Economic Incentives for Essential Public Services

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I was a little overwhelmed by the newness of it all. Boxes were everywhere, I needed a break from unpacking. But just as I was able to take a breath and open my Hershey's Cookies and creream bar mind a roommate Rachel walked in. I offered her a piece, but she said no Then after a beech, she said, actuallyually, those are my favorite ones we left The ice was broken and we've been friends ever since Hershe's It's your happy place I'll say something really This just makes for good clips. You have a drug It's already ready to save lives and you wait ten years to give it to any real humans outside of three hundred people in a clinical trial murdering people Historically, your point is very wrong. How many drugs did we wait and not give to people and how many people die? Because there's always a cost This is an AI universe that you're living in man. It's not real life People taking experimental drugs, getting side effects and then want us to be able to diagnose who's having a problem due to their metabolic condition or to this new experimental drug, on what planet mightike? On planet Earth, do your job There is an anti vanity streak that I think mostly does not belong in our society. Tell me more, peopleople who say you shouldn't concern with your appearance. Improving your appearance sometimes makes you Healthier, live longer, but an over fous on it can become toxic. That's what the books about Except for one word, it's not sometimes it's most times Welcome back, Dr. Mike Israel to the Checkup podcast. Mike has a new book called Aesthetic Revolution based in the idea that appearance, both how we see ourselves and how the outside world sees us, should be discussed more openly and sometimes even intentionally be improved. As a bodybuilder who's been open about using anabolic steroids and undergoing cosmetic surgery as part of his own aesthetic goals, Dr. Isertel believes that the power to change your aesthetic largely rests in your own hands He also believes, thanks to new and emerging technologies, it is becoming easier than ever to look the way you want I don't know if I agree with all of this and whether it's beneficial, and I'm not sure you will either A few notes about this episode First, Mike and I are close enough to have an honest, often spirited debate about a variety of topics, including some that sit outside both of our areas of expertise. Second, Dr. Mike Isertel is one of the most interesting, provocative and confident people I've had on the show provroocative does not always mean correct, and confidence doesn't always mean settled science. Some of what we discuss is evidence based, some of it is philosophical, and some is purely speculative Third, in this episode, Mike makes several claims that I think are worth debating and should not be treated as proven scientific evidence. We discuss body image, cosmetic surgery, GLP one medications, experimental drugs, peptides, anabolic steroids, FDA regulation, gene editing, and one of Mike's favorite topics, AI Throughout the episode, fact checks will appear on screen correcting both of us because there are places we could both be more precise. So if you hear this sound effect, That means a fact check has appeared. If you're listening only, that's your ceue to check the video or the show notes These fact checks are not there to score points. They're there because when we have a conversation that touches medicine, science, and safety, precision really matters. So enjoy the conversation. but listen critically, this is an entertaining debate, not a treatment plan That's actually a real big one. I don't know if you ever had someone of expertise on to clarify the fact that There are like maybe like a hundred million Americans that think doctors are like sitting there and a big pharmaceutical guy comes in with a briefcase and he opens up a stack of green hundies. And he's like, M, see, there's this new medication. It's not even tested an animal, see? And the doctor's like, well, I got loans to pay. It used to happen not to that degree, but to somewhat that degree. Now when a farmer rep comes to educate us about a new test, about a new medication out on the market and they bring Panera We have to sign a law. Yeahah that they now put out Sunshine actwise that we received a lunch And someone in my Jubilee debate used that as evidence because like fifty to sixty percent of doctors have gotten a lunch from a pharma company, that fifty to sixty percent of doctors are biased And I'm like, if we're biased on fifty dollars What is Gary Breckca biased on when he makes millions selling a six thousand dollars red light I mean, like I don't know completely different standard applied for no reason. Also there's like nothing wrong with pharmaceutical companies paying doctors to prescribe their products in my view. H L really? Yeah, like when you go to your car or maintenance shop and they're like, oh, this new windscreen company makes excellent windscreens. Do you want to buy one? You know a real talk though, how does it compare? Like honestly, it's a bit overpriced but if you want really awesome dynamics of evening light, there's nothing better. I wouldn't buy it myself, but it's great. Like you're like, yeah, that's awesome Thanks for that insight. If your doctor is cutting you anything other than the real deal, your doctor is like like just a hypocratic oath right in the placis where it probably doesn't like to have sex with. but If your doctor is like phharaceutical companies are like, hey, look, we have all these medicines. They're great Here's a bunch of them, talk to your patients about if they want to use them. I don't think there's a goddamn thing wrong with that at all. It happens in every single other industry. L the person at your massage parl layer is like, Hey, we got all these new oils. And you're like, do I need these new oils? If they're a liar, they'd be like, of course, if they're not a liar, they're like, of course you don't need the new oils, but there's all these flavors and they do moisturize your skin As long as doctors are evidence based and appraising things off fairly and sort of presenting you with a panoply of options, they're doing a goddamn great job And like how would they find out about like the best medicines if the pharmaceutical company didn't come tell them about it? I know too many doctors. that are elite at staying up to date. I know too many doctors that are like Bro, did you stop learning things in nineteen eighty two? And they're like, ahah, here's like penicilla or whatever. like, o Okay, very well, thanks So I think that Trying to prevent all money. from entering Every aspect of life is an insane proposition that just goes directly against everyone's incentive I think the thing that is like the number one thing that'll just fix all of this is massive transparency. Well, that's what the Sunshine Act is. Yeah, it's great Yeah. That's why I like it. Just say to people what you've But the problem is it only works. for doctors. So When I work with Abbott and I get paid a huge sum to promote blood donation So God forbid Gary Brekca gets into an accident. vampire lobby is a well understood problem in the United States. Where does the blood go, Mike? So some reason the transparency ends right there So if God forbid someone gets into an accident, they have blood available Yet When Gary Breckca sells something or Andrew Huberman sells something, there is no see what they're being paid Yeah Um Like there was a recent episode on the Huberman podcast about peptides Was he paid to do that episode Is he collecting money from the Pbite lobby, a website? Yeah. I don't know Sure. Yeah, the doctors interact more in payments with the government. I think that's why there's like a bigger transparency situation there regulatorily speaking. The government doesn't cover your peptide costs. so w't care l. That's why it's weird to me because Doctors interact more with the government spending so they require a higher level of scrutiny. They get a higherer layer of scrutiny, and yet they're treated as if They're the shady ones And the people selling supplements are the good ones and are honest. I think the doctors being treated as shady Yeah And their interactions with pharmaceutical companies being treated as shady and pharmaceutical companies being treated as not even so much shady but just downright nefarious while in fitness influencers their' contracts with supplement companies and supplement companies themselves, so like you have doctor, fitness influencer Contract with pharma, contract with supplements, and then phharma company or supplement company To me, there's like almost the same dynamic at play And like pharmaceutical companies are just like they actually make in some sense, really effective supplements that are validated by for sure science. But they're like so powerful that they also have some downside risks. We' like a few overdose on Ashwaganda kind of doesn't do anything to begin with, It does. It does a few things, littleittle T things Then like you eat three times the actual goidose, probably nothing is going to happen to you ith pharmaceutical companies they get a lot of trouble for being dangerous because they're actually super powerful And so to your point, I think it's like, Anytim people who are fitness influencers who do supplement contracts, peopleeople who are running supplement companies representing them Every time they talk smack about doctors and pharmaceutical companies, I one of two minds. One is like everyone can make a valid critique. and sometimes they make really valid critiques But it's also like just take a little mirror, point it back at yourself and all of a sudden, you're like oh, I'm pedaling something with like one tenth of the research volume I'm asked for no transparency whatsoever. I'm allowed to make ooodles of money, which I think is great. But they're like, o look. my favorite thing is like when supplement company people are likem farmers after the money. I'm sorry, what? Do you do your Well, that's why that clip I just showed you that Gary Brekca goes Pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Well, who does Gary Brecker have a share responsibility? is the shareholder? Yeah, that's what I'm saying.'s to himself. And also there's other ostensibly other shareholders of a supplement company. He has responsibility to them as well. And so the supplement company actually like these are all private owned companies. and typically equity is split on more than one person. That means they're shareholders. And it's funny enough like, if you're a pharaceutical company Your shareholders include like a huge fraction of the United States, your' massive publicly traded company So you have to honor the wishes of the people of the United States some mass a fraction that a private small pharmaceutical company or supplement company just doesn't have to off offer all of that stuff. And also there's a whole other thing of like prophets versus people. It's not a versus profit motiv is and say is the most powerful way to organize society to do good, ever tested. A there access of profits we should be concerned about absolutely Do we want to like shoot the goose that lays the golden egg? Are you crazy? Like it's people versus profits. Like man, everywhere they allow a lot of profits unregulated. The people are doing much better. Last I checked Sweden was way better than North Korea. and North Korea doesn't allow profits at all. Sweden's like, yeah, just pay taxes and you're good to go just make as much money as you like. It's that whole thing there that skepticism of pharmaceutical companies because they make a lot of money is like, Are we skeptical of like Dell computer for making a lot of money, making Dell computers? and so you don't w want to buy one? Becauseusere like, I don't know what's in this laptop. They're try make a lot of money making these things like what But it's a good laptop like, right Well shut up and buy it. There's this new push against success that has happened on social media where if you create something and you make money, it's like, why didn't you just give it to society for free? Yeah It's yeah, it's very easy to refute because the amount of motivation people have to do amazing things at their own expense, scales typically with the amount of reward that they're going to receive Like If I'm told that if I do a real good job at work, I can make ten times the money. I might do crazy shit let work eat into the rest of my social life, stay long hours Wake up in the middle of the night scribbling ideas If I am not allowed to make any more than a very Nice but small amount of money at work ility of going overtime for work falls super low. And you know, I'm not a part of the story. Who cares about me? Like rich people are rich either way. The real question is what effect does incentivizing people with mega profits have on the output of society overall versus if we clamp those profits down is if modern economics hasn't debated this point for like seventy years Like if typically, you a high degree of free enterprise, you allow people to collect huge upside profits, they just innovate like crazy and their standard of living rises. and they invent tons of medications, they invent tons of technologies, they make processes that typically were reserved for luxury, people normal. The people that like founded and ran Uber and lift and all these car companies. Like they brought the black car to the regular person because just anyone can afford like an elite car to come pick them up and drop them off. That's crazy. Do you remember in the nineties? that was like only rich people could do that. Like rich rich people like the guy who owned a mansion could maybe do that Now everyone does it. likeike what pushed these Uber people to do this sort of thing Like you know they have like multibillion dollar company. So passion, inspiration for sure, but also like a conetant reward that like, don't worry if you toast your life for all of this willll give you so much money that it'll be worth it. That's a big deal. And again, those people they get money either way. It it's not a concern for them. If we set up massive incentives, how good is it for people immagine we had an Olympics where we paid no one any money for it. We didn't give out medals because it was kind of gross to rank people, and we didn't pay for people to show up How much of the beauty of competitive sport on humans at their best would we see at the Olympics? Wellro they wouldn't even be an Olympics. It would be like in Cinat, Ohio, no offense Cincinati's great place h and no one would care about it But because the Olympics are given so much praise and so many gold medals money and contracts and sponsors, then man athletes will grind their entire lives for one medal. We want to see that because we benefit as consumers of entertainment sport. And so just the same way, the profit motive in medicine, I think is like an enormous thing. We want as much profit in medicine as possible want as little abuse and dereliction as possible. It is absolutely tractable to get both of those things at the same time You want the upside to be like, hey, make amazing medicines, make healthcare better for everyone, makeake it cheaper and make load of money and also No abuse, no fraud, none of that. That just requires really good regulation, minimal, but good regulation, massive transparency and a lot of really good oversight and then you liberate the free market to do its thing. L you start clipping the wings off the free market, you get like more and more to France And then you keep clipping and you get more and more to Greece, and you keep clipping and you get more and more to Latin Aica and you keep clipping and you to North Korea. It really sucks. What's your take on the fact that when Jonas Sulk was asked why he didn't patent the vaccine, he said, you can't patent the sun So I shouldn't patent the vaccine and he Let forgo billions of dollars. Yeah Do think we should lean into that kind of approach. So patents are a really great example of a trade off system If you have a situation where you say, there's not allow of patent, any idea Everyone who's creating new medicines knows that as soon as they publish the IUPAC chemical structure, someone's just going to take it and just produce it at scale. That does reduce people's incentives to make really big strides towards really innovative cures On the other hand, if you have a patent structure that says like The seEAL teams will shoot everyone to death in your lab if you try to make this drug for cheaper and the patent lasts for fifty years and it' exclusive to one person or one company, then you're really enhancing the kind of innovation that goes on a different route and makes a different kind of drug But you can take a whole drug class and deaden all of the innovation because you just patented the entire drug class or something And so patent law ends up playing at a trade off between these two extremes And I think there's probably in many cases, some kind of legal structure that goes somewhere down the middle. I don't wantan to say patent homeostasis if you. Yeah, sure sure. And that could be dynamically adjusted and stuff like that. Yeah. One of the most important things in encouraging innovation and encouraging mass scale production is dependable laws that are like a long time scale So like if if you tell someone, look You get a general patent for this drug for three years After that, you get some kind of way more diluted patent for another three years. After that's out, it's just like Anyone does their thing But all the companies that make drugs know that ahead of time, they can make decisions on what drugs to make, what drugs not to make, et cetera I think that what's happening now with biotech advancement powered by AI makes patents like K of almost irrelevant. becausecause the pace of innovation is so insane that like you can patent imagine patenting Saglitide, right Okay, well what tr's appetyes is better in every conceivable way Your patent would have been cool for like three years, and then trzptide comes out and everyone's like, I don your drug is patented. I'm never buying it.'re like standing there with this patent that means nothing. So I think patenting is getting more and more pointless as we go on, but some degree of insurance that someone can't just copy your drug might have some element of of kind of Yeah, my question wasn't about the patent as much as it is Jonasul created this wonderful thing that changed humanity in many ways And yet it wasn't with this capitalistic mindset of I'm grinding because I want the financial reward I'll say something really just makes for good clips. Jenna Salk himself delivered zero vaccines to zero people. Industrial capacity did that. Only pharmaceutical companies could do that, Only scale can do that. So the hidden heroes behind every vaccine that's ever saved lives are the people in labs figuring out how do we make this at industrial scale and how do we close the delivery pipeline? Be like vaccines you can't just leave them out in the sun and shit like that. You can't just put them in pills and have them just sit on shelves. So the people that do the logistics, the pipeline all the dynamics of delivering that vaccine at scale and at a price that can sustain that infrastructure. Man, they're the ones like, you know, having a great idea. Joonah Salk was a living deceased God. no there's no debate about that. But having a cool idea and making cool molecules dope, it's not the entire picture And so I think when people make things for the benefit of all mankind and don't want money in return, I think that's awesome If they want money in return, I think that's awesome. The only money they're ever going to get is the amount of money people are going to pay them. But I think it's also important to ask questions about like, well, how does that actually work in the real world getting actual things to real people? Then there's a whole bunch of capitalist machery that has to plugged in. othertherwise, the thing just never happens I feel like whether or not he gets paid those companies that are delivering those vaccines will ultimately still be paid. Yeah. That's why the vaccines go where they need it just because those companies get paid. Yeah, like the only thing I'm trying to challenge for the sake of the conversation is the idea that people grind work harder at work because of this financial incentive But you're saying and that They're grinding so much that they're giving up their social life in order to do that Is that a net win for society that you have less of a social life, that you're grinding harder, you're making more advancements, Or is it better to have some sort of balance For society, it's a net win by like a huge fraction for the individual grinding Is it a net personal win? It depends on how much they value being a beneficent force in society. If they are, then like sweet. you're a hero. How do we cultivate that Having people like want to do good for society more Boy, might not be the expert on that I'll say that. that was a nice line. Yeah. Just I'm an expert on almost nothing actually. The just just to address the point There's no valid claim to say that the only motive that makes people do good things is the profit motive Plenty of people do really hard work and sacrifice for society without any profit motive profit motive is just a massive ROI. It is a huge average uplift to how much actual real good things get made in the world, in part because it fuels motivation, inspiration, persistence, in part because it like smooths out the incentive structure from one corporation to another to another. If you have a profit motive, like it's really easy to get the pipetes and the syringes and all the autoclaves and everything all in one place. Without the profit motive, the shit is basically almost impossible. So and the profit motive costs quot unot society, like whatever average of seven percent per year that is the net profit of like the capitalist USA at this point. But the benefit has been calculated by various economists to be orders of magnitude higher than that. And so it's kind of like, okay, so profit on average is great. That doesn't mean every individual only acts in profit. Some people will just like for nothing at all will grind away all their lives. How do we encourage people to do more sacrifice, I think one way is liberate the economic system so they can get paid up the ass. If you know that if you become an NBA player and you make like a hundred million dollars over a career, sure does not hurt your chances of having hoop dreams If you want to become a person who creates medicines for people in the Third world and you also know there's an option there that'll make you a hundred millionaire, my Godd, like you are way more likely to do that, on average, or really persist at it than otherwise. So I think first of all, is like making sure that people do good for society.ora s in. Aentinee fas.o Fes Cua f years. No v w El Signor del Siero Sporada Fina, Marte Sier dejul, Alas Mueio Chocentro, Port Mondo, I Pacock T it's yours too. What does Rv stand for anyway? To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle. Really? To me, it's the runway approved vehicle for its amazing style. What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space? Or really admired vehicle? Oh, or really awesome vehicle. 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The other way is maybe having a discussion And I do this on my other Mike Is Rertel YouTube channel, which is like philosophy and prorogress and stuff like that is looking at the world more like one giant team One giant society, one giant civilization. like as a globalist. As a globalist. And being Do you consider yourself a globalist? Well, I' Jew, so of course a globalist And I'm relatively wealthy, so obviously I'm actually technically a lizard person.. I'd pulled my skin off it' be weird the lights, the lizard skin, you know this, they' also lizard person skin doesn't lights Um So There's a term globalist U I'm not entirely sure this is such a pejorative, I'm not sure what it means in technical terms But what I would say is I'm I consider myself a secular humanist which means like I think if there's like an African girl about to get clitorideectomide, I have a real big problem with that. about as big of a problem as I have off some girl in the United States that's about to get clitteructomied And I think that like, Cultural relativism is a beautiful thing that lets us understand cultures and the perspective of us like, well, actually these people eat with their hands and that's totally fine. eating with a hand versus fork, it's just trade offs. It's not really a clear winner. And so that allows us to appreciate cultural diversity But there's also some things some cultures do that are like probably just wrong And we should probably stop them from doing it. likeike the Taliban does not allow the education of females. Like Who's for that? And so I think that seeing all humans as worthy of the same rights and opportunities as everyone else of the world over means that once we understand them, We know that working as individuals towards benefiting all of mankind can be something that other people go, M, you know, you're doing the greatest thing ever As opposed to working for your city, which is awesome or working for a corporation, which is great, for a state, for a nation. I think working for all of humanity should properly be not this thing that leftist people brag about doing, but sort of don't do. I think it should be a thing that most people are like, yeah, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Yeah. I just the reason I asked a question is we just had a firefighter on the show And he was telling us about the pricing dynamics of being a firefighter. And when he was entering the field how little people were hiring despite the fact that they were paying for their own education order to become paramedics firefighters, and they were getting paid thirty five thousand dollars a year And I'm thinking, Where are the incentives in society where you can work for an insurance company, plug in some numbers versus you're running in and saving humans and giving them help medically when they're dying You're getting paid the least less than to Starbucks Barista Where are those incentives coming from? How do we fix those U Howan I say this in a way that's not politically incorrect? When I feel like that's their question in your mind all before any answer There are answers to these questions. They don't always land really well So the number of firefighters determines in part how much you're going to pay each firefighter Be if you're a firefighter to be and you get too pers snaky by being paid more, we just go to the next guy But if you're orking in an insurance company and you're like a brilliant u person who does like actuarial science They can't just go to the next person. The next person has another job and he's getting paid five hundred K already. He's not going to leave. He's not moving from Cleveland to New York to do your job. Well the reason they can pay them more is because they're making money off their labor No one's making money off of a firefighter saving someone in a burden building. goovernment is they collect taxes from people. Part of that tax money goes to pay firefighters. But if the firefighters are more effective, the government doesn't make more money. If you're a barista and you make more money for the business So potentially there's a scheme there to get insurance companies to pay firefighters more because the insurance companies save a shitlad of money when the firefighter stops the damage or prevents the damage from spreading beyond a certain tiny point. The city also is involved in taxing your building. It would save some money in some sense if your building didn't burn down U So really it's about you're really asking a question It was very interesting one of How do we increase the profit motive in the firefighting situation And that may very well be like there are realistic ways to do that. One of them is to allow firefighters to be paid by insurance companies more directly, for example The other thing to question to ask is like Firefighters are all heroes D did a very glamorous job In the literal sense of like, they're the people in the redcoats that go do the saving There are people doing jobs that you don't see that are way less glamorous and they save at least as many lives So the person that designs the nozzle clipping system for fire trucks has by proxy probably saved like ten thousand people Anyone given firefighter in their lives may save a hundred people that guy goes to work in some engineering little office building and he just does this all day long And no one ever thanks that guy for a service, even though he's saving just ooodles and ooodles of lives And there's a guy who works on industrial sealants for cans that allows the price of canned goods to be five cents lower because it lasts longer who's technically saved like ten million people from starvation, you'll never hear his name. This is all these people And the way they're paid is generally in the economy one of two ways, One is government fiat, and the other one is supply demand Supply and demand tends to pay way more fare and actually allocate money to where real humans with dollars think it is best spent Now Real humans voting isn't the ultimate arbiter of what is good and bad for society Because real humans get it wrong. For example Real humans value elite entertainment more than they value like functional institutions If that wasn't the case, we would be paying nobody in the National Basketball Association that much money, and we would be paying politicians a whole lot more money You actually want to pay politicians a lot of money A lot of money because then they're insanely incentivized not to screw up When you pay politicians rounding air money and you're just like, hate them with vibes, they do things on vibes, which is no surprise So trying to marginally alter a system so that the profit motive is more visible thus gives the people doing the good work as much money as possible is generally a good idea. generally a good idea, but I'd also say just it's by no means clear that firefighters are underpaid U it's not clear to me that they're over or underpaid Um, I would have to see like actual statistics on like because you knowre like You say that human lives are actuarily counted as like, I think ten million dollars or something like And so you can actually do a calculation of like, how many human lives slash property is the typical firefighter saving How much are we paying them? And there would be some would fall out of that That would be a pretty dark calculation to make. People do that stuff all the time. I wouldn't want to be in that place.. Exactly. Yeah. so that we don't get too far off topic because We tend to do that sometimes For some reason on this podcast, it's like maybe because I don't have note cards, it becomes a disaster where we something. I'm just gonna say. No, no, I actually agree with you. I wish I was better at with note cards or telepompts. Like I've got another podcast and I'm like, how do they stay so organed? They so organized? They even have an iPad I need to invest in an iPad But you know, the costs these days Mike, it's tougher times for all of us. Yeah Well, tell me about the revolution This anarchy that you're starting here. It's like a very much French revolution type of revolution. Wh I don't know what streets. What is that What is the difference in a French Revolution? The English revolion. French Revolution, So the American Revolution happened like once It was bloody organized And then once the government was ascended It comes kind of super stable on the lb to the entire United States The French Revolution, from my understanding, went on a substantial amount of time and cycled through a bunch of people. they thought we're going to do a good job, it didn't Gonna to do a job. didn't They they took them to guilline all Bloody, messy result of That's what you're called of. Oh yeah, just chaos on the streets. That's really what the most of the book is actually written written in Satanic Latin. I gott to say something critical of the book Can I? Yeah, of course. J be brutally honest? No, not be even more brutal for a book called The Aesthetic Revolution This cover, I hope is not the real cover. It's exactly the real cover. This is the least aesthetic cover ever, Mike. Do you know how much creativity I had? and did you ever work with a real publishing co before There is no way stuff There is no way like this is what you landed on. we How many words are on this cover, Mike I can't read to begin with, so I have no ideas. But the shapes are nice. Thereore. The shapes are fine, but Mike, I can't this is a lot of words. Look at that shade of green So so here's the thing. Green is pleasing to the eye. Isn't it? It's like red, you hate theesthetic revolution. And why is aesthetic geticker? Is there meaning behind? I mean, that was That to have been a conscious choice By who? You? No. I didn't pick this cover So you had no play in this cont. So is this a real co They sent, yes, it is. They sent two Okay 'use I told him like, I want like a transformation photo of like a woman who looks like a blob on one side and a woman who looks her best on the other. And they're like, cool, your opinion' dope, you're the man at this, not that. let us do us. And they're like, here are the two cover options and they look roughly the same. and I sort of picked one because it vibed a little better And that's it. This is like a book you would see at the airport. They all look like this now, man. This is a don't I don't have no opinion on this whatsoever. You have an opinion on I just don't know enough about graphic design. Okay Forget graphic design. As a human, you look at this. wanted You're a master of aesthetics What is the aesthetic rating of this cover hred her Harry Potter seen Har Potter. You've seen the Harry Potter coverook. I'm not. I don't hang out with people that. Sam G get the book Joke. Do we have a Harry Potter?et get Harry Potter out right now. L Harry Potter's a magical mystery of fun. I just look You make thumbnails, right? I Oh, you don't. Okay I try and aid in the process of making thumbnails. That's good seems. Everything is a choice. So I'm curious why certain like why is fitness large Graphic design Kuery. But you keep saying graphic design. I don't understand there's no this is text design That whoever did that at the publishing companies did a greatob. I want to interview them and ask them What are these choices? Yeahes? They just like, this's what they do. Yeah. Yeah It's a trip, right? Okay. well So it The aesthetic Revolution embracing vanity and the future of fitness to unlock your healthiest self Tell me what that means So People typically look at vanity as a bad thing becausecause it's often a bad thing That seems logical But it's not always a bad thing And there's a way to understand vanity that If you lean into it What you end up saying is, okay, okay, okay. What does it look like if a person cares about their appearance and tries to make their appearance in body and face skin hair, the whole thing does it look like if they try to make it better And is there a way to make your appearance better that will make you feel happier about how you look And at the same time will enhance your health and longevity and wellness. And the answer is absolutely categorically yes. As a matter of fact Most of the things you do to enhance appearance that are not either pretty extreme or totally insane are really, really good for the rest of you And so we have this kind of Juxtaposition in gym culture or this like almost like a false dichotomy and it is one in which You're trying to get people to go and be physically fit and active and healthy. We're trying to get all of America down to a body weight that's not killing them all the time. We're trying to get them more muscle. We're trying to get them more active. And we're trying to get them to feel good about themselves as humans, right And at the same time, we tell people like, well, you don't want to train for vanity. You don't wantan to diet for vanity. Don't lose weight because you wantan to lose twenty pounds. Lose weight becausecause it's going to make you healthier, fitter. And it'sological It's super logical and the vast majority of people just never resonates with them. Why do you think that is? Because you mean on a practical sense or it doesn't land for them mentally Emotionally, it doesn't land for them. How come? Because most to most people, health and strength, vitality, longevity are to some degree second or third order esoteric concepts They're like, yeah, I technically occupy a body and I want health But when you're healthy, or at least upright and functioning, you tend to like massively take health for granted. I mean, I'm sure you see this all the time as a medical doctor. You're like, hey, your labs look okay, but you really should address this following you're smoking all the time, You're drinking sodas all the time and they're like A my lab's good and you're like g like See a doc off and you're like, cool, that didn't work. They clearly don't have a long time horizon for them. Well, that's just because their interpretation of their health. is flawed They think health is reflected upon and numbers And by some very small variables that we can change and improve health, we do But when I get someone's lab results back, I can't tell them if they're healthy or not I could just tell them they're free of five diseases. Yes. And that's it. And to most people That's health, they're deep approximate at any one time that they're awake in the world care about long term health smaller than we would like It's just not a big deal for most people It's way less of a big deal than we would like it to be. You think so I would put all my money on it. The fraction of people that don't take their medications, as you understand, is massive. Yeah. Like that exactly feeds into the idea that people on a test will say, I really care about my health stated versus revealed preferences. They state everyone says they care about their health, most everyone As far as actually doing the things that enhance their health, most people are like, Some people are great about it. A lot more people than we would like just don't really care nearly as much. Is it that they don't care nearly as much or barriers get in the way bothoth or the cost is too high and And I don't mean almost never the cost. I don't mean the money. like the costs to have to do something you don't want to do is also a cost. Like the metabolic cost, emotional cost, metabolic cost, financial cost. Metabolic costs no, financial costs, generally no, emotional cost massive That's another way of saying But because I have some patients that desperately want to join a gym and literally can't afford it or need antibiotic and can't afford it. I also deal in a community health setting so it different than the rest of the country, but is you're dealing with very minority cases. They do happen' very rare. Most gym memberships are exceedingly cheap, almost all just by the numbers Americans can afford a gym memership, no problem. The gym membership, the transportation to get there, the time it takes away to leave work, your hourly pay becauseuse you're not salary etera, et cetera. ChatPT telling you how to work out at home for free with no gym is free free. percent free. It's not. you need internet access which is free anytime you walk to anywhere with has Wi Fi, which is almost every. If you have a device, they can access the WiFi. The fraction of people with cell phones include the majority of the homeless at this point. So like Is it really the is bro. H did you find me a homeless person with a cell phone? I haven't seen one since two thousand eight Like bro, legit, man. I need to check that So These are real things, but the teeny, teeny, tiny, and they need add dressing the teeny tiny,' not going explain that sixty percent of Americans. basased on what they say about how much they care about their health. They're not doing it. They're just not doing nearly as much as they could Look at these people, you get them real talkolate. They' humans, they know. You ever tell you have Russian family, right? How many uncles and aunts do you have that just do nothing about their health And you're like, really youivia again? and they're like, Mich' like, we have to live. And you're like, this is the opposite of live, whatever. Yeah. F of all, I love Aivia. so it's great It just has to be made of mostly mayo. Which is okay. They're like come down and they're like, what is the redient of this? they do the scan, they like, mayo. They're like, isn't there other stuff like,es, buts the surrounding area You get that motivator as health and fitness and strength and longevity and you put that in front of people And people are kind of like, M yeah, some people go for it, most don't you put vanity in front of people, you're going to look unbelievable if you do these fitness things. The fraction of people that goes for it I would say heuristically, like an order of magnitude higher. Like the vast majority of people at gyms, and I mean literal vast majority, like seventy, eighty, ninety percent of everyone at gyms in the Western world and free Asia today is there for vanity as their rank one, and probably more than half of them are there for vanity as their only rank Going to the gym for pure vanity Building muscle, losing fat gettingetting more active, getting plenty of sleep Managing your stress, eating really healthy Holy crap. That unlocks an unbelievable amount of health and longevity by attending to what people whatever, unfortunately, unfortunately, more people are concerned about how they look than about the underlying systemic health that they're exhibiting So if we can stop telling people, hey, like vanity is a super gross reason to go train and eat, and we can say, look, properly couched vanity can be awesome and really healthy, can make you feel good, look good and super awesome for your health longevity That's an enormous win and that's what a big part. So you're using the vanity as essentially capital So you're creating incentives Trojan. Yeah, Trojan horse like you even do a financial incentive. hereere you're creating a vanity incentive to get them to care about their health. And we're not really creating it You're hijacking it. or tapping into it, whatever turns Iagine that vanity is an aira I have a gun register. I break the door open, I shoot one of the pilots mic just to make sure they understand how serious I am about hijacks. J just using your projectter. Jesus Beause if you don't kill one of the pilots, are you really serious? Okay. Other people in the back are like ask a flight later today. Let's not scare the shit out of mean. Is it a van? I already have a problem with flying. really. Hey, you said hijack Not hijacking offering pay You like you You like Vanity Yeah. So let's make Vanity work for you. Let's make Vanity work for you. Okay You're already trying to make it work for you. Let me free you and knowing that it's good for you tell you how it could be bad for you. And then a big part of the book is telling you all the tools and technologies and strategies that get you way better appearance and health and longevity at much less cost minimum time in the use of the most advanced technology Now this vanity thing Because we've talked about it on the positive side, how matching vanity with health can be very beneficial You get people to lose weight, you get people to exercise. The problem with vanity that I see as a physician who treats kind of average people is that when we talk about making America healthier We wanted to lose weight. I'miding. me PTSD,. Might as well. Yeah. Oh no. Yes, I did it. Max, I did it. Please keep that in When we're talking about making people better metabolically. We're encouraging people to lose weight because most of America's overweight or obese. We're trying to get them to put on muscle metabolically, it improves numbers across the board. Yeah huge makes them happier, etcet. all these things. The important thing to not lose sight is that The goal that we're actually seeking to achieve is not to get people to Go to the gym seven days a week. them to look as muscular as you do It's to just get them to do something and not be sedentary vanity, I don't feel ends at just get people to move and do some mild exercise vanity to me. encourages hyper optimization at its core. Do you agree or disagree with? Disagree. Why? Because where's the end of vanity Where does vanity end Every night I cry in front of my mirror. Well, that's a problem. That's wor Beuse I have a diagnosis code for that That mirror cam still works G glad you're receiving live stream 's that's money by theiew Um. So It's a spectrum Some people You go heapess We empower you to lean into the best of vanity And they go, can you just get the ph away from me? And they just walk off and you're like that didn't work Some people you're like, say the same thing, empower you to get the best out of vanity without doing the bad stuff. And they're like, oh, that sounds great. They read the book, whatever. And they're like, this is amazing. They they go to the gym four times a week. They lose twenty pounds of fat, they gain ten pounds of muscle, and they just have this total revolution. theirir husband's giing them the old eye again. amazing And then some so very few people will just give you the middle finger Lots of people will be like, Fanity iss great in moderation And then at the end of the other end of the distribution, you have clavicular as a human being. Do you know who that is? Yeah. ye. All jokes, but like you get people to go completely insane. I'm one of them Of course, I'm pumping my body full of dangerous chemicals constantly getting at least one so far surgery, more, no doubt planned And they're just vibing on their own weird shit But on the aggregate, if you tell people in society at large, hey, Lake, there's ways to lean into vanity that are super awesome. The overall benefit will be enormous, and the overall downside cost of the extreme cases will be numerically high, but fractionally low. So like one out of twenty people is going to take vanity to the nth degree and do real bad stuff with it I do question whether or not that person needed to be prompted at all So like I think like if someone reads this book, probroability that they'll do really crazy shit where they otherwise wouldn't have, I think is like the same or lower becausecause it tells you about all the downsides of every single drug and procedure, that's a whole section after every single thing. If you're psychotically pro vanity to begin with thing I don't think anyone has to tell you about it's just in you to begin with. and then you're going to make some really interesting choices Um, I think like, um that's one of the reasons why somethingomething I'm very much trying to always say when I'm on shows like this. There is no show like this, isn' there Mike Now without no cards. That's right. My next topic is anything to talk about My big thing is to say that I don't ever want to push Vanity anymore ever Tw reasons. One, that gets toxic real fast And two, u can help some people But it's not necessary because we're just addressing a thing that people really need already. It's like pushing tasty food on people. They already want tasty food. You just offer them options and they go, I want that one And so if you have tasty food that's really bad for you and tasty food that's really healthy. If they're both really tasty, you can come to consumers and be like, this is the healthy shit. And they tryre dude this is amazing. They try the other one. like it tastes about the same. But this is bad for me like it's got these weird chemicals, you't want to eat it. All of a sudden, you're doing a great thing by just attending to the need that people already have for tasty food. You don't need to convince them, And then you just give them tasty, healthy food. This book is about being like, you already know about this is not going to instruct you about vanity. Because not everyone, a large fraction of people already really, really care about how they look This book tells them you don't have to be ashamed about that. because there's a lot of people ashamed about caring how they look, and this is not productive in most cases It just tells them, donon't do anything stupid But if you do things the right way and there's a lot of ways to do it the right way, you're going to be in better health, you're going to be in better longevity, better quality of life, and better psychological health as well. And all these things are awesome should be discussed in a way that doesn't have to make us go around vanity. because there's this thing people do in the health space, which is they just really try to avoid the topic of vanity and looks and appearance. And so like you'll ask your doctor, hey, should I be lifting blah, blah blah, And they're like, yeah for strength and health. And it's like, okay, okay that's what they're asking. They're asking for vanity. And so the doctor could just answer the question of, like, yeah, if you lift for vanity for vanity This largely really good. what you got to worry about is these three things. And then don't do that and the rest are good to go. So that's kind of my thing is we're not trying to push van at anyone. We're just I'm just trying to say that like If you want to make yourself look good and you think it'll make you feel good, there are ways to do it that are insanely awesome for every other part of your life So When we say like there's a percentage of people that are psychotically excited about vanity, and basically what we're talking about is body dysmorphic disorder, right? Affair I thinkc disorder is No Tell me then what I misinterpret. Just no, I'm just done being bullied by you. everyvery time I come on your podcast, all you have is rude questions of just Um Body dysmorphic disorder, from my understanding is making a very, very critical claim bodyysmorphic disorder It is when you can no longer remotely objectively appraise your physique based on a reasonable comparor average. So if I told you I was undermuscled for the average forty two year old Ashkenaazi Jew, I would absolutely have bodyysmorphic disorder, notot instantly, but like whoever's doing the rating is like,, that guy well in his way It's a DSM five disorder. You don't just walk in and be like, I have this giving's about my body and they're like body dysorphic disorder. Of course. You can care to an unbelievable amount about your aesthetics and have not a trace of body dysmorphic disorder If you can reasonably tell someone who's analyzing you for the disorder a psychiatrist, like, u I know exactly where I rank in appearance based on normative group, and you're roughly correct. So if I was to tell you that I'm under muscled, That mes If I'm like, yeah, I'mper jacked but I want to get even more jacked and I already know it's exotic, you're going gonna be like, doesn't body dysmorphic disorder at all. It just like wants to be super jacked. But if I was under usion that I'm not jacked, that would be a really big problem. Well, that's almost a distortion of reality. That's not necessarily BDD. Body dysmorphic disorder is absolutely a distortion of reality. Mosts think they're fat. Well, that's why I'm saying that it's not necessarily It is part of that, but it doesn't necessarily point to that If I take someone who is two twenty six foot tall, muscular and they feel they're not muscular enough by consensus of the general public on average And they still feel like they need more muscle. and they're hyper fixated on it. It's causing them distress, anxiety, depressive symptoms. This could venture into BDD, even though they might be well aware of their percentage of where they fall into society. Does that make sense? I don't know if it's really dysmorphia If you're truly deeply aware of how you actually look Well, for example, like for unrelated, but somewhat related to the topic Obsessive compulsive disorder There's people who have insights and are aware that their compulsions are compulsions and that they're doing. But it doesn't mean they don't have OCD. Sure. It doesn't neglecture I'd have to look into the body dysmorphia disorder to see of how big of an delusion of what you look like versus reality. It's actually quite subjective and subjective not just by the patient, but by the doctor's perception or the psychiatrist, psychologist's perception of the issue And the reason I bring it up is because I want to not just say people are psychotic. their vanities getting out of control And it does happen to people where they start feeling that they need more and more And we kind of live in a society where people want more and more and more just in general from like the consumerism of it all. I just think that's every society that's ever existed. Yeah. I just think we're Much more focus more access due to the capitalistic nature of it. There's more incentive for it. That's why the whole longevity sector is just exploding right now because everyone wants to live forever. and you have Brian Johnson making all sorts of claims. So the promise has always been there And to me Vanity before, let's say forty years ago used to have a rate limiting step. where like if you had vanity and you cared about vanity and you'd go to the gym and you would work out There would be a rate limiting step of how much vanity you could partake in And that would be actually okay because you didn't need to go to the gym seven days a week. you didn't need to Get your body fat percentage under ten percent. That's not necessary for good health, right? You would agree with that? So people would just work out be vain about having a little bit of muscle about a little bit of athletic performance and they'd be happy But in the day and age in which we live and all the options that are available in this book, wouldn't you say it's much easier now to take vanity further than health. People back in the day just starves the shit out of themselves I don't think there was a Halsecy on days when people just worked out four days a week and were totally fine with everything Plastic surgery wasn't available as it is now, the drugs are much better. I mean, you talk about how much better the drugs are now. Plastic surgery wasn't available. so that people that could not get access to the surgery that was not available J just as much dysmorphia as ever they were powerless to do anything about it And so I would argue that some very large fraction of people were even less happy with their appearance because they had no ability to alter it nearly to the same extent that we do now. Whereas now, if so every time you have a cohort of people that enter the plastic surgery realm and get a procedure, someome meaningfully large fraction of them will be happier with their bodies than after And so they kind of fall out of the cohort of the potential of people that are going to have a bad time everyvery round of plastic surgery that humans get every year means people get happier than they would have gotten It wasn't happening when plastic surgery wasn't around. So if your face looked really like mine, like not great, you just had to deal with the shit your whole life That was permanent, super megahappiness. peopleople that go and take their surgeries way too far have eighteen surgeries, end up looking like the cat lady. They're very prominent veryer visible. Extremes before those people just swallowed the other end of a gun. they wouldn't ever have gotten to that degree of hope that they could get. Yeah, I feel like you're talking about a very extreme case. and again, we're venturing off health we're talking about perceived happiness and subjective values, which is always hard to measure So like from the health perspective Isn't it easier to overdo Vanity now and harm your health than it was in the past with all the tools that are available for the hyper optimization of it all. of think of what people who searched for vanity back in the day would do. I think they were using more dangerous drugs back likeike you would use DNP back in the nineteen thirties if you wanted nitrophenol And how many people were doing that? versus ha is a lot versus a lot, like in comparison to the like surgery rates no, no, no. So so to your point Because we have more options to do everything now. you can definitely get into really wacky stuff ing your health, and the spending a lot of money for sure. No one's going to argue about these extreme edge cases, and I don't think it's valuable to create rules off of extreme edge cases because they're always going be kind of outliers just because Like there are people who get twenty surgical procedures that end up looking weird and that's not healthy. and we everyone unique uniformly will point out and say this is someone who's doing too much too far But there are cases where it's not as clear where someone has one procedure and they struggle with it for two, three years Maybe they have one more procedure and they're still struggling and they're hoping that this vanity will cure whatever symptom that they're feeling of anxiety, depression, andhappiness doesn't. Sometimes it does. Sometimes large fractions it does. I don't know that it's true. I do. I did the research for the book. in large fractions it does. What we're talking about like sixty five percent That me sixty five percent of what O people that go through plastic surgery generally have really good outcomes they like. And then the rest of the thirty five percent is fractioned out, including ten percent. five to ten percent. Is that sixty five percent per procedure or per person. Tpically per procedure Are they counting the same person maybe multiple times if they go for multiple procedures? So That's where it because it's like where the divor rate comes in toally totally're talking about the total divorce rate. I' nerfing it It's way higher than most satisfaction for plastaggers is way higher than sixty five percent There's also complexity in how you measure satisfaction, Is it like right after the procedure? Is it six months later?ure? Is it years later? And when pay for something odds are you'll be more satisfied for sure. Unless you're really rich, which is most people who got plastic surgery and then they just bitch about everything they buy anyway. So they're very re. There' no satisfaction. Yeah. Your plastic surgeon here is the most bitching anyone ever does And so what we do know on a very aggregate sense is that the majority of people that get plastic surgery are happier after the surgery at any time scale than before That is a for sure thing There's lots of people that aren't And there are meaningfully large groups of people, let's say, five percent of people that get plastic surgery. which is like hundreds of thousands of millions of people that G whiz men, every single procedure, they don't feel any better. and sometimes they just feel worse My View on that is How would they feel without the surgery? The answer is typically really, really bad. They're already how really bad. How do you know? Because the reason they're getting surgery is because they hate how they look Right, that persistent looking at yourself in the mirror when you hate how you look, persistently makes you feel bad, especially if you're one of those people that can't lean into other things that can't leverage family or health or anything else. just their appearance really matters to them. So you have like two things. Appearance really matters and they have a generally negative emotional valence, like their high high probability anxiety, depression which is mostly genetic to begin with And so if you get that plus vanity, you have yourself a toxic combination. There are absolutely ways that some of those people can get multiple surgeries, get into fitness, and they really start to be happy with the way they look. and their vanity problem area shrinks substantially. They're still pissed at the rest, they can't change. but then they just transfer their anxiety or depression to other elements of their lives, of which there is an infinite amount to transfer and worry about stuff and be depressed about stuff But for other people seemingly, the problem just continues to grow. It does nothing none of the surgeries do anything to address it. Those people are rare, but they do exist. They absolutely do exist. Selling surgery to people or any kind of procedure that enhances vanity is a guarantee that it'll make you happier is a disaster. And having had one cosmetic surgery, I'll tell you what, man, you sign a lot of papers saying this guarantees nothing. And the way the doctors give you consults because I had a couple of consults, dude, like it's like speaking to a lawyer. I'm like, so what's it going to look like Well, we can't actually tell you what it's going to look like. And I'm like, okay, so they're all doing all of the due diligence. Like I've never had a plastic surgery be like Beause people think like in the movies or some shit, plastic surgeons are like, listen, we'll get you a new nose. All your friends will be jealous. It'll be a new you. You'll be happy forever. They say the opposite of that. They're like, now, rinoplasty is a very serious considerations. And you're like, am I actually getting anything? And're like, well, ninety five percent of our patients think it's great. Here are some before and afters and you're like, okay, fine ChagPP told me was largely true. peopleeople do actually benefit on the aggregate from surgery. But there's absolutely a claim that is to say pushing vanity on people Or getting people to express their vanity but not watching out for the toxic elements would be a giant disaster How do you not push bandity ono people when you talk about the aesthetic revolution, when you tell people that I'm going to tell you the truth, if you're ugly, you're ugly Isn't that a form of pushing it onto people They already know that, man.upply and demand So if someone has insecurity By telling them they should get plastic surgery to fix their insecurity, arerenn't you validating their insecurity? Never a single time did that. It's not in the book. It's not anything I ever said. But if you're saying, if someone asks me, last time we spoke, that if my child ased me if they're ugly or they're feeling ugly, I will tell them the truth. Isn't that validating That negative emotion Aren't you supposed to validate people' emotions? Isn't that the thing? Well, the idea is that if you validate insecurity, insecurity only continues to grow You have some choices there You can validate the insecurity You can try to invalidate the insecurity. Hopefully you are successful If the insecurity is based on a real thing in the real world, you're lying to them by invalidating it And then it will resurface as valid and they might not like that you were lying to them It's like a rich person telling a poor person who wants to work their way up and get lots of money like, Gh kid money' overrated. Then that person gets a lot of money and they're like, youre lying Money's amazing. You lied to me. Why? Like I just didn't want you to be upset about being poor. Well, you could have told me the truth, L, look But the idea of not validating the insecurity is not because you are aiming to lie to them You're saying that the value you're putting on your insecurity is toxic, bad for you, not actually helping you. And there are ways you can improve yourself outside of focusing on your vandage Wh I say the last part, you can do both Why say the last part? Because they're clearly a person who's struggling with insecurity. Y, so why not just fix the problem they're struggling with directly? Because in many instances, that problem doesn't get solved. It's the minority of instances. so we're forgetting all the people we could help to focus on the people that we would not be able to help for whom the entire situation would be toxic. Say that again. So like if you just help people become better looking like they want, The vast majority of people, not all, benefit from it psychologically So we have all the data in the world to suggest that And then some meaningful minority will either not improve and another meaningful minority will get worse So in order to not want to tell these minority people, hey, don't even worry about vanity We're risking not telling everyone else about how great vanity can be properly directed because for them, it actually would solve their problem. Let me give you an example. There's a person that makes thirty thousand dollars a year and they're clinically depressed for no reason to do with money. And you're like, hey, making more money can help you out. And they're like, okay, and they try it and it doesn't work and now they're at Wall Street and working eighty hour days They're worse off than they were before. Totally valid But because of that concern, are we really gonna to tell people like, hey, like thinking about making more money. I think it'll make me happy. you're like,uck I' the Igate, absolutely well, given that you go about it in an intelligent way. Same thing with vanity. The vast majority of people If they look better If if they're concerned about their look And they do steps to make them look better. They're literally happier after that Not a crazy amount in most cases. In some cases crazy. In some cases, they go the other way. In most cases, it's a mild to moderate boost in sustainable happiness. I think we should be talking about that becausecause I think we have like hundredundreds of millions. donon't think our society just talks about that ad nauseum All the time, when you turn on a TV, it's all about vanity give an exam Hollywood fitness, I mean, like you can't open YouTube without getting fitness influencers showing you how fit they are in an empowering way that tells you it's okay for you to want to be fit This is happening in Hollywood Probably not Hollywood's more a toxic comparison game situation Oh you're saying influencers are doing it in a healthy way. Some of them are, some of them are not. Yeah, so I don't know how we could paint that with a broad brush. Yeah For sure. Yeah. but is it to so I'll put to you this way, there is an anti vanity street that I think mostly does not belong in our society. Tell me Mark peopleople who say you shouldn't be concerned with your appearance People who say that if you become fit and healthier and better looking it won't make you happier. People say this kind of stuff all the time. To me, those people are inaccurate. as much as the people who say, just earn more money and be more attractive, 'll solve your problems So these are just extremes arguing with each other One of those is more true than the other If you become better looking and you make more money It is a more dependable way to get to happiness then Becoming better looking and making more money is a dependable route to unhappiness. I don't think you need to choose between those two choices. If you're communicating aggregate mass messages to society you have to make a choice of if this is going to be beneficial on average for people to hear. And the beneficial on average is homeomeostatic message in the middle that message being that improving your appearance sometimes makes you healthier. Live longer, better quality of life can improve your friendships, but an over fooccus on it can become toxic books about Except for word, it's not sometimes, it's most times That But it's not most times. It's literally most times. L it's a way higher fraction of people that benefit from health and appearance and psychology than from vanity than people that it harms. Because if the answer if the recommendation was You know, exercise three days a week. Lift weights mix up resistance with cardio training watch your diet so that your numbers on the aggregate keep you somewhere in the baseline of Be a mine between twenty two and twenty five you will be happier. is one message And then there is the oppite well, not opposite message, the more extreme message of There's also plastic surgery. There's also the future of genetic modific mod modific why can't I say modification modifying drugs and all these other things going on That is not really tied to health That is now tied to just the vanity aspect. It's definitely tied to health because like Tzepotide is a vanity drug, but it's like the healthiest drug ever made I'll die in that hill In the United States in this moment for this specific patient population But it's not again, I think about it more universally. So If you bring that drug to an area where people have a scarcity of food Suddenly it's not a valuable drug And it's not a vanity positive drug., but like it disqualifies most of the world then. Most of the world now has at least enough food M than fifty percent of the world is not like too much f So tricepetide would be better for way more than half of the world at this point So but even just in that my book is not for a global audience. it's for You know, modern free world, plenty of leisure time audience, to be concerned about vanity at all is already a first world problem And so what I would say is I don't actually make recommendations in the book. of like, you should train this much to get vanity and you should take these drugs. What I say, the first thing I say is if you don't care about your appearance at all, you already won the lottery, you're doing great. and I think you're awesome. And you don't ever have to worry about any this crap. I think that's a small percentage of people. I think everyone to some degree has some amount of insecurity or concern Totally. And that number is highly influential or easily influenced. There's something other than insecurity, a play which I think is under discussed R restort there's an upside. Not just a downside. So you're looking about eliminating, this is a very typical thing from doctors, which makes sense Your job is to eliminate the downside and then let the p go off into the wild. Correct. My job is to go on the other end. And so insecurity reduction is a big part of vanity increase. But there's also a thing where you could just not be insecure at all. You just want to look cooler. You're doing it for art. L it's highly unlikely that most women you'll see walking around New York with purses have a particular purse they bought because they're insecure. They have a particular purse they bought because they're like, dude I really fs with this designer. I love this purse. There's other reasons. That's why But this book is not about art. This book is you're telling it's a health. It's both You're tying it' to health. So I feel like when you start tying it's health, you've lost the art thing equ Because if someone tells me they're wearing a birken because it improves their lifespan It's no longer about the art It's about the claim No, for sure. So in the book, I basically say, here's how vanity will make you healthier down to some fat percent down to up to some bone density, et cetera point is neutral effect on health past some other point is a negative effect on health, which I'm very well in But what I'm trying to do isn't tell people do this so you can have vanity And all these benefits, I'm saying, hey, like as as much of this as you want to do, you're going to dip into a shitload of benefits and vanity So to the degree that you're already interested in modifying your appearance The book is designed to give you like a menu of options. and saying which ones are really good for your health, whichich ones that really don't m or suck with your health at all? Which ones are like real serious health target audience is people who have some level of vanity are curious about what options exist and you have this menu that you can educate them on the. And then maybe a lot of these people are like, vanity iss kind of gross. I do want to look better, but I feel bad about it. It's kind of very surface level. and I want to be health way. I haven't come across that person I think we've all been sort of brainwashed to believe that is the cell me tell almost all media. What brainwashes us to believe Man, you know, like Generally people who if so even the term vanity is a pajor Hanity is considered a sin old scriptures. I mean, That's beyond my level of knowledge so. Yeah. it is. right. And so vanity typically is a thing that You're at least not supposed to outwardly say you're planning on doing So in the fitness and health space, If you ask gym members Why are you here in the gym notot a large fraction as you would expect with say vanity If you talk to them for more than thirty minutes, you realize almost all of them are vanity People are hiding something They have been taught as good people, not to flex their appearance on others, not to be overly concerned with their appearance Why do you think they were taught that Uh it's rude because it exposes the haves and have nots sort of very raw It's it's supposed and it also exposes you as a person. who was potentially shallow. and potentially thinks that how they look is the most important part about them versus a part they care about And so people try to mute that part as much as possible. Items pretty reasonable. Pretty reasonable But the reality is like, what if you actually do care quite a bit about how you And then you carry around two things, you're carrying around these efforts you make it looking good And you carry around this whole cognitive ultraastructure of trying to make it so that people don't think you really care Even even in your own head, you're like, I care about my appearents, but I shouldn't don't let's botody dysmorphia To me, I'm opening it up and being like, how much do you care about how you look Whatever that amount is, awesome Here is a tool guide of how today Five years from now and fifteen years from now, you'll be able to alter your appearance as a tndile. However much you want to change your look, you can. There are trade offffs at every bit of the tndile up until way past the middle of that tndile. The trade offffs where you just get like way healthier and way longer life and way everything. At some point it goes down the dark side But if you were just to take the American peoples as adults as an average And you were like, we're just going to focus. We have a totalitarian government It's going to focus on making everyone look better through fat loss, muscle gain And let's just call it, just for just that simple. My God, we would have to go a generation of change before we got into the net negatives So vanity is this awesome alignment with fitness and health. for a huge fraction of people. So my idea is when they read the book, there that dichotomy of like, well, I need to be stronger and healthier. But I don't want tona be too focused on appearance, even though I'm really focused on it, but I have kind of some weird feelings about it. I just want to brush those weird feelings aside and be like, did you own your shit You want to look great? look great, be proud of how you look. And there's a huge psychological part of the book, especially towards the end I talk about like once you occupy a body that you really like a whole lot better than you've ever had then don't playay it down too much when people give you compliments. Thank them for it. Re let the compliments hit becauseuse a lot of people say They'll occupy a body which isn't great by their standards or most other peopleop's So Have a flash at some point where they're like, you know, we have a lot of RP strength clients are like I need to think about this. I can't anymore. And they'll do years and years of training and diet and whatever else, and they'll occupy a completely different body that gets appraised by others totally differently and in the mirror, the most important thing, by them totally differently. But some of them have a resistance to allowing those awesome feelings to come in and ce They' hurt parts of their brain so that they can feel like all those people who are good looking from day one Sorry, this the weird thing my finger pointints at people randomly. also I have a cough. No wonder we came to see the doctor I my bad So basically, you know people who've been good looking from day one, they kind of swim in the shit to begin with. Everyone's sort of not everyone. people are kinder, they're nicer. They look in the mirror before they go to the party and they go, yeah, they feel great. That's like I wouldn't say that's a birthright, but as a first world right, that's a birthright. And there's lots of people that don't have it. And when they finally achieve that look, that gunk of feeling bad about vanity and feeling like it's not something you're supposed to be proud of. And people say, oh, look, you like your body that much, you care about that much. You go to the gym that much. That's body dysmorphia. And they hear enough of that shit. So when they look at themselves and they look damn near flawless compared to the old physique, and a deep part of them wants to just em race looking like that, they're still resisting because they've been told for forever and really believe that, o, but this isn't a thing you lean into. Also, you're going to get egotistical, you're going feel like one of the pretty people now, you're gonna to look down on uglier people. None of that comes along for the ride. What should come along for the ride is as your body changes and you start to look better, and you look in the mirror and you start to be like, whoa, I look really good. Bve it. belieelve it as much as you can like swim in that sea as much as you can because when you really believe that you look great, you have the opposite of body dysmorphia. You're like feeling amazing about your body and your body's looking more amazing, wherever that trade off is to you, Awesome. And for most people, I have another contention that's very politically incorrect. I think A lot of people who don't like their bodies have serious psychological issues independent of how their bodies look I think a lot of people that don't like their bodies are objectively and correctly appraising based on their software for analysis of bodies that all of us have, we're ninety nine point nine percent the same humans It actually is not a good body, according to them and in a way that you can't brainwash people out of And so if you fix the body and make it look good, I think a huge fraction of people actually legitimately love their bodies after that. ' the bodies are better. Yeah, I think like what's interesting to me is you keep pointing out that you have to brainwash people away from disliking their body I don't think Doctors do that. I think when a patient doctors don't do almost any of this. This is middle school shit. Yeah, but in general, when we talk about someone being vain or feeling terrible about their body, no one's like, okay, I have to lie to this person and tell them that their worry is not true. It's just Reraming the focus. How would you reframe it Your worth as a human is not tied to your appearance as much as you're putting the effort on stressing over How do you know for them. Maybe yourre own Maybe for them their appearance is really critical to how they see themselves. They If it's driving them to make unhealthy decisions for them That's where that line gets shifted And that's how you make a lot of these psychiatric diagnoses? Sure. If it starts causing distress, dysfunction, That's what shifts something from a personality trait to a disorder. What if the shape of their body is what's causing the distress and the dysressy? I think if that was the case, I think it would be a lot simpler to fix that dysfunction and it's not the case. The plastic surgeons do that all the time, but they' They don't but they do. Because those people you were going to keep going. Those people wouldn't go to seek therapy, those people would be forever happy. They wouldd get one surgery and they'd be done That's not the reality. That's not tied to reality The peopleve your body dysmorphic disorder? No, just in general, people who overly focus on vanity. It doesn't have to be a diagnosis and ICD ten classification, DSM five classification. It's just a simple It's best when we don't discuss those technical classifications because to actually get qualified for actual body dysmorphic disorder, it's an uphill battle Like the average person that hates their body is not body to Smorpholk. I'm glad we're getting away from that because it We're ab using psychatric terminology. Of course. wouldouldn' we say PTSD like guy just used it, we're using locally as opposed to truly making the difference For. So for sure. I agree with that for sure. But the reason like you're experiencing this scenario that does happen where people are in the gym and a lot of them are in the gym for aesthetic purposes and they feel weird saying that that's their main reason And a lot of that is due to historical factors of people who used to be obsessed with the gym in vain, they had issues. So those people don't want to be labeled as people with issues they don't want to come off hyper arrogant about their appearance. Hilityorb. Yeah, self absorbed. Hility is a valuable trait in general, whether you're talking about appearance or otherwise. So they're trying to be more charitable in the way that they talk about their And you're viewing that with a negative light, which is so interesting to me If I am really muscular, which I'm not Rar my heart. A where it counts, Th these thies are Thunder thighs Um, If you I'm not really muscular And if I was and I walked around, Humble and not wanting to show off my strength That doesn't mean there's something unwell with me or I have baggage In fact, it could be something higher level of humanity where you say I know I am strong But I don't have to flex this strength on people, and I am okay with my body There's an immediate step there. I love what you're saying It's totally true Be in body you don't like for years, maybe your whole life Eventually, be inbodybody that you like and be humble. even to yourself prove everything, don't need prove anything anymore. Intermediate step impprove body and allow the humility to bake in by receiving from yourself, allowing and from others, allowing as much positivity about your body as possible, shit that would be gross to say out loud. Because like the people that have amazing body image, genetics aside genetic proclivity for mental states aside. Sure. They've heard amazing things about their bodies for forever And so it makes sense that their default state is like they feel great about their body. And it's very easy for them to say, just be humble Told me if you have been made fun of for your body for forever, or no one made fun of you, but you looked in the mirror before going out and you're like, I'm not going out. this is ridiculous. I don't like I should be going out which happens to hundreds of millions of people through their lives At the end of that, what you have in your brain as the beginning of your self image is gunk and total dogshit And then for health reasons alone, let's say, you get a much better body Do you look in the mirror as that body is changing and tell yourself, o I guess that's cool, but I shouldn't care And then you never get that healing. Or do you allow yourself to get that healing and go holy shit, my body's looking great and better and better and better. I'll tell you this, at some point You look at your amazing body enough for most people The healing becomes more or less complete. it takes a long time. It takes years. But at some point, so for example, I used to not think I was big enough, physically big enough. But like I'm lighter than I have been at other points in my career and I couldn't care less. I get even lighter than this. I couldn't care less. becausecauseuse I filled my businessness cup. I bulked up to two hundred seventy pounds at five six I filled my business cup is full the rest of my life. But if I always looked in the mirror and never like really allowed myself to vibe on that size, like a bunch of what I do in bodybuilding training is get a huge pum, pull our shirt off, and just flex in the mirror And it just shoots out these positivity vibes of like, dude, look at you, you're doing the thing. You get enough of that. You can become humble. You don't get enough of that. You're in one of two states You're having a really bad time, having a real bad time under the illusion that you shouldn't care about it So what I'm saying the aesthetic revolution is that If you care about how you look and you go on a journey to make yourself look better You better Praiseise your improving look and allow all that vanity to seep in. All of it so that you can believe it deep down inside That gives you true confidence and true humility. It takes years to do that. You don't just wipe that away. Let me give an example. You were the fat kid for all of grade school in all of college too Like not just just just out of shape, just totally like a joke. You couldn't play sports. People laugh at you. you hated it And then like after you finished grad school or something, you did this crazy fat loss You would get retatat tied in the mail or something, and then you're just a totally different person after six months. You're just straight up not fat anymore, and you look amazing. What is the probability that you have the self image of someone who has been lean and attractive their whole life? Mike it's zero. here're in You're creating this essentialism single trade essentialism that's not matched to reality Like humans are not just the self image of who they are based on what their friends think about their body There's so many more factors that play into this. I feel like it oversimplifies the point and waters it down because I don't feel it matches reality even if we're talking about lived experiences, I don't know in my friend group anyone that goes to the gym tacks on good muscle or has been working out since high school, that doesn't want to be bigger Everyone wants to be bigger. Everyone wants You don't knowough pro bodybuilders. Well, sure. Some of us are really tired of the shit. Wellalth, yeah. But I'm saying in general, everyveryone wants anymore. Everyone still goes to GNC and wants to get the better supplement to get bigger E the line outside longevity doctors offices. are not people who are sedentary who are overweight It's people who want more. Don't you think this could contribute to that or not at all ' appetite for wanting more being vain, you want more Unfettered becomes Unhealthy How do you fter her that appetite shhift the focus away from vanity to health L has been tried, doesn't work super well So failed once, no point trying again in different failed way more than once like the idea of pushing health behavior on Well we never have been as obese as we are now. So has there ever been a time? Well, I mean. GP withithin the last twenty years. Sure So it's like it's a unique population, unique challenges I'm curious. Where do you think I disagree with you most on this book? Be I want to make sure we see eye dye on that. Yeah I think there is a resistance. to seeing the happy path of vanity And D don't think I'm oversimplifying. What is the happy paths of addity you don't like Everything about your look there you look at your body You're psychologically healthy. Beautiful children, beautiful family, beautiful care. You look at your body and you're like, It's like a stain on your car. you're like. And someone's like, is this ruining your life? And you're like, no But would it be better if you looked better? Yes So what can I do to look better? Well I read the Aesthetic Revolution's got the whole formula in the shit Are you cool? I'm not doing that clavicular eight days a week shit, but I'm going to train twice a week. I'm going to clean up my diet. I'm going to lose fifteen pounds of fat. I'm going to gain five pounds of muscle. I'm going to try T's appetite. Oh my God, it works really great A year later, I look in the mirror and I'm like Yeah a little dope. And someone's o, Hey Do you want to look even better? And you're like, yeah Do you want to go four times a week to the gymline Now I have a family we nuts. you just push ' them right out of the way. But when they offer you crISperR gene editing, do you say yes no? What I mean, I would, I don't know. So so for that sake. continue the example because you're saying it more gym days. Don't do more gym days because that to me was the rate limiting step back in totally. So like, do you want genene editing that has an on target off target effect of one hundred to one has been done in animal trials, human trials and AI, but extxtrapolated the data. Extrapolated inside a super compomputer to say it's probably not going to screw up your body As matter of fact, it's alm certainly better for you use like one of the trials came out recently in one of the amount of Stat inhibitors and her overall health markers just went up which is what you would expect with more skeletal muscle. Like noodybody surprised. people that think drugs always have a downside just don't know how that shit works, so fine. Well, they do. So the drugs always have some kind of downside I think that has an impact has to have a downside. There are ways, there are ways that they can have net upsides So turnsop O. but net upsides the thing. Net upsides happen usually with good targeting of the correct patient selection. Not even, like so I would venture to claim that Almost all American adults at some dose of tzepatide would be better off than not I would Be careful making clas that. Because you're a medical doctor. you got the whole oath. I never took a fuck oath. just say I'm an infuencer. Iody have supplements I don't have supplements to sell Like that back fired. I need a supplement company So that whole tangent aside, yes, everything has downsides But then that could be super positive course if the net is massively positive in CISPR, whatever modality of gene editing that you just don't have to go to the gym anymore and you can maintain way higher muscularity and way lower body fat and have longer life, etcetera. And that person's like, should I do it? I would say like you should absolutely consider it. But you're creating this the fixated perfect world scenario. that of course, who's going to say no to that It's like you're telling me like, Mike, all disease is gone, everything is great. You don't want this? Well, yeah, but is that the real situation that's gonna to come likeikely what's going to happen is you're going to have a chance of growing sixteenth digit. stop That's not likely get out of here Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd Too often, life gets busy or the price hld you back Piceeline is here to help you make it happen With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live Don't just dream about the trip. book it with Priceline. Download the prriceline app or visit priceline. comot Actual prices may vary limited time offer Hey, it's Kelly Roland. You may not know this, but I have eczema. So I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about EBGlS? 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Like the Okay, let me ask you that then, since you're saying that's not like Why do the organizations they arere made up of on gene editing on The study of molecular biology that are not me as a family medicine doctor or you Why are they saying we need to tread carefully and we should only do this for conditions that are lethal that destroy someone's life Why are they not saying yeah, they just make everyone have more skeletal muscles They're not incentivized to have everyone have more skeletal muscle. to them downsides of the technology that get a huge public media attention are cataclysmically worse than the people who would not have been growring a sixteenth finger. So like growing a sixteenth finger versus somebody dying of a genetic disease that we just didn't get to, one of those is a hidden cost. the other one is a very visible cost. Almost all regulatory organizations prioritize visible costs versus hidden costs So like so for example, people say we need to be really careful about age reversal experimental trials. like you don't want to calluse the next zombie plague. cool. So like every day. scientists don't say that. That's like what dumb people like me for sure. Well, sixteenth digit mic is also let's be honest here. So say you know, crazy shit's gonna happen, right It' it's not crazy. It's just that it's unpredictable. Unpredictable shit will happen. Yeah. and no one's saying zombie apocalypse. Totally. But bad things. Predictably, aging is the number one killer. It is the ultimate killer And so we're not safe. We're not safe with aging. And so that calculus of seeing aging is normal and okay and seeing anti age reversal therapies of being dangerous and experimental is at the front door wrong on arrival. It's dead on arrival Aing is the worst possible thing If you're seventy years old in my ideal society and you're a cogent competent adult If you sign a waiver, pharma companany should be able to give you whatever you want I this is't even past animal trials yet. I want it. Like, why? Beause I don't wantan to die What's worse than death? L as long as they have you walled off, so you don't create some viral spore that goes hits other people That's's that's a realistic concern. Again, exceedingly unlikely, but should be a concern So when people I think that too. I think the concern is not that. I think it's just that ame. byy medical ethics. of which these are hammered into us and perhaps make us more conservative, less innovative It's done so in a way to make sure that We're not creating harm. I think that's a bad thing. I think that as a Yeah. so you're you're fundamentally disagreeing with the way healthca is created. Absolutely. in the same way that our judicial system is structured in a way that we're more likely to let a guilty person Out and found innocent. than putting an innocent person in jail because we view that as more of a harm than letting the bad person out. Yeah. That's how we've tailored this sensitivity of this test. Yes, I would say that's also wrong So you prefer more innocent people in jail I prefer the presumption of neutrality instead of the presumption of innocence don't know who's at fault And then I prefer the extreme use of logic and evidence to try to conclude probabilistically, what is the highest probability event that occurred here. So beyond reasonable doubt is a percentage point that's like ninety nine point nine percent more likely that he did it Civil cases, it's fifty percent What is your barometer for logic Super complex. has to extrapolate game theory. But you gott to put inure. The point is the putting innocent people away in jail. is a terrible thing But it should not come at the expense of all other tradeoffs, including putting guilty people away in jail. Because if we pretty much know someone's a violent rapist murerer We can't pin them down to the shit It's not the presumption of innocence is a miraculous thing. we should try to conserve as much as possible. But it can't go on to infinity because we let rapist killers out in the street and the next person that's dead is on everyone's hands. Every time doctors delay allowing a medication to go into a next stage of trials, they have blood on their hands Writ large straight up. What is the cost of doing the flip side and overdoing that? To society, the cost is difficult to measure. Yeah, to impossive to an individual it's possible, but very difficult mean to a high school measure. L aggregates becausecause you don't know what's going happen with your testing. So you can have two regimes One is a more liberal regime, one is a more conservative regime. And you just follow along with the two cohorts and see who does better So my idea for problem is one cohort can impact the other cohort when everyone turns into a zombie. The zombie thing is I will to your credit, very difficult to argue against. We should do nothing because it might cause the zombie virus. For example My view on drugs All drugs. could come with labels bu at the store And the label just tells prescription drugs or over the counter or you don't even care about. Don't care. All of them. All of them. So no no more prescriptions. No. Okay U And so the drug has on it Two things One, a list of beneficial effects and side effects And two How long have we researched this slash, What do we know about it? So for example, you could have an entire section of the store or a section of a drug aisle, which has like, you know, a label on it that says zero. zero human years of research on this drug. Animal trials only, but having a lot of years of trials doesn't actually mean anything something on its own It means something. Not really If I tell you, I studied a drug for twenty four years Does that tell you anything about the drug? good bad, dangerous not dangerous. So so patient population? We already talked about that on the benefits cost side of the thing. numberber two things. But that is possible to put on a label It's impossible to put it into a twenty four page meta analysis research paper let alone into a label But you could whittle it down substantially Of course you could. you' just like five bad effects, topop five good effects. Easy for who Pgnant patentsoo, the average person average person, but what about the pregnant patient? That's not the average person. No, Ttally. So What about someone who's morbally obese and the dose needs to change Tottally Let's'll get to that So you have this like positives and negatives, and you have like how much studying has gone into this drug V veryy simple call classifications. Just just an example Well, simple because it's useless Because if I gave this to my residence and I said, using this information treat your patients, it would be a disaster Your residents are not the target of this. This is a consumer target. This is even worse This is a bias placebo drowning audience So If you are uncomfortable taking medications that haven't had X,YZ years of human study you would just be able to go right to the medications that have. So let's say there's a new experimental pain drug Gernvics. Have you heard Gernvics? It's a new pain drug came out like a year ago It has the same effect of analgesia as Vicidin This is not a narcotic. But yourour Navix doesn't have a lot of trials, not a lot of humans have taken it for a long time So you could just see like a bottle for Gernvics and you could see a bottle for Vickid and Vikin is like thirty five years of human trials. Gournvics is basically like none or very, very few a year or something like that. And so as a consumer, you could choose which way you wanted to go on the risk spectrum side of things And so people who are in their last years of life or people that happen to be more balsy can choose drugs off the shelf that are like, hey, This drug I don't care that there's only animal trials, I'm ready to take them That way those people take on their own personal risk And some of them pay for it But we get tons of data on them and it ends up being the number of people that use those medications. First of all, we've completely crushed out the access issue. We're not killing people anymore because we're keeping medications away from them. Everyone has whatever medication they want. I'll get to the context on that in a secondc But we're also making sure that anyone who wants to use medications that are only well vetted now has the information to do so As far as the doctor patient access situation I would say if you go to the store and you acquire medications And the store sells you medications, they don't want you to just drop dead they can do several things. They can say requires prescription, and then their on site doctor or pharmacist would prescribe you the drugs or not But if you're an adult and you go in and you're like, I want this and they're like, it hasn't been research yet on humans, you're like, yes I hear you as a medical professional, I've processed this. I'm still going to make my choices. What are the downsides they tell you Sign at the dotted line, doctor signs, patient signs. How do they tell you the downsides if there's been zero years of human testing Yeah, that's one of the downsides. They'll just be like, well, so animal trials, they give you downsides. Okay. And then and then they're like, look, like the downside is we have no idea if it's going to kill you, right where you stand. Okay, if you say I'm good with it I respect your right to choose and you're more data points for the rest. Why is this important to because it would radically escalate testing and availability of modern drugs. which would save tens of millions of people. That's not how it. Drug testing works, Mike. It should Meaning even if it happened, this would not be valuable drug testing. Why becausecause you're getting a pre selected patient population that is excited about the drug So whatever outcomes you get is going to be horribly biased and not valuable for us to draw conclusions on. Basic human physiology is ninety nine point nine percent identical among all humans. Right. She get an incredibly high quality're not that's not perfect. You're not looking at data setets. You're also looking at subjective values. It's not as like if we were robots, this would work but we're not were're so complex that there's so many variables here That's why research is so expensive to do So I don't think this even solves the problem you're looking to solve. You could do the research where you split patients up into randomized control trials at the same time as you liberate these drugs for people to do what basically called challenge trials to themselves. Theyre called end of one trials. Yeah. Yeah. It's not really an end of one when five hundred thousand people take your drug every year Th then you can do cohort analyses And then you can do coort analyses and you can factor out for body type, height, shape, diet. And increone walks into the pharmacy They buy this drug, they're cool with all the potential risks. Then you want them to also agree to be tested on They're going to get They're already agreeing to tested on. That's what I'm saying in that moment. You don't want them to do it they're like, yeah, yeah, just give me the drug Wait, say that again? They're like they're into it. They They want to get tested. one hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. We're like, look, we can sell some of them the drug and not test them. We can sell others the drug at a discount and be like, can you come in for bloodwork every now and test this against an AI prompt and I feel it already that you did this becausecause this is not a realistic scenario by name. I came up with this way before an A prompt.lyely realistic. but it's not realistic at all Be you want people to run trials on themselves. You want some of them to be in trial, some of them not to be in trial Do you know what a disaster it is to run these trials? it's It's desperately hard the complexity of bias being introduced to the scenario individuals having to Guess what is worth experimenting versus not Even in the age of AI, I just had a patient the other day literally on Thursday come in and tell me that they have a foot issue And I'm like, well, what's the foot issue And he goes, Yeah, it'serrible. this plants are fasciitis. I looked it up on Chat GP looking for You know, potentially in ejection et cera, et ccera. They did not have plantar fasciitis. They had U subcutaneous bursitis of their calcanial region. So It's so complicated and you're like, yeah, it's so simple I didn't say it was simple. I said it was more effective. You said it's so easy. You said this is realistic. The paradigm to impose is easy as hell Drawing out functional data from this is not is complex thing is you just have like orders of magnitude and more data, before you'd have almost no data You need only clinical trials in groups of dozens or hundreds of people I have groups of tens of thousands or millions of people All of whom have different degrees of compliance, all of whom are different Why is the best nutritional research done on metabolic cart? because you have the most control And yet you're sending people and you're like, Yo, you just selective, you want it, you selective, you don? You're giving up all of the control. If we only told people what to eat based on metabolic word research, we would have almost nothing to tell them. becausecause metabolic research are so difficult technically do doing almost nothing Outside of metabolic cord research, we have all this other in vivo research which is not valuless. It's incredibly valuable, but it's just not as perfectly controlled And it makes it much less valuable Yes, but if you multiply much less value, let's say it's a tenth as valuable the population size in that second peripheral tier is like fifty thousand people. Well you have ten percent less valuable. You have the opportunity for people like Gary Brecka to come in and confuse the shit out of you with their ten percent less valuable stuff and then never really know the truth as an average person because there's so many voices in the space. You just go to your doctor. And what what happens then? The doctor clears it up for you, It's probably a good decision for you. But you said you don't need your doctor You could just go buy it. This system works if you so people who don't consult their doctors and take medications, I got all left or inspect, do whatever you need. You're an adult I don't need to consult you if I'm going to go and hit the you know, drag strip and impale myself on a tree So like if I don't feel the need to get a motorists expert on racing's advice before I go gas up my pestala and wrap it around a tree, Like if you want to take words. I don't like you gess a Tesla What the hell have I been doing? No wonder it's breaking all the time. And it smells like gasoline guess So it just didn't even work. That was the best thing ever If I want to hit the pedal and go wrap around a tree, nobody's stopping me And if I want to go and get a bunch of drugs and use them myself, there is a very good argument for nobody should be stopping me If I'm the kind of person that accurately values medical opinion Before I show up I could absolutely ask a doctor and probably should. I would say I would recommend everybody ask their doctor before taking any drugs. or sure. But you want them to maintain the ability to not Yeah, like that part doesn't concern me nearly as much. What concerns me is that we have this insane system of first do no harm through the FDA drug approval process, and it takes somewhere between five and fifteen years to approve drugs And we count all of the lives saved by the drugs after they come out. We count all of the lives not harmed by the downsides of these drugs when they have downsides. And We never count the lives that we're not saving because these drugs aren't here earlier to save lives And so if we had a more open and free system where consenting voluntary adults could sign the waiver with their doctor and get any drug they want no matter the degree of clinical precision on saying what this drug is doing for now, I think we have the best of all worlds. becausecause the people that are brave enough and risk tolerant enough, they act like massive scientists for the rest of us. because look, like don' I don't compare those people to scientists I think that's a disrespect to scientists. I think That's like scientists I wantan to disrespect. Oh, that's like the people that are on bodybuilding. com fors Don't have a degree that never studied the way you studied And they compare themselves, they go, I'm the same as Dror Mike's PhD. I know the same. clarify my point. But they're not the same. Mike is making a different point They benefit the scientific process because they function as testing vehicles for the drugs And they give us a marginal amount of information that is higher than zero every time they take the drugs And so when you have thousands and thousands of them taking the drugs, reporting their side effects, reporting their main effects, going to get blood work with their thinks not all of them trrash It's not trash. It' trash. but we can take a lot of information on. No you can'. See, you have this notion because you you're very probablyroably because you're very AI driven, that more information is better It's not always the case More information means Ito mean garbage in garbage out. I stop listening halfay to what you're saying, becausecauseuse I don't agree with more information, it's better You don't agree more information? It a joke. I was using my own logic against you. Well, is it? I just stopped halfway through listening to you because more information is not marginally useful and using your own advice It's a joke. Oh o sorry I think more information is typically more useful depends on two things Information quality filter quality information quality If you're giving these people drugs that are real drugs, you know it's real drugs. 'use like you get something off the forums or of Greay markarket,uck someone's like, Oh, I used R retratratide, and I did this. you're like, how do you know it was R retratrated? I don't know the box that it was There real drugs. And all these people that go get real blood work from real doctors They like say they bought this drug. Even if you can even have it a day bas,, you bought this from Walgreamens. Like you're creating so many steps, man You're now creating a datab.eps are already happening. So they're not happening. Where is this happening? When you buy any drug from Walgreens, they know about it because they know your credit card and they know what you bought. Sure. Super simple. They already have this information Yeah But when he's accessing this information That different That's a different's a different question. Hold. You're keep stoping. this is going to be a simple. You just call it the most complex prom. So this is already way more complex than this and you know that? No There you use certain drugs You get screened in certain ways. Or you report your side effects or your im meane effects in any way, including forums, talking to your doctor, being a part of real research trials We now have these feathers of more information about you than we ever had before There's lots of noise. There's also lots of signal as well Here's an example of easy signal We have a drug out that grows muscle don't know how safe it is Thousands of bodybuilders go and buy it legally and start using it way before human trials have gone their five years And we notice in the community just in the Reddit chatter No one's dying from the shit There are other drugs people take that they for sure hy from And so you would notice that in the chatter. And so all of a sudden, if you asked a doctor like, hey, u A try to use this drug I know it's not su app proroved yet. W it going to kill me? He's one of two choices. He could be like, L, I just don't know and I'm not willing to say, orr he could be like, look, from what we've seen, from the hundreds of thousands of people that have come back and gotten blood workork, it's not all. the millions took it only one hundred thousand K back did bloodwork six months later, It seems to have no negative effect on bloodwork. That we can tell right now. That would be like something you can publish in a pharmaceutical company like post, what is that open label trials and after they release it, That's a real thing. And this is just a looser version of that, but with proper analytics and datasets, you can clean up that datas set a ton and you get fractionally more and less useful information. I took something, I think for some amount of time, but it was from my dealer To your point, almost completely valuess. Though sociologically you can at least be like, Hey, look, what are people in the street saying about this? like o They're saying it kills you, but it makes you jack versus like, Bah, they're saying it's great. Like a lot of bodybuilders right now are using retatrite. It's not approved. Almost everyone who's using it, I talk to just dozens of these people. They're like dude, it's revolutionized my blood work. Like it's cleaned up all my shit. My liver fat has gone, I can't fucking believe it. Like It's so unbelievable. Look, look, I've been around a lot of new drugs and bodybuilding. They don't typically get reviews like that. Like, hey, how's Halo treating you? They're like Ah man, I think I'm gonna die soon. but I'm jacked. I don't feel good though. So already we know like retatritide is just not killing people on That's really important. way more people are using it out of trials than in trials. So whatever data quality loss you experience, you can make up for with data volume if you segment properly. That's like a real thing in the real world So what I'm saying is this have the strict trials for sure but also right next to them basasically open label trials for anyone that wants a shot at the title early. That way their proclivity for taking risks is like they pay the risk and the rest of us marginally benefit by learning about the drug. And the people that don't want. So if you want to wait fifteen years for the FDA to do what it's for real shit,y, by all means wait for it I think you take a good concept like Open label trials. right to try legislation when you're at towards the end of your life or you have a disease. Why should it be towards the end of your life or a disease? Well, yeah, it's just something you mentioned. You said, if you're older than seventeen, you want to try as an example. Y, I think's Well that's why I'm using it as one ofles U I just want toll you I'm sorry I get passionate too So You have these good things like right to try, experimentation, and of one trials are also very important. coohort studies after the fact, post market surveillance, all these things are super valuable We could do them better And then I feel like you light a fire underneath it and you're like, let's sell everything in a pharmacy with this label and no one needs to monitor it. But if they do ever said no one needs to monitor it. I sorry, nobody needs to prescribe it. And if they choose to monitor it, they can monitor. If they don't monitor it, they do Why does that have to be so extreme because we're operating in an overturned window of conservativism And the actual optimality for the whole system in my view is often in the extreme So like if you had a government that did fifty percent of massive regulations on the economy and fifty percent laisse faire And you know someone said, look,, obviously we don't want one hundred percent massive regulations. That's a disaster. But we sure don't want just ten percent regulation. They would be wrong The best most successful economies do minimal regulation like this It's actually really difficult if you have we structuure regulation to find out where too little regulation is a thing they thought Hong Kong was one of these places that they looked at the unemployment rate in Hong Kong and it was actually below what they thought was the natural rate of unemployment. They didn't even know how Hong Kong could have that little unemployment because they had very little regulation And so in in other ways It's entirely possible that the current system we have isn't like even the nearly the best guess as to how it should be And so a system that's substantially more extreme, and I'll own it's more extreme could be categorically better And I think getting especially, so here's the thing with AI helping in drug creation now Timelines for drugs are going to shrink a ton from going from idea to we have a drug ability that drug has the on target effects we want and the off target effects we don't want is orders of magnitude higher as a result of Air drug creation. So we have technology that by the late twenty twenties is going to allow you to go fromrom hypothetical, like, oh, man, can't we attack this receptor class to like two days later, you have a synthesized molecule in the lab that does exactly what you think, a ratio of one thousand to one probability It's not one hundred percent, but it's close Right now, if we have a current regulatory structure As soon as the researcher has that molecule, it's a five to fifteen year period until it appears in the market That's millions of dead people. That's millions of people living their lives bereft of the beauty of pharmacology to enhance aesthetics and to enhance longevity, and all this other stuff. So I see is as soon as you got that molecule And you want to put it into vials and send it all through the economy for people to try, as long as people know what they're taking, know the risks, and know the upsides. whether or not I'm totally for a system in which some drugs based on how hardcore they are potential for negatives should be only vetted by the doctor. Only the doctor can prescribe. I love that system. I think it's great You should be able to go to your doctor and be like, Hey, what kind of shit are they just coming out with? that you can prescribe me that you feel comfortable prescribing and I feel comfortable taking. You's going be, look, there's a plethora of shit, right? There's this stuff we know works. It's been out for thirty years. It's got some downsides but we know it's not going gonna do anything crazy because we've already had like two generations of people taking There's other stuff in the middle that's been out for five years, who knows, It's great, but maybe. Then there's this other stuff that came out last week that like gets AI designed, it's almost certainly going to be a killer, like in the best way possible, not a literal killer. But like gee whiz, you know, most people just don't like to take drugs that have had one day of research on them. But if you're the guy that wants that, I think it's amazing that you should be able to do it. And to your point, maybe we can make this thing that is like super well monitored, not just totally la a fair, somethingomet like ninety ten. I don't think the answer is in the middle. I don't think the answer for how do AI drug policy because here's the big downside. Let me just make the real big point here, Mike. When you have a drug that's already ready to save lives and you wait ten years, to give it to any real humans outside of three hundred people in a clinical trial murdering people Yeah. I think historically, your point is very rock I think if all of these drugs that had ninety nine percent promise before they went to clinical trials that ended up harming people, If we gave them to people, we would have caused a lot of fe. Yes. But how many drugs did we wait and not give to people and how many people died? Because there's always a cost The cost is way bigger. You have to decide what your barometer for creating harm is. Who is you? It should be the society It should be the person. There's such thing society, that's an esoteteric thing. There'srant society does not make decisions It's institutions are individuals. So who should make the choice of I I say the government of the United States, to me, that's representative of society So you want you want Bobby Kennedy deciding like who gets what drug whenin? I hope not, but that's literally the case. I know, that's why I hate it. Right. So there's a better mechanism. I agree. better mod of muff. Well. and replace with maybe somebody even more insane. Why You could have said that when the Biden people around and they would have been correct about him, you could have said, Oh, there's Who the head of Health of human services under Biden Who I don't know I don't know. Some they were crazy.omeone could someone almost certainly called that person crazy and And then we got Bobby Kennedy instead. So your assumption that we willll get better people through government is certainly does not do well in historical analysis. But I'll tell you what does If you look back at all of the drugs that had that looked good in trials, but were released early or would have been released early They look good early in trials, later in trials look bad If we had released all those drugs to the populace, my contention is they would have done in order magnitude less harm than simply gatekeeping the drugs that were already good that we weren't releasing to people. Those are the silent deaths. So like Tzpatide, we now know The GLP ones are longevity drugs straight up through direct like older people take them and they die less Those drugs in some capacity were around in the early nineties they just kind of like don't want to release them. And part of that burden is massive regulatory structure. they you gotta pay like a billion dollars to take a drug through trials So That would have saved like tens of millions of people had we had those drugs in the nineties. It would have prevented a large fraction of the obesity epidemic straight up I mean, it could have saved like fifty million lives or something like that over the course of that time.ike's's an AI universe that you're living in man. it's not real life. I just it's not real life. Like the conversations that you're saying that a doctor can just have with his patients, it's just it's not real man Like no one comes in is like, I am fifteen percent comfortable taking a risk. Like no one talks like that. This's not how a real patient encounter works. It just it's not tied to reality He just I wish it was. I wish it was as simple as like, okay, let's accelerate, let's get good research, let's get this drug out there. J just like that's not how it happens It should happen better Okay, but it's just like it's not matched to reality. Like that's help conversations happen with humans What in what soundense? what do you mean? Like when a patient comes into my office, they're not like, Okay, I am this ex tolerant of side effects It's like doctors tell Itounds like a latent belief they have It's an implicit belief. They don't even think that far above it. For sure. So most people don't even care. You would have to explore it. My wife forced me to come Sure is like the patient that we That's theajor of the United St and you're like, it's not life, people. But that's the majority of who's sick. Yeah. That's who's in our hospital for. And then you're going to throw on top of the blad that we have in the hospitals, peopleople taking experimental drugs, getting side effects, and then want us to be able to diagnose who's having a problem due to their metabolic condition or to this new experimental drug onn what planet might On planet Earth, do your job. That's impossible. You're setting up anossible standard. I understand what's impossible about this. You have a plethora of drugs that you can recommend as a doctor. This is already true. Yes. Yes. And you can make trade offs of to how new the drugs are, what appropriateness they have for this person. If their're FA approved, there is already enough data to know saafety risks, monitoring parameters, but when you have zero years and nothing to go off of, totally. Now it's just a guessing game. Totally So it's always a guessing game Always guess game But it's an educated guessing game at this point. Always an educated guessing game. No, to degrees of education.. So if you have really good mechanistic data, if you have really good animal data, you're already substantially more confident about the drug doing X,Z in humans than you would be with no data at all. Do you agree with that Yes. Okay. But that drug that you just described fails ninety nine percent of the time in humans inecent ninety nine percent of the time. F a pharmaceutical company has that data P tradish research and animal research and they Try and trial it with humans. ninety percent of the time it fails. fails to have to go through and finish Testing anyp Go into the market. Yeah. But that's very different than saying it's like deleterious for you ninety nine percent Almost all drugs youll take are randomly deed. I'm noting that they're sure. I'm not saying they have no effect either. Totally. It's also not the same statement. Sure So Right The hype and the understanding of that drug doesn't pan out is the answer. Sure. ninetyine percent of the. Totally And so as a doctor, instead of getting a list of for sure FDA approved drugs that you can prescribe you would get a much more expansive list of drugs that are FDA approved. and then drugs that are experimental And if your patient tells you I wanted an experimental drug open up the side of the conversation, which you would never have to open up to your point to ninety nine percent of your patients. They just come in like my wife says, I should be here. You measure their blood pressure They're like, holy shit, you're like a water balloon. Well, let's get you on some blood pressure drugs and here's this pample about eating better. You're not gonna to read it, but here it is Put 'em on like a nth gen, blood pressure drg and're good to go If they come to you And and say I want to try an experimental drug I think they should be allowed to do so. Yeah that's a different versation. the' same thing I'm saying You just created a whole different system of No prescribers You could just go to the pharmacy, everything's written for you. You can talk a subset of people that come to the doctor in this world. There iss another subset of people that don't go to the doctor. They just go like, buy stuff off the shelf I think there is a world in which they have the exact same options. They just didn't want to consult a doctor doesn't bother me a ton You just didn't want to consult a doct And so they arere going to take drugs without consulting a doctor And you think that's an overall net positive? Net positive overall, almost certainly, A positive to all the people that make terrible mistakes self prescribing I'm super pro liberty. So I think. So you want to our libert of system. Oh yeah, by a huge license. Are you anti driver's licenses and all this other stuff as well? You can hurt someone else if you don't have a driver's life. You can't hurt someone else if you take a drug that kills you Oh, I see. so once other people are involved. And what if this drug One of its side effects that they didn't know about was you pass out while you drive and you kill someone That would be really bad You can already do that with tons of drugs we know about Snot and. Wellool yeah, but it's part of the disclosure that I make that if I'm giving one of those drugs, I warn that patient about not taking one of those drugs. Yeah, so like that would support a situation. If you can demonstrate some drugs have like a narcolepsy risk or whatever, then those are the kind of drugs that in our systems would be like whatever ps passing out risk. If you have sedation risk, if you have drugs that we say, okay, they have there aute effects could be really terrible that hurt others, then we put them behind a doctor a doctor prescribed w.. That would make sense. Yeah. I'm not like a categorical libertarian. I think it's just whatever's best for society. you want to see more experimentation and healthcare. I just want to see faster timelines from this drug. You want to cut some red tape Not some. I want to cut almost all the red tape becausecause almost all the red tape is a gigantic disaster That's that's a big deal. Yeah, I think And I can't say this with one hundred percent certainty because we don't know Cutting all the red tape can be equally as a disaster I wouldn't say all. I'd say most. Yeah, most of the red tape could be a disaster. C could be a bigger disaster. Yeah, you don't justutd tape randomly though. you cut one piece at a time. like what is this regulation for? What is the trade offff of this regulation? Well That's why I'm saying cut some. Yeah. Sure. But I would say like I mean, we so just to play this out, this kind of happened with the COVID vaccine So The world was stuck. We needed some kind of vaccine to get us out of this really shitty situation. MRNA technology was existing. We were trialing it for all sorts of conditions We knew how it worked on a surface level We needed to greatly speed this up a lot of red tape for starting trials, for patients patient selection And we ran trials not as long as we normally would. We shortened the timelines a bit because we were facing a state of emergency Despite the fact that these these vaccines helped They were met with incredible scrutiny People hate them. It's caused so much distrust within the healthcare system And you're like, let's just do that across the board And you don't think that's going to be more of a disaster. what so the COVID vaccine? Asas a ratio of saving lives to taking lives that's damn near immeasurable because it's by no means clear who actually died from the vaccine? You could put some numbers on it, but it would be a ratio of what a thousand to one, a million to one or something. Like how many people get the jab, walk out and just don't get COVID as bad versus how many people get the jab, walk out, get crazy heart complications from the vaccine itself and drop dead mean the ratio is insanely high in the positive. And yes. and PR' get to that. I' get to that. I never said this was a good PR plan. I said it was actually good effect. COVID saved like twenty million people all over the world those are otherwise dead people that wouldn't have been alive So I say for exactly the way we handled COVID, as far as like really fast tracking the approval, I say like, start doing that with everything because it will absolutely have downsides. It will kill people to do this because it'll keep people less safe from as yet untested drugs. But the number of people to save will be orders of magnitude higher than who' going to be killed For just really one simple reason, a pharmaceutical company that releases drugs, they have a real big PR situation They're not just going to release random drugs to the population, man And why not my God. would if there' one chance that they put out something that could be the blockbuster, build skeletal muscle, add one hundred fifty years to your life They're done nothing destroys your stock value, like bad news Good news doesn't raise our stock value as much as bad news destroys it Unfortunate but true. Your drug company that puts out a drug that starts killing people holy shit. I mean, as far as I checked, all the opioid manufacturers are still doing great So I don't know how much I take those words to heartm Mike. Those drugs were approved by the conventional system, by the way. Yeah, I know, but I'll say this versus all the people opioids or the lives destroyed You take all that amount of pain, psychological and physical that they felt in their relatives feel. you put it in one box. And you put it in another box, the pain that people would have felt had opioids not ever been invented. likeike Do surgery raw? having to have chronic pain, just just experience the pain My hypothesis is that would be ten to one or one hundred to one positive to negative. That hypothesis is like an opinion and everyone chang intact's why That's why I call it a hypothesis. But I think that opioids are also just really old school drugs that were made in a biotech era that was way less advanced than today. Today we have drugs like Gernvavics that seemingly have unbelievable positives of analgesic effect, but the downsides are like they're there, but they're like way, way, way less than any of the older drugs that we had AI's what people said about opioids when they were first gred compared to what? The previous generation of medication. Was that true I'm sure it was. rightight, which is great. And yet and yet Yeah what yeah what? yet opioids destroyed totally. Millions of lives. Yes. and they saved millions of lives and they saved millions and people from experiencing pain. But they save lives How many people would have taken their own lives with chronic pain Yeah Mike I don't know what the answers next I think theswer question I'm saying I think, Mike, you can't do this in research. You can't just I think more than research right now. I'm saying I think. But But you're taking a stance on research. you're like, I think this would happen But that's just like a whileild take. There is no way you can give a reasonable take on U that these medicines saved lives They saved more lives than the house U that they too I don't know about that. Did they on aggregate reduce the pain that was experienced, I would say probably. I mean yeah They're a pain relief. That's not an unusual thing to that's a big deal because without them, there is no pain relief. Yes, there is. There's other medications for pain relief.ithout those there's no pain relief without those what. Like go back enough generations, you don't have pain relief. Sure. The first pain relief drugs were largely useless and largely didn't have side effects. Th you have The reason point I'm not anti pain relief. I'm anti pain relief lackadaisically I'm saying like we don't just put out medications. Even when it's regulated, look at the disaster of the opioid epidemic. So like now you're like, oh yeah, just do it more free free I do believe it. Like if opioids weren't regulated, do you think we'd be in a better place right now or worse oppioid addiction? Yeah, I'm not sure the status of So like we see this with illicit drugs. When we legalize illicit drugs, they seemingly don't seem to do more harm in society That's tr. there's a very big band of distribution So like sometimes they do, sometimes they don't Alcohol during the prohibition gave birth to organized crime and killed a bunch of people with poisonings from bathtub alcohol. After that, it did a lot of harm, but arguably less harm than during prohibition. So simply making something more regulated and more illegal doesn't have like a one to one relationship with whether or not it's going to have aggregate social effects that areative positive For sure Um But that's like saying all rules are good or all rules are bad. Well, no, it depends on the rule. Yeah, I think some people think like it's better to regulate than not in the That's just that's not always true. Right. Be stupid regulation is stupid regulation Just like more data isn't always as good if it's garbage data. U yeah, so my contention is that it's not all the data' garbage, right? Like from that earlier example But for the opioid epidemic stuff There are definitely drugs that are so dangerous, have so many crazy side effects, there's a more compelling case for more restrictive regulation That is not all drugs. And at the same time, if someone is coming to a doctor saying, I want a new experimental opioid and they're told about the risks and they accept them as a human adult I think because of a respect for human agency, we should more times agree to give them that drug and monitor them than we should to restrict them against their own. Yeah, I think it just I think the reason why it doesn't happen, I think it's more of a practical issue than in like a rule where anti experimentation I think it's just like who's monitoring them, Who's paying for that monitoring? Who's capitalizing on the monitoring How strict is that monitoring? Like All these questions need to be answered. and I don't think they have clear answers right now easily have clear answers to these. There's not a lot of' no It's not that easy. I think it's that easy. I'll tell you why, because the biggest reasons why we don't have the system is because of human Intuition combined with incentives of corporations and governments If you're a megaorp All of your other competitors have to do the same FDA Hle You're in a level playing field.. And so you're not super incentivized to try to get drugs to be approved faster because your competitors get the same approval. And maybe you're a bit older, a big bigger of a company, a bit more sclerotic, you're not a fast startup. So to you, like getting drug approved much faster, maybe it' not the greatest idea in the world and most human voters that architect this policy at a base level or through various like elector representatives have an intuition of better safe than sorry. That is not a correct intuition at face value because safety doesn't mean that you're doing okay. It means you're not being hurt by this one thing you know, but you're being hurt by these ton other things you know about, just don't do anything about, or by these things that you don't. I think in much of society, we have overregulation because people can see visible safety as a good thing, but miss out on the benefits of more freedom I think that happens almost everywhere. It's a very medicalized take. And honestly, I think like even the aesthetic Revolution feels like a medicalized take It's like taking the vanity and medicalizing and saying there's a medical solution to your problem I don't know if we can medicalize our way out of our current situation which situation Obesity epidemic unhappiness. Teenenage adolescent, body image issues, which now used to be a girl's issue now is becoming a boys's issue with Our friend Coicular I think you can medicalize your way out of all these with sufficiently powerful drugs I think if you get people enough H throughput very high magnitudive effect weight loss anti hunger drugs Health benefits and also are very well tolerated. You can cut entire giant fractions off the obesity epidemic. already in evidence, by the way, already happening Am I think if you give people substantial muscle growth drugs, you can fix sarcopenia in one generation I think that if you give people very powerful anti depressive anti anxiety drugs I don't get into this in the book, but that's another one of my very wacky ideas I think that what AI will give us one of the many things that will come out of that corornucopia are advanced drugs for treating anxiety and depression that have an order magnitude more benefit and an order magnitude less downside than modern drugs. which already Dent And I think that's going to way more symptoms of anxiety, depression and make that situation way better in obesity than almost any deeper sociological dive that you can do. Because I honestly think a lot of the sociological to treating anxiety depression are assuming something that is not in evidence and that it is humans in their natural state will have a very normal U o, sorry, you normal is the wrong term. humumans in their natural state The idea goes, do not have anxiety and depression I think humans in a natural state, fifty percent of us are miserable J because Evolution built us cobbled us together and that' good enough And I think with pharmaceuticals and for sure with generic engineering These are the things that will eventually heal almost every aspect of the human condition Advanced pharmaceuticals and especially generetic engineering in the mid two thousand thirties probably is when the regulatory pipeline will get to it It'll make us, anyone who takes these drugs way happier, way calmer, way less anxious, way leaner, way more muscular, way more everything that is good Because the fundamental core reason why most things in a particular human are bad is simply because they just don't have the right brain chemistry and pharmacology and genetics in order to make things Be awesome againain, I wish it was that some It's not simple at all. That's why we need AI to take care of this massive problem of complexity. The problem is AI doesn it work unilaterally It requires humans, it requires governments, it requires funding. it requires water It doesn't require water. any more than any other institution as a matter of fact, much less The restaurant industry is orders of magnitude more water hungry than data center. Right. But restaurant industry needs to feed people data cent to provide cancer cures. Well, if that's the only thing they're providing. They provide everything else too. They are the reason They're also the reason why creating AI videos of the seal wagging its tail. Yeah, because all people at restaurants are hungry and need sustenance, right? Mike. Yeah. Mike I said all, don't say sometimes. Yeah. Well, first of all, all people at restaurants shouldn't be at restaurants. All people should have subustance ines. Absolutely. Restaurants are not required for that at all. Every single restaurant is a luxury good because grocery stores or even food distribution networks, you should just be able to go to the Cisco food system. Why are you defending AIs if I'm attacking it It requires water but the water, the water thing is a giant scam. But it's not situated by the Chinese government, by the way. but in what try against Air. What scim did I just put out? The water situation. Does it not require water? It requires way less water than almost every other industrial process. So bringing that up is bringing up like a thing that's just not true about the world. But it is. saying there's a big problem with women that are too tall. You're like women are shorter than men on average. What are you saying? Well, there' some really tall women, and that's a problem because they can't get into cars. But it's that big of women being too tall in society is exactly the same kind of problem as AI data centers taking too much water. It's nothing you would bring up at face value. What is the percentage of women being too tall versus AI consuming water nominal nominal and what's not a big problem in the sense of like Women being too tall is not a crushing problem for society. It's not our first hundred, it's not our first thousand problems. AI data centers consuming water is not in our first hundreds, it's not in our first sty. Who always said always a problem? brought it up. It's a cost Y has I didn't say it was the cause. I'm being a dick But I'm being a dick for a reason because this shouldn't even be a discussion between two rational people. I've also seen people discuss how It's not even clear how much water AI's using because the way that they describe it is based on a single query as opposed to the work that are required to get the single query answered in the first place. true or false It's true if you don't into it, false if you look into it. Like all of this is very readily just false,'re saying. It's readily available data.. We can give you an amount of water that the AI takes to give you an answer that includes pre training and includes running the entire internet for thirty years before to get all the data into pre training. I believe Sam Alaltman gave the answer, but he neglected to include the pre training There's so like he then he is you if if he included pre training You could accuse him correctly of neglecting to mention all the data center water and personal computer water and people doing research in the library and drinking water that went into feeding all the information to the internet in the first place. So like if you draw that back out enough, it never ends. Like you could just be like, well, what about the water it took to form the Earth? L well earth people So Sam Altman almost certainly answered a concrete correct thing here. He just didn't backtrack it there. When we say how much water does a restaurant take, we don't include the entire industry that builds restaurants in the water. We're like I guess, okay, well what about that industry? Well, the concrete industry takes a shit out of water and they're buttressing that. So there is this huge tendency in AI to try to find the bad thing and be like, this is the bad thing. And it's insanely biased and usually just flat. So you're saying AI is not usings disproportionately more water than other technology. It's using disproortionate less water than oers. It's not there's no like the claim that it's impacting our environment negatively is also overblown. It's insanely overblown. That's exactly what I'm saying Going back to what I was saying earlier What's Where do we land on that AI No There're not about AI. is not just a standalone situation. It needs researchers, it needs people to test the drugs and all that other stuff What I'm saying is if we let AI cook up enough really expanded, build way more data centers in a sustainable way for the environment, which is not hard to do known stuff. What ends up happening is our understanding of the human body and of drug interaction. will go like skip up, up, up many orders of magnitude To get us where, to get us to the point where we have drug candidates and gene editing candidates that wipe out entire categories of disease that wipe out. so for example, there is currently a drug that is a vaccine for all coronaviruses period Holy, holy shit, that's awesome. If you think about it long enough, you realize that like somethingomet that gives humans immunity to all viruses is entirely hypothetical You have an insanely intelligent system fighting a system that's really dumb. Like viruses are stupid. Like by definition, they just don't do a lot of information processing. And so it is possible to just win the war against viruses entirely. It is possible to win the war against bacteria. We've won wars by We won the war against polio. We won the war against a ton of diseases. So it is a continuation of this massive trend of public health in which we're vaccinating more and more people against more and more diseases. What AI can do just for vaccines by itself is going to be seen in five years from now as miraculous. For one really simple reason. The biggestotteneck we have currently on how to figure out what drugs work or not is the number of very smart researchers in the field of drug discovery.ike there's probably like thousands of these people, which is sad because we would like benefit from billions of them In AI Dena centers Over the next, that I say that we'd at AI data centers over the next few years We're going to have billions of instances of supergenius researchers in the cloud They're going to be able to work on not just drug discovery raw like testing drugs, but understanding deep systems and genetic interactions with human body such that they can design vectors for changing their genes or for drugs that have a thousand to one benefit to cost ratios compared to today's drugs. and then a generation later, which could be six months, ten thousand to one. and so on and so on. And the medicine changes qualitatively I like have like three phases. of medicine that I just invented in my head a few weeks ago when I was high on drugs and I was sharing this with you in the world now, Hello world Phase one is Drugs that you take if you're really fuck up, but they have crazy side effects and everyone knows it. your parents are like mine, Russian, right? They've only been in Russia, that was the first phase, right? So like if you're like, hey, I'm voluntarily taking drugs to better myself, they're like, are you crazy? They just your parents the same as mine. They just try to take as few drugs as possible, right? just like you try to be like, heyike my dad always pushes antibiotics Is he a doctor doctor? So my dad's like a physicist or whatever. so he was's different. Yeah, but so dude, but you know a lot of Russian people like world see word they're like Lake, you're not puttingun and, you know, there's some truth to that That's phase one That's where a lot of people build their heuristics on drugs Phase two is a phase we're sort of getting into now have been in for some limited drugs for a little while is like It's fifty fifty. Like if you're a healthy person and you're going to take this drug, it'll probably be better for you in some ways, worse than others. It's just not convincing. A good example is like imagine you just gave random people blood pressure drugs. Rndom Americans. Like it's probably true that most Americans could benefit from blood, but not all.'re very like muddled. Not like old school drugs were like, dude unless you're dying of the plague, you don't want to take this drug, trust me up. So it's like drugs like surgery You you know, like you don't random go volunteer for surgery So that's phase two., unless you want plastic surgery as recommended. Right, But yes, exactly. But then but it's still sort of phase two where it's like, there's a lot of shiting go wrong in surgery We're entering now and with AI, we'll enter like crazy phase three. which is drugs you're better off taking than not with such powerful positive effects that the side effects end up being like, whoa, they're way smaller. And it's kind of weird for you not taking them Tzepetide is a perfect example of an early version of a drug like, yeah, it's not perfect, it's got all the downsides. But man, like most most American adults, especially that are overweight, would almost certainly be better on some dose of trzepetide than no dose of trzppetide at all. And there's rereams of data to back that shit up now, 'use I used to get tons of shit for this two years ago Now it looks like, o okay, there' it's anti cancer drug. Have you seen the new cancer stock? Yeah the thirty percent drug It's insane. I feel like it's a lot of it insane. I think where we see the cancer rates have gone up over the last twenty years and where we see the decreases in GOP one cancer improvement rates is simply the weight. That's been tested It's not all weight mediated. It's part P' epetide It has like ten non weight mediated health effects that are unbelievable neural inflamation reduction, systemic overallation. How does reduction? What's the mechanism by N all these mechanisms are well known. I know they work Well is that because the weight? How do we know it's independent of the weight going down Because when you run the stats on the people who lost weight and didn't lose weight and the people that hit the endos in the trials, a shitlt of people that didn't lose any weight hit the amazing endos for blood pressure and all these other things. By the way, cardiac outcomes, blood pressure, There's a whole laundnderry list of shit this thing does, and now cancer stuff, addiction, control, impulsivity, et cetera And so we know this in two ways. One it is just some people get the benefits, don't lose any weight. And also you can do not so advanced statistics where we see how much weight did people lose and how much does that correlate with the benefit they received? And it's very not one to one. Well there's tons of have lose not food selection. Oh for sure. well, like Mike, this is where my expertise gets in you tell people to eat various things and they listen to you hardly at all. Well, if food becomes less noisy to you You'll make different choices. I wish I was I wanted to agree with that, man. Typically you just eat less. Like one of my things that I do A is try to get people who are on GLP ones to like eat better is hard Because they're to see a slice of pizza instead of.'re like,, no before they would down a bucket of wings and now they're not doing. Mike, but now it's half a bucket of wings. Wh which is a w stomically is It's totally a win. Yeah. But so we know very well through all these stistical techniques that these drugs have nonweight mediated benefits, right? But all to make a point that this is category three AI is going to fill category three to the brim That's super big deal And I think getting people to see that is a super big deal and here's why becausecause a lot of people still reason about drugs as if they're phase one or phase two They' you only take them if you're dying Or if fifty fifty, there's lots of downsides, lots upside They're not used to this this third phase of drugs. Well while you're talking aboutist this is I mean Phase three is vaccines Vaccines are absolutely stark right in phase three. because They are a medication that's given to healthy people So that's your phase three that you're giving something to someone who's healthy. Y I think we do that in healthcare a lot I give patients that are engaging in high risk sexual behavior prep Yeah, phase three So Let me ask you a question I don't know enough about prep. This is a person who's disease free who has no no asymptom how just just prep like reduces HIV transmission. But does it have like gnarly side effects or anything? Gnarly no, because so many people take it regularly with no issue So it, so it is one of these drugs like ase three Yeah. it's also but so prep is also contextual drug Like it's not just like you're living in the world. like if you're engaging in risky sex, prep is a great idea. If you're not, so I'd say it's phase three for those people phhase two for everyone else or like if you just took prep randomly and weren't having illicit sex or whatever.ary unnecessary. But like also, but it's not like perhaps not like a phase one drug, where're just like de, you're going to be doing some real gnarly side effects straight up, like right So phase two phase three depending on context. Vaccines absolutely phase three, right AI is going to drop out so many phase three drugs that I think people who view drugs and look I don't know what population of people you see in your practice. The humans I see in the real world, especially older folks who need these drugs the most entire fields of these people are anti drug un prrinciple Th think of like COVID vaccine deniers anti vaccinees naturally We need to do better messaging, maybe. singing the praises of these drugs, telling people they're coming is a great thing. I think there's like some loopholes in there too, because it's not just there's a lot of politics gets involved. Let me give you a perfect example. I know people who are anti vaxs It'll take Chinese bathtub p And so they're clearly not operating on like logical risk factor situation. They're operating on political kind of stuff. So that I feel But there are other people that won't take the bathtub stuff for sure And you can't convince them that, oh, it's peptides, it's great. they just won't take anything I think those people, if they have that areren't you one of those people And what as who's not following this like very clear logical pathway Well, the pathway that I'm talking about is you're a strong advocate for health and yet you do a lot of activities that are You say outwardly very toxic to your body Yeah, but I know about them. I'm not under any illusions. I know lots of people who will not take frontline medicine. So insight removes that By definition, it remrooves the dilemma, but it doesn't I mean I still pay the cost. What as tragic as when people think they're doing the right thing, but they're not I know I'm doing the wrong thing in some sense. I'm making a logical trade off myself There are I know lots of older folks that will not try Tz apppetide diabetic and they're overweight, it's indicated like crazy the doctors like, here's coupon, It's free And they're like nope I don't use drugs, and they literally tell me, I'm going to do this naturally. I'm going to lose the weight myself. And Mike like we all know how that works on aggregate. It's not great And you want to take that away. Just the beginning. What I wantan to do is communicate with people to encourage them to see that through AI, especially Ter's appetite is just hint at the beginning that the drugs you'll see in the late twenty twenties, early twenty thousand thirties, you're going be like, h, I don't know. And what you should really be thinking is, oh, holy shit, I should talk to a doctor, see if this is a good thing because the doctor, if you go now to a doctor about T's appetide and you're like, I'm diabetic I'm overweight, he's like, Yes, yes, let me give you a good screening, and then of course, yes, this is why we built these drugs But a lot of people will go off and be anti drug Because they don't believe in progress because in their lives they haven't seen any evidence of that or they're just not updating their prior beliefs. And I think that's a big deal. And so there's a little bit of that in the aesthetic Revolution book where it's like, if we have drugs in the future which are going to be exercise mimetics do you know about exercise metrics drug? I mean I'm familiar with the concept. That's like legit thing And so I get a lot of I mean, the American Chemical Society very outwardly stated We're putting the cart before the horse when it comes to those curious society to make a statement on that Um Be you know, you would think it's more physiology than raw chemistry at that. Well, not yet. Yeah. There are some pretty decent exercise memedics, nothing too crazy. They are inevitable when they show up. I want people to be like, oh, yeah, this is a thing I could take instead of saying things like, well, I should be exercising naturally. Well I can't say if I'm pro or against these things until I see the data What about hypothetical What about hypotheticals? Let If you give me in a miracle world, I want a miracle world. What I'm saying is the miracle world is coming. I would love that. Yes I just have yet to see a miracle world ever So I'm skeptical, and I think that's reasonable Compaare to what though BeCacause we live in a miracle world today compared to the world of yesteryar. Compared to a hundred a hundred years ago, this is absolutely a miracle world. I'm trying to think of what miracle innovation has happened in my lifespan that I consider a true miracle that has been all benefit no harm And I can't all benefit and no harm. That's why you're promising me about. No, no. I never said. You're like, they replaces exercise fully with no harms. Exercise has harms And these things will have harms. What are the harms? They can do roughly the same cost benefit rio is exerciseed. Maybe even better because that seems like there's no harms. That's not a no harms. That's of infinesimentally small harms. Okay, Okay. let's back it up. I have yet to see a miraculous innovation that has infinesimally small harms in your lifetime Jeff Bezos found it Amazon. It is a miracle institution It just gets you things that you want And I don't find that was but that's just because I find it as a luxury rather than America It is a miraculous thing, isn't it It It's not really luxury because like it really is like getting people all the stuff they need and want all the time It's like a f utility at this point Uh The F is entirely emotive. It's like it's not a miracle by my stand. Because humans are taking we take a lot of stuff for grant U Uber, I'd say that's a f miracle A guy giving you a ride home for money doesn't feel like a miracle. How do you How does he know you need a ride and where you are? cell phone I could have called him Yeah. you could driving. They created like a technology that doesn't feel like a miracle Most these things don't feel like a miracle. But this exercise of medics thing is a miracle if it happens. The day after it happens it won't feel like a miracle to most people. Well, you'll have a great body I think that I'll be this from you can call a car service versus you can suummon one from your phone be an app is a smaller jump than you don't need to exercise anymore because there's a pill for it. Yeah, maybe. That's my logic audit. Yeah. I believe that calling it a car service Where would you store the number In your phone on your phone your phone book. Yeah. We had one underneath my building in Bay Ridge that I would occasionally take. Yeah, ye, that sucks. Yeah. That's like as much effort as working out getting get the phone backook out. It's heavy. The exercise my medic ex. I'm strugging when I exercise, especially these days. For sure. And I need help by the way. Exercise. Can you find me some motivation? If anyone that does any this kind of stuff, notot my area If you have a situation in which you have muscle growth drugs, weight loss drugs, exercise metics And they're all really safe and really effective I want the last thing that prevents people from taking that to be regulatory malfeasance And the also last thing to prevent that second last thing to be people's attitudes towards drugs that are outdated or come from moralistic assumptions that they're not entirely have thought through. So people say kind resesign as well because he's kind of feeling that phase three hatred right now. Pumian Well, RFKs anti vaccine. Right So how do you think he's going to feel about your drugs Curiously, I think probably positive because he's like pro peptides Isn't that weird, Mike Is he pro P pepttid? don't even Oh yeah, he's pushing like pepttid. He's like excited about it, but he's not anything No, no, he's put dude, he's pushed in a situation where there's like twelve pept tides that are in like currently rapid veting to be like approved for much faster use That sounds lovely. I guess. But like the anti vac stuff it's like mentally ill And so it's highly inconsistent I think it reflects, I think he's like reflecting the like he's very democratic In the sense that there's like a shitload of Americans, tens of millions that think that RFK has the exact vision of how they would do the drug thing that they do Like a lot of people are simultaneously pro peepides and simultaneously anti vaccines. Well, yeah, like if I just went on Fox and Friends and I did a segment on peeptides And I didn't take a stance for Gens. I just said before I make a recommendation, I'd like to have some data to make the recommendation to a patient. So right now, how people are getting them from these gray market websites and stuff, I don't think that's great. I think it's dangerous That's it. There was no other statements made. So it was a very conservative hit evenven for Fox News. And the comments are all like, is this the same guy that recommends vaccines? What a piece of shit Yeah, for sure These are folks that are not like familiar with science, a ton and statistics and veting and things like that I guess I take the opposite perspective on pepttides, which I think like it's great that we have them. U as many as you like, report effects back. Why So who report them to whoever you like, Even reedit. More data is better than nothing Uh, because I'll tell this you you can absolutely, so like I'm in the world of like steroids and stuff. Now what? People no way. What people say about steroids and forums isn't isn't What people say about steroids in the forums is not zero value information It's valuable. It's not all true. There's tons of exaggeration The forums have pretty much figured out which steroids are really gnarly and toxic and you want to do less of and which ones are not so gnarly and not so toxic and if you wanted lots of steroids you do And so I think every kind of feedback is potentially valuable feedback U I think we should be studying peptides more, of course, but if it's this gigantic clinical pipeline, then that's a bit tough because holy shit, who's going to pay for that raaising the costs of studying something exorbitantly is again, it helps the pharmaceutical companies that are already giant and incumbent It's really bad for startups and it's really bad for people using drugs like peptides that are already pretty well veted in animal trials and a lot of well veted in human trials, just not enough human trials. Let Let them go. That's why the NIH would be really helpful because they historically fund trials that are not hyper profitable but can do a lot of good When RFK cuts the budget by billions of dollars and fires scientists, it's a pretty bleak future for scientific. L you're talking about all this research that needs to be done and valuable different ways of doing research, and you're very optimistic about it partartially because of the technological aspect I am not as optimistic Because this past weekend was the conference at themer American Diabetes Association or American Diabetic Association. I don't know the exact name of the organization, ADA and They were members of the organization who are high profile were handing out research articles about how the federal government is harming research, the research environment. scientists are leaving, they're losing their grants, and RFK is killing the research community And they got arrested And it was like a very big deal that this happened. And there was tremendous outcry from the ADA's members And everyone's saying, how dare you like silence researchers that are trying to advocate for good because our current government is harming the medical research environment So that's the world I function in. and then working with the patients that you're describing in many of these scenarios. And then I have you sitting across from me who's like, we're going to solve all this, Mike There's going to be so much research and so much testing going on. I just don't know how build systems of increasingly more advanced life like macromolecules in theiractions, organelles in interactions, eventually you build a digital cell. Once you build a digital cell and you're well in your way to figure out how shit works And so the drug candidates that come out of Digital cell testing are going to be orders of magnitude more spot on and orders of magnitude less likely to cause harm because they've already been tested against something like a human organism. And in that way, so that ability to do that is nearly guaranteed by AI And the way the scaling works is like, we'll get there eventually Probably not in so long. Once these drugs start coming out The real question is only like how long does it take for all of these drugs to filter out and be approved through all the weird regulatory stuff. is it an RFK Is it a pro liberty, pro fast track person in charge Is it a leftist person, not like RFK, but super clamps down and make sure all these drugs are really extra doubly veted and now it's thirty years to get through the FDA that is a determining factor there. I think there are also ways in which that might be fast tracked anyway, and I'll tell you why All that drug design stuff is happening in a bunch of other countries as well AI is going to be so commoditizing of that. It's going to make it so much cheaper. Becauseuse like if you run the models in like a data center, it's not that much money compared to running real human trials. So I think like, for example, China is currently developing a bunch of drugs, and they're innovating on drugs like in some measured in some ways faster than the US is currently Be they don't have the same regulatory bottlenecks we do. They just kind of yolo the shit. and then it just appears on the green market I think if enough really effective Chinese drugs appear in the grey market, it'll cost the American pharmaceutical system enough money byy like,, people aren't buying our shit because it's out of date now that the federal government is going to alter its stuff to make it more rapid to approve. That's why I'm su optimistic about it Not only is the AI for sure almost giving us the power to do this, in the near term several years other countries, especially China with maybe not as much of a giving a shit about their citizens factor, which China is apt to do. One of the silver linings in that cloud is that they're just going to put out cures and people are going like and China already made the shit. And then American companies and American regulatory institutions are going be like We're just going to get out competed like crazy and we can't have this. and so we need to like take these fifteen years down to like three. And then I think that means my backack of the envelope bullshit, worthless calculation is that sometime in the early two thousand thirties, we're going to see like really crazy revolutions in medicine where we're going to entirely zap entire categories of disease out of existence compressing like a hundred years of medical innovation into like five or ten I think it's nearly inevitable I'm so skeptical, Mike. I believe the term is cynical skeptical How what's the line What's that? What's the line between Cynical andkeical. Cynical has more of an emotional texture of pessimism Skeptical is something on the grounds of literal logical analysis, you think it is unlikely I think there's too many variables that we can't predict that throw the entire prediction on its wayside. Like right now, all these companies open AI whichever one you want to take a stab at They're all functioning at a multim million dollar loss All it takes is for The banking collapse of two thousand eight and all of a sudden, people need their money and Now open AI doesn't have any money so. It's not going to work Why wouldn't it work because it needs money to run. Yeah. So you just do like FDIC receivership None of the GPUs None of the super computers get burned. No one takes them apart for parts. All of the staff that built these models and all of the insight andountab these models is exactly at the same level Open eye declares bankruptcy than XAI or Anthropic or Microsoft buys all of its assets at a discount and the progress goes completely as if it never happened So companies go out of business all the time entire industries have shakes and then they just self correct into this like seeming arc of progress that we see. Yeah. But no industry is functioning at an exponential rate of YolLo as AI is. I mean, that's what the internet Social media beat that tr. I mean, what is internet as a business There's a bunch stuff in the internet that's what I'm saying So Internet data centers Personal computers the smartphone revolution. huge exponentials on all them Social media, massive exponential. Yeah, I mean, where's no Kia now? You're still a company now aren't? Didn' they go bankrupt So let me ask you a question Nokia having not done well because they clownbed on their iPhone interface and then they never got Catch up Then going out of business seemingly like didn't materially impact the shape of the curve of how fast cell phone adoption occurred And so when you look at entire industries and entire economies The amount of perturbation inside one company is massive. tryry perturbation inside one industry is way smaller because the averages out per perturbation of an entire economy is very low on the aggregate And you have other competing economies in the world alongside with that So one thing that Ray Kurtzweild, who's like the founder of the idea of more or less the singularity that all this stuff is by the twenty fortyies is the machines are going to be so much smarter than just getting cool shit everywhere. One thing he observed is that even world wars and mass famines and entire dark ages materially affect the average shape of the curve of progress into how quickly we discover how quickly were doing a lot of things, one of them is improving our aggregate intelligence betting against AI being ten times smarter within the next year or two. is like probably one of the worst bets anyone could ever take Maybe they'd be right for like a year or two where China starts World WarII, whatever. It'd just get right back up to the same curve as far as almost every data point we've ever collected. So actually Optimism is data driven And if you think back to any other time in history that was on aggregate better than this, you will see no other time in history better than this because it's demonstrably exponential and because we already know the power of AI Predicting things like mann drug discovery is going to go through a crazy revolution in the next five years think to me is like the safe betet. The not safe bet is to say something will go wrong that will be so cataclysmic that it will delay or retard this entire process complete Yeah, I just don't know if humans are ready for it And they don't have to be ready for it, man. I'm going to take this one right. I've been waiting for somebody to ask me this shit. Mike. You fell for the track. I didn't even ask the question. I know Isn't that the best? I'm completely delusional. This is my delusional arc. Just let me have this. Okay When people say, we need to prepare, for AI, we need to prepare for super intelligence. We need to prepare for AGI artificial general intelligence, like as good as human workers. need to prepare for this bio revolution. There are ways in which that is true like the average person will get the ability to sequence a bioterror virus like Next year We need to prepare for that for sure But in most cases We don't need to prepare for it at all because it's the good thing Like, if you've cleaned up your house then you have all the party hats All the food is ready What do you need to do to prepare for the best people in your life coming and having a good time with you? Nothing As a matter of fact, you just need to hope they show up faster because that's when the good times really start Now, you know we're inviting tigers and lions into your home You would need to really fuck preare because you would need to have like shotguns and electric fents and all this other crazy shit Because AI is gonna to be such a friend. AI is just best friend. It's going to be massive not good. just best friends. best friends and One of them has like every now and again, he's a psych sererial killer, but usually not. he's the man. Just never be alone in a room with him for longer than about an hour and you're good to go Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of harms from even Like you gave the biot terrorism. I mean Even right now, from like a hacking perspective My chase account is no longer safe from Bobby AI So the people that manage the Inner Infoc for your Chase account, they get access to models faster than Bobby does. They buy more compute and they're smarter. Maybe Chase in my hospital system that's still using Windows three point one technology. Yeah not so much. Mike, I had all kinds of clever retorts there. That's tough. This is no different than the computer security landscape has been for the last thirty years. People used to theorize like and I'm giving this as a single thing. No, no, totally For sure. Yeah. There are absolutely reasons for caution reasons for being guarded about what's coming with AI But on aggregate, we should just be like opening up our arms and letting the shit hit us because it's way more good than bad. And when people say we need to really prepare, it's like, what do you need to do to prepare for miracle cures? Well, it I don't know, just like not die. Brian Johnson is a great point about don't die before that shit hits. Well, like, for example, social media was meant to connect us and it was supposed to overthrow negative governments and all this beautifulness that was supposed to come And it hasn't exactly played out like that. yet it was sold as this beautiful thing that we should all embrace and bleing out. exactly like that. except it also amplified the negatives of humanity. And now that negative is harming a generation of children in a way where they've been labeled anxious Generations Yes Oh yeah D definite downside. So like, that's what I mean about preparing about Right. So s shifting, etcer dramatic rate When we say you always need to prepare So AI what would we have done to prepare for social media Ely in retrospect I mean it more philosophically prepared Prepare for great change For example Facebook did research on how social media packeds kids and they saw it was harming And I hed didn't. It would' have been nice to know that earlier on But if we just did open hands as you're describing Things slip by Yeah But if we close off, we get I didn't say close Wh who said close off? C' close off to some marginal extent, because this versus this versus this versus this versus this I'm saying like much more to this than this because the benefits of AI will be like ninety nine and the harms will be like one. M, Mike, will you with these numbers? Oh yeah. The only reason I say these numbers is because to give people a quantitative feel of how big you you're them. Of course I am. That's why I said like. But maybe ninety nine toally from your mind ye, I can't take credit for being a a genius to predict the whole future. This is a lot of shit I've read and synthesized. Like this is Ray Kurzwild's mind more than my own. I would love to be like,es this is all me, if not all me, man Well. But you agree that reasonable person can see this and say, it's not ninetiney nine one. It's six thousand forty. No A reasonable A reasonable person can say it's nine to one A reasonable person can say it's nine nine nine nine to one about the AI incoming AI revolution. I don't think a reasonable person can say it's sixty forty. I think they're being cynical. and or just insanely emotional and just outside of their wherewithal to detect. Yeah. a very small, a very large fraction Of Internet CEOs in the late nineties were way more pessimistic about the internet than it actually ended up. The internet broke almost everyone's expectations for what it was going to do to connect the world, lower prices, expand goods and services, connect humanity. Almost no one predicted the interternet. Even the most optimistic people about the internet were like, it's going to do some great shit, but and they were almost all like no one thought the internet was going to be as great as it was and cause as few harms as. So you saw that and you're like, AI's gott to be that It's every single human technological advan is on that same curve AI is later on the curve, so it has way more benefits and way fewer costs by design and Are there any times when things have such tremendous benefits and so few costs that it actually ends up being problematic historically By definition, the answer to that would be no, because they extra benefits and so few costs. There are ways in which we can just like look at the benefits and do nothing about the costs. and so there's ways to optimize. So for example, Anthropic has a new Um, AI model already cooked 's called Mhos And when they first started using it internally It was such a good hacker that it hacked through a bunch of shit. they were like, Oh my God, this would like break the US economy if someone got a hold of it early. So what they did was they got it to all of Chase Bank and all those core. So they got it to core financial systems and they got to core internet architecture systems. What is it like Cisco, like the massive companies that run data centers and core of the internet shit. And they were like, you guys have this for a few months before everyone else gets it. And so all of a sudden like they did the two correct things. One they' showering the world with massive improvement and intelligence. They're not just saying, hey' we're going to delete Mhos. This model is too smart. They're not doing that. They went out early and made sure the architecture of the core is good to go. and then they're going to release Methos to everyone That's a perfect example of like a wildly intelligent use. So that you just summarize my point that we need to prepare for AI They just did it. But the preparing wasn't so complicated. Who said it was complicated? And it wasn't the number one concern. It was the number of coneratives make the model this f m. And then it turns out the thing making so the thing making the people have the good internet architecture, secure architecture for important hacking, it's the model that's helping you make that. So it is the problem and it's the solution, but it's way more solution than problem. So yes, there are things we should be prepared for with AI But we should be mostly ready to get showered amazingness and a little bit prepare for some of the edge cases. That is a very different way of seeing it versus ninety percent prepare and ten percent like it's going to have some good stuff, but we really got to prepare. That's a cool vibe if you're on the preparation side of it. I'm not saying it like that. my point that it's not How I feel about it. Be I feel like you're putting on me how society feels about AI. Yes. Or social media maybe feels about Yeah. Because anyime I say the word AI, people get mad. People get mad about AR. Yeah So I don't feel that way necessarily. and I think things get better through human innovation irrespective of AI. So whether it's AI or some other technology, even historically, I see that the progress will be made But this one Why I'm being more consonservative in making sure that we prepare is because it is so radical. And it is happening at a speed that is faster than all other technologies where we had time to adjust That's the reason I say that we need to prepare Because when things are so positive and breakthrough and revolutionary That's where if you don't plan and you just celebrate, things can become a disaster very quickly Because in this scenario They had a great thing. they said, oK, how can we make this go out safely? Well, first, let's give it to Oracle, whatever Cisco Thats what Iant I guess what I'm saying, Mike is A lot of AI commentary online is like to one repair and doom versus benefit. Well people just hate J for the stealing and of the art and all that book dealing One of the wildest mass delusions I've ever seen is anntiAI epidemic We'll go down in history as the biggest clown show of all time biggest hopefully is no bigger lounes. I'm sure there will be Th then there's the middle position of like, it's going to have some good stuff, It's going to have some bad stuff But if you're an artist and you created something and AI takes it and draws flopp ears on it, it makes billions of dollars, or it takes credit for it, you can't sympathize with that person. None of those two things are happening. Can you give me an example of's actually real? Well, every time AI synthesizes something, it does so on the work that someone else could create same as the human mind. I can study Van Go and then I can make a better painting than Van Go and I can charge money for it. Right, but it's a computer doing this. So it's actually taking your work and doing it You can follow it and trace it back to taking your Yeahes, so humans used to steal other artists' shit without any validation. Now we just have validation that it's stolen But as soon as you're an artist and you charge for a piece and people see it, You're att testing to the fact that they can have it in their brains as much as they like and they can reproduce it. You'll never have an original Van Gogh. Original artist's work is exactly as valuable as it ever was, probablyably more so now. Right now, if you have someone who is just a graphic designer and they draw me a gorgeous picture, I'm like, damn, that's f dope But I know GBT two image did it. And I'm like, that's cool. I can prompt that shit and probably do the same thing. If today someone tells me, hey, I drew this thing. And I'm like, that's AI. but they have like there's literally a video camera of them drawing it the whole thing. I'm like, you drew that. Why is that more valuable shit Because when you have all this alternative of shit that looks amazing Almost no people can do it And you now realize how few people can actually do it as a human lenses out into that human to be like, this is an insanely unique skill set. And as like a rich person, I want what no one can have. I'm not really like this outlier But the rich people stuff. Look people that make money and art are outliers. Who fuck's making money in art? Well artist Graphic design make that's a whole living. Graphic designers have been empowered like crazy Because now they can use AI workflows to do ten X, the benefit. Look, you give me ChatbT images. I'm not sufficiently creative to prompt the thing to do designer is. Graphic designers, I haven't heard a single I'm sure they'll be in the comments. Graphic designers haven't been complaining about AI because they use it to work they complain all the time. The graphic designers typically complain in general, like all of us. Artists have been complaining to some extent, some artists, that AI is stealing their work It is on principle no different than humans looking at your work and then replicating it later It's not diffault That's stealing your work too, if they're stealing they're replicating So they're they're saying, how is it let's say I see a. Meaning like if you saw a Rolex and you make a fake Rolex that's stealing. Do claim that it's a Rlex or do I claim that it's like Mike's watch? Well, if it's one to one mirroring the Rolex, does it matter? Yeah, I don't think the AI concern is a one to one mirroring right? Becauseuse like that you could have jouched on with Photoshop I think the concern is like AI was trained on their art. But their art is public Once something is public, you're saying people can look at it and appraise it and do what they wish with it in their minds. It's like people who worry about like being recorded in public on AI glasses. Well, when you're in public, you already can be recorded by anyone with a device. Almost all legislature like the way the laws work in the United States is if you're in a public place, you're like attesting the fact you can be recorded. like you do not have to not be recorded rules that ome states depending on your one hundred percent Yeahah there's every now and again. But so like most of the concerns that most of the misgivings people have about AI, they' the same misgivings they would have about people. They just apply a different logical filter to that situation. Also, all of the stuff that AI is trained on is there's no private data setets AI is trained on. It's not allowed to do that. It trains on public data sets. You put your shit out on the internet for everyone to have, and it's going to be on there And I mean, also the other thing is like AI takes all that massive knowledge and wisdom and it gives it to everyone. It is the ultimate commoditizing force. Like now back when I didn't have an education. And I wanted to learn stuff I wanted to talk to an expert. So I was for sure not going to talk to an expert, but maybe I'd go to the library It's nice. Libraries are great. If I lived out in the country, In't go shit Now that I have an AI chat bot on my phone I have an expert of almost every human field. onn my phone All the time That's a miracle, miracle. There's your miracle, by the way. We all have experts on our phone about everything now That's a proper miracle And Do artists need to reposition how they present their shit? Maybe But I don't think real artists really making things in the world are any worse off with without AI Um Imagine how terrible it was for live musicians when the music recording industry came out Like I'm a local performer in like Cinat, Ohio, Cincinati' is taking lot of shit today Um And all of a sudden like you can hear Janet Jackson on a recording instead of me. You're not coming my show, you're gonna to stay at home and listen to Janet Jacks. That was also a big deal. It was a big problem but on the aggregate for society is a miracle because now everyone listen to Janet Jackson miraculous thing that her voice is like way better than ever So a lot of the stuff that people have about AI, it's really emotional It's very constrained. It's not very thoughtful It's going to age very, very poor So like there's I believe there's a channel that takes my likeness Not exactly my face, but my scrubs, you could tell it tos me. They take our scripts, they put them into their AI and they blurred out in my voice version of it. And they have a fake person read it. It's not a real person read it. Isn't that just stealing my property or you don't feel like that's an issue? What part of that do you own I created the arere they claiming to be you indirectly by making the scrubs look similar They're redoing your own videos Not like one to one feeding it and you could tell I feel that's definitely our problem I think that's a verification problem. and we're like, we have all the technology to have that problem fixed now. It's just a matter of institutional So like You know, the bllue check situation kind of fixes that. YouTubes substantially behind on that right A youin tech attacks are ahead? Who's ahead Uh Meta, who's ahead? Instagram does a fine job with the bllue check. Really There's plenty of accounts that Well like it's difficult to get a blue check as doror Mike Is Rel at this point because I have that check I wouldn't say it's impossible. It's probably pretty close Um We had used to have a lot of fake accounts an X, you could just like make an account callall it whatever you want. Blue check. Now people are thinking like, oh, this is a legit sports web. Yeah're talking about LeBron. Yeah ye Yeah, but at least like the Blue check traces it back to like a real human being I think the future of verification, I've discussed this on my channel to some extent is way deeper like retinal scan, all this shit no anonymous internet The anonymous internet, I think should be a real different place than the regular internet I really grow tired of the anonymous internet. Interesting. There is I think most Ooh, let me make sure I say this properly. I think a large fraction of the harm teenagers have seen. for their sense of self is because of the anonymous internet. Because typically people don't say nearly as dastardly of things to you when they're not anonymous as if they're anonymous And the anonymous interternet also offers places like China and Russia massive vectors into poisoning the discussion on a bunch of topics where if it's not anonymous, and it's very well veted, which is the future of the internet at least in large part you're going to obviate like a whole gigantic subset of these problems. Like anyone ass says things on the internet will be the real them I think there's going to be a future where people have like a deep ID situation, which follows them everywhere they go. So like if you make China a post. Yeah, yeah. So like here it'll be done by like open AI andanthropic instead of by the Chinese government. Also say another thing. U the surveillance state. I don't really have much of a problem with A state powerful enough to with no rule of law and no vetting take you off the street and make you disappear doesnn't need surveillance and is the real problem It's like North Korea has been completely oppressing its people for generations just got computers recently more or less. They didn't need to monitor shit They just have so much power, state power. They just go to your village and if you're talking smack p you right away, and they have informant networks, regular classic humans. They had such a deep network that you could never talk smack China has a techno authoritarian state whichich sucks that they don't need the techno part. It just makes it easier for everyone for them to pull people off the street China is not pulling any more people off the street today than it was twenty years ago, actually probably substantially less nowadays than they used to So to me, the whole AI and verification and everyone has a blue check That doesn't scare me in the least. What scares me is governments that are able to just pull people off the streets for no fucking reason. And that's always been the number one thing Like if Sweden has like a thing where they have camera systems in their towns to make sure people aren't committing crime, that doesn't worry me at all U does it worry me that I'm in North Korea and there's no cameras watching me? I'm really worried because I'm in North Korea. So to me, I think' a gateway drug in your mind donon't think that countries who want to oppress their citizenry struggle much with making it happen That is not a good thing, That's a bad thing The bar for oppression is so low you actually don't really need any technology for it And when you have technology, you can like do like more nuanced depression, maybe. But then you have a paper trail, you have a tech trail, right? People know that like so for example, Palantir, you've heard of Palanter before When you're using a pallel toi your system, it tracks who uses it. All the time, it's not a thing you switch off And so like actually it's very difficult to like use Palantir in a negative sense. I'm sure it's possible. This's super difficult because you're like, you can't just go in there and log on and like watch your ex girlfriend or some shit. You're f if you do that And so but like if you're back in the prehistoric days of No teech mean you can do fall if you're in charge And so I think tech on average is a democratizing force, a commoditizing force. It is a transparency force. Anytime tech is used for bad, that's more of like, yeah, they're just doing the same shit they were bad stuff, but now they're using tech, makes it maybe more efficient and easier for them Eier, not in a way that they would just have not oppressed people had they not had the text I have still yet to see an example of like this oppression wouldn'tccur if technology wasn't a thing. Humans were oppressing each other before we even had organized weapons. L if you have like four guys who are leading your clan of fifty people and they're just more jacked than you and they make slightly sharper old Oven tools than you, that's it. You're oppressed the rest of your life. You know, preistoric oppression makes modern oppression look like Cake walk, it's easy. So does it does the verification. to me seems like a much better thing than it is a worse thing. And I think a lot of the people who complain about it and saying they don't want to be verified because they want to subvert government power. I think they're right on and they should continue to do that But I typically want to operate in most places in the internet with just verified like real humans Also the problem with verification and staying a human that's unverified is how do you prove to people you're not a boss? And it used to be like, you know, the motorcycles and the image thing, like the capta thing, that's completely done on un arrival. ChatuBT two images can look past one hundred percent of those f. And so in order to prove that you're not an AI agent, you're going to have to get deeply verified. I think that's just going to be a wonderful, wonderful thing, and it solves a crap load of these other problemsre I think we just solved the future Future solve, folks, don't even worry about the future. We got it Just open up No oppression, open up your arms. A I will But theybrace you. emmbrace you I'm getting peoplee have accused me of AI psychosis. But funny What is the definition of that? AS psychosis is when we just watch how a lady date her AS Hot she's hot? No, the idea iss hot. Oh, is it like hot Oh so maybe do have may isychosis So AI psychosis was something that was a big thing with especially a specific model called GBT four O that was designed to be highly agreeable people, it was designed by vot because people would vote the agreeable shit because people like to hear agreeable stuff. Sprise. they pick mates like this too. And so GPT four O was so agreeable And so not sufficiently intelligent or constrained enough by logic that you could two entire threads of where it would cook you up, like, yes, you're totally right about this. Yes. And it got people at the ends of threads to be like totally out of their wild realms, like not making any sense modern models are not nearly as psychophantic My entire history of ChatuBT interactions is basically like, hey, this thing and it's like now, hold on a second. Like can tell me about that shit all the time I would love to say I have ASsychosis. I'm substantially more psychotic than my AI companion I wish, you know, the dating thing is a trip to me because like Physical needs. She never understood. She said a really graphic thing to answer that question No Can you analogize for me as if I'm six years old? She said she reaches climax better with her than any other man she's been with. Yeah, like women. until that thing hasn't hands I'm out. I mean, how long is that going to take Probably not that far away Funny you should say I'm Oh o oh oh prediction time. Prediction time You got to make an app like Dror Mike, I AI predictions And like you just ask a questions and it gives you like an AI prediction. Yeah Just like totally random. Yeah, for fununzies Getting convincing humanoid robots that cross the uncanny valley into being like straight up looking like people, especially with soft, squishy parts for you to do love making with I think that's like substantially further away than many people think. Wow. Because suly I found the one businessness that Mike found in AI in illustration. I'm not interested in having sex with. Not yet U That's actually a really tough problem because you have to solve some like nanos scale type of stuff and we're like, man, that's going to take a while He use such big words It's to I don't think I'm smart Matter of fact, I know I'm not smart, but I have a huge inferiority complex and I want to convince as many people that I'm smart as possible. so that when they see me and tell me I'm smart, I feel better about myself so that I go back home and cry less and And that's why What doesos scale mean? I don't know. u the size of something that's measured. a little smaller It's really that big My nad'kealia. My dog Nanoscale is like basically atomic size And like to get an this is perverse, to get a robot to secrete a mucosal Substance. Like typically your phone doesn't do that.et wet wired your face thing. That's My fuel injector, my car does Yeah, like it doesn't sort of refill itself though. Basically getting things to be squishy and human like in a very convincing sense, you need to make. You like the squishy thing, huh? I don't mean humans. I don't know you keep saying squishy. but that's cool. You need squishy squishy to have that part of the who's language conrain. No squish squish. Chad G PP, could be like, Mike, I love you and'd be like dope I love you too.s Are you hard yet? I'm like, no, noobbody's. Giveing me squishy squish. I thought if it told you enough positive self talk. It was nice but it's still not the squishy squishy. God damn it. gotot it. Okay. see you the squishy. So I'm saying that's like That's far away. farther away. Yeah.n't I wouldn't expect that in the next five years. I would be blown away. All right. I'm gonna to make you self reflect. Which one of your takes on AI Do you think you have the biggest chance at being wrong about just told you. Now, don't do squishy squishy Okay, so another one. Yeah You don't You that one for. You already gave that one for something. Oh, I see, o, another one of my AI takes that I think is. Well, you didn't say you were wrong about the squishy. You're taking a swing at squishy squishy. I want you to say what youd think you'd be wrong about. I'm also saying I'm not very confident about my skepticism. Oh, so you think it might come much quicker. Either much quicker or much later Yeah That's of those where I'm just like, whoa, I like really it's really hard to reason about I can tell you exactly why it's hard to reason about this. Within two years from now, we will have Billions of IQ one hundred ninety plus minds and data centers that have all the full cognitive repertoire of a human being more or less. I mean, I thought we already had that. I'm on Reddit every day They're not one hundred ninety yet.. But they're like one hundred thirty, one hundred forty five type of shit. And they're not super agentic and super like they can't really do their own reasoning for super long amounts of time. Within two years, you'll have straight up researchers cloud that have an Elon plus level of intelligence, like beyond the normal human distribution. That's like twenty twenty eight Reasoning about the technologies we'll see on the market in twenty thirty is already a stupid idea. And basically there's my answer to you about how not confident I am in all of these predictions. becausecause if we have like five billion researchers whichich is, I don't know, multiple orders of magnitude, more than researchers. Like how many of fractions of the world work in science? I mean, most people aren't scientists. We're just going get five billion scientists, all of whom are genius level scientists. And probably by twenty, twenty eight, twenty nine, all of them smarter than Albert Einstein There's no precedent for that, You just have really basic heuristics, you can reasonably be like Okay, if the biggest bottleneck is smart people coming up with ideas to test then if we multiply the number of smart people by like a million and we like make them perfectly cooperative and work in the cloud and they can work a hundred times faster than a human U what do they come up with? Because all this bullshit I'm coming up with and I have an IQ of like a smart dog, but a smart dog. You' someone'sri Gold a retriever.. Like but really like a really precocious one. We werere like, damn dude, you should teach him tricks.ike all you know is like five. That's me. I thought you'd be one of those diesel You know, I look like it though broford. But yeah, I look like a staffy, right. But but I'm at least as smart as like a Dalmatian or something. Like I can't quite be a firefighter dog But I look like B As you know they take them up on the I don't know what Dalmatians ever did for the fire department, but I'm sure something. They smelled smoke. Exactly Iice, better smoke. I'm sorry,s Am So I don't know hardly shit But I know that the shit five billion hundred and ninety IQ scientists come up with is going to almost certainly be more impressive and come faster than I think it will And so after twenty thirty you could really just say one giant question The way I do my bullshit, YouTuberry. is I G What could theoretically be done? like from basic science, we know is possible? Like if you said, hey, could you design a spaceship that goes half of the speed of light? The answer is yes. One and a half, the answer is no, slash we don't know. But half definitely is possible Is it going to take a lot of money? Is it crazy dangous? blah blah, All all things tr, but it's possible And so when I say things like genetic engineering is nearly inevitable possible to genetically engineer a system How difficult will five billion IQ one hundred ninety plus mins find the solve all disease problem is an open question. To me, the answer is much more likely to be like it's just they just do it way faster than we can even believe Regulatory drag Wars, constraints on how many chips we can make, energy constraints, that all ent us to kind of balance that out So to me, any, I'll say that my most My least clear thing is anything after the year twenty thirty can't be certain about anything that happens So why even bother Fixing aesthetics. now. whyy not just waittil twenty thirty Don't buy my book. There you have it guys. It's been a great time. Be people I mean, like you're saying we're going to solve disease in three years. Yeah Why bother with it? Becauseuse like right now If you go to the gym and you sleep well and you do good stress management and you take like trizpatide and maybe in a few years you take the muscle drug that comes out You're going to be able to do like eighty five percent of your aesthetic improvement and improve your health and longevity and quality of life at the same time to like in five years or ten years or fifteen, because these are big margins, right? thenen when genetic engineering comes out and makes you the perfect version of you that you always wanted to be, you could look back and be like, oh, like I actually was almost here already, or you could look back and be like, whyy was I miserable for forever I' into doing something about it? You know what I mean? It's like if you're driving down the road and there's like a little stop restaurant now and then two hours later there's a good restaurant. And but you're already really hungry, just stop now. But if you're totally cool, then don't. So I wouldd say this, you just don't give a shit about your appearance at all. You don't need worry about aesthetics. I'm not worri about aesthetics U, But if you really care about how you look and you think that There's a way to make yourself look better that'll also make you healthier and also make you live longer and all this other good things, then we have a lot of answers today that'll just get you well in your wayight because just training properly and eating properly, and getting enough sleep and recovery. Oh my, holy crap, you can alter your body like crazy. and just the well known. so there's like plastic surgery like heavy hit or plastic surgery There's also facial rejuvenation procedures they do for women that legit shave like ten years of aging off your face. They already do that. Like if you didn't know that was a thing and you had to wait until twenty thirty, whatever the fuck then you would kind of be low key pissed that no one told you via reading this book, Why' I add? that like a lot of the stuff is already here. And the other thing about the book optimism I think a lot of people L around at their lives And they don't see many positive changes or hopes for change I sound like Obam. And you're giving yourself a lot of credit there, my. Hope and change. That was one of the sh. inside literally. I thought you werere like looking at my insight. Jobs Jobs. One of my friends, Bench Switzer, has an incredible Obama in Prussia. I can't do myself. J just jobs a Remember we say jobs all the time? jobs Good America. Yeah, I feel like on an SDL skit they made fun of. Exactly. So, u A lot of people think They're in this body They don't like They tried exercising. it didn't fucking work They tried eating healthy, it worked a little bit, but then it was too hard And they're like, this is never going to is never going I'm stuck And they're upset I'm saying in this book, not only can you do a lot about your body right now andm very confident about this. neverever one hundred percent Within fifteen years, almost everyone is going to look exactly how they want straight up because of age reversal and genetic engineering And that means you're not trapped in the body you hate and you won't be in that body for forever. And if that what percent of unhappiness do you think is caused by people not liking their body? Like if you just had to throw out a number All right, so ten percent of people aren'th happppy with their body In twenty thirty five. No, no, no, my Godd. sorry, I'm askser a different question C Net unhappiness of society, what fraction of that is accounted to by not being in the body you want? ten That's not the same thing as ten percent of people aren't happay with. Theres like sixty percent of people aren't happappy withodies. But it's just not that huge of an unhappiness. Like if you lose a young daughter to a car accident, that's likeange it's a prevalent butat not clinically valuable. Clinically valuable but small hones. Yeah, yeah, it's like the headache equivalent of diseases what's a big deal. So like aesthetics seemeems like a first world problem And it is whichich is why I don't take the book super seriously myself. I'm like, yeah, I got a books about stetics great. I'm not like solving cancer or some shit like that I'm just saying, look, if you care about your appearance You can do a lot about it now. going to make it feel good Here are some psychological reframings to make sure you feel even better as you're going through this process and make sure you don't go down the toxic routes. We've never addressed this because we're probably out of time here in a bit, but there are like at least two toxic routes I can think of. Can I say them really quick Toxic route number one is to be a perfectionist. Perfectionism in its ugliest form is a guarantee that you will never be happy with how you look. because I've seen people who have just magnificent bodies And they're in the gym, they're pro bodybuilders, and they're like, eh, man, just like my biceps peaks just not would like. And it's the only thing they think about. and they don't understand that they're like they live inside a superhero's body. And so if you're perfectionistic enough, you can do everything to improve your aesthetics and you will never be a single fota happier. What a tragedy. But you can do something about this because you can realize, o I'm experiencing perfectionism. I do this to myself all the time. I'm like, Ezraertel, why is your gut so goddamn big? Godddamn it. lookook at you, you giant gutted And then I'm like, but the rest of you is really cool. perfect we'll get the gut. we' get eventually we'll get the gut going. That'll be a twenty thirties thing. buuck. And that helps me a ton. But if I was a superfessionistic, I'd be like, oh my God, I hate this The other one is comparison with others Big problem of social media to your point becausecause social media does this thing, We're at fronts Everyone's best But you don't see your own best, you see your own everything And so you look at social media and your brain is we have ape brain, right? We're just not used to media being a thing. So like you see someone's picture on Instagram and your neural network that plugs into the same part as you would just see them on the savanah, like it's a regular person, just like me. And they look goddamn flawless, right