Transcript for:
Insights from Dr. Mike Israel's Lecture

I think initially we met because I think you were talking [ __ ] 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 by 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 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're 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 in my own action. All right. Should we arm wrestle? I don't want to lose or get hurt. How have you dealt with um I mean you've really blown up online and you have a lot of notoriety. How has that affected uh you the way you think about the world and yourself and what you're doing? It'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 like I guess like you know 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 um almost uh 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 and an airport under there's assumption of general eneral 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 and 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 you I I still to this point have not gotten used to it in the sense of like, "Ah, whatever." It's much more like uh oh, cool. That happened. Like it's still same narrative as before. But it is a thing that is a little jarring uh 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 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 oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh 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 uh 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 um an amount you can't possibly dedicate almost any time to processing. And rarely do you hear that many opinions from that heterogeneous uh population of people about you. Like I'm come from the old world of preocial media as do you where if someone was going to say something about you, they were going to talk that [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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, "Ah, 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 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 [ __ ] I'm trying to excise from my head. So, at the end of the day, it 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 uh luckily having never been born beautiful that you know if people are like oh that guy's face looks weird. I'm like [ __ ] 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 um attachments to my own infallibleness cuz 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 a hundred thousand 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, uh, but you're kind of just like, yeah, like you have an opinion about my body, that's cool. People may be right, may be wrong. And so my best kind of coping mechanism has just been like I'm I'm just me. I'm absolutely not perfect. And if you know people are going to criticize me, I I probably have it coming. And uh if they're going to be incorrect about their criticisms, you know, it's 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, 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, uh, I probably could be doing better in many respects, but also like, yeah, 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, like two years ago. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Meeting people that where where the comments really are a 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 um it's a pretty tough environment for many people to be exposed to that. So, 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. Um I've always found it to be fascinating that um everyone takes their strategy of life and like takes like figures out a model that keeps their psyche stable. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean I my personal disposition is I love the comments. Get out of here. You're going to do great on social media. It's my favorite part of social media. Oh, I wish I could say that 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 insult, right? And like you can tell that they thought about it a lot and they really carefully crafted it, taking their best go like a paragraph sized kind of or like even a sentence. Uh but like you just like respect like you actually gave them some thought like according to your abilities tried to land one. Uh but yeah, that's interesting. So Mike, one thing I want to talk to you about today on the um is so I'm really trying to figure out uh like the vibe of the 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 to 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 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 uh physique. I have applied it towards age. Uh but we're both both using the same architecture. You take evidence, you try to map it as best you can. you keep an open mind on it. You know, you're going to be somewhat right, somewhat wrong. You're going to be constantly evolving into new things, but our approaches are pretty identical and that we really do try to isolate the evidence and the results. Um, 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 uh fortunate enough to get to talk uh 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 in the 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? So on and so forth. So that is stuff that's already kind of um a known road. It's 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 uh uh to be derisive to other people uh at large practical per 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 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 a insane downpour. Texas-sized hail, all that [ __ ] 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 ompics, the trespatides 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, like if you're not deficient in vitamin D, more vitamin D doesn't help you arguably can 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 met Metformin might do some things, but it's 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 it's a laundry list. It's worse than the main effect. And so with the new class of anoractic 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 atyposity, 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 uh I think ribbalsis 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 fentamine and stuff 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 proletizing 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. And it's such a weird thing because you're like, it used to be before the 2022 kind of revolution, I would just myself and my friend Jared uh 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 Curtzwhile in them. Sweet. Shut up. But after OMIC and all those drugs, it's kind of like, oh, oh, is this a oneoff or are more drugs like this coming? And for me, one of my huge passions and one of my bridges that I 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 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 the laundry list of having higher than declining muscle mass with age coming back up to that mid20 status and even a little extra is enormous. And you can resistance train. It has a very large effect, but it takes time. And um 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 um 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 that are 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 uh not on paper difficult to exploit. They 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 uh series of drugs for mental stuff. And we're already maybe in the late 2020s 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. Yeah. I agree. I think OMIC 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 so 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 it's uh actually pretty remarkable. When you got into this uh to bodybuilding uh 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 a being your own sculpture. Now, I'm not a particularly beautiful sculpture, which is an upside and a downside. The downside is like I don't always look that great in my own eyes, so I'm like, "Uh." 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 that do not care about how their bodies look. God bless them. I think there's so much beauty in just being like, I exist. Who gives a [ __ ] about 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. You're like, "All right, you're single, dating scene." And you're like, uh, 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 value 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 in a social media site, Brian, do you have trouble picking an avatar of like, well, 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. Mhm. But in real life, you're back to this [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] with that. You think you look great weighing 300 lb. Girl, come over here. Get some love. I'm married, so don't. But theoretically, uh, you know what I'm saying? But like, um, 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-farmaceutical 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? I did. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Was it because of your physique? God, no. The funny thing about my wife and I's relationship, and if I maybe wife, can I be frank? There you go. Who cares? Let me let me process that. Yeah, sure. Okay. 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. Is this 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 ultrajacked. 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. Uh is that right honey? Pretty much. So like I think if I'm like 220 a little soft or 230 like rock hard chiseled kind of. So I'm like uh 235 and I have like some some details in my glutes and stuff. So like about nine or 10% body fat, maybe a little lower than that. And so I just store it 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 [ __ ] you are really lean." It's like it's the worst, you know, like 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 a 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 looked 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 [ __ ] 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 skating in. Yeah. Putting bait out there. Boy, can you imagine I putting out that pick? I was like, "That's it, man. Girl of my dreams is gonna No way. I don't even know who took that picture." I thought I looked terrible in it, but she was like, "Oh, this is my vibe." So, yeah. And so, in pursuing this, um, you you decided to do, uh, 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? Yeah, there's probably like three reasons maybe why I decided to do steroids. One is uh back when I was coming up natural everything drug free powerlifting bodybuilding etc was very nent and very um 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 looked like they knew things were gigantic juice monsters and I was like [ __ ] it let's do it uh cuz 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 um I just like the idea of progress and uh natural gains. I trained naturally for 12 years. I uh 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 cuz more than absolute level of physique I want to continue to work on my masterpiece longer. Yeah. 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 um I'm a nerd first and everything else after. And the ability to use uh chemicals, pharmaceuticals, atoms and molecules to upgrade your abilities is straight up comic book [ __ ] And I'm 100% here for it. So there's my trifecta. I got into I'm with you, Mike, on um the excitement of using any available means to achieve an objective. Yeah. 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 rapid me for a while. Yeah. And I just recently stopped after doing it for four years. What get you to stop? Uh it was messing with my lipids. No way. Uh yep. So a few side effects. Uh lipids were messed up. Blood glucose. Resting heart rate was increased and I had some small tissue infections. Holy crap. Yeah. It is a grotesqually catabolic substance is point. 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 uh two weeks ago where on certain aging clocks uh I think 12 out of 16 aging clocks I think rapamy showed it accelerated the speed of aging. Oo 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 it 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 we were that Rapomias guy. Oh, Brian Johnson, you mean the guy that did rap my 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 like 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 gains, what's the maximum 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,"Wh do you do this many sets, but you quote unquote recommend way more?" But I never recommended way more. I said, "This is the theoretical maximum recover volume for many people." I don't say train at your maximum recover 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'd 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 rapamy I guess I feel a relief uh not doing it now because it definitely like my resting heart rate uh 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've tolerated side effects to achieve this in objective like I'm okay with the tra which is noble in a certain sense so you've done the same I' I've heard you say on steroids that you experience anxiety that you experience certain feelings of rage that yeah certain feelings yes yeah yeah How do you think through the balance of um 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, forgoing 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 it always the thing I approximately want to do and feel like doing? [ __ ] 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 workcoholic 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 They're like, "Okay, breathe it out. Regrit the teeth. Keep plowing." To me, the interaction with anabolics and uh 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. 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. M I'm in extreme doses of anabolic androgenic steroids and I feel like I have a lot of rage. Uh 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, yeah, but I'm here for it, you know. And thinking through like for example, you my met my son Talmage who's 19. He was great. Yeah, he's a he is he's a good kid. That's a trit statement. Uh but it um can you imagine as a parent you're like I I [ __ ] don't like the guy. He's around kick him out. Yeah. He's currently trying to sort his models of life. 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 uh 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 are you ultimately thinking that's going to get you because people think things like well I'll have muscles and then then what you're going to get laid more are you going to feel better inside your skin some people get so caught up in the moment of doing the thing they sort of leave the end product 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?" You're like, "It doesn't matter. Just collect the data. Data is data. It's great. It's valuable." But nobody had any approximate 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 were people that were visionaries that knew what the data was going to be used for. And there are other people that were like I just heard data is good so 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 going to gain muscle and then and the rest is haze like just vibes. You 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. You're like, like that, right? 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 poores, as I like to call them. My word, how do you even live on this? 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 [ __ ] 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 in mine and getting older faster. Yeah. I mean how 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 a good example where you take an injection it changes a fundamental part of of who you are. We also both uh imagined that we could actually just have injections or have genome gene editing and we basically get the same benefits of exercise. So we could not even have to do exercise in future. Right. Which is by the way not fantasy land at all on a theoretical biological basis. Anyone who studied nth 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. Yeah. You're not violating any laws of the universe or anything like that. Exactly. It could be rewritten uh like our entire our lives, how we eat, how we exercise, sleep, etc. How how we think exactly our conscious experience and so like how do you if you do certain things today that do accelerate aging in some capacity like let's say antibiotics always have some negative effects on health they do you have to postulate how how do you reconcile that given this moment do you are you imagining that uh technological progress will be able to address that in the future you're not worried about it because you have this other endeavor you're working on now um I have been involved in um 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, macroolelecules 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 um if someone This is ridiculous, this is going to get me to death, but [ __ ] it. I mean this wholeheartedly. If someone in a crowd raised a gun at Sam Alman, 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 lynch pin 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 could always get hit by a bus tomorrow. Am I uh going to index really highly on trying to never die? Um 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 uh 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 time scale of like before the black hole comes and swallows us all or before protons decay. Um you may never die. When in the hell could we ever say that? Mhm. So, if that isn't something that gets you excited about agent reversal and longevity, I don't know what the [ __ ] to tell you. Uh then you just yolo eat a lot of uh 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 Homer Rectus and you're asking them to map the future of existence, this is a million years ago. We 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 organized in large 1500 people living together. That's crazy. Yeah. Something basic like a tractor in the field harvesting. Oh my god. Like all so they they basically can't say anything. And so I guess as we talk about this uh we both see the next 10 to 15 years to be um 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. Mhm. That's it. And that's why the anti-aging efforts, it's not to try to achieve immortality. is 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, uh, 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 is 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 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 uh hit by a bus scenario. So, if I overindex 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] long. You know the old Jews you're just like why the [ __ ] are you still here? Like 90 butogyny 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 [ __ ] like that. So there's something there. Um 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 [ __ ] happens, but you can't be there to see it because you're not going to make it. I'll be like, "Ah, [ __ ] Who gives a shit?" Really? To me. 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. Uh a few years back Jared and I were walking around the campus of uh an University of Michigan and 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 you like what happened? Did you lose someone like this is a robot doing? because it was like oh my oh my god like him and I had been thinking about this theorizing about so long reading Curtzwhile 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 piffy really New Yorker type of [ __ ] and then nowadays it's like you [ __ ] idiot this shit's coming like now and you're in it like oh 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 systemwise 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 in true deep consciousness like we could never comprehend. As long as that thing's kicking, I'm a [ __ ] sideshow. Yeah. Do you think it's possible that uh 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? Mhm. 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 identify with today of 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 that it was just like, whoa, holy [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] right and I had some [ __ ] 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 world view, I can reach real far with my imagination typically and do some really crazy [ __ ] 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 my muscles, all this other stuff. Let's say we do brain to cloud, which I think is uh 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 [ __ ] We already know enough. Uploading human brain to the cloud and now you exist in a virtual space. That's cool because you can live a thousand different Matrix fantasies. Dope. Uh, 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 gonna be able to live in a reality like simulated at a thousandx 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 uh 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 and be like oh my god like when VR fully comes in like fully immersive VR my own thought to myself was like I'm gonna have so much goddamn sex with every [ __ ] thing that moves in that space cuz it's all irrelevant all 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 and be like what do you want out of living in a VR space he's going to be like so many bananas you [ __ ] I've 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 them. You're like 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 super intelligence 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, right? Right. Wonder I mean if 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 um Am I speaking to it now? Excellent robotic interface. I say we worked hard on it. Thank 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 and like it has enough text from me where I've 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 uh 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 larger vocabulary or to understand more concepts or to bridge new things together. Uh 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. I mean soon, very soon. Uh 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 saying like in the like the far edge cases, the nuances. But 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 uh AI is already in emerging cases better at being us than we are. Yeah. 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 uh staying up all night or eating poor, you know, like bad food or uh 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 I'm relaxing or I'm having a good time with friends, like whatever the the thought following thought experiment is or excuse I'm still doing something that is accelerating my age. Uh it's actually lessening my biological ability as a as a person. And if we say that pattern can be mapped to other things like when we um change the environment of planet Earth to maybe be less hospitable to the to the species, that's a bad thing. when um 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 uh 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 of violence that may be on the earth. But that basically to try to eliminate from all of our all of us this trade-off space we have of pleasure andor 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 I was thinking through like your life decisions and my life decisions and how we're both trying to play this game and 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 you can 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 open AI or anthropic is their own trajectory and like little old me like what am I going to I don't think that's true. I think why not? Because everyone behaves and it has a ripple effect where we work, who we vote for, how 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 a 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 this these positions of authority. And so if if you see it, if you see this moment and uh 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 um red team my own position. Yeah, I am trying to locally optimize for the next 5 to 10 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 [ __ ] is that myopic. Uh 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 like 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 uh 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 not there again the technical AI discussions for dilotantism another time uh but It's going to be apparent that people will 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, uh, 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 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. I'm kidding. Yeah, that's funny. Uh, because that's like that's like a legitimate response, you know, like um it's true. No, I definitely want to hear. It's it's not like I don't think uh the things that people want are necessarily truth, right? Whether you want like more muscle or whether you want more money or whether they want more status or more power or whatever. Yes. Those things are just ephemeral social cultural phenomena. Typical rich guy [ __ ] Here we go. But people people want something to focus on meaning. Yeah. So they want a they want objective. They want uh 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 a species. We're evolutionary moving into this new game. It makes sense we change our new games to want different things. I 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 proverating 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 um you're going to 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 is my two political philosophies right there. But if you want to drink alcohol and stay up all to 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. Yeah. 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 entertain some healthy eating and exercise every now and again." Yeah. Okay. So, I guess on that note, uh, 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 heavy sigh of 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. [Music] So first the vizia scan this is this measures um 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. So I'm biologically uh sorry uh chronologically 40. Yeah. So age 44 skin a baby. That makes sense right? And not bad. I would say we've seen a lot worse. Okay. Yeah. So good job. My skincare routines involve on every several days putting some kind of generic soap on my face. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. 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. Spometry. This is lung capacity. Uh 99th percentile. Yeah, it makes sense. I have a lot of lung. Yeah, good job. So 13.2 L per second. Thank you so much. Okay. your advanced glycated end products. Great score. No way. Age 23. 23. Yep. Yep. The score would take 1.3. So fantastic job. Uh 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, sort of thing. So, yeah. So, good job on that. All right. Uh, grip strength 99th percentile. That makes sense. 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 99th percentile within your age group. Sure. And then if you wanted to be 99th 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 cuz 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 [ __ ] 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. I thought it was time. I'm not doing that. We're doing different content. Exactly. Okay. Sit and reach. Uh, this is 50th percentile. All right. In the middle. I don't want to stand out. I'm not some freak gymnast. No offense, gymnast. Yeah. 15 inches. And so, eight additional inches would put would put you in the 99th percentile. Ryan, if I've 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. Uh, 9.5. So, you 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, um I can't score a 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. Yeah, like when your quads get big enough and your torso is big enough. Sitting vertically straight down to your butt is kind of like how Yeah, exactly. I need to actually I only tried it once. I need to actually work on it. I uh maybe if I found some greater flexibility or something, but rig the scale. One more result. Onelegged stand uh 13 seconds was nine nth percentile. That's low, huh? It's low. So the range here is So the 99th percentile for men would be 35 seconds. Oh, okay. Um, 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 from your first attempt to your your first attempt was what 4 seconds 5 seconds and then you tried and got to 13. 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 a neural health? Is it something like okay as you age your balance deteriorates? No way. Yeah. Okay. I've done tests like this uh throughout my life and uh 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. 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 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 uh 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. Uh I do have a thing where I think that if we make it another 5 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 uh how do I say this best? It's nerve-wracking to think about. What do you what do you what do you have about that? But probably been a few times throughout history where uh certain people and certain cultures needed to have coherent clear thinking. Uh so for example, in the early days of the cold war, you know, do you do it or not? Yeah. uh when you're in crisis of there's a a global pandemic, how do you think about what to do and why? You know, like what are the leverage you have and how do you work together as a society? How do you communicate it? Uh do you lie? Do you tell the truth? You know, like Sure. where you need to real game theory type. You need to have good judgment. Yeah. And and judgment of course is a like a branch of intelligence. Yes. Um but I I think that uh we've never needed wisdom more than this moment. Yeah, but wisdom is more um tilted into the crystallized part of intelligence and less into fluid intelligence. So I guess it'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 um 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. The 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. Uh though not from a survival perspective, from an enhancement perspective. Yeah. Back in the day, you were stupid, you died. Uh nowadays, you're stupid and you just continue to watch stupid TV and sit in your house. But I think that 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 younger people have new ideas they're open to new things and older people who are more ingrained in their ideas uh are resistant to these new new things which are inevitable but they just their old patterns don't match. Sure. So it's definitely a tradeoff uh 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 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 ones foreclosed. And so yeah, I'd say like on this question, I was talking to this um gentleman working in AI and he said I I stopped applying sunscreen because AI is just going to solve it for me. And so I now this is like a pattern you were saying as well that many people are 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. 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 sideeshow. Just to put that in the I'm not saying that's a correct view, 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 uh it's such a squirly situation. Yeah. Well, Mike, I've I've really enjoyed hanging out with you. Uh 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 um 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 the podcast? What is your most general way to in several or one sentence state your goal with the podcast? If someone, let's say your media team was like, "Dude, the podcast takes a lot of editing throughput. We got a ton of other [ __ ] a 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. Yeah. Um, I'm trying to do information compression. Of course. Um, I want a billion of us humans to band together and devote ourselves 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 that'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 entire existence and say we are doing this. I can think of a lot of uh 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. Yeah. 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 blew in the face. Another one is having research scientists that are working deeply in the space of anti-aging, aging reversal, cosmetics, um physique alteration through the scientific approach like you know plastic surgeons and skin removal specialists and facial deaging and just talk to them about like what's in the pipeline, what are you working on and what is currently empirically validated as sound because unfortunately our space of fitness and health is filled with an unbelievable amount of empirically validated awesome things and like a 10 to1 ratio of just like [ __ ] fly by night dogma insane schemes of people being like oh lay in this [ __ ] dumbass machine and have these raise 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 uh for lack 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 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 sword on here because YouTube doesn't like that. Thinking that maybe 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 about psychologists and other people who have been through difficult things, uh, 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 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 got to 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 just 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 their 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 of the beautiful revelations that are going to be made in biology also have an 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 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 [ __ ] so goddamn fast you they'll trip to to get there. Yeah. 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 or like anti-aging they're like yes where please God. Uh unless they you know resign themselves to be like I'm good. Yeah. Um, 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, your face. 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." But they're like, "I'm partying." Fun, right? What are you partying with? Your little rockstar 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 crows 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, "Yeah, hell yeah, I want to be that." And so rearchitecting 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 for just to look sexier? They're gonna be like yes. Like okay, you're gonna want to look at all this anti-aging stuff because it's gonna make you look better for longer. Yeah. Maybe it'll bite. What do you think? Yeah, it's the it's the shest path. It's the shest path, which is 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 uh deeper anti-aging side. Oh man, those doveetail. Our 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 Kool-Aid going. Yeah, we found it. Oh, there it is. I really enjoyed the conversation. Like, um I think initially we met because I think you were talking [ __ ] about me. Exactly. Yeah. And I made a nice comment in return. It was an incredibly awesome move. Yeah. And uh it could have gone completely differently. Now, if you actually watch the video, I was respectful where respect is due. But I you know what? I I do struggle with that cuz like people love it when I'm a [ __ ] on the internet cuz I got that [ __ ] But then again, like um 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 [ __ ] 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 um Liverp type people. Brian Johnson. Yeah, Brian. So many Brian Johnson. I get you two confused. I'm like, you wait a minute, you look almost the same. And wait, what? Um, 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. Uh, and so I said all of us. I didn't mean you, Lord, by lordship. And um, 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, [ __ ] them." Because they're like literally bad actors. Mhm. 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? I mean, you're basically you're acting like autophagy, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're trying to act like as a a cleanup mechanism. Exactly. Yeah. Which is a loveless job. Uh and honestly, like I 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 believe various principles into existence, and just run away with the cash, so [ __ ] them. But on the other hand, like imagine being one of these guys that makes a living from training, and then some [ __ ] on the up and up who now everyone knows is a household name or whatever, household head. Um, it's 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? Cuz 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 and then someone's like, "Look, like I'm an expert assassin paid well. I 100% pull a [ __ ] bullet in 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? Mhm. What do you think? You're taking money from Putin, aren't you? Brainree 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 guess like in in like a tribe, tribes are are comprised of various personalities. And there's certainly a a productive path of being cooperative and and kind and uh dancing to the nuance of those things. There's also a value in um not being beholden to the tribe. And so oftentimes I know that many of my friends are, you know, in like 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 they do need to work in a system of power. Sure. 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 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 and we align with. So it in the end it 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. Yeah. I don't really care what gets us there. I just want it to be right. Yeah. Uh for the for the result. And so in doing that, I personally have chosen to not be beholden. Yeah. 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 and be that 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 going to be right sometimes, wrong sometimes. you're going to correct yourself. So, 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 um like when when you were talking [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] about an older version of me? I know. I didn't. 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 a lane. 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 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 was in my best interest, right? Like you're trying to help people out genuinely. So that was 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 challenged him to arm wrestle. I uh 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." Uh I was in when I was in undergrad, I was a competitive powerlifter. 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 supenate 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 was the only upside I was interested in." And then I never did it again. That or hooking up with any females. Yeah. One of those not according to my own choice. Yeah. A friend of mine, we were at a party and there was um someone there was like a a wrestler or 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 and which one? The muscular guy that you just muscular guy. Oh, good. Yeah. Who? He was like, you know, I'm gonna jump in. But he um he's had two surgeries on his back now. And capital H hurt. It plagues him. Like it just Can you imagine having to deal with that? So I always think of that. Yeah. I always think of that. 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 middle school that I liked, I would not be able to live with myself like catastrophic injury for some dumb [ __ ] Again, when I was younger, I did [ __ ] like that. I got hurt low one time. Uh like when you're a powerlift, 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 4 foot platforms just from a stand just when drunk with friends in college. And at one time I I actually jumped up onto the thing, but I scraped my knee and I was like, "Ow." And then I never jumped onto anything ever again. Yeah. 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 ghee. We can go no ghee. Sign a waiver in a me in a in a 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. Maybe he'll [ __ ] me up. It's unlikely. Uh but you know that and really the question is why? What are we trying to ascertain? If we're just roughousing for fun, I love that energy, but I'm not eight anymore. my [ __ ] 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 Crystal and I would love to ride bikes around. We have great places to 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 [ __ ] stick on a bike, what am I going to tell myself? Yeah. 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? And so people are like, "Dude, these guys suck. They like you stay the [ __ ] 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 going to 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'm sure I get it all the time. It's like, bro, so maniacally focused on living forever, he forgot how to live. Yeah. And so it's like the knee-jerk reaction that probably 25% of people say in response to becoming acquainted with me. They um 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. Right? And that's what I'm 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 uh 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 likeminded people the longer that you're kicking because all of the short-sighted people are short-sighted and not around anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Like they'll just be um Yeah. 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, um that's bridgible. and like also friend yes take this one more step of like there's we're doing this because these are building blocks for this much bigger thing we're playing and that's why I like is a it is reachable to a group of people that otherwise they don't understand what's happening there's no there's no vector for them it's very hard and they intuitively like they they interact with these models but they don't understand like how they scale and applications and biology and molecules and engineer 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 [ __ ] can sit and be like we are actually earnestly working on this and like if you had the guy uh Deis Cybus the guy who leads deep mind at Google if you of course uh 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 I would say it sounds like another religion that sounds like faith. How do you know maybe the future is really dystopic? A lot of people have really idea 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 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, but you get the what can 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 string along. They're like, "Yeah, okay, [ __ ] it. I'm long for this shit." Yeah, I totally agree. Like, so Demis, uh, 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 real 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. So but he was let me say one thing he was doing he 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. That's has been his whole quest. He's like he's just trying to solve intelligence and like we humans are a certain form of intelligence and we have certain uh positive attributes or negative attributes. There's all kinds of externalities. A lot of limitations too. We do. Yeah. So I I really admire and he's just been maniacal in that pursuit you know from deep mind through his days at Google. Uh so uh but I glad 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 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, "No, no, don't do that." But if it's like, "Do it, do it, put it on." He's like, "I don't know you. Do it right now. Going and then he gets the [ __ ] eye the whole thing." That's right. I agree with you uh entirely. Put on the ring of power. I think that's probably going to summarize our discussion. Froto, don't be a little wuss. Put the ring on. Go to Mordor. Do that [ __ ] 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 of existence. I think it's actually a billion of us are going to because I think that it's going to be uh 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. Uh we're going to decide whether to go to war or not. Like we're going to make all these decisions as a 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. Did Is your anxiety down since you stopped taking the substantially? It's down to nonclinical levels as you can probably see. I don't know. I I've never experienced anxiety, but I would imagine that's just bold. Awful. I just I would imagine I've been worried about stuff before. Just imagine that extended out at infin item. That would be uh such a terrible state to worry about something for a while. Yeah. I know it's like to be depressed. I barely know what that's like. Uh, I can be depressed for several minutes at a time and then I'm like, tada, like 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 uh I can't get my mind off of this this worry. That was a decent take which is kind of like depression. Pul 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. I 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 aderall for attention deficit disorder when I was younger. It's like pharmacologically induced depression where I could always go back and that part of my mind was like it's just the drugs. 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 is 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 I was just curious. Yeah. Vzero 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 CBT. I did um 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 um left the Mormon religion and I basically just tried to rewrite my entire life and only in that moment did it start lifting. It started lifting. It wasn't an instant lift. Uh 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 uh 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 is genetic proclivity multiplied by your current life circumstance. Yeah. So the genetic proclivity gives you a baseline and then like people who are genetically engineered as a evolved by accident to be very depressed even when they're extreme fame and wealth they're still kind of like maybe a little less happy than the average person do in 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, yeah, if even if they're dealing with cancer, they're still like they're pretty reasonable about it. But if they're dealing with regular life, they're ecstatic. And if they get into some really 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 benol when you say it like yeah like legit life like being involved in a crap marriage is like really [ __ ] bad and it follows you everywhere Crystal. I underhand pitched that joke to myself. Oh my god. Yeah. It's um I 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 uh did you engender ideas of like things will get better in this relationship and I'm still in it to see that through you always have hope of like you can keep on grinding away. You hear stories of people like, you know, they've worked through their trials and they've been married for 45 years and it's like definitely there's that. Uh it's just like when you're building a team and someone joins a team, you know they're not the right fit. Mhm. 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 through me but for a few penantries 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 for the depression was like the uh probably the coolest experience in my life where I just got like you it was like obeic for hope just like I just got infused like I just it was just raining and uh it was like sunshine of hope just like absorption where I just was back to existence after being in this dark cave for a decade. So like what an amazing uh 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 uh about personal journeys and happiness and things like that. And uh 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 uh 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 talked to you and people are like, "How was he?" I'm like, "Fucking robot, weirdo, vampire." Everyone's Exactly. Exactly. I wouldn't expect anything less. Exactly. 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.