← Old School with Shilo Brooks
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- [00:00]
A
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm sitting down with Dr. Mike Isretel. Dr. Mike is the co founder of Renaissance Periodization, a coaching company that teaches evidence based diet and training. He's been a longtime college professor of exercise and sports science, a competitive bodybuilder, a Brazilian Jiu jitsu black belt, and the author of multiple books. The Blank Slate by Steven pinker, published in 2002, changed Dr. Mike's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is Old School. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. The Jack Miller Center's mission is to reinvigorate education and America's founding principles by empowering professors, supporting teachers, and bringing civic education to millions of students nationwide. If you believe in educating the next generation to sustain American ideals, join us@jackmillercenter.org Dr. Mike Israel. Welcome to Old School.
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B
Thank you for having me.
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A
It is a pleasure to have you. I've been looking forward to this one. I watched a video you made on our subject today, Steven Pinker. And in it you didn't call him Dr. Steven Pinker because you said that once you reach a sufficient level of fame and learning, you, you drop doctor. You, of course, call yourself Dr. Mike Israel. And so I suppose you haven't reached that level.
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B
I don't think I ever will. Steven Pinker's the real deal, man.
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A
Yeah, he is the real deal. But today you're going to be a real doctor. You're going to be a real intellectual because you've picked for us a serious book, a complex book, Steven Pinker's the Blank Slate. I think it's probably one of Pinker's best. But I'm interested in hearing from you first before we dive into the content. How did you find this book? How did you find Steven Pinker? How old were you? Where were you? And how did he shape your thinking about science and the world?
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B
Yes, I was four years old. I was a chimney sweep in London. It was 1929. Difficult times.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
Then I woke up and I was in my early 20s and I was going through a bit of a phase of acquiring Internet knowledge about the types of political insights that I thought were kind of rather bereft from my formal education at the time. So high school. And then I was at the University of Michigan for my undergrad at the time. And there was just like stuff they don't teach there and I got into. So I was actually perusing the Internet and I saw a website by Mr. Larry Elder, who is like a famous person now as well, and he's like a political commentator and a lawyer from California. And he had like a list of books that he liked. And, and the Blank Slate was on there. And I looked at it and I read the kind of like, what it was, and I was like, okay, that, that seems really interesting. And so I just purchased the book. And back then we didn't have Amazon. Damn it. So. No, I'm kidding. So I walked into in the snow, 50 years One Direction.
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A
Right.
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B
And then I read the book once and I was just like, I don't know, there's like, if you have like a really nerdy kid who's like eight and it just hasn't seen much and you take him to like the world's biggest science museum, he's just going to do this the entire time. Like, how did you. How was today? He's going to be like, today was the greatest day ever. It was like that for the days and days I dug through the book. It was just unbelievable.
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A
Wow. Wow. And so you read it voraciously. I know you've said elsewhere that you sometimes like to read books at least twice, especially of this magnitude. So I assume you've been through this a few times. And if I'm not mistaken, you've gone on to read a lot more Pinker too. He's been influential on you in a lot of ways.
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B
Steven Pinker has multiple incredible abilities unified into one human, into one kind of thread of authorship. And one of them is the bringing of things that are. Every other paragraph is revelatory, but stated in such plain and understandable terms that it fits into your world model in your head like a square peg and a square hole. And you're like, oh, that makes perfect sense.
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A
Well, let's talk a little bit about the blank slate. You know, this is a big book. It's a difficult book in some respects if you're not kind of acquainted with science and philosophy. But if there's somebody out there who's interested in. Steven Pinker, interested in maybe approaching the blank slate for the first time, could you say just sort of in general, what is this book about for somebody who's never read it?
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B
Yeah, it's just about human nature. And you would say, like, what is human nature? And the answer is, it's like our brain is engineered by evolution to be a non random thinking machine. And the way in which it is non random is a confluence of roughly Two things. One, biological substrates aren't ideal at anything. So just it screws up a lot. But the other one is, to the extent that it has a structure, it is mostly the structure of our evolutionary history. And thus the way we think is really closely tied to the demands that we have seen as important in our evolutionary history and the constraints we've had in our evolutionary history. And so once you understand that, okay, that's how our brain works. So what is human nature? How does it shape our brain? And thus why do we think in certain ways that if you didn't know evolutionary psychology, you would have never predicted people would think like this, but if you did, you would be like, that situation right there. People are gonna have a lot of feelings that look like this about it. And you would be correct many times. And the reason that. So it's. The book is actually about human nature. But much of the book really documents why there's a massive denial of the existence of human nature or of some particular views of it from many facets of society, especially the extreme left and the extreme right, which I like to make a joke, all love and respect to everyone. It just. Folks are having a lot of feelings, is how I like to describe it. You have a lot of feelings about how you think humans should. And if you interpolate that or kind of map it over how humans really are, there are going to be discordances. And this book is about resolving them and being like, here's how stuff actually is. And it's actually a really great thing. It's a limited thing. It's a really great thing. But a lot of people on various sides of the aisle think that if they were to accept the reality of evolved human nature, that they would have to conclude other very, very terrible things. And Pinker basically very eruditely demonstrates that's not true.
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A
Yeah, let's drill down on that. So the idea is, if Pinker is concerned that people are going to think that his proof of human nature, that there's an existence of a thing called human nature, that that's a real thing, that's going to come with a lot of controversy. And so the book is, in a way, an attempt to first show that there's such a thing as human nature, that it's biological, genetic, and that we can know it. And secondly, and I think more importantly, given the title in a way, that this notion that there's no such thing as human nature, that we are blank slates, that from the beginning we can just have anything we want written on us and become whatever that's false. And if I'm not mistaken, he gives kind of three theories of blank slateness that he's trying to refute. One is the blank slate, like we're not, you know, blank tablets from birth. The second is that we're not. I think he calls it something like noble savages.
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B
Noble savage.
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A
That we're not all human beings are not good by nature, from birth.
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B
Like only society corrupts.
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A
That's right. That's right. That he thinks so, that the blank slate's false, the noble savage is false. And the third is the notion of what he calls the ghost in the machine, namely that there's such a thing as a soul and that that's driving us separate from our body.
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B
Yes, right.
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A
Those are the three things. And I don't know if you have thoughts about those and his refutations of those, but I invite your thoughts on, you know, what the kind of idea that it is he's pushing back against. What is that idea?
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B
Yeah, yeah. Excellent summary. So we can just go point by point.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The blank slate, if you boil it down to its real basics, is the idea that if you try to put it in. So I say it's as much of an idea as it is a wish.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Almost everyone who has ever come to the idea, let's say, creating the assumption that we are rather blank slates, that humans can be taught anything and all humans are fundamentally equal in their ability to learn and all of that stuff, and we don't have any predilections to think in some ways and not think in others. That starts off as a hope. I think people bring that hope to the data, and then they kind of squint at the data and kind of black this part out and they go, I'm going to believe that. And so the blank slate runs into problems fundamentally because it's just not true. It's like saying, well, you know, like every single car on the road is just about the same in its performance characteristics, how well it turns, how fast it goes, its range. And you're like, huh? So, like, so it is just the drivers that make the difference in how the cars are operating.
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A
Right.
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B
And you're like, but is that really true? And it turns out it's not true. And so Steven Pinker attacks that from a rivalry perspective perspectives, mostly from an evidentiary perspective of like, you know, people think neural plasticity is infinite.
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A
Right.
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B
There's all of the research saying that it's not.
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A
Right.
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B
And he also, I think, does an Excellent documentation of who believes in the blank slate where in history. That view was first kind of granularized and then kind of what intellectual tradition they're bringing into it. Like. Like socialists are a big fan of the blank slate ideology because. And, and people on the political left. Why? Yeah, super straightforward. Because they want to believe that we live in a world in which the only reason some folks are without and some folks with are top down social forces that can be manipulated by a beneficent authority, them or people they elected or something. All great ideas. And then we can change outcomes almost one to one or pretty close and really like make some good happen in this world. And if you tell them like a lot of the reasons some people are like without is cause of that social force stuff, which is definitely true. But a lot of it's like, cause some people just aren't as productive as others. Like some people like to sit around and do not a whole lot of much. Some people just kind of workaholics. It's just gonna lead to differences and they really don't like to hear that kind of stuff because it disempowers the central tenet of their ideology. People on the extreme right, of course they have other feelings. Their feelings get real triggered in some of the other ones. And so that's kind of the blank slate. The idea that humans are capable of exactly the same outputs and the only thing that really does the shaping is the external social forces and we're infinitely malleable. That's definitely incorrect. Pinker does that really well.
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A
Right.
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B
The noble savage myth is like, I would say, like especially hilarious given empirical understandings about how people of less developed, less civilized proclivities actually act. And it's again, this idea that is really, really held on to by people who want society to be immortal. From the top down thing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because then the noble savage myth is basically saying, okay, default in our evolved. And you can even say, hey, evolution's great. In our evolved ancestral environments, let's see, hunter gatherer groups, people are characteristically bereft of the instincts for war. The instinct, the instincts for intermarital violence, the instincts for any kind of exploitation or abuse.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And they're just generally amazing and having a really awesome kumbaya time. This noble savage myth is presented like if you need a real clear example of it, the entire movie Pocahontas will do just fine. And if you want a modern version, Avatar is just literally that like they live in the woods, they don't need technology and they have like Essentially zero bad impulses. And then evil society comes in and screws them up. And if you're a person who thinks they can re architect society carte blanche, then you're like, yeah, like of course we're all internally just good. And it was all these social things that screwed us up. But good news, we can re architect social forces and return back to our pristine nature. And like that's just going to run into problems because it's also not true Humans, to Pinker's immense credit, we have the not so great angels of our nature, the parts of human nature that are really quite nasty. And then we have amazing parts of our human nature and we have both. And depending on what social forces are around, some will get activated more than others. And so social engineering is to an extent a tractable problem. It absolutely is, but not to infinity extent. And if you just pretend that everyone's good to go to run into problems because these not so kind angels of our nature, greed, jealousy, anger, sociopathy, psychopathy, they're going to be present to some extent and it's going to confuse you and you're going to say but weren't we noble savages? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact it's quite the opposite that in the absence of civilizing social forces in pre industrial societies, the savages were quite ignoble. Of course, noble in many ways, but on average pre industrial society is not a place you want to be. The ghost in the machine is the idea that we have this biological stuff, but that there's something special. If you are more scientifically minded, the secretion of our brain is what you call the mind. And the mind behaves in altogether completely different ways than the brain has almost no relation to it. And if you want the more religious perspective, then somewhere in there, I guess there's a soul or somehow your body communicates to a soul and then the soul is pristine and very super special. And, and then so if you look into the sciences of biology and evolutionary psychology and you try to explain like why do people behave differently or why do some people do this? You start being like, well it's literally brain structures. Like the brain is, with no analogy at all, a computer. That's what it is. And it has certain kinds of structures and you know, like ChatGPT will make certain mistakes because of its structure, so will your brain. And people saying like, well so you're saying we're just machines. Like yeah, that's exactly the case. And the ghost in the machine does not allow for that. And people who, whose moral hierarchies, their sense of belonging and understanding of how the world works, a sense of personal security, usually focus on a religious right when it rests with the assumption that the soul is, is like the thing. And you start being like, I don't, I don't know so much know if the soul's there and if it's there, like it's really related to actual brain structure. It just really starts to put a stick in their spokes about a lot of their assumptions. Those are the kind of folks that have pretty hard time swallowing all this stuff.
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A
That was an extraordinary summary. I think you've covered that fully. I want to highlight for people, though, one aspect of what you said that Pinker is concerned with and spends a lot of ink dealing with the political abuses of these two problems on the left and the right. And you mentioned that for a moment on the left, he says if you have an, an excess of blank slate belief, and you mentioned this one, you can kind of run in the direction of thinking, you know, we can all be shaped by cultural and social forces. And that's like the problematic is to get those things right so that we can all be better or something like that. But the other side of the matter is if you get too deep into genetics on the left, which was a kind of transgression of the turn of the century left, you get, he says, social Darwinism, which is that you think essentially everything is genetic. And so what we have to do is like, figure out who's genetically best and who's genetically worse and then organize society sort of on the base of that and kind of. You see what I mean? So that's like an excess in both directions. And then he does the same thing on the right. He says there are people on the right whose excess in the blank slate direction, he says, is sort of the cultural Christians or the evangelical Christians that they want to say, God made us, you know, he shaped us. We're completely at the, at his whims. And so this stuff about human nature, I mean, maybe, but we're really clay in God's hands. Sure. But the excess on the other side of that, when you go too far in the direction not of the blank slate but of the human nature, is eugenics the far, far right to say, well, since it's all about genetics, we can breed for excellence, you know, or something like that. And so he, he's at pains to sort of diffuse the bomb here and say all of the excesses are bad, you know, and that seems to me to be, like, a really hard thing to do. And so a lot of it is about him trying to, like, calm people.
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B
Down, you know, which he does, I would say, masterfully.
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A
Yeah, yeah, he does masterfully. The word of the day today is Cartesian. Where does that word come from? You've probably heard it before. It's a reference to the modern philosopher Rene Descartes. And it comes up in our book today because Pinker refers to Cartesian dualism, which is the notion that was popularized by Descartes, that the mind and the body are separate substances. So you've got a soul substance, and then a body substance, and that those two things are separate and different. And that one of the most intractable problems of philosophy is to figure out how the soul and the mind fit together when they're fundamentally different. This comes up in the blank slate because Pinker is pushing back against the Cartesian notion that we are blank slates with minds which are separate from body. Whereas Descartes argues that the mind and the body are separate and separate substances, Pinker pushes back on that claim by saying essentially that the mind is body, the body and the mind are the same, and that in order to make sense of all bodily phenomenon, we must look to the brain, the mind, evolutionary biology, genetics, that there's no such thing as a soul substance, or a separate soul from the body. But Descartes is also known for a lot of other things. Believe it or not, Descartes invented algebra. You can look at his book the Geometry, and you can learn about not Cartesian dualism, but the Cartesian plane, which is those XY coordinates that you see if you've ever had to graph anything. And he's also known for having assigned x, Y and z to shapes which can then be expressed in equations. So Descartes, a genius.
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B
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A
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B
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A
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B
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A
What about this aspect of the book? You know, one of the things that he spends a lot of time doing is saying, well, because there's a human nature, this is not a depressing fact. So he says, you know, some of you are going to say, well, then everything's deterministic as a consequence of evolutionary biology and genetic insight. We now live these deterministic lives where, like, we're on rails, we're all programmed, we don't have any control of any of our actions. Genetics determine everything. So I'm just going to be a determinist. And he, he refutes that. In one chapter, he says, no, no.
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B
Quite easy to refute.
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A
And then the next one, he says, well, okay, if genes are controlling everything, then there's no such thing as morality, because the reason I did that thing was a genetic predisposition to rape someone or something of this kind. And then the third is, he says, this could. The notion of human nature could, could give rise to nihilism. Right? That you could just say, nothing is true. Screw it, everything's genetically determined. And so I'm curious if you have thoughts on him trying to show people that the notion that there is a human nature is not a destructive or depressing insight. In fact, it's an enlivening, enriching one.
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B
I think it's really important philosophically to understand something very, very deep. And this, this is something I think that will take people who are into thinking extra hard about things really, really far. And that is you do not have a choice. Sitting in your study reading books about how the world actually is. The world is a certain way. And that way could range from anything to serendipitously harmonious and amazing. I mean, like, just go like, watch an iPhone being assembled, and you're like, they're making functionally magic here. This is insane. Yeah, or like, Uber eats when you're hungry. It's like, this is crazy. How is this possible? Yeah, and then all the way through, oh, you know, ups and downs. The same father figure who you looked up to your whole life, not you necessarily, hypothetical father figure had his great moments of stability and had his nasty moments of anger. And so, like, is my dad a good person? Is answered with, well, you know, all humans are quite complex. And then it ranges all the way into, like, the Holocaust was real and Pol Pot's, you know, adventures were real and countless people died. That really happened. Humans made it happen. And so if you come in and you're really worried about your sacred cow or belief getting destroyed by facts and evidence and the real structure of the world, you're going to have a bad time. And so some people who think, okay, the blanks, the existence of a human nature implies X, Y, Z, that's usually their first recourse, their first bounce back from being shown that, okay, the way you think the world works isn't real. It's like their first clap back. And almost never is it like a really well thought out series of understandings that ends up being like, oh, okay. And so there's no guarantee, there never was a guarantee that our real human nature didn't imply all these terrible things that people think it could have implied. Terrible things. Like, imagine looking through a telescope being like, that comet's headed over here. Like, well, there must be a misunderstanding. Nope, telemetry confirmed five times over. It's going to kill us all. That could really be reality. And then it'd be like, well, you shouldn't have said that. Like, well, it's real. Right. Luckily, good news. Human nature as discovered when understood properly. And when good policy that matches human nature is pushed forward leads to, I would say, zero of the extreme concerns surfaced by critics. Some concerns that are real, but they're real and the ways to get around them aren't. With the sophistry of make believing your way into, well, the world shouldn't work like this. So I'm going to say it doesn't. It is resolved by being, okay, these are tough things in the world. These are tough, real things about human nature. How do we deal with them in the best way possible? There are real good answers to those questions.
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A
Yeah, I liked your remark a lot because it echoes what you said earlier about people hoping the world works a certain way and then having to sober themselves up and see that it doesn't. And that's very, very difficult.
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B
Super difficult.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. And that there are such things as truths which are painful to digest.
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B
Yeah. The whole gamut. You don't have a choice in what's true or not. Yeah, I. I wish I would have designed my body significantly differently if that was the case. If I squint hard enough, I'll be 6:3. That's what I tell myself every morning. But for example, some people statistically are kinder, more productive, and even better looking all at the same time. I'm in neither of those. Not three of those categories. You're in all three, by the way, my man. And so you say, okay, some people are like that. And some people are criminally prone chromogeny, and just kind of awful. You ever been around someone maybe your whole life that you were just like, you're fucking awful. I don't mean as a person. I mean parts of you, damn it. And so that to the core. Right, right, right. So that is a thing that everyone who's been around humans long enough, especially In New York. Am I right? Hey, hey, I'm walking here. And that's something that a person who's been alive long enough can be like. Yeah. Yes. Okay. The reality really does work like this Disney would have you believe, not the corporation Disney, just the idea. This kind of blank slate ism would be like everyone's beau, beautiful in their own way, which is true, but also just doesn't say the whole picture. So the next question, and this is one of Pinker's big points phrased differently by me, is now that we know people are different and some people are just having a harder time than others. Right. They're a little. They'll fly in the milk. Right. And some people are just amazing. What's our next move? And if you think our next move has to be kill the bad people. Holy. Are you jumping ahead to something that's a real bad idea?
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A
Yeah.
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B
For people, purely objective utilitarian purposes, it's a bad idea.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Nothing to do with. Oh well, look, we need to be compassionate. Erase compassion altogether. It's still an absolutely God awful idea to kill tons of people or to prevent people from breeding as they wish. Oh my God. And you think, okay, what other better ways of interaction could we have? Still assuming that some people are going to have a harder time than others? Well, I mean like intelligent government programs that seek to find people who are having a hard time and try to offer them care. A good charitable society, an excellent understanding that if we increase our overall peaceable nature, decrease crime and increase prosperity. But that kind of helps everyone as far as we can tell. And so if you think about the real world being a lot of ups and downs and not just this flat plane, you don't necessarily have to conclude the worst possible thing you can about that. And most of the people doing that, unfortunately, they're not arguing in good faith.
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A
Yeah, no, that's good. And what that brings out, I think what you've done is you've shown what is one of the, I think the hallmark features of Pinker's book, which is that he's, he's a man, I'll put this in an odd way. He's a man of a moderate intellect and a moderate soul. By that I mean this you just said. Well, it's true there are bad people and they're bad to their core. Maybe that is in a certain sense genetic. However, what Pinker is not doing is abandoning the notion that the environment and that the things that the Blank Slaters think matter really do matter. Like it matters how you condition behavior. It matters. The kind, as you just said a moment ago, the kinds of social institutions and how they're formed in the government and these sorts of things. And so Pinker really is not doing what I think his most knee jerk critics would say he's doing, which is it's all genetic and he can't control. He's saying, no, no, they both matter. Although he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to. I mean, in the beginning, there's a sense in which he doesn't embrace that view because he wants people to feel the full weight of the notion that there's such a thing as a human nature. But by the middle, he's like, look, the environment matters. Behavior matters. There is one important exception to this, and I wonder if you'd let me ask you about it. And that is the chapter on child rearing.
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B
I knew you were gonna say child rearing.
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A
This is like one of the controversial places I was shocked to find in his afterword that he says to this day, I mean shocked in a good way, that this is one of his favorite pieces of writing that he's ever done. This is like the best thing he's ever written because it really was controversial. I would point out this. I'm a father. Steven Pinker has no children. Not that having children is necessarily, you know, this authority is what you need to be able to pronounce truths about them. But nonethele, he has no children. The reason I say this is that his claim is that for any given child in a family, the heritability of characteristics and genetics matters a lot more than parenting. That's like, I mean, to. As, you know, maybe I'm a parent and I just want to over assign myself responsibility for my. I have one which is not, you know. Yeah. But I wonder what you make of his claim that parenting is sort of. It matters, but it's sort of the least important. Maybe. Maybe I'm overstating that ingredient in the equation.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. The first time I read it, I was of the mind that parenting was more akin to engineering. But you, every little thing you did as a parent, even that one thing you said when you were angry that you shouldn't have said, yeah, that's that zig that should have zagged. That's your kid's gonna go to jail instead of Oxford.
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A
Right, right.
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B
And so when I read this, at first I was incredulous. I was like, no, no, no, this is categorically impossible. Then I looked into his explanation, and then I Went off and read the article, I believe by Eric Turkheimer. The three laws of behavioral genetics and what they mean, a little technical, but intense. And so what I can say about this idea of child rearing is in properly contextualized, you have to have some nuance here. It's, first of all, it's within a normal range of typical modern homes and modern families. No clear physical or emotional abuse, no absence of one or both of the father, mother figures, and then no like, lack of nutrients and things like that. Then once you have those things and they're in a certain given culture, like if you're raised by roughly decent people in Minnesota or roughly decent people in California, or XYZ hippie parents or slightly stricter parents, all of those kinds of variations to credit, you know, sitcoms and things like that. Precisely the variations we think matter a lot. Like, oh, of course Billy's rebellious, he had a strict dad. But then of course, when Billy is very straight and narrow, of course Billy's straight, narrow, he has a strict dad. Wait a minute, hold on a second. Yeah, yeah. And so within the context of just things that vary in normal society, the claim is that for really core human capabilities and kind of assets, the variation introduced by the common home environment, how parents raise you and how you interact with siblings and stuff actually matters to an extent that seemingly in the best control studies trends towards 0% and the worst control tends towards 10% effect on overall behavior. And these are for things like intelligence as measured by standardized tests, personality traits, deep personality traits. Like, is. Is Sean extroverted or introverted? If you have a kid who is. Is born, let's say, a certain way with genetics, you don't know, is it possible with good parenting to raise them to be exceptionally extroverted? There's an experiential way in which as a father, nothing, anyone without children, or anyone even with children or anyone looking at statistical data can tell you that's going to replace your inner knowledge and understanding of how humans really are raised. Yeah, that experiential wisdom is irreplaceable, but there's a mirror to that, and that's statistical aggregations of thousands of people raised in very different ways. When genetics are accounted for, like twin and adoption studies, like, one identical twin goes to this home, another identical twin goes to that home. And so, but for a few confounders, you can say like, okay, the, the only difference in their upbringing was the common home environment. And then you have another way of comparing, which is you have three siblings that are related and one adoptive sibling who arrived at age one now say, okay, this adoptive sibling is going to have to be like, way more like his siblings that are not adoptive because he's raised in that same environment with 18 years in the same suburban California home. It's got to leave some mark. And when you look at how that adoptive sibling compares to their biological siblings living in other families versus how he compares to his siblings in this family who are not related, there's functionally no detectable effect of 18 years on things like intelligence, major personality traits, major life outcomes. And so that leaves you with like, this has to be a misunderstanding. I've looked at it at depth recently. I've argued with ChatGPT's O3 model about it. At the end of the day, it's like, yeah, the common home environment probably has limited impacts, which is a bad thing and a good thing. It's a bad thing because you actually can't shape your kids like Clay. You can't get a kid and be like, you're going to be an NBA all Star. You're going to be, you know, with the Guggenheim displaying your work. That's probably not going to work the good way to understand it because, you know, it's real again. It's real.
- [32:17]
A
It's real.
- [32:18]
B
You can't shape your kids. Likely you have some ability, but not much. And so what's the good thing? Well, one is like, as long as you make sure they get decent food, someone makes them go to school and do their homework, and then afterwards they're allowed some free time to do whatever. Then like, your need to be stressed out as a parent is like really misplaced. I mean, I am an Ashkenazi Jew 3/4. And that's my cultural heritage. Russian Jewish parents. I mean, like, the extent to which it was I was attempted to be molded cannot be overstated. Constants everywhere. You know, people who have Chinese parents will know what this feels like. It's like, you are a machine. We're gonna turn you into this. And then we know that's really all for not right. And oh boy, I really kind of want to know what has an effect and what doesn't.
- [33:05]
A
Right? So in addition to the the parent chapter, which is quite controversial, there's another on gender and sex difference. And the argument in that chapter is that there are of course genetic differences between the sex sexes that do color, behavior, capacity, you know, well, strength capacity, upper body strength in men, but also dispositionally. But that this, despite these differences, this is not grounds for discrimination or unequal Treatment. So I want to invite you to reflect on that controversial chapter.
- [33:44]
B
Yeah. So a lot of people will say one of several extremes. One is the sexes have to be identical in every measurable way other than, I guess, gross external morphology. Yeah, maybe even that, who knows? Because if we admit that there are sex differences that are genetically and biologically based, we have to start really doing like a handmaiden's tale type of society. Radical discrimination, like you're a woman. No sports. Here's a knitting thing, go knit. And then another group of people hopes to God that's really true with a capital T, because they want to make society really discriminatory towards various genders. Hyper, hyper extreme conservatives of the kind we scarcely even have in the, the free Asia, modern Europe and the US and Canada like the very, very rare view, but in some of the parts of the other world like that as absolutely the view. And so what Pinker manages to say, I think excellently, is that there are absolutely statistical differences between men and women. Now, the statistical part's a trip, right? Because if I would say to you that men are stronger than women, if you just take that as a really easy heuristic, in parlance, regular conversation, you could easily come up with counterexamples because the people who win the world's strongest woman competition every year, they're stronger than you, they're stronger than me, but I'm pretty strong. So is my statement false? Well, if you look at it as probability distributions, bell curves, the male bell curves just slid up from the female. There's overlap.
- [35:16]
A
Yeah.
- [35:16]
B
And so you can say, say things like, you know, men are taller than women. Now your boys out here, I'm dry as at five, six. You feel me? Yeah, I'm like the shorter the average woman or something like that. Just a little. I'm a little taller than the average woman. Which brings me to men's source of pride. And so is it true to say that men are taller than women? Well, yes, absolutely. Now is it true to say that we should discriminate? So I could actually take that one directly on the face that, that claim, if we mean discriminate by law, then we already know from economics, from work actually cited by Steven Pinker, by, by the great Dr. Thomas Sowell, that like having the government do discriminatory practices is just really bad economics, really bad social policy. The government's really bad at deciding who needs to go where. That's for voluntary association and markets to decide almost always. So do we have to do discrimination because people are different? No, God, no. It's a really, really terrible idea. But because people are different, we can just understand that sometimes when there's more people doing one thing and fewer people doing another, it absolutely could be because of nefarious, discriminatory cultural forces, and we should be investigating that to our full abilities. But if it turns out that really there is no more nefarious cultural force, like a common claim is like, well, girls aren't taught to really embrace math, like, really in 1990s classrooms in. In Northwest, like Boston. That's still true. And no, of course not everyone wants to promote women in mathematics as much as possible and has for generations now. And so we can say, okay, the nefarious forces were not found. Yeah, then it's okay if there's some asymmetry. And then it's really a matter of individuals to choose their proclivities based on their own proclivities, because every single individual is not necessarily a good representation of their gender or sex. For example, if you say, you know, males generally have a bigger proclivity for high risk work and females for work that involves other humans. Like, if you're a nurse, you're female. It really matters to you to connect with humans where if you're a male and you're like a lumberjack, beaver hunter. Not that kind of beaver, the animal.
- [37:18]
A
Right, right.
- [37:19]
B
I saw your eyes glimmer up.
- [37:20]
A
Yeah, I was shocked.
- [37:21]
B
Yes. A man of the beaver, my friend. And so, you know, that could be true. But there's tons of women out there that see the lumberjack position and they're like, I want that. And that's not our job to tell them. Now, statistically, most women don't like. All right, I'm not. Most women like. Wow, that was an easy refutation. Off you go. No problem at all.
- [37:42]
C
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer availability, amount of discounts, and savings and eligibility vary by.
- [38:16]
A
So one of the things that we do on Old School is we ask our guests to bring a passage that particularly moved them. Read it out loud and let's discuss it. So I understand you've brought a passage from the blank slate.
- [38:26]
B
Yes.
- [38:27]
A
All right.
- [38:27]
B
And I can read. And I'll demonstrate stability.
- [38:30]
A
I'm surprised.
- [38:30]
B
I mean, look at me. For the love of that.
- [38:32]
A
I'm stunned.
- [38:33]
B
All right, so here's the quote. The first revolution with a utopian vision was the French Revolution. Recall Wordsworth's description of the times. With human nature seeming born again, the revolution overthrew the ancient regime and sought to begin from scratch with the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. And a belief that salvation would come from vesting authority in a morally superior breed of leaders. That sounds bad already. The revolution, of course, sent one leader after another to the guillotine as each failed to measure up to usurpers who felt they had a stronger claim to wisdom and virtue. And my take on this is that so this is basically Steven Pinker recounting the French Revolution, which he juxtaposes to the American Revolution. I think excellently as kind of a real world test of the blank slate versus the alternative. Like human nature is real ideology. And in the United States, the American Revolution basically presupposed that the governments weren't always great and need an incredible amount of limit to their power and that free peoples should associate. Whereas the French Revolution assumed like if you get the right people in, everything's going to be grand. And that was not. It turns out to be true. And also because the nature of the world is quite complex and the way things are sometimes are pretty unjust and pretty limited. But if we're going to fix them because the world is complex and in many cases quite fragile, like with political institutions, when we are to go about making change, we should be very reverent of that complexity and treat it like a very masterful surgeon treats the human body. Change something small, measure, see the effects. Change something something small again, because one of the things about real human nature that Steven Pinker conveys very well is that it is flawed in some ways in a biblical sense, but in some ways just in the sense of like humans are only capable of so much. Like if you want to appoint someone to government that is perfect, you're gonna be looking for forever. It's not gonna happen. So now we can't have a perfect government leader. How do we design government to make sure that even imperfect people can do a decent job? It's harder. And so reverence, calm, humility and a systems wide analysis is my huge preference. Revolution's dope. I love it. But let's think about what system we're building. Because when you go out in the world, society's not random.
- [41:03]
A
Yeah.
- [41:03]
B
Like UPS trucks somehow make it to where they're supposed to go. The mail shows up on time. The sewer system works. If you have a terrible thing happening, the police will show up. These are very, very intricate systems. Like how does food even get to your grocery store? How the hell do they know what you're going to buy? You can't just carte, launch that and build a better system unless you know a lot of stuff. And as soon as you learn a lot of stuff, humility about the complexity of the system is such a big deal.
- [41:25]
A
I recommend to you, given what you've just said, if you haven't read it, Edmund Burke's book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Have you read this?
- [41:32]
B
I've heard it was a classic.
- [41:33]
A
This is like your view stated by Burke. I mean, there's a lot of symmetry here. So read Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and combine that with. There was a pamphleteer at the American founding named Thomas Paine and he had the more blank slate view, shall we say? And so if you're really, and it seems you are interested in this fight, Burke and Pain read together will like blow your mind. I love it. So, yeah, I want to ask you a little bit about the way the blank slate has shaped your views on your profession. You're a guy who doubtless comes into contact every day with just the brute fact of genetic limitation. Either in your own training, you've clearly thought about your own longings to be taller, your own, these sorts of things. But in the people who you've trained in the past, educating students, a coach, you, you run against these walls.
- [42:26]
B
Yes.
- [42:26]
A
And so I'm curious, how has the blank slate and the claims that Pinker makes about human nature shaped your approach as a coach, as a scientist, as an educator?
- [42:37]
B
Yeah. One of the absolutely immensely instructive things I read on the blank slate I didn't like reading this part, was Pinker's discussion of human imperfections and kind of the tragedy of the human condition. Now that's a very literary, very Ashkenazi Jew way to put that. But basically, you know, he recounts various passages from fictional books, various real life interactions to say that the same humans that are unbelievably angelic creatures in one instance can be really limited and really ugly and really nasty in other instances where all of those things combined and there's no need to try to conclude that humans are good fundamentally, or that humans are bad and terrible and we need to repent. We're both. And that allows you to understand that humans can, with the right mix of Motivation and program design, let's say, and training and diet on some conditions be pushed to incredible heights and accomplish amazing things. But at the same time, you have to understand you can't infinitely push people because not everyone's ready for that kind of push. And some people have various limitations. Some of us have them a lot, some a little less, some. It's the time of the season where we have to very gingerly approach behavior change. So when I was a personal trainer and I teach people how to be personal trainers, it's really cool to be able to look at the physiology of fitness and be like, all right, if I lower someone's calories, I raise their activity, I have them lift weights two or three times a week in a proper manner. It's going to have like a massive effect on everyone. And that's true. Hey, how likely are you to get people to control their calories? Well, if you come from a blank slate approach, you just need to tell them lower calories are better and they're like, yes, and they just do it. But if, you know evolutionary psychology, you're going to say people are hardwired to want really high sugar, high fat, calorie, dense, tasty foods. And when you lower their body weight, there are mechanisms, dozens of them. Some of the ones that modern weight loss drugs attack very well, that tell them, hey, shut up with this diet stuff. You see those two hot dogs? I bet you can eat both of those in 30 seconds. Pimp. And you're like, I bet I could body. I won my own bet.
- [44:55]
A
Right?
- [44:55]
B
So if you understand humans will struggle with ancestral things like hunger. Humans have certain bandwidths that can be higher or lower depending on the conditions. And that you can't just expect everyone to be your most successful case. What you can do is have a process by which you lay out very basic fundamentals, very easy to do things in fitness, and everyone gets those. And then as someone demonstrates to you that they're at that time in their lives where they're capable of more, you give them more, say, oh, well, you get a stricter diet, you get three days a week of lifting instead of two, and they succeed with it. And then it's four, and then an even stricter diet and they turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger or something like that. Whereas other people, coming from a maybe different time in their life, maybe their capabilities are less or more or whatever, they get a little bit less intervention. And you don't try to aim for the same sky high goals with everyone, because when you meet a human being you have no idea of the confluence of their biology and psychology, what result that's going to produce, given your best effort. Immensely helpful. Why am I saying this? When I was younger, I would really hope, slash expectations that all of my clients got the best possible results that a human with any given genetics could get.
- [46:04]
A
Right?
- [46:05]
B
And then later, I realized, like, man, sometimes people just like to go out Friday night and have a lot of drinks, and they have nothing to say about it in a Saturday morning session other than, like, I'm 35 and I live in New York and I'm single.
- [46:16]
A
Yeah.
- [46:16]
B
Am I gonna do.
- [46:17]
A
Yeah.
- [46:17]
B
And you're like, all right, that. Taking that into account, we're not going to achieve the exotic fitness goals I had set out for you. But we sure can make incredible traction on the bandwidth that we have.
- [46:28]
A
What about. What about elite athletes? I saw a video you did on Matt Fraser. Like, that guy's a freak. For people who don't know, Matt Fraser was a CrossFit champ. Five time CrossFit champion.
- [46:39]
B
CrossFit champ.
- [46:40]
A
It's like, unbelievable. And when I was a little younger, the guy was Rich Froning. You know who Rich is?
- [46:46]
B
Yes.
- [46:46]
A
People should look these people up. What? I'm talking about LeBron James. If you don't know who those people are. Elite athletes, how do you keep people motivated? Especially athletes motivated. Like, you're not Mat Fraser, but you're real good. Or you're not LeBron James, but you're in the G League, you might make it to the Lakers. How do you keep elite athletes motivated in the face of these freaks that just, like, you know, whose natures it seems, whose biological makeup is just, like, off the charts crazy? And I guess this would drain down into ordinary people. Also, in the face of Pinker's insights about our limits, how are we to maintain motivation? So I guess that's two questions in one.
- [47:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's practical advice I can give you how real athletes think about it, which is actually quite good. Yes.
- [47:35]
A
Fantastic.
- [47:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. So number one is like, your. Your internal locus of control is incredibly important in competitive athletics. Like, if I'm playing my game of basketball, fuck's LeBron gonna do to me? He's not even in my league. Is me and the ball, all the opponents, my teammates and the net. I do me, and whatever the result is is me doing the best thing I can do. If someone, like, takes you after the game, they're like, man, you're five, eight. You're like, yes, I wish you were taller. You're like, I agree. Okay, that was a productive conversation. Great game. See you next time. What is it even. So it's easy now. It's easy as an athlete to look at freaks and be like, whoa, how the hell am I supposed to match up with that? Well, whatever told you you're supposed to match up with it. Maybe you'll never be that good. Maybe that freak will get hurt and you'll be a shining star and they'll have been that one guy who could have been, but then he hurt his ankle. Maybe that freak will do the freak thing and you, in your own right, will maximize your abilities to such an extent that you'll look back on your basketball career and be like, I never had the gifts of a Michael Jordan, but ask anybody about who I was to play with or against.
- [48:47]
A
Yeah.
- [48:47]
B
And it's a lot of guys scratching their heads like, dude, Jim was psychotic, bro.
- [48:51]
A
Dennis Rodman, hustler.
- [48:52]
B
Dennis Rodman doesn't even begin to describe. He tried way harder than everyone, and it was a pain in the ass. And so if as an athlete, the best thing to say is, like, everyone else's genetics have absolutely nothing to do with what you're going to do about being the best at your sport.
- [49:07]
A
Right. And you would say that's a kind of mentality to have as a, as a non elite athlete. Just somebody who goes to the gym every day.
- [49:13]
B
First of all, about fitness.
- [49:14]
A
Yes.
- [49:15]
B
You can't have other people's results. It is impossible. We used to have. I used to train people in New York City and people would come in and be like, I want to look like JLo. It's a nice thought. If I look like Jane, I'm kidding. I'm not going to do that joke.
- [49:28]
A
I mean, you do a little.
- [49:29]
B
I have done. I have a little flavor.
- [49:31]
A
Like, when you sat down, I was like, is this JLo? Like, is he.
- [49:35]
B
Ms. Lopez, I didn't know we could book you for the free Press.
- [49:38]
A
Right.
- [49:40]
B
And so basically they were like, I'm gonna look like this. And the reality, which we try to say in polite terms at first and then more straightforward terms later, you're not gonna look like anyone. You're gonna look like a better version of you. And how much you're gonna look like that version, we actually don't know until we try. And that's true for fitness and that's true for all of life. And look, this is all, I think in 10 years, 15 years, we'll have genetic engineering society wide. And then you can get into Getting whatever kind of limb lengths you want, and you can finally be your own dream basketball player.
- [50:10]
A
So I want to ask you about that. Right, And I want to ask you about that in the context of what you just said, genetic engineering and also performance enhancing drugs, because 1.
- [50:19]
B
Which I know nothing about, by the way.
- [50:21]
A
Yeah, which you know nothing about. But Pinker is of the view that there are these limits and we have to work within them. And you've just articulated that quite well with respect to elite athletes and even ordinary people. You're not going to be LeBron, but that doesn't mean maybe, but don't count. Probably not.
- [50:34]
B
Don't count on it.
- [50:35]
A
Statistically unlikely. But you can be the best you. And you can, you can still be Dennis Rodman, you can still get big contracts and you still. Or what? Or you can still be attractive to the opposite sex, even if you don't look like Brad Pitt and fight Dennis Rodman was. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Maybe a little too much. So I want to ask you about that because on the one hand that's a sentiment which says there are these limits and there's no such thing as blank slate ism. You have to reconcile yourself to these things. But it seems to me that modern science, and I mean hyper modern science, pharmacology, the science of genetic engineering and biological engineering, are pushing back against Pinker in a certain way and saying, or at least revealing to us, it's very frustrating to have a nature that's fixed and permanent. Despite Pinker's claim and proof that we are not blank slates. I want it so modern science is now giving it to us. As you just said, well, here's your designer baby. Here is the drug you can take to be skinny. Here's the one you can take to be strong. Essentially innovating us back into a blank slate mentality and making possible our deepest hopes and longings to be blank slates by saying, take this pill, have this surgery, let us design your baby this way. And so it seems to me that on the horizon, given what you've just said, there is a return of the blank slate of the kind of which we can hardly even fathom.
- [51:59]
B
Let's say we assume there's a blank slate. You literally just like a piece of paper with nothing drawn on it. And then we can draw whatever genetic engineering is not that genetic engineering, and it never will be. And here's why. Genetic engineering. Well, so says you.
- [52:14]
A
Yeah, yeah, good luck with science and.
- [52:16]
B
Telling it what it won't do. So basically, the reality of genetic engineering is that the human body, let's say, is a painting of a human body, but to micron detail by an unbelievable artist. And the only. And this painting, by the way, has to keep being excellent, just like your body has to keep being alive and doing all the normal stuff that you want it to do. So this is a painting that's sitting in a museum exhibit and, you know, 8am to 8pm at the Guggenheim or whatever, that painting's behind a wall, you know, Plexiglas and all that stuff. And people have to look at it, and everyone ever has to look at it. Be there's no mistakes in it or anything. That's gorgeous, right? It's still functional. Genetic engineering has to learn that painting so well that it has to be able to. With a one pass, whatever needle you get or what pill you take has to take that painting and turn the woman in it purple. But a deep. A deep purple. My. My bad. Oops. Accidental song reference. It has to turn her into a deep purple that looks exactly like her skin tone reflected into purple instead of just like a kid with a marker. And so that is not the blank slate genetic engineering assumes. Immense complexity has to fully process that immense complexity and go, okay, now all this complexity taken for granted. What if we took this and moved it here? Would that work? If they can solve that problem, and they are, that is a testament to the reality of there absolutely is no blank slate. There's a very complex thing that if you want to improve, you have to know it it front to back. Now, once you know it front to back, you can do a lot of stuff with it and eventually trend toward that painting can be almost anything you like. But it has to rest on the understanding that that painting still has to be a painting. If we say, look, we can change your body to make you six foot one. How tall are you?
- [54:12]
A
About six foot one. Yeah.
- [54:13]
B
Well, it's not very easy. You're welcome. We did it. The science work. Six foot four. We change it and make six foot four. But we give you a little dropper of something and you just like melt into an ooze and die. That would be the equivalent of like blank slate assumption. Like, oh, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. We can just build structure from nothing. False. We have to understand exactly how your DNA works and exactly how our molecule we give you is going to interact with kind of every part of you to make sure nothing bad goes wrong. That is genetic engineering. It very much rests on the idea of human nature, of very realistic biology with very hard limits on how much you. You can push it. If you know it well, you can change it, but you have to know it well.
- [54:50]
A
But that, I would say that's just the beginning. I mean, that's true today, but I mean, that's why I said a moment ago, I don't envy you for predicting what science can and may do, you know, with innovations like artificial intelligence and these sorts of things. I think some of these guys really do think that the sky is the limit with respect to how the sky is definitely the limit, you know, and that means that I think, you know, it's not inconceivable. We can already, in a way, do this with animals. To think that the malleability of what was once a permanent nature is on the horizon in sort of unthinkable ways.
- [55:22]
B
It really is. I agree with that fully. It's a process that's incredibly complicated, that has limitations. The limitations are falling. The complexity is becoming more tractable, and thus the solution set that comes out of that of things you can actually change about your body without turning into goop is exponentially rising in the mid-2030s is going to be, I think, kind of psychotic.
- [55:41]
A
What is the worst? I'm just curious about this. You know, you are a guy who has to deal with a lot of fitness trends coming on your doorstep. And you. And I love your videos where you're like, what is. I mean, unbelievable? What is the worst fitness trend right now or of which you're aware of all time, where it's like, people doing crazy. You know, I'm even going back to, like, people strapping on those things and like, that jiggles them, you know, like, what is the worst fitness trend, you know, right now anyway?
- [56:05]
B
Man, I don't know if I can say worst, but a trend that always baffles me. This, this, like, this, this joke meme on the Internet, yeah. Called another day of white women doing anything other than working out hard. And it's always Caucasian women, usually in the greater Los Angeles area, that have bought into a gym that's just some wacky new thing. Like, there was a gym, no offense. This is dope vibe in which you have like. Like heavy drumsticks and you have drums, that person up front drums, and you drum with them and they're like, it's fitness. It's for your arms. You sweat and you're like, yeah. The amount of time you spent was an hour. The amount of fun you had was arguably a lot. The amount of fitness. You got through, your body was teeny tiny, and you could have just done way more. And so I think a lot of what gets you in the best shape is, like, sets of 10 to 20 repetitions close to failure in squats, deadlifts, bench presses, upright rows, machine rows, things like that that people look at as some combination of boring and difficult, but that per unit time gets you in way better shape than everything else.
- [57:07]
A
Yeah.
- [57:08]
B
Just socks and hurts. And you have to go to the gym to do it. There's no glory in it.
- [57:11]
A
Yeah.
- [57:11]
B
And so, like, I know deeply why almost everyone goes to somewhere to work out, and that's for results. And when people delude themselves very charitably, very not their fault, into thinking, yeah, like, this new weird drumstick workout is going to be the thing that gets me in shape, and it's not true. That's kind of sad.
- [57:32]
A
Yeah. So you're saying for the average person, I mean, based on what you just said, compound movements, and for people who don't know, compound movements mean movements that utilize multiple joints.
- [57:41]
B
Correct.
- [57:42]
A
In the same compound movements. I don't know how many sets, three to four sets of 10 to 12 is a good way to start.
- [57:48]
B
Of 10 to 12. 10 to 15. Yeah. Is a great way to start. It's a great way to keep going. It's a great way to finish.
- [57:54]
A
Yeah, it's.
- [57:55]
B
It's just great. And because it introduces a lot of necessity for mechanical tension to be produced by your muscles, and it also has great cardiovascular benefits if you take short rest between sets. And it really increases your muscle mass, and it decreases your fat mass, it upregulates your health, you feel better, and all of a sudden you're like some combination of in better shape in every conceivable way and also way sexier. And that's kind of what you wanted. And the other thing is, one of the reasons I love the Free press is you guys will say shit that most people are, like, not supposed to say that. You'll just print an article about it. And one of the things is, like, the vast majority of people that work out are doing it exclusively to look better naked or in clothes. That's it, man.
- [58:35]
A
Yeah.
- [58:35]
B
And so attesting to that and being like, come here, Betsy, what you doing? Come here. What's the drumstick workout for? She's like, it's like, for core, it's like, for cardi, be like, do you want to look like a thing that everyone, including yourself, wants to have desperate sex with? Guess that's a Fucking as well. Like, oh, I got you. Well, here's this workout about the 30 minutes twice a week and a diet control that'll get you exactly the, exactly the fine bullet point of that. It's going to give you that and nothing else.
- [59:02]
A
Yeah.
- [59:02]
B
And so a lot of people don't even want to admit that they're in the gym to try to look sexier because it's weird, right? It's weird. You're like bone strength or femininity or whatever.
- [59:12]
A
Right, Right.
- [59:12]
B
And it's like, really, all those things are amazing and they all happen from this way of working out as a side effect.
- [59:16]
A
Yeah.
- [59:17]
B
What you really want us do to, to be better looking. Here's how to train for it. That's my claim to fame. Not in evidence, but in theory.
- [59:23]
A
And you have the same approach, if I understand you, some of the videos I've watched of you to diet, namely the same approach we just talked about. Compound movements, 10 to 12 reps, a few sets, sensible working out. You have the same approach to diet. You're not a guy who's like, go all in on the carnivore diet or go all like, cut your carbs completely. It's a more sensible, you know, mix of these things.
- [59:46]
B
3, 3 Super Core Basics for good dieting. One is getting in enough protein because protein fuels your muscles and it's really good for your health in 50 other ways. It regulates your appetite super well. So every meal, having your core fistful size or some kind of lumpo protein, and it is really good. And the next one is calorie control, like your total calories. If they're at your maintenance level, you're not going to gain weight, you're not going to gain fat. Fat. If they're below maintenance level, you're going to lose fat for some time and get leaner. If they're above, you're going to gain weight. So just knowing how to control your food amounts to be like, okay, I'm on a diet. I want to lose fat. Core of protein. And then I want to make sure that my calories are, you know, there's 50 trillion apps you can use now tell you exactly what you're eating. Just making sure that you're losing weight over time and not being like, but I'm eating healthy, you know, so tons of people, especially New Yorkers will go to like Whole Foods for a bunch of their meals and they won't lose weight. They'll be like, but I'm eating like natural nut butter. Like, you just, just ate A can of that, that's like for 50 children in Africa. What are you doing? And so at the end of the day, if you control your protein intake, your calories and most of the foods you eat should be healthy foods. What does healthy mean? Pause. You know what it means. Stop asking. Yeah. A donut. Is that healthy? No. You knew that already. Pizza? No. Burgers? No. Lots of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats. That's what you should be eating.
- [61:08]
A
Yeah. Do you have tips for young men or older men as they age, how to sort of sustain a good workout regimen while not destroying themselves?
- [61:19]
B
So that's, I mean, not destroying themselves is a great way to say that if you think lifting a certain weight that's less than your, let's say it's more than your 5 rep max and you got to really warm up to do it it. And the last time you tried it, you hurt your pec. You gotta ask yourself, if I was 22, would I try this? Yes, of course. YOLO. If I'm 42, should I try this? Well, what do I want my tomorrow and the eight weeks after that to be? Like, do I want it to be fun with family and friends and I'm in great shape or do I want it to be like, yeah, this. You want to sign my cast? Yeah. And so understanding, understanding that like risk to benefit ratios and knowing that if you train more for like sets of 10 or 15 or even 15 to 20 reps, push yourself very close to failure. Getting a good cardio workout and muscle workout, not doing high risk stuff, not skipping the warmup. If you start a workout plan, don't just cold Turkey, go to 50 sets, right? Start with two or three sets per exercise and slowly work up over time. Just sensible. You should, you should know better. And I'll put it to you this way. Do like an adult would. Don't do like, look. Oh, this workout, this teenager at my gym suggested, it's called like, you know, mega death 5000. Supposed to nuke my quads. Start half of that and then slowly go up. Do adult things.
- [62:35]
A
Gotcha, gotcha. Thank you for that. Let's do a lightning round real quick. What is your least favorite good exercise? And by that I mean the one that's really good for you, but boy, you hate doing it.
- [62:50]
B
Bicep curls. Yeah, it just hurt, man. Like, there's no glory. You're never going to be strong enough to impress anybody. And, and the arms, like, like a lot of like metabolites, you know, the Burn and it just. It's awful, bro.
- [63:03]
A
Two supplements. If you could only take two or maybe no supplement. I don't know where you stand, but are there two that you would say this? These are.
- [63:10]
B
Just keep it basic, you know, multivitamin and. And creatine.
- [63:15]
A
Okay.
- [63:16]
B
Fish oil is a third.
- [63:17]
A
Yeah, maybe. Okay, we'll let fish oil in there. What about the two things people should do for recovery if you could. If you had to keep it to two, Like, I suspect sleep has got to be one.
- [63:25]
B
So. So sleep is out of contention for a controversy.
- [63:30]
A
Yeah.
- [63:31]
B
You have to have sleep. And this is. I'm glad you bring this up. A lot of people really, really, really find sleep to be negotiable thing in their lives. And it's so negotiable that they don't joke about it. They'll, you know, they'll be in the gym and like, how you doing, man? Looking big. Like, yeah, man, haven't been sleeping much, but I'm in here, baby. Like, oh, okay. You're going to cancel out your being in here by not sleeping enough, my man.
- [63:54]
A
Yeah.
- [63:55]
B
So sleep is enormous. And sleep will make you lose fat and build muscle at the same time. Magnitudes better than if you don't get enough sleep. I actually just recorded a video, will be out on our YouTube in a while about how much muscle it costs you to not sleep. Well, it's sobering. Very sobering. Sleep is huge. And the other one is what I would say is total amount of stress in your life. If you want to be in your best health and your best shape, you have to realize that you can't actually do all the work that is available. Like, I'm a workaholic. My wife and I are insane people. So my best place in the world is my office doing this. And if I do too much of that, it really hinders my recovery for everything else. And so understanding that you have to, if you want to be really, really, really in your best shape ever, maybe working 80% of what you usually do for a few months and resting a little more is going to be huge. Professional athletes do almost nothing other than train and do all. And then the rest of us are like, I'm gonna look like LeBron. He's got abs. And like, he doesn't do anything else other than workout whole life. His whole life.
- [64:55]
A
What's the best YouTube fitness channel that's not yours?
- [64:58]
B
I have another YouTube fitness channel. So it's that.
- [65:00]
A
Oh, come on.
- [65:02]
B
I don't think you understand. It's just me yeah, yeah. The best YouTube. Oh, my God. Like, with. There's so many good ones. I would just say Jeff Nippard has an excellent channel, and he's a bit more accessible to regular folks and Canadian, so he's very polite.
- [65:16]
A
And. Last one, Mirrors in gyms. Yay or nay?
- [65:21]
B
Yay. The hell are you there for? Other than the look at yourself. And if you're into ogling other people, you can catch them out of the corner eye from the mirror. And it's not as awkward because you were just looking in the mirror, not at her.
- [65:31]
A
Yeah, very good. Mike is fertile. Thank you for coming on Old School.
- [65:36]
B
Thank you for having me. Huge honor.