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Muscle Expert: Everyone Takes Ozempic But Nobody Knows What It Does to Your Muscles | Dr. Mike Israetel
01:29:54
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Many women can become ripped and jacked and curvaceous and stunning. That's the number one reason I wrote the book. One of the biggest misconceptions is that you're going to end up looking like your yoga or Pilates instructor. That is a person who is a fitness professional. Yoga and Pilates are not designed to get you a better physique. Here's another misconception.
- [00:18]
Louise Nicola
Looking at how people train, is there anything that's the biggest mistake that people are doing?
- [00:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, yeah. This is a very, very big female specific problem. When people do not engage in any kind of resistance training, they're missing a can train effectively two sessions a week. It only took you literally sets. You've basically checkboxed every single major muscle group of the body, which is going to be 20 minutes of your time as a busy professional.
- [00:44]
Louise Nicola
What do you think the next blockbuster drug is?
- [00:47]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Wow. Jeez.
- [00:49]
Louise Nicola
You've got something really interesting that I want to talk to you about. And you've been experimenting on yourself slightly. So what did you get done?
- [00:55]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, many years of lifting weights, stuffing myself so that I can get bigger. Many years after that of anabolic steroids and various other drugs. And then recently, cosmic cosmetic surgery.
- [01:05]
Louise Nicola
Let's talk about that.
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Dr. Mike Israetel
Not on my face. All of the cool cures that you've seen, it's everything to do with AI. I think by 2040, nobody's going to have any kind of disease that we can identify today. Hundreds of millions, billions of women will be age reversed back to looking roughly 22 for forever. That's going to heal a lot of hurt souls. And there's a dark reality to this.
- [01:25]
Louise Nicola
I'm Louise Nicola and this is the Neuro Experience. Mike, there's so many ways that we can go with this podcast, but why don't we first start with you've spent most of your life understanding muscle physiology, understanding and looking at how people train. Is there anything that stands out to you as the biggest mistake that people are doing every day?
- [01:51]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Is not training a mistake?
- [01:53]
Louise Nicola
Yes.
- [01:55]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean that probably have to be that, right? Training with weights in a way that makes you repeatedly tired and then healed and then tired again and then healed and then tired again is incredible for so many things. It's awesome for health, for longevity, for quality of life. It's amazing for aesthetics. And it increased muscle mass actually reduces overall systemic inflammation, it turns out, and a bunch of bunch and bunch and bunch of other stuff. And so when people do not engage in any kind of resistance training, they're missing a lot and the minimum bar for what counts as really effective resistance training is incredibly low. You can train effectively for two sessions a week, each one being 20 minutes. And as long as you go pretty hard, you can get tons and tons of benefits. And I think a lot of people don't train with weights because it's painful, which it is. But a lot of other folks don't train with weights because they say they just don't have enough time. And that's probably just a matter of priorities. But it's also a matter of just not knowing how little can make a really big difference. Because people think, oh, training with weights, that's like, I have friends that do that. It's like an hour and a half, five days a week. That ain't me. And they just write it off.
- [03:10]
Louise Nicola
It's interesting because I also think, I think we have a, a problem. You know, I always say, you know, we, we have a huge literacy problem here in America at least. But I also think we have a, a problem when it comes to actually knowing what to do at the gym. So you mentioned, like, a lot of people have to train a lot more than what we actually have to do. You've stated just now that 20 minutes times two can effectively build muscle. Oh, yeah, I had no idea. Which actually brings me to my next point, actually. Let's just start from the start. For someone listening right now, who wants to build muscle and stay lean, where do they start?
- [03:47]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I would just start talking to AI about it. Just go to ChatGPT or any of the other models and you ask that literal, exact question, where do I start with lifting weights? I'm really confused. And it helps if you give the model a lot of context. So you say, here's how old I am, here's my experience, here's what I want to do, but here are my constraints. I have a bum knee, my left knee. I have the following medical conditions, and I can only train XYZ time, XYZ days a week. It is going to start to give you very good advice shortly thereafter. And it's not just one time. You don't just get one response back, oh, it's all my questions answered. You interact with it, go back and forth, ask it to clarify things, say, well, I can't do what you told me because there's actually too much time. Can you reduce the amount of time that I would spend in the gym and still be effective? And so that's a really swell idea because you have insane intelligence in your pocket. Might as well ask it stuff it knows a lot of stuff. But what you're going to be eventually filtered into, in many cases with AI, and it might not get to this exact kind of program that I'm going to describe right now, but the kind of program that probably is one of the most effective ones in a super short amount of time is a program in which you come into the gym and you do basically like six exercises, as a good starting example. And each one of these exercises is paired to another exercise. So it's three pairs that you're doing. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So 1 and 2 are both exercises. And the rule is between all the pairs of odds and evens you have to train Multiple muscles with the same exercise. Shouldn't just be one in most cases. So instead of doing bicep curls, you want to do, like, underhand lat pull downs, which hit your biceps, your rear delts, and your entire back, which is great. And the other rule is that it's paired exercise should hit other muscles that basically don't overlap with the initial muscles. So, for example, if exercise number one is underhand pull downs, then I'm hitting biceps, I'm hitting rear delts, I'm hitting my back. Exercise number two can be a close grip incline bench press, which hits my triceps, hits my front shoulders, not the back, so that's good, and hits my chest. And exercises one and two. So they're underhand pull downs and incline close grip bench. They're paired together. And that's not just on paper. That means as soon as you get done doing about 15 to 20 repetitions, the last few of which are very difficult to complete with good techniques. In the first exercise in underhand pull downs, you don't really do much resting. You just walk right over to the incline bench and start going. You do a set of 15 to 20 reps in the incline bench. You rack it. At this point, you're pretty out of breath, and you don't take a break. You just walk right over to the unhand pull down, you hit it again. And so when you just come into the gym for the first time, literally just do one of those sets each a set for the underhand pull downs, no rest set for incline close grip. You just trained almost all of the muscles in your upper body, just two sets. You didn't spend a lot of time resting either, which is great for cardiovascular stuff. And it condenses the amount of time you're at the gym. Then you move on to another group of paired exercises. This is a grouping that should probably train different muscles altogether and also doesn't have any interference. So a good example of this is something like pairing a squat with an upright row. If you do squats 15 to 20 reps and then immediately go into upright rows, barbells, dumbbells, cable, doesn't matter, no overlap really. In the muscles used, you do one and then you do the other. And then by pairing muscles like that, you find two more exercises that day, that pair to take care of the rest of your muscles. At this point, a good idea would be stiff legged deadlifts and then an abdominal crunch machine. And so you do one, then you do the other. With that program I just made up in my head right now, you've basically checkboxed every single major muscle group of the body and it only took you literally six total sets, which is going to be like 10 minutes or something like that. It's just one set of each the next time now, so you're going to leave the gym and you're going to be like, oh man. And you're going to be tired and the next day you're going to be sore. And the next day probably even more sore. A few days later when you heal, you come back and you do that same workout again. But you'll notice the weights don't feel as heavy. You just write down your weights. We have an RP hypertrophy app. You can keep track of all that. It's really cool. And you'll notice that second session is substantially easier and you go, okay, okay, okay. Finish the second session just like the first, no problem. The next time you come back, it's going to be sooner because you're going to heal faster. Might not be five days later, it might be like three. And then you're thinking, you know what, I need to do more because my body's getting really used to this workout. So you do two things, maybe three Thing one is you either add a repetition to each set or you add like two and a half pounds on the bar in the machine. One or the other doesn't have to be both. And what you can also do is if you're recovering super easy and you're not getting ultrasound anymore, go to two sets of everything instead of one. You repeat that pattern over the course of several months, at the end of which you're doing up to five sets of every single pairing, right? That's 10 sets, that's 30 sets total. And you're lifting substantially heavier weights. If you get up to about 20 reps per set, don't add any more reps, Just add weight. And what you're looking for is every time that you make the decisional calculus of should I add more reps or more weight? The real question is, in those sets in which you're trying to hit those reps, is the weight really slowing down and feeling super heavy at the end? If it is, don't add anything. If at the end of whatever reps you did last time, let's say you did 16 reps on squats on day one, same weight. You do 16 reps again, but this time you finish rep 16, you're like, I don't know, I could have done a few more. No big deal. Then you add either a replacement or you add a little bit of weight. Through that process of adding sets, reps, and weight, you basically come up to higher workloads. That challenges your body more. You can do more because now you're in shape to do more, because you're going to recover from more. And then you start filling out the entirety of that 20 minutes, maybe even 30 minutes, if you're really psychotic. And then you are now training in a consistent way that hits every single muscle of your body. It's incredibly efficient because you're never really doing a whole lot of isolation work. Like, you know, there's not really any exercise in there that just trains one muscle. Usually it's two, three, or even more. And then you are getting amazing muscle gains, getting in incredible shape. And then after a few months, you're going to get real tired. So what you're going to do is take a week of just doing nothing. I usually buy a few packs of cigarettes and just smoke those because I got to do something. That's a joke.
- [11:00]
Louise Nicola
I hope so.
- [11:01]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. I don't ever smoke one cigarette at a time. I smoke an entire pack. Not the carton harmonica style. You ever see anyone do that? You just light the whole thing.
- [11:09]
Louise Nicola
And I've never seen.
- [11:10]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Great for brain health. Lots of nicotine. All the nicotine. Exactly. So for that week, don't worry about anything. Don't go to the gym. You can, if you want, just vibe. But make sure your body heals. When you come back, you can repeat that process, but start with two or three sets of everything because you're pretty well trained at that. And if you really, really like, man, I love this. I can train maybe not 20 minutes. I can train for 40 minutes, and maybe I can train for three or four days a week. God bless you. Same pattern. Go to three days a week and go up to six sets of everything. At the end of the next two months, take another week off and repeat.
- [11:48]
Louise Nicola
Six sets seems substantial.
- [11:51]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Substantial. And you can't just start there, because you will nuke yourself into orbit. If you start with six sets, then you're gonna, like, not be able to use your legs much for a week and a half. And that's no fun for anyone and is also counterproductive because the amount of tissue healing your body can do is predefined state. And if you do a lot of training, it stimulates growth past a certain point. The kind of stuff that gets you psychotically sore. You're just making so much damage that it actually has to heal you before it can make you better. And that dips down in and takes away from that healing ability. So it's kind of like the difference between cleaning your room with a mop versus ripping up the floorboards. One of those is costing you a lot of money because you got to fix that. The other one just cleans up the mess, and it makes your room better. That's why a moderate amount of training is a real good idea. Now, moderate is a personal thing. When you come in completely untrained, moderate, to you, is one set. Even then it'll screw you up a little bit. But we can't do half a set. Really. It doesn't make much sense. But over time, you're going to need more training, and you're going to be able to recover from more training. And you were asking earlier about misconceptions. Maybe one of the biggest misconceptions is that there is this thing I do called a workout. And it's kind of the same for everyone. And I show up and, like, if I want to be in shape, I do what the workout people do. They're big and whatever. They have muscles. Their heads are weirdly shaped like mine. Maybe I'm kidding, maybe I'm not. Or they look like you. They look phenomenal. And, like, I want to look like you. You work out, I'll just do your workout. Not a good idea. That's kind of the equivalent of figuring out who the best people in math are. Terence Tao or something. And going, like, looking on their. Like, stuff they're doing on their board. Yeah, I'll just do your equations. Like, you're not gonna make any sense of that, man. Start with one plus one, which is three, by the way. The two things have been refuted, and you go well on your way. And as you become used to your workout, here's another misconception people will tell you, oh man, after a while, you just get used to it. True, for a certain given workout, but the purpose of working out is to challenge yourself because your body really only adapts to challenge. Evolution occurred, as you well know, in a very food constrained environment, resource constrained environment. Unless you give it like a real good reason to make adaptations, it's like, nah, I'm good. So if you get the same workout all the time, you don't ever make it any harder. It'll kind of be like it'll make you pretty good at stuff, but then it'll stop. And so there's no such thing as a workout. There is a workout for you. And if you're a beginner, very, very tiny. And then you go up and up and up and relax, up, up, up, relax. Up, up, up, relax. And eventually you're a workout person. And you're doing a workout that if your mother in law comes and trains with you, you'd be like, mom, you're gonna be going to the hospital if you try this. That's my little quick summary of how that all works.
- [14:36]
Louise Nicola
One of the best ways to improve brain energy metabolism is to make sure that you have adequate ketones circulating in your body. This is why I ingest ketone iq. I'm obsessed with ketones. They're one of the brain's most efficient energy sources, especially as we age and glucose handling changes. I use it for deep work or for long days when I want to focus without caffeine or crashes. But I also use it just in my day to day to make sure that I am neurologically adequately fueled. If you haven't tried ketones, you must. These ones taste great and you can get 30% off your subscription@ketone.com neuroplus get a free gift with your second shipment. Oh, I love that. You took so many things into consideration. You took periodization, you took time management, which I want to touch on, you know, very, very simply because I would
- [15:34]
Dr. Mike Israetel
touch on it, but I don't have time.
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Louise Nicola
Yeah, exactly. I think. No, I think that we've got a time management issue as well. When we go into the gym. I live in New York, so I see a lot of Wall street guys, quote, unquote.
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Dr. Mike Israetel
I see a lot of Wal guys too. Different context. I'm kidding.
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Louise Nicola
Well, they go into the gym, they've got next to Nothing time, maybe 30 minutes to work out, and they're doing the leg extensions. Or the worst is they're doing the dumbbell.
- [15:53]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Absolutely.
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Louise Nicola
Throw something out.
- [15:55]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Absolutely. Hopefully they'll catch it in a compound way. That helps them train for real.
- [15:59]
Louise Nicola
That would be more effective. Right. It's a big deal when I speak to women, especially in that, you know, 45 year age range and above and that's when they're starting to struggle. They've got kids, they've got work, they've got husband, spouse, they've got to look after so much and then they're in the gym doing these single leg movements rather than the compound movements. By the way, I think we share the most. My favorite exercise is a deadlift.
- [16:24]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't know if that's it's up there for sure.
- [16:26]
Louise Nicola
I think it just involves so many different muscle groups.
- [16:28]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yes.
- [16:29]
Louise Nicola
Especially for women, but also men.
- [16:30]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It prevents back pain and all this other crazy stuff.
- [16:33]
Louise Nicola
We'll touch on time management. But I think at the starting point here is quite what precedes that is probably psychological. Right?
- [16:42]
Dr. Mike Israetel
How so?
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Louise Nicola
The psychological sense of actually knowing it's going to be hard, I need to be doing it. And some of the healthiest people I know actually have boring diets and boring workout plans. It's just consistency. Consistency in sleep, consistency in showing up. So I think, I think all of this is psychological at the start.
- [17:04]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh yeah, it is super psychological. And there are many challenges, many impediments, but also many empowerments. And I think one of the biggest empowerments I'm familiar with is to tell folks listening, hopefully some folks listening, I don't know, when they see my face on the preview, they're just going to click off. You don't have to conquer the world in your first day or week or year. And I think people really get into their heads about that. They look at their yoga instructor, she's gorgeous, she's got all these muscles, she trains like an animal eight days a week. And you're like, well, that's what I gotta do. And that's not true. And so when people are like, oh man, like taking the plunge, the commitment, that's tough. But commitment to what? If someone was like, hey, do you want to sign up for the Peace Corps? You're like, I don't know. Like, well, you can sign right now. It's a five year contract. We send you straight to Southeast Asia, the Malaya ridden parts, you're going to be living in a hut. Good luck. What do you say? You're like, that's a big commitment. They could also say, we want a commitment of you. Just to read this pamphlet just for five minutes to see if is anything interesting. All right, five minutes. No problem. Completely different level. And so I think a lot of people think the commitment that it's going to take for them, gym wise and diet wise, is to become a robot fitness person that trains every hour that they're awake, eats only powdered weirdness and whole foods stuff, and just doesn't have any more joy in their lives. And it turns out that you're training two days a week and just not being a total scumbag about your diet can be an unbelievable start and can because of something super special about the human body. When you're not yet super well trained and you haven't dieted a ton in a way that is effectual, you're super ready to make these amazing changes as you get more advanced. The changes are tougher as you reach these various ceilings of the body's physiology. So because you're on the outside looking into fitness is precisely the reason that you don't need much fitness to get way fitter. And if after a few weeks or a few months, you're doing your two workouts a week and you're like just prioritizing protein and vegetables every time you eat almost anywhere, that's a special occasion, whatever, fine. But like protein and vegetables, Protein and vegetables. If you do that, after a few months, you'll probably have lost 5 or 10 pounds of fat, you'll probably have gained 5 pounds of muscle. You're feeling different, you're vibing. And now that problem that we're talking about of commitment, it's not a theoretical problem anymore. Things seem really scary when you're outside looking in. But once you've been training for a few weeks, people are like, oh my God, training. How is that? You're like, I don't know, you just show up, you do your stuff. It's tough, but it's challenging. It's kind of fun. And I just like, know what I'm doing. It's a vibe. And then I leave. Because a lot of people also, this is true for females, they're like a little bit afraid of the gym because some of the Wall street guys like to shoot their shot or they just grunt really loudly. And that's kind of weird.
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Louise Nicola
That is my biggest pet hate. And slamming the weights down.
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Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, you said you like deadlifting. Grunting and slamming are essential to that. But yeah, it's weird vibe, right? It's not for everyone. One thing you'll realize if you go and you lift for a few weeks, even a few sessions, the gym is a profoundly respectful place of your own thing. There's just, just almost nobody cares what you do and it's just you and your workout and it looks like they're gonna judge you. They don't judge you, they're judging themselves. They're too busy being selfish pieces of shit like me to even look in your direction. When I'm in the gym and you walk in as a first timer, you may be thinking, oh my God, oh my God, look at that crazy gorilla. He probably thinks I don't belong here. I'm not thinking about you at all. And if you did prompt me, if you were like, hey, I don't want to step on your space, is it okay if I train here? I'd be like, whoa, of course. What are you talking about? We paid the same money for the same membership and you can work in with me if you'd like. So everyone who turns out in the gym, almost everyone, is super welcoming and they just couldn't care less. But people don't think that because outside looking in it can be kind of really scary.
- [21:13]
Louise Nicola
I'm recording this after traveling from the US to Australia. Long flight, time zone change, disrupted sleep. And this is exactly why I have been taking kion aminos. I know a lot of you probably think it's really hard to meet your protein requirements.
- [21:30]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I do.
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Louise Nicola
Essential aminos are the building blocks your body uses to maintain muscle and help it recover. Especially when you're undereating or you're jet lagged or you're sitting for hours on a plane. Being able to meet your protein requirements can be helped with essential aminos. I take these every day. Better energy, less soreness, staying lean and strong. Like I'm so obsessed with these. I have the watermelon flavor, the easy to digest. The kion aminos are sugar free and I mix it straight into my water. Even on rest days or days where I skip a meal, they help me stay on track. So if you're traveling, training or it's just hard to meet your protein requirements, you should add this in. Go to getkeown.com neuro to get 20% off I highly suggest the watermelon flavor. Getkeon.com neuro and you mentioned that about women maybe being intimidated. But I also think equally women have the wrong idea. Some women that they're going to get big and bulky just from taking either creatine or by lifting weights, which is insanity.
- [22:33]
Dr. Mike Israetel
We'd say it's man insanity is a real good way to describe it. And for every time you say that's insanity, there's some woman who's going to be like, no, you don't understand. Like, I just get huge. Okay, Cindy, stay calm. You're working against female physiology, female genetics, which is already not the right card to draw to gain as much muscle as possible. You're working against having, you know, no history of having lifted before, so you don't even base this on anything. But also the really big one is diet. You know, I think if you, like, take protein and creatine and you lift a lot, but then you eat like the world's coming to an end, you'll gain weight, most of it will be fat. But it's just highly unusual to see females that gain muscle so radically that it throws off their own aesthetic. And if they train for, in resistance training, consistently, they eat plenty of protein that they lower their calories to below maintenance, they actually end up losing weight. And so you could be 140 pounds when you start lifting. Six months later, you could be 130 pounds, but with 5 to 10 pounds more muscle, which means you look more like prime Jennifer Garner than you used to, which is like the ideal female physique.
- [23:43]
Louise Nicola
Oh, her arms are beautiful.
- [23:44]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's ridiculous, right? How is that a real person? I don't think you can accuse her of being, like, jacked. She's not like a freak. You wouldn't see her at a really dress up tuxedo ball and be like, my God, Harry, look at her, she's gross. You'd be like, whoa, what do you do for your arms? And the reality is just like calorie control, resistance training and protein. That's it. Or a colleague of ours, Gabrielle Lyon, like you, she weighs like 90 pounds or something. Just a tiny person. But she's ripped. She's ripped, but she's £90. You would never think she's huge. You could see a picture of her and be like, she's huge. And you see her in life, you're like, oh, my God.
- [24:16]
Louise Nicola
No, I always, I joke around and I say, I can bench press you.
- [24:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
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Louise Nicola
Like literally.
- [24:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Literally.
- [24:20]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [24:21]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [24:21]
Louise Nicola
Well, that brings me to my next argument that I want you to settle for me. Now. There's, there's this growing, I guess, debate on social media right now. And we've got this, I think it was around, I want to say, December last year, a new study came out. I think it was Brad Schoenfeld, Stu Phillips, where they actually stated that stimulus is all that matters. Meaning that if you want to induce muscle hypertrophy, you need to be just lifting heavy to failure. Meaning that We've all thought that you need to be doing six reps high, high, high weights, right? For four to six rep, four to six sets. But they're arguing in this new paper that it doesn't matter as long as you get to failure. So you can do three sets of, let's just say, 20 reps, right, or light weights. But you just have to keep going and pushing and pushing and pushing until you go to failure. Like, how do people know what to do? Are we lifting the heavy weights for lower sets, higher sets and lower reps? Like, what are we doing to increase our hypertrophy? What's the best way to do that?
- [25:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's like a similar question to asking what protein sources grow muscle and being like, is it chicken? Is it beef? It's fish, isn't it? No, it's pork, hamburger meat. What about steak? And the answer is, every single one of those is awesome and roughly equally effective as a nutritional source for protein. People are so maybe used to or interested in one zenith of an answer. That's the thing. They sometimes can benefit from backing up and going, okay, there are multiple correct answers here, because there are anywhere between sets of five repetitions and sets of 30 repetitions are roughly equivalent for muscle growth in the medium term, which means months. But they don't even have to be taken to failure. They just have to be taken to a challenge several reps shy of failure. Failure is totally fine. You don't have to go all the way to failure. As long as the weight starts to do a combination of feeling way heavier at the end of the set, like, you're like, who turned up the gravity or moving slower or both, you're good to go. So as long as all of your sets are challenging sets, what you don't want is like, you do a set of 10, 10, just put down the weight. Someone comes up to you, how many more could you have done? Gun to your head? If the answer is more than about three or four, you're not training hard enough. If it's like, I don't know, 50, you're for sure not training hard enough. And I will say, since you know you're a female, ostensibly some of your viewers would be female as well. This is a very, very big female specific problem. Females will often have usually have better technique than males. They're less egotistical. They'll usually do more intelligent programming than males because they're less egotistical.
- [26:58]
Louise Nicola
Wow.
- [26:59]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. But they will, in many cases consistently leave at least five reps in the tank beyond what they should be leaving, which means their results are not nearly as good as they could be. That's a consistent problem that I see in gyms across the world. And a lot of the very fit women do it at least as much as women that are not very fit. Tons of bikini champions that compete in the bikini division. Like, there is an inside joke that my friends and I have. It's mildly cruel, but meant in good fun. You see a bikini champion and you see her doing an exercise and you joke, you go, is that a warmup or a working set? Never can tell. Look legit. There's a lot of girls. You can't tell, are you warming up or are you training? Warmups typically leave 10 to 20 reps in reserve. Working sets typically leave 1 to 3 reps in reserve. 0 to 3 can even go to failure. But so many females do not push close to failure that a lot of times you just can't tell. And so you're like, I've had many females ask me about, like, how do I enhance my outcomes? The answer is often just train harder per set. And we've had many females on the RP strength channel that we've trained. And you just keep saying, one more rep, one more rep, one more rep. And they're like, wait, what? And they can just keep going because one more rep doesn't, you know, it's advice that's self limiting. As soon as you can't do a rep, the leg press just kind of falls on you and you're like, I can't do this. Cool. Good enough. We peel you out of it. All is well. But if you're not willing to push yourself closer to failure, at least to where you're very, very uncomfortable, man, you're gonna be going through the motions. But the results will not be speaking for themselves. So when Stu Phillips and Brad Schoenfeld say all the sets between 5 and 30 reps are roughly so long as you go to failure, the modifier there is twofold modifier one close to failure is good enough. Modifier two, that's hard. And many people don't do that.
- [28:50]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, the hardest part for me to get to failure is muscle group, I would say in my triceps. I don't know why.
- [28:56]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Interesting.
- [28:56]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I just. I don't know. I feel like I gas and I feel like I can't do anymore. But then I feel like that they're not trained. Like, I can still do a lot more. I don't know how to explain that. And readults, I Guess it's just that
- [29:08]
Dr. Mike Israetel
that area of me rear delts are weird. I don't know what's going on back there for me either.
- [29:12]
Louise Nicola
I'm such a Lego.
- [29:13]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, the rear delts thing is a problem too, because at least with tricep stuff, you know what the technique is. It's like there's a very distinct starting point, a very distinct lockout point. With rear delts. If you just bend your arms a little more and use more of your back, you just kind of keep going. So you're like, I don't know where failure is, but a really straightforward solution to the female problem of not knowing where failure is is putting more weight on the bar. There's actually some decent evidence to show that females sometimes respond better in muscle growth training to sets of, like, five to 10 repetitions than they do to sets of 20 to 30 repetitions. And you would think, like, why, that's crazy. It's the same physiology. It is. The psychology is different. If you get to rep number 22 and you could have done 25, you're in so much pain from all that lactic acid that you're like, say me. But if you're doing a set of five to 10, it never really hurts much. You're just. Muscles just kind of stop working. That's the failure you want. A lot of the times I see females training and they're using weights that are just way too light. And so warming up, using a lightweight for a few reps, putting it down and then going heavier is a real swell idea. And that can be done in any exercise. I mean, you give a woman the eights for lateral raises, and she does 10, and she's kind of like, ah, that was tough. Like tens. She's like, I can't lift these. She tries and doesn't work. Try harder. Boom. One great rep. Go again. Another. Another. Another. And at nine reps, she's like, that doesn't work. Boom. Set a nine.
- [30:45]
Louise Nicola
Perfect.
- [30:45]
Dr. Mike Israetel
And then a lot of times the response is, you write it down. The response is, isn't that, like, too heavy? Did you do more than five? Yes. And the answer is no, you're totally fine.
- [30:54]
Louise Nicola
I want to talk to you about today's presenting sponsor, pulsetto. I've been thinking a lot lately about the vagus nerve. It's the longest cranial nerve in the entire body, and it runs down from your brain stem all the way down to your gut. And it controls something that most people never think about. Your ability to shift out of stress and into recovery the problem is that chronic stress keeps you locked in this fight or flight mode. And this is where your cortisol stays elevated. So then your sleep degrades. And over time, that chronic physiological load starts to do real damage to your brain. Pulsetto, which is what I'm holding right here, directly stimulates the vagus nerve. It's the same nerve clinicians use in hospital settings to treat mood disorders. Except you can do this in the comfort of your home in just four minutes. In a 2025 study, participants used Pulsetto twice a day for four weeks. Their cortisol dropped by 47.5%, their stress markers fell by 56%, and their sleep quality improved by 41%. So this is not a supplement and it's not a meditation app. This is a measurable physiological shift. So I keep pulsetto in my routine because I understand the mechanism. And when you understand the mechanism, you use the tool consistently. Your vagus system is trainable. This is one of direct ways to train it. So if you want to pick up this device, go to pulsetto Tech and use code Neuro at checkout for an exclusive discount. Pulsetto Tech, Code Neuro. Everyone's obsessed now. What I see equipment wise with eccentric, right? It wasn't a thing, I would say probably like unless you're in the, in the space. It wasn't a thing like five, ten years ago. But now there's these machines. I'm actually thinking about buying one. It's like this big. I don't know what it does, but it's a pulley machine. Okay. You pull up. But I know it's doing like an eccentric load and I know that it's like through, I don't know, some configuration. It can get heavy and all you need to walk around with is this little pulley machine.
- [33:02]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Okay.
- [33:02]
Louise Nicola
Okay. And I'm thinking of buying one because I'm like, this would be great just for my home. Just like do some deadlifts. Then when I was like a pulley machine. But it just travels with you anyway. And I think it focuses on both concentric and eccentric. And I love that. And people are saying on there, oh, you only really need to work out for 20 minutes. But it feels like a two hour workout.
- [33:19]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean, that's usually total bullshit.
- [33:22]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
The 20 minute workout I recommended earlier does not feel like a two hour workout at all. Any kind of claims that are extraordinary are probably wrong. And the fitness industry is full of BS claims. Are there a few machines that are good pulley machines that have electric motors that Provide eccentric and concentric resistance. Yes, definitely, for sure. And those are great. The only problem I would be concerned with if it's just one pulley and one angle. I don't know how many exercises you can do on that thing. You can do pulling exercises and maybe some curls. It's pretty useless for pushing movements, it's useless for abdominal movements, it's useless for your legs. And so something that you buy and at home is super easy is one of the most unused categories of fitness machine in the entire world. So like, if you buy fitness equipment, you put it in a gym, people use it. Fitness equipment for the home is often just going to turn into a hanger for.
- [34:17]
Louise Nicola
Oh yeah, everyone gets excited for the first month and then it's. That's right, collecting dust.
- [34:21]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Especially if a machine doesn't have a lot of functions and just one function. It's like your favorite song. I want you to listen to that until you're like, okay, new favorite song, same idea. So single pulling machines are fine. I wouldn't get too, too, too excited about them in most cases because what you want is a machine that hits multiple exercises, multiple angles, et cetera. And so far there are home gym machines that you can use, but most of them are at the gym still.
- [34:46]
Louise Nicola
How long have you been in this space for?
- [34:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, it's been about 30 minutes. Nothing. I got nothing with humor with this one. It depends on what you mean. But gee whiz, maybe like 20 years or something.
- [35:01]
Louise Nicola
And you started out here in New York?
- [35:03]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Nope, not even close.
- [35:05]
Louise Nicola
Oh, I thought you started out here as a personal trainer in New York.
- [35:07]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, so I started out, I think I have done personal training in New York for a year and that was my first out of grad school job. But I had worked as a personal trainer all through undergrad and everything and through grad school. So I was training people when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan. And I would say like training people, competing in powerlifting and stuff, I think that's in the space. Right. And so that was when I was like 20 years old in Michigan. That's where I started. But to your point, my first big boy real job job was a personal trainer with my colleague Mr. Nick Shaw, who co founded RP. We were training just a couple blocks away from here, actually, where we're recording today.
- [35:49]
Louise Nicola
The reason I ask that is because I want to know the motivator back then 20 years ago isn't the same, I would say, mission that you're on today. Has anything changed along the way it's very similar.
- [36:03]
Dr. Mike Israetel
The reason that we were trying to help folks back then was because a lot of professionally successful, intelligent people were getting ripped off with fitness scams or just misinformation. They would have all the work ethic and all of the push to do really good things with fitness, but they were at every left and right turn being swindled out of their money by people who would promise them results. But the results never arrived. And so Nick and I saw this happen right in front of us. We did not enjoy it. We started RP precisely for the reason of, like, let's at least do some good things in this industry. There was, of course, other good players in the industry, but not enough. Today we're on the identical mission of trying to make sure that people who are hardworking, who are ready to put in the work, and who value science and reason and logic have a set of fitness recommendations and now fitness tools through our app suite that can help them clear away a bunch of the fluff and just beeline straight for the best results that they can possibly get. Because people have too much other stuff going on in their lives to be spending time doing fitness that is not effective. And it's a little heartbreaking because these folks are like super diligent, awesome people and then they end up doing something that like, wastes their time mostly, and that's no good.
- [37:26]
Louise Nicola
What's the misinformation that we're seeing today on social media?
- [37:31]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It depends on how many people I'm interested in upsetting. I'll give you an interesting example. I think yoga and Pilates are phenomenal ways to improve mental health, to improve flexibility and mobility, and to connect with your community. And amazing. Usually women that do these things, neither yoga nor Pilates are in remotely the category of difficulty, range of motion, repetitions, metabolic demand and muscle muscular stimulus or caloric burn to be the highest rate of return use of your time as a busy professional woman who wants to be fit. Not even close. A lot of women are doing only Pilates or only yoga for their fitness. What they really want is a better physique. Yoga and Pilates are not designed to get you a better physique. The great myth is that you're going to end up looking like your yoga or Pilates instructor. That is a person who is a fitness professional. She trains in the gym four times a week, maybe six times a week. She watches every gram of protein like a hawk. And she has excellent genetics to begin with. And then you look at her, you're Like Pilates. That's what I'm going to get. No, that's not it. And so there are many other ways. This is a joke that's in the fitness industry. It's racially charged. So I'll warn you in advance. The meme is you show a video of women doing wacky new fitness trends that are really fun but that don't work you out super well for results. And the meme is white women doing anything they can to avoid working out hard. And sometimes it even looks pretty hard, but it doesn't do any kind of real organized structured improvement.
- [39:16]
Louise Nicola
Oh, I see it every day, all the time.
- [39:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, right. There was that trend in LA a few years back where people had like drums and they had big, bigger drumsticks than average and they would drum their way to fitness. And it was this whole drum class. No legit, dude, that, that's where we are. We reviewed one trend on the channel in which you get repelled into like a climbing rope and you have a wall and you like so gravity is pointing down, you're rappelled into the wall. So you're here and you can jump off and it's easy, right? And they do these fitness routines literally, like with no gravity. Believe it or not, gravity is the only thing that loads the body. When astronauts go into space, they become weaker and less muscular. You're doing the opposite now. It's easier. Great thing about that is it's fun and it's inclusive and it can get people into fitness that otherwise wouldn't be in, which is amazing. But at some point after jumping around the wall for a while, you're going to want to go jump into a squat rack and jump in with some weights on your back and actually do some real const. And the funny thing is that the people in the world that are in the best possible shape, these are female physique competitors, Bikini Olympia champions, figure Olympia champions. You won't see them using yoga, Pilates and the wall jumping drumstick thing as their number one or number five ways of getting fit. They're in the gym doing squats and deadlifts and bench presses and underhand pull ups. They're eating multiple high protein, high vegetable meals per day. They're getting eight hours of sleep and they're managing their stress. That's how they look like that. And it takes them years to look like that. Yes, that's what needs to be realized by most people. It's kind of. I don't know what the analogy is, but you know, if you Want to be somebody that creates flower arrangements for weddings? Just scrolling on Instagram or looking around your garden at flowers, not going to cut it. You need to have a diligent approach to really learn what's going on. And a lot of people know that is true in every facet of their lives. Like, you talk to a medical technician, like, can I just come in and kind of do your job? No, you need to learn a lot of stuff. But when people go to the gym, they're like, I'll just sign up for a random class. Okay. You might get random results. You probably don't want random results. You want specific results. And for that, it takes an organized, diligent approach of doing stuff, some of which you might like at first, some of which you might not like at first. But the people we are appealing to, especially at rp, are people that know that the best results in life often come from doing things you don't necessarily love doing. Corporate lawyers. Did you love reading case law when you were at Harvard Law School? They're like, no. Who the hell likes reading case law? Well, you did it anyway, right? Because it makes you an amazing lawyer. Well, yeah. Exercise is often the same.
- [41:53]
Louise Nicola
I think I feel the same with the people who go to the gym to walk.
- [41:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yes. Now, okay. I typically put on my female podcaster hat to be all lovey and inclusive. If you're being hateful.
- [42:04]
Louise Nicola
No, you don't have to, because it drives me insane.
- [42:07]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yes. Yes. So public service announcement. There is not a damn thing wrong with going to the gym to walk. But I got you, girl. Ready? There's also not a damn thing right with it.
- [42:20]
Louise Nicola
Yes.
- [42:21]
Dr. Mike Israetel
You could have walked anywhere else. And I think especially the very minimum incline. Very. You're not looking like it's challenging. Walk at the gym is like, whoa.
- [42:33]
Louise Nicola
Inclined of 3% for, like, 20 minutes.
- [42:36]
Dr. Mike Israetel
And they're talking on the phone. It's great. But you could be doing so much more. It's like, I don't know, it's like going to the Louvre in Paris. The greatest museum in the world, darling. And, like, you went to the gift shop and you didn't really see any of the paintings, like, what? But the Van Gogh originals are in there. And so if you go to the gym and you just do incline walking, there's like, there's nothing wrong with going to Louvre just to go to the gift shop. But there's a lot there also, you might like. And in the gym, if you go and lift the heavyweights, you might see that your results look absurdly. Good. If you just incline. Walk on a treadmill. Hey, better than nothing. But probably not your best use of time because you're at the gym anyway, right? That's the really crazy part. You already went there. You might as well do the thing.
- [43:26]
Louise Nicola
That's why I'm struggling right now with this whole. Is it time management or do you just not know what you're doing? Or like, you just don't want.
- [43:33]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's column A, column B, I think there it's a bit of both.
- [43:37]
Louise Nicola
So you've got something really interesting that I want to talk to you about. And you've been experimenting on yourself slightly, slightly for quite some time in different avenues, aesthetics. So I, I, when I started growing on social Media, it was one, one clip went viral, I would say, in 2022. And literally I said I don't want people to go to the gym for their body or to look good. I want people to go to the gym for their brain. Albeit I'm an Alzheimer's disease scientist. I mean, you're a physiologist, so that's why I said that. But it went viral, right? And you're here in the studio and you believe that people should go to the gym for aesthetic purposes.
- [44:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't, I'm not a prescriptivist. I don't want to tell people anything what to do. I want to be a person who presents people with options if they present me with things they want out of their lives. And so I don't ever think anyone should go to the gym. But if you're going to go to the gym, you, you may be inclined to prefer some things happen in the gym as a result of you going to the gym versus some other things. And humans happen to be, most of us, a little bit vain. Maybe not in the unhealthy way. It just kind of giving a little bit of a shit about how you look. I think the ideal world is where nobody cares about how they look. That's just pure magic. We do not live in that world. And it's not really. In some part it's because of social media. In some part it's your grandmother saying, you look fat, you eat less, whatever, all that cultural stuff. But a lot of it is just because we all have the same beauty detectors in our brains, roughly. And when we look at each other, we assess who's hot, who's not, and we do that to ourselves in the mirror. And so the vast majority, I would say more than 90% of the reason anyone goes to the gym at all, and I mean anyone, everyone in the world is there for number one thing, and that is to become better looking either naked or in tight clothing or in all clothing. But you just can't tell with sweatpants. So because people want aesthetics already, they come prepackaged wanting it. Then I say, well, hey, there's ways to train for aesthetics that are a combination of more effective and massively improve your health and longevity and quality of life and brain health and confidence and. Well, for sure. Confidence, yes. Not just the confidence of being able to succeed doing hard things, but also the confidence of someone in the last 10 years whistling you as you step off the bus. You're like, hey. And then it gets creepy. You're like, wait, wait, hold on, I got pepper spray exactly for that. But. But aesthetics is not a thing that I think people should care about. Quite the opposite. My God, look at me. How could I possibly think that? I think that most people already care about aesthetics and empowering them with two things is important. Here's how you do the thing. And here's a little speech, a little talk, a little book upcoming aesthetics revolution book that I have in June or something that's coming out pre order is live now, I think. I'm not sure we'll find out if that works. Being told that when it's not in a toxic way, when it's not in a compare with others and sneer at others when it's not a hate yourself unless you're perfect kind of way. Vanity in the pursuit of aesthetics is totally cool. There's not a damn thing wrong with it.
- [47:01]
Louise Nicola
But what you see as beautiful may be different to what I see as beautiful.
- [47:06]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean, clearly, my God, look what I did to myself.
- [47:09]
Louise Nicola
Well, I don't know what you did to yourself. Why don't you tell us?
- [47:12]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, many years of lifting weights, stuffing myself so that I can get bigger, many years after that of anabolic steroids and various other drugs and then recently cosmetic surgery.
- [47:22]
Louise Nicola
Let's talk about that.
- [47:22]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Not on my face.
- [47:23]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, no, let's talk. Yeah, because you shared a lot. You share videos. Actually, they're quite interesting.
- [47:30]
Dr. Mike Israetel
You could say they're interesting. Not pushing out my relaxed.
- [47:33]
Louise Nicola
Oh, wow, that's just looks like that.
- [47:35]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I actually don't know how people push out their guts. Mine just has a relaxed mode and then a tight mode.
- [47:40]
Louise Nicola
So what did you get done?
- [47:42]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I got my. So I purposefully made myself larger and thus fatter when I was younger and drug free. And I got up to £270 at five foot six. And my love handles were like, yo, what's up? They were like huge.
- [47:57]
Louise Nicola
Why did you do that?
- [47:59]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Because it would make me stronger when I gained weight. And I love being stronger. Okay, that's it. And because I didn't have enough physiological, anatomical understanding to know that fat cells and skin don't go away. They multiply skin cells and fat cells. And then when you lower your calories and lose weight, they shrink, but they don't. Like, it's like you bring people into a party, but they never leave.
- [48:23]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [48:25]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So at some point I was much leaner later. And I noticed I still have love handles no matter what. And sometimes they were really deflated, but they were still there. And it was really upsetting me. And I had known enough anatomy by then physiology to know that the only way to get rid of them was to cut them out. And so liposuction, I did it at home by myself. No, I'm kidding. Wouldn't that be fun?
- [48:44]
Louise Nicola
I was like, what?
- [48:45]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Home surgery, it's tough to see back there, but believe it or not, if you take apart a toaster, you have everything you need.
- [48:51]
Louise Nicola
It's like doing an at home appendectomy.
- [48:53]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Easy. Good God. So I consulted a few surgeons and one of them was like, ah, you're not so crazy. Dr. Douglas Steinbreck, who practices in New York and Chicago and Beverly Hills, darling. Which is, you know, if I'm getting surgery, it has to be the best.
- [49:09]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [49:10]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So he's amazing. And he cut me open and took out a bunch of stuff and sewed me back up, and one of the best decisions I've ever made, it turns out.
- [49:19]
Louise Nicola
And how's the, how's the response from social media and the wider population on that?
- [49:28]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's tough to figure out the wider population because the people who leave comments are absolutely not representative of the humans that watch or even the humans that exist outside of social media. So the people that consume social media content, like looking at a picture, are a different group of people than the people that like the picture. And that is still a different group of people. There's very giant subsets of each other of people who comment. And so people who comment split into roughly three groups. Some are just like saying normal stuff like, whoa, trippy, you got cut in half. Hope it works out. Another group is like, you are a charlatan because you claim to be able to help people using your apps get into shape, but you're doing surgery, you lying asshole. They leave out a certain couple of bits. First of all, I'm public with my surgery, so I'm not lying at all. And second of all, our apps are unbelievable industry leaders, but they can't get rid of your fat cells or skin cells. Nothing can do that unless you rip it out in surgery. And so our view at rp, and my view personally, is that if you want your aesthetics to be as good as possible, the core basic is amazing exercise, amazing physical activity, and amazing nutrition. But if you want to get up there, you might want to or not do some other things. So, for example, let's say you had a female friend, and she's like, I want me a Wall street man. Right? What are they called? Finance Bros. Finance Bros. Oh, my God. And I want to maximize my chances of getting a Wall street man, not just kind of be myself and do my best. Maximize. You wouldn't only be concerned with her fitness routine and her diet and her sleep. You would be like, girl who decides what goes on your body. And she's like, at random, you're like, we have to pick your clothes out now. What the hell does picking clothes that have to do with attractiveness? Well, it makes your body certain shape, certain silhouette, and makes you look a certain way that's more pleasing and average. You'll have to think about makeup, jewelry. If you're really intense on the Kardashian scale, you might have to think about some surgical stuff to your face. Anywhere from a little Botox here and there so mommy looks 25 again instead of 35. Or rejuvenating facial surgery all the way down to reconstructing all the jaw. And everything depends on what you like, because maximum attractiveness to the same or opposite sex is what? Maximum is a hell of a word. It does a lot of lifting for me. I don't want to be maximum anything, but I was looking at my physique, and I was like, I hate my love handles, and I want them gone. And that in no way has any bearing on anything else that I did to my body. It's just an additional thing. It's like having a baker make an awesome cake, and then they're about to put frosting on it, and someone's like, wait, wait, wait. You're putting frosting on it? You're like, well, yeah. They're like, I thought you were a good baker. Can't you make a good cake without frosting? I guess you could, but it's not going to be as good unless you put the frosting on it, because that makes the whole cake. So cosmetic surgery, outfits, makeup, et cetera, they're the frosting on the cake. The basic core is what your body looks like through proper training, through proper diet, through proper stress management.
- [52:40]
Louise Nicola
And the reason why you did this was specifically for aesthetic purposes, but also to feel good for you, to increase your confidence.
- [52:47]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Same thing.
- [52:48]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [52:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
One thing. Just one thing not to increase my confidence. I have no confidence problems. I have the opposite problem where I don't shut the fuck up. So I had confidence problems when I was younger. Those all went somewhere. They're just only so famous. You can be for so long, and people come up to you in the street and shake your hand until you're like, I clearly did something right. But just pure aesthetics. Like, I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like, I used to pinch my love handles and be like, yeah, this isn't like. Is as simple as that. And I'm like, I want that gone. And now it's gone.
- [53:17]
Louise Nicola
The book that you're bringing out on aesthetics, it's gotta go into more than just what we've spoken about.
- [53:22]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So it starts out with a little bit of a history of aesthetics, and it paints this picture that the amount of effort and the resultant change in aesthetics people can make is on an exponential curve.
- [53:36]
Louise Nicola
Oh, can I just cut you off right now and say, like, as a woman who. I don't know if you can tell, like, sometimes I care about the way I look, but let me tell you, my. The amount that I'm spending now is. Is getting. Is getting higher and higher even, like, just on my skincare products, right? My skincare routine. There's like five steps in it, and I don't know why. I don't know who I'm following on Instagram. And it's so funny. My doorman thinks I've got a drop shipping company.
- [54:05]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [54:06]
Louise Nicola
He's like, what are you doing?
- [54:07]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- [54:07]
Louise Nicola
There's so many packages coming. And it's like, okay, well, I need this. I just saw that this girl's using this. I need this on face. I need this. I need that. Like, it's just. It's insane.
- [54:15]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's insane.
- [54:16]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. Getting my hair done now. Maybe it's just the product of getting older. I don't know.
- [54:20]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Getting older is usually antithetical to looking your best.
- [54:24]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [54:26]
Dr. Mike Israetel
The second part of the book is talking about how diet training and lifestyle can make everything better aesthetically. The last part of the book, it talks about the future of aesthetic enhancement, talks about pharmaceuticals people can take today and in the next five to 10 years, it talks about surgical interventions. It talks about skincare and hair care products that are technically pharmaceuticals. You just don't eat them or inject them. You put them on your face. And then it talks about really wacky stuff, age reversal and genetic engineering. And those will end the aesthetic journey for everyone that wants and end at the finish line with a giant gold medal. Which means what? I think that by about 2040 or so, the year 2040, through a combination of age reversal and genetic engineering, everyone, every single human of adult consenting age that can say, I want this, and the corporations give them the thing is going to look pretty close to or almost exactly how they want in an idealized way. And so that's going to heal a lot of hurt souls, because there's a dark reality to this. And I was on a colleague of yours podcast, Dr. Mike, the real Dr. Mike.
- [55:40]
Louise Nicola
Yes.
- [55:41]
Dr. Mike Israetel
And I was talking about how painful it can be if you exist in this world, especially as a single female, and you don't look like what most people think is attractive, and you don't think you look attractive. And it can be an unbelievable amount of. You see that thing that you want? Kevin, the cute boy at the office? Kevin's not going to be interested in you. You're going to watch a bunch of rom coms that end well. And that's never going to be you in 2040. By 2040, it's going to be you because you're going to look exactly how you want. Now, in my case, I'm going to look like some kind of dinosaur, cyborg, tank, airplane mix, weird stuff. But that's just my vibe. But I mean, hundreds of millions, billions of women will be, in my view, age reversed back to looking roughly 22 for forever and adjusting all of their facial features, their hair type, hair quality, skin quality, even body proportions, to look exactly how they think they look their best. And that is the critical thing. It's the crux of the book. It is absolutely not about anybody else how you look. It's about one person, you. And you look in the mirror. Do you like what you see? That's it.
- [56:56]
Louise Nicola
Because if you like what you see, then you don't give a shit about what Kevin thinks.
- [57:01]
Dr. Mike Israetel
If you like what you see, and Kevin's like, nah. And then you find out Kevin prefers a different look, you have a choice. Do you adopt Kevin's preferred look so that you can be with Kevin finally, a fine idea. I guess you may find that after you alter your look and three dates later, Kevin is super boring, wildly overrated, or more likely, you go, you know what? What? Now that I'm hot AF and I'm hot in the way I like, I'm gonna find me a man that likes me for what I am. So let's say you're the girl that has a crush on Kevin. Kevin is 5 foot 9, average male height in the United States. But you've always seen yourself as taller, in principle. And you looked at supermodels and you're like, whoa, my God, she's five' eleven. Whoa, what a vibe. And so you get all the genetic stuff, and you get all the extensions and everything, and all of a sudden, the natural, you quote unquote, it's all genetic. You walk around at 5:11, and you come up to Kevin Gore, just stunning. Drop dead. At 5:11. You're like, Kevin, what's up, big homie? That's a strange way to hit on a guy, but, you know, you got game. And he's like, it's too much, right? How many guys out there like a woman that's five' eleven? My God, hundreds of millions would beg for that. You take your show on the road to somebody else. But I'll tell you this. The option to look how you want, be it for how you best want or some combination of how you want, but also to get enough. Kevin's in the door. That's a great option that most women today simply do not have, because how they look is not as modifiable as we would like it to be. And if you're stunning like yourself, I'm sure you've heard that a long time, then, you know, pick up the litter. But if you're not stunning, if you're the opposite of stunning, things that are descriptions of women that are too heinous for me to repeat on this podcast, you live in a different world. And that's a hurtful, not so great world. And that is something I don't like. That's the number one reason I wrote the book for mostly women, really, that are the have nots of genetically endowed physical appearance. So now with exercise and diet, whatever is going on up here, many women can become ripped and jacked and curvaceous and stunning. All right? And then we've got Botox, we have facial rejuvenation procedures, we have cosmetic surgery. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That you can inherit stuff, that you can change your appearance radically. And so if you want to know, as a woman who's never been classically beautiful, what it's like to be beautiful in the next 15 years, if you're interested, you will find out.
- [59:42]
Louise Nicola
Wow. Well, why don't we start in one of the subcategories you mentioned? Pharmaceuticals. What do you think the next blockbuster drug is?
- [59:52]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Wow. Geez. I'll take a guess. So the current blockbuster series of Drugs are the GLPs, right? And they're unbelievable.
- [59:59]
Louise Nicola
Oh, I'm a huge fan.
- [60:01]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Amazing, right? What they do for brain health is actually like really intense weight. Independent effects on neural inflammation are like, they didn't even make these drugs for that. And they start detecting these changes like,
- [60:11]
Louise Nicola
what the hell is going on? Gut health, arthritis.
- [60:14]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Unreal. And most of those effects are because they reduce low grade systemic chronic inflammation, which is like the great killer.
- [60:22]
Louise Nicola
Wonderful.
- [60:22]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Amazing.
- [60:23]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [60:23]
Dr. Mike Israetel
So these drugs are already punching above their weight. There's a problem. These drugs reduce your appetite. And if you especially don't eat enough protein, and if you especially don't lift weights, when you lose weight, you lose a substantial amount of fat mass but a substantial amount of muscle mass. And it's a weird vibe when you get on these medications and you want to lose weight to look healthier. But then people at the office are like, I just want you to know, like, my mom went through chemo and you're gonna be fine. And you're like, thank you, I'm not in chemo. Oh my God. Oh my God. I totally thought. Because your face is like.
- [60:58]
Louise Nicola
I thought, okay, then they call that
- [61:00]
Dr. Mike Israetel
ozempic phase, ozempic face and ozempic boss, which means your butt goes ba ga and it just kind of takes a smoking break. And so that's not great for two reasons. One is the aesthetic reason of like muscle is what makes you look Jennifer Garner. Like, it's why your shoulders have that bit of a loop to them that everybody likes. And if you lose muscle, then you kind of look sort of deflated. Which maybe in the early heroin chic 90s was a cool look, but today maybe not everyone's preferred look. The other problem is muscle is a massive generator of health. It also reduces with its sheer presence, chronic low grade inflammation. It makes you the opposite of diabetic. It also gives you the ability to be super spry. Like Moving like a 65 year old is a consequence mostly of just not having enough muscle mass. I've done jiu jitsu against 65 year olds who were jacked. It does not feel like they're 65, I can assure you. You, it feels like they're whatever, 22. And so if we have drugs, when we have drugs that without crazy Side effects of steroids, because those are mostly side effects, can increase or preserve your muscle mass as you diet down.
- [62:08]
Louise Nicola
Wow.
- [62:09]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Is that going to make a big difference? Because then you take a combo therapy of like tirzepatide and then one of these myostatin blocker muscle drugs and you lose like 25 pounds of pure fat and you lose zero muscle muscle. And if you lift weights and eat more protein, you can gain 5 or 10 pounds of muscle while losing that fat. It completely transforms you in health and completely transforms you aesthetically. That is nigh. It is almost here. How do we know it's almost here? I mean they're in clinical trials right now.
- [62:33]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, but now you're touching on peptides, which we know that there's no, you know, no human evidence right now when it comes to peptides. Unless we're talking about like insulin and GLP ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [62:44]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean, you mean like the other ones?
- [62:46]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, Like I'm like, What are the TB 500. Yeah.
- [62:50]
Dr. Mike Israetel
And BBC 157. Amazing animal data. Not so much human data. So these are so the drugs I'm talking about right now. I wish they were peptides. They're not even peptides, they're biologics. The most of the myostatin inhibitor drugs are like you get them hospital infused for $10,000 a pop once a month for four months. That's how the studies go. So we'll need a revolution where these drugs are first, maybe peptides, which would be great. But then the kind of the tip of the spear for the pharmaceutical industry is what are called oral small molecule drugs. Right. Because you just take a pill. Because injections are just not for everyone and you take a pill and then it just transforms your body however you want. That would be amazing. We're probably a few years away from really good candidates for oral small molecule, non androgenic anabolics or drugs that grow muscle, skeletal muscle and just don't do much of anything else. You need really, really high receptor target and really low off site targeting and that's inevitable. That is coming. There's nothing about it that's mystical. It's also a pretty, as far as biological intervention problems go, it's like a pretty straightforward problem. Like if someone has a severe mental illness and there are five different axes of neurotransmitters that are off, you're like, the hell do we, what do we do for that? There's like 10 different interactive effects, but like cranking myostatin expression down. This is really just there's one receptor site and you can have activen, which is another receptor site. And then all of a sudden you got two killers. You just have to make an oral small molecule that hits that and not much else. I gotta have respect for the pharmaceutical industry doing hard work. But if you tell a pharmaceutical individual like, hey, how do we make a universal cancer cure for everyone, for all kinds of cancers versus how do we make one drug that grows muscle in two pathways, One of those is way easier than the other. And the massive amount of consumer demand is like not up for debate. Inevitably we will have those drugs.
- [64:37]
Louise Nicola
Have any of those drugs made it to phase three?
- [64:40]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No.
- [64:41]
Louise Nicola
No, that's it.
- [64:42]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, not yet.
- [64:43]
Louise Nicola
What's your take on retatrutide? Retatrutide, I hate saying that word.
- [64:49]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's a weird word to say.
- [64:51]
Louise Nicola
I think it's going to be revolutionary. Even more so than trisepatide.
- [64:54]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. The only thing about retatrutide which is unclear to me me, are the long term health effects of cranking your metabolism up because it increases your metabolic rate substantially. Is that wearing and tearing your metabolism at all? The answer is probably not. But it's not. Definitely not. Tirzepatide does a bunch of the stuff retatratide does, but it doesn't crank your metabolism up. Which means that if you don't eat much food and you're taking tirzepatide, you're not hungry. But you're like a robot where the battery pack is low and you just don't move around much because you're like, whoa, I feel super fatigued. They used to say that high fatigue was a side effect of ozempic and tirzepatide. But then they realized, like, actually it's just you undereating, which you're empowered to do because you don't even need food anymore, you don't like. Retatretide doesn't have that problem nearly to the same extent because of its triple agonist thing. It agonizes the glucagon receptor, which through some mechanism increases your resting metabolic rate substantially. But what it does is you need substrate to increase the metabolic rate. You gotta be burning something. And so it turns out the way that retatrutide burns something is it mostly targets intra abdominal fat and especially peri liver fat, which makes you unbelievably more healthy because fat around your liver is like super bad. It basically like retatrutide, accidentally in trials, became the single best treatment, cure sort of treatment for sure for non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Was ready for this. They were like, are these correct scans? Like, huh. 80 plus percent of our cohort does not have non alcoholic fatty liver disease anymore. And all of them had it to begin with after like six months or something crazy. If retatrutide bears out that it is healthy to take long term, I'm going to be on it and I'm never coming off.
- [66:47]
Louise Nicola
I think it's going to eradicate some of the diseases that are causing us to go into chronic diseases such as like, you know, obesity. I think in 100 years, years, probably like 50, you know, we'll be in history books. Like people will be looking like, oh my God, people were that big. I think Alzheimer's disease could be, you know, right now it's around 60 million people worldwide. That number is going to triple by the year 2050, but I think maybe by the year 2080 it'll just be going down substantially. Like people will be looking back on
- [67:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
this, thinking what I think by 2000-40s, nobody, nobody's going to have any kind of disease that we can identify today. That's what I think.
- [67:24]
Louise Nicola
Wow. I think in part as well, that's got a lot to do with AI.
- [67:27]
Dr. Mike Israetel
It's everything to do with AI, not just in part. So all of the cool cures that you've seen, all of the advances in biotech, all of our deep understanding about how the world of biology both works and how we can make inroads into it to modify it away from just whatever it does by evolution. All of those contributions were from people who typically are like two standard deviations higher than average in intelligence, like doctor and above professor people. That's who invents all that stuff. I'm not in that group of people. I'm not that smart. But those smart people, they really come up with all those ideas. The number of smart people in the world is massive numerically. But most of those people don't even work in biotech. Most of them work as therapists, as teachers, as doctors, as lawyers, as a bunch of different stuff. And scientists too. But you know, like biotech, tiny bit of science. Because the number of smart intelligences that are working, the problem of how do we fix disease is on a global scale like you wouldn't even see it on a pie chart what AI is doing even today. So OpenAI's GPT 5.4 thinking model is in almost every way, not every way, and almost every way categorically smarter than almost every human on earth, except for super genius people. And in probably, well, Almost certainly by 2027, we'll have AI that will make propositions in physics and chemistry and math in biology that the smartest people in the world are going to look at and be like, I need some time with this, because this is complicated. But it's not just a hallucination. There are connections here. And after several days or weeks or months of verifying, they're going to be like, this model is beyond Einstein level and intelligence. It discovered something we were looking at for 20 years, just couldn't see. So put another way, the number of geniuses that we have access to is going to multiply to however many data center instances we can serve, which is like easily billions. That's no problem. And so think about it. Right now, if you're a scientist at Merck or Pfizer or whatever, it's you and your team of 10 people on your drug that you're working on. And that's just it. By 2028, it's going to be you and a team of 100,000 people that are five times smarter than you, have access to all of your data, and spend 24,7 only thinking about the problems. They don't think about their legal battles. They don't think about the dog crapping in the yard and the neighbors bitching about it. They don't think about anything except for exactly the thing of solving various diseases, various cures. That is really cool, but is just the beginning. Because one of the major uses of AI is already and is going to be even more to make AI smarter recursively. Because, like, when you have a really smart AI, it can do a bunch of stuff. It can invent drug cures to diseases, it can invent new ways of transportation, new battery tech. But it can also look at AI systems and go, oh, I'm real smart. How can I make the next generation of me even smarter? Smarter? That is called recursive self improvement. And it does this weird vertical thing, which is going to go vertical later this year and is going to be psychotically vertical by 2030.
- [70:41]
Louise Nicola
Why later this year?
- [70:43]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Just the trajectory it's on. Yeah, so, for example, Claude, that model, Claude, they said the last Claude model was built with 90% of its own code. Like it coded 90% of its own stuff into existence. Most of the people at Anthropic, they don't code anymore. They just talk to Claude code now. They're still intellectually leading it, but Claude is already smart enough to understand how to do a lot of AI research by 2020, end of 26, beginning of 27, the fraction of AI research and insight and upgrading that AI is going to do is going to be bigger fraction than humans do. And by 2028, 2029, it's going to be like more or less 100%. The real crazy stuff happens in the late 2000 and 20s, early 2000 and 30s. Okay, we're going to say unless the robots decide to terminate or laser gun us to death, fine, whatever. We can't. The robots are not going to stop. Right? But it's highly unlikely they do that. If they don't do that, we're going to end up seeing researchers both as embodied robots in a lab and as brains in the cloud that are 100 times smarter than the smartest person today. And so like, it's real difficult to grok what that really means, but it means at least one thing. Problems that to us seem categorically intractable. So complicated, unweaving the entire rainbow of human biology to figure out how cancer works and stop it with one cure to us seems like, whoa, that's crazy. To an intelligence 100 times the power that works consistently for six months on the process problem with no rest. And it's not just one intelligence, it's not one mind. Each mind is 100 times smarter than a human. You have 10 billion of them in a data center talking to each other. You have 10 billion of the smartest scientists that ever worked at ever pharmaceutical company, each 1 times 100 in qualitative intelligence. That's a problem solving thing. And they're going to solve problems for us that to us seem insane and to them seem like that's actually not that hard. Like, like a shitty but workable analogy is like your dog is trying to get through the door and he's like scratching and nothing. You just turn the handle like, ta da. But your dog can't understand serial causality that well and can't understand geometric manipulation to be like, oh, oh, turning right is going to open the door. Turning left isn't. It also does not have the physical tools to do that. The dog paw on the door is adorable, but non functional, right? And so just like, like we look at our dogs and we're like, oh my God, Wolfie's not that smart. Watch this buddy. And you open the door and he runs through AI of the future that's a hundred times smarter than us. It's just going to be turning open a door into that. It's curing cancer, curing most if not all diseases, reversing human aging, genetically engineering Humans to be whatever they want, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
- [73:27]
Louise Nicola
Getting a quadriplegic to walk again seems so crazy. Miraculous even. But I can't help but wonder, what are the ramifications of all of this?
- [73:38]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, there are some unsettling potential ramifications. I think they're in the vast minority of all the ramifications. I think the ramifications are generally a gigantic cornucopia of amazingness pouring down on all of us. That's what I think. Because imagine curing a vast fraction of human disease. We've already done so much of that, right? Like, if you look at the medieval ages, how people used to live, and it was just not cool. Like, when's the last time you dealt with bedbugs? When's the last time you dealt. You had cholera? When you ask cholera, hey, let's bring
- [74:13]
Louise Nicola
in vaccines right now. Just to really piss people off. Cause I do that, you know, why do we exist? Why isn't polio and smallpox still here? Vaccines.
- [74:22]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, I know.
- [74:23]
Louise Nicola
People hate that.
- [74:24]
Dr. Mike Israetel
The COVID vaccine saved about 20 million lives all over the world. And so vaccines are like. Humans made vaccines. Vaccines, right? And it took us years to figure. Decades, 100 years to figure that out. Just human intelligence with AI empowered intelligence that's orders of magnitude more powerful. My God, man. Vaccines are going to look like a joke. And you could you vaccinate people for all disease at some point. And so the ramifications are generally just awesome. I would love to respond to any concerns you have. I do this a lot of. What do you think the bad things will be? I have a lot of good, witty retorts to those. Some of them are real things. But I think a lot of people just look at new things and assume they're bad. And I think more and more new things are good. Like, if someone showed you that you had. Like, if you were in the 90s, right, and someone showed you an iPhone from 2026, you'd be like, what are the ramifications of this? You'd be like, it was awesome. You get your entire. Like, you have 80 different tools, like a compass. You can talk to any of your friends around the world anytime you want. And he'd be like, what are the ramifications? Like, I don't ever want to go back in time to the 90s. There's a ramification, and then there are little slivers of not so great stuff. Social media, it's tough, right? Social media, a lot of psychological pressure. Teenagers in the 2015-2020 did not have a good time with it. That's a serious problem. But compared to all the wonders of digital technology and social media, I mean, it doesn't even, it doesn't even remotely compare. If social media didn't exist, we would be talking to nobody. You and I wouldn't know each other just to start. The amount of total helpful information that the Internet would have generated would have been nothing if social media hadn't come up. And so all of these benefits, we tend to forget them because as soon as we solve problems as humans, we go, okay, cool, what's next? Like, we're literally talking to alive awake machines through ChatGPT. And most of us, like, I don't know, it hallucinates sometimes. Like, oh, my God, five years ago, this would have been miracle technology.
- [76:21]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. If you prompt it. Well, my problem that I'm seeing now, this is from a neurological perspective and also looking at, you know, younger kids is this brain rot era. Right. You're just looking at this dumb content. Dumb content. You're scrolling, you're scrolling. We're not doing math anymore. So arithmetic is just going down. We're not using our brains as extensively.
- [76:40]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Really.
- [76:40]
Louise Nicola
Well, look, consider the most easiest thing. You go to a. You know, 10 years ago, you'd go to, you know, you go and eat. You need to calculate 20% of the tip. Right. So you'd be calculating in your head, maybe doing some strong.
- [76:51]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Like, we have a calculator on our phones.
- [76:52]
Louise Nicola
Everyone's using the calculator on their phones. Okay, well, let's talk 20 years ago. I wasn't paying for tips 20 years ago.
- [76:58]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Okay. Right. I just didn't tip people.
- [77:00]
Louise Nicola
No, but what I'm trying to say is, like, everything is just so accessible now. We're not using our brains, which is why I think that we have a strong literacy problem in America. You know, people are not reading anymore. Why read when you have an audiobook or you have YouTube. We're not writing anymore. Writing elicits, like, so many different enhances in our cognitive function. We're not writing anymore because we've got the phone. So I think about it as a problem from a brain health perspective as well.
- [77:28]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I think we're attached to how we used to do things. Those things were challenging for us and thus they were good for our brains. It's almost certainly the case that we're not going to convince people to do things that are more challenging in ways that they've already learned or easier. You won't convince me to Write anything. When I start writing, I realize my handwriting is total crap. And also I have jacked enough forearms that I end up just gassing out, writing, holding a pen, and they just cramp and I'm just throwing my pen away. There are many tests during high school which I would write, right, right, take a break. Forearm cramp. Right, right, right. Take a break. I'm just not doing it. And also, to be fair, I actually hate texting because, like, why just two thumbs. Keyboards are cool, but I prefer to talk to the computer most of the time because my throughput is going to be so high. These challenges of basic arithmetic for tip of writing by hand, they're. They're dead. They're gone to history. We used to also farm all our own food. That was really dope. Super challenging. Having to survive every day was really cognitively handsome. Saying, no one's doing that anymore. So we have options of two paths. One path is take the easy way on everything, let the brain rot hit you and just suck respect. That's definitely a thing a lot of people do. The other path is take all the easy ways that you can free up your cognitive bandwidth for super challenging stuff. And there's so much challenging stuff. Here's a challenging thing. Ask ChatGPT to teach you complex topics and try to understand what the hell it's saying. Gang. And ask it to coach you and quiz you. That's a huge deal. And it's been forever since people tried to challenge themselves outside of school and work anyway. So now if the onus is on our educational system to challenge the crap out of these kids, one way to do it is to say you do not have any devices in school and all of your tests are live and oral or written.
- [79:24]
Louise Nicola
That's the only way.
- [79:26]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Great. That makes school real hard. That means online education should be AI empowered, but can no longer be as easily vetted or verified. You have to get clever because people can just like submit their questions that ChatGPT wrote and they get an A. So maybe the way you end up doing it is having an AI program that students download on their computer or on their phone. That program, you give it authority to scan your entire use of your working memory in the computer and it knows for a fact that there is no AI giving you any kind of hints. And it also has a camera system that sees 360 in your room so you don't have a phone behind it. With ChatGPT, something like that. Right. Just offhand. And then you can do online quizzes again, because that's just you pimp. There's only one person answering. And then you'll see. Oh, wow. So the, the challenge is to get humans to challenge themselves brain wise. And all those challenges exist. So when I decompress for the day, I watch like technical military analysis videos. Super stimulating.
- [80:28]
Louise Nicola
I watch surgery, I watch tumors being restored.
- [80:30]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh my God. You have a problem never being in the same room with you. Thank God there's a fellow here to protect me from that. In any case, I mean, that's super stimulating, right? It's a choice and it always was. Because here's the thing we do say there's lots of brain rot, right? In the 1970s you didn't have brain rot. What did you have? Comic strips. And just sitting outside on the porch talking to your neighbors about nonsense all day long. Just your neighbors don't know much. You don't know much. You're drinking beer. People used to drink way more, used to smoke way more. And they would just say dumb shit and reinforce each other. I'll tell you what brother, blah blah, and I'll tell you what. And that's it. And then so. And there's also like a total paucity of input stream. One of the number one candidate hypotheses for why the Flynn effect happens. You've heard of the Flynn effect. It's like a steady slow rise. And as measured IQs in. Since they started measuring IQs in like the 1920s, they just keep going up. Super slow, but they keep going up. One of the best hypotheses for why people have like higher IQs now is have more input streams, have more data. When you're on your phone, you're on Twitter, you're on TikTok. Even if it's brain rot, it's a ton of stuff. And your brain loves data. That's how it trains itself. Imagine if you grew up in rural Alabama in the 1920s. Within a month, about several days, you know everyone in your, in your town. And within about several man months you kind of know what kind of how the birds sound. Where all the trees are so little novelty. Some new tourist comes to your town once a month and you do this thing. You ever see kids, like third world kids see some of that? Oh my God. Because they just don't see new stuff. If you have a kid who's scrolling on social media all the time, you don't shock them anymore because they've seen crazy shit on social media out to time, which is a good thing. The question is, do they go in the Easy route and just do brain rot for fun or do they challenge themselves is not a social media question. It is a parenting question. And for parents who are now adults who can choose to consume brain rot or choose to consume things that are. Everyone needs a little every now and again. I want to see a cat do this on a table. I don't care if it's rotting my brain. Damn it. I love cats. They do that. Right. But a lot of the stuff I consume should be intellectually stimulating. To your point, I have every power in the world. YouTube does not care what I watch, but whatever I watch, it's going to recommend me more of that stuff. Same with TikTok. You know, you can learn like crazy in depth stuff on TikTok. On TikTok.
- [82:52]
Louise Nicola
I don't even use Google now if I want some, if I want to know something, I'll just go straight to TikTok, which is scary for me.
- [82:57]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Insane. I need to excuse myself from this podcast. I'm totally kidding. 100%. Right? Right. And so what I think is the future, very soon future of this is that everyone's going to have an AI that is their personal assistant slash if you let it life coach.
- [83:15]
Louise Nicola
Well, have you seen openclaw?
- [83:18]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Not with my own eyes. I have colleagues that use it. No, I'm not technically savvy enough to use any of those.
- [83:22]
Louise Nicola
No, you're not using any of these things.
- [83:24]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Also, openclaw has a big. So my team at RP does Claude. They do the Claude.
- [83:29]
Louise Nicola
They do the Claude.
- [83:30]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No AI knowledge. Yeah, they do that. I, I'm. I have a deep, deep history with my ChatGPT instance and so I just stick to ChatGPT and I'm just waiting for them to come up with their new crazy agentic model which apparently they just say finish training and is shocking everyone how smart it is. Makes sense. So I'm going to stick to OpenAI for at least the foreseeable future. But the Open Claw stuff is unreal. The thing is that it's not always a hard on technically and it unfortunately just does not have enough awareness to your life. Like these things need to have access to your video camera and be able to interpret continuous video streams. They must be on a device somewhere on your body. Like in a few years we're all going to be wearing VR AR glasses. And if it has cameras where it sees your world and hears your world and is always on and is always processing, then it's really going to be able to life coach the shit out of you for Nothing. Wow. It's a great scaffolding, but not quite enough for me to be like, that's my life coach. Because the models still struggle with context. They're not aware of everything. They make assumptions that are not exactly true because they live in a fucking data center. I don't see anything. So when these models get more access to visual stream, audio stream, continual access, and the token counts get really crazy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Then you'll be like, hey, you know, whatever. OpenAI chatgpt. Like, I need help just, like, making a schedule for my day and week, and I need you to be a little mean about it and tell me what to do. And I also don't want to get stupid on brain rot. I want to be smarter. And you just tell it general goals and it starts to learn your life and it goes, hey, from 5 to 6pm today, I queued up a bunch of awesome reading for you. I want you to get through with the reading because I'm going to quiz you. Tiny quiz is going to be fun. At 5:55pm and then at 6 to 9pm, your free time. You don't even need to talk to me. You do whatever. But at 9pm we start your daily routine, your nightly routine to start getting you down for the night reminds you what to do, blah, blah, blah. I think that's the future. That's what I want. I want. I'm tired of running my own life. I need a coach, and I want it smarter than me. And by 2027, it will be smarter.
- [85:26]
Louise Nicola
And the one principle that we follow today, that we have to follow in that era is the principle of actually doing the work.
- [85:35]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Cheese.
- [85:36]
Louise Nicola
Because unless you're going to have a robot that's actually going to physically get you, which one day I believe we all will, it's going to come and knock on the door. Time to get up.
- [85:42]
Dr. Mike Israetel
I can't wait. But even then, like, almost. No, it is an ins. I'm almost certain that all of the robotics manufacturers and the AI companies that are the brains will never have the robot put its hands on you in a way that you don't, like, ever. Because. Lawsuit.
- [86:02]
Louise Nicola
Unless it malfunctions.
- [86:03]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. Which, like, you know, they'll malfunction way less than people. People malfunction all the time. We have jails for reason. And so the robot is not going to have a policy of forcing you to do anything. We were, my. My colleague, Nick and I at rp, we were talking about where to take the app, what direction, and we were talking to somebody super smart, super in the industry. And he basically said the big players like Google and Meta, they don't ever want you to have any bad experiences with their products. Which is why they don't even make workout apps because, like, the workout app makes you sore and you hate it. And they're like, nah, we're good. We're just going to empower other people to do it. But we're never. We don't ever want to have an iPhone associated with bad things in your head. Just the same way robots are probably never going to be like, get up. They're not going to do that. They're just going to remind you. And you'll always be able to be like, I'm sleeping in. Get out of my face. And be like, of course, no problem. I'll come bother you again in an hour, if that's okay. And you're like, humans were like that. So, Right. If only humans were like that, we'd have two things. One is everyone be kinder. Two is sometimes you need tough love. But I think that is where robots cooperate with humans. So you can have a robot life coach, but you can also have a human life coach. And the robot does most of the coaching. But you sign a little contract with your human life coach and you say, okay, here's the contract. I'll listen to what my robot says. But if my robot ever reports me for not doing shit, that's where you come in. Because the robot's going to be super respectful. But the robot's going to ping the human coach and be like, like, jim's not waking up anymore. Knock on the door, get away from me, robot. No, it's Phil, your buddy. Like, oh, damn it.
- [87:36]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, it's like this blended learning environment.
- [87:39]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Yes. And then humans, because here's the big thing with humans. You can always tell ChatGPT, like, just don't bother me. And it's gonna be like, of course. That's never changing. You can't tell humans that humans have agency and humans have, like, a moral weight to them that most people just won't assign to AI. At least not for a while. While. And so if you want somebody to take you to task, hire yourself a life coach, hire a nutritionist online or in person, and hire a personal trainer. That's my best advice.
- [88:04]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I think that too.
- [88:04]
Dr. Mike Israetel
You could have all sorts of ideas about how hard you're interested in or not interested in training that day. Two things. One, you're going to cancel. You have to text your personal trainer. Shame. 90% of the time will prevent you from doing that. You get out to cancel and you go, nope, can't do it. Go to the gym. And number two is how hard the workout is. That's not up to you anymore. That's up to your trainer. And that ability to kind of just give someone the reins for a while to help you hem in what to do so you do it better. Worth the money times 10.
- [88:33]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I think we actually share the very same thesis. You've got so much to, you know, you bring so much to the table, quite literally because, you know, it's not just. It's not just aesthetics and bodybuilding and muscle physiology. It's. It's everything. Your. It seems like your interests are so wide and vast. You obviously read a lot when it comes to AI.
- [88:54]
Dr. Mike Israetel
There's a term for that. It's called schizophrenia.
- [88:56]
Louise Nicola
Schizophrenia. Great.
- [88:57]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Excellent.
- [88:57]
Louise Nicola
It's a medication for that too.
- [88:59]
Dr. Mike Israetel
No way. Yeah, if you want them to brainwash you with their mind virus. I don't trust corporate media. Am I doing okay on the schizophrenic index?
- [89:07]
Louise Nicola
No. Well, this all just means that we have to bring you on for a part two. Thank you so much, Mike, for being a huge pleasure.
- [89:13]
Dr. Mike Israetel
Thank you for putting up with my knife sounds. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in with a full lineup of non alcoholic beer styles you can enjoy. Bold flavors, all game game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stock the fridge for tip off with a variety of non alcoholic craft styles. Available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com near Beer Fit for all times.