The Future of Fitness: Dr. Mike Israetel on AI, Steroids & Online Criticism

I think initially we met because I think you were talking shit about me.

Exactly.

Yeah. And I made a nice comment in return.

It was an incredibly awesome move.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Mike Israel, who has a PhD in sports physiology.

Look, we're all flawed. I said all of us. I didn't mean you, my lordship. Am I really going to alienate other people on a big platform and say they're charlatans and liars? I do think there is a social value for exposing charlatanism.

He's also co founder of Renaissance Periodization and is a coach to Olympians and professional athletes. Mike is a competitive bodybuilder and also a popular either youtuber.

I love being a voice for positivity and inclusion more than I like anything else. But does the witty banter and the dogging on people who kind of suck.

Also do well, you basically, you're acting like autophagy.

I don't like that I did those things. And I'm still kind of dealing with how much positivity to call out culture am I willing to put up with in my own head and my own action.

All right, should we arm wrestle?

I don't want to lose or get hurt.

How have you dealt with. I mean, you've really blown up online and you have a lot of notoriety. How has that affected the way you think about the world and yourself and what you're doing?

That's a really good question. It's definitely something to think about because when you make YouTube videos and write books and make software and stuff, you do things, things happen. You can even pull up your own iPhone and see your face on the screen, and there's a bit of like, oh, look. I guess, like, you see the numbers, like, how many views or whatever you get, and you're like, okay, that those are numbers. They're kind of almost devoid of any reference to any kind of emotion. Like, okay, those are high numbers, I guess, relative. What does that mean? Doesn't mean anything. And then it first started to really hit about a year and a half, two years ago, when, like, I think most people operate when they're in the public sphere, like walking through a shopping mall at an airport under the assumption of general anonymity. Like, I can go to the mall and walk around with my wife, and it's just my wife and I, and people look at you. I look really ridiculous. So people often stare. But, like, that doesn't bother me at all. It's just normal. But then the first few times when people look differently, you know they know who they're looking at. And some of them will be like, you're Dr. Mike. And I'm always really happy to meet people, so it never throws me off. But the fact that it happens after, when I walked away for the first several dozen times, I was like, whoa, what the hell? And then after a while it's like, happens all the time. And I still, to this point, have not gotten used to it in the sense of like, whatever. It's much more like, oh, cool, that happened. Like, it's still same narrative as before, but it is a thing that is a little jarring at first and kind of maybe not jarring requires me to recontextualize how I see things. Another thing is like, this is disgusting. So my apologies in advance. But, like, you know, some of us pick our noses on occasion. I'm not talking about eating it or something, just a little boogie gets in there. You kind of try to get in there, a little napkin and let's say you're on a flight and you're doing that. Nowadays I'm like, but there are many people around that maybe know who I am and you know, like, oh, oh, God. It's like I'm always in a mini spotlight. And if you go on the Internet, you look at other fitness youtubers and stuff, people always talking about you, and the number of comments that are addressing you or about you when anyone makes a video about you or on your own videos starts to climb, like, to an amount you can't possibly dedicate almost any time to processing. And rarely do you hear that many opinions from that heterogeneous population of people about you. Like, I come from the old world of pre social media, as do you, where if someone was going to say something about you, they were going to talk that shit behind your back. And either you wouldn't hear about it or you would hear about it and it would be like, oh, you're talking that shit behind my back. You wouldn't take it seriously. Because real men say things to the face. And then, you know, otherwise. It's like face to face, though someone finds you disagreeable or finds something you said erroneous or curious, they'll say it to you, which means in the real world, they just never say it to you. Because people almost never do that after, you know, teenagehood. But then on the Internet, you see very, very unfiltered opinions, very hot takes about who you are, what it is you're doing, how you're thinking. You have this other thing where including right Very. Now exactly how you phrase and don't phrase various things. Alternatively, you are judged on. And I have absolutely no problem being judged. I don't think I'm expected to be perfect. Every time when I flub on something and give an explanation that's not amazing. Of course, if I watch it back, I'm like, crap, I should have said this versus that. So that kind of thing is a bit more of a thing. I'm coming to grips with it. I have had my streak of reading comments and being like, I wonder if this person would ever say this to my face. But that's this really nasty kind of dominance hierarchy, alpha male bullshit I'm trying to excise from my head. So at the end of the day, what's been comforting to me is to accept a few truisms of, I'm here just doing my best. I am who I am. I am not perfect. I was graced, luckily, having never been born beautiful, that, you know, if people are like, oh, that guy's face looks weird, I'm like, fucking join the club, my friend. I've been looking at this thing for 40 years. Imagine how I feel. So I'm not like, I haven't had to be liberated from any attachments to my own infallibleness because, like, imagine you're a female celebrity, you're a very pretty girl. Growing up, you heard only good things. Then social media comes on and everyone's dunking on you like, you look terrible. You had one bad makeup day on a show and they caught an interview from the wrong angle. And it's just 100,000 comments about how you've crested the hill and all this other stuff. Luckily, I don't have to deal with that. My physique is open to criticism, but I'm also a competitive bodybuilder. I have been that much longer than I've been social media relevant. It's like when you're on stage and basically underwear in front of a crowd of people and they're literally judging you, you sort of just like kind of develop. I don't even know if it's a thick skin. Yeah, but you're kind of just like, yeah, like you have an opinion about my body. That's cool. People may be right, maybe wrong. And so my best kind of coping mechanism has just been like, I'm just me. I'm absolutely not perfect. And if people are going to criticize me, I probably have it coming. And if they're going to be incorrect about the criticisms, you know, it is not my Responsibility to correct every single person. I would love to do that. I used to do every single comment or reply to until I beat the conversation to death and won the debate. I can't do that anymore for time constraint reasons. So I just have to really. It's a really good thing for me emotionally to have the constant exercise of letting things just get shrugged off. Like, oh like you're an idiot and you're a Charlton, you're a clown, you're a steroid addict and you're ruining fitness and media and you know, at the end of the day I have to be like, you know, there's probably some good points in there and I probably could be doing better in many respects. But also like I'm pretty damn good at some stuff and I have a decent amount of confidence about that. So on the aggregate I'm just kind of going to be like it is what it is. And that's what's helped me the most.

Yeah. A lot of the people I. So I just started doing YouTube videos a couple years ago, I think two years ago.

Same.

Yeah. Yeah. Meeting people that were the comments really are a new psychological phenomena that many people need to deal with.

Yes.

And so like you're saying it's true that typically we had these social circumstances where you gathered information about yourself by those around you. You heard gossip of what people said about you, but you didn't have to confront the brutal assessments people make. Sometimes on point, sometimes they're mean spirited. But it really is like a, it's a pretty tough environment for many people to be exposed to that. I know several of my friends, they don't read comments at all. So they'll have their, their team will put together the best comments, you know, the most cheerful ones and they'll share those but they leave the negativity out and so like do their do your thing. I've always found it to be fascinating that yeah everyone takes their strategy of life like take like figures out a model that keeps their psyche stable.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I mean my personal disposition is I love the comments.

Get out of here. Love. You're going to do great on social media.

It's my favorite part of social media.

I wish I could say is to.

Hear what people say. It brings me so much joy. Especially those who try earnestly to do. They try to create their best insults. Right. And you can tell that they thought about it a lot and they've really carefully crafted it. Taking their best go like a paragraph sized. Yeah. Or like even a sentence but like you Just like, respect. Like, you actually gave this some thought, like, according to your abilities. Try to land one. But. Yeah, that's interesting. So, Mike, one thing I want to talk to you about today on the Is So I'm really trying to figure out, like, the vibe of the podcast, like, why does this exist? Why is it valuable to people? And I'll confess, my secret motive is that I do think that humanity is at this critical juncture. Like, we could be evolving into something spectacular. We could also get ourselves into a mess in so many ways. And I see the situation for what it is, and it's hard for me to spend time on anything other than that. But that's not where people's minds are at. People want to put on muscle and they want to lose weight, and they want to not feel anxious, and they want to not be depressed, and they want to make more money at their job, and they want more status in life, and they want a partner in life. These basic things that humans want. And so I discovered in hanging out with you that we really care about similar things. We see the world in a similar way. So I had many questions for you that I'm now remapping.

Okay.

Into other directions.

Thank God.

Yeah.

I'd much rather talk about the stuff you and I connected on, though. I would be happy to talk about anything you like.

Okay, cool. So I. I mean, this is like an open conversation. Is. So you and I both have an interest in the science of physiological function, and you have applied it towards physique, I have applied it towards age. But we're based both using the same architecture. You take evidence, you try to map it as best you can. You keep an open mind on, you know, you're gonna be somewhat right, somewhat wrong. You're gonna be constantly evolving into new things. But our approaches are pretty identical in that we really do try to isolate the evidence and the results.

Sure.

And so as you think about what you're doing, how have you imagined bridging these two worlds from what you've become known for and what you see happening in the world? And do you see there's a way to bridge these two into a conversation that brings people in, that makes them relatable and understandable? Or have you not found that bridge?

I have a few bridges. I don't know if any of them would be something I would claim to be. The bridge, the big one that gets everyone thinking on the futurism topic, but at least one of my bridges that I've been fortunate enough to get to talk a Few times in places, though never for long enough, is the future of physique and health and biotechnology. Because today the tip of the spear of the best ROI things you can do for your health and how you look and feel are things like sleep, are things like exercise, are things like proper dietary management, stress modulation, so on and so forth. And those are now beginning to be more and more well understood tactics and strategies. And it is a big part of my job and social media sphere and in general through books and all this other stuff, including software, to get people both to understand the theoreticals behind what is sleep? Why do you need sleep? What's good about getting enough sleep? How do you know you're not getting enough sleep, so on and so forth, and also empowering them with strategies and recommendations to actually do the thing and having various autoregulatory mechanisms in there for them to guess and check to see am I doing the thing, am I lifting properly, am I getting results, am I eating properly, how's that going? And so forth. So that is stuff that's already kind of a known road. It is not a road we have walked completely yet, but like we know roughly where we're going and there are some questions that have really good answers, questions that have marginally good answers, questions that we don't know the answers to, but getting the answers very tractable and research is currently very fruitful in that regard. I think a lot of people kind of stop their own mental model at that point. Not to be derisive to other people writ large. Practical human being in 2024 will ask the question of how do I sleep, how do I eat, how do I fitness train in order to get my best combination of, let's say longevity, quality of life and physique, vanity, etc. Which, you know, RP is really a vanity channel at the end of the day and that's totally cool. But something really big changed recently and it's the first drop in a rainstorm that's going to be an insane downpour, Texas sized hail, all that shit. I'm kidding. Hopefully just pleasant raindrops, fat raindrops of progress. And that first raindrop to me was the exploitation at large of a new class of anti obesity drugs, the Ozempics, the Tirzepatides and so on and so forth. Because it used to be that in your pursuit of fitness and health you could take some supplements and they had these very small upsides, they were very contextual. You had to be, you know, if you're not deficient in Vitamin D, more vitamin D doesn't help you arguably become toxic, so on and so forth. And then you could do the basics of actually eating well and doing fitness and all that stuff. But the conversation about pharmaceutical intervention and enhancement was like, you think metformin might do some things, but it's a very small effect and most people don't need it, blah, blah, blah. And then there's like anabolic steroids and growth hormone which are like, oh, they work, but the side effect profile is bigger than. That's a laundry list. It's worse than the main effect. And so with the new class of anorectic drugs, which is what they're called, drugs that reduce appetite and food intake, you had this situation occur where to millions of people for whom dietary control was not realistic, given their genetic food drive and food environment and history of eating and their current adiposity, it now became insanely empowered. Yeah, to be able to control their diet however they saw fit. The ability to do that through just one injection a week, subcutaneous or now they have like, I think Rybelsus is like a pill or something like that. Baffling. Because now to a large extent, for a huge fraction of the population that struggles with weight, your body weight becomes a turn dial. You could just turn the medication dose up and down as long as the side effects are manageable and they are very manageable relative to older drugs like anabolic steroids, for example, or you know, like phentermine and stuff, or drugs that would work for three months and then you were used to them, they didn't do anything, just side effects. Now that we have that, all of this proselytizing that I've been doing, and no doubt you've been doing about the coming biotech revolution has its first real.

Killer on the block.

It is such a weird thing because you're like, it used to be before the 2022 kind of Ozempic revolution, I would just, myself and my friend Jared, pro bodybuilder, we would just blather to whoever was listening about the coming renaissance of biotech and you get some point, you're just like, look, I get it man, you like YouTube videos with, you know, Ray Kurzweil in them. Sweet. Shut up. But after Ozempic and all those drugs, it's kind of like, oh, is this a one off or are more drugs like this coming? And for me, one of my huge passions and one of my bridges that I mentioned earlier was, okay, what, what other drugs could be potentially in the pipeline through AI drug discovery and very receptor selectorized drug design which is now a reality. What kind of drugs are there that could be real game changers? And I can think of at least two offhand. One is what would be called a non androgenic anabolic muscle mass is a critical part of your healthiness of your organs. It's a huge contributor, lowers blood glucose, it works as a calorie sink, it allows you a crazy amount of mobility, it allows everything else to be healthier. I mean, the laundry list of having higher than declining muscle mass with age coming back up to that mid-20s status and even a little extra is enormous. And you can resistance train and it has a very large effect, but it takes time. And in addition to that, some people through combination of age or just have a not so great genetics, quite frankly, put it quite frankly, they don't get a lot of traction on the problem. They'll gain three pounds of muscle and after a year they'll gain another pound. And the doctor's like, you could gain another 10, that would be great. But it's just really not in the cards for you. You're 63 years old, you have whatever genetics, they're just like, you ain't doing the thing. And so a non androgenic anabolic would be a muscle growth substance that you take that would help you grow muscle and have almost no side effects at all otherwise. And you think this is fantasy land nonsense. But there are many pathways, at least one very good candidate, the myostatin pathway in humans that would be like not on paper, difficult to exploit, I think, okay, if we had that, how would that change the game? Well, imagine now you are a person who's out of shape, you're in your 50s and you're like, I need to do something. You go to the doctor and you're like, I need to change my health. It used to be like, well, you got to diet and exercise and it was a very uphill battle for many people. Now you can be empowered by various drugs like drugs that reduce food intake and drugs potentially hopefully in the future that increase your muscularity, another drug that increases your resting metabolic rate, and potentially another series of drugs for mental stuff. And we're already maybe in the late 2000s at a very different point where if you have physique problems, these bridges to the next generation are here meaningfully to affect you. Very different than theory. I want to be there as it happens to bring people in and go, don't you should try these, but talk to your doctor because they're real and they're coming.

Yeah, I agree. I think Ozempic really did change the game, that it can change a fundamental part of being human, which is the hunger response.

Huge.

And you just get a shot. And it's all like other primal things we have, like the want for sex and the right. Like all these basic needs we have. And now we can basically reliably modulate them.

Turn, dial.

Yeah. And so it's. And even turn up right. On certain things. So it's actually pretty remarkable. When you got into this to bodybuilding, what was your primary game you were trying to play? Is it you locked in because it was a fun game to play, or did you have an inspiration you wanted to be? Like, what was the primary motive for you getting into bodybuilding?

Pure art aesthetics. When I have a huge pump in the gym and I'm relatively lean and there's no one around, I train in a gym that's just me. And occasionally my wife will come and scoff at me and then leave disappointed, as many women do when they're in my presence. I pull the shirt off, I hit a couple poses, and I'm just like, yeah, that looks right. It's being your own sculpture. Now. I'm not a particularly beautiful sculpture, which is an upside of downside. The downside is, like, I don't always look that great in my own eyes. I'm like. But the upside is it's so exciting to have so much more enhancement to allocate. I want to eventually be in a world where in my own body for my own selfish artistic interests. I look so much cooler than I ever have, and I want to be able to help other people accomplish that as well. There are so many people walking around, they do not care about how their bodies look. God bless them. I think there's so much beauty and just being like, I exist. Who gives a shit when we bite it? What a mature look. What a mature outlook. There are so many more other people that walk around every day uncomfortable in the bodies in which they are, if for no other reason than purely aesthetic. Like, imagine I put you into someone who is 300 pounds obese. Like, all right, you're single. Dating scene. You're like, oh, really? I want to be a part of that stack of helpfulness a person could arrange around themselves to get to be in the body they want to be. And I absolutely. Because it's a first principles thing of people want to look like they want to look. No valley judgment. And if you want to look more aesthetic or artistic, however, that Looks to you. I don't judge people for using any combination of exercise or pharmaceutical intervention or eventually genetic engineering to look exactly how they want. You go, and this is one of these things where the gamification brought to us by the digital space comes back to us in the physical space and makes the digital look a little better and kind of aspirational. If you want a different avatar on a social media site, Brian, do you have trouble picking an avatar of like, oh, none of these fit. Like it's custom. You can do whatever you want. You can have an artist render one for you, whatever. You can look like whatever you want on the Internet, but in real life you're back to this bullshit. And I want the Internet to reflect real life more vice versa. I want people to appear in the body they feel the best in. I don't give a fuck with that. Think you look great weighing 300 pounds. Girl, come over here, get some love. I'm married. I don't. But theoretically, you know what I'm saying? But like it's a little mini super tiny violin, low key tragedy that people have to exist in bodies they don't love.

Yeah.

I think my small addition to this world will be first, to give people the modern strategies that already work. And second, as the pharmaceuticals come out, maybe destigmatize a little bit because a lot of people have a reflexive anti pharmaceutical knee jerk reaction. Understandable, but largely out of date. And so I want people to understand that these are powerful weapons that should not be misused, but can be used in a way that enhances you. That's so great. And why not look how you want to look?

Yeah. You met your wife on online, Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it because of your physique?

God, no. The funny thing about my wife and I's relationship and if I may be wife. Can I be frank? There you go. Who cares?

Let me, let me process that. Yeah, sure. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

My wife likes me for a few reasons and that's why she's with me or got with me initially. And now it's just, it's just, it's just too laborious to break up.

Just like the comment section your wife leaves for you.

Yes, that's right. It turns out that my own aesthetic preferences on physique just are not really her high priority. She doesn't care if I'm super lean or ultra jacked. I think her, if I'm to go back into my library of things, she's told me that I've committed to Memory. It's like, just be bigger than me and don't make me feel gigantic. So, like, don't shrink down to 120 pounds and like, we're pretty good to go.

Yeah.

Is that right, honey? Pretty much. So, like, I think if I'm like 220, a little soft, or 230, like rock hard, chiseled.

Yeah. What are you right now? What are you right now?

So I'm like 235 and I have like some, some details in my glutes and stuff. So like about 9 or 10% body fat, maybe a little lower than that. And so I just stored in such an atrocious way that I always look like higher percent unless I like show you my legs. And then you're like, oh, shit, you are really lean. It's the worst. Everything just goes right to the waist and the face. But for my wife, it wasn't the physique that did it at all. I think what really did it was I had an advanced degree and she saw that and I was roughly in the lifting community and that she saw a picture of me on Facebook when I was at the Arnold Classic, the trade show. And I had like a backpack on and my glasses and I look like a nerd. And she's into the nerds. And I was like, girl, if you're into nerds, I got a whole well deep of the shit for you. So that's, I think, why she was into that, baby. Is that right?

I think, yeah, that one pick.

That's it, Just one pick.

Yeah.

Somehow I skated in.

Yeah. Putting bait out there.

Boy, can you imagine? I put now that pic. I was like, that's it, man. Girl of my dreams is gonna. I don't even know who took that picture. I thought I looked terrible in it.

Yeah.

But she was like, oh, this is my vibe.

So, yeah. And so in pursuing this, you, you decided to do steroids. And so walk me through that process. Like, how did you come to that conclusion and what's it been like to be on them?

Yes, probably like three reasons maybe why I decided to steroids. One is back when I was coming up, natural everything, drug free, powerlifting, bodybuilding, etc. Was very nascent and very irrelevant. Unfortunately. Very. Unfortunately, it's much more relevant now. I think it's a beautiful thing. So in order to be taken seriously as someone who knew things, you just had to look like you knew things. And so the people that look like you knew things were gigantic juice monsters. And I was like, fuck it, let's do it because, like, my colleagues and I realized we knew some things and could help a lot of people. And we were just inculcated in that culture where, like, this is the thing that you do. Like, if you want to be a really good football coach, you should probably play some football and maybe try to do as well in that as you can. Now, like, if you make it to the NFL yourself, dope. That sure helps you in coaching. It's not required, but it sure helps. Right. So one of those was that another was the fact that I just like the idea of progress and natural gains. I trained naturally for 12 years. I got excellent gains. I was still making gains, but slower. And I just wanted to see that road lengthened out for a long time. So I've never used like a ton. A ton of drugs in the grand scheme. And I've always kind of scaled up over time strategies and implementations cause more than absolute level of physique. I want to continue to work on my masterpiece longer. And so I've actually been working on it not as aggressively as I could so that I can continue to have slight elevations in my experience. And the last reason is I'm a nerd first and everything else after. And the ability to use chemicals, pharmaceuticals, atoms and molecules to upgrade your abilities is straight up comic book shit. And I'm 100% here for it. So there's my trifecta I got with you.

I'm with you, Mike, on the excitement of using any available means to achieve an objective.

Yeah.

And you're trying to piece together the relevant parts. Have. So for the. I know, for example, like, in some of the things I've done, like I was doing rapamycin for a while.

Yeah.

And I just recently stopped after doing it for four years.

What gets you to stop?

It was messing with my lipids.

No way.

Yep. So a few side effects. Lipids were messed up. Blood glucose resting, heart rate was increased, and I had some small tissue infections.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

It is a grotesquely catabolic substance.

Yeah. So, yeah. So we just reasoned that it just wasn't worth the trade off. And so of course, my objective was to slow the speed of aging. And then also there's this preprint came out two weeks ago where on certain aging clocks, I think 12 out of 16 aging clocks, I think rapamycin showed it accelerated the speed of aging epigenetically.

I love that you're able to be committed to something for so long given the state of the evidence at the time. And then so gently with no attachment, switch gears and go. I was wrong.

Yeah.

You're going to get flack for that all the time, by the way, in social media. I think you should stick to your guns and just keep iterating on what works and discarding what doesn't. People like to label people as a weird. That rapamycin guy. Oh, Brian Johnson. You mean the guy that did rap myosin for four years. Yes. And a guy who quit doing it because the state of the evidence was updated. Isn't that strange?

Yeah. Have you found that to be the case that people have that you've had things drag over from previous time periods where you want a clean break and they want you to continue for some reason?

Yeah, definitely. I was probably the first person to really formalize the understanding of how much training volume you need and muscle growth.

Yeah.

With like theoretical landmarks of what's the minimum amount you can do to get gained? What's the max amount you're going to recover from. I sort of coined all those terms with a few colleagues because the term that got the most popular first was the maximum recoverable volume. I was known as the high volume guy for a while. Then when I got to talking about minimum effective volume and maintenance volume, I started being known as the low volume guy. And people like looking at my own training and they were like, why do you do this many sets? But you quote unquote recommend way more. But I can never recommend it way more. So this is the theoretical maximum recover volume for many people. I don't say train at your maximum recovery volume all the time. I pretty much never said that maybe for like a few months in 2013. So there are people who will hold you to things and allow zero updating of what your position is in their head. But I think those people are few and far between. They're just, I would think the. They have high trait disagreeableness. And so they're in the comments section a lot. Yeah, I think most people are just interested in hearing what you have to say and anytime you change your mind they're like, oh cool. That's the new thing.

Yeah, the rapamycin. I guess I feel a relief not doing it now because it definitely like my resting heart rate when I sleep is substantially lower, which gives me better sleep and it's like really been a boost. And so I, I guess I, in, in retrospect I tolerated side effects to achieve this end objective where like I'm okay with the trail, which is noble.

In a certain sense.

So you've done the Same. I've heard you say on steroids that you experience anxiety, that you experience certain feelings of rage.

Yeah, certain feelings, yes.

Yeah, yeah. How do you think through the balance of choosing to do this thing which does cause these negative side effects of your conscious experience?

I can eat a shitload of discomfort if I'm gifted in any way. That's probably it. I don't give a. I can delay gratification up there, I don't know with the best of them, but a lot. I mean I went years of schooling, getting paid, nothing, studying in a lab by myself for half a generation for going all sorts of stuff, going on vacation and finding out where I can get good training and good food first. And as long as I get that, that's priority number one. Is that always the thing I proximately want to do and feel like doing? Fuck no. Some points gotten so out of touch with what I feel like doing that I had to take some time to get my brain to recognize like oh, I have internal states and I can't just full send. And my wife is also a psychotic workaholic, commitment driven person who like had like, I don't know, like 10 nervous breakdowns on her way to like various insane achievements. And I was there for all of them, she was there for mine. I'm like not large nervous breakdowns, very difficult times, but our always our answer is kind of like, okay, breathe it out. Regret the teeth keep plowing. To me, the interaction with anabolics and mood and all this other stuff. I had very finite timelines, very explicit goals up for review and modification which I eventually ended up modifying and no big deal, but it's like as long as the plan is the plan, give me nightmares, give me demons, I don't give a. I'm here for it. It's also not a surprise. Look. Oh, I'm in extreme doses of anabolic androgenic steroids and I feel like I have a lot of rage. There's not really a contradiction there, onwards. And someone's like don't. Don't you want to feel better in your own head? Yes. But what really makes me feel better long term is to stick to a difficult plan for an extended period of time to unearth great benefits on the other end. That really gets me going. So it's kind of like I'm here.

For it, you know, and thinking through like for example, you might met my son Talmadge, who's 19.

He was great.

Yeah, he's a kid, he's a good kid. That's a trite statement, but it.

Can you imagine as a parent, you're like, I don't like the guy. Yeah, he's around. Kick him out.

Yeah. He's currently trying to sort his models of life, you know, what a time, huh? What does he do? Even in his own fitness protocol, you know, like, does he, what does he try to optimize for? Is it longevity? Is he trying to become an athlete of some sort? Is he trying to build muscle mass? Like there's so many branched pathways that he could take. And so having done this yourself, you know, like, if someone wanted to do steroids at 19, what, what would you say to them?

In almost all cases at age 19, choosing to use steroids is a miscalculation, trade off equation because it's important to be explicit about what the upsides are. Both like, in the sense of what do you literally get? Like how much muscle and how less fat, but also in the sense of what do you ultimately thinking that's gonna get you? Because people think things like, well, have muscles and then, then what? You're gonna get laid more? Are you gonna feel better inside your skin? Some people get so caught up in the moment of doing the thing, they sort of leave the end products into this hazy cloud of like, good things will happen. You remember back, it turned out to be a really good gamble. But back in somewhere between 2000 and 2020, you would have a startup or some kind of thing that deals with data and software and people are like, what are you going to do with all this data you're collecting? It doesn't matter, just collect the data. Data's data, it's great, it's valuable. But nobody had any proximate idea of how that data was valuable. And it wasn't for generation until now. AI mining is like, oh, you're actually, you are sitting on a trillion dollars worth of data. And so at the time there are people that are visionaries that knew what the data was going to be used for. And there are other people that were like, I just heard data, collect all the data you can. And like that doesn't have a huge downside because it's a software company that's part of the model. But there are people that are like, if I do steroids, I'm gonna gain muscle. And then. And the rest is haze, like just vibes, you know, like when someone's like, hey, you're going to a party, right? You're like, yeah, I can't wait. They're gonna be like, why do you Want to go to this party? You're like, you know, like, party stuff, and all you have is like some kind of little mini pizza commercial version of a party where it's all really good looking people and they're vibing and someone jumped in the pool and everyone's laughing like, except you haven't realized, what the hell am I going to do at this actual party now. Parties are fun. The thing is, the side effects from steroids are not fun. So you had better have a very good idea of what that party looks like to you, so to speak. So if you're like, okay, I'm going to get huge. Why? Because in my spirit of spirits, I want veins and mass and I want to scare old people with my muscles. Dope. Wait until you're 25, when you've got all the natural growth, consistent years of building with almost zero health downsides, and then see, am I mature enough and do I really still want this? If you want it. Hey, start threading in the anabolics. If you live in the United Kingdom, where they're legal, rock on. But up until you get to that point, staying drug free is a good idea because you pay almost no downside risk. And until and unless you have a distinct clarity of this goal is worth it, definitely don't do it. So if your son was like, hey, should I do drugs? The next thing I would ask him is, why? And if you couldn't give me very well articulated, very impassioned and also sensical reason why not to delay, I'd be like, yeah, don't do it. It's like someone who, let's say, makes $100,000 a year. One of the pores, as I like to call them. My word. How do you even live on this? Yes. I would never speak to someone like that. My butlers would do it for me. And they're like, I'm thinking of buying a $200,000 car. Now look, if you are an ultra car buff and some guy is selling you an old GT40 that he refurbished, it is the car you had on your fucking wall in the 70s and you finally scrimped and save, and it makes a little bit of sense and it's technically a collector's piece, all right, we're in a conversation. But if you make $100,000 a year and you're not like generationally wealthy or something, and you're like, should I buy a $200,000 car? The first thing is like, why? And if you're like, I don't know it's kind of cool, bro, are you out of your mind? The cost to benefit, the cost two years of your life. The benefit notional, like you don't even know what it is. Too many people get into anabolic steroids of like, that's just some vibes. Like it's something people are doing on TikTok. Muscle's cool, right? Don't do it for that reason. Does that make sense?

It does make sense, yeah. So I think we've been in parallel paths where my focus primarily has been in age and yours, you know, in.

Mine and getting older faster.

Yeah, I mean, how do you think about this? I mean like again, where we converge on the future is I think that we are entering into a period of health flourishing in ways we can't comprehend. Now we've touched on this, we've said, well, zembic is a good example where you take an injection. It changes a fundamental part of who you are. We also both imagine that we could actually just have injections or have gene editing and we basically get the same benefits of exercise. So we could not even have to do exercise in the future, which is.

By the way, not fantasy land at all. On a theoretical biological basis, anyone who studied 9th grade biology could be like, theoretically, if you could arrange all the parts to do the thing, there's nothing stopping you.

That's right.

You're not violating any laws of the universe or anything.

Exactly. It could be rewritten like our entire lives. What we eat, how we exercise, sleep, etc, how we think, how we think exactly. Our conscious experience. And so like how do you, if you do certain things today that do accelerate aging to some capacity, like let's say antibiotics, always have some negative effects on health.

They do. You don't have to postulate how, how.

Do you reconcile that, given this moment, do you. Are you imagining that technological progress will be able to address that in the future? And you're not worried about it because you have this other endeavor you're working on now?

I've been involved in meditative practice for some time, 20 years or something, and had a lot of time to think about life and my relation to the rest of the universe. And what I've come to is a few things. One is life on Earth, in the universe, and this trajectory of evolving tiered layers of complex systems, atoms, molecules, macromolecules that self replicate biological life, now technological life, which is this huge transition that all is just the most beautiful thing in the world to study and witness. But I'm not a critical component of It. I don't have to be alive for it to keep going. It's going without me. Now if I have some ability to give my life literally to prevent someone from stopping this, like if, if someone. This is ridiculous. This is going to get memed to death. But it, I mean this wholeheartedly. If someone in a crowd raised a gun at Sam Altman, I 100 unthinkingly would take the bullet. Because he's way more important than me in this regard. He's one of these people that's doing this to AGI. The AGI pigeon flutters off, right? Yeah. I'd like to not croak sooner than later, but like, you know what I'm saying? I'm not like some kind of linchpin in the universe. If I'm having a time in my life where I feel like I've been net productive to society and had a decent time of it myself, it is what it is. I can always get hit by a bus tomorrow. Am I going to index really highly on trying to never die? I could put that hat on. It fits real well. But some of the choices I've made and continue to make don't comport with that entirely. What matters much more to me is that the rest of the world grows up and matures and evolves into the next thing. My own story is very secondary. So while I'm taking quite reasonable steps, I am making some trade offs for the here and now versus for the future that I don't recommend other people make. I am not somehow like some kind of like philosopher. Where I live my own stuff, I live some of it. But I'm just one human being. And so I think that many people should really invest in the long term because I think for the first time, and this is really crazy to say, if you don't croak for another 10 or 15 years on a human relevant timescale of like before the black hole comes and swallows us all, or before protons decay, you may never die. When the hell could we ever say that? So if that isn't something that gets you excited about aging reversal and longevity, I don't know what the to tell you then. Just yolo eat a lot of really tasty burgers.

So cool. When we were chatting before, we're both converging on this idea that if you travel back in time and you're hanging out with Homo erectus and you're asking them to map the future of existence, this is a million years ago. We both agree that they wouldn't have the models of reality to even say anything intelligent. So they wouldn't be able to talk about quantum mechanics or about technology or about markets or money or the electromagnetic.

Spectra or even about city states.

Exactly how like people organize in large.

1500 people living together. That's crazy.

Yeah, something basic like a tractor in the field harvesting.

Oh my God, like all wheel.

So they, they basically can't say anything. And so I guess as we talk about this, we both see the next 10 to 15 years to be consequential beyond our ability to explain. We can't really fathom it. And so in, in my calculus of reality, the only thing I'm trying not to do is not die.

Mm.

That's it. And that's why the anti aging efforts, it's not to try to achieve immortality, it's to try to not die. Because this, these series of events are happening that are going to change our outlook and perspectives.

And so do you want to see that personally?

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. I mean I so do I. I genuinely don't want to die now. That is different than wanting to live forever.

Sure.

I just don't want to die. And so in this moment, I wonder if in like 10 years from now, if we're talking, if the world has changed so much that our models of reality would have us say existence is the highest virtue.

I do think existence is the highest virtue.

There's like there's no other game. Making money is not the game. Acquiring status, not the game. Acquiring power is not the game. AI has transformed the world where human games are rewritten entirely.

Sure.

And so in that case, you know, in that moment, hopefully biotech is at a point where we're able to do things very quickly. Maybe not like maybe biotech will take some more time to develop. And so in that moment, I guess my question for you is like you're making these trade offs now also you know that something big is happening. And so I wonder, is there a contradiction in that, in your own mind of like what you want right now in the trade off space and that it may come at a cost of this magnificent moment that's coming?

Yeah. There's a discount for the just hit by a bus scenario. So if I over index on how salient the future is in my mind and I just like fall into a ravine and die on my way down, I'd be like, man, I sure as shit wish I would have been more jacked and had fun while it lasted. Maybe. So that maybe assuages some of the contradiction the other Thing is, if you take two points, they're quite different and you accept both of them to be preferences and have some marginal trade off between them. I don't think there's necessarily a contradiction there. So I eat very healthy, I stay very lean, I'm very muscular, but no longer taking high amounts of anabolic steroids. All of my blood work ever has come back phenomenal. Most people in my family live like too fucking long. You know, the old Jews, you're just like, why the fuck are you still here? Like 90. But curmudgeony is still sharp but pissed. So that's half my family. And so like I'm not like, you know, carelessly freewheeling into, into just like boozing myself to death and shit like that. So there's something there. To me, it really, I do see myself as just. If you told me right now, listen, I'm from the future, all of this shit happens. But you can't be there to see it because you're not going to make it. I'll be like, nah, fuck, who gives a shit really? Oh yeah. To me, the, the beauty of our modern world and technological progress progressing is so beyond me, it's transcendent in a religious way. Gladly give my life thoughtlessly, Jared and I both would to get this progress to a higher probability. So I don't need to be there to see it. Now, if I'm there to see it, will I cry? Tears of beauty? Yes. A few years back, Jared and I were walking around the campus of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I went to school. We were just like, it was summer, it was fun just being existing. And we saw one of the first prototype delivery robots just wheeling down the road. We both cried in public because. Not like, like, what happened? Did you lose somebody? This is a robot. Because it was like, oh my, oh my God. Like him and I had been thinking about this theorizing about so long, reading Kurzweil and others so long, and for a long time these were just predictions. And you know, people say, oh, this was it. Somebody said the singular. Belief in the singularity is a religion for people of IQ 145. That was fun to say in 2005. Really pithy, really New Yorker type of shit. And then nowadays it's like, you fucking idiot, this shit's coming like now and you're in it. Like, oops. And so those moments of witnessing transcendence are gorgeous beyond belief. But I am just one human. And the most important thing to me at this point, value system wise, is that the Great Awakening occurs, which means that a machine intelligence that has read and continues to read vast fractions of the Internet continues to interact daily with almost all humans through robotic or other APIs, and is learning and understanding and living in the world and true deep consciousness like we could never comprehend. As long as that thing's kicking, I'm a fucking sideshow.

Yeah. Do you think it's possible that you yourself may evolve to a point where your current frame of mind is unrecognizable to your future self? That in the scenario you painted in. So in 2030, there's Mike. Right. And looking back on this conversation right now and seeing how you express ideas of self sacrifice and of, you know, taking a bullet and like, those are definitely. Those are cultural norms that we'd identify with today of. Right. Do you think it's possible there could be a version of Mike that can observe Mike objectively and see it, but is not even closely relatable, that has none of the same viewpoints or models or values, but is entirely a different being? Can you imagine that scenario?

Yes, possible. I think there's a lot of nuance in how that's expressed and a few probability ranges. I look back at the thoughts and opinions I had when I was in high school. There is a core of, like, belief in objective reality, belief in a roughly consequentialist nature of events, belief in the deep revelatory power of mathematics and so on that have just stood the test of time. They're just true. And so I was already with it there, but. And I'm with it today, I was like, oh, I got that right. There's tons of other stuff I did not get right and tons of other labors under mass delusion that I was, you know, engaging in. Yeah, that it was just like, whoa, holy shit, that I have that wrong. So, no doubt some of those 180s are in store, but I do suspect that some of the things that I've come to realize are probably true, at least as how I can see it in 10 or years or something. If I'm still around, I look back and be like, well, I had some shit right and I had some shit wrong. So can I imagine a world in which everything's turned completely upside down? I can imagine in the sense that I can attach the emotion of an blissful ignorance of awe. But can I imagine what sorts of things would that would entail? No. By definition, because I'm constrained to a current worldview, I can reach real far with my imagination, typically. And do some really crazy shit. Here's take a quick walk for this. What matters to me is how I look. The only reason that matters to me is purely some combination of genetics and environment that has neurally architected me to really care emotionally about what appears in the mirror and how I feel. My. How big is my gut? How are my muscles? All this other stuff. Let's say we do brain to cloud, which I think is inevitable unless we're so useless to AI that it's just like. Just live out your biological lives. We don't need to upload shit. We already know enough. Uploading human brain to the cloud and now you exist in virtual space. That's cool, because you can live a thousand different matrix fantasies. Dope. Cool. I'll be doing a whole lot of that. So I think, and I think, okay, if I'm a brain in the cloud, I'm going to be able to live in a reality, like simulated at a thousand x normal speed. So every several days I live like a year of life where I'm like a champion bodybuilder, where I'm like doing crazy, like, you know, like fully immersive, like adult activities, right? With all kinds of crazy stuff. But then I think, okay, okay, okay. But my whole brain's in the cloud. What if we get to the part of my brain that chooses sexual proclivities and chooses body composition, affect relations through visual examination, and tune it to where it's either excised or grossly modified, and then I'm quote unquote, the same person, but I literally no longer care about how I look. Also, brain of the cloud, there is no how you look. I'd be like, oh, my God. Like when VR fully comes in, a fully immersive VR, My own thought to myself was like, I'm going to have so much goddamn sex with every fucking thing that moves in that space because it's all irrelevant. So it's all fully immersive adult experience. But if you can edit the part of you that even wants that and you can edit it down, it's no longer a thing. Imagine talking to some kind of upscaled chimp. You'd be like, what do you want out of living in a VR space? He's going to be like, so many bananas. You motherfuckers have never seen this many. So many females of reproductive age. And I'm a clan leader and no one even steps to me. And that one other chimp that kicked me when I was 13 years old, everywhere, everyone hates him. You're like, yeah, that is understandable, but oddly parochial. But expectedly so. No doubt. If I make it that far, I'm going to have some like, oh, I'm a different person altogether. And my last thing I'll say is actually very not curious about what I'll think, very curious about what the machine superintelligence thinks. I want less of my opinions expressed about what I want about the world and more like, hey, GPT7, what are we supposed to do with all this? Can you help us help ourselves? Can you explain some shit that to me is one of the reaching stars of artificial general intelligence is like, I want something smarter than me around by a long shot. You know what I mean? When's that coming? Damn it. How many more interviews do I have to do until I get AGI?

Yeah, I mean, we may already be there. I wonder, I mean, if we spun up an AI of all your past interviews. Right. Everything you've ever produced. Like, we've done this with my stuff. Okay, so we have an AI of me and.

Am I speaking to it now? Excellent robotic interface.

Thank you. We worked hard on it.

Thank you. It does that every now and again. We don't even know what the bug is. We don't care.

Yeah. With this basic model, it has enough text from me where I have articulated many of my life experiences, many of my viewpoints, my thought patterns are pretty similar on how I map the world. So it's not unreasonable that a current AI of me could take the best of me and then become better. Like, it wouldn't have to. Wouldn't take much to just add some slight additional, Some new patterns on top to make me more creative or to have a large vocabulary or to understand more concepts or to bridge new things together. So that's the thing. My belief is that it's already happening that AI is better at being you than you are in many elements of who you are. Now it can't navigate a kitchen environment and make breakfast as well as you. Although, maybe close, it means soon, very soon. Maybe it can't do certain interpersonal relationships of understanding, nuance and context.

You talk to GPT4. It's damn good. It's better than me in many regards. It's so much kinder, so much gentler.

Exactly. But I'm seeing, like, in the, like, the far edge cases, the nuances. What I'm saying is, especially with specific.

People you know and have a history with, it doesn't have anything on that. Yeah.

So I feel like we're at this point where AI is already in emergent cases better at being us than we are. Like it's done.

Yeah.

And so in that case my mind goes to the only thing we should do as a species is just lock in and say let's not die. And so I view like any action that we take and this could be like me doing something like staying up all night or eating poor bad food or not taking care of my body. Those are all acts of self destruction. And even though we understand these things of like oh I'm taking a day off or I'm relaxing or I'm having a good time with friends, like whatever the thought follow on thought experiment is or excuse, I'm still doing something that is accelerating my age. It's actually lessening my biological abilities as a person. And if we say that pattern can be mapped to other things like when we change the environment of planet Earth to maybe be less hospitable to the species, that's a bad thing. When. So I'm trying to map all the things in the world we do right now where when you say death is inevitable, you then yolo your way to all these decisions.

Yeah.

And so what I'm getting out with the trade off space you're making. And what I want to talk to you about is I want us to be an army on this earth.

I knew you were going to get to the Dracula show sooner.

Exactly. So here we are and like to rise up and we say like we're going to recognize this moment for what it is and we're going to be around for this thing. And the enemy is our proclivity to yolo our way to death. And that may be individual behaviors, it may be going to war, it may be killing each other, it may be other forms of violence and maybe on the earth. But the basically to try to eliminate from all of our, all of us this trade off space we have of pleasure and or debauchery or whatever. And it's just a new era of being human and that we can't say anything intelligent about the future. Like we're, we are blind to what we may be and become. We just can't even map our values and norms. That's why I guess when we started talking about this I was thinking through like your life decisions and my life decisions and how we're both trying to play this game, how we think about it. We're both front facing talking to people in the world about building muscle and about getting good sleep and like we're taking our own avenues. But it really is not in this intertwined way of like, hey everybody, can we just have an honest conversation? Like what is really happening right now? And do our behaviors map at all to this bigger picture? Because a lot of times I think people can say I'm doing my thing, but it doesn't really have an impact on the larger big picture thing. Like what's going to happen to OpenAI or anthropic is their own trajectory and like little old me, like, what am I going to do? I don't think that's true.

Okay, why not?

Because everyone behaves and it has a ripple effect where we work, who we vote for, what have, what kind of friend we are, the opinions we express, we post on social media, the comments I make, we're all contributing to this emergent thing as a species.

Sure.

And when you multiply that and you say it's hundreds of millions or billions of us doing this, it's overall zeitgeist. And so when someone like yourself or someone like me, we have certain positions where people listen to us to say certain things, then we really are in these positions of authority. And so if you see it, if you see this moment and there's not many people who do, like, who genuinely see what's happening right now. Yeah, I mean, sure, like maybe more.

And more, but like, I'm not disagreeing.

Very few people like really understand the extent of how much reality could change.

How much better the future is going to be in every regard and how long the future can be. So basically to really red team my own position.

Yeah.

I am trying to locally optimize for the next five to ten years of YOLOing. And what I could have with brain and cloud plus rapid computing is 500,000 years of pure ecstatic scientific exploration and unity with the great knowledge that AGI will collect. Holy shit, is that myopic. I'm really, really optimizing for the wrong thing. It's like a three year old with a beautiful life ahead approaching a electrical socket with a fork. Like, this is going to be fun, but how fun compared to the rest of your life? So there's definitely something to be said for that. And I think for most people they are undervaluing that to a considerable extent. And because almost everyone is net useful to the society at large, most people are net productive. And I think with the enormous emphasis that is likely to come on AI studying all of us, like there's a data problem in AI. Right. I think it's insanely overstated, but that's neither here Nor there again the technical AI discussions for dilettantism another time. But it's going to be apparent that people probably be getting money, substantial money, probably enough money to live, just so that drones and robots and your interfaces can study every single thing you do as long as you're awake. All of your decisions to get as much training data for the major foundation models as possible, everyone then, even if they're not in some obvious way productive, is hugely helpful to creating this wisdom machine. And more than that, there's so many great things ahead that if you're struggling through a tough time right now, things are going to get so immeasurably better, you're going to wish you were there. And so really indexing on not taking any irrational risks. Yes, investing in your health, investing in longevity, at least the basics, is probably the smartest thing you can ever do as a rational human being. 100%. And to whatever extent I do or do not embody that, the genetic fallacy is to ascribe where an opinion comes from, the validity of that opinion. I think that opinion I just shared is valid, even though I'm a gigantic steroid addict who's no, no, no doubt circling the drain in his last several years of life.

Yeah. So this is what I wonder if we could team up on, you know, like people.

I'm good, man. Next segment.

Yeah, that's funny because that's like, that's like a legitimate response, you know, like, it's true.

I definitely want to hear.

It's. It's not, I don't think the things that people want are necessarily truth. Right. Whether you want like more muscle or whether you want more money or whether you want more status or more power or whatever.

Yes.

Those things are just ephemeral, social, cultural phenomena.

Typical rich guy bullshit. Here we go.

But people, people, people want something to focus on meaning. Yeah. So they want a, they want objective, they want people like difficult things. Exactly. And so it's not like the things that are in place right now are truths of intelligence, they're just constructions of our reality. Right. And like you could see these games going away. And that's why I think pointing humanity in a new direction to say we have a new game to play. It starts with not dying, but it really is like this humility that we don't quite know what's coming. And so it's this unknowing which gives us power, but definitely we want to embrace, not making the trade offs of the YOLO debauchery or whatever because these games are no longer worth our attention. We really want to play new games as species, we're evolutionary moving into this new game. It makes sense. We change our new games to want different things.

I love that perspective. I think that there's kind of the old way of assuming you have a trajectory after age, whatever. You get older and things sort of degrade, then you die. The future game is there's going to be a you like entity that is perseverating for some time and changing radically with time. Yeah, that's where I think it's going. The bridging the gap part is very curious. And I think there are two ways to go about it or more than two ways. Yours is to tell people, listen, you're gonna want to do these things, which is super, super true. And right on. Maybe the thing I can bring to the table is to at least get people to look at their YOLO trade offs.

Yeah.

And go like, if this really matters to you, God bless you. I'm a libertine person. Politically. Freedom is dope. Wealth, wealth and freedom. That was my two political philosophies right there. But if you want to drink alcohol and stay up all odd hours, listen, if you've thought it through and it's really worth it to you, I can't do anything but like, like your Instagram photos of you throwing up in the sink. But give it some thought and think, is there anything on the margins that I can do to push the longevity thing forward? Because I think you're going to probably thank yourself for it later on. Because I think if you too much get into that space of like, obviously longevity, you're going to gain a lot of traction. And you're going to not gain traction with some people. Some people can't be reached in a totalistic way yet. Some people just need to be met where they're at on the margins. And it's so much better than not. So you'll be the perfect exemplar of these philosophies and I'll be your fallen angel to be like, look, if you're a real idiot, you can at least be like Mike and. And entertain some healthy eating and exercise every now and again.

Yeah. Okay. So I guess on that note, do you want to. Should we look at your results?

Yeah. I can't wait to see how terribly I did. I like that you breathe out like a sigh of a heavy sigh. Oh my God. It's in a cool little envelope.

Yeah, it's a cool envelope. This is a legit presentation. All right. Here we go. So first, the vizia scan. This is. This measures age of skin. Yeah. So typically. Yeah, sun exposure, you know, can have a cost and then. Okay, so the score came in age 44. Not bad.

Terrible.

No.

So I'm biologically. Sorry, chronologically. 40.

Yeah.

So age 44. Skin baby. That makes sense. Right?

And not bad. I would say we've seen a lot worse. Okay, yeah. So good job.

My skin care routines involve on every several days putting some kind of generic soap on my face.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, I. Same for the first.

My skin is my sunblock. Usually.

Yeah. For the first 43 years of my life, same thing. I never even applied a cream.

What's that for?

All right, spirometry. This is lung capacity. 99th percentile.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Good job.

I have a lot of lung.

Yeah, good job. So 13.2 liters per second.

Thank you so much.

Okay, your advanced glycated end products. Great score.

No way.

Age 23.

23.

Yep, yep. The score, take that 1.3. So fantastic job. If you got to a 1.2, it would be age 18. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you're. You're very good on that.

So how does one improve their glycated end product scale?

It's very hard. There's very few therapies that. Actually, it's mostly accumulation of junk, right. From, like, from fried foods, foods cooked at high temperatures, etc, but yeah, very hardy.

Copious amounts of steroids.

Yeah, yeah.

Sort of thing.

So, yeah, so good job on that.

All right.

Grip strength, 99th percentile. Yeah, makes sense. 132.8 pounds. The 99th percentile for men is 127. So you're five.

Oh, dope.

Five pounds above. Very cool. So you're doing very well. Push ups, 46. So 90th percentile within your age group.

Sure.

And then if you want it to be 90th percentile for all men, it'd be 56.

Oh, yeah, I could have done that. No problem.

Yeah.

You watched me just quit.

At some point I wondered.

Yeah, the marginal risk of even a minor injury for my physique goals at this point doesn't make any sense. If I clown showed myself on a podcast and even did a little pulling of the pec because I went closer to failure, I would never be able to forgive myself in a million years. I told myself a long time ago that. So, like, I do a lot of collabs and shit and they're like, oh, do you want to, like, flip this tire? Hell no. My biceps not coming off. So as soon as I got a pretty decent pump and felt a little juicy and like I did well enough on this test to do pretty well, I more or less quit.

I'm so with you like that. I think about life through that frame everywhere.

There you go.

Yeah. Yeah. And people always think it's such so odd. It's like, why don't you want to flex in this moment? Like, no. Like, absolutely not worth it.

Yeah. That's what highlight reel fail videos are for.

Yeah.

I thought it was time.

I'm not doing that. We're doing different content.

Exactly.

Okay. Sit and reach. This is 50th percentile.

All right.

In the middle.

I don't want to stand out. I'm not somebody freak gymnast.

No offense.

Gymnasts.

Yeah. 15 inches. And so eight additional inches would put. Would put you in the 99th percentile.

Right. Have I ever heard that statement more than three times in my life?

I walked right into that. Okay.

Yeah, that's what she said.

Sit and stand, 9.5. So your technique was very good. 63rd percentile.

All right.

Yeah.

What do people score above 10 or something like that?

10.

Almost everyone scores a 10 except for me. The wobbling.

But, you know, I can't score 10.

No way.

Yeah. I haven't tried your technique, though. Your technique is very good.

Delivered on the spot.

Yeah. I can sit with no help, but then coming up and so I'm the complete opposite.

Yeah. I can't sit with. There's a leverage situation for me where there's like a lot of stuff in the way.

Yeah.

Like when your quads get big enough and your torso is big enough.

Yeah.

Sitting vertically straight down to your butt is kind of like how.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I need to. Actually, I've. I only tried it once. I need to actually work on it. Maybe if I found some greater flexibility or something.

But rig the scale.

One more result. One legged stand. Thirteen seconds was nine. Ninth percentile.

That's low, huh?

It's low. So the range here is. So the 99th percentile for men would be 35 seconds.

Okay. Is there a way we can go through all of these where I caveat everything to make it look like I was barely trying so that I can.

I think so, yeah. Yeah.

What a fun use of.

Your first attempt. Your first attempt was what, four seconds? Five seconds? Yeah. And then you tried and got to 13.

Yeah.

So, yeah. So I think you were definitely on the trajectory, but I mean, overall, this is. These are like markers.

What's the balance Thing indicating you think what does it say about what? So clearly direct balance doesn't help you not age. What, what are the underlying inferential things we can pull out as far as what is balance and neural health or something like that.

As you age, your balance deteriorates.

No way. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I've done tests like this throughout my life and as soon as my eyes close I get wobbly enough to just not give a anymore about trying any harder. So I'm like that. Yeah, it's a curious test. I wonder about my neural health.

Yeah.

Because anabolics are no good for that. Though I do take a few supplements and I do get lots of sleep and all this other stuff. I do wonder about how much my burning at the stake work wise because like I got an interesting machine up there. It likes to think. And like do I not recess back away from intense thinking often enough to get the repair processes going? I do wonder about that occasionally. Self investigated estimates of cognitive capacity are always an everywhere dog.

Yeah.

But I don't feel substantially stupider than when I was younger. I also feel like my ability to have deep revelations about complex concepts has increased substantially since then. So I can't say I'm like duller in some capacity. I do have a thing where I think that if we make it another five to 10 years, the neural regenerative therapies are going to be so absurdly powerful that like I can lose a few IQ points and afford it. Though you want to be as smart as possible, what is your thinking about optimizing for intellect? And it's a bit of a, how do I say this best? It's nerve wracking to think about what do you have about that.

But probably in a few times throughout history where certain people and certain cultures needed to have coherent clear thinking. So for example, in the early days of the Cold war, do you do it or not? When you're in crisis of there's a global pandemic, how do you think about what to do and why? You know, like what are the levers you have and how do you work together as a society? How do you communicate it? Do you lie to the truth? You know, like sure, where you need.

To real game theory type.

You need to have good judgment. And judgment of course is a like a branch of intelligence. Yes, but I, I think of that we've never needed wisdom more than this moment.

Yeah, but wisdom is more tilted into the crystallized part of intelligence and less into fluid intelligence. So I guess that's older people probably make better choices in any given situation than younger people, especially a large intellectual space, because they've seen, it's like a very powerful AI model that's been trained on very little data versus a not so powerful model that's seen a lot of data. Second model is going to do better because it's just seen a lot of data. So I guess it's kind of maybe good, maybe I'm wrong about this, but like, it absolutely pays to be as smart as humanly possible now more than ever.

Yeah.

Though not from a survival perspective, from an enhancement perspective.

Yeah.

Back in the day, you were stupid, you died. Nowadays you're stupid and you just continue to watch stupid TV and sit in your house. Yeah, but I think that with the wisdom of age counterbalances the cognitive decline from sheer neurological physiology somewhat. Do you agree with that or do you think like, we got to do our best on all fronts?

The flip side of that is that knowing too much is a detriment. And that, you know, with age you've, you've created your patterns of life and then you apply your patterns to all things. Which is why this very common situation happens where younger people disrupt older people, where, yes, younger people have new ideas, they're open to new things, and older people who are more ingrained in their ideas are resistant to these new things which are inevitable, but they just, their old patterns don't match. So it's definitely a trade off where I don't think that one side necessarily has an advantage. There's wisdom of seeing things having happened before. You don't have the naive contemplations. But when you're more open minded and spry, you're more aware you can create new discoveries of new patterns, new possibilities. Yeah, the other one's foreclosed. And so, yeah, I'd say, like on this question, I was talking to this gentleman working in AI and he said, I stopped applying sunscreen because AI is just going to solve it for me. And so now this is like a pattern. You were saying as well that many people are thinking like they're basically, they're yoloing our way. Typically people say, I'm going, I might as well do this because I'm going to die anyways. Now people are saying, I might as well do this because AI is going to fix it.

I have a third take for you.

Okay.

It doesn't matter if I do it because AI is so much bigger than all of us. It's the show now and I'm a sideshow. Just to put that in the. I'm not saying that's a correct view.

Yeah, yeah.

Just something to add to the cauldron of.

Yeah. It's almost like any way you squeeze the problem, humans are going to come up with a clever way of justifying not doing what they don't want to do.

Justifying doing what they've already done. And like.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But like, there's just. It's such a squirrely situation. Yeah. Well, Mike, I've. I've really enjoyed hanging out with you again. A great time we had. We have so much more in common than I realized and really enjoyed hanging out. It was a lot of fun. And do you have any feedback for me? Like, what. What do you think this podcast could do? So, given what I'm trying to do in the world, what should this podcast be about? What should I talk about? What should be the angle?

Why are we talking? What is your goal with a podcast? What is your most general way to. To, in several or one sentence, state your goal with the podcast? If someone, let's say your media team is like, dude, the podcast takes a lot of editing throughput. We got a ton of other shit, ton of other collabs. Why are we doing this again? What would you tell them? See, you need to work on that. I'm kidding.

I'm trying to do information compression.

Of course.

I want a billion of us humans to band together and devote ourselves to that. We will not die individually as a species with Earth and with AI that we. We opt in and say yes to a future. We don't know if it's good or bad. We just opt in and say, this could be the most extraordinary existence in. It's ever happened in this part of the galaxy.

Yeah.

And it could be ours. And there's nothing. There's no prize that is bigger than this and that. We reframe our entire existence and say we are doing this.

I can think of a lot of folks you could have on here and conversations you could have. I'll give you maybe like four classes that come to me instantly. One is helping people figure out how to live music. You're saying, live, like, what is. What is a good life to you? How to be productive in society. How to have deep personal meaning. You could talk to so many people about that. And I have good psychological health. How to be motivated at work and think about what things are the things you really want to be working on. What are future career paths? Because a lot of people are like, if AI is the show, what the hell am I doing here? Well, you're a big part. Here's a way to do all these things. So that's one thing for sure you can talk about till you're blue in the face. Another one is having research scientists that are working deeply in the space of anti aging aging reversal, cosmetics, physique alteration through the scientific approach. Like you know, plastic surgeons and skin removal specialists and facial de aging and just talk to them about like what's in the pipeline, what are you working on and what is currently empirically validated to sound. Because unfortunately our space of fitness and health is filled with an unbelievable amount of empirically validated awesome things and like a 10 to 1 ratio of just like bullshit fly by night dogma insane schemes of people being like laying this fucking dumbass machine and have these raised blaster dumbass. It's going to cost $50,000. But there's one study out of like some lab in Denmark in 2003 that said it was good and that's it. Like we can do better than this. So getting some legit killers research wise to come in here and say what is the standard? And the thing is that's not content area that ever ends because there's always updates and there's always more people. And with your, for lack of a better term, clout you can have all kinds of, you know, head of whatever UCLA's whatever medicine come sit here and tell you all about what's coming. And also so have a skeptical discussion or two about people are like look, here are the biggest myths in anti aging that we have to abandon so that we can get to the right stuff. Because there's so many of those. So that's a content category you could for sure do. Another one is like I don't know if you want to dip into this but like dealing with emotional difficulties in your life like you said you were at some point I don't want to use the S word on here because YouTube doesn't like that thinking there may be the no point to continue on. No doubt you learned a lot about yourself and if you had to speak to someone who was going through that thought process, you could probably with your wisdom now tell them a lot about why to keep going and talk to a lot of other people about like have people on the body psychologists and other people have been through difficult things veterans of war to talk about like in the darkest times, describe the times. What is it that we can hold on to? What are the strategies to keep going? Because a lot of people end their lives Needlessly, all the time. Right now you want a billion of us to make it, you're going to have to dip into that and be like, guys, listen, come through. I think those are some of the categories that you can lean into that are very, very fruitful and will help advance the cause. Maybe.

Yeah, very practical. Yeah.

So the question was about aesthetics. Aesthetics is really interesting and actually I think can bridge the gap for many people with age reversal and anti aging. This doesn't sound so nice. I mean in the best way, I promise you. Tell people that are in their 30s, listen, you gotta think about anti aging and longevity. And they're like, you know, like people, quote unquote, die in like their 80s now, I guess. 70s, 80s, whatever. That's so far off, it's almost sometimes too far off to really like you said many times, our ability to comprehend what's in the future is so dusty that there's nothing even there. And so you may not get much traction with people to convince them to really care in their 30s and even 40s about like, look really like you have to care about the stuff. Because I have so many relatives that are in their 60s and they're living a great life. Like they're still kicking, they don't do anything, they just drink and smoke all day and they're still alive. But aesthetics is kind of like a cheater way to get in there. There are two types of people. The following is a joke with some grain of truth. Two types of women in the 30s, ones that hope to God aging reversal comes soon. Or liars. I'm kidding. But not so much. And much is the case with males as well. There are very few males in their 40s and 50s which don't want a smaller waist with a tight abdominal midsection and big bulging muscles, at least lean muscles. It's like, hey, do you want your 22 year old body back? Like, what the hell is that? Like a trick question? Of course I do. And so a lot of the beautiful revelations that are gonna be made in biology also have incredible profit motive. Instant stream to be adopted by the plastics industry, plastic surgery and the people that currently make cosmetics. As soon as they get wind of the fact that like, hey, we have new drugs now, that means you just have a 22 year old girl face forever and makeup is just optional for the club, they're gonna buy shares in that motherfucker so goddamn fast they'll trip to get there. And so I think one of the ways maybe to reach a lot of people with anti aging Stuff that are a little too young to really appreciate the finality of death. As someone who's in their 70s are like anti aging. They're like, yes. Where, please God. Unless they, you know, resign themselves to be like, I'm good.

Yeah.

So I think with aesthetics you can really get to a lot of people and be like, look like if you are biologically younger, then it's going to reflect itself in how you move, how you talk, how you think, how you feel, the color of your hair, the thickness of it, you, your face. And you get going enough on that. And people are like, what do you have on skin? Tightness. And as soon as you're like, look, there's stuff in the pipeline that's going to make your skin as tight as you were in your 20s. They're like that, I want that. I'm in. And all of a sudden they're doing fitness, they're doing health, they're working out, they're eating better, they're sleeping better. Because if you tell somebody like, hey, you should get more sleep, they're like, I'm partying. Fun, right? But what are you partying with your little rock star 22 year old body? Cute. I love it. It's great. How long you think you got that thing going? You smoking 18 cigarettes a night and drinking eight beers. That is wearing down. It's fun to use up when you're young. You're going to want to use it later. Right? Right. So if you get lots of sleep on average and save the going out psychosis for every now and again and you get lots of good food in you when you're 27 and some of your girlfriends you secretly didn't like have bags under their eyes and crow's feet and like that. And all the botox just makes them look like Barbie dolls instead of real humans. You are still in the prime of your. Don't you want to be that? And a lot of people are like like, yeah, hell yeah, I want to be that. And so re architecting things away from like the finger wagging like, you should get enough sleep because you know, your parents are like, you should get enough sleep. And you're like, why? Like, because. And then they slam the door and you're in the dark. That doesn't work so well in adults, especially young adults. For those folks, I think it's the enhancement side that's going to work well. And you can start with aesthetics. Like, do you just want to just straight up look better just to look sexier? They're going to be like, yes, like, okay, you're going to want to look at all this anti aging stuff because it's going to make you look better for longer. Yeah, maybe it'll bite. What do you think?

Yeah, it's. It's the surest path.

It's the surest path, which I think maybe where you and I can connect to a large extent is I'm on the aesthetic side purely like my entire company's motto is get everyone the closer to the physique they want to be in than otherwise. And then your side is the deeper anti aging side. Oh man. Those dovetail are folks that are clientele at RP who are in their 50s. They want both Kool Aids and they want to mix together.

Exactly.

So we got to get our.

Yeah, I agree. That's a great. Yeah, we found it.

There it is.

I really enjoyed the conversation. Like. Yeah, I think initially we met because I think you were talking shit about me.

Exactly.

Yeah. And I made a nice comment in return.

It was an incredibly awesome move.

Yeah.

And it could have gone completely differently.

Yeah.

Now if you actually watch the video. I was respectful.

I know you guys do. Yeah.

But you know what? I just struggle with that. Cause like people love it when I'm a cocksucker on the Internet because I got that bullshit. But then again, like, I'm trying to make it over time more and more. Like everyone's laughing together, not against other people. And you're not a fucking charlatan. So I have no problem giving you love when it's due. I do have a reservation in my heart for like people who are like liver king type people.

Brian Johnson.

Yeah, Brian Johnson. So many Brian Johnsons. I get you too confused. I'm like, you son of a. Wait a minute. You look almost the same. And wait, what? I do struggle with the fact that where is my own personal line between, look, we're all flawed. Well, you're not flawed. I got to that joke really late and so I said, all of us. I didn't mean you, Lord my lordship. And am I really going to alienate other people on a big platform and say they're charlatans and liars? On the one hand, on my bad days, I say, yeah, fuck them, because they're like literally bad actors. But on my better days I'm like, is there a way to bring them in or at least not talk about them and give them some love? I do think there is a social value for exposing charlatanism. It's probably a big deal. Does it Feel good for me to do it? No. Do I begrudgingly do it because I think it's important? Yes. I don't even know where I'm going with that. I just don't know how to parse that space. And that's one of those things I'm still learning how to do. Like, I love being a voice for positivity and inclusion more than I like anything else. But does the witty banter and the dogging on people who kind of suck also do well and is maybe valuable in itself?

You, basically, you're acting like autophagy, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're trying to act as a cleanup mechanism.

Exactly, yeah. Which is a loveless job. And honestly, like, I remember I made some criticisms of Hollywood trainers when we first started the whole Friday show we do on YouTube. And on the one hand, a lot of these people just charge people obscene amounts of money, make belief, various principles into existence, and just run away with the cash. So them. But the other hand, like, imagine being one of these guys that makes a living from training and then some asshole on the up and up who now everyone knows is a household name or whatever household head is just talking mad about you. That's damn near personal. Like, I would hate that. I don't like that I did those things. And I'm still kind of dealing with how much positivity to call out culture am I willing to put up with in my own head, in my own action? Do you have any advice on that regard? You know what I mean? Because it's like, imagine you'd be like, hey, like, Vladimir Putin is toasting hundreds of thousands of people for nothing. Some kind of delusional grandeur, aspiration that's completely off base. And then someone's like, look, like, I'm an expert assassin, paid well. I 100% pull a fucking bullet on his head. We'll end this whole war. Would you be like, look, like we don't do that? Because even though Vladimir Putin's an evil man, he's a human like us, and he's on our humanity survival team, and we want him in. How do you parse that? What do you think? You're taking money from Putin, aren't you? Braintree didn't grow itself. A lot of Russian developers.

Yeah.

And I'm not talking about killing people, but even being negative towards people in a way that is exclusionary. Making fun of them, not laughing with them.

Yeah, I mean, I guess like, in. In like a tribe. Tribes are. Are comprised of various personalities, and there's Certainly a productive path of being cooperative and, and kind and dancing to the nuance of those things.

Yes.

There's also a value in not being beholden to the tribe. And so oftentimes I know that many of my friends are in very powerful positions in the world and they have to dance through these really challenging circumstances where they want to do a given thing because they think it's right. But then they have all these powers around them and they do need to work in a system of power and so they become beholden to it. And it's not good or bad, it just is a, is a reality of their system that they've built. Whereas other people basically say, I'm not going to be beholden to anyone under any circumstance and that's just who I am. And that, that's a choice they can make that has repercussions because then certain powers won't align with them. Right. So it's, it's like, it's a path.

So much money you can't make anymore because.

Yeah, exactly. But it's also like you lose some, but then you also gain others because other partners will come into play and say, this is the kind of thing we want.

Yes.

And we align with. So it in the end maybe mixes out to be the same. But I'd say like you, you're carving out a voice where I perceive you trying to be evidence based and do the correct thing. I don't perceive you as having alternative motives. Maybe you do. I can't see it.

I, I don't know what those would be.

But you like you legit. And I, I guess I, I view we're both in a similar place. I'm legitimately trying to do the right thing based upon evidence and results. I don't really care what gets us there. I just want it to be right for the result. And so in doing that, I personally have chosen to not be beholden. And so no one owns me and no one puppets me and no one can tell me what to say and nobody can. So I just do me in my.

Own path, either negative or positive, depending on the context.

Yeah. And so, I mean, I think there's power. You have chosen a path where you're legitimately trying to parse the world and to speak what you think is accurate and you're sufficiently self aware and self deprecating where you know you're gonna be right sometimes, wrong sometimes you're gonna correct yourself. It's like that's the proper balance where if you're in that position and you're assessing others. But then you're either overconfident or you're. You have some lacking self awareness. That's the danger zone. But I think you've got the skill sets to keep on doing you and letting the market respond and rebuild around your observations. But I think most people probably find refuge in an opinion they can trust.

Genuine.

Yeah. Yeah. So if I were you, I'd probably lean into it more. And like, when, when you were talking shit about me, I was like, fine, like, great. You know, it's just, it's fun. It's play. Like you're messing around. I get it. And it's like, did you see my.

Video of me talking shit about. Older version of me? Oh, my God. I mean, excoriated myself.

Yeah, there you go. So, I mean, I think that's, that's a good signal to the, the audience. But yeah, I think you have found, Elaine, you've got traction, you've got momentum. People trust you. And so, like the, the most valuable thing you have is your trust. And so if you were to compromise what you say because you're worried about someone else reacting, that would compromise your value. Right. Because now someone stepped on your trust.

Yeah.

Like, stepped on your ability to tell me what I really want to hear. Because I want to trust you, that you are going to tell me to the best of your abilities, what is evidence based and what, what is in my best interest. Right. Like, you're trying to help people out genuinely.

So that is very valuable feedback, Brian. Thank you so much, man. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna noodle on that for some time.

All right. Should we arm wrestle?

I don't want to lose or get hurt.

I challenge him to an arm wrestle.

I assign you the winner by me withdrawing.

You know what? I did this the other day. Somebody challenged me to the arm wrestle. I did the same thing. I was like, no way. Like, absolutely the worst idea. And they gave me. And I was like, you're stupid.

They prove it. You're like, all right, let's arm wrestle. I was in. When I was an undergrad. I was a competitive power lifter.

Yeah.

And I was at a party and someone asked me to arm wrestle. And I said yes, and I beat them. And I also, like, had a muscle pull.

Yes.

Like a very small forearm muscle, one of the muscles that allows you to supinate. And it just bothered me for like the rest of the day. And then a little bit in training the next day. That little of a downside. I was like, I'm never arm wrestling anyway. Because then you ask like, what's the upside? What was the upside? Yeah, as soon as I beat him, I checked around. There were no of the. None of the females had any more of their pants pulled down than before. And so I was like, well, that's the only upside I was interested in. And then I never did it again. That or hooking up with any females. Yeah, yeah, one of those. Not according to my own choice.

Yeah. A friend of mine, we were at a party and there was someone there, it was like a. A wrestler, jiu jitsu or something. And this person was big, like muscular. And they're like, wrestle him. And I was like, go, go, go. He did it and, you know, he hurt his back.

Which one? The muscular guy.

The muscular guy.

Oh, good.

Yeah. He was like, you know, I'm gonna jump in. But he. He's had two surgeries on his back now, and he's.

Capital H hurt.

It plagues him.

Like, can you imagine having to deal with that?

So I always think of that. Yeah, I always think that it's like every time the smallest of things of like, let's do this thing or that thing.

I think, should I still regret I said to like girls in midd, liked I would not be able to live with myself, like, catastrophic injury for some dumb shit.

Yeah.

Again, when I was younger, I did shit like that. I got hurt low one time. Like, when you're a powerlifter, you get strong enough for your body weight, you can actually jump really high off just being strong. And so like, I would jump onto like three or four foot platforms just from a stand, just when drunk with friends in college. And at one time I actually jumped up onto the thing, but I scraped my knee and I was like, ow. And then I never jumped onto anything and ever again. And when people try to like, play fight with me during video shoots, I just like curl up into a ball. You want a shot at the title? Throw on a gi. We can go no gi. Sign a waiver in a me in a. In a real jiu jitsu gym with mats. We'll warm up. I'll sit to guard so no one gets hurt, and we'll get it popping. Yeah, maybe you'll fuck me up. It's unlikely. Yeah, but you know, and then really the question is, why? What are we trying to ascertain if we're just roughhousing for fun? I love that energy, but I'm not eight anymore. My shit and my body is a little too important for me. To do stuff like that. I don't even like, I don't even throw on the helmet and ride the like mountain like Crystal and I would love to ride bikes around. We have great places do it where we live. But we're like, we train jiu jitsu so much and she's trying to become a killer and I'm trying to get my craft going. They're like if I hurt my elbow in a real serious way just like hitting a fucking stick on a bike, what am I going to tell myself? So I mean it makes us so real quick. It makes us so boring. Like do you have anything to tell people about risk aversion that is exciting and fun? As if people are like dude, these guys suck. They like you stay the fuck out of the sun looking like Dracula. I don't do anything with my body. Even though it does all these things. Like Mike do the thing. I'm like, nope, I'm just gonna sit in the corner and cry. What the hell is our excuse? What's our. What do we tell people?

Yeah. I get this so much.

I get it all the time.

Like bro so maniacally focused on living forever, he forgot how to live.

Yeah.

And so it's like the knee jerk reaction is probably 25% of people say in response to G becoming acquainted with me, they but this is how I feel about the future. Like so in the same way this, this like anything that would compromise your ability to do your craft. I feel like anything that would compromise my ability to live in the future.

Living in the future is your craft.

Is not worth it.

Yeah.

Nothing is worth it. There's no trade off that's worth it. And that's what I'm trying to basically persuade the human race. Nothing. There's no sensorial pleasure. There's no debauchery. There's no level of sensorial pleasure that is worth missing out on. The future like that is my only thing I want to tell the world.

It is self evidently true. If you fast forward in time, only people that care about surviving into the future will be around. And so you'll be surrounded by more like minded people the longer that you're kicking. Because all of the short sighted people are shortsighted and not around anymore.

Yeah. Like they'll just be memories. They'll be worked out of the gene pool. Yeah. I do think that well intentioned intelligent people do actually would actually agree with this. They just don't understand this moment.

It's a different mind frame, very big switch.

They haven't Been they're not aware of it, they can't understand it. And so that's why I was saying this bridge, right? It's like so when an AI researcher is stringing words together about matrix multiplication and about these reinforcement learning models and blah blah blah, that doesn't translate. But when someone who is much more practically relatable to them, like build muscle and work on your physique and sleep well, that's bridgeable. And also friend, take this one more step of like we're doing this because these are building blocks for this much bigger thing we're playing. And that's why I like it is reachable to a group of people that are otherwise they don't understand what's happening. There's no vector for them. It's very hard. And they intuitively they interact with these models but they don't understand how they scale and applications and biology and molecules and engineer of reality.

And we have like what we can do now very relatable. We have a bridge of what's coming down the pipeline that's already worked on that real scientists that have real jobs instead of just fantasizing about the shit can sit and be like we are actually earnestly working on this. And like if you had the guy Demis as Ibis, the guy who leads DeepMind at Google, if you of course amazing. If you had him here and you were like, hey, what's coming with AI drug discovery? He'd probably give you like a wink like crazy. Don't tell anyone but it's. We're working on it that and you have very aspirational ideas. You're saying the future is going to be amazing and so amazing that we can't even comprehend it. Now to me, if I was a red team that that I would say it sounds like another religion. It sounds like faith. How do you know? Maybe the future is really dystopic. A lot of people have really ideas, tons of ideas about dystopic. So I think something I may be able to bring to the table if we ever have one of these in depth discussions again, which hopefully we get a chance to a few more times at least I can also I think a lot about that third pillar of what could the future look like in a reasonable take based on expected trajectories. Wacky stuff. If you get here the middle, if you get the what can you do now? What's in the pipeline? What's there to live for? If you do a lot of conversations between those, you get some people strung along. They're like, yeah, okay, it. I'm long for this.

Yeah, I totally agree. Like, so Demis to give him a shout out. He and I started hanging out 10 years ago. Also a fantastic human.

That's awesome.

I would love to see him in a position of power in the world. I think he has the right power. I do. I think he has the right combination and like, he just has the. He's really well built constitutionally to, I think, navigate trippings of power. And I love him. But he was. Let me say one thing he was doing. He was basically saying his whole thesis on existence was if you solve intelligence, intelligence solves all things.

Correct.

All.

Solves all tractable things.

Yes. Yeah.

And any debate about that is rendered null because you're not intelligent enough to debate with something much more intelligent than you.

And that's been. His whole quest is like, he's just trying to solve intelligence. And like, we humans are a certain form of intelligence and we have certain positive attributes or negative attributes. There's all kinds of externalities.

A lot of limitations too.

We do, yeah. So I really admire. And he's just been maniacal in that pursuit, you know, from DeepMind through his days at Google. So. But I'm glad that he, you know, that is his objective.

So have you seen the Lord of the Rings situation? The whole trilogy? So if someone found the Ring of Power and it's more or less anyone else, and they're looking at you and they're doing this, you're kind of like, don't, don't do it. But if it's damaged, you're like, do it, do it. Put it on. He's like, I don't know. You'll do it right now.

Go. That's right.

And then he gets the eye, the whole thing.

That's right. I agree with you entirely.

Put on the Ring of Power. I think that's probably going to summarize our discussion. Frodo, don't be a little wuss. Put the ring on. Go to Mordor, do that shit.

Yeah, yeah. And I think the argument is that. I think the idea is there's a small number of people that are going to change the future existence. I think it's actually a billion of us are going to. Because I think that it's going to be. Governments are going to make decisions on how to regulate. They're going to make decisions on what to build, what not to build. People are going to make cultural decisions on what to be and not to be. We're going to decide whether to go to war or not. Like we're going to make all these decisions as a pot. As like a species. And so I think we do need all of us engaged in this conversation. It's not a situation where we're on the sidelines observing. We are actually all of us are in the game and I think we're much more consequential than we give ourselves credit.

Thank you for raising my already high anxiety. I'm kidding.

Is your anxiety down since you stopped taking this?

Substantially. It's down to non clinical level. Else as you can probably see. I don't know.

I've never experienced anxiety, but I would imagine that's just bold claim. Awful. I just, I would imagine I've been worried about stuff before.

Just imagine that extended out at infinitum.

That would be such a terrible state to worry about something. Yeah, I know. It's like to be depressed.

I barely know what that's like. I can be depressed for several minutes at a time and then I'm like, ta da. Hamster wheel.

Yeah. Isn't it funny? Because it's. And like I could never explain to you what it feels like to be depressed. I can give you words.

Yeah.

Like you never really. True. Could grock it. And like same with anxiety where I guess I could probably imagine that. Where like just the pulsating incessant feeling of this. I can't get my mind off of this. Out this worry.

That was a decent take.

Which is kind of like depression. Depression is the same thing. It's just like relentless annihilation of hope.

I've heard powerlessness be described with depression. And I. I can't put that hat on in a way that fits for too long. You know, like some things you see and you're like, I can. I can attest to that. There are parts of depression which I'm like, I've had depression before as a consequence of using Adderall or for attention deficit disorder. When I was younger it was like pharmacologically induced depression where I could always go back in that part of my mind was like, it's just the drugs.

Yeah.

When it's not just the drugs, it hits different.

Yeah.

I'm sure. And so I think more people can probably. Everyone's been anxious somewhat. But there's a difference between sad and depressed. Depressed as a whole level. Beneath that. And I do mean beneath. I'm glad you made it through what led you out of the darkness because we never talked about that and you mentioned it earlier and I'm Not. I was just curious.

Yeah. V0 blueprint was me trying to solve depression. So I basically went out and tried to find all the evidence on like, what things work for depression. And I tried everything with evidence and everything without evidence.

Nice.

I tried energy healers. What the is that? Yeah, exactly. What the is that? I mean, I tried the tms, I tried tdcs, I did medication, cbt. I did acupuncture.

Whoa, you really did try.

I mean, I did. I was so desperate.

The needle goes through the brain.

I mean, anything. I mean, for 10 years I had like a chance, like if any treatment offered any possibility of relief. And I just systematically worked through every single one. And then in the end, I think it really ended up being circumstantial more than anything else. Where I was raised in a religion and I was still in that religion. And I think it boxed me into a degree that made me feel paralysis. And then I had a challenging personal relationship. I think the combination of those two things just broke me. And I couldn't get out of those cycles. And so once I. I sold my company, I got a divorce, I left the Mormon religion, and I basically just tried to rewrite my entire life. And only in that moment did it start lifting.

Started lifting. It wasn't an instant lift.

Within one year, I was fully out.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's never come back. I've never even dipped back in, even partially.

That's what I've read some literature on depression a lot on just general behavioral genetics. And it seems the two biggest factors for how happy you are at any one time are his genetic proclivity multiplied by current life circumstance.

Yeah.

So the genetic proclivity gives you a baseline. And then like people who are genetically engineered as evolved by accident to be very depressed, even when there extreme fame and wealth, they're still kind of like maybe a little less happy than the average person doing a regular life. And then at their lowest points, if they get into a car wreck and they hurt their ankle, I mean, they're in the dumps. Whereas someone with extremely high affect, generally, if, even if they're dealing with cancer, they're still like pretty reasonable about it. But if they're dealing with regular life, they're ecstatic. And if they get into some really good, good stuff, they're just like having a manic episode for 40 years straight. So I guess people discount the fact it's sort of banal when you say it like you like legit life, like being involved in a crap marriage is like really fucking bad. And it follows you everywhere. Crystal. I underhand pitched that joke to myself. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Yeah, it's. I think people actually underestimate the seriousness of the consequences of being in a unhealthy relationship. I mean, I knew, of course, like, I experienced it on a daily basis, and it was very challenging, but I. I didn't connect the dots. That that was like, some meaningful amount of the contributor.

That big of a thing. Did you have. Did you engender ideas of, like, things will get better in this relationship and I'm still in it, right. To see that through.

You always have hope of, like, you can keep on grinding, keep it on. You hear stories of people, like, you know, they've worked their trials and they've been married for 45 years. And so, like. Like, definitely there's that. It's just like, when you're building a team and someone joins a team, you know, they're not the right fit. You know, it never in my entire life has someone changed to become the right fit. It's always the right decision to just.

Not be the same team through me. But for a few pedantries and exclusions, I largely agree.

It's like, just very rare. Like, most of us know what works, and that's the same true of someone who joins a team and they look at the team, they're like, this is not the right team for me. They should probably leave. Like, it's just rarely do those things sort themselves out over time. Relief of depression was like, the. The coolest experience in my life where I just got like. You know, it was like ozempic for Hope. You're just like, I just got infused. Like, I just. It was just raining and it's like Sunshine of Hope. Just like, absorption where I just. I was back to existence after being in this dark cave for a decade. So, like, what an amazing thing to come out of.

We all have to go our separate ways now because chronological time still exists, unfortunately. I'm very, very enthralled. I want to know, I hope that on your podcast, with me or without me, you dive in more to this kind of discussion about personal journeys and happiness and things like that. And I would love to hear infinitely more about your own take because, like, I just thought you were the vampire guy on the Internet. I obviously, I know everyone's complex underneath, but I've just gotten none of this, and I think it's wonderful and I think you need to talk about it more.

Thank you. Yeah, I know that that's the perception, so.

Yeah. But looks like you do have a legit thing going for you, so no worries. It'll be a different perception very soon.

Yeah.

I talk to you and people like, how is he? I'm like, robot, weirdo, vampire, everyone's.

Exactly. Exactly. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Exactly.

That's great. Yeah.

No, but now I can tell the true tale.

Hi, friend. Great hanging out with you today.

Likewise.

Thanks for being here so much. Yeah.