dad always says you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink, which is a very west west visit.
- [34:19]
Cody Sanchez
A cigarette smoking horse with the cowboy.
- [34:21]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Hat, they get thirsty Also. Speaking of thirsty, maybe we could grab like, his water somewhere, I think.
- [34:27]
Cody Sanchez
Oh, no, I have it right.
- [34:28]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, you have one. Okay, good. I just want to make sure you were.
- [34:30]
Cody Sanchez
Did I look thirsty?
- [34:31]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No, but I feel bad. I'm over here drinking and then you're, you know, having to do all the work. Okay, this is. Let's talk conspiracies.
- [34:38]
Cody Sanchez
Yes.
- [34:39]
Dr. Mike Israetel
My conspiracy is I want to have what the kids talk about these days, which is a snatched jaw. Have you heard of this? And I'm sorry, Like a really strong jaw and jaw.
- [34:52]
Cody Sanchez
Snatched.
- [34:53]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Snatched. That's what they say. You ever heard this? No. Okay. You have one. So does my husband. Is it true that we are eating softer foods? And so we have not. We have these, like, weak jaws. And if we masticate on, I don't know, hard, gross, sappy things that I see on the Internet, or if we do jaw exercises, we get stronger jaws. Is that true?
- [35:15]
Cody Sanchez
That's very likely. Yeah. The effect might in some people be profound where, like, they started their jaw stuff and like a few months later, like, oh, my God, like Tony Danza kind of thing hanging out.
- [35:27]
Dr. Mike Israetel
But that actually works. Like those things that you chew on. Like that.
- [35:31]
Cody Sanchez
You're funny enough. The muscles for mastication go all the Way up your head.
- [35:35]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Are you masticating all the time?
- [35:37]
Cody Sanchez
I just take a lot of steroids, to be honest. Jk, I used. I had these. I had the same head shape before I ever touched any steroids. It's just weird genetics or whatever. Cody, to be completely honest, I used to want to be a head model. It just never happened. Don't patronize me. Thanks.
- [35:56]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Listen, have you seen models these days?
- [35:58]
Cody Sanchez
Yes. Very few. Plenty of ugly people are models. I'm like, that's a good point. So for some people, that effect will be very small. Chew on sticks for six months, look in the mirror, and you'll be like, damn it, I look the same. But on average, there should be an effect. And it will. Here's the thing. Like, you got to be consistent. And so one thing. If you get some kinds of gum that are pretty hard to chew, chewing a few sticks of gum a day can get you some good jaw exercise. Changing your whole diet would be a highly inconvenient trip. Maybe you could do that. I don't know. What is the benefit of having a muscular jaw that people want?
- [36:36]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, I think men want it because women find it more attractive.
- [36:39]
Cody Sanchez
Do they?
- [36:40]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I think so. That's like the whole chad. You know, the meme of the chad with the big jaw and a slack jaw, kind of like.
- [36:47]
Cody Sanchez
Okay, so on that note, I never can tell if the ideal man memes floating around are just perpetuated by what men think women want or what women actually want.
- [37:01]
Dr. Mike Israetel
That's true, because more women choose the dad bod. I read a wild study that basically said actually, if given two choices, a chad, very fit, six packed, et cetera, versus a dad bod. A little fluffy, maybe a tiny bit of a receding hairline on average, as a partner, perhaps not in a one off situation. They choose more than 60% of the time the dad bod. So maybe you're right. Men think women want chads, and really, they want Todd's.
- [37:31]
Cody Sanchez
Todd.
- [37:32]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I feel like a Todd would have a dad bod.
- [37:33]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah, he could.
- [37:35]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. Okay.
- [37:36]
Cody Sanchez
There's also a different. Very off topic at this point, but whatever. Women, based on what they want out of you, you're gonna look different for them. So if they want, like, Becky just broke up with her long term boyfriend. She's like, I just need a night out. It's girls night. It's not girls night. She's hunting. And girls night's a great cover for that sort of thing. Like, hey, Liz, is that guy looking at me? She's like, I Don't know. Shut up and look over there. She's going to want a male that on average looks a little different than like the guy of your dreams who you fantasize about having children with after one minute of talking to him. Yeah, that latter person is going to be softer featured, kinder, gentler, probably has like a future of income stream stability and nonviolence. This guy's probably not going to rough me up. But if you're looking for a one night stand sort of vibe, which girls get into every now and again also with their menstrual cycle, there are periods where girls will prefer one versus the other.
- [38:31]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Wrong guy based on.
- [38:32]
Cody Sanchez
Oh yes. You think back to your friends like, oh yeah, it absolutely does happen. But then you want more of like a 6 foot 5 bearded abs. Who else knows what cigarettes? I don't know, the horse. I'm just back to the horse again. But yeah, no, there's a difference there. Yeah.
- [38:51]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't know where I and my wife and your wife went wrong then because we both chose like the really jacked sort of violent dudes. Like you're a, you're a brown belt in jiu jitsu, right? But I guess, yeah, it's super interesting.
- [39:04]
Cody Sanchez
My wife's way more violent than me. She's just getting into grappling now and she can't like, like if every now and again we'll be somewhere and there's like a crazy person being crazy. You live in Austin. You know what that's like. She starts to do like the jiu jitsu finger warm ups. She wants that shit. Yeah, yeah. She's nuts, man. I love that bitch.
- [39:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [39:24]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah.
- [39:24]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Chris taught me a wrist lock.
- [39:25]
Cody Sanchez
Oh yeah, Dope.
- [39:26]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Never felt more powerful. Life.
- [39:27]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah. Hell yeah.
- [39:28]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Like 100%. The only problem I found with that stuff is, man, this sound like sounds like a weird thing I'd be curious to take. But it seems like as a woman, if you want to be good at self defense, you actually have to really train your violent fast twitch or like fast action muscles. Because I could have all the theories in my head, but then something happens. Like one time Chris tried to show me this. He's like, just watch. And he like charged at me like full thing across the jiu jitsu map and I just, I just freaked out and just like I did nothing and, and I feel like men, you guys get used to that. Like you're good at fast twitch. Like my husband will err on the side of violence if he needs to.
- [40:04]
Cody Sanchez
Quickly, but women, he's Also a Navy seal.
- [40:07]
Dr. Mike Israetel
That helps.
- [40:08]
Cody Sanchez
Slightly trained in violence.
- [40:09]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It helps.
- [40:10]
Cody Sanchez
He's had a few, few months of training here.
- [40:12]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, but have you found that for women it's harder to, to err on the side of violence even when we.
- [40:16]
Cody Sanchez
Need to on average? Absolutely, yeah. This is such a real thing that a large fraction of female athletes at the very top of their sports have trouble getting up for a competition, like waking up to try to do their best. Especially in various sports which require confrontation, jiu jitsu, wrestling, even like volleyball and stuff like that, where like women have a more on average cooperative vibe in a synergistic vibe and less of a clashing of big chests vibes. And that actually makes women like, I don't know, a thousand times less violent and prone to going to prison than males. So thank God they got the luck of the draw on that one. But also a lot of times women don't have that like fire, I want to kill something kind of energy even maybe when they need it. So one of the big things about like self defense seminars that they teach, two drawbacks. One is they'll teach you something for an hour. It's not enough training time for you to be able to pull it on off. In real life you need consistent training all the time. So that's a problem. The other problem is a lot of women, when faced in that real scenario, they won't have what in the military is called violence of action. And that means like, like real gunfights, real fights for life and death, they happen very aggressively and very quickly. And if you're not in that mindset, when it starts happening to you, your brain could recess into a sort of evolutionary, calculated victim mindset where like, you know, a typical insanely thoughtless retort to, let's say, an account of sexual violence against a woman. Inevitably some guys in the Internet will be like, why didn't she fight back? Well, imagine if you were a typical male, 180 pounds, 5 foot 10, and you were being sexually assaulted by a 340 pound, 6 foot 7 offensive line. Like you might calculate totally subconsciously, if I resist, he's just going to kill me. But if I just make it through this, I'll be okay and I'll deal with it later. Survival is more important than reproductive sanctity, which is super, super messed up to say, but it's also true. And so if women want to flip that switch of I'm not interested in being a victim, they have to have the toolkit behind them, the combat training or the arsenal like there's cool pens you can have, like the atomic bail.
- [42:35]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, I have some of those.
- [42:37]
Cody Sanchez
Baller. But the thing is like, using that pen requires flipping it into a very ancestral frame of mind. Because the way you're supposed to use that pen is you're supposed to take it out and repeatedly jam it up someone's chin until they fall over and then you run away.
- [42:51]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Which sounds messy.
- [42:52]
Cody Sanchez
It's insanely messy. It's supposed to be messy because it's supposed to get their blood going out of them. But if you just go poke one time, they're going to take that pen and do things to you with it or they'll swat it away, or they'll just proceed and doing whatever they wanted. So in a confrontation that's real, real, you have to make that switch. I'm fighting for my life. I'm fighting for my life. And then if you have a toolkit behind you of knowing what to do, you can be really dangerous as a woman and make a lot of guys really uncomfortable and no longer want to pursue anything. But if you don't know much, you might be in a place where you're like, oh my God, like the more I fight back, the more violent he gets and just gotta kind of sit through this.
- [43:32]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Which is terrible, but fascinating, but sadly true, I think. You know, I feel like you should break my heart and tell me about alcohol because I really love a couple glasses of wine and these days I hear that's pretty much categorically not great for you. What, what's going on with alcohol? Should we drink it or not?
- [43:51]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, yeah, I'm drunk right now. To be honest. I never leave the house sober. Moderation is a huge thing and it's still a real thing. It's never sexy to talk about, but it's real. So if you have lots of alcohol consistently 4, 5, 6 drinks a day, it's going to have an effect on long term health, long term cognition, definitely. Body fat and all that other stuff, muscle mass. If you have one or two glasses of wine a night, most nights, statistically, it has almost no effect on anything. Negative wise, it has maybe some curious positives here and there.
- [44:31]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Really?
- [44:31]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Like cardiac health and stuff like that. Turns out like red wine especially has some really healthy things in there for you. Another thing is if a little bit of alcohol is. All alcohol is poisonous to some extent. But if a little bit of alcohol gets you into the unplugging, stress reducing mindset frame that you're gonna carry through the rest of that evening, that three hours of super low stress body and mind, sympathetic nervous system goes down parasympathetic, the relaxation part kicks up. If that gets you there, then that three hours every day of super relaxed being is such a huge health promoting factor that the alcohol to get you there is worth the trade off. Ideally, you should just be able to do meditation or something, flip it into a mind frame of relaxation and then boom. But if it takes a few drinks, that's totally cool. The thing is, if you go from one to two drinks a day on average to two to three, you're in questionable water. Three to four, you're not really in questionable water anymore. You're probably doing health harm all the way up to 9, 10, 11. And then you need to go live in a rehab center for a while. So with alcohol, like with many things, the dose, the frequency and what you do with it is important. Another thing is if you just have a couple of glasses of wine, it's really not a big deal. But if you have a couple glasses of wine and then you get the. Do you get like the alcohol hunger?
- [45:50]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No, but I've heard weed, but bath, when I used to use weed, that was, I was like, it's great because it's no calories. Wine is like 100 calories a glass of wine or 150 or whatever. But then I'd have some weed and I'd be like, the thing is, I probably need to eat that whole cake.
- [46:06]
Cody Sanchez
It looks so good and it tastes so good.
- [46:08]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I know. And it's hard, I think, in business for me at least. I meditate, I work out a lot, whatever. But I think similar to a lot of people, it is hard for me to shut it off. This thing's always motoring.
- [46:18]
Cody Sanchez
Oh yeah.
- [46:19]
Dr. Mike Israetel
And so that glass of wine, it's interesting that you say that because I feel guilty for it these days and I think a lot of people do. There's so many people, like, big fan of Andrew Huberman. But he's like, the thing is, if you're drinking alcohol bad, and he says.
- [46:33]
Cody Sanchez
That about a lot of things.
- [46:34]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I know. So I think I just live joylessly through life with, you know, that's fun.
- [46:39]
Cody Sanchez
That's definitely bad. You know, it's actually empirically bad to live joylessly because they've done tons and tons of research that people that don't have a lot of fulfillment and people that can't unplug and de stress, they die much earlier than everyone else. And so many of the people that have lived the Longest have had plenty of alcohol and other things in their life, but they have a very, very concentrated focal point of why they're around. Deeply immersing career, family connections, purpose, why they wake up every day sort of thing. And so if in moderation, alcohol is a tapestry, a part of the quilt and the beautiful quilt of your whole life, it's going to be a net positive. Ideally, if you could get what you get out of alcohol through a pill that has no actual alcohol in it, yeah, hell yeah, that'd be better. So humor is not wrong, wrong. But it all comes down as a trade off. And so if someone said, you know, like, sitting is bad for you, there's some research. If you sit a really long time, generally inactivity is not that great. And then like, does that replace, like sitting your kids down and watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy over a long weekend? Like, if that's not a cool thing to do anymore, what the hell are we living for anyway? It's a beautiful part of life that you just removed. So everything should be seen as in context on average and over net effects over lifespan. So, yeah, if you're a booze hound, you're just always drunk, like you're gonna die much sooner, Bad health, et cetera. But if you have a few drinks here and there, guiltlessly, I might add, guilt is not so good for the body, mind connection. And you're able to relax with them. Very, very likely it's a nap positive.
- [48:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
That's fascinating.
- [48:18]
Cody Sanchez
I don't drink, by the way.
- [48:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Ever.
- [48:21]
Cody Sanchez
No, I just, I just don't get anything out of it that I used to. I used to drink a little bit in college because drinking reduced my inhibitions and allowed me to be more confident with others. I now arguably have, like, I need more inhibition in my life. Less. I got totally. I have no issues with that whatsoever. And so I just don't need alcohol. It just poisons me. Like, I'm like, oh, I'm getting sick and I have a headache and I can't think straight. Yay. If none of the positives I do, I do dabble in the weeds a little bit. I do edibles. I don't smoke about that.
- [48:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Like, I was in cannabis actually for a couple of years, three or four years. I was an investor. Oh, companies there.
- [48:57]
Cody Sanchez
Okay.
- [48:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. And I actually thought I was doing a really good thing and I'd be curious your take on this. Then I started to see the THC percentages that they were putting in some of the cannabis out there and how it Changed. And I had one person in my family and then just recently, a second person in my family get what was diagnosed by the doctors as cannabinoid hypermesis. Hypermiosis syndrome.
- [49:22]
Cody Sanchez
Okay, what is that?
- [49:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, apparently it is when. Oof, you should check me on the Internet. But that cannabis can do something to your cannabinoid receptors. And you know how a lot of times they give people cannabis when they have cancer or something and they're going through chemotherapy to help with nausea? Well, it almost is like it triggers the opposite effect. So basically I saw it firsthand. One of my family members was staying with me and took a hit off of a vape pen. And we had a sneaking suspicion that it was something with the cannabis. But what I'm saying, sober hit, about to go to the airport, violent vomiting for two days, blue all over, multiple IVs. They have to stay. He had to stay in the shower. Heat seems to like, be one of the only things that temper the response. So they'll just sit in the shower, the bath, for like hours on end and it happened and lose like 40 pounds, like skinny, I mean, on the brink of death.
- [50:18]
Cody Sanchez
The ultimate weight loss drug, cannabis.
- [50:21]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So. So I got started to get concerned about the degree at which we were increasing THC. There's no research about this because it's still Schedule 1, so we don't actually know why. So I'm definitely concerned about the high THC levels. Just having experienced that twice must be something genetic too, because two of my family members had it and arguably used high dose THC previously. But it was horrifying. It was so scary for our family. And he was addicted, like he had to get off of it. So I guess I never thought that cannabis was addictive previously.
- [50:56]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah. So kind of two kinds of addiction from what I understand, sort of this is very, very not highly informed. Take. There's physical.
- [51:05]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's hard to be highly informed when there's no research. Right.
- [51:09]
Cody Sanchez
So there's like psychological addiction where, like, you like it, it fits your lifestyle, you don't want to be without it, it feels good. And then there's physical addiction, which is like if someone just stops doing heroin, they have to be supervised, otherwise they could die and they have like crazy fevers and all this other hallucinations. And once you're over the hump, like you're fine. But there's no real physical addiction, seemingly with marijuana or nothing to write home about. Like, you don't like, have people who used to weed at like a treatment center be like, Watch out, they're crazy. Like, they're just kind of like, because I'm not high. Yeah, but the psychological addiction can be a thing because if you really like how weed makes you feel, you can just keep taking weed all the time and feel something like that. It's super cheap, it's ubiquitous. It doesn't, like, just THC doesn't destroy your body's health like heroin does, for example. And so some people get into this place where they're like, using a lot of weed all the time. And for a huge, huge number of people, this is totally fine. You're just high all the time. Who cares? Well, I don't know how people do it because I only do weed when I have to. Like, nothing is required of me. I can't be useful on weed, no way. But some people can, apparently. And so for them, God bless them, use all the weed you want. But for other folks, especially at certain very high concentrations, they're going to get into some side effects and they're going to get into some weird, quirky scenarios, and it's just not going to be something that fits for them anymore.
- [52:27]
Oh, wasn't that so good that Mike just said, I want to pop here really quickly and tell you one thing, we saw that about 60% of our audience is not following the podcast is not subscribed. As you're listening to somebody as brilliant as Mike, I want to make sure you guys get to the next one. So do me a favor right now, stop wherever you are and subscribe to this podcast so that you can be part of our cool crew. We got a ton of exciting stuff coming up this week, and that helps us get bigger guests for all of.
- [52:51]
You, basically, like THC and marijuana, et cetera. This is a drug. And every drug, the way I treat it is a serious thing. Like one does not simply there is like a culture and fitness, more like in the Middle Eastern world and in the European world. Not as much in the US of like, oh, I've been lifting for a few months. Let's try oral steroids. It's just like another tool in the toolbox. It's not. It's a super powerful thing that has big upsides and big downsides. It requires careful management. Marijuana is the same way. So is alcohol. And so if weed people treat as just like, oh, whatever, who cares, then yes, some fraction of people are going to have a real bad time. And again, in a country of 300 million people, 5% of people have pretty bad experiences with marijuana. There's tens of millions of people that are going to be screaming at the top of their lungs that, holy crap, this is poison. The other thing with weed is that I think a lot of people more on the hippie side of things, which I think they're great. But we all have our various ways in which. Wrong, myself included, the hippie people want to imagine that marijuana is this, like, God made it for us from the earth, and it's this herb that takes care of the whole being. It is never a problem. It just heals everything.
- [54:09]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I've met a few of those.
- [54:10]
Cody Sanchez
A few. Austin's a half the population.
- [54:12]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [54:12]
Cody Sanchez
They're all. But, like, that's just not true. Yeah, weed can be great for many people, but it's also a powerful drug. And thus we have to treat it with respect. And if and when we see that some folks are climbing up in the dosages and they're starting to have a real wacky time, it's time to pull back and think, like, hold on a second. You can't just eat three, 200 mig THC candy bars an hour and think like, hey, this is okay, because maybe it is, but when it's not, we have to dump that hippie philosophy of like, weed's good. And that's the real thing is in the Internet, we can get things pretty simplified, maybe overly simplified.
- [54:45]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [54:45]
Cody Sanchez
And you start to get people that are like, weed is great versus people like, weed is terrible. And a few of us who are here on the corner, like, weed's a drug. It can be good in some instances but bad in others. Nobody wants to hear that. Shut up. That's too nuanced.
- [54:57]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. That is the Internet, definitely. So I get slightly overwhelmed by all the supplements out there. And I really like that you have a bunch of videos where you're just super clear. You're like, here's what I think. Here's some that I like. If you had to say, like, some of your favorite supplements that you think actually work, what are they work for.
- [55:16]
Cody Sanchez
Who and for what?
- [55:18]
I don't know.
- [55:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
For being fit and healthy.
- [55:21]
Cody Sanchez
So for most people, they're just trying to be fit and healthy. They just don't need any supplements at all. Some people can get tests for this, especially in northern latitudes, if you don't see the sun a lot, like, various vitamin D supplements might be a good idea. Some people need a little bit more zinc and so on and so forth. But that's much more contextual and nuanced than depends on the individual. The average person, if they're eating a decently well balanced diet just doesn't need any supplements of any kind. Now, if you have a little trouble getting in your daily protein requirement, protein supplements are cool and they're really just like actual protein food distilled down into a chocolate powder that you mix and you drink and it's fine. So there's nothing exotic about them. If you're trying to get really extra super special jacked and you want that little bit of an edge, creatine can work. There are a few other supplements in that general sort of space where like, for most people that just never even notice that they're on them, it's just annoying to take a powder every morning. But for some people, the trade off is worth it. And it's super cheap, it's super good for your health. But 5 grams of creatine a day is totally cool. Most supplements fall into that category of if you're trying to really push your fitness in that next level, there are like three or four, maybe five that are like possibly worth exploring. The other thing is if you have a nutrient deficiency of some kind, vitamin D deficiency, zinc or something, you can take those as supplements and then you'll be better. But for most people eating remotely healthy and just pursuing a healthy lifestyle, it just would be untrue for me to say that everyone needs supplements.
- [56:47]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So when, when people come to like, you know, RP strength, for instance, and they're looking for different ways to get fit and I would assume often like muscularly fit too.
- [56:57]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
How do you guide somebody in trying to figure out supplements, let's say. Or do you guys?
- [57:04]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah. So we have a few videos on our YouTube channel that tell you what the supplements are that we think work and tell you about the use cases.
- [57:10]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So if you were to say, like, you're young, you want to get fit, you're like sort of middling right now, but you want to be pretty muscular and you're a man versus a woman. Broad strokes. I know it can't be that nuanced, but people have no time for nuance. So what would you tell somebody like that or even the questions that they should ask themselves?
- [57:28]
Cody Sanchez
Go to your doctor, ask them if you are deficient in any of the essential vitamins and minerals and what tests can be done to ascertain that your doctor will help you out or will refer you to a registered dietitian to figure that out. And if the tests come back like you're Gucci, no worries, then you don't have to take anything. If you Are deficient in some kind of vitamins and minerals, Then you can start to buy supplements to address that deficiency. Retest later to see that it's been addressed, and then you're good to go. If you have trouble getting in a daily amount of protein, then protein shakes and protein bars can be really cool. Those are supplements if you want to get a little bit more jacked. But you've been lifting for a while, and you can now kind of tell subtlety versus, like, oh, I have muscles, versus I used to not. Creatine can be a supplement you can take if you train really early in the morning and you're just dragging, but, you know, you got to get it done. Pre workouts can be okay. Although pre workouts are really just a ton of caffeine smashed into something that.
- [58:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Tastes like one once in a brown. Had a heart attack, and I didn't realize it got better if you worked out. So I just laid there and canceled.
- [58:29]
Cody Sanchez
My workout in panic.
- [58:30]
Dr. Mike Israetel
In panic for an hour. But now I kind of can use them, and it works. It really does help in the gym, though.
- [58:36]
Cody Sanchez
It can, yeah. If you need. If you need a bit more of that rage. Totally. But also, like, a cup of black coffee can do something very similar. And you can grade it more because, like, one scoop is one scoop. You could start to get the level. Half a scoop or something. Most pre workouts are, in my opinion, like, wildly overdosed. Why? Because when people buy them, the kind of people that recommend pre workouts on the Internet are the kind of people that are connoisseurs, which means they build up a tolerance. And if you don't wow people on the first dose, they're just gonna be like, this thing sucks. It doesn't work. And so a lot of times you get this increasing amount of caffeine and other stimulants inside of pre workout to where someone like me and you who aren't used to them. Yeah. You end up lying in bed thinking, like, did I mess up? Am I gonna die here? Start writing out your will.
- [59:15]
Dr. Mike Israetel
100%. I was like, the thing is, I took meth on accident. And what happened is funny you should say.
- [59:20]
Cody Sanchez
There used to be a kind of oral modified version of meth that was legal to put into supplements. There's a supplement called. What is it? Jacked 3D. That was the old formula prior to 2015 or something, and that legitimately had a version of methamphetamine in it. And so friends that used to take it were like, it was not caffeine. It was different. You would train until your body fell apart and you were just like eye lasering everything. It was intense. Yeah. Turns out it wasn't that great for your health. But whatever. You're jacked, you're on meth.
- [59:54]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Who cares how when you go to the gym? And then I kind of wanted to switch topics a little bit, but a couple of things that I love that you've talked about. One, you've talked about how many times a week people actually need to go on average. What are your thoughts on that? Do I got to go to the gym seven days a week? Do I need to be there for an hour and a half? Can I go for 15 minutes a day?
- [60:14]
Cody Sanchez
If it's my gym and I train there as little as possible because I don't want to see you because I want the whole gym to myself. If it's my gym that I own, I want you to be there every day, twice a day. No, no, no. I want you to pay the membership, but never show up. The Planet Fitness model. Yes. Depends on your goals and depends on how long you've been exercising at a various capacity. So if you've been training hard four times a week for an hour, and you want to take your fitness to the next level, you have to do four times a week for an hour or four times a week for an hour, 15 or five times a week, or six times a week, like whatever physique you've gotten after months and months and maybe even years of doing a certain frequency like to level up, you might have to do a little bit more if you can recover from it. But if you're just getting into fitness for the first time and you want to make some serious changes, but you don't have a lot of time, two sessions a week, each being 30 minutes of doing like compound exercises like rowing and bench pressing and squatting and deadlifting and doing various pull downs and all the shoulder exercises.
- [61:11]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Compound means you're moving multiple, multiple muscle.
- [61:13]
Cody Sanchez
Joints at the same time. And that means it's really economical, it's efficient because you don't have to like spend one set doing one exercise, one muscle, and then go to the next one. If you take very short rest breaks between sets, and if you arrange the sets, such as muscles that are currently working are going to be resting on the next exercise. So like if you, let's say, combine a bench press with a dumbbell row, not really any of the muscles do both. And so while your bench pressing muscles are resting, you're doing dumbbell rows instead of taking time. If you arrange that in those supersets, with two sessions per week of 20 to 30 minutes each, even with at home dumbbells, you can revolutionize your physique and your health. If you are starting from just being a regular person out in the world who doesn't work out, huge deal. If after a year or two, your physique starts to kind of stabilize and the gains are very slow, you can start to add another session in and another one until you get to. You know. One of my colleagues, Jared Feather, he's a pro bodybuilder. He trains like 10 times a week, technically, because he has some days, which he comes to the gym twice, like, do chest and maybe some triceps. Come in later and do much more triceps and shoulders and biceps. You can't. For him, a chest workout or back workout is so intense that there's not much to do after that except go home and rest. So if you want that elite. Elite, yeah. Maybe anywhere from five to ten times a week in the gym is what's going to get you in your absolute best shape that you're physically capable of getting into. That's at the expense of the rest of your life, though. So I'm not a recommendation on my part. But the really good news is that for most people who aren't working out very seriously or consistently, just two or three sessions a week, 20 or 30 minutes at a time in a gym, can get you unbelievable results. However, you gotta be moving. None of this scrolling on the phone, wild dumbbell curling nonsense. You're gonna be sweating, you're gonna be breathing heavy. You're gonna need how much sweating.
- [63:03]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Like, how do we measure intensity? That's what my husband says. My problem is, I think it's very normal for women. Like, I go in the gym and collective, everybody looks hot, they got makeup on.
- [63:10]
Cody Sanchez
It's not coming off beautiful over there. I feel like such a troll.
- [63:13]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Me too. Half the time I'm in, like, my shirt stained. It's not great. So how does. How does one measure intensity? And how important is that?
- [63:20]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, it's pretty important. Consistency is by far the most important. You show me someone who doesn't work out hard, but they show up every time, they're going to get into way better shape than someone who's psychotic that, like, skips a month here and there. It's a thing, but basically we can't measure it super well because it's really internal. But that's up to the person watching this to decide how far Am I pushing in? And so a really good landmark for it is this. First of all, try hard. Say, you know, this set I'm going to push my body and here's a big one. I'm going to accept the inevitability of discomfort. I'm here to be uncomfortable. If I'm comfortable the whole time that I'm training, I'm doing something wrong. And there's a couple ways to tell if at the end of a set, you're really pushing the muscle very close to failure. Because when the muscle can't lift the weight anymore, that's kind of the ultimate arbiter of, like, you're training pretty hard and that's good enough. So how can you tell you're getting close to failure? Two ways to tell. One is probably a bit better than the other one is how fast are you lifting the weights? Like, if you're rowing a row machine and every rep looks like this and you racket, someone's like, bro, you really couldn't have done a few more? You're like, ah, I got really, really tough. I don't believe you. Nothing changed. So if the last few reps are starting to get real slow and anytime you want to quit between when they start getting slow and when you can't move anymore is a okay, you're in that zone of acceptable difficulty to really get great results. The other one that occurs at roughly the same time is how does your perception of how hard and heavy the exercise feels change as you do the Reps? So reps one through 10, you're bench pressing and you're like, feels like 45 pounds or whatever it is. If you're gonna fail with a gun to your head at 15 reps, anything after 10, 11 rep, 12 rep, 13, you may even be able to move it at the same velocity because you're really tuning up. But perceptively, the weight is going to feel heavier, like it's pushing back at you. If you can do a whole set of dumbbell curls, you ever been to, like an aerobics class? They do a set of 10, they put the dumbbells down, they do something else, you're like, but he tried on that set. If at the end of the curls, you're like, really straining, you're working hard enough. And as long as you do that on every single working set of your program, you're going to get all the sweating, you're going to get the heart rate benefits, you're going to get the fat loss benefits, you're going to get the cognitive benefits if you never really look like you're trying. And more importantly, if you don't feel like you're trying, you're not gonna get as good a result.
- [65:43]
Dr. Mike Israetel
God, that's so helpful. Actually. Now I'm gonna do that. This is kind of a crazy idea. I sort of wonder if in the future we'll be able to buy fitness.
- [65:53]
Cody Sanchez
Yes.
- [65:54]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Really?
- [65:55]
Cody Sanchez
Cause I kind of think I can't agree anymore.
- [65:57]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Okay, tell me, tell me why will we be able to buy hot bodies and being fit in the future? And if so, how?
- [66:04]
Cody Sanchez
This is very much speaking to a huge passion of mine. So any time that you train with weights or that you eat a different way or that you do physical activity, the real thing you're doing is activating certain biochemical pathways in your muscles and other tissues. You're trying to get certain molecular machines to turn on. When these machines turn on, they signal other parts of the body to start building muscle, to start losing fat, to do whatever. And so the reason we do all this stuff is just to turn on a few molecular machines. Now, if we develop drugs that just turn on those machines anyway, why do we need to do this now? There are still some connective tissue benefits which you could also target with different drugs. I'm getting ahead of myself. There are psychological benefits to training that are awesome. I don't want to take away from that at all. It's very important to some people. But if you just want the result physically a fitness, and we know that the way to do that is to activate biochemical pathways. The ability to develop a cocktail of drugs to target most of them is very much within our reach currently. So right now we've developed a drug that reduces your appetite substantially. The new line of anorectic drugs. They really, really work. And so, like, we already have a drug that can cause you weight loss. Like, that's really dope. That's like half of the battle. Another drug that I'm looking forward to hopefully hitting the markets in the next five to ten years or something is a pure anabolic. What that means is if you take anabolic steroids, they grow muscle with you just sitting there a ton. They grow as much muscle as working out does, but you don't have to work out. The problem is they give you heart disease risk, stroke risk, they drive you insane, they take sex drive, goes all over the place. If you're a woman, they're called androgens, man creators. They will turn you in every conceivable way into more of a masculine person. You'll get hair growing all over here. Getting ready for the club becomes more difficult or easier depending on which target you got. So they're really, really terrible at this. But it turns out that there are certain receptors we know exist and certain molecules in the body exist that if you target them, you'll just get purely muscle growth of skeletal muscles, all the normal ones you can see and really nothing else. Have you ever seen the pictures on the Internet of like the cow and the mouse and the greyhound? They're like double. They're super jacked. They don't work out. They just have a genetic mutation in which there's a molecule, a protein called myostatin. Myomuscle Statin means stopper. It stops muscle growth. It caps muscle growth all the time. So it turns out your body's muscle growth machinery is always kind of like ready. It's ready to go and it stops it. And so if you deactivate that gene and you don't make myostatin anymore, your body's like full tilt muscle growth all the time, right? Boom. Just goes. Which why the cow is adorable. This is a little gentle cow. And he's just standing there, his triceps are hanging fat free and everything. Because most of your metabolism starts going to your muscles, your fat gets starved, and then you're just super lean and super jacked. There is no current human grade myostatin deactivator drug. But to make one isn't a matter of like, how do we get people to like Alpha Centauri, the next star? Like, that's a huge undertaking with a lot of questions that we don't have answers to and a lot of questions we don't even know we should be asking. How to make a myostatin inhibiting drug is just a matter of like, the guys doing the AI modeling with drugs now just put that into the computer, getting a couple candidate drugs out, testing them on animals, and then humans, and boom, you got one. It's not super complex. It's also one target. It's just one protein.
- [69:40]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Why haven't they done that?
- [69:41]
Cody Sanchez
You don't think drug companies are, as we talked about earlier, profit and loss enterprises, and the number of people that would be paying a lot of money to get a muscle enhancing drug is just like, relegated to, like, fitness people, and even not most of them, because most people are like, I'm not taking any drugs. And most fitness people in America don't take steroids because they're like, that's poison. And they're not wrong. And so you make, you're a pharmaceutical company, you do years of FDA approval to get a drug that like 300,000 people buy. Like you're in the red, like $3 billion or something like that. However, this is changing now as we're getting a grip in the pharmaceutical industry on having drugs that allow people to lose weight. We're now realizing that, oh, oh gee, we're having a lot of more elderly people and people who can lose a lot of weight and then they're under muscled, they just don't have enough muscle to be as healthy as they could be. Activities of daily living become a problem. So now there was a position paper written about a year ago that was like we need a non androgenic anabolic for a lot of stuff because it's going to reverse diabetes, it's going to do all this really cool stuff. And so now that's probably going to start to be in the pipeline. It's just like when you have heart disease and diabetes and all those other things that are prominent, you develop drugs for them. Like what is the American obesity drug market? I don't know, 200 million people. Holy crap. So even if a million people are willing to pay for this muscle gain drug, that's not enough. But over time it builds and builds. And all of a sudden now that we have AI powered drug discovery, the process to getting, here's the worst thing that can happen to a drug company short of their drug killing a bunch of people once it's approved stock price, right? It's terrible. You have a drug that you took a long time to develop, it gets into FDA trials like phase one, two, three and it fails them. Like what are you supposed to do? Like fellas, we're in the hole. $300 million, we got nothing, nothing and nothing. It's not like you can sell to these people, this country, it's just not going for sale anywhere. Imagine that. Like let's say you're in a T shirt business, you got some T shirts that you make. It doesn't cost a lot of money to make T shirts. And let's say you don't sell all that. Well, whatever. Like we made 200, 200 bucks, we didn't lose $300 million. And so now with AI powered drug discovery, you can get a drug predicted by AI to like within 99% chance be exactly as effective at what you think it's going to do before it enters the phases of real animal and human trials. And then there's a huge chance that it's Just going to like Rockstar all through those. And then it's not as big of a risk anymore. Pre AI drug discovery, your chemists better be damn good at guessing the receptor concentration than receptor shape, because if they get it wrong, it's like hundreds of millions, if not more down the drain. That's not any more in the next five years going to be nearly as big of a problem. It's kind of like this. If you have a couple of days to get a picture to be really beautiful using Photoshop and AI image generation, that you're going to make a pretty picture. But if we give you a crayon and the President of the United States watches you draw a picture and go, you got one shot. Go. You're like, oh. And it's wrong. Sucks. You suck. Sorry, you're gone. Holy crap. That's what drug discovery used to be like. You know, one shot of making a molecule. As soon as it enters the phases and the trials, you're already losing money if it doesn't just blockbuster everything. So being that that's the current environment, we're going to have this I predict very confidently in the late 2000s, especially through the 2000s, we're going to have a drug renaissance where they're going to be able to make drugs that are incredibly targeted at one specific thing. They're going to just start kiboshing entire classes of disease. What that's going to do for people is people can be on an anorectic drug to control their appetite. They can be on an anabolic drug to increase their muscle mass. There are many drugs that they've tested in animals which replicate almost every feature of exercise, but it's just through a pill, like everything you think an exercising rat would be able to do, that rat can do just because it takes the pill. You can Google this. It's very ubiquitous. Once they get that working in humans, you'll just be taking maybe three drugs, and almost everyone you see on the street is going to be in incredibly good shape. That in addition to that, what happens later is we start thinking, okay, we have DNA, right? Genetic code that makes these proteins, and they do some really good stuff. But we need drugs to make the proteins more effective, or we need drugs to take the blocking proteins out of the mix. Why don't we just change the DNA so that our DNA creates a beautiful body for us in the probably late2030s, that's going to be almost inevitable. Obviously, by then you might have cybernetic replacements for stuff, really wacky stuff. But I think that's the direction it's going in is like, exercise is awesome and amazing and having to watch your diet, having to do exercise takes hours out of your day. Why not just be the person that genetically is amazing and looks like they want anyway and do that? And my last kind of mini point on this is, as long as regulatory agencies approve this, the market incentive is unbelievable. So you see a coworker you haven't seen in a couple of years, she's transformed. You're like, what did you do? She's like, I take two pills. They've got to be crazy, like expensive like that. They're nominal. You're like, but they're bad for you? Like, no, they're actually really good for me. My health is as good as it's ever been. You're not going to be like, oh, she's crazy. You're going to be like, I'm going to Google a few things because what the hell is going on? Once they have drugs like that that are effective, huge fractions of people will be on them and then we won't have to exercise as much. And then we can use exercise to connect better with other people, more social exercise, play team sports for fun, hike, do combat sports, all this other great stuff instead of just like being in the gym and being in pain, which if anyone still wants to continue to do, they absolutely can. But then it'll be like a extra thing you can do versus thing you have to do. So, so interesting.
- [75:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
You're almost like a fitness optimist or like a health optimist. Sort of like they have the techno optimists, you know, and right now I'm.
- [75:24]
Cody Sanchez
One of those two.
- [75:25]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, me too. It sounds like it. But you know, I think right now people, there's sort of this camp that's happening with people not trusting drug companies, especially, let's call it post vaccine and sort of the rollout there, People not trusting food companies because of additives and obesity rates. And so it'll be interesting to see if like the villains could in some ways eventually become the victors or new victors, sort of arise through technology. And I actually, I think all these corporations, like you said, are not made up of Machiavellian lizards. They're made up of humans just like us that are working on incentive alignment. And like, if we change the incentives, where actually they can make more money off of fit people overall and healthy people and not like length of care, but actually like acute change of health, then that's probably what they'll do and. Or a really good competitor will come up and eat their lunch if they just focus on keeping people sick as opposed to making somebody healthy.
- [76:18]
Cody Sanchez
That's the thing is I've never seen any internal documents of any pharmaceutical corporation that explicitly addresses this idea of sick care. I've only seen sick care in conspiratorial references. I don't think any executive in their right mind, even if they thought, look, we don't want to cure cancer, that'll be terrible for our profits, which I'll get to in a sec, that's backwards. They're gonna be like, well, we want people to still have cancer, but our drugs are gonna make you feel better. That way we'll make the real money. If you articulate that to scientists researching the drug, to members of the board, to privileged investors, to business partners, like some company sells you like assaying machines because you're a pharmaceutical company, you use them to develop drugs. And you're like, yeah, we want the class B model, not the class A model. They're like, the class A model leads to cures. You're like, we're not into cures. If that leaks to the media, you're not done. You're done. Done.
- [77:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [77:19]
Cody Sanchez
Pfizer gone, Gone. It's never happened. Because those people are generally much smarter than the average person. And they've done that thought experiment in their head and they go, even if we wanted to this crazy thing where on purpose keeping people sick, how the hell do you keep them under wraps? Bill Clinton was trying to get one BJ in the, in the White House that thought out, right? Like secrets are real hard to keep in a corporation. You can't even like CIA threaten people, we'll kill you. They're not going to kill me. They're going to do anything. One stray email to the wrong person and you're done. This idea that corporations intentionally, pharmaceutical corporations are intentionally keeping people sick is baffling and wrong. And honestly, like, I'll make a bit of a further inclination here, probably damaging my character. It's offensive to the people that work at these corporations and to sick people. In a certain light, a certain light. It's an interesting hypothesis. It could be true. That's probably not true. And here's why. Pharmaceutical companies, you go into a pharmaceutical company, you real talk just real human to human with the researchers, with the CEOs and everything, and you go, where's the cancer cure? They're going to be like, motherfucker, we don't fucking have one, you idiot. Can you imagine what would happen to Pfizer stock if they had a drug approved the straight up cured cancer. Can you imagine any other drug they made after with the tagline of from the people that cured cancer? We're done.
- [78:41]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [78:42]
Cody Sanchez
Goodbye competition. It turns out the human body is insanely complex. And but for AI's discovery of how that all works, shortly we're stabbing in the dark. So when people say, look man, corporations are trying to keep us sick, I wish there's some evil conspiracy to do that. So there was really these hidden away drugs that made us super healthy. They don't have them and they're desperately trying to get to them as fast as possible. No, of course if you have a drug that's a therapeutic, is it in your 100% best interest to completely erase that illness and disease? Maybe not. Can you outright tell your guys at the company to stop working on one? No. Holy shit. They'll expose the crap out of you. They just go to New York Times, be like, sick care. It's happening. You're done, bro. You're done. This like why CEOs do the old. They all keep a gun on the COVID You know how it is. You're a business person. Oh, that's it. Stock price went down. It's so that's just not how it works. And to your point earlier, competition's a motherfucker, man. If Pfizer's not working out at Novo Normal, sure shit is. And there's how many other pharmaceutical companies the world over and do you think companies in other countries can be influenced by the global corporate? No, no.
- [79:50]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Hell no.
- [79:51]
Cody Sanchez
There's some company in Japan that is going to cure cancer and all the American companies who maybe are even colluding with each other. They're not, but maybe they are. They're not going to be able to control that. Taiwan, you got representatives in Taiwan? Do we have pharmaceutical representatives in every single worthwhile lab in the world making sure guys remember, no cures, just treatment. The whole thing is fucking insane Alex Jones level fantasy. It's just not happening. And the real nasty thing is, and at this point I sound, you know, a bit left of center and all of a sudden, well, maybe not. And pro corporate, which is no news libs exists. The, the other thing is this, a lot of people don't even care about the treatment or the cure. They're just going to do what they do. People talk about like all corporations are like trying to give you food that's bad for you. Do you give a or you just Buy Cheetos. There's no lie, there's no grand conspiracy. The corporation is like, we're secretly poisoning. Don't tell anyone really. Hey, Cheetos have all these chemicals in them and they're on sale now. If people really gave a shit, they'd stop buying them. But they don't. A lot of people don't. So a lot of this comes back down to like, corporations are just like the people at the market to like unveil their shit. And they're like, do you want any of this? If you say yes, hell yeah, you're signing up for it. It's up to you to be like, well, no, I want healthier stuff. And here's the thing. How many corporations are selling healthy stuff? Oodles, whole Foods, entire brand is based on healthy stuff. There's all these other players and it's up to humans individually to choose, like, do I want the stuff that's not so good for my health or otherwise. I wish there was a conspiracy so we could tell the drug manufacturers, okay, do better work on cures. They're trying.
- [81:29]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, I agree.
- [81:30]
Cody Sanchez
They're trying desperately.
- [81:32]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't think they're. I mean, I don't know if there's a conspiracy or not, but I think the one item that I do think is real, and we talked about this before, is just incentive alignment. And so some of the problem with corporations overall, and I've seen it firsthand from being in finance, is just the nature of the stock market. It's actually, it's not. The stock market is not inherently good or bad, but it is quite short term. And so, you know, if you always have an incentive to have short term alignment as opposed to long term, which is usually what happens in private companies to a bigger degree, that's problematic. And if you have alignment to have maximum profit increase above all else, that's bad. And an interesting example is, for instance, like China, they did this fascinating thing with one of the, I don't remember what they call it there, let's call it a mayor, but let's say you're a mayor of a region in, in China. And they did something that I would have thought was very clever when I first heard it, which is how do we measure our politicians right now? We have no idea if they're good or bad, right? We go, I like that guy because X, I like that guy because he's not Y, you know, and, and so that's good or bad. But there's no, like track record, there's no scorecard we have no idea. At least a CEO, you can see their public stock parameters and how are they done one way or the other. There's some metrics. Well, they said, hey, why don't we actually just measure the mayors by GDP growth and employment? Do they employ more people and do they increase the economic activity? That seems like something politicians should do. That seems like a great idea. And it was in many ways. And it lifted many areas of China out of poverty. One thing that they didn't think about though, was with every sort of right oar on a boat, you need a left or you got to have a collar, right. And so the right aura was like growth and employment, let's go. While the left aura was, whoops, what about environmental impacts? Whoops, what about waste? And so they created like sort of these toxic zones through this and they eventually had to change it. And their version of the fda, I think they killed him. He was put up for. Because in China they got a different sort of justice system. Yeah, but there was a widespread outbreak, killed a bunch of people. So he went to jail or died. And so I think one of the things that, at least for me, looking on the outside to the, to the pharmaceutical industry or to the health industry overall is we do have to look at not only one, can the individuals have higher willpower, but two, how are these people being judged if they win or lose? Which kind of takes us to the next point I want to talk to you about, which is teamwork. Like, I actually don't think that you really ever have an employee that's just like, it's very rare where the employees just shit. They're just awful. They actually want your company to fail. They don't want the job. You know, like, that's not that normal. Often it's a couple things. Like you placed the wrong person in the wrong seat. They have bad incentive alignment. Do you want them to do something that is actually not in their best interest to do? Or, you know, you have a person that just X grew or changed in the company and they went sort of Y direction. There's not a fit anymore. So I do think there's like in the world of fitness and health, it seems like there's the same thing. We have some bad incentives overall with stock market, with perhaps integration between. And this isn't just health and fitness, but everything big companies and government incentive. We always want to protect industries in order to protect our entrenched entrance and to not allow competitors if we get a chance. We don't want new competitors So I think there is. I get why people get conspiracy theories, but I'm with you. It's not because they're really brilliant and secretive. It's because there are perverse incentives that if we change there would be a different outcome, then we'd have different perverse incentives. But sure, that's why.
- [84:57]
Cody Sanchez
No, I think that's great. I think the net balance of incentives is what really matters. Also, it's not a mystery as to how to create a regulatory environment that is super beneficial. There's not a ton of debate in formal economics about the basic outlines of that plan, like very low levels of very basic regulation, especially ensuring that due process will be followed every single time. And you favor long time horizons like most of the regulatory structures in Canada, the us, England, most of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, they're very good. You have regulatory structures in other countries like Spain for example, where it's not entirely clear if they're on your side or not. And the government has so much power to arbitrarily declare this corporation the winner versus not that self interested corporations have to play the lobbying game because you can't win without the lobbying game. And so it's really quite clear from economics perspective how to create intelligent regulation. It's no longer mysterious. It hasn't been mysterious for probably 100 years. But the thing is, when people vote, most people are economically illiterate in the literal sense. And it's worse than that because most people feel like they know economics, but they know opposite of the truth in many cases. Like for example, people talk about housing getting expensive. There's actually only one reason housing is expensive, pure regulation. That's good for no one. But it turns out that both landlords and tenants roughly agree on how much housing regulation there should be. And it hurts both of them, but they just feel like it's the right thing, they're just wrong. So there's all kinds of stuff that democracy is like the worst way of all to govern, but all of the other ways are much worse. And so hopefully as people become intelligent over time, more intelligent, more educated and more libertine in their attitudes of live and let live, as has been happening through history, but kind of up and down here now and again, eventually the corporate regulatory environment gets better and better and better. But there's also a bit of that ethos to bring in to how you run a company. So like at rp, wave the flag a little bit here, but this can be done with any company. You have to have a real good reason of what you're doing that comports with the rest of society. So at rp, our deal is this. We only exist to try to get everyone who wants to become more fit version of themselves tactics and tools and strategies to do that easier at a very reasonable cost financially. And everything else lies to them. If and when there is no more reason for us to exist because everyone is genetically altered and is fit forever, we'll lay it down and we'll cash out and we'll just not be a company anymore. We're not going to try to be like, oh, you can scuzz away some money somehow. And so corporations are part of a society wide team to try to make everything better. The purpose of a corporation is to supply demand. It is to give people what they want, but also in as long of a time horizon as possible. So if you give people what they want and it hurts them in the medium term, you can run a company like that, and many people do. But if you want to become super super rich, rich for real, for real, you want a company that outlasts even individuals that run it. So for example, General Motors or Ford, they're older than any living human. There's companies in Japan that are 4 or 500 years old. If you run a company like that, that company's mission has to be long term, that our customers that we're supplying are straight up better off because we exist. And so now each corporation is kind of a player and this super big team of society corporations around and they're all trying to help everyone else and getting money for it, which is great, you benefit, I get rich, I go use my money to benefit, someone else gets rich, super, super happy circle. So it's all one giant team. You lens down a little bit to the corporation itself and everyone in the corporation, every worker has to have a similar mentality of I am here to try to help the corporation, which means all the other people that work around with me and because I help them, they get better at doing what they do, they are able to help me better and we all lift each other up. So this one giant cooperative web at every single level of analysis. And if you come at it from that perspective, a lot of the weird incentives start to fall off and you start to realize that selfish incentives, short sighted incentives, bad incentives to do all these other nasty things are often because you just weren't thinking long term enough. Because people say like, oh, let's make a quick buck, what you going to do after that? Who's going to trust you? No one's going to trust you, you're not going to make a lot of money. How do people who make billions make their money? By providing real, over the long term quality, high value stuff. And if you really think through that as a person who runs a corporation or a person who works for one, you just bring that attitude into work of how can we help our customers? And in a way that is super awesome for them, also considers their long term interests. Because if people realize a company they're doing business with is painstakingly thinking through what's best for them, the customer, in the long term, they never leave you, man. They might leave you for someone categorically superior as well as they should, you should quit and go work for that company because they're that much better at pleasing and serving the customer. So that whole web of essentially cooperation, like we're all on the same team, all humans in this world except for like ISIS or whatever, they just need to be killed off. Well, they're explicitly on a different team.
- [90:35]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Because they're kind of getting there. Not many of them left. 100% not having a great time, right?
- [90:40]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, good times ahead for those people in heaven or whatever. But outside of nasty insane terrorist people, we're all trying to work together to have a better time on planet Earth. And that means at every level of analysis, including the family incorporation, the questions we should be asking are how do we create the most value? How do we provide the long term benefits to everyone so that some level of trust but verify develops? Like if I go to the store and I buy a 20 ounce bottle of Coca Cola Coke Zero, which is God's gift to mankind and.
- [91:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I couldn't do it. No chance.
- [91:20]
Cody Sanchez
That's.
- [91:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Is that your number one?
- [91:21]
Cody Sanchez
That's it, that's your go to caffeine free Coke Zero? Because I don't do caffeine much.
- [91:28]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Caffeine free Coke Zero. This is the grossest thing I've ever heard of in my life. Do people know about this on the Internet? About you?
- [91:34]
Cody Sanchez
People know about me about this? Yeah. But now more people. And that's terrible. This is a quirky, it's a quirk. But here's the thing. When I go and get that bottle of whatever from PepsiCo or Coca Cola, I have a very high probability assessment. The two things are the case. One, they're not trying to poison me and two, they're going to try to make a product that I like a lot. They're trying to make me happy. So if you have a corporation which either has internal attitudes in Its employees of, like, I'm going to get mine, fuck everyone else. Not good.
- [92:07]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [92:08]
Cody Sanchez
If you have an attitude of, I'm trying to help everyone that I am able to with my skill set to empower them, you got a good thing going. And then it's a matter of, do you have the skill set? So like our CEO at rp, Nick Shaw, he does almost no grandstanding, very few board meetings where he's like, quarter numbers, it's going down, you raise your ass. I'm trying to blame people. He doesn't do that. What he does is he knows he has a lot of talented people. Engineers and super talented. Everyone in the company is fucking just a baller. And then I'm there also, but in a closet, very dirty closet. I don't even have a light switch. I just do this. The laptop, they say, provides enough for me to work. And everyone's super talented and everyone is aligned that we're like just fucking trying to help people. We're trying to help people get in more shape, better shape if they want. And because everyone's aligned on that general thing, Nick's job really is just one thing. It's to address various people and divisions in the company, to ask them the question, do you have everything you need to be as empowered as possible to help everyone else in the company and the end user, that's the only thing he does. And like, it's such a good vibe to have. Like, it's really cool for me to work personally for a company. Like, there's no fucking trick. There's no upside. There's no secret quirk. There's not like, well, when we get to this many users in our app database and then we sell and we fucking cash out. These people, we don't care about them. Pure long game. We're just trying to get people in shape. And I think most companies can have that vibe. Like, I've read some of your stuff about how you're trying to empower people to invest in local small businesses. Like, there's not like a get rich quick scheme at the end of the day for you on that.
- [93:42]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Sometimes I wish, like, you know what will make me billions? Laundromats.
- [93:46]
Cody Sanchez
Right? It's not like you're like buying the businesses and then nuking them and then installing nuclear reactors instead of schools, the children of the fuel, that sort of thing. I do have a penchant for that like mega evil rich guy fantasy world, like Captain Planet type of shit.
- [93:59]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I like to read it. I like to read it.
- [94:00]
Cody Sanchez
It'll be great, right? Exactly. But there's no thing like that for you. You're just trying to get people to spend their money in such a way that decades down the line they can be in their 50s and be like, really glad we listened to Cody. Because like, fuck, man, we have like three laundromats that we own. We don't have to work anymore. But it's not like you're scuzzing and taking money off the top of the Laundromat. You got to stay in business. So Laundromat has to be updated all the time. Better machines, better customer service. Better, better, better. Because if your customers are having an amazing experience, that to me is rank one of how to run a business. Rank two is, is their amazing experience sustainable and healthy for them in the long term? Will they continue to be repeat buyers? Selfishly, because we want repeat buyers also selfishly for our whole team. As a society. We're not trying to hurt people. Which is why like, you know, if you're like a person that like sells crack on the street, on the one hand, you're kind of doing a good thing. Supply and demand. People want crack, you're here to bring them crack. But also crack kind of destroys a lot of people. So you gotta be up at night. Like, fuck man, am I really doing the right thing? I suppose most crack dealers are not up at night. Probably not, but maybe up at night they won't get high neurons supply of those. They're still not doing that up at night on crack alone.
- [95:10]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I always think if you can run a crack business and make a ton of money, you're probably a really good entrepreneur.
- [95:15]
Cody Sanchez
Oh my God.
- [95:15]
Dr. Mike Israetel
And like, you should just try the, you should try the straight and narrow.
- [95:18]
Cody Sanchez
That is actually an interesting. So first of all, yes. But also there is a reason why if you look at real crime, huge fascination of mine is real crime that actually happens versus tv. Crime movie crime, movie crime. They got the three piece suit, they're connected to the mayor, they got slick operation. Real crime is a bunch of fucking idiots tripping over themselves, selling each other out to the FBI every other day. That's true. Real criminals that are smart are usually like, wait a minute, I'm expressing diligence and organizational efforts to try to generate profit. I could just make a lot more money and not go to jail if I did that in the computer sales or something. So most criminals are just totally degenerate people with barely anything going for them. Because you'd have to be to choose crime as a way to do things. So most of the best cartel people, you're just not going to get the best to do that. Because they're going to be like, what with my skill set, I just be an accountant. I don't have to worry about getting shot in the middle of the night in my bed while I sleep. Yeah, so. So that's a thing. But that whole corporate idea of starting from first principles, of there are humans in the world that need our help, but we can't work for free because then we starve to death. So if we can make a product or service set that really actually helps these people. For real? For real. And it occurs at an economic scale that they can afford, but also that lets us do nice things. And I like to crash my private planes for fun. That's the thing. I'll fly it. I don't know how to fly, but who cares, right? Because the pilots jump out first. They have parachutes. I have a parachute. And as soon as it starts to crash, I'm like. And then I go, right. It's costs money. It's $10 million a plane. I'm not native money, literally, in a sense, I sort of am at this point. But, like, if we are to get super wealthy, we have to find out how do we please the most number of people in a truly deep way that they'll continue to come. That is the most secure business model in the entire world. It also has this awesome thing of, like, it has great vibes. Like, you know, this is. There's many corporations or entities, especially back in history, which you could be involved. You can make a lot of money. You just don't feel that good afterwards. And no offense to anyone, because I think a lot of people love gambling in a very safe and healthy way. Most people, actually. But, like, if you're in the gambling business, they can run a casino. You go home, your wife's like, how is it working? Caused a lot of people out of the money today. I mean, what's for breakfast? What's for dinner? It's weird, but if you're really in a corporate setting where you get to truly, truly help people and you get to make some money off it, man, it's just, like, unbeatable.
- [97:37]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's the best thing ever. Plus, there's like, no. I mean, I think physical fitness is one way for you to become a better human and actually see, like, Michelangelo getting carved from the marble physically.
- [97:47]
Cody Sanchez
But I see you've been looking at my body.
- [97:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
You're pretty big. I think you're bigger than Michelangelo.
- [97:52]
Cody Sanchez
I'm like, michelangelo, you're hairier. If da Vinci was on like acid, a very bad trip.
- [97:59]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No, but I think you, you know, the other part about business that's fascinating is like, it's another amazing way to become a better human. Because where else do you get constant feedback? Do you have other people where you're like, rowing in the same direction? Will they actually teach you, like for free how to do skills that they have? Because you have incentive, alignment, you make money if you're better, they make money if you're better. Like, it's a very. It's one of the few things where it's like, oh, everything is aligned for you to become a better person. If you work at a place with really high skilled people and you get.
- [98:29]
Cody Sanchez
To help other people, at the end of the day, you're not just becoming better for your own ego. Like, if I get bigger muscles, who gives a shit? I care, but nobody else does. Totally care if I make a new version of Coca Cola that's healthier and safer and tastier and happy.
- [98:40]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Just you.
- [98:42]
Cody Sanchez
How dare you.
- [98:43]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Okay, I have to ask you that question. And podcast, I think I am bad at naming things. Contrarian thinking has like a ton of vowels. Nobody can ever say it. When I go on a podcast. They can't spell it. Renaissance Periodization. That is a long ass name.
- [98:57]
Cody Sanchez
I don't know how to spell it.
- [98:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Where did you come up with that? What does it mean? Happy Strength, Good, Strong.
- [99:03]
Cody Sanchez
Yes, that's now our formal corporate entity title.
- [99:06]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Can't imagine why.
- [99:07]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah, strange times. So there are like sort of three reasons why we named it this. One reason is that when Mr. Nick Shaw and I got into the fitness business, there was considerably more like lying charlatanism, liver king type of shit. And a lot of just really good people were being scammed and very unscientific times. And we kind of to want to contribute to a renaissance, a rebirth of science and fitness. Periodization is the science of making people better at sports and physical things.
- [99:39]
Dr. Mike Israetel
That's what that word means.
- [99:40]
Cody Sanchez
Periodization? Yeah. Correct. Yeah. The science of making better athletes, essentially. And so we wanted a renaissance that addressed that. That's kind of cool. The other reason is the Renaissance historically In the whatever, 15, 1700s, blah, blah, blah. That was kind of like the Dark Ages. So like the Greeks and Romans had some cool shit going. Science and democracy and shit like that. And then like everyone basically was just literally drunk and in some insane religious extremism for like a thousand years. The Dark ages were Kind of bad. And the Renaissance was a rebirth of like, hey, like, science exists. Let's look into this again. And it radically just completely revolutionized standards of living. It was just this beautiful thing that happened. And so, like, we saw some very small but nonetheless salient connections to our kind of business model. And probably the biggest reason is there is a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies. And I didn't know anything about it, but Nick and I trained super wealthy New York people for a while in personal training in New York City. And I was asking him always, because I was super big on economics and learning stuff. And I was asking these people who like ran hedge funds and stuff, like, really? Before you met someone who has a net worth of $30 million, you don't know how that's going to interact. And it turns out they're just really cool, normal people. But I asked them like, oh, how did you guys do in the recession? And I would get the same answer a lot. They're like, well, everyone lost money. You can't do stuff like that. Unless you're rentech. Unless you're rentech. Unless you're rentech. I'm like, what the hell's rentech? And one of my guys who owned his own hedge fund, he's fucking, I don't know, 100 millionaire by now. He's like, look it up. And I looked it up. And so James Simons, the guy who founded rentech, he was like, yeah, like, stock picking and guessing is cool, but can't we just use like algorithms and machines and tons of scientists to figure this out? And he decoded the stock market and the medallion fund has a year on year, 33% return, which as you know, is fucking insane. And it's just done through like computational modeling. And so that idea that you can just science and math the living shit out of something and help a ton to get clarity on it, we're like, yeah, we're just going to do this to fitness. So we science living shit on fitness. And now we have a team of super highly qualified software engineers, a ton of PhDs, very run tech, like, and they make software, they make our diet coach app, they make our hypertrophy app, and they make a ton of digital products for us. And these things help people for pennies on the day. And it's like kind of a really miraculous thing. I'm super proud of, I guess. But when I found out that Renaissance Technologies was like, yeah, stock picking and guessing is because mostly fitness up until that point had been like, do this, trust me. And we're like, this is.
- [102:09]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Or this worked for me. So it works for you. Which you never do.
- [102:12]
Cody Sanchez
Just on vibes. Right, right.
- [102:14]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Because, you know, it's like Brat Summer Fitness.
- [102:16]
Cody Sanchez
Exactly. And then we have this new way of doing things which is more science based, more calculation based, more computation based. And the only reason we do that is because it works better. And it's cool vibes because I love all the science. Y. I'm a nerd at heart. And so when I realized what Renaissance Technologies was, when we started naming our company Mr. Nick Shah and I together, I was like, renaissance periodization. Boom. And on the one hand, it's impossible to say or spell. On the other hand, it kind of sticks with you as a quirky name. They were like those weird people. Also rp, as a shortening of that you, like, you can remember rp.
- [102:53]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, that works.
- [102:54]
Cody Sanchez
Yeah. And mostly people at the time were naming their companies after themselves and had fitness after themselves in nutrition. Like Sanchez Nutrition. Yeah.
- [103:04]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No, I never wanted to do that. I already think, like, my face is on the Internet too much. I'm sure you feel the same way too. Like, why do you like a podcast? Because I'm not talking, though. Like, I get to listen to somebody else. And you guys don't have to painfully sit through more of me talking. You know, what's the other thing that's cool about Renaissance is like, to our point, on team, that now most of the money is the team's money. And so they, instead of going out and having big, huge GP or LPs, investors, people like, you know, me and you, who would give them money, increasingly they did so well that they allowed their employees to invest in the employee pool and the GP pool, the owner pool became so high that they're some of the largest investors at Renaissance. And now it's very hard. If you want Renaissance to take your money, they don't take everybody's money.
- [103:48]
Cody Sanchez
There's a reason they don't take everyone's money. Because the SEC requires more disclosure about processes if you have external investors. And so if you can't, if you don't have external investors, the SEC is like, whatever. You do, whatever the fuck you want. Because Rentech has insanely proprietary algorithms and processes. When you get a job there, from what I understand, you sign away a whole hell of a lot of your rights. You're not. And no one's ever leaked. There's been zero leaks about what they do.
- [104:11]
Dr. Mike Israetel
True. They're very quiet.
- [104:12]
Cody Sanchez
Also, the leak would have to be insanely complex of like most people wouldn't even understand it. Like, oh, here's like the, the, the, the data dump of the like 10 page algorithm we use. But I don't understand what the. That says. Some other finance people could for sure and I'm sure people are looking all the time, but that's a big reason. It's also really awesome for them. Like, can you imagine making so much money that people like, do you want external money? And you're like, ah, we're good.
- [104:31]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, be amazing.
- [104:32]
Cody Sanchez
Holy. Yeah, there's, I think there's James Simons, recently deceased. Rip he died a multi billionaire. There are countless people at that company that have oodles of oodles of money that just keep going up.
- [104:46]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I love it. Okay, I want to close out with one thing. You started a new philosophy channel. You have this giant YouTube channel, you know, millions of followers, millions of followers across your social channels. And then you did what you know is not that natural, which is you started a philosophy about the mind, health of the mind in some way instead of health of the body. One thing that I'm obsessing about lately because I can't quite figure out what's going on is it seems like we're having a little bit of a mental health tragedy with the youth in this country and particularly young men. And I was looking at your audience demographics. You have a very large population of young men. Do you understand philosophically, like what is going on with the youth today? And do you have a take on young men today, how they're thinking and how maybe they could be thinking different if they wanted to change their lives?
- [105:34]
Cody Sanchez
Not much. The reason I started the channel at first was because I just saw other people and other news outlets putting out their ideas about what the nature of life was like, the nature of the universe, the purpose of society, consciousness, a lot of stuff about AI And I just was like, man, there's a lot of people that are wrong and not a lot of people that are right are very well sought after. There's tons of people saying the right stuff, but normally most people just don't listen to them. And so it started for me as a passion project and still is of just like putting my ideas out into long form videos because I have some pretty decently organized thoughts about a lot of different stuff. And I think my take could be comically wrong, but is often at least somewhat valuable for people to hear things like politics and stuff like that. And what we noticed after a while was the self help advice, which I also like. We did A bunch of different types of videos. Turns out the self help advice and our target, not target, our actual demographic, is mostly young men or mostly men. Those videos seem to do really well. And so I basically had a little bit of a turning point on the channel recently where I'm like, fuck, like, all right, we're a men's advice channel, God damn it. And I'm joking about the goddamn apart. It's cool. It was not my intention, but we're leaning a little bit more into that. We still have all the other topics to cover on the channel because it just seems to be that people want to see it. So to your point of like we're having this crisis perhaps maybe because a lot of people are looking for kind of advice about how to live life, how to deal with insecurity, how to deal with anxiety, how to plan for the future, meaning and things like that. I'm not 100% sure on a few things. One, if there even is a crisis, the ability for media to manufacture a crisis is highly, highly impressive. I'll say something that'll get me a lot of hate from a lot of people. Why not? The COVID vaccine situation was largely uncontroversial, insanely effective, and saved probably 20 million lives worldwide. But if you look at the news articles, it was like a poison and a conspiracy and Fauci somehow is bad. Now, I'm not a huge fan of government overreach. I'm mostly a libertarian in my politics. Maximum freedom in social and economic, I think is wonderful. But it just was never true that the COVID vaccine was an actually controversial thing. It was from millions and millions of people with no medical training and no ability to appraise statistics. So it's not necessarily true that we even have a mental health crisis. I haven't myself looked deeply into the data. There are certainly some things that are bad. There are certainly some things that are really good. Bullying is down by such an insane fraction that back in the 70s and before we didn't even really measure it because like you just got that ass beat at school. This is what happened, right? So a lot of our increasing diagnoses of various mental disorders is the first time ever people have the money and time and the wherewithal to give a shit, to take their kids to the psychologist. It was before, like back in like pre 1850, you were possessed by demons or insane. There was a two diagnostic categories that they used and then nobody had adhd. But think about it. Of course, almost the same number of people had adhd. Back then, as do today, you were just considered lazy and dumb or the level of attention we required you to pay at school or whatever was just minor because after three grades of school you went to the farm. And farm work is tractable for people with adhd. Nobody gives a shit. Another one is people are being asked a lot how they feel nowadays and their calibration for how good they're supposed to feel is increasingly higher and higher. Whereas before, like, you know, like back in the old world, you just had like a grumpy aunt. She's just fucking grumpy. That's just who she was. She was terminally depressed in retrospect, but they didn't do diagnostic criteria. The DSM 5 wasn't around that whole thing. Now there absolutely probably are and could be groundswells of increasing anxiety, increasing depression, so on and so forth. For real? For real. We got to be really careful how we assess that because a lot of times it's just people paying attention to stuff that they didn't before. Here's an interesting example from physical health. Cancer is on the rise, has been for the last hundred years. And people will be like, dude, what in our food supply or whatever is causing cancer? Turns out nothing really. Not an aggregate. It turns out that people live to older age so much more now that they live long enough to get cancer. How many 30 year olds get cancer? Tragic. It's insanely rare. The average human lifespan used to be 30 back in the day up until like 100 years ago. And then it was 45 and then it was 60 and now it's like in the 70s and 80s. Yeah, if you get to your 80s, man, you still alive from not anything else killing you, you're probably going to get you a cancer or two. That's why cancer rates are skyrocketing. So you could be looking at this problem like, oh my God, cancer is eating us all. But in reality it's actually a side effect of a really beautiful thing that most people get to meet their grandchildren as adults nowadays. That all being the case, really big foundation laid for that one. Yeah, there might be a situation where anxiety is increasing. There are some interesting candidate hypotheses that I think at least worth thinking about. One of them is that for more and more people, life is so preposterously easy and lacking in challenge and real fear initiating events that our baseline levels of anxiety have no traction and nowhere to grab onto. And we know that if you put a human being in a very visually rich environment that generally don't hallucinate because like there's stuff to look at. If you put someone in an isolation chamber, it's just a matter of time until they hallucinate and they're seeing shit. But there's nothing there. Because the human visual system is evolved on a baseline of input and if it doesn't receive it, it's just going to construct it because it's like, no, no way. Ms. Be misperception. There must be things here. And so think about what the baseline human anxiety was through most of human evolution. I mean like, you step on something wrong, your fingernail comes off, you get infected, half your foot is gone, you die. Everyone's crying around you as you die by the fire. Typical Tuesday, saber tooth tigers were around. We had fucking spears and that's it. And rudimentary teamwork to try to defend her life was absolutely chaos and hell up until multiple industrial revolutions allow us to sit uncomfortable chairs with air conditioning. This is all new stuff. But our brains are evolutionarily very old. They're still looking for saber tooth tigers. If they don't find them, the anxiety is going up. Because here's the thing, after killing a saber tooth tiger, putting that motherfucker in the fire and ripping steaks off and eating, you got no worries at all. Because the insanely psychotic event of watching your best friend get mauled by the tiger before you killed him is such a huge up that the down is like heroin relaxation. That's the default. But we don't have any more crazy ups like that. Like if you go through a super insane episode near death experience. It's known that a lot of people who go through near death experiences have like a re clicking of like they love life again. Everything tastes better, it looks better. Like we used to get near death experiences all the time and actual death experiences all the time. Now luckily almost no people die from tragic accidents, et cetera. Saber tiger is not a problem anymore. Although Texas crazy ass animals around here, who knows? Because our lives are so easy, I think we're hallucinating anxiety. And that's not to say that it's like hallucination is not really there, it's really there in your head and that's the only thing that matters. So I think maybe some of the solution to the problem of a lot of anxiety from life being too good is to make your life focused and purposefully more difficult. You're not going to get a ton of anxiety if you train like a animal, if your job is physical or if your job is mental. But you're Pouring over documents and details and meetings. You're too busy to be anxious and you're too drained. And there's lots of fight or flight at work. Third quarter numbers came in. They're not good. The CEOs on the phone when you get home and you spend time with your kids or whatever on the weekends. You're just, you're just a weed poff smoke away from being just totally Zen. Because you're getting that chaos somewhere. You don't have to hallucinate it. But as life becomes very easy for all of us, yeah, we might have to lean back into working extra hard or training extra hard. Getting into some crazy Jiu Jitsu is a great hobby because people try to kill you for an hour at a time every day. After that like you walk, people walk out of the jiu studio. Every single one of them is zero fucking anxiety. Because like you just tried to save your life for an hour, you ain't got nothing left. You're too physically tired and you're emotionally so drained. Anxiety is just not an option. Many of the people who are anxious are precisely the people from life is the easiest. There's not like a crazy anxiety thing in like 50 year old CEOs. Not happening. Who's getting anxiety? 14 to 18 year old teens. Cody, you've been around 14 to 18 year old teens nowadays. Everything they could ever want is one click away and that's it, no problems. And the problem is like oh, people on social media didn't follow me when I wanted to follow them. That is not sufficient enough to get you really going to reduce your anxiety because it's some crazy event. That's a big deal. And I think that until we genetically re engineer our brains or pharmacologically take drugs to lower that base rate of anxiety, we're just going to keep basically looking back into the Pleistocene era and being like fuck, fuck, fuck. There's got to be woolly mammoths coming soon, man. And you're just anxious because everything's too good to continue. Another way to see is this. Anytime in evolutionary time, you had a long string of good stuff happening. Great harvest, maybe, but this is even farming is a new invention. Just you found some great good food, you killed the big mammoth. It's just a matter of time until hits the fam again. Winter comes, half your tribe dies. It's a regular thing, chaos. So now when people get a really good time going, if that time lasts too long, your internal sensor for hey, I gotta be aware because shit's gonna get fucked up. Real soon it starts to go up and I think that might be a part of anxiety. That's at least one of the more compelling hypotheses I've heard.
- [115:39]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So far so good. Mike, Ezra Tell Renaissance periodization. Nailed it. RP strength on all the socials. And I'm going to subscribe to the Philosophy channel. I love the way your brain works. Thank you so much for being here today.
- [115:51]
Cody Sanchez
It's an honor to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me.
- [115:55]
You know what I say? I say you should be a G and don't keep this podcast just for a little old me. Please go out there and share this podcast with. It's the only way this thing grows is you guys sharing. It's probably the hardest thing we grow right now. So you doing that makes all the difference in the world. Be a little G. Okay, so wrapping this guy up. Here's what I want to say. One, if you liked what Mike had to say, go over to Instagram right now because you're going to die when you see the shorts that we did from this one. There's some things you will never unsee on Instagram after you go over there from Mike. And that's all the heads up I'm gonna give you. Also, I don't know if you guys know this, but we have a ton of events coming up for next year. I don't do tours right now. I don't really speak on any more stages after the podcast is launched. I do one thing and that is I throw big events for you guys. If you wanna see those, you can check them out at contrarianthinking Co. You can get on the waitlist for all the events next year. Lastly, if you want to buy a business and you are serious about taking that the next step, we have created the Contrarian Academy, which I think is the only place in the world that is focused on people buying Main street businesses every single day with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue bought and thousands of business owners doing it live. If you are interested in that in the link below. We have to make sure that it's the right fit for you and the right fit for us. So fill out the form. You can talk to one of our M and A specialists about is this the right fit for you? And if not, we'll steer you somewhere else. If you're not the right fit for the academy or the community, then perhaps it is for one of our curriculum or for some of the free things that we offer at Contrarian thinking, too. And then, of course, I don't want to forget. If you guys haven't picked up the book Main Street Millionaire, you can go to msmbook.com we got a bunch of cool things coming for those of you guys who want to become owners. All right, until next time, this is for the owners. See you next week on the Big Deal podcast.