How To Spot Good Versus Bad Information

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Built With Science podcast. You're here with your host as always, of course, me, myself and I, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman at all. And sitting in front of me, only 200 miles away from me today, is the one and only Daniel Plotkin, AKA Daniel doesn't deify or demonize the Pump Lotkin, AKA Danny Boy. And don't let me being closer to Daniel today scare anyone. Even though it's a new location, we're still discussing the same vocation and today we're discussing something a little different from what we normally do. Obviously, usually what we talk about is very applied stuff and usually things that you can directly apply to your training or nutrition to kind of further grow muscle or, or help you with whatever resistance training goal you have or, or fitness goal you have. But today we're talking about little bit more philosophical, which is how to know if advice is good or not on social media. And we're going to talk about a lot of different things. We're going to talk about specific questions you can ask about the people delivering the, the advice, how they're delivering that advice, and then of course, specific questions about the advice that they are delivering, right? Because even wonderful scientifically integral individuals can deliver bad advice sometimes and the opposite is true, right? People who have no idea what they're talking about. What is it that a broken clock is still right two times a day or something like that, right? So let's talk about quickly why this is so important, right? Why. Why this is such an important thing, though I don't think that this requires a whole lot of attention, right? So we live in an age, this is obvious, probably something that you've all heard a trillion times before, where there's more information than ever on basically any topic you could possibly care about, right? And oftentimes this is looked at as a negative thing you will very often hear on, especially like news pod or news sources, that we're in an information age where you never know if you're being lied to or not. And there's definitely negatives to that, but there's also a lot of positives to this as well, right? There's, it's an amazing thing. The information age is an incredibly valuable and wonderful time to be alive in, right? For instance, all the information that Danny Boy and myself provide, as, you know, close to genuine experts in this field, we do so free of charge to you guys so you can listen and get all the great advice that you want from the built with science podcast without having to pay a thing. Right. But with that comes the negatives of the information age. Right. We have constant misinformation and disinformation on social media that's really hard to parse out. And for those of you who don't know, misinformation is just when the individual is misguided and what it is that they're trying to deliver, they might not actually know that they're ignorant to the thing that they're talking about. And then of course, disinformation is just someone who's a grifter. They know what they're saying is wrong, but they know that what they're saying is powerful and they can get a lot of people to listen to them by saying it. Think of it as idiot meatheads versus jerks that actually know that they're lying on social media. Right. And it's always better to assume ignorance as opposed to mal intent. But unfortunately, we do live in an age where some people are trying to take advantage of others. Now that leads us into the meat of today, which is Danny boy. How do we know if something is reliable or not as far as information goes?

Yeah, yeah. So I think in order to get this started, going over the categories of how you sort of make decisions, especially in an applied field, is probably a good place to start. So I have four categories. We have principles. So principles generally are based on the hard scientists sciences. So you have physics, you have chemistry. There are things that you know that are based on laws of how the universe works and sometimes even physiological principles. So pentament size principle, things like that that you can sort of rely on to some extent to help you make decisions. And then you have evidence. So actual scientific studies where they took one group, ideally randomized participants, and all the stuff that we constantly talk about on the podcast, you have actual randomized control trials and you have mechanistic studies which you rely on a little less and so on. So that whole umbrella of evidence, then you have experience. So people who actually, in the context of exercise, trained people, see what happens in the real world. This exercise makes more people's shoulders, you know, feel kind of wonky and so on. So things that you wouldn't necessarily get from a study or at least if it hasn't been studied, something that you could at least hang your hat on to some extent. Like it's fairly obvious if the majority of coaches say that a straight barbell gives more of their clients discomfort than a dumbbell, which has, you know, unlimited degrees of freedom. So Experiences. The third category and then the last category is logic. Just making sure that the decision making that you implement is logical. It makes sense when you apply it to one person, and it allows you to sort of see A through D without making a bunch of fallacies in between and convincing yourself of stuff that's not actually going on. So all of those are four categories where when I'm interpreting information or when I'm making decisions that I think about. And this is where we get into. All right, so the information itself versus how that information is being presented. So that's where a lot of stuff can get cleared up. When you realize, what is this person actually relying on? When they're telling me something, are they saying that. This is what I've noticed with my clients, Are they saying that these four trials showed this and these are the limitations, Are they saying that this implementation used in this specific fashion will have the most force in this position? Okay, now they're relying on physics, something that, as long as you understand it decently well, you can see. Yeah, I mean, that makes a whole lot of sense. All of those things allow you to say, all right, they're relying on this bucket. So based on that, I can sort of parse out whether I should be more or less confident in the information itself and in the individual. If they continuously rely on one bucket, that would fall kind of lower on the totem pole, especially for certain topics. So if you rely on experience for literally everything, you're going to be misled because obviously we're biased in our experiences. We can very, very easily convince ourselves of something that's not true. But when you marry evidence with experience with a bit of logic, that's when you start, you know, cooking with oil.

All following the principles that underlie all of those things as well. I didn't say this, but I kind of meant to earlier. The obvious answer to how to know if information is reliable or not, or how to know if the individual delivering that message is reliable or not. The most straightforward way, of course, is become an expert in the field in which they are discussing. Right. Uh, I just. I. Obviously that goes without saying, but I. I felt like it is important to. To dimension. Right. Because in fact, while Danny Boy and I were kind of piecing together the outline for this. This episode, we talked about how it's. It's. We kind of get disconnected from what it is to. To parse out information on social media with respect to fitness, because we are experts in. In. In the realm of fitness. So it's really quick and easy for us to go. That person that. That just said something wrong, and it immediately throws up red flags in our brain. Right. But the goal of this episode, obviously, is to discuss the ways in which you can parse out Ms. And disinformation without knowing much at all about the topic that the individual is talking about. Right. I. I meant to. I meant to bring that up earlier, so I apologize for kind of like awkwardly throwing that back in the mix. One thing I did want to say. Go ahead, go ahead.

I think it's just really important to underline that because while we're giving some general advice, it's going to be really hard if you don't have some bearing on the topic. There's going to be glaring holes that unfortunately, you won't be able to. If something is plausible enough, it's going to be really hard to parse out. And I think there's even studies on this where even with very smart people, if two people who are pretty knowledgeable on the subject are talking to each other, but one is clearly more knowledgeable once they reach a certain threshold of knowledge, a person who's not an expert in the field has a very hard time deciphering who is giving better information on that.

Right. So, like, you might not even know what those underlying principles are for the topic that you're discussing. And so if someone. Even if someone's using evidence from, like, empirical evidence and studies, they could cite something and it sounds very, very, like, good and strong. But if it defies the underlying principles, that's obviously an issue. But you might not even know what those are. Right. So it's important to point out, I also wanted to say that we named those kind of like four areas of evidence principles, or four areas of, yeah, I guess, evidence. So principles and then empirical studies, experience and then logic, those aren't necessarily ordered from most important to least important, necessarily. Right. So, like, for instance, this is a bit of an oversimplification. Not necessarily true. But if you only ever relied on the Henneman size principle, you might think, oh, we need to be lifting heavy weights to kind of activate the most motor units that we possibly can. Right. Obviously that's kind of a misunderstanding of the Henneman size principle, but we have direct evidence showing that. No, not necessarily, because X, Y and Z. Right. Because of the way that the head of his principle actually works. So that was actually a terrible example. Now that I think, yeah, that was bad. It doesn't matter. Anyway, you could use.

You could use physics, for example, so you could Say that applying a load or sort of like using a cable perpendicular to your arm will create the most torque in that position, which is true. Right. But you can use that. You can use the physics to then say that you're going to produce the most growth because that's the most stretched position. But if we don't know that the most stretched position versus just reaching a threshold of stretch is more hypertrophic, then we can't say. Even though a lot of the things leading up to that last statement are based on principles, the last statement itself, which is you're going to get more muscle, is not based on really anything.

So principles or empirical evidence, obviously.

Exactly. So sometimes people can sort of like the Socratic yes, yes, yes, yes. And then oops kind of thing. So yeah, I think you can definitely be misled by relying, especially within an applied field where biology is super messy. You can definitely be misled by things that sound right or are based in principles all the way up until the point of saying this is why you're going to gain more of whatever this physiological thing is, whether it's quality sleep or more muscle or more strength and so on. Because there's so many factors that go into that construct that you can't rely solely on mechanisms, principles, even evidence like actual randomized control trials, because of the fact that even variables within those trials, if they're modified, can interact with each other and create a different outcome. So, for example, let's say the evidence on volume is, you know, showing the dose response, what that dose response might look like could be different. For if every exercise is in the most stretched position, would 16 sets now be optimal instead of 20 sets? Obviously I'm just throwing random numbers out, but that dose response curve could change based on a bunch of variables. Proximity to failure, training status, how the muscle length, and so on. So just realizing the limitations and this is kind of what we're going to get into moving forward, realizing the limitations of each of those categories and whether the person actually underlines those is another way that you can sort of decipher whether the person and the information is good, should be followed and so on.

Yeah, and it's exactly why we have to rely on all four areas of evidence we've talked to. I mean, I've probably said this ad nauseam on this podcast alone of evidence based does not mean that you have a PubMed article for every claim that you make about fitness. Right. If you did, we wouldn't be able to say much at all on this podcast. Right. So like, what Danny boy was just saying, if you start throwing more lengthened bias sets towards people, maybe that curve kind of shifts downwards because you're just, you know, more stretch work tends to lead to more soreness. There's a potential there for a little bit more muscle damage and more muscle fatigue associated with it. So maybe you're not able to recover as much and maybe that brings it down. So you have to rely on your own personal anecdotal experience as well as the logic in conjunction with the evidence that you have. Just as a really, really good example of principles and how they kind of have to be followed to a certain extent. It's really weird that calories in, calories out, like the SECO model, right. Is starting to be challenged a lot more by specifically like the carnivore community, which I mean, again, I'll take any excuse to talk about that community on this podcast, but they are saying things like, no, calories don't matter, ingredients do when it comes to weight loss and stuff like that right there, boom, boom, boom. Alarm bells going off because they're saying something that certainly doesn't sound illogical, right? It's not the craziest claim out there, but it directly defies not only a principle of human physiology, but of thermodynamics and physics at root, right? If you start defying math and physics, the thing that kind of underlies literally all other sciences that we hold up, that bolsters up all evidence in other science, essentially, that's usually going to be a huge problem, right? So if someone has some wonderful supplements or some new diet that directly defies the laws of, of physics, usually that's an area for red flags to start going up. Which kind of brings me to how to parse out good information, right? Which is kind of what we've been talking about this whole time. But I don't have good. Just a really nice, easy step by step process for you to got for you all to follow. But I do have a list of things here that you are questions you should ask yourself when you're hearing people make claims, right. Are you good to move on to this portion or did I miss something? Okay, cool. Again, these are not like rules to follow, but it's more so just these are things to ask yourself. And if you start noticing that more of these questions, the answer is no or yes, whatever the negative direction is, that's usually a problem for the person as well as the information that they're asking. So the first one here is obviously, do they make large sweeping claims and generalizations. Right. So, for instance, basically all of these examples are probably going to be fitness related because it's just the way that was what this podcast is about. But it's also just how my brain works in general. So let's say that this individual on Instagram says, my new program works for everyone and every single client I've ever trained. They grow by x percent after 3 months following my resistance training protocol. Immediately, pretty large alarm bells going off because we know again, this defies some principles and, and as well as some evidence, as well as obviously experience and logic. This defies all four of them. Right. We know that there's a lot of inter individual variation when it comes to muscle growth and responses to resistance training. Not to mention we have direct evidence on that. And of course, with experience that everyone knows that you go to the gym with your friend, all of a sudden he's benching 315 in three months, and you're still stuck at 135 for some reason, even though you guys are following the same resistance rating program. Right. So that's obviously the first one. And again, if someone's making large general sweeping claims, does that necessarily mean that what they're saying or the that who they are is to be drawn into question? Not necessarily. Of course not. Like for instance, I could say that the calories in calories out model applies to everyone and every single person out there. If they reduce the amount of calories that they're consuming in like conjunction with increasing the amount of calories that they're expending, we can be pretty confident that they start losing weight. I just made a very large sweeping generalized claim. But that does not necessarily mean that what I said was wrong. Which is just the re. The whole reason I bring that like up is because again, saying yes or no to any or even all of these questions does not necessarily mean that the person or the information is incorrect or misleading. It's just if the. If the answer is no to all of them or yes to all of them in the negative direction, that's usually a cause for concern. Anything you want to say about large sweeping claims or anything?

Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting because there's always caveats where people need to have some underlying knowledge in order to really be able to parse these things out. But something I think about often is if this were true, what would it look like or play play out like in the real world? So, for example, large sweeping claims about, let's say, a weight loss supplement, if it were true, that this weight loss supplement worked in the way that it was advertised and with the little side effects that the people are claiming, then we wouldn't see, you know, I don't know, 70% of the population continuing to be obese and so on. So like, it's just on face value, you could just dismiss a lot of the claims. This one thing is going to be dissolved. Well, if it was, then obviously we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic that continued to grow. And two, and this one is even more perplexing, is a lot of the sort of advice just kind of makes almost no sense to the point where they miss obvious things about society and psychology. So one thing that I always go back to, and this is in line with the obesity thing, is that many people make the claims as if being obese or overweight is not something that is very. Looked at very negatively in society. Something that a person wouldn't want to change. Like they just don't want it bad enough kind of mentality.

Yeah, yeah.

And it just makes absolutely no sense. Like the amount of negative consequences for being obese just societally, like, put all the health stuff to the side, the amount of people that judge you, like the looks you get, even like room on a plan. Just a whole bunch of obvious societal things that would occur. If you thought about it for more than five seconds. You really think that those billions of people didn't try at least a few of the gimmicks that these people are touting? It just makes absolutely no sense if you just think about it for a little bit. So I think just thinking about, all right, what would need to happen or what would. How would this play out if it actually worked in the way that it was advertised? And in most cases it would just absolutely makes no sense whatsoever if you actually thought about it for a little bit.

Yeah. Which is directly in line with the second question, which is do their claims sound too good to be true? And now there's a certain. It's certainly the case that sometimes something can sound like, for instance, you look at GLP1 agonists, right? They given exactly what Danny boy was just saying, if there really was some sort of medication out there that kind of like add minimal side effects. And not to say that, you know, Ozempic has minimal side effects, though I guess in conjunction with the benefits that it has, I would call them minimal, but more research needed, blah, blah, blah. Does it necessarily sound too good to be true? That doesn't always mean that it's not true. Like for instance, oic kind of might be a miracle drug and all the, all the analogs similar to it. They. It. It might actually be the thing that ends this whole obesity pandemic. Right. But. Or epidemic. But. Or pandemic. I never know which one. I think epidemic is worldwide. Right. Pandemic is localized. Yeah. So I think we call the OP obesity epidemic. Anyway, it's possible that something, someone can say something that is. It sounds too good to be true while absolutely being true, but it is pretty rare. And it's the same thing that Danny Boy was just saying with his second caveat there, which is if this, if what this person is saying is true, why isn't every single person on earth using it? And sometimes there's really good reasons for that. For instance, with Ozempic, it's very expensive and not necessarily everyone has access to it. Right. Anything you want to say about too good to be true? You covered it a lot with the, with the first thing.

But yeah, I was going to make that point with those. Like how it's playing out is pretty much exactly how you would expect something that actually works to be playing out where many people who fall into that category want to get their hands on it. It's just there's things that are precluding them from being able to currently. So as prices go down, I do really think that we will see pretty significant downward trend in obesity as people get their hands on more and more of these medications. And as the medications get better, like, I see more and more trials of different analogs of GLP1s that work even better and have less side effects and so on. And there's, you know, tons of outcomes where it's hard to see blood pressure, blood sugar, all that, all that kind of stuff that you see. And what were extreme surgeries before, so bariatric surgery and stuff like that, you're getting pretty much equal outcomes from a drug now, which is pretty sweet.

It's incredible. This is just going to turn into the GLP Ozempic family episode of. Of Built With Science. Sorry, go ahead.

But yeah, there's obviously other concern. I don't want to make it seem like, you know, miracle drug, no side effects, so on. Obviously work with your, your doctor. All that kind of, you know, medical, legal mumbo jumbo. You get the point. We're not doctors. So definitely consider.

Even when Danny Boy is a doctor here soon, we're not real doctors. And this is not medical advice or health advice. We're never giving medical or health advice ever. Live fast and leave a Big coffin is literally my whole motto. So certainly not the Help with Science podcast. Okay. Do their claims ever sound too good to be true? Obviously that one kind of goes without saying. Do they ever Steel man their own claims? Right. When someone makes a claim, or if they have this like particular thought process that they go about, or they have this method for resistance training or for diet that they follow, do they ever present arguments against their own case that are the most charitable? Right. Do they ever actually address the claims people make against the things that they are saying? Right. Very rarely. You'll see this. It's nice when people do it, but again, it's pretty rare. Like if I would say that, for instance, I would say that I think that you probably should be lifting in the 8 to 12 rep range if you want to get as jacked as possible. Because I think that personally it's more likely for individuals be going closer to failure when they're training slightly heavier. It's kind of the old lift big to get big mentality. I think there's a lot of grace to truth to that. However, if I was going to sit here and Steel man myself, I would say now we do have a lot of evidence suggesting that you can get jacked with as little as 5 reps and as many as 50 reps, but that doesn't necessarily mean. And then X, Y and Z. There are other reasons why I still think that 8 to 12 might be the best rep range for muscle growth. Right. Anything you want to say about Steel Manning?

Yeah, Steel Manning the other side of yourself or even allowing others to.

Right.

Come on. And Steel man, their own position is definitely basically just being open to. There's a lot of characters that are, are not at all open to dialogue, which in my opinion is a red flag. I think this can go too far. There's individuals which, yeah, probably not worth it to have any dialogue with, but for the most part, I think if the person's on open to dialogue, then that's a pretty red, big red flag to me. Yeah.

And this one, this is, this is another one of those just little things that's not actually like a good rule to follow, but it's just like a little thing for me particularly that bothers me a lot is does this individual say studies and. Or research shows without ever actually citing research or, or delving into the actual evidence that they're claiming, this one is insanely common. As things progress, especially with health and fitness, people are kind of coming to see the, the, the values and benefits of relying on empirical Evidence for informing decisions in the gym and in nutrition. And so with that, a lot of people realize that if I say something that sounds scientific, especially if I say study show or evidence suggests whatever it may be, that's usually going to catch people's ears. And so a lot of people will do that. They will say things like, well, all the best evidence we have, or all of these studies, blah, blah, blah, or there's a new study. That one always. That. That one for some reason always bothers me more than anything else. But there's this new study that shows blah, blah, blah. But they never actually show you where that research is coming from. They don't like link to it. They don't actually even talk about it at all. They just say studies show. And then the claim that they're making without ever addressing the limitations of that, that's usually a huge red flag for me. Now, again, it's not always necessarily the case that that's a problem. But very rarely does someone say study show and then just make a conclusive statement. That's very rare for that to be, I find an accurate statement. Especially if they're not like showing you which study showed that so that you can go read the study and look at it on your own. Or we're actually delving into the methods of that study's conduction. Right. Anything you want to say about. About that?

Yeah, for sure. I think my least favorite thing is it's one thing when you're. And I think this is where we can sort of get into how the message is being presented. We can say studies the evidence generally points toward, and so on in a real format because we're aware of the evidence, we know the limitations, but we're constrained for time depending on where we're giving that message. So there are definitely times where we just can't give all the caveats. We're going to say studies instead of mentioning any sort of specific studies and so on. So how the message is being presented. And even when we say that, you should still have a degree of skepticism until you see it. So that's totally fine. But realizing how the message is being presented is really important. So on that front, if somebody's even going to use that, you know, have an idea of who the person is, what their messaging is previous to that, do they delve into the studies on other occasions, or do they constantly just use studies show? And then my most hated moment is when articles will talk about a new study and never link the study.

Oh, dude, don't.

I'm like I just want to hurt something. And then it's hard to find the study sometimes because obviously new studies are not, you know, super googleable because of the fact.

Not to mention that if you Google the claims that they're making in the article about the new study, oftentimes it's like not actually what the study shows. So it doesn't even really take you to the, like, the, the, the like, whatever you're typing in doesn't actually direct you towards the study you're talking about because the person that wrote the article or made the claim on Instagram is completely misquoting or, or just making stuff up sometimes with respect to the study that they're referring to. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, but agree that that makes me so angry when I see that.

Yeah. And usually it's a big page, so you'll look it up with something related to the claim, it'll link you back to that article and then seven other articles that are using that article as evidence for the claim and it just ends up being just a frickin, you know, tag you're it without ever actually, you know, showing the evidence that they're basing any of the claims on. So, yeah, pretty sad stuff. What can you do on that front? I have no idea. But I think we should hold journalists more accountable for that kind of behavior. I think that's probably the most egregious thing you can do, like show, show, at least link it or at least give the title. Like it just doesn't make any sense when specifically the article is based around one new study and you're not even reviewing any of the other evidence.

So it's funny because this is like the thing that makes us this, like we're saying this makes us the most angry, probably partially at least because it's like one of the most common, like people have been saying studies show for a really, really long time. Like, like you said, journalists have been doing this for a very long time. Like news anchors have been doing this for a very long time. It's just becoming more and more prevalent within the fitness community itself. Right. So certainly is annoying. And it's really annoying just how prevalent it actually is. Right.

And I think to piggyback off, please piggyback off that. Because I think it's just a super important topic that pulls on the fabric of science. That is what causes people to think that, oh, science is constantly overturning itself. Because if one week studies show that butter causes heart disease and the Next week studies show that it actually prevents it. Then you're like, oh, you know, what's the point of thinking about science if every week there's scientific studies that constantly counter each other when, if people were being honest, then they would one, actually read the research and two, they would say the quality of evidence and how weak it is. So if every single time somebody came out on a topic that we don't have strong evidence on and said this is very weak evidence, be careful, then people wouldn't be saying that, oh, the science overturned itself. They would just realize that, oh, it's just we didn't have a whole lot of evidence and now we have a little bit more and we still don't know as opposed to, you know, oh, this week this thing is killing you and next week it's not kind of deal.

So yeah, yeah, this is something I go back and forth on a lot, especially within our field. Someone will make a really strong claim about an exercise being better for your chest than another exercise or something like the, the dumbbell bench. The bench press is way better for chest growth than the incline dumbbell bench. And on one hand I'm thinking to myself, like, how would my grandma react if I went up to my grandmother and I was like, grandma, you're not going to believe what Danny Boy said about the dumbbell bench press. I mean, can you imagine? He said it caused 30% more growth of the clavicular head. Like, does he even know about it? Sounds crazy, right? But then you kind of look at it from a more of a meta, a high level, like a high degree or a top down level. It is of someone bastardizing science, which, yes, it's a, it's within the realm of muscle growth. And like, kind of the stakes here aren't super high, but at the same time this person is potentially hurting the credibility of this wonderful tool that we have of science. Right. So I kind of like oscillate, to use your word, back and forth between being really offended when someone bastardizes science and trying to remind myself, yes, while it is something as kind of menial as, as meaningless as muscle growth, it still is science at the bottom that is being hurt by this person making these overarching claims.

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And speaking of claims, my next of the last couple things here is do their claims tend to go against common scientific consensus? Right. Uh, this one is a little bit more complex because science, it does change. It's not change its mind, but it does change course very often. Or again we're, we're always trying to go towards the truth, right? And sometimes we're veering really far away from the truth and someone will make a claim that actually brings us much more in line with the truth. But more often than not someone will say something like yeah, all the scientists have it wrong or all the experts in this field actually have it wrong. It's actually this way and that you should be doing X exercise that results in the most growth. Right. That person might be correct, that person might have some insight into some mechanism that we are not aware of yet or something like that. But very often if someone is making a claim that goes directly against the majority of what people think, especially in a scientific, it's something that we do have a lot of like scientific evidence for, empirical evidence for, that's usually not a good sign. Is there anything you want to add to that particular point?

Yeah, I think just relying on consensus, especially when you're not an expert, will often lead you in the right direction more often than not. So I think there will definitely be mistakes and course corrections and stuff like that. But if you had the choice between relying on all the contrarians all the time versus relying on the scientific consensus all the time, obviously you don't have to, you shouldn't do either one of those things. But if you had to choose, I would definitely veer on the side of the consensus where at least for the most part, the base variables, the things that are the meat and potatoes of training of nutrition and so on, are usually fairly well agreed upon as opposed to the contrarians where they're trying to overturn a lot of those main principles and big rocks and say this one thing is the reason why you're not having the success, whatever it may be, muscle growth, health, fat loss and so on, you know, fasted cardio is the unlocker. You know, ridiculous things like that. I think the biggest one, which really is perplexing that isn't in this field but like LDL deniers or people who claim that sky high low density lipoproteins are protective based on basically their misinterpretation of a reverse causality. So they see that people die with lower LDLs and don't realize that when people have cancer and other horrible diseases, their LDL plummets. And so, oh my God. Like, is LDL actually protective? No, it's just that, you know, chemotherapies and other things like that will cause a lower ldl. So yes, they die with lower ldl, but it's not a causal factor. So just realizing that if somebody says everyone else is wrong and I'm right and all of these experts have been wrong for hundreds of years and tons of Nobel prizes have been won on this topic, but I Mr. Got a bachelor's degree in history and nothing else, know best. You know, they could be, as you said, just a once in a few generation genius and everyone was wrong and they were right, but chances are they're not. So when in doubt, in fields that I'm not an expert in, I tend to just go with the consensus because you can't be an expert in everything. You can't, you just don't have enough time. So I'd say when in doubt, go with consensus if you have the time to delve into some things and see where you can make your own course corrections. And the cool thing about this applied field that we're in is that the stakes are low. If you decide to go against consensus and train in a, even a vastly different way, you can course correct one and the risk to you trying those things out is very, very low.

So let's say less muscle growth over the year.

Yeah, exactly. Let's say you tried to do an absurd number of sets, which we wouldn't recommend, you know, like 40, 50, even then would you be fine? Most likely.

You might even grow more. Who knows? Yeah, yeah. Who knows? Like.

To do five sets, you know, I think you'd grow less, but if you did that for a while, I think you'd still definitely grow and perhaps you'd end up in the same place, but it would take you like, I don't know, a couple of years later, like, it's not the end of the world. You're still exercising, getting a whole bunch of good stuff. So in our field, there's a lot more leeway. So that's why I feel more comfortable about, about people experimenting. What I wouldn't feel comfortable about is people experimenting with having new.

Drugs.

Yeah, exactly. Just dumb. Yeah.

Fortunate that we are in an area where even if we do give bad advice, we're like, oh, sorry, we're trying our Best to give good advice, obviously, but like, worst case scenario, yeah, you grow muscle a little slower than you otherwise would. Granted, I don't think we did. Because actually, you know what? This is the biggest takeaway is anytime anyone disagrees with Danny Boy or I, that's how you can know that it is misinformation or disinformation. In fact, just assume it's disinformation and they're directly trying to be antagonistic to Danny Boy and I. And then just spam them and email them 35,000 emails a day to kind of show them who's actually the top dog in this evidence based fitness world. That is not advice. Okay, last little, kind of like red flag here before we start talking about questions about specific claims, which is do they ever address criticisms about their ideologies? We kind of already touched on this, so we're not gonna spend a lot of time here because we kind of said, do they ever steel man their own claims or do they ever address the steel bands of their claims for other people? It's basically the same thing here oftentimes. Go ahead. What's up?

One thing that I want to touch upon on this because we already pretty much covered it. They don't cover their, the criticisms. But the fact that you said ideologies is a really bone.

Yeah, yeah.

They make it their identity and they can't. There's some, some figures in the space that literally said verbatim that they won't change their mind on the topic. So yeah, if you ever hear that, just gone. Right. But if you see in their bio the type of diet that they're on, the type of training that they tout as the best with a capital B, E, S and T and just things that are huge red flags, like, I don't know, what's a good one? Metabolism. Anything with metabolism in their bio just automatically a volleyball point. Just anything with hormone. Unless they're an endocrinologist, I was gonna.

Say, unless they're someone who literally has their PhD and like metabolic pathways and understanding how they work and stuff like that. Yeah. But even then they probably won't have metabolism in their, in their bile or anything like that.

Balance hormones, just basically just red flags like that. Just one. They've clearly made it an ideology where they think everything is based on balancing somebody's hormones, getting their metabolism working appropriately because our body can't do that on its own. And all kinds of things that, you know, maybe there's some niche cases. Obviously there are some niche cases where people have endocrine issues where an actual endocrinologist would be necessary. But in all the other cases, you know, unqualified person who's made it their ideology to fix something that probably doesn't exist, you know, unfollow or at least be highly skeptical of those individuals. Tons of people to your, you know, soapbox have carnivore in their bio. Like if you feel the need to put your diet in your bio and make, you know, all of your content revolve around you eating steak, you probably have some overt mental health issue that needs to be. I'm just kidding, guys.

There it is. No, it's a good point though. So not only do they ever address the criticisms to their points or their like, not beliefs, but like their, I guess, beliefs, because if they make whatever their kind of thing is a part of their identity, that in of itself is a huge red flag. And if you ever hear someone say I will not change my mind on this, don't. Yeah, like that is a, that is a inherently a scientific frame of thinking. Right? And that should be like the biggest red flag if someone says that. In fact, I was watching a, a video where these flat Earthers were debating these astrophysicists and discussing like they, they had their beliefs and one of the astrophysicists said, I will never change my mind on this. And I went, that's terrible. Like, that's bad. That's, that's bad argument from the really, really intelligent astrophysicist. Because as someone who, I mean, he literally has his PhD in some area of astrophysics and was talking about how we just have so much evidence pointing towards the Earth being round that there is nothing that would change my mind, which I get where he's coming from. If the Earth is flat, that means that almost everything in science is, is wrong. Because like so much is predicated on us having a round Earth. Right? Or a globe Earth. But you still, even with all of that, should never say, like, for instance, I wouldn't be willing to argue that I will never change my mind about the SECO model. Maybe there is some crazy happenstance where that model doesn't work anymore. Obviously I've never been pointed to that before and there's no reason to believe that as of right now. But I'm not, I would never say that I'm unwilling to change my mind on this. Right before. What'd you say?

I disagree. I think the astrophysicist was completely fine in his statement. That's okay. Well, we can agree to disagree. I get what you're. I think a better framing of that is even if you don't ever think that there is a chance that the amount of evidence that we have would be overturned, that language.

Yeah, exactly.

Sometimes be off putting to people where, well, why are you having this conversation in the first place? And basically, I think that it just sends the wrong message to some extent.

But rhetoric is really.

Yeah, I think it's more about. Yeah. The rhetoric then. Because I do think that if we can't just accept things that are true.

You never accept. There's no. You only fail to reject. Come on, Danny boy.

I mean, that's only, that's only way rely on. Exactly.

We're really, we're really about to go on a tangent. Like a high, like a. I said this was a philosophical episode, but let's not delve that deep into the philosophy of science and how to answer questions. So there are particular instances where the person is not wrong in saying that they would never change their mind. But it does. The rhetoric itself kind of goes against what it means to, to be scientific. To a certain extent. Yes. The astrophysicist was particular, probably right in that particular instance that the amount of evidence that they would have to get, like they would have to wake up in the matrix and be like, oh, okay. So I was just. Everything was wrong. I was in a bat. Right. There was a brain in a bat. That, that. But again, I don't want to delve into like that degree, that degree of philosophy of like how to think about. About evidence and stuff like that. Okay, so, Danny boy, let's discuss very briefly because we're, we're at the end here. What are specific questions you can ask an individual making claims about the specific claim that they're making. So we just discussed kind of how to know if the individual in general is. Is kind of a reliable source. Questions that you should ask yourself about the individual making the claims as well as the specific claims they're making. But let's say you're having a conversation with someone making a claim. What are some of those questions you can ask them if they say something to kind of give you more granularity in how much you should trust the thing that they are saying.

Yeah. So I think the biggest question is, especially when it's the type of person that says study show and so on, is what? And how strong is the evidence? So what evidence are they basing this on? And how strong is the evidence that they're basing their claim on? If they can't supply the Actual evidence that they're basing it on, or give you any sort of thoughts on what the limitations are and how strong that evidence is, how much they can hang their hat on it, then you could probably be a bit skeptical. Even though they may be right. You can be a bit skeptical of information or even the arbiter of the information. If they say they don't know and they're simply basing it off of what another evidence based person said, then you can at least trust that the person is an honest interlocutor. But that information in and of itself still needs to be parsed out and you need to go and see what those other people are basing that information off of, which is a very common thing, actually. People just repeat what another person said, who they trust, and I think that's fine to some extent, but obviously it's a slippery slope, so I think that's one where it's important. Do you have anything to say on that front?

Yeah, just where they're getting the evidence from, obviously. And they can say studies, they can say this study, that in of itself should be kind of a red flag because you never want to rely on. We've said this a million times on the podcast, you never want to rely on one study. Right. So when you say how strong is the evidence? Not only does that rely on what is the evidence? Because remember the four types we discussed earlier, which is the principles, the empirical evidence, the experience of the person, and then just basic logic, not only which form of evidence are they drawing from, but the strength of it. So is it empirical evidence? Okay, how many studies are actually pointing in the direction of best times and whatever it may be that they're actually discussing? Right. But no, I think you covered it really well there.

Yeah, I didn't want to dive too deep into that, but yeah. How many studies, what is the population studies? What are the different variables? How do they interact? Did what, what is the amount of time that the study, what measures did they use, how reliable were those measures, and so on. There's like unlimited amount of categories. That's why it is important for people to have an understanding of the things that go into the research in order to have strong opinions on a topic. And that's why often I won't have a strong opinion on almost really anything.

Other outside of muscle growth.

Outside of muscle growth? Yeah. I'd be like, yeah, you know, I've read a few studies on the topic. It seems like it points in this direction, especially because a lot of experts are saying this but if you're asking whether I know for sure, I have no clue. I'm not an expert. I'd have to spend probably at least a year getting my amount of time.

Not that I've spent muscle growth.

So, yeah, hold less strong opinions in general is probably a good takeaway on that front. But just realizing all the things that can go into and how complicated it can get when you're actually trying to parse out whether we have strong evidence on a topic.

So the next question you have here is the, the degree to which it matters.

So, like, I just added that one.

Yeah, yeah. Can least, like, delve into what that means.

Yeah. So a lot of the time, and this is potentially my least favorite thing about social media, we talk about things that matter very little because of the fact that we don't have a lot of evidence on the topic. So there's a lot of room for speculation. So as an example, mechanisms of hypertrophy, because we don't have a whole lot of evidence on the topic and because it's hard to have strong evidence on the topic because there's so many overlapping mechanisms and you don't know which ones are redundant or additive and so on. You can have opinions and you can argue ad nauseam, but at the end of the day, the practical takeaways are pretty much nothing. Like they don't really 3% more muscle.

Growth over the year or something like that and not. Yeah, like if that.

And also it just doesn't even lend itself to something that you could even say this type of training would end up in more growth because there's just so many mechanisms where using the mechanisms alone to get to any conclusion would end up in a million different directions. So nobody can rely solely on, on the mechanisms if they're being honest, because there's just things that we couldn't square with one or two mechanisms. So I think realizing how practically important the conclusion would be from arguing about some of the minutiae is really important. It's totally fine to go down the rabbit hole if you're doing it out of intellectual interest while realizing that it doesn't really matter. But if you're going down that rabbit hole because you believe it'll get you to a strong conclusion about how you should go about doing whatever it is that you want to do, then you should probably take, you know, a few steps back and realize that it's really not going to get you there. Like the thermodynamics example, if you actually look at what is necessary to have a strong bearing on thermodynamics. You will literally be just a combination of nauseated and blown away because I've tried to read the textbooks on the topic and it's literally just a math textbook. It's math with just symbols that I've never seen before. It's like really, really advanced math with a combination of chemistry, which is also really advanced. Like you would need to. Not only would you need to dedicate your life to understand a topic that you could just pan out from and realize that, all right, this principle is holding and smarter people than I have have figured this out, or you could dedicate your life and realize on your deathbed that you were not smart enough to do that. So, you know, those are your two options. You choose. It's. It's up to you. But I think that for the vast majority of topics, it's enough to go just deep enough where you get your bearings on what matters practically, without having to be an expert on every detail and get into all of the layers because it's just too time consuming and not worth it. And that's where I think trainers can a lot of times make mistakes where they go deep on one thing and go super shallow on a bunch of other things and they end up with really weird training practices. So I think being a generalist and realizing, all right, these are the main categories that matter, I'm going to go just deep enough where I can create a good holistic program instead of going crazy on one topic and then leading into it super hard and then ending up with, you know, some weird high intensity program where I concoct some mechanisms that really are going to unlock your, you know, hypertrophic potential and so on.

Yeah, I think that the next question you have here is perhaps one of the greatest ones you have. So obviously, how strong is the evidence, the degree to which it matters? But this one I really like because it's a very practical and kind of really gets at the root when you ask someone this question, which I'll just say it, which is, what would you need to see to change your mind on the subject? Not only does it give you really good insights into the direct question that you're asking because it tells you about the strength of the evidence they have. Well, like for instance, if you asked me what would I need to see to see the, to change my mind about the calories and calories out model, I would have to list out, like you were just saying, and an unbelievably long list of things. Well, first of all, we'd have to know, we'd have to go back and kind of rework our understanding of thermodynamics. And that would obviously require a lot of work. And then we'd also have to rewire our understanding of how human physiology itself works. A lot would be necessary. That kind of gives you insights into the strength of evidence that we have on the subject, but it also gives you really good insight, perhaps better insights into the person that you're talking to. If they say, oh, no, nothing, I wouldn't change my mind on this. That obviously is a red flag that I was just talking about earlier. But it also kind of gives you insights into how much they actually know about how evidence works and how changing your mind works. Do you have anything you want to add to that question?

Yeah, I think just to piggyback off that, what would you need to see? If they don't give a granular answer, you can also ask what study would you want to see that would change your mind on topics? For example, on the thermodynamics topic, you could obviously have one group eat much less calories than the other while measuring every output and input, so expenditure, including thermic effect of food and so on. So when accounting for all of those variables of intake and output, if you didn't see weight change and body composition go in the direction that you expected, then you could say, oh, looks like in humans it doesn't pan out. But it has in every single study that, you know, we have tons of. So if one study came out and showed that we would be enough for me to change, it'd be like, yeah, the methods. Because once you realize the methods that go into it and what could have went wrong with whatever the method that was used was, then you realize that, okay, if one study out of the 20 studies that did the same exact thing showed this, I'm still not confident in that conclusion because of the fact that those 20 studies exist. And there's a super strong principle that is underlying disinformation. So that's, I think, a really good example of sort of how you sort of put things into buckets where, honestly, if I see a study where there was a super large discrepancy where they measured everything, I would almost certainly go to the fact that there was some sort of measurement error because it's just such a well established thing. But, but let's say 10 studies came out showing, then I'd be like, all right, listen, I can't explain it, but it seems like we're wrong, right? So Yeah, I think that's a good example there.

And the last question you have here or the last question that you. It's not really social question, but like a point of action. This one's a little bit harder to do if you don't have at least some understanding. In fact, to be able to steel man another side, you kind of have to like really know what you're talking about. But I kind of just gave it away there. The last thing here is questions to ask. The individual is just steel man their side. So if they say something, provide questions or at least evidence that are contrary, contrary to what it is that they're claiming. But obviously it's your point, so I'll let you kind of discuss that a little bit more.

Yeah, so it's very similar to the point you were making about whether the person ever steel mans the other side. So this is literally just asking the person to do something that potentially they haven't done in the past. What is the other side saying? And do your very best to put it in the best light possible. So this does a bunch of things. One, it shows whether the person is ideological about, you know, if they really, really, really can't do anything to show the opposite side in a positive light, then they might have super strong feelings to the point where they can never be convinced. There are also situations where the other side is just complete lunacy, where, you know, you can give the person a pass for not steel manning the other side. So I don't, I don't want to make it seem like it's never appropriate to just dismiss the other side.

But you're not a steelman at that point, obviously.

Yeah, I'm just saying, like you could in any context ask somebody to steel man the other side. Like you can ask the physicist to steel man the flat earther. And they usually would do an absolutely terrible job doing that just because it's something that can be dismissed so readily that it's not really worth steel manning. So this usually falls into the bucket of something that is somewhat contentious and has some gray area. But I think the practice in and of itself, especially when you ask a bunch of experts, can help you get at that, actually. So if, you know, you ask a whole bunch of physicists, they'll probably tell you a similar thing when you ask them to steel man the other side on the flat earth topic. But if you ask somebody to steal man the other side for, let's say, training at longer and shorter marital lengths, you could do a pretty decent job of steel manning other side, while giving a bunch of caveats that are useful and in the research. For example, if somebody asked me to steel man the other side off of the dome, I would probably say something along the lines of one, we have most of the evidence in untrained individuals, so we'd want to see some evidence in trained individuals. Two, we don't have lots of studies which measure across the whole muscle. And because there are specific parts of the nervous system that innervate along the muscle, there could be some potential benefits that are in areas where we didn't measure for training at shorter muscle lengths. It could also be that shorter muscle lengths allow you to recover a bit better. And the cherry on top of, let's say you do a certain amount of sets and you probably won't recover from more sets at the longer muscle lengths, then you can get a few sets with a cherry on top at those shorter muscle lengths. There's also potentially different mechanisms where it's not an additive, it is an additive thing, it's not a redundant thing. So potentially the combination of shorter and longer muscle lengths might be slightly better. You could also make the argument that the actual mechanisms that revolve around longer muscle length training would plateau at some point because you only have short term best studies, so on. So there's a bunch of caveats that you can give if you were really trying to steel man the other side. That doesn't mean that you're on the other side.

Means you know what you're talking about.

Yeah, exactly.

And even knowing all of this, I still have come to the conclusion that longer muscle length training is likely more ideal for hypertrophy than shorter muscle length training. Right. I think that. Yeah, sorry, I totally misunderstood. The steel man the other side. You're asking the person to steal me on the other side, which is. Yeah, perhaps like one of the most valuable questions. You can add a really good addition. Yeah, well done. Is there anything else you want to, you want to say with respect to that before we.

Yeah, I think in order to tie a bow on that, the conclusion to the longer muscle length segment would be even with all of that, if every study is neutral to positive for longer muscle lengths, it seems like a fair conclusion would be that at the very worst, if you were doing a combination of both and leaning more along muscle lengths, hypertrophy would probably be neutral. If you were really, really trying to steel man the other side, I don't really see a world where all of those caveats aside, you'd get negative or less hypertrophy over time by leaning a bit more on longer muscle length. So that's why the practical side of things, the degree to which it matters, ties in to this whole argument where. All right, now that we've gone over the caveats and steel, man, the other side, what are the practical takeaways? Well, if there's very little downside, then why wouldn't we experiment with it and implement it to a larger extent and so on?

So, yeah, beautiful little bow right there. Dude, that was awesome. I'm not going to go ahead and recapitulate all of this because a lot of it was. It's an energy dense episode. So I'm not just going to go through and say everything again, but basically I will say just remember to train your abs and always be skeptical when you're hearing claims on social media. Right. That is like the most important thing is just try to nurture an environment of skepticism when you're going through all of the information that we have on social media, including things that you hear. Danny boy. And I say, if you ever come up to us in person and ask us to do these things, we'll be like, oh, let's freaking go. This person genuinely wants to get at what it is that we're talking about. We will be. Generally speaking, people should be happy to have a discourse about the things that they're making claims about. Right. Because it gives an opportunity to teach the person about what they're discussing. Right. Which is ultimately should be the goal of individuals on social media trying to disseminate scientific information. Right. Anything you want to say as a. As a last little raw. Cool. All right, thank you everyone so much for listening to the Built the Science podcast. If there's something that we would. You would like us to cover that we have yet to discuss on this podcast, please feel free to reach out to us at Built with Science on Instagram. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Peace.